How teaching James Joyce ruins appreciation of liturgy

Here we go again, he sighed. The “Spirit of Vatican II” has once more spoken against the new translation.

This time, it’s in the person of Fr. Joseph S. O’Leary, graduate of that Maynooth College seminary which Abp. Timothy Dolan of New York recently recommended closing, now a professor of English at Sophia University in Japan. (In case you have any doubts, Fr. O’Leary has “Spirit of Vatican II” posted at the top of his “About” page.) I assume he is still a priest in good standing, although neither his blog nor his profile at Sophia’s website say “Rev.” or “Fr.”

Here beginneth the rant:

The bishops of the English speaking world have disgraced themselves in their handling of the new translation of the liturgy. They have failed in their primary duty of ensuring that the faithful have access to a decent celebration of the sacraments. Their treatment of critics of the new liturgy is particularly disheartening — I refer in particular to how 300 US bishops snickered at Bp. [Donald W.] Trautman [of Erie], who had the bad grace to point out that only 5 of them had submitted any written comments on the texts they somnambulistically rubberstamped, and also to a shoot-the-messenger speech from one Bp. [Leonard P.] Blair [of Toledo].

The blessed mother of us all

Once again I post on an important day in the liturgical calendar just a little too late—ideally, I should have posted on the Annunciation two or three days ago. Ah, well ….

A person coming into Christianity from a non-Christian background, or into Catholicism from a free-church Evangelical background, might find it hard to understand why churches closer to the apostolic tradition would celebrate the Annunciation. So okay, it's exactly nine months before Christmas, but isn't Christmas the really big deal? And isn't the dating of Christmas speculative anyway?

Yeah, the dating of Christmas is—well, not exactly pulled out of a hat. Its close conjunction to the first day of winter and the slow lengthening of days in the northern hemisphere isn't an accident, although we shouldn't put too much weight on pagan antecedents. (Sorry, JWs … you can talk all you want to, but we're not celebrating the Roman Saturnalia.) If we're going to celebrate the Nativity, then December 25 is just as good as any other day to celebrate it.

But the Annunciation is important for its own reason, and not because it's the speculative date of an episode from the New Testament. Rather—and this factor may cause the Evangelical's posterior to pucker—it's important because it celebrates the fiat of the Blessed Virgin.

The Church's "sex problem"

Over at the National Catholic Distorter, Thomas C. Fox links us to an essay on the Australian website Catholica by Joe Rigert, a “veteran investigative journalist”, and sociologist and former Benedictine priest Richard Sipe. Although Fox posted the link on the “NCR Today” line on Tuesday, the original Catholica editorial apparently was posted last May.

As the first person in the combox said, “Yawn. Is this what this site has become […] mere repostings of predictable anti-Catholic articles?”

Nothing in the post itself is original; in the context of today, the authors’ accusations of Pope Benedict XVI’s “complicity” in “tolerating and covering up the crimes of the priests” merely remind us that the accusations were baseless and overwrought to begin with, and are now without current interest. In fact, it appears Fox’s only purpose in linking us to Rigert’s and Sipe’s hysterical jeremiad is to get us to the conclusion:

At the very least [Pope Benedict] could open up for discussion and study the antiquated sexual teachings on such common practices as birth control, use of condoms and sex outside of marriage. Further, he could lead the way to making celibacy optional for priests and allow women in the ministry. (Would women have taken part in, or allowed, the sex abuse scandal?) And he might call for a representative church council to consider all of these basic reforms.

Of course, nobody could have seen that coming. Especially not in what Father Z is pleased to call “the National Catholic Fishwrap” (and the good Fr. Zuhlsdorf gets a hat tip for the reference). Especially not from an article whose second paragraph tells us that the predator-priest scandals are “a symptom of an outmoded, in some cases ludicrous, teaching on sex and sexuality. In short, the pope—and his church—have a sex problem.”

Nothing to say today ....

Don't bother to click here ... I don't have the link active ....

