Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog

Priests battling Protestants in Florida

From The St. Peterburg Times, the story of tensions in Florida between Catholic Hispanics and various Protestant groups:

WIMAUMA - Father Demetrio Lorden walks into the garage of a concrete block house here, slips on his robe and vestments, and unpacks a gold chalice.

He tests a microphone, and as dogs howl nearby, a small group of Hispanic workers and their families launches into a discordant song of praise.

Lorden calls this his "evangelism Mass," the one he has every Monday night in houses and mobile home camps of this immigrant community.

Like other Catholic priests with Hispanic members, Lorden is trying to fend off competitors for the parishioners in his pews.

Protestant evangelists - people just as dedicated as he is, but with a quite different approach to Christianity - are aggressively recruiting on his turf. Some target workers as they labor in the fields; others approach them in their homes or at local bodegas, grocery stores.

Catholic priests like Lorden are responding with outreach and Bible studies, hoping to hold on to this large and growing population.

Read the entire story. Florida, by the way, has twice as many Protestants as Catholics.

Up to two million pro-family supporters demonstrate...

... in Spain. Perhaps even more. Teresa Polk is doing a great job of covering the story, which is challenging considering how underreported it has been, especially here in North America. Read all about it over at Polk's Blog-by-the-Sea.

You gotta love Father Pacwa!

From 1997-2000 I had the privilege of earning a Masters in Theological Studies from the University of Dallas through the Institute of Religious and Pastoral Studies. Once a month I would drive up to Portland, Oregon, to join 25 other students for a weekend of classes (18 hours total) with wonderful professors, including Dr. Mark Lowery, Dr. Marcellino D'Ambrosio, Mark Brumley, Fr. Mitch Pacwa, and many others. Fr. Pacwa was a favorite, and I was fortunate and blessed to not only have him as a teacher, but as a spiritual director, for half of those 36 months.

For those who know Fr. Pacwa through EWTN, but have never met him in person, I can say that what you see is what you get: a warm, humorous, intelligent priest who is gifted in so many ways but is one of the most grounded and humble men I've ever known. He is, as they say, a straight shooter, whose willingness to talk to anyone at anytime about anything is combined with a keen perception and gentle spirit. Fr. Pacwa may produce a lot of shows with EWTN, but there is no show with him: he is the real thing.

I say all this because I just received an e-letter from Fr. Pacwa, which I've flowed in below, and it again reminded me of how fortunate I've been to know him and to count him as a spiritual father. And Ignatius Press is very happy to be producing a number of videos with Fr. Pacwa and Ignatius Productions, including The Da Vinci Hoax video, Lost Gospels or False Gospels?, The Story of the Nativity, and a soon-to-be finished video about the Resurrection.

I've not been able to find Fr. Pacwa's New Year letter on the Ignatius Productions site, so I've reproduced it here in its entirety.

Dear Friends,

I am able to send out a Christmas letter because of help from two good friends, Abe and Mickie Grijalva. They have helped me answer mail, a good amount of which went back to the 1990's. We are now caught up and can catch you up on my past year.

Work at EWTN has gone very well. The viewers seem pleased with the presentations on Threshold of Hope and the interviews on the Live program. I will be signing a new contract with EWTN in order to continue this work. In many ways I still miss the classroom, where I could build on the students' knowledge and develop themes more fully. Still, television teaching reaches so many more people (over 140 million households worldwide) that I think it is a greater good. Also, many people stop me when I travel and let me know that they are learning a lot about their Catholic faith from these shows. That is such a wonderful gift.

Last May the EWTN administrators asked me to go to the cable industry national convention in Las Vegas. I have to admit, I do not like casinos and their subculture; whenever I walk through the gambling area, I never see anyone smiling. After all, why should they? They are sitting there giving their money away to the already very rich in hopes (slim ones at that) that they might get enough back to become rich themselves. Instead, one man in the elevator asked (rhetorically) "How am I going to tell my wife that I lost sixty thousand dollars?" The young woman standing behind me in line for the airplane bathroom simply broke down in tears. However, I started to like Las Vegas a bit more. Catching sinners got to be like shooting fish in a barrel. I had some great conversations with folks about their faith and standing before God. After all, by wearing clerics I stood out a bit, as when one guy asked for a blessing as I passed him at his slot. I told him I do not bless foolishness.

Still, the convention was a good proving ground to show that I am truly my Dad's son. Mitch Pacwa Sr. was a great used care salesman; this apple did not fall far from the tree. Doug Keck even said that he felt he was working at a used car lot as I stood in front of the EWTN display, button holing passers by, giving out rosaries, praying for individuals, hearing confessions and connecting people with our marketing staff, who really knows what to tell the folks. I just hooked them in.

My other work includes heading Ignatius Productions, the video production company I began under the Chicago Province in 2000. We hired a new man, David Wright, in addition to the other four employees. He has contributed so much, enabling Tim Brown, the VP, and Sam McDavid to produce so many more videos. Ignatius Press has engaged us to produce videos for them on the Story of the Nativity and on the Resurrection of Jesus. Human Life International uses us to make pro-life videos, in addition to my work in the Holy Land and Greece. Meanwhile, Cathy Williams and Linda King make sure the four of us guys keep in line and they get the product out to our customers and clients. We hope to expand a bit more this year with another editing machine and, hopefully, someone to edit full time.

