Sentire Cum Ecclesia

I also received an email yesterday from Larissa at the XT3 network.

Hi David,

My name is Larissa, and I work for Xt3.com. I check in on your great blog every now and again, and thought I would point out some audio we’ve got in the library that you might be interested in!

The audio for the Cardinal’s debate against Dan Barker, held at Macquarie Uni, is available on Xt3 here : www.xt3.com/library/view.php?id=1855 . We also video taped it, and will hopefully put the footage up next week in our media player.

Also, I noticed on your blog that you were quite keen to catch Dr Michael Casey and Professor Gerard Bradley’s public address on religious liberty, hosted by the Ambrose Centre. While the quality of this recording is not quite as high (we could not get a direct feed), I hope you enjoy it anyway! You can find it here: www.xt3.com/library/view.php?id=1853

Kind Regards,
Larissa
Xt3 Admin

I am more than happy to use SCE to promote XT3 and these recordings – which incidentally I just downloaded yesterday but have still to listen to. Enjoy!

Rocco Palmo at Whispers in the Loggia carries this story:

Fresh off presiding and preaching at last week’s dedication of a new Nebraska seminary chapel for the traditionalist Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, the church’s “Grand Inquisitor” — California’s own Cardinal William Levada, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — went North, using a Saturday address at a dinner in Kingston to offer his most in-depth comments to date on Anglicanorum coetibus, the Vatican’s controversial new pathway for groups of disaffected Anglicans to swim the Tiber whilst maintaining significant elements of the patrimony of the English church.

Reflecting the significance of Levada’s remarks, a transcript of his text has been posted by our friends at Salt + Light….

HT to Chris for sending me this link. The transcript of the speech can be found here, and it is, as Rocco notes, “lengthy”, but well worth reading in its entirety.

The speech falls into two sections, one where he outlines the history of ARCIC I and II (and the announcement by the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury that there is to be a new round of ARCIC – ARCIC III – starting soon, on the topics of “Church as Communion, local and universal, and how in communion the local and universal Church come to discern right ethical teaching”) and then when he very frankly discusses the Catholic goal of ecumenism, in direct relation to Anglicanorum Coetibus using the musical image of a piano and a symphony orchestra.

The first section makes the obvious point that new issues have arisen since the first heady days of ecumenism causing divisions among Christians (both between Catholic and Protestant and within various communions, in particular the Anglican Communion), especially the issues of women’s ordination and homosexuality. It is certainly surprising, but true, that no bilateral dialogue between Christian communions has to date discussed either of these major current issues. Levada notes:

The only outstanding question on ministry and ordination that remained was the ordination of women, an issue that was new. I note here that the ARCIC statement on ministry was published in 1973 and only in 1976 did the first ordination of a woman priest occur in the Episcopal Church in the United States. In spite of the request of the Holy See for further elucidation on this question, the commission maintained that its mandate to examine the classical teaching on ministry and orders had been accomplished, and asked that the question of the ordination of women be remanded for consideration by its successive commission. Until now this issue has not been examined by ARCIC.

He also notes that while ARCIC II reached a fairly solid agreement that “the claim, sometimes made that homosexual relationships and married relationships are morally equivalent, and equally capable of expressing the right ordering and use of the sexual drive” was to be rejected, this agreement has been almost totally lost since the consecration of Gene Robinson by the Episcopal Church in the US.

It seems that the new ARCIC will at least address this latter issue, if not also the former.

But then Levada goes on to make some quite amazing and, as I said, frank claims about Catholic ecumenism, claims with which I find myself to be in full agreement. Here is just a slice of the entire cake:

Union with the Catholic Church is the goal of ecumenism—one could put, “we phrase it that way”. Yet the very process of working towards union works a change in churches and ecclesial communities that engage one another in dialogue, in actual instances of entering into communion do indeed transform the Catholic Church by way of enrichment. Let me add right away that when I say enrichment I am referring not to any addition of essential elements of sanctification and truth to the Catholic Church. Christ has endowed her with all the essential elements. I am referring to the addition of modes of expression of these essential elements, modes which enhance everyone’s appreciation of the inexhaustible treasures bestowed on the Church by her divine founder.

