Ubi Petrus

I’ve been tagged by Indolent Server for the Birthday Meme. It goes like this:

1: Go to wikipedia
2: Enter your birth month and day, but not year in the search box
3: List three events that happened on your birthday
4: List two important birthdays and one death
5: List one holiday or observance

Hmmm. My first meme tagging. I s’pose that means I should try to make this a good one.

Three events:

1. 1814 – Francis Scott Key writes The Star-Spangled Banner.
2. 1944 – United States Marines land on the island of Peleliu. (Given that my grandfather was in Guadalcanal around this time, these things have a special significance to me.)
3. 1964 – The opening of the third period of the Second Vatican Council.
4. 1965 – The opening of the fourth and final period of Second Vatican Council. (Okay, so I cheated.)

Two birthdays:

1. 1849 – Ivan Pavlov, Russian scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1936)
2. 1936 – Walter Koenig, American actor (I want to know anyone over the age of 16 who doesn’t know who he is.)

One death:

1. 258 – Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (Hmmm. That means his birthday into heaven is my birthday into the world. Perhaps I should learn more about him.)
2. (Extra credit) 891 – Pope Stephen V
3. (More extra credit) 1523 – Pope Adrian VI (b. 1459)

One celebration or holiday:

1. Roman Catholic Church – Triumph of the Cross (compare May 3, Finding of the Holy Cross).

I hereby tag … hmmm … Curt Jester, Dyspeptic Mutterings, and Dappled Things.

The Knights of Columbus have invited us all to partake in a Spiritual Pilgrimage with the Pope as he travels to Turkey, the “minefield” as one official put it. We may not all be able to travel with the Pope physically, but we can all be with him spiritually in our prayers. The prayer, written by the KofC’s Supreme Chaplain Bishop William E. Lori, to be recited daily during the Pope’s pilgrimage to Turkey:

Heavenly Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name, we humbly ask that you sustain, inspire, and protect your servant, Pope Benedict XVI, as he goes on pilgrimage to Turkey – a land to which St. Paul brought the Gospel of your Son; a land where once the Mother of your Son, the Seat of Wisdom, dwelt; a land where faith in your Son’s true divinity was definitively professed. Bless our Holy Father, who comes as a messenger of truth and love to all people of faith and good will dwelling in this land so rich in history. In the power of the Holy Spirit, may this visit of the Holy Father bring about deeper ties of understanding, cooperation, and peace among Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and those who profess Islam. May the prayers and events of these historic days greatly contribute both to greater accord among those who worship you, the living and true God, and also to peace in our world so often torn apart by war and sectarian violence.

We also ask, O Heavenly Father, that you watch over and protect Pope Benedict and entrust him to the loving care of Mary, under the title of Our Lady of Fatima, a title cherished both by Catholics and Muslims. Through her prayers and maternal love, may Pope Benedict be kept safe from all harm as he prays, bears witness to the Gospel, and invites all peoples to a dialogue of faith, reason, and love. We make our prayer through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

And as Whispers pointed out, “Oremus pro Pontifice nostro Benedicto. Dominus conservet eum, et vivificet eum, et beatum faciat eum in terra, et non tradat eum in animam inimicorum eius.” Which, if I’m not mistaken, is the same prayer Diogenes points out from the Enchiridion of Indulgences, Grant #25:

A partial indulgence is granted to the Christian faithful who, in a spirit of filial devotion, devoutly recite any duly approved prayer for the Supreme Pontiff (e.g., the Oremus pro Pontifice):

V. Let us pray for our Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI.

R. May the Lord preserve him, and give him life, and bless him upon earth, and deliver him not to the will of his enemies.

Amen.

Gerald points out the official Vatican page with the overview of the liturgies the Pope will be participating in. The attention to detail is indeed impressive. One thing that I noticed was the following teaching which seems almost in praise of orienting the priest ad orientem, which is interesting given the Pope’s known preference for Mass ad orientem as opposed to the now-common versus populum. It may well mean nothing, but it’s interesting none the less. From the page:

The Byzantine Divine Liturgy, like that of all the Eastern Churches, is celebrated facing East. The priest and all the faithful look to the East, whence Christ will come again in glory. The priest intercedes before the Lord for his people; he walks at the head of the people towards the encounter with the Lord. At different moments the priest turns to the people: for the proclamation of the Gospel, for the dialogue preceding the anaphora, for the communion with the holy gifts, and for all the blessings. These symbolize moments in which the Lord himself comes forth to meet his people.

