More Interference from Those Pesky Bishops!

In light of the previous post in which scientists argue the merits and dangers of 'irrational' Bishops spreading lies, evidence to support their charges comes from the Diocese of San Francisco. It seems Archbishop Niederauer is preaching ignorance, hate and suspicion of science by decrying the use of the technology that allows people to engage in healthy aesthetic dialogue.

Below are a few highlights as reported in the Catholic San Francisco.

Describing what he sees as an electronic tsunami of pornography, Archbishop George H. Niederauer told a Utah based anti pornography organization that pornography is evil because it debases the priceless worth and dignity of each human being and the gift of human sexuality given by a God who shares his loving, creative power with us....

Every computer terminal is its pipeline, and cell phones and other hand held devices, many of them marketed to children and young people, literally deliver pornography everywhere, to anyone, the Archbishop of San Francisco said in his keynote address....

We have all heard the discouraging numbers, he said, noting research shows there are 68 million Internet search engine requests for porn sites every day, that 70 percent of 18-24 year old men visit porn sites in a typical month, that 90 percent of eight to 16 year olds have viewed porn on line, and that the average age of a childs first exposure to pornography on the Internet is 11....

However, he said, What should motivate us most profoundly is not the amount of pornography there is but the kind of harm it does. Pornography assaults human dignity and commodifies people and human sexuality. Porn starves the human soul in its spiritual dimension....

Archbishop Niederauer pointed out the late Pope John Paul II had observed that the opposite of love is not hate, but use....

The whole article is here. The complete text of Archbishop Niederauer's speech can be downloaded (pdf) here.

Should Science Ally With Religion? Be Reasonable!

Oh those altruistic scientists! This is from the Guardian in the UK.

Speaking at a debate at the Guardian Hay festival, Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal who heads the Royal Society, said that science needed as many allies as it could find in the current climate. "If we give the impression that science is hostile to even mainstream religion, it will be more difficult to combat the kinds of anti-science sentiments that are really important," he said. "We need people like that as allies in dealing with extreme fundamentalism."

His fellow panellists, evolutionists Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones, disagreed. Prof Dawkins said that, though he had cooperated with the recently-retired Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, to complain about allowing creationists to set up schools, he urged a limit. "If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment."

Bishops themselves never killed anybody, but possibly made the world safer for "people who do kill people by extolling the virtues of faith as opposed to reason and evidence".

Prof Jones discussed the problems he comes across when teaching students with Islamic backgrounds. "To a man and to a woman, there are parts of science they will not accept. "That means that, in their early lives, they have been told deliberate lies by people who, I'm sure, know they are deliberate lies. I don't care how charming they are, I don't care how pleasant they are, these people are evil.

"What's true for imams is, more or less, true for bishops."

Read the whole article here.

One wonders where Professors Jones and Dawkins uncovered evidence of "evil" and "virtuous". That Dawkins actually asserts "extolling the virtues of faith" as the impetus driving murders would be ludicrous if not for the many who follow his lead unreflectively (i.e., unreasonably).

I'd love to read their replies to the Holy Father's book, Values in a Time of Upheaval.

Bioethics and Society

In fact, the article referenced in this post is not about bioethics and society per se, however, it does speak to the ethical framework at the heart of the relativistic culture. It is by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a Catholic priest, PhD and Director of Education at The National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.

Father Tadeusz writes a monthly column called Making Sense out of Bioethics, and this article was his April 2007 submission. His style is crisp and to the point, and he helps us see the moral imperative at the center of many ethical issues, including, abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, and a host of others. Below is the opening paragraph to his column entry, Recapturing the Soul of Bioethics.

