Healing homosexual attractions... a study

Origin and Healing of Homosexual Attractions and Behaviors
Richard Fitzgibbons

In my clinical experience over the past twenty years I have witnessed the resolution of the emotional pain which caused homosexual temptations and behavior in several hundred males and females. Their process of healing occurred, first, through insight-oriented psychotherapy to identify the origins of their conflicts and then through the use of forgiveness and Catholic spirituality.

At the present time most Catholics have little to no understanding of the emotional causes of homosexual attractions and behavior nor of the powerful role that Catholic spirituality can play in the healing of this disorder. The reasons for this state of ignorance are numerous and include the scant literature available on the value of the Catholic Faith and the sacraments in the resolution of homosexual attractions and acts; failure of traditional therapy to resolve homosexual behavior; views within the media and educational, social service, health and political fields. In addition, there are many factions within the Church herself that are opposed to and are attempting to undermine traditional Catholic moral doctrine on this issue.

The failure to understand the actual causes of homosexuality impacts those who counsel teenagers and adults with this disorder. Therapists regularly tell those seeking help that the Church's teaching on homosexuality is insensitive to homosexuals, unscientific, and erroneous. They are advised to accept themselves as being created homosexual by God. Unfortunately, those giving such counsel usually have little awareness of the emotional conflicts leading to homosexual attractions nor of the healing power available with forgiveness and the Catholic spirituality.

In my clinical experience over the past twenty years I have witnessed the resolution of the emotional pain which caused homosexual temptations and behavior in several hundred males and females. Their process of healing occurred, first, through insight-oriented psychotherapy to identify the origins of their conflicts and then through the use of forgiveness and Catholic spirituality. Such a treatment approach is similar in ways to the employment of spirituality in the treatment of substance abuse disorders. In fact, major breakthroughs were made in the management of addictive disorders only after a reliance on God was made the cornerstone of the treatment plan. Prior to that time, traditional psychotherapy alone resulted in minimal improvement. The use of Catholic spirituality in the treatment of homosexuality follows a similar pattern.

Origins

The most common conflicts at different life stages that predispose individuals to homosexual attractions and behavior are loneliness and sadness, profound feelings of inadequacy, mistrust and fear, narcissism, sexual addiction, excessive anger, sexual abuse in childhood and a lack of balance in one's life. During times of stress these inner difficulties are activated. In an attempt to seek relief or to escape from this unconscious emotional pain, strong sexual temptations and behavior can occur. This dynamic of inner emotional suffering leading to homosexual desires and activity rarely can begin during childhood but usually it develops in early adolescence. However, adult life may be the first time for the emergence of this disorder.

Read the rest here.

Forcing students to condone homosexuality - EMU in Michigan

From CNA:

School faces lawsuit for dismissing student who refused to condone homosexuality

Ypsilanti, Mich., Apr 9, 2009 / 03:31 pm (CNA).- A lawsuit was filed against Eastern Michigan University on Thursday after school officials allegedly dismissed a student from the school’s counseling program for not affirming homosexual behavior as morally acceptable. The Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom filed the lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on behalf of student Julea Ward.

EMU reportedly requires students in its counseling program to affirm or validate homosexual behavior within the context of a counseling relationship. It also prohibits students from advising clients that they can change their homosexual behavior.

According to the Alliance Defense Fund, Ward has never addressed homosexual behavior in any form during counseling sessions with her clients.

The school initiated a disciplinary process against Ward and reportedly said she could stay in the graduate school counseling program if she agreed to undergo a “remediation” program. According to the ADF, the program’s purpose was to change her belief system as it concerns counseling about homosexual relationships and to conform her beliefs to the university’s views.

Given the choice of voluntarily leaving the program or asking for a formal review hearing, Ward chose the hearing.

During the hearing, EMU faculty reportedly denigrated her Christian views and asked “several inappropriate and intrusive questions about her religious beliefs,” the ADF said.

Read the rest.

Shea & Zmirak on living in exile

Read it here.

Part of Shea:

I don't know how many times I'm going to have to say that I think both parties in our country are, in various ways, deadly to the Church before people believe it and stop making the dumb accusation that I think Bush worse than Obama or the GOP worse than the Dems. Chesterton remarks that "Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils. They differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."

Anybody with any sense at all knows that I am mortally opposed to the Democrat dogmatic enthusiasm for the sacrament of abortion and their (apparently incurable, though miracles can happen) lust to sacrifice the weakest to money, sex, and power. So it goes without saying that I am implacably opposed to Obama and the Dems current campaign to advance this goal and crush the consciences of those who would oppose them. I've said this repeatedly, as I've said that Obama is behaving like an enemy of the Church. When you support legislation that would effectively destroy the Catholic hospital system, that's called "being an enemy of the Church."

At the same time, in my ongoing quest to urge peopl not to be insane, I have also pointed out that opponents of Obama would acquit themselves much better if they kept their heads and stopped making ludicrous comparisons of the guy to Hitler or some sort of devil worshipper. He is a man. A politician. He has virtues and faults. It is not the case that you will persuade normal people that some of his policies are very bad by screaming that he is evil incarnate, or by insisting that he is completely indistinguishable from a foaming madman filled with a racist, militaristic ideology bent on world conquest, enslavement of inferior peoples, genocide, and the establishment of a thousand year Reich in which every citizen is subject to his absolute and unquestioned will. If you talk this way, people will look at their watch, clear their throats, and say, "I think this is my stop." They will be sure to find a different seat the next time they get on the bus with you.

How do I know this? Because Lefties tried the same thing with Bush. Barking madness it was with them, and barking madness it is with anti-Obama wingnuts.

Part of Zmirak:

As Catholics and Americans, it's clear from recent events that we have just embarked upon a long and dangerous Lent. It's a secular Lent, with no resurrection promised, with tempting spirits aplenty, and no guarantee we will refuse their bread transformed from stones, their angels to cushion our fall, their kingdoms on offer for kneeling before the world. The hungrier we become, the more reckless we will get, more likely to worship would-be "saviors."

The liturgical season itself drags on long enough, and if you take it seriously it can seem to last forever. But it has a definite ending, set down in black and white -- the black vestments of Good Friday, the white dawn of Easter lilies and candles. As hard as we try to recapture the grief of the apostles and Our Lady on Good Friday, to join ourselves to Jesus as He cries, "My God, my God, why have You abandoned Me?," there's always a cushion in the back of our minds: We know the story's ending. As we watch with Christ an hour this Thursday, or meditate upon His seven last words on Friday, at the very lowest point in this bleakest, hostless liturgy. . . we can't quite forget that "death is swallowed up in victory." We have that advantage over the apostles.

Not so in worldly affairs. Societies, even Christian societies, really have collapsed. Catholic missions to pagan empires that came achingly close to mass success -- in Japan, in China -- have failed thanks to human mistakes, to hubris or corruption, and ended in massacres. More tragic than those who died horribly as martyrs are those who succumbed to fear, who traded (as most of us would) the integrity of faith for a few more years of "quantity time.” Catholic nations have lost the Faith, as the English did, under slow, relentless pressure from their governments. Still others have weathered persecution nobly, then greeted the dawn of freedom with a yawn. The faith that sustained my Irish ancestors through the Famine in time of feast seems childish, a bogeyman of the past that adds local color -- like the leprechauns.

As Americans we like to think that we're exceptional, that our nation is some unique, divine experiment, immune to the laws of history. (We're not the first nation to think so, and we're unlikely to be the last.) The events of the past eight years have disproved this charming theory. It turns out we really can't impose modernity and liberalism on a civilization of a billion through either force or farce; neither the Pentagon nor Hollywood seem likely to turn the Dar al-Islam into one more interchangeable piece of a globalized, peaceful McWorld. Nor can we live in prosperity forever without making anything -- trading for cheap imports our cleverness at finagling finances. One needn't think all lending at interest sinful, nor even reject the market economy, to see that the hucksterism that passed for investment wizardry on Wall Street amounted at last to usury. Nor can we count on the order and stability of a society that has undermined its very building block -- the family -- through sexual revolution, incessant contraception, and easy divorce. Anarchy begins at home.

Marriage for all - a homosexual manifesto

This was an excellent post about what is really behind gay 'marriage' amendments from Catholic Culture.

marriage for all Posted Apr. 8, 2009 11:40 AM || by Diogenes || category

In every nation, in every epoch, homosexuals have been free to marry. In every nation, in every epoch, homosexuals been free to marry other homosexuals. Homosexuals have been prohibited, exactly as heterosexuals have been prohibited, from marrying persons of the same sex. There was no question of discrimination on the basis of orientation because the appetites of the consenting parties (as is the case in every contractual obligation) were beside the point. Until now.

Partisans of same-sex marriage pretend that marriage is a good they wish to extend to those it has been arbitrarily denied: hence campaigns named "Marriage for All" or "Marriage Equality." But the publicly dispensable good (the kind a marriage license gives you) has always been available. What they resent is the moral value accorded marriage -- an honor markedly weaker today than in the past, yet still potent enough to cause gnashing of teeth among the innovators. That honor is what they want to abolish.

