I'm A Deputy!

No, really! I am!

I’ve been duly deputized! Put another way: I done been deputed!

I am not, however, a deputy sheriff or marshal.

I’m a deputy commissioner . . . of marriages.

Here’s the story on that:

Recently a relative and the relative’s fiancee (fiance?) asked me to marry them.

Neither the relative nor the fiance (fiancee?) is Catholic, so there is no requirement of Catholic form and it’s a first marriage for both, so it is presumptively valid in the eyes of the Church.

I was honored to be asked, of course, and you don’t say no to a relative lightly when they ask you something as personal as this, so I also checked and verified that there is no canonical barrier (and there’s not) to a Catholic layman performing such a service under these conditions. In fact, many Catholic lay people are commissioners of marriage working in county courthouses all across the country performing civil but–unless there’s an impediment–valid marriages.

Here’s how that gets applied to me: It turns out that California marriage law is crazy (no, really!) and basically anybody can perform marriage ceremonies.

F’rinstance: If you are an ordained minister of any denomination–even a shaman, a witchdoctor, or a minister of a phony Internet denomination made up purely so people can get tax breaks and marry people and call themselves ministers–then you can do marriages in California. You don’t have to be a resident of California. You don’t even have to tell California that you’re coming in to do a marriage. California maintains no central registry of persons authorized to perform marriages.

Since I’m not an ordained minister (not even of a phony Internet denomination), I’m not going that route, of course.

But wait, there’s more!

If you’re Joe Blow, you can go down to the county courthouse, fill out a form, pay a filing fee, and get appoitned a deputy commissioner of marriage so that you can perform one, specific marriage (whose particulars you describe on the form).

So that’s what I did.

And, as of next week, I’m going to go where (a few) Catholic lay people have gone before and perform a marriage.

I do get a gold-star, though. It’s the seal on the form commissioning me:

Here’s the appointing document itself in case you’re curious. Figgered most folks have never seen such a thing (I certainly hadn’t). Click to enlarge it.

I’m particularly interested in the fact that it goes on at such length to say the county won’t cover injuries caused to you in the act of performing the marriage and that it also won’t cover injuries you cause others.

Guess there are still more shotgun weddings than I thought there were or something.

I’m A Deputy!

DeputyNo, really! I am!

I’ve been duly deputized! Put another way: I done been deputed!

I am not, however, a deputy sheriff or marshal.

I’m a deputy commissioner . . . of marriages.

Here’s the story on that:

Recently a relative and the relative’s fiancee (fiance?) asked me to marry them.

Neither the relative nor the fiance (fiancee?) is Catholic, so there is no requirement of Catholic form and it’s a first marriage for both, so it is presumptively valid in the eyes of the Church.

I was honored to be asked, of course, and you don’t say no to a relative lightly when they ask you something as personal as this, so I also checked and verified that there is no canonical barrier (and there’s not) to a Catholic layman performing such a service under these conditions. In fact, many Catholic lay people are commissioners of marriage working in county courthouses all across the country performing civil but–unless there’s an impediment–valid marriages.

Here’s how that gets applied to me: It turns out that California marriage law is crazy (no, really!) and basically anybody can perform marriage ceremonies.

F’rinstance: If you are an ordained minister of any denomination–even a shaman, a witchdoctor, or a minister of a phony Internet denomination made up purely so people can get tax breaks and marry people and call themselves ministers–then you can do marriages in California. You don’t have to be a resident of California. You don’t even have to tell California that you’re coming in to do a marriage. California maintains no central registry of persons authorized to perform marriages.

Since I’m not an ordained minister (not even of a phony Internet denomination), I’m not going that route, of course.

But wait, there’s more!

If you’re Joe Blow, you can go down to the county courthouse, fill out a form, pay a filing fee, and get appoitned a deputy commissioner of marriage so that you can perform one, specific marriage (whose particulars you describe on the form).

So that’s what I did.

And, as of next week, I’m going to go where (a few) Catholic lay people have gone before and perform a marriage.

I do get a gold-star, though. It’s the seal on the form commissioning me:

Commission2

Here’s the appointing document itself in case you’re curious. Figgered most folks have never seen such a thing (I certainly hadn’t). Click to enlarge it.

Commission1_1 I’m particularly interested in the fact that it goes on at such length to say the county won’t cover injuries caused to you in the act of performing the marriage and that it also won’t cover injuries you cause others.

Guess there are still more shotgun weddings than I thought there were or something.

Marcion & The Canon

A reader writes:

I have become reaquainted with a friend from highschool and we have had a couple of conversations of a religious nature. I have just recently come back to the Catholic faith and have been studying diligently but feel inadequate to answer some of his questions. He recently wrote to me regarding his criticisms of the creation of the Bible.

