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Bp. Morlino (D. Madison, WI) defends Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI1) reputation

Rep. Paul Ryan’s (GOP VP candidate – R-WI1) congressional district overlaps with the Diocese of Madison, where His Excellency Most Reverend Robert C. Morlino is the local ordinary bishop.

On the site of the Diocese of Madison Bp. Morlino has published a comment about Rep. Ryan, who, in terms of the Church, is his subject.

Let’s have a look with some detail in order to get this whole thing clear:

Subsidiarity, solidarity, and the lay mission
Bishop’s Column
Thursday, Aug. 16, 2012

Dear friends,

It was no shock at all for me to learn that our diocesan native son, Paul Ryan, had been chosen to be a candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States. I am proud of his accomplishments as a native son, and a brother in the faith, and my prayers go with him and especially with his family as they endure the unbelievable demands of a presidential campaign here in the United States. It is not for the bishop or priests to endorse particular candidates or political parties. Any efforts on the part of any bishop or priest to do so should be set aside. And you can be assured that no priest who promotes a partisan agenda is acting in union with me or with the Universal Church. [A new definition of "nano second" could be the interval between when a liberal reads this and then accuses Morlino of meddling in politics.]

It is the role of bishops and priests to teach principles of our faith, such that those who seek elected offices, if they are Catholics, are to form their consciences according to these principles about particular policy issues.

However, the formation of conscience regarding particular policy issues is different depending on how fundamental to the ecology of human nature [interesting starting point: ecology... ecological anthropology? anthropological ecology? ecological theo-anthropology?] or the Catholic faith a particular issue is. Some of the most fundamental issues for the formation of a Catholic conscience are as follows: sacredness of human life from conception to natural death, marriage, religious freedom and freedom of conscience, and a right to private property.  [Which all happen to be burning issues in public debate and in the political campaign.]

Violations of the above involve intrinsic evil — that is, an evil which cannot be justified by any circumstances whatsoever. [It seems to me that some might bring in "eminent domain" when dealing with the right to property, but the principle remains: we have a right to property. ] These evils are examples of direct pollution of the ecology of human nature and can be discerned as such by human reason alone. [Good.] Thus, all people of good will who wish to follow human reason should deplore any and all violations in the above areas, without exception. The violations would be: abortion, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, same-sex marriage, government-coerced secularism, and socialism. [Since the starting point of the argument is human reason, we cannot be accused fairly of pushing "religious views" on the public when we defend life from a natural law stance.]

Where intrinsic evil is not involved

In these most fundamental matters, a well-formed Catholic conscience, or the well-formed conscience of a person of good will, simply follows the conclusions demanded by the ecology of human nature and the reasoning process. A Catholic conscience can never take exception to the prohibition of actions which are intrinsically evil. [You cannot be... cannot be... pro-choice and a faithful Catholic.] Nor may a conscience well-formed by reason or the Catholic faith [WATCH THIS...] ever choose to vote for someone who clearly, consistently, persistently promotes that which is intrinsically evil.  [Some who are truth-deficient will claim that that was a political statement.  It. Was. Not.]

For the rest of the article click here:  WDTPRS

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‘FIRED UP FOR THE FAITH’: 3 BROTHERS FROM 1 FAMILY SET TO BECOME CATHOLIC PRIESTS

MILWAUKEE (The Blaze/AP) — When Luke Strand started college nine years ago, he wanted to earn a marketing degree, a job in the business world, then a house and children. But all of that changed — and in a profoundly transformational way.

Now he‘s a priest and that’s not all. His brother, Vincent, is on his way to being ordained a Jesuit priest and their youngest brother, Jake, was ordained in the spring.

The family calling is remarkable at a time when fewer men, especially in the U.S., are choosing the Roman Catholic clergy. More than 3,200 of the 17,800 U.S. parishes don’t have resident priests, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. As of last year, the total number of priests in the U.S. had decreased 14 percent from 2000.

So why did three men from one family sacrifice what they thought they wanted in their lives to become priests? Even their family was blindsided. The brothers’ parents, who live in Dousman, Wis., never encouraged it or discouraged it — they just never discussed it.

