Punditry

People are being rather tough on Richard Dawkins over his latest statement.

“I wrote [an] article called ‘Atheists for Jesus,’ I think it was… Somebody gave me a t-shirt: ‘Atheists for Jesus.’ Well, the point was that Jesus was a great moral teacher and I was suggesting that somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we know today.”

When you have a restricted viewpoint allowing no possibility of God than you are limited to only having certain opinions that flow from it. Plus all of us have some degree of belief in what we accept and think our apprehension of truth to be truth. So an atheist saying someone, even Jesus, would come to the same conclusion they had is to be expected. The problem is not with what Dawkins said, but with his underlying philosophy. The joke goes as a philosopher Dawkins is a good biologist.

When I first heard Dawkins’ statement I thought of C.S. Lewis’s famous alliteration that Jesus is either Liar, Lunatic, or Lord. Update: Actually the source is Josh McDowell and as Steve Greydanus pointed out “The traditional formulation is a dilemma, not a trilemma. (either God or bad man)”

Creative Minority Report thinking along the same lines quotes in full the relevant passage from C.S. Lewis.

Now from the famous alliteration Dawkins is limited to two options. So if he says Jesus would be an atheist that means he would either be a lying atheist or a lunatic atheist.

This type of nonsense also reminds me of the meme liberal theology explored where Jesus did not know he was God. By their perspective I guess they would also allow Jesus to be a fleeting agnostic or atheist. Pretty bad when you don’t believe in yourself or are not convinced of the evidence relating to yourself. Liberal theology gives us an amnesiac Jesus more fitting for a soap opera plot. In Jesus’s case finding yourself and finding God are the same thing. I would recommend Fr. Most’s “The Consciousness of Christ” for a thorough-going refutation of this idea and the magisterial teachings that totally contradict it.

Creative Minority Report links to a story about Cardinal Joseph Zen being on a hunger strike to defend the right to freedom of education.

The use of the words hunger strike rang alarm bells for me and I thought surely there is some miscommunication about this.

It comes as a response to the decision by the Supreme Court of Hong Kong to introduce a government committee in the management of a school. Now in addition to parents and students, government officials will have a say on the school governance.

With this hunger strike, the cardinal denounces what he calls “the danger of destroying Catholic education in the territory.”

The protest will last at least three days, during which the 79 year old cardinal will take only water and communion.

So he is not really going on a hunger strike he is fasting for three days. Words matter and describing this as a hunger strike is totally wrong. An actual hunger strike would be a form of suicide and would be expressly forbidden.

In fact a couple of years back a bishop went on an actual hunger strike and the Vatican intervened.

The Holy See, through the Apostolic Nuncio in Brazil, has asked Bishop Luiz Flavio Cappio of the Diocese of Barra to end “as soon as possible” the hunger strike he has been carrying out for 18 days.

Bishop William Morris doubles down in refusing to resign from the Diocese of Toowoomba. He responds to charges that he supports women’s ordination and recognizing some Protestant priestly orders as valid.

How it can be said that my Pastoral Letter teaches these things is beyond me when it purely refers to the fact that these are among many questions being discussed internationally, nationally and locally. To me this shows a total misreading and misinterpretation of what my Pastoral Letter is saying. Pope Benedict further states that my leadership of the priests and faithful of the diocese raises serious questions and that the diocesan bishop must above all be an authentic teacher of the faith, which is the foundation of all pastoral ministry. This is said without any foundation or proof. I have also been told that it is the bishops role to support the Pope in whatever he says without question, to teach from the Catechism and the documents of the Church and not to ask questions about topics that have been declared definitive or closed. I ask you, where is the Spirit in this? I was also told by Pope Benedict that I am too practical and it is the will of God that I resign.

Where is the Spirit in this? Considering the teaching or male-only ordination is part of the ordinary magisterium I should certainly say the Holy Spirit is involved in that. The problem is not with asking questions about these subjects, but with rejecting the answers. When the Pope writes “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” it does not mean that you get to keep questioning and doubting. Even though Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was not a solemn definition itself, it is an infallible teaching of the ordinary magisterium. But even if it had only been taught as part of the Papal Magisterium:

LG 25: “Religious submission of mind and of will must be shown in a special way to the authentic Magisterium of the Roman Pontiff even when he is not defining, in such a way, namely, that the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to according to his manifested mind and will, which is clear either from the nature of the documents, or from the repeated presentation of the same doctrine, or from the manner of speaking.”

I’m not seeing much religious submission on the part of Bishop Morris, or much submission at all for that matter.

