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Mexico City's Cathedral Closed (Due to Leftist Protest)

Posted:

Mon Nov 19, 2007 10:35 pm (GMT -5)
Mexico City's Cathedral Closed
100 Protesters Disrupt Sunday Mass

MEXICO CITY, NOV. 19, 2007 (Zenit.org).- The cathedral of Mexico City closed its doors last weekend, after more than 100 political protesters disrupted Sunday Mass.

The decision was announced the same day by Armando Martínez, the president of the College of the Catholic Lawyers of Mexico, who said that the cathedral will not open again until the government can guarantee the security of the faithful and priests.

During the midday Mass at the cathedral Sunday, a group of members of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) interrupted the liturgy chanting slogans supporting Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the 2006 presidential candidate who lost by a slim margin to Felipe Calderón. López Obrador contested the results, raising allegations of electoral fraud, and proclaimed himself the "legitimate president" of Mexico.

The protesters also threatened the faithful, the priests and Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico City, who was in Rome on Sunday.

"These are acts of aggression that we should not allow," said Martínez, who said the main concern is for the safety of the faithful present in the cathedral, as well as the cardinal, bishops and priests.

The demonstrators said they were provoked by church bells that chimed for an unusually long time, disrupting a rally in the central Zocolo square at which López Obrador was speaking. The dean of the cathedral, Rubén Ávila, told the newspaper El Universal that the bells rang for the normal time for a Sunday Mass.

In a statement released by Hugo Valdemar Romero, director of communication for the Archdiocese of Mexico, he called the event a "condemnable and cowardly act of terror, unequivocal expression of religious intolerance and of the hatred toward the Catholic Church."
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Blessed Pius IX, pray for us!

Expert hails new era in Jewish-Catholic relations, friendshi

Posted:

Mon Nov 19, 2007 6:11 pm (GMT -5)

Expert hails new era in Jewish-Catholic relations, friendship

By Kevin Kelly
Catholic Key Associate Editor

KANSAS CITY - Jews can go to heaven. That issue is no longer open to debate, said an expert in Jewish-Catholic relations.

Neither is the permanency of the covenant God made with the Jews as his "chosen people." When God makes a promise, he makes it forever, said Father Dennis McManus.

The issues of the salvation of the Jews and the everlasting covenant between God and his "chosen people" were settled once and for all in Catholic theology by the late Pope John Paul II, whose papacy marked a "revolution" in Catholic-Jewish relations, said Father McManus.

A scholar in Scripture and a leader in Catholic-Jewish dialogue, Father McManus spoke to audience of more than 100 Catholics and Jews at St. Thomas More Parish Nov. 5.

His lecture was an expansion of a March 25 talk he gave to members of Kansas City's Congregation Beth Shalom who came to Conception Abbey at the invitation of Abbot Gregory Polan.

A member of the Conception Seminary College faculty at that time, Father McManus, a priest of the Archdiocese of Mobile, Ala., is now a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

His Kansas City lecture was co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee, the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, Conception Abbey and Rockhurst University.

So profound was the shift in Catholic-Jewish relations during the reign of Pope John Paul II that Father McManus calls it the "Wojtyla Revolution," after the late pope's birth name, Karol Wojtyla.

Repeatedly, the pope called on Catholics to reject not only the overt hatred of anti-Semitism that led to the Nazi Holocaust, but also the more covert "anti-Judaism" caused by centuries of separation between Catholics and Jews, leading Christians to believe - erroneously - that Christianity renders Judaism obsolete and irrelevant.

"The root of anti-Judaism is the reading of the New Testament outside and apart from its Jewish context," Father McManus said. Pope John Paul issued "a new challenge: What would it be like for Christians to read their own Gospels in a Jewish context? What would it be like to understand Jesus as a Jew? What does that mean to us as Christians to understand that the first faith of the apostles was completely Jewish?"

The equation is simple. God promised to send a Messiah to the Jews.

"If we (Christians) regard him as the Messiah, then he can't be the Messiah if he is not Jewish," Father McManus said.

But the "anti-Judaism" over centuries that has downplayed and even denied Jesus as a Jew also gave birth to anti-Semitism, he said.

"Anti-Semitism is a racist philosophy that was based on the pseudo-theological view that Judaism had been surpassed by Christianity, and that God had cursed the Jews and left them behind," Father McManus said.

"There is no place in Christian life for anti-Semitism - none," he said. "John Paul II would repeat that again and again: It is sinful to engage in anti-Semitic behavior. It is wrong, no matter what form it takes, whether personal or group. It is wrong in every way."

Yet in ways both subtle and overt, anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism remain as strong and powerful voices, echoed in the "myths" that only Christians can reach heaven, and only Christians are the rightful heirs to God's covenants with his people.

"Yearning for the Messiah and living justly under the law is the recipe for salvation," Father McManus said.

To illustrate that Jews faithful to God's law are in heaven, he pointed to the Gospel story of the Transfiguration.

Jesus took Peter, James and John to a mountain top. There, his clothes became "dazzingly white." The great Jewish prophets Elijah and Moses appeared and talked with Jesus.

"Where did Elijah and Moses come from?" Father McManus asked.

