Bible May Be Almost As Old As It Seems

See, everytime someone tries to tell me some aspect of the faith has been disproved by modern science, I remain skeptical. Cause, well, modern science has a habit of fact checking itself.

Bible Possibly Written Centuries Earlier, Text Suggests

The State of the Church

So an interesting spate of news in the past week on the shifts in the Church. From darkest America, we get this:

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, which might be called the golden age of Catholic dissidence, theologians who took positions challenging traditional church teachings—ranging from the authority of the pope to bans on birth control, premarital sex, and women's ordination—dominated Catholic intellectual life in America and Europe. They seemed to represent a tide that would overwhelm the old restrictions and their hidebound adherents.

Now, 45 years after Vatican II concluded in 1965, most of those bright lights of dissident Catholicism—from the theologian Hans Küng of the University of Tübingen to Charles Curran, the priest dismissed from the Catholic University of America's theology faculty in 1987 for his advocacy of contraception and acceptance of homosexual relationships—seem dimmed with advanced age, if not extinguished. They have left no coherent second generation of dissident Catholic intellectuals to follow them...

The piece concludes with an unwontedly complete dismissal of what Allen calls "conservative Catholicism."

Not that conservative Catholicism is in any better straits; it's a vibrant but niche branch of the religion, and its leading intellectuals—Robert George, Mary Ann Glendon—aren't theologians. But it is fair to note that when Prof. Daly died, she left behind no young Mary Dalys to continue waging her quixotic war against the faith that shaped her, whether she liked it or not.

Since she seems to intend "conservative Catholic" to include anyone and everyone on the opposite side of the fence from the dissenters listed in the article, she must contend with the massive forces in American Catholic culture known as EWTN, Ignatius Press (currently the main English-language source for many of the works of Pope Benedict), Scott and Kimberly Hahn, George Weigel (who deserves great credit for his biography of John Paul II among other fine works and less for his odd reaction to Caritas in Veritate), the Knights of Columbus (and especially their ever-more-published leader Carl Anderson), Catholic Answers, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and oceans and buckets more, many affiliated with the various people or groups already mentioned, a vast and growing tide of people who really are changing the face of American Catholicism. Indeed, they already have--there are a multitude of converts to the faith who can be traced back to the people and organizations listed. But Allen's article is interesting nonetheless for what it points out: the dissenting generation is beginning to die/retire/both. We are entering into new territory. The people bothering to attend church, work for the Church, enter the seminary, join religious life, or in fact be religious on an ongoing, committed basis, are people who believe what the Church teaches. There are a lot of cultural Catholics out there, true. But the ones who are shaping the current direction of the Church are people who follow the Pope. Why? There's nothing to hold the commitment of young dissenters. If push comes to shove, the people who are in it for the social justice but don't really believe the faith will quickly realize there's tons of places to do social justice work outside the Church where they can believe whatever they want, live however they want, and get the same yearly service opportunities as they could at the best Catholic colleges. If the dissenters are right, there's nothing to see here. The Church will quietly die and go away. If they are wrong, the Church will never go away, no matter how many people leave it. From across the pond, Damien Thompson on the liturgical wars over the English language translation of the Novus Ordo Mass:

Elderly liberals in the United States, horrified by the return of solemnity to Catholic worship, are mounting a campaign against the new English translation of the Mass, entitled What If We Just Said Wait. The campaign and petition have been endorsed by the supersmug National Catholic Reporter, which really tells you all you need to know. Here’s my suggestion. What If We Just Said Get Stuffed, You Finger-Wagging Liberals Who Wreck The Mass Every Sunday By Boring The Pants Off Us With Your Politicised Bidding Prayers, Dreary Folk Antiphons And Other Self-Aggrandising Stunts. Or, if you’d like to express yourself more temperately, sign this petition, entitled: “We’ve Waited Long Enough”.

While Thompson is about as diplomatic as a two-by-four to the forehead, he is a fair representative of a certain body of Catholic thought. And then there's people like me, who watch all this and wonder--why was it great to change the Mass in the 60s and 70s, and unthinkable for it to change today? If the earlier liturgical changes could go through at the behest of a Pope and his liturgical consilium, what's wrong with another Pope doing the same? But then they'll say, it's not the fact that they're changing it, it's the nature of the changes... To which the response will come: well, now that you mention it, these aren't actually changes to the Mass. Not the way the 60s and 70s stuff actually changed the Mass. No, these are alterations of the English translation of the Mass, since the English translation apparently was not very accurate. And the ceremony by which God comes to earth ought to be accurate. Will it be clunky? The language of the Mass has always struck me as clunky. We use words and phrases in ways that do not ever appear outside the Church. Will everybody understand it? I can vouch for the fact that a lot of Catholics have no idea of what's going on at Mass or why we do what we do as it is. A more accurate translation will not change that one bit. America magazine has an excellent defense of the new translation. Once again, on the American front, Evangelical revert to Catholicism Francis Beckwith blogs that

Norman Geisler's co-author of Is Rome the True Church? (Crossway Books, 2008), Joshua Betancourt, has converted to Catholicism!

They just keep coming...thank God! And on the continental front, John Allen reports:

...the liberal bloc in the European church had long been led by three towering cardinals: Carlo Maria Martini of Milan, Basil Hume of Westminster(...), and Godfried Danneels of Brussels.

More than ten years later, Hume is gone and Martini is retired, and in a matter of days it seems likely the third member of the trio will also be out of job. Rumors in Belgium suggest that sometime soon, Pope Benedict XVI intends to appoint Bishop André-Mutien Léonard of Namur to succeed Danneels in Brussels.

If so, the changing of the guard at the senior levels of the European church will be virtually complete.

By Catholic standards, the facelift has been remarkably swift. In Milan, Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi followed Martini in 2002; in Westminster, Archbishop Vincent Nichols took the reins from Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor last April, who had succeeded Hume in February 2000. Now it seems that Léonard, 69, is poised to arrive in Brussels. Sources in Belgium this morning said the announcement is expected soon.

This follows on the news that the episcopal face of the Church in Canada has been rather rapidly changed, the remarkable efforts of the USCCB to rally opposition to a health care bill which would cause the state to cover abortions, the raised voices of a plethora of bishops in response to Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden during the recent presidential election, and much more. Methinks the first phase of the post-conciliar Church is on its way out. We are having done with the hermeneutic of discontinuity decisively. The age of dissent is drawing to a contentious close. The next phase will be marked by the shift in the demographics of the Church, the issues facing Europe and Islam, the hidden Church of the Asian persecutions, the unsteady future of America as a nation, and the anticipation of whatever the Spirit and the Bride may bring in the next few decades.

On Deification

Every so often, I am humbled by the realization of how much I have still to learn. The discovery of the Christian concept of deification caused my most recent attack of humility, and promises to occupy my curiosity and attention for some time to come. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia has this to say about deification in the article on "Supernatural Gift":

The Fathers have not hesitated to call supernatural union of the creature with God the deification of the creature. This is a favorite expression of St. Irenæus ("Adv. Haer.", III, xvii, xix; IV, xx, etc.), and is frequently used by St. Athanasius (see Newman, "St. Athanasius", II, 88). See also St. Augustine (? Serm. cxci, "In Nat. Dom."), quoted by St. Thomas (III:1:3).

