Welcome, Francis! (updated anew)

In celebration of this new star in the firmament,
we offer the hymn of St. Francis to Brother Sun.

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Laudato sie, mi Signore cum tucte le Tue creature,
spetialmente messor lo frate Sole,
lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui.
Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore:
de Te, Altissimo, porta significatione.

 

Anglicè:

Thank you, Lord, for Brother Sun.

He warms us till the day is done.

With joy we gaze upon his face,

the image of Thy perfect grace.

Theodiscè:

Dank’ Gott, um Bruder Sonne.

Uns ist er reine Wonne.

Schenket uns mit Wärm’ und Licht:

ihm wir schenken  dies’ Gedicht.

Romanicè:

O frère Soleil

nous fais merveille.

Merci au Seigneur

qui fait pousser les fleurs.

(Weitere Gedichte hier:  poèmes.)

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Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

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For further visions  of the Saint in action:
Welcome, goslings
Blessing the birds.

In re Saints (Francis in particular):
Recommended and disrecommended reading.

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Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péché irrémissible???

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For a defense of the papacy  against its shallow detractors:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/de-logica-ecclesiae_10.html
(This, btw, is something you can freely share with your non-Catholic friends.
The essay really makes no religious assumptions, it just looks at things logically.)

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Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

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[Update, Ides of March, 2013]

Pope Francis has asked the bishops, priests, religious, and laity of Argentina not to travel to Rome for his papal installation Mass … . Instead, the Pontiff has asked them to show charity to the neediest while continuing to pray for him.

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=17322

Hmm… It is not for me to comment, not having been formally received into the RCC.   But one cannot help recalling Mark 14:7;  re-iterated in Matthew 26:11; and confirmed in John 12:8.

As the Pope well knows, extravagant humility can be a sly form of pride;  so it cannot be that.  Perhaps he deems this a Teachable Moment.   But perhaps he overestimates our power to learn the lesson …

[Update 16 March 2013]  The latest -- A punchy portrait of a promising Pontiff, from the moderate-conservative French newspaper Le Figaro :

S'adressant aux cardinaux, François a de nouveau démontré le style qu'il entend donner à sa charge : jovial mais décapant.

Cela faisait longtemps que l'on n'avait pas vu un pape rire aux éclats. Vendredi matin, dans la salle Clémentine du Vatican, où il recevait un à un tous les cardinaux, François a une nouvelle fois démontré le style jovial qu'il entend donner à sa fonction. Elle cadre avec l'image du pape François assis, en blanc, au second rang d'un minibus chargé de cardinaux, tous en route vers la chapelle Sixtine! Ou avec celle du nouveau pape, passant lui-même dans la pension de prêtres, via della Scrofa, où il logeait avant le conclave pour y reprendre sa valise, saluer, chacun par son prénom, l'ensemble du personnel qu'il connaît et… payer sa note!

Mais cette joie expansive, cette décontraction - on l'a vu prendre les cardinaux dans les bras, enfiler spontanément au poignet un petit bracelet jaune en caoutchouc que lui offrait le cardinal d'Afrique du Sud, Wilfrid Napier - ne doivent pas oblitérer la gravité du message qu'il entend transmettre. Et dont sa première homélie, improvisée jeudi soir, a donné un goût amer à certains.

Jamais un pape en exercice n'avait, en effet, osé une telle radicalité christique. Ses paroles de feu - « quand on ne confesse pas Jésus-Christ, on confesse la mondanité du diable, la mondanité du démon», «quand nous confessons un Christ sans Croix, nous ne sommes pas disciples du Seigneur: nous sommes mondains, nous sommes des évêques, des prêtres, des cardinaux, des papes, mais pas des disciples du Seigneur» - ont vraiment impressionné.

Ce samedi matin, devant la presse, il devrait encore dévoiler les prémices d'un pontificat qui s'annonce décapant. Le tout avec une aisance, un sens de l'improvisation et du geste qui ont déjà fait mouche. Dimanche, à 12 heures, il apparaîtra pour la première fois depuis la fenêtre des appartements pontificaux, pour sa première prière de l'Angélus. Avec probablement un premier message, fort et simple, comme il les aime, adressé au monde.

