The Shroud of Turin: A Mystery Across the Ages

 Science, although not incompatible with faith when properly understood, has more often served to reduce the wonders of nature to molecular conglomerates than to awaken man to the infinite wisdom and power of God as reflected in His creation. Because it acts to unlock the mysteries of nature, science has long been cast in the role of a protagonist by those seeking to destroy the stronghold of faith. Historian Lewis Spitz writes:

"The scientific revolution, which made its first giant strides in the 17th century, has won such a total victory through its apparent domination of nature that the Western mind has virtually capitulated to its truth."

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.    (Heb. 11:1)

If scientists are gradually losing their position as high priests of society, generations educated in a system governed by the scientific method still carry the burden of doubting Thomas. Although faith does not rest on scientific evidence, unbelievers continue to clamor "Show me," "Prove it." Ultimately the case rests on the question of Christ's Resurrection. While there is not, and can never be, a scientific test for the resurrection of Christ, skeptics have used the lack of material evidence in their favor. Is it not providential that today, in this age of science's hegemony, they are being challenged by a mysterious piece of cloth, the Shroud of Turin, believed by many to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ?

To say that the Shroud is a challenge to hard-line materialists is not to say that the debate over its authenticity is neatly divided between believers and unbelievers. Not at all. In fact, until quite recently, most people-even Christians-have readily dismissed it as a fake. But over the past two decades the debate has sharpened as proponents of the Shroud's authenticity have been joined by number of eminent scientists, This has brought considerable publicity, to the subject, and understandably so, for science has not generally been kind to religion, and most scientists have a reputation for regarding relics of this nature as so much "flummery from the Dark Ages." 

Read the rest here.

Archbishop Cupich calls for mercy toward nontraditional families

CHICAGO – Catholics must avoid being rigid, embrace change, and show mercy, not harsh judgment, toward nontraditional families.

That was the message from Chicago’s Archbishop Blase Cupich Sunday afternoon after receiving his pallium, a wool stole that is a piece of liturgical regalia symbolizing his connection to the pope, from the papal ambassador to the United States.

In a 15-minute homily, Cupich said bishops and other Catholics should avoid “absolutizing one particular era” by remembering the richness and diversity of their faith.

Read the rest here

Maltese bishop: remove ‘barriers’ to those who have remarried outside the Church

Four years after the legalization of divorce in Malta, the head of one of the nation’s two dioceses has issued a pastoral letter on mercy for those who have divorced and entered into a civil marriage outside the Church. 

“It is no secret that there is expectancy about the conclusions of the Synod regarding the pastoral situation of those who are divorced and are in a second relationship,” Bishop Mario Grech of Gozo said in his August 15 letter. “Those who propose that certain barriers between those who are in an ‘irregular relationship’ but who believe in Christ as Savior, and the rest of the community, should be removed, are in no way putting at risk the teaching about the indissolubility of marriage, but they are eager to make possible the experience of the balm of God’s mercy, particularly that kind of mercy which according to the Tradition of the Church, the penitent accedes to it when he is on the road of conversion, known as the via poenitentialis [penitential way].”

“God’s mercy is not only a doctrine alongside the doctrine of marriage and the family, but is at the heart of Christian doctrine,” he continued. “The promoters of ‘God’s justice’ may feel uneasy when confronted with this pastoral view.” 

Read the rest here.

The worst op-ed of the month

Yeah I know; there is still a little over a week left in the month. I don't care. No one is going top this idiocy.

Thanks to a compromise between Southern slaveholders who wanted enslaved blacks counted in the population, for the sake of boosting Southern congressional representation, and Northern whites who didn’t, the framers enshrined the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. This agreement set the census value of a slave as 60 percent of the value of a free person. Even after the 13th Amendment neutralized the political (and moral) compromise by abolishing slavery, Jim Crow laws, which contravened the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equality, stopped blacks from voting. The just answer today is to invert that ratio. If black Americans were once counted as three-fifths of a person, let each African American voter now count as five-thirds.

Reparations in America have come to mean “free” money, so any serious discussion about them also mandates a discussion of how much — an exercise doomed to failure. Other ways of imagining reparations (as the spilled blood of more than half a million Union soldiers during the Civil War; as affirmative action in universities and workplaces; as subsidized education) don’t involve cash payments, but they also don’t do enough to combat the structural disadvantages black Americans face — disadvantages that have gone largely unaddressed by our legislative and executive branches.

Under the constitution an African American slave was originally counted as three fifths of a person for the purpose of determining a state's electoral vote count and House representation. That boosted the power of slave states in the federal government.

 What if we now turned that ratio upside down? To make up for past racial injustices, what if in elections the United States counted an African American voter as five thirds of a person?

Read the rest here.

ISIS bulldozes ancient Syrian monastery

ISIS fighters have demolished a monastery in central Syria, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Mar Elian monastery in the town of Qaryatain near Homs, was captured by the terrorists  from the Syrian Army two weeks ago. This week they used bulldozers to raze the holy site,

Mar Elian is also where Fr Jacques Mourad was kidnapped in May. He remains one of six clergy in Syria who have been kidnapped by rebel groups, their fates unknown.

