Archive for John Paul II

Science and Theology Agree: Bill Nye the Science Guy is Correct

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , on August 29, 2012 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

There has been quite an internet and media discussion about the YouTube video featuring the well-known children’s television-program host, Bill Nye of “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” in which the science enthusiast tells viewers that teaching children creationism is “inappropriate.” And he is absolutely correct. This is one thing about which both science and Christian theology agree: a literal reading of scripture, that which seemingly grounds views like creationism, is inaccurate and does not reflect an authentic theological interpretation of scripture or tradition.

Those who claim that Christian faith does not allow for a belief in evolution as a scientific theory or explanation for the diversity and complexity of life in this universe has probably never (a) understood the science itself or (b) studied theology in a formal setting. The truth is that the aphoristic response that many theologians, clergy, and members of the faithful give in response to questions about the compatibility of science and religion (as the question is generally put), is that they are not incompatible. One area of study deals with questions of “How” (science) and the other deals with questions of “Why” (theology/religion).

Those who are Roman Catholic should read the incredibly important document, “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church,” by the Pontifical Biblical Commission (1993). Like almost no other Vatican document, the PBC uses some direct and strong language in discussing the fundamentalist view or literal interpretation of scripture:

The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life. It can deceive these people, offering them interpretations that are pious but illusory, instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem. Without saying as much in so many words, fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations.

To claim that the scientific theory of evolution is untenable for Christians or to challenge the veracity of other dimensions of modern science on the grounds that the Bible and Christian faith prohibit it, is not supported by the church nor by sound theological research.

The late Pope John Paul II famously said, in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Science, that scientific theories of evolution are not incompatible with Christian faith and theology and, that as rational human persons in the our current age, we need experimental and observational sciences to better understand God’s creation.

Bill Nye is correct. Teaching children creationism, whether expressed as such or couched under the name “intelligent design,” is inappropriate and, as the Pontifical Biblical Commission suggests, is dangerous! Good job, Bill Nye! I knew there was a reason I always liked his program as a kid.

Here’s an interview with Bill Nye on the HuffPo and Here’s the now-famous video:

Photo: Stock

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Holy Week and the Death Penalty

Posted in Social Justice with tags , , , , , on April 4, 2012 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Jesus was condemned to death.

This fact becomes, like far too many of our prayers and reflections on Scripture during Holy Week, overlooked by much of the Church because it takes on a “religious” or all-too-familiar tone and quality. It is simply the First Station of the Cross or it becomes associated with something much larger than its own reality, the small prelude to the bigger Passion. It becomes tamed and domesticated and pious. It becomes something other than what it is: the stark, scandalous reality that the Son of God, the Word-made-flesh was sentenced to the death penalty and died as one of society’s criminals.

While what we call to mind this week is the whole life, death and resurrection of the Lord, we also call to mind the fact that the Lord died because he suffered at the hand of the state’s Death penalty. What better time is there for us to pause and consider the ways in which we are committed to being part of, as Pope John Paul II had said, the “culture of life” over and against a “culture of death?” Here we recall with horror execution of Jesus Christ, but do we exhibit a comparable horror at the reality that the United States continues to execute men and women today?

In 1999 the United States Bishops (USCCB) released a document titled, “A Good Friday Appeal to End the Death Penalty,” inspired by the call of the Holy Father, then Pope John Paul II to end this barbaric and inhuman practice. Instead of reiterating what the bishops say, I’ve posted the text below. During your prayer this Holy Week I invite you to reflect on this call, now more than a decade old and as relevant as ever, and consider what you can do to help end this attack on the dignity and sanctity of human life.

The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform. I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary.1
–Pope John Paul II, January 27, 1999, St. Louis, Missouri

For more than 25 years, the Catholic bishops of the United States have called for an end to the death penalty in our land. Sadly, however, death sentences and executions in this country continue at an increasing rate. In some states, there are so many executions they rarely receive much attention anymore. On this Good Friday, a day when we recall our Savior’s own execution, we appeal to all people of goodwill, and especially Catholics, to work to end the death penalty.

As we approach the next millennium, we are challenged by the evolution in Catholic teaching on this subject and encouraged by new and growing efforts to stop executions around the world. Through his powerful encyclical, The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae), Pope John Paul II has asked that governments stop using death as the ultimate penalty. The Holy Father points out that instances where its application is necessary to protect society have become “very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”2 In January 1999, our Holy Father brought his prophetic appeal to “end the death penalty to the United States, clearly challenging us to “end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary.”3 Our Holy Father has called us with new urgency to stand against capital punishment.