Update: Fr. Z. apparently noticed the same bit in his post here, although he also took further notice that it was His Excellence Msgr. Marini who wrote the above. If memory serves, Msgr. Marini did mention once after Ratzinger became Benedict that his job as MC became harder because Benedict is also a liturgist as well as a theologian and had his own ideas of how liturgies should be composed. As I like to say, vewy vewy intewesting. (It’s a Buggs Bunny thing if you don’t get the intentional mis-spelling.) I’ll have to look for the reference.

In the bustling metropolis that is my home town of Manchester, NH, this is what passes for big news. To boil it all down, the school administration has awarded a $200K contract to provide pizzas to the schools to a company whose two owners have criminal records. What makes the story interesting is that the school board did not run any background checks on the owners during the bidding process, so of course now everyone has the opportunity to say, “if we’d known about this…”. Of course, there are questions of whether it’s both legal and practical to run background checks on every single vendor for the school system. My question is, if you had known about their background you would have done what, honestly?

First, let’s look at the situation. The couple’s company is contracted to provide cooked and uncooked pizzas to the schools in Manchester; they will not be “in” the schools other than for delivery of the goods so in practice they do not pose any physical threat to the students. The only threat they may pose is to fail to deliver on the contract by either: 1) failing to deliver the agreed upon pizzas or 2) delivering objectively (vs. subjectively) substandard goods. I’d suggest it is debatable whether a subjective grading of the pizzas delivered would be a good measuring stick – some students complained that they use crushed tomatoes vs. pureed tomatoes; neither of these qualifies the product as “inferior” in an objective sense but rather against the particular tastes of the particular student. Now, if a majority (or perhaps to be fair a super-majority) of the students find the pizzas sufficiently subjectively inferior that may qualify as an objective substandard good in my book.

So…the question being run around town is, should the board void the contract and start a secondary bidding process taking into account background checks? In my opinion, all other things being equal (i.e. the bidding process was otherwise without controversy), it would be a moral wrong to pull an already granted contract from someone based on a past action for which the offender has already paid their debt to society (in this case, the article notes the owner has served jail time and is making monthly payments on his $60K debt to the state). To continue to punish a person for an offense is not only un-American, it’s un-Christian. Certainly, of course, current contrition for a past act does not preclude future recurrence, but to assume “once a crook always a crook” stands in direct contrast to the Christian teaching that people are basically good.

Now, of course, there is a question of protecting both the school system (from being bilked out of contract monies) and the students (from being provided objectively substandard, or no, goods). These issues should be handled, however, in either the original contract or in amendments to the contract to stop payment and/or terminate the contract based on sufficient and well-designed metrics. But then, one would hope that such performance metrics would be a part of the contract regardless the criminal record of the contractor. Perhaps that points to the real heart of the matter – it is too easy to pull one over on government agencies and people are sensitive to that, as well as the fact that the assumed proximate victims in this case are school children. But let us not forget that the crimes the owners were convicted of were fraud and theft, respectively, not assault or anything like that; they tried to cheat, not to harm anyone. If the contract is written properly, the children would have to suffer at most one or two days of bad or no pizza before the situation were rectified.

So to wrap up, it is (obviously) my opinion that it is against proper morals to reject a person for a contract based solely on a small sampling of prior acts which have been settled in the legal system and whose debts have been (or are currently being) paid. It is wrong to, effectively, ruin someone’s life after their debt to society has been made in full. At the same time, while it is a Christian principle to forgive, it is also stupid to forget, so one should take extra measures to ensure proper and full compliance with the intent of the granted contract. In the end, this case should come down to drawing up a proper and airtight contract with appropriate awards and penalties clauses, not judging the rest of a person’s life on his or her past. “If any one of you is without sin…”

I was able to finish up The Lamb’s Supper this weekend and saw the following quote. In my opinion, one of the greatest gifts of studying patristics is that the Fathers often did not waste time mincing words and a spiritual shot to the gut is very often a good thing. Particularly in this day and age when it is so easy to become complacent. It’s almost like having your favorite grandfather tell you to “stand up straight next time” – the response is almost reflexive.

