Month: November 2006

6 Imams Removed From Flight

Y’know, I really find my sympathy significantly limited when it comes to

THIS STORY.

The facts, so far as I can discern them, appear to be these:

Six imams returning from an imam conference got on a plane headed to Phoenix and then–prior to takeoff–three of them stood up and started reciting standard evening Muslim prayers in Arabic. The other passengers, however, didn’t speak Arabic or understand the significance of the prayers and got nervous. One of them then passed a note to the flight crew, following which the imams were asked by the captain and airport security to leave the plane so that they could be re-screened. At this point the imams refused to deplane. Following this the police were called and the men were removed from the plane and questioned for several hours. Everyone else was also deplaned and re-screened, and the flight took off three hours late.

Now the imams are crying victimization and blaming the incident on western "ignorance of Islam."

The imams have my sympathy for being in a situation in which it is difficult to fulfill their ordinary religious duties and wanting to do so anyway, but my sympathy ends there.

The fact is that you cannot act on a flight in America like you would on a flight in Saudi Arabia. America is not a Muslim-majority country, and the attacks on it by fanatics of your religion using commandeered airplanes are seared into American memory. You therefore cannot stand up on an airplane in America and start ritualized prayers in Arabic–a language the locals don’t understand–and then refuse the orders of the captain and security to get off the plane and be re-screened–and then go around crying about victimization and blaming Americans for the situation.

The fact is that the Americans on the flight were needlessly alarmed and then forced to wait three additional hours before takeoff due to your arrogant, resentful, high-handed behavior and refusal to make even minimal attempts to adjust to the local culture.

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do" goes the old saying. You cannot expect the people of a country with a different cultural background to understand everything about your culture and accomodate all of it. You must make reasonable adjustments to the culture around you. The thing to do would have been to close your eyes and say your prayers silently in your heads, so as not to needlessly provoke and alarm people who had an entirely human reaction to the situation.

If I were in Saudi Arabia and made open displays of my Catholicism–behavior that would be entirely normal here in America–I would get a much, much worse reaction than what you guys got on the plane–and Saudi Arabia hasn’t even been attacked by Americans. On the contrary, it’s been defended by them.

You guys got off lucky by comparison. You created an entirely predictable situation by your unacceptably rigid and pig-headed behavior, and you have no grounds on which to act like crybabies afterwards.

You have my sympathy for being in a situation that doesn’t allow you to fulfill your religious duties in the way you ordinarily would, and you have my respect for wanting to fulfill them anyway, but that’s it. You handled the situation atrociously.

You created the situation. You needlessly scared and delayed numerous people. You get no sympathy for that.

You shouldn’t get it from your fellow Muslims, either, because your disgraceful public performance only serves to make Islam look bad and reinforce western perceptions of it.

UPDATE: The NYT is reporting that there may be more to what the imams were doing than just evening prayers:

Detailed accounts of the incident varied. Witnesses, including a number of passengers and US Airways employees, said they heard some of the men making anti-American remarks and chanting “Allah,” first as they boarded the plane and then when led off, Mr. Hogan said.

Others said the men behaved strangely once on board, with some asking for seat belt extensions, the police report said. “I did not see they actually needed them,” one flight attendant wrote in a statement given to the police. “They were not overweight.”

Dr. Shahin disagreed, saying the extensions were necessary for their “big bodies.”

In another statement, a gate agent said some of the imams had been praying in Arabic in the gate area. “I was suspicious by the way they were praying very loud,” the agent said.

CHT: Powerline. More.

I’m wondering if the imams didn’t deliberately provoke the situation so that they could play the victim card afterwards.

Stupid Definition Of Planet To Get Revisited

Planet
I predicted that the International Astronomical Union’s ABSURD definition of what counts as a planet would not stand the test of time and would get revised.

Now others are saying the same thing (EXCERPTS):

Rather than crafting an acceptable definition, the IAU alienated members, put the group’s authority in jeopardy and fueled schisms among astronomers on theoretical grounds and even nationality.

The controversial planet-definition resolution, passed Aug. 24 in a vote of just 424 IAU members, will not stand as worded. Some 300 astronomers have pledged not to use it, and many others say it must be redone to eliminate contradictions. It will be reworked, at the least, and possibly overturned at the 2009 IAU General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Great Pluto War alienated many of the roughly 10,000 professional astronomers around the world who did not have a chance to cast a vote.

Good. Now let their voices be heard.

It really is appalling to me that the IAU adopted such a boneheadedly short-sighted definition that only covers objects in our solar system and is based on irrelevancies such as what kind of orbit it has as whether or not it has cleared its orbit of competitor bodies.

