Author: Jimmy Akin

A few days ago I pointed out a striking Media Failregarding what Cardinal Schonborn said in a meeting with members of the Austrian press.

Fr. Joseph Fessio of Ignatius Press offers some helpful perspective on the story, which only illustrates the 285th Rule of Acquisition (CHT to those who sent links).

First, Fr. Fessio provides some clarity regarding the nature of the event (which the press had given conflicting accounts of):

Cardinal Schönborn, who like his mentor Pope Benedict is a model of openness and transparency, invited the editors of Austria’s dozen or so major newspapers to a meeting at his residence in Vienna. How many bishops can you name who have extended such an invitation to the press?

The journalists agreed that this would be an “off the record” meeting so that everyone could take part freely and frankly. Was this to impose silence on the press? To cover up once again the misdeeds of clerics? No, it was an attempt by Cardinal Schönborn to be as open as possible and to make himself available to answer any question that was asked. It was an attempt to help educate the press on matters that the press often finds difficult to grasp—such as the essential foundations of the hierarchical and sacramental structure of the Church, and the intricacies of moral theology.

That’s certainly a noble effort. As is so often lamented, the press just doesn’t “get” religion and their stories suffer as a result. It would be nice if editors had enough background to catch some of their reporters’ mistakes.

But unfortunately it seems that someone in the private meeting betrayed the Cardinal’s trust and published a garbled account of what happened. So what perspective does Fr. Fessio add regarding the specific claims concerning what Cardinal Schonborn said?

Let’s take them one by one.

1) What about the claim that we should move away from a morality based on duty and toward one based on happiness?

In my own prior piece, I took up this claim first—though it is not first in the article—because the solution to this one is easy to discern. Fr. Fessio offers the same basic interpretation, adding the technical terms for the philosophical positions in question:

First, he [the Cardinal] explained that it is important to avoid the errors of a Kantian moral philosophy, that is, one based on the categorical imperative of duty alone. Thomas Aquinas, inspired by Aristotle, elaborated what scholars would call a eudaimonistic rather than a deontological moral philosophy. That is, a moral philosophy not based on mere duty, but based on the natural desire of all men for happiness.

The Tablet, apparently drawing on other published sources, wrote: “Instead of a morality based on duty, we should work towards a morality based on happiness, [the cardinal] continued.” This is in itself accurate. But in the context of the Tablet article, it implied that the Church should change her teaching on homosexual relationships and divorced and re-married Catholics. (Both were mentioned immediately preceding the above quote.)

But what did Cardinal Schönborn mean by the reference to eudaimonism? He tried to explain it to the journalists. The Church attempts to lead men to their ultimate happiness, which is the vision of God in his essence. Moral norms are meant to do that; they have that as their end or purpose.

2) What about the claim that the Church ought to view long-term homosexual relationships as less bad than promiscuous ones?

Here Fr. Fessio introduces another concept from Catholic moral and pastoral theology, the difference between the law of gradualism and gradualism of law:

The [moral] norms themselves are unchanging. However, our approach to obeying them is gradual and our efforts are a mixture of success and failure. This means that while certain moral norms are absolute, that is, they hold in all circumstances without exception, our approach to obeying them may be halting and imperfect.

This is commonly referred to as “the law of gradualism” and is opposed to “the gradualism of the law,” as if the law itself were somehow variable.

This is the context for the cardinal’s saying: “We should give more consideration to the quality of homosexual relationships,” adding: “A stable relationship is certainly better than if someone chooses to be promiscuous.” This does not at all mean that the cardinal was advocating or even suggesting that the Church might change her teaching that homosexuality is a disorder and homosexual activity is always a grave evil. It is always grave, but there can be gradations of gravity—or, to call it by its true name, objective depravity.

Fr. Fessio may well be right that this is the context in which Cardinal Schonborn was speaking. He may have talked to the Cardinal and found that out first hand. From The Tablet’s piece, it’s not as easy as with the first point to discern that, but this may be due simply to the poor quality of The Tablet’s reporting of the incident.

