Carl E. Olson's Blog, page 308

Your online guide to understanding the new Roman Missal translation

[image error]


Our Roman Missal Translation Now Available!
Click Below and Get Your 4-part Course Now

Now you can be first to gain a better understanding of the New Roman Missal with our new online four lesson course created by My Catholic Faith Delivered in conjunction with Midwest Theological Forum, the Archdiocese of Boston and Msgr. James Moroney Professor at St. John's seminary who has made presentations in 2000 parishes and 20,000 priests! You can easily reach hundreds in your parish with this interactive course. MORE INFORMATION...

Benedict XVI reflects on the Book of Psalms, "the book of prayer par excellence"

From the Vatican Information Service, a report on the Holy Father's most recent general audience on prayer, given today:

VATICAN CITY, 22 JUN 2011 (VIS) - Benedict XVI dedicated his catechesis during this morning's general audience to what he described as "the book of prayer par excellence, the Book of Psalms". The audience was held in St. Peter's Square in the presence of 10,000 people.

  The 150 Psalms of the Book of Psalms "express all human experience", said the Pope. "All the truth of the believer comes together in those prayers, which first the People of Israel and later the Church adopted as a special way to mediate their relationship with the one God, and as an adequate response to His having revealed Himself in history".

  "Despite the many forms of expression they contain", the Psalms "can be divided into two broad categories: ... supplication associated with lamentation, and praise. These two dimensions are related, almost indivisible, because supplication is animated by the certainty that God will respond, and this opens the way to praise and thanksgiving; while praise and thanksgiving arise from the experience of salvation received, which presupposes the need for help expressed in the supplication. ... Thus, in the prayer of the Psalms, supplication and praise intertwine and fuse together in a single song which celebrates the eternal grace of the Lord as He bows down to our frailty".

  "The Psalms teach us to pray", the Holy Father explained. "In them, the Word of God becomes the word of prayer. ... People who pray the Psalms speak to God with the words of God, addressing Him with the words He Himself taught us. ... Through these words it is also possible to know and accept the criteria of His actions, to approach the mystery of His thoughts and His ways, so as to grow and develop in faith and love".

  "By teaching us to pray", the Pope went on, "the Psalms also teach us that at times of desolation, even in moments of suffering, the presence of God is a source of wonder and consolation. We may weep, plead and seek intercession, ... but in the awareness that we are advancing towards the light, where praise will be unending".

  "Equally important and significant are the manner and frequency in which the words of the Psalms appear in the New Testament, where they assume and underline that prophetic significance suggested by the link of the Book of Psalms with the messianic figure of David. In His earthly life the Lord Jesus prayed with the Psalms, and in Him they reach definitive fulfilment and reveal their fullest and deepest meaning. The prayers of the Book of Psalms, with which we speak to God, speak to us of Him, they speak of the Son, image of the invisible God Who fully reveals the Father's face to us. Thus Christians, by praying the Psalms, pray to the Father in Christ and with Christ, seeing those songs in a new perspective which has its ultimate interpretation in the Paschal Mystery".

  Having completed his catechesis and delivered greetings in various languages, the Pope recalled the fact that tomorrow is the Feast of Corpus Christi. He invited everyone in Rome, residents and pilgrims alike, to participate in the Mass he will celebrate at 7 p.m. tomorrow in the basilica of St. John Lateran, and in the subsequent procession along Via Merulana to the basilica of St. Mary Major. "I invite you", he said, "to join this act of profound faith towards the Eucharist, which represents the most precious treasure of the Church and of humankind".

Related links:

• The Holy Father focuses on Prophet Elijah; says "main objective of prayer is conversion" (June 15, 2011)
• Benedict XVI reflects on Moses as intercessor and "a prefiguration of Christ" (June 1, 2011)
• Benedict XVI: Our entire lives are like Jacob's long night of struggle and prayer... (May 25, 2011)
• Pope reflects on the example of prayer given by Abraham, "father of all believers" (May 18, 2011)
• Pope reflects on prayer, "the expression of humanity's desire for God" (May 11, 2011)

"Thomas More died the death of a traitor for defying absolute monarchy; ..."

