What Does The Prayer Really Say?
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When I am in St. Paul I sometimes take a break from the good Chinese to stop at a well-known deli, Cecil’s on Cleveland.

If you can’t be in New York, you can come here.

Service is … well, you never know. At least it is cheerful. Lunch can be nuts here and they are short on staff.

Great sandwiches! The matzah ball soup and beet borscht are excellent. Try an egg cream.

I usually get a couple loaves of bread too.

From the site of First Things, Michael Novak has a comment about the anticipation felt by liberals over the Holy Father’s upcoming encyclical.

My emphases and comments.

Economic Heresies of the Left
Jun 29, 2009
Michael Novak

What exactly is in Benedict XVI’s new encyclical on the economy and labor issues is not yet known. Catholic leftists and progressives, though, are already trembling with excitement. Three glaring errors have already appeared in these heavily panting anticipations.

An accurate presentation of real existing capitalism requires at least three modest affirmations:

1) Markets work well only within a system of law, and only according to well-marked-out rules of the game; unregulated markets are a figment of imagination.

2) In actual capitalist practice, the love of creativity, invention, and groundbreaking enterprise are far more powerful than motives of greed.

3) The fundamental systemic motive infusing the spirit of capitalism is the imperative to liberate the world’s poor from the premodern ubiquity of grinding poverty. This motive lay at the heart of Adam Smith’s important victory over Thomas Malthus concerning the coming affluence—rather than starvation—of the poor.

Since the origins of modern capitalism around 1780, more than two-thirds of the world’s population has moved out of poverty. In China and India alone, more than 500 million have been raised out of poverty just in the last forty years. In almost every nation the average age of mortality has risen dramatically, causing populations to expand accordingly. Health in almost every dimension has been improved, and literacy has been carried to remote places it never reached before.

Whatever the motives of individuals, the system has improved the plight of the poor as none ever has before. The contemporary left systematically refuses to face these undeniable facts.

Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., one of our most reliable leftist bellwethers, [how one tires of him] has recently opined that Benedict XVI’s new encyclical will cry out for more regulation, rather than unregulated markets. Further, the pope will denounce greed and cry out for more attention to the urgent need to aid the world’s poor.  [Woiw… the Pope an advocate for the poor.  Such insight.]

Reese thinks these are anticapitalist positions. That is ridiculous. They lie at the heart of why capitalism has worked as well as it has to liberate the poor—first in the United States and Europe, then in one continent after another, as it is now doing in almost all areas of Asia.

Fr. Reese says that the pope will blame the greed of U.S. bankers for the current global financial crisis. [What do you want to bet that the Pope won’t get so specific.  It is Reese himself who is pushing his agenda into a fantasy about the Pope’s encyclical.] While many institutions, including banks, failed in their basic duties, government action was the principal villain in the 2009 debacle. It was the federal government that forced banks to make sub-prime loans to poor families (who were known to be unable to pay their mortgages on a regular basis). It threatened banks that did not invest in poisonous packages of mortgages, vitiated by the bad ones.

The federal government even guaranteed the work of two huge quasigovernment mortgage companies—Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac—that wrote more than half of all mortgages during the fateful years. Of course, when the house of cards fell, government was not there to make good on its guarantees—or even to accept responsibility for its own heavy-handed actions.

For at least ten years before the disaster finally occurred, my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute had been warning of the government abuses that were heading toward this calamity. Partisans of big government refused to listen.

For moralists, it is essential to see how often (not always) government itself sins grievously against the common good, out of a lust for power and domination over others. Furthermore, government often (not always) generates foolish and destructive regulations, and often dispenses justice that winks rather than justice that is blind. [Wait until we see more and more federal judges with "empathy".] Government is more frequently the agent of injuring the common good than the ordinary lawful actions of free citizens. During the twentieth century, governments too often destroyed the common good of their citizens for years to come.

In the United States, the existing code of federal regulations for businesses is enormous. Title 12 covering “Banks and Banking” runs to 4,786 pages; Title 15 on “commerce and Foreign Trade” is 1,941 pages; Title 16 on “Commercial Practices,” 1,600 pages; Title 17 on the “Securities and Exchange Commission,” 2,708 pages; and Title 31 on “Money and Finance: Treasury,” 1,917 pages.

