Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1418

Pope Benedict...

on the Senses of Scripture.

You know, somebody should write a book about that fascinating subject!


Why, I bet it would be a great Christmas present for those who want to know more about their Faith!

See you Monday!

I reckon posting will be spotty till after Thanksgiving, since I'm trying to plow through a backlog of work. Expect me when you see me.

I hate being right all the time

Read about it from me months ago:

The curious result of our culture's growing abandonment of the notion of sin is (as Faustian bargains tend to be) a loss of our humanity. As our culture becomes coarser and our belief in humans as moral creatures made in the image of God fades in favor of a vision of humans as creatures shaped by heredity and environment, our faith in the power of moral suasion goes with it. So, for instance, despite years and years of evidence to the contrary, self-styled combox experts in interrogation endlessly inform us that our first, rather than last, assumption is that prisoners in the War on Terror must be tortured like animals to get even minimal "results" from them. These self-appointed experts base this claim not on reality but on watching lots of episodes of 24. Meanwhile, real interrogators who dealt with pantywaists like Nazis and Commies insist that real intelligence is much more fruitfully gained by treating prisoners as what they are: rational human beings and not beasts.

As a culture embraces the view that men are essentially brutes, it is not possible to keep that in the bottle of a prison or CIA black site. Caesar starts to treat his subjects that way, too, while congratulating himself on his gritty "realism." So, for instance, where there used to be public service announcements that said, "Every litter bit hurts," we now get, "Litter and it will hurt" -- something you could just as easily say to a beast via a whip. "Buckle up for safety!" has been replace with "Click-it or ticket" or "Drive hammered. Get nailed." Threats, not admonition, are the order of the day.

Or watch it unfold in the headlines today:

Obama's Last Best Hope

If the GOP is dumb enough to nominate The Quitter, they deserve to have their defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. I don't think they are that dumb though. I expect it'll be somebody like Christie from NJ.

Reader Zac Alstin...

...on Obama's empathy problem.

Zac's an Aussie and can consider our crazy country from a distance. I sometimes suspect we appear to have become a madhouse over the past decade.

What Church Will be Like in Hell

This press release just came over the transom:

More People Replacing Cable TV With Internet Set-top Boxes, Using These Devices to Attend Church in People's Home

LONGWOOD, FLA. — Even as USA Today reports that more Americans are cutting out cable and satellite and replacing these services with set-top devices that stream TV shows and movies from the Web, many of us are now using these devices to attend church in people's homes.

Case in point: More than 4,000 owners of the Roku player have installed a new channel from Northland, A Church Distributed (www.northlandchurch.net) that streams live worship services, along with past sermons, music and classes.

A pioneering church that has brought live worship to mobile devices including the iPhone and to Facebook's 500 million users, Northland launched the first-ever church channel on Roku this October. Northland recently helped LifeChurch.TV launch a similar channel on Roku and wants to help many more churches do the same.

Originally designed to stream Netflix directly to TVs, Roku has since opened up to developers to create new music and video channels including Amazon On-Demand, Pandora and Major League Baseball.

Starting at $59, and about the size of a paperback novel, Roku is one of the most compact and least expensive ways to bring the church into just about any room. Installation is simple: Just connect the box to your existing Internet connection using ethernet or WI-FI, and plug an HDMI cable from the back of the unit into the TV.

"Our hope is that people will use this tool to gather together as the Bible challenges us to do in Hebrews 10:25," explains Marty Taylor, Northland's executive director of media design and technology.

The device is a potential boon for the burgeoning house church movement. According to noted researcher George Barna, one-third of American adults claim to have "experienced God or expressed (their) faith in God in a house church or simple church meeting in the past month."

Ron and Marcy Burth started a house church this summer at their home in Venice, Fla., which is now attended by 20 people. Marcy raves, "The Roku box is fantastic. It has really simplified our connection to Northland."

Jeremy Langston is an online congregant from Benton, La., who has worshiped with Northland along with his wife and five children for about a year now. A paramedic on an offshore oil platform, Langston worships via Northland's Facebook app when he's working in the Gulf.

"When I am home, I enjoy the Roku's large, high-quality picture instead of a tiny computer screen, and the sound is much better," he says.

Hulu, the popular online TV and movie site, just made its subscription service available in the Roku Channel Store. Additions such as this will almost certainly have more people buying the device during the holidays, which means more people potentially finding Northland's channel.

Langston concludes, "It may help win many people to Christ who were not even looking for Him."

Not the Onion. Honest.

Tales of the Unexplained

A reader, responding to this recent Tale of the Unexplained, writes:

I have a similar story.

My Father died in a car-crash at around 1 AM on the night of Saturday August 22 1987. He was killed in a head-on collision by a drunk-driver. We know the other driver was drunk because he survived for a few hours longer than my Father (killed instantly, beheaded by his own steering-wheel); the other driver's blood-alcohol was stratospheric. By the way, I know that man's name, and I pray for his soul.

Well, during that night, before I heard news of my Father's death, I was in my one-room apartment in Center City Philadelphia. I was 24, and my third year of law school (Temple Law School) was to begin the following Monday. (And yes I completed my law degree the following May, but I missed the first week of classes due to my Father's death.)

