|
Post by hibernicus on May 27, 2013 20:38:53 GMT
Lee Podles links to a video interview with Cardinal Schonborn in which he talks about his journey of faith and the influence of Orthodoxy on him. EXTRACT He is frank about some of his family’s problems. His grandfather and father were not practicing, and his parents divorced when he was young. He was a young Dominican during the disastrous period after Vatican II. Bultmann was their guide to theology, and he was told prayer was meaningless. He stopped praying for a year, and was getting ready to leave the Dominicans. He returned to the practice of prayer in 1967 after hearing an Orthodox monk who spoke about prayer and the importance of a spiritual father, a staretz. He has told me he is deeply grateful to the Orthodox for saving his vocation. Orthodox have told me that the Catechism of the Catholic Church could have been written by an Orthodox, so I think that Schönborn has learned both to pray and think like an Orthodox. Schönborn is both the Latin archbishop of Vienna and metropolitan of Eastern Catholics in Austria. If he is ever elected pope, we may see major movements to restore communion between East and West. END OF EXTRACT www.podles.org/dialogue/the-faith-of-a-cardinal-631.htm Unfortunately the link only takes you to the Whispers in the Loggia blog (which BTW has a lot of Pope Francis's recent sermon texts) rather than to the specific interview - it seems impossible to link to individual posts. You have to go back about 3 days (to 24 May 2013). Two little details Podles doesn't give is that it is a video interview (in English) rather than textually based, and that the interview is none other than the Evangelical Anglican Rev. Nicky Gumbel of Holy Trinity Brompton in London (promoter of the Alpha Course and various pentecostal phenomena) which says something about the circles the Cardinal moves in. (It is also striking how obviously sympathetic the Evangelical audience are when he discusses Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.)
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 28, 2013 7:48:50 GMT
Cardinal Schönborn is very catholic in his tastes and company.
If I recall correctly from Ralf Siebenbürger's Brandsma Review article, his father was a free mason. Not that it matters whether he was or wasn't, as an Austro-Czech aristocrat, the milieu that the Counts Schönborn moved in would have at least been sceptical or deistic, as the ethos would be very similar.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jun 13, 2013 23:12:38 GMT
I happened to walk past St Paul's on Arran Quay, which was where I first attended Indult TLM/EF Masses, and I saw from the noticeboard outside that as well as the regular Catholic Masses the Syrian Orthodox Church (i.e. Nestorians not in communion with Rome) now hold their Divine Liturgy there. This is a good example of real ecumenism in practice (another BTW being the attendance of the priest of the Dublin Ethiopian Orthodox (i.e. Coptic) congregation at the Vigil for Life in Merrion Square last Saturday. (I didn't see him there myself, but I've heard from people who did.) Through the intercession of Bl. Columba Marmion (baptised in St Paul's) may the Syrian Orthodox prosper in Dublin, as they endure so many misfortunes in their homelands, and may we all be united one day in the One Fold of the One Shepherd.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jun 22, 2013 18:51:16 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jul 10, 2013 20:42:39 GMT
George Weigel on prospects for the new Ukrainian-Rite University in Kyiv/Kiev. I tend to take anything Weigel says with a grain of salt, but this may be encouraging nonetheless: nationalreview.com/node/352911/printEXTRACT FROM MARTYRDOM TO MISSION From 1946 until 1990, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — Byzantine in liturgy and church polity but in full communion with the Bishop of Rome — was the largest illegal, underground religious body in the world. For more than four decades, those Greek Catholics who refused to truckle to the spurious “L’viv Sobor [Council]” of 1946 and be “reunited” with Russian Orthodoxy — an exercise stage-managed by the NKVD — lived a modern catacomb existence in which everything from worship to seminary instruction, priestly ordinations, and the consecration of bishops was conducted clandestinely, often deep in Ukraine’s forests. In 2001, John Paul II formally beatified more than two dozen martyrs of that draconian persecution; Ukrainian Greek Catholics today know that that martyrology could be extended into the hundreds and thousands. Andrey Sheptytsky, who bridged the worlds of Latin and eastern Christianity in his family, his person, and his cast of mind, was a man who imagined European Christianity once again breathing with its “two lungs,” as John Paul II so often put it — and who invested 40 years in the project of building the Greek Catholic religious, educational, and cultural institutions that could give that vision historical reality. Virtually all his work was destroyed by the Second World War, and what wasn’t destroyed by the war was subsequently plowed under by communism. But while his world was crumbling around him, Sheptytsky chose as his successor (under special authority granted him by the Vatican) Josyf Slipyj, who paid for his consecration as leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church with more than 17 years in the Gulag, from which he was released in 1963 at the personal request of Pope John XXIII and exiled to Rome, where he died in 1984. Slipyj was determined to keep Sheptytsky’s vision alive by every means at his disposal. He maintained a vigorous presence in Rome during his exile, often aggravating those Vatican officials whose realpolitik view of the Ukrainian situation led them to put more stock in ecumenical relations with Russian Orthodoxy (which they seemed not to recognize as being under the thumb of the