The total number of pages in this code is 12,592. Laid out end to end, the volumes of the code extend for 2.35 miles. If you count the pages in feet (30 inches per linear foot is the standard measure) the code runs for six linear miles.

An unregulated market indeed! The real world of American capitalism is more like Gulliver bound down by thousands of threads. Many of the regulations are out of date, obsolete, costly, destructive, and—in their actual effects—counter to the very intentions that gave them birth. But regulation there is, and regulation there must be. Without rules, American capitalism cannot function.

As for greed, Max Weber pointed out that greed is present in every age and every system of human history. [Darn Adam anyway!] Yet greed was rather more socially central in ancient times than today, and played a much more decisive role. And nowadays, greed flourishes most wherever government power is concentrated.

By contrast, in enterprise societies such as the United States, it is possible to become rich—even very rich—by methods that focus on innovation rather than greed. The great universities of the Middle West and Far West, were founded expressly to give spur to new inventions in mining, agriculture, and other technical fields. Texas A & M, Iowa State, Wisconsin State, Oklahoma State, and scores of others have been the hothouses of ideas in agriculture, engineering and electronics, geology, mining and drilling—ideas rendered practical by the makers of many fortunes. They have mightily served the common good of Americans and the entire human race.

As John Paul II wisely commented in Centesimus Annus, practical knowledge is the main cause of wealth today. Ideas rather than great landholdings are the main form of wealth in our time. As both Caesar and Cicero long ago observed, although it seems as though community ownership ought to serve the common good best, in practice private property does. The right to private property has long been justified by virtue of its superior service to the common good.  [Beware of those who speak badly about "self-interest" and do not specify that what they mean.]

And in the United States, scores of entrepreneurs are ready to risk losing everything they have in order to create something new, create something that will make life better for their fellow men. Henry Ford failed repeatedly in several businesses before he finally made the Ford Motor Company the great model for business that it once was. (It was the first establishment in history to pay its laborers a handsome wage of five dollars per day. At the time, ordinary lawyers averaged about $1500 per year. Ford’s motives, of course, were not altruistic; he wanted his workers to purchase the cars they helped build.)  [A kind of "self-interest" which includes and expands benefits for others.]

As Oscar Handlin once noted, almost every industrialist who built a new railroad North and South in the United States in the nineteenth century prospered. Nearly every tycoon who tried to build an East–West railroad lost money. What spurred men to keep trying had less to do with greed that with the sheer romance of conquering the deserts and the Rockies. The element of romance in business is simply not grasped by dialectical materialists. [Interesting observation.]

In brief, nearly all the leftish critiques of American and other forms of capitalism are empirically false. They do not fit the actual facts. [Liberals will always ask you to deny the evidence of your senses and of common sense.  They don’t like facts or distinctions and will accuse you of being uncivil if you counter their positions with reason and facts.] But these three—greed, unregulated markets, and the idea that capitalism makes the poor of the world worse off—are especially tiresome, and very far from reality.

Will all those good Catholic leftists who announce their own enthusiastic preference for the poor actually help to liberate the poor, even by a little? Will their anticapitalist policies help alleviate poverty? The historical record offers very little evidence for that contention.

And yet wherever a healthy, inventive capitalism goes, the poor soon rise by the millions out of poverty, come to better physical health, and advance into higher education.

You can look up the record.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God (Doubleday, 2008).

Great article!  Kudos to Novak!

There is a very interesting piece from Sandro Magister’s Chiesa on the new discoveries about St. Paul which have recently come to light.  

This is one you want to read carefully… especially you seminarians out there.

My emphases and comments.

New Discoveries. Why St. Paul Was Given a Philosopher’s Face

The oldest depiction of the apostle has been found just a short distance from his tomb, which is also the object of new investigations. The Church wanted to represent him as the Christian Plato. [interesting] A daring decision. And still extremely relevant, even today

by Sandro Magister

ROME, June 30, 2009 – The year dedicated to St. Paul, two millennia after his birth, has concluded with two important discoveries announced on the same day, the vigil of the saint’s feast.

