Marriage Counselling

A reader writes:

My wife and I are Catholic. We have been married for several years. As of late, we have been going through some rough times. So much so, that we feel we need to see a Marriage Counselor. Unfortunately, our parish has not been as helpful as I would like. I called the Rectory and asked for a referral to a Catholic Counselor but they did not have one. They could only refer me to a secular counselor. Is this standard practice? What would you do? My wife and I love each other and want to resolve our conflict and grow in God’s Grace and Peace.

I can’t really say whether this is standard practice. I don’t have the breadth of knowledge of what parishes do in this situation to speak to that. I can, however, try to offer some practical suggestions:

  1. Ask if there are any psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, or other counsellors or mental health workers in the congregation. If so, call them and ask who they could recommend. (They might know who to call better than the parish staff.)
  2. Call a neighboring parish and ask them.
  3. Call the diocese and ask them.
  4. Try seeing a priest for counselling. If there is a solid monastery nearby, one of the priests there might be able to help (and might be able to make his time more available than a parish priest).
  5. Call some marital therapists and say, "My wife and I are both Catholics and think that we’d be more comfortable with a Catholic counsellor. Are you Catholic or could you recommend a Catholic marriage counsellor?"

If all else fails, brace up and go to a non-Catholic counsellor. Just be clear up front that you both care about your religion, which might prevent you from following certain kinds of advice (e.g., about sexual practices), and you want to make sure that the counsellor knows that.

Most counsellors will (or should) understand. It’s unprofessional not to respect the religious convictions of the patients.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Vows To Protestant Church Authorities

A reader writes:

1) A protestant believer is convinced that the Catholic Church is the
Body of Christ and that the "authority" claimed within protestantism
is illegitimate. However, he has vowed submission to the session of
elders at his local congregation, who will not release him from that
vow unless he is transferring to an "acceptable" congregation.

2) A protestant congregation has vowed submission to a presbytery but
the leadership of the congregation becomes convinced that the Catholic
Church is the Body of Christ and that the "authority" claimed within
protestantism is illegitimate.

Does the Catholic Church have a position on whether or not such vows
should be honoured? Or how they should be broken or regarded?

The Catholic Church would hold that any vow or promise is null insofar as it requires one to do something immoral.

Those who have recognized the truth of the Catholic faith have a moral obligation to join it. (Indeed, a duty so grave that salvation hinges on it.)

While the timing of joining the Catholic faith may be affected by various considerations (e.g., will it help one’s family come closer to the truth or even join the Church themselves if one waits a bit to give them more time to adjust), the basic obligation to join remains.

Therefore, it would be immoral for those who recognize the truth of the Catholic faith to permanently remain apart from it.

If the promises made to the session or the presbytery would require one to permanently remain apart from the Catholic faith then they require one to do something immoral and so are null. They have no binding force.

If there is a realistic chance that the session would regard the Catholic Church as an "acceptable" church then one might apply to the session for release to the Catholic Church. If there is no realistic chance that the session would do this then one need not apply to them.

That should deal with the first question sufficiently, I hope.

The answer to the second question would be built on similar principles, but I’d need to know more about what exactly the leadership of the congregation is proposing to do before I’d be able to give a concrete answer. If you e-mail me privately on this I may be able to be of more help in this regard.

Hope this helps!

Reason and Faith

A reader writes:

Can reason lead us to faith in Christ or is it by the Grace of God and faith alone?  I ask this because of the big debate going on now with Intelligent Design.

Reason can allow us to know certain truths about God and his nature–the fact that he exists and that he has certain attributes, for example.

Reason alone cannot teach us the doctrine of the Trinity or that Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity or that we are to have faith in him.

Instead, reason can offer evidences or "motives of credibility" that make it rational for us to place our faith in Christ, but these do not compel or force us to place our faith in Christ. This is where the grace of God comes in.

God’s grace elevates will and allows it to respond to the call to place our faith in Christ. It is then that we either cooperate with or reject God’s grace as we make the decision to put our faith in Christ or not.

Thus one might be able to construct Intelligent Design arguments sufficient to show the existence of God and certain things about him (e.g., he is intelligent, he is a designer). These arguments (with others) then can make it rational to embrace faith in Christ, but they do not prove the Christian faith in the same way that the existence and certain attributes of God can be proved.

MORE INFO HERE.

AND HERE.

Attack Of The Blue Blogs

Now here’s a bit of good news: Did you know that liberals believe that they are a repressed minority? That there is a need to recapture America from those awful Red State conservatives? Evidently so, despite all objective indicators that America is culturally and politically a Blue State society temporarily clinging to Red State voting blocs. Exhibit A: The "mission statement" of LeftyBlogs.com:

"There are a lot of great blogs out there — and it can be tough to track them all, even just in your home state. Here at LeftyBlogs, we’re building the one place you can go to stay on top of all the latest action alerts, news, gossip, and important info that every progressive activist needs.

