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The official commemorative book on Pope Benedict’s 2008 apostolic visit...

...will be available June 20th:

Christ Our Hope: Pope Benedict XVI's Apostolic visit to the United States

Hardcover, 145 pages.

This is the Official Commemorative book on Pope Benedict’s 2008 apostolic visit to the USA April 15 – 20. This lavishly illustrated, large-size edition, has dozens of fabulous photos of all the papal visit venues during his historic visit, with inspiring, informative commentary on the various papal events, and also includes the texts all the Pope’s addresses, homilies, and his prayer at Ground Zero.

This beautifully produced, high quality coffee-table book is a deluxe edition for all those who want to have a keepsake treasure of this powerful six day visit to the USA by Pope Benedict who won the hearts and minds of countless people with his inspiring words and gestures of love, truth, hope and compassion.

From his first stepping off the Shepherd One plane in Washington, to his White House visit and warm exchange with President Bush, the moving, festive Masses in two baseball stadiums, his inspiring address to the United Nations, his talks to U S Bishops, Catholic educators and to youth, and deeply moving visit to Ground Zero, the many memorable moments of Pope Benedict’s apostolic journey are captured in moving pictures and words in this collector’s edition.

Lavishly illustrated with dozens of inspiring photos!
Includes all the Pope's talks and homilies!
Large 8.5 x 10.5 coffee-table size

See sample images and learn more about the book.

Or, as the dissenting Judge Baxter put it...

Commenting on my post about the court ruling in California re: "same sex marriage," (May 15, 2008; #S147999), a reader kindly linked to the court documents, which can be accessed as a PDF document and as a Word document. This is some of what Judge Baxter wrote in dissenting from the majority opinion:

Only one other American state recognizes the right the majority announces today.  So far, Congress, and virtually every court to consider the issue, has rejected it.  Nothing in our Constitution, express or implicit, compels the majority’s startling conclusion that the age-old understanding of marriage — an understanding recently confirmed by an initiative law — is no longer valid.  California statutes already recognize same-sex unions and grant them all the substantive legal rights this state can bestow.  If there is to be a further sea change in the social and legal understanding of marriage itself, that evolution should occur by similar democratic means.  The majority forecloses this ordinary democratic process, and, in doing so, oversteps its authority.

The majority’s mode of analysis is particularly troubling.  The majority relies heavily on the Legislature’s adoption of progressive civil rights protections for gays and lesbians to find a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.  In effect, the majority gives the Legislature indirectly power that body does not directly possess to amend the Constitution and repeal an initiative statute.  I cannot subscribe to the majority’s reasoning, or to its result. ...

The question presented by this case is simple and stark.  It comes down to this:  Even though California’s progressive laws, recently adopted through the democratic process, have pioneered the rights of same-sex partners to enter legal unions with all the substantive benefits of opposite-sex legal unions, do those laws nonetheless violate the California Constitution because at present, in deference to long and universal tradition, by a convincing popular vote, and in accord with express national policy (see fns. 1, 2, ante), they reserve the label “marriage” for opposite-sex legal unions?   I must conclude that the answer is no.
The People, directly or through their elected representatives, have every right to adopt laws abrogating the historic understanding that civil marriage is between a man and a woman.  The rapid growth in California of statutory protections for the rights of gays and lesbians, as individuals, as parents, and as committed partners, suggests a quickening evolution of community attitudes on these issues.  Recent years have seen the development of an intense debate about same-sex marriage.  Advocates of this cause have had real success in the marketplace of ideas, gaining attention and considerable public support.  Left to its own devices, the ordinary democratic process might well produce, ere long, a consensus among most Californians that the term “marriage” should, in civil parlance, include the legal unions of same-sex partners.

But a bare majority of this court, not satisfied with the pace of democratic change, now abruptly forestalls that process and substitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the People themselves. Undeterred by the strong weight of state and federal law and authority,  the majority invents a new constitutional right, immune from the ordinary process of legislative consideration.  The majority finds that our Constitution suddenly demands no less than a permanent redefinition of marriage, regardless of the popular will.

