First Sunday of Lent

No required reading today.  Feast when the Church feasts, fast when the Church fasts.

However, if you want to keep your momentum, I might recommend the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians.

Clement of Rome was the fourth pope, following Linus and Cletus after Peter.

Fourth day of Lent

Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians (complete)

Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna, a contemporary of Irenaeus, and a disciple of John the Evangelist.

Third day of Lent

Epistle to Diognetus, chapters 7-12

All known copies of this document were made from a 13th century manuscript after damage caused the loss of two lines from the middle of the text.  The last two chapters are possibly additions from later in the second century or possibly early in the third century.

Second day of Lent

Epistle to Diognetus, chapters 1-6

An anonymous apologetic ("Mathetes" is not the author's true name but a word that means "disciple") from the late second century.

First Day of Lent

The Didache (complete)

The Didache is one of the oldest non-canon documents of Christianity.  Written in the late first century AD, it is thought by some to be the constitution of the Council of Jerusalem mentioned in Acts 15.  Thought lost, it was rediscovered in the late 19th century in Constantinople.

40 days of patristics for Lent

Since many bloggers largely stay offline for Lent, I thought I would try something different.  Lent is a good time to pray and meditate by turning to Christian writings that have already stood the test of time, but I don't mean to go against that.  Since I normally don't write very much (except when I really get going), and not all that well, I wanted to provide something worthwhile for people whose Lenten penances do not include avoiding the Blogosphere, to try facilitating some Patristic reading that everybody should at least develop some passing familiarity with.  Also, I compiled all the stuff I'm going to be posting over the next six weeks in advance, and I didn't personally have to write any of it, so it keeps this from becoming a chore for me as well.

When I was in grad school, someone turned me on to the Lenten Fathers devotion.  Over the course of the 40 days of Lent (Sundays excluded--they're feast days), with an average of 10-15 minutes of reading a day, you will have read some of the most influential documents of ten writers from the Patristic era.

Starting tomorrow, I will post links to the various Patristic writings from this reading plan at ChurchYear.net  I'd post the whole texts but I'm not entirely clear on the intellectual property rules for particular translations of documents in the public domain.  Most of them are short enough you can read the entire thing in one sitting, but for the longer ones I will link the whole document each day from New Advent, and list the chapters prescribed by ChurchYear.net for each day's reading because I don't know of a way to create links that navigate to specific locations inside a document that doesn't already have anchor tags where I'd want them.  If you know how, please let me know.

Since Sundays aren't included, in order to help keep in the habit of reading and reflecting every day, I have included additional Patristic documents to keep things consistent.  Some of them get a little long, but since Sundays are a day of rest, maybe you'll have more time for reading, anyway.

Prayer request

So, I took a new job back in July, moved across three states to do it.  I wasn't sure that I'd like it a lot, but it was a good career move.  The guy who interviewed me warned me that the hours would be long, which gave me some pause, but assured me that dedication and hard work were well rewarded.  So, I took the chance.

Things were okay at first.  I hadn't quite been trained on enough of my new responsibilities to fill the 60-72 hour work week by the end of my second month, but that didn't matter because they thrust me into a supervisory position.  My boss wasn't thrilled with losing me, and he was sympathetic because in every way except the most abstract I had no qualifications for the job or for the department I was now on loan to ("they figure," my boss said, "you're smart enough, you can figure it out"), but neither of us really had a say in the matter.

I don't want to go into details now about the corporate climate; suffice it to say our management was accurately described in an online review of the company as having "comic-book villain personalities."

So here's my concern.  I left my last job for a lot of the reasons I don't like my current job.  I know it's not like this everywhere, but this seems to be endemic to the industry, if not to American business in general.  It's making me think that engineering isn't what I'm supposed to do for the rest of my life, if I can't go somewhere that isn't going to make me sick.

I ask, then, for your prayers:  that for now I continue to get by, and that I may discern what the rest of my career should be, and succeed in whatever that is.

Never pass up an opportunity to float some propaganda

I haven't been following the tragedy in Newtown, CT very closely; I can't quite bring myself to stare it in the face and I'm reluctant to desensitize myself with another media frenzy.  Instead I want to talk briefly about the media.

As you've noticed, the events of last Friday have provided a great opportunity to bring a long neglected national debate back to the forefront:  gun control.  I tend to see the debate from one side of the argument that you will probably be able to guess easily if you don't already know, but I don't want to talk about gun control itself right now.

I read part of an article this morning that focused on how the gun debate has awakened in the wake of the Newtown shooting.  It attempted to sum up the debate in a few sentences that, for lack of an eidetic memory, I will paraphrase:

Advocates of less restrictive gun laws point to states that have more widespread gun ownership and claim that there is a lower incidence of violent crime.  Gun control advocates disagree, however, and say that jurisdictions with tight gun laws have records of lower gun violence.

Both sides of the debate could be right, because they're talking about two different things.  Through either sloppy or dishonest reporting, the reader is left to wonder which side is going to massage the data better.

