Punditry

As a listener of plenty of podcast including many Catholic podcasts – one thing that annoys me is that the ones put out by major Catholic organizations don’t have any cover art. If you have pretty much and recent MP3 player with a video screen, use iTunes, most recent versions of Winamp and many other media players they will show cover art for the podcast or song if any is embedded. Instead for all of the EWTN podcasts, Catholics Answers, Greg Popcak’s HMS radio, and Mark Shea’s "Rock Solid" I get treated with no cover art and a big question mark on my iPod Touch. Almost all Catholic podcasts put out by amateurs include the cover art. Even Vatican Radio has finally got on board in including it. It would be nice if at least they used a generic cover art for their podcast, even better if it was tailored towards the program itself. It would be a lot more professional for them to use cover art considering how many media devices can use it.

I would complain about the America Magazine podcast also not including covert art if I could actually listen to their podcasts without my iPod accidentally becoming a missile. Having interviews with people like Fr. Roger Haight, S.J., Fr John "Let Terri Schiavo die" Paris, S.J. Phillip Pullman fan Donna Freitas, and the author of the worst biography on Pope Benedict XVI is not exactly my cup of tea. Now if they had a separate feed for Fr. Jim Martin I would subscribe to that. Actually though I am subscribed to their podcast feed, I just usually end up deleting more shows than I listen to.

It also annoys me when EWTN puts up blogs by Raymond Arroyo and Joan Lewis without RSS feeds. Memo to EWTN: WordPress is free and you don’t have to attempt to roll your own blogging software.

While I am on petty rants. Please give me back the original Catholic Answers theme music. I loved how the violins punctuated the opening Catholic Answers Live, plus you have to love the irony of using a piece from "New Age" musician Yanni for Catholic Answers. The new theme isn’t very distinctive and much more modern sounding, though I guess I don’t have to worry about Hans Kung being a guest any time soon, though he would make a great April Fools guest.

But Harris said she sees the problems caused by small, rural parishes closing due to a shortage of priests as having grave consequences for U.S. Catholic religious life.

"The people of God in the Catholic communion are starving because of the want of Eucharist," she said.

"Why is it that the people of God have to starve while the institution is holding to clergy celibacy?" said Harris, who lives in Schoharie County, about 150 miles north of New York.

"I have to place the excitement of the pope’s visit next to the fact that there are now only a few churches in my county," she said.

…The pope remains a symbol of a hierarchy "that has failed the victims," Kirk said, adding that he believed media coverage of the pope’s visit was focusing too much on Pope Benedict’s pastoral image rather than on what Kirk said was the pope’s potent political symbolism.

"If the pope had gone to the nearest soup kitchen after arriving and (President) Bush had been the third person, rather than the first person, he had met, I’d be happier," said Kirk.

Catholic students are a minority at Union but one of the largest single denominational groups at the predominantly Protestant school.

Although Union is still perhaps best-known for being the midcentury intellectual home of such leading Protestant theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, since the 1970s the school has been known as a leading center of study in the United States for black and feminist liberation theologies. The prominent black theologian James Cone, for example, has taught at Union for more than three decades.

But Union also has had a long tradition of hosting well-known Catholics. Liberation theologians such as Peruvian Dominican Father Gustavo Gutierrez have taught for short terms at Union, which has ties with Columbia University. Catholic scholars not associated with liberation theology, including the late biblical scholar Sulpician Father Raymond Brown, have also been permanent faculty at Union.

Of the current five full-time Catholic faculty members at Union, three are women. Union’s current Catholic faculty includes Jesuit Father Roger Haight, whose book, "Jesus Symbol of God," was sharply criticized by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when it was headed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. The Vatican has banned Father Haight from teaching at a Catholic institution.

Another Roman Catholic theologian who has had trouble with the Vatican is Paul F. Knitter, currently Union’s Paul Tillich professor of theology, world religions and culture.

Kirk told [??????????] April 20 that Union was lucky to have scholars like Father Haight and Knitter on the faculty, adding that the student view of Pope Benedict at Union is colored in large part by the pope’s relationship with them, with figures like Father Sobrino and by Pope Benedict’s past criticism of liberation theology.

For her part, Harris — a Catholic who used to be Presbyterian — said her concern about church reform, specifically the need to expand the eligibility for clergy to include noncelibate men and women, is coming out of real and "lived experience."

Catholic women at Union share a commissioning service as a tribute to their work and also as a formal recognition that they cannot be ordained as clergy within their church.