Judicial fiat. Judicial oligarchy. Power play. It is all of that and more. With more to come, I think it is reasonable to guess.

The "pure joy" of "The Chronicles of Narnia"

There are many fine books on the life and work of C. S. Lewis, and I won't pretend that I've read even a small percentage of them (okay, a very small percentage). One of the best I've read is Narnia and Beyond: A Guide to the Fiction of C. S. Lewis (Ignatius Press, 1987, 2006), by Dr. Thomas Howard, who has written about Lewis for decades and even met him briefly back in the early 1960s, not long before Lewis died. Here is the preface to that book:

  C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia began appearing in the United States in the early 1950s. They made a stir then; but presently the stir became an insistent sound, which itself became eventually a roar, so to speak. By the time of this writing, two, or perhaps three, generations of children have been regaled by these "fairy tales" (as Lewis called them). And indeed they are fairy tales, in the best tradition of that genre. Everything is here: spells; talking animals; fauns; centaurs; unicorns (or at least a unicorn); witches; dryads; heroes; and, best of all, a lion who turns out to be the Son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea.

There is an irony in all of this, however. The thing is, what we find extolled in the Chronicles are such odd qualities as purity, humility, fidelity, valor, courtesy, domesticity, simplicity, and holiness, forsooth. This is all very well, but the point is that virtually every one of these qualities has long since been buried and forgotten in the avalanche which has swept over Western civilization in the last fifty years. The boulders and rubble in this avalanche have such names as "self-authentication", "self-actualization", "self-assertion", and "self-promotion", and with all of this comes a certain harshness, callousness, cynicism, and a thing which calls itself liberation, which is as old as mankind itself, namely the indulgence in ribald forms of public sexual license which would make Babylon itself blush.

But this is to strike an unhappy note. The Chronicles are full of pure joy. Glorious, hilarious, rhapsodic joy. To be sure, there is sorrow, and terror and wistfulness and horrible evil. But Lewis is like Dante: he knew that joy is a higher and deeper word than sorrow. He knew that joy is the Last Word. The Chronicles of Narnia are a "comedy" in the old sense of that word. It does not mean lots of laughs. Rather, it refers to a tale that ends in marriage, whatever ordeals may have gone before. Readers already versed in the Chronicles may object here that there is no marriage in Narnia. No. Not as such, of course. But that great rush at the end, when jewel the Unicorn leads them all in a great race "farther up and farther in", is akin to the glorious consummation of all things which we find in Dante, and, before that, in Christian revelation itself. It is the ingathering of all of God's people into his kingdom, the way a bride is brought into the household of her lord or, in this case, the way all of the good creatures in Narnia are swept up into Asian's country.

The interest in Narnia seems, suddenly, to have exploded in our decade. This may be due, in part, to the worldwide fascination with Tolkien's saga. And it makes sense: Lewis and Tolkien wrote about, and loved, the same world, and they read their manuscripts to each other over the years when they were working on them. We can only hope that the lovely, and even salvific, effects of their tales may keep alive in those who love these stories, something of the sheer goodness that obtains in Middle Earth and in Narnia.

• A short bio of Thomas Howard
• Thomas Howard books published by Ignatius Press
• Interviews and book excerpts
• C. S. Lewis resource page at Ignatius Insight

Will the Real Shakespeare Please Stand Up?

Will the Real Shakespeare Please Stand Up? | Joseph Pearce | Chapter One of The Quest for Shakespeare

Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides. — Cordelia (King Lear, 1.1.282)

The quest for the real William Shakespeare is akin to a detective story in which the Shakespearian biographer is cast in the role of a literary sleuth, pursuing his quarry like a latter-day Sherlock Holmes. In fact, since the object of the chase is not to elicit the confession of a crime but the confession of a creed, it could be said that Chesterton's clerical detective, Father Brown, might be better suited to the task than Conan Doyle's coldly logical Holmes. Chesterton certainly believed that the evidence pointed toward Shakespeare's Catholicism, stating that the "convergent common sense" that led to the belief that the Bard was a Catholic was "supported by the few external and political facts we know". [1] One presumes from this assertion that Chesterton was familiar with Henry Sebastian Bowden's The Religion of Shakespeare, published in 1899, in which Father Bowden assembled the considerable historical and textual evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism that had been gathered by the Shakespearian scholar Richard Simpson.

