March 31: Blessed Natalia Tułasiewicz, New Martyr Of Poland

Blessed Natalia Tułasiewicz, 1906-1945

“A teacher from Poznan & a leader in the apostolate of lay people. During the occupation, she volunteered to leave for the Third Reich together with of ther women condemned to do heavy work in order to give them spiritual comfort. When the Gestapo found out, she was arrested, tortured and humiliated in public and was condemned to death in the Rawensbruck camp. On Good Friday, with the strength that was still in her, she climbed a stool in the hut and gave a talk to the prisoners on the passion and resurrection of Jesus. Two days later, they brought her to die in a gas-chamber.”

When Did Catholics Add Books to the Bible?

Q. When did Catholics add books to the Bible?

A. They never did. The Jews and the Protestants removed books from the OT. The Catholic Church simply received the Septuagint version of the Hebrew scriptures, from the Jews, at the time of Christ. This became known as the Old Testament. 70 years later, the Jews removed 7 Old Testament books from the Septuagint. The reason given for this was that they could no longer find those books in Hebrew.

Interestingly some of these books were being used to good advantage to make converts among the Jews. For example:

Islam Overtakes Catholicism as the World’s Largest Religion?

“Islam Overtakes Catholicism as the World’s Largest Religion”has been a headline that has hit the blogosphere hard and taken off running… But there are some points to ponder when taking in this story…

Islam is not a singular cohsesive institution… There are divisions. If we are going to compare all adherents to forms of Islam to another group, wouldn’t it be all adherents to forms of Christianity? If we are going to compare the largest sub-groups… Well Holy Mother Church still is the largest single religious body the world has ever known. And we are still growing.

Something to really consider though - Muslims have more children.

Sister Joan of Erie: Jesus Didn’t Ordain Anybody At All

From a few years back in 2004, the noted Joan Chittister,OSB, when speaking with a Buddist female monk (I thought they were called nuns…) explained to the monk-nun that true Christianity wasn’t discriminatory and patriarchal:

“After all, Jesus didn’t ordain anybody at all. So we start out even.”

Or at least so says Pope Joan.

One is left to wonder, given that she doesn’t believe Christ instituted priesthood by ordaining the Apostles… Well doesn’t that reduce priestly ministry to just a function of a man-made (er, “person-made”) concept in her mind? If it does, why bother with the “man-made” (er, “person-made”) Catholic Church?

All things being equal, any denomination or self-appointed group would do.

But to go down that route, I suppose she would have to actually step away from the Catholic Church which has been her bread and butter, given her respectablility, and provided her so many platforms and opportunities over the years…

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Who Laid The Easter Egg?

Who Laid the Easter Egg? 

Basilian Bishop, Kyr Dionysius Lachovicz, OSBM.

Four Basilian Consecrated Without Mandate This Month

In November 2007, the Catholic World News (www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=54919) reported on excommunication of Father Basil Kovpak, the head of the Priestly Society of Saint Josaphat Kuntsevych (SSJK), a group with ties to the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) which has been active among Byzantine Catholics in the Ukraine since the early 1990s. Bishops of the SPPX – themselves excommunicated because they were consecrated without approval from the Holy See – ordained two priests and seven deacons for the SSJK. On 23 March 2008, this past Easter Sunday (according to the Gregorian Calendar), the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (UGCC) published a communiqué about the latest schism to divide its unstable ranks. Four members of the Basilian Order of St. Josaphat – Eliáš Dohnal, Metoděj Špiřík, Markian Hitiuk and Robert Oberhauser – were consecrated bishops without having been nominated by the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Synod and without a papal approval. Thus, according to CCEO, canon 1459 §1, they have automatically encurred the penalty of excommunication.

Strangely, the UGCC communiqué has an air of uncertainty about it. It does not explicitly state they are excommunicated; rather, if all that is stated about these four Basilians is true, they await excommunication. What is not certain is who was their consecrator. A possible candidate seems to be Mychajlo Osidach, who claims to have been

Four Ukrainian Bishops Consecrated Without Mandate Of Rome Or Major-Archbishop

Is this a Greek Catholic Version of the SSPX?

Benedict the Re-Gatherer

Ok so it’s an awkward title, but the veritable forest of olive branches that il Papa has been extending in so many directions has given me the impression of a pope laboring to draw together once again the broken church of history perhaps in a conscious effort to prepare us for the ultimate re-gathering that only Christ himself can achieve. Besides, it’s Advent and things apocalyptic fill the Catholic spirit and mind.

