As most Catholics know, Vatican II was held 40 years ago and in many quarters is still controversial. But this should surprise no one; the first ecumenical council, the Council of Nicea, was held almost 1700 years ago and it is still controversial today. It has been upheld as the standard of orthodoxy, derided as an intervention of the state into Church affairs, and accused of being the origin for both a belief in Christ’s divinity and the pope’s primacy. The Vatican II Fathers had nothing on the bishops at Nicea when it comes to controversy!

Even after all these centuries, Nicea is still important. Not only did it express in clear language the divinity of Christ (something believed before the Council, of course), but also it demonstrates the authority of the Church to make such authoritative declarations. By attacking Nicea, those who wish to reshape the Church or change her doctrines know that they can make great progress in their cause.

With that being said, blogger Darrell Pursiful has a great – and fun – test to determine what your religious beliefs are, all based on your attitude towards the Council of Nicea:

How would you complete this sentence? “The Council of Nicea…”

1. “…was a genuine work of the Holy Spirit, codifying for all time the true apostolic teaching on the person and nature of Christ.”

You are a conservative Catholic or Orthodox Christian. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

2. “…was a good thing, and it may even be said that the Holy Spirit was in it, leading the church to affirm Christ’s full divinity and humanity in terms that have stood the test of time. Shame about those anathemas at the end.”

You are a run-of-the-mill conservative Christian. If you’re Protestant, you can probably recite the Four Spiritual Laws. If you’re Catholic or Orthodox, I bet you’ve had some interesting discussions with some of your fellow parishioners.

3. “…contextualized the Christian message for a Greco-Roman audience. In those terms, I have no problems with it, although I do cross my fingers at certain points when (if) I recite the Creed in church.”

You are a centrist or liberal Christian in a mainline denomination. You probably subscribe to The Christian Century and wear a jacket with elbow patches.

4. “…is irrelevant to my faith. It was just some bunch of Catholic bigwigs asserting their authority over plain, Bible-believing Christians like me. Of course I believe in the Trinity, why do you ask?”

You are a fundamentalist Christian. And you need to take a church history course.

5. “…is irrelevant to my faith. It was just some bunch of Catholic bigwigs asserting their authority over plain, Bible-believing Christians like me. Of course I deny the Trinity, why do you ask?”

You are a Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, or similar. And you need to take a church history course.

6. “…was the final nail in the coffin of the inclusive spirituality of Jesus, replacing theological diversity and egalitarianism with patriarchal regimentation and the silencing of all dissent. Oh, and they wrote the New Testament.”

You are a pagan or Gnostic who appreciates the teachings of Jesus—at least the ones that conform to your religious presuppositions—although you distrust most traditional, institutional forms of Christianity. You need to take a church history course, and you need to quit reading Dan Brown books.

7. “…was the final nail in the coffin of the Judaic faith of Yeshua ha-Mashiach, replacing Torah-observance and traditional Jewish piety with syncretistic pagan mythology. Oh, and they wrote the New Testament.”

You are an Ebionite. You appreciate the teachings of JesusYashuaYehoshuaYeshua—at least the ones that conform to your religious presuppositions—but want nothing to do with Christianity or the New Testament as classically defined. The Greek language probably makes you break out in hives.

Hopefully, readers of this blog should know how I answered this quiz. I’ll give you a hint, however: it didn’t take me long to find my answer.

H/t: The Way of the Fathers

One of the things that most Catholic bloggers and blog-visitors would love to know is: “What are the most popular Catholic blogs?” Unfortunately, there has been no good way to find out, as such statistics have either not been publicly available or difficult to compile.

Until now.

As a service to the Catholic blog community, I decided to put on my programming hat and attack this problem. I knew two things: the list of Catholic blogs is publicly available at the Catholic Blog Directory and the number of Google Reader subscribers for every blog is also publicly available. The problem: who is going to manually determine the subscriber numbers for over 2,000 blogs? Thus, I wrote a program that would do the work for me (programmers are essentially lazy people), gathering the subscriber numbers for every Catholic blog at the Directory. I then ranked them in order by number of subscribers. Below is the top 25 plus a link to the top 200.

Big red disclaimer: this list is based on Google Reader subscribers only. I imagine that this is a good indicator of a blog’s popularity compared to other blogs, but it does not measure actual traffic to the site or the total number of subscribers across different feed readers. Furthermore, it doesn’t guage a blog’s current popularity as much as its popularity over the full history of the blog.

