And so it came to pass that in the eighth year of Pope Benedict’s reign, some tabloid and social media decreed that he had cancelled Christmas.
You know media coverage on the Pope’s new book has spiraled out of control in misreporting when Reuters issues a corrective piece lambasting the bad reporting. The Reuters piece is actually quite good.
CATHOLYC LIVE AID CONCERT EVENT ANNOUNCED
Larry D has a great list of appropriate bands appearing. I think some others might be considered:
The amazing and consistently funny Eye of the Tyber has some gems this week, but this is the latest.
University Of Steubenville Quarterback Exclusively Throwing “Hail Marys”
The update on the bronze statue of Blessed John Paul II at Father Z’s contains a hilarious photoshop.
For years I have been having caption contests where you won nothing but the smiles from others for fun replies. Some blogs such as Brandon Vogt’s excellent blog have been having lots of book giveaways.
Well finally I am having a contest of my own. Discount Catholic Products offered to supply a prize for my readers. Having a devotion to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel I thought a statue of her would be great.
The Santa Monica City Council caving in to atheist lawsuits. No irony here with a city named after a Catholic saint – just move along. Die dioramas. Fairness means banning everyone. Funny how survival of the fittest leads to atheists with membrane thin skin walking around offended at expression of faith. I was a jerk as an atheist, but did not rise to this level of jerkness.
In other “atheist’s making friends news” is the Atheists Humanists Agnostics (AHA) program against Blessed Mother Teresa in full Christopher Hitchens mode.
This is the 39th volume of The Weekly Benedict ebook which is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I post at Jimmy Akin’s The Weekly Benedict. The post at Jimmy Akin’s site contains a link to each document on the Vatican’s site and does not require an e-reader to use.
This volume covers material released during the last week for 12 November, 2012 – 22 November 2012.
The ebook contains a table of contents and the material is arranged in sections such as Angelus, Speeches, etc in date order. The full index is listed on Jimmy’s site.
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 39 – ePub (supports most readers)
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 39 – Kindle
There is an archive for all of The Weekly Benedict eBook volumes. This page is available via the header of this blog or from here.
Pope elevates 6 cardinals to choose successor
I guess after elevating this one he had to hold on to him to keep him on the ground.
Via Wesley J. Smith
Har de har: The BBC is creating a comedy series called Way to Go about friends who establish an assisted suicide business. “Way to go:” Get it?
I am reminded of the recent The Three Stooges movie homage to the original comic team that had the boys willingly attempt a mercy killing. This is nothing less than the normalization of suicide.
Oh, and by the way, this idea was already proposed for real in Oregon ($5000 for the whole package, including music and flowers), but the psychiatrist would-be entrepreneur lost his medical license for other reasons before he could open the doors. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, suicide clinics rake in the dough.
Culture of death, Wesley? What culture of death?
Msgr Robert Hugh Benson a Catholic convert and son of the then-Archbishop of Canterbury wrote a quite excellent apocalyptic novel called “Lord of the World” where he envisioned in his future world “ministers of euthanasia.”
“He gave no more thought to his exposition of the Christian creed; it was a mere commonplace to him that Catholics believed that kind of thing; it was no more blasphemous to his mind so to describe it, than it would be to laugh at a Fijian idol with mother-of-pearl eyes, and a horse-hair wig; it was simply impossible to treat it seriously. He, too, had wondered once or twice in his life how human beings could believe such rubbish; but psychology had helped him, and he knew now well enough that suggestion will do almost anything. And it was this hateful thing that had so long restrained the euthanasia movement with all its splendid mercy.”
This idea of euthanasia being a splendid mercy is certainly on the upswing especially with the very idea of a “mercy killing” which displays the irony of Satan. But it is more despair than mercy that drives this and it is usually not the despair of the victim, but the despair of the mercy killer towards an actual understanding of the dignity of life. You certainly don’t look at the paintings of the late Dr. Kevorkian and find joy in them.
We can only expect more and more positive portrays of assisted suicide in the media. In the movie Soylent Green we say a portrayal of this and we learned to be more alarmed that “Soylent Green is people” than that the character Edward G. Robinson seeked assisted-suicide at a government clinic in despair at this fact. Whether murder in this form will take the path of the government clinic, faux-religious component, or a combination of the two remains to be seen.
“We should neither of us shrink from the task, awful though it be to contemplate. “Euthanasia” is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.” — Dr. Seward in Dracula by Bram Stoker
I don’t often get outraged about religious coverage since it so often drives me to laughter over anger. There is such a disconnect of understanding that I feel more pity than anything else. It is like they have an editorial board meeting to decide just how wrong they can get a story. While the media’s coverage of Christianity is often so mistaken they crank it up a notch when covering the Pope.
Pope sets out to de-bunk Christian myths
They are of course referring to the Pope’s new book Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives
This article presents plenty of evidence that CNN’s Atika Shubert and Hada Messia who wrote this piece had no idea what they were doing and if they actually read the Pope’s book I would be quite surprised. Though I guess it is possible they read it scanning for the controversial and totally missing out on what the pope was saying. I provide as evidence:
He also debunks the claim that angels sang at the birth, a staple theme of Christmas carols.
The reality is he said quite the opposite.
According to the evangelist, the angels “said” this. But Christianity has always understood that the speech of angels is actually song, in which all the glory of the great joy that they proclaim becomes tangibly present. And so, from that moment, the angels’ song of praise has never gone silent.
Well I could go on about the mindset that produced this article and the total unreliability of so many other headlines and articles on the Pope’s new book. I think it would be much more interesting to discuss what was actually in his book.
