MEMO

To: Your Holiness, Pope Benedict XIV

From: Laura Jones - http://www.mamaleh-larisa.com

Date: October 8, 2008 – Vespers, Feast of Pat. St. Tikhon

Subject: Oh, Hear the Word of the Lord!

Your Holiness: Truly, as the Synod is now in progress – since it is altogether appropriate to use scriptural terminology here, let us say that our world is being TRANSFIGURED right before our very eyes!

I was very moved by your message to Patriarch Aleksi, delivered during the recent visit of the Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, at the Patriarch’s invitation. I read that Bishop Vincenzo Paglia of Terni, president of the Italian bishops' ecumenism commission, who was also present in the meeting with Alexy II, stressed that "Certain limits and challenges can only be faced from a perspective of unity."


I was also most gratified by the following report: “Rome, October 6, Interfax - A Bible reading marathon organized by Vatican television … was launched in Rome last Sunday….
The marathon was lead by Pope Benedict XVI reciting the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. He was immediately followed by Bishop of Vienna and Austria Hilarion, a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in European international organizations, who recited the second chapter of the Book of Genesis.” As you know, Abp. Hilarion and I have the same Spiritual Father, Abp. Paul of Ryazan.

And so, your Holiness I was not even mildly perturbed by the appalling statement of a Jesuit Card. Vanhoye, billed as “a renowned biblical scholar” on Zenit, who is quoted as saying:

“It is clear that for the Christian it is necessary to begin with the Gospel, to delve into it in meditation, in prayer, to apply it to your own life. This is the first essential thing. But the Gospel itself points to the Old Testament. Jesus is the promised Messiah. So, it is helpful to read the prophetic texts, especially the messianic ones. The Psalms are useful for prayer, but it must be said that they do not always have the Gospel spirit. A distinction has to be made, then. Some Psalms are full of curses against enemies, they are very far from Jesus' precept about loving enemies and praying for them. It is clear that it is necessary for the faithful to have the assistance of aids that present the texts and place them at the intellectual level of the faithful, their capacity to understand and live.”

Can you believe this? The Cardinal states: “The Psalms are useful for prayer, but it must be said that they do not always have the Gospel spirit.” ?!?!?!? Even though they were given to us precisely to prepare us for the Messiah and for his gospel, id est, his “good news”!?!?! And he continues: “A distinction has to be made, then. Some Psalms are full of curses against enemies, they are very far from Jesus' precept about loving enemies and praying for them.”

Yet, your Holiness, I didn’t even blink once after reading such an atrocious denigration of the Word of God through that so-called “biblical criticism” which is designed to place the Bible at what this self-proclaimed intellectual elite regards as the inevitably inferior “intellectual level of the faithful, their [likewise inferior] capacity to understand and live.” Such “scholarly criticism” allows one, if one belongs to the scholarly “in crowd”, that is, those who stand far, far above the intellectual level of the “faithful” (read: those not in “holy orders”, cf. my web site, www.mamaleh-larisa.com, under “current updates”, “Truth X Majority Vote”, the first of “Two memos inspired by the heavily contrived and labored Instrumentum Laboris prepared for the upcoming XI Ordinary Council of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Catholic Bishops”) so this “scholarly criticism” would empower those who stand so far above the intellectual level of the “faithful” - and these faithful Christians’ capacity to understand and live - to pick and choose what elements of the Word of God to “delve into in meditation, in prayer, and apply to one’s own life”, discarding whatever Words of God they, in their warped and darkened reasoning, find not to their taste! I thought you, Your Holiness, must yourself have specified that the article on this Jesuit Cardinal appear on Zenit, so that I would be able to address this hideously flawed approach. I became certain that it must have been you who acted thus when I saw on Zenit the following report:

VATICAN CITY, OCT. 6, 2008, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Shear Yashuv Cohen, chief rabbi of Haifa, the first Jew to ever address a world Synod of [Catholic] Bishops says his participation in the meeting of Church leaders is a sign of hope for progress in Jewish-Catholic relations.