If the Cardinal were thinking of the law of gradualism in this connection, I still don’t know that I’d think a stable homosexual relationship is better than homosexual promiscuity. As I mentioned in my previous post, few stable homosexual relationships seem to be exclusive—“fidelity” to one’s partner is given a different meaning in homosexual subculture—and even if such a relationship is both stable and exclusive, I don’t see why serial homosexual acts with one person are less objectively disordered than serial homosexual acts with multiple partners. Indeed, I can see an argument for it being worse in that the parties may be reinforced in the idea that what they are doing is okay because it more closely imitates marriage, while intrinsically failing to possess the reality of marriage.

However that may be, it seems to be a point that is arguable.

3) What about the claim that the Church should rethink the situation of divorced and remarried couples?

Here Fr. Fessio also invokes the law of gradualism, saying:

This is also the context of the Tablet’s statement: “The cardinal also said the Church needed to reconsider its view of re-married divorcees ‘as many people don’t even marry at all any longer’.” This “reconsideration” does not mean a change in the Church’s teaching that a valid marriage is indissoluble, and that someone who is validly married cannot remarry validly. It means that perhaps—but only perhaps, because this is an opinion that does not have the authority of a magisterial pronouncement—the Church should find new ways of leading the weak and confused to the difficult but liberating challenge of Christ’s demands.

Fr. Fessio again may well be right that this is the context in which Cardinal Schonborn was speaking, though it is hard from the lousy reporting of The Tablet to tell.

If all the Cardinal was suggesting is that the Church should try to find ways to help couples more perfectly conform their lives to Christ’s teachings regarding marriage then that would be entirely uncontroversial. Such a claim would make sense of The Tablet’s assertion that he referenced the fact many people don’t even marry any more. In that kind of world, the Church definitely needs to think about how better to help people understand and embrace the truth about marriage.

It still would be unclear how that explains the claim that the Church “need[s] to reconsider its view of re-married divorcees,” but this again may simply be shoddy reporting by The Tablet. It’s hard to tell.

4) What about the claim that the Roman Curia needs to be reformed?

Here Fr. Fessio says:

In the course of this “off the record” meeting, the cardinal also frankly expressed his belief that a “reform of the Roman Curia” was needed. It’s not as if nothing had been done. In fact, the cardinal recognizes that the transfer of all sexual abuse allegations against priests to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) in 2001 was already a major reform. He was referring to an attitude of secrecy and defensiveness, as well as an inability to comprehend the gravity of the scandal.

And that’s certainly a reasonable view to take!

Indeed, any organization composed of fallen human beings is prone to need reform, just as the fallen human beings themselves are prone to need ongoing conversion. The trick is making sure that efforts at reform and conversion achieve the intended goods. But the claim that the Roman Curia—or any other institution—could be improved is scarcely the stuff of scandal.

5) What about Cardinal Schonborn’s “attack” on Cardinal Sodano?

I just love what Fr. Fessio says regarding this:

Cardinal Schönborn did not “launch an attack,” as the Tablet states; he made a criticism. And to characterize the substance of the meeting with such a false and misleading headline is typical of the treatment the pope, Cardinal Schönborn and the Church have been receiving at the hands of a sensationalist press.

This is so true.

Criticisms and disagreements are not the same thing as attacks. Attacks may take the form of criticisms, and disagreements may lead to attacks, but they are not the same things. One can make criticisms and have disagreements without the metaphorical violence implied by “attack.”

Yet the mainstream media invariably phrases things in terms of Drama Verbs: launched, attacked, assailed, blasted, etc.

In fact, just today the Drudge Report carried the headline, “Pope blasts gay marriage as ‘insidious and dangerous’…”.

Here is the full text of the pontiff’s “blast”:

Initiatives aimed at protecting the essential and primary values of life, beginning at conception, and of the family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman, help to respond to some of today’s most insidious and dangerous threats to the common good. Such initiatives represent, alongside numerous other forms of commitment, essential elements in the building of the civilization of love.

Wow. Harsh, man! “Civilization of love.” Lots of blasting going on here!

Fr. Fessio concludes:

In sum, Cardinal Schönborn is not calling for any change in the Church’s teaching or discipline. He is calling for a deeper understanding of the struggle to live the high demands of the moral law. He is critical of an attitude of defensiveness and dismissiveness still present in the Roman Curia (not to mention many episcopal curias—but the meeting was not about that). And he is trying to be transparent and responsive to the press.