Rule #2: When you run out of things to say, shut up. Sorry, folks, my mind isn't working well this week; I'm half tempted to take yesterday's post down because it wasn't my best effort. Please pray for me, that I may find some mental Metamucil.

The dissidents are losing ... no thanks to the Jesuits

“He is a member of a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the defense and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine ….” —St. Ignatius Loyola, Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus

Over at Mirror of Justice, Fr. Robert Araujo points us to a four-part series of colloquia with the overall title “More Than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church”. It’s not surprising that two of the sponsoring institutions are Union Theological Seminary and Yale Divinity School. It ought to be surprising that the other two are Fordham and Fairfield Universities, both of which are “in the Jesuit tradition” and both of which still have priests for their presidents (Revs. Joseph M. McShane and Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J., respectively).

Alas, the latter  fact isn’t a surprise. If anything, as soon as you read the description of the colloquia, you could easily have guessed that the Jebs would be involved.

For too long, the conversation on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in the Roman Catholic Church has been only a monologue—the sole voice being heard is that of the institutional Catholic Church. We must engage in more than a monologue by having a 21^st century conversation on sexual diversity, with new and different voices heard from.

Of course, Fr. Araujo (a Jesuit himself) is correct to question the intent of the colloquia; on gay issues, normally “dialogue” means the gay lobby talks and everyone else either agrees or remains silent. And, in fact, the first sentence is a misrepresentation at best: normally, Mother Church has to shout to be heard over dissenting voices.

The limits of God?

Last year, in “What does God want?”, I wrote about the problem of two atheist arguments that depend on an equivocal understanding of God wanting or willing. On Wednesday, I got into a dog pile on Jennifer Fulweiler’s National Catholic Register blog combox over the issue of the logical problem of evil.

Briefly stated, the logical problem holds that, if God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then: 1) He would know every way evil can come into existence; 2) He would have the power to prevent them from coming into existence; and 3) He would want to prevent them from coming into existence; therefore, He would prevent them from coming into existence. But since evil does exist, then God is either not omnipotent, or not omniscient, or not omnibenevolent … or He doesn’t exist.

The error lies in a fuzzy understanding of the term want, especially in the assumed premise that a perfectly good God would want to prevent suffering. How do we know that? We only know that, as imperfect as we are, we want to prevent suffering; however, we don’t know how omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence affects God’s decision-making. It’s just as easy to conclude that God sees some benefit to suffering that we don’t recognize because of our limitations; in fact, as I’ve pointed out before, suffering isn’t always and ever a bad thing.

But I had to leave the argument to do some stuff around the house. The atheist with whom I was arguing left some ancillary issues that I couldn’t respond to at the time. Well, here I am with nothing better to write about just now ….

Bright Maidens: what feminism should have produced but couldn't

Dear readers, for clear and luminescent examples of the new generation of Catholic women, I present to you the Three Amigas: Trista at Not a Minx a Moron or a Parasite, Elizabeth at Startling the Day and Julie at The Corner With A View. All three are young, attractive, college-educated, career-minded … and deeply committed to communion with the Holy See.

Right now, they’re presenting their second installments of “Bright Maidens”, a series where each week all three post on the same topic. No reading of cue cards, no cut-and-paste boilerplate arguments: each brings her own particular brio and flavor to the table. On the subject of contraception, Elizabeth has a brilliant fisk of the Beyaz™ commercial; Trista thoughtfully combines a quote from Humanae Vitae with reflections on the cast of Jersey Shore and a screen grab from WhenParentsText.com; Julie has a great mix of quotes, stats and a video from Okervil River.

Let’s not even try any claims of false consciousness: all three women have taken a good look at the sexual life of the postmodern “liberated woman”, and found it to be a worse enslavement than traditional marriage and motherhood. By adopting the norms of the Church as their own, they’ve been able to create stable relationships on their own terms … and they’re not the last women on the relationship block, not “left over” after all the women willing to put out are taken.

