World Youth Day

 This year's World Youth Day, a Catholic celebration with and for young persons, starts August 1, 2023 in Lisbon, Portugal. For more information, you can go to their website HERE. 

Amoris Laetitia

I just finished reading Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia (March 19, 2016). It is translated, The Joy of Love, and is a culmination of two years of Vatican-sponsored meetings and input concerning the family. With the explosion of the number of divorces, there has been an increasing pressure from liberals (progressives) to change the Church’s response to those who have divorced and remarried. This is especially because these persons are not allowed to partake of the Eucharist in the mass. The divorced complained that a repentant murderer can receive communion while they can’t. On the conservative (traditionalist) side, marriage is held as a metaphor for Christ’s relationship to His church, and therefore indissoluble. One of my own interests in the document is from the viewpoint of how women are treated by the Church, and I was pleasantly surprised to see some understanding.

Pope Francis agrees to the Christ-Church-marriage comparison, but with the understanding that people are not as perfect as Christ and therefore their marriages will not be perfect. The pope continues to hold up a good marriage as a difficult but attainable goal, worthy of all its efforts. Yet he asks for the mercy of those who interact with married couples and for the divorced and re-married Catholics who feel ostracized by not being allowed communion. The pope maintains these people are not excommunicated and should not be made to feel as such. To conservatives who don’t want change, any thought of giving them communion is a liberal viewpoint that they fear will lead to a downhill slide of the entire institution of marriage.

I found some of the most refreshing sentences in the whole exhortation Amoris Laetitia to be in Sections 36 and 37. In 36, Pope Francis comments on the overbearing emphasis of Church leaders on procreation that made Catholicism seem more about having the maximum amount of children instead of focusing on the divinity of Jesus Christ. Of course having children is important, but I don't think every married person is called to parenthood. And unfortunately not all children come to believe in God. But we are all called to worship and evangelize the nations for Jesus Christ. Section 36 has this sentence:

Then too, we often present marriage in such a way that its unitive meaning, its call to grow in love and its ideal of mutual assistance are overshadowed by an almost exclusive insistence on the duty of procreation.

Then, speaking of clergy, in 37 Pope Francis wrote: 

We also find it hard to make room for the consciences of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and are ca­pable of carrying out their own discernment in complex situations. We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them.

How important this is in contrast to the effort to control people.

Another section I like is 54, which speaks of women’s rights. It says emancipation of women is not to be blamed for all the woes of marriage. The pope writes:

If certain forms of feminism have arisen which we must consider inadequate, we must nonetheless see in the women’s movement the working of the Spirit for a clearer recognition of the dignity and rights of women.

Thank goodness. Let us hope this is a dawn finally of a new worldview about women. I’m not saying women always will make the right decisions or discern correctly, but I believe we can be as capable as men of doing so.

It remains to be seen what will actually happen in response to the paper. The Germans have been chafing at the bit to make changes, as are progressive groups of priests in Ireland and the US. But the tensions persist because there are plenty of conservatives up in arms and writing about it. One article is by Raymond Cardinal Burke, "'Amoris Laetitia' and the constant teaching and practice of the Church," National Catholic Register, April 12, 2016, basically saying that bishops and priests don’t really have to follow it. Conservative bloggers are complaining as well.

Pope Francis, though he says he encourages dialogue, has in turn had some pretty harsh words for conservatives: Carol Glatz, "'Witch hunts' rooted in putting laws above God's truth, pope says,"  Catholic News Service, April 11, 2016. The tensions are simmering and though it is rather fascinating to watch, it is not good for the Church to be mired in disagreements. When Catholics, leaders or lay, are so diverse, we need to pray for discernment. I’ve found, though, that persons can be so tied to one worldview, they can’t imagine any other having merits. This is a block to listening to other people.

However, what happens when different people are convinced the Holy Spirit is leading each of them but in different ways? Then we obviously have a problem of understanding exactly how the Holy Spirit leads and what He is leading toward. It may be that we need to consider what each other is saying and seek God’s will in mutual prayer. Hopefully we can all improve in discernment together.

Discerning Women

My post for today is on the first Monday of the Month. I had been doing it on First Fridays, the day of devotion for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I’ve been attending mass on that day for a long time, but am planning a shift toward Monday devotion and will try to attend mass at least one Monday a month. Monday is devoted to the Holy Ghost and souls in Purgatory (you can see a list of devotions at Fish Eaters HERE). 

In my last post, I mentioned the Extraordinary Synod of the Family, called by Pope Francis and held in October. Pope Francis has called Catholic Bishops to give input about the family and work on the problems related to it. They are going to have another meeting next year in which there may be some revisions of the current status of teaching. The Pope is looking for input from the general Catholic membership also. Since the Pope and others have used the Holy Family as a model for families, I’d like to comment about that for my December post.

For a long time the Church leadership has insisted that all married couples seek to “develop a mentality of openness to life,” which to them means having a marriage in which every sexual act would potentially lead to children. Concerning the Holy Family, the Catholic Church holds that Mary was a virgin throughout her whole life and Jesus was her only child. In order for that to be true, Mary and Joseph had no sexual relations and apparently felt no compulsion to have more children.

Last month I talked about Christ saying that his true family are those who do God’s will. Ironically the example of the Holy Family, instead of backing the Magisterium's apparent interpretation, more clearly shows that God called Mary directly and personally (through an angel) to do His will. God did not consult first with Mary’s religious leaders, her parents, or even her husband-to-be. And Mary answered directly to God (through an angel) without first consulting with her religious leaders, her parents, or even her husband-to-be. She had to discern (I believe with God’s help) that the angel was a good one, since not all angels are. Mary didn’t know if, in her acceptance, Joseph would still marry her or if her parents would reject her or if the Jewish leaders would try to have her stoned. 