Imagine that the attitudes of a century ago -- when marriage was accorded the power to ennoble sexual relations -- could be beamed forward into the present. And imagine today's parents of a young man betrothed to another young man, urging him to remain a virgin until his wedding so as to preserve intact his and his fiancé's purity. Or imagine a same-sex couple, piously abstaining from fellatio or rimming during the season of Lent, only to resume it with prayerful joy on Easter morning. Simply to raise these possibilities is to see how grotesque they are. The decision to countenance same-sex unions is not to shift sodomy in one's books from the "immoral" to the "moral" column, it is to dispense with the category of sexual morality full stop. It is to rip up one's passport and renounce one's citizenship in the commonwealth of sexual morality.

Gay activists taunt the rest of us that conventional man-woman marriage is in a shambles today, and they're right. But their proposed innovation, as they really understand and rarely admit, is a choice for moral anarchy. Within their world there is no question of calling one act pure and another act impure, because the notion of purity has to be put to death before their project is embarked on. Chastity cannot be ennobling because to embrace same-sex congress is to debunk nobility. Even the photos from the Pride parades display a kind of sack-dance gloating over the dethronement of the concepts of purity and sexual integrity; it's a burlesque of those values that marriage -- real marriage -- was ordained to uphold.

Same-sex marriage is a war on honor. And it appears to be winning.

BXVI on the Holy Triduum of Easter

On the Holy Triduum
"Hope Is Nourished in the Great Silence of Holy Saturday"

VATICAN CITY, APRIL 8, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the address Benedict XVI gave today at the general audience in St. Peter's Square.

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Holy Week, which for us Christians is the most important week of the year, offers us the opportunity to be immersed in the central events of Redemption, to relive the Paschal Mystery, the great mystery of the faith. Beginning tomorrow afternoon, with the Mass "In Coena Domini," the solemn liturgical rites will help us to meditate in a more lively manner on the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Lord in the days of the Holy Paschal Triduum, fulcrum of the entire liturgical year.

May divine grace open our hearts to comprehend the inestimable gift that salvation is, obtained for us by Christ's sacrifice. We find this immense gift wonderfully narrated in a famous hymn contained in the Letter to the Philippians (cf. 2:6-11), on which we meditated several times in Lent. The Apostle reviews, both in an essential and effective manner, the whole mystery of the history of salvation referring to Adam's pride who, not being God, wanted to be like God. And he contrasts this pride of the first man, which all of us feel a bit in our being, with the humility of the true Son of God who, becoming man, did not hesitate to take upon himself all the weaknesses of the human being, except sin, and pushed himself to the profundity of death. This descent to the last profundity of the Passion and Death is then followed by his exaltation, the true glory, the glory of the love that went all the way to the end. And that is why it is right -- as Paul says -- that "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord!" (2:10-11). With these words, St. Paul refers to a prophecy of Isaiah where God says: I am the Lord, to me every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth (cf. Isaiah 45: 23). This -- says Paul -- is also true for Jesus Christ. He really is, in his humility, in the true greatness of his love, the Lord of the world and before him every knee truly bows.

How marvelous, and at the same time amazing, is this mystery! We can never meditate this reality sufficiently. Jesus, though being God, did not want to make of his divine prerogatives an exclusive possession; he did not want to use his being God, his glorious dignity and power, as an instrument of triumph and sign of distance from us. On the contrary, "he emptied himself" assuming our miserable and weak human condition -- in this regard, Paul uses a quite meaningful Greek verb to indicate the kenosis, this descent of Jesus. The divine form (morphe) is hidden in Christ under the human form, namely, under our reality marked by suffering, poverty, human limitations and death. The radical and true sharing of our nature, a sharing in everything except sin, leads him to that frontier that is the sign of our finiteness -- death. But all this was not the fruit of a dark mechanism or a blind fatality: It was instead his free choice, by his generous adherence to the salvific plan of the Father. And the death which he went out to meet -- adds Paul -- was that of the cross, the most humiliating and degrading that one can imagine. The Lord of the universe did all this out of love for us: out of love he willed to "empty himself" and make himself our brother; out of love he shared our condition, that of every man and every woman. In this connection, Theodoret of Cyrus, a great witness of the Eastern tradition, writes: "Being God and God by nature and having equality with God, he did not retain this as something great, as do those who have received some honor beyond their merits, but concealing his merits, he chose the most profound humility and took the form of a human being" (Commentary on the Letter to the Philippians, 2:6-7).

As prelude to the Paschal Triduum, which will begin tomorrow -- as I was saying -- with the thought-provoking afternoon rites of Holy Thursday, is the solemn Chrism Mass, which the bishop celebrates in the morning with his presbytery, and in the course of which at the same time the priestly promises are renewed, made on the day of ordination. It is a gesture of great value, an occasion all the more propitious in which the priests confirm their fidelity to Christ who chose them as his ministers. Moreover, this priestly meeting assumes a particular meaning, because it is almost a preparation to the Priestly Year, which I have proclaimed on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the death of the holy Curé of Ars and which will begin next June 19. Blessed also in the Chrism Mass will be the oil of the sick and of catechumens, and the chrism will be consecrated. These are rites that signify symbolically the fullness of Christ's priesthood and the ecclesial communion that must animate Christian people, gathered for the Eucharistic sacrifice and vivified in the unity of the gift of the Holy Spirit.

In the afternoon Mass, called "In Coena Domini," the Church commemorates the institution of the Eucharist, the ministerial priesthood and the new commandment of charity, left by Jesus to his disciples. St. Paul gives one of the earliest testimonies of all that happened in the Cenacle, vigil of the Lord's Passion. "The Lord Jesus," he wrote, at the beginning of the 50's years, based on a text he received from the Lord's own realm, "on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, 'This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me'" (1 Corinthians 11:23-25). Words charged with mystery, which manifest clearly the will of Christ: Under the species of bread and wine he renders himself present in his body given and with his bloodshed. It is the sacrifice of the new and definitive covenant offered to all, without distinction of race or culture. And from this sacramental rite, which he entrusts to the Church as supreme proof of his love, Jesus appointed his disciples as ministers, and those who followed them in the course of the centuries. Holy Thursday is, therefore, a renewed invitation to render thanks to God for the supreme gift of the Eucharist, to be received with devotion and to be adored with lively faith. Because of this, the Church encourages, after the celebration of Holy Mass, watching in the presence of the Most Holy Sacrament, recalling the sad hour that Jesus passed in solitude and prayer in Gethsemane, before being arrested and then being condemned to death.

And so we come to Good Friday, day of the Passion and crucifixion of the Lord. Every year, placing ourselves in silence before Jesus nailed to the wood of the cross, we realize how full of love were the words he pronounced on the eve, in the course of the Last Supper. "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many" (Mark 14:24). Jesus willed to offer his life in sacrifice for the remission of humanity's sins. Just as before the Eucharist, so before the Passion and Death of Jesus on the cross the mystery is unfathomable to reason. We are placed before something that humanly might seem absurd: a God who not only is made man, with all man's needs, not only suffers to save man, burdening himself with all the tragedy of humanity, but dies for man.

Christ's death recalls the accumulation of sorrows and evils that beset humanity of all times: the crushing weight of our dying, the hatred and violence that again today bloody the earth. The Lord's Passion continues in the suffering of men. As Blaise Pascal correctly writes, "Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world; one must not sleep during this time" (Pensées, 553). If Good Friday is a day full of sadness, and hence at the same time, all the more propitious a day to reawaken our faith, to strengthen our hope and courage so that each one of us will carry his cross with humility, trust and abandonment in God, certain of his support and victory. The liturgy of this day sings: "O Crux, ave, spes unica" (Hail, O cross, our only hope)."

This hope is nourished in the great silence of Holy Saturday, awaiting the resurrection of Jesus. On this day the Churches are stripped and no particular liturgical rites are provided. The Church watches in prayer like Mary, and together with Mary, sharing the same feelings of sorrow and trust in God. Justly recommended is to preserve throughout the day a prayerful climate, favorable to meditation and reconciliation; the faithful are encouraged to approach the sacrament of penance, to be able to participate truly renewed in the Easter celebrations.

The recollection and silence of Holy Saturday lead us at night to the solemn Easter Vigil, "mother of all vigils," when the singing of the joy of the resurrection of Christ will erupt in all the churches and communities. Proclaimed once again will be the victory of light over darkness, of life over death, and the Church will rejoice in the encounter with her Lord. We will thus enter into the climate of the Easter of Resurrection.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us dispose ourselves to live the Holy Triduum intensely, to participate ever more profoundly in the mystery of Christ. We are accompanied on this journey by the Holy Virgin, who in silence followed her son Jesus to Calvary, taking part with great sorrow in his sacrifice, thus cooperating with the mystery of the Redemption and becoming Mother of all believers (cf. John 19:25-27). Together with her we will enter the Cenacle, we will stay at the foot of the Cross, we will watch next to the dead Christ, awaiting with hope the dawn of the radiant day of the Resurrection. In this perspective, I now express to all of you the most cordial wishes for a happy and holy Easter, together with your families, parishes and communities.