I had thought to delay buying this book as I had other books in my virtual stack of ebooks to go through. I soon dismissed such a foolish idea and went ahead and bought it, downloaded it, and read it.
First off it is interesting what the Pope said about his book in the foreword.
It is not a third volume, but a kind of small “antechamber” to the two earlier volumes on the figure and the message of Jesus of Nazareth.
While it is certainly true at around 130 pages this is a much shorter book than his first two books in this series I find this to be my favorite of them. This is not to diminish how great the first two were and maybe I just love more whatever I am currently reading. Yet with Advent and Christmas approaching the subject matter really grabs me and what the Pope writes also makes me see some things anew or for the first time.
While news coverage puts the narrative in terms of debunking, that is not what the Pope does. Pope Benedict does not try to definitively answer questions and at times questions the plausibility or certainty of some solutions put forward. He is questing towards the truth and puts forward different opinions and then makes clear what his preference is regarding this. Still it is clear as he has previously noted that he is writing in a private capacity as a theologian and not making dogmatic statements. He leads a way forward in understanding some common disputes regarding the infancy narratives. While he does note why he thinks some things are improbable or mistaken, he certainly does not definitively rule them out.
Now as I was reading this book I was highlighting passages like crazy. I highlighted so much that just reading through my notes is like reading the book again. At least the advantage of highlighting on an ebook is that it makes it so easy to retrieve the same texts. For example what he said regarding exegesis to illustrate my last paragraph:
Again and again, Jesus’ words exceed our rational powers. Again and again, they surpass our capacity to understand. The temptation to reduce them, to bend them to our own criteria, is understandable. Yet good exegesis requires of us the humility to leave intact this loftiness that so often overtaxes us, not to reduce Jesus’ sayings by asking to what extent we can take him at his word. He takes us completely at our word. Believing means submitting to this loftiness and slowly growing into it.
As I was reading through the book I was trying to formulate in my own mind his exegesis of humility and luckily instead of bungling through how to explain it he did it himself towards the end.
I especially found interesting his look at the two genealogies in Matthew and Luke and all the attempts to explain them and reconcile them. After reading through what he had to say about the two genealogies and looking at them with the view of the authors he writes concerning reconciling the two genealogies:
It seems to me utterly futile to formulate hypotheses on this matter.
So much has been written trying to present possible solutions and yet the Pope cuts to the quick.
Neither evangelist is concerned so much with the individual names as with the symbolic structure within which Jesus’ place in history is set before us: the intricacy with which he is woven into the historical strands of the promise, as well as the new beginning which paradoxically characterizes his origin side by side with the continuity of God’s action in history.
Another thing that really struck me was when he was writing about passages in the Old Testament that seemed to have no context and meaning until the truth was revealed in the New Testament. I just love the term he used “Word in waiting.” He wrote about how Mary’s yes really was the dividing line between the Old and New Testament. This seems to me to be kind of an ironic reversal. The Old Testament was pregnant with the Word until Mary’s Fiat and the Word was conceived. This is a clumsy analogy on my part, but what the Pope had to say about the “Word in waiting” really made me see some of these passages in the Old Testament in a new light. For example he covered Isaiah 7:14 where the prophet Isaiah, addressing King Ahaz of Judah gives him the famous prophecy. The Pope dismisses attempts at relating the prophecy to specific events during the time of King Ahaz and relates this to one of his “Words of waiting” that required the fullness of time to understand.
Much of the media’s coverage of the book relates to what the Pope write about the date of Jesus’s birth. There is really no controversy here as scholars have long questioned the traditional date that goes back to a miscalculation by the monk Dionysius Exiguus (550). This might seem like news to the media which only proves their ignorance. The Pope gives various evidences for an earlier date which he says is “placed a few years earlier.” The dating of the census is part of this, but he does not pick any specific solution and sets forth some possibilities regarding this. Also contrary to the press he does not speak at all on the subject of whether December 25th is the day Jesus was born.
Now I don’t want to write a review longer than the book being reviewed, so I will try to stop here. I admit this is hard because the book really struck me and I was learning something through every page of it. This would make a great Christmas gift for Catholics or any one of good will. It is just so insightful, yet being so readable. This is not something as dense as “Introduction to Christianity”, but obviously written for everybody. Though I hope readers of my blog need little encouragement in wanting to read this wonderful book.
Father Longenecker with some more analysis on the divisions in the Church of England which comes down to this:
The clash therefore is between those who believe the Christian religion is revealed and those who think it is relative.
This is part of a post I wrote ten years ago.
Today I am thankful that I can be thankful.
On the Easter Vigil where I came into Holy Mother Church I reflected on the fact that I had literally spent forty years in the wilderness. I had been chasing after false gods and idols and was totally oblivious to the miracles that God had created around me. I would have fit in easily with the hardheaded Israelites, ignoring every blessing and focusing on even the most trite inconvenience. I was suffering from spiritual autism, locked into only the material world and undiscerning of the spiritual world around me. I did not realize that I was afflicted with this eternal life threatening illness, nor did those around me inform me of my malady. After reading Franks Sheed’s awesome book Theology and Sanity I came to see my insanity for what it was. As an atheist the concept of thanksgiving was alien to me, I knew I should be thankful but to whom was I to be thankful to? It is difficult to give thanks to random eddies of atoms coalescencing into a cell. Oh chaos I thank you for we are wonderfully made just doesn’t sound right. How can you be thankful for your flukeness, your undesigned accidental existence. Luckily, as most atheists I did not dwell too much on the actual meaning of these unbeliefs. Thank you God for bringing me into the promised land of your Church.