"My priest and I occasionally share articles with each other in an ongoing amicable discussion about the state of the Church. He recently gave me a copy of an article written by Walter Cardinal Kasper entitled 'On the Church' from the Jesuit magazine America (April 23-30, 2001), which was directed against Cardinal Ratzinger by name. My priest suggested that the comparatively young Kasper might make a good pope someday ('Kasper, the friendly pope?'), perhaps right after Cardinal Martini of Milan, who, he said, might make a good immediate successor to Pope John Paul II." ...
Showing posts with label Pope Benedict XVI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pope Benedict XVI. Show all posts
The Kasper-Ratzinger Debate & The State of the Church
Pope Francis turns 85 tomorrow. For the occasion, this from Philip Blosser at the
New Oxford Review archive (April 2002). He began,
Ratzinger’s Way
'The first of a projected two-volume biography of the theologian-pope underscores his thought’s consistency and how it was shaped by Germany’s twentieth-century traumas.'
Samuel Gregg reviews Benedict XVI: A Life: Volume One: Youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council 1927–1965, by Peter Seewald, at The Public Discourse.
Catholicism, authority and desire
In "Mad virgins and Don Juans" Rupert Shortt reviews In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, homosexuality, hypocrisy, by Frédéric Martel, translated by Shaun Whiteside, at The Times Literary Supplement.
"Over the past century the Catholic Church has done more than any other institution to demonstrate the abiding relevance of biblical and classical principles of justice and charity: its records on debt remission, conscientious consumption habits, the environment, and socially responsible uses of technology speak for themselves. There is therefore much to lament about the retreat of Christianity across Europe."
Pope Benedict on Jacob and the Angel
Today's reading on Jacob wrestling with God had me reading up a bit. I found this extremely helpful...... remember when Wednesday Audiences read like this:
Night is the favourable time for acting secretly, the best time, therefore, for Jacob to enter his brother’s territory unseen, perhaps thinking to take Esau by surprise. It is he, however, who is surprised by an unforeseen attack, one for which he was unprepared. Having used his cleverness to try to escape a dangerous situation, he thought he had managed to have everything under control; instead he now finds himself forced to enter a mysterious struggle that catches him alone and gives him no opportunity to organize a proper defence. Unarmed, in the night, the Patriarch Jacob wrestles with someone. The text does not specify the identity of the aggressor; it uses a Hebrew word that indicates “a man” in a generic sense, “one, someone”; it is, therefore, a vague, indeterminate definition that purposely keeps the assailant shrouded in mystery. It is dark, Jacob does not manage to see his opponent clearly, and even for the reader, for us, he remains anonymous; someone is opposing the Patriarch, and this is the only certain data supplied by the narrator. Only at the end, when the wrestling is over and that “someone” will have disappeared, only then will Jacob name him and be able to say that he had wrestled with God.
Cardinal Ratzinger: The terrible mystery of Holy Saturday, its abyss of silence, has thus acquired a crushing reality in these days of ours.
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| Hans Holbein the Younger |
A century later, in Nietzsche, it becomes a mortal seriousness which is expressed in a cry, shrill with terror: “God is dead! God will stay dead! And we have killed him!”. Fifty years later, it is discussed with academic detachment and preparations are made for a “theology after the death of God”, eyes search for ways to go on and men encourage each other to start preparing to take God’s place. The terrible mystery of Holy Saturday, its abyss of silence, has thus acquired a crushing reality in these days of ours....
But even if Holy Saturday has drawn deeply near to us in that way, even if we understand the God of Holy Saturday more than the powerful manifestation of God in thunder and lightning of which the Old Testament speaks, a question remains unresolved - that of knowing what is really meant by the mysterious phrase that Jesus “descended into hell”. Let’s be clear about it: no one is really capable of explaining it. Nor does it become clearer by saying that here “hell” is a bad translation of the Hebrew word shêol, indicating merely the whole kingdom of the dead and so the formula would originally have meant only that Jesus descended into the profundity of death, that he really did die and he shared in the abyss of our destiny of death.full Three Meditations by Cardinal Ratzinger at 30Giorni
I offer a few tidbits but it's well worth reading all three short reflections in their entirety. Pope Benedict may at some point be declared a Doctor of the Church.