[The Pope then greeted pilgrims in several languages. In Italian, he said:]

I address a cordial welcome to Italian-speaking pilgrims. In the first place I renew my spiritual closeness to the dear community of L'Aquila and of the other regions, harshly stricken by the violent seismic phenomenon of past days, which has caused numerous victims, many wounded and immense material damage. The solicitude with which the authorities, forces of order, volunteers and other workers are helping these brothers of ours shows the importance of solidarity, to overcome together such painful trials. Once again I wish to say to those populations that the Pope shares their sorrow and concern. Very dear ones, I hope to come to see you as soon as possible. Know that the Pope prays for all, imploring the Lord's mercy for the deceased and the maternal comfort of Mary for the families and survivors, and the support of Christian hope.

Then I greet the participants in the UNIV international convention, promoted by the prelature of the Opus Dei. Dear friends, I exhort you to respond with joy to the Lord's call to give full meaning to your lives: in study, in relations with colleagues, in the family and in society. "Don't forget that many great things depend on the fact that you and I," said St. Josemaría Escrivá, "behave as God wishes" (The Way, 755). I greet the faithful of the parish of St. John the Baptist, in Campagnano of Rome, and the directors, teachers and numerous young students of the Don Milani Didactic Circle of Galatone. I hope that the visit to the tombs of the Apostles will arouse in all the desire to always serve Christ and brethren ever more generously.

I greet young people, the sick and newlyweds. Tomorrow we will enter in the Holy Triduum, which will make us relive the central mysteries of our salvation. I invite you, dear young people, to draw from the Cross the necessary light to walk in the footsteps of the Redeemer. For you, dear sick people, may the Passion of the Lord, culminating in the triumph of Easter, always be the source of hope. And you, dear newlyweds, by living the Paschal Mystery, make your existence become a mutual gift.

[Translation by ZENIT]

[In English, he said]

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Tomorrow we begin the Holy Triduum, the heart of the entire liturgical year: a time when we immerse ourselves in the central events of our Redemption. The Chrism Mass serves as a prelude to these three days, as priests renew their promises to the Bishop, who then blesses the holy oils and consecrates the chrism signifying the gift of the Holy Spirit. At the Mass of the Lord's Supper, we recall the institution of the Eucharist, the supreme sign of Christ's love for us. As we venerate his Cross on Good Friday, we contemplate the full meaning of his words: "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many" (Mk 14:24). Holy Saturday finds us waiting in silent hope for the Easter Vigil, when every church will break forth in a song of joy at the Lord's Resurrection. The celebration of the Paschal mystery recalls the depth of Christ's love: he did not wish to exercise his divinity as an exclusive possession, a means of domination, or a sign of distance between him and us. Rather, "he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant" (Phil 2:7) by sharing fully in our human condition, even to the point of death: not a death imposed by blind chance or fate, but one freely chosen in obedience to the Father's will for the salvation for all. May our fervent celebration of the Triduum draw us ever more deeply into Christ's Paschal mystery!

I am pleased to greet the English-speaking pilgrims present at today's Audience. May your visit to Rome during this Holy Week fill you with the peace, hope and joy of Christ Jesus!

© Copyright 2009 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Save the monastery & liturgy, save the world!

Save the monaster & liturgy, save the world!

The Clear Creek Monastery list just sent text of a wonderful Russ Hittinger profile of the congregation of Benedectine monks in Fontgombault, who at the time it was written (1999) was starting to plant a daughter house in eastern Oklahoma. I know this is my kind of thing, but I tell you, when I got to the end of Russ's piece, I got a chill of excitement. This really has to be the year I make a pilgrimage to Clear Creek. It really does. If you have any interest in monasticism and/or Catholicism, read past the jump. God bless these holy monks and their efforts at renewal!

Crisis Magazine
November 1999
Solesmes Monks Coming to Tulsa
by RUSSELL HITTINGER
The establishment of a new Benedictine monastery at Clear Creek, Oklahoma is the occasion for this account of the recent history of monasticism in Europe and the remarkable story behind the new foundation.

In January 1999, as the pope was preparing to fly from Mexico City to St. Louis, a rumor rippled through Cherokee County, Oklahoma. Perched in the foothills of the Ozarks, Cherokee County is the capital of the Cherokee Nation; here ended the 1839 Trail of Tears, the 1,000-mile forced march of the Cherokees from Georgia to Oklahoma. The local grammar school at Lost City had received a fax from a monastery in France. Someone reckoned that the fax was in Italian, and by the time this report reached the local feed store and therefore to cell phones and CB radios country-wide, the rumor was in full orbit.

The pope was headed for Lost City -- specifically, to a 1,200-acre tract of land at one time owned by Cleo Epps, a notorious bootlegger, but recently purchased by French Benedictine monks of the Congregation of Solesmes. That very week, the Lost City school was visited by two black-hooded monks, one wearing a pectoral cross. Someone overheard a remark about the monks meeting with the pope. There were too many coincidences. It was clear, the pope would be touching down enroute to St. Louis.

The monk with the pectoral cross was Dom Antoine Forgeot, abbot of Notre-Dame de Fontgombault, an eleventh-century Benedictine monastery east of Poitiers. His companion was Father Philip Anderson, prior of Notre-Dame de Triors, a daughterhouse of Fontgombault, founded south of Lyon in 1984. And they were indeed going to meet the pope in St. Louis to ask for the Holy Father's blessing on the new monastery outside of Lost City to be christened Our Lady of the Annunciation at Clear Creek. This fall, 13 monks -- two Canadian, three Frenchmen, and eight American -- arrived from France to build their monastery.

Contemplative life in modern Tulsa

Compared with other end-of-the-millennium events, the founding of the new Benedictine monastery at Clear Creek is a rather quiet and certainly unassuming affair. But what these black-hooded monks propose to do in the foothills of the Ozarks is significant, for Clear Creek is the first foundation (for men) of the Congregation of Solesmes in the United States. The most famous Benedictine congregation in Europe, at least in modern times, is planting itself in a place where Catholics constitute little more than 2 percent of the population, during a time of unprecedented American prosperity and power. An hour away in Tulsa, the parking lots of malls, high schools, and mega-churches are packed deep with Lexus SUVs and Land Rovers. Where oil wells once defined the American century in these parts, ten-story cell phone transmission towers now encircle the city, symbolizing the new digitalized Sunbelt. From a worldly perspective, this is a strange time and place to sow the seeds of contemplation.

But more than 150 years ago, Benedictine monasticism was revived at Solesmes under conditions that would have seemed even more unusual. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, from Lisbon to Vienna, European civil authorities declared war on monasticism. As Rousseau said, "Wherever the Clergy constitutes a body it is the master and lawgiver in its realm." Religious orders constituted such a "body" par excellence. Deriving their authority from Rome, they enjoyed independence from the local church and from civil powers. Such imperium in imperio was unacceptable to the new European regimes. Monastic institutions were an affront not only to the state but also to the new civic culture of republicanism. Garat l'Aine declared in the Assemblée Nationale in 1790 that the religious vow "is a civil suicide." Monks, he alleged, detach their affections from things of the world without giving anything back to society in the form of schools, hospitals, or orphanages. In a word, he said, monks are "useless."

The new constitutional democracies in Europe used every means at their disposal to eliminate monasticism. Within one generation, only 30 of 1,500 Benedictine abbeys survived in Europe. Cluny, the capital of medieval monasticism in the West, was closed and auctioned off to the highest bidder. Citeaux and Clairvaux likewise were confiscated and turned into state prisons. At La Trappe, the Trappists were rounded up for chain gangs, and some of the monks were sent to the penal colony of Conenama in French Guiana. By 1803, every one of the 68 Carthusian houses in France and the 18 in Germany had vanished under the legal and extralegal policies of the new regimes. Augustinian Hermits disappeared forever from Portugal, where they once had 50 monasteries. At the end of the 19th century, 500 Dominican houses had dwindled to 80, and the total number of friars plummeted from 25,000 to about 3,000. The consecrated life of religious was over, or so it seemed.

In the 1830s, a secular priest named Prosper Guéranger received permission from Pope Gregory XVI, a Camaldolese monk, to refound Benedictine monasticism at the abandoned priory of Solesmes, not far from Le Mans. Though he had never been a novice or a monk, Guéranger was made an abbot overnight. He rebuilt the Benedictine life by virtue of an extraordinary ability to imagine what monasticism once was and what it is supposed to be. This was the era of Romanticism, when many intellectuals and artists indulged a sympathy for things medieval. Guéranger, however, understood how to revive the older institutions and traditions as living realities, not as a mere exercise in nostalgia.

His multi-volume works, L'Année liturgique and Institutions liturgiques, were devoted not only to the revival of monastic chant but more broadly to exploring the historical and theological grounds for a recovery of the Roman liturgy. He insisted that liturgy and apostolic authority are intertwined, for Christ gave his apostles power to dispense the mysteries; Christ bestowed liturgical power. This simple but profound point was quite contrary to the spirit of the age, which wanted Catholicism reduced to national churches and connected to Rome only by extrinsic authority. Rather than seeing the papacy as a power external to the temporal state, Guéranger saw it as an authority internal to culture, a culture supernaturalized through the "great and mighty river" of liturgical life.

