Don't miss the rest of them. They just keep getting better. Read more here.
A passage in Pope John Paul II's last encyclical on the Eucharist reads: "The Son of God became man in order to restore all creation, in one supreme act of praise, to the One who made it from nothing." 
deeper essential and sacramental meanings. 
A Reuters report out of Washington released yesterday (June 21, 2005) confirmed our worst fears about why seeing an SUV in the rearview mirror full of kids with a soccer mom at the wheel talking on a cellphone inspires terror. The report says that using a cellphone -- 
even with a hands-free device -- may distract drivers because the brain cannot handle both tasks. Imaging tests conducted by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found showed that "the brain directs its resources to either visual input or auditory input, but cannot fully activate both at the same time." Read more here. [Cellphone SUV crash, pictured right]
Sheeesh! Seems my blog has turned into a bully pulpit for a liberal Irish priest in Tokyo named Fr. Joseph O'Leary (pictured left), who has more time on his hands than he knows what to do with. Just examine the Comments to any one of the recent posts below, and you'll see what I mean. About 95% of all the comments are his. I ought to start charging him a user tax!
. Edited by Jennifer Ferrara and Patricia Sodano Ireland. Our Sunday Visitor Books. 299 pages. No price given.
New Oxford Review editor Dale Vree relates (NOR, June 2005, p. 5) that geopolitical expert Jack Wheeler, wrote an article on his intelligence website, ToThePointNews.com (April 26, 2005), saying: A Vatican source has disclosed ... a psychological trauma of John Paul II. Whenever Vatican investigators brought the results of their vetting process regarding an individual's candidacy for bishop, cardinal, or other office, and they revealed he was a homosexual, John Paul would refuse to believe it. He did so because accusing someone of homosexuality was a standard practice of the Communist government in his native Poland regarding anyone it regarded as an enemy of the state ... [John Paul] summarily dismissed such accusations ... and would approve the elevation of anyone accused.In the same issue of NOR, in an article entitled "Reflections on Pope John Paul II's Legacy," Tom Bethell lays the difficulty at the feet of the Pope's understanding of "collegiality":
A striking feature of his papacy was that he evidently thought it inappropriate to discipline brother bishops. Doctrine, emanating from Rome, remained unchanged; but practice, within the far-flung dioceses, was the responsibility of the bishop. Errant shepherds went uncorrected. Jim Hichcock told me: "The only working absolute in his pontificate, as far as I can see, was that bishops could do no wrong. His support of bishops seemed to be virtually absolute, unless there was a public scandal, and sometimes not even then."Often the flip-side of a man's virtues sometimes reveals his weaknesses. One of our former priests was immensely popular, with great presence as a speaker, warm pastoral sensibilities, and great compassion. His gifts of personalism and congeniality also made him effective as a fund raiser, and he was in demand to head up a number of major building projects in the diocese. On the other hand, however, he could not bear personal confrontation. He could not bear being disliked. Consequently, he passed over with a blind eye numerous abuses in his parish that never met with proper resolution. These are common human failings, as understandable as they are deplorable. And it should come as no surprise that the same kinds of human limitations may circumscribe a pontificate.
As far as the Vatican is concerned, it will be interesting to see how the current pontificate plays out. Many Catholics, of course, are hopeful, given the caliber of theological acumen and orthodoxy they see in the present Pontiff. Dale Vree, for example, writes in an editorial entitled "Three Cheers for the Panzerkardinal": For years, as Pope John Paul II grew weaker and weaker, your Editor has been saying intercessory prayers on a daily basis to St. Vincent Pallotti, under whose patronage the NOR is published, that our next pope would be more traditional, a much better administrator, more insistent on orthodoxy in the Church, less ecumenical, more anti-feminist, an upholder of Just War doctrine, but no less saintly than John Paul. Your Editor believes his prayers have been answered, in each and every particular. (Read more here.)Recalling how St. Francis of Assisi heard Christ tell him, "Rebuild my church," we can't avoid the thought that we could use a little remedial maintenance around the Church these days too. There is far greater need for the nuts-and-bolts work of plugging holes in the leaky Barque of Peter than for geopolitical summitry and statesmanship. The challenges facing Pope Benedict are legion, but the opportunities are also great. The same could be said, too, of the Bush administration, whose long-term aversion for doing anything significant about the abortion issue may nevertheless prove to be one of the great disappointments of his presidency for those who voted him into office (see my earlier post: Pro-lifers: sold out by Bush?"). And, thus, we move foreward -- to work and to pray. There is a lot of difficult pruning and cultivating that awaits us in the Lord's vineyards -- work for everyone.