The new reality of visible unity among Christians should not thought of as the coming together of disparate elements that previously had not existed in any one community. The Second Vatican Council clearly teaches that all the elements of sanctification and truth which Christ bestowed on the Church are found in the Catholic Church. What is new then is not the acquisition of something essential which had hitherto been absent. Instead, what is new is that perennial truths and elements of holiness already found in the Catholic Church are given new focus, or a different stress by the way they are lived by various groups of the faithful who are called by Christ to come together in perfect communion with one another, enjoying the bonds of creed, code, cult and charity, in diverse ways that blend harmoniously.

Coincidentally, just on Thursday night I had the pleasure of sitting at dinner with an entire table of Anglicans, including clerics (some who would describe themselves as Anglo-Catholics) and a retired bishop. It was a case for me of “don’t mention the ordinariates”, but I need not have worried. They themselves raised it in their own discussions, and not in an entirely negatively way. One cleric commented that it was a strange business, because the announcement of the establishment of these ordinariates seemed to have sidelined the Vatican’s ecumenical council and its president, Walter Kasper. I argued that this is because Rome wanted to keep the two issues separate, that the ordinariates were not to be viewed as the Vatican’s “new way of doing ecumenism”. Levada’s speech has caused me to rethink this. Perhaps, in fact, this is the future for Catholic ecumenism. If that is so, then we really are entering a whole new phase of the ecumenical movement – at least between Catholics and Protestants.

The Atheist Convention is in full swing here in Melbourne. One of the “New Atheists” who is conspicuously absent from the show is Christopher Hitchens. Last night, celebrating my natal feast with my good Lutheran clergy friends Andrew and David, Andrew mentioned that there had been a “rapprochement” between Christopher and his brother Peter. It was the first I had heard of hit, but coincidentally there was an email waiting for me this morning from one of our commentators (HT to Paul) with a link to the full article on the matter by the younger Hitchens brother, the theist of the duo.

It is a fairly lengthy article, which goes rather deep into the history of the two brothers, and their long feud that seems (like most sibling rivalries in my experience) to long predate Peter’s conversion to Christianity when he was 30. But it is that stark difference, the one who believes that “religion poisons everything” and who “loathes and despises” all religious believers of all kinds, and the one who says that

I think it true to say that for many years I was more or less ashamed of confessing to any religious faith at all, except when I felt safe to do so. It is a strange and welcome side effect of the growing attack on Christianity in British society that I have now overcome this. Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge – for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

In the article, Peter does take the time to recount a number of issues on which he believes his brother is “astonishingly unable to grasp [the] assumptions [that] are problems for his argument.” Among these is the atheist’s :

fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.

On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher’s supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?

Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn.
I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour.

For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.

Its most powerful expression is summed up in the words ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’.

Another is the

favourite argument of the irreligious is that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion. By saying this they hope to establish that religion is of itself a cause of conflict.

This is a crude factual misunderstanding. The only general lesson that can be drawn is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power, wealth or land.

Peter and Christopher have apparently occasionally participated in public debates against one another on the relative arguments for theism and atheism, the latest of these being in April 2008. Unfortunately, I cannot find a video or audio or transcript of this on the internet (perhaps a reader can assist?). But after the last debate, Paul admits that

Normally, I love to argue in front of audiences and we had been in public debates before. …But despite one or two low blows exchanged in the heat of the moment, I do not think we did much to satisfy them. I hope not.
Somehow on that Thursday night in Grand Rapids, our old quarrels were, as far as I am concerned, finished for good. Just at the point where many might have expected –and some might have hoped – that we would rend and tear at each other, we did not.
Both of us, I suspect, recoiled from such an exhibition, which might have been amusing for others, because we were brothers –but would have been wrong, because we are brothers.

The whole article makes fascinating reading, but perhaps that final lesson is the important one. Jesus said that faith in him would divide “father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Luke 12:51-53) Peter has demonstrated that while this is the all-to-common outcome of differences in faith within family groups, this need not be so. We are told to love another, and Paul and his brother Christopher obviously do.

