January 29, 2018

January 29, 2018
Silence and Beauty: Fujimura, Endo and Scorsese - Benedict XVI Institute

The mostly negative reaction to Scorsese’s Silence among orthodox Christians in America was somehow for me diagnostic of what ails American Christian culture. We cannot surrender the triumphalist narrative. Nor do we know how to live with the humiliation of defeat. We have not yet summoned a creative minority capable of creating again anew.
Endo faced the same criticisms of Silence’s themes from Christians of his own time, particularly in Japan where formerly hidden Christians felt it tarnished their forefathers’ heroism. Endo has a response: “To such a comment, what I’d like to say is this: How can anyone who has never experienced the horrific tortures of the Christian persecution era have anything to say about the depth of the shallowness of the believers then?…It shows not the shallow faith of those who end up apostatizing, but it reveals the lack of compassion the ones making such a judgment. I cannot accept the faith of those who lack compassion.”
Fujimura’s extraordinary exhibit has been met mostly with silence. If you put “Fujimara exhibition Waterfall gallery” into Google news, no reviews come up.
But as Fujimura writes “Testament to a writer’s impact may not lie in how successfully a book sells or even in whether the author wins a Nobel Prize. The true testament is the generative impact the work has over time.”
“Future generations need to move beyond survival and live in generativity,” he reminds us.
Finding Home
Where do we find the faith and the love that make creativity and procreativity possible?
Watching Scorsese’s Silence, with tears running down my cheeks in the dark, I understood my own weakness not intellectually, not as an argument, but viscerally. I might, by the grace of God, be a martyr if they killed me real quick.
But if they tortured my children in front of me, I would fold like a deck of cards. We doubt. We fail. We lose. Where is God in our failures? How do we find our way Home?
Scorsese’s great theme is Endo’s great theme and it is the theme too of Fujimura’ s great art exhibit:
“Hidden, veiled, but still sacramental signs of a mysterious beauty and grace through the murk of sin and shame, piercing through.”
In Scorsese’s Silence, the martyr Mokichi dies singing Tantum Ergo:

January 29, 2018
Pope Francis: Pro-Marriage & Contra "Marital Skepticism"

In essence, Pope Francis is confronting what has sometimes been dubbed the “Marriage Strike”. That is, young people are refusing to marry because of a certain pessimism and lack of understanding toward the sacrament and institution–one that has taken root in the current culture.

In my experience both men and women have been affected by this pessimism toward marriage, although it often expresses itself differently between sexes. That is, I find women more often seek to delay marriage, while I find men simply refuse to commit. And it is not just about secularism, sowing wild oats, or establishing oneself financially. Quite often, the pessimism young people feel toward marriage and raising children is due to their own experience growing up in less-than-ideal family circumstances.

Pope Francis recognizes that given their experience growing up in today’s culture, young people have in large part tuned out when it comes to marriage and family life. They no longer approach relationships with the rose-coloured optimism of previous generations of young couples. To previous generations, spring meant that love was in the air. To today’s generation of young couple, having survived the winter of their own family life, spring is a foreshadowing of fall when the warmth of summer cools and everything else around you dies.

January 28, 2018
Pope Francis: Where Mary is, 'the devil does not enter'

Vatican City, Jan 28, 2018 / 04:09 am (CNA/EWTN News).- At Mass in the Basilica of St. Mary Major Sunday, Pope Francis said that when we go through difficult times or have problems or worries, Mary is our shield, guarding our faith and protecting us from evil.

“Where the Madonna is at home the devil does not enter; where there is the Mother disturbance does not prevail, fear does not win,” the Pope said Jan. 28.

“Who of us does not need this, who of us is not sometimes upset or restless? How often the heart is a stormy sea, where the waves of problems overlap, and the winds of worry do not cease to blow! Mary is the sure ark in the midst of the flood.”

Pope Francis celebrated a special Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary Major for the Feast of the transfer of the icon of Salus Populi Romani.


Salus Populi Romani (Protectress of the Roman People) is the title of an ancient Byzantine icon of Mary and the Child Jesus, traditionally held to be painted by St. Luke the Evangelist and to have arrived in Rome in the 6th century.

