What's with this "Holy Fire" nonsense?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all;

We heard some loon on the radio going on and on about something called the "Holy Fire" at the Church of the Resurrection (Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem) I had to google it to try and find more information on it. Absurd! What nonsense. Thank goodness not too many Catholic websites will acknowledge this phenomenon... could you comment? Is this a Greek Orthodox tradition? Beware of Greeks lighting fires. Isn’t that in the Bible somewhere?

Yours,

Mr. &Mrs. Phil & Sophie Majors

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Majors,

For those less aware than you, let me explain the Holy Fire. Every Easter, that is Easter according to the Greek Orthodox calendar, the Greeks claim that fire spontaneously lights the candles held by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem as he prays alone in the tomb of Christ. That sort of thing seems a bit much to swallow. After all, we are living in scientific times and know that such displays of the supernatural are nonsense. (It is interesting that the comment “Nonsense!” (leiros) does appear once in the New Testament. It is the reaction of the disciples to the women’s tale of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday morning.) All moderately well educated moderns know that the Holy Fire must be a fraud. The interesting thing is that if it is a fraud, it goes back at least 1,625 years.

The Holy Fire is first mentioned in documents dating from the 4th century. One of them, Eusebius of Caesarea’s “History of the Church,” talks about something similar in 188 AD, when Narcissus was Bishop of Jerusalem. It seems that there was no oil for the lamps for the Easter Vigil and water miraculously burned in the oil lamps. This may or may not be a reference to the Holy Fire, but it certainly could not have happened in the tomb itself. The tomb had been buried by the Emperor Hadrian in 135 and remained buried under a temple to the goddess Venus until 325 when the vigil services probably resumed at the Holy Sepulchre which had never been forgotten by the Christians of Jerusalem.

The next mention comes from that era and is much clearer. Around 385, Egeria, a Celtic noble woman from Spain, traveled to the Holy Land. In the account of her journey, she speaks of a ceremony at the Holy Sepulchre of Christ, where a light comes forth from the small chapel enclosing the tomb, by which the entire church is filled with an infinite light. St. John Damascene mentions the phenomenon in 780.

Things become even more explicit in an itinerary written by a western monk named Bernhard after his journey to Jerusalem in the year 865. He describes an angel who came down after the singing of the "Kyrie Eleison" and ignited the lamps hanging over the burial slab of Christ, whereupon the Patriarch passed the flame to the bishops and to everyone else in the church. This description matches what happens to this day. Bernard writes: " It is worth saying what happens on Holy Saturday, in the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Easter. In the morning the divine office begins in this church. Then, when it is over they sing the Kyrie Eleison 'til an angel comes and kindles light in the lamps which hang above the Sepulchre. The patriarch passes some of this light to the bishops and the rest of the people, and each one has light where he is standing. "

On October 18, 1009, Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, (also known as Hakim the Crazy) ordered the complete destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Tomb of Christ as well as random arrests and executions of the Christians of Jerusalem. This is the event that started the Crusades. Al-Hakim "...was aggrieved by the scale of the Easter pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which was caused specially by the annual miracle of the Holy Fire within the Sepulchre.”

In 1096, Pope Urban begged Christians to save the Holy Land and restore the tomb of Christ. In his appeal to Christendom, Pope Urban spoke of the Holy Fire . “Of holy Jerusalem, ...This very city, in which, as you all know, Christ Himself suffered for us, because our sins demanded ...in that place ...He died for us; there He was buried. How precious would be the longed for, incomparable place of the Lord's burial, even if God failed there to perform the yearly miracle! For in the days of His Passion (Holy Week) all the lights in the Sepulchre and round about in the church, which have been extinguished, are relighted by divine command. Whose heart is so stony, brethren, that it is not touched by so great a miracle? Believe me, that man is ...senseless whose heart such divinely manifest grace does not move to faith!”

In fact, the Holy Fire still falls in our time in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in much the same manner as early Christian and medieval sources report. If it is a fraud, that would mean that every Bishop of Jerusalem who has participated in this ceremony for almost 2,000 years has taken his cue from his predecessor and hoodwinked another generation of the gullible.

Let me describe the ceremony. The tomb is searched and sealed, formerly by the Muslim Turks, by the Israeli police presently. The patriarch is similarly searched. He enters the tomb and prays while the congregation chants “Lord have mercy.” A recent Greek patriarch, Diodorus who died in 2000 describes what happens. "I enter the tomb and kneel in holy fear in front of the place where Christ lay after His death and where He rose again from the dead... I find my way through the darkness towards the inner chamber in which I fall on my knees. Here I say certain prayers that have been handed down to us through the centuries and, having said them, I wait. Sometimes I may wait a few minutes, but normally the miracle happens immediately after I have said the prayers. From the core of the very stone on which Jesus lay an indefinable light pours forth. It usually has a blue tint, but the color may change and take many different hues. It cannot be described in human terms. The light rises out of the stone as mist may rise out of a lake. It almost looks as if the stone is covered by a moist cloud, but it is light. This light each year behaves differently. Sometimes it covers just the stone, while other times it gives light to the whole Sepulchre, so that people who stand outside the tomb and look into it will see it filled with light. The light does not burn. I have never had my beard burnt in all the sixteen years I have been Patriarch in Jerusalem and have received the Holy Fire. The light is of a different consistency than normal fire that burns in an oil lamp... At a certain point the light rises and forms a column in which the fire is of a different nature, so that I am able to light my candles from it. When I thus have received the flame on my candles, I go out and give the fire first to the Armenian Patriarch and then to the Coptic. Then I give the flame to all present in the Church."

