Eclectic Amateur

This is beautiful:

Be united but not closed off. Be humble, but not fearful. Be simple, but not naive. Be thoughtful, but not complicated. Enter into dialog with everyone, but remain yourselves.

-- Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the youth of Genoa, May 18, 2008

(via Amy Welborn)

Labels: Catholic, The Most Important Things

Today is the one-year anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address.

As part of our homeschool co-op responsibilities, I find myself about to teach a class on logic.

Using Son #1 as a guinea pig for the class, I ran through the intro with him last night, and needed to find some explanation of why logic and reason matter, and most especially, why they should matter to us as Christians.

My shower-powered inspiration this morning was that I've already seen such an explanation, and just need to look up Regensburg. It was a nice coincidence to find out that today is the talk's anniversary.

Go, read. It's more lucid (and more important) than anything I have to say.

Labels: Catholic, homeschooling, Logic

I suppose these results aren't terribly surprising ... I'm so "new", I'm not yet Catholic. And I do love Pope John Paul II of happy memory, and I do feel as if I'm rediscovering a lost faith.

The 2% "Liberal Catholic" result would explain my disconnect with the official ECUSA party line on ... well, just about everything.

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You scored as New Catholic. The years following the Second Vatican Council was a time of collapse of the Catholic faith and its traditions. But you are a young person who has rediscovered this lost faith, probably due to the evangelization of Pope John Paul II. You are enthusiastic, refreshing, and somewhat traditional, and you may be considering a vocation to the priesthood or religious life. You reject relativism and the decline in society that you see among your peers. You are seen as being good for the Church. A possible problem is that you may have a too narrow a view of orthodoxy, and anyway, you are still a youth and not yet mature in your faith. New Catholic 79% Traditional Catholic 60% Evangelical Catholic 59% Neo-Conservative Catholic 59% Lukewarm Catholic 33% Radical Catholic 19% Liberal Catholic 2% What is your style of American Catholicism? created with QuizFarm.com

Labels: Catholic

I was meditating a bit upon Lepanto, and fell into a moderate case of Catholic envy.

After all, the Catholic church has these wonderfully triumphalistic feasts such as Christ the King and Our Lady of Victory.

I'm pretty sure as Episcopalians, our corresponding feasts are of Jesus the Really Nice Rabbi and Our Lady of Perpetual Dialogue.

Now that I'm envious and depressed, I think I'll go read The Ballad of the White Horse as an antidote ("hair of the dog", perhaps?). At least we haven't taken Alfred the Great off of the list of feasts yet.

Labels: Catholic, ChesterBelloc, Episcopal Church

God bless you and keep you, Benedict XVI. "Be not afraid!"

Labels: Catholic

I am sure I don't have anything profound to offer on the death of His Holiness John Paul II, other than my profound sorrow and sense of loss. I have known intellectually that he too, is but mortal flesh, and wouldn't be with us forever, it still hurts to see him go.

Like so many others, John Paul II is the only Pope I've really "known." I don't remember if I even knew there was such a thing as a "Pope" until the media coverage of the death of Paul VI and the election of John Paul I.

Things John Paul II has done for me:

• That whole "downfall of communism" business is pretty big -- I am forgetting what it was like to live under the threat of The Bomb™ and total annihilation at the hands of the Soviets. My children will never know, in their bones, what that feels like, praise God.
  
• He made me rethink the ordination of women (along with many other things) with Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. What struck me most was the humility of this letter; the gentle insistance that "Jesus did it this way, He surely had His reasons and the Church and I don't really have the authority to go changing around things that He and the Apostles set up." A far cry from the "Popes just get to make up whatever doctrines they want" caricature of Papal Infallibility that I had been fed. Also, a refreshing change from the ECUSA false prophets of "God is doing a new thing."
• In his entire life as Pontiff -- his travels, his preaching, his actions -- he made Catholicism ... thinkable. Something which would have been, well, unthinkable in my teens (and still is, to most of my family).

God bless you and keep you, Holy Father. Rest well after your labors. And keep praying for us.

Labels: Catholic

"Philothea" nails it in an email to the Heart, Mind, and Strength blog:

[T]he wonderful thing about the crisis in the Catholic church (as opposed to the Episcopal church) is that you are simply dealing with sin while we are dealing with heresy.

How true (see Borg, Marcus and Spong, John Shelby). I'm still utterly shocked, appalled, flabbergasted, and yes, scandalized to see Jesus Seminar tripe handed out for consumption by new confirmands:

The purpose of the group is to support and encourage one another as they try to live out their Baptismal Covenant, to explore and challenge their understanding of Christian faith by reading appropriate books, to deepen and strengthen their faith that they might more effectively demonstrate their faith in daily life...

I guess I must be one of those right-brained, analytical types, no doubt caught up in hidebound tradition, because I just can't get my head around how denying the content of the Creeds (contained within the Baptismal Covenant) can deepen one's faith.

Labels: Catholic, Episcopal Church