Spes Salvi is masterful in so many ways, it is difficult to appreciate it all just now. But many facets of this magisterial document are coming into focus. Its lack of all reference to the Second Vatican Council is perhaps a strong indication that we are now past the post-conciliar age and entering a wholly new epoch in the life of the Church. This is an invitation, even an insistence that we look wide eyed at the present state of affairs and plan for the future. And the future which Benedict is preparing for us in various acts this year is a brave one indeed.

 

 

• The allusion to a new conception of Purgatory as a purification at the moment of Judgment, Christ’s divine and holy love burning away one’s imperfections due to sin, is clearly Eastern in spirit. Western conceptions of purgatory form just one item on the laundry list of Eastern complaints against the West, but an important one. Taken together with the considerable achievements of the recent Ravenna Document, the turn to the East is advanced now again one step with this generous olive branch. Eastern complaints of Latinization are met with a small but significant dose of Western Hellenization. If only by a toe, the once firm frontier is crossed.

   

   

• In Liberation Theologized South America, evangelical Christians and Pentecostals are having a field day. One of their most potent charges is that the Catholic Church has abandoned the pursuit of Heaven. Not only the Bible but salvation itself they can claim as their proper domain when the popular perception prevails that Catholic clergy only talk about social analysis and the transformation of sinful political and economic structures. While not abandoning the demands of Christian charity and justice, in Spes Salvi we find the clearest articulation of the Church’s fundamental orientation toward Salvation through Christ since before the Council. As articulated in Antonio Socci’s commentary partially translated on the Catholic blog, Rorate Caeli, Spes Salvi may be seen as a correction to Gaudim et Spes’s more earthbound image of God’s Kingdom. One may hear in Benedict’s words a call to ex-Catholic evangelicals and pentecostals to be reconciled to the Church whose aim is the Heavenly Jerusalem.

   

• Catholic traditionalists have certainly had their share of olive branches this year. Summorum Pontificum was perhaps the first of several gifts which may lead to a reg-athering of that corner of the Church.

   

• The 400,000 members of the world wide Traditional Anglican Communion, an Anglican splinter group formed in protest to the ordination of women, were given hope of reunion en masse with Rome this fall when their petition written with the reported assistance of Vatican officials was formally submitted and received.

   

• The Church’s Chinese mission was advanced earlier this year with the long awaited letter to the Chinese Church which was full of conciliatory sentiment and affirmed that for the Church to be herself she must be fully Chinese and fully Catholic. The first fruit of this olive branch was the appointment by the Chinese government of a new bishop of Beijing acceptable to Rome. A formidable achievement, détente is in the air.

Pope Benedict has clearly been working overtime in 2007. May all his efforts be blessed.

March 27: Blessed Francesco Faà di Bruno

Blessed Francesco Faà di Bruno
1825-1888

Thank You Governor Strickland

Thanks Governors Ted Strickland & Mike Rounds!

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland (D) and South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds signed into law bills that require abortion clinics to provide fetal ultrasound to those women contemplating abortion. I want to publicly thank them for that. Those states join eleven other states that require ultrasound before an abortion and that is literally turning the tide on the abortion debate in favor of life. There is a entity called Womb with a View that does ultrasound and their selection of that name says it all.The Ohio bill, was passed by their Senate on March 14 and before that their House passed it in December 07. It is named the Ultrasound Viewing Bill, HB 314.

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Culture Change For The Legion of Christ?

A Zenit article with some of my comments below.

In a private audience with Benedict XVI, the general director of the Legionaries of Christ renewed the congregation’s loyalty to the Pope at the start of a new stage in its history, following the Jan. 30 death of the founder.

Culture Change For The Legion of Christ?

A Zenit article with some of my comments below.

In a private audience with Benedict XVI, the general director of the Legionaries of Christ renewed the congregation’s loyalty to the Pope at the start of a new stage in its history, following the Jan. 30 death of the founder.

