Posted on 12/04/2006 7:52:47 PM PST by Pyro7480
'The Nativity Story' Movie Problematic for Catholics, "Unsuitable" for Young Children
By John-Henry Westen
NEW YORK, December 4, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A review of New Line Cinema's The Nativity story by Fr. Angelo Mary Geiger of the Franciscans of the Immaculate in the United States, points out that the film, which opened December 1, misinterprets scripture from a Catholic perspective.
While Fr. Geiger admits that he found the film is "in general, to be a pious and reverential presentation of the Christmas mystery." He adds however, that "not only does the movie get the Virgin Birth wrong, it thoroughly Protestantizes its portrayal of Our Lady."
In Isaiah 7:14 the Bible predicts the coming of the Messiah saying: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel." Fr. Geiger, in an video blog post, explains that the Catholic Church has taught for over 2000 years that the referenced Scripture showed that Mary would not only conceive the child miraculously, but would give birth to the child miraculously - keeping her physical virginity intact during the birth.
The film, he suggests, in portraying a natural, painful birth of Christ, thus denies the truth of the virginal and miraculous birth of Christ, which, he notes, the Fathers of the Church compared to light passing through glass without breaking it. Fr. Geiger quoted the fourth century St. Augustine on the matter saying. "That same power which brought the body of the young man through closed doors, brought the body of the infant forth from the inviolate womb of the mother."
Fr. Geiger contrasts The Nativity Story with The Passion of the Christ, noting that with the latter, Catholics and Protestants could agree to support it. He suggests, however, that the latter is "a virtual coup against Catholic Mariology".
The characterization of Mary further debases her as Fr. Geiger relates in his review. "Mary in The Nativity lacks depth and stature, and becomes the subject of a treatment on teenage psychology."
Beyond the non-miraculous birth, the biggest let-down for Catholics comes from Director Catherine Hardwicke's own words. Hardwicke explains her rationale in an interview: "We wanted her [Mary] to feel accessible to a young teenager, so she wouldn't seem so far away from their life that it had no meaning for them. I wanted them to see Mary as a girl, as a teenager at first, not perfectly pious from the very first moment. So you see Mary going through stuff with her parents where they say, 'You're going to marry this guy, and these are the rules you have to follow.' Her father is telling her that she's not to have sex with Joseph for a year-and Joseph is standing right there."
Comments Fr. Geiger, "it is rather disconcerting to see Our Blessed Mother portrayed with 'attitude;' asserting herself in a rather anachronistic rebellion against an arranged marriage, choosing her words carefully with her parents, and posing meaningful silences toward those who do not understand her."
Fr. Geiger adds that the film also contains "an overly graphic scene of St. Elizabeth giving birth," which is "just not suitable, in my opinion, for young children to view."
Despite its flaws Fr. Geiger, after viewing the film, also has some good things to say about it. "Today, one must commend any sincere attempt to put Christ back into Christmas, and this film is certainly one of them," he says. "The Nativity Story in no way compares to the masterpiece which is The Passion of the Christ, but it is at least sincere, untainted by cynicism, and a worthy effort by Hollywood to end the prejudice against Christianity in the public square."
And, in addition to a good portrait of St. Joseph, the film offers "at least one cinematic and spiritual triumph" in portraying the Visitation of Mary to St. Elizabeth. "Although the Magnificat is relegated to a kind of epilogue at the movie's end, the meeting between Mary and Elizabeth is otherwise faithful to the scriptures and quite poignant. In a separate scene, the two women experience the concurrent movement of their children in utero and share deeply in each other's joy. I can't think of another piece of celluloid that illustrates the dignity of the unborn child better than this."
See Fr. Geiger's full review here:
http://airmaria.com/
You are beyond speaking to.
Hey, watch it: us Orthodox have *major* feasts based on the events recorded in the Proto-Evangelium, not to mention still using in every Divine Liturgy a hymn composed by St. Justinian, the convener of the Ecumenical Council that proclaimed the Perpetual Virginity of the Theotokos.