The author of the piece makes some very good points, though I don’t agree with everything he says. He is of the opinion, for example, that we will never have a definition for what counts as a planet. I don’t think we’ll have one soon, but eventually common sense will prevail.

There is a perfectly common-sense definition of "planet" that is easy to understand and will unambiguously apply to the vast majority of planets we find outside the solar system, regardless of what kind of orbit (if any) that they have: A planet is something big enough to be round because of its own gravity but not big enough to start nuclear fusion and become a star.

With the progression of time, the obviousness of this definition will force itself more and more on the astronomical mind and, in coming years and decades and centuries, the definition of planet will more and more approximate what I just wrote.

Yes, this definition leads to our solar system having considerably more planets than the ancients thought.

So what.

You don’t want to know more than the ancients did?

Yes, it leads to the Moon being a sister planet of Earth’s.

So what.

The Moon was one of the seven classical planets recognized by the ancients. Mankind has thought of the Moon as a planet before and–if common sense prevails–it will so again. Modern attempts to define what a planet is and discover more of them are attempts to build on the nature of the classical planets, and the definition I gave above fits six of the seven classical planets.

I’m willing to concede, of course, that further learning since ancient times has revealed that the sun is more like the stars in its nature and not the other planets, and so we today think of the sun as a star.

We should, however, think of the Moon as a sister-planet.

Because that’s what it is.

GET THE STORY.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

Excommunication

Excommunication
Canonist Edward Peters has a new book out on excommunication.

I’d say that this is a much-misunderstood topic except that this would not remotely convey just how misunderstood the topic is. It would be like saying that the ocean is a little wet. In fact, excommunication is so vastly, hugely, wave-crashingly, tsunami-style misunderstood that one almost never encounters a press story about excommunication that gets it right.

It’s such a relief, therefore, to have a sound canonist like Peters explain–in simple, layman’s terms–exactly what excommunication is and is not, why it gets imposed, what its effects are, and a host of other questions on this horrendously-gotten-wrong topic.

The book is short, easy-to-read, and written in an accessible question-and-answer style.

And with Peters writing, you know you’ll be getting a rock-solid, straight-shooting orthodox explanation.

GET YOURS TODAY!

BTW, Peters has promised JA.O an exclusive interview on the subject. Look for it soon!

New Book By Post-Pre-16 On Jesus Soon

For some time it has been known that the pope was working on a book, and now the book’s publication has been announced:

Pope Benedict XVI has completed the first volume of a major scholarly and spiritual book on Jesus of Nazareth, a work he began several years before being elected pope.

"Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration" is scheduled for a March release in Italian by the Rizzoli publishing house and in German by Herder Verlag.

Announcing the publication Nov. 21, Rizzoli and the Vatican gave reporters copies of the book’s preface and a portion of its introduction.

In the preface, signed "Joseph Ratzinger — Benedict XVI," the pope wrote that for decades he had noticed a growing scholarly distinction between the "historical Jesus" and the "Christ of faith," a distinction that many Christians now accept as accurate.

But, he wrote, if the human Jesus was totally different from the Jesus depicted in the Gospels and proclaimed by the church, what does it mean to have faith in him?

"I trust the Gospels," the pope wrote.

This book is intended to be the first part of a longer work, which apparently would have been published in one volume but is now envisioned for three. The pope wrote:

"Because I do not know how much time and how much strength I will still be given, I have decided to publish the first 10 chapters" as Volume One of "Jesus of Nazareth."

But the book is not an act of the papal magisterium, despite its author’s election to the papal see:

In a Nov. 21 statement, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said, "The pope says clearly, with his usual simplicity and humility, that this is not a ‘magisterial act,’ but a fruit of his personal research and, as such, can be freely discussed and critiqued.

"It is not a long encyclical on Jesus, but a personal presentation of the figure of Jesus by the theologian Joseph Ratzinger," who was elected pope after beginning the work, Father Lombardi said.

This says volumes about the personal humility of the man who is now pope. To have the spiritual authority to mandate that every sentence in the book be believed by Catholics and to refuse to use it–to refuse to put forward one’s own ideas authoritatively–and to instead openly say that people are free to discuss those ideas and critique them–knowing even that they will meet hostility in many scholarly circles–is the mark of an extraordinarily humble man.

Which is one of the things that makes His Most Awesomeness B16 so most awesome.

Which is why B16 was the right man for the job. It shows that he takes the role of being the servant of the servants of God seriously and does not wish to use the position as a platform for merely advancing his personal preferences and ideas.

What I want to know is how soon Ignatius Press will have an English translation out.

In the meantime,

GET THE STORY.

Apology For The Halloween Mass

A lot of people have e-mailed me links to the video of the Halloween Mass. As soon as I saw it, I thought, "Okay, this is never going to stand. One way or another, action is going to be taken to rectify this situation."

