New Zealand Conservative

I've just been reading an article on the website of The Guardian about an ex-nun, who says she is both a female Catholic priest and a Bishop and wears a Bishop's ring. She was 'ordained' by a renegade Catholic Bishop and, along with six other women, has been excommunicated by Rome. She hasn't let that stop her, however, from performing baptisms, funerals, and marriages. The article also mentions her doing a funeral Mass. Ms Mayr-Lumetzberger, it seems, chooses to ignore her excommunication because she doesn't agree with it. Excommunication, though, is surely a heavy price to pay. “It doesn’t touch me,” she says serenely. “The canon [church] law used against me was an unjust law made by celibate men who rule over people whose lives they do not really know, and who give no explanation as to why these negative laws should be followed. Except fear.” With all due respect, you can't be something if you do not have the authority from the governing body of the...

The title of this post is based on the title of a story that appeared on the Stuff website over the weekend (' Catholics Tell Gays To Ditch Sex '), that I have changed to more accurately reflect the teaching of the Church. The story is concerning the new video The Third Way that I posted about a few weeks ago, and reports how the Catholic Bishop of Auckland, Patrick Dunn, now wants to use the video in teaching the position of the Church on homosexuality. The story begins - Gay people should give up sex if they want to be Catholics, according to a documentary supported by the New Zealand Catholic church. A video endorsed by Auckland Bishop Patrick Dunn says homosexual sex is a sin and those who are experiencing same-sex attraction are encouraged to "love God" instead. But the gay community says the doco is "horrifying" and an insidious attempt to make it seem the church is more tolerant towards homosexuals. The Third Way, billed as the church...

I read an interesting story today about a woman who says that reading atheist author Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion led her to becoming Catholic. I doubt that Dawkins would be very happy with that! After she began reading the book, at the insistence of her daughter, she found that it contained "no cogent arguments" and afterward, read Pope benedict's book Jesus of Nazareth which led to her conversion. Truthfully, I found the [ The God Delusion ] a waste of my time as it afforded me no cogent arguments concerning the existence or non-existence of God. In fact, not only was Dawkins disrespectful of opinions other than his own, I found his statements about Jesus to be so ill-informed (and, mind you, I was no fount of scholarly information myself) that I resolved to actually learn something about Jesus Christ. Reading Dawkins challenged me to go beyond my comfort zone and honestly confront the issues holding me back from a full commitment to faith. My sens...

A video message by Pope Francis, recently shown at a Pentecostal conference in the U.S, where he gives voice to his desire for unity between the Catholic and Protestant churches, asking them to pray for him, and saying he will pray for them.

From What's wrong with Belgium , Tracey Rowland writes of the lack of authentic Catholic culture there: I first visited Belgium in 2004 to attend a theology conference in Leuven. The conference Mass was the most bizarre liturgical experience of my life. It did not take place in any of the many churches in Leuven but in the conference room itself. Part of the ritual took the form of watching a video of the September 11 attack on the twin towers while listening to mood music. One of the participants from Holland was dressed in a folk costume and looked like a member of the band The Village People. There was also a Nigerian priest who was treated like an idiot because he expressed respect for Cardinal Arinze. I took some flak for being critical of the culture of modernity and one polite person apologized to me by saying, “you see, around here people think of you as an ally of Joseph Ratzinger”! My overall impression was that Leuven was like a town that had been hit by a ne...

Terry Chimes (second from Left) with Punk-rock band, The Clash The Catholic Herald has a great article about Terry Chimes, erstwhile drummer for The Clash and other bands, who describe his return to Catholicism. In his autobiography, The Strange Case of Doctor Terry and Mr Chimes, baptised Catholic Terry Chimes, who drummed on The Clash’s eponymous debut album and toured with the band in the early 1980s, writes about his journey back to the Catholic faith. Chimes describes stumbling across a copy of CS Lewis’s book Mere Christianity at a car boot sale in 1998 and reading about Lewis’s analysis of the sin of pride. Chimes said: “There was a chapter entitled The Great Sin. The great sin is pride, the tendency we all have to think we are better than someone else. I had always known that pride existed but wondered why it’s referred to as the great sin. That was until I realised the significance of pride as an obstacle to spiritual growth. “The problem with pride is that those...