Read the paraphrased paragraph over again.  Advocates of gun ownership say violent crime is lower where law-abiding citizens are not prevented from defending themselves with guns.  Advocates of gun control say gun violence is lower where there are fewer guns on the books.

Violent crime ≠ gun violence.  A crime could be committed violently with guns, knives, baseball bats, binder twine, a roll of quarters, or bare fists.  Gun control only attempts to take one class of tools out of the hands of criminals.

Today I'm not going to argue about whether gun control would be fruitful or not.  I only want to draw attention to the fact that honest and informed dialog is not going to be possible if we're not going to hold our sources of information up to better scrutiny.  This instance happened to be obvious to me because I've had practice looking for cases where my political opponents try to have a debate on their grounds under their terms and treat any sign of skepticism as an act of bad faith or ill will.  There have been other instances when I've been let down by sources I thought were more trustworthy (I know, trust not in princes and all that...), and I'm sure yet others that I haven't become aware of.

I strive to be more perceptive.  I don't know if I'm any better at it than anyone else, but I'm better than I used to be.  I encourage everyone to do the same, to challenge their own suppositions from time to time.

A coworker of mine mentioned a few weeks ago, "I don't like FOX News.  They lie."

Honey, lying news outlets are the only game in town, including the networks and publications that tell you FOX is not to be trusted.  Best get used to checking your own facts.

"If marriage is opened to anyone who wants it...so what?"

A chilling exchange crossed the forums at ISCA recently.  A user posited the question "If we opened marriage up to everyone, so what?  What are the things that would go bad in society if this happened?"

These are not unreasonable questions.  Too often the most common argument made is the "appeal to squick," the notion that if something seems gross, there's something wrong with it.  True or not, it's a subjective and emotional standard that can't stand on its own.  It was the discussion that followed that was bothersome.  Paraphrased nuggets of wisdom from the "discussion:"

"Who cares?"  "Are we supposed to clutch our pearls and say 'land sakes, God a'mighty' while all these terrible things happen?"  "If there's some species-ending occurrence like not enough people preferring to couple with adult humans, instead preferring animals or machines or children, so what?"  "Only adults have legal standing and the ability to sign contracts, so the line is drawn at polygamy and gay marriage; anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot."

It's these last two that bother me.  I don't know what kind of idiot it would take to realize that people are already pushing beyond plural and gay marriage, beyond the line Mark Shea describes as "consent as the sole criterion of the good."  Sure, statues and children and dolphins can't sign contracts legally, but children at least have the ability to do so, and machines could be programmed to do so, as long as we're maintaining the facade of mutual consent.

If you want to blur the line between what's accepted now and what you want accepted, start on the fuzzy cases:  machines programmed to do what you already want, children who might be precocious enough to be emancipated or who might just be brought before a judge more sympathetic to the head of the local chapter of NAMBLA than to the well-being of children.  If you can throw the matter of consent into question, you really don't have to stop there.

"Oh, but plural marriage isn't illegal--bigamy as an instance of fraud and adultery/cohabitation laws being excepted--it's just not legally recognized," it was said.  Um, no.  Legally recognizing these arrangements is the whole point.  There are already people who do these things and it is decreasingly held in check by the forces of shame and law.  If it weren't unhealthful we'd already have more than the alleged hundreds or thousands of people practicing these things successfully.

And if "species-ending occurrence" doesn't strike you as a bad thing, how can, or why should, anyone else explain that any of the problems that are less dire than suigenocide are both problems and real possibilities?  If you want to have a thorough discussion, more power to you, but do you honestly think the burden of proof is not on the people saying "What could it hurt?"  If you really want to be honest, you should be calling to heel your allies who are making bad arguments that you already understand well enough to counter on behalf of your rhetorical opponents.

"Well, even two-person marriages don't always last forever, so what's it matter if larger ones don't, either?"

The fact that polygamous arrangements are not more successful than normal marriages is beside the point.  The point is that they are less successful.  Between nuclear families and plural marriage you have millions of people who cheat in secret; or who start seeing someone new before breaking it off with the current significant other, because they know it's not going to last long if they're open and honest with everybody about it; or who do so with the knowledge and toleration of the other party because they have some other compelling reason to keep up appearances.

Again I am compelled to remind my reader of boiling a frog in a pot of water.  If all it takes for evil to succeed is good men doing nothing, then all it takes to get good men to do nothing is trick them to make a thousand trivial compromises while evil hides in plain sight.  We see it on TV, we see it in our communities, we see it at work:  something unpleasant happens, people shrug and say "Well, it's just the times we live in; who can mount a crusade against a swarm of gnats, let alone this?" and everyone gets used to things being worse than they should be, without quite being able to explain what's wrong.

