Character, courage, redemption and some thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well (hint: mellow isn’t just for coffee and gratitude really is an attitude)

Bill sitting at desk at Wits End

By many definitions, I am now considered a “senior citizen.” I remember when I started this blog back in September 2014, I thought it might be interesting at some point to invite some folks that I knew who were a few years older than me, and perhaps a bit wiser, I suspected, to write some guest columns for SOUNDINGSJOHNBARKER (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) sharing their thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well. I never quite got around to extending that invitation almost eight years ago, but now that I have reached that milestone, I do so here. If you want to contribute some thoughts on the subject of aging gracefully, aging well, this blog is at your service.

My own thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well, might be summarized thusly: Be mellow, be grateful.

First, some words on mellowing with age: As a young reporter, and even much later as an editor, I several times came very close to quitting newspaper jobs as a matter of principle over some story, editorial or column dispute with my bosses. While I still think there are times when that is the only appropriate and ethical thing to do, I have come to realize they are probably few and far between, and ego and arrogance were bigger factors driving my soapbox fury than I realized at the time. As recently as Sept. 11, 2014, I wrote: “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/).”

While I haven’t revised my view on what I wrote eight years ago, I tend, however, to recall as well now a conversation I had with my parish priest, Father Eugene Whyte, about such a dispute that I was having with my general manager and publisher several years earlier. “John, I have a bishop, I have a superior of my order. I have taken a vow of obedience, and do or don’t do things I might otherwise do.” He also wondered if perhaps my pride was blinding me? While I hadn’t taken a vow of obedience, like a religious, it is true I had a fiduciary duty to my employer(s), that I on more than one occasion served it by making an end run around them because I knew better and knew it. Learning to pick my fights, and realizing even then I might lose some, was a very long process indeed for me. Winning is not always everything. As the late West Wing actor John Spencer, playing Leo McGarry, White House chief of staff, exhorted staff in an April 26, 2000 episode: “And we’re gonna lose some of these battles. And we might even lose the White House. But we’re not going to be threatened by issues: we’re going to put ’em front and center. We’re gonna raise the level of public debate in this country, and let that be our legacy.”

When I worked as a news editor at Northern News Services in Yellowknife some 20 years ago, an inside joke in the newsroom was that people could “pass away” in the city newspaper, the Yellowknifer, edited by my talented colleague, Janet Smellie, who sat right beside me on the desk, but in my paper, the western edition of News/North, they always died or were “dead at.” While it takes up more headline space in a hard copy print edition, in a world of mainly online journalism, where space is less of a constraint, I can now occasionally live with people “passing away” in a headline or the body of a story. While “dead at” has remarkable concision, I’d be hard pressed to argue that it doesn’t often have a harsh sound at the same time, especially to surviving family and friends. While I haven’t had to balance those type of newspaper considerations since 2014, I do try in my public writing these days to harken back to what St. Francis de Sales, the 16th and 17th century priest, Bishop of Geneva, and Doctor of the Church, who became the patron saint of journalists, counselled on using language with gentleness and charity. Anyone who has read some of my Facebook posts will have no doubt I am something of a work-in-progress on that score.

And while I used to tell new reporters I’d fire them if they ever referred to cocaine as a “narcotic” in a news story they handed in, no matter what the police or other official sources said or described it as, I’d probably be less inclined to wield that stick today. Perhaps. As James Boswell wrote in 1791 in Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

My gratitude has increased with age. Reality can be sobering. I have two first cousins who have lost their husbands so far in 2022. They passed away. In the Knights of Columbus, our fraternal Latin motto is “tempus fugit, memento mori,” which translates in English to “time flies, remember death.” If I’m tempted to think counting a cash drawer at the hotel (regularly) or library (occasionally) is a tedious task, I usually catch myself and think something to the effect of thank God that I am still blessed with the cognitive skills (aided by a pocket calculator) to count the cash. The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who died in January at the age of 95, had many useful things to say over many decades of teaching on mindfulness and seemingly ordinary and mundane tasks.

Everyone falls short. Watching the Apostles follow Jesus in Dallas Jenkins’ brilliant series The Chosen, reminds me of that constantly. The struggle is real. This week, it serves to remind me also that it might be time to revisit Matthew’s New Testament retelling of “The Sermon on the Mount” and “The Beatitudes.”