... in the strict sense of treating monarchy as an absolute. He was willing, and even eager, to respect it as a relative thing, but not as an absolute thing. The heresy that had just raised its head in his own time was the heresy called the Divine Right of Kings. In that form it is now regarded as an old superstition; but it has already reappeared as a very new superstition, in the form of the Divine Right of Dictators. But most people still vaguely think of it as old; and nearly all of them think it is much older than it is. One of the chief difficulties today is to explain to people that this idea was not native to medieval or many older times. People know that the constitutional checks on kings have been increasing for a century or two; they do not realize that any other kind of checks could ever have operated; and in the changed conditions those other checks are hard to describe or imagine. But most certainly medieval men thought of the king as ruling sub deo et lege; rightly translated, "under God and the law," but also involving something atmospheric that might more vaguely be called, "under the morality implied in all our institutions." Kings were excommunicated, were deposed, were assassinated, were dealt with in all sorts of defensible and indefensible ways; but nobody thought the whole commonwealth fell with the king, or that he alone had ultimate authority there. The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school. There was an idea of refuge, which was generally an idea of sanctuary. In short, in a hundred strange and subtle ways, as we should think them, there was a sort of escape upwards. There were limits to Caesar; and there was liberty with God.

Read the entire essay, "St. Thomas More", by G. K. Chesterton:

"Let us praise God, then, for our English martyrs, Thomas More and John Fisher..."

St. Thomas More had no lack of plausible excuses if he had wanted to avoid the crown of martyrdom; no lack of sincere people who urged him to take refuge in them. Never, I suppose, was man so tempted both by friends and foes to abandon his purpose. His own wife, his own daughter took the part of his enemies, and entered into a loving conspiracy to save him from himself. But to friend and foe alike he opposed the impenetrable wall of his good-natured banter.

You see, he realized, long before other men of his time, that what stood before England was a complete parting of the ways. He saw that, in the conditions of his time, you must needs throw in your lot either with the old faith or with the heresies that were beginning to spring up all over Europe; that a nation which defied the authority of the Pope, although it might do so merely in the name of national independence, would be forced, sooner or later, into the camp of the heretic.

You see, he [More] realized, long before other men of his time, that what stood before England was a complete parting of the ways. He saw that, in the conditions o fhis time, you must needs throw in your lot either with the old faith or with the heresies that were beginning to spring up all over Europe; that a nation which defied the authority of the Pope, although it might do so merely in the name of national independence, would be forced, sooner or later, into the camp of the heretic. It is amazing to us, looking back upon all the intervening centuries have brought, that so many good men of that age – men who were afterwards confessors for the faith – were hoodwinked for the moment into following the King when he incurred the guilt of schism. But perhaps if were could think ourselves back rather more successfully into the conditions of the time, we should pardon them the more readily; and for that reason we should feel even greater admiration for the few men who, like our martyr, were wise enough to see what was happening. It was a time of national crisis, a time of intellectual ferment. There were only a few people who kept their heads, and those few who kept their heads lost their heads, like St. Thomas More.

… Let us thank God's mercy for giving us the example and the protection of a great Saint, our own fellow-countryman, who knew how to absorb all that was best in the restless culture of his day, yet knew at once, when the time came, that he must make a stand here; that he must give no quarter to the modern world here. His remembrance has long been secure in the praise of posterity; it only remained for us to be assured by the infallible voice of the Church, what we could not doubt already, that he is with our Blessed Lady and the Saints in heaven. He knows our modern needs, let us turn to him in our modern troubles; his prayers will not be lacking for the great country he loved so, for the great city in which he lived and died. ...

Let us praise God, then, for our English martyrs, Thomas More and John Fisher and the Charterhouse monks, and, from Blessed Cuthbert Mayne onward, the long line of proscribed and hunted priests. Men of our blood, they have left sayings which ring more familiarly to us than the translated pieties of the Continent; men of our latter-day civilization, they stand our with more of human personality than the mist-wreathed heroes of the medieval world. And surely, if they have not forgotten among those delights of the eternity the soft outlines and the close hedgerows and the little hills of the island that gave them birth; if in contemplating the open face of God, they have not ceased to take thought for the well-loved kingdom that exiled and disowned them, the patiently evangelized people that condemned and hurried them to the gallows, their prayers still rise especially, among all the needs of a distracted world, for the souls we love whom error blinds or sin separates from God.

