A Short Primer on Fasting

SDG here (not Jimmy) with some brief thoughts on fasting.

In recent decades, many American Evangelicals have rediscovered the practice of fasting long practiced in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. In 1978 Richard J. Foster, a Protestant writer in the Quaker tradition, published Celebration of Discipline, a book on spiritual practices that introduced many Protestants to the ascetical and devotional heritage of the early monastic tradition, the mystical writings of John of the Cross, and other writers ranging from Brother Lawrence to Dostoyevski to Thomas Merton.

It was reading Foster as a young Evangelical that I first encountered the claim that fasting is a normative part of the Christian life: After all, Our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount said to his followers "When you fast," not "if"; and in Mark 2 Jesus declared that while His disciples could not fast while He, the Bridegroom, was among them, in the days when the Bridegroom would be taken away, "then they will fast."

Later, as I learned more about the early Fathers, I discovered the Didache, one of the earliest extrabiblical Christian texts (possibly as early as 70 AD), which records that Christians in the apostolic Church fasted twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays (in contradistinction to the practice of the "hypocrites," which was to fast Mondays and Thursdays).

Even so, for many Christians, fasting continues to be a somewhat exotic or unfamiliar practice, perhaps carrying a suspicious whiff of works-righteousness or something of the sort. Why do we fast? How can we explain it to others?

What follows below the fold is my attempt, originally written for and posted in a non-Catholic Christian forum, to brief sum up what I understand to be the basics regarding the place of fasting in Christian spirituality as a form of penance and asceticism. Additional thoughts, insights, corrections and comments are welcome.

Continue reading “A Short Primer on Fasting”

Socialized Medicine

John Stossel has a nice piece on socialized medicine as being advocated by Michael Moore and various others.

Here’s the nut of the piece:

One basic problem with nationalized health care is that it makes
medical services seem free. That pushes demand beyond supply.
Governments deal with that by limiting what’s available.

Yeah. Like anything else, medical care is a limited resource with alternative uses, making it a subject of economics. If you don’t have a monetary rationing system, you’re going to have some other rationing system, and in an egalitarian society you’re likely to get a time-based rationing system (meaning: waiting lists).

He’s got some real horror stories about England and Canada.

GET THE STORY.

One More Step into the Future of TV

NBC to begin free downloads of programs.

GET THE STORY.

As you’d expect for this kind of thing, there are commercials that can’t be easily skipped and (somewhat less expectedly) the files expire after a week.

Nevertheless, the industry continues to experiment with online delivery.

Paid, non-commercial, non-expiring is where it’s at as far as I’m concerned, but I understand free and commercial as one avenue to be explored.

Lying Liars and the Lies They Tell

A reader writes:

I don’t know if you saw Dr. Phil tonight, but he was doing a show about liars.  The first guy was incredible– he had absolutely no clue.  He impersonated all kinds of things — including a Roman Catholic priest!  He posed as a "visiting priest from Mexico," heard an engaged couple’s confessions, performed their wedding, and faked the mass.  I can’t tell you how flabbergasted I was.  It is obvious that this guy is completely unrepentant.

But, here is my question– Where does that leave the couple?  Obviously, they were not legally married by this fraud, the mass cannot possibly be valid, and he violated the sanctity of the confessional as well.

But what about the couple who believed in good faith that they were married?  The marriage can be convalidated, I guess.  But am I correct in assuming that there was no sin of fornication in this instance?  They did not know about this bogus "Fr. Fred" until they returned from their honeymoon.

I am so bowled over by the audacity and callousness of what he did to this couple and to other victims, my brain is fried.  He actually terms himself "a benevolent con man" and doesn’t think it was wrong, because he "worked and earned a living" by impersonating everything from a psychiatrist to a orchestral conductor.

Like I keep saying, I don’t get it.  I would appreciate your comments.

Reports of this type are, indeed, disturbing, and to do what this man did is clearly a grave sin against the people he deceived. If the gentleman was Catholic, he would be subject to multiple penalties under canon law.

In terms of where he left the couple that he purported to marry, you are correct that there is not a valid marriage between them and they would need to have that situation fixed in order to go on living together as husband and wife.

In terms of the moral character of their life as husband and wife prior to the point at which they learned the priest was a fake, they were acting in good conscience. This does not mean that they were not performing acts that were objectively immoral (having sexual relations with a person to whom you are not married) but the fact that they did not know that this was the case means that they are not culpable for engaging in those acts.

This illustrates why the man in question was not a "benevolent con man." He deceived a couple into engaging in objectively gravely immoral acts, and that is gravely sinful even if the couple was acting in good conscience.

Incidentally, this kind of thing–simulation of the sacraments by a fake priest–is precisely what makes me uncomfortable with the concept of movies like The Left Hand of God or TV shows like Father Murphy.

New CDF Document! New CDF Document! New CDF Document!

