The Dangers of Web-Banking

I have never understood the willingness of many to handle many of their financial transactions online. Everything from banking to paying bills was possible but, with the exception of occasional online shopping, it didn’t interest me. Why solicit trouble?, I thought. This story shows my concerns were well-founded:

"Bank customers know to shield their ATM passwords from prying eyes. But with the rise of online banking, computer users may not realize electronic snoops might be peeking over their shoulder every time they type.

"In a twist on online fraud, hackers and identity thieves are infecting computers with increasingly sophisticated programs that record bank passwords and other key financial data and send them to crooks over the Internet.

"That’s what happened to Tim Brown, who had account information swiped out of the PC at his Simi Valley store.

"’It’s scary they could see my keystrokes,’ said Brown, owner of Kingdom Sewing & Vacuum. ‘It freaks me out.’"

GET THE STORY.

Freaks me out, too.

Ex-Priest Gets Married

A reader writes:

Recently a (catholic) parish priest left the church  in our town  rather
abruptly. About a year later, the community learned why.  He has since left
the priesthood and married a teacher who was teaching in that same catholic
school.  There have been a lot of questions concerning him .

What does the church teach, as far as a priest leaving the priesthood to
marry, and what can we say in response to some of the negativity regarding
this issue?

It depends on the situation.

The Church regards it as a tragedy when a priest leaves the ministry but it recognizes that there are cases in which it is pastorally prudent to allow this to happen. As a result, the Church has a procedure known as laicization by which a priest can be returned to functioning in the Church as if he were a layman.

This means (among other things) that he can no longer celebrate the sacraments apart from emergency circumstances (e.g., hearing the confession of a dying man). There also are restrictions on the kind of public role he can play in parish life (the Chruch doesn’t want such individuals to have too high a profile because of the confusion it can cause the faithful). Laicized priests may, however, be able to marry.

On the other hand, some priests simply abandon their ministry and do not pursue laicization. Some of these then attempt marriage in a civil ceremony, which results in an invalid marriage because the sacrament of holy orders creates an impediment to marriage that must be dispensed if the marriage is to be valid. This applies even if the priest formally defects from the Church. The only way a priest can validly contrat marriage is if he is laicized first.

I’m not sure how to advise you regarding the "negativity" issue. The fact that this gentleman left the priesthood and in a short space of time married a woman who taught at the local Catholic school suggests that there was at least an inappropriate emotional relationship between the two (and possibly more than that) before he left the priesthood. It wasn’t simply that he concluded that he did not have a vocation. There was some kind of malfeasance on his part when he was still conducting his ministry–and that’s assuming that he did pursue laicization and is validly married to her now. (Given what you say, he may not be.)

There is an element of scandal here (in the sense of setting a bad example that may lead others into sin) and a sense of betrayal on the part of those who the priest and the teacher served, and it is natural for people to be negative toward a situation like this.

Excessive negativity, though, is likely to be a passing phenomenon, and I would probably counsel patience regarding it. It is likely to pass with time.

The Shakespeare Code

You may have heard the speculation that William Shakespeare was a Catholic. Author Clare Asquith, in her new book Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, claims that the Bard of Stratford seeded his plays with subversive Catholic references that was a code for the Elizabethan and Jacobean Catholic resistance movement:

"Far from being an ambitious entertainer who played down his Catholic roots under a repressive Elizabethan regime, Shakespeare took deliberate risks each time he took up his quill, according to Clare Asquith’s new book Shadowplay. She argues that the plays and poems are a network of crossword puzzle-like clues to his strong Catholic beliefs and his fears for England’s future. Aside from being the first to spot this daring Shakespearean code, Asquith also claims to be the first to have cracked it.

"’It has not been picked up on before because people have not had the complete context,’ she explained this weekend. ‘I am braced for flak, but we now know we have had the history from that period wrong for a long time because we have seen it through the eyes of the Protestant, Whig ascendancy who, after all, have written the history.’

"It is now widely accepted that the era was not a period of political consensus, says Asquith. Instead, it was a time in which opposition voices were banished and censorship meant the burning of illegal pamphlets and printed works.

