The Catholic Golfer

David Limbaugh argues that Howard Dean's latest reach out to evangelicals is pointless...I agree!

2006-06-02T09:31:00.001-07:00

By David Limbaugh

Jun 2, 2006

At least Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean is colorful; you've got to give him that much. But he's not the guy to be leading the charge to reunite the Democratic Party with so-called "values voters."

The Washington Times' Greg Pierce reports that Dean was outraged when he heard that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist intended to call to a vote a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

Dean called opponents of homosexual marriage "bigots." He said, "At a time when the Republican Party is in trouble with their conservative base, Bill Frist is taking a page straight out of the Karl Rove playbook to distract from the Republican Party's failed leadership and misplaced priorities by scapegoating LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) families for political gain, using marriage as a wedge issue." It's not only morally wrong, it is shameful and reprehensible," said the enlightened Dean.

Now flashback a week or so and picture Dean on the set of the evil bigot Pat Robertson's "700 Club." Dean appeared as part of his effort to reclaim "values voters" for the Democratic Party. On that program Dean reportedly said the party's platform provides that "marriage is between a man and a woman." Later, Dean had to apologize to gay rights leaders for incorrectly stating the party's platform position.

Surely I'm misreading one of these two reports. Which is it, Howard? Or, perhaps I should say, "Which face will you be wearing today: the bigoted or the enlightened one?"

Regardless of what the party's official position on gay marriage is, these two side-by-side incidents reveal the Democratic Party's predicament with "values voters." It appears they can't live with 'em and can't without 'em.

Democrats have been wrestling with this issue for some time now, realizing that Christian conservatives constitute a substantial part of the Republican voter base.

The Democrats' problem connecting with "values voters" was reinforced when 2004 exit polling data, along with other concurrent polling, showed that Democrats not only have difficulty connecting with evangelical Christians, but orthodox practitioners of most religions.

They do just fine with avowed secularists, agnostics and atheists, but not with those who attend church or other religious services more regularly. A Pew Research Center poll showed that President Bush beat Kerry 64 percent to 35 percent among voters who attend church more than once a week and 58 percent to 41 percent among those who attend once a week. Those who attend just a few times a year favored Kerry 54 percent to 45 percent. But those who never attend favor Kerry 62 percent to 36 percent.

A later Pew survey had even worse news for Democrats. It revealed that only 29 percent of the respondents believed the Democratic Party is generally friendly toward religion (down from 40 percent in 2004), and 44 percent believed secular liberals have too much influence on the Democratic Party. It also showed that people believed, by a margin of 51 percent to 28 percent, that Republicans were more concerned with protecting religious values.

Apparently all that scripture John Kerry recited during the presidential campaign didn't work. Nor did Howard Dean's protestations that true evangelicals believe the government ought to radically redistribute wealth.

Nor did Reverend Jim Wallis's book, "God's Politics," in which he advised Democrats to recast their positions on issues to make them more appealing to "values voters."

Even the multiple seminars and retreats the Democrats have had to address their waning appeal to values voters have had little impact.

Perhaps sooner or later the Democratic Party will realize that their problem with "values voters" is not that they have failed to clearly articulate their message on values issues. It is that they have succeeded in communicating their positions, loudly and clearly, despite their efforts to obfuscate near election time.

The problem isn't that conservative Christians -- generally speaking -- don't understand where the left is coming from; it's that they do. They have expressed open contempt for certain traditional values, even though many Democrats are Christians, too.

It's not that Democrats don't have values voters, too. But those voters are -- generally speaking again -- motivated largely by a different set of values.

The Democrats' outreach to values voters isn't an appeal to voters who share their values -- they are already firmly in the Democratic base. It's a cynical ploy to semantically repackage their positions in terms designed to fool churchgoers (see the Pew Poll) into believing they are in their corner -- politically speaking.

Too bad these reputedly "poor, uneducated and easy to command" conservative Christians aren't so easy to command.

David Limbaugh is a syndicated columnist who blogs at DavidLimbaugh.com. He is also the author of Persecution and Absolute Power: The Legacy of Corruption in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department.

We need to ask ourselves whether marriage matters or not...

2006-06-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

That's what Mike Gallagher, from Fox News and Townhall.com, says in his latest article....

Face it: Marriage is in trouble

By Mike Gallagher

Jun 2, 2006

The NBC-TV reporter had a huge smile on his face while asking the “newlyweds” about their lives together. “Who gets up earlier?” he said. The young “groom” grinned and said, “Oh, I do.” The “bride” giggled and blushed. Just a warm, fuzzy interview on NBC’s “Dateline” about a nice, young married couple, right?

Wrong. This is no ordinary couple. This was an interview with Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, the notorious ex-schoolteacher and her young “husband”, the boy she raped when she was his grade school teacher and he was 13 years old.

It has been positively mind-boggling to observe the fawning by the national news media over the one year “wedding anniversary” of these two pitiful people. Last week, the beaming couple was on the cover of People Magazine. In addition to the “Dateline” segment, they appeared on NBC’s “Today Show” with Matt Lauer slobbering all over them. Their sordid story has been featured in newspapers all over America this week.

But rather than telling the sick tale of a child predator who wound up pregnant by her victim, the media seems positively enamored by the relationship these two have, now that they’ve been officially married for a year. Instead of asking Letourneau probing questions about why she engaged in such sick, depraved behavior, they want to know if the couple argues very much. Rather than ask the young man about what it’s like to be the victim of a sexual predator, reporters and broadcasters ask him things like what it’s like to be famous, if he’s recognized when he goes to the grocery store.

Once again, the American media wallows in a moral cesspool and tries to glamorize a degenerate.

If it weren’t so tragic, it would actually be a bit comical to consider the double standard involved here. If a 40 year old man raped a 13 year old girl and she became pregnant and they ended up married, it’s not likely they’d be featured on “Dateline” or on the cover of People Magazine. In fact, if a man sexually molested a 13 year old boy, I doubt that reporters would be clamoring to cover the story 8 years later if the boy moved in with the man.

Calling the relationship between Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau a marriage is a slap in the face to just about every single man and woman who ever made the lifelong commitment to love, honor and obey one another.

It seems pretty obvious to me that marriage is under siege. Not only are Americans divorcing in record numbers, but activists are determined to undermine the very definition of marriage as the covenant between one man and one woman.

Next week, the U.S. Senate will vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment. It will be a fairly simple decision. The Senate will decide whether marriage is important enough to declare that marriage in America is between one man and one woman and literally say so in our Constitution.

I’m trying to remain optimistic. Our government has a rare opportunity to show the world that our country understands that marriage is truly a foundational way of life for us. We have always considered marriage as being exclusive to one man and one woman. And yet, considering the way the Senate has misfired over the issue of illegal immigration, I’m afraid that it might lack the backbone to do the right thing on marriage, too.

This is an event that desperately needs the voice of the people. If an average American has never called his or her U.S. Senator’s office, yet feels strongly that marriage between one man and one woman needs to be preserved, now is the time to make that call. This doesn’t have to be a partisan effort. I know Democrats who are in favor of the Marriage Amendment and Republicans who are uncomfortable with it.

Ultimately, we’ll need to decide together, as Americans, whether marriage matters.

Sadly, some will consider this position to be a “homophobic” one, an ugly attempt to discriminate against gays and lesbians who want to get married. But that’s just not true. This isn’t “anti-gay”, it’s “pro-marriage.” I hold a majority belief that marriage in our country should be exclusive to one man and one woman. If we don’t officially declare marriage to be this way, there really is no stopping the possibilities.

When Senator Rick Santorum suggested that marriage could be diminished into all kinds of different permutations if we don’t preserve it, he was right. If we call the union between two men or two women a marriage, what stops the bigamist from taking four wives?

If marriage doesn’t mean what we know it to mean, let’s face it: anything goes. Failing to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment might lead to the proverbial slippery slope.

Many would argue that we’re already there.

Make that call.

Mike Gallagher is a contributing editor at Townhall.com, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, and a contributor and guest host on the Fox News Channel. Gallagher's website is MikeOnline.com

Dirk drops 50 on the Suns

2006-06-02T07:32:00.000-07:00

If were to become a monk, I'd want to be a monk here...

2006-06-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

Wine-tasting and retreats at California monastery

VINA, California (AP) -- In a Northern California monastery, 25 monks following the teachings of St. Benedict rise hours before dawn to pray, work the land and make a serious syrah -- a full-bodied red wine.

The men at the Abbey of New Clairvaux have opened the first Roman Catholic Cistercian winery in North America, though their vineyard has a storied place in California's wine history.

The 580-acre spread in this tiny town north of Chico was once owned by Leland Stanford -- the railroad magnate, California governor and university founder -- who ran what was considered the world's largest winery in the late 1800s, said Aimee Sunseri, a fifth-generation winemaker hired to help the monks start the winery.

The brothers' vineyards are more modest, but they hope wine sales will boost the monastery, where recruitment to the order has been hard and the monks must dig up ways to make cash.

"We need to work to keep going, but we don't want or expect to get rich. But the wine has done well -- better than expected," said Father Harold Meyer, who has been at the abbey for 33 years.

While their quarters are kept private, they've opened the monastery to the public for three- and four-day retreats, tours and weekend wine-tasting.

The grounds are quiet most of the day except for the splashing of koi fish in a small fountain and the abbot speeding by in a golf cart. At 7:35 p.m., the monks say their last prayer before the "grand silence," which lasts until morning prayers at 3:30 a.m. the next day.

Then, it's time for work.

"There's a sacredness about working with grapes," Meyer said. "Wine is very special."

The monastery's property is bordered on one side by the Sacramento River. Century-old walnut trees create canopies over the retreat facilities, including a modest library, a small dining hall and a store offering the wares of other monasteries and religious books.

Most of the fields and simple buildings are named, but not all carry religious monikers. Guest rooms for visitors taking retreats at the abbey are labeled by virtue: Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, Peace.

The rooms are austere, with a twin bed and desk. Each room has a private, modern bathroom.

Guests are asked to observe silence at night but there are no religious requirements and no schedule to the stay. Guests are welcome to attend prayer services in the monastery's small church or worship as they wish in a quiet room.

Retreats are booked months in advance and the stays are donation-based.

Some of the brothers are more outgoing than others, happy to talk to visitors. Others prefer solitude, meals alone and a day spent tinkering with farm equipment or making pottery.

"We get a lot of city people. We're intriguing, I guess," Meyer said, laughing.

The men follow the Roman Catholic teachings of St. Benedict, which advocate private and communal prayer and self-support through manual labor.

Trappist monks in Massachusetts sell jam and preserves, Benedictines in New Mexico brewed up plans to make beer and Cistercians have made wine in France and Germany for centuries.

Before settling on wine grapes, the Sacramento Valley monks dabbled with dairy, made a go at walnuts, then tried prunes and organic vegetables.

They now grow 10 varieties of grapes chosen specifically for the region's soil and climate, including petite sirah, tempranillo, graciano, zinfandel, barbera, viognier and muscat blanc.

"The ground here is kind of sandy and rough, which is perfect for growing grapes," Sunseri said.

Perfect for grapes, maybe, but not necessarily for those toiling in the fields. They have named and blessed the two fields: St. James and Poor Souls.

"Anyone that has to work that land is a poor soul," said Rafael Flores, one of the brothers.

The monks expect to make about 19,200 bottles of wine this year, twice as many as their first batch in 2002, Sunseri said.

That year, the monks harvested the first wine grapes at the Vina property since the close of the Stanford Winery in 1815, she said. Stanford's vineyards were torn out in the early 1900s and then prohibition kicked in. The land was eventually parceled off and sold in pieces.

The monastery moved here from Kentucky 51 years ago, building a church, a dining hall and residences. They are currently rebuilding part of an 800-year-old Spanish monastery William Randolph Hearst bought in the 1930s, dismantled and shipped to San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, where it was never reassembled.

The Abbey of New Clairvaux still uses Stanford's 100-year-old brick wine cellar to produce, age and bottle their wines.

"People will come at first because we're monks, but we want them to come back because this is a good place and we have quality goods to offer," Meyer said.

Does it really matter what a women chooses to wear?

2006-06-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

Of course it does! Here is a great article from Edward Sri about the importance of returning to modesty. Here's the beginning of the article.

To Inspire Love: A Return to Modesty

In our post-sexual-revolution world, skimpy dresses, mini-skirts, tiny bikinis, low -rise pants, and low-cut shirts have become part of the mainstream attire for women today. And anyone who might raise questions about the appropriateness of such dress is viewed as “rigid,” “old fashioned,” or “out of touch” with modern style. Modesty is no longer a part of our culture’s vocabulary. Though most people sense they wouldn’t want their own daughters dressing like Madonna and Britney Spears, few have the courage to bring up the topic of modesty, and even fewer know what to say if they did.

John Paul II — then Karol Wojtyla — in his book Love and Responsibility, offers much needed wisdom on the nature of modesty and how dressing modestly is crucial for strengthening our relationships with the opposite sex.

The Experience of Shame

Wojtyla begins his treatment on modesty with an explanation of a common human experience: shame. Shame involves a tendency to conceal something — not just bad things, such as sins, weaknesses, and embarrassing m oments, but also good things that we desire to keep from coming out in the open. For example, someone who performs a good deed may prefer that his action go unnoticed. If he is complemented publicly, he may feel embarrassed, not because he did something bad, but because he did not want to draw attention to his deed. Similarly, a student who receives high marks on an exam may feel embarrassed when the teacher praises her in front of the whole class, since she wished to share her good grade only with her closest friends and famil y. There are many good things that we wish to keep hidden from public eyes, and we feel shame if they are brought out into the open.

This helps us understand one of the most powerful experiences of shame: sexual shame. Why do human persons tend to conceal body parts associated with sexuality? Why do men and women instinctively cover themselves quickly if someone of the opposite sex accidentally walks in on them while they are changing their clothes or going to the bathroom? Wojtyla explains that this tendency to conceal those parts of the body that make it male or female is itself not the essence of shame, but a manifestation of a deeper tendency to conceal the sexual values themselves, “particularly in so far as they constitute in the mind of a particular person ‘a potential object of enjoyment’ for persons of the other sex” (p. 176).

For example, a woman may instinctively sense that if certain parts of her body are exposed, a man might view her merely for her sexual values as an object of pleasure. Indeed, those particular parts of her body reveal her sexual values so powerfully that a man can be drawn primarily not to her true value as a person, but to her sexual values which give him sensual pleasure in his glances and imagination.

That is why we tend to veil the sexual values connected with particular parts of the body — not because they are bad, but because they can overshadow the greater value of the person. Wojtyla thus says sexual shame is “a natural form of self-defense for the person” (p. 182). It helps prevent the person from being treated as an object of enjoyment. Thus, the concealing of sexual values through modesty of dress is meant to provide the arena in which something much more than a mere se nsual reaction might take place. Modesty of dress helps protect interactions between the sexes from falling into utilitarianism, and thus creates the possibility of authentic love for the per son to develop.

Catholic Matters from Fr. Neuhaus

2006-06-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've been reading Fr. Neuhaus' "Catholic Matters"...it is so well written and so well thought out...I have to recommend it to anyone. Below is a blurb from Chapter 5 (thanks to CERC).

Anyone thinking about becoming Catholic is forewarned. Must reading is a little book by Thomas Day, a modern classic, Why Catholics Can't Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste. It is both comic and sad. Cradle Catholics read it laughing through their tears. Converts brace themselves. Day sends up chatty priests who emcee the Mass as though it were their own live talk show, song leaders who challenge anyone else to sing, and happy-clappy ditties that might embarrass preschoolers. There is, to cite but one of hundreds, "To Be Alive":

To be alive and feeling free
And to have everyone in your family
To be alive in every way
Oh how great it is
To be alive.

Be forewarned. "Convert stories" have been a major genre in Catholic popular literature. That has been less so in recent years because, as we have seen, some Catholics assume there is a tension, even a contradiction, between ecumenism and conversion. "Why," it is asked, "would you want to become a Catholic when we Catholics have only now learned how wonderful Lutheranism is?" There are compelling theological reasons for becoming Catholic. Not so long ago, convert stories typically stressed the compelling aesthetic attractions of Catholicism. People such as Thomas Merton were drawn to the Church by the beauty, the solemnity, the ceremony, the dignity of the worship. The word commonly used was "mystery."

Merton, writing a long while ago, described the genius of Gregorian chant:

It is an austere warmth, the warmth of Gregorian chant. It is deep beyond ordinary emotion, and that is one reason why you never get tired of it. It never wears you out by making a lot of cheap demands on your sensibilities. Instead of drawing you out into the open field of feelings where your enemies, the devil and your own imagination and the inherent vulgarity of your own corrupted nature, can get at you with their blades and cut you to pieces, it draws you within, where you are lulled in peace and recollection and where you find God.

"Cheap demands on your sensibilities" nicely describes the experience of much contemporary liturgy and music. One now more commonly encounters people who, instead of being attracted by the beauty of it all, entered the Church despite the aesthetic shambles of liturgy and music in many parishes. For the "high church " Lutheran or Episcopalian, contemporary Catholicism can be a liturgical and musical move downmarket, and sometimes way down. When over lunch I told my editor friend Norman Podhoretz, with whom I share musical passions, that I was becoming a Catholic, there was at first a long pause. Then, with a deeply baffled expression, "But, Richard, what about Bach?" What about Bach indeed.

As I say, anyone thinking about becoming Catholic should brace himself by reading Thomas Day's Why Catholics Can't Sing. That having been said, I do believe the silliest of the silly season is past or now passing. And I am impressed by Lutherans and Anglicans who, upon entering into full communion, say they are pleasantly surprised to find that the horror stories of Catholic worship are greatly exaggerated. You can still find, here and there, priests who pin balloons to their vestments, ad lib the words of the Mass as though it were their personal performance, and never rise homiletically above "Have a nice day." There are still the ditties of doggerel set to vapid tunes that would make even Andrew Lloyd Webber wince; ditties that are typically much more about Wonderful, Wonderful Us than about the glory of the Lord. But all that is now passing. Its passing is hastened by the complaints of lay people who go to Mass not to celebrate their wonderful selves but to surrender themselves in the worship of the Mystery who is Christ in his Real Presence. Avery Cardinal Dulles tells of saying Mass in a parish that had a big banner by the altar emblazoned with the message, "God is Other People." He says he very much wished that he had had a magic marker with which to put a big comma after "Other." But that, he notes, was more than twenty years ago.

Stories of liturgical and musical malpractice abound. Where Catholics gather to lament the state of the Church, the game of choice is "Can you top this?" It can be very funny, in a sad sort of way. The malpractice is evident not only in liturgical and musical antics but also in the bare ruined choirs of churches stripped to the austere specifications of "worship spaces " designed to facilitate the community's encounter with itself. Encounter with the Other is a decidedly secondary consideration, if it is considered at all. The tabernacle of the Real Presence is moved either somewhere off to the side or into a closet-sized space down a side corridor, as though to pose a challenge to those really determined to engage in eucharistic adoration. Not for nothing are the church renovations of recent decades sometimes referred to as wreckovations. All this is painfully true, and there will no doubt be cause for legitimate complaint far into the future. However . . .

There is a real and present danger of idealizing the state of liturgy and music prior to the destabilizations following the Council. Today's reformers rightly remind us that the pre-conciliar twenty-minute "quickie Mass" hurriedly mumbled in butchered Latin to get people in and out with minimum delay was not marked by the aesthetic care or reverence that so many say they miss today. The Council called for full, active, and conscious participation by the faithful. "Active" was sometimes interpreted as a mandate for keeping the people busy.

A liturgist recently reported that he observed a Mass with stopwatch in hand and discovered that 80 percent of the time the people were not doing anything. I expect some of them were just praying, or pondering the mystery of what God was doing at and on the altar. After the Council, liturgical experts obsessed with change imposed novelty upon novelty, the result being the radical destabilization of the sacramental and devotional order. But again, that season is passing. Today, the new thing is the recovery of the traditional. It is commonly called "the reform of the reform," and it is making headway, albeit too slowly. Balloons, priests in clown outfits, and the guitar-strumming monotony of "Kumbaya my Lord " are period pieces; they are embarrassingly remembered by aging baby boomers, and utterly baffling to their children and grandchildren.

Then, too, and despite the banality and sentimentality of the English texts that were rushed into use for the New Order Mass (Novus Ordo Missae), it is a rite that can be done, and often is done, with dignity, reverence, and more than a touch of the majesty that befits the worship of God. And, let it be admitted, the banality and the sentimentality chiefly offend those of us who were reared in the elegantly virile liturgical English of The Book of Common Prayer. That was also the language adopted by Lutherans in this country when they switched from their immigrant tongues. After the Council, the general Catholic experience was very different. They went from the linguistic obscurity of the Latin to the linguistic barbarism of the New Order without passing through civilized English. Most Catholics, the former Episcopalian Father Rutler tells me, simply don't know what he is talking about when he says he misses the liturgy in English.

And yet there is this: the attentive reverence of Catholics at the eucharistic prayer, and most notably at the consecration and elevation of the elements. At least that is, with notable exceptions, my experience. It is so intense that you can, so to speak, cut it with a knife. Despite all the chatter about the Mass as a celebration of the wonderful people that we are, there is this almost electric intensity of devotion toward what God is doing, toward the reality that Christ is keeping his promise once again when we "do this" in remembrance of him. Or so I have found it to be in parishes around the country, in corrugated huts in the slums of Mexico City, in the basilicas of Rome, in a bombed-out schoolhouse in Nigeria, in a Polish priory, in a village church of northern Quebec. Such palpable intensity of devotion, such manifest evidence of being caught up into the Mystery, I did not see in all my years as a Lutheran. It is quiet, undemonstratively earnest, a palpable yearning for a gift desired, a sigh of gratitude for a gift received. "It" is happening again. It is the Mass that holds together the maddeningly ragtag and variegated thing that is the Catholic Church. Which is to say it is the Presence. Which is to say it is Christ, doing it again, just as he promised.

Truly remarkable article about the need for men willing to sacrifice

2006-06-01T14:27:00.000-07:00

The world needs manly men, especially manly Christian men. Prof. Esolen echos this in an absolutely beautiful article in Touchstone about the need for men who are willing to sacrifice their very selves for something greater than themselves. It is a wonderful article...a must read. Here is a section from it:

The humility of risk is perfected in Christ and is, even when marred or hidden by the swagger, essential to natural manhood. The men of all really thriving cultures know that their lives, if truly lived, are not their own. The samurai was taught to relish each day as one won from death, an unexpected boon: For the moment he swears allegiance to his lord, he must consider his life as already forfeit. Thus, he can lay that life down at a nod, whenever the sacrifice should be required.

Men who went down to the sea in ships, Viking marauders or Nantucket whalers, knew well they might never return, yet they did go; and the man on the mizzen in the midst of a storm knew that his life literally hung by a thread, and that many of his fellows in just his situation never saw land again, but without him and his obedience there could be no voyage beyond the calm of a bay. The crewmen on the Titanic held it as their duty, once the iceberg’s devastation had been reckoned, to assume that their lives were lost. Only so could they tax their muscles and their broken hearts to the last stretched fiber, to save as many other souls as they could, particularly women and children.

The lad who carried the flag in the old fields of war was unarmed and most conspicuous, but most necessary for the rallying and ordering of his comrades. He was indispensable in his choosing the honor of being the single man least likely to survive the battle. The man first up the ladder to scale the walls of a besieged city would likely also be the first man dead beneath; but if he does not go, no one goes.

The Spartans at Thermopylae knew they could not hold that pass forever against a Persian army many times their strength, but they held long enough for the Athenians to prepare for the onslaught. And you hold a pass by understanding that your life is not your life. You block the opening. The foe must break through over your dead body.

A man need not bear a saber to be a true soldier. When Louis Pasteur was searching for cures for infectious diseases, he had not our same luxury of safety. He was a devout Catholic who attracted to himself young men of high ideals and similar devotion. Those men knew that to be Pasteur’s assistant meant constant exposure to, and experimentation with, disease. Theirs was less a profession than a creed. They went forth in the wake of a plague in Egypt, to seek knowledge and cure the sick.

One gentle young man, like the holy Damien of Molokai, contracted the disease himself, and laid his body down in that alien land. The men embraced the risk. They were dispensable; the cause was not.

Want to see the best air guitarists?

2006-06-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

Go here.

Gay marriage is the "battle of our times"

2006-06-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

At least it is according to the CS Monitor....they talk about how it has become an argument between equality and religious liberty, and neither point has room for compromise, which is true. Here's the intro to the article.

Gay Marriage Looms as Battle of Our Times
by Jane Lampman

The battle over same-sex marriage is shaping into something more than deep societal tradition vs. civil rights. It is becoming a conflict of equality vs. religious liberty.

As gays make gains, some religious institutions are coming under pressure. For instance:

• A Christian high school in Wildomar, Calif., is being sued for expelling two students on suspicion of being lesbian. The parents' suit claims that the school is a business under state civil rights law, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation.

• Catholic Charities in Boston, where same-sex marriage is legal, recently shuttered its adoption agency rather than serve gay and lesbian couples in conflict with church teaching. The church's request for a religious waiver from state antidiscrimination rules has made no headway.

• Christian clubs at several universities are fighting to maintain school recognition while restricting their leadership to those who conform to their beliefs on homosexuality.

