DaveTown

I am rarely moved to tears by anything. Maybe half a dozen times in my entire life, and, I don’t think, ever, by the printed word.

This article moved me to tears.

Excerpt:

In February, 2004, we attend Cardinal Ratzinger’s weekly Mass, celebrated Thursday morning at 7 a.m. inside the Vatican in the church of the Campo Teutonico, but open to the public.

He has celebrated the Mass for many years for anyone who wishes to come.

After celebrating his Mass, then Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, emerged from the sacristy in a simple cassock and was greeted warmly by an excited crowd of people from all over the world, some to get the great theologian’s personal autograph, others to get a picture with the second most powerful prelate in the Church, and yet others to thank this holy German priest for his persevering and faithful service to Christ and the Church.

At first he struck us as somewhat timid.

However, as he approached the excited and sizeable crowd of people, he began to talk to and take interest in each individual person who has come to see him.

He answered questions in various languages, asked some of his own, occasionally cracked a joke or two, while always devoting his entire attention to each individual person in such a soft, pastoral way.

This much was obvious: the real Ratzinger was most at home as a man of the people, as a shepherd keeping watch over his flock.

It was our turn. We introduced ourselves to his eminence, reverenced his ring, engaged in some pleasant talk with him, and then we popped the question: “We have a favor to ask of you, your Eminence”.

He waited patiently.

“Will you celebrate our wedding mass?”

“Well, let’s see what we can do. Why don’t you write a letter to me with some possible times and dates.”

“Well, actually your eminence, we already have one prepared.”

Within a week, Marta received an envelope from the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith. We open it, stunned: it is a yes!

Several months later and a few days before our wedding date, at the cardinal’s request, his secretary scheduled us to meet the cardinal. He wanted to get to know us a little better.

Being a responsible secretary, he emphasized over and over, “You only have 10 minutes with the cardinal ” that is all. He is a very busy man and I am responsible for keeping his schedule.

The door opened and we entered to be warmly received by the cardinal.

However, we exited his office some 30 minutes later, only at the end realizing that not we but rather he had far exceeded the set limit.

This absolutely blew me away. Go read it.

Here’s a taste:

If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? And once again the Pope [John Paul II] said: No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ � and you will find true life. Amen.

Did you enjoy “Napoleon Dynamite“?

Do you have $100,000 lying around, waiting to be spent?

Today is your lucky day.

Terrific piece by George Weigel about Pope Benedict.

Here’s a taste:

Benedict XVI has long been concerned that the West risks the possibility of a new Dark Age. What he described in a sermon on the day before his election as a new “dictatorship of relativism” is one dimension of the problem. If there is only “your truth” and “my truth” and nothing that we understand as “the truth,” then on what principled basis is the West to defend its greatest accomplishments: equality before the law, tolerance and civility, religious freedom and the rights of conscience, democratic self-governance? If the only measure of us is us, isn’t the horizon of our aspiration greatly foreshortened?

Today’s topic will touch on a question JSN asked me via email: “I’d be interested in how you made your conversion to Roman Catholicism and how it, and some of the the church’s strict doctrines play out with your Libertarian beliefs.”

As to my conversion, I wrote a bit about the topic on a blog called Sons of Frater Louis, so I encourage you to go wade through as much of that as you can stand.

Basically, though, my conversion was the culmination of a lifelong search. I wasn’t raised in a religious household, so I had to figure things out for myself. Fortunately, though, I was raised in a household with a very firm sense of basic morality, decency, and self-giving, so I had a foundation for the search, if not the details.

I never went to church until I was about 15. Fundamentalist Protestantism was my first ecclesial experience, and I kept to that, with steadily decreasing enthusiasm, until I was about 20. After that, somewhat disillusioned with religion, I drifted. I decided to let my own desires and my own wisdom be my guide through life. But, having, as it turned out, a surfeit of the former and a dearth of the latter, this was a plan doomed from the start.

Every now and then I would try again with religion, either going to another flavor of Protestant church, or dabbling with eastern religions and such. I found the scriptures of the Hindus and Buddhists fascinating, but was never tempted to follow them whole-heartedly. The Bible, on the other hand, became more mysterious and less helpful as I went along, to the point where I basically gave up.