"As a result the Catholic resistance, which had been going for 70 years by the time Shakespeare was writing, had already developed its own secret code words; a subversive communication system which the playwright developed further in his work."

GET THE STORY.

GET THE BOOK.

This story caught my eye since I am currently reading through The Winter’s Tale with a reading group, in preparation for seeing the play performed. I’ve always been fascinated by Shakespeare, but found him difficult to penetrate and so have neglected actually studying him. Whether or not Asquith’s claim has merit, it certainly does pique my desire to better understand Shakespeare.

Eucharistic Bread Recipe

demptionA reader writes:

Attached is a "bread recipe" a local parish uses to bake its own Eucharistic bread.  They’ve established a group of people within their Worship commission to bake this weekly and have it ready for weekend Masses.  I’ve attached the recipe for you to look at.  Is it legitimate?  Hopefully you can shed some light on the issue.  Thank you very much.

Bread Baking Recipe

Since the recipe calls for the use of salt, baking powder, honey, and oil, it is clearly illicit (not in conformity with the law). The Code of Canon Law provides:

Canon 924 §2.

The bread must be only wheat and recently made
so that there is no danger of spoiling.

The instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum further specifies:

[48.] The bread used in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharistic Sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat, and recently made so that there is no danger of decomposition. It follows therefore that bread made from another substance, even if it is grain, or if it is mixed with another substance different from wheat to such an extent that it would not commonly be considered wheat bread, does not constitute valid matter for confecting the Sacrifice and the Eucharistic Sacrament. It is a grave abuse to introduce other substances, such as fruit or sugar or honey, into the bread for confecting the Eucharist. Hosts should obviously be made by those who are not only distinguished by their integrity, but also skilled in making them and furnished with suitable tools.

I would talk to the bishop about the problem if you can’t get it rectified on the parish level.

Yesterday’s News

The NYT has announced that it’s cutting 500 jobs from its different operations (which are more diverse than just the paper you think of). This amounts to 4% of its overall labor force.

Why?

Because they have fewer readers and fewer profits and so can sustain fewer workers.

Over at Powerline John Hinderaker offers this:

As life-long newspaper junkies, we take no pleasure in the
industry’s current crisis. Apart from anything else, we web-based
commenators need newspapers to produce the raw material for our
commentary. But my sympathy for the Times, the Globe, the Chronicle, et
al. is tempered by the knowledge that there is a path to solvency,
which I think would likely succeed, but that they would never consider:
stop being so liberal. Wouldn’t you think that with newspapers nearly
everywhere sliding inexorably downhill, just one might consider whether
its readers–or former readers–were trying to tell it something? Like,
we’re not interested in supporting far-left nonsense?

But no. They would rather go broke than abandon their reason for
being, which is, with only a handful of exceptions, promoting the
Democratic Party.

Would moderating their hard-left politics help stop the financial
bleeding? It’s hard to say for sure. But don’t you think that if they
were motivated mainly be economics, just one of our major liberal
papers might try it? [SOURCE.]

I agree that stopping being so liberal would help the situation of the major newspapers, and that they’d try it if they were motivated by purely economic considerations, but I don’t think it would fix the situation.

Why?

‘Cause I think newspapers are losing their market for reasons independent of the fact that their political ideology is driving readers away.

Personally, I have no interest in reading newspapers. None. I don’t need any more paper piling up around my house, thankyew. I don’t need burglars knowing that I’m not at home because my sloppy, distracted paperboy keeps throwing papers when I’m out of town. I don’t need anything that the papers have to offer.

Not when I can get it all online.

I can get my news online, read comics online, print coupons online, check movie times online, go to eBay instead of the classifieds. Anything! I can get all of my newspaper-type business done online far faster, cheaper, and more conveniently.

It’s the same reason I don’t watch TV news (except for rare exceptions for major national events like after 9/11 or a presidential election).

If I can get my standard information needs fulfilled online–for free–anytime I want them, then why should I even bother with television, much less something as klunky as a newspaper.

As more people are brought up in the fourth age of human communications, it will be harder and harder for newspapers to have a go of it.