A discussion of grace follows. The concept has popped up more recently in a Wednesday General Audience by John Paul II:

Wherever “the Spirit of holiness” (Rom 1:4) is poured out, whatever is opposed to holiness, i.e., sin, is destroyed...The Spirit of the Lord not only destroys sin, but also accomplishes the sanctification and divinization of man. “God chose” us, St Paul says, “from the beginning to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth” (2 Thes 2:13).

Let us look more closely at what this “sanctification-divinization” consists of.

The Holy Spirit is “Person-Love; he is Person-Gift” (Dominum et Vivificantem, n. 10). This love given by the Father, received and reciprocated by the Son, is communicated to the one redeemed, who thus becomes a “new man” (Eph 4:24), a “new creation” (Gal 6:15). We Christians are not only purified from sin, but are also reborn and sanctified. We receive a new life, since we have become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4); we are “called children of God; and so we are!” (1 Jn 3:1). It is the life of grace: the free gift by which God makes us partakers of his Trinitarian life...

In reflecting on grace it is important not to think of it as a “thing”. It is “first and foremost the gift of the Spirit who justifies and sanctifies us” (CCC, n. 2003). It is the gift of the Holy Spirit who makes us like the Son and puts us in a filial relationship with the Father: in the one Spirit through Christ we have access to the Father (cf. Eph 2:18).

The Holy Spirit’s presence truly and inwardly transforms man: it is sanctifying or deifying grace, which elevates our being and our acting, enabling us to live in relationship with the Holy Trinity...The sanctification of the individual believer always takes place through incorporation into the Church. “The life of the individual child of God is joined in Christ and through Christ by a wonderful link to the life of all his other Christian brethren. Together they form the supernatural unity of Christ’s Mystical Body so that, as it were, a single mystical person is formed” (Paul VI, Apostolic Constituion Indulgentiarum doctrina, n. 5).

This is the mystery of the communion of saints...

Read the whole thing. This is really cool to me. We are joined through the sacraments with the divine life of God. The presence of grace in the soul is, in actuality, the presence and action of the Holy Spirit. So "Mary, full of grace" is really "Mary, full of the Holy Spirit." So then she who was already a home for God, a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit, becomes "overshadowed" by the Holy Spirit and conceives a Son by the Spirit's power. And so she is rightly identified as "Our Lady of the Indwelling Trinity":

In the evening of August 5, the feast of Our Lady of the Snow, as I knelt in my room, Our Lady spoke to me about the Divine Indwelling. It was her life and she lived it perfectly, always conscious of His presence, never forgetting that all her greatness came from within, from Him Who dwelt there, working, loving, and doing good through her. This is what Our Lady means when she speaks of reformation, renewal. It is this about which she is so concerned, namely, sanctification from within.

As Our Lady spoke this, she seemed at the time to be deeply occupied. Though the serenity of her countenance never left her, she spoke with a gravity that made her words all the more solemn. She seemed anxious to impress me with some idea of the greatness of this gift of God to us, namely, His Divine Presence within our souls through sanctifying grace...

Our dear Mother showed herself to me in a special way around 11:30 on the morning of November 22. The next day, a Saturday, the experience was more detailed as more was shown me, or perhaps I had not noticed details the day before. This vision of herself is very important, as it reveals Our Lady as she really and truly was, the Immaculate Tabernacle of the Indwelling God.

Our Lady was standing on a globe, her right foot resting on a crescent or quarter moon, the left on the snout of a rather small and very ugly looking dragon. I saw fire come out of his huge jaws, but not very much, as he could not open them wide enough because of Our Lady's foot. At times he seemed to be somewhat black, again of a shade of green. Our Lady was all in white. Her veil was so long that it seemed to envelop the globe halfway. Sometimes the veil appeared so transparent that Our Lady's hair could be seen through it, and the hair seemed to be sparkling with the light of many glittering stars. At times the edges of the veil, sleeves, and garments seemed to be outlined in light. The veil was held about her head by a wreath of white roses. Her feet were bare. The previous day Our Lady had appeared with her hands outstretched. At this second visit she slowly raised them, then crossed them on her breast rather close to her waist. While doing so, she bent her head slightly forward, and it seemed that her eyes were closed, not just lowered. On her breast, as though through a veil, the Triangle and the Eye, which is often depicted as the symbol of the Divine Indwelling, could be visibly seen. I said that Our Lady's feet were bare, that is, devoid of any kind of footwear, but on each foot was a large white rose. The roses, both on the feet and on the crown, were of such dazzling whiteness that the outlines of the petals could barely be seen, sometimes not at all. It seemed that a strong beam of light streamed from the Divine Presence within Our Lady onto the globe at her feet. Then halfway around the figure of Our Lady above her head appeared a scroll on which were written in letters of gold the words: "All the glory of the King's daughter is within."

Though it did not appear that her lips moved, yet I heard these words quite plainly:

I am Our Lady of the Divine Indwelling, handmaid of Him Who dwells within.

She seemed suffused in a soft glow of light that appeared to come from within her. It seemed to permeate and, as it were, saturate her whole being, even her apparel and the roses...

For the medal of Our Lady of America, go here. For more on the stance of the Church towards the Our Lady of America apparitions, Archbishop Raymond Burke has made a public statement. How ought this to change our perception of the sacraments, especially of Confession and the Mass? The Church is the avenue through which we participate in the divine life of the Trinity, through which we become little heavens on earth, little homes for God, tabernacles, temples, walking around and being present to other people while bearing the Indwelling God within. What does this mean for the communion of saints? What about the power of Christians to serve as a light in dark places, when all other lights go out? We bear within us, not just the image and likeness of God, but God himself under these circumstances--where does this lead us?

Gnosticism vs. Catholicism

I'm also reading through Henry Chadwick's classic The Early Church, which frequently makes reference to the early controversies between the leaders of the Church (going straight back to the apostles and writers of Scripture) and the various Gnostic heresies--that is, those sects which preach salvation through hidden knowledge, or gnosis. And various is the right word for them--they diverge and multiply as the heads of the Hydra!

In the context of the previous posts on Masonry, and reflecting on the traditionally antagonistic relationship between Christianity and Masonry, I was struck rather forcibly by the realization that Gnosticism is truly the one constant opponent of Christianity throughout history, or at the very least, the one strong alternative system offered the Christian at every age. There's always the basic temptations, of course, and any number of ways to damn your soul without going in for esoteric speculation, but really, in terms of serious, long term religious competitors, the Gnostic offer has paralleled the Christian from the earliest days of out history.

There's something incredibly Biblical about this--almost a literal actualization in the world of the two trees in the Garden of Eden. God presented mankind with a garden full of good things, of which man was free to partake. The two trees specifically mentioned in the second creation account (cf. Genesis 2:9) are the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Interestingly, the tree of life is not forbidden to them by God. That tree is among the trees of the garden permitted to them.

