Catholic Culture

A friend with Polish roots sent me a link on a rich Christmas tradition in Poland.

On the first Thursday of December, crèche masters from around Poland and other parts of the world display their szopki at the history museum in the Krzysztofory Palace. The winning models are placed on display throughout the Christmas season. The szopka is a traditional Polish folk art that has its origins in the Middle Ages. The tradition is a rich and colorful one, having evolved over the ages. The szopki depict the Wawel Cathedral, which is a part of Krakow’s Wawel Castle with a Nativity scene set inside its doors. Some of the models are as small as 6 inches while others are around 6 feet high.

How's that for cool?

The Pope and Relativism

From the Telegraph:

In a message for the 2012 World Peace Day of January 1, Pope Benedict said that neither peace nor justice was obtainable if the objective norms of morality expressed in the Ten Commandments continue to be rejected.

He words represent another severe criticism of moral relativism, the humanistic creed that holds there can be no objective standard on which to base morality. ...

"Deep within his conscience, man discovers a law that he did not lay upon himself, but which he must obey," he said in his message, Educating Young People in Justice and Peace.

"Its voice calls him to love and to do what is good, to avoid evil and to take responsibility for the good he does and the evil he commits," he said.

"Thus, the exercise of freedom is intimately linked to the natural moral law, which is universal in character, expresses the dignity of every person and forms the basis of fundamental human rights and duties - consequently, in the final analysis, it forms the basis for just and peaceful coexistence."

Life

“I’m done, I did what I was supposed to. My baby is going to get here safe.”

Only weeks after Jenni was diagnosed with cancer, she found out she was 10 weeks pregnant. Doctors told her she had to terminate the pregnancy or stop treatment while pregnant for the safety of the baby. Jenni reportedly did not consider terminating the baby. She decided to forgo radiation and chemotherapy while pregnant.

"Terminating the baby." It's amazing how such a chilling thing can be said with utter insouciance.

Block Him

From FoxNews:

WASHINGTON – As a year marred with fights and stalemates within the federal government comes to a close, Republican lawmakers and President Obama are embroiled in yet another battle of wills.

Republican lawmakers are refusing to officially adjourn for the year in hopes of deterring Obama from making any unconfirmed appointments to controversial boards while Congress is on vacation.

Senate Republicans and the president can’t agree on new National Labor Relations Board members, leaving only two chairs on the board filled going into the new year. ...

In an effort to prevent these recess appointments, Republicans are having the Senate ‘gavel in gavel out’ every few days, meaning they are not officially adjourning for the year.

If this prevents the Senate from taking a recess, lawmakers believe Obama will be stopped from making any recess appointments.

This is what I like to see.

Dewey the Progressive

Tiffany Jones Miller wrote an insightful piece on progressivism that appears on National Review Online:

If the progressive label seems less radical today, it is only because progressivism is less well known than its liberal progeny. It was initially an academic phenomenon far removed from American politics. Particularly in the post–Civil War American university, professors — many of whom had obtained their graduate training in German universities, and whose thought reflected the “intoxicating effect of the undiluted Hegelian philosophy upon the American mind,” as progressive Charles Merriam once put it — articulated a critique of America that was as deep as it was wide. It began with a conscious rejection of the natural-rights principles of the American founding and the promotion of a new understanding of freedom, history, and the state in their stead. From this foundation, the progressives then criticized virtually every aspect of our traditional way of life, recommending reforms or “social reorganization” on a sweeping scale, the primary engine of which was to be a new, “positive” role for the state. As the progressives’ influence in the academy increased, and growing numbers of their students sallied forth into all aspects of endeavor, this intellectual transformation gradually began to reshape the broader American mind, and, in time, American political practice. “A new regime in thought,” as Eldon Eisenach writes, “began to become a new regime in power.”

Mount Athos

Watch this incredibly rare look into the secluded life of the monks living on Mount Athos. It is impossible not to be deeply moved by this. I couldn't help thinking, "If only the Orthodox accepted the Pope."

The reporter comments, incorrectly, that the Orthodox Church is the only church that has not changed any of its teaching in 2,000 years. Of course, that is the view of the Orthodox, so I'm not surprised that it was repeated here. That statement was the only issue I had with this phenomenal series. Catholics can learn a lot from their Orthodox brethren when it comes to strict liturgical reverence and the mystical life. How wonderful it would be if East and West were united once again!

Saint Stephen

The sarcophagus of Saint Stephen in the Church of San Lorenzo in Rome

Open Secret

From the Telegraph:

Vatican throws light on history as it opens secret archives

...100 of the most historically significant documents held by the Vatican's Secret Archives are to go on public display in Rome – the first and probably last time that they will leave the buttressed stone walls of the tiny city state.

The priceless documents span more than a millennium, from the 8th century to modern times, and feature a cast of historical characters ranging from the Knights Templar to Galileo, Martin Luther and Henry VIII.

They are normally kept in air-conditioned, climate-controlled rooms in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, which boasts more than 50 miles of shelves, as well as in a high-security underground bunker.

Archivists have gathered them together for an unprecedented exhibition, to be held in Rome's Capitoline Museums, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Secret Archives in their present form.

Christmas Morning Attack

From the Associated Press:

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI's Christmas pleas for peace around the world were brutally ignored in Nigeria, where an explosion Sunday claimed by Muslim extremists ripped through a Catholic church during Mass.

Authorities say at least 25 people were killed by the explosion at the St. Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla, near the Nigerian capital, Abuja. Boko Haram, a radical Muslim sect waging a sectarian fight claimed the attack and another bombing near a church in the restive city of Jos.

The assaults come a year after a series of Christmas Eve bombings in Jos claimed by the militants left at least 32 dead and 74 wounded.

