Free Republic

Why would the scandal make the bishops press for reforms against the will of the Pope when it’s the bishops who caused the scandal by their failure to do their job and the Pope who’s trying to get them to clean up their act?

Kueng’s piece reproduced at the NYRB blog is amazing, by the way. He lives in his own factual reality. Is there anyone who takes the man seriously?

Learn Persian not Arabic unless you have a very good reason for putting in the time and effort.

It’s not just the fact Persian is Indo-European, it’s grammatically quite simple. They don’t have case, articles or grammatical gender, and the verb forms are quite simple with few irregularities. Half of the time they don’t even bother with number—they just use the singular. The sounds aren’t particularly difficult either.

True enough. The American laws though have been imposed on the country by a small elite that doesn’t even pretend to be democratic or representative. For that reason Americans feel less responsible for them.

Not a completely good fight. His political caricatures made him Stalin’s favorite artist, and if you look up his work you’ll see what that means. Some of them were indeed about Nazis but there were other people Stalin didn’t like.

This is just an example of bad reporting. The Church isn’t “taking steps to prevent LDS Church members from performing baptisms for Catholics after their deaths.” They’re simply saying they won’t cooperate in the practice. If someone wants to interpret that as an insult to the Mormons it’s not the Church’s problem.

I agree Teddy Kennedy shouldn't receive communion and it should routinely be denied to him. The question is how to go about dealing with the situation that now exists.

People want the Pope when he shows up for a visit to discipline particular laymen. Does that make sense when the guy's own pastor and ordinary haven't done anything? The Pope can't do everything. He has to rely on his people, and in the case of a visit to America "his people" are the American hierarchy.

Rome doesn't normally discipline people 3000 miles away without some kind of process, and what's the process going to be? Is establishing a system for second-guessing the local pastors of souls in individual cases supposed to be the Pope's big emphasis when he goes on tour?

(Maybe a better question would be whether pro-abortion politicos get denied communion in the Pope's own diocese.)

Does anyone know why Ahmadenejad is such an extreme threat when in Iran it's the Supreme Leader and not the President who's in charge of the military?

Wouldn’t it normally be the guy’s own pastor who makes that decision rather than somebody passing out communion wafers who might have heard something about him but isn’t involved in the care of his soul? (Or the bishop of a diocese several thousand miles away, which is who the Pope is.)

Working in a hospital is “boost[ing] the Nazi war effort”? Dunno what the laborers were doing in the monasteries. I suppose more of the same, or growing food. Crimes against humanity, for sure.

This is odd. There are multiple instances of criminal prosecutions in Europe, including Gledhill's own country, for criticizing homosexuality. (Google "Harry Hammond" or "Christian Vanneste," or check out this case.) Did Gledhill treat those situations as a crisis demanding intervention from the Archbishop of Canterbury and who not else?

It's a denunciation that doesn't denounce anything, though. The point of saying "I don't know what the specific words were" is to avoid making any comment whatever on what the Pope actually said. And he didn't -- he spoke in generalities.

He's in a very difficult position, so he's saying something soothing and meaningless. Why do people think that's so terrible?

The GadgetVicar sanitizes things a bit I think. It's not a question of "picking and choosing to whom they offer fire safety advice" but refusing to participate in an event they think outrageous.

If the British National Party held a demonstration that featured people in costume lampooning immigrants would the local fire department have been there handing out safety info? Would they have disciplined firemen who felt personally affected and refused to go along?

Do people really say the Episcopal Church is democratic? What I saw when I was Episcopalian was an extraordinarily abusive management style. The whole point when you dealt with higher ups at any level was for them to show you who was boss. I don't think that's much of an exaggeration. That was in the Diocese of Long Island, though, which seemed to me extraordinarily dysfunctional at the top but also to some degree at every other level.

