Per Christum

“Self-realization is a contradiction and it is too little for us. We have a higher destiny…

The Cross is the definitive revelation of love and divine mercy. To enter into this mystery of love there is no other way than that of losing ourselves, giving ourselves: the Way of the Cross.“

–Pope Benedict XVI, public audience today, Ash Wednesday of 2007

“Remember man you are dust, and to dust you will return.”

For those unfamiliar with Ash Wednesday, this phrase is what the priest says when he places ashes on your forehead during the Ash Wednesday service. This phrase is not exactly affirming and I doubt you will hear it come from a self-help guru on Oprah, but it is true.

Ash Wednesday injects a little reality into our heads as we begin the penitential season of Lent.

I wish everyone a blessed and fulfilling Lent. Keep the self-flagellation to a minimum please!

I want to remind our readers of some of our Lenten resources, including the materials at ChurchYear.Net. We have updated the Church Fathers Lenten Reading Plan for 2007. We now have a brand new “lite” version of the same reading plan, for those who don’t want all of the reading: Church Fathers Lenten Reading Plan LITE. This plan was pretty popular last year, and we hope everyone interested in being introduced to the Church Fathers checks it out. We also have some Lent Prayers for those interested. We have some suggestions on what to give up for Lent too. There are more resources on our main Lent page.

Lent is a good time to spiritually “clean house.” It is a time of reflection, penitence, and sacrifice. Anybody have any thoughts on what to give up? I haven’t decided yet.

A blessed Lent to all of you.

By the way, it seems Anglican conservatives have won a bit of a victory at Tanzania. We shall see if the resolutions are enforced, but it seems like the Anglican Communion means business. Is this a Lenten gift to reasserter Anglicans? Seems so.

I haven’t had the time to follow all the “breaking news” in the Anglican Communion these last few days, but it seems that conservatives have been dealt a huge blow at the big meeting of the Anglican Primates in Tanzania. If the celebrating on the liberal blogs, and the complaining and sadness on the conservative blogs (here too), are any indication, I am right. Apparently an important subcommittee, consisting of a conservative Primate and the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, and some others, has said that the Episcopal church really is mostly in compliance with the Windsor Report. For those unfamiliar with the situation, the Windsor Report basically laid out what the Episcopal church should do to correct the harm it has done to the Anglican Communion with the consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop. Also, the claims that the Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katherine Schori wouldn’t be seated with the other primates due to her views, and that she would be ignored, etc, didn’t come to pass either. She was seated as a full Primate.

Now the Primates meeting isn’t over, and there could be more developments, but this does seem to be a major blow to Anglican traditionalists. You can just sense the deep disappointment on conservative blogs (and yes, I read a variety of blogs). Again, let me repeat, this blog entry could be completely wrong, and the Primates that are meeting in Tanzania may just shrug off this report and create a new Anglican province in America, effectively kicking the Episcopal church out of the Anglican Communion, what many conservative Anglicans really want. Of course, we have heard these promises before in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, but maybe 2007 is the year!

Let me be frank and ask an honest question. When have the processes and commissions of the Anglican Communion ever actually come through in a concrete way in favor of conservatives in the last 20 years? Ever since General Convention 2003, when Gene Robinson was consecrated bishop, we have heard about the next major event when “realignment” would occur, about the next line in the sand when the Primates would act, and so forth. Each time, nothing concrete has materialized for the so-called reasserters. Parishes are being sued, priests deposed, and nothing has happened, unless of course more commissions and ambiguous statements count as “something.” Honestly, I don’t think the Anglican Communion has the structures or authority, or even the will, to discipline anybody, unless the local province takes the lead. Anglicanism is just not set up like the Catholic Church in that all the Anglicans in Africa can’t make the Episcopal church do anything it doesn’t want to do. And the Episcopal church has the right to do exactly what it wants to do, even if it is the equivalent to giving the rest of the Anglican Communion the finger. Again, I may be wrong, but where is the proof that I am wrong (and strong words and new study groups don’t count)?

What is the AA definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. I ask the following question as one who basically once was a “reasserter Anglican”: Are “reasserter” Anglicans insane by this definition?