L'homélie qu'il prononcera est très attendue, car elle devrait en dessiner les grandes lignes. À moins que cet homme pragmatique ne se contente de commenter l'Évangile du jour. Ce qui serait le signal d'une volonté d'insister sur le Christ avant de parler de l'Église. Et de prendre son temps pour mieux agir, comme il semble vouloir le faire pour le choix - capital - de son numéro deux, le futur secrétaire d'État. Pour l'heure, mais à titre seulement transitoire, l'équipe actuelle sera reconduite.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2013/03/15/01016-20130315ARTFIG00594-le-pape-imprime-un-peu-plus-sa-marque.php?m_i=NoKNeGUjRyxIKOAo4vjm9Qzy0UHeq7FHI%2Bcn2nLhaKf8RhkNv

[Update 18 March 2013]  Our friend and colleague Dr Massey has just posted some intriguing observations -- "meta-Catholic", you might say (i.e., the next level up....)
http://magnaliadei.blogspot.com/2013/03/francis-bishop-of-rome-primus-inter.html

And this:

La simplicité du Pape soulève les foules

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2013/03/17/01016-20130317ARTFIG00181-la-simplicite-du-pape-souleve-les-foules.php?m_i=jGkjSbypaPXnBRiRMMeiFXNLvRCbzIoyAWxRF0GUCdBrS%2BLPe

To be sure, we are now in the honeymoon phase.  God grant it may last -- may it be the Papacy that heals us -- but for purposes of history, nous posons ce jalon.

[Update 21 mars 2013]  La vue depuis Rome:
http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5449541
Such simplicity and humility  might have certain other cardinals gnashing their teeth, since, in effect, it advances the ratchet-wheel.  Henceforward, it will be difficult to a new pope to debut otherwise, without seeming stiff.

[Update, Holy Saturday] 

   Le pape François tutoie les fidèles pendant la veillée pascale

[Update, Easter]

   Le style François plaît aux cathos français

   

[Update 2 April 2013]  This strikes exactly the right note:

Pope Francis has made comments on the Shroud of Turin, the much-discussed and analyzed burial cloth that some believe shows the face of Jesus Christ, saying that it "speaks to the heart," though he stopped short of declaring the piece an official relic.

"This disfigured face resembles all those faces of men and women marred by a life which does not respect their dignity, by war and violence which afflict the weakest … And yet, at the same time, the face in the shroud conveys a great peace; this tortured body expresses a sovereign majesty," he added.

The shroud made news again last week right before Easter when a research team from Padua University used carbon dating and concluded that the artifact is not a medieval fake, as some had previously suspected, but dates back to somewhere between 280 B.C. and A.D. 220.

www.christianpost.com/news/pope-francis-comments-on-shroud-of-turin-after-new-research-upholds-authenticity-93047/

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De logicâ ecclesiae

The unexpected retirement of the Pope, and the resultant Conclave, have elicted much idle kibbitzing, best ignored.   But when this comes from the lead editorial in the flagship feature of one of the nation’s most respected magazines (The New Yorker, in “The Talk of the Town”, essay by Margaret Talbot), response is due.   Not by way of religious advocacy by any means, but simply as logical and factual hygiene.  The editorial occurs in the current issue of that periodical (the one whose cover depicts a half-naked ex-pontiff browsing the scandal-sheets).

She writes:  “The Vatican dismissed an American priest who had participated in an ordination ceremony for a woman,” and waxes indignant.

“Ceremony”: as though referring to some lark at the Elks Club, where people dress up in funny hats.

Rather:  Ordination is a sacrament of the Church -- one of just seven.   (Note that this is not a tendentious claim:  the statement is epistemologically on a par with “The parallel postulate is part of Euclidean geometry” or “Driving on the left is a traffic regulation in England”.)  And this he wilfully desecrated, as certainly as had he officiated at a Black Mass, or fed the consecrated host to a squirrel.

She then slyly attempts to load the dice, referring to that instance in terms of “a Church that expels a priest for advocating women’s ordination” [emphasis added].  Does The New Yorker not know (for surely there was a copy-editor) the distinction between doing a thing, and merely advocating it?  You are quite free to opine on your blog that incest should be legal;  that is very different from actually shtupping your mother.

