Sentire Cum Ecclesia

My wife recently came home from a trip to Adelaide with a complete bung of fritz! Yay! I was trying to explain this to someone today, and while looking on the internet found this recipe from the ABC’s The Cook and the Chef. If I can findte required “1 length wide sheep bung sausage casing”, I will have to give this home cooked version a go!

Ingredients
1 length wide sheep bung sausage casing
100g of salt to clean the casings
2 lemons juiced to soak the casings

75g onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 teaspoon ground coriander
¼ teaspoon dried marjoram, crumbled
¼ teaspoon ground mace
½ teaspoon mustard powder
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1 teaspoon freshly-ground white pepper
1 large egg white
1½ teaspoons sugar
15 to 20g sea salt (the correct small good ratio of salt would be 2 per cent of the meat volume which is 20g, I find this a little high but if you are after a real smallgood flavour use the 20g)
60ml cream
450g lean pork, cubed, and kept on ice
340g lean beef, cubed and kept on ice
200g pork fat, cubed and kept on ice (somewhere between 20 and 30% of fat to meat ratio depending on your taste)
String

Method
Salt down the sheep bung for a day or two in 100g of salt (this draws out impurity’s and the associated stinky smell) Rinse several times and then soak the pig casings overnight in lemon juice nd water.
You can buy a synthetic casing if this is too daunting!

Combine the onion, garlic, and spices in a food processor and blend to a smooth paste. Add the pepper, egg white, sugar, salt and combine thoroughly.

Put all the pieces of the mincer on ice or in the fridge to really cool them down then and fit together. Mince the pork, beef and pork fat through the medium blades of a meat mincer. Pass through the mincer again using the fine blades to get it as fine as possible, keeping the meat as cold as possible.
Add the seasoning puréed onion spices etc, from step one to the mincer and flush through, adding a little ice at the end to really clean it out.

Mix the mixture together and add cream, check for seasoning. If the meat has got warm, cover the bowl and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. If you want a really fine creamy texture, push through a fine drum seive. The mixture should feel a little sticky in your hands if the mincer has worked the proteins; if not, slap it lightly against the sides of a bowl until it feels slightly sticky and clings to your hands. This is necessary protein binding which will hold your fritz together and prevent it crumbling when cooked.

Attach casing to sausage maker, and feed the sausage mix through until you get the desired shape and length (be careful not to overfill). Or use a piping bag and a second person, and push the mix into the casing making sure that you have got all the air pockets out.

Tie the end of the casing using string, then take the string and loop around the other end to take the pressure off the first tie and make a loop that you can use to suspend the sausage in the water so that you don’t get a flat spot. (if you don’t understand this, check out the way fritz is tied at your butcher).

Place in a large pan of gently-simmering water and parboil at about 80C for 20-40 minutes depending upon the thickness.

Immediately take out of the simmering water and place in to a bowl of iced water. Cool completely. Slice thinly (the fritz will not appear as pink as a commercial product because of the lack of nitrite salt which is used to preserve colour and is a common additive in some smallgoods).

Serve with fresh bread and tomato relish, you can fry the slices of fritz if you want an extra dimension to the flavour.

The world feels just that little bit lopsided these days with Catholica continuing on its merry way without the Cooees Crowd to counterbalance it.

Anyway, they have run a story (as every bit as biting in its satire as anything Cooees could ever have come up with) and a comment string on the Installation of +Anthony Fisher in Parramatta last night. They seem to have taken a shine to my photography, having decided to nick (with acknowledgement – Ta!) my picture of +Anthony. They have also generously linked to my page, which has sent my ratings today through the roof. Thanks, Brian! I am returning the favour!

This story in Cathnews – about the special mass for the installation of the new National Executive of the Catholic Women’s League – highlights the great work of the CWL in Australia. I am especiall thankful for their support and promotion of Anima Education. Please pray for the League, and especially for their President Madge Fahy. She works very hard and ethusiastically for the Gospel through the work of the League. Pray that she remains in good health and that all she and her colleagues do will prosper. Also, if you are female and Catholic, find about about the League, its history and its current work. You don’t have to be retired to join!

