Advocates for Mary as co-redemptrix suffer blow, Vatican decides there is no Lourdes on the Amstel

 

In a letter dated 11 July, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) informed Bishop Johannes Hendriks of Haarlem-Amsterdam that the alleged Marian apparitions in the Dutch capital had been ruled non supernaturalitate and were therefore not recognised by the Vatican. ... 

A foundation called “Lourdes on the Amstel” ... collects funds for a planned pilgrimage church modelled on Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia to be built in the south of the city to mark these visions. It also wants Mary to be proclaimed “co-redemptrix” in Marian dogma, a cause among some conservative Catholics but not supported by the Vatican. Catholic teaching says Jesus is the only redeemer of mankind.

Read the whole thing here.

Pope Francis, 87, has geezer eruption, lets the cat out of the bag, UK Daily Mail publishes the Italian but not the English thinking we're too dumb to know what it means

 

  Pope Francis has allegedly shocked bishops in Italy by using an offensive slur when saying that homosexual men should not be admitted to church seminaries because there is already 'too much' gay sexual activity.

The pontiff told a closed-door meeting at an episcopal conference at the Vatican that homosexual men should not be allowed into colleges to train for the priesthood, Italian media reports.

Bishops at the meeting were reportedly taken aback by the language the 87-year-old used to make the statement - the derogatory word 'frociaggine', which roughly translates to f*****ry.

Italian news agency Adnkronos, citing sources, reported that the Pope said in the speech: 'Look: there is already an air of f*****ry around that is not good. There is today's culture of homosexuality with respect to those who have a homosexual orientation [who] are better off not being accepted [into the seminary].' 

More.

 

Everyone is blaming the slip on Italian being the pope's second language.

 

Meanwhile the eggheads for USA Today write yet another story speculating about why people are running away from church, not mentioning that the Roman Catholic Church teaches that homosexuals are "born that way", but must not act that way.

 

The pope reportedly has no sympathy for that distinction anymore when it comes to seminary admissions. He's no dummy.

 

Meanwhile, according to that story, fellow Argentine Cardinal Victor Mánuel Fernandez, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, ten days ago when presenting the new rules on apparitions had let slip a similarly vulgar phrase "doing some bullshit".

 

He would know. Argentina is the world's 5th largest beef exporter.

Vatican issues new norms to try to keep phenomena like Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina from getting out of hand again

Christopher R. Altieri for The Catholic World Report tends to think "Our Lady" made no appearance in Medjugorje in 1981, but will believe it if the church ever says he must.

 

He notes that the (phony) miracle is a hard case, which has, however, helped millions become better Catholics. (No word is offered on how many millions the superstition has driven away from the faith).

Altieri doesn't tell you that by 1983 the local bishop had decided that the apparitions were Franciscan fabrications, but by then it was too late because the hysteria for the site had already become a worldwide phenomenon.

On the new Vatican norms for the discernment of supernatural phenomena :

Much of the talk last week was about the new Vatican norms for the discernment of supernatural phenomena—apparitions especially, but not exclusively—presented at a press conference in Rome on Friday. ...

Under the old norms, local bishops had to talk with Rome but were free to make their own determinations. Also, and more importantly, the locals had to keep mum about their consultations. Local bishops, in other words, couldn’t say what Rome said to them about the thing(s) the locals were examining.

Local bishops, in other words, bore all of the public responsibility for judgments that were theirs only in part (if they were really the locals’ judgments at all). ...

Under the old disposition, a local bishop could issue a judgment: Constat de supernaturalitate. A judgment of constat de supernaturalitate does not quite say that a phenomenon is certainly of supernatural origin, but only that “it [clearly] evinces [signs of the] supernatural.”

The opposite of constat under the old scheme was—you guessed it—non constat (de supernaturalitate), which simply meant that there were lacking sufficient grounds for agreement on the origin of the phenomenon.

A judgment of constat de supernaturalitate did not compel an assent of faith, in other words, but only proposed its object as worthy of belief. The point is that it did propose something.

