Evangelisation draws on "the beauty and radiance of faith," Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer (pictured) of Regensburg told CNA Deutsch in an interview published 1 September.

"However, it (evangelisation) needs to go hand in hand with a ‘healthy' form of apologetics, insofar as the proclamation of the faith has never, and certainly not today, taken place in a merely benevolent and affirmative atmosphere."

Apologetics "should demonstrate the reasonableness of faith and the hope the faith can give in the face of critical inquiries," Voderholzer, a professor of dogmatics, said.

Bishop Voderholzer said there was a specific canon of scandals that Catholics often find themselves confronted with: "The crusades, witch trials, the Galileo case, colonialism, complicity in totalitarian systems, corruption of the Jesus tradition, and recently especially sexual abuse."

Apologetics does not mean a "defiant denial of the dark sides of the Church, or dogmatism at any price," the theologian warned.

"What matters is a knowledge of history, discernment and the understanding that the ‘holiness of the Church' does not mean the moral blamelessness of all its members, but the gift of the Lord to communicate his presence, his salvation, precisely in fragile vessels."

Asked about role models for a "healthy form of apologetics," the German prelate said he thought of Irenaeus of Lyon, Thomas Aquinas, Blaise Pascal, John Henry Newman, Henri de Lubac, and also Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI.

"They all know that the revelation of God, which is handed down to us in the Holy Scriptures and the faith of the Church, is self-evident," he said.

Voderholzer is the founding director of the Pope Benedict XVI Institute, which was created in 2008 to compile and make available both published and unpublished writings of the theologian, bishop and pope emeritus.

Sources

Catholic News Agency

Pope Francis typically meets with the local Jesuits whenever he visits a country and the conversations really show the wisdom and the personality of this pope.

For example, we know the first pope from Argentina likes colorful metaphors and stories.

The nation that gave the world the tango would not give us a dull pope. When asked about where he finds consolations, he said:

I'll tell you a story. I like to spend time with children and the elderly. Once, there was an old lady. She had precious, bright eyes. I asked her, "How old are you?"

"Eighty-seven," she answered.

"But what do you eat to be so well? Give me the recipe," I said.

"Everything!" she answered.

"And I make my own ravioli."

I said to her, "Madam, pray for me!"

She says to me, "Every day I pray for you!"

And joking, I add, "Tell me the truth: Do you pray for me or against me?"

"Of course, I pray for you! Many others inside the Church pray against you!"

The story illustrates that he means it when he talks about accompanying people.

He clearly takes delight in meeting this elderly woman and he remembers her specific age.

He remembers her "precious, bright eyes."

He engages with her like a real person: "Give me the recipe."

But, he also makes a very clear point, adding: "True resistance is not in the people of God who really feel they are the people."

His comments about dealing with difficult times demonstrate a different attitude towards evangelisation than, say, what we heard about last week from Bishop Robert Barron at the U.S. bishops' conference meeting.

The pope says:

What to do? It takes patience, it takes hupomeno, that is, carrying the weight of the events and circumstances of life. You have to carry the burden of life and its tensions on your shoulders. We know that we must proceed with parrhesia and courage. They're important. However, there are times when you can't go too far and then you have to be patient and sweet. This is what Peter Faber did, the man of dialogue, of listening, of closeness, of the journey.

Today is a time more for Faber than for Canisius, who was the man of the dispute. In times of criticism and tension we must do as Faber did, working with the help of the angels: he begged his angel to speak to the angels of others so that they might do with them what we cannot do. And then you really need proximity, a meek proximity. We must first of all be close to the Lord with prayer, with time spent in front of the tabernacle. And then the closeness to the people of God in daily life with works of charity to heal the wounds.

The contrast of Faber and Canisius illustrates that these divergent approaches are not new in the experience of the church.

But, whereas Barron calls for a new apologetics, revels in arguing with atheists, and holds up Jordan Peterson as some kind of icon of effective communication, Francis counsels against following the model of the disputatious Canisius, states that we need a "meek proximity" to the people of God, and goes on to say:

The Church is so wounded, and today it is also so wounded by tensions within it. Meekness, it takes meekness! And it takes a lot of courage to be meek! But you have to go forward with meekness. This is not the time to convince, to have discussions. If someone has a sincere doubt, yes, one can dialogue, clarify. But don't respond to the attacks.

