Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1333

Me, Yakking

Turns out Christendom College has put up a recording of a talk I gave on St. Paul, Evangelization and Apologetics at iTunes. This was for a conference they did a couple of years ago to wind up the Year of St. Paul. I reckon the other speakers (who were much better) can also be found at the site.

Prayer Request

A reader writes:

I ask you pray for my future husband and for my current boyfriend, John. I pray that his eyes are open to the true faith, The Catholic Church. I pray for his soul. I pray for our relationship. I pray fervently for peace, patience, and guidance!!! His is such a good man of God, but he is Lutheran. That is not that far from us and I just pray that his heart is open to the Catholic Church. Please pray for us! In return, I pray for you.

Thank you and God Bless you!

Father, hear our prayer that you guide this man and woman in their relationship with you and with each other, through Christ our Lord. Amen! Mother Mary and St. Joseph, pray for them!

Prayer Request

A reader writes:

Could you please post a prayer request? My sister is a college sophomore. During choir rehearsal on Thursday afternoon her macbook pro was stolen by another student. Her whole academic life is on that computer and she has midterms and papers due next week. She is very, very stressed. Please pray that the theif's heart softens and he/she returns the computer! Thanks and God bless!

Father, hear our prayer that the computer be returned safe and sound through Christ our Lord. Mother Mary and St. Dismas, pray for her!

Gone for the Triduum!

Have a Glorious Easter!

I leave you with this exceedingly cool Korean portrayal of Holy Week from the Western Confucian:

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Only in California Could This Even Be a Question

Should California Pay for Convicted Murderer's Sex-Change?

Oooh! Oooh! Pick me! Pick me! I know the answer to that one!

Frank Weathers...

..might be meeting angels. It's hard to tell so it's best to play it safe.

The New Feudalism

CEO pay is 343 times that of employees.

What's fascinating about the time in which we live is that modern serfs are still, at present, willing to fight to the death so that their Lords can maintain this ridiculous inequity. To suggest, as Chesterton did, that the principal trouble with capitalism is that there are too few capitalists is to invite being shouted down as a socialist, Marxist or Commie not by the CEO, but by the people who are watching their savings vanish, their jobs disappear, and their buying power dwindle while presidents of failed corporations ditch the plane in a golden parachute. Ideology is the triumph of the All Explaining Theory of Everything over reality. The Commie wants the wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the State. The Capitalist wants it concentrated in the hands of the rich man. Chesterton thought wealth and power shouldn't be concentrated but part of the common good and that everybody should own a little property, run a little business and take care of his family. Naturally, he is vilified as a closet communist by the people who think Ayn Rand is a genius.

My Brother Rick is Famous!

Our local paper, the Herald (used to be the Everett Herald) just did a story on him and what it was like growing up on Paine Field AFB. How extremely cool!

You can see the whole collection of his vintage photos here. There's even a couple Your Obdt. Svt. as an Easter Egg hunting tot with Dad.

It's always odd to see these. Something about childhood memory makes these events seem more historically remote than the Age of the Dinosaurs.

A reader writes...

I don't know if you have time to respond to individual questions like this, but I thought I might at least try. I've been trying to find someone who can explain to me why Venerable John Paul II's actions were correct regarding the whole "Assisi thing" that seems to be running rampant on blogs and sites these days. Most of the detailed articles are on the offensive, and most of the defensive articles are of more of a "don't be silly" nature than doing any explaining about WHY it was okay for him to pray with people of other faiths. While I think of him with reverence and I love his Theology of the Body etc, I have to admit that the "traditionalists" have me a little confused about the interfaith thing and how it meshes with not compromising on the first commandment. For example, somewhere it said that Pope John Paul II participated in a ritual that had to do with scattering water in honor of one's ancestors, and another place it had him kissing the Koran. Being that my dad (a fallen-away Catholic) espouses the "there are many roads up the mountain to God, not just Christianity" philosophy and it took me a long time to get rid of that error myself, I feel sort of like the Pope was encouraging my dad's error. Can you explain to me why it was okay?