I suspect that they will always exist. There will be a few big ones, probably on the model of USA Today, and there will be lots of little, tiny, local papers, like the weeklies that exist principally to run classified ads and that do a few stories on the side.

But I suspect that within a generation the middle level of papers will simply be gone.

They’ll be yesterday’s news.

What will emerge in their places, I’m not sure. Blogs will be a big part of the picture, but not all of it. Probably the broadcast media will have web sites that provide news, on the model of FOXnews.com or CNN.com.

I’m dubious, though, whether anybody will be able to put together a for-pay online newspaper, not when you have newsgatherers like the broadcast networks wanting to involve people with their web sites so that they can involve them with their TV channels.

The quality of news coverage may suffer, at least for a while.

Ultimately, though, the Internet will serve as a net knowledge gain for society, not a net knowledge loss.

That’s what the fourth age is all about.

The Via Dolorosa Of John Paul II

The Vatican has released a detailed report of the final hours of Pope John Paul II:

"Struggling to breathe, Pope John Paul II mumbled his final words weakly in Polish: ‘Let me go to the house of the Father.’ Six hours later, the comatose pontiff died, the Vatican says.

"The account of John Paul’s final hours appears in a meticulously detailed official report on his last weeks just released by the Vatican in what might be an effort to ward off any doubts about how forthcoming it has been about his illness and April 2 death.

"There was much speculation in past decades over how some pontiffs died and what caused their end.

"John Paul I’s brief tenure of 33 days as pope in 1978 spawned conspiracy theories that he did not die naturally in his bed, as the Vatican said. Some wondered if the pope might have been killed because he had information about an Italian banking scandal in which the Holy See’s bank was later found to be involved.

"While no one has publicly suggested anything amiss about John Paul II’s final hours, the Vatican said nothing for years when it was apparent to observers that the globe-trotting, widely beloved pontiff was suffering the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

"The Vatican already revealed many of the details in the new report, but the 220-page volume provides more description of John Paul II’s decline. It went on sale at the Vatican in recent days, the Holy See’s publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, said Saturday."

GET THE STORY.

The reported final words of John Paul, "Let me go to the house of the Father," certainly sheds new light on then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s now-famous reflection during the funeral homily of John Paul II standing at the window of the Father’s house:

"We can be sure that our beloved Pope is standing today at the window of the Father’s house, that he sees us and blesses us. Yes, bless us, Holy Father. We entrust your dear soul to the Mother of God, your Mother, who guided you each day and who will guide you now to the eternal glory of her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen."

Amen.

GET THE HOMILY.

Patristic Recommends

A reader writes:

I’ve been studying Catholic teaching and am considering becoming a Roman Catholic.  My question is: what resources ought one actually read the early fathers in?  The snippets on Catholic.com  are helpful but I am seeking a broad base understanding.

There are several different resources that I could recommend. It depends on what you are looking for.

The main problem is that the writings of the Chruch Fathers are so voluminous that one person could spend years reading them. If you’re actually up for that, the most easily available set is a 38-volume set produced in the 19th century that, since it is public domain, is now online at a number of locations, such as www.newadvent.org.

Even this set, though, is not complete. There are other works of the Fathers not found in it. (And, as one Baptist pastor who later became Catholic noted to me, it sometimes excludes some of the more Catholic-leaning works since the editors were Protestant.)

If you’re looking for a broad summary but not the texts themselves then there is a 4-volume set called Patrology by Johannes Quaesten.

What I’d really recommend if you’re looking for a summary, though, is the 1-volume setbook Ealy Christian Doctrines by J.N.D. Kelly. Kelly is a Protestant, but he’s very good about admitting how Catholic the early Fathers were.

If you’re looking for texts (shorter than the 38-volume set) rather than summaries then I’d have to main recommendations.

The first is a 3-volume set called Faith of the Early Fathers by William Jurgens. It is like the excerpts on Catholic.Com except that it isn’t organized by topic. Instead, it proceeds in historical order from Father to Father, giving passages that the different Fathers said on particular subjects. The passages also (often) are longer than the ones on Catholic.Com and will give you a broader selection of what the Fathers were saying on different topics, as well as more of the context.