To the liberals of his time, Guéranger seemed to be an ultramontanist, and he was, for he worked behind the scenes writing briefs for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and Pastor Aeternus, the Vatican I document on papal authority. From the right, he seemed to be a dangerous liberal because he believed that efforts to restore political unity between throne and altar distracted from the renewal of the Church's interior landscapes. If permitted civil freedoms, he argued, the Roman Church had sufficient spiritual resources to restore religion and culture. Thus Guéranger anticipated some of the most important issues that would come into view a century later at Vatican II: religious liberty vis-à-vis the state, the role of Rome in evangelizing culture across national boundaries, recovery of patristic theology, and the renewal of the Roman liturgy.

Despite being expelled from France three times (in November 1880, the monks were forcibly removed from their choir stalls while chanting the divine office), the Congregation of Solesmes not only endured but flourished. Today, there are some 29 monasteries and convents, and about 1,000 monks and nuns.. They have continued to resist taking on "useful" apostolates that would distract from the contemplative life and the priority of choir. Many Catholics in the United States have heard of Solesmes, for almost all Gregorian chant by choirs or on recordings -- or even better, at a Catholic liturgy -- is derived from the restoration of chant undertaken by the monks of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. Today the very word Solesmes evokes the image of serenity, beauty, and liturgical refinement.

The road to Oklahoma

The new foundation in Oklahoma derives from Fontgombault and three of its daughterhouses in the Solesmes system. Monasticism at Fontgombault dates back to 1091, when hermits living in caves on the banks of the Creuse River, east of Poitiers, united under the Rule of St. Benedict. Its history is not atypical of French monasticism. It thrived in the Middle Ages but slowly declined under the force of religious wars, absentee abbots, and finally the French Revolution.

Monasticism first returned to Fontgombault with the Trappists in 1849. The French government permitted the Trappists to reclaim the monastery provided the monks did something "useful" -- in this case, they ran a reform school for boys. Charles de Foucauld visited the Trappists there before becoming a hermit in the Sahara. They were evicted in 1903. In The Waters of Siloe, Thomas Merton recounts how some of the Fontgombault Trappists took refuge at Gethsemani in Kentucky; when Merton entered Gethsemani in 1941, one of the Fontgombault monks was still alive.

After World War II, Solesmes established a daughterhouse at Fontgombault, which became an Abbey in 1953. Plentiful vocations have enabled it, in turn, to found three more monasteries at Randol (1971), Triors (1984), and Gaussan (1994). The average of monks at each of these monasteries is about 40. Randol, on top of a mountain just outside Clermont-Ferrand, is the first contemplative foundation in the Auvergne region of France since 1789. All of these monasteries, including the new priory at Clear Creek, celebrate the traditional Roman liturgy at the Conventual Mass after tierce each morning.

In addition to being the first Solesmes foundation for men (in 1981 a convent was founded in Vermont) in the United States, the new priory at Clear Creek represents yet another first. It is the first time Europeans have sent Americans to spearhead the founding of a contemplative house in America. And this is perhaps the most interesting part of the story.

The connection with America goes back almost 30 years, when there was a remarkable influx of Yanks to Fontgombault. Strangely enough, this movement of Americans across the Atlantic was indirectly aided and abetted by the United States government, which, in 1970, gave University of Kansas (KU) professors John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Frank Nelick a grant for an experimental program in "Tradition." The Pearson College Integrated Humanities Program provided courses in Western civilization, which in its time and place had just enough countercultural edge to attract a surprising number of students. The program included no overt training in theology or Catholic catechism.

In 1972 two students set out on a field trip to Europe to study village life. They also expressed a desire to hear Gregorian chant. A Trappist monk of Gethsemani who happened to be passing through KU recommended that they visit Fontgombault. Before the boys left for Europe, Professor Senior quipped, "bring back an abbot." As providence had it, the students ended up at the porter's gate of Fontgombault in July 1972. The abbot at that time, Dom Jean Roy, was absent. Upon his return, the master of novices informed him that two Americans in the guest house had requested permission to stay for several months. Dom Roy agreed. Later, he mentioned he had been thinking of the United States all that day and, in fact, had thought of founding a monastery there a few years before.

Despite their parents' incomprehension and even threats of being pursued by cult-deprogrammers, more than 100 KU students followed the first group to Fontgombault. In 1976, 60 American students arrived during Lent. It is said that many of them eventually became Catholics, including three who took monastic vows and four who became secular priests. Meanwhile, back at KU, French professors protested these field trips on the grounds that France belonged exclusively to the French Department. More serious, though unproven, allegations of religious proselytizing and brainwashing were brought against the faculty. The Humanities Program was closed after the 1977-1978 academic year. Evidently, the reality of Kansas Jayhawks exchanging hooded frat sweatshirts for hooded habits could not be tolerated by state and university officials. (An editorial cartoon in the March 31, 1977, Kansas City Times depicted an evolutionary scheme, beginning with a college hippie who evolves into a businessman, before evolving into a monk.)

In any event, 3,000 miles away, Fontgombault now had a significant contingent of Americans and three Canadians who found their way to Fontgombault completely apart from the Kansas program. By the early 1990s, according to Dom Forgeot, "it just did not seem possible to wait any longer before restoring to America the considerable number of vocations that we have received from her." Exploratory trips were made to several dioceses in search for the right combination of factors, such as suitably remote land and episcopal approval of a group of monk who bring no active apostolate.

The right combination was found in the diocese of Tulsa. Bishop Edward Slattery had been to France in 1997 to ordain, in the Carthusian house of Sélignac, a Tulsan who had once tested a vocation at Fontgombault. Three other Tulsans -- a priest, a librarian, and a public school teacher -- had also tested vocations at Fontgombault. Yet another, the daughter of a professor at Oral Roberts University, had become a nun at Jouques, a traditional Benedictine convent in the south of France. Though it might seem like a strange episode in a Catholic X-Files, there was a spiritual chord reverberating between eastern Oklahoma and France.

On the Feast of the Assumption in 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the return of Benedictine monasticism to Fontgombault, Bishop Slattery and Dom Forgeot signed an ecclesiastical charter, Ad Dei Gloriam. The diocese formally recognized the purely contemplative vocation of the new foundation, while the monks promised to be a ministry of prayer and retreats. Bishop Slattery returned to Fontgombault again this year on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul to celebrate Mass and to give some last-minute encouragement to the monks who, after more than 20 years in a French cloister, would be making a trip back to the New World.

Planting seeds in fresh soil

More than 25 years after the Kansas professor made the quip about the boys bringing back an abbot, the Americans are back, along with three Frenchmen and two Canadians. I was so struck by the story of American students from the late 1960s bringing what is essentially Carolingian monasticism to the New World that I decided last spring to visit the three French monasteries at Triors, Randol, and Fontgombault before the monks departed for Oklahoma.

My high expectations for the liturgical ritual were more than fulfilled. There is a kind of Romano-Gallic beauty, at once earthy and refined, that pervades these houses. The Roman rituals never appeared or sounded so good. I felt as if I had happened upon them for the first time. Even a tourist like me could easily catch a glimpse of the impression it must have made on those Kansas students a quarter-century ago. The question I wanted answered is whether this kind of monasticism is transplantable to Lost City, that is, to the United States. After all, this is not a golden or even bronze era of contemplative life in North America.

For his part, the abbot of Fontgombault insisted that it would be a mistake to believe that even the external refinements of the Solesmes Benedictine tradition are merely French, or for that matter merely Old World European. The beauty of the externalities, he explained -- what makes them refulgent even to the casual observer -- derives from St. Benedict's teaching on the degrees of humility. From interior humility, which is a supernatural gift, the body is induced to share in a certain order and beauty. The abbot said, "We do not for a moment forget this beauty, but by the same token we cannot forget its source, which is supernatural." It is not French, and it is not American -- it is the monastic appropriation of Gospel. There is no reason why this cannot be taught to Americans who live in varying degrees of proximity to Lost City.

One monk, an American, took a rather different approach to my question. The French soul, he explained, is old soil for monasticism. It has been tilled and turned for centuries, and even in its exhaustion, it can still produce a sturdy plant. Contemporary France is a jaded, secular culture in which anticlericalism is a democratic sport, but even so, there are 79 Benedictine monasteries in France. The American soul, on the other hand, has not been tilled to this end. (Incidentally, several of the monks, especially the French, expressed great admiration for Thomas Merton and the American Trappists of the era.) The American religious genius has been given to other, more active ends. But once this soil is cultivated for the seeds of contemplation, it will be so fresh that it will produce dramatic results.

Perhaps these monks are right. It is an issue of timing that defies worldly predictions. American Catholics are the most religiously free and prosperous people on earth. Once a church of immigrants who had something to prove to themselves and to their surrounding culture, Catholicism is today the last mainline church; it is the last church that consistently speaks in the voice of Christian tradition on those moral and spiritual issues recognizable to anyone's grandparents, Catholic or Protestant. The Catholic Church in America really doesn't have anything left to prove to the political and economic culture. The question now is how to use and direct her own freedom and generosity. Perhaps the nobility of what St. Therese called her "little way," the hidden life that once created such far-reaching results for Western culture is the next American frontier, the challenge for a truly free people. Perhaps this is to be the next chapter in "How the West Was Won."

Vermont Gay 'Marriage' and consequences...