“It takes you off guard, (having) one after the other come and talk to us,” said their mother, Bernadette Strand.

The boys went to Catholic grade school, attended church every Sunday and prayed before dinner but weren’t “eccentric,” according to their father, Jerry. Their aunt is a member of the Poor Clare Sisters in Kokomo, Ind. His mother, Ruth, said she and her husband hoped one of their grandsons would join the priesthood.

“Grandma would always say, `Maybe one of you boys is going to be a priest‘ and I think we’d just laugh: `Whatever, grandma.‘ I mean we’re not going to study to be a priest,” Luke Strand said.

They say they all discovered their calling at the end of high school or college. All three wrestled with the decision for years, mainly because of the celibacy vow.

The first to attend seminary was the oldest, Luke, now 31 and described as the peacemaker and most social.

He said he started getting involved in the campus ministry at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and found a lot of young people “getting fired up for the faith.” But he found the priest shortage intimidating, he said. He worried he would have to serve an entire county by himself. But it was also one of his motivations.

By his senior year he found himself living with a priest in a homeless shelter “radically serving the poor and applying to the seminary. And I remember thinking to myself: `How did I get here? Like, what’s this all about?’ And ultimately it was about service in the church.”

He’s now working as vocations director for the Milwaukee Archdiocese, recruiting priests.

Described as the family academic, Vincent Strand, 29, is studying German in Austria as part of his 11 years of formation before he’s ordained.

He said his calling came at Marquette University, a Jesuit school in Milwaukee. Much like Luke, he wanted to make a lot of money as a neurologist, get married and have kids.

“I do distinctly remember thinking: `Oh good. (Luke’s) going to be the priest. I don’t have to now.’”

But a theology professor’s teachings showed him “God was real in a way I hadn’t (realized) before,” he said. And he realized he could have an intellectual life that involved God.

He considered devoting himself to God even if he got married but he knew he’d only go halfway and he wanted to “completely empty” himself. He broke up with a longtime college girlfriend to pursue his calling.

“The celibacy and that vow of celibacy has been one of the real things I love about the life and one the very freeing things about the life,” he said.

For the rest of the article go to:  The Blaze

Recommended by Fr. Pisut

This article was posted on CatholicVote

The case for a boys-only policy for altar servers

by Rachel Campos-Duffy

Sometime in the 1970’s the long-standing male-only policy for altar servers changed.  Here I am in 1976 in a picture with my sister, Leah, after Mass with Fr. Nadine, a pastor who welcomed both girl altar servers and colorful Hawaiian vestments.

Thirty-five years later, many pastors and dioceses are having second thoughts about the presence of girls on the altar.  Some cite tradition; others the Church’s teaching on the differentiation and complementarity of the sexes. But many more are pointing to vocations.

According to the Communications Office of the Diocese of Phoenix, there is growing evidence to support the claim that where altar service is limited to boys, priestly vocations increase.  The best example is the Diocese of Lincoln Nebraska, the envy of all dioceses when it comes to vocations.

Why? Because serving at the altar was always considered an apprenticeship for the priesthood.  Prior to the modern seminary, it was the primary means by which boys discerned their interest and calling to become priests.

For starters, there’s the surprising fact that the participation of boys in altar service programs decreases with the inclusion of girls; likewise it increases when it is boys-only.

My 10 year-old son is an altar server in a boys-only program he loves and I can attest that the inclusion of his 8 year old sister would, well, annoy him.  He’s not a sexist.  He’s a typical 10 year-old boy and that is the age that boys begin considering altar service.  Our priest is a role model to our son and it’s common sense if the Church wants the experience to feel like a priest-in-training experience, then it ought to be limited to boys.

Despite the positive effects male-only altar service has on participation and more importantly on vocations to the priesthood, many priests are reluctant to implement the policy in this hyper-sensitive, war-on-women era.  But changing the policy doesn’t necessarily have to be contentious or cause hurt feelings for girls who desire to serve the Church in its most central sacrament. One way to ease the pain that comes with any liturgical change is by implementing a sacristan program for girls.

