One of the primary fruits of the Enlightenment is the belief that we can put our complete faith in the results of science. If scientific testing shows something, then we can believe it is true without a shadow of a doubt. And many times this is true. There is no reason to doubt the law of gravity nor that the earth revolves around the sun nor countless other findings of science.

However, in the 19th century this assuredness transferred to the realm of Biblical studies. For over a millennium the Church was seen as the final authority on how to interpret Scripture. After the Protestant Reformation, the individual was seen as that authority. With the rise of biblical criticism, the scholar became the final authority in all matters biblical. In the world of biblical scholarship, certain theories are sacred cows that cannot be challenged, because the “assured results of scholarship” have magisterially declared that they must be true (the two-source hypothesis comes to mind). Yet the more you study such theories, the more you realize that many of them are built on questionable presuppositions and weak scholarship. Most of the “assured results” are anything but. I thought of this when I read this article about a fascinating discovery:

Bible Possibly Written Centuries Earlier, Text Suggests

Scientists have discovered the earliest known Hebrew writing — an inscription dating from the 10th century B.C., during the period of King David’s reign.

The breakthrough could mean that portions of the Bible were written centuries earlier than previously thought. (The Bible’s Old Testament is thought to have been first written down in an ancient form of Hebrew.)

Until now, many scholars have held that the Hebrew Bible originated in the 6th century B.C., because Hebrew writing was thought to stretch back no further. But the newly deciphered Hebrew text is about four centuries older, scientists announced this month.

“It indicates that the Kingdom of Israel already existed in the 10th century BCE and that at least some of the biblical texts were written hundreds of years before the dates presented in current research,” said Gershon Galil, a professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, who deciphered the ancient text.

This is very typical; for a long time some scholars questioned if King David really existed, because there was no proof of him anywhere but in the Bible. Then an inscription was found outside of Israel which mentioned King David, and that theory was quickly discarded.

My point is not to say that biblical scholarship is worthless. Far from it: we have learned many invaluable things about Biblical times over the past two centuries. However, problems arise when the results of scholarship are elevated to magisterial status. The Holy Spirit has guaranteed to protect the Church, not PhD’s, from error, so we should be careful where we place our faith.

One of the most profound sections of the entire Bible is the first three chapters of Genesis. I tell my kids that everything we need to know about life can be found in those chapters, if we look carefully enough. Which is why it is so sad that it has become a battleground for a false dichotomy between faith and science and a litmus test for determining one’s political views.

Anglican bishop N.T. Wright (one of my favorite Scripture scholars) gives some good advice on how to read these chapters properly:

H/t: Dr. Beckwith

Since the dawn of man, cultures have elevated certain people above everyone else. Our hearts recognize that we must direct ourselves to something higher, and often we place other individuals above us in order to fulfill these innate desires. In the Roman Empire, for example, Caesar was not just the ruler of the known world, he was divine. In Nazi Germany, Hilter was not just the head of state, he was “the Führer” (i.e. the Leader).

Our own country likes to think that it is beyond such foolishness; we rejected the shackles of royalty and live in a democratic wonderland where no one is exalted above any other. But of course that is nonsense: our culture loves to elevate anyone and everyone it can, from Hollywood actors to sports figures to politicians. We are desperate to look up to someone as greater than ourselves.

But, sadly, we almost always look the wrong way. The Scriptures tell us again and again that God exalts the humble and humbles the exalted. However, instead of looking to emulate those who humble themselves, we only look at those who exalt themselves. In heaven, I think it will be shocking to see who are the apples of God’s eye.

I think this young woman, who was born almost exactly a year after me and only lived to be 18, will be one of those who shine brighter than any actor, athlete or politician:

Chiara Badano

Read her amazing story here.

“Modern society, with its emphasis on material possessions and indifference to community, is making us mentally ill.”

Or, in other words:

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

The good news: New Hampshire shot down an onerous bill that would have placed draconian restrictions on homeschoolers.

The bad news: The chattering classes still look upon homeschoolers like they are aliens with three heads.

As always, pray first, in the middle, and last.

Also, you can fast for Haiti.

And I received an email from someone who is very knowledgeable about various charities, and he recommends the following organizations:

AmeriCares
Attn. Curtis R. Welling, President & CEO
88 Hamilton Avenue
Stamford, CT 06902
203-658-9500
800-486-HELP (4357)
99.01% Program Services, Fundraising: 2%  Administrative: .35%

Hope for Haiti, Inc.
Attn: Joanne Kuehner, President
900 Broad Ave. South, 2
Naples, FL.34102-7319
(239) 434-7183
www.hopeforhaiti.com
98.2% Program Services, 1.1% Administrative, 1.1% Fundraising 0.6%

Catholic Medical Mission Board
10 West 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
(800) 678-5659
(212) 242-7757
www.cmmb.org
Program Services: 97%, Fund Raising: 2%  Administrative: 1%

Catholic Relief Services, Inc.
P.O. Box 17090
Baltimore, MD 21203-17090
(800) 736-3467
Programs: 93%  Fund Raising: 4%  Administrative: 3%

And don’t forget to pray!