It was first canonically crowned in 1838 by Pope Gregory XVI and a second time in 1954 by Pope Pius XII. It has a long history of devotion by the Roman people, as well as by popes. It resides in the Pauline, also called Borghese, Chapel in St. Mary Major.

Francis has a special devotion to the image. His first visit as pontiff was to the Basilica of St. Mary Major to pray before the image following his election.

The image has been undergoing extensive restoration in the Vatican Museums, and the Mass also served as the image’s official unveiling following the work.

In his homily, Pope Francis said that it is “a great danger to faith, to live without a mother, without protection, letting ourselves be carried away by life like leaves by the wind.”

Just like persecuted people once took refuge under the cloak of the noble, high-ranking women of their village, in “turbulent moments” we must take shelter under the mantle of Mary, “the highest woman of mankind,” for our own protection.

“Her coat is always open to welcome us and gather us,” he said. “The Mother guards faith, protects relationships, saves in bad weather and preserves from evil.”

As Christians, we cannot be neutral or detached from our Mother, he continued. “Because without a Mother we cannot be children. And we are, first of all, children, beloved children, who have God for a Father and the Madonna for a Mother.”


To illustrate his point, Francis recalled a story of a woman who sat beside the bed of her son in the hospital. He was in pain after an accident, and the mother remained by his bed day and night.

Once she complained to a visiting priest that God never allowed one thing to a mother, which is to suffer in place of her child.

“Here is the mother’s heart,” the Pope said. “She is not ashamed of the wounds, of the weaknesses of her children, but she wants (to take) them on herself.”

And this is how it happens every time, he said. Whether we lack hope, or joy, or our strength is exhausted; whatever our problem, our Mother intervenes.

“And she never, never despises our prayers; she does not let even one fall. She is a Mother, she is never ashamed of us, she only waits to be able to help her children.”

“Let’s make the Mother the guest of our daily life, the constant presence in our home, our safe haven,” he concluded. “Let’s entrust (ourselves) to her every day. Let’s invoke her in every turbulence. And let’s not forget to come back to her to thank her.”

January 28, 2018
The Forgotten Democratic Congressman Who Championed Churchill & Free Trade

It’s fitting that a great American orator, post-Daniel Webster and pre-Franklin Roosevelt, was Irish. So many born on the Emerald Isle master English and melodrama as first languages. Holding an audience in these pre-radio days required grandeur not intimacy, pathos more than humor, bombast rather than empathy. The Irish-American actor Barney Williams described Irish melodramas as “full of poetry and romance, for there never was an Irish play written where virtue was not rewarded, vice punished, and heroism, in some phase or other, exhibited.”

This formula turned William Bourke Cockran’s political speeches into morality plays, while Cockran’s charisma made every interaction with him epic. “When he entered a room, it was like someone turning on the electric light,” the Anglo-Irish politician, Sir Horace Plunkett, gushed.

January 25, 2018
America's reluctant septuagenarian workforce

The way major U.S. companies provide for retiring workers has been shifting for about three decades, with more dropping traditional pensions every year. The first full generation of workers to retire since this turn offers a sobering preview of a labor force more and more dependent on their own savings for retirement.

Years ago, Coomer and his co-workers at the Tulsa plant of McDonnell-Douglas, the famed airplane maker, were enrolled in the company pension, but in 1994, with an eye toward cutting retirement costs, the company closed the plant. Even though most of them found new jobs, they could never replace their lost pension benefits, and many are facing financial struggles in their old age. A review of those 998 workers found that 1 in 7 has in their retirement years filed for bankruptcy, faced liens for delinquent bills, or both, according to public records.

Those affected are buried by debts incurred for credit card payments, used cars, health care, and sometimes the college educations of their children. Some have lost their homes. And for many of them, even as they reach beyond 70, real retirement is elusive. Although they worked for decades at McDonnell-Douglas, many of the septuagenarians are still working, some full time.

