I introduced Dancing Girls!

Fr Mildew has been making some predictions for 2008, this is his December thought.

Fr Finigan and Fr Blake both introduce dancing girls at Mass. Fr Mildew is so horrifed that he has heart attack and dies...

Well yesterday after Mass I met a couple of young women, the conversation was basically, "I am "M", and this "K", we are dancing girls from Ukrania, we are dancing in Brighton for Christmas." I introduced them quickly to another parishioner who speaks both Russian and Polish, before someone else wanted to introduce their newborn baby to me, born on the 23rd December.

No way are these young women going to dance at Mass, but I did introduce dancing girls at (or rather after) Mass. Call me a liberal if you must!

I must check to see if Fr Mildew is alright.

Benedict XVI and 'Affirmative Orthodoxy'

This is part of a very insightful article by John Allen.

Frankly, a pope preaching Christ simply comes off as “dog bites man” stuff to most news editors.

Yet beneath this veneer of familiarity, there was something original about the way Benedict presented the Christian basics in 2007, so much so that I would nominate it as perhaps the year’s most important neglected papal story. To put the story in a sound-bite, I would call it the emergence of “Affirmative Orthodoxy” as an interpretive key to Benedict’s papacy.

By “affirmative orthodoxy,” I mean a tenacious defense of the core elements of classic Catholic doctrine, but presented in a relentlessly positive key. Benedict appears convinced that the gap between the faith and contemporary secular culture, which Paul VI called “the drama of our time,” has its roots in Europe dating from the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the Enlightenment, with a resulting tendency to see Christianity as a largely negative system of prohibitions and controls. In effect, Benedict's project is to reintroduce Christianity from the ground up, in terms of what it’s for rather than what it’s against.

This spirit of “affirmative orthodoxy” was clear in Benedict’s first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est, in which the pope laid out a philosophical and spiritual basis for the church’s teaching on human love. His encouragement for the International Theological Commission to set aside the hypothesis of limbo offers another example. Without softening the traditional teaching that Christ’s grace, normally mediated through baptism, remains essential for salvation, Benedict nevertheless put the accent on hope.

Two more recent examples make the point.

In his recent encyclical, Spe Salvi, Benedict once again takes a classic Christian doctrine usually seen as foreboding and gives it a positive spin. In this case the doctrine is the Last Judgment, often presented over centuries of Christian theology, preaching and art as an implied threat – obey God’s law or face eternal damnation. Instead, Benedict presents the Last Judgment as an expression of hope – specifically, hope that justice will ultimately triumph in a world in which evil and corruption too often seem to have the upper hand.

“Faith in the Last Judgment is first and foremost hope — the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries,” Benedict wrotes.

“I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life,” the pope said. “Only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ's return and for new life become fully convincing.”

Benedict provided another illustration of affirmative orthodoxy in his annual address to the Roman Curia on Dec. 21. This time the subject was evangelization, or the missionary drive to make converts to Catholicism.

In keeping with the thrust of a recent doctrinal note from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Benedict insisted that the church cannot renounce the missionary imperative. Yet he argued that the motive for doing so is not that people will otherwise be damned, but rather that only through evangelization can the Kingdom of God announced by Jesus, with its promise of reconciliation and true happiness, reach its maximum potential in history.

“St. Paul actually felt himself under a sort of ‘obligation’ to announce the Gospel, not so much out of concern for the salvation of individual non-baptized people who have not yet heard the Gospel, but rather because he was aware that history in its totality could not reach its fulfillment until all people were reached by the Gospel,” Benedict said.

“It’s so important that forces of reconciliation, peace, justice and love reach humanity today,” the pope said. “It’s so important that these forces be aroused and reinforced, in the balance of human experience, over against the feelings and realities of violence and injustice that threaten them.”

“Through the encounter with Jesus and his saints, through the encounter with God, the balance of humanity is strengthened by those forces of good without which all our projects in the social order never become reality, but, facing the extraordinary pressure of other interests contrary to peace and justice, remain solely abstract theories,” Benedict said.

The traditional argument for missionary work has been the precariousness of individual salvation without baptism and the sacraments – in other words, a largely negative concern that souls may be lost. Benedict’s point of departure is different. The motive for mission, he suggests, is rather the positive conviction that the great human dreams of justice and peace must have Christ as their foundation, or else they will remain hollow promises.

To put the point differently, Benedict subtly shifted from an individualistic argument for evangelization to the collective welfare of humanity.

read the whole thing here

Pope decries world with luxury for few and poverty for many

VATICAN CITY :Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday criticized a world with luxury for a few and poverty for many and called for moderate lifestyles to ensure fair distribution of wealth amid a scramble for natural resources.

"One cannot say that globalization is synonymous with world order — it's the opposite," Benedict said in his homily in St. Peter's Basilica to mark the Catholic feast day of the Epiphany.

"The conflicts for economic supremacy, and the scramble for energy and water resources and raw materials render difficult the work of all those who strive to construct a more just and united world," Benedict said.

"We need a greater hope, which allows us to prefer the common good of all to the luxury of few and the poverty of many," the pontiff said.

"If true hope is lacking, you search for happiness in intoxication, in the superfluous, in excess, and you ruin yourself and the world," he said. "Moderation is not only an ascetic rule, but also a way of salvation for humanity."

