Limits of Councils – “[Councils] always point to an extraordinary situation in the Church and are not to be regarded as a model for her life in general or even as the ideal content of her existence.” Ratzinger Vatican II, and the Idea of Synodality (The Catholic Thing)
A Wandering Eliot – “Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot has always been a bit of an enigma to me. An American until he was twenty-five, he thereafter thoroughly cultivated a reputation as a high-society Brit.” The Evolution of T.S. Eliot (Word on Fire)
Facing the Altar – “The subject of which direction the priest should stand while celebrating Mass has generated a great deal of attention since about the middle of the twentieth century.” Why Celebrate Mass Ad Orientem? (Catholic Answers)
Declining Oral Contraception – “In January 2023, an article by New York Post columnist Rikki Schlott surveyed a striking trend: a growing wave of young women opting out of hormonal birth control.” Feminists and Contraception (Human Life Review)
A Distancing from the Institution – “A major new study of the Catholic Church in Latin America has highlighted a decline in the number of baptisms and other sacraments.” Study: Sacraments in decline in Latin America (The Pillar)
Our Universities Are Broken – “Student and faculty reactions to Hamas’s atrocities demonstrate once and for all the fraud of elite higher education. We must reform our universities—or create new ones.” The Campus Peril to Western Civilization (City Journal)
A Therapeutic Lie – “‘Let me make myself clear: The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. And Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.” Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Hamas and the Lies Westerners Tell Ourselves (European Conservative)
A Diocese in Freefall – “Speaking to journalists in Italian Oct. 21, the Bishop of Essen said: ‘We almost no longer have seminarians. I’ve been bishop of Essen for 14 years. In these 14 years, I have buried almost 300 priests and ordained 15.’ What’s eating Germany’s Essen diocese? (The Pillar)
LGBTQ+ Issues – “Asked about LGBTQ+ individuals who feel hurt and disrespected by the catechism’s description of homosexual acts as ‘intrinsically disordered’ . . . Schönborn, . . . said the catechism has been changed before.” Author of Catechism says Pope could change language on LGBTQ+ issues (Crux)
A Great Civilization – “Byzantium was the first Christian Empire, and the Byzantines were a Christian people. Walking through the markets, you could hear ordinary citizens arguing about Christology.” Of What Is Past, or Passing (The Common Man – Substack)
Mental Health Crisis – “Dozens of states . . . sued Facebook’s and Instagram’s parent company Meta on Tuesday for alleged harm the platforms knowingly cause teens, especially girls, in a single-minded quest for profits.” Dozens of states sue Meta, alleging it actively cultivated addictive tendencies in teens (Daily News)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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As to the article about Cardinal Schonborn, I consider him (and other bishops like him), to be leading bureaucrats of the anti-Christian cult living as parasite inside the Body of Christ. Cardinal Schonborn, and all of the current hierarchs who now claim (curious, isn’t it?) they are “inspired” to contradict even the commands of Jesus and the revelation he made (by The Holy Spirit!) to his apostles, does not have the mind of Christ. Schonborn has “the mind of McCarrick.”
Such men are to be prayed for and confronted and, if they do not recant, to be openly called apostates and in all interactions and considerations, for the sake of all people, especially young people and children, they should be treated as apostates, and certainly not as faithful shepherds of The Body of Christ.
@Limits of Councils
Echiveria contrasts Ratzinger’s clarity about “councils” to the obscurity of theologian Alberigo who proposes that the council “event” itself is the definitive fact, deeper than the concluding texts, and therefore a “rupture” and “discontinuity” with the past.
What Alberigo misses altogether is that he’s late to the rodeo. Ratzinger set the tone and foundation early for the Vatican II texts when he redirected a draft Dei Verbum away from then-existing tomes and back to the gifted and historical “event” of the singular Incarnation, Jesus the Christ. The only real rupture and discontinuity with the past–and which is not to be displaced later by any pretentious theological mish-mash.
Aberigo is old news.
@ LGBTQ+ Issues
Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna is a benchmark of a tidal process away from Apostolic tradition to new modernism, a modernism with deep roots in the past. The Renaissance transition from austerity to intellectual, artistic grandeur. A turn from Christocentricity to Anthropocentricity.
Schönborn, previously a doctrinal stalwart as described by Elise Allen Crux. Schönborn, contributor to the Catechism now in apparent agreement with Trans ideology within the Church proposing change and revision of the Catechism he helped design. The turn precipitated back when he hosted a homosexual dance production on the communion rails of St Stephen’s Cathedral Vienna. Switzerland’s deathly homosexual opening celebration march of young men and women into the ominous Gotthard Base Tunnel’s gaping maw.
Suddenly the universal Synod. American economist Jeffrey Sachs, who is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences expressing admiration, envious that the UN doesn’t engage similar to the synod’s working method of listening, reflection and dialogue. For Catholicism revealed truth up for roundhouse discussion. With that, the message to the faithful: the end of doctrinal permanence.
We read: “The turn precipitated back when he hosted a homosexual dance production on the communion rails of St Stephen’s Cathedral Vienna.” Yes, this “modernism with deep roots in the past…”
Lacking both cerebral imagination and anatomical backbone, team-player Schonborn mimics weakly the Reign of Error, which in 1789 featured another dance–the nude prostitute said to have danced atop the altar in Notre Dame Cathedral as it was transitioned into a Temple of Reason.
As to A Therapeutic Lie, I think Dreher didn’t frame the topic at all. The tactic/strategy of belligerence to the Middle East with select allies like Saudi, forged around self-serving policies and visions, is driving the consequences we see.
And Israel is there mirroring it and making itself its exemplary form and chief executor. Israel does this -that is, Netanyahu does it- because it knows it thereby takes both the lead and the leadership role simultaneously. Admittedly, it suits a party in the US; yet at the same time it subserves alliance between parties and groupings with “shared interests”, which includes running experiments and pushing the enevelopes.
The account in the L. A. TIMES is from 2017.
‘ Last year in Baghdad, I asked then-U.S. Army spokesman Col. Steve Warren what the NCV was for Iraq. That is: How many innocent Iraqis was his command authorized to kill incidentally in an airstrike?
“There are numbers — we don’t put those numbers out,” he told me, “and here’s why we don’t put ‘em out: because if the enemy understand, ‘oh if I have X number of civilians around a thing,’ its gonna be harder for… right? So that’s a piece of information that we protect.”
The number, however, came out. It was first reported by Buzzfeed, and then the Associated Press, in December, when the Army issued its latest Rules of War Manual.
…..
Recently embedded in a tactical operations center to observe airstrikes, I met targeteers and commanding officers who were mostly conscientious, within the parameters of their bloody business.
But what’s on paper matters. On paper is where we read about equal justice under the law, and facts submitted to a candid world, and unalienable rights.
The math, then, is troubling — especially under a president who, unlike the men and women he leads, has endorsed the intentional, rather than incidental, killing of noncombatants.
“The other thing with terrorists,” then-candidate Donald Trump said on “Fox and Friends” in December 2015, “is that you have to take out their families.”
To do so would be a war crime. Whether or not the Trump administration has relaxed the rules of engagement, as some suspect, Airwars reported in March that we are, for the first time, causing more civilian casualties in the fight against Islamic State than our Russian counterparts. ‘
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcdonell-civilian-casualties-ncv-20170331-story.html
I’ve heard it said that the Islamist terrorists treat their own populations like hostages.