The Holy Light is not only distributed by the Patriarch, but spreads by itself. It is emitted from the Holy Sepulchre with a hue completely different from natural light. The blue flame appears in different places in the Church. Believers claim that sometimes this miraculous light spontaneously ignites candles, which they hold in their hands. It flashes like lightning, and sometimes flies around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and lights the oil lamps in front of the tomb. It flies from one end of the church to the other. Sometimes it lights the lamps in the upper chapel of Calvary. For about a half an hour after the Holy Fire appears, it is a cool flame that does not burn the face, or beards or the hands. People “wash” themselves with the cool flame. You can find video of the event on You Tube. There is one fascinating video in which a large ball of fire explodes from the tomb, darts through the crown and strikes a pillar which lights up and then the light is gone.

Here's a fascinating 30 minute documentary "Holy Light in Jerusalem: Proofs & Testimonies" with English subtitles (originally produced in Greece). Apparently non-believers are in on the fraud, too.

Some Greeks claim that the Holy Fire proves they are the True Church. However, the Fire is given to the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, not the Patriarch of Constantinople. Catholics believe that Greek Orthodox are "true Church." By our lights, they reject the ministry of the apostle Peter, but they are still "true Church." Sometimes some of them don't like us Latins very much and historically we have sometimes returned the favor, but God is generous with His miracles. They have the Holy Fire and Our Lady of Zeitoun. We have the Shroud and Our Lady of Fatima. My personal belief is that the Holy Fire was given to the first (Jewish ) Christians of the Holy Land and the history of this community involves the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. They have custody of the tomb of Christ, though we Westerners have access to it. God loves them and us very much. I believe that the Holy Fire is not about who is right. God loves us all, East and West, North and South. However, the sad schism of the Church has limited the awareness of the miracle for perhaps 600 years. Perhaps an increasing awareness of this miracle will draw us into the miracle of deeper unity.

“Nonsense!”, you say? Well, hasn’t the Bible lots of nonsense? Remember the bush that burned but was not consumed? Remember Elijah’s chariot of fire? Remember the pillar of fire that led the people of Israel through the wilderness? Remember when the sun danced at Fatima and fire fell, changing the 20^th century because of our blessed Mother’s love for Orthodox Russia? Remember the fire that fell on the disciples and the Blessed Mother at Pentecost? It didn’t burn them, but sent them to the ends of the earth. Remember the fire that burned the burial shroud of Jesus and left His image scorched on the linen? John and Peter saw and believed! Didn’t Jesus Himself say, “I have come to throw fire on the earth and how I wish that it was already lit.” (Luke 12:9)? Don’t you say every Sunday that “He is light from light, true God from true God?” The Bible is full of fire, from the angel’s sword in Eden to the fire that exploded in the holy and deathless tomb, the empty tomb on Saturday just a few weeks ago, when an old man, a bishop, an unworthy servant of God knelt to pray. Look at the video on YouTube. The passing of the fire, the clanging of the bells. Isn’t this exactly what we reenact on Holy Saturday in our Vigil service? Look at the video and then read the Exultet. It is the Holy Fire that we celebrate even in the West, His wonders are ever new, but the fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” There is an old song:

and when the waves of anger again the earth shall fill with fire, the ark shall ride the sea of fire and rest on Zion’s hill.

May it soon be so! Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!

Rev. Know-it-all

Setting the Times straight

Friends,

This is an unusual article, but these are unusual times. I have shortened a fine article on our current difficulties. I am borrowing it, hopefully legally. It is “A Response to the New York Times” by Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, a chaplain at Queen's University in Ontario. It can be found in its entirety in the National Review Online. I urge you to go to the site to read the article in full. I excerpt it because it makes it absolutely clear that there is a conspiracy to defame the Church and its Sovereign Pontiff and that there is a significant involvement by our old friend, Rembert Weakbrain, I mean Weakland. Rembert, as you may remember from my article “Are we rolling back the reforms?” from January 31, 2010, is the man who trashed the Catholic Liturgy as well as the Milwaukee Cathedral. Now he is trying to trash the papacy. That old duck is surely the gift that keeps on giving. Well enough of my rantings. Here is the article.

Yours ever,
the Rev. Know it all

The New York Times on March 25 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent a priest, Fr. Lawrence Murphy, from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors.

The story is false. It is unsupported by its own documentation. Indeed, it gives every indication of being part of a coordinated campaign against Pope Benedict, rather than responsible journalism.

Before addressing the false substance of the story, the following circumstances are worthy of note:

• The New York Times story had two sources. First, lawyers who currently have a civil suit pending against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. One of the lawyers, Jeffrey Anderson, also has cases in the United States Supreme Court pending against the Holy See. He has a direct financial interest in the matter being reported.

• The second source was Archbishop Rembert Weakland, retired archbishop of Milwaukee. He is the most discredited and disgraced bishop in the United States, widely known for mishandling sexual-abuse cases during his tenure, and guilty of using $450,000 of archdiocesan funds to pay hush money to a former homosexual lover who was blackmailing him. Archbishop Weakland had responsibility for the Father Murphy case between 1977 and 1998, when Father Murphy died. He has long been embittered that his maladministration of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee earned him the disfavor of Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, long before it was revealed that he had used parishioners’ money to pay off his clandestine lover. He is prima facie not a reliable source.

• Laurie Goodstein, the author of the New York Times story, has a recent history with Archbishop Weakland. Last year, upon the release of the disgraced archbishop’s autobiography, she wrote an unusually sympathetic story that buried all the most serious allegations against him (New York Times, May 14, 2009).

• A demonstration took place in Rome on Friday, coinciding with the publication of the New York Times story. One might ask how American activists would happen to be in Rome distributing the very documents referred to that day in the New York Times........ The New York Times made available on its own website the supporting documentation for the story. In those documents, Cardinal Ratzinger himself does not take any of the decisions that allegedly frustrated the trial.. .....that Cardinal Ratzinger’s impeded some investigation is proven utterly false.....

The canonical trial against Father Murphy was never stopped by anyone. In fact, it was only abandoned days before Father Murphy died. Cardinal Ratzinger never took a decision in the case......His deputy.. suggested, given that Father Murphy was in failing health and a canonical trial is a complicated matter, that more expeditious means be used to remove him from all ministry. That Cardinal Ratzinger did anything wrong is unsupported by the documentation.... He does not appear in the record as taking any decision. His office... agreed that there should be a full canonical trial. When it became apparent that Father Murphy was in failing health, Archbishop Bertone suggested more expeditious means of removing him from any ministry.

