Questions/Answers about the Golden Compass

This question-answer guide has been published by the ....

MAGISTERIUM [cue sinister music: duhn duhn DUHN!!!!]

That's right... the Office of Catechesis and Evangelization for the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Yes, you read correctly, a BISHOP of the MAGISTERIUM was behind this. OOooohhhh.

Letter from Bishop Listecki:
http://www.dioceseoflacrosse.com/files/
GldnCompBp%20Listecki%20Ltr%2011-30-07.pdf

What every parent should know:
http://www.dioceseoflacrosse.com/files/
Gldn%20Comp%20Zenit%20Art.pdf



My bottom line would be: why pay to see a film that debases your deeply cherished faith?

Here is a link to the guide (I have it typed out below in this post)http://www.dioceseoflacrosse.com/files/Gldn%20
Comp%20Office%20of%20Cat.%20&%20Evang.pdf

New Movie Release - The Golden Compass
The Office of Catechesis and Evangelization—Diocese of La Crosse

So, what is the big deal about this movie? Why should
parents be concerned?

The movie The Golden Compass is the fi rst book of the
trilogy, His Dark Materials. Parents need to be concerned
because it attacks the foundation of the Catholic Faith.1
Author, Philip Pullman says,
• “My books are about killing God.”2
• “I am all for the death of God.”3
• “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian
belief.”4

The author is an atheist, but how does that affect
the fi lm?

“Though much of Pullman’s trilogy involves… mystical
worlds with talking animals and magical witches, the
underlying theme is no simple fantasy. In the fi ctional universe
of His Dark Materials, there is no real God; rather
there is a high angel called the Authority, who purports
to be God.”5 The Catholic Church, frequently called the
Magisterium, is portrayed as the dark force to be overcome.

Isn’t His Dark Materials just fiction?

It is fiction but it presents good as evil and evil as good.
It portrays the evil of dark, demonic forces that battle God
and ultimately kill God. So a fi lm like this (and especially
the trilogy it is based on) invites us to join forces against
God.

How is the Golden Compass different from Narnia and
the Lord of the Rings?

The Chronicles of Narnia are a fantasy representing the
battle between God and His followers and Satan and his
devils. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien shows the power
of God and His grace and invites the reader to join Him.
Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, promotes the lie
that evil can ultimately defeat God. But we know that Jesus’
death on the Cross has already won the ultimate victory.

Why can’t kids go to it as a fun, fantasy movie? What
am I to tell my child?

It is no simple fantasy. It is about evil being presented in
an enticing and glamorous way. As the fi rst teachers and
protectors, parents would not allow their children to be desensitized
to evil so that it becomes commonplace and they
no longer recognize it as dangerous and seek to avoid it. It
is the same as saying that parents would not let their children
drink poison. Tell your children that this movie is definitely
poison for the soul. In the Our Father, Jesus taught
us clearly to pray, deliver us from evil.6 Jesus does not
want us to toy with evil even when it looks fascinating.

The producers say any references to the Catholic Church
have been removed. Doesn’t this leave the movie as just
a fun fantasy adventure?

The references to the Catholic Church have been removed
from the movie but a different word has been substituted,
it is the Magisterium. The producers of the movie are not
stupid. They have removed some of the most sinister aspects
against Christianity. But don’t be fooled. The fundamental
direction of the story is the same even if it has been
sanitized and Pullman’s goal is to entice people to read his
books and reject God.
The books are much more detailed, more evil, and they
attack, with a hateful vengeance, priests, nuns, bishops, the
Mother of God and the Pope.

What is Pullman’s philosophy and how is it dangerous?

Pullman’s worldview is a world without God. He thinks
the very idea of God needs to be destroyed. Pullman spreads
his hatred for religion through these books.
The Christian worldview is that God is our loving Father.
We cannot exist without Him; God created us and has given
us everything out of love. To believe in God and embrace
Him for all eternity is the joy and very center of our lives.
How can we use this movie’s debut as a teaching experience?
Talk about this with your children. Do not be in denial
that evil exists and that skilled marketers can disguise it and
make it look attractive. We need to have a healthy level of
concern about the power of evil even though Satan does not
have equal power with God and cannot defeat God.
Satan is a fallen angel who hates God and wants us to
hate God.7 We love God and therefore we reject Satan and
all his evil. This is why you promised at baptism:
■ “to reject the glamour of evil and refuse to be mastered
by sin.”

What should Catholic parents do?

Please do not go to the movie and do not buy the books.
Return the books if you have already bought them. Spread
the message to family and friends. Embrace the positive
movies that have come from Hollywood like the Chronicles
of Narnia or read the Lord of the Rings, and refuse to give
your money or your approval to “Dark Materials” that try
to snuff out the Light.8

1 1 John 4:1-4 “…every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God.”
2 Tony Watkins, Dark Matter, pp. 21, 152
3 Philip Pullman, www.books.guardian.co.uk
4 Alona Wartofsky, “The Last Word; Philip Pullman’s Trilogy for Young. Adults EndsWith God’s Death, and Remarkably Few Critics,” Washington Post, Feb. 19, 2001.
5 The Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked, Catholic League. p. 7
6 Matthew 6:13, Philippians 4: 8
7 See Revelation 12:7-9; John 8:44; I John 2:18-25; Catechism of the CatholicChurch, #391
8 Wisdom 4: 12 “ … the fascination of wickedness obscures what is good.”

Mother Theresa's spiritual darkness: faith is about TRUST,... not certitude and clarity

This is an interesting article about the current talk of Mother Theresa's spiritual darkness as revealed in a new publication of letters to her spiritual director entitled Come Be My Light.
[ Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light ]

Jesuit Fr. John Kavanaugh is a gifted theologian (for an example of his work see entitled
Following Christ in a Consumer Society:
The Spirituality of Cultural Resistance
_______________________________________
Godforsakenness
'Finding one's heart's desire'
By John F. Kavanaugh OCTOBER 1, 2007 AMERICA
[http://www.americamagazine.org/
content/article.cfm?article_id=10235

There has been much written about Mother Teresa of Calcutta these days. Not only has the 10th anniversary of her death been observed; depths of her interior life have been inspected as well. The publication of her letters to spiritual directors in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., has revealed that the founder of the Missionaries of Charity herself lived in profound spiritual darkness for nearly 50 years.