Here again, though, the adage is confirmed: No good deed goes unpunished.

Indeed.

What are your thoughts on this mainstream media mess?

The Internet has been abuzz with reports that Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, Austria has made some rather unusualstatements.

The one that has been getting the biggest headlines is that he criticized (explicitly or implicitly, accounts seem to differ) Cardinal Angelo Sodano, accusing him of blocking an investigation of Viennese Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer in the 1990s, when then-Cardinal Ratzinger wanted to initiate an investigation regarding allegations that Groer had committed sexual abuse.

The investigation wasn’t held, but Groer was soon replaced as the cardinal archbishop of Vienna by Schonborn himself. (Read about Groer here.)

He’s also allegedly said that the Roman Curia is in urgent need of reform and that Pope Benedict is gently working toward that goal.

While it’s certainly noteworthy for one cardinal to publicly criticize another—whether explicitly or implicitly—any remarks Schonborn may have made regarding Sodano or the need for curial reform pale in comparison to other remarks he is reported to have made.

According to The Tablet:

Questioned on the Church’s attitude to homosexuals, the cardinal said: “We should give more consideration to the quality of homosexual relationships,” adding: “A stable relationship is certainly better than if someone chooses to be promiscuous.”

The cardinal also said the Church needed to reconsider its view of re-married divorcees [receiving Communion without an annulment and convalidation] “as many people don’t even marry at all any longer”.

The primary thing to consider should not be the sin, but people’s striving to live according to the commandments, he said. Instead of a morality based on duty, we should work towards a morality based on happiness, he continued.

YIKES!!!

If the good Cardinal is being accurately represented by The Tablet then something is very definitely wrong. But before betting the farm on The Tablet’s accuracy, we should note a few things.

First, we’re dealing with story in translation, because the Cardinal’s remarks were presumably delivered in German, as we was apparently speaking to members of the Austrian press. We therefore have to watch out for possible translation issues.

Second, the facts of the whole situation are unclear. I haven’t been able yet to even determine the nature of the event in which Cardinal Schonborn made his remarks. Precisely what day did it happen? Accounts vary. Was it a press conference, an interview, or some kind of informal get-together? Accounts vary. Was it to Austrian press editors or reporters? Accounts vary. LifeSiteNews is even reporting that he made his remarks to The Tablet. (As The Tablet’s story makes clear, he was speaking to members of the Austrian media; The Tablet is a British publication that was merely doing an English-language story on the Austrian session.)

Third, and more importantly, we don’t have a transcript of the event—in German or English. I’ve done a bunch of searching online, including Austrian news services, and I haven’t been able to come up with a fuller account of his remarks. Without a transcript, we can’t tell what precisely he said and in what context. All we have to go on are press summaries and partial quotations, and we all know how reliable those can be.

Context and exact quotations are important. Consider, for example, the final claim attributed to the Cardinal, that “Instead of a morality based on duty, we should work towards a morality based on happiness, he continued.”

Sounds like situation ethics or utilitarianism, with the denial that any acts are intrinsically wrong, so that you can do whatever makes you happy, or whatever promotes the most happiness—a position firmly rejected in the Catechism and John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor—right?

Well, that may be the way it sounds based on how The Tablet reported it, but The Tablet didn’t actually quote him, so suppose Cardinal Schonborn actually said something like this: “Many of us were raised with the idea that God’s laws are imposed on us arbitrarily, from without, and that we need to focus on obeying them as a matter of duty alone, totally unconnected from the good that God’s laws are meant to bring us. In reality, God’s laws are not arbitrary or capricious. They are not imposed from without. Rather, they are based on human nature and are designed—as John Paul II said in Veritatis Splendor—to bring us happiness and human fulfillment. It is precisely by obeying God’s laws that we find true fulfillment and eternal happiness, and we need to work toward a situation where people realize this rather than just viewing God’s laws as a matter of sheer duty towards arbitrary commandments.”

Doesn’t sound nearly as bad, does it?