The first discovery was revealed by Benedict XVI in person, in his homily for vespers on June 28, in the Roman basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls:

"We are gathered at the tomb of the apostle, whose sarcophagus, kept under the papal altar, was recently made the object of a careful scientific analysis. A tiny perforation was made in the sarcophagus, which had not been opened for many centuries, for a special probe that picked up traces of a valuable linen cloth dyed purple, laminated with pure gold and a blue-colored cloth with linen thread. It also detected grains of red incense and of substances containing protein and calcium. Moreover, very tiny fragments of bone, subjected to Carbon-14 dating by experts who were unaware of their origin, were determined to belong to a person who lived between the first and second centuries. This seems to confirm the unanimous and unopposed tradition that these are the mortal remains of the apostle Paul."

So for Paul, too – as also for the apostle Peter, whose tomb has already been identified with certainty beneath the main altar of the basilica of St. Peter at the Vatican – there is important confirmation that he is buried precisely where he has always been venerated: under the main altar of the Roman basilica dedicated to him.  [Time and again, we see how modern science confirms what the ancients said.]

***

The second discovery was announced by "L’Osservatore Romano" in its June 28 edition.

It is the discovery of the oldest known depiction of the apostle Paul, dating back to the fourth century: the depiction reproduced at the top of this page.

This image of Paul emerged last June 19, from the excavations that are underway in a catacomb named after St. Thecla, along the Via Ostiense leading from Rome to the sea, a short distance from the basilica of the apostle.

Using laser beams to clean the vault of a niche, the archaeologists saw a rich fresco decoration reemerge. At the center of the vault appeared the image of the Good Shepherd, surrounded, in four arches, by the figures of Paul – the best preserved of the four – of Peter, and probably of two other apostles.

The archaeologists Fabrizio Bisconti and Barbara Mazzei provided all of the details of the discovery in two extensive accounts in the newspaper of the Holy See. But one element is more striking than all the rest. And it concerns the reasons that led to depicting the apostle Paul as we see him in this fresco, and then in so many others that followed: with the appearance of a pensive philosopher, with the penetrating expression, the high forehead, the incipient baldness, the pointed beard.

In effect, in an art exhibition dedicated to St. Paul and inaugurated a few days ago in a wing of the Vatican Museums, two of the pieces on display are busts made in the Roman era, of two philosophers – one of which is probably Plotinus – who bear a strong resemblance to the ancient depictions of Paul, beginning with the one that has just been discovered.

The same question is posed for the apostle Peter, who is traditionally depicted with short, thick white hair, his face broad and his expression decisive, his beard also short and full. And so on for other characters of sacred history.

Portraiture was very widespread in Greek and Roman art. But in Jewish culture, human images were forbidden, and therefore it was unthinkable that Paul and the others would have themselves depicted. It was only later that the Church accepted the depiction of figures of the Christian faith.

But how? Here is the evocative explanation given by Professor Antonio Paolucci, director of the Vatican Museums and a great art historian, in presenting the exhibition on St. Paul:

"The problem was posed between the third and fourth centuries, when a Church that had become widespread and well structured made the great and brilliant wager that is at the basis of our entire artistic history. [very cool] It accepted and made its own the world of images, and accepted it in the forms in which the Greco-Roman stylistic and iconographic traditions had developed it. It was in this way is that Christ the Good Shepherd took on the appearance of Pheobus Apollo or Orpheus, and that Daniel in the lion’s den had the appearance of Hercules, the victorious nude athlete.

"But how could one represent Peter and Paul, the princes of the apostles, the pillars of the Church, the foundations of the hierarchy and doctrine? Someone got a good idea. He gave the first apostles the appearance of the first philosophers. So Paul, bald, bearded, with the serious and focused air of the intellectual, had the appearance of Plato or perhaps of Plotinus, while that of Aristotle was given to the pragmatic and worldly Peter, who has the task of guiding the professing and militant Church through the snares of the world."

If this is what happened, then the Church in the early centuries had no reservations about attributing to the apostles, and to Paul in particular, the title of philosopher, nor of handing down, studying, and proclaiming in its entirety his thought, which is certainly not easy to understand and accept.

The same can be said of the Fathers of the Church. In a phase of Christianity in expansion, in a phase in which the transmission of the Christian faith to the Gentiles was in full development, the Church never considered watering down or domesticating its own message in order to make it more acceptable to the men of the time.  [Thus the high dependence of many of the Fathers on Platonism in its variious forms.]