Many people find the prohibition of the tree of knowledge an incredible act--he's holding them back! Why on earth would God forbid them from knowing the difference between good and evil? And yet we have much the same understanding today: some sorts of knowledge ought not be had. There are books we wish we hadn't read, images we wish we hadn't seen, thoughts we wish had never crept into our minds in the middle of the night. There are some things that ought never to be known.

Indeed, since evil is the privation of the good, to know evil (especially in the deep sense of knowing indicated throughout the Bible) seems like a very foul thing indeed. But look again at what we are faced with: the two trees, one with the fruit of life, and the other with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent speaks to the woman, calling her to taste of the fruit of the forbidden tree "and become like God." Funny thing, though--when God speaks his name at the request of Moses, he does not name himself "I am who knows." He says, "I am who am." His self identification is the one who is, the one who lives. He is the God of the living, not the dead. And the consequence of eating of the forbidden fruit was death.

In knowing good and evil, somehow Adam and Eve knew less. They became less wise--they hid from the omnipotent. They attempted to avoid blame. They lost their way, and drew all their children after them. What if Eve had repudiated the serpent, and gone to the tree of life, and eaten of that instead? In much the same spirit--what if people reject the poison pill of gnosis, of secret wisdom, of that inexpressible sense of self satisfied pride of being among the elite, the Inner Circle, as Lewis called it, of the Knowing Ones? What if they instead turned towards the tree of life, the Cross, on which hung the fruit of life, which we must eat if we are to have life within us? What if we walked with the New Eve, the Lady of Sorrow, to the foot of the tree where the serpent was crushed and a new garden, the Church, was planted to feed and save the world?

Modernity and Perpetual Eschatological Expectation

I'm in the middle of reading Thomas Howard's Chance or the Dance, a rather marvelous book on the different perspectives of modernity and all prior ages on the nature and backdrop of the cosmos. Howard captures some very fundamental truths very well, most particularly the difference between the sort of images of man generated by the old worldview, which held we stand under the lordship of some higher power, and those generated by modernity, which hold that we make ourselves anew, each his own image of himself. And somehow modern man always looks boring. Not always--I'll take that back--because wherever somebody retains the notion of law binding on man and demanding certain things of him, man tends to rise to a higher level. Look at sports, or war, or any other field which can still be called a discipline, which recognizes a law written into the very fabric of reality which no human may buck without consequence. Look at those religions which still generate saints, or at the least, more interesting human beings than those portrayed in Death of a Salesman. Howard drew a number of very interesting contrasts, and there's a lot more to be said about the book, but the main point I wanted to make is related to the 2012 fervor and expectation. It's an odd thing that in our age of science and technology, an ancient calendar's end should generate such apocalyptic speculation. Especially since it's the equivalent of a very long delayed New Year's Day, rather than a real prediction of the end of all things--more the declaration of the end of a galactic year, if you will, than any real attempt at calling the time of eschaton. And yet I've grown up in the midst of such speculation and expectation. Some new end times cult popping up in the news like clockwork around significant dates or historical events. A constant low level drumbeat, inherited from Hal Lindsey in the 70s, and the American heritage of millenarian thought running back through the genesis of the notion of the rapture around the turn of the century, and the notion of the New World being the promised Zion for the Mormons, and the revivals back before that. In some sense, every generation really has thought their time was the time of the end--but as Michael O'Brien pointed out, if a sick man recovers, and falls ill, and recovers repeatedly, can one say he was never truly ill or in danger of death? Can one say he shall then never actually die, since he has fallen sick unto death repeatedly before? Anyway--I think the modern age finds the notion rather more fascinating and powerful than ages past. We get the spectacle of vehement denials that it shall ever come, or vehement claims that it soon shall come. We get movies about the end from any number of perspectives, secular prophecies of an end by global warming or cooling, by disease or nuclear war, by comet strikes or massive eruptions, a constant cataloging of prophecy and natural disaster on the History and Discovery channels, a constant series of lists and surveys of potential dangers, constant recollections of the near misses of WWII--an apocalyptic war if there ever was one, against some of the most naked evil the world has ever seen--and the Cold War, especially the Cuban Missile crisis--perhaps the most spiritually costly and truly deadly war ever fought, especially because of the murk and the fog pouring forth from the propaganda arms of both sides. We live in a climate of fascination with the end. I think it may be because humanity finds itself boring. The modern mind, stripped of the means of transcendence from ages past, finds itself alone and aimless in the universe. The meaning of life is a question that has only recently gone unanswered--ages past had answers of varying qualities and levels of hope. But now we stand in a universe illuminated only by machines and physical processes, amalgamations of chemicals in the cold, dark night of the universe. And we wonder. I think many would find a crisis or an end to be a relief, a sharp imposition of necessary acts for survival, a sharp breach of the aimless wandering in the night of the post-transcendent mind.

Our Lady of Good Success and the 20th Century

Fascinating:

Our Lady of Good Success
Date: very early 17th c., first approved 1611
Place: Quito, Ecuador
Visionary: Venerable Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres

The story of Our Lady of Good Success is a most fascinating one -- and incredibly important and timely, as many of the prophecies of our Lady and our Lord given to Mariana pertain explicitly to the 20th c. and thereafter.

Mother Mariana was a Spanish Conceptionist nun, blessed with the charismata of discernment and prophecy, who ran a convent in Quito, Ecuador. First, Our Lady told her to make a life-sized statue of her holding the Infant Jesus under the title "Our Lady of Good Success." The statue was begun by a local sculptor, but was miraculously completed in 1611 by the Archangels.

Our Lady told her that at the end of the 19th Century and especially in the 20th Century, Satan would reign almost completely by the means of the Masonic sect. She told Mother Mariana that this battle would reach its most acute stage because of various unfaithful religious, who, "under the appearance of virtue and bad-spirited zeal, would turn upon Religion, who nourished them at her breast."

"During this time, insomuch as this poor country will lack the Christian spirit, the Sacrament of Extreme Unction will be little esteemed. Many people will die without receiving it - either because of the negligence of their families or their false sentimentality that tries to protect the sick from seeing the gravity of their situations, or because they will rebel against the spirit of the Catholic Church, impelled by the malice of the devil. Thus many souls will be deprived of innumerable graces, consolations and the strength they need to make that great leap from time to eternity..."

"As for the Sacrament of Matrimony, which symbolizes the union of Christ with His Church, it will be attacked and profaned in the fullest sense of the word. Masonry, which will then be in power, will enact iniquitous laws with the objective of doing away with this Sacrament, making it easy for everyone to live in sin, encouraging the procreation of illegitimate children born without the blessing of the Church. The Christian spirit will rapidly decay, extinguishing the precious light of Faith until if reaches the point that there will be an almost total and general corruption of customs. The effects of secular education will increase, which will be one reason for the lack of priestly and religious vocations..."

"The Sacred Sacrament of Holy Orders will be ridiculed, oppressed and despised. ...The demon will try to persecute the Ministers of the Lord in every possible way and he will labor with cruel and subtle astuteness to deviate them from the spirit of their vocation, corrupting many of them. These corrupted priests, who will scandalize the Christian people, will incite the hatred of the bad Christians and the enemies of the Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church to fall upon all priests. This apparent triumph of Satan will bring enormous sufferings to the good Pastors of the Church...."

