The
Catholic Weekly
Online
Sydney
19 October 2003
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Peace
in our hands
Jubilee
week for Pope
Special
guests at Mother Teresa’s beatification
School
insurance hike
Honoured
by university
It’s
truly feminine and truly beautiful
Spiritually
renewed by Lourdes
$1.75m
for Caritas
Catholic
Women’s Network
Board
short bonanza for Vinnies
Advice
to lectors, acolytes
Much
deeper reality
Editorial:
Time for tribute
Letters:
Barrel of a gun
Conversation:
Terry Hanley, lay missionary who has spent nearly 15 years in the field - Happy
to ‘spend rest of my life in Africa’
What
is peace like?
Religion
test upsurge
Malouf
on campus
Ministry
of Jesus to the sick and dying
‘Father,
this is your life’
‘Priest
in residence’ honoured
Bushland
setting for Thurgoona church
Full-on
disciple of Jesus
Active
practice of faith
Requiem
Mass for ‘Bacon Priest’
Letters: Barrel of a gun
Thank you for your article on our mission in Peru (Baptism query, then it was the barrel of a gun, CW 12/10).
I was quoted as saying “I did the usual parish priest things” but my comment was “the normal things that a parish priest does”.
Could I recommend to Peruvian and Spanish-speaking people, and all who would like to celebrate one of our great feasts, the Mass in honour of Our Lord of Miracles, followed by a procession and fiesta, at 1.30pm on Sunday, October 19, at Holy Family Church, Oxford Road, Ingleburn.
Fr John Andersen,
Iquitos, Peru
SAME RELIGION?
Fr Martin Maunsell (A difference, Letters CW 5/10) says: “Protestants, Christians and Catholics all belong to the same religion.”
As Catholics we believe that the Pope is the vicar of Christ, that the Mass is a true sacrifice and that at Holy Communion we receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ under the appearance of bread.
Protestants do not hold these beliefs. It stands to reason then, that Catholics and Protestants do not belong to the same religion.
Peter Kaline
Woollahra, NSW
NO CONTRADICTIONS
Fr Dietzen asserts that our knowledge of St Joseph derives from the Gospels “and even what they tell us is brief and sometimes contradictory” (Address unknown, Insights CW 28/9).
The original biblical texts as written by the inspired writers contain no errors, i.e. no real contradictions.
Pope Leo XIII observed: “For all the books (of the Bible) which the Church receives as sacred and canonical are written wholly and entirely with all their parts, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error but excludes and rejects it absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God himself, the supreme truth, can utter that which is not true” (Providentissimus Deus).
In the same encyclical Pope Leo insists: “Those who maintain that an error is possible in any genuine passage of the sacred writings either pervert the Catholic notion of inspiration or make God the author of such error.”
On the same theme in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, Pope Pius XII wrote: “This teaching which our predecessor Leo XIII set forth with such solemnity we also proclaim with our authority, and we urge all to adhere to it religiously.”
Valentine Gallagher
Arncliffe, NSW
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
Does Mr Ken Wildy (Natural events, Letters CW 28/9) not know that God made the world … all growing things, all birds and beasts, that God made us to know him, to love him, to bring us to his eternal love?
Do scientists know more than our Creator God?
It is written in Genesis that “the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire” and “overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground”.
FM Bridges
Drummoyne, NSW
WOMEN RELIGIOUS?
I was watching the video of the September episcopal ordinations of Bishops Porteous and Fisher.
The procession of the many cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, seminarians and leaders of Churches of other Christian denominationsand of other Catholic Churches was an overwhelming sight.
But why were there no women religious in the procession?
Were they excluded and, if so, why?
David Lo
Marsfield, NSW
NEW MASS
According to Fr Sean Cullen of Wollongong diocese, a new Mass setting features the singing of the Eucharistic Prayer by parishioners (Hopes that
new Mass will avoid the sounds of silence in Wollongong, CW 5/10).
Canon law #907 states that deacons and lay persons are not to say the eucharist prayer which is reserved to the celebrating priest.
This has been emphasised in several Vatican instructions, e.g. “It is reserved to the priest, in virtue of his ordination, to proclaim the Eucharistic Prayer … It is therefore an abuse to have some parts of the Eucharistic Prayer said by the deacon, by a lower minister, or by the faithful” (Inaestimabile Donum, 4, 1980).
Arthur Negus,
Tuggerawong, NSW
OXFORD DEBATE
In his address to the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship (Truth, a fictional conflict and the need for Christian morality, CW 31/8), the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr George Pell, is quoted as saying that he was “almost disappointed to learn that the whole account” of the 1860 Oxford debate between Bishop Wilberforce and TH Huxley “is fictional, and was shown to be fictional more than 20 years ago”.
In reaching this conclusion, the Archbishop relied heavily on a new book For the glory of God by Rodney Stark.
Unfortunately, Stark’s account of the debate is seriously flawed; it omits crucial evidence and misinterprets what others have said.
In fact, there are contemporary accounts of the bishop’s questioning of Huxley and also of Huxley’s response; the bishop himself mentioned speaking “in controversy with Huxley”.
All this, and much more, is recorded by JV Jensen in British Journal of the History of Science 21: 161-179 (1988).
Of course, not all accounts of the exchange tell exactly the same story. As with the gospels. different observers report the event differently
However, the archbishop can be assured that the evidence overwhelmlingly supports the notion that Wilberforce’s question and Huxley’s response are not fiction.
FW Nicholas
Mosman, NSW