Pope Francis confirms he’s a huge fan of Benedict XVI

 

Inés San Martín

June 22, 2016

VATICAN_CORRESPONDENT

Pope Francis has written a prologue to a book about his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, in which Francis says that Catholic priests everywhere should learn from Benedict's "kneeling theology," and also says his resignation was a "lesson for the Church."

ROME— Although they’ve often been portrayed as a study in contrasts, a book excerpt released Wednesday confirms Pope Francis is actually a huge fan of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, calling Catholic priests everywhere to look to, and to read, Benedict whenever they have doubts about their calling.

On June 29, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI will celebrate the 65 anniversary of his priestly ordination, which will be marked the day before with a small ceremony at the Vatican’s Secretary of State, with Pope Francis heading the VIP list.
Ahead of the celebration, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica shared an excerpt from a prologue of a book collecting Benedict’s teaching on the priesthood, written by Francis.
In it, the pope praises his predecessor, calling him a “kneeling” theologian, meaning that before being a great “teacher of the faith,” the pope emeritus is a man who “embodies holiness, a man of peace, a man of God.”
It’s with this kneeling in prayer which, according to Francis, Benedict embodies the exemplary heart of the priesthood: “That deep rootedness in God, without which all the organizational capacity and all the supposed intellectual superiority, all the money and power are useless,” Francis writes.
“[Benedict] embodies that constant relationship with the Lord Jesus without which nothing is true, everything becomes routine, priests [become] salaried [employees], bishops’ bureaucrats, and the Church is not the Church of Christ, but a product of our making, a superfluous NGO,” he adds.
Talking about the first papal resignation in over 600 years, Francis called it a “lesson for the Church.”
The pope quotes one of Benedict’s last public addresses, a meditation after the weekly Sunday Angelus, on Sunday Feb. 24, 2013: “The Lord has called me to ‘scale the mountain’, to dedicate myself still more to prayer and meditation,” the retired pontiff said.
“But this does not mean abandoning the Church,” Benedict continued. “If God asks me this, it is precisely so that I might continue to serve her with the same dedication and the same love with which I have tried to give up to now, but in a way more suitable to my age and my strength.”
According to Francis, it’s from the monastery Mater Ecclesiae, a few yards from the Santa Marta residence where he lives, that Benedict delivers his “greatest lesson of ‘kneeling theology,’” because he continues to witness the “decisive factor, that inner core of priestly ministry that deacons, priests and bishops must never forget: namely, that the first and most important service isn’t the management of ‘current affairs,’ but praying for others.”
With his testimony, the pope continues, his predecessor shows that praying is not a job for a few who are particularly devout, or incapable of solving problems. Benedict, he said, shows that “doing” is not the decisive element of the priesthood, and that prayer shouldn’t be relegated to something done during one’s “free time.”
Writing specifically for other priest, Francis tells them to meditate on the pages of the book whenever they have doubts “about the center of your ministry, its meaning, its usefulness,” or about “what people really expect from us.”
Benedict’s teachings on the priesthood, the pope writes, give testimony of the job description: bringing souls closer to Christ.
The book, titled in Italian “Teaching and Learning the Love of God,” is the first volume of several that will collect the writings of the emeritus pope, both during his papacy and previous to his election as Joseph Ratzinger. Each tome will be introduced by different people, either religious or lay. It will be released in simultaneously in six different languages, including English, by Ignatius Press.
Little has been revealed by the Vatican on next week’s ceremony, beyond the fact that the guest list is limited to the heads of Vatican offices and some of Benedict’s closest collaborators.
Benedict XVI has rarely appeared in public since he stepped down from the papacy in February 2013. He’s attended the two consistories for the creation of new cardinals, held in February of 2014 and 2015. He was also present for a “Festival of Grandparents” which took place in September of 2014, and he attended the canonization Mass for popes John XXIII and John Paul II.
His addresses or remarks have been even rarer. The last time he broke his self-imposed silence was last May when, through the Vatican’s press office, he released a statement denying there’s more to the third secret of Fatima than what was revealed during John Paul II’s papacy in 2000.
Francis, however, has praised his predecessor several times, including during several of his press conferences coming back from foreign trips. On the way back both from his only African tour in Nov. 2015 and Mexico last February, Francis said Benedict launched reform both of the Vatican government and the Church’s response to clerical sexual abuse, saying he’s following the outlines in place before his pontificate.

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Taken from: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2016/06/22/pope-francis-tells-priests-look-benedict-guidance/

Christ the Doctor: Christus Medicus

Pope Francis: Let’s be clear – assisted suicide is 'false compassion'

Vatican City, Jun 10, 2016 / 02:13 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Physician-assisted suicide is part of a “throwaway culture” that offers a “false compassion” and treats a human person as a problem, Pope Francis told medical leaders on Thursday.

