Damian Thompson’s readers’ choice for Cardinal after Cormac Murphy-O’Connor?
It’s Aidan Nichols, the UK’s most published theologian, presently at Blackfriars Oxford
It is time someone took the Christendom Awake website in hand, by the way.
Cardinal’s Lectures
Some oddly non-Roman Catholic speakers have been chosen for
The Cardinal’s Lectures – Faith and Life in Britain
Westminster Cathedral, London April-May 2008
Partnership, but not at the cost of religious identity
Groups like Catholic Charities do accept government funds, which they then pass through to the needy. In fact, one of the main reasons governments use nonprofits like Catholic Charities is because theyâ??re cost-effective. As a result, government gets much more for its dollar by working through Catholic Charities to reach the poor. But administering the support personnel, ministries and distribution of funds does cost money, and a portion of government money is retained to help pay expenses, including in some cases salaries. This is necessary. Itâ??s also fair and reasonable.
What I hope Catholics and the wider community clearly understand about HB 1080 is this: Catholic organizations like Catholic Charities are glad to partner with the government and eager to work cooperatively with anyone of good will. But not at the cost of their religious identity. Government certainly has the right and the power to develop its own delivery system for human services. But if groups like Catholic Charities carry part of societyâ??s weight, then itâ??s only reasonable and just that they be allowed to be truly â??Catholicâ?? â?? or they cannot serve. And that has cost implications that the public might prudently consider in reflecting on HB 1080.
Finally and quite candidly, one of the Catholic communityâ??s deepest concerns in regard to HB 1080 is the billâ??s source. Iâ??ve heard from quite a few Catholics over the past week; Catholics who find HB 1080 offensive, implicitly bigoted, and designed to bully religious groups out of the public square.
Archbishop Chaput How to write a really bad bill
Fulcrum – Conflict and Covenant
Fulcrum Conference – Conflict and Covenant
Saturday 12 April 2008, 10am to 4pm
Dr Tom Wright
Bishop of Durham and Member of the Lambeth Commission which prepared The Windsor Report
Dr Andrew Goddard
Editor of Anvil, Member of the Faith and Order Advisory Group
Union Chapel, Upper Street, Islington, London
Christ-centered Anthropology and the mystery of man
That Pope John Paul II was profoundly formed by and faithful to the general pastoral purpose and style of Gaudium et Spes throughout his pontificate is easy to show. He not only made constant reference to Gaudium et Spes, 22 and 24, referring to the former as encapsulating the motif of his pontificate, his encyclical, Fides et Ratio, stressed the unity of the two orders of knowledge, natural and supernatural. There is a “unity of truth” assured by the fact that God is Creator and Redeemer and thus the Author of what is revealed through creation and through the economy of salvation.
Carl Olson Pope John Paul II and the Christ-centered Anthropology of “Gaudium et Spes”
Here is Gaudium et Spes 22.
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come,(20) namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.
He Who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15),(21) is Himself the perfect man. To the sons of Adam He restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward. Since human nature as He assumed it was not annulled,(22) by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too. For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, He thought with a human mind, acted by human choice(23) and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin.(24)
The Christian man, conformed to the likeness of that Son Who is the firstborn of many brothers,(27) received “the first-fruits of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:23) by which he becomes capable of discharging the new law of love.(28) Through this Spirit, who is “the pledge of our inheritance” (Eph. 1:14), the whole man is renewed from within, even to the achievement of “the redemption of the body” (Rom. 8:23):
Such is the mystery of man, and it is a great one, as seen by believers in the light of Christian revelation.
Christodoulos
Orthodoxwiki tells us about Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and Primate of Greece who died this week.
Wikipedia gives plenty of detail on the public impact Christodoulos made.
Christodoulos opposed the decision to remove the ‘Religion’ field from national ID cards, seeing as part of a wider plan to marginalise the Church from Greek public life and stating that the decision was “put forward by neo-intellectuals who want to attack us like rabid dogs and tear at our flesh”
In 2004 the Archbishop criticized globalisation as a “bulldozer that is out to demolish everything, on account of those who want to rule the world without resistance or obstacles” adding that Greeks live in a paradise compared to other Europeans, because “they have a strong faith, they build churches, follow traditions, and resist globalisation”.
On another occasion he stated that “the forces of Darkness cannot stand it [that Greece is a predominantly Orthodox country], and for this reason they want to decapitate it and flatten everything, by means of globalisation, the novel deity
Give us another like Christodoulos.