In fact, it sounds a lot like things John Paul II and Benedict XVI have said—and like what a cardinal in Austria might say given the disastrous pastoral situation in that country, which was the one that gave us the Wir Sind Kirche or “We Are Church” movement back in the 1990s. The country is so secularized and the situation so pastorally fragile that one could cut the cardinal archbishop of Vienna some slack for expressing himself in ways that sound different than how he might express himself in areas where adherence to the faith is more robust (just as Paul complimented the religiosity of the pagan Athenians at the Aeropagus as a prelude to preaching the gospel of Christ; Acts 17).

But how far does this kind of explanation go?

I don’t know. I can see how the “morality based on happiness” thing could be redeemed (potentially), but I can’t make heads or tails of his alleged comments concerning the divorce and remarried and whether they should be able to receive Communion. What does many people not marrying any more have to do with that? The sheer inexplicability of this makes me wonder if there is important stuff being deleted.

What about the statements that, “We should give more consideration to the quality of homosexual relationships,” and, “A stable relationship is certainly better than if someone chooses to be promiscuous.”

I don’t know what the first of these means. Certainly there are differences in the “quality” of “homosexual relationships.” A once-in-a-lifetime”, one-night-stand “relationship” is certainly different in quality than an ongoing many-thousands-of-illicit-sexual-acts-with-the-same-person relationship, but why does more consideration need to be given to this—and is this even what the Cardinal has in mind?

It would seem not, if the second assertion is an accurate, in-context quotation. I don’t know at all that a “stable [homosexual] relationship” is better than if someone “chooses to be [homosexually] promiscuous.”

I suppose that viewed exclusively in terms of HIV/AIDs transmission, a “stable” and exclusive homosexual relationship has less chance of spreading AIDs than a promiscuous one and is better in that limited, narrow sense. However, it seems that “stable” homosexual relationships are rarely exclusive.

And if HIV/AIDs is factored out of the picture, I don’t know if the statement is true from any perspective. It seems to me that a person who is promiscuous has a greater chance of burning out and realizing the emptiness and the intrinsic disorder of the homosexual lifestyle than a person who stably and peacefully cohabits with the same homosexual partner for many decades, creating the illusion of a loving—as opposed to an obviously exploitative—relationship.

Still, in the absence of a transcript—or an A/V recording of the remarks—who knows?

Thus far we’ve looked at how Cardinal Schonborn’s reported comments might be more reasonably explained. But it should by no means go without notice that Cardinal Schonborn has said and done things in the past that are, at a minimum, quite eye-opening (here is his Wikipedia page, with the understood limitations of such pages).

So I don’t want to give anybody a free pass regarding this story. There could be press misreporting, there could be misstatements or problematic statements by Cardinal Schonborn, or both.

The problem is: We can’t tell what the situation is.

Thus, for the moment, the whole things goes under the heading of “Media Fail.”

The media has not done its basic job of reporting the facts in a clear and reliable way.

It may have been true, back in the days of the dead-tree/broadcast-only press, that because of economic considerations the media was constrained by word count and air time and that it could only present us with summaries of what newsmakers said, forcing us to rely on their reporters’ fairness and accuracy in composing summaries—but those days are GONE.

There is no longer a rational constraint on the ability of news agencies to provide us with transcripts, or at least audio or visual recordings, of what newsmakers say—complete and thus in context.

And if the press isn’t doing its job in this respect, newsmakers should bring their own recording equipment.

It’s not like it’s hard. A bunch of iPhone apps exist for this purpose.

But with this story we have a Media Fail, with The Tablet and other news sources not linking to the original transcript/recording that we need.

What are your thoughts?

It’s always dramatic when, in a war, the capital city falls.

Jerusalem before Romans.

Rome before barbarians.

Constantinople before Turks.

Richmond before Yankees.

Paris before Germans (twice).

Berlin before the Allies.

Kabul . . . Baghdad . . . and countless others.

And now Washington has fallen.

In the culture war.

As of today, licenses for homosexual “marriages” are being issued in Washington, D.C.

You might not have known it—the media has been deliberately under-reporting the march of homosexual marriage across our nation—but the D.C. city council recently passed a measure allowing homosexual marriages to be performed in the district.

