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Sunday, April 10, 2022

Why parts of Good Friday worship have been controversial

The following article was obtained through the website, The Conversation, and written by Joanne M. Pierce, Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross

Churches around the world will be holding services for their three most important days during this Holy Week: Holy Thursday, sometimes called Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Easter commemorates Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the fundamental belief of Christianity. It is the earliest and most central of all Christian holidays, more ancient than Christmas.

As a scholar in medieval Christian liturgy, I know that historically the most controversial of these three holy days has been the worship service for Good Friday, which focuses on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Two parts of the contemporary Good Friday worship service could be misunderstood as implicitly anti-Semitic or racist. Both are derived from the medieval Good Friday liturgy that Catholics and some other Christian churches continue to use in a modified form today.

These are the solemn orations and the veneration of the cross.

Prayer and anti-Semitism

The solemn orations are formal prayers offered by the assembled local community for the wider church, for example, for the pope. These orations also include other prayers for members of different religions, and for other needs of the world.

One of these prayers is offered “for the Jewish people.”

For centuries, this prayer was worded in a way to imply an anti-Semitic meaning, referring to the Jews as “perfidis,” meaning “treacherous” or “unfaithful.”

However, the Catholic Church made important changes in the 20th century. In 1959, Pope John XXIII dropped the word “perfidis” entirely from the Latin prayer in the all-Latin Roman missal. This missal, an official liturgical book containing the readings and prayers for the celebration of Mass and Holy Week, is used by Catholics all over the world. However, when the next edition of the Latin Roman missal was published in 1962, the text of the prayer still mentioned the “conversion” of the Jews and referred to their “blindness.”

The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, a major meeting of all Catholic bishops worldwide held between 1962 and 1965, mandated the reform of Catholic life and practice in a number of ways. Open discussion with members of other Christian denominations, as well as other non-Christian religions, was encouraged, and a Vatican commission on Catholic interaction with Jews was established in the early 1970s.

Vatican II also called for a renewal of Catholic worship. The revised liturgy was to be celebrated not just in Latin, but also in local vernacular languages, including English. The first English Roman missal was published in 1974. Today, these post-Vatican religious rituals are known as the “ordinary form” of the Roman rite.

The completely reworded prayer text reflected the renewed understanding of the relationship between Catholics and Jews mandated by Vatican II and supported by decades of interreligious dialogue. For example, in 2015 the Vatican commission released a document clarifying the relationship between Catholicism and Judaism as one of “rich complementarity,” putting an end to organized efforts to convert Jews and strongly condemning anti-Semitism.

However, another important development took place in 2007. More than 40 years after Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI allowed a wider use of the pre-Vatican II missal of 1962, known as the “extraordinary form.”

At first, this pre-Vatican II missal retained the potentially offensive wording of the prayer for the Jews.

The prayer was quickly reworded, but it does still ask that their hearts be “illuminated” to “recognize Jesus Christ.”

Although the extraordinary form is used only by small groups of traditionalist Catholics, the text of this prayer continues to trouble many.

In 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwiz, Pope Francis repeated the vehement Catholic rejection of anti-Semitism. While the pope has not revoked the use of the extraordinary form, in 2020 he ordered a review of its use by surveying the Catholic bishops of the world.

The cross and what it symbolizes

© Jacopo Landi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The veneration of the cross is celebrated on Good Friday the Cathedral of San Giusto in Italy.

There has been similar sensitivity about another part of the Catholic Good Friday tradition: the ritual veneration of the cross.

The earliest evidence of a Good Friday procession by lay people to venerate the cross on Good Friday comes from fourth-century Jerusalem. Catholics would proceed one by one to venerate what was believed to be a piece of the actual wooden cross used to crucify Jesus, and honor it with a reverent touch or kiss.

So sacred was this cross fragment that it was heavily guarded by the clergy during the procession in case someone might try to bite off a sliver to keep for themselves, as was rumored to have happened during a past Good Friday service.

During the medieval period, this veneration rite, elaborated by additional prayers and chant, spread widely across Western Europe. Blessed by priests or bishops, ordinary wooden crosses or crucifixes depicting Christ nailed to the cross took the place of fragments of the “true cross” itself. Catholics venerated the cross on both Good Friday and other feast days.

In this part of the Good Friday liturgy, controversy centers around the physical symbol of the cross and the layers of meaning it has communicated in the past and today. Ultimately, to Catholics and other Christians, it represents Christ’s unselfish sacrificing of his life to save others, an example to be followed by Christians in different ways during their lives.

Historically, however, the cross has also been held up in Western Christianity as a rallying point for violence against groups that were deemed by the church and secular authorities to threaten the safety of Christians and the security of Christian societies.

From the late 11th through 13th centuries, soldiers would “take the cross” and join crusades against these real and perceived threats, whether these opponents were Western Christian heretics, Jewish communities, Muslim armies, or the Greek orthodox Byzantine Empire. Other religious wars in the 14th through 16th centuries continued in this “crusading” spirit.

From the 19th century on, Americans and other English speakers use the term “crusade” for any effort to promote a specific idea or movement, often one based on a moral ideal. Examples in the United States include the 19th-century antislavery abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement of the 20th century.

But today certain “ideals” have been rejected by the wider culture.