³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
    for they will be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
    for they will inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
    for they will be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
    for they will be shown mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
    for they will see God.
⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,
    for they will be called children of God.
¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Many, many years ago now, when I was a fourth-year student at Trent University, I was taking a politics and women’s studies gender theory course with Elaine Stavro, who I still consider to be one of the most brilliant professors I ever had the privilege to study with. It was a glorious spring day and we were strolling across the Faryon Bridge on the Nassau Campus, which crosses the Otonabee River, joining the east and west banks. Elaine was good-naturedly teasing me a bit about my Catholicism and sin and guilt. We bantered a bit, and then Elaine turned serious, looked at me and said, “John, the difference that matters is not who believes and who does not believe, but rather who cares and who doesn’t care.”

“Character, courage and redemption. These manifestations of virtue are not the moral preserve of any institution, including the Church. They are manifested by the human heart. And nowhere is that manifestation repeatedly better illustrated than by the influence of Gene Rodenberry in popular culture in Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was about half-way through its seven-season run when Rodenberry, the Southern Baptist-turned humanist, died in 1991,” I wrote Sept. 24, 2018 in a blog past called, “Church of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the moral arc of the universe (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/church-of-star-trek-the-next-generation-and-the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/)

A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the series and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994.

Ensign Sito Jaxa is a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise. Two years earlier while in Starfleet Academy in 2368, she was a member of Nova Squadron, along with Wesley Crusher. Under the direction of Cadet Nicholas Locarno, Nova Squadron attempted the dangerous Kolvoord Starburst maneuver during a flight exercise – an action that resulted in a collision and death of fellow cadet Joshua Albert. Jaxa and her fellow cadets lied about their flying of the illegal maneuver to a board of inquiry.

Character, courage and redemption.

Now serving on the USS Enterprise, after being handpicked by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Jaxa was to assist a Cardassian defector, Joret Dal, return to Cardassia Prime by posing as a Bajoran prisoner captured as part of a bounty hunt, which would allow Dal to cross the border without difficulty. She would then be returned to Federation space in an escape pod, after Dal reached Cardassian territory.

Jaxa freely volunteered for the mission, and was surgically altered to appear as if Dal had abused her in his custody Dal was shocked that she was so young, but was grateful that she risked her life in order for the mission to succeed. The Enterprise-D waited more than 32 hours for her to return before Picard orders a probe to be launched into Cardassian space, despite being warned that doing so could be considered a treaty violation, but the probe only detected debris 200,000 kilometres inside Cardassian space consistent with that of a destroyed escape pod. Eventually, a Cardassian communique was intercepted indicating that the escape pod was detected and destroyed after escaping.

And then with remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge:

“To all Starfleet personnel, this is the Captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XUt1HU5H8).”

Gratitude is defined as, “Readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness; thankfulness.”

Similar to appreciation, gratitude occurs when we affirm the goodness we’ve received in life, says Robert Emmons, a leading expert on gratitude, in his Greater Good essay, “Why Gratitude is Good.” To better understand gratitude, you might also well look at 12-Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA). Gratitude is a major component of 12-Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA). The 12th step states:

“Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to [alcoholics/addicts], and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

The entire 12-step movement, which now totals more than 100 self-help fellowships, can be traced back to two men originally from Vermont, Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician.

The birth of Alcoholics Anonymous is dated from their meeting and Smith’s last bottle of beer on June 10, 1935. They would be affectionately known ever after as Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the co-founders of AA.

Wilson had been influenced by Ebby Thacher – or Ebby T. in the preferred anonymous parlance of 12-step programs – a friend from boarding school, who paid Wilson a visit in November 1934, while Thacher was a member of the Oxford Group, popular on college campuses in the 1920s, and founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister.

The first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, known almost universally by its informal title as simply the Big Book, was published on April 10, 1939. There were 4,730 books printed, with red cloth binding, wide columns, thick paper (which was why it was called the Big Book in the first place), and a red, yellow, black and white dust jacket, which came to be known as the “circus cover.”

Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA as it is also known, has long had an impact on the larger culture and its perhaps most famous slogan, “one day at a time,” long ago entered the public vocabulary as a sentiment to remind people feeling overwhelmed by events to pause for a moment, step back and see their lives in the present moment, not the past or future, which  has made the concept of the current 24 hours – and in a crisis sometimes even smaller units of time – a cornerstone of AA.

Wilson’s spiritual advisor and “sponsor” for almost 20 years from November 1940 until his death in April 1960 was a Jesuit priest, Father Ed Dowling, from St. Louis.