It's easy to forget how high the stakes of the last presidential election were for pro-lifers. As Hadley Arkes notes, in a recent article in First Things (April 2005), entitled Bush's Second Chance, "even the most sober observers of the political scene recognized that a Kerry presidency would mark the end of any prospects for the pro-life cause in Congress or the courts." As one conservative news commentator remarked, "we narrowly dodged the bullet that time."On the matter of abortion, however, the President did not seem to be seized with any comparable sense of moment, or any heightened awareness of possibilities now come into sight. And yet, in the case of abortion, the new possibilities had already been visible for more than two years. The President showed no keen awareness of these possibilities now, just as he had shown no awareness earlier. It was not that the facts were not there to be seen, or that the President had no means of knowing. For at least two years the White House staff, and the President it advises, had ample reason to conclude that America had reached a turning point, and that, with the slightest moves on the part of the administration -- moves so slight that they did not require the exertion of an executive order -- they could have produced some striking gains for the pro-life cause while fostering a deep crisis in the ranks of their adversaries. With moves modest by any measure, Mr. Bush could have advanced the pro-life cause and propelled the Democrats in Congress into an internecine war that would surely have torn them apart, and left them morally exhausted during the season of the campaign. That the President should have had no interest in inducing such strain among his adversaries, at virtually no cost to himself, must be ranked among the great political mysteries of our time. But apparently more pressing than any desire to sow confusion among his adversaries has been the President's desire to preserve his reticence on the matter of abortion.The upshot, for Arkes, is that Bush has had no interest in promoting the pro-life cause for at least the last two years. In the President's world, he says, "a willingness to talk about abortion is seen as tacky and unseemly." Read more here.
... For Mr. Bush, this reluctance to speak on abortion has been part of a policy fixed in his makeup and critical to his political design. In 1999, when he was preparing for his first presidential campaign, Mr. Bush took soundings among prominent conservatives, and the word went out: he was emphatically, decisively, on the side of the pro-lifers. He could be depended on to do the things that President Reagan and his own father had done before him to preserve a coalition that included pro-lifers. But, as the report went, he did not feel that he could “lead” with the issue of abortion. Either it was impolitic to make this question his defining issue, or he did not feel confident of his own facility in making the argument. He would speak on this vexing issue only when it was absolutely necessary for him to do so.
Before he passed from this life, Pope John Paul II declared this the Year of the Eucharist. Throughout this year, not only His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, but many local bishops are calling Catholics to renewed attention, study, faith, devotion and adoration of the Blessed Eucharist. Our diocese is hosting a major Eucharistic congress in Charlotte in September. We have already seen a new focus on Eucharistic teaching in homilies, as well as in our diocesan newspaper (The Charlotte News & Harold). We have even seen a number of Eucharistic processions in local parishes. A number of my friends have purchased copies of books of Eucharistic theology written by the Holy Father himself while he was known to the world as Cardinal Ratzinger. Among these, pride of place likely belongs to God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life (Ignatius Press, 2003). But there are also the earlier related volumes, also by Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2000), and, much earlier, Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy (1986). One should also mention his contributions in Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy With Cardinal Ratzinger: Proceedings of the July 2001 Fontgombault Liturgical Conference, edited by Alcuin Reid (St. Augustine's Press, 2004), reviewed with keen interest for Ratzinger's favorable remarks about the traditional Latin Mass by the late Michael Davies before his passing. 
Without wishing to detract in the least from these excellent choices in reading, I would also suggest a book to which new attention is being called after many years, Abbot Vonier's A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist. Vonier was a bestselling Catholic author in England during the 1920s -- that golden age of Catholic letters when writers like Chesterton, Knox, and Belloc flourished (you know, writers of the sort that contemporary dissenters have "outgrown" and traded in for the "more substantial" dreamy fantasies of Teilhard de Chardin & Hans Kung). After his death in 1938, Vornier's work fell out of print and was largely forgotten. Yet his writing on the subject probably remains about as clear and fresh and orthodox as can be found anywhere. And it is succinct: his book is a mere 196 pages long. But the work is substantial. 
