I am sure I don’t have anything profound to offer on the death of His Holiness John Paul II, other than my profound sorrow and sense of loss. I have known intellectually that he too, is but mortal flesh, and wouldn’t be with us forever, it still hurts to see him go.
Like so many others, John Paul II is the only Pope I’ve really “known.” I don’t remember if I even knew there was such a thing as a “Pope” until the media coverage of the death of Paul VI and the election of John Paul I.
Things John Paul II has done for me:
- That whole “downfall of communism” business is pretty big — I am forgetting what it was like to live under the threat of The Bomb™ and total annihilation at the hands of the Soviets. My children will never know, in their bones, what that feels like, praise God.
- He made me rethink the ordination of women (along with many other things) with Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. What struck me most was the humility of this letter; the gentle insistance that “Jesus did it this way, He surely had His reasons and the Church and I don’t really have the authority to go changing around things that He and the Apostles set up.” A far cry from the “Popes just get to make up whatever doctrines they want” caricature of Papal Infallibility that I had been fed. Also, a refreshing change from the ECUSA false prophets of “God is doing a new thing.”
- In his entire life as Pontiff — his travels, his preaching, his actions — he made Catholicism … thinkable. Something which would have been, well, unthinkable in my teens (and still is, to most of my family).
God bless you and keep you, Holy Father. Rest well after your labors. And keep praying for us.
I haven’t stayed away from reading blogs. (At least it’s not technically Lent today.)
Evidence is at Amy Welborn’s here and here.
(For those who don’t follow the links, they’re commentary on various Catholic scandals.)
I keep seeing numbers about the quantity of adult converts to Catholicism in America yearly, in the range of 160,000 – 200,000. I find this absolutly astonishing. At that rate, supposedly Catholic converts alone make up the 9th largest religious denomination in America. (Certainly dwarfing the poor, befuddled ECUSA.)
Either a tremendous amount of these are via marriage, or there’s some serious work of Grace going on — because it sure isn’t the winsomeness of the hierarchy, for the most part. (Exceptions made for His Holiness John Paul II and various heroic local priests, of course. And not all bishops are destined as paving-stones, although certainly the peril is great …)
From Greg Krehbiel (via Mark Shea):
Of course we still have to wonder about the 100 percent failure rate in my large sampling of Catholics at the University of Maryland. I have a lot of theories about that, but none of them have anything to do with the council of Trent. The sad fact is that we have a generation of Catholics who know Catholicism about as well as I did when I was in college. The bishops will answer for this when they visit Aslan’s country, but for now it seems that the failure is pastoral, not doctrinal.
Yeah, the hardest thing for me about trying to take Catholicism seriously has been Catholics. I managed to make it through 2/3 of my life without meeting Catholics who (a) know their faith, (b) seem excited about Jesus, and (c) want to share the Good News. Not that they were bad people (see the “(1) I never killed anyone”) but … being a Christian isn’t about just not having violated gross moral and social standards.
Of course, the danger for a good Protestant is when you do meet Catholics who are on fire for Jesus and apologetically capable, it kicks that chair out from under you …
Karen Marie Knapp, who saw much more of the Bishop’s conference than I could hear, tells me that when the motion (for episcopal penance) was reintroduced, that the bishops did agree to a day of fasting and abstinence in reparation for their faults and set the date as August 14.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re doing that much. But do the math, this is 1/270th of the nine months of penance that Abp. Flores proposed.
While I’m not a moral theologian, and I don’t know how to quantify penance, it seems to me that a single day of fasting fails to address the gravity of the bishops’ failure and complicity in this terrible scandal.
… is my basic thought in listening to the EWTN coverage. With the exception of a few glimmers of light struggling to break out here and there, it seemed depressingly political and non-spiritual. (Yes, I know, everything should be done “decently and in good order”, but one would hope that the successors to the Apostles ought to know that parliamentary procedure is a servant, not a master.)
Most inspiring moment: the bishop (Abp. Flores?) who rose up and called the entire body of bishops to remember that this is not just a matter of poorly-coordinated policies, but that this is sin that has offended and pained Jesus greatly, like unto his Passion. And called the bishops to enter a nine-month period of pennance, with holy hours and fasting and prayers, to begin to make things right.
Most depressing moment: Although this proposal received an immediate second, it was not part of the approved agenda, and was therefore tabled. Discussion then turned immediately to the utterly mundane and administrative matter of the division of once province into two.
(OK, so the justification of this is that they needed to get the provinces in administrative order so that some lay oversight board with representation by province could then be filled ASAP. Still. It shouts to the world, to anyone with ears to hear, that most of the bishops Just Don’t Get It™.)
Following a link from Doug’s blog, I find RazorMouth and the essay Victory by Infiltration or Isolation? (“Why the impulse to split is wrong and why staying the course is right”) by P. Andrew Sandlin. I would normally take this as encouragement to stay and fight the good fight within the Episcopal church regarding our current struggles with the “human sexuality” question and (even more profoundly) the wholesale abandonment of the faith in any recognizable form in exchange for Spongian/Jesus Seminar secularist mushiness.
On the other hand, I’m also reading Steve Ray’s book, Upon this Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the Early Church. And it occurs to me: Sandlin’s essay is practically a Catholic apologetic tract. I mean, if it’s a Bad Thing™ to leave and start a new church rather than stay and fight for reform, shouldn’t we apply that same logic to the efforts of Martin Luther and John Calvin?
“Philothea” nails it in an email to the Heart, Mind, and Strength blog:
[T]he wonderful thing about the crisis in the Catholic church (as opposed to the Episcopal church) is that you are simply dealing with sin while we are dealing with heresy.
How true (see Borg, Marcus and Spong, John Shelby). I’m still utterly shocked, appalled, flabbergasted, and yes, scandalized to see Jesus Seminar tripe handed out for consumption by new confirmands:
The purpose of the group is to support and encourage one another as they try to live out their Baptismal Covenant, to explore and challenge their understanding of Christian faith by reading appropriate books, to deepen and strengthen their faith that they might more effectively demonstrate their faith in daily life…
I guess I must be one of those right-brained, analytical types, no doubt caught up in hidebound tradition, because I just can’t get my head around how denying the content of the Creeds (contained within the Baptismal Covenant) can deepen one’s faith.
Recent Comments