The public revelation of Mother Teresa’s interior crisis (much of the documentation appeared on the Internet news site zenit.org in 2002, while the cause for her canonization was moving forward) has struck some as a cruel betrayal of her desire not to have her letters published. Others were shaken by what seemed to be her loss of faith or by God’s harshness with her. Some have linked her experience with the harrowing purifications of high mystical prayer.

The most voluble response has likely been that of Christopher Hitchens. An often brilliant polemicist and eminently readable essayist, Hitchens is perhaps the most prominent of nonbelievers to have recently published an anti-theist manifesto. His best-seller is titled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. But over a decade ago he wrote The Missionary Position, a searing and often mean indictment of Mother Teresa, whom he dubbed the "Ghoul of Calcutta."

There is a puzzling zeal in Hitchens’s fascination with Mother Teresa and his seizure of every media opportunity to disparage her. He opined in the Time magazine cover story (a remarkably balanced article) that she was like a die-hard, disillusioned Communist carrying on even though things were falling apart. On television news shows he attributed her perseverance to the fact that "advisors egged her on because she was a great marketing tool."
Apparently the only good thing he can see in her life is what he thinks was her loss of faith. Thus, from his two-page opinion piece in Newsweek one gets the sense that Hitchens has discovered a strange sympathy for "this troubled and miserable lady." But first he must convince himself that she has really lost her faith. Thus he moves from his first paragraph’s guarded "all but lost her own faith" and "for all practical purposes ceased to believe," to his ringing conclusive indictment of "a blind faith in which she herself had long ceased to believe."

Hitchens gave a much more accurate description of Mother Teresa’s crisis during a three-hour interview on C-Span’s "Book TV." Correcting himself after asserting her loss of faith he said, "If not a loss of faith, a great loss of certainty." Precisely.
The problem (and Hitchens could not have suspected it) is that Mother Teresa never had certainty. At least that’s what she told me.

In Calcutta during December 1975 and for a few days in the following March, I was doing the "long experiment of humble ministry" that Jesuits undertake during their last year of formation. On those days when I celebrated the Eucharist at the Missionaries of Charity motherhouse and worked at the House of the Dying, I had a number of conversations with Mother Teresa.

Two of them still inhabit my life. Our first talk concerned my worry that I should not go back to the comfort and riches of being a university professor in the United States. She told me to go back. "There is far greater poverty there. The greatest poverty is the absence of love."
Much more puzzling was a comment she made shortly before I left Calcutta. I had asked her to pray for me. She said "for what?" "For clarity," I pled. And she immediately said no, she would not pray for that. I complained that she seemed always to have clarity and certitude. "I’ve never had clarity and certitude," she said. "I only have trust. I’ll pray that you trust."
So Hitchens is correct on at least one count. Mother Teresa was living with a "great loss of certainty"—about herself, about her relationship to Christ, about her fate, about her very God. The feeling of not having faith is quite different from not having faith. Otherwise it would not be so harrowing to the believer, who cries out with nothing but trust.

It would be good if all of us, believer and nonbeliever alike, could learn once and for all that whatever faith is, it is not a crutch. Sometimes in faith, you have nothing to lean on. Nor is the "feeling" or consolation of faith something we can conjure up on our own. If anyone had such powers of conjuring it would be Mother Teresa. So much for feel-good religion—that "opiate of the masses." Morphine is much more effective.

The real story, the deepest subtext, in Mother Teresa’s "dark night" is not that God was purifying her. God was actually giving her her heart’s desire.

Every Missionaries of Charity community I have visited has a large crucifix with the words "I thirst" over it. It is that broken man on the cross that Mother Teresa most wanted to identify with, the same Jesus she could see in the most bereft and seemingly unloved of her brothers and sisters on earth. In one of her desperate cries to Jesus she wrote, "Lord my God, who am I that you should forsake me?" Is it possible that she could not see that her very words were the same as those uttered by the man on the cross she so longed to be with? Could she not realize that she had finally found union with the man who cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Perhaps it is best that she did not appreciate the intensity with which her prayers were answered. Freed from her darkness, she would have left him to his cross. Such can be the paradox of finding one’s heart’s desire.

John F. Kavanaugh, S.J., is a professor of philosophy at St. Louis University in St. Louis, Mo.

Reviews of Pope's new book Jesus of Nazareth

I have been pretty busy with work lately, and thus, very few posts. However, my work load has lessened quite a bit now so I am able to catch up on some blogging.





Friends have pointed out to me some reviews on Pope Benedict XVI's new book (to be released in English on May 15) entitled Jesus of Nazareth:



First, Zenit News has a synopsis of the book:

Code: ZE07041510
Date: 2007-04-15
Synopsis of Pope's Book
"Jesus of Nazareth"

ROME, APRIL 15, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is the synopsis of Benedict XVI's book "Jesus of Nazareth," released by the Italian publisher Rizzoli, which has handled worldwide sale of the rights to the work. The Italian edition will be in bookstores Monday, and the English-language edition will be made available May 15 by Doubleday in North America, and by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom.

* * * The Pope's Path to Jesus A personal meditation, not an exercise of the magisterium. This book is the first part of a work, the writing of which, as its author states, was preceded by a "long gestation" (Page xi). It reflects Joseph Ratzinger's personal search for the "face of the Lord" and is not intended to be a document forming part of the magisterium (Page xxiii).

"Everyone is free, then, to contradict me," the Pontiff stresses in the foreword (Page xxiv). The main purpose of the work is "to help foster [in the reader] the growth of a living relationship" with Jesus Christ (Page xxiv). In an expected second volume the Pope hopes "also to be able to include the chapter on the [infancy] narratives" concerning the birth of Jesus and to consider the mystery of his passion, death and resurrection.

It is primarily, therefore, a pastoral book. But it is also the work of a rigorous theologian, who justifies his assertions based on exhaustive knowledge of sacred texts and critical literature. He underlines the indispen¬sability of a historical-critical method for serious exegesis, but also highlights its limits: "Admittedly, to believe that, as man, he [Jesus] truly was God exceeds the scope of the historical method" (Page xxiii).

