Jimmy Akin – Page 428

Timing Rumors

Catholic News Agency is reporting:

Sources close to the Vatican have told Catholic News Agency that the Motu Propio by which Pope Benedict XVI would allow for the universal use of the Missal of St. Pius V may be published after Christmas, while the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist could come in mid-January 2007.

MORE . . .

The Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, according to the same sources, has already been finished by Pope Benedict XVI and is being translated into the different languages in which it will be presented.

The document, which sources say will be issued after January 15, reaffirms the Church’s commitment to a celibate priesthood, encourages the use of Latin in liturgical celebrations, and even requests that seminarians learn the language as part of their formation.

It will also promote the recovery of Gregorian chant and sacred polyphonic music as a replacement to modern music, which would result in a gradual elimination of musical instruments that are “inappropriate” for the solemnity and reverence of the Eucharistic celebration.

GET THE STORY.

My General Christmas Present

Like everybody, when I give Christmas presents, I try to match the present to the person to whom I am giving it.

This ain’t always easy.

It’s often hard to figure out something (a) that the person would like and (b) that the person doesn’t already have.

Sometimes you have a promising candidate, but you’re not sure, and so you just have to take your best guess and accept the risk that they won’t like it or that they already have it.

But if you have a large number of people that you are buying presents for–family, friends, co-workers–then the process of finding individualized presents for everyone can be extraordinarily difficult.

One solution in recent years has been getting gift certificates/gift cards for people. Those get you around the problems mentioned above, since the person can pick for himself what he’d like, and they’re useful. This year I asked my own family for gift certificates from a particular online service so that they wouldn’t be burdened with figuring out something that I would like and that I didn’t already have.

But there can also be a desire to give something that is specific, and I have that desire myself. One of the ways I’ve tried to do this in recent years is by figuring out a general Christmas present that I can give people if I don’t already have something in mind for them.

I have several criteria that I look for in a general Christmas present. I want them to enjoy it, so I look for something that I myself have really enjoyed. I also don’t want them to already have it, so I generally try to pick something that has just come out.

A few years ago, when The Incredibles had just come out on DVD, that was my general Christmas gift. That was something I really liked; it was wholesome enough that almost everyone would enjoy it; and it was brand new.

This year my general Christmas present is occasioned by the election of His Most Awesomeness B16. It’s a new book that I really enjoy and appreciate.

It’s Robert Moynihan’s Let God’s Light Shine Forth: The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI.

The first third of the book is devoted to Joseph Ratzinger’s life story, and it hits the major events of it all the way up to his election as pope. It also includes the author’s personal reminisences of Pre-16 (Robert Moynihan is the editor of the magazine Inside the Vatican, and so he knew him before his election).

The last two thirds of the book are brief passages from a variety of writings by Cardinal Ratzinger that express his views on different topics. It’s divided into three sections: His Faith, Today’s World, and The Church Pilgrim.

The first covers Pre-16’s thoughts on things such as God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, Mary, Judaism, the Church, and the Sacraments.

The second covers things like Morality, Marriage and Family Life, Social Justice, Politics, Culture and the Arts, Modernity, Ecumenism and Other Religions, Bioethics, and the Challenges of the Future.

The third covers things like Loneliness, Suffering, Sin, Death, Faith, Hope, Love, Holiness, Eternal Life, and True Joy.

The final part of the book includes B16’s first words, his first message to the world, and his first homily as pope.

All in all, it is a book that I myself am really enjoying–so much so that I decided before I’d even finished it to make it my present for Catholic friends this year unless I already had something distinctive in mind for them.

You might consider it as well–or consider it for yourself.

B16 On Christmas Presents

A while back ago, SDG did a post in which he quoted Pre-16 on Christmas in which the predestined-to-be-pontiff took something other than the usual dour, scolding tone that priests and preachers are expected to take toward the way that Christmas is celebrated.

To be sure, he did say that "The hectic commercialism is repugnant to us, and rightly so," but he went on to say, "And yet, underneath it all, does it not originate in the notion of giving and thus the inner urgency of love, with its compulsion to share, to give of oneself to the other? And does not the notion of giving transport us directly into the core of the mystery that is Christmas?"

He went on to reflect more concretely on the custom of giving Christmas presents, saying:

In the offertory prayer of the Christmas Vigil liturgy, we ask God for the grace to receive with joy his everlasting gifts that come to us in the celebration of Christ’s birth. Thus the concept of gift-giving is squarely anchored in this liturgy of the Church and, at the same time, we are made aware of the primal mode of all giving at Christmas: that God, on this holy night, desired to make himself into a gift to mankind, that he turned himself over to us.

The one genuine Christmas gift to mankind, to history, to each one of us, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. Even those who do not believe him to be God incarnate will have to admit that he has enriched and gifted the inner existence of generations upon generations.

This year Post-Pre-16, which is to say, B16 himself, took up this theme again in an address to college students , telling them:

"Christmas gifts remind us of the most perfect gift that the Son of God gave us of himself in the Incarnation,” Pope Benedict told the youth. “Christmas is the day in which God has given himself to human persons and this gift is made perfect, so to speak, in the Eucharist." (SOURCE.)

