Excerpt from an essay, “Faith, Reason, Islam and the West” by Father J. Patrick Serna, Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Catholic Men’s Quarterly.

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So what do we do? Do we sit on the sidelines, which send more people to the hottest parts of hell, according to Dante? No. We must be the Catholic men and women who Jesus wants us to be. We must be filled with a passionate love for Jesus, His Church, and His Mother. If we are filled with that love, then we will pray more. If we pray more, preoccupy ourselves with living in a state of grace and preach more with our lives than our mouths, then the world will be transformed. God’s Grace will transform this sad world of ours if and when we decide to cooperate with that Grace. Catholicism has always held to the belief of Faith AND Good Works. We must show God that we want to change ourselves and the world with more than just words… if we show Jesus in our actions that we wish to cooperate with His transforming Grace, then moral decadence in Christendom will be reversed, as will the Islamic threat to world civilization.

Full article here.

From ZENIT:

In the letter, Benedict XVI recalled his visit to Istanbul, and said that the practice of exchanging delegations represents an authentic sign “of the commitment of our Churches to an ever deeper communion, strengthened through cordial personal relations, prayer and the dialogue of charity and truth.”

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He continued: “Indeed, our work toward unity is according to the will of Christ our Lord. In these early years of the third millennium, our efforts are all the more urgent because of the many challenges facing all Christians, to which we need to respond with a united voice and with conviction.”

Full report here.

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From Catholic World News:

Abortion now the leading cause of death in Spain, a pro-life campaigner there told the Fides news service.

Eduardo Hertfelder, the president of the Spanish Family Policy Institute (IPF), based his report on a study prepared by IPF, which shows that in 2006 there was an abortion every 5.3 minutes, or 270 abortions every day, in Spain. Roughly one in every six pregnancies– 15.8%– ended in abortion…

Full report here.

See also:
CNA: Spanish government prohibits pro-life protests in front of Congressional building

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From Catholic News Agency:

The interesting twist in the Pope’s proposal for dialogue is that he has insisted on changing the context of the talks. While the Muslim leaders’ letter framed future dialogue around the twofold commandment to love God and one’s neighbor, Benedict XVI’s reply suggests a change in the terms of discussion.

According to the Holy Father’s letter to the prince, the path to true dialogue lies in “effective respect for the dignity of every human person, on objective knowledge of the religion of the other, on the sharing of religious experience and, finally, on common commitment to promoting mutual respect and acceptance among the younger generation.”

The letter also explained that Pope Benedict believes that this tack will lay a foundation for fruitful dialogue. The reply quoted a speech by the Holy Father in Cologne: “I am profoundly convinced that we must not yield to the negative pressures in our midst, but must affirm the values of mutual respect, solidarity and peace. The life of every human being is sacred, both for Christians and for Muslims. There is plenty of scope for us to act together in the service of fundamental moral values.”

Vatican analyst Sandro Magister explained a few days ago how Pope Benedict’s approach is fundamentally different than the proposals of the original Muslim letter.

Drawing on what he sees as the clearest example of the Holy Father’s approach to Catholic-Muslim dialogue, Magister cited the Pope’s pre-Christmas address to the Roman curia on December 22, 2006:

“In a dialogue to be intensified with Islam, we must bear in mind the fact that the Muslim world today is finding itself faced with an urgent task. This task is very similar to the one that has been imposed upon Christians since the Enlightenment, and to which the Second Vatican Council, as the fruit of long and difficult research, found real solutions for the Catholic Church.”

He summarized Benedict’s methodology writing, “The pope is asking Islam to make the same journey that the Catholic Church made under pressure from the Enlightenment. Love of God and neighbor must be realized in the full acceptance of religious freedom”, writes the Vatican analyst.

Full report here.

