Dear Readers – on behalf of me and my family, I extend best wishes for a meaningful Christmas. I’m posting this dated on the 24th, since Christmas Eve Masses will be held this afternoon. We’re off to visit various family. Thanks for reading. You keep reading, I’ll keep posting.

LINK

A 45 year old priest of African descent is serving a parish in France. He says:

“As an African, I’m surprised at the indifference toward religion here,” Father Longo told Catholic News Service. “But there’s plenty of good will and a lot of lay participation. I’ve had no problems being accepted.”

This the direction Europe’s been moving for a while – toward postmodernism, and a postmodernism that has no use for religion (at least not traditional religion where there’s a God and right and wrong and stuff like that.) The War on Christmas on this side of the Atlantic, we might think, is pretty rough. Over there, political correctness has gone so far that one dares not even mention their faith. Lots of beautiful cathedrals stand empty in Europe. In the US, it’s not that bad – but in Africa, Mother Church is growing exponentially. So, men training to be priests from Africa are being shipped around all over the world to fill the vacancies. I hope a story like this won’t ever be written about our continent.

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Remember a few weeks back when I posted a screen capture from Catholic News Service, featuring a headline about Clergy and laity seeking a solution for global warming, right next to a bunch of kids huddled around a fire to keep warm? Just for chuckles I sent that screen cap to BBSpot.com, a satirical website that posts ironic/funny screen captures each day. Well, today, my screen cap was posted. Check out the link for more. Remember, BBSpot is satirical. It’s hilarious – enjoy.

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There are segments of the Catholic Blogosphere that spend a good deal of time decrying the terrible “modern worship space” architecture in new or renovated Catholic churches. In some cases, rightly so. When a space is “opened up” to make it feel more like everyone’s up close, you often lose some focus…with everyone facing the front, everyone’s facing the altar, and therefore everyone’s facing the Eucharist, presumably undistracted. When people can see each other’s faces, there’s the possibility of distraction, etc. Also sickening is the way that many Catholic churches are stripped of iconography and statuary, and end up with a “flying Jesus” instead of a Crucifix. For examples of such, check out the website of Mr. Richard Vosko. By the way, he is a priest, but he doesn’t make that too obvious.

Well, our Archdiocesan weekly, the Georgia Bulletin, had a story last week on Our Lady of the Assumption parish in the Atlanta area. They began a building project a few years back, only to have the work halted by a resident of the neighborhood who questioned whether the outcome would be in harmony with other local historical architecture. In fact the parish had to change plans in order to be able to continue with their project.

At a reception in Moylan Hall following the pastor’s installation, Javadi recalled how the neighbor’s dispute with the designs forced them to redesign, shifting from a very modern to the Gothic style. “It changed, and out of all these hassles came this beautiful facility with a Gothic look nobody ever dreamed of.”

So, there we go – if the parish is going in too modern a direction with her architecture, let the community step in to make the design faithful to something – anything – that is more traditional. Read the whole article – it sounds to me like they ended up with a really beautiful parish.

Courtesy of the USCCB, we don’t have a Holy Day of Obligation on January 1, the Solemnity of Mary, this year. Reason given is that the Holy Day falls on a Monday. Therefore, it melds into the preceding Sunday and we celebrate the Solemnity then. Reasons given have been things like “it’s more convenient” and “more people will be able to attend.” Hello – if it’s a Holy Day of Obligation, then it means that we are supposed to attend, unless we are ill, or are unable to attend due to existing obligations (e.g., Mass isn’t offered outside my work hours), and we should certainly not intentionally miss Mass.

This is much akin to the Baptist church I grew up in, where they cancelled Sunday School on Chrismtas Day! For Protestants, Christmas is a way bigger deal than Easter (one of the reasons I became Catholic) and so here, on what ought to be the penultimate day on the Calendar, we cancelled Sunday School.

No word yet on whether the USCCB is going to allow us to attend Mass only on Sunday morning on 12/24 this year. For the Protestants reading the blog, here’s the situation. Christmas Day is a Holy Day of Obligation. Traditionally we attend Mass either on the evening of Christmas Eve, or before noon on Christmas Day. This year, it happens that Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday, the 4th Sunday of Advent. All Sundays in the liturgical calendar are also days of obligation. So, a Catholic is obligated to attend Mass on Sunday morning, 12/24, to celebrate the 4th Sunday of Advent, and then to attend either a Christmas Eve Mass (on Christmas Eve Evening) or a Christmas Day Mass. By the logic presented here, we ought to be able to attend Mass on Sunday morning 12/24, celebrating the 4th Sunday of Advent, and then not worry about going again.

