Catholic Matters...

Catholic Matters: Confusion, controversy, and the Splendor of Truth.

Richard John Neuhaus is the editor-in-chief of the magazine First Things. He is a convert to Roman Catholicism from the Lutheran denomination. He is now a priest of the Archdiocese of New York.

This book is his most recent publication that reflects on his journey of faith from one Christian denomination into full communion with Roman Catholicism.

He writes about Catholicism from this perspective.

“ … Catholicism is not a theological construction, and certainly not the construction of a school of brilliant intellectuals. It is not a code of moral rules or an instructional supplier of spiritual uplift. One cannot begin to understand it without theology; moral rules mark the path to the holiness to which we are called, and Catholicism offers a spiritual alternative to the world’s abandonment to nihilism and despair. But, mainly, Catholicism is a habit of being in the centuries-long company of those , living and dead, who are part of a distinctive society with its own memories, vocabulary, rituals, devotions, and, yes, confusions and controversies, that are necessarily part of living in the splendor of the truth who is Jesus Christ…” pp. 244,245.

Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult

I'm slowly winding my way through another complicated narrative by Ms. Picoult. This is a convoluted tale of people relating to one another and being in dysfunctional relationships nearly simultaneously.

Mother/child is the core topic and the inability of folks to see the other in themselves is another topic that is interpsersd amidts the story line.

Let's see where it ends up before I conclude my brief review.

Christ the Pastor

Reading for reflection, insight, and affirmation…
That’s how I am feeling about my browsing through and settling in with ‘Gilead’, a novel written by Marilynne Robinson.

This is a story and not a story. From my perspective, it is a range of thought about life put into the context of a father and son dialogue. It is almost as a series of essays that are illumined by the historical narrative of a particular family.

As a minister and preacher, the storyteller frequently drifts into his pattern of explaining how a particular sermon came into being.

Of interest to me, as an ordained minister (permanent deacon in the Roman Catholic Church) is the following.

“ …I noted that Abraham himself had been sent into the wilderness, told to leave his father’s house also, that this was the narrative of all generations, and that it is only by the grace of God that we are made instruments of His providence and participants in a fatherhood that is always ultimately His.

At this point I departed from my text to say that an old pastor’s anxiety for his church is likewise a forgetfulness of the fact that Christ is Himself the pastor of His people and a faithful presence among them through all generations…” p. 129.

Fiction or Non-Fiction?

Anne Rice has brought to fruition a novel with enormous benefit for the reader and consequent benefit to our society.

Rice has worked at understanding the history, the sociology, and the religious culture of the first century CE. She has studied the scriptures and the corollary commentaries of contemporary scholars. Rice has written the story that is absent from the Gospels. Rice writes of Jesus, born in Bethlehem and exiled to Egypt, as a youngster discerning his role in life and identity as a young boy.

This story, 'Christ The Lord: Out of Egypt', is fiction and non-fiction.

The story is narrative woven by Rice from the threads of the clues in the Gospels and the historical understanding of life in Judea at that time.

Read and reflect upon that great mystery.

Reading and Writing

The New Year and its attendant demand for work has minimized my irregular reading time.

There are books to read and to digest and report upon.

Meanwhile, check out the bi-weekly column accessible at www.walpoletimes.com

Click on my name.

After eight days, Jesus was circumcised ...

Faithful Jews ...

Mary and Joseph, according to the law, took Jesus to be circumcised, and then they went to the temple for the Purification.

After our children are born, how do we today initiate these gifts of God into the journey of faith?

Remembering the Story... or stories

The Birth of Jesus…Matthew 1:24… “ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife , but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus…”

Luke 2:6 “ … While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn…”


John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us…

The Incarnation

Le Jour C'est Arrivee..

We enter into the final days of Advent and prepare for the celebration of the entry of our God into our humanity.

More Midrash and Stories of Women and Torah

I recommend to all another book that sets a focus on women in the Bible as reflecting and being reflected by contemporary stories. The author is Marsha Mirkin, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and resident scholar at Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center.

Mirkin has studied Torah since her early student days. She relates the stories of biblical women in their relationship to their families and the critical events that arise. The approach Mirkin takes is a contemporary ‘Midrash’.

For example, in the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael, Mirkin says, “… When God said ‘listen’ to Sarah’s voice, Abraham thought God meant obey and went into action mode by expelling Hagar and Ishmael. But, as I tell many of the heterosexual couples with whom I work, ‘Men might believe in the statement ‘don’t just sit there, do something;’ but women often need you to ‘don’t just do something, sit there’!”

P. 39 The Women Who Danced by the Sea

And, what are you reading?

This is your opportunity. Tell me and the viewers what books or articles have come your way and we should look at.

Click on the 'Comments' field and have at it.