The idea of a democratic church is ridiculous anyway. Even assuming none of the stuff Harding says applies what you have is a committee or convention made up of professionals (clergy together with lay pros and semipros) together with some well-meaning amateurs who don't have much experience and put most of their time and attention into other things. The professionals will always get their way, and the amateurs will enable them to say that it was all the people's choice adopted after maximum participation etc.

His sympathies and interests run that way. I suppose that's a big part of his success in getting material. He's evidently tied into a lot of well-placed gossipy people who feel they can trust him to do the right thing with the info they feed him.

It's not just English speakers who call it Easter instead of Pascha. The Germans call it Ostern. (All this stuff about how it's all really pagan etc. is of course unbelievably stupid.)

It sounds like Fr. Parisi is saying:

1. A man is a formal heretic who willingly professes what he knows to be false.
2. A man is a formal schismatic who knowingly and willfully refuses to submit to papal authority or to join in communion with the Catholic Church subject to him, presumably knowing who the pope and Church are and what their authority amounts to. (Without the proviso all Orthodox and Protestants would be formal schismatics, and Fr. Parisi doesn't want to say that.)
3. A man is a formal apostate if he willfully and knowingly repudiated Christ Himself or the Church, again presumably knowing who Christ is and what the Church is.

On these definitions, how many formal heretics, schismatics or apostates could there ever be? And wouldn't most of them be insane, which would remove culpability?

"This prayer never made it to the west until our Lord gave it St. Faustina."

It made it into the Improperia. There's an article on it in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Some of these comments are really outrageous:

"If a gay man feels called to the priesthood, [under the proposed new ruling] he must dissemble, or even lie, about his sexual orientation," Appleby said. "In a sense, the Church would be complicit in a lie."

So if you think God's calling you to something, you're required to lie in order to bring it about. Sounds like cutting-edge moral theology.

Appleby said throughout the 20th century, when priests were asked why they joined the priesthood, their "number one reason was to save their immortal souls, which means to become holy and do Christ's work."

The proposed restrictions are a commentary on this concept, Appleby said.

"What the Church seems to be saying is Christ can transform the lives of sinners who are heterosexual, but not those who are homosexual," he said.

What's the point, that if you want to be a priest but get turned down for some reason Appleby thinks is OK, you're a kleptomaniac or misogynist or have an IQ of 70 or whatever, then that shows the Church and Appleby have decided Christ can't transform your life?

Appleby was one of the two speakers the bishops chose to address them at the big pow-wow they had about the Scandal a couple of years ago. The other was even worse. Makes you wonder. Or maybe it doesn't make you wonder.

McBrien said the restrictions would "of course" worsen the current priest shortage facing the U.S.

"If a significant number of gay priests decide to leave the priesthood over this matter and if gays leave the seminaries and others no longer apply for admission, mathematically this will deplete the number of priests and future priests," he said.

What does mathematics have to do with it? The guy sounds like a clerk of some sort. If there's a definite identity to being a priest, and men admire that identity, then men will want to be priests.

Thanks for posting this. It gives a somewhat different angle on an issue I've been puzzling over, the relation between ordinary human ways of coming to understand things, revelation, and religious authority. Since Radner rejects an indefectible church though I don't think he's able to escape the problems he describes. (FWIW, I agree with the Catholic extra ecclesiam nulla salus.)

Who wrote this thing? The only objection noted is that some renderings are not as comprehensible as present-day English as the (presumably very pastoral) bishops want. What does that have to do with "and with your spirit" as opposed to "and also with you"? The author says

One translation that seems destined to remain, despite widespread objection by a great number of liturgists and bishops, is the people's response to "the Lord be with you". English-speaking Catholics have always responded, "and also with you". However the latest small group of bishops overseeing ICEL's translations are insisting on changing that to, "and with your spirit", in order to identically mirror the Latin "et cum spiritu tuo".

They don't think they even have to pretend it's a news story instead of an editorial. Like they say on the street in Iran, Marg bar tamaam-e-letorgesthaa! ("Death to all liturgists!") We could learn something from them, I think.