Furthermore, under canon law at the time, the principal responsibility for sexual-abuse cases lay with the local bishop. Archbishop Weakland had from 1977 onwards the responsibility of administering penalties to Father Murphy. He did nothing until 1996..... The New York Times flatly got the story wrong, according to its own evidence. Readers may want to speculate on why.

Here is the relevant timeline, drawn from the documents the New York Times posted on its own website.

15 May 1974
Abuse by Fr. Lawrence Murphy is alleged by a former student at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. In fact, accusations against Father Murphy go back more than a decade.

12 September 1974
Father Murphy is granted an official “temporary sick leave” from St. John’s School for the Deaf. He leaves Milwaukee and moves to northern Wisconsin, in the Diocese of Superior, where he lives in a family home with his mother. He has no official assignment from this point until his death in 1998. He does not return to live in Milwaukee. No canonical penalties are pursued against him.

9 July 1980
Officials in the Diocese of Superior write to officials in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee about what ministry Father Murphy might undertake in Superior. Archbishop Rembert Weakland, archbishop of Milwaukee since 1977, has been consulted and says it would be unwise to have Father Murphy return to ministry with the deaf community. There is no indication that Archbishop Weakland foresees any other measures to be taken in the case.

17 July 1996
More than 20 years after the original abuse allegations, Archbishop Weakland writes to Cardinal Ratzinger, claiming that he has only just discovered that Father Murphy’s sexual abuse involved the sacrament of confession — a still more serious canonical crime. The allegations about the abuse of the sacrament of confession were in the original 1974 allegations. Weakland has been archbishop of Milwaukee by this point for 19 years. It should be noted that for sexual-abuse charges, Archbishop Weakland could have proceeded against Father Murphy at any time. The matter of solicitation in the sacrament of confession required notifying Rome, but that too could have been done as early as the 1970s.

10 September 1996
Father Murphy is notified that a canonical trial will proceed against him. Until 2001, the local bishop had authority to proceed in such trials. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is now beginning the trial.

24 March 1997
Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, advises a canonical trial against Father Murphy.

14 May 1997
Archbishop Weakland writes to Archbishop Bertone to say that the penal process against Father Murphy has been launched, and notes that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has advised him to proceed even though the statute of limitations has expired. In fact, there is no statute of limitations for solicitation in the sacrament of confession. Throughout the rest of 1997 the preparatory phases of the canonical trial is underway.

12 January 1998
Father Murphy, now less than eight months away from his death, appeals to Cardinal Ratzinger that, given his frail health, he be allowed to live out his days in peace.

6 April 1998
Archbishop Bertone, noting the frail health of Father Murphy and that there have been no new charges in almost 25 years, recommends using pastoral measures to ensure Father Murphy has no ministry, but without the full burden of a canonical process. It is only a suggestion, as the local bishop retains control.

13 May 1998
The Bishop of Superior, where the process has been transferred to and where Father Murphy has lived since 1974, rejects the suggestion for pastoral measures. Formal pre-trial proceedings begin on 15 May 1998.

30 May 1998
Archbishop Weakland, who is in Rome, meets with officials but not including Cardinal Ratzinger, to discuss the case. The trial process is ongoing. No decision was taken to stop it, but given the difficulties of a trial after 25 years, other options are explored that would more quickly remove Father Murphy from ministry.

19 August 1998
Archbishop Weakland writes that he has halted the canonical trial and has immediately begun the process to remove him from ministry — a quicker option.

21 August 1998
Father Murphy dies. His family defies the orders of Archbishop Weakland for a discreet funeral.

Do you really think Jesus rose from the dead?

Dear Rev. Know it all,
The Christian religion is so primitive. This myth of the dying and rising god permeates ancient religions and is only symbolic. Science has proven that dead bodies cannot be brought back to life. I celebrate Easter because it is a beautiful celebration of the power of nature, a celebration of the Goddess in all her power and splendor. Perhaps there is some kind of survival of death, or cosmic consciousness, but resurrection? Really! To believe in an impossibility without a shred of evidence is the height of gullibility. You traditional Catholics make this beautiful spring festival of life and fertility more like something from a Frankenstein movie.
Yours faithlessly,
Dr. Agnes Tick
Professor of Feminist Studies
Bathsheba Bible College

