The Sheepcat

Synagogue Receives Torah Recovered from Auschwitz

The New York Times carries the remarkable story of the recovery of a Torah that had lain underground for more than six decades after a sexton at a Polish synagogue buried it to protect it from invading Nazis. Four of its panels were smuggled into Auschwitz and eventually entrusted to a Jewish-born Catholic priest. Today, in recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day, a synagogue in New York was to rededicate the restored Torah scroll. The Nazis have had their evil day; the God of Abraham is greater than they.

Attentive readers may have noticed signs of my long-standing interest in matters Jewish. With this post I'm adding a new TypePad category, Jews and Judaism, and I may eventually get around to tagging some older posts on the theme. They aren't all on the Holocaust, though that topic looms rather large.

Link thanks to TitusOneNine.

Every Knee Shall Bend South

The Kloska Family Blog shows pictures from an awesome Eucharistic Procession on the campus of Notre Dame.

Link thanks to the Curt Jester, via Diogenes.

Liberal Jesuit Praises Pope

A very long time ago, "Jesuit Praises Pope" would have been a dog-bites-man headline, and "liberal Jesuit" would have been an oxymoron. That era has long passed, and I used to cheer its passing.

But can the turning of the tide back towards orthodoxy in the Jesuit order be held back when the associate editor of America praises the Pope's homily yesterday at St Patrick's Cathedral in New York as one of the best he has ever heard? The day before, after the Pope's "Shalom" to the Jewish congregation and meeting with victims of sexual abuse, Rev James Martin, SJ, had observed a softening of his attitude to Benedict.

All of us have our blind spots about other people and other groups. Those blind spots can be overcome best by personal contact, honest dialogue, heartfelt prayer, and the hard work of trying to understand someone different than oneself. I think Benedict is trying very hard to do some of that with Jewish groups, with other Christian denominations and with people of other faiths. And I think he’s succeeding in building bridges, and changing relationships “for the better.”

As he does so, I’m finding that I’m succeeding in something, too: in feeling real admiration — and even affection — for the pope whose election I once lamented.

Of moments such as these are conversions made. Cherish them, and pray, pray without ceasing, that we all may find in this papal visit our own moments of humbling and grace.

B16, Joyful Shepherd

I hadn't read Pope Benedict's inaugural homily until Amy Welborn linked to it today (avoid the New York Times readers' comments on the thread unless you have a strong constitution).

Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him. The task of the shepherd, the task of the fisher of men, can often seem wearisome. But it is beautiful and wonderful, because it is truly a service to joy, to God’s joy which longs to break into the world....

Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? And once again the Pope [JPII] said: No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.

If only everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, could come to see this joyful leader unfettered by the templates which many a secular journalist uses to portray him.

"Christ Our Hope" is the theme of the trip. Not abortion, important as that is. Not the war in Iraq, important as that is. Christ. Let us open wide the doors to Christ.

Papal Visit Roundup

I can't possibly keep up here with all the coverage of the Pope's visit to the United States--most of my regulars will know where to look anyway--but I can point to some good resources, especially for non-Catholic readers who perhaps have decided now would be a good time to learn a little more about our beloved Papa. Saturation coverage of the papacy just after JPII died was, after all, one of the things that got me seriously interested in Catholicism.

• Christopher Blosser's Benedict in America has something for everyone.
• Amy Welborn has an excellent roundup of current reporting and commentary as well as meatier background reading.
• EWTN-TV has live and encore coverage of major events.
• AmericanPapist has lots of engaging bits an' bobs.

That'll keep you busy till Sunday and then some.

Prayer Request

Please pray for the repose of the soul of Richard, who was husband and father to friends of mine. He was Catholic. The funeral is Thursday at 10:30.

Couple Reverses Sterilization

A friend of Radical Catholic Mom's tells how she and her husband decided to reverse the vasectomy he'd had done before they reverted to the Catholic faith. It's a remarkable story, concisely told, and I enjoyed this remark:

Unfortunately I don’t think that NFP is presented nearly enough [in RCIA] and one of its pitfalls is that some of the best NFP stories are from larger families. People see this and automatically think that NFP is only appropriate if you want to raise a baseball team or something which is totally not the case.

First It Was Clinton's Bosnian Snipers

... and now it looks as if there will have been some high drama during the still-to-come papal tour, according to this CBS story.

Pope Benedict XVI will visit a synagogue led by a rabbi who survived the Holocaust during his first papal trip to the United States, the nation's bishops said Thursday.

I suppose journalists have it drummed into them to get to the verb speedily, so moving "During his first papal trip" to the beginning of the sentence might make some readers fall asleep, but still, that's one badly misplaced modifier.

Catholic Education Worth Going to Court For?

David Ryan, an atheist, is suing his ex-wife, Susan Bisig, a practising Catholic, to keep their son from enrolling in St. Xavier High School in Louisville, Kentucky.

According to the news story, "Whichever parent wins will pay Michael's tuition, [Judge] Feeley said." So money doesn't seem to be the central issue. Rather the two sides are squaring off over parental rights: according to the Kentucky constitution, no one shall be "compelled to send his child to any school to which he may be conscientiously opposed."

In court papers, Ryan has said that "Any parochial school controlled by the Catholic Church will teach and attempt to indoctrinate my son into a belief system which I reject."...

"The mother has equal constitutional rights not to have the court forbid a school because it is religious," [her lawyer] said.

I was hoping St X would live up to the father's fears that the school would actually form the boy in the Catholic faith. Unfortunately, of course, a lot of Catholic schools are rather less Catholic than they ought to be.

And to be fair, I found a bit on the school's site about corporal works of mercy and various charitable activities--all well and good, but virtually any public high school encourages its students to volunteer for good causes. How much of the school's culture is distinctively Catholic?

So I searched for some Catholic terms (and "contraception", about which a Catholic school might be expected to have a thing or two to say to its teenaged charges).

To put the data in perspective (mindful of a cautionary note about interpreting press coverage of Benedict XVI on the basis of rather crude quantitative methods), I tried the same searches using Google at the site for De La Salle College, a Catholic private school in Toronto I visited last year to sing at a Lenten retreat for the Catholic Teachers Guild. So here's what came up.

(Sorry if you end up having to scroll way down. I've fiddled with the formatting, but Typepad doesn't seem to want to cooperate with my table.)

Term	St X	De La Salle
pray	4	29
God	21	175
magisterium	0	3
virgin	4, none to do with the Blessed Virgin Mary	15
pope	3	35
eucharist	0	2
tabernacle	0	2
adoration	0	1
Jesus	6	62
chapel	25	38
contraception	1	0
Bible	4	20
faith	20	28
sacrament	4	3
rosary	0	38
devotion	5	1
bishop	18, mostly as a personal surname	22 excluding "Bishop Strachan" (school)
pro-life	1	1
gospel	7	34
Vatican	0	3
communion	0	7
vocation	2	7
feast day	16	69

Alas, I confess, somewhere along the way this became a dogged and less than charitable exercise in demonstrating the thinness of St X's Catholic identity. I thought I had a perfect "Gotcha!" against the Kentucky school when its site yielded 250 hits for "football," dwarfing the count for any of the religious terms I had searched for. Harumph! What shamefully misguided priorities!

The same term, "football," at De La Salle? About 2600 hits. Serves me right.

Link thanks to TitusOneNine.

Bishop Burke Did Not Give Up on Gay Activist

Eric Hess tells how his defiance and anger as one of Wisconsin's most prominent gay activists was met with pastoral kindness on the part of the bishop, and hope that Hess would eventually reconcile with the Church.

Link via Clinging to the Barque of Peter.