A fav Lutheran blogger

Taking a timeout from yet another blogging hiatus here at Veritas to plug a blog: Weedon's blog, authored by Lutheran (LCMS) pastor William Weedon. Pastor Weedon exhibits an ability which -- at least in my experience -- is somewhat rare among confessional LCMS bloggers: you get the sense that he defines himself more by what he is (a confessional LCMS Lutheran) than by what he is not (a Catholic, or Reformed, etc.). (Unfortunately, the same tendency can be found among people of any tradition -- including Catholicism -- who are zealous about their orthodoxy; there's something about that zeal that tempts us to identify ourselves by opposition to others.)

Pastor Weedon reminds me of something often said by some Lutheran converts to Catholicism: with the truth at the heart of his view of justification (apart from the errors), Luther might have been able to reform the Church from within, instead of falling into heresy and excommunication. Alas. Why does Weedon's blog remind me of this? Because he offers us (in my opinion) some idea of the best that Lutheranism has to offer.

So: check him out. And be Catholic. :-)

Dialogue

Lutheran (LCMS) pastor Paul McCain today kindly (and I mean that) emailed me to let me know that I'm banned from commenting at his blog, noting that its not an open forum.

I replied that I appreciated him letting me know, but I also noted that I'm not sure what I said that he took issue with. In the last couple days, I've made three comments at his blog: one, here, wondering what his thoughts on Benedict's new encyclical Spe Salvi were; another, here, expressing concern (with him) about a Knight of Columbus who supposedly said, in regard to some relics of the Magi, "This is the closest I'm going to get to God in my physical lifetime"; and a final comment back at the first post I'd commented on, trying to clarify to another commenter that almsgiving in the context of indulgences wasn't very different from his own understanding of almsigiving and its potential effect on our sanctification.

It's the final comment which I think got me banned, but I'm not really sure why. Pastor McCain stated that he's not inclined to feature folks who are "intent on promoting faulty understanding and error." Now, given that I was simply trying to clarify that Catholic teaching on indulgences & almsgiving, I'm not sure how I was doing so, but there you go. Based on prior interactions with Pastor McCain and the history of his blog, I am inclined to think that he simply isn't interested in having his preconceptions regarding Catholicism challenged: he's confident that he understands Catholic teaching, and he isn't interested in haven't his understanding questioned. Nor is he interested in entering into dialogue with Catholics in order to confirm that his understanding is in fact accurate.

C'est la vie. There are plenty of other Christians -- including Catholics -- with similar mindsets, and while I'm disappointed that Pastor McCain has no interest in ecumenical dialogue, I can't say that I'm that surprised... for many of us who take confessional orthodoxy seriously, it can be difficult to understand the point of ecumenical dialogue. So while I am saddened by his actions in banning me, I applaud Pastor McCain for desiring to promote Lutheran orthodoxy on his blog. I only hope that at some point he realizes that one can uphold one's orthodoxy while simultaneously dialoguing with those of differing confessions.

Pope Benedict and the Jews

The First Things blog recently posted an article by Jewish scholar David Dalin on John Paul the Great and the Jews, extolling the late great pontiff for his relationships and engagement with the Jewish people, both on a personal and pastoral level.

In his conclusion, Dalin also makes reference to our current Bishop of Rome: "Pope Benedict XVI, like Pope John Paul II, is known to be a staunch friend of the Jewish people and the State of Israel and a vocal critic of anti-Semitism. [...] John Paul II was the heir and exemplar of a long a venerable philo-Semitic tradition within papal–Jewish relations, [!!!] a tradition of papal friendship and support for the Jewish people that has continued with John Paul II’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI."

New encyclical tomorrow!


Pope Benedict is set to sign and publish his second encyclical tomorrow. Entitled Spe Salvi ("salvation by or through hope"; it's from the writings of St. Paul), it's said to be on Christian hope, especially in the context of modern philosophy. Word from those who have read it is that it's weighty, which is no surprise.

The letter should be at the Vatican's website around 5:00 a.m. Central time, so keep your eyes peeled.

There's no way Rudy will get my vote

If the GOP nominates Giuliani, I'll either vote third-party or not at all (for President). I think that having a Republican president who supports abortion rights will do more harm than good to the pro-life cause in the long run, no matter what he says about judges.

