Punditry

It is sometimes the case that a headline has little or nothing to do with the actual contents of an article. That headlines are crafted for page views not a quick summary of an article. It is also true in many news organizations that the author of the piece is not the one to write the headline.

So I kept all that in mind when I read this headline from the Daily Mail “How a Pope called Pius turned the confessional box into a paradise for paedophiles”.

Unfortunately the article and headline are one and the same. The attack against Pope Pius X is that he decreed in 1910 that children must make their first confession at the age of seven.

The article goes on to state:

Statistics of offences have revealed that the age group most prone to attack was seven to 13 – the precise child cohort admitted to obligatory confession by this papal decree.

Well that is certainly news to me. For example the report commissioned by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice regarding clergy sex abuse would dispute the previous statement and that majority of victims were post-pubescient. Although the fact that roughly 21% of the victims were in the category described is not to be diminished. Still I can’t think of a report that stated what was said in this article.

While there certainly has been in cases a link to a priest using the confessional in such a ghastly manner is this true in the majority of cases of sex abuse? So trying to blame Pius X for the abuse crisis that seem to rise so many decades later is stretching it. The article does not mention at all the reason Pius X in the Decree Quam Singulari lowered the age regarding the sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance. It was based on discerning the “age of discretion” or the “age of reason” a necessary point to determining when a child should have access to these sacraments.

Just a slimly article that does no favors regarding calling out the sexual abuse that did occur.

With the Pope being on the cover of the latest Rolling Stone cover with a 7,700-word article associated with it there have been various responses to it.

Much of the reaction has been similar to Pope Francis being named Time’s person of the year. That they like him because they think he is changing the Church at some fundamental level doctrinally. That if they really understood that he was truly a “son of the Church” they wouldn’t be very enthused about him.

The Rolling Stone article also has a contrast between Pope emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Francis that really sets up a straw-pontiff. The evil never-smiling staunch-traditionalist that is even compared to Freddy Kreuger; “he should be wearing a striped shirt with knife-fingered gloves and menacing teenagers in their nightmares.” A “disastrous pontificate” with no supporting evidence regarding this supplied. The language regarding Pope emeritus Benedict XVI is so over-the-top that Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi has strongly criticized it in this regard.

Whereas Pope Francis has a gentle voice and won’t judge anyone. Anywhere the Pope’s previous comments can be cast in the most unfortunate light they are. So you see the expected quotes pulled out by so many at odds with what the Church teaches. Plus this article contained this quite unfortunate comparison. “But Francis, like Bill Clinton, thrives on personal contact.” Yikes does the writer even realize what he is saying?

Still reacting to a Rolling Stone article on the Pope is mostly a waste of time as it is exactly what you would expect.

There has been much talk about the “Francis effect” and how those who are not practicing Catholics or even favorable towards the Church generally like Pope Francis. Part of this is that a seeming change in tone means an underlying change in doctrine. He seems like such a nice friendly guy that he really couldn’t believe in all those hard-sayings of Jesus and his Church. Many are drawn to likin him that they will broaden some specific statements that they interpet as liberal and then give him a pass if he mentions abortion since he is only throwing a bone to conservatives.

Some would critique the “Francis effect” as not a good thing since it might attract people to the Church with a totally false idea of what the Church is. Part of me is drawn to this critique since I am so tired of dissidents that bringing in another generation of them does not appeal to me. Yet I also reflect that any movement in the right direction is in fact a movement in the right direction. Any openness to truth can lead to more openness. God has worked with far less. The married couple that starts going to church because they had a child is not usually very well catechized, yet often God can work with this to bring them to a fuller understanding.

Have you ever read a conversion story where the person was already totally aligned with everything the Church had to teach? That the only thing they were lacking was becoming a member of the Church? We are all broken with various degrees of brokenness. Some will have less to repair, but we all need repair to become fully aligned with the Church and what God has in plan for us. A daily process with no end point in this life.

So I can’t say that “Here comes everybody” Catholicism delights me. I would be all for a smaller but more faithful Church where the members know their faith and act on it with total consistency. Plus I want that category to include me even though I don’t always fit that definition. I bet Moses would have been happier with a much smaller number of the faithful where they didn’t start building idols when he turned his back. Yet like the Israelites in the Exodus the Church is journeying towards the promised land and we can expect dissent and rebellions along the way. So while I long for the perfect Church that strangely also includes me I desire to welcome those to the Church drawn by Pope Francis or other means. Even if their journeying to the truth of what the Church teaches might include some time in the wilderness.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.

O, God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations, Through Christ Our Lord, Amen.