“The chances of an elderly person in this condition with septic shock surviving 24 to 48 hours are slim — about 10-20 percent, but that would be in an intensive care unit with very aggressive treatment,” said Dr. Gianni Angelini, a professor of cardiac surgery at Bristol University in England.
…
“If he is not going back to the hospital, they must realize there’s not much point in doing anything more heroic. It indicates they are preparing for him to die peacefully at the Vatican,” Angelini said.
“The chances of an elderly person in this condition with septic shock surviving 24 to 48 hours are slim — about 10-20 percent, but that would be in an intensive care unit with very aggressive treatment,” said Dr. Gianni Angelini, a professor of cardiac surgery at Bristol University in England.
…
“If he is not going back to the hospital, they must realize there’s not much point in doing anything more heroic. It indicates they are preparing for him to die peacefully at the Vatican,” Angelini said.

This has nothing to do with feeding and hydration. Why is it that those advocating we let people starve to death can not honestly recognize the difference that that the Church instructs us to recognize? The document clearly explains it.
God Bless,
Matt

I like new CDF documents!

They make me happy.

I have a whole book of them (mostly in Latin and other non-English languages, unfortunately), of all the CDF documents from Vatican II through the end of John Paul II’s reign.

I expect to be especially happy when the new bioethics document they’re working on comes out.

The current document gives us a preview of a topic they may take up in the forthcoming one. The current document consists of a pair of responses to dubia submitted regarding whether you can yank artificially administered food and water from someone in a "vegetative state."

And the answer is . . .

.

.

.

.

.

SPOILER SPACE

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.

.

.

.

No! You can’t starve someone to death just because they have impaired mental abilities or have lost consciousness!

So there!

Take that, Evil Medical Establishment!

There are, of course, cases when the administration of food or water actually harms the patient (because the body has lost the ability to assimilate them), but that’s a different situation. It isn’t the case that just because someone’s lost mental function that it’s okay to starve them to death.

HERE’S THE DOCUMENT. [Evil File Format: .pdf warning!]

Oddly, it was released with an unsigned commentary amplifying on the responses. That’s something the CDF has taken to doing in some cases lately, which is kinda weird since the commentary has ambiguous doctrinal status, but it seems to be a mode of operation the body is trying out. Such commentaries seem to have a status of "not official Church teaching, but trying to help explain official Church teaching and the reasons for it."

AND HERE’S SOME COMMENTARY ON THE RESPONSES AND THE COMMENTARY FROM THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC BIOETHICS CENTER.

P.S. Goat stealing is also immoral, but the new CDF document doesn’t go into that. Maybe a future one will.

SDG IN DC #1: The Great Elevator Escape

SDG here (not Jimmy) with a follow-up to the SDG Mystery Photo post.

As many readers correctly guessed/stated, the picture shows the Greydanus family standing in the White House Rose Garden, on the West Wing side.

Some readers may remember my mentioning in a combox awhile back that Suz and I are sort of related to someone who works on the President’s staff. A few months back we took off for a week for a four-day trip to DC, and we got a super-cool White House tour that included the West Wing.

I hope to post something on the White House visit next week — though it wasn’t the best story to come out of our DC trip, and that’s what this post is about.

I think I can safely say that what our four older kids will probably most remember of our DC trip is our dramatic escape from a stalled elevator at the Smithsonian Institution Air & Space Museum, which involved an access panel in the roof of the elevator, two ladders, and a climb through the elevator shaft.

Here’s how it happened. (Note: Photos below the fold! Click to see larger version!)

Continue reading “SDG IN DC #1: The Great Elevator Escape”

All The Action Is In The Back

Best_seat

If you listen to certain airline officials, they’ll tell you that that there is no particular seat on a modern air liner that is safer than another.

They’re making that up.

In reality, the seats toward the back of an air liner are safer than those at the front.

Keep that in mind the next time you travel by air . . . or just the next time you watch Lost.

I’ve got a number of airline journeys lined up the next few months.

I’ll be sitting in the back.

As every good Catholic knows, it’s where the action is.

GET THE STORY.

Remembering 9/11

The following is an e-mail I got today from Suzanne Greydanus (who gave me permission to post it and said it was okay to use her name, though I offered to omit it). Her brother, David, died earlier this year of sudden-onset leukemia and at a very young age. In the wake of 9/11 there was a lot of concern about rescue workers breathing in toxic dust from the collapse of the towers, but less attention devoted to the health effects it might have had on others who were there . . . like Suzanne’s brother.

Here’s what she wrote:

My brother was one of the first to get pictures up of the 9/11
attacks — he did it that day.  He got about a zillion hits on this
little slide show in the weeks following.  I believe that the
leukemia that killed him back in May was a result of him breathing in
the toxic dust that day.  So I think about 9/11 in a new way this year.

(Also, I look at all these other folks pictured here and I wonder
about their health too.)


http://westra.com/disaster/

Suz