Never mind me. For your own reputation's sake, can you or can you not substantiate your allegation, made in 1,797 to Kosta, that "Catholic offshoots [...] want to deify Mary literally [and they] petitioned the Pope to do just that"?
I know, I was being sarcastic.
I answered that question already or are you unable to read?
Not to my knowledge, you did not answer. Which post of yours are you referring to? You link in 2248 did not describe any petition to deify The Mother of God.
Reread the post. You asked can I substantiate it. I gave you an answer.
************
You are lucky indeed to have such a mother in law.
If that is it, then no, you cannot substantiate a very serious charge you threw around cavalierly.
Based upon what I see on the internet, I can not. So stone me.
Of course, but it doesn't mean that someone would not say "I was Jesus' blood brother" if it were true. People might want to know more about Jesus through such acquaintance, don't you think? I picture Mary sitting in the Upper Room with the Apostles after the Ascension and before the Pentecost telling stories about Jesus as a young man and the Apostles intently listening, as in the movie, "Jesus of Nazareth".
I think that it's fairly certain that Jesus and John spent some time together as children ... perhaps on those treks to the feasts in Jerusalem.
No mention is made of that. However, we do know that John "knew Him not" in John 1:31. So perhaps Jesus never did spend time with John as a youth. This is open to debate, I suppose. But it appears from reading the accounts of John the Baptist, that they did not have a relationship that pre-existed the Baptism of Jesus.
Regards
In Judaism, a Jewish mother gives birth to a Jew. So in order for someone to be born Jewish, the mother has to be Jewish.
While innate "Jewishness" is given by the mother to her children (even if they are baptized Christian, they are still Jewish as far as the law is concerned), the blood line is inherited through the father.
This law goes back to the times when the Jews were polygamists. As long as the father was known, the family was intact regardless of who the mother was (the reverse, one woman having more than one husband, doesn't work, and the family unit falls apart).
I suspect that one of the reasons the Jews did not accept Jesus as the descendant of David is precisely because the man who they though was His father (+Joseph) did not have a clean bill of lineage in that respect, but somewhat remotely, not from the "choice stock" so to say. The Gentiles (primarily Greeks), on the other hand, for whom the Gospels were written after all, the Davidian lineage was much easier to accept.
I always found the attempt by the Apostles to link Christ to King David using Mary as less then convincing for the Jewish consumption.
But one must also be a little careful when we speak of DNA. Two strands of DNA are required for conception, one set from the father, the other form the mother. Each set (in the egg and sperm) are haploids (cells containing only half the DNA required; trouble is, Mary's egg would contain only the female half). Ooops, there goes the touched-her-egg theory!
The only way that Christ could have ended up with both sets of Mary's DNA signature is by using her existing flesh (or bone or hair, or any part of her body (a product of her mothers' and her father's DNA, and not her egg).
So the Gospels writers knew that it had to be a mysterious and miraculous, supernatural event in order for it to be true, even though they didn't know any of the modern microbiology!
Except that we are not just made up of "flesh." Christ would have had to use every part of Mary's anatomy (save for reporoductive organs) to fashion His own body of out it. Or, He would have had to turn the differentiated tissues into the premordial embryonic cells ("stem cells") that could then differentiate into a human being, but He would have had to change the chromosomal makeup of Mary's embryonic cells from XX to XY in order for His flesh to be that of a man.
No matter how you take it, not only the Mary's seedless "conception" (the appearance of God the Word in her womb), but the actual "pregnancy" (i.e. the Incarnated God the Word, embryonic Jesus if you will) are of profoundly miraculous character, unlike anything we have ever seen or known in all of human history.
Knowing all this, insisting on His birth bieng "natural" is just plain naïve, in sharp contract to His appearance and incarnation in Mary's body. It is not His brith that makes Him a human, but Mary's "flesh" as they say. So, having a "normal" birth, after having undergone a highly miraculous conception and pregnancy, lacks any logic or justification.