I don't understand how our Church leadership can be sincere in using Mary as an example to promote child-bearing. Of course, Jesus Christ was quite a child, but no amount of child-bearing could make another woman into Mary or another child equal to Christ.

John Paul II, in his Apostolic letter Mulieris dignitatem (August 15, 1988), also extensively cites Mary’s life. He says virginity and motherhood are complimentary, but it is a little hard to understand that in a practical way. He talks about consecrated virgins caring for others, such as the poor, which certainly is often the case. This is a form of mothering though it is not to biological children. However, perhaps a young woman does not feel the call to religious vocation but does discern that God calls her to be, for example, a doctor. Then she spends her youth in becoming educated and starts to practice. If she later falls in love with a man, she will probably discern that she still has that original calling to be a doctor. She then also needs to discern if this man is compatible as a life partner, and by “compatible” I mean someone who respects the woman in all her facets. Women and men both need to realize they first must seek God, then, if so inclined, seek a human partner.

Marriage is present in other religions, so to be married is not necessarily to evangelize for Christianity. Though lasting marriage is very important, it seems to be one aspect of Christ’s larger message. The priority of the Church is evangelization. The central point of Christianity is to believe Jesus Christ is one of the persons of the Trinity of God who came to Earth, lived a sinless life and died in atonement of the sins of humanity. We are also to proclaim such to others in the best way we can. It is vital for each of us to believe in Him and to continue to proclaim His divinity and inform persons that they also need to have this faith for the salvation of their souls and an everlasting life with God in heaven.

Most of us have long lives, and if a married Christian woman truly discerns that God is calling her to motherhood, the Church should support her and her family in every way they can. But if a married Catholic woman discerns that God is calling her to promote His kingdom using gifts other than motherhood, then the Church should also support her and her husband in every way they can. These women with other callings would indeed be wonderful assets to the Church’s mission. Not every career woman is selfishly out for herself in the way she is often portrayed. She might be giving to others in very important physical and spiritual ways. (And this is possible for married women without abortifacients, but NFP is just not sufficient. Women can be irregular and can't always plan for the wedding night.) The Church leadership is a long way off from this ideal of supporting women. I believe this contributes greatly to the fact that American, European, and now Latin American women, and men along with them, have left the Church.

There was another conference on the family in November—this one ecumenical. Vatican News at the time reported comments from Pope Francis about complementarity between spouses in a family:

The Holy Father began his address by dwelling on the word “complementarity”: “a precious word, with multiple meanings.” Although complementarity can refer “situations where one of two things adds to, completes, or fulfills a lack in the other” it also means much more than that. Christians, he said, “find its deepest meaning in the first Letter to the Corinthians where Saint Paul tells us that the Spirit has endowed each of us with different gifts so that-just as the human body's members work together for the good of the whole-everyone's gifts can work together for the benefit of each.”

Complementarity, the Pope said, “is at the root of marriage and family.” Although there are tensions in families, the family also provides the framework in which those tensions can be resolved.” He said that complementarity should not be confused with a simplistic notion that “all the roles and relations of the sexes are fixed in a single, static pattern.” Rather, “complementarity will take many forms as each man and woman brings his or her distinctive contributions to their marriage and to the formation of their children.”

Pope Francis has been encouraging discernment. Of course we all need the right foundation. Then the Church leaders and members should learn when to discern together and when individuals should be trusted to discern God's will for themselves. We need to pray that we can listen to God as well as Mary, the mother of Jesus, did so many years ago.

______________

May you have a blessed Christmas. I hope you have time (3:44) to play the video at the top of the page. The song is "Joy." Music by Cindy Morgan, Lights by eShepherds of Light. I saw it  HERE at the Vimeo website.

Family Discernment

Pope Francis had called for an “Extraordinary Synod of Bishops,” which was held in October in Rome. The group discussed the family and its relationship with evangelization. At completion of their 2 week meeting, they issued a statement called, ‘Synod14-"Relatio Synodi" of the 3rd Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of bishops: "Pastoral Challenges to the Family in the Context of Evangelization" (5-19 October 2014). Zenit has an English translation of the final document HERE.

The Synod has focused on the family as the male-female-child unit (nuclear family), but the whole Church is also sometimes referred to as a family (Church family). Though I’ve seen quite a few references to what Jesus Christ said about divorce, here I want to point to another quote concerning what He said about family.

Jesus had been speaking to a crowd and someone told him that his mother and brothers were outside seeking him. The Lord asked,

“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Matthew 12:48-50 NABRE).

God’s will is something Christians strive to do in our imperfect way, and our efforts have many aspects. If we are Christians, our nuclear families are to be considered in the greater context of what it means to follow Christ. In doing this, we try to understand the meaning of Christ’s words with the help given to us by the writers of the Bible and Christian leaders. But if and when possible, we also try to connect with God in an interior way. We pray to Him, we think about Him, and this already is beginning to make that interior relationship. Then, some of us feel movements deep within that lead us to believe God may be present. They evoke emotions of awe or love or other spiritual dimensions. They seem to us beyond those felt every day, perhaps as a part of special events of life or even deeper and wider than these.

Catholic leaders encourage young people to seek their vocation, meaning to try to follow God’s will. They also mean it in another way, since “vocation” stands for a life in specific religious service. I’ve often read of priests, religious or deacons who felt they had followed God’s will in pursuing their vocation. This effort to hear God’s call is an interior communication with God.

Romance books always have scenes of persons starting to notice each other and becoming aware that they react in a different way to each other than to anyone else. As most people know, these feelings can be very vivid and energizing. And of course if thwarted, they can lead to heartbreak and great pain.