It is very hard to be quiet in this age of Twitter, but can we doubt that the pope is right, that aping the culture which has marginalized the Christian faith, as Barron does, is no way to proceed, and that we must bear witness to the suffering of people more than we should try and convince them by argumentation. Continue reading

• Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR
• Image: Lifesite News

But it's worth remembering that posing a question to a search engine is not the same as posing a question to any other kind of source.

The competition for authority online is governed by a very different set of rules than in previous contests for theological legitimacy; often, when people express doubt on the web, those most ready to answer will also be those most dogmatic in their beliefs.

Every so often, economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz crunches Google search data for theNew York Times and comes up with some fun statistics about, say, the anxieties of pregnant women ("can pregnant women eat shrimp?" is a popular search query in the US).

This Sunday, Stephens-Davidowitz turned his attention to God.

Some of the patterns he documents are predictable, such as the steep reduction in "Google searches for churches," yet more evidence of the increasing number of "nones," or that "searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere."

Other patterns are more jarring: "Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell," he writes.

Each month, on average, 422 people in the US ask Google "Why did God make me ugly?" and 103 ask "Why did God make me black?"

The most common God-related question, asked over 25,000 times per month in the US, is "Who created God?," followed by that old Job-ian classic, "Why does God allow suffering?"

But we should be careful here; Google search data offers a skewed sliver of insight into the full range of human motivation and behavior. Continue reading

He said he was conscious that New Zealand is a very secular country and often a Christian voice doesn't get much of a hearing in the media.

"People have a stereotypical picture that to have a Christian faith is to believe in something superstitious or irrational."

"I wanted to make sense of Christianity for secular people. There are major problems, like the problem of suffering, which is a very genuine stumbling block to faith."

Hay said he had some difficulty getting his book published.

He tried mainstream publishers, such as Penguin Random House, and "the general response was it's well-written and interesting and not our thing".

Eventually an Auckland-based Christian publisher, DayStar Books, published it.

Hay also experienced a lack of interest from mainstream booksellers.

"Whitcoulls' national buyer turned me down sight unseen," he said.

Since publication in November 2014, he has sold 1600 copies.

Finding the Forgotten God recently won the Ashton Wylie Charitable Trust Award for books on spiritual matters.

In his review of the book Bosco Peters says" Ron's approach is clearly within the evangelical stable."

"His chapter on the cross assumes that Christ dying "for us" and "for our sins" means penal substitutionary atonement."

"But his God is a positive image; his Jesus, one whom people would want to know."

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• Image: prweek.com

Broadcaster and author Michael Coren, whose books include "Why Catholics are Right", was formally welcomed into the Anglican Church of Canada in Toronto recently.

Mr Coren had been worshipping privately in an Anglican church for a year.

He told the National Post he had not been able to embrace some of the Catholic Church's social and moral teaching for more than a year.

"I could not remain in a church that effectively excluded gay people," Mr Coren said.

"That's only one of the reasons, but for someone who had taken the Catholic position on same-sex marriage for so long, I'd never been comfortable with that even though I suppose I was regarded as being a stalwart in that position.

"I felt a hypocrite being part of a church that described homosexual relations as being disordered and sinful."

" . . . I felt that the circle of love had to be broadened, not reduced," he concluded.

Mr Coren is married to a Catholic wife and they have four Catholic children.

The uproar over his move to Anglicanism cost him several speeches to conservative American Catholic groups and his regular column in the Catholic Register was pulled.

Mr Coren said his conversion has "brought out the worst in the Catholic right".

"The Catholic right is very frightened and very aggressive right now, because they have a pope who they no longer think is one of theirs, and so they're feeling very defensive," Mr Coren said.

He was received into the Catholic Church in 1985, when he was 26.

Mr Coren worshipped in evangelical and Anglican churches for three years in the 1990s, in the wake of a battle with the late Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic over a magazine article.

It was the pull of the Eucharist that drew him back to the Catholic Church.

But now he feels he can be spiritually fed in the Anglican Church.

Sources

• National Post
• Anglican Samizdat
• Image: Position Papers