I don’t have the full text of his address, but I hope it appears on the web soon, because I’d like to read more about what he has to say on this subject.

In former days, I myself expected pastors to take the scolding attitude toward the commercialization of Christmas, not that this ever stopped me from giving Christmas presents to others.

To this day any talk that suggests a horizontalization of Christmas–that good will among men is the "real meaning" of Christmas–turns my stomach, and I am no fan of the endless holiday movies and TV shows that make this point, including remakes of Charles Dickens’ secular fairy-tale A Christmas Carol.

The real meaning of Christmas is Christ, and to convey the idea that it is anything else, whether commercialistic or sentimentalistic is to confuse the epiphenomena for the Phenomenon that occasions them.

Yet I find myself agreeing with B16, too.

It’s natural to give gifts as part of a celebration. When the Jewish people were saved from Haman’s plot against them in the book of Esther, they exchanged presents of food with each other (9:22). There’s a certain naturalness to that, particularly in an age when food was not as cheap and easily available as it is today. But even apart from the biblical precedent, the exchange of gifts as a sign of joy is a human universal.

There is a familiar pattern that shows up across cultures whenever something is being celebrated. The details may vary, and not every element may be present in each celebration or in each culture, but in the main, whenever humans celebrate something you’re going to find a familiar cluster: eating, drinking, singing, dancing, gift-giving, and decorating. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Christmas or Purim or Eid al-Fitr or Diwali or Chinese New Year. There’s going to be a substantial presence of what we might call the human "celebration pattern" present.

Why does the pattern exist?

I haven’t reflected on the matter until recently, but it seems to me that there are likely to be at least two main reasons:

1) Humans are tangible creatures and we need to externalize our feelings through physical actions. Vulcans might be able to commemorate an event of joy just by meditating on it (assuming they weren’t wrong-headedly repressing their joy), but not humans. We’ve got ants in our pants, and we need to do something.

2) This blends into the second reason, which is that we need to externalize joy not just to express it but to promote it as well. All of the things in the human celebration pattern promote joy–they (when done well) make us happy, and so it’s natural to use them to promote joy over the thing we are celebrating. If you will, they are the occasion of natural happiness that, in religious contexts, becomes supernaturalized by pointing us to something beyond themselves.

Let’s look at gratitude for a moment. Suppose that you had come down with a horrible disease that was going to kill you or otherwise ruin your life. Then a doctor shows up and tells you that there’s a cure, and he gives it to you. In the moments of joy and relief that follow, you would not need any elements of the human celebration pattern to get you to feel joy and gratitude. You’d just feel it. Immediately. Hugely. Without any assistance.

But what about ten years later? The feelings wouldn’t be the same at that point, and while they’d still be there, latent, it would require more effort to bring them to the surface.

Something similar happens in religious contexts.

If you were one of the Israelites who came through the Red Sea, you wouldn’t have needed special celebrations to evoke feelings of awe and joy and thanksgiving to God. But 3500 years later? It’s a different story.

In the same way, if we were there at the manger on the night of the first Christmas–in Bethlehem–knowing the significance of the night, we wouldn’t need special assistance in evoking feelings of awe and joy and thanksgiving. But 2000 years later, it’s a different story.

Because of the distance that exists between us and the events we are celebrating, and given the way the human psyche works–at least in its fallen form–we need assistance to help evoke the feelings that we recognize are appropriate for the event we are celebrating. And so we employ elements of the human celebration pattern to help raise us to the level where–at least in a fallen, partial, incomplete way that doesn’t compare to what we would feel if we could go back and be in Bethlehem on that first Christmas–we feel some of what is appropriate.

We use the epiphenomena (the external elements of celebration) to help us appreciate the Phenomenon that occasions them.

That’s just the way humans work.

And so the celebration pattern not only allows us to express joy but to create joy as well.

The danger, in a religious setting, is that we will let the party become an end for its own sake. Parties are fine, and you don’t need a special occasion for them. My square dance club has one every month (that is, a special "Party Night," in addition to its weekly dances). But if you are having a party imbued with religious meaning, that meaning needs to be kept in sight.

This is something that we have to work at at times. It’s easy–when we are children–to focus exclusively on presents–or other elements of the celebration pattern (e.g., decorating Easter eggs, Halloween costumes, Halloween candy)–and we need our parents to help us keep a spiritual perspective in view.

But it is not wrong to use elements of celebration to evoke religious feeling. God knows how we’re made, and he expects us to do this, receiving and blessing the pattern. One of the purposes toward which the tithe was put in the Old Testament was to throw a party in thanksgiving for what God had given you. This was a matter of divine command at the time, and it shows the divine reception of external, joyful celebrations oriented toward the spiritual.

If we then ask: How much celebration is appropriate on a particular occasion, the answer will depend in part on what it is we are celebrating. If it’s the feast day of St. Paul well, as awesome as St. Paul is, that ain’t nothing compared to the birth of the Messiah. The joy occasioned by the latter should far outstrip the former–and St. Paul would say so himself. (Indeed, he would be positively insistent on the matter.)

The birth of God in human form–together with the rising of God from the dead for our salvation–should occasion the greatest joy and the greatest celebrations. One can argue that our culture doesn’t have the respective proportions between Christmas and Easter right, or that it allows other holidays to compete with them that shouldn’t, but at least among Christians they are recognized as the two most important religious holidays.