Sadly, many Americans–including many Catholics–still support the death penalty out of understandable fear of crime and horror at so many innocent lives lost through criminal violence. We hope they will come to see, as we have, that more violence is not the answer. However many in the Catholic community are at the forefront of efforts to end capital punishment at state and national levels. Catholics join with others in prayerful witness against executions. We seek to educate and persuade our fellow citizens that this penalty is often applied unfairly and in racially biased ways.4 We stand in opposition to state laws that would permit capital punishment and federal laws that would expand it.

We strongly encourage all within the Catholic community to support victims of crime and their families. This can be a compassionate response to the terrible pain and anger associated with the serious injury or murder of a loved one. Our family of faith must stand with them as they struggle to overcome their terrible loss and find some sense of peace.

We fully support and encourage these and other efforts to uphold the dignity of all human life. The actions of Catholics who consistently and faithfully oppose the death penalty reflect the call of our bishops’ statement Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics: ”Our witness to respect for life shines most brightly when we demand respect for each and every human life, including the lives of those who fail to show that respect for others. The antidote to violence is love, not more violence.”5

Respect for all human life and opposition to the violence in our society are at the root of our long-standing position against the death penalty. We see the death penalty as perpetuating a cycle of violence and promoting a sense of vengeance in our culture. As we said in Confronting a Culture of Violence: ”We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing.”6

We oppose capital punishment not just for what it does to those guilty of horrible crimes but for what it does to all of us as a society. Increasing reliance on the death penalty diminishes all of us and is a sign of growing disrespect for human life. We cannot overcome crime by simply executing criminals, nor can we restore the lives of the innocent by ending the lives of those convicted of their murders. The death penalty offers the tragic illusion that we can defend life by taking life.

We are painfully aware of the increased rate of executions in many states. Since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976, more than 500 executions have taken place, while there have been seventy-four death-row reversals late in the process. Throughout the states, more than 3,500 prisoners await their deaths. These numbers are deeply troubling. The pace of executions is numbing. The discovery of people on death row who are innocent is frightening.

In the spirit of the coming biblical jubilee, we join our Holy Father and once again call for the abolition of the death penalty. We urge all people of good will, particularly Catholics, to work to end the use of capital punishment. At appropriate opportunities, we ask pastors to preach and teachers to teach about respect for all life and about the need to end the death penalty. Through education, through advocacy, and through prayer and contemplation on the life of Jesus, we must commit ourselves to a persistent and principled witness against the death penalty, against a culture of death, and for the Gospel of Life.

Photo: Stock

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Maureen Dowd and (the soon to be) Blessed JPII

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , on April 24, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Maureen Dowd’s New York Times Easter weekend column, “Hold the Halo,” is both good and bad. This is generally how I feel about many of Dowd’s columns. She often raises some important points, makes some sensible critiques or observations, but these aspects are almost always mitigated by some detracting aspect of her reflection. I think this is case with her latest piece.

Like Dowd, I have mixed feelings about the fast-track beatification of the late Pope John Paul II. What is not mentioned is JPII’s own interest in fast-tracking universal recognition of Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado’s alleged holiness and we’ve seen what happens when one rushes such things without careful vetting. This is not to suggest that Pope John Paul II has similar skeletons in his closet, but there is a reason there is a standard five-year waiting period before the process begins. Even Mother Teresa had to wait 6 years after her death before Pope John Paul II celebrated her beatification.

Although Dowd can be imprudent at times and quick to make comments that may be construed as disrespectful, I think she raises an interesting point about the hasty beatification of any person, particularly in light of the clergy abuse coverup crisis. Is it wise to rush these sorts of proceedings? I agree with Dowd that it is incongruous that Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Oscar Romero and others — clearly symbols of Christian holiness and ordinary examples of everyday Gospel living — remain in recognition limbo, while others are rushed through. The politics don’t play equally for all.

Do I think that JPII rates the title “Blessed?” Yes, I do. But, probably not so soon. There are others that should not be forgotten.

