The Bible is, after all, a Catholic book.

I don’t normally go for overstatement (*ahem*) and in this case I don’t entirely think I am.  Sometimes you come across something where the only reaction you can come up with is stunned agreement, your mind torn equally between silently absorbing what you’ve taken in and the urge to yell out in your finest Southern Baptist twang, “Preach it!“  Adoro’s post Souls in the Balance is without a doubt one of those.  I echo here her closing sentiment: “Christ did not die a horrible death on the Cross so that we could be comfortable. Who, around you, is hanging in the balance? Go get them!”

Matthew Warner has a post that anyone who cares about evangelizing in this modern world has to read.  The numbers are stark and sobering.  Particularly for someone whose parish scores very low on the social networking scale.

Via NLM:

His Eminence Antonio Cardinal Cañizares Llovera, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, announced this monday his intention to ask the Holy Father, in this Year for Priests, to extend the Feast of Jesus Christ the Eternal High Priest (D.N.J.C. Summi et Æterni Sacerdotis) to the Entire Church (source: Religión Confidencial).

From one man in white to another.  In his General Audience yesterday Pope Benedict discussed, albeit briefly, the life and work of St. Dominic Guzman, the founder of the Order of Preachers, more commonly known as the Dominican Order.  If you don’t follow me on Plurk, let me only say that the life of this great saint has become the subject of considerable interest for me in the past several months.  Starting with, of all things, a childrens’ book, I’ve found myself fascinated by this man who saw the hurt and pain that poor formation and catechesis can cause and set out without a care for himself to preach the Truth.  St Dominic, ora pro nobis!

There was a time not so long ago when the ringing of church bells to mark the major hours of the day was as common as the sunrise.  Now we come to find out that in some places it can get the pastor of that church thrown in jail.  It may well be that this will be overturned on further appeal and will simply blow away as the dust of another silly judicial decision.  Or it may indeed be, as Fr. Zehnle suggests, the beginning of a new level of persecution.

For my part, let me just ask this:  if we as Catholics hadn’t given away this tradition, both in building new churches without bell towers and in a concession to the surrounding culture, would this even be a question of the free exercise of religion?  Put another way, when we decide to drop a tradition en masse, how can we later claim its practice to be an important part of the practice of our faith?  Lesson learned:  be careful when deciding something isn’t important to the faith – you might just have a problem getting it back later.

LifeSiteNews gives us this mortifying news:

A national group that promotes abortion and homosexual rights has deep ties with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development, according to a report released Monday.

Top USCCB executive John Carr held simultaneous leadership roles, creating a conflict of interest, with the USCCB and the radical Center for Community Change.

…

John Carr’s relationship with the Center for Community Change goes back at least to 1983, serving in leadership roles from 1999 to 2006 – including as chairman of the board.  The Reform CCHD Now report details the organization’s promotion of abortion, “reproductive rights” and homosexuality as among the CCC’s core advocacy focuses.

As one commenter at Patrick Madrid’s blog put it:  “Our bishops are not stupid men; they must have been aware of this for some time.“  One would have thought that after the recent CCHD fiasco the Bishops would have performed a thorough and independent scrubbing of the ties of anyone working for the USCCB that in any fashion could affect funding or policy-making.

I only ask this:  how many women could have been helped, and abortions prevented, with the funds that instead went to CCC?  It may sound harsh, perhaps melodramatic, but when it comes down to it these kinds of decisions cost lives.

I’ve been backed up on my blog reading, as evidenced by the fact I’m linking to a post by Fr. Powell OP from last week.  I think it’s perhaps the best concise reading of the situation of dissent in the Church today that I have read yet.  I’ll include it here, but if you don’t already read his blog, you should!

5).  You and your fans seem to loathe any kind of dissent from Church teaching.  Is there no place in the Church for good faith disagreement?

Of course there is!  You couldn’t put Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas, and Bonaventure in same room and not expect some disagreement.  Catholic orthodoxy is incredibly generous and incredibly broad.  Dissent doesn’t mean disagreement.  Dissent is a public declaration that the Church has incorrectly taught a significant tenet of the faith.  IOW, the Church has taught an error.  Dissenters often confuse the unwillingness of the Church to accept their views with an unwillingness on the part of the Church to listen to their views.  The sharpest weapon of the dissenters is “process.”  Let’s keep this question open in a dialogue until all views are heard.  The thrust of this tactic sounds reasonable until you realize that its real purpose is to keep us all talking until everyone agrees with the dissenter.  Imagine for a moment that the Church decided to ordain women.  Do you think that supporters of women’s ordination would agree to keep the question in dialogue?  Of course not.  They would declare the question settled and anyone who suggested that we revisit the issue would be labeled a dissenter!  You already see this sort of thing happening with Church teaching on social justice issues.  It’s important to distinguish between doubt and dissent.  There are a few Church teachings that I doubt.  My assumption however is that I simply don’t understand the teachings.  I assent to them as conclusions by holding my doubts in suspension.  Dissenters tend to do the exact opposite.  They assume that b/c they have a doubt about a teaching that they are free to reject that teaching.  Cardinal Newman famously noted that a thousand doubts do not make a single dissent.  Basically, don’t assume that b/c you are smart that you are smarter than 2,000 years of Church teaching!

That last part is what finally cracked the nut shell of my brain.  Humility comes hard to those who have a gift in any form and know it.  The beginning of the end of my ability to believe I was smarter than the Church was Evangelium Vitae.  It’s been a roller-coaster ride of intellectual humility ever since.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a Pope who has spent so much of his time in the Vatican would know how to control information when he really wants to.  But I can’t remember a time in recent history (since, say, maybe Humanae Vitae) when self-styled Vatican watchers were caught more off-guard.

Today Pope Benedict promulgated, among others, the decrees of heroic virtue virtue for Pope John Paul II, which had been well-reported and expected, and to the great surprise of many, the joy of some and the irritation of others, that of Pope Pius XII.  In greatly understated language we simply see these names in a list along with seven others and ten approved miracles, five of which clear the way for canonization and five of which for beatification.  Announcing the heroic virtues of Pope Pius XII at the same time as that of Pope John Paul II was a very interesting way of managing the sure-to-come controversy.

It should be interesting to see now how those who made a great noise against Pope Pius XII, even in the face of continuing and growing evidence of his efforts to save as many Jewish people as possible in WWII, will address this rather ad intra issue.  While I am no expert on Pope Pius XII what I do know tells me this is a well overdue recognition.

One would not, indeed, have thought that Pope John Paul II being named Venerable would be able to be overshadowed on the very day of the announcement.  His was a life of which we are quite unlikely to see a corollary any time soon.  Then again, these are increasingly interesting times in which we live, so who knows what God has in store for us.