“True compassion does not marginalize anyone, nor does it humiliate and exclude – much less considers the disappearance of a person as a good thing,” the Pope said. He criticized “those who hide behind an alleged compassion to justify and approve the death of a patient.”

“You are well aware of the meaning of the triumph of selfishness, of this ‘throwaway culture’ that rejects and dismisses those who do not comply with certain canons of health, beauty and utility,” he said.

The Pope addressed the managers of the Medical Orders of Spain and Latin America in the Apostolic Palace on June 9.

According to Vatican Radio’s translation, he described compassion as “the just response to the immense value of the sick person.” This response is composed of respect, understanding and tenderness “so that the sacred value of the life of the patient does not disappear or become obscured, but instead shines with greater splendor precisely in suffering and helplessness.”

Compassion is a necessary part of the medical profession, Pope Francis stressed.

“The doctor’s identity and commitment depends not only on scientific knowledge and technical competence, but principally on the attitude of compassion and mercy towards those who suffer in body and spirit. Compassion does not mean pity, it means ‘suffering with’,” he said.

Technological and individualistic culture does not always consider compassion well, he said. It even disdains it and regards it as humiliation.

“Frailty, pain and infirmity are a difficult trial for everyone, including medical staff. They call for patience, for ‘suffering-with.’ Therefore, we must not give in to the functionalist temptation to apply rapid and drastic solutions, moved by false compassion or by mere criteria of efficiency or cost-effectiveness,” he added.

“The dignity of human life is at stake. The dignity of the medical vocation is at stake.”

“Nothing must prevent you from ‘putting more heart into your hands’,” the pontiff told the medical leaders, citing St. Camillo de Lellis.

Pope Francis reflected on the theological aspects of health and medicine. In the biblical tradition, there is a close link between health and salvation.

“The Fathers of the Church used to refer to Christ and His work of salvation with the title ‘Christus Medicus’ (Christ the Doctor),” the Pope explained. “He is the Good Shepherd who cares for the wounded sheep and comforts the sick. He is the Good Samaritan who does not pass by the injured person at the roadside, but rather, moved by compassion, cures and attends to him.”

The Pope added he likes to bless doctors’ hands as a sign to recognize “this compassion that becomes the caress of health.”

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Taken from: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-francis-lets-be-clear-assisted-suicide-is-false-compassion-79396/

Paradise (Jerusalem) Centre of the World

 

 

by

 

Damien F Mackey

 

 

“Thus says the Lord GOD:

‘This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the centre of the nations, with countries all around her’.”

 

Ezekiel 5:5

 

 

The most common geographical expression used in the first 4 chapters of Genesis (so devoid of specific geographical indicators) is that general word/phrase, “[the] east”.

Thus the Lord plants “a garden in Eden, in the east” (2:8). And “…east of the garden He placed the cherubim” (3:24). And Cain “settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden” (4:16). (This eastern orientation is taken up again in Ezekiel 47:8).

W. Albright, though, contended most interestingly that Hebrew miqeddem means “in primeval times” and not “from or in the east” (W. Albright 1968:97, as cited by Dr. Livingston). That would certainly make the more sense for me, at least in regard to the usage of this phrase in Genesis 2:8; for it would remove a geographical complication (by actually taking the geography right out of it) that I had encountered in “The Location of Paradise”, when trying to situate the Garden “in Eden, in the east” (instead of, perhaps, “in Eden, in primeval times”).   

Presumably the Garden of Eden still remained the primary point of reference or orientation for exiled man and woman: their prototypal holy place. Just as Jerusalem would later be for the Israelites/Jews even during their various exiles (Assyria, Babylon). Based on the testimony of Jesus as I have interpreted it, what became the site of Jerusalem was the very site where Abel the Priest was slain by his envious brother, Cain, when the former was bringing his acceptable offering unto the holy mountain (Genesis 4:4-8). Wherever Adam and Eve may have dwelt subsequent to the Fall, the Garden of Eden presumably continued to be the ‘altar’ to where Adam seasonally would bring his offerings. Perhaps pious tradition can fill in at least one gap by telling us that Adam (his head, at least) was buried at this sacred site (Jerusalem). Thus R. Graves (The Greek Myths, 146:2): “… according to Ambrose (Epistle vii. 2), Adam’s head was buried at Golgotha, to protect Jerusalem from the north”.

This may, in fact, be the very origin of the name of that place:

 

So they took Jesus; and carrying the Cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. There they crucified him … (John 19:17, 18).

 

The Divine plan of salvation has this perfect symmetry about it:

the New Adam redeemed humankind, died, was buried and rose, precisely where the Old Adam had caused humankind’s Fall, and was ultimately buried.