From NewsTalkZB: There's been a massive change to New Zealand's religious landscape. New census data shows Catholics outnumber Anglicans for the first time in New Zealand history. At the March census, just over 490,000 people identified themselves as being Catholic, compared with 460,000 Anglicans. Unfortunately, last census in 2006, there were 508,437 Catholics in New Zealand, so the top position is not really that much of a newly attained status to celebrate. After the figures were publicised, I was amazed at the number of people who phoned into NewsTalkZB the other day, and believed in God and Jesus and quite a bit of the whole Christian landscape, yet did not want to identify themselves as religious and therefore picked the "No religion" option in the census. As my son says, they're hippies, against authority and human structures, yet people need both in order to flourish. Identifying as religious has now declined overall in New Zealand to below 50...

[UPDATE] Looks like the Govt has backed down and allowed masses to continue, according to an update from the   Thomas  More Law Centre , although they are continuing with the lawsuit. The Government capitulated just one day after the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), a public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, MI, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Department of Defense’s actions which prohibited a Catholic Priest from celebrating Mass at a Naval base under threat of arrest and barred the Chapel to Catholic religious services due to the government shutdown. TMLC attorney Erin Mersino filed the lawsuit in the Federal District Court in Washington DC on Monday on behalf of Father Ray Leonard and Fred Naylor, a parishioner.  The lawsuit is the only legal challenge to the Government’s shutdown of religious services.  Other Christian denominations were allowed to continue their religious services. Late yesterday afternoon, in response to the lawsuit, three at...

I remember seeing somewhere that in America, of all the religions, atheism has the lowest retention rate. It's most likely the similar in other Western countries, though it would be interesting to know for sure. Anyway, here's a great story of young atheist woman who decided to better understand her opponents by reading them, and ended up converting. Last Easter, when I was just beginning to explore the possibility that, despite what I had previously believed and been brought up to believe, there might be something to the Catholic faith, I read Letters to a Young Catholic by George Weigel. One passage in particular struck me. Talking of the New Testament miracles and the meaning of faith, Weigel writes: “In the Catholic view of things, walking on water is an entirely sensible thing to do. It’s staying in the boat, hanging tightly to our own sad little securities, that’s rather mad.” I totally get that quote about walking on water being sensible! Once you realise that t...

It's a pretty funny video above with atheist author Penn Jillette explaining Catholicism to Piers Morgan, but it's also a bit sad, from the perspective that many Catholics don't seem to know what it is to be Catholic. The latest New York Times/CBS News Poll finds that American Catholics at Odds With Vatican on Many Teachings : American Catholics want the next Pope to liberalize the church’s position on issues such as birth control, ordaining women, and allowing priests to marry, a new poll has discovered. And two out of every three Catholics want Pope Benedict XVI’s successor to be “someone younger, with new ideas,” The New York Times/CBS News poll found. Three-quarters thought it was a good idea for Benedict, who entered the Vatican in 2005 at the age of 78, to resign rather than remain in office until his death. The poll indicated that many Catholics feel the bishops and cardinals are out of touch. “I don’t think they are in the trenches with the people,” Th...

The only way a joint Anglican/Catholic Cathedral would work would be if the Anglicans all converted to Catholicism. There is precedent for large conversions of Anglicans to Catholicism through through the Ordinariate, and that would be the way to go. I was reading an article of an Anglican convert who became a Catholic priest, who has just recently died . He once compared the Anglicanism to “whisky with three parts water”, while saying Catholics were “straight out of the bottle” . With that imagery in mind, a joint cathedral would just massively dilute the whiskey for Catholics, and be far too strong for the Anglicans. The only people that have been talking about this potential plan have been the Anglicans, so I doubt it will get anywhere. Related link: Historic super-cathedral plan

I see the likes of Big Bruv and Pauleastbay regularly spewing hate filled rants against Lucia, generally accusing her of things based on their negative interpetations of her comments, rather than wondering, for even a moment, if they have applied their own absolutist interpetations to her comments.  This then has them arguing against the strawman of their own preconceived opinions, but using Lucia as the punching bag to justify their disgusting comments [which I wont repreoduce here] You can see Pauleastbay's own assumptions here creating a problem for himself : What pisses me about the likes of Lucia, is my parents are really decent people and they would be if they were muslims or atheists or Buddhists, this isn’t something I can claim for myself but my point is religion does not make you a decent human being, in fact it acts in the opposite way for many. What Pauleastbay assumes here is that Lucia has supposedly maintained that one can only be good if they are Christian. Tha...

