Inside the Vatican NewsLetter #72, 2010 -- The Present Controversy

The Issue

 

A reflection on the present controversy, not specified or named

Iraqi Christians light candles. Image by Getty Images via @daylife

By Robert Moynihan

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The Present Controversy

 

The issue is another one.

 

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 Lacrimae rerum

 

"Enough!"—Adam, three years old

Reflecting in silence during recent days on many things, on our sorrowful condition, fraught with fears and folly; on Satan's clever wiles, by which our very virtues can become our vices, leading all, without exception, to blundering; on the Second Vatican Council and its effects, and heirs; on the desire expressed by many in the Catholic media, and in the Vatican itself, to newly evangelize the 21st century by twittering, I went back to Massachusetts, where, on Saturday evening, a new American cardinal, Raymond Burke, an old friend, raised on a Wisconsin farm, now head of the Apostolic Signature in Rome, gave a talk, he first since being named a cardinal.

 

His shoulders were stooped with the weight of his own long traveling, and his head fell forward almost to his chest, while the good president extolled his college and pleaded for support for Thomas More.

 

"He's going on too long," a leading Catholic woman whsipered to me. "Too long..."

 

As I ate my dessert, and heard the weighty words of the college president -- an earnest man -- and of the good cardinal, who spoke on the need for Catholic universities to have a Catholic identity, and as I looked around at the 300 or so Bostonians gathered there, and as I debated with a bright, rebellious lad of 20 who sat next to me and defiantly declared he was an atheist -- "I simply want my life, my consciousness, to end some day," he said -- the word spoken by a littler boy -- "Enough!" -- echoed in my memory, and made me long for it all -- all -- not to end, but to begin again, some day, in a different, better, way, without the need for tears...

And what I was remembering was this: a November 28 article by John Norton of Our Sunday Visitor, archived here: http://www.osv.com/tabid/7621/itemid/7173/Openers-BIshops-stress-US-moral-responsibility.aspx

 

And the essence was this (the man speaking the words is Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, outgoing president of the US bishops' conference, and so the pre-eminent Catholic prelate of the US in the recent past):

 

“An American Dominican sister, a friend of a friend, has written from that country (Iraq): ‘Waves of grief have enveloped their world, surging along the fault lines created in Iraqi society by the displacement of thousands of Iraq’s Christian minority who have fled what is clearly a growing genocidal threat... One survivor was asked by a reporter, what do you say to the terrorists? Through his tears he said, “We forgive you.”

 

[Here, Cardinal George choked with emotion, and had to recompose himself before continuing.]

“‘Among the victims of this senseless tragedy was a little boy named Adam. Three-year-old Adam witnessed the horror of dozens of deaths, including that of his own parents.

 

‘He wandered among the corpses and the blood, following the terrorists around and admonishing them, “Enough, enough, enough.”

 

‘According to witnesses, this continued for two hours until Adam was himself murdered.’”

“As bishops, as Americans,” Cardinal George said, “we cannot turn from this scene or allow the world to overlook it.”

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“Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life.” —St. Paul, First Letter to Timothy 6:12

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Available: A Talk by Dr. Robert Moynihan about the "Old Mass"

This talk gives a 2,000-year history of the Mass in 60 minutes which is clear and easy to understand. The talk covers questions like:

— Does the motu proprio overcome some of the liturgical confusion since Vatican II?
— Who was Annibale Bugnini?

— The mind of Pope Benedict: How can the Church restore the sense of the presence of God in the liturgy?

Click here to order 

 

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