Religion

Another book finished: Michael Rose’s Goodbye, Good Men. It’s not a must-read, and I didn’t read the whole thing. It’s an accumulation of horror stories tending to show that many Catholic seminaries in recent decades have been dominated by homosexual cliques, heretics or both, that responsible officials have been disinclined to do much about … More ...

I just finished Ralph Wiltgen’s The Rhine flows into the Tiber. There was nothing very surprising in the book—to my mind it reaffirmed what I’ve thought before, that it’s an odd idea to call an ecumenical council to have open-ended discussions on what to do in general and make universally binding decisions. It’s … More ...

Writing in U.S.Catholic, Notre Dame theology professor Lawrence Cunningham has some problems with the way the word “dissent” is used today. He points out that it can be OK for a Catholic to discuss doctrinal or a moral issues with the intent of clarifying them, as in the case of certain novel reproductive … More ...

Philip Jenkins has written an interesting paper on the dodgy background of current scholarly images of Christ. Yesterday it was Madame Blavatskaya, today it’s Elaine Pagels. I had been inclined, in a broadbrush fashion, to view most current New Testament scholarship as a bunch of experts turning their predilections into expertise. Jenkins provides a … More ...

There is a paradox in the notion of ultimate goods. They set our goals and measure our actions, so we need to align ourselves with them if our life is to hang together. However, we can’t define what they are without diminishing them. To state them fully would be to subordinate them to what defines … More ...

From a well-known Catholic blogger: “Parish programs are supposed to be about strenghtening [sic] parishioners to live the gospel out in the world. That would, you would think, be the point of religious ed programs or liturgy committee meetings.” You hear such things all the time, and that was certainly the point of the … More ...

I just ran into Cardinal Medina’s letter from early last year rejecting the ICEL version of the Roman Missal. It’s an extraordinary document, both for the complaints about bureaucratic footdragging and for the substantive comments on the ICEL translation. It seems obvious from the latter that consciously or not ICEL had been treating the “dynamic … More ...

Here’s the latest script for interfaith understanding, produced and presented with the help of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: swipe a draft of Mel Gibson’s script for The Passion, get some revisionist scholars to look it over, and leak their report to the press. The result of the effort is that what … More ...

What does it mean that the Index of Leading Catholic Indicators, the only comprehensive compilation of statistics regarding trends in the American Church before and after Vatican II, gets mentioned only 32 times on the web, mostly in connection with a WorldNetDaily column Pat Buchanan wrote last December? I suppose the answer is that … More ...

There’s no substitute for seeing what’s there: Cardinal Arinze’s comment at Georgetown sparks protest. Mention that homosexuality mocks the family, and a theologian can’t bear to share the stage with you and 70 of her colleagues sign a letter of protest. In a way it’s all to the good—the more direct personal experience those … More ...