Synodal rhetoric vs Christian reality – Compare Joseph Ratzinger’s spirit in seeking to understand Creation to the recent words of Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich. The Ruinous Rhetoric of ‘Synodal Interpretation’ (The Catholic Thing)
Euthanasia in Canada – “Since MAID was legalized, euthanasia is Canada’s sixth leading cause of death. Why are so many Christians silent?” Where Are the Churches in Canada’s Euthanasia Experiment? (Plough)
Clarifying Doctrinal Errors – “After an attention-grabbing essay, Bishop Thomas Paprocki talked about heresy, Cardinal McElroy, and the obligations of bishops.” Paprocki: We’ve ‘passed beyond the point of private conversations’ (The Pillar)
Rival Camps – “As we approach Pope Francis’s ten-year anniversary next week, there’s going to be a great deal of commentary about popes.” Repeat after me: On left v. right debates over popes, ‘It just doesn’t matter!’ (Crux)
Galileo and The Inquisition – From beginning to end, the Inquisition’s actions were disciplinary, not dogmatic, although they were based on the erroneous notion that it was heretical to claim that the Earth moves. Eppur si muove: The Legend of Galileo (Public Discourse)
Lab Leak – The media’s dutiful narrative-shifting on the Covid lab-leak theory is just another reminder that today’s ‘journalists’ are Democrat Party activists who specialize in gaslighting. The Only Thing Conspiratorial About The Covid Lab-Leak Theory Was Media’s Coordinated Dismissal Of It (The Federalist)
Catholic Social Teaching – There is a lot of talk these days about an increasing interest in socialism. It is quite the conundrum if approached within the assumptions of late liberalism: why indeed would the victors in the Cold War seek to become their vanquished enemies? Capitalism Leads to Socialism (New Polity)
YouTubers and Podcasters – Bishop Robert Barron, a YouTuber, and the Rev. Mike Schmitz, a podcaster, have built substantial followings online. Their goal: to get people to attend church. Catholic leaders turn to YouTube and podcasts to reach new followers. Will it work? (Washington Post)
Pro-Life Webathon – On no topic has the press been more consistently, and persistently, biased than on abortion. The Media Won’t Stop Lying about Abortion (National Review)
Manufacturing Consent – California’s new misinformation law aims to silence dissenting medical opinions while allowing state-sponsored falsehoods to proliferate unchecked. Collapse of the COVID Truth Regime (Tablet)
Contemporary U.S. – American tendency to move around is one challenge to establishing Catholic culture. What it takes to build a Catholic culture (Aleteia)
Cry of the Heart – Study of the humanities in the United States has decreased by 17% over the past ten years. ‘Don’t give up on the liberal arts,’ Catholic Bishop argues (Campus Reform)
Forward-Thinking Bacon – Medieval philosopher Roger Bacon was said to have predicted numerous inventions hundreds of years before they were created and may have even discovered the formula for the philosopher’s stone. The Fascinating Life Of Roger Bacon, The 13th-Century ‘Wizard’ Who Helped Pioneer Modern Science (All That’s Interesting)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
@ “Galileo and the Inquisition”: In yesteryear the religious theologians declined to view the outer universe through a telescope; today in our scientific age (!) the secular illuminati prohibit mothers from viewing the inner universe through ultrasound. Eppur se muove!
Also, prior to Galileo and Bellarmine by several centuries, we have this pre-Copernican insight, already, from the 13th-century St. Thomas Aquinas:
“Reasoning is employed not as furnishing sufficient proof of a principle but as showing how the remaining effects are in harmony with an already posited principle; as in astronomy the theory of eccentrics and epicycles [the Ptolemaic universe with the sun and planets rotating around a stationary earth] is considered as established because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained; NOT however as if this proof were sufficient, since some other theory [!] might explain them” (Summa Theologica, I, 32, I, ad 2; cited in L.M. Regis, Epistemology, 1959, p. 455).
@ “Forward thinking Bacon”: The 13th-century Roger Bacon moved us toward the scientific method, but in the long run have we also been moved toward a sort of box canyon as proffered in Laudato Si?