Harris said she would like to be ordained if she could be, though she doubts that her ineligibility will change in her lifetime. Still, she added, "We never thought we’d see altar girls and now we do have altar girls."

So is the above a typical New York Times article? Or perhaps Newsweek, AP, or some other typical outlet looking for the negative side of the Pope’s visit?

No we owe this article to Catholic News Service the U.S. Bishop’s news arm. Surely going to an extremely liberal Protestant seminary is the best place to get reactions to the Pope’s visit. Surely you wouldn’t want to actually highlight the largely positive response from Evangelicals such as in this post.

It is also pretty ironic for those from liberal Protestant congregations that each year have less and less attendance being concerned over the availability of Catholic priests. Anglicans and other allowing pretty much anybody into leadership roles has only lead to splits and smaller congregations and yet this is the cure they would thrust on us. Maybe miserly loves company. There is also an irony of Protestants worried about Catholics not having access to the Eucharist. Why exactly are they worried about access to "just a symbol." Protestantism has been the larger force ever for denying people the Eucharist and while the majority in good conscience don’t realize this, it is rather silly for them to lecture us on access to the Eucharist.

American Papist has a good roundup of reactions to this article.

The always sensible Amy Welborn has a good post on the NYT Papal Discussion blog in regards to Latin and Vatican II. She ends with an absolutely great line.

I mean, if you think about it, wasn’t Jesus, well … “pre-Vatican II”?

This demarcation using the council never made much sense and pre and post Vatican II is often treated as having the same weight as B.C. and A.C. which I guess now means Before Council and After Council. This is quite silly and is like looking at one tree ring and picking it out as having more meaning than all the other tree rings. When in reality every Council is a continuation and a sign of growth within the Church.

I would like to apologize for thinking that Bill Maher is a unfunny selfish jerk by saying he is a rather pathetic unfunny selfish jerk. Or at least I think that is the way apologies go according to Bill Maher.

His apology under pressure from HBO for calling the Pope a Nazi was ""The pope was not a Nazi. When he was a teenager, he was in the Hitler youth, which meant he said the oath directly to Hitler and not to the Nazis … which is sort of worse, okay."

Bill Maher and his little diatribes doesn’t really upset me. He is like a school yard bully in a small school looking for attention. When I hear about something he recently said I feel more sadness for the man than any outrage. A poor soul who sadly sees the highlights of his life being going to the Playboy mansion. The only real thing Bill Maher evokes from me is prayer for the man and these little outburst only remind me all the more to pray for him.

Josef Razinger as a Nazi Youth was a miserable failure considering that circumstances allowed him to never have to attend one of the meetings. As a seminarian at the time a local Nazi allowed him to just sign up without attending the meetings so he obviously had a good idea about what the Ratzinger family had thought about the Nazi’s; especially considering the families moves to avoid them. But facts were never something that Bill Maher was overly fond of.

Watching the Pope speak to Catholic educators I am amazed once again at the words of the Holy Father. There was so much ink spilled beforehand of what the Pope would say during his trip and for the most part there were as accurate as false prophets. In most cases they would have the Pope say what they wanted said on any hobby horse issue. This was especially true in what was written previously in regards this speech. A guilty conscience seemed to spark many to think that they were going to get scolded by the Pope and others hoped that they would indeed be scolded. Either perspective shows a total lack of understanding of Pope Benedict. People seemed to be shocked that the theme of the Papal Visit "Christ our Hope" is actually the theme of the Papal Visit. When the Pope did address serious issues in this speech it was not as a scold but to act as a persuader. He is able to both point out the problems and their solutions. I look forward to looking at the full text of the speech to go through it again because it was certainly one to go over again.

I did find odd the places where the audience clapped like when the Pope praised the good work of Catholic educators and this seemed rather like they were applauding themselves. No applause though when the Pope spoke about Catholic identity and how the beauty of the Church’s teaching on sexuality is reduced to risk management – those were applause moments for me.

Here is the text of the speech.

I was mostly happy to hear about the lineup that the NYT got for their Papal Visit blog, especially with their recruiting Amy Welborn. Well there is one contributor they didn’t announce ahead of time. Feminist theologian and all around dissenter Catholic Rosemary Radford Ruether posted today. The post is so typical that I could have wrote it as a parody in my sleep.