Dowling was born in St. Louis on Sept. 1, 1898. He attended the Baden Public and the Holy Name Parochial School and went on to St. Louis University High School. In 1918, he served as a private in the First World War. In 1919, he began working as a reporter on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Later that same year, Dowling entered the Order at Florissant and followed the regular course subsequently for philosophy at St. Louis University.

Dowling was a member of the American Newspaper Guild and served as a delegate for the St. Louis local at Guild conventions in Toronto and San Francisco. He was a friend of Heywood Broun, the noted New York columnist, Guild founder and legendary union activist, and helped, along with then Father Fulton J. Sheen, to convert Broun from agnosticism to Catholicism seven months before his death in 1939.

When he decided to become a priest, Dowling reportedly told his newspaper colleagues he was entering the seminary –  the very next morning –  at an all-night café frequented by Globe-Democrat reporters.

While it’s impossible to overstate the influence of Alcoholics Anonymous and related 12-step programs on addictions treatment and recovery, it’s not the only model in a reality where relapse is the norm.

Two steps forward, one step backwards and perhaps a step sideways is the reality of addiction.

Bill Wilson himself  was a surprisingly freethinker on a lot of this, refusing often to get bogged down in the semantics. AA worked for him, so he worked his program with a live-and-let live attitude.

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Rejoice: Canadian Catholic author Michael D. O’Brien’s Elijah in Jerusalem, the long-awaited sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, has just been published

Michael D. O’Brien, the Ottawa-born Roman Catholic author and painter, has just had Elijah in Jerusalem, his long-awaited sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, published by San Francisco’s Ignatius Press, one of the largest American publishers of Catholic books, which was founded by Father Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit, in 1978.

He has worked as a professional artist since 1970 when he had his first one-man exhibit at a major gallery in Ottawa. Since 1976, O’Brien has painted religious imagery exclusively.

When one says Elijah in Jerusalem is the long-awaited to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, they should perhaps qualify that by making it clear long awaited by readers. Not necessarily O’Brien, who told Joan Frawley Desmond, senior editor of the National Catholic Register in an Oct. 15 interview, that he had not originally intended to write a sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, published in 1996:

“No, I didn’t,” O’Brien told Frawley, in response to her question asking if he had intended from the beginning almost 20 years ago to write a sequel? “Though the idea of a sequel was often suggested to me by readers, I rejected it for many years,” O’Brien said. “However, during the past few years, powerful images and scenes for the continuing story kept arising in my imagination, begging to be set down on paper. So I prayed and waited. Then came a moment when it was clear that I should write the book – and that the time was now.”

The father of six children, O’Brien, and his wife, Sheila, live in the village of Combermere in eastern Ontario’s scenic, historic, and very rural, Madawaska Valley, about 125 miles west of Ottawa.

I have known about O’Brien, who was briefly both an agnostic and an atheist as a young man, and his work since at least the mid-to-late 1990s, around the time Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, was published, but only got around to reading the novel a couple of years ago. It was a true delight from cover-to-cover. A few years earlier, I had read Plague Journal, one of the novels in his apocalyptic and dystopian 1990s’ trilogy, which also includes Strangers and Sojourners and Eclipse of the Sun. Plague Journal is set in the near future, composed of both written and mental notes made by Nathaniel Delaney, who is the editor of a small town newspaper. The story takes place over a five-day period as he flees arrest by a federal government agency during the preliminary stage of the rise of a totalitarian state in North America. Delaney is one of the few voices left in the media who is willing to speak the whole truth about what is happening, and as a result the full force of the government is brought against him.

O’Brien is an original yet orthodox thinker, writing a novel again with themes rooted in a Catholic view of spiritual warfare, the end times and the Second Coming. While it is not quite uncharted Catholic writing territory, eschatological and apocalyptic themes are often more associated with Protestant premillennial dispensationalist evangelical writers, say Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and their best-selling 16-book Left Behind series.

O’Brien is interested in exploring the battle between good and evil in history, but also through the souls of individuals, and God’s desire for human beings to choose to love him through an act of free will. Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, Notre Dame-educated Chicago Catholic writer Thomas O’Toole has written, “follows not the simplest interpretations that ‘Revelation’ refers solely to John’s own time,” or “it is exclusively a meditation on the end of things,” or even “a map of the Church’s history.” Rather, it is the interpretation ‘favored by most of the Church Fathers … a theological vision of a spiritual landscape’ that combines all three.”