"Remember, think global and act local. Together, we’ll take back America."

Amusing side note: If you’ve fallen for the myth that only political conservatives are prone to bouts of paranoia, I’m here to explode that myth. LeftyBlogs.com is so protective of its material that I had to literally transcribe the excerpt from LeftyBlogs reproduced above. LeftyBlogs apparently does not allow visitors to copy material through the standard copy-‘n-paste procedure that most bloggers use to post brief excerpts of Internet material.

UPDATE:  Since there are some users who are able to copy-‘n-paste from LeftyBlogs — see the combox — my guess is that it is a technological glitch that prevented my copying, not leftist paranoia.  Thanks to the readers who corrected my error.

The Bar at the Center of the Galaxy

MilkyNASA scientists using information gleaned from the Spitzer space telescope have determined that we live in a barred galaxy;

"It is a major component of our galaxy and has basically remained
hidden until now," says team member Ed Churchwell, an astronomer at the
University of Wisconsin in Madison, US. "The fact that it’s large means
it’s going to have a major effect on the dynamics of the inner part of
our galaxy."

NewScientist.com, the source of the article, also recently reported that the Milky Way has been officially granted an extra arm;

"Astronomers are shocked that the feature has been overlooked until now. ‘I was absolutely flabbergasted, it was quite clearly seen in some of
the previous surveys but it was never pointed out or given a name,’
says Tom Dame at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in
Cambridge, Massachusetts."

The exact nature of our home galaxy has in some ways been difficult to determine for the same reason that you can’t see your own face (without a mirror); we are just too close to see the big picture. Our view is also obscured by lots of dust, debris and interstellar gasses, so often scientists are left to subtle interpretations of indirect or sparse data in order to construct useful theories.

Apparently we now have enough data to solidly suggest that there is a bar at the center of the galaxy, even if we can’t be sure whether there is a restaurant at the end of the universe.

GET THE STORY. (Warning! Possible Evil Subscription Requirement!!)

Br. Roger Has Been Killed

Brother_rogerBr. Roger (left), foundre of the Taize community, has been murdered.

For those who may not know, the Taize community is an ecumenical monastic community. It has both Protestant monks and Catholic monks. Br. Roger was its founder and its prior. He was very supportive of Benedict XVI, who has already condemned his murder.

EXCERPTS:

A Romanian woman slipped into a choir of singing monks during an
evening prayer service and fatally slit the throat of the 90-year-old
founder of an ecumenical Christian community in the presence of 2,500
horrified pilgrims in Burgundy, authorities said Wednesday.

"It happened very fast. There were some screams. We turned around.
He was wounded," said Brother Emile, who witnessed the killing. "We
carried him out of the church so people didn’t see the terrible part.
… She slit his throat."

Brother Roger was stabbed at least twice in the neck. Bleeding
profusely, he died 15 minutes later in the community house, Brother
Emile said.

The 36-year-old intruder had visited Taize for a week in June and was
considered psychologically fragile. Brother Emile said they had learned
from colleagues that she was "a very sick woman in Romania" who
screamed in churches.

"We asked her not to stay," Brother Emile said in a telephone
interview. She returned about two days ago, bypassing the reception
area.

Romanian media identified the woman as Luminita Solcan, from the northeast city of Iasi.

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

STATEMENT FROM THE TAIZE COMMUNITY.

STATEMENT FROM POPE BENEDICT.

Incidentally, perhaps I should mention something else that people have asked recently. During the funeral of John Paul II, Br. Roger (a Protestant) received Communion from Cardinal Ratzinger, which has prompted many questions. As far as I can tell, this is the straight story on what happened:

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls declared in July 2005 that Roger had been in the queue for Communion by accident. Navarro Valls further stressed that Roger Schutz was against intercommunion, but that he shared the Catholic teachings about the Eucharist (transubstantiation).

SOURCE, WITH BIOGRAPHY OF BR. ROGER.

Ruthlessly Pursuing Your Goals

A reader writes:

Hi, I hope you are doing fine today. I have a question regarding the book of Ruth. [Naomi says to Ruth regarding Boaz:] “But when he lies down, take note of the place where he does so. Then go, uncover a place at his feet, and lie down. He will tell you what to do." What is the meaning of uncovering his feet? Why is that Noemi told Ruth to uncover his feet?