The depiction of Paul the philosopher is an eloquent warning to those who today deny relevance to a pope theologian like Benedict XVI, a modern Father of the Church.

Ed Peter’s of In The Light Of The Law has correctly understood a burning issue of our day.

L’OR and the Loss of Reason

For most of my life L’Osservatore Romano has been a sleepy Roman rag that arrived weeks after its publication date, printed in cheap ink that soiled the fingers of those who felt the need to read page after page of boilerplate remarks on the latest ambassador from anywhere shown in his tuxedo presenting diplomatic credentials. Aside, I suppose, from an occasionally interesting book review, L’OR has for decades carried nothing of serious interest that could not be found much more quickly in a half-dozen other venues, ones, moreover, that didn’t compel readers to wash their hands before handling anything beige or white.

But lately, [Behold!  A line to be quoted….] L’OR has decided to become relevant. God help us.

Having just emerged, battered, but, I thought, moderately chastened after its embarrassingly naive and harmful editorial in praise of Pres. Obama, L’OR treats the world to a high-schoolish tribute to the highly talented and utterly pathetic entertainer Michael Jackson.

Jackson might not be fully responsible for the swirling chaos that was his life and death, but for L’OR even to mention his death – - [get this…] without simultaneously urging Catholics to pray for his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed – - astounds me.

Worse, the L’OR report leaves Catholics little sense that much of Jackson’s work was sexually exploitative, at times quasi-obscene; it dismisses as insignificant the terrible example that Jackson’s chronic pursuit of superficial "beauty" gave to millions of young people; and, worst of all, it trivializes the serious, and in some cases unresolved, allegations of child sexual abuse made against him. L’OR need not assume the worst about Jackson’s conduct in these cases, but it should never have implied that such allegations, even if they are true, cannot tarnish the world-wide esteem in which he is held! Good grief. Has L’OR completely lost its reason?

If the Vatican wants a newspaper to provide a Catholic perspective on the world, fine. Item Number One on the to-do list, though, should be to find Catholics who can write and edit such a paper coherently. Anyone can lurch from gaff to gaff.

In the meantime, if you really want to get in on the Jackson Praise Train, check out M-TV, dude. Their graphics are like way better than L’OR.

 

Dude!

What is your good news today?

More and more I have the impression that "the environment" is rapidly becoming the focus of a new age sort of a religion.

I missed this when it came out, from Catholic World News:

Catholic World News (CWN)
Feature Stories
US Catholic hierarchy shows support for legislation requiring massive tax hike
Jun. 26, 2009 (CWNews.com) -

The US bishops have given their enthusiastic support to the Waxman-Markey bill, a piece of legislation designed to address climate change, which Republican opponents have characterized as entailing "the largest tax increase in American history."

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 proposes a complicated series of schemes known as "cap and trade," ultimately imposing taxes on the carbon-dioxide emissions that are cited as a major factor in global warming. Even before the 1,200-page legislation was made available to Congress, the members of the House of Representatives received a letter from two leading representatives of the American Church, giving their strong endorsement for the bill.

Bishop Howard Hubbard, [With due respect to His Excellency, and to the writer, how on earth is Bp. Hubbard a "leading representative of the American Church"?] who chairs the US bishops’ committee on international justice and peace; and Ken Hackett, the president of Catholic Relief Services, welcomed the introduction of the Waxman-Markey bill. They criticized the legislation only because, in their view, it did not include adequate funding to protect the poor—in the US and abroad—[More taxes?] from the bill’s economic impact. Bishop Hubbard and Hackett argued that "the funding resources committed to international adaptation fall fundamentally short of what is needed." Their letter also suggested measures to protect churches and non-profit agencies from the adverse economic effects. [Soooo… ]

By pointing to the ways in which the legislation could harm the economic interests of the poor and the non-profit sector, Bishop Hubbard and Ken Hackett demonstrated that they were aware of the bill’s economic costs. But their letter to Congressmen betrayed no concern at all about how the bill would affect ordinary American families above the poverty level.

