Monday 18 March 2024
Catholicism's civil war rages on?
How Catholics Celebrate Pride: Jesuit Pastor Defends Pride Mass Against Protests
So much negative news regarding Pride seems to have arisen this year. For this final week of Pride Month, we are instead highlighting, in a series of posts titled “How Catholics Celebrate Pride,” all the good ways that the people of God are celebrating queerness and advocating for equality. Some of the content will be highly visible news events. Other bits will be the more local, somewhat quieter, but no less significant actions of pro-LGBTQ+ Catholics in their parishes, schools, and communities.
At Holy Trinity Church in Washington, D.C., the pastor, Fr. Kevin Gillespie, SJ, affirmed the parish’s commitment to its LGBTQ+ ministry after right-wing activists tried to have its 3rd annual LGBTQIA+ Pride Mass cancelled. Gillespie issued a brief statement:
“This celebration is an expression of our parish’s mission statement TO ACCOMPANY ONE ANOTHER IN CHRIST, CELEBRATE GOD’S LOVE, AND TRANSFORM LIVES. Our LGBTQIA+ ministry is a response to the Holy Father’s call to go out to the margins. Our celebration of Pride is not celebrating personal vanity, but the human dignity of a group of people who have been for too long the objects of violence, bullying and harassment. Our parish reaches out to LGBTQIA+ people as it reaches out to all Catholics in our area.”
The Pride Mass was celebrated as scheduled on June 14 with more than 250 people joining in person, uninterrupted by the small group of protestors gathered outside the church. Petula Dvorak, a columnist for The Washington Post, wrote about attending the Mass and conversing with some of the queer faithful there. Dvorak told the story of Joseph Chee
“Chee, who went to Catholic school, who studied Carmelite theology, who belonged to conservative political groups and who knew for a good part of his 30 years that he was gay, had spent years searching for his place in the world and in a church that didn’t seem to want him.
“‘I felt very alienated from all the communities that I had,’ he said. ‘I felt deeply convinced that I wasn’t supposed to leave the church, you know? But I was like, “Where is my place?”‘
“But under the leadership of Pope Francis, who last year publicly rejected judgment of gay people, Chee sensed an opening.”
Dvorak spoke to longtime parishioners and newer ones at Holy Trinity. Cerissa Cafasso, a bisexual Catholic, explained: “[At this parish] I can be myself, my full person, with no throat clearing.” Dvorak also reported:
“‘It’s ridiculous,’ said a gay man who traveled about five hours to walk up those steps of Holy Trinity, to sit in a pew and to — finally — exhale.
“He’s in his 30s, lives in a conservative town in Pennsylvania, works at very conservative organization and is only out to his family. He asked me several times to preserve his anonymity in our interview.
“Deeply Catholic, he kept trying to go to church, knowing what he knows about himself, about what those in the pews next to him think of him. ‘I wouldn’t feel welcome,’ he said.
“Ever since he accidentally found Holy Trinity’s online Mass during the pandemic (he said his mouse bumped a tab and opened the link, he called it a ‘God sighting’) he’s been attending their services, online, then in person, making that drive. Five hours each way, as often as he can.
“His mom came with him on Wednesday, and they knelt together.”
A growing number of parishes have held Pride Masses in recent years, like New York City’s Church of St. Paul the Apostle, run by the Paulist Fathers. Once again, its LGBTQ+ group, Out at St. Paul, planned to hold a Mass near The Stonewall Inn in New York City, where, in 1969, riots against police raids led to the launch of the modern gay rights movement. (Due to the park’s closure, the Pride Mass ended up being celebrated at the church.) Michael O’Loughlin reported about other parish celebrations in America:
“A parish in Hoboken, N.J., Our Lady of Grace and St. Joseph, will host a Pride Mass on June 25. In Seattle, Wash., St. Joseph Parish was scheduled to host a pride picnic on June 11, following the Saturday afternoon Mass, an event which has previously drawn scrutiny from conservative media. An art installation celebrating Pride is present again at Historic St. Paul Catholic Church in Lexington, Ky., which is intended to serve as a signal that the parish is welcoming to L.G.B.T. Catholics and their families. . .