So I found myself in my 30’s as an agnostic. I had given up trying to bother finding out the truth about God, assuming it was impossible, pointless, and definitely inconvenient to my increasingly self-centered lifestyle to do so.

But in the back of my mind, I always wondered about, and always thirsted for, that elusive thing called the truth.

So about 8 years ago I stumbled upon some books that changed my life. Two books by Thomas Merton, The Ascent To Truth and The Seven Storey Mountain; two books about Thomas Aquinas, one by Robert Barron and one by Ralph McInerney.

The common theme in these works that caught my attention was the idea that there is such a thing as truth.

The twofold implication of that idea was that first of all there is such a thing as untruth, and secondly, that although all religions and philosophies claim to proclaim the truth, some of them are dead wrong.

These implications turned my life upside down.

See, the easy thing about being an agnostic was, for me anyway, that it absolves you of all responsibility. Once you have determined that it is impossible to know God, then truth becomes irrelevant to your day-to-day existence. If it’s unknowable, then what possible effect can it have on my life? Indeed the only thing I had that resembled a moral code was my belief in libertarianism, which can be boiled down to the maxims “do no harm” and “do not coerce”. Those were my beliefs simply because they made sense to me, no more, no less. They aren’t a bad place to start, as far as living in a civilized society goes, but they do nothing to explain the great questions of life. Not to mention the fact that I was entirely incapable of following even such a stripped down morality with any consistency.

The other common thread in the four books I mentioned is that they are all works by Catholic authors. This got me thinking that just about the only thing I hadn’t looked in to, religiously speaking, was the Catholic Church. This is easily explained by my time as a fundamentalist of Baptist leanings. I was involved in that strain of the Baptist faith that treats Catholics much as Monopoly treats players who get the Go To Jail card: “go to hell, go directly to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200″.

I was by this time, as it turns out, far enough removed from those days to have no regard for any of those teachings. Thus I was wide open to the idea that the Catholic Church might be what I had been searching for. For the next six months or so, I went on a reading spree, devouring every single thing I could find about Catholicism, finding to my surprise and chagrin that nearly everything I’d been told as a young Baptist was completely and utterly wrong. Not just wrong, but wrong-headed, and often malicious and ridiculous.

Thanks for that, folks. Thanks just bunches.

About a year later, Easter of 1998, I was received in to the Church. I recieved the sacraments of confirmation and first Communion. That night was perhaps the only night of my entire life when I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

Politically, I’m still a libertarian, though not a Libertarian, if you get my drift. I believe with Jefferson that that government is best which governs least. I guess the difference is only to be found in my definition of Liberty. Previously it meant the freedom to whatever the hell I wanted with no regard to the consequences to either myself or others. Now it means the freedom to become more fully human by living as best I can by the truth. Not that I’m particularly successful at it, but it’s truly a saner approach to life. Indeed, as Merton taught me, the definition of sanity is living in accord with reality. What’s more real than God?

As far as the strictness of the Church’s doctrines, there are only a couple that I find strict at all. I’m sure you can hazard a guess as to which ones they may be. They are in fact many of the ones I found difficult when I was a Baptist. The difference is that the Catholic Church doesn’t just tell you “this is the way it is, shut up and do it” (or, don’t do it, as the case may be). The Church actually has well thought out, intellectually honest, rational reasons for the positions it takes. If you look into the real reasons behind any doctrine of the Church you disagree with, you may still disagree at the end of the day, but you will be forced to admit there is nothing arbitrary or capricious about it.

So that, dear J. Scott, is the Readers Digest version of it all. There are of course details left out, not the least of which is how my life fell apart completely during the time of my separation and divorce in the late 90’s, which not only led me back to a serious search for the truth, but which was only survived because of my discovery of same. But that’s another story, best told over a case of brew.

Benedict XVI known for love of cats, conversation.