Messages from Our Lady of Akita—a follow-up

On Saturday, I was looking through various news reports, still trying to make sense of what had happened in Japan on Friday, when I came across an item of interest about the Shrine of Our Lady of Akita.

In 1970, the Bishop of Niigata, Most Rev. John Shojiro Ito, erected a second-order religious institute, the Seitai Hoshikai (Institute of the Handmaids of the Holy Eucharist), with their motherhouse to be set in the northeastern hills near the Soegawa district of Akita. Among the postulants of this new order was an older lady, Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa, who had recently lost her hearing.

(By the way, I don’t know whether Japanese Catholics take on Western Christian names at the baptismal font or only when pursuing a consecrated vocation; I would be grateful for enlightenment on this point.)

In 1973, Sr. Agnes began to have a series of visions, culminating in three apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, who gave her some apocalyptic warnings and injunctions to pass on to her superiors. She also received a stigmata in her left palm, in the shape of a cross. Two years later, the statue of the Blessed Virgin in the chapel began to shed tears, as well as blood from a similar stigmata. Scientific analysis showed that the tears and blood were human. This recurred over one hundred times between 1975 and 1981; at least once, the phenomenon was viewed on national television.

The Giant Evil Conspiracy and my role in it

There’s nothing so frustrating in discussion of public issues as when the person with whom you’re talking stops challenging your reasoning and starts questioning your motives. Only charity at that point stops you from throwing up your hands: “Okay, I’ll admit it—we’re part of a giant, evil conspiracy to drain all wealth, health, hope and happiness from the universe. Just give me your money, put on these chains, and start chanting ‘Arbeit macht frei,’ alright?”

I ran into that brick wall a couple of weeks ago while discussing the pro-life perspective with a friend of mine. She asked why Catholics care what people of other religions do with their bodies and their kids, and whether they have sex or use birth control. I responded, “We care because that’s what it means to love. That’s what it means to be part of a community: to care what happens to others, and to do what can be done to protect them from evil.”

That wasn’t good enough. If we really cared, we might understand that labor can do damage to a teen, or that the mother and child will likely suffer more in their lives, or that the children of poverty end up in jail or fighting our wars … and so forth and so on. There has to be more going on here than love and compassion; otherwise, we’d concentrate more on these other problems and less on giving a kind of help people don’t want.

Okay, you figured me out. I’m part of one Giant Evil Conspiracy to enslave all America, struggling against another Giant Evil Conspiracy out to destroy the country. It reminds me of how James Longstreet characterized the Civil War in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels: a nightmare in which you pick your nightmare side, put your head down and try to win.

The loss of original justice

Half a world away, as I sit here listening to Robert Shaw and the London Philharmonic play Mozart's Requiem, uncounted thousands of Japanese people struggle and scramble to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of incomprehensible natural devastation.

The opening stanzas of the sequence "Dies Irae" are eerily appropriate: Day of wrath! O day of mourning! /See fulfilled the prophets' warning, /Heaven and earth in ashes burning! Oh, what fear man's bosom rendeth, /When from Heaven the Judge descendeth, /On Whose sentence all dependeth.

In truth, the temblor which struck just off the northeastern shore of Honshū, the main island, is but a small foretaste of the wrack which will come at the End of All Things. Even the apocalyptic warnings of Our Lady of Akita, grim and desperate as they are, leave open the possibility that the hand of the Almighty may yet be stayed; the time when the true End will come—without warning,[1] "like a thief in the night"[2]—is already fixed, and no plea or prayer will halt the descent of the axe.

Yet it's true that many people, even Christians, see no necessary connection between sin and natural disasters. The connection isn't in the fact that disasters occur; tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and such are all consequences of living on an active, dynamic planet. Even disasters that occur from the collapse of man-made things, from the tower at Siloam[3] to the World Trade Center, aren't direct consequences of sin, though one could argue that our need for such structures is an indirect consequence.