From Maggie Gallagher's latest column:

But the Vermont same-sex marriage bill was a breakthrough in another way which has received zero attention in the press. For the very first time, a legislature has formally acknowledged that gay marriage poses a serious threat to the religious liberties of Vermonters who disagree with the government's new definition of marriage. And the gay marriage movement has permitted -- if not exactly trumpeted -- that legislature to enact some imperfect yet substantive religious liberty protections, instead of the fake religious liberty protections generally offered to deflect voters' attention from the real issues at stake.

Same-sex marriage is quite different from bans on interracial marriage in one powerful respect: It asks religious Americans to surrender a core belief -- no, not Leviticus (disapproval of gay sexual acts), but Genesis -- the idea that God himself made man male and female and commanded men and women to come together in a special way to image the fruitfulness of God.

Many religious people and groups will bow to, if not exactly endorse, the power of gay activists. Witness Rev. Rick Warren, who on "Larry King Live" this week came very close to recanting his support for Proposition 8. Rick did not quite do so. What he did, instead, is what many good people will do in the face of the massive campaign of intimidation and harassment designed to silence Christians and others of good will who support marriage: He dodged. Rick said, more or less: I am not now and never have been an anti-gay marriage "activist."

(Follow the "He dodged" link to watch a clip of Warren on Larry King. He absolutely dodged. King asked him a direct question. He should have given a direct answer, yes or no. But he changed the subject.)

Anyway, here's an FAQ in PDF form from the Vermont Legislature, explaining the religious liberty protections in the legislation. I'm grateful that they're there. If same-sex marriage is achieved statutorily, it is possible to provide religious liberty protections. If it's decided in court, there's no guarantee of this. Of course, if a same-sex couple wishes to challenge the religious liberty parts of this law as discriminatory, these protections could be thrown out. I expect that's just a matter of time, because I don't think activists will rest until all those who disagree with them are marginalized and silenced.

Still, if we are going to have gay marriage, getting it via legislative action that provides clear protections for religious organizations is about the best deal religious traditionalists can hope for. Ask yourself, though: if those who say that religious-liberty fears around gay marriage are baseless are correct, why did the Vermont legislature feel obligated to put them into its same-sex marriage law?

Gay marriage = polygamy

Rod Dreher posts the following:

A Canadian writes:

Those opposed to gay marriage said in 2004/2005 that if Canada allowed gay marriage then polygamy would follow. People who said that, like myself were called bigots, obviously detached from reality. Today we have had polygamy endorsed as inevitable by The Ottawa Citizen newspaper ("Sure, it strikes many people as a weird arrangement, but so did gay marriage -- which is now legal. Again, it's about consenting adults."), it gets op-eds endorsing it from law professors at top schools ("The Criminal Code's polygamy section, from its inception through its bizarre history of virtual non-use, has always been shrouded in an aura of xenophobia and racism."), judges are deeming the practice of polygamy to be immaterial to an immigration application, and Ontario our largest province is granting polygamous men welfare benefits and recognizing multiple marriages in family law.

Oh, it could never happen here...

Tony Blair... model of a Catholic convert (embarassing)

Thanks to Rod Dreher again:

Tony Blair has been Catholic for less than two years, and now takes it upon himself to tell the Pope that the old man is out of step with the times. I take it for granted that Blair is a very intelligent man, but his reasoning hardly rises to the level of freshman intro to philosophy class.

Anyway, I can understand -- though strongly disagree with -- people who were born into Catholicism and remain Catholic for cultural reasons, though rejecting the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Magisterium. I think they're wrong and that they're deluding themselves, but I understand the emotional reasons why they stay in the Catholic Church. But it takes a lot of chutzpah to embrace Catholicism with the full intent of picking and choosing which dogmatic beliefs you'll accept, and not only that but to give a public statement telling the Pope that he's wrong about something that the Catholic Church has taught since forever.

Nevertheless, you have to concede this point to the cheeky Blair:

"Look, there are many good and great things the Catholic Church does, and there are many fantastic things this pope stands for," Blair said.

"But I think what is interesting is that if you went into any Catholic church, particularly a well-attended one, on any Sunday here and did a poll of the congregation, you'd be surprised at how liberal-minded people were."

He's talking about UK Catholics, of course, but it's true of US Catholics too. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism triumphs.

Bizzare: mom wants dead son's sperm to create 'grandkids'

From Rod Dreher:

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- A judge has granted a mother's request to have someone harvest sperm from her dead son's body, so she can have the option of carrying out his wish to have children.

Nikolas Colton Evans, 21, died Sunday at a Brackenridge hospital after being punched and falling outside an Austin bar March 27.

His mother, Marissa Evans, told the Austin American-Statesman newspaper that he wanted to have three sons someday and had even picked out their names: Hunter, Tod and Van.

"I want him to live on. I want to keep a piece of him," she told the newspaper.

I want to keep a piece of him. So now, human beings that may be created using her son's sperm, without (obviously) his consent, will be grandmother's little souvenirs.

When I woke up this morning, I wouldn't have even imagined such a thing possible. Now it seems we are going to have to pass a law forbidding our parents from harvesting our own eggs and sperm after we die, so they can get the grandkids they want no matter what. What a world.

I don't even know where to begin with this. Think of it: a dead man has no say over whether or not he will have children, because his mother has cannibalized his body with the consent of the state.

Modern liberalism and destruction of society...

Read here.

Here's a taste:

Modern liberalism is committed to the idea that no substantive objective norms exist, and that all value claims are therefore equally subjective, equally valid and equally empty. Liberalism is therefore really a philosophy of power. For if there are no objective limits to human volition (which is all that liberal freedom means), then for liberals will and self-grounding and self-validating choice is all there is. In a society without objective values, will and power become the only source of value. Finding itself confronted with the competing claims of isolated and potentially warring individuals, the liberal state thus takes the only path it can to ensure peace. It enforces a purely formal contractualist and utilitarian order, void of any notion of an inherent good or a guiding telos. This in turn ensures that the price of individual liberty is a purely notional equality, which cashes out as a liberal indifference to difference and the formal erasure of any cultural distinction in favour of an enforced judicial uniformity.

For example, the liberal state claims a purely formal equality without accounting for the real differences of culture, character or wealth. Failing to account for the latter ensures that all substantive issues are left to private contractual resolution - a relationship where the most powerful individual is always dominant. This is why liberal democratic states which promise a formal equality of opportunity are also synonymous with material inequality, the destruction of a plural and a high culture and the increasing rule of unprincipled elites. The liberal failure to think about community leaves less powerful individuals at the contractual mercy of the more potent; just as the liberal state destroys differential communities, as it believes that in order to secure equal rights we all have to be the same.

More:

I do not want to pretend that all was wrong in the late 1960s left. The opposition to the war in Vietnam seems just and noble, as does the campaign for civil rights and the advancement and liberation of women. Moreover, many of those on the new left were not cultural iconoclasts they also wished to preserve high culture and extend its benefit to all. However, what requires analysis is how this legacy decayed into mindless consumerism and an aggressive low culture founded on the hedonism of a relentless and mindless sexualisation of culture. A development that has robbed children of their childhood, freed men from any responsibility to women and condemned women to a male model of advancement at great cost to themselves and their offspring.

The victory of economic liberalism in 1979 could not have happened without the New Left's cultural libertarianism of the late 1960s. The cultural politics of the left was (and still is) in covert and complicit alliance with the neoliberal right. Through the late 1960s politics of desire, the left constructed the political anthropology of a wholly self-interested libertarian self. Not content with sidelining the autonomous institutions of the working class through the medium of the state, new left liberals set about destroying their collective culture of mutual and reciprocal virtue. Decrying the white working class as unfashionable, religious and reactionary, decadent middle-class elites looked with disdain on settled patterns of sexual codes, moral responsibilities and extended families. In the name of individual liberty, the avant garde licensed pornography, drugs and sexual experimentation as aesthetic forms of self-expression. But in so doing they commodified the human body and allowed the most exploitative forms of capitalism to shape and define sexuality, desire and human relationships. Such that at the end of the 1960s a new a-social being was created. Self-enclosed and relentlessly in search of glamour and stimulation, this new left creation sought a politics of limitless self interest. Defining all others by reference to itself, it considered any restriction on freedom as a violation of choice and a restriction of will. It was thought that both will and choice should be thoroughly unconstrained, and here we can see that left-wing values were already proto-Thatcherite and entirely neoliberal.

The left was fatally undermined when it embraced equality through the state and liberty through the individual - a paradigm that is liberal in origin and fatal to the idea of the communal. For unless community is thought of as the primary category, equality and liberty conspire against fraternity.

More:

Perhaps the least developed aspect of the current conservative renaissance is the most important: culture itself. Conservatism may well provide the institutions and funding for a revival of civil society, and if it limits the state to achieve this, then it might also, to attain a similar end, constrain the market. But what is most crucial is that we have a culture of interactivity and mutuality to fill this vacated space. Currently, with our emphasis on glamour and sedentary pleasure, we wholly lack any defenders of a high culture. Instead we have a debased public realm of constructed gratification and unreflective demand. High culture is high not because of any perceived elitism on the basis of class, but because the better is superior to the worse, and the good is desirable over and above any evil. We can have any form of public space we want, but unless the Conservatives really go back to the future and try to restore a common but high civilization, one that binds all Britons together in a vision of a culture worth participating and believing in, then we will fragment into the self-interested libertarian subjects that we so very nearly already are. A recovery of a national virtue culture is required. One that allows all the different cultures, races and creeds of modern Britain to eschew multi-culturalism and create a new binding common way of life of shared values and higher belief. For it is only on this basis that something called society can be restored.