It could have been stopped by Congress, but it wasn’t—which tells you where Congress is on this issue.

And it followed the pattern by which capital cities usually fall.

They aren’t the first thing to go. Before the capital is taken, other areas fall first.

Take a look at the map above. Anything blue is bad. Those are the areas that have already partially or totally fallen.

MORE INFO ON THE MAP HERE

And in Washington the barbarians—now in control of the city—are rejoicing.

GET THE STORY

AND THE CHURCH IS BEING FORCED TO MAKE HARD CHOICES.

So.

What does the loss of the capital portend in this war?

Your thoughts . . . ?

Yes! No longer do pregnant moms have to make do with the services of ordinary doulas—women who assist them during or after the birth of a child and who aren’t midwives.

No! This is the twenty-first century, and now women—in New York City—have a brand new service available to them: the abortion doula.

These service-providers hang out on a web site called DoulaProject.Org, where they blog about their services and experiences. They have an e-mail list and a Facebook fan page, and their suggested reading section includes titles like, “The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden Story of the Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.”

Imagine that! It’s so much better now that we have Roe v. Wade and mothers can simply terminate their children rather than having to surrender them to adoption.

But let’s meet some of the abortion doulas themselves, shall we?

First, there’s E. Kale Edmiston, who describes herself as “a college-educated, white genderqueer,” who works as “a research scientist” and who is “a reproductive justice organizer.” She’s committed to her work as an abortion doula, as she has to take the train from her home in New Haven, Connecticut to her abortion gig in New York City. She says that she became “pro-choice because I grew up in the rural Midwest and saw how abstinence only education, coupled with limited access to abortion, exacerbated class disparities in my hometown.”

When she first became an abortion doula, she worried that she might not be able to relate to her clients, “who are mostly lower-income women of color and immigrants,” but fortunately . . .

What I found after my first few shifts of work was that I had worried way too much about saying the right thing. With most of my clients, I barely speak at all. In the waiting room, I sit next to her as I hold her hand. During the procedure, I try to be a solid presence- I plant my feet squarely next to the table and I face her; I try to make our dynamic her focus- whether its letting her squeeze my hand or looking her in the eye with absolute confidence that she is going to be ok. Afterward, we mostly sit in silence together, only really speaking if I sense that she wants to talk. This is a huge departure from my normal way of being in the world. I live mostly in my head; I over-think everything; my 9-5 job is working as a research scientist. Being an abortion doula is my one much-needed chance to be embodied emotion with another person.

Another abortion doula is “Lauren Mitchell, a petite redhead from Williamsburg” who is one of the founders of the Doula Project and who, according to the Meet the Doulas page on their site, “firmly believes in the inherent interdisciplinary connections that appear in the context of the body and throughout the spectrum of pregnancy.” She also is evidently a firmly-committed believer in the singular efficacy of bafflegab. Her bio notes, “When she’s not thinking about women’s health (which is rare), she writes. Her work can be found under the pseudonym L.A. Mitchell,” but the bio quickly qualifies this by saying, “(please note, she is not the L.A. Mitchell who writes sci-fi Christian romance novels).”

Whew! I am so relieved to hear that. (Not that I read sci-fi Christian romance novels, mind you.)

Another founder of the project is . . .

Miriam Perez, 25, an editor at Feministing and author of the blog Radical Doula, found that some people like herself felt isolated in their doula communities because they were queer, pro-choice or uninterested in making a full-time career of doula work. For Perez, it was also an issue of reconciling her reproductive rights work with being a doula.

And so the Doula Project was imagined when Perez met the Mitchell and the project’s co-founder, Mary Mahoney, at a meeting of The New York Birth Coalition in 2007. The idea of installing a doula unit at a local hospital or clinic became a passion project that Mitchell and Mahoney eventually carried to fruition (Perez had relocated to Washington, D.C.). And it continues to grow. Besides the partnership with the Manhattan hospital, the project appoints abortion doulas on an individual basis to women undergoing abortions at other hospitals and adoption doulas to Spence Chapin Adoption Agency. It’s also set to open a chapter in Atlanta.

