Month: January 2011

Scripture at mass — punchy or not?

"Saint John the Baptist" (c.1560) by...
The Baptist, by Joan de Joanes (1523-1579)

Slim pickin’s today offered by the liturgy monkeys at the bishops’ conference, I don ‘t know why.  The Isaiah passage —

The LORD said to me: You are my servant,
Israel, through whom I show my glory.
Now the LORD has spoken
who formed me as his servant from the womb,
that Jacob may be brought back to him
and Israel gathered to him;
and I am made glorious in the sight of the LORD,
and my God is now my strength!
It is too little, the LORD says, for you to be my servant,
to raise up the tribes of Jacob,
and restore the survivors of Israel;
I will make you a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.

— is pretty generic.  I mean, admirable sentiments and at the heart of belief, but nothing to inspire most of us short of extensive explanation, it seems to me.

Douay-Rheims has this, by the way:

[3] And he said to me: Thou art my servant Israel, for in thee will I glory. . . . .  [5] And now saith the Lord, that formed me from the womb to be his servant, that I may bring back Jacob unto him, and Israel will not be gathered together: and I am glorified in the eyes of the Lord, and my God is made my strength.

[6] And he said: It is a small thing that thou shouldst be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to convert the dregs of Israel. Behold, I have given thee to be the light of the Gentiles, that thou mayst be my salvation even to the farthest part of the earth.

Quite a bit more musical, of course.  It has soundbites, words to walk away with and mayhap recall during the day.  Like God’s being one’s salvation “even to the farthest part of the earth,” vs. that it “may reach to the ends of the earth.”  The farthest part.  I like that.

The reading from Paul is even more generic, even in part procedural, as goes the explanation, “Paul follows the conventional form for the opening of a Hellenistic letter,” which is helpful in its way.  But what else?  It “expands the opening with details carefully chosen to remind the readers of their situation and to suggest some of the issues the letter will discuss,” which is Bible study.

That’s the idea, apparently.  The Vatican 2 liturgy is to make every day a Scripture lesson, so as to make us more scripturally literate.  But the same people are going to church for consolation, self-improvement, encouragement, and the like as before.  Which is where soundbites come in.  Why do newspapers have headlines?  To get people to read the stories.

Finally, the gospel, from John 1, John the Baptist beholding Jesus as “the lamb of God,” etc.  Again the odious comparison with Douay-Rheims.  “[34] And I saw, and I gave testimony, that this is the Son of God”?  Or, currently, “34 Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God”?  Gimme the first.

More substantially, contrast the selections for this “Second Sunday in Ordinary Time” (who thought that up?) with the long-ago Third Sunday after the Epiphany, which gives us the pithy Romans 12.16–21,

Be not wise in your own conceits. [17] To no man rendering evil for evil. Providing good things, not only in the sight of God, but also in the sight of all men. [18] If it be possible, as much as is in you, have peace with all men. [19] Revenge not yourselves, my dearly beloved; but give place unto wrath, for it is written: Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. [20] But if thy enemy be hungry, give him to eat; if he thirst, give him to drink. For, doing this, thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.

[21] Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil by good.

Dunno know where this turns up in the current cycle of readings, but I tell you, it sings: you are pissed off at someone?  Hah!  Returning good for evil is the best revenge!  Suck it up, you Christian, take your cue from The Apostle.

Or the olden-time gospel passage, Matthew 8.1–13, with tight narrative, hardly a word wasted:

[1] And when he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him: [2] And behold a leper came and adored him, saying: Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. [3] And Jesus stretching forth his hand, touched him, saying: I will, be thou made clean. And forthwith his leprosy was cleansed. [4] And Jesus saith to him: See thou tell no man: but go, shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift which Moses commanded for a testimony unto them. [5] And when he had entered into Capharnaum, there came to him a centurion, beseeching him,

[6] And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, and is grieviously tormented. [7] And Jesus saith to him: I will come and heal him. [8] And the centurion making answer, said: Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof: but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed. [9] For I also am a man subject to authority, having under me soldiers; and I say to this, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. [10] And Jesus hearing this, marvelled; and said to them that followed him: Amen I say to you, I have not found so great faith in Israel.

[11] And I say to you that many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven: [12] But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. [13] And Jesus said to the centurion: Go, and as thou hast believed, so be it done to thee. And the servant was healed at the same hour.

I hope this selection also appears, even in one of our Sundays in ordinary time.

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Don’t you just hate it when they talk that way?

Official presidential portrait of Barack Obama...
He gave permission.

Here’s a new blog — Climate of Hate — dedicated to the proposition that hate lives! in political discourse in the U.S., especially on the left.

Clever indeed, and a blog whose time has come.

Seeing it, I am reminded of what I heard at a meeting of Oak Park leftists at the library in September of 2009, on the day after Obama had said, “The time for games [had] passed” in the matter of health care legislation in a speech to Congress.