But let no one come here, who could say with his mouth, “We lift up our hearts unto the Lord,” but in his thoughts have his mind concerned with the cares of this life. At all times, rather, God should be in our memory but if this is impossible by reason of human infirmity, in that hour above all this should be our earnest endeavour. (St. Cyril of Jerusalem, On the Mysteries V.)

What follows is a probably disjointed set of thoughts that keep coming back to me as our RCIA team and our inquirers go through the process. I’m hoping that by writing down the thought process and with any gracious pointers anyone in St. Blog’s might have to nudge me back on track I might be able to make use of the points I am trying to connect to make the reality of the God these folks are trying to understand more apparent, more real to them. I don’t think anything I write hereafter is anything but orthodox Catholic faith, but if it is I certainly implore anyone who notes such to let me know where I have erred, that I might both correct my error and assist others from following the same path. But enough. Without further adieu…

What is God? John tells us (1 Jn 4:8,16) and Benedict reminds us that God is Love. And what is love? Jesus tells us, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay his life down for his friends” (Jn 15:14). Now, with those definitions, we can look further.

God is love. It’s a phrase we hear quite often now, particularly so since the publication of the Holy Father’s first Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, God is Love. It seems a perfectly innocuous statement, but yet it is truly deeper than can be seen at the start. For when we are saying “God is Love” we are not saying “God feels love” or “God is loving” but rather that He is Love. It is the definition of who and what He is and reflexively He is the definition, the embodiment if you will, the fullness and completeness of what the very word “Love” means.

And so we come to the problem of our second definition. God is Love. Wonderful – but what is this love that we say God is? For without knowing the meaning of the latter, defining the former as it is an exercise in futility. Love is, as we are told, exemplified by giving of what one has, be it one’s time, talent or treasure for the benefit of the beloved. Pure love, then, would be the complete giving of something one has – even more truly, it would be the complete, the utter giving of what one is. The contrast of has and is in this case is the difference between something one has received and that which is the very essence of one’s self. It strikes me this may come as somewhat circular logic and perhaps it is, but follow me if you will – if God is Love, then the essence of God is to give that which He is, to give Love and to give it completely in its fullness. In that end, the essence of God is to give Himself.

In the Old Testament we read the Israelites made sacrifices to make reparations for their sins, their trespasses against the God who is all-good, all-loving and all-powerful. But they knew even then that these sacrifices were insufficient to truly expiate those trespasses completely (Lev. 16:6,16; Heb 9:13), for reason tells us that greater offenses against greater parties require greater and more pure sacrifices (Heb 9:14). And what greater a party can there be than the omnipotent, omnipresent God through whom all that is “lives and moves and has its being”? And what greater offense to God than to take the gift freely given and disrespect it? It is of sufficient magnitude it would take the perfect sacrifice to make up the fullness of the debt, if you will. But who is able to make this perfect sacrifice, for we know “no one is good but God alone” (Mk 10:18)? Indeed then the only one capable of making this sacrifice is God Himself. Would that be out of character for God? Not at all for as we established above, the essence of God is to give Himself.

So now we have the perfect offerer (God) combined with the perfect offering (Himself). But there is one step further yet. Though we have offerer and offering, we have not yet made the offering act. This is critical because Love is, itself, an act – it is not passive, it is not static, it does not sit by and merely allow any and everything to happen around it. As we stated above, Love is the giving of one’s self for the loved – note the active tense – it is not merely in a willingness or intent but indeed the act, or rather the continual act, of giving. This meshes cleanly with the theological assertion that God is pure act – if God is Love, and love is an act, God’s very essence must be to act, to perform the action that is Love. This correlation then between God, Love and Act meshes also with what we find in 1 Timothy 1:13, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful – for he cannot deny himself”; in other words, if we say God is Love then He must be that which is Love, which means to say that His essence is the continual act of giving Himself and in the particular case in question, giving of Himself in the greatest fullness possible.

