Filling Holes

I've just about finished reading The Tide Is Turning Towards Catholicism, by David J. Hartline, and of all the lessons it's teaching me, there's a simple one that it seems I will be re-learning over and over again, as yesterday I learned it for the millionth time: to learn how little I really know.

I'm not much into sports, so when I got to the book's 11th chapter, on "Catholic athletes and coaches", I was mightily tempted to skip it, and zip ahead to chapter 12, "Megachurches, Salvation, and other debated issues", which sounded much meatier and more to my interest. Ankle-deep into that next chapter I mentally forced myself to go back and tackle the book in the order the author intended; how could I know whether or not the previous chapter was not worth reading, unless I at least made the effort to listen to what he had to say? Why was I presuming that the author wouldn't find a way to at least make his stories interesting? He had, after all, succeeded in doing so in every other chapter I had read so far. So I steeled myself to read it.

Was I ever glad I did. It ended up being the most inspiring chapter of the book to date, and introduced me to someone a non-sports person like myself would probably never have heard about otherwise: the remarkable Coach Lou Holtz.

Author David Hartline quotes from an interview he had conducted with the former Notre Dame football coach, and it was so inspiring that it whetted my appetite for more. Taking my lead from the chapter that I almost chose not to read, I searched for the full interview at the author's website; at the end of the online interview came this marvelous suggestion for a game plan for living life:

Coach Holtz: You know Dave it has taken me a long time to figure this out but I now live by the belief that if something isn’t going to bother you on your death bed then it shouldn’t bother you now. I can’t say that I do that with every problem, but I am trying.
[Let] me leave the Catholic Report readers with a couple of thoughts. There are four things that we must do and have to succeed in life.

1. Something to live for
2. Someone to love and love us
3. Something to hope for
4. Something to believe in

Due to my vanity I almost ended up missing out on discovering this most helpful advice. I can't help but think if I had heard it twenty years ago I would have lived a much more meaningful pair of decades... if I could have summoned the humility to feel the need to listen to him in the first place.

Goes to show that we can just never know what lies ahead; try as we might, think as we will, we really can't know everything. We can't really know who will and who will not prove to be of service to us.

When we're young we're taught the sensible advice, "Don't Talk To Strangers". But like so much else in life, that should be a principle, not a rule; as we are changed through aging, this admonition should adapt as well, growing as we grow, maybe even to the point of us growing out of its first formulation, in the same way that we eventually outgrow the teeth we first use to chew our daily bread.

If we never listen to strangers, how do we test our ideas? Is it so impressive to win an argument against yourself? Even if we're convinced we're right, do we really have the whole truth..? Do we really see the big picture... or are there holes needing to be filled? How do we even know what holes might need filling, unless we interact with different people with different experiences, holding different pieces to the puzzle.

The old analogy of the blind men and the elephant comes to mind; the lord of a castle looks into his courtyard, and watches a group of blind men examining an elephant, by touch. Being blind, they can't know that it's an elephant, so they are busily relaying to each other the conclusions they are drawing from their individual pieces, together trying to define this big picture. Their best guess is shattered by the lord surveying the test, who shouts down to them: "You're describing an elephant."

In our own lives, we tend to think of ourselves as the lord of the castle, and not who we really are, one of the groping blind men, with holes to fill.

UPDATE: Welcome readers of the Catholic Report! Thank you for visiting our Canadian team blog. My usual "beat" is to write about European news, searching for stories that don't seem to get picked up by other North American sites.

Here are some past articles, some with good news and some with bad, that you might find of interest:

Looking For Reasons To Keep Faith In The UK

French Teens In Suicidal Leap Of Faith

Blind Faith Decapitates Madonna In French Church

France Destroys Her Churches

Muslim Father Demands Removal Of Crucifix From French Catholic Hospital Room

A sign-of-the-times story about fear and faith in today's France.

