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Lutha Mahtin posted:I was at the library yesterday and read that one of the first known political cartoons depicts Martin Luther's head being played by Satan like a bagpipe. A literal instrument of Satan  Pretty sure every pupil in Germany (or Bavaria at least  ) has seen it at least once.
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Apr 16, 2015 14:29
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HEY GAL posted:goon project: kidnap a child for moralehazard  Awwww..... I'm touched.Keromaru5 posted:Or borrow from Batman, and go to the circus until some trapeze kid's parents die. There are people who deliberately hold the most extreme views as some sort of badge of honor or vie for attention. Either that or it's some sort of psychological urge that in order to be X one has to be EXTREME in order to have any credibility as X.
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Apr 16, 2015 16:30
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System Metternich posted:
my favorite part of this is satan's genital-face with a combination feather dick and vagina dentata
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Apr 16, 2015 20:08
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Lutha Mahtin posted:my favorite part of this is satan's genital-face with a combination feather dick and vagina dentata Pro-Lutheran propaganda wasn't exactly subtle either   (dat perspective)
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Apr 16, 2015 20:22
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How should a christian approach the subject of surrogate mothers ( women who rent out their wombs to a infertile couple)? This results in a child with three parents. The father, the birth mother and the genetic mother. The dominant view among christians where i live is that is not cool and very wrong. Firstly because it`s not what god wants since it has alway been the case until now that the genetic mother and birth mother are the same person. I am not convinced by this , if god did not want to us to do freaky science stuff he would have made us dumber. Secondly because this way of making babies deprives the child of one it`s parents since the law will only allow for two legal parents, one either has to deny parental rigths to the Genetic mother or the birth mother. This argument has some weigth . But i dont see how it is backed up by anything more than a gut feeling. Is there a christian theological argument to be made in favor of or in opposition to surrogate mothers?
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Apr 16, 2015 22:13
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Baudolino posted:How should a christian approach the subject of surrogate mothers ( women who rent out their wombs to a infertile couple)? This results in a child with three parents. The father, the birth mother and the genetic mother. The dominant view among christians where i live is that is not cool and very wrong. Firstly because it`s not what god wants since it has alway been the case until now that the genetic mother and birth mother are the same person. I am not convinced by this , if god did not want to us to do freaky science stuff he would have made us dumber. The Catholic argument is that, just like fertility should not be intentionally excluded from intercourse, intercourse should not be excluded from conception. The Catholic Church opposes even intrauterine insemination with semen collected from the woman's husband, and that doesn't have to involve "freaky science stuff"; it'd be possible in any civilization that had the technology to invent condoms and turkey basters. There's an additional complication with surrogacy, though: it necessarily involves in vitro fertilization (because it's embryos that are introduced to the surrogate's uterus, not separated sperm and ova) and I don't think it's ever the case that only one ovum is fertilized at a time, meaning that some zygotes are never implanted. The Catholic Church believes that each and every embryo is already a person, even though any embryo young enough to be implanted as part of IVF is also too young to do more than take in nutrition and continue to grow, so deliberately causing people to come into being who will either be allowed to die or be destroyed for 'research' is not acceptable. (Neither is it acceptable to implant multiple embryos because some of them will probably die rather than successfully implant; that means that multiple people have been conceived but only the ones who eventually survive 'matter'.)
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Apr 16, 2015 22:36
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Russian Orthodox (ROCOR) checking in. Sorry I'm late! I'm gonna scour the thread and see what I can add to this, but feel free to add me to the registry or whatever.
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Apr 17, 2015 02:20
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Mishakaz posted:I'm gonna scour the thread and see what I can add to this, but feel free to add me to the registry or whatever.
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Apr 17, 2015 02:26
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Mishakaz posted:Russian Orthodox (ROCOR) checking in. Sorry I'm late! Hey I know this guy  quote:Such pretty blue vestments.
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Apr 17, 2015 15:13
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The bishop has listened to our priest when he has kept saying that he's too old to be the sole priest at three parishes 80 miles apart, and he's being replaced by someone slightly younger. Is this an issue where any of you are at, or is it mostly just a rural west thing?