ISCA seems, more than most places I've been on the Internet, intolerant of the slippery slope argument. I think it is because back in the heyday of BBSes, it was not uncommon to find debaters who committed the classical slippery slope fallacy.  Whether it is a fallacy, or a bad argument, in contemporary usage depends on the circumstances, much as the appeal to authority does:  while an appeal to authority is valid if one can accurately cite the position of a legitimate expert, the slippery slope is valid if one can demonstrate the progression from making the first trivial compromise to reaching the state that the debater warns against.  While one can still sometimes have interesting discussions there, this propensity for assuming that arguments they don't like are badly framed arguments really makes me question the value of coming there to mine for post fodder.  Maybe it's a good intellectual barometer for the state of society, but there's not much room these days for new or unpopular ideas.

I wonder if there's a good theology on tap that runs during the winter around here somewhere.

The wasted vote

I don't recall if I posted on this topic before, but if so, it's worth revisiting, especially this time of the year.

Many people talk about how they would like to vote third party because they dislike the major party candidates, or how they would like to vote for one of the two main party candidates; but they won't, because they feel they would be wasting their votes.  Others just decide to vote for the one they think will win, rather than the one they want to win.

I ask:  What would make their vote well spent, instead?

I say there is no such thing as a wasted vote; or, they're all wasted.

The vast majority of time, elections aren't close enough that any individual's vote is going to make a difference.  How is your one vote for a candidate who loses by a hundred thousand any more wasted than the one vote cast for a candidate who wins by a hundred thousand?

What would your vote accomplish either way?

What return do you get for casting your vote one way or another?  A clear conscience for throwing in with the lesser of two evils instead of with an actual good?  Is someone at least paying you?

Not that I have anything against people who vote tactically, but even in that sense, the sense of voting to increase the probability of successfully electing someone who isn't as bad as the alternative in any particular election, there's still the fact that you're making an unnecessary contribution to the polling statistics, at the expense of sending a message about the kind of person you really think should be in charge.  That may be more of a waste than anything, if you do nothing else for the next four years.

The best thing to do, really, is to try to stay current on political happenings, vote in primaries when you can, and do your homework so you can vote meaningfully in local and state elections, because that's where national-level politicians get started.  Maybe someday you'll find, say, pro-life Democrats who don't capitulate on abortion when they go to Washington because they finally see how much support they have inside their party.  Maybe someday you'll find activists and journalists hoisted by their own petards as they try harder and harder to paint the Tea Party as racists and imperialists every time one gets elected on a sane and traditional platform.

Or maybe that's not your thing, but whatever you believe, if you don't help the right people get started in politics, you'll always only be choosing between a candidate you don't like and a candidate you don't want.

"Conservatives have spent the last 40 years trying to convince people that the mainstream media is somewhere left of center...and it's paid off."

Well yeah, of course it has, with all the help the conservatives' political opponents have provided.

You want examples?  Look at the last presidential campaign.  In the preceding eight years, W hardly got away with anything without being denied the benefit of the doubt.  The Iraq war was just over its first hump when people started complaining about the lack of an exit strategy (not that it's bad to have one, but it's weird to focus on that while skipping right over things like, say, a victory strategy; maybe the armchair generals thought a successful first wave was just how wars work in the post-Vietnam era).  Then a freshman congressman from Chicago, with hardly anything to his voting record, shows up; and not only is treated like the Second Coming, almost no one is heard saying "Um, that's a little beyond enthusiastic, isn't it?  Can we talk about what he plans on doing instead of how he's going to usher in the Age of Aquarius?  Who is lucid or sane enough for us to be quoting seriously, who goes around talking about Obama like he's the übermensch?"

And I know it's not exactly the same thing, but it's related, so while we're discussing bias, we should also talk about slant.  Things where articles give equal time but one side enjoys the application of euphemisms or more favorable adjectives.  Things where articles are objective in content but give more air or screen time or column space to one side than to another.  Things where articles are pretty well balanced but giving one side an apparently decisive but premature last word.  Things where biased experts are brought in to analyze a situation and fall short of reasonable efforts to keep his preferences out of the discussion.

But let's also talk about media magnates who visit journalism schools and tell students that not only is true objectivity impossible, leftist bias is preferable--even an obligation.  Let's talk about the folks in the media who apparently missed those lectures and insist that they and theirs are capable of rising above it all.  Let's talk about industry language standards that clearly favor one side, to the tune of using "pro-choice" for the side that favors abortion while using "anti-choice" for the side that considers it to be the worst of murders.  Let's talk about how Fox news doesn't just seem conservative, but seems predominantly conservative against the bulk of the rest of the media.

I can only conclude that they have some radically different definition of "bias" from the rest of us.  I wonder what they have in mind when they use the word.  I wonder what they think we're talking about, when we use it.

But biased or not, I don't put a lot of stock in the mass media as a stand-alone source of predigested news.  They're ignorant or sloppy enough at reporting on the topics that I understand well, that I'm inclined to think they perform about as well in reporting on other topics I'm less equipped to judge.  That doesn't leave much worth watching except the weather and traffic.  Oh, and sports, I guess.

Charismatic...Catholic...New Age?