He states that the process of collecting and consolidating Scripture was launched when a rival sect produced it’s own quasi-biblical canon. Around 140 a Gnostic leader named Marcion began spreading a theory that the New and Old Testaments didn’t share the same God. Marcion argued that the Old Testament’s God represented law and wrath while the New Testament’s God, represented by Christ, exemplified love. As a result Marcion rejected the Old Testament and the most overtly Jewish New Testament writings, including Matthew, Mark, Acts and Hebrews. He manipulated other books to downplay their Jewish tendencies. Though in 144 the church in Rome declared his views heretical, Marcions’s teaching sparked a new cult.

Challenged by Marcion’s threat, church leaders began to consider earnestly their own views on a definitive list of Scriptural books including both the Old and New Testaments. He goes on to say that he thinks the process was flawed.

Would you please comment on this and possibly refer me to some writings on this subject? Your thoughts on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

This is a case of "right premises, wrong conclusions."

It’s true that Marcion rejected the Old Testament, holding that it had a different god, and that he produced an edited version of the New Testament (consisting of an edited version of the Gospel of Luke and edited versions of Paul’s epistles) that he had stripped the overtly Jewish passages out of.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MARCION HERE.

It’s also true (or thought to be true) that Marcion’s release of his mutilated canon helped spur the solidification of the real canon by the Church.

But . . . so what?

God often uses heretics to spur the Church to codify in explicit form what was handed down from Christ and the apostles. The Church tends to deal with things in a pastoral manner, meaning that if something hasn’t become a problem, it doesn’t come down on it with the full force of its teaching authority.

The fact is: Being challenged makes people get more explicit and precise about their beliefs. As long as they aren’t challenged on them, they aren’t forced to think through how to defend them and precisely what their boundaries are.

In the beginning, Jesus handed on certain Scriptures as divine to the apostles (i.e., the Scriptures of the Old Testament), and the apostles and their associates wrote new Scriptures (i.e., the New Testament0, which they handed on to the Church.

As long as nobody was challenging these Scriptures with a rival set, there was little need to write out a formal list of precisely what they included.

But when Marcion comes along and starts chucking out large portions of Scriptures known to have been handed on from Jesus and the apostles, the Church needed to start making explicit statements on the point in order to protect the faithful from absorbing his harmful ideas.

It thus reaffirmed in a more precise form what had always been believed.

That’s what typically happens when a new heresy crops up: The Church his forced to articulate what it has always believed in a more forceful and precise way.

Marcion wasn’t the only gent who furthered this process regarding the canon, either. In the second and third centuries lots of Gnostic individuals wrote phony gospels that they tried to pass off as the genuine article. Since these disagreed with the doctrine that had been handed down from Christ and the apostles by Tradition, and since they showed up all of a sudden, with no tradition of their having been used in the churches as handed down from the apostles, it was easy to spot them as fakes. But to prevent ordinary individuals from being taken in by them, the bishops felt it prudent to start issuing lists of the authentic Scriptures and contrasting them with the new-fangled forgeries.

Again: What had always been believed was being reaffirmed more forcefully and precisely.

None of this gives us any reason to doubt the canon or think that the process leading to it was flawed. The process was superintended by the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Scriptures, to make sure that the Church ended up identifying the right ones. Individual bishops, not possessing the charism of infallibility, might make mistakes, but the Magisterium of the Church as a whole (which does possess the charism of infallibility), could not err once it defined the matter.

That was some centuries later, but even before then the fact that Marcion’s scripture and the Gnostic scriptures were rejected as incompatible with what had been handed down from Christ and the apostles shows that the process of preserving and passing down the authentic Scriptures was working.

Marcion & The Canon

A reader writes:

I have become reaquainted with a friend from highschool and we have had a couple of conversations of a religious nature. I have just recently come back to the Catholic faith and have been studying diligently but feel inadequate to answer some of his questions. He recently wrote to me regarding his criticisms of the creation of the Bible.

He states that the process of collecting and consolidating Scripture was launched when a rival sect produced it’s own quasi-biblical canon. Around 140 a Gnostic leader named Marcion began spreading a theory that the New and Old Testaments didn’t share the same God. Marcion argued that the Old Testament’s God represented law and wrath while the New Testament’s God, represented by Christ, exemplified love. As a result Marcion rejected the Old Testament and the most overtly Jewish New Testament writings, including Matthew, Mark, Acts and Hebrews. He manipulated other books to downplay their Jewish tendencies. Though in 144 the church in Rome declared his views heretical, Marcions’s teaching sparked a new cult.

