May I quote someone else here? I am one of those frequently in despair with the current situation of the Church thoughout the world and in this glorious day of the Patron Madonna of Spain, Our Lady of Pilar, on which Columbus reached the New World on behalf of the Catholic Kings, the words of Cardinal Pell in the Synod are comforting:
"We should remember the situation of the Church 500 years ago just before the Reformation, a small weak community separated from the East. The enormous expansion since then and the purification of Church leadership (imperfect but substantial) were achieved primarily under grace, through the lives of celibate sisters, brothers and priests."
"They think religion -- any religion -- is a good thing not because it is true but because it fosters morality."
Which, I suppose, makes them indistinct from the utilitarians they probably despise.
Since we're quoting people, here's one from one of my from my favorite marshwiggle:
'Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important then the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the pay world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.'
from The Silver Chair
Oh come on, I have to say this since it is this particular blog:
EVERYONE KNOWS THAT KREEFT GUY IS GAY!!
J-U-S-T kidding, just kidding, just kidding.
But now I feel like I fit right in.
Proof that Kreeft is gay:
He lives in a Boston suburb.
He likes to make lame puns and rhymes all the time.
He likes The Lord of the Rings (which everyone knows was one big homoerotic semi-pornographic story).
He, despite being a former Calvinist, complains about the liturgy and we know what that means.
He has tought at Boston College for a very long time.
Can there be any doubt that this man is gay? And all you homophobes praise him to high heavens, proving O'Leary's thesis: everyone who criticizes homosexuality is really a closeted homosexual hypocrit, and everyone else is pretty much gay too. The real sexual minority are straights.
In reality, homophobia has alone led to the procreation of the human race since it has caused everyone to pretend to be straight by having children. Now that artificial methods of procreation exist, we can do away with the no longer necessary evil of homophobia and honestly enjoy our gayness. You can't fight the future.
For crying out loud! Fr. O'Leary doesn't ever show up to this thread and it still gets hijacked by the homo theme!
The guy is seriously bent, and reading his posts and brooding on his memes will bend the brooder too - one becomes like ones enemies...
Fatuousness at the Synod
The archbishop of Sydney, Australia, said that in his country, as well as in New Zealand, there is a decline in the number of priestly vocations, and confusion is evident in the proliferation of Communion services.
"My recommendations to the synod on how to deal with these 'shadows' presuppose the maintenance in the Latin Church of the ancient tradition and life-giving discipline of mandatory celibacy for the diocesan clergy as well as the religious orders," affirmed the cardinal.
"Losing this tradition now would be a serious error, which would provoke confusion in the mission areas and would not strengthen spiritual vitality in the First World," he stressed.
"It would be a departure from the practice of the Lord himself, bring significant practical disadvantages to the work of the Church, and weaken the sign value of the priesthood," the Australian cardinal continued. "It would weaken, too, the witness to loving sacrifice, and to the reality of the Last Things, and the rewards of heaven.
"We should remember the situation of the Church 500 years ago, just before the Reformation, a small weak community separated from the East. The enormous expansion since then and the purification of Church leadership, imperfect but substantial, were achieved primarily under grace, through the lives of celibate sisters, brothers and priests."
"The recent sexual scandals have not invalidated these gains," he continued.
Unnecessary substitutions
Regarding the proliferation of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, the cardinal asked the synod "to draw up a further list of suggestions and criteria to regulate the celebration of Communion services, especially on Sundays."
"'Liturgies awaiting a priest' is a better title than 'priestless liturgies,'" he said. "There is no such thing as 'lay-led liturgy,' because lay people can only lead devotional prayers and para-liturgies."
Cardinal Pell, 64, applauded the suggestion of Coadjutor Bishop Pierre-Antoine Paulo, of Port-de-Paix, Haiti, who suggested to the synod that the title "special ministers of holy Communion" be used instead of "ministers of the Eucharist."
"Communion services or Liturgies of the Word should not be substituted for Mass, when priests are available," Cardinal Pell said.
"Such unnecessary substitutions are often not motivated by a hunger for the Bread of Life, but by ignorance and confusion or even by hostility to the ministerial priesthood and the sacraments," he contended.
"To what extent are regular celebrations of Communion services, Sunday after Sunday, a genuine development or distortion, a Protestantization, which risks confusing even regular churchgoers?" the cardinal asked.
Isidro Catela, a synod spokesman, explained that none of the Latin-rite bishops who have addressed the synod have proposed changes in the discipline of clerical celibacy.