If we leave off comparing one holiday to another, though, and just ask ourselves "How much celebration is warranted for the birth of God in human form?" it seems to me that there is no intrinsic maximum to how much joy or how much celebration we should have. This is an event of such transcendant importance that the answer to how much joy you should feel or how big a celebration you should have, the answer is "As much as you can."

God doesn’t want you to exceed your means in these matters. He doesn’t want you to get so joyful that you become blind to your surroundings and rush out into the street shouting praises and get hit by a bus. Neither does he want you to ruin your family finances buying Christmas presents that you can’t afford. But within your means, it’s warranted to throw Christ a tremendous birthday party.

What counts as a tremendous birthday party depends on the means of the family and the culture throwing it. On the principle of the widow’s mite, a family or a culture that has very modest means will throw an externally modest party that is just as tremendous in God’s eyes as a family or culture with larger means which throws an externally larger party.

The key is not the size of the party but that it seeks to reflect the joy that is due the Event, within the means we have available, and that the party not lose sight of the purpose for which it is being celebrated.

I thus find my own reaction to the contemporary celebration of Christmas taking a somewhat different shape than it used to. It’s not the size of the party that our culture throws or all the economic activity that Christmas generates. My concern is more directed to orienting the celebration toward Christ rather than complaining about the excesses of the celebration (though there are certainly those in individual cases).

Which is why I was very pleased Friday night at my square dance club when our new caller confessed himself unashamed to wish people Merry Christmas. This not only drew immediate applause from the dancers but occasioned extensive Merry Christmassing for the rest of the evening.

I don’t know how religious everyone at the event is (it’s not a specifically Christian square dance club), but it helped keep Christ in Christmas–not to say keep Christmas in Christmas–and that made me happy.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

“From A Certain Point Of View”

Obi-Wan Kenobi once explained to Luke Skywalker that "many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." What he meant was that the flat-out falsehood he had told Luke could actually be seen as a truth if looked at "from a certain point of view."

The same principle holds true in other areas of life.

So let’s look at some visual falsehoods generated by looking at things "from a certain point of view."

CHT to the reader who e-mailed!

Ramesh Dusts Off His Crystal Ball

In the FRC Blogger Briefing with Ramesh Ponnuru one of the subjects that came up was what we are likely to see politically in the next two years on the subject of abortion.

His basic prediction was that we will have a number of significant battles as Democratic lawmakers try to reverse gains made by pro-lifers. Specifically, he thought that they are likely to try to reverse the Mexico City Policy, which prohibits US foreign aid being given to nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion, to allow abortions on military bases again, and to patent human embryos.

This was interesting to me. In light of the Democrats’ realization that abortion is hurting them, it would be shrewd of them to keep the abortion genie in its bottle until after the 2008 elections. It was sounding less strident on the subject that helped them gain control of Congress, and if they immediately go all shrill on the subject again then it will remind voters of their recent weddedness to abortion and put them at a disadvantage come 2008.

So in the question period of the briefing, I asked Ramesh about this.

He said that he didn’t think that the Democrats would lead with the subject of abortion–that they wouldn’t put it on the front burner when they take control of Congress in January.

He acknowledged that this is "a potentially explosive issue in their caucus" and described a struggle in the party between those Democrats who were elected as pro-lifers (or pretending to be pro-lifers), saying that they wouldn’t want to have to "choose between the values of their districts and the values of Nancy Pelosi." But other Democrats would say, "Look, on these narrow abortion-related issues, the polling is good and we can win." He also could see DailyKos and similar folks weighing in in favor of taking up abortion.

Ultimately, he said, he didn’t think that the Democrats would be able to keep the pro-abortion wing of the party bottled up, saying that you are already seeing some on the left stating that the Mexico City Policy is a terrible, inhuman thing, that it’s killing people, and that if Nancy Pelosi doesn’t take it on then she’s spineless–a wimp.

I also asked Ramesh whether, if the Democrats do push the abortion issue, it is likely to give pro-lifers and opportunity to expose the insincerity of some Democratic politicians who try to present themselves as more pro-life than they are (what you might call PLINOs).

He said it absolutely would create such an opportunity and, if I understood him correctly, he thought that it would be of general benefit to the pro-life cause. One of the problems with the recent elections, he said, was that values voters didn’t have a lot to vote on. Abortion was not a central issue this election, and so many social conservatives ended up voting not on the values issues but on matters where they felt more in tune with the Democrats, such as the War or economic issues. If the values issues took center stage again, it would help pro-lifers.

He also addressed at some length the "common ground" tactic that some pro-aborts are using at present, saying that we should seek common ground by trying to reduce the number of abortions through things such as contraception.

Now, I would point out–and I’m speaking for myself rather than summarizing what Ramesh said at this point–that this common ground initiative is a sign of weakness on the part of pro-abort forces. It’s an attempt to shift the spotlight off of abortion, which hurts them politically, onto other issues on which they think they can win–or at least sound less extreme to voters. It’s also disingenuous, because the initiatives that they recommend we undertake (more contraception, more sex-ed, etc.) would not do diddly-do to decrease abortions. In fact, they would increase the number of abortions. That’s been the experience of the last thirty-five years, and that’s what would replicate in the future if these initiatives were pushed further than they have been.