I think whatever happens, we should pray for our brothers and sisters in the Anglican Communion. It has been a rough period for those on all sides.

Anti-Catholic “blogmaster” for John Edwards, Amanda Marcotte, has resigned, over crude anti-Catholic comments she made on her personal blog.

She is suggesting that everything was fine until some right-wing nuts came along and blew the whole thing out of proportion. I am sorry, but this is not about her opinions, however non-mainstream they may be, but about the disrespectful and downright foul ways Marcotte chooses to express herself. If I were a liberal, I would suggest she stop her ranting and bomb-throwing, lest her outrageous ways turn people away from liberalism. And trust me, I am not a big fan of foul-mouthed, bomb-throwing conservatives either, even if I might be inclined to agree with them more.

Marcotte said the following about Catholic League president Bill Donohue, whose complaints had a hand in causing the controversy:

“No matter what you think about the campaign, I signed on to be a supporter and a tireless employee for them, and if I can’t do the job I was hired to do because Bill Donohue doesn’t have anything better to do with his time than harass me, then I won’t do it,” Marcotte wrote Monday night.

So standing up against bigoted and deeply disrespectful comments constitutes harassment? Next time an African-American leader demands someone resign over a racist comment, should I take a lesson from Marcotte and suggest that he shouldn’t complain? After all, doesn’t he have anything better to do with his time than “harass” someone??

Plus, if the tables were turned, and a Republican campaign employee said something deeply offensive about blacks, gays, or another minority, would Ms. Marcotte remain silent, keeping her opinions to herself? I doubt it. I am sure she and her friends would “harass” the person involved in the same way she was “harassed” by Donohue, by demanding a resignation and calling into question the values of the person who made the comment.

John Edwards’ campaign “blogmaster,” Amanda Marcotte wrote the following on the Pandagon blog in June of last year:

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

Details Here (including some outrageous quotes from Marcotte about religion). Note that Amanda seems to have a chip on her shoulder about religion in general, but specifically Catholicism. The actual blog entry shows a misunderstanding of Catholic Teaching, dismissal of actual statistics, and is filled with sarcasm. A controversy is currently brewing over another sarcastic, extreme left post Amanda has made about the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. Maybe I am just slow to get on board, but do blog entries have to be angry and sarcastic?

Please don’t tell me Amanda Marcotte represents the so-called Democratic base. You know, the same base that excitedly elected Ned Lamont in the Connecticut primaries only to get thrashed by Joe Lieberman in the Fall. If this is the future of the Democratic party, they will truly become unelectable. Working Class Catholics are not going to warm-up to this sort of thing. Not many people at all are going to warm up to this sort of thing! And remember: many freshmen Democratic members of Congress lean to the right. The recent election was a referendum on the pathetic performance of the Republican Congress and the President, and not a call to a liberal revolution.

If John Edwards has any sense, Marcotte will be history, because if she truly represents his views, his campaign will be history.

(Thanks to The Catholic Report for bringing this to my attention)

This blog and other Catholic blogs have often tackled issues of Scripture. The conversation inevitably brings up the issue of biblical criticism. I will talk about my thoughts of the merits and limits of biblical criticism a little later. First, I think that I can say that I would not be Catholic today if it weren’t for biblical criticism.

For some background, I was raised strongly Protestant evangelical. One of the advantages of this is that I learned the contents of the Bible as well as to love and respect it. However, I was also deeply wedded to the concepts of sola scriptura (without ever even hearing the word mentioned until university) and biblical inerrancy (once again, a word I don’t recall hearing until I went to university). Even without always knowing the “lingo,” I certainly understood the concepts and held to them without thinking.

The conflict began when I went to university and began to encounter, as much as I hate to use the word, “diversity.” I met Catholics, Orthodox, and even stauncher evangelicals than myself. I also encountered Calvinism for the first time. After a period of virtual agnosticism, I returned to evangelical Christianity my junior year, but with admittedly a far more open mind. I was being pulled in two directions: the academic and the evangelical.

