Jimmy Akin – Page 436

The Other Kind Of Voters Guide

Catholic Answers produces the Voters Guide for Serious Catholics (and the Voters Guide for Serious Christians), both of which focus on the moral principles that need to be brought to bear in voting.

There is another kind of voters guide, though: One that documents the positions or voting records of candidates.

I’ve had some requests for where folks can find guides of that kind, but I haven’t had good resources to point them to.

This morning, though, I got an e-mailing from Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, and I thought folks might be interested in what he had to say, so here goes:

I have communicated with you and many others regarding tomorrow’s elections. You may also be among those who have been working hard to mobilize voters. Now, the moment has come for the voters to do their job.

If your state has early voting, and allows you to vote today, please do so. For information, please visit www.priestsforlife.org/states/early-voting.htm. Take advantage of the opportunity to cast your vote today rather than tomorrow, so that unforeseen obstacles don’t prevent you.

The big question, of course, is “How do I find information about the candidates?” We have set up a web page, www.priestsforlife.org/candidates, to assist you.

You can find candidate information in several places, such as newspapers, television news, voter guides, and on the internet. You may also run into people on the street handing out candidate literature. Don’t refuse them, but take and read what is being offered to you.

If these sources fail, you can always contact the candidate’s campaign to make an inquiry about his or her position.

Frequently politicians make statements like, "I have always been personally pro-life," or, "I would never encourage a woman to have an abortion." Rather than offering comfort to pro-life voters, statements like these should raise red flags, as they are typically followed by, "but I would never impose my personal beliefs on anybody else," or some similar statement.

Even in cases in which these words do not follow, they are often implied. In such cases, be sure to look for a clearer statement of the candidate’s position, again, in writing if possible. Moreover, don’t only ask what the candidate believes. Ask what he or she intends to do to protect the unborn.

You should also look at a candidate’s voting record. This is extremely easy with members of Congress as you can simply contact any one of a number of national organizations, like National Right to Life, that track votes as part of their regular activity. They will be able to inform you how your Congressman and Senator voted on the bills that have come before them. You can often obtain similar information about state candidates from pro-life organizations within your state.

Finally, remember that elections not only put candidates into power, but they put parties into power, too. In voting for a candidate, you should know the positions of the candidate and also the positions of the party to which he/she belongs.

Some organizations have provided specific voter guides, and we have placed links to many of those at www.priestsforlife.org/candidates.

If you have further questions about how you should evaluate candidates, please contact our office at (888) 735-3448.

Along with candidates, there are also important measures on the ballots in various states.

Detailed information is at www.priestsforlife.org/elections/state-initiatives-referenda.htm. Even if you don’t live in these states, you can influence the vote by urging people you know in that state to vote the right way.

California – Proposition 85 – Parents’ Right to Know and Child Protection Initiative – Vote YES. See www.priestsforlife.org/legislation/proposition85.htm for more information.

Oregon – Measure 43 – Parental Involvement and Support Act – Vote YES. See
www.priestsforlife.org/legislation/oregon-measure-43.htm for more information.

South Dakota – Referred Law 6 – Women’s Health and Human Life Protection Act – Vote YES. See www.priestsforlife.org/legislation/south-dakota-referendum.htm for more information.

Missouri – Amendment 2 – Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative – Vote NO. See www.priestsforlife.org/legislation/missouri-amendment-2.htm for more information.

Additional reminders: Join today and tomorrow in the final days of the Election Novena; prayers are found at www.PrayerCampaign.org and my booklet “Voting with a Clear Conscience” is found at http://www.priestsforlife.org/vote/voting-clear-conscience.pdf

OK – that’s all I have to say. Let’s go make November 7 a day of progress for the pro-life cause!

God bless you!

Fr. Frank Pavone
National Director, Priests for Life

A Reminder

A reader writes:

I know that you reach a huge number of people through your blog. Could you remind your readers to do all that they can for the cause of life in Tuesday’s election by remembering to:

1) Pray (a lot!)

2) Fast (from something, anything, as much as possible)

3) Remind family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers to vote pro-life

4) Vote (as difficult as it may be in this world of negative campaigning)!

