Category: Church

Here then, beloved seminarians, is the world which you will be sent forth to serve. In the mind of secular man, there is no God, or even if He does exist, it does not matter. This is clearly the condition of a grave disease. WWhat is the medicinehat are the models of healthful words that you will supply to spiritually sick people? leading to truth that you have been given to offer?

Let me at the final part of my presentation briefly outline the nature of our Orthodox Christian response to the sickness of our contemporary world. First, we must maintain our Churchâ??s position as being a witness to the Truth. The absolute Truth revealed by Christ, the incarnate God. . In our post-modern world, the word â??truthâ?? as something absolute is believed not to exist! But the reality is that if there is one God, there can be but one truth.

The truth to which we give testimony is not first of all a philosophical system. Truth is an experience of the living person of Jesus Christ, Who declared â??I am the Truthâ?? (St. John 14:6), and Who prayed that His disciples â??be consecrated in truthâ?? (St. John 17:19). Truth is tasted and seen in a life that has been transformed by the touch of the unseen hand of the Great Physician of souls and bodies, our Risen Lord. Without the blessing of this transformation that comes through genuine repentance and is perfected by the grace of God, no priest or bishop is empowered to witness to the Truth. Witnessing to the truth of Christ, establishing its absolute character, constitutes a very effective and salvific medicine or antidote to the falsehood of contemporary life and the deplorable relativization of truth in a secularized world.

Secondly, we offer the true worship of God to a thirsty humanity. and we offer it through the magnificent variety of worship services provided by our Orthodox Church, in joyful accordance with what the Lord commanded: â??God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truthâ?? (St. John 4:24). If the sickness of the world is a distancing from God, the cure is a return to Him, falling down in worship of Him. Genuine worship is the chemotherapy for the cancer of secularization and existential alienation. In our Orthodox worship, we rejoice as servants before their Lord, receiving with gratitude His divine love and all its gifts. And we are eager to share the treasures of Orthodox Christian prayer and chant with all peoples, so that all may rejoice in the radiance of the presence of the Risen Christ through the experience of the Divine Liturgy.
Thirdly, we offer the true life of God in a life of love that is like the love of the heavenly Father: unlimited, unconditional, and without discrimination. Without love, without a genuine, personal, and tender concern for our neighbors, our preaching will be in vain. Actions speak louder than words, we say in America. For this reason, Saint Paul enjoins Timothy: â??Follow the model of healthy words, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus.â?? Philanthropy is at the heart of the Christian message. You cannot be an effective witness to the Truth; you cannot be an effective healer of the suffering soul, unless you personally radiate love from a heart that is full of love received from the Lord. â??We love because He first loved usâ?? says Saint John the Evangelist (1 John 4:19). Aside from that divine and self-sacrificial love, no true expression of love is possible.

Finally, what we offer as medicine for the world is not simply a model of words about Christ, but a model of words and life and faith that make Christ present in every place we go. In this way we offer the total Christ, the genuine Christ.

Archbishop Demetrios (Traketellis), primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, Address to seminarians in Moscow
with thanks to Matthew Baker

You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

We stand at a threshold – either we can continue to allow this plague (pornography) to spread with fewer and fewer checks, or we can take concrete steps to uproot it in our lives, our families, our neighborhoods and our culture.

We are a people called to share in the pure and noble vision of God and His creation. We are also a people whose future glory has been bought with the precious sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must never forget the high cost of this purchase.

A free people can combat the tremendous moral, social and spiritual danger of pornography with great courage. My fervent prayer is that Catholics, other Christians, and all people of good will understand this threat, confront it, facilitate true healing, and ever more fully live out our God-given use of human sight.

Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington Bought at a Price and other homilies and pastoral letters

By the way, can I have a bishop who writes homilies and pastoral letters, and can I have a priest who reads them out to us? Can I have a church that does does not leave its members in pastoral free-fall? Just thought I’d ask.

Now we include in the Honours List people who live a lifestyle that is totally at odds with the family and children. According to the law of the land, this is no longer the definition of a family. A family can be any kind of assortment of people, two men and a child or two women and a child or any other kind of permutation that you can devise, as in the law of the land, each or any of those permutations are equally valid.