Dear Dr. Tick,
I would venture that there are shreds of evidence, like a group of men and women, many of whom died violent deaths refusing to deny that they had seen Jesus of Nazareth risen from the dead. Their testimony transformed the world. There are still events that don’t conform to the laws of science, such as Fatima and Lourdes and Zeitoun. There is also the nearness of the Lord available to believers, but I don’t expect you to accept any of these. To do so, you must rely on the witness of others. Still, there is something that one can actually touch and see and examine under a microscope: the Shroud of Turin. I can here you laughing all the way from your tenured teaching chair. After all, wasn’t the Shroud proven a fake by carbon dating in 1988? Herein lies the problem with tenure in institutions of higher learning. Once a person is in for life, he, or she, need never have a new idea — intellectual curiosity becomes optional. The pope should be so infallible!
Let me tell you the latest. Dr. Ray Rogers of Los Alamos National Laboratory was the head of chemistry experiments for the Shroud of Turin Research Project that performed scientific tests of the shroud in 1978. When carbon dating put the origin of the Shroud at around 1300 AD, he gave up on the Shroud. The case was closed. Science had spoken. When some tried to explain why the carbon dating was wrong, Dr. Rogers became angry at these nut-cases who couldn’t accept the verdict of hard science. He was particularly angry at Joseph Marino and his wife Sue Benford. In the year 2000 they claimed that there had been a repair attempt in the area of the Shroud from which the testing samples had been taken. They concluded that the Carbon 14 tests were done on a medieval patch, not on the actual Shroud. Dr. Rogers knew he could prove them wrong. He actually had small pieces of the Shroud from the test area. He examined his samples and was thunderstruck by what he saw. A couple of non-academics had been right.
The cloth examined by some of the world’s most prestigious laboratories was made of cotton. The Shroud is made of linen. Dr. Rogers could actually see where the linen and cotton threads had been spliced together and dyed to match the rest of the Shroud. He submitted his work to review by fellow chemists. His article in the scientific journal Thermochimica Acta (Jan. 20,2005) is the one of the few peer reviewed articles on the subject. In 2008, at Dr. Rogers’ request, a team of nine scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory headed by Dr. Robert Villarreal proved the carbon dating invalid. Villarrea. wrote, “The age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area... must...be representative of the whole."
"The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.” This means the Shroud of Turin has never been carbon dated. However, there is another way to date ancient cloths. Vanillin is produced by the decomposition of lignin, a component of flax, from which linen is made. It’s found in medieval linens but not in older cloths. It vanishes with time. First century linen cloths don’t contain vanillin because they are too old. Medieval linens contain some vanillin and modern linen has a lot of vanillin. Dr. Rogers' paper concludes that , based on vanillin loss, that the Shroud is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old, old enough to have wrapped the crucified Christ. Well fine, you may say. So the cloth is old. What proves that it’s the burial cloth of Jesus? Where’s your evidence?
First, let me review what the Shroud of Turin is, in case you have been hiding under an ivy covered rock at Bathsheba Bible College.
The Shroud of Turin is a fourteen foot long cloth that has the faint image of a man imprinted on it. The image is not painted, but formed by a sort of scorch, perhaps a radiation burn, of only top threads of the top fibers of the cloth. There are human blood stains on the cloth, but the image is so limited to the threads that where there is a bloodstain, there is no image on the underlying cloth. This means that the image was formed after the bloodstains had been made. There is a faint, pale brown image of a man, five-foot eleven inches tall, who appears to have Jewish style payes (side locks). He has wounds in his hands, side and feet, and small puncture wounds around the scalp, small double wounds all over his body and a side wound the size of a typical roman lance. The small wounds all over the body are the exact size of the tips of an ancient Roma whip, a flagrum. The wounds are consistent with a Jewish man whipped by Romans, crowned with thorns, crucified and pierced with a lance. It is clearly an image of Jesus, the only man we know of who was whipped and crucified, but also crowned with thorns and pierced by a lance. These last two were not part of a typical Roman crucifixion.
You may say, “So it’s Jesus. Big deal. It doesn’t prove a thing. There is nothing supernatural or even unusual about any of this. There are untold thousands of such images in churches everywhere.” Well, what convinces me is what is not seen. For centuries the Shroud attracted no scientific interest until 1898. Secondo Pia, an Italian photographer was allowed to photograph the cloth. When he developed the photographic negatives he was shaken. On the cloth was a faint image. Impossibly, the negative was a perfect photograph. That started the scientific investigation of the cloth that has never stopped. In the 1960's Peter Schumacher developed the VP8 image analyzer for creating relief maps of distant objects such as the Moon and Mars. In 1976, Schumacher had has just finished installing a VP8 Image analyzer for Dr. John Jackson of the Sandia Scientific Laboratories. Jackson placed an image of the Shroud of Turin in the analyzer When it was activated, a three-dimensional image appeared. Schumacher says “I had no idea what I was looking at. (He had never heard of the Shroud.) However, the results were unlike anything I have processed through the VP-8 Analyzer, before or since. Only the Shroud of Turin has produced these results from a VP-8 Image Analyzer.”
Wait, there’s more! Dr. Joseph Kohlbeck, of the Hercules Aerospace Center in Salt Lake, Utah, and Dr. Richard Levi-Setti of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, have examined particles taken from the Shroud’s surface. They found travertine aragonite, from near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. The chemical signatures of the Shroud samples and the dust found near Golgotha are identical. This particular kind of limestone dust has been found only near Jerusalem.
Wait, there’s more! The bloodstains, which are human blood, have the hidden characteristics of blood. On the Shroud, there are components such as bile, bilirubin, heme, and serum, unknown to medieval medicine. These marks were made after death, and are invisible to the naked eye. They can be seen only under ultra-violet light. The blood has a high bilirubin content which means it was shed under conditions of severe stress. Quite a clever medieval forger to put all these invisible things on the Shroud in a foolish attempt to dupe us modern sophisticates.
Wait, there’s more. Mechthild Fleury-Lemberg, one of the worlds leading textile experts did conservation on the Shroud and was able to thoroughly examine the cloth front and back. She discovered a unique nearly invisible seam that she has found on only one other cloth. That cloth is is from the time of Christ and from Masada, only a few miles from Jerusalem.
Wait, there’s more! Dr. Peter Soons of Holland noticed another detail of the Shroud. There is no directionality to the image on the Shroud. The image is the same from any angle, above or below, from right, left, or front. The image emerges from the cloth evenly. The Shroud looks like a picture to our eyes but image analysis shows no directionality to the lights and shadows of the picture. In every picture, painting or photo, there is a light source that reflects off the image to the beholder, whether artist or camera. This is not true of the Shroud. The light is everywhere at once. The Shroud is a holograph! In Jerusalem there is an amazing exhibit on the Shroud. When you see the 3-D holograph, you realize that the image is not on the cloth at all. It floats in space some distance from the cloth. It is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.
Wait, there’s more! Dame Isabel Piczek, a particle physicist, noticed that there is no distortion in the image on the cloth from the pressure of the body on the tomb slab, nor are there folds and wrinkles from the cloth. Rather, to quote her, “There is a strange dividing element, an interface from which the image is projected up and the image is projected down. The muscles of the body are absolutely not crushed against the stone of the tomb. .....The body is hovering between the two sides of the Shroud..... there is absolutely no gravity. The image is absolutely undistorted...... A heretofore unknown interface....” This interface she says, “would have been the result of a, collapsed event horizon, in the center of which, “there is something which science knows as a singularity. This is exactly what started the universe in the Big Bang.” Golly!
Wait, there’s more. I haven’t room here for the coins minted by Pontius Pilate on the eyes, (Barry Schwortz, a brilliant photographer disputes this, though he has no doubt that the Shroud is for real) or for pollen unique to Jerusalem on and on and on. So the Shroud has hidden photographic and hidden three dimensionality in it. It is a hidden holograph and demonstrates the mysteries of quantum physics, as well as rock dust and pollen that come only from the area of the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem. It may have coins from the holy Land minted only at the time of Christ.
I can hear you say, “Well all this must be just coincidence. After all, the carbon dating proves....”
Can’t you get it through your thick tenured head that there was no carbon dating of the Shroud? JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD. The sooner you get used to the fact, the sooner you’ll come to know Him and accept Him as the Lord of the universe and the Lord of your life.