I also thought, "It’s going to be a lot harder for people to get away with extreme liturgical abuses from now on. YouTube brings a whole new level of accountability, as it is now possible for the local bishop and the Vatican to see the abuse being committed and not just rely on verbal reports of it."

This led to the thought, "I’m sad about the idea of people doing hidden camera videos of the Masses in their parishes, but it’s going to happen now and will play a role in cleaning up the liturgy."

We’ll have to see how my latter two thoughts play out, but the first has already happened. The priest in question has written a letter of apology to his bishop, Tod Brown. Here’s the text of it:

November 8, 2006

Dear Bishop Brown:

Since 1998, when we first began celebrating liturgies here in Aliso
Viejo, a particular dynamic has always been the youthfulness of our
community with an obvious abundance of children. With this in mind,
many of our programs have been developed to be of service to them and
it was in this spirit that we began inviting children to wear their
Halloween costumes to the Masses on the weekend prior to Halloween.
Many parents inquired if they too could wear costumes so as to make it
a family event, and thus, a Halloween tradition of having parishioners
in costume at Mass was born. Based on our Catholic-Christian grounding
of faith in Jesus Christ, we know that the assorted costumes of
Halloween are a manner of poking fun and holding up to the light of
Christ’s Resurrection the things that may have
once frightened us. 

I am aware that my enthusiasm for our family celebration of
Halloween has caused me to neglect my pastoral duties of providing
appropriate direction and instruction to our people regarding
appropriate/inappropriate costumes. Prior to the weekend of October
28-29 I failed to adequately instruct our assorted liturgical ministers
as to what might be appropriate apparel for their ministry. Because of
this oversight on my part, we had some lay ministers of communion
attired in devil horns and assorted other costumes that, in hindsight,
I could easily have prevented if I had been more attentive to my
pastoral duties. Bishop Brown, I stress to you the goodness and
faith-filled integrity of the ministers who were so attired, they are
some of our most involved and faithful members. They accepted me at my
word in regards to their costume making fun of fearful things, and
would be mortified to think that they gave offense to people of good
faith. The lay ministers are innocent of any wrongdoing, the offense is
mine and I take full responsibility.

I realize that my pastoral neglect and lack of prudent judgment has
caused great concern and offense to many in the Church. I have given my
life as a priest to the Church of the Diocese of Orange and it causes
me great pain to realize that my lapse in judgment could so easily
transform a wonderful family tradition into something questionable and
repugnant to people of good faith. From my heart I apologize to you and
to the larger community of the faithful for my pastoral neglect.

I await your counsel and assistance in  determining an appropriate manner of  making amends for this matter.

Sincerely, Reverend Fred K. Bailey

MORE FROM ROMAN CATHOLIC BLOG.

You’ll note that Fr. Bailey in a praiseworthy fashion accepts full responsibility for the abuse, but this does not change the reality that the parishioners who dressed up in devil costumes to attend Mass and hand out Holy Communion were doing something extraordinarily boneheaded. They have a jaw-droppingly astonishing sense of what is appropriate at sacred liturgies. Setting aside the question of whether a costume is even appropriate at sacred liturgies, devil costumes are undeniably and obviously inappropriate, and these parishioners failed to discern that.

Not The Solution I Expected

Image003
As long-time readers know, I am an enthusiastic square dancer.

I go dancing several times a week (in addition to keeping up the blog). At my peak, I danced five nights a week, though in a major metropolitan area like San Diego you can go seven nights a week if you want to.

Lately, I’ve pulled back and have also focused on learning to round dance.

Over the summer, I pulled back to the extent that I didn’t regularly go to the club I’m formally a member of–the Alpine Squares–which meets on Friday nights. So I hadn’t been there in a while.

But I got a letter telling me about an important club meeting that was coming up on November 17, and I went.

After we were done dancing for the evening (and square dancing is MORE FUN THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE–join your local club AS SOON as they start a new class!), we held the meeting, and it became clear that the principal thing the club needed was to elect a new board that included new blood among the officers.

In most social clubs, people don’t want to put themselves forward as potential officers, and so getting new officers is hard.

I would have been willing to serve in any office that the club needed filled, but I was embarrassed to put myself forward since I hadn’t been attending regularly of late.

The meeting began, and during it I asked a number of questions that I hoped were helpful.

I was trying to steel my nerve to volunteer for secretary or treasurer, though I was embarrassed to do so.

Then people who had served as officers in the past volunteered for these positions, and I thought, "Well, that’s it for me. Those are the only positions I could conceivably volunteer for."

And then a former president of the club turned to me and said, "Jimmy, what I want to know is: Would you be willing to step forward for the office of president?"

I was flabbergasted.