— from "The English Martyrs: II", by Monsignor Ronald Knox, Pastoral and Occasional Sermons (Ignatius Press, 2002; originally published in 1940).

"Beauty and the Renewal of Culture: An Evening with Catholic Artists"

On Tuesday, June 28th, at 7:00 p.m., Thomas More College (Merrimack, New Hampshire) will be hosting a presentation titled "Beauty and the Renewal of Culture: An Evening with Catholic Artists" as part of its summer program, "Way of Beauty Atelier".

This event brings together three Catholic artists  working in the areas of sacred art, traditional painting, and architecture. The discussion will  involve portrait painter Henry Wingate, painter and architect and artist David Mayernik, and Thomas More College's own icon painter, David Clayton.

The discussion will be chaired by Father Thomas Kocik, author of two books on the liturgy including Reform of the Reform? A Liturgical Debate (Ignatius Press, 2003), and former editor of Antiphon, the journal of the Society for Catholic Liturgy.

These men will discuss the guiding principles of Catholic art and its role in the liturgical life of  the Church and in the broader culture.  The evening's presentations will be conversational. They will show examples of their work to illustrate the points they are making.

Those interested in attending may RSVP by contacting Lucy Domina at 603-880-8308, ext. 25

Weigel on "the rise of the anti-Catholic Catholics" (specifically, Maureen Dowd)

From George Weigel's most recent essay, "Maureen Dowd's Catholic Problem", on National Review Online, which begins with an historical overview of (Protestant) anti-Catholicism in the U.S., and then states:

Ecclesiastes notwithstanding, there is something new under the sun in the annals of American anti-Catholicism; and that something is the rise of the anti-Catholic Catholics, self-described Catholics who make a career (or at least part of a career) out of mounting endless attacks on the Church, its settled beliefs, its leadership, and its people. Like the Nast/rationalist anti-Catholicism of the past, today's Catholic anti-Catholicism is a left-of-center phenomenon that, in secular guise, often reflects the critiques of the Church mounted by so-called "Catholic progressives": The Church is hopelessly sexist; the Church is hopelessly sex-obsessed; the Church is cruel to women and gays; the Church is hypocritical. And, of course and most recently, the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of child rapists and their abettors, which "fact" validates the other charges in the standing indictment just cited. ...

Dolan, you see, opposed New York governor Andrew Cuomo's attempt to get the New York state legislature to adopt "gay marriage," of which Ms. Dowd approves. But Dowd was not content to register her disagreement with the archbishop, who had properly described such legislation as a quasi-totalitarian extension of state power. No, the Catholic girl raised in Blessed Sacrament parish on Washington's Chevy Chase Circle lit into Dolan — "the Starchbishop" — and the Church as a gang of hypocrites who defend marriage but deny it to gay couples; who worry about the young leaving the Church but then don't protect the young from sexual predators; and who have tried to slough off responsibility for clerical sexual abuse by blaming it on a toxic ambient culture, a tactic Ms. Dowd unoriginally described as "Blame Woodstock."

The last is, in fact, the key to understanding Maureen Dowd's particular form of virulent anti-Catholicism. Ms. Dowd believes in the sexual revolution as fervently as Archbishop Dolan believes in the Creed in which he leads his congregation at St. Patrick's every Sunday. The difference between them is that Archbishop Dolan can rationally defend the articles in the Creed, while Maureen Dowd is impervious to the massive empirical evidence that demonstrates that the sexual revolution has been a snare and a delusion for a) women, b) children, c) men, d) marriage, e) family stability, and f) the country's political culture (cf. Clinton, William Jefferson [whom Dowd helped save in 1998]). Interestingly enough, and in this respect, Maureen Dowd is not the linear descendant of Nast and the rationalist anti-Catholics, who were more often than not the "progressives" of their day. Rather, she is the rhetorical great-great-granddaughter of Elder W. C. Benson and his 1928 anti-Catholic screed, the difference being that Benson's fundamentalism involved notions of Biblical inspiration and inerrancy, while Dowdian fundamentalism involves an irrational and empirically unsustainable belief in the sexual revolution.