There are 20 active abortion doulas in New York, mostly women under 30, and they work in shifts on a volunteer basis, serving up to 25 patients a week. To become doulas, they must complete 20 hours of clinical training, but the bulk of the job is intuitive — being present with the patient before and after the abortion, responding to her cues and providing necessary support. The intimacy of the experience can be wrenching. “What you get very used to is this weird mix of tragedy and relief and sex and death — this wild variety of emotions,” Mitchell says. “There’s always this interesting mix of remorse and relief.”

Not everybody is cut out to be an abortion doula, of course.

“A lot of people are interested in this politically, but don’t have the warmth,” Mitchell says. “You need more than just your conviction to do this.”

So it’s not enough, you see, to want to assist in homicide out of a sense of sheer ideological driven-ness. You have to have a human touch, too. Got it?

Elsewhere co-founder Mary Mahoney writes:

Three years ago I became a doula. Early in my training, I became part of a conversation that focused on providing doula support for all of a pregnant person’s choices, including abortion. Since that time, I have served more than 100 pregnant people as part of The Doula Project in New York City. The project was founded on the idea that pregnancy is a spectrum and that as female-bodied people we may experience any and all of the possibilities that spectrum contains in a lifetime. Within that, we should also have access to doula care for each of our pregnancies.

Presumably, most of the “pregnant persons” that Mahoney works with are also “female-bodied people” Probably most of them aren’t “genderqueer.” But such is the life of a “reproductive justice organizer.”

It’s interesting in how Sin-As-An-Ideology (as opposed to a weakness) causes language to be warped as a way of masking the hideous distortions it introduces.

File this one under Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show.

Your thoughts on this amazing new service?

That’s the message that British MP Ed Balls recently “reassured” the public Catholic schools would be forced to send to the children who attend them. According to the Guardian:

Ed Balls’s controversial amendment to the bill on sex education, allowing faith schools to opt out of new rules on teaching about issues such as homosexuality and contraception, was passed in the Commons yesterday by 268 votes to 177, giving the government a majority of 91.

The amendment, which was passed without debate due to a lack of time at the report stage, allows faith schools to teach personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) lessons “in a way that reflects the school’s religious character”, and has been condemned by teaching unions and the National Secular Society, which said the government had betrayed children in faith schools.

Balls insisted there was “no watering down”. “There’s no opt-out for any faith school from teaching the full, broad, balanced curriculum on sex education,” he said. “Catholic schools can say to their pupils that, as a religion, we believe contraception is wrong, but what they can’t do is say they are not going to teach about contraception.”

This is just jaw-dropping.

So . . . Catholic schools in England get to say that contraception is wrong, but they have to go ahead and teach kids how to procure and use it?

And that’s supposed to be allowing them to present the matter in a way “that reflects the school’s religious character.”

I wonder if Mr. Balls would view this as a legitimate way of acting if the shoe were on the other foot . . . e.g., “As a state-sponsored, secular school, we believe it is wrong to tell people what religion they should be. Now here are some very detailed instructions about how to become a Catholic.”

Of course, the “compromise” that this measure represents is just hypocritical window dressing.

I suppose that it’s possible that, after the next election in England, this could be reversed . . . but I don’t hold a lot of hope for that.

England seems hell-bent on literally being hell-bent in its social policy these days.

And, as always, anything bad that happens in England is a cautionary tale for what could happen in America if we aren’t active and vigorous in opposing it.

GET THE STORY.

MORE HERE.

The faithful are abandoning the Church in droves!

The number of priests is plummeting!

The number of seminarians is spiraling downward!

The number of nuns has dropped!

Right?

Well, the number of nuns has dropped, but the rest of that is just wrong.

I remember back in my Evangelical days, it was a well-accepted fact that the Catholic Church was on its last legs, with people abandoning it in droves, losing more and more ever year.

Funny how things change when you check the facts.

Certainly, there are problems in the Church (always have been; cf. Epistles of St. Paul). The Church did take a big hit after Vatican II. And we’re a long way from where we should be.

But we’re actually growing. Worldwide.

As is the number of priests and seminarians.

The evidence for this—or rather, a summary of it—is found in a work the Holy See produces each year called the Annuario Pontifico (Pontifical Yearbook). Among other things, it collects Catholic statistics from around the world. The newest edition of it came out last Saturday.

