IDEAS is a section of our Holy-Rosary website devoted items of interest to contemporary Catholics who wish to deepen their understanding of their faith and practice.
Click on the titles for full details.
Two Movies ... [2010-09-05]
A while back I was invited to contribute an article on clerical celibacy to a religious periodical.
Sensing that my approach would be inimical to the editor, I wrote beforehand .....
The advancement of knowledge has been remarkable. I have kept the calculus book I used in 1955,
the year I entered university, but it is less suited .....
The Holy Spirit is sometimes referred to as the neglected Person of the Trinity,
and it is true that his mode of presence highlights his dependence .....
On 6 May, at the synagogue Temple Sinai, the annual interfaith dinner brought together Christians,
Jews and Muslims. The programme included statements about the principles of inter-religious dialogue. What follows is a .....
The first public event of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s visit to Toronto was a Eucharist held on Sunday afternoon, 13 April 1986,
at Saint Basil’s Church. The Mass was an epitome .....
For most of us the official prayers of the Church - those in the Sacramentary,
for instance - have something absolute about them; we don’t think of them as .....
You could determine the philosophy of life of the most pragmatic financier on Bay Street in the course
of a day or two by noting his actions and decisions .....
Jargon is technical language, appropriate, therefore, in its place.
The most inaccessible of these places is surely mathematics, as is indicated by the fact that “parameter”, one of the few .....
Ecumenism can be defined as a friendly dialogue among Christians. In the old days, such discussions,
if they occurred at all, were concerned with pointing out .....
In October I wrote about “the Church’s way of entangling herself in any culture she finds herself in,
even to the point, at her best, of informing it totally. The greatest, never equalled, example is the .....
Pope Benedict’s interest in the Church history and, in particular, the liturgy,
has made him sensitive to the feelings of those Catholics who were startled at the extent and rapidity of the changes .....
There is a disposition to believe that being smart and being good are equivalents.
Anyone who thinks that would do well to spend some time at a university. There is no doubt .....
Benedict XVI gives many talks, and almost all of them are in print.
If you don’t believe me, consult the Vatican web site under “Benedict XVI”.
Over the years I have developed a knack for .....
On 24 September 2009 President Obama presented a resolution to the Security Council of the United Nations that was passed unanimously.
It envisaged a world without nuclear .....
In Graham Greene’s novel Monsignor Quixote, Sancho says,
“Men will always have to choose a lesser evil and the lesser evil may mean the state, the prison camp,
yes, if you like to say it, the .....
Bad Christian Art is everywhere. We have all seen in a variety-store window the mass-produced Madonna with mouth askew and blurred eyes.
It is doubly offensive: it is not art and .....
It used to be that, when a novice made his vows,
he would receive a number of holy cards on the backs of which his confrères would have inscribed axioms useful for someone beginning religious life in earnest.
A favourite saying used to be, “Keep the rule and the rule will keep you.” .....
Clueless, a box-office hit of 1995, was successful enough as a movie to spawn a television series the following year.
The show was an unacknowledged tribute to Jane Austen in that the plot is a hip version of Emma,
considered by many critics to be her greatest novel. Other adaptations of the novel,
like the multiple versions of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion,
keep to the original settings. But one novel in her canon .....
John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter to the Youth of the World [2009-09-20]
Pope John Paul’S Apostolic Letter of 31 March 1985 is not only addressed to the youth;
it is youthful in spirit. This youthfulness arises from two characteristics of the letter:
a mood of hopeful optimism, and standards of fairness and justice as rigorous as those young people expect from individuals and governments.
The Pope knows that these qualities .....
Pope Benedict’s new encyclical is both simple and complex.
It is simple because the entire document is based on a single principle;
complexity arises from the multifaceted implications of this principle for contemporary society.
And what is this axiom on which the Holy Father bases his assessment of modern life?
It is this: man is a being that is open to .....