Translated from the short account carried in the French-language newspaper Le Figaro:

After vehement demands, a muslim obtained the removal of a crucifix hanging from the wall of the room of a Catholic clinic in Bourgoin-Jallieu (Isère) where his daughter was being treated…

Monday afternoon, at the Saint-Vincent de Paul clinic, the father of a young girl, who had just underwent scheduled preventative surgery, demanded that personnel unfasten a crucifix from his daughter’s room.
"For almost 15 minutes, the father, in the presence of his wife, verbally ranted, demanding that the crucifix be taken down", reported a witness. The establishment’s personnel eventually gave in to this demand.

The management of the clinic expressed their astonishment. The director of the clinic, Marie-Thérèse Besson, declared that this demand was "surprising [given that it’s] from a family that freely chose our establishment."

"When people choose to be treated in our establishment… they know that they are in a Catholic maternity hospital", she added.

I wonder, whose fear is the most palpable in this story; that of the hospital attendants, who can be so quick to accommodate their ranting customer?
Or the father who can allow himself to become so hot and bothered about seeing a Crucifix hanging in a Catholic hospital?

For what else is his fury based on, but fear?

Surely someone secure in their faith doesn’t behave as he behaves. If his faith is really the "real" one, then why would the presence of a simple icon defile him so deeply? Does he maintain so tenuous a grip on his religious beliefs that they can be this gravely threatened by a visual reminder of potential alternatives?

The story is a good example of how we are each an ambassador of our faith. A stranger to our faith will reasonably presume that our behavior is the result of our values taught by that faith, and any lack of civility is likely caused by, not incidental to, our religious beliefs. Look at what his behavior will make readers think now, of his fellow co-religionists.

And look what Catholic France is made to look like by the spineless capitulation of the hospital staff to the fear this ingrate father held for their faith. Don't the staff at that Catholic clinic believe in the healing power that the Cross represents?

If I get mud on my hands, I can probably wash it off. If I make a mistake, I can usually find, or be shown, some way to help atone for it. As a Catholic, I believe that if I sin, in word or in deed, there are circumstances under which my sin can be forgiven. I might fall away, but I can always be welcomed back by God. There must be something I can do, or something I can stop doing, that will help wash away the stain from my hands, and be clean again.

Should I conclude from this father’s un-reasonable behavior that his faith offers no such forgiveness for his stains? Does mere contact with the symbols of a rival faith cause a permanent, unwashable stain sufficient in power to anchor his soul to hell?

Judging by his behavior, he acts like it would. No wonder he was so scared of that Crucifix.

This father's ingratitude, insecurity and incivility is a timely reminder that good fruit does not fall from a bad tree, and that we should strive to think a second time about our actions, to ensure we are acting in accordance with our values, and our faith.

We can't expect others to be impressed by the reasonableness of our faith unless we act as if we are helped, not cursed, by that faith.

[Much thanks to the great French blog Le Salon Beige for unearthing this story.]

UPDATE: Esther at Islam in Europe has translated further details from the original report that appeared in the French paper Le Dauphine Libere. Apparently this isn't the first time that such incidents have taken place in these Catholic clinics...

This photo shows the sign at the front entrance to the building. Clearly visible: the notice that it is a "CATHOLIC Maternity".

The Dauphine article provides clinic director Marie-Thérèse Besson's full comments, rather than just the excerpts quoted by the article I translated in Le Figaro: "When people choose to be treated in our establishment, they do so in full awareness of the facts. They know that they are in a Catholic maternity [hospital]. This is not at all hidden: it is actually clearly inscribed at the entrance to the facility, as well as in the reception leaflet. The nuns of Catholic maternities perform their duties in religious garb, the bell, visible from the rooms, tolls three times at each birth. This demand [to take down the Cross] is surprising coming from a family that had freely chosen our establishment."
"Each room contains a Crucifix. Of small size, it is in no way ostentatious, [it's] very modest."

UPDATE II [July 2nd]: The father has apologized..!

The Passing Of A Righteous Hero

On May 12th the world lost a very special lady.

