Ubi Petrus

I had the chance a couple of days ago to Greg and Jennifer’s podcast where they interviewed Professor Scott Appleby from Notre Dame.  It was, to say the least, a very entertaining if slightly frustrating episode.  I’ll leave it to you to listen to the episode – I don’t think my comments require you going through it all but it certainly, at the least, would not hurt.

In the middle of the discussion between Greg and Prof. Appleby the professor admitted there were multiple possible interpretations of the intent of the university in extending the invitation to President Obama and giving him an honorary Law degree.  He asserted that the most charitable explanation was the only reasonable one and the only one people should accept.  In that right there he reminded me that academics and academia exist in a sphere all their own and forget that not everyone else see the world through their glasses.

This is more than just the ivory tower or liberal demagoguery that I’m talking about here.  Academia, particularly the university environment, exists outside of the influences that affect the lives most of us live.  Granted, there are exceptions to every rule, but we’re not here to pick that nit.  Prof. Appleby’s argument boils down to, if I can paraphrase, “if there’s a possible positive interpretation of Notre Dame’s actions that is the only plausible one and anyone who disagrees is doing so out of their own private motives.”  Tell me where else you get to do something and then demand everyone else agree with your selected interpretation.

That leads me to my second observation.  People have been railing about how the Vatican has done such a poor job of anticipating reactions to various statements in the recent past.  Yet somehow those same people aren’t making the same complaints about Notre Dame’s complete failure in anticipating the reaction to this action.  There’s a fundamental difference in reaction on the part of the university which I think is the genesis of this different reaction by the pundits.  When the Vatican makes a mistake (of late, at least) it has generally admitted in some form the shortcoming, apologized for it and tried to move the discussion back to what they’d intended.  Notre Dame instead has come out swinging, saying it has done nothing wrong and that everyone else is at fault for their malicious interpretations.  The former is red meat to those who have any reason to find fault; the latter puts them on their heels.

For reasons that still elude me universities have been given (or perhaps, have taken) the right to define the terms of discussion regarding anything they do and have, as can be seen in this case,  taken broad privilege with that right.  When you get to deal the cards and decide the rules of the game as it’s being played it’s no wonder things have slid just a little off the straight-and-narrow.  Somehow, in some way, the academic world needs to realize that it can’t dictate reality to those around it and come to see that things such as academic inquiry are not, in fact, carte blancher to ignore the desires of everyone else.  True freedom, and this includes academic freedom as well, is the freedom to do what is right, not just to do whatever one finds intriguing, exciting or glamorous at the time.  I don’t know about you though, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.  Sadly.

Pope Benedict’s general prayer intention for April is: “That the Lord may bless farmers’ work with an abundant harvest and sensitise the richer populations to the drama of hunger in the world”.

His mission intention is: “That the Christians who operate in the territories where the conditions of the poor, the weak and the women and children are most tragic, may be signs of hope, thanks to their courageous testimony to the Gospel of solidarity and love”.

Oremus!

Owing only to being otherwise ridiculously busy I haven’t yet had a chance to blog on the whole Notre Dame/Obama scandal yet.  Suffice it to say I’m disgusted but not surprised, and I’m not surprised at either the arguments used by Notre Dame President Fr. Jenkins nor his unwillingness to recognize the error of his ways.  The former are boilerplate excuses used in academia to excuse any of a litany of abuses under the sovereign (and thus super-Constitutional) right of educational institutions to do anything necessary in the name of “exploring the issues” or “engaging in conversation”.  The latter is what happens when you rise to the level of University President, particularly one with such a grand reputation as Notre Dame – you begin at some point to believe your own arguments and fail to see the ocean of reality surrounding the small island that is your campus.  I have spent enough years in academia both as a student and an employee to recognize these things with some ease.

Just every once in a while something will happen that actually gets through the densely packed polysyllabic layers of insulation in academia, and it’s usually utter simplicity that does it.  Quite simply, you can’t out-talk a talker or out-quibble an academic, but you can thwack them over the head with a pointy stick and stop them in their tracks.  The good Bishop of Phoenix, Bishop Thomas Olmsted has done just that in an email to Fr. Jenkins that is a pointed as it is brief and as stiff as it is armored with truth.  AmP has first coverage of the letter and, to put it plainly, not a word was spared.  Go there to read the rest, but let me only say that when a Bishop uses the words “public act of disobedience to the Bishops of the United States” and they’re directed at you, it would serve you well to pay close attention.  I only hope Fr. Jenkins doesn’t have any “helpful” staff screening his email, and pray with the Bishop that he realizes what a massive public scandal he has caused.

This blog has been in need of some maintenance for some time now and I’ve just managed to wrangle my way through step one.  Since moving to my own self-hosted WordPress blog I’ve had the dubious honor of also having to manage all the plugins that go with using WP.  One of these provides the social networking buttons you see at the bottom of each post – the Sociable plugin.  The only issue with Sociable is that it doesn’t include PickAFig by default, and PickAFig just recently underwent some changes so it’s only recently that I’ve had the time and inclination to fix up the interaction of the two.