I am sure that the conclusion that I have drawn will have shocked you. If it has, be ready for what I am now about to say. Where were you when this legislation was being enacted? I tried to do my best to challenge the Scottish Executive about our adoption agencies. I had all manner of support from all kinds of people from parts of the land. Most were from members of the Church of Scotland who saw me as their bishop! I found that description astonishing, given the traditional opposition to bishops in the national church. I knew what those people meant in their letters and phone calls. I had given them a voice, when the leadership of their own church had been silent. Where were you, the articulate members of the Catholic Church in Scotland? Of course, I was aware of the fact that wheat I was saying was to represent what you were thinking. But you have to be more vocal in showing your disapproval of what is enacted in Holyrood in your letters to your local MSP’s (members of the Scottish Parliament).

Let me return again to my main theme. That main theme is that the media, soaps and film industry have promoted values detrimental to family life. What they have done is to have coarsened attitudes and prepared society to be much more accepting of such things as promiscuity, infidelity and a wide variety of sexual lifestyles. At the same time, the values of Christianity are being pilloried as impediments to these new freedoms.

WHAT WE NEED TO DO
There is a need to establish principles around which a Christian culture can be regenerated. The bedrock of this fight-back has to be around these three areas, freedom of conscience, the importance of family and the stability of family life. I believe, with all that is in me, that this is the moral battle ground for the future. It is a battle ground on which we can win, for it is Christianity and Christianity alone which has a message of salvation. But a vital aspect to consider is that in establishing principles behind any campaign, they must be resistant to being corrupted by secularism.

This can occur only all too easily if we accept terms which we may be able to interpret favourably but others can interpret otherwise. We must aboid debating whether we are ‘homophobic’ or not. Instead we should argue that we support the wellbeing of all human persons, whether they are male or female.

Bishop Joseph Devine (Motherwell, Scotland) Saying No to Secularism – Gonzaga Lecture, Glasgow

Andy,

You ask about the SST (the Society for the Study of Theology annual conference) last week.

The conference was good, the company was great, and I found a fellow Spaemann fan. My paper was feeble, but everyone was very polite. England’s greatest living theologian was just great – master of self-control and understatement. He talked about Augustine and refused to be pushed into any of moral clichés that the assembly loves.

Durham itself was more wonderful even than I had imagined. Durham Cathedral is planted on a hill, good defensive position, with a river below. There is no clutter in the cathedral: the light blazes through the East rose window over the altar at mattins and through the West window at evensong. On the south are the cloisters, Chapterhouse and library, on the north a large green. The building nearest the cathedral is the music school on one side (the lex orandi – cantati) and the department of divinity (lex credendi) on the other, then further down the green, and in neighboring streets, all the other departments of the university, each science and discipline, and all human wonder flowing from the worship that goes on in the cathedral, and the town is beyond them. The whole arrangement is an image of the relationship of Church to society.

Chris Jones showed a group of us round one afternoon. He took us to Bede at one end of the cathedral and behind the altar to Cuthbert at the other. As we approached Cuthbert’s tomb he told us to stop nattering, and when we reached it, there was a momentary silence and that posture of reverence that told us that we were standing before God’s incorruptible saint. We alighted as briefly as flies on Cuthbert’s eternity .

The cathedral was a Benedictine abbey. Our guide couldn’t tell us whether the cathedral and bishop came before the monks (that company dedicated to singing the praise of God) and their abbey. If I was bishop, I would put the monks back in the cloisters and in that Quire, and have them singing around the clock. (I would have monks just between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, and then again those over sixty. At thirty, I would insist that they marry. They would not be released from vows: it would simply become a different vow, to the chaste life with one woman.)

Now I tell you this because in London we have a cathedral and an abbey, two separate institutions. Westminster Abbey is down on the river, and about a mile and a half, on slightly higher ground, in the city of London, is St Paul’s Cathedral. This is just the right distance for processing. So I would have my monks processing, singing the psalms of ascent, from abbey in the morning to the cathedral, where they would sing the office during the day, and back down to the abbey after evensong. Behind them would be the young and the old from every church in London (on yearly rota perhaps). Your baptists would be there, HTB and Jesus House. They know how to sing the praises of God. They would do so past parliament, the length of Whitehall, past the entertainment industry of the West End, past the lawyers, universities and media of the Strand and Fleet Street, and past the finance houses of Ludgate hill. If they sang over the course of this most un-Sacred Way, from Abbey to Cathedral, twice daily, our clergy might stop telling us that this or that can’t be done and tell us that it can indeed be done, and that this Christian life can indeed be lived, and in public too.

