A Sound of Sheer Silence

So, the conservative journal First Things published a piece by Dominican friar Romanus Cessario, defending the Mortara affair .  For those not familiar, Edgardo Mortara was a Jewish boy living at the tail end of the Papal States period who was secretly baptised by a nurse in a Catholic hospital.  Having done so, Papal law required that he be raised Catholic, and so he was forcibly taken from his parents and raised more or less directly by the Pope at the time, Pius IX.  This has generally been seen as one of the more monstrous black marks on the Roman Catholic Church in its long history of anti-Semitism, and so the Hot Take of defending the Pope's action were bound to be controversial.  Ross Douthat, no liberal Catholic he, gave a strong negative reaction to the piece , as did others. In particular, Douthat makes the case that the article is clarifying as to the nature of the traditionalist Catholic stance--i.e. still anti-Semitic.  I think Douthat is right, ...

1. In 1843, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote a book entitled Fear and Trembling .  The primary focus of the book is the story of Abraham's attempted sacrifice of his son Isaac on Mount Moriah (Genesis 22), known in the Jewish tradition as the Akedah .  Kierkegaard begins his analysis by noting that sacrificing one's own son, or any innocent person for that matter, is unethical.  In the normal course of affairs, if someone asked you or told you to kill your own child or some other random person, you would of course reject that request.  In fact, you would be obligated , by any reasonable moral framework, to reject that request.  Your ethical duty is clear, and it says that you must not kill an innocent child. But, in the Akedah , it is God who commands Abraham to kill Isaac.  As the creator of the universe and the ground of all being, God is generally seen as the ultimate source for all moral analysis.  If God is the ultimate measur...

The danger with asking complicated questions is that you sometimes forget to ask the simpler, foundational questions.  Rob Bell's new book, entitled What is the Bible? ,   asks a simple question, but in so asking it exposes a truly fundamental issue about how one approaches religion.  In asking "what is the Bible?", Bell asks the reader to consider the question of how we understand what these sacred texts are and what they are supposed to represent.  If you don't get that right, then you will inevitably lost in the weeds. Let's look at this from might seem like a strange place--a comparative look at the three great monotheistic faiths.  The name for the holy text of Islam is al-Quran , which translates to something like "the Recitation."  According to Islamic theology (as I understand it), the angel Gabriel appeared to the Prophet Muhammad and recited (hence the name) the Quranic text to him, and Muhammad in turn wrote in down into the form we have tod...

The Society of St. Pius X, or "SSPX" is a dissident group of Catholics that split off from the main body of the Church after the Second Vatican Council under the leadership of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  Their objections were numerous, essentially all of a traditionalist variety.  In the 80s. Pope John Paul II excommunicated Lefebvre for ordaining new bishops.  In the 00s, Pope Benedict rescinded those excommunications in preparation for a deal believed to be imminent to bring them back into the fold.  That deal fell through, for reasons that vary depending on who you talk to.  Since then, they have been in a kind of limbo. Recently, reports have surfaced that a new deal is in the works, and that reconciliation is imminent.  Based on the reporting that has been happening, and now an interview with the leader of the SSPX , it appears that a reunion will occur without any preconditions or concessions from the SSPX side.  If this does come to pass, I b...

I moved to Columbus, Ohio in 2011 to take a one-year position as a law clerk for a judge on the United States Court of Appeals.  The Court of Appeals is the level below the Supreme Court, and so we would hear appeals from every sort of case that makes its way through the federal trial courts.  We would also review what are called petitions for habeas corpus--supplementary appeals of criminal convictions (usually either life sentences or capital sentences) that occurred in state court.  When I tell people about the cases we saw during my time associated with the court, many people assume that these criminal cases were the most interesting and engaging.  But they were not, at least I didn't think so.  More than anything else, those habeas cases were frustrating. The source of this frustration came in large part from a law called, and I am not making this up, "The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996," commonly called "AEDPA."  AEDPA was pa...