Happy Easter,

Rev. Know-it-all

Notes from my family...

N.B. We are beginning Holy Week and I can think of nothing as penitential as a lecture on German history.

Dear Readers,

It is a very painful correspondence that I want to share with you today. It is also very personal and I am not making up a word of it. People come to me with family problems all the time. Well, your friend the Rev. Know-it-all is not immune from such difficulties. Some of my relatives are about to throw their religion overboard because of a new translation of the Missal.
Let me begin by once again saying how proud I am of my ethnic heritage. It is the vehicle through which I first heard the Gospel message. German Catholics have been heroic in the defense and practice of the faith which St. Boniface brought to us when he cut down a tree in Fritzlar, a few miles from where my family originates. The tree was sacred to Thor, and when our people saw the tree go down, they dumped Thor like a bad habit. Now of course, Boniface would be arrested for a hate crime, destruction of property and violating first amendment rights.
So I am proud not only to be ethnically German but still more proud to be a German Catholic. Germany was once a collection of tiny countries all going under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire. In the 18th century the Holy Roman Empire consisted of over 1800 separate immediate territories governed by distinct authorities. Back in 1520, when Father Martin Luther, a Saxon and a Catholic University professor (things never change much, do they?), decided he was more infallible than the pope, Europe went up for grabs. It started a century of war in which my father’s family’s town and my mother’s family’s town were burned to the ground by the Duke of Braunschweig, a northern Protestant prince. When the smoke cleared and they managed to bury the 8 million or so corpses, the north of Germany, places like Prussia, Hamburg and Braunschweig, ended up Protestant. Places in the south like Bavaria and Austria ended up Catholic. My people were a bit odd. (Are you surprised?) We are from a little grouping of towns in Oberhessen in the north that ended Catholic surrounded by, not Lutherans, but Calvinists! That means we are crabby, but still Catholic.
There really was no Germany until the 19th century when the Calvinist Dukes of Brandenburg/Prussia decided to take over the rest of the German Sates. The Prussians are what most people think of as Germans, precise, humorless, fond of a good argument or an invasion of Poland. The rest of us like beer, accordion music and wine that is sweet enough to give you diabetes. That’s why my people came here. They wanted to be Catholic. That’s why a lot of people came here, like the Irish and the Polish and the Assyrians. We have forgotten who we are and it breaks my heart that my own family has forgotten. It is a disaster to forget the faith that created our beautiful culture.
Fr. Luther started the process of forgetting by rejecting the universality of the faith that the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, represents and, by the grace of God, creates. Much of Europe is having a wonderful time forgetting the Gospel and its irritating moral demands, like permanent marriages and children. We now look forward to Islamic Republic of France, the Islamic Republic of Holland and the revived Caliphate of Cordoba (Spain). In a little while we will have the Emirate of Milwaukee and the Caliphate of New York. I imagine when that happens we, (not they, because it will be we who have given up our faith) will blow up the Statue of Liberty. It is after all the image of a goddess. One consolation; all the feminists will have to wear black birkahs. We can pretend that nuns are making a come back.

Yours,
Rev. Know-it-all

(Here’s the promised correspondence and my response:)

Subject: Re: Here's the new translation of the missal…
Dear Relatives,
I can't decide if it's time to start our own church or just give up on it all together. There doesn't seem to be much reason to support the power politics that the higher clergy call church, but which is only the institutional and least important of Avery Dulles' models of the church.
Cousin Wilhelm

And this from another relative:

It seems wordy and the words seem foreign to the 21st century. One wonders who wrote it and if this is the language that they personally use... check it out. I'd be interested in what you think....
Cousin Hildegarde

And this is my response to my kin:

Dear Relatives,
I am delighted that the ethnic heritage is still so strong in the family. I had thought we were no longer very German. How wonderful to hear talk of starting our own church. Nothing could be more quintessentially Teutonic. It's just what our ancestors' neighbor down the road apiece, Fr. Luther, did when he realized his own charisma of infallibility.
Our people left Germany because Bismarck was so antipapal. A good German owed no allegiance to a foreign prince, such as the Bishop of Rome pretends to be. Bismarck loved to draft the Catholic boys and put them in the front lines to see if the French had got the cannon range right. So they put Great Grandpa on a boat in Hanover Schmuenden at the age of sixteen to send him to Amerika where he could be Catholic and free. How delightful that a little change in vocabulary, designed to bring us more into line with other English speaking Catholics outside Amerika is about to liberate us from that foolish notion of universality and the tyrannical old Bavarian in the Vatican. Perhaps now we can all migrate back to Europe, give the land back to the Native Americans from whom we stole it and become Muslims like the rest of Europe. Allah hu Akbar.
Your cousin,
Rev. Know-it-all

P.S. Perhaps you've heard the saying, "There is no one so conservative as a liberal."

The Rev reviews The Shack

Dear Rev Know it all;

I have just read the book The Shack. It was very interesting, but I’m not sure that it very Catholic. Could you please comment?