And yet, "Without anchoring in God, the person of Jesus remains shadowy, unreal, and unexplainable" (Schnackenburg, "Freundschaft mit Jesus," Page 322). In confirming this conclusion of a notable Roman Catholic representative of historical-critical exegesis, the Pope states that his book "sees Jesus in light of his communion with the Father" (Page xiv).

In addition, based on "reading the individual texts of the Bible in the context of the whole" -- a reading that "does not contradict historical-critical interpretation, but carries it forward in an organic way toward becoming theology in the proper sense" (Page xix) -- the author presents "the Jesus of the Gospels as the real, 'historical' Jesus," underlining "that this figure is much more logical and, historically speaking, much more intelligible than the reconstructions we have been presented with in the last decades" (Page xxii).

For Benedict XVI, one finds in the Scriptures the compelling elements to be able to assert that the historical personage, Jesus Christ, is also the Son of God who came to Earth to save humanity. In page after page, he examines these one by one, guiding and challenging the reader -- the believer but also the nonbeliever -- by way of an enthralling intellectual adventure.

Grounding his core premise on the fact of the intimate unity between the Old and the New Testament, and drawing on the Christological hermeneutics that see in Jesus Christ the key to the entire Bible, Benedict XVI presents the Jesus of the Gospels as the "new Moses" who fulfills Israel's ancient expectations (Page 1). This new Moses must lead the people of God to true and definitive freedom. He does so in a sequence of actions that, however, always allow God's plan to be anticipated in its entirety.

The Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan is "an acceptance of death for the sins of humanity, and the voice that calls out, 'This is my beloved Son,' over the baptismal waters is an anticipatory reference to the Resurrection" (Page 18). Jesus' immersion in the waters of the River Jordan is a symbol of his death and of his descent into hell -- a reality present, however, throughout his life.

To save humanity "He must recapitulate the whole of history from its beginnings" (Page 26), he must conquer the principal temptations that, in various forms, threaten men in all ages and, transforming them into obedience, reopen the road toward God (Chapter 2), toward the true Promised Land, which is the "Kingdom of God" (Page 44). This term, which can be interpreted in its Christological, mystical or even ecclesiastical dimension, ultimately means "the divine lordship, God's dominion over the world and over history, [which] transcends the moment, indeed transcends and reaches beyond the whole of history. And yet it is at the same time something belonging absolutely to the present" (Page 57). Indeed, through Jesus' presence and activity "God has here and now entered actively into history in a wholly new way." In Jesus "God ... draws near to us ... rules in a divine way, without worldly power, rules through the love that reaches 'to the end'" (Pages 60-61; John 13:1).

The theme of the "Kingdom of God" (Chapter 3), which pervades the whole of Jesus' preaching, is developed in further depth in the reflection on the "Sermon on the Mount" (Chapter 4). In the Sermon Jesus clearly appears as the "new Moses" who brings the new Torah or, rather, returns to Moses' Torah and, activating the intrinsic rhythms of its structure, fulfills it (Page 65).

The Sermon on the Mount, in which the beatitudes are the cardinal points of the law and, at one and the same time, a self-portrait of Jesus, demonstrates that this law is not just the result of a "face-to-face" talk with God but embodies the plenitude that comes from the intimate union of Jesus with the Father (Page 66). Jesus is the Son of God, the Word of God in person. "Jesus understands himself as the Torah" (Page 110). "This is the point that demands a decision [...] and consequently this is the point that leads to the Cross and the Resurrection" (Page 63).

The exodus toward the true "Promised Land," toward true freedom, requires the sequel of Christ. The believer has to enter the same communion of the Son with the Father. Only in this way can Man "fulfill" himself, because his innermost nature is oriented toward the relationship with God. This means that a fundamental element of his life is talking to God and listening to God. Because of this, Benedict XVI dedicates an entire chapter to prayer, explaining the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus himself taught us (Chapter 5).

Man's profound contact with God the Father through Jesus in the Holy Spirit gathers them together in the "we and us" of a new family that, via the choice of the Twelve Disciples, recalls the origins of Israel (the twelve Patriarchs) and, at the same time, opens the vision toward the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21:9-14) -- the ultimate destination of the whole story -- of the new Exodus under the guidance of the "new Moses."

With Jesus, the Twelve Disciples "have to pass from outward to inward communion with Jesus," so as then to be able to testify to his oneness with the Father and "become Jesus' envoys -- 'apostles,' no less -- who bring his message to the world" (Page 172). Albeit in its extremely variegated composition, the new family of Jesus, the Church of all ages, finds in him its unifying core and the will to live the universal character of his teaching (Chapter 6).

To make his message easier to understand and indeed to incorporate that message into daily living, Jesus uses the form of the parable. He comports the substance of what he intends to communicate -- ultimately he is always talking about his mystery -- attuned to the listener's comprehension using the bridge of imagery grounded in realities very familiar and accessible to that listener. Alongside this human aspect, however, there is an exquisitely theological explanation of the parables' sense, which Joseph Ratzinger highlights in an analysis of rare depth. He then comments more specifically on three parables, via which he illustrates the endless resources of Jesus' message and its perennial actuality (Chapter 7).

The next chapter also centers round the images used by Jesus to explain his mystery: They are the great images of John's Gospel. Before analyzing them, the Pope presents a very interesting summary of the various results of scientific research into who the apostle John was. With this, as also in his explanation of the images, he opens up new horizons for the reader that reveal Jesus with ever-increasing clarity as the "Word of God" (Page 317), who became man for our salvation as the "Son of God" (Page 304), coming to redirect humanity toward unity with the Father -- the reality personified by Moses (Chapter 8).

This vision is further expanded in the last two chapters. "The account of the Transfiguration of Jesus [...] interprets Peter's confession and takes it deeper, while at the same time connecting it with the mystery of Jesus' death and resurrection" (Pages 287-288). Both events -- the transfiguration and the confession -- are decisive moments for the earthly Jesus as they are for his disciples.

