Still Running Off at the Keyboard

TAKING A SHORT BREAK

I've been spending quite a bit of time researching some of the recent blogs, and it's time for a short break. I'll probably be back over the weekend, but if not, by next Monday for sure.

SISTERS OF INTENTIONAL ANNOYANCE

Catherine of Siena reports the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are planning a 29th anniversary celebration. When? On Easter Sunday. Complete with an egg hunt and bonnet contest. What? No bunnies?

TRIDENTINE GOOD FRIDAY PRAYER REVISED

Vatican City, Feb 5, 2008 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- Today the Vatican's Secretary of State issued the anticipated changes to the prayer for the Jews used in the Good Friday Liturgy celebrated according to the Roman Missal of 1962.

This new prayer, which is to be used this Lent, is a simple prayer for the Jewish people, that they may discover the salvation brought by Jesus. The previous version was regarded as offensive by some Jewish organizations. ...

The version in force until today did not contain the reference to the Jewish people as "perfidious" because it was suppressed by Blessed Pope John XXIII. However, the prayer found in the Roman Missal approved by Pope St. Pius V, still requested that God take "that people away... from their darkness" and liberate them from "their blindness," a text inspired by one of the letters of St. Paul.

The new formula announced today by the Secretary of State reads:

Let us also pray for the Jews that God our Lord should illuminate their hearts, so that they will recognize Jesus Christ, the Savior of all men.

Read the article...

Jesus Christ - 1
Dual Covenant Theology - 0

Many are not happy.

From ChristianNewsWire:

"In a very disturbing acquiescence to "political correctness," Pope Benedict XVI has chosen the approval of non-Christians and unbelievers over the truth of Christ," said Dr. Gary L. Cass, Chairman and CEO of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission. "Because Christians are commanded by Christ to demonstrate love, they must pray for the conversion of non-Christians which Christians believe are lost. Christians single out the Jews for prayer out of a genuine concern for their souls."

From Reuters:

Jewish leaders have reacted with disappointment to the Vatican's new version of a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews and said it could set back inter-religious relations by decades. ...

"While we appreciate that some of the deprecatory language has been removed ... we are deeply troubled and disappointed that the framework and intention to petition God for Jews to accept Jesus as Lord was kept intact," said Abraham Foxman, U.S. national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

Foxman denounced the changes as "cosmetic revisions" while Rome's chief Rabbi Riccardo Segni called them "a serious step backwards". ...

Foxman said the changes were a "major departure" from the teachings of Pope John Paul, who died in 2005. He revolutionised relations with Jews, called them "our beloved elder brothers," and was the first pope to visit a synagogue or Nazi death camps.

Segni spoke of "a serious step backwards that poses a fundamental obstacle" to Catholic-Jewish relations and which had put "decades of progress into doubt".

David Rosen, an Israel-based rabbi with decades of experience with the Vatican, expressed "deep regret and disappointment".

Rosen, chair of The International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, which groups 12 major Jewish organisations, called the new prayer a "regression".

PLENARY INDULGENCE OFFERED FEBRUARY 2 - 11

We are currently in the time period during which a plenary indulgence may be granted in honor of the 150th anniversary of Mary's appearance to St. Bernadette Soubirous near Lourdes, France. The details are spelled out in this Catholic News Service story.

TEMPLETON SUPPORTED SCIENCE AND RELIGION LECTURE SERIES

The John Templeton Foundation supported the lecture series "Science, Religion, and the Human Experience" at the U. of California, Santa Barbara. One lecture was given by Dr. Daniel Matt titled "Kabbalah and Contemporary Cosmology: Discovering the Resonances".

CHINESE CULTURE DECLINES INTO CANNIBALISM

LifeSite reviews Dr. Mark Miravalle's book, THE SEVEN SORROWS OF CHINA, which describes the destructive effects of abortion and the one-child policy on the Chinese culture:

"New macabre manifestations of this conscienceless abortion mentality include the recent opening of five restaurants in the region of X, which began serving 'fetal soup' at the price of 300 Yuan (approximately $40) a bowl! Recent medical publications have praised the exceptional health benefits for the consuming of 'fetal remains' (this jargon allows them to overlook what this really is-unborn baby bodies). Therefore, local entrepreneurs jumped on the opportunity to distribute this new health breakthrough to the chosen few who could afford the price. So evil and scandalous is this fetal soup trade that the Government shut down the Web sites advertising the restaurants, in fear that they would scandalize the reputation of the People's Republic to outside countries and businesses.

