I knew I needed to do something to get back into regular blogging, and this is news I can’t not report: Our archbishop has just been named a cardinal!
At the end of his celebration of Mass for the Feast of the Epiphany, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he will be elevating 22 cardinals in a concistory on February 18. Among them is Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York! Abp. Dolan accepted in his usual folksy and humble fashion.
And just a bit more:
It’s delightful news, but really no surprise. The Archbishop of New York is always traditionally a cardinal, but Dolan hasn’t been made one in his almost three years in New York because he predecessor, Edward Cardinal Egan, is still under 80, the age at which cardinal usually “retires,” at least in the sense of losing his voting rights in a conclave. It’s not thought good to have two cardinals with voting rights from the same diocese. Abp. Dolan is rising to the rank of cardinal just a little before Egan’s 80th birthday in April, so Pope Benedict raised him the minute he was able to do so. Cardinal Dolan will now have the chance to advise the Pope in one or more of the Vatican’s congregrations and will almost certainly vote in the conclave to elect Pope Benedict’s successor.
Just another piece of Catholic history being made.
Many of us have felt enraged, and often close to tears of frustration over ignorance and malice of the press in their treatment of the Pope in these last few weeks.
Maybe it’s time for a laugh, courtesy of this editorial by Hilary White, on the attempts by the two most embarrassing atheists alive, Messieurs Dawkins and Hitchens (who else?) to have the Pope arrested when he visits Great Britain this fall. Maybe the press will finally back off, when it learns these two nutjobs are involved in the attack against Benedict. Oh, they originally got acclaim for their books, but now people just more or less look at them funny when they talk. Think of the two oddest uncles at the secularists’ family reunion.
Pointing out that the behavior of the author of The God Delusion, has become more and more well, delusional, the author compares him to Napoleon, who actually did arrest a Pope — Pius VII — and held him captive for six years, an adventure that didn’t turn out well for the emperor:
It is notable that upon Napoleon’s defeat and imprisonment on the remote island of St. Helena, Pius VII begged the British government to treat his former captor more gently.
It is to be hoped that Professor Dawkins has not yet come to the point where he believes he is Napoleon, but if he has, I am confident that our current pope, known for his gentleness and courtly good manners, will be as solicitous for his welfare as was his predecessor for that of the former Emperor.
But laugh, or cry, as we might, there is a serious side to all this: these men are using the misery and suffering of the victims of horrible sexual crimes for their own political purposes, and worse, for their own self-aggrandizement. The frenzy of pope-bashing that has gone on since Holy Week is an insult not only to the man who has done more than any other religious or political leader to put a stop to the sexual abuse of young people, but to those who have suffered from the crimes and those who have tried to help them.
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history."
Pope Benedict XVI to the German Parliament, Sept 22, 2011.
