Crime and punishment: A papal bull in the Church’s china shop

From the pope who rarely surprises us.

Reminds some of us of the California federal circuit whose decisions are most often overturned.

By Dr. Jeff Mirus (bio – articles – email) | Dec 18, 2018

Pope Francis has decided not only to raise questions about the prudence of capital punishment in our world today but also to cast into doubt centuries of previous Catholic moral teaching on the subject. It is true, to give Pope Francis his due, that there is no single definitive teaching by the Magisterium of the Church which proves beyond a shadow of doubt that he is demonstrably wrong. But all prior ecclesiastical evidence indicates, pace Francis, that capital punishment may be applied morally by legitimate public authority for grave crimes with the purpose of punishing evil and protecting the common good.

Even the latest changes to the Catechism can be interpreted in a manner consistent with this moral tradition. This consistency represents the current state of the teaching of the ordinary Magisterium on the subject, reaffirmed and clarified many times, strongly rooted in Sacred Scripture, and repeated in the Fathers of the Church. But definitive Magisterial statements are in short supply, for the historical reality is that this teaching has been considered so obvious that it has never been thought necessary to make it the subject of either a papal or a conciliar definition. . . . .

Etc., none of which stops him from going on and on with his flights of fancy. Where did they get this fellow?

Who killed reverence at holy mass? Alternate opening to book . . .

Today’s mass not prayer-friendly?

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

. . . as explanation for my interest in Holy Mass besides the usual for a mass-going octogenarian with a history of  mass attendance.

Along lines of something I wrote in a few years back as “Church Reporter” for the (now defunct ) Chicago Catholic News:

Meditating at Mass: PRAYER AND MEDITATION

No paragon of these am I, even if at 18 I left home to study them full time. After two years of it (novitiate), I got my SJ degree, which I relinquished many years later but would rather not go into right now.

Even so, much of it has stuck. At Mass, for instance, I often enter the zone of prayer and meditation, which makes me a poor participant in the liturgy.

Doesn’t mean I think of nothing else (distractions, you know) or that I am superior to the fellow or gal next to me who belts out the…

View original post 219 more words

Robert Spaemann, the Last Great Catholic Theologian — A man who called the pope out . . .

On his death, the word in the Vatican is, “Don’t cry for him, or look out for the Argentinian Papa Francisco!.” His last public statements included these judgments of his on the state of the Church:

“Pope Francis does not love unambiguous clarity. His response is so ambiguous that everyone can interpret it, and does interpret it, in favor of his own opinion. He wants only to ‘make proposals.’ But to contradict the proposals is not forbidden. And, in my view, they should be vigorously contradicted.” “Pope Francis likes to compare those who are critical of his politics with those who ‘sit on Moses’ seat.’ But in this way the shot comes back at the one who fired it. It was none other than the scribes who were defending divorce and handing down the rules about it. The disciples of Jesus were, instead, disconcerted over the strict ban on divorce on the part of the Master.”

“Uncertainty, insecurity, and confusion are growing in the Church: from the episcopal conferences to the last parish in the jungle. “

“The chaos was first set up with a stroke of the pen. The pope should have known that such a step would split the Church and lead it toward a schism. This schism would not reside on the periphery, but in the very heart of the Church.”

The man?

He was the philosopher closest to Benedict XVI, his friend and peer. He died at the age of 91 on December 10, in the light of the season of Advent.

. . . Spaemann was both a philosopher and a churchman, a Catholic through and through, very severe with the tendencies of the current pontificate, especially after the publication of “Amoris Laetitia.”

A good and faithful servant, it would seem.

China blinked . . .

. . . this time.

China Is Preparing to Increase Access for Foreign Companies

China plans to replace an industrial policy savaged by the Trump administration as protectionist with a new program promising greater access for foreign companies, according to people briefed on the matter, in a move to resolve trade tensions with the U.S.

China’s top planning agency and senior policy advisers are drafting the replacement for Made in China 2025—President Xi Jinping’s blueprint to make the country a leader in high-tech industries, from robotics to information to clean-energy cars. The revised plan would play down China’s bid to dominate manufacturing and be more open to participation by foreign companies, these people said.

Part of ongoing give and take, we presume.