Challenged by Marcion’s threat, church leaders began to consider earnestly their own views on a definitive list of Scriptural books including both the Old and New Testaments. He goes on to say that he thinks the process was flawed.

Would you please comment on this and possibly refer me to some writings on this subject? Your thoughts on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

This is a case of "right premises, wrong conclusions."

It’s true that Marcion rejected the Old Testament, holding that it had a different god, and that he produced an edited version of the New Testament (consisting of an edited version of the Gospel of Luke and edited versions of Paul’s epistles) that he had stripped the overtly Jewish passages out of.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MARCION HERE.

It’s also true (or thought to be true) that Marcion’s release of his mutilated canon helped spur the solidification of the real canon by the Church.

But . . . so what?

God often uses heretics to spur the Church to codify in explicit form what was handed down from Christ and the apostles. The Church tends to deal with things in a pastoral manner, meaning that if something hasn’t become a problem, it doesn’t come down on it with the full force of its teaching authority.

The fact is: Being challenged makes people get more explicit and precise about their beliefs. As long as they aren’t challenged on them, they aren’t forced to think through how to defend them and precisely what their boundaries are.

In the beginning, Jesus handed on certain Scriptures as divine to the apostles (i.e., the Scriptures of the Old Testament), and the apostles and their associates wrote new Scriptures (i.e., the New Testament0, which they handed on to the Church.

As long as nobody was challenging these Scriptures with a rival set, there was little need to write out a formal list of precisely what they included.

But when Marcion comes along and starts chucking out large portions of Scriptures known to have been handed on from Jesus and the apostles, the Church needed to start making explicit statements on the point in order to protect the faithful from absorbing his harmful ideas.

It thus reaffirmed in a more precise form what had always been believed.

That’s what typically happens when a new heresy crops up: The Church his forced to articulate what it has always believed in a more forceful and precise way.

Marcion wasn’t the only gent who furthered this process regarding the canon, either. In the second and third centuries lots of Gnostic individuals wrote phony gospels that they tried to pass off as the genuine article. Since these disagreed with the doctrine that had been handed down from Christ and the apostles by Tradition, and since they showed up all of a sudden, with no tradition of their having been used in the churches as handed down from the apostles, it was easy to spot them as fakes. But to prevent ordinary individuals from being taken in by them, the bishops felt it prudent to start issuing lists of the authentic Scriptures and contrasting them with the new-fangled forgeries.

Again: What had always been believed was being reaffirmed more forcefully and precisely.

None of this gives us any reason to doubt the canon or think that the process leading to it was flawed. The process was superintended by the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Scriptures, to make sure that the Church ended up identifying the right ones. Individual bishops, not possessing the charism of infallibility, might make mistakes, but the Magisterium of the Church as a whole (which does possess the charism of infallibility), could not err once it defined the matter.

That was some centuries later, but even before then the fact that Marcion’s scripture and the Gnostic scriptures were rejected as incompatible with what had been handed down from Christ and the apostles shows that the process of preserving and passing down the authentic Scriptures was working.

ComBox Problem Query

Down yonder a kindly reader points out that there’s a problem with the comboxes: They aren’t remembering who folks are, so they have to re-type their name, e-mail addresses, etc.

This is a problem I’ve been having for a while, but . . . I thought it was just me.

I got a new computer recently and I haven’t downloaded Mozilla or Firefox yet, so I’ve been using Internet Explorer and I thought I’d just had a setting wrong or something.

Then the kindly reader mentioned he’s having the same problem and a buncha folks chimed in.

Sooooo . . . I contacted TypePad and asked what the deal was. They wanted to know what browser I and others are using since their techs have spotted the problem and are working to resolve it for IE. They hope to have it fixed soon.

Is anybody encountering the problem who is not using IE?

Conscience

A reader writes:

I was told by a Catholic that he was free to disagree with Church teaching by virtue of the "Doctine of Conscience" He doesn’t believe that missing mass is a mortal sin, and for a lapsed Catholic to take communion etc.

I am not yet a Catholic, and am being confused by individuals who are active practicing Catholics, but appear to be of the cafeteria type. Am I out to lunch and uncharitable?

Nope.

Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

1790 A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself. Yet it can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes erroneous judgments about acts to be performed or already committed.

1791 This ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility. This is the case when a man "takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin." In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he commits.

1792 Ignorance of Christ and his Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one’s passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church’s authority and her teaching, lack of conversion and of charity: these can be at the source of errors of judgment in moral conduct.

Your friend clearly has an erroneous notion of conscience. Whether he is culpable for this or not is a matter that we should not attempt to judge, but he has an erroneous notion nonetheless.

