Benedict on Clement

On St. Clement of Rome

Benedict XVI used his Wednesday address to talk about Clement, fourth bishop of Rome and martyr to Christ. Having finished discussing the apostles, he is now using his weekly addresses to discuss the apostolic fathers.

The Pope speaks to pilgrims in St. Peter's Square each Wednesday. John Paul the Great used these Wednesday addresses over a two year period to expound his theology of the body. The new Waldstein edition and translation is out.




Why the Apostolic Fathers

Benedict told the pilgrims, "Now, we will turn our attention to the Apostolic Fathers, that is, to the first and second generation of the Church after the apostles. This way we can see how the Church's path started in history. St. Clement, Bishop of Rome during the last years of the first century, is the third successor of Peter, after Linus and Anacletus. The most important testimonial of his life is that written by St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon until 202. He asserts that Clement 'had seen the apostles … had met with them,' and 'still had their preaching in his ears, and their tradition before his eyes' (Adv. Haer. 3,3,3)."

"The Church Has a Sacramental, Not a Political Structure"

What is the church? Benedict tells us that "St. Clement['s letter to the Corinthians] underlines that the Church has a sacramental structure, not a political structure. God's actions that come to us in the liturgy precede our decisions and our ideas. The Church is above all a gift of God and not a creature of ours and therefore this sacramental structure not only guarantees the common order but also the precedence of the gift of God that we all need. "

As Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict warned the church that it was incrreasingly perceived more like a multinational corporation that the body of Christ.


You can read the whole address and his comments to the English speaking pilgrims on zenit (www.zenit.org )

Justin Martyr

April 14th is the traditional feast date of Justin Martyr. It is currently celebrated June 1st in the Roman rite.

He was the first great Christian apologist: a rhetorician for Christ.

Rhetoric is the art of speaking persuasively using logic and appealing to the emotions to persuade your audience. Its end should be the truth. It contrasts with polemic, the use of emotional speech to rally one's supporters and excoriate one's opponents. A polemicist does not care to persuade his opponents.

Rhetoric is the art of free men: it is a necessary ingredient of a free republic. Polemic is the art of demagoguery; its prevalence is the symptom of empire, where men are no longer free.

Getting "a lot of Christians with their knickers in a knot"

We finally discovered the true purpose of biblical scholars and journalists!

The Discovery Channel is airing Sunday (a/k/a the Lord's day) a sensational story claiming to have found ossuaries that once held the bones of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, His "wife" Mary Magdalene, and two other members of the family. The highly paid strategists at the Discovery Channel have apparently decided that they are in the same business as the tabloids at the supermarket checkout counter.

The Wall Street Journal's David Hall found last Tuesday’s quote of the day in Laurie Goldstein's coverage of this momentous event:

“’A lot of conservative, orthodox and moderate Christians are going to be upset by the recklessness of this,’ said Ben Witherington, a Bible scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. ‘Of course, we want to know more about Jesus, but please don’t insult our intelligence by giving us this sort of stuff. It’s going to get a lot of Christians with their knickers in a knot unnecessarily.’”

Tying our knickers in knots! So that what biblical scholars and journalists are for! That’s a mystery that has baffled me for decades!

(If you are too embarrassed to ask: "knickers" are what you wear under your pants or skirt. An Aussie friend of mine, who was rather a rake, one confided in me that "Sheilas that don't wear knickers are more fun." I have no personal knowledge with which to judge whether his generalization be true or false. He was a sort who rather enjoyed testing such hypotheses: a line of research I neither recommend nor condone.)

Plunging "back into the liturgical life of another age."

Some French bishops think that freeing the Church to pray the mass of John XIII would "plunge us back into the liturgical life of another age."

Catholic World News reports French clerical and seemingly official "opposition to release of a papal document that would allow wider use of the traditional Latin Mass." According to a story dated October, 24th, 2006, "A group of 35 French bishops and priests have issued a statement urging Pope Benedict XVI ... not to issue the motu proprio that has been widely discussed in recent weeks. The clerics predict that by allowing broader use of the Tridentine rite, the papal document would 'plunge us back into the liturgical life of another age.'"

I like that phrase. The purported goal of the liturgical reforms imposed on the Church after the Council was to restore the mass to the pristine simplicity of worship in the early church. Now THAT, had it succeeded, would have plunged "us back into the liturgical life of another age."

Unfortunately, the experts and bureaucrats were more reductionist than restorationist. They created much that was new while destroying much that was old. Research and scholarship in the decades since have taught us how inaccurate was their understanding of liturgical history. Far from plunging us back into the age of the early church, they worshiped idols of their own intellectual making.

Now the council is finally bearing fruit. We are growing in our understanding of the worship of the early church. (See

Mike Aquilina's The Mass of the Early Christians.) The Council's call to rediscover the patristic roots of our theology and prayer life has been heard. And a true reform of the Roman liturgy is budding up through the dirty snow of our winter of liturgical discontent.

Deo gratias!

Happy St. Valentine's Day

Today is St. Valentine's Day. I doubt he would have approved of his metamorphosis into Cupid.

The picture was my message to my most special person.