I don’t often comment on the sexual abuse cases. I will just make an observation about the current allegations against the Regensburg choir and Mons. Georg Ratzinger. Cathnews reports:

There have also been reports of severe beatings by administrators at two primary feeder schools for the choir, one in Etterzhausen and one in Peilenhofen. One director has been cited in several allegations as being particularly abusive, the AP report adds.

Mons Ratzinger said boys would open up to him about being mistreated in Etterzhausen, but did nothing … “Had I known with what exaggerated fierceness he was acting, I would have said something”.

“Of course, today one condemns such actions,” he is cited saying. “I do as well. At the same time, I ask the victims for pardon.”

“At the beginning I also repeatedly administered a slap in the face, but always had a bad conscience about it,” he said, adding that he was happy when corporal punishment was made illegal in 1980.

Of course, today one condemns such actions. In the 70’s and earlier one did not. I too was beaten in primary school by the teacher – with the weapon we call the “yardstick”. She had a lesser weapon we called “the ruler”. Both instruments were designed for drawing a line, and they certainly did so in more ways than one. In fact, all members of my class still remember the day she hit one student so hard on the backside that the yardstick snapped in two… I guess it is an injustice that she hasn’t been imprisoned yet to pay for her cruelty.

But then I guess you would have to imprison my parents too. They had a thing called “the Strap” and it was mighty powerful in laying down the law. My father never administered this punishment in anger. Strikes were administered in strict accordance with misdemeanours and at some duration after the actual crime. It certainly kept four unruly boys in check. Am I too conclude from this that my father did not love me?

For the record, Cathy and I do not and never have used corporal punishment on our children. Like Mons. Ratzinger, my primary school teacher, and my parents, we have all come to realise that there are other less violent ways of disciplining children. But really, are we to be surprised that an elite German School would have used corporal punishment in the era before the 1980’s enlightenment? And we have to realise too that there are some forms of violence – eg. verbal – which can be more damaging on a permanent basis than corporal punishment.

There is, of course, a very, very thick dark line to be drawn between corporal punishment administered rationally and in a limited manner, and sustained, cruel physical, sexual or verbal abuse. According to reports and allegations, there were some in the circle of the Regensburg Choir schools who stepped out of the one thing (discipline) and into another (abuse). But lets not muddy the waters in this discussion. It is vital that, in order to understand what consitutes abuse, we understand what does NOT constitute abuse.

Well, those funny fellows (and lassy) from Cooees in the Cloister have been leaving comments for moderation on my post below (“What the hell is up with Cooees?“). However, they have – not surprisingly – refused to comply with the requirements for commentator status on this blog (ie. they won’t reveal their true identities to me!). So, apart from a “boo!” from Br Momus, I will pass on this simple, but somewhat insufficient, explanation from The Warden:

Dear David,

it may interest you to know that reports of our passing are somewhat premature… We are simply observing Lent!

As for our friends at aCatholica… they couldn’t manage satire if they employed the entire Monty Python ensemble!

Happy Lent!

Yes… and pigs might fly too. If you believe that one, you’ll believe anything. Still, it would be nice if we could indeed celebrate more than one resurrection this Easter…

Yes, I know, the last person you would expect to hear this from. But here is the link to an interesting address.

Sorry, PE, you missed your chance for that “night out” with Catherine Deveny. She is one of the speakers at the “sold out” The Rise of Atheism 2010 Global Atheist Convention to be held in Melbourne 12-14 March 2010.

There was a bit of bruhahah last year about the fact that the Government gave financial support to the Parliament of the World’s Religions and not to this Athiest Convention. The reason is fairly simple, I think, and has nothing to do with the State supporting religion over secularism (as if). It is the simple fact that the Parliament was, to all extents and purposes, a “multi-cultural” event. The Atheist Convention isn’t.

Just look at the line up of speakers. There are one or two non-Anglo-Saxons. There are women (eg. Deveny) involved – mostly on one panel – but the majority of speakers are male. There are no cultural events besides comedy (and you can be sure that they won’t be laughing at themselves). No food, no dance, no ritual, no art, no song, no music. Where are the indigenous, who were so well represented at the Parliament? Where are the third world representatives?

As far as I can make out, the Government sponsored the Parliament of the World’s Religions because it was a creative event that was seen to enrich our vibrant multicultural society here in Melbourne. They didn’t see the Atheist Convention in the same light.

Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ of Eureka Street has an interesting take. He says he is about as excited about this event as he would be if Melbourne were hosting a “an international convention of Christian evangelists”. Mmm. Says a lot about where Fr Hamilton is coming from. He later clarifies in the comment string that “When I referred to Christian Evangelists I did not mean groups in denominations other than Catholic, but people who focus on ‘selling their message’ aggressively.” Okay, well, we’ll leave that well enough alone and let it speak for itself, and look at what he says about how we should engage our atheistic brethren and sistern:

The wellsprings and justification for religious faith, and for other foundational views of life, are to be found in qualities of human experience that are not susceptible to large, knockdown and narrow arguments. Faith in God and in humanity, is rooted in experiences of wonder, questioning, desire and invitation that are delicate and not easily framed in simple argument.

Powerful arguments can and should be built for faith, but the experience on which they are built needs clarification, not codification; amplification, not reduction; ruminative conversation, not assertion.

In conversation we can tease out the subtleties of our intuitions, and the ways in which we account for the beauty and the complexities of our world. We can explore why people find religious faith persuasive, and also come to see how people put together their lives and their world without it.

Now, in one respect, I think that Fr Hamilton is right: we should be engaging in conversation with the Atheists, Rationalists and Humanists. In fact, the Commission for which I work is doing just that, and have started by inviting a member of the Rationalist Society to our Interreligious Symposium on Death and Dying (Lyn Allison, who is coincidentally appearing at the Atheist Convention also).

But in another respect, I think he is dead wrong. The “wellsprings and justification for [Christian] religious faith” is NOT “to be found in qualities of human experience”. Christian “Faith in God and in humanity” is NOT “rooted in experiences of wonder, questioning, desire and invitation”. This is because the Christian faith, unlike the religious philosophies of the East (for instance) are not built upon “the subtleties of our intuitions”, but upon the eye-witness verified fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. I do not say that we cannot have a fruitful dialogue with our Atheist pals about religious experience and intuition. If you can find an Atheist who is prepared to acknowledge that such a thing exists in the first place. Its just that this is neither the “wellspring” nor the “justification” for our faith. Just as their atheism is (according to their claim) based on ration and demonstrable facts, so is our Christian faith. To forget this is already to have moved yourself into a position of checkmate.

Just arrived today: Prof. MacCulloch’s 6 part BBC series “A History of Christianity” on DVD from Amazon. The kids and I watched the first episode this evening. Maddy fell asleep, but Mia was intent on finding out, in the contest between Nestorius and Cyril, “which was the bad guy and which was the good guy?”

I know from bitter experience how difficult it is to tell the story of the history of Christianity in six one-hour sessions. You can’t do it. You have to edit all over the place in the hope of conveying more than just a list of dates and names and gives at least a true-to-life sketch for the whole 20 century history. There was never any way that MacCulloch was going to be able to include even a fraction of the material in his 1250 page masterpiece. For a start, he cuts out the “first thousand years” of his “three thousand year” history (the Greek/Roman and Jewish background) and jumps straight to the most characteristic feature of his book, the story of the eastern Church.

Too often the visual accompaniment to his text has nothing to do really with what he is talking about. Scenes of modern day Syria and Constantinople and Edessa are really not much help to visualising these 1st-3rd Century localities – not the least because the architecture is now decidely Islamic rather than Christian. But the one really good bit was the visit to the Chinese Buddhist Pagoda which was a 7th Century Christian (probably Nestorian) monastry. Pity the locals kicked up a stink about letting the cameras inside.

And ultimately the whole thing is a little short on detail. I reckon this is one case where it helps to have read the book before hand. I am looking forward to the next five episodes. Hopefully I can encourage the children to keep watching it too.

Last night, Cathy and I finally got to see Avatar.

I will have to admit from the outset two things:

1) I usually go to the movies for the entertainment and escapism it offers. So shoot me. I don’t want to see a film that rubs my nose in the dirt and says “This is your dull stupid life, get used to it.” (For this reason, I cannot imagine ever wanting to see “Precious”). But this doesn’t mean I don’t want the films I see to challenge or inspire me. I don’t mind a film that shows me how “dull and stupid” my life is, as long as it then goes on to uplift me in some way and to encourage me to exercise heroic human virtue – especially the virtue of hope.