Apostle to the Apostles

In his writing of “Mary Magdalene”: A Biography, Bruce Chilton underscores the scriptural references to Mary as being there at the cross and subsequently at the tomb.

Chilton further affirms that Mary is the first person to ‘see’ Jesus after the crucifixion, despite Paul’s erasing that story in his account. Chilton then emphasizes the tradition that Mary is the ‘Apostle to the Apostles’.

Chilton writes:

“… Mary is the first person to see Jesus, and in John, she sees Jesus himself, although she is hysterical and doesn’t recognize him at first (John 20:11-18). Only when he speaks her name does she realize that she is speaking to her rabbi, and so she cries out in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni’ (which is to say, “Teacher”) (20:16). She must have reached out to Jesus, because he says (v. 17), “Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the father. But proceed to my brothers and say to them, I ascend to my father and your father, my God and your God.” Mary departs and is the first person to say, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). It is her experience that ultimately teaches the other disciples how to see Jesus as well…”

P. 130

Mary Magdalene: A Biography

Apostle to the Apostles …

Bruce Chilton, a professor of Religion at Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson and a priest at the Free Church of Saint John in Barrytown, New York, has written a new piece on Mary Magdalene.

Chilton takes on the challenge of trying to construct a biography of Mary in order to situate her more properly within and without the traditional images we have of her from scripture, drama, and the arts.

The sparse details in the Gospels are but clues to her identity. Many people have tied her to other unnamed women in the Gospels in order to produce a sketch of the person so important to the post-resurrection period of Christianity.

…. I’ll post more after finishing reading the book.

Vows - holy orders and marriage

Vows: The story of a Priest; a Nun and their son, by Peter Manseau.

Peter Manseau writes of the complications of being the son of a priest and a nun – parents who committed themselves to the church and thence to each other and their family.

How so?

William Manseau was ordained a priest on Feb. 2, 1961 by Richard Cardinal Cushing. Manseau served the Archdiocese of Boston as a parish priest. On June 14, 1969, he married Mary Doherty, a professed member of the CSJ.

In the wake of the reforms of Vatican II, Manseau and Doherty walked away from one life to another in search of their vision of the emerging church. That vision is yet to be.

Their son, Peter, writes now of the early years and the call to a vocation and the pre-Vatican II church environment and ethos. Peter describes the separate journeys of his dad and Mom in their struggle to find the path that God called them to.

From his father’s own writings, in July of 1968, “ … O Father, deep within my being I feel a call to follow you in a new way – trusting beyond knowledge that it is right – it is so insistent – Lord Jesus, accomplish your will in me. Whatever it may be. I am bewildered as to which course to follow…” p. 192

Earlier, Manseau had said that “ …I had come to a junction in my life … when I really felt that in order to be faithful to the Gospel, I should enter into the deepest relationship possible for a Christian, marriage…” p. 191

And the Bible Says....

‘Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why’

Bart D. Ehrman, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains how the inspired Word of God in original writings was altered over time as manuscripts were copied and translated. What we read today in various different editions or translations is the product of scholarly work that is interpretative and illusory.

Ehrman writes of the accidental and the intentional alteration of the early manuscripts such that it is difficult to know what the exact original words are.

He says that “… The King James was not given by God but was translation by a group of scholars in the early seventeenth century who based their rendition on a faulty Greek text …” p. 209.

Children born to Unwed Mothers ...

Births to Unmarried U.S. Women Set Record
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By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID Posted: 10/28/05 - 01:51:25 pm CDT

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WASHINGTON - Nearly 1.5 million babies, a record, were born to unmarried women in the United States last year, the government reported Friday. And it isn't just teenagers any more.

"People have the impression that teens and unmarried mothers are synonymous," said Stephanie Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics.

But last year teens accounted for just 24 percent of unwed births, down from 50 percent in 1970, she commented.

The increases in unmarried births have been among women in their 20s, she said, particularly those 25 to 29.

Many of the women in that age group are living with partners but still count as unmarried mothers if they haven't formally married, Ventura noted.


The 20s are the prime childbearing years, regardless of whether the mother is married or not, she said.

Among teens, more than 80 percent of mothers were unmarried.

There were 1,470,152 babies born to single women in 2004, 35.7 percent of all births in the country, NCHS said. That was up from 1,415,995 a year earlier.

Births to older women continued to increase, Brady Hamilton of NCHS pointed out, reflecting choices these women are making in terms of careers and having families.

The birth rate for women aged 35 to 39 increased 4 percent from 2003 to 2004. It was up 3 percent for women aged 40 to 44 and 9 percent for those 45 to 49.

Other findings of the report included:

_There was a total of 4,115,590 births in the country in 2004, up from 4,089,950 in 2003.

_Births to whites declined by nearly 18,000 while Hispanics were up 32,000, there was an increase of more than 8,000 in births to Asians and a rise of just 72 births among black women.

