Priest denies teen confirmation for supporting gay marriage. Good on him.

If you are a Roman Catholic, you must follow what your church teaches, or else, get out of it. If you see your faith as a club, that you can do and believe whatever you want, even there, in a club, are guidelines and expectations from members. So, don't complain if you are rejected confirmation.

One Catholic teen's Facebook post reportedly cost him his confirmation last month after a picture of him holding a sign urging people to vote for "equal marriage rights" was spotted by his priest at a Minnesota church.
Rev. Gary LaMoine of the Assumption Church in Barnesville, Minn., allegedly denied Lennon Cihak the religious rite of passage after seeing him online holding a sign altered to criticize the Minnesota Marriage Amendment, the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead reports. The amendment would have changed the state’s constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman.

 If you go against your church position regarding mariage, why do you want to be confirmed in such a church? Either you want to destroy it from the inside, which is reason enough to be denied confirmation, or you don't understand your faith, and should be denied confirmation until it is proven that you have a proper understanding of it.

Lennon's mother, Shana told, the Forum that she was shocked to hear of the decision after she was called into a private conversation with the priest, according to the outlet.
However, the priest has since told the Associated Press that the teen was not in fact denied confirmation, but declined to explain, calling it an "internal and pastoral" matter.

The mother just doesn't care what her son believes, as long as he is given this rite of passage, and he is happy.

My admiration to this priest, who has a pastoral heart, and wishes for this teen to grow in the fear of the Lord.

Is America blessed by God?

This is a Catholic Perspective, but is a balanced one.

First Things has done a good thing publishing this article.

Is America Blessed by God?

August 27, 2012

William Doino Jr.

In 2008, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly released a survey on how Americans view their country’s relationship to God: “Sixty-one percent agree that America is a nation specially blessed by God,” it revealed, “and 59 percent believe the United States should be a model Christian nation to the world.”

These are the kind of results that inspire many Americans—and make others shudder with fear.

Ever since Europeans came to America, the idea of the United States as a land of special blessings has animated America’s soul. John Winthrop, the Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, famously drew upon the Bible to describe the early New England settlers: “We shall be as a City upon a hill, the eyes of all people upon us.”

Subsequent generations have voiced similar themes to propel America’s narrative: their country was thought to have a “manifest destiny;” to represent “an empire of liberty;” to offer the “last best hope on earth;” and above all, to embody “American exceptionalism.”

All this talk of America’s unique stature, however—especially when combined with a supposed mandate from Heaven–has unnerved critics, both Christian and secular. They have a point.

Biblically speaking, all human beings are blessed by God by virtue of the fact they are created in his image, and fundamentally equal. Even when the Lord honored the children of Israel as his chosen people, it was done to fulfill his divine plan foreveryone, and in the context of his boundless love for a unified human race. Further, nothing is more alien to the Old and New Testaments than to sacralize the unholy, or divinize material things. To regard secular America as some kind of Messiah nation, or geo-political golden calf, is sheer idolatry.

The secular critique is just as pointed. In an article for Foreign Policy magazine, Harvard University’s Stephen Walt assails “the myth of American exeptionalism,” pointing out that America’s sins at home and abroad undercut this “self-congratulatory portrait” of a country superior to others and consistently beneficial. Excessive nationalism, he argues, can lead to hubris, and hubris to something dangerous and destructive. “Americans,” he writes, “are blind to their weak spots, and in ways that have real-world consequences.”

This critique has validity, but suffers from selective indignation, and ignores moderating factors. While American Christians have never been shy about assuming God’s blessings, they have invariably seen them as conditional and under God’s judgment. In the very speech in which he spoke about the “City upon a hill,” Winthrop qualified it by cautioning that “if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.”