The new norms, on the other hand, borrow from bureaucratic argot to create a new category: Nihil obstat, which does not propose anything as worthy of belief but only says that there is nothing standing in the way of believing in the supernatural origin of a given phenomenon. That’s nice to know, but it really only tells us something about what isn’t there. ...

On the one hand, it is now unmistakably clear that the Vatican not only gets the final word but is involved in the investigation and adjudication of purportedly supernatural phenomena from the start. On the other hand, the Vatican will henceforth refrain from proposing even thoroughly vetted phenomena as worthy of belief and will limit itself to saying that nothing stands in the way of believing a given phenomenon to be of supernatural origin.

Appartions, and visions, and legends, oh my!

 

  Apparitions, visions, and intercourses of all kinds between the dead and the living, are the frequent and familiar embellishments of the legends of the Romish church.

-- Bishop Francis Atterbury

The ringleader of unbelief in the resurrection is Peter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had appointed for them. When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted. 

-- Matthew 28:16f. 

The unique word for doubt here is used elsewhere in the NT only of Peter when walking on the water. Apparently doubt and Peter go together in Matthew's mind.

Immediately Jesus reached out with His hand and took hold of him, and said to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

-- Matthew 14:31

 

Peter does not figure in the resurrection narrative of Matthew, and only indirectly figures in Mark. In Luke Peter acts as an investigator of the empty tomb claim of the women, but comes away only with questions. He is also named as a recipient of a special appearance of Jesus, but this is so perfunctorily reported it is strange. A fuller account involving him is provided by John, which contrasts with the presentations of Matthew and Mark which refer to the persistent incredulity of the eleven summarily.

 

In John 21 the three core intimates of Jesus, Peter, and James and John the sons of Zebedee, go back to their old lives, despite seeing the resurrected Jesus in John 20 gladly. The impression is anti-climactic, to the extent that some see two competing and separate narrative endings to John in the accounts.

 

Doubting Thomas, privileged with a special appearance of Jesus in John 20, joins the three in John 21, as does Nathanael (of "in whom there is no guile" fame), and two others who are not named (probably Andrew is one, the brother of Peter and a partner with Peter in the fishing company, Zebedee and Sons).

 

That makes seven of eleven remaining disciples who do not go back to Jerusalem rejoicing as Luke would have it. They do not go into all the world making disciples after being clothed with power from on high. They go back to making a living in Galilee, about which Luke knows nothing. And it is Peter who leads them by example.

 

There were together Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples. Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing. They say unto him, We also go with thee. They went forth, and entered into a ship immediately; and that night they caught nothing. 

 

-- John 21:2f.   

It all flies in the face of the robust conception of belief and a changed life which the resurrection is supposed to have elicited from his closest followers. How we get from this sorry business in Galilee in John to what the disciples supposedly later do with their lives in Luke/Acts in Jerusalem remains a mystery.

The traditions about the resurrection in the gospels are deeply unsettled.

Mistaken vision

Some have mistaken blocks and posts

For spectres, apparitions, ghosts,

With saucer eyes and horns.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

And ye are witnesses of these things, says the risen Christ

Despite the confidence put in eyewitness testimony, it is wrong up to a third of the time, and of wrongful convictions for certain violent crimes, some 75% have turned out to be based on eyewitness testimony.

And he was transfigured before them: Jesus as Brocken spectre

And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.

-- Matthew 17:1f.

And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured before them.And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them.

-- Mark 9:2f.

And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering.

-- Luke 9:28f.

A Brocken spectre (German Brockengespenst), also called Brocken bow or mountain spectre, is the apparently enormous and magnified shadow of an observer, cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun. The phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside or cloud bank, even when seen from an aeroplane, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name. The Brocken spectre was observed and described by Johann Silberschlag in 1780, and has since been recorded often in literature about the region. 

More here.

Walpurgisnacht: Witches and devils and spectres oh my!

 

 

 Now to the Brocken the witches ride;

The stubble is gold and the corn is green;

There is the carnival crew to be seen,

And Squire Urianus will come to preside.

