Antiquitopia

So, I have a question for any Catholic canon law specialists.  The blessing today (3/13/13) for the new pope, Francis I, included a plenary indulgence.  They explicitly stated that the plenary indulgence worked remotely through media (so if you watch the blessing on tv, hear it on the radio, watch it on the internet, it counts).  I realize that remote blessings and indulgences have occurred on television before, but with recording technology and the re-posting of the blessing on the internet, might raise some issues.   1.  Temporal issues.  The plenary indulgence is mediated through television, the internet, etc.  Is there a temporal limit to the blessing?  That is, does this mean whenever one watches the recording they receive a plenary indulgence?  If there is a temporal limit, what is it?  2.  Problem of recording and repetition.  If there is no temporal limit, or at least a generous one, an additional questio...

Barnard College's indefatigable Elizabeth Castelli has written up a thoughtful comparison of Harold Camping's and the John Jay Report's failures in the Revealer: Last week, two things did not happen. The Rapture did not take place on May 21, 2011, despite the fervent prognostications of a retired engineer-turned-Christian broadcaster and biblical numerologist. Meanwhile, the sex abuse scandal that has mired the Catholic Church in litigation and shame for nearly three decades was not resolved nor even really explained, despite the earnest efforts of the number-crunching social scientists at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice, City University of New York. The coincidence of these two non-happenings was more than a matter of the calendar. Read the rest of it here . Susan Jacoby also talks about the John Jay report's failures on the Washington Post online .

According to the London Times , the Spanish Catholic Church with the backing of the Vatican has come out completely against the celebration of Halloween. The article quotes an earlier, more lenient position taken by the Vatican as follows: The Vatican appeared previously to take a more lenient position. Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, once said: “If English and American children like to dress up as witches and devils on one night of the year, that’s not a problem. If it is just a game, there is no harm.” But the Spanish hierarchy begs to differ. Wearing skeleton suits, dressing up as vampires, witches or goblins or slapping on fake blood is not far removed from communing with the Devil, according to the country’s bishops. However, the bishops, with Vatican backing, have reserved their venom for the millions of parents who allowed their children to celebrate this “pagan” festival. Father Joan María Canals, the director of the Spanish Bishops Conference Committee o...

So there has been a lot of discussion of Pope B16's welcoming of Anglican bishops and priests who want to defect into the Catholic Church (after a re-ordination). From the Anglican side, it has been seen as "poaching" and "predatory" as discussed by the London Times . It is "poaching" more conservative Anglicans who have problems with the ordination of women and (openly) gay clergy. On the other hand, this maneuver to attract conservative Anglicans has instigated the paradoxical speculation of a possible result of "liberalizing" the Catholic clerical structure. Since the move by the Pope allows MARRIED Anglican clergy to defect to become Catholic clergy as married clergy, it will reopen or give momentum to the discussion of allowing married Catholic clergy. Married clergy are allowed by every other Christian tradition--Orthodox and Protestant--but hasn't been a part of the Latin rite in over a millennium. Will anything come of this?

The NYTimes reports that American Bishops and the Vatican take diverging approaches to President Obama. While American Bishops have been vocally adversarial (particularly on abortion rights), the Vatican has sought common ground on issues of the poor, redistribution of wealth, and so forth. These are the issues emphasized in the newest encyclical Caritas in Veritate, something which might highlight the differences between the Vatican and American Catholic leaders. July 10, 2009 U.S. Bishops and Vatican View Obama Differently By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Ever since he took office, President Obama has been given a cold reception by some Roman Catholic bishops in the United States who have repeatedly emphasized their church’s differences with him on abortion, birth control and stem cell research. But Mr. Obama is likely to receive a much warmer reception in the Vatican on Friday when he meets Pope Benedict XVI for the first time, experts on the church say. Both the pope and the president recogni...

I am usually somewhat repelled when Pope Benedict XVI makes an official statement, but I am intrigued by the new encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) recently released. In it, he basically softens anti-abortion language and calls for more socialized programs (medical, etc.) and redistribution of wealth. Someone has been reading the Gospel of Luke ! There are some responses to it here and here . Here are some snippets of comments from Thomas Reese, S.J. (the first link above): Pope Benedict's long awaited encyclical calls for a radical rethinking of economics so that it is guided not simply by profits but by "an ethics which is people-centered." "Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end," he writes in Caritas in veritate (Charity in Truth), but "once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty." .... ...

According to the NYTimes : The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition. Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming. But for the last three decades, their numbers have been declining — to 60,000 today from 180,000 in 1965. While some nuns say they are grateful that the Vatican is finally paying attention to their dwindling communities, many fear that the real motivation is to reel in American nuns who have reinterpreted their calling for the modern world. In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently and went into new lines of work: academia and other professions, social and political advocacy and grass-roots organization...