There is a long-standing Catholic tradition of nuns and women serving as sacristans. Now girls can follow in this tradition and experience and learn more about the Mass and this awesome responsibility.  In many cases, these programs are designed and run by religious sisters.  Not surprisingly, parishes that offer a sacristan program for girls report increases in religious vocations for women.

In pondering the wisdom of a male only altar service policy and a girls only sacristan program, it would be good to consider Matthew 7:20:

“Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.”

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Aloysius Gonzaga, Thomas More, and second marriages

June 21^st, St. Aloysius Gonzaga

June 22^nd, St. Thomas More

While St. Aloysius Gonzaga is notable for his great purity – indeed, not only did he shun all impurity, but it is said that he did not even look upon the face of any woman, not even his own mother! – St. Thomas More is recognized as one of the great married saints of the modern Church. Certainly, St. Thomas More was mot pure and chaste, but St. Aloysius lived out the evangelical council of chastity to is perfection through a life of perpetual continence and virginity (i.e. avoiding all sexual pleasure).

And so, we see something of a tension: Can the Church on the one hand teach that St. Aloysius is a better example of purity on account of his perfect celibacy, and on the other hand still honor and reverence St. Thomas More who was married not only once but twice (after his first wife died)? How is it that the Catholic Church can exalt celibacy without degrading marriage?

The marriages of St. Thomas More

While many are aware of the virginal purity of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, who died at the young age of twenty-three, the married life of St. Thomas More is perhaps less well known. He married Jane Colt in 1505, when he was about twenty-seven and she only about eighteen. Having had four children with Jane (Margaret, Elizabeth, Cicely, and John), she died in 1511.

Upon the death of his first wife, St. Thomas More remarried almost immediately. His second wife was herself a widow named Alice Middleton. While Alice had a daughter from her first marriage, the two never had any children of their own.

In St. Thomas More, then, we have an example not only of a married man, but even of a widower who remarried, who has become a saint.

The celibate vocation is more perfect

The tradition of the Church and the wisdom of the saints, rooted also in the explicit teaching of Sacred Scripture (cf. 1 Corinthians 7), maintains that the celibate vocation is the greatest and most perfect of all. Indeed, by vowing perfect and perpetual continence, religious monks and nuns together with diocesan priests of the West (and even certain lay people, like the numeraries of Opus Dei) live on earth something of the life of heaven, where there will be no marriage.

The life of consecrated virginity is a sign of the glory of heaven and also a most secure means of whole-hearted devotion to the service of Christ and his Church. Surely, it is not that married people are unable to give their hearts to Jesus, but they will be divided. Divine Scripture teaches the same:

He that is without a wife, is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please God. But he that is with a wife, is solicitous for the things of the world, how he may please his wife: and he is divided. (1 Corinthians 7:32-33)

Essentially, the wisdom of the saints is that, if a man is able to live without the pleasures and supports of married life (which, of course, include but also go far beyond sexual intimacy), then he ought to strive for the more perfect life of celibacy. 


For the rest of the article click here:  The New Theological Movement

Recommended by Fr. Pisut

Garvey: Six Proofs that Our Religious Liberty Is Threatened

The Catholic University of America President John Garvey addressed the General Assembly of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Atlanta, Ga., last week and offered six reasons to believe that religious liberty is under attack.

Garvey compared the current situation with regard to religious liberty in the U.S. to that of Tudor England, a time and place synonymous with religious persecution. “We are not the kind of violent and intolerant society Tudor England was,” he said. “But in recent years the landscape of religious freedom has changed. Its purview has narrowed considerably. Let me give six examples.”

1) EEOC – The Ministerial Exemption

Garvey pointed to a Supreme Court case called Hosanna-Tabor Church v. EEOC.

Hosanna Tabor is the name of an Evangelical Lutheran church.

The question in Hosanna-Tabor was whether a minister or teacher can sue a church under discrimination laws–the so-called “ministerial exception” that prevents courts from interfering in churches’ relationships with employees who are responsible for religious activities. The plaintiff and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) thought so.

“It’s hard to imagine the government telling Lutherans whom they can hire as pastors. Could the EEOC order the Catholic Church to ordain women?” asked Garvey.