March 25: Blessed Omeljan Kovc, Greek Catholic Martyr & Righteous Among The Nations

Blessed Omeljan Kovc, 1884-1944

Greek Catholic Martyr & Righteous Among The Nations

from www.vatican.va: “The Servant of God Fr Emilian Kovch was born on 20 August 1884, near Kosiv. In 1911, after graduating from the College of Sts Sergius and Bacchus in Rome, he was ordained to the priesthood. In the spring of 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo for aiding Jews. On 25 March 1944 he was burned to death in the ovens of the Majdanek Nazi death camp. On 9 September 1999 he was honoured with the title “Righteous Ukrainian” by the Jewish Council of Ukraine.”

Why Do Evangelicals Celebrate Easter When They Do?

Ok, I grant that a number of non-Catholics go out of the way to call the holiday “Resurrection Sunday” a few seem to have gravitated towards calling it “Pascha” like Eastern Christians do… Some of them dislike the term “Easter” wrongly thinking it connotes paganism. (Taylor Marshall has the 411 on that with today’s entry Why is the festival of Christ’s Resurrection called Easter? - it is about as “pagan” to use the term “Easter” as it is “Thursday” or “January” or “Sunday“[!] for that matter!)

“Pregnant Husbands” In The Brave New World (or) “Woman With Plastic Surgery & Hormone Treatment Gets Pregnant”

Homosexual activist and lifestyle publication The Advocate reports something that very well may qualify as “new under the sun.”

In the brave new world, after an operation for “gender re-assignment” a woman who has legally married another woman has opted to become “the pregnant husband”.

How does it feel to be a pregnant man? Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child—I am so lucky to have such a loving, supportive wife. I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family.

I remain uncertain how it is the case that breast reconstruction and testosterone therapy allows a woman to be considered to be married to another woman. When it comes to pro-creating, nothing seems to have changed in that department.

So “How does it feel to be a man and to be pregnant?” Find someone with an XY chromosome set who is pregnant and you will answer that question! Get out your lamp, Diogenes - you will be looking for one honest man for a good long time.

Now might be a good time to consider spending a little time with some of JP2’s Theology of the Body writings.

Magdi Allam, Benedict. Why?

“I realize what I am going up against

but I will confront my fate with my head high,

with my back straight and the interior strength

of one who is certain about his faith.”

— Magdi Christian Allam.

Some voices in Europe and other places are presently criticizing the pope for his high profile baptism of Magdi Allam at the Easter Vigil. They assert that the pope is somehow taunting Islam and unnecessarily putting Mr. Allam’s life in danger, and perhaps the pope’s as well. I cannot know the pope’s mind. But I would like to suggest why he might do something so dramatic and frankly foolish in the eyes of the world:

I think the pope is making all kinds of points.

• He wants to uphold the example of this man who has stood up to Islam already for many years.
• He also wants to make an issue of the Muslim practice of assassination of those who convert out of it. Imagine the shame heaped on Islam if Allam is killed.
• He wants to show Muslims that reasonable and rational people, the very best of Islam are ashamed of what Islam has become.
• He wants to make a point to sleepy Europeans that Christianity is a faith worth dying for.
• He wants to give all the world an example of Christ-like willingness to die for the good, rather than to kill.
• He wants the world to know that it is superior to suffer violence than to commit it.
• He wants to show the world the moral and spiritual superiority of Christ and Christianity.
• He wants to show the world that the willingness to innocently suffer violence for one’s faith is not reserved to the earliest ages, but is a very present reality.
• He wants to highlight that Christians throughout the world willingly suffer violence for their faith every day.
• He wants to bring about religious freedom, a true liberation of personal conscience in the lands of Islam.
• He wants to give the Muslim world an example of Christian virtue that they will notice.
• Should Mr. Allam or Benedict lose their lives, he would want to offer martyrs for the sake of the Muslim world.

Finally, Magdi Allam, now on the world stage, may be safer than if he had not been in the spotlight. Who knows?

Welcome Home!

Was just curious to find out if any of our dozen readers or so out there were received into the Church this weekend. If so, welcome home! Also feel free to leave a note in the combox.

I know more than a few of our regular combox warriors as well as (a majority?) of our contributors made that journey - some in just the past several years. For them, how long have you been Catholic?

Anyone picking out swim apparel and eyeing the Tiber for next year out there?

