Catholicism and sanity

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.

—Abp. Fulton J. Sheen

Last week, when I had that attack of writer’s block, my good friend Larry sent me an email reply. Here it is, in part:

… [Y]ou are attracting readership because you have strong spirit in your writing and you have passion for the subject matter. There is a lot going on in the world. “Scary wrath of God stuff”; maybe what your readers need is some comfort (perhaps a new perspective wouldn’t hurt you either). God is with us always; I am reminded of the poem “Footprints”. He carries us in our time of need. … Catholicism has been providing this confidence to parishioners for centuries. This is the one thing that sets it apart from other Christian ideals.

Larry does have a point. I did say, in reply, that there are two sides to the doctrinal coin; as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, God’s mercy is meaningless if we deny God’s justice. However, a steady diet of “scary wrath of God stuff” does tend to beat the joy out of anyone.

The presumption of sexual innocence

If you think re-translating the liturgy of the Mass is a problem, try re-translating the Bible.

Recently, the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine issued a revised edition of the New American Bible (NABRE). I haven't picked it up yet; I do have a couple of copies of the NAB, though for most of my work here I use the Catholic edition of the Revised Standard Version (RSV-CE, which I usually abbreviate RSV).

Although there are plenty of minor changes—especially the much chuckled-over switch to "treasure" from "booty"—the one change that causes the most concern is the retranslation of almah in Isaiah 7:14 from "virgin" to "young woman". In this chapter, God speaks through Isaiah to Ahaz, the king of Judah, and tells him to ask for a sign. Ahaz refuses: "I will not tempt the Lord!". Then he turns to the people and says:

Listen, O house of David! It is not enough for you to weary men, must you also weary my God? Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign: the [almah] shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.

Gender silliness and the intersexed—UPDATED

Over on Mercator.net, Babette Francis has a lightly ironic piece on the Australian Human Rights Commission’s discussion paper, “Protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and sex and/or gender identity”. At the same time, Simcha Fisher has a rumination on boys and girls who, in this day and age of stereotype-free living, still insist on behaving like boys and girls.

The AHRC’s paper, which bemoans the poor discriminated-against transgendered and thus has plenty of recommendations for Aus to adopt, includes this definition of “gender”:

The phrase sex and/or gender identity is used in this paper as a broad term to refer to diverse sex and/or gender identities and expressions. It includes being transgender, trans, transsexual and intersex. It also includes being androgynous, agender, a cross dresser, a drag king, a drag queen, genderfluid, genderqueer, intergender, neutrois, pansexual, pan-gendered, a third gender, and a third sex. It also includes culturally specific terms, such as sistergirl and brotherboy, which are used by some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Francis quipped, “Being Indian by birth and having married an Australian of Anglo-Celtic origin, I am all for diversity, but I am not going to commit to ‘neutrois’ until someone tells me what it means.” But as a respondent, Zoe, informed us , “neutrois” is a word used to describe some who because of certain genetic conditions doesn’t completely fit into either male or female categories.

Gonzaga's Catholic identity and the Monologues

Robert Swope, if you look his name up on LinkedIn.com, is doing alright.

Having served eight years as an officer in the Army Reserves—much of it active duty, and about half of that time in Iraq—he’s also worked with the State Department and with government contractors. His resume reads, “Extensive knowledge of stabilization doctrine and best practices for international development in areas ranging from humanitarian aid provision and human rights promotion, to education, infrastructure development, and ministerial capacity-building.” Very impressive.

All that, however, was in the future in 2000, when he was a senior undergraduate student at Georgetown and a columnist for The Hoya. Journalists at student newspapers don’t ordinarily get much notoriety for anything they write that gets published.

Swope, however, got his fifteen minutes of fame for something he wrote that got him fired: He dared to criticize The Vagina Monologues. The column never got published.

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 ….