Helpful distinction from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
This meaning of 'eternal life' appears very clearly in the account of the raising of Lazarus: 'He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die' (Jn 11:25-26). 'Because I live, you will live also', says Jesus to his disciples at the Last Supper (Jn 14:19), and he thereby reveals once again that a distinguishing feature of the disciple of Jesus is the fact that he 'lives': beyond the mere fact of existing, he has found and embraced the real life that everyone is seeking. On the basis of such texts, the early Christians called themselves simply 'the living' (hoi zontes). They had found what all are seeking--life itself, full and, hence, indestructible life."
HT Joy
Koslowski: How to Actively Participate in Mass
Are we meant to be spectators at Mass, simply watching and listening to what is happening? On the contrary, “Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, §14). But what does “fully conscious and active participation” mean? Is the Church asking everyone to find a “role” at Mass, either reading, serving or distributing Holy Communion?continue at Philip Kosloski
Quite the opposite. Here is what the Church means when she mandates that all the faithful actively participate in the liturgy.
Immediately following the Second Vatican Council, many sought to implement this principle of “active participation” but few knew exactly what it meant. At the time various bishops, priests and laity “misunderstood [it] to mean something external, entailing a need for general activity, as if as many people as possible, as often as possible, should be visibly engaged in action” (Spirit of the Liturgy, 171).
Be careful though, we been told the greatest sins of participation at Mass are "stoic expressions."
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Caption Contest: Benedict and Francis
source: http://www.infovaticana.com/2013/08/13/secretos-del-conclave-de-2005/
Note: I have to approve it. The goal is to be funny or witty, not cranky....
Regensburg Revisited
On Sept. 12, 2006, the day after the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Benedict returned to the university where he taught as a young professor to speak about faith and reason, religion and violence. Faith and reason need each other as paths to truth, Benedict argued. Moreover, this is an essential part of Christian belief, because the God who reveals himself (faith) is also the author of the natural order and the human capacity to understand it (reason). The Holy Father highlighted that the prologue of John's Gospel begins: "In the beginning was the Word (Logos)," and logos is the Greek word for reason. God is reasonable, and so to act contrary to reason is to act contrary to God.
Benedict then asked if Islam conceives of God in the same way. Does Islam have an equivalent to the divine Logos? Does the Islamic conception of God as utterly transcendent, beyond all human categories, mean that God is beyond reason itself?
The suggestion is not that Allah is insane or irrational, but, rather, that he is not bound by a reason accessible to human beings.
Benedict argued that faith without reason gives rise to fundamentalism. He employed a late-14th century quotation from Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus — the one that ostensibly set off the riots on the inflammable Muslim street: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
In 2014, it is more obvious why the question needs to be asked — ordinary people watching the news are asking it. Benedict warns that one of the consequences of a faith-only fundamentalism is violence. Violent force — which by its nature does not seek to persuade — can grow out of a zeal to convert without recourse to reason. This is partly behind the rise in Islamic violence.
Dad29: The Loss of Beauty, the Gain of Atheism
Benedict XVI mentioned beauty quite a bit, saying that it was an essential element of the liturgy. The iconoclasts like Rembert Weakland didn't think so highly of beauty.
Maybe they had a deeper problem than mere iconoclasm.
...The most precious, profound and important of the great ideas which the Left has raped from us is beauty. I need spend no time on the proposition that life without beauty is a nightmare: those who have seen true beauty – sublime beauty, if even for a moment – have nothing to which they can liken it except the ecstasies of mystics and the transports of saints. Beauty consoles the sorrowing; beauty brings joy and deepens understanding; beauty is like food and wine, and men who live surrounded by ugliness become shriveled and starved in their souls....
....At any point before World War One, if you asked any philosopher or intellectual what was the point of art, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, all of them of each generation all the way back to Socrates would have said the purpose of art is to seek beauty. Socrates himself would have said that by beauty, by the strong love and longing created in the human breast at the sight of something sublime, we are drawn out of ourselves, and are carried step by step away from the mundane to the divine.
The strongest argument against the atheism so beloved of the Left is not an argument that can be put in words, for it is the argument of beauty....