Your charge is baseless then, or do you have a privileged knowledge of petitions secretly made to the Holy See?
There would be NO reason to call Mary a virgin IF she had other kids after Jesus because SHE WOULDN'T BE ONE anymore! Thus, the Liturgy is proof that the earliest of Christians knew she was a virgin AFTER Christ.
This bit of logic struck me as "Duh, why didn't you see this before?" and I thought I'd share it with you.
Regards
This one is not it. But, it suffices to show that such groups exist. Also, note, "OFFSHOOT" not the Church itself
"In September, for instance, Dominic Sanchez Falar founded the “Mary is God Catholic Movement”, which claims that the third secret of Fátima revealed Mary’s divinity. This secret was covered up, he says, by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Rantings of this kind would be risible were they not gaining so much currency, particularly in the US."
http://www.catholic-pages.com/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&topic_id=6901
http://www.maryisgod.org/
It's always been this way. Otherwise, Church fathers would simply have said that Jesus was born of a virgin, but would NEVER have referred to her as the Virgin Mary; otherwise, the term could be used on any female who later had children.
Here, thanks to Salvation, a quote about Eve and Mary:
The Lord, coming into his own creation in visible form, was sustained by his own creation which he himself sustains in being. His obedience on the tree of the cross reversed the disobedience at the tree in Eden; the good news of the truth announced by an angel to Mary, a virgin subject to a husband, undid the evil lie that seduced Eve, a virgin espoused to a husband. As Eve was seduced by the word of an angel and so fled from God after disobeying his word, Mary in her turn was given the good news by the word of an angel, and bore God in obedience to his word. As Eve was seduced into disobedience to God, so Mary was persuaded into obedience to God; thus the Virgin Mary became the advocate of the virgin Eve. Christ gathered all things into one, by gathering them into himself. He declared war against our enemy, crushed him who at the beginning had taken us captive in Adam, and trampled on his head, in accordance with God’s words to the serpent in Genesis: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall lie in wait for your head, and you shall lie in wait for his heel. The one lying in wait for the serpent’s head is the one who was born in the likeness of Adam from the woman, the Virgin. This is the seed spoken of by Paul in the letter to the Galatians: The law of works was in force until the seed should come to whom the- promise was made. He shows this even more clearly in the same letter when he says: When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman. The enemy would not have been defeated fairly if his vanquisher had not been born of a woman, because it was through a woman that he had gained mastery over man in the beginning, and set himself up as man’s adversary. That is why the Lord proclaims himself the Son of Man, the one who renews in himself that first man from whom the race born of woman was formed; as by a man’s defeat our race fell into the bondage of death, so by a man’s victory we were to rise again to life.
Note that while Eve is described as "a virgin espoused to a husband", Mary is described as "a virgin subject to a husband", indicating no spousal relationship, but merely that of custodial duty, consistent with the Protoevangelium.
And I was 'joshing'. When I preface a post with something folksy like 'watch it', or 'hey', you can always read it as a textual equivalent of a twinkle in the eye.
I thought so, but wasn't certain.
Pope Benedict, for one, takes [the false seers] seriously. Three years ago, while Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), he said that private revelations posed a threat to the unity of the Church and warranted an “exemplary pastoral response” from the Holy See.[...]
Benedict is now already moving against private revelations in a way his predecessor did not. Two cases signal his intent. Barely a month after his election, the CDF issued two documents. One was a decree removing Father Gino Burresi from active ministry, and the other was a letter to the Filipino bishops effectively declaring as false the claims of Ida Peerdeman, a Dutch seer, that the Virgin Mary had revealed new truths about her status
[...]
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger thought that Burresi was a fraud, was guilty of “pseudo-mysticism” and “asserted apparitions, visions and messages attributed to divine origins”.
The CDF stripped Burresi of the right to hear confessions, preach, give interviews, publish or broadcast.
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