To make a long story short, if you’re wanting to use the latest Sociable plugin and would like to be able to have it include PickAFig but haven’t gone through the work of figuring it out yet, here’s the short instructions:

[click to continue…]

A few weeks ago during one of our RCIA sessions someone asked a seemingly simple question the answer to which I hate to admit I simply don’t know.  We were discussing the Transfiguration of Jesus (Matthew 17:1-9, Mark 9:2-8, Luke 9:28-36) and how He talked with Moses and Elijah when someone asked, “but how did Peter, James and John know it was Moses and Elijah?  It’s not like they had pictures or anything.”

The best answers I could come up with were either that: 1) they did actually appear as they’re depicted so often with the tablets and scroll and so the Apostles were able to discern their identities from their symbols; 2) their names were brought up in the conversation they had with Jesus or 3) they asked Jesus afterwards who it was (although that leaves Peter’s build tents, “one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah” rather awkward).  So, I leave it to you, St. Blog’s, to see what kind of answers you might have.

I’ve been absolutely buried lately, but I have absolutely every intention of putting up at least a few posts tonight.  I only wish my absence were due to having such an intense Lent rather than temporal issues.

This past weekend our RCIA catechumen (or candidates, in the case of my parish) went through their first Scrutiny, which means that we heard proclaimed the readings from Year A instead of Year B (and yes I know that candidates don’t technically go through the Scrutinies, but that’s a topic for another time).  Our RCIA director is off on vacation until just before Easter so I’m flying solo including for the Breaking Open the Word, where we go back and discuss further the readings of the day while the Liturgy of the Eucharist goes on at Mass.

Well I was all high and full of myself this past Sunday thinking I had found a great little tidbit to share, tying together the Gospel reading of the Samaritan woman at the well (from John 4)  with our topic of conversion.  It was all about how the pattern of her speech and her word choice changed as she slowly came to understand bit-by-bit who was this Man with whom she was talking.  Really good stuff, and compact enough to fit in the roughly half hour we have for the session.  That plan was working itself out just fine right until Father started his homily.  Let’s just say that Father and I must have been using some of the same sources.  My wonderful presentation went up in flames right before my eyes.  I think the folks behind me thought I had my own private stash of incense as my plans slowly smoldered.

Did I survive?  Yes.  Was the discussion as good as it could have been?  Hardly.  Did I learn a lesson?  Absolutely.  Never, ever, go into a discussion on any reading of the Bible with only one plan for what to say.  You just never know when someone else might be reading the same commentary.  To be honest, it also served as a humbling reminder that: 1) I can’t afford to be getting lazy just because I’m flying solo and 2) the depth of the Scriptures cannot be plumbed in a half hour and I do everyone a disservice by prepping only a half hour’s worth of material.  Mea culpa, my friends.  This weekend I intend to do better – at least two commentaries this time!

Sometimes the most potent argument against an opponent comes from someone who would normally be seen as their ally.  This article by Charles Krauthammer is one of those.  Why is it so important? When you can have this:

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception.

in the same article as this:

How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

you find Obama with a problem.  Now, to be fair, here’s the full context of those two quotes:

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science, and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of “science” and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

Wait, that’s not much better for those who supported Obama’s move, is it?  Well, that’s because as you draw the lens back further the picture gets continually more bleak for those who want unfettered federal funding for the purposes of “research” which has at its heart the murder of millions of babies.  Perhaps the worst part of this whole issue is that this presidency has just begun, and I somehow doubt the next three-plus years will find us doubling back on these decisions.  We.  Must.  Pray.

There are a few priests around St. Blog’s that I think would be quite worthy of receiving the mitre and crosier some day, even though I wouldn’t necessarily wish that much stress on anyone.  Fr. Fox at Bonfire of the Vanities is one of them, and his homily this past Sunday shows, in part, why.  A couple of snips to whet your whistle:

To me, it suggests that true worship,
the way we really are supposed to worship,
is not something that comes from us, to God—
but it is God who tells us how to do it, and we respond.

In other words, we don’t create worship;
we learn how to do it, from the Lord.

…

Remember, when God’ People arrived at Mt. Sinai,
they did not form a liturgy committee
and to plan how they would worship God.
God already had a plan for them—
which he gave to Moses, on top of the mountain.

Well, let me correct myself.
While Moses was up the mountain,
they did form a committee.
And the result was the golden calf.

Now I’m quite sure that it’s impolite to say it, but that last part had me roaring in laughter.  Not necessarily because it was intended as a joke, but because it’s so very, very accurate.  When we try to create our own form of worship we wind up worshiping either ourselves or some dead non-God.  “Save the liturgy, save the world” is more than just a battle cry for embittered rad trads.