Polish Catholic Irena Sendler (1910-2008) saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.

Working in the Zegota ("Council for Aid to Jews ") underground movement, where she ran the Children's Division, Irena contrived ways to enter into the Ghetto (often as part of the official Contagious Disease Department) and, with the consent of their parents, smuggle out Jewish children through various means, from hiding them in suitcases and body bags to sneaking them out, as was the case of five-month old infant, Elzbieta Ficowska, inside a carpenter's box. An ambulance driver who smuggled infants under stretchers in the back of his van kept his dog on the seat beside him, having trained the animal to bark to mask any cries from his hidden passengers.

Once outside, Irena created new identities through false documents and worked to find families willing to accept the children and pass them off as Catholic, or managed to hide them in convents and orphanages. Zegota made it clear to all of those hiding children, when the war was over, they must be returned to Jewish relatives.

She kept meticulous records of the real names of all the children she saved, having the courage to believe that her country would one day be freed and that the children could then be reunited with their parents. She hid the lists in glass jars that she buried in the garden rather than keep them around the house, and risk them being discovered.

Her rescue operation came to an end in 1943 when she was captured by the Germans. She was brutally tortured in prison, as the Nazis attempted in vain to learn more about her underground activities. These beatings resulted in both her legs and feet being fractured, causing injuries that plagued her to the end of her days, yet she did not reveal the whereabouts of her list.

She was rescued from the hands of her torturers by the Polish underground, and even though she herself spent the remainder of the war years in hiding, she continued to find ways to be of service to the hidden children. After the war, she dug up her lists from their hiding place, and devoted much time trying to reconnect the rescued Jewish children with their families.

Sadly, most of the relatives had been killed at the Treblinka death camp.

The communist regime that occupied Poland following World War II branded Irena a "fascist" , for her group's anti-communist views, and kept her from receiving just reward for her valiant wartime activities. Her story was rescued from the fog of history by four American high school students from Kansas, who created a play called "Life In A Jar", based on their research into Irena's righteous acts during the war.

As the play's popularity helped her brave efforts to become more internionally known, Irena Sendler put her inspiring courage into humble perspective:

“We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true—I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little.”

Last year Irena Sendler was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, but lost...
to Al Gore.

Dag For Pope.

Last time I checked there were a few reasons that I'm not a Catholic. Chances are those reason are still valid today. One reason I'm not a Catholic is because I'm a nominal Protestant. Another reason, I never chose to be a Catholic instead. I don't want to be a Catholic. There are many aspects of Catholicism that I find not to my personal ways of being. In short, I'm not a Catholic because it doesn't have any deep appeal to me. So what the hell is the matter with that Church? Are they crazy or stupid? Maybe they're all a lot of bigots.I've written hundreds of letters to the pope telling him of my complaints, and he and the Church carry on as before. Well, fine, I'm not becoming a Catholic till they change.

DAVID CRARY, "Papal Visit Provokes Array of Protests." NEW YORK (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI may not see them or hear them, but aggrieved Roman Catholic activists hope his U.S. visit this week will help them draw attention to issues ranging from the ordination of women and gay rights to sex abuse by priests and the Vatican ban on contraception.

The groups have planned vigils, demonstrations and news conferences to press their causes as the pope visits Washington and New York. On Monday evening, the eve of his arrival, supporters of women's ordination will host what they are calling "an inclusive Mass" at a Methodist church in Washington, presided over by Catholic women — including two who were recently excommunicated.

"We cannot welcome this pope until he begins to do away with the church's continuing violence of sexism," said Sister Donna Quinn, coordinator of the National Coalition of American Nuns.

Participants in the service will include Rose Marie Hudson and Elsie McGrath, who were excommunicated last month by Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis because they were ordained as part of a women-priest movement condemned by the Vatican.

[....]

Gay Catholic activists, who plan to demonstrate Tuesday along the papal motorcade route in Washington, have compiled a list of statements by Benedict during his career which they consider hostile to gays and lesbians. These include forceful denunciations of gay marriage and of adoption rights for same-sex couples.

