Community Events

Weekly Bulletin

Two parts for the week of 22 June, 2008: part 1 | part 2

Homily

29 June 2008

Feast of Sts. Peter & Paul

Today’s first reading is about Peter. Today’s second reading is about Paul. Two more different people could not be found in the church community of their time. Peter was a self-taught fisherman, no stranger to making mistakes. He was spontaneous, lived by his instinct and followed Jesus from his heart. Paul was a highly educated, logical-thinking Pharisee, cultured, argumentative, expecting perfection of himself and others. If these two had shared a meal, Peter would have slurped his food and belched loudly when the meal was over. Paul would have used the proper fork for the proper food and announced to whether the table wine was excellent or of poor quality. A friendship between them was not very likely.

News

Pope Benedict XVI Asserts Authority Over His "Flock"

Fr. Francis Baiocchi, MJS

“Before a crowd of nearly 60,000 people at Yankee Stadium, Pope Benedict XVI last Sunday ended his first visit to the United States as leader of the Roman Catholic Church with a reminder to the flock that obedience to the authority of the church is the foundation of their religious faith” (italics added, quoted in the Sunday MJS April 21, 2008).

Speaking Truth To Power

Anthony P. Kowalski, Corpus Reports

My Kowalski grandparents came from the Poznan area in Western Poland, a region controlled throughout the entire 19th century by Prussia. Grandfather Jan Kowalski fulfilled his prescribed military service in the Prussian army, and then at age 25 in 1890 departed for America; Grandmother Antonina Kubis joined him two years later. Their sons would serve as American doughboys in World War I, fighting against the same Prussian army. One son, Francis, was killed; another son, John, was wounded.

Meditations

Strangers In Our Own House

adapted from WEORC

Have you heard the tale of the two frogs? One fell into a pot of boiling water and in a nanosecond jumped right out again. The other fell into a pot of lukewarm water and finding it quite comfortable, fell asleep and eventually boiled to death. Something similar seems to have happened to us Catholics in these years since Vatican II. It’s how we’ve become strangers in our own house.

Catholicism & The New Atheism

Richard Gaillardetz, E-CORPUS

One of the less noted contributions of the Second Vatican Council is its brief treatment of atheism in its “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” In that groundbreaking document, the council avoided the shrill condemnations of atheism that were so common in preconciliar texts. Instead, the council acknowledged the diverse motives for modern atheism, from the overreaching claims of the positive sciences to modern atheism’s legitimate rejection of “a faulty notion of God” (No. 19). The bishops invited Christians to go beyond condemnation and “seek out the secret motives that lead the atheistic mind to deny God” (No. 20). By way of contrast, the so-called “new atheists”—figures like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—engage in an aggressive and decidedly nondialogical attack on religion. They insist that religion is fundamentally toxic to human society and must be directly challenged and eradicated where possible. Consider the second part of the title of Hitchens’s volume, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.