Explaining the role of Scripture in the Jewish faith, the rabbi said: "We pray God using his own words, as related to us in the Scriptures. Likewise, we praise him -- also using his own words from the Bible.
"We ask for his mercy -- mentioning what he has promised to our ancestors and to us. Our entire service is based upon an ancient rule, as related to us by our rabbis and teachers: 'Give him of what is his, because you and yours are his.'"


I am so glad my Spiritual Brother, Abp. Hilarion is there together with you and Rabbi Cohen, because Abp. Hilarion loves to expound how our Orthodox services also pray to God and praise Him – the Slavic variant of “ortho-dox” actually means, literally, “right praise”, pravo-slavnie – in His very own words, giving him of what is his, because we and ours are his.

And so, Orthodox are very akin to the Jews for both of whom the Psalms constitute the core of the daily prayers – as is also the rightful Catholic tradition, however disdained by certain scholarly contemporaries. I myself, as a Catholic, for some years prayed the Latin breviary daily, then as our 7 children came into the world, I prayed the Little Office of the Dominican rite. We don’t pick and choose which Psalms we approve of and which we do not, in fact, I was in my element in the Russian Orthodox Mission in Jerusalem during Great Lent because at that time the entire Psalter is prayed twice weekly. While I grew up loving the Psalms, I found that there were some which I had never had occasion to focus on in depth, so during the morning and evening services, when I found myself skipping over a Psalm because I lacked a very deep grasp of its meaning for me, I would mark it, and then I would spend the middle of the day meditating on those Psalms to understand them better. I think this is a better plan than the Jesuit Cardinal’s weeding out the ones he and his scholarly equals would find inapplicable, as not having “the Gospel spirit”, and dumbing the rest down to what they consider to be the inferior capacity of faithful lay Christians to understand and live - howsoever brilliant, educated, and with howsoever many years of service at the highest levels within the Church and government, as you can see for yourself on catholiconline in the way they unscrupulously trash the much revered Pepperdine Professor, Dr. Doug Kmiec, and this repeatedly, on an ongoing basis, reinvigorated virtually daily. And I have yet to find anyone other than myself suggesting: Methinks this cavil doth protest too much!

Apparently the Jesuit Cardinal and his supposedly brilliant buddies edited out of the Gospel also the places where Jesus tells us that we ourselves, in our fallen nature, are our own worst enemies.

Nothing is more deadly than self-love: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.” Lk 9:24, Mk 8:35, Mt 16:25, et passim - Jesus reiterates this so many times, and in all the Gospel accounts, you are left with a pretty truncated Gospel if you edit it all out – not to mention St. Paul’s letters and the entire rest of the New Testament. After Herbert’s repose, when Cecilia Mellet, who had initially anointed herself “Herbert Schwartz’ successor” but then turned against him, and was at that juncture literally screaming, “And another thing I never want to hear again is: ‘Hate your own life.’” I said to her openly: “It’s just tough if you don’t want to hear that, because Herbert did not make that up! Jesus Christ said it: ‘The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’”Jn 12:25 But Cecilia and her pals didn’t even know where Herbert learned what he taught, because they never read the Bible themselves. If they took any interest in Holy Scripture at all, Cecilia’s set didn’t take up the Good Book itself, but occupied themselves with the likes of Fr. Raymond E. Brown (who must have been Card. Vanhoye’s mentor.)