"Moreover, in these unhappy times, there will be unbridled luxury which, acting thus to snare the rest into sin, will conquer innumerable frivolous souls who will be lost. Innocence will almost no longer be found in children, nor modesty in women, and in this supreme moment of need of the Church, those who should speak will fall silent."

"But know, beloved daughter, that when your name is made known in the 20th century, there will be many who will not believe, claiming that this devotion is not pleasing to God...A simple humble faith in the truth of My apparitions to you, My predilect child, will be reserved for humble and fervent souls docile to the inspirations of grace, for Our Heavenly Father communicates His secrets to the simple of heart, and not to those whose hearts are inflated with pride, pretending to know what they do not, or self-satisfied with empty knowledge..."

Our Lady said, "...the secular Clergy will leave much to be desired because priests will become careless in their sacred duties. Lacking the divine compass, they will stray from the road traced by God for the priestly ministry, and they will become attached to wealth and riches, which they will unduly strive to obtain. How the Church will suffer during this dark night! Lacking a Prelate and Father to guide them with paternal love, gentleness, strength, wisdom and prudence, many priests will lose their spirit, placing their souls in great danger. This will mark the arrival of My hour."

"Therefore, clamor insistently without tiring and weep with bitter tears in the privacy of your heart, imploring our Celestial Father that, for love of the Eucharistic Heart of my Most Holy Son and His Precious Blood shed with such generosity and the profound bitterness and sufferings of His cruel Passion and Death, He might take pity on His ministers and bring to an end those Ominous times, sending to this Church the Prelate who will restore the spirit of its priests."

She predicted a truly Catholic president of Ecuador who would dedicate that country to the Sacred Heart and who would be assassinated by Masons (this happened during the presidency of Gabriel Garcia Moreno, 1821-1875. Read more here).

She predicted that the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility would be strictly defined and declared dogma (these happened in 1854 and 1870, respectively).

She predicted that a Pope would be a prisoner in the Vatican and that there would come to pass "the unjust usurpation of the Pontifical States through the iniquity, envy and avarice of an earthly monarch" (these things happened in the 19th c. during the pontificate of Blessed Pope Pius IX).

Another prediction yet to come concerns the statue shown above left. The Infant Jesus part of the statue isn't original: a Conceptionist sister hid the original statue during a revolution and died before revealing where she'd secreted it. Our Lady told Mother Mariana that the original statue would be found after the restoration of the Church had begun.

Mother Mariana predicted the day and exact hour of her death (she died at 3:00 P.M. on January 16, 1635). After death, her body remained flexible and lovely. A blind girl was cured at Mother's wake when a flower that encircled Mother's head was touched to her eyes.

In 1906, Mother Mariana's casket was opened and her body was found to be incorrupt, exuding the fragrance of lilies. One may view it by visiting the convent in Quito...

"Soft Tyranny" & "Straight Capitalism"

This piece has a number of fascinating points of great value, and a number of flaws. Among the excellent points:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. —C. S. Lewis, 1953 ...The late Irving Kristol, who died last year at 89, was exquisitely sensitive to the role of intellectuals in the metabolism of this debate, and I’d like to start by quoting from a speech he gave to the American Enterprise Institute in 1973. “For two centuries,” Mr. Kristol noted,

the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape...

Democratic despotism, Tocqueville points out, is unlike despotisms of old. It pre- fers the carrot to the stick. The goal of the operation is the same—the achievement of conformity and the consolidation of power—but the means of choice is not terror but dependence. Accordingly, Tocqueville writes, democratic despotism is despotic at one remove. It does not, unless stymied, terrorize. Rather, it “hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” ...One of the most rebarbative features of the Obama administration’s effort to bring government-control to a life near you is its combination of the antiseptic rhetoric of utilitarian social science with old-fashioned central planning. Consider Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is a top White House advisor on health care reform. Dr. Emanuel has famously argued that doctors “take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously.” He wants to concentrate medical services not on those who need it most—the elderly, seriously impaired children, etc.—but on those who are likely to contribute to “the continuation of the polity,” “ensure healthy future generations,” and so on. Forget about “first do no harm.” “Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens,” quoth Dr. Emanuel, “are not basic and should not be guaranteed.” Got a loopy grandparent or a kid who is playing with half-a-deck? What can they contribute to “the continuation of the polity” or “healthy future generations”? The internet blogger Glenn Reynolds made the observation, amusing and scary in equal measure, that what we’re dealing with here bears an awful similarity to the troubled “cash for clunkers” program: “First Grandma’s Caprice then Grandma.”

We live in interesting times. The problem with the piece excerpted above is the inclination of the author to espouse a pure libertarian capitalist type vision of what a good future would be. He praises the glories of a "mercenary" mentality and hails the rule of the market as the path to freedom. Unfortunately, though, such a view inevitably mandates that the consumerist society will rise again. So long as the libertarian right mistakes license for liberty, they shall never understand the perils of the market unchained. Marx did not rise up in a vacuum--the industrialists did screw the workers. Profit does not necessarily reward virtue--it can be gained by vile practices and can reward shoddy quality products. A truly Darwinian economic environment would lead to the same serfdom and tyranny offered by the state. Neither government nor business writ large offers a human future unless captained by virtuous humanity, and even then we need the two ever dwelling in tension to ensure a human future for all.

More Avatar

More information on Avatar:

In an email to the New York Times, James Cameron explains Weaver’s character: She’s rude, she swears, she drinks, she smokes. Also, from a character perspective, we were showing that Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.

So Cameron may be pulling the "Augustine loathed women/sex/the body/humanity because he taught original sin...he was a grumpy dude" claim. In which case, there is little subtlety and even less value to his choice of "Grace Augustine" for a character name. Also, on further reflection on the movie, I think the liberation theology schtick seems rather more likely.

The Year for Priests Continues

And they can really use our prayers.

Holy Father, sanctify your priests, sanctify them in the truth, preserve them in Your name. May the love with which You loved Your Divine Son be in them. Keep them from evil, they are in the world and the world hates them. Protect them, they are yours. May not even one of those whom You have entrusted to Your Son be lost. Jesus, sustain, comfort, save Your priests. Divine Spirit of love fill them with Your charity. Lead them as You led Jesus, even to the cross. Grant that priests be also hosts of love: for God for their fellow priests for all souls. Amen.

-prayer of the Oblate Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (following the charism of Ven. Teresa Casini)

Liberation Theology

In response to the post on Avatar, I received the following question:

...tell me more about liberation theology, I'm curious...What it IS... you know... not what it has led to... and, what do Catholics think about the Bible?

To the last: um...we're in favor?

More seriously: The Bible is the product of the incarnational nature of God's interaction with humanity. That is, God speaks through the product of human labors, language, and culture, covering an array of genres, literary devices, and interpretive layers. The human authors are true authors, but God's inspiration adds an massive depth beyond anything the human authors knew or intended.