This is what I learned from Durham. Can you organise this for me? I know a couple of bishops who are looking for a lead and who would be very glad to hear from you.

On 9 April the Church of England calendar of saints remembers Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Archbishop Rowan Williams gave a sermon on Pastor Bonhoeffer at the Berliner Mattäuskirche in 2006

to become a human being and a Christian, to use Bonhoeffer’s words in the same letter, is not to separate ourselves and work to become holy in a space that is defined and protected by religious convention; nor is it to seek for perfection by ordinary social or political activism. It is to be present with Christ in the world. It is to be there in God’s name and God’s presence in both confusion and order alike, standing with Christ, standing in that place in the world where God has chosen to be.

and a short account of what we can learn from Bonhoeffer’s ecumenical work.

Bonhoeffer’s legacy to the European ideal is not some theory of supranational administration and cultural homogeneity. It is rather the application to national and international affairs of the Christian principle of mutual accountability. A healthy international network is one in which we take responsibility for each other, and recognise the crisis, the suffering or the collapse of one national or local community as an issue for all.

God give us grace to follow him.

The subject is bishops as theologians and theologians as bishops. The Christian world is much indebted to N.T. (Tom) Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham.

Most of (Bishop Tom’s) book (Surprised by Hope) is devoted to making the case for a greater accent in Christian piety and liturgy on the final resurrection of the dead and the coming of the Kingdom of God. Or, as Wright likes to put it, we need to recover the biblical focus on â??life after life after death.â?? I believe Wright is right about that. As he is also on target when he insists that the resurrection â??is not the story of a happy ending but of a new beginning.â?? But his argument is grievously marred by his heaping of scorn on centuries of Christian piety revolving around the hope of â??going to heaven,â?? and his repeated and unseemly suggestion that he is the first to have understood the New Testament correctly, or at least the first since a few thinkers in the patristic era got part of the gospel right.

Unseemly, too, is the pervasive edge of anti-Catholicism, although I suppose that is to be expected from those who must justify their separation from the centering authority of the ancient Church. In refuting Catholic ecclesiology, Wright invokes the authority of what he calls the â??magisterial workâ?? (Ascension and Ecclesia) of Canadian theologian Douglas Farrow in the 1990s, apparently unaware that Farrow has long since become a Catholic. Both unseemly and risible is Wrightâ??s claim that Pope Benedict is coming around to his own view of the traditional doctrine of purgatory, which Wright mockingly repudiates. Paraphrasing a text by Cardinal Ratzinger, Wright claims that it is â??a quite radical climb-down from Aquinas, Dante, Newman, and all that went in between.â?? Bishop Wright would do well to consult Ratzinger-Benedictâ??s encyclical Spe Salvi and what it says about purgatory. As the pope recently said in a meeting with Italian clergy: â??God creates justice. We must keep this in mind. For this reason, it also seemed important to me to write about purgatory in the encyclical, which for me is such an obvious truth, so evident and also so necessary and comforting, that it cannot be omitted.â?? It appears that Bishop Wrightâ??s tutelage of the pope still has a way to go.

Richard John Neuhaus The Possibilities and Perils in Being a Really Smart Bishop

But, dear Father Neuhaus, you agree that we do have a couple of very smart bishops in the Church of England? The media-savvy one (Wright) is occasionally sloppy in his popular work, and on occasion we wish the intellectually careful one (Williams) was a little more circumspect with the media. Now what do you make of the greatest of our Anglican theologians, the Rt Revd Oliver O’Donovan? Do you think we should drag him onto an episcopal throne?

Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, president of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum”, is to meet with bishops of England and Wales. At the invitation of the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales (CBEW), the cardinal will dialogue with the bishops in the light of the Holy Father’s first Encyclical “Deus caritas est” on

how to promote the Catholic identity of the Church’s charitable organisations in a rapidly changing environment, characterised by challenges to the Church’s traditional outreach in this field.

While the Church in England and Wales has reached out to those in need in an efficacious way historical and cultural changes warrant a reflection upon the role of the bishop as the primordial locus for charitable activity.