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Apr 21, 2015 15:02
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Mr. Wiggles posted:The bishop has listened to our priest when he has kept saying that he's too old to be the sole priest at three parishes 80 miles apart, and he's being replaced by someone slightly younger. Is this an issue where any of you are at, or is it mostly just a rural west thing? Northern Illinois is about 2 priests per parish.
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Apr 21, 2015 15:06
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Mr. Wiggles posted:The bishop has listened to our priest when he has kept saying that he's too old to be the sole priest at three parishes 80 miles apart, and he's being replaced by someone slightly younger. Is this an issue where any of you are at, or is it mostly just a rural west thing? Here in rural Germany and Austria (and I suspect elsewhere in Europe as well) this has been the norm for decades. While I've never heard of the parishes being 80 miles apart, it isn't uncommon for priests to care for three, four and in rare cases even five parishes. I remember a friend of mine who comes from the Vulkaneifel region in western Germany telling me that near her hometown there was a priest caring for five parishes with I think 17 villages altogether. The church authorities tried to account for the lack of priests either by appointing priests to several parishes at once or (and I think this has become somewhat of a trend recently) by fusing several parishes to one larger pastoral unit which is cared for by several priests at once(as well as continuously strengthening the role of the laity, because being the sole person responsible for the spiritual care of thousands of people as well as managing the financial affairs of several parishes at once has to suck pretty hard). Note that this is highly controversial, of course. This will happen in Vienna as well (Cardinal Schönborn has set the goal at 2022 iirc), and there are lots of people in the parish councils who don't like it one bit. Which wouldn't be too bad in itself, but sadly those people all too often won't offer any viable alternative except "things are supposed to the stay the way I grew up with forever!" 
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Apr 21, 2015 15:45
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System Metternich posted:Note that this is highly controversial, of course. This will happen in Vienna as well (Cardinal Schönborn has set the goal at 2022 iirc), and there are lots of people in the parish councils who don't like it one bit. Which wouldn't be too bad in itself, but sadly those people all too often won't offer any viable alternative except "things are supposed to the stay the way I grew up with forever!" Then they can join Trad parishes or threaten to bring in the SSPX  Realtalk, the village parish has gone the way of the village, for better or worse. Priests have to be concentrated where the faithful are.
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Apr 21, 2015 17:27
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How large are your parishes if you have one priest managing multiple? Here in Finland it's in the church law that every parish has to have a vicar and a deacon, at least. I think a church musician, too.
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Apr 21, 2015 18:10
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The primary parish, where I live and am the chorus master/cantor, has a regular attendance of about 600 on a weekend, over three masses. At another parish where our priest serves, there are about 60 people on a weekend, and then at the other it's about 30-40. No deacons.
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Apr 21, 2015 19:11
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Valiantman posted:How large are your parishes if you have one priest managing multiple? Here in Finland it's in the church law that every parish has to have a vicar and a deacon, at least. I think a church musician, too. Theoretically the same goes for the Catholic Church, but there's nothing stoping a single priest from managing multiple parishes at once. My grandmother's parish forms part of a "parish community" consisting of four parishes. In 2010 there were 5026 Catholics (1862, 710, 658 and 1796 respectively) of which about 900 would regularly attend mass, which comes up at about 18 percent. They are cared for by two "main" priests and one priest who is already retired but still cares for one of the parishes, making work easier for the other two. I think that in the meantime another parish has been added to that, but I can't find any data for it.
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Apr 21, 2015 19:32
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Got to love the shortage of vocations, especially when everyone has their own idea as to why there is a shortage. I've heard people say it is because the Church is too traditionalist and other people say that it's because the Church isn't traditionalist enough. I personally blame student loan debt, at least in the US. Students go to a college affiliated with the Church to prepare themselves to serve the Church, only to be turned away because they had to borrow money in order to study.
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Apr 21, 2015 20:11
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We have a number of young priests from Latin America who have thankfully come to serve in our diocese, but not enough in number and not enough with the English skills to be able to effectively serve as pastor in many parishes.