Re: Assisi. Go here. Bottom line: there was no prayer in common at Assisi. Basically, it was a good faith effort to work with others of good will on what could be done in common for peace. It has become a byword among Traditionalists who loathe JPII, for no good reason I can see. The illogic of their attack on it depends, from what I can see, on a sotto voce rejection of Dignitatis Humanae (The Decree on Religious Liberty) and wishing for a world in which the Church outlaws and persecutes all religions but itself. If that's not it, I can see no other rational basis for it, for I can see no sane basis for saying that adherents from other traditions are free to pray according to their consciences in synagogues, mosques, and temples throughout a Catholic country, but are forbidden to do so in the country called the Vatican. At no point was there prayer in common at Assisi, precisely because we are Catholic and not Jews, Muslims, pantheists or polytheists. Rather, there was simply an appeal to men and women of good will to work together in common so that we might not be incinerated in our beds--which makes proclaiming the gospel much harder when the world's population has been slaughtered in a Holocaust. Some critics labeled all this as "utopian" and insisted that suffering makes us stronger, so it was futile to oppose war. I wonder if these same critics oppose that damn new Catholic innovation called the hospital. After all, we'll never wipe out disease or death either, so is it also "utopian" to fight these things?

Dunno about the scattering water thing, but since the Church has a long history of accomodating pagan customs (recall the recent brouhaha about Easter Eggs, aka "Spring Spheres") I'm skeptical that those hostile to JPII are going to be entirely reliable on what is and is not an embrace of pagan content as distinct from the honoring of a common custom. Likewise, with the Koran thing, it constituted no scandal for the Iraqi Christians who were part of the delegation to Rome that brought the Koran. It was simply a polite act in response to a polite diplomatic gift. People who are determined to see in JPII yet another enemy of their sect of Purely Pure Puritan Catholicism can and have inflated the incident into Still More Proof that JPII was a Destroyer of the Church. But I think the strongest case you can make is that it was an inadvisable gesture, though ultimately one up to his discretion.

For a sane take on the Church's relationship with other religious traditions, both Christian and non-Christian, I strongly urge you to read the following:

The Decree on Ecumenism

Dignitatis Humanae

Nostra Aetate

and
Dominus Iesus

Basically, the habit of the Church is to affirm what can be affirmed in common with people of good will, while distinguishing what cannot be affirmed in common and maintaining the proclamation of the gospel in respectful disagreement where other religious traditions contradict the gospel. Since grace builds on nature, this means, among other things, that where indigenous cultures contain the "seeds of the word" they are to be affirmed and judiciously incorporated into Catholic tradition (which is, again, why you are probably coloring Easter eggs, which used to be pagan fertility symbols and now are images of the Empty Tomb or New Life in Christ). It's why we have Christmas trees, wedding rings, Latin, and lots of other bric-a-brac from pagan culture knocking around in the Church. What always happens is that something pagan gets filled with Christian content. What does not happen (with the Church's permission, I mean) is that Christian forms get filled with pagan content.

When *that* happens, it's generally called "heresy" (as, for instance, when a Catholic theologian embraces the pagan notion that nature is The Ultimate and therefore decides that a transcendent God can't *really* raise Jesus from the dead since that would mean God is higher than Nature). I see no indication at all that JPII denied the essentials of the Faith. On the contrary, he proclaimed the faith to more people than anybody else who ever lived--literally. He was a great gift to the Church, I think, and constituted a great threat to those who prefer to think of the Church as a besieged fortress rather than as a battering ram against the gates of hell.

Speaking of First Things

Joe Carter writes a lovely appreciation of the Catholic Church from an Evangelical perspective. Hats off to you, Joe! You are an ornament of the Christian faith and I am proud to call you brother!