The introduction alone is worth the price of the book. Given the price ¡X $140 (sic) ¡X
my use of this cliche is a compliment to Sheridan Gilley who prepared this splendid edition of a book that has long been a classic of Catholic apologetics,
although Chesterton was still an Anglican in 1908, when the book was first published;
he entered the Church only in 1922. “Orthodoxy,” it need hardly be stated,
refers to the teachings of .....
This autumn, Father Callam will be offering three seminars on Catholicism.
Meetings will be on Wednesday evenings from 7:30-8:30 p.m. for four weeks.
These seminars are open to parishioners or any other interested party. There are no pre-requisites;
all that is needed is a copy of the text and a willingness to say something about it. There is no charge.
In the 1950s Father Roach said an early Mass for the Sisters of Saint Joseph in their motherhouse on Wellesley Street.
The seminarians from Saint Basil’s used to serve, and I remember feeling a little daring crossing Wellesley in my cassock.
Father Roach was old and devout, and his voice would take on an additional tremor as he recited the prayers said after low Mass for the conversion of Russia:
“Holy Michael Archangel, defend us the day of battle; be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. . . .”
The chapel, as big as a church, was filled by .......
The code of canon law governs the practical aspects of Catholic life.
One interesting canon (i.e., law) is number 844, §4, which describes the conditions under which a Protestant may receive sacramental ministry from a Catholic priest.
The conditions are stringent: If the danger of death is present or if,
in the judgment of the diocesan bishop or conference of bishops, some other grave necessity urges it,
Catholic ministers administer these sacraments .......
Recent popes, inviting Catholic scholars use modern historical techniques in biblical studies,
have also cautioned them to make sure their conclusions are based on the whole of Scripture. Few,
even among professional scholars, have time to keep the whole Bible in focus.
Most of us have to get our milk and honey one drop at a time out of the Promised Land. But you don’t have to ingest the whole or even a whole book in order to make contact with its spirit;
so there’s no need .......
On the day that Father Brezik died I happened to be reading an account of a recent exchange between a prominent spokesman for the Catholic Church and a well-known atheist.
Their topic was whether believers and unbelievers can agree on certain principles which would allow them to support common laws and policies and perhaps even to work together towards the common good of a society.
In the course of his presentation the Catholic spokesman cited the natural-law theories of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Puffendorf,
two influential seventeenth-century Protestant thinkers, as examples of efforts to find in human reason a basis on .......
The Nine Ways Of Prayer Of Saint Dominic [2009-06-28]
Holy teachers, such as Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, Hilary, Isidore, John Chrysostom,
John Damascene, Bernard, and other saintly Greek and Latin doctors have discoursed on prayer at great length.
They have encouraged and described it, pointed out its necessity and value, explained the method,
the dispositions which are required, and the impediments which stand in its way. In learned books,
the glorious and venerable doctor, Brother Thomas Aquinas, and Albert, of the Order of Preachers,
as well as William in his treatise on the virtues, have considered admirably and .......
Prayer is a topic I find difficult to address without sounding somewhat confessional.
For one thing, it's personal; for another, no one¡Xno one I know, at least¡Xis satisfied with his prayer.
One would think that years in religious life and as a priest would have made prayer easy and consoling.
Why this is not so is not altogether clear to me. It seems unlikely, pace Mother Teresa,
that anyone would experience the dark .......
The definitive break between the Catholics and the Orthodox¡Xthe Latin West and the Greek East¡Xtook place in 1054 when the Churches excommunicated one another.
In 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagorus of Constantinople lifted the excommunications,
but that action alone could not heal the rift of 900 years.
One astute observer made this comment .......
Every so often, a seriously disturbed individual releases his pent up frustration by a murderous assault on innocent people.
The “Montreal Massacre” perpetrated by Marc Lepine at the Ecole Polytechnique on 6 December 1989 has scared the Canadian imagination ever since.
A movie version of the event, released in February, was featured last month at the Cannes film festival in France.
Similarly, the tragedy at Columbine High School in April 1999 .......
Two famous names will inevitably call forth the inexhaustible talent of mimicry in a young child.