Meanwhile, the Christian Legal Society and similar groups are mounting a national effort to challenge antidiscrimination policies in court, claiming they end up discriminating against conservative Christians.

"The fight over same-sex marriage - and two very different conceptions of the ordering of society - will be a knock-down, drag-out battle," predicts Marc Stern, a religious liberty attorney at the American Jewish Congress.

Both sides are pursuing their agendas in state legislatures, courts, and public schools. Both sides tend to view the struggle as a zero-sum, society-defining conflict. For supporters of gay marriage, it represents the last stage in America's long road to equality, from racial to gender to sexual equality. For opponents, traditional marriage stands as the God-ordained bedrock of society, essential to the well-being of children and the healthy functioning of the community.

While no one expects the courts to force unwilling clergy to perform weddings for same-sex couples, some see a possibility that religious groups (other than houses of worship) could lose their tax-exempt status for not conforming to public policy, as did fundamentalist Bob Jones University, over racial issues in 1983.

Legal experts of various views met last December, hosted by the Becket Fund, a nonpartisan institute promoting religious free expression, to consider the implications of same-sex marriage for religious liberty. Writing about the conference in The Weekly Standard, Maggie Gallagher quoted participants as seeing the coming litigation as "a train wreck," "a collision course," and "the battle of our times."

To ameliorate such conflict, some insist that, given the nation's commitment to both equal rights and religious liberty, accommodations must be found.

The Austrailian talks about the growth of "cultural" Christianity in Europe....

2006-06-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

Here is the intro...

Godless Europeans turn to cultural Christianity
by Michael Burleigh

It is increasingly argued, especially by Americans, that contemporary Europe is a godless zone in a world that since the 1980s has witnessed the revenge of God. The one exception to this trend is the growth of radical Islam, a phenomenon that has led some Americans to fear the prospect of "Eurabia", if European demographic decline and Muslim migration continue as they now are.

From an American perspective this has worrying implications. Not least, as we have seen in Britain, when politicians with substantial inner-city Muslim constituents are influenced as to how they vote on key issues.

I am not at all sure that Europe is godless at all. While attendance at churches is declining, most people still claim to believe in God or describe themselves as spiritual.

Increasing numbers describe themselves as cultural Christians, a term borrowed from those who identify themselves as cultural rather than religious Jews. I think we will hear much more of that one.

I also think that politics and religion are going to be more and more inextricably linked, beyond such issues as faith schools, headscarves, or whether Tony Blair prayed with George W. Bush.

Rather than Europe becoming more secular in the past 200 years, I suspect the religious instinct has simply metabolised into other forms. This was most obvious in the case of the political religions. These began with the radical Jacobins during the French Revolution, who made the first attempt to create a "new man" so as to realise heaven on earth through violence. The result was hell for many people, with a quarter of a million people murdered simply for adhering to their traditional Christian beliefs.

Great Peter Kreeft blogs....

2006-05-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm definitely a Peter Kreeft fan, so I decided to link back to some of his great blogs over at Ignatius Insight. They are all worth a read.... Enjoy! And as always, you can download a lot of his writings and lectures over at www.peterkreeft.com.

Weigel and Card. Schonborn discuss Europe's problems...

2006-05-30T16:03:00.000-07:00

Tales from the Vienna woods

By George Weigel

During a conversation in Cracow last July, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, O.P., the archbishop of Vienna, proposed that he and I organize a conference to discuss the growing gap between America and Europe, the roots of that gap as analyzed in my book The Cube and the Cathedral, and the possibilities of strengthening the trans-Atlantic Catholic dialogue and the new evangelization on both continents. I readily agreed, and the conference, which included some fifty public intellectuals from “Old Europe,” “New Europe,” and the United States, met in April in the archbishop’s palace in Vienna. Many of us were housed in a former barracks of the Teutonic Knights; to have come from Poland, where I had been visiting, to the barracks of the Teutonic Knights was ... historically interesting, to say the least. (Why? Google “Battle of Grunwald, 1410”). But the Deutschordenshaus is a story for another day.
Cardinal Schoenborn, who makes great sense in a half-dozen languages, provided the intellectual glue that held an international, interdisciplinary conversation together; as an American present, Dr. William Hurlbut of Stanford, put it, “Coming from California, it’s refreshing and amazing to hear words of truth and light in the accents of Arnold Schwarzenegger.” But perhaps the most intriguing intervention of the conference came from my friend Rémi Brague, who divides his time between the Sorbonne in Paris, where he teaches philosophy, and Munich, where he holds the chair of the late, great Romano Guardini. Professor Brague’s name would rightly appear on any list of Ten Most Intelligent Catholics in the World, and in Vienna, he didn’t disappoint.

Picking up on a phrase I had used in The Cube and the Cathedral, that Europe is “dying from a false story,” Brague suggested a fascinating way of looking at the last two centuries of western history. The 19th century, he proposed, was focused on the question of good-and-evil: the “social question,” posed by the industrial revolution, the emergence of an urban working class, and the demise of traditional society, dominated the landscape. The 20th century, he argued, had been the century of the question of true-and-false: totalitarian ideologies, built on perverse misunderstandings of the human person, defined the contest for the human future that drove history from the aftermath of World War I until the Soviet crack-up in 1991.

And the 21st century? Ours, Professor Brague said, is the century of the question of being-and-nothingness — the century of the metaphysical question.

Which may sound extremely abstract, but is, in fact, very concrete. For if nothing is “given” in the human condition, then everything is up-for-grabs. If, to take a salient example on both sides of the Atlantic, maleness and femaleness are mere “social constructs,” then “marriage” can mean anything someone wants it to mean, including not only “gay marriage” but polygamy and polyandry — and to deny that is an act of irrational bigotry.

Brague, who knows a great deal about Islamic philosophy, knows all about the threat to the West from jihadist Islam. In Vienna, however, he insisted that nihilism – a soured cynicism about the mystery and wonder of being — is the prior enemy-within-the-gates. For nihilism leads to deep skepticism about the human capacity to know the truth of anything; skepticism leads to what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described on April 18, 2005, as the “dictatorship of relativism;” and relativism is a solvent eating away the foundations of western self-understanding, western civilizational morale — and the western capacity for intelligent self-defense.

An Enlightenment intellectual, cited by Professor Brague, once said that he didn’t have children because begetting children was a criminal act — a matter of condemning another human being to death, to oblivion. That is the kind of nihilism that lies beneath Europe’s demographic suicide of recent decades. That is the kind of nihilism that occupies some of the commanding heights of American culture. That is the kind of nihilism that makes the defense of western civilization difficult today — and would make it impossible tomorrow, were it to triumph culturally.

The very goodness of life, the goodness of being — that is The Issue beneath all the other issues of the 21st century. So suggested Rémi Brague. I’m afraid he’s right.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Weigel’s column is distributed by the Denver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver. Phone: 303-715-3215.

Peter King of Sports Illustrated picks the Cowboys to go to the Super Bowl...

2006-05-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

Early favorites
Peter King, SI.com

The envelope, please. The combatants in Super Bowl XLI, on Feb. 4, 2007, at Dolphins Stadium?

The New England Patriots vs. the Dallas Cowboys. You heard it here first.

All kinds of great angles. Belichick-Parcells. Bledsoe-Belichick. Kraft-Parcells. Brady-Bledsoe. Parcells and his son-in-law, Pats VP of player personnel Scott Pioli, on opposite sides. Maybe we'd call it the Dallas Pioli Bowl. There are two weeks between the conference championships and the Super Bowl this season. We'd need two months to cover all the angles. That's how many good stories would be connected to this game.

And we haven't even mentioned Terrell Owens yet. Or Jerry Jones.

So many good stories that Terry Glenn might make the 17th paragraph of the Associated Press' Super Bowl preview. Might.

Now we get to the idiotic part of the story: defending the pick. I remember picking Minnesota-New England for Super Bowl XL at this time last year, and after I made the pick, I was the toast of the Twin Cities. Talk and print media in Minnesota were all excited about the Vikings getting props from a national columnist in the midst of an exciting off-season. You can see where that got them. Sex-boatgate. Daunte Culpepper playing and acting his way out of town. Mike Tice getting whacked. New England at least won the AFC East and a wild card game last year.

Minnesota won nothing but scorn. So please, take this not with a grain of salt, but with a pound. The Super Bowl is eight months and a week away, and I very much reserve the right to change my mind.

Over the last few days, I filtered my pick down from eight teams. Seattle, Carolina and Tampa Bay were my other NFC teams. San Diego, Indianapolis and Miami were my other AFC teams. When I woke up Saturday morning, I was thinking Carolina-Indianapolis. Then Carolina-San Diego and Dallas-San Diego. I knocked out San Diego because of Philip Rivers' playoff inexperience. I dropped Miami because I don't trust Culpepper to play 16 games, and I really don't trust his backup, Joey Harrington. I eliminated Seattle because I think they'll lose home field advantage with trips to Denver and Tampa Bay in December. Though I really like Bucs quarterback Chris Simms, I'm not sure I can totally trust him yet.

Carolina and Indy? Very, very tough. I can't find much not to like in either team, and I could see both winning the Super Bowl. But history tells me they're too chalk. Only once in the last decade have the Super Bowl teams been in their conference championship games the previous season. There's usually a surprise. Like Seattle and Pittsburgh last season. Who figured they'd make it? Who figured Baltimore and the Giants six years ago, or the Patriots five years ago?

Maybe Indy's lost too much on defense with David Thornton and Larry Tripplett now in Tennessee and Buffalo, respectively. Maybe Dan Morgan once again can't make it through 16 games and the playoffs in Carolina. Maybe DeAngelo Williams isn't the 1,300-yard guy John Fox thinks he is. Maybe the offensive line continues to torment the Panthers. Maybe Steve Smith and Keyshawn Johnson duel from 10 paces at midseason, tired of screaming for the ball. Maybe it's just an unforgiving late schedule -- at Washington, at Philly, Giants at home, Steelers at home, at Atlanta, at New Orleans to end the season. I don't know. It's a long season and things happen.

I like Dallas because it has answered every question I have for them but two: Is the offensive line good enough and will the secondary have any more meltdowns like the one it had in the last two minutes of the Washington game last year? We'll see. And I like the Cowboys even though they may have to win a road game or two in the playoffs to get to Miami because they just might go 3-3 in the toughest division in football right now.

There's some risk, to be sure, because Owens is a living, breathing incendiary device. But all kinds of silly chemistry things can happen once the year begins. What I like about this team is it addressed almost every one of its major needs entering the off-season. The Cowboys got a kicker with some clutch misses on his resume, Mike Vanderjagt, but he's better than any guy they've had in years. They got the best player in free-agency in Owens, who's also one of the five best offensive forces in football when he's mentally right.

They got a second blocking/catching tight end in the second round in Notre Dame's Anthony Fasano. They got the kind of stonewallish strongside linebacker in the draft -- Bobby Carpenter -- Parcells must have to play the 3-4 the way he wants. That's a really good 3-4 right now, and it could be superb if DeMarcus Ware provides the kind of pass-rush his potential says he can.
I like New England, even though so many leader-type vets are gone. There are still five left -- Brady, Tedy Bruschi, Richard Seymour, Mike Vrabel and Rodney Harrison. That should be more than enough to compensate for the loss of Willie McGinest, but I don't like Adam Vinatieri leaving, especially to the team that has the best chance to torment the Patriots in the conference, Indianapolis. But life will go on.

This team will be better on offense, with a real alternative to Corey Dillon in first-round pick Laurence Maroney. And you watch, the fantasy tight end sleeper this year will be third-rounder Dave Thomas from Texas. The kid's a keeper. Great hands, great route-runner. Brady's going to love him, and he'll find him six or seven times in the end. Write it down.

You know what else I like about Dallas and New England? Their schedules. December looks like it'll be kind to both teams. The Cowboys finish with three of four at home (New Orleans, at Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit). Look at New England's final eight games: Jets, at Packers, Bears, Lions, at Dolphins, Texans, at Jags, at Titans. There's a chance they'll be favored in all eight.
So it's Dallas-New England ... unless after touring the camps this summer, I feel like picking two other poor, unsuspecting teams.

Oh, you want a score?

Parcells goes out on top. Dallas 23, New England 21, behind six catches (two for touchdowns) by Owens.

After the game, Parcells hugs his owner, retires, hugs his son-in-law and takes the first plane to Saratoga the next day. He'll go out a winner.

I can't believe this parish is banning kneeling...it's sick...

2006-05-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

From the LA Times:

A Ban on Kneeling? Some Catholics Won't Stand for It
By David Haldane, Times Staff WriterMay 28, 2006

At a small Catholic church in Huntington Beach, the pressing moral question comes to this: Does kneeling at the wrong time during worship make you a sinner?Kneeling "is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin," Father Martin Tran, pastor at St. Mary's by the Sea, told his flock in a recent church bulletin. The Diocese of Orange backs Tran's anti-kneeling edict.

Though told by the pastor and the archdiocese to stand during certain parts of the liturgy, a third of the congregation still gets on its knees every Sunday. "Kneeling is an act of adoration," said Judith M. Clark, 68, one of at least 55 parishioners who have received letters from church leaders urging them to get off their knees or quit St. Mary's and the Diocese of Orange. "You almost automatically kneel because you're so used to it. Now the priest says we should stand, but we all just ignore him."

The debate is being played out in at least a dozen parishes nationwide.Since at least the 7th century, Catholics have been kneeling after the Agnus Dei, the point during Mass when the priest holds up the chalice and consecrated bread and says, "Behold the lamb of God." But four years ago, the Vatican revised its instructions, allowing bishops to decide at some points in the Mass whether their flocks should get on their knees. "

The faithful kneel … unless the Diocesan Bishop determines otherwise," says Rome's book of instructions. Since then, some churches have been built without kneelers.The debate is part of the argument among Catholics between tradition and change. Traditionalists see it as the ultimate posture of submission to and adoration of God; modernists view kneeling as the vestige of a feudal past they would like to leave behind.

At the center of the controversy is the church's concept of Christ, said Jesuit Father Lawrence J. Madden, director of the Georgetown Center for Liturgy at Georgetown University in Washington. It's a question raised in the bestselling book "The Da Vinci Code."Because the earliest Christians viewed Jesus as God and man, Madden said, they generally stood during worship services to show reverence and equality. About the 7th century, however, Catholic theologians put more emphasis on Christ's divinity and introduced kneeling as the only appropriate posture at points in the Mass when God was believed to be present.

Things started to change in the 1960s, Madden said, when Vatican II began moving the church back to its earliest roots. What has ensued, he said, is the predictable struggle of an institution revising centuries of religious practices.The argument over kneeling, Madden said, is "a signal of the division in the church between two camps: those who have caught the spirit of Vatican II, and those who are a bit suspicious. Because it's so visible, what happens at the Sunday worship event is a lightning rod for lots of issues."

One flashpoint involves the Agnus Dei. Traditionalists say the faithful must then fall to their knees in awe for several minutes, believing that the bread and wine are literally the body and blood of Christ.Lesa Truxaw, the Orange Diocese director of worship, said Bishop Tod D. Brown banned kneeling because standing "reflects our human dignity. It's not that we think we're equal to God, but we recognize that we are made in the image and likeness of God."

Orange County parishioners are still allowed to kneel at other points in the Mass, including the Eucharistic prayers. Kneeling is optional as worshippers receive communion.No less an authority than the pope is on record as favoring kneeling. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI last year, wrote in "The Spirit of the Liturgy," published in 2000, that the gesture, "comes from the Bible and the knowledge of God." He has not addressed the issue as pope.American Catholic bishops have taken the opposite position. "Standing can be just as much an expression of respect for the coming of Christ," said Msgr. Anthony F. Sherman, a spokesman for the liturgy secretariat of the U.S. Bishops Committee on the Liturgy based in Washington.

That hasn't quieted critics."It's hard to understand why any bishop would prohibit his people from expressing reverence in the way they have done for centuries," said Helen Hull Hitchcock, a founder of the conservative Adoremus Society for the Renewal of Sacred Liturgy in St. Louis.The controversy at St. Mary's by the Sea began to intensify late last year after Brown appointed Tran to lead the 1,500-family parish. Tran took over following the retirement of the church's longtime pastor, who had offered a popular traditional Latin Mass.Tran's Mass reverted to the more modern English form practiced in most American churches, and hundreds of parishioners signed a petition in protest. Then, to pull the church into the modern era, the priest told members, they were not to kneel after the Agnus Dei. Many refused to comply. "Not kneeling would be sinful," said Manuel Ruiz, 45, "because that is what I believe I should do."Mary Tripoli, 54, a former member of the parish council, was dismissed for her insistence on kneeling: "Standing may be reverence, but kneeling is adoration. It's the one thing that means Catholicism throughout the world. It's what sets us apart."At least two altar boys, the parish altar servers coordinator and three members of the parish council have been dismissed from their duties for kneeling at the wrong time, according to parishioners.Angered by the anti-kneeling edict, a group calling itself Save Saint Mary's began distributing leaflets calling for its return outside church each Sunday.

Tran responded in the church bulletin with a series of strident weekly statements condemning what he called "despising the authority of the local bishop" by refusing his orders to stand, and calling the disobedience a mortal sin, considered the worst kind of offense, usually reserved for acts such as murder. Tran sent letters to 55 kneeling parishioners "inviting" them to leave the parish and the diocese for, among other things, "creating misleading confusion, division and chaos in the parish by intentional disobedience and opposition to the current liturgical norms."Father Joe Fenton, spokesman for the Diocese of Orange, said the diocese supports Tran's view that disobeying the anti-kneeling edict is a mortal sin. "That's Father Tran's interpretation, and he's the pastor," he said. "We stand behind Father Tran."Recipients of Tran's banishment letter said they have declined his "invitation" to depart. Kneeling, said Teri Carpentier, 50, is praying "with our bodies, not just our minds." During a recent Saturday afternoon Mass, dozens of worshippers defiantly knelt after the Agnus Dei.

One who didn't was Winifred Mentzer, 84."I've been standing lately," she later said, "because I'm all the way up front, and I know that the priest is watching. But I'm kneeling in my heart."

Nearly 1 million for mass in Krakow...

2006-05-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

Pope's Mass Draws 900,000 in Krakow
Sunday , May 28, 2006

KRAKOW, Poland — Some 900,000 Poles sang, clapped and chanted "Benedetto, Benedetto" at Mass in a soggy field Sunday for Pope Benedict XVI, who urged them to share their faith with other countries in a mostly secular Europe.

Benedict said that was the best way to honor his predecessor, John Paul II — one of the themes of his four-day visit to John Paul's homeland.

"I ask you, finally, to share with the other peoples of Europe and the world the treasure of your faith, not least as a way of honoring the memory of your countryman, who, as the successor of St. Peter, did this with extraordinary power and effectiveness," said Benedict as he concluded his homily during the Mass in the Blonia meadow.

"I ask you to stand firm in your faith! Stand firm in your hope! Stand firm in your love! Amen!" he concluded, speaking in Polish on the last day of his trip.

The enormous, exuberant crowd chanted his name and sang "Sto Lat," or "A Hundred Years," wishing him a long life.

Benedict has appealed to dominantly Catholic Poland to serve as a beacon of faith in a Europe that has become mostly secular. The country joined the European Union only two years ago, 15 years after the collapse of communist rule.

"He told us that we should remain ourselves, that we should stay as we were before, attached to our traditions and Christian values," said Jacek Radon, a 37-year-old businessman from Krakow. "We should carry into the European Union our attachment to faith and to Christ."
"We should be ourselves, which means we should not take shortcuts to an easy and comfortable life with no responsibility, but should take responsibility and act according to our faith."

Later in the day, the pope is to make a somber stop at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp before flying back to Rome. The visit, by a German pope who was enrolled unwillingly in the Hitler Youth and drafted into the German army, is heavy with significance for Catholic-Jewish relations.

A shadow was cast over the Auschwitz visit by an attack Saturday on Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who is to say Kaddish, or the Jewish prayer for the dead, during the ceremony led by the pope.

Schudrich told The Associated Press that he was attacked in central Warsaw after confronting a man who shouted at him, "Poland for Poles." The rabbi said the unidentified man punched him in the chest and sprayed him with what appeared to be pepper spray, but that he was uninjured. Police said they were treating the incident as a possible anti-Semitic attack.

The 79-year-old Benedict has reached out to Poles by delivering parts of his speeches and homilies in Polish, and by retracing beloved native son John Paul II's steps. He visited John Paul's birthplace, Wadowice, and Sunday's Mass was held on the same spot where John Paul also drew large crowds on his return trips to Krakow, where he served as archbishop before becoming pope.

Although Benedict has avoided using German, some at the Mass held German flags and a banner reading in German, "We greet our Holy Father."

Benedict has won applause during his visit to Poland for encouraging prayers for John Paul's canonization, and for saying he hopes it will happen "in the near future."

People in Krakow have responded warmly, giving him his first John Paul-sized crowds of the trip, with police estimating Sunday's crowd at 900,000 — on the order of the throngs who turned out for John Paul, and more than the roughly 300,000 who came to Benedict's Mass on Thursday in Warsaw on the first day of his trip.

Some people spent the night in the field, while others streamed in with folding chairs and umbrellas early in the morning.

Kamila Wrobel, 16, spent the night in the meadow and got soaking wet, but felt it was worth it. She rode four hours with her Catholic youth group from the town of Debica, and was present for John Paul's Mass in the meadow in 2002.

"The pope is probably in Poland for the first and last time," she said. "This is a great, great experience filled with emotion.

"When he says something in Polish, then the atmosphere becomes really very special," she said.

For all your Papal Poland Trip 2006 needs....

2006-05-26T11:39:00.000-07:00

Go to the American Papist....he's got EVERYTHING you could ever want and more....

http://www.americanpapist.com/2006/05/great-poland-post-of-2006.html

Fr. Wauck has a great review of DV Code at Beliefnet

2006-05-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

Here's the intro to the review...

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

THE DAVINCI CODE: A BLESSING IN DISGUISE
By Father John Wauck

What’s it like for someone who’s been a member of Opus Dei for more than 20 years to watch "The Da Vinci Code"? It turns out to be a fairly amusing experience. By way of example, try to imagine a British intelligence officer watching a James Bond movie: yes, England exists, and, yes, spies exist, but apart from that, it’s all pretty much hooey. The caricature presented is so unrecognizable, so far off the mark, that you can’t really feel outrage, because you don’t even feel like a target.

Unfortunately, the "Da Vinci Code’s" silliness is not nearly as light and entertaining as James Bond’s, but now that the critics seem to have exhausted all the different ways of saying the film is lousy, it’s probably useless to point out its flaws yet again (stale, humorless, boring, long, unimaginative, over-stuffed… it’s all that and more). So I’ll move on to the more interesting question: What exactly went wrong? After all, the book, for all its faults, managed to be fun in a stupid comic-book way. At some level, it hit a chord; it worked. The movie does not.

Perhaps it was a mistake to treat the novel as a thriller. As a thriller, it was only mediocre. As a loopy cocktail of pseudo-culture, however, it was a tour-de-force. That is why the greatest measurable impact of "The Da Vinci Code" has been not on religious practice (more or less unchanged), but rather on tourism (record numbers at sites in Paris, London, and Rome). It is this cultural cocktail--not the thrills, not the supposed “blasphemy”--that is the source of the novel’s allure and runaway sales.

Ultimately, it looks as though director Ron Howard erred in trying to make a serious movie out of a fundamentally unserious book. There isn’t a single laugh or thrill in the whole film. Earnest fidelity seems to have been Howard’s goal. Of course, it would have been impossible to cram all the mistakes and absurdities of the novel into even a five-hour film, but in the mere two-and-a-half hours at his disposal, Howard does his solemn best. It’s all there: Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the Gnostic “gospels,” Constantine and the Council of Nicea, medieval witches, the Templars, the Priory of Sion, Clement V, the Crusades, Opus Dei, etc.

"The Da Vinci Code" is so cluttered with historical, symbological, and theological pseudo-facts that it seems hard to imagine any viewer, even one who manages not to doze off, walking out of the theater with a coherent recollection of what exactly has been said--which is probably a blessing. In the long run, this kind of feeble, fictional “attack” will probably end up doing far more good than harm to Christianity, Catholicism, and Opus Dei.

Will all the priestly spies please step forward?

2006-05-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

Church leadership in Poland is asking all of the priest who spied for the communists to come forward and repent. Some some as much as 10 percent of the Polish priests during that time were spies...that is unbelievable...could there be spies among us at our parishes now? Didn't think so.

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

Polish Catholics urge clergy spies to come forward

By Jonathan Luxmoore
5/25/2006

Catholic News Service

WARSAW, Poland – Influential Polish Catholics have urged clergy who spied for the communist secret police to admit their guilt, following a recent report that named a priest as a former spy.

"It is with great pain that we receive the news about priests and others linked with the church who collaborated with the security services of the communist state – they cast a shadow on the Catholic Church's heroic history under communist rule," said an open letter May 24.

The letter said that the more than 100 lay Catholics who signed it felt "responsibility for our church" and that they could not stay silent.

The letter was published by Poland's wiara.pl news agency a day before Pope Benedict XVI's arrival for his May 25-28 visit in Poland.

Addressing Polish clergy May 25 in Warsaw's Cathedral of St. John, Pope Benedict said that communist rule had created "an unconscious tendency to hide under an external mask," and that the church should remember "there are sinners among her members."