The true mission of the Messiah of God and the destiny of those who want to follow him are now definitively established. Both events become comprehensible to their full extent only if based on an organic view of the Old and New Testament. Jesus, the living Son of God, is the Messiah awaited by Israel who, through the scandal of the Cross, leads humanity into the "Kingdom of God" (Page 317) and to ultimate freedom (Chapter 9).

The Pope's book ends with an in-depth analysis of the titles that, according to the Gospels, Jesus used for himself (Chapter 10). Once again it becomes evident that only through reading the Scriptures as a united whole is one able to reveal the meaning of the three terms "Son of Man," "Son," and "I Am." This latter term is the mysterious name with which God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. This name now allows it to be seen that Jesus is that same God. In all three titles "Jesus at once conceals and reveals the mystery of his person. [...] All three of these terms demonstrate how deeply rooted he is in the Word of God, Israel's Bible, the Old Testament. And yet all these terms receive their full meaning only in him -- it is as if they had been waiting for him" (Page 354).

Together with the man of faith, who seeks to explain the divine mystery above all to himself; together with the extremely refined theologian, who ranges effortlessly from the results of modern doctrinal analyses to those of their ancient precursors, the book also reveals the pastor, who truly succeeds in his attempt "to help foster [in the reader] the growth of a living relationship" with Jesus Christ (Page xxiv), almost irresistibly drawing him into his own personal friendship with the Lord.

In this perspective the Pontiff is not afraid to denounce a world that, by excluding God and clinging only to visible and tangible realities, risks destroying itself in a self-centered quest for purely material well-being -- becoming deaf to the real call to the human being to become, through the Son, a son of God, and thereby to reach true freedom in the "Promised Land" of the "Kingdom of God."

* * * The page numbers refer to the U.S. edition of the book, which will be published by Doubleday.

And here is a review (I will post others as I come across them):

All Things Catholic by John L. Allen, Jr.
National Catholic Reporter, Friday, Apr. 27, 2007 - Vol. 6, No. 34

When people pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV news, they generally aren't looking for a Sunday school lesson. This creates a challenge for journalists covering religious leaders, since most of their public utterances are devoted either to expounding their faith, or urging people to behave. The way reporters solve the problem is by combing through those utterances to find statements presumed to have broad, non-sectarian significance, normally because they apply to matters of politics or culture.

The result is that the real concerns of religious leaders, and the priority they assign to those concerns, often don't come across terribly clearly -- not because reporters aren't doing their jobs, but because of how the news business works in a secular world. Recent coverage of Benedict XVI's new book, Jesus of Nazareth, offers a good example.

The first wave of stories focused on comments in the book about Africa and capitalism, even though they amount to asides in a 448-page treatise on the Gospels. Other stories styled the book as a rebuke to The Da Vinci Code. (That red herring was encouraged by an indirect allusion to Dan Brown's potboiler from Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna in a Vatican news conference.) Still others seemed charmed by the fact that the pope wrote that because his book is not a magisterial act, "everyone is free to contradict me." Beyond those angles, there was little interest in follow-up, in large part because a pope discussing Jesus strikes most people as the ultimate in "dog bites man" developments -- that is, the most normal thing in the world.
By the time anyone had actually read all 448 pages of Jesus of Nazareth, the moment for further analysis had already passed. Passed, that is, everywhere but here, where papal analysis never goes out of fashion.

I'm in Rome this week, and, among other things, I set myself the task of studying Jesus of Nazareth. The key question is, "Why this subject, and why now?" Yes, a pope talking about Jesus is hardly a thunderclap -- but a pope talking about prayer or morality would be equally par for the course. Given Benedict's fascination with liturgy, one might have expected him to turn his pen to that theme if it were purely a matter of indulging his own interests, or settling old academic scores. Yet the pope himself hinted that something more urgent is involved in Jesus of Nazareth, writing that he devoted "all his free moments" after his election to finishing the book. To be honest, that's a bit of misdirection; popes don't really have "free time," and in any event, how they fill the moments in their day which are not formally scheduled usually is a good indicator of their real priorities. Thus the choice to write on Jesus, striving to put the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith back together again, is hardly casual.

What seems clear is that the motive for the book is also emerging as the core doctrinal concern of this pontificate: Christology. Put in a nutshell, Benedict's thesis in Jesus of Nazareth is that there can be no humane social order or true moral progress apart from a right relationship with God; try as it might, a world organized etsi Deus non daretur, "as if God does not exist," will be dysfunctional and ultimately inhumane. Jesus Christ, Benedict insists, is "the sign of God for human beings." Presenting humanity with the proper teaching about Jesus is, therefore, according to Benedict, the highest form of public service the church has to offer.

The English edition of Jesus of Nazareth goes on sale from Doubleday May 15, and an excerpt will be carried in the May 11 edition of Newsweek. (That should make the pope, for at least a week, no longer "invisible," as Newsweek described him April 16.) Jesus of Nazareth is the first installment of what Benedict has projected as a longer work; he decided to publish the first 10 chapters now, he wrote, "because I don't know how much time and how much strength will still be given to me."
* * *
Intellectually, the aim of Jesus of Nazareth is, in the first place, to defend the reliability of the gospel accounts; and secondly, to argue that that gospels present Christ as God Himself, not as a prophet or moral reformer. Over and over, the pope uses phrases such as "implicit Christology," "hidden Christology," and "indirect Christology," to argue that even where the gospel accounts don't draw out the theological consequences of stories and sayings of Jesus, their message is nonetheless discernible.

On one level, Jesus of Nazareth reads like a running conversation with exegetes such as Adolf von Harnack, who argued that the Jesus of the gospels was not yet "the Christ," and that turning him into a deity was a work of later Christian theologizing. (Clearly, Benedict isn't buying it.) The book is sprinkled with references to writers such as Rudolf Bultmann, Joachim Jeremias, Pierre Grelot, Romano Guardini and Hans-Peter Kolvenbach (the Superior General of the Jesuits, whom Benedict obviously admires.)

The book also contains some characteristic literary flashes of Joseph Ratzinger, such as his suggestion that we can see a model of redeemed creation in the beauty of Benedictine monasteries, while the horrors of a world enveloped by the "obscurity of God" can be glimpsed in Chernobyl.

