Without ruling on its merits, an Alabama judge blocked a plan to form a town whose laws would be based only on the King James Bible and the Ten Commandments. In April, probate judge Bobby Day said the application to incorporate the town of Brooksville had failed to meet the minimum standards of state law for an incorporation vote. Among the judge’s objections to the application were that too few people signed a petition in favor of the idea, and it lacked maps to show the town’s exact location. Only one hundred sixty people had signed a petition in favor of the plan, while three hundred eighty of the townspeople signed petitions against it.
Brooksville, much of which already falls within the city of Priceville, is little more than a few dozen houses and mobile homes situated around two intersections with gas stations. Trucks rumble along the main highway, a two-lane blacktop.
Evangelist James R. Henderson and others wanted to form a new town that would use the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ teachings as laws, with citizens providing their own police protection through a community watch. The only officeholder would be a volunteer mayor, and each of the town’s six hundred residents would serve on the city council.
“The Bible rules are great, but you can’t live by them alone,” said Dot Brinkley, one of about twenty opponents who attended the hearing. “They’re just telling us to get a gun and protect ourselves. We’ve got to have other things and sewer mains.”
Last month we reported a secular study that concluded that devout women enjoy more satisfying sex lives. Here’s another example of the practical good fruits of living according to Christian tenets: A new study produced by American university sociologists shows that couples who live together before marriage are forty-eight percent more likely to get divorced than those who do not.
In fact, living together-which more than 4.2 million American couples now do-almost doubles the risk of wife-battering and child abuse. Unmarried couples also register lower “happiness levels” than their married counterparts.
David Popenoe, a Rutgers University sociologist and co-author of the study based on previous research and census information, says, contrary to what many people believe, “Living together is not a good way to prepare for marriage or to avoid divorce.” Fellow researcher Alan Booth of Pennsylvania State University said “permanent cohabitants” who live together on a full-time basis with no intentions of marriage “show a lot of symptoms of depression. Their relationships are not stable, especially if there are children.”
Since 1960, the number of unmarried couples in America has increased almost tenfold. The total of those households with children has gone up from twenty-one percent to thirty-six percent in the past decade.
Luke was a stocky man with a bad back who was arthritic and short of breath. For the first time, scientists examining the remains of an apostle are able to reconstruct how he looked, at least in old age.
We already know that the author of the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles was a doctor and that he addressed his writings to a Greek called Theophilus, trying to put the stories about Christ and “the traditions handed down to us by eyewitnesses” into an “orderly narrative” (Luke 1: 1–4). According to scientists who have examined what are believed to be his remains, it appears the evangelist was a short, swarthy, long-faced man who died in his eighties and suffered from back trouble, arthritis, and emphysema.
Skepticism about supposed relics has often proved well-founded in the past. But Church authorities in Padua, Italy, near Venice, announced last October that they had authorized the examination of the contents of a lead casket marked “S. L. Evang” in the Basilica of Santa Giustina, which has long been held to be Luke’s final resting place.
A fourteen-member commission of scientists, historians, and churchmen was set up to subject the remains to forensic examination. Vito Wiel Marin, professor of anatomy and histology at Padua University in Italy and a member of the commission, said the bones found in the lead casket lacked a skull. This was consistent with the tradition that a skull kept at St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, Hungary, was that of Luke and had been transferred there in 1354 by Emperor Charles IV.
“We had the skull brought from Prague, and it matches the topmost cervical vertebrae of the skeleton exactly,” said Marin. Other members of the commission-including Maria Antonia Capitanio, an Italian anthropologist, and Emanuel Vlcek, a Czech pathologist-confirmed the match. “The cranium-atlas articulation is perfect. A second perfectly matching example is unimaginable,” Marin told the Italian magazine Trenta Giorni (Thirty Days).
Luke was born in Antioch, which was then in Syria and is now part of Turkey. He was a traveling companion of Paul, who described him in Colossians 4:14 as “my dear friend Luke, the doctor.” Although he did not see the Lord in the flesh, his account is widely held to be the most meticulous of the Gospel narratives, a reflection of his intellectual and medical training.