Your friend apparently knows what the Church holds regarding certain situations (i.e., that it is gravely sinful to miss Mass on Sundays without an excusing cause, that lapsed Catholics should not go to Communion without confession first) and is wilfully disregarding this. It seems from what you have said as if he has taken little trouble to investigate the firmness with which the Church holds these points or that he knows they are firm but wilfully disregards this fact. This means that he may be in a situation where he is culpable for his error on these points, though this cannot be said with certainty.

What is certain is that your friend is wrong and needs to re-think these issues with greater attention to the teaching and governing authority that Christ bestowed upon the Church:

"I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatsoever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; whatsoever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heave"–Jesus Christ, Matthew 16:18

H. P. LOVECRAFT: Artist!

Lovecraft describes some pretty weird monsters in his fiction. The most famous is Cthulhu, which he describes as looking like a cross between a man, a dragon, and an octopus.

In the story The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft mentions an apparent voodoo cult in Lousiana that has a small, pre-human statuette of Cthulhu that they use in their rites. When the police bust up and arrest members of the group, they get the statuette, which is then taken to a meeting of archaeologists in a vain attempt to identify it.

Lovecraft describes the statue this way:

The figure . . . was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.

This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.

The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way clown toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees.

The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth – or indeed to any other time.

Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy.

The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it. something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.

Now, since reading the story, I’ve had my own mental image of what the statuette looks like (though I must say that I have a tendency to forget that it’s supposed to be made of greenish-black stone and imagine it as being made of straight black stone instead).

I’ve wondered, though, what mental image Lovecraft had of the statue. He was no artist (despite the fact I just said he was in the title of this post), but he did once draw a picture of it in a letter to his friend F. Lee Baldwin. Here it is:

WARNING! IMPENDING VISAGE OF ELDER COSMIC MADNSS THAT MAY SHATTER YOUR SANITY! VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED! THIS IMAGE CONTAINS MATERIAL KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE INSANITY!

Continue reading “H. P. LOVECRAFT: Artist!”

Distance Doctorates?

A reader writes:

I currently have been looking online for a possible distance learning "accredited" Phd/doctorate program in theology. Can anyone point me in the right direction of a credible source?

For one here in the U.S., not really, but see below.

I have looked at a few. For example, Liberty University has a doctorate program and claims to be accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Is this a legitimate accreditation?

Yes, it is. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools is one of the major regional U.S. accreditors. I also checked the CHEA database, and they are there (see below).

Finally by whom should a distance learning program be accredited by in order to have any legitimacy?

It depends on what country one is in. In most countries, accreditation is carried out directly by the government and there are few diploma mills. Here in the U.S., it doesn’t work quite that way. The major accreditors are private institutions, but anyone listed by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a safe bet. In fact, some places (like the state of Michigan) use the CHEA database as a test of whether a degree will be honored for employment purposes and exclude schools that aren’t under the CHEA umbrella (WARNING! Evil file format [.pdf]!).

p.s. Is there a link or website where I can look up the names of universities to see if they are accredited by a credible educational institution?

Sure, you can

CHECK THE CHEA DATABASE.

Now, a few further thoughts:

  1. I can’t recommend that you go with Liberty University as they are a Southern Baptist School. A doctorate in theology from such a place will cut absolutely no mustard in Catholic circles. Doctorates in other things, like biblical languages or biblical studies, might, but theology, no.
  2. I don’t think distance education has matured to the point that many accredited institutions (particularly Catholic ones) feel comfortable offering doctoral degrees at a distance. We may get to that point some day, but we ain’t there yet. That’s why such things are so hard to find.
  3. I can mention one place that you might want to investigate that offers a distance doctorate at least somewhat along these lines: The Maryvale Institute in Birmingham (the one in England, not Alabama) offers a doctorate in Catholic Studies. This is a research degree and not a PhD in theology. They are accredited through the UK’s Open University, if I am not mistaken.
  4. The real acme degree in Catholic circles is not a PhD in theology but an STD. That’s not as horrible as it sounds (it stands for Doctor of Sacred Theology). Such degrees are awared only at schools that have Vatican approval to offer them, and I am sure that none of these schools presently offers a distance STD. It probably will be a long time before any do, though other doctorates in related fields may still cut a good bit of mustard.
  5. When looking at accreditation issues, one has to look at look not only at the school but at the program. Some schools are accredited to offer certain degrees but not others. Make sure to inquire about whether the degree you’re after is accredited and by whom.
  6. You also sometimes have to look at the government. Accreditation by some governments may not be worth much internationally.

Hope this helps!

LEARN MORE ABOUT ACCREDITATION.