Cardinal McElroy and the God of Surprises

The Catholic Thing

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S4, E1 - Day One 7:38

5 weeks назад7:38

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7:38

Last summer, something monumental happened. One of Uncuffed's founding producers, Greg Eskridge, came home after more than 30 years in prison. In this episode we’ll bring you back to that emotional day last summer when he walked out of the San Quentin gates, free at last. Our work in prisons is supported by the California Arts Council, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, independent foundations, and donations from listeners like you. Learn more, sign up for Uncuffed news, and support the program at www.weareuncuffed.org Follow us @WeAreUncuffed on Instagram and Facebook Transcripts are available within a week of the episode coming out at www.kalw.org/podcast/uncuffed…

год назад 6:58

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By Robert Royal.
But first a note: Be sure to tune in tomorrow - Thursday, January 9th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy to head the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., the appointment of the first woman to head a Vatican dicastery, and other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.
Now for today's column...
I don't make any great claim to virtue, but one vice that I've (mostly) avoided is the itch to predict the future. Especially around the New Year, when people - even Catholics - despite warnings from Scripture and Jesus Himself ("sufficient to the day"), often offer themselves as prophets, sometimes even something closer to soothsayers. Not only do we make predictions for the next twelve months, lament or exult over what we think is coming, but we recommend new books or diets or exercise programs or spiritual practices. As if human life is - or should be - a rationally manageable, wholly predictable thing.
Life's a pilgrimage. An adventure. And often, under God, deeply and happily unpredictable.
Item: Practitioners of the dismal science, which is to say economists, often hedge their bets by saying such and such will happen to the economy "all things remaining equal." Which of course, they never are.
Item: Lately, "The Science" does things like predict that even small amounts of alcohol may give you cancer in some far-off future, unless a meta-analysis this year or the next questions those findings and may even recommend a drink or two.
Uncertainties are a good thing because otherwise we would be even more addicted to our own horizons, to very small, all-too-human goals. God has bigger plans. For all of us. And these uncertainties are among the many sly avenues he uses ("subtle is the Lord") to wake us up to greater vistas.
In the ancient and medieval worlds, the unpredictable nature of the world was properly recognized, even personified as Dame Fortuna. A fickle lady, but one entrusted by God with the crucial task of changing things around, beyond human ken, so that no person or group or nation can go long without realizing they're not in control, which is to say, not God. Though the human race being what it is, it's a lesson that we forget or fail to learn over and over.
Which brings me, as you may have been waiting for, to the Vatican's appointment this week of San Diego's Cardinal Robert McElroy as cardinal archbishop of Washington D.C. There are rumors that previous occupants of that post - including Cardinals Wuerl and Gregory along with the papal nuncio to the United States and several figures in Rome - opposed that appointment.
Except for the very exceptional Theodore McCarrick, the archbishop of Washington has usually been expected to be a calming figure, someone who can manage the Church in a city where Democrats and Republicans, liberals, conservatives, leftists, libertarians, and even further-out political oddities all exist both inside and outside the Church. For the most part, they've succeeded in that task.
McElroy's appointment is an oddity. He is a native of California, has spent almost all of his priestly life there (none in Washington), and has no great claim to being the best - or even a good - choice for the new post, other than he's long been a progressive social justice advocate. And, in some readings, "in line" with Pope Francis.
If one were given to speculation, it might be thought that Pope Francis was persuaded to appoint him as a counterweight to the return of Donald Trump. McElroy has been a vocal opponent of deportations. And as an intelligent man (degrees from Stanford and Harvard) he's a more articulate spokesman for that and other progressive positions than any othe...

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Cardinal McElroy and the God of Surprises

