November 2005 – Page 7

I’m Baaaaaaack!

Got back from the 4th annual Catholic Answers cruise yesterday.

It was a long, rewarding, and exhausting trip. Things went very well. We were particularly pleased with how well the personal interaction with and among the attendees went this year.

It was a special treat to meet a couple of folks on the cruise who identified themselves as readers of the blog!

Armistice Day, which honors the official end of World War I on November 11, 1918, falls on the feast of St. Martin of Tours, a pagan soldier who gave up his military career upon becoming a Christian. (Martin Luther, whose birthday was November 10, was baptized on November 11 and given the name of the saint whose feast fell on his baptismal day.) After World War II, the name of Armistice Day was changed to Veterans Day in the United States.

In honor of Veterans Day, I recommend checking out The Legacy Project, a project that seeks to preserve the wartime letters of America’s service personnel. You can listen to readings of a few of the letters, which are on display at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City.

One of my favorite letters in the collection (Warning: evil .pdf format) was written in July 1969 by a soldier named Dean Allen, a first lieutenant, to his wife Joyce. The letter ended this way:

"Some letter, huh! I don’t know if I have one sentence in the whole thing. I just started writing. Don’t worry about what I have said[,] these are just things I think about sometimes. I am so healthy I can’t get a day out of the field and you know I’m to [sic] damn mean to die. Now I better close for now & try to catch a few z’s. It will be another long night. Sorry I haven’t written more but the weather is against me. You can’t write out here when it rains hour after hour. I love you with all my heart. All my love always, Dean."

SEE THE DOCUMENT.

The museum reports that four days after writing this letter, Lt. Allen stepped on a land mine. Three days after that, Lt. Dean Allen, a multiply-decorated soldier, died.

Eternal rest grant to all our deceased veterans and may perpetual light shine upon them through Christ our Lord.

I Like Koalas!

Who doesn’t?

I mean, they’re furry and slow moving and cute.

What’s not to like?

Well, maybe the fact that they have razor sharp claws and that the males can’t stand each other and will battle and scar each other with their razor sharp claws, but those are minor things.

They’re still cute!

This is something I recognized even as a child.

In fact, the VERY FIRST THING THAT I BOUGHT WITH MY OWN MONEY was a toy koala.

A local drugstore had stuffed toys, and one was a really cute koala bear. It was made of really soft animal fur (brown rabbit, I think), and it had flexible black plastic claws, and brown plastic eyes, and when I was five years old I set my heart on it.

My parents, who were encouraging me to learn the use of money, allowed me to save up for it and do chores to earn more money, and so the little toy koala was the first thing I ever bought! YEE-HAW!

I’m afraid that I’ve lost track of it now, but I’m sure it’s still at my parents’ house, tucked away in a closet, and I’ll stumble across it again someday and take it out and let the memories come back.

The memory of the toy koala itself came back when I stumbled across

THIS ARTICLE ABOUT REAL KOALAS.

Really interesting stuff!

Koalas are most unique creatures.

As many people know, they live entirely on eucalyptus leaves (y’know, those sap trees that drip sap all over your car if you park under them in California?).

Eucalyptus leaves are poisonous to almost all creatures–but not to koalas!

Except when they are.

The article doesn’t mention this, but during a certain part of the eucalyptus tree’s annual cycle, they become so toxic that even koalas can’t eat them, at which point the little critters have to fast until the poison level in the trees goes down again.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS FASCINATING CREATURE OF GOD.

Friday Caption Contest

Starting captions:

Other than a bit of expected Hollywood license with respect to the little-elaborated Narnian adulthoods of Peter, Susan and Lucy, the film sticks quite close to the original story.
One of these things is not like the others…
The Lion, the Action Hero and the Warrior Princesses

Blue Meanies?

There’s a new biography of the Beatles–a THOUSAND PAGE BIOGRAPHY–and in it the Fab Four don’t come across as all that "Fab."

Except maybe for Ringo.

According to Time Magazine’s reviewer:

The Fab Four hated the silly, lovable mop-top image they created, and
on that score alone they would probably love Spitz’s book. He marshals
a staggering mass of research in support of the conclusion, broadly
speaking, that Lennon was a drug-addled, attention-hungry rageoholic
who picked fights and cheated on his wife; Paul McCartney was a smarmy,
manipulative charmer; and George Harrison was dour and sour. Before you
lose faith entirely, it turns out Ringo really was just a lovable
goofball.

Well, at least there was one lovable goofball!

Or maybe more than one.

I haven’t read the book–or studied their lives in detail–so I really can’t say.

GET THE STORY.

Growing Up Potter

What’s it like to grow up as Harry Potter?

I don’ t know. And in fact nobody knows since Harry Potter is a fictional character.

But one kid has an unusual insight on the matter–Daniel Radcliffe–the kid who plays Harry Potter in the movies.

Time Magazine has a story about him and the other kids playing in the Potter films.

Reading the article makes for an interesting insight into the world of child actors.

The fact that the Harry Potter movies are so successful has kept the kids locked in an unusual sociological bubble for years, with years yet to go (apparently–unless they re-cast the parts).

