✣Highlights from the week online
When religion haunts a news story At Get Religion, a blog on religion and the news, Terry Mattingly explained his idea of “religion ghosts”. A “ghost” is a story that’s “haunted” – that is, “there is a religious fact or subject missing, creating a religion-shaped hole that makes it hard for readers to understand what is going on.”For instance, the New York Times recently reported on an effort to build a new hospital in rural Florida. A larger hospital objected, saying the new hospital would siphon off patients and revenue, and a legal wrangle ensued. The “ghost” appears in a brief reference to the “Ave Maria community”, which would be near the new hospital. This is the college town built around “Catholic values”.
It also turns out that the doctor starting the hospital is “a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College in California – a small, very doctrinally conservative Catholic liberal arts college”. ‘So,” Mattingly concluded, “We have a rather young, clearly idealistic Catholic doctor who moves, with his semi-large family, to the Ave Maria area to start a clinic to serve the poor and others near a controversial Catholic town.
“Might religion have something to do with this story?”
The roots of envy – and the remedy
At Hanc Aquam, Fr Philip Neri Powell posted a sermon on the envy of the Pharisees. The Pharisees want to destroy Jesus because of envy – what, according to Aquinas, is “the sorrow I feel about another person’s gift when I falsely believe that that gift has been taken from or withheld from me. The Pharisees and scribes see Jesus’s gift of healing and they are envious because they falsely believe that that gift should be theirs.”
The cure for envy is gratitude – the recognition that “you and I have no right to the gifts we receive. God freely gives His gifts and we freely receive them. So, the Devil wins when I spend my time envying your gifts rather than cultivating my own.”
Coming to terms with an unusually bad time
At her Patheos blog, Eve Tushnet said that when she converted to Catholicism, “I assumed I was living in an ordinarily bad time and place for the Church. Not great, full of sin both personal and structural, but not the worst.” In some eras, after all “most of the Catholics you’d meet owned human beings as chattel, or hated Jews and cheered their (our) deaths.”
But Tushnet wrote that the times were worse than she had realised. “I don’t think, now, that this is only an ordinarily bad time. And we can’t expect our hierarchy to respond well; the safest assumption is that most of them will respond badly.”
At the same time, “those who have abused others and violated their trust are also a part of the Body of Christ. As far as I know, there are no canonized saints who are also rapists. And yet we know repentance is possible for all people, no matter what they’ve done. Don’t encourage in yourself a desire to see the population of Hell increase.” Tushnet observed: “Without Christ’s mercy all of us stand condemned.”
✣✣ Meanwhile...
✣ The owner of Leeds Utd has given Pope Francis a club shirt. Andrea Radrizzani gave the Pope a personalised jersey with “Francesco” on the back during a brief encounter in St Peter’s Square. Radrizzani, 43, said it was an “emotional and unique moment.”✣ The resemblance between Hollywood star Ryan Gosling and SSPX founder Archbishop Lefebvre is causing a stir. Twitter user @hanmariams posted mugshots of the two side by side, provoking hundreds of likes. Both had similar beards as young men and the same twinkly-eyed smile. @hanmariams wrote that Hollywood was too cowardly “to give us the action movie of Ryan Gosling as the young Lefebvre we need and deserve”.Another Twitter user suggested they both appeared to have strabismus, where one eye looks at the camera and the other is slightly misaligned.
✣ The papal almoner has handed out ice cream to immigrants. Cardinal Konrad Krajewski distributed the treats at a centre for immigrants near Rome. The centre was hosting 35 immigrants who had been stranded on a rescue ship for 11 days. the cardinal said the ice creams were a “sign of the Pope’s tenderness for them”.
✣The week in quotations
The failings of my fellow bishops are there for all to see Cardinal Vincent Nichols at AdoremusCNSHe’s handling it, I guess, the best anyone can handle it
Donald Trump defends the Pope’s response to the abuse crisis
The Daily Caller
We have a bigger agenda than to be distracted by all of this
Cardinal Cupich’s reported words to seminarians
Chicago Sun Times
Bishops soloists singing their own tune
Pope Francis speaking to 74 new bishops
CNS