John Owen Today
A conference on the theology of John Owen
Westminster College
Cambridge, UK
19–22 August 2008
An increasing number of scholars from a wide range of disciplines are finding the thought of John Owen to be a fertile field for study. Nine of them will be presenting papers on his work at Westminster College, home to the original copy of the Westminster Confession.
Willem van Asselt
Utrecht University, Holland
Stephen R Holmes
St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, UK
Michael S Horton
Westminster Seminary, California, USA
George Hunsinger
Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, USA
Kelly M Kapic
Covenant College, Georgia, USA
Suzanne MacDonald
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, USA
Sebastian Rehnman
Johannelunds Theological Seminary, Sweden
Alan Spence
United Reformed Church, London, UK
Carl R Trueman
Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, USA
For further details and a booking form – johnowentoday@aol.com
A John Owen blog gives links to some of the speakers.
Learn more and more about Owen.
Well done Alan (and Terry and Andy).
Collaboration between some bishops and the state security agencies
Long since the Moscow Patriarchate defrocked Father Gleb Yakunin, a Moscow priest who, as an elected deputy in 1990, had privileged access to the KGB archives and discovered that the collaboration between some bishops and the state security agencies had been worse than even he had imagined. The Church has never properly investigated this, clearly because so many of the bishops, not least the Patriarch, rose to power with the say-so of state authority.
Sometimes it is the local bishop who acts as an agent of secular power. Father Sergei Taratukhin was imprisoned in the 1980s as a Soviet-era dissident. In prison he became a believer, trained for the priesthood and became chaplain in Penal Colony No10, near Chita in eastern Siberia. He served there seven years, befriending an inmate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, condemned by a Moscow court in 2005 for financial misdemeanours in a trial widely seen as politically motivated.
Taratukhin became convinced that Khodorkovsky was a political prisoner and campaigned for him. Bishop Yevstafy, his diocesan, intervened and removed him to a remote parish. Taratukhin objected, so his bishop defrocked him. Now the priest has appeared abjectly contrite on TV, in a scene reminiscent of clergy who recanted their anti-Soviet activities in former days. The bishop has offered him forgiveness and partial reinstatement – he now organises rubbish collection and shovels snow from the paths around Chita’s new cathedral.
Michael Bourdeaux Putin and the Patriarchs
28 January – Saint Thomas Aquinas
In the man Jesus Christ however there was no movement of sense that was not controlled by reason; and even his natural bodily activities were in a sense voluntary, inasmuch as that he willed that his flesh should do and suffer according to its own proper nature. So there is even greater unity of activity in Christ than there is in other men. … Christ’s grace was not just his own personal grace but the grace proper to the head of the whole Church, to whom all members are joined so as to constitute one person mystically. So what Christ earned he earned for all his members, just as what man does with his head serves all his members. The sin of Adam, whom God appointed to beget the whole of humanity, passed on as inheritance to others by bodily propagation; the earnings of Christ, whom God set up as the head of all men by grace, pass on to all his members by spiritual birth of baptism which makes us members of Christ’s body.
Saint Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae Part III, chapter 13, 19.1
25 January – Saint Paul and Saint Gregory Nazianzus
Today is the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul and also the feast of Saint Gregory Nazianzus
At his birth we duly kept Festival, both I, the leader of the Feast, and you, and all that is in the world and above the world. With the Star we ran, and with the Magi we worshipped, and with the Shepherds we were illuminated, and with the Angels we glorified Him, and with Simeon we took Him up in our arms, and with Anna the aged and chaste we made our responsive confession. And thanks be to Him who came to His own in the guise of a stranger, because He glorified the stranger. Now, we come to another action of Christ, and another mystery. I cannot restrain my pleasure; I am rapt into God.
Almost like John I proclaim good tidings; for though I be not a Forerunner, yet am I from the desert. Christ is illumined, let us shine forth with Him. Christ is baptized, let us descend with Him that we may also ascend with Him. Jesus is baptized; but who is He, and by whom is He baptized, and at what time? He is the All-pure; and He is baptized by John; and the time is the beginning of His miracles. What are we to learn and to be taught by this? To purify ourselves first; to be lowly minded; and to preach only in maturity both of spiritual and bodily stature.
Oration on the Holy Lights (XIV)
The saints are there to do us good. Let’s get to know them. Many thanks to Wikipedia contributors to the saints pages, list of saints, chronological list and links to calendars.
Now I’d like a single ecumenical saint-a-day calendar please.