Catela clarified that the only o
Dear Spirit of Vatican II:
I just tried connecting to your blog, but all I get are error messages. Have you discontinued? Concentrating your efforts on a blog of your own might allow you to dialog more effectively, as well as present your ideas and thoughts in a format that doesn't require them to be chopped up in pieces, as does a comment section on someone else's blog. Interested readers could then go directly to your postings, and other bloggers could link to them, which is less likely when you confine yourself to commentary on the blog of another. Just a thought.
Well, so much for celebrating the sparkling prose of Peter Kreeft.
O'Leary has turned this blog into his psychic toilet.
Philip:
Three ideas. First, add Haloscan Trackbacks and either ask O'Leary to respond to your posts only on his own blog with a trackback or ban him from commenting if he won't refrain willingly. That way he could feed his obsessions without ruining your blog in the process.
Start a new blog entitled All Gay All The Time on which O'Leary would be allowed to comment while banning him from this blog.
Add another Haloscan account to this blog set up specifically for Joe while the rest of your readers could discuss the topic at issue without him.
Anonymous, it was not I who turned this particular thread into a forum for schoolboy toilet humor.
See does this give my website address.
I try again.
Anonymous, it was not I who turned this particular thread into a forum for schoolboy toilet humor.
Perhaps it was not Joseph O'Leary that did that, but indubitably it was the Spirit of Joseph O'Leary at work. 
Not so, Anonymous. I have never perpetrated schoolboy guffaws about sexuality or promoted abusive and discriminatory language directed against gays. You would more accurately say that it is the spirit of homophobia at work.
Does anyone know anything about the novel Kreeft has said he is working on?
His new revison of his book on the Bible, BTW, is great stuff.
We used Kreeft's Catholic Christianity as our RCIA textbook last year. Very readable. It's organized to mirror the official Catechism.
Tony,
Thanks for the tip! I am starting my own teaching gig again next week.
It seems that Kreeft wants to be as quotable as Lewis or Chesterton, but lacks the originality to do so. Chesterton, especially, managed to look at the world from previously unexplored angles, and the rest of us can only try to keep up. Kreeft is rehashing these thinkers for the next generation, but I doubt he will be remembered in the same way.
Hypothesis: Anonymous and Fr. O'Leary are the same person. That way, he can appear to be carrying on a conversation, when in fact all he is doing is monopolizing this, Philip Blosser's, blog.
Philip: I'm all in favor of the open exchange of ideas and all that -- it cost me a teaching position some years back -- but must one be subjected to the senseless droning of the bagpipe calling himself Fr. O'Leary?
I don't think Kreeft is trying to compete with Chesterton or Lewis in the quotability department. He himself references too many authors too frequently to be aiming in that direction. It is exuberant fans who class him in that league ("Another C.S. Lewis!"), understandabe since he mines that tradition for ideas and is a literary stylist in his own right. My guess is he is happy if he has the effect of simply getting others to read Lewis and company.
"I'm all in favor of the open exchange of ideas", says Chris, who indulges here in paranoia and refers to the reflective, argued, and unrefuted contributions of his fellow-contributor, who actually voices some ideas rather than mere pique, as "the senseless droning of a bagpipe".
I think Chris believes in the open exchange of ideas only when they are ideas he agrees with. His reaction to anything that rubs his moldy conservatism the wrong way is huffy and dismissive. I fear that Chris is a man who is unable to listen or dialogue and who is heading for an unhappy old age, bereft of insight.
I would like to add a quote from our best-known heretic priest:
"The virgin birth is not as pure and innocent a doctrine as is often imagined."
New Catholic, what I mean by the phrase you quoted can be gleaned from close study of such utterances as the following: "Your Holiness has done well to condemn the idea that another child could come from the same virginal womb of which Christ was born according to the flesh. The Lord would never have chosen to be born of a virgin if he thought she would be so little continent as to soil by the seed of a human union that place from which the body of the Savior was to be born. To say so must mean to assume the unbelief of the Jews who say he could not be born of a virgin. If one accepts the opinion of their priests that Mary seems to have had several children, one is making a great effort to destroy the truth of the faith" (Pope Siricius, 392).
You can see how the virgin birth can go hand in hand with the ideas that sex is dirty and the Jews are wicked.
Even conservative theologians like Jean Galot today urge a symbolic or metaphorical interpretation of virginitas in partu (a doctrine rejected by Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius and first thought up around the year 400). But the virginitas ante partum, in partu, and post partum go together in Papal teaching, as defined by the Lateran synod held by Martin I in 649.
If virginitas in partu can be given a spiritual and metaphorical meaning by orthodox theologians, why not virginitas ante partum and post partum as well?