“He gave us permission to hate the insurance industry,” said a Democratic Socialist, former Beye School parent (when my wife & I were Beye parents), former neighbor (a block over), who was busy at the time trying (without success) to get the village to enforce a “living wage” for its employees and employees of all who do business with or have received a subsidy from the village.

I’d been writing for the Wed. Journal of OP&RF, and his wife, also there to plan events etc., asked if I would be writing it in the Journal.  (I wouldn’t, having resigned as columnist.)  She clearly did not relish the idea, but he just wanted to be sure he meant health and not auto, etc. insurance.  In fact, he was looking pretty pleased with having said it in my hearing.

And nobody else at the meeting (of 10 or so) seemed to object to his saying that, though not all would have said it.  A fellow Dem Socialist (of America) seemed equally pleased, however.

Permission to hate, given by the president.  What do you know about that?

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Jesus saves

Jesus at the house of the Pharisean, by Jacopo...
At a pharisee's house, by Tintoretto

Forgiveness double-header today.  From Hebrews 4:

For we do not have a high priest
who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,
but one who has similarly been tested in every way,
yet without sin.
So let us confidently approach the throne of grace
to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.

And Mark 2:

Some scribes who were Pharisees saw that Jesus was eating with sinners
and tax collectors and said to his disciples,
“Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus heard this and said to them,
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.
I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”  (Italics added)

Tax collectors bought the position, then took tax revenue to cover their cost and make a profit.  So there you were, dealing with a middle man reporting to no one.  To sit with these people was to be one of them.  Jesus had something else in mind.  Good for him and good for us.

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Two colors of tyranny

Flag of the National Fascist Party of Italy. F...
Italian fascists' ties that bound

Reference to Yves Simon by Eugene Kennedy led me to this:

Communism and national socialism have come to resemble each other in so many respects that their historical diversity and their lasting opposition arouse wonder. In spite of common features that are profound and increasingly obvious, they prove altogether repugnant to effecting any kind of merger.

The task of fighting them would be greatly eased if followers, actual and potential, were led to believe that one system, i.e., the one which appeals to them, is substantially identical with the other, i.e., the one which they hate; but such identification never was very successful as a polemical instrument.

Conservatives in the 1930’s were given a fair chance to understand that naziism was but brown bolshevism;{1} yet many of them helped the Nazis. Today it seems that it should be easy for all concerned to recognize in communism the very features that they hated most in naziism; but not all do.

It’s from Simon’s Philosophy Of Democratic Government (Amazon). You can read it online here.

The Kennedy reference is to his and his wife Sara Charles’s 1997 book, Authority: The Most Misunderstood Idea in America, which I have even now waiting for me at the OP library.

As for the two-colors business, I wrote about liberalism as fascism for the Wed. Journal of OP&RF late in the ’08 campaign.  This horrified leftist Oak Parkers, fascism being a word the left reserves for its enemies.

I argued that excessive governmental power (authority) was common to fascism and, for that matter, socialism.  Will have to stay with Y. Simon et al. to see to what extent they back me up.  As Bob McClory says in his comment below, with “perhaps even enlightenment” for me.

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How keen is your crozier? (Modified)

Coat of arms (shield only) of Francis cardinal...
George's coat of arms. Not kidding.

Eugene Kennedy does the Chicago cardinal up brown.

Questioning whether Francis George’s is “the keenest crozier at the conclave,” he recalls the great man’s initial meeting with psychiatrist Sara Charles, Kennedy’s wife.

“I’ve looked into your book” — Authority: The Most Misunderstood Idea in America — “and I’ll tell you where you’re wrong.”

“It’s too Jungian,” George began, but my wife cut him off: “There is nothing Jungian in it. It’s based on the work of the Catholic philosopher, Yves Simon.”

“It is?” the startled George replied but did not wait for an answer.

[It’s a 1997 book, co-authored by Kennedy, by the way.  We take Kennedy’s word for the implications here; he does not say when it happened or in what circumstances.  Not a receiving line, we must presume, for instance.]

Interviewing George as “the U.S. bishops’ thinker-in-chief,” NC Reporter’s John Allen “suggests that many Catholics would like to see Cardinal Law-like resignations from bishops who covered up or reassigned sex abusing priests.

To which George:

Law — who, as his great patron put him in line to become archbishop of Chicago as soon as he heard that Cardinal Bernardin had a fatal illness — “went into exile.”

I guess so, but remaining on six powerful Roman congregations, being in charge of a prestigious basilica and living in splendid apartments does not sound like Elba to most people.

[Yes.  Law blew it in Boston, got transferred (in style) to the home office.  George can’t or won’t get this.]