I believe that this is the most crucial election ever for pro-life issues; let’s keep the pendulum swinging in the correct direction.

Done.

Fr. Edward McNamara’s answers to liturgy questions on Zenit can be uneven, but when he recently addressed the rad trad argument that the 16th century bull Quo Primum irrevocably defined the "Mass of Pius V" as the only one that can be validly or licitly used, he delivered a real smackdown.

Here’s a taste:

[L]egal expressions such as "which shall have the force of law in perpetuity, We order and enjoin under pain of Our displeasure that nothing be added to Our newly published Missal, nothing omitted therefrom, and nothing whatsoever altered therein" cannot be literally interpreted as binding on possible later actions of Pope St. Pius V or upon his successors. The strictures fall only upon those who act without due authority.

If it were otherwise, then Pope St. Pius V would have excommunicated himself a couple of years after publishing "Quo Primum" when he added the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary to the missal following the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, not to mention Pope Clement XI who canonized Pius V in 1712, thus altering the missal.

Among the many other Popes who would have thus incurred "the wrath of Almighty God and of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul" would have been St. Pius X for reforming the calendar, Pius XI who added the first new preface in centuries for the feast of Christ the King, Pius XII for completely revamping the rites of Holy Week as well as simplifying the rubrics, and Blessed John XXIII for adding St. Joseph’s name to the Roman Canon.

GET THE STORY.

Reporter Digs, But Not Deep Enough

CHT to the reader who e-mailed THIS STORY.

It’s a piece written by Mollie Ziegler Hemmingway, who is a reporter in Washington, DC and a blogger at GetReligion.Org, which deals with the fact that–as their slugline says–"The press . . . just doesn’t get religion."

That’s certainly true, and I wish them the best in their efforts to comment on and correct news stories that don’t handle the subject of religion accurately, but the post linked above itself needs some correction.

In the post, Mollie discusses a story about a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran candidate for public office from Minnesota who lefty bloggers have gone after on the basis of her religion. It’s a divide and conquer strategy: The bloggers point out that the confessional documents of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) refer to the pope as the antichrist and then they try to drive Catholic voters (and other voters who like the pope) away from the candidate by painting her as an extremeist.

When asked by a radio interviewer whether her church teaches that the pope is the antichrist, the candidate denied it and said that some of her family members are Catholic.

I have a lot of sympathy for the candidate. In fact, the WELS’ confessional documents do indeed describe the pope as the antichrist, but this is something that a lot of WELS members don’t know, it doesn’t reflect their own views, it doesn’t stop them from having good relations with Catholics, and it is unfair to try to paint the candidate as an extremist in this way.

So sympathy there.

In her post, Mollie covers a story from the infamous Minneapolis Star-Tribune that covers the controversy and compliments the reporter for going beyond simply what the candidate said and checking with other sources rather than relying on the candidate’s statement. Unfortunately, the reporter only quotes from a minister at a WELS church who–at least as quoted–admits that Luther viewed the papacy as the antichrist but seemed to spin what the WELS confessional documents actually say, downplaying this view somewhat.

It is praiseworthy that the reporter asked other sources, but this guy wasn’t necessarily the best one. Simply Googling "WELS lutheran antichrist" turns up a WELS doctrinal statement on the official WELS web site that is titled Statement on the Antichrist. After reviewing the history of the Lutheran doctrine regarding the antichrist, the statement concludes:

Therefore on the basis of a renewed study of the pertinent Scriptures we reaffirm the statement of the Lutheran Confessions, that “the Pope is the very Antichrist” (cf. Section II), especially since he anathematizes the doctrine of the justification by faith alone and sets himself up as the infallible head of the Church.

We thereby affirm that we identify this “Antichrist” with the Papacy as it is known to us today, which shall, as 2 Thessalonians 2:8 states, continue to the end of time, whatever form or guise it may take. This neither means nor implies a blanket condemnation of all members of the Roman Catholic Church, for despite all the errors taught in that church the Word of God is still heard there, and that Word is an effectual Word. Isa 55:10, 11; cf. Apology XXIV, 98, cited above under II.