O’Brien himself, in a talk given by him on Sept. 20, 2005 at Saint Patrick’s Basilica in Ottawa, said, “There is always a battle over every soul. Even if our times prove not to be the times toward which St. John’s Revelation is pointing, each of us must go through a kind of small ‘a’ apocalypse. Each of us certainly will be given a capital ‘R’ revelation at the moment of our deaths when we experience our personal judgment, when all that we are, all that we have done or neglected to do will be revealed.

“The Greek word apokalypsis means a revealing or unveiling. During our lives in this world each of us will indeed face the beast, which is the devil, our ancient adversary, the enemy of our individual souls and of mankind as a whole. In some form or other we must learn to personally resist him and to overcome him in Christ. At the same time we must understand that there will come a point in history when all his malice, all his devices, all his rage will be released in a final vicious attack upon the entire Body of Christ. It will be intense; it will be brief. If we find ourselves in the midst of those three and a half years of total persecution, it will not feel so brief. Yet we must always keep in mind that his time is coming to an end; indeed he is already defeated by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross and there remains only the final battle through which the Church and the world must pass.

“We are in the final battle, we are in the apocalypse, we are in the book of Revelation, which the Church, beginning with most of the Church Fathers, believes to be a vision of the entire unfolding of salvation history after the Incarnation, culminating in the total victory of Christ over the entire cosmos and its restoration to the Father. The book of Revelation is not a schematic diagram or a flat blueprint or a purely linear timeline. It is a mysterious multidimensional vision which surely contains linear-chronological aspects, but that is not the whole thing. Indeed it is not the main thing.”

O’Brien told Frawley earlier this month: “Satan attempts to mesmerize, like a serpent paralyzing its victim with fear before devouring it. The many fronts of evil are components in the vast and complex war between good and evil  the war that will last until the end of time. As the forces of evil, visible and invisible, appear to spread and grow ever stronger, we who follow Jesus must keep before the eyes of our hearts the ultimate truth of his coming victory. A healthy balance is needed in our pondering of ‘end times’ questions. We should remain prayerfully alert, but we should never allow ourselves to become obsessively over-focused on the darkness. Again, the eyes of the serpent can delude us into discouragement and even despair.”

In the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist interpretation of Bible prophecy, which posits a pretribulation secret Rapture – there is a belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this belief, pre-tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading, nor would it be O’Brien’s reading, of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, as does O’Brien, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming.

While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist end times writers is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people. This is all alien to both Catholic theology and even the premillennialist views of some of the early Apostolic Fathers.

The premillennial dispensationalism on display in recent years is of a much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

Elijah in Jerusalem, published earlier this month, is the continuing story of Father Elijah, formerly David Schäfer, a convert from Judaism and survivor of the Holocaust, who has for nearly two decades been a Carmelite friar at a monastery on Mount Carmel, the mountain of the prophet Elijah, overlooking the Bay of Haifa in Israel.

In the earlier novel, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, Father (later Bishop) Elijah Schäfer confronted the president of the European Union, a man rising toward global control as president of a soon-to- be-realized world government – a man who displays certain anti-Christ-like qualities – and calls him to repentance as he attempts to sow the seeds to transform the heart of this “Man of Sin” on a secret papal mission that will take him from Israel to Vatican City and Rome, and to other cities in Italy, Poland and Turkey.

In Elijah in Jerusalem, Bishop Elijah Schäfer, appointed by the Pope in pectore as the titular bishop of the ancient Titular Episcopal See of Panaya Kapulu near Selçuk, in Central Aegean Turkey, about 200 miles from Constantinople in western Asia Minor, near Ephesus, and travelling incognito, accompanied by his fellow friar, Brother Enoch, enter Jerusalem just as the president arrives in the city to inaugurate a new stage of his rise to power. They hope to unmask him as the Antichrist prophesied by scripture and to warn the world of the imminent spiritual danger to mankind.

As the story unfolds in Jerusalem, people meet the secretly episcopally-ordained Bishop Elijah Schäfer, and in the process their souls are revealed and tested, bringing about change for good or for evil.