The Psalms in the Bible are a reminder of the communion King David had with the Lord, with emotions not exactly the same but comparable to the romance books. Often he expresses anguish, but also joy and awe at God’s creation. Many people have experienced a great joy when they have first become Christians. But after time, the going can get tough. Saints have talked about their “dark nights of the soul,” and so it can be a little like the human relationships we experience.

Christians in general experience difficult relationships among each other, easily demonstrated by the number of denominations we have and even the infighting inside each of these. And certainly we have problems relating to non-Christians.

All relationships can be joyous on one hand and terribly difficult on the other. How do we get to the right place in these relationships? I’d like to say I’ve figured it out, but my rapport with others can be as rocky as anyone else’s. Yet I do have an ideal that I try to follow in my life, and it has to do with discernment and prayer.

I know for Catholics, especially devout ones, that saying the Rosary is next to being in heaven. However, I’m a convert, and I don’t have the same connection to it that they do. I’m not saying they shouldn’t continue with it, but I personally prefer a prayer which expresses thanks, awe and supplications more specifically. I do this as my life rolls along, often praying for specific situations.

I’d like to see that happen in our Church families, with groups praying, discussing, and discerning together. Right now, we pray in the mass, which is good, but it sometimes feels like the prayers are done for us instead of including us. Group prayer certainly should be done in mass, but prayer should also be part of the community beyond the prayers of mass and the small number of devout people who daily or weekly repeat the Rosary.

Now, I say this having experience with group prayer in other settings, and it takes a lot of commitment and patience. What can happen is that it can devolve into politics, with people praying for their party to win. Members would have to remember the Church is not the same as the state. Another problem is there can be almost as much repetition as with the Rosary, because people pray the same things over and over. This is not necessarily bad, but it is where other crucial elements should come in: frank but civil discussion to express individual differences of opinion and evaluate progress toward agreement. The idea is not that everyone has to do everything one exact way, but that if we are disagreeing about serious subjects, we are not hearing God’s perfect will. (We thereby discern what subjects require further discernment.)

Group prayer should focus on listening to God and not to the individual desires of the members. That is where the discipline of discussion, prayer and discernment is distinguished from personal power-grabbing. When discussion reveals that members do not agree, they should go back to prayer and ask God for His guidance. Then, after a waiting period, there would be another discussion and if necessary the cycle repeated until agreement is reached.

And that is where it gets very tough, because many people, including priests and Church leaders, do not seem to understand the difference between what they want and what God wants. Any time anyone disagrees with them, they automatically assume they are right and the other is wrong. This is the very reason for the desperate need for discerning prayer in the Church family, as well as the male-female-child nuclear family.

Being the optimist, I think that prayer such as this is possible though it takes faith and great patience. In fact, it is a life-time commitment. We’ve heard the phrase, “Families that pray together, stay together.” If the people of the Church could pray together sincerely, specifically and with a heart to listen for God, we could communicate with the Lord and each other. Prayer would include praise and thanks but also supplication for spiritual, emotional, and physical needs, such as those which each family experiences. And on all levels we could seek solutions for problems and help against the temptations of separation experienced by Christians.

I hope to talk about the Holy Family next month. December seems like a good time to talk about family, since we focus on our Lord’s birth. May you have a blessed Thanksgiving and I’ll see you then.

A Matter of Faith

This month a movie that comes out on October 17 and will be showing in Grand Rapids is A Matter of Faith (Five & Two Pictures, Cristiano Film Group, 2014) which I’ll abbreviate AMOF. In it, a young woman attends college and is influenced away from faith by her evolutionist biology professor. Her father becomes upset and ends up debating the professor.

I heard a producer of the film being interviewed on a Christian radio show I listen to on Saturday mornings, and I looked the movie up on the Internet. I found the website and played the trailer (at the link on the movie's name above). To my surprise, I saw the campus of one of my alma maters—Aquinas College in Grand Rapids! I did a search and found the co-producers, the Christiano brothers of Christiano Film Group, are from Grand Rapids and the production was headquartered at Cornerstone College which is located on the East Belt Line there. Scenes were indeed taken from Grand Rapids locations including Aquinas. These facts and more were reported by Terry DeBoer in "Feature film 'A Matter of Faith' continues filming in Grand Rapids...," MLive, June 24, 2013.

I attended Aquinas College for a certificate in theology, which I received after 18 credit hours. I had already earned a veterinary degree, but have been interested in theology and spirituality for a long time. Then, around the time I was going at Aquinas, I started reading the works of Intelligent Design (ID) advocates such as Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box), William Dembski  (Intelligent Design) and Phillip Johnson (Darwin on Trial). I already was convinced that biological life was not a product of totally natural evolution, but I enjoyed reading their works and learning more about the controversy.

I didn’t agree, though, with the Intelligent Design advocates in their approach to science. They wanted to prove design in a strictly scientific way, but I think that faith comes first. Of course, not everyone believes. But, IF a person believes in God, THEN s/he believes all things are Created and therefore all things are designed. You don’t prove design, you believe it. However, if you want to look at the scientific part of why totally natural evolution should not be considered feasible with the knowledge of natural laws as they are now, it’s as simple as this: the complexity of biology defies probabilities.

I wish I had bookmarked a conversation I saw recently, I’m pretty sure from Evolution News, between an ID advocate and an evolutionist. I can’t find the article now, but the background is that, as scientists compare the proteins of different species, they try to match the sequences of their sub-units. If they match, the scientists say it proves that one species came from another. As I remember, the ID advocate, who wrote the article, asked how evolutionists can think that the low probability of matching protein sub-units in various species proves evolution whereas the overall probability of the proteins existing in the first place is much smaller by far. The evolutionist said something like: the comparison of proteins gives scientists frames of reference, but the origin has no frame of reference. Apparently chemistry, physics and mathematics don’t count as frames of reference when it comes to origin of life and new proteins along the way of species differentiation. Actually, the experimentally proven extreme rarity of functional proteins among all the combinations of their sub-units (amino acids) provides a very fundamental frame of reference. (The evolutionist also did not explain why the differences in proteins do not count in the determination of proof but only the similarities.)