On another level, the book offers detailed commentaries on the Scriptures. Benedict, for example, complains that modern translations of Matthew 7:28, which in Greek says that the crowds were "frightened" by Jesus' teaching, often uses "astonished" instead, which he believes obscures the awesome character of an encounter with divinity. Likewise, Benedict doesn't like the way modern translations treat "Yahweh" as a proper name for God, when in fact the Hebrew means "I Am," which is almost a way of underlining the impossibility of naming God. Benedict also says that he would prefer calling the "Parable of the Prodigal Son" the "Parable of the Two Brothers" instead, because the older brother who resents his father's graciousness offers an equally important lesson, especially for pious religious people.
Yet Jesus of Nazareth is not just an intellectual exercise, or an attempt to offer grist for homilies, though there's material for that aplenty. Ultimately, the motive for the book seems to be deep concern for what the pope sees as the toxic consequences of flawed Christology.

Over the course of the book, Benedict critiques a number of popular modern interpretations of Jesus: Jesus as a preacher of liberal morality, Jesus as a social revolutionary, Jesus as an inspired prophet or sage on the level of other founders of religious movements. The pope is well aware that these interpretations usually arise from noble motives, which he also shares -- to affirm the primacy of human beings over the law, to combat poverty and injustice, to express tolerance for other religions. In the end, Benedict believes that all such exegesis puts the cart before the horse. Out of impatience to get to desired social outcomes, Benedict argues, revisionist Christologies subvert the only basis for real humanism, which is belief in God, and in an objective truth that comes from God and stands above the human will to power.
On page 56, reflecting on Christ's temptations in the desert, Benedict makes this argument. (The following is my translation from the Italian edition.)

"Whenever God is considered a secondary concern, which can temporarily or stably be set aside in the name of more important things, then it is precisely those things presumed to be more important which fail. It's not just the negative result of Marxism which makes the point. The aid given by the West to developing countries, based purely on technical-material principles, which has not only left God to the side but has also distanced people from God with the pride of its presumed superior wisdom, has made the Third World into the 'Third World' in the modern sense. That aid put aside existing religious, moral and social structures and introduced its technical mentality into the vacuum. Believing it could transform stones into bread, it has instead given stones in place of bread. What's at stake is the primacy of God. It's a matter of recognizing God as a reality, a reality without which nothing else can be good. History cannot be governed with merely material structures, prescinding from God. If the heart of the human person isn't good, then nothing else can be good. And goodness of heart can come only from He who is Himself goodness, who is the Good."

Benedict makes the same argument with regard to peace.
"Discord with God is the point of departure for all the poisonings of the human person; and overcoming that discord is the fundamental presupposition of peace in the world. . . . Standing in peace with God is an indispensable part of any commitment to 'peace in the world.' It's from the former that the criteria and the strength derive for this commitment. Where humanity loses sight of God, peace also falls away, and violence takes the upper hand with previously unimaginable forms of cruelty. We see this today all too clearly."

In that sense, Jesus of Nazareth expresses in an exegetical key the same concern with Christology that drove the interventions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger with regard to theologians such as Jesuit Frs. Jacques Dupuis and Roger Haight, as well as the most recent notification on Jesuit Fr. Jon Sobrino. In each case, the concern was with what Joseph Ratzinger saw as a faulty Christology in the name of some presumed good -- inter-religious tolerance in the case of Dupuis and Haight, social liberation for Sobrino.

Thus we come to what the pope wrote about Africa, in the context of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
"The actuality of the parable is obvious. If we apply it to the dimensions of globalized society, we see how the population of Africa, which finds itself robbed and pillaged, concerns us closely. We see how much they are our 'neighbor;' we see also that our style of life, the history in which we too are involved, have despoiled them and continues to despoil them. In this regard, what's understood above all is the fact that we have wounded them spiritually. Instead of giving them God, the God who is close to us in Christ, and thereby gathering from their traditions all that is precious and grand and carrying it to fulfillment, we have instead brought them the cynicism of a world without God, in which only profit and power count; we've destroyed moral criteria so much that corruption and the will to power deprived of scruples become something obvious. This doesn't apply just to Africa. Yes, we must give material aid, and we must examine our kind of life. But we give too little if we give only material things."

To be clear, Benedict XVI is not minimizing the importance of both direct aid and structural justice with regard to the poor, above all in Africa. On April 23, Benedict wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, current president of the G-8, demanding the "the rapid, total and unconditional cancellation" of the external debt of poor countries, describing it as a "grave and unconditional moral responsibility, founded on the unity of the human race, and on the common dignity and shared destiny of rich and poor alike."

His argument is rather that any such act of justice, shorn of reference to God, is destined to be a partial remedy to the wounds afflicting the human family. Only a renewed focus on Christ, and on the plan for human life marked out in the example of Christ, he believes, offers hope of a lasting cure. According to Benedict, efforts to cut corners, to recast Christ in ways that seemingly promote progress more directly, always end in ruin.
I had an unexpected confirmation of this analysis last week.

Last Thursday, I attended the annual Rector's Dinner at the North American College, the residence for American seminarians in Rome. While there, I was pulled aside by a Vatican official who wanted to comment on what I had written some time ago about the Sobrino notification, where I made the point that it wasn't really about liberation theology but about Christology.
"That piece was widely noticed here," the official said. "Christology is the key for this pope." The official then added: "And it's not over."

That comment suggests there may be additional investigations, additional notifications, additional teaching documents and papal messages, circling around the themes laid out in Jesus of Nazareth.
* * *
I'll add four vignettes from the book which don't necessarily illustrate larger themes, but which are nevertheless of interest.

First, Benedict tackles the question of calling God "mother." In a nutshell, he affirms that God is beyond gender, and that Scripture often uses the image of a mother's womb to express the intimacy of God's love for humanity. Yet, he says, "mother" is not a title of God in the Bible, and hence the church is disqualified from using it.

Benedict notes that there were a number of mother-gods in the religious traditions of the cultures surrounding the Israelites, and speculates that perhaps it was only by excluding that sort of language in the Bible that the sovereignty and the "otherness" of God could become clear. While the pope acknowledges that theory may not be completely satisfactory, he says we're nevertheless obliged to follow the Bible's lead.