We make this confession in the confidence of faith. The Antichrist cannot deceive us if we remain under the revelation given us in the Apostolic word (2 Th 2:13-17), for in God’s gracious governance of history the Antichrist can deceive only those who “refused to love the truth” (2 Th 2:10-12).

And we make this confession in the confidence of hope. The Antichrist shall not destroy us but shall himself be destroyed—“Whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming” (2 Th 2:8).

We reject the idea that the fulfillment of this prophecy is to be sought in the workings of any merely secular political power (2 Th 2:4; cf. Treatise on the Power and the Primacy of the Pope 39).

We reject the idea that the teaching that the Papacy is the Antichrist rests on a merely human interpretation of history or is an open question. We hold rather that this teaching rests on the revelation of God in Scripture which finds its fulfillment in history. The Holy Spirit reveals this fulfillment to the eyes of faith (cf. The Abiding Word, Vol. 2, p. 764). Since Scripture teaches that the Antichrist would be revealed and gives the marks by which the Antichrist is to be recognized (2 Th 2:6,8), and since this prophecy has been clearly fulfilled in the history and development of the Roman Papacy, it is Scripture which reveals that the Papacy is the Antichrist.

What the Strib reporter should have done was check the WELS official doctrinal statements and then ask a representative of the church (preferably at its home office) for comment.

Unfortunately, what Mollie does in her commentary on the story is even worse than what the reporter from the Strib does. Essentially, she tries a tu quoque (Latin, meaning roughly "You’re another" or "You’re no better") strategy that seeks to make Catholics look like extremists–at least to the extent they adhere to their own confessional documents.

Here’s what she says:

But if reporter Pamela Miller is going to turn this political season
into a referendum on religious doctrines, I wonder how far she’ll take
it. Is she covering any Roman Catholic candidates? What do Roman
Catholics believe about Lutherans? It just so happens that we covered
this in my church this week when my pastor read declarations of the Council of Trent (the Roman Catholic response to the Reformation), it being Reformation Day and all. Here are a few of that council’s statements:

Canon 9: If anyone says that the sinner is justified by
faith alone, meaning that nothing else is required to cooperate in
order to obtain the grace of justification . . . let him be anathema.

Canon 32: If anyone says that the good works of the one justified
are in such manner the gifts of God that they are not also the good
merits of him justified; or that the one justified by the good works
that he performs . . . does not truly merit . . . eternal life . . .
let him be anathema.

In other words, if anyone is Lutheran, let him be cursed and damned to hell. The church councils haven’t exactly backtracked on those views.

I can compliment Mollie for not sticking with simply what the Strib reporter did and checking sources, but the thing about tu quoque approaches is that they (a) often distract rather than enlighten and (b) you’d jolly well better be right in what you say.

It’s generally not a good idea to take things that you only just heard about from your pastor when he was criticizing other people and rush into print with them. At a minimum, and as a reporter should know, you need to check with the people in question to find out if what your pastor said accurately represents their position.

What Mollie says about Catholics is flat wrong.

The Church does not say that "if anyone is a Lutheran, let him be cursed and damned to hell." That is not the meaning of the term "anathema" as used by Trent, the mighty Dictionary.Com notwithstanding.

In fact, Mollie hasn’t even read the Dictionary.Com references with sufficient thoroughness, because some of them actually get the definition of anathema in ecclesiastical documents almost right, viz:

3.a formal ecclesiastical curse involving excommunication.
1. A formal ecclesiastical ban, curse, or excommunication.
2: a formal ecclesiastical curse accompanied by excommunication

In fact, anathema was a kind of canonical penalty involving excommunication that used to be found in Church law that could be imposed for various offenses, including certain doctrinal ones. It did not take place automatically but had to be imposed by an ecclesiastical court and, since Church tribunals have better things to do than millions of trials for purposes of excommunicating every Lutheran in the world, it was never applied to more than a handful of individuals. It tended to be applied–and then rarely–only to people who made a pretense of staying within the Catholic community.

Excommunication also does not damn people to hell–it’s an equivalent of disfellowshipping (cf. Matt. 18:17, 1 Cor. 5:1-2) meant to prompt the sinner to repentance (2 Cor. 2:5-8).

Further, anathema no longer exists in Church law. It ceased to exist with the release of the 1983 Code of Canon Law.