The comparison of proteins can be accessed on the Internet in various databases. The UniRef database is from the UniProt consortium, which is a combination of particular European and American protein database providers. UniRef shows relationships between proteins in over 200,000 species. The species are classified by "taxonomy," and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) home web page for this database is HERE. This is about 10% of all formally described species. They identify each protein and give it a cluster identification, then compare proteins to different species. If the proteins are similar, they are put together in a category of "cluster members." The charts on the database give the number of clusters that compare closely to others, along with the species names. And yet as of October 3, 2014, there are more than 7,750,000 single clusters of proteins that match less than 50% to other clusters out of a total of around 82,000,000 clusters. (2020 Update: it appears now that if there are no matches the protein is called 100% match with itself in a cluster of 1 member. An example, UniRef100_A0A001)

I took one of the clusters (UniRef entry M0E4M2) and looked a little more closely at it. There were several species in this cluster, but the group for the "cluster" were still close cousins. The protein is called “histidine kinase” (UniProt entry M0E4M2) and it is in the organism "Halorubrum saccharovorum," part of a family of archaea (pronounced are-KEY-ah). Archaea are single-celled organisms that were first thought to be ancestors of bacteria, but were found to not be related once the genes could be sequenced (starting in the mid-nineties). So this particular protein structure is so far only found in one family of one type of organism. The protein is involved in sending molecular-level signals. (Histidine is an amino acid, Wikipedia entry HERE, and a kinase is an enzyme, Wikipedia HERE).

It can be hard to get an image of a specific protein since there are so many proteins--not all have been depicted. I apologize that I have not been able to find an image of this particular one, but think I am still able to demonstrate how different proteins can look and how different their structures are. The first image is from an Archaea species, Methanocaldococcus jannaschii, of a kinase that has histidine as an active site. It is called Isopentenyl phosphate kinase, UniProt entry Q60352. The explanation of the protein is at RCSB PDB entry 3K4O.

The second image has a histidine kinase (UniProt  (Q9WZV7) from a different species known as Thermotoga maritima. This is a bacteria instead of an archaea. When the sub-units (20 different amino acids) of the Halorubrum and Thermotoga proteins are compared, the identity is figured by the ALIGN program in UniProt to be 14.2%. When I run the two proteins pictured here, from Methanocaldococcus and Thermotoga, against each other, the identity is less than 10%. And even the two Archaea proteins, from Halorubrum and Methanocaldococcus, matched only at 9.9% . You can run the Align yourself if you want by using the UniProt ID numbers of the proteins: Q9WZV7 for Thermotoga, Q60352 for Methanocaldococcus, and M0E4M2 for Halorubrum. Though they have different lengths, all with hundreds of amino acids, the matches are very minimal for any of the sections.

Some say that instead of individual amino acids, larger sections of various proteins might have randomly combined, and often you hear there is “horizontal transfer” from one species to another. But horizontal transfer depends on about 30 specific proteins, and besides the improbability of them forming in the first place, not all organisms can do this transfer. And once you get above single-celled organisms, the chances are even smaller because the transfer would have to involve the specific reproductive cells.

Even though there is a big variety of molecules throughout living systems that do similar things, this doesn't mean every protein can do every job. Just like in factories, the thousands of specialized jobs need specialized tools to do them. Or think of cars, trains and planes. Each of them are used for transportation, but you don't use car parts for a train, and train parts do not have intermediates for plane parts. Each part is made specifically for its purpose. To take the analogy a little further, there are different kinds of cars, trains and planes, and though some parts may interchange among the various types of each, many can't.

In naming clusters, UniRef compares proteins and the manual says it looks for 80% match. However, in the UniProt "Align" section, the comparison of proteins described above shows you how well short fragments match. When you get very low matches, this minimizes the idea of functional sections from different proteins somehow finding each other, at least so far. It is becoming known that about 10% to 20% of proteins of every living organism are ORFans, or those which have statistically little to do with each other (see my booklet, Creation Biology). And millions of fragments would have to unite at the exact junctures to become functional within the limit of 10^50 organisms that could have existed in 4 billion years on Earth.

All Christians should consider themselves Creationists because, as it says in our creeds, we believe God made all things, visible and invisible. Unfortunately in today’s academic atmosphere, even Christian colleges are blocking the attempts by certain Creationists called Special Creationists to make their cases. Special Creationism is a belief that God made humans and “kinds” (similar to species) directly without long-term evolution. Many Fundamentalists are Young Earth Creationists, but one can be open-minded about the age of the Earth and still believe people were created directly, in a way that they did not stem from other species.

Even Theistic Creationists, who are supposed to believe that God intervened along the way of long-term evolution, don’t seem to want to talk about the supernatural part. Many from their main think tank at Biologos seem to insist that evolution is totally materialistic and at bottom a random process.

The situation is worse in secular colleges, where the mere mention of supernatural biological Creation by God brings condemnation. But it is a shame that the Christian universities are almost as bad. From the overall situation comes the movie AMOF which, as said above, involves a college student who is being taught evolution by her biology professor. Her father is fearful she will lose her faith altogether which is why he debates the professor.

The AMOF movie does not have the wide distribution of “God’s Not Dead,” but the movie conveys very real problems felt in the Catholic world. The Catholic philosophy of “Thomism” in which St. Thomas Aquinas, the great scholar of the 13^th century set out to blend faith and reason, is very complex. But to address one point, I have heard it said in the name of Aquinas that God created the universe in a way that all things were laid out in order and that He would never contradict that natural order by intervening in a supernatural way once it was laid out.