See also:
CNA: The Holy Father’s response to the open letter of the 138 Muslim leaders

From Catholic News Agency:

The Muslims’ letter, titled “A Common Word Between Us and You,” sought to build on common ground shared between the Muslim and Christian faiths. It compared texts from the Bible and the Koran to argue that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. It said both religions believe in “the primacy of total love and devotion to God,” and both value love of neighbor and a peaceful world.

The bishop asked for clarification about whether the love of God and the love of neighbor have the same meaning in both religions. He linked Christian love of neighbor to the human dignity of each person and his or her right to grow in freedom.

He noted that for Christians love of neighbor extends to love of enemy, even if that person is of a different religion.

Bishop Hinder linked the questions about love of neighbor to the lack of any Jewish leaders addressed by the Muslim scholars’ letter. “I am surprised that it is addressed to Christian leaders only and not also to the Jewish leaders. Is it not a missed opportunity?” he asked.

Further, he emphasized the uniqueness of Christ against Muslim interpretations, which see him as one of many prophets. “Christians cannot simply see Jesus Christ as one among other prophets, but profess him in his divinity as the living Son of God within the belief in One God in three Persons,” he wrote.

Full report here.

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Article: The Muslim Letter to the Pope

From Asia News:

[Chaldean bishop of Kirkuk (Iraq)]

We Christians in Iraq have lived through hard times. Many of us have been killed, kidnapped and forced to leave. Families are split and scattered in various countries.

Iraq is our homeland—we have been here long before the arrival of Islam. We are an indigenous people, not some colonial entity coming from somewhere else.

We have given a lot to Islamic culture during the Umayyad and Abbasid eras. We have become part of Islamic culture and today we want to continue to exist in a spirit of love and respect for human rights.

Full report here.

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Professor Roberto de Mattei (tip to Real Clear Religion):

It does not seem excessive to affirm that the participatio actuosa of the community appears to be the ultimate criterion of the liturgical reform from the perspective of a radical secularization of the liturgy. Such a secularization consists of the extinction of the Sacrifice, the sacred action par excellence, which will be replaced by the profane action of the community that glories in itself, or, according to the words of Urs von Balthasar, aims to respond to the praise of the Grace of God with a “counter-glory” purely human.

(…)

Today secularism is in crisis. However, the new forms of the sacred, whether it be New Age religiosity, or that of Islam prospering in the West, eliminate the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ and with it the idea that man can be saved solely by the gratuitous Love of God, by His Sacrifice, and that to such a gift, man must respond by also embracing the Cross of redemption. So one must approach with love of the sublime mystery of the Cross and of the idea of sacrifice that follows from it. The sacrifice, of which the model is martyrdom and of which the expression is Christian combat, is before all the renouncement of a legitimate good in the name of a higher good. Sacrifice supposes a mortification of the intelligence which must bend itself to the Truth, on a line exactly contrary to that of the self-glorification of the human thought that characterizes the last centuries.

But how are we to imagine a reconquest of the idea of sacrifice, which is at the heart of the Catholic vision of history and of society, without this idea being lived? It is necessary, it seems to me, that the idea of sacrifice impregnate society in the form, today extremely abandoned, of the spirit of sacrifice and penitence. This, and no other, is the “experience of the sacred” of which our society has an urgent need.

Full speech here.

See also:
Oriens: Ratzinger speaks at Fontgombault

“We are parting with the speech of the Christian centuries; we are becoming like profane intruders in the literary preserve of sacred utterance. We will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant.”

- Pope Paul VI, Address to a General Audience, November 26, 1969

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From UPI:

VATICAN CITY, Nov. 20 (UPI) — Pope Benedict XVI is returning the Vatican to Gregorian chant, the medieval music that served the Catholic church for centuries.

The pope has named a new director of pontifical liturgical celebrations. He has also dropped Pope John Paul II’s practice of using singers from Catholic churches around the world for the St. Peter’s choir, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Benedict’s leanings on forms of worship are conservative. Earlier this year, he gave churches more freedom to use the Tridentine mass, the Latin rite replaced by vernacular translations after Vatican II.