And why not? It takes dealing. Always did. Winners, losers, and rest are watchers.

Market leverage. What else?

Ecumenism a third rail for liturgical movement, but remains part and parcel of its mystique. Church politics at its finest . . .

The intriguing Beauduin led anti-German underground, mystified his superior, got banished for his trouble . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

Ecumenism is the third rail of traditionalist criticism. The universal church prays for Christian unity, that all may be one, Father, etc. So what kind of Catholic would choose such a wary, un-Christian approach? A fool or a charlatan or an all-round mean person. That kind.

And yet traditionalists have been wary, boldly claiming to see a problem in the business of uniting somehow, some way, with the separated brethren, suspecting a watering-down of the true Church, its values and in the case of liturgical change, its everyday ways of praying and worshiping.

Be that as it may, as the liturgical movement flourished in the 1920s, it began to absorb this presumed given of contemporary Christian life that in the view of many seemed to undermine and contradict true Catholicism.

At the heart of this movement within a movement was a man whose penchant for activism led him during the…

View original post 877 more words

Mass priest facing people, communion in hand were not of ancient practice

Bishop Athanasius Schneider, 2/5/15, Wash DC:

In the early church, the altar and other sacred items were veiled out of respect for the sacred mystery in which they played a role. There was not, contrary to popular belief in our present time, a versus populum celebration of Mass or even a widespread practice of communion in the hand. The priest and the people faced together towards God in the liturgical East.

But those are good ideas, are they not? Not:

When we celebrate liturgy, it is God who must be at the center. The incarnate God. Christ. Nobody else. Not even the priest who acts in His place.

Bring Christ back to the mass:

It impoverishes the liturgy when we reduce the signs and gestures of adoration. Any liturgical renewal must therefore restore these and bring about a more Christocentric and transcendent character of the earthly liturgy which is more reminiscent of the angelic liturgy.

It’s there, for us to recognize and not play down.

Trump on Israel etc.

Four stars.

“A little over a year ago, President Donald Trump promised he would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and, six months later, he delivered on that promise by officially moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” Alex Titus writes in The Hill.

“Standing up for Israel at the United Nations, confronting Iran, and empowering the Jewish state to defend its interests have been successful outcomes of [the Trump Administration’s] policy agenda.”

Even Dems have to credit him for that.

The early ’20s: Wonderful developments but with shadows of Euro-extremism

Halcyon days of early reform. Learning Gregorian chant in New York (and Chicago) Catholic schools. But trouble brewing in Europe.

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

The war over, the liturgical movement kept moving along. Special gatherings, “liturgical weeks” and days became common, as in the French cities Rouen and Lourdes and other cities. A Congress of Sacred Music in 1919 was attended by cardinals and bishops and “mitred [bishop-level] abbots.” Interest was building in high places.

Gregorian chant, approved vigorously by Pius X almost 20 years earlier, was being taught to children — a half million in New York City, to site a major effort. Lay people were being encouraged to receive communion at mass — another Pius X footprint — and were in some cases were reading Scripture at mass. Pius XI told of “lively satisfaction” at these developments.

In Holland, the best organized in these matters, every diocese clergy-staffed liturgical commissions established by their bishops.

The lights of the movement were beginning to shine — Dom Odo Casel (1886-1948), source in his Liturgy…

View original post 427 more words

In worship, who comes first, God or the faithful? More than a conundrum.

The movement gets legs from a Jesuit-Benedictine squabble. Major issue, worship vs. instruction and formation . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

In 1889 at a Eucharistic Congress in Lieges, Belgium, Dom Gerard van Caloen, a trailblazing Benedictine monk, presenteda daring idea: reception of communion by worshipers at mass.

 Dom Gerard had already published a Missal for the Faithful in Latin and French and la much appreciated Little Missal for the Laity and started a publication and a study group.

 Participation was in the air. The new pope was to play catch-up.

He would be Pio Decimo, the tenth Pius, with a “Renew all things in Christ” motto –very much the parish priest from humble surroundings, a man of the people with a common touch but also a stern demeanor and willingness to take the battle to the enemy, in his case the moral (and cultural) evil as he saw it, of modernism.

He was to push frequent communion also.

As to worship in general, he was already…

View original post 595 more words