A problem in Thomas' time was that the Greek philosophy had recently become available to European minds through its translation into Latin. And for one thing, there was an apparent conflict between this “Reason” and “Faith” over the source of the universe and its contents because the Greeks (such as Parmenides) had said “Nothing comes from nothing.” Christians believe that God made the Universe from nothing. So Aquinas held that though things are usually made from other things, there must be a “First Mover” and a “First Cause.” But he also specifically commented about the creation of humans.

In Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 92, Article 4, Thomas Aquinas says this in his answer (after laying out the contrary argument [objection] first, which is at the New Advent link HERE if you want to read it):

As was said above…the natural generation of every species is from some determinate matter. Now the matter whence man is naturally begotten is the human semen of man or woman.  Wherefore from any other matter an individual of the human species cannot naturally be generated.  Now God alone, the Author of nature, can produce an effect into existence outside the ordinary course of nature.  Therefore God alone could produce either a man from the slime of the earth, or a woman from the rib of man.

 In the next statement, Reply to Objection 1, Aquinas says: 

This argument is verified when an individual is begotten, by natural generation, from that which is like it in the same species.

 Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was causing problems for the Church, but there was philosophical upheaval before then. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII put out an encyclical called Aeterni Patris. He said that science is good, but it needs to be combined with faith, and used St. Thomas Aquinas as the ultimate model in the combination of the two.

I'll never know all the in's and out's of philosophy and theology. I do perceive we've gotten to the point where anyone who argues against neo-Darwinian theory is considered either an anti-science Fundamentalist or an anti-reason, anti-"form"ist. We are treated in a hostile manner by many Catholics as well as atheists. Well, the complexity of biology is showing that the Fundamentalists may just be right after all.

It is a little risky to speculate on what God would or wouldn’t do. Some think He’d never “trick” them by making genes “look like” they have mutated over time when they really hadn’t, such as they say is the case with Vitamin C gene. However, the Fundamentalists have long associated imperfect (fallen) nature to original sin. In fact, it would be contrary to our doctrine if nature were still perfect. But I’ve never heard this aspect discussed by the detractors.

We are left with the question of whether God created species or kinds in increments, with parents of different characteristics. Though Darwin claimed it was a slow process, in the intervening years we have found the difference in body make-ups between parent and child would have to be pretty big in some cases. Can the parent bug give birth to a fish-type child?  (I'm exaggerating, but only a little.) The body type comes from the egg as well as the DNA, so the egg would have to have major changes from within the parent. I’ve never heard any proposal of scientific-supernatural solutions for these problems from Theistic Evolutionists. Maybe I’ve just missed them, but I doubt it.

I used to accept that people come from apes, but I don’t anymore. People were made by God, and I think He did it directly and supernaturally and not by evolution. I am not saying God wouldn’t make people by evolution, because He does as He sees fit. But it’s just as logical to think He didn’t have a person born to an ape as that He did.

Division and Change

Austrian Fr. Helmut Schüller is a representative of many priests in the Catholic Church.  He is currently on a US speaking tour.  He is organizing priests and laypersons to make a grass-roots change.  His group thinks all Catholics should have greater participation in the running of the Church and that married men and women should be able to become ordained.

Several bishops have disallowed Fr. Schüller to speak under their jurisdictions.  This web page article by Matthew Archbold, "Philadelphia Archdiocese Opposes Dissident at Chestnut Hill College," Free Republic, July 8, 2013, reports that Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia thinks his appearance at a local college on July 19 would be dangerous to Church unity.  Does Archbishop Chaput actually think that the current Church is united?  Perhaps he doesn’t count all the people who have left it in recent years or those crying for change.

When the Pew Research Center released an extensive survey in 2008, US Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation, it found that Catholic Church has the most percentage loss of any denomination.  In the past few decades here, around 25,000,000 people have left. As the survey says, if it were not for the Latino influx into our country, the losses would be much higher.  The bishops may hope for Latinos to change the order of things in the US, but these people are also leaving the Church. There may have been an enthusiastic World Youth Day in Brazil, but in another Pew Forum study, Brazil's Changing Religious Landscape, the statistics show people are declining in Catholic affiliation there too, especially the young.

Ever since Pope Francis has been elected, he has talked about change.  He wants Catholics to “get outside themselves,” to dialogue with others and to care for the poor. If you follow the Vatican News website which gives daily updates on his homilies and other activities, you will see the themes often.

The people who leave the Catholic Church go to various ends.  Some join Pentecostal churches, some mainline Protestant, some lose their faith altogether. Even within the Church a wide range of opinion is seen, from liberal to conservative. So is there any hope for unity at all?

The Catholic Church has been through all kinds of tough times.  Past popes were involved in wars (Free Library description HERE) and belonged to corrupt political families (Wikipedia entry HERE).  During Inquisitions, heretics were burned at the stake. Women are totally excluded from leadership. The child sexual abuse travesty has apparently been around for a long time but not as widely known as it lately has been. (And we hope that this coming to the surface will lead to permanent cleansing.) A well-researched article by Thomas Doyle, "A very short history of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church," is on the Crusade Against Clergy Abuse website.   People ask why members stay. 

I do not want to minimize our responsibility to try to solve our problems. Fortunately, things do change and we hopefully try to evangelize heretics instead of burning them at the stake. In my blog I have had many articles concerning the inequality I feel is imposed upon Catholic women. Though some Catholic women are not insulted by the traditional way of men-only clergy, in this day and age many women are indignant about the differences. Though some people hold there are reasons for distinctions between genders, this theology has obviously been put forward by an all-male Magisterium. Would a group which included women in the decision come to the same conclusion?

However, getting back to the point, I along with other Church members have priorities.  I saw a comment on the Internet where they were discussing grievous wrongs of the Church. The person said he can answer why he stays with two words: the Eucharist. 