The Congressional Budget Office, in its analysis of the legislation, concluded that the Waxman-Markey bill would entail new costs of $770 a year for the average American family. A separate analysis by the Heritage Foundation suggested that this figure was grossly understated, and the actual costs would be closer to $3,000 per year for a typical family of four—rising steadily up to $4,600 by the year 2035. The Heritage analysis added that the bill would increase gasoline prices by 58%, home heating oil by 56%, and electric rates by 90%. The total drag on the economy would likely result in a loss of over 1 million jobs, Heritage concluded. In spite of this enormous cost, the Foundation argued, the Waxman-Markey bill would produce only a miniscule effect on the process of climate change, producing a drop in world temperatures of "only hundredths of a degree Celsius" in the next 40 years. [Would a Magic 8-Ball work better?.]

 

So, after reading that, go back and look at the title of the article. 

"US Catholic hierarchy shows support for legislation requiring massive tax hike"

Two people are cited.

People are telling me I must upgrade to Windows 7.  Riiiight.   Like we had to upgrade to Vista… is that it?

So… asuming for a moment that this is in the cards….

Do you have to upgrade from the same version of the old version to the same version of the new version?

For example, if you have Vista Groovy version, do you upgrade to Windows 7 Groovy, or can you go to Windows 7 Far Out, or even father to Gnarly?

For the same of this entry leave the "Just switch to Mac" comments to languished UNWRITTEN in the back of your minds… along with any references to "emergency powers".

Please pray for the consecrandus.

With a tip of the biretta to Fr. Roderick,  I present this great iPhone ap commercial spoof with a Catholic twist.

It was made by P. Camarata.

It looks like that guy needs to charge his iPhone… a common experience we share.

From a reader comes yet another e-mail without a link:

Info from theratzingerforum: Our Pope’s Mosaic in St. Paul’s Outside the Walls hat been altered and shows now the pallium which the Pope is wearing now, no longer the one he wore at his installation.

The Forum is "astonished".

Are you also?

 

No.

From a reader:

As you know, July 1st is the Feast of the Precious Blood in the pre-1969 calendar.  Unfortunately, this is one of the "idea feasts" which didn’t make the "expert" cut in 1969 (and the highest-ranking victim of tinkeritis [good word] – I think it was a second-class feastday).

Happily, July 1st is a feria in the modern calendar, with only an optional memorial for Blessed Junipero Serra otherwise obligating the day.  Thus, priests are free to use the votive mass of the Precious Blood which is found in the 2002 M.R. (not that I’ve ever really seen this done).

My question is the following: for those laity (or even obligated religious and clergy) who use the LOTH for daily prayer, is there a way to celebrate the Precious Blood?  I notice in the Liturgia Horarum that there is an office for "Christ, Our Eternal High Priest."  Would that be appropriate to use?  It has many references to the Precious Blood of Our Lord.  This "votive office" is also a good one to keep in mind for the Year for Priests, even if it’s only in the Latin editio typica.

The alternative, of course, is simply to pray the July 1st office in the extraordinary form.

Non-obliged lay people can do as they please, since they have no obligation to say the Office at all and they do so from devotion.

As for those who are obliged, I like the idea of "Christ the Eternal Priest", especially during this Year.

The feast of the Precious Blood is a fairly new feast for the Roman Calendar.  It was observed in Spain in the 16th centur, brought to Rome by the great St. Gaspar del Bufalo and them placed on the universal calendar in 1849 by Pius IX. 

I don’t see why one could not, on a feria, use another office. 

Today is the consecration as bishop of Fr. Lee Piche.   It will take place in the Cathedral of St. Paul, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

In your charity will you please pray for him?

Perhaps you might stop right now and say, right now, a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, or a Memorare.

On the very day the Year for Priests began, I was happily able to post about a nice thing that happened to me on an airplane.

This now comes from the editors of the National Catholic Register with my emphases and comments.

Thank You, Father

BY The Editors

June 14-20, 2009 Issue | Posted 6/5/09 at 7:05 AM

As the Year for Priests begins, we lay editors of the Register want to take a moment to thank priests.

We want to thank not only the priests who have been our friends, but also those we barely knew, who did more for us than our friends ever could.

We want to thank not only the priests who inspire us with their words, but also those who moved us more deeply with the daily work of their priesthood than they ever could with words.

