Monday, April 30, 2018

More on Worship

This past Sunday the Gospel was the story of Christ's encounter with the Samiritan woman at Jacob's well, which features the word "worship." In Greek: προσκυνεῖν (proskynein). The Latin word used in the neo-Vulgate is adorare.

For Aquinas, he discusses the virtue of religio, under which he talks about latria (and adoratio) in (II II ae) Question 84.

There is no Latin for Gaudete et Exsultate yet, so I am not sure what the English word "worship" is translating. In the CCC, worship translates adorare/adoratio. But in the CCC, worship is also used to translate the word cultus. (Similar to how the English word was used to refer to any form of reverence and also to that which is due to God alone?)

Edit. I remembered to check the Italian text for Gaudete et Exsultate: "worship" corresponds to both culto and adorazione in the Italian text.

Hyperdulia

Old Catholic Encyclopedia: Christian Worship

Building Your Church Music System, Part 1

Sunday, April 29, 2018

The Complete Psalter

Is Liturgy More than Worship?

I have been considering this question for the past few days, in connection with Bouyer and Schmemann. Worship is part of St. Thomas's catalog of the virtues, but I suspect that the Latin equivalent can be found in the texts of the Roman rite going back to the earliest days, when Latin was first introduced. (If this is the case, was it a translation of a Greek word introduced by the first Roman Christians, or was it adopted later?)

Youth, liturgy, and the need for true worship by Peter M.J. Stravinskas

Liturgy – like the Faith it celebrates – never admits of an “erector-set” approach; good liturgy, true liturgy is received, not fabricated, and it takes seriously the human person in all his complexity of body and soul.

Friday, April 27, 2018

CWR: Female ordination advocates ignore theological truth, focus on power by Nicholas Senz

Those who insist that women ought to be ordained as Catholic priests do not simply want to serve the Church—they want to change the Church. […]

Unirea Canton



(via Byx TX)

Thursday, April 26, 2018

But Islam Will Never Embrace Historical Criticism

What If Muhammad Didn’t Write the Qur’an? by Will Jones

In Trust Feature on SVS Press

here

Greek Chauvinism

Does it exist today within Chalcedonian Orthodox circles? Do non-Greek clerics who can speak ecclesiastical Greek feel welcome among Greeks as equals? (And what if they don't speak Greek?)

Greek is no longer a universal language or lingua franca of the Church Universal, but of a minority of Christians. Is the language used as a barrier to entry to certain ecclesial networks?

I was thinking that it should be an ideal quality, if not a qualification, for the bishop of Rome to be be fluent in ecclesiastical Greek. But would this just reinforce Greek chauvinism, if it exists? Perhaps it is not meant to be for the Church to have a universal language (despite the historic pretensions of Greeks and Latins alike).

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Liturgical Scholar, Not Theologian or Bishop

Byz Tx: Sr. Vassa: There's no ontological impediment to priestesses

Is the rationale for the prohibition against women receiving Holy Orders (setting aside the claim by Byzantine Christians that deaconesses are a major order) merely that it has been prohibited by God or the Church? Or is there something more? Is Christ a male for a reason? Could the Second Person of the Trinity have become Incarnate as a woman? Could the Second Person of the Trinity exercise authority over men as a woman?


Fotx XI International Liturgical Conference

Eastern Christian Books: Tradition and Transformation in Christian Iconography

Eastern Christian Books: Tradition and Transformation in Christian Iconography 

Eastern Christian Books: Christos Yannaras

Eastern Christian Books: Christos Yannaras

Leonardo Polo

Learning Polo: An introduction to the Spanish “metaphysician of freedom” by Alvino-Mario Fantini

The late Spanish philosopher’s works encourage us to remain faithful to the constant, rigorous questioning required by the philosophia perennis.

On the Conversion of the Western Roman Empire

It would not be surprising if Latins think first of all of the persecution of Christians in Rome in connection with its eventual conversion. But in considering the historic relations between Christians and their pagan neighbors, and to what degree they co-existed, does Rome give us a representative picture of what was happening elsewhere in the Roman Empire? And was it truly the case that Rome converted because the blood of martyrs is the seed of faith? Or because of the rise of the "Constantinian Church" and the subsequent declaration of Christianity as the official religion of the empire, along with the outlawing of other religions? Is this pattern of apparent conversion replicated elsewhere, with the conversion of tribes and kingdoms? And should we really consider that a viable model of evangelization? After all the persecutions (and martyrdom) of Christians in China, Korea, and Japan, for example, has not had similar results yet; and Christians not having the reins of state in these polities is not an insignificant difference. Even if we think of Mexico converting not because of the prestige and power of the Church under the Spanish but because of the intervention of Our Lady of Guadalupe, what about the rest of Ibero-America?

A Church of the Many or a Church of the Few? Louis Bouyer's question remains relevant today, especially with the latest Apostolic Exhortation repeating the calls of previous pontificates for a new evangelization.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Not Mutually Exclusive

Hell: punishment or self-inflicted? What if it is both, especially if we keep more than the sense of poena in mind -- that it is a privation. Secondly, God's judgment is not a distinct act from His being or His love.

