All the Answers
Certainly it has happened to all of us at one point in our lives: a party, a company dinner, any type of casual gathering where conversation may turn to less than casual topics. The election of a new Pope, one can imagine, has instigated many such tense discussions of late between Catholics and non-Catholic Christians or non-Christians. One minute the person in the next chair is asking for the salt, then he’s throwing out remarks like “You can’t be cremated if you’re Catholic” or “Oh, did you know that there is no purgatory?”
In an age when people find theological insight in The Da Vinci Code, sweeping misconceptions about the Catholic Church are common. Non-Catholics want answers in plain English.
Fr. John J. Dietzen’s Catholic Q&A is an invaluable resource for readers interested in quick references to many topics related to Church teaching. Dietzen, whose column “The New Question Box” has informed readers for thirty years, covers questions ranging from the usual (“Do Catholics worship Mary?”) to the downright surprising (“What is the Church’s position on transsexuals?”).
What is especially convenient about Dietzen’s book is the ease with which one can find information on a particular subject. One need not read through the entire book but start and stop anywhere or move back to front if necessary to find needed answers. The first three chapters tackle the heart of the faith: the Bible, the Church, the Mass—why we as Catholics do the things we do, where our traditions are explained in the Bible, why priests observe celibacy, why women can’t be priests. Dietzen provides straightforward answers.
Chapters 4 through 9 cover queries about the sacraments, tackling subjects such as: Do annulments make children illegitimate in the eyes of the Church? How can a person with celiac disease take Communion? Must a woman stay in an abusive marriage?
Chapter 8, “Right and Wrong,” covers a multitude of societal issues: What does the Church view as sin? Why does the Church frown upon birth control and abortion?
The final four sections deal with global topics such as ecumenism, Catholic prayer, end-of-life issues, devotion to the saints, the Catholic view of other religions, the Catholic teaching on suicide, and the Catholic view of final judgment. These chapters will be beneficial to non-Catholics and Catholics alike.
The book includes an easy-to-navigate glossary that covers many topics not found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Consider it “everything you wanted to know about the Catholic Church but were afraid to ask.” With a reference like Catholic Q&A, the next time somebody asks, perhaps you won’t be afraid to answer.
— Kathryn Lively
Catholic Q&A: Answers to the Most Common Questions About Catholicism
By John J. Dietzen
Crossroad (2005)
536pages
$17.95
ISBN: 0824523091
Jews and Christians
Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History by David Klinghoffer provides for Christians a historical overview of the Jewish rejection of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. He argues that the Jews rejected Jesus because they believed that to accept him would necessitate jettisoning the Sinai covenant between God and the Jewish nation. Christians, Klinghoffer suggests, should be grateful for this rejection of Jesus, because without it Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect rather than becoming the mother of Western civilization.
Klinghoffer, an Orthodox Jew, offers a powerful argument that if evangelical progress is to be made Christians and Jews first must begin to take each other seriously. But in offering Jewish responses to Christian evangelism, Klinghoffer unwittingly demonstrates the great failure of both Christians and Jews to give each other due credit as educated believers in sophisticated religious traditions. Klinghoffer gives an image of this dynamic with his metaphor of the “alternative realities” he asserts that Christians and Jews inhabit:
In one reality, the truth of Jesus’ messiahship is obvious to anyone who takes an honest look at the biblical sources. In the other reality, Jesus as Messiah is a proposition that would be hard to take seriously were there not so many intelligent and earnest Christians who stake their lives on it.
On the Christian side, this is expressed in the Christian fondness for documenting the fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. The eager Christian missionary too often assumes that all he must do is line up the Old Testament prophecies with the evangelists’ New Testament documentation of their fulfillment and any “honest” Jew will be compelled in conscience to be baptized or prove himself “hardhearted.” As Klinghoffer demonstrates, this approach fails to appreciate that a biblically literate Jew may read those Old Testament passages from a vastly different perspective that finds little support for the idea that Jesus is the Messiah.