So over the valleys our company floats,

With witches a-farting on stinking old goats.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

Put By More Than Money

So advises the ghost of Christmas present to Scrooge, as played by George C. Scott in one of the many productions I have seen of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The line is not in the original, but captures the spirit of it pretty well. The idea seems oddly out of place these days, seeing that many people haven't put by nearly enough money to survive what has turned out to be a protracted period of unemployment, crushing debt, dispossession and economic stagnation.

We watch a number of these productions in our home in the days leading up to Christmas every year, and in 2009 Disney produced another which was notably the occasion for some materialist nonsense by one Peter Foster (which can still be accessed in full here):

Would the world have been better without Scrooge? Did he force people to do business with him? Was Bob Cratchit not free to find better employment elsewhere? And if no such employment was available, was that Scrooge’s fault? Scrooge’s “conversion” is also problematic. Once Marley’s spectre has shown Scrooge what the afterlife looks like for the uncharitable, is there any need for the three Christmas ghosts? Scrooge has been “scared good” the old Christian way. With fear of eternal damnation.

The author is at pains in the essay to help the reader achieve, dare we say it, a more charitable view of capitalism than these productions usually afford, the 2009 Disney production starring Jim Carrey in sympathy with and perfectly timed for, it would seem, that odd thing, the wealth re-distributionist 44th president. Foster points out, quite rightly, how there has been a strong tendency in all quarters and evident for a long time, to encourage us to bite the invisible hand that feeds our society. And in this Mr. Foster surely is correct.

But if this tendency often expresses itself in caricatures of the reality in films, it is to miss the point entirely to conclude that Scrooge was simply "scared good." If Mr. Foster had taken the time to re-familiarize himself with Dickens' story, it is not evident from that remark. The ghosts were not superfluous because Dickens was anything but a proponent of some stern form of Christian fundamentalism any more than he was of the revolution of the proletariat. 

On the contrary, we should consider that the ghosts sent to Scrooge revealed to him many important truths which speak to the mysteries and wonders of life beyond the superficialities of mere production and consumption with which both Marxism and now capitalism concern themselves in a world flattened by the dismal science of economics. And it is this flat view of life which animates Mr. Foster no less than it does his anti-business bogeymen.

At least the economists of the past paid back-handed compliments to the more real, multi-dimensional world we all used to inhabit, where "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" and "in the long run, we're all dead." As Dickens reminds us in the beginning of his story, at Christmas we open our shut-up hearts freely and think of people as "fellow-passengers to the grave," into which no new 3D film technology from Disney will scarcely be able to take us.

No, Dickens is more a proponent of the methods of Socrates than of some wild-eyed hellfire and damnation preacher. Scrooge lives the unexamined life, which to Socrates is a life not worth living. Wedded to a Christian conception of reality in which the grace of God trumps all, it is Divine Providence which sends the spirits who help awaken Scrooge to life's examination and explanation, showing him the meaning behind the "shadows of the things that have been, that are, and are yet to come."

A thoughtful, educated person would instantly be reminded of the shadows constantly beheld by the cave-dwellers in Plato's allegory in Book X of The Republic, whom the philosopher comes down from the mountain to release, fixed in their seats facing the darkness, unable to see behind themselves. He comes to loosen their chains, which stand for Ignorance, that they may turn and see the objects on which the Light shines, creating the shadows their eyes mistook for the true things.

These Socratic ghosts show Scrooge that he once thought his own life had been truly worth living; 
that he was actually happy once, open to the world and other-directed;
that love was real and precious;
that people could mean it when they repented of their mistakes;
that they could change for the better;
that each life has the potential to mean something positive to every one around it;
that people exist who are quite happy without money;
that if individuals mattered to God they should matter to him;
that we must pay homage to ordered liberty, be thankful and toast the founder of our feast, whatever else others may think of him;
that choosing justice for its own sake is as indispensable for the conduct of his own business as for the conduct of the business of life.

"Mankind was my business!" shrieked the ghost of Marley.

And it is ours.