One light show at a time.
In case you missed it, the Vatican celebrated the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (yesterday) with a light show:
A mixture of fascination, curiosity and consternation is greeting a light show to be projected onto St. Peter’s basilica tomorrow — the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and the opening day of the Jubilee of Mercy.
A coalition of non-Catholic humanitarian, philanthropic and conservation groups along with the World Bank are staging the event. It will be the first time ever that images will be projected onto the 17th century basilica’s façade and Michelangelo’s cupola.
The organizers say the three hour event, called “Fiat Lux, Illuminating Our Common Home”, will tell the “visual story of the interdependency of humans and life on earth with the planet, in order to educate and inspire change around the climate crisis across generations, cultures, languages, religions and class.”
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, called the event “unique” and said the illumination show “will present images inspired of Mercy, of humanity, of the natural world, and of climate changes.”
He added that the light show, whose images have been shown on various landmarks around the world, is meant to link Pope Francis’ environment encyclical Laudato Si’ with the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) currently underway in Paris until Friday.
“It is our hope that this beautiful and contemporary work of public art will inspire citizens of the world to join together in a moment of compassion and to activate a global movement to protect humankind, our common home and precious endangered species,” said Carole Tomko, vice president of Vulcan, Inc., one of the groups sponsoring the event and which promotes initiatives to “change and improve the way people live, learn, do business and experience the world.”
Some conservative Roman Catholics have taken a page from Protestant iconoclasm and regard such a use of holy buildings as sacrilege:
The sense that St. Peter’s Basilica has been profaned is strong. The symbolic significance of the event is a Church immersed in darkness, but illuminated by the world, by the new climatist-religion-ideology (all financed by the World Bank Group which will now have to explain to us what politics compatible with the teaching of the Church it is promoting..)
The holy place par excellence, the heart of Christianity transformed on a maxi-screen for the show of the New World Power Ideology …and the Nativity Crib was left in darkness.
It does make you wonder what salvation means. If improving the environment can save the world, then what happened to the cross of Christ and the sacraments? Could it be that hell is empty (and will remain so) and so the church can now devote itself to more humanitarian and less heavenly causes? Did Balthasar really win at Vatican 2 as Commonweal suggests? Before Vatican 2, Rome was pretty clear where unbelievers went at death:
Any sin, for Augustine, is an unspeakable offense against God; particularly offensive was the sin of the first man who was singularly graced with an intimate “enjoyment of God” and who stood as the progenitor of the human race. His impiety in abandoning God was so great that it “merited eternal evil” in consequence of which “the whole of mankind is a ‘condemned mass’ [massa damnata]; for he who committed the first sin was punished, and along with him all the stock which had its roots in him.” According to Augustine, no one has the right to criticize that retribution as unjust, and the fact that some are released from it through the free bounty of God is ground for heartfelt thanksgiving.
The same severe doctrine of hell has been affirmed time and again in official church documents. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 declared that, at the end of time, “all will receive according to their deeds, good or evil, the former to their everlasting glory with Christ, the latter to perpetual punishment with the devil.” In his constitution of 1336, Benedictus Deus, Benedict XII solemnly defined that “the souls of those who die in actual mortal sin go down immediately after death into hell and suffer the pain of hell.” The Council of Florence in 1442 maintained that “not only pagans, but also Jews, heretics and schismatics” are precluded from salvation for they “will enter into eternal fire” unless they embrace the Catholic Church before their death. Similar declarations on hell and salvation were issued by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. Vatican I reinforced them in the nineteenth century. Vatican II did not revisit the solemn definitions of hell by earlier councils, but it did at least affirm that, yes, atheists can be saved.