I'm familiar with the argument that voting for Giuliani (as opposed to Hillary or any of the other Dem candidates) would be voting for the lesser of two evils (which is legitimate, from a Catholic moral perspective), but I'm still not sold... obviously, anyone who is pro-life would be voting for Giuliani in spite of his views on abortion, but if it was impossible for someone to support Kerry "in spite" of his views on abortion, how can someone do so with regard to Rudy?

My position doesn't have anymore weight behind it than my own solitary vote, but I don't care: I don't see anyway in which I can vote for Rudy for President.

Attached and Attacked

[W]hat we need is the heroism of life, not because it is against banality, but because it illuminates it. Like a young man who is in love with his girlfriend and she says “yes” to him: the world is the same, but different; the light is different, food tastes differently, relationships are different, what he does is different, his struggles are different. Therefore, the difference that makes it possible to live the ordinary lies precisely in affection, which means to be attached and attacked, attached to the truth and attacked by it, living reality intensely.
-- Giancarlo Cesana

Where else shall I go?

A fellow blogger used the occasion of San Francisco's archbishop giving Holy Communion to two transvesite men dressed as nuns to state the following:

"Wake up, folks! This is the reality of the Church of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Conservative Catholics longed for change, thought that these men would bring it, and what have they received? This."

Said blogger (a former Catholic) proceeded to quote Revelation 18:1-5, implying none too subtly that the Catholic Church is the Babylon of St. John's vision.

Here was my comment in response, which (for reasons inscrutable to me) didn't make the moderation cut:

"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."

I stopped fretting about the sins and failings (real & perceived) of popes and bishops a long time ago... it's not my billet. I am confident that the Catholic Church is the fullness of the Body of Christ, despite the faults of her members, and there is no where else for me to flee to, no utopian ecclesial community that will be without fault, if for no other reason then as soon as I joined it, it would cease to be such.

The teachings of the Catholic Church are the teachings of Jesus Christ, and I know that I receive Him and His grace & life when I dwell in her... that's good enough for me.

Warts and all, the Catholic Church is the place where I encounter Christ, in the fullness possible this side of heavenly glory.

Update: Said blogger now compares yours truly and other convicted Catholics to the people of Jerusalem who ignored the warnings of the prophet Jeremiah. But here's the thing: there's been plenty of sin in the history of the Catholic Church, which has been around now for much longer than Jerusalem was the capitol of Judah prior to its fall, and God hasn't destroyed it. Why? Because He promised that the Church would be pillar and foundation of truth, the place where His disciples would encounter Him even after His return to the Father. To compare the fall of Jerusalem to a supposed fall of the Catholic Church commits the crucial error of placing the Old and New Covenants and their promises and exactly the same level, when the very point of Christianity is that the New fulfills and completes the Old.

To posit that the Church can fail is to assert that Jesus cannot keep His promises.

Besides, if God didn't destroy the Catholic Church after Alexander VI, he won't destroy it because of John Paul the Great and Benedict XVI.

Sadly, not too surprising

Bill Cork -- recent convert from Catholicism to the Seventh-Day Adventism of his youth -- jettisoned his belief in the immorality of contraception when he swam the Tiber (the other way).

Unfortunately, it's relatively common to see those who once presumably recognized the destructive nature of contraception to abandon that belief when they abandon Rome... the cultural current in favor of contraception is an especially strong one, which relatively few Christians (including Catholics) seem able to swim against. (NB: I'm not psychoanalyzing Bill here... just making a more general observation.) And there's another issue at play here, which might get closer to addressing Bill's recent spiritual wanderings...

Generally speaking, Christians accept the truths of their faith not (necessarily) because they are convinced of the arguments offered in favor of said truths, but precisely because of their faith, their faith in God: they accept as true the things which He has revealed, even if they don't (yet) understand the "why's" with regard to each of those truths. This is in no way to disparage the process of seeking to answer those "Why?'s"... that's exactly what theology does, and it would be strange for a theologian to disparage his own discipline. However, as Christians we don't withhold assent to our doctrines until we have been presented with a proof with demonstrates their rationality... instead, we recognize He who is the origin of those doctrines, and give our assent accordingly. In those instances wherein we do not fully understand a particular doctrine, we can still give our assent because of our confident faith in God, and at the same time we can seek to understand the intelligibility of said doctrine.