Yours, Frieda Reid

Dear Frieda

I once heard the eminent Fr. Bob Barron say that The Shack was like watermelon; very sweet but one had to spit out the occasional seed. To his perspicacious comments I would like to add something said by the sagacious Dr. Ashleigh Brilliant, “I may not be perfect, but parts of me are excellent!” I recommend the book to those who understand that it is a fantasy, and not a work of theology. It is more of a meditation to be taken with a grain of salt. It is particularly good for those who suffered some great grief or for those who have trouble with forgiveness or believing that God loves them. It struck me as I read it, that it is sort of a Protestant longing for what Catholic visionaries experience. Some of it sounds like the accounts of the Fatima visionaries. It describes the intimacy with God that believing Catholics almost take for granted when we encounter Jesus in the Eucharist and in the tabernacle, body blood soul and divinity,

The Shack is quite a book. When I first started it, I was alarmed at the mention of a chai latte with soy milk. That certainly did not bode well, but my fears of new age voodoo were largely unfounded. What I found was modern American non-denominational Protestantism lite.

To briefly summarize the plot without giving anything away a good man, an unsure Christian has his life and faith shaken when his very young daughter goes missing on a camping trip. It is clear that she has been molested and murdered by a serial killer, but her body cannot be found. “Mac” the protagonist sinks into a depression for years that he calls the great sadness. He receives a note saying that God would like to see him in the shack where his little daughter’s bloody dress was recovered. Desperate, he goes and there he meets God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

His first encounter is with God the Father who is an ample African American woman, maternal and warm, one of the most delightful characters in the book. Jesus is, of all things, a Jewish carpenter. The Holy Spirit is an Asian woman. I can hear staunchly orthodox people gritting their teeth. You needn’t. At least not right away. The author’s point seems to be that God is never quite what we expect, and in this he is quite accurate.

First what’s good about the book? The plot is very compelling. Though you know what’s going to happen, you still want to keep reading. The portrayal of the Trinity is largely orthodox, with an important exception to which I will refer later. The book seems in its discussion of Jesus and salvation. It is wonderful in the way it discusses the love of God for creation and humanity. It rhapsodizes about the way God knows. I kept remembering the Scripture verse, “We shall know as we are known for we shall see Him as He is.” God is very humanized in the book.

Second what’s not so good about the book? Evangelical leader R. Albert Mohler, Jr. called The Shack "deeply troubling," saying that it "includes undiluted heresy." To a Catholic, this is quite a comment. From a Catholic perspective, evangelical Protestantism is undiluted heresy, but it still makes some interesting points. William Young, the author, considers himself a great fan of C.S. Lewis, and The Shack is a fantasy, not unlike CS Lewis allegorical works about God. C.S. Lewis was just inches from Catholicism himself. Perhaps that is why the Shack gives certain evangelicals the shpilkus. Mind you, I am a believing Catholic, thus my critique. To be quite honest the plot drags in spots when Young psychologizes or theologizes at great length. Sometimes his language is very, well, new age groovy, but he is after all a Canadian who lives in Oregon.

Third: What’s really not so good about The Shack. Being a theological descendant of Father Martin Luther, that renegade Catholic priest, Young doesn’t realize that there should be four people in the Shack, Father, Son, Holy Ghost and the Bride (that is the Church.) Jesus mentions the Bride, but she isn’t really there. That’s why he has to make the Father a woman who eventually turns into a man. We Catholics understand that the feminine in God is wrapped up in Mother Church, personified in our Blessed Mother, Mary. This blind spot means that Young humanizes God, but doesn’t really understand the Incarnation. How could he? He is the theological descendant of Father Martin Luther and Uncle John Calvin. He makes God out to be very human, but not very incarnate. There is a difference.

In the chapter “God is a Verb”, the author’s Lutheran inheritance becomes clear. God doesn’t like religion very much and the 10 commandments exist only to point out the futility of trying to follow rules. We Catholics think religion is a virtue. Its purpose is to render God the worship due to Him as the source of all being and the principle of all government. God owns us, body and soul. This is the reason for religion and ritual. We are not spirits trapped in flesh. We are incarnate spirits. What I do with my body, I do with my soul. Jesus doesn’t destroy the law. He fulfills it. The Law is a gift of God’s love, warning us of the dangers of sin and pointing us to the beauty of virtue. Ritual is the worship that our embodied spirits offer God. In The Shack God seems to say that there are no rules or rituals or restraints, just love. There is also no hell, no fallen angels and no ultimate freedom. One cannot finally choose evil. God’s love seems irresistible. This is pure Luther. Young seems to believe in predestination without hell. Everyone is predestined to go to heaven, but predestined none the less. God will eventually have his way. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Fourth: What is excellent about The Shack? Its treatment of God’s universal love and forgiveness is very good. In classic Protestantism and Islam, God loves some and hates others. It is called predestination. In Judaism, God’s justice demands punishment for heinous crimes. On the other hand Catholicism and in the New Testament teach that God is universally just, universally merciful and universally loving.

This is the problem is that The Shack really tackles. Mac comes to believe that God loves him even though he did not prevent his daughter’s death. He finds assurance that his daughter is in God’s safe keeping, but he cannot cope with God’s love for the perpetrator of this horrific crime. The “!%*# deserves to burn in hell. I cannot forgive him!” God explains that Mac is His child, Mac’s daughter is His child and the murderer is His child. They are all brothers, children of the same Father.

By my lights, this section of the book is the most Catholic part. It is why Catholicism is so universally hated when it is fully Catholic. The world wants thing to be good or bad, black or white, up or down. That is why God describes himself as a parent. For a parent who loves his children nothing is all one thing or the other. While acknowledging the bad, a father -- a real father -- still sees the good.