Yet there is a politically shrewd side to this approach because contraception is widely supported by the American public. Even most in the Catholic and Evangelical communities support it, though orthodox Catholics don’t and many Evangelicals are coming around on it. As a result, not only do pro-lifers lose support from non-values voters if the issue is framed in this way (i.e., on contraception rather than abortion) but a split develops in pro-life ranks on the question as well.

Ramesh’s solution to this problem was to suggest that pro-lifers refuse to allow the issue to be defined in these terms and to suggest counter-proposals on how to limit abortion, such as new regulations on third-trimester abortions and cutting tax-payer funding for abortions. He cited the latter in particular–refusing to subsidize abortion with public funds–as a historically-proven way of reducing the number of abortions.

He also, in a somewhat different context, suggested revising the tax code to remove the disproportionate burden that is placed on families with children–a burden that he said has grown in recent years compared to the burden on tax-payers without children. This would help people invest more in children, which (in my opinion) is certainly something that American society needs to do for its long-term health.

Overall, Ramesh thought that "This is a pretty hopeful moment to be a pro-lifer." In spite of the recent elections, abortion is still a losing issue and pro-lifers can take the offensive and gain more ground.

Apologies, again, if I’ve mischaracterized anything, Ramesh. Just lemme know by e-mail or combox if I have. In the meantime, for more of his thought,

CHECK OUT THE PARTY OF DEATH.

Ramesh Ponnuru On Pro-Life Issues

I recently participated in a telephone Blogger Briefing put on by the Family Research Council (FRC). The event was organized by Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost, who works at FRC. His idea is to help pro-life/socially conservative bloggers connect with figures in Washington (lawmakers, think tank types, commentators) who thus far haven’t been as available to the pro-life part of the blogosphere.

I think the briefing is a great idea, and I want to publicly thank Joe and the FRC for it and wish them the best of success.

For the initial installment of the briefing, the guest was Ramesh Ponnuru (pictured), senior editor and commentator for National Review and the author of the book The Party of Death (BTW, Ramesh, I still owe you a review of the book; my apologies!).

The conversation began with Ramesh summarizing the recent history of abortion in American politics and what he thinks is likely to happen with it in the future.

In covering this ground, he addressed one of the questions that I have been fascinated by for a long time. It’s no secret that the Democratic Party used to be the more conservative party and the Republicans the more liberal party. That clearly was the case, for example, at the time of the Civil War, and much, much more recently as well.

The Republicans are still the more liberal party economically, which to say that they are the more free-market party (i.e., they are more supportive of classical liberal economic policies, as opposed to more conservative, protectionist ones). But on social issues, the parties have changed places.

The timing and the mechanics of how that happened are things I’m quite interested in.

In the blogger briefing, Ramesh cited 1972 as a key year in the social transformation of the two parties. In his book, I’m sure he goes into the background that the late 1960s played in setting up the events of 1972, but he cites the campaign of George McGovern in that year as the point at which the elite of the Democratic Party was taken over by socially liberal secular activists. The rank and file of the party still had a lot of socially conservative working-class Catholics, Evangelicals, and Southerners, but that was when the elite switched sides.

Two things then happened: The rank and file Democrats–being socially conservative–started to find Republican candidates more attractive, and social liberals in the Republican Party started finding Democratic candidates more attractive. A period thus followed in which members of each party found themselves being more attracted by and voting for candidates of the opposite party, and eventually a general realignment of the two took place. The Democrats became a smaller, more liberal party, with more of the most wealthy supporting it, while the Republicans ceased to be the party of the affluent and became larger and more conservative socially.

Democratic politicians also found that, even though they might represent pro-life districts and had historically been pro-life themselves, with the party elite in the control of secularists they had to switch and become pro-aborts if they wanted to make headway nationally in the party.

For a time, Ramesh said, it was not obvious to either Democrats or Republicans whether this strategy was a wise one politically. For a time it seemed that American support for abortion was growing, but eventually it became clear to Democrats that the strategy wasn’t working, and pro-lifers began to gain ground. Many Democrats (particularly Catholic ones) tried to say, "I’m personally opposed, but . . . " yet this strategy did not prove effective in the long run.

The point we are at now, he suggested, is one in which the leadership of the Democratic Party recognizes that the fact they have been wedded to abortion is hurting them more than it is helping them, and this explains why some Democrats, such as Hillary Clinton, have tried other forms of "window dressing," such as saying "I’m very interested in finding common ground between the two positions" and simply hoping that they will not be called on the fact that their voting record is solidly pro-abort (something the MSM is quite willing to not call attention to).

It also explains why Democrats were willing to run pro-life or nominally pro-life candidates in some races in the 2006 elections, and why Democrats were able to pick up as many seats as they were.

This was a bad year for pro-lifers as well as Republicans, but there was a difference between the two. If I caught the numbers Ramesh cited correctly, Republicans lost about thirty seats, while pro-life candidates only lost twenty seats, depending on how they are counted.