You know that lack of priests is all due to not ordaining women and dropping the requirement for celibacy and how the sexual abuse crisis is all because of repressed sexuality. If only they could get married they wouldn’t abuse predominantly pubescent boys. And of course women’s ordination is all about the current Pope’s opinion.

To say such nonsense you have to ignore that vocations are on the upswing and that sexual abuse is orders of magnitude worse in institutions like public schools. She writes that they are "taught to view sex as the opposite of sacredness." I guess she considers that sexuality reserved only to marriage ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring as not being sacred. But fornication, adultery, and homosexual acts which are inherently sterile are sacred. The sacredness of an act deals with the context of the act and sex within an act that is inherently evil can never be sacred.

But then again you can’t argue with someone that would say something like "Once the mythology about Jesus as Messiah or divine Logos, with its traditional masculine imagery, is stripped off, the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels can be recognized as a figure remarkably compatible with feminism."

Canon Lawyer Peter Vere writes in the Washington Times on the case of the photographer who refused to do wedding photo’s for lesbian wedding.
The New Mexico Human Rights Commission ordered the photographer to pay $6,600.
Whenever the words "Human Rights Commission"
are used in any context for country you know that if you are a Christian and/or a conservative you are going to get screwed.
Somehow freedom of religion is not a human right
and the First Amendment seems to have been lost.

Add this to the recent case of the pharmacist loosing his appeal not to have to dispense Plan B and we can see the path we are headed on. Homosexual and abortion ideologues forcing their will on whoever stands in their way.

"There is a strong tendency among supporters of nondiscrimination laws and hate crime laws to use them as weapons to suppress dissent against same-sex marriage," Mr. Lorence said.

You will be assimilated or fined.

Yet another boring article defending academic freedom on the Catholic campus in anticipation of the Pope’s visit, this time from Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity College in Washington. Methinks they protest too much.

It seems to me in articles that attack dogmatic thinking while at the same time seeing academic freedom as something dogmatic that no one should dare dissent from to be rather ironic. But once again G.K. Chesterton says it best.

"In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.

The problem is so many confuse liberty and freedom with license and that real freedom and liberty is "the right to do what we ought to do." If we believe in or perform any evil we are not truly free but enslaved. The modern idea of academic freedom is pure relativism and largely what gets promoted is not the truth. Without truth we can not be truly free. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life and it was Satan who was called the father of lies. Catholic universities should be at the service of the truth and not the winds of theological and societal fads that will pass. Instead they have decided to not build on a firm foundation. Chesterton also complained that children would be taught with academic theories that were younger than they were and this prophet of modern times was right once again.

There is also always the sneering of orthodoxy, which simply means "right thinking." You would think that dissenters would be calling their ideas orthodoxy and to call those of us who fully accept Church teaching as heterodox. Maybe they are just honest enough not to do that.

I also found funny her use of Ex Corde Ecclesiae to try to support what she says and while this document certainly supports the valid sense of academic freedom, she conveniently does not mention the mandatum being required for those teaching theology. This in itself shows that academic freedom is not without bounds. She has the document backward for the most part and sees the culture as influencing the Gospel.

Pope Benedict will be doing his job when he addresses Catholic university presidents Thursday on our obligation to be faithful stewards of the Catholic intellectual tradition and the moral teachings of our faith. We academics do our job when we engage in critical analysis of those teachings in light of our Gospel tradition, contemporary research and cultural context.

A church with a brain is not afraid to ask itself the hard questions about the role of faith, moral teachings and theological exploration in contemporary life. This is what Ex Corde Ecclesiae calls us to do; this is what the pope will remind us is essential and what we will continue to do in our mission in Catholic higher education.

Ex Corde Ecclesiae does address cultural dialogue, but it is mainly about "offering the rich experience of the Church’s own culture" and also calls for a "fruitful dialogue between the Gospel and the culture." What she would put in the category of fruitful dialogue is more like a poisoned fruit. Defending the Vagina Monologues, "gay clubs", speakers who support abortion and other intrinsic evils is like telling Snow White to accept any apple givers that happen come to her door.

What they never seem to get is that the truth of what the Church teaches will never change. The changeable quality is how these truths are taught. We can always go deeper into truth. We can vary the methodologies used to teach the truth to best adapt to the current generation. This was largely the role of Vatican II. Instead what happens is that the truth is changed to adapt to the culture instead of changing how the truth is presented to best address the culture. But to adapt to the culture of death is to drive the wrong way down a one way street. Cultural context only applies to how the truth is taught and not the truth itself, though sometimes cultural context can even help us to better understand the truth.