Metropolitan Jonah (OCA) vs. Patriarch Barthowlemew

Here's a link to a lead up by Rod Dreher, Orthodox reporter.

Below the jump, the full text of Metropolitan Jonah's sermon on Sunday, in which he called for American Orthodox unity, and for the Ecumenical Patriarch to quit trying to strong-arm American Orthodoxy. Discuss.

Metropolitan Jonah, St Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral, April 5, 2009

It is a great joy to see everybody here this evening from so many
different communities, from different traditions. Orthodoxy is a
celebration of diversity in unity, and unity in diversity. Our unity
is in our one Lord and savior Jesus Christ, and our one Orthodox faith
and our one commitment to living the truth, to living as Christians.
Not to live according the spirit of the world, not to live according
to our passions, not to live according to the desires that flit by
through our minds and lead us into all sorts of trouble, but to live
the truth, to live Orthodox. And, our diversity is something we
celebrate, not a diversity of lifestyles, but a diversity that
reflects the whole spectrum of our community, people of all races,
people of all colors, people from a multitude of different ethnic
backgrounds.

And yet, there is another thing that unites us here as well: we are
all Americans. We are a single community, we are a single community of
Orthodox Christians, and we are the local church in Dallas, the local
church in Northeast Texas. It doesn't matter that we have all these
various administrative jurisdictions, ultimately, because we gather
together as one body, to pray with one mind and one heart, to
celebrate the same Eucharist, to come to the same chalice. It doesn't
matter if we are eastern rite or western rite, doesn't matter the
language in the service is, but its all, we are one church, we are one
local Church, and I might add, we are one indigenous Church.

Right now in world Orthodoxy there is a solution to our disunity being
proposed. But I would propose there are two solutions. There's one
solution being proposed in which we all submit to Constantinople. We
all submit to a foreign patriarchate where all decisions will be made
there, where we will have no say in the decisions that are made. We
will have no say in our own destiny. We surrender the freedom that we
have embraced as American Orthodox Christians to a Patriarchate still
under Islamic domination. I think we have a better solution.

And this is something of the utmost importance, and it is something
imminent. It is not something where we can wait and say "Oh maybe in
my grandchildren's time there will be Orthodox unity." I'm talking
about June. And, if you think I'm kidding, there is a conference being
convened in the Phanar in June to discuss exactly this -- (actually,
it's in Cypress) -- to subject the Diaspora to the single singular
control, the so-called Diaspora, to the Patriarchate of
Constantinople, and thereby come into unity.

Well, that's one model for unity. I would submit if we wanted a Pope
we'd be under the real one. And I don't think any of us want a Pope,
otherwise we wouldn't be here. But who are we really? I think part of
this comes from a total and complete ignorance and misperception on
the part of the holy fathers who are the leaders of the churches in
the Old World. They don't understand that there are Americans who are
Orthodox.

There are Americans who have been born and bred in this land who have
embraced the Orthodox faith. There are Americans who have come over
here -- fleeing communism, fleeing Islamic domination, fleeing
oppression. Who have come to this land to embrace a new life, a life
of self-determination as well as a life that is governed by the
Orthodox faith. I don't think they understand that our church here has
this rich diversity but we all share a common identity.

It doesn't matter what language the services are in, we appreciate
them all. We appreciate the Arabic and the Romanian and the Slavonic;
we appreciate the Georgian and the Albanian and who knows what else.
But we also have to appreciate the English and the Spanish and the
French, just as we have to appreciate the Klinkit and the Aleut, and
the Upik and the Athabaskian, who are the true indigenous Orthodox
Christians of our land.

I don't think the holy fathers in the Phanar understand that we are a
Church, albeit with separate administrations, but that has a common
value of determining our own destiny. A church that is dedicated to
the conciliar process, which does not ignore the voice of the laity,
which does not ignore the voice of the priests, a church which is
united in its common commitment. Because we are Orthodox not simply by
birth, we are Orthodox not simply by our ethnic heritage. We are
Orthodox because we have chosen to be Orthodox. We are Orthodox
because we have committed our entire life to Jesus Christ and the
Gospel. And, it is that commitment to Jesus Christ and the Gospel and
our commitment to bring our brothers and sisters in our land to that
same commitment of Jesus Christ and the Gospel, not to some kind of
alien ideology, not to some nationalist or imperialist ideology from
some forgotten empire, not the imposition of foreign customs and the
submission to foreign despots.

But, to a united Church in this country, a Church in which we value
the diversity and value the unity equally. A Church in which we
appreciate one another and listen to the voice of one another so that
no person is devalued. So the traditions that our fathers in the faith
have brought to this country are valued. So the efforts and the labor
and the sweat and the blood and the tears of all those who have gone
before us to establish the Orthodox Faith in America for over 200
years now, 215 years to be precise, to acknowledge their sacrifice.
And, it is upon their sacrifice, upon their martyrdoms, upon their
sanctity, upon their sacrifice that our Church here is built.

There are those there that say that there was no canonical Orthodox
Church in the North American until 1924 until the establishment of the
Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Greek archdiocese.

Excuse me. The Russian Orthodox Church established a missionary work
here in 1794. It established English-speaking churches where priests
were trained to speak, to serve the liturgy, to teach the Gospel, and
to bring faithful people into the Orthodox Church, from 1857 in San
Francisco. They say our unity in America was a myth at the time of St.
Tikhon. Well yes, there were a few dozen churches that were not part
of it, but what about the 800 that were? What about those 800
churches? Churches that may have had Russian clergy, or had clergy who
were trained by the Russians, but were composed of Greeks and Serbs,
of Arabs, of Romanians, of Bulgarians, and of converts, who have stood
for the integrity of the Orthodox Faith and the integrity of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the integrity of the witness, the
missionary outreach which is essential to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Not to make people Greeks, not to make people Russians, not to make
people Arabs, but to simply bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to this
land, in its wholeness and its completeness, as it was preached by the
holy Apostles, in the fullness of its integrity. There are those
there, in the old world, who devalue this, who say that they are the
only criteria of Orthodoxy. Who are ignorant of our Saints, who refuse
to recognize the sacrifice of so many of those who have come before
us, in Christ, to establish the Gospel here.

I think we have a different solution. It is imperative for us to come
together. Not for all the other churches, the Antiochians and the
Serbians and the Bulgarians and the Romanians and everyone, to join
the OCA, but to come together in a new organization of Orthodoxy in
North American that brings us all together as one Church, even just
pulling together all our existing organizations so that all the
bishops sit on one Synod, so that all the Metropolitans get together
on a special Synod or something like that. So we can continue our
relationship with the Mother Churches, a relationship of love and
support. Firm in our own identity as Orthodox Christians and making
our witness to protect them from whatever evils confront them, whether
it be an aggressive Islam, or whether it be Communists who now call
themselves democrats (I'm not talking about Washington by the way, not
at all.)

It's very interesting. Seven months ago I was still an abbot in a
monastery in northern California. Just a few months ago I was made
Metropolitan and I had no idea, really, what the scope of Orthodoxy is
in America. And, now I'm beginning to get an idea. Not only did I find
myself the Metropolitan of the OCA, but Locum tenens of the Bulgarian
diocese. Well, these are people who have fled oppression just as in so
many eastern European countries. It's the same people who were there
under the communists; they just changed their titles.

It's the same thing with the churches in the Middle East. How many
hundreds of thousands of faithful Iraqi Orthodox Christians are living
as refugees in camps in Jordan and Syria, ignored by the world. We
need a united, powerful witness. A witness that will not only bear
witness to the unity of the Gospel and our common commitment to one
Faith in Jesus Christ the one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism that
constitutes the Orthodox Church. We need to bear witness as a united
Body, only to those issues that affect the Phanar, not only to the
tragic situation in Cypress, but to those issue that affect all
Orthodox Christian throughout the world. There is no witness in
Congress. There has been no Orthodox voice, save one lone Serbian
bishop, during the American aggression in Kosovo. There were so many
hundreds and thousands of Orthodox Christians that suffered and died
at our hands, and the hands of our government and our voice was muted.

We have to come together as one united Orthodox Church in North
America in order to truly show people that the Orthodox Church is the
One Holy Catholic Church, in order to show that truly we are the
Church constituted by the Apostles of Jesus Christ. And, there is only
one way to show that -- not by self-righteous proclamations of our
Orthodoxy it's not by self-righteous condemnation of non-Orthodox
Christians, it's by coming together and showing people how we love one
another, how we forgive one another. How we bear common witness to the
Gospel. Though we have multiple churches and diverse traditions, we
affirm that there is One Truth, who is the person of Jesus Christ. The
Orthodox way of life is the way of the healing of the soul and the way
of salvation.

