Finalmente!

Il Santo Padre Benedetto XVI ha nominato... Vescovo di Sioux Falls (U.S.A.) il Rev.do Mons. Paul Joseph Swain, finora Vicario Generale di Madison.

Rev.do Mons. Paul Joseph Swain

Mons. Swain è nato il 12 settembre 1943, da una famiglia di confessione Metodista. Dopo aver seguito le scuole elementari e medie, ha continuato la sua educazione superiore prima nella Ohio Northern University, dove nel 1965 è diventato Bachelor of Arts in History; poi, all’University of Wisconsin-Madison, dove nel 1967 ha conseguito il Master of Arts in Political Science; e successivamente, presso l’University of Wisconsin Law School, dove ha conseguito il titolo di Juris Doctor, nel 1974. Nel frattempo ha partecipato alla Guerra in Vietnam (1967-1971), come Air Intelligence Officer. Per i suoi meriti ha ottenuto l’onorificenza di Vietnam Veteran Bronze Star. Laureatosi in Diritto Civile, ha seguito la pratica giuridica: prima come Assistant Legal Counsel, League of Wisconsin Municipalities (1975-1976); poi come Avvocato (1976-1979); e successivamente come Legal Counsel del Governatore dello Stato di Wisconsin, Sig. Lee Sherman Dryfus (1979-1983).

Dopo la sua conversione, è stato ricevuto nella Chiesa Cattolica nel 1982. Nel 1983 ha iniziato la sua formazione per il sacerdozio, presso il Pope John XXIII National Seminary a Weston, Massachusetts. Ha concluso nel 1988 conseguendo il titolo di Master of Divinity.È stato ordinato sacerdote il 27 maggio 1988 dal Vescovo Cletus F. O’Donnell. Ha poi ricoperto i seguenti incarichi: 1988-1993: Vicario cooperatore di Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary a Sun Prairie. 1993: Segretario di S.E. Bullock, Moderatore della Curia e Vice-Cancelliere. 1994-1997: Parroco di St. Mary of Pine Bluff. 1997-1999: Rettore della Cattedrale di St. Raphael di Madison. 1997-2000: Vicario Generale. 2002: Parroco di St. Bernard a Middleton. È Prelato d’Onore di sua Santità dal 14 giugno 1997 e membro dell’Ordine Equestre del Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme. Attualmente è Vicario Generale della diocesi di Madison e Rettore della Cattedrale di San Raffaele.

New SF, SD blog

Greg Belfrage is a local talk-show host as well as a fellow parishioner at my Catholic parish, and he now has a blog: Prairie Conservative. Check it out!

(He's added to the blogroll to the left as well.)

Bainbridge on Wal-mart again

Another good post on Wal-mart by conservative law professor Stephen Bainbridge.

As I've noted before with regard to the professor's view, there is a conservative case against Wal-mart, and it's a serious one.

First jet plane flew today

The first turbojet-powered airplane flew on August 27th, 19XX.

Any guesses as to the year, and the country of origin?

Put your guesses in the comments, and then go here to get the answers.

More permalinks

I've added a few more blogs that I regularly visit to the blogroll:

Professor Bainbridge
Hugh Hewitt
Instapundit

I know there's a lot of cleaning up to do in the blogroll, with inactive, dead, and moved blogs... all in good time, my pretties. :-)

Speaking of carnivals...

I recommend the Carnival of Personal Finance; archives can be found here.

On the topic, I also recommend Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover and Eric Tyson's Personal Finance for Dummies.

Wish I would have read both about ten years ago.

An Elementary [sic] Christian Metaphysics

One of my friends from my time in Rome is Fr. Dan Gallagher, a priest of the Diocese of Gaylord, Michigan, who is currently "on loan" to Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.

In a recent conversation, Father mentioned that he's going to be teaching metaphysics this fall at the seminary, and said that the text he's assigning is An Elementary Christian Metaphysics by Fr. Joseph Owens. I'm just a few chapters into the work, and while it isn't the easiest read, it is worthwhile, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.

For an idea of where Owens comes from, here's a line from the backcover blurb:

Using original Thomistic texts and Etienne Gilson's interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas, Owens examines the application of metaphysical principles to the issues that arise in a specifically Christian environment.

Again, a good introduction to metaphysics.

Comments switched over

As mentioned last week, I've moved from YACCS for comments to Blogger; after leaving both up for a few days, I've taken the YACCS comments offline.

FYI.

Latest CC is up!

You can read the latest Catholic Carnival here.

New issue of The New Atlantis now online

The editors of The New Atlantis -- a Journal of Technology and Society are kind enough to make each new issue available online a few weeks after it's available for purchase (back issues are also online).

The latest issue is now up, and as always, there are some very interesting articles, including one on the first fourteen days of human life coauthored by my friend, Pat Lee, and Robert George.

Moral utilitarianism among the American left and right

At the First Things blog, Ross Douthat has a terrific post on the prevelance of moral utilitarianism among Americans of all political stripes, offering examples of tactitly approving the torture terrorists to get information that might stop an attack (the right) and approving of embronic stem cell research if it might cure disease (the left).