Top 25 Most Popular Catholic Blogs by Google Reader Subscribers

(1) What Does the Prayer Really Say?: 4841
(2) Whispers in the Loggia: 4685
(3) Charlotte Was Both: 3053
(4) Conversion Diary: 1817
(5) New Advent Blog: 1429
(6) Creative Minority Report: 1248
(7) Patrick Madrid: 1173
(8) Standing on my Head: 1156
(9) The Hermeneutic of Continuity: 1053
(10) Damian Thompson: 954
(11) Rorate Caeli: 933
(12) The New Liturgical Movement: 892
(13) Ask Sister Mary Martha: 867
(14) Mere Comments: 811
(15) Catholic and Enjoying It!: 796
(16) Ignatius Insight Scoop: 749
(17) By Sun and Candlelight: 712
(18) Catholic Cuisine: 648
(19) The Shrine of the Holy Whapping: 643
(20) Testosterhome: 638
(21) Happy Catholic: 607
(22) The Crescat: 573
(23) Domine, da mihi hanc aquam!: 521
(24) Shower of Roses: 481
(25) Wildflowers and Marbles: 474

See the list of the Top 200 Most Popular Catholic Blogs over at my main website.

For those who are curious, my blog came in #303, which isn’t bad out of over 2,000 blogs considering I’ve only been doing this for a little over a year. But feel free to subscribe to my blog to bump me up.

Growing up in Cincinnati, my brother and I played little league baseball. One year, my brother played against a team who had a player whose dad was a well-known Major League ballplayer. My brother played center field, and when this kid got up to bat, he hit one so far over my brother’s head that by the time he ran back and picked up the ball, the kid had already crossed home plate.

That kid, aka “The Kid”, who became the greatest baseball player of his generation, has decided to finally stop playing the game. I’m sure we’ll see him in Cooperstown in five years.

Living in the Washington, DC area has many advantages, one of which is the rich cultural diversity found here. Just about every community on earth seems to be represented in some form in this city and its suburbs. This diversity also exists in the various Catholic communities found locally, and this has impacted my own spiritual life. On a regular basis I attend four different types of Mass:

• On most Sundays I attend my parish’s regular Novus Ordo Mass.
• For daily Mass, I usually go to the local charismatic Catholic community.
• About once a month I attend the Extraordinary Form of the Mass on Sunday instead of the Novus Ordo.
• About 3-4 times a year I visit a Melkite Greek-Catholic church which celebrates the Eastern Divine Liturgy.

All of these liturgies are faithfully and reverently said and I like aspects of each of them. I admit that I prefer some forms more than others (I’ll keep coy about the specifics), but I acknowledge that such preferences are often a matter of personal tastes and not based on fundamental theological principles. But I’ve found that among those who believe in the importance of the liturgy (as I do), I’m a bit of an anomaly. It seems (at least online) that most people who are passionate about the liturgy are passionate about one particular form of the liturgy and believe all other forms to be inadequate at best and harmful or even heretical at worst. But although I am passionate about the liturgy, I do think multiple forms are possible and can even be complimentary.

Fortunately, I have found a kindred soul – and he is even here locally: Msgr. Charles Pope, a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington. Msgr. Pope is the pastor of an African-American church which has a Gospel-style Mass, but he also regularly celebrates the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. From his unique experience he has found many similarities in the two types of Mass, which he explains in this video:

Of course, neither Msgr. Pope or myself are advocating chaos in the liturgy: there must be order and the Church is the one to impose that order. No one can make up their own liturgy and the liturgy must abide by certain standards and structures. But the Church herself allows for some diversity within those standards and I think she is wise to do so.

In the 4th century, debate raged within the Church surrounding both Christological and Trinitarian issues: were you an Arian, a semi-Arian, or a defender of Nicea? Do you believe that the Holy Spirit is God or not? People would literally get into fist-fights at the local shops over these issues. It is reported that jolly ol’ St. Nicholas punched the heretic Arius in the face during the Council of Nicea. People realized that these issues were vitally important, as all of Christianity revolves around the identity of Jesus Christ and the nature of the Godhead.

Today debates in the Church are not about such sublime and elevated topics. Most Catholics might not deny the Christological and Trinitarian definitions of the early Councils, but they don’t put much thought into them, either. Today our debates are over sexuality, specifically, what I like to call the “pelvic trinity:” abortion, contraception and homosexuality. This unholy trinity of issues are of course interrelated and they all revolve around our “right” to engage in sexual activities with no consequences. But these issues go even deeper, as they touch whether we have the right to define morality as we see fit, or if there is One above us who makes those determinations. Ultimately, it comes down to the question of who is in charge: us or God.