"We must guard against the arrogant claim of setting ourselves up to judge earlier generations who lived in different times and circumstances," Pope Benedict said. "Humble sincerity is needed not to deny the sins of the past, and at the same time not to indulge in facile accusations in the absence of real evidence or without regard to the different preconceptions of the time."

The letter said Catholics understood the "difficult situation" of people whose sins had "harmed the whole Polish church."

However, it added, Catholics were offended by the "lack of courage, humility and trust" shown by many former clergy informers.

"We understand how hard it must be to admit one's own faults and sincerely confess the truth – this demands courage and great penance. But is this penance not precisely what Christ expects from us?" said the letter, whose signers included editors of Poland's Wiez and Znak Catholic monthlies.

It said the issue of clergy collaborators affected "the whole church community, including priests, religious and laity."

"Since the time of Peter, the community of the church has had to distance itself from betrayal and unfaithfulness, as well as a lack of confidence in love and forgiveness," the letter said. "We appeal to your consciences – have the courage to trust in our forgiveness, which has its source in the mercy of God."

However, it said, "We cannot and do not want to evaluate specific cases, since we know how easy it once was to make mistakes and harm innocent people."

The letter came after a May 17 report in Poland's Zycie Warszawy daily that said Warsaw-based Msgr. Michal Czajkowski informed to the communists for more than two decades about fellow clergy, including Solidarity movement hero Father Jerzy Popieluszko, who was later murdered by communist agents.

Msgr. Czajkowski denied the claims in a May 22 statement in Poland's Catholic information agency, KAI, but resigned from his posts as church supervisor of the Wiez monthly and co-chairman of Poland's Council of Christians and Jews.

Approximately 10 percent of Catholic clergy are believed to have acted as informers in communist Poland, although higher recruitment rates were recorded in some dioceses in the 1980s.

In recent months, Poland's Catholic bishops were urged to take action against collaborators after a Solidarity movement dissident, Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, claimed to have seen the names of Krakow-based clerical collaborators while reading his own secret police file.

Changes to the mass are coming...

2006-05-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

The bishops will soon be deciding whether or not to alter the translation of the english mass in order to better represent the latin....I hope they do it. Here's an article which goes through some of the changes that will occur.

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Bishops to vote on new Order of Mass in English

By Jerry Filteau
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The U.S. bishops will be asked to approve a new translation of the Order of Mass when they meet in Los Angeles June 15-17.

If the new translation is adopted as proposed and subsequently approved by the Vatican, Catholics will have to learn a number of changes in their Mass prayers and responses. Among the more obvious will be:

-- Whenever the priest says "The Lord be with you," the people will respond, "And with your spirit." The current response is "And also with you."

-- In the first form of the penitential rite, the people will confess that "I have sinned greatly ... through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault." In the current version, that part of the prayer is much shorter: "I have sinned through my own fault."

-- The Nicene Creed will begin "I believe" instead of "We believe" -- a translation of the Latin text instead of the original Greek text.

-- The Sanctus will start, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God of hosts." The current version says, "Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might."

Approving a new text of the Order of Mass is only the first step in a long process of considering and approving a new translation of the entire book of prayers said at Mass. In the United States that book has been called the Sacramentary since 1970, but the Vatican wishes to restore the name Roman Missal, since it is an English translation, with minor adaptations, of the normative Latin "Missale Romanum."

Officials of the bishops' Secretariat for the Liturgy told Catholic News Service May 23 that it is uncertain whether the bishops will seek to publish the new Order of Mass for U.S. use as soon as possible or wait until they have the new English translation of the entire Roman Missal completed. Completing the entire Roman Missal is likely to take at least two more years.

Once the bishops adopt new liturgical texts, they must also be confirmed by the Vatican before they can be authorized for use.

In general, people will find many of the Mass prayers in the new version slightly longer and fuller, as the new translation is based on rules for liturgical translations issued by the Vatican in a 2001 instruction. Unlike the previous Vatican rules -- which encouraged freer translations more adapted to the language into which one was translating -- the new rules require closer adherence to the normative Latin text.

In a recent letter Cardinal Francis Arinze, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, told the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that if a current text does not conform to the new translation norms it must be changed.

"It is not acceptable to maintain that people have become accustomed to a certain translation for the past 30 or 40 years, and therefore that it is pastorally advisable to make no changes. ... The revised text should make the needed changes," he wrote.

He said his congregation is open to dialogue about "difficulties regarding the translation of a particular text," but the 2001 instruction calling for translations more faithful to the Latin text "remains the guiding norm."

His letter, dated May 2 and addressed to Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., USCCB president, was posted on the Catholic World News Web site in late May.

In response to a query from CNS, Bishop Donald W. Trautman of Erie, Pa., chairman of the USCCB Committee on the Liturgy, said Bishop Skylstad sent the letter to all Latin-rite bishops in advance of the June meeting.

"I see this letter as a clarification and further restatement of criteria for translation previously authored by the congregation," Bishop Trautman said. He said it "offers additional input for the deliberation of the bishops."

The Order of Mass, found at the center of the Roman Missal, consists of the prayers recited every day at Mass, as distinct from the Scripture readings and prayers that are proper to the day's feast.

Thus what the bishops are to vote on in June are new versions of the prayers that Massgoers are most familiar with because they hear or say them so regularly.

Within the Order of Mass are some prayers for which there are a limited number of alternatives, such as the forms of the penitential rite, the four different eucharistic prayers or the various acclamations following the consecration.

The text the bishops are to vote on in June does not include the prefaces, solemn blessings, prayers over the people or elements found in the appendix that also form part of the Order of Mass.

The International Commission on English in the Liturgy, which prepared the text to be voted on, is still consulting with English-speaking bishops' conferences around the world on the translation of the prefaces and other elements and does not have a final version of them yet.

Churchgoers will have to learn a different version of the Gloria when the new texts are put into use because part of the current prayer in English does not follow the structure of the Latin version.

In the Nicene Creed, where the current version refers to Christ as "one in being with the Father," the new ICEL translation says, "consubstantial with the Father." In the documentation sent to the bishops before the meeting, however, the Committee on the Liturgy has recommended keeping the "one in being" translation in the United States.

The new ICEL text for the people's prayer before Communion says, "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed."

The committee proposed that the bishops seek to keep the current shorter version of the beginning of that prayer, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you." The committee did not, however, propose a change from the ICEL translation at the end, where the people currently pray, "but only say the word and I shall be healed."

The bishops will also vote on several American adaptations in the Order of Mass, such as adding the acclamation, used in the United States since 1970 but not found in the Roman Missal in Latin, "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again."

666 is approaching

2006-05-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

I noticed because I saw a movie ad for "The Omen", which comes out on June 6th...nice marketing touch. There is definitely a recent resurgence in interest in numerology...the DaVinci code, the hit tv show "Lost", etc. Here's an article from Fox News which goes into people's fascination with 666 and numerology...

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

Six Six Six: Number Looms Large in Numerology, but Scientists Dismiss It

Friday , May 26, 2006

By Heather Whipps

If you're just a bit more cautious on a Friday the 13th, wouldn't fly on Sept. 11 or could never live in a house numbered 666, you are not alone.

With 06/06/06 looming (June 6, 2006), authorities in some cities are worrying prophecy theorists or hate groups might read something ominous into the date and use it as an excuse to stir tension.

Some expectant mothers are making birthing appointments to ensure they avoid the date, according to the Sunday Times in London.

For others, it is a marketing opportunity. Twentieth Century Fox's remake of "The Omen" and Ann Coulter's book, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," will both come out June 6.

The Beast

The number 666 is used to refer to the Beast — the Antichrist — in the Bible's Book of Revelations:

"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666."

Among many coincidences that occur with numbers, life itself is based partly on these three: Carbon atoms, key to life as we know it, have six protons, six neutrons and six electrons in their most common form.

That there is concern over the date at all is a reflection of how popular it's become to search for the hidden meanings in numbers, experts say.

"People have a tendency to latch onto things, like numbers, that help them make sense of the world," said Mario Livio, an astrophysicist and author of 2005's "The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved."

Troubled times

The perceived importance of numbers becomes especially true during troubled times, when finding wisdom in numbers can be a comfort, says professional numerologist Sonia Ducie.

"Humanity and individuals are attracted to numbers during times of great transformation," Ducie said.

The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks are an overwhelming example. Conspiracy theorists in the years since the tragedy have tried hard to thread together "eerie" numerological coincidences, especially those tied to the number eleven.

A few of the best known:

— 9 + 1 + 1 = 11

— The first plane to hit the World Trade Center was American Airlines Flight 11; AA can also be "translated" as the alphabet's version of 11.

— The State of New York was the eleventh state added to the union.

— The names "George W. Bush," "New York City," "Air Force One," "Afghanistan" and "The Pentagon" all contain eleven letters.

Despite its modern manifestations, searching for deeper meanings in numbers is a practice that goes back to ancient times, Livio said.

"Numerology has a long history," he told LiveScience. "You can trace it all the way from the followers of Pythagoras, whose maxim to describe the universe was 'all is number.'"

Thinkers who studied under the famous Greek mathematician combined numbers in different ways to explain everything around them, Livio said.

Para-science

Modern numerology has since morphed into a kind of para-science in the same vein as astrology, according to skeptics. Still, many numerologists claim to rely on Pythagoras' ancient system to divine the hidden connections between numbers — often a birth date — and an individual's life.

Our attraction to certain numbers has to do with the cycles of birth and death those numbers have seen through many millions of years in existence, said Ducie, who trained at the Connaissance School of Numerology in Royston, Hertfordshire, England.

"People are subconsciously drawn towards specific numbers because they know that they need the experiences, attributes or lessons associated with them, that are contained within their potential," she said. "Numerology can 'make sense' of an individual's life (health, career, relationships, situations and issues) by recognizing which number cycle they are in, and by giving them clarity."

Mathematicians are quick to dismiss numerology as having no scientific merit, however.

"I don't endorse this at all," said Livio, when asked to comment on the popularity of commercial numerology today.

Seemingly coincidental connections between numbers will always appear if you look hard enough, he said.

Lucky numbers

When it comes to lucky numbers, at least, Ducie agreed.

"People can also 'make' numbers lucky simply by believing they will be lucky when they have those numbers around them; these preconditioned thoughts strongly contribute towards their manifestation of luck," she said.

The obsession with particular numbers also tends to wax and wane according to the trends of popular culture, Livio noted.

Dan Brown's mammoth bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" has played a part with its showcase of the golden ratio, or divine proportion, which Livio explores in his book "The Golden Ratio" (Broadway, 2003).

The irrational number — one plus the square root of five, divided by two, or approximately 1.61804 — is said to exist mysteriously in various places in nature and be extremely attractive to the human eye.

Spin-offs in the worlds of architecture, art and even diet books are a result of the "Code" phenomenon.

Ronald Reagan's 666

The supposed number of the devil falls in and out of favor with the public, too. It is unclear just how influential the number was in the centuries after the Bible became widespread as literature, but it was certainly ingrained in popular culture after the 1976 release of the movie "The Omen", in which the neck of a demon-child is stamped with the digits 666.

When former President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy retired to their last home in the Bel Air district of Los Angeles in 1989, they forced officials to change their address from 666 to 668 St. Cloud Road, Livio said.

No word on whether the former president, whose full name was Ronald Wilson Reagan, was bothered by the number of letters in each of his first, middle and last names.

Soon we can all be invisible like Harry Potter...

2006-05-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

According to scientists, the invisbility cloak is not an impossibility, but rather a question of advancing engineering and technology. This article explains that one day we can all be invisible if we want (can you imagine the legal nightmares that will come from this?). Here's the intro to the article:

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

Researchers: Cloak of Invisibility Technically Possible

Friday , May 26, 2006

WASHINGTON — The key to creating a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak lies in manmade materials unlike any in nature or the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, researchers say.

They're laying out a blueprint for turning science fiction into reality. And they say that, in theory, nothing's stopping them from making such a cloak.

Well, almost nothing: They still need to perfect the manufacture of those exotic materials with an ability to steer light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation around a cloaked object, rendering it as invisible as something tucked into a hole in space.

"Is it science fiction? Well, it's theory and that already is not science fiction. It's theoretically possible to do all these Harry Potter things, but what's standing in the way is our engineering capabilities," said John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College London.

Details of the study, which Pendry co-wrote, appear in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.

Scientists not involved in the work said it presents a solid case for making invisibility an attainable goal.

"This is very interesting science and a very interesting idea and it is supported on a great mathematical and physical basis," said Nader Engheta, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Engheta has done his own work on invisibility using novel materials called metamaterials.

Pendry and his co-authors also propose using metamaterials because they can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation — radio waves and visible light, for example — in any direction.

A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle.

That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from view.

Al Gore wants to scare you...

2006-05-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

At least that's what the former governor of Delaware (and current chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis) argues in the Wall Street Journal this week. Al Gore's new movie "An Inconvenient Truth" comes out soon, and argues that global warming is reaching a critical and deadly stage. Mr. du Pont argues back saying that, in fact, things are getting better environmentally in many ways. Here's the intro to the article...

Don't Be Very Worried
The truth about "global warming" is much less dire than Al Gore wants you to think.

BY PETE DU PONT
Tuesday, May 23, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, America's population has increased by 42%, the country's inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has grown 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the United States has more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven has increased by 178%.

But during these 35 years of growing population, employment, and industrial production, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, the environment has substantially improved. Emissions of the six principal air pollutants have decreased by 53%. Carbon monoxide emissions have dropped from 197 million tons per year to 89 million; nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 19 million, and sulfur dioxide from 31 million to 15 million. Particulates are down 80%, and lead emissions have declined by more than 98%.

When it comes to visible environmental improvements, America is also making substantial progress:

• The number of days the city of Los Angeles exceeded the one-hour ozone standard has declined from just under 200 a year in the late 1970s to 27 in 2004.

• The Pacific Research Institute's Index of Leading Environmental Indicators shows that "U.S. forests expanded by 9.5 million acres between 1990 and 2000."

• While wetlands were declining at the rate of 500,000 acres a year at midcentury, they "have shown a net gain of about 26,000 acres per year in the past five years," according to the institute.

• Also according to the institute, "bald eagles, down to fewer than 500 nesting pairs in 1965, are now estimated to number more than 7,500 nesting pairs."

Environmentally speaking, America has had a very good third of a century; the economy has grown and pollutants and their impacts upon society are substantially down.

Weigel notes that a "golden" opportunity was missed at ND

2006-05-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

A Golden Dome Opportunity Missed
By George Weigel
Posted: Wednesday, May 17, 2006

THE CATHOLIC DIFFERENCE

Publication Date: May 3, 2006

A pall will hang over commencement at the University of Notre Dame this year -- the pall of a great opportunity missed. Temporarily, one must hope.

Notre Dame's new president, Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., got off to a brilliant start this past fall, with an inaugural address that located Notre Dame solidly within the ancient tradition of Catholic higher learning. Father Jenkins then led a pilgrimage to Rome, an act that embodied a key plank in the reformist platform announced in his inaugural address: to "think with the Church" means both to think and to think "with the Church." Then, in April, things changed, dramatically and for the worse. After a campus wide debate, Father Jenkins announced that "the creative contextualization of a play like The Vagina Monologues can bring certain perspectives on important issues into a constructive and fruitful dialogue with the Catholic tradition." Therefore, Father Jenkins decreed, the V-Monologues could continue to be produced on campus.

It was difficult, bordering on impossible, not to read Father Jenkins' decision as a surrender to the most corrosive forces eating away at the vitals of Catholic higher education.

That view is shared by numerous Notre Dame faculty, among whom Father Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C., stands tall, literally, intellectually, and spiritually. In a public letter to his brother Holy Cross priest, Father Miscamble told Father Jenkins that "your decision is being portrayed as involving your 'backing down,'" in part because of an untoward deference to "the convictions of certain senior Arts and Letters faculty that any restriction on this play would damage our academic 'reputation' -- and especially among those 'preferred peer schools' whose regard we crave." "Indeed," Miscamble continued, "it is hard to understand [your decision] in any other terms."

Then Father Miscamble got down to cases: "In your recent...statement you reveal a level of naivete about the process of a Catholic university engaging the broad culture that is striking and deeply harmful to our purpose as a Catholic university. We live at a time, as Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter pointed out some years ago, when the elite culture is programmed to trivialize religion. Further more, much of popular culture is deeply antithetical to religious conviction and practice. It offers a worldview completely at odds with any Catholic vision. It is a worldview from which none of us can be sequestered and, indeed, many of our students arrive here far more influenced by the reigning culture than by faith convictions.

"Amidst this larger context you are to permit the continued production and promotion of a play which, as our colleague Paolo Carozza rightly puts it, 'seems to reduce the meaning and value of women's lives to their sexual experiences and organs, reinforcing a perspective on the human person that is itself fundamentally a form of violence.' Dialogue with this point of view is ridiculous. It should be contested and resisted at Notre Dame but never promoted. Notre Dame must hold to a higher view of the dignity of women and men. Might I ask that if this play does not meet your criteria of an ‘'expression that is overt and insistent in its contempt for the values and sensibilities of the University,' then what would?"

Father Miscamble ends by asking his brother priest to "go back to your best self and to your original instincts and position on this matter. Don't embarrass those of us who want to work with you to build a great Catholic university. Lead us."

Anyone who cares about the flagship university of Catholic higher education in America must pray that Father Miscamble's plea is heard by Father Jenkins, a man who has shown courage in the past. The V-Monologues is trashy, pornographic nonsense, like a lot of other stuff available in the movies and on cable-TV. A great university can't monitor what its students watch on TV or in theaters. But it can teach them about stupidity. The V-Monologues are stupid, and one of the things a great Catholic university ought to teach its students is to avoid the stupid. It can't do that by the "creative contextualization" of stupidity.

What would CS Lewis say about the DV Code?

2006-05-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Debunking the Debunkers
By Joseph Loconte
Posted: Friday, May 19, 2006

ARTICLE
The Wall Street Journal
Publication Date: May 19, 2006

Religious leaders and others distressed by Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code -- and its movie debut this weekend -- might take a cue from an Oxford don steeped in medieval literature, C.S. Lewis.

A former atheist, Lewis became one of the most beloved Christian authors of 20th century. He was not only a master at exposing the fault lines of modern, secular thought. As a layman, Lewis also could see the weaknesses of the church with unusual clarity -- a skill he likely would apply to the furor over this latest challenge to orthodox belief.

here are few things more easily corruptible, Lewis observed, than religious belief and practice. "We must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better," he wrote a friend, "it makes him very much worse." Stories like The Da Vinci Code and Michael Baigent's The Jesus Papers carry a special appeal for people who are vividly aware of the historic failings of the church: the anti-Semitism, the persecutions, the soul-crushing legalism, right down to modern-day sex scandals.

As a scholar and a devoted churchman, Lewis was familiar with them as well. "If ever the book which I am not going to write is written," Lewis cautioned, "it must be the full confession by Christendom to Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty." Nevertheless, Lewis would insist that a confession of Christianity's sins does not absolve us of the obligation to think: Conspiracy theories are no substitute for calm and clear arguments about matters of faith.

In a short yet brilliant 1959 essay, Fern Seeds and Elephants, Lewis debunked the debunkers of his own day -- those who held that the Gospels were the product of myth, legend and outright deception. He began by drawing attention to the "shattering immediacy" of the Gospel stories, the often brash realism of Jesus' encounters with ordinary people.

Mark's Gospel, for example, sets the scene of Jesus' arrest this way: "A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind." We're never told who the man was or what happened to him. Luke describes a tax collector named Zacchaeus, who was too short to see over the crowds following Jesus. "So he ran ahead," Luke reports, "and climbed a sycamore tree to see him." It's irrelevant to what follows. Likewise, the Gospel of John tells of a woman caught in adultery and dragged before Jesus, who "bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger." Nothing, absolutely nothing, comes of it.

Any serious reader of the Gospels knows that their many references to the divinity of Jesus are thoroughly embedded in these earthy details. Here is a narrative style that anticipates the modern, realistic novel. "I have been reading poems, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life," Lewis wrote. "I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this."

Lewis, I suspect, would also point out that theories about massive cover-ups presented in fanciful works such as The Da Vinci Code ignore an elephant-sized fact: There are any number of people and events in the Bible that are frankly embarrassing to believers. Recall, for example, that the family tree of the Messiah includes a prostitute (Rahab), a king who commits adultery and murder (David) and another king who leads his nation headlong into religious idolatry (Manasseh). Yet the earliest Christians failed to excise these characters from their story.

The first "conspiracy theory" about Jesus, in fact, actually appears in the Gospel of Matthew. After the crucifixion, religious leaders ask Pontius Pilate to post a guard at the tomb of Jesus because they suspect his disciples "may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead." Why keep a story about a possible conspiracy lodged at the heart of your sacred text if you're determined to cover up a deception about the credibility of that text?

Here is the real harm of these modern conspiracy theories: They may appeal to our emotions, but they violate our common sense. They reject reason, just as surely as they reject revelation. "I do not wish to reduce the skeptical element in your minds," Lewis explained. "I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else."

Sounds like good advice to moviegoers this week -- for the skeptics as well as the faithful.

Mr. Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a regular commentator on religion for National Public Radio.

One of my hero's, Fr. Neuhaus, does a Zenit interview on "Loving the Church"

2006-05-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

FATHER RICHARD NEUHAUS ON LOVING THE CHURCH

"Main Problem Is a Lack of Faith"

NEW YORK, MAY 24, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope has brought clarity to confusions and gentle firmness to controversies in the Church.

So says Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things and author of "Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy and the Splendor of Truth"

He shared with ZENIT his thoughts on thinking with and loving the Church, and why lack of faith is the faithful's greatest challenge.

Q: One of the main themes of your book is St. Ignatius of Loyola's exhortation that we should "think with the Church." What did he -- and you -- mean by that?

Father Neuhaus: Yes, it's a marvelous phrase -- "sentire cum ecclesia." It means to think with the Church, but also to feel with the Church. In short, to love the Church.

If we love the Church, as a lover loves the beloved, then we will her to be, we will her to flourish, we will her to succeed in the mission she has been given by Christ.

As in a good marriage, the Catholic never thinks "I" without thinking "we." It is necessary to cultivate this communion of shared devotion, affection and purpose in a very disciplined way, for not all aspects of the Church are lovable, just as we are not always lovable.

Nonetheless, we are loved by the Church, and most particularly by all the saints in the Church Triumphant. "Sentire cum ecclesia" means being concerned never to betray St. Paul, St. Irenaeus, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, St. Theresa and the faith for which they and innumerable others lived and died.

And, for all the inadequacies and sins of the Church and her leadership in our time, it means always doing one's best to support, and never to undermine, the effectiveness of her teaching ministry.

She is, after all, the bearer and embodiment of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is nothing less than the story of the world -- without which the world, and we with it, is lost.

Q: In your days as a Lutheran pastor, you were known as someone who "spoke truth to power," yet in your book you extol docility and obedience as typically Catholic virtues. Do you see any necessary tension between the two?

Father Neuhaus: I hope I am still someone who speaks truth to power, although that phrase has in it the temptation to an arrogant assumption that I have a unique hold on the truth.

The phrase is more appropriate in a political context of challenging corruptions of power in earthly regimes. Unlike the Church, political orders are not established by Christ to be his body on earth.

As Pope Benedict writes in "Deus Caritas Est," politics is the realm of justice while the Church is the realm of love. That does not mean that questions of power and politics do not arise in the Church. They do, but they are alien elements.

The Church is constituted by and for love. Docility and obedience are strong, not weak, virtues. They require sensitivity and responsiveness to the beloved. In such a relationship, one may sometimes admonish, reproach and suggest a better way, but always within the bond of love. See above on "sentire cum ecclesia."

Q: Your book seems to echo G.K. Chesterton's statement that there was never anything so exciting or perilous as orthodoxy. Why do you believe this is the case?

Father Neuhaus: I am always honored to be associated with Chesterton, one of the great Catholic spirits of modern times.

Yes, orthodoxy is a high adventure -- intellectually, spiritually, aesthetically and morally. It is ever so much more interesting than the smelly conventions that so many, viewing orthodoxy as a burden, embrace in the dismal ambition to be considered progressive.

In the encyclical "Redemptoris Missio," John Paul II said that the Church imposes nothing; she only proposes. But what she proposes is an astonishment beyond the reach of human imagining -- the coming of the promised Kingdom of God, and our anticipation of that promise in the life of the Church.

It is a great pity that so many are prepared, even eager, to settle for something less than this high adventure.

For instance, in "Catholic Matters" I discuss the preoccupation with being an "American Catholic" when we should really want to be "Catholic Americans." Note that the adjective controls.

The really interesting thing is not to accommodate our way of being Catholic to the fact of our being American but to demonstrate a distinctively Catholic way of being American.

Q: Are the main problems in the Church today primarily intellectual or spiritual?

Father Neuhaus: The main problem in the Church today -- as it has been from the apostolic era and will be until our Lord's return in glory -- is a lack of faith.

Our sinful nature resists, does not dare to believe, the good news of our salvation now and forever. This has intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, moral and whatever dimensions you want to name.

We have turned the high adventure of discipleship into something dreary, drab and predictable. This is nowhere so evident as in the long-standing intra-Church squabbles between left and right, liberals and traditionalists.