He is also being a bit disingenuous on his pastoral letter – a letter he later scrubbed from his site. In it he wrote:

As has been discussed internationally, nationally and locally the ideas of:

• ordaining women, married or single;
• recognising Anglican, Lutheran and Uniting Church Orders.

He mixed these in with valid approaches for the vocation crisis in his diocese. Just presenting them as “ideas” in a pastoral document is rather weaselly since bringing it up implies some level of support for the idea. Certainly all the women ordination advocates totally believe that he supports them.

If indeed he supports the Church’s teaching than why not make a positive statement in this regard as Australia Incognita suggests? If he is really just misunderstood it would have been simple for him to affirm the Church’s teaching.

The whole process has relied on the presumption that I would be compliant and resign. However, I cannot do so in conscience because my resignation would be based on my acceptance of a lie. My resignation would mean that I accept the assessment of my being unfaithful to the Magisterium and breaking communio. I absolutely refute and reject this assessment. I do not accept that there is any grave reason for me to resign and the conditions of Canon 401 §§ 1,2 not being met, it would be dishonest of me to suggest that they had.

Funny thing that when the Pope asks you to resign their usually is a presumption that you will be compliant and resign. You know that whole Holy Obedience thing? What if St. Padre Pio refused to stop offering Mass publicly with the excuse that doing so would give in to the false accusations against him? Bearing accusations even if false is a path of humility and holiness and I detect only the path of pride here. There seems to be absolutely no concern for the effects on his diocese and the Australian Bishops Conference by his intransigence.

He even has the audacity to compare himself to St. Thomas More towards the end of his letter. So a bishop refusing to be obedient to the Pope is the same as a man who lost his head for defending the authority of the Pope?

St. Thomas More Ora pro nobis.

I have not written anything since the initial news concerning Bp. Zurek and Fr. Pavone. From my sofa-eyed view of the situation there seemed to be much fault on both sides and I was not exactly thrilled with the actions of either.

The latest news that Fr. Pavone had not attended a private meeting with his bishop due to his canon lawyer’s advice added a new wrinkle to this conflict. Fr. Pavone is adept at using media to get information out so I really wonder why he did not announce that he was not going to attend this meeting ahead of time? I also wonder why exactly he feels he needs a mediator when talking with his bishop. This action is more like somebody who is lawyering-up before meeting a district attorney. This makes the bishop-priest relationship an adversarial one and that he feels he must be protected from his bishop. That it seems his greatest fear is that he will be given a parish. With first Fr. Corapi and now Fr. Pavone is canon-lawyering-up to be the latest phrase.

Now I have long admired Fr. Pavone’s pro-life work and the good he has done, but doing pro-life work does not excuse you from Holy Obedience. Even if your bishop throws around words like “suspended” when they are canonically incorrect. Even if your bishop might not be making the most prudential choice in this matter. Would having Fr. Pavone step down from his leadership roles in the pro-life movement to be a parish priest be the most prudential use of his talents? Maybe not, but a parish priest is simply not a low-rung on the ladder as many great saints and St. John Vianney in particular have shown.

I was hoping that Canonist Ed Peters would post more on the subject of mediation. I certainly wanted to understand the subject of mediation in the view of Canon Law since I know nothing on the subject.

His post is informative and answers my questions and confirms some initial thoughts on the subject.

VATICAN CITY — A U.S. Catholic priest who supports ordination for women has been detained by police after marching to the Vatican to press the Holy See to lift its ban on women priests.

The Rev. Roy Bourgeois and two supporters were taken away Monday in a police car after their group marched down the main boulevard leading to the Vatican and chanted outside St. Peter’s Square “What do we want? Women priests!”

One of Bourgeois’ lawyers, Bill Quigley, says police had tried to take the group’s banners and members resisted.

Bourgeois and members of the Women’s Ordination Conference and other groups that support women priests had come to Rome to deliver a petition backing Bourgeois, who is facing dismissal from his Maryknoll order for his support of women’s ordination. [Source]

“What do we want? Priests faithful to the magisterium!”

“Bourgeois and members of the Women’s Ordination Conference and other groups”

Considering that there were three people including Fr. Bourgeois involved that statement seems off.

I reckon something good is coming out of the Wall Street occupation: it’s getting people talking about one of the seven deadly sins. We really should be talking about greed. We should be talking about how violent a sin greed is. It is violent because the greedy person will invariably do some sort of violence against another person in order to advance his avarice.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker writes something I have been thinking about myself.