In a word it is the Word for Whom we stay.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2 NABRE). When we receive the true body and blood of Christ at each mass, the encounter is awesome. Most Protestants and a large number of Catholics think that the bread and wine are simply symbols, so I suppose I should speak for myself.  One way I will try to put it is that even though I accept, as Christ promised, that He is with us always, there seems like an added or maybe clearer dimension in this sacrament. It reminds me of a Scripture verse from the King James Bible: "Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end" (Isaiah 9:7 KJV). It's like when you think you've had a peak experience with the Lord, it can get even better. Those of us who experience this mystery want to invite others to come to Him too.

People are sinful and sometimes very badly sinful.  But you don’t get away from evil by leaving the Church.  Evil is all over the place.  We come to the Lord because He is our protector.  He is our Savior, and we surely need one.  Through the ages, no matter how bad it got, people realized this.  Though they may have disagreed with their leaders and each other, this is the focal point from which they carried on. This is the power that is greater than evil.

Many Catholics agree with Fr. Helmut Schüller in his first priority: to ensure that there are enough priests to provide the precious gift of the Eucharist for all who desire it (along with time for those priests to adequately serve their parishes).  Christ told Peter, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:17 NABRE). It is good that Pope Francis cares about the poor--I'm glad he does. But he must also care for the Catholic flock. And he especially must care about the souls of all human beings.

Another commenter I read in a different discussion about disagreements among Catholics declared, tongue in cheek, he will change the name of his blog to “I alone am the True Church.”  I think we all feel this way at one time or another.  But we pray for the grace to move forward, and that we may all do our best so that Christ’s body and blood can be given each week to all who believe it is real.

We Want Change

I will be putting in a new post on First Friday as I've done for a few months now.  That's the day many Catholics follow the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as I've noted elsewhere.  Today I just want to say a few words about two images I put together and display here. They represent a wooden nickel, with one side saying "Peter was Married!" and the other side saying "We Want Change!" Bible verses concerning Peter's marriage are: Matthew 8:14-15 NABRE; 1 Corinthians 9:5 NABRE.

I am interested in evangelization and it doesn't behoove a church to have infighting when they want to attract others to join them.  However, it is no secret that the Catholic Church has had a lot of problems lately between scandals and incompetency.  Most of us, I hope, realize that we have got to clean up our own act if we are going to help others toward Christ.  Of course, we admit we are sinners, but one of the points of becoming Christians is to put off the old self and become renewed in spirit (Ephesians 4 NABRE).

I like Pope Francis quite a bit and have so far read almost everything that he has said that's been posted on the Vatican News website HERE.  He talks about reforming the Church and I sincerely hope he does.  But things move so slowly we think we will never get where we have to be.  We must try to release our frustration in ways that are not permanently harmful.  I had seen that some Catholics were giving wooden nickels to the Church instead of cash or checks to show their frustration with the leadership and using the real money they withheld to donate directly to worthy charities.  I forget what was written on the nickels, but I made up my own in pictures to show my wish for the collection plates until at the very least married men are allowed to be priests. Though this isn't directly related to the problems mentioned above, it would turn things in general to the direction of change for the better.
 
To be up front, I admit I haven't gone so far as to drop wooden nickels yet. But I did look up a few stores to see if they have wooden discs.  Many can't understand why Catholics still give with all the bad things happening, but the Catholic leadership does many good things like care for the poor and sick and teach children.  There is government help for some of the work, but much comes from donations.  I'd sure like to figure out a way to get money to the right place without it being diverted to the people who have gone so badly wrong.

Pope Francis and Prayers

We pray for our new Pope Francis, that he may receive strength, wisdom, courage and all gifts from the Lord he will need for good leadership.

It was wonderful to see the first pope from the Americas, from Latin America, and from the Southern Hemisphere. He is the first Jesuit and the first pope named Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi (Wikipedia biography HERE). He has apparently lived a simple, humble life and is compassionate toward the poor. It is an inspiring start.

Catholics have had many surprises in the last few weeks, and it is very refreshing. Though people talked of having a pope from Latin America, it was easy to think it would never happen. I thank the College of Cardinals and especially the Lord for this change. It inspires us to hope for a better environment within the Church so we may go forth and evangelize more effectively.

We pray, Lord, that we may worship in a way that is pleasing to You. We pray You bring us ever more toward your Truth and Light and help us proclaim it to others.

Benedict XVI

At the homily of Benedict XVI for the inauguration of his pontificate on April 24, 2005 (found at the Vatican website HERE), the then Pope said among other things:

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. (April 24, 2005).

When Benedict left his office on Thursday, February 28, 2013, he flew by helicopter from the Vatican to Castel Gandolfo. He was followed by cameras and the scenery was beautiful, over the homes and ruins of Rome and in the nearby countryside. Once inside his temporary residence, he emerged through a doorway over a crowd of people to say a final goodbye:

Thank you, thank you from my heart. I am happy to be here with you surrounded by the beauty of Creation and your friendship that warms me. You know that today is different from others. As of eight pm I will no longer be the Supreme Pontiff of the Holy Roman Church. I am a pilgrim who is beginning the last part of his pilgrimage on earth. But with all my interior strength, with all my heart, with all my love I will work for the good of the Church and all humanity. (Vatican Radio)

These first and final statements are tied with the appreciation of Creation. To know we are made by God is to commence the relationship with appropriate awe and wonder. Then we learn more and more of the Lord who is not only genius but love. Though our lives on this plane last only so long, there is no end to the delight the Creator can supply.

Despite the severe troubles we may experience individually and collectively, the greatness of the Lord and his Creation come through. The problems drag us down, but the glory of the Lord lifts us up. We know He is able to overcome. We know He has the victory.

Benedict, Pope Emeritus now, prays for the Church and the next pope. May all Catholics join with him in humble supplication for truly wise leadership.