Understanding that story, and the entire New Testament, in their Jewish roots is not only essential to understanding Judaism, Father McManus said, it is essential to understanding both Christ and Christianity.

"When you learn to read the Gospels with all the Jewish cues brought out in crispness and sharpness, you will meet Jesus in a brand-new way," he said. "Yes, he is Jewish. Unless we meet Jesus in a brand-new way, we are not going to get this."

Father McManus said the goal of "Wojtyla Revolution" is not the conversion of one faith tradition into the other.

The goal is the same that prompted Conception's Abbot Gregory to reach out to the Jewish community in Kansas City and western Missouri. It is the same that prompted Congregation Beth Shalom to accept the hospitality of the Benedictine monks in March. It is the same that brought scores of Christians and Jews together on Nov. 5 at St. Thomas More Parish.

"Friendship," Father McManus said. "Friendship between two great faiths. Friendship between individual Jews and individual Catholics and their families. In our theology of friendship as followers of Jesus, 'friend' is something spiritual. The networks of these friendships should be enough to chase away any movement to destroy one faith or the other."

END
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Dominus Meus et Deus Meus!

Agnostic composer of JP2 DVD calls it "trippy"

Posted:

Mon Nov 19, 2007 10:59 am (GMT -5)
Vatican to release 'trippy' DVD of pope

United Press International
Nov. 18, 2007
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Entertainment/2007/11/18/vatican_to_release_trippy_dvd_of_pope/9387/

LONDON, Nov. 18 (UPI) -- The agnostic British composer who set the late Pope John Paul II's speeches to music describes the new DVD as "quite trippy."

Simon Boswell was given free rein to edit the pope's voice for the DVD "Santo Subito," which means "canonize him quickly," The Independent reported Sunday.

The DVD, to be released by the Vatican Monday, resembles a pop video with Gregorian chant, Boswell said.

"A lot of it is quite trippy," he said. "Ecstasy in a drug sense rather than a religious sense. It's quite psychedelic."

Boswell, who has scored more than 100 films after starting his career with ghoulish Italian movies, is to be paid through royalties, the British newspaper said.

"If 5 percent of all Catholics buy it, this will sell more copies than Michael Jackson's Thriller," said Boswell, noting he remains an agnostic but was impressed by the clergy who commissioned him for the DVD.

"They're doing this for the love of the man," Boswell said, "and I can understand that."

Russian Orthodox Church reacts to Orthodox-Catholic document

Posted:

Mon Nov 19, 2007 10:50 am (GMT -5)
Bishop Hilarion requests the Theologian Commission to examine the ambiguous document adopted at the Orthodox-Catholic conference in Ravenna

Interfax
November 16, 2007
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=3945

Moscow, November 16, Interfax - The Russian Orthodox Church's representative of the under the European Institutions, bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria considers the final document of the 10th meeting of the Joint Orthodox-Catholic Commission in Ravenna should be examined in details by the Synod Theologian Commission.

"The document has got a whole series of doubted conclusions and assertions that are not beard by historical truth," - Bishop Hilarion stated in the interview to Interfax.

By his words, the Ravenna's document "is to be thoroughly examined by a group of the canon law specialists, ecclesiologists and church historians" under the Theologian Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church. Then an official assessment of the Commission must be approved by the Holy Synod of the Russian Church.

The document was not signed by the representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate as they abandoned one of the first Commission's sessions in Ravenna in October this year. They disagreed about a participation of the so-called "Estonian Apostolic Church" established by the Constantinople Patriarchate on the Russian Church's canonical territory in 1996. After that bishop Hilarion stated that the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue may not be considered legitimate without the Moscow Patriarchate's opinion.

In his interview to Interfax he called the Ravenna's assertions doubted, they describe the Catholicity of the Church and Church power on a "universal" level that is on the Ecumenical Church's level. By his words the document's authors commence describing not the modern Roman-Catholic and Orthodox Churches, "yet probably some theoretical Church established on the Church's principles of the Ecumenical Councils period."

The representative of the Moscow Patriarchate has not agreed with the clause 39 of the document where it is asserted that in 1054 after the Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches both the Churches continued assembling councils in the critical situations, and bishops of the Local Churches associated with the Rome See, although it was understood otherwise, and associated with the Constantinople See attended those councils."

"In 2006 in Belgrade I already disputed these assertions and called them contradicted to the ecclesiology self-interpretation of the Local Orthodox Churches." "We are orthodox Christians and consider ourselves of such kind just as we communicate with the Constantinople See, aren't we?" Bishop Hilarion stated.

He thinks, the 45th clause's assertion of the Ravenna document "to examine more thoroughly" a role of the Rome bishop in the communication with all Churches s should be a start point in the next stage of the dialogue's Commission where a primacy in the Ecumenical Church is to be discussed.

"Apparently we will find ourselves in a trap. That is to say: The Roman Catholics would strive to express an ecclesiological model of the Ecumenical Church so that a role of "the first bishop" would be described most closely to that the Rome Pope has got in the modern Roman Catholic Church," - he considers.

In his turn the Constantinople Patriarchate, bishop Hilarion says, "would strive to arrange so that the "the first" hierarch will obtain the rights that he does not have now, but apparently he would have them.

The Bigger View

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

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