Asked if he was surprised that New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan was elected president of the U.S. bishops’ conference over then-vice president Tucson Bishop Gerald Kicanas,

thereby breaking the conference’s tradition of selecting its outgoing vice-president as its new president, George cuts right to the chase: “Yes and no.”

Oh my.  Painful to watch.

[As Gene K. presents it.  But the rest of what George said is important here, which I failed to check.  Sloppily.  After the easily criticized “yes and no,” George:

I expected [the election] to be very close, but . . . had assumed the custom would be followed. . . .  The discussion [about the election] was going on [among the bishops], and we [he and Kicanas] knew it. It was fed by many factors, which have been analyzed and discussed. Some interpreted it ideologically, but I don’t know there’s that much ideological difference. Some saw it in terms of different eras – new bishops and old bishops. Obviously, Bishop Kicanas has the capacity and the personality to be president of our conference, and so does Archbishop Dolan. Maybe some bishops simply thought, since both are worthy candidates, why should we be bound by a rule we didn’t make?

[This last sentence makes no sense that I can see, but at least he didn’t let it go at “yes and no.”  He also defended Kicanas as working “extraordinarily” hard at coordinating bishops’ committees, which is fair enough.  All in all, his remarks on this matter were forthcoming enough, if not persuasive.

[As for his wanting to study and read more in retirement, it was a relaxed interview and he was candid in a personal matter.  Retirement?  That’s the biggest issue raised in the whole article.  Does he mean to do so at 75, in a year?]

Lots more of what the cardinal said — and decide for yourself — at “Picking the brain of the U.S. bishops’ thinker-in-chief.“

.

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Not easy to be Catholic

Main entrance to Manhattan College. See also F...
Identity issue

Here’s a hot one.  This Catholic college can’t claim to be Catholic:

In In re Manhattan College, (NLRB, Jan. 10, 2010), a National Labor Relations Board regional director held that the judicially and administratively developed exemption from NLRB coverage for colleges whose purpose is the propagation of a religious faith does not apply to New York’s Manhattan College.

Its adjunct faculty wanted to unionize, the college claimed not be required to brook it.

The decision concludes that the evidence shows the purpose of the college is secular. It finds that there is little risk that exercising NLRB jurisdiction will lead to unconstitutional entanglement of government and religion because the “school’s stated purpose does not involve the propagation of a religious faith, teachers are not required to adhere to or promote religious tenets, a religious order does not exercise control over hiring, firing, or day-to-day operations, and teachers are given academic freedom…” [italics added]

The union had argued that the college “does not meet the test of a religious institution,” the NLRB bought the argument, in the face of this from the college president:

[T]he fact that we are a welcoming, pluralistic community is being presented as proof that we cannot be an authentic Catholic college. Questions about the number of brothers in various roles imply that the work of lay faculty, staff, and administrators is negligible in forwarding our mission, and betrays a complete incomprehension of a full generation’s hard and faithful work in passing forward the charism of religious orders to lay colleagues. [italics added]

Oh my, this “charism” business, which is trundled out whenever people notice that priests or brothers or sisters are distinctly minority figures on campus, as if years of training and lifetime commitment can be transfused to the unordained, the non-vowed, the non-religious-disciplined on demand.

The word should be banned in religious circles.

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He falls, he bleeds

Up today at Chicago Catholic News, Fr. Pfleger in Bob McClory’s new book:

(POSTED: 1/12/11) “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”

— Percy B. Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”

“We lepers.”

— Fr. Damien to his flock on Molokai

The Rev. Michael Pfleger is no Shelley, but he has a Romantic’s intensity of personal experience and self-absorption. He’s also a paradigm of latter-day Roman Catholic activism who has found in Robert McClory his perfect delineator.

Indeed, it could be argued that Pfleger has answered the call to action more perfectly than any other, making him and McClory a match made in Detroit, home of the Call to Action movement with which McClory is closely identified.

Neither is big on a Divine Providence approach to being Catholic. Instead they put their chips on a firm belief in the power of human beings to change the course of history.  . . . .

more more more . . . .

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The ABC’s of getting it right

Some nice explanation here from various experts about what’s been wrong with the RC liturgy and how it will change come next December, the first Sunday of Advent, 2011:

The original translation of the Roman Missal into English was carried out under 1969 Vatican rules that stressed simplicity, modernity and other factors that would make the language of the liturgy more comprehensible and participatory.

I believe it.

[T]here was concern “that the language has been too laid back” and failed to convey the rich liturgical heritage of the Roman rite.

Yep.

The new translation [in December] shows an effort “to heighten the language a bit” and capture “the transcendence as well as the imminence of God,” he says.

Yes, give us a taste of something special here, alert us to the mystery.

“. . .  To radically simplify the language is often to dilute the concept.”

Not to make light of the problem that led to simplifying things, but you do lose something.  I like the challenge the translators are recognizing.  Let’s hope they meet it.

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