Catholic Bishops Warn Against Literal Interpretations of Bible

Roman Catholic bishops from England, Scotland and Wales have published a teaching document which points out that sections of the Bible can not be taken literally, and challenges many ideas held by some Evangelicals about both creation and the end of the world, reports Ekklesia (Oct. 4, 2005). Entitled The Gift of Scripture, the 60-page booklet was presented to delegates who are in Rome attending a congress celebrating forty years of the Vatican II document, Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation promulgated by Pope Paul VI on November 18, 1965.

According to The Gift of Scripture, the Bible is “God’s word expressed in human language” and, therefore, “we should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision.” Among the passages meant not to be taken literally are the first 11 chapters of Genesis, which the bishops, comparing them with early creation legends from other cultures, insist cannot be “historical,” but may contain “historical traces,” according to The Times, UK (Oct. 5, 2005).

The bishops also teach that the Church must offer the Gospel in ways “appropriate to changing times, intelligible and attractive to our contemporaries.” While the Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, “we should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.”

In The Gift of Scripture, the bishops of England, Scotland and Wales also condemn fundamentalism for its “intransigent intolerance” and to warn of “significant dangers” involved in a fundamentalist approach. “Such an approach is dangerous, for example,” they write, “when people of one nation or group see in the Bible a mandate for their own superiority, and even consider themselves permitted by the Bible to use violence against others.” As an example of such violence, they cite the blood curse recorded in Matthew 27:25, “His blood be on us and on our children.” The bishops describe this passage as an example of dramatic exaggeration, which have had “tragic consequences” in encouraging hatred and persecution.

Father Adrian Graffy, who assisted the bishops in their work, commented: “[This document] will be a major help in fostering the familiarity and love of the Bible which have grown so strongly since Vatican II.”

Comment: The Gift of Scripture? Some gift. Half-baked myths and hate-speech, with some helpful hints on “salvation” mixed in to keep the Bible from being a total loss. This bunch of clueless shepherds, embarrassed by the sources of their alleged Faith, have decided that “complete historical precision” is incompatible with Scripture. I mean, after all, who can really believe this stuff – men made out of earth, floods, the sea parting in two, the sun stopping in the sky, etc. And the later stuff is even wilder – God present in a piece of bread, men rising from the dead, etc. I mean, where does it end?

The ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh contains a flood story, a terrestrial paradise set aside for a man and a woman – even an insidious serpent! The simple fact that these details mirror somewhat the events depicted in Genesis is enough to crush the faith of the bishops of England, Scotland and Wales, apparently. Because they discover a similarity, they come to the rash conclusion that the Genesis accounts simply can NOT be true! The possibility that pagan “creation myths” are mere distortions of a primal event – the Truth of which has been preserved in Sacred Scripture – is less acceptable to these bishops than the fashionable idea that the Church has mistaken fantasy for fact all these centuries.

The odd thing is that Our Lord Jesus Christ believed that the Genesis accounts were true and, no doubt, He was aware of The Epic of Gilgamesh. As I pointed out in this column not too long ago, when Jesus replied to the Pharisees who were attempting to trap Him in a discussion on divorce, He quoted Chapter 2 of Genesis as the very bedrock and basis for the Sacrament of Matrimony:

Have ye not read, that He who made man from the beginning, made them male and female? And He said: For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. (Mt. 19:4-6)

If such a solemn Sacrament is based upon a myth, then what is it worth? Perhaps the bishops of today believe that Our Lord Himself was either too gullible a chap, or He just cannot seem to make the Gospel “intelligible and attractive to our contemporaries.” Therefore, they needed to step in and “tweak” things a bit.

In the end, these bishops are merely taking their cue from their Vatican II gurus. In Dei Verbum, we read of the importance of “literary forms,” and we are told that the interpreter of Scripture “must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture.” We are also told that “due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.”

Under the guidance of the Holy Ghost and motivated by the promptings of faith, such advice can be useful for a clearer overview of the sacred texts. For too many of today’s bishops, however, it is merely an excuse to teach an already befuddled mass of uninformed Catholics that Moses was a spinner of fables and St. Matthew, a hate-monger. How else could these guys talk about the “familiarity and love of the Bible which have grown so strongly since Vatican II” with a straight face?

Islamic Extremists Attack  Catholics Reciting Rosary

Asia News reports (Oct. 14, 2005) that a group of Islamic extremists attacked Catholics praying the Rosary on October 11th and threatened to burn down the house in which they were gathered. The assailants, who claimed to be part of the Islamic Defender Front (FPI, Front Pembela Islam), invaded the house of one of the Catholic communities belonging to the parish of Christ Salvator in western Jakarta, Indonesia.

The men forced the Marian prayers to stop immediately, threatening to burn the place down. They forced all those present including the Ketua Lingkungan (informal parish leader) to sign a declaration that they will not hold any more Rosary gatherings in houses in the area. The attack has fueled fears and apprehension among Indonesian Catholics who fear further possible hostile moves from the FPI. The front is also behind the closure of 24 home-churches in western Java.