What this shift in the approach Democrats are taking will mean in the future is something that also came up in the call, and it’ll be the subject of my next blog post.

In the meantime, I want to thank Ramesh for taking the time to discuss matters with us, and my apologies if I have mischaracterized anything he said. Also,

CHECK OUT HIS BOOK.

B16’s Book Out Spring 2007

A press release from Doubleday:

DOUBLEDAY ACQUIRES POPE BENEDICT XVI’S

FIRST BOOK AS HOLY FATHER

December 12, 2006, New York, NY—Pope Benedict XVI’s first book as the Holy Father has been acquired by Doubleday, it was announced today by Bill Barry, Vice President and Publisher of the company’s religious publishing division. Entitled JESUS OF NAZARETH: From His Baptism to His Transfiguration, the book, which will be written for the general reader, will be published in Spring 2007. Barry acquired world English, first serial, audio and exclusive Spanish language rights in North America from the Italian publisher Rizzoli, which licensed international rights to the book at the behest of Libreria Editrice Vaticana (LEV), the publishing arm of the Vatican.

“Having previously published works by Popes John XXIII and John Paul II,” said Barry, “we are especially honored by the Holy Father’s confidence in Doubleday in entrusting to us the English language publication of his book. His scores of books written as the theologian Joseph Ratzinger demonstrate His Holiness’s erudition, but the appeal of this work will be in the personal passion he means to share about the intimate friendship with Jesus as the central figure of Christianity. It is truly a gift for all believers and sure to be an instant spiritual classic.”

JESUS OF NAZARETH represents the culmination of Pope Benedict’s lifelong quest to defend historical Christianity in the modern world. It is, he writes in the book’s preface, the result of a “long interior journey,” and “an expression of [his] personal search for the face of the Lord.” He began work on the project in the summer of 2003 and because, as he explains, “I don’t know how much time and how much strength I will still be given, I have decided to publish the first 10 chapters [from Baptism to Transfiguration] as volume one.” In the book, Pope Benedict paints a vivid portrait of Jesus as depicted in the Gospels and asserts that “only if something extraordinary happened, if the figure and words of Jesus radically exceeded all the hopes and expectations of his age, can his crucifixion and his effectiveness be explained.”

The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group is a division of Random House Inc., whose parent company is Bertelsmann AG.

###

No word if Ignatius will also be publishing an edition.

Tridentine Mass Liberalization News/Rumors

One big clue to the pope’s thinking came in his 1997 book, titled “Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977” and written when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in which he sharply criticized the drastic manner in which Pope Paul VI reformed the Mass in 1969.
…
But the picture is not so clear-cut. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he said he considered the new missal a “real improvement” in many respects, and that the introduction of local languages made sense.
In one revealing speech to Catholic traditionalists in 1998, he said bluntly that the old “low Mass,” with its whispered prayers at the altar and its silent congregation, “was not what liturgy should be, which is why it was not painful for many people” when it disappeared.
The most important thing, he said at that time, was to make sure that the liturgy does not divide the Catholic community.
With that in mind, knowledgeable Vatican sources say the pope’s new document will no doubt aim to lessen pastoral tension between the Tridentine rite and the new Mass, rather than hand out a victory to traditionalists.
CNS on the Motu Proprio: a link and commentary
What came to my mind here was there is also a need for those who have rejected our tradition and traditional forms to likewise demonstrate their own good will and a hermeneutic of continuity. Let’s be clear and fair, there has been a hermeneutic of rupture which has banished most anything deemed “pre-conciliar” and this is as problematic as the sort of traditionalist who has rejected anything and everything “post-conciliar.”
Further, not all “traditionalists” take on this approach of rupture. If they are simply attached to the treasures of the classical liturgy, desirous of true liturgical reform in the light of both the Council and our tradition of organic development, all the while never questioning the validity of the modern Roman rite, but calling for a reform of the reform with regard to it, then it seems to me that they have nothing to justify and join the ranks of our Holy Father as a Cardinal in this set of ideas. In that regard, I would propose they form a part of the true liturgical centre and mainstream —- just as do those who focus upon the reform of the reform, but who are supportive of the availability of the classical liturgy, provided we do not take an immobiliistic and triumphalistic approach to it, or one which rejects the Council — not as popular opinion may go of course, but as the mind of the Church may go, as seen in the light of the Conciliar documents and our tradition.
As for the extremes, the road to a change of heart and mind is not a one way street as this article might make one think; it is rather and precisely a two-way street.

Catholic World News reports:

At a December 12 meeting, the Ecclesia Dei commission discussed a papal document that will broaden access to the traditional Latin Mass, Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez confirmed after the Tuesday-morning session. The Chilean cardinal said that he expects Pope Benedict XVI (bio – news) to release the document in the near future.

Cardinal Medina Estevez, the former prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, is a member of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, which was set up in 1988 to supervise Vatican relations with traditionalist Catholics. He confirmed that the group’s December 12 meeting was dedicated entirely to a discussion of a papal initiative that will allow more liberal use of the Tridentine rite.

The cardinal told the Roman news agency I Media that the results of today’s discussions would be presented to the Holy Father by Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos (bio – news), the chairman of the Ecclesia Dei commission. He suggested that the Pope might then schedule publication of the document. Cardinal Medina Estevez indicated that he did not anticipate further discussion of the matter by the Ecclesia Dei commission.