The Catholic Thing

published год назад

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by Father Raymond J. de Souza. The feast of the "Apostles of the Slavs" - Saints Cyril and Methodius" - is observed liturgically on 14th February and not at all culturally, as schoolchildren draw valentines instead and their fathers buy flowers. No harm done. If the feast of the holy brothers had an octave, this year's would be remembered as bringing much harm to the Slavic lands. As the world rubbed its eyes in disbelief, the president of the United States offered his thoughts, analysis, and proposals regarding Russia's war on Ukraine, the third anniversary of which falls on Monday. In 2022, Catholics in Ukraine prayed that President Vladimir Putin of Russia might have a change of heart. This year they beseech God for the same regarding President Donald Trump. The two presidents see the world in similar ways, in which great powers dominate their "near abroad." St. John Paul the Great, a proud Slav himself, had a different view, which he laid out in some detail in the 1980s. The contrasting views are apparent before the Christian world now. In 2014, when Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was distressed, muttering that it was a "19th-century act in the 21st-century." He must have been totally flummoxed when Putin then gave his Crimea address to the Russian Duma, and went back not to the 19th century, but nine hundred years earlier, to the Crimea where "Prince Vladimir was baptized", noting that "his spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization, and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus." "We are one people," Putin continued. "Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other." In the name of these spiritual and fraternal bonds, Putin has invaded and killed his brother Slavs. He has done this with the blessing of Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, who understands himself to be the spiritual father of the Ukrainians being killed by the Russian armed forces. For that reason, the "father and head" of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv - on a visit to the United States and Canada in these days - has referred to the war as "sacrilegious." It is unlikely that President Trump has views on the 10th-century baptism of the Slavic peoples, but he certainly has ideas about the 19th-century. Unlike Kerry, who lamented 19th-century thinking, Trump welcomes it. In his second inaugural address, Trump declared that the "United States will once again consider itself a growing nation - one that. . .expands our territory." It was a return to the Monroe Doctrine and "manifest destiny," words Trump deployed to rather extravagant effect, speaking of setting out for Mars. Trump did not speak of the American founding but did mention two presidents, William McKinley (1897-1901) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). Trump frequently praises that era - "tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary." The Monroe Doctrine, announced in the State of the Union address in 1823, instructed the European powers to consider the American continent, north and south, as the sphere of the United States. Their colonial days were over in America's backyard. In his 1904 State of the Union address, Theodore Roosevelt noted that in certain situations "adherence to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States. . .to the exercise of an international police power." America reserved to itself the right to intervene in its own backyard and to acquire new territory, as it did in the McKinley-Roosevelt years. And if there are to be colonies in this hemisphere - Greenland, Panama, Guantanamo - then the United States should have them. It is easy to imagine that he would be sympathetic to how Putin thinks about Russia's "near abroad." That term, the English translation of blizhneye zarubezhye, came to prominence after the dissolution of ...…

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A Good Death 5:51

15 дней назад5:51

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By David Warren. There is a joke I remembered from my senior childhood, itself a large number of years ago: "I want to die in peace and tranquility, like my grandfather. Not screaming and panicking, like his passengers." Well, my own maternal grandpa was a railway engineer, or as we say today "a train driver." I hasten to point out that he did not die in a train wreck, though some did on the Sydney and Louisburg Railroad, though few, because its passengers were mostly humble lumps of coal. I remembered this joke when I was myself being wheeled into surgery, from a heart attack with all the trimmings, four years ago (to the day). This was my way of planning for a good death, or at least as good as possible. By an extraordinary coincidence, my Nova Scotia buddy, the poet Fraser Sutherland, was being wheeled in a gurney the other way along the same hospital corridor. He had also had a heart attack, but it was not his first, and he did not survive it. In a peculiar sense, I deem Fraser my "secular" guide to death, a kind of "Canadian Book of the Dead." (He was a sincere Quaker, and a courageous one, who had recently endured the loss of his whole family.) May he rest in peace. Death, for modern man, comes usually by surprise, for we have received no preparation from "happy clappy" Church figures, who avoid what they see as morbidity. Even when the doctors have given us formal warning, and death comes with or without bells clanging, it comes suddenly even when it is smooth. But there are also good priests, and traditional churches, and even though the Church may appear to be passing through a spiritual vacuum, there are ten-thousands of them and they can't all be utterly broken. Among such company one may speak of "a good death," and find people who won't be offended, because they know what you mean. My own first acquaintance with this phrase came not from personal experience but when I was exposed to the movie, A Man for All Seasons, and then went to the length of reading a Catholic biography of this saint, as he became one of my principal heroes. I was in high school, and not even Christian at the time, but accessible to heroism and a good story. It had not escaped my notice that Thomas More had had his head chopped off. This did not usually cause much pain (except, the Tudors often combined it with torture). But More had been unjustly tried and convicted, and had time to "think about it," while a guest of the Tower of London. Through all his parting conversations with friends, and unambiguous enemies, he had maintained not only calm, but a rich sense of humor. I soon learned that this humor, sometimes even slapstick, is a common quality among Catholic saints and martyrs. And yet they do take death, even their own, seriously. Given excruciating pain, there may be a certain amount of involuntary shrieking, but grumbling about fate and injustice is rare. There are Christian prayers to give thanks to God and heart to the afflicted, and these may be found in any traditional worship manual. You may say them, but in silence if necessary, or if not, in a moderate, unemotional voice. The good non-Christians also share this habit, and the execution chamber is a good place to look for subtle, secretive Catholics and near-Catholics, and for the chance of witnessing a good death. Alas, the condemned do not stay very long to prattle, for the typical execution is fairly prompt. To die well does not require a formal education or degree, but it does require preparation. It is, or would seem to be, the culminating moment for an organized life. This does not mean the most dramatic moment, and could be the opposite - especially if one is well-prepared. For in that moment of "transition," where one is changing from a live person into a dead person - or rather like the dragonfly, a metamorphic change from nymph - one is not merely a mechanical thing who dies as a fly dies, perhaps by impact with an automotive windshield. It is more like being born....…

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