How Mollie could feel so confident as to make the sweeping statement "The church councils haven’t exactly backtracked on those views [i.e., that Lutherans are or are to be damned to hell]" is simply mind boggling.

Hello? Vatican II anybody? The Church has never taught that all Lutherans are going to hell, but even apart from that the positive tone taken by Vatican II toward other Christians should give Mollie pause.

Or perhaps she means that the Church has not backtracked on the canons of Trent, which she has misinterpreted as condeming all Lutherans to hell. It’s true that the Church hasn’t backtracked on the doctrinal content of the canons (properly understood), but it has clarified their understanding in a way that definitely casts matters in a very different light than the one Mollie presents us.

Mollie herself is a member of the Missouri Synod Lutheran church, and that body is not a signatory of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification that I just linked, but it is simple misrepresentation to present the Catholic Church as holding remotely what Mollie presents it as holding regarding Lutherans

In other words, Mollie is flat wrong, and as a reporter–particularly one with an interest in correcting bad press coverage of religion–she should have known better than to try a tu quoque strategy against Catholics based on what her pastor said and what she chose to get out of definitions found on Dictionary.Com and then make sweeping statements that act like the last four hundred years of conciliar and canonical history didn’t happen.

Most bloggers, when caught in an error of this magnitude, are quick to make a correction, and I hope that Mollie will make one and do so–in keeping with the best journalistic practice–giving the correction equal prominence with the original mistake (i.e., a new blog post) so that her readers will not continue to be misled.

I’m writing this on Saturday, so by the time this post goes up Monday she may have already done so. I know it’s been pointed out in the combox of her post that she is wrong about these matters, though I can’t fault her if she doesn’t keep up with everything said in her combox.

If she has not done so, I hope that she will display the journalistic and blogger integrity that I am confident she has and issue a correction post promptly.

I’d also invite her–if she has questions in the future about what Catholics do and don’t believe–to contact me and I’ll point her toward the right sources.

Secret Chinese Weather Manipulation Program Uncovered!

Beijing (DAILY PLANET) — Western diplomats were shocked when photographic proof emerged of the secret Chinese weather manipulation program.

As part of the new Cold War, Chinese officials have circumvented the technological gap by ordering their population of one billion to line the Great Wall and manipulate global weather patterns by waving fans in unison and generating powerful winds.

"It’s staggering that they could think they could get away with something like this," said Wink Blinkley of the State Department. "This is a clear act of hostility, and we have strongly protested this action of the Chinese government. Next week we will be introducing a U.N. Security Council resolution dealing with this alarming turn of events."

Climate experts said that the Chinese weather manipulation effort could harm crops in various countries–particularly China’s competitors in population-heavy Southeast Asia–disrupting food supplies and economies.

"It could go even further than that," said author Michael Crichton. "This may well be responsible for the phenomenon of global warming. The Chinese may have been playing the West for suckers by redirecting warm air currents, trying to hobble our own economies by forcing us to take draconian steps in dealing with a phenomenon that has been a hoax all along, giving them time to catch up to the West in economic development."

Tensions between Washington and Beijing have spiked since the photographic evidence of the Chinese program emerged. Speaking on background, officials in the White House compared its potential significance to that of the Cuban Missle Crisis, which occurred in the 1960s when a U.S. spy plane provided photographic evidence that the Soviet Union was basing strategic missles in Cuba.

"We sincerely hope that ‘Operation Red Fan’ will not lead to that kind of confrontation between superpowers," said one official.

Developments in technology since the 1960s played a role in uncovering the secret Chinese program. Evidence of Operation Red Fan (which in Mandarin can also mean "Operation Hot Wind") was not collected by a spy plane but by a tourist with a cell phone camera.

"I can’t give any details on precisely how this photo arrived in our hands," said Blinkley, "but let’s just say that the photo has touched off a crisis that is Cingular in the history of Sino-American relations."

GET THE STORY.

“St. Me, Pray For Me”?

A reader writes:

If Heaven is beyond time and space, and the Angels and Saints can hear our prayers as the book of Revelation shows, then are the prayers the saints hear ones that are made after their death?