Such a means of interpreting the Bible is evidenced by Christ with the men on the road to Emmaus, when he shows them how the Scriptures of the Jews all point to him, or by Paul, when he speaks of Christ as the new Adam and interprets the Old Testament as indicating Christ throughout, or by the Gospel writers, when they reference passages of the Jewish Scriptures in order to demonstrate the promised coming of Christ.

There is, of course, much more to be said. If you want a really good one book summary, take your pick between Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth, Mark Shea's Making Senses out of Scripture, or Scott Hahn's A Father Who Keeps His Promises.

Liberation theology is an attempt to take the philosophy/ideology of Marx and his intellectual heirs and enflesh it into Christianity. The effort demands the redefinition of a great many Christian terms, such that a liberation theologian may profess the same creed I do and yet believe something very different.

Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a model example of this labor put into practice (or "praxis"). He offers a theoretical framework for education, designed to "raise the consciousness" of the students regarding their oppressed status, or to their status as oppressors. The goal is to get the oppressors to turn upon their own "class" (i.e., betray family, friends, culture, faith, etc.--anything part of the socially constructed oppressor class) in order to aid the oppressed in their struggle for the absolute overthrow and eradication of the oppressor class, who may be enslaved or exterminated.

Since the oppressed behave violently only because of their oppression, any acts of violence or vengeance they work is the fault of the oppressor. They are free from fault--blamelessly able to work any atrocity and eradicate any foe in their relentless pursuit of revenge.

Liberation theology, then, means liberation from all restraints. Marx has no room for Christian forgiveness. Nor the supernatural, really, rendering the promise of ultimate justice undertaken by God (which then renders revenge unneccessary and frees one from the dread of justice never being done if not achieved in this life) a pipe dream, suitable only to keeping down the poor and oppressed--the "people of God".

Avatar, Cameron, and...Christianity?

I went into Avatar with low expectations as to plot, high expectations for the beauty of the imagery and construction of the movie itself, and no preparation for any new or interesting subtext. I came out very puzzled and rather more interested in Cameron's work than before. Midway through the movie, I suddenly started picking up indicators that there was another plotline operating sub rosa. Huge clue: the lead scientist in the avatar program on Pandora is named Dr. Grace Augustine. Let's sit and stare at that for a moment. St. Augustine of Hippo is a Doctor of the Church. One of the (many) things he's famed for theologically is taking sides in a dispute with the heretic Pelagius in a dispute over grace and nature. Pelagius argued humans could justify themselves and achieve perfection through dint of their own efforts. Augustine argued that, due to original sin, we are bound to depend on divine grace for salvation while still maintaining free will. The humans invading Pandora, seeking to achieve mastery by dint of force and imposition of their will on the garden planet, use huge mechanical cyborg-type bodies (see the head of security, Colonel Miles Quaritch). The humans seeking to understand, cooperate, and blend with the inhabitants--that is, cooperate with the planetary consciousness/higher power/"Mother" are led by Dr. Augustine and use biological "avatars". I think there's a lot more to be said here, but I'm not sure what it is yet. Another hint: Home Tree, the massive ancient tree which serves as the Lothlorien-style home for the clan at the center of the movie plot, which is large enough for the "the birds of the air [to] come and perch in its branches", is growing right over the largest deposit of "unobtainium" on the planet--that is, they live in a "house built on a rock." And another: Cameron's aliens had a massive, world at risk fight at the end in which the lead warrior of the hosts of Pandora casts "Dragon" out of the sky. He then descends to do battle with the military leader of the Sky People on the earth, who'd survived the fall. And said Sky People are seeking to destroy the planetary "Mother." Sound like this, much? My godson presented a paper at a conference on eschatology in which he developed the notion of Terminator 2 as an apocalypse. I think Cameron has been using Christian imagery for years. I've never seen Titanic or much of Cameron's other work--I'm barely acquainted even with Terminator--but now I think I'll have to go take a look. There are several options here. One is that he's just using a strong source of great imagery and potent story elements when he borrows Scripture. Another is he's Christian and working the story of salvation into all his work. Yet a third (made somewhat plausible by the plot of this movie) is that he's into Liberation Theology, and so offers Marxised symbols of Christianity--a pernicious brew. Again, I'm not sure. His critique of the human invaders is not merely an anti-military screed--there are warriors among the Na'avi--nor an anti-capitalist rant. Rather, I think he's saying something useful and important by having the human invaders fail to 'see" the alien other. The aliens, by contrast, greet one another by saying "I see you." In one sense, they acknowledge the other as being on a level more fundamental than a mere obstacle, as something more than either a resource or an impediment--the common failing of Marxism and pure capitalism. Christians are called beyond this myopic view to one in which humans have intrinsic dignity and all of creation has been given to us for stewardship rather than ruthless exploitation. We are forbidden, in other words, from living or encountering others like the invaders. In another sense, there's theology here. I and thou, straight out of Martin Buber...and referenced frequently by Joseph Ratzinger. Take for instance this snippet from a piece on Mary, the Mother of God and Mother of all the Living, the Woman whom the earth helps at the end of Revelations 12:

What is grace? This question thrusts itself upon our text. Our religious mentality has reified this concept much too much; it regards grace as a supernatural something we carry about in our soul. And since we perceive very little of it, or nothing at all, it has gradually become irrelevant to us, an empty word belonging to Christian jargon, which seems to have lost any relationship to the lived reality of our everyday life. In reality, grace is a relational term: it does not predicate something about an I, but something about a connection between I and Thou, between God and man. "Full of grace" could therefore also be translated as: "You are full of the Holy Spirit; your life is intimately connected with God." Peter Lombard, the author of what was the universal theological manual for approximately three centuries during the Middle Ages, propounded the thesis that grace and love are identical but that love "is the Holy Spirit".

There's a lot more to be said--the connection between people and planet mirroring the relationship between Christians and the Body of Christ, made possible by Mother Mary and the action of the Holy Spirit. The "incarnation" aspect of the avatar program versus the false incarnation of the human/cyborgs, like fallen angels assuming physical form to war amongst men. The motherly mediation of the planetary consciousness for the birth of the savior among the people. Anyway, I'm not sure what he's doing, but color me much more impressed than I expected to be. Postscript: Cameron makes heavy, heavy use of Plato's allegory of the cave:

Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world and in here is the dream

Also, there's a scene for the preparation of the grand assault on the natives, in which the humans are in a room with all the windows shutting, the powerpoint shining on the wall... Additional Postscript: in Stephen Greydanus's review of the movie, he mocks the "Grace Augustine" thing and makes passing reference to the "intriguing" interconnection of lifeforms thing. I think he needs to go take another, harder look at some of this. Again--Cameron may be doing a "Teilhard de Chardin," "Liberation Theology" type job with his subplot, but still there's more going on here than I've seen discussed elsewhere.

HIV--Cured?

In at least one patient:

German researchers who used a bone marrow transplant to treat a cancer patient with the AIDS virus, have declared him cured of the virus -- a stunning claim in a field where the word "cure" is barely whispered.

The patient, who had both HIV infection and leukemia, received the bone marrow transplant in 2007 from a donor who had a genetic mutation known to give patients a natural immunity to the virus.

Nearly four years after the transplant, the patient is free of the virus and it does not appear to be hiding anywhere in his body, Thomas Schneider of Berlin Charite hospital and colleagues said.