I have already done a quite thorough study of this whole issue, it was published in the Journal of the Churches of the Moscow Patriarchate when Abp. Paul was serving here, and when I sent it to the Catholic Cardinals in the US several years ago it was highly praised (needless to say I did not send it to any of the now 16 bishops trying to do truth by majority vote), and it is on my web site, www.mamaleh-larisa.com, under “latest updates”, the last post on the page. So I recommend this to everyone – I originally wrote it in connection with the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, a right understanding of which is so crucial, not only in the present context but for the unity of the entire Church - but here I will quote the conclusion, beginning at the point where I quoted Pope John Paul’s identification of precisely the very selfsame rejection of the truth contained in the Word of God that we have seen set forth by the “renowned biblical scholar”, Jesuit Card. Vanhoye:

The Pope explains the character of this first sin [i.e., that of our first parents – which is THE ORIGINAL SIN – not the very unbiblical notion of this which has gained currency in the west].

“This original disobedience presupposes a rejection, or at least a turning away from the truth contained in the Word of God, who creates the world. For in spite of all the witness of creation and of the salvific economy inherent in it, the spirit of darkness (cf. Eph 6:12, Lk 22:53) is capable of showing God as an enemy of his own creature, and in the first place as an enemy of man, as a source of danger and threat to man. In this way Satan manages to sow in man’s soul the seed of opposition to the one who “from the beginning” would be considered as man’s enemy – and not as a Father. Man is challenged to become the adversary of God!”

[This adversarial relationship being the genesis of our self-protective self-love.]

The sinlessness of the Mother of God, then, does not consist only in that she never transgressed the Law, but, more profoundly, in that she had, from the very beginning, “a converted heart”; she never placed herself in an adversarial relationship to God.

And so we sing in the service for the Entry of the Most Holy Mother of God:

“Thy wonders, O pure Theotokos, surpass the power of words. For in thee I see something beyond speech: a body that was never subject to the taint of sin. Therefore in thanksgiving I cry to thee: O pure Virgin, thou art truly high above all.”

The term “taint of sin” used here is remarkably close to the Roman Catholic expression “the stain of original sin” which appears in the definition of the Immaculate Conception. So it is not the expression itself that we would focus on, but rather the understanding of sin which informs it.

St. Simeon the New Theologian speaks of the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit from whom we were separated by our first parents’ sin:

“As the death of the body is the separation from it of the soul, so the death of the soul is the separation from it of the Holy Spirit, by whom God … had been pleased that man be overshadowed, so that he might … remain stable towards evil.”

When the converted heart approaches God in holy truth and cries out in the same Spirit, “Abba, Father,” the adversarial relationship to God is born away by the flow of tears of holy contrition that open the penitent to God’s forgiveness, the remission of sins, and reconciliation with God the Father.

The Holy Virgin, however, never regarded God as an adversary, never withdrew from him in disobedience; rather, by her obedience she became the New Eve, and the cause of our salvation. In the words of St. Irenaeus,

“Having become disobedient, [Eve] was made the cause of death both to herself and to the entire human race; so also did Mary, … by yielding obedience, become the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race.”

Thus I believe there is one Roman Catholic interpretation of the Immaculate Conception that Orthodox Catholics can find acceptable, and this is an interpretation deriving from Bernadette of Lourdes. Bernadette steadfastly maintained that the lady who had appeared to her had said, “I am the Immaculate Conception,” against critics who insisted that she must have said rather that she was the immaculately conceived one, for how can a person be called a conception? And were it merely a question of affirming the Virgin’s sinlessness, to say that she was immaculately conceived would suffice. Only as we see the Virgin Mary as, in St. Irenaeus’ words, the cause of our salvation, does it make any sense to call her the Immaculate Conception. It is in her that we are conceived holy and immaculate. Because the Most Pure Mother of God is also our Mother, in her we are born into a participation in God’s own life, as those many brethren of whom her Divine Son was the firstborn. (Rm 8:29)

Before signing off, I would note one of our popular spirituals, based on Ezekiel 37:1-14, where the prophet visits the Valley of Dry Bones and brings them to life by mentioning God's Word. So the traditions of our black community also are based upon the same ancient rule related to the Jews by their rabbis and teachers: 'Give him of what is his, because you and yours are his.'"