We want to thank not only those men who gave up their retirement, and their well-deserved rest, to enter the priesthood as late vocations, but also — especially — those who as young men saw their whole life ahead of them and handed all of it to Christ.

We want to reassure them that the attacks on the priesthood will not prevail, because Christ doesn’t take their kind of generosity lightly. [A good point to remember during this Year.]

We know that there have been terrible, scandalous priests. This has been true from the beginning — from the original Twelve Apostles [Indeed.  The first collegial act of bishops/priests was to abandon the Lord.] through the early Christian heresies, from the scandals before the Reformation to the scandals of the 20th century.

But we also know that the priesthood is under attack.  [I believe this is true.  I also think that this is one of the reasons why Pope Benedict is giving "gifts" to priests, such as this Year and also Summorum Pontificum.]

Priests know it, too.

Whenever someone looks at them suspiciously, whenever a mother hurries her children away from them, whenever they read an antagonistic article about how the life of a priest makes them prone to become monsters, they know it.

Their noble, loving sacrifice is so often made to look ugly and twisted — the opposite of what it is. The whole group is too often defined by the exceptions in a way few of us ever have to deal with.  [You know… even most of the liberal, confused, progressivists are trying to be good men, thinking that what they are doing is the right thing.]

But the priesthood will survive, and grow stronger. In fact, it is already growing stronger. There are more new priests than we have seen in a long time, and the new generation of priests is more committed to the Church’s mission than any in memory. [Everywhere I go, the seminarians I meet are solid.]

We want to tell the faithful priests who unjustly suffer from these attacks that we’re on their side and, more importantly, remind them what Christ said: Rejoice and be glad on this day, for your name is great in heaven.

Thank you, priests, for sacrificing the fulfillment of “making it in the world” in order to give us a chance to make it in the next world. You don’t take on jobs — they are appointed to you. You put your own will at the disposal of the Church, for us. We are grateful.

Thank you for bringing our children into the Church, and sustaining their souls with the sacraments. And thank you for welcoming them into the Church informally, as well. We see them look at you like celebrities, and we’re glad the first “celebrity” they got to meet was a man of God. Thank you for patiently listening to them, for taking such joy in teasing them, and for showing them the true face of Christ: the gentle one who said “Let the children come to me.”

Thank you, priests, for presiding at our marriages, even while you yourselves live such that you can be ready to serve your people at a moment’s notice. Sometimes married people sigh and think envious thoughts about living alone. But in the end, it’s hard for us to imagine how you do it. Thank you for risking loneliness to serve us and our families.

Thank you, priests, for putting yourself in the unenviable position of dealing with us at our worst moments — when we’re anxious, upset, depressed, even a little out of our minds, focused on our own problems to the exclusion of all else.

When we see the care you have to take in listening to the problems of so many kinds of people, we can’t imagine how you do it. How do you listen to angry people, whining people, weeping people, nervous people, suspicious people and clueless people? How do you listen to us?

Thank you, priests, for sitting in empty confessionals on Saturday afternoons. You wait there, not even knowing if we’ll come, like the Prodigal Son’s father on the road. Thank you for all the times we hear “I absolve you from your sins” and feel a great burden lifted from our hearts. This gift of God’s forgiveness brings the greatest joy back into our lives. We can give you nothing in return that even comes close to that.

 And thank you, priests, most of all, for bringing Christ himself into our lives. Where would we be without your astonishing ability to make the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ present on our altars and in our tabernacles? You are there for us every Sunday, every morning, giving us this infinite gift. Thank you.

In the end, that’s what is so great about you: not you, in yourself, but who you bring us — Christ.  [Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui.]

People call from the hospital and say, “I need a priest.” They point to the confessional and ask, “Is there a priest in there?” They approach in the airport and ask, “Are you a Catholic priest?”

When people need a priest, any priest will do.

Because a priest is nothing but a representative of Christ. Christ is the main actor in the consecration at Mass. It is Christ who forgives sins. It is in Christ that we are baptized.

“The story of my priestly vocation?” wrote Pope John Paul II. “It is known above all to God. At its deepest level, every vocation to the priesthood is a great mystery; it is a gift which infinitely transcends the individual. Every priest experiences this clearly throughout the course of his life. Faced with the greatness of the gift, we sense our own inadequacy.”