Qaryatain is near a road linking the ancient Roman city of Palmyra, also ISIS-controlled to the Qalamoun mountains on the border with Lebanon.

ISIS has also kidnapped 230 people including dozens of Christian families after taking Qaryatain. Of those captured, 48 had been released and 110 were transferred to Raqqa province, the headquarters of the Islamist group.

From here.

Migrants crisis: Slovakia 'will only accept Christians'

Slovakia says it will only accept Christians when it takes in Syrian refugees under a EU relocation scheme.

The country is due to receive 200 people from camps in Turkey, Italy and Greece under the EU plan to resettle 40,000 new arrivals.

Interior ministry spokesman Ivan Netik said Muslims would not be accepted because they would not feel at home.

The UN's refugee agency (UNHCR) called on countries to take an "inclusive approach" to relocation.

But Mr Netik denied the move was discriminatory and said it was intended to ensure community cohesion.

Read the rest here.

SCOTUS: Sleeper case sharply limits governments power to regulate speech

WASHINGTON — It is not too early to identify the sleeper case of the last Supreme Court term. In an otherwise minor decision about a municipal sign ordinance, the court in June transformed the First Amendment.

Robert Post, the dean of Yale Law School and an authority on free speech, said the decision was so bold and so sweeping that the Supreme Court could not have thought through its consequences. The decision’s logic, he said, endangered all sorts of laws, including ones that regulate misleading advertising and professional malpractice.

“Effectively,” he said, “this would roll consumer protection back to the 19th century.”

Floyd Abrams, the prominent constitutional lawyer, called the decision a blockbuster and welcomed its expansion of First Amendment rights. The ruling, he said, “provides significantly enhanced protection for free speech while requiring a second look at the constitutionality of aspects of federal and state securities laws, the federal Communications Act and many others.”

...It would have been easy to strike down the ordinance under existing First Amendment principles. In a concurrence, Justice Elena Kagan said the ordinance failed even “the laugh test.”

But Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for six justices, used the occasion to announce that lots of laws are now subject to the most searching form of First Amendment review, called strict scrutiny.

Strict scrutiny requires the government to prove that the challenged law is “narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests.” You can stare at those words as long as you like, but here is what you need to know: Strict scrutiny, like a Civil War stomach wound, is generally fatal.

Read the rest here.

St. Gregory Palamas: A Homily on the Dormition of Our Supremely Pure Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary

Both love and duty today fashion my homily for your charity. It is not only that I wish, because of my love for you, and because I am obliged by the sacred canons, to bring to your God-loving ears a saving word and thus to nourish your souls, but if there be any among those things that bind by obligation and love and can be narrated with praise for the Church, it is the great deed of the Ever-Virgin Mother of God. The desire is double, not single, since it induces me, entreats and persuades me, whereas the inexorable duty constrains me, though speech cannot attain to what surpasses it, just as the eye is unable to look fixedly upon the sun. One cannot utter things which surpass speech, yet it is within our power by the love for mankind of those hymned, to compose a song of praise and all at once both to leave untouched intangible things, to satisfy the debt with words and to offer up the first fruits of our love for the Mother of God in hymns composed according to our abilities. 

If, then, "death of the righteous man is honorable" (cf. Ps. 115:6) and the "memory of the just man is celebrated with songs of praise" (Prov. 10:7), how much more ought we to honor with great praises the memory of the holiest of the saints, she by whom all holiness is afforded to the saints, I mean the Ever-Virgin. Mother of God! Even so we celebrate today her holy dormition or translation to another life, whereby, while being "a little lower than angels" (Ps. 8:6), by her proximity to the God of all, and in the wondrous deeds which from the beginning of time were written down and accomplished with respect to her, she has ascended incomparably higher than the angels and the archangels and all the super-celestial hosts that are found beyond them. For her sake the God-possessed prophets pronounce prophecies, miracles are wrought to foreshow that future Marvel of the whole world, the Ever-Virgin Mother of God. The flow of generations and circumstances journeys to the destination of that new mystery wrought in her; the statutes of the Spirit provide beforehand types of the future truth. The end, or rather the beginning and root, of those divine wonders and deeds is the annunciation to the supremely virtuous Joachim and Anna of what was to be accomplished: namely, that they who were barren from youth would beget in deep old age her that would bring forth without seed Him that was timelessly begotten of God the Father before the ages. A vow was given by those who marvelously begot her to return her that was given to the Giver; so accordingly the Mother of God strangely changed her dwelling from the house of her father to the house of God while still an infant . She passed not a few years in the Holy of Holies itself, wherein under the care of an angel she enjoyed ineffable nourishment such as even Adam did not succeed in tasting; for indeed if he had, like this immaculate one, he would not have fallen away from life, even though it was because of Adam and so that she might prove to be his daughter, that she yielded a little to nature, as did her Son, Who has now ascended from earth into heaven. 

Read the rest here.