Do you believe in miracles? People in Colwich Kansas do . A boy survives a potentially fatal pole vaulting accident. In the process, the community prayed to the soul of a potentially martyred army chaplain in the Korean War, and the boy recovered. The Vatican has taken notice and is going to investigate whether or not this is, indeed, a miracle to be attributed to this chaplain, who is being investigated for sainthood. I know this is way outside of the land of antiquity, but it does raise interest (not just as a human interest story) since martyrdom, miracles, sainthood, and the intermediation of those saints is an important characteristic of early Christianity that persists today in nearly every Christian tradition (except Protestant ones).

Obama's overturning of Bush-era restrictions on stem-cell research has had an interesting religious response according to AP . The interesting aspect of it is its complexity and ambivalence. Firstly, the divide is largely between killing innocent life and the importance of alleviating suffering (all quotations from AP): The embryonic stem cell research debate is steeped with religious arguments, with some faith traditions convinced the research amounts to killing innocent life, others citing the moral imperative to alleviate suffering, and plenty of religious believers caught somewhere in between. The expected Catholic response of opposition came from Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia: Cardinal Justin Rigali, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, called Obama's move "a sad victory of politics over science and ethics." "This action is morally wrong because it encourages the destruction of innocent human l...

I recently commented on the reinstatement of a Holocaust- (and 9/11-) denying bishop by the Vatican. Now the Vatican has issued a statement that says that the reinstatement does not mean that it agrees with the bishop's views. For text and commentary, see Rebecca Lesses at Mystical Politics .

According to Newsweek , the Pope is following in Barack Obama's footsteps and is launching his own channel on YouTube. B16 is entering the digital world...a world without boundaries. It has actually proven effective for a great deal of people: politicians and religious leaders. Evangelicals love YouTube--decentralized information networks as a means to disseminate their religious views, a tool of proselytization. But, ironically, it is also a tool of control: The Vatican said it was launching the channel to broaden Benedict's audience while also giving the Holy See better control over the papal image online. Why do they need to control his image? You might think they need to do spin control on the Papal or Vatican positions and how they are taken by the rest of the world: on birth control, homosexuality, etc. But they mean this quite literally: the actual visual image of the pope: "It's undeniable that certain images are already circulating," Celli said. Wh...

The NYTimes reports that one of the largest Catholic diocese in the U.S., the one in Brooklyn, is slated to close 14 schools this coming term: January 13, 2009 Brooklyn Diocese Moves to Shut 14 Schools By PAUL VITELLO and WINNIE HU The Diocese of Brooklyn has proposed closing 14 elementary schools at the end of the current academic year, a plan that would mean that one of the nation’s largest Catholic dioceses would have shuttered nearly 40 percent of its grade schools in the past seven years. The proposed closings and mergers, announced on Monday, are the latest retrenchment for a school system that was once a bedrock of neighborhood stability, and a magnet for families of many creeds and homelands seeking safe, reliable education at a relatively modest cost. The news, passed along at midday to principals of schools from Flushing, Queens, to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, shook students, parents and teachers, many of whom had joined in desperate fund-raising efforts in recent months to avoid th...

The NYTimes has an interesting article on the battle between Church and State in Spain. Spain famously has been a major Catholic stronghold for the past few centuries or so, but now the Vatican is hoping just to maintain a foothold. January 6, 2009 For Vatican, Spain Is a Key Front in Church-State Battle By RACHEL DONADIO VALLADOLID, Spain — The Macías Picavea primary school hardly looks like the seat of revolution. But this unassuming brick building in a sleepy industrial town has become a battleground in an intensifying war between church and state in Spain. In an unprecedented decision here, a judge ruled in November that the public school must remove the crucifixes from classroom walls, saying they violated the “nonconfessional” nature of the Spanish state. Although the Roman Catholic Church was not named in the suit, it criticized the ruling as an “unjust” attack on a historical and cultural symbol — and a sign of the Spanish state’s increasingly militant secularism. If the judg...

With the large growth of the Catholic population in the U.S., mostly due to the influx of immigration from Latin America, combined with a huge downturn in the number of Catholic seminarians, the Catholic Church in the U.S. is experiencing a priest shortage. In an attempt to rectify this problem, many U.S. dioceses are recruiting priests from around the world, particularly Africa and Latin America, but also places like India, to fill churches in places like Kentucky (which has seen a surge in Latin American immigration in the past 10 years). Foreign priests-to-be also make up about 1/3 of all Catholic seminarians in the U.S. The shortage is to the point that many priests, at the moment, have to serve four or five churches at the same time, rushing from church to church to perform mass. It is a crazy lifestyle, but one that reminds me of what the Methodists did in the 19th century, when their ministers had to circulate from church to church on horseback. See the full, rather lengthy,...