On the other side, Klinghoffer’s analysis of the New Testament underestimates Christianity. As one example, Klinghoffer offers “proofs” for his skepticism of Paul’s Jewishness. One “proof” is his assertion that Paul identified himself with the Gentiles: “Once, in composing his letter to the community at Galatia, the apostle made an intriguing slip in his choice of pronouns, writing as if he himself were a non-Jew: ‘that in Christ the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith’ [Gal. 3:14].”
When read in context, this text affirms Paul’s Jewishness. Moreover, it makes sense that Paul, who by the time of this letter had been apostle to the Gentiles for years, would readily identify himself with those to whom he was specially called to evangelize. Klinghoffer should have expected this Christian rejoinder and dealt with it.
Why the Jews Rejected Jesus has considerable weaknesses, but to the extent that it leads Christians to a better understanding of and respect for post-Christian Judaism, it will make them better evangelists for Christ.
— Michelle Arnold
Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History
By David Klinghoffer
Doubleday (2005)
247 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0385510217
On Solid Rock
The subtitle of Saint Peter Lives in Rome: An Anglican Discovers the Ministry of the Pope is a bit misleading. Rather than a personal account of one Anglican’s conversion, Robert Stackpole gives us a semi-scholarly treatise on the nature of the papacy. It is designed to answer objections coming from a number of different quarters—Evangelical, Anglican, Orthodox and modernist—from a historical and theological perspective.
Stackpole is a professor of spiritual theology at Redeemer Pacific College and the director of the John Paul II Institute of Divine Mercy run by the Marians of the Immaculate Conception in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
We actually learn very little about the author and how his conversion to the Catholic Church came about. But he does give us a good resource to use for what Scripture and the early Church Fathers say about the papacy. He also spends considerable time defending the understanding that the bishop of Rome has universal jurisdiction and clearing up the confusion over the term infallible.
His discussion of the doctrine of infallibility is particularly helpful. The major misconception, of course, is that infallibility equals the inerrancy of all papal pronouncements whether made ex cathedra or over the breakfast table. There is also the misconception that the pope can change Church doctrine.
The pope, Stackpole rightly points out, can only reiterate Church teaching that has been established from her beginnings and clarify that doctrine for the contemporary world.
Stackpole’s romp through papal history is rather thorough for such a short book. He answers objection after objection about the scriptural evidence for the papacy and the Patristic-era documents and practices. As an example, a common Evangelical interpretation of the key passage of Matthew 16:17–19 (“and on this rock I will build my Church”) is that the name Jesus gives Peter (” Petros“) is not exactly what he said when he repeated the word for “rock” in reference to the Church (” petra“). But, Stackpole argues, “Matthew hardly could have used the Greek word petra, a feminine word, as a proper name for a male! . . . We need to remember that Matthew was trying to translate in Greek a ‘word play’ from Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, in which the two words (Kepha) would have been identical” (22–23, emphasis in original).
Stackpole goes after the more specialized and obscure objections as well, ones that would come mostly from the Orthodox end of things. For instance, the claim is made that Pope Honorius “not only taught heresy but was condemned as a heretic by an ecumenical council of the Church.” The heresy, it is claimed, was contained in letters he wrote to the patriarch of Constantinople in 634. But, he writes, ” no one has ever claimed that the pope is infallible in his personal or private letters to another patriarch! ” (emphasis in original). Stackpole then goes on to quote at length from an article by Robert Spencer originally published in This Rock (“The Truth about Pope Honorius,” September 1994) that gives a detailed history of that controversy.
I said at the beginning that this is a semi-scholarly book, meaning that there are some footnotes for his sources but not enough. I found myself many times looking at the bottom of the page for the source of a particular quote and not finding it. There are abbreviations prior to some quotes, but there is no explanation of what they mean.
These shortcomings aside, this book probably will prove very useful to apologists dealing with many different.aspects of the question of the papacy.
— Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz
Saint Peter Lives in Rome: An Anglican Discovers the Ministry of the Pope
By Robert Stackpole
Marian Press (2005)
166 pages
$13.95
ISBN: 1596141123