Vatican insiders expect that the papal document, widely expected to take the form of a motu proprio, will give priests permission to use the Tridentine rite– the liturgical form used throughout the Roman Catholic Church prior to Vatican II– without requiring the explicit permission of the local bishop.

CHT: Roman Catholic Blog.

MORE . . .

Rorate Caeli, quoting Il Giornale, reports:

Benedict XVI intends to extend the indult of his predecessor, in fact withdrawing from the bishops discretionary power on the matter: the Missal of Saint Pius V is no longer abolished, and even if the ordinary Roman Rite is that originated from the post-conciliar liturgical reform, the old one — used by centuries in the Church — can subsist as an "extraordinary rite".

The bishops, therefore, will not be able to deny the ancient mass anymore, but only regulate its eventual celebration, together with the parish priests, harmonising it with the need of the community. The corrections included would have reduced from 50 to 30 the minimal number of faithful who ask for the celebration according to the old rite. As for the readmission of the Lefebvrists, once the rite of Saint Pius V is liberalized, the deal should be easier.

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

What Kind Of Coke I Drink

Yesterday’s mention that I drink a kind of diet coke that doesn’t have caffeine or Aspartame prompted some questions about what kind I do drink.

Actually, it varies. Here’s a selection . . .

None of these kinds of diet coke have either caffeine or Aspartame in them. They are all sweetened with Splenda.

Here are a few notes on them:

1) Diet 7-UP used to have Aspartame but got rid of it a while back. It is the easiest form of Aspartame-free diet coke to find. One note though: There are variants of Diet 7-UP that still DO use Aspartame, such as Diet Cherry 7-UP. Beware of these. It is the regular Diet 7-UP that you want.

2) Diet Rite is also commonly found in supermarkets, and it was the first diet coke to chuck Aspartame in favor of Splenda, as far as I can tell. It comes in several flavors, which the Royal Crown company (which makes Diet Rite) switches around from time to time. They always have a Cola flavor (which, for some strange reason, upsets my stomach; I think I’m allergic to this flavor, though other people obviously aren’t), and lately they’ve had White Grape and Raspberry (which do just fine by my stomach). Occasionally they have Tangerine or other flavors. At the moment they have Cherry Cola, so I’ll see how that does with my stomach.

3) Diet Hansen’s has a BUNCH of different flavors. Pictured here are three of my favorites (which is why I had them on hand): Peach, Kiwi-Strawberry, and Black Cherry. They also have Tangerine-Lime, Ginger Ale, Root Beer, and Grapefruit. MORE INFO. The Diet Hansen’s drinks taste really good (or at least my favorites do). It’s a little harder to find Diet Hansen’s, though. I get it at Henry’s and Trader Joe’s, but I’ve also seen it showing up at some local Vons. You can also order it online.

Incidentally, all of these drinks (Diet 7-UP, Diet Rite, Diet Hansen’s) are also sodium free–so they’re not trying to Ferengi you into drinking more of their product by putting salt in it to make you thirsty (unlike most forms of coke).

There are also other, similar caffeine-free, Aspartame-free kinds of coke, but these are the ones that I drink the most and thus the ones that I had on hand.

BTW, a word about why you might want to avoid caffeine and Aspartame . . .

Most folks know that caffeine can make you feel wired, keep you awake, etc. And some people use it precisely in order to stay awake. I’m not opposed to that in principle. However, caffeine also has some side-effects that people don’t commonly know about.

If you drink enough of it quickly enough, it will raise your blood sugar (which is bad for diabetics and dieters) and it will raise your adrenalin (which is bad if you have high blood pressure or heart palpitations). INFO HERE. Caffeine is safe for most people in moderation–or at least safe enough that they’re willing to live with the obvious side-effects–but it’s something that I avoid as part of my diet since I don’t want my blood sugar raised.

Aspartame is another story. There is a huge controversy over the safety of Aspartame, and for a long time I didn’t pay it any mind. I generally don’t get freaked out about safety claims made regarding products that are being consumed by millions of people. If there’s a significant problem with the product then, in the long run, science will out.

But I started doing some research on Aspartame and found out some things that concerned me enough that I decided to cut it out of my diet. It breaks down into chemicals that I really don’t like. It does this at surprisingly low temperatures, too (lower than body temperature), which is why diet cokes that contain Aspartame frequently have gone "stale" before you open the can. They’ve been exposed to heat that causes the Aspartame to break down and they taste funny.

Even if they haven’t broken down already in the can, they will break down in your body, and one of the things they break down into is phenylalanine. Phenylalanine is something I’m familiar with from my diet and nutrition studies.

Phenylalanine is an amino acid that is common in nature. There’s some of it basically whenever we eat meat. But that form of phenylalanine is slowly-absorbed and is pretty safe. If you’re taking a nutritional supplement or chugging down diet cokes or certain protein drinks, though, it’s another story. In this setting phenylalanine is absorbed much more quickly and causes a spike of the amino acid in your blood stream.