Ms. Talbot was thus dishonestly attempting to shift the debate to the more favorable grounds of Free Speech, which everyone salutes up there with apple pie and motherhood.  Desecrating a sacrament is, no doubt, protected “speech”, in the greatly and sometimes grievously distended sense that that simple word has gradually acquired in secular law;  but that doesn’t mean the Church has to put up with it, and that is what is at issue here.

Moreover, a little less round-eyed wonder, if you please, at the notion that there might be any legitimate restrictions on a priest’s anti-ecclesiastical advocacy.   To put it in perspective, switch to a purely secular context:  Schoolteachers, these days, have very little latitude to advocate anything at all, or even to acknowledge the truth of anything that isn’t explicitly in the lesson plan.  If a pupil asks his teacher, did Evolution happen, or did Columbus discover America, she would be well advised to take the Fifth, and to retain counsel.

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Further answers to all your questions:

Q:  Will Ratzinger continue to be infallible  now that he has left the papacy?

A:  Of course not.  He never was, as a man, infallible or anything close to it, even while Pope.  To ask that question is like asking whether ex-Presidents can still appoint Cabinet members.

The doctrine of Infallibility  attaches, not to this or that forked radish, but uniquely to certain central doctrinal pronouncements, uttered ex cathedra.   It is a little like saying “I now pronounce you man and wife”:  the phrase is effectual only if appropriately uttered by a man of the cloth or a clerk of the court, in the presence of a man and a woman, neither of whom is married;  you can’t just run up to a couple of passers-by on the street (or a couple of lampposts) and shout that, with any matrimonial effect.

The infallibility, then, applies to the contextually-situated utterance, and has nothing per se to do with the incarnated man, with all his faults and failings. 

The doctrine thus exactly parallels that of the validity of the sacraments when properly administered by one duly constituted to administer them, independently of the personal worthiness of that unworthy servant, the priest.  For in both cases, we are not dealing with some feat dependent upon the prowess of one individual -- like ringing the bell with the strongman’s mallet on the Midway -- but with, well, a miracle.

Q:  Many Catholic priests are gay, yet they publicly endorse the doctrine of the Church on that intrinsically disordered state.  Is that rank hypocrisy or what?

A:  Indeed not.   What psychological pangs they may personally experience, while trying, in their office and in their private lives, to reconcile their own individual Fallen state, with the abiding, guiding doctrine of the Holy Mother Church, we cannot know; but there is no theological incongruence:  no more than in whoso preaches against Sin, albeit himself quite certainly a sinner.

(Or, more prosaically:  A cop is allowed and indeed required to enforce the law, even if he himself once received a speeding-ticket.)

[This just in]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/new-pope-to-inherit-demystified-office/2013/03/11/31469288-89cd-11e2-a88e-461ffa2e34e4_print.html

New pope to inherit demystified office

By Anthony Faiola, Monday, March 11

VATICAN CITY — Papal conclaves historically created mystical figures, men transformed by divine authority into heirs of Saint Peter. But as 115 cardinals begin deliberations Tuesday to pick the next pope, observers say any successor to Benedict XVI is set to step into an office demystified by scandal and early retirement.

In other words, the magic might be gone from being pope.

For the most devout, the figure of the pope spoke with a nearly preternatural voice, vesting him with a transcending influence when, for instance, John Paul II called for the end of communism in the former Eastern bloc. But more than at any other point in recent history, Vatican watchers say the papacy has been brought back down to earth by Benedict’s unprecedented decision to step down and revelations of financial corruption in the Vatican and clergy sexual misconduct.

Those who are innocent of history, will gape and stare at this.

Those with a modicum of knowledge, will nod.

For the fact is:

There have been far worse scandals  in the history of the Church, than what we see now;  and Popes, far less worthy, than the worthy Benedict.

There have  moreover  been Presidential administrations  far worse than that of Obama, or even Dubya :  students of history  will moan at their memory.

And yet, and yet …  The Presidency remains  the best hope of the Republic;

the Papacy remains  the best hope of the Church.