The Heresy of Hell as Self-Inflicted by Charles Robertson

I also note that while the title calls it a heresy, there is no evidence that it is so, other than that the position that Hell is self-inflicted seems to go against Scripture. And this only if we hold that Hell being self-inflicted contradicts it being a punishment. But more likely than not supporters of Hell being self-inflicted can offer an explanation of how it is still a punishment, or harmonize it with the words of Christ.

English Translation of the Psalter

For Latins --- what is available?

Magnificat, Give Us This Day: do they use the same English translation of the Psalms?

I don't think Word Among Us provides a version of the Divine Office for laity. I don't think Living With Christ does, either.

Then there is the Customary of Our Lady of Walsingham, which uses a version of the Coverdale translation.

How good is the Grail translation for private devotion and singing? (I should ask, is it a faithful translation of Scripture? And how about the Revised Grail Psalms?)


Revised Grail Psalms

I need to do some research on Psalm tones too...

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Friday, April 20, 2018

Not Really an Assessment

But a gathering of opinions from different people.

NCReg: ‘Gaudete et Exsultate’: An Assessment by Edward Pentin
Cardinals Daniel DiNardo and Gerhard Müller praise holiness document; others express concern about content regarding sanctity of life, heresies.

The "Conversion" of St. Paul

OAJ Interview with Ioan Popa

Thursday, April 19, 2018

A Decree from 1847

During the peak years of papal maximalization?

If there is to be a patron of the Church other than the Bridegroom Himself, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, why would it not be the Theotokos? Of course this is linked to the growing cultus of Holy Joseph in Roman Catholic Christianity. Still, if he is not accepted as the designated patron of the Church Universal by the Church Universal, does the decree really mean anything? It is just an example of the pretense of the patriarch of Rome to be a universal pastor.

And yet, he still went through with it.

Too nice to say no? Or too indecisive to reject a bad reform? A lack of leadership. A worthy candidate for canonization? No.



Rorate Caeli: Don't whitewash history: Paul VI was front and center the creator of the New Mass of Paul VI

Sandro Magister

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Fr. Andrew Louth on the Greek Schism




Theological Casuistry

Re: Ott (and similar manuals) weighing or attempting to weigh the certainty or probability of theological opinions -- upon what crtieria is one opinion deemed to be merely probable versus being of common consensus? (It's been a while since I've picked Ott up so I probably have the exact terms wrong.) Does the author look not just across space but across time? Is there any evaluation of the strength of the opinions themselves other than authority or number of adherents?

Monday, April 16, 2018

Friday, April 13, 2018

"Voice of the Faithful"

Sandro Magister: In a Church With No Leader, Two New Protests From Bishops and Faithful
Sandro Magister: Francis, Spin Doctor To Himself. His Latest Exploits

Finally, the third modality of communication dear to Francis had as its “partner,” in recent days, a Benedictine monk and psychologist among the most widely read in the world, the German Anselm Grün.

Last February 15, in conversing behind closed doors with the priests of Rome, as he does every year at the beginning of Lent, Pope Francis recommended that they read a book by Grün - whose affectionate reader he is too - describing it as “modern” and “close to us.”

So then, Grün is the one who in an interview with the “Augsburger Allgemeine” on March 30, Good Friday, said that "there are no theological reasons that speak against an abolishment of priestly celibacy or against female priests, female bishops, or a female pope." It is an “historical process” that “needs time” – he added – and ‘the first step has to be now the ordination of women as deaconesses.”

An ordination, this last, that turns out to be among the short-term objectives of Francis, on a par with the ordination of married men to the priesthood.

While on the subsequent steps of the “historical process” delineated by Grün, that of women priests, bishops, and pope, Francis has not yet gone off the rails, either in public or in private (*).

But meanwhile he has recommended listening to someone who enunciates them as goals to be reached, no matter if these are in stark contrast with the “non possumus” of all the previous popes.

Monday, April 09, 2018

Carl Olson on Gaudete et Exsultate

Pope Francis “takes aim” in “Gaudete et Exsultate”—and misses? by Carl E. Olson
The many good qualities and substantive passages in Gaudete et Exsultate are often overshadowed, or even undermined, by straw men, dubious arguments, and cheap shots.
CWR Dispatch: The temptation and the challenge of reading “Gaudete et exsultate” by Christopher R. Altieri

Whatever else there is to say about the document and regardless of one’s personal, spiritual, or intellectual disposition toward Pope Francis, it is fair to say the Holy Father has touched a nerve.

Patrick Deneen on Liberalism





The End of Liberalism: Why the World is Falling Apart

Saturday, April 07, 2018

Thursday, April 05, 2018

Sacrifice

CWR: Martin Luther’s flawed understanding of natural law: A response to Dr. Korey D. Maas by Timothy J. Gordon

Voluntarism denies the Catholic teaching that logos constitutes—rather than delimits—God’s nature, and Luther was a voluntarist.