2) I also believe that most films which fit this “inspiring and challenging” bill will, almost of necessity, have something of a “gospel” to offer. In fact, I am always on the lookout for how “redemption” takes place, for who the “Christ-figure” is. Almost without fail, there is such redemption and such a figure – even though they may not always be in accord with my own beliefs.

So, Avatar. Yes, it is an inspiring and challenging film. And yes it also has a gospel to offer. But is that “gospel” as opposed to the Gospel which we preach as some commentators make out? That’s my question. Of course, all sorts of people project all sorts of ideas and mis-ideas onto this movie (see this article in the NYTimes for an example). As a foil, I could have chosen the L’Osservatore Romano piece by Gaetano Vallini – in which he commented that it “gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature” – but I don’t have an English version of that article to hand. What I do have is the latest edition of a much more modest church newspaper, the March 2010 edition of “The Lutheran”, in which Mark Hadley writes a comment under the title “Take me away from all this…me”. His comments are so predictable, that I thought I would use them.

First of all, he tells us that this is the biggest movie since James Cameron’s Titanic. That’s for sure. No argument there. I felt much the same when I came out of the cinema. Big, long, epic, WOW! Totally gripping, etc. etc. Then, after a paragraph synopsis, he gets to business:

Avatar mirrors the pro-environment mindset that has globally energised Generation Y. …Young viewers have learnt so to loathe the behaviour of merciless multinationals that identifying with aliens over their own species was an easy ask. Furthermore, the resemblance of the story to current oil politics in Iraq and Afghanistan swells their support for a marine who would abandon his comrades to fulfil a ‘higher duty’. And what is that duty? Nature worship.

Okay, we’ll get to the “nature worship” in a minute. Just note, however, that the NY Times article I linked to above says that this film is a virtual “Rorschach test for your personal interests and anxieties”. Some see the environmental movement, some the peace movement, some say its antifeminist, some that it is pro-smoking… etc. etc again. Let’s just hold off on that for a bit, eh?
But now to the “nature worship”.

Avatar ushers neo-paganism into the new millennium. Because Pandora’s environment is interconnected at every level, the Na’vi can truthfully call the animals and the trees their brothers. The eco-theology that emerges is straight out of the 1980s’ New Age movement. This worldview connects the current generation’s environmental concerns with its growing spiritual awareness. When Sully inhabits his Na’vi body he is happier and freer than he has ever been, without having to count himself more important than anything. His final peace rests not on retaining his rights as an individual but on humbly trusting himself to the all-knowing Pandora.

What do we see in this movie? We see some sort of religion, yes. We see another bunch of guys (and a couple of gals) who laugh at even the notion of religion as primitive and superstitious. They could be US soldiers laughing at Muslims. They could be Australian mining companies laughing at the Sacred Sites of the Aborigines. BUT they could also be the secular media laughing at the simple minded Catholics. They could be. After all, we are presented with a religion and a bunch of gung-ho anti-religionists as determined as Richard Dawkins with a missile launcher to rid the simple minded of their impractical and unscientific superstitions. So, the religion presented is a nature religion. Granted there are probably a million differences between the sort of “religion” in this film and the sort of “religion” in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but there’s a lot of similarity too, isn’t there? Think of the way in which Tolkien represents the good guys as nature lovers and in tune with nature (Lady Galedriel and the elves – the “home tree” in Avatar is straight out of Tolkien – or the Ents) whereas the forces of evil are destructive of nature: the Scouring of the Shire, or what Saruman does to the forest, etc. This aversion to Avatar’s “nature religion” may be just a little more due to neo-conservative political ideology than Christian theology.

