The Hermeneutic of Continuity

Last week, the new play "The Quality of Mercy", written and directed by Leonie Caldecott, was performed at the Oxford University Chaplaincy. The play was put on as part of the spiritual preparation for the beatification of Pope John Paul II. The actors were young people from the Oxford Oratory parish. I was glad to hear that the play was a great success. There is an article on the play at the Second Spring blog: Rhapsodic Theatre reborn Here is a summary from there: The new play, directed by Teresa Caldecott with choreography by Anna Maria Mendell and music by Benedict Nichols featuring the voice of John Paul II, was part Theatre of the Word and part Ballet of the Word, a multi-levelled Theo-drama about youth and age, despair and modernity, vocations to marriage and celibacy. It wove together the poetry of John Paul II with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and passages from Scripture (in beautiful adaptations by Dr Carl Schmidt of Balliol). It exposed the spiritual warfa...

Michael Voris addressing Catholic bloggers gathered at the Scholars' Lounge in Rome. I haven't watched it yet - I'm saving it for when I've finished blogging this evening. Hilary White has a post up about the alternative Rome blognic which, in the end, became the perfectly-acceptable-to-the-Vatican "we know about it and we're not at all worried, in fact we hope it goes well" blognic. This week has been quite a landmark for Catholic blogging, I think. Very positive all round. Do go over and read Hilary's piece We had a great time . I especially liked the close: And sorry also to those who came hoping for polemics and maybe a foodfight. Stuart Reid said he had come expecting a lot of shouting and was surprised at how measured and intelligent all the discussion was. We'll try to be less charitable next time.

Fr Michael Brown at Forest Murmurs has written an amusing riposte to a letter in Northern Cross, the newspaper for the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. In the letter, Mr Loughran said regarding the new ICEL translation: I promise that I will approach it with all goodwill but I have to say this: if the word CONSUBSTANTIAL is there, I'm off to the mosque. As Fr Brown rightly points out: Well the bad news for Mr Loughran as I'm sure he has by now discovered is that the word consubstantial is indeed part of the new translation. However here is more bad news. If he goes to the mosque he may find he has a few more problems than trying to wrestle with consubstantial . I wonder how his Arabic is? After giving a brief account of his own studies in Arabic at St Andrews, Fr Brown concludes: I still have my text books so if Mr Loughran is determined that he can't cope with consubstantial I am willing to lend them to him so he can enjoy full and active participation on his Fridays a...

The Vatican meeting of bloggers was a great success by all accounts. With touching honesty, bloggers who were formerly skeptical have basically agreed that "Yes, they understood us, they weren't trying to control us, and they were keen to co-operate with bloggers." For a good example of the success of the event, consider that  Hilary White was thanked by the organisers, mentioned by name in the introduction by Rocco Palmo , and was quoted by David Kerr of the Catholic News Agency. Even the alternative blognic in the pub has made it onto  Vatican Radio  who interviewed Hilary! (It's well worth listening to.) Her summary for CNA of the Vatican meeting: "What I think is that they (the Vatican) are trying to do today is to send out a message to the national bishops conferences to say ‘let them go, bloggers are here to stay and that they’re going to keep saying things that people don’t want them to say and they’re going to keep looking under rocks that nobody ...

Ingredere in templum Dei "Come into the temple of God" are the words addressed to a baby who is about to be baptised. We have had a series of "Bank Holidays" in England recently and today was another; therefore I found myself unusually free to attend the baptism of the first-born of Matthew and Benna Schellhorn. Ferdinand Joseph was baptised at St Bede's, Clapham Park, by Fr Andrew Southwell. Matthew is a renowned pianist - I wrote about him last August. Dr Joseph Shaw and his wife, Lucy, were the Godparents After the Baptism there was first the blessing for a mother who has given birth. Sometimes this is ignorantly decried as though it implied that childbirth was somehow "impure" (which would be a manichaean error.) In fact, the blessing is a beautiful prayer of thanksgiving for the birth of a child. Today we were blessed with a schola to sing the 23rd psalm. We weren't quite finished: Matthew and Benna placed Ferdinand on the Lady ...