For Catholics all over the world, including those in Indonesia, October and May are months dedicated especially to the Virgin Mary. In Indonesia, believers manifest their faith by undertaking pilgrimages to the country’s Marian shrines and by reciting the Rosary in parishes. Meeting to recite the rosary together, better known as Doa Rosario Bersama, is usually organized once a week in one of the houses of the community.

Comment: On December 8, 1995, Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore, a member of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, received the “1995 Mahmoud Abu Saud Excellence Award” from the American Muslim Council. At the interreligious awards banquet, Keeler quoted the Vatican II document, Nostra Aetate:

Upon the Muslims too the church looks with esteem. They adore one God, living and enduring, merciful and all-powerful, maker of heaven and earth and speaker to humankind.... They also honor Mary, his virgin mother; at times they call on her too with devotion ....It is certainly true that in her very person there is a meeting point, or at least a stepping stone, between  Christianity and Islam.

And yet, in the very same address, Keeler made a statement that contradicts this quotation. His perhaps unintentional slip here drives home the futility of modern ecumenism. He said of Our Lady:

For Christians she is the all-holy “Theotokos,” the mother of God, the mother of Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate. For Muslims she is the mother of Jesus, the Messiah, “who was no more than God’s apostle and his Word, which he cast to Mary: a spirit from him.” While this radical difference in faith forever separates us, it paradoxically also holds us forever in conversation with one another.

Forever separates us? When has a modern ecumeniac ever been so honest, albeit without meaning to? While it is true that there is a certain kind of Marian devotion present in Islam, and that Mary has used this devotion to effect conversions in the past, it is far too simplistic to suppose that a “Marian connection” exists between Catholicism and Islam merely because the Virgin has a place in each. Reverence for an altered, “demoted” Mary is no true reverence at all. She is either revered as the Mother of God, or she is not revered at all. In his treatise, True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, St. Louis de Montfort wrote:

Such is the will of almighty God who exalts the humble, that the powers of heaven, earth and hell, willingly or unwillingly, must obey the commands of the humble Virgin Mary. For God has made her queen of heaven and earth, leader of his armies, keeper of his treasures, dispenser of his graces, worker of his wonders, restorer of the human race, mediatrix on behalf of men, destroyer of his enemies, and faithful associate in his great works and triumphs.

Trafalgar Square Needs “Femininity,” Says Artist

According to The New York Times (Oct. 10, 2005), a new statue in London’s Trafalgar Square has gained the attention of  both art critics and the British public. Titled “Alison Lapper Pregnant,” the statue, 11 feet 7 inches of snow-white Carrara marble, shows the naked, eight-and-a-half-month pregnant figure of 40-year-old Alison Lapper, a single mother who was born with shortened legs and no arms due to a condition called phocomelia syndrome. Lapper is a friend of the sculptor, Marc Quinn, who has said that Lord Nelson’s Column, a granite column surmounted by an 18-foot-tall statue of Lord Horatio Nelson, the focal point of Trafalgar Square, is “the epitome of a phallic male moment” and that he thought “the square needed some femininity.”

Commissioned early last year by a government-appointed panel that selects a rotating series of works for the long-empty plinth at the northwest corner of the square, “Alison Lapper Pregnant” stands in marked contrast to the other statues adorning Trafalgar Square, those of Lord Nelson, King George IV, General Henry Havelock and Sir Charles James Napier. This has fueled a sharp discussion concerning the purpose of public monuments and the appropriateness of displaying such a piece in such a singular public space.

British art critics are divided on the issue. Rachel Cooke of The Observer praised the sculpture’s “elegant proportions,” describing the figure as “an Everywoman.” “You look at her face, her breasts and her swollen belly,” writes Cooke, “and only afterwards do you wonder about her limbs.” Meanwhile, Robert Simon, editor of the British Art Journal, said that, though he found Ms. Lapper to be “very brave,” he considered the sculpture “just a repellant artifact.” He added, “It looks like overused soap on a very large scale.”

The Daily Telegraph’s Richard Dorment referred to sculptor  Marc Quinn as “smug and self-righteous,” and believes that “it’s not Miss Lapper whom Quinn has put on a pedestal in the heart of London, but political correctness.” “He knows full well,” wrote Dorment, “that anyone who dares to criticize the statue will instantly be accused of prejudice against the disabled.”

Alison Lapper, a painter, was present at the unveiling of the statue. “At least I didn’t get there by slaying people,” was her reaction to the statue of herself atop the plinth at Trafalgar’s northwest corner. Writing in The Evening Standard about the unveiling a few days later of a memorial to pilots in the Battle of Britain, Allison Pearson pointed out that the Nazis, whom the pilots fought against and in some cases slew, tried to wipe out people who did not fit their standards of Aryan perfection – including those who were disabled, such as Lapper.