"Our results strongly suggest that cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient," they wrote in the journal Blood.

AIDS researchers have rejected the approach on any kind of scale for patients with HIV. A bone marrow transplant is a last-ditch treatment for cancers such as leukemia.

It requires destruction of a patient's own bone marrow -- itself a harrowing process -- and then a transplant from a donor who has a near-exact blood and immune system type. Months of recovery are needed while the transplant grows and reconstitutes the patient's immune system.

"It's not practical and it can kill people," said Dr. Robert Gallo of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, who helped discover the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

"It is possibly a cure, that's for sure, you won't know for absolute sure until the person dies and undergoes extreme PCR (genetic) analysis of post-mortem tissue..."

The Davidic Queen Mother

shares in the fate of the House of David:

...In an essay from a 1992 issue of Communio entitled "‘Hail, Full of Grace’: Elements of Marian Piety According to the Bible," Ratzinger returns to the theme of Mary’s co-passion with Christ. He says that the prophecy told by Simeon points to Calvary. This brings Cardinal Ratzinger to recall the words spoke to David by the prophet Nathan after the former falls into sin: "You … have slain (Uriah the Hittite) with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house" (2 Sam 12:9-10). He says that this "sword that hangs over David’s house now strikes Mary’s heart. In the true David, Christ, and in his Mother, the Pure Virgin, the curse is suffered through and overcome" (58)...

Masonry (cont.)

A run-down of Masons of note and terms. Ignatius Insight blog has a post on Catholicism and Freemasonry, as well as a brief comment on The Lost Symbol and a book recommendation:

What is it about Freemasonry that would cause churches to forbid or openly discourage seventy million Americans from membership? Why have eight popes condemned the Lodge? Why has the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Masonic order been strained for centuries? Christianity and American Freemasonry answers these and many other questions and describes why Christ ianity and Freemasonry are incompatible. Today over two million American men belong to the Masonic order, the largest and oldest secret fraternal society. In earlier history the Freemasons boasted a prestigious membership, including fourteen American presidents and such founding fathers as Ben Franklin, Paul Revere, and Alexander Hamilton. [Christianity And American Freemasonry, by William J. Whalen] is the most complete reference book available on the subject. Chapters discuss the rituals and oaths, the Scottish and York rites, allied organizations such as the Shriners, and the historic antagonism of Christianity toward Masonry.

From the same book:

After the Reformation had practically halted the construction of new church buildings, the waning masonic lodges began to admit "honorary" or nonworking members to their ranks. The original lodges were unquestionably orthodox in their adherence to the Catholic religion that they served so admirably. One of the earliest masonic charges reads: "The first charge is that you shall bee true man to God and holy church, and that you use no heresie or error by your understanding or by teachings of indiscreet men." Eventually the honorary members outnumbered the operative masons, more or less dispossessed the active members, and took over the symbols and secret signs of the lodges to form what we know as speculative Masonry. Members were expected to believe in God and in the immortality of the soul, but otherwise their religious views were completely irrelevant to the lodge. In 1717 a governing authority known as the "Grand Lodge of England" was established at a meeting of four surviving lodges in the Apple Tree Tavern in London...

Also, current Catholic apologist and ex-Mason on Masonry. All very interesting. All suggesting that more time might be profitably spent examining the group which has, for most of the modern age, been counted amongst the Churches most persistent and effective foes.

Click to download in FLV format (123.06MB)

And Now, the Masons...

Just cause The Lost Symbol came out (btw--Chesterton on Dan Brown), it's part of American history, I'm curious, and gee golly, it's a traditional Catholic conspiracy theory. So...a Masonic roundup. Victorian prime minister William Gladstone's private library was for sale in 2008. He had a "typical Victorian gentleman’s library, featuring the subjects of interest of the day...", including:

An unusual sub-collection is formed by 60 books dealing with the history of freemasonry in Dundee, Perth, Scone and Edinburgh.

One particularly unusual item being sold on behalf of the Gladstone family is The Memoirs of The Carbonari.

Published in 1821, it is one of the earliest books written about a topic that has long fascinated writers everywhere – the secret societies of Sicily.

A Mason's complaint and call to action:

By focusing on ourselves and failing to perceive the true cause of our decline in numbers, we have gone down many false paths. One day classes, reduced proficiencies, and lately a loss of respect for our obligation towards secrecy are all a part of these changes. To stem this decline many Grand Lodges focused significant resources towards charitable activities in the belief that Masonry should be perceived more as a fraternal organization working for the public good. This, it was thought, would serve to lift the veil from our private functions, to depict us as another form of Elk or Lion. In recent years, lodges have opened themselves up and allowed ritual to be recorded knowing it would be publicly broadcast. This was done, as well, to say we have no secrets, when in truth we do...

The Internet has created an enormous temptation for lodge officers and brothers that is very destructive to the Craft. There already exists today video programs on the Internet which can be downloaded and used within the lodge as part of its education program. Many of these are quite engaging but they are often the product of non-Masons and contain information which we are obligated not to disclose. Because it comes from the Internet, and because anyone can view it there, there is the tendency for Masters and brothers to disregard their obligation. They justify this by arguing that because so much that violates Masonic secrecy is readily available, there is no harm in their violating their obligation.

Setting aside the utterly lack of judgment such a decision represents, it also reveals a failure to understand the true nature of our obligation. One consequence is that newly raised Masons who have been aggressively charged in the Third Degree to never violate their obligation are then exposed to a cavalier disregard for it by long standing brothers. They form from that the notion that the obligation is not to be taken seriously, and if the obligation is not a serious matter than neither are the other teachings of Freemasonry. The steady erosion of our commitment to secrecy which has been encouraged by the spread of the Internet is a great threat to our Craft. Every Grand Lodge should have an educational program to impress upon all Masters and line officers what information they can, and cannot, use in the lodge.

A canon lawyer explains the past and continuing ban on Catholics being Masons:

So what is the big deal about Freemasonry, anyway? Masons frequently describe their organization as one devoted to brotherhood and the improvement of society by enlightened means. They deny that they are a secret society at all, much less a society conspiring to destroy the Catholic Church. They emphasize that, as mentioned above, they are largely a social fraternity involved in charitable works.

It must be pointed out that many, many Masons make these assertions in good faith, genuinely unaware of the overarching aims of international Freemasonry. A thorough history of the Masons is of course beyond the scope of this column, but there is much historical evidence that there is a lot more to Masonry than just fraternity and brotherhood...

Freemasons’ references to their enlightened ideas and generous ideals of universal fraternity may sound positive, but their insistence on acceptance of these concepts actually implies a fundamental conflict with the Catholic Church. Insofar as the Church teaches that it possesses divine truths which were revealed nearly 2000 years ago by the Son of God, it embraces a belief system that is diametrically opposed to Freemasonry. And in asserting its own beliefs, Freemasonry cannot but work against the Catholic Church. To cite just a few examples, if one delves in detail into the history behind the bloody persecution of Catholic clergy during the French Revolution in the 18^th century, political upheavals in Catholic Spain in the late 1800’s, or the brutal assault on the Catholic Church in Mexico in the early 20^th century, the quiet, behind-the-scenes direction and influence of Freemasonry can be seen. In other words, there is plenty of evidence that Masons have already in the past been involved in attacks on the Church. The Vatican’s assertion that Masonry is anti-Catholic is not based merely on some sort of vague notion of potential problems; it is grounded in cold, hard historical facts!