Throughout the twentieth century a good deal of solid historical detective work was done, adding significantly to the "few external and political facts" known by Simpson and Chesterton. In consequence, the claims made by Carol Curt Enos in Shakespeare and the Catholic Religion, published almost exactly a century after Bowden's volume, were more self-confidently emphatic: "When many of the extant pieces of the puzzle of Shakespeare's life are assembled, it is very difficult to deny his Catholicism." [2] Every piece of the puzzle, placed painstakingly where it belongs, brings us closer to an objectively verifiable picture. As more and more of the facts of Shakespeare's life and times emerge from the fogs of history (to switch metaphors), the more clearly are those fogs lifted and the more clearly does Shakespeare emerge from the centuries-laden gloom that has surrounded him.

Even as the solid work of historians brings the real Shakespeare to life, the vultures of literary criticism continue to pick over the bones of the corpse of their unreal Shakespearian chimera. It is for this reason that Anthony Holden, on the opening page of his biography of Shakespeare, complained that "the long-suffering son of Stratford is ... being picked apart by historicists, feminists, Marxists, new historicists, post-feminists, deconstructionists, anti-deconstructionists, post-modernists, cultural imperialists and post-colonialists". "Perhaps," Holden added, "it is time someone tried putting him back together again." [3]

Read the entire introduction...

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (aka, Denys the Areopagite)

The fifth-century theologian was the topic of Pope Benedict XVI's general audience today, as reported by the Vatican Information Service:

PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE: MEDIATION AND DIALOGUE

VATICAN CITY, 14 MAY 2008 (VIS) - In today's general audience, held in St. Peter's Square, the Holy Father resumed his series of catecheses on the Fathers of the Church, concentrating his remarks on the figure of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite whose aim, said the Pope, was "to place Greek wisdom at the service of the Gospel".

  Benedict XVI explained how, during a period marked by "harsh disputes following the Council of Chalcedon", this sixth-century author affirmed the fact that "the light of truth ... eradicates error and brings the good to shine forth. With this principle he purified Greek thought, bringing it into relation with the Gospel".

  The Pseudo-Dionysius used Greek polytheism "to show the truth of Christ and transform the polytheistic world into a cosmos created by God" in which "all creatures together reflect the truth of God".

  "Because the creature is a glorification of God, the Pseudo-Dionysius' theology becomes a theological liturgy. God is found, above all, by praising Him and not just through reflection".

  This Father of the Church created the first "great mystical theology. ... With him the word 'mystical' took on a more personal and intimate meaning: it expresses the soul's journey towards God. ... The Pseudo-Dionysius shows that at the end of the road to God is God Himself, Who comes close to us in Jesus Christ".

  "Today Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite assumes fresh relevance", said the Holy Father. "He appears as a greater mediator in the modern dialogue between Christianity and the mystical theologies of Asia, the well-known characteristic of which lies in their conviction that it cannot be said who God is, that He can be spoken of only in negative terms, ... and that only by entering this experience of 'no' can He be reached".

  Dialogue, said Benedict XVI "does not accept superficiality. It is when we enter deeply into the encounter with Christ that a vast area for dialogue opens before us. When one meets the light of truth, one realises that it is a light for everyone: disputes disappear and it becomes possible to understand one another, or at least to speak to and approach one another".

For much more about the important writings and thought of Denys the Areopagite, see the recently published book, Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the Areopagite (Ignatius, 2008), written by William Riordan, S.T.D., who is Professor of Theology at Ave Maria University. Here is more information about the book:

In his missionary journeys, St. Paul spoke in a number of cities in the Greek peninsula including Athens, renowned for its philosophical heritage. He addressed to them the message of the One, Unknown God (Acts 17:22ff). Among those present in the Areopagus (the open city center of Athens) on that day was a certain Denys (Dionysios) who eventually became a disciple of Paul.