"He has issued some of the most hurtful and extreme rhetoric against our community of any religious leader in history, and we want to call him into account for the damage that he's done," said Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA....

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g8iPkS6Yy8EfBGUxorWF9tXSyWAQD9013J1O4

I see that these folks above feel about the Church pretty much as I do. If it won't conform to my personal wants, then it should or the Church leadership should go away and let me run the institution properly. It doesn't take a genius to figure it out; so why are they still staying and pissing me off? I mean, don't they care if I'm a Catholic? Don't they get the obvious right of Dagmatism? What a bunch of losers they are.

Singing A New Song In Qatar

Singing in Mass this morning through the sniffles of a lingering cold, I set my mind the task of imagining similar sounds echoing from the new church I had read about earlier, over my morning coffee... a Catholic church newly constructed in Doha, Qatar:

...Thousands of worshipers gathered Saturday for the consecration of Qatar's first Christian church, ending decades of underground worship in this Sunni Muslim and deeply conservative Persian Gulf nation.

Three dozen bishops and priests gathered to celebrate the mass, which was conducted in English with prayers in the Tagalog language from the Philippines, Hindi, Arabic and other languages.
...
Qatar follows the rigorous Wahhabi teachings of Sunni Islam, and like neighboring Saudi Arabia had not previously authorized Christians to practice their faith openly. A Catholic priest had operated in Qatar without official approval since the 1960s.

Imagine the sound of a congregation so long denied the simplest of priviledges we take so for granted here in Canada, now granted the reality they had been waiting for, praying for... decades of hope, now seen fulfilled.

What must their singing be like, on this Palm Sunday..?

I imagine that we would hear words and lyrics in many languages that may defy our understanding, yet behind the words would soar a language of the heart that any human being in love with freedom must find exhilirating to listen to, the most glorious of any music.

I imagine that through their singing we would rediscover what it truly means to have Faith, to live in Hope, to believe in Renewal. And to see a way to Peace.

Ten years ago it was probably "unreasonable" to dare imagine that a Passion Sunday service would ever be held in Qatar. Five years ago it might have been Faith without reason to continue to believe Easter may one day be celebrated so publicly as it will be next weekend in Qatar. Today, the simple songs of humble parishioners assembled in Doha reveal how helpful it remains to live through both Faith **and** Reason, how both attributes may serve to compliment the other, as essential halves to one whole. These attributes need not be seen as adversarial to each other, despite the natural conflict which may arise from their differences; these differences should be embraced, and celebrated, as the blessed gifts that they are. For as one weakens, the other persists, each balancing the other in turn, as required. A lesson in maintaining balance as simple, yet as challenging, as learning how to walk.

And if we should ever forget the lesson, all we need do is listen to the sound of the singing parishioners of Doha.

As if this were not miracle enough, the French Christian newspaper La Croix reports on reasons to have faith that this one, new church may be but the tip of the iceberg: there are apparently negotiations underway between the Vatican and "authorities" in Riyadh for the construction of Catholic churches in, of all places, Saudi Arabia..!

Translated from a story published in the online version of the paper on Saturday:

"Discussions are ongoing with Saudi Arabia for authorizing the construction of churches within the kingdom", said [Mounjed Al-Hachem, the Vatican's representative in the Gulf region], during his participation Friday in Doha, at the inaguration of the first church in Qatar.

"We can not predict the results" coming out of these discussions, he added, bringing to mind king Abdallah's visit to the Vatican in November 2007, the first visit of a saudi sovereign.

Bishop Hachem has elsewhere revealed that Gulf leaders had "raised the idea of a papal visit to the region", citing the king of Bahrain, sheik Hamad Ben Issa Al-Khalifa, and the Qatari energy minister Abdallah Ben Hamad Al-Thani.

"In my capacity as ambassador, I will deliver these wishes and it is up to the Pope to decide", he concluded.