January 25, 2018
My speech tonight in the Dáil debate on the Right to Life Amendment. First of all this is an enormously difficult topic. There are many tragic, difficult, scary, challenges situations facing mothers, fathers and unborn children every day creating enormous stresses and strains on their lives. Our approach to these families; our friends, relations and neighbours, should be FOUNDED on compassion. We need to ensure the necessary supports are made available for every mother and child. I have many colleagues who are prochoice and while I disagree with them fundamentally on this issue I know that for the majority, their perspective is motivated by a desire to help in massively difficult situations. My own party Sinn Féin believe that the 8th Amendment should be repealed and that Abortion should be made available in certain cases where there is a life limiting disability, rape and incest and if there is a threat to the health of the mother. I have a different view. Over 100 years ago through the Proclamation, Republicans from throughout Ireland set forth a progressive vision for a new independent Ireland. At the heart of the proclamation is the objective to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’. This objective is also at the heart of my viewpoint. The 8th Amendment is in my view the most important human rights debate of our generation. In the upcoming referendum each citizen is being asked the most serious of questions, one that will radically change who we are as a people and our core values. Firstly the life of the mother in all cases should be protected. At the committee stage of the 2013 Abortion Bill I ask the Masters of the Maternity Hospitals present, were they aware of any mother who had lost her life due to the 8th Amendment. They said no. I would not and could not support any law that did not guarantee the right to life of mother. Its important to state that with the 8th Amendment, Ireland has one of the best records on maternal mortality in the world. The unborn child is an individual living human being. She is the weakest and most vulnerable of all Human life. She has no voice, but currently within the constitution she has the protection of the 8th amendment. Human life is the most valuable thing we have. Without it, you, me and the unborn child have nothing. What is at stake in the forthcoming referendum, is the existence, the lives and the potentials of that tens of thousands of individuals. Every living human being, by definition should be entitled to Human Rights. Human Rights should be universal. For if you withdraw a human right from any section of humanity, it is no longer a human right but a sectional right. In Britain 1 in 5 pregnancies end in abortion. Since abortion was legalised there nearly 9 million abortions have been performed. It’s estimated that 2 million abortions have happened internationally so far this year. To most Irish people these are frightening figures. In Ireland the story is radically different. Firstly the abortion rate in Ireland is now at a 30 year low even if you take into consideration the estimated use of abortion pills. 1 in 20 pregnancies in Ireland end in abortion. In Britain its 4 in 20. In Ireland 3 out of 20 pregnancies reach full term that would not if British laws and culture existed here. That’s hundreds of thousands of people alive today amongst us who would not if were not for the 8th amendment. One of the main difficulties I have with abortion is its impact on minorities. If you are from a minority sector of society you are far more likely to be negatively affected by abortion. Last year, I met with Karen Gaffney, who has a disability. She spoke eloquently to me about the real fear, that people with her condition are being almost completely eradicated before birth. Today I spoke to Anne Traynor a mother of child with a disability. She asked her fears in this regards be articulated my be in the Dáil today Around the worlds organisations such as DON’T SCREEN US OUT are being formed. Think about that for a second, people with certain disabilities are forming organisations which seek to stop the eradication of children like them. In countries that have removed the right to life we see shocking rates of 90% and more of all unborn children diagnosed with certain disabilities in the womb being aborted. Its expected that some countries will have no more children with these disabilities born in the next 20 years. Shockingly the Minister for Health Minister in the Netherlands has stated that "If freedom of choice results in a situation that nearly no children with disabilities are being born, society should accept that”. Obviously for the individual children concerned the result is catastrophic. But societies are radically poorer as the rich diversity of humanity is progressively removed. Life limiting disability is a heart breaking diagnosis for any parent to get. Most unborn children who receive this diagnosis lose their lives before birth or shortly afterwards. There are exceptions to this. I have had the honour of meeting a wonderful girl called Kathleen Rose Harkin. She has a condition called Trisomy 13. Diagnosed in the womb her condition would be described as a fatal foetal abnormality. Yet she is now 10 years old. I believe Kathleen Rose should have an equal right to life to anyone sitting here in this Dáil. I have asked a number of doctors, is it possible for any doctor to declare that an unborn child will not make it to birth and live outside the womb. They have all said no. What we saw on this issue in the Citizens Assembly was startling. They decided that depending on whether you were able bodied, had a non-fatal foetal abnormality, or a fatal foetal abnormality you would have different time limits to abortion. They defined three categories of human beings with different legal right to life. This is the polar opposite to what equality means. The issue of Gender Selection Abortions has not been discussed properly in this debate. It is estimated that over 100 million women are missing throughout the world due to gender selection abortions and infanticide. In countries such as China, Britain and the US some parents for economic, social and cultural reasons seeks sons and therefore abort unborn baby girls. Abortion also differentiates against minorities. More African American babies are aborted in New York City than are born. In the states in general where figures exist, you are three and half times more likely to be aborted if you’re black as opposed to white. It is a shocking that in the generation declares loud and clear that Black Lives Matter we know that abortion rates are seriously skewed against ethnic minorities. Abortion differentiates against the poor. In the US if you are from a poor family you are far more likely to be aborted than if you are from a rich family. 75% of all unborn children aborted in the US are from poor or low income backgrounds. If this government seeks to really help women, targeted funding to lift families out of poverty along with childcare and a decent living wage for working mothers are pivotal. The abortion debate in Ireland is only focusing on the law. In all the talk of choice, we are ignoring the economic factors that make so many women feel that they don’t actually have a choice. Life should be a right for the rich, the fortunate, the planned and the perfect. We all live under the same sky. We are all responsible for each other, no matter how frail, small or vulnerable. Surely we must fight for a society that leaves no mother or child behind.

