Wholly Catholic

Greatest gift ever?

2009-02-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

No offense to anyone else who's ever given a gift, but I doubt you've ever given one quite as awesome as the one that Jeanette and I recently got from our friend Kathy:

It's a 3-by-3-foot quilted wall hanging of our coat of arms! How cool is that?

Too hot for TV

2009-01-31T22:03:00.000-08:00

A thought-provoking ad you won't see during the Super Bowl:

Pumpkin cookies

2008-12-02T23:13:00.000-08:00

I invented a new seasonal cookie recipe a few weeks ago, and I have to say, they are quite delightful. They also happen to be incredibly easy to make. So if you've got any Christmas festivities coming up, consider bringing these cookies. (Or you might want to check out my recipe for peanut butter chocolate chip cookie s, a cookie for all seasons.)

INGREDIENTS:
1 box Trader Joe's Pumpkin Bread & Muffin Mix
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

4 ounces cream cheese
1/2 cup butter flavor shortening
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

24-30 pecan halves (optional)

1 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 1/2 tablespoons water

DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 375 F. In a small bowl, mix pumpkin bread mix and pumpkin pie spice and set aside. In a large bowl, mix cream cheese, shortening, granulated sugar, eggs, and vanilla until smooth. Add dry ingredients in three batches, mixing until smooth after each addition. In a separate bowl, mix powdered sugar, coriander, and water to make an icing.

Form dough into ping-pong-ball-sized balls and place on cookie sheet (preferably neither dark nor non-stick). Leave about 3 inches between the dough balls, because they'll spread quite a bit. Gently press a pecan half onto the top of each dough ball. Bake for 12-14 minutes, until cookies just start to brown around the edges. Drizzle cookies with icing immediately after removing them from the oven.

Let set for 2-3 minutes, then transfer cookies to cooling rack. Once cookies have cooled completely, put them in an airtight container. Makes 24-30 cookies.

First Sunday of Advent roundup

2008-11-30T10:35:00.000-08:00

Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new liturgical year in the Western Church. Here's a quick explanation of the season from the old Catholic Encyclopedia:

Advent

(Latin ad-venio, to come to)

According to present [1907] usage, Advent is a period beginning with the Sunday nearest to the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle (30 November) and embracing four Sundays. The first Sunday may be as early as 27 November, and then Advent has twenty-eight days, or as late as 3 December, giving the season only twenty-one days.

With Advent the ecclesiastical year begins in the Western churches. During this time the faithful are admonished

* to prepare themselves worthily to celebrate the anniversary of the Lord's coming into the world as the incarnate God of love,
* thus to make their souls fitting abodes for the Redeemer coming in Holy Communion and through grace, and
* thereby to make themselves ready for His final coming as judge, at death and at the end of the world.

EWTN has what looks to be a very nice little page with succinct explanations of different Advent traditions, plus an Advent calendar with short Bible readings, reflections, and suggested prayers and acts of love for each day.

I went out and bought an Advent wreath yesterday. It's not exactly traditional, but it is quite beautiful. It depicts a Nativity scene, with an angel, a shepherd, the Magi, and Mary and Joseph all adoring the baby Jesus. I've always loved Nativity scenes, so it was a natural choice for me. Jeanette and I blessed it and lit the first candle last night.

I think it will be good to try to celebrate Advent as a season unto itself, a season of eager longing and spiritual preparation for the coming of Christ. It's not the Christmas season yet (that comes after Christmas). The wonderful Father Bernhard Blankenhorn gave a good homily to this effect a couple years ago at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Seattle, and Father Robert Barron has posted a typically good video on the spirituality of Advent:

Pray for the defeat of Initiative 1000

2008-10-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

Please pray for the defeat of Initiative 1000, the Washington state ballot measure that, if passed by voters Nov. 4, would legalize physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill adults with a prognosis of less than six months to live.

The passage of I-1000 would be bad news for everyone, especially the most vulnerable in society. It would be the first in a row of dominos down a slippery slope. If it passes here, it will pass in other states and, over time, attitudes and laws will grow increasingly lax until society as a whole doesn’t blink at the government forcibly exterminating people as “burdens.”

Don’t believe me? Read the New York Times Magazine piece on Booth Gardner, the former Washington governor who’s led the push for I-1000:

“Gardner’s campaign is a compromise; he sees it as a first step. If he can sway Washington to embrace a restrictive law, then other states will follow. And gradually, he says, the nation’s resistance will subside, the culture will shift and laws with more latitude will be passed … ”

Or look at Oregon, where a similar law is on the books, where poor people with cancer are sent letters telling them they can’t have chemotherapy but the state will gladly pay to give them massive and lethal (and much cheaper) overdoses of barbiturates.

If I-1000 passes, the poor and uninsured will be the first to suffer, and it will all be – if Oregon’s experience is any indication – for the sake of the convenience of a handful of well-off, well-educated white people who don’t have the guts to kill themselves themselves, without getting the rest of us involved.

If assisted suicide is legalized here, it will almost certainly spread to the entire country, riding the tide of an insidious and deadly cultural shift. The shift is already happening.

Don’t worry, we’re told by the initiative’s supporters, there are plenty of safeguards: Doctors must ensure that patients aren’t depressed before prescribing them the “medicine.” Never mind that this apparently hasn’t happened in Oregon – what has happened to a society when a desire to kill oneself is no longer seen as an obvious symptom of depression?

Ultimately, any “safeguards” must be illusory, because this initiative – like the worldview of which it is an outgrowth – has no foundation in anything foundational. It is a clear rejection of the sanctity of human life, and once that’s gone, nothing is off limits.

The polls don’t look good. At this point, we may need a miracle. So please pray for the defeat of Initiative 1000.

Arts and crafts

2008-10-11T01:08:00.000-07:00

"Oh no, I married a three-year-old!"

That's what Jeanette said the other night when she came home from work to find me sitting on the couch with scissors, a glue stick, and a 50-pack of construction paper, making this:

I don't see what the big deal is. I'm totally proud of my Halloween scene. I told Jeanette there's no way a three-year-old could make something this awesome.

No, I'm not going to tell you how long I took to make it.

I like Halloween. Or at least the foggy, campy atmosphere of imagined old non-scary horror movies that I vaguely associate with it.

This is just the first in a series of similar arts and crafts projects. Stay tuned for a Thanksgiving scene (possibly) and a Nativity scene (definitely).

"Give us this day our daily bread"

2008-09-24T22:43:00.000-07:00

I've sometimes wondered how to reconcile the reality of crippling poverty with some of the promises that Jesus makes in the Bible. Jesus teaches His disciples to pray "Give us each day our daily bread" (Luke 11:3), and then a few verses later he promises that "every one who asks receives" (Luke 11:10). Now, I am sure that there are many people throughout the world who earnestly pray the Lord's Prayer every day, and yet starve. Where is their daily bread? Why are they not receiving what they ask for, even though it's something Jesus specifically told them to ask for? Why isn't God holding up His end of the deal?

I think I got some insight into this problem on Monday when I talked with a man who has been working in Guatemala for the past few years. For 18 months he worked with people in Guatemala City who literally lived in a garbage dump. They dug their homes out of the garbage, and the floors were garbage and the walls were garbage. For the past year he's been working in the rural areas of Guatemala, where 50 percent of people are so poor that they can't afford sufficient food for their families. Here's what he said:

"Now when I say the Lord's Prayer, it's just very different for me. It's much more immediate, that it's not something just on Sunday, but it's actually a daily prayer there for them. 'Give us this day our daily bread.' And I think it's important to remember it doesn't say 'my daily bread,' it says 'our daily bread,' that it's for the whole world. You know, it's not, 'Oh, give me enough for me to get by today.' No. It's 'Give us -- give all of us -- our daily bread,' and I have a greater understanding of that now."

As usual, the problem is not with God, but with us. He has certainly provided us with enough food to feed the world. But selfishness and indifference keep us from seeing that those who are hungry get the food they need. There's no excuse for it. We are responsible for one another. I probably eat enough for a small village, and somewhere a child is swallowing rocks to fill the awful emptiness in his belly.

Obama, McCain and the abolition of man

2008-09-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

Since several people have taken issue with my non-support for both of our fine presidential candidates, I figured I'd expand on my reasoning a bit and answer a few objections.

Here's my fundamental concern: Both Barack Obama and John McCain are unwitting (I hope) advocates of what C.S. Lewis referred to as "the abolition of man." Their positions on abortion and embryonic stem cell research, in light of their beliefs about the beginning of life, don't just mean death for millions of tiny humans; they mean the death of human morality and, thus, of humanity itself.

If you say, as Senator McCain essentially does, "Yes, an embryo is a living human being with human rights, but it's OK to kill it if there's a good reason," that's not the first step down a slippery slope. That's leaping off a precipice. Once you say that deliberately taking innocent human life is acceptable in certain situations, morality is over.

The inalienable right to life is the most basic of all human rights. It's the foundation upon which all other rights stand. Start justifying exceptions to this absolute law, and the whole edifice of morality comes crashing down, not gradually, but in an instant. Gone.

It may take a while for people to notice. The building still looks pretty sturdy.

But it's an illusion, a trick of the mind. There's nothing there. We're debating a mirage. Without certain absolute values, there is no morality, no right or wrong, no good or bad.

And what used to be humanity is left to be governed by animal desires and brute force.

Am I being hysterical, over-dramatic? I hope so. But I don't see how to escape the conclusion.

So yeah, I don't want to support either Obama or McCain, because I think they're both extraordinarily scary candidates. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops tells me that, as a Catholic, I'm under no obligation to support either of them. Plus, I live in Washington state, where even if I could vote 100,000 times for either candidate I wouldn't affect the outcome.

For the record, I do think it's morally legitimate to vote for the lesser of two evils with the intention of limiting evil. I imagine I'll do it many times in my life. But not this year. I don't want either Obama or McCain to see my vote in their column and get the idea that I support their vision.

I'm not just shirking my civic duty. I plan to write letters to both Senator Obama and Senator McCain to let them know why they won't be receiving my vote. They'll never personally read them, of course, but I've got to think a letter is significantly more impactful than a single ballot. And I'll vote for some quixotic candidate whose hand I wouldn't be hesitant to shake.

Writing this post has left me in rather a dark mood. I don't like to think too deeply about the state of the world. In times like these it's good to remember the words of Jesus: "In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world" (John 16:33).

In the hierarchy of values ...

2008-09-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

... freedom of conscience is easily trumped by convenience, say Hillary Clinton and the president of Planned Parenthood in a New York Times op-ed opposing a proposed regulation from the Department of Health & Human Services that would protect health care providers from being forced to violate their consciences. It might be interpreted by some doctors as "a free pass to deny access to contraception," they ominously warn.

"Conscience" is such a quaint, outmoded idea these days, anyway, useful only to invoke when one wants to justify something completely unconscionable.

Hospice provides true death with dignity

2008-09-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

The dying need ‘comprehensive, compassionate end-of-life care,’ not physician-assisted suicide, say palliative care providers

BY KEVIN BIRNBAUM

End-of-life issues have been thrust into the spotlight in recent months by the debate surrounding Initiative 1000, the November ballot measure that would legalize physician-assisted suicide in Washington state if approved by voters.

Proponents of the initiative point to the potential physical suffering and loss of autonomy associated with terminal illnesses to support their position. According to the Yes! on I-1000 Web site, “When facing the prospect of agonizing pain, breathlessness, nausea and vomiting, or loss of dignity at the end of life, many patients achieve tremendous peace of mind if they know there is a safe and dignified alternative.”

For supporters of the initiative, that alternative would entail ingesting a massive and lethal overdose of doctor-prescribed barbiturates.

But area providers of hospice care say that services are already readily available to help people with terminal illnesses live and die in comfort, control and dignity, without the moral and practical problems raised by physician-assisted suicide.

What is hospice?

Hospice is the subset of palliative care specifically for people with a prognosis of less than six months to live – the same population targeted by Initiative 1000. Like all palliative care, hospice aims to control the symptoms and pain associated with a patient’s condition rather than trying to cure it. But hospice, which is fully covered by Medicare and most insurance plans, is about more than just reducing pain.

“It’s holistic care aimed at supporting a patient’s emotional, spiritual and psychosocial needs – body, mind and spirit,” said Mark Rake-Marona, director of Franciscan Hospice and Palliative Care in Pierce County. “And we care not only for the patient, but also for the family and anyone who’s affected by the terminal illness.”

Most hospice care takes place in the patient’s home, though some hospice providers have inpatient facilities, like the 20-bed Franciscan Hospice House, for patients who need more intensive treatment. Hospice providers employ a wide range of specialists to ensure that patients are as comfortable as possible.

“We have physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, we have a cadre of comfort therapists that provide massage, music, aromatherapy, hypnotherapy, art therapy, and we have hospice aides that provide personal care like bathing,” said Rake-Marona. “It’s a pretty comprehensive service.”

Contrary to the common misconception that “hospice equals death,” the philosophy of hospice is to neither hasten nor postpone death, said Lyn Miletich, director of public relations for Providence Hospice of Seattle. “Hospice is more about quality of life, and having that until the end of life, than it is about dying,” she said.

In fact, said Rake-Marona, hospice’s holistic approach to care is so successful that “we actually discharge 20 percent of our patients that are admitted alive, meaning they don’t die.”

Controlling pain

While supporters of Initiative 1000 point to unbearable physical suffering as a reason for legalizing physician-assisted suicide, major medical advances have been made in recent years in the treatment of pain, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms of terminal illnesses, said Dr. Mimi Pattison, the medical director for Franciscan Hospice and Palliative Care.

“It’s extremely unusual that we cannot get symptoms under satisfactory control to meet the wishes of the patient and family,” said Dr. Pattison.

In fact, hospice providers have become so adept at alleviating physical suffering that unbearable pain is no longer a valid argument for assisted suicide, said Dr. William Toffler, a professor of family medicine at Oregon Health & Science University and the national director of Physicians for Compassionate Care.

“It’s absolutely mythical that (pain is) the reason we need (physician-assisted suicide),” he said. “The solution to pain is to redouble our efforts to address the pain, not to eliminate the person who has the pain.”

Control and dignity

Perhaps a larger issue than pain for proponents of physician-assisted suicide is the desire for a sense of autonomy, dignity and control at the end of life. But this is exactly what hospice affords, say providers.

“Our philosophy at hospice is that the patient is in charge of their care plan,” said Dr. Pattison, explaining that patients can determine what kind of treatments they want and don’t want.

“We partner with them in their care rather than having them be passive about it, so I think they feel more in control of their lives,” said Rake-Marona. “We support them towards the goals of safe and comfortable dying, self-determined life closure and effective grieving for the family and significant loved ones.”

“Self-determined life closure,” he said, means that patients are able to take care of their financial, legal, familial, relational and spiritual affairs, “so that they are able to leave the world peacefully and dignified, knowing that they had as little unfinished business as possible left on earth.”

Dr. Pattison highlighted the importance, for both patients and their families, of the natural process of dying that hospice care enables.

“In seeing the natural dying process and the beauty and the strength in that process,” she said, “what happens to patients and their families, the reconciliation, the love, the forgiveness – all of the stages that people need to go through to be able to die peacefully – to think that that would be artificially foreshortened (by physician-assisted suicide) would be just tragic.”

The discussion around physician-assisted suicide and end-of-life issues is inevitably emotionally charged and fueled by the fears that many people have about the end of life. But people can take heart, said Rake-Marona, in knowing that hospice care can effectively address many of those concerns.

“Comprehensive, compassionate end-of-life care is available to folks,” he said. “All of the fears that people have are fears that we have committed our lives to improving.”

The Catholicism Project

2008-09-22T23:08:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty excited about this. Father Robert Barron, a Chicago-based priest and professor who podcasts his Sunday sermons and gives his Catholic take on everything from Christopher Hitchens to "The Dark Knight" on Youtube, is working on a 10-part video series entitled "The Catholicism Project," which looks pretty awesome. He's looking for funding to complete production, so visit his website if you feel moved to donate. Here's the trailer:

Why I won't support Obama or McCain

2008-09-18T17:36:00.001-07:00

I don't have high expectations for political candidates. Google's corporate motto sums up my standard: "Don't be evil."

I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, neither liberal nor conservative. I'm just as orthodox a Catholic as I know how to be, and I can't seem to square that with the platforms of either major party. Perhaps such a "plague o' both your houses" position is naive or irresponsible, but it isn't born out of mere contrarianism. Everyone wants to belong, and it would be nice to have some political camp to call home.

So I'd like to be able to get behind Barack Obama or John McCain and feel hip and stylish or old and crotchety, respectively. They both seem like nice enough guys who generally want to do good. But I can't get past the fact that they both support causes that are intrinsically evil, like abortion and/or embryonic stem cell research.

It has always been obvious to me -- completely independent of any religious conviction -- that human life begins at the moment of conception, i.e., when a sperm fertilizes an egg. (If it doesn't begin then, when does it?) It has also always been obvious to me that it is always wrong to deliberately take the life of an innocent human being. (If that's not wrong, what is?)

Those two propositions, taken together, lead me to the conclusion that abortion and embryonic stem cell research are never morally acceptable, regardless of the circumstances.

Obama supports both abortion and ESCR; McCain supports the latter. Which leaves me hoping that the two senators either haven't given their positions on these issues much thought, or that they're both incredibly stupid. Because otherwise I can't escape the conclusion that both our candidates for the presidency are moral monsters. Let me explain.

If you accept the premise that murder is wrong, the only morally legitimate way I can see to support abortion or ESCR is to claim to know that human life does not begin at conception. But neither Obama nor McCain claims to know that, or even to believe it.

When Obama was asked at the Compassion Forum on April 18 whether he personally believed that life begins at conception, he said, "I don't presume to know the answer to that question." Now, either Obama was simply being insincere and was trying to appear humble while painting pro-lifers as presumptuous, or else he knowingly supports the destruction of what may or may not, for all he knows, be living human beings. I refer him to Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft, who asks: If you're out in the woods hunting, and you hear a rustling in the bushes, and you're not sure whether it's a deer or your fellow hunter, what do you do? Don't shoot! If you honestly don't know whether a zygote or an embryo or a fetus is a living human being, Senator Obama, don't destroy it. That's at least criminal negligence, if not manslaughter.

McCain's moral inconsistency is perhaps even worse. At the Saddleback Forum on August 16, Rick Warren asked him at what point a baby is entitled to human rights. McCain immediately replied, to much applause, "At the moment of conception." So in supporting ESCR, McCain is endorsing the destruction of what he believes (correctly) to be living human beings with human rights. That's the definition of murder.