While the Supreme Court sided with Hosanna Tabor, Garvey said it is still “disappointing” that the executive branch “took such a dim view of the church’s right. We might expect that the EEOC would side with the employee. But the Solicitor General of the United States argued that churches had no more rights in cases like this than would a labor union or a social club.”

2) NLRB – Collective Bargaining Exemption

Garvey pointed to two recent cases in which National Labor Relations Board Regional Directors have held that Manhattan College in New York and St. Xavier University in Chicago are not Catholic institutions when it comes to exemption from the Wagner Act. The Board therefore allowed the adjunct faculty at each school to hold an election about forming a union. The colleges have both appealed to the full Board. (In fact, just yesterday, a similar decision was handed down from a regional NRLB office concerning Duquesne University.)

Garvey pointed out that the Supreme Court has previously held that the Wagner Act does not apply to lay teachers in Catholic high schools because it’s their job to instruct students in the faith.

“Should we have a different rule for colleges? ” Garvey asked. “The Board thinks we should, and its view is very much like the EEOC’s.” The Board maintains that Catholic teachers are exempt only if they engage in “indoctrination” and “proselytizing.” College teachers and students live in an environment of academic freedom. Students don’t have to attend mass. Schools may hire non-Catholic faculty. Boards of trustees are dominated by lay people, not clergy and members of religious orders. This openness “means (to the NLRB) that these institutions should be subject to regulation.

Garvey said the NLRB’s view on this issue “shows a disappointing ignorance of, or disregard for, the way faith is communicated among intelligent adults. Faith is not an unthinking adherence that we come to only if we are forced, or swept along by a wave of mindless enthusiasm. Nor are the things we believe formulae we commit to memory, as fourth graders learn the catechism or ninth graders the axioms of geometry. Catholic universities bring their students and faculty to a better knowledge and love of God by appeals to the intellect and examples of virtue. These can’t be persuasive unless they occur in an atmosphere of academic freedom. The government should not make a rule that exempts only those colleges that conform to its (fairly ill-informed) view of how religion should be taught. Better to leave that to the Church.”

For the rest of the article click here: The Cardinal Newman Society

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On altar rails and sanctuaries and proper liturgical roles

At Pray The Mass Fr Evan Harkins has a reflection on altar rails. Per force, he digs into what a “sanctuary” is.

Here is an excerpt with my emphases:

[...]

Practically, the rail is a help to people, both physically and spiritually. The use of rail and the way Holy Communion is distributed with it sets a solemn pace for the reception of Holy Communion. On the part of the priest, more of his time is spent actually distributing the Blessed Sacrament and less time waiting. On the part of the person receiving, the hurried tone is removed; there is a great opportunity for quiet and prayer both a few moments before and after receiving our Lord. The rail also is a help to people in kneeling and standing back up.

On the psychological level, we all have a desire, built into us by God, to offer Him our love and worship, but all of our efforts will be imperfect. This is a truth we cannot escape. If we deny our short-comings and wrong-doings on our conscious level, we will feel it and suffer on a more subconscious level. Because we know that the ‘sanctuary‘ exists — we know that there is a realm that we are unworthy and unable to enter on our own. We know that our knowledge and power are limited. God, of course, knows this too and created a solution. God sent His Son — His Christ — as the perfect high priest, who in turn instituted the Sacrament of Holy Orders, by which He allows and commands men to enter His sanctuary and offer His perfect sacrifice, so that we, the entire Church, may join our imperfect sacrifices to His. Having a sanctuary that is marked off by an altar rail is not a way of keeping people out of where they have a right to go, but it is more than anything a visible reminder to us of the reality of our situation — we need God to do what we cannot. Our worship of God is not something that we get together and decide to do; it is something that God enables us to do. We cannot worship perfectly, so Christ enables us to join in His perfect act of worship.

[...]

For the rest of the article click here:  WDTPRS

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Ryan vs. Georgetown

By George Weigel

There is snobbery, and then there is academic snobbery.