Ah, the masters of understatement are back.

On 8 April at Birmingham ‘s Maryvale Institute, the president of “Cor Unum” will deliver a public lecture on the Church’s charitable activities.

What is Maryvale?

The Mission of Maryvale Institute is to be a leader in the provision of lifelong learning for all in Catholic Evangelisation, Catechesis, Theology, Philosophy and Religious Education in order to serve Christ’s mandate and his Church’s mission of Evangelisation in contemporary society. This provision is through a distinctive combination of the methodology of distance learning and critical engagement with the Word of God in Scripture and Tradition guided by the Church’s Magisterium. The work is carried out within an environment of Christian Faith, of academic and administrative quality, of open dialogue and the mutual valuing of the work, gifts and the personal and professional development of every member of the Institute.

One little flickering candle then – in Birmingham.

And in London? Is there a single place on the muddy banks of this river where we may gain a little lifelong learning in Catholic Evangelisation, Catechesis, or guided by the Church’s Magisterium serve Christ’s mandate and his Church’s mission of Evangelisation in contemporary society?

Cultural changes warrant a reflection upon the role of the bishop as the primordial locus for charitable activity.

I think we might do reflection on these cultural changes and on the bishop as the primordial locus for charitable activity on this blog. And I am going to tell my bishop that he is the primordial locus for charitable activity. I know he has at least as good an idea of what this means as I do. No bishop can be afraid, because he is bound to love the people to whom he is sent.

The Church in this land is now in a totally new situation. After years of enjoying a comparatively privileged position, we are now clearly facing attack, ridicule and even persecution. We are in a counter-culture situation and our position is increasingly similar to the Early Church.

Viewed from the position of the world, the Church is not a single body giving a clear message, but rather a large number of disparate congregations who each have their own interpretation and presentation of the Gospel message and who appear to be in competition with each other. There is a very real danger of the churches ceasing to engage with our culture. At the two extremes, we either withdraw and disconnect from it, or run the risk of being consumed by it. God calls us to invade and transform our culture, not to collaborate with it, capitulate to it, retreat from it.

This engagement is inevitably confrontational. There is clearly much doubt about the central truths of the Gospel in the churches. There is also evidence of some Christians substituting an ethical or a programme of social action for the Gospel.

Maranatha – Crisis and Glory (PDF)

I know a bishop not far from here who talks about ‘the coming storm’ and a ‘tidal wave’. He means secularism, but he doesn’t spell out what he means by that, and I am not sure that he knows how to. Sometimes he seems to regret this and to want to do something about it, sometimes not. Our caution and elipticism is becoming a problem. We have to stop worrying about sounding unsophisticated and apocalyptic. We have to bring the people of Maranatha into Church and ask them to teach us how not to be sophisticated or ironic, and we have to learn how to spell this ‘new situation’ out.

Costly discipleship involves using our heads, consistently, and over the long term. No probs there. But that also means getting to know my own tradtion and speaking consistently from it, without attempting to preserve any ironic distance. It also means learning the old practices and practising them, in public. I am going to start reading my bible (big, black, leather) on the Central Line. I am going to kneel in church, dunk my fingers in the holy water when I enter a Catholic church. I am going to learn to cross myself (every nerve screams No!). I am going to learn a half dozen psalms off by heart. I am going to familiarise myself with the readings for each next Sunday. When you see me, test me.

The Goal of a Catholic School is the Promotion of the Fully Human Person

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10)

The Church’s recent teaching on the purpose of Catholic education states clearly that its goal is the promotion of the human person. What does thismean for the schools and colleges of our diocese? I think it means the following:

The fundamental needs of the human person are the focus of Catholic education – intellectual, physical, emotional, social, and spiritual, and eschatological (Our eternal destiny).

These fundamental needs can only be truly fulfilled through a rich and living encounter with the deepest truths about God and the human person.

This is why Christ and His Gospel must be the foundation of the educational project of each school and college, because He is the ‘the perfect Man in whom all human values find their fullest perfection’ (Congregation for Catholic Education, The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School).

Therefore, the Catholic school or college is called to keep the Gospel whole and alive amongst pupils, families, and staff.

Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue of Lancaster Fit for Mission?