I understand that abortion and embryonic stem cell research are deeply personal, emotionally charged issues. But in any moral system worthy of the name, there are some things you just can't do, even in the worst circumstances, or with the best intentions. That our presidential candidates don't seem to understand this, and that they both employ such duplicitous and disingenuous rhetoric to obscure the reality of their positions, makes me fear for the future.

We're married!

2008-09-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

Today is Wholly Catholic's first birthday, and I thought I'd celebrate by actually posting something for a change.

One of the major reasons I've done so little posting in recent months is that Jeanette and I were spending pretty much every waking moment either doing stuff for our wedding or stressing about how much stuff there was to do for our wedding.

Well, the wedding has finally come and gone, and I think it took, so Jeanette and I are now married!

God really came through for us, as we always knew He somehow would. It was a long, tortuous, and sometimes torturous road to the altar, but He carried us through it all, and our wedding day was more beautiful than we could reasonably have hoped for.

We were married on Saturday, August 30 at St. Petronille Catholic Church in my hometown, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and we had our reception at the Brookfield Zoo. Here are a few pictures:

Our traditional rehearsal dinner the night before at a local Italian restaurant, in honor of Jeanette's heritage.

The most important part of the day/my life: our vows.

Our traditional neo-pagan unity candle ceremony.

Our dear friend Tim wrote us a beautiful a cappella quartet based on one of my favorite Bible verses: "This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."

Kissing my beautiful bride.

Having a well-deserved drink in the limo.

It was a beautiful day, so we took pictures at Lake Ellyn. Notice my old high school football team winning in the background.

Cutting the cake neither of us had time to eat.

The traditional part of the reception where the groom embarrasses the bride by singing a Sinatra song.

And, finally, getting down (and getting laughed at) on the dance floor.

So, all in all, easily the most joyful day of my life.

A well-lived life still well worth living

2008-08-07T23:54:00.000-07:00

Though ravaged by Lou Gehrig’s disease and barely able to speak, John Peyton is using his final months to oppose Washington’s assisted suicide initiative

BY KEVIN BIRNBAUM

John Peyton doesn’t have long to live. His doctor gave him three to six months. That was more than two months ago.

Peyton, just 64, has an unusually aggressive case of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. In the months since he first had trouble lifting a hammer over his head last November, he has gone from healthy and active to completely paralyzed, struggling to breathe with a ventilator.

The motor neuron disease has made him totally dependent on Patricia Peyton, his wife of 40 years. He can't dress himself, feed himself, brush a stray eyelash from his cheek, or even shift his weight in the living room recliner where he now spends his days.

The former Boeing computer programmer’s once-strong voice is fading fast, and soon it will go altogether. But while he still has it, John Peyton is using his voice to proclaim the intrinsic value and sanctity of every human life, at every stage, in every condition. He has spent his final months opposing Initiative 1000, the so-called “Death with Dignity Act,” which will be on the ballot in November and, if passed, would legalize physician-assisted suicide in Washington state.

In recent interviews with The Associated Press and Fox News, among others, Peyton has shared the message that every life is precious, a message, he believes, with which the November ballot measure is fundamentally at odds.

“This Initiative 1000 is just the first step in putting into law the lie that there is such a thing as a life not worth living,” he says, and he fears where that lethal logic will lead if the lie is bought into.

A pro-life life

Peyton is no Johnny-come-lately to the anti-assisted suicide cause. His engagement with pro-life issues began when Washington state legalized abortion in the early 1970s, before Roe v. Wade. That spurred the Peytons, then living in Ohio, to get involved with Birthright International, an organization that aids women in crisis pregnancies. Through Birthright, John, Patricia and their young daughters welcomed several expectant mothers into their home for days or weeks at a time. It was simply a matter of “putting your money where your mouth is,” says Patricia – if they were going to be personally opposed to abortion, they were going to do something to help.

When the Peytons, who first met as students at Seattle University, returned to Washington in 1977, John joined the speakers bureau of Human Life of Washington and began giving talks on pro-life issues at schools, churches and club meetings. He also served as the state pro-life chairman for the Knights of Columbus when, in 1991, Washington’s first assisted suicide ballot measure, Initiative 119, was defeated.

True compassion and dignity

Becoming what some would consider a perfect candidate for physician-assisted suicide hasn’t changed Peyton’s stand on the issue. If anything, it’s strengthened it.

Peyton knows that he is “exceedingly fortunate” to have the loving support of his wife, his six grown daughters and their families, his friends and neighbors and his home parish, St. Paul in Seattle. But what about those suffering with terminal illnesses who are not so fortunate? Rather than tempting them to commit suicide, Peyton contends, our society needs to extend true compassion to the dying.

“So much can be done to help people who are helpless,” he says. “We could, as a society, be far more compassionate. We've become so accustomed to luxury. We've become so materialistic in some respects. We've become so selfish. … You can't legislate compassionate care, but that's what's going to be needed.”

Though Initiative 1000 is couched in such attractive terms as “compassion” and “dignity,” the Peytons say such wording is ultimately deceptive. “I feel that I’m helping my husband have death with dignity by keeping his dignity and helping him in any way I can,” says Patricia.

Facing death with faith

The Peytons have been able to deal with the prospect of John’s impending death largely because of their deep Catholic faith, which John calls “the fundamental and essential part of our lives.” That faith is a major source of strength for John and Patricia, but it doesn’t mean they haven’t had their share of tears in recent months.

“Well, I'm disappointed, there's no denying that,” says John, who had hoped to have many more years to enjoy retirement with Patricia. “But I don't feel any anger or bitterness. I don't feel cheated of anything.” In fact, acquaintances have marveled that John’s disease hasn’t dampened his attitude. While his body has deteriorated, his hopeful outlook and dry sense of humor have survived intact.

“I’ve told people that if this is what God demands of me to improve my chances of living with him in the hereafter, mine is a pretty poor negotiating position,” he says with a smile.

So, after more than 30 years of speaking about life issues, John’s voice is giving out, and he’s prepared to leave this life with trust in God’s mercy, though he’ll leave behind much unfinished work.

“I've just about said the last pro-life thing that I'm going to be able to say,” he gasps at the end of a long interview. A single tear runs down his cheek, but his eyes burn with urgency and intensity. “It's up to you guys now. Take it up. May God go with you.”

John Peyton may soon lose his voice, as he will surely lose his life, but the witness of his life, his faith, his courage and true dignity in the face of death will reverberate long after he’s gone to his heavenly reward.

-------------------------

'Death with dignity' or a path to disaster?

Though Lou Gehrig’s disease has nearly robbed him of his voice, John Peyton still has some strong words of warning to say about Initiative 1000:

• “In our legal system, an accomplice is as guilty as a perpetrator. A doctor writes a prescription so someone can commit suicide, he's an accomplice to suicide. … Suicide is killing. It makes a doctor a killer.”

• “Every life is a good. A legitimate government protects every life. A legitimate government is honest, and to give physicians the chance to be killers … and tell people that life can be worthless – what kind of society are we building?”

• “One of the fundamental principles of this thing is the absolute autonomy of the individual, and this myth of absolute autonomy … is the foundation for anarchy. But that's one of the things that's in play here. You are the absolute master of your life. Nobody has a right to tell you any different.”

• “If you say that I have an absolute right to do away with myself in this case, where do my absolute rights stop? They don't. Once you say that you are your own ultimate moral authority, you've joined Friedrich Nietzsche, you've become one of the Übermenschen, one of the higher men, and you are above the law, you are above any law, and that's what this thing implements. That's the principle involved.”

On the Eucharist: Why can't Protestants receive Catholic Communion?

2008-07-11T20:37:00.000-07:00

A friend recently wrote the following on her blog:

"we went to catholic mass on sunday. it was great to be in church, and the priest mentioned a few times the desire for unity among all those who believe in jesus, which is something we all can hope for. but then came communion, and protestants aren't supposed to take catholic communion. it saddened me that i wasn't allowed to take communion, since we believe in the same God, the same body + blood + cross + resurrection. also, to my knowledge, protestants would welcome catholics to take communion in a protestant church. so i'm not sure why the reverse isn't true?"

This post will be my attempt to shed a little light -- however dim -- on the issue for my friend, from a Catholic perspective. I hope it might be helpful or interesting to others, as well.

What is Catholic Communion?

I'll start off by saying that the sacrament of Communion, or the Eucharist, is something far more profound than most people -- Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise -- realize. I won't pretend to have a complete, or even an adequate, understanding of the Eucharist, either intellectually or spiritually. But I'll do my best to explain what little I can as clearly as I can.

Most people just can't accept the fundamental Catholic teaching about the Eucharist, but here's what it boils down to: The Eucharist is Jesus.

That little disk that looks, smells, feels, tastes exactly like a bland wheat cracker, that liquid in the chalice that sure seems like wine, actually is the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the Second Person of the Trinity. Not just symbolically. It really is Jesus -- God -- in the most real, full, and immediate manifestation of Himself that we can experience in this life.

To get philosophical about it, the sacrament of the Eucharist involves "transubstantiation," meaning that the substance, or essence, of the bread and wine changes -- in a real, fundamental, ontological way -- into the substance of the Body and Blood of Jesus, while the accidents/appearances/characteristics -- those things that can be observed with the senses -- of bread and wine remain.

The word transubstantiation means that this change of substance is complete: The Body and Blood of Christ are not contained in the bread and wine, nor do they exist side by side with the bread and wine. The bread and wine are gone, completely replaced by the Body and Blood of Jesus.

That the accidents of bread and wine remain means that if you were to hold up a consecrated ("transubstantiated") Host next to an unconsecrated one -- in other words, if you were to hold the Eucharist in one hand and an ordinary wheaten wafer in the other -- you would not detect the slightest difference between them. If you put them under a microscope, they'd look exactly the same. They'd taste the same, too. No matter what scientific scrutiny you subjected them to, you wouldn't find any discrepancy between them.

But one would be a cracker, and the other would be the Savior of the world.

This miraculous transubstantiation takes place when, during the Mass, the priest holds the wheat bread and grape wine and says the words of institution that Jesus spoke at the Last Supper ("This is my body" and "This is my blood"). By the power of Jesus' words and the Holy Spirit, the bread and wine truly become the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ, and Jesus' once-for-all sacrifice on the Cross is made present on the altar. At the Mass, we are thus present in a mystical but very real way both at the Last Supper and at Jesus' Crucifixion.

The Church refers to the Eucharist as "the source and summit of the Christian life." It is a conduit of grace -- the very life of God -- for our souls. It is the greatest gift God could possibly give His Church, because it is the gift of God's very Self. For that reason, when the priest elevates the consecrated Host and the chalice of the precious Blood, we can -- and in justice must -- worship it and in our hearts exclaim, "My Lord and my God!"

Why do Catholics believe all this?

Now, if this all sounds completely ridiculous, or if you're thinking that I must not really be saying what it sounds like I'm saying, that I couldn't possibly believe that I'm literally consuming God when I go to Mass each week, then you're experiencing much the same reaction that Jesus' disciples had the first time He foretold the institution of the Eucharist, when He told a crowd, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh" (John 6:51).

Naturally, this didn't make a lot of sense to His hearers, who obviously took Him quite literally: "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (John 6:52) they asked each other. Now, Jesus had run into problems before with His disciples taking Him literally when He was merely speaking figuratively (see Matthew 16:6-12 and John 4:31-34). In such cases, He was always quick to clear up the misunderstanding.

But in this instance, Jesus reiterated His shocking message even more emphatically: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed" (John 6:53-55).

At this point, many of Jesus' disciples said, "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?" (John 6:60) and walked away. But Jesus didn't call after them, "Wait, come back! I was just speaking metaphorically!" Why? Because He was being cruel and deceptive? Or because He hadn't been speaking metaphorically?

We find the same kind of literal language in the accounts of the Last Supper, when Jesus instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist. Luke records it this way: "And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' And likewise the cup after supper, saying, 'This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood'" (Luke 22:19-20). The same God Who spoke all of creation into existence declared bread to be His Body, and so it was. (Those words, "Do this in remembrance of me," by the way, are where the Church finds the institution of its sacramental priesthood.)

That the apostles understood Jesus to be speaking literally at the Last Supper is evident from the testimony of the early Church, which was taught by the apostles. Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop who was martyred for the faith in the early 100s, and who was himself a disciple of the apostle John, wrote to the Church in Smyrna about "those who hold heterodox opinions" that "[t]hey abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, Flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His Goodness, raised up again."

For 2,000 years, the Catholic Church has trusted in Jesus' words at the Last Supper. She has celebrated the Eucharist as the very center of the Church's life and has maintained a steadfast faith in the life-giving reality of Christ's real presence in the Eucharist.

Why can't Protestants receive Catholic Communion?

So, after that long introduction (which, believe it or not, barely scratches the surface of the Church's rich and polyvalent understanding of the sacrament), we actually get to the question we started with: Why can't Protestants receive Communion in the Catholic Church? As this question was posed in the context of a desire for Christian unity, I'll try to address that issue as well.

The Catholic Church longs for Jesus' prayer "that they may all be one" (John 17:21) to be fulfilled, and is grieved by the fact of division within the Body of Christ, because division is contrary to the will of Christ, Who is the Head of the Church.

Since the Catholic Church understands herself to be, historically, the one Church that Jesus founded, she sees herself as the locus of Christian unity and prays that all people might be reconciled to her and, through her, to Christ. Which means, to put it bluntly, that the Catholic Church desires, ultimately, for all people to become Catholic.

Doesn't that make the Catholic Church the most delusionally presumptuous and hubristic organization on the planet? Yes it does, if the Church's desire is not also the will of God. But that's a topic for another excessively long essay.

Does this desire mean that the Catholic Church does not regard Protestants as true Christians? By no means! The Church regards all those who have been baptized as brothers and sisters in Christ and recognizes that God is truly at work in Protestant communities.

But while the Church sees non-Catholic Christians as brothers and sisters in Christ, she must honestly acknowledge that they are "separated brethren." While the Catholic Church longs, works, and prays for full unity in the Body of Christ, the wounds of division cannot be healed by fiat. While great strides have been made in mutual understanding and reconciliation between Catholic and non-Catholic Christians in recent decades, the longed-for unity is not yet a reality.

The Eucharist is a sacrament of unity: It both signifies and strengthens the bonds of unity within the Church. You might ask why, if the Eucharist is a source of unity, Catholics wouldn't encourage Protestants to receive Catholic Communion, so that the divisions in the Body of Christ might be healed. The answer to that question can be found in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. After recounting Jesus' words at the Last Supper, Paul writes:

"Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died." (1 Corinthians 11:27-30)

Serious stuff. And so the Catholic Church's teaching that Protestants -- who typically do not discern the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist in the same way that the Catholic Church does -- ought not receive Catholic Communion is born, not out of some ill-conceived and insensitive desire for exclusivity, but primarily out of love. Undoubtedly it can be hard to feel the love when you're the only one left sitting in the pews at Communion time, but love really is the motive.

The passage from 1 Corinthians also highlights another Church teaching about the Eucharist which is rarely emphasized or even acknowledged these days: Catholics are not to receive the Eucharist if they are conscious of having committed any serious sins which they have not confessed in the sacrament of reconciliation. To receive the Eucharist in such a state of sin is, itself, a serious sin. Protestants are not the only ones who ought not receive the Eucharist at Mass. There are, in all likelihood, several Catholics eating and drinking judgment upon themselves at most Masses by receiving the Eucharist in an unworthy manner (I have, unfortunately, often been one of them in the past), and we are not to be envied.

There is more that I could say -- and much, much more that could be said -- about the Eucharist, but this post has gone on long enough.

If you have any questions or want to take issue with anything I've written, please feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail, and I will do my best to respond.

And if you want more complete and authoritative information about the Eucharist than I can offer, please check out the Catechism of the Catholic Church or, for a briefer treatment, the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Candy-making sister

2008-06-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

I imagine I've probably lost any of my regular blog-checkers with my nearly two-month silence, but I'm gonna ease back into this and hope that a few people come back with me.

Anyway, here's a link to a fun little story I wrote for The Catholic Northwest Progress about an 87-year-old religious sister who auctions off her candy-making talents in charity auctions. Enjoy.

Sleepy bear

2008-05-03T01:06:00.000-07:00

I'm a sucker for bears, babies, and sleeping, so I was quite taken with this video of a sleepy baby bear. Enjoy!

Could someone please explain this to me?

2008-04-30T23:41:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting piece in the Telegraph by Professor Stuart Campbell, a London obstetrician who discusses his "technique for producing detailed 3D images of the developing foetus that show it smiling, yawning, rubbing its eyes and apparently 'walking' in the womb."

He continues:

"Though I perform these scans every day, I am still overcome by the excitement and the wonder of the foetus that is learning to be a baby. By 20 weeks it smiles, makes crying expressions and sucks its thumb. At 23 weeks, it begins to open its eyes and develops quite complex patterns of behaviour. It can survive outside the womb.

. . .

"I have been accused of sentimentality, but the fact is that, in these images, foetuses are baby-like. To me it is almost barbaric to abort foetuses between 20 and 24 weeks. In fact, the procedure is so unattractive and distressing that few doctors will perform the operation after 20 weeks."

Campbell, however, advocates reducing the amount of red tape involved in procuring an abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. (The current law in Great Britain requires two doctors to sign off in such cases, though in practice this is basically a formality, according to Campbell.) Here's his reasoning:

"Delay is bad. Anything that speeds up the process and enables an abortion to be carried out more expeditiously once a woman has made her decision, is to be welcomed.

. . .

"Some GPs are less keen on performing terminations than others. While they go through the laborious formalities of seeking independent signatures, a woman may be left waiting for two or three weeks before her termination. In that time, the foetus is acquiring the startling human characteristics seen in the scans carried out every day in hospitals around the country."

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understand it, this obstetrician's position with respect to unborn babies is, Hurry up and kill it before it starts doing anything too cute that might convict my conscience!

I can't understand how anyone could be intellectually satisfied with such a position. Aborting a 20-to-24-week-old fetus is "almost barbaric," but aborting a less-than-20-week-old fetus is apparently morally neutral, a process to be streamlined? There's a very strange philosophical scheme at work here, one that establishes a firm chronological cut-off point for determining the humanity of an unborn baby, based largely on the emotional response the baby evokes.

Such a scheme seems, to me, intellectually unsustainable. What if you're faced with a particularly precocious 19-and-a-half-week-old fetus? Would aborting that baby be barbaric, or no? What is it, exactly, that happens at that magical 20-week threshold that universally transmogrifies non-humans into humans?

Is there an ontological difference between a 20-week-old fetus and a 19-week-old fetus? Between a 19-week-old and an 18-week-old? Between an 18-week-old and a 17-week-old, and so on?

Could someone please explain this to me?

Pope Benedict reflects on his visit to the U.S.

2008-04-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

In case you missed Pope Benedict XVI's trip to the United States a couple weeks ago, or if you just couldn't quite assimilate all that he said while he was here, here's a very brief wrap-up of his visit. It's basically an abridged version of his weekly audience today, courtesy of the Vatican:

"My recent Apostolic Journey to the United Nations and the United States of America was inspired by the theme, 'Christ our Hope'. I am most grateful to all who helped in any way to make the Journey a success. My visit was meant to encourage the Catholic community in America, especially our young people, to bear consistent witness to the faith, and to carry on the Church’s mission, especially with regard to education and concern for the poor. American society traditionally values religious freedom and the need for faith to play its part in building a sound civic life. In my meetings with President Bush, and with Christian leaders and representatives of other religions, I reaffirmed the Church’s commitment to cooperation in the service of understanding, peace and spiritual values. My address to the United Nations stressed the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which grounds respect for human dignity in a universally valid ethical order. In a particular way, my visit to Ground Zero, charged with sober silence and prayer, was a moving testimony to the hope which is stronger than evil and death. I ask all of you to join me in praying that this Visit will bear abundant spiritual fruit for the growth of the faith in America and for the unity and peace of the whole human family."

"U.S. trip helped pope, Catholic Church image: poll"

2008-04-30T16:47:00.000-07:00

From Reuters:

"As a result of what they saw and heard during the trip, 65 percent of Americans have a more positive view of the pope, while 21 said it made no difference and 14 percent said their opinion was now less positive."

Mission accomplished.

Pope Benedict can finally breathe a sigh of relief, and maybe give a Sally Field-esque "You like me!" speech.

The greatest book I have ever read

2008-04-28T23:01:00.000-07:00

When I first read G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy in November, I remarked that it was a book that would bear repeat readings over the years. Well, I think I underestimated my enthusiasm for this book. In the five months since my initial reading, I have already re-read the book and listened to it in audiobook form. (Please do yourself a favor and download the free audiobook here. I promise you will not regret the investment of six hours of your life.)

Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy in 1908, so it's 100 years old this year. Some people say it's the best book of the 20th century. Now, not having read all the books written in the 20th century, I'm in no position to comment on the veracity of that rather sweeping claim, but I will take a stand and say that Orthodoxy is at least the greatest book I have ever read. As far as I'm concerned, it's the perfect book -- short, funny, thought-provoking, and utterly brilliant.

It's a cliché to observe that Chesterton's writing is as fresh and relevant today as it was 100 years ago, but it's so true that I'll risk the cliché. Chesterton understood everything. His vision penetrated to the heart of every intellectual fashion and cultural trend of his time, and he saw with seemingly prescient clarity how such trends would play out in the long run. He understood the year 2008 better than most people today do. Change out a few of the names and specific cultural references, and you'd think the book was written last month.

If I let myself get going, I could quote dozens of favorite passages, but for now I'll just give you one that never fails to make me smile. It's from Chapter 4: The Ethics of Elfland:

"All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, 'Do it again'; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance."

Pray for Aliza Shvarts

2008-04-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

It’s been more than three days since I first read about Aliza Shvarts – the Yale senior who claims to have artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” during the past year and then taken abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages as part of her senior art project – and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it. I will provide a brief run-down of the situation for those who may not have heard about this yet.

On Thursday morning, the Yale Daily News ran a story about Shvarts’s project entitled “For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse.” The Drudge Report and other news outlets picked up the story, and it quickly permeated the Internet. Later in the day, a Yale spokeswoman released a statement saying that Shvarts had informed Yale officials that she had never actually impregnated herself, that the whole thing was just “performance art.” Shvarts shot back that the Yale administration was simply trying to dissociate itself from her in response to negative media attention, and that she really had repeatedly inseminated herself and self-aborted as she claimed. On Friday, the Yale Daily News ran a column by Shvarts in which she explained what she considered the artistic significance of her project and gave this account of how she had proceeded:

“For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding.”

Since she always timed her ingestion of the abortifacient to coincide with the expected start of menstruation, Shvarts says she does not know whether she was ever actually pregnant.

The Yale Daily News gives this account of Shvarts’s plan for the presentation of her project, which will be exhibited at Yale’s Undergraduate Senior Art Show from April 22 to May 1:

“The display of Schvarts' project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts' self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

“Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.”

Here ends my impartial recounting of this situation.

When I first read about this, I was physically sickened. I was appalled, angered, disgusted, dumbfounded … and deeply, deeply saddened. I wanted to decry this abomination as an act of pure, distilled evil – and so it is. And I wanted to condemn this girl as a demon, an inhuman and menacing monster. These were my visceral reactions – and the apparent reactions of many people – to this story, and they were, I believe, completely natural.

But outrage should not be the only – or even the primary – reaction to this heartbreaking situation. When I first read the story, it took me only a few seconds to realize that righteous indignation and disgust, while almost unavoidable, were not what this situation most desperately needed. And so I prayed.

I prayed that God would have mercy on this girl’s soul and that He would hold in His loving embrace the souls of any babies she may have conceived and killed. I prayed that God would heal this girl of whatever terrible affliction – whether psychological, demonic, or otherwise – led her to believe that her actions were acceptable. I prayed that God would make His loving presence known to this girl and that she would come to understand and repent for what she had done. I prayed that God would comfort all those for whom this story is a source of great pain. I prayed that God would have mercy on us all.

More than anything else, we need to pray for this situation, whatever the situation really is. I was not surprised to hear the report from Yale that Shvarts’s project was a hoax, nor was I surprised to hear Shvarts’s insistence that it was not. I don’t know what the truth is, whether she actually inseminated herself or not, but either way, she needs our prayers. Whether she actually aborted (or at least intended to abort) innocent life for the sake of “art,” or just intended to cause havoc and widespread distress by convincing people that she did, she needs our prayers. Her actions were absolutely abhorrent either way, and either way she is so far off course that she’ll never be able to find her way back without a lot of help.

Like I say, my visceral desire is to condemn Shvarts as a monster. But I can’t do that so easily. I have to remind myself that we are all sinners, and that judgment belongs to God alone. Also, Shvarts’s words and actions reek so strongly of serious mental illness that I have to wonder to what extent she can even be considered responsible for her actions. So I’m not going to condemn Aliza Shvarts. But, oh boy, can I condemn her actions.

Shvarts’s project is disgusting. In addition to the obvious evil of intentionally conceiving and killing babies as “art,” her project spits in the face of every woman who has ever suffered a real miscarriage (as opposed to Shvarts’s euphemistic “miscarriages”). Shvarts’s whole project is, quite literally, sickening.

Shvarts’s rationale (far too generous a word) for her project is almost as disturbing as the project itself. I was very interested to read her explanation of the project to see what kind of justification she could possibly give for her actions. It was … frightening. Her account is an inhuman nightmare of intro-level deconstructionist nonsense and pseudo-intellectual buzzwords that epitomizes everything that has gone wrong with “thinking” in recent history. I hesitate to give an excerpt, but I think it’s important for people to see what passes for scholarship at elite universities these days:

“[This piece] creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation — the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading.

“This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word to something physical — is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies. In a sense, the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns the term ‘miscarriage’ or ‘period’ to that blood.

“In some sense, neither term is exactly accurate or inaccurate; the ambiguity is not merely a matter of context, but is embodied in the physicality of the object. This central ambiguity defies a clear definition of the act. The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming — an authorial act.

“It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it.”

If you didn’t understand any of that, it’s because it doesn’t mean anything, at least not anything that anyone with a modicum of common sense would ever fall for. No, Ms. Shvarts, there is absolutely no sense in which “the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns the term ‘miscarriage’ or ‘period’ to that blood.” There’s either a dead embryo in there or there isn’t, completely independent of our knowledge or our “ideological” “act of identification.” You have not “isolate[d] the locus of ontology to an act of readership” because, as every normal person knows, there is such a thing as objective reality, however “heteronormative” you may find that reality to be.

I can’t stand this kind of garbage, but it’s just sad in this case. No one comes up with stuff like this on their own. This is quite obviously the result of long-term hardcore nonsense indoctrination that has apparently deadened Shvarts’s soul.

Perhaps the one faint glimmer of a silver lining in this storm cloud of a situation is the fact that Shvarts’s actions have been almost universally denounced. The response of students at Yale seems to have been overwhelmingly negative. “My initial reaction was on par with everyone else’s,” Yale freshman Laura Gonzales told The Harvard Crimson. “I was appalled and shocked. Both sides of the abortion debate are against it.”

According to the Yale Daily News, even NARAL Pro-Choice America has condemned the project. “This ‘project’ is offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage,” said Ted Miller, a spokesman for the organization.

My fiancée, Jeanette, told me that her co-workers, many of them pro-choice, were all disturbed by the story when it broke on Thursday. One of them in particular followed the story with great interest as it developed throughout the day, trying to understand his reaction to it. He is staunchly pro-choice, so he was trying to figure out why he had such a negative response to Shvarts’s project.

I guess that would be my challenge to those who believe that abortion is acceptable in principle and yet find Shvarts’s project abhorrent: Please try to articulate clearly why you think and feel the way you do. If you believe that abortion is acceptable, why are you bothered by Shvarts’s project? I would be very interested to read your response.

The pope's prayer at Ground Zero

2008-04-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

From EWTN, the text of Pope Benedict's prayer at Ground Zero in New York this morning:

"O God of love, compassion, and healing,
look on us, people of many different faiths
and traditions,
who gather today at this site,
the scene of incredible violence and pain.

"We ask you in your goodness
to give eternal light and peace
to all who died here —
the heroic first-responders:
our fire fighters, police officers,
emergency service workers, and
Port Authority personnel,
along with all the innocent men and women
who were victims of this tragedy
simply because their work or service
brought them here on September 11, 2001.

"We ask you, in your compassion
to bring healing to those
who, because of their presence here that day,
suffer from injuries and illness.

"Heal, too, the pain of still-grieving families
and all who lost loved ones in this tragedy.
Give them strength to continue their lives
with courage and hope.

"We are mindful as well
of those who suffered death, injury, and loss
on the same day at the Pentagon and in
Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

"Our hearts are one with theirs
as our prayer embraces their pain and suffering.

"God of peace, bring your peace to our violent world:
peace in the hearts of all men and women
and peace among the nations of the earth.

"Turn to your way of love
those whose hearts and minds
are consumed with hatred.

"God of understanding,
overwhelmed by the magnitude of this tragedy,
we seek your light and guidance
as we confront such terrible events.
Grant that those whose lives were spared
may live so that the lives lost here
may not have been lost in vain.

"Comfort and console us,
strengthen us in hope,
and give us the wisdom and courage
to work tirelessly for a world
where true peace and love reign
among nations and in the hearts of all."

The pope's address to the UN

2008-04-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

EWTN has the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's address this morning to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Here's an excerpt from roughly the second half of the pope's address. If you're like me, you'll have to read it slowly to grasp all that the pope is getting at -- he is a very dense thinker, in the sense that every sentence and every clause is tightly packed with meaning, and his ideas unfold over the course of paragraphs rather than in catchy slogans or phrases. Here, the pope touches on the basis of human rights, the discernment of good and evil, the role of religion in society, the aim of inter-religious dialogue, and the true meaning of religious liberty:

"Experience shows that legality often prevails over justice when the insistence upon rights makes them appear as the exclusive result of legislative enactments or normative decisions taken by the various agencies of those in power. When presented purely in terms of legality, rights risk becoming weak propositions divorced from the ethical and rational dimension which is their foundation and their goal. The Universal Declaration, rather, has reinforced the conviction that respect for human rights is principally rooted in unchanging justice, on which the binding force of international proclamations is also based. This aspect is often overlooked when the attempt is made to deprive rights of their true function in the name of a narrowly utilitarian perspective. Since rights and the resulting duties follow naturally from human interaction, it is easy to forget that they are the fruit of a commonly held sense of justice built primarily upon solidarity among the members of society, and hence valid at all times and for all peoples. This intuition was expressed as early as the fifth century by Augustine of Hippo, one of the masters of our intellectual heritage. He taught that the saying: Do not do to others what you would not want done to you 'cannot in any way vary according to the different understandings that have arisen in the world' (De Doctrina Christiana, III, 14). Human rights, then, must be respected as an expression of justice, and not merely because they are enforceable through the will of the legislators.

"Ladies and Gentlemen,

"As history proceeds, new situations arise, and the attempt is made to link them to new rights. Discernment, that is, the capacity to distinguish good from evil, becomes even more essential in the context of demands that concern the very lives and conduct of persons, communities and peoples. In tackling the theme of rights, since important situations and profound realities are involved, discernment is both an indispensable and a fruitful virtue.

"Discernment, then, shows that entrusting exclusively to individual States, with their laws and institutions, the final responsibility to meet the aspirations of persons, communities and entire peoples, can sometimes have consequences that exclude the possibility of a social order respectful of the dignity and rights of the person. On the other hand, a vision of life firmly anchored in the religious dimension can help to achieve this, since recognition of the transcendent value of every man and woman favours conversion of heart, which then leads to a commitment to resist violence, terrorism and war, and to promote justice and peace. This also provides the proper context for the inter-religious dialogue that the United Nations is called to support, just as it supports dialogue in other areas of human activity. Dialogue should be recognized as the means by which the various components of society can articulate their point of view and build consensus around the truth concerning particular values or goals. It pertains to the nature of religions, freely practised, that they can autonomously conduct a dialogue of thought and life. If at this level, too, the religious sphere is kept separate from political action, then great benefits ensue for individuals and communities. On the other hand, the United Nations can count on the results of dialogue between religions, and can draw fruit from the willingness of believers to place their experiences at the service of the common good. Their task is to propose a vision of faith not in terms of intolerance, discrimination and conflict, but in terms of complete respect for truth, coexistence, rights, and reconciliation.

"Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian - a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer. The activity of the United Nations in recent years has ensured that public debate gives space to viewpoints inspired by a religious vision in all its dimensions, including ritual, worship, education, dissemination of information and the freedom to profess and choose religion. It is inconceivable, then, that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves - their faith - in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one's rights. The rights associated with religion are all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an exclusive nature. The full guarantee of religious liberty cannot be limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the possibility of believers playing their part in building the social order. Indeed, they actually do so, for example through their influential and generous involvement in a vast network of initiatives which extend from Universities, scientific institutions and schools to health care agencies and charitable organizations in the service of the poorest and most marginalized. Refusal to recognize the contribution to society that is rooted in the religious dimension and in the quest for the Absolute - by its nature, expressing communion between persons - would effectively privilege an individualistic approach, and would fragment the unity of the person."

"We are Catholic: Welcome home"

2008-04-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

I saw this video from a group called Catholics Come Home a while ago, and I've been waiting for it to turn up in embeddable form so I could post it. Thanks to Dyspeptic Mutterings and others for highlighting it.

UPDATE: Ah well, they took it down from YouTube. The video is here, at the bottom of the page, on the left.

"Pope prays with victims of clergy sex abuse scandal"

2008-04-17T19:54:00.000-07:00

A good story from the Associated Press. Excerpts:

"Pope Benedict XVI prayed with tearful victims of clergy sex abuse in a chapel Thursday, an extraordinary gesture from a pontiff who has made atoning for the great shame of the U.S. church the cornerstone of his first papal trip to America.

. . .

"The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a papal spokesman, said that Benedict and Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley met with a group of five or six clergy sex abuse victims for about 25 minutes, offering them encouragement and hope. The group from O'Malley's archdiocese were all adults, men and women, who had been molested when they were minors. Each spoke privately with the pope.

"'They prayed together. Also, each of them had their own individual time with the Holy Father,' Lombardi said. 'Some were in tears.'"

The pope on Catholic education

2008-04-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

EWTN has the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's address this afternoon to Catholic educators from around the country at the Catholic University of America. Here's an excerpt from his remarks on the touchy subject of "academic freedom":

"In regard to faculty members at Catholic colleges universities, I wish to reaffirm the great value of academic freedom. In virtue of this freedom you are called to search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads you. Yet it is also the case that any appeal to the principle of academic freedom in order to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university's identity and mission; a mission at the heart of the Church's munus docendi and not somehow autonomous or independent of it.

"Teachers and administrators, whether in universities or schools, have the duty and privilege to ensure that students receive instruction in Catholic doctrine and practice. This requires that public witness to the way of Christ, as found in the Gospel and upheld by the Church's Magisterium, shapes all aspects of an institution's life, both inside and outside the classroom. Divergence from this vision weakens Catholic identity and, far from advancing freedom, inevitably leads to confusion, whether moral, intellectual or spiritual."

Papal Mass pictures

2008-04-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

A few photos from Pope Benedict XVI's Mass at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., from Reuters:

The pope's homily

2008-04-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

EWTN has the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's homily from the Mass at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., where 46,000 people are gathered this morning. An excerpt:

"I pray, then, that this significant anniversary in the life of the Church in the United States, and the presence of the Successor of Peter in your midst, will be an occasion for all Catholics to reaffirm their unity in the apostolic faith, to offer their contemporaries a convincing account of the hope which inspires them (cf. 1 Pet 3:15), and to be renewed in missionary zeal for the extension of God's Kingdom.

"The world needs this witness! Who can deny that the present moment is a crossroads, not only for the Church in America but also for society as a whole? It is a time of great promise, as we see the human family in many ways drawing closer together and becoming ever more interdependent. Yet at the same time we see clear signs of a disturbing breakdown in the very foundations of society: signs of alienation, anger and polarization on the part of many of our contemporaries; increased violence; a weakening of the moral sense; a coarsening of social relations; and a growing forgetfulness of God. The Church, too, sees signs of immense promise in her many strong parishes and vital movements, in the enthusiasm for the faith shown by so many young people, in the number of those who each year embrace the Catholic faith, and in a greater interest in prayer and catechesis. At the same time she senses, often painfully, the presence of division and polarization in her midst, as well as the troubling realization that many of the baptized, rather than acting as a spiritual leaven in the world, are inclined to embrace attitudes contrary to the truth of the Gospel.

"'Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth!' (cf. Ps 104:30). The words of today's Responsorial Psalm are a prayer which rises up from the heart of the Church in every time and place. They remind us that the Holy Spirit has been poured out as the first fruits of a new creation, 'new heavens and a new earth' (cf. 2 Pet 3:13; Rev 21:1), in which God's peace will reign and the human family will be reconciled in justice and love. We have heard Saint Paul tell us that all creation is even now 'groaning' in expectation of that true freedom which is God's gift to his children (Rom 8:21-22), a freedom which enables us to live in conformity to his will. Today let us pray fervently that the Church in America will be renewed in that same Spirit, and sustained in her mission of proclaiming the Gospel to a world that longs for genuine freedom (cf. Jn 8:32), authentic happiness, and the fulfillment of its deepest aspirations!"

Pope Benedict XVI's "opposition to abortion rights"

2008-04-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

Right in the middle of what was shaping up to be an admirably fair and accurate New York Times article (seriously) summarizing the pope's day ("Pope Praises U.S., but Warns of Secular Challenges"), we get this account of President Bush's welcoming remarks this morning:

"The crowd burst into applause when Mr. Bush told the pope that Americans 'need your message that all life is sacred,' a reference to the two men’s shared opposition to abortion rights."

(They tried to find a more negative way to spin it, but there wasn't any.)

Actually, I'm pretty sure it was reference to Pope Benedict XVI's message that all life is sacred, which does not consist primarily in his "opposition" to abortion "rights," but rather in his -- and the Catholic Church's -- unwavering defense of the most fundamental of all rights, the foundation of all other rights, namely, "the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death," as the pope put it in his address to the bishops this evening.

The Catholic Church's position on this point is not a negative one, nor is it restricted to the issue of abortion. Pope Benedict XVI and the Church uphold the dignity and value of the lives of every single human being: the unborn, the elderly, and everyone in between. The Church's teaching cannot fairly be reduced to a partisan position on what, for many, is a political issue. Rather, the Church's teaching is indeed based on the conviction that all life is sacred, and the fact that without an inviolable right to life, all other rights -- no matter how important -- are ultimately meaningless.

But I guess that's too profound an idea to actually engage for those who trade in secular boilerplate.

Pope's address to bishops

2008-04-16T17:59:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's address tonight to the bishops of the United States in the crypt of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, as well as his answers to the three questions the bishops posed to him.

Most of the coverage of this address in the mainstream media will undoubtedly and understandably focus on the pope's words about the clergy sexual abuse scandal. Pope Benedict XVI reiterated that the situation was a source of "deep shame" for him and for the entire Church, and he acknowledged that the Church's response was "sometimes very badly handled." I'm glad that the pope addressed this scandal which has rocked the Church, but I think I'll leave it to others to discuss and debate the significance of what he said about it. I will simply pray that "this evil" (the pope's words) of clergy sexual abuse will be definitively eradicated, and that the victims may find healing.

While the abuse scandal is obviously an extremely important topic, and while it was one of the major issues addressed in Pope Benedict XVI's speech, it would be a shame if the rest of the pope's message were overlooked, as I suspect it will be my most people. The pope issued a challenge to all Americans, and especially to Catholics, to embrace a vibrant, living faith that embraces all areas of life. This is a message I think we all need to hear, again and again, for as long as we live. Here are a few highlights:

"It is in this fertile soil, nourished from so many different sources, that all of you, Brother Bishops, are called to sow the seeds of the Gospel today. This leads me to ask how, in the twenty-first century, a bishop can best fulfill the call to 'make all things new in Christ, our hope'? How can he lead his people to 'an encounter with the living God', the source of that life-transforming hope of which the Gospel speaks (cf. Spe Salvi, 4)? Perhaps he needs to begin by clearing away some of the barriers to such an encounter. While it is true that this country is marked by a genuinely religious spirit, the subtle influence of secularism can nevertheless color the way people allow their faith to influence their behavior. Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death? Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted. Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.

. . .

"In a society which values personal freedom and autonomy, it is easy to lose sight of our dependence on others as well as the responsibilities that we bear towards them. This emphasis on individualism has even affected the Church (cf. Spe Salvi, 13-15), giving rise to a form of piety which sometimes emphasizes our private relationship with God at the expense of our calling to be members of a redeemed community. Yet from the beginning, God saw that 'it is not good for man to be alone' (Gen 2:18). We were created as social beings who find fulfillment only in love - for God and for our neighbor. If we are truly to gaze upon him who is the source of our joy, we need to do so as members of the people of God (cf. Spe Salvi, 14). If this seems counter-cultural, that is simply further evidence of the urgent need for a renewed evangelization of culture.

. . .

"Of course, what is essential is a correct understanding of the just autonomy of the secular order, an autonomy which cannot be divorced from God the Creator and his saving plan (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 36). Perhaps America’s brand of secularism poses a particular problem: it allows for professing belief in God, and respects the public role of religion and the Churches, but at the same time it can subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator. Faith becomes a passive acceptance that certain things 'out there' are true, but without practical relevance for everyday life. The result is a growing separation of faith from life: living 'as if God did not exist'. This is aggravated by an individualistic and eclectic approach to faith and religion: far from a Catholic approach to 'thinking with the Church', each person believes he or she has a right to pick and choose, maintaining external social bonds but without an integral, interior conversion to the law of Christ. Consequently, rather than being transformed and renewed in mind, Christians are easily tempted to conform themselves to the spirit of this age (cf. Rom 12:3). We have seen this emerge in an acute way in the scandal given by Catholics who promote an alleged right to abortion.

"On a deeper level, secularism challenges the Church to reaffirm and to pursue more actively her mission in and to the world. As the Council made clear, the lay faithful have a particular responsibility in this regard. What is needed, I am convinced, is a greater sense of the intrinsic relationship between the Gospel and the natural law on the one hand, and, on the other, the pursuit of authentic human good, as embodied in civil law and in personal moral decisions. In a society that rightly values personal liberty, the Church needs to promote at every level of her teaching — in catechesis, preaching, seminary and university instruction — an apologetics aimed at affirming the truth of Christian revelation, the harmony of faith and reason, and a sound understanding of freedom, seen in positive terms as a liberation both from the limitations of sin and for an authentic and fulfilling life. In a word, the Gospel has to be preached and taught as an integral way of life, offering an attractive and true answer, intellectually and practically, to real human problems. The 'dictatorship of relativism', in the end, is nothing less than a threat to genuine human freedom, which only matures in generosity and fidelity to the truth."

Slip of the tongue

2008-04-16T14:25:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure Father David O'Connell, the president of the Catholic University of America, just inadvertently called Benedict XVI "the poop" on CNN.

Joint statement on Benedict-Bush conversation

2008-04-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

From the Associated Press, a joint statement from the Holy See and the White House about this morning's private, 45-minute Oval Office conversation between Pope Benedict XVI and President Bush. It is, not surprisingly, pretty vague, but it gives an idea at least of what they talked about.

"His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI and President George W. Bush met today in the Oval Office of the White House.

"President Bush, on behalf of all Americans, welcomed the Holy Father, wished him a happy birthday, and thanked him for the spiritual and moral guidance, which he offers to the whole human family. The President wished the Pope every success in his Apostolic Journey and in his address at the United Nations, and expressed appreciation for the Pope's upcoming visit to 'Ground Zero' in New York.

"During their meeting, the Holy Father and the President discussed a number of topics of common interest to the Holy See and the United States of America, including moral and religious considerations to which both parties are committed: the respect of the dignity of the human person; the defense and promotion of life, matrimony and the family; the education of future generations; human rights and religious freedom; sustainable development and the struggle against poverty and pandemics, especially in Africa. In regard to the latter, the Holy Father welcomed the United States' substantial financial contributions in this area. The two reaffirmed their total rejection of terrorism as well as the manipulation of religion to justify immoral and violent acts against innocents. They further touched on the need to confront terrorism with appropriate means that respect the human person and his or her rights.

"The Holy Father and the President devoted considerable time in their discussions to the Middle East, in particular resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict in line with the vision of two states living side-by-side in peace and security, their mutual support for the sovereignty and independence of Lebanon, and their common concern for the situation in Iraq and particularly the precarious state of Christian communities there and elsewhere in the region. The Holy Father and the President expressed hope for an end to violence and for a prompt and comprehensive solution to the crises which afflict the region.

"The Holy Father and the President also considered the situation in Latin America with reference, among other matters, to immigrants, and the need for a coordinated policy regarding immigration, especially their humane treatment and the well being of their families."

Pope pictures

2008-04-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

Some photos of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the White House this morning, courtesy of the BBC:

White House video

2008-04-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a brief video excerpt from Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the White House this morning. I thought President Bush's welcoming remarks were uncharacteristically eloquent, and the pope's address was definitely a message that we all need to hear.

Pope Benedict XVI's "awesome speech"

2008-04-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

From the pope's address this morning at the White House:

"Freedom is not only a gift, but also a summons to personal responsibility. Americans know this from experience -- almost every town in this country has its monuments honoring those who sacrificed their lives in defense of freedom, both at home and abroad. The preservation of freedom calls for the cultivation of virtue, self-discipline, sacrifice for the common good and a sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate. It also demands the courage to engage in civic life and to bring one's deepest beliefs and values to reasoned public debate. In a word, freedom is ever new. It is a challenge held out to each generation, and it must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Few have understood this as clearly as the late Pope John Paul II. In reflecting on the spiritual victory of freedom over totalitarianism in his native Poland and in eastern Europe, he reminded us that history shows, time and again, that 'in a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation,' and a democracy without values can lose its very soul. Those prophetic words in some sense echo the conviction of President Washington, expressed in his Farewell Address, that religion and morality represent 'indispensable supports' of political prosperity."

Full transcript available from Reuters.

President Bush's private reply . . .

2008-04-16T07:52:00.000-07:00

. . . to Pope Benedict XVI's brief address at the White House, captured by the nearby microphones:

"Thank you, Holiness, awesome speech!"

Oh my.

Happy Birthday, Holy Father!

2008-04-16T07:39:00.000-07:00

Today is Pope Benedict XVI's 81st birthday, and he just got an impromptu singing of "Happy Birthday" from the crowd gathered on the lawn of the White House, where he is spending the morning. It's great to see him on TV and see how strong, lucid, and full of joy and hope he still is at such an old age.

The Star-Spangled Banner

2008-04-15T23:40:00.000-07:00

What can I say? I'm a sucker for good a cappella duets. John Legend and Stephen Colbert on Monday's Colbert Report.

Pope Benedict XVI's US visit itinerary

2008-04-15T13:48:00.000-07:00

From yahoo.com:

Tuesday, April 15 -- Washington, D.C.

4 p.m. -- Arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, greeted by President George Bush and Laura Bush

Wednesday, April 16 -- Washington, D.C.

Pope Benedict XVI's 81st birthday

10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. -- Meeting with the president at the White House

President George Bush and Laura Bush welcome Pope Benedict XVI to the White House. This is only the second time in history that a pontiff has visited the White House.

Noon -- Departure via popemobile -- parade route open to the general public

5-7 p.m. -- Vespers and address to U.S. bishops at the National Shrine

The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is the largest Roman Catholic church in the United States and North America and one of the 10 largest churches in the world.

Thursday, April 17 -- Washington, D.C.

10 a.m. -- Mass at new Nationals Park

5 p.m. -- Address to Catholic educators at the Catholic University of America

6:30 p.m. -- Interreligious gathering at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center adjacent to Catholic University

The pope will meet with representatives of other religions on the theme "Peace Our Hope." The audience will include some 220 individuals from five religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and Judaism. Pope Benedict XVI will give an address and will then be presented with symbols of peace by five young people of different faiths.

Friday, April 18 -- New York

8:30-10 a.m. -- Flight to New York City

10 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. -- Address to the United Nations

During his scheduled three-hour visit to U.N. headquarters, the pope will meet with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other leaders. It is the fourth papal visit to the United Nations, following those of Paul VI in 1965 and John Paul II in 1979 and 1995.

6 p.m. -- Ecumenical prayer service -- St. Joseph Parish, Upper East Side of Manhattan

Saturday, April 19 -- New York

Third anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI's pontificate

9-11:15 a.m. -- Mass for clergy and religious at St. Patrick's Cathedral

Participating in the mass will be 3,000 deacons, priests, and religious men and women from throughout the United States. At least two representatives from each diocese in the country will be present.

4:30 p.m. -- Blessing of youth with disabilities at St. Joseph Seminary in the Dunwoodie section of Yonkers, a few miles north of New York City. Pope John Paul II visited on Oct. 5, 1995.

5-6:30 p.m. -- Rally with seminarians and young people at St. Joseph Seminary

Approximately 25,000 young Catholics from throughout the United States, including 5,000 seminarians, will be in attendance at St. Joseph Seminary, 201 Seminary Avenue, Yonkers.

Sunday, April 20 -- New York

9:30 a.m. -- Visit to ground zero, site of the former World Trade Center

The pope will visit the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, offer a blessing, and greet representatives of the Port Authority, New York fire and police workers, those who survived the attacks, and family members who lost loved ones in the attack.

2:30 p.m. -- Mass at Yankee Stadium

8-8:30 p.m. -- Departure from John F. Kennedy International Airport

Approximately 3,250 guests will bid farewell to the pope in Hangar 19 of JFK Airport.

8:30 p.m. -- Departure via Shepherd One

(Check out pope2008.com and ewtn.com for extensive coverage of the pope's visit.)

Shepherd One has landed

2008-04-15T12:51:00.000-07:00

The pope is here!

"Candles, Clergy, and Communion for 57,000"

2008-04-11T23:22:00.000-07:00

The New York Times is running an interesting story about the itinerary of Pope Benedict XVI's upcoming trip to the United States and all the logistical details that go into planning and executing a papal visit. Remarkably, the piece seems to be free of any glaring errors or cheap shots at the pope or the Church, so the reporter has probably been fired.

Pope Benedict XVI talks to you!

2008-04-11T21:17:00.000-07:00

In preparation for his visit to Washington, D.C. and New York next week, Pope Benedict XVI has released a video in which he addresses the people of the United States in English (and a little Spanish). It's really interesting to see hear him speaking English, and he has a wonderful message to share, as usual. Anyway, check it out.

(Thanks to Jimmy Akin for highlighting this.)

Literary criticism is a farce

2008-04-11T05:51:00.000-07:00

In Seattle, there is a fun little program called "Poetry on Buses," where they put poetry on buses. The poems are sometimes fun to read, if you've got nothing better to do. Anyway, I spotted this gem on Wednesday night:

untitled
By Giovanni Paredes, age 6

I dreamt that a zebra was talking to me
I gave him some food
And walked away

The zebra followed me
I yelled, "GO BACK!"

He didn't want to go back
But he went back
Ate some grass
And then drove off
In a red monster truck

I like it, but here's the slightly maddening thing: I was an English major in college, and this little ditty by a six-year-old is, with a few possible exceptions, way better than any poem I encountered in four years. You could probably trick someone into including this in the next Norton Anthology. I've heard tenured professors ramble on for an hour about poems far less profound or pleasing than this one. And it was written by Giovanni Paredes, age 6.

Literary criticism is a farce.

The media misrepresent Catholic teaching on sin? Impossible!

2008-04-07T13:42:00.000-07:00

An editorial in today's New York Times called "The Vatican and Globalization: Tinkering With Sin" by Eduardo Porter is just the latest in a long line of ridiculous misinterpretations by the media of an interview with Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, Regent of the Apostolic Penitentiary, which was published nearly a month ago in the newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. In the interview, Bishop Girotti emphasized the fact that globalization and technology have opened up the possibility of new sins with widespread social consequences. Here's an excerpt:

"There are various areas today in which we adopt sinful behavior, as with individual and social rights. This is especially so in the field of bioethics where we cannot deny the existence of violations of fundamental rights of human nature -- this occurs by way of experiments and genetic modifications, whose results we cannot easily predict or control. Another area, which indeed pertains to the social spectrum, is that of drug use, which weakens our minds and reduces our intelligence. As a result, many young people are left out of Church circles. Here's another one: social and economic inequality, in the sense that the rich always seem to get richer, and the poor, poorer. This [phenomenon] feeds off an unsustainable form of social injustice and is related to environmental issues -- which currently have much relevant interest."

Now, there was nothing in Bishop Girotti's remarks that indicated a fundamental shift in the Catholic understanding of sin, but nearly every major news outlet took his remarks and ran with them. Unfortunately, they almost universally ran into a nightmare of misinterpretations, misattributions, misrepresentations of Catholic teaching, and outright fabrication. A flood of "news" stories informed the public that "the Vatican" had "updated" the traditional list of the seven deadly sins, which were frequently conflated with mortal sin (they're not the same thing). The first sentence in an article in the Telegraph epitomizes the lot: "Failing to recycle plastic bags could find you spending eternity in Hell, the Vatican said after drawing up a list of seven deadly sins for our times."

Of course, Bishop Girotti does not speak for the Vatican, and no list was ever drawn up. Bishop Girotti gave no indication that his remarks were intended to supplant or augment the traditional list of seven deadly sins, nor did he suggest that the sins he mentioned constituted an exhaustive list of the moral pitfalls of our times.

The Telegraph piece, and media coverage of Bishop Girotti's remarks in general, reflects a profound ignorance, willful or otherwise, about the Catholic Church's teaching on mortal sin and hell. Pope Gregory the Great's traditional list of seven deadly sins -- lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride -- is not a complete account of all possible sins. Nor are the seven sins listed always mortal sins in and of themselves. Rather, the seven deadly sins represent certain perverse dispositions of the heart out of which many other sins flow.

To sin, generally speaking, means to deliberately do something that is contrary to the will of God. For an official definition, let's turn to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

"Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. It has been defined as 'an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.'" (CCC 1849)

The Church distinguishes between venial sins and mortal sins:

"Sins are rightly evaluated according to their gravity. The distinction between mortal and venial sin, already evident in Scripture, became part of the tradition of the Church. It is corroborated by human experience.

"Mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God's law; it turns man away from God, who is his ultimate end and his beatitude, by preferring an inferior good to him. Venial sin allows charity to subsist, even though it offends and wounds it." (CCC 1854-1855)

So mortal sin is worse than venial sin. Now, it takes three things to make a sin mortal:

"For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must be together met: 'Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.'" (CCC 1857)

By committing a mortal sin, we deliberately cut ourselves off from the love of God, and Catholics guilty of mortal sin must turn to the sacrament of reconciliation (also called "confession" or "penance") in order to be restored to the state of grace:

"Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace, that is, of the state of grace. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God's forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ's kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back. However, although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God." (CCC 1861)

Okay, enough of the primer on sin. Let's return to the New York Times piece. To be fair, it isn't nearly as outlandish as much of the other coverage of Bishop Girotti's interview, and it does make some interesting points. But it's wrong all over in what it implies about Church teaching. Here's the opening paragraph:

"It's hard to erect rules to last forever. The recent suggestion by a bishop from the Vatican's office of sin and penance that globalization and modernity gave rise to sins different from those dating from medieval times seemed to many like an acknowledgment that the world is, indeed, changing."

As if that were some kind of scandal, that the Vatican was finally admitting that the world is changing. The whole point of the bishop's remarks was that the world is changing. The Church has never denied that. But the fact that the world is changing doesn't mean that the Church's understanding of sin is now outdated. It's no discredit to the Church or to Pope Gregory the Great that he didn't foresee drug trafficking or bioethics violations in the sixth century -- the Church's understanding of sin is broader than some list. And Gregory's seven deadly sins, by the way, are still going strong. Look around: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride are as prevalent and problematic as ever. Indeed, they are still at the root of the "new" sins that Bishop Girotti discussed.

Later on, the piece says this:

"The Vatican has long been riven by this tension between dogma and the outside world. Yet it could apply to any religion: it's hard to rejigger the rules when truth is meant to be fixed forever."

I have a hard time believing that Eduardo Porter, whoever he is, really misunderstands this situation so profoundly, so I have to assume he's just being disingenuous for the sake of rhetoric. Even if Bishop Girotti had been speaking for the Catholic Church, his remarks would not have indicated any "rejiggering" of the rules -- he was merely describing new realities. He wouldn't even have been able to call these modern phenomena "sins" without appealing to the lasting principles which undergird the Church's understanding of sin, in this age and every other.

And by the way, Mr. Porter, the truth isn't meant to be fixed forever. It is fixed forever.

Vegfest 2008

2008-03-30T23:37:00.000-07:00

So this afternoon Jeanette and I went to Seattle's Vegfest, a kind of convention for vegetarians, and it was great. Now I am certainly no vegetarian, and neither is Jeanette, but we were enticed by the promise of hundreds of samples of food, and we were not disappointed. The convention center was packed, and there were lots and lots of samples to go around. Some of them even tasted almost as good as normal food. I did think some of the displays were a little silly, though; as I sampled some salsa on a tortilla chip, I remarked to Jeanette, "Wow, it's almost as good as non-vegetarian salsa!" But that was not the funniest thing I said today.

Like I said, the place was packed with people, and as we were slowly meandering through the masses, we ended up near a baby in a stroller who clearly was not enjoying Vegfest quite as much as the rest of us. He was crying pretty hard. And as I heard this baby crying, I was struck with inspiration. Now, sometimes an opportunity for a funny remark will present itself, but I'll miss my window of opportunity, and later on I'll think of something hilarious that I could have said and wish that I had said it at the time. This was not one of those situations. I had the perfect line, and I did not hesitate in delivering it. Loud enough for those in the immediate vicinity to hear, I said, "That baby wants some meat!"

It was so funny that even Jeanette laughed, and a girl nearby nearly spit out her free sample. I had to keep my eyes peeled, though, in case I'd offended any of the more militant vegans in the area who might want to bludgeon me with a block of tofurkey.

Jesus Christ is risen today!

2008-03-23T14:21:00.001-07:00

"Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward," by John Donne

2008-03-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They'are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree;
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.

Easter Triduum

2008-03-20T12:20:00.000-07:00

Tonight begins the Easter Triduum, which is basically the most intense period in the liturgical year. The Triduum officially begins on the evening of Holy Thursday and continues until the evening of Easter Sunday. During this three-day period, the Church celebrates the core of the entire Christian faith, the three historical days that changed the course of history forever.

At the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday, we remember and celebrate the Last Supper, the meal that Jesus shared with His apostles on the night before He was crucified, at which He instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist when He took bread and wine and told His apostles "this is my body" and "this is my blood" and "do this in remembrance of me."

On Good Friday, we are drawn into the most sorrowful of mysteries, the death of God on a Cross. Crucifixion was a painful, shameful way to die, and Jesus willingly submitted Himself to such suffering and ignominy on our behalf, to free us from our sins. We mourn as we recall that, in a very real sense, it was our sins that drove those nails through Jesus' hands and feet.

Holy Saturday is a day of silence and prayer as the Church prepares for the evening Easter Vigil, the "mother of all vigils," when the Church recounts the history of salvation, receives the Elect into the Church, and celebrates the Resurrection of the Lord.

Easter Sunday is the holiest day of the year. It is the day when the Church celebrates Jesus' Resurrection from the dead, by which Jesus gave proof of His divinity and opened for us the way to a new life of grace.

If you've been away from the Church for a while, this would be a great time to give it another try. If you don't even know what I'm talking about, you might try reading the accounts of these events in the Bible: Matthew 26-28, Mark 14-16, Luke 22-24, or John 13-21.

Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

2008-03-14T20:13:00.001-07:00

A few months ago, I decided I would like to eat some peanut butter cookies. So I opened the Betty Crocker Cookbook and looked for a recipe for peanut butter cookies. Once I found the recipe, I followed it, and I made some peanut butter cookies.

And they were not good. At all.

So I decided to make up my own recipe for peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I did, and I followed it, and I made some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies.

And they were fantastic.

So fantastic that I considered keeping the recipe a secret, like a secret family recipe. But then I decided that it would be much nicer to give the recipe out to whoever would like it, so that everyone could enjoy these fantastic peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. So here's the recipe:

INGREDIENTS:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup butter flavor shortening
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup fat free vanilla yogurt

18 oz. jar of creamy peanut butter

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

extra granulated sugar for dipping

DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 375 F. In a small bowl, mix flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt, and set aside. In a large bowl, mix butter, shortening, sugar, brown sugar, egg, and yogurt until smooth. Add peanut butter and mix until smooth. Add dry ingredients in three batches, mixing until smooth after each addition. Stir in chocolate chips with a spatula. By the rounded teaspoons, form dough into balls, dip the top in granulated sugar, and place on cookie sheet (preferably neither dark nor non-stick). Bake for 5-7 minutes. Cookies will not spread much. Remove from oven at first sign of browning. Let set for 2-3 minutes, then transfer cookies to cooling rack. Once cookies have cooled completely, you can pile them loosely in an open container. Let them sit out uncovered overnight. After that, you can put them in airtight containers. Makes 60-80 cookies, depending on how big you make them, and how much raw dough you eat.

So there you go. Follow the directions, and you will not be disappointed, I hope. Enjoy, please!

Society of St. Vincent de Paul

2008-03-06T15:44:00.000-08:00

The Society of St. Vincent de Paul is a pretty awesome organization. Its members are devoted to serving the poor through personal, face-to-face encounters. In 2007, the Society helped 229,503 people in western Washington alone. Anyway, this year, the Society is celebrating the 175th anniversary of its founding in 1833 by a group of college students in Paris, and I got to write a story for the occasion for The Catholic Northwest Progress. Check it out.

A day in the life of Pope Benedict XVI

2008-03-05T23:38:00.000-08:00

This is a pretty cool video. It's in German, so I have no idea what the narrator is talking about, but you can get a pretty good idea of what's going on. It's interesting to see what the Pope does all day, celebrating Mass, signing documents, greeting visitors, eating lunch, addressing a crowd in St. Peter's Square before praying the Angelus, taking a walk, watching TV, etc. He keeps busy. Anyway, enjoy.

Get free stuff

2008-03-02T21:56:00.000-08:00

You should really go here to request an absolutely free copy of the monthly magazine Magnificat. It's a beautiful little book that could really help you deepen your prayer life. I bought the March edition, and I'm loving it. For each day of the month, it has morning and evening prayers adapted from the Liturgy of the Hours, as well as all the Scripture readings and prayers of the Mass. Each issue also has prayers for night, daily meditations, mini biographies of Saints, a few editorials, and an article on a piece of religious art.

I'm also a sucker for publications that feel nice, tactilely, and this is one of the nicest feeling ones I've come across. It would be worth getting one of these things just to hold it in your hands. It's about 400 pages, but you could still put it in your back pocket. The paper is really thin, but the whole thing's incredibly sturdy -- very high-quality. The covers are smooth and shiny, smoother than a normal magazine. Anyway, maybe not so important to the normal person, but I enjoy it.

So yeah, check it out. Like I say, it's completely free -- no shipping cost, and it's not even one of those awful "free trial" things where you have to send back a card so they don't start billing you. Just free. And you might really like it.

Religion in America

2008-02-29T23:48:00.000-08:00

I happened across an article in The New York Times the other day about a recent poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life called the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. (You can download the full 143-page report here.) They surveyed 35,000 adults and found that 44% of them were no longer affiliated with the religion they had grown up with (assuming you count shifts between Protestant denominations as changes). The results of the poll reflect only how respondents identified themselves; I'll be more interested in the results of the second part of this survey, which has to do with people's actual religious practice, and which will be released later this spring.

The poll found that Catholics represent 23.9% of the total population, a figure that's been relatively steady since the '70s. But it also revealed a somewhat dismaying fact: according to the survey, "Approximately one-third of the survey respondents who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic." Which I guess shouldn't be that surprising. If you don't understand the Catholic faith -- and a lot of Catholics don't, unfortunately -- it can seem like there's no reason to stay. If I'd have been a part of this survey a little more than a year ago, I'd have likely identified myself as a member of that separated one-third.

It was also sobering to be reminded, in the commentary in the New York Times piece, that a lot of people see religion as nothing more than a helpful political indicator:

"'I think politicians will be looking at this survey to see what groups they ought to target,' Professor [Stephen] Prothero [of Boston University] said. 'If the Hindu population is negligible, they won’t have to worry about it. But if it is wealthy, then they may have to pay attention.'"

People aren't usually so blunt.

Peter Gomes and being human

2008-02-29T16:33:00.000-08:00

I said a while ago that I wished everyone could have the privilege of hearing Peter Gomes, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, speak. Well, today is your lucky day. The website big think now has 19 videos of nothing but Gomes talking.

One of them is particularly relevant to my last post, so I'll share it. (It's less than two minutes long, so go ahead and watch it.)

Key quote: "It seems to me that science can never explain such things as joy, or happiness, or sorrow, even though they try to find the little nodes in the brain in which these emotions are alleged to reside."

Contrast Gomes's thoughts with another quote from Pinker:

"I don’t believe there’s such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost in the machine, a spirit or soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There’s no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, there is a vast amount of complexity that means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that have impinged on it beforehand."

Elevating rhetoric.

Of course, if you conceptualize the soul as an anthropomorphic creature pushing buttons and pulling levers (which Pinker helpfully mimes in the video), the idea of the soul or of free will is going to sound silly and nonsensical. But an argument from parody isn't very convincing or, as Pinker would say, rational.

Does Pinker really believe that saying "there is a vast amount of complexity that means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that have impinged on it beforehand" really gets to the heart of what it means to be human? When you start talking like that with respect to one of the fundamental mysteries of human existence, I've got to wonder whether Pinker is human.

I don't wish to denigrate scientific advances or the mind-boggling complexity of the human brain. Science is a wonderful tool for understanding the natural world, and the human brain is without a doubt the most amazing physical specimen our universe has to offer. But all the scientists in all the world could study the human brain for the rest of time, until they had discovered literally everything there was to know about the brain, and they would still be no closer to understanding love, or laughter, or mourning, or mercy -- in short, all the things that make us human. You can trot out all the evolutionary, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and neuroscientific explanations you want, and they may be quite rational, but they're also always going to fall just a bit short, because they're always going to sound, to the normal person, just a little bit inhuman.

Say all our "behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain," which are simply the result of external stimuli. Say free will is an illusion. Fine. But everyone (with the exception of university professors) knows that we have free will. You don't have to have a Ph.D. to know it. You don't have to do laboratory studies to prove it. It's what we live, every moment of our lives. We know that there is more to us than our physical bodies. We know that we are not just parcels of matter unfolding inevitably in time. We know that we have souls.

And to miss that, because you're too caught up in your own materialistic explanations of human behavior, is to miss the whole point of what it means to be human.

Reason VS. Faith: The Ultimate Showdown!

2008-02-29T12:46:00.000-08:00

There's a relatively new website called big think that styles itself as a sort of "YouTube for intellectuals." It consists largely of brief videos in which people talk about their views on a wide range of important topics. There are a decent number of entries from some rather prominent politicians, professors, and other public figures. These are supplemented by a multitude of videos featuring obscure writers, chefs, and (seriously) yoga masters.

I was interested to see that there were contributions from a number of familiar (to me, at least) Harvard professors, including Steven Pinker, Daniel Gilbert, Michael Sandel, and Peter Gomes. Now, when it comes to the latter two, I'll listen to pretty much anything they have to say. Sandel teaches one of the most popular courses in the history of Harvard -- Justice -- which I took as a freshman; and Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, is one of the most strangely captivating speakers I've ever heard. Pinker, an experimental psychologist, is one of the superstars of the Harvard faculty, and has written several bestselling books, including and The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works; and Gilbert, also a professor of psychology, recently wrote a bestseller of his own, Stumbling on Happiness.

So I started watching some of Pinker's and Gilbert's videos, and I found -- somewhat to my dismay, but certainly not to my surprise -- that they were both saying some pretty ridiculous things about the relationship between reason and faith, as so often happens when otherwise intelligent people start talking about the relationship between reason and faith. For example, here are Pinker's opening words from his discussion of the topic:

"I think my own personal philosophy -- one that I think offers a sounder basis for knowledge and wisdom than religion -- is based on reason. Now, as soon as soon as we’re having this conversation, as long as we are trying to persuade one another of why you should do something or should believe something, you are already committed to reason. We're not engaged in a fistfight. We’re not bribing each other to believe something. We’re trying to provide reasons. We’re trying to persuade, to convince. As long as you’re doing that in the first place, you’re not hitting someone with a chair, or putting a gun to their head, or bribing them to believe something, you’ve lost any argument you have against reason. You’ve already signed on to reason whether you like it or not. So the fact that we’re having this conversation shows that we are committed to reason."

I'm not sure to whom, exactly, this valiant defense of reason is addressed. I don't know who these people are that Pinker thinks are trying to put forth "argument[s] . . . against reason." I've never heard anyone disparage, deny, or downplay the importance of reason. And yet Pinker speaks as if all religious people were an angry mob mindlessly chanting "Down with reason! Down with reason!"

Pinker's logic makes sense, however, once he explains his definition of faith:

"I think that the alternative [to reason] that many people appeal to, namely faith, is . . . immediately refutes itself. Faith means believing something with no good reason to do it."

Pinker's thinking is entirely self-consistent. Unfortunately, it's completely divorced from reality. I don't know a single person of faith who would say that there is no good reason for their beliefs. Of course, Pinker might interject with some definition of what constitutes a "good reason," but then he'd be verging on dogmatism, another thing that Pinker is adamantly against. (Of course, Pinker is just like everyone else who speaks out against dogmatism. It's not really dogmas that he hates, just other people's dogmas.)

Gilbert also chimes in with his explanation of what religion is:

"By religion we usually mean deism. We mean belief in something we absolutely can't see for which there's no evidence."

(Let's set aside the fact that, in reality, when we talk about religion these days we generally mean theism, not deism.)

Now, I subscribe to the Catholic Christian faith because I think that there are good reasons to do so. I think there is good reason to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead three days after dying on a cross, thereby giving pretty good evidence that His claims of divinity were true. I can't rationally explain why His tomb was empty, or why His apostles would suddenly be willing to die proclaiming Jesus' Resurrection and divinity, unless Jesus really rose from the dead. So I rationally deduce that Jesus did rise from the dead, and based on that rationally arrived-upon conclusion, I put my faith in Him as the Lord and Savior of the world. If someone claims to be God, and is willing to undergo an incredibly painful and humiliating execution rather than recant that claim, and then rises from the dead to back that claim up, I'm going to take that claim, and that person, pretty seriously. It would be entirely irrational not to.

Faith and reason are not, as Pinker and Gilbert suggest, competing "alternatives." They are, as Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Fides et ratio, "like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth." Without reason, faith would be just groping in the dark, and without faith (say, in the legitimacy of reason), reason itself would never get off the ground.

Fr. Robert Barron on Lent

2008-02-09T02:11:00.000-08:00

Fr. Robert Barron is a priest, professor, and theologian in the Chicago area, and he is generally awesome. He also has some thoughts on Lent that he would like to share with you:

Prison ministry story

2008-02-07T15:31:00.000-08:00

I got to write a story for this week's edition of The Catholic Northwest Progress about a wonderful woman who has devoted her life to ministering to people behind bars. I think it's a pretty interesting story, so you might want check it out.

Satisfied

2008-02-06T14:59:00.000-08:00

A post by Jennifer on the blog "Et tu?" inspired me to think about our never-ending search for satisfaction and the purpose of the season of Lent. She writes:

"I'd forgotten about this until now, but up until a few years ago, almost every time something exciting or good happened I would feel a tinge of depression. No matter how great or exciting the situation, for some reason I could never quite feel fully happy about it. Just as my happiness would be about to reach a crescendo, something would make it fall flat, like when a singer just barely misses the high note. I didn't generally struggle with depression in this time in my life; it was just that for some odd reason whenever something particularly good occurred, it would trigger a vague sensation of despair somewhere deep down inside."

When I was at Harvard, I was in a Christian a cappella group called Under Construction, and as part of our semesterly concerts, we always put on a little skit, divided up into four scenes, that was intended to provoke thought about some aspect of the Christian faith. In the spring of my junior year, we wanted to explore the thought experiment, What would it be like if you got everything you wanted?

The skit centered around a person named Kevin (played, conveniently, by me) who dreamed of being a boxing champion. It followed him through his training to his gold medal victory in the Olympics and subsequent celebrity. In the final scene, Kevin, who has now turned pro, wins a bout to become the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world. After all the celebration, Kevin sits alone in the middle of the stage, looking at the ground. His coach enters, beaming with pride.

"Congratulations, Kid," he says. "You did it. You're the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world. You're the best there ever was. You worked hard -- you should be proud of yourself. You've got everything you ever dreamed of."

Kevin, who hasn't looked up through all this, turns his head and asks, quietly, "So . . . what do I do next, Coach?" Fade to black.

This seems to be the position we always end up in whenever we finally get whatever it is that we are sure will finally make us happy, content, fulfilled, satisfied. Whether it's a good education, a good job, a good family, wealth, fame, prestige, security -- it always leaves us wondering, Is this really all there is? Why do these things never satisfy us like we hope they will? Is there anything that can perfectly fulfill these deepest desires of our hearts?

The things of this world cannot finally satisfy us because we are not made for this world. God created us, and only God can satisfy us. As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions, addressing God, "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Only in God can we find the fulfillment of all our desires. And that is part of what Lent is all about. It's a time to remember that all our attempts to find fulfillment apart from God are ultimately futile, a time to turn to God and to turn away from all the things that keep us from Him and His perfect, infinite, intimate love. Lent is a time to really take to heart Jesus' words from the Sermon on the Mount:

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also." (Matthew 6:19-21)

Ash Wednesday

2008-02-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, so you may see people walking around with black crosses (or, more likely, indistinct black smudges) on their foreheads. You may even have one yourself. If you're wondering what's up with this practice of putting ashes on foreheads, here's a little info from the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN):

"The liturgical use of ashes originated in the Old Testament times. Ashes symbolized mourning, mortality and penance. In the Book of Esther, Mordecai put on sackcloth and ashes when he heard of the decree of King Ahasuerus to kill all of the Jewish people in the Persian Empire (Esther 4:1). Job repented in sackcloth and ashes (Job 42:6). Prophesying the Babylonian captivity of Jerusalem, Daniel wrote, 'I turned to the Lord God, pleading in earnest prayer, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes' (Daniel 9:3).

"Jesus made reference to ashes, 'If the miracles worked in you had taken place in Tyre and Sidon, they would have reformed in sackcloth and ashes long ago' (Matthew 11:21).

"In the Middle Ages, the priest would bless the dying person with holy water, saying, 'Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return.'

"The Church adapted the use of ashes to mark the beginning of the penitential season of Lent, when we remember our mortality and mourn for our sins. In our present liturgy for Ash Wednesday, we use ashes made from the burned palm branches distributed on the Palm Sunday of the previous year. The priest blesses the ashes and imposes them on the foreheads of the faithful, making the sign of the cross and saying, 'Remember, man you are dust and to dust you shall return,' or 'Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.' As we begin this holy season of Lent in preparation for Easter, we must remember the significance of the ashes we have received: We mourn and do penance for our sins. We again convert our hearts to the Lord, who suffered, died, and rose for our salvation. We renew the promises made at our baptism, when we died to an old life and rose to a new life with Christ. Finally, mindful that the kingdom of this world passes away, we strive to live the kingdom of God now and look forward to its fulfillment in heaven."

Lent starts Wednesday

2008-02-04T22:31:00.000-08:00

This Wednesday, February 6, is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the liturgical season of Lent, which will continue for 40 days (not counting Sundays) until Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, which will be celebrated this year on March 23.

UPDATE: I seem to have been mistaken, as I was afraid I would be, about the exact extent of Lent. It actually runs from Ash Wednesday and ends before the Mass of the Lord's Supper on the evening of Holy Thursday, at which point the Easter Triduum begins.

At Mass this afternoon, Fr. Garry said that Lent was probably his favorite season of the year, and I just couldn't relate. Though Lent has sometimes been a beneficial time for me spiritually, my overall gut reaction to it is rather gloomy. I think there are a few reasons for this.

One of my earliest childhood memories of Lent is of waiting in a long line to eat disgusting seafood at a Long John Silver's one cold Friday night, because Catholics are required to abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent. A good deal of my subsequent spiritual struggles can probably be traced back, in one way or another, to hush puppies.

In recent years, I have tried to practice the discipline of fasting during Lent, which involves eating one regular meal and two small meatless meals each day, with no snacking. I don't think this has ever turned out very well. I'm not a good faster. I tend to go back and forth between feeling bad because I'm hungry and feeling bad because I'm not being strict enough about my fasting. I can't say for sure, of course, but I don't think I've ever gotten any spiritual benefit out of my rather half-hearted attempts at fasting.

So for me, Lent has often felt like one long trial to be endured, waiting impatiently for the celebration of Christ's Resurrection at Easter, and the return to normal eating patterns.

But Lent is supposed to be so much more than that. It's supposed to be a time of spiritual growth, of drawing closer to God, of reflecting on our lives and striving to be better, of doing good deeds for others out of love, and of dedicating ourselves more fully to prayer. Lent is a solemn, penitential time, but it is also a time of great blessedness.

I like the opening few sentences of Pope Benedict XVI's Lenten Message 2008:

"Each year, Lent offers us a providential opportunity to deepen the meaning and value of our Christian lives, and it stimulates us to rediscover the mercy of God so that we, in turn, become more merciful toward our brothers and sisters. In the Lenten period, the Church makes it her duty to propose some specific tasks that accompany the faithful concretely in this process of interior renewal: these are prayer, fasting and almsgiving."

So yeah. I'm going to try to take a better attitude towards the season of Lent this year. I haven't decided exactly what concrete measures I'll take, but I'm working on it, and I pray that this Lenten season will be a very blessed one.

If you're interested in some specific suggestions about how to observe the season of Lent, Tan Books has a pretty good document called "Pious Practices for Lent" that you can download for free from their website.

Stewardship story

2008-02-03T20:50:00.000-08:00

For anyone interested in keeping up with my journalistic career or with the state of stewardship in Catholic parishes in the Seattle area (that should cover pretty much everyone), here's a link to my latest story in The Catholic Northwest Progress, the award-winning newspaper of the Archdiocese of Seattle. It's about how different parishes in the area are trying to encourage stewardship as a way of life among their parishioners. (To be honest, I wasn't 100% clear on the concept of stewardship when I was assigned this story, but it involves acknowledging all the blessings that God has bestowed upon us, and in gratitude giving back to Him of our time, talent, and treasure.)

A journey through John - 16:29-33

2008-02-02T22:31:00.000-08:00

"His disciples said, 'Ah, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure! Now we know that you know all things, and need none to question you; by this we believe that you came from God.' Jesus answered them, 'Do you now believe? The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, every man to his home, and will leave me alone; yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me. I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.'"

This is such a rich passage, it's hard to know where to begin. Jesus' initial words to His disciples are sobering, to be sure. The disciples have just expressed their exuberant faith in Him, but Jesus knows what's going to unfold during the next few hours. When Jesus is arrested and the chips are down, His disciples will abandon Him, deny that they even know Him. When being a follower of Jesus suddenly means weird looks, ridicule, and the possibility of persecution, Jesus' most loyal friends and followers will lose any sense of loyalty to Him. And we think, How sad.

I do this all the time, though. For all my idealism and big talk from the safety of my blog, my life is often one big denial of Christ. I don't like weird looks or ridicule -- real or imagined -- so I keep my mouth shut most of the time and effectively abandon Jesus. It's so easy to silently conform to the norms of a secular culture which sees religious belief as foolish at best. It's so easy to acquiesce to the ways of the world. It seems so inevitable. Who am I to go against the grain, to stand up and speak out against the anti-Christian sentiments of an "enlightened" society?

I have to remember that, luckily, I'm not alone, and that the decisive battle has already been won. Jesus has overcome the world.

Apologies

2008-01-06T23:19:00.000-08:00

To whomever may read this blog: I am sorry that I have not posted anything in almost two weeks, and I am sorry that it has been considerably longer than that since I've written anything substantial. I got quite lazy around the holidays, I suppose, and I'm still trying to shake off that laziness. But I haven't given up on this blog. In fact, I'm in the process of brainstorming some new ideas for taking this blog in a more exciting and interesting (at least to me) direction. So keep checking back. Alright, that's all for now, because tonight I'm still feeling a tad lazy.

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-25T22:09:00.000-08:00

My gift to you: Corregio's Nativity (Holy Night). Click on it for a better view.

What Christmas is all about

2007-12-24T22:19:00.000-08:00

I've posted this before, but I just can't not post it again now.

(Linus quotes Luke 2:8-14, King James Version, if you're wondering.)

Lectio Divina

2007-12-21T21:39:00.000-08:00

I found a website today dedicated to lectio divina, a way of prayerfully reading and meditating on Scripture. The site is run by the Carmelite Order, and it seems to have commentaries and reflections on the Gospel readings for every Sunday of the year, as well as some weekdays. It looks like it could be a great aid in reading and understanding the Gospels and drawing closer to God. Here's the entry for today:

1) Opening prayer

God, we tend to lose ourselves
in the bustle and stir of the day,
in our work and our petty worries.
Give us the freshness of heart
to look for the things that matter,
those that make our lives deeply human
and at the same time open us
to your world and to your values.
Make us long to encounter you with joy,
that we may discover again the quality
of gratuitous giving, of respect,
and of carefree, self-forgetting love,
through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

2) Gospel Reading – Luke 1, 39-45

Mary set out at that time and went as quickly as she could into the hill country to a town in Judah.
She went into Zechariah's house and greeted Elizabeth. Now it happened that as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.
She gave a loud cry and said, 'Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? Look, the moment your greeting reached my ears, the child in my womb leapt for joy. Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.'

3) Reflection

• Luke stresses the readiness of Mary in serving, in being a handmaid. The Angel speaks about the pregnancy of Elizabeth and immediately, Mary rises and sets out as quickly as she could to go and help her. From Nazareth to the house of Elizabeth there were more than 100 km, the minimum, four days of travelling!, There were no buses, no trains. Mary begins to serve and fulfils her mission in behalf of the people of God.
• Elizabeth represents the Old Testament which was about to end. Mary represents the New Testament. The Old Testament accepts the New one with gratitude and trust, recognizing in it God’s gratuitous gift which is going to be realized and is going to complete the expectation of people. In the encounter of the two women is manifested the gift of the Spirit. The child leapt with joy in Elizabeth’s womb. This is the reading of the faith which Elizabeth makes of the things of life.
• The Good News of God reveals his presence in the most common things of human life: two house wives who visit each other to mutually help one another. Visit, joy, pregnancy, children, mutual help, house, family: Luke wants us and the community to perceive precisely this and that we discover in this God’s presence.
• Elizabeth says to Mary: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” Up until today, these words form part of the best known Psalm and most prayed in the whole world, “The Hail Mary”.
• “And blessed is she who has believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled”. This is the praise of Elizabeth to Mary and the message of Luke for the community: to believe in the Word of God, because the Word of God has the force to fulfil all that which it tells us. It is a creative Word. It generates new life in the womb of the Virgin, in the womb of people who accept it with faith.
• Mary and Elizabeth already knew one another. But in this encounter, they discover, one in one another, a mystery which they had not known as yet, and which fills them with great joy. Today also, we meet persons who surprise us because of the wisdom they possess and the witness of faith that they give. Has something similar happened to you already? Have you met persons who have surprised you? What prevents us from discovering and from living the joy of God’s presence in our life?
• The attitude of Mary before the Word expresses the ideal which Luke wants to communicate to the Community: do not close yourselves in self, but get out of self, be attentive to the concrete needs of persons and try to help others as far as possible according to their need.

4) Personal questions

• Placing myself in the place of Mary and Elizabeth: am I capable to perceive and experience the presence of God in the most simple and common things in the life of every day?
• The praise of Elizabeth to Mary: “You have believed!” Her husband had difficulty to believe what the angel was telling him. And I?

5) Concluding Prayer

We are waiting for Yahweh;
he is our help and our shield,
for in him our heart rejoices,
in his holy name we trust. (Ps 33,20-21)

A journey through John - 15:12-14

2007-12-18T17:19:00.000-08:00

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you."

Note: So it's been about two months since the last installment in my "journey" through the Gospel of John, but I'm getting back on track now.

There's a whole lot packed into these three little sentences that Jesus speaks to His apostles at the Last Supper. Jesus makes the astounding promise that we can be His friends -- we can be the friends of God. But, it seems, there's a condition. We must do what Jesus commands us. And Jesus commands us to love each other, and to love each other as He has loved us. That's a tall order, to say the least, because -- as Jesus here suggests and will prove the following afternoon -- He loves us enough to die for us.

That is the kind of radical love that Jesus calls us to have for each other, and I don't know anyone who could live up to such a standard by their own power. Luckily, no one has to -- indeed, it is only by the grace of God that any of us can do anything. And Jesus continually offers us the grace we need to fulfill His commandments and become His friends. Our job is to cooperate with that grace.

Where is happiness to be found?

2007-12-17T22:14:00.001-08:00

I really liked this commentary on the readings for the third Sunday of Advent by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the Pope's personal preacher. (It was posted on zenit.org.) It's good food for thought and reflection, so here it is:

"Let us take the point of departure for our reflection from what Jesus says to the disciples of John to reassure them he is the Messiah: 'Glad tidings are announced to the poor.'

"The Gospel is a message of joy: The liturgy proclaims this on the Third Sunday of Advent, which, from the words of St. Paul in the opening antiphon, has taken the name 'Gaudete Sunday' -- Rejoice Sunday, the Sunday of joy. The first reading, taken from the prophet Isaiah, is a hymn to joy: 'The desert and the wasteland rejoice ... They sing with joy and jubilation ... They will be crowned with everlasting happiness; they will meet with joy and felicity and sadness and mourning will flee.'

"Everyone wants to be happy. If we could represent the whole of humanity to ourselves, in its deepest movement, we would see an immense crowd about a fruit tree on the tips of its toes desperately stretching out its hands in the attempt to lay hold of a piece of fruit that constantly eludes it. Happiness, Dante said, is 'quell dolce pome che per tanti rami / cercando va la cura de' tanti mortali' -- 'that sweet fruit that mortals seek / and strive to find on many boughs.'

"But if all of us are searching for happiness, why are so few truly happy and even those who are happy are only happy for such a short time? I believe that the principal reason is that, in our climb to the summit of the mountain, we go up the wrong side, we decide to take the wrong way up. Revelation says: 'God is love,' but man has tried to reverse the phrase so that it says: 'Love is God'! (That is what the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach said.)

"Revelation says: 'God is happiness,' but man again inverts the order and says 'Happiness is God'! But what happens here? On earth we do not know pure happiness, just as we do not know absolute love; we only know bits and pieces of happiness, which often become mere passing stimulation of our senses. Thus, when we say, 'Happiness is God,' we divinize our little experiences; we call the works of our own hands or our own minds 'God.' We make happiness into an idol. This explains why he who seeks God always finds joy while he who seeks joy does not always find God. Man is reduced to looking for quantitative joy: chasing down ever more intense pleasures and emotions, or adding pleasure to pleasure -- just as the drug addict needs bigger and bigger doses to obtain the same level of pleasure.

"Only God is happy and makes happy. This is why a psalm says: 'Seek joy in the Lord, he will fulfill the desires of your heart' (Psalm 4). With him even the joys of the present life retain their sweet savor and do not change into anxiety. I am not only speaking of spiritual joys but all honest human joy: the joy of seeing your children grow, work brought happily to conclusion, friendship, health regained, creativity, art, leisure and contact with nature. Only God was able to draw from the lips of a saint the cry 'Enough joy, Lord! My heart can hold no more!' In God is found all of that which man usually associates with the word 'happiness' and infinitely more, since 'eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has it entered the heart of man that which God has prepared for those who love him' (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:9).

"It is time to proclaim with greater courage the 'glad tidings' that God is happiness, that happiness -- not suffering, deprivation, the cross -- will have the last word. Suffering only serves to remove obstacles to joy, to open the soul, so that one day we can receive the greatest possible measure."

That's a challenging message, at least to me. I know, intellectually, that true joy is found only in God. I would never say that happiness is God -- but what does my life say?

Christmas trees and Nativity scenes

2007-12-14T23:24:00.000-08:00

There's a little blurb on the Catholic News Service website about Pope Benedict XVI's speech about the significance of Christmas trees and Nativity scenes. I thought it was interesting, so here it is:

"Displaying the Christmas tree and a Nativity scene can help create a loving, warm, spiritual atmosphere in a world bent solely on making material gains, Pope Benedict XVI said. Christians 'must preserve' the spiritual heritage of the decorated tree and Christmas creche, he told representatives of Italy's Val Badia region who donated the 86-foot spruce tree adorning St. Peter's Square. The pope met with civil and religious leaders from this Dolomite region in a special audience Dec. 14 at the Vatican. 'Christmas is a Christian holiday and its symbols ... make important references to the great mystery of the incarnation and the birth of Jesus,' the pope said. The evergreen is an important symbol of the birth of Christ 'because its evergreen boughs recall everlasting life,' he said. Together with the Nativity scene, the decorated tree creates 'an atmosphere replete with religious feeling and domestic intimacy,' he said."

Giving gifts

2007-12-13T18:01:00.000-08:00

There is so much emphasis at this time of year on buying, giving, and receiving gifts. While the over-commercialization of Christmas that has grown out of this practice is somewhat dismaying, the impulse to mark this holy season with the exchange of gifts dates back to the very first Christmas, when the Magi brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the baby Jesus (Matthew 2:11).

One thing that Jesus' Incarnation, life, death, and Resurrection teach us is that the greatest gift one can give is the gift of oneself. This week, The Catholic Northwest Progress features several stories about people who are sharing themselves and their gifts with others. I was lucky enough to be able to write a few of those stories. The first is about a group of Microsoft employees who take time out of their busy schedules to serve the poor with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. I also wrote a story and a sidebar about college grads who teach in under-resourced Catholic schools as part of a program called ACE at Notre Dame.

It was inspiring for me to see some of the many ways that people share their gifts with others out of love, and to remember the One Who is the ultimate Source of all gifts.

The Muppet Christmas Carol

2007-12-12T23:17:00.000-08:00

Jeanette and I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol tonight. I think it might be the most wonderful movie there is. Perhaps that's hyperbole, but maybe not. I'm not sure how many times I watched the DVD during the Christmas season last year, but far too many to admit publicly.

It's a beautifully filmed movie, and it's full of typical Muppet humor and catchy songs. It's also quite faithful to Dickens's original story, often using Dickens's dialogue and even his narration (performed by Gonzo). Michael Caine is excellent as Ebenezer Scrooge, completely unfazed by his Muppet costars.

I think my favorite scene is Christmas present at the Cratchit house. In addition to the song "Bless Us All," it contains one of my favorite lines of the movie, which comes straight out of Dickens. When Mrs. Cratchit (played by Miss Piggy), asks how Tiny Tim behaved at church, Bob Cratchit (played by Kermit) replies, "Aw, as good as gold and better. He told me that he hoped the people saw him in church because it might be pleasant for them to remember, upon Christmas day, Who made lame beggars walk and blind men see."

Even in movies with a positive message about "the true meaning of Christmas," it's so rare to find any reference to Who Christmas is all about.

Biblia Clerus

2007-12-10T23:24:00.000-08:00

The Vatican Congregation for the Clergy just launched a new site called Biblia Clerus that has a whole lot of resources for studying the Bible in the light of the Catholic Church's magisterium, or official teaching, and the writings of the Church fathers. I just found it, so I haven't had a chance to explore too much of what it has to offer, but it looks like it could be extremely valuable for anyone interested in increasing their understanding of the Bible.

Free rice

2007-12-09T23:34:00.000-08:00

On the off chance you haven't heard about freerice.com, I thought I'd tell you. It's a website where you can play a game that tests your vocabulary. For every question you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Programme to help fight hunger and starvation around the world. (The rice is paid for with money from companies who advertise on the site.) If you get a question wrong, the game isn't over -- your next question is just easier, and you can go on donating and improving your vocabulary.

The site was created by a guy named John Breen, who also created thehungersite.com, another site where you can contribute to worthy causes just by clicking on a button. Since it launched on October 7, freerice.com has donated more than 7 billion grains of rice.