Centuries later, a corpus of writings appeared bearing the name of the Denys the Areopagite. These texts were considered to be the writings of the first century disciple of the Apostle Paul and thus achieved almost immediate prominence, strongly influencing the lives of St. Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) and St. John Damascene (d.749) in the East and Eriugena (d. 877), St. Bede (d. 735), St. Bernard (d.1153) St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1272) Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464), St. John of the Cross (d. 1591), and many other great minds in the West.

Later historical studies of Denys’ texts, especially during the 19th century, showed conclusively that the writings are of a later date (5th century) than had generally been thought. Hence, the appending of “Pseudo-” before the name of Denys (Pseudo-Denys, Pseudo-Dionysius) became common place.

The extraordinary brilliance of the texts themselves, however, has been in no way dimmed. The late Holy Father John Paul II in his monumental encyclical Fides et Ratio warns insistently against an approach to Revelation that shuns metaphysics. The texts of Denys provide a majestic and profound metaphysical perspective. Deeply formed by the Divine Liturgy and the Sacred Scriptures, this mysterious author uses the great insights of Plato and his later disciples, expressing the deepest profundities of the faith in stunningly beautiful writings. In Denys, readers past, present, and future find a penetrating contemplative vision into the Mystery of the Trinity and its creation.

This book is a focused exposition of Denys’ theological understanding with particular attention to the illuminating metaphysical depth of his insight. Care has been taken to prepare a text that is readable for the serious laymen accompanied with footnotes to provide a more detailed background for the scholar.

Go here for more about the book, including praise from Dr. Matthew Levering, Dr. Daniel A. Keating, and Dr. Scott Hahn.

Today: Lorraine Murray on "Kresta in the Afternoon"

Lorraine Murray, author of Confessions of an Ex-Feminist, will be a guest on "Kresta in the Afternoon" today at 4:20 p.m. EST. You can listen to the show online,

• From Catholicism to Radical Feminism and Back | Lorraine V. Murray, author of Confessions of an Ex-Feminist, reflects on her journey through radical feminism and then back home to the Catholic Church.

John Hagee expresses "deep regret" for comments "hurtful" to Catholics

John Hagee has sent a letter (dated May 12, 2008) to Bill Donohue (whose name I continually misspell as "Donahue"; my apologies), which expresses his "deep regret for comments that Catholics may have found hurtful":

In my zeal to oppose anti-Semitism and bigotry in all its ugly forms, I have often emphasized the darkest chapters in the history of Catholic and Protestant relations with the Jews. In the process, I may have contributed to the mistaken impression that the anti- Jewish violence of the Crusades and the Inquisition defines the Catholic Church. It most certainly does not. Likewise, I have not sufficiently expressed my deep appreciation for the efforts of Catholics who opposed the persecution of the Jewish people. It is important to note that there were thousands of righteous Catholics - both clergy and laymen -- who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust. According to many scholars, including historian Martin Gilbert and Rabbi David Dalin (author of The Myth of Hitler's Pope), Pope Pius XII personally intervened to save Jews.

In addition, I better understand that reference to the Roman Catholic Church as the "apostate church" and the "great whore" described in the Book of Revelation is a rhetorical device long employed in anti-Catholic literature and commentary.

I hope you recognize that I have repeatedly stated that my interpretation of Revelation leads me to conclude that the "apostate church" and the "great whore" appear only during the seven years of tribulation after all true believers - Catholic and Protestant - have been taken up to heaven. Therefore, neither of these phrases can be synonymous with the Catholic Church.   

The entire letter can be read in PDF format. See this FOX News story.

Donohue responded:

“The tone of Hagee’s letter is sincere. He wants reconciliation and he has achieved it. Indeed, the Catholic League welcomes his apology. What Hagee has done takes courage and quite frankly I never expected him to demonstrate such sensitivity to our concerns. But he has done just that. Now Catholics, along with Jews, can work with Pastor Hagee in making interfaith relations stronger than ever. Whatever problems we had before are now history. This case is closed.”