The Sydney Morning Herald reports this morning that when Anthony Fisher was presented to Pope Benedict on Ash Wednesday a few weeks ago, the Holy Father called him ” “my friend from Australia” and told him “I have every confidence in you, my brother.” So do we!

Here is a gallery of pictures from last night’s enthronement and of St Patrick’s Cathedral. Click on the pictures for a larger view.

I wanted to get a good record of the night for the sake of Cathy and the kids who couldn’t be there, so I took lots of video too. What I didn’t realise, but should have, was that due to the design of the building, I was rather more conspicous than I thought I was. I was speaking to our IT man in Melbourne today, and he said “I saw you on the live XT3 internet coverage – couldn’t miss you – you were jumping up and down like a rabbit with your camera.” Groan… I hope I wasn’t too distracting to the others who viewed last night’s events on the live stream. I was in fact seated behind the Knights and Dames of Malta. They were seated on the last and highest row of seats on the south side, so I was seated behind them on a row of seats about 10 inches lower than they were. To see anything, you had to stand up, but when you did, that put you head and shoulders above them. Thus was produced the “rabbit” effect. Really very awkward and embarrassing.

Well, the best news is the latest news, and before anyone else in the blogosphere gets in, I can report to you that Bishop Anthony Fisher OP was well and truly installed and plugged in to the Diocese of Parramatta this evening. And the best thing about the ceromony (other than the Real Presence our Lord and Saviour under the appearance of bread and wine, of course) was the music! I had a copy of the installation service hot of the press during the week, because it was prepared by our own Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Communications team (a sterling production in itself, and I am sure the mass book will become a collectors item).

The mass opened with the singing of St Patrick’s Breastplate IN FULL eight verses while the priests entered. Bach’s Kyrie Gott Vater in Ewigkeit on the organ, and then Gregorian chant by the Schola for the Solemn Reception of the new bishop and the Congregation responding with “Ecce Sacerdos Magnus”. The bishop and metropolitan (+Anthony and +George respectively) came into the Church during the singing of “In faith and hope and love”. The Gloria and the Agnus Dei were from Mozart’s Mass in C Major, the psalm was by Roger Heagney, a Taize response to the prayers of the faithful, a new piece by Flor Peeters on Psalm 100 for the offertory, the Sanctus in Latin from Mass XVIII, Gregorian communion chant, “Sing my tonue” and “Let all mortal flesh keep silence” for communion, the Te Deum in English chanted responsively between the congregation and the choir, ending with the Ave Regina Caelorum and Now Thank we all our God. Wonderful. My friend Peter, with whom I am staying, commented: “They sang like Lutherans!” One piece that had me giggling (my sense of the ridiculous always lets me down on these solemn occasions) was the singing by the choir before the Solemn Entrance of the setting of Psalm 23 which features as the theme song for the Vicar of Dibley… A sublime piece, but wrong connotations, unfortunately!

Deacon Paul OP chanted the gospel beautifully. One got a very strong impression that things were done at this mass to set an example for how things would follow later. I chatted with some choir members at supper later, and commended them on their work. They will be appreciated, I think, by the new incumbant.

One good thing that can be said for the new Parramatta Cathedral (aka St Bunnings) is that it has good acoustics, thanks to plenty of hard edges and a high roofline. Aside from that, the set up of the Cathedral – with pews in rows facing eachother “choir” style, the large central granite square altar, bishops cathedra one end under a very modern huge metal crucifix and the lectern at the other end – means that there is effectively no “sanctuary” and people enter at the beginning and mill around afterwards all around the altar. The old Cathedral – used now as a Narthex – houses the Blessed Sacrament Chapel (inside a large “easter egg”) and the baptismal font and pool. As one person said: It is an excellent example of “that” kind of layout. All in all it is not what one would call practical. And someone from the other side of the Cathedral said they spent the mass trying to work out what was on my tie (I was seated at the back of the other side facing them). In fact, it was a Calvin and Hobbes tie, which I wore largely because I thought Prof. Hadyn Ramsey, Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Notre Dame, would appreciate it. (I am saving my Phantom tie for Bishop Anthony’s 50th Birthday party on Saturday night). Just illustrates the problem of a church designed so that everyone can see everyone else.