A New Day

What a difference a week makes. Pope Benedict XVI resigned. He had said all along he doesn’t think someone who is unable to do the job should stay, and I am glad for that. In these days of advanced technology, people often live longer but don’t necessarily retain competence. I don’t know if traditionalists would agree, but I hope they appreciate this is better than having years of waiting for another leader.

Some may dread change, but others look forward to it with cautious hope. Though some Catholics seem willing to ignore the child sex abuse crisis in the Church, may I remind them that we need to protect the vulnerable as well as hold up the faith. It should be possible to do both. No matter how one may dislike media, they have reported much that was true. In fact, it has been victims, their lawyers and the media who have informed us of secret policies of the Church. These have included hiding the identity of predator priests and passing them on to unsuspecting parishes and communities.

How can people accept child sexual abuse and endangerment from leaders of our Church? Catholic leaders should collectively know about evil and how important it is to overcome. Many Catholics don’t even believe in hell anymore. Does this kind of behavior deserve heaven? Christ died for our sins, but one of the first calls of His ministry was to repent (cf. Matthew 4:17 NABRE). When we sincerely are sorry, we also must try to do better!

It is not hard to suppose that the Christian Church is a favored target for evil. How better to turn people away from the Lord than to drag Christians into sinfulness? If you have read some of my posts, you know I’m interested in science. These days many scientists, including social scientists, don’t believe in the spiritual categories of good and evil. According to them, we have just evolved, there is no God. But from what I’ve read, some of the same people still define bad behavior in general terms of “hurting others.” This isn’t terribly logical, since one can’t define bad behavior without using the concepts of good and evil. How does their definition make it evil? If there is no good or evil, then hurting people is a neutral activity. Actually, in Darwinian terms, hurting others probably increases one’s own chance for survival.

It is a real shame that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI both got caught up in duplicity concerning sex abuse. It is a shame because they both also seemed to understand the Truth of Jesus Christ and His salvation for those who believe, and the importance of evangelization. Though many Catholic theologians might tell us otherwise, this is critical for Christians to know. The tendency now is to believe that anyone can get to heaven, a theology called “Universalism,” which is a side-effect of wishful thinking on the part of certain “intellectuals.” This problem is discussed in a book by Ralph Martin, Will Many be Saved? (Eerdman's Publishing, 2012).  Martin goes into the details about two theologians who promoted this worldview and how their influence affected the faith of many.  He says they ignored a vital part of the Vatican II document concerning those who have never heard of Christ (Lumen Gentium, Section 16). Missions are still as important as ever, but now even many Christians are missing the point.

It is very easy to despair of change when the leadership seems so uninterested in what the followers think. Yet if we read Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, (Crossroad Publishing Co., 1995), we can be inspired by African American persistence in the face of demeaning prejudice by US Catholic clergy. Actually, the hierarchy in Rome was on the side of helping the descendants of slaves who pleaded their case to them. There was still much resistance, but eventually things changed for the better. However, the Protestants had already made great progress and many African Americans had joined them by the time the Catholics here saw the light.

In a way, we can be glad the hidden sins of our leadership are being exposed because that is the first step in fixing the problem. But the leaders are still without satisfactory solutions and we need to get this straightened out. No more secrets! No more ignoring bishops who have hidden sexual predators or have known about it!

But if leaders follow through as they should, do you know what that will do? It will create even more shortages than we already have with only celibate male priests and bishops. After all these sex scandals, I don’t want to hear about the beauty of celibate male priesthood or how priests don't have time for families. Celibacy may be a wonderful way of life for some, but celibacy is not necessary in order to serve the church. One example from the fourth century is St. Hilary of Poitiers (biography at Catholic Online HERE) who was made bishop. Even though he was married with a child, he had the time to fight a great heresy, Arianism. Admittedly, he was exiled and did a lot of studying and writing then. Perhaps we can look at that as a sabbatical.  But he also continued the battle and wrote hymns when restored to his office.

I feel sometimes like the leadership of the Catholic Church would rather provide obstacles to the Lord for the faithful than give us a helping hand. We need a forthright, just Church for our spiritual health and in order to evangelize. I sincerely hope the leaders humbly ask the Lord to protect all Christians from evil and pray that He teach us and help us to do our part for the good.

Economic Principles

My husband and I will be visiting with relatives for the next two weeks, so I won't be posting. Feel free to look around my blog. If you are interested in Intelligent Design Theory and/or biological Creationism, click the ID and Creation links in the right column under "Topics."

Recently I've talked briefly about problems with US health care and immigration reform. I thought I'd add here a bishop's statement, "A Catholic Framework for Economic Life" that is on the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) website. It's found through links from their economic teaching page. They used various sources to write this list of principles, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church (USCCB info HERE), and their pastoral letter of 1986, "Economic Justice for All," (PDF file HERE). (2019 Update: The link I had no longer led to the following text so it was removed. The page for Justice, Peace and Human Development is HERE}.

Here is the introduction and list:

As followers of Jesus Christ and participants in a powerful economy, Catholics in the United States are called to work for greater economic justice in the face of persistent poverty, growing income-gaps, and increasing discussion of economic issues in the United States and around the world. We urge Catholics to use the following ethical framework for economic life as principles for reflection, criteria for judgment and directions for action. These principles are drawn directly from Catholic teaching on economic life.