Benedict didn't refer explicitly to the bombings in his Christmas Day survey of the world's trouble spots, delivered from the sun-drenched loggia of St. Peter's Basilica. But the Vatican issued a statement denouncing them as a sign of "cruelty and absurd, blind hatred" that shows no respect for human life.

Let's Get Real

Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of God's humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity. ...

Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light.

... let us strip away our fixation on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped. Let us allow ourselves to be made simple by the God who reveals himself to the simple of heart. -Pope Benedict XVI

Giotto's Nativity

Theodore Roosevelt on Family

I don't often praise the arch-Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, but I came across this quote and thought it certainly warranted an airing here.

“It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful businessman . . . or farmer, or a successful lawyer, or doctor, or a writer, or a president, or a ranchman . . . or to kill grizzly bears and lions. But for unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.”

A professor in college once related how Roosevelt would often single out large families for praise when out and about, holding them up as great assets to America. This, obviously, was before the worldwide birth control frenzy that substantially whittled down the average family, transforming children from gifts from God into rapacious economic consumers to be minimized and controlled. In my view, Roosevelt makes up for an array of political solecisms with his pro-family take, which was a common attitude, at one time.

The Affirmative Action Illusion

Jeff Jacoby, writing for The Boston Globe, makes the case for eliminating affirmative action policies in higher education. Pretty convincing. Here's a snippet:

IF RACIAL preferences in higher education were good for racial minorities in higher education, we surely would have seen definitive evidence of it by now. Instead, a widening shelf of empirical research suggests that the opposite is true - that affirmative action in academia is not advancing minority achievement but impeding it. ...

When an elite institution relaxes its usual standards to admit more blacks and Hispanics, it all but guarantees that those academically weaker students will have trouble keeping up with their better-prepared white and Asian classmates. Minorities who might have flourished in a science or engineering program at a middle-tier state college are apt to find themselves overwhelmed by the pace at which genetics or computer architecture is taught in the Ivy League. Many decide to switch to an easier major. Others drop out altogether.

Especially when it comes to issues of race, no matter how bulletproof the evidence, ideology will always trump reason and cheap political pandering will outweigh the common good. Consequences be damned.

Exodus

Life for Christians in Iraq

From the Telegraph:

Father Immanuel Dabaghian, one of Baghdad’s last surviving priests, is expecting a quiet Christmas. To join him in the Church of the Virgin Mary means two hours of security checks and a body search at the door, and even then there’s no guarantee of survival. Islamist gunmen massacred 58 people in a nearby church last year, and fresh graffiti warns remaining worshippers that they could be next.

The Americans have gone now, and Iraq’s Christian communities – some of the world’s oldest – are undergoing an exodus on a biblical scale.

Of the country’s 1.4 million Christians, about two thirds have now fled. Although the British Government is reluctant to recognise it, a new evil is sweeping the Middle East: religious cleansing. The attacks, which peak at Christmas, have already spread to Egypt, where Coptic Christians have seen their churches firebombed by Islamic fundamentalists. In Tunisia, priests are being murdered.

Maronite Christians in Lebanon have, for the first time, become targets of bombing campaigns. Christians in Syria, who have suffered as much as anyone from the Assad regime, now pray for its survival. If it falls, and the Islamists triumph, persecution may begin in earnest.

Who else is talking about this tragedy?

Shroud of Turin

From the Telegraph:

Italian study claims Turin Shroud is Christ's authentic burial robe

Just days before Christmas, a new study has emerged that suggests that one of Christianity's most prized but mysterious relics – the Turin Shroud – is not a medieval forgery but could be the authentic burial robe of Christ.

...The scientists used extremely brief pulses of ultraviolet light to replicate the kind of marks found on the burial cloth.

They concluded that the iconic image of the bearded man must therefore have been created by "some form of electromagnetic energy (such as a flash of light at short wavelength)." Although they stopped short of offering a non-scientific explanation for the phenomenon, their findings will be embraced by those who believe that the marks on the shroud were miraculously created at the moment of Christ's Resurrection.

Fascinating.

Read more on this story here.

The Gingrich-Roosevelt Ticket

In this article, appearing in National Review Online, John Fund highlights some very troubling comments made by Newt Gingrich regarding the Roosevelts.

But at the same time Newt tries to wrap himself in the Reagan mantle, he also exhibits another nostalgic tic that should give conservatives agita. Newt is an unabashed admirer of the Roosevelts — Theodore and Franklin. Together those two presidents embodied the Progressive Era and the New Deal, developments which dramatically expanded Washington’s powers and radically changed the expectations Americans had of government.

Just last week, Newt made clear his desire to emulate the two men when he told Newsweek magazine that, in handling intractable problems such as poverty, “we’re gonna experiment and experiment and experiment until we break through.” When Newsweek’s Peter Boyer dryly noted that this might “not please the ear of a small-government conservative,” Gingrich didn’t flinch: “It makes me, in some ways, like the two Roosevelts.”

I am pretty stunned that Gingrich, for all his brilliance, is so unreservedly pro-Roosevelt during a Republican primary. What is he thinking? It's going to be pretty difficult to win over the tea party crowd if you evince nostalgia for the two presidents who are most to blame for the deleterious accretions of big-government.

A First

Blessed Kateri Tekawitha

From ABCNews:

Jake Finkbonner was near death for months with a flesh eating bacteria, but made a miraculous recovery that the Vatican credited to The Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, marking the second miracle for the 17th century Mohawk-Algonquin woman and clearing the way for her to become the first American-Indian saint.

Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree Monday approving the miracle attribute to the intercession of the woman, and she could be canonized as soon as February. The Vatican said it believes that the prayers Finkbonner’s family directed to Tekakwitha were responsible for bringing the boy back from the brink of death.

Cardinal Burke on Holy Communion