Don't take my word for it. Read the Introduction by Aidan Nichols, O.P., who is no theological slouch himself. Then read the book and see for yourself! You will be glad you did. is one of the few classics in Catholic theology composed in English.... This book, remarkable for its balance, depth, and accessibility, should never be out of print." -- Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.. Its theological depth comes largely from its fidelity to, and its power to illuminate, the Church's sacred Tradition concerning the Eucharist. The most stunning effect this book had on me was the realization of the shallow and ephemeral nature of most current theology, by comparison. We don't seem to produce theological thinkers like this anymore. Perhaps this book will begin to remedy that lack, by instructing apprentices and stimulating us to imination. We dwarfs had better start standing on the shoulders of giants like this, as Father Vonier himself clearly has done." -- Peter Kreeft. by Abbot Vonier, Preface by Peter Kreeft, Introduction by Aidan Nichols, O.P. $12.95 retail. ($10.36 from Amazon links above)
MADRID, Spain, JUNE 16, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Paul Ricoeur, a leading philosopher of the 20th century, died serenely in his sleep May 20 in Chatenay Malabry, Paris, at the age of 92. 
Woods has finally come out with a book that includes full-blown chapters on these contributions of Catholic scientists widely-overlooked in standard textbook histories. His book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, promises to be as controversial as it is informative, and has already drawn the vituperative ire of professor in France who has posted a vitriolic review on Amazon.com (in French). Whether or not one likes the way Woods manages to side-step some of the more ignonimous aspects of Church history (one thinks here of the typical knee-jerk reactions to "the Crusades" and "the [sic] Inquisition"), these are clearly peripheral if not irrelevant to the subject of his study. This is an undeniably well-researched volume, not to be overlooked by friend or foe. The mine of information Woods has managed to assimilate is simply staggering. Anyone wishing for the data to combat the pervasive ignorance that takes the Catholic Church for an enemy of open-minded learning, or takes the Middle Ages for a preserve of benighted supersition and knuckle-dragging mouth breathers, will be grateful that Woods has done this yeoman's job of research. As one reviewer put it, Woods has just upped the price of being anti-Catholic. Tolle, lege!
According to TIME magazine (June 6, 2005), p. 50, "The average Amish man takes 18,425 steps a day, and the average Amish woman takes 14,196. A typical American takes 5000." No comment needed.
The June 2005 issue of Crisis magazine carries an unusually cryptic piece entitled "Salvation," by James V. Schall, in his usual column, Sense and Nonsense. In it is the following paragraph, which begins with a quote from the Vatican II document, Lumen Gentium:Further, "Eternal salvation is open to those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church but seek God with a sincere heart, and under the inspiration of grace try in their lives to do his will, made known to them by the dictates of their conscience." Grace is seen working outside the visible confines of the Church, but not apart from the Spirit's being sent into the world. Like the court, the Church here insists that the person holding these positions must be sincere and in a position of unavoidable ignorance about the truth of revelation.And then he adds:
Suicide bombers usually meet this criterion.Amazing! Simply amazing! What a breath of absolutely fresh, clean air! Clarity! Finally!
Finally, Divine Providence does not "deny aids necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet reached an explicit belief in God, but strive to lead a good life, under the influence of God's grace." By such criteria, one wonders who, other than a few unrepentant believers, are not saved? If the vast majority will be saved with these beliefs, why disturb them?Schall concludes:
One wonders whether there are more erroneous consciences than we are led to believe, or whether the objective order is not more demanding than we suspect.Indeed. While I would be the first to defend the integrity of the truth contained in Lumen Gentium, such passages as those above, taken in isolation, can certainly suggest such a romantically ebullient soteriology as to seem surpassingly naive. The greatness of Christianity is it's ability to understand both the aspirations and aberrations of human nature. Without a full picture of both the doctrine of creation (which speaks to our human greatness, created in the image of God Himself and destined for eternal communion in the life of the Holy Trinity) and the doctrine of original sin (which speaks to our wretchedness, our condition of terminal alienation and misery stemming from our inwardly twisted disposition -- in curvatus in se -- captured superlatively well in Peter Jackson's image of Tolkien's Gollum), we can't hope for a view of reality that avoids hopelessly naive romanticism, that speaks to the heart of our aspirations, but at the cost of ignoring our aberrations, or that avoids a hopelessly bleak pessimism, that speaks to the heart of our aberrations, but at the cost of despair.