The idea that the priest and people should stare at one another....
The idea that the priest and people should stare at one another during prayer was born only in modern Christianity, and is completely alien to the ancient Church. The priest and people most certainly do not pray one to the other, but to the one Lord. Therefore, they stare in the same direction during prayer: either towards the east as a cosmic symbol of the Lord who comes, or, where this is not possible, towards the image of Christ in the apse, towards a crucifix, or simply towards the heavens, as our Lord Himself did in his priestly prayer the night before His Passion (cf. John 17.1).
-Pope Benedict XVI
via Fr. Heilman
Pope Benedict and Archbishop Fulton Sheen
[Bp. Jenky] The Holy father told me something I hadn't known. He told me that he worked on the commission for mission at the Second Vatican Council with Fulton Sheen.
Cardinal Burke to offer Summorum Pontificum Anniversary Mass at Saint Peter’s Basilica
The Cœtus Internationalis Summorum Pontificum is happy to announce that His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, will celebrate the Solemn Pontifical High Mass according to the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, on Saturday, October 25, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, at 12:00 Noon, on the occasion of the Third Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage to Rome.unacumpapanostro.com
The CISP would like to thank His Eminence Angelo Cardinal Comastri, Archpriest of Saint Peter’s Basilica, for responding so quickly to our request and making possible the celebration of the Holy Mass, the culmination of our pilgrimage ad Petri Sedem.
We can therefore begin to organize the pilgrimage, already now, eight months in advance, making it easier for pilgrims from Europe and from abroad to plan to participate in the pilgrimage to Rome. Thanks to the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum of H.H. Pope Benedict XVI of 7 July 2007, the riches of the Extraordinary Form are becoming more and more accessible to the Universal Church (Instruction Universæ Ecclesiæ, 30 April 2011), and people from all parts of the world are able to gather in pilgrimage for solemn prayer and for offering a witness to the faith.
We remind all that the Pilgrimage will begin on Thursday, October 23, and will conclude on the Feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King, on Sunday October 26, 2014.
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Update: Rorate also with some details
Obama and Benedict XVI on the Kingdom of God
As our country continues to embrace all sorts of grave evils, I have felt, lately, like a foreigner in my own country. This feeling of sorrow led me to reflect on two stunningly contrasting visions for how to construct human society.
The first was a campaign quote during a Sunday church service by Barack Obama:
If you haven't read volume of Jesus of Nazareth, I'd encourage you to find it. Chapters two and three provide the best Gospel-based counterargument to big government that you'll find.
The first was a campaign quote during a Sunday church service by Barack Obama:
"I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth." --Barack Obama, Sunday, October 7, 2007
I distinctly remember the president saying this because I spent a portion of his first campaign reading Cardinal Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth. Here's what the future Pope Benedict XVI had to say:
"Earthly kingdoms remain earthly human kingdoms, and anyone who claims to be able to establish the perfect world is the willing dupe of Satan and plays the world right into his hands... The earthly kingdoms that Satan was able to put before the Lord at that time have all passed away.” --Benedict XVI, Bishop Emeritus of Rome in Jesus of Nazareth, page 44
If you haven't read volume of Jesus of Nazareth, I'd encourage you to find it. Chapters two and three provide the best Gospel-based counterargument to big government that you'll find.
Take 5 with Abp. Listecki: Dick Butkus, Marquette and Pope Benedict
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| M. Cherif Bassiouni |
1. Who is a hero in your life?continue at MilCatHerald
If everybody realizes I have a number of priests, men and women religious, bishops, popes who are heroes, if we could push that off to the side, then I can talk about a few others:
M. Cherif Bassiouni, Emeritus Professor of Law, DePaul University College of Law, Chicago
He was my criminal law professor as well as my international law professor and Sharif was instrumental in the collaboration for the constitution of the International Criminal Court of Justice, part of United Nations. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
He was a man who always had clear vision, always respected the law and always presented himself in a manner to all of the students with a level of reasonability and so it was always a joy to go into his class because you were treated with the respect that sometimes other teacher-student relationships were not always given.
Minnie Oresta Minoso, a White Sox ball player who was one of the first people of color to enter into Major League Baseball. Not only was he extremely talented, but he had a joy about the sport that was just contagious. He’s one of the few ballplayers to ever play in five decades of the sport.