Snobbery is often instinctual and inadvertent, and if it’s cruel, it’s the cruelty of the unthinking. Academic snobbery is deliberately cutting, snarky, intended to wound, and usually clumsy in asserting its own superiority.

Snobbery was the immediate reaction of English historian Christopher Dawson’s mother to the news of her son’s impending conversion to Catholicism: Mrs. Dawson wasn’t bothered so much by questions of doctrine, she told her son, but by the sad fact that he’d “now be going to church with the [Irish] help.” Academic snobbery is the letter from more than 80 Georgetown faculty members delivered to Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), prior to his delivering the university’s annual Whittington Lecture on April 26. In that letter, the Hoya pedagogues not-so-subtly suggested that Ryan was a Catholic ignoramus, presumed to instruct the congressman on the meaning of the Catholic social ethical principle of subsidiarity, and concluded on an arch note, redolent of tenured arrogance: “Along with this letter, we have included a copy of the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, commissioned by John Paul II, to help deepen your understanding of Catholic social teaching.”

(And if you’re a good boy, Paul, we might let you audit Georgetown courses on Catholic social doctrine; that would help you better understand colleagues on the Hill such as Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin, Barbara Mikulski, and Rosa DeLauro.)

The Georgetown letter’s substance, to stretch a term, is the same old, same old: a bedraggled catalogue of complaints about the Ryan budget “gutting” various federal programs, with results the Hoyas promise will be “devastating.” Those with memories that reach back into the mid-1990s will remember the same apocalyptic warnings coming from the same intellectual quarters about federal welfare reform; those warnings were accompanied by, indeed based on, the same simplistic understanding of the Catholic “preferential option for the poor” as a preference for more and more government. The welfare apocalypse never happened. Empowerment strategies helped end patterns of welfare dependency. But you will learn none of this from the Hoyas, for one of the other notable features of academic snobbery is its addendum to Love Story moral theology: Moral superiority means never having to say you’re sorry (or wrong).

The Georgetown letter also embodied the Catholic Left’s unfortunate habit of cherry-picking papal statements. No one risks contradiction by suggesting that the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI seven years ago caused mass heartburn on the Georgetown faculty. Yet here are seven dozen or so Georgetown faculty members quoting Benedict XVI at Paul Ryan: “Subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa.”

Alas, for the rhetorical force of that presumed pontifical slam dunk on the Ryan budget, that was precisely the point Paul Ryan had made on EWTN’s The World Over on April 20. Perhaps on the well-founded assumption that EWTN is not required viewing at Georgetown, Ryan drove the point home again in his Whittington Lecture. Insisting that America needed a better approach to poverty than the Obama spend-a-thon (which, he argued, was accelerating a “debt crisis in which the poor would be hurt the first and the worst”), Ryan proposed that a new approach “should be based on the twin virtues of solidarity and subsidiarity — virtues that, when taken together, revitalize civil society instead of displacing it.”

Thus, Ryan demonstrated that he is entirely familiar with the social doctrine of John Paul II, with its insistence on what the pope called “the subjectivity of society” — what the Anglosphere calls “civil society.” Civil society, Catholic social doctrine insists, is an essential component in shaping free politics, free economics, and the vibrant public moral culture needed to bend the energies of democracy and the market toward empowerment, inclusion, and genuine human flourishing. And that brings us to another facet of recent papal social teaching that the Georgetown faculty might consider more carefully: the warnings John Paul II raised about the corrosive effects of the “Social Assistance State” on the moral sinews of the free society, a process of deterioration the pope saw at work in Europe toward the end of his life.

For the rest of the article click here:  National Review Online

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Benedict at Regensburg: Why It Still Matters

September 12, 2011 10:15 A.M.

By Samuel Gregg

Five years ago today (one day after 9/11’s fifth anniversary), a soft-spoken, 79-year-old former professor visiting his old university in Germany delivered a speech to a group of academics. In 30 minutes, it was all over. forty-eight hours later, the world exploded.