“Meredith Augustin has helped plan the ‘Pre-Pride Mass,’ held the afternoon before the New York City’s pride parade, at St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Manhattan since its inception about a dozen years ago. The parish’s director of pastoral music and staff liaison to its L.G.B.T. ministry, Ms. Augustin said that in previous years, the Mass had attracted protesters, but the parish never considered canceling it. . .
“In Chicago, St. Teresa of Avila Parish has marked Pride for several years, the Rev. Frank Latzko told America.The pastor said that he tries to keep messages of solidarity and acceptance in his sermons all year, but the weekend of Chicago’s Pride parade, which attracts about a million spectators, counts as a special celebration.
“While there is not a special ‘Pride Mass,’ many parishioners attend Sunday Mass, at which Father Latzko delivers a topical homily, before making the walk over to the parade.”
—Robert Shine (he/him), New Ways Ministry, June 26, 2023
Hummingbirds vs. Darwin.
Ingenious Artistry in the Origin of Hummingbirds
Please see below the Abstract of my recent article which asks, “Can Neo-Darwinism Explain the Origin and Variation of the Hummingbirds?”
Abstract
Richard Dawkins is one of the leading spokesmen for the evolutionary theory’s modern synthesis (neo-Darwinism). He is in full agreement with virtually all his colleagues when he asserts that “evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” So, the entire array of the fascinatingly different 366 hummingbird species of the family Trochilidae, being “distinctly different than all other avians,” must have evolved by natural selection through — in Darwin’s words — “infinitesimally small changes,” “infinitesimally slight variations,” “insensibly fine steps,” and “insensibly fine gradations.” Many of those gradations are thought to have been due to mutations with only “invisible effects on the phenotype,” according to Ernst Mayr. However,
“Even a new mutation that is slightly favorable will usually be lost in the first few generations after it appears in the population, a victim of genetic drift. If a new mutation has a selective advantage of S in the heterozygote in which it appears, then the chance is only 2S that the mutation will ever succeed in taking over the population. So, a mutation that is 1 percent better in fitness than the standard allele in the population will be lost 98 percent of the time by genetic drift.” (Emphasis added.)
Let us apply this method to individual hummingbird species, including their sexual dimorphism, and the corresponding flower formations of their nectar-producing host plants. Together these imply coordinated inter-kingdom mutations and interactions. Five examples will be discussed in the following article: (1) the strongly curved beaks of the two species of Eutoxeres, (2) Lophornis gouldii (the dot-eared coquette), (3) Docimastes ensifer (Gould) = Ensifera ensifera (the sword-billed hummingbird), (4) Sappho sparganurus (the red-tailed comet), and finally (5) Loddigesia mirabilis (the marvelous spatuletail).
All five examples display sexual dimorphism. Now, sexual selection stands in clear opposition to natural selection. Here that is the case not only because of the fact that “conspicuously colored males preferentially fall victim to their enemies,” but also because their often astoundingly acrobatic behavior to impress the females necessitates a tremendous expenditure of energy for the show. Ontogenetically, it requires development of a strikingly showy and flamboyant plumage. In the present cases, displays by the males in color, size, and shape almost completely dwarf those of the females. (Compare with this the prime example of the phenomenon among the class Aves: the well-known peacock.)
Moreover, to evolve a special preference for brightly colored males with specially formed short and/or long decorative feathers, sexual selection presupposes the occurrence of a series of highly unusual mutations in the females. For these mutations, however, there is not the slightest evidence.
Now, let us look briefly at the species mentioned above, in reverse order. We begin with (5) Loddigesia, whose males possess two stunningly long tail feathers ending in large flat violet-blue discs (see the photo at the top of this article). To evolve in a process of continuous evolution, this would mean thousands of unknown mutations — mutations, again, with “slight or even invisible effects on the phenotype,” each new step implying the substitution of the entire population of birds. All this would have happened regularly in opposition to natural selection. The females, however, have been described as “not easily impressed” by the show of the males. So, one may ask: are there really decisive selective advantages for the survival of spatuletail populations due to changes of about 1 millionth of 1 meter or 1 thousandth of 1 mm of the male’s two tail feathers?