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Pope Francis in Bolivia: Crucifix, Communism and Controversy

Pope Francis, since his election as supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in March 2013, has always kept both his supporters and critics alike guessing by his flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants pastoral style. While doctrinally the Catholic theology he teaches is consistent with what occupants of the Cathedra Petri have taught, well, all the way back to St. Peter, his pastoral style as the shepherd of the flock of one billion-plus Catholics worldwide, is one-of-a-kind.

Pope Francis, of course, rocketed into the media stratosphere on July 28, 2013, little more than four months after being elected pope, when returning on his first foreign papal trip from Rio de Janeiro on the Alitalia flight to Rome July 28, at the end of his seven days in Brazil, wandered back to the press compartment in the rear of the plane and took questions from 21 reporters travelling aboard the papal aircraft for 81 minutes with nothing off the record. Francis stood for the entire time, answering in Italian and Spanish without notes and never refusing to take a question. The Pope’s answer to the last question became the worldwide take-away quote: “If a gay person is in eager search of God, who am I to judge them?” While Pope Francis’ answer shot around the world – for the most part without benefit of being prefaced by the question or contextually situated – it didn’t break any new Catholic theological ground or offer up a new heresy. What it did represent was a change in tone.

He also has a penchant for giving interviews to prominent atheist journalists, talking about and with atheists, picking up the phone to cold-call folks he wants to talk to, and meeting with Protestant evangelicals, with a special fondness it seems for Pentecostals and other charismatics.

And Pope Francis also misses going out for pizza. In an interview earlier this year, to mark the second anniversary of his election to the papacy March 13, with Valentina Alazraki, the veteran Vatican correspondent for Mexico’s Noticieros Televisa at Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican hotel where he has lived since his election as pope, he said the only thing he really misses about his old life pre-March 13, 2013 is the ability “to go out to a pizzeria and eat a pizza,” adding that even as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires he was free to roam the streets, particularly to visit parishes.

Almost half the population of Buenos Aires can rightfully claim  Italian heritage, so it is little surprise the Argentinian capital is so well-known for its Napoletana pizza. “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza,” Pope Francis said, comparing his life now to how it was when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. “In Buenos Aires I was a rover. I moved between parishes and certainly this habit has changed. It has been hard work to change. But you get used to it,”  Pope Francis told Alazraki.

But #coolpope also talks about the devil and dystopia. A lot. In his Monday homily at a mass at Casa Santa Marta on  Nov. 18, 2013, Pope Francis, made reference to the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson and himself a former Anglican clergyman, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1903 and was ordained a priest in 1904, in which he writes of an imagined future where, in the words of Father Robert Barron, rector of University of Saint Mary of the Lake, also known as Mundelein Seminary, in Chicago, “Europe and America are dominated by a rationalist regime bent on making life as technologically convenient and politically harmonious as possible.” Sound familiar?

Of course for all those who think Pope Francis is #coolpope, there are no shortage of those who think he is Petrus Romanus (Peter the Roman). In that eschatological end times vision of unfolding history,  U.S. President Barack Obama often cast as the “Antichrist” and Pope Francis the “False Prophet.” This is the kind of thing you are not likely to hear discussed in polite company, except maybe in a dismissive fashion or to be held up to scorn and ridicule. Yet millions of people around the world believe in just such a scenario.

Within hours of Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI announcing his resignation Feb. 11, 2013, becoming the first pope to resign in almost 600 years (the last having been Pope Gregory XII, who resigned at the request of the Council of Constance on July 4, 1415 to help end the Great Western Schism) some folks were talking excitedly about “Petrus Romanus” (Peter the Roman) who would be history’s last pope, according to the Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139.

The fact Pope Francis was formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and the name Peter appears nowhere in his former or current appellations, hasn’t much fazed Petrus Romanus true believers, who happily point out the first Pope to take the name Francis did so after St. Francis of Assisi, an Italian whose original name was Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, but nicknamed Francesco (“the Frenchman”) by his father. Pietro in Italian translates to Peter in English. Is this “Francesco di Pietro (Peter) di Bernardone, literally, ‘Peter the Roman,’” as Tom Horn and Cris Putnam, co-authors of the 2012 book Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope is Here, have argued? While their research was prodigious, in a sense, the result falls pretty far short of anything approaching coherent scholarship in any true academic sense. The strategy much of the time seems to be to dig up what you can and if you throw enough of these scattered historical documents against the wall of the “Romanists” something will stick.