New movie out soon, based on a true story of the Cristeros war in Mexico 1926, when the Govt tried to outlaw Catholicism and other religions. The blurb at Brietbart says of the movie - The film, “For Greater Glory,” hits theaters on June 1 and tells a little known chapter of Mexican history — the Cristero War of 1926 to 1929, which pitted an army of devout Catholic rebels (led in the movie by Andy Garcia) against the government of Mexican President Plutarco Calles (played by Ruben Blades). For Catholics enraged by the Obama administration’s proposed contraception mandate, the film about the Mexican church’s fight in 1920s is a heartening and timely cinematic boost in the American church’s battle to preserve “religious freedom” in 2012. For other Catholics and non-Catholics, the film is, more simply, action, suspense and a good cast. Besides Garcia and Blades, there’s “Desperate Housewives” star Eva Longoria and the legendary actor Peter O’Toole.  For a fuller account o...

My post below is a condensed and slightly modified excerpt from H.W Crocker III: "Triumph - the Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church" we get a brief summary of the Edict of Milan. I was reminded of it as I watch the rising tide of resistance to Obama's steadfast efforts to make the State trump individual rights and freedoms. Freedom of conscience is one of these under threat, and it requires us to unravel Obama's doublespeak to understand this. Unravel away, and keep history in mind. Edict of Milan - AD313 The Emperor, Maxentius, decided to crush upstart Constantine. In the early morning of October 28, AD312, Rufius Volusanius, prefect of Maxentius's Praetorian Guard, led his crack troops across the river Tiber in a surprise attack on Constatine's sleeping forces. Constantine, a pagan, had no real belief in Christianity, but his mother and stepmother were Christians. At Verona, he had called upon the Sun God. Here, outside of Rome though he ha...

Good to see some celebrities not afraid to come out and talk about their faith.

An ancient blog post talked about protesters who planned to disrupt the Catholic World Youth Event in Sydney in 2008. They want to hand out condoms to Catholic youth and children to promote their own personal unholy trinity: condoms, promiscuity and abortion. This stems from many non-Catholics taking offense over the Catholic Church's stance on contraception, and the use of condoms. In some ways, it's a strange attitude. I say this because when people protest against the Church's stance on contraception they conveniently ignore that this is part of a bigger message. At the very least, we could mention four things, not one: 1. Contraception is bad  2. Sex outside (before) marriage is bad. 3. Adultery is bad. 4. Divorce is bad. In reality non -Catholic people don't give a toss what the Catholic Church's position is on these points, and they generally don't know or care to know the reasoning behind these points.  Sure, they get offended at the Pope ex...

There is a different way at looking at contraception, and it is articulated well in Pope John Paul II's work called "The Theology of the Body". I found a blog post that makes a few good points around this topic that is worth reading, if only to understand the spiritual dimension to this subject. And a quick scan through our blog tag of " Contraception " indicates we've discussed this before in different ways. [Contraception] changes the thinking about children as gifts from God and truly belonging to God, to something we can control and get for ourselves, like commodities, so that in some manner we even think about our children selfishly. It changes the image of the marriage from God-centered, because God is literally centered in and active in the midst of the marriage due to the openness of the couple to Him in their most intimate acts of union, to exclusionary self-centered and human-centered. It closes off the unitive act to the presence of God - s...

Goodness. Don't know what to say really. My folks used to watch this show ('Hour Of Power') on TV a lot. It has been going for years.

On discussing Holy Days of Obligation , I left this comment on another blog, I'd thought I'd file back here at NZC: Reference was made to the idea that in a Christian/Catholic culture, we made time for going to Church. Indeed, it seemed that the Church, by setting multiple days of Obligation helped the population step outside their daily work-life and think about bigger things – their relationship with God, their family and life. It was good. Now, we tip-toe around this word “obligation” because we understand that with Sunday trading (for example) we can’t be talking about obligations and responsibilities in this “new” society, for fear of putting pressure on people. The key is to understand that we are now back in Roman times for the Catholic Church. We are now counter-cultural*. It is understanding our obligations and responsibilities that will differentiate us from the main-stream culture that is currently suiciding. Obliged to go to mass? Oh, lets make it optional....

Archbishop Chaput, in talking about the desire of secularists to push religious faith out of the public sphere makes the point that we are either Catholic all of the time with our faith guiding how we live and make decisions, or we are phonies. We can't claim to be a faithful husband or wife and then cheat on our spouse. And we can't claim to love God and be a "good Catholic," but then ignore what it means to be Catholic in our business dealings, our social policies and in our political choices. Christian faith is always personal but never private. It either guides our behavior all the time, both in public and in private, or it's phony. And if it's phony, we should stop trying to fool ourselves. We need to be faithful Catholics first. If we're good at that, then every other quality of fruitful citizenship will follow. Related link: Abp. Chaput urges Catholics to fight "for their ideas in the public square"