Among the evangelicals I befriended, inerrancy was one of their foremost emphases. The campus groups gave multiple lectures on it and it was a frequent topic of discussion in the “small groups.” My friends and mentors frequently noted that the Bible simply has to be inerrant in the fundamentalist sense or Christianity simply falls apart. As one of the few who had actually read large chunks of the Bible, I recall mentioning, offhand of course, that it didn’t really matter if one passage says Solomon had 5,000 horses and another 10,000. I was simply noting that such a discrepancy is hardly relevant. I was told that I was “wrong.” It did matter and I was treated to the apologetics of reconciling the number of Solomon’s horses. Contrary to their intentions, such intellectual gymnastics only made me doubt this view of inerrancy even more.

My other direction was academic, which included the study of religion and even Church history. Part of this included buying a copy of the New Jerusalem Bible as an evangelical. The NJB uses “moderate” critical study, yet it struck me as irreverent. The translators in the preface asked the reader to pray for them. I remember being somewhat indignant and thinking I wasn’t sure if I would pray for them because I wasn’t sure they were even Christian given their views on the Bible! However, a strange thing happened. I read the book of Revelation in the NJB and found their interpretation, which essentially places many of the events in the context of the 1^st century, to be a welcome antidote to the silly “end times” speculation of some Christians. As I read through the entire Bible and took a course on the New Testament, I found critical study to be somewhat liberating. It didn’t force a person into a philosophically weak inerrancy that, for example, spent time reconciling the number of Solomon’s horses or identify the Word of John 1:1 with the Bible (yes, I actually heard a “talk” by an evangelical campus group about this).

Critical study, in some ways, de-mystified the Bible. Now, by this, I’m not talking about the stories or the people in the Bible or even the holy book itself. Critical study simply put the Bible in history and in context. The Bible was no longer simply a divine manual or sourcebook straight from God’s mouth to my ears, but also a record of God’s working with his people in their own context. Biblical criticism allowed me to put the Bible in a communal, historical, and developmental framework, something my evangelical friends and I were unable to do. This included understanding the development of the canon and doctrine, which was also helped by a concurrent reading of the Church Fathers. So, how does this lead to Catholicism?

First, seeing the Bible put in an historical context helped me think in a more broadly historical context about Christianity in general. If the Bible has a history, then the people of God have a history, one that could even possibly be continuing under the guidance of the Spirit (later of course I’d find that in the Church). I don’t think it’s a coincidence I took up the Church Fathers and the critical study of the Bible at the same time. Second, seeing the development of Hebrew thought helped me look to and appreciate the development of Christian thought. Many evangelicals cringe at the thought that the Hebrews may have developed their belief in the resurrection over centuries just as much as they cringe that a doctrine like the Immaculate Conception could have developed over the centuries. Studying the developments of Hebrew religion throughout the Bible helped prepare me to appreciate and understand the development of doctrine in Catholicism.

In short, I could never have become Anglican and eventually Catholic if I had rigidly held on to sola scriptura and inerrancy in the Protestant sense. Seeing the reverent biblical criticism from Catholic sources helped me greatly in questioning my basic Protestant assumptions. In a sense, my evangelical friends from university were right, assuming we were discussing evangelical Christianity and not Christianity as a whole. Many forms of evangelical Christianity do succeed or fail based on the complete inerrancy of the Bible. To deny the Bible gets every minute detail correct would bring in the more complex issues of development and history and authority. Biblical criticism brings out the complexity of the Bible, which forever removes a person from the “just read the Bible yourself and the Holy Spirit will reveal to you the truth” school which is foundational to some forms of evangelicalism (the frustratingly elusive “plain sense” of Scripture). Although such a person may not necessarily become Catholic or Orthodox, it will make, at least for the serious believer, the idea of the interpretation of the Church rather than of multiple individuals and denominations far more attractive.

Of course, unbridled biblical criticism can lead to the opposite error, where the Bible is viewed as totally “errant” and nothing at all can be said about truth. Certainly some folks who “discover” biblical criticism go down this path. They become liberated from fundamentalism only to fall into the slavery of secular academia and the newest whims of queer/feminist/speciesist or whatever brand of faddish “interpretation.”