"Even if we can't give absolutely cogent reasons, the language of the prayer of the entire Bible remains normative for us, in which, the great metaphors of maternal love notwithstanding, 'mother' is not a title of God, and is not an appellation with which one may address God. We must pray as Jesus, on the basis of the Holy Scripture, has taught us to pray, not as it might strike us or please us. Only thus do we pray in the right way."
* * *
Second, in light of recent controversies in Catholic-Jewish relations, including a dispute in Israel over the presentation of Pope Pius XII at Yad Vashem and concerns related to the renewed use of the older Tridentine Mass, it's interesting to note the way in which Benedict refers to Judaism in Jesus of Nazareth.

In keeping with classical Christian exegesis and theology, Benedict is unabashed in asserting that Christ was the fulfillment of the promises and longings expressed in the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet he is deeply impatient with suggestions that Christ rebelled against, or transposed to a merely metaphorical plane, the demands of the Jewish law. Yes, Benedict says, Christ "universalized" the law, making it applicable not just to Israel but to all peoples, but he also insisted repeatedly that it was not his intention to cancel anything from the Law and the Prophets. Benedict rejects any attempt to minimize the importance of the Old Testament for Christianity.

It's interesting in this regard that the exegete whom Benedict quotes at greatest length, and with most evident fondness, is Jewish. The pope devotes pages 129-140 to reflections on the book A Rabbi Talks with Jesus by Jacob Neusner, whom Benedict calls a "great intellectual." Benedict writes at one stage that he wants to insert himself into their conversation. He praises the "great love" with which Neusner writes of Jesus, and applauds him for seeing clearly what Benedict believes too many Christian exegetes, in their passion for dissection, fail to grasp: that the Jesus of the New Testament is precisely the Christ of Faith, one who claims for himself the authority that belongs only to God.

"Jesus was not simply another reforming rabbi," Neusner writes, in a passage Benedict cites with approval. "What's in discussion are the claims of authority on the part of Jesus." In that sense, Benedict claims, Neusner "liquidates" the image of Jesus as a preacher of liberal morality promoted by Harnack and others.

Benedict adds that he also wants to walk along the same path with Neusner in order to better understand "our Jewish brothers."

Another insight into Benedict's attitude towards Judaism comes in his discussion of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (or, as noted above, as the pope prefers, the "Parable of the Two Brothers."). Benedict notes that ancient Christians tended to see in the two brothers representations of the Pagans (the profligate brother who saw the light) and the Jews (the earnest older brother who stayed home and followed all the rules).

"This application to the Jews is not unjustified," the pope writes, "if we leave it as we've found it in the text; as a delicate effort of God to persuade Israel, an effort which is completely in the hands of God. We should certainly note, in fact, that the father of the parable not only does not contest the fidelity of the older brother, but expressly confirms his identity as a beloved son: 'My son, you are with me always, and everything I have is yours.' Such an interpretation would be wrong, however, if it were transformed into a condemnation of the Jews, which is not what the text is talking about."
* * *
Though Benedict is a gracious figure, sometimes in the thrust-and-parry of academic argument, one can feel the iron fist beneath his velvet gloves. There are passages in Jesus of Nazareth where his frustration with exegetes who cast doubt on the reliability of the gospels becomes especially clear.

Perhaps the best example is Benedict's discussion of the temptations of Christ. In the gospel accounts, Satan supports his offers by quoting the Psalms, and Jesus responds by quoting Deuteronomy. Benedict says the conversation reads like a debate between two experts on the Scriptures, and notes approvingly a passage from Vladimir Solov'ëv, a 19th century Russian philosopher, in his book on the Anti-Christ. Solov'ëv wrote that the Anti-Christ "received a doctorate honoris causa in theology from the University of Tübingen; he's a great expert in the Bible."

"With this account," Benedict writes, "Solov'ëv wanted to express in drastic fashion his skepticism with regard to a certain kind of erudite exegesis of his time. It's not a matter of rejecting scientific study of the Bible as such, but rather a very healthy and necessary warning regarding erroneous paths that such study might take. Interpretation of the Bible can, in fact, become an instrument of the Anti-Christ. It's not only Solov'ëv who says so, it's implicitly affirmed in the account of the temptation itself. The most destructive books on the figure of Jesus, which dismantle the faith, are interwoven with the presumed results of exegesis."
* * *
Finally, anyone who knows the thought of Benedict realizes how strongly he recoils from charges that Catholicism went wrong by "Hellenizing" the faith of the Bible.

In fact, Benedict has argued that the encounter between Christianity and the thought world of Greco-Roman antiquity was providential, and that Christianity cannot simply shuck aside its Hellenistic inheritance, like a snake casting off an old layer of skin, without losing something essential. (That formed part of the argument in his now-famous address at the University of Regensburg, which few noticed because of controversies over his comments about Islam.)
In that light, it's interesting that the very last paragraph of Jesus of Nazareth aims to exonerate the church from the charge that by adopting Hellenistic philosophical concepts, it betrayed the message of Scripture. Instead, he argues, Greek concepts allowed the early church to explicate more clearly the claims implicit in the Bible about what it means for Jesus to be the "Son of God," and to save those claims from misinterpretation.

"It was necessary," he writes, "to clarify successfully this new significance through complex and difficult processes of differentiation and through pain-staking research, in order to protect it from mythico-polytheistic and political interpretations. This was the motive for which the First Council of Nicea (325) employed the adjective homoousios ('of the same substance'). This term did not Hellenize the faith, it did not burden the faith with an extraneous philosophy, but rather it fixed precisely the incomparably new and different element which appeared in [the Bible's] speech about Jesus with the Father. In the Credo of Nicea, the church once again says together with Peter, 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.' "

"He Descended into Hell": Pope Benedict XVI on the Holy Saturday Mystery

The Absence of God... and the Conquest of Hell!


The following is a beautiful passage from Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) [1968, pp. 294-97]. Cardinal Ratzinger is dealing with an article of the Creed that causes a great deal of curiosity and confusion to the modern mind: Christ "descended into hell".