These have been hard times for Mother Church, the Bride. The world the flesh and the devil say that there are some who are beyond her maternal embrace. There are some whom the Father should not forgive. The Father, the true Father, the Father who is God punishes in order to heal, not to delight in the pain of the punished. He is not the sadist Luther believed Him to be. Poor Luther seems to have hated God. Luther says “He (God) gorges on us with great eagerness and wrath . . . he is an avaricious, gluttonous fire." The children of Luther have never quite understood the universal love of God because their father, Martin Luther never did. He stands solidly with the world saying that a very human, a very incarnate, church should be destroyed. Only the perfect church as Luther defines it, should be left. And so says all the modern world. They cannot understand how universal love can be reconciled with justice.

A case in point. Despite what you may have heard Pope Pius XII is credited with saving 700,000 Jews from the Nazi ovens in the Second World War. (If you don’t believe me, read “The Myth of Hitler’s Pope” by Rabbi David Dahlen, “Special Mission” by Dan Kurzman and “Triumph, the Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church” by H. W. Crocker III) Shockingly, the Church has been implicated in the flight of some Nazi criminals from justice after the war. How can a church which saved Jews then turn around and save Nazis? That is the wrong question. The real question is how can a God who loved and chose the Jews allow them to suffer so hideously and then, if He really loved them, how can He also love the fiends who tortured and killed them? The idea that God’s love is universal sounds good on paper, but its demands enrage savage, fallen humanity.

Here’s an example of the problem. The world wants full disclosure. The Church offers the Holy Seal of Confessional. Untold numbers of priests have gone to their death rather than betray criminals. This is unacceptable to a blood thirsty world. Criminals should be betrayed -- unless of course that criminal is your son or daughter whom you love.

We don’t really want a God who is love, a God who is Father, loving both victim and perpetrator. We want a God who will take just revenge on those who have hurt us. That is why God allowed us to brutally kill His own beloved Son and then heard His son’s prayers that his “Papa,” His “Abba” forgive them. Sometimes the Catholic Church fails to punish evildoers in the way that the world believes they should be punished. The church, or rather the weak and sinful people in whose hands God has placed the Church, tries to imitate their Lord. Sometimes they get it wrong. Most parents get it wrong, but often they get it wrong for the right reason. The pastors of the Church are compelled to see the common humanity of victim and perpetrator, indeed more than that. They see the potential divinization of both!

That is part of the reason why the Catholic Church opposes the death penalty. The death penalty is not necessarily forbidden. It must simply be administered with perfect justice. And who is the perfect, just judge in this sorry world. The death penalty is abhorrent to us partly because it ends the possibility of repentance, and God does not wish the death of a sinner, even though the world longs for it.

What about all those people consigned to the flames by the Inquisition etc. etc. When the state has masqueraded as the Church it has done horrible things wearing clerical vestments, but when the Church has done the right thing and has been truly Herself, she has always struggled to love the sinner as Christ Himself loves the sinner. For this, she has been hated more than for any other thing. She holds up the high moral standard of Christ that Young’s book seems to brush away. She is hated for reminding people of their sins. At the same time holds out the hope of complete forgiveness, and she is hated all the more for doing so. May she always stand with her Lord at the cross which was intended for His shame but has become His sign of victory and the very emblem of God’s glory.

Rev. Know it all

Why do Catholics call priests "Father"?

Dear Rev. Know it all,
My neighbor, a member of the First Fire-Baptized Church of God in Christ with Signs and Wonders Following Inc., says that Catholics are in violation of the Holy Scriptures because they call their pastors “father” but the Bible says “Call no man father!” Can you explain this or should I join their church?
Yours,
Pat Ernity
 
Dear Pat,
When people hit me with this I always ask them, “If you should call no man father, what do you call that man who married your mother?” People who use the Bible that way are about as deep as a puddle. They take individual verses out of context, and a text without a context is a pretext. They are looking for a fight. They sound like they know the Bible, but they’ve only interiorized certain parts of it — the parts that are fun in a fight. It’s the same spirit that motivated pseudo-liberalism. It is allows you to be virtuous and cantankerous at the same time. I call it the baptized anger.
Let’s look at the passage in the 23rd chapter of Matthew. “Then Jesus said… ‘The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat..... but everything they do is done for men to see.....they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues.... They love..... to have men call them Rabbi....But you are not to be called Rabbi, for you have only one Master and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth father, for you have one Father, and He is in heaven. Nor are you to be called teacher, for you have one Teacher, the Christ.’ ”
First of all, the word Rabbi means “my great one” or “my revered one” — “reverend” in English and the word “doctor” is Latin for teacher. I don’t know a single Christian group that doesn’t use one of those three titles. For instance, we have, the Rev. Doctor Billy Graham. And we have the Rev. Ernst Angely (Oh Lord, heal my toupee!) All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as St. Paul says.
St. Paul tells the Corinthians (1Cor.4:15 ) “Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel.” Actually, in Greek it reads “I begot you” and not “I have become your father,” but he does concede that they have fathers in Christ, though not many among whom he clearly counts himself. Apparently St. Paul doesn’t realize this title is forbidden.
What’s really going on here? Some rabbis at the time of Christ really believed they deserved perks. The question was asked, “If your father and your rabbi were drowning, and you could only save one of them, who should you save?” The correct answer was, of course, your rabbi, since a father confers only physical life and your rabbi confers spiritual life. People vied to dress their rabbis, to tie their shoes, in general, to be at their beck and call. Even in our own time, the fuss made over great rabbis is amazing. The great Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the last of the Lubavitcher Rebbes, was followed and fawned over like a rock star and, from people who knew the Rebbe, I have gotten the impression that the Rebbe was pretty sick of it. Little orthodox Jewish kids even have “Gedolim” cards, literally “great men cards.” These are famous Rabbi trading cards, similar to baseball cards.!!!
This is what Jesus is referring to, not so much the idea of titles. I have known people in some really weird wacky sects that would never dream of calling their ministers “father,” but their preachers and pastors tell them whom to marry, what to say, how to eat and how to dress. Believe me. Few Catholic priests are in danger of this kind of status.
What Jesus is saying here is that your salvation should never be dependent on any one human being. People leave the Church over the darndest things. The priest yelled at them or missed an appointment or didn’t attend their third cousin twice removed’s funeral. Far more serious is scandal. We get so discouraged when we hear of priestly scandal. Jesus warned us that scandal was inevitable. Priests are not only weak men, but they are under unusual pressure. I don’t just mean day-to-day stress; I mean demonic attack. St. Paul says that it isn’t against flesh and blood that we war, but against powers and principalities. (Eph.6:12)Jesus said that “...they will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.” (Mark14:27) In other words, if the devil can ruin a priest, he has done a good day’s work, at least what he would call a good day.
If you are a Catholic because you met the perfect priest or deacon or nun, I would suggest you leave the Church now and avoid the delay. You may have been led to the Catholic faith by a good man or woman, but trust me, they aren’t perfect. God alone is good, as Jesus tells us. The rest of us are original sinners. This includes the clergy. The reason to be a Catholic is that the Catholic Church holds the truth and that it is the Church founded by Jesus. However, it is to be remembered that Jesus founded the Church through the ministry of the apostles, that bunch of cowardly reprobates. We, the clergy, have been walking in their footsteps ever since.
Rev. Know-it-all