To say that Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture was one of this century’s pivotal speeches is probably an understatement. It’s not every day a half-hour lecture generates mass protests and is subject to hundreds of learned (and not-so-learned) analyses for weeks on end.
In retrospect, however, we can see Regensburg taught us many things. Leaving aside the response of parts of the Middle East, reactions elsewhere underscored most Western intellectuals’ sheer ineptness when writing about religion. One well-known American Jesuit, for instance, opined that Regensburg illustrated how Benedict hadn’t yet transitioned from being a theologian to pope — as if popes should only deliver the type of banal poll-tested addresses we expect from most politicians.
More seriously, Regensburg shattered the inconsequential niceties that had hitherto typified most Catholic-Muslim discussions. Instead of producing more happy-talk, Benedict indicated that such conversations could no longer avoid more substantial, more difficult questions: most notably, how Christianity and Islam understand God’s nature. Regensburg reminded us that itmatters whether God is essentially Logos (Divine Reason) or Voluntas (Pure Will). The first understanding facilitates civilizational development, true freedom, and a complete understanding of reason. The second sows the seeds of decline, oppression, and unreason.
But perhaps above all, Regensburg asked the West to look itself in the mirror and consider whether some of its inner demons reflected the fact that it, like the Islamic world, was undergoing an inner crisis: one which was reducing Christian faith to subjective opinion, natural reason to the merely measurable, and love to sentimental humanitarianism. The West, Benedict suggested, was in the process of a closing of its own mind.
For, in Benedict’s view, it’s precisely the Christian understanding of God as Logos that opens our minds to their full potential. And this theme was powerfully developed by Benedict exactly two years after Regensburg in a lecture that completely escaped the commentariat’s notice. Apparently it’s only when you quote fourteenth-century Byzantine emperors that you get their attention.
Seated this time before France’s cultural elites in Paris, the Pope argued that quaerere Deum(the search for God) — and not just any god, but the God who incarnates Reason itself — was the indispensible element that allowed European culture to attain its heights of learning. The same God who gave man hope of eternal life was understood to be a thoroughly rationaldeity rather than a willful, capricious divinity. Thus astrology began giving way to astronomy, as humans accelerated their quest for truth, confident that humanity’s existence was not the work of mere chance or a master clock-maker, but rather was freely willed by a God who was simultaneously Veritas and Caritas.

For the rest of the article click here:  National Review Online

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Reading at Mass and “eye contact”

Posted on 3 September 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From a seminarian:

I wanted to know if the lector should keep eye contact while
proclaiming the word of God at Holy Mass? Many parish guidelines say that it’s important to keep eye contact.

Keep eye contact… presumably with the “audience” to which the lectoress is “playing”?

Here’s my view.  There is a thin line between reading the Word of God in an articulate, intelligible, thoughtful way, and a performance.  While Holy Mass is the greatest drama even in earthly terms, our roles are not dramatic roles.

I was an actor in a former life.  I know the temptation to “play” the crowd.  Keeping eye-contact, for most people, will lead them into problems, in my opinion.  Unless they are quite disciplined, they will lend to their reading the overtone that that reading is about the reader and not the Word.   In all our reading in Scripture, the Word is both speaking and being spoken, raised to the Father.

“Keeping eye-contact” is not something that I would push.  I would push proper pronunciation of the words, the phrasing, the meaning.

Perhaps we can, under the gravitational pull of the Extraordinary Form, take a cue from how the priest was trained to say Holy Mass.  Even though the priest knows most of the texts by heart, he is to keep his eye in contact with the texts printed on the pages of the Missale Romanum or on the altar cards.   A priest does well, for the sake of prudence, to follow the printed texts even when they are something he has said everyday of his life for decades.  The texts are important.  They are Christ speaking.  The priest ought not stumble over them, scramble them, lose his place.

For the rest of the article click here:  WDTPRS

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USCCB Media Blog: 10 points in favor of going to Posted on 11 July 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

I am all for any official entity of the Church promoting the Sacrament of Penance.

The media blog of the USCCB has a post by Sr. Mary Ann Walsh about the Sacrament of Penance.  Shall we have look with my usual approach of emphases and comments?