I said I was hesitant to volunteer for anything, given my attendance over the summer, but I like the club and want to do whatever it needs. And maybe I would be a good secretary or treasurer, but I was willing to do whatever the club needed.

So she said, "All in favor of Jimmy being president say ‘Aye.’"

And people shouted "Aye!" and raised their hands.

After we talked about it for a bit, I said, "I’m not sure there was a majority," and they shouted "Aye!" all the louder and more people raised their hands.

At the end of the meeting there was a voice vote on the entire slate of candidates, and it passed without opposition.

And then everyone congratulated me and my fellow officers elect.

So now I’m the president elect.

Come January, I will be the new president of Alpine Squares and will do my best to serve the club.

But it’s something I was not expecting.

Please pray for me and support your local (INCREDIBLY FUN!) square dance club.

Pro Multis = “For Many”

CHT to the reader who pointed out the location of the letter from Cardinal Arinze. Diogenes had already posted it over at CWNews. Here ’tis:

[To their Eminences / Excellencies, Presidents of the National Episcopal Conferences]   

Congregatio de Cultu Divino et Disciplina Sacramentorum

Prot. N. 467/05/L

Rome, 17 October 2006

Your Eminence / Your Excellency,

In
July 2005 this Congregation for the Divine Worship and the Discipline
of the Sacraments, by agreement with the Congregation for the Doctrine
for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote to all Presidents of Conferences
of Bishops to ask their considered opinion regarding the translation
into the various vernaculars of the expression pro multis in
the formula for the consecration of the Precious Blood during the
celebration of Holy Mass (ref. Prot. N. 467/05/L of 9 July 2005).

The
replies received from the Bishops’ Conferences were studied by the two
Congregations and a report was made to the Holy Father. At his
direction, this Congregation now writes to Your Eminence / Your
Excellency in the following terms:

1. A text corresponding to the words pro multis,
handed down by the Church, constitutes the formula that has been in use
in the Roman Rite in Latin from the earliest centuries. In the past 30
years or so, some approved vernacular texts have carried the
interpretive translation "for all", "per tutti", or equivalents.

2.
There is no doubt whatsoever regarding the validity of Masses
celebrated with the use of a duly approved formula containing a formula
equivalent to "for all", as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith has already declared (cf. Sacra Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei, Declaratio de sensu tribuendo adprobationi versionum formularum sacramentalium,
25 Ianuarii 1974, AAS 66 [1974], 661). Indeed, the formula "for all"
would undoubtedly correspond to a correct interpretation of the Lord’s
intention expressed in the text. It is a dogma of faith that Christ
died on the Cross for all men and women (cf. John 11:52; 2 Corinthians
5,14-15; Titus 2,11; 1 John 2,2).

3. There are, however, many arguments in favour of a more precise rendering of the traditional formula pro multis:

a. The Synoptic Gospels (Mt 26,28; Mk 14,24) make specific reference to "many" (πολλων = pollôn)
for whom the Lord is offering the Sacrifice, and this wording has been
emphasized by some biblical scholars in connection with the words of
the prophet Isaiah (53, 11-12). It would have been entirely possible in
the Gospel texts to have said "for all" (for example, cf. Luke 12,41);
instead, the formula given in the institution narrative is "for many",
and the words have been faithfully translated thus in most modern
biblical versions.

b. The Roman Rite in Latin has always said pro multis and never pro omnibus in the consecration of the chalice.

c.
The anaphoras of the various Oriental Rites, whether in Greek, Syriac,
Armenian, the Slavic languages, etc., contain the verbal equivalent of
the Latin pro multis in their respective languages.

d. "For many" is a faithful translation of pro multis, whereas "for all" is rather an explanation of the sort that belongs properly to catechesis.

e.
The expression "for many", while remaining open to the inclusion of
each human person, is reflective also of the fact that this salvation
is not brought about in some mechanistic way, without one’s willing or
participation; rather, the believer is invited to accept in faith the
gift that is being offered and to receive the supernatural life that is
given to those who participate in this mystery, living it out in their
lives as well so as to be numbered among the "many" to whom the text
refers.

f. In line with the Instruction Liturgiam authenticam, effort should be made to be more faithful to the Latin texts in the typical editions.

The
Bishops’ Conferences of those countries where the formula "for all" or
its equivalent is currently in use are therefore requested to undertake
the necessary catechesis for the faithful on this matter in the next
one or two years to prepare them for the introduction of a precise
vernacular translation of the formula pro multis (e.g, "for
many", "per molti", etc.) in the next translation of the Roman Missal
that the Bishops and the Holy See will approve for use in their country.

With the expression of my high esteem and respect, I remain, Your Eminence/Your Excellency,

Devotedly Yours in Christ,

Francis Card. Arinze, Prefect