Photo: Vatican Pool Photo

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Inspiration Amid Controversy: Van Jones at Siena College

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , on April 8, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

I was surprised to find a pack of about fifteen-to-twenty people standing across the street outside of my Friary window last evening. These folks had gathered across the Siena College campus to protest the 2011 Martin Luther King, Jr., annual speaker: Van Jones. Mr. Jones, a former Obama Administration White-House Staffer, was one of the favorite targets of (soon-to-be ‘former’) Fox News television personality Glenn Beck. Beck had continually named Jones, a relatively unknown personality on the national scene prior to Beck’s denouncements, as a communist (a former affiliation that Jones does not deny while a graduate student at Yale University) and the negative attention garnered by these repeated attacks led Jones to resign during the early months of the Obama Administration and during the peak of Beck’s TV career.

Some of Beck’s loyal adherents continued to carry the mantle of denouncement, protesting Siena College’s (a Roman Catholic private college in the Franciscan tradition) decision to invite Jones to speak. Yet, it was precisely the Franciscan tradition that College President Fr. Kevin Mullen, OFM, cited as a central reason for Jones’s fittingness to deliver the MLK Annual Lecture.

Fr. Mullen noted in his introduction of Jones that in the Thirteenth Century there was a man who similarly spoke out against the injustice of society, cared for the environment and stood with the marginalized — Francis of Assisi. As a school in the Franciscan tradition, it is wholly appropriate to invite someone who similarly mirrors those values — albeit through a different expression, perhaps — in an age when the message of both Francis and those like Jones are needed so acutely.

Jones was an entertaining speaker to be sure. Peppering his address with humorous lines, often at his own expense (particularly in light of the Fox News Network’s treatment of his reputation), Jones began with a recollection of his experience in law school and what led him to become so “radical;” namely, the injustice both of an economic and racial variety in the city of New Haven, Conn., he witnessed in law school. His remarks reminded me of a line from Lawrence Cunningham’s book Things Seen and Unseen (Ave Maria Press, 2010), that I’ve quoted here before:

The newspaper reported that someone just recently paid over $250,000 for a private parking space in some exclusive part of the city of Boston. A friend of mine once said: it is not the misery of the poor but the excesses of the rich that has turned him into a radical.

There were some memorable lines from last night’s lecture. One in particular, early in the address, referred to the experience Jones has had following the Beck troubles. Jones said, “People want to talk about the controversial views I don’t have and the controversial views I used to have, but I want to talk about the controversial views I have now.”

I thought that line was particularly striking because it, in my opinion, captures the tension behind Beck’s focus on Jones. In an effort to avoid the important and, in a way, prophetic views Jones currently has about clean energy and the economy, certain commentators prefer to discredit the speaker through distraction and misrepresentation.

In a manner befitting a Franciscan lecture series, Jones, speaking about the perils of the world’s current energy issues, made this keen observations: “you live in a human civilization powered by death!” How true! Fossil fuels, he noted, are created from dead organic matter going back 60 or 300 million years. No wonder we get death on that return, pollution of the earth and asthma in the lungs of children, to name but two consequences.

Instead, Jones said in a way that sounded a bit like Francis himself, “don’t look down into some [mine], but look up at the living sun…living wind.” What an apt image to consider — “clean” or “green” energy is really an energy that gives life and renews the earth. Why don’t we harness the Sun or the wind? Why do so many continue to support, through their complicit political or social agendas, the efforts of a few to monopolize the “energy of death?”

John Paul II was correct to talk about a “culture of death,” but I don’t think he realized how true that moniker was in relation to the way we power our communities. It is now time for a “culture of life,” beginning with clean energy and nonviolent transformation of society.

Photo: Dan Horan, OFM

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Natural Family Planning: Some Women Speak Out on the Subject

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on March 29, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

There is an excellent article posted on the WIT Blog (Women In Theology) titled, “Women Speak about Natural Family Planning.” Whether you practice NFP or not, whether you agree with the Church’s position on artificial contraception or not (and there is, as regular polling suggests, a huge population in the United States that does not agree), I would be interested to hear what you think about this excellent reflection on the subject. I’m sure the women over at WIT would also be interested in a respectful conversation on the subject. Here’s how the piece begins:

If we listen to the stories of all women, not just those for whom natural family planning works in the way that the magisterium says that it does, we will see that natural family planning is not always good.  In fact, in some cases, it is natural family planning, rather than artificial birth control, that is harmful to marriage and families.