Part of the production work entails my trips nationally and abroad. Last year I lectured around the country, coast to coast. I love getting a chance to see the folks who watch EWTN, address various conferences and parishes, and teach new topics. People have especially been interested in Islam, for which we have made a number of new CD's and DVD's. Since Pope Benedict has announced that we will celebrate a year of St. Paul, I will try to focus the coming year's teaching on him and his letters. In fact, Bishop Robert Baker of Birmingham has invited me to give a lecture series at St. Paul Cathedral on St. Paul and the Sacraments. We will make the talks available at Ignatius Productions and I am writing another book on that topic. It was providential that I led a pilgrimage to the Footsteps of St. Paul in Greece, without having known that the year of St. Paul was in the works. With the help of Jason Addington, we filmed a series on 1 and 2 Thessalonians in Greece. The trip was great and we got a lot of good footage when we were there. Jason also went with me to the Holy Land last year, and will do camera work again this Christmas trip. I plan to film more about St. Paul while we are there, in addition to a trip next June to Turkey.

One other project this year was to write and publish Go in Peace: 101 Questions on Confession, published by Ascension Press. Sean Brown helped me write this book, as he has with other texts, some of which are still in the process of being written. I love writing with him and I look forward to our new book on St. Paul and another title on Jesus in the Qur'an and the Gospels. I still choose the Jesus of the Gospels, in case you are wondering.

I had a lot of enjoyment in my work, but I also had great fun doing some hunting. I only began this sport in 2005 when a rancher, Neil and Gaylin Fisher and their family, invited me to hunt their ranch near Fredricksburg, Texas. I took them up on it and fell in love with hunting. My first year I got one white tail buck and a black buck antelope; last year I got two whitetail bucks and a doe. This year I had five days over Thanksgiving and got three bucks, a doe and another black buck. We ate venison and beef instead of turkey, which was delicious. I am doing a little hunting here in Alabama, though it is not as easy as in Texas. The extra meat, of course, went to the poor.

Neil Fisher and his two sons, Matthew and Ben, with his wife Amy, and I thought it would be good to develop a Catholic hunting society - St. Hubert's Lodge. St. Hubert is the patron saint of hunters and dogs, so we are moving ahead to develop ideas on honorable and ethical hunting, with conservationist and spiritual components. We are developing a novena for hunters and some blessings and devotions. We shall see where that goes.

God bless you all. Know that I will be praying for you when I go to the Holy Land on December 14. I will remember you at my Masses and in praying the Rosary at the holy places. Please keep me in your prayers, too.

In Christ Jesus,

Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J.

Knowing When to Hold My Peace

In a farewell post at Get Religion, Douglas LeBlanc raises some spiritually-minded issues concerning blogging.  Much of what he says could apply to journalism in general. Certainly, it applies to alternate media such as the Internet and talk radio. Thoughts?

The Obfuscation of the New Atheism

The Obfuscation of the New Atheism | Dr. Jose Maria Yulo | December 31, 2007

"No man who is in fear, or sorrow, or turmoil, is free, but whoever is rid of sorrows and fears and turmoils, that man is by the selfsame course rid also of slavery." —Epictetus

"Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back." — G. K. Chesterton

It has been the position of the current generation of atheism advocates (apologists does not seem the appropriate term), that belief in a transcendent divinity is not necessary for the development of a human system of ethics. Here, there is present an unspoken rebuttal to those who would argue that morality, as conjured in a space and time beyond transcendence, beggars most, if not all, likelihoods. As a substitute for a divinely inspired source of revelatory morality, the abovementioned advocates stress the theme of "human solidarity," the nebulous phenomena which is produced ex nihilo to promote the survival of the tribe and species. Crucial to this idea—one which bases itself on "scientific" analysis of the human condition—is the study of that condition within the landscape of human civilizations.

Read the entire piece...

Fr. Kenneth Baker's homily for Feast of the Holy Family

A Perfect Family | Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. | A Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family, Dec. 30, 2007 | From the November 2007 issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review

Feast of the Holy Family—December 30 | "A" Readings: Sir. 3:2-6, 12-14 | Col. 3:12-21 | Matt. 2:13-15, 19-23

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Title: The fourth commandment: Respect for parents; care for children

Purpose: (1) to explain that many families today, holy or not holy, are in trouble; (2) to stress the need for strong, united families with devout fathers, mothers and children.

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There is no doubt that the family today is in serious trouble, given the widespread practice of contraception, abortion and divorce. In today's liturgy the Church holds up for our admiration and imitation the most perfect family that ever existed, the Holy Family composed of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Continue reading...

The forgotten Cold War warrior

UPDATE (Dec. 29th): Dr. Kengor has also just penned a column titled, "Twenty Years Ago: A Giant Step Back from the Nuclear Precipice," about an important anniversary that few people are talking about.