But at least everyone got a good view of the action. And of the 30 odd bishops from around Australian and the Pacific who attended. Quite astounding, given that it was just the installation of a bishop, not his ordination. Shows the regard in which +Anthony is held by his brothers, I guess.

What else? Well, there was the obligatory welcome by the Aboriginal Elders at the beginning, which was a nice touch, but didn’t actually flow with the liturgy as such. Makes one wonder if we should (as one bishop once commented to me) feel obligated to make such an acknowledgement a part of our liturgy or not. My preference (and this is just a personal thing) is that the greetings from the elders should have been done along with the greetings from the various other groups, such as priests, religious, people and civil representatives which took place after the entrance. But each to their own.

I expect that the new Bishop’s homily will be published on the Parramatta Dioceson Website sooner or later, but for the moment, I would like to note a couple of things that +Anthony said. These installation homilies are usually the opportunity the new bishop has to thank his predecessor (+Kevin) for all their work and their contribution to the life of the Diocese, but also to set the tone for how he intends to do things in the future. In one section of the homily (and I don’t have it word for word, but this is the gist of it), Anthony said:

“We are not either a pre-Vatican II or a post-Vatican II church. We are not either a Roman church or an Australian church. We are not either a desert church or a church of the Western city. We are a Catholic Church.”

[Update: His actual words were “for we are not either a pre-Vatican II or a post-Vatican II Church; either a Roman or an Australian; either a Western Desert or a Western suburbs one; we are the Catholic Church embracing all time and space and cultures. Nicaea and Vatican II, Rome and Australia, the bush and the city.]

I took this to mean that he was not going to tolerate people trying to push a party line, but that he would be a Catholic bishop for all Catholics in Parramatta. He also told us a bit of history about the woes of the first Dominican priest in Sydney, and commented that when this Dominican first began ministry in the western region almost 200 years ago, he found that less than “one in six Catholics attended mass, and many Catholics never went to confession”. He said later in his homily: “We will not let the situation slide back to those days”. Of course, we know that in fact at this point in time, we would be lucky if one in six Catholics attended Sunday Mass, but he made is point. This is not a level he finds acceptable and he will work to raise the level of participation in the Sacraments during his time in this See.

He also noted that there had in fact been “four churches built on this site”, and each has changed and altered over the years. “This building too will evolve during the 21st Century”. And I guess that the point of that is “Let the reader understand”.

He spoke of the importance of justice for every inhabitant of the diocese, referring to the first reading from Isaiah 61:1-3 which Jesus also used at the beginning of his ministry. He said that whatever their particular captivity, the Gospel had come to liberate them. Let this night be “good news” for everyone in the Parramatta diocese, Catholic or otherwise. He spoke of working closely with the civil representatives of the area, to ensure dignity for every person “from conception to natural end of life”. We remember that Anthony’s particular area of expertise is bioethics. Someone told me at the supper afterwards that Anthony has a regular Thursday morning slot on the local ABC Radio station. You can expect that his voice will continue to be heard on all manner of issues that require the Church’s attention.

Finally, +Anthony also said in his homily a heart felt thank you to his family and friends who had travelled a long distance to come to Parramatta tonight. “Thank you for loving me so well”, he said. We do love you, Anthony, and trust that your people will too.

When a blog goes “private”, surely it defeats the whole purpose of blogging? Isn’t the point of a Catholic blog to evangelise? And to defend the Truth? And doesn’t this mean it has to be public, ie. published, for all the world to see? So what’s this about needing to be part of an in crowd to read Cooees from the Cloister – formerly (and I do mean formerly) Australia’s premier Catholic blog? How are the Brian Coynes of the world to be educated without the wisdom of the Cooees crowd? How are faithful Catholics throughout the land to be amused without their wit? How are we to learn the latest gossip from the corridors of Ecclesia, from Rome to Sydney to the “Diocese of the Big Drain”?