I have met two Beati in my life (so far!). I don't have a photo of my meeting Blessed Teresa of Calcutta but I do have photos of some of the occasions when I met Blessed Pope John Paul II. The above one is from 8 October 1980, shortly after I arrived in Rome. We were taken to the General Audience as part of our introduction to the Holy City and got to the barrier where the Pope went by. The next is at S Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini on the pastoral visit of Blessed John Paul on 9 March 1981. I was the server carrying his pastoral cross - on the right in the picture: and here we are in the sacristy after Mass: Now for my two favourite photos. These were taken shortly after my ordination to the Diaconate at Palazzola by the late Bishop Cyril Restiaux of Plymouth in July 1983. The newly-ordained Deacons were invited to the private Mass of Blessed John Paul at Castelgandolfo, together with our parents. Here is the Pope with myself and my mother, Frankie: First of all, Bl...

If, like me, you are busy doing other things this morning and cannot watch the coverage of the beatification of Pope John Paul II live on the internet, you can catch up from time to time on the Catholic Herald's Live Blog . I'd probably excuse you even looking at your smartphone during the sermon provided you know how to turn all sound notifications off, and provided you are able to multi-task so that you can drink in my words of wisdom. OK: maybe the second proviso isn't so important.

Jennifer Fulwiler writes for the National Catholic Register (for people in the UK, that's the good one.) Earlier this week, she had a good piece On Being Catholic and Infertile | Blogs | NCRegister.com . I think this article might be encouraging and supportive for Catholic couples who would love to have children but struggle with the heavy cross of infertility. We should also remember in our prayers those who have had some children but can have no more because of a bad miscarriage or some damage in a previous pregnancy. Jennifer speaks of the temptation to envy when couples are rejoicing in the birth of a new child. There is also something rather bitter in observing a couple who were contracepting and did not want a child, worrying about a "problem pregnancy." Among those that I know, I have seen two very positive responses to infertility. One is to adopt children: this can be a gruelling process in politically correct England. Another is for husband and wife to suppo...

A pharmacist points out the inconsistency of promoting healthy living in every area of life except sexual behaviour. RoseMary Baker, a pharmacist from Wirral, Merseyside, has written a good piece for PJ Online, the internet version of the Pharmaceutical Journal, a publication of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. She points out that pharmacists do not sell chocolate or tobacco, they try to encourage their customers to adopt a healthy lifestyle, and warn about the consequences of smoking, poor diet and lack of exercise. Then she says: But what about sex? Well now, that is different. Oh yes, we do display leaflets on how to have safe sex or where to go if you need an abortion. In Wales we can provide post-coital contraceptives free of charge without the necessity of obtaining a prescription from a doctor. Are we being as fair to the public about sex as we are about smoking or eating sweets or drinking alcohol? Do we highlight the failure rate of contraceptives or do we couch the true ...

During the Easter season it is good to see an enthusiastic presentation of the resurrection - both in video form and in thoughtful comments on the Gospel texts. I found the above video by Rob Bell on the blog of the Archdiocese of Washington where Mgr Charles Pope regularly writes a lot of sense. Over the past few days he has been looking at the accounts of the resurrection in the Gospels. Many students of scripture will be familiar with the kind of exegesis that leaves you really no choice but to suppose that the "resurrection stories" are all rather confused, that the whole thing is probably a myth, and that it is more "grown-up" to imagine that the apostles were really sitting around like people at a funeral reception saying "it's as if old Bob were still with us." Mgr Pope looks at the scriptural accounts in two excellent posts in which he offers a reconciliation of the accounts. I'm not a scripture scholar and I expect that some might ...

One of the themes of Pope John Paul II's pontificate was his insistence on the necessity of the priesthood and his personal and heartfelt encouragement to priests, both in positive spiritual terms and, occasionally, in correction and admonition. At the time Pope John Paul II was elected to the Papacy, it was quite common to hear, even in official circles, that the shortage of vocations to the priesthood was a work of the Holy Spirit, encouraging the laity to take their full part in the ministry of the Church. The fact that this is heard much less today (although there are still some dinosaurs who persist in the error) is largely due to the consistent teaching of Pope John Paul II on its falsity. I well remember during the first year of his pontificate, the Pope's  Maundy Thursday letter to priests . This was the first of a series that continued almost every year during his reign.In that letter, there was a moving exhortation to priests who were weary or doubtful: Dear Bro...