My mom once mentioned a faith healer she had wanted to go see at the annual state Catholic charismatic conference he was supposed to be attending somewhere near her home this past summer.  I told her I was also interested in going; I've been trying to be more open to different kinds of prayer, since my prayer life tends to be more rote and...I don't know, insensate?  Less seasoned with personally significant or just personal phenomena.  Anyway, that and I hoped to provide some grounding for my mom whose interest in a visibly fruitful prayer life after having grown up on the cusp of Vatican II sometimes leaves her open to gauging activity of the Holy Spirit by emotional impact.  So we've got things to learn from each other.


Well, she encouraged me to look this healer up online, so I did.  The first Google hit I got was a discussion about whether he was on the level or not, so it seemed as good a place to start as any.  I looked at a few more, some which were enthusiastically supportive, others which were cautious because some of his language and healing techniques (he had been a physician but now does full-time prayer healing and some unorthodox/experimental medical practices I don't want to get sidetracked on) bear similarities to Eastern philosophy and contain occasional references to Eastern religious figures, still others which were pretty well against this man's work because of its Eastern appearances.   


What was funny was that this first web site was cautiously skeptical, based largely on conversations with a Catholic acquaintance of the author of the web site, but all the criticisms were against Catholic doctrine and culture.


Repeated denials that the man with the alleged gift of healing had anything to do with the healing of the Catholic acquaintance, that Jesus did not need him and could have healed him from the prayers of anyone else, such as the site's author (who may or may not have offered any).  Reminders that we don't need healers, we need Jesus (do we even need doctors, then?  Are we to despise certain tools Jesus may deign to use other than a grace of spontaneous recovery of health?).  "Alarm bells" going off at this healer's admission to using the rosary and chaplet of Divine Mercy frequently during his healing services.  Frequent "corrections" to the healed man talking about the work of his priest, and dismay at the man's cancer coming back, as if no sola fideist ever died.  Sorrow over his alleged misconception that he would have to go to purgatory, with the author's own misconceptions being clear in claiming that the doctrine of purgatory was proof in the lack of faith in the completeness of Christ's suffering (or rather, in the owner's thorough ignorance of Colossians 1:24) "that the RCC invented in the 800 years after Christ's death"--not sure how the RCC differed from the Eastern or Oriental or other Occidental rites back then, or if it wasn't until the ninth century that questions of purgatory presumably first arose.  Saying it is a lie that Rome is the one Church and [the pope, anyway] the successor of Peter, even though most ecclesial communities find it more fruitful to attempt to trivialize these claims than to attempt to show the claims are simply, willfully, false.  Regretting that this person, being Catholic, isn't even aware of his savior (a claim I find odd every time I hear it; we don't use "personal relationship with Jesus" language as much, although talk and writing about the Eucharist is pretty clearly that, and if he wasn't up for correcting the simple factual errors about purgatory and the role of the priest or the Church then he probably wouldn't have been well-equipped to cut through the Evangelical jargon either, but I hear this "you don't know Him" stuff so much it makes me wonder how stupid they must think we are for praying to some blue-robed Mother while the Son to whom she is a mother we never think about--who's the guy on the cross supposed to be, anyway, if not Jesus?).  Regretting that, in their zeal to show him the truly-true Gospel before Time Ran Out and he finally succumbed to cancer, they may have been blunt to the point of alienating; this is another curious feature I sometimes observe, one that smacks to me of a belief in the inadequacy and narrowness of the Cross, that if someone can't be pressed into reciting a trite formula before the buzzer on his life goes off, then there's no hope.  But maybe being overzealous and then recognizing the share in culpability for the harm done by belligerent proselytizing is better than saying "Well, we logistically haven't been able to evangelize to absolutely everybody in the world, so God must be okay with sending all those pagans to hell, and so who am I to have a problem with what God wants?" which I have also seen.


What was perhaps funnier was a comment left by a reader who laments that we Catholics never do discernment of the supernatural, that it's all the same and must all come from God, and so we never know if we're being deceived by satanic healings.


You know what?  Satan might heal (maybe wouldn't, but for the sake of the argument), but he couldn't if God didn't allow it.  Satan couldn't act, or exist, if God didn't allow it.  God allows things because in the end they will glorify Him.  I don't find a sorting logic of "Direct from God is good, anything that appears to be mediated by the saints or angels is from the devil" to be particularly discerning.  It attributes too much native power to hell and too little shared power to current and would-be saints.  You know what?  Okay, God did the healing, but you had the charity to ask God to heal.  God gave you the charity too, but He also gave you the free will to exercise it--the opportunity to let Him act through you.  Scrupling to deny that crosses the line from humility into denial of facts, and woe to he who calls good evil.  You've got a problem with free will?  Then you've got a lot of non-Calvinists to preach to than just the Catholics (which makes me wonder, on a tangent, what or when doctrinal differences qualify as fundamental and gross, or just negligible differences of interpretation betwixt brethren).


But I'm getting off track.  All these criticisms of Catholics' various apparently inferior charisms, but nothing about what should alarm them:


No qualms about mentioning Buddha alongside Jesus and the saints who worked through the power of love.  No fears about the similarities between Eastern pantheistic-medical practices and this healer's allegedly unorthodox medical practices.  No alarm raised at the descriptions of God as an Energy or a field like for one of the four fundamental forces of nature.