For certain people, who can’t metabolize phenylalanine, Aspartame is very dangerous. These people have a condition known as phenylketonuria, and if they consume phenylalanine it will cause BRAIN DAMAGE.

In your body, about HALF of the Aspartame in a diet coke converts into phenylalanine, which is why products containing Aspartame are required to carry a warning label that says "Phenylketonurics: Contains phenylalanine."

Now, phenylketonuria is rare (though it is more common among people of Irish descent), and if you have it, you’d already know about it. It’s one of the things they test for right after birth, and if you’ve never been told that you have it then you don’t.

But phenylketonurics aren’t the only people who need to watch out for getting a phenylalanine spike in their blood.

Some dieters take phenylalanine because it suppresses hunger (a good thing for dieters), but in significant numbers of people it has bad side-effects, like raising your heart rate and blood pressure (not good things for people who are overweight).

If you have been chugging down diet cokes–even caffeine-free ones–and find your heart racing or pounding or your blood pressure staying higher than it should be, it may be the phenylalanine spike in your blood stream that the diet cokes are causing.

There are a lot of other criticisms that are made of Aspartame, but I already knew about phenylalanine from my own diet and nutrition studies, so when I found out that 50% of Aspartame turns into phenylalanine, that was enough to convince me to cut it out of my diet.

Y’all can make your own decisions, of course, but I’m not waiting for the science to catch up on this one. To my mind, Aspartame is too risky. I’ll stick with other sweeteners, like Splenda or Stevia.

Assessing Mortal Sin

A reader writes:

What is meant by the phrases “full consent” and “sufficient reflection” as two of the three conditions necessary for something to be a mortal sin? I have read spiritual authors who imply that it means that if you have immediate remorse after doing something gravely evil, then you obsiously did not have full consent or sufficient reflection. I have also read authors who say that true mortal sin is very rare for committed Christians because they almost never give full consent to a grave evil, when factoring in mitigating factors like anxiety, compulsion, etc.

On the other hand, if this is true, then how can anyone ever be considered to have commited mortal sin by giving in to temptation? Wouldn’t the temptation itself, by exerting influence, cause one not to have had full consent or sufficient reflection? And what are the implications of this for confession?

I appreciate it if you can make this more clear.

I’ll do what I can, but I’m not sure how much light can be shed on this question. The fact is that the Church has a stronger grasp on the principles involved in this area than it has on how they are to be applied in practice. This is one reason that the Church is reluctant to judge that a person has actually committed a mortal sin. It can recognize that he has committed an objectively grave act, but it is hard to assess his personal level of culpability (i.e., his understanding of what he was doing and how freely he did it anyway).

It may be that further doctrinal development will clarify how the consent and knowledge criteria are to be concretely applied, or there may just be something intrinsically slippery and subjective about these that will always make it hard to assess these matters.

Because of the difficulty we have in assessing them, the general rule for most people (i.e., those with a lax conscience or a normal conscience) is that if you think you may have committed a mortal sin then go ahead and confess it, just to be safe.

The exception to this rule is people who have a scrupulous conscience. For them the rule is do not confess unless you are sure that you have committed a mortal sin.

Whether a person has a lax, a normal, or a scrupulous conscience is something that is best determined in consultation with his spiritual director. It is also something that may change over time in his life. (E.g., most people who are serious about their faith go through at least temporary periods of being scrupulous; most people who are sons of Adam go through at least temporary periods of being lax).

When it comes to the subjective two criteria for mortal sin–that you need adequate knowledge of the moral character of the act and that you need to give adequate consent to it–I can offer these thoughts:

1) I don’t like the way these are sometimes phrased. For example, you sometimes read about a person needing to have "complete knowledge" of the moral character of the act. I think this is misleading because it can make it sound like if you aren’t a thoroughly catechized moral theologian who has thoroughly studied a situation and has all the relevant facts at his fingertips then there is no mortal sin.

Nonsense.

Suppose I’m a poorly-catechized ordinary guy who’s out hunting in the woods and I see a shape in the forrest in front of me that I think might be a man, but it might also be a deer. I am not excused from mortal sin if I shoot at it anyway, even though I didn’t know for certain whether I was objectively shooting at a human being or not.

Same thing goes for aborting a baby if I’m not sure whether it’s a human being or not.

I thus prefer to speak in terms of "adequate knowledge" of the moral character of the act. There are a lot of things that we can know in an intuitive or incomplete way and still be mortally responsible for them. If this were not the case then St. Paul would never have been able to speak in the terms he did in Romans 1 about pagans who "do not have the Law" (i.e., the Torah) and yet are gravely responsible to God for their actions.

One of the things that can hinder adequate knowledge, though, is a lack of what the reader terms "sufficient reflection." It may be that we do know that an act is gravely wrong and yet we haven’t reflected on it sufficiently to realize this at the particular moment.

The classic example of this is having impure thoughts creep into your head. They can just kind of start, without you even realizing it, and then you catch yourself and go "No! I don’t want to be thinking about that!" The general rule here is that if you catch yourself and immediately start resisting the thoughts then you weren’t engaging in them with sufficient reflection to result in a mortal sin.