For each species, this immensely improbable process of continuous evolution implies thousands of mutations, with visible or invisible effects on the phenotype, each time selected with certainty by the respective females. This observation applies to (4) the “deeply forked, spectacular, long, iridescent, golden-reddish tail, longer than the length of the body,” of Sappho sparganurus (the red-tailed comet); (3) the enormously long bill distinctive of Docimastes ensifer (the sword-billed hummingbird); (2) the “long dark rufous feathers [that] on its crown form a crest” plus the “long white feathers with shiny green dots [that] make tufts that fan out and back on the cheeks” of Lophornis gouldii (the dot-eared coquette); and (1) the strongly curved beaks of the two species of Eutoxeres (the sicklebills), seemingly in coordination with the flower forms of Centropogon and Heliconia.
If neo-Darwinian theory cannot explain even differences between the hummingbirds themselves (including their sexual dimorphism), what then can we expect when it comes to the origin of the entire family of this anatomically and physiologically well-defined group of birds? From an evolutionary standpoint, we must agree with many hummingbird researchers, including the clear statement of Jillian Mock, that “the origins of hummingbirds are still a major mystery.”
With this in mind, we turn to the theory of intelligent design (ID). According to Stephen Meyer, “The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” ID, writes Michael Behe, is usually recognized by “a purposeful arrangement of parts.” In what follows I argue that the origin of hummingbirds reflects brilliant, ingenious artistry, not the work of an endless number of infinitesimally small coincidences, haphazardly chained together by the “truly hideous process” of natural selection, “rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror,” etc.
In contrast with neo-Darwinism, I conclude that an absolutely ingenious artist was at work here, transcending all human abilities, ideas, and powers.
For all details and references, please see,
Isaiah ch.6 demystified.
Isaiah Saw His Glory:
A few trinitarians attempt to use Is. 6 and John 12:41 as trinitarian evidence. They point out that Isaiah "saw" Jehovah (Is. 6:5). And at John 12:41 John says that Isaiah said the things quoted at John 12:38 and 12:40 "because he saw his glory and spoke about him" - NEB. Although these few trinitarians tell us it's very clear that John 12 is all about Jesus, and, therefore, the glory of Jehovah seen by Isaiah is really the glory of Jesus --- it's not quite that "clear."
First, John 12 is not entirely about Jesus alone. We find several references in it to the Father (12:26, 28, 49, 50). Therefore, when John speaks of "his glory," he could mean either the Father's glory or the Messiah's glory.
Let's examine the scriptures in question - Jn 12:37-41 (NEB):
"In spite of the many signs which Jesus had performed in their presence they would not believe in him, for the prophet Isaiah's utterance had to be fulfilled:
"`Lord, who has believed what we reported, and to whom has the Lord's power been revealed?'
[John is quoting Is. 53:1. Is. 53 is well-known as a reference to the Messiah's suffering and dying for mankind and it also clearly shows that the Messiah is not Jehovah - Is. 53:2, 4, 6, 10.]
"So it was that they could not believe, for there is another saying of Isaiah's:
"`He has blinded their eyes and dulled their minds, lest they should see with their eyes, and perceive with their minds, and turn to me to heal them.'
"Isaiah said this because he saw his glory and spoke about him."
So whose glory did John say Isaiah had seen? The glory of the Messiah (Is. 53 and other places in Isaiah) or God's glory (Is. 6 and other places in Isaiah)?
Jn 12:41 in the very trinitarian NIV Study Bible, 1985, Zondervan: "Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him."* And the footnote for this verse in this trinitarian study Bible says concerning Jesus' glory in this verse:
".... The thought of glory here is complex. There is the idea of majesty, and there is also the idea (which meant so much to John) that Jesus' death on the cross and his subsequent resurrection and exaltation show his real glory. Isaiah foresaw the rejection of Christ, as the passages quoted (Is. 53:1; 6:10) show. He spoke of the Messiah both in the words about blind eyes and hard hearts, on the one hand, and about healing, on the other. This is the cross and this is the glory, for the cross and the resurrection and exaltation portray both suffering and healing, rejection and triumph, humiliation and glory."