Ok...so I thought that Rick Warren's analogy between gay marriage and brother-sister marriage was bizarre. I also thought his analogy between homosexuality and pedophilia ridiculous--unless he is stuck in Periclean Athens. But the award for the strangest homosexuality analogy goes to Pope Benedict XVI: VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict said on Monday that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behavior was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. "(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed," the pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican's central administration. "The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less." The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are. It opposes gay marriage and, in October, a leading Vatican official called homosexuality "a d...

This is actually old news--the story is from August 5--but it just came to my attention and the news is in effect into the next year: ANNOUNCES INDULGENCES DURING PAULINE YEAR Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio has announced that parishioners in the Diocese of Brooklyn can receive plenary indulgences for participation in events connected with the 2008-2009 jubilee year of St. Paul the Apostle proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI in May. The Pauline year began June 28 and will close June 29 next year to mark the approximately 2,000 anniversary of the saint’s birth. In a decree, dated July 23, Bishop DiMarzio designated the places where the faithful may benefit from the plenary indulgence if they take part with devotion in a liturgy or other public exercise in honor of the saint during the Pauline year. On any day during the jubilee, indulgences can be gained at St. James Cathedral Basilica; St. Paul’s Church, Court St.; SS. Peter and Paul Church, South Third St.; St. Paul’s Church, Corona; SS. Peter a...

In an scene that looks like it could come out of 1984 , the institution whose leaders act like clones, look like clones, and all dress alike, have reified the Catholic Church's position against cloning. Those who have sidestepped the "natural" processes of procreation, as usual, want to regulate those things in which they themselves do not participate : birth, creation, etc. The official document, " Dignitas Personae " or the "Dignity of the Person," forbids creation through in vitro fertilization and human cloning. It forbids the manipulation of human biological raw materials: so no stem-cell research. Or, no stem-cell research based upon embryos. It allows stem cells extracted from adults and umbilical cords. And, the cherry on top this ice-cream Sundae is no morning after pill! I always find it strange that a bunch of celibate men sit around in rooms all day talking about the proper and improper ways to have sex, have children, and so forth...

In the NY Times today there is an article of the internal divisions among Catholics regarding political parties. Which party, Democrat or Republican, best represents the full panoply of teachings of the Catholic Church? The debate comes down to respect for human life. Conservative Catholics, most prominently Catholic bishops, have focused on the issue of abortion, equating abortion with homicide, saying that "liberals" who say they are for social justice are ironically endorsing homicide. In Scranton, Pa., every Catholic attending Mass this weekend will hear a special homily about next month’s election: Bishop Joseph Martino has ordered every priest in the diocese to read a letter warning that voting for a supporter of abortion rights amounts to endorsing “homicide.” This, of course, leaves only Republican candidates eligible for voting according to these conservative bishops. I am largely annoyed by politicking from the pulpit. But all sides actually do it. The other si...

Evidently an Italian priest, Antonio Rungi, wants to break general negative stereotypes of nuns (as elderly, stiff, ruler-holding women) by holding a beauty pageant only open to nuns. It seems he wants to promote a Sofia Loren vision of nuns. It is an online competition, but he hopes that in the future it will be run like other beauty competitions, in person. According to the Times (that's the one in London), The contestants must be aged between 18 and 40, and can be either full members of an order or novices. Father Rungi said that he expected many who applied to be young, attractive — and non-Italian. He said: “Do you really think nuns are all wizened, funereal old ladies? Today it’s not like that any more, thanks to an injection of youth and vitality brought to our country by foreign girls.” He said there were nuns from Africa and Latin America who were “really very, very pretty. The Brazilian girls above all.” See the full article here . Is this attempt to balance inner, spi...

I was just at the grocery store, getting some supplies for this evening's supper, and I saw a man wearing a particularly distasteful t-shirt. On the front it read: Roman Catholicism: It'll Send You to Hell Then on the back, it read: Christianity: Christ-Centered Roman Catholicism: Man-Centered I added the punctuation. So now religious intolerance or prejudice can be found on t-shirts! That's right. Now we no longer have to guess whether someone dislikes a particular religious group. Now they have a big sign on them that says: I hate you. Or if not hate, strongly dislike. Or they may say that they do not hate you as a person, but just everything that you believe in, things that you hold dear, things that give meaning to this life. (So, I don't hate "you" but just everything about you.) The back of this particular t-shirt makes a typical Protestant Christian move, usually associated with Protestants of a more conservative stripe, that distinguishes n...