With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that disgraced Catholic priest Fr. Alberto Cutié (aka “Father Oprah”), who left the Catholic Church to become Episcopal after being caught with his mistress last year, has adapted his own views on sexuality to be more in line with his new ecclesial communion. He was recently ordained an Episcopal priest and now he is admitting that he had struggles with the Catholic Church’s position on the pelvic trinity:

As a Catholic, he secretly struggled with his church’s stance toward homosexuality, contraceptives and his own celibacy. As an Episcopalian, he’s speaking freely about his support of openly gay clergy, of birth control, and, when a woman’s life is in danger, even abortion.

This should come as no surprise, as the most common modern response to personal failures in the area of sexual ethics is not to repent and try again, but instead to redefine sin and continue in your activities. Fr. Cutié justifies his own failures in practicing sexual self-control by rejecting the immorality of just about any sexual activity. He exacerbates his own sin by encouraging others to engage in similar sins to make him feel better about himself.

But Christ through his Church has a better way: instead of wallowing in sin which harms the human person, the Church’s sexual ethic frees one to live as God designed us to live. And failure to live up to this sexual ethic is never total: even when we fall, Christ always offers us the grace – through confession and the Eucharist – to get back up and try again. We should never get discouraged, as success in the moral life is measured less by our falls than by how much we keep striving for holiness.

Please pray for Fr. Cutié that he might be one day reconciled to Christ in the Catholic Church.

Fr. William Mills is an Orthodox priest and author of “A 30-Day Retreat: A Personal Guide to Spiritual Renewal.” During the month of June, he will be conducting an online retreat on his blog Walking with God. Today is Day 1 of the retreat, so be sure to take a few minutes from your day to visit his blog.

Living in the post-Vatican II ecumenical world we Catholics can sometimes get a bit ahead of ourselves when it comes to the potential for unity between Christian churches. This is especially true for our relations with the Orthodox Churches, whose beliefs and practices appear so close to ours (and in many ways are very close to ours). When I mentioned last week that it might take 500 years for Catholic-Orthodox unity to occur, I had a number of people scoff at such pessimism. But the fact remains that unity cannot occur without grassroots support for it, and in many parts of the Eastern Christian world, such support is limited and even nonexistent.

The latest example of this occurred this week as Pope Benedict travels to Cyprus, a majority-Orthodox country. The head of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus had to threaten a number of his fellow bishops with sanctions in order to keep them from boycotting a welcoming ceremony for Pope Benedict. These bishops have labeled the Pope a “heretic,” and their views are not uncommon in Cyprus, where last year protests greeted a Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical gathering.

None of this should discourage us from pursuing reunion with our Orthodox brothers and sisters, however. In fact, it should remind us that reunion will only be an action of the Holy Spirit, because if left in our hands, we will only have a continuation of the division of Babel. We should therefore work and pray (and pray some more!) that all parties might be docile to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to reunite us into one Body in Christ.

This past weekend a fellow convert asked me why I became Catholic. I quickly answered, “Because it is true.” Of course that didn’t really answer his question, as he wanted to know the specific things that drew me to Catholicism. So I gave him an abbreviated form of my conversion story.

But the answer “because it is true” is the fundamental reason why I became Catholic. And there is no better patron saint for this reason for conversion than today’s saint, St. Justin Martyr. Justin was a pagan philosopher who jumped from one philosophy to another in pursuit of the truth. This fundamental longing for truth is something that has been missing from much of modern philosophical studies, and in modern society in general. At the beginning of C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, the senior demon Screwtape writes,

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I note what you say about guiding our patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” of “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real”.

It seems like the work of Hell has been largely successful today: the pursuit of objective truth has become unfashionable in most circles, as whatever someone believes is “true for them” and not really relevant to daily life anyway.

Yet St. Justin lived in a different era, and he was a passionate about pursuing the truth, wherever it might lead him. When he eventually encountered the “philosophy” of Christianity, he recognized that the truth was not a concept or philosophy, but a person: Jesus Christ. And although he was a philosopher, he was not drawn to Christianity merely by intellectual arguments, but also by the witness of the martyrs, whose love of the Truth led to their heroic deaths. St. Justin himself ended up following their witness, which is why he is remembered as St. Justin Martyr.

St. Justin Martyr, pray for us!