Marin said the investigators had found third-century coins in the bottom of the lead casket, as well as seashells, plant residues, and rodent skeletons, together with parchments and coins from Renaissance times, indicating that the coffin had been opened again in the sixteenth century. The casket is “an exact fit” for the empty marble sarcophagus at Thebes in Greece, which is still venerated as Luke’s original tomb.
Marin said the examination of the remains show they are of “a male who died in old age, between eighty and eighty-five. He was about five feet, three inches tall, of powerful, stocky build.” He said the curve of the ribs indicated pulmonary emphysema, while a “serious diffuse osteoporosis” suggested arthrosis of the spinal column.
The investigating team has promised to release its conclusions in full for the millennium celebrations and is confident its researches will show that the relics are genuine.
A commentator on the February 13 installment of “Performance Today” on National Public Radio, which focused on liturgical music, pointed out that Catholic sacred music — polyphony and traditional chant — has been the rage for more than a decade.
A growing number of trained Catholic musicians, with the clear vision of hindsight, maintain that the imposition of the new liturgy was a turning point-downward. It not only introduced non-sacred language and tampered with the traditional structure of the Mass, it introduced secular and democratized music styles into Catholic worship, contrary to centuries of explicit instructions by popes.
The major force within Catholic music today remains the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, a group still enamored with guitars, synthesizers, and folk and new-age music. But another group, the Association of Cathedral Musicians, recently co-sponsored (with the U.S. bishops’ liturgy committee and Catholic University of America) a music conference in Washington, D.C.
Attendee Charles Olegar, choirmaster and organist at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Mobile, Alabama, reported a notable shift away from the popular styles and rag-tag instruments and toward a capella chant, polyphony, and traditional hymnody with organ. Several speakers urged the musicians to throwaway Glory and Praise and any hymnals that contain songs from it, and they were met with general agreement. Another conference-goer reported that great appreciation was expressed for the new Adoremus Hymnal; Olegar, for instance, wants it to be in exclusive use at the Mobile cathedral.
There was also consensus that the Communion hymn – an emphasis of post-Vatican liturgical reform – should be abolished and replaced with traditional chant, or simply organ, or nothing. In addition, most agreed that vernacular congregational hymns in general should be used only for processionals and recessionals.
This slight indication of a turning of the tide might cheer some Catholics weary of bad church music. But the restoration of traditional music in the Novus Ordo Mass would require changes in the rubrics of the General Instruction on the Roman Missal. For instance, the GIRM requires that the “people of God” sing the Gloria together, which necessarily excludes a vast amount of traditional choral repertoire.
Some traditionalists griped that even the Adoremus Hymnal contains only a sliver of the sacred chant literature, and, given the ICEL translations of the Novus Ordo reprinted in it, any Catholic from pre-conciliar times might assume it was some sort of Protestant hybrid hymnal. Wrote conference attendee Jeffrey Tucker in an e-mail to an Internet Catholic music chat group: “That this [the Adoremus] hymnal is regarded as restorationist and reactionary is all we need to know about the state of things.”
The hokey pokey. You did it as a group dance when you were in kindergarten. It involves participants forming a circle and flinging their limbs about in line with commands. Now an Anglican clergyman claims to have uncovered its sinister roots. George Nairn-Briggs, provost of Wakefield Cathedral, West Yorkshire, England, says both the name of the dance and its actions were designed to satirize the Latin Mass and Catholic clergy.
“In the days when the priest celebrated the Mass with his back to the people and whispered the Latin words of consecration with many hand movements, the laity mimicked the movements as they saw them and the words as they misheard them,” Nairn-Briggs claims. The words “hokey pokey” were a mishearing — or a deliberate parody — of the Latin phrase ” Hoc est enim corpus meum” (“This is my body”).
Nairn-Briggs also contends that another corruption of the same phrase is “hocus pocus,” the words believed to be used by magicians when they were casting spells.
Historical sources appear to back up his theories. The hokey pokey became a popular dance in the 1940s in America and crossed the Atlantic with U. S. soldiers. But an earlier folk-dance version was performed in mainland Europe in the nineteenth century and was taken to the U.S. by refugees.