Here is a guy with cancer putting himself in the care of a guy potentially attempting to harness the powers of Eastern mysticism, and you're worried that he lacks some familiarity with Christ gained by reciting a rote verse?  Christ hasn't been present in this world the way you and I are for two thousand years; I would venture that none of us is really adequately familiarized with Him.  Worry first about whether the doctor has a predilection for conflating God and The Force.  

I read a few other silly-creepy articles from this mailing list that will beat the Church and modern culture with any stick they can find, and I'm leaning again more in the direction of unsubscribing from their list and ignoring them.  On the one hand, they still make some correct criticisms of certain movements that are popular because they're comforting, such as the prosperity gospel, but judging from my moderate exposure to Joel Osteen, it may be fruitful for a discerning soul to take some of his "the Lord will reward you for behaving rightly" lessons in a metaphorical mode rather than in a materialistic one, and I think the outfit running this mailing list tends to err a little too scrupulously on the side of cutting out things that could be good because they might also be bad.

I don't want to encourage anyone to sin, nor to put them in the near occasion of sin, but sometimes there should be room for prudential judgment and a consideration for the individual's disposition and temperament.

Anyway, on the other hand, they pull some stuff that is so...inbred...that I can't even bring myself to make fun of it.  I can hardly say to myself with a straight face "Well, maybe someone should answer those charges, for the benefit of the anonymous reader who might read them and fail to find the sane rebuttal."

I mentioned a few days ago a few examples, the most egregious I think being the usual smack about the Vatican trying to establish a one-world government (which I have never seen an argument against, except on the grounds that the Antichrist also seems to want such a thing--certainly not a reason to embrace it, but not compelling on its face to the sober minded, either) after that silly article by an obscure department in Rome about global banking.

Somewhat more recently than the message where they criticized that occurrence, they had another article on the proper way to pray.  This sounds like it should be good, but keep in mind this is also coming from some folks who said we shouldn't pray to the Holy Spirit, because it's not Biblical; that we should only pray to the Father, through the Son.  I'm surprised they're Trinitarian at all, after the theological reasoning I saw there.

Anyway, they started by listing a bunch of spiritual practices known around the world, including the Divine Office, Zen mediation, reiki, centering prayer, and a few other things I can't remember at the moment.  The rosary was probably on there, too, and I think those crop labyrinths that show up outside of harmless harvest festival milieux.  Pretty disparate collection, but they then asserted that what all these practices have in common is that they're forms of contemplative prayer, and that they're unbiblical.

Huh?

Um...no.  Not at all.

Of course eastern mystical practices are unbiblical, even if you don't want to go as far as saying they're fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.  But none of these things in itself is contemplative prayer.  Contemplation is a form of prayer that is only a gift from God, perhaps best understood as a special kind of mediation that might occur during one of these other forms of prayer, but it's not something someone can simply sit down and do, like praying rote or praying extemporaneously.  Granted, grasping natural contemplation is an expected fruit of lectio divina, but infused contemplation is not something we can achieve, and thus not something we can resist, except by refusal to cooperate with grace--and that, being the definition of sin, no honest Christian would endorse).

Naturally I can't say God would never bestow the gift of contemplation on a pagan, I've seen too many pagans act in what I would have called Christian charity  to believe that God would refuse to work in their lives, so maybe there is a common thread after all, but honestly, all the things they mentioned are otherwise unrelated.  The rosary?  Mediation on the life of Christ, through the eyes of Mary.  The Divine Office?  Largely psalms of praise.  Reiki?  Some kind of pagan healing technology, of sorts.  Eastern meditation?  Perhaps the closest thing to Christian mediation on the surface, but geared more towards detachment and emptiness than towards calming the self and trying to listen to God, to just spend time with Him.

No, how they say we should pray is to say our praises and petitions, and then search the Scriptures for an answer.

This is not a bad thing, but it puzzles me that anyone would think this is a well rounded way to live.  I would lament if I were of the majority of Christians in history who could not read to study the Bible, or could not afford a Bible to read or the time to read it.

I wonder how they would react if, in poring over Lamentations or Revelation, they received a gift of a moment of spiritual communion in the very sense they said we should not pursue.  It is not seemly to pursue glories, but God is well known for giving us what we don't want because it's good for us.

Above and beyond, our Lord did give us instructions on how to pray, and it was not "praise and beseech, then search the Scriptures."  It was "Pray like this:  Our Father, Who art in heaven; hallowed be Thy Name.  They kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

You can follow that exactly or use it as a guide or template for all your prayer, but it far from supports the position of folks like I'm talking about who try too hard to be pure and correct.  Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, guys.