Read the entire report...

Thanks to a reader for the link.

Oddly enough on the news this evening was a segment on the devastating winter storms that China is weathering, said to be the worst in 100 years. Many cities have been without power for a week. Lines are down everywhere. Buildings have been destroyed by the weight of the snow. Families have spent all of their savings on coal and have no more money to buy coal for the rest of the winter.

Weather is the work of God. Perhaps He is sending China a message.

LORD JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG-ACTON

He is more commonly known simply as Lord Acton, and he is most famous for his charge that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." What most don't know is that he made that charge in reference to the papacy.

Fr. Robert Sirico's Acton Institute is named after this man. Given the unexpected involvement of Sir John Templeton in Swedenborgianism, and given the Templeton Foundation's funding of think tanks involved with the Acton Institute, I thought Lord Acton needed a closer look. Was he somehow also involved in occultism?

Acton was born in Naples, Italy in 1834. He died in 1902. For our purposes the most significant segment of his education took place at the University of Munich under the direction of Fr. Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger, with whom he lived and traveled for several years. They remained lifelong friends. Dollinger's history is checkered from the Roman Catholic standpoint.

For whatever reason, as answers.com tells us

he ultimately became the leader of those who were energetically opposed to any addition to, or more stringent definition of, the powers which the Papacy had possessed for centuries. In some speeches at Munich in 1861 he outspokenly declared his view that the maintenance of the Roman Catholic Church did not depend on the temporal sovereignty of the pope....His address to the assembled divines was "practically a declaration of war against the Ultramontane party."...

Many bishops and divines considered the proposed definition a false one. Others, though accepting it as the truth, declared its promulgation to be inopportune. The headquarters of the opposition was Germany, and its leader was Döllinger.

As we know, however, papal infallibility was declared to be a dogma of the Church at Vatican I despite Dollinger's efforts to oppose it.

Döllinger, however, was not to be silenced. He headed a protest by forty-four professors in the University of Munich, and gathered together a congress at Munich, which met in August 1870 and issued a declaration adverse to the Vatican decrees....the authority of the council was held by the archbishop of Munich to be paramount, and he called upon Döllinger to submit. Instead of submitting, Döllinger, on March 28, 1871, addressed a memorable letter to the archbishop, refusing to subscribe the decrees. They were, he said, opposed to scripture, to the traditions of the Church for the first 1000 years, to historical evidence, to the decrees of the general councils, and to the existing relations of the Roman Catholic Church to the state in every country in the world. "As a Christian, as a theologian, as an historian, and as a citizen," he added, "I cannot accept this doctrine." From the Roman Catholic viewing point he thereby became an heretic as he clearly and publicly denied a doctrine proposed by the Church Magisterium to be divinely revealed (de fide divina). ...

The archbishop replied by excommunicating the disobedient professor. This aroused fresh opposition. Döllinger was almost unanimously elected rector-magnificus of the university of Munich. Oxford, Edinburgh and Marburg universities conferred upon him the honorary degree of doctor of laws and Vienna that of philosophy. The dissident Bavarian clergy invited Bishop Loos of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands, which for more than 150 years had existed independent of the Papacy, to administer the sacrament of Confirmation in Bavaria. The offer was accepted, and the bishop was received with triumphal arches and other demonstrations of joy by a part of the Bavarian Catholics. The three Dutch Old Catholic bishops declared themselves ready to consecrate a "non-infallibilist" bishop for Bavaria, if it were desired. The momentous question was discussed at a meeting of the opponents of the Vatican Council's doctrine, and it was resolved to elect a bishop and ask the Dutch Old-Order bishops to consecrate him. Döllinger, however, voted against the proposition, and withdrew from any further steps towards the promotion of this movement. This was the critical moment in the history of the resistance to the decrees. Had Döllinger, with his immense reputation as a professor, as a scholar, as a divine and as a man, allowed himself to be consecrated bishop of the Old Catholic Church, it is impossible to say how wide the schism would have been. But he declined to initiate a schism.

He remained in sympathy with the Old Catholics for the remainder of his life although he never formally joined them. He continued to attend Roman Catholic Mass, but abstained from receiving communion. He received the last rites from an Old Catholic priest.