It has become a rite of passage of sorts in our modern world: the TV confession. A public figure does something disgraceful and after a period of time in which everyone piles on in self-righteous answer, he (usually it is a “he”) goes on television, usually in interview-format, and makes a “confession” and asks the public for forgiveness. As long as we believe him to be sincere, this has an amazing effect on the public’s perception of him, and he goes from reviled to beloved, or at least forgiven, in a few short hours. After all, we Americans are a pretty forgiving people.

The latest examples of this phenomenon are Mark McGwire and Harry Reid. McGwire has been hounded by steroid rumors for years and he finally admitted to their use this week. Reid, it was recently discovered, made what many consider racially insensitive remarks about President Obama over a year ago, for which he has now apologized. Big Mac and the Senate Majority Leader follow in a long line of public TV confessions that have occurred over the past decades.

These confessions often take a standard form:

1) Admit to wrongdoing, often without being too specific. (“I made inartful statements”)

2) Note that the alleged wrongdoing didn’t really change anything (“I took steroids, but it didn’t impact my performance in any way”).

3) Be sure to cite mitigating factors (“I played during the Steroid Era”).

4) Deflect the emphasis from your apology to the offense others have taken (it’s not “I’m sorry for my actions”, but “I’m sorry for any who are offended by my actions”)

5) Hope desperately that the public will forgive you.

As Catholics, we need to be careful that we don’t take these TV confessions as our model when we go to sacramental confession. Instead, our whole outlook must be precisely the opposite:

1) We are brutally specific about our sins.

2) We admit that our sinfulness has dire consequences, even if we can’t see them.

3) We do not excuse or mitigate our sins, but instead take full responsibility for them.

4) We do not talk about others, but only focus on our own sinfulness.

5) We have confidence in the mercy of God and God alone to forgive our sins.

It is a good thing that people still feel the need to ask for forgiveness when they do something wrong; we can take that as a reminder of our own need to ask for forgiveness. However, we must not model our own confessions after TV confessions, but instead model them on the advice of saints and doctors throughout the ages.

St. John Vianney, pray for us!

I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “Kill your TV”. It now looks like if you take my advice, you can claim self-defense.

Pray, of course. Don’t think for a minute that this is not the most important thing you can do.

Secondly, give material assistance. They don’t need our second-hand clothes or leftovers from our medicine cabinet. They need money. I would recommend sending money to a legitimate organization like Catholic Relief Services.

Oh, and did I mention that we should pray?

This week is National Vocations Awareness Week, in which we contemplate the vocational call in each person’s life. In recent years I have noticed that prayers for vocations often include the following, “We pray for vocations to the priesthood, the permanent diaconate, religious life, married life, and the single life.” I admit that the addition of “the single life” as a vocation has always troubled me: is being an unconsecrated single person really a vocation? It seems politically correct in many circles to make such a claim, but I can’t help but think that such a life, while capable of including a saintly way of living, is not really a vocation per se. But as a married person, I felt it was improper for me to make such an observation publicly.

So I was very happy to see Catholic author and speaker Mary Beth Bonacci, who is single, declare that the unconsecrated single life is not a vocation:

[F]rom the first time I heard it, something rubbed me wrong about the concept of a single “vocation.”

Reading the Holy Father’s letter on women, Mulieris Dignitatem, reinforced my suspicions. In that document, John Paul II says that God calls all women to give themselves in one of two ways – in motherhood or in consecration to Christ.

No mention of singleness in there.

In fact, I find no mention of an unconsecrated single “vocation” in Church teaching anywhere. As far as the Church is concerned, it doesn’t exist.

Here is the problem: “vocation,” in the sense the Church understands it, means “to give oneself completely.” The Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes says that man finds himself only through a sincere gift of himself. John Paul II, in Mulieris Dignitatem, speaks of the “spousal disposition of women.” We – women and men — were made to give ourselves, in love, to others. That’s where we find happiness.

Don’t singles give? Of course we do – often more than most. But vocation doesn’t mean “being a generous person.” It means giving our lives completely to another – either to a spouse in marriage or to God in consecrated virginity. And singleness doesn’t do that. In fact, the single state is defined by the lack of that gift. We are unattached, un-given.

Be sure to read the whole article here.

In our overly sensitive world, we try to avoid saying anything that might offend another. By saying that someone else’s life is “missing” something, we appear to be judging them unduly. But the fact remains that we are created to give our whole selves over to another. For married people, they give themselves to their spouses; for religious, they give themselves directly to Jesus. A single person is not able to do this. But that does not mean that they cannot achieve holiness; on the contrary, their cross gives them a unique ability to do so.