The Oxford English Dictionary says that “hokey pokey” comes from the phrase “hocus pocus,” the traditional magicians’ incantation that derives from a Latin phrase used in satanic Masses, themselves parodies of the Latin Mass.
“Paradise is that place up in the clouds where people drink coffee.” This was the response given by twenty-two percent of Italian children in a survey made by the advertising agency McCann Erikson using a sample of three hundred twenty children between the ages of seven and twelve. The children’s answer is the result of a successful Italian television commercial where an older actor plays St. Peter, dressed in an elegant white suit and hat, who spends his time in heaven sitting in an armchair drinking coffee. The speaker is another comic actor with constant surprises who is also portrayed drinking coffee. Peter’s cook is a feminine angel with whom he falls in love. Similar incidents follow.
The series of ads for a well-known brand of Italian coffee has striking dialogue that changes with current events. For example, when the soccer World Cup was being played last year, those in purgatory not only had to watch black-and-white TV by way of punishment, the events they viewed were deferred by two years.
The survey results caused Vincenzo Vita, the Italian under-secretary of communications, to declare his intention to introduce into law a norm banning advertising of any kind during children’s programs.
A new book contains the inspiring conversion stories of fifteen doctors who no longer prescribe contraceptives to their patients. The compelling narratives in Physicians Healed speak to the struggles healthcare professionals, clergy, and lay people face in accepting the Church’s teaching on contraception and the great joy and peace that come in obeying God’s plan for sex within marriage. The doctors discuss how they dealt with performing abortions while in medical school, prescribing the Pill to teenagers, and the financial pressures to prescribe contraceptives to their patients. In the end, the faith of these doctors triumphs as their moral struggle ends with a decision to stop prescribing contraceptives. This book shows the great impact one person’s witness can have on other people’s moral decisions and the tremendous power of the clergy to influence the faithful. Physicians Healed can be ordered for $10 from One More Soul by calling 800-307-7685 or by visiting its web site at http://www.omsouLcom.
A historic meeting between Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders has been postponed because of the war between NATO and Yugoslavia. In late April leaders from both churches said they would meet in June to look for similarities between the two churches separated for half a millennium.
“The work now is to see where the Church was before the division,” said Cardinal William Keeler, who was to meet with Archbishop Spyridon, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church. “We have to get to know each other better.” One possibility to be discussed: full communion between the two churches and the state churches in central and eastern Europe since the collapse of communism. The meeting, the first ever in the western hemisphere, was postponed until sometime in the year 2000. The Orthodox Christian Church has three hundred million followers.
In mid-April, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) announced emergency shipments of “reproductive health services” to Kosovar refugees.
Two weeks before, the Holy See delegation had moved that refugees should receive a much broader range of health and social services. Its proposal, which called specifically for basic services like clean water and safe sanitation, died without support from the wealthy nations, and without support from UNFPA. The list of “reproductive health” supplies sent to 350,000 Kosovar refugees included an oral contraception kit, a sexually transmitted disease kit, intrauterine devices (IUDs), a “complications from abortions” kit, vacuum extraction equipment, and condoms. The kits also contained emergency contraception pills that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, thereby causing a chemical abortion.
Critics charge that UNFPA promotes abortion in refugee camps, which are among the most unsanitary and dangerous places on earth. UNFPA’s own figures bear this out. The agency reports that in Haiti, for instance, eighty-eight percent of women have access to contraceptives while only twenty-two percent have access to clean water.
“It is outrageous that they are not providing basic health services for these people,” said Jeanne Head, chief UN. lobbyist for International Right to Life Federation and an obstetric nurse for thirty years. “Basic things, like clean water. UNFPA seems to be obsessed with preventing people from having children, which has to be the last thing on a refugee’s mind.”
In the cacophony of commentary following the high school massacre in Littleton, Colorado, this piece from the Denver Catholic Register by Archbishop Charles Chaput, “Ending the Violence Begins With Our Own Conversion,” stands out so purely we run it in its entirety:
“‘He descended into hell’
“Over a lifetime of faith, each of us, as believers, recites those words from the Creed thousands of times. We may not understand them, but they’re familiar. They’re routine. And then something happens to show us what they really mean.
