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Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

January 1996

"Now, in the opinion of those who make up the so-called cultural elite, our view is 'out of date.' The elite say we hurt people more than we help them, and that we belong in one of the century's dustbins. They have managed to sell this idea to a great many Americans, thereby making homosexuality fashionable and raising formerly aberrant behavior to the status of an 'alternate lifestyle'.....

"How did this change come about? Well, the revolution didn't just happen. It has been orchestrated by a small band of very bright men and women -- most of them gays and lesbians -- in a cultural campaign that has been going on since a few intellectuals laid down the ideological underpinnings for the entire tie-dyed, try-anything-sexual Woodstock generation....

"Because of the persuaders embedded in thousands of media messages, society's acceptance of homosexuality seemed one of those spontaneous, historic turnings in time -- yes, a kind of conversion. Nobody quite knew how it happened, but the nation had changed....

"And, when homosexuality takes on all the aspects of a political movement, it, too, becomes a war, the kind of war in which the first casualty is truth, and the spoils turn out to be our own children. An exaggeration? Well, what are we to think when militant homosexuals seek to lower the age of consensual intercourse between men and young boys to the age of 14 (as they they did in Hawaii in 1993) or 16 (as they tried to do in England in 1994)?"


MARIAN APPARITIONS. In the November edition of Crisis George Sim Johnston recalls, "In the series of interviews with Italian journalist Vittorio Messori which appeared as The Ratzinger Report, Cardinal Ratzinger was asked about Marian apparitions. He confirmed that reports of Mary's appearances were reaching the Vatican from around the globe and in guarded language suggesting that these phenomena are a 'sign of the times.'

"Ratzinger also discussed the so called Third Secret of Fatima, which was supposed to have been revealed by the pope in 1960. John XXIII is said to have read it, concluded that it 'was not for our time,' and placed it in a drawer in the papal study in the Vatican. The newly elected John Paul II examined it and agreed -- until he was shot on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima in 1981. While recovering in the hospital, he reportedly asked for a copy of the message and had a Portuguese translator go over it carefully. It may be that the increasingly eschatological tone of his papacy, particularly with regard to the year 2000, has something to do with that one sheet of paper.

"Why, it might be asked, hasn't the Third Secret been made public? Cardinal Ratzinger, who has read it, said that its divulgence would expose the Church to the 'danger of sensationalism.' Besides, he added, the crux of Mary's message should already be known to Christians -- namely, the need for prayer and penance....

"There is ample reason to accept the Church's finding that Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima, and a handful of other Marian appearances are 'probable' and 'worthy of credence.' Recent and ongoing apparitions are a trickier matter. The list is lengthy: Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina; Conyers, Georgia; Garabandal, Spain; and numerous spots in Africa and Russia....

"If the urge to travel to the site of a Marian apparition is upon you, you might want to consider the traditional itinerary. Having visited Lourdes, I can offer the words of Robert Hugh Benson, who wrote a beautiful little book about his visit there in 1908: despite all the tourists and shops peddling garish madonnas, the place is 'soaked, saturated and kindled by all sensible presence of the Mother of God.'

"If you are an armchair pilgrim, there are several books worth reading; among them are William Thomas Walsh's classic Our Lady of Fatima; Abbe Troch's Saint Bernadette Soubirous, a splendid model of modern hagiography; and 1917: Red Banners, White Mantle by Warren Carroll."


THE INFALLIBILITY FACTOR. According to Pamela Schaeffer (National Catholic Reporter, December 8) Pope John Paul II's Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and Cardinal Ratzinger's follow-up responsum ad dubium to the various conferences of bishops reassuring that Ordinatio was infallible is nothing else than a maneuver to stifle dialogue and provoke dissenters to leave the Church. She does, however, allow: "But Jesuit theologian Fr. Avery Dulles of Fordham University said he feels the pope and Ratzinger are doing just the opposite -- trying to avoid power tactics by referring to the 'ordinary and universal magisterium' and calling Catholics to assent to church teachings even when infallibility is not formally invoked.

"It is gentler to cite the ordinary and universal magisterium rather than declare ex cathedra that a male-only priesthood is infallible, he said.

"'People continue to hedge the point, so they use heavier ammunition each time,' he said. 'I think they're hoping it won't be necessary' to speak with the formality and solemnity that an ex cathedra statement entails.

"'That would put the dissenters in a very difficult situation,' he said. 'It's like not using nuclear weapons. You hope conventional weapons will do it.'"


BEATUS VIR. Chrysogonus Waddell, editor of Liturgy magazine and choirmaster of Gethsemani Abbey, sets out the difficulty in the fall, 1995 Communio: "In March of 1994 the National Jesuit News published a two-column article from the Catholic News Service, 'Fessio to Republish Old RSV as 'Ignatius Bible'.' Quite correctly identifying Fr. Fessio as 'an opponent of new inclusive-language Scripture translations,' the article quoted him -- again, quite correctly -- as saying that the U.S. bishops 'are depriving their flock of the Christ of the Psalms' through the new translations. Psalm 1, argued Fr. Fessio, was a case in point. Where the earlier New American Bible had rendered the opening verse of Psalm 1 as, 'Happy the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked,' the New Revised Standard Version and the new New American Bible version both begin, 'Happy are those who...' To quote further from the Catholic News Service release: 'Fessio said that Jesus himself is the one without sin, 'the man truly blessed to whom this Psalm, the whole Psalter, and the entire Old Testament primarily refer.'' And Fr. Fessio went on to add: 'To translate it as 'those' simply obliterates the christological--and therefore the most profound and divinely intended--meaning of the Psalms.'"

After reviewing attacks on Fessio's position (most in America magazine) and 17 pages of citations from Church Fathers, Waddell concludes: "And like a Hippolytus and an Augustine or a Cassiodorus, and like generations of Christians before us, we who pray those psalms know the name of that Messiah whom we seek and find in every psalm. He is the Blessed Man who prayed them long before us, who invested them with a new fullness of meaning, and who, through these ancient poems, is still drawing us, as individuals and as a community, with him and in him in his paschal journey through this present world into the glory of his risen life."

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