Furthermore, as historian Donald Scott notes:

In the decades following Winthrop’s speech most New England divines preached less about New England’s divine mission, than issue deep laments—Jeremiads, subsequent historians have called them—about how far New Englanders had fallen from fulfilling the requirements of their Covenant with God and how all the woes and turmoil that had befallen them—Prince Phillip’s war, the loss of New England’s charter, the witchcraft phenomenon, droughts and dreadful winters, etc—were the signs and result of God’s wrath over their failings.

America’s sense of mission was never higher than during World War II, but it was at that moment when Venerable Fulton Sheen warned his fellow countrymen not to allow the justice of their cause to minimize their personal sins:

Our greatness is conditioned upon our earnestness in examining our own faults and remedying them. America will be reborn when it stops its roaring self-righteousness, and begins to examine its conscience, not its newspaper editorials: begins to judge itself not by the degeneracy of warring dictators, but by what we ought to be in the eyes of God. . . . Let us give up Stephen Decatur’s ‘my country right or wrong,’ and substitute for it the promise that the world will never be wrecked by faults of ours.

More recently, Richard Land, the well-known Evangelical leader, expressed his deep appreciation for America’s blessings, but stressed that “those blessings invoke a reciprocal obligation and responsibility,” and cautioned fellow Christians: “We cannot assume ‘God is on our side.’ We are not God’s gift to the world. America does not have a special claim on God.”

If excessive self-flattery is embedded in America’s tradition, so too is self-reflection and self-criticism. One cannot walk into an American bookstore without finding a plethora of books, from every different angle, decrying some national problem or crisis, and advocating changes for the better.

Walt’s Foreign Policy article is flawed because it ignores this corrective aspect of American history, just as it downplays American generosity: whenever a catastrophe strikes the world—an earthquake, tsunami, famine, epidemic, or emerging genocide—America is the first to be called upon. And for good reason: despite its errors, and need for self-examination and penance, America is, at its best, a giving and caring nation.

Curiously, though Walt’s article castigates America for its transgressions, it is silent about its most serious one: the ongoing slaughter of the unborn. Is that a part of an “American exceptionalism” that critics are now ready to accept?

Pro-life Christians never will, and it is abortion, more than anything else, that has shaken their faith in America as “one nation under God.”

As they ponder that question, and vacillate between idealism and despair over the United States, they can reflect on a message sent to them at the end of the Second World War. At that time, the world was still in a state of disorientation, having witnessed the deaths of tens of millions of people, hoping to recover some sense of its humanity. Because of their leading role in the world—first in winning the war, then in rebuilding the peace—Americans were highly regarded, and Pope Pius XII sent them a letter, expressing his admiration and expectations: “The American people,” he began,  “have a genius for splendid and unselfish action, and into the hands of America, God has placed the destinies of afflicted humanity.”

Ronald Reagan liked quoting that line, and Walt criticizes Reagan (and by implication, Pius XII) for suggesting “the United States has a divinely ordained mission to lead the rest of the world.” But neither the well-intentioned Reagan nor the disapproving Professor Walt mentioned the title of Pius’s letter—“Wisdom—not Weapons of War,” nor did either quote the rest of Pius XII’s message, which reveals it was a call for selfless Christian witness and universal love:

May the noble flame of brotherly love be kindled in your hearts. Let it not die quenched by an unworthy, timid caution in the face of the needs of your brethren, let it be not overcome by the dust and dirt of the whirlwind of anti-Christian or non-Christian spirit. Keep alive this flame, increase it, carry it wherever there be a groan of suffering, a lament of misery, a cry of pain, and nourish it evermore with the heat of a love drawn from the Heart of the Redeemer

Armed with the arms of spirit and heart, the merciful weapons of peace: wisdom, justice and charity, we must stand united against the wanton weapons of war: tyranny, hatred and greed. Then the griefs of the world’s bereaved . . . will be sealed with the tranquility and the glory of God’s peace.

This is the kind of America we should strive to build: an America that walks humbly with the Lord, in charity and prayer, seeking truth, and hoping to live honorably enough to receive his immeasurable blessings.