“Watching a disaster unfold for your community in the glare of the international mass media is terrible and unreal at the same time. Terrible in its bloody cost; unreal in its brutal disconnection from daily life. The impact of what happened this past week in Littleton, however, didn’t fully strike home in my heart until the morning after the murders, when I visited a large prayer gathering of students from Columbine High School, and spent time with the families of two of the students who died. They taught me something.
“The students who gathered to pray and comfort each other showed me again the importance of sharing not just our sorrow but our hope. God created us to witness his love to each other, and we draw our life from the friendship, the mercy and the kindness we offer to others in pain. The young Columbine students I listened to spoke individually – one by one – of the need to be strong, to keep alive hope in the future, and to turn away from violence. Despite all their confusion and all their hurt, they would not despair. I think I understand why. We’re creatures of life. This is the way God made us: to assert life in the face of death.
“Even more moving was my time with the families of two students who had been murdered. In the midst of their great suffering-a loss I can’t imagine-the parents radiated a dignity that I will always remember and a confidence that God would somehow care for them and the children they had lost, no matter how fierce their pain. This is where words break down. This is where you see, up close, that faith-real, living faith-is rooted finally not in how smart, or affluent, or successful, or sensitive persons are, but in how well they love. Scripture says that ‘love is as strong as death.’ I know it is stronger. I saw it.
“As time passes, we need to make sense of the Columbine killings. The media are already filled with sound bites of shock and disbelief; psychologists, sociologists, grief counselors, and law enforcement officers-all with their theories and plans. God bless them for it. We certainly need help. Violence is now pervasive in American society-in our homes, our schools, on our streets, in our cars as we drive home from work, in the news media, in the rhythms and lyrics of our music, in our novels, films, and video games. It is so prevalent that we have become largely unconscious of it. But, as we discover in places like the hallways of Columbine High, it is bitterly, urgently real.
“The causes of this violence are many and complicated: racism, fear, selfishness. But in another, deeper sense, the cause is very simple: We’re losing God, and, in losing him, we’re losing ourselves. The complete contempt for human life shown by the young killers at Columbine is not an accident, or an anomaly, or a freak flaw in our social fabric. It’s what we create when we live a contradiction. We can’t systematically kill the unborn, the infirm and the condemned prisoners among us; we can’t glorify brutality in our entertainment; we can’t market avarice and greed . . . and then hope that somehow our children will help build a culture of life.
“We need to change. But societies only change when families change, and families only change when individuals change. Without a conversion to humility, non-violence, and selflessness in our own hearts, all our talk about ‘ending the violence’ may end as pious generalities. It is not enough to speak about reforming our society and community. We need to reform ourselves.
“Two questions linger in the aftermath of the Littleton tragedy. How could a good God allow such savagery? And why did this happen to us?
“In regard to the first: God gave us the gift of freedom, and if we are free, we are free to do terrible, as well as marvelous, things. And we must also live with the results of others’ freedom. But God does not abandon us in our freedom, or in our suffering. This is the meaning of the cross, the meaning of Jesus’ life and death, the meaning of ‘he descended into hell.’ God spared his only Son no suffering and no sorrow-so that he would know and understand and share everything about the human heart. This is how fiercely he loves us.
“In regard to the second: Why not us? Why should evil be at home in faraway places like Kosovo and Sudan and not find its way to Colorado? The human heart is the same everywhere-and so is the One for whom we yearn.
“‘He descended into hell.’ The Son of God descended into hell . . . and so have we all, over the past few days. But that isn’t the end of the story. On the third day, he rose again from the dead. Jesus Christ is Lord, ‘the resurrection and the life,’ and we-his brothers and sisters-are children of life. When we claim that inheritance, seed it in our hearts, and conform our lives to it, then and only then will the violence in our culture begin to be healed.
“In this Easter season and throughout the coming months, I ask you to join me in praying in a special way for the families who have been affected by the Columbine tragedy. But I also ask you to pray that each of us-including myself-will experience a deep conversion of heart toward love and nonviolence in all our relationships with others.”