Scripture calls Jesus the son of Joseph -- "son of David according to the flesh" (Rom 1.3) -- and the scene in which his mother and his brothers think he has gone insane contradict the idea that Mary knew of his messianic status. The texts in Lk 1 and Mt 1 are rather isolated; the rest of those gospels give no indication of virgin birth, rather the contrary.
The phrase 'son of Mary' in Mark and the phrase 'we were not born of prostition' in John may testify to early awareness that Jesus was, to external appearance, illegitimate, but this is far from clear. Luke and Matthew both replace 'son of Mary' with 'son of Joseph' or 'son of the carpenter'.
The many references to the brothers and sisters of Jesus in the New Testament are most naturally read in the normal way, like the reference to Mary's sister.
If Catholics want to persuade Protestant or Islamic fundamentalists to drop their cherished false doctrines, they must begin by honesty about the wobbly state of some of their own cherished doctrines. The mariological doctrines offer a clear case where such honest discussion would have a salutary effect.
"You can see how the virgin birth can go hand in hand with the ideas that sex is dirty and the Jews are wicked."
I've had personal experience with your weak reading comprehension skills, and now you're doing it with Pope Siricius. He did not say "sex is dirty and the Jews are wicked." Not even close.
Here is Cerbelaud's commentary on the text from Pope Siricius:
Besides the astonishing devalorization of the sexual act conveyed here, note the link between virginity ante and post partum, the latter reinforcing the former in a way -- and the negation of the one _and the other_ stemming from a Jewish mentality...
In short, all discussion of the triple virginity has been cut short by a double whammy: 1. How dare you mix our savior and his mother with the low, degraded world of human sexuality (the locus par excellence of original sin) and 2. So now you are casting in your lot with the Jews, are you?
As I say, the tradition of this dogma is not at all as innocent as it appears.
Cerbelaud is as bad at reading as you are. You and he (or she) are bringing your conclusions to Siricius' words and imposing them on what he wrote -- you're not reading what he wrote and then drawing your conclusions about his meaning from what he actually wrote.
Are there any Unitarian Universalist churches in Tokyo? Fr. O'Leary would probably fit right in at one of their churches. On the other hand, he likes Anglican-style liturgy, so he could join Spong and Robinson in the Episcopalian church and blend right in without too much effort. He sure isn't at home in the Catholic Church, though.
His reading of Siricius is no doubt informed by familiarity with what Latin Fathers were writing about sex at the time -- look at Jerome, who makes a song and dance about virginity (while admitting he is no virgin himself) by denouncing sexual love in no uncertain terms.
I am quite at home in the Catholic Church, thank you. My views here reflect the wider Catholic debate you seem to be unacquained with. An author like Cerbelaud, for example, would be considered very normal and middle of the road in the Catholic culture I know.
Well, certainly sexual love in marriage is far inferior to celibacy, but that doesn't mean it's dirty or unclean or sinful (though with the effects of original sin, it's probably very common that even in marriage the sex act can be an occasion for venial if not mortal sin). But Siricius was talking about, say, using the Holy of Holies as a spot for a birthday party. Birthday parties are just fine, but they're far, far inferior to the Holy Sacrifice, and you just don't have a birthday party in the Holy of Holies. In the same way, you don't take the virginal womb of the Blessed Mother and use it for something like ordinary marital sex -- it would soil and profane her womb, not because sex is dirty, but because you just don't use the sacred vessels and implements of God's Temple to prepare a birthday cake.
"My views here reflect the wider Catholic debate you seem to be unacquained with."
I'm well aware of the debate that Catholics have been having with modernists.
"An author like Cerbelaud, for example, would be considered very normal and middle of the road in the Catholic culture I know."
I'm don't know anything about Cerbelaud, but judging only from your characterisation of him, my guess would be that he propounds things incompatible with the Catholic faith. But all that to the side, the fact remains that he has misread and wholly mischaracterised Pope Siricius' words.
"Your Holiness has done well to condemn the idea that another child could come from the same virginal womb of which Christ was born according to the flesh. The Lord would never have chosen to be born of a virgin if he thought she would be SO LITTLE CONTINENT AS TO SOIL BY THE SEED OF A HUMAN UNION (recall that the reference is to legitimate marital sexual behavior)!!! that place from which the body of the Savior was to be born. To say so must mean to assume the unbelief of the Jews who say he could not be born of a virgin. If one accepts the opinion of their priests that Mary seems to have had several children, one is making a great effort to destroy the truth of the faith" (Pope Siricius, 392).
The Latin fathers of the later fourth century were far from having that reverence for the marital act that current Catholic theology prescribes. And they saw the Jews as enemies of the faith with whom would would not wish to be associated, whereas currently the Church seeks to reappropriate a Jewish understanding of Jesus (even the work of Geza Vermes has been praised by the Vatican on this score).