Angels don’t have death, but yes, saints in heaven do hear prayers made after their deaths. Thus in A.D. 2006 I can pray to St. Paul, who died in the A.D. 60s. That doesn’t require heaven to be beyond time and space, though. Even if St. Paul is still fully within the flow of time, so that for him it’s also 2006, he can still hear the prayer as long as he has a way to perceive it.

The standard thought is that it is God who communicates to the saints the fact that someone is praying to them, so if I am in 2006 and St. Paul is in 2006, God can simply pass on my prayer to St. Paul. God, of course, is outside of time, but St. Paul doesn’t have to be for him to learn about my prayer long after his death.

If, because Heaven is beyond time and space, I could hear prayers from all times, then if I pray now, die and go to Heaven, will I be able to hear my own prayers that I made before I died?

Possibly. There are a few caveats, though:

1) While God is outside of time, it is not at all clear that human souls are outside of time. Or at least they are not outside of time in the same way that God is. God does not experience any sequentiality; he lives in an "eternal now" in which all of history happens at once (or, to put it more precisely, every moment in the history of the world is equally present to God).

Souls, however, clearly do experience sequentiality. There is the point at which they die, experience the particular judgment, are purified (if needed), and fully glorified, are restored to their bodies at the Resurrection, experience the general judgment, experience the eternal order, etc. Even if you want to say that this sequentiality doesn’t take place in time as we experience it (and I’m open to the proposition that it does take place in time as we experience it), you at least have to say that it takes place over something analogous to time that allows things to happen in sequence rather than all at once in an eternal now.

2) You don’t need to posit heaven being outside of time, though, in order to get your prayer request to your future, sainted self. As we mentioned, God is outside of time, and so if you are alive in 2006 and praying to yourself in heaven then God could tell you about that prayer in 2306, when you die and arrive in heaven (let’s assume that medical technology discovers something really fabulous that lets you live for more than three centuries).

3) It’s not clear that this would be necessary, however, since Scripture seems to indicate that we will have a whole-life review at some point–possibly at more than one point (i.e., both the particular and the general judgments) and we may have constant, continuous access to the events of our own lives in the form of memory (unimpeded by our brain’s faulty retrieval system). If that’s the case then, or whenever the whole-life review takes place, we could come across our former prayer request and be able to fulfill it.

4) On the other hand, there may be limits to what we can pray for on behalf of our former selves. One thing that it does not make sense for us to pray for is something that we know was not God’s will. For example, even today–with me still being alive–I could not ask God to make it so that I had never been born. I already know that it was God’s will for me to be born, and I cannot legitimately pray for something that I know to be contrary to God’s will.

(I could pray that God create an alternate timeline in which I was never born, but I cannot pray that I never existed in this timeline.)

Once we’re in heaven and have had our whole-life review and know everything that happened to us, we wouldn’t be able to pray that things turn out differently for us–at any particular moment of our lives–than they did, for to do so would be to pray contrary to God’s will for us.

5) We could, however, pray for things to turn out as they did. Since God is outside of time, I can ask him in 2306 to allow something to happen to me in 2006 that I know did happen to me in that year. In this case, I’m praying in harmony with God’s will–and such a prayer of mine in 2306 might (hypothetically) be a contributing factor to why God allowed the event to happen to me in 2006.

6) It is not clear, however, whether God would respond to this type of prayer. First, he might judge that the purpose of the Communion of the Saints is to build up the body of Christ by praying for each other. Praying for our own past selves might not be what he has in mind. For example, I’m not sure what God would think of me praying–now, in 2006–that he allow me to be born back in the 1960s.

In fact, I rather suspect that God might take a dim view of me making that request of him, at least while I’m in this life. Given that I already know what his will was on that matter, I suspect he would rather have me spending my time and energy praying for things where I don’t know his will–like my present needs or the needs of others.

In this life I have limited time and energy to devote to things, and God might well deem it more productive for me to devote my petitionary prayer to matters that are not yet settled from my temporal perspective. I might praise and thank him for allowing me to be born, but in terms of what I should be asking for, he might want me to ask that he bless me or my loved ones or the pope or the poor of the souls in purgatory or someone who I don’t already know it was his will to bless.