KGB) than in solidarity with their own persecuted and underground fellow Catholics. Slipyj’s tough example of independence also kept alive, throughout the Ukrainian diaspora, the idea of a free Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in a free Ukraine, with a Ukrainian Catholic University as one of its cultural centerpieces. And in the last years of his life, he found and helped form an instrument for that purpose. Advertisement Borys Gudziak, born in Syracuse of emigre Ukrainian parents, once imagined himself an NBA star. When it became clear to him that six-foot-tall Ukrainian Americans of slight build were not being avidly sought by NBA general managers, he altered his adolescent ambitions and became immersed in the life, thought, and history of the Church of his ancestors, finishing a Harvard doctorate in history with a groundbreaking study of the 1596 Union of Brest, which brought today’s Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine back into full communion with Rome. Gudziak’s studies took him to Rome, where he met Josyf Slipyj; there, his own imagination was seized by Slipyj’s hope to build a Ukrainian Catholic University on the foundations of the L’viv Theological Academy, which the exiled leader had reestablished in Rome. Now, that vision is being realized in L’viv in the only Catholic university in the former Soviet space, a remarkable enterprise whose 2013 commencement address I was privileged to deliver on July 6. Handsome new university buildings are being erected on the edge of Stryisky Park in central L’viv; they will include, within three years, a magnificent university church that honors both Holy Wisdom and Pope St. Clement I, the pope who died in Crimean exile. The university’s press wins awards for its Ukrainian-language publications and translations; its business programs are recognized by the honest entrepreneurs of the country as the best available; its theology and philosophy departments are staffed by scholars with degrees from major universities throughout the world; its new journalism school is a direct response to the corruption of the Ukrainian media by the Yanukovych regime and the oligarchy. Perhaps most crucially, the Ukrainian Catholic University is built around an idea that is crucial to the country’s future: Education must include formation — human formation, spiritual formation, and cultural formation. Student life in the university’s residential colleges (the first of which is now open) includes worship, service opportunities, and regular interaction with special-needs adults, on the model of Jean Vanier’s L’Arche communities around the world. And all of this is being led not just by Gudziak (who is now Bishop Gudziak, having been named head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s Paris eparchy last year) but by a remarkable team of men and women that has gathered around him. Most of them grew up in the underground Church; several of them are graduates of the Gulag’s distinctive educational system; all of them are living economically sacrificial lives, at salaries far below what their advanced degrees could command elsewhere, out of commitment to the Sheptytsky–Slipyj vision of an intellectually first-rate university that provides a solid cultural foundation for Ukrainian public life while taking its inspiration from the rich spiritual heritage of eastern Christianity — and from Ukraine’s new martyrs. The challenges are endless: Four-fifths of the university’s budget comes from donors, not from tuition and fees; the Yanukovych regime’s education ministry continues to look askance at what is afoot at UCU, although under various international pressures it has backed off from a threat to decertify the university; the initial master plan for the campus remains to be completed, and if that can be achieved, there are ambitious plans to expand the campus further so that UCU becomes a place of intellectual and spiritual encounter for the entire country. The university’s youth is an advantage, in that UCU missed the silly season that corrupted so much of Catholic higher education in the West in the late 20th century. Thus, even as it opens regular lines of communication and exchange with Catholic institutions of higher learning in the West, UCU’s challenge will be to avoid the mistakes that have rendered schools like Georgetown and Fordham largely supine in the face of the anti-culture of the imperial autonomous Self. So a lot is at stake in L’viv these days. If Ukraine is to shed the self-destructive moral and mental habits of its colonial and totalitarian past, its civic culture must be re-formed and reconnected to the cultural sources of its national identity. Those sources are eastern Christian, and the most lively and forward-looking embodiment of the eastern Christian tradition in contemporary Ukraine is the Greek Catholic Church — a point conceded, if roughly, even by some Ukrainian Orthodox observers. The Greek Catholic Church of martyrs is now a Church in mission. The success of that mission, in which the Ukrainian Catholic University will play a key role, will have much to do with answering the question of whether Ukraine enters Europe, or is reabsorbed into a new form of Putinesque Russian imperium. And the answer to that question touches the future of the entire West. END www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/2408/weigel_ukraines_future_depends_on_greek_byzantine_catholic_church.aspx#.Ud3HLfmmjW5
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jul 15, 2013 21:00:25 GMT
Here's an unfortunate example of provincial trad humour. rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-latin-mass-debate-still-rages.html St Thomas Aquinas (who was Neapolitan) and St Benedict would surely know of the Byzantine-rite Mass as said by the Italo-Greeks of Southern Italy, and I would be very surprised if St Francis of Assisi never encountered Eastern-rite Mass when he visited Egypt...