Contraception: Why Not? MP3s by Dr. Janet Smith

A professor of moral theology, Janet Smith is the author of Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later, editor of Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader, and Life Issues, Medical Choices. (Click To Listen, Right Click To Download)

Contraception: Why Not? - Part 1

Contraception: Why Not? - Part 2

SOURCE: CatholiciPod

To hear an interview with Dr. Janet Smith, Fr. Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics and Professor of Moral Theology from an Australian Radio (May 2, 2006 at 8.30pm)
on the topics of condoms and AIDS:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s1629283.htm

While you are thinking about it… Stop in and take a look at Taylor Marshall’s The Bible Against Contraception

Subscribe To Your Favorite Blogs’ Feeds - Including The Black Cordelias!

A lot of folks may be unaware of the fact that if they read several blogs on a regular basis, there are many, many options for using what are called aggregators (or “feed readers”) to keep up with the latest posts at each of their favorite blogs.

Some that are out there include:

I myself am a Google Reader™man. I chose it for the simple sake that when we were with Blogger™, it was relatively easy to use that service as I already had a Google account through Blogger. Anyone who uses Gmail™ will also have an account. I don’t have any special attachment otherwise - in fact their may be aggregators among those listed above which have superior functions, I simply have not investigated others at this time.The convenience of an aggregator is really in its simplicity. Like an old time newspaper wire service, as entries are submitted to your favorite blogs, they are fed into your aggregator and simply show up at one location when you are ready to see what is new in the blogs that you have subscribed to. For Google Reader™all you need to do is copy and paste the address of your favorite blogs and enter it into the “Subscribe to new blog” field of Google Reader™ and voilayou are subscribed. This is equally useful, I have found, in tracking blogs that have especially frequent, or especially infrequent updates.What aggregators do our readers like to use? I note that we have about 30 who subscribe to us via Google Reader™… What else are you using? What do you reccomend?

Belleville’s 60%???

Much hay is being made in the blogosphere about the 60% of priests in Belleville calling on Bishop Braxton to resign. But is this accurate?

To get to the “60%” statistic being bandied about in the press and blogosphere, most are demonstrating that a lot of arbitrary and self-serving qualifications need to be used to achieve it.

To get to the “60%” mark one has to selectively excise a significant group of priests with faculties in the diocese by not counting those who were in orders and not diocesan, those who are on loan, those who are retired and have different capacities of activity.

At the end of the day, you come to 45 signatories actually located in the diocese (one is outside as a military chaplain) out of somewhere between 106-110 with faculties… and only 37 of those signatories not retired.

Interestingly, over at SOIL, a reader offers:

There are 38 active priests in the Diocese ordained 25 years or less.These are the “John Paul II” priests — attracted to the priesthood by the late Pope’s person, teaching, example. They are the bishops, chancellors, vicars general — and good parish priests — in the years to come.Of these 38 JPII priests, only 5 signed the infamous letter! That’s only 13%…This opposition to the Bishop is generational. Those trained/ordained in the 1960’s and 1970’s — who are now in their own ’60’s and 70’s — are the dissenters.

So of the Belleville 45, 40 of them were ordained in the 60s and 70s and now seem to enjoy - like a good many priests from that cohort - popularity among Call To Action and similar crowds. Interesting and telling.

I am still looking to cross-reference the signatories of the letter of revolt to the signatories of the 2005 letter of protest over the +Braxton appointment.

I am betting dollars to donuts that the men protesting today will be found to largely be the same group that were protesting +Braxton before +Braxton even got there. I smell expedience…

And the math just doesn’t add up to 60%.

See also: Bishop Braxton Fire Them!
See also: +Braxton’s “Belleville 46″ Identified - Look Familiar?
See also: Are You Kidding Me? SUPPORT BISHOP BRAXTON

+Braxton’s “Belleville 46″ Identified - Look Familiar?

Below is the list of the “Belleville 46″ that constitute the majority of the “native born calling for resignation”… That is to say 46 = 60% of the priests with faculties in Belleville if and when you don’t count the 20ish priests who are on loan, and the 41 or so others who didn’t sign the letter of revolt.
So now that we have this list, can anyone do a little research for me and see if we can find a list of the signatories of the 2005 Letter of Protest against +Braxton’s assignment? I for one would very much like to cross check the list of those who were protesting his assignment with those calling for his ouster.

If they aren’t substantially the same, I will buy intrepid PC reader Rob of Arizona a Heineken. (He will have to come here to get it though - it is not legal to mail it.)

H/T: Doctor E!

1) Rev. Msgr. James A. Buerster
2) Rev. Msgr. Donald W. Eichenseer
3) Rev. Msgr. Thomas D. Flach