In "Catholic Matters" I refer to the "discontinuants" of both left and right -- those who speak of a pre-Vatican II Church and a post-Vatican II Church as though there were two churches. The alternative is to gratefully and loyally take our place in the glorious, and sometimes stumbling, march of the one Church through time to the end of time.

Q: A major theme in your book is the importance of a revitalized liturgy for renewing Catholic life. How do you see that occurring?

Father Neuhaus: Don't get me started. The banality of liturgical texts, the unsingability of music that is deservedly unsung, the hackneyed New American Bible prescribed for use in the lectionary, the stripped-down architecture devoted to absence rather than Presence, the homiletical shoddiness.

Where to begin? A "high church" Lutheran or Anglican -- and I was the former -- braces himself upon becoming a Catholic.

The heart of what went wrong, however, and the real need for a "reform of the reform" lies in the fatal misstep of constructing the liturgical action around our putatively amazing selves rather than around the surpassing wonder of what Christ is doing in the Eucharist.

All that having been said, however, be assured that there has never been a second or even a nanosecond in which I've had second thoughts about entering into full communion with the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time.

Q: What have we learned from Pope Benedict XVI thus far about the appropriate approach to the "confusion" and "controversy" existing in the Church?

Father Neuhaus: When Pope Benedict was elected, my first words were "Deo gratias." And I repeat those words every day since.

John Paul the Great, as history will surely know him, was a gift of person and charism that happens every millennium or so. As Benedict was his intimate collaborator, so he has pledged himself to continue and expand John Paul's initiatives, and especially his teaching initiatives. Nobody is better equipped to do so, as we have seen in the year past.

To the confusions he brings an exquisite clarity in setting forth the truths by which the Church is constituted, and in inviting the world to engage the truths upon which its future depends.

To the controversies he brings a pastoral heart and a gentle firmness that can turn rancor into reason and recall those who are at odds with one another to their shared devotion -- as in "sentire cum ecclesia."

He is not going to straighten out everything that is wrong with the Church, beginning with ourselves. Our Lord will do that in due course.

Former Harvard Dean sees universities as "soulless"

2006-05-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

The Confusion on Campus
A Harvard prof reflects on the hollowness of higher ed.

BY VINCENT J. CANNATO
Wednesday, May 24, 2006 12:01 a.m.

Are American universities now in their golden age? Many rank as the leading research institutions in the world. A college education is within reach for more Americans than ever before. Applications continue to rise as colleges attract the best and the brightest from the U.S. and from overseas. And yet it is hard not to get the feeling that there is something amiss at American schools.

Recent headlines certainly suggest troubles at individual universities--Duke with its lacrosse scandal, Yale with its admission of a former Taliban member, Harvard with its routing of president Lawrence Summers. But Harry Lewis, a former dean at Harvard who still teaches computer science there, thinks the problem is deeper than a handful of alarming anecdotes might suggest. In "Excellence Without a Soul," Mr. Lewis decries the "hollowness of undergraduate education."

He takes Harvard as his case study, but many of his conclusions apply to the rest of American higher education. Mr. Lewis finds American universities "soulless" and argues that they rarely speak as "proponents of high ideals for future American leaders." He bluntly states that Harvard "has lost, indeed willingly surrendered, its moral authority to shape the souls of its students. . . . Harvard articulates no ideals of what it means to be a good person."

Arguing that American universities are soulless did not originate with Mr. Lewis, of course. In fact, it is one of the main themes of Allan Bloom's classic (and more entertaining) "The Closing of the American Mind," a book to which Mr. Lewis strangely never refers. Still, "Excellence Without a Soul" has some fresh arguments and a few pleasantly maverick views. Mr. Lewis defends the benefits of college athletics, for instance: Far from being an overcommercialized distraction, they are a "source of joy" and embody an "ethos of self-sacrifice, perseverance, drive [and] endurance." The much-lamented dangers of date rape, he suggests, result in part from a combustible campus mix of alcohol and sexual liberation. Mr. Lewis even includes a game, if unconvincing, defense of grade inflation: Students are better, he says; teaching is better; and more small courses push up grades deservedly "because students and faculty get to know each other better."

The core of this book, though, is a defense of the idea that universities should be about something. What makes an educated person? Unfortunately, too many professors and administrators, if they ever bother to think about it, would have difficulty answering the question beyond the pabulum found in most university brochures.

So how does Harvard define an educated person? A Harvard education, the university states, "must provide a broad introduction to the knowledge needed in an increasingly global and connected, yet simultaneously diverse and fragmented world." Mr. Lewis, rightfully dismissive, notes that the school never actually says what kind of knowledge is "needed." The words are meaningless blather, he says, proving that "Harvard no longer knows what a good education is."

Such institutional incoherence has consequences. In his sharpest criticism, Mr. Lewis charges that Harvard now ceases to think of itself as an American institution with any obligation to educate students about liberal democratic ideals. As the school increasingly focuses on "global competency," the U.S. is "rarely mentioned in anything written recently about Harvard's plans for undergraduate education." In the absence of agreement on common values or a core curriculum, anything goes. Echoing Allan Bloom's critique of relativism, Mr. Lewis writes that at Harvard "all knowledge is equally valued as long as a Harvard professor is teaching it."

Mr. Lewis skips past many campus matters that seem ripe for discussion (affirmative action, speech codes, the academic monoculture, the viability of the tenure system). He is less an angry prophet than a genteel provocateur. But the portrait he draws, however limited, is disturbing enough.

There is too little accountability at most schools, Mr. Lewis observes. Trustees often abdicate their responsibilities, while college presidents have become glorified fund-raisers. Most professors are "narrowly educated experts" with little experience outside academia. They are "poorly equipped to help college students sort out" their lives. Meanwhile, professors teach what they want to teach based on their own interests, not on the needs of their students. At too many schools, Mr. Lewis argues, students pursue an "à la carte" course schedule that lacks coherence and can leave large gaps in knowledge.

There is little incentive, he adds, for reform among the university's various "constituencies." Students want a high grade-point average and a college degree that is a passport to a well-paying job, but they also want freedom from authority. Tenured professors want to be left alone to conduct research without academic oversight. Administrators who prize stability and consensus are loath to rock the boat.

But one "constituency" should be concerned. Parents preparing to shell out a small fortune for their children's education will want to read Mr. Lewis's book as they ask themselves: What exactly are we paying for?

A professor from Edinburgh tears up the DV Code...

2006-05-24T07:56:00.000-07:00

Ungodly Errors
Scholarly gripes about The Da Vinci Code's Jesus.
By Larry Hurtado

In a climactic scene in the movie The Da Vinci Code, the supposed Holy Grail expert, Sir Leigh Teabing, lays out the conspiracy theory at the heart of the movie and the novel: "Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false," he declares. Actually, just about everything author Dan Brown puts in the mouth of Teabing is ludicrously false history. Catholics have responded to gratuitous accusations against the church. And other Christians have taken on Brown's utterly unsupported claim that Jesus married Mary Magdalene. My scholarly concern is the Da Vinci Code's errors regarding historical beliefs about the divinity of Jesus and the creation of the New Testament.

The belief that Jesus is somehow divine was not invented by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, as Brown and movie director Ron Howard have Teabing say. Instead, this belief is attested in first-century Christian texts, such as the Gospel of John, and dates back even earlier to the letters of the apostle Paul, whose New Testament writings between A.D. 50 and 60 are the earliest Christian texts we have. Faith in the divine glory of the resurrected Jesus appears to have emerged amazingly soon after his execution, most likely among circles of his Jewish followers. Scholars commonly regard particular passages in Paul's letters as preserving early hymns about Jesus, in which he is praised as the one through whom the world was created, and as sharing in God's nature and glory.

In fact, in pretty much the entire body of early Christian writings from the first three centuries, Jesus' divinity is taken for granted. Christians differed not over that basic assumption but rather over how to understand his divine nature. At the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, the crucial question was how to reconcile Jesus' divinity with Christian monotheism.

Curiously, The Da Vinci Code presents the so-called Gnostics, who regarded other Christians as lesser beings than they and were in turn treated as heretics, as the heroic defenders of a thoroughly human Jesus. But actually the historic Gnostics and the gospels often linked with their circles did not emphasize Jesus' human nature at all—quite the opposite. Typically, Gnostic Christians portrayed Christ as a heavenly being who came down to earth to awaken them from their spiritual slumber by disclosing their own divine inner nature. Regarding the physical world as a source of delusion and place of confinement, Gnostics were deeply negative about bodily existence, including their own. So, they tended to treat Jesus' body as simply the temporary vehicle for his revelatory mission, believing that he discarded it before returning to his heavenly status in the realm of pure light. It was actually the Orthodox Christians who made much of Jesus' full human nature and the reality of his death as the essential redemptive act.

In Brown's scheme, the Gnostics are also the suppressed source of the true account of Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene. In reality, the Gnostics' negativity about the body includes a dim view of procreation and the sexual activity that went with it. Usually in their writings Jesus is the ideal ascetic who models for his followers a disdain for bodily appetites. So, the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene isn't just antithetical to Orthodox accounts. It goes against the Gnostic grain, too—if anything more so.

To clear up another piece of history on which The Da Vinci Code is completely unreliable, the New Testament was not created at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. The question wasn't even on the council's agenda. The formation of the New Testament had begun much earlier and continued on later than Nicaea. The familiar four Gospels, which scholars commonly regard as the earliest such texts, were treated as a completed set at least by A.D. 150 in many or likely most Christian circles. Still earlier, Paul's letters were collected and circulated as scripture. In the early third century, the Christian scholar Origen listed the writings regarded by most Christians of his time as scripture, other writings that had largely been rejected, and others still under consideration. Among the texts regarded as scriptural, he included most of those that became part of the New Testament.

It's also important to emphasize that this question of which writings to treat as scripture, which to treat merely as edifying reading, and which to regard as heretical, was not decided at a single point by a church council, a pope, or a Roman emperor. Once again, in service of its conspiracy theory, The Da Vinci Code gets it wrong. The canonizing of scripture involved circles of believers spread across the many lands of the Roman Empire and beyond. The result wasn't a fiat foisted upon the Christian world. Essentially, the writings that commended themselves earliest and to the largest number of Christians came more quickly and securely to be part of the emergent New Testament. Some other writings, such as Revelation and the second book of Peter, were accepted later. A few writings, such as Didache or Shepherd of Hermas, were contenders that lost out in the end. They enjoyed favor in some circles but just didn't have sufficiently wide endorsement.

In the book and the movie, Teabing asserts that other texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary, were cast out of the New Testament because Constantine and those mean old Nicaean bishops wanted to impose their beliefs on the rest of Christendom. These texts, however, reflect an elitist attitude disdainful of ordinary Christians and their beliefs. It is unlikely that their authors ever sought to have them included with the writings of the emergent New Testament. In any case, they weren't chucked from the canon in an act of suppression. They just never won the confidence of a sufficient number of Christians to make the grade in the first place.

Oh, and one more matter on which The Da Vinci Code is bonkers. There were no two-way wars between Christians and pagans in the decades before Constantine. Instead, beginning with Nero's cruel pogrom against Roman Christians in the first century, there were occasional persecutions mounted by the Roman state, the most vigorous ones under Caracalla (A.D. 215), Decius (A.D. 249-51), Valerian (A.D. 253), and perhaps the most violent of all, Diocletian (A.D. 303-05). There is no record of Christians taking up arms against pagans in this period. They fought back by fervently articulating their beliefs and backing their professions to the point of martyrdom. So, Constantine's decision to legitimate Christianity (in A.D. 312, not 325, as Brown asserts) was not prompted by his desire to end pagan-Christian battles.

In the novel, in the scene in which Teabing lays out all the crazy assertions, the Harvard professor character, Robert Langdon, nods sagely in support of the whole scheme. At the same point in the movie, by contrast, Langdon strongly objects. The word is that Ron Howard made this change, as well as a few others, in hopes of placating historians. Nice try. By the end of the movie Langdon has undergone a conversion of sorts and acclaims Sophie as Jesus' last living descendant. Never mind that Teabing is revealed as a maniacal villain, his ideas carry the day. The movie can't escape the charge that it promotes the mischievous fictions that masquerade in the book as the revelation of historical secrets. Instead, of course, the film widens Brown's reach.

Larry Hurtado is Professor of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?

William Donohue argues the media gets away with anti-Catholicism...

2006-05-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

William Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, writes an editorial in the New York DailyNews about how easily people get away with blatant anti-Catholicism in the world today, especially in the media. This is an absurd double standard since no one can get away with being anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-gay, or anti-anything else. Here's his conclusion:

To understand what's driving this, consider that our culture teaches that freedom means the right to do whatever we want to do and Catholicism teaches that freedom means the right to do what we ought to do. There's a natural disharmony here, a tension so taut that something's got to give. Never mind that a libertine idea of freedom — liberty as license — is spiritually, psychologically, physiologically and socially deadly in its consequences. It's what sells. Sadly, what is attendant to this perverse interpretation of liberty is a need to lash out at any creed that preaches the virtue of restraint.

The scandal in the Catholic Church did not help matters, but the frontal assault on Catholicism antedated the revelations of 2002. No matter, the kind of hate speech that spews with regularity toward the Catholic Church can never be justified. That it occurs amid all the chatter about tolerance and respect for diversity makes it all the more repugnant.

Prager argues that liberals throw out "phobias" and "isms" instead of thinking through issues...it's just easier

2006-05-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

Harry Reid and the end of liberal thought

By Dennis Prager

May 23, 2006

The highest-ranking Democrat in America, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, described the Senate bill making English the national language of the American people as "racist." And the New York Times editorial page labeled the bill "xenophobic."

Welcome to the thoughtless world of contemporary liberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, liberalism, once the home of many deep thinkers, began to substitute feeling for thought and descended into superficiality.

One-word put-downs of opponents' ideas and motives were substituted for thoughtful rebuttal. Though liberals regard themselves as intellectual -- their views, after all, are those of nearly all university professors -- liberal thought has almost died. Instead of feeling the need to thoughtfully consider an idea, most liberal minds today work on automatic. One-word reactions to most issues are the liberal norm.

This is easy to demonstrate.

Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ:

Racist
Sexist
Homophobic
Islamophobic
Imperialist
Bigoted
Intolerant

And here is the list of one-word descriptions of what liberals are for:

Peace
Fairness
Tolerance
The poor
The disenfranchised
The environment

These two lists serve contemporary liberals in at least three ways.

First, they attack the motives of non-liberals and thereby morally dismiss the non-liberal person.

Second, these words make it easy to be a liberal -- essentially all one needs to do is to memorize this brief list and apply the right term to any idea or policy. That is one reason young people are more likely to be liberal -- they have not had the time or inclination to think issues through, but they know they oppose racism, imperialism and bigotry, and that they are for peace, tolerance and the environment.

Third, they make the liberal feel good about himself -- by opposing conservative ideas and policies, he is automatically opposing racism, bigotry, imperialism, etc.

Examples could fill a book.

Harry Reid, as noted above, supplied a classic one. Instead of grappling with the enormously significant question of how to maintain American identity and values with tens of millions of non-Americans coming into America, the Democratic leader and others on the Left simply label attempts to keep English as a unifying language as "racist."

Another classic example of liberal non-thought was the reaction to former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' mere question about whether the female and male brains were wired differently. Again, instead of grappling with the issue, Harvard and other liberals merely dismissed Summers as "sexist."

A third example is the use of the term "racist" to end debate about race-based affirmative action or even to describe a Capitol police officer who stops a black congresswoman who has no ID badge.

"Phobic" is the current one-word favorite among liberal dismissals of ideological opponents. It combines instant moral dismissal with instant psychological analysis. If you do not support society redefining marriage to include members of the same sex you are "homophobic" -- and further thought is unnecessary. If you articulate a concern about the moral state of Islam today, you are "Islamophobic" -- and again further thought is unnecessary. And if you seek to retain English as America's unifying language, you are not only racist, you are, as the New York Times editorial describes you, "xenophobic" and "Latinophobic," the latest phobia uncovered by the Left.

There is a steep price paid for the liberal one-wording of complex ideas -- the decline of liberal thought. But with more and more Americans graduating college and therefore taught the liberal list of one-word reactions instead of critical thinking, many liberals do not see any pressing need to think through issues. They therefore do not believe they have paid any price at all.

But American society is paying a steep price. Every car that has a bumper sticker declaring "War is not the answer" powerfully testifies to the intellectual decline of the well educated and to the devolution of "liberal thought" into an oxymoron.

Dennis Prager is a radio talk show host, author, and contributing columnist for Townhall.com.

The Catholic Church and Women

2006-05-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

The DV Code argues that the Catholic Church has been led by women-hating, power-hungry men who have done everything they can throughout history to suppress women and the "sacred feminine". Dr. Pia di Solenni (a friend of mine from Santa Croce in Rome) guest blogs on Fr. John Wauck's site about how wrong Dan Brown is about the historical relationship between women and the Church. Here's the intro to the article...

Pia de Solenni is a theologian in Washington DC, whose prize-winning doctoral dissertation in Rome dealt with gender issues in St. Thomas Aquinas. Slightly different versions of this article appeared in Hearst papers, a Canadian syndicate, and Catholic Exchange.

For those familiar with the history and tradition of the Catholic Church, The Da Vinci Code might provide more cause for laughter (at the absurd) than suspense. Author Dan Brown sounds as if he’s accusing the Catholic Church (and perhaps all Christian Churches) of not recognizing women, particularly in their role as mothers.

It used to be that the Catholic Church was faulted for talking too much about women as mothers and their life producing capabilities. Brown now suggests the contrary.

Had he done a serious historical analysis, Brown would have found just how groundbreaking the Catholic Church has been in its regard for women. In Catholic parlance, the Church is the bride of Christ, by no means a demeaning role. The Church eschewed mere cultural traditions and focused on the essential nature of women, starting with the fact that women are of equal dignity with men.

Women and men were subject to the same initiation rite, baptism, in order to become Christians. In a move that completely broke from ancient Roman law and tradition, Christianity understood that women were the bearers of rights (or decision making abilities) apart from their husbands and fathers. A long list of women martyrs, extolled by the Church for making their own decisions, witnesses this fact.

The Catholic Church, Brown’s subjugator of women, was also the first organized body to promote the education of women and to acknowledge that the decision of a woman not to marry was in fact a valid choice. Prior to this, women’s education was not endorsed or promoted by any government, religion, or large scale institution. Certainly, there were educated women; but they were educated because of private – not public – efforts. Similarly, most cultures had no place for an adult woman who chose not to marry. Even the so-called vestal virgins of the pagan religions were given recognition for their sexual relations with men of generally higher status, like a priest.

Europe is trying to promote having babies...

2006-05-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

But at the end of the day Europe needs a cultural change, not just better pro-family policies (though they can help). Here's the intro to the article from Zenit...

EUROPE'S ENDANGERED FAMILIES

MADRID, Spain, MAY 22, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Finding an effective strategy to help European families is not proving easy. This month the Madrid-based Institute for Family Policies published a study titled, "Report on the Evolution of the Family in Europe 2006." The report noted a growing awareness of the need to protect the family and family life. Yet in spite of this concern, the family is under increasing pressure.

The first sections of the report look at the problem of a declining birthrate and an aging population. It then considers how marriage is faring. During 1980-2004, the number of marriages in the 25-member countries of the European Union dropped by more than 663,600, even as the population grew by 31.1 million. In 2003 the average age at marriage for men was 30, and for women, 27.7. The respective figures for 1980 were 26 and 23.3.

Another trend is the increasing numbers of children being born outside of marriage. A strict comparison here for the current 25 EU member countries is not possible due to the recent entry of 10 nations. But in the 15 older EU member countries, in 1980, only 9.6% of children were born to single women or unmarried couples. By 2004 this skyrocketed to 32.8%. The 2004 figure for all 25 EU countries is 31.6%.

The overall average conceals wide variations among countries, however. Sweden's proportion of out-of-wedlock births stands at 55.4%; Denmark's at 45.4%; France's, 45.2%; and the United Kingdom's, 42.3%. Greece and Italy, at 4.9% and 14.9%, respectively, have relatively low levels.

Divorce rates, meanwhile, increased by about half over the last couple of decades. From 1990 to 2004, more than 10 million marriages broke up in the 15 EU nations, affecting more than 16 million children.

Mavs Win!!! Booyah!!!!

2006-05-23T07:30:00.000-07:00

Dallas: 119 San Antonio: 111 in OT

Dirk came up huge when he needed to with that sweet 3-pt. play. I loved the fact that he took it to the rim instead of jacking up some crazy 3-pointer. The people of Dallas can celebrate for the day, then gear up for the Suns. They knocked us out of the playoffs last year, now it's time for revenge....

Madeleine Albright is freaked out by Bush's faith...

2006-05-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

Former Secretary of State (and amateur theologian) Albright says that President Bush's faith worries her. She says:

"I worked for two presidents who were men of faith, and they did not make their religious views part of American policy," she said, referring to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both Democrats and Christians.

"President Bush's certitude about what he believes in, and the division between good and evil, is, I think, different," said Albright, who has just published a book on religion and world affairs. "The absolute truth is what makes Bush so worrying to some of us."

God forbid that truth be absolute! What if evil things were actually evil! Oh no!

And her qualifications for making such a theological statement about absolute truth?

Asked about her own beliefs, Albright said she had "a very confused religious background."

Born and raised a Roman Catholic in Czechoslovakia, Britain and then the United States, she converted to Anglicanism when she married and only later in life discovered she had Jewish roots.

It is this legacy which makes her wary of any religion which claims a monopoly on truth, she said.

These days, she describes herself as "an Episcopalian (U.S. Anglican) with a Catholic background", recalling how she used to pray to the Virgin Mary as a child and still does.

"I know I believe in God but I have doubts, and doubt is part of faith," she said.

Yeah, I hate it when truth actually means truth instead of not truth. But, at least she likes Mary....

SF Gate does an interview with a Gnostic bishop about the DV Code

2006-05-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

And even he didn't like the book. Go figure. Here is the link to the interview, and here are a few nuggets of interest about Gnosticism in general:

What are the basic teachings of Gnostic Christianity?

There is a huge spectrum of Gnostic beliefs, so I can't speak for all forms of Gnosticism. But generally speaking, mainstream Christianity believes that we all inherit original sin. So the purpose of the incarnation [of Jesus] is atonement for that sin. This isn't the Gnostic view, however. Gnostics believe that the real problem isn't sin -- it's ignorance, because we don't know our origins, who we really are.

We also believe that everyone has the potential for gnosis. Everyone has a spark of the true light or the divine in them. The whole point for Gnosticism is to help reveal that spark so that a person recognizes it inside of himself or herself.

How do you help a person reveal that spark?

We serve as midwives for each other, so that we can each remember the light within us, and then live according to that truth and light revealed in our experience. So rather than tell them how to live, we would be more inclined to help them find the divine within them and let that instruct them.

You lead a group of Gnostic initiates. What is the teaching process like?

We have weekly meetings as a group. We also work with our new students for a period of about three years in one-to-one mentoring. Sometimes we'll take that process up again, if a person goes into advanced study and practices. We will also facilitate ceremonies and meditation circles that people can attend to draw out their spiritual experiences.

We're living in complicated times. There is a lot of upheaval, a lot of change. What does Gnosticism have to teach us about dealing with these pressures?

Gnosticism -- particularly Sophian Gnosticism -- proposes that creation is an evolutionary process. We are constantly going through change, growth and development. And everything that we encounter in the material dimension is an impermanent phenomenon. So when we are looking at the world, we know it's a continuum of change. And our way of spirituality is to move with what's happening as it's happening, to remain in the flow.

In a Gnostic view, rather than root ourselves here outwardly, we learn to go within and live within -- and to root ourselves in that transcendent being that we recognize and realize inwardly. So we're very empowered, very free to live fully here. But also we are aware that we are just travelers here.

Where are you traveling to?

Gnostics see this world as the tip of the iceberg of reality. And rather than identifying with just the tip of the iceberg, we seek to be aware of the entire iceberg -- all of these various layers and levels, dimensions of reality -- while we are here and now. And when we do this, it changes how we relate with this dimension, with this world, with this body. We know that we are more than this body, that our consciousness is beyond this body while within it. And this empowers us to embrace the challenges, to embrace the constant flow of change in our lives.

Gay marriage amendment makes it to the Senate...

2006-05-19T14:14:00.000-07:00

Only after a shouting match between Sens. Specter and Feingold. The measure has little chance of passing and is seen as a nugget being thrown to the religious right in order to "make up" for the many mistakes Republicans have made since coming into power. Here's the brief article....

Specter to Feingold: 'I don't need to be lectured by you'

Same-sex marriage hearing gets testy; amendment passes

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate committee approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Thursday, after a shouting match that ended when one Democrat strode out and the Republican chairman bid him "good riddance."

"I don't need to be lectured by you. You are no more a protector of the Constitution than am I," Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, shouted after Sen. Russ Feingold declared his opposition to the amendment, his affinity for the Constitution and his intention to leave the meeting.

"If you want to leave, good riddance," Specter finished.

"I've enjoyed your lecture, too, Mr. Chairman," replied Feingold, D-Wisconsin, who is considering a run for president in 2008. "See ya."

Amid increasing partisan tension over President Bush's judicial nominees and domestic wiretapping, the panel voted along party lines to send the constitutional amendment -- which would prohibit states from recognizing same-sex marriages -- to the full Senate, where it stands little chance of passing.

Democrats complained that bringing up the amendment is a purely political move designed to appeal to the GOP's conservative base in this year of midterm elections. Under the domed ceiling of the ornate and historic President's Room off the Senate floor, senators voted 10-8 to send the measure forward.

Among Feingold's objections was Specter's decision to hold the vote in the President's Room, where access by the general public is restricted, instead of in the panel's usual home in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Specter later said he would have been willing to hold the session in the usual room had he thought doing so would change votes.

Not all those who voted "yes" support the amendment, however. Specter said he is "totally opposed" to it, but felt it deserved a debate in the Senate.

"Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman," reads the measure, which would require approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states.

"Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman," it says.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has scheduled a vote on the proposed amendment the week of June 5.

Cultural debate

The issue has ignited a cultural and political debate over what constitutes marriage and the legal rights of gay partners.

Earlier this week, Georgia announced it will appeal a judge's ruling that struck down its voter-approved ban on gay marriage. Gov. Sonny Perdue said he will call a special legislative session if the state Supreme Court doesn't rule on the issue soon.

The Georgia constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage was approved by 76 percent of the state's voters in November 2004. On Tuesday, however, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Constance C. Russell ruled the measure violated the Georgia constitution's single-subject rules for ballot questions.

The issue has been on the political radar across the nation for more than two years.

On Election Day in 2004, a presidential year, initiatives on gay marriage and civil unions were on the ballot in 11 states, driven in part by opposition to the Massachusetts state Supreme Judicial Court's recognition of same-sex marriage and Republican calculations that the issue would send conservative voters to the polls.

Two states -- Louisiana and Missouri -- had approved bans earlier in the year.

Clarification on the meaning of "conscience"...

2006-05-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

There are so many people in today's society (especially pro-abortion "Catholic" politicians) who claim that they are following their conscience, when their conscience goes against the teachings of the Church. This is a clear misunderstanding on the role of conscience. Below is a nice, brief article on the true meaning of conscience. Here's the intro:

A Clarification on the Meaning of "Conscience"
by Doug McManaman

Whenever I think certain popular misconceptions are finally behind us, someone who should know better, such as a priest, teacher, or God forbid, a bishop, brings me back to reality. One such misconception that seems to never go away is the idea that conscience is the final arbiter of what is morally right — a misconception often designated under the expression “primacy of conscience”.

But to put it bluntly, conscience is not the final arbiter of what is morally right, nor has the Church ever taught that it is. In its truest sense, conscience is the intellectual apprehension of the Divine Law. For this reason, Divine Law is primary.

In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Newman quotes Cardinal Gousset, who writes: "The Divine Law is the supreme rule of actions; our thoughts, desires, words, acts, all that man is, is subject to the domain of the law of God; and this law is the rule of our conduct by means of our conscience. Hence it is never lawful to go against our conscience."

Essentially, conscience is one's best judgment, in a given situation, on what here and now is to be done as good, or to be avoided as evil. Because conscience is one's best judgment, hic et nunc, a person has a duty to obey it. The Fourth Lateran Council says: "He who acts against his conscience loses his soul".

Moreover, the duty to obey one's conscience includes an erroneous conscience. For example, if, as a result of being brought up by neurotic parents, I judge that in this particular situation right now, drinking this cup of Tim Horton's coffee is contrary to God's will, then I have a duty not to drink the cup of coffee. Should the Pope or a local Bishop try to persuade me that there is nothing sinful in drinking a cup of coffee, yet for some reason I continue to judge, erroneously, that drinking this cup of coffee would offend my Creator, I must nonetheless follow my conscience and not drink the coffee. The reason is that if I were to drink it, I'd be doing what in my best judgment is morally wrong.

This is what is meant by the “primacy of conscience”, that is, conscience having the final word on what I ought to do in the here and now situation.

”Primacy of conscience” does not mean that I can dissent from Church teaching on a particular issue because I don't agree with the teaching or see anything wrong with doing what the Church says I ought not to do. That this is true is rather easy to demonstrate.

Proof positive that liberals will believe anything that bashes tradition...

2006-05-17T19:17:00.000-07:00

Liberals most likely to believe Da Vinci tale

New York, May. 17, 2006 (CNA) - Data from recent surveys indicate that liberals and people who are not regular churchgoers are more likely to believe the tales proposed in The Da Vinci Code about Jesus having children with Mary Magdalene, said Catholic League president William Donohue.

“There is an inverse correlation between religiosity and belief in the Da Vinci Code’s thesis,” explained Donohue in a press release. “The more likely one is to attend church, the less likely he or she is to believe the book’s thesis.”

According to Donohue, a Barna Group survey found that liberals were twice as likely as conservatives to have altered their religious beliefs after reading Dan Brown’s book.

Donohue also cited statistics indicating that the British are twice as likely to believe Da Vinci’s “moonshine” than Americans. Donohue attributed it to the fact that British Christians attend regular church services less often than Americans. The 2001 British census revealed that 72 percent consider themselves Christian, but only 8 percent regularly attend church services.

Donohue also quoted a USA/Gallup poll taken this month, which found that 72 percent of Americans said no movie had ever had a profound effect on their religious beliefs in any positive or negative way; 21 percent said they saw a movie that strengthened their beliefs; and four percent said they saw a film that caused them to question their religious beliefs.

As well, a Barna Group survey reported yesterday that 24 percent of those who read the book said it was helpful in relation to their ‘personal growth or understanding.’ Only five percent said they changed their beliefs because of The Da Vinci Code.

The World Cup is approaching...

2006-05-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

The World Cup

...and most Americans don't even know it. Only 22 days away. They also don't realize that the Americans have a pretty good team. In fact, in the latest FIFA World Rankings, the US is fifth (they were fourth last month, their highest ranking ever). Here is the latest top 10:

1) Brazil
2) Czech Republic
3) Netherlands
4) Mexcio
5) USA (tied)
5) Spain (tied)
7) Portugal
8) France
9) Argentina
10) England

I used to love Gandalf....

2006-05-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

But now he's starting to say some stupid things. Here are quotes from Ian McKellan, who plays Leigh Teabing in the DV Code.

"Well, I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction. I mean, walking on water, it takes an act of faith. And I have faith in this movie. Not that it's true, not that it's factual, but that it's a jolly good story. And I think audiences are clever enough and bright enough to separate out fact and fiction, and discuss the thing after they've seen it."

and

"I'm very happy to believe that Jesus was married," he said. "I know the Catholic Church has problems with gay people and I thought this would be absolute proof that Jesus was not gay."

The Critics are Destroying the DV Code....

2006-05-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

Comments from critics:

"I didn't like it very much. I thought it was almost as bad as the book. Tom Hanks was a zombie, thank goodness for Ian McKellen. It was overplayed, there was too much music and it was much too grandiose," said Peter Brunette, critic for the US daily The Boston Globe.

"At the high point, there was laughter among the journalists. Not loud laughs, but a snicker and I think that says it all," said Gerson Da Cunha from The Times of India.

"People were confused, there was no applause, just silence," said Margherita Ferrandino from the Italian television Rai 3.

"It was really disappointing. The dialogue was cheesy. The acting wasn't too bad, but the film is not as good as the book," added Lina Hamchaoui, from British radio IRN.

"Sitting through all the verbose explanations and speculations about symbols, codes, secret cults, religious history and covert messages in art, it is impossible to believe that, had the novel never existed, such a script would ever have been considered by a Hollywood studio." Todd McCarthy, Daily Variety.

To Those Who Say That Christians Should "Lighten Up" About the DV Code...

2006-05-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

Reading "Da Vinci Code" does alter beliefs: survey
Tue May 16, 2006 10:11 AM ET
By Paul Majendie

LONDON (Reuters) - "The Da Vinci Code" has undermined faith in the Roman Catholic Church and badly damaged its credibility, a survey of British readers of Dan Brown's bestseller showed on Tuesday.

People are now twice as likely to believe Jesus Christ fathered children after reading the Dan Brown blockbuster and four times as likely to think the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei is a murderous sect.

"An alarming number of people take its spurious claims very seriously indeed," said Austin Ivereigh, press secretary to Britain's top Catholic prelate Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.

"Our poll shows that for many, many people the Da Vinci Code is not just entertainment," Ivereigh added.

He heads a prominent group of English Roman Catholic monks, theologians, nuns and members of Opus Dei, who commissioned the survey from leading pollster Opinion Research Business (ORB) and have sought to promote Catholic beliefs at a time when the film's release has provoked a storm of controversy.

ORB interviewed more than 1,000 adults last weekend, finding that 60 percent believed Jesus had children by Mary Magdalene -- a possibility raised by the book -- compared with just 30 percent of those who had not read the book.

The English group demanded that the "Da Vinci Code" movie, being given its world premiere at the Cannes Film festival on Wednesday, should carry a "health warning".

The group, which stopped short of following the Vatican line of calling on Catholics to boycott the film, accused Brown of dishonest marketing based on peddling fiction as fact.

The novel, which has sold over 40 million copies, also depicts Opus Dei as a ruthless Machiavellian organization whose members resort to murder to keep the Church's secrets.

The survey underlined the astonishing popularity of Brown's novel -- it has been read by more than one in five adults of all ages in Britain.

Ivereigh complained that Brown and film studio Sony Pictures "have encouraged people to take it seriously while hiding behind the claim that it is fiction.

"Our poll shows they should take responsibility for their dishonesty and issue a health warning."

In the survey, readers were asked if Opus Dei had ever carried out a murder. Seventeen percent of readers believe it had, compared with just four percent of non-readers.

Opus Dei spokesman Jack Valero said he was astonished.

"Since we were founded in 1928, Opus Dei has promoted the highest moral standards at work, spreading a message of Christian love and understanding," he said.

"Yet the Da Vinci Code has persuaded hundreds of thousands of people that we have blood on our hands."

Pat Buchanan asks: Whose God May We Mock?

2006-05-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

Whose God may we mock?

By Pat Buchanan

May 16, 2006

If "such lies and errors had been directed at the Koran or the Holocaust," said Archbishop Angelo Amato, the Vatican's secretary for the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, "they would have justly provoked a world uprising."

The archbishop was speaking of "The Da Vinci Code," the Ron Howard film that debuts at Cannes and opens worldwide this week, and is expected to gross $500 million by summer's end.

The archbishop's point is undeniable. Blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban, published a few months ago in a Danish newspaper and reprinted on the front pages of Europe's major papers, ignited demonstrations in Muslim communities across Europe and violent and deadly riots across the Islamic world.

Leaders friendly to the West, from Egypt to Afghanistan, felt compelled to denounce the cartoons, as did many in the West, as a provocation and insult to the faith of a billion people.

In the 1990s, the British novelist Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a "fatwa" calling for his killing for publishing the blasphemous "Satanic Verses." In the 1970s, the film "Muhammad," starring Anthony Quinn, was pulled from many U.S. theaters after bomb threats. The film had offended Muslim faithful by showing the face of Muhammad.

Last February, British historian David Irving, whose books on World War II have sold in the millions, was convicted in an Austrian court of Holocaust denial and sentenced to three years in prison. His crime: In two speeches in Austria in 1989, Irving asserted there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Though he recanted in court, it did not save him. Prosecutors felt his sentence was too light.

Karen Pollock of Great Britain's Holocaust Education Trust applauded the verdict: "Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism dressed up as intellectual debate. It should be regarded as such and treated as such."

In nine countries of Europe, Holocaust denial is a crime. In the United States, to deny the Holocaust happened or suggest that it has been exaggerated is not a crime, but marks one down as a social leper.

If you would know who wields cultural power, ask yourself: Whom is it impermissible to offend? Thus the hoopla attending the release of "The Da Vinci Code," based on the Dan Brown novel that has sold 7 million copies in the United States, tells us something about whose God it is permissible to mock and whose faith one is allowed to assault.

For what "The Da Vinci Code" says is that Roman Catholicism is a gigantic fraud, that the church has for centuries been perpetrating a monstrous hoax, duping hundreds of millions into believing something it knows is a bald-faced lie. At the novel's heart lies the contention that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, that they had a daughter, that the Vatican has known this and been hiding the descendants of Jesus, that Opus Dei is a secret order whose agents will engage in murder to protect the secret.

Leonardo da Vinci's painting "The Last Supper" is said to hold the secret, as Jesus is portrayed touching the hand of the youngest apostle, John, who holds the place of honor at his side -- and who is, on close inspection, Mary Magdalene.

In Catholic teaching and tradition, the Holy Grail is the chalice that contained the blood of Jesus. In the book, the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene, carrying the flesh and blood of Jesus in her womb.

If "The Da Vinci Code" is based upon facts, no other conclusion follows
than that to be a Catholic is either to be in on this fraud or to be the dupe of those perpetuating it. But if it is fiction, why would Hollywood put out so viciously anti-Catholic a film that can only have the effect of undermining the faith of millions of Christians?

Putting "The Da Vinci Code" on film, with what it alleges about the Catholic Church, is the moral equivalent of making a movie based on the "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and implying this is the truth about the Jewish plot to control the world. One imagines Ron Howard and Tom Hanks would take a pass on that script.

Like the "Hitler's Pope" smear of Pius XII, a man who did more than any other to save the Jews in World War II, "The Da Vinci Code" is a Big Lie that, though readily refuted by the facts, will be believed.

But that it will be a box-office smash, that it is the subject of lavish praise in the press, that it is the best-selling novel of the 21st century, tells us we live not just in a post-Christian era, but in an anti-Catholic culture not worth defending or saving, for it is truly satanic.

Pat Buchanan is a founding editor of The American Conservative magazine, and the author of books such as The Great Betrayal, A Republic, Not an Empire, Neo-Conned, and Where the Right Went Wrong.

New Bishop in DC

2006-05-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

The question on everyone's mind is whether or not Bishop Wuerl will bring the smacketh down on the pro-abortion politicians in DC....I sure hope he does. Here's the intro to an article from the NY Times today:

Pope Names New Archbishop for Washington

By JOHN O'NEIL

Bishop Donald W. Wuerl of Pittsburgh was named by Pope Benedict XVI today as the new archbishop of Washington, succeeding Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick.

Bishop Wuerl, 65, has served as Pittsburgh's bishop since 1988, and is considered one of the more prominent of the nation's conservative bishops. His first appointment after being ordained a bishop in 1986 was in an unusual power-sharing arrangment in Seattle, where he was sent as assistant bishop by Pope John Paul II while Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen was under investigation by the Vatican for unorthodox views.

Cardinal McCarrick, who was regarded as more moderate on many issues, praised Bishop Wuerl as "one of the great churchmen of the United States." He spoke of his prayers that the Pope would pick a great bishop to take his place, saying, "He has done that, in spades."

Cardinal McCarrick, who had led the archdiocese since 2001, submitted his resignation to the Vatican last July when he turned 75, as church policy requires. It had been refused by the Pope, and a spokesman for the Cardinal said last fall that it was expected that he would serve for another two years.

At a press conference in Washington today, Bishop Wuerl said that the appointment was being made now because the Pope had agreed to Cardinal McCarrick's request that he be allowed to retire now.

Cardinal McCarrick had hinted that a change would be coming soon in an interview with The Washington Post last month. In the interview, the Cardinal listed ideal traits for a successor, including that he "not be afraid of the media."

While the archdiocese of Washington is not a large one — it serves 560,000 Catholics compared with some 800,000 in the diocese of Pittsburgh, according to their respective websites — it has traditionally been a high-profile position, due to its location at the heart of government, and its leader has traditionally been elevated to the rank of cardinal.

Bishop Wuerl showed himself at home with media attention during the televised press conference, sidestepping several questions and bantering that reporters should direct all hard questions to the Cardinal.

Asked how he would deal with Catholic politicians who support abortion rights while personally opposing abortion, he responded, "I think that the first task of a bishop is to teach."

A growing number of Catholic bishops contend that the church should deny communion to Catholic politicians who take positions contradicting church teachings. Cardinal McCarrick was the most prominent bishop to oppose that approach.

25 Years Ago...

2006-05-15T12:39:00.000-07:00

There was an assassination attempt on John Paul II in the middle of St. Peter's Square.

This past weekend the Vatican placed a memorial in the square on the spot where it occured. From EWTN:

NEW MEMORIAL MARKS SITE OF PAPAL-ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

May. 12 (CWNews.com) - The Vatican has placed a memorial marker in St. Peter's Square on the spot where Pope John Paul II was shot 25 years ago.

A rectangular white marble, bearing the late Pope's coat of arms and the date of the assassination attempt, has been placed in St. Peter's Square at the site of the attack. A matching marker has been placed at the entrance to the Vatican clinic where John Paul II was briefly treated before being transferred to the Gemelli Hospital. The memorials were placed by the government of Vatican City.

May 13 will mark the 25th anniversary of the assassination attempt. To mark that date, the pilgrim statute of Our Lady of Fatima will be carried in a procession from the Castel St. Angelo to St. Peter's basilica. Pope John Paul always credited Our Lady of Fatima-- whose feast is celebrated that day-- with preserving his life when he was shot.

The Polish Pontiff had finished his regular weekly public audience, and was riding through St. Peter's Square in the open "popemobile," when would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca loosed three pistol shots at him from close range. Two of the bullets struck the Pope, gravely wounding him. On the same date-- May 13-- in 2000, the Vatican later revealed that the renowned "third secret of Fatima" involved a prediction of the assassination attempt.

How to raise priests and nuns...

2006-05-15T08:27:00.000-07:00

As someone who was open to the idea of entering religious life, I have a great desire to see at least one of my children enter into priesthood or religious life. But how can a parent encourage a child towards these vocations without becoming a burden and applying too much pressure? This past week was Vocations Awareness week, so the National Catholic Register put together a top 10 list of things parents can do....

How to raise priests and nuns

5/7/2006

National Catholic Register

It’s easy to find people to blame for the vocations crisis. Whole books have been written about institutional failures of the church on the part of bishops, priests, cardinals and even popes and councils. These books stop just short of blaming God himself for setting up the Church the way he did.

But the most important group, the one whose influence is absolutely decisive to the question, is often spared the blame for the crisis. It’s this institution that deserves the most praise for the current upswing in vocations, too.

That institution, of course, is the family.

For Vocations Awareness Week, here are some tips on what families can and should be doing to help increase the number of vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life. Mostly, these things are the parents’ responsibilities. But godparents and grandparents can follow these, too.

1. Speak often of Christ in terms that endear your children to him. Let his name, spoken with respect, be part of the family vocabulary.

2. Help them grow, according to their age, in their relationship with God and knowledge of their faith. The lives of the saints are a great source of inspiration for children — and adults. They should also be able to receive the sacrament of reconciliation frequently and have access to spiritual direction.

3. Pray for your children and for whatever vocation God is calling them to, and teach them to do the same. The greatest and deepest wish of every parent for a child should be that he or she discovers and does God’s will for his life. Finding this will deliver your child his or her greatest guarantee of happiness. But no matter what that vocation is, the child will have difficulties and temptations to overcome, with the help of your prayers.

4. Each morning, place the vocation of each of your children under the protection of Jesus through the hands of Mary. Be courageous and ask for the blessing that they may be called to a consecrated or priestly life.

5. Teach your children to be open to God by your example. Try to imitate Mary in the way you deal with your children. Love them (through service and sacrifice) as you teach them to love Christ. They are going to absorb your priorities from the thousand ways you reflect them during your day and, if your example is consistent, they will almost certainly adopt them.

6. Do not push the religious life on them but do not be silent, either. Answer questions — at times bring them up yourself — and raise possibilities, but do so always with a sense of freedom and love.

7. Enable them to participate in outreach, service or missionary work.

It is in serving the poor that your children will see how much Christ and the Church need them, and begin to understand how much they have received and how much they have to give.

8. Demonstrate a healthy and beautiful married and family life.

Most vocations come from Catholic homes where the faith is practiced fully by the mom and dad, where the children can grow up experiencing in their own homes the beauty and dignity of the married vocation, the fidelity and depth of true love. The importance of this cannot be exaggerated. You needn’t be perfect — but you need to strive to be holy, and settle for nothing less than the Church’s authentic teachings.

9. Introduce them to priests and nuns. Seek contact with priests and consecrated persons who can serve as role models. Always speak positively about bishops, priests and consecrated persons. Your respect will give your children the interior freedom to consider a possible vocation.

10. Develop your child’s mind, memory, sense of beauty and joy. This includes — but is not limited to — knowledge of the Catechism. Help children develop their critical sense, awareness of objective truth, and appreciation for music and the arts. Pay special attention to their use of the media. It is especially important to monitor children’s access to the Internet, giving them reasons for limitations, and teaching them responsible use of this medium.

McCain is trying to get in good with the evangelicals...

2006-05-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

So he spoke at Liberty University's commencement. Apparentely he and Fallwell have patched up their differences...probably a good move for someone with presidential hopes, since you have to have some of the religious conservatives vote for you in order to win....

Here's the intro to an article in the CS Monitor covering it:

Sarah Smith and Bryan Northup, both recent graduates of Liberty University, were surprised when the Rev. Jerry Falwell invited Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona to deliver the commencement address at their alma mater last Saturday.

After all, Senator McCain has not exactly been viewed as a friend of Christian evangelicals, especially since he tagged the Reverend Falwell - Liberty's founder and president - and a few others as "agents of intolerance" who were "corrupting influences" in American politics during the 2000 presidential campaign.

But as the 2008 race gears up, with McCain a likely competitor, it's a new day - at least for some. Falwell and McCain have patched up their relationship. And if the reaction of a sample of attendees is any guide, McCain may have done himself some good at this campus nestled in the rolling hills of Lynchburg, Va.

"He's a man of action," says Mr. Northup, an '05 graduate who works for the IRS.

Ms. Smith, who graduated in '04 and is now a law student here, appreciated McCain's focus on the Iraq war in his address - a war that he has strongly supported from the start. "I see we have common ground in our patriotism," she says. "He didn't get into religion or abortion; it was smart to avoid hot topics."

Not that McCain favors abortion rights. As a senator, he consistently votes the antiabortion-rights position, but is not a vocal advocate. He also differs in approach in his opposition to gay marriage: While Falwell and other conservative leaders favor a constitutional amendment defining marriage as man-woman, McCain takes the federalist position - leave it up to the states.

The Social Conservatives Want Bush to Do Something....

2006-05-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

Here's an article from the NY Times explaining how many social conservatives feel that Bush has betrayed them since getting into office for the 2nd time. Betrayed may be too strong a word..."forgotten" may be more appropriate. They feel they are due some favors since they were the ones that really put him into office. They especially want to focus on the marriage amendment Here's a blurb from Dr. James Dobson:

Dr. Dobson, whose daily radio broadcast has millions of listeners, has already signaled his willingness to criticize Republican leaders. In a recent interview with Fox News on the eve of a visit to the White House, he accused Republicans of "just ignoring those that put them in office."

Dr. Dobson cited the House's actions on two measures that passed over the objections of social conservatives: a hate-crime bill that extended protections to gay people, and increased support for embryonic stem cell research.

"There's just very, very little to show for what has happened," Dr. Dobson said, "and I think there's going to be some trouble down the road if they don't get on the ball."

We'll see if the Republicans can get the message in time for midterms...

Golf is #1

2006-05-11T12:32:00.000-07:00

Google has a new program called "Google Trends", where you can compare the search trends for various topics. I decided to see what popular sport is searched for the most globally, and surprisingly golf is currently #1. The trends go back to the beginning of 2004...and since then football and golf have consistently been at the top. Very interesting.

golf football basketball baseball hockey

A spiritual leader for the new millennium: Oprah?

2006-05-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

You heard it right. The USA Today argues that Oprah has become a strong spritual leader in the world today. God help us. This article contains one of the DUMBEST quotes I have ever heard:
"She's a really hip and materialistic Mother Teresa," says Kathryn Lofton, a professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore., who has written two papers analyzing the religious aspects of Winfrey. "Oprah has emerged as a symbolic figurehead of spirituality."

Every student at Reed College should withdraw from school because the professors there are IDIOTS. The only similarity between Blessed Mother Teresa and Oprah is that they are both women.

Then there is the most accurate quote in the article, from Debbie Schlussel, a lawyer and blogger:

Schlussel says Winfrey followers "are incredibly gullible, bandwagon-jumping trend-slaves." Winfrey, she says, "acts as if her show has 'evolved,' but in fact, she still has the salacious sex and deviance stories, with a psychologist in the audience to make it seem highbrow and give it the kosher seal of approval. If this is the person whose morals we are putting on a pedestal, then America's moral compass is in much need of retuning."

Amen, preach it sister! It is terribly sad that millions of women (and some men) worship at the altar of Oprah. If she says it, it is Gospel.

Europe's Two Culture Wars - George Weigel

2006-05-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

VS.

George Weigel argues in Commentary that Europe is actually struggling through TWO, not ONE culture war. One is similar to what is playing out in the US right now: liberals vs. conservatives or progressives vs. traditionalists. Yet Europe is also struggling with a second war: the limits of multiculturalism with a growing Muslim population. He writes:

For the events of the past two years in Spain are a microcosm of the two interrelated culture wars that beset Western Europe today.

The first of these wars—let us, following the example of Spain’s birth certificates, call it “Culture War A”—is a sharper form of the red state/blue state divide in America: a war between the postmodern forces of moral relativism and the defenders of traditional moral conviction. The second—“Culture War B”—is the struggle to define the nature of civil society, the meaning of tolerance and pluralism, and the limits of multiculturalism in an aging Europe whose below-replacement-level fertility rates have opened the door to rapidly growing and assertive Muslim populations.

The aggressors in Culture War A are radical secularists, motivated by what the legal scholar Joseph Weiler has dubbed “Christophobia.”¹ They aim to eliminate the vestiges of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture from a post-Christian European Union by demanding same-sex marriage in the name of equality, by restricting free speech in the name of civility, and by abrogating core aspects of religious freedom in the name of tolerance. The aggressors in Culture War B are radical and jihadist Muslims who detest the West, who are determined to impose Islamic taboos on Western societies by violent protest and other forms of coercion if necessary, and who see such operations as the first stage toward the Islamification of Europe—or, in the case of what they often refer to as al-Andalus, the restoration of the right order of things, temporarily reversed in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella.

The question Europe must face, but which much of Europe seems reluctant to face, is whether the aggressors in Culture War A have not made it exceptionally difficult for the forces of true tolerance and authentic civil society to prevail in Culture War B.

Do the Republicans Need to Lose?

2006-05-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

Peggy Noonan, over at the Wall St. Journal, argues that a loss in November may be good for Republicans. They need it in order to remember why they were put in power in the first place. She writes:

Power is distancing.

When you've been in Congress for a while, or the White House for a while, you both forget too many things and learn too many things.

You forget why they sent you. You forget it's not that you're charming and wonderful. You forget it's not you. You become immersed in a Washington conversation, a political conversation, that is, by definition, unlike the normal human conversation back home. To survive and thrive, national politicians have to speak two languages, Here and Home. Actually it's more than two languages, it's two cultures. It's hard to straddle cultures.

But even as you forget a lot, you learn a lot. You get crammed into your head the political realities on the ground around you--how big the minority Democratic bloc in the House really is, how many votes the other team has in what committee, where to go for legal money, how the press will react to any given decision or statement.

In time you know a lot of things the people who sent you to Washington don't know. And you come to forget what they do know. It used to be easy for you to remember that, because it's what you knew too.

Howard Dean: Democrats have common values with evangelicals

2006-05-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

Really? Let's go through a brief list....

Right to kill a baby....nope
The sacred institution of marriage is between a man and a woman....sorry
Embryonic stem cell research...don't think so
Christian heritage of our nation....not a chance
Faith is central to life....not really
Tolerance....different definitions
Inclusivity....oh please
And the list continues...

Here is a comment from Mr. Dean in this article...how he says these things with a straight face I'll never know:

"The truth is, we have an enormous amount in common with the Christian community, and particularly with the evangelical Christian community,” Dean said. “And one of the biggest things that Democrats worry about is the materialism of our country, what's on television that our kids are seeing, and the lack of spirituality. And that's something we have in common."

But the Democrats’ record on hot political issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and separation of church and state don't match up with that of evangelicals. Still, Dean said that evangelicals do not need to be scared off by Democrats.

He said, “I'm a Democrat because of my values. My values include inclusiveness -- they include not leaving more debt to our kids than we have ourselves. My values including wanting our values to drive our public policies. My values include not having kids going to bed hungry at night. Now those are values that I bet I share with the vast majority of evangelicals.”

Mr. Dean, here are some other "values" you share with evangelicals that you can include on your list:
- you both like sunlight
- you think flowers are pretty
- you like to yell out "yee haw" (most evangelicals are in the south)
- breathe air
- you exist

As long as the Democratic platform supports the slaughter of unborn children, faithful evangelicals and catholics will vote another way...period.

You know your church is liberal (and in trouble) when this is the headline announcing your new bishop...

2006-05-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

Heterosexual elected Episcopal Bishop of Calif

By Duncan MartellSat May 6, 6:17 PM ET

The Episcopal Diocese of California on Saturday avoided widening a rift over gays in the global Anglican Communion by electing a heterosexual man as its next bishop.

More than 1,000 clergy and laypeople packed Grace Cathedral in San Francisco's tony Nob Hill neighborhood to elect the Rt. Rev. Mark Andrus as successor to longtime Bishop William Swing, who is retiring after 27 years.

Two openly gay men and one lesbian were among the seven candidates on the ballot.

No gay or lesbian cleric has been elected bishop since the consecration of Eugene Robinson in 2003 as bishop of New Hampshire threw the U.S. church and the worldwide family of 77 million Anglicans into turmoil.

"Your vote today remains a vote for inclusion and communion

-- of gay and lesbian people in their full lives as single or partnered people, of women, of all ethnic minorities, and all people," Andrus said by telephone over the cathedral's public address system to members after being told of his election. "My commitment to Jesus Christ's own mission of inclusion is resolute."

Rev. Andrus of Alabama was elected with 72 percent of the clergy vote and 55 percent of the lay vote. The Rev. Canon Eugene Sutton of Washington, D.C., who is also heterosexual, came in second, with 13 percent of the clergy vote and 33 percent of the lay vote.

'FOSTERING DIALOGUE'

When told a bishop had been elected, members of the diocese cheered, rose and applauded, and church bells rang out to commemorate the election.

Andrus, who has served as Bishop Suffragan in the Diocese of Alabama since 2001, is known for building bridges and reaching across different points of view, said John Kater, acting president of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

"He has the ability to take strong positions on social justice issues," Kater said. "He seems to be incredibly good at fostering dialogue across strong disagreements."

The roots of the U.S. Episcopal Church are as old as the country and eight of the first 14 presidents were Episcopalian. The church has long prided itself for including liberal and conservative ideologies.

Robinson is the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than 450 years of Anglican history.

The issue of homosexuality within Anglicanism has been simmering since at least 1979, when the Episcopal Church's General Convention resolved that the ordination of gays was inappropriate.

Robinson's eventual consecration prompted some U.S. churches to leave the Episcopal Church and affiliate themselves with a network of churches in Africa, where homosexuality is largely taboo.

Last month, the Special Commission of the Episcopal Church, composed of clergy and laypeople and formed to address divisions caused by Robinson's consecration, recommended that the church be cautious about installing another gay bishop.

The group's report said its members were divided over whether to go further and instruct the 2.3 million-member U.S. church to "refrain" from putting gays into the episcopate, but settled on telling members to use "very considerable caution" before doing so.

You know a bishop is good when Nat'l Catholic Reporter is up in arms...

2006-05-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

The new bishop of Kansas City, Bishop Robert Finn, has begun to clean house in KC and the Reporter and the liberals in the diocese are not too happy about it. Plus, he is a priest who is a member of Opus Dei's Priestly Order of the Holy Cross, which doesn't make them happy either. And, he likes the Latin Mass, which clearly means that he is a close-minded papist. Here are some of the moves he has made that have them foaming at the mouth:

Dismissed the chancellor, a layman with 21 years of experience in the diocese, and the vice chancellor, a religious woman stationed in the diocese for nearly 40 years and the chief of pastoral planning for the diocese since 1990, and replaced them with a priest chancellor.
Cancelled the diocese’s nationally renowned lay formation programs and a master’s degree program in pastoral ministry [note: he moved them from St. Louis University, a liberal Jesuit university, to Ave Maria, a Catholic university that is faithful].
Cut in half the budget of the Center for Pastoral Life and Ministry, effectively forcing the almost immediate resignation of half the seven-member team. Within 10 months all seven would be gone and the center shuttered.
Ordered a “zero-based study” of adult catechesis in the diocese and appointed as vice chancellor to oversee adult catechesis, lay formation and the catechesis study a layman with no formal training in theology or religious studies.
Ordered the editor of the diocesan newspaper to immediately cease publishing columns by Notre Dame theologian Fr. Richard McBrien[note: I can't believe a bishop wouldn't want his flock reading the near heretical writings of Fr. McBrien].
Announced that he would review all front page stories, opinion pieces, columns and editorials before publication[note: Oh man! He wants the Catholic newspaper to be Catholic].

And here are his year 1 priorities:

The budget of the Office of Peace and Justice was cut in half. One of two full-time staff positions was eliminated, and the other may be reduced.
Support of the Diocesan Bolivian Mission, a relationship established with the La Paz archdiocese in 1963, was cut from $50,000 annually to $10,000 annually. Fr. Michael Gillgannon, the diocesan priest missioned to Bolivia since 1974, learned of the cut while home on leave in April.
The Vocation Office went from a part-time priest vocation director to a full-time priest vocation director with a part-time priest assistant and additional support from the head of the newly established Office for Consecrated Life[note: wow, a focus on vocations...how terrible].
A separate Respect Life Office was established to handle pro-life issues and battle stem-cell research[note: And he's willing to put some support to pro-life issues...how 'conservative' of him].
The diocesan-sponsored master’s program, administered for eight years by the Aquinas Institute of Theology, a Dominican school affiliated with Jesuit-run St. Louis University, was transferred to the Institute for Pastoral Theology at Florida-based Ave Maria University. Ave Maria is being developed by former Domino’s Pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan, who has funded a host of conservative Catholic efforts[note: I love this bishop].
Finn upgraded a Latin Mass community, which has been meeting in a city parish, to a parish in its own right and appointed himself pastor[note: I love him even more, now].

Let us pray that we have more bishops like Bishop Finn lead our nation...men who strive for holiness in everyday life and are not afraid to "rock the boat" a bit in order to teach people about Christ and His Church.

Religion may not be true...but it makes me feel better!

2006-05-10T09:17:00.000-07:00

Here is an incredibly stupid article from the Washington Post about parents who don't believe in God, but want their children to be involved in "religion" for its "psychological and spiritual comforts"...are you serious? Now, I think that they are right in sensing that there is a need for God in order to have moral order in the world, but these people are not looking for Truth (with a capital "T"), but rather they hope that their children get "spirituality"...ugh, I hate that word.

Here are some RIDICULOUS quotes from the article (my comments in yellow):

1) Gauri says he wants to offer Yasmeen (his daughter) the moral foundation and spiritual guidance he believes religion can provide. Perhaps above all, he wants his daughter to enjoy religion's potential for providing solace. Recently, the 5-year-old expressed a deep-felt desire: "I wish people wouldn't grow old and die," she said. Religion, Gauri hopes, "can help her find some ways of living with that kind of loss."

[So you giving your daughter 'religion' so she can cope when you die? What?]

2) Asked if she believes in God, Koralleen Stavish says, "I just don't get it." But years ago, at a relative's christening, an idea hit her: With no experience of religion, how could her kids make up their minds about it? Or, as she quips, if they didn't study religion, "how could they reject it properly?" So she joined a Lutheran church and enrolled the kids in Sunday school. She even started attending services pretty regularly, despite her discomfort mouthing prayers she didn't believe.

[So you giving your kids 'religion' so that they can truly reject it? What?]

3) Khan also believes that spirituality -- with its sense of purpose and meaning -- is key to her children's emotional well-being. And she's convinced it would be a lot tougher for them to develop spirituality without the structure and guidance that religion offers.

So she and Gauri are dishing up a religious smorgasbord: Islam from one grandma, Hindu from the other, a Quaker school, a Buddhist retreat and a bit of evangelical Christianity via their former nanny. As Khan acknowledges, "Only time will tell if we were creating great confusion or great enlightenment."

[Yep, a six-year old will definitely be able to discern the truths of God from this buffet line...]

4) Parents might want to check out a religious school or place of worship in advance to avoid a fundamental clash with their own beliefs. A couple might sidestep a stricter sect if they're concerned their child will worry about God's punishing her parents' irreverent ways. If their kids later want to increase the family's religious observance, parents should be prepared to work toward compromise.

And what if a youngster asks point-blank if Mommy and Daddy believe in God? Mahoney recommends answering honestly but age-appropriately; complex theological musings could frighten a child who wants only a simple reply.

Considering such potential pitfalls, some therapists advise conflicted parents to explore alternative routes to spirituality.

[Man, it would be terrible to go to a church that actually teaches morals (gasp!) and that God exists (gulp!) and that irreverent ways are wrong (oh my!)...if it does, then just go for "alternative routes to spirituality" aka crapola...]

Would Jesus play video games? Would he shoot people?

2006-05-10T09:06:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article from the LA Times talking about how new video games are coming out which attempt to have a "spiritual" or Christian message in them. Will kids actually want to play them? We'll see. However, the better answer is that parents should get their kids away from the TV and into reading, sports, playing outside, music, SOMETHING....

Also involved in this discussion is how can a "shooter game" (a game where kids are trying to kill one another) be a "Christian game"...that is what they are trying to do with this "Left Behind" themed game....you are trying to kill the armies of the anti-Christ. Does that fit into the just war category?!? Here are some screen shots from the "Left Behind" game....

Great Gospel of Judas Cartoon....

2006-05-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

From Savage Chickens...

What if women could have been apostles?

2006-05-09T11:06:00.000-07:00

A female New Testament professor at Vanderbilt asks the question at Beliefnet. Here's her conclusion, which I agree with:

And, rather than ask how Christianity would be different had women "been given an equal seat at the table," we might note that Jesus' teaching is not ultimately about getting a seat at the table. In antiquity that location easily signaled elite status. Jesus' message is not to sit at table, but to provide food for those who need it, not to be served but to serve. Christianity taught then, and it teaches now, that the hungry should be fed, that people in prison should be visited, that the sick should be cared for, and that the stranger should be welcomed. Who in antiquity did most of the feeding, the visiting, the nursing, and the welcoming? The answer has not changed over the past two millennia.

In the long run, I worry less about what the church would be like if women had greater roles in antiquity, and wonder more what it would be like if everyone, male and female, decided to serve rather than be served.

Just what we need...another "-ism"

2006-05-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

A ndrew Sullivan, over at his blog at Time, attacks the religious right for making Christianity a political movement. This Christian political movement should be called "Christianism", so that he can now hate something that is separated from the Christian faith. What he seems to be saying is that people should take their faith seriously, but it shouldn't have an impact on their politics. Huh? Here's his closing paragraph:

I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.

I agree with him that God doesn't back a particular party, BUT I would argue that God, for example, is absolutely pro-life...and that the Democrats are not very welcoming to such a position, while the Republicans are....so, it's not that God is a Republican, but that the Republican stance on that specific issue is more in line with the will of God. Sullivan thinks that is intolerant. So be it.

Can Commonweal unearth the identity of Diogenes?

2006-05-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

Commonweal, the liberal unorthodox "Catholic" magazine, can't stand that most of the Catholic blogosphere is filled with faithful, orthodox Catholics. One such blogger is the blunt and truthful Diogenes over at the Catholic World News. His blog, Off the Record, is a daily must read. He pounds the liberals day in and day out. Commonweal hasn't been a target for him yet (that I have seen), but they ought to be. They are getting frustrated that no one knows his identity, so they are trying to open it up and get to the bottom of it. Here is their post, and the comments are pretty interesting as well (especially the one liberal Jesuit who works at America Magazine who refers to Diogenes as "hate-spewing").

Sen. Santorum thinks we need to get tougher with China on religious freedom

2006-05-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

Spreading the seeds of freedom

By Sen. Rick Santorum

May 8, 2006

In nations like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, state-sponsored religious persecution often infects other areas of civil society and stifles other personal freedoms. The case of Hao Wu in China demonstrates this reality.

On February 22nd, the Chinese government arrested Mr. Wu, a filmmaker who, after spending twelve years in the U.S. -- including a few years in my state as a legal permanent resident -- recently returned to his native China to create a documentary on the underground church movement. Although Chinese officials have not given any explanation for his detainment, it seems clear from his ongoing detention that his film project was an irritant to the Chinese government, the same government the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently recommended be kept on the State Department’s list of "Countries of Particular Concern" (CPCs): nations whose human rights records are particularly execrable and warrant particular attention.

Beijing officially recognizes only state-approved churches and permits only them to meet in public. Recognition of non-sanctioned churches or religious groups comes in the form of arrests, beatings, and persecution of Christians, Buddhists, the Falun Gong, and in some cases, similar treatment for their family members as well. What makes Mr. Wu’s case unique is that he is not a member of any religious community, sanctioned or not.

Recently the President of China visited the White House, where President Bush said, "China can grow even more successful by allowing the Chinese people the freedom to assemble, to speak freely, and to worship." President Bush understands that religious freedom is intimately connected to other personal liberties: freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the right to a fair trial. Chapters two and three of the Bush administration’s 2006 National Security Strategy outline the president's commitment to encouraging freedom of religious expression throughout the world.

While I share President Bush’s commitment to international religious freedom, I believe our government needs to rethink its understanding of religious freedom in relation to our foreign policy strategies. And by supporting international religious freedom through every avenue available to us, we may begin to stem the tide of religious persecution that washes over far too much of our world.

As former State Department Deputy Undersecretary for International Religious Freedom Thomas Farr points out in a recent issue of First Things, the United States must no longer allow religion to be consigned to the realm of the irrelevant by our diplomatic corps; the "secular myopia" that prevails within the diplomatic community must be abandoned. If we are to understand nations and peoples defined by religious identification, we must stop behaving as if religion is the pastime of the unenlightened.

Diplomatically, we must galvanize the International Religious Freedom Act; see religious freedom as a non-negotiable cornerstone to any fledgling democratic state; insist that our allies protect the religious rights of all citizens, regardless of whether their beliefs comport with the state’s or not (e.g., Copts in Egypt); ask that U.S. officials, when meeting with leaders of "Countries of Particular Concern," name and inquire about the status of prisoners of conscience; and do more than merely issue reports on the incidences of religious freedom abuses worldwide.

It further means keeping religious freedom concerns on the forefront of any legislative agenda and to the extent we are able, supporting indigenous religious freedom movements worldwide. To this end, I founded and lead the bicameral Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom, which updates members of congress, their staff, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on incidences of religious persecution, and works to keep the promotion of liberty and freedom in the minds of my congressional colleagues.

Concerning Mr. Wu, I wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on April 27th and urged her to do all she can to work toward his release. I have also sent a letter of inquiry to the Chinese Ambassador seeking answers as to why Mr. Wu is being held, and what the Chinese government intends to do with him.

Ronald Reagan once said, "Given the freedom to choose, people choose freedom.” We know this to be true from the recent elections in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while we recognize that the first fruits of electoral freedom might sometimes be distasteful or even unacceptable, as in the case of Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan, we recognize that our opportunity to spread the seeds of freedom is the calling of our time.

Rick Santorum has served in the United States Senate since January of 1995.

The DaVinci Catechism?

2006-05-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

Fr. John Wauck has a great blog today (as usual). He calls it the DaVinci Code Catechism:
---------------------------

The Da Vinci Code is only a novel. It is not a source of serious information, but it does raise some serious questions.

1. Was Jesus Christ really married?
Yes. Jesus was married to the Church. In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently referred to as the Bridegroom, and St. Paul tells us: “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh. This is a tremendous mystery. I’m applying it to Christ and the Church.” (Ephesians 5:31-32) In fact, the Christian vocation is nothing less than an invitation to the eternal “wedding supper” (Rev. 19:9) of Christ and His Bride, the Church.

2. Did the Church really create the New Testament?
Yes. Without the Church, we wouldn’t know which of the many ancient texts that talk about Jesus were inspired by God; we wouldn’t have the New Testament. Jesus Christ directly gave His divine authority not to a group of texts which didn’t exist in His time, but rather to a group of men, the twelve apostles and their successors (bishops), who teach in His name and with His authority.

3. Is sex really meant to be holy?
Yes. That’s why one of the seven Christian sacraments is called Holy Matrimony (the literal meaning of “hieros gamos”). Christian marriage and the priesthood are holy and sanctifying vocations approached through special sacraments (Holy Matrimony and Holy Orders respectively). All the sacraments – like Baptism or the Eucharist, for instance - are outward signs instituted by Christ to give grace, and, in fact, the ministers of this sacrament are the bride and groom themselves.

4. Did Jesus Christ really leave descendents?
Yes. Jesus is God, and He gave all who believe in Him the power to be God’s children. In short, we are His descendents: “See what love the Father has given us so that we might be called children of God – and so we are!… Beloved, we’re now God’s children” (1 John 3:1-2). So forget about the Merovingians. We are the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9).

5. Is our culture really missing a figure of female sanctity?
Yes, in today’s world there is such a missing woman. Her name is Mary, and she should be venerated not as the wife of a mortal man but rather as the Mother of God. Happily, she is not hard to find. Hers is the most familiar female face in history, represented in countless works of art. The best place in the world to find grown men and women praying on their knees to a woman, perhaps saying the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is in a Christian church.

6. Should we really pray over the bones of Mary Magdalen?
Yes. Saint Mary Magdalen is honored by the countless churches and women named after her and by a special Mass on her feast day (July 22). In fact, for more than a millennium, Christians have made pilgrimages to pray in the Basilica of St. Maximin in southern France, where a tradition says that Saint Mary Magdalen was buried.

7. Does a Holy Grail really exist?
Yes. The popular story of “the Holy Grail” is a medieval legend, but a non-fictional Holy Grail can be found on the altar during every Mass. What made the chalice of the Last Supper so holy was the blood of Jesus Christ that it contained, and in the Holy Mass, that blood is once again present. This means that every chalice in every Mass is truly a “Holy Grail.”

8. Did a woman’s womb really carry the blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of God?
Yes. The uterus of the Blessed Virgin Mary contained not only the blood but also the entire body of Jesus Christ for nine months. That’s why, when they pray the “Hail Mary”, Christians refer to Jesus as the fruit of her womb and praise Mary as a most honorable “Vessel”.

For once I agree with Iran's clergy....

2006-05-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

Women shouldn't be allowed to watch sports with men....
-----------------------------------------------------------

Iranian clergy angry over women fans

By Frances Harrison
BBC correspondent in Tehran

It is hoped the presence of families will improve stadium behaviour

Iran's religious right is voicing growing opposition to a decision to let women watch football matches for the first time since the 1979 revolution.

Six grand ayatollahs and several MPs have protested against the move, saying it violates Islamic law for a woman to look at the body of a male stranger.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that stadiums would reserve special areas for women and families.

The move was welcomed by women's rights groups which long contested the ban.

Mr Ahmadinejad, who is regarded as an ultra conservative, lifted the male-spectators-only rule on Monday.

It was a highly populist move in a country where both sexes love football and there is growing excitement about the World Cup.

Bad language

Members of the clergy say it is wrong for men and women to look at each other's bodies, even if they have no intention of taking pleasure from it.

The president may find he has kicked an own goal

One MP said, if the reformists had tried this, there would have been suicide bombers protesting on the streets of Teheran.

A hardline newspaper said the atmosphere in football stadiums was now so deplorable one should weep - a reference to the bad language and rowdy behaviour of male football fans here.

It is this failure to control the male spectators that is often given as the main reason for not allowing women into football matches.

Women can watch football broadcast on Iranian television and they can attend basketball and volleyball matches even though they too involve men dressed in shorts.

Speaking on state-run television on Monday, Mr Ahmadinejad said he had ordered the head of Iran's Physical Education Committee to make sure women were adequately catered for during Iran's major sporting occasions.

"The presence of women and families in public places promotes chastity," he said.

"The best stands should be allocated to women and families in the stadiums in which national and important matches are being held."

Bootylicious Backlash...

2006-05-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

Several month ago my wife and I saw some middle school girls get off the bus after a long day at class, and I was struck by one thing: Oh my gosh, they have no clothes on. They were dressed as if they were going freak dancing in some shady NY club at 2 in the morning. I could see more skin than cloth. And this was they wear to math class?

Anyway, here is an interesting article about the "pure fashion" movement, which teaches that "you don’t have to look promiscuous to be glamourous." Our society definitely promotes the idea to young women that "your body is your best asset", which is a huge lie...this group is a good way to attempt to turn this attitude around. Here's the intro to the article:

-----------------------------------------------
Bootylicious backlash ANNE MARIE OWENS

The Pure Fashion movement is giving girls an alternative to hyper-sexualized ways of dressing.

When the models stroll down the catwalk at Calgary’s Spruce Meadows Congress Hall this weekend, there will be no plunging necklines, no exposed thongs or teddies, no skintight pants or barely-there skirts.

These models, all of them young women between the ages of 12 and 18, will instead be adhering to the dictates of an alternative fashion movement that espouses these kinds of counter-cultural beliefs: Undergarments should not become outer-garments; clothing should not reveal what should be concealed; and it’s possible to be pretty without being provocative.

This is the Pure Fashion movement, gaining popularity among churchgoing families as an antidote to the Britney-Spears-induced realm of sexualized attire for girls at ever-younger ages.

And while what’s going on in Calgary this weekend and in the handful of U.S. cities also involved in this program may be a fringe movement, there are hints that its new modesty ethos may be gaining ground.

The fashions at all of the major international shows took a noticeable turn toward covering up this season, with longer hemlines, higher necklines and more voluminous clothing on the runways in Paris, Milan, New York and London.

Even the world of cheerleading is beginning to eschew its sexualized dress and demeanour: The British Cheerleading Association recently adopted new modesty rules that prohibit any midriffbaring fashions; and the House of Representatives in Texas — home state of the original pom-pom-toting sex symbols, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders — voted to ban “overtly sexually suggestive” routines for school cheerleaders.

