To a very special Mother

Originally posted May 8, 2011

Fundamentalists and Evangelicals sing in truth, "What a friend we have in Jesus!" But I wonder what their Friend thinks about the way they talk about His Mother.

You may read the Bible. You may read it so much that you can rattle off whole chapters from memory without missing a word. But if you don't have a proper love and reverence for the Blessed Virgin Mother, then either you don't truly understand what you read, or your relationship with Jesus is way off. Or both.

Yes, Marian devotion can be overdone, just as you can have an inordinate or improper love for your own mother. But the opposite is just as true. "As a protestant," Randy at Speak the Truth in Love writes, "I looked at Mary and saw a concubine. Someone who performed a biological function. A surrogate mother. I was told to look at her and marvel at how amazing a thing she did. God using her body to bring Jesus to the world. That contemplating that was dangerous. It might lead me to worship Mary."

Yes, Randy has come past that point. And to be fair, there are Protestants who love Mary as well. "You Catholics don't have sole claim on her," one woman said, and I for one am willing to share. But to regard Mary as important only for her uterus? That wrongs not just Mary — and all women should take umbrage at it — but God as well.

The foundations of the New Jerusalem

Today, the sixth Sunday of Easter, almost starts us on a countdown to Pentecost, the “birthday of the Church”. For the first reading (Ac 15:1-2, 22-29) concerns the Council of Jerusalem (ca. 42) and the letter the Council sent to the gentile Christians of Antioch, Syria and Cilicia — not just the first ecumenical council, but also the first instance in which the Church instructed others without appeal to Scripture, Christ’s teaching or other precedent.

There is a choice of second reading; for our purposes, let’s take Revelation 21:10-14, 22-23. In this reading, the angel shows St. John the heavenly Jerusalem, the City of God, which he tells us “had twelve courses of stones as its foundation [the Greek has themelious dōdeka, “twelve foundations”], on which were inscribed the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” This should call back to our minds St. Paul’s words to St. Timothy, where he refers to the Church as “the pillar and foundation [hedraiōma]^[1]of the truth”.

Again with the Gospel we have our choice, so let’s follow John 14:23-29, which forms part of Jesus’ “Last Supper discourse”. In this passage, the Lord promises the gathered disciples, who will (with one lamentable exception) become his first apostles, that “The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name — he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” Earlier, he had said, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows it. But you know it, because it remains with you, and will be in you” (vv. 16-17).

Picking on gay people—UPDATED

Former PE teacher Carla Hale

It would be easier for everyone if, like Rainbow Sash, we all wore some form of distinctive clothing to signify to the Catholic Church leadership what sins we were committing and not confessing. Then perhaps gay people wouldn’t feel singled out.

Let me tell you what brought that thought into my mind: Recently the Diocese of Columbus fired Carla Hale, a phys-ed teacher at Bishop Watterson High, after learning that she is in a lesbian relationship. Hale has said that she was terminated March 28, two weeks after an investigation spurred by an anonymous Bishop Watterson parent. The parent had sent diocesan officials a copy of Hale’s mother’s obituary, which listed the complainant as “Carla (Julie) Hale of Powell” — “Julie” being her companion’s name, and in parentheses just like other spouses’ names. Hale apparently confirmed that she and her partner consider their relationship a “marriage”.

Naturally, Hale is shocked, shocked! that she could have been fired: “That had nothing to do with my ability to teach and coach. I don’t think I’m immoral; I don’t think I’ve done anything that’s unethical,” she complained in a local television interview. Of course, maintaining false pretenses and contract violation have nothing to do with morality, right?

Hale’s lawyer, Thomas Tootle (oy, the poor man), struck all the expected buzzwords, accusing the diocese of orientation discrimination, demanding her reinstatement and threatening a lawsuit. “The Catholic Church has their own perceptions on immorality, but when you look at the contract, who decides that term, ‘immorality’? That, ultimately, will be decided by an arbitrator,” Tootle declared. Oddly enough, nobody heard an orchestra swell its volume dramatically.

Caricatures of the Catholic Church

Abp. Fulton J. Sheen and his Life Is Worth Living blackboard.

One of the eminently quotable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s most well-known dicta is this: “There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.”

Let’s face it: The history, beliefs and culture of the Catholic Church comprises almost 2,000 years of development. To do justice merely to the last hundred years or so would require two or three volumes the size of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is thick enough to make Stephen King pale with fright. Frankly, non-Catholics ought to read Frs. John Trigillio and Kenneth Brighenti’s Catholicism for Dummies^® and at least peruse the Catechism before they attempt to comment on matters of the Faith. All too often, though, people hate a caricature of the Church, usually one they learned from similarly ill-informed people, like a person who hates Pres. Obama based on editorial cartoons he’s enjoyed.