And finally: I hope my invitation to join this new select club of Cooees readers is “in the mail”, as they say. In the mean time, I guess this means the position of “premier Australian Catholic Blog” is up for grabs?

“Of course, you know, this means war!”
– Groucho Marx, Duck Soup (1933)
– Bugs Bunny, Porky’s Hare Hunt (1938)
– Tom Roberts, National Catholic Reporter “Battle lines in the Liturgy Wars” (2010)

Well, he’s in good company anyway. HT to Christine for alerting me to this one. What to say? Well, up to the end of the sixth paragraph, I have no argument with Mr Roberts. He says:

Liturgy, the central act of worship, embodies the genetic code of the community. It holds the key to what we think about God; about Christ’s action in human history; about our relationship to the Trinity; about our relationship to each other; about the relationship between ordained and lay, between the community and the wider world. In the big picture, a lot hinges on the way we approach liturgy.

The council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy is so important, said Jesuit historian Fr. John O’Malley, because liturgy “is at the heart of what we do.” He considers the recent attempts to change the sense of the liturgical renewal from the top down a serious matter. “In 1985,” he said in a phone interview with NCR, “the synod of bishops said of those four constitutions [of the Second Vatican Council], those are the standards against which all the other documents are to be interpreted. Once you start to play with one of those, you’re playing with everything.”

The state of the liturgy debate can also be a leading indicator of which view is prevailing in the equally long and divisive battle over how to interpret Vatican II a half century after Pope John XXIII first conceived the idea of the council and 45 years after it ended.

He is absolutely correct, of course. But “playing with those four constitutions” is what certain theologians and liturgical experts have been doing since 1968. They have indeed been “playing eith everything”, and it is a very “serious matter” indeed. It is because the language of the liturgy “holds the key to what we think about God”, especially about Christology and Trinitarian theology, not to mention all those other issues, that the Holy Father has said “Enough is enough – no more mucking about.”

Roberts goes on to say:

How the changes in liturgy were arrived at in the four decades since the council is significant, because the process speaks a great deal about whose articulation of the elusive “spirit of the council” is in ascendancy.

Well, that isn’t quite correct, is it? Because only one bunch ever talks about “the spirit of the council”, while the other bunch bother to read what the Council actually said. This very article gives a perfect example of this perennial error:

When the assembled bishops of the world ratified the first document of the Second Vatican Council on Nov. 22, 1963, the groundbreaking Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the tone and direction of the rest of the council’s session was irrevocably set. It is not overstatement to say that with that document, the church as the modern world knew it was changed forever.

For even with the “reform of the reform” in motion, history has amply recorded what followed the council:

• Altars were turned so the priest faces the people;
• Communion rails disappeared;
• The Eucharist was distributed to standing, rather than kneeling, communicants;
• Latin was replaced the world over by languages spoken by the people;
• The liturgy was seen as intimately connected to what takes place outside the sanctuary walls, particularly regarding issues of social justice;
• In a deeper change, an understanding of Christ’s humanity took its place in a profound way in the Mass alongside reverence for the divinity of Christ, and there was a shift in emphasis from a vertical relationship with God to a more horizontal relationship to God in the community;
• Perhaps most important for average churchgoers, everyone became participants, and not simply passive observers, in the eucharistic celebration.

As described by the late Benedictine Fr. Godfrey Diekmann of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., one of 55 international liturgists who helped write the document, “It was a Magna Carta of the laity.”

“But sir, please sir!”