The Church is never afraid to ask the hard questions. We have a massively parallel processing computer that has helped us to do this. It is the constant teaching of the Church with the thousands and thousands throughout history that have made up this massively parallel processing that has processed the faith throughout the generations. Under the guidance of the magisterium (and ultimately the Holy Spirit) the development of doctrine has lead to a richer and deeper understanding of the mysteries of faith. A Catholic is never afraid of the truth since it only leads to Jesus. We can ask the hard questions because we are confident in the tools that Christ has given us through his Church. "A church with a brain" requires thinking Catholics to think with the Church. But so many so-called thinking catholics would cut themselves off from the thought that went before them and instead of feeding our brains are more likely to feed itching ears.

Catholic Insight is being sued by the infamous Canadian "Human Rights Commission"
and so far for a quite small Catholic periodical has paid six thousand dollars in legal fees to defend themselves with no court date in sight. The "hate crime" is related to denunciations of homosexual activism (not individual persons) and upholding the Church’s teaching.

Kathy Shaidle who linked to this article is also being sued along with four other Canadian bloggers for speaking out against free speech thug Richard Warman the human rights lawyer who specializes in separating humans from their rights.

The picture to the right is one of Richard Warman, or at least I assume that someone with such a thin skin would look like this.

Free Mark Steyn! is keeping track of all of the shenanigans going on in Canada right now. I also wonder if the Human Rights Commission sharing the same initials with Hillary Rodham Clinton is just a coincidence?

An interview with Rev. John Jenkins President of Notre Dame introduces some unintentional hilarity mixed with some wisdom. Regarding the Pope he says:

He is a person who could easily hold an endowed chair at Notre Dame."

Wow, imagine that. Maybe a corner office next to Dicky McBrien and tickets each year for the Vagina Monologue. Though the interview improves with:

Asked to speculate on what Pope Benedict might say, Father Jenkins tells me, "The greatest respect we can show him is to let him speak and then reflect." But the president, who himself has a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, says that the pope is "a subtle thinker [who] doesn’t think in slogans." Father Jenkins is worried that "people with various interests will pick out a line or a phrase," and misunderstand the pope’s message.

But then deteriorates when he says:

"The Newman society has no ecclesiastical standing and no academic standing," Father Jenkins says. "For me, it resembles nothing more than a political action committee."

While certainly these points are true, the real question is whether the Cardinal Newman Society is right in their critique or not and not their ecclesiastical or academic standing.

In 1990, Pope John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae, an encyclical whose provisions included a requirement that theologians teaching at Catholic schools receive a stamp of approval from the church (a "mandatum"), and that the campus environment should be supportive of a Catholic way of life.

Father Jenkins calls Ex Corde a "superb document" that he has read "many times." But most Catholic college leaders, including Father Jenkins, have not implemented it to the extent that they or others expected they would have to. The mandatum provision, for instance, was met at the time with outrage by college faculty and administrators, who found it to be an infringement on academic freedom. But since then, Father Jenkins explains, "positions softened a bit on that. Misunderstandings were eliminated."

The way the mandatum controversy was resolved is this: Local bishops give their approval to some theologians and not others. But no one besides the bishop and the theologian knows who has it. So Father Jenkins can claim total ignorance about which members of his own theology department are approved by the church.

Surely he must have a small statue of those famous monkeys on his desk. "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." Or possible Sergeant Shultz has been appointed as the universities president "I see nothing!"

Other intellectual battles seem to have been resolved in the university’s favor as well. Despite the Vatican’s clear condemnation of liberation theology, a Marxist approach to Christianity, the doctrine is still proudly taught at Notre Dame.

Father Jenkins says the situation is not so clear cut: "Liberation theology is a label for a family of views and concerns . . . [a set of] theological reflections in light of certain social and economic conditions." In other words, no violent revolutionaries here.

Despite the large presence of liberal faculty members, Father Jenkins complains that in some circles, the school is not considered radical enough. People on the left say that "we’re too tied to the Republican party. We don’t advocate enough for women’s ordination. You name the socially divisive issue and we’re criticized that we’re not on the front on [it]." And it is true that on the spectrum of Catholic universities, Notre Dame is considered somewhat middle of the road – still less radical than its Jesuit brethren like Georgetown, Fordham and Boston College.

While I think Notre Dame is moving in a positive direction, it often seems that this is largely the result of the students and not the faculty.