A young seminarian reflects on what it means to wear a clerical collar.
The Scientist offers its scientific quotations of the month.
Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly asks do pets go to heaven?
Helen Alvare argues that abortion law is family law.
Steve Cohen argues that anonymous juries will improve the judicial process.
Jed Perl suggests what Oscar Wilde could tell us about art criticism.
An Anglican theologian responds to an Orthodox archbishop’s challenge to Anglicanism.
GetReligion investigates the religion of Senator-elect Marco Rubio, almost universally described as a devout Catholic though he attends a Southern Baptist church.
An English food writer urges readers to raise geese for the holidays (the dinners, that is).
The famous English nurse Edith Cavell insisted that “patriotism is not enough,” and showed why in her life, which resulted in her being executed by the Germans, according to a new biography.
The social sciences offer 26 reasons marriage matters, according to scholars associated with the Center for Marriage and Families.
Although the U.N.’s Human Development Report believes that “people are the real wealth of nations,” the “true worth of female members of the population will have to be measured with additional standards” than those the report uses, writes an economist.
November 12th, 2010 | 9:48 pm
On pets going to heaven, here is what Fr. Hardon, SJ, once wrote: yes, pets may go to Heaven.
The more detailed answer:
“Pets, as pets, do not go to Heaven. But animals and such like beings may be said to be brought to Heaven because, after the Last Day, they can serve as part of the joys of Heaven. In other words, animals and such like creatures may be said to be brought to Heaven to serve as part of our Heavenly joys. Clearly, we do not need pets to provide happiness in Heaven. But pets and such like creatures will be brought to Heaven to become part of our creaturely happiness in the Heavenly kingdom. Consequently, we may say that animals and such like creatures may be brought to Heaven by God to enable us to enjoy them as part of our creaturely happiness in Heavenly beatitude. Absolutely speaking, medals and such like religious articles may be part of Heavenly beatitude. Certainly, they do not serve the same purpose as other creatures do in Hea ven. However, while they do not serve the purpose which medals do on earth, they may nevertheless be part of God’s mysterious providence in our Heavenly beatitude.
“Religious medals for pets are not wrong. The whole question is whether an object, like a religious medal, is used for an appropriate purpose. There is nothing per se wrong with having a religious object on an animal. Clearly a religious object is not necessary for animals. But there is nothing inherently wrong with having a religious object on or near an irrational being.
“Certainly a religious medal attached to or associated with an irrational animal can be misunderstood. We cannot say that a religious object helps an animal because somehow the animal is spiritually inspired by the religious object. But there is nothing wrong with having a religious object on or near an animal. The benefit would always come through the mind of some intelligent being who is inspired by the religious object.”
The answer comes from The Catholic Faith magazine, (May/June 1999) Vol. 5, No. 3.
November 15th, 2010 | 1:02 pm
I’d be more than happy if Greek Catholic clergy ditched their clerical collars and adopted their proper and traditional cassock, with a pectoral cross as the distinguishing feature of the presbyter. In many jurisdictions, priests don’t even wear the pectoral cross during Liturgy, which is scandalous. In others, you get weird mongrelizations, like priests who wear a suit with dog collar AND a pectoral cross, or bishops who do the same while wearing the Engolpion (sometimes called the Panagia (All Holy), a gold and enamel medallion of the Theotokos). Stop trying to be different. Just wear what the Orthodox wear, for crying out loud.
November 15th, 2010 | 1:03 pm
On whether pets go to heaven or not, let’s try to remember that “heaven” is not the final destination on the Eschaton Express. We will all be raised into a restored and perfected material world, and of course, in such a world, there will be animals, including those we love.
November 15th, 2010 | 1:06 pm
On the Anglican theologians comments about Metropolitan Hilarion’s recent address on Orthodoxy and Anglicanism: he manages to say very little while taking up a lot of bandwith in doing so. The fact is nothing has changed since the 1970s, when Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann remarked to one of his Anglican friends, “The ordination of women means the end of dialogue”. There really isn’t anything else to say.
November 15th, 2010 | 1:09 pm
On raising geese for the holidays: there is no need. The entire Chesapeake Bay watershed is overrun with the nasty, filthy and aggressive fowls, who like nothing better than to settle en masse upon one’s lawn, or the local town green, or the golf course, and demonstrate how quickly you know what moves through a goose. Rather than raising more of these nuisances, I invite the food writer to come to the States, where I will provide him with a shotgun and sufficient ammunition to supply the demand of the entire British Isles.
November 15th, 2010 | 11:28 pm
Stuart,
“let’s try to remember that ‘heaven’ is not the final destination on the Eschaton Express. We will all be raised into a restored and perfected material world”?
Huh? A “restored and perfected material world”?
Is this a Christian belief?
November 16th, 2010 | 9:11 am
“Is this a Christian belief?”
Most certainly. That our ultimate goal is to live for eternity as disembodied spirits clothed in ethereal robes and playing the harp all day is the common but erroneous view held by far too many Christians.
But it is quite clear that man was created by God as a psycho-somatic entity, composed of both a body and a soul (and some would add an animating spirit), so that death, the separation of the soul from the body, is a distortion of God’s divine plan, a true obscenity.
At the Parousia, when Christ comes again in glory, we shall all be raised, in “spiritual” but material bodies resembling those of the Risen Christ, who was physically present, could be touched, could be seen, could eat and drink–and yet possessed qualities greater than those of our “fleshly” bodies (e.g., to materialize and dematerialize, to walk through doors and walls, and so forth).
Where will we live in these spiritual bodies, but in a world brought back to perfection through Christ, who says, “Behold! I make all things new again”. Note, He does not make a “new thing”, but restores the old one. This is how the Apostles and the Fathers understood the meaning of the “Resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come”.
It is an unfortunate distortion of popular piety that that eschatology is either misrepresented or simply ignored, and that a pseudo-gnostic understanding of the afterlife has such a strong hold on the popular imagination.
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