If you want whole documents but aren’t up for a long set, I’d recommend Early Christian Writings, edited by Maxwell Staniforth. This is a 1-volume edition of writings from the first and second centuries. It was very helpful to me when I was becoming Catholic, though it suffers from two problems: (1) It only covers a very small handful of documents compared to those that are out there (which is why it can offer whole documents while remaining 1 volume long) and (2) the period it covers is so early that the Church hadn’t yet had a chance to thoroughly reflect on what had been given to it by Christ and the apostles and so there are a lot of imprecise and, at times, even bizzare things. You won’t get as many of the crisply formulated expressions of theology that you will from later ages. Still, it’s quite valuable and contains things like Clement’s and Ignatius’s letters, as well as the Didache.

Following up with any of these recommendations will give you clues about what you may want to investigate next. For example, if you do some reading in Quaesten or Jurgens or Kelly then you’ll learn about documents that you may want to look up and read in more detail in the 38-volume set.

Hope this helps, and God bless!

Highs & Lows

Here’s a little SoCal geography to set you up for my trip to the Salton Sea.

If you were standing at the edge of the beach in San Diego, you’d be at what altitude?

Sea level. Right.

But if you go 15 miles inland, to El Cajon, where I live, you’d be at an elevation of 435 feet.

What happens if you keep going? Suppose you go in another 15 miles, to Alpine. What would the elevation be then?

If the rate of the slope is constant, it’d be 870 feet, but the rate isn’t constant. Alpine’s official elevation is 1735 feet, or thereabouts. Actually, the situation is more complex because the way Alpine’s borders work, you hit the 1000 elevation mark just before the city limits and the 3000 elevation mark just after you pass the city limts, so you’ve got a 2000 foot jump in just about the course of one town (spread out as it is).

A bit further on, about 60 miles inland, you hit the 4000 foot mark, and you stay above that level for another 60 or so miles, though it never gets much above 4200 feet. Then it drops off again. 

FAST!

In six or so miles you drop from the 4000 foot mark down to the flat plane of the Imperial Valley, which is basically about sea level again.

The largest town along the highway is El Centro, which has an elevation of a measley 45 feet above sea level.

So as you move inland from the beach, you get a moderate climb up to El
Cajon, then a really fast climb up through Alpine to a high,
mountainous region that drops off suddenly to the desert floor.

As you make the transition through the mountainous region, you pass
through a number of different small mountain ranges: the Cuyamaca
Mountains ("KWEE-ah-MAH-kah"), the Laguna Mountains ("lah-GOO-nah"),
the In-Ko-Pah Mountains ("In-Ko-Pah"), and the Jacumba Mountains
("hah-KUM-ba"), in that order.

It’s a wild ride! (More on that tomorrow.)

But what happens if you turn north at El Centro to go up to the Salton Sea?

You keep heading downhill.

The slope is gradual, but when you get to the Salton Sea the elevation is:

Salton_sea_elevation_1

Yes! That’s right! The Salton Sea is actually below sea level!

In fact, the lowest part of the sea is even lower. It’s got a maximum depth of 48 feet, the lowest point in the place is 276 feet below sea level.

That’s just a fathom shy of being the lowest point in North America, which is 282 feet below sea level.

And where would that be?

A site just up the road from the Salton Sea . . . Death Valley.

Stamp Of Disapproval

V2stamp_1 The Angry Radical Traditionalist now has a customized postage stamp with which to post grumpy letters to his bishop. Using the personal-design technology approved by the U.S. Postal Service, these stamps feaure a mushroom cloud with the caption "Vatican II: Mass Destruction."

Before Angry Radical Traditionalists who think such stamps are a wonderful idea rush out to order a package — only $16.99! — let me offer some words of caution: Simmer down.

There is no quicker way to be dismissed as a crank than by decorating your mail with stuff like this. Those on the receiving end of a large amount of mail take seriously letters that make the writer’s point in as courteous and succinct a manner possible. Crisply professional business letters demonstrate that the writer is someone who is open to reason and thus it is worth trying to resolve this person’s dilemma. An envelope with a stamp like this might be posted on the lounge bulletin board at the local chancery for the amusement of the staff, but the letter writer’s problem will likely not be taken seriously.