Let us all pray for single people during this week of Vocations Awareness; not that they embrace their current life as a “vocation”, but that they might bear their cross lovingly and in union with Christ’s Cross and one day find their true vocation.

Here is a great story of a Australian woman who was healed of cancer through the prayers of Bl. Mary MacKillop, who is soon to become Australia’s first canonized saint:

Kathleen Evans, a mother of five and grandmother of 20, is from Windale near Lake Macquarie in the southeast Australian state of New South Wales.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1995, at the age of 49.

“My youngest was only 13,” Evans said, according to the Archdiocese of Sydney.

At first her surgeon thought he could add five or six years to her life by removing her right lung. This would be enough to see her son through high school.

However, Evans’ cancer was particularly virulent and spread fast into her glandular system and the base of her brain.

This barred any possibility of surgery and chemotherapy was ruled out because the cancer was too advanced. Evans was told radiation would only treat the side effects of the aggressive disease and would add only a few weeks to her life, the Archdiocese of Sydney reported…

She then turned to prayer.

“My husband Barry and I were devout churchgoers but I wouldn’t say I spent my life on my knees,” Evans explained.

A friend gave her a picture of Bl. Mary MacKillop and attached to the back was a relic, a small piece of Mary’s clothing, the Archdiocese of Sydney says.

“I wore this relic on my nightie and later on my clothing. It never left me,” Evans reported.

She also distributed to her friends and family prayer cards from the Sisters of St. Joseph in North Sydney.

“We asked them to pray the same prayer, asking Mary to pray with us to God for nine days on my behalf,” she said.

Evans suddenly and unexpectedly began to improve. Instead of becoming weaker and frailer, her color began to return and she began to feel better.

“Every day I thought I was going to lose her, and when she started getting better, well it just blew me apart!” said Barry, her husband.

Ten months after her initial diagnosis, a series of X-rays and scans showed scar tissue on her lungs and brain where the cancer had been, but there was no sign of the disease.

“They asked to do a second series of tests. They couldn’t believe there could be nothing there,” she explained.

There was no scientific explanation for the disappearance of the cancer. Almost 15 years after its disappearance, Evans is fit and healthy and has not suffered any recurrence, the Archdiocese of Sydney reports.

This is something the materialists and atheists simply can’t explain. They want to reduce our world to only those things we can physically study. But our world is so much more than that, as this story shows.

Bl. Mary MacKillop, pray for us!

The 2007 return of Francis Beckwith, President of the Evangelical Theology Society, to the Catholic Church of his youth caused quite a stir in Evangelical circles. On the Internet, copious amounts of ASCII were spilled either lionizing or vilifying Dr. Beckwith’s decision. Many Evangelicals found themselves on the defensive, as they had to justify their continued “protest” against Rome in the face of many conversions and reversions such as Dr. Beckwith’s.

Two prominent Evangelicals, Norman Giesler and Joshua Betancourt, even wrote a book in response to this phenomenon of Evangelicals becoming Catholic entitled Is Rome the True Church?, describing it as “a major critical analysis of the Roman Catholic Church’s exclusive claim of infallibility.” In the book the authors go into substantial detail explaining why Rome is NOT the true church.

But, in a case of irony that could only originate with God, it appears that co-author Joshua Betancourt has now decided to answer “yes” to the eponymous question; shortly after the book was published, he converted to the Catholic Church.

The rise of the Internet over the past two decades has challenged one of the sacred cows of modern American life: the “right” to privacy. This “right”, which was unheard of in previous generations and cultures, is one of the fundamental presuppositions of our society; we all just blithely assume that we are allowed to dictate what information about us is revealed to the public. This “right” received legal backing in our country with the famous “Griswold v. Connecticut” Supreme Court decision which declared that a “right” to privacy was a constitutional right.

However, another, more recent, desire of Americans is conflicting with this desire for privacy: the desire to be famous. It seems that many Americans today crave fame, and technology is making it possible to become well-known – at least in a small circle – much easier than in previous times. With a blog, a Facebook page or a YouTube video, you can let the world know about yourself, your views, even your shoe size (mine is 9 1/2, by the way). Yet everyone also wants to strictly control what information is available to what people; they want to maintain their “privacy”.

The latest battleground in this conflict between fame and privacy has been Facebook. The social networking giant has been repeatedly changing their privacy settings for users, and recently the head of Facebook admitted that he would like to see less privacy, not more, on the web. This has caused no end of protests from people declaring that they should have strict control over the information they put on their Facebook page.