I don't often like visiting web sites that feature philosophies I strongly disagree with

Usually they're so rich with content I disagree with, I'd burn up the remainder of my soul trying to beat the host and his supporters with arguments about the truth of the Church and what all.  I don't want to do that, and don't like it when I feel myself so inclined, because what I should be doing is trying to convert them and win them over with love, instead of turning it into a fight.  Sometimes I'll visit a few, but I try not to comment or anything so I don't get too caught up in it.

I do get one mass e-mailing from some outfit that warns about some conspiracy between Rome and the UN creating a world government (a refreshing change from both being part of the same Jesuit plot although sometimes they go there, too), but they have a mix of silly stuff that doesn't bother me too much yet (I may get my fill after a few more missives like what I've received lately, though) and criticisms of the culture I actually agree with, so I can stomach the few nuggets of bigotry and misplaced paranoia, turn them into post fodder.  Although recently they attempted to Biblically deconstruct the "Catholics Come Home" ad campaign; they did such a grade school job on that "maybe a world bank wouldn't be a bad idea, eh?" article from whichever Vatican dicastery that it would have killed any faith I might have still had in their ability to exegete weightier subjects like the Bible itself.  You've probably seen the type; they talk about being among the mere tens of thousands of true Christians, write off all ecumenism as false ecumenism and put out articles and DVDs about how the "Bible Church" cannot "merge" with Rome, get it right on isolated topics like prosperity theology (I wish a few of them had the historical memory to attack residual liberation theology, but maybe the Jesus-Marxists are too far out there to show up on their radar), and then spend a great deal of effort going around debunking the messages of specific Protestant celebrities along side Masonry and Rome and other bogeymen.

I read an editorial by Richard Dawkins from last fall, though, that really made me want to add my drop to the bucket of challengers to his comfortable misconceptions.  I won't go into all of it, because I'm lazy and because his caricatures are only convincing to people who want to have an exotic, bureaucratic boogeyman to rage against.  The supporters in his combox, however, were perhaps more alarming.

Dawkins was talking about how the Church--the Latin Rite, at least--was a viable contender for the title of greatest evil force in the world, something like that.  Gave "examples" by referring to the teachings on chastity as lies about condoms that kill Africans with AIDS.  I wanted to go all Robert Louis Stevenson and point out that, even though federal monies sometimes make their way to Catholic hospitals in the US, the Church (and other religious groups) actually have boots on the ground trying to help the people who have AIDS now and are starving and in poverty now, instead of issuing shrill criticisms from his comfortably distant laptop computer.  But I doubt I have the charism to prick his conscience, if no other opponent of his has managed to do so, either.  Time to pray for him and for patience and humility for myself along the way.

Naturally the defenders of the Faith made their various and sundry contributions and efforts, and Dawkins' fan club chimed in with insults, compliments to his clarity of thought I found oddly uniform, and eerily disconnected as well as brazen affronts to all things Catholic, such as suspicion about Benedict's sexuality, the tenacious delusion that Benedict really was a Nazi sympathizer, and my personal favorite, an assertion that Rome had active agents involved in African genocide, supported only by a link to catholic-hierarchy.org, to the page listing nothing but the bishops of Rwanda.

That was all.  Merely pointing out that there are bishops in a country that currently experiences genocide and expecting others to assume there's a deliberate connection.  You know what's also in Rwanda, buddy?  Trees and water.  Maybe they're also contributing factors.  You know who else had a genocide?  Germany in World War Two.  You know what else Germany had?  Sauerkraut and beer.  Maybe they're also contributing factors.  You know what else?  Rome has bishops for every square inch of land; most of them occupy their territories but some only have virtual or potential jurisdiction, like Timothy P. Broglio for the American military or whoever indirectly responsible for Antarctica whom my Google-fu is failing to identify.  Do you really think any attempt to assign contributing factors to these fellows would in any way be fruitful or meaningful?

I mean, this is what we're up against.  I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

“I don’t think a college student in Colorado Springs should have to choose between textbooks or the preventive care she needs.”

This from our president, to which and to whom I respond:

If this college student were spending so much on "preventive care" that she can't afford her books, she's having way too much sex to have time to study, let alone make it to class or do homework and take exams.  She'd be expelled for academic failure and have no further need of her books by spring break.

“We worked with Catholic hospitals and universities to find a solution that protects both religious liberty and a woman’s health,” he went on, but apparently this work did not come to fruition: “We’ve made sure churches and other houses of worship don’t have to provide or pay for it.”

Too bad for Americans with traditional religious values and beliefs that you couldn't find a solution that protects religious institutions other than churches, such as the aforementioned Catholic hospitals and universities.  

Need proof that the MSM has a liberal bias?

I submit that the following evidence is representative, if perhaps a bit inflammatory; abortion is the example I give, and I recognize that the lines between Life and Choice are not drawn perfectly down the middle aisle.

The Bad Catholic has two posts with videos from the March for Life.

Mark Shea has more posts than I could hope to write, but in his defense, it's kind of his job.

Shameless Popery...well, you get the idea.


