From my email box and other places:
Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice questions – a new offering of Feminists for Life.
Fr. Martin Fox has really interesting advice to blogging seminarians.
Priests need to have quite a variety of gifts, including zeal, including holiness, including firmness and boldness, including orthodoxy and commitment to the Faith. But that is not the end of the list. We also need to be "gentle but ardent shepherds," as one of the collects in the Missal says; we need to be prudent, sensible, patient. We need to be able to choose our battles, because you will not be able to fight them all, at least not all at once. We need priests who can build bridges ("pontifex") to all we can. If I can find a way to proclaim the message faithfully, and keep that person who disagrees from walking out? I think that’s the right way to be "pastoral."
You see, there are many temptations, and the most perilous ones are not obvious — they are disguised as "angels of light." The temptation to be more certain than you really have right to be (I don’t mean about the big things, but about more subtle matters, or about application rather than principle), the temptation to make the present situation more urgent and more unique than it is, the temptation to overestimate ones own importance (you will learn that when you’ve preached awhile: many listen well; but many will break your heart!)
Also, remember — this was important to me — that your primary task as a seminarian, is to learn and prepare. It’s not your turn yet to lead. So wherever they send you: learn first; fix later. No matter how much good you do, you won’t fix the whole Church — learn to accept that fact.
Do check out Kevin’s translation of all of St. Jerome’s prologues for the Vulgate. Marvelous work – what a service!
Holy Challenge: an excellent article from NRO by John Cullinan on Benedict and Islam
The upshot is that purely theological dialogue between Christians and Muslims is pointless, if not counterproductive. Whatever its other attributes, the most fundamental elements of all orthodox Christian thought are Trinitarian and Christocentric; and these are precisely the same elements that orthodox Muslims necessarily find blasphemous on the one hand and idolatrous on the other. What’s more, sharia jurisprudence plays roughly the same role in Islam as systematic theology in Christianity. That’s why purely theological dialogue inevitably mixes apples and oranges. But basic disagreement over the nature of God in no way precludes discussing how best to coexist peacefully in a pluralistic world. That’s the meaning of Benedict’s September 25 exhortation in favor of “sincere and respectful dialogue, based on ever more authentic reciprocal knowledge which, with joy, recognizes the religious values we have in common and, with loyalty, respects the differences.” In other words, it’s possible to share — and discuss — certain religious values without sharing religious truths.
Similarly, fruitful dialogue does not consist in futilely seeking to assign relative responsibility for religious conflicts lasting more than a millennium. These historical issues — all too easily reduced to whataboutery or the politics of the last atrocity — have rightly been relegated to a joint Vatican/al Azhar commission. What really matters, as Benedict put it in another address he quotes, is the “imperative to engage in authentic and sincere dialogue, built on respect for the dignity of every human person, created, as we Christians firmly believe, in the image and likeness of God.” Do Muslims believe in the equal, indivisible, and inviolable dignity of every person, or are some (namely Muslim males) more equal than others?
Rich Leonardi insists we all look at the wonderful English Catholic writer Joanna Bogle’s blog – and go back every day!
Oh, and in case you’ve not yet discovered it…you should also be reading another excellent blog from those parts – The Hermeneutic of Continuity from Fr. Tim Finigan.
Read Previous Post