Thoughts of an Army Gal is written by a young lady I had the privilege of teaching, lo the many years ago, when she was a fifth grader. Now, she’s a bright, dedicated, awesome adult. She’s only 19, yet, she is a veteran of the Afganistan/Iraq War. As a 17 year old nurse/medic, she took mortar fire and small arms fire for her country while taking care of dead, dying and wounded young heroes. In my book, she herself is one of those heroes. She has some incredible stories to tell, check back with her often.

When I was 17, by the way, I was pumping gas for a living and trying desperately to find ways to get out of my chores. How about you?

There is an increasingly fascinating discussion on religion going on between my former college roomies and myself. It is going on partly via email, and partly via the posts and comments on this here lil’ blog. I’m going to make it a regular feature for as long as it lasts.

This group of men have been my friends for 20 years. It has been said that a friend is a person that knows everything about you, and still likes you; while family is made up of those people who will always take you in, no matter what. That makes these guys both friend and family to me.

I can’t decide whether to refer to us as the Shirttail Gang (based on our habit of going around campus untucked, in our mid-80’s, non-fashion-conscious manner), the Guilford Hall Debating Society (based on our dormitory and favorite activity . . . okay, second or third favorite activity), or the Jefferson Street Posse (based on the really cool grey house on Jefferson where we all lived for a while, which is now a parking lot). I’ll either alternate between all three, or get a group consensus and go with that.

By way of introductions, the members of the group are as follows:

Dr. J.W. Bray, Quaker. Genius, economist, and the holder of the highest academic degree out of the group.

J.S. Nunn, Episcopalian. Newspaper editor, raconteur, holder of the World Record for the most consecutive playings of Pat Metheny’s “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls”. album.

C.R. Harris IV, Unaffiliated. Poet, black belt, photographer extraordinaire, and tallest member of the society.

J. Gogick, Russian Orthodox cum nondenominational Protestant. Newspaper editor, mystic, gnome, provocateur.

D. J. Walkerman, Catholic. Schoolteacher, attorney, slacker/underachiever/moron, Okie.

Join us, won’t you, as we test the limits of religion, philosophy, and b.s. here on our little corner of cyber-blogger-space-o-sphere.

It will either be a fascinating discussion for the ages, or a literary trainwreck. Either way, you don’t want to miss it.

I couldn’t be happier with the selection the Cardinals have made.

If you’re puzzled or pissed off about the selection, I want you to do one thing for me. Don’t believe the stereotypes about this man. Judge for yourself by reading his own words. You will be very surprised.

We haven’t run this feature much on DaveTown lately (and when I say ‘we’, I mean, of course, me), but it seems the time is about right for another episode of America’s favorite weblog gameshow:

AP OR ONION?

You remember how we play; I post the headline, and before you click the link, you decide if the story comes from the worldwide leader in print/electronic news distribution, the Associated Press, or, the seminal internet news satire website, The Onion.

Okay, hands on buzzers, here we go:

WISCONSIN RESIDENTS SEEK LEGALIZED CAT HUNTING

Is it . . . AP OR ONION?

Fr. Sibley cracks me up.

From Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s wonderful book, Salt of the Earth:

The loss of joy does not make the world better — and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the courage and impetus to do good.

We have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and be a human being. This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to making sure that other people, too, can rejoice and recieve good news.

A Mr. Randy Harris of Greensboro, NC writes in and says, “Hey, Dave, talk about the Pope as a world leader”.

We’re always happy to take requests here at DaveTown. Though, truthfully, this is only the second one. But nonetheless, here goes.

Stalin once famously said “How many divisions has the Pope?” (oh, that he had lived long enough to see the reign of John Paul the Great).

John Adams once said, not as famously, but just as relevantly “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

Somewhere in the middle of these two quotes is the answer to your question, Randy. The Pope has no authority in the world apart from moral authority. If he is able to exercise it, more people will attempt to conform their lives to the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If this happens, then Stalin’s question becomes moot, and the admonition of Adams is fulfilled.

Securing the liberty of individual citizens is the only legitimate goal of government. Guiding individuals toward the goal of eternal salvation is the only legitimate goal of the Church. If both entities do their jobs correctly, we have peace, both in the temporal and spiritual sense.