Wikipedia tells us

Lord Acton, who was in complete sympathy on this subject with Döllinger, went to Rome in order to throw all his influence against it, but the step he so much dreaded was not to be averted. The Old Catholic separation followed, but Acton did not personally join the seceders, and the authorities prudently refrained from forcing the hands of so competent and influential an English layman. It was in this context that in a letter dated April, 1887, to Bishop Mandell Creighton, Acton made his most famous pronouncement:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is commonly referred to as Lord Acton's dictum. But it is the third phrase in this quote that might be the most important, if little-known:

Great men are almost always bad men.

Most people who quote Lord Acton's Dictum are unaware that it refers to Papal power and was made by a Catholic, albeit not an unquestioning one.

Ironically the article also tells us that Acton was sympathetic to the Confederates during the Civil War in America.

The Online Library of Liberty tells us:

Munich was chosen as the place for him to continue his studies for several reasons; not only was it a seat of Catholic learning at the time, but it was also the home of his mother's relatives, the Arco-Valleys. Count Arco-Valley (whose daughter Acton later married) had known Dollinger for years; accordingly arrangements were made for him to stay with the Professor in Munich and to visit the Arco-Valley country house at Tergensee on weekends.

Although a priest, Dr. Dollinger was primarily concerned with the life of the mind; he had refused the archbishopric of Salzburg because it would have interfered with his scholarship. Generally considered to be one of the greatest historical scholars in Europe, he was to be more influential than any other single individual on Acton's intellectual development.

Even before coming under the influence of Dollinger, Lord Acton had been steeped in the rebellion against the papacy, as the Library of Liberty tells it:

Acton's first teacher was Monsignor Felix Dupanloup. Like the other two priests who were to influence his intellectual development, Cardinal Wisemar and Professor Dollinger, Dupanloup was also a prominent theologian, with ideas of his own on how Peter's bark should be piloted. As the clerical spokesman for the liberal wing of French Catholicism he was deeply involved in the attempt to reconcile the liberal state with the Catholic Church. At the Vatican Council he was to be part of the minority faction which held the definition of papal infallibility to be inopportune.

thefreelibrary.com warns that "care must be used when approaching Acton since there is much in him conservatives would find distasteful. For conservative Catholics, this is even more true."

There is a further interesting connection. Pope Benedict's great uncle on his father's side, Georg, said to be "one of the towering Bavarian figures of the nineteenth century", was also connected to Johann Ignaz von Dollinger according to NCR correspondent John Allen.

Dollinger's key idea was the "organic development" of church tradition, a notion he shared with England's John Henry Newman....Dollinger went further: "The papacy is based on an audacious falsification of history," he declared. "A forgery in its very outset, it has, during the long years of its existence, had a pernicious influence on church and state alike." To no one's surprise, when Vatican I declared the pope infallible in 1870, Dollinger led the dissent. He was excommunicated in March 1871 and fired from the university. ...

Dollinger said that he belonged to the Old Catholics who split from Rome over the infallibility issue "by conviction," he never attended their services and refused to become their first bishop. After his excommunication, he continued attending Catholic Mass, but did not receive communion.

Georg Ratzinger, who was ordained to the priesthood in 1867, resigned as Dollinger's assistant in order to take up his first pastoral appointment in Berchtesgaden. There is no evidence that he ever publicly associated himself with the ecclesial positions of his mentor, yet there are two intriguing hints in this direction. First, Ratzinger voluntarily resigned his priesthood in 1888, in a day when laicized priests were rare. Second, politically Ratzinger gravitated away from the Center Party, which was the established Catholic party, and toward the farmers and workers parties, both of which had a definite anticlerical tone. In any event, Ratzinger assisted Dollinger during the four years, 1863 to 1867, in which his antipapal views took their sharpest form.

Why does all of this matter? Primarily because it is the Old Catholic Church with its wandering bishops, its affiliation with occultism, and its close association with the leading lights of Theosophy, Blavatsky and Olcott, which stands in sympathy with the homosexual protest in the Roman Catholic Church today, as I have blogged many times in the past. Given the information about Fr. Sirico's background in homosexuality, this is hardly surprising.

The Old Catholic Order of Saint Thomas features a link to an extensive archive on Lord Acton on its website.

