On Sunday evening Damian Thompson posted an edited transcript from the reporters’ meeting with Cardinal Castrillon. I’d recommend looking at the whole of it. These are some of the notable passages:

This celebration, the Gregorian one, was the celebration of the Church during more than a thousand years . . . . Others say one cannot celebrate with the back to the people. This is ridiculous. The Son of God has sacrificed himself to the Father, with his face to the Father. It is not against the people. It is for the people . . . . [At this point, Iosephus is chanting: "Hoyos! Hoyos! Hoyos!"]

Damian Thompson: So would the Pope like to see many ordinary parishes making provision for the Gregorian Rite?

CC: All the parishes. Not many – all the parishes, because this is a gift of God. He offers these riches, and it is very important for new generations to know the past of the Church. This kind of worship is so noble, so beautiful – the deepest theologians’ way to express our faith. The worship, the music, the architecture, the painting, makes a whole that is a treasure. The Holy Father is willing to offer to all the people this possibility, not only for the few groups who demand it but so that everybody knows this way of celebrating the Eucharist in the Catholic Church.

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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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An interesting interview with Fr. de Tanouarn of the Institute of the Good Shepherd. This particularly caught my eye:

What specific role does the Good Shepherd Institute play in this whole context?

The way I see it, we have a double function. We are quite near the bishops as we meet lots of them. Real relations can be built that way little by little –at least with some of them. It takes time, but scars from the past can be healed and mutual trust can develop between individuals, beyond personal agendas. Another thing we do is we try to unify all the forces on favor of Benedict XVI’s ecclesial policy, by organizing public events – such as the congress we’re planning in Paris next January to thank the pope, at the occasion of which there may be a little surprise.

There may be a little surprise? These are the kind of surprises I look forward to.

From Brian Mershon’s interview with Fr. John Berg, the Superior General of the F.S.S.P.:

Q: After one year as Superior General, what has been most surprising to you?

A: The thing that has surprised me the most, or perhaps that has been the most revealing aspect, is that what people seem to really thirst for and need with the Traditional Mass is to have a full-time priest there and having a parish set up.

I was in Sacramento for years where we were able to purchase a church with a school, a hall and a rectory on the premises. Having all of this there, I did not realize how difficult it is in other places that do not enjoy it.

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This is the third and final part of our interview with Simplex Sacerdos, a Navy chaplain who has served with the Marine Corps in Iraq. (For Part I and Part II, follow the links.) In this third part, Simplex Sacerdos kindly answered some general questions we had about Catholicism and the culture of the U.S. military.

CSGT: What, in your experience, has been the effect of the “culture of death” upon the military? For instance, what is the military’s - or the Marine Corps’ - position on the distribution of pornography and condoms?

SS: No doubt, those in the military, especially the younger servicemen, have long been given over to drunkenness and impurity. I believe it’s historically accurate to say that, before the rise of nation states at least, being enlisted in the army or the navy was not necessarily considered honorable, largely because of the immorality known to prevail there. Nowadays too there is a great deal of impurity prevalent in the ranks.

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