The later 16th century Francis Bacon—also an advocate of the inductive scientific method—is criticized for saying he wanted to put nature “on the rack” to reveal her secrets for our control. Control? Today, does the controlled/progressive trajectory involve a denied similarity between political defenestration and ecological deforestation?
@ Rival Camps
“During the last 4 years of John Paul’s papacy through Benedict’s and up to the present under Francis Italy’s National statistics institute reveals there has been a steady decline in Mass attendance” (John Allen Crux).
Italy, an apparent bellwether. My search found Gallup reported 2021 that Mass attendance in the US declined during the same period. John Allen concludes, “Let us also remember, however, that if Catholic fortunes are to be revived in our time, perhaps analyzing Church life exclusively in terms of left and right isn’t necessarily the most promising use of time and energy”.
Allen, considered progressive, is also an honest broker. He doesn’t rule out analysis of Church life, rather that the trend indicates there may be other markers. What then? If it isn’t’ Church life in the sense of papal policy is there another dynamic?
Answer to that is found in what are fallen, nominal Catholics most preoccupied with. Sensuality, drugs, individualistic pursuits for happiness, name it, the media is all over the dynamics in which most are engaged. Still the question is why the departure from practice?
What appears is inferred from another cause. Not the form of religiosity Left or Right, rather the consistency and effectiveness of the message. The obvious poor performance, for those of us in the traditional grouping, innocuous sermons, innocuous Apostolic defenders of the faith, our bishops. The faithful have become unfaithful, fed up with inconsistency and false messaging. As such, the lure of sensuality too great.
Faithful, consistent leadership from top to bottom, from pope to presbyter is the sine qua non for faithful practice.
@ Synodal rhetoric vs Christian reality
Robert Royal’s critique of undergrads “Well catechized by the world”, is quite relevant to the catechesis preached to Synod and Church at large by Card Hollerich SJ. Where does the cardinal elicit his doctrine on homosexuality, morality in general if not from the world. Certainly not from scripture, nor the Magisterium.
Pitting [reference to Royal’s contrasting comparison] Ratzinger’s The Divine Project: Reflections on Creation and the Church against Hollerich’s visionary understanding of the Creation won’t do. For Hollerich that is. Jean-Claude Hollerich as his compatriot in arms Card Robert McElroy are the equivalent of Stephen King’s leading cast in Children of the Corn. Discoverers of a god that fits their predilections, He Who Walks Behind the Rows. A god well suited to sexual liceity within and without the walls of the Church. A visionary replacement of the sacrifice of the Mass with the sacrifice of our humanness.
Re #2 Euthanasia in Canada – Where Are the Churches in Canada’s Euthanasia Experiment? (Plough)
Good question but it sounds fairly accusatory. Cardinal Thomas Collins, Archbishop Emeritus of Toronto, has been outspoken (some would say relentless) in his opposition to euthanasia and support for much-needed palliative care. There are others but you won’t hear about them in the MSM, which are overwhelmingly in sync with the culture of death.
@ Cry of the Heart
We could easily discover why the Liberal Arts are vital by asking questions of passersby [as is done by Fox] about anything apart from computer tech [Bishop Barron contends in this essay that an additional cause of crisis among youth may lie in prioritizing technological progress over the liberal arts]. And the answers would mostly reveal no knowledge of history, geography, philosophy, theology, anthropology, sociology, the fine arts.
When our intellectual horizons are limited, so are our interests, so are our means of finding purposeful meaning in any circumstance. Card Newman, visionary of a future dehumanizing pragmatism addressed this in The Idea of a University. “A liberal arts education challenges you to consider not only how to solve problems but also trains you to ask which problems to solve and why, preparing you for positions of leadership and a life of service to the nation and all of humanity” (Princeton U).
We realize we’re not specks in a vast sweep of transient particles, Pythagoras’ microcosm within a macrocosm. Life is enriched with beauty in general, and specifically with the beauty of truth. We are, by our knowledge, reflective of something greater than ourselves responsible for the magnificence.