"By now it is obvious that only by adopting a sober lifestyle, accompanied by a serious commitment to a fair distribution of wealth, will it be possible to install a just and sustainable model of development," Benedict said.

On the Epiphany, the Church marks the visit of the Three Magi, or Wise Men, to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem, and Benedict praised their courage for undertaking a long journey guided only by the light of a star.

"We all need this courage, anchored to solid hope," the pope said.

Benedict's remarks reflected the 80-year-old German pontiff's worry for the environment, a developing theme of his papacy.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi elaborated on the pope's concerns in an interview with Vatican Radio.

"Until a little while ago, environmental issues seemed the concern of the rich rather than of the poor, of developed countries rather than of more backward ones for which economic development was instead the priority," Lombardi said.

"Now, frequent disasters due to environmental imbalances hit hard those who have few resources to defend themselves," the spokesman said. "Today, humanity fears for its future ecological balance, and to this observation, the pope links a strong moral call to solidarity," Lombardi said.

Practical Love

CNS carries an acount of the Holy Fathers visit to a shelter for the homeless run by the Missionaries of Charity. The story then continues to discuss the various charitable works of the Holy See through Cor Unum. I was touched by the final section:

The oldest existing form of papal charity is the Almoner's Office, established in 1409. It responds to individual requests for assistance with expenses like medical or utility bills and rent.

Spanish Archbishop Felix del Blanco Prieto, who was named papal almoner last year, said Pope Benedict told him to "never let our charity be lacking" and to come to him personally if he needed additional funds.

"Every day we receive pressing requests from people in trouble: from the sick, from those who can't pay the rent or the gas or light bill, from immigrants, from students and from people looking for work," Archbishop del Blanco told the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, in a recent interview.

The archbishop said his office allocates funds after the petitioner's situation is checked with his local pastor. The amount is generally between 100 and 500 euros (about $150-$750), and each year more than $2 million is distributed.

Most of those asking for financial help are individuals, he said.

"We're here to give out a small, concrete assistance, not to finance great projects," he said.

The Almoner's Office is tucked into a courtyard on the north end of Vatican City. The Missionaries of Charity shelter stands behind the Vatican walls on the southern border. For those on the receiving end, these are essential institutions, but most of the thousands of visitors who stream to the Vatican each day don't even know they exist.

In this parish we try to do other very practical things like feeding the hungry and homeless on the sea front, every year we touch between 5,000 to 6,000 lives, we have the immense privelege of hosting the Voices in Exile project which cares for destitute refugees.
Every year in our parish we offer "free money" for people in similar situations to what the Papal Almoner's Office, we have few takers. The one's we have had have generally been genuine, some have been out and out scoundrels on the make. I have always been unhappy about dividing the poor into the "deserving" and "undeserving poor" but sometimes you just have to be prudent.

Love has to be practical. Christ identifies himself with naked, the hungry, the imprisoned, the sick. I think every diocese, every parish, every Catholic institution, every Catholic should be giving money away. It is so easy to substitute the ubiquitous "committee" for personal practical acts of love. Neither committees nor the State can substitute for Christ's demand on us as individuals to be generous.

Wisemen:

Now, remember scripture says, "there were wise men from the east" and they brought "gold, frankincense and myrrh". Now there were three gifts but we do not know how many wise men there were. St John Chrysostom says there were forty!

Why did they need French, that is frank-incense. Was one of them French?

St John and Elizabeth: unresolved

I though that the St John and Elizabeth Hospital affair was done and dusted, that the hospital had returned to Catholic principles but apparently not.

Fr John Boyle has the following report from something called the Restituta Group:

Hospital Board defy the Cardinal

In their edition of 14th December 2007 the Catholic Herald was announcing “A Catholic hospital is saved … thanks, in part to the leadership of the Cardinal”. Little did they or anyone else know that in a secret meeting of the Hospital Board two days previously, on 12th December 2007, the Board had voted to defy the Cardinal and to proceed with allowing the entrance of the St John’s Wood Medical Practice into the former Convent of Mercy, on 14th January 2008, in order to provide referrals for abortion, the full range of contraceptive services etc etc in total disregard of the Code of Ethics which they had accepted at their previous meeting albeit not to be implemented “just yet”.

The Board did announce some resignations and changes but these are now seen to have been merely cosmetic with a new acting Chairman whose track record has not been seen to be in support of Catholic ethics – instead he is to be supported by the former Chairman, Lord Bridgeman, who has been the chief architect of the ongoing plans to remove the Hospital from Catholicity.

It has been suggested that we, the Restituta Group, should apply for an injunction to prevent the entry of the St John’s Wood Medical Practice. However the law provides that this can only be done with the permission of the Charity Commission who are the body responsible for seeing that charities act within the law. We have now asked for that permission. If permission is not granted we will be applying to a Judge for such permission with a view to eventually applying for an injunction.

Apologise, Now!

From CWNews
Spanish government leaders have asked the country's Catholic bishops to apologize for the massive pro-family rally held in Madrid on December 30, Vatican Radio reports. Leaders of the Socialist governing party have charged that the Church intervened in partisan political affairs with the rally, which drew nearly 2 million participants. (The government is reporting that only 160,000 took part in the demonstration.) The government has asked the bishops' conference for an apology. Although 40 bishops took part in the pro-family event, and the hierarchy gave clear support to the event, the rally was organized primarily by lay Catholic activists.