January 24, 2018
A Great Man in Public and Private | Fathers for Good

As the doors of the funeral home opened for my dad’s wake, the first visitor shuffled in. He was bent over, a thin man in worn clothes, prematurely aged by life’s troubles. Somewhere on the bumpy road to redemption, he’d met my parents and become a friend. On this day—begging a ride and braving the snow—he came to console my mom and pray for my dad, whose kindness and constant counsel to “trust God,” no matter what, buoyed the man through difficult days. It was fitting: this man from “the peripheries,” as Pope Francis would say, was the first to pay respects to my dad in death. Dad would have felt honored.

Singularly unimpressed with status, power, or wealth, my dad, Professor Charlie Rice, treated everyone he met with kindness and respect. It was no surprise, then, that his wake and funeral drew an interesting mix: politicians, judges, lawyers, former students, and Notre Dame colleagues joined with local repairmen, shopkeepers, retirees, and daily Mass buddies from the parish.
In truth, Dad always had a heart for the underdog, and not just because he was a diehard Notre Dame football fan. By phone and email, he fielded requests for help from students, colleagues, pro-life volunteers, Catholic families, and friends of friends. We knew, but only after the fact, when those he helped shared their gratitude for jobs found, recommendations written, cases won, second-chances arranged, and prayers and mentoring freely given.

January 24, 2018
City of Rod : Democracy Journal

Then there is the question of whether or not Dreher really hews as close to the thinking of the famous moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose groundbreaking 1981 book After Virtue proposed that the moral ideas issuing from Enlightenment liberalism had been corrupt and incoherent to begin with, and were always doomed to degenerate into emotivism. It was MacIntyre who wrote, in After Virtue, that the world must look to “another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict,” which inspired the title of the whole optional enterprise. Yet it isn’t clear that an apolitical retreat is precisely what MacIntyre had in mind; quite to the contrary, he seems to have envisioned a revitalized Christian engagement marked by a Christian consciousness of our disputes with liberalism.
Even so, critics have argued estimably against the apolitical inklings present in MacIntyre’s work. As scholar Thomas Osborne argued in a 2008 conference paper on “MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good,” the establishment of small, local communities of virtuous Christians still leaves open pressing questions of justice and right. “If two fishing crews are in conflict, they should both submit to the authority of the judge. Otherwise, justice would belong to the more ruthless and stronger fishing crew,” Osborne notes. The same can be said of any bowling league, tiny missional community, or family. We have civil authorities vested with the power to use force precisely because small platoons of virtuous persons do not themselves a just order make, and failure to grapple with the question of how to order these small societies is glaring neglect.
Further, it isn’t clear why Dreher, who envies Medieval man’s eye for enchantment, would identify politics as a realm closed to grace. Father John Hughes, the late Dean of Chapel at Jesus College, Cambridge, and a brilliant Christian socialist wrote that “the dynamic tension between Church and state is a distinctively Christian achievement…Without religious concern for ultimate ends, we will become a society dominated by instrumental utilitarian ‘understanding’ rather than reason and its ideas.” Perhaps Dreher feels society has slid as far as it can in that direction, but I rather doubt it; the wise tend to note things can always get worse. And it is the duty of Christians qua Christians to oppose the erosion of liberalism into wanton, inhumane technocracy, even when it means setting out into risky waters.
Because I believe all of nature does point to God, just as the Medievals did, I can’t seal myself away from society. Society is part of our nature; politics is part of our nature. Entering the fray is fraught just like walking into the surf is; you will be pulled and pushed and yet you know, because you love God, you will break above the waves with water in your eyes to see God’s glory bright as sunlight. His name is written on the wind. It’s inescapable. It’s inscribed into the hustle and jolt of democracy, if you look closely, and believe.