You don’t have to be anti-Catholic, pro-Catholic, neutral or even much of a scholar to know the historical record has lots of less than flattering documents when it comes to the Catholic Church, many of them quite authentic. Marshaling such disparate sources into a coherent and convincing argument to support something approaching a thesis is something else again. Horn and Putnam are also stuck with the problem of time. Inconveniently for them, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI  resigned in February 2013 – just after their book was published – rather than slightly earlier in 2012 – before Petrus Romanus was printed – which would have fit on their timeline a bit better. The longer out in time Pope Francis’ pontificate runs, the farther removed it is from their graphic images of Rome burning.

While Horn and Putnam are careful not to fall into the trap personally of being “date setters,” which can cause one’s reputation to evaporate quite literally in a second if you’re wrong, they’re not above conveniently quoting other writers to make those kind of points at times, such as the ersatz Ronald L. Conte Jr., a self-described “Roman Catholic lay theologian and Bible translator” who publishes something called Catholic Planet. Conte, as Horn and Putnam noted in 2012, predicted that by “July 2013, Rome is destroyed when it is struck by a nuclear missile.” Conte also predicted, again parroted by Horn and Putnam, that after Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, the next pope would be Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze and that he would take the name Pius XIII. Wrong and wrong again. As prognosticators on the papacy, Horn and Putnam are no better than Conte. Their 2012 Top 10 list in Petrus Romanus to succeed Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI included Arinze; followed by Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was dumped as secretary of state by Pope Francis in October 2013, seven months after he took office.

Rounding out their list in descending order for “Final Pope” were Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson; Italian Cardinal Angelo Scola; Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi; Argentinian Cardinal Leonardo Sandri; Italian cardinal Ennio Antonelli; French Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran; Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn; and Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet.  While they did have an Argentinian cardinal on their list, unfortunately for Horn and Putnam it wasn’t Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair, born in Armagh in 1094, later to be known as St. Malachy, was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint on July 6, 1199 by Pope Clement III, and was the former archbishop of the Irish Archdiocese of Armagh and Diocese of Connor, and while in Rome in 1139 reportedly experienced what is considered by the Catholic Church to be an unapproved private revelation – if the incident even happened – in the form of an apparition of the 112 popes following Pope Celestine II, who died March 8, 1144. Malachy was said to have recorded his Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes (and antipopes) as a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope. “In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit, Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people. The End.”

Malachy’s manuscript was supposedly deposited in what is now known as the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum before he returned to Ireland as the papal legate. And there the manuscript is said to have sat, forgotten and gathering dust until re-discovered more than 400 years later by Arnold Wion, a Benedictine monk, who published them in 1595 as Lignum Vitae (Tree of Life). Or not. Given the very accurate description of popes up to 1590 and lack of accuracy after that year, “modern scholars have unanimously noted, in the 37 subsequent mottoes, a radical departure from the unfailing precision and appropriateness of the previous 74, and they are agreed that the Prophecy of Malachy is a counterfeit,” wrote John J. Driscoll in the Roman Catholic theological scholarship journal American Ecclesiastical Review in June 1944.

Historians generally conclude that the alleged prophecies are a fabrication written shortly before they were published, perhaps in a failed bid to see Italian Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli elected Pope during the second conclave of Oct. 8, 1590 to Dec. 5, 1590 where Pope Gregory XIV was eventually elected as the successor of Pope Urban VII.

Pope Francis was in Bolivia yesterday, as part of his second papal trip to South America. A crucifix sculpted in the shape of a carved wooden hammer and sickle, combining Catholic and communist symbols, was presented to him during an official gift-exchange ceremony in La Paz by Bolivian President Evo Morales and lit up the blogosphere among Catholic commentators and reignited the Petrus Romanus crowd on the other end of the continuum. Morales also draped a medallion around over the pope’s neck that bore the hammer and sickle.

“No esta bien eso,” Pope Francis is said to have responded in Spanish to Morales, which translates to “that’s not right.” However, both Vatican and Bolivian officials played down the incident, saying no offence was intended.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi, himself a Jesuit, said later Pope Francis didn’t know the history behind the crucifix and that he was surprised to receive it. The crucifix was a replica of a similar crucifix based on a design by Luis Espinal, a Jesuit priest tortured and killed by Bolivia’s right-wing militia paramilitary death squads in 1980 to whom Pope Francis paid tribute to earlier in this trip, stopping to deliver a prayer at the site of his assassination, in remembrance of “a brother of ours, the victim of those who did not want him to fight for freedom in Bolivia.”