A controversial window display in the Oakville lululemon outlet encapsulates the competing choices for its young, affluent clientele this way: On one side is Yoga Girl in the stylish but comfortable attire that has made the retailer popular; on the other, Stupid Girl identifies the crasslooking fashion of mannequins surrounded by trashy celebrity magazines.

“There’s such a big push from the entertainment media and from Hollywood that these girls just get sucked into thinking they have to dress provocatively to be in fashion. We’re teaching them they can be fashionable and pure,” says Jodie Britton, the Calgary woman who has brought Pure Fashion to Calgary, the only Canadian city to officially join the organization, although there’s been interest in hosting similar events in Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver and Halifax.

Fr. Thomas Williams on "inclusive Christianity"

2006-05-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

I've seen these ads for the United Church of Christ, which basically say "come join our church, we're not judgmental". But what they really mean is: " we don't care about morality...everything goes!" Fr. Thomas has a few insightful thoughts, as always. Here's the intro to the National Review article...
-----------------------------------------------------------

Inclusive Christianity REV. THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, LC

To celebrate Holy Week and Easter, the United Church of Christ (UCC) produced an attention-grabbing television ad highlighting its inclusive policies.

Viewers watch (see here) an “intolerant” church rejecting — or rather, literally ejecting — a black mother, a gay couple, an Arab, and a person using a walker. As each tries to sit in a church pew, he or she is sent flying by an ejector seat. The ad contrasts the inclusive UCC with the ejecting church: “The United Church of Christ: no matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”

This is, in many ways, a wonderful message. It strikes a chord with us Americans in our conviction that all should be welcome, none rejected. The inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, penned by American poet Emma Lazarus in 1883, sums up American open-heartedness:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

More to the point, wasn’t it Christ himself who welcomed the “wretched refuse” of his time, associating with publicans and adulterers, lepers, prostitutes, and the whole offal of Palestine? He and his disciples were from the wrong side of the tracks, the Palestinian outback of Galilee — a powerful message for the rich and famous of his time and ours. He was fiercely criticized for fraternizing with outcasts, and disparagingly dubbed a “friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Isn’t this absolute inclusiveness essential to the Christian message?

Yet I suspect the UCC ad had a more specific criticism in mind. I am unaware of any church in America that turns away blacks, or that has a policy against Arabs or handicapped persons. There are, however, a number of Christian churches that consider homosexual behavior to be sinful. By sneaking the gay couple in between the African-American woman and the Arab-American, the UCC disingenuously equates racial discrimination with moral principle.

Masons say they can be Christian?

2006-05-05T07:18:00.000-07:00

This article confused me...why do the Mason care what the Catholic Church teaches?

MASONS CLAIM COMPATIBILITY WITH CHRISTIAN FAITH, CALL FOR LIFTING OF EXCOMMUNICATION

Madrid, May 04, 2006 (CNA) - The head office of Masons in Spain is calling on the Spanish bishops’ Committee on the Doctrine of the Faith to review the decree of excommunication imposed on Catholics who practice Masonry, claiming it does not contradict Christianity.

In a press release, the Spanish masons said that the Church is committing an “injustice” in their case, because the Masonic system to which they belong-the Rectified Scottish Rite (RSR)-is “totally Christian” and does not attack “Christianity or any Roman Catholic dogma.”

The masons said they have turned over the complete texts of the RSR to the Benedictine Monastery of Montserrat “as sign of our good will and so that they can be calmly reviewed and studied by the person or persons designated by the Catholic Church.”

The masons said the press release was “the continuation of diverse contacts” that have been made with the Church in Spain. They added that they were determined to find a resolution to the matter.

The Code of Canon Law promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1983 states in canon 1374 that, a “person who joins an association which plots against the Church is to be punished with a just penalty; however, a person who promotes or directs an association of this kind is to be punished with an interdict.”

Since the new code only implicitly mentions Masonry, then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, published a statement on November 26 of the same year in order to clear up any confusion and reaffirming the Church’s “negative judgment” regarding Masonry, “because their principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the teaching of the Church.

Consequently, membership in such associations continues to be prohibited by the Church. The faithful who belong to Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and cannot present themselves to receive Holy Communion,” the statement noted.

Likewise it warned that local Church authorities do not have the competence to issue pronouncements about the nature Masonic associations that would imply a repealing of what the Church has already established in the declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of February 17, 1981.

Mommies should make $135,000

2006-05-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

Any man who is married and has a stay-at-home wife knows that even $135k is too little a salary for all the work she does...but here's an interesting study which calculated what a stay-at-home mom shoud make. Here's the intro:

Study: US Mothers Deserve $134,121

By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A full-time stay-at-home mother would earn $134,121 a year if paid for all her work, an amount similar to a top U.S. ad executive, a marketing director or a judge, according to a study released on Wednesday.

A mother who works outside the home would earn an extra $85,876 annually on top of her actual wages for the work she does at home, according to the study by Waltham, Massachusetts-based compensation experts Salary.com.

To reach the projected pay figures, the survey calculated the earning power of the 10 jobs respondents said most closely comprise a mother's role -- housekeeper, day-care teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive and psychologist.

"You can't put a dollar value on it. It's worth a lot more," said Kristen Krauss, 35, as she hurriedly packed her four children, all aged under 8, into a minivan in New York while searching frantically for her keys. "Just look at me."

Employed mothers reported spending on average 44 hours a week at their outside job and 49.8 hours at their home job, while the stay-at-home mother worked 91.6 hours a week, it showed.

An estimated 5.6 million women in the United States are stay-at-home mothers with children under age 15, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

Rome church before and after DV Code

2006-05-03T11:51:00.000-07:00

Fr. John Wauck updated his great blog to show the before and after pictures of St. Pantaleone with the DV Code advertisement. He said that actually they didn't take the ad down, but simply turned it around. Here they are....

A Constitutional Prayer Amendment

2006-05-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

It doesn't have a prayer (pun intended) of passing, but I guess it brings school prayer to the forefront...

SENATOR BYRD PROPOSES CONSTITUTIONAL PRAYER AMENDMENT

Washington DC, May 02, 2006 (CNA) - For the eighth time in 43 years, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) has proposed that the U.S. Congress adopt a constitutional amendment allowing voluntary prayer in public schools. Byrd introduced the amendment in the U.S. Senate April 27.

"The importance of prayer is recognized by people of faith in nearly all of the world's religions," Byrd said, according to the Daily Mail newspaper. "Yet, in America, prayer is increasingly barred from public life,” based on the argument that it violates the First Amendment."

Byrd believes the nation's courts pay too much attention to the clause in the First Amendment that says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," and disregards the second part about "prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..."

"I believe that, in ruling after ruling, the U.S. courts have been moving perilously close to prohibiting the free exercise of religion in America,” he reportedly said.

Byrd said the "ingrained predisposition" in the courts against religious or spiritual expressions is contrary to the intent of the country's founding fathers. Byrd discussed this point with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

"It seems to me that any prohibition of voluntary prayer in school violates the right of our school children to practice freely their religion," the senator reportedly said. "Any child should be free to pray to God, of his or her own volition, whether at home, in church or at school."

Byrd also said that voluntary school prayer would help in "getting the country back on the right track,” reported the Daily Mail.

The amendment will go to the Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration. The Supreme Court struck down prayer in schools in 1962.

Fascinating article from Aljazeera....

2006-05-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

It's an article from a Muslim scholar who uses the Quran to argue for:

1) Intellectual freedom
2) Religious freedom
3) An Islamic distinction between morality and legality
4) A recognition that apostasy does not equal treason and therefore should not be punishable by death.

Now, this scholar now lives in the US, and so he has the ability to write this article without fear of attack. However, if he were living in the Middle East somewhere, would he be willing to proclaim these same points? I don't know. But there needs to be more Muslim intellectuals who are seeking to understand how Islam and religious/intellectual freedom can co-exist.

Here is the beginning of the article:

"Intolerance show ignorance of Islam"
by Mohamed El-Moctar Shinqiti

Eighty years ago, Marmaduke Pickthall, the British scholar of Islam and translator of the Quran, wrote: "It was not until the Western nations broke away from their religious law that they became more tolerant, and it was only when the Muslims fell away from their religious law that they declined in tolerance."

Tolerance was regarded as irreligious in the Christian world, but was an essential part of Islam, but it is no longer credited to Muslims.

Nowadays, the more "religious" some Muslims regard themselves to be, the less tolerant they are. The cause is a troubling intellectual decline of the Islamic civilisation.

While Muslims complain about the Western lack of understanding of Islam, this misconstruction in the interpretation of religious texts is unfortunately prevalent in the Muslim mind today.

John Daly...what?!?@$!@?

2006-05-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

So, John Daly...winner of TWO major championships has quite a track record of difficulties:

- alcoholism (claimed that he drank a fifth of Jack each and every day during the year he was 23 years of age) and has gone through at least three "programs"
- overweight
- three divorces
- wife in prison
- was kicked off airplane flight for abuse of the flight attendant while drunk
- smokes like a chimney
- got into several post round fights in parking lots
- many, many instances of making 10+ on holes on the PGA Tour from not caring
- once had to quit a tournament because he had the trembles so bad....that was sad to watch
- and much, much more....

However, he dropped an absolute bombshell in his recent book...apparently over the last 10 years or so, he has lost appromixately $50 to 60 MILLION DOLLARS ON GAMBLING. Are you serious? What? He tells one story in his book of earning $750,000 when he lost in a playoff to Tiger Woods last fall in San Francisco at a World Golf Championship. Instead of going home, he drove to Las Vegas and says he lost $1.65 million in five hours playing mostly $5,000 slot machines. Wow.

Here's an article from Sports Illustrated about it.

One Hundred Billion (pronounced BEEEEL-YON)...

2006-05-01T15:43:00.000-07:00

...Catholics! Actually it's just 1.1 billion. Whatever.

WORLD CATHOLIC POPULATION AT 1.098 BILLION

Vatican, May. 01 (CWNews.com) - The world's Catholic population is now 1.098 billion, according to the latest figures from the Vatican's statistical bureau.

The figures contained in the Annuarium Statiscum Ecclesiae, presented to the press on April 30, show the number of Catholics in the world growing at roughly the same rate as the overall global population. The rising numbers of Catholics come mainly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The Annuarium, which will be published this week, covers the Catholic population from 1978 to 2004, the last year for which full statistics are available. The volume, which will be published this week by the Vatican, offers a more complete analysis of the figures provided in the Annuario Pontificio, the official Vatican yearbook that appeared in February.

From 1978 to 2004 the world's Catholic population grew by 45%, from 757 million to 1,098 million. But in Europe the percentage of Catholics dropped slightly over the same period, from 40.5% to 39.5%. There are now 280 millions in Europe: an increase of only 12 million from 1978.

The growth of the Catholic population in Africa has been much more positive. There the number of Catholics has almost tripled: from 55 million in 1978 to nearly 149 million in 2004. There has been a similar pattern of growth in Asia and the Americas-- where the number of Catholics has grown by 49.7% and 79.6%, respectively, over the same period. The Vatican statistical bureau notes that these figures reflect the overall population growth in those regions. Catholics now account for 62% of the people in the Americas, but only 3% in Asia.

The number of Catholic bishops rose 28% between 1978 and 2004, with the media age of those bishops also rising, so that in 2004 the average bishop was over 67 years old. The number of priests worldwide rose much less sharply: by 3.5%. The number of seminarians grew by 77%, with that increase attributable to sharp rises in Africa and Latin America. In Europe, however, over the same period of time the number of priests dropped more than 20%. In religious life, the number of male religious (excluding priests) dropped by 27% over the period of the Annuarium study, and the number of female religious dropped by 22%.

The steepest increase shown in the Annuarium is in the number of permanent deacons. From 1978 to 2004 that number soared from 5,500 to 32,000 worldwide, with 97% of the permanent deacons found in North America and Europe.

University presidents battle for honors in spinelessness

2006-05-01T15:14:00.000-07:00

John Leo at Townhall.com gives his annual Sheldon Awards...given to lame university presidents who love double standards. He names five in this article....he could have gone on forever if he'd looked closer at the Ivy League presidents. Here's the intro to the article:

University Presidents Battle for Honors in Spinelessless
by John Leo

It's time for this column to announce its Sheldon Award, given annually to the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus. As all Sheldon fans know, the prize is a statuette that looks something like the Oscar, except that the Oscar shows a man with no face looking straight ahead, whereas the Sheldon shows a man with no spine looking the other way. The award is named for Sheldon Hackney, former president of the University of Pennsylvania and a modern legend in looking the other way.

College presidents who say and do nothing about newspaper thefts or unconstitutional speech codes usually make it to the Sheldon finals. But not this year. The competition was too keen. At least five colleges suffered thefts of newspapers in April 2006 alone, too many for even the most relentlessly silent president to make much headway toward a Sheldon.

The Pope kicks off the Month of Ma(r)y

2006-05-01T12:38:00.000-07:00

Pope launches month of Mary with visit to Shrine

Rome, May. 01, 2006 (CNA) - Conversion to God, who is a God of Love, is necessary today for the world to be “liberated from war and terrorism,” said Pope Benedict XVI Monday during his papal visit to the Italian Shrine of Our Lady of Divine Love.

During his discourse to the faithful who gathered at the shrine, he recalled several points that he made in his first encyclical, Deus caritas est.

“From this shrine, I renew my invitation that was expressed in Deus caritas est: let us live love and, in this way, we will allow the light of God to shine in the world,” he said.

The Pope’s one-hour visit to the shrine on the first day of May launched what is considered the month of Mary in the Church. He led the recitation of the rosary in the old sanctuary and prayed privately in the new sanctuary, which was consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1999. He recalled his predecessor’s first visit to the sanctuary in 1979.

“It is a comfort for me to be here with you today to recite the rosary in this Shrine of Our Lady of Divine Love, in which we express great affection for the Virgin Mary, rooted in the soul and history of the Roman people,” he said, following the prayer.

He noted how the Joyful Mysteries “allow the beginnings of our salvation to pass before the eyes of our heart… We have contemplated the docile faith of Mary, who trusts God without reserve and places herself fully in his hands.”

The link that unites Mary and the Holy Spirit was clear throughout her life, from the moment of her Immaculate Conception, to her fiat, to her Assumption into heaven at the end of her earthly life, the Pope said.

“In the encyclical Deus caritas est I wrote that Mary is a woman who loves,” he stated. “Yes, dear brothers and sisters, Mary is the fruit and the sign of the love God has for us, of his tenderness and of his mercy.

“For this reason, together with our brothers in the faith of every time and place, we turn to her in our needs and hopes, and in the difficulties of life,” he said.

The Pope noted that many people will likely make a pilgrimage to the shrine in May and said he expected “strong spiritual support” to emanate from the shrine for the Diocese of Rome, for its bishops and clergy, for families, vocations, the poor, children, the elderly, all those who suffer and the nation of Italy.

“We also await the interior strength to fulfill the promise made by the Romans June 4, 1944, when they solemnly asked Our Lady of Divine Love to spare this city from the horrors of war,” he said. The promise was to correct and improve one’s personal moral conduct and conform it more to that of Jesus.

The Pope also recalled the victims, civilians and troops, in last week’s attack in Nassiriya, Iraq. “We entrust them to the intercession of Mary, Queen of Peace,” he concluded.

Reviving an Ancient Monastery in Syria

2006-05-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

Interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about an Italian Jesuit who discovered a crumbling, unused 6th century monestary, and is attempting to bring it back to prominence. He is also trying to use it as a means of bridging the gap between Christians and Muslims in Syria.

A Syrian monastery lies at the nexus of Islam, Christianity

By James Brandon
DEIR MAR MUSA, SYRIA - It is late afternoon at the monastery of Deir Mar Musa on the edge of the Syrian desert and the only sounds are the call of desert birds and the whisper of the breeze over time-worn stones.

Until, that is, a group of Muslim schoolgirls arrive from a nearby town to fill the monastery's valley with laughter and joyful chattering.

"Keep the noise down. This is a monastery," bellows the Rev. Paolo Dall'Oglio, the monastery's Italian Jesuit founder, looking stern for a moment before breaking into a broad, proud smile.

The monastery of Deir Mar Musa was first built by Greek monks in the sixth century as a remote retreat from the material and political world. Abandoned in the 19th century, it once again houses a small religious community. But now, under its second founder, Father Dall'Oglio, it is on the forefront of politics with a fresh approach to bridge-building with the Islamic world.

"When I arrived here 25 years ago, Syria was [a] center of the struggle between communism and capitalism," says Dall'Oglio, dressed in a worn gray pullover. "And today it is the crossroads between Islam and Christianity."

"For us, dialogue really starts from being curious about others," he says, explaining that instead of proselytizing, the Catholic Church now advocates building bridges with Islam.

Through day-to-day interaction, bridge-building is what the Deir Mar Musa's six monks and nuns and several lay assistants are working toward. Traveling to local Muslim communities they work with Muslim leaders to improve opportunities for young people, promote ecological awareness, and arrange theological discussions between religious leaders.

"It's really just a simple, evangelical life," he says, stroking silvery beard. "I accept pluralism as a gift from God."

In 1977, Dell'oglio began studying Arabic in Damascus, where he soon heard about a ruined Byzantine monastery 50 miles away on the edge of the Syrian desert.

Five years later he made his first visit. After leaving the main road and trekking into barren hills, he arrived at a crumbling building. Clambering through the ruins, he found himself in a roofless church staring at medieval frescos slowly dissolving beneath the sun, wind, and rain.

"I came here for 10 days of prayer and meditation," he says. When he returned to Damascus, he began laying plans for nearly a decade to restore the ruins and make it the home for a new sort of monastery.

REBUILT: An Italian Jesuit has reopened an ancient monastery in Syria to act as a bridge between Christians and Muslims.

Babe Ruth Helps Out a Parish

2006-05-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

What a great story. In 1923, Babe Ruth made an apperance in Philadelphia to help a parish pay for its baseball field. The story, from the Philadelphia Inquirer, is definitely worth a read. Here's the intro to the article:

The Babe in Kensington

In '23, the legend helped a parish pay off its ball field.

By Frank Fitzpatrick

Inquirer Staff Writer

Barry Bonds might well surpass Babe Ruth's home-run total when he and the Giants make their only 2006 visit to Citizens Bank Park next weekend.

But you can bet your supply of performance-enhancing substances that Bonds won't duplicate the feat Ruth achieved in Philadelphia on Sept. 4, 1923.

We won't see Bonds, or any other major-leaguer for that matter, playing two nine-inning games with his major-league team and a Catholic parish club on the same day. We won't see him hitting fungoes into a crowd of Kensington youngsters, donning the uniform of that parish team, or dirtying it by stealing home.

Ruth did that, and more, on that busy late-summer Tuesday nearly 83 years ago.

The strange saga - details of which were extracted from the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historical Archives at St. Charles Seminary - all began when the Rev. William Casey became concerned that the working-class children in the Kensington parish he pastored, Ascension of Our Lord, didn't have enough wholesome activities.

So Casey took out a loan and built them a ball field at I and Tioga Streets.

Soon, it became clear that the workers who toiled at neighborhood factories making Stetson hats and Philco batteries weren't going to be able to put enough extra into the collection plates to pay for handsome Boger Field.

Casey, who also served as the Philadelphia Athletics chaplain, went searching for a money-making scheme. Looking at the A's schedule one afternoon at Shibe Park, he found one.

The two-time defending American League-champion New York Yankees, with their sensational 28-year-old slugger Babe Ruth, were due in town for an early September series. Casey knew that Ruth had grown up at St. Mary's, a Catholic orphanage in Baltimore, and had a soft spot for kids.

When the Yankees visited Philadelphia for a July series, Casey approached Ruth with his proposition: Would he be willing to help him pay off the ball field by participating in a charity game there in September?

"Is it going to help the kids, Father?" Ruth asked.

Assured that a significant ticket sale would indeed help the youngsters, Ruth instantly agreed to participate in the event two months away.

Another pro-lifish Democrat?

2006-05-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

Pro-life Democrat Vying for Governor

By Valerie Richardson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
May 1, 2006

DENVER -- After eight years of chafing under the rule of Republican Gov. Bill Owens, Colorado Democrats have a candidate for governor with a real shot at winning -- and he opposes abortion.
Bill Ritter, the former Denver district attorney who's running unchallenged for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, doesn't describe himself as pro-life -- but he is also not pro-choice -- thus violating what has become a virtual litmus test for Democratic officeholders.
His candidacy has created an awkward situation for state Democrats, who are presented this year with an opportunity to capture both the legislature and the governor's mansion.

CBS News investigates the Priory of Sion and finds out...

2006-05-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

THAT IT IS A HOAX! Sorry Dan Brown and all you Da Vinci people, but unfortunately even CBS News can figure out that the "research" done by Dan Brown is pathetic.

Here's the link.

The Bishop of Fort Bend bring the hammer down on Notre Dame...

2006-05-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

Bishop D'Arcy is greatly disappointed in the leadership of Notre Dame, who recently allowed the Vagina Monologues to be presented on campus. It was an opportunity to show the world that Notre Dame will stand for Truth and Light, and instead, they caved to the whims of society.

I have to say that I'm greatly encouraged to hear a bishop come out and speak against the intellectual and moral trash that many Catholic universities are spewing out these days.

Here is a phenomenal quote from his pastoral letter to the diocese:

Only when Notre Dame makes its great decisions in light of the truths of faith will its Catholic identity grow. To set aside these truths, as seems to have happened in this case, at least in the campus-wide discussions and in Father Jenkins’ Closing Statement, is to turn away from its vocation. It lacks fidelity to Father Sorin’s original enterprise and to the vocation to which every Catholic university is called.

Does this decision and the way it was explained mean that Notre Dame and its leadership will no longer make its critical decisions based on faith, on revealed truth, on those things which come from God and the church, but only on those things that may seem to endear it to secular institutions of higher learning? I pray that this may never be so.

And he closes the letter with:

Some have said that this is a watershed moment in Notre Dame’s history and certainly any discussion of academic freedom and Catholic character goes to the heart of Notre Dame’s everyday life — both in theory and in practice. Consequently, I believe that many people of good will who wish only blessings on Notre Dame will share my concern that on matters such as academic freedom, human sexuality, the nature of truth, the link between freedom and truth, the teaching of the church was not brought to bear on the wide-ranging dialogue and did not seem to find adequate room in the president’s closing statement.

Notre Dame, with its vast resources, can do better than this. I believe it will. Its responsibility to its students and to the position it has attained in Catholic higher education calls it to do better.

I do believe that Our Lady watches over Notre Dame and I place this matter in her hands, the woman of faith so revered in this place. We need her prayers and the light of her Son, who is the Way, the Truth and the Light during these hours and always.

God is sooooooooo punk rock!

2006-04-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

Apparently many kids in the UK are taking religion more seriously...even converting to either Christianity or Islam...and many parents aren't liking it (since they don't believe in anything). Kids sense that the materialistic world view that our society holds ends in misery and lonliness, and they long for more....as they should. We should pray that these kids actually find Christ through this process, and not just some new age "spirituality". Here's the intro to the article:

Younger people are turning to religion

By Tom Schaefer
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

Odd to think that some young people have better insight into faith than their parents do.

Think that's too generalized? There are plenty of specifics to back it up. Let's skip across the ocean first.

The Sunday Times reported last week that baby boomer parents in Great Britain are seeing more and more of their children converting to a faith, especially Christianity and Islam.

And some parents aren't happy about it.

A British mother, who's agnostic, conceded that her twentysomething son was "quite aimless" before he joined an evangelical church.

Today, she applauds his sense of purpose, but says, "It also makes me sad because none of the rest of the family shares his beliefs, and it excludes us from a massive part of his life."

Myfanwy Franks, an author quoted in the Times, has interviewed British converts to Islam (15,000 have claimed the faith in the past few years) and Christianity and sees a sociological angle to their decisions.

"More and more, it seems that becoming highly religious is the ultimate form of rebellion, because secularity is really our society's main religion now," he said.

"A lot of people utterly despise religion, don't they? To convert to Islam or Christianity is really the punk rock of the modern age."

But there's more to this religious revival among youth than rebelliousness. Heading to the land Down Under, signs of spiritual rebirth are evident there, too.

Nathan Tasker of Australia, a Christian singer-songwriter for 10 years, has toured his country numerous times.

"I've noticed there's a lot more searching going on," he said on an Internet posting. "Spirituality is cool again."

He, too, talks about an emptiness in secular life and the spiritual enrichment Christianity offers young people. (Asia and Africa are other prime examples of such a revival.)

The story is similar in our country. Earlier this month, the Harvard University Institute of Politics released a survey of 1,200 college students nationwide about their religious attitudes.

It found that most students say religion is important in their lives (seven in 10 say it was somewhat or very important). One in four say they have become more spiritual since entering college.

Last year, UCLA released results of a national survey on matters of faith that found, among other details, 80 percent of college students say they believe in God, and three-fourths say they are searching for meaning or purpose in life. More than 112,00 college students were surveyed.

Can't we just get along?

2006-04-29T08:52:00.000-07:00

Europe, America need to listen to each other, says Cardinal Schonborn during historic symposium

Vienna, Apr. 28, 2006 (CNA) - Yesterday, Vienna’s Cardinal Christof Schönborn inaugurated an international symposium to discuss the growing rift between the two shores of the Atlantic, stressing that the United States and Europe both need to listen to criticism from the other on critical cultural matters.