If you don't care to follow the links, each shows how the March for Life, attended by hundreds of thousands of pro-life demonstrators, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade was anything but news, but the relatively scant counter-protesters got disproportionate coverage, with interviews focusing on asking Planned Parenthood executives questions that suggest the underrealized utopia that consequence-free sex was supposed to usher in was mainly due to logistical difficulties.

And yes, I realize that I'm just rolling a few Catholic blogs.  But hey, the hard work's already been done, and sometimes being fair and balanced, so to speak, means presenting something with bias opposite to the usual so a lucid mind can consider the merits of both sides; and like I said, I consider this to be a representative, if dramatic, example.

You know, just to mix it up a bit, I'm going to link a couple gems from the Zombietime blog (which may not be suitable for those with delicate sensibilities):

• Taxonomy of a Fraud
• The Red Cross Ambulance Incident

There are some other articles there that go into more detail.  For those not in the know, Zombie is a photographer in the San Francisco area who, despite not being particularly conservative, finds much blog fodder in the incoherence of the fringe Left and the intellectual bankruptcy of its alleged elites.

A man had two sons.
He came to the first and said,
'Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.'
He said in reply, 'I will not, '
but afterwards changed his mind and went.
The man came to the other son and gave the same order.
He said in reply, 'Yes, sir, 'but did not go.
Which of the two did his father's will?"
They answered, "The first."
Jesus said to them, "Amen."

This gospel passage, where the vintner hires workers in the morning and at midday and in the evening and pays them all the same, tells us amongst other things that whether we come early or late to the party, there is no partial reward upon admission to heaven.
I think this makes a reasonable contribution to the argument that we don't gain heaven through our own efforts; if God is not fair, then at least He is generous, and whenever you accept His invitation to the vineyard, at the end of the day you'll receive the day's wages.
Then, though, we are presented with the question Jesus posed to the chief priests and elders in another passage (which are actually mass readings a week apart for year A, I think).  Here's another vintner, one with two sons he tells to go work in his vineyard.  One says he won't do the work, but relents; the other makes an obeisant sign and then reneges.  Which one did his father's will?  In terms of the analogy, which one would enter the kingdom of heaven? The one who did his father's will.  Not the one who said he would.
I would hope that this episode would serve as a counterpoint to certain schools of thought that look at the parable as a proof text (one of several, I should say) for easy and irrevocable salvation bought by the recitation of a verbal formula.  When asked to explain someone who invites Jesus into his heart and at some subsequent point in his life seems to succumb to temptation and embraces malice and hedonism until the end of his life, the only possible answer given is "He must never have gotten saved in the first place."
It's very easy for the next thought to be "but that would never happen to me; I meant it in my heart when I asked Jesus to become my personal Lord and Savior."  
Savvy:  Christians are offered every same temptation as pagans and other unbelievers.  Committing sin remains a very real possibility for the duration of every person's mortal life.  An adulterer may reasonably expect his life to be destroyed by vices other than alcoholism or rage, but if he says "I'm turning over a new leaf, so help me God!" and then completely doesn't, then maybe he never meant it...or maybe it's just not that simple.
After all, not all who cry "Lord, Lord!" will be saved.  God will do everything to bring you to paradise except force you to go.  If you make a habit of making promises you don't keep (which is what the disobedient son did), your promises will come to naught; they won't fool God, and they won't fool you.  If you make a habit of breaking promises to do the will of God, you won't find yourself inclined to do or submit to His will for long.
In the first parable, even the people hired at the end of the day worked that last hour.  The vintner did not pay them in advance.
Okay, okay; some will say "He's saved despite the evils he commits" and others even "Christ's blood has it covered so those aren't really sins."  To the former I say one who endeavors to reject the graces of living a good life will not be disposed to accept the grace of salvation, no matter when either is offered; and to the latter I say a pardoned debt extinguishes deficit expenditures without defining them away.  To the former I say thus does presumption endanger the soul of the lazy believer, and to the latter I say you have no dog in this fight from the very beginning of it.
But again, while we are not expected or required or able to achieve the sanctity of heaven by our own efforts, we are expected to make hay during whatever sunshine still remains in the day.  Blessed Teresa of Calcutta said we are called to be faithful, not to be successful.  We are not called to earn justification and righteousness, we are only called to do the work.
Just as Paul said "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her," it is to husbands given the responsibility of dying for their wives; it does not then follow that no man who fails to consummate martyrdom for his wife has failed as a husband.  He is called to that duty, not required to execute it in the extreme in every case.

Prayer after communion

Lord, I praise You and thank You for coming to us in this sacrament You have given to us, by which we may approach You.  I pray that I receive You to my salvation and sanctification, and not to my condemnation; and that You suffer me never to be farther from You than I am at this moment.



Since it is sometimes said that the Father can resist no request made to Him at the time of communion, I sometimes make petitions in the following form (I try not to dwell on them too much; focus should be more on communion during communion, so to speak, and there are other times to offer petitions):

Heavenly Father, for the breaking of Your Son's Body and the shedding of His Blood, I pray for X.

If I receive under both species, I split it up and pray through the Body and through the Blood when I receive each, respectively.

