✣ Highlights from the week online
The religion Hugh Hefner rejected There were many responses to the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner; but not enough, said Terry Mattingly of getreligion.org, focused on his Methodism. Hefner once told the Chicago Sun Times: “Our family was Prohibitionist, Puritan in a very real sense. Never smoked, swore, drank, danced. Or hugged. Oh, no. There was absolutely no hugging or kissing in my family.” And there was more to Hefner’s rejection of Christianity. He explained: “At a very early age, I began questioning a lot of that religious foolishness about man’s spirit and body being in conflict, with God primarily with the spirit of man and the Devil dwelling in the flesh.” One detail – recorded in the New York Times obituary – also revealed Hefner’s deep-rooted hostility to Christian morality. After his fiancée cheated on him, before their unhappy marriage, he said he realised what was wrong with traditional attitudes to sex. “Thinking sex is sacred is the first step toward really turning it into something very ugly,” he explained. Why a Nigerian parish likes traditional liturgy In the New York Times, Matthew Schmitz observed the first traditional Latin ordination in Nigeria for decades. Eighty-six-year-old Bishop Gregory Ochiagha, who carried out the ordination, “nearly fainted,” Schmitz said. “‘I am so happy, I am so happy,’ he whispered as he was led to a chair.” Bishop Ochiagha lived through the 1970s, when – at the same time as the vernacular liturgy was introduced – the Nigerian government expelled foreign priests. “The time of the liturgical change was not easy: people thought the Church was collapsing,” the bishop recalled. But it isn’t just the liturgy which is appreciated by parishioners in the southeastern town of Umuaka. Perpetua Iwuala, 16, told Schmitz: “The priests here tell you everything you need to know. They teach you the Commandments. At other parishes they don’t.” Why artists started giving angels wings At aleteia.org, Philip Kosloski asked whether angels actually have wings. Essentially, the answer is no: “The visible form that is often reported in Scripture or popular news stories is a facade, a mask they put on so that we can see them with our eyes. Otherwise they are naturally invisible creatures.” And in the early centuries, Christian artists depicted them as quite similar to humans. “However, by the 4th century artists started to differentiate these spiritual creatures. The first known depiction of an angel with wings is on the Prince’s Sarcophagus, found at Sarigüzel, near Istanbul, and dated between 379 and 395. “Ever since, artists generally used wings and linked it to the mission of these creatures as messengers.” That was partly because angels are messengers – and, in the ancient world, birds were especially known as carriers of messages.
