RELIGION: THE TRUCE OF 2005?

Friday, August 17, 2018

The Jesuits have been in the vanguard of the movement to openly promote homosexuality in the priesthood:

Father John Coleman, S.J., is acclaimed by some as one of the leading intellectual lights among contemporary Jesuits. He teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and is a frequent contributor to America and Theological Studies, a Jesuit quarterly. He recently addressed the annual meeting of the National Association of Catholic Diocesan Lesbian and Gay Ministries. “I am, simultaneously, a gay man, a professional sociologist, and an ordained priest of the Roman Catholic Church,” he said. “Not surprisingly, these different, even conflicting, roles and their expectations sometimes cause me to experience intense cognitive dissonance.” 

The dissonance, he said, results from “the universal love and outreach of Jesus to all, even sinners, versus a sense that homosexuality, if practiced, is against the teaching of Christianity.” When people succeed in integrating their identities, Fr. Coleman said, it “will lead to something new, and for some, an oxymoron: a GLBT practicing Christian and practicing homosexual.” That gives rise to the questions, he said, “Can you ordain them? Can you have holy union ceremonies?” The Jesuit policy, he said, is not don’t ask, don’t tell, but, rather, do ask and do tell. “You’re not going to have integrated, mature sexuality unless you process it—and therefore yes, ask; yes, tell; yes, process.”

Read the full article here:  THE TRUCE OF 2005?

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RELIGION: CLEANSING THE CHURCH OF CLERICAL SACRILEGE

Friday, August 17, 2018

The number one issue facing the entire Catholic Church is finding a way to put a halt to the avalanche of sexual abuse issues that seem to be never-ending.  From First Things:

It is time for clergy and laity to begin a movement for the purification of the Church. The shameful sexual sins and crimes of clergy—including cardinals, bishops, and priests—can no longer be tolerated. Tolerance is precisely what has allowed these problems to multiply for decades and persist up to today. 

As Fr. Thomas Berg recently explained, the issue is sexually active priests and bishops. In the main, the persistent problem is with homosexually active priests.  Fr. Roger Landry argues—rightly, I think—that most priests who persist in infidelity with women eventually leave the priesthood, but priests who cheat on their vocation with men often continue to live a double life. Most of the issues stem from this kind of duplicity. Networks of active homosexual priests have developed: They protect and promote their own and others who will tolerate them. They become a major problem when they insinuate themselves into positions of power (in a seminary, in a chancery or diocese, in a religious order, in the Roman curia)—as occurred in the case of Theodore McCarrick. 

Read the full article here:  CLEANSING THE CHURCH OF CLERICAL SACRILEGE

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RELIGION: "That Most Prophetic Letter"

Friday, July 27, 2018

From "First Things" -- The prophetic significance of Humanae Vitae:

Who were the prophets? In the Bible, the prophets were often confrontational. They dressed down to draw attention to themselves: Jeremiah buried his underwear, dug it up, and put it on again (Jer 13:1-11); John the Baptist let his hair grow, and Ezekiel shaved his head (Ezek 5:1); John wore camel skins, and Isaiah wandered around naked and barefoot for three years (Mt 3:4, Isa 20).

Their eating habits also left something to be desired: Ezekiel ate books (Ezek 3:3) or bread cooked on a fire fueled by human waste (Ezek 4:12); Elijah was fed by ravens (1 Kings 17:1-5); Daniel eschewed all rich food (Dan 1); and John was into the paleo diet (Mt 3:4). Their activities were unpredictable: Jeremiah smashed pottery and pretended to be a dumb animal, wearing a cattle yoke (Jer 19, 27, 28); he remained celibate, whereas Hosea married a notorious prostitute (Jer 16, Hos 1:2); and Ezekiel lay on his side for more than a year, went into trances, and talked to mountains or dead bones (Ezek 3:24; 4:4-6; 6:2; 8:1-3; 35-37).

The Biblical prophets were not afraid to be counter-cultural. They wandered about speaking for God and telling people off. “Woe,” “return,” and “repair” were their most common words. No wonder these men were unpopular. In due course, they were proven right and their wisdom heeded. But in the meantime, they were vilified for speaking inconvenient truths.