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Apr 21, 2015 20:19
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Mr. Wiggles posted:We have a number of young priests from Latin America who have thankfully come to serve in our diocese, but not enough in number and not enough with the English skills to be able to effectively serve as pastor in many parishes. Here in Germany & Austria it seems to be mostly Polish, Indian and Nigerian priests who are called to help out. Especially the former often represent a very staunchly conservative Catholicism, which sometimes leads to a lot of fraction when they arrive in more liberal parishes. The language divide doesn't help, either. Konstantin posted:Got to love the shortage of vocations, especially when everyone has their own idea as to why there is a shortage. I've heard people say it is because the Church is too traditionalist and other people say that it's because the Church isn't traditionalist enough. I personally blame student loan debt, at least in the US. Students go to a college affiliated with the Church to prepare themselves to serve the Church, only to be turned away because they had to borrow money in order to study. I once found an interesting article about that which argued that the reason that more traditionalist parishes, dioceses and orders see more vocations ist the following: you can see the decision of becoming a priest as a decision between several advantages and several drawbacks. The advantages are (or were) an elevated social standing in your community as well as the belief that ordination would put you closer to God than it would be possibly as a layperson. The drawbacks were celibacy and the obedience duty to your bishop. While Vatican II mostly stripped away the theologically special position of a priest and the secularisation of society pulled priests off their pedestal, the drawbacks remained - therefore, vocations are strongest in communities where being a priest still "counts for something", so to speak. The article tried to back its thesis by referring to several examples like Franquist Spain (where the dictatorship prevented the implementation of Vatican II decisions until its end in 1975 which corresponded to a remarkable delay in a dwindling of vocations, which other and more liberal countries apparently had observed much earlier). I can't say that I support the thesis 100% - it seems to me that (at least in my recollection of it) it paid too little attention to the general secularisation of society which in some way or the other has been in process since the Enlightenment at least. I'll see if I can find it again, in any case it was an interesting read. e: Okay, that was easy. Rodney Stark/Roger Finke: Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival, Review of Religious Research 42, No.2. (Dec. 2000), pp. 125-45. I even found a scan online! e2: I have no idea how to do an MLA citation, in case you couldn't tell
System Metternich fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Apr 21, 2015 |
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Apr 21, 2015 20:35
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Also, the traditional demographic for the priesthood is drying up, or rather, going elsewhere. The priesthood has long been the traditional path for gay Roman Catholic men, particularly those who were serious enough about their faith that they wouldn't want to break the prohibitions against sex between men anyway. There are a lot fewer of those these days, particularly in countries where gay rights have made strong progress. Even the kids in rural, deeply conservative areas grow up knowing that they have options other than lifelong celibacy if they can just get away. I once had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with a woman who had been an officially-sanctioned minister to the New York LGBT community in the 70s and 80s during the early AIDS crisis, and who was one of the people involved in the formation of the New York chapter of Dignity. At the time that she was ministering, she knew for a fact that over 70% of the priests in New York were gay or bisexual. Especially in a place like New York, those kinds of numbers just won't happen anymore.
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Apr 21, 2015 21:20
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Bel_Canto posted:At the time that she was ministering, she knew for a fact that over 70% of the priests in New York were gay or bisexual. So she went around to every Catholic church in New York with her trusty gaydar device, eh? 
Lutha Mahtin fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Apr 22, 2015 |
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Apr 22, 2015 04:57
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Beyond the obvious gaydar joke, that would suggest 70% of the priesthood did not discern a true calling to the priesthood but found it to be the simplest way to live a celibate lifestyle. That's pretty distressing. Wouldn't it make more sense to suggest cultural values were at play in terms of Cold War politics and anti-communism, leading to a stronger cultural role for Christianity in the West without necessarily meaning a deeper faith? Again this discounts discernment of a true calling to Holy Orders. Last thought is celibacy doesn't seem to be a defining characteristic of the decline of the priesthood since it seems to be reflected in other Christian traditions which do not enforce a discipline of clerical celibacy.
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Apr 23, 2015 04:05
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PantlessBadger posted:Beyond the obvious gaydar joke, that would suggest 70% of the priesthood did not discern a true calling to the priesthood but found it to be the simplest way to live a celibate lifestyle. That's pretty distressing. It would be pretty distressing, yes. If it were true, that is. And it isn't true, of course, because the idea of this woman keeping a ledger of every priest in New York and meticulously documenting the ones who are so totally gay is one of the most laughable church story anecdotes I've ever heard.