"...Instead of pushing the question aside, then, should we not learn to see that this article of faith, which liturgically is associated with Holy Saturday in the Church's year, is particularly close to our day and is to a particular degree the experience of our [twentieth] century? On Good Friday our gaze remains fixed on the crucified Christ, but Holy Saturday is the day of the "death of God", the day that expresses the unparalleled experience of our age, anticipating the fact that God is simply absent, that the grave hides him, that he no longer awakes, no longer speaks, so that one no longer needs to gainsay him but can simply overlook him. "God is dead and we have killed him." This saying of Nietzsche's belongs linguistaically to the tradition of Christian Passiontide piety; it expresses the content of Holy Saturday, "descended into hell" (cites: Cf. H. de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism).
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This article of the Creed always reminds me of two scenes in the Bible. the first is that cruel story in the Old Testament in wihch Elijah challenges the priests of Baal to implore their God to give them fire for their sacrifice. They do so, and naturally nothing happens. He ridicules them, just as the "enlightened rationalist" ridicules the pious person and finds him laughable when nothing happens in response to his prayers. Elijah calls out to the priests that perhaps they had not prayed loud enough: "Cry aloud, for he [Baal] is a god; either he is musing, or has gone aside, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened" (1 Kings 18:27). When one reads today this mockery of the devotees of Baal, one can begin to feel uncomfortable; one can get the feeling that we have now arrived in that situation and that the mockery must now fall on us. No calling seems to be able to awaken God. The rationalist seems entitled to say to us, "Pray louder, perhaps your God will then wake up." "Descended into hell"; how true this is of our time, the descent of God into muteness, into the dark silence of the absent.
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But alongside the story of Elijah and its New Testament analogue, the story of the Lord sleeping in the midst of the storm on the lake (Mk 4:35-41, par.), we must put the Emmaus story (Lk 24:13-35). The disturbed disciples are talking of the death of their hope. To them, something like the death of God has happened: the point at which God finally seemed to have spoken has disappeared. The One sent by God is dead, and so there is a complete void. Nothing replies any more. But while they are there speaking of the death of their hope and can no longer see God, they do not notice that this very hope stands alive in their midst; that "God", or rather the image they had formed of his promise, had to die so that he could live on a larger scale. The image they had formed of God, and into which they sought to compress him, had to be destroyed, so that over the ruins of the demolished house, as it were, they could see the sky again and him who remains the infinitely greater. ...
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Thus the article about the Lord's descent into hell reminds us that not only God's speech but also his silence is part of the Christian revelation. God is not only the comprehensible word that comes to us; he is also the silent, inaccessible, uncomprehended, and incomprehensible ground that eludes us. To be sure, in Christianity there is a primacy of the logos, of the word, over silence; God has spoken. God is word. But this does not entitle us to forget the truth of God's abiding concealment. Only when we have experienced him as silence may we hope to hear his speech, too, which proceeds in silence (in a footnote, Ratzinger notes the significance of silence in the writings of apostolic father Igantius of Antioch). Christology reaches out beyond the Cross, the moment when the divine love is tangible, into the death, the silence and the eclipse of God. Can we wonder that the Church and the life of the individual are led again into this hour of silence, into the forgotten and almost discarded article, "Descended ino hell"?
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When one ponders this, the question of the "scriptural evidence" solves itself; at any rate in Jesus' death cry, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mk 15:34), the mystery of Jesus' descent into hell is illuminated as if in a glaring flash of lightening on a dark night. We must not forget that these words of the crucified Christ are the opening line of one of Israel's prayers (Ps 22:1), which summarizes in a shattering way the needs and hopes of this people chosen by God and apparently at the moment so utterly abandoned by him. This prayer that rises from the sheer misery of God's seeming eclipse ends in praises of God's greatness. This element, too, is present in Jesus' death cry, which has been recently described by Ernst Kasemann as a prayer sent up from hell, as the raising of a standard, the first commandment, in the wilderness of God's apparent absence: "The Son still holds on to faith when faith seems to have become meaningless and the earthly reality proclaims absent the God of whom the first thief and the mocking crowd speak--not for nothing. His cry is not for life and survival, not for himself, but for his Father. His cry stands against the reality of the whole world." After this, do we still need to ask what worship must be done in our hour of darkness? Can it be anything else but the cry from the depths in company with the Lord who "has descended into hell" and who has established the nearness of God in the midst of abandonment by God?"
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...In this last prayer of Jesus, as in the scene on the Mount of Olives, what appears as the innermost heart of his Passion is not any physical pain but radical loneliness, complete abandonment. But in the last analysis what comes to light here is simply the abyss of loneliness of man in general, of man who is alone in his innermost being. This loneliness, which is usually thickly overlaid but is nevertheless the true situation of man, is at the same time in fundamental contradiction with the nature of man, who cannot exist alone; he needs company...
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...where man falls into extreme loneliness he is not afraid of anything definite that could be explained away; on the contrary, he experiences the fear of loneliness, the uneasiness and vulnerability of his own nature, something that cannot be overcome by rational means. ...
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...The fear peculiar to man [fear of loneliness] cannot be overcome by reason but only by the presence of someone who loves him...
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...if a state of abandoment were to arise that was so deep that no "You" could reach into it any more, then we should have real, total loneliness and dreadfulness, what theology calls "hell". We can now define exactly what this word means: it denotes a loneliness that the word love can no longer penetrate and that therefore indicates the exposed nature of existence in itself. In this connection who can fail to remember that writers and philosophers of our time take the view that basically all encounters between human beings remain superficial, that no man has access to the real depths of another (i.e. the anthropolgy of Sarte)?...
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In truth--one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone--the door of death. In the last analysis all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness. From this point of view, it is possible to understand why the Old Testament has only one word for hell and death, the word sheol; it regards them as ultimately identical. Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which love can no longer advance is--hell.
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... This article [of the Creed] thus asserts that... in his Passion he went down into the abyss of our abandoment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer. Neither is the same any longer because there is life in the midst of death, because love dwells in it. Now only deliberate self-enclosure is hell or, as the Bible calls it, the second death (Rev. 20:14, for example). But death is no longer the path into icy solitude; the gates of sheol have been opened. ...[cites the opening of tombs and rising of the dead at the death of Jesus in Mt 27:52] ... The doors of death stand open since life--love--has dwelt in death.