I can’t help but chuckle, however, at these complaints. These are people who are putting their most intimate life details on a distant computer server they neither own nor operate and which is run by a company whose sole purpose is to display that information to others. Yet they somehow expect it to remain “private”.

As an Internet professional, let me tell you a secret: nothing on the Internet is private. If you want something about yourself to remain private, then don’t tell anyone about it, and for God’s sake don’t put it on a computer. I worked in the web hosting industry for over 10 years, and I know first-hand that nothing that is stored on an Internet server is truly private. Data put on the Internet is transmitted through various computers before reaching its true destination, is stored on a computer which many people have access to, and is tracked to the minutest detail (what time it was entered, where it came from, etc.). Furthermore, all data is copied to multiple machines (for backup purposes), so even if you delete something after you enter it, most likely it will remain on a backup device somewhere, possibly indefinitely. By putting anything in an email, a blog, a Facebook page, or a YouTube video you have made it public and available to anyone who really wants to discover it, no matter what “privacy” settings you might apply. To think such information can somehow remain private is simply delusional.

So if you really want to keep something private, be quiet.

California abortionist accused of gross negligence in woman’s death

I’m looking forward to the day when the headline reads “Abortionist accused of gross negligence in unborn baby’s death”

At least a few times a year I attend an Eastern Catholic liturgy, and many times I will try to encourage friends to attend with me to that they can experience this beautiful liturgy of the Church. The first time someone attends I usually try to prepare them by explaining some of the aspects of the Eastern Liturgy that differ from the Western Mass. I usually am sure to mention the following:

1. Everything is sung.
2. There is no kneeling, and you stand for almost the entire liturgy.
3. There is a lot, I mean a lot, of incense used.
4. There are many, many icons.
5. The priest faces the same direction as the people during the Eucharistic prayers.
6. Communion is received on the tongue.
7. The bread used for communion is leavened, not unleavened.
8. Baptized infants can receive communion.

It is that last one that usually gives people pause. After all, the other practices are clearly outward signs and are not fundamental to our faith. But infants receiving communion? Don’t you have to reach the “age of reason” to be able to received our Lord in the Eucharist? Isn’t this somehow disrespectful of this great Sacrament?

The reality is that infant communion (also called “paedocommunion”) has always been the practice of the Church in the East, and was also the practice of the Church in the West until the 1200′s.  Fellow blogger Orthocath gives a useful overview of the practice in this post, quoting Fr. Robert Taft, S.J. (one of the foremost scholars on Eastern Christianity in the world today):

“The practice [of communing infants] began to be called into question in the 12th century not because of any argument about the need to have attained the “age of reason” (aetus discretionis) to communicate. Rather, the fear of profanation of the Host if the child could not swallow it led to giving the Precious Blood only. And then the forbidding of the chalice to the laity in the West led automatically to the disappearance of infant Communion, too. This was not the result of any pastoral or theological reasoning. When the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) ordered yearly confession and Communion for those who have reached the “age of reason” (annos discretionis), it was not affirming this age as a requirement for reception of the Eucharist.

“Nevertheless, the notion eventually took hold that Communion could not be received until the age of reason, even though infant Communion in the Latin rite continued in some parts of the West until the 16th century. Though the Fathers of Trent (Session XXI,4) denied the necessity of infant Communion, they refused to agree with those who said it was useless and inefficacious — realizing undoubtedly that the exact same arguments used against infant Communion could also be used against infant baptism, because for over ten centuries in the West, the same theology was used to justify both! For the Byzantine rite, on December 23, 1534, Paul III explicitly confirmed the Italo-Albanian custom of administering Communion to infants….So the plain facts of history show that for 1200 years the universal practice of the entire Church of East and West was to communicate infants. Hence, to advance doctrinal arguments against infant Communion is to assert that the sacramental teaching and practice of the Roman Church was in error for 1200 years. Infant Communion was not only permitted in the Roman Church, at one time the supreme magisterium taught that it was necessary for salvation. In the Latin Church the practice was not suppressed by any doctrinal or pastoral decision, but simply died out. Only later, in the 13th century, was the ‘age of reason’ theory advanced to support the innovation of baptizing infants without also giving them Communion. So the “age of reason” requirement for Communion is a medieval Western pastoral innovation, not a doctrinal argument. And the true ancient tradition of the whole Catholic Church is to give Communion to infants. Present Latin usage is a medieval innovation.” (Emphasis added) (Text from here.)

I admit that I am supportive of the idea of returning the practice of infant communion to the Western Church, although I do think there can be solid pastoral reasons for refraining until the age of reason is reached. The grace that is received from the sacrament – grace that is not due to our ability to understand it (for who can really understand it?) and therefore unrelated to our use of reason – is needed from the earliest ages. I personally would love it if my own 6-month-old daughter was allowed to participate at the Lord’s Table with the rest of the baptized.