Just read your birthday cake analogy, which is a good defense of Siricius. But nonetheless, the protectiveness around the birth of Christ does tend to put down ordinary human processes and make Christ human only in some unordinary, docetic sense.
Apart from the historicity or the virgin birth, which as far as I can see must remain at best an open question, must we not also do a critique of our myths and symbols in view of the distorted values they may project? Tillich discussed this 50 years ago.
An interesting historical remark from Cerbelaud -- the Council of Ephesus, 431, never defined that Mary was Theotokos! Nor did it condemn Nestorianism! These are retrospective interpretations of the muddled proceedings at Ephesus, a retrospective dogmatization that began after Chalcedon, 451, which contains the word theotokos in its formula. The theotokos was presented as a dogma of Ephesus for the first time by Nicea II in 787.
The implication of all this is that "there is nothing that resembles a 'Marian dogma' before the 19th century" (p. 101), though of course the church has developed a very dense web of doctrinal affirmation concerning Mary, including the virgin birth and divine motherhood, with slow development also of the immaculate conception and bodily assumption.
Gotta thank New Catholic for sending me back to the history of Mariology. It is more interesting and surprising than I expected. Who would have thought that St. John Chrysostom, scourge of Jews and gays, would deny the perpetual virginity of Mary? Yet he does! "When the disciples fled, the women remained. Who? His mother -- it is she who is called 'the mother of James' -- and the others" (Homilies on Matthew 88.2).
Some modern exegetes do identify the Mother of James and Joset (Joseph) with the Mother of Jesus, accepting that the brothers and sisters of Jesus are the other children of Mary. However, the oddity of such a way of referring to Mary is an argument that the brothers are in fact cousins. The women at the cross and at the tomb of Jesus raise lots of enigmatic questions.
Mt refers to "many women" looking on from afar at Calvary including Mary Magdalen, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. The two Maries are at the tomb and come back on Easter morning. Mark has the two Maries (the Magdalene and the mother of James the less and Joset [sic]) and Salome, all three of whom come to the tomb on Easter morning. In Luke Jesus speaks to the women on the way to Calvary and they are mentioned again at the end of that chapter and the beginning of the next (as they go to the tomb on Easter morning), but not named. Only at 24.10 are we told that they were Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary [the mother] of James and the others with them. Many more witnesses of the empty tomb then than in the other Gospels! John has four women at Calvary -- the mother of Jesus (unnamed), her sister, Mary [the mother?] of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene -- but only one at the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene.
How many women in all?
1. Mary, mother of Jesus.
2. her sister
3. Mary Magdalene
4. Salome
5. Johanna
6. Mary of Clopos
7. The mother of the sons of Zebedee
8. Mary, mother of James and Joseph.
Could 4, 5, 6 and 7 be the same person?
Could 2 and 8 be the same person (though it would mean have two sisters with the same name)?
Could 6 and 8 be the same person?
Could 1 and 8 be the same person?
Perhaps Chrysostom's "orthodoxy" can be saved by supposing him to see Mary as the mother of James in the sense of stepmother, James being the son of Joseph by a first marriage. But he does not clarify this. The virginitas post partum may not have been very stongly held in Constantinople at that time.
Tatian's Diatessaron has "Mary" meet the risen Christ at the tomb, and readers could take the reference to be to the mother of Jesus. This may have launched the tradition not so long ago voiced by John Paul II to the effect that the first person the Risen Christ appeared to was his mother.
Oops, it's not the Diatessaron but Ephrem's commentary on it that courts the above-mentioned confusion.
St Maximilien Kolbe, 1894-1841, connected the immaculate conception with the immaculate procession of the Holy Spirit from Father and Son and declared that "the immaculate is in a certain sense the 'incarnation' of the Holy Spirit".
"The Holy Spirit is in the Immaculate, one may say, in the way the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word, is in his humanity... The Holy Spirit acts only through the Immaculate, his spouse".
Leonardo Boff goes beyond even his fellow Franciscan, Kolbe: "The Virgin Mary realizes the feminine absolutely and eschatologically because the Holy Spirit mades of her his temple in so real and true a fashion that she should be considered as hypostatically united to the third person of the Trinity".
Boff teaches that the Word divinizes the masculine, the Spirit the feminine.
Bizarre.
Well, well, we have been left with a complete Protestant, even with the "brothers of Jesus" and "mother of James" arguments! Good grief!