In her article, “Papal Ideals, Marital Realities: One View From the Ground,” Northwestern professor Cristina Traina critiques magisterial teaching on sex and marriage, especially as it relates to artificial contraception and sexual complementarity, from the standpoint of her experience as a married, Catholic woman.   Her argument is not so much theological as it is practical— she offers her experience as evidence that church teaching on marriage and sex does not always “work,” and in some cases can actually harm, rather than protect, particular marriages.   This approach is particularly effective since the magisterium often argues that contraception and betrayal of gender roles do great harm to marriage and family.

For the full text, visit: “Women Speak about Natural Family Planning.”

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German Theologians’ Open Letter: “Silence No More”

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , on February 14, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

The National Catholic Reporter published a story today that has garnered much-deserved attention and has sent ecclesiastical shock waves throughout the Church. The article, “144 Theologians Confront Hierarchy: Blunt letter says reforms necessary in light of scandals, priest shortage,” details the efforts of some of Europe’s top academic theologians — largely from German-speaking nations — to raise several serious issues that challenge many of the Church’s current leadership models and disciplinary or practical positions (such as clerical celibacy or male-only presbyteral ordination).

Among other demands, the statement calls for ending celibacy requirements for priests, opening the priesthood to women, and in general introducing significantly more democracy into the church’s structures in the German-speaking world and beyond. “We feel that we have the responsibility to contribute to an authentic new beginning,” the theologians continue, referring to the “unparalleled crisis year of 2010″…

“2011 must be a year of renewal,” says the letter, released just weeks before Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to visit his homeland.

Many of the issues raised might strike U.S. Catholics, particularly those who consider themselves to be “conservative” keepers of the Church’s tradition, as brash and disrespectful. Yet, a spokesman for the German Bishop’s Conference expressed, on behalf of the bishops, an optimistic welcome to the theologians’ request for dialogue, while also acknowledging that some of the more tension-inducing issues will need further clarification.

The German bishops welcome the contribution of the theologians to dialogue about the future of the church, said a Feb. 4 statement released by Jesuit Fr. Hans Langendörfer, secretary of the German bishops’ conference.

“The church in Germany has to examine with new intensity where its path leads,” Langendörfer said. “The church should recognize and discuss the mistakes and failures of the past, as well as current deficits and calls for reform.”

He noted that several issues raised in the letter are in “tension” with core church theology and teaching and these will “require urgent further clarification.”

Langendörfer said the bishops will discuss the issues addressed in the theologians’ letter at their plenary meeting in March.

It will certainly be interesting to see if and how Church leaders respond to the open letter. There are some German bishops that have expressed disapproval of its content and publication, asserting the unchangeability of some of matters requested by the theologians. With Pope Benedict XVI, who has the unique distinction of having been both a German Catholic theologian and a German Bishop at some point in addition to now being pope, visiting his homeland soon, it would be significant if he were to respond to the letter.

My guess is that he will not. If the response is anything like the German theological backlash to Pope John Paul II’s more autocratic leadership style in the early 1990s, then Benedict XVI will likely respond through the local Churches, pressuring the local bishops to make statements or respond.

The fundamental issue at play here is the right to theological freedom, the notion — closely associated with that more standard academic freedom — that for theologians to be able to do their work for the good of the Church and the world, there must be the freedom for open dialogue, research, publication and teaching on issues of theological and ecclesiological import without fear of censure. In a sense, these theologians — representing more than 1/3 the total number of German Catholic theologians — are preempting precisely that concern. They wish to dialogue about important, practical theological concerns that have, after the last papacy, been effectively “taken off the table.”

Perhaps its time to put some of these concerns back on the table and have another, academically rigorous look.

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Pope to Make Peace Pilgrimage to Assisi in 2011

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , on January 3, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Thanks to DotCommonweal contributor and Pulitzer-Prize Winning journalist Paul Moses for posting this news, which slipped past me during the chaos of the holidays and my tight travel schedule of recent weeks. October 27, 2011 marks the 25th Anniversary of the famous interreligious peace gathering called by Pope John Paul II in Assisi. The iconic image of the gathering, with the Pope surrounded by religious leaders of all sorts, was taken at the Portiuncula — the “mother church” of the Order of Friars Minor.

 

This news is good indeed. For the video of the announcement with translation, watch below.

 

 

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