For further proof of this, one can hunt in the texts of the Masons themselves, if one has the call to do so. Possible problems for society from the organization are made explicit by the affair known as Propaganda Due, and are laid out by the British in this piece from 1998:

"While many people find the rituals of Freemasonry a risible diversion, concern has been growing about the number of Masons thought to be in positions of influence, particularly in law enforcement, and what kinds of favored treatment they afford one another. Masons have always resisted attempts by officials to learn the identities of their members. A portion of the Mason code compels them to form a ''column of mutual defense and support,'' language that investigators suspect has been used to protect lawbreakers in the ranks from police inquiries. Parliament's home affairs committee last month conducted hearings into Freemason membership on three police forces responsible for well-known miscarriages of justice. Michael Higham, a former Naval Commander who is the Grand Secretary of the London-based United Grand Lodge, the premier institution of world Freemasonry, acknowledged about 20 names on a list only after being threatened with a contempt-of-Parliament order. Over the years, a number of cases have spurred calls for the end of secrecy. In the late 1960's the head of the Obscene Publications Squad sponsored a convicted pornographer as a member of his own lodge. In the 1970's there were a number of cases where leading criminals were members of the same lodge as senior police intelligence officers. In the early 1980's one of Britain's ''most wanted'' criminals, Leonard Gibson, was found to be the Worshipful Master, or head, of a lodge that included eight police officers."

For an overview of Masonic involvement in history, check out 10,000 Famous Freemasons from A to J Part One and 10,000 Famous Freemasons from K to Z Part Two. Apparently, Harry S. Truman wrote the afterword of this two volume set. More on the Masons as an avenue to polite society:

At the same time Albert Nordheimer, the building’s owner, was becoming involved with the growing and highly enigmatic Masonic movement that was sweeping through North America. So he decided to convert the former upper floor music hall into the various homes to the nine Masonic Lodges then in Toronto.

The Masons have been in Toronto since the late 1700s with one of their first permanent lodge homes standing where the entrance to 35 Church St. is today. Back then it was the site of Russell’s Hotel (c.1848) of which the upper floor was built especially for the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons.

It was de rigueur for men in early York (and later Toronto) society to belong to this mysterious and beneficent organization with its constitutional declaration of a belief in a Supreme Being. It was the only way to get ahead in business or to climb the social ladder (today there are about 5 million members worldwide of the Masons).

Those early men of York had as their grandmaster none other than the Duke of Kent who lived here in York from 1799 till 1806. As well as being the fourth son of King George III, he is best known to history as the father of Queen Victoria.

And there's more.

The Masons' Room in City Hall

In the realm of "interesting bits of Americana I'd never heard of before," this one from Jackson, Mississippi, takes the cake:

""We've got a 24-hour armed guard even on weekends," Weill told the Jackson Free Press. "There's no reason we need a person like that, when most other public buildings in Jackson just have an alarm system." Johnson explained to Weill that the city had to pay for around-the-clock security to accommodate the Masons. Weill, always vigilant about fat in the city budget, considers the roughly $50,000 that the city pays for City Hall security excessive. "I can't imagine the Masons would throw up their hands and cry outrage if we didn't have an armed security guard in City Hall on the Fourth of July," Weill said... Former Councilman and Jackson State University professor Leslie McLemore said that he knew of little more than the presence of a Masonic meeting room in City Hall. "I just know we have the arrangement," McLemore said. "I was sort of surprised to learn about it when I joined the City Council." Former Mayor Kane Ditto also confessed to knowing little about the agreement, other than its existence. "I know during my term in office it was discussed several times, but I don't know that I've actually seen documentation," Ditto said. City spokesman Chris Mims confirmed that the city does have an agreement with the Masons allowing the organization use of a third-floor meeting room in perpetuity, but he could not retrieve any formal documentation of the relationship... As bizarre as it may seem to contemporary citizens for a private fraternal organization to meet in a public building, the practice was anything but unusual when City Hall was built. Many political leaders at all levels were Masons: President George Washington laid the corner-stone for the U.S. Capitol in a Masonic ceremony. S.P. Baley, a mayor of Jackson during the 1830s, was also the first Master of Pearl Lodge 23, one of the three branches that currently use City Hall for meetings. During the Civil War, Masons met in the Senate chamber of the Old Capitol. Masonry also had its role in the state's black political leadership as well. The offices of the Mississippi Conference NAACP are housed inside the M.W. Stringer Lodge on Lynch Street, headquarters for the historically black Prince Hall Affiliated Freemasons. Although the two organizations are now distinct, the Prince Hall Masons helped establish the Mississippi NAACP, president Derrick Johnson explained. "Wherever they had their headquarters, they housed all their auxiliaries, including the NAACP," Johnson said. Despite their deep roots in city history, the Masons have had to explain their presence at City Hall anew several times. In 1946, The Clarion-Ledger ran an article titled "Still Some Question Who Owns City Hall: No Record of Lodge Hall Agreement." The article refers to "local attorney W. Harold Cox," who was puzzled by the Masons' claim to the building and "is at a loss to explain how the (Masonic) orders ever obtained use of the rooms." Current Pearl Lodge treasurer Arthur Jackson remembers former Mayor Melton touring the third-floor meeting room early in his term after learning that the Masons used it. He said that sort of thing happens with every new administration. "We always have to tell them again," Jackson said...

Huh. That's rather odd. I suppose if you have a big enough building, having a room which nobody just stumbles across doesn't seem strange. And I wonder how they prove the deal election after election?

Click to download in FLV format (36.96MB)

Pray for the Christians of the Middle East

Their suffering goes on:

A policy of “ethnic and religious cleansing” is underway in Mosul; in fact, it has worsened as Christmas approaches, Mgr Louis Sako told AsiaNews. The archbishop of Kirkuk says security measures will be strengthened during Christmas for fear of new attacks. Two attacks are carried out in Mosul yesterday; two churches are hit, one baby girl is dead and 40 people are wounded. Source tells AsiaNews that the Christian community is “destined to die” in the city...

Yesterday’s attacks are the latest episodes in a series of violence against Christian places of worship. On 26 November, terrorists razed to the ground the Church of Saint Ephrem and the Mother House of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine. A source told AsiaNews that most nuns left; only a few have remained but “are afraid of going out”.

Such attacks are a “warning” for Christians to leave en masse. Many “families have fled north, into Kurdistan, but are jobless and have no hope for the future. The Christian community is destined to die,” the source said.

Mgr Louis Sako shares this concern. For the archbishop of Kirkuk, “ethnic and religious cleansing” is underway in Mosul. The central government and parties are concerned only about the elections, scheduled for 7 March 2010, especially about “sharing the oil”.

To understand the current situation, the interested reader must inform themselves about a little thing called "dhimmitude."

