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Okay, nothing against Baptists, I used to be one, but I’m watching the “Dateline” piece on exorcism, and all I can think… exorcisms shouldn’t be done in the living room with guys dressed in golf shirts Exorcisms require crucifixes and holy water and black robes and white collars. This should be accompanied by “The power of Christ compels you!” not “You need to leave now.”
It just looks, well, kinda goofy.
One of the lessons from last year that too many American Catholics still don’t want to face is that it’s OK to be Catholic in today’s public square as long as we don’t try to live our beliefs too seriously; as long as we’re suitably embarrassed by all those “primitive” Catholic teachings; as long as we shut up about abortion and other sensitive moral issues and allow ourselves to be tutored in the ways of “polite” secular culture by experts who have little or no respect for the Christian faith that guides our lives.
The reason Pope Benedict XVI will get no media honeymoon is simple. It’s the same reason he instantly won the hearts of committed Catholics, worried the lukewarm and angered the proud and disaffected. He actually believes that what Jesus Christ and His Church teach is true, and that the soul of the world depends on the Church’s faithful witness.
As one columnist bitterly observed, “the cafeteria is now closed.” Of course, for believers, it was never open.
This is why we love our Bishop. He is one of the major reasons why our seminaries are full and we are building more and trying to get money to support the number of young men who want to be priests. As Curt Jester points out, we have 1 in 4,000 young Catholic men who choose to be priests, vs. L.A.’s 1 in 65,000. Archbishop Chaput is the chief reason.
If you are an unmarried man and meet him, you can expect him to ask you if you’re ever thought about being a priest. He asks and asks, over and over, because he says if you don’t ask, sometimes people never ask themselves. Every week I ask my oldest son if he will go to mass with us, and ever week, he says no, but he’ll never not go because I failed to ask.
This is the way I believe God to be — always asking, never apologizing, never giving up.
I was fired. It was the first time an American Catholic theologian had been censured in this way. At issue was my dissent from church teachings on “the indissolubility of consummated sacramental marriage, abortion, euthanasia, masturbation, artificial contraception, premarital intercourse and homosexual acts,” according to their final document to me. It’s true that I questioned the idea that such acts are always immoral and never acceptable (although I thought my dissent on these issues was quite nuanced).
Well, there be a shocker A catholic priest teaching theology and dissenting that what the church taught was not true got fired. We could use with more of that.
And this…
But in papal sexual ethics, an older methodology still prevails. Unchanging human nature and the eternal law of God, not historical development or the person understood in light of relationships, constitute the primary considerations. The many people both inside and outside the Catholic Church who experience some dissonance between papal sexual and social teachings are right. There is a different methodology at work in these two areas.
Could it be that Papal sexual ethics stay the same because, well, not much has changed in nonpapal sex? I’m a little oogied out just typing that.
I honestly do not get why people continue to keep throwing themselves against this wall, hoping for a different result. Do they think Martha and Bob Peasant didn’t feel the same way? That they wanted to go and have sex with whom and whatever they wanted, whether married or no?
I grew up knowing all churches taught this — sex outside of marriage was a bad idea, you ought not do it. Masturbation is a bad idea and really ought to have some constraints on it, lest you become pretty lonely. Artificial contraception tends to lead to a lot of sex outside of marriage because there’s no visible downside of it.
So if the church has always said this, why do people keep arguing? If they believe absolutely that they are right, why can’t they just go their own way, certain in their rightness? Why is it necessary to bend a 2,000-year-old church to their thinking?
I don’t get it. I used to be on that side of things, and I still don’t get it.
Dale ruins what was a very nice day… dream and reminds us that Pope Benedict XVI won’t be a Superpope, nailing heresy to every wall with his Papal Flying Heresy Daggers.
But this just makes me giggle.
I, too, would delight in an announcement that failure to adhere to the last jot of Redemptionis Sacramentum–and the rubrics in general–would result in the appointment of a co-adjutor just promoted from faculty work at a FSSP seminary.
I’ve got a friend that could fill this role too, she thinks BPXVI is a little fuzzy in places, but acceptable.
Cdl. Ratzinger’s got several spots on Amazon’s bestsellters.
Right now, he has 25, 21, 20, 18, 15, 13, 12, 11, and 7. I expect this to change tomorrow. 9 of the top 25 on Amazon. I think someone’s earned a brand new Popemobile!
There definitely won’t be any fuzzy headed Catholicism for a while longer. I have heard so many good things about him, his kindness, his humbleness, that he is a teacher through and through and well loved by those who know him, always taking the time to speak to everyone.
But he is orthodox, and the usual suspects (Democratic Underground) are already calling him a Nazi and every other unkind name they can come up with. The left and liberals will hate him. Not because he is unkind or evil or egotistical. No, they will hate him because he stands for something. Just as JPII stood for something. Standing there makes you a target for hate, and he will get plenty of it.
My heart is breaking for him now, I am filled with sadness for the burden he takes on. I will pray for him that he knows how much so many of us love him and support him.
Here we go already….
Many blame Ratzinger for decrees from Rome barring Catholic priests from counseling pregnant teens on their options and blocking German Catholics from sharing communion with their Lutheran (search) brethren at a joint gathering in 2003.
Holy tolerance, no communion sharing between two faiths who do not believe the same thing about the Eucharist! No priests telling young girls all of their options, like…. what, abortion? If a Catholic priest starts telling young girls that they can have an abortion, I want off this planet now. There are plenty of people in the world that will tell them about abortions and how easy it is to make their problems go away.
He is theologically orthodox, kind, humble, and he carries a huge burden. That guarantees that the liberals will villify him and his character.
You know, I never know what to do with my weblog anymore. There’s really no time to post regularly, but I don’t want to just dump it entirely. Then there’s the damn trackback spam. I just deleted most of my old posts just to get rid of it. Getting 100+ of them a day is just not fun at all.
Then JPII died, and I know I’m glad I have this spot to go to and post something, if I want.
I have always admired him and loved him, but when I saw that plain box he was in at his funeral, that he was leaving the earth became really painful. I know he’s in a wonderful place, and I would not wish him back for more suffering, but we are going to miss his goodness and kind face. No one is perfect, and there is much that I wish he had done and addressed, but his pontificate was so full of so much good, it seems small to just point out the things he didn’t get to or the things that he didn’t do so well on at the end of his life when he was sick.
What is harder to take is listening to the news channels finding every Catholic dissident out there wax on about how now maybe we can have women priests now, perhaps the church will reconsider their stand on abortion and contraception.
Just stop it. The Catholic Church is that, and it is more likely that our wax wings will hold up on a trip around the sun than the church ordaining women as priests or saying abortion is okay if you just do it quick enough. If they did that, they would cease to be the Catholic Church. There simple has to be in this world one outpost of moral certitude (even if there is much disagreemtn) that never changes.
2000 years have passed with very little change, and here’s one reason why. I think it was the Montanists way back in the 300s or 400s that had the same problem moral progressives have now — failure to reproduce in adequate replacement-plus quantities means your brand of theology will die out.
But if you do embrace creation of life and all that brings — large, messy families with not enough money and not enough time, but lots of humanity — you very quickly stop being a moral progressive.
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