For Catholics in particular, this is (or should be) a fairly easy process: because we understand the Magisterium (the pope and the bishops in union with him) to be infallibly guided by the Holy Spirit in the teaching of Christian doctrine, we have confidence that what the Magisterium proposes for our belief is in fact true, even if we do not see the rationality of a particular doctrine at any particular moment. The Magisterium acts, then, as God's concrete instrument by which those who follow His Son can know what He proposes for our belief, and therefore what we can give confident assent to in faith, even prior to an understanding its intelligibility.

What this means is that we do not need to earn PhDs in theology in order to follow Jesus Christ! For if there is not a concrete means by which we know the doctrines which He teaches and therefore what we can give assent to, we are forced to examine each allegedly Christian doctrine to determine if it in fact is authentic Christian doctrine, and only then can we give our assent to it. Such a proposal strikes me as non-sensical: while we are all called to grow in faith and in our understanding of it, the divine pedagogy as we find it in Sacred Scripture certainly does not indicate that assent is to be withheld from each and every supposedly Christian doctrine until every such doctrine is judged as true by the (Almighty!) individual and his quasi-divine intellect. In addition, it's ahistorical: although the Church did not substantially and dogmatically articulate its Trinitarian & Christological doctrines until forced to by the Arian heresy, Christians before Arius still assented to the truths which were precisely formulated at Nicea and the other early Councils. And we're seeing the same thing today with regard to the reservation of ordination to men alone: the theological arguments which explain this teaching are only know being thoroughly developed (because the teaching has been challenged), but that doesn't mean that Catholics who lived centuries ago did not believe this teaching... they in fact did, despite the fact that they were not presented with elaborate theological argumentation in its defense.

I praise and thank God for giving us the Magisterium; even though I do have a doctorate in theology, I have just enough self-awareness to recognize that if I had to arrive at the intelligibility of a doctrine prior to giving my assent to it, the content of my faith would be extremely sparse. Thankfully, I don't have to do so to revel in the truths which God has revealed for my salvation.

(Feel free to offer your critical comments... this line of thought is very much a work in progress.)

S-CHIP

Last week the House and Senate passed sizable increases the State Children’s Health Insurance Program budget, despite the threat of a presidential veto. S-CHIP ostensibly exists to offer health insurance for children of the working poor, and because of that, many thoughtful and well-meaning people -- including some of the people at the very interesting Catholic blog Vox Nova -- support the growth in the program which the House and Senate approved.

However, it looks to me like this is another example of a good program being grown beyond its original purpose to create a new entitlement for those who do not need it. I'm certainly not questioning that there are those enrolled in S-CHIP who need it: that's definitely true. But I have a hard time understanding how a family of four with an income of $60,000 (or even $83,000 in some cases) and whose kids are 25 years old can qualify.

Let's help the working poor, but let's not redistribute income to those who don't need it. (See here for more.)

Oops.

Despite being (or because he is?) a highly successful suer (not sewer, but close), John Edwards has a penchant for sticking his feet in his mouth.

Take his recent criticism of Hillary Clinton for accepting political contributions from media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Turns out that Murdoch's publishing house gave Edwards and $800,000 advance for his 2006 book. As a News Corp. spokesman said, I wonder if Edwards will give that money back to Murdoch?

In distancing us from ourselves, we distance ourselves from Christ

The first way we distance ourselves from Christ is by distancing ourselves from our very selves. In that text from the Exercises twenty years ago, Father Giussani quoted a phrase from Pope John Paul II that is still decisive for us today: "there will be no faithfulness... if a question isn't found in man's heart to which only God... is the answer." He doesn't say there will be no faithfulness if we're not good, if we're not coherent, if we lack the energy. No. There will be no faithfulness -- in other words, in the end Christ will not matter to us -- without a question to which only He is the answer. If this question is not rooted in the depths of our I, and if we are not loyal to it, sooner or later Christ will not matter to us anymore. Like many others, we too will go away. For this reason, our first loyalty is to our humanity, to our cry, to the urgent need of our heart.