Comment: It is easy to see why a statue of Lord Nelson should grace Trafalgar Square. His most famous battle, The Battle of Trafalgar (1805) saved Britain from the threat of invasion by Napoleon. Nelson died in that battle, after losing both his right eye and right arm in earlier battles. But, since Nelson merely “slayed people” according to Lapper, and represented a “phallic male moment” according to Quinn, why should his maimed torso be honored?

And what of Sir Charles James Napier (1782-1843), British general and Commander-in-Chief in India? When a delegation of Hindu locals approached him and complained about the prohibition of “Sati,” the custom of burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands, Napier replied:

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

For Quinn, this must have qualified as another “phallic male moment.”

And what of sculptor Marc Quinn, creator of the politically-correct “repellant artifact” that will stand in Trafalgar Square until 2007? Previous Quinn masterpieces include a boiled sausage filled with the artist’s blood, a model of his newborn baby’s head cast in the mother’s placenta and a self-portrait formed from eight pints of his blood poured into a cast of his head and frozen. Oh, yes, Quinn also deals in the medium of excrement, and has produced pieces called “[Expletive] Paintings” and “[Expletive] Head.”

What is it about some of today’s artists and their infantile scatological obsessions? Remember Chris Ofili, whose elephant-dung covered “Madonna” caused a stir when it was displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999? He claims he experienced a “moment of clarity” in Zimbabwe. This moment told him that, if he wanted to ground his paintings “in a cultural as well as natural landscape,” he must plaster them with elephant dung. True to form, he soon afterwards held “[Expletive] Sales” in Berlin and London, where he exhibited several balls of elephant dung in the context of a market.

When artists become trapped in their infantile obsessions, enamored of physical deformities, bodily fluids and excrement, they will of necessity become lazy, stagnate .... and regress. An inability to “comprehend the whole” will follow. The logic of the art of Trafalgar Square calls for statues which will complete a thought, which will celebrate deeds of national consequence. Of such symbolic importance is Trafalgar Square that the Nazi S.S. developed secret plans to transfer the Nelson Column to Berlin following an expected German invasion, according to Norman Longmate in the book, If Britain Had Fallen (1972).

As the son of a blind mother, I have observed firsthand the often soul-crushing trials of the disabled, and I also know that seemingly small victories in overcoming such obstacles can be, in reality, monumental ones. Alison Lapper, abandoned and institutionalized from infancy, began painting at a young age, using her feet and mouth to hold the brush, and has an honors degree in fine arts. A noble feat.

A statue of a woman in Trafalgar Square can be a truly uplifting thing, in and of itself. I would nominate St. Margaret Clitherow for the honor. However, Lapper’s image stands there now for the simple reason that she is a buddy of sculptor Marc Quinn, who has a rather strange aversion to strong male figures (albeit, a fondness for excrement), and felt compelled to foist this anomaly on the British public. It is akin to writing a new Sherlock Holmes story and making Holmes a kindergarten teacher instead of a detective. There is no logic to the progression.

Instead of another element in an artistic whole, what the people of London got with “Alison Lapper Pregnant” was a fulfillment of Edith Wharton’s observation: “Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.”

First Temple-Era Seal Discovered In Jerusalem

The Jerusalem Post reports (Sept. 27, 2005) that Israeli archaeologists have discovered a First Temple period seal amidst piles of rubble from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The 2,600 year old artifact is a small (less than 1 cm.) seal impression containing three lines in ancient Hebrew, possibly the name of its owner, which makes it the first written artifact found from the Temple Mount dating back to the First Temple Period.

The seal, which predates the destruction of the First Jewish temple in 586 B.C. and is the first of its kind from the time of King David, was discovered amidst piles of rubble discarded by the Islamic Wakf (“wakf” = property devoted to a particular purpose or use, for the benefit or support of public religious purposes) by Bar-Ilan University archaeologist Dr. Gabriel Barkay and a team of young archaeologists and volunteers who were sifting the grounds of a Jerusalem national park.

The seal was found amidst thousands of tons of rubble discarded by Wakf officials at city garbage dumps six years ago, following the Islamic Trust’s unilateral construction of a mosque at an underground compound of the Temple Mount known as Solomon’s Stables.

After the Israeli Antiquities Authority voiced disinterest in thoroughly sifting through the rubble discarded by the Wakf, Barkay applied – and eventually received  – a license from the Antiquities Authority to sort through the piles of earth thrown into the garbage dump in search of antiquities, and has since found scores of history-rich artifacts from the First Temple Period until today, including a large amount of pottery dating from the Bronze Age through modern times, and a large segment of a marble pillar’s shaft. Also unearthed were over 100 ancient coins, among them several from the Hasmonean Dynasty, descendants of the Maccabee family. The Hasmonean Dynasty ruled until approximately 38 B.C., when the Romans, having appointed Herod the Great as King of Judea, declared the Hasmonean Dynasty to be terminated.