_The total birth rate was 14.0 per 1,000 women, down from 14.1 in 2003.

_The birth rate for women aged 15 to 19 was 41.2 per 1,000, down from 41.6 in 2003 and a record low. The teen birth rate was 61.8 in 1991 and has been declining since.

On the Net:

National Center for Health Statistics: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs

A service of the Associated Press(AP)

Who is God in the Bible?

Jesus and Yahweh: The names Divine. Harold Bloom, literary critic of longstanding reputation, has entered again into an area of some rhetorical density.

Bloom has ventured to look at the books of the bible and to examine the interrelationships existing among: Yahweh (the God the Tanakh); Jesus (the son of Mary and Joseph); and Jesus Christ (the Son of God).

Half way through his book, Bloom sets out, for me, the thesis of his work.

“ … ‘Jesus’ in my title primarily means Jesus-the-Christ, a theological God. Yahweh, in his earlier and definitive career, is not at all a theological God, but is human, all-too-human, and behaves rather unpleasantly. Christianity transforms Jesus of Nazareth, a historical person about whom we possess only a few verifiable facts, into a polytheistic multiplicity that replaces the uncannily menacing Yahweh with a very different God the Father, whose Son is the Christ or risen Messiah. Both of these divinities are shadowed by a ghostly Paraclete (Comforter) named the Holy Spirit, while Miriam, the mother of the historical Yeshua or Jesus, lingers nearby under the designation of ‘The Virgin Mary’…”

P. 111

You Sit Down to Dinner and Life As You Know It Ends

Joan Didion is an author of long standing acclaim. Her long career as a writer includes five novels and several books in the nonfiction genre. Her essays have been published in many journals.

She writes now, in autobiographical mode, of the extent and reality of sudden calamity in her life. In December 2003, her daughter became seriously ill. Didion and her husband became caregivers for their adult daughter who was being treated for a critical condition of unknown origin. Late on the night of December 30, 2003, her husband suffered a massive heart attack and died nearly instantly while at supper.

In this chronicle of those interwoven tragic events, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, Didion writes of the emotions and the memories and the near impossibility of understanding grief.

Her theme seems to be expressed as follows.

“ … Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. …

Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself…” pp. 188, 189

And Didion repeats her catch phrase throughout the book, “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends…”

Changing Attitudes Among Young Adults

The young adult population views sexual activity and its consequences very differently today than 60 years ago.

A report in the recent Review of Psychology compared attitudes in 1943 versus today.
The abstract for the paper follows


Changes in Young People's Sexual Behavior and Attitudes, 1943-1999: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis.
Wells, Brooke E.; Twenge, Jean M. Abstract
Article abstract: Hide abstract

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A cross-temporal meta-analysis of 530 studies (N = 269,649) showed that young people's sexual attitudes and behavior changed substantially between 1943 and 1999, with the largest shifts occurring among girls and young women. Both young men and women became more sexually active over time, as measured by age at first intercourse (decreasing from 19 to 15 years among young women) and percentage sexually active (increasing from 13% to 47% among young women). Attitudes toward premarital intercourse became more lenient, with approval increasing from 12% to 73% among young women and from 40% to 79% among young men. Feelings of sexual guilt decreased. The correlation between attitudes and behaviors was stronger among young women. These data support theories positing that culture has a larger effect on women's sexuality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)

Coping with chronic illness and Terminal Disease

The Anatomy of Hope – Jerome Groopman, M.D., holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and is the chief of experimental medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

His previous books were: ‘The Measure of Our Days’ and ‘Second Opinions’.
Groopman writes from a long career in research and patient care and out of a personal background of faith and courage.

After years of treating patients and enduring his own afflictions, Groopman sought to understand more about the emotional and physical interplay in coping with pathology.

This book takes the reader beyond the ordinary.

What is hope for the terminally ill patient?

Groopman says that “…I am searching for hope. Hope, I have come to believe, is as vital to our lives as the very oxygen that we breathe...” p. 208

Further, he says that “… Each disease is uncertain in its outcome, and within that uncertainty, we find real hope, because a tumor has not always read the textbook, and a treatment can have an unexpectedly dramatic impact. This is the great paradox of true hope: Because nothing is absolutely determined, there is not only reason to fear but also reason to hope. And we must find ways to bridle fear and give greater rein to hope…” p. 210

“ … I see hope as the very heart of healing…” p. 212

More Biblical Stories ... aka quasi-midrash

The Hannah story of patience and prayer and commitment.

In the style of 'The Red Tent', Eva Etzioni-Halevy has written 'The Song of Hannah'.

The familiar story of the birth of the prophet Samuel is found in the Tanakh.

In this book, the story is developed into a whole narrative to provide a deeper picture of the singular events.