On the humorous side 7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Be Too Pleased About Pope Francis on the Cover of Rolling Stone

Simcha Fisher with Just enough Gores and Gateses; too many Africans:

In the interest of environmental responsibility, Al Gore suggests that all African women should bear four children.

This is, at least, what Al Gore surely anticipates when he speaks of “making fertility management ubiquitously available” to African women.  He says that ”If you get the health improved, if you get the availability of contraceptives, then families will voluntarily choose to have less children.”  Surely he and Tipper had good health and access to contraception when they bore their four children.

Following Gore’s example, African women should also, presumably, voluntarily choose to live in a 20-room, 10,000 square foot mansion that uses approximately four times more energy than the typical home in the neighborhood.  In addition, each African mother should maintain a luxury apartment in San Francisco. In order to save the environment, Mr. Gore encourages all African women to take several plane trips every year, and only to charter a private jet “when necessary.”

Just part of the progression of Sartre’s “Hell is other people” to “Hell is other people’s children.”

The post follows this with a look at the the true needs of African families. Hint it’s not more contraception.

I must say I am really surprised that Time Magazine named Pope Francis person of the year. Really surprised they are still making Time Magazine.

Any positive mention of the Pope is a good thing. I can’t say I get to excited that a magazine that often has anti-Catholic screeds by Amy Sullivan and others and usually celebrates Christmas or Easter by yet another “real Jesus” article takes time out to get something right. Plus I suspect they got this right for the wrong reasons. Remember the retraction the other day from them?

Correction: An earlier version of this post suggested that Pope Francis rejected some church dogma. He does not.

Considering that the selection is towards noteworthy regarding impact on the news during the year it means even less than an Nobel Peace Prize. People often reference that Hitler was named Man of the year, but there was also Stalin and the Ayatollah Khomeni along with “the computer” and “the Earth” also being winners.

No doubt the Pope’s obvious love of the poor is something even the media is able to recognize and even generally the Church’s work for the poor. This reminds me of something the pope wrote in Evangelii Gaudium:

1. Despite the tide of secularism which has swept our societies, in many countries – even those where Christians are a minority – the Catholic Church is considered a credible institution by public opinion, and trusted for her solidarity and concern for those in greatest need. Again and again, the Church has acted as a mediator in finding solutions to problems affecting peace, social harmony, the land, the defence of life, human and civil rights, and so forth. And how much good has been done by Catholic schools and universities around the world! This is a good thing. Yet, we find it difficult to make people see that when we raise other questions less palatable to public opinion, we are doing so out of fidelity to precisely the same convictions about human dignity and the common good.

I really liked Thomas L. McDonald’s take that included “The Good” and “The Meh”. This point especially resonated with me:

I’m not going to start jumping with joy because a magazine I consider offensive and irrelevant noticed the bloody obvious: that one man commanded more media attention than any other person this year: stopped clocks, and all that.

He also goes on to post some of Time’s other recent covers.

The always funny Eye of the Tiber has Pope Emeritus Benedict Glances At Cover Of Time Magazine Again, Discreetly Wipes Tear From Eye

Metaphors regarding the Church and sports are nothing new. St. Paul certainly used them and there are intersections with sports and the practice of the faith that make them useful. So I was interested when I saw a new book called The Catechism of Hockey by Alyssa Bormes. That it had a forward by Dale Ahlquist and is published by the American Chesterton Society certainly recommended itself to me. Plus that it has positive reviews from Archbishop Nienstedt and Bishop Paprocki sealed it.

Now I am not exactly a hockey fan and only have passing familiarity with the sport. Yet my lack of knowledge about hockey did not subtract from my enjoyment of the book in any way. A book as an extended metaphor comparing the Catholic faith and the sport of hockey would seem to be able to only go so far. That you would be stretching the metaphor at every juncture to try to make an apt and worthy comparison. Yet over and over I was rather amazed at how she put this forth with comparison after comparison and provided examples and lessons that I think are quite helpful in thinking about the faith. The penalty box and confession makes for a good parallel, but it is her writing which takes it beyond that. She ties it up quite nicely going from personal sin to how it affects the whole Body of Christ or using the hockey term being at “full strength.” There were a couple of comparisons that I thought were stretching it a bit. Still overwhelmingly it was dead on with an intriguing perspective of the faith and a real Catechism in the amount of topics covered.

Not every comparison in the book was hockey related, but even these parallels were made after originally grounding it in something hockey-based. One of these correlations involving the Mystical Body and the crowd of people in line to see the body of Pope John Paul II was stunning in its aptness and another example of how she took a metaphor and drew so much out of it. Over and over again in a Chestertonian way you would start to see something fresh from a new angle. No surprise that G.K. Chesterton was quoted a couple of time. In fact as I was reading the book and where she talked about the rules of hockey I was often reminded of one of his quotes.

“Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playgroundÉ.We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliffÕs edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.”

So I was quite pleased to see her use that same quote later on in the book. I so enjoyed how fun and inventive this book was which made serious points in a way I suspect could break through a previous barrier to something regarding the faith.

Update: Pope Francis on November 22nd offered what I would call a Catechism of Rugby.

Why in the world is the USCCB Blog promoting Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ? Despite what good work she might have done involving the death penalty she is also involved in serious errors. She is not an example to parade on the USCCB blog.

At the Democratic National Convention in 2008 she spoke to an interfaith crowd saying:

She received nothing but a stony silence, however, when she questioned the basis of the biblical crucifixion story as a “projection of our violent society.”

“Is this a God?” Prejeans asked about the belief that God allowed his son, Jesus, to be sacrificed for the sins of humanity. “Or is this an ogre?”

So much for St. Paul’s “we preach Christ crucified.”

The previous year in 2007, she had this to say:

(A)ccording to Sister Helen Prejean, author of the best-selling book Dead Man Walking, and internationally-renowned advocate against the death penalty, it is the Church’s doctrine on homosexuality that is sinful, as it fails to recognize “the full dignity of all human beings.”

Speaking on Sunday at the close of the symposium, Prejean noted that the first steps in denying and “removing” a human being is to declare them somehow “not quite human, not like how we are … to say that they’re ‘disordered’” – a reference to the language of the Vatican to describe the orientation of gay people. Such terminology, she said, fails to recognize the full dignity of all human beings and is the “greatest form of disrespect.”

Accordingly, “to not stand with LGBT people would be a sin,” declared Prejean to thunderous applause.

Prejean said that she is hopeful as she’s convinced that “people are waking and rising,” and that this will “change the Church.”

“When dialogue starts, the bread starts rising,” she said. “The yeast, the Holy Spirit, is in our hearts.”

In 2006 she was one of the signers of an ad in the New York Times that in part said “YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth control and abortion.” After being disinvited by Duluth Bishop Dennis Schnurr to be a keynote speaker at an education dinner she later clarified “I believe that all of life is sacred and must be protected, especially in the vulnerable stages at the beginning of life and its end.” Yet she still managed to sign this document while at the same time saying: “ I stand squarely within the framework of ”the seamless garment“ ethic of life.” A year after this in the July-August 1997 St. Catherine Review: Sister Prejean “will not take a stand against abortion.” She has also said if she got a chance to talk to President Obama it would only be about his support of the death penalty. She can find nothing else to chide him about.

Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the archbishop of New York, made clear that the Catholic Church remains adamantly opposed to the president’s health-care law because of what the Church considers its assault on conscience rights. “We bishops have been really kind of in a tough place, because we’re for universal, comprehensive, life-affirming health care,” Dolan said on Meet the Press, noting that the Catholic Church in the United States has supported the goal of universal and affordable health care for almost a century.

But the so-called HHS mandate, which requires coverage of contraception, sterilization, and drugs that may be abortifacients, without any co-pays, on all health-insurance plans, has made it impossible for Catholics to support the president’s efforts, Dolan said. “Mr. President, you’re really pushing kind of aside some of your greatest supporters. We want to be with you, we want to be strong, and if you keep doing this, we’re not going to be able to be one of your cheerleaders,” Dolan said. “That sadly is what happened.” (source)

While I can certainly understand some of the points Cardinal Dolan is making here. I think it also plays down or ignores other aspects. For example it was not the tacking on of the HHS mandate that made Obamacare morally unacceptable. The mandate just made it even worse. The U.S. Bishops were in the majority opposed to this act before the HHS Mandate which occurred only after the passage of the law. The very law itself had significant moral problems.

His statement “Mr. President, you’re really pushing kind of aside some of your greatest supporters.” also seems rather hyperbolic or a kind of diplomacy in place of truth. The assault on our faith by this President has extended across multiple lines beyond just the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” The idea that Catholics could be his greatest supporters if only he put aside the HHS Mandate is rather laughable. Yeah if he would just put aside his support for abortion, infanticide, contraception, so-called same-sex marriage, ordered drone strikes with oversight or accountability, assault on religious liberty, IVF, three-parent embryo creation, and a whole laundry list of morally problematic thrusts by his administration we would be great friends! We are called to love our enemies not whitewash away what makes them enemies.

Maybe I am being too hard on the Cardinal here who is obviously trying to balance prudentially calling out something without being belligerent. Yet I wish this prudence included not making a statement so obviously untrue.

Photo credit: BostonCatholic via photopin cc