Recent disinformation about so-called gay marriage in the early Church

Recently, some hokum has been making the rounds of the Intertubes suggesting that, in the early days of the Church, gay marriage was not just recognized, but sanctioned and blessed.

The evidence ranges from circumstantial to falsified.

I won't add too much to the discussion here; the heavy lifting has already been done by Jimmy Akin and Mark Shea, who in turn cite more detailed articles that debunked the source of the "ancient gay marriage" myth when it came out almost twenty years ago:  a book written by John Boswell, late professor of history at Yale, which (except in that it claimed to be honest history instead of claiming to be a novel full of historical facts) is The DaVinci Code of gay marriage--something appealing only to those whose itching ears can only be satisfied by the hope that such scandalous ideas are true.

One of the articles--I won't link it, but you can get there from Mark's and Jimmy's sites if you really want--that has resurrected this notion attempts to describe the ritual as a wedding mass:  hands joined, vows and blessings made, followed by the Eucharist and a celebratory feast.

Um, hello?  It's a religious ceremony; of course there will be blessings.  Vows?  Could be marriage, could be joining a religious order or the priesthood, could even be one of the other sacraments, or something else completely.  They're Catholics/Orthodox; of course there will be the Eucharist during and a celebratory feast after.  If it were a wedding in an eastern church, there also would have been a crowning, but instead of that we only have this reference to holding hands.  

Well, that and bald assertions, like "While homosexuality was technically illegal from late Roman times, homophobic writings didn’t appear in Western Europe until the late 14th century. Even then, church-consecrated same sex unions continued to take place."  I guess Paul's allusions to Sodom don't count, since he technically wrote in Judea for the most part rather than Western Europe, but "gay marriage kept going on under the radar" is assuming the conclusion.

Maybe Boswell would have done well to consider the "current events" side of history before finding a publisher, see what modern trends and activities linger that are descended from practices of the time period of interest.  Maybe he would have been surprised to learn that this adelphopoiesis still goes on, or maybe he only would have been disappointed, instead, to learn that it is a blessing of friendships, not of romantic relationships.

It's sad in many ways.  The word used to describe a fraternal relationship between men is adelphopoiesis, which anyone familiar with the largest city in Pennsylvania would be literate enough to recognize as something other than eros, despite Boswell's insistence on translating it as "Office of the Same Sex Union."  Ah, but is it maybe a euphemism, or a misunderstanding arising from blind homophobia?  Okay, then where's the talk about gay sons pooling their inheritances?  Where's the talk of them adopting successors to continue the family name or business?  Where are the references to mundane relationships based on brotherly love?  How are we to know the difference?  Surely not so much time has passed that I am the last person to remember friendships between members of the same sex being understandably described without the use of terms like "man-crush" and "bromance," without even needing to be qualified with the word "platonic"--after all, I'm only middle aged.

But maybe, if a "bromance" is just "the kind of gay relationship that nominally straight men are comfortable having," then there is no meaningful difference between a friendship and a "relationship," and if these two things are distinguished despite having no differences, then one might argue that gay marriage is also distinct from traditional marriage for no good contemporary reason, for no real difference.

Maybe that's just what they want.

Obedience, faithfulness

Father Denis at Life WIth A German Shepherd wrote a nice reflection on the Pope's Chrism Mass homily.  I just want to quote one small bit:

The idea often is out there that obedience to the Church means turning your brain off, becoming passive, relapsing into a kind of ‘pay, pray, and obey’ mode where all the power and initiative of the Church lies with the clergy, while the laity are supine and essentially inert.

This is simply not the case. ... There is nothing passive about it.

He goes on to give some examples of how the difficulties of being faithful to the Church are commensurate with the fruits that result from persevering, but I want to focus briefly on this misconception of obedience.  

I can muster some sympathy for people on the outside.  They look at dogmas, hear something about the necessity of assent of the intellect and will to something, then look at all the contingent notions in their own lives, and somewhat understandably completely miss the fact that, guided by the Holy Spirit or not, the Church has spent the last two thousand years studying the human condition, and so might just have a pretty good idea of what factors that distinguish modern life from that in medieval Europe or ancient Palestine just really aren't game-changers, after all.  

At the very least, it would behoove more of us to look at the prudential teachings found in Tradition, and thereby save ourselves the trouble of repeating all of the mistakes in human history firsthand.  But maybe that's more about the intellect than the libido, so I'm getting ahead of myself.

Some people joke, sometimes nervously, about how they'd hate to be married because then they'd be spending their whole lives with just one person, instead of living it up with whomever and then moving on when they'd had enough.  People in healthy marriages understand, and single people who have a well formed understanding of what marriage and chastity are, recognize, that such concerns completely miss the point, and are often flatly wrong.  They understand that by submitting their will and libido to a monogamous covenant, they make themselves fertile soil for graces that will bear fruit in this life and in the life to come.  So it is with obedience to the Church:  in submitting--not abandoning--their wills and intellects to the expertise and guidance of the Church, they make room for renewal and growth, in ways expected and unexpected.