Sentire Cum Ecclesia

You will have heard all the ABC hype about the new Matt Smith Dr Who being available on I-View from Midnight, but the kids, wife and I will skip it and watch it the good old fashioned way on Sunday night on the telly.

In the mean time, if you really like your Dr Who via the Internet, why not check this one out…

This story in The Age raises interesting questions: One of these paintings is by a 17th-century Dutch master, the other has won a $25,000 Australian landscape prize .

Be your own judge: is this a copy or what? I know that if a student handed in a paper to me that looked as much like the work of another author as this painting does of the original, I would see it as plagiarism. But then, what do I know of art?

Credit to The Age

Well, this gives a whole new meaning to the term “Militant Atheism”: Call to hold Pope over abuse cases. The Age reports Dawkins’ article in the Washington Times in which he calls the Pope:

– “former head of the Inquisition”

– a leader of a “tinpot fiefdom”

– “A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds”

– “a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part”

– “a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa”

– “a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence”

For all this, he suggests that the remedy is that the Pope:

“should be arrested the moment he dares to set foot outside his tinpot fiefdom of the Vatican, and he should be tried in an appropriate civil – not ecclesiastical – court. That’s what should happen.”

Now that’s militant. It reveals the real objective of Militant Atheism Dawkins-style is to take on the biggest player on the world faith scene – and eliminate him.

Post script: Professor Dawkins has obviously moved on from his position which he stated in “The God Delusion” (pages 315-316):

The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America.

HT to reader Paul for this.

Update: And from Edward in the UK here is something to make you giggle” Meanwhile, in the bunker…

Well, silence does not suit me. I admit it. Day after day I lay in my bed recovering from a sore back, each morning my daughters bring me the latest edition of Melbourne’s premier rag, The Age, and (glutton for punishment that I am) I turn to the World News to read the obligatory page on the Catholic Church and (what might as well just be called now) the Scandal.

“Scandal” is a great word for the current crisis, because it exactly mirrors the greek in Matthew 18:6-7

“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. 7 Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!”

The word “stumbling block” is “skandalon” in Greek. Remember, Jesus was a prophet.

So there it is. The Scandal filling our daily reports. Is this a good thing? Yes, according to the Jesuit Provincial for Australia Fr Steve Curtin SJ, who writes (without any further elaboration):

“A free and independent media is a pillar of every civil society. To blame the media for misreporting aspects of the scandal of sexual abuse in the Church would overlook the service the media have provided for a church that needs to address a grave problem. (Read this article from Fr James Martin SJ).”

In the linked article in the Huffington Post, Fr Martin argues as follows (and please excuse me for quoting this at length, because he makes a number of valuable points):

There has always been a lingering degree of anti-Catholicism in some quarters of the media, for a variety of reasons, some with roots deep in American history, which I’ve written about at length in America magazine. The media also gets things dead wrong at times, even in factual reporting — especially when reporters new to the religion beat don’t have a clue about the way that the Catholic Church functions.

There are also op-ed writers and columnists who seem never to have a good word to say about the Catholic Church, even in the best of times. Snotty comments from pundits who know zero about celibacy are useless; misinformed asides from journalists who know little about the Vatican are unhelpful; and mean-spirited stereotypes from otherwise thoughtful writers about all priests, all sisters, all bishops, all popes and all Catholics are as harmful, and as defamatory, as any other stereotypes. To that end, I agree with a few of the critiques about the media.

But to blame the messenger for this current wave of stories about sexual abuse is to miss the point. For instance, a friend told me that at the Chrism Mass, a diocesan-wide liturgy a few days before Easter, her local bishop told the congregation to cancel their subscriptions to The New York Times, which he called “the enemy.” Besides the fact that a Mass is not the time to critique your local newspaper, this overlooks a critical dynamic about the service the media has provided for a Church that needed to address a grave problem but wasn’t doing enough.

To wit: without the coverage by The Boston Globe in 2002 of the sexual abuse by priests, the Catholic Church in United States would not have confronted the issue on a nationwide basis and instituted mandatory guidelines.

To sum up:

1) Latent anti-Catholicism in the media is a fact, but not the point here.

2) Media reports can often skew the facts or misinterpret them – not due to any malice but simply due to ignorance of the Church’s language and functions; but this is not the point either.

3) Op-Ed pieces in the media are a different matter – often the writers do not even bother to hide their malice toward the Church; this is a point, but does not negate what IS Fr Martin’s point, to wit:

4) Nevertheless, the media reporting of The Scandal has at least served the Church in opening up this issue and prompting a thorough-going review of the Church’s procedures for dealing with both the causes and results of The Scandal. That IS the point.