I’ll stop here before I go any further than I already have. If you have come this far, I congratulate you on your courage and fortitude to deal with my discursive discourse for such a long time. Do let me know if I have gone off to the left, or to the right, or off the tracks entirely. Of course, if you got this far and I haven’t made any egregious theological errors, do let me know that too since this is the furthest I have delved into this topic in a single sitting.

From CWN:

Lay Catholic activists in Massachusetts have sharply criticized the Boston office of Catholic Charities for advertising in a local gay newspaper.

The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts said that a quarter-page ad in Bay Windows represented “either an appalling example of bad judgment or a disturbing sign of indifference to Church teaching, or both.”

The Catholic Charities ad– promoting a pre-Christmas open house at a Boston community center– appeared in Bay Windows at a time when Massachusetts politicians were debating a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage. The gay-oriented newspaper was leading the charge against that amendment.

Sadly, when it comes to Boston and the area, things like this don’t surprise me. There’s a reason terms like “Massachusetts liberal” and in this case “Boston Catholic” are considered pejorative in the non-Mass. parts of New England. While there are large numbers of good and faithful people in the fine Commonwealth, there are others who have, er, “agendas” who often control the stations of power. Pray for Cardinal O’Malley, he has a very difficult job to do.

I was just lent a copy of Dr. Scott Hahn’s The Lamb’s Supper after our weekly viewing of Father Corapi’s series on the Catechism. As I was reading the foreward by Fr. Benedict Groeschel I was struck by the intersection of one thing both he and Fr. Corapi said in different ways – words mean something. Not that this is new, but it’s intriguing that I should come across this at nearly the same time as the whole pro multis issue was being decided. Interesting timing. Anyway, Fr. Groeschel:

I always feel a twinge of annoyance when I see in a college or a hotel a list of “religious services” and observe the Mass listed at 9 A.M. The Mass is not a religious service. When Catholics say morning prayer or the recitation of the rosary or even have Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, that’s a service. It’s something that we do for God, similar to the public prayer of any religious denomination. But the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist, the Divine Liturgy, is not precisely – in its essence – done by man at all.

Again, not one of those things as a Catholic you should be surprised to hear. But certainly something that makes you stop for a second and say, “yes, indeed it is so”. Source. Center. Summit.

Whispers reports:

“Pro multis” = “For many” = “Done Deal.”

Get ready.

One does wonder if this portends any greater changes in the nearby offing or if it is merely a one-time change that anyone who has read works by the then-Ratzinger would have expected. Interesting times do we live in…

Update: Jimmy Akin points us to a CWN article which also says this is a done deal and the letter has already been sent from Cdl. Arinze to the heads of the Bishops’ Conferences. He also gives a nice explanation of why people care about this little two-word translation.

According to this CWN article President Bush has appointed a doctor with strong ties to the pro-life movement as the assistant secretary of Health and Human Service. In this post Dr. Eric Keroak will be responsible for supervising the disbursement of $283 million in federal grant money.

Prior to his appointment, Dr. Keroack had served as a medical director for crisis-pregnancy centers operated by A Women’s Concern, a Massachusetts non-profit group that operates several crisis-pregnancy centers in the Boston area. The group– which has won state and federal grants for abstinence education– takes a firm stand against family-planning programs that encourage contraceptive use.

It may just possibly be that President Bush has heard the message that came from his famous “values voters” in this last election, that if he won’t push forward those values he risks their support. Perhaps this is the first positive fruits of what was an absolutely disastrous election for pro-life supporters. It may take a while, but I expect to see the leading Democrats attempt to attach anti-life riders and amendments to just about any bill that comes through, particularly ones like the annual omnibus budget which the president is nearly forced to sign. This may well be the most corrosive two years of politics we have seen in a long time. Keep your hats on folks.