Contemporary alt-right groups use what has been called the “Deus vult” cross. The words “Deus vult” mean “God wills (it),” a rallying cry for medieval Christian armies seeking to take control of the Holy Land from Muslims. These groups today view themselves as modern crusaders fighting against Islam.

Some white supremacy groups use versions of the cross

as symbols of protest or provocation. The Celtic cross, a compact cross within a circle, is a common example. And a full-sized wooden cross was carried by at least one protester during the Capitol insurrection in January.

Prayers and symbols have the power to bind people together in a common purpose and identity. But without understanding their context, it is all too easy to manipulate them in support of dated or limited political and social agendas.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

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Saturday, April 2, 2022

The four horsemen of the apocalypse are destroying planet Earth

The following article was obtained through the website, The Hill, and was written by David Shearman, opinion contributor - Mar 21, 2022


Climate change and loss of biodiversity are the terrible twins working together to threaten human existence. Unfortunately, their wicked problems are accompanied by two equally important drivers of calamity -population and economic growth. These four horsemen gallop in unison and must be considered together.

Climate change

After several decades characterized by misinformation and then prevarication on the veracity of climate change, governments are now acceding to the warnings from climate scientists and their learning experience from rapidly increasing extreme weather events. However, their actions remain insufficient to ensure future world temperatures allow civilization to exist. Indeed, we need to arrest greenhouse emissions within the next two decades.

The positives are that the science is secure, we can measure our success and failure by measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane, and we have the option of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to suck these gases out of the atmosphere if all else fails.

However, much climate change mitigation is based on technological fixes, some of which are problematic and many indeed create their own environmental harms.

Biodiversity and its ecological services

Climate change and biodiversity crises impact each other. Climate change is a significant cause of biodiversity loss, but even if climate change was contained today, the biodiversity crisis would still proceed, although more slowly, for its fundamental cause is the consumption of the natural environment for economic gain by a population too large for the world's finite natural resources.

The 2019 "Warning of a Climate Emergency," signed by over 11,000 scientists, identified continued increases in human population and the world's gross domestic product as causes of ecological decline.

The science to explain how the loss of biodiversity and their ecological services will end civilization is poorly understood. It is diffuse, complex and we have no one measure to assess demise or success. There are no dramatic examples such as storm, flood, fire and heat domes by which we experience the consequences.

Healthy ecosystems, interdependent webs of millions of living organisms and the physical environment they create, are vital to all life on Earth. They are our life support systems that provide clean air, freshwater, fertile soil for food as well as many other resources and medicines. We are part of this web of life but now plunder it beyond repair.

As recognized by scientists from Australia and the U.S., the scale of the threats to all these forms of life - including humanity - is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp even by well-informed scientists. Awareness by public government and industry is weak which explains the universal presence of ineffective environmental protection and laws.

Some outcomes will relate to failure of agriculture with hunger, starvation and conflict. In the Dust Bowl disaster in the early 1930s, prolonged drought led to the loss of 1.2 billion tons of soil across the Great Plains and there were thousands of refugees as depicted in John Steinbeck's 1939 novel "The Grapes of Wrath."

With an average rainfall of less than 500 mm, stock grazing had been replaced by wheat production and soil stability conferred by native grasses was lost. As with climate change, the deniers will say such episodes have always occurred and dismiss the increasing prevalence of similar disasters which are now occurring around the world.

There are a few hopeful developments that indicate increasing awareness by governments.

Long overdue collaboration will now occur between the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Natural capital accounting is underway in 90 countries under the UN SEEA system but both the U.S. and Australia have not yet made progress, as detailed in The Hill.

An international Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) launched last month will develop a framework for corporations and financial institutions to report on nature-related physical and transition risks.

Population growth

Philip Cafaro, professor of philosophy of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University, notes many studies show that limiting population growth is among the cheapest, most effective means to limit and help societies adapt to climate change. Yet, population growth is taboo in the current debate. One of the main reasons lies with human rights concerns; this needs to be balanced by the right for humanity's continued existence and indeed many other species some of which we depend upon.

Cafaro also notes that the IPCC's 2014 report states that, "Globally, economic and population growth continue to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion." This was reiterated by one of the Working Groups from the 2021 IPCC report, yet it was absent from the 3,676-page final report.

As detailed in The Hill, American couples are having fewer children than in the past but specific population policy is largely absent and population increases intermittently by immigration. By contrast, Australia is encouraging population growth. When introducing the "baby bonus" scheme in 2002, Australian Treasurer Peter Costello promoted the scheme with the encouragement to "have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country." This philosophy still exists in our huge country despite our rapidly deteriorating environment with increasing impacts of climate change.

Nevertheless, rational views based on science are being advanced in Australia, for example, the discussion paper "Population and Climate Change."

The consumer economy

The fourth most terrifying horseman is the obsession with economic growth which fails to acknowledge that our planet and its biological resources are finite. The leaders and representatives of nations at the UN climate summit COP26 together with a huge contingent from the fossil fuel industries were set in their ideology of growth, progress and prosperity. They cannot conceive of economic reform toward an economy to curb consumerism and consequently it was not addressed in the 2021 IPCC report.

Humanity urgently needs and integrated Intergovernmental Panel report- the IPCBPE report

Unfortunately, a fifth horseman of the apocalypse has now arrived from the Russian steppes, but we must not allow war to distract us from our urgent mission to stop the advance of Four.