Modern bioethics seems to be going through a kind of identity crisis. With ethicists available for hire, drug companies and biotech firms have easy access to "experts" who can provide them with the veneer of respectability if they decide to head in the direction of unethical science. Erwin Chargaff, a pioneer in the field of biochemistry, once quipped that, "Bioethics didn't become an issue until ethics started being breached. Bioethics is an excuse to allow everything that is unethical." One common approach to allowing the unethical is to claim that, "We have already made certain choices, and now we really must move on to the next step - we must yield to the inexorable progress of science." Rather than examining and rejecting certain poor choices that may have been made in prior years, and trying to regain lost ground, bioethicists today unwittingly continue to grease the slippery slopes by their lack of courage in disavowing some of the unethical practices they have aided and abetted in the past.

Look for Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk's work in your diocesan newspaper, or bookmark his page at the NCBC website.

Holy and Glorious Pentecost Sunday

Little Entrance Hymn

Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength! We will sing and chant the praise of your might.

O Holy Counselor, save us who sing to You: Alleluia!

Troparion of the Feast in Tone Eight

Blessed are You, O Christ our God, who have filled the fishermen with wisdom by sending down the Holy Spirit upon them and who, through them, have united the world. Glory to You, O Lover of mankind!

Kontakion of the Feast in Tone Eight

When the Most High came down and confused the tongues (in Babel), He divided the nations; but when He distributed the tongues of fire at Pentecost, He called all men to unity. Wherefore, we glorify the Holy Spirit with one accord.

As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Alleluia!

The Reading from the Acts of the Apostles

In those days: When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God."

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to St John

At that time: On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, "If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, `Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.'" Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. When they heard these words, some of the people said, "This is really the prophet." Others said, "This is the Christ." But some said, "Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the scripture said that the Christ is descended from David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?" So there was a division among the people over him. Some of them wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him. The officers then went back to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, "Why did you not bring him?" The officers answered, "No man ever spoke like this man!" The Pharisees answered them, "Are you led astray, you also? Have any of the authorities or of the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd, who do not know the law, are accursed." Nicodemus, who had gone to him before, and who was one of them, said to them, "Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?" They replied, "Are you from Galilee too? Search and you will see that no prophet is to rise from Galilee." Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, "I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Hirmos (Megalynarion) in Tone Four

Hail, O Queen, glory of virgins and mothers: for your praise is beyond the eloquence of the most cultured tongues, and the wonderful manner in which you gave birth to Christ throws every intelligence into amazement. Wherefore, we the faithful magnify you with one accord.

Kinonikon

Your Good Spirit shall guide me on level ground. Alleluia!

Benedict's Jesus

I have stopped all other pleasure reading to concentrate on the theological masterpiece of the decade. This post is intended to give you a glimpse of what will be remembered as one of the most important works of the twenty first century. The book in question is so straightforward one could read it through in a weekend; and yet it is so profound that one will want to savor every paragraph.

Reading Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth is a most humbling experience. After reading the foreword, I realized that all my theological and intellectual posturing is mere hubris compared to the thought of this truly great mind. After reading the introduction, I was certain that I must have squandered my entire academic life in the face of such precise theological prose. After reading the first chapter, I began to wonder if I had ever really read the Scriptures or encountered Jesus Christ before. In this post I will focus solely on the Foreword.

One would assume the book to be a huge theological tome of sophisticated argumentation. Benedict is arguably one of the greatest minds of the last century having an intellect capable of dissecting the premises and fallacies of even the most challenging treatises. Yet, this is the same Benedict whose only Encyclical to date is Deus Caritas Est, one of the most readable and uplifting affirmations of the Christian message since John Chrysostom.

It has been said that people came to see John Paul the Great but they come to listen to Benedict. He is a teacher; not in the stodgy sense of dry academia, rather as one who passionately believes in his subject, who has respect and love for his students, and who has the gift to explain his subject so that every listener goes away refreshed, enlightened and enriched in their humanity. This is the Benedict speaking in Jesus of Nazareth.