Why did they take away the Holy Water?

Dear Rev. Know it all,
I was out in the suburbs this past Sunday and stopped at St. Vatsnu’s Church in Rolling Bluff Oak Terrace Vistas for Mass. I was a bit taken aback. First there was sand in the holy water fountain and then there was a glorious liturgical dance in which some nun in a diaphanous gown and a body stocking twirled up to the altar with what appeared to be a Mexican bean pot belching clouds of incense. Were these changes mandated by the Second Vatican Council?
Yours,
Patience X. Austed

Dear Patience,
No, these changes were not mandated by the Second Vatican Council. They were probably mandated by a second string team of unemployed department store window decorators, or a pastor who considers himself avant garde. I have seen the bean pot incense thing and I worked in the Spanish speaking world for many years. When I see a bean pot/incense burner, I always wonder, “Who burned the beans?” As for the sand in the holy water fountain, it is absolutely forbidden. Allow me to quote:

CONGREGATION DE CULTU DIVINO ET DISCIPLINA SACRAMENTORUM
Prot. N. 569/00/L
March 14, 2000
Dear Father:
This Congregation for Divine Worship has received your letter sent by fax in which you ask whether it is in accord with liturgical law to remove the Holy Water from the fonts for the duration of the season of Lent. This Dicastery is able to respond that the removing of Holy Water from the fonts during the season of Lent is not permitted, in particular, for two reasons:
1. The liturgical legislation in force does not foresee this innovation, which in addition to being beyond the law, is contrary to a balanced understanding of the season of Lent, which though truly being a season of penance, is also a season rich in the symbolism of water and baptism, constantly evoked in liturgical texts.
2. The encouragement of the Church that the faithful avail themselves frequently of her sacraments and sacramentals is to be understood to apply also to the season of Lent. The "fast" and "abstinence" which the faithful embrace in this season does not extend to abstaining from the sacraments or sacramentals of the Church.
The practice of the Church has been to empty the Holy Water fonts on the days of the Sacred Triduum in preparation of the blessing of the water at the Easter Vigil, and it corresponds to those days on which the Eucharist is not celebrated (i.e., Good Friday and Holy Saturday). Hoping that this resolves the question and with every good wish and kind regard, I am,
Sincerely yours in Christ, [signed]
Mons. Mario Marini
Undersecretary

So, the practice of emptying the Holy Water font during lent is forbidden, no matter what your pastor and or liturgy committee say. They may counter with “Who the heck does Mons. Mario Marini think he is anyway?” He is the person delegated by the Pope to comment on these things. (the Pope, remember him? The cheerful Bavarian with the white beanie?) Once again the silliness and endless innovation of the modern era cause us to ask, “What the heck is going on anyway!?!”
It’s really quite simple. It started with Eve and the apple. (I can hear someone shouting even as I write “There that chauvinist goes again, blaming women for the whole mess!” It is clear that the devil had to get to the woman first, because, as any reasonable man knows, men are, in fact, the weaker sex.) Instead of explaining away the text as a creation myth like any other creation myth, why don’t we try to understand what the story tells us about the human condition? It seems that the first human beings were presented with the opportunity to be children of God. They opted instead for equality with God. Allow me to quote once again. “The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Gen 3:2-5)
So there it is: the Original Sin, the refusal to be children of God. It is insistence on independent adulthood. “Nobody is gonna tell me nuthin! I got my rights!” That’s why Jesus says “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:15) Let us jump ahead a few eons, to the Renaissance, famous for sculpture, music, really neat clothing and poofy hats. The motto of the Renaissance was “Man is the measure of all things.” Now let us jump ahead a few more years to Rene Descartes, who said in 1637 in his Discourse on Method, “I think therefore I am.” The Discourse on Method was the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, which ended by enlightening people through cutting off their heads in the French Revolution of 1789. That would certainly make people a few pounds lighter.
A great advocate of enlightenment, French-style revolution and occasional head-chopping was our own Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the owner of 267 slaves. (This, in 1822 long after he had railed against the slave trade. The man was about as consistent a thinker as a sugar-crazed 4-year old.) Thomas took the great ideas of the Enlightenment and gave us the stirring words of the Declaration, “Life, Liberty and the Purfuit, (or as we now write it “pursuit”) of Happiness!” He failed to define happiness. In his case it seemed to involve the ownership of lots of other human beings. Thus it moved from, “We will be like God” to “Man is the measure of all things,” to “My personal happiness is the measure of right and wrong.” So, the pastor of St. Vatsnu’s couldn’t give a good gosh darn for what Mons. Mario Marini in Rome has to say.
St. Paul said about our Lord Jesus. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made emptied himself taking the form of a slave, becoming in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death...” (Phil.2:5-8)
It is interesting to contrast the humility of God with the arrogance of some who claim to be His servants.
Yours,
Rev. Know-it-all