Toward these ends, the role of the Pope, as a world leader, is twofold. First, to encourage, support and foster political freedom, insofar as his moral authority and influence are able to do so. Secondly, and more importantly, it is to facilitate the ability of the Church to teach the truths of the gospel, so that, once free, we will have the integrity, dignity, and moral awareness to live freely in the fullest sense of the word freedom. That is, to be free to do good and to love, and free to live in a society that hasn’t descended into a deadly barbarism, where the strongest exploit the weakest, and narcissism and nihilism are the only dogmas people will follow.

Historians will look back in amazement at how effectively John Paul the Great filled both of these roles. God grant us a next Pope who is just as brave, just as inspirational, and just as faithful.

Fr. Hamilton requested that I give some rationale for my support of Cdl. Appiah Turkson of Ghana.

First, he’s young. Younger even than John Paul the Great was when he was elected. I reject as silly this notion that we “need” an old Pope because JPG reigned too long, and we need to transition to a shorter papacy. What nonesense. One of the JPG’s greatest legacies will be his vitality and energy. Why is this all of the sudden a bad thing for the new Pope?

Second, he’s is from Africa, and I think it’s time for another African Pope. Call me crazy but the gap of roughly 1,800 years is ready to bridged. The African continent, despite being the great hotbed of Catholic growth, could rightly feel as if it were ignored by the Church at large. Also, I just love the idea of a Pope with black skin, if only to give a poke in the eye to ignorant racists worldwide.

Finally, he’s cut from the same cloth as John Paul. He speaks six languages, has intellectual credentials, and is faithful to the teachings of the Church.

Here’s a recent quote:

“The church needs a leader who’ll be as true to its teachings as possible, even if it’s the minority view. The church doesn’t survive by itself. It’s God, it’s Jesus who saves us. So it’s His will which we recognise. And that can be a minority view and be rejected and be opposed.”

Can’t beat that, my friends.

Here’s a link to a recent BBC interview with the Cardinal.

When and if the College of Cardinals call to ask my opinion, or if they happen to be checking in on Catholic Ragemonkey and somehow hit the link for this blog, this is who I want for the next Pope.

With the passing of the Pope, I fear, we’ve lost the last sane man. By that I mean we no longer have a public figure who we can count on to be a beacon of reasonableness in what can only be called an insane world.

Even people who disagree with what he believed have to admit that at very least he was consistent and faithful to his core beliefs. And I defy you to produce another public figure in our lifetime who had put more effort, thought, meditation, prayer, and brain-sweat into figuring out what the truth is. I can’t come up with one, can you?

For me personally, it is like losing a guardian angel. I didn’t have the personal knowledge of his day to day existence, except through the media, but nevertheless his untiring activity somehow providentially provided for my entrance into the Church. His writings, his love, his prayers, and his faithfulness are always there to nudge me back to the right path when I want to pack it in and implode into a little ball of self. That’s his legacy to me.

I don’t really care who becomes the next Pope. Good Pope or bad, the Church keeps chugging along through history, doing what it is supposed to do. To have had one of the finest men to ever live as Pope for 26 years has been a blessing the world might not see again for some time. We who lived during his reign will be looked at by history as one of the most fortunate generations in recent history. I hope we’ll end up being worthy of his memory.

I’ve been far too depressed to blog the last few weeks. Terri’s dead, the Holy Father’s dead, yet I have to keep on living. It hardly seems fair.

Okay, that was a bit dark.

Oh, did I mention the big break-up? No? Well, I’ll not go into it; you can just imagine what it did for my already bleak outlook.

Were it not for the start of MLS Season 10, I don’t know how I would have muddled through at all.

Anyway, enough of that.

I’m still putting my thoughts together about the death of the Pope. I’m not even sure I can write about it. Not that it hasn’t been covered more than sufficiently by better bloggers than I.

The death of Terri Schiavo, well, I think I’ve been more than clear about that. She was put to death in a fashion that our society wouldn’t tolerate being done to a convicted murderer, or even a rabid dog. Yet so many people think it was a case about “the right to die” or “big brother interfering with our lives”. The ignorance and stupidity were overwhelming amongst not only the general public, but also people who are paid to know better. It’s a national disgrace that very few people feel disgraced about.

So what else is new?