Mark Shea on the name "Easter"

"But what about the very name 'Easter'? It comes from the pagan goddess 'Eostre'!"

Right you are. And 'Friday' comes from "Freya's Day". Does that make you a Norse pagan who worships Freya when you say, "Thank God it's Friday?" No it makes you an inheritor of a Germanic language group that didn't bother to change the names of some of its days. But in all Latin language groups (and beyond) what we English speakers call "Easter" is known by some variation on Pascha, or (as it's translated into English) "Passover". Why? Because Jesus was crucified on the eve of Passover and is our Passover sacrifice

-Mark Shea

The function of news organizations is to contribute to the smooth and difficulty-free lives of the powerful people who own them, to make sure they get invited to the right parties, and to sell beer and shampoo to the rest of us.

-Mark Shea

A good Mark Shea quote

The reason the three same names–Hypatia, Bruno, and Galileo–keep getting trotted out by historical illiterates as evidence of “The Catholic War on Science” is because there was no Catholic war on science. Hypatia was killed because she was unlucky enough to live in Alexandria, where civil violence was a municipal sport. Bruno was not a scientist, but a practitioner of what has rightly been described as mystic woo woo. For Cosmos to herald him as a champion of SCIENCE[TM] persecuted by the Church is like wringing one’s hand because the Pope did not convert to Scientology. And Galileo? Well, what you want to do is read Mike Flynn’s magnificent and hilarious account* of how, largely due to the work of Catholic scientists, we got from geocentrism to heliocentrism–and how Galileo being a pain in the neck who went beyond the evidence available at the time and wound up running afoul of a hierarchy reeling from the Protestant revolt and jittery about his rash theological claims.

Next time some historical illiterate talks about the Church’s “War on Science” ask for details on these three. Then give the real details. Then, ask for other names. A “war” with only three casualties is not much of a war, particularly when the Church has canonized St. Albert the Great, has a couple dozen craters on the moon named for Jesuits, was mother to Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan Nicholas of Cusa, and Louis Pasteur (not one of whom the average Cosmos-educated sophisticate has even heard of), carefully fostered the work of Gregor Mendel (the Augustinian monk who founded the science of genetics), and fully supported the work of Jesuit Msgr. Georges Lemaitre, the formulator of the Big Bang hypothesis.

In sum, the iron truth remains that the more ignorant somebody is, the more certain they are they are obviously smarter than the common herd. Seth MacFarlane, the producer of Cosmos, is certain he knows what is talking about, and therefore has never bothered to discover how wrong he is.

Someday, somebody is going to have the guts to tell the story of the history of Science and the Faith that is not a cartoon. But one can hardly expect that from a cartoon maker.

*Incidentally, for the work by Mike Flynn detailing the affair with Galileo, see here:

The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown

Why God wishes us to worship him.

Perhaps you should contemplate the difference between Christ crucified and Kim Jong Il. A God who calls us to worship him is, by definition, giving us the best he has, which is himself. A man who demands worship is substituting himself for the best there is, which is God. Jesus didn’t exactly get the royal treatment when he came.

-Mark Shea (in a comment on his blog)

We're a Paris Hilton people in an apocalyptic world

-Mark Shea

"The question is not whether the Church will survive persecution in the West. It’s whether the West will survive persecuting the Church."

The question is not whether the Church will survive persecution in the West. It’s whether the West will survive persecuting the Church. Meanwhile, in the global south and Asia, the Church continues to explode in numbers. The problem the Church faces is not decline, but insufficient numbers of vocations to handle the vast ocean of converts pouring in–including, by the way, unprecedented numbers of converts in the Islamic world.

-Mark Shea

Wile E. Coyote’s Biblical Life Verse: “He who digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back upon him who starts it rolling.” (Proverbs 26:27).

-Mark Shea

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a right wing scoundrel. 'Hate' [i.e., accusing others of] is the first refuge of a left wing scoundrel. The Left, even more than the right, loves manichaean division of the human race into the Children of light and the children of darkness."

-Mark Shea (combox comment)

Tradition

The great thing about being Catholic is that you can plagiarize and call it “being faithful to the Tradition”.

-Mark Shea

Sin and forgiveness

A culture that perpetually excuses sin is a culture that cannot, when push comes to shove, forgive it. Paradoxically, a culture that bites the bullet of acknowledging the reality of sin is a culture that carries within it the possibility of accepting forgiveness for sin.

-Mark Shea

"The mission of the Church is not to crouch in a defensive posture behind the walls of Fortress Catholicism, but to take the fight to the enemy."

I’m always delighted to see it when people get excited about the word of God and see in the revelation of Christ the power of liberation. My reader gets it: The mission of the Church is not to crouch in a defensive posture behind the walls of Fortress Catholicism, but to take the fight to the enemy. “The gates of hell” is imagery from siege warfare. You do not attack with a gate. You hide behind it while the attacking army deploys battering rams to smash it to pieces. We, the Church, are the attacking army against the gates of hell, with Jesus as our captain. The weapons of our warfare are not violence but the testimony of Christ, charity, and our own blood and suffering, offered in union with His sacrifice. We do not fight because we are sinless and perfect, but because grace enables us. We defeat our enemies by making them our brothers and sisters and no longer enemies. We can’t be defeated, because even death is on our side now, having been taken prisoner and made the conquered slave of the Risen One. The only thing hell can do is lie and plant thoughts of despair or presumption in our minds to turn us from Hope. If we accept these thoughts, either by bitterly embracing the lie that there is no hope for the Church or by drunkenly concluding that we need not fight since the battle will be won someday, then we turn from Hope. But if we remain in Christ and keep putting one foot in front of the other in obedience, we have every reason to rejoice as we keep battering at the gates of hell in his Name and Power.

-Mark Shea

"... But the greatest of these is Funding. "

Now abide these seven elements of Modern Science: Time, Space, Matter, Energy, Power, Prestige, and Funding. But the greatest of these is Funding.

-Mark Shea