FATHER FERNANDO SUAREZ

If you've been following the course of events resolving around the healing ministry of of Fr. Fernando Suarez--a ministry that began in the Philippines, progressed to the Canadian religious congregation called Companions of the Cross, and has returned to the Philippines in the form of Fr. Suarez's guest appearances at healing Masses there--you will be interested in the latest development.

DAGUPAN CITY, Pangasinan -- Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz on Saturday said he will stop Fr. Fernando Suarez, known in the country as the “healing priest,” the next time he visits Pangasinan and tries to conduct healing masses in his archdiocese.

Cruz, whose archdiocese covers 26 parishes in central Pangasinan, said too many questions hound Suarez’s “miraculous healing.”

Suarez was at the St. Therese Parish here on December 28 for a “very special day of prayer and healing.”

Cruz said that healing mass was held without his permission.

The Catholic Church’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith requires a local bishop’s permission for Church-related activities conducted by those who do not belong to the diocese. Suarez is a member of the Canada-based religious congregation called Companions of the Cross.

“There’s no problem that some people are gifted to cure as practically all saints have done this during their lives,” Cruz said.

But he said with Suarez’s popularity now, his healing masses are “open to abuses, like superstition, hysteria, fanaticism, and money.”

“There is already a question of hysteria, not to mention credulity [among the people],” Cruz said. “It is too much to say that Father Suarez resurrects the dead.”

Continue reading...

Thanks to a reader for the link.

LATIN MASS OR GYNMASTICS MASS ?

I watched part of Latin Mass on EWTN last night. What a contrast to the gynmastics Mass at the Cathedral of Auch in the Diocese of Gers.

Contemporary Gnostic Christianity is very much in tune with the performance aspects of liturgy.

Latin Mass, on the other hand, is a prayer, not a performance.

The Novus Ordo is up for grabs, it would appear.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

FROM THE EMAILBOX

Spirit & Life®
"The words I spoke to you are spirit and life." (Jn 6:63)

Human Life International e-Newsletter
Volume 03, Number 05 | Friday, February 1, 2008

..................................................................................

www.hli.org

HLI Pilgrimage to Guadalupe

Dear Spirit and Life® readers,

I take this opportunity to invite you to a marvelous pro-life pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico from April 6th through April 10th! I myself have been on pilgrimage to this spiritual center of the Americas more than 15 times and never pass up an opportunity to visit this blessed place which showed so clearly the victory of life over death.

Those who join us on this pilgrimage will be immersed in the Guadalupe event in the following ways:

Daily Mass and prayer in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Study of the religious and pro-life significance of the world-famous tilma of Juan Diego on which Mary left the imprint of Her image.
Visit to the 16th century Metropolitan Cathedral and the tomb of Bishop Juan Zumárraga who was the first to see the tilma and authorize the evangelization of the Aztec Indian people.
Prayer with HLI Mexico before an abortion center in Mexico City to stand in solidarity with the pro-life movement and the babies there.
Visit to the tomb of Blessed Miguel Pro, Mexican priest and martyr.
For further information please click the following link:

http://www.ourpcc.com/
HLIpilgrimagetoourladyofguadalupe.html

Space is limited so sign up today and join us for the pro-life experience of a lifetime!

Sincerely Yours in Christ,

Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer,
President, Human Life International

SEER JULIA KIM EXCOMMUNICATED

SEOUL, South Korea (CNS) -- A South Korean archbishop said an alleged Marian visionary and her followers have been excommunicated automatically.

Archbishop Andreas Choi Chang-mou of Kwangju issued the decree Jan. 21, saying "for Christians' healthy faith life and the unity and communion of the church, I declare as such, though my heart grieves."

The decree was released to all dioceses and media Jan. 23, reported the Asian church news agency UCA News.

The Kwangju Archdiocese issued directives in 1998, 2003 and 2005 banning Catholics from visiting and participating in ceremonies in Naju, South Korea. The Korean bishops' conference supported the archdiocese.

Archbishop Choi said he met with Julia Youn, 60, and her husband in Naju in 2003 to warn them against promoting the alleged apparitions and later gave her a final warning in 2005, but they did not modify their actions. The excommunication was not imposed by judgment but automatically results from an action that places one outside the community of faith, Archbishop Choi said.

"Rather, they speak as if the Holy Father approves them," the archbishop said. "They libel me, the Korean bishops and the Korean church through their publications and the Internet."

Continue reading...