Funny stuff going on over at catholicnews.org. She has come up with some pretty funny satirical news stories and the last two posts were especially good.
Here is an excellent article in The Tablet on Fr. Fessio that provides a good short biography on him.
Pope John Paul II, Catholic ChurchWhen people meet me and find out that I’m a Catholic theologian, it does not take long before they pop the question: “why doesn’t the Catholic Church have women and married priests?”
Now the fun begins. “There must be some mistake,” I respond. “The Catholic Church has had female and married priests from the very beginning.”
That is usually met with a blank, perplexed stare.
But really, it is true. In Exodus 19:6 God promises to make the chosen people “a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” The first letter of Peter 2:5-10 echoes this. And to show how seriously the Catholic Church takes this, the sacrament of confirmation offers to all Catholics an anointing with the sacred chrism that is used to confer only one other sacrament–the ordination of bishops and priests.
This is not to blur the distinction between the ministerial priesthood and the priesthood of all believers.
The rest of the article by Dr. Marcellino D’Ambrosio is here.
| Your IQ Is 120 |
 Your Logical Intelligence is Above Average Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Exceptional Your General Knowledge is Exceptional |
Via The Anchoress.
Michael Cook at TechCentralStation answers charges about Pope John Paul II being responsible for AIDS deaths in Africa.
But there is something absurdly medieval about making the Pope a scapegoat, as if the clouds would break and the sun shine if we thrust enough pins through a JP2 voodoo doll. Pinning such blame for the tragedy of African AIDS on one man is one of those ideas that is, in the words of George Orwell, "so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them."
Two doubtful ideas run through all these criticisms. The first is basically this: African Catholics are so devout that if they have sex outside of marriage, dally with prostitutes or take a third wife, they will piously refrain from using condoms because the Great White Father told them not to. Ms. Toynbee darkly invokes "the Vatican’s deeper power… its personal authority over 1.3 billion worshippers, which is strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees."
But she can’t have it both ways: these benighted dark-skinned Catholics can’t be both too goody-two-shoes to use condoms and too wicked to resist temptation. Journalist Brendan O’Neill — who describes himself as an ex-Catholic who has jettisoned Catholic teaching on sexual morality — sums up this patronising argument in the on-line journal Spiked: "The only reason you could believe the fantastically simplistic idea that Vatican edict = AIDS in Africa is if you consider Africans to be little more than automatons… who do as they are told" (8).
Superimposing maps of prevalence of AIDS on prevalence of Catholicism is enough to sink the link between the Catholic Church and AIDS. In the hospice which is Swaziland nowadays, only about 5 per cent of the population is Catholic. In Botswana, where 37 per cent of the adult population is HIV infected, only 4 per cent of the population is Catholic. In South Africa, 22 per cent of the population is HIV infected, and only 6 per cent is Catholic. But in Uganda, with 43 per cent of the population Catholic, the proportion of HIV infected adults is 4 per cent (9).
In fact, without the Catholic Church the situation might be much worse. The AIDS disaster in Africa weighed heavily on the Pope. Ten years ago he appealed to "the world’s scientists and political leaders, moved by the love and respect due to every human person, to use every means available in order to put an end to this scourge" (10). And Catholics have responded. [Source]
The whole article is also pretty good and even though it isn’t written from a specifically Catholic prospective the author noted "These statistics suggest that the true story may be quite the opposite to the tune sung by the media: that Catholic observance may, in fact, be the best prophylactic."
Peter at Catholicae Testudines has come up with a great Jack Chick parody. Just click next on each panel to read the whole strip.
Interesting post on Belief and Obedience in regards to a sermon the blogger heard where the priest had said altar rails were invented to keep the Protestants from Communion. This blog Deus Volent is new to me though it looks like it has been around for almost a year and is authored by a student at Thomas Aquinas College (an oasis of Catholic orthodoxy in California).
[Via Holy Fool (another blog well worth checking out)]
Ignatius Insight has the latest article in a series related to blogs. This time Catholic bloggers were asked "What are the problems with blogs."
Nancy at Flying Stars has been doing an excellent series of post’s concerning Catholic journalism and specifically responds to an article by Tom Sheridan. Her latest brings up this interesting point.
As Dr. Thursday again points out, Saint Thomas Aquinas in his brilliant book Summa Theologica has a ton of errors in it. There is a tremendous amount of space in that book with errors and dissent all over the place. But St. Thomas is taking each error in it’s turn, and then explaining why that particular position doesn’t work. That is what a Responsible Catholic Journalist should do. Now if St. Thomas had presented the dissent and then the Catholic view, giving equal weight, or perhaps even more weight to the Catholic view, and then stepped back and said, "There you are. You decide." would that be helpful? The church has always been brave enough and bold enough to say, "We’re going to give you the Truth, and the Truth is…..X" Maybe the Catholic newpapers of today aren’t that brave. They think people are grown up enough to decide for themselves. People can decide things for themselves when they know what’s right. But if they don’t know what’s right, how then can anyone decide? What feels good? What seems good? People today are longing for the Truth and no one is willing to give it to them. That’s why people are drawn to the Catholic Church, if they seek answers, because the Church is basically the only place in the world brave enough to say what Truth is.
The Summa Thelogica does seem to me to be a good model for Catholic journalism in some areas. St. Thomas Aquinas would write opposing views on a subject that fully reflected the argument used to the best of his ability (which was normally better than those proposing the arguments) and then Sed Contra would answer them. Too much of what goes for Catholic journalism is missing the Sed Contra part. We need to see opposing views clearly stated and then why they are wrong.
If you read Captain’s Quarters or Power Line you are probably well know how bad the editorials of the Star Tribune normally are. About a month ago they hired Katherine Kersten full time who had twice-monthly written editorials there from 1995 to 2003. A couple of weeks back she was interviewed on the Northern Alliance Radio Network (made up of prominent Minnesota bloggers) and she talked about the types of columns she would be doing and mentioned one she was going to do on Dale Ahlquist who left his job as a lobbyist to found the American Chesterton Society. The article is now outand available here. If you had never had the opportunity to see Dale’s show on EWTN about Chesterton called the "Apostle of Common Sense" you can hear the first season here. [Via The Seventh Age]
You can read other excellent columns by Katherine Kersten here.