Your inadequacy is your secret weapon.

You aren’t acting on your own behalf or through your own powers. You are acting for Christ. And that’s why, despite all the attacks, the priesthood will prevail. We depend too much on you to ever let you go.

Thank you, Father, for being Christ for us.

Can anyone identify this bishop?

I am wondering if this isn’t he.



UPDATE: 1 July

All the photos are here.

In December of 2006 I attended a presser on the unearthing, but not opening, of the tomb of St. Paul, Apostle, in the Basilica of St. Paul outside-the-walls.

At that time questions were raised about the opening of the tomb, but answers were dodgy.  We knew it was going to happen but didn’t know when.

The Pope gave permission in 2007.

I find this now, in the pages of the Nicole Winfield of AP.

My emphases and comments.

Pope: Scientific analysis done on St. Paul’s bones

By NICOLE WINFIELD
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 28, 2009 8:31 PM

ROME —The first-ever scientific test on what are believed to be the remains of the Apostle Paul "seems to confirm" that they do indeed belong to the Roman Catholic saint, Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday.

It was the second major discovery concerning St. Paul announced by the Vatican in as many days.   [second]

On Saturday, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano announced the June 19 discovery of a fresco inside another tomb depicting St. Paul, which Vatican officials said represented the oldest known icon of the apostle.

Benedict [Pope since 2005] said archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of St. Paul.

Benedict said scientists had conducted carbon dating tests on bone fragments found inside the sarcophagus and confirmed that they date from the first or second century.

"This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul," Benedict said, announcing the findings at a service in the basilica to mark the end of the Vatican’s Paoline year, in honor of the apostle.

Paul and Peter are the two main figures known for spreading the Christian faith after the death of Christ.

According to tradition, St. Paul, also known as the apostle of the Gentiles, was beheaded in Rome in the 1st century during the persecution of early Christians by Roman emperors. Popular belief holds that bone fragments from his head are in another Rome basilica, St. John Lateran, with his other remains inside the sarcophagus.

The pope said that when archaeologists opened the sarcophagus, they discovered alongside the bone fragments some grains of incense, a "precious" piece of purple linen with gold sequins and a blue fabric with linen filaments.  [I believe that purple imperial cloth was found in the tomb of Peter under the Vatican Basilica, probably from the time of Constantine.]

On Saturday, the Vatican newspaper announced that a round fresco edged in gold featuring the emaciated face of St. Paul had been discovered in excavations of the tombs of St. Tecla in Rome. It was believed to have been dated from the end of the fourth century, making it the oldest known icon of St. Paul, meaning it was an image designed for prayer, not just art, L’Osservatore Romano said.

Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, presidente of the Vatican’s culture department, said the discovery was an "extraordinary event" that was an "eloquent testimony" to the Christianity of the first centuries, L’Osservatore said.

Vatican archaeologists in 2002 began excavating the 8-foot(2.4-meter)-long tomb of St. Paul, which dates from at least A.D. 390 and was buried under the basilica’s main altar. The decision to unearth it was made after pilgrims who came to Rome during the Roman Catholic Church’s 2000 Jubilee year expressed disappointment at finding that the saint’s tomb – buried under layers of plaster and further hidden by an iron grate – could not be visited or touched.

The top of the coffin has small openings – subsequently covered with mortar – because in ancient times Christians would insert offerings or try to touch the remains.

The basilica stands at the site of two 4th-century churches – including one destroyed by a fire in 1823 that had left the tomb visible, first above ground and later in a crypt. After the fire, the crypt was filled with earth and covered by a new altar. A slab of cracked marble with the words "Paul apostle martyr" in Latin was also found embedded in the floor above the tomb.

Monday is the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, a major feast day for the Roman Catholic Church, during which the pope will bestow a woolen pallium, or scarf, on all the new archbishops he has recently named. The pallium is a band of white wool decorated with black crosses that is a sign of pastoral authority and a symbol of the archbishops’ bond with the pope.

At the end of Sunday’s service in the warm basilica, the 82-year-old Benedict lost his balance slightly as he slipped on a step on the altar, and was steadied by one of his assistants who was by his side.

I caught some articles in L’Osservatore before they scrolled off.