“Europe, he said during his opening speech, “should be open to critical voices that are raised against [them] from the United Sates.”

Cardinal Schonborn--who himself called for the symposium--recalled his own gratitude for the liberation of Austria by the Americans in 1945. He then stressed the “common Christian roots of both continents,” saying that “An essential difference between Europe and the U.S. would be the greater value given to the role of Christianity in the United States.”

“Today, Europeans are hearing from the Muslims living in their midst, that religion is not only for private, but also has its place on the Public square,” the cardinal said, reminding his listeners of the words of former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami to the German President: “If you want dialogue, then you should recognize your roots, otherwise no dialogue is possible.”

“We have been witnessing for a long time the growing divide between Europe and the United States. What can be done to stop this?” the cardinal asked.

The prelate also mentioned an article from writer and columnist George Weigel titled “Europe’s Problem-and ours” published in 2004 in ‘First Things’, a Catholic monthly review.

In it, he stressed the ironic turn that European’s integration progress has taken, accompanied by a loss of power and of identity. He likewise pointed to Europe’s rejection of its Christian roots, giving way to a hedonistic secularized society.

Weigel, who is also present at the symposium, said Thursday said that “Europe is on the brink of committing ‘Demographical Suicide’, which threatens the pension system. It’s about something deeper. The soul of Europe is penetrated by ‘the Dictatorship of Relativism,’ as Pope Benedict XVI said.”

Other symposium participants included French philosopher Remi Brague, who voiced his skepticism for a genuine dialogue with Islam, and also criticized a certain perception of modernism, which he said can be witnessed in Spain, which has one the lowest birth rates in the world.

Law philosopher Joseph Weiler was also on hand and expressed his great concern for Europe’s future. “Europe doesn’t need a new constitution. What keeps me worried is rather the demoralization of Society. The participation in elections has been strongly reduced; it shows a lack of interest in the European Union project.”

Other prominent intellectuals who are scheduled to lecture during the symposium are American Priest and Writer Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, former Polish Ambassador in Austria Irena Lipowicz, Italian Senate president Marcello Pera, and Law researcher Lord Daniel Brennan among others. The symposium will be held in Vienna, at the Archbishop’s Palace until Saturday.

This evening, Weigel will give a lecture discussing, "Politics and God: Thoughts on the Democratic Future in the Twenty-First century."

Are we ready for a Mormon president?

2006-04-28T11:42:00.000-07:00

Robert Novak has an interesting column in the Chicago Sun-Times talking about whether or not Mitt Romney (Gov. of Massachusetts) can win the presidency. The crux of the issue is whether or not the "Religious Right", many of whom do not think Mormons are really Christians, are willing to choose someone who is not a true Christian (even if Hillary is the opponent).

Here's the intro to the article:

Religion may hinder Romney in '08

April 27, 2006

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Mitt Romney, in his last nine months as governor of Massachusetts, was in Washington Tuesday to address the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in an early stage of his 2008 presidential campaign. To a growing number of Republican activists, he looks like the party's best bet. But any conversation among Republicans about Romney invariably touches on concerns of whether his Mormon faith disqualifies him for the presidency.

The U.S. Constitution prohibits a religious test for public office, but that is precisely what is being posed now. Prominent, respectable Evangelical Christians have told me, not for quotation, that millions of their co-religionists cannot and will not vote for Romney for president solely because he is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If Romney is nominated and their abstention results in the election of Hillary Rodham Clinton, that's just too bad. The evangelicals are adamant, saying there is no way Romney can win them over.

Reason # 4,236 to consider homeschooling...

2006-04-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a story out of the Boston Globe where a teacher, trying to teach the public school SECOND GRADERS about marriage, read them a book where a prince falls in love with another prince. Since gay marriage is "legal" in Massachusetts, the principal of the school argues that he doesn't need to inform the parents about this topic ahead of time. Ah, the beauty of molding the mind of a 7-year-old...

Here's the beginning of the story:

Parents rip school over gay storybook

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff | April 20, 2006

In a controversy with a familiar ring, parents of a Lexington second-grader are protesting that their son's teacher read a fairy tale about gay marriage to the class without warning parents first.

he teacher at Joseph Estabrook Elementary School used the children's book, ''King & King," as part of a lesson about different types of weddings. A prince marries another prince instead of a princess in the book, which was on the American Library Association's list of the 10 most challenged books in 2004 because of its homosexual theme.

''My son is only 7 years old," said Lexington parent Robin Wirthlin, who complained to the school system last month and will meet with the superintendent next week. ''By presenting this kind of issue at such a young age, they're trying to indoctrinate our children. They're intentionally presenting this as a norm, and it's not a value that our family supports."

She complained more than a year after Lexington parent David Parker was arrested for trespassing, because he refused to leave the Estabrook school grounds until administrators allowed him to opt his son out of discussions about families with same-sex parents. The latest incident has renewed the efforts of Waltham-based Parents' Rights Coalition to rid the state's schools of books and lessons that relate to homosexuality, and led the school system to reemphasize its stance on teaching about gay marriage and related issues as part of larger lessons on diversity and tolerance.

1 in 5 Attend Mass in Boston

2006-04-27T19:59:00.000-07:00

Such a sad statistic, but not surprising. It's also not surprising since Boston is the national headquarters for every fruit loop "lay organization" that promotes heresy. People yearn for Truth and orthodoxy...something substantial...not this feel good, everything is cotton candy, go to your happy place kind of Church. Much needs to be done in the Boston archdiocese...we should all keep Cardinal O'Malley in our prayers.

Here's a part of the article:

Fewer than one in five Catholics who live in the Boston Archdiocese regularly attend Mass at a parish, according to church statistics. The archdiocese estimated its Catholic population at about 1.85 million in 2005, but Mass attendance was just 319,559 (17.3 percent), according to numbers from the archdiocese.

While attendance has dipped from around 20 percent prior to the clergy sex abuse crisis, which centered in the Boston Archdiocese, experts see the numbers as part of a wider trend - a de-emphasis on Mass as a critical part of Catholic living.

Cardinal Sean O'Malley said Thursday that lower Mass attendance was "certainly a concern."

The Challenges of Faith-Based Initiatives

2006-04-27T19:53:00.000-07:00

Professor John Dilulio, a professor of mine at Princeton (but now at the safety school Penn), talks about the challenges that exist for faith-based initiatives. Hopefully the government can get out of the way and let these organizations do the good that they are capable of.

From the article:

President Bush has repeatedly called supporting religious groups that help the poor "the most important domestic initiative of my presidency." Last year, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D., N.Y.) preached in Boston that nobody "is more likely" to serve the needy than "someone who sees God at work." Rather than continue to "have a false... debate about the role of faith-based institutions," she insisted, we should "provide the support that is needed on an ongoing basis."

Amen, but President Bill Clinton signed the first relevant federal law in 1996, President Bush's faith-based initiative began in 2001, and Washington still has not come close to providing "the support that is needed on an ongoing basis." That, however, can finally begin to happen, and soon.

Louisiana is fast on the heels of South Dakota

2006-04-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

LOUISIANA SENATE PASSES PRO-LIFE BILL

Baton Rouge, April 27, 2006 (CNA) - The Louisiana Senate passed a bill Wednesday that would prohibit abortion except to save the life of the mother. The measure, which passed on a 30-7 vote, is similar to one enacted earlier this year in South Dakota. The legislation now goes to the Louisiana House of Representatives for consideration.

Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, applauded Louisiana for taking a positive step toward “rebuilding the culture of life after decades of Roe v. Wade’s devastation.”

“Everyone’s life deserves the protection of law,” he added. “I pray that the Louisiana House will continue the work to protect the most vulnerable in the Bayou State, the unborn.”

Motorcross for Christ?

2006-04-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

Only Baptists from Oklahoma (where I'm from) could come up with a creative idea like this. I may not agree with some of the theology of the Baptists, but dang, you've got to give them credit for using ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING to promote the gospel of Christ.

Motocross rally with Gospel message leads many to Christ

By Dana Williamson
4/27/2006
OKMULGEE, Okla. (BP)--About 300 teenagers made decisions for Christ at the conclusion of four-days of evangelistic outreach in the North Canadian Baptist Association in Oklahoma.

The Extreme Sports School Assemblies conducted in schools throughout and an evangelistic meeting concluding the events resulted in 170 professions of faith among the decisions.

A Sunday night rally at First Baptist Church in Okmulgee, attended by about 350 youth, was designed to encourage Christian students to pray for their lost friends that week and get them to the final event on Wednesday evening. Twelve professions of faith were recorded at that event.

Six school assemblies -- two each day on Monday through Wednesday -- focused on a positive message of how to make an extreme impact in life. Before the evangelistic rally on the campus of OSU Tech in Okmulgee on Wednesday night, the students were entertained by motocross racers leaping high into the air on their motorcycles.

One of those racers, Brad Bennett, told the students they had a choice of going to heaven or to hell.

Peer Pressure Conversions to Islam

2006-04-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

Here's an article that goes into the pressure Christians feel in Pakistan...and the intimidation that leads many to "convert" to Islam. It's a simple choice: convert or die. Heaven will be full of Pakistani martyrs...

From the article:

In February about 400 people attacked and burnt a church in the southern city of Sukkur after accusations that a local Christian had burned pages from the Koran.

After a similar allegation last November a Muslim mob wielding axes and sticks set fire to three churches, a dozen houses, three schools, a dispensary, a convent and two parsonages.

The attacks were the worst on Pakistan's Christian community since 2002, when Muslim fanatics led an assault on a church with grenades on Christmas Day. Three young girls were killed in that attack, at Chianwala, 40 miles north of Lahore.

George Weigel Given Poland's Highest Honor

2006-04-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

Congrats to our friend, George Weigel, for being awarded Poland's highest honor, the Gloria Artis medal. His book, Witness to Hope, about the late John Paul the Great is truly one of the great books written in recent times. I highly recommend it!

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

George Weigel, the well-known American Roman Catholic theologian, has been given the Gloria Artis medal for his services to Polish culture.

Slawek Szefs reports for Radio Polonia

George Weigel has a long-established reputation as one of America’s leading commentators on issues of religion and public life. His weekly column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated to sixty newspapers around the United States. He currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. But perhaps his major claim to fame is a major study of the life, thought and activities of Pope John Paul II.

Witness to Hope, the Biography of Pope John Paul II was published to international acclaim seven years ago. Its English edition was followed by those in French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Czech, Slovenian, German and Russian. A Chinese translations is in preparation. A documentary film based on the book has won numerous prizes.

During the presentation ceremony in Warsaw, George Weigel said that the Polish Pope’s biography was one of the most important projects in his life. ”It’s been one of the privileges of my life to help the world know a little more about Poland, its dramatic history and its unique culture, a culture which I believe has important things to teach the world at the beginning of the twenty first century.”

The Polish minister of culture and national heritage Kazimierz Ujazdowski, who presented George Weigel with the Gloria Artis medal, described him as Poland’s best ambassador in the world. This is a book which shows the Polish Pope’s formative process, a process in which the history of Poland and the history of the nation’s struggle against communism played a key role. It was thanks to George Weigel that readers in Western Europe and America learnt about Polish history.

According to George Weigel, the role of Poland and the Polish Pope in modern history, and especially the overthrow of communism, cannot be overestimated. ”I think that the crucial moment was not a letter to Gorbachev or even a letter to Brezhnev…The crucial moment in the collapse of communism came in those nine days in June 1979 when the Pope came home and gave Poland back its authentic identity.” After his ‘Witness to Hope’, George Weigel has been continuing his research interests in the legacy of John Paul II. His latest book entitled “God’s Choice. Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, deals at length with the impact of the Polish Pope on his successor.

Immigration Division in the Religious Right?

2006-04-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

Don't you get the sense that the media is LOVING the fact that the "Religious Right" is divded on this issue? Anyway, here's the intro to an article from the USA Today on this topic.

Religious communities at odds on immigration
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Special for USA TODAY

With bishops speaking out, clergy marching in the streets and parishes frequently acting as local organizing headquarters, the immigrant rights movement appears to have the full support of the USA's Christian communities.

But appearances can be deceiving. And in this case, they are.

Although Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant leaders are voicing strong support for undocumented immigrants, recent survey data suggest that their flocks are increasingly uneasy about immigration trends. And evangelicals are proving to be divided along ethnic lines.

"That Bush coalition of religious conservatives has some qualms" about establishing pathways to citizenship because they want stiff punishments for lawbreakers, says Luis Lugo, director of the non-partisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in Washington, D.C. "But these folks are also being cross-pressured. There is in all of these religious traditions strong emphasis on care of the immigrant. ... That's why people are conflicted."

In a March survey by Pew:

• 64% of white evangelicals agreed with the statement "Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care." That's up from 49% in December 2004.

• 56% of white Catholics agreed with the same statement, up from 44% in December 2004.

• 51% of white mainline Protestants agreed that "The growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens traditional American customs and values." In December 2004, 41% agreed.

Fr. John Wauck Did a Podcast About the DV Code

2006-04-26T14:23:00.000-07:00

Here's the link.

In it, Father comments on:

the Annunciation (includes the Gospel Reading from 03/25/06, Luke 1:26-38).
What is it that makes the DV code compelling and popular with millions of people around the world.
A person who reads this novel and treats it as "Fact" is making a huge error.
Where we should start when evaluating the inaccuracies contained in the DV Code.
The Gnostic Gospels. (The best "cure" for thinking the Gnostic Gospels have validity is read them!)
The Council of Nicea: Who called it, why it was called, what was its purpose.
There is no coherent theological system contain among the Gnostic Gospels.
Why it is important for Catholics to believe that Jesus wasn't married.
The role of women in the Catholic tradition is greater than that of any other religion that we know of.
The "missing Mary" of the DV Code is not Mary Magdalene, it is the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The definition of monk as a one who lives in a monastery
The canonical status of Opus Dei as a personal prelature (not a sect or an order)
The Priory of Sion was actually fabricated by a French fraud from the 1950's
Dan Brown's gigantic exaggeration and narrow interpretation of the practice of corporal mortification
Opus Dei is not a secretive organization
The mission of Opus Dei is to promote holiness among lay Catholics, that every baptized person is called to be a saint and an apostle, to convert the "prose of everyday life into heroic verse"

Most Catholics not fazed by DV Code...which is good because it's crap...

2006-04-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

From the USA Today:

Most Catholics not fazed by 'Code' talk
By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Author Dan Brown may be surprised by a new survey on Catholics' view of his best-selling novel and upcoming film The DV Code— a tale of a murderous Catholic conspiracy to hide that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene.

Brown told a New Hampshire audience Sunday that he delights in all the clergy and scholars "debunking" his story of church fathers suppressing "the sacred feminine" in Christianity. Debate, he says, helps spirituality "evolve."

But most Catholics view the brouhaha with a big yawn, according to the survey released Tuesday by Catholic Digest, the 70-year-old monthly magazine.

Most (73%) say The DV Code has had "no effect on their faith."

And 92% say they don't know of anyone leaving the church after reading the book, says the March 23-27 survey of 443 Catholics, by Yankelovich Inc. Margin of error was ±4.7 percentage points.

"Catholics know this is fiction," and they're "smart enough and strong enough not to let a book or movie bother them," says Dan Connors, editor-in-chief of Catholic Digest.

Other findings:

• 28% have read all or part of the book; 63% did not read it, chiefly, they say, because they lack time, interest or inclination to read fiction.

• 43% plan to see the film; 48% don't.

• 91% say it's not wrong or a sin to read the book or see the film.

Even if they haven't read the book or seen the movie previews, debate over The DV Code has permeated popular media recently.

Connors said the magazine conducted the survey, which will be reported in the June issue, and published a 35-page pamphlet of Catholic facts, because "there was a real fear among some clergy that it would be dangerous ... Brown is talking about the origins of our faith and a scenario of Jesus different than what the church says."

Even more worrisome, Connors says, is "the nagging feeling that Catholics don't know enough — or care enough — to question" when Brown addresses fundamental questions such as whether Jesus was divine or human, or how the New Testament was established. "These are foundational pieces of the faith."

Talk show host Dick Lyles, CEO of Relevant Radio, a chain of 17 Catholic stations in 13 states, echoes this concern.

"The DV Code is an assault on Jesus that has (Catholics and Protestants) upset ... People are tired of these endless attempts to undermine the teachings of the church," Lyles says.

Author Brown, however, argued Sunday that ferment is good for faith.

"The more vigorously we debate these things, the more vigorous our spirituality," he said in a lecture broadcast by New Hampshire Public Radio.

"You don't have to believe a single word of the story to enjoy it, to engage in the debate, to remain open-minded to perspectives that make us think, perspectives that challenge us to ponder and articulate why we believe what we believe. Who knows? Many of us may emerge from that debate with stronger faith then when we started."

Vatican and China

2006-04-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

John Allen has an article in the WSJ today on the relationship between the Holy See and China. Will the Holy See eventually recognize the "official" Chinese church? Will the Chinese open diplomatic ties despite the fact that the Holy See recognizes Taiwan and an independent state? Many good questions out there that will eventually need to be resolved....

Church and (Communist) State

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
April 25, 2006

At the dawn of the 17th century, a Roman Catholic missionary priest named Matteo Ricci, a brilliant and audacious member of the newly founded Jesuit order, made his way to Beijing. Known at court as Lì Madòu, Ricci dazzled the emperors with his command of Chinese language and culture, his mastery of Western science, and his creative fusion of Confucian and Catholic ideals. He stood on the brink of converting the intellectual classes, until the Vatican lost its nerve over fears that its traditions would be assimilated into Chinese culture, and banned Ricci's so-called "Chinese rites." For the ensuing 400 years, China has remained basically a "closed shop" for Catholicism.

It wasn't for lack of trying. During the 19th and 20th centuries missionaries tried anew to penetrate China, beginning in the major ports and radiating outwards, but they were largely seen as agents of the colonial powers. When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, this historical resentment, combined with the Vatican's ties to the Chinese nationalists in Taiwan, made relations between Rome and Beijing impossible.

Pope John Paul II tried hard to break that stalemate. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's secretary of state, famously said in 1999 that his boss would move the Vatican embassy from Taiwan to the mainland "not tomorrow morning, but tonight," if only the Beijing government would negotiate.

Though there's scant indication of an immediate breakthrough, Pope Benedict XVI may make better headway. The People's Republic of China is one of just nine countries -- including North Korea and Saudi Arabia -- which have no diplomatic ties to the Holy See. Vatican officials under both John Paul and Benedict have publicly stated that the pope is willing to compromise on a wide range of issues, including a role for Beijing in the appointment of bishops, in exchange for establishing formal relations.

Such eagerness may seem counterintuitive for a historically European institution that reaches less than 1% of China's 1.3 billion citizens, especially given the church's tradition of ferocious anti-communism. Given the Vatican's perceived interests, however, playing the "China card" makes all the sense in the world.

The pope's foremost concern is to defend the basic human rights of the estimated 13 million Catholics on the mainland. This isn't a negligible issue. While antireligious persecution today is nowhere near as severe as in the heyday of the Cultural Revolution -- when all religions were persecuted, not just Catholics -- believers who don't worship through state-approved organizations do so at their peril. The Cardinal Kung Foundation, an activist group, estimates that there are seven Catholic bishops in China currently in prison, 10 under house arrest and one in hiding -- not to mention 23 priests either in jails or forced labor camps. To put this into perspective, official Chinese statistics put the total number of Catholic bishops in the country at 69, with some 5,000 priests, though perhaps as many as 40 "underground" bishops are not counted in those numbers.

Recognizing China's official Catholic Church would heal the schism between official and unofficial worshipers on the mainland. In China, the split is government-created: Beijing exerts tight government control over the church through its "Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association," a Communist Party-controlled agency that vets clergy, church construction, public activities, and other aspects of religious life. But there's also an unofficial, "underground" church, known as the "church of the catacombs," that recognizes the Vatican's authority.

The Vatican abhors such formal ruptures in the church, which create the possibility of further division along the lines of the Protestant Reformation. So in China, the Vatican has quietly worked to heal the divisions. Today, there's an informal understanding that the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association will not insist upon a bishop unacceptable to the Vatican, and the pope will recognize bishops that emerge from elections held under the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association's aegis. On background, Vatican officials have told me and other reporters that more than three-quarters of the bishops in today's "official" church have been recognized by the pope.

That understanding, however, remains dependent on the goodwill of those in power in Beijing. The Vatican believes that formal diplomatic relations, with a promise of religious freedom, would end the era of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association altogether, thus erasing the distinction between the official church and that of the catacombs. In so doing, the church in China would finally be unified, with the infrastructure and administrative capacity to absorb future growth. Beijing remains wary of such a move, conscious of what happened in Eastern Europe, where the Catholic Church bolstered opposition forces to the Communists and ultimately helped bring down the Soviet-backed regimes.

There's also a host of practical reasons why the Holy See wants to make up with the China's Communists. The Vatican sees China as the next, and perhaps the last, great missionary frontier for Catholicism. Given the erosion of traditional Catholic cultures in Europe and North America, an Asian country with more than a billion people, with a deep hunger for moral and spiritual values as the old Communist ideology crumbles, and without any established national religion, appeals strongly. Asia's other emerging superpower, India, will never offer as many potential converts, given the tight identification there between national identity and Hinduism. Behind closed doors in Rome, missionary orders and lay movements have been meeting for years, laying plans for expansion in China if and when the government relents.

That leaves the sticky issue of Taiwan, which China claims as its own -- and which the Vatican currently recognizes as an independent state. John Paul II repeatedly vowed that the church "will not abandon" its roughly 310,000 worshippers in Taiwan, regardless of where its embassy to China is located. The fact that the pope has not appointed a full ambassador to Taiwan since 1979 -- sending a charges d'affaires instead -- is a clear signal that the Vatican is already preparing for the transition.

Ultimately, history will judge whether the Vatican's China policy is forward-looking or feckless. If China can be persuaded to enter into diplomatic relations with the Holy See, or so the theory goes, it will have to make concessions on religious freedom, which will eventually mean that Chinese Catholics can worship more freely, travel more easily, construct churches more readily, and generally practice their faith without intimidation. Seen from within a Catholic worldview, it is little wonder that once again, as in Ricci's era, Beijing is in the church's prayers.

Mr. Allen Jr. is the Vatican correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, and author of "The Rise of Benedict XVI" (Doubleday, 2005).

Coach of the Year is...

2006-04-25T09:43:00.000-07:00

THE MAVERICKS OWN AVERY JOHNSON!!!! Avery has won more games than any 1st time coach in the history of the NBA. Not too bad of a stat. Unfortunately it doesn't look like Dirk will win MVP, but that was expected. Usually you have to be a legitimate candidate for a year or two before they'll give you that trophy. If Dirk and the Mavs have the same success next year, Dirk will have a great shot to win it.

Here's the article from the Dallas Morning News:

Sources: Mavs' Johnson honored, Dirk snubbed

02:59 AM CDT on Tuesday, April 25, 2006

By EDDIE SEFKO / The Dallas Morning News

Avery Johnson will be honored with one of the NBA's two biggest individual awards today when he is named the league's coach of the year, numerous sources said Monday.

However, the league's other major piece of hardware – the MVP trophy – will elude Dirk Nowitzki, a source said. While it was unknown who will win the MVP, it will not be Nowitzki, who was lumped with Phoenix's Steve Nash, Cleveland's LeBron James, Detroit's Chauncey Billups and the Los Angeles Lakers' Kobe Bryant as legitimate candidates.

Johnson, in his first full season as Mavericks coach, won the nationwide ballot of media members, besting, among others, Detroit's Flip Saunders, San Antonio's Gregg Popovich and Phoenix's Mike D'Antoni , who won the award last season.

Johnson is the first winner of the award in Mavericks history. He broke the NBA record for fastest coach to 50 wins (50-12) and best record after 82 games (66-16). He was coach of the month in November and January, in addition to winning the award in April last season after taking over for Don Nelson. His career record is 76-24.

"He got a great opportunity, and he's a great coach who took that opportunity and ran with it," Nelson said from San Francisco, where he was preparing for a speaking engagement, unaware of the pending announcement. "He deserves the coach of the year, and I couldn't be happier for him. Not everybody gets a chance to step into a winning situation like this.

"It's a terrific honor for him and his whole staff. They helped make it happen."

The Mavericks finished 60-22 this season, tying the franchise record for victories. They had the third-best record in the NBA. The team also had only one All-Star – Nowitzki – which probably worked in Johnson's favor. Each other coach of the year candidate had at least two All-Stars on his team.

Throughout his playing career as a gritty point guard, Johnson was known as the "Little General." He appeared in 1,054 games, one of only two players shorter than 6-0 (with Calvin Murphy) to appear in more than 1,000 games.

As a coach, Johnson prefers to drop the first part of his nickname and simply be known as "The General." He served as an assistant coach for most of the 2004-05 season before Nelson, a three-time coach of the year with other teams, retired last March.

Nowitzki became a legitimate MVP contender by averaging 26.6 points and nine rebounds this season. He hit a career-best 48 percent from the field, including 40.6 percent from 3-point range.

However, the competition was stiff for MVP this season with five players producing legitimate credentials. Nowitzki is, however, expected to be first-team All-NBA for the second straight season.

In addition to Nowitzki, Jerry Stackhouse was a prime contender for the league's sixth-man award, but he, too, came up short.