Curious features of Marian doctrines of recent centuries:
no biblical basis, or positive tension with biblical claims
defined by the Pope not by an ecumenical council
not prompted by the severe necessity of countering a heretical doctrine
Cerbelaud: "in a Church in which many celibate clerks have a complex, even ambiguous, relationship with their own mother (secretly dominating and officially idealized), this virgin Mother is a perfect symbolic model, at once maternal and bereft of all sexuality".
Questions that will not go away...
Sorry, New Catholic, but these supposedly "Protestant" preoccupations are alive and kicking in the RCC today, as my dip into the literature is showing me.
The book I am quoting is volume 232 of the leading theological series of French Catholicism, Cogitatio Fidei. Looking through the list I see no other volume on Mary.
"The anti-Jewish thematic, omnipresent in the Christian writings of the early centuries, seems concentrated with a particular intensity in the texts concerning Mary. ... In the Dormition of Mary of Pseudo-John.. one of the Jews seeks to touch her corpse; by a miracle, his hands remain stuck to it and he has to convert to get back the use of them... This episode is found in the other versions of the legend (see also John Damascene, Homilies on the Dormition 2.13) and even in Byzantine iconography." Jewish writers who speak appreciatively of Mary today include S. Ben-Chorin, S. Asch. Catholic exegetes Brown, Fitzmyer and Meier see the virgin birth as historically undecidable. Several Catholic writers seek a new appreciation of Mary as a Jewish woman.
Sub tuum praesidium confugimus, Sancta Dei Genetrix!
What about Jesus of Nazareth being the "Son of God"? You surely do not believe that, do you??? It was a common myth in several cultures of the Ancient World. No man can truly be a "son of God" in a strict sense, right?
If you deny the Virgi Birth you are a heretc and shoul dbe burned at the stack. As for "volume 232 of the leading theological series of French Catholicism," ...french Catholicsm... is here tuly such a thing anymore. And Volume 232... LOL.
And, actually, since I know you appreciate non-Catholic authors, may I forward a suggestion? "The Virgin Birth", by J.Gresham Machen, is a wonderful book, as fresh today as it was in the "great" age of Theological Liberalism.
In 40 years of theological rumination I have faced in an open and undefensive manner all the objections to Catholic belief that can be derived from philosophy, literature, theology, science ancient and modern.
This has clarified for me the fundamental principles of faith -- God, grace, an understanding of Christ that combines Johannine incarnational vision with the adoptionist elements in the Gospels, Paul, Acts and Hebrews.
I am happy that many aspects of the Catholic dogmatic edifice are not as solid as its defenders would wish (notably Mariology, authority, ministry, sexual ethics -- the subjects that theologians are warned against discussing). This prevents Catholics becoming arrogant and reactionary. It is the Achilles' heel of the neocaths' apologetical crusade. It makes dialogue with other Christians and other religions a necessity rather than a luxury.
All in all, I am happy with the results of my decades of mulling over theological themes. It has given me a seasoned, sturdy faith that is immunized against dogmatism and that is poised eagerly for appreciative dialogue with Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and modern literature and culture. In short, a truly Catholic faith.
Even if it's not "the" Catholic faith . . .
... I am happy with the results of my decades of mulling over theological themes. It has given me a seasoned, sturdy faith that is immunized against dogmatism and that is poised eagerly for appreciative dialogue with Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and modern literature and culture. In short, a truly Catholic faith.
Doubtless like the faith that was bequeathed to us in the Bizarre Legacy of Robert Funk (Sept. 30, 2005), according to whom Jesus was "one of the great sages of history," but not the man portrayed in a "surface reading" of the New Testament -- the kind of reading Funk ascribed to Christian tradition. Funk's profession of faith? Hear him: "I do not want my faith to be in Jesus, but faith in the really real ... in some version of whatever it was that Jesus believed ...." Something akin to what O'Leary would likely term "truly Catholic" -- in the sense in which "Catholic" means nothing specific but everything in general, embracing the contradictory propositions (oh, sorry, "encounters") concerning ultimate reality as personal and impersonal, incarnational and non-incarnational, real and non-real, ineluctably Arabic and ineluctably Hebrew, etc., etc., etc. As Mr. Potter was saying ...
I would never describe Jesus as one of the great sages of history. Equating my liberal Catholic outlook with unitarianism is a mistake.
I would never describe Jesus as one of the great sages of history.
You wouldn't? Say, in one of your classes where you had Japanese students who were unacquainted with world religions? Funny, I could imagine you saying that and not even being surprised.
If you want to disagree with me, pb, I have given you plenty of statements to discuss. No need to exercise your imagination on inventing statements I have never made and would in fact be deeply unsympathetic to.
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