Category: The Pope

No, not the car of the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger that you heard so much about after the election of Pope Benedict XVI. Apparently, the only car Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, ever owned is in litigation because a father and son are fighting over who it rightfully belongs to:

“The powder blue, four-door 1975 Ford Escort is expected to go for as much as $5 million but Jerome Rich says his son Jim has no right to sell it.

“Jim Rich obtained the keys to the car from the pontiff himself a decade ago after purchasing it through an Indiana auction house for $102,000, said lawyer Wade Joyner, who represents Jerome Rich.

“Jim Rich put the car on display under glass at his suburban Chicago restaurant but the establishment closed a year ago. He has said he now wants to auction the car on June 5 at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas to pay off debts owed his father.”

GET THE STORY.

Idea! Get a welder to split the car in half and then give it to the person who is willing to let the other have it.

On the twenty-fourth anniversary of the attempted assasination of Pope John Paul II, the late pope’s successor Pope Benedict XVI announced that he will be waiving the five-year waiting period required before a cause for canonization can be opened for John Paul II:

"The pope’s decision to authorize the start of the process for sainthood for Pope John Paul II overrode the usual five-year waiting period following the death of a candidate before beatification procedures can begin. The only other time the waiting period was waived was for Mother Teresa. The process was begun a year after her death.

"Benedict made the announcement in Latin during a meeting at the Basilica of St. John Lateran with the Roman clergy. Friday is the anniversary of an 1981 assassination attempt on John Paul in St. Peter’s Square at the hands of a Turkish gunman.

[…]

"Benedict’s announcement drew a standing ovation from the Roman priests.

[…]

"Benedict, who had been seated, stood up to join the clergy in applauding the major tribute to his predecessor."

GET THE STORY.

On the twenty-fourth anniversary of the attempted assasination of Pope John Paul II, the late pope’s successor Pope Benedict XVI announced that he will be waiving the five-year waiting period required before a cause for canonization can be opened for John Paul II:

"The pope’s decision to authorize the start of the process for sainthood for Pope John Paul II overrode the usual five-year waiting period following the death of a candidate before beatification procedures can begin. The only other time the waiting period was waived was for Mother Teresa. The process was begun a year after her death.

"Benedict made the announcement in Latin during a meeting at the Basilica of St. John Lateran with the Roman clergy. Friday is the anniversary of an 1981 assassination attempt on John Paul in St. Peter’s Square at the hands of a Turkish gunman.

[…]

"Benedict’s announcement drew a standing ovation from the Roman priests.

[…]

"Benedict, who had been seated, stood up to join the clergy in applauding the major tribute to his predecessor."

GET THE STORY.

May 13.

1981.

The day the pope was shot.

This is a picture that was taken just after the horrible incident.

But it was an event that rehaped the future course of the 20th century.

GET THE STORY HERE.

AND HERE.

Were you wondering who is the hottest collectible personality in trading cards? Probably not, but you might be intrigued to learn that it is not Kobe Bryant or Johnny Damon, but a man who was a soccer player in his youth but found fame in another calling. Karol Wojtyla. Yep. A limited-edition trading card of Pope John Paul II recently sold for $8,100.

"Beckett Media, whose pricing guides are the acknowledged arbiters of value for collectible trading cards, said on Tuesday a limited-edition Pope John Paul II from the 2005 World Treasures line of card maker Topps has sold for $8,100.

"The Topps series includes other historical figures like Czar Paul I and King Frederick the Great, though their cards are trading for around $3,000. All the cards in the series have etchings of the figures’ autographs.

"In comparison, Beckett said, regular cards depicting Barry Bonds, who is contending for baseball’s all-time home run record, have never sold for more than $1,200."

Somehow, I think John Paul would be touched … and highly amused.

GET THE STORY.

Some years ago I read a children’s biography of St. Dominic (1170-1221) that included mention of a dream that Dominic was said to have been granted by God. In the weeks since Pope Benedict’s election, I have been reminded of the story of that dream and have been pondering it again.

In his dream, Dominic saw Jesus, furious and ready to hurl spears toward the earth as punishment for the wickedness of mankind that he was witnessing. The Blessed Virgin approached Jesus and begged him to have mercy on mankind. “My Son,” she said, “I have two witnesses who will convert them.” Jesus glanced at her and asked, “Who are they?” She replied, “Love and truth,” and brought forward two men. Dominic recognized one to be him. The other man he did not recognize until he later met St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226). St. Francis of Assisi was the embodiment of love; St. Dominic was the embodiment of truth.

