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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.
Patty