“Napoleon” provokes in the youngster the upright military posture and the familiar crooked right arm and the hand over the heart;
“Frankenstein” galvanizes the child into not merely a pose but a motion¡Xthe rigid, uncertain walk,
the glassy stare, and the outstretched arms precariously balancing the imagined eight-foot frame.
That Napoleon acutally .......
Scripture is what is known as “evolved literature”.
This term means that the individual books were not written down all at once and then preserved intact,
but that as time went on the original text was revisited, revised, added to,
corresponding to the ongoing religious experiences of the chosen people.
For example, the book of Isaiah contains an opening section from the prophet and .......
“The End Of Orthodoxy” was the original title of this essay.
An equally provocative title would have been “The End of Catholicism”.
It is not that I think that Catholicism or Orthodoxy is finished as a religion;
what I had in mind was that .......
Religious communities have suffered financially for the sexual misdemeanours of their members that have been punished in secular courts.
Some of the loss could be compensated for, perhaps, if the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Nuns were to sue The Globe and Mail for two articles on the residential school at Fort Albany,
Ontario (19, 21 October). Two large photographs accompany these articles, one of a priest .......
The Spanish Inquisition is universally regarded as the epitome of evil,
right up there with Auschwitz and the Gulag.
That is why the Inquisition will come immediately to the mind of anyone who encounters Pope John Paul II’s widely publicized statement of 1994,
The Approach of the Third Millennium, in which he summoned the sons and daughters of the Church to repentance for “acquiescence given,
especially in certain centuries, to intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of truth.”
My difficulty with John Paul’s summons is .......
The Argument Against Artificial Contraception [2009-04-26]
The teaching of the catholic church on artificial contraception and sterilization seems odd,
to say the least. On the one hand, using artificial means of contraception or sterilization in order to limit the size of the family is wrong .......
The world has become small, and films recognize that fact by plots that have their subjects scurry around.
Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond, dizzies its audience with its frequent changes of location.
Similarly, Traitor takes place in Africa, the Near East, Europe, and North America
(including both Canada and the United States). Taken, on the other hand, relatively limited in locale,
assembles its characters from hither and yon. .......
The fifty days between Easter and Pentecost are devoted to meditation on the mystery of the resurrection,
which is the foundation of Christianity. Just how much that is so came home to me when I was called upon recently to give an address on the faith of the apostolic Church.
To begin with, I realized as never before how thoroughly Jewish primitive Christianity was.
There is nothing really surprising .......
A GREAT NUMBER OF MEN live and die without reflecting at all upon the state of things in which they find themselves.
They take things as they come, and follow their inclinations as far as they have the opportunity.
They are guided mainly by pleasure and pain, not by reason .......
I being with two observations: there are various types of differences, and some cannot be reconciled,
nor should they be. I shall not speak tonight about family feuds or about disagreements with one’s neighbour or at work.
I mentioned something about them last week. Rather, I would like to take this opportunity .......
Almsgiving in the Twenty-First Century [2009-03-22]
This statement from the Summa of Saint Thomas Aquinas provides the principle upon which I wish to base my remarks about almsgiving.
The axiom expresses in succinct form the theological insight that creation and redemption are the work of the same God,
and hence .......
If we are to take Saint Paul’s words seriously,
we see that there must be different forms of prayer; we can’t be on our knees or in church all the time.
And given that fact, we are immediately invited to put these forms in some sort of order,
starting with the method of prayer that is .......
Fasting was an essential aspect of primitive Christianity,
as it had been in Old Testament times. Given that this is the year of Saint Paul,
I may note that he fasted between his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus,
and his baptism and again when he was chosen as .......
Mel Gibson’s film on the passion of Jesus Christ, released in 2004,
was bound to be controversial. Neither critics nor believers go to the movies to encounter God in a film that depicts the Eternal Word incarnate and His life-giving sacrifice.
The media, generally, place form over content, as colour photographs fill the pages of magazines .......
The Jesus Seminar has attracted attention for its Scholar’s Version of the New Testament,
The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.
In it red ink is used for sayings of Jesus accepted as authentic by most of the Seminar’s members:
“That’s Jesus!” Pink ink designates a phrase that .......