2) I similarly don’t like the formulations that one needs to give "complete consent" or "full consent" before a sin is mortal. This is also misleading and can convey to a person that you have to be going, "Yes! Yes! YES!!! I know this is mortal sin AND I LOVE IT!!!"

That’s not true either.

Suppose I’m robbing a liquor store and I’m pointing a gun at the cashier, and to keep him from identifying me to the cops I shoot him in the heart, and just before I pull the trigger I have a little twinge of remorse about what I’m doing.

The fact that I had at least somewhat mixed feelings does not let me off from having committed a mortal sin.

I thus like the phrasing that the Catechism uses on this point, saying that we need to give "deliberate consent" to the act.

Some examples of when we do not give deliberate consent include:

1) When we do something on the spur of the moment, without thinking about it first.

2) When we do it when we are asleep.

3) When we do it when we are really groggy (e.g., just going to sleep or just waking from sleep)

4) When we are intoxicated or under the influence of a substance that makes us groggy (e.g., certain allergy or other medications), though this one raises the question of how we got into a state like this and whether we committed a sin in doing so.

5) Under the influence of reason-depriving emotion (e.g., walking in on someone sleeping with your spouse; thinking that your life is in imminent danger)

6) Under the influence of strong psychological illness.

Just how strong some of these have to be for deliberate consent to cease to exist is not easy to determine. Look at grogginess or intoxication as examples. The impairment those involve exists on a spectrum, and it is not easy to say just where on the spectrum deliberate consent stops. Being just a little tired or just a little tipsy is not going to be enough. Yet at some point one reaches a state where one does not have enough possession of one’s faculties to commit a mortal sin.

Where that line is is something that’s really hard to determine, which gets us back to the practical rules mentioned earlier: If you think you may have committed a mortal sin then confess it just to be sure, unless you are scrupulous, in which case don’t confess it unless you are sure.

We may see further doctrinal development (or pastoral distortion) on this question with the progress of time. Three things in this regard strike me as particularly noteworthy:

1) The development of psychology and cognitive science is going to play a role here. The Church already acknowledges in its pastoral practice that we have learned more about the psychological pressures and conditions people can suffer from than we previously knew and that this has an impact on how we assess the personal responsibility of people in various situations. The progress of the cognitive sciences is likely to deepen this awareness, as it has been shown that some decisions seem to be made by us before conscious thought even happens.

The danger in this area is allowing psychology and cognitive science to eliminate the concept of personal responsibility. This is something that is inconsistent with the Christian faith, and up with it the Church cannot put. We’re likely to see further Magisterial interventions at some point to try to clarify the role that psychological and biological factors can and cannot play in assessing moral culpability.

2) The Church is now living in a world in which it is much more acutely aware of the existence of people of good faith who are not Catholic or even Christian. This is a development that has been underway for several centuries–beginning with the age of exploration and the discovery of vast populations who had never heard the gospel–and the Church has become much more sensitive to the role of education and cultural conditioning in forming peoples’ consciences, such that many more people than were previously thought are recognized as being innocently ignorant of the objective moral character of their acts.

The same is true of the collapse of proper catechesis in the developed world. There are now large groups of people who are objectively Christian but who–through no fault of their own–have absorbed very little of the teaching of the Christian faith, and this has to be taken into account in assessing their personal moral culpability.

3) The Church has become more optimistic about the possibility of salvation–particularly in the last century. The previous two factors–greater awareness of psychological and informational impediments to full personal responsibility–have played a role in this, but even beyond that, the Church is just more optimistic.

I’m not fully comfortable with that. I’d love to think that more people will be saved rather than less, but I have a hard time squaring that with the way Christians have traditionally regarded matters and with certain statements in the New Testament.

Nevertheless, I have to acknowledge that doctrinal development may be underway on this point.

A while back I was reading an interview with Pre-16 in which he was taking note of this greater optimism and saying that we may hope (note the word "hope") that a large majority of people today are saved and that only a few go to hell.

If that’s the case then it has implications for how we read the criteria for mortal sin. You have to say that those who are properly catechized have a greater chance of getting to heaven than those who don’t (otherwise catechesis and evangelization would harm the good of souls, and we can’t say that), so you can’t chalk the optimism up to the fact that more people don’t know their faith. Neither do we have evidence that more people suffer from psychological impediments than in the past (it’s almost certainly the opposite).

So if you want to be more optimistic than previously about salvation then you’d have to say that it’s harder than previously thought to commit mortal sin or easier than previously thought to be reconciled with God–or (more likely) both.

Like I said, I’d love this to be true, but I’m not comfortable with saying that it is. Consequently, I fall back on the principle of erring on the side of caution and assuming in my own life that the traditional understanding of these matters is correct.

Part of what we have to do in a situation like this is just do the best that we can. Follow the best advice that we can obtain, even if it is fuzzy and unsatisfying advice, and then trust the results to God.

Remember: He’s a God of Mercy. God is Love. And unless we knowingly and deliberately hold something back in confession, he forgives us. If we do the best we can in confession, that’s good enough for him.

For further reading,

HERE’S THE CATECHISM’S DISCUSSION OF THE ISSUE (INCLUDING THE ROLE THAT TEMPTATION–I.E., THE PASSIONS–CAN PLAY IN AFFECTING OUR CULPABILITY).