From a Front Page magazine interview with Paul Kengor, co-author of The Judge (Ignatius, 2007), the biography of William P. Clark:

FP: What was Clark’s contribution to the end of the Cold War? How exactly did he serve Reagan?

Kengor: That’s covered over about 250 pages in the book, and too much to recount here. In short, he laid the foundation to undermine the Soviet empire through a bunch of NSDDs—National Security Decision Directives—that involved efforts from building up the military through a policy of “peace through strength,” to a concerted plan of economic warfare. On the latter, Clark told me about a priceless moment in 1982 when Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin whispered to Clark: “You have declared war on us, economic war.” Clark told me what he couldn’t tell Dobrynin back then, “Yes, we had.” The left might have underestimated Reagan and Clark, but the Soviets did not.

Clark also ensured that SDI was shepherded through, and not sunk pre-emptively by White House moderates. He saw to it that Reagan’s speeches like the 1982 Westminster Address and 1983 Evil Empire speech were not edited of their essence by White House moderates fearful of offending Moscow. He championed programs like the MX missile. He ran secret missions that until this book have not been revealed—like the very significant classified trip to South America in April 1983, where Clark and a few men kept the little country of Suriname from falling into the Soviet-Cuban camp, which would have been far more damaging than anyone reading this right now realizes. He became the principle liaison between Reagan and Pope John Paul II. That’s a short list.

Read the entire interview.

• The Mission | The Introduction to The Judge
• William P. Clark: The Quiet Catholic Who Changed the World | An interview with Paul Kengor
• Visit The Judge website for further information, praise, and more.

Interview with Michael O'Brien about his new novel

Hell on Earth and the Hope of Heaven | An Interview with Michael D. O'Brien on his new novel Island of the World

This interview was originally published on December 26, 2007, by LifeSite News (www.lifesitenews.com), Combermere, Ontario. It appears here with the gracious permission of LifeSite News and Michael O'Brien.

Question:  Tell us about your new novel, The Island of the World, to give readers a sense of it.

O'Brien: The Island of the World is the story of a child born in 1933 into the turbulent world of the Balkans and tracing his life into the third millennium.   The central character is Josip Lasta, the son of an impoverished school teacher in a remote village high in the mountains of the Bosnian interior. As the novel begins, World War II is underway and the entire region of Yugoslavia is torn by conflicting factions: German and Italian occupying armies, and the rebel forces that resist them—the fascist Ustashe, Serb nationalist Chetniks, and Communist Partisans. As events gather momentum, hell breaks loose, and the young and the innocent are caught in the path of great evils. Their only remaining strength is their religious faith and their families.

Q: Is this primarily a historical novel, or perhaps a political one?

O'Brien: No, it is neither, though of course history and politics play important roles in the story.

Read the entire interview...

Disbelief, help my indifference

Michael Cohren, author of C.S. Lewis: The Man Who Created Narnia and several other books, considers—in a column for National Post—the ironic fact that his faith being "profoundly encouraged by those most eager to smother it." Coren writes:

Put simply, I was helped along the road from indifference to belief by the banality of atheism. Since reaching the age of reason, I’ve had the usual old regulars thrown at me. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why doesn’t He make Himself more obvious? Why is evil committed in the name of religion? Throw in the Inquisition, the Crusades and some lies about Papal culpability during the Holocaust and you have the standard God-hating manifesto.

The more I dealt with all this, the more I realized that the very belief being attacked was absolutely and abundantly true. More than this, the reason it was under attack in the first place was precisely because it was true.

Read the entire column.

Ratzinger on the Gospel of John

On this Feast of Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist, here is an excerpt from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's book, On The Way to Jesus Christ (Ignatius, 2005):

Seeing Jesus in the Gospel of John | An Excerpt from On The Way to Jesus Christ | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

The farewell discourses of Jesus, as the Gospel of John presents them to us, hover in a singular way between time and eternity, between the present hour of the Passion and the new presence of Jesus that is already dawning, because the Passion itself is at the same time his "glorification" as well. On the one hand, the darkness of the betrayal, of the denial, of the abandonment of Jesus to the ultimate ignominy of the Cross weighs upon these discourses; in them, on the other hand, it seems that all of this has already been overcome and resolved into the glory that is to come.

Thus Jesus describes his Passion as a going away that leads to a new and fuller coming–as a state of being-on-the-way with which the disciples are already acquainted.[1] Thereupon Thomas, surprised, asks the question, "Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?" Jesus answers with a statement that has become one of the central texts of Christology: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me."

This revelation of the Lord, however, elicits a new question now-or rather, a request, which this time is made by Philip: "Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied." Again Jesus replies with a revelatory word, which leads from another perspective into the very depths of his self-consciousness, into the very depths of the Church's faith in Christ: "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:2-9). The primordial human longing to see God had taken, in the Old Testament, the form of "seeking the face of God". The disciples of Jesus are men who are seeking God's face. That is why they joined up with Jesus and followed after him. Now Philip lays this longing before the Lord and receives a surprising answer, in which the novelty of the New Testament, the new thing that is coming through Christ, shines as though in crystallized form: Yes, you can see God. Whoever sees Christ sees him.

Continue reading...