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Sept 9, 2013 23:25:15 GMT
When I was at Knock on Saturday for the LMSI pilgrimage I passed the gable-wall chapel about 12 and saw Mass being celebrated by Coptic priests. I could tell they were Copts because the celebrant wore a headcovering resembling one I have seen worn by Coptic priests on television, and carried a cross in one hand as I have seen an Ethiopian Coptic priest do in Dublin. It is possible they might have been from one of the Indian rites which have a presence in Dublin, but for the reasons given above I think they were Copts. The appearance of the congregation made me think they were Egyptian rather than Ethiopian Copts - the two churches are in communion though the Ethiopians have their own Patriarch. I do not know whether these would have been Copts in communion with Rome (there is a Coptic Catholic Church and its former Patriarch is a Cardinal) or those who follow Pope Theodore of Alexandria. I suspect the latter as the Coptic Catholics are a small minority and I doubt if there would be enough in Ireland for a pilgrimage of the size I saw. Since the Copts have valid orders and I believe we have reached some sort of agreement with them which falls short of full communion but acknowledge that our doctrinal statements are trying to say the same thing, letting them celebrate Mass in our churches where they have none of their own would be legitimate hospitality. I confess I am in two minds about the whole Egyptian situation. I don't like the Muslim Brotherhood, I like the overthrow of an elected government however unsavoury and the massacre of its supporters even less; both the Coptic Pope and the Coptic Catholic patriarch have endorsed the coup and the MB supporters ahve responded with yet another wave of church-burnings and attacks on Copts. Whatever I may think of the attack on democracy, I can hardly denounce the Copts for not acquiescing in their own persecution, especially when I am thousands of miles away from any risk of that persecution myself. Perhaps the best thing to do is just to pray for the Copts in Egypt and elsewhere, especially those who have come to our own country to find employment and religious freedom which they cannot find in their own countries.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Sept 13, 2013 22:54:05 GMT
The current issue of the IRISH CATHOLIC (12 September) has a very informative article on the Syro-Malabar community in the North (they have mostly immigrated since the end of the Troubles; there are about 2500 in the North and 5000 in the Republic) including an interview with the priest who serves them. Well worth a read if you want to learn more about our brethren of this Eastern Rite in communion with Rome. Those of you who were at the Eucharistic Congress last year may remember their Major-Archbishop, Cardinal Alencherry.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Nov 9, 2013 21:24:21 GMT
Joseph Shaw of the British LMS discusses the www.lmschairman.org/2013/11/the-traditional-mass-and-christian-east_9.htmlwww.lmschairman.org/2013/11/the-traditional-mass-and-christian-east_8.htmlEXTRACT The Oriental Catholic Churches, the ones in communion with the Pope, have endured a sad history of 'Latinisation': the adoption of the liturgical and other practices of the Latin Church, which has flattened the rich diversity of the Universal Church and cut them off from the traditions still kept, in most cases, by Eastern Churches not in communion with Rome. Indeed, from the point of view of the latter this process was and remains a scandal and an impediment to reunion: if this is what happens when you accept Rome, they reasoned, then we don't want to have anything to do with it! However, the great Pope Leo XIII initiated a very clear policy of encouraging Eastern Catholics to preserve and restore their traditions in their integrity, and this was powerfully reaffirmed at the Second Vatican Council. It was easier said than done, unfortunately, since the leaders of these Churches were usually educated in Rome and were often eager to be as like their Latin friends as possible, even without any of the official encouragement of Latinisation which was in evidence in the 17th and 18th centuries. Nevertheless, important progress was made. In the meantime, of course, we had the liturgical reform of the West. Out goes (nearly all) silent prayer by the priest. Out goes worship ad orientem. Out goes the use of the West's ancient liturgical language. Out goes (a lot of) proskenesis, which in the West usually takes the form of kneeling and genuflections. Out goes the mystery, the awe, the timelessness and otherworldliness of the liturgy, and liturgical texts which anticipate the consecration (referring to the unconsecrated Host as 'this spotless Victim' in the Offertory). Out goes (a lot of) the sense of the sinfulness of the priest. Out goes the sharp distinction between Sanctuary and Nave, marked in modern times in the West by steps and rails. In comes a lot of new things like lay people distributing the Blessed Sacrament, secular musical styles, and so on. None of these things were, in fact, called