Catholics Outnumber Anglicans in Anglican England

News of former Prime Minister Tony Blair's conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism has made headlines around the world. In the shadow of that story we read of another angle to the growing decline of Anglicanism in England: for the first time since the 16th Century, there are now more practicing Catholics in England than Anglicans.

A survey by the group Christian Research published in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper showed that around 862,000 worshippers attended Catholic Mass each week in 2006, exceeding the 852,000 who went to Church of England services.

Attendance at Anglican services has almost halved over the past 40 years as the country has grown steadily more secular, the research showed, with only Pentecostalism showing any rise in popularity among Christian denominations.

While attendance figures for both Catholic and Anglican services are declining, Catholic numbers are slipping by a lesser degree as new migrants arrive from east Europe and parts of Africa, boosting Catholic congregations.

The Church of England is not taking the dip to second place lying down, the Telegraph article reveals:

In an attempt to combat the declining interest in traditional religion, the Anglican Church has launched radical new forms of evangelism that include nightclub chaplains, a floating church on a barge and internet congregations.

The French Christian site La Croix adds some details, from Peter Brierley, the former general director of Christian Research, who assisted in conducting the survey:

"A part of the reason for the increase [in the number of practicing Catholics] is that you have a large number of immigrants coming from Catholic countries, especially Poland." British authorities say that at least 300,000 Poles have come to Great Britain since joining the EU in 2004, while polish sources place the number at closer to one million, of which half have centered around London.

Unmentioned in the Sunday Telegraph's coverage of the story is what effect, if any, the ongoing schism within the Anglican communion may be having on Church attendance. Might British traditionalists be growing as disillusioned with their post-modern church, as many of their US counterparts are? Maybe, just maybe, it's not about where it is being taught, whether on land or on "floating barges", but simply what is being taught... or rather, what is no longer being taught.

If one's faith teaches that anything goes, then why need a God at all to help us live that kind of life? If every behavior is equally healthy and helpful to the community at large, then why even have faith to begin with, since there would exist no better version of ourselves to imagine aiming ourselves to become?

Bishop urges Dutch Catholics to pray to allah

Every group tends to have its black sheep; it’s an inevitable challenge to working as a team. Every family seems to possess its black sheep as well, which helps us develop the grace to live with disappointments, and accept the reality that not everything (or everyone) will always go our way.

What is to be done, however, when the black sheep is actually the shepherd in charge of the flock..?

A controversial Dutch Catholic Bishop, Tiny Muskens, who has previously raised eyebrows with his decidedly un-catholic pronouncements on the acceptability of using condoms, is back in the news, this time for asking his fellow Dutch Catholics to appease muslim immigrants to Holland, by praying to allah.

From Radio Netherlands:

The Bishop of Breda, Tiny Muskens, wants people to start calling God Allah. He says the Netherlands should look to Indonesia, where the Christian churches already pray to Allah. It is also common in the Arab world: Christian and Muslim Arabs use the words God and Allah interchangeably.

Speaking on the Dutch TV programme Network on Monday evening, Bishop Muskens says it could take another 100 years but eventually the name Allah will be used by Dutch churches. And that will promote rapprochement between the two religions.
...
"Someone like me has prayed to Allah yang maha kuasa (Almighty God) for eight years in Indonesia and other priests for 20 or 30 years. In the heart of the Eucharist, God is called Allah over there, so why can't we start doing that together?"
....
[Several years ago the bishop] also suggested abolishing Whit Monday as a national holiday in favour of an Islamic religious day.

Are we going to start seeing a schism within the Catholic Church similar to the one brewing in the Anglican Church over doctrinal issues? Are Catholics in store for a modern-day Avignon Papacy? Or is Bishop Muskens a lone wolf in sheep's clothing?

Reasonable people are perfectly willing to accomodate reasonable requests by reasonable guests, but adopting the arabic name of God is not an accomodation that many traditionalist Catholics are likely to follow.