I like situations where everyone wins, and this seems to be one of them. Companies get exposure, visitors get learning and fun, and hungry people get food.

Jesus said that whatever we do for the least of His brethren, we do for Him (Matthew 25:40). So if you've got some time to kill, check out freerice.com and help feed some hungry people, and Jesus.

The Immaculate Conception

2007-12-08T21:34:00.000-08:00

December 8 is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Contrary to a common misunderstanding, the Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of Mary (the mother of Jesus) in her mother's womb and not to the Incarnation of Jesus in Mary's womb.

Though belief in Mary's Immaculate Conception had been widely held since the early centuries of the Church, it was only defined dogmatically by Pope Pius IX in 1854 in the document Ineffabilis Deus, in which he wrote:

"The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin."

So, basically, Mary was conceived in the normal, sexual way (unlike Jesus), but God protected her from the stain of original sin that has plagued the rest of us ever since Adam and Eve first turned their backs on God in the Garden of Eden.

A friend once told me that one of his major problems with Catholicism was the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and the idea that Mary was sinless. If that were true, he argued, then Mary wouldn't need to be saved, which doesn't square with Scripture, where, in her Magnificat, Mary calls God "my Savior" (Luke 1:47). At the time, I didn't know enough about Catholicism to know that Mary's Immaculate Conception and sinlessness did not imply that she did not need to be saved. Jesus is the Savior of all, including Mary. Mary did not remain sinless by her own power. Rather, Christ saved her from sin at the moment of her conception and filled her with God's grace. Scott Hahn explains this idea in his book Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God when he writes, "The immaculate conception is a divine act of preservation -- a work of God, and not a work of Mary herself." He continues:

"The immaculate conception, then, was a fruit of the redemption applied to Mary by way of anticipation; for the redemption was always in view for the eternal God, Who is not bound by time as we are. Thus, Christ's redemption applies to you and me, though we could not be there at Calvary -- and it applied to Mary at the moment of her creation, though Christ's saving death was still years away. Her redemption was an act of preservation, while for all others it is an act of deliverance.
"If Mary was sinless, did she really need Jesus to redeem her? Yes, she did. Her singular preservation could not have taken place without the redemption won for all men by Jesus. Jesus is God, and so He is both our creator and our redeemer. In the very act of creating Mary, he redeemed her from any limitations of human nature or susceptibility to sin. She is a creature, but she is His mother, and He has perfectly fulfilled the commandment to honor her. He honored her in a way that is singularly beautiful."

For an extensive treatment of the Immaculate Conception, check out this entry in the old Catholic Encyclopedia.

St. John Damascene

2007-12-04T17:59:00.000-08:00

Today is the feast of St. John Damascene. Here's a little blurb about him from a little blue Advent book I'm going through:

"Born about 676 in Damascus, Syria, John's Christian education from a captured Italian monk was supplemented by Muslim schools.

"He became chief counselor for the caliph, but when the new caliph became hostile to Christians, John left Damascus to become a monk at St. Sabas Monastery, southeast of Jerusalem.

"After ordination, John lived a quiet life of prayer and writing. He wrote commentaries on St. Paul, adapted choral music for liturgy, and composed hymns. He also successfully defended the use of icons (painted or mosaic religious art) against critics who felt venerating icons was akin to worshipping idols.

"John died in 749, and was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1890."

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

2007-12-03T23:06:00.000-08:00

This is a great Advent hymn. I love its evocation of the history of God's people and the theme of hopeful and eager expectation.

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.
Refrain:
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, thou Wisdom from on high,
who orderest all things mightily;
to us the path of knowledge show,
and teach us in her ways to go. Refrain

O come, thou Rod of Jesse, free
thine own from Satan's tyranny;
from depths of hell thy people save,
and give them victory over the grave. Refrain

O come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer
our spirits by thine advent here;
disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
and death's dark shadows put to flight. Refrain

O come, thou Key of David, come,
and open wide our heavenly home;
make safe the way that leads on high,
and close the path to misery. Refrain

O come, O come, great Lord of might,
who to thy tribes on Sinai's height
in ancient times once gave the law
in cloud and majesty and awe. Refrain

O come, thou Root of Jesse's tree,
an ensign of thy people be;
before thee rulers silent fall;
all peoples on thy mercy call. Refrain

O come, Desire of nations, bind
in one the hearts of all mankind;
bid thou our sad divisions cease,
and be thyself our King of Peace. Refrain

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear. Refrain

The Pope on Advent and hope

2007-12-02T19:55:00.000-08:00

There's a nice little article on zenit.org today in which Pope Benedict XVI reflects on the nature and importance of hope and the season of Advent. Here's an excerpt:

"The world needs God, otherwise it remains without hope, said Benedict XVI when he summarized the central message of his encyclical 'Spe Salvi.'

"The Pope said this today before reciting the midday Angelus with those gathered in St. Peter's Square. He also spoke on the meaning of Advent, which begins today.

"Advent, the Holy Father said, 'is the propitious time to reawaken in our hearts the expectation of him "who is, who was and who is coming."'

"The Pontiff regarded the First Sunday of Advent as 'a most appropriate day to offer to the whole Church and all men of good will my second encyclical, which I wanted to dedicate to the theme of Christian hope.'

"Benedict XVI noted that in the New Testament 'the word hope is closely connected with the word faith.' Hope, he added, 'is a gift that changes the life of those who receive it, as the experience of so many saints demonstrates.'

"He asked: 'In what does this hope consist that is so great and so "trustworthy" as to make us say that "in it" we have "salvation"?

"'In substance it consists in the knowledge of God, in the discovery of his heart as a good and merciful Father.'"'With his death on the cross and his resurrection,' added the Pope, Jesus 'has revealed to us his countenance, the countenance of a God so great in love as to communicate to us an indestructible hope, a hope that not even death can crack, because the life of those who entrust themselves to this Father always opens onto the perspective of eternal beatitude.'"

Spe Salvi

2007-12-01T20:06:00.000-08:00

Pope Benedict XVI's second encyclical, Spe Salvi, was released yesterday. The subject of the encyclical is hope. I haven't read it yet, but just to get an idea of what it's about, I thought I'd scan the headings for each of the sections in the letter. They are:

1. Faith is Hope
2. The concept of faith-based hope in the New Testament and the early Church
3. Eternal life -- what is it?
4. Is Christian hope individualistic?
5. The transformation of Christian faith-hope in the modern age
6. The true shape of Christian hope
7. "Settings" for learning and practicing hope
-- Prayer as a school of hope
-- Action and suffering as settings for learning hope
-- Judgement as a setting for learning and practising hope
8. Mary, Star of Hope

The Birth of Christ

2007-11-30T08:57:00.000-08:00

Last night I stumbled across a new piece of music called The Birth of Christ. It's a Christmas cantata by Seattle composer Andrew T. Miller. It was recorded by Anglican and Catholic choirs in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, and it's narrated by Liam Neeson. It's being aired around the US during the weeks leading up to Christmas (here's the schedule). You can check out a video preview of the piece here.

It sounds like an exciting piece, and I'm looking forward to watching it in its entirety. The story of Christmas is just so fascinating -- I know that no matter how long I contemplate it, I'll never do more than scratch the surface of its beauty and mystery. So I take every chance I can get to experience someone else's take on the incredible night that changed the world forever. Here's what the composer has to say about his rationale for writing The Birth of Christ (from his website):

"The biblical chronicle of the Christmas story has always moved me. It is the tale of how God sent His son to us as a child. Most Christians know the rest of the gospels as the foundation of their faith—Christ ultimately grew to adulthood, lived a human life not unlike ours, performed miracles, gathered followers, was the example of how to live, endured many of the trials we do on earth, gave himself freely for our sins in the most selfless way and finally rose from the dead after three days, opening the gates of heaven for all who believe. The story is powerful, and has converted many just in its telling. But it has always been important for me to remember that Christ came to us as a little child, a helpless and defenseless tiny little baby. He was not born to nobility. He did not come to the throng of cheering crowds. He did not come as a conquering hero. He was born to a young and vulnerable woman and a carpenter who both said 'yes' to God’s call. He came in the manner He did, with the aid of the people He called so that all might know, as I’ve written in the conclusion of the cantata, He came for each and every one of us.

"I have likened The Birth of Christ to 'Mr. Andy’s Opus.' It has been many years in the making, but it is a story I’ve always wanted to tell through music. I have examined the scriptures and have juxtaposed them to what I feel must have been the human reaction by these very lowly and humble people to these amazing events. Bottom line, they must have been in awe and probably even a bit terrified: to encounter an angel in a dream, to receive instructions that you would conceive out of wedlock (a stoning offense in that time), seeing not just one angel, but a multitude in your field, or to encounter a few kings led by a star showing up to pay homage to an infant. These unbelievable events unfolded in this incredible tale and occurred to ordinary work-a-day folk who just responded to God’s call and said 'yes' in some way. It has been my desire to express, through the most powerful medium I know, a testament to God’s divine wisdom and power, and to share the reverence I hold for the holy people of this grand story.

"It is my great honor to have our special guest narrator, Liam Neeson, share this powerful scripture, have Catholic and Anglican choirs assembled en masse singing their hearts out, and enjoy six of the most talented soloists I know, sharing this new work with you. May it inspire you and usher in this Christmas season with a renewed sense of awe and wonder."

World AIDS Day

2007-11-29T13:36:00.000-08:00

December 1 is World AIDS Day, a day dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic. According to the latest estimates from the UN, there are 33.2 million people living with HIV worldwide, and 2.1 million people have died of AIDS this year.

To help raise a little bit of awareness about this tragic problem and the ways that ordinary people can help, I've written an article for The Catholic Northwest Progress about a recent college grad who's volunteering in Tanzania serving AIDS orphans. You can check it out here.

Advent is coming

2007-11-28T21:58:00.000-08:00

This Sunday, December 2, is the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new liturgical year. Advent is a season of preparation and anticipation, as we wait for the celebration of Jesus' birth on Christmas, as well as for His second coming. I've never observed Advent very seriously in the past, but I'm hoping it will be a season of growth and reflection for me this year. It looks like americancatholic.org has some decent ideas for the Advent season. Anyway, here are a few paragraphs from the Catechism of the Catholic Church that are relevant to Advent:

"The coming of God's Son to earth is an event of such immensity that God willed to prepare for it over centuries. He makes everything converge on Christ: all the rituals and sacrifices, figures and symbols of the 'First Covenant'. He announces him through the mouths of the prophets who succeeded one another in Israel. Moreover, he awakens in the hearts of the pagans a dim expectation of this coming.

"St. John the Baptist is the Lord's immediate precursor or forerunner, sent to prepare his way. 'Prophet of the Most High', John surpasses all the prophets, of whom he is the last. He inaugurates the Gospel, already from his mother's womb welcomes the coming of Christ, and rejoices in being 'the friend of the bridegroom', whom he points out as 'the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world'. Going before Jesus 'in the spirit and power of Elijah', John bears witness to Christ in his preaching, by his Baptism of conversion, and through his martyrdom.

"When the Church celebrates the liturgy of Advent each year, she makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah, for by sharing in the long preparation for the Saviour's first coming, the faithful renew their ardent desire for his second coming. By celebrating the precursor's birth and martyrdom, the Church unites herself to his desire: 'He must increase, but I must decrease.'" (CCC 522-524)

P.S. I am the king of inadvertent plays on words. The word Advent basically means "coming," but I did not have that in mind when I titled this post. I've never been a fan of puns and such, so maybe my subconscious makes me use them without realizing it sometimes just to mess with me.

Praying to Saints

2007-11-27T22:30:00.000-08:00

Note: Before I get started, I'm just going to clarify that when Catholics pray to Saints, we are not worshiping them. Worship is reserved for God alone, as the Catholic Church has always taught and will always teach. And Saints are certainly not God. They are simply people -- real, sinful people -- who sought to live lives of faith and holiness and who are now in Heaven with God.

Moving on: Jeanette asked me tonight what the point of praying to Saints is. I told her that was something I'd often wondered about myself. I tried to give her a decent answer at the time, and maybe this post will help clarify things a little more.

Many non-Catholic Christians have a big problem with the idea of praying to Saints, largely based on 1 Timothy 2:5, which says, "For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." By praying to a Saint, Catholics are putting a mediator other than Christ between themselves and God, these Christians argue.

I guess now would be a good time to talk about what Catholics do when we pray to a Saint. I've already said it's not worship, but what is it? Basically, it's asking the Saint to intercede for you, to pray to God on your behalf.

If you think about it, that's really not so different from something that many Christians do all the time. We all go through difficult times in our lives, and during those times of trial it's very common to ask our friends and relatives to pray for us. Now, I've never heard anyone make the objection, based on 1 Timothy 2:5, that this practice is unbiblical. And yet it is practically identical with the practice of praying to the Saints. In both cases you are asking someone other than Christ to pray to God for you.

Of course, the reason you never hear anyone worrying about circumventing or usurping the unique mediation of Christ by asking their friends to pray for them is that asking others to pray for you is a perfectly biblical practice. It's true that Jesus is the one mediator between God and men, but He can effect that mediation however He pleases, and He allows us to participate in His mediation. Jesus has not arranged things such that we cannot intercede or mediate for one another. This is clear enough from moving just a few verses back from 1 Timothy 2:5 to 2:1, where Paul writes, "I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men." Indeed, in Romans 15:30, Paul specifically asks others to pray for him: "I appeal to you, brethren, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf." James is more explicit still when he tells his readers to "pray for one another" (James 5:16).

So it seems pretty clear to me -- since God inspired Paul to write both that Christ is the one mediator and that we should pray for each other -- that asking a friend to pray for you is not in conflict with 1 Timothy 2:5. And if we can ask our friends to pray for us, why not the Saints? The Saints are our friends in Heaven. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ who have gone before us. They're not dead -- they're more alive than us, and more closely united to God. And since "nothing unclean shall enter" (Revelation 21:27) Heaven, we know that God has made the Saints in Heaven fully righteous. Now, James 5:16 tells us that "the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects," so it seems like the Saints would be good people to have praying for you.

Praying to the Saints is not about circumventing Christ or avoiding Him or replacing Him -- it's about enlisting others who love Him and who know Him far better than we do to pray to Him along with us.

Now, when it comes to how prayer in general works, that is a mystery whose depths I have barely begun to plumb, so you'll have to give me some time if you'd ever like me to speak to that with any kind of clarity. For the time being, since I do not understand it, I must walk by faith in the amazing promises of Christ.

Christ the King

2007-11-25T17:05:00.000-08:00

Today is the Solemnity of Christ the King, a feast that, in the current Church calendar, falls on the Sunday before the first Sunday of Advent. It was instituted in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Quas Primas. Pope Pius XI was concerned with the many problems of the world, which he saw as stemming largely from man's rejection of the sovereignty of Christ and the fact that "the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives." He wanted to see a "restoration of the Empire of Our Lord," as he explained:

"15. This kingdom is spiritual and is concerned with spiritual things. That this is so the above quotations from Scripture amply prove, and Christ by his own action confirms it. On many occasions, when the Jews and even the Apostles wrongly supposed that the Messiah would restore the liberties and the kingdom of Israel, he repelled and denied such a suggestion. When the populace thronged around him in admiration and would have acclaimed him King, he shrank from the honor and sought safety in flight. Before the Roman magistrate he declared that his kingdom was not of this world. The gospels present this kingdom as one which men prepare to enter by penance, and cannot actually enter except by faith and by baptism, which, though an external rite, signifies and produces an interior regeneration. This kingdom is opposed to none other than to that of Satan and to the power of darkness. It demands of its subjects a spirit of detachment from riches and earthly things, and a spirit of gentleness. They must hunger and thirst after justice, and more than this, they must deny themselves and carry the cross.

"16. Christ as our Redeemer purchased the Church at the price of his own blood; as priest he offered himself, and continues to offer himself as a victim for our sins. Is it not evident, then, that his kingly dignity partakes in a manner of both these offices?

"17. It would be a grave error, on the other hand, to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs, since, by virtue of the absolute empire over all creatures committed to him by the Father, all things are in his power. Nevertheless, during his life on earth he refrained from the exercise of such authority, and although he himself disdained to possess or to care for earthly goods, he did not, nor does he today, interfere with those who possess them."

The questions I think we have to keep asking ourselves are, "Is Christ true?" and "If so, what does that mean for me?" Because if Christ is true, if He died and rose again, if He is the Son of God, then He is the King, whether we like it or not. He either is or He isn't. And if He is, then He is the Standard by which all else is measured, He is our Savior, He is the Source and Sustainer of our very being.

It's hard to believe that, and it will take eternity to understand it, but the most difficult part is to submit to it. It takes great humility to submit to the sovereignty of Christ, and we can't do it without His grace. Even with His grace, none of us can do it perfectly. We will all inevitably stumble, and often. Yet we are still called to submit ourselves to Christ, to continually strive to surrender our own desires to His perfect will.

It sounds scary, and it sometimes is, but this submission to Christ is ultimately liberating. Because Christ the King is not a tyrannical dictator, but an extravagantly loving Good Shepherd Who desires nothing but the best for all of us.

Pope Benedict XVI's second encyclical

2007-11-24T19:38:00.000-08:00

Pope Benedict XVI is going to be releasing his second encyclical (kind of official letter) next Friday, and it's going to be about hope. Here's an announcement from zenit.org:

"Benedict XVI's second encyclical, 'Spe Salvi,' will be signed and released to the public Nov. 30, the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle. The Pope's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said Thursday that the Holy Father would sign the document next Friday. The Vatican further confirmed today that the encyclical will also be released that day in eight languages, including English.

"The Holy See said 'Saved In Hope' will be presented by Cardinal Georges Cottier, retired theologian of the Pontifical Household, and Cardinal Albert Vanhoye, retired professor of New Testament at the Pontifical Biblical Institute.

"As the Church prepares for the Year of St. Paul, the title, 'Spe Salvi,' refers to Paul's Letter to the Romans, 8:24: 'For in hope we were saved.'

"Hope has been an important theme in this pontificate. For example, in the homily the Pope delivered in Naples last Oct. 21 at the inauguration of the interreligious meeting for peace, he spoke of hope 11 times.

"Benedict XVI's second encyclical continues with a reflection on the theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. His 2005 encyclical, 'Deus Caritas Est,' considered charity."

Happy Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T19:04:00.000-08:00

. . . to everyone. I'm tired.

Thanksgiving is coming

2007-11-21T16:38:00.000-08:00

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.
--Psalm 118:29

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, which means that I should take some extra time to give thanks to God for all the ways that He has blessed me. It also means that I've got two football games to play and a whole lot of food to eat. Those are great blessings in themselves.