Yes, I know, Johnny. The Constitution on the Sacred liturgy says diddly squat on any of those issues. At least the first four are completely absent from the document, the next two are a question of gross misinterpretation, and the last is a misunderstanding of what the Council meant by “participation”, but we will let that pass. As for Sacrosanctum Concilium being the “magna carta of the laity”, there is this comment in Fred McManus’ foreword to the Kathleen Hughes’ biography of Deikman “A Monk’s Tale”:

As soon as the Constitution on the Liturgy was published in 1963, Godfrey (and I) regretted how few were its direct references to the total mission of the Church in its context of Christian communal holiness and worship. In a way, Sacrosanctum Concilium is a “churchy” document, perhaps inevitably so because of its explicity goal of Roman liturgical reform within the life of the Catholic people. It is necessary to hunt down the few mentions of the apostolic and social dimension of the celebration of the mysteries as these are part of the total life of the church, part of the liturgical committment of faith that is made in text and rite. (A Monk’s tale, page xii)

What he is saying is, effectively, that the Constitution on the Liturgy was not quite the radical document Tom Roberts wants you to believe it was.

Roberts pounces on a comment made by the the Fr Ratzinger, to the effect that the “fundamental innovation” of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was that “for the first time…the conferences of bishops [were assigned] their own canonical ahority”, a fact which “has more significance for the theology of the episcopacy and for the long-desired strengthening of episcopal power than anything in the Constitution on the Church itself”. So the argument now turns to one of Vatican centralisation vs. national conferences, where Roberts portrays Liturgiam Authenticam and the dissolution of ICEL as an attack upon American Sovereignty akin to 9/11. Poor Roberts doesn’t seem to realise or care that other people in the world speak English too – and that English speaking lay Catholics the world over have the right to have an accurate and beautiful translation of the liturgy of the Latin Rite.

But upsetting some old Yankee bishops isn’t the worst sin of “the liturgy wars”. Next, Roberts asks us to give some thought for the “the accumulated anger and disappointment among many liturgical experts”. My heart bleeds. Roberts also reports that Georgetown University professor John O’Malley complains that “they don’t listen to liturgists” and “the professional liturgists have been elbowed out”. Someone call the Church police…

Roberts says the “new translations being imposed on the English-speaking Catholic”. “Imposed”? Well, yes, I guess they are. Just as the rites and texts of the liturgy are always “imposed” upon the Church – or rather, given as a gift by the Church to the Church. And as for translations, are you telling me the 1970 translation wasn’t “imposed on the English-speaking Catholic”? Come on. Even some of us who can’t remember what happened then are still able to read the history books and hear from people who did experience the imposition. But Roberts wants you to believe that the 1970 translations were the result of “a widely consultative process that went on under the guidance of English-speaking bishops from around the world and liturgical and scriptural experts for more than 30 years” whereas “the reform of the reform” resulted from “a secret Vatican meeting in 1997”. Purrleeease. Between the end of the Council and the imposition of the 1970 translation was only five years – seven if you count from the date of the publication of Sacrosanctum Concilium. Even if we take the “Reform of the Reform” to have started in 1997 (and I think it was actually started a bit before that, but lets not quibble), that makes 14 years of consultation and scholarship, built upon 40 years of experience of vernacular liturgy (both its triumphs and its failures). And this time the translations were directly prepared and scrutinised by the all the Bishops Conferences of the English speaking world, as opposed to a handful of “experts” in a US dominated ivory tower committee.

Just as the article began with a half dozen paragraphs to which I can wholly assent, so they end with a paragraph to which we can all agree:

Can the factions that fought, sometimes bitterly, come together in the future in the kind of unity the liturgy begs? Benedictine Sr. Mary Collins, a liturgist and professor emeritus at The Catholic University of America in Washington, said, “I do think there needs to be a change of heart running through the whole ecclesial body.” A reality in the church today, she said, “is that we are still in the winners-and-losers game. I think unless the church can get beyond that, we can’t tell ourselves we’re responding to the call of the Holy Spirit.”

Yes, a change of heart is exactly what we need if “war” is to be averted.

You will be aware that the declaration of “heroic virtue” of Pope Pius XII has not been without controversy. What does “heroic virtue” mean, if – with all the external contraints of the time – the proposed saint in question did not live up to what we by our standards today would judge “heroic”?

Well, here is another example, the world’s first beatified lay journalist – Spaniard Manuel Lozano Garrido (1920-171). John Hooper, writing in The Guardian, raises the following point:

But journalism is also about resisting efforts to hide or distort the truth, and it is worth noting that the personally admirable Lozano Garrido spent his working life under a dictatorship – that of the late General Francisco Franco – in which journalists were expected to do both.

