A TRIO OF GOOFBALL IDEAS
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
This week, three off-the-wall items:
1. I appreciate plain speaking, no matter where it comes from. Thus it was good to see We Are Church forthrightly state its position on the Eucharist. In brief, the dissident group is against the sacrament.
According to a report from Catholic World News, We Are Church leaders said that "the dogma of transubstantiation ... is unacceptable to Protestants and thus impedes ecumenical unity. The group decried traditional forms of Catholic piety, such as Eucharistic adoration and processions, as tending to make an 'idol' of the Blessed Sacrament."
Well, yeah. Since Protestant churches do not have the Eucharist, the sacrament "impedes ecumenical unity." Ditto for any other distinctive belief of the Catholic Church.
No Protestant church has a pope either, which means the papacy is an impediment. No Protestant church has a hierarchy of bishops, so that is another obstacle. No Protestant church endorses the veneration of saints the way the Catholic Church does, so that is yet another impediment. In fact, every belief that distinguishes the Catholic Church from other Christian churches is an impediment. This is news?
What about transubstantiation? If the belief is false, then adoration and processions do amount to idol worship. You worship an idol when you worship something that is not God. If the Eucharist is not really Christ--if the Real Presence is not really present--then the host is just a piece of bread, and to adore it or even to honor it in a procession is to give the bread the regard that is due God only.
Unsurprisingly, We Are Church could not leave bad enough alone. It also whined that people who are divorced and remarried are barred from Communion and that priests have a "monopoly" on the sacrament.
In a way, you can appreciate the latter point. If the Eucharist is merely symbolic, why reserve the confection of the sacrament to priests? If the bread remains just bread, anyone could oversee the Eucharist. No special power granted through ordination would be needed to celebrate Mass.
As for Communion for the divorced and remarried, why not, if the Eucharist is just plain bread? Why exclude anyone at all from the ceremony?
2. World Net Daily (www.worldnetdaily.com), a popular Evangelical site, this week had this as its main headline: "Robertson: Disasters Point to 2nd Coming." The subhead said: "Evangelist observes quakes, hurricanes 'starting to hit with amazing regularity.'"
You might remember that Pat Robertson, founder of the 700 Club and a one-time presidential candidate, was in the secular press most recently for advocating the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. He meteorological comments are considerably less volatile but not any more intelligent.
He is quoted as saying what he has been saying for years, that a rash of natural disasters indicates that the End Times are near at hand. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the earthquakes that hit Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan mean that God is about to wrap things up for mankind.
World Net Daily follows up the article about Robertson with one that tries to substantiate his position. It says that reported earthquakes are up by a third in the last five years. Even if true, this does not necessarily mean that the number of earthquakes has risen. It could mean that there are more seismometers in place around the world or that reporting procedures have been relaxed so that lesser tremors are now counted as earthquakes.
The online news service implies that the number of hurricanes has risen dramatically, which actually is not the case, and that their severity has increased, which also is not true.
In New Orleans about 1,000 people are known to have died as a result of Katrina, but the 1900 hurricane that hit Galveston took 6,000 lives. It would be incorrect to argue from this that hurricanes are now only one-sixth the threat that they were a century ago, but that is the kind of math that World Net Daily is playing with.
3. Bill Koenig runs an Internet news service called Koenig's International News. Its web address (watch.org) is a featured link at World Net Daily. What Koenig claims in his newest book, "Eye to Eye: Facing the Consequences of Dividing Israel," is that the U.S. is being punished by natural disasters because recent presidents have acted against the interests of Israel.
"What do these major record-setting events have in common?" asks Koenig:
a. "Nine of the ten costliest insurance events in U.S. history"
b. "Six of the seven costliest hurricanes in U.S. history"
c. "Three of the four largest tornado breakouts in U.S. history"
d. "Nine of the top ten natural disasters in U.S. history ranked by FEMA relief costs"
e. "The two largest terrorism events in U.S. history"
He gives the answer: "All of these major catastrophes transpired on the very same day or within 24 hours of U.S. presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush applying pressure on Israel to trade her land for promises of 'peace and security.'"
The promo for Koenig's book says that he "provides undeniable facts and conclusive evidence showing that indeed the leaders of the United States and the world are on a collision course with God over Israel's covenant land."
Koenig uses the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy: "After this, therefore because of this." It is like saying you got in a car accident because you wore mismatched socks today--after all, you never had had an accident before, and you never had worn mismatched socks before, so the one must have led to the other.
If recent disasters have been especially costly, that might mean nothing more than that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes recently have hit areas that were built up considerably since they last were devastated. The hurricane that hit Galveston in 1900 was a bigger event in terms of lives lost than was the hurricane that hit New Orleans, but the latter resulted in many times more monetary loss because so much had been constructed over the intervening century.
And what about the connection between natural disasters and presidential pressure on Israel? The correlation is bogus, since the last three presidents have been involved in Middle East peace-seeking efforts on almost a daily basis. Maybe someone else will write a book arguing that the way to prevent devastation by storms and earthquakes is to have presidents put the diplomatic squeeze on Israel. After all, such pressure usually coincides with an absence of natural disasters.
Evangelicals often claim they are not taken seriously when it comes to public policy issues. To the extent they subscribe to Pat Robertson's and Bill Koenig's ideas, they have no cause for complaint.
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
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