 

 

 

Gavin Ardley’s Complete Renovation of Berkeley

by

Damien F. Mackey

 

  

Bishop George Berkeley is revealed by philosopher-scientist Gavin Ardley to have been a most poorly misunderstood, and wrongly classified, philosopher of science and mathematics.

  
 
Introduction


Some decades ago, Gavin Ardley (RIP) very kindly posted me a copy of his marvellous book, Berkeley’s Renovation of Philosophy (Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), in which he turned upside down virtually everything that I had been taught about the Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher, George Berkeley (1685 -1753).
Traditionally, bishop George Berkeley – who is not highly regarded at all by champions of philosophia perennis - is placed alongside such Age of Enlightenment philosophers as Locke and Hume, albeit with his own unique brand of Empiricism.


For example (http://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_berkeley.html):
Bishop George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) was an Irish philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, best known for his theory of Immaterialism, a type of Idealism (he is sometimes considered the father of modern Idealism). Along with John Locke and David Hume, he is also a major figure in the British Empiricism movement, although his Empiricism is of a much more radical kind, arising from his mantra “to be is to be perceived”.  
 
And again (http://www.iep.utm.edu/berkeley/):


George Berkeley was one of the three most famous British Empiricists. (The other two are John Locke and David Hume.)  Berkeley is best known for his early works on vision (An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, 1709) and metaphysics (A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710; Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713).
….
Berkeley claimed that abstract ideas are the source of all philosophical perplexity and illusion.  In his Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge he argued that, as Locke described abstract ideas (Berkeley considered Locke’s the best account of abstraction), (1) they cannot, in fact, be formed, (2) they are not needed for communication or knowledge, and (3) they are inconsistent and therefore inconceivable.
In the Principles and the Three Dialogues Berkeley defends two metaphysical theses:  idealism (the claim that everything that exists either is a mind or depends on a mind for its existence) and immaterialism (the claim that matter does not exist).  His contention that all physical objects are composed of ideas is encapsulated in his motto esse is percipi (to be is to be perceived). ….

[End of quotes]

 
According to Gavin Ardley


In Berkeley’s Renovation of Philosophy, Gavin Ardley paints an entirely different portrait of Berkeley as a most common sense and realist philosopher, “one who strove to seat philosophy once more on the broad human and common sense foundations laid by Plato and Aristotle”. Berkeley, Ardley explains, has been misread, causing his actual philosophical outlook to have been quite misunderstood due to a misinterpretation of his dialectical method. For often Berkeley’s antithesis has been taken for his final synthesis, with the inevitably catastrophic result: “… they select and abstract from the totality of Berkeley, and miss the robust simplicity and universality of Berkeley’s intentions”.
Ardley introduces his book as follows:
In this work I have endeavoured to see Berkeley in his contemporary setting. On the principle that philosophy is ultimately about men, not about abstract problems, I have tried to see Berkeley the philosopher as an expression of Berkeley the man. When this is done, what is perennial in the philosophy may be discerned in and through what is local and temporal. Berkeley then emerges as a pioneer reformer; not so much an innovator as a renovator; one who set out to rescue phi losophy from the enthusiasms of the preceding age; one who strove to seat philosophy once more on the broad human and common sense foundations laid by Plato and Aristotle. Critical studies of some of the more striking of Berkeley’s epistemological arguments are legion. They commenced with the young Berkeley’s first appearance in print, and have continued to this day. But whether they take the form of professions of support for Berkeley, or of bald refutations of Berkeley’s supposed fallacies, or whether, like the contemporary analytical studies of Moore, Warnock, and Austin, they are subtle exposures of alleged deeply concealed logical muddles, they all tend to share one common characteristic: they select and abstract from the totality of Berkeley, and miss the robust simplicity and universality of Berkeley’s intentions. It is the intentions which control the whole, and give the right perspective in which to view the various items.

[End of quote]

After that it is a roller coaster ride towards the discovery of an entirely new Berkeley and his vital contribution – not without Ardley’s points of criticism here and there – to the philosophy of modern science and mathematics.
Not least of Gavin Ardley’s achievements here is his re-interpretation of Berkeley’s supposed principle of immaterialism, esse est percipi, along the lines of realism and common sense. Earlier we read of the standard view of Berkeley in this regard: “[Berkeley’s] immaterialism (the claim that matter does not exist). His contention that all physical objects are composed of ideas is encapsulated in his motto esse is percipi (to be is to be perceived)”. Berkeley’s true view of this famous principle is well explained also in the following review: “… everything that is perceived is truly real and existing; it is, because it is perceived, esse est percipi”.
http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/MC.13.4.338?journalCode=mc