Francis, known for his love of all mankind and for all creation, is beloved throughout the world, even by non-Catholics. And yet he is often misunderstood. The popular image of him is of a pantheistic nature-devotee, whose idea of love might be summed up as “Don’t worry, be happy.” Such an image couldn’t be further from the truth. Francis, often called the Catholic Man, was highly devoted to the Eucharist, to the Blessed Virgin, and the love he displayed for his neighbor was grounded upon his devotion to God (not the other way around). He was the Catholic Man in the universal sense because his love for all mankind was all-encompassing, but he was also the Catholic Man in the particular sense. He was an exemplary Catholic.

Dominic, when remembered today, is usually seen as a grim figure who fought heretics, was involved in the Inquisition, and who founded an order that would give the world the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada (1420-1498). Generally forgotten is a love for the poor that compelled him to sell his own hand-annotated books, his willingness to stay up all night talking to a heretic to show the heretic through reason the error of his ways, his love for the Blessed Virgin that inspired his order to promote the rosary in his name.

In other words, Francis and Dominic are often seen as caricatures of their true selves, molded to fit the biases of the individual.

What does this have to do with Pope Benedict’s election? It occurs to me that we are seeing a similar phenomenon with John Paul II and Benedict XVI. John Paul, especially in the halcyon glow surrounding his eulogies, is popularly thought of in much the same way as Francis of Assisi. John Paul reached out to men and women around the world, emphasizing to them the beauty and goodness of love and brotherhood. Indeed, his motto was a declaration of love, Totus tuus (“Totally yours”). But John Paul also firmly upheld Catholic doctrine, especially on matters of life and death and on the dignity of the human person.

Benedict, on the other hand, is seen as the spiritual incarnation of Dominic; an inquisitor, ready to crack down on the heretics. After all, his motto is an assertion of truth, Cooperatores veritatis (“Fellow workers in the truth”). We keep having to be reminded by those who know him personally that Benedict is a gentle person, a good listener, genuinely interested in the ideas of others. They report that his love of his priesthood is profound and his reverence during celebrations of the liturgy transparent.

Although, to the best of my knowledge, Dominic’s dream is a pious legend attached to the saint, I think it may contain something we should consider. If Dominic’s time was in such sad shape that Love and Truth needed embodiment to convert humanity, how much more desperate is our own time?

Perhaps John Paul’s mission was, in part, to gather mankind around the See of Peter – much as Jesus gathered a large crowd of followers – so that they may listen to truth as expounded by Benedict. Indeed, the truth Benedict expounds will likely be the hard sayings of the faith; and, as Jesus had to confront his apostles after the large crowds left him in disgust over the doctrine of the Eucharist, Benedict may also be forced to ask of us Christ’s question “Will you also go away?” (cf. John 6:67).

How appropriate it then becomes when we remember that this papal transition has taken place in the Year of the Eucharist.

I thought, while we were talking about the Aramaic underlying Matthew 16:18 ("You are Peter . . . ") that I’d show you this verse  in the standard Armaic translation of the New Testament.

Many Catholics have heard that "kepha" is used in both places in this verse ("You are Peter \[kepha] and on this rock [kepha] I will build my Church . . . "), but few have seen it with their own eyes.

So I scanned it and here ’tis:

The standard Aramaic translation of the New Testament is known as the Pshitta or Peshitta (pronounce it the former way, not the latter). It is not generally regarded as an Aramaic original to the New Testament, but it is based on very early Aramaic versions that were utilized to produce a standard edition and, indeed, it uses kepha in both slots in this verse.

Because of the unfamiliarity of the scrip for most folks (NOTE: It’s read right-to-left instead of left-to-right), I’ve circled the word kepha both times it appears in the text so folks can tell that it does appear twice.

I thought, while we were talking about the Aramaic underlying Matthew 16:18 ("You are Peter . . . ") that I’d show you this verse  in the standard Armaic translation of the New Testament.

Many Catholics have heard that "kepha" is used in both places in this verse ("You are Peter \[kepha] and on this rock [kepha] I will build my Church . . . "), but few have seen it with their own eyes.

So I scanned it and here ’tis:

The standard Aramaic translation of the New Testament is known as the Pshitta or Peshitta (pronounce it the former way, not the latter). It is not generally regarded as an Aramaic original to the New Testament, but it is based on very early Aramaic versions that were utilized to produce a standard edition and, indeed, it uses kepha in both slots in this verse.

Because of the unfamiliarity of the scrip for most folks (NOTE: It’s read right-to-left instead of left-to-right), I’ve circled the word kepha both times it appears in the text so folks can tell that it does appear twice.

A reader writes:

Do you know of a place I can go to get an authoritative definition of the Aramaic word Kepha (Or however you would transliterate Simon Peter’s Aramaic name meaning rock). I am in an online dialogue with some folks who say that Kepha in Aramaic means hollow rock and therefore would not be a suitable foundation for a Church. Therefore, Jesus could not have said, "You are Kepha and upon this Kepha I build my Church."