I was dead, but now I live for ever,

and I hold the keys of death and of hell.

--antiphon from Morning Prayer for Holy Saturday

A book review on St. Joan of Arc

The following is a book review from the washingtonpost.com. This books sounds interesting and is written by a man of faith. However, the headline of the review makes me a little nervous ("On Her Own Terms"). We Americans seem to love the story of saints who buck ecclesiastical authorities (we saw this in the coverage of the newly canonized St. Theodore Guerin). Of course, in this, and many other cases, the Church leaders were in the wrong, but journalists fail to note that saints practice obedience first to God--and not prideful disobedience to authority just for its own sake (the ole' "I did it MY way"). Shea's review also mentions that St. Joan was targeted because she was a woman of power in a world dominated by "male clergy" and because she received revelations from God without the mediation of a priest. That may be the case, but I wonder if there is a little bit of radical feminism in the back of Shea's (or Spoto's) mind. The point about private revelations independent of the clery is perfectly vaild. Throughout history God has given private revelations directly to men, women, and children. Priests exist primarily to give Christians the sacraments--most especially the Eucharist--and not to be the sole source for truth from God. God gave private revelations to St. Joan, but He gave her the Eucharist (without which she would admit she would be nothing) through the ministry of priests. While St. Joan unfortunately was persecuted by churchmen, she never would have considered herself as independent of the Church or outside of the Church. This book sounds like an interesting read. Now, for the review:

On Her Own Terms
By Rachel Hartigan Shea, a contributing editor of Book WorldTuesday, March 20, 2007; Page C03

JOAN:
The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint
By Donald Spoto
HarperSanFrancisco. 222 pp. $24.95

What is a modern reader to make of the story of Joan of Arc? A country girl hears voices she says are from God, persuades an uncrowned king to put her at the head of his army, wins a crucial battle and changes the course of history. She seems pure myth and yet is a historical fact. Modern minds shy away from the myth and try to explain away the fact by casting her as "a cunning charlatan, a deluded patriot, a sexually confused peasant . . . or a pitiable psychotic," writes Donald Spoto in "Joan," his slim but compelling paean to the virgin who saved France.

But Joan must be understood on her own terms, argues Spoto, a theologian whose books include biographies of Jesus, Saint Francis of Assisi, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Tennessee Williams. Born in 1411 or 1412 in the tiny French village of Domr?my in the midst of the Hundred Years' War, Joan lived at a time when "the language of faith was like a common country in which all people lived." That God would choose to speak to a young girl in her father's garden would surprise her contemporaries, perhaps, but not shock them.

Nor does it shock Spoto, who approaches his subject with the sophistication of a historian and the admiration of a true believer. "I believe that her spiritual experiences were profoundly valid," writes Spoto, "and that they convey something of the truth." According to him, any theory that strips religion away from Joan's visions in favor of some psychological or medical root cause -- an ear infection producing strange sounds, say, or an eye condition causing light sensitivity -- must ignore her demonstrated sanity and physical health. If the visions "came from the mind of a religious fanatic," he argues, "or a romantic, neurasthenic adolescent, or if they were the specters of an inflamed mind or the deliberately concocted tales of a self-deluded egotist, then we would expect to find -- would have to find -- an accompanying pattern of delusion in her life."

Instead, Spoto discovers that she was "energetic, witty, courageous, and intelligent beyond all expectation." Uncowed by authority, she declared upon meeting Charles VII, "my most eminent lord Dauphin, I have come, sent by God to bring help to you and to the kingdom." The demoralized dauphin, whose kingdom was so racked with civil war and English invaders that he had not yet been crowned king, glowed "radiant" at her words and sent her to lift the English siege of Orl?ans.

Joan's strength was not her military might -- her sword remained unblooded -- but her piousness, which heartened the French soldiers. She had persuaded them of the "grander purpose of their battle: to save France, which was sacred to them and, they believed, to God." When the French prevailed at Orl?ans, after a horrific battle in which hundreds of English drowned in the Loire River from the weight of their armor, "British hegemony in France had been broken, and the survival of France was no longer a dim hope but a distinct probability."

But Joan's moment of great victory led, inexorably, to her downfall. She had succeeded where French military men had not, and she based that success upon direct contact with God, no priestly intercession required. She was a "transforming presence in a world of male warriors, male royalty, and male clergy," writes Spoto. Naturally, men, both French and English, moved to be rid of her. The king, guided by jealous advisers, stopped providing her with sufficient troops. The English set aside special forces to capture her with the aim of trying her for heresy. And captured she was, by a French noble who sold her off to the English.

The trial, held on French soil with a French judge but very much under English control, had only one possible outcome: to burn Joan as a heretic. What else to do with a woman who "is schismatic, sacrilegious, idolatrous, apostate, evil-speaking and evil-doing, blasphemous, scandalous, seditious, a destroyer of peace, a warmonger who thirsts for human blood and urges others to spill it," as one of the charging documents spluttered. Twenty-five years later, when French officials acquitted Joan in a posthumous retrial, it was clear that evidence had been falsified and that she had been tricked into wearing men's clothing one last time, the charge that ultimately sent her to the stake at the age of 19. A minor infraction, it would seem, but, Spoto explains, "to claim male prerogatives was . . . abominable."

As archaic as Joan's life and terrible end appear, Spoto argues for her relevance today: "If Joan was right in her insistence that the unwarranted takeover of one country by another is repugnant, then she is more than a historical curiosity: she remains a prophetic witness for every generation." Yet he goes no further with this political claim, leaving the reader to wonder whether this is an oblique criticism of U.S. foreign adventures or something else entirely. More convincing, even to a nonbeliever, is his contention that Joan saw, or truly believed she saw, visions from God. "The entire Jewish-Christian faith tradition," writes Spoto, "is based on the belief that God once summoned ordinary people and through them worked extraordinary deeds for His own purpose."

On the morning before Joan died, she asked a priest, "Where shall I be tonight?" Spoto, for one, believes he knows the answer.