While growing up in a "non-denominational" fundamentalist environment in the 1970s and '80s, I knew very well by the time I was eight or years years old that the Catholic Church was "apostate" and was either part of or was the "great whore of Babylon" described in the Book of Revelation. This was an integral part of the "Rapture" theology that informed nearly every aspect of my thinking about Jesus, the Bible, and the world. Anyone familiar with books such as Dave Hunt's A Woman Rides the Beast: The Roman Catholic Church and the Last Days (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1994), is familiar with this rhetoric, which has been around for centuries, dating back to at least the Reformation era, and which has been readily embraced by dispensationalist writers since the inception of that belief system in the 1830s.

An obvious example can be found in the popular non-fiction work of Dr. Tim LaHaye, creator and co-author of the Left Behind series. In Revelation Unveiled (Zondervan, 1999), a revised version of Revelation Illustrated and Made Simple (Zondervan, 1973, 1975), his commentary on The Apocalypse, LaHaye made his case for the belief that "Babylon the Great" of Revelation 17 is a system of false belief clearly identified with the Catholic Church. Drawing on Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons and Loraine Boettner's Roman Catholicism, LaHaye (who was baptized as an infant in the Catholic Church) condemns the "mystery Babylonian religion" of the Catholic Church, (go here and here for details) and then writes:

After reading the above quotations, you may be inclined to think me anti-Catholic, but that isn’t exactly true; I am anti-false religion. ... In some respects the religion of Rome is more dangerous than no religion because she substitutes religion for truth. Human beings would be better off with their God-given desire for truth unfulfilled that they might seek after Him. Romes false religion too often gives a false security that keep people from seeking salvation freely by faith. Rome is also dangerous because some of her doctrines are pseudo-Christian. For example, she believes properly about the personal deity of Christ but errs in adding Babylonian mysticism in many forms and salvation by works. (p 267)

There is another variation of this approach that is, however subtly, somewhat different from this approach. This variation—which may or may not (depending on the particular "prophecy expert") condemn Catholic Church as she now exists—focuses more on figuring out the Catholic Church's role in the future, when the "prophetic clock" is restarted by the Rapture. This is hinted at, for example, in a booklet titled The Coming World Church, published in 1963 (and again in 1978) by Back to the Bible, a fundamentalist organization, James DeForest Murch describes the "Coming Great Church" and renounces the ecumenical movement as apostate and inspired by Satan. He writes:

Evangelicals who are prophetically inclined are now warning us that we are witnessing the creation of an organization which is pictured in the Bible, not as the Bride of Christ, but as the adulterous woman bearing on her forehead the name, "Mystery Babylon." They see the ecumenical movement as a stage on the road which can eventually lead to the creation of an ecclesiastical body which has all the admixture of truth and error found in the Church of Rome, universal in scope, and eventually heading up the Romish abomination itself. (p 22)

In the late 1990s I had a couple of conversations with the pastor of the largest Baptist church in the state of Oregon. He had given a sermon on the "church of Thyatira", which is described in Revelation 2:18-29, and is often interpreted by fundamentalists as a description of the Catholic Church. The pastor used many of LaHaye and Company's standard anti-Catholic talking points, but his real interest was in trying to ascertain the role played by the Catholic Church during the seven years of Tribulation he believed (as most dispensationalists do) will come between the "Rapture" and the Second Coming. When I spoke to the pastor on the phone about his anti-Catholic rhetoric, he was both very polite and very unapologetic. His position, in essence, was that while he believed some Catholics are "saved," he was convinced that the unique size and influence of the Catholic Church strongly suggested that it would be, after the Rapture, the key institution of an apostate One World Religion. You simply cannot underestimate how obsessed such folks are with figuring out all of the details of their "end times" system!

That pastor's interest in the future is, from what I can tell and what his quote above suggests, similar to Hagee's stance. Which is, again, why I recently emphasized that while the issue of Hagee's offensive remarks is important, it needs to be understood in the light of his seriously flawed theological beliefs. And, just so I'm not misunderstood or misrepresented, I'm not dismissing or making light of Hagee's offensive remarks; on the contrary, I'm saying that as bothersome as they are, they aren't nearly as troubling as his entire theological system, which is shot through with notions and presuppositions that are not in keeping with basic Christian doctrines, especially his belief that Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jews, his belief in a "Rapture" event separate from the Second Coming, and his belief that Christians will not endure the final tribulation.