Fr. Julian Carron, Exercises of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, Rimini, 2007, pp. 8-9 (English transl, Fr. William Vouk et al.).

Can you believe it?

That's three posts for this month, not even counting this one!

Wow!

Who is the real liberal Catholic?

A nice post by Shawn of NLM on the opposition of some Catholics to Pope Benedict's recent decision to liberalize the use of the "traditional Latin Mass". He notes that if you look at the historical meaning of what a "Catholic liberal" is, the Holy Father fits the bill far more than those opposing this liberalization.

Hey libs: do you want to stop genocide or not?

Jonah Goldberg has a succinct column examining the hypocrisy inconsistency of many liberals (including many running for their party's presidential nomination) on the question of using force to stop genocide.

Comments

I know posts have been extremely sparse here over the last several months... I appreciate those of you who poke your heads in on occasion, as well as those who feel moved to offer a thought or two. Rest assured that vulgarity and spam aside, comments are not moderated... I feel that if you take the time to offer a thought, I'm happy to give you the space. Nor does disagreement (even strong disagreement) concern me... I'd hate for someone to think that I ignored/deleted a comment because I didn't like the conclusions or consequences of the comment.

Polarization remains

Good post by Stanley Kurtz on the reality of polarization in our country.

Hear hear!

"In same way, many Catholics congratulate themselves as "Thinking Catholics" under the false impression that they have devoted actual thought to the Church's theology. The vast majority have simply followed the line of least cultural resistance by adapting themselves to the fashion that disdains Catholic orthodoxy as a kind of boot camp of working class muscular moralism. Since it's so terribly un-chic, you never have to get around to showing that it's false" (emphasis added).

Well said, Diogenes!

Josh... still at it

Josh S. is a Lutheran (LCMS) seminarian at the synod's seminary in Ft. Wayne, Indiana who's been in the blogosphere for a number of years. Last year he closed down the group blog that he'd started (after closing his own personal blog previously), owing to his time in the seminary. That, however, hasn't stopped his need to blog... I just discovered that he's continuing to post at The Boar's Head Tavern, under a pseudonym.

Josh's online personality is a bit of an ornery cuss. He seems to mildly enjoy flamethrowing and the results that it brings... at his own blogs, he's gone after anyone and everyone from any Christian tradition, focusing his ire in particular on Calvinism and Catholicism at various times. Like a number of Christians I know, he seems to identify himself by what he isn't (Catholic or Calvinist), more so than by what he is. Or to be a bit more precise, his explanations of what he is (or what he believes) are generally in the context of what he is not (or what he does not believe). In Josh's case, I have no idea why that is... any ideas I could offer would only be speculative, no matter their accuracy.

Josh has always been fairly well read, and that's obviously still the case in seminary. But as they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And despite the reading he's done, he evidently still doesn't get Catholicism (not that that's uncommon, btw... I suppose if he did get it, he'd convert). Unfortunately, he's still prone to occasionally saying completely ridiculous things. For instance, he has this funny little post on what converts to Catholicism ignore. Written in the context of Dr. Francis Beckwith's recent return to the Catholic Church of his youth (he became an evangelical when he was young, and had some standing... he just resigned as President of the Evangelical Theological Society), Josh apparently thinks that no one could possibly convert to Catholicism if they really knew these things (many of which are fairly accurate, but some of which are off-base; for instance, the second item on his list).

Conversions & reversions are mysterious things, but it's pretty bold to claim that someone of Dr. Beckwith's intellectual rigor & honesty would ignore the warts on the Church. More likely, he's well aware of them, but realizes that in the end, they don't obscure the reality of what the Church is: the community of disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, founded and structured by Him, communicating (in many ways) the salvation won by Him.

The Key to '08: Minnewisowa!

Glad to see that some political analysts are recognizing the major political importance of what some are calling the Minne(sota)Wi(sconsin)(I)owa SuperState.

And note which comes first ;-)

Greedy Capitalists

"my needs for the future just didn't dovetail with what ABC was able to offer me."
-- Rosie O'Donnell, explaining that she won't be back on The View in the fall because of contract differences with ABC.

I hope she has enough consistency to avoid complaining about people who she thinks are overpaid.