Reconsidering Warren Harding

The aura of scandal that has plagued Warren G. Harding, our 29th president, has almost obliterated the substance of the man as a senator and as president. Breaking news that DNA testing may now prove that Harding fathered a child with one of his paramours, Nan Britton, will no doubt play to the stereotype of Harding as a womanizer and reinforce his already miserable reputation as president — a reputation that regularly lands him at the bottom of historians’ lists of our worst leaders.

That’s a shame because, unlike the DNA samples from the Harding and Britton families, the reputation of Warren Harding the man and the record of Warren Harding the Republican politician do not match. At the time of his death, Harding enjoyed tremendous popularity. It was only later, when details of his infidelity scandalized the nation, that his legacy took a nosedive. Our obsession, past and present, with Harding’s sex life has obscured the truth: This man was a good president.

Among his more important accomplishments was stabilizing the country and the world after the catastrophic war in Europe, a true Armageddon that left most “civilized” nations in economic, political and social chaos. The United States alone was capable of steadying the world. Harding started by lifting our country out of a sharp postwar depression and then placed the federal government on a budget for the first time — establishing the Office of the Budget (the forerunner of the modern OMB).

He addressed severe racial tensions that the war stirred up, in part because of the great migration of African Americans to the North to work in war industries. Harding traveled to Birmingham, Ala., in his first year in office to deliver a courageous civil rights speech. “Democracy is a lie,” he said, without political equality for black citizens. He also supported a federal anti-lynching law.

Harding oversaw the first world arms limitation treaty, the Washington Conference, aimed at reducing the number of battleships in the world. He formally ended the war with Germany and its allies.

Read the rest here.

I have long felt that Harding has gotten a bum rap from the usual suspects in academia. My own take is that he was an amiable, moderately progressive (for the time)  president who was not a great judge of character in some of his appointments. Overall I'd give him a B- for a grade. I am of course much more a fan of his successor who I regard as by far our most underrated president, Calvin Coolidge.

Akathist to the Most Holy Mother of God before the Tikvin Icon

Taking a Blog Break

It's getting on to late summer, the Dormition Fast has begun and I need to spend some time on things other than blogging and the internet. Expect very limited posting until after the Feast of the Dormition.

Planned Parenthood and the barbarity of America

Executives of Planned Parenthood’s federally subsidized meat markets — your tax dollars at work — lack the courage of their convictions. They should drop the pretense of conducting a complex moral calculus about the organs they harvest from the babies they kill.

First came the video showing a salad-nibbling, wine-sipping Planned Parenthood official explaining how “I’m going to basically crush below, I’m going to crush above” whatever organ (“heart, lung, liver”) is being harvested. Then the president of a Planned Parenthood chapter explained the happy side of harvesting: “For a lot of the women participating in the fetal tissue donation program, they’re having a procedure that may be a very difficult decision for them and this is a way for them to feel that something positive is coming from . . . a very difficult time.”

“Having a procedure” — stopping the beating of a human heart — can indeed be a difficult decision for the woman involved. But it never is difficult for Planned Parenthood’s abortionists administering the “procedure.” The abortion industry’s premise is: At no point in the gestation of a human infant does this living being have a trace of personhood that must be respected. Never does it have a moral standing superior to a tumor or a hamburger in the mother’s stomach. 

Read the rest here.

Craig Rowland - Why the Euro and European Union Will Fail

Everything I needed to know about why the European Union would fail I learned at a truck stop.

It was in 2001 when a bus tour I was on stopped at a truck stop on the German Autobahn. For the American readers, you must understand that European truck stops are much different from what you get in the states. In Europe, the facilities are clean and the food is actually decent. They don’t have the same hot dogs sitting in the cooker for five days. And no, you can’t buy six gallon soda cups.

As it were, in this truck stop the inside was what you expect to see in Germany. It was clean and efficient. You grabbed your tray, stood in line quietly, pointed to the food for the scowling German lady cook to serve you, and moved to the next station. It had just enough order, cleanliness, and gray color inside to remind you that you were in Germany, but without making you feel like you were in East Germany.

As the bus wound its way across Europe we eventually stopped in Italy at the identical chain of truck stop. This is where I had an epiphany about the European Union, the Euro, multiculturalism, and why it’s all a bunch of garbage.

Italy is a great country, but nobody is going to tell you it’s like Germany unless they are a completely clueless moron. Instead of the quiet line of people collecting their food and proceeding to the next station, you instead had a mob of people yelling, waving their hands, and rushing the counter in a huge mass. If you didn’t push forward, you didn’t get food. In other words, it was Italian.

This is when I realized the EU and the Euro would never work. The idea that you were going to get Italians, Germans, Spaniards, Greeks, French, Dutch, etc. to live under one government and one currency is simply madness. Not only are the Germans far too impatient to deal with the hyper-emotional Italians, but the Italians are far too laid back to want to deal with a bunch of controlling Germans. This of course applies to the other countries as well. The Dutch really don’t like the French telling them what to do. The French don’t like the Germans. The Germans don’t like the Spaniards (or anyone else), and everyone dislikes the Swiss mostly because they were smart enough to not join the EU and share the misery.

Read the rest here.