How comfortable the soon-to-be blessed Manuel Lozano Garrido was with that situation is hard to make out in the laudatory accounts of his life written by supporters of his cause. …Many an intellectual who backed Franco in his early days, though, became disillusioned subsequently. …Perhaps a reader can enlighten as to where exactly Lozano Garrido fitted in because, by approving his beatification, Pope Benedict is sending a message to the world about the sort of journalism that he regards as worthwhile.

None of his readers drew the logical comparison with Pius XII that immediatey occured to me, but here are some relevant comments, including Hooper’s reply:

No, the Pope is not sending a message about the type of journalism he approves. He does that — if at all — through L’Osservatore Romano.

I knew nothing of Lozano Garrido until reading this column, but his beatification has nothing to do with whether or not he supported Franco. What people fail to understand is that there is a difference between moral virtue and human virtue. For instance, some people fault Pope John Paul for the Assisi multi-religion summit he held or for kissing a copy of the Koran. The fact that he was a mystic and communed deeply with God on a daily basis did not make him perfect. The Assisi summit may have been a stupid move and kissing the Koran probably wasn’t the smartest thing he ever did, but they, in and of themselves, do not point to an unsaintly life. They simply show that, like the rest of us, he was a flawed human who could make bad temporal judgments. Yet, the fact that he was a mystic who communed deeply with God on a daily basis is the basis for the cause of his beatification and canonization.

Sanctity does not mean absolute perfection. It means that one is close to God, but not God Himself, which is why Catholics venerate, but do not worship, the saints.

Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz

And:

No he is not. The cause was presumably initiated not because of the mans journalistic oeuvre but because of his heroic virtues. Unless one can point to anything he wrote as antithetical to the faith then its not particularly relevant.

To which Hooper replies:

I’m interested to see that a couple of readers have picked me up on my contention that “Benedict is sending a message to the world about the sort of journalism that he regards as worthwhile”.
I take the point that this is a judgement on Lozano Garrido’s virtue, not his writing. But I stand by the argument that the Vatican uses beatification and canonisation as a means of communication. It is saying, in effect, “This is the sort of man or woman we regard as a model for others”, particularly when that person is the first of his or her kind to be so honoured.
If, as in this case, the proposed object of veneration is a journalist who worked within the constraints of an unpleasant, authoritarian regime that showered privileges on the Roman Catholic church, then I think his attitude to those constraints becomes a pretty important part of the message.

All in all, it raises the question of what exactly “heroic virtue” means in terms of the judgement of saintliness. It might be worth someone doing a bit of work into this subject. A doctoral project, perhaps?

I have just finished watching “The Bible told me so” on Geraldine’s Compass programme on the ABC. If you missed it, the whole program is on Youtube in a number of separate clips (see this search query here). What can I say? Only that if this program is really about how people read the bible in relation to homosexuality, then we are dealing with a veritable Sare Lee danish pastry: Subtext upon subtext upon subtext of the text itself.

It is interesting that while the program deals primarily with Evangelical and Liberal Protestants, and tangentially with Judaism, not one word (as far as I heard) is mentioned of the Catholic Church, the biggest homophobic bogey man on the block according to many commentatosrs. Why was that?

Well, for one thing this program was entirely about America (except for a couple of cameo appearances of Archbishop Desmond Tutu), and I guess that Catholicism still isn’t an authentic form of American religion. Secondly, this program was about “the bible” and “what the bible says” – or doesn’t say – about homosexuality. Catholic doctrines regarding sexual morality are a little more complex than the Protestant (or Jewish?) “because the bible tells me so”. Same conclusion, admittedly, but that conclusion stands on more legs than one or two passages in Scripture. Just as the Church’s opposition to abortion is not based upon any single biblical passage, neither is the Church’s evaluation of the morality or otherwise of homosexual activity. Thirdly, the Catholic approach to sexuality is somewhat alien to that of Protestantism and Judaism – stop to think for a moment of the role of celibacy in Catholicism, and on the other hand the sensuousness of an art form such as the baroque.