Personally, I’m disturbed by some of the things child actors go through. I often see scenes in movies and TV shows where I find myself thinking, "I really hope they got the child actor off the set before they filmed what’s going on in this shot"–or realizing that they clearly DIDN’T.

I couldn’t imagine allowing a child of mine to grow up in the entertainment biz, and especially not becoming a central player in a franchise like Harry Potter. I’d want my kids to have much more normal experiences growing up. Even with precautions taken (like only letting the kids film for four hours a day), I’m afraid that the experience would fundamentally warp them as adults. After all, former child stars don’t have a very successful track record as a whole.

GET THE STORY.

Happy Birthday, Martin Luther!

In case you forgot to circle the date on your calendar, today is the 522nd birthday of Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation — or the Protestant Revolt, depending on your point of view — and author of 95 theses that he nailed to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Had he been contemplating how best to disseminate his theses today, perhaps he would have blogged them, a la the Internet Monk.

If you’re trying to think of the perfect gift for Luther, might I suggest obtaining a partial or plenary indulgence for his soul? Wherever Luther is now, I’m sure he now knows the value of an indulgence.

MYTHS ABOUT INDULGENCES.

PRIMER ON INDULGENCES.

Vatican And The iGod Generation

Available now for an iPod near you: Vatican documents, which can be downloaded to your very own portable MP3 player.

"In the beginning there was… Madonna. Now you can also download Pope Benedict XVI into your iPod.

"Inspired by Vatican documents that called on Church officials to exploit the full potentials of the computer age, the Holy See’s official broadcaster, Vatican Radio, is ‘podcasting’ audio content to any of the world’s one billion plus Catholics who own a portable MP3 player.

"The service, launched with little fanfare during the summer, has proved unexpectedly popular.

"’It has been a success right from the start,’ says Jean-Charles Putzolu of the Vatican Radio’s web team."

GET THE STORY.

I’m no techno-geek but I did a bit of Internet fishing to try to find the Vatican’s podcast service. If you are a techno-geek and if you want to start listening to Vatican podcasts, I think you need to go to the site of Vatican Radio.

Growing Protestant Devotion To Mary

Catholic News Agency reports a surge in Marian devotion among British Protestants:

"Walsingham is home to two Marian shrines — one Catholic and the other Anglican — located at opposite sides of the town.

[…]

"According to the New York Times, the number of Protestant pilgrims visiting the Marian shrine and staying overnight has risen since 1999, from 10,000 to 12,000.

"Protestant worshipers in Walsingham often belong to the Anglo-Catholic tradition, which accords greater reverence to the Virgin Mary than other Protestant sects, and uses the bells and incense like in the Roman Catholic liturgy.

"The shrines also appeal to other Christians, and the Orthodox and Methodist churches in the town are indicative of this."

GET THE STORY.

This Rock ran an article a few years back on how one Catholic teacher presented the reasonableness of Marian devotion to Protestant students.

GET THE ARTICLE.

Can A Priest Force You To Break The Seal On Yourself?

A reader writes:

My neighbor is areligious yet very curious: Can a priest make
absolution conditional when a crime (e.g., murder, child abuse) is
being confessed? I’m assuming real sorrow for the sin(s) here. The
CCC says only that there are no exceptions to the seal. Thank you for
your time and attention.

A priest cannot make his absolution conditional on you going and confessing a crime–i.e., he can’t assign it as a penance that you go tell the police (or anyone else) what you did.

If he could do this then the seal of the sacrament would be meaningless as any priest could force any penitent to publicly disclose what he did.

This means that some crimes that come to light in the confessional will go undiscovered and unpunished by civil law, but the Church has judged it better to encourage the faithful to confess their sins by giving them an absolute assurance of confidentiality rather than leaving them to wonder whether the priest will disclose what they have done or–just as bad–force them to do so themselves.

The Code of Canon Law provides:

Can. 983 §1. The sacramental seal is inviolable;
therefore it is absolutely forbidden for a confessor to betray in any way a
penitent in words or in any manner and for any reason.

Can. 984 §1. A confessor is prohibited completely
from using knowledge acquired from confession to the detriment of the penitent
even when any danger of revelation is excluded.

Though Canon 983 doesn’t address specifically the issue of forcing a penitent to confess to the police, it does cover this case implicitly by stressing the inviolability of the seal and forbidding the priest to betray the penitent "in any manner" (including forcing the penitent to betray himself) and "for any reason" (even reporting a grave crime against the civil law).

Indeed, as canon 984 states, the confessor is prohibited from using what he learns in confession to in any way harm the penitent even if he could do so without breaking the seal.

Breaking the seal of confession is one of the gravest crimes that exists in ecclesiastical law. Any priest (or anyone else bound by the seal, such as a translator or an eavesdropper) who violates the seal is automatically excommunicated and this excommunication is reserved to the Holy See.

(NOTE CAUSE FOLKS WILL WONDER: The penitent himself is not bound by the seal. They’re your sins; you can tell them to anyone you want. But if you tell them to a priest in confession then the priest–and anyone else who hears them as you are confessing–cannot disclose them.)