Case in point: Before I went on my post-Easter “Internet fast”, I wrote a post for The Impractical Catholic arguing that the “rich Catholic Church” trope was a simplistic and unjustified treatment of Church finances. When I came back online Saturday, I found a reply from “Chester” which was little more than a dismissal. For our purposes, two lines stand out which illustrate this tendency to beat the stuffing out of straw men:

I think you raise some good points about businesses, but the Catholic church claims to be above human law, above mere business dealings.

The Catholic church is claimed to be a charitable organisation, but they actively discriminate against women and gays. If your god is good enough for everyone, so is your time and money.

Resurrecting the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin

Fibrils from one of the image areas of the Shroud.

Just when you think you’ve debunked a religious artifact good and proper ….

Many people who only know that the Shroud of Turin is alleged to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ were happy to accept the 1988 carbon-14 dates — 1260 to 1390 — without further question, and not all of them were atheists or anti-Christians. Many Christians would find a Christ who actually rose from the dead to be upsetting; they much prefer the Resurrection as a psychological metaphor rather than as an historical fact. So the “medieval forgery” became the Accepted Wisdom quite easily, despite later stories concerning the integrity and scientific value of the tests.

Those who knew anything more about the Shroud — I’m not a qualified sindonlogist myself — weren’t happy with the results, for reasons having nothing to do with religious faith. The fact is, no one has come up yet with a plausible explanation for how the image on the Shroud was formed given the technological limitations of the 13th and 14th centuries. None of the techniques suggested to date, and some have been rather inventive, would leave an image with the physical and chemical characteristics known of the Shroud; in fact, no one’s had luck reproducing the Shroud with 21st-century tech. Frankly, at this point Erich Von Däniken’s aliens can look like a more credible explanation for the Shroud than some anonymous High Middle Ages genius.

Tuesday saw the release of news about a series of three new tests, two chemical and one mechanical, carried out by “a number of professors from various Italian universities”, which point to a date of 33 BC ± 250 years. This puts 30 AD, the generally accepted year of Jesus’ death, well within the bracket.

Cue the protests.

Pushing social conservatives out the GOP door

The root of the GOP’s problem now is the same as that of the Democrats in 1969: the party’s reputation has been ruined by a botched, unnecessary war — Vietnam in the case of the Democrats, Iraq for the GOP. This may sound implausible: every political scientist knows that Americans don’t care about foreign policy; certainly they don’t vote based on it. But foreign policy is not just about foreign policy: it’s also about culture.

This is the theme that Daniel McCarthy convincingly fleshes out in “The GOP’s Vietnam”. Basically, the Vietnam era created the templates we still use for defining political left and right; however, those templates no longer fit an electorate where “an 18-year-old first-time voter in 1992 was born the year after [Pres. Richard] Nixon withdrew most U.S. forces from Indochina” (1973). The cultural values which created neo-conservatives out of baby boomers disaffected and disenchanted with the New Left no longer obtain for the millennials, for whom “[the] sexual revolution [has] been background noise … since the day they were born.”

The GOP never learned to talk to the post-Vietnam generation in the first place; over the last decade, it compounded the problem by launching wars that, far from resolving the unfinished business of the Vietnam era, only made clear that those who are refighting the conflicts of that time are oblivious to today’s realities.

This generational disconnect showed up at the recent CPAC conference. Brad Todd of FOXNews reports, “For three decades, the locus of the Republican Party family debate has been over social issues. Today, there is no such fight — and that’s the bad news for all of us social and foreign policy conservatives. … The activists who power the elevation of Sen. [Rand] Paul and his ilk are corporately much less interested in the pro-life, pro-family agenda that drove the conservative movement for years, and openly hostile to the muscular foreign policy that has differentiated Republicans from Democrats since the Age of Aquarius.”

O those awful Catholic writers!

Nope, no religious bigotry here in the Land of Tolerance!

My last post, on gender differences, drew attention from an unexpected source. I mentioned that SisterLisa, the author of a condescending piece on women’s ordination and male insecurity, had drawn inspiration in part from a piece of satire written for Forbes by Victoria Pynchon. I just mentioned it; I neither praised nor blamed it.

In the marvelous world of cyberspace, that’s all you need; it must have shown up as a trackback. Pynchon decided to be the first to comment. As of this writing [3/21/13 @ 12:27 am], I’m having issues with IntenseDebate, so her comment hasn’t shown up yet.

There are a few lines that deal with Pynchon’s own experience of gender stereotyping and social role expectations. It’s not my purpose to devalue or minimize them; while the examples she quotes may sound quaint to postmodern ears, there are still parents who are pleased when their daughter is a “girly girl”, and who are more apt to give them a cosmetics case for their twelfth birthday rather than a chemistry set. No, I’m simply cutting to the chase:

I have no business telling Catholics what they should do, think or believe. I’d prefer it if Catholics didn’t tell non-Catholic American women what they should do, think or believe. [That’s a first.] If Catholic writers would like to tinker with women’s lives, perhaps they should stick to reconciling the gap between the Church’s position on birth control (it’s wrong) and American Catholic women’s refusal to stop using it.

