Punditry

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.

The Washington Post covers an amazing sub-species, Catholic who actually love their faith. As Christopher Blosser notes:

Jacqueline L. Salmon of the Washington Post discovers a rare form of Catholic and marvels at their peculiar behavior: they’re young! they don’t question the Church’s teachings! they attend the Tridentine Mass regularly and go to confession!

Actually, I shouldn’t be so hard. After browsing article after article accentuating the gulf between Benedict and American Catholics, it’s refreshing to see a newspaper present the lives of the orthodox in a fairly straightforward manner.

The article actually is pretty good and not sneering, but you do get paragraphs like this:

They appreciate Benedict for his unwavering advocacy of what they hold to be "Catholic": ancient liturgical practices such as the traditional Latin Mass, the supremacy of the Catholic Church, Gregorian chants in worship and theologians who concur with the pope’s teachings. As the Vatican’s orthodoxy watchdog for 24 years before becoming pope, Benedict earned this group’s devotion.

In so many articles anything controversial is always mentioned as the Pope’s teaching and not the Church’s teaching. I found it ironic in a recent article by Peter Steinfel in the NYT about Clichéd Coverage in the Media he mentions abortion, contraception, same sex marriage and then relates it to "papal positions." Talk about a cliche, but amazingly the rest of Steinfel’s article is also pretty good.

Tomorrow, the U.S. Air Force Academy is mandating that hundreds of students and faculty members attend a closed-door lecture on religious intolerance. It will also show clips from Constantine�s Sword, an upcoming movie. Catholic League president Bill Donohue registered his objections to this event today:

� The person pushing this agenda is Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation; he also appears in the film. In the mission statement of his organization, he stakes out a position against any member of the armed forces being �compelled to conform to a particular religion or religious philosophy.� But evidently Weinstein has no problem orchestrating a propaganda film that trashes Catholicism�in the name of fighting religious intolerance�all the while insisting that the cadets and faculty be �compelled� to attend.

�The movie is based on the widely discredited book by James Carroll, an embittered ex-priest. The book says the Gospels are inherently anti-Semitic and that unless the New Testament is gutted to the point where the messiahship of Jesus is rejected, Christian anti-Semitism will not end.

Well maybe they are using the vaccine theory to explain this. That is use an anti-Catholic source to explain religious tolerance, kind of like using snake venom to help with snake bite victims.

Southern Appeal

The movie Constantine’s Sword is coming out during the Pope’s visit. I guess with Easter being early this year they couldn’t get it out in time for Holy Week. Christopher Blosser’s excellent "Benedict in America" blog previously posted on this movie and the background to Carroll’s book that mistakenly got labeled history instead of alternate history.

In other fun Catholic entertainment news Carl Olson posted on NBC doing four-hour mini-series based on the novel, The Last Templar, by Raymond Khoury, a basic Da Vinci Code clone. This book like the Da Vinci Code tried to pass itself off as not just being fiction since the author says "The Last Templar works as a thought-provoking exploration of religion in today’s world, and of historic fact versus faith, particularly regarding the origins of the Catholic Church."

In even more art news we have another homoerotic version of Christ’s Last Supper being displayed which shows the Apostles having an orgy. Now you might think, boring! Yet another homoerotic piece of art where an artist isn’t even creative enough to do something new. Though this painting was displayed a the museum of Vienna’s Roman Catholic Cathedral and the museum curator was rather surprised at the negative reaction.

Guess you can’t guess how he defended the original decision? Well actually I bet you can guess since it was basically "art should be allowed to provoke a debate." I guess museum curators are no more creative than many modern artists. But he must be pretty smart and have a degree or something. The reason I say this is only someone with a degree could say the following:

"I don’t see any blasphemy here," he said, gesturing at a Crucifixion picture showing a soldier simultaneously beating Jesus and holding his genitals. "People can imagine what they want to."

Yeah you with dirty minds it’s all your fault that you jump to a conclusion instead of seeing the deeper symbolic meaning.

Diognes notices the irony of a U.S. Today article on the Pope visit, though not concerning the visit itself.
In it George Weigel gives his opinion of the Pope and his visit
followed by a much more negative view by Fr. Reese S.J. where he says "Benedict is still stifling theologians. Theologians worry because the Vatican insists we continue to explain the gospel in the language of the 13th century."

The irony is that recently George Weigel has written a couple of columns concerning the state of the Jesuit order that was much decried within Jesuit ranks. So it is rather funny in an article that quotes George Weigel that they manage to provide proof for his contention.

I also think that the word processing programs that journalists use has a macro that anytime they type Thomas Reese it will automatically append " Jesuit priest and former editor of the Jesuit-owned magazine America. Reese lost that job just after Ratzinger was elected pope;" Getting "fired" was the best thing that could have happened to him since it has even made him more the media darling and the go to guy for journalist wanting the right spin desired for a story. Now I of course jest about this being the best thing that has happened to him, but I bet their are other Jesuit editors right now thinking "What do I gotta do to get fired?" Well maybe I jest about that also.

One thing I find interesting about the whole Weigel/Jesuit kerfuffle is that I wish they would have the same energy against those in their order who teach something contrary to the faith. Many seem to ignore if someone in their order gives them a black eye, but get mad when someone points out the black eye A Jesuit can write in support of abortion and euthanasia and it goes without comment, but if someone writes about the Jesuit who supports abortion and/or euthanasia then that needs a response.

Any Welborn in response to the same article:

… Again, reporters – when a source says something about the Vatican insisting that theological language be that of the 13th century – push . Ask what exactly that means. Request specific examples. Be conversant enough with recent documents – say, the last few encyclicals, from both Benedict and John Paul II – to question that statement in light of those documents. Know that Benedict’s encyclicals sell in the hundreds of thousands when they are published, his books are best sellers for any publisher who gets them and the Vatican website gets millions of hits a day.

Are all those people conversant in 13th-Centuryese?

And once again, add new names to the Rolodex

Well maybe the reporter realized that the comment was pure hyperbole, though probably not. The charitable view is that the statement is hyperbole because otherwise is it just plain malicious or ignorant. Anybody who has read either the Pope writing’s or the books he wrote before being elected as Pope would laugh at such an assertion. The Pope’s book Jesus of Nazareth liberally quotes modern scriptural scholars and praises the good of it where in enlightens and lightly chastises it when it goes astray. Even when Cardinal Ratzinger had to discipline theologians, which was very rare, it was not because there language was not 13th century, but because it was not sufficiently first century in that it contradicted scriptural or Apostolic tradition.