Read the entire piece. And also see Dr. Ed Peters' post, "Oh no! Maureen Dowd doesn't seem to like me!" (June 19, 2011).

Here are a couple of posts I've written in recent years about Dowd's attacks on the Catholic Church:

• "The Vatican's insistence on male prerogative is misogynistic poppycock" (July 18, 2010)
• Dour, unhinged, and factless, Maureen Dowd seeks papal whipping boy (March 29, 2010)
• Dowd for the Count (October 27, 2009)
• Maureen Dowd: Dan Brown is Vatican's ally (March 27, 2005)

The Necessity and Limits of Politics

The Necessity and Limits of Politics: A Review of Daniel J. Mahoney's The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight | June 21, 2011

"When self-sufficiency and freedom are severed from their dependence upon and completion in God, the human person creates for himself a false destiny and loses sight of the eternal joy for which he has been made."
— Pope Benedict XVI, "The Meaning of the Gospel," To Bishops of the Philippines (Ad Limina Meeting of Philippine Bishops, L'Osservatore Romano, February 23, 2011).

"A laudable respect for the accomplishments of different cultures has given way to an absolute relativism that denies the very idea of universal moral judgments and a universal human nature."
— Daniel J. Mahoney, The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order: Defending Democracy against Its Modern Enemies and Immoderate Friends (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2010), p. 102.

I.

Though it has some important things to say about politics, the New Testament is not a book of politics. Indeed, the early Christians took a considerable amount of time to come to terms with the political order, an effort pioneered by Augustine more than anyone else. That the New Testament was not somehow a substitute for the Politics of Aristotle or any other political book did not mean that politics was not important. It was just not the most fundamental thing about us.

The New Testament tells us primarily about our final purpose and end, not our temporal life in which our end is to be worked out with not a little "fear and trembling," as St. Paul put it. The New Testament did not think it necessary to have a formal teaching about politics. This absence of politics implied that men had sufficient intelligence and experience by themselves to figure out its basics. Revelation presumed and expected men to use their brains. Besides, Plato and Aristotle had already outlined most of the important things.

Even though Aristotle had said "man is by nature a political animal," he also recognized, as did Augustine, the messiness—to use no stronger word—that could flow from politics. To be unaware of the lethal dangers of politics was not really possible to the early Christians. They were often under constant persecution, as many Christians are in the world today though we do not much notice them. Both Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have remarked on the relation of the death of Socrates to the death of Christ. These deaths gave rise to the classical question of political philosophy about whether a regime can be found in which the best man would not be killed. It is still an open question. Modern liberal often claimed that it could do so, but things kept going wrong, even in Paradise.

What marks modern Church thinking on politics is that politics are primarily the task of laymen. Benedict calls it a "healthy secularity." The Church has indeed proposed what it calls its "social doctrine." This ongoing effort thinks out the general lines of an adequate social and political order. The Church acknowledges that responsibility for the temporal order is not the competence of the hierarchy.

Catholic social doctrine combines revelational and reasonable analyses into a coherent whole. It has accepted many of what are called modern political institutions that would guarantee the freedom of the Church's mission in the world as well as promoting the common good of citizens. What it has more and more run up against since nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism, capitalism, communism, fascism, liberalism, and now Islam are concepts of politics that admit to no limits.

Politics, in effect, becomes a militant rival to the revelational understanding of man.

Read the entire review on Ignatius Insight...

I hereby nominate Deepak Chopra as "Most Irrational, Vicious Sham of a Shaman"

This little post about Deepak Chopra isn't going to be as impeccable and memorable as Dr. Ed Peters' post about Maureen Dowd (Note his restraint: "With a predictability that borders on banality". Borders?).

But I confess that I have certain and pointed dislike for the writing and "thought" of Chopra, who I consider to be only about a half-step up from a con artist, although it could be that he has simply taken con artistry to a New (Age) level. His book, The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, is quite possibly the most embarrassing, confused, illogical, and ignorant "serious" book ever written about Jesus, which is really saying something.