He then draws the following conclusion:

This reality, I think, offers the umpteenth example of why the Victorian project (which persists to this day) of doing away with Christian dogma but trying to keep Christian morality intact is doomed to failure. Not because Christian morality can’t be approached rationally by nonbelievers of good will, but because without the lived experience of a religious tradition it will never be anything more than an abstraction, an arid intellectualism, something that gets followed when following it is easy to follow and abandoned as soon as the going gets tough.

I agree, wholeheartedly.

Read the whole thing.

Programming note: Switching Comments

YACCS comments have served me well for a few years now, but YACCS is also often the source of delays in loading the blog and individual posts. So I'm transitioning to Blogger's commenting system...

For the time being, I'm leaving the YACCS comments up (the link tha follows "Not here:"), so that people can read recent comments made to the blog. But for new comments, please use the Blogger comments (where it says "Comment here:").

Thanks!

Gates praises ABC, gets booed by activists

Bill Gates spoke at the 16th annual International AIDS conference, held this year in Toronto. He spoke of the "ABC" approach to fighting AIDS used in some African countries, like Uganda ("ABC" means abstinence, be faithful, and condoms for specific populations that refuse "A" and "B").

When Gates said, "This approach has saved many lives, and we should expand it," he was booed, according to FRC, Lifesite, and a blog by AIDS activists at the conference. Abstinence, after all, is unrealistic... who can really expect people to exercise self-discipline and virtue?

ComprehensiveContraceptive Sex Education = more teen sex

According to a story in yesterday's Washington Post (free registration required), a Philadelphia study found that (black) teens who had a comprehensivecontraceptive sex education curriculum were more likely to engage in sexual intercourse than students whose curriculum took an abstinence-only approach.

The study also found that the teens in the absistence-only curriculum who did have sex were just as likely to know about condoms and how to use them as those in the comprehensivecontraceptive sex education curriculum.

Blogroll updates

I finally updated by blogroll... I use the personalized Google homepage to check a number of blogs, and I've been tardy in getting some of them on the blogroll. So over on the left you'll find new links to:

Pontifications
AmericanPapist
Whispers in the Loggia
The New Liturgical Movement
Cosmos - Liturgy - Sex
Looking Closer Journal

FYI.

Happy Feast of the Assumption!

(Find a beautiful painting along with a meditation on the Assumption at Pontifications.)

New Catholic Carnival!

Find it at just another day of Catholic pondering.

It is better to be than to not-be

At Mass this Sunday, Father Al began his homily with a few comments on Jesus' words in John 6:44: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day" (the Gospel reading was John 6:41-51). Father noted (and I'm paraphrasing here) that at this point in his life, he understands most "mysterious" things, with a few things excepted. One of those exceptions was this: if God knows from all eternity those souls who will finally refuse his gift of grace and salvation and choose eternal separation from Him instead, why did He create them?

Here is my meager attempt at a possible response.

Taking Genesis 1 as the point of departure ("and God saw that it was good"), it is a basic principle of Catholic theology and philosophy that God created all things good, and this fundamental goodness remains, despite the effects of the Fall of humanity in the garden. (Philosophically, this notion is expressed in the axiom that being and good are convertible.)

In other words, insofar as something exists (i.e. has being), it is good.

Consider, then, those who are damned (who count among their number the fallen angels and any human beings who persist in refusing God at the moment of their death). On a moral level, they are rightly described as evil. But on a metaphysical level, the fact that they continue to exist in some way, however diminished, means that they are good, and hence that their being adds some goodness to the cosmos.

And here lays my possible answer to Father's query: by the sheer fact of their being, the existence of even the damned "adds" some measure of goodness to creation. In other words, the universe is better off with them than it would have been without them.

Thoughts?

It's not all about "No"

Pope Benedict recently gave a television interview to a panel of four German journalists in anticipation of his visit to his homeland in a few weeks. The english translation of the transcript can be found here. Right now, there's one passage I want to call attention to:

And when you have so little time you can't say everything you want to say about "no." Firstly you have to know what we really want, right? Christianity, Catholicism, isn't a collection of prohibitions: it's a positive option. It's very important that we look at it again because this idea has almost completely disappeared today. We've heard so much about what is not allowed that now it's time to say: we have a positive idea to offer

Right on!

Wright on von Balthasar on Protestants and Catholics

Nazarene pastor John Wright has a nice post up on twentieth century theologians Hans Urs von Balthasar (Catholic) and Karl Barth (Reformed Protestant). Wright comments on some passages in von Balthasar's book examining Barth's thought, and a couple of those passages express something I've been trying to get some Net pals to understand.

Here's a key section of Pastor Wright's post:

Yet Balthasar says important things that accurately, and negatively, define Protestants relationship to Roman Catholics, even after over 50 years that he has written. He writes, 'Protestants are convinced that they have seen through Catholicism once and for all; and if it should so happen that they discover a presentation of Catholic views that they do not find absurd, this must surely be due to the Catholic habit of countenancying "Jesuitical' arguments, hiding the Church's true esoteric features behind politically shrewd and seductive masks" (p. 17). He concludes his observations, "And the result is that, if sloth and inattention hinder conversations on the Catholic side, mistrust and suspicion cripple it on the Protestant" (p. 18).

Yet Balthasar states that "perhaps today we are beginning to move beyond the era of stale antithese -- Reformation and Counter-Reformation -- with Catholics trying to be more catholic and not 'anti-Protestant' and the Protestants more biblical and 'evangelical' and not 'protesters'" (p. 19).

Let's hope so.