Of course, Christmas is one of those times when every Mass is jam-packed with all the twice-a-year-attenders and their wallets, so I bet that the USCCB won’t be deleting the Christmas obligation.

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Israeli PM Ehud Olmert made a comment today that warrants our attention.

Mr Olmert had said on German television: “We have never threatened any nation with annihilation. Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?”

Immediately upon this hitting the internet, of course, Israel’s government began damage control – saying that the comment was being taken out of context. Israel has always had a policy of neither confirming nor denying nuclear capability…but from this quote it looks like now they might be saying that they have it. Simply enough, it’s entirely plausible that it was a mis-speak by Olmert.

But suppose PM Olmert had taken a page of the book of Reagan, and decided to make a comment to bait the enemy, with the intention of essentially saying, “we’re ready to play hardball whenever you are.” Here’s what I am talking about. Of course you can hear the laughter in the background; and Reagan’s handlers came out immediately and said, “it’s a joke, he didn’t know the microphone was on” and such. But that audio, combined with great statements like, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and referring to USSR as an evil empire, was enough to scare the Soviets into thinking we might just finally be ready to wipe them out if they tried anything. And that brought them to the negotiating table. And it brought about the eventual end of the Soviet Union.

So I am just thinking about this a little. Perhaps Olmert’s trying the same thing. Talk tough. Let Iran know Israel won’t put up with another holocaust. More power to him.

Link

Here’s a great story for CNS all about how Protestants are discovering Mary and thinking it might be a good idea to hold her in a little higher esteem than they have been. I would personally qualify it to be “re-discovering,” since all Protestants started out holding Mary quite high. From the earliest Protestants, the Eastern Orthodox, to Calvin, Luther, and Wesley, all have considered Mary to be a lot more than just “highly favored daughter” as the NIV translation says. There are some great lines in this article:

Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, a Baptist college in Birmingham, Ala., wrote recently that “it is time for evangelicals to recover a fully biblical appreciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her role in the history of salvation, and to do so precisely as evangelicals.” George’s comments appeared in the December 2003 issue of Christianity Today and in a 2004 collection of essays by various theologians, “Mary: Mother of God.”

“We may not be able to recite the rosary or kneel down before statues of Mary, but we need not throw her overboard,” George wrote.

[snip]

“We have been afraid to praise and esteem Mary for her full worth,” said George, citing Robertson, “lest we be accused of leanings and sympathy with Catholics.”

Of course, we have to have a little touch of anti-Catholic drivel mixed in her, fortunately, quoting Dean George and not editorializing on the part of the reporter (hey, it’s not like this is the NCR.)

A.T. Robertson, who said Mary “has not had fair treatment either from Protestants or Catholics.” Robertson argued that while Catholics have “deified” Mary evangelicals have coldly neglected her.

[snip]

“We need not go through Mary in order to get to Jesus,” George concluded, “but we can join with Mary in pointing others to him.”

This brings up what I think is a reasonable question. How the heck do you get to be Dean of a school of divinity when you think Catholics “use” Mary to get to Jesus? This is outright intellectual dishonesty and the esteemed Dean gets this stuff published?!?

Still, the core of the story is quite encouraging. I think that it’s possible a lot of this started because “The Passion of the Christ” was likely hotter among the Protestant crowd than the Catholics…and what those Protestants saw on the big screen was a very Catholic view of the Passion – including a very definitive characterization of Mary.

LINK

You readers know I don’t normally post images – but in this case, I had to due to the humorous if not unfortunate placement of these 2 stories – global warming right next to some people huddled together to keep warm around a fire.

Sadly, the humor stops when you actually read the story. It reads like a flippin’ environmental-extremist-alarmist-Algore- anti-capitalist set of talking points that repeats the same catch-phrases we hear over and over.

“We need energy policies that guarantee global-warming emissions will decrease, that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency, and that tighten fuel economy standards.”

