Posted on 09/02/2012 1:22:52 PM PDT by caldera599
ROME (Reuters) - The former archbishop of Milan and papal candidate Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said the Catholic Church was "200 years out of date" in his final interview before his death, published on Saturday.
Martini, once favored by Vatican progressives to succeed Pope John Paul II and a prominent voice in the church until his death at the age of 85 on Friday, gave a scathing portrayal of a pompous and bureaucratic church failing to move with the times.
"Our culture has aged, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our rituals and our cassocks are pompous," Martini said in the interview published in Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
"The Church must admit its mistakes and begin a radical change, starting from the pope and the bishops. The pedophilia scandals oblige us to take a journey of transformation," he said in the interview.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
Latin was the language of the Church of Rome. Until the second century, the Liturgy was in Greek. Earlier Latin translations of the Bible were done, but the Pope knew that something better was required. So he tasked Jerome to make a new translation. As he may himself have been of Greek descent, and certainly had a first rate command of the language —as his quarrel-mate Augustine did not, produced a first class work. But he didnt do all the Vulgate. His work was mixed with some of the older Latin versions and then redacted over the centuries, although he did master Hebrew so to do justice to Jewish Scripture, so that by the 16th Century when the Council of Trent made the Vulgate the standard, it needed revision. The great irony is that although Erasmus had produced a new version of the Greek New Testament, and caused other scholars to look again at the Greek Bible, the Vulgate was probably a better translation of the Greek than either Luthers or the KJV. Even now we are not sure that Jerome did not have better Greek manuscripts to work with than the ones extant, which we have to look at.
There was a Latin liturgy as far back as the 2nd Century, but do we have a copy of it?
Well, Pilate was an aristocrat, so he may have known Greek. More likely that Our Lord would have known Greek than Latin, but we dont know that. I have the impression that St.John spoke Greek. Koine. There is an old story that explains how he was able to get him and Peter in the Palace of the High Priest. That his father had a shop in Jerusalem, and John and his brother sold fish to the Butler of the place, who knew him. Fish from the Sea of Galileo was processed and sold all over the empire, as well as in the capital, Jerusalem.
God works in mysterious ways. This guy was supposed to be a sure bet for Pope, but instead we got a staunchly orthodox Pope Benedict. And Benedict is continuing to replace liberal bishops with strongly conservative bishops, bringing back the Latin mass etc
The papacy didn't get this cardinal, remember -- instead we got a conservative Pope Benedict, thanks to the Holy Spirit
Jesus probably worked as a carpenter/construction worker at the Greek town near Nazareth, and the area of Egypt where his family lived when he was young was the Greek speaking city of Alexandria. In other words, lots of Greek speakers in the “pagan” parts of Galilee...
Pilate like most educated Romans probably spoke Greek too.
Aramaic was the language of the Semetic area of the eastern empire (Palestine/Mesopotamia) and yes, there is also a chance that pilot spoke Aramaic.
What? "Let go of" mitochondria since we could have such nifty nanoengineering now from MIT? Permit me to think it would be a loss, for which the latest bio-nano-innovations would be no very adequate compensation.
Besides, English is already dated, on the wane. I think it may come down to everybody doing Christianity in Chinese. There's an idea.
I've found just the opposite. It's like the turtles: Catholic all the way down.
BillyBoy:
It read Jesus the Nazorean the King of the Jews. Now many of he Jews read the inscription because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew, Greek and Latin... [Cf. John 19: 19-20].
So maybe Jesus and the Apostles new a little more about Latin than you think. Further, Christanity and Rome/Latin and Greek are inseperable as the History willed by Almighty God is that the Incarnation of CHrist took place in that historical context. As such it is as much a part of Salvation history as God choosing the Jewish People to be the first to reveal himself to. As such, it is the History willed by God and binds us to events that took place in a historical context so that man does make religion up on his on.
“What they both have in common in the thing they’re proclaiming as THE only acceptable form didn’t even exist until the late 1600s.”
While you are correct that the Council of Trent standardized the Roman Mass in the 16th Century, the elements of the Mass in Europe, e.g., the prayers of the daily office, the chants of the Mass (developed in 7th-10th centuries) were all in place.
Other contemporaneous rites, like the Sarum Rite or the Ambrosian Rite were more similar to the Tridentine Rite than not, and would probably be quite acceptable to the devotee of TLM.
Those of us who cherish the Tridentine Rite prefer the solemnity of the rite, the strict attention to the rubrics of the Mass, the beauty of the prayers, and the sacredness of the music.
In addition, because priest and congregation tend to be conservative, the sermons tend to uphold our values: family, the sacrednesslife, personal responsibility: these sermons are heavy on the teaching of the theology of Catholicism and lack the superficiality and touchy-feelyness of many modern homilies.
Consequently, at the TLM, I find myself eagerly anticipating the sermon as opposed to my usual dread of the banality of too many “relevant to the times” modern homilies.
For me, this is the liturgical equivalent of listening to a discussion of strict interpretation of the Constitution rather than one dealing with the Constitution as a “living, breathing document.”
All this having been said, most of the Catholics that I know who have opted for the TLM do not deny the validity of the Novus Ordo; it is just that the Novus Ordo Mass tends to leave us unfulfilled. However, most of us do attend Novus Ordo Mass when the TLM is unavailable, as on holydays when we are working and away from our home parishes.
You are an apologist for the ignorant and revisionist cabal at FR and pointing out that someone is either ignorant or a revisionist; particularly habitual offenders like Iscool, is simply stating a fact not a personal attack despite your warped definition.
Why don’t you address the absurd nonsense that Christ and the Apostles would know nothing of Latin.
Is there some SSPX site where “traditionalists” go to high-five one another after they ride the zot here?
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
Please remember that St. Paul and the other Apostles, whenever they entered a town, sought out the agora to preach the Gospel to the pagans and other unbelievers. There the crowds and the authorities rejected them and often beat, rebuked, and arrested him for his speaking the truth.
Like an ancient agora, Free Republic is a market place of ideas where you can expect no better treatment from the crowds and the authorities. Follow St. Paul's example.
"Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." - Ephesians 4:31-32
Peace be with you
Far more than 'one'...There are hundreds of millions of bible readers/believers who have agreed with that premise...
Hardly a coincidence...
Really??? But yet John the Apostle at the end of the century wrote the scriptures in Greek...
That, along with countless other things shows that your Catholic religion was not the Christianity spoken of in the scriptures by the Apostles and Desciples...
Like I said, a study of the scriptures will lead a Christian away from your 'Church'...So it's easy to 'deny' your religion just from believing scripture...
It is said that there were 400 books floating around which could have been considered for inclusion in the Bible when the Church, again guided and led by the Spirit, decided on the canon of the Bible.
And it may have been said back then that the Detroit Tigers would never win the pennant...So what??? Who cares what a bunch of pagans said back then, or now...
The Old Latin Bible was in circulation long before your religion even knew what the Trinity was...Long before Jerome was even born...
Well that's not the fault of the English language...Why does the Catholic religion allow the 'we' to exist???
The Nicene Creed is a personal profession of the Christian faith, not a communal one.
After looking at numerous written Catholic prayers, it appears that they all say 'we' most everywhere...And as you say, there's no personalization in that...
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