January 24, 2018
Trump-land Decides: What You Need to Know About the First Major Special Election of 2018 | The Weekly Standard

Pittsburgh is, politically speaking, an interesting place. It’s the only true major city in Appalachia, and, unlike many other major metro areas, it has been trending right for the past few decades. In 1988, the Pittsburgh metro area gave Michael Dukakis 60 percent of the two-party vote, and in 2016 it gave Hillary Clinton 47 percent. The 18th covers some of the red-trending parts of the area.

January 23, 2018
The Real Reason the Benedict Option Leaves Out the Black Church - The Witness

In its uncritical embrace of white normativity, the Benedict Option misses the opportunity to glean from the wisdom of marginalized people, especially African Americans. Absent from Dreher’s analysis is how Christian community might be formed in the midst of a culture wherein Christians never had power. This was, and in some senses continues to be, the reality for people of African descent in the United States. For centuries black people couldn’t build their own institutions—not schools, not banks, not businesses—the only option they had was the church.

The church in the African American community became a powerful symbol of perseverence amidst persecution. The black church represents the triumph of faith over fear. The black church dramatizes Christ’s words, “blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” That is why physical church buildings so often became the targets of arson and bombings. By focusing on the church, racists tried to destroy the most important survival mechanism in the black community, and they used tactics much more existentially threatening than the possibility of losing tax-exempt status. But hate has not destroyed the black church. The black church is still here because the black church is part of the universal church that Christ is building and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

January 19, 2018
"Although he rarely utilizes direct quotations, Pope Francis’s words reflect the language and ethos of the ressourcement theologians. In particular, several key concepts and themes from the work of Henri de Lubac, a fellow Jesuit and explicitly recognized as a significant influence by Pope Francis, consistently reoccur in the pope’s theology.[3] According to de Lubac, humanity’s vocation is essentially communal. In his book Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, de Lubac explores the fundamentally social nature of Catholic Christianity and shows how, as described in a foreword by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “The idea of community and universality … permeates and shapes all the individual elements of Faith’s content.”[4] Pope Francis, in his writings, homilies, addresses, and interviews, implicitly takes up de Lubac’s understanding of the communal and universal nature of Catholicism’s mission. For both Pope Francis and de Lubac, Catholicism reveals the slow, patient pedagogy of a God who is calling humanity to recover its lost unity—a unity that binds all together while bringing each individual to the fullness of his or her own existence."

http://churchlife.nd.edu/2018/01/17/the-catholicity-of-catholicism-salvation-cannot-occur-in-isolation/

January 19, 2018
"Here’s what those right-leaning boomers did mean by “conservatism.” If read a list of scally liberal statements like, “It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” boomers became increasingly likely to deliver a stern no over the 20 years between the 1990s and the 2010s. In fact, by 2010, they had become the age cohort most likely to answer no, more so than either their elders or juniors. They were the cohort most likely to attribute individual economic troubles to those individuals’ own personal failings, rather than to ill fortune, racism, or any other systemic cause."

January 18, 2018
Analysis: A Complete Breakdown of PA's Presidential Results (Maps) | PoliticsPA

January 17, 2018
Joseph Ratzinger

Joseph Ratzinger

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