When I was receiving my first holy Communion, I asked for one gift. It was an autographed baseball of my favorite player, Minnie Minoso, and my Uncle (Sylvester) who was a police officer and my sponsor at confirmation, had friends who worked “the dugout” and they got me a ball signed by Minnie, which was really cool.
Dick Butkus, middle linebacker, Chicago Bears, 1965-1973
He was a person who was raised in the community right next to mine on the south side of Chicago. I would occasionally see him at Russell Square Park, when he was in high school playing, as he became a legend in the NFL. The wonderful thing about Butkus is his talent was so superior that it modeled the intensity of professional football, but at the same time, he never pounded his chest to talk about how great he was.
In high school, I had a number of really wonderful teachers, but one who made an impact on me was a person by the name of Harold Hild.
He had a special creative writing class in the minor seminary that only a number of individuals got an invitation to be a part of; I was fortunate enough to be a part of that class, and he introduced us to an appreciation of literature and the development of our own ability to write creatively that I’m forever grateful to.
He was a wonderful teacher who inspired a love for his subject.
Abraham Maslow, a famous psychologist, had a theory called self actualization and he had a whole list of criteria of people he believed to be self actualized, and there were some that posited that this is a rarity.
Well, I really challenge that because I met a lot of self actualized people, individuals who because of the integration of faith into their lives have lived this life with a larger vision than just what they can get out of it and that includes my family, my friends, individuals who have been my students, my teachers, and they become my heroes for what they contribute to me in giving me the enthusiasm that I have about life and about my faith.
2. What’s a memorable moment you shared with Pope Benedict XVI?
When we had the ad limina, being the archbishop of the metropolitan (in the Wisconsin Province), I have the lead in terms of addressing the pope. I’m sitting here and the pope is sitting there (across from him).
He was very gracious and greeted every one of us and when I came in they said, ‘This is Archbishop Listecki from Milwaukee, your holiness.’ And he looked at me and he says, ‘Oh, Milwaukee,’ he says, ‘Marquette, huh?’ and the pope had visted Marquette, so it was immediately a connection for him about his time. [Alright, who's got the scoop on this visit??!?]
He was a scholar so he was invited to give an address there and he remembered that time. So, there was a real sense of I know where you live, from the pope. It put a smile on both of our faces as it did to the other bishops in the room.
Great stuff!
A must watch: Cardinal Burke on Canon Law and the New Evangelization
VERY good. Wow, a must watch. "pseudo-pastoral" invoked. Many cardinals think that canon law is opposed to charity or opposed to a pastoral approach to situations.
Would love to hear this whole talk, does anyone know it's origin?
UPDATE:
2012 Priests Retreat at Bloomington Indiana with Cardinal Burke
Would love to hear this whole talk, does anyone know it's origin?
UPDATE:
2012 Priests Retreat at Bloomington Indiana with Cardinal Burke
PE Benedict: as a disturbing experience that knocks on the door of my heart
- Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI
HT CERC
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Milwaukee "artist" creates Benedict XVI portrait out of condoms
continue at JS: FaithWatch
A Milwaukee-area artist is drawing international attention, some of it negative, for one of her creations: a portrait of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI constructed out of 17,000 colorful condoms.
The piece by Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design instructor Niki Johnson, a kind of latex embroidery, is a commentary on the artist's views on sex and Benedict's statements on condoms -- including the now famous 2009 quote while on a trip in Africa stating that condoms increase the spread of AIDS.
Johnson, who described herself as a "curious agnostic" and described the piece as "cheeky and irreverent, but not hateful," said she means no disrespect to the past pontiff, but instead hopes to spark conversation about about social issues, including sex and inclusion.
The conservative web site MediaBusters dismissed the piece as "disgusting."
But the Archdiocese of Milwaukee took a more measured tone. Spokesman Jerry Topczewski said in a statement:
“The Catholic Church has always been open to frank conversations about human sexuality, especially regarding the morality that comes with the choices people make in their individual lives and understanding that, along with those choices comes an inherent responsibility to live as God has created us, respecting the dignity of all human persons.”
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