1. The economy exists for the person, not the person for the economy.
2. All economic life should be shaped by moral principles. Economic choices and institutions must be judged by how they protect or undermine the life and dignity of the human person, support the family and serve the common good.
3. A fundamental moral measure of any economy is how the poor and vulnerable are faring.
4. All people have a right to life and to secure the basic necessities of life (e.g., food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, safe environment, economic security.)
5. All people have the right to economic initiative, to productive work, to just wages and benefits, to decent working conditions as well as to organize and join unions or other associations.
6. All people, to the extent they are able, have a corresponding duty to work, a responsibility to provide the needs of their families and an obligation to contribute to the broader society.
7. In economic life, free markets have both cleat advantages and limits; government has essential responsibilities and limitations; voluntary groups have irreplaceable roles, but cannot substitute for the proper working of the market and the just policies of the state.
8. Society has a moral obligation, including governmental action where necessary, to assure opportunity, meet basic human needs, and pursue justice in economic life.
9. Workers, owners, managers, stockholders and consumers are moral agents in economic life. By our choices, initiative, creativity and investment, we enhance or diminish economic opportunity, community life and social justice.
10. The global economy has moral dimensions and human consequences. Decisions on investment, trade, aid and development should protect human life and promote human rights, especially for those most in need wherever they might live on this globe.

It is not a perfect world, and not everyone will live by these guidelines. But Catholics are a significant part of the population and can have a real impact on others. Of course, many already try to follow these principles. Let us pray for wisdom and right judgment in our economic affairs.

Evolution's "Open" Debate

The National Catholic Register (NCR) has run a story about the conference on Biological Evolution the first week in March in Rome. The conference was co-hosted by the Pontifical Gregorian University, University of Notre Dame, the Pontifical Council for Culture and STORP (Science, Technology, and Ontological Research Project). (2019 Update: the NCR story is not available but a link to information on the conference is HERE.

The conference was supposedly an appraisal of Darwin's theory 150 years after his Origin of Species was published. I say supposedly, because an appraisal usually implies that criticism is heard and evaluated. But any critics of evolution were kept outside the doors. (And by evolution, I mean by totally materialistic, naturalistic means, as is the present working theory.)

Edward Pentin interviewed one of the main organizers, Gennaro Auletta, Pontifical Gregorian University professor of philosophy, after the conference. Pentin asked why persons who back Intelligent Design (among others) were excluded. One of Aultetta's answers was that "We should never have recourse to a supernatural cause when we are dealing with rational matters."

Well, exactly how, then, is our world created by God at all? Does Auletta count the Big Bang as a rational matter? After all, scientists came up with the idea and are still studying it. Auletta apparently does not see that as a vehicle for God's creation. Yet many Catholics believe this is the initial point of Creation. The Big Bang was proven by science about 80 years ago even when an eternal universe was predicted by Aristotle and Einstein.

When asked what the conference achieved in terms of finding compatibility between Catholic theology and evolution, Aultetta replied, "I would like to think that we've shown the world that it's possible to discuss these very relevant and critical issues in a way that is fruitful and at the same time open."

How can something be open when certain groups are actively excluded? It is not. The question is, "Why?"

Most people know about the history of the Church in relation to the scientific discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. These early scientists realized, against the general scientific mindset of the day (which was an Earth-centered system), that the Earth rotates around the Sun. The leaders of the Church denounced Galileo and it took until the late 20th century for a pope, John Paul II, to truly acknowledge the faults of the leadership in this question. Yes, the Church made a long, ongoing mistake here, and part of the problem is the complexity of scientific knowledge. Church leaders such as popes are not scientists nor should they be expected to be. Eventually scientific knowledge comes to light, and we should pray for knowledge as much as for wisdom. Knowledge is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

As humans we are curious how God created and want to know as much as we can to improve our lives. But the decisions on how to make the world were God's business. It is our business to believe that He created, not to second-guess or claim inside information on His accomplishment.

We all make mistakes and we learn by them. It is no answer when we refuse new ideas because we might make a mistake. A mistake in the other extreme is to accept everything that is told us, even by scientists, without question or critical thinking. Scientists have been wrong, as in the example of Einstein and Aristotle above.

Many people, scientists and others who have studied biology and nature, believe that biological life is too complex to have come about by natural processes, chemistry and physics, alone. The more they know about the amazing cell, the more convinced they become that only a Designer could have made something like this. There is an excellent paper by David Abel, "The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity," International Journal of Molecular Sciences 10, 1 (Jan 2009): 247-291. It cuts to the true state of research into life's origins. There is much speculation and wishful thinking on the part of many materialistic, naturalistic scientists, but NO HARD PROOF that nature has formed life by chance.

This is the concept that seems so hard to get through to people. They don't even want to hear that God may have created the cell after the Big Bang. Even the suggestion of the possibility, the "MAY" in "He may have directly, supernaturally created the cell," elicits shuddering, incredulity or anger.

I ask that we learn from our mistakes but do not overreact to the other extreme. Though Christ came and lived on Earth in a pre-scientific age, his miracles had to do with life and nature. Wine is a product of biology, healing is to restore biology, raising persons from the dead most certainly has to do with biology. If we can't have recourse to supernatural explanations to science, then we will have trouble believing that God had anything to do with creation and miracles.

Notre Dame's Open Minds

Bruce Chapman of Discovery Institute wrote an interesting comment on the Institute's blog about Notre Dame and the recent flap concerning their invitation to President Obama for commencement (2019 Update: previous link to the comment removed due to lack of availability).

Many Catholics are distressed, since President Obama is very pro-abortion and the Catholic Church teaches against it. But, the president of Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins, has taken the stand that open dialogue is useful for universities. Fr. Jenkins and his spokespersons claim they value academic freedom, where various views may be heard and considered.

Yet, at the beginning of March, Notre Dame co-sponsored an evolution conference in Rome (descriptive web page HERE), where it was made clear that Intelligent Design Theory would not be considered. I wrote of it HERE. Chapman complained that the organizers seemed willing to discuss Michael Behe's theory of Irreducible Complexity as a cultural phenomenon unworthy of the name "science," but refused to invite Behe, a Catholic, to defend himself. Behe was refused an ear, but not Obama.