In an address to the bishops and priests of St. Peter’s, the pope called for “continuity with tradition” and talked about “the time of St. Gregory the Great,” referring to the pope after whom Gregorian chant is named.

Monsignor Valentin Miserachs Grau, the director of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, believes the entire church should return to Gregorian chant.

“Due to general ignorance, especially in sectors of the clergy, there exists music which is devoid of sanctity, true art and universality,” he said.

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Theme: The Latin Conundrum

From The American Spectator:

Last year it emerged that three out of four employers were no longer putting up Christmas decorations in the workplace for fear of offending political correctness policing, and as I wrote recently Christmas lights are disappearing from High Streets, ostensibly because of the cost of complying with the expanding torrent of health and safety regulations as well as because of enforced political correctness. However, attempts to rename Christmas “Winterval” and/or to remove Easter from the calendar by some local authorities a few years ago were dropped in the face of public protests and defiance.

The report proposes Christening services be replaced by “birth ceremonies” in which the parents of children and the State agree to “work in partnership” to raise children, and that action is taken to “ensure access” by “ethnic minorities” to the countryside which so far remains largely populated by British people. (How? Are they to be shipped forcibly into Vietnamese-style New Economic zones?) The apparent motivation for this is a determination to ensure that nothing of traditional British identity remains. It seems typical of the “soft totalitarianism” that has never been far below the surface in the Britain of New Labour.

The report also proposes an end to “sectarian” religious education — it is hard to know what this means, or whether it is proposed to go as far as actually banning Christian schools, but it seems likely that it at least means that government support for religious schools would be banned (despite the fact that, apart from anything else, many religious schools provide a far better, and now physically safer, education than many of Britain’s ghastly sink-comprehensives). The national flag, the Union Jack, which is made up of the crosses of three Christian Saints, should lose its position.

It says that: “If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas — and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to — then public organizations should mark other religious festivals too. It then goes on to claim that: “We can no longer define ourselves as a Christian nation, nor an especially religious one in any sense.” This is very peculiar, and may be an exercise in wishful thinking on the part of the report’s authors because the last census for which figures are available, that of 2001, actually showed 71.6% of the population was Christian, and the total of all religious believers who answered the census was 76.8% of the population. The very large number of Polish immigrants since then have been very largely Catholic and it is possible the Christian percentage has actually increased because of this. There have also been many Christian Baltic immigrants.

The report says further that immigrants should be required to acquire some proficiency in English and other aspects of British culture “if — but only if — the settled population is willing to open up national institutions and practices to newcomers and give a more inclusive cast to national narratives and symbols….Even-handedness dictates that we provide public recognition to minority cultures and traditions.” I don’t think it’s Catholic Poles or Protestant Balts they’ve got in mind here.

(…)

Registering the birth of children should be made a “public rite,” where “Parents, their friends and family and the state [would] agree to work in partnership to support and bring up their child.”

Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservative spokesman on community cohesion, was quoted as saying that the report shows “a breathtaking misunderstanding of what it is to be British. These proposals could actually damage cohesion….You don’t build community cohesion by throwing out our history and denying the fundamental contribution Christianity has played and does play to our nation. As a British Muslim I can see that — so why others can’t just staggers me.”

Full article here.

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Theme: The De-Christianization of Britain

From Catholic World News:

Rome, Nov. 14, 2007 (CWNews.com) – The European Union commands slightly more confidence among Italians than the Catholic Church, according to a survey in the daily Corriere della Sera.

The Corriere survey found that 66% of respondents were willing to trust the European Union, while 61% trusted the Church. Only 51% trusted the media, 46% the banks, and a mere 21% trusted the country’s political parties.

In Poland, a similar poll conducted by the CBOS firm found that 60% trusted the Catholic Church– a number nearly matching the Italian figure. However, in Poland a remarkable 83% expressed trust in television coverage, 76% in radio, 74% in the police, and 70% in the army– all winning higher confidence ratings than the Church.