In the foreword, the Holy Father states his intentions to present a reflection on Jesus to counter the dominant historical-critical scholarship of the last century. He notes truthfully and simply that these approaches "have produced a common result: the impression that we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus and that only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him." (p. xii) Benedict, on the other hand, offers a perspective that "sees Jesus in light of his communion with the Father, which is the true center of his personality; without it, we cannot understand him at all, and it is from this center that he makes himself present to us still today." (p. xiv) He will not jettison the historical-critical method; he will utilize it while recognizing that "it does not exhaust the interpretive task for someone who sees the biblical writings as a single corpus of Holy Scriptures inspired by God." (p. xvi) It is a tool; an important tool, but only a tool.

Benedict proposes a "canonical exegesis" which views the individual books of the Scriptures as part of a whole. This uniative approach recognizes "that any human utterance of a certain weight contains more than the author may have been immediately aware of at the time." (p. xix) In this context we see the reality of inspiration, the power of the word to speak in a living dynamic context. The Scriptures have a life that confronts us and transfigures us when we approach them from the perspective of faith. It is God who speaks through the Scriptures with a voice as real as the voices of the writers of its individual books. Thus, Benedict asserts, "I trust the Gospels." (p. xxi)

I believe that this Jesus - the Jesus of the Gospels - is a historically plausible and convincing figure. Unless there had been something extraordinary in what happened, unless the person and words of Jesus radially surpassed the hopes and expectations of the time, there is no way to explain why he was crucified or why he made such an impact. (p. xxii)

Jesus is precisely who he claims to be, the Son of God taught by the Church, the Saviour. This faith and trust in Jesus as proclaimed in the Scriptures does not require a rejection of historical-critical scholarship. Rather, this theological tool can serve to enhance our appreciation of the Scriptures and the Jesus who is revealed in their pages. It is in this context that Jesus of Nazareth is written.

And it gets better with every page.

I wonder how the New York Times will take it when this book becomes the number one best seller of the summer (and yes, I know there's a Harry Potter book coming out).

Wait for it!

Catholic World News on Atheist Contribution

Catholic World News has a short but interesting report on an atheist giving a large donation to the Archdiocese of New York.

New York, May. 24, 2007 (CWNews.com) - The New York archdiocese has received a record-breaking gift of $22.5 million from an atheist.

Robert Wilson, a retired financier, has given the sum-- the largest single donation ever recorded by the Church in New York-- to a program that will pay tuition for needy children attending New York's parochial schools.

Explaining his decision to make the grant to a Catholic charity, Wilson pointed out that his money would be used to pay for the education of children, rather than for specifically religious purposes.

While he is not religious, Wilson indicated a deep respect for the Catholic faith. "Let's face it," he told a reporter: "without the Roman Catholic Church there would be no Western civilization."

Lest anyone think this quote from Mr Wilson is merely a compliment, I would recommend How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, available from Amazon.

Sandro Magister Highlights Papal Theme for Brazil and Beyond

Italian Sandro Magister is one of the world's most insightful commentators on the Church. His comments from Tuesday on the Pope's recent trip to Brazil address an important theme of the Holy Father's message to South America that also has resonance for the Church in general. Below are a few highlights. Click here for the whole article and text of the speech in question.

ROMA, May 15, 2007 – Among the twelve speeches, homilies, messages, and greetings pronounced by Benedict XVI during his four-day trip to Brazil, the one most keenly awaited was the inaugural address for the fifth conference of the bishops' conference of Latin American and the Caribbean, in Aparecida.

But the discourse that will be remembered in the future as the one most revealing of the pope's objectives was another. It was the one he delivered to the bishops of Brazil in the cathedral of Sao Paolo, at the end of Vespers on Friday, May 11.

...

All of the instructions that the pope gave to the Brazilian bishops following the address descend from this foundation. Benedict XVI's clear intention is that of reestablishing Jesus, true God and true man, as the center of the Latin American Church: a Church that, in his judgment, has in recent decades strayed too far into political territory, under the influence of liberation theology.