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the release of the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time").  I have not counted words, but I believe  Nostra Aetate  is the shortest of the Vatican II documents, clocking in at only five paragraphs.  Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that  Nostra Aetate  is the most consequential of all of the Vatican II documents, and is undoubtedly the most revolutionary. Special attention should be paid to Paragraph 4 of  Nostra Aetate .  The document as a whole is about the relationship between the Catholic Church and non-Christian religions, and Paragraph 4 deals with Judaism. In it, it makes three major claims.  First, while acknowledging that Catholics believe Jesus to represent the true fulfillment of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants, it rejects the notion this transition from the old to the new covenant leaves continued practitioners of the old divorced from God's love a...

[Note:  Since it has been a while, the first post on forgiveness is here ] I will state up front that I have always struggled with the Sacrament of Confession (or Reconciliation, to give it the more modern label).  I have always found the experience both unpleasant and spiritually unsatisfying.  More specifically, I have never gotten a handle on what I am supposed to do with the Sacrament.  Either it turns into me reciting a laundry list of faults and failings, the recitation of which feeds into a tendency to view myself entirely through the lens of my failures and deficiencies.  Candidly, this state of mind sets me on the path to the dark home of my depression, a home from which the grant of absolution provides no escape.  Or, it turns into an unfocused counseling session, which the poor priest is not really expecting or prepared to engage in, leading to a frustrating and unproductive experience.  For this reason, it has been several years since I...

This last part of Father Alison's talk (the other four can be found  here here here and here ) is, in my view, the most thought-provoking and challenging.  In the last two posts, Alison touched on how individuals need to seek out and foster a kind of sacred space for people to come together and be wrong together.  That space, in principle, is the Church.  But, as seen in the first two parts, there are problems with the way the Church approaches that task, problems that stem in large part from the language with which it understands itself.  Bringing these two ideas together, Alison provides a sketch of how we should think about the Church and how the Church should talk about itself. But, first, some starting principles. If it is true that what Jesus did was to knock out the centrepiece of the mechanism by which humans make anything sacred, that is, by offering himself up to death in a typical sacralised lynching so as to show that the victim is innocent, and...

Lost in the canonizations of John XXIII and John Paul II the Sunday before last was the beatification of Father Giuseppe Girotti, OP .  Beatification is the last step on the road that leads to canonization, so you could say that Fr. Girotti is "almost" a saint. Girotti was an Italian Dominican priest and Scripture scholar.  In the 1930s, he studied at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, with a focus on the Prophets.  Whether it was because of his time in Israel, or because of his love for the Old Testament, or his inherent goodness and sense of justice, during World War II he was actively involved in organizing an "underground railroad" of safe houses and escape routes in northern Italy for Jews fleeing the Holocaust.  In 1944, he was caught by the Gestapo helping a wounded Jewish man, and was sent to the concentration camp at Dachau.  On April 1, 1945, Easter Sunday and just weeks before the U.S. Army liberated Dachau, he was killed by the Nazis when they inje...

The weather here is horrible--high 30s, rain, turning to snow (!) this evening.  A perfect day to go see  Noah , the latest epic from Darren Aronofsky, Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly et al.   Before I get to my thoughts on the movie, two disclaimers.  First, to talk about the stuff I want to talk about, I have to include spoilers.  That may seem like a ridiculous concept for a movie like Noah --doesn't Genesis "spoil" the story already?  But the movie includes elements that go beyond the Biblical text.  According to interviews with Aronofsky, he drew on Jewish midrash  and other non-canonical sources (such as the Book of Enoch) in writing the screenplay.  I am not familar enough with the Jewish source material to be entirely sure which stuff is from Jewish sources and what is Aronofsky's own creation, but in any event this new material is some of the most interesting parts of the film.  To talk about it, I have to spoil it, so fair...

In the past few weeks, I have returned to something I haven't done since my time with the Dominicans--I have been praying Morning and Evening Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, which is the official daily prayer of the Church.  It is not a massive commitment of time--15 minutes in the morning and 15 or less in the evening--and it has done a nice job of providing a regular practice of marking the day.  It also gives an opportunity to follow along with the Calendar of the Saints.  I have, however, added a little twist by following the Franciscan calendar, which includes some of the less well known saints who were Franciscans.  Since I have been drawn of late to St. Francis , I figured it would be a good way to engage in the Franciscan tradition. A couple of weeks back (October 23) was the feast of St. John of Capistrano.  Here in America, to the extent he is known at all, he is known for a town in Southern California and the swallows that return to ...