But that changed when Balthasar and Kung met Barth:
Like Barth and Balthasar, Hans Küng too comes close to proposing universal salvation. And like them, he enlists the virtue of hope to support the idea. In his book Eternal Life, Küng’s critical discussion of hell begins with Jesus’s own words about hell, which, according to Küng, were figurative rather than literal: terms in the New Testament pertaining to final judgment—words like “hell,” “eternal,” ‘fire”—are to be taken as metaphors warning sinners of the delicate edge they’re dancing on. They are “meant to bring vividly before us here and now the absolute seriousness of God’s claim and the urgency of conversion in the present life,” Küng writes. No one should dismiss his or her responsibility to meet the demands of conversion, but how each of us meets them “remains a matter for God as merciful judge” in his “all-embracing final act of grace.” Like Balthasar, Küng maintains that judgment of the individual is in God’s hands; it would be “presumptuous for a person to seek to anticipate the judgement of this absolutely final authority. Neither in the one way nor in the other can we tie God’s hands or dispose of him. There is nothing to be known here, but everything to be hoped.”
Barth, Balthasar, and Küng all agonize over the question of universal salvation, which they treat not just as a theological puzzle but as a genuine mystery. Because we cannot answer the question with absolute certainty, it finally has to be left—in humility and hope—to the judgment of a loving God. This is as much of an affirmation as they dare to make.
What these three theologians show us, however, is that hope is a powerful virtue and not just a matter of wishful thinking. Hope always has its reasons, even earthly hopes. In the everyday sense of the word, a doctor’s skill is reason for his patient to hope for a cure, a worker’s good job performance a reason for her to hope for a promotion—though such hopes, subject to human limitations, can be disappointed. In the economy of salvation, however, the reason for hope is nothing less than the divine will—profoundly declared in the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus: “For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). The clarity of this scriptural passage on God’s will reassures not only Christians but all mankind that our hope for salvation will be fulfilled—without exceptions.
But if U.S. parochial schools can reconsider their mission, maybe the Vatican can find it’s pre-Vatican 2 self:
“We don’t open Catholic schools to get kids into college,” Guernsey said. “We open Catholic schools to get them into heaven.”
As long as it’s not a conspiracy:
If you can shrug like this, you can shrug Protestant goofiness.
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Father Dwight doesn’t realize he’s in a liberal denomination.
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Darryl, We have a church movie night scheduled for January and was wondering if you could make any recommendations. Only films with pristine content please. Just kidding. But seriously, if you have any suggestions that would be much appreciated. Thanks!
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Ken, how about Babbette’s Feast (about pietism in a thoughtful way) or the Coen’s True Grit (for once they play it straight).
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Save the of Jews: check.
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Darryl & Ken – I was thinking Pale Rider. Clint was a preacher after all. And had some good advice for the vow of poverty folks over at St. Peters: “You can’t serve God and mammon. Mammon being money.”
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Shrug:
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So the Vatican,
1. Says Jews aren’t saved one way and Christians another, but
2. Nevertheless said there should be no institutional outreach to preach Christ to the Jews, and
3. Both Jews and Christians will be saved but how nobody knows.
Now I appreciate the attempt to repent for anti-Semitism on Rome’s part but this would seem to be a massive undercutting of it’s own theology of the church and of the words of Christ. We Protestants are evil schismatics for not being in union with the pope but at least the Jews can be saved while formally rejecting papal authority?
Why does the “principled means” of the Vatican often look no different than liberal Protestantism?
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It isn’t easy being the one true, apostolic church and universalist at the same time. No wonder the Roman apologists have to tie, untie, and retie their rhetorical knots.
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@ Ken: In addition to Dr. Hart’s picks, which are both good ones, might I suggest an old western, High Noon.
https://patriactionary.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/a-lesson-about-men-for-marriage-minded-women-from-the-movie-high-noon/
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Blame it on Vatican 2:
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For those who think accusing the church of anti-semitism is a cheap shot, consider that the magisterium also thinks this. Boniface explains:
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And now Pope Jimmy makes sense of it all:
Sounds to me like he still has some ‘splaining ahead.
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What is a bit surprising is that, instead of pointing to the Church’s established teaching that people who do not embrace the Christian faith through no fault of their own can be saved, the document points to elements in St. Paul’s thought in an attempt to show that he would have recognized the possibility of salvation for non-Christian Jews.