Bishop Musken, I think your recommendation pushes your diocese One Bridge Too Far.

Here's a new one: Gnosticism and "Incarnophobia"

Regular readers of this blog will know our propensity to label so much of left-liberal-progressive political ideology as one or another kind of "gnosticism": broadly, the belief that there is something wrong with the creation or the world as it has been given to us, that the true creation, or some possible better world, is unnecessarily obscured from our present view, and that through some kind of heroic, intellectual, perhaps magical, operation in the here and now we can avoid further decline and disaster by transforming the world. The gnostic thus implies that we can transform the traditional Judeo-Christian faith in a salvation that is only to come in a transcendent or divine world, into faith in salvation through a commitment to a progressive cause and history in this immanent, worldly, existence.

I like to argue that while the gnostic faith has had its hand in some real worldly progress, historically - it is hard to imagine the rise of modern science without it - the faith has now had its day, as is evident in the present bankruptcy (moral and ethical) of "progressive" politics. I believe that the expansion of human freedom in future will require a return to certain orthodoxies, to disciplines that allow the human soul to have a sound grasp of our uncertain existential reality - avoiding the desire to control or transform our given reality - not that I know exactly what these will be for any given person or group.

I tend to contrast gnosticism with the patient faith of those who can wait endlessly for the return of the Messiah, those who also have faith that our worldly future is open-ended and so unknowable, that mundane history is not progressing in any linear sense, nor that there is any reason to hope it could progress in any consistent or knowable, i.e. controllable, sense, under the management of experts. Rather, I believe that human cultural evolution - i.e. the ways in which the human scene may be represented and organized - is inexhaustible, and that no final apocalypse, or great revelation, is presently unfolding. We will expand freedom by doing away with the gnostic experts who presently rule too much of our public opinion, by building nations in which anyone can have a healthy say and role in ruling themselves together through covenants (which will require its own kinds of expertise). But to do this we must first relearn our faith in ourselves, in the ultimate goodness and open-endedness of our shared humanity.

It is useful to have very general categories, like "gnosticism", that can tie together a wide range of phenomena we can then further differentiate. It is important to recognize that there are certain basic, recurring, patterns to human experience, and that our study of these may serve as starting points for our analysis of the historical particulars of our place and time. Still, to the inevitably somewhat gnostic mind (I doubt any of us can entirely free ourselves from the gnostic faith that has been so central to modern life) that is always looking for that special key to understanding and/or transforming our fallen nature, or our less-than-perfect social/cultural history, it can seem pointless to label every progressive or utopian ideologue who promises worldly salvation as a "gnostic". Let's have a little more precision here, people say.

Well I, for one, am certainly not against an ongoing differentiation of our consciousness in such matters, even as I hold to the usefulness of the broad category. So in this spirit, though knowing this will be contentious for some of our readers (but I hope useful for us to discuss), allow me to present for our ongoing consideration of gnosticism, Mark Gordon, of the blog, Suicide of the West and his Catholic convert's reflection on what he sees as the protestant-cum-gnostic (or perhaps, gnostic-cum-protestant) struggle to control time, or to control people through a "levelling" (making uniform and worldly) of our understanding of time, in such a way that man's worldly pursuits, the valuing of acts before faith, become the foundation of our experience of time and how we symbolize this experience and its promise of salvation:

it has been a tremendous grace for me to learn to live within the metronomic rhythm of the Church’s liturgical year. It took me a few cycles, but eventully the movement from Advent through the Feast of Christ the King became second nature. I don’t know when or why the Christians in my native tradition did away with the liturgical calendar. I can understand their dismissal of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (I guess), but Pentecost? The Transfiguration? Even the Annunciation? The wholesale levelling of time in the Evangelical tradition is a sign of the essentially gnostic and Manichean assumptions that inform so much of Evangelical theology and practice, assumptions which themselves spring from what I would call Incarnophobia: a fear of the Incarnation and its implications.