And during that night - when I went to bed after 1 AM as usual - I dreamed of my Father standing in front of his (our) house, and he told me, "remember the ring". In my dream, he smiled and appeared "content", but he seemed a bit sad and regretful too. But he was basically alright, and he was "reassuring" me in his typical way.

The following afternoon, my sister phoned me to inform me that my Father had been killed in a car accident during the previous night.

But that's not a ghost story yet. It becomes a ghost story after I tell you about "the ring":

When I was a boy, my Father always told me that he would leave me his signet Class Ring from La Salle University (where I also got my first degree as a National Merit Scholar.) It was especially significant to him because he was the first generation among our forefathers to get a degree, and he was a teacher. (And later, I became a university teacher.) He wore his class ring every day of his life. Including on the day he died. And he often told me with especial emphasis, that he wanted me to inherit his class ring.

But when he was killed in that car accident, his body was so mashed-up that he required a closed-casket funeral. And his class ring was not on his hand when his body was taken to the hospital for identification.

But then several weeks after the funeral, my Mother went to the garage where my Father's car wreck had been taken. She did it on her own initiative, for her own personal reasons, because she wanted "closure" by seeing the wrecked car in which my Father died. That's all she intended.

But then when my Mother went to the garage to see my Father's wrecked car, someone at the garage asked her, "Did your husband wear a class ring?" Because the crew who had cleaned up the wreck, found a signet ring on the side of the road.

It was my Father's ring.

So my Mother identified it, and she took it, and she gave it to me.

And so my Father kept his promise to leave me his class ring.

Having Kids is like Littering

Have I mentioned that the hatred of children is satanic?

Yes. I have. Good.

And have I mentioned that the childfree movement is therefore an archetypally evil movement?

Yes. I have. Good.

And have I mentioned the corresponding truth that babies are therefore an unalloyed good?

Yes. I have. Good.

My work here is done.

Safe, Legal and Rare

In which we discover that the defenders of consequentialism don't tend to think ahead.

Good News!

Fr. Brian Harrison writes, understandably wounded that I referred to him as "every Catholic torture defender's absolute favorite theologian". He reminds me that he wrote this some time ago, a point which I have not forgotten.

Just to be clear, I was not talking about his position with regard to torture. I'm talking about the way in which his work has been exploited, for years now, by people who are bent on making excuses for torture—specifically the torture policies deployed by the Bush Administration (including by such national figures as Marc Theissen). And not a few of them have, in fact, regarded Fr Harrison as Athanasius contra mundi and appealed to him *constantly* to justify every excuse they make for torture, every "well, there are two sides to whether torturing for information is immoral. Fr. Harrison says…", every "Catholics can agree to disagree about whether torture is really immoral. After all, Fr. Harrison says…" every "if the situation is dire enough, then it would be immoral *not* to torture. Bishops should keep their noses out of practical politics and let real men do the dirty work of fighting wars. After all, Fr. Harrison says…" I've had a thousand of these conversations and, tragically, Fr. Harrison's work and name has been invoked more times than I can count as the absolute and sole authority on the permissibility of torture, trumping all references to the Magisterium. The logic is, "Despite the obvious teaching of Benedict XVI, Veritatis Splendor, the Council and the Catechism, if it's even remotely possible that torture is permissible, that makes it a prudential judgment. And 'prudential judgment' means 'Ignore the bishops and their cloud cuckoo peacenik unrealism and do whatever is necessary to win in war. After all, Fr. Harrison says the moral legitimacy of torture remains open.'" Sorry, but them's the facts about a great deal of moral reasoning out here in the pews and that's what I was referring to, not to Fr. Harrison per se.

Happily and to his great credit, Fr. Harrison has chosen to definitively close that loophole for these folks by adding the brief Addendum reproduced below, which states that "the last sentence of the article I wrote is now to be understood as having been withdrawn. (That sentence is where I had said that 'the moral legitimacy of torture under the aforesaid desperate circumstances . . . remains open at present to legitimate discussion by Catholic theologians'.)"

ADDENDUM (to Living Tradition, #119)

After the above article was published, Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech of 6 September 2007 on Catholic prisons ministry, personally endorsed a statement against torture found in the 2005 Vatican Compendium of the Church's Social Teaching. Citing article 404 of this document, the Holy Father said, "In this regard, I reiterate that the prohibition against torture 'cannot be contravened under any circumstances'".

In the above article I have already cited and discussed, in my section A13 and endnote 27, this article 404 of the Compendium, which is a publication of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace. I have pointed out that this and other statements authored by the Commission itself - as distinct from the statements of Popes and Councils which it cites abundantly throughout the Compendium - does not possess magisterial authority; for the various Vatican commissions, unlike the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, are not in themselves arms of the Church's magisterium (teaching authority). However, now that Pope Benedict himself has personally reiterated this particular statement of the Compendium, I wish to state that I accept the Holy Father's judgement on this matter, and so no longer hold that Catholics can ever legitimately defend the use of torture - not even in extreme circumstances to gain potentially life-saving information from known terrorists. Accordingly, the last sentence of the above article, regarding "the present status quaestionis" on torture, should now be taken as withdrawn.

Thank you, Fr. Harrison, for this. May God bless your work in the Vineyard. Please forgive any false impressions I have given and any lack of charity on my part. I ask your prayers.