Bolivia’s communications minister, Marianela Paco, told Bolivian radio: “The sickle evokes the peasant, the hammer the carpenter, representing humble workers, God’s people,” adding there was “no other” motive behind the gift.

Pope Francis may have thought Morales’ overtly linking the crucifix to communism an inappropriate over-the-top grandstanding  gesture, but within hours of the crucifix incident, “Pope Francis Declares Lucifer as God,” a three-minute and 15-second YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcpVrtv2t-M) , published July 4 by “Souldier4Christ” was showing up on my Facebook news feed with the controversial crucifix story. The introduction of the short video spells declaration as “decleration,” happened as “happend,” exactly as “exaclty” and Corinthians as “Corinthains.” All in the first 2:15. Spelling apparently is not Soldier’s forte. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not inclined to put much store in the theology or Latin translation of those who can’t spell much less think clearly. Thanks, anyway Facebook.

Mind you, none other than Blessed Pope Paul VI himself delivered his now famous “Smoke of Satan” homily on June 29, 1972 on the ninth anniversary of his coronation, which remains perhaps the most famous and most-argued about in terms of meaning sermons the Holy Father delivered during his 15-year-plus pontificate, while the enigmatic Malachi Martin, a Jesuit priest and best-selling author suggested the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier – on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived. But however controversial and debatable Blessed Pope Paul VI and Father Martin’s musings on Lucifer and the Vatican were and remain, no one is likely to suggest they were anything but clear thinkers who could spell correctly and that spiritual warfare is always a very real and clear and present danger for the Church.

As the Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century, wrote in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950,“There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, author of the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World, (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/) , who has been quoted approvingly by Pope Francis, would have agreed with Lewis.

Pope Francis is now in Paraguay, the third and final country on his second tour of Latin America since becoming Pope, which ends on Monday. The eight-day tour began in Ecuador July 5.

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Pope Francis’ remarkable rapprochement with Protestant evangelicals

Pope Francis, pretty much since his election as supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in March 2013, has also been the de facto supreme pontiff of world religious leaders among the secular media. Other than the 14th Dalai Lama, long serving Tibetan Buddhist, most journalists would likely be hard pressed to name the current Archbishop of Canterbury (Justin Welby), who leads the worldwide Anglican Communion, much less the leaders of any other Christian denomination.

Pope Francis, of course, rocketed into the media stratosphere on July 28, 2013, little more than four months after being elected pope, when returning on his first foreign papal trip from Rio de Janeiro on the Alitalia flight to Rome July 28, at the end of his seven days in Brazil, wandered back to the press compartment in the rear of the plane and took questions from 21 reporters travelling aboard the papal aircraft for 81 minutes with nothing off the record. Francis stood for the entire time, answering in Italian and Spanish without notes and never refusing to take a question. The Pope’s answer to the last question became the worldwide take-away quote: “If a gay person is in eager search of God, who am I to judge them?” While Pope Francis’ answer shot around the world – for the most part without benefit of being prefaced by the question or contextually situated – it didn’t break any new Catholic theological ground or offer up a new heresy. What it did represent was a change in tone.

And if there was any doubt whether that was the start of a new tone and emphasis, Pope Francis answered that less than two months later on Sept. 19, 2013 when the Italian Jesuit journal La CiviltÀ Cattolica published a 12,000-word interview that took place over three days in August at Santa Marta in Rome between the first Jesuit pope, until little more than six months earlier, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and Father Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit confrere and the journal’s editor-in-chief.

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” Pope Francis said. “This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

“The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.”

While it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the sex-and-morality hot-button issues of his pontificate, although it does garner some coverage, one of the most interesting facets of Pope Francis in action to watch is his truly remarkable rapprochement with Protestants, particularly evangelicals of all denominations. With no disrespect to either side of the now 43-year-old Joint International Commission for Catholic–Pentecostal Dialogue, Pope Francis has probably done more for harmonious and improved relations between the two groups, as he has with Christian evangelicals of various denominations and non-denominational identities, such as with his now famous impromptu iPhone video message for Kenneth Copeland and other influential evangelicals, done during a January 2014 three-hour breakfast meeting chat at the Vatican with his close personal friend Tony Palmer.

A young English bishop with the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a group that broke away from the Anglican Church and considers itself part of the Convergence Movement, founded by Anglicans and other Protestants and embracing a middle ground of Anglican identