Month: February 2010

Patriarch of Constantinople´s New Encyclical Defends Catholic-Orthodox Dialogue

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The Catholic take on +Bartholomew’s Sunday of Orthodoxy encyclical. Caveat: I am a columnist for Catholic Online.

ISTANBUL, Turkey, (CNA Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople´s newest encyclical encourages dialogue between the Orthodox Church and other Christian churches and laments those who are “unacceptably fanatical” in challenging such dialogue. He specifically condemned the false rumors spread about Catholic-Orthodox dialogue.

Patriarch Bartholomew

Patriarch Bartholomew´s patriarchal and synodal encyclical was dated Feb. 21, Orthodoxy Sunday, when the Orthodox Church celebrates the defeat of the iconoclastic heresy.

His letter began by noting the failure of those who tried to suppress, silence or falsify the Orthodox Church. He said that the Ecumenical Patriarchate cares about “protecting and establishing” the unity of the Orthodox Church in order that the Orthodox Christian faith may be confessed “with one voice and in one heart.”

Orthodoxy, he said, must be promoted with humility and interpreted in light of each historical period and cultural circumstance.

“To this purpose, Orthodoxy must be in constant dialogue with the world. The Orthodox Church does not fear dialogue because truth is not afraid of dialogue,” Bartholomew continued, saying that a Church enclosed within itself would no longer be “catholic.”

Dialogue with the outside world must first pass through all those who call themselves Christian, he wrote.
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Papal Environmentalism: Pro-Life and Pro-Marriage

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Ethics and Public Policy Center | George Weigel

In his January 11 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI continued to carve out an interesting Catholic position on ecology. The Pope insists that care for creation is a moral obligation that falls on both individuals and governments. His very invocation of “creation,” however, challenges the secular shibboleths that underwrite a lot of contemporary environmental activism.

Here is the money paragraph in the papal address to the diplomats assembled in the Sala Regia of the Apostolic Palace:

“Twenty years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the materialistic and atheistic regimes which had for several decades dominated a part of this continent, it was easy to assess the great harm which an economic system lacking any reference to the truth about man had done not only to the dignity and freedom of individuals and peoples, but to nature itself, by polluting soil, water, and air. The denial of God distorts the freedom of the human person, yet it also devastates creation. It follows that the protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need, but much more to a moral need, in as much as nature expresses a plan of love and truth which is prior to us and comes from God.”
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Relics, icons, and crosses onboard International Space Station

+Bartholomew: Sunday of Orthodoxy Encyclical

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Prot. No. 213

(February 21, 2010)

† BARTHOLOMEW

By God’s Grace
Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome
and Ecumenical Patriarch
To the Fullness of the Church, Grace and Peace
From our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ

Our most holy Orthodox Church today commemorates its own feast day, and – from this historical and martyric See of the Ecumenical Patriarchate – the Mother Church of Constantinople directs its blessing, love and concern to all of its faithful and dedicated spiritual children throughout the world, inviting them to concelebrate in prayer.

Blessed be the name of the Lord! Those who endeavored over the ages to suppress the Church through various visible and invisible persecutions; those who sought to falsify the Church with their heretical teachings; those who wanted to silence the Church, depriving it of its voice and witness; they all proved unsuccessful. The clouds of Martyrs, the tears of the Ascetics, and the prayers of the Saints protect the Church spiritually, while the Comforter and Spirit of Truth leads it to the fullness of truth.

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A Rather Less Than New Kind of Christianity

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Here’s my latest review for the Oooze. You can find this review and others here.

A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (HarperOne, $24.99)

The critiques I’ve read of Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith condemn it as heretical. Key to this judgment is that they all evaluate the book based on a canon of orthodoxy that I would characterizes as a loosely post-Reformation Protestant-Evangelical-Fundamentalist theological standard. The irony of these critiques is that it is just this standard of orthodoxy that McLaren is rejecting. Flipping it around, though he doesn’t use the word, McLaren is calling his post-Reformation Protestant-Evangelical-Fundamentalist critics heretics and presenting himself (explicitly) as a new Martin Luther, a as man called by God to reform the Reformation and the daughters of that tradition. Continue reading →

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