That same book contains some slanderous comments about orthodox Christians and their political activities, including his outrageous statement that a certain Christian law student who spoke of her belief in "absolute truth" is very much like the mentality of an Islamic terrorist: "Does she see how closely she echoes the ideology of the jihadies, for whom truth is so absolute and God-given that they gladly strap themselves to suicide bombs? ... Once war becomes a clash of absolutes, there is no breathing room for mercy. Absolute truth is blind truth." (p. 229). As I wrote in my lengthy essay review of Chopra's book:

Dare I ask: Is that statement absolutely true? Because if it is, it's blind truth. And if it isn't, then it isn't true. And so it goes. Put simply, Chopra's arrogance is matched only by his stunningly gross illogic. And hypocrisy: "The point isn't to judge the religious right. Not only would such behavior not be enlightened, it would be totally counterproductive as a strategy." (232)

Fast forward to Chopra's June 16th column, "Sarah Palin, My President", on the Huff-and-Puff Post site, which has all of the usual characteristics of Chopraology: incoherent thought, vicious attacks, condescension, unfunny attempts at cleverness, and wild accusations about the potential actions of those he disagrees with. Consider this nugget, keeping in mind that Chopra has said judging the religious right would be unenlightened:

My President Palin would lead us through a national cleansing, like Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Nothing as violent, however, not at first. Maybe she might let school kids scribble with crayons on the paintings in the Museum of Modern Art. I've never met a soccer mom who wanted a Picasso refrigerator magnet. Or she might close all the high-brow music schools and inaugurate the kind of music that gosh darn real Americans like: harmonica, the musical saw, and tapping your foot to the radio while driving a pickup. What more do we really need?

Andrew Jackson's inauguration in 1828 was disrupted when a mob burst into the White House, tracking in mud, breaking the china, and eventually turning the lawn into a drinking bout. Sarah has the style to make this an official event. The Jackson mob dropped so much cheese on the floor that it ruined the White House carpets, so my advice is for Sarah to skip the buffalo wings and hand out beer bongs. (emphasis added)

Oh, sure, I get it: all is fair in politics and there is lots of name-calling and nastiness on right-wing talk radio. But the comments above are still a bit surprising, even to those of us familiar with Chopra's many confused rants about issues political and cultural. After all, last time I checked, Sarah Palin wasn't even a working politician or a political candidate; nor does it seem likely that a woman who refused to abort a baby with Down's Syndrome is interested in somehow killing millions of Americans who disagree with her beliefs (estimates vary, but Mao was responsible for the murder of some 40 million Chinese, perhaps many more). And, really, what was the point of Chopra's essay/rant?

My partial take is that this is the product of an angry elitist whose disdain for ordinary Americans, conservative Christians, and people with convervative political beliefs is overt and obvious, in direct inverse proportion to being coherent and thoughtful. And the New Age movement, although not a cohesive body of beliefs, seems to produce a similar elitism, one that talks constantly of being "enlightened" but then argues at an elementary school level (my apologies to children everywhere). After all, it only takes fifteen seconds to explose the logical fallacies of one of Chopra's central beliefs:

Pentecost and the new evangelization

Those were the two main topics taken up in the conversation that Sheila Liaugminas and I had on her program, "A Closer Look with Sheila Liaugminas", last Tuesday. I'm a bit late in posting the link, but if you want to listen to the show, you can access it on the Relevant Radio website.

More about the Franciscan University of Steubenville summer conferences and YOUCAT

John Beaulieu, Director of the Youth and Young Adult Outreach Office at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, was on "Kresta In the Afternoon" on Ave Maria Radio, on June 14th. He spoke about the new Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the partnership between Ignatius Press, publisher of YOUCAT, and Franciscan University that will bring 40,000 copies of the catechism to youth attending 18 different conferences this summer (the interview starts at the ten-minute mark):

• YOUCAT will reach 40,000 North American Catholic teens this summer (June 7, 2011)
• The catechism's website: YOUCAT.us