And I grant it. With all these caveats, we have reason to be thankful for the media reporting on The Scandal. As a number of Churchmen have argued (most vehemently, Archbishop Timothy Nolan of New York – you can download the audio of his Palm Sunday statement here – it is about 4MB in size) the Church in general and this Pope in particular have responded to this media barage by bringing in clear guidelines and procedures that are more stringent than any other organisation. Only just yesterday, the Holy See publically released clarifications of its longstanding policy on dealing with sexual abuse allegations. (In fact, the Vatican Website has put up on its front page an entire page detailing all documentation dealing with The Scandal.)

We can be thankful for all this, painful as it is.

What we have to bear in the mean time is all the rest of it: the latent anti-Catholicism, the misinformation arising from ignorance, and the outright scorn of many op-ed writers.

If there is any comfort here at all, let it be in Jesus own words (Luke 6:26): “Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.” Jesus was NOT a false prophet. This is a painful and cathartic time for all Catholics. We cannot dodge shame that has arisen because of these sins. Nor can we change the past. Some have claimed in the press that this is the greatest crisis ever to face the Catholic Church. That is hyperbole. Just as we cannot get away from our past in respect to the Crusades, the Inquisition, and a host of other areas, so with The Scandal we are called to repent of the past and move on in hope toward the future.

Update: You might be interested in John Allen’s interview with the editor of L’Osservatore Romano here for some more analysis. A quotation:

A vintage moment came when the Rome correspondent for the New York Times, Rachel Donadio, introduced herself and jokingly said: “Don’t shoot!” She was referring to criticism from senior Vatican officials and numerous Catholic pundits of the aggressive manner in which the Times has pursued the sex abuse story, and especially its connection to the pope. Not to be outdone, Vian laughingly replied: “You’re the ones shooting!”

Sometimes life is just not fair. I mean I did say to some one towards the end of our three day Symposium on Death & Dying that when it was all over I intended to go home and go to bed and not get up for three days, but I didn’t mean it to happen like this. Within half an hour of the end of the conference I had put my back out and am now resigned to being laid out horizontal for at least another three or four days. Which means no blogging folks. Your prayers for a speedy recovery would be appreciated.

I wonder if someone might not organise an equivalent event in Melbourne?

Sorry I haven’t been posting much. We are in the middle of our Interfaith Symposium on Death and Dying and I am having to find a third end to my candle just so I can burn it along with the other two ends… It has been really good so far. Grand finale tomorrow.

I was mercifully spared the usual Fairfax breakfast menu over the weekend (I read The Age as a voluntary act of penance…), as the fill-in holiday newspaper deliverer gave us the Herald Sun two days in a row.

But I wake up this morning to find a reply to a letter published in The Age on Saturday, written by a good friend of mine. I found his letter online here, and reproduce it below:

AS A Catholic, I have been with each passing day offended by the Age’s bashing of Catholics and its priests any way it can. There is no denying that a few priests engaged in immoral and illegal behaviour, but to stigmatise all Catholics is almost unforgivable. Most of our priests are good men. Yesterday, on Good Friday, to see Spooner’s caricature of the Vatican was too much. All of this gives Good Friday a new meaning, wouldn’t you say? Please give it a break and desist.

Stewart Sharlow, Box Hill South

If Stewart had asked me for advice before sending in this letter, I would have advised him not to bother. The reply among the letters this morning was so predictable, it could have been written by a computer (programmed by the New York Times, of course):

STEWART Sharlow (Letters, 4/4) is offended by the continued reporting of abuse in his Catholic Church and thinks the attention given to it excessive. He refers to ”a few priests engaged in in immoral and illegal behaviour”, while not mentioning that this behaviour was officially sanctioned by the bishops, who did not remove those priests from their duties and call in the police.

Thousands of victims worldwide are not only ”offended” by the Church’s behaviour, but greatly distressed and damaged.

It is bad enough to be abused by an evil priest, but to then have a powerful organisation turn on you by allowing the priest to continue and be lauded as ”a man of God” is so abhorrent that I think the media will rightly pursue the matter until there is some sense of justice in this sorry saga and those involved in the cover-up are also bought to account.

Marianne Dalton, Balnarring

The key word in this reply is, of course, “powerful”. Every single media article on this subject uses it as an adjective for the Christian community to which I belong.