On 1 February 2009 the Archdiocese honoured the consecrated life, i.e.,
those men and women who have taken the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
It is therefore worth recalling that this form of life was the topic of the synod of bishops that met in Rome in 1994;
in 1996 a summary of their .......
A few years ago I spoke at a symposium that had as its theme “Religion and the Quest for Peace”.
One after the other, the representatives of various religions described how completely opposed to warfare they were.
A Moslem quoted from .......
It’s hard to contain my pleasure or my surprise at the continuing interest in Jane Austen.
The more-or-less successful adaptations of her books for film and television as well as a library of offshoot novels indicate that many people who would seem to disagree on every other topic join in admiring her.
The agreement, however, is not as extensive as .......
Magazines often publish questionnaires to help you determine the state of your health,
your intelligence, or your personality. Here¡¦s a series of questions to measure .......
Watching two films about magicians ¡X The Prestige and The Illusionist ¡X
I was reminded of an old (1959) film by Ingmar Bergman ¡X The Magician ¡X
which was loosely based on G.K. Chesterton’s 1913 play, Magic. It is almost axiomatic .......
Saint Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch¡Xthe city where the followers of Jesus were for the first time called “Christians” ¡X
was martyred in Rome around A.D.110.
Because he may well have known the Apostles personally, he is identified as an .......
How can the Catholic Church today claim to be the Catholic Church of a hundred years ago,
or five-hundred years ago, or a thousand? Can we Catholics be sure that we preach the message of the Apostles?
Can we be sure that our liturgy celebrates what they celebrated?
These are the concerns of the Catholic theologians in our century.
Way back in the twentieth century .......
A Poem for Christmas - The Nativity of Christ [2008-12-21]
Behold, the father is his daughter's son,
The bird that built the nest is hatched therein,
The old of years an hour hath not outrun,
Eternal life to live .......
Is it ever permissible to take the law into one’s own hands? Most people think so,
in desperate situations such as, to take an extreme case, the plot to kill Hitler.
I ran across a remote parallel in one of Alexander Kent’s Bolitho books: Signal¡XClose Action.
In it, the captain of a warship who is .......
Glance at any catalogue of saints and you will be struck, as I was,
at how few of them were married. There are Mary and Joseph, of course,
but their situation was hardly typical. Of the other saints who were married, women outnumber men. .......
“The hierarchy of truths” is a phrase found in the Decree on Ecumenism of Vatican II where the Council is advising Catholic theologians engaged in ecumenical dialogue:
“When comparing doctrines with one another, they should .......
Father Robinson has written two essays, not one as his title indicates.
That on tradition is prolegomenon to an extended treatment of prayer,
a prolegomenon that one at first might think could well have been omitted without .......
Murphy, whoever he was, has gained immortality of a sort by enunciating a law which,
if not absolutely universal, is close enough to experience to be universally quoted:
“If anything can .......
HERE are two modes of praying mentioned in Scripture;
the one is prayer at set times and places, and in set forms;
the other is what the text speaks of, ¡X continual or habitual prayer.
The former of these .......
The encounter between Jesus and the rich young man came to mind as I watched Into the Wild.
It would surprise me if the director, Sean Penn, intended it,
but the movie can be read as an intriguing variation on the incident.
In Matthew¡¦s Gospel.......
I propose, subject to the patience of the reader,
to devote two or three articles to prophecy. Like all healthy-minded prophets,
sacred and profane, I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look ugly for everybody.......
In moving offices recently I found,
between my copies of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings,
a long-lost fragment from the unfinished third part of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
The manuscript, consisting of a single article......
Rome’s Synod of Bishops on Scripture: 5-26 October 2008
The next General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops will reflect on “The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church.”
Among the Ecclesial Community’s many and great duties in today’s world, I emphasize evangelization and ecumenism.
They are centred on the Word of God and at the same time are justified and sustained by it.