Okay, there are two theories here. The first takes the expression literally and assumes that Naomi was telling Ruth to take the blanket off Boaz’s feet and then snuggle up to his feet and wait there for him to wake up, find her lying at his feet, and then propose marriage to her (to be signified by him spreading his garment over her and symbolically claiming her as his own).

And that’s what the text describes as happening.

Problem is, this is a really weird way to catch a man (not that I’d be opposed to it myself; I’m not criticizing).

Now, it’s possible that this is based on some cultural practice in ancient Israel and that by snuggling up to Boaz’s feet, Ruth was making her intentions clear, but we don’t have any independent evidence of such a cultural practice as far as I’m aware. The text is still just weird. That suggests that there may be something else going on here.

What that something else could be is suggested by a bit of knowlege of the Hebrew language.

Hebrew, like every language, has certain terms that are considered indelicate to use in polite society and so, whenever people needed to use one of these words, they’d say a better sounding word instead. Kind of the way in English we sometimes say that someone has "passed on" when we mean that they died.

Hebrew had euphemisms like this, too, and in biblical Hebrew the word for "foot" (regel) was used as a euphemism for . . . er . . . well . . . uh . . . er . . . (ahem) . . . for a certain piece of the male anatomy, y’see. In order to keep matters delicate, the Old Testament elsewhere uses "foot" when it really means . . . y’know. It also uses the word in the plural–"feet"–when it means the same thing.

And so some interpreters (including some very respectable ones) think that in this passage Naomi is directing Ruth to sneak up on Boaz in the night and uncover his . . . anatomy . . . and then seduce him–which is a well-known method in many cultures of trying to obtain a spouse (though it is immoral and does not usually yield quality results).

If that’s what’s going on in this text then Ruth is behaving very ruthlessly in pursuit of her goals (sorry, couldn’t resist) and the biblical author is reporting what happened (he certainly portrays her as One Determined Woman in the book), but he’s cloaking the story to make the telling more delicate.

He thus speaks (both in the passage you cite and later on) as if Ruth was just snuggling up to Boaz’s feet but expects the Hebrew-speaking audience to recognize his use of euphemism.

From what I can tell, this is a possible interpretation, and it certainly would explain an otherwise weird text.

Notice also that in verses 13 and 14, Boaz first invites Ruth to stay the night but then hustles her off before it gets light enough for people to recognize each other, because he doesn’t want it known that a woman came to the threshing floor. Ruth also waited until everyone was asleep before she came, suggesting secretiveness on both their parts.

Indulge Yourself

As y’all may have heard, B16 issued a plenary indulgence for those taking part in World Youth Day.

Unfortunately, that leaves most of us out.

But he also offered a partial indulgence for the reast of us!

EXCERPT:

A partial indulgence is available to all the other faithful, wherever they may be during World Youth Day, if, with a contrite heart, they pray fervently that Christian youth

– be strengthened in the profession of the Faith;

– be confirmed in love and reverence toward their parents; and

– form a firm resolution to follow "the holy norms of the Gospel and Mother Church" in living out their present or future family life, or whatever vocation they are called to by God.

GET THE STORY.

WHAT THE DEAL IS WITH INDULGENCES.

MYTHS ABOUT INDULGENCES.

Bertie Bott's Beans Bodacious

If there is disagreement about J.K. Rowling’s literary legacy, she should at least be given credit for inventing something really fun, and the people at Jelly Belly are to be commended for bringing her idea to life.

Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans are sure to bring your family, friends or co-workers hours of fun at one another’s expense.

For those who may not be familiar with Bertie Bott’s Beans, they are (in the Harry Potter stories) basically jelly beans that have a magical property that makes them able to take on the flavor of, well, almost anything. They are unpredictable, and the only way to tell what flavor one may be is to taste it and see. A green one might be Lime Sherbert (yum), or it might be Broccoli or Slime Mold – there’s no telling.

In the muggle world they are real jelly beans that come in a bizarre range of flavors inspired by the candies in the books. They are available in candy stores nationwide.

Our family had a great time sitting around daring one another to try different flavors (this is more fun if the flavors and corresponding color schemes are not known to the taster, but not absolutely necessary).

Some flavors are just interesting (Bacon, Grass…), some are not as bad as they sound (I found Vomit mercifully toned-down and Booger just kinda salty…) and some are wickedly nasty (Sardine would not go away and Rotten Egg was truly revolting).

How a candy company like Jelly Belly goes about manufacturing and testing such a product is a mystery. I am not sure I really want to know how they decided what Booger was supposed to taste like. How do you know when you’ve got Earthworm just right?

We enjoyed them, if you could call it that, and not all the flavors are gross. Buttered Popcorn was pretty good. Still, I will be a little more cautious from here on out if offered jelly beans.

I’m just gonna go brush my teeth… again…