Read the full article:  That Most Prophetic Letter

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ARTICLE: INEVITABLE SCHOLASTICISM: A REVIEW OF "INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY"

Friday, July 13, 2018

Excellent book review on the importance of Scholasticism from First Things:

Leinsle shows that many truisms that animate the standard narratives of Catholic theology are false. For example, he refutes the notion that Scholastic methods were introduced into theology as an alternative to scriptural reading and biblical commentary. On the contrary, from the sixth century onward, collections of theological sentences were gathered within glosses on Scripture precisely to help readers interpret the sacred text. Patristic citations were assembled by monastic communities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in order to facilitate understanding of the discrete senses of Scripture (the literal sense, the typological, the moral, and the analogical). The first concordances of terms and Bible verses were created by twelfth-century Scholastics in order to compare terms and analyze the meaning of Scripture as a coherent whole. 

More decisively, Leinsle shows that our presumption that Scholasticism encourages an insular and isolated mentality is exactly the opposite of the truth. The theology of the high Middle Ages was focused on a central question: In light of the discovery of Aristotelian philosophy, what is the scientific status of Christian theology? In other words, in what sense is Christian theology the queen of the sciences, the most complete view of the world available to human beings? How does it relate then to philosophical or scientific knowledge that derives from natural experience as such—in a respectful and critical way? These are not easy questions to contend with. But they are also unavoidable for an intellectually serious Christian culture.

Read the full article here:  INEVITABLE SCHOLASTICISM: A REVIEW OF INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY

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ARTICLE: "Origami of the Soul" and thoughts on formation

An excerpt from the article "Origami of the Soul" by Timothy Reichert and Francis X Maier that appeared on the First Things web site in June of 2018:

Aristotle and Aquinas recognized that a person’s happiness depends on his proper “functioning”—on the orientation of his acts toward the ends proper to man. In nature, function coincides with shape. We can infer function from shape, and shape from function. 

So it is with the human soul. The mature soul achieves a complex “shape” that fits with other shapes—other souls. We learn manners and are shaped by customs. We acquire a common language and habits of mind that “fit” our social circumstances. These shapes, which often take the form of the standard set of virtues, drive all shared and fruitful human action: marriage, family life, and civic activity. The particular shape of a man’s soul “matches” with other particular shapes. The husband dovetails with his wife. The roles of father and mother shape adults in ways that fit with the only partially shaped lives of children. Students are trained to have dispositions that accord with those of their teachers. These matches overlap with other matches to create productive social configurations, making for a functional society. Upon such matches, and so upon complementarity, our happiness depends. 

To speak of the soul’s having a “shape” may seem odd, but it should not. Shape governs a large domain of activity in nature. Atomic binding depends on shape. The DNA-protein interactions that regulate physiology depend on shape. Social science sees the human person’s objectives and choices in terms of shape.

source:  https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/06/origami-of-the-soul

Some thoughts:

A soul is shaped by formation,  and it WILL be shaped, one way or the other.  The only question is this: who or what will be forming the shape of the soul?  It's an important question, because just as a great river invariably flows out to the sea, so to does a soul have to endure shaping and molding.   It's not a matter of it being shaped or not, but what sort of shape it will be.

But unlike a river, which almost always flows in just one direction,  there are two directions that the soul can move in: up towards heaven, or down towards hell.  Our soul will be formed by one of those two great kingdoms, and often times both.  Just like a battery is useless without both a positive and negative pole, so too are we also worthless unless we have the extremes of heaven and hell to choose from.

But it's not just a matter of us forming our own souls, there is a big, dangerous world out there that will form us whether we like it or not, and hence a lot of formation is beyond our ability to choose, but maybe not all of it.  We must come to the realization that every single contact we have with another human being is something that will be used to form that person, it will shape their soul, whether or not we are conscious of it.  Likewise, their interaction with us will also serve to form our souls, like it or not.

So much of life is just becoming conscious of those forces that are shaping us, and how, we in turn, go about shaping others.  But the shaping is never, ever a neutral activity: we are either helping them to get to heaven, or casting them into the depths of hell, with every word we speak and every action we take.  And the same is true for ourselves: we are the victims of our own thoughts, words and actions.  To a certain extent we can accept or reject the formation being forced upon us by our circumstances and environment, even though we might be powerless to changes those external forces.  But the big question is how do we stand firm when disaster strikes all around us?

Hence, formation will happen, there's no doubt about it.   But perhaps we do have a bit to say in how that formation is going to take, and how we want to help form others. 

Something to think about: the way information causes formation......