William Doino Jr. is a contributor to Inside the Vatican magazine, among many other publications, and writes often about religion, history and politics. He contributed an extensive bibliography of works on Pius XII to The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.

RESOURCES

“Survey: Most Americans Believe God Uniquely Blessed U.S.,” The Christian Post, October 23, 2008.

“The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” by Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, November, 2011.

John Winthrop (1588-1649) on the “City Upon a Hill,” Bartleby.com.

“The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny,” by Donald M. Scott, National Humanities Center.

A Declaration of Dependence by Fulton J. Sheen (Bruce Publishing Company, 1941).

“A God-Blessed America: Obligations and Responsibilities,” by Richard Land, The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, July 2, 2010.

“We Will be a City Upon a Hill,” Ronald Reagan, Speech of January 25, 1974, to the First Annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

“A Post-Christian America,” by Father C. John McCloskey III, The Catholic Thing, August 19, 2012.

“Reflections on the Institute on Religion and Democracy,” (speech on Christianity in America) by Father Richard John Neuhaus, October 2005.

“Wisdom—Not Weapons of War,” Message of Pope Pius XII to the American People, Colliers Magazine, January 5, 1946. 

Christianity must change or die, but not like Gene Robinson suggested

I've been told that the church must change in order to continue as a living organism. But the people who tell me that, usually belong to churches that are dying, exactly for implementing the changes they suggest to me.

Ross Douthat, has written a good piece dealing with this issue in the New York Times, where he deals with this issue. Liberals have been telling us for years that the church must change in order to stay alive, but the churches lead by liberals are the ones dying because of their misguided change.

Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States. 

As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

Spong was wrong then, and is wrong now. He wants to kill of Orthodox Christianity, so it doesn't stand in the way of his sinful life, but at the end, he seems to had inflicted a wound to his own type of christianity. The issue was then, and is now, that those who should have known better, did nothing, instead went on to dismantle the Episcopal Church in order to be in the good graces of today's society and culture.  So there's no interest in defending the truth of the Bible against a society that needs it so much, rather, picks up their political fights, which contradict the Gospel at its core.

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

Well, there's nothing they can offer but the same thrush that the young people are facing outside the church. We don't see a great increase in the audience they intended to target. In Australia, the Uniting Church, is experiencing something similar. Yet, the churches it was meant to replace, seem to either thrive (the Methodist), or at least survive (the Presbyterians).

This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital. 

Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.

My sentiment as well. But I wouldn't call prosperity Gospel people "traditional believers". They are as far from the Gospel as the Mormons or Jehova Witnesses. They have a total different religion. These churches thrive, not because they are Gospel driven, rather, because they are money driven. People want money and wealth, so they go to these churches to get a hand of how to obtain it, or make it.

But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.

Not all Methodist, Lutheran or Presbyterians are going the way of the dinosaurs, but those denominations that have adopted the Episcopal way, are going the way of the Episcopal church.

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.) 

Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor. 

 Liberals don't want to accept their peril. As we see in the case of Katherine Jefferts Schori, she wants to window dress their declining numbers by passing it as a way of "stewardship of the earth". This type of denial would not be allowed in other quarters. And in the case of "progressive" Catholicism, it just won't get people inside their orders. If some progressives nuns wants to affirm somebody's homosexuality, why would, they in turn, would quit being a lesbian in order to turn into a life of celibacy?

But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

May the Lord deliver us from the right to take the face of Christianity!!!!

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.” 

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

I wonder then, how these "liberals" couldn't pass on their faith to the next generation. There's still much we have to learn. 

A bit of Cat-holic confusion

3 Ways of Reading Scripture (This Sunday's Sermon).

I would like to share my sermon with you, since I wasn't at church on Sunday, but visited another church.

I hope you can find edification in this sermon, which aims to encourage you how to read the Bible, and to apply it in a triple manner, Spiritually, Ethically and Intellectually.



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