Look Up!

So, these are weird, and cool. Out of Norway:

Images of the light that appeared in the sky above the Norwegian city of Tromso and elsewhere prompted explanations ranging from a meteor, northern lights, a failed missile or even a UFO.
Describing the latest failure of the Bulava as a major embarrassment for the military, leading Russian defence analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said the images were consistent with a missile failure.

"Such lights and clouds appear from time to time when a missile fails in the upper layers of the atmosphere and have been reported before," he told AFP.

"At least this failed test made some nice fireworks for the Norwegians," he joked.

The Mail has more:

..despite earlier reports denying a missile launch yesterday. Even early today there was no formal confirmation from the Russian Defence Ministry.

The light appears to be unconnected with the aurora borealis, or northern lights, the natural magnetic phenomena that can often be viewed in that part of the world.

The mystery began when a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain in the north of the country. It stopped mid-air, then began to move in circles. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky.

Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre - lasting for ten to 12 minutes before disappearing completely.

Onlookers describing it as 'like a big fireball that went around, with a great light around it' and 'a shooting star that spun around and around'.

Yesterday a Norwegian defence spokesman said the display was most likely from a failed Russian test launch.

The Telegraph has video:

The sighting of an eerie turquoise light provoked hundreds of reports of UFO sightings when it appeared over the Norwegian city of Tromso. Unfortunately the spectacular plume of light was created by the latest failed test-flight of a new Russian missile The Bulava missile was test-fired from a submarine in the White Sea before dawn on Wednesday. The 12th test launch of the missle and the seventh time the firing has ended in failure.

Now, of course, the Russian missile explanation is the perfectly reasonable, sane, rational explanation. For a flavor of the less respectable speculation also abroad, we turn to the Examiner:

Following a cross-volley of interpretations of the Dec. 9, 2009 blue-green light vortex over Norway on the eve of Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech (Russian missile; ETs destroying Russian missile), two researchers have independently posited that HAARP, a space-based weapon of mass destruction one of whose antenna fields is close to the site of the Norwegian spiral light. According to one of the researchers, David Wilcock (see below), one of his confidential sources stated the Norway spiral light was part of Project Blue Beam... One of the alleged purposes of Project Blue Beam is the use of advanced electromagnetic imaging such as that produced by HAARP and exhibited in the Norway spiral light as a psychological mass conditioning device in aid of the implementation of a global corporate new world order. If this analysis is accurate, the Norwegian light may have been a HAARP-induced effect attempting to anchor an extraterrestrial-like or “transcendent” aura around U.S. President Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo the following day, Nov. 10...

HAARP exists and has some pretty interesting capabilities:

"HAARP’s main job is to produce radio waves to probe the ionosphere," an Air Force Research Laboratory officer said in October.

Which is true — up to a point.


A drive by Clifford Stone on the X-Files-esque uber-site Above Top Secret to use the Freedom of Information Act to turn up UFO-related documents has led to the release of a fascinating report, HAARP: Research and Applications. It’s from the Air Force Research Laboratory and Office of Naval Research, and it lays out the uses the military see for HAARP. Turns out the Pentagon wants some military bang for their buck from the program.

HAARP can actually perform a lot of militarily important functions, all involving the interactions of radio waves with the high atmosphere, magnetosphere and ionosphere...

The third band is optical and near-optical: HAARP can make lights in the sky. While we have looked at the effect of creating high-altitude plasmas before (as possible anti-missile defence), the document notes that it can also produce "airglow with megawatt power…in the IR [infrared] region of the spectrum." This has "significant military implications for IR detection and countermeasures." The picture with this shows the IR glow below a satellite, suggesting that the system may be able to blank out the view of IR satellites selectively. Given that such satellites are the best way of detecting the launch of ICBMs, this is a significant capability...

I know nothing much about the purported "Project Blue Beam" or other claims from the Examiner article. From Russia:

More from the Telegraph:

The object has been compared to an Imperial Cruiser in the Star Wars films and witnesses estimated it could be up to a mile wide.

Two film clips exist which appear to show the same object and footage has been repeatedly playing on Russian television news channels...

The identity of the shape has not been confirmed. Russian reports ruled out a UFO but police refused to comment.

Nick Pope, a former Ministry of Defence UFO analyst, said it was "one of the most extraordinary UFO clips I've ever seen".

"At first I thought this was a reflection but it appears to move behind a power line, ruling out this theory."

A spokesman for aerospace journal Jane's News said: "We have no idea what it is."

And from Egypt:

More from AFP:

Every night in the run-up to Christmas thousands of Egypt's Coptic Christians have been gathering in a Cairo suburb eager for a glimpse of a vision that has given hope to their marginalised community.

It is three hours past midnight in Al-Warrak, a poor working class neighbourhood of the Egyptian capital, and a 10,000-strong crowd is silently staring at the sky.

Then the appearance of a mysterious light over the church tower jolts the gathering into a frenzy of cries and ululations. It is the apparition of the Virgin Mary, they say.

Thousands have been coming nightly since the first sighting of the Virgin Mary on December 10, in the hope of being blessed by her light...

"The first person to spot the sighting of the Virgin Mary was a Muslim neighour. He took a video and pictures and distributed them to everyone," said Father Fishay, a priest at the Warrak church, describing how he first heard of the apparition.

Hassan, the Muslim neighbour, was sitting at his local coffee shop when at around 8:30 pm, he saw a strong light coming from the church.

Others on the street began to notice the light and saw a bird circling above the church. At around 2 am, a vision of the Virgin Mary in her white and blue robes appeared, Fishay said.

But Muslim residents of the area insist it is a hoax, with someone creating the image with laser beams...

From the major Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram:

...neighbours, worried by crowds gathering outside, called at midnight on 10 December to ask if something was wrong. "The phone calls poured in and many people said they had just seen an apparition of Virgin Mary on the right dome of the church," said Father Dawoud, who added that Muslim neighbours were among the ...callers, including "Haj Rashad, a neighbour and a dear friend who told me, 'what are you doing here, father? I have just seen Our Lady Mariam with my own eyes, go and see for yourself'." "At first we thought that a little kid was playing with a flash light, but then the light intensified and moved from the tree in front of the church entrance up to the right dome and an embodiment of Virgin Mary could be easily recognised. It stayed there for a while. I have captured the scene with my mobile phone," says Hassan, the neighbourhood distributor of gas cylinders. On Monday the Coptic Orthodox Bishopric in Giza issued a statement: "On 11 Friday, at 1am, a full apparition of the Virgin Mary on the right dome of the church was reported by at least 3,000 people. She appeared in her usual heavenly blue costume. She was crowned and the concrete cross on the dome was placed on top of her crown. Those present captured photos and videos of the Holy scene," read the statement. The scene, as described, was broadcast on Amr Adib's talk show "Cairo Today" on 13 December. According to Bishop Theodosios of Giza, it was important to investigate the event in detail. "I stayed up all night on Sunday. I saw doves appear suddenly in the sky. They flew in circles in front of the church before they vanished into thin air. They were floating rather than hovering with their wings," said Bishop Theodosios, adding that it is uncommon for doves to fly at night..."