It is imperative brothers and sisters, imperative on us that, we come
together and with one voice, as the Orthodox Church of North America,
to say to the holy fathers of the Old World, the Orthodox Church
exists in North America. We are grateful for the support you have
given us. We love and support your work. We rejoice in your victories
and we are sad with your tragedies. But, you have to give us the
freedom to take care of our own Church in our own country, in our own
culture, and not to be controlled by people who have never heard a
word of English much less allow a word of English to be spoken in the
liturgy. We can't allow our Church to be controlled with people who
have no appreciation of our culture and have to bow to the Turkish
Islamic authorities.

This, my friends, is something truly critical affecting our life and
our witness. We hear of all of these scandals, all the stuff that went
on in the OCA and all the stuff going on in the Antiochian
Archdiocese, and all the petty little stuff that goes on in our
parishes. All of that is pettiness. We have to come together. The Lord
Jesus Christ is calling us together to be one Church in America,
composed of all Americans, no matter where they came from, no matter
how long their ancestors, or they themselves, have been in this land.

Because the canonical organization of the Church, according to the
Holy Apostles and all of the ancient Fathers, is not about some kind
of international organization where we look 8000 miles away for some
source of canonicity. But it is the local Church, the presbyters and
the deacons, and the faithful people gathered around their bishop.
This is the fullness of the catholic Church. This is the fullness of
the Orthodox Church as it was given to us from the holy Fathers, as it
was given to us by the Apostles. And, it is this that we must affirm.

That Church exists now, here, in our midst. It was planted by our
Fathers in the faith generations ago, on this continent. It has grown
and bears fruit. And, it subsists out of our common sacrificial
commitment to Jesus Christ. Let us give thanks to God for our unity,
let us give thanks to God for our diversity. Let us affirm to our
bishops that they will tell the bishops of the Old World,

"There is an American Orthodox Church. Leave it alone."

God Bless you.
(transcribed from Sermon, April 5, 2009)

Weigel on Neuhaus, Dulles, Smith, & Canavan....

Freed to be images of God

Four distinguished American theologians have died since the beginning of Advent: Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Father Richard John Neuhaus, Msgr. William B. Smith and Father Francis Canavan, S.J. Each of these men enriched both Church and country with a noble idea of freedom. That idea has much to do with the events of salvation history we recall at this sacred season.

After receiving his vocation from God, Moses tried to tell the Israelites the good news of their impending liberation: they would be freed from the power of the Egyptians and brought into the land that God had given to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their offspring. It sounds like a very good deal: Israel comes into the possession of its ancestral land; Israel is brought into communion with God, who is truly the Lord.

But Israel isn’t buying: “Moses spoke thus to the people of Israel; but they did not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and their cruel bondage” (Exodus 6:9). After centuries of slavery, Israel could not imagine itself free. Israel had lost the image of God within itself.

As Father Dominique Barthelemy, O.P., puts it in a wonderful book, God and His Image (Ignatius Press), mankind after the Fall had “become wild; (man) flies in terror toward death, in terror because he can no longer bear the gaze of the Father, whose love he has in fact disowned and flouted.” Israel, trapped in the bondage of Egypt, had forgotten the loving gaze of the Father who had called Abraham and spared Isaac. So Israel would have to be tamed anew; Israel could only recover the truth about its freedom by casting off the bad habits of slavery.

“Jacob’s descendants in Egypt are a people in winter,” Father Barthelemy writes, “a people ready to die, who see death staring them in the face. God will be able to tame a people in conditions like these. It is not immediately that he will be able to take them by the hand on Sinai. He must begin by saving them from death in a wholly unexpected manner—hence the exodus from Egypt... . He will not expect this people to start calling him God, a name that evokes terrifying almighty power, immediately. He asks them to call him ...Yahweh, which for Israel means ‘Savior’ ... .

“And Israel will grasp the hand of this Savior as their guide, since it is he who has saved them from death. Afterward, they will allow this saving hand to fashion them anew. It is very necessary that God should fashion man once more in his own divine image. For man was made in the image of God. But this same man has fled ... and has fashioned in himself a caricature of God’s image. God cannot therefore make himself recognized by man unless he first fashions in him (once again) the true image of God ... .”

This is God’s fatherhood, reaching out to refashion us in true freedom which as St. Paul writes, is the freedom of the children of God—the freedom to be the images of God that we were created to be, and thus the freedom to bring into the world the healing power of God’s fatherly love. God begins the definitive work of refashioning his image in us in the Exodus. He completes that work in raising Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary, from the dead, so that Jesus the Christ might be the first of many brothers—brothers who live true freedom in the communion of the Church, which is the Son’s mystical body, extended in time and space.

This is the truth about freedom that Cardinal Dulles, Father Neuhaus, Msgr. Smith, and Father Canavan tried to teach us: that true freedom consists in looking up, not looking down—in casting off our broken spirit and living according to the image of God within us. That is the truth of both Exodus and Easter. We learn it crossing the Red Seas of our own life-journeys, where we meet the risen Lord.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Hilarious irony! Robot independed from creator...

I wonder if they intentionally named the robot... naw, I bet they are just stupid.

Robot achieves scientific first

By Clive Cookson, Science Editor

Published: April 2 2009 19:17 | Last updated: April 2 2009 19:17

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

Read the rest.
Can anyone say "Terminator 4" here we come?

More miracles for John Paul II

These are great. Santo Subito!

Wheelchair-boy ‘miraculously walks again’ at memorial visit to tomb of Pope John Paul II

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 11:25 PM on 02nd April 2009

A child crippled by a kidney tumour was able to walk again after praying at the tomb of Pope John Paul II on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the late pontiff’s death, it was claimed last night.

The nine-year-old Polish boy was brought to St Peter’s Basilica on a pilgrimage to the grave of the Polish pope who died on April 2 2005.

Last night Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the former private secretary of Pope John Paul, said that after praying at the tomb in the crypt of the Rome basilica he ‘suddenly’ started walking again.

‘He was brought in a wheelchair because he wasn’t able to walk,’ the cardinal said. As soon as the boy emerged from the basilica, he told his parents: ‘’I want to walk.’ He got up and started walking, healthy,’ the prelate said.

He said the boy is from Gdansk, the Polish seaport known as the birthplace of the Solidarity movement which helped bring down decades of Communist rule in John Paul’s homeland in the late 1980s.

If investigations reveal that there are no scientific explanations for the child’s recovery, the healing may be put forward as the miracle needed to declare John Paul II ‘blessed’. A second miracle will be required to declare him a saint. [After beatification…]

...

Only a month after John Paul’s death in 2005, Benedict put him on the fast track for sainthood by waiving the usual five years before a person’s life and works can be examined. Vatican officials say the process is taking its course, and the required miracle has been identified for examination.

One possible miracle involves the curing of a French nun with Parkinson’s disease.

Cardinal Dziwisz said ‘there is always hope’ that John Paul II will be announced a saint before the fifth anniversary of his death. But in an interview with Polish TVN24 television, he said the process must go though all necessary stages ‘so there can be no doubt.‘ [Well… there must be a moral certitude, not "no doubt".]

The cardinal – who now heads John Paul’s old diocese of Krakow, Poland – indicated there was no shortage of potential cases of possible miracles to investigate.

The head of the Vatican’s saint-making office, Archbishop Angelo Amato, said the process already got a boost when Benedict waived the five-year waiting period.

In an interview with Vatican Radio, he said the process must actually be more rigorous and thorough for a pope like John Paul since he was so well-known.

‘Promptness doesn’t mean speed or superficiality; on the contrary this requires care and professionalism,’ Amato said.

The parliament in Poland, the pope’s homeland, observed a minute of silence yesterday to mark the anniversary. Masses and prayers were also being held across Poland.

==============

‘Miraculous’ recovery from ‘non-survivable’ gunshot wound could beatify Pope John Paul II

Cleveland, Ohio, Apr 4, 2009 / 01:55 pm (CNA).- A man who suffered a "non-survivable" execution-style gunshot to the head during a mugging in Cleveland has had a "miraculous" recovery possibly due to the intercession of Pope John Paul II. If the late pontiff is credited for the miracle, it would lead to his beatification. [This from the beginning reminds me of some of the amazing stories I read when I was doing the Studium at the Cong. for Causes of Saints. Amazing and inexplicable things. Amazing.]

Jory Aebly, 26, suffered the gunshot would five weeks ago. Doctors at the Metro Health Medical Center declared it to be a "non-survivable" injury, ABC’s Good Morning America reports.

Hospital chaplain Fr. Art Nedeker administered Aebly with the Sacrament of the Sick, asking Pope John Paul II to pray for Jory and to protect him. [This is an important element: There has to be a specific intention to pray for the intercession through that specific person. This usually requires the suggestion and prompting of someone who knows about the cause and then how to report it.]

Fr. Nedeker explained that the Pope had promised him [!] he would always pray for the patients at the hospital and blessed a dozen rosaries with special patients at the hospital.

The priest gave Aebly the last of the rosaries [This is sounding to me more and more to a serious cause for a miracle.] that had been blessed by the Pope, after which Aebly consistently improved.

He was released on Tuesday, two days before the fourth anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s death.

