Month: January 2018

General

My Top Ten Movies of 2017

January 3, 2018 Nick Olszyk 1

Favorites include a masterpiece about World War II, the “best superhero film ever made”, a movie about conversion, and Pixar’s takes on Purgatory, the Afterlife, and […]

No Picture
News Briefs

Bishop Barron: Don’t water down Christianity

January 3, 2018 CNA Daily News 1

Chicago, Ill., Jan 3, 2018 / 01:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Speaking to some 8,000 people at a Catholic leadership conference, Bishop Robert Barron said on Tuesday that trust in the risen Christ should give us the courage to preach the truth boldly.

“Through the Holy Spirit, the ascended, risen Christ commands his mystical Body the Church to do what he did, and to say what he said. That’s it…that’s the task of the Church to the present day.”

Barron, the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, is also the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and host of the award-winning “Catholicism” documentary.  

He delivered one of the opening keynotes at this year’s Student Leadership Summit in Chicago. Known as SLS, the summit is hosted by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) every other year. It aims to train student leaders and other ministers with tools for evangelization and missionary work, largely on college campuses.

This year’s SLS drew more than 8,000 participants, more than double the attendance of the last summit, hosted in 2016 in Dallas with approximately 3,400 participants.

In his talk, Bishop Barron focused on the Acts of the Apostles, a Biblical book that he said “sets the agenda for us” in the work of evangelization.

He noted that this book begins with an account of Jesus’ ascension, comparing Christ’s glorified position in heaven to that of a general who commands his army at a vantage point from above.

“It tells us very clearly who’s in charge, and what I mean by that is, the ascended Christ who now commands his Church.”

Moving on from the Ascension to the account of Pentecost, Barron said that the descent of the Holy Spirit compels us to spread the Word of God. The Holy Spirit comes to earth to guide the Church, he said, led by the ascended Christ from heaven.

“In a myriad ways, according to your particular missions, bring something of heaven to earth, doing as Jesus did,” the bishop exhorted attendants.

In bringing the message of heaven to earth, Catholics should be careful not to water down the Gospel or fall for bland and uninspiring half-truths, he said.

He recalled an encounter that he had with Biblical scholar Scott Hahn, who remarked that “there is no historical basis for the for the claim that St. Francis said, ‘Preach always, and when necessary, use words.’”

While indeed “our whole life should be a kind of preaching,” Barron said, the statement attributed to St. Francis can become a problem when it is “used as a justification for a kind of pastoral reductionism,” for example, the idea that “what it all really comes down to is taking care of the poor.”

While caring for the poor is important, Barron said, this work “in and of itself can never be evangelically sufficient.”

“This is not the time for anti-intellectualism in our Church! We have lots of young people, you know them, they’re your friends and colleagues, who are leaving the Church for intellectual reasons,” Barron said.

He called for a kind of “bold speech” needed to proclaim the Gospel, pointing to the preaching in the early Church, which challenged the widely held belief at the time that “Casear is Lord.”

“The bold speech of the Church is that not ‘Caesar,’ or any of his colleagues or predecessors or successors, but rather Jesus is Lord, Jesus is the king. And he is also Christos, anointed.”

The Roman empire at the time, Barron said, was rather liberal with regards to new religions, yet still rejected the early Christians because they identified Jesus – and not Caesar – as the only Lord.

“If he is Lord, everything in your life belongs to him. Your personal life, yes. Your body, yes. Your friendships, yes. Your political life, yes. Your entertainment, yes. All of it.”

When Christianity becomes reduced to a mere message that can be gained from the dominant culture, Bishop Barron said, it moves from the faith of early persecuted Christians to one which is rewarded lavishly by others.

“That’s what happens to a weakened, attenuated Christianity,” he said.

“In the Acts of the Apostles we hear that when those first disciples spoke, people were cut to the heart. Still true, still true to this day. Bland spiritual teachings, saying what everybody else says, that won’t cut anyone to the heart, but trust me, declaring the lordship of Jesus, that’ll cut them to the heart.”

Bishop Barron highlighted Jesus’ role in light of the Old Testament, saying that only as a fulfillment of laws and the prophets does Jesus make sense. He pointed to St. Stephen’s speech to the Sanhedrin before his martyrdom, in which the saint summarized the entire Old Testament and then described Jesus’ ministry.

When Jesus is cut off from his roots in Israel, he becomes just a philosopher or wise figure, a “flattened out, uninspiring Jesus,” the bishop warned.

In contrast, he said, “when you present Jesus as the fulfillment of the great story of Israel, Jesus as the fulfillment of the temple that was meant to bring humanity and divinity together, when you preach him as the fulfillment of the law and the covenant and the Torah, when you preach him as the culmination of all the proclamation of the prophets, people will be cut to the heart.”