A pause here for a moment to consider the plot. There have been many criticisms of the plot weaknesses of this film. Okay, it ain’t Shakespeare. But it is a damned good story telling. It doesn’t rush things, it doesn’t push you too fast, it takes you with it up to the very end. It is all classic story telling – and I didn’t find as many plot holes in the story as I was made to expect. It is also very simplistic – granted. The Company guys are about as one dimensional as you can get. And yes, the Na’vi are all perfect in every way (though not quite in the Mary Poppins sense). But as one of my friends says, look at it as a comic book movie like Batman or – better still – the Phantom!, and you are on the right track. It isn’t meant to be complicated. The best stories never are.
Okay, back to Mark’s article:

However, I believe that modern audiences also crave Jake’s transcendence for a wholly new reason. In another sphere of life we have all become aware of the self-loathing that advertising has encouraged in first the female and now the male mind. Films like Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas have encouraged audiences to mentally switch sides; Avatar encourages them to reject their bodies altogether. Its humans are sweaty, scarred and, in Jake’s case, shattered. The Na’vi are nine-foot supermodels with Olympian agility. Of course Cameron would be unlikely to create hideous exteriors for characters he wants us to identify with. Yet Avatar may have unwittingly tapped into the profound discomfort many of us feel within our bodies.

Well, there could be something here. There is a certain Cartesian division between mind and body, most evident in the attempted and then successful scenes in which the “person” of the human is attempted to be permanently transferred from the human body to the Na’vi body. And yet, have there not been times when we have preached exactly what Jake is looking for? Have you never heard this text used at a funeral?

“But those who wait on the Lord
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.”

Yes, Jake’s body is shattered, and he longs for…oh, what’s the word for it?…RESURRECTION! You see, the Na’vi avatar bodies are not completely discontinuous with their human bodies. They are made from the same DNA, they even look recognisably the same. There is continuity here. You could watch the movie and see the whole of Pandora as a kind of picture of Paradise. That is, after all, what Cameron wants us to think, isn’t it? Isn’t the lure of the movie the idea that we could indeed one day inhabit such an existence? Where our God will be all in all, and where “the leaves of the Tree of Life will be for the healing of the nations”? Where we will share fully in the divine nature? Where we will not be disembodied spirits, but will inhabit bodies of the new creation, bodies that are-and-are-not-yet these very bodies we inhabit now? When we see Jake kneeling and “talking to a tree” in his prayer scene, can we not recognise our own stumbling prayers and hopes? I think we can, if we don’t immediately write this all off as “new age nature worship”.

As for Dances with Wolves, yes, I know that a lot of people have made the comparison. A less common comparison (because it doesn’t have the “nature worship”) is District 9 – with which this film has a lot in common. But why has no one compared it to the 1986 Roland Joffe movie, “The Mission”? [HT to my wife Cathy for making this connection.] The plot is very similar and is actually more or less historical. The natives are the South American Indians in the jungle, the “unobtanium” is gold, the Company are the Spaniards, and (lo and behold!) the “religion” is the Catholic religion and the hero is a Catholic priest who “goes native” and joins the Indians. The final desperate ending of “The Mission” has none of the happy ending that Avatar does – but there are deep similarities between the scene of the destruction of the Home Tree and the Spaniards shooting down the Indians as the priest carries the Blessed Sacrament through their village.

Imagine, though, if you could tell viewers that their fantasy could be reality in far less than a century. That they could look forward to a new, beautiful body that would respond to, rather than resist, the world around them. That there was a way to finally do away with those things they loathed that went deeper than their skin. And that this transcendence was the gift of an all-surrounding being who could guarantee their peace for eternity. That would be great news – gospel news – wouldn’t it!

Yes, I agree, Mark. I think you are spot on in the fact that what Avatar taps into is a deep longing for Paradise, a deep longing for Resurrection, and a deep longing for God. With Jake, I almost felt the sense of disappointment when we returned to the “waking world” of the militarised and industrialised company. I wanted to be back with the Na’vi in that Paradise. This was what I had come to the movies to see and to experience. Because in my heart – as in your heart, dear reader, and in the heart of every human being – there is a longing for the New Creation, a longing to be one with the Creator, a longing for redemption, which, as Augustine said, we will always feel until we rest in God.

Well, probably more of the latter, actually. But I will say this, in his commentary on the sermon, Brian has been big-hearted enough to acknowledge that it was indeed “inspiring and thought-provoking homily”. He has also found out the link to the full video of the Installation Mass.