Here’s one way God might want us to handle things in prayer:

* If we know it’s his will, praise and thank him for it.
* If we don’t know if it’s his will, ask that he will grant the request if it’s his will.
* If we know it’s not his will, don’t ask him for it.

For our future selves, things that we know did happen to us would go in the first category and things that we know didn’t happen would go in the third. Once we’re in heaven, presumably nothing about our past lives would fall in the middle category. If that’s the case then praying for our past selves would not be in harmony with God’s will.

That’s assuming, of course, that God handles things according to the three categories mentioned above. He may not. As noted before, he might act on the prayers of our future selves in granting blessings to our present selves.

Litany Of The Saints . . . And Then Some

A reader writes:

When I went to church for All Saint’s Day, I was happy to hear the
Litany of the Saints announced. But then I started hearing saints I had
never heard of …well, there are some of those. But I saw the people
in the choir looking significantly at each other as they said these
names, and some of them sounded like common names in our area…so I
asked afterwards. It turns out that this "worship site " of my
territorial parish has a custom of including the names of all the people
in the parish who died in the previous year, in the litany of the
saints.

I expressed some reservations about this to the priest….we don’t know
that these people are in heaven, we don’t know their eternal fate, some
might be damned although we hope not, most probably had some "time" in
Purgatory during which they would need our prayers. He seemed to be
upset by my statement that it was conceivable that some of these people
were damned and that probably most would be in Purgatory.

What do you think of this practice?

Two things:

First, it’s prohibited by law. According to the Code of Canon Law,

Can. 1187 It is permitted to reverence through
public veneration only those servants of God whom the authority of the Church
has recorded in the list of the saints or the blessed.

Since the people who have died in your parish in the last year have not been recorded in the list of saints and blesseds by the authority of the Church (either of which listings requires the approval of the pope), they cannot be given reverence through public veneration. You can pray to them privately if you want, but not under church auspices. As the litany of the saints is a form of public veneration, including non-saints/non-blesseds in the litany of the saints is prohibited by law.

Second, doing this on All Saints Day undermines the purpose of the following day, All Souls Day. The whole point of All Souls Day is to encourage us to pray for those souls who have not been declared saints. That’s why they have their own separate day. If you go and quasi-canonize them by venerating them the previous day, it works againt the purpose of the day that is devoted to them on the liturgical calendar.

Number Six Takes His Children To The Beach

Be seeing you!

Beisner Responds

Regarding the recent controversy with Bill Moyers, Dr. E Calvin Beisner writes:

First, I didn’t lie but wrote honestly from the best of my memory.
Second, the conversations on which my memory were based occurred before and
after the recorded interview, as I reported in the October 12 issue of the ISA
newsletter (before ever hearing from Moyers about the October 9
issue) and were not taped.

Equal space will be given to any response that Mr. Moyers chooses to send me.

A Canadian Drinan?

Remember this guy?

If you were politically conscious in the 1970s, you may.

It’s the man who introduced a resolution for the impeachement against Richard Nixon.

But how could a priest do that? Don’t you have to be a member of the House of Representatives to introduce a resolution for impeachment?

Well, this man is a priest and was–at the time–a member of the House of Representatives.

He was a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, a Jesuit, and his name is Fr. Robert Drinan.

He was also vocally anti-war and vocally pro-abortion–at least in terms of the legality of abortion (he claimed to be privately opposed to it with one of those "personally opposed but . . . " rationalizations of babykilling).

And Drinan’s disgraceful performance is one of the reasons that, when the 1983 Code of Canon Law was released, it was made absolutely clear that priests are not to hold such offices. Already, under the 1917 Code, there were severe limitations on what kind of political offices priests could hold, and the Drinan scandal was so shocking that John Paul II took steps to get him out of office (Drinan eventually complied by not running for re-election to a fifth term) and to ensure that in the future priests would not follow in his footsteps. Thus the current Code of Canon Law provides:

Canon 285 §3

Clerics are forbidden to assume public offices
which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power.

So why are there now reports of a Canadian priest trying to become the Robert Drinan of the Great White North?

ED PETERS POINTS OUT HOW CANONICALLY SUSPECT THIS ALL IS.