As the Church's missionary activity with its evangelizing work is inspired and aims at the merciful revelation of the Lord,
ecumenical dialogue cannot base itself on words of human wisdom (cf. 1 Cor. 2.13) or on neat,
expedient strategies, but must be animated solely by constant reference to the original Word that God consigned to his Church so that it be read,
interpreted and lived in communion with her. In this area, St. Paul’s doctrine reveals a very special power,
obviously founded on divine revelation but also on his own apostolic experience,
which confirmed anew the awareness that not wisdom and human eloquence,
but only the power of the Holy Spirit builds the Church in the faith (cf. 1 Cor. 1.22-024; 2.4 ff). Pope Benedict, 8 January 2008.
Throughout the Old Testament era, God’s people were engaged in religious and cultural dialogue with their pagan neighbours.
Perhaps the most well known is the influence of the Gilgamesh epic on Genesis’s description of Noah’s flood.
One may also note the growing emphasis on angels and demons after the Babylonian exile,
the typically Mesopotamian denial of an after life (as in Psalm 87/88: “Is thy steadfast love declared in the grave,
or thy faithfulness in the tomb?”), or Canaanite influences on the calendar and rituals of Jewish festivals.
Pope Benedict called attention to another instance of this sort of dialogue in his Regensburg address, namely,
the entry of Greek thought into late Judaism as represented by the deuterocanonical books: Wisdom, Tobit,
1 and 2 Maccabees, etc. This acknowledgement of rationality in divine revelation, presented as a challenge to Islam,
also calls into question elements of Protestantism and Judaism, both of which, significantly,
exclude these books from the canon of inspired texts.
It is a striking fact that Christianity has continued this divinely inspired approach to the world.
From apostolic times, the Church has been daring in “baptizing” acceptable features of the pagan societies in which it found itself.
Greek philosophy and Roman law, to name only two, have been extremely influential in forming Catholicism as we know it today.
At present, the Church is engaged in another dialogue¡Xdangerous, and yet unavoidable (unless we wish to shut ourselves up in a Lefebvrist ghetto)
¡X with the scientific, democratic, and technological society to which we all belong.
Such is the context of the Synod of Bishops that will occur in Rome from 5 to 26 October.
The topic is Scripture: “The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church.”
The Instrumentum Laboris (“working document”) exhibits its complicated origin as a summary of responses to lineamenta from “the Eastern Catholic Churches,
the Departments of the Roman Curia and the Union of Superiors General, . . . bishops, priests, men and women religious,
theologians and the lay faithful” (no. 1). I feel sorry for the bishops who will have to come to grips with this long,
disjointed document. While it is full to bursting with excellent statements about the liturgical use of Scripture,
the role of the magisterium, monastic lectio divina, and so forth, the editors, it seems,
have been too lenient in admitting a plethora of ideas and opinions, some of which seem difficult to reconcile with one another.
For example, in number 47 we read:
Today technology and the means which put people in contact with the Bible are many and generally well-done,
including commentaries, introductory materials to the Bible, Bibles for children and young people,
spiritual books and scholarly and popular magazines on the Bible, not to mention the vast field of simple and elaborate means which serve to communicate the Word of God. . . .
Familiarity with the Sacred Scriptures is not an easy task.
And then, in number 22, “The Church attempts to avoid making Bible reading sound too complicated.”
A careful reading through the Instrumentum, nevertheless,
makes clear the essential goal of the synod; it has taken upon itself the task of reconciling the traditional approaches of Scripture which are based on faith,
with the historical-critical method which is based on science. The difference between the two can be easily summarized:
for the believer, the Bible, as inspired, has one author, namely God; for the scholar, the Bible has many authors,
all human. The former position therefore justifies the liturgical practice of juxtaposing passages from the Old and New Testaments,
given that the history of Israel before the time of Christ was a prefigurement of what was to come:
“Now these things were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10.11).
Numerous texts from the New Testament illustrate this statement: Christ is the new Moses,
the new David, the Prophet, the Christ. The Instrumentum, of course, stresses this fundamental principle:
“reading the Bible with Christ in mind¡¨ (no. 13). The conviction that the Bible is a single book with, ultimately,
a single author has inspired traditional Christian exegesis until the present day.