This website seems to agree with the "hollow rock" definition.

http://www.htmlbible.com/sacrednamebiblecom/kjvstrongs/FRMSTRHEB37.htm

Okay, two problems:

1. The page you reference is an online version of Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary. Now the thing about Strong’s is, it’s not a scholarly dictionary. It gives brief glosses on words and is based, frankly, on outdated scholarship and has a lot of flaws. I really wish people would stop trying to appealing to it in apologetic controversies, because it’s simply too unreliable to try to get precise nuances out of. Unfortunately, it’s old enough (outdated scholarship, remember?) that it’s a public domain text and so it’s all over the Internet and people cite it constantly.
2. You’ll note that the word in question (#3710) does not have "(Aramaic)" at the front of the definition (compare it, for example, to #3706). That tells you that the dictionary is attempting to offer a definition for the Hebrew word keph. Now the thing is: You can’t rely on a definition of a Hebrew word to tell you what an Aramaic word means. Hebrew and Aramaic may be cognate language, like English and German are, but you can’t use words in one language as a sure guide to the meaning of similar-sounding words in the other. The German word bitte sounds like the English word bitter (especially in a non-rhotic English accent that drops the final /r/), but they mean very different things. (Bitte means "please," not "acrid tasting.") In the same way, you can’t appeal to the definition of a Hebrew word as a reliable method of determining the meaning of an Aramaic term. So even assuming Strong’s is right on the meaning of the Hebrew keph, that can’t be used to settle arguments about the meaning of the Aramaic kepha.

The reader continues:

I have seen a translation of the bible into Aramaic where they used Kepha for Simon’s new name AND for the rock that Jesus builds His Church, but I was hoping to find some sort of Aramaic Dictionary that I can easily obtain that has a definition closer to "big rock".

I can help you here, but I have a caution: I’d drop the "big rock"/"small rock" thing. While this distinction existed in at least one dialect of classical Greek several centuries before the time of Christ, the distinction was gone by the first century. It is also exceedingly hard to recover something like size distinctions at this remote date in history since we can’t survey a swath of native speakers to ask them to clarify their usage. From what we can tell now, petros, petra, and kepha all just meant "rock" in the first century, and it isn’t productive to try to argue size differences one way or the other.

That being said, the most exhaustive Aramaic-English dictionary that is commonly in use today is A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (Syriac is a major Aramaic dialect) by R. Payne Smith, which was edited down from a longer work (Thesaurus Syriacus) by his daughter, J. Payne Smith.

So. . . . Here’s the definition for kepha in Smith:

Now, you may not be familiar with the Aramaic script that the dictionary uses, but you should be able to see that the basic meanings of the term are "a stone, rock."

It is also used elliptically (i.e., as shorthand) for "a stone vessel, column, idol, a precious stone." This means, for example, that speakers might be referring to a stone cup (a kind of vessel) and say, "Hand me that stone."

From there the entry starts to give examples of the term used in phrases ("he was stoned") and compound constructions ("a millstone").

As you can see, though, in no case is a definition anywhere close to "hollow rock" given, either for the term itself or for anything else the entry covers.

The idea that kepha means "hollow rock" is simply bogus.

A reader writes:

I thought I had seen it all regarding arguments against Petrine Primacy until a day or so ago. In arguing the case that Peter’s name change was not significant, a Protestant gent asserted that since his text says that Simon ‘was surnamed’ Peter, that Jesus did not give the Apostle a new name but rather just decided to call him by his already given surname.

Is there evidence that first century Jews used surnames in the sense we do today? I find it difficult to fathom that Jesus would decide that he would do something as petty as calling someone by a different name for the mere reason that He did not like the original name. Thanks.

The guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. First century Palestinan Jewish nomenclature didn’t work that way. They didn’t have family names the way we do, they had patronyms–which is to say, they were distinguished from others of the same personal name by an appellation designating them as the son (or daughter) of their father.

Thus Peter’s birth name was Simon bar-Jonah, or "Simon the son of John," and Jesus bestowed the name Peter on him, as we see in John 1:42:

He [Andrew] brought him [Simon] to Jesus. Jesus looked at him, and said, "So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas" (which means Peter).

There also is no history of anybody prior to Peter having kepha (the original Aramaic form of the name) as a name, either as a personal name or as a surname (since they didn’t have surnames in first century Palestinian Jewish culture).

This custom of using patronyms to distinguish indiviuals with the same personal name is still used in many places in the world today, including other Middle Eastern cultures.

MORE INFO ON JEWISH NOMENCLATURE.

MORE INFO ON PATRONYMS.