for by the Second Vatican Council, with the partial exception of the use of the vernacular, but they happened, they were officially promulgated or, at least, permitted, and the theological rationales for them gained currency even if they were never explicitly endorsed by the Magisterium. Thus, Bugnini and his friends said that the pre-Conciliar Latin liturgy was illogical, that the stuff about sinfulness was 'negative' and unpastoral, that Latin, silence, and worship ad orientem excluded the Faithful and made them 'dumb spectators' at Mass, and that its historical development was a matter of 'accretions' which obscured the true, pastoral, and logical shape of the primitive liturgy. If this is true, then it is true in the East as well as the West: you don't cross some invisible line in the Balkans and suddenly find that human nature, logic, and the principles of historical development flip upside-down. The leaders of the Oriental Catholic Churches, accordingly, could hardly look at these arguments without seeing a systematic attack not only on the traditions of the West, but on the traditions of the East. Insofar as they wanted to be up with the latest trends, it was natural that they should seek to implement a version of the reform in their own churches, in direct opposition to the official policy of eastern traditionalism. Taking the policy of Eastern Traditionalism with the de facto endorsement of Bugnini's attack on Western traditionalism, it would appear that in the West, the ancient Mass is obscurantist; in the East, though, where the liturgy exhibits many of the same traits in a far more extreme way, this is all wonderful, mysterious, and (in the words of Bl Pope John Paul II's Apostolic Letter Orientale Lumen), speaks to the human person in his totality, and not just the intellect... Non-Catholic Easterners, of course, may well wonder how sincere all this respect for tradition is given the way the Latins treat their own traditions. Indeed, I would forgive them for thinking we are completely schizophrenic on the subject. It is not surprising that they welcomed Pope Benedict's Summorum Pontificum, since it suggests that the Latins might begin to walk the walk and not just talk the talk about preserving liturgical tradition... [The second post in the series quotes extensively from an early-80s Vatican instruction blocking proposals to impose a wholesale Novus-Ordo-style remodelling on the Syro-Malabar liturgy over the protests of a large minority - HIB] END OF EXTRACT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Nov 27, 2013 21:24:53 GMT
Posters on a US Catholic blog discuss whether/why Putin is doing more for MIddle Eastern Christians than any other world leader. Note Fabio PAolo Barbieri's comments on the historic background (i.e. the fact that much of what is now Russia was conquered from Islamic rulers and that there is a long history of Christian minorities looking to Russia) and his scathing comments on the Obama administration in this matter (and note that this blogger can be extremely critical of the Republicans and is certainly not a laissez-faire liberal). www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/2013/11/is-russia-a-surprise-ally-in-the-defense-of-persecuted-christians/
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Dec 8, 2013 21:37:13 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jan 31, 2014 23:38:33 GMT
An Eastern-Rite Catholic makes some suggestions about where Roman practice is superior to Orthodoxy and where Rome should in his view make adjustments for the sake of unity, in response to a similar piece by an Orthodox blogger (linked in the article). The combox sadly displays just how bitter Catholic-Orthodox exchanges can get. www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2884/roman_rights_and_wrongs.aspx#.UuwyIvl_vY4BTW one thing that does irritate me about some Eastern-Rite advocates of reunion with the Orthodox is that they seem to speak as if Latin-Rite developments of the second millennium with which they disagree (e.g. devotion to the Infant Jesus) are not merely mistaken but contemptible.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Mar 16, 2014 0:25:12 GMT
Rod Dreher (Orthodox convert, ex-Catholic) links to discussions of how the extreme anti-Latinism of much Orthodox commentary is actually a nineteenth-century development, and of how Catholics calling for the Church to imitate the Orthodox practice of synodical government should be aware of the fragmentation, scandalous wranglings and other problems to which such government has given rise among the Orthodox (though he also notes that while Catholicism may look better in theory, in practice we experience equally scandalous disunity and heterodoxy at ground level - he instances an experience of going to confession, while Catholic, to a priest who scolded him for NOT practising contraception with his wife): www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/christianity-east-west-catholicism-orthodoxy/
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on May 17, 2014 18:05:20 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on May 21, 2014 19:59:40 GMT
|
|