This is where it becomes important to always read the Bible with the Church. One is able to read the Bible in an honest manner, while still recognizing that it is first and foremost the book of the Church and source of our dogma. For example, it doesn’t matter if there are two creation accounts in Genesis to Catholics. It doesn’t touch us dogmatically because even if there were fifty accounts in those 2 chapters, for example, the truth of creation ex nihilo is still dogma. That the New Testament never unequivocally declares the Holy Spirit to be God may be troublesome for evangelicals, but not for Catholics. The first Council of Constantinople settled it. Like the view of resurrection in the Bible, the doctrine developed from the already latent truth. We can deal with it.

In conclusion, moderate biblical criticism led me to not only a greater love of the Bible, but to the Church that gave us the Bible. And I still love them both. The catechism declares:

“Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”

So, yeah, when it comes to the truths of our salvation the Bible as interpreted by the Church is inerrant. That is quite liberating and comforting! But, we don’t have to fret about how many horses Solomon had. That’s pretty liberating and comforting too.

Yesterday Jennifer and I watched The Scarlet and the Black, a movie about priest Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty, who worked at the Vatican during World War II.

Basically O’Flaherty, an Irishman, hid over 4,000 Allied soldiers, Jews, and others who were in danger when Germany took control of Italy late in World War II. Despite his distrust of the British, he saved hundreds of British soldiers. He used Vatican neutrality to his advantage, and at times acted more like a spy (dressing up as a nun, an SS officer, and so forth) than a priest. However, he was first and foremost a priest. The movie details his work and amazing courage, and the courage of other Europeans. One of my favorite parts is at the end of the movie when Rome is about ready to fall to the allies. The German commander Hebert Kappler, who has tried to have O’Flaherty killed numerous times, has asked that Fr. O’Flaherty help his wife and children escape the city, because they will surely be killed by the Partisans. During the conversation, Kappler praises the Third Reich and suggests it will last forever. The conversation, occurring in the Coliseum, goes like this:

Kappler: What is important is the Reich…not Rome. What is Rome? All its greatness is over. All that’s left is a picture postcard. A playground for whores and priests. There will be a new order in Europe…The Third Reich is the future.

O’Flaherty: How many murderous dictators have talked that kind of rubbish? Just look around you Kappler. You are standing where your ancient friends entertained themselves, watching lions tear the Christians to pieces, but the Church is still here. A lot of broken stones like these, in a few years that is all that will be left of your Third Reich.

The movie portrays Pope Pius XII as interested in neutrality, but also as sympathetic to the work of O’Flaherty. I wasn’t necessarily offended by the portrayal of Pius XII, although I know some Catholics have been. The ending of the movie shows the power of grace and why the Catholic faith is above any nationality, rather seeking the Good for all people.

Overall, this is one of the best movies I have ever seen. It is a reminder why we must stand up against evil and not compromise with it, and why we must always be courageous

For those who are unfamiliar with his story, Jeremiah of the Paleocrat_etc Xanga site is exploring the Catholic Church. Why is this a big deal? Jeremiah used to be a staunchly reformed and anti-Catholic apologist. This is a scenario that gets many internet Catholics salivating, witnessing such a radical paradigm change. However, we must be cautious. Rejoicing in another person’s discovery of the Catholic Church must not turn into a game of “who has the best converts.”

Jeremiah’s decision has caused a strong reaction among some in the online reformed community. In fact “Draught Horse” posted the following on an internet board

Practically, [Jeremiah] stopped being Reformed a long time ago. I used to interact with him. He is a nut, if I can speak plainly. He changes his position every week. Next week he will probably be something else. (Don’t get me wrong, I am saddened by all of this, but am not surprised).

James White even seems to have weighed in, linking to a site that critiques Jeremiah’s decision. Some people seem to suggest that Jeremiah woke up one morning, got out of bed, and over his morning coffee decided to become Catholic. Stranger things have happened, but it didn’t happened in this case.

I had the privilege of talking to Jeremiah on Tuesday night over Skype. I found him to be a well-reasoned, very sane individual, a far cry from a “nut.” In fact he has not made his decision lightly. I look forward to more discussions.

Please keep him in your prayers.