A Catholic watching “The Bible told me so” is likely find himself in a confused muddle by the end of the program, because the picture which the documentary paints is alien to the picture that most Catholics (at least, outside the States) will be familiar with. At so many points one whats to stop the tape and say “Hold on a moment!”, but the ideological merry go round keeps going round and round and faster and faster. The program starts from the simple and thoroughly understandable premise that loving parents always love and accept their children no matter what, and ends up with nothing less than a religious ideology in support of the morality of homosexual behaviour entirely comparable and equally if not more strident than the “homophobic” religious ideology which the documentary sets out to condemn.

It is not “the bible” which one hears speaking in this documentary – still less any thing of which one could say “The Word of the Lord” and express a heartfelt “Thanks be to God” in response. What one hears is the subtext of all the unhappiness currently afflicting American religion and morality, and the complete inability of the self-appointed spokesmen for God – on either side of the argument – to say anything with any authority on the subject of homosexuality and homosexual activity.

All in all, usual Compass fare. Watch out for the new series starting next week on Compass on the history of the Church. At first I thought it might be the BBC series based on the excellent History of Christianity by Dairmaid MacCulloch, but no such luck. Instead it seems like it will be the usual unhistorical, cynical anti-Christian propaganda we have come to expect from this program.

While Cathnews is reporting the story that “Organisers of The Atheist Bus Campaign in New Zealand are considering taking legal action after their ads were rejected by the national bus company”, the A2 in yesterday’s Saturday Age was running a story on Richard Dawkins “Keeping the Faith” using a picture of the walking edition of the Atheist Manifesto with just such a bus in question. (not online).

In her article, Stephanie Bunbury writes:

What is beyond doubt, at least for me, is that you would think twice about starting any kind of argument with “Darwin’s rottweiler”, a man of gimlet eye, rapier tongue adan armoury of intelectual weaponry, no matter how much evidence you thought you had.

Well, we have given a couple examples on this blog, that more than one (ie. at least two) interviewers have had no such fear, one being Hugh Hewitt and the other Andrew Denton, in which Dawkins had his “rapier tongue” rather tied…

In any case, back to that bus ad campaign. It is questionable at just about every level. Pascal, author of the idea now known simply as “Pascal’s wager”, would say: How can you be so sure that “there’s probably no God” in the first place and secondly, are you willing to bet your eternal life on it? Apart from any Christian claim (and, in my book, the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ rather weights the probability toward the opposite conclusion), from the perspective of pure logic, can one ever say that there “probably isn’t” something? Evidence can point to the fact that something “probably” exists, and clear evidence can also point to the fact that something “probably” does not exist, but lack of evidence cannot justifiably lead one to conclude that there “probaby isn’t” something. The best example of this fallacy can be seen if we were to ask a 17th Century Englishman if there is any such thing as a “black swan”. The lack of evidence – ie. no Englishman before that date had ever seen a black swan – would not have been grounds for concluding that black swans “probably” don’t exist – for even in the 17th Century, black swans really did exist here in Australia. In other words, black swans not only “probably” but “really” existed, despite the lack of any positive evidence available to 17th Century Englishmen.

On the other hand, even if this statement were true – that God “probably” does not exist – Pascal’s logic would answer that even if there is only a remote possibility that God did exist, it would be worth living “as if God existed” because of the outcome of such a belief not only for the afterlife but for this life also.

That is the guts of what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said the day before Pope John Paul II died:

The attempt, carried to the extreme, to manage human affairs disdaining God completely leads us increasingly to the edge of the abyss, to man’s ever greater isolation from reality. We must reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even one who does not succeed in finding the way of accepting God, should, nevertheless, seek to live and to direct his life “veluti si Deus daretur,” as if God existed. This is the advice Pascal gave to his friends who did not believe. In this way, no one is limited in his freedom, but all our affairs find the support and criterion of which they are in urgent need.