More immediately, it means that I'm back in my hometown of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and that I'll probably see most of the people I've ever known in my life at Curly's tonight.

The Gnostic Gospels

2007-11-20T21:07:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a rather well-known book called The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, who is a professor of religion at Princeton University. The book is based on a large batch of so-called "gnostic gospels" that were discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The writings include texts from groups that were considered heretical by the orthodox Christian Church during the 2nd and 3rd centuries. In her book, Pagels explores the theological differences between the orthodox and "gnostic" groups and the apparent reasons for them.

The book has been interesting so far. I do disagree, however, with some of Pagels's argumentation. For example, she believes that ulterior political motives were behind the development of much of orthodox Christian doctrine. Though she does not seem to base this conclusion on anything more than speculation and coincidence, she asserts it as plain fact.

Though this assumption of bad faith is irritating, The Gnostic Gospels is valuable for -- if nothing else (which is not the case) -- the window it occasionally provides into the breathtaking world of early Christianity. An excerpt from "The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp" brought tears to my eyes. Polycarp, a 2nd-century bishop, was faced with certain execution unless he renounced Christianity and honored the Roman gods:

"The governor persisted and said, 'Swear and I will let you go. Curse Christ!' But Polycarp answered, 'For eighty-six years I have been his servant, and he has done me no wrong . . . If you delude yourself into think that I will swear by the emperor's genius, as you say, and if you pretend not to know who I am, listen and I will tell you plainly: I am a Christian.'"

"Polycarp was burned alive in the public arena," Pagels adds.

What a badass. What a faith.

Chesterton's Orthodoxy and Jesus' secret

2007-11-19T20:17:00.000-08:00

I finished reading G. K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy today. I thought it was a great book, and one that will bear repeat readings in years to come. Chesterton is a big-picture thinker. He is sometimes given to over-generalization, but more often than not, his insights ring true. One of Chesterton's great gifts is his ability to take the assumptions and beliefs of the modern world and turn them on their heads, usually by their own logic. His reasoning is utterly rational, his sense completely common.

Anyway, I found the conclusion of Orthodoxy particularly interesting, so I've included it below. I'd heard people remark before about the phenomenon Chesterton here considers, but I'd never heard such an intriguing and appealing explanation for it proposed. Anyway, here it is:

"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."

The value of work

2007-11-18T21:27:00.000-08:00

Brothers and sisters: You know how one must imitate us. For we did not act in a disorderly way among you, nor did we eat food received free from anyone. On the contrary, in toil and drudgery, night and day we worked, so as not to burden any of you. Not that we do not have the right. Rather, we wanted to present ourselves as a model for you, so that you might imitate us. In fact, when we were with you, we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat. We hear that some are conducting themselves among you in a disorderly way, by not keeping busy but minding the business of others. Such people we instruct and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to work quietly and to eat their own food.
--2 Thessalonians 3:7-12

Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the Pope's personal preacher, gave a commentary on today's Mass readings that I found interesting. (It was translated and posted on zenit.org.) I've often struggled with the question of whether there would be any real meaning in a lot of the things I could do with my life, work-wise, and it was good for me to read his perspective. Here's an excerpt:

"This Sunday's Gospel [Luke 21:5-19] is one of the famous discourses on the end of the world, which are characteristic of the end of the liturgical year.

"It seems that in one of the first Christian communities, that of Thessalonica, there were believers who drew mistaken conclusions from these discourses of Christ. They thought that it was useless to weary themselves, to work or do anything since everything was about to come to an end. They thought it better to take each day as it came and not commit themselves to long-term projects and only to do the minimum to get by.

"St. Paul responds to them in the second reading: 'We hear that some are conducting themselves among you in a disorderly way, by not keeping busy but minding the business of others. Such people we instruct and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to work quietly and to eat their own food.' At the beginning of the passage, St. Paul recalls the rule that he had given to the Christians in Thessalonica: 'If anyone will not work, let him not eat.'

"This was a novelty for the men of that time. The culture to which they belonged looked down upon manual labor; it was regarded as degrading and as something to be left to slaves and the uneducated. But the Bible has a different vision. From the very first page it presents God as working for six days and resting on the seventh day. And all of this happens in the Bible before sin is spoken of. Work, therefore, is part of man's original nature and is not something that results from guilt and punishment. Manual labor is just as dignified as intellectual and spiritual labor. Jesus himself dedicates 17 years to the former -- supposing he began to work around 13 -- and only a few years to the latter.

"A layman has written: 'What sense and what value does our ordinary work as laypeople have before God? It is true that we laypeople also do a lot of charity work, engage in the apostolate, and volunteer work; but we must give most of our time and energies to ordinary jobs. If this sort of work has no value for heaven, we will have very little for eternity. No one we have asked about this has been able to give us satisfactory answers. They say: "Offer it all to God!" but is this enough?'

"My reply: No, the value of our work is not only conferred on it by the 'good intention' we put into it or the morning offering we make to God; it also has a value in itself, as a participation in God's creative and redemptive work and as service to our brothers. We read in one of the Vatican II documents, in 'Gaudium et Spes,' that it is by 'his labor [that] a man ordinarily supports himself and his family, is joined to his fellow men and serves them, and can exercise genuine charity and be a partner in the work of bringing divine creation to perfection. Indeed, we hold that through labor offered to God man is associated with the redemptive work of Jesus Christ' (No. 67)."

Planet Earth

2007-11-17T22:16:00.000-08:00

Over the next few weeks, the Discovery Channel is going to be showing an "encore presentation" of Planet Earth, a documentary miniseries that BBC spent an exorbitant amount of time and money to shoot and produce.

I saw several of the episodes on DVD this summer, and I thought they were wonderful. The technology, technique, and obvious care that went into making them resulted in some absolutely breathtaking results, and I don't say that lightly. The series reveals things in nature that no one had ever seen before, and I found myself appreciating God's creativity and creation more and more as I watched. The episode lineup is:

1. "From Pole to Pole"
2. "Mountains"
3. "Fresh Water"
4. "Caves"
5. "Deserts"
6. "Ice Worlds"
7. "Great Plains"
8. "Jungles"
9. "Shallow Seas"
10. "Seasonal Forests"
11. "Ocean Deep"

Anyway, do yourself a favor, check out the schedule, and watch Planet Earth.

A Man for All Seasons

2007-11-16T23:25:00.000-08:00

Jeanette and I just watched A Man for All Seasons, a 1966 film about St. Thomas More that won six Academy Awards, including best screenplay, best director, best actor, and best picture. Here's the synopsis from the box:

"In 16th-century England, the corrupt King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) betrays the Roman Catholic Church to divorce his wife and marry his latest conquest Anne Boleyn (Vanessa Redgrave). Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield) is then forced to choose between his principles and duty to his heretical king, who has begun executing the treasonous with increasing frequency. The historically profound battle of ideals also involves Cardinal Wolsey (Orson Welles), Thomas Cromwell (Leo McKern), and More's valiant wife (Wendy Hiller)."

I thought it was a great movie, and it gave Jeanette and me a lot to think and talk about. If you haven't seen it, you should see it.

Identity crisis in Catholic higher education

2007-11-15T14:49:00.000-08:00

My first freelance story appeared today in The Catholic Northwest Progress, a newspaper serving the archdiocese of Seattle. It's about a lecture given recently at Seattle University about how Catholic colleges and universities can maintain or recover their distinctively Catholic identities. You can check out the article here.

More on Peter J. Gomes

2007-11-14T22:20:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the highlight of my college career was the time when, during a Wednesday afternoon tea (yes, tea), Peter J. Gomes, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, said to me, in reference to my thirty-plus-year-old pastel striped necktie, "I like your tie."

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus

2007-11-13T23:06:00.000-08:00

Peter J. Gomes, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, has a new book out entitled The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good About the Good News? I haven't read it yet, but I can tell you already what the book's main weakness is -- that you can't hear Gomes speak it.

Gomes was one of my favorite professors at Harvard, largely because he was just such a joy to listen to. The best way I can explain his speaking skill is that my parents went to hear him give a talk during a parents' weekend at Harvard, after which my dad told me, "He talked for an hour and a half, and it felt like five minutes!"

I enjoyed Gomes's lectures so much that, after taking a course of his during the fall semester of my junior year, I audited his spring term course despite the fact that I had no interest in the subject matter. (The name of the course, just to give you an idea of how disgusting Harvard can be, was -- I'm not kidding -- The History of Harvard and Its Presidents.) Gomes is an old-school lecturer, and he speaks in what I've often called an affected (and inimitable) pseudo-British accent.

Now, I don't agree with all of Gomes's theology, but I have a great deal of respect for him, so I was very interested when I saw his new book the other day. Here's what the dust jacket had to say:

"Jesus came preaching, but the church wound up preaching Jesus. Why does the church insist upon making Jesus the object of its attention rather than heeding his message? Esteemed Harvard minister Peter J. Gomes believes that excessive focus on the Bible and doctrines about Jesus have led the Christian church astray. 'What did Jesus preach?' asks Gomes. To recover the transformative power of the gospel—'the good news'—Gomes says we must go beyond the Bible and rediscover how to live out Jesus' original revolutionary message of hope:

"'Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned against cheap grace, and I warn now against cheap hope. Hope is not merely the optimistic view that somehow everything will turn out all right in the end if everyone just does as we do. Hope is the more rugged, the more muscular view that even if things don't turn out all right and aren't all right, we endure through and beyond the times that disappoint or threaten to destroy us.'

"This gospel is offensive and always overturns the status quo, Gomes tells us. It's not good news for those who wish not to be disturbed, and today our churches resound with shrill speeches of fear and exclusivity or tepid retellings of a health-and-wealth gospel. With his unique blend of eloquence and insight, Gomes invites us to hear anew the radical nature of Jesus' message of hope and change. Using examples from ancient times as well as from modern pop culture, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus shows us why the good news is every bit as relevant today as when it was first preached."

Obviously, I can't extrapolate the whole message of Gomes's book from this brief summary, but I have a few thoughts on what this blurb suggests (keeping in mind that the blurb may just reflect the publisher's over-sensationalized spin). It's true that many Christians would do well to pay more attention to the radical nature of Jesus' teachings. We should always be trying to better understand and live out all that Jesus taught. But I don't like the suggestion that there must be some trade-off between focus on Jesus' message and Jesus Himself. Because Jesus was more than a teacher; He was God incarnate. He didn't come just to teach us the way; He is the way, and the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him. That's a pretty important aspect of Jesus' message, if you ask me.

Coming to America

2007-11-12T23:29:00.000-08:00

Pope Benedict XVI is making a visit to the United States next April, according to an article on zenit.org. Here are the logistical details from the article:

"The dates for Benedict XVI's upcoming trip to the United States were confirmed today; the Pope's visit is scheduled for April 15-20.

"Archbishop Pietro Sambi, apostolic nuncio to the United States, confirmed the dates for the six-day trip when he participated in the opening of the U.S. episcopal conference's fall meeting under way in Baltimore.

"Ban Ki-moon, U.N. secretary-general, last April officially asked the Pope to visit the United Nations.

"The Holy Father will arrive in Washington on April 15. The next day, his 81st birthday, he will receive an official welcome at the White House. Later that afternoon, he will address the U.S. bishops' conference.

"On April 17, after celebrating Mass at the Washington Nationals' stadium, the Pope will give an address at the Catholic University of America.

"Benedict XVI will be in New York on April 18, for a visit to the United Nations in the morning and an ecumenical meeting in the afternoon. His time in New York will also include Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral on April 19, the anniversary of his papal election, and a meeting with youth. On April 20, the Holy Father will visit ground zero, where the twin towers stood. That afternoon, the trip will officially end with Mass at Yankee Stadium."

Holy water and sacramentals

2007-11-11T21:31:00.000-08:00

So as we were leaving Mass tonight, Jeanette asked me, as she has a few times before, what the deal is with holy water. She asked in reference to the bowl of water at the back of the church that people commonly dip their fingers in before making the sign of the cross as they enter or leave the church building.

I told her, helpfully, that holy water is water that has been blessed by a priest. She asked what does it do? I said holy water is what's known as a sacramental, and that I wasn't entirely clear on what exactly sacramentals do, but that I thought they were supposed to have some symbolic/reminderly value. Anyway, since no one should have to go off of my vague notions and semi-educated guesses, I told Jeanette that I would do some research about sacramentals, and holy water specifically. So here are the fruits of my research.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church has a section on sacramentals which starts off thusly:

"Holy Mother Church has, moreover, instituted sacramentals. These are sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments. They signify effects, particularly of a spiritual nature, which are obtained through the intercession of the Church. By them men are disposed to receive the chief effect of the sacraments, and various occasions in life are rendered holy." (CCC 1667, quoting Sacrosanctum concilium)

I didn't quite understand all that, so I kept reading to try to find out exactly what sacramentals are and what they do:

"They always include a prayer, often accompanied by a specific sign, such as the laying on of hands, the sign of the cross, or the sprinkling of holy water (which recalls Baptism)." (CCC 1668)

"Sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church's prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it. 'For well-disposed members of the faithful, the liturgy of the sacraments and sacramentals sanctifies almost every event of their lives with the divine grace which flows from the Paschal mystery of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. From this source all sacraments and sacramentals draw their power. There is scarcely any proper use of material things which cannot be thus directed toward the sanctification of men and the praise of God.'" (CCC 1670, quoting Sacrosanctum concilium)

So, broadly speaking, it sounds like pretty much any material thing can be a sacramental, as long as it helps us to receive God's grace and cooperate with it. But apparently not all sacramentals are material:

"Among sacramentals blessings (of persons, meals, objects, and places) come first. Every blessing praises God and prays for his gifts. In Christ, Christians are blessed by God the Father 'with every spiritual blessing.' This is why the Church imparts blessings by invoking the name of Jesus, usually while making the holy sign of the cross of Christ." (CCC 1671, quoting Ephesians 1:3)

Exorcism is also covered in the section on sacramentals, but now we're a long way from where we started, I think. Here's what the Catechism says "in brief" about sacramentals, and then we'll get back to holy water:

"Sacramentals are sacred signs instituted by the Church. They prepare men to receive the fruit of the sacraments and sanctify different circumstances of life." (CCC 1677)

Jimmy Akin, a great Catholic apologist, gives this explanation of sacramentals on his blog:

"Like the other sacramentals, holy water thus serves as a means by which we can to something to signify our desire to consecrate ourselves and our circumstances to God, striking a connection with him in response to his grace and asking him to give us of his grace. They are, if you will, a kind of acted out prayer in which we and the Church implore God's blessings."

So, holy water. As I said, holy water is water that has been blessed by a priest, and it is a sacramental. And the bowl that it is kept in is properly called a font. Holy water is used for baptism (which is itself a sacrament, not to be confused with a sacramental) and, as I said, for making the sign of the cross as one enters a church. Dipping your fingers in holy water and making the sign of the cross is intended to be a reminder of baptism. A priest will also sometimes sprinkle holy water over the congregation at the beginning of Mass. You can even put some holy water from church in a bottle and take it home with you.

Anyway, to close, here is the rite of blessing said by the priest at a baptism to make water into holy water. I think it's wonderful.

"Father, You give us grace through sacramental signs, which tell us of the wonders of Your unseen power.

"In baptism we use Your gift of water, which You have made a rich symbol of the grace You give us in this sacrament.

"At the very dawn of creation, Your Spirit breathed on the waters, making them the wellspring of all holiness.

"The waters of the great flood You made a sign of the waters of baptism, that make an end of sin and a new beginning of goodness.

"Through the waters of the Red Sea, You led Israel out of slavery, to be an image of God's holy people, set free from sin by baptism.

"In the waters of the Jordan, Your Son was baptized by John and anointed with the Spirit.

"Your Son willed that water and blood should flow from His side as He hung upon the cross.

"After His resurrection, He told His disciples: 'Go out and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.'

"Father, look now with love upon Your Church, and unseal for her the fountain of baptism.

"By the power of the Spirit give to the water of this font the grace of your Son.

"You created man in Your own likeness: cleanse him from sin in a new birth of innocence by water and the Spirit.

"We ask You, Father, with Your Son to send the Holy Spirit upon the waters of this font.

"May all who are buried with Christ in the death of baptism rise also with Him to newness of life. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen."

G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy

2007-11-10T21:35:00.000-08:00

I was at Barnes & Noble today and I found a nice little hardcover edition of G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy with a foreword by one of my favorite Christian writers, Philip Yancey, who calls Chesterton the "Prophet of Mirth." I'd tried reading Orthodoxy in an online once before, but I always find it hard to read things on a computer screen for extended periods (not nearly so easy as writing . . . ) and so I gave it up a couple chapters in.

But I think that Chesterton is just such a funny and fascinating character, and I've never heard a bad thing about his book, so I want to finish reading it. Here is Chesterton's preface to Orthodoxy:

"This book is meant to be a companion to 'Heretics,' and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book called Heretics because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. The writer has been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset Newman in writing his Apologia; he has been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere. While everything else may be different the motive in both cases is the same. It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer's own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But if it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence."

Feast of the Dedication of St. John Lateran

2007-11-09T16:12:00.000-08:00

I found out at Mass this afternoon that today is the Feast of the Dedication of St. John Lateran. To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure who St. John Lateran was, or what he was dedicated to, so I decided to do a little research. Turns out I was on the wrong track. From americancatholic.org:

"Most Catholics think of St. Peter’s as the pope’s main church, but they are wrong. St. John Lateran is the pope’s church, the cathedral of the Diocese of Rome where the Bishop of Rome presides.

"The first basilica on the site was built in the fourth century when Constantine donated land he had received from the wealthy Lateran family. That structure and its successors suffered fire, earthquake and the ravages of war, but the Lateran remained the church where popes were consecrated until the popes returned from Avignon in the 14th century to find the church and the adjoining palace in ruins.

"Pope Innocent X commissioned the present structure in 1646. One of Rome’s most imposing churches, the Lateran’s towering facade is crowned with 15 colossal statues of Christ, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist and 12 doctors of the Church. Beneath its high altar rest the remains of the small wooden table on which tradition holds St. Peter himself celebrated Mass."

Intercessions

2007-11-08T23:31:00.000-08:00

I thought intercessions from this morning's prayers in the liturgy of the hours were beautiful:

Let us joyfully cry out in thanks to God the Father whose love guides and nourishes his people: May you be glorified, Lord, for all ages.
Most merciful Father, we praise you for your love, for you wondrously created us and even more wondrously restored us to grace.
At the beginning of this day fill our hearts with zeal for serving you, so that our thoughts and actions may redound to your glory.
Purify our hearts of every evil desire, make us intent on doing your will.
Open our hearts to the needs of all men, fill us with brotherly love.