Confession: It puts you straight with everyone

Penance, aka confession, is the sacrament of the forgiveness of sin. You can’t beat it for convenience. [Not to mention salvation.] It’s available practically whenever. Tell a priest you want to go to confession and you’ll get his attention. One bishop I know was cornered on an airplane. Another passenger figured out what was going on and asked if he could confess too. It must have been an interesting game of musical seats. An interesting question for priests might be: Where was the strangest place you ever administered the sacrament of penance? The answers I’ve gathered include “in a sports bar, at a graduation party” and “on the golf course, walking up the fairway.”

Confession has benefits. Here are ten:

1. Confidentiality guaranteed. There’s nothing like confessing your sins [That's the key, isn't it?  Forgiveness of sins.  I am glad to see that the word was mentioned at the top.] to someone guaranteed not to tell anyone else. Sometimes you need to talk in absolute confidence. Even under subpoena, a priest can’t tell anyone what’s said to him in confession. He can’t even hint at it. Now that’s confidentiality.

2. Housekeeping for the soul. It feels good to be able to start a clean life all over again. Like going into a sparkling living room in your home, it’s nice when clutter is removed – even if it’s your own.  [Again, it is about forgiveness of sins.]

3. A balm for the desire for revenge. When you have been forgiven you can forgive others. If the perfect Jesus forgives me, who am I to want to avenge the slights in my life. Think: “Why did they promote him over me?’ or “Mom played favorites!”

4. Low cost therapy. It’s free, which makes it cheaper than a psychiatrist for dealing with guilt.  [To a certain extent yes.  But some people need the help of a professional as well.  The confessional is more the "tribunal dock" than it is the "couch".]

5. Forced time to think. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Toexamine our lives and acknowledge failings marks the first step of making things right with God, others and ourselves. Life can be more worth living when you ponder the meaning of your own life.

For the rest of the post click here:  WDTPRS 

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The Magisterium and Catholic Social Teaching

Rev. C. J. McCloskey III

What is the magisterial authority of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), and how is it applied to real world situations? Catholic Social Doctrine is simply the voice of the Church, starting with the Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers, that lays out the principles of how justice and charity are to be lived out in the world.

The contemporary era of CST began with Pope Leo’s XII’ Rerum Novarum in 1891, and continues up to Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate. Through the social documents, one can see a gradual development that reflects the Church’s study of the times. That is to say, the Church is always looking to update and clarify the basic principles of Social teaching, given new economic situations and technologies, without ever contradicting authoritative past teaching.

Confusion enters in when Catholic lay faithful (and in some cases clergy) mistakenly claim for their opinions the absolute magisterial authority of the Church and correspondingly denounce as un-Catholic the conflicting positions of others, whether their political criticism comes from the left, right, or center. The basic error is the failure to see that the foundational teachings and principles of CST can be applied in practice in a wide variety of ways — and working out the application of such principles in any given case rightly falls mainly to the laity, not the hierarchy. The magisterial Church’s role, normally exercised through the local ordinary (the bishop), is to point out when these applications appear to diverge from the principles and teachings themselves.

Conflicting opinions on CST fall into three basic camps:

1. Those (including both some on the Catholic Left and Traditionalists) who seem to believe that all CST is Catholic doctrine, from basic principles of social justice down to their specific applications in the documents. They would argue, for example, that Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio requires Catholics to support government-to-government aid to developing nations (regardless of conflicting opinions about whether such aid actually harms the recipients). This group makes little distinction between the principles and their application.
2. Those who hold that the principles of CST constitute definitive Church teaching and require assent, but that the applications found in Church documents are strictly prudential.
3. Those who hold that CST constitutes the combined institutional wisdom of a Church that has existed since the Roman Empire. This group would argue that, while Catholics should follow CST, the principles are of relatively recent origin and therefore do not constitute definitive doctrine.

Before delving deeper into these questions, we should also consider another modern development: the post-Vatican II emergence of national conferences of bishops (known as episcopal conferences), and the extent to which, especially in the United States, such conferences speak and teach authoritatively on issues of Catholic social teaching. There has been much confusion in this area, going back to the American bishops’ conference’s endorsement of controversial documents largely written by bureaucrats. The most noteworthy of these statements, emerging during the Reagan years in the context of the Cold War, dealt with nuclear weapons and was titled “The Challenge of Peace.”