So what did it say?

Globally, an increase in the Catholic population of 19 million, for a total of 1,166,000,000 Catholics, or 17.4 percent of global population.

“Yes,” you say sagely, “but 19 million is just a raw number, and the number of Catholics could be going up and yet the Church could still be shrinking in terms of percent of global population.”

But it’s not. The previous year’s Annuario showed the Church at only 17.33 percent of global population, so the increase was not just an increase in raw numbers but in percentage of overall population as well. In other words: The Catholic population is growing faster than the world population.

“Good!” you say, ‘but surely the Catholic population is shrinking here in the U.S.”

Noooo. Though I don’t have numbers from the new edition of the Annuario, according to the 2009 Official Catholic Directory (the Kenedy directory) for the U.S., the number of Catholics in this country increased by a million over the course of the year, maintaining the overall Catholic percentage of the population here.

“What about priests and seminarians?”

They’re up, too, worldwide. According to the new Annuario there were an additional 4,000 priests worldwide between 2000 and 2008 (the most recent year of the Annuario’s data), for a total of 409,166 priests. And in just one year (2007-2008) the number of seminarians jumped by 1,000 (total: 117,024).

The number of consecrated religious, of both sexes, did drop from 2000 to 2008, hemorrhaging 40,000 and dropping the total to 739,067.

There are still lots of problems the Church has to face, but imminent extinction isn’t one of them.

GET THE STORY.

I was very pleased to see Matt Warner’s poston the fact that the Big Bang theory of cosmology was proposed by the Belgian priest, Fr. Georges Lemaitre (pictured).

This is a really cool thing, and not many people know it. It’s also a terrific way to show people that the Catholic Church isn’t anti-science. “Why, the father of Big Bang cosmology was a Catholic priest!”

Pope Pius XII was also very enthusiastic about the Big Bang (though he didn’t use the term) and its potential to show the coherence of the idea that the universe was created in time, which was widely denied by scientists previously. He gave a speech about this to the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences back in 1951.

Being an astronomy and apologetics buff, I find all of this absolutely jazzy.

But I’d also give a quick word of caution, because Catholics need to be a little careful using the Big Bang in apologetics.

One temptation is to identify the Big Bang not just as the moment of creation but specifically as the creation of light in Genesis 1. That’s problematic because Genesis does not portray the creation of light as the moment the world came into existence. It really doesn’t! Let’s look at the text:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

The earth already exists in a formless and empty state, with a deep of waters that has a surface, which the Spirit of God hovers over. Then light gets created.

So Genesis depicts the creation of light happening when the heavens and the earth and its waters already existed. At least that is how the text depicts it. You can argue that this isn’t to be taken literally, but that only makes the same point another way: We shouldn’t be too quick to identify the Big Bang with the creation of light in Genesis. We have to be careful about mapping Genesis onto modern cosmology.

But there is another thing we need to be careful about, which is identifying the Big Bang as the moment of creation.

It may well have been! I would love for us to find a way to prove that scientifically.

But we’re not there yet. Scientifically, there is still a lot about the Big Bang that is a mystery. We just don’t understand it. The evidence shows that it happened, but not why it happened. We have very little clue about that scientifically—and there may well be no scientific answer. It may be that God just did it, and did it in a way not susceptible to scientific study.

But that’s not the only option. There are others that cannot presently be ruled out on scientific grounds. For example, the visible universe we see today may have budded off of a larger universe that we cannot see, and the moment it budded off may have been the Big Bang. There are other options, too.

If one of those options is the case, it just means that God created the universe—from nothing—even farther back in time than we can currently see.

But new scientific instruments may allow us to go even further back. In fact, there are plans for a new set of scientific projects that may let us discern something about the state of the universe before the Big Bang (if there was one).

In his 1951 speech, while hailing the Big Bang, Pius XII also cautioned that “the facts established up to the present time are not an absolute proof of creation in time, as are the proofs drawn from metaphysics and revelation.”

So, while the idea of the Big Bang is consistent with the idea that the universe was created a finite time ago, and while the Big Bang may be that moment of creation, we need to be a little careful on that score.

MORE INFO HERE.