Dr. Robert Geertman, a neurosurgeon involved in Aebly’s treatment, told Good Morning America his patient’s survival was "one in a million."

"My jaw was on the floor after a day or two of seeing he is hanging on. …I’d say it’s pretty miraculous," he said at a press conference days after the shooting.

At the press conference announcing Aebly’s release, Fr. Snedeker said:

"I stand before you today and can say, to my mind, Jory is a miracle." [At the level of the Congregation all the medical records would be reviewed.]

Aebly himself credited his recovery to "the many prayers from family, friends and co-workers" and others.

His mother Deb Wolfram told the press conference she believes in "the power of prayer" and said she believed people’s prayers helped her son through his ordeal, Good Morning America says.

A Vatican official reported that the investigation into the alleged miracle could take time. [Of course!]

"We cannot predict a precise schedule," Monsignor Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Caucus of Saints told ANSA. "All stages, including the examination of the miracle, have to be conducted in a particularly thorough way."

Approval of the miracle could lead to Pope John Paul II’s beatification, leaving one more miracle before he can be canonized.

Here is what happens.

When people think there was a verifiable miracle, they start a cause, like a court case.

All the "proofs" must be gathered… documents and testimony gathered according to a procedure.

Once everything is gathered in the place where the alleged miracle occured, it is sent to Rome.

The Congregation verifies that the procedures were followed correctly. Then they look at the theological aspects of the claim: can it be demonstrated that the people prayed to X or asked for a miracle through X, etc. It has to be explicit and not just mixed in with "Jesus, Mary, Joseph and X, Y, Z all the saints and angels!" Often there is an image or relic or project to pray to X.

In the case of a cure (there are other kinds of miracles too!) the healing or change in condition must be sudden, complete and lasting. That must be demonstrated by proofs. The medical records are studied by a panel of doctors and other necessary experts. They look into the diagnosis and prognosis and then what happened in stark scientific terms. They determine if what happened can be explained by the science they know.

With a miracle, the Congregation has to look at the evidence and then determine that what happened. within moral certitude, through the intercession of X, the condition was grave/dire/serious and there was a sudden complete and lasting change that cannot be explained.

What I like about this case is that there was a priest who knew what was going on and there was an object associate with John Paul II and his own remark. The person’s prognoss was very bad and the healing was sudden and complete and seems to be lasting and they can’t explain it.


This is a great book...

Vatican responds to Belgium's facism...

From CNA:

Vatican City, Apr 3, 2009 / 01:42 pm (CNA).- In response to Belgium’s diplomatic protest against Pope Benedict’s comments that condoms could potentially "increase the problem" of AIDS being spread in Africa, Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See newsroom questioned whether the lawmakers had considered the Popes words and scientific research, or whether they received their information "through the non-objective, imbalanced filter of the echoes in the western media."

According to Reuters, the Belgium House of Deputies called the Pope’s comments "unacceptable" and instructed their government to "react strongly against any state or organization that in the future brings into doubt the benefit of using condoms to prevent transmission of the AIDS virus." [Satan, is that you?]

The measure approved with a strong majority, 95-18, and asks the government to "condemn the Pope’s unacceptable position statement and to lodge a formal protest at the Holy See." Premier Herman Van Rompuy said he will support the motion saying, "it is not the Pope’s job to shed doubts on public health policies which are unanimously supported and save lives ever day."

Father Lombardi, expressed "amazement" at the resolution, reported the Italian news service, SIR.

He questioned how a democratic country could limit the "freedom of the Holy Father and the Catholic Church to express their own positions" which are "clearly relevant to the view of the human person."

As Belgium reacted to the Pope’s comments, Lombardi pointed to "the great tradition" of the Catholic Church in "education and health-care, especially in the poorer countries" that needs no "evidence or comments."

Lombardi also questioned whether Belgium lawmakers had considered the "Pope’s arguments" and scientific research, or whether they received their information "through the non-objective, imbalanced filter of the echoes in the western media."

JPII remembered & Orthodoxy

by Rod Dreher, Cruncy Con

Amy Welborn notes that four years ago today (April 2), John Paul II died. She quotes a First Things essay by Fr. Thomas D. Williams, on why JP2's faith that we were entering a "new springtime" could not be seen as shallow optimism, but something deeper. Excerpt:

So what did he discern? The first significant sign of spring does not involve twittering birds and pink buds. What we see first is slush and mud: The world in spring gets uglier before it gets prettier. That, after all, is why T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month: Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow.

In the slush and mud of his own day, John Paul II saw something emerging: a meltdown of formerly frozen ideologies and consolidated problems. People's disillusionment with the therapeutic promises of Freud, the voluntarism of Nietzsche and the utopianism of Marx may not lead to a sudden embrace of Christian faith, but it does prepare the way, just as the Prodigal Son's hunger brought him back to his father's house. We can witness an opening to and hunger for spiritual realities, located in a generalized dissatisfaction with what the world offers.

Please God, yes. As Walker Percy said, what else is there? It might be worth recalling a piece I wrote some years back, when I was a Catholic, defending John Paul's cultural vision against some extreme narrow-mindedness from a few knotheads of what is now my church. I still stand by this piece. For all my frustration with JP2 over his handling of the sex-abuse scandal, he was probably the foremost Christian prophet of our time. Excerpt:


Unlike his Orthodox counterparts, this pontiff lives in the real world. He understands that if Christianity is to survive, much less thrive, in the third millennium, believers cannot afford quarrels over past grievances. There are deep theological divisions between East and West, and any ecumenism that etends otherwise is false. But isn't working more closely to combat the functional nihilism that accompanies the spread of consumerist values a more pressing concern than fussing over the fate of the Filioque clause? The pope knows that the key question in the era of post modernism and globalization is not what brand of Christianity the world will follow; it is whether the world will follow Christianity at all.

It is said that the Greek Orthodox regard John Paul as a symbol of the Westernization they despise. Who are they kidding? The pontiff who was the scourge of the militant atheist ideology that made martyrs of millions of Orthodox believers is the same man who is the fiercest enemy of the secular Western juggernaut. Have the Orthodox been paying attention for the past two decades? Do they read his stuff? Maybe not. The late Alexander Schmemann, the eminent Russian Orthodox theologian, lamented his faith's "complete indifference to the world," claiming that official Orthodoxy lived in a "heavy, static, petrified" world of "illusion." Orthodox consciousness "did not notice the fall of Byzantium, Peter the Great's reforms, the Revolution; it did not notice the revolution of the mind, of science, of lifestyles, forms of life," Schmemann wrote in his private journal. "In brief, it did not notice history." John Paul does.

Well, I don't completely stand by that piece. I would have phrased things somewhat differently were I to write it today; I understand now why the filioque clause is a much bigger deal than I knew then. But I still believe basically as I did then: that we cannot and should not say the theological differences between us are not serious, but now is not the time to keep a practical and instrumental unity around certain causes. The Evangelicals and Catholics Together movement isn't about converting Evangelicals to Catholicism, or vice versa. It's about bringing traditionalist members of the two great Christian traditions together to work together on issues of mutual concern. Boy, would I ever love to see Orthodox and Catholics Together. Maybe somebody should start that. Metropolitan Jonah is in Dallas this weekend. If I have the chance to speak with him, I'll suggest it. Hey, you never know. Springtime is bustin' out all over.

Freeman Dyson: global warming a sham (the evidence mounts)

The Civil Heretic

By NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson — a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists — and has lived a more original life.

Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics. Dyson has written more than a dozen books, including “Origins of Life” (1999), which synthesizes recent discoveries by biologists and geologists into an evaluation of the double-origin hypothesis, the possibility that life began twice; “Disturbing the Universe” (1979) tries among other things to reconcile science and humanity. “Weapons and Hope” (1984) is his meditation on the meaning and danger of nuclear weapons that won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dyson’s books display such masterly control of complex matters that smart young people read him and want to be scientists; older citizens finish his books and feel smart.

Yet even while probing and sifting, Dyson is always whimsically gazing into the beyond. As a boy he sketched plans for English rocket ships that could explore the stars, and then, in midlife, he helped design an American spacecraft to be powered by exploding atomic bombs — a secret Air Force project known as Orion. Dyson remains an armchair astronaut who speculates with glee about the coming of cheap space travel, when families can leave an overcrowded earth to homestead on asteroids and comets, swooping around the universe via solar sail craft. Dyson is convinced that our current “age of computers” will soon give way to “the age of domesticated biotechnology.” Bio-tech, he writes in his book, “Infinite in All Directions” (1988), “offers us the chance to imitate nature’s speed and flexibility,” and he imagines the furniture and art that people will “grow” for themselves, the pet dinosaurs they will “grow” for their children, along with an idiosyncratic menagerie of genetically engineered cousins of the carbon-eating tree: termites to consume derelict automobiles, a potato capable of flourishing on the dry red surfaces of Mars, a collision-avoiding car.

These ideas attract derision similar to Dyson’s essays on climate change, but he is an undeterred octogenarian futurist. “I don’t think of myself predicting things,” he says. “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.” Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination’s ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. “You point Freeman at a problem and he’ll solve it,” Goldberger says. “He’s extraordinarily powerful.” Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate. Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

Read the whole story here.