• For much more about all of those topics, see my book, Will Catholics Be "Left Behind"? (Ignatius, 2003).
• Pastor John Hagee: "Thank you, Pope Benedict" (April 29, 2008)
• Eschatological Fact and Fiction: Catholicism and Dispensationalism Compared | Carl E. Olson
• The Jews and the Second Coming | Roy H. Schoeman
• The End Times: The Secret Hidden From the Universe | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

Why Fantasy?

Why Fantasy? | Richard Purtill | From the Introduction to Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien

Those who enjoy reading and discussing Lewis and Tolkien often encounter an impatient, even irritated, reaction from friends or acquaintances. Why read fantasies or fairy stories? Aren't such things for children? Shouldn't grown-ups read about "real life"? (One literary critic called Tolkien's trilogy a "children's story which got out of hand".) A former student of Lewis, novelist and critic John Wain, once challenged Lewis' own praise and enjoyment of fantasy.

A writer's task, I maintained, was to lay bare the human heart, and this could not be done if he were continually taking refuge in the spinning of fanciful webs. Lewis retorted with a theory that, since the Creator had seen fit to build a universe and set it in motion, it was the duty of the human artist to create as lavishly as possible in his turn. The romancer, who invents a whole world, is worshipping God more effectively than the mere realist who analyses that which lies about him. Looking back across fourteen years, I can hardly believe that Lewis said anything so manifestly absurd as this, and perhaps I misunderstood him; but that, at any rate, is how my memory reports the incident. [1]

Here we have very neatly the whole basis of the conflict between Lewis and Tolkien on the one hand and many modern writers and critics on the other. Wain maintains, and many moderns would agree, that a writer's task is to "lay bare the human heart". Judged by this standard, practically nothing written by Tolkien and only a few things written by Lewis carry out "the writer's task". The theory attributed to Lewis, which is a recognizable caricature of the theory developed by Tolkien in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", is dismissed as "manifestly absurd". Before discussing who is more nearly right, let us first try to understand more thoroughly the theory proposed by Lewis to Wain.

Continue reading...

Protestants, patristics, and the art of biblical interpretation

Jason Byassee is an assistant editor at the Christian Century whose wife is a Methodist minister. In a review essay titled, "Reading with the Saints: The art of biblical interpretation," he writes:

Ever since Martin Luther pulled the Bible and the traditions of the church apart by playing the former off against the latter, we have had problems. The Reformed tradition described the Scriptures as clear, "perspicuous," intelligible to any reader. They meant, of course, to stand in contrast to a Roman Catholic suggestion that only ordained, Latin-reading, Mass-mumbling priests could read God's word. But if Scripture were so perspicuous, why did Calvin have to write the multivolume Institutes and a library of commentaries to tell us what it meant? And why have subsequent generations of Protestants, each insisting they were following the Bible, shattered like so many pieces of smashed glass into a bewildering variety of denominations? It's not obvious that the result is a more biblically literate population among Protestants. The Bible sits atop bestseller lists but often gathers dust on believers' shelves.

And, a bit later:

Those in Reformation-based churches have often recoiled at allegory as one of the means by which the plain sense of Scripture is distorted. This is rooted in our revolt against our Catholic forebears: let them have allegory, and pretty soon they'll find the Queen of Heaven in Revelation, or prayers to the saints in 1 Maccabees. Williams ably shows that the heartbeat of allegory for the ancient church was Christological. Allegory was a means to further the church's passionate love affair with Christ through discerning his presence on every page of Israel's Scripture. Like any interpretive practice, allegorical reading can go wrong and stand in need of reining in, sure enough. But without it, something dear to the heart of Protestants is lost: the chance to see Jesus anew, now refracted through the words not only of the New Testament, but of the Old as well. And there are so many more words in the Old! This is no individual venture, as Williams makes clear; it is an intensely ecclesial, communal one, to a point that our love for privacy is scandalized: St. Egeria writes in the 4th century that before baptism the bishop asks the neighbors of those seeking baptism whether they are indeed as good and decent as they claim!