Every year a bunch of questions come up concerning Lent and the details of the laws governing it. Sometimes these rules are misstated or not clearly stated in various places on the web, so let’s look at what the Church’s official documents say regarding the practice of fast and abstinence on Ash Wednesday.

Before we do that, though, let me offer a few notes of caution:

1) The Church’s laws regarding fast and abstinence today are very mild. As such, they are minimums. One can go beyond what they require and observe a stricter form of penitence, though one is not legally required to do so.

2) There are ways of technically staying within the letter of the law while violating its spirit—e.g., avoiding meat but having a lavish seafood feast. These should be avoided. We want to keep both the letter and the spirit of the law.

3) The Church does not mean us to hurt ourselves by observing penitential practices, and there are a number of exceptions to the law of fast in particular. Anyone who has a medical condition that would conflict with fasting is not obliged to observe it. For example, someone with diabetes, someone who has been put on a special diet by a doctor, someone with acid reflux disease who needs to keep food in the stomach to avoid acid buildup.

Now let’s look at the law.

Ash Wednesday is a day of abstinence and fast. According to Pope Paul VI’s constitution Paenitemini:

III. 1. The law of abstinence forbids the use of meat, but not of eggs, the products of milk or condiments made of animal fat.

2. The law of fasting allows only one full meal a day, but does not prohibit taking some food in the morning and evening, observing—as far as quantity and quality are concerned—approved local custom.

Something to note about the law of fast is that while it acknowledges one full meal, it does not further specify the quantity of “some food” that can be consumed in the morning and evening. You sometime hear or read about “two smaller meals as long as they don’t add up to another full meal” but this is not what the law says. It just says “some food.” That is certainly something less than a full meal, but the Church does not intend people to scruple about precisely amounts. (Also, the “doesn’t add up to another full meal” rule is very difficult to apply since people eat meals of different sizes during the day and the “size” of a meal can be measured in more than one way; e.g., calories vs. volume.)

The law does provide that approved local custom can regulate the quantity and quality of this food, but the U.S. bishops have not established a complementary norm regulating this. Nor has any U.S. bishop bound his subjects in this respect, to my knowledge. (Your mileage may vary.)

Now: Who is bound to abstain and fast? Here the governing document is the 1983 Code of Canon Law:

Can.  1252 The law of abstinence binds those who have completed their fourteenth year. The law of fasting binds those who have attained their majority, until the beginning of their sixtieth year. Pastors of souls and parents are to ensure that even those who by reason of their age are not bound by the law of fasting and abstinence, are taught the true meaning of penance.

“Those who have completed their fourteenth year” mean those who have had their fourteenth birthday (your first year starts at birth and is completed with your first birthday). The obligation to abstain begins then and continues for the rest of one’s life.

Not so with the law of fasting. “Those who have attained their majority” refers to those who have had their eighteenth birthday, and “the beginning of their sixtieth year” occurs when one turns fifty-nine (the sixtieth year is the one preceding one’s sixtieth birthday, the same way the first year precedes the first birthday). The law of fast thus binds from one’s eighteenth birthday to one’s fifty-ninth—unless a medical condition intervenes.

What about those who are too young to be subject to these requirements? Here Paenitemini states:

As regards those of a lesser age, pastors of souls and parents should see to it with particular care that they are educated to a true sense of penitence.

As noted, these are legal minimums, and one certainly can do more.

Christianity Today has a web article noting (and quoting from) our recent discussion of John Paul II’s practice of self-mortification.

The piece—written by an Evangelical—is noteworthy in that it doesn’t just lash out against the concept. (No pun intended! Honest! Didn’t even notice that until later!) Indeed, it devotes a significant amount of attention to understanding the practice from a Catholic perspective.

Though ultimately the author sees self-flagellation as “misguided,” he acknowledges and recommends the practice of self-denial, including fasting.

(So . . . why is self-flagellation “misguided” whereas fasting is to be recommended? As long as you don’t permanently injure your body with either—and both can be done in ways that do permanent damage—why is one more misguided than the other?)

In any event, I’d like to kudos CT and the author of the piece—Collin Hansen—for seeking to explore the issue in a fair-minded way!

GET THE STORY.