Recently in Faith & Reason Category

Rooted in Jesus Christ (RiJC) is an Adult Faith Formation Community whose goal is to offer everyone the opportunity to explore ways to ratify, strengthen, and renew their knowledge of, and love for, Jesus Christ. If you are interested in deepening your faith, then we invite you to join us at one of our Friday night gatherings. RiJC meets at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church (East 90th Street, NYC, btw 2nd & 3rd Aves). For dates of the meeting read the flyer here. 

The former Swiss theologian of the papal household under Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Georges Cottier, OP, thinks it's possible to accept some of Obama's approach to matters like abortion, etc. as a temporary measure because he perceives Obama as realistic. John Allen writes about the cardinal's remarks. I think the cardinal's approach is too optimistic and weak in some areas. What do you think of Cottier's and Allen's analysis? Is Cottier realistic or naive?

The Jesuit report that after residing more than seventy years within the papal summer Palace itself, the headquarters of the Vatican Observatory recently moved to a new location in the Papal Gardens at Castelgandolfo. The move was occasioned by increased demands for space within the Palace, and the growing needs of the Observatory. Until few weeks ago, the observatory offices were located on the top floor of Papal Palace, the Pope's summer home located in the Alban Hills, 25 kilometers southeast of Rome. Its extensive astronomical library is scattered over four rooms on the top two floors of the Palace, while the valuable meteorite collection and laboratory, the historic vault of photographic observations made at the Observatory from 1895 to 1979, and the classroom where the biennial Vatican Observatory Summer Schools are conducted, are located on the ground floor of the Palace. Meanwhile, the living quarters of the Jesuits is divided between rooms on the second and top floors. With the prospect of half a dozen younger Jesuits joining the staff over the next five years, the issue of both residence and office space was becoming acute.

"Moving the Observatory collections and libraries has been a logistical challenge," noted Father José Funes, the Argentinean Jesuit and director of the observatory. "But the new site will allow us to address a growing need for space and order." The new quarters, located in the remodelled monastery built by the Basilian monks within one of the most beautiful gardens in the Italian peninsula, should provide a far more peaceful and comfortable setting. The Vatican Observatory traces its history to the reform of the calendar by Pope Gregory XIII in 1583. It was re-organized by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, "so that everyone might see clearly that the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science, whether human or divine, but that they embrace it, encourage it, and promote it with the fullest possible devotion."

Using the method of Saint Cyril and Methodius Pope Benedict spoke about the work of the Church in making the faith intelligible to people using their own language. The task of inculturation is an extremely difficult work because of the nuances of language and culture. Just look at the headaches in translating catechisms, papal speeches and liturgical texts today. The coalescing of faith and culture is a work the Church has done since the time of Christ. Watch the video clip on the subject.

The Pope said, in part: 

This was a decisive factor for the development of the Slavic civilization in general. Cyril and Methodius were convinced that the various peoples could not consider that they had fully received Revelation until they had heard it in their own language and read it with the characters proper to their own alphabet.

To Methodius falls the merit of ensuring that the work began by his brother would not remain sharply interrupted. While Cyril, the "philosopher," tended toward contemplation, he [Methodius] was directed more toward the active life. In this way, he was able to establish the foundations of the successive affirmation of what we could call the "Cyril-Methodian idea," which accompanied the Slavic peoples in the various historical periods, favoring cultural, national and religious development. Pope Pius XI already recognized this with the apostolic letter Quod Sanctum Cyrillum, in which he classified the two brothers as "sons of the East, Byzantines by their homeland, Greeks by origin, Romans by their mission, Slavs by their apostolic fruits" (AAS 19 [1927] 93-96).

The historic role that they fulfilled was afterward officially proclaimed by Pope John Paul II who, with the apostolic letter Egregiae Virtutis Viri, declared them co-patrons of Europe, together with St. Benedict (AAS 73 [1981] 258-262). Indeed, Cyril and Methodius are a classic example of what is today referred to with the term "inculturation": Each people should make the revealed message penetrate into their own culture, and express the salvific truth with their own language. This implies a very exacting work of "translation," as it requires finding adequate terms to propose anew the richness of the revealed Word, without betraying it. The two brother saints have left in this sense a particularly significant testimony that the Church continues looking at today to be inspired and guided. (Wednesday Audience, June 17, 2009)

Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News & World Report's "God & Country" blog posted an exclusive interview in which Newt Gingrich speaks on following his desire to enter into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. 

The former Speaker of the House said in part: "The whole effort to create a ruthless, amoral, situational ethics culture has probably driven me toward a more overt Christianity."

To read the interview

Are we committed to beauty and truth in art? Thinking about Dan Brown's books which contains Catholic "material" I have been a bit distressed at some peoples' an uncritical acceptance of what I think is mostly scandalous regarding the Catholic faith. To me it is not OK because Brown is, as it's said belowi, cashing in on the work of the Church. But my gripe is that fiction is always received as such by some people aren't able to clearly discern the meaning of things. That is, there are people who can't separate fact from fiction in printed materials; for them anything in print is true. Right, it's ludicrous but people do think that what Dan Brown writes is true and beyond reproach. Father John Wauck, an Opus Dei priest, is a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, and the author of the blog "The Da Vinci Code and Opus Dei" said the following recently in an interview the rest of the interview was published on Zenit.org.

Dan Brown's trying to sell books by offering a "cocktail" of history, art, religion and mystery, and, in today's world, there seems to be only one place where he's able to find all those things together: in the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, he's cashing in on the culture of the Church.

Universities are an invention of the Church. Copernicus was a Roman Catholic cleric, and he dedicated his book on the heliocentric universe to the Pope. The calendar we use today is the Gregorian Calendar, because it was promulgated by Pope Gregory XIII, who was working with the best astronomers and mathematicians of his time. Galileo himself always remained a Catholic, and his two daughters were nuns. One of the greatest Italian astronomers of the 19th century was a Jesuit priest, Angelo Secchi. The father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel, was a Catholic monk. The creator of the "Big Bang" theory was a Belgian priest, Georges Lemaitre.

In short, the idea that there is a some natural tension between science and the Church, between reason and faith, is utter nonsense. Nowadays, when people hear the words "science" and "the Church," they immediately think of Galileo's trial in the 1600s. But, in the larger scheme of things, that complex case --which is frequently distorted by anti-Catholic propagandists--was a glaring exception. There's a reason why critics of the Church are always brings it up: It's the only example they've got. So, when we hear the words "science" and "the Church," we should think Copernicus, Secchi, Mendel and Lemaitre. They're representative. Galileo's trial is not.

We're observing the anniversary of death of the famed Jesuit, Matteo Ricci. Benedict XVI wrote to Bishop Claudio Giuliodori of Macerata-Tolentino-Recanati-Cingoli-Treia, Italy on the occasion of a Jubilee Year commemorating the fourth centenary of the death of the Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci, who died in Beijing, China on 11 May 1610. In part the Pope said:

In considering his intense academic and spiritual activity, we cannot but remain favourably impressed by the innovative and unusual skill with which he, with full respect, approached Chinese cultural and spiritual traditions. It was, in fact, this approach that characterised his mission, which aimed to seek possible harmony between the noble and millennial Chinese civilisation and the novelty of Christianity, which is for all societies a ferment of liberation and of true renewal from within, because the Gospel, universal message of salvation, is destined for all men and women whatever the cultural and religious context to which they belong.

A biography of Father Ricci can be read here.

More about Father Ricci can be found here and here.

For those with a deeper curiosity I could recommend Jonathan D. Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.