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Apr 23, 2015 04:17
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It also sounds entirely like something you would hear mentioned at the council of the general synod here or at General Convention in the US.
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Apr 23, 2015 05:20
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Lutha Mahtin posted:It would be pretty distressing, yes. If it were true, that is. And it isn't true, of course, because the idea of this woman keeping a ledger of every priest in New York and meticulously documenting the ones who are so totally gay is one of the most laughable church story anecdotes I've ever heard. Or it would imply that in ministering to the New York LGBT Catholic community she met a very large number of priests personally in that context, which I'm pretty sure is what actually happened. I mean she could still be wildly off, but there are much easier explanations that "going around to parishes," particularly in light of the very confusing time for LGBT Catholics that was the 70's and mid-80's. Bel_Canto fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 06:29
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In ministering to LGBT Catholics, I've found a fuckload of LGBT Catholics 
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Apr 23, 2015 06:51
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I'm not so sure that 70% of all Catholic priests in NYC in the 70s-80s were gay, that seems a bit high Always be skeptical towards conspicuous statistics Smoking Crow fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 06:56
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You know 40% of all statistics are made up on the spot, right?
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Apr 23, 2015 07:16
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Bel_Canto posted:Or it would imply that in ministering to the New York LGBT Catholic community she met a very large number of priests personally in that context, which I'm pretty sure is what actually happened. This isn't what you said, though. You said that this woman knew for a fact that 70% of all Catholic priests in New York were gay. And I simply pointed out the ludicrousness of this statement by showing how such a claim would have to be actually verified. But by all means, go ahead and backpedal into whatever ill defined argument you're trying to make here.
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Apr 23, 2015 14:10
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Lutha Mahtin posted:This isn't what you said, though. You said that this woman knew for a fact that 70% of all Catholic priests in New York were gay. And I simply pointed out the ludicrousness of this statement by showing how such a claim would have to be actually verified. But by all means, go ahead and backpedal into whatever ill defined argument you're trying to make here. Aside from the dubious statistic, I do there's a lot of truth in the idea that gay Christians have been drawn to the notion of clerical celibacy. It's certainly true in Anglicanism. Forward in Faith has pretty much collapsed as gay clergy realise they don't have to sign up to conservative Anglo-Catholicism just to justify not being in a heterosexual marriage.
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Apr 23, 2015 21:47
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There is also the absence of cultural pressure along the lines of "Someone from this family is going to be a priest!" which I guess could be put under general secularization trends.
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Apr 24, 2015 21:13
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System Metternich posted:
That's just wonderful.
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May 3, 2015 07:28
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Took my first catechism class today. This week we got a rundown of the history of the Church; next week we're starting on the Creeds. No idea how long this is going to take, but I'm looking forward to it. Also picked up a nice Transfiguration icon.
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May 3, 2015 18:48
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So has anyone here wrote a letter to Francis numero Uno yet? He just migth call back to thank you.
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May 5, 2015 22:52
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Baudolino posted:So has anyone here wrote a letter to Francis numero Uno yet? You think if I ask him to reunite with the orthodox church he would Smoking Crow fucked around with this message at 23:06 on May 5, 2015 |
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May 5, 2015 22:54
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Smoking Crow posted:You think of I ask him to reunite with the orthodox church he would put a cute emoji in it like ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ or (✿◠‿◠)
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May 5, 2015 23:04
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Baudolino posted:So has anyone here wrote a letter to Francis numero Uno yet? like, on the phone? brb writin a letter
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May 6, 2015 00:32
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I know he called up a lady in South America who was raped and told her he was praying for her
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May 6, 2015 00:34
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Lutha Mahtin posted:like, on the phone? If it doesn't have 95 theses in one form or another you have failed in your Christian duty.
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May 6, 2015 00:37
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Smoking Crow posted:I know he called up a lady in South America who was raped and told her he was praying for her
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May 6, 2015 00:41
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