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The Church Around the World

Contents - Dec 2012 - Buy a copy now Homily: Benedict XVI: the new consoling certainty of Christmas - Pope Benedict XVI Culture: Western crisis is spiritual: Russian Orthodox leader - Metropolitan Hilarion News: The Church Around the World Sectarianism: Dignitatis Humanae Institute: Christian values in public life - Babette Francis Young Men of God 2012 Conference showcases Christian leadership - Br Barry Coldrey Events: iWitness Retreat / Campion College Summer Program Pilgrimage: Crossroads: young people spread the message of life and love - Angela Schumann Catholicism: The Year of Faith: time to revisit the Catechism of the Catholic Church Church - Audrey English A different fire: Vatican II and the new evangelisation - Archbishop Mark Coleridge History: Parish life in the Middle Ages (Part 1) - Frank Mobbs Caroline Chisholm Library: Melbourne's hidden gem - Angela Schumann Advent and the Second Coming: a forgotten article of faith - Br Christian Moe FSC Letters: Abortion silence - Thomas M. Kalotas Letters: Courage of convictions - Robert Bom Letters: Bob Santamaria - Brian A. Peachey Letters: Old Testament - Fr Brian Harrison Letters: Harm minimisation - Tom King Christmas: Latin Mass in Melbourne Poetry: The Reunion - Father John W. Ó Néill Books: A BIBLICAL SEARCH FOR THE CHURCH CHRIST FOUNDED, by Linus F. Clovis - Michael Daniel (reviewer) Books: ADAM AND EVE AFTER THE PILL, by Mary Eberstadt - Brian Peachey (reviewer) Support: Fighting Fund Books: Order books from www.freedompublishing.com.au Reflection: Feast of the Holy Innocents: Rachel weeps for her children - Anne Lastman

Senior Greek Orthodox patriarch calls for unity

Orthodox Christianity's most significant bishop told Pope Benedict XVI that the Year of Faith should spur greater prayer, hope and effort towards the unity of their two Churches.

"We join in the hope that the barrier dividing the Eastern Church and the Western Church will be removed, and that - at last - there may be but the one dwelling, firmly established on Christ Jesus, the cornerstone, who will make both one," said the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople.

The patriarch made his remarks in an address at the opening ceremony of the Year of Faith, which was inaugurated with Mass in St Peter's Square on 11 October.

The 72-year-old Greek cleric ranks as the "primus inter pares" or "first among equals" in the Eastern Orthodox communion which has over 300 million followers worldwide.

Patriarch Bartholomew recalled how the opening of the Second Vatican Council 50 years ago paved the way for a thawing of relations between Catholicism and Orthodoxy after generations of division dating back to the 11th century.

"Over the last five decades, the achievements of this assembly have been diverse as evidenced through the series of important and influential constitutions, declarations, and decrees," he told the Pope and over 400 of his fellow Catholic bishops in the shadow of St Peter's Basilica.

Amongst the fruits, said Bartholomew I, the warming relationship between the Churches since the mid-1960s has resulted in "the mutual rescinding of the excommunications of the year 1054, the exchange of greetings, returning of relics, entering into important dialogues, and visiting each other in our respective sees."

EWTN News

Pope Benedict XVI recalls Vatican II

The text of Pope Benedict XVI's recollections of the Second Vatican Council was published in L'Osservatore Romano on 10 October. The following are some edited extracts.

"It was a moment of extraordinary expectation. Great things were about to happen. The previous Councils had almost always been convoked for a precise question to which they were to provide an answer. This time there was no specific problem to resolve. But precisely because of this, a general sense of expectation hovered in the air: Christianity, which had built and formed the Western world, seemed more and more to be losing its power to shape society.

"So that it might once again be a force to shape the future, John XXIII had convoked the Council without indicating to it any specific problems or programs. This was the greatness and, at the same time, the difficulty of the task that was set before the ecclesial assembly.

"The various episcopates undoubtedly approached the great event with different ideas. Some of them arrived rather with an attitude of expectation regarding the program that was to be developed. It was the episcopates of Central Europe - Belgium, France and Germany - that came with the clearest ideas.

"A central aspect, especially for the German episcopate, was ecumenism: the shared experience of Nazi persecution had brought Protestant and Catholic Christians closer together so this now had to happen at the level of the whole Church, and to be developed further.

"For the French, the subject of the relationship between the Church and the modern world came increasingly to the fore - in other words the work of the so-called 'Schema XIII', from which the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World later emerged.

"The Declaration on Religious Liberty was urgently requested, and also drafted, by the American Bishops in particular. With developments in philosophical thought and in ways of understanding the modern State, the doctrine of tolerance, as worked out in detail by Pius XII, no longer seemed sufficient. At stake was the freedom to choose and practise religion and the freedom to change it, as fundamental human rights and freedoms.

"The Council Fathers neither could nor wished to create a new or different Church. This is why a hermeneutic of rupture is absurd and is contrary to the spirit and the will of the Council Fathers."

L'Osservatore Romano

Los Angeles Archbishop's first pastoral letter

Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles has written his first pastoral letter to his archdiocese, invoking the Catholic history of California and calling on Catholics to witness to the "New World of faith."

"Los Angeles - like all of California and the Americas - is built on a Christian foundation. And today we are called to build on that missionary foundation to make a new evangelisation of the Americas," the archbishop said in his 2 October letter. "The world needs a new evangelisation! The people of our city, our nation and our continent are waiting for the encounter with Jesus Christ who makes all things new."

The Archbishop, who took office in March 2011, named five pastoral priorities: improving faith education, encouraging vocations to the priesthood and religious life, fostering Catholic identity and diversity, promoting a "culture of life" and strengthening marriage and the family.