Rome, twisting the Bible to make it say what it plainly doesn’t say? Shocking!
This idea that Paul thought non-Christian Jews could be saved apart from profession of faith makes a mockery of his life and his final martyrdom.
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Funny, Rome used to irreformably teach that
Now, evidently, the church irreformably teaches that,
Curious…
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Is evangelizing Jews a micro or macroaggression?
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http://www.theonion.com/article/pope-rummaging-through-vatican-basement-for-plasti-37608
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Publius
Posted December 10, 2015 at 2:05 pm | Permalink
Darryl & Ken – I was thinking Pale Rider. Clint was a preacher after all. And had some good advice for the vow of poverty folks over at St. Peters: “You can’t serve God and mammon. Mammon being money.”
Here, smart guy. Learn something.
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vd,t, but you haven’t seen a poor church until you’ve looked at the OPC’s books. Can’t boast about 1.2 billion and not have it boomerang. Duck!
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D. G. Hart
Posted December 19, 2015 at 8:16 pm | Permalink
vd,t, but you haven’t seen a poor church until you’ve looked at the OPC’s books. Can’t boast about 1.2 billion and not have it boomerang. Duck!
Sorry you are not a church just because it says so on the door. You are a provisional fragment of a fragment of a fragment of a breakaway theology, a Bible debating society. No offense, but your premise is wrong.
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Bucky theWonderHorse
Posted December 19, 2015 at 5:53 pm | Permalink
http://www.theonion.com/article/pope-rummaging-through-vatican-basement-for-plasti-37608
Awesome. 😉
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Saving the world but not Jews — the Vatican view:
A person who can read (a Lutheran) interprets:
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Convert’s remorse:
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How to blur papal encyclicals and the Bible, the nature and grace, creation and redemption:
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Do you turn the lights off to reduce consumption or to send a message?
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perhaps you are just being ‘uncharitable’? Sure, he talks every once in a while about these not-so-bad-ideas, but, surely, mostly, almost always (?), he talks and ‘issues’ warning ‘statements’ about true ‘earth destroyers’ – unbelievers -embracers of all the worlds systems/values opposed to God- Jesus rejecters- and His judgment and destruction of them.
And the nations were enraged, and Your wrath came, and the time came for the dead to be judged, and the time to reward Your bond-servants the prophets and the saints and those who fear Your name, the small and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the earth. Rev 11:18
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Ali, you mean Pope Francis doesn’t pray with Hindus and Muslims? Have you not seen his prayer videos?
Don’t tell me that you, a Bible thumper if there ever was one, are soft on Rome.
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DG: a Bible thumper if there ever was one
wow, didn’t figure you were one for a compliment so, thanks; but haven’t you heard the proposal : http://www.patheos.com/blogs/blackwhiteandgray/2015/04/it-is-time-to-retire-the-term-bible-thumper/
DG: soft on Rome
I was saying that hoping I wasn’t being facetious because you could confirm from your Catholic-airwave-scouring that indeed the message heard by the world from the pope in the media is unequivocably, overwhelmingly … Come all who are thirsty to Jesus -for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.
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Ali, as usual you’re as clear as mud. Are you saying the overwhelming message of Rome is ” Come all who are thirsty to Jesus -for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved”?
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Ali, you don’t get out much.
Unequivocally my arse.
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Then again, Francis prayer videos are having effects:
Sometimes doctrines develop and then — wait for it — they break.
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DG reference quote…In this Year of Mercy,
Checked this post to see if, by some chance, JESUS was mentioned….nope.
‘Give us a selfie, Papa!’: Crowds armed with camera phones – including the police – beg the Pope for a picture as he holds special audience for the Jubilee of Mercy
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3567123/Give-selfie-Papa-Crowds-armed-camera-phones-beg-Pope-picture-holds-special-audience-Jubilee-Mercy.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490
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