From my point of view there are some other odd competing messages in the Occupy Wall street Movement. My purpose is not to sneer at this protest or pick out loony signs or philosophies of specific protesters. Do corporate CEOs and Wall street bankers need reform? Surely since we all need reform. Greed like all the seven deadly sins hurts not only the person with such a vice, but the community also. Unfortunately the direction of the criticism seems to have no concern for the effects of sin on the persons they criticize, but on what they can get out of it. Last I checked envy was also one of the seven deadly sins and class warfare rhetoric that concentrates on what they feel is owed to them. There is covetousness involved in the underlying attitudes. The whole “We are the 99%” invokes a less than charitable view of the so-called 1%. Besides it is rather odd to have such a small demographic of protesters say they are speaking for the 99%. I am also reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s “The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.”

Besides I find it interesting that they want to force their values on Wall street bankers. Rather ironic in such a relativistic culture that stresses individualism over moral virtues. Being that we are fallen creatures I would certainly suspect that greed exist among the targeted person, though it oversteps to assume greed is the driver among every individual that has amassed a fortune. So what is their plan to help those suffering from the effects of greed? There is really no call for conversion, but instead a call to extract money from them and transfer it somewhere else. Taking money from the actual greedy won’t reduce their greed. Even more regulation won’t affect greed. Transferring their wealth to the government is a great idea since we know politicians don’t suffer from greed or the love of power themselves – oh wait. The fact that so many in Washington are supported by the same “greedy” people seems to be lost on the protesters. The President who they are so sympathetic with has taken more money from the so-called 1% than anybody else in history. Again the driving force seems to be transfer of wealth to the government to be dispensed into some program that is seen as boon for the protesting individuals. The cost of a college education and the resulting student load debt seems to be one focus, yet they don’t talk about greed educational administrations and the gigantic increase in the cost of an education. I guess occupying Harvard, etc, just doesn’t sound as good. The effects of government on the economy is another area that seems to be totally ignored. The collusion of bankers and government and the resulting bailouts is certainly something I object to whether it is President Bush or President Obama at the helm. The economy is a complex thing and there is plenty of blame to go around.

Alexis de Tocqueville statement “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” has much to recommend it. We have become more and more a less virtuous nation with an underlying luke-warm Christianity. Moral relativism and individualism has undermined this nation. The common good now means “what’s in it for me.” Forced charity is no charity at all and what we really need is a call to conversion rooted in our own lives. We need to occupy the confessional and the adoration chapel. To intercede for those suffering from greed, envy, and the other deadly sins.

It showed up in a letter from HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to advise the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Office of Migration and Refugee Services (MRS) that it would not receive a grant to continue its services for victims of human trafficking.

Instead the grant was given to a company that is not fully operational and is still hiring despite what is demanded of the contract. Not only that it appears that the people who received the contract are in no way prepared to receive it or in any way provide a smooth transition.

Sr. Mary Ann Walsh concludes:

Apparently HHS rules about the benefits of experience and cost effectiveness can be waived. So can rules about being fully operational by a certain date. What can’t be waived is the new, albeit unwritten rule of HHS, the ABC rule – Anybody But Catholics.

We’ve seen this at the state level where Catholics are being excluded from adoption services and the same principals are being applied at the Federal level. A religious test of conformance to accepting homosexuality, contraception, abortion, etc is now a criteria in government. Liberal Christians and secular groups are fine – others need not apply.

In related news:

There was some just criticism of President Bush’s faith based office partly on what would happen with the office in a later administration. President Obama gave the Reductio ad absurdum when he appointed a self-proclaimed “spiritual activist, pastor and lesbian” Rev. Dr. Nancy Wilson to the Faith Based office.

I think none of my readers will be shocked to find out that she has has written what Thomas Peter calls a “600-word screed against Catholic teaching (and Archbishop Dolan in particular)” in the Huffington Post.

The thrust of her letter is that her church does great good and the Catholic Church a slave to evil dogma does great harm. We have a government official writing “Bishop Dolan, hit the restart button on the Gospel.” and –

“…like most threatening letters, [Arch]bishop [Dolan]‘s words actually pulled back the curtain on the hierarchy’s not-so-veiled efforts to impose Catholic dogma on all U.S. citizens.

Though what could you expect from an article headlined “Should DOMA Dogma Be Law?”.

Like most bigots she knows not what she rails against and does not make any distinctions. Technically I believe marriage between a man and a woman is part of the Natural Law and not directly part of divine revelation. Divine revelation including Sacred Scripture and Tradition of course supports the Natural Law but marriage is certainly not a Catholic dogma as she means it. While the Catholic Church is the greatest defender of marriage, this view of marriage is certainly not specific to only the Catholic Church.