He explained the defence of marriage as an effort to restore a "family culture" in the face of "widespread cultural confusion." This defence must include doing more to support mothers, fathers and families in Catholic parishes and ministries.

"Our Church must lead a cultural renewal so that our society will once more see that marriage is sacred and that the family is the true sanctuary of life and the heart of a civilisation of love."

Catholic News Agency

Brisbane Archbishop praises pro-life initiative

Archbishop Mark Coleridge has described a new home established by Pregnancy Crisis Incorporated (PCI) on Brisbane's southside to protect women under pressure to abort their children as "right at the heart of what we are and do as Church".

Archbishop Coleridge, blessing and opening the home on 11 October, said "I didn't expect anything as big or as splendid as this". Later, in a house packed with people, he paid tribute to the house's founders. "I can only thank God for extraordinary sacrifices made to enable this to happen."

The Archbishop commended the fact that the home had been placed under the patronage of Our Lady of Guadalupe. "It is a reminder that through her influence the Church brought an end to human sacrifice in Mexico. We ask the Mother of Christ to make this place her own and give into your loving care all who dwell here. We also pray for an end to abortion's tide of death in Australia."

Catholic Leader

Benedict XVI launches series for Year of Faith

At his first general audience during the Year of Faith, Pope Benedict XVI initiated a new, year-long cycle of teachings aimed at healing the division between what Christians say they profess, what they actually believe, and how they live their lives.

"Christians often do not even know the core of their Catholic faith, the Creed, thus leaving room for a certain syncretism and religious relativism, without clarity on the truths to be believed and the salvific uniqueness of Christianity," the Pope told pilgrims in St Peter's Square on 17 October.

Unless Christians understand their faith and live it fully, he warned, they leave themselves prone to the forces operating in a "profoundly changed society" scarred by "many forms of barbarism." The Pope pointed to the influences of secularism, relativism, the use of other people as objects "for pure selfishness" and a "widespread nihilistic mentality".

In response, the Pope urged sound instruction in the Creed and the teachings of the Church for all Catholics. "The risk is not far off today of people building a so-called 'do-it-yourself' religion. Instead, we should return to God, the God of Jesus Christ, we must rediscover the message of the Gospel, to bring it into more deeply into our minds and our daily lives."

Benedict then announced his plans for a year-long series of reflections. "In the catechesis of this Year of Faith I would like to offer some help in making this journey, to take up once again and deepen the central truths of the faith of God, man, the Church, of all the social and cosmic realities, meditating and reflecting on the statements of the Creed."

Catholic News Agency

Uruguay bishops' tough anti-abortion statement

Uruguay's bishops say that local lawmakers who recently voted to legalise abortion in the country are automatically excommunicated for separating themselves from the Church's teaching.

"Automatic excommunication is for those who collaborate in the execution of an abortion in a direct way," said Bishop Heriberto Bodeant, secretary for the Uruguayan bishops' conference.

"If a Catholic votes ... with the manifest intention that he thinks the Church is wrong about this, he separates himself from the communion of the Church. Excommunication means you are not in communion with the ecclesial community to which you openly claim to belong by doing something that puts you outside communion, and therefore you cannot participate in the Eucharist," he explained.

The Catholic Church teaches - and canon law upholds - that life must be respected from the moment of conception, he said. If the new law is signed by President Jose Mujica - who vowed support for the measure - the Church will strengthen its work in support of human life to "reinvigorate the law written in the heart of every person that says that a fundamental value exists, which is life." This "is above all other" rights, the bishop said.

EWTN News

Chicago Cardinal warns of secularisation threat

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has said that the "secularising" of American culture is a "much larger issue" than political causes or the outcome of the presidential elections, warning against a rise of anti-religious sentiment and restating his fears of a future persecution in the US.

"The world divorced from the God who created and redeemed it inevitably comes to a bad end. It's on the wrong side of the only history that finally matters," Cardinal George said in his 21 October column for the Catholic New World.

He said the 2012 political campaigns have brought to the surface "anti-religious sentiment, much of it explicitly anti-Catholic, that has been growing in this country for several decades." Secularism, he said, is just "communism's better-scrubbed bed-fellow."

Cardinal George said his predecessor Cardinal George Mundelein acted similarly in his 1937 criticisms of Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi government had dissolved Catholic youth groups, silenced the German bishops in the media and tried to discredit the Church's work through putting on trial priests, monks and sisters on trumped up charges of immorality.

Cardinal Mundelein warned there was no guarantee "that the battlefront may not stretch some day into our own land." American Catholics' silence could mean that "we too will be fighting alone."

While Cardinal Mundelein never saw persecution at home, Cardinal George warned against trends that follow the example of the John Lennon song "Imagine," which imagines a world without religion.

"We don't have to imagine such a world as the 20th century has given us horrific examples of such worlds," he said. He denounced the violence of "the nation state gone bad" which claims an absolute power to decide questions and make laws "beyond its own competence."

Catholic News Agency

The Old Mass returns to St Peter's

Solemn Pontifical High Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite was celebrated in St Peter's Basilica on 3 November. The celebrant was Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera, the Spanish-born Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, whose theological and liturgical views closely match those of Pope Benedict XVI.

Given the position and outlook of Cardinal Canizares, one could argue that, symbolically speaking, the decision to allow this Mass in the Vatican basilica at this time at the outset of the "Year of Faith," and to have the celebrant be the man in charge of the Vatican's liturgical office, is as close as Rome could come to having the traditional Mass celebrated by the Pope himself without having it celebrated by the Pope.

Robert Moynihan

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 25 No 11 (December 2012 - January 2013), p. 4