“I don’t think people in our community realize the catastrophic effect of global warming,” Archbishop Flynn said. “This is a problem for all.”
SNIP
“Can we adapt in time? The naive optimist in me thinks yes, but there’s no question our quality of life is going to be under increasing stress in our lifetime, certainly in this century for our kids and for our grandkids,”
SNIP
“Some people are more interested in the green of money than the green of the forest,” Kirk told The Beacon, newspaper of the Diocese of Paterson, N.J. “We are responsible to God and the earth, this beautiful planet, which we’ve shortchanged.”
SNIP
“Cultivating Care for All Creation,” identifies global climate change and mercury contamination as the two most pressing problems today.

Sounds like they just took a democrat party fax and copy/pasted…but many of these comments were made by bishops and priests.

I’m no dispensationalist. I am not for destroying the environment. However, I am against the perceived needs of the environment trumping the needs of the people populating the earth. The archaelogical record shows us that for millions of years, the climate has undergone substantial changes, with hotter and colder periods – and this is before mankind was even here! That leads me to believe that we’re conceited if we think we can have much effect at all on the climate – and it’s especially idiotic of us to take 100 years of records and decide we are undergoing severe climate changes, when the cyclical nature of this environment’s been going on without our intervention for millions!

Chicken Little’s been griping about various things for years. Most recently it was the “hole in the ozone.” Did you hear about it when the “ozone hole” closed itself back up? Nope, the mainstream media by and large didn’t mention that.

There’s a sinister angle to any story that talks about how we have to “save the earth” and “change our lifestyle.” It goes back to another example of Chicken Little…about 100 years ago people started warning that we were going to overpopulate the Earth and it wouldn’t be able to support us. Well, we kept having kids and look – we’re still here. Of course, this group of Chicken Littles evolved into Planned Parenthood, and look what it got us – babykilling is the norm, and contraception was accepted as necessary to keep from overpopulating (which obviously didn’t work out so well.) For the Catholic Church to flirt with enviro-nuts in this way may bring Her dangerously close to cozying up to the culture of death. And that is one thing that does scare me.

Regular readers will note that the word “Link” is missing just below each of my headlines now. Blogger apparently killed this, and I can’t figure out how to get it into the template again. So, from now on I will place links to my sources in the body of each post.

The good news is that the links are not lost – you can simply click on the headline of a post, and it’ll take you to the story I reference in the post.

A nugget of joy from Al-AP today. After the Imams who acted in a suspect manner on board a flight a couple of weeks ago created the publicity it appears they were seeking, now Muslim groups are calling for special secluded prayer rooms in airports, where they can go pray toward Mecca without people around thinking they’re terrorists. If you read the police report, of course, you’ll find that kneeling toward Mecca isn’t the thing these Imams were doing that was suspicious. Just as many hospitals have very neutral “chapels,” so do some airports have meditation rooms, and I think rightly so.

That aside, though, I think a special room just for Muslims is a great idea. Essentially, they’re asking to be profiled. Seeing as, in the last 30 years, nearly all, if not all, airline hijackings have involved Muslims, seems like the TSA folks could just plant a few plainclothes guys in the meditation rooms at all times, maybe some surveillance cameras, and prevent more 9/11’s from happening. Of course, this would be met with cries of bigotry and racism. But hey, if they want their own special room, then they are segregating themselves. My take? Consider the difficulties. Suppose Muslims of different sects end up in the same “Muslim prayer room.” We know the different sects don’t get along too well, so there will be fights. And before long, we’ll be asked to have a Sunni prayer room, and a Shiite prayer room, and so on.

Let’s take this a step further, with my tongue planted firmly in cheek:

Personally, I think each denomination of Christianity should have its own prayer room too. After all, if I were a Baptist and was praying in a generic meditation room, and a Mariolatrous Catholic walked in with a rosary, and started praying to Mary the Queen of Heaven (who’s really a pagan goddess) and asking her for help that only God can give, I would probably need an airsickness bag.

We all know that Methodists, Lutherans, and Calvinists would have no problem with this since all three of them spoke ad nauseum about the importance of Marian devotion [/sarcasm], but remember, I’m a Baptist…so I don’t care what any of these three guys has to say. All I know is that there’s somebody praying to those beads and that little man on the cross and Mary and that’s idolatry, and therefore offensive. I shouldn’t be subjected to such religious terrorism.

See how this could go completely crazy.

By the way, we could substitute the word Baptist in the above illustration with various other denominational names. I chose to pick on Baptists because I used to be one…I intend no offense, but rather to make a point through humor and absurdity. If you couldn’t tell that from my tone, I am surprised you found my blog.