But the word “dogma”is red meat for liberals as they dogmatically state that only the Church is dogmatic. As G.K. Chesterton said “There are two kinds of people: those who accept dogmas and know it and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.” Though the dogma referenced is in the general and not the technical sense.

Lifetime Apple user Domenico Bettinelli writes on the subject of Steve Jobs’ death.

I’m not going to write a hagiography of Jobs here or canonize him. I’m sure he was flawed and had his failings. But you can’t deny that he’s changed the world as we know it. In the past 30 years, he has completely changed four major industries: computers, telephones, music, and animated movies. And his influence has extended deeply into dozens of others.

While much has been written on the subject of his passing and the effect he had I want to add a Catholic take. The Catholic blogosphere has done fairly well with the pro-life aspect being that Steve Jobs was adopted. Umberto Eco had the famous essay “Mac is Catholic, DOS is Protestant” which I will expand upon. Eco also saw Windows more like “an Anglican-style schism.”

For the majority of my life the world of Apple was not one I paid any attention to much cared about. If anything I was a common Apple-bigot full of inaccurate opinions about Apple computers. I was also an early adopter of MP3s and the first players that came out and went through various makes and models. In addition I started listening to podcast early on and getting those podcasts on my mp3 player was a daily chore. It took some overcoming of bias to take a serious look at the iPod and so in 2005 I bough my first Apple product. Two years later I bought my first Mac.

Now as someone who makes a living writing Windows based software this was a bit like heresy to me. But there were serious reasons I moved into the Apple ecosphere other than just “new and shiny!”.

By all accounts Steve Jobs seems to have been not only a perfectionist, but a visionary in the area of design. In the past these qualities did not always mesh well with what was the state-of-the-art in hardware at the time. Many companies talk about user experience, but Steve Jobs really did seem to see that as an overriding focus.

So what are the Catholic aspects I see? It is Apple’s design philosophy that really drew me in. For one they talk about the philosophy of UI design and create specific guidelines such as the “Human Interface Guidelines.” There is a canonical aspect to how software designers and programmers are to write user interfaces. So often I find that when it comes to form and function one side of the equation is more represented than the other. For the human person aesthetics are not something that is just to be an afterthought. We have lost so much beauty for example when we design churches more like auditoriums than places of worship. The considerations seem to be more to the physical than with having beauty help your spirit rise up in worship. When it comes to hardware and software this is also quite evident. Sure a skin or a gloss might be added to something at the end of production, but it is something grafted on and not a coherent whole of form and function. There is something almost Gnostic about so much design. In Gnosticism the body is evil and the spirit is good and in design Gnosticism the material aspects are all that really matters.

What I discovered with Apple products and the Apple software development community is that they have a very Catholic both/and as a philosophy. Form and function both drive the end product. The attention to detail in their products is at a level I had never seen before. Sure they might constantly tempt us with the latest model, but there is no planned obsolescence built into their products. I never kept a computer longer than the Mac I am typing this on. Yet it still looks as aesthetically pleasing as the day I bought it and has not experienced any of the problems I have had before involving parts going bad or pieces of the case coming off. Apple’s attention to detail is what drove them to add a speaker to the iPod just so you could hear an audio click with you pressed on the classic iPod’s click wheel.

This type of attention to detail is also found on the software side where again how the user interacts with the program is given great importance. As a long-time geek I worked with hundreds of programs with confusing and/or ugly interfaces. Sure the underlying program might have done it’s job quite well, but again as human persons we should expect more than just function as in an atheistic materialist way. Though things have improved in the Windows world as the importance of design has become more prevalent and tools like WPF and Silverlight helping to focus on that.

Apples products are certainly a team effort, but it is quite evident that Steve Jobs set the bar when it came to sweating the details so we don’t have to. His leadership brought a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy to a world leader in consumer electronics it is today. It takes more than leadership to bring this about, it took having a vision and a philosophy and imparting it as a part of the DNA of the company. As Catholics there is much we can learn from this. Are attitudes should always take in account the whole of the human person. Each individual is the intended target of the Gospel and when the world of Catholic art and literature is substandard it is no surprise that so are the results.

There is much talk about how the Catholic faith “baptized” various things and brought them into use within the faith. Apple did not create the first personal computer, mp3 player, GUI, tablet, or phone – yet they took each to a new level. Again as Catholic we need to do the same with all the tools at hand looking for opportunities to spread the Gospel with the highest levels of professionalism.

Link: Good article on Steve Jobs at the National Catholic Register