I don’t know about you, but I am not feeling particularly “powerful” at the moment. In fact, I am feeling fairly vulnerable. If the Catholic community were really as “powerful” as the media makes us out to be, how come we are absolutely “powerless” to defend ourselves against the slander and vitriol thrown at us on a daily basis in the public press? Who, really, is the “powerful organisation” in this confrontation?

I was flicking through my copy of the Manual of Indulgences last night, thinking: If there is a plenary indulgence for Maundy Thursday and one for the Easter Vigil, I wonder if there is one for Good Friday?

And lo and behold, there is! This afternoon’s exercise of the adoration of the cross carries a plenary indulgence, as does involvement in the Way of the Cross devotion (Nb. you can only get one plenary indulgence each day – if it’s full, it’s full – there is not such thing as “double-full”!). Check out the exact conditions here, and don’t forget the usual norms here.

I know all this stuff about indulgences must really be getting on some readers’ goat (I noted that the excellent article in Logia to which Pastor Weedon directed us in a com box on another topic listed his “revival” of indulgences as one thing about the Holy Father that might be a subject for dialogue between conservative Catholics and confessional Lutherans at some point in the future!), but really, if an indulgence is what the Church really claims they are (and of course, I believe they are), then we should be making them as well known as possible, and not hiding them away as something to be ashamed about. The long, tall and short of it all is that indulgences are an important for two reasons: Primarily because they are a way in which God dispenses his mercy and grace to sinners, and secondarily because they are an encouragement and aid for growth holiness and detachment from sin. A good thing, methinks!

So I really don’t understand why the Vatican website does not have a translation of the Enchiridion Indulgentiarum 4th Edition in every major language. It only has the Latin. And so buying the American USCCB Manual of Indulgences is the only way you will get it in English. There must be a reason for this, but it escapes me.

Well, Sentire Cum Ecclesia has been at this WordPress site now for just on a year, and in the last year, readership has returned to and finally exceeded the level of the old Blogspot days. In March 2009, we had just over 7,600 hits for the month. Last November, we had just over 7,000 visitors. But in this March just completed, we had a grand total of 8,976 visits to the blog. I realize that is pretty modest by the standards of some blogs (Cooees, for eg.), but it does mean that many of you find that this is a good place to come and talk about our faith and the things that matter most – the “First Things”, as another (and also much better read) website and journal call them.

Your prayers and support are requested and always appreciated. This blog exists for one purpose: to aid all who wish to “Think with the Church”, to the glory of God and in the service of his Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Here is a little ditty by Heinz Zimmermann that I learnt as a child, which I would like to share with you all. The tune is cheery and bouncy and may be accessed here on midi file.

It brings to mind several things at this time. First of all, the words “Be not afraid!” – the words of the Angels at the tomb, and of the Risen Jesus himself at his appearances. But also our dear belove Holy Father John Paul II who died five years ago tomorrow. He made these words his own and used them to encourage Christians all over the world.

Jesus said: “Have no fear, little flock. It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom” (Luke 12:32). There is much that we could be afraid of today. Martin Luther, when he wasn’t railing against the “Devil, the Pope and the Turk”, was always warning against “The Devil, the World and our own Sinful flesh”. We need to recognise that these three enemies are the dire enemies of the Church and will never, never let up in their battle until the Last Trumpet sounds. We need to have courage – even at the same time as we remain meek as lambs – in the face of these wolves, these “roaring lions” (as St Peter called them) that prowl around both inside and outside the Church and seek to devour us.

Now is not the time for fear! Now is not the time for timidity and nervousness! Now is not the time for retreat into the grey tones of biege! Now is the time to unfurl our colours and proudly and couragously march forward under the Cross. In these very days we are celebrating the death of our Lord – on a Friday which we call “Good”! But what appeared to be the greatest disaster for the Kingdom – the death of the King – became our Victory in his Resurrection.

So, click on the link to the midi file above, and sing your little hearts out on this little ditty. And may it put true courage into the hearts and souls of all who read this ‘ere little blog this Eastertide!

Have no fear little flock,
have no fear, little flock,
For the Father has chosen
to give you the Kingdom.
Have no fear, little flock!

Have good cheer, little flock,
have good cheer, little flock,
For the Father will keep you
in His love forever.
Have good cheer, little flock!

Praise the Lord high above,
praise the Lord high above,
For He stoops down to heal you,
uplift and restore you.
Praise the Lord high above!

Thankful hearts raise to God,
thankful hearts, raise to God,
For He stays close beside you,
in all things works with you.
Thankful hearts raise to God!