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* The ETRV says: "because he saw his (Jesus') glory. So Isaiah spoke about him (Jesus)." The GNB says: "because he saw Jesus' glory...." The NLV says: "Isaiah said when he saw the shining-greatness of Jesus..." The LB says: "for he had seen a vision of the Messiah's glory." Phillips says: "because he saw the glory of Christ..." And the NAB (`70) says: "because he had seen Jesus' glory...."
............................................................................
The Daily Study Bible Series: The Gospel of John, Vol. 2, by famed trinitarian scholar and Bible translator Dr. William Barclay, 1975 ed., p. 81, also tells us:
"Again and again in the fourth Gospel Jesus talks of his glory in connection with the cross. John tells us in 7:39 that the Spirit had not yet come because Jesus was not yet glorified, that is to say, because he had not yet died upon his cross. When the Greeks came to him, Jesus said: `The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified' (John 12:23). And it was of his Cross that he spoke, for he went on to speak of the corn [kernel] of wheat which must fall into the ground and die. In John 12:16 John says that the disciples remembered these things after Jesus had been glorified, that is after he had died and risen again. In the Fourth Gospel it is clear that Jesus regarded the Cross both as his Supreme glory and as the way to glory."
So we see noted trinitarian scholar Dr. William Barclay also explaining that Jesus' sacrificial death was understood by John to be Jesus' Glory. Isaiah saw that Glory (sacrificial death) and told of it in his writing (including Is. 53).
[Additional information by Timo Koonstra (Belgium):
May I add something a friend of mine discovered:
The glory referred to may well be near the Isaiah 53 passage, and even clearer just before verse 1, namely 2:13, 14 where the word glory is used three times in the LXX (doxa), twice as a verb. Since the chapter break between chapter 52 and 53 is very badly chosen, I feel this is what John had in mind.
I quote these Isaiah verses from an English translation of the LXX:
(52:13) Behold, my servant shall understand, and be exalted, and glorified exceedingly. (14) As many shall be amazed at thee, so shall thy face be without glory from men, and thy glory shall not be honoured by the sons of men. (15) Thus shall many nations wonder at him; and kings shall keep their mouths shut: for they to whom no report was brought concerning him, shall see; and they who have not heard, shall consider. (53:1) O Lord, who has believed our report? and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
I think this fits very well with what John stated.
On ID and reductionism.
Understanding “Reductionism” and Intelligent Design
The burgeoning field of “systems biology,” as defined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
is an approach in biomedical research to understanding the larger picture — be it at the level of the organism, tissue, or cell — by putting its pieces together. It’s in stark contrast to decades of reductionist biology, which involves taking the pieces apart.
I’m sure that statement is designed to make systems biology sound radical and exciting, and it succeeds. It’s especially exciting for proponents of intelligent design, because ID theorists have been arguing against reductionism in biology for a long time.
But we need to be careful. We don’t want to make an argument based on an equivocation. The word “reductionism” is thrown around a lot, but it can mean several different things. It’s not as simple as saying, “Biologists are learning that reductionism is bad!”
As it turns out, the move away from reductionism in systems biology is significant for the ID debate, but not simply by word-association. So I want to take some time to suss out the different meanings of the word “reductionism” and what they have to do with intelligent design.
There are two kinds of reductionism that are relevant to this discussion: methodological reductionism and ontological reductionism. (For a third kind, epistemological reductionism, see this Cartoon.) The opposing philosophies are, respectively, methodological antireductionism and ontological antireductionism. The terms are a bit eye-splitting, but they aren’t difficult to understand.
Methodological Reductionism
Methodological reductionism is the idea that a thing can best be understood by breaking it down into its parts. The contrary philosophy, methodological antireductionism, says that a thing can be best understood by looking at it as a whole.