In other words, she’s happy to “discuss” gender biological differences — so long as it’s her talking and me shutting up. Drat that pesky First Amendment, which allows me to shoot my mouth off whenever I please on whatever I please! Why … it even allows Catholics to have opinions on secular subjects! O the outrage!

Gender differences and feminist sexism

Back in November, Deacon Greg Kandra reprinted a list that was making the rounds of “10 reasons why men shouldn’t be ordained”. In essence, it’s a list of stereotypes flipped against men rather than women. “I have to admit,” Kandra chuckled, “this made me laugh.”

As well it should; it’s a light, airy tongue-in-cheek exercise conducted in the demolition of a straw man. Which didn’t stop SisterLisa at Soul Liberty Faith from using it, along with another satirical list written by Victoria Pynchon at Forbes, to create a patronizing “there, there, you poor widdle babies” post on male ecclesial leadership. The essence of her argument is this: Conservative men don’t want women priests and deacons because they’re insecure.

Men who are insecure in their pants tend to puff up their ego with brutish verbiage with their self proclaimed titles and they belittle those around them. Their childish behavior reveals the fear they suffer from and perhaps it’s time they openly admit their brokenness so they can find healing. In this era of women theologians and justice seekers these men will rise louder and more brutal in their effort to keep women oppressed. The more fervent women are in putting their collective foot down about abuse, oppression, and equality the greater path we pave for women and children world wide. …

So perhaps we should be in prayer for our insecure brothers who rail against women in leadership. It just might make a difference for them to know we understand their insecurities and will hold them up in prayer. ... So when you see men like these … just pat them on the back and let them know it’s all going to be okay. We still need men in the world and there’s no hidden agenda to minimize their gender or belittle their sexuality.

Who was Saint Patrick?

Just so you know: I hold green beer to be an outrage, the defilement of an innocent pilsner that hadn’t done anyone harm (yet). I wait for the Church to add it to the list of sins crying out to Heaven for vengeance.

Other than that, Saint Patrick’s Day is not an optional memorial to me. Nor is it a day solely for getting plowed, whether the instrument be a fine product of the Old Country like Jameson’s or something unnatural and heretical like the vile Presbyterian abomination, scotch. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten drunk on St. Paddy’s; when I did drink to excess, which hasn’t been for a long time, it was because I still thought getting drunk was fun (which started to change about the third or fourth time a night of such excess left me “driving the porcelain bus”).

Lá Fhéile Pádraig is a solemnity in Ireland, which in Church-speak means that Mass attendance is not required but very highly recommended. Instead of purple, the ordinary liturgical color of Lent, the celebrant wears white. In some rural locations, the folk still leave a bowl of porridge on the front stoop, in case the saint should be wandering through and be in need of sustenance. (That’s Irish hospitality for you; if ever you sit down for a meal at an Irish house, your hosts will do all in their power to insure you don’t get up until you’re stuffed.) No fasting and abstinence; instead, festivals, dances (céilithe) and parades, and the Irish government uses the time to promote Irish culture (and economic opportunities).

“We have a papa …”

A couple of weeks ago, in “Has the papacy become ‘just a job’?” I lumped concerns that emeritus Pope Benedict’s resignation had changed the nature of the papacy in with other bits of “silliness inflicted on us by the incessant noisemakers well described as ‘the chattering classes’”. This, I think, goes to show that I can miss the point just as anyone else can.

The basics, I think, are still valid. People who don’t buy into Catholic theology of the papacy, especially the Pope as vicarius Christi, can be found inside the Church as well as outside; you can’t be disillusioned if you don’t have an illusion to begin with. For those of us who do believe it — and to be in communion with the Holy See, you must — what does Benedict’s resignation really change? “The ‘cult of the strong leader’ may suffice for those who hang on to late nineteenth/early twentieth century speculative anthropology.  However, it’s bad history and bad theology, not to mention a total misread of Joe Catholic in the pews.”

That’s the response of the mind. But the heart often discerns truths the mind doesn’t wish to face, and can tell the difference between explaining and explaining away.

Robert Moynihan wrote of an encounter he had with a cardinal before the conclave, a man very troubled in his heart. Said the cardinal, “I love [Benedict], but this should never have happened. He never should have left his office. It is like a man and a woman, a husband and wife, a mother and father in relation to their children. What do they say? They say, ‘until death do us part!’ They stay together always.” And the ineffable Fr. John Zuhlsdorf confessed that he’d been (among other things) angry over the resignation.

I missed it totally. The word “pope” comes from the old Greek papa, “father”. Many people around the world, who know Benedict only though his books and the media, still felt abandoned by their Papa.