The reaction from the Catholic right was great. One of the founders of this magazine, Michael Novak, spearheaded a group of lay Catholic writers who issued a “pastoral” letter disagreeing with some of the conclusions of the conference’s document, as well as with the bishops’ authority on the subject and the extent to which their teaching was normative for their flock. The Novak piece, which took up an entire issue of National Review, was later published as Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age (Nashville: Thomas Nelson).

Happily, the collapse of the Evil Empire and the end of the Cold War made “The Challenge of Peace” largely a dead letter. However, in 1997, the Committee on Marriage and Family of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued an even more controversial document titled “Always Our Children: A Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children.”

On the bright side, this document led the Vatican (or, more precisely, Pope John Paul II) to issue a clarifying motu proprio (a document issued by the pope on his own initiative and personally signed by him), Apostolos Suos, on May 21, 1998. Apostolos Suos confirmed the limited authority of national bishops’ conferences, along with their associated committees, commissions, advisors, and experts. Since Vatican II, these had tended to usurp the fundamental canonical responsibility of an individual bishop as chief teacher of the faith in his diocese.

In a statement apparently directed principally toward the USCCB, the Holy Father wrote, “Commissions and offices exist to be of help to bishops and not to substitute for them.”

Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger also commented on the purview of episcopal conferences: “Episcopal conferences do not constitute per se a doctrinal instance which is binding and superior to the authority of each bishop who comprises them.” However, “if the bishops approve doctrinal declarations emanating from a conference unanimously, they can be published in the name of the conference itself, and the faithful must adhere” to them.

In practice, this has never happened.

Apostolos Suos made clear that the magisterium of the Church comes from the Holy Father and the bishops in communion with him, and not from episcopal conferences. That question is therefore settled. Now let’s turn to what the Church teaches about the implementation of the social doctrine of the Church.

In 2004, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a magnificent Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. This document, which should be on every Catholic’s bookshelf, draws from Scripture, papal teaching, curial documents, and the teaching of the saints, in 584 terse paragraphs.

To read the rest of the article click here:  Crisis Magazine

Recommended by Father Pisut

Monday, June 20, 2011

When a Priest's Accused

written by Father Dwight Longenecker

I have no doubt that some of the priests who are now on 'administrative leave' have been falsely accused, and it is terrible to read some of the comments of those who have been gathering around in the wake of the Corapi affair like a pack of hyenas to fight with others for their bite of the corpse.  I'm not saying John Corapi is innocent or guilty. We don't know, but everyone deserves a fair hearing and to judge the man too harshly for his recent decision is also unfair. We just don't know the facts. We should step back and observe and pray and hope good comes from these events.

However, we should also take the opportunity to look again at the whole matter of accusations against priests. The standards we have for our priests are just about as high as they can get. At the same time the demands we make on their time and their personalities are just about as high as they can get. Furthermore, while the standards and expectations are just about as high as they can get, at the same time the complaining and gossip and back biting against our priests is about as high as it can get. The lack of co operation, lack of appreciation, negativity and criticism is also about as high as it can get. It's basically like this: Father has to be Jesus Christ here and now, but not just Jesus Christ, but everybody's particular understanding of Jesus Christ, and if Father should fail and let someone down he gets both barrels. Not just that: Father doesn't have to even fail. He only has to be perceived as failing to get both barrels. Not only will the bad Father has done be used against him, but the good he says and does will be used against him.

Here's an example from a priest I know. Father wants to buy a couple of beautiful new statues for the church. So he gets copies of the images printed up and he distributes them to the congregation for consideration. He's being consultative. He's trying to share his vision. He's trying to inspire the congregation. He's asking if they like these and want him to buy them. He asks for their feedback, and in the first day someone offers to buy both statues. Others say how much they like them. All well and good. So Father lets slip, in his enthusiasm, that someone has already offered to buy both statues. Next thing he knows the gossip mill has gone into overdrive and the message among the faithful is, "Father has already ordered those statues. The whole consultative thing was a sham. We don't like the statues and he is imposing them on us."

For the rest of the article click here:  Standing on my Head