The opposing views are summed up nicely in a conversation between the wizards Saruman and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Saruman shows Gandalf his new rainbow-colored outfit and tells him that he has decided to stop going by “Saruman the White” and go by “Saruman of Many Colours” instead.
“I liked white better,” says Gandalf.
“White!” Saruman sneers. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”
“In which case it is no longer white,” says Gandalf. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
Saruman is a methodological reductionist and Gandalf is a methodological antireductionist.
Methodological reductionism: “The white light can be broken.”
Methodological antireductionism: “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
Ontological Reductionism
Ontological reductionism, on the other hand, is not about the best way to study something, but rather about what that thing “really is” at the deepest level. Ontological reductionism says that a thing can be reduced to its most basic parts, and that’s what it is — nothing more. According to this theory, a tree is a collection of cells, which in turn are collections of molecules, which are collections of atoms, which are collections of subatomic particles. So in the final analysis, a “tree” is a collection of subatomic particles.
This view, and its antithesis, is expressed in C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader. On an island near the edge of the world, the characters meet a being named Ramandu who claims to be a star.
“In our world,” Eustace Scrubb objects, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son,” replies Ramandu, “that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”
Eustace is an ontological reductionist and Ramandu is an ontological antireductionist. (And if Ramandu’s statement seems mind-bending or baffling, that’s because most of us were educated into ontological reductionism.)
Ontological reductionism: “A star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
Ontological antireductionism: “That is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”
Gandalf Points to Ramandu
The field of systems biology is methodologically antireductionist. It does not have to be ontologically antireductionist. So, systems biologists do not necessarily reject materialism or physicalism. They do not have to believe in minds, or be willing to posit neo-Platonic souls of cabbages, or think the true meaning of a mushroom can only be found in its wholeness.
They have simply found it to be the case that looking at living organisms as complete systems yields better results than only taking them apart to focus on their bare components. Researchers are coming to realize that it is more productive to think about the plan of an organism than simply about its physical structure or components.
But this is important, because whether systems biologists always admit it or not, methodological antireductionism implies ontological antireductionism. Gandalf agrees with Ramandu, not Eustace.
That’s not to say that ontological antireductionism logically follows from methodological antireductionism, or vice versa. In theory, you could have one without the other. But the success of methodological antireductionism fulfills a prediction of the hypothesis of ontological antireductionism.
That is: if there really is a plan, then you would naturally suppose that looking for a plan would turn out to be a great strategy, and that proceeding as if there were no plan would not be a great strategy. And that is the reality. It turns out that when you take a creature apart to see what it’s parts are, you see a bunch of parts; but when you take a step back and look for a plan, you find a plan
This Is What Intelligent Design Predicts
Intelligent design is a sub-type of ontological antireductionism. To be exact, it is one way of answering the question “if a thing isn’t just the sum of its parts, then what is it?” ID proposes that (at least some) natural entities are more than the sum of their parts because they are ultimately an expression of an idea in a conscious mind. If this is true, then you would predict those entities to be best understood by grasping the idea behind them; you would try to see the scheme, the purpose, the outline, the plan.
The neo-Darwinian model, in contrast, does not inherently lead to this prediction, because the mechanism of natural selection and random variation is, by definition, an uncoordinated piling-up of useful features, whereas a “plan” is the coordination of useful features. (Michael Behe’s three books and Marcos Eberlin’s Foresight explore this idea in depth.)
This is not proof of the design hypothesis, but it is evidence for it. In fact, this sort of evidence is one of the pillars of the scientific method: the strength of a scientific hypothesis depends on its ability to make predictions that are borne out by investigation. Based on that criterion, the hypothesis of intelligent design is doing very well. The hypothesis of mindless evolution is not doing so well, because although mindless processes might generate great complexity, they do not make plans.
Some systems biologists may want to reject Saruman but stay with Eustace; to reap the practical benefits of methodological antireductionism while avoiding the philosophical costs. But they may find that stance difficult to maintain. An unwary systems biologist could easily drift over to Ramandu’s Island, where the ID theorists are waiting.
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