There was no denial of the historicity of the Old Testament, but past events were recognized as having a significance beyond the here and now.
The Fathers of the Church, whose preaching is lauded in the Instrumentum,
were ingenious in their presentation of this fuller¡Xspiritual¡Xsense of Scripture.
Origen (+258) in the Greek Church and Augustine (+430) in the Latin are only the most famous instances of this approach.
Consider, for instance, Augustine’s treatment of Genesis 27, in which Jacob lies in order to obtain his brother Esau’s birthright.
The blindness of their father, Isaac, is seen as symbolic of the blindness of the Jews who did not recognize Jesus as their Messiah,
and Jacob, who had covered his arms with goatskins, represents Jesus bearing the sins of the world.
While none would deny Augustine’s ingenuity, no contemporary scholar would permit, much less practise,
this method of preaching. Nevertheless, the Instrumentum defends it:
In this matter, the outstanding exegesis of the Church Fathers should be taken up again and properly understood as well as the great medieval institutions of the “four senses of Scripture,”
and interest in them kept alive (no 22).
At the same time, it says, “A proper exegesis of the text, therefore,
must be based on the historical-critical method, enriched by other approaches” (no. 21).
The conviction that science and traditional exegesis are not in conflict will be honoured by every Catholic but not however by very many biblical scholars,
even among those that profess an allegiance to Christianity. The notorious Jesus Seminar, for example,
not only denies the fuller sense but also radically calls into question the historical value of the New Testament.
In its publication The Five Gospels ¡X the fifth being the Gospel of Thomas ¡X the entire Gospel of John is presented as a fabrication.
The consequence is to replace the hierarchical magisterium with a scholarly one:
“The historical study of Jesus is assigned no less a role than the validation or invalidation of a given version of Christian proclamation as really Christian”
(Marcus J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship [Harrisburg (PA): Trinity Press, 1994], 190).
In short, the bishops of the synod are facing a real question, and more is required of them than uncritical platitudes about the unity of truth.
Fortunately, in the writings of the present Pope they have a model of a fruitful approach to the difficulty.
Unlike John Paul II, whose encyclicals, in many ways profound, by and large bypassed the historical-critical method,
Benedict XVI is aware of its challenge to traditional belief. His Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday: New York, 2007) is best described as an extended and eloquent homily in the patristic style that nevertheless acknowledges and makes use of the achievements of modern biblical scholarship.
In other words, it is thoroughly Catholic and, as such, able to encounter contemporary culture without panic or compromise.
The Instrumentum refers to the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s hefty document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1994).
Both draw attention to the dangers of Protestant fundamentalism as the opposite extreme of the skeptical historicism of the Jesus Seminar.
In fact, fundamentalism and scepticism represent two sides of the same coin, in that each of them wants to separate the text of Scripture from it proper setting in the Church:
they both reject the role of the apostolic Church in providing, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
a theological interpretation of the figure of Jesus. The sceptical scholar’s claim is that the historical Jesus is other than the Christ of faith,
and so, in a fruitless search for the “real” Jesus, he strips away what are assumed to be accretions that have distorted the actual man.
The result is to reduce the text of the New Testament to a few pages. The fundamentalist, on the other hand,
salvages the text but at the cost of an intellectual schizophrenia by which he must deny the scientific study of history.
A Catholic, however, sidesteps this pseudo dilemma by recognizing in the Church the divinely appointed interpreter of the work of Jesus Christ.
Hence one can accept the validity of passages in the New Testament that provide an interpretation of Jesus beyond “what actually happened” because the Church,
in its beginnings as now, has been guided by the Holy Spirit to present to the believer the authentic Jesus,
the Christ and Saviour of all mankind.
Thus the principle is clear; but its application is fraught with difficulties.
How does one in fact sort out, e.g., the various accounts of Christ’s passion?
The Bishops have their work cut out for them! We must pray as well as watch. Fr. Daniel Callam, C.S.B.