Bishop Barron related a story he commonly tells of a little girl he met while working in Chicago who presented to him a detailed account of George Lucas’ “Star Wars” movies. He said that kids’ aptitude to memorize such complex plotlines and character names dispels the notion that they cannot understand the Bible.

“This great, rollicking, complex, rich story that we have, full of weird names, yeah, but no weirder than Obi-Wan Kenobi, right? The kids have no trouble with that. Don’t tell me they can’t understand the Bible. And therefore don’t tell me that they can’t appreciate Jesus as the culmination of that great story.”

The bishop ended his talk by encouraging conference attendees in prayer and asking them to help “remind the world whom they are to worship.”

“Everybody worships somebody or something,” he said. “Everyone’s got a king, right? Our job is to stand up boldly and say, ‘No, Christ is your king. Everything in your life belongs to him’.”

 

 

[…]

The Dispatch

Viva Cristo Rey!

January 3, 2018 George Weigel 4

While many Catholic schools are closing because of decreasing enrollments and financial pressures; the Cristo Rey network is opening new schools. […]

No Picture
News Briefs

Could Iranian protests bring religious freedom for Christians?

January 2, 2018 CNA Daily News 0

Tehran, Iran, Jan 2, 2018 / 04:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Ongoing protests in Iran could be a sign of hope for repressed religious minorities, if protesters demand that conscience rights be respected, said an Iranian-born journalist who converted to Catholicism in 2016.

Although most of those protesting in the streets of Iran were born after the 1979 revolution that led to the current Islamist regime, “many of them are chanting nostalgic slogans about the pre-revolutionary era,” noted Sohrab Ahmari.

“At the time Iran was no democracy,” he said, but the pre-revolution regime “was far less repressive and people retained many personal and social liberties, if not political ones.”

Ahmari was born in Tehran. He has lived in the United States for two decades and worked for the Wall Street Journal for several years before becoming a senior writer for Commentary magazine.

Ahmari spoke to CNA on Jan. 2, as Iranians protesting economic and social grievances flooded the streets of the Middle Eastern country.
 
Since the current round of protests erupted on Dec. 28, at least 21 people have died and 450 been arrested, CNN reports.

The protests are the largest in the country since the 2009 Green Movement, when thousands rallied in opposition to a presidential election they claimed was fraudulent.

The Iranian government has responded to the current demonstrations by sending out riot police and restricting access to internet and social media.
The protests began over economic issues. A year after sanctions against Iran were lifted by the United States, United Nations, and European Union, citizens of the Middle Eastern nation have yet to see the economic recovery that many had expected. Unemployment among the youth is high, and food and gasoline prices have risen significantly.

However, as the protests have grown, so have the grievances, with signs and slogans opposing what many see as a corrupt regime that suppresses the civil rights of its people.

“I don’t think you can separate the economic from the political,” Reza Marashi, research director for the National Iranian American Council, told CNN.

Ahmari agreed that the nation’s unrest shows a deep-seated discontent.

“The Iranians who are pouring into the streets have had it with an ideological regime that represses them and can’t even delivery basic economic security,” he said.

And while life is difficult for every Iranian, the situation for Christians and other religious minorities is particularly perilous, Ahmari told CNA.

“They are systematically discriminated against, are barred from various public offices and military posts, are prohibited by law from proselytizing, and so on.”

The regime does grant Christians and Jews a certain level of “second-class protection” as “People of the Book,” Ahmari said, but even this “limited protection only applies to the likes of Armenians and Assyrians, who are considered indigenous Christians.”

Converts are not protected, he said, because Sharia law – which is the foundation of Iran’s penal code – views apostasy from Islam as a crime punishable by death.

While the regime generally does not formally charge Christian converts with apostasy, Ahmari said, “it routinely harasses them, monitors and raids their house churches, and arrests and imprisons their pastors on trumped-up ‘national-security’ charges.”

Nearly a week after the start of the protests, it remains to be seen what effect they will have, if any. But Ahmari is hopeful that any changes in the government will include a greater respect for religious minorities.

Life before the 1979 revolution that brought Sharia law to the country “wasn’t ideal,” he acknowledged.

“(B)ut minorities thrived, and there was a sense that Iranian-ness wasn’t just about Shiite Islam but also incorporated pre-Islamic elements. Jews, Christians, Baha’i and others belonged to this identity. They were tolerated and even celebrated,” he said.

“If the protesters can recover something of that inclusive nationalism, then Christians and other ethnic and sectarian minorities will be better off than they are now.”
 

[…]