Pius XI was simply a beast of a pontiff. (That’s a highly laudatory term in my book.) I am just now looking again at Divini illius magistri - there are so many great lines in there, and he lectures the State up and down, really tells the State what is and what is not its business. I loved this quotation towards the end:

This fact is proved by the whole history of Christianity and its institutions, which is nothing else but the history of true civilization and progress up to the present day.

None of this nonsense from Pius about the “Western tradition” and “Western civilization” - there was no other civilization, period.
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One of the things which I love about the old Catholic Encyclopedia is that the biographical entries rarely lack sympathetic authors. It frequently happens that in reading some such entry you discover that character x, of whom you had never previously heard, is regarded (or ought to be regarded!) as one of the greatest lights Christendom has ever produced. My favorite example is that of the entry for Pope St. Gregory VII, “one of the most remarkable men of all times.”

I had another such experience today when I discovered - I should properly say “rediscovered” (and I’ll explain why) - François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. As I might have expected, Fénelon’s biographer says of him: “he remains one of the most attractive, brilliant, and puzzling figures that the Catholic Church has ever produced.” Probably had never heard of the guy before today, right?

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The Early Papacy to the Synod of Chalcedon in 451 by Adrian Fortescue is now in it’s fourth edition. The fourth edition came out from Ignatius Press in 2008 and is edited by Alcuin Reid. I picked up the slender volume at the bookstore the other day and was hooked after a few pages. Prior to reading this book, my feeling was that Ronald Knox in his The Belief of Catholics did the best job (as far as my knowledge of apologetic literature goes) of presenting the Catholic case vis-a-vis a moderate protestant position. Now, if I have to recommend a book to an inquiring and serious protestant, it will probably be this volume by Fortescue.

The work originated as a series of articles which appeared in The Tablet in 1919. Fortescue revised them and published them as a book in 1920. The purpose of the articles was to answer the protestants who say that the “Church” to which they owe allegiance (to which we all owe allegiance) is that Church which existed up until some time shortly after 451. Anything that was said or done by the “Catholic” guys at that date and earlier is a-okay. As a corollary, these protestants deny that the modern papacy is anything like (in the relevant Vatican I terms) the papacy at and before 451. Back then, so they claim, the pope was only one of many bishops, even though somewhat more preeminent.

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This brief interview caught my eye partly because of the year that I spent in Hebrew and Jewish studies at Oxford, partly because it is an attack on Joseph Ratzinger’s scholarship. While at Oxford, I never had the pleasure of taking a course with Professor Vermes, but I certainly came to know his reputation. I have no difficulty in crediting his claim that the Holy Father’s knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and other Semitic languages might be better than it is. But I think that it is a mistake when Prof. Vermes, perhaps as a deliberate slight, attributes a lack of knowledge about Biblical scholarship later than 1970 to Benedict XVI. I don’t know if Papa Ratzinger is the most scholarly of popes since Papa Lambertini, but it wouldn’t be a far-fetched claim.

Prof. Vermes seems to think that the consensus of certain contemporary scholars amounts to the fact of matter; so Benedict, by defending orthodoxy, has written a book which will pressure Catholic biblical scholars to deny the facts before their eyes. This is really a ludicrous position. In order to assess the worth of any consensus, one first needs to know who the scholars are that make up the consensus. Especially in a field of study as controversial and hotly debated as Biblical and New Testament studies, I think that we can never ignore the pre-scholarly, as it were, bias of the investigators. The one solid fact of the matter in this case is that the evidence can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Just as in philosophy, what we first of all need to consider is whether the scholar has a made a case consistent with the facts; we ask whether his account is internally coherent. Then we look at the “costs” and benefits of maintaining that consistent account; we hesitate to commit to neat solutions in one area that require us to make ridiculous conclusions in another area.
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I don’t normally read recent scholarship in sociology (nor even in theology for that matter — most of my theological reading is restricted to the works of the long-deceased) but I was referred to William Portier’s Here Come the Evangelical Catholics by a good friend from college, and when she posted it on her blog I thought I’d take a look. Portier teaches theology at the University of Dayton, and was the dissertation advisor to my friend’s husband. I knew from her description that his article concerns Catholic culture in America, and particularly the culture of younger generations of Catholics who grew up after Vatican II. I also had the general impression that Portier was using the term ‘evangelical Catholic’ in a fairly positive sense, which was confusing; why in the world would a group of serious Catholics want to be named for evangelicals? To me it sounds like a taunt or a jab. However, I know my friend and her husband to be serious and well-educated Catholics, so I figured I’d better take a look.

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A friend sent this to me. I hardly agree with everything on the lists - C.S. Lewis and The Book of Common Prayer, of whatever year, for starters - but I do like the general thrust of the thing:

I realize that most of you (obviously) aren’t in the Detroit area; but I figured that all of you would appreciate the traditionalist class of this event:

We recently received details about the Roman Forum’s 2008 annual summer symposium in Gardone Riviera, Italy. It will take place June 26th to July 7th. I have the distinct pleasure of saying that I will be able to attend this year for the first time.

These Ruins are Inhabited
Catholic Emergence From the Rubble of Two
“Iron Ages” (The Tenth and Twentieth Centuries)

The great Catholic civilization of the High Middle Ages arose from initiatives developed in the Tenth Century. This was popularly known as an “Age of Iron” and filled with tales of ecclesiastical collapse and social confusion. Can a new Catholic civilization arise from the ideological and social rubble left by the Twentieth Century’s Iron Age? What signs of hope and warning bells must we Twenty-First Century Catholics heed in attempting to “restore all things in Christ”? What does the example of the Tenth Century teach us in our efforts to rebuild Christendom? These are the questions to be addressed by our expanded, European-American faculty in the 2008 Summer Symposium, in a program dedicated to Pope Benedict XVI and offered in gratitude for his motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum. Why not join us for ten days of living, learning and praying in a microcosm of traditional Christendom.

Among others, there will be talks given by the following faculty, clergy, and musicians:
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Today is a Federal holiday in the United States — the only one in the American calendar designated in honor of a single individual. That individual, of course, is Martin Luther King, Jr., the most famous black leader to come out of the Civil Rights movement, and the closest thing Americans have to a national hero. Cornell is certainly doing its part to honor King’s memory. Earlier today I received this email from our esteemed president, David J. Skorton:

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I would call to our readers’ attention an article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic about Bishop Jin Luxian of Shanghai. The article is an extremely favorable portrait of Bishop Jin, who languished in prison for many years, like Cardinal Kung, but then after his release, began to cooperate with the Communist government and became a member of the Communist-approved episcopal hierarchy. The rationale for this collaboration with the Communists, which the author, Adam Minter, seems to have swallowed hook, line, and sinker, was that millions of Chinese Catholics were in need of the sacraments, a need which the underground Church could never hope to meet. Thus, even though it meant disobedience to Rome and, as far as I can see, latae sententiae excommunication, Bishop Jin agreed to the Communists’ terms and carried on his episcopal ministry.

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