Brian is quite correct to see the homily as a statement of the pastoral mission of the Church today – at least in Australia (it might be hyperbole to suggest, as does, that it “has much broader application to the universal Church” – does to make the error that his experience of the Church is paradigmatic of the experience of Catholics everywhere).
He correctly and graciously acknowledges +Anthony’s virtues: he is “intellectually astute and, from all reports, well-read in the latest thinking in theology as well as in current affairs and contemporary culture”. The latter is, I believe, very important. Our bishops need to know something of the musical, “literary”, online and (I add because I think this is very important) cinematic influences on contemporary culture, and too often cut themselves off from these important sources of understanding (I saw Avatar last night, and believe that it is too easy to dismiss the mythology behind it as “anti-Christian” – more about that in a separate post).
He is also a “a youngish bishop” even though “he’s even a good fifteen years older than the median population age for his diocese”. You really can’t expect much more, Brian. As he said to the Aboriginal elders when they welcomed him, he too is “an elder”, an “elder of the Catholic Church” no less. Once “presbyter” meant the same thing, and perhaps today, in our glorification of youth, we forget that age was once seen as a notion correlated to the notion of wisdom.
But of course, he must remind us that the new bishop carries “some ‘baggage’”. Actually, he doesn’t really. Not to speak of. But Brian has to find some. So trust him to pick up the one time his judgement may have lapsed under pressure (even then, his comments in this circumstance were directed at the media itself). As for his other “baggage”, the worst that Brian can think of is that

“Young Anthony also comes with a legacy of being a John Paul II bishop. He’s been overly identified with the agendas of JPII, his successor Benedict, and their self-appointed mouthpiece in Australia, the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell.

These are only negatives because Brian sees them as negatives. Others, including your correspondent, would see this as a veritable strength.
The bulk of the rest of the article is directed at Pope Benedict’s championing of the faith of those whom he “has labelled the “simple people” and the “little people””. Be it understood, that Brian takes this to mean the Pope and his minions wish to confirm “the “little people” [in] their superstitions and magic beliefs about Jesus—the Saviour”, and that Brian is not such a “little” or “simple” person. He is, rather, one of the

vast masses in the Western world do not need to be “protected from the intellectuals” (to again borrow Benedict’s words). They are well educated themselves and they need to be reasoned with in intelligent, adult ways.

He then goes on dismiss in his usual colourful language the following anti-intellectual notions:

It is simply bullshit to believe that by reaching out to what Benedict has labelled the “simple people” and the “little people” that the re-evangelisation of Catholicism is going to be brought about. It is simply bullshit to suggest that the vast majority of people who have left have left because they have been sucked out of the Church by secularism, consumerism and the allures of affluence. Benedict’s “little people” are not the same “little people” Jesus Christ speaks about.

Who are they, then, we wonder? Not Brian, apparently. Brian dismisses not only the diagnosis of the physician, but the “program” by which the physician intends to restore the health of the patient.
I fully agree with Brian that

Being Catholic, or Christian, is a deadly serious adult game of learning how to make intelligent moral decisions when the parameters of life are often a long way from black or white. It’s about demonstrating our loyalty to our Loving Creator — “the will of our Father in heaven” as Jesus himself labels it

but he believes that what we – and, by implication, +Anthony and the bishops – are involved are

immature kindergarten games we play in this realm of existence trying to prove what ‘good little girls and boys’ we are for some kindergarten Ma’am of our imagination — or the Holy Father.

Well, the “kindergarten Ma’am” is our Holy Mother, the Church, and the Holy Father is the Vicar of Christ, so some of us judge that being “good little girls and boys” for them isn’t quite as “immature” as Brian would have us believe.
There is, if I may say so, something almost “gnostic” about Brian’s division of the Church into the “enlightened” and the “simple”. He has knowledge, we don’t. He has surpassed our “kindergarten” “superstitions and magic beliefs about Jesus—the Saviour”. He is the adult, and we are the children. He has “the light of the new knowledge our Loving Creator is constantly raining down on human civilisation through new insights obtained through the sciences and other disciplines of human enquiry, including Biblical scholarship and theology itself” – and we don’t.
Sorry, Brian, blame it on my protestant Sunday School training, but I will stick with “the old, old story” and continue to tell it to all – children and adults alike – who (before God) are always “the little ones” for whom Christ died.