An interesting read, to say the least.

For more on the senses of Scripture and allegorical interpretations, see the following Ignatius Insight articles:

• Approaching the Sacred Scriptures | Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch
• Origen and Allegory | Henri de Lubac  | Introduction to History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen
• Singing the Song of Songs | Blaise Armnijon, S.J. | The Introduction to The Cantata of Love

Donahue vs. Obama

Bill Donahue of the Catholic League is not impressed with Barack Obama’s Catholic National Advisory Council. On May 2nd he said:

“The best advice I can give Sen. Obama about his Catholic National Advisory Council is to dissolve it immediately. Of the 26 Catholic former or current public office holders he has listed as either National Co-Chairs (5), or as members of the National Leadership Committee (21), there is not one who agrees with the Catholic Church on all three major public policy issues: abortion, embryonic stem cell research and school vouchers.

“Indeed, on the issue of abortion, their record is disgraceful. Consider the scorecard as issued by the most radical pro-abortion organization in the nation—NARAL. Of the two National Co-Chairs who have a NARAL tally, one agrees with the extremist group 65 percent of the time and the other agrees 100 percent of the time. Of the 20 National Leadership Committee members with a NARAL score, 17 have earned a 100 percent rating. Of those who have less than a perfect score, not one is in favor of school vouchers. ...

As CNA reports, the committee members were offended—nay, outraged!—that their failure to support clear Catholic teaching was being used as evidence that they don't support clear Catholic teaching:

The 26 member advisory council, which includes two sisters and one priest, responded to Donahue’s accusation that they are “dissenters” from the Catholic Church by writing him a letter.

In their letter, the council members counter Donahue’s charge that they don’t follow Church teaching on abortion by saying, “Unlike the Catholic League, the U.S. Catholic Bishops advise careful consideration of candidates’ positions on a broad set of issues.” This type of consideration, according to the council, is bolstered by the U.S. bishops’ document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship”.

The advisors quote from paragraph 29 of the bishops’ document, where the bishops explain that Catholics cannot be against abortion and simultaneously ignore other offenses against human life.

They advisors point out that this means, “particular issues must not be misused ‘as a way of dismissing or ignoring other serious threats to human life and dignity’ such as ‘racism and other unjust discrimination, the use of the death penalty, resorting to unjust war, the use of torture, war crimes, the failure to respond to those who are suffering from hunger or a lack of health care or an unjust immigration policy’."

Read their entire response here (PDF format). Donahue responded on May 8th:

“The reason I mentioned only public officials who are part of Sen. Obama’s Catholic National Advisory Council is the same reason I chose just three public policy issues: voting tallies are available on these advisors (but not on the others) and on these three issues. If I knew more about the others, no doubt some would have made the cut.

“It is more than embarrassing—it is shocking—to read how these Catholics view abortion. The Catholic Church regards abortion, as well as embryonic stem cell research, as ‘intrinsically evil.’ But not these folks. For them, abortion is merely ‘a profound moral issue.’

“Sadly, it has been apparent for years that many who fancy themselves ‘progressive’ Catholics do not treat abortion the way they do racial discrimination. No one in his right mind says that the best way to combat racial discrimination is by changing people’s hearts and minds, not the law. Which is why we do both. But when it comes to abortion—including partial-birth abortion—the progressives settle for dialogue.

“It is so nice to know that Obama thinks abortion ‘presents a profound moral challenge.’ Is infanticide another ‘profound moral challenge’? To wit: When he was in the Illinois state senate he led the fight to deny health care to babies born alive who survived an abortion. That, my friends, is not a moral challenge—it’s a Hitlerian decision.”

• Sen. Barack Obama: "I don't know anybody who is pro-abortion." (Jan. 24, 2008)
• That's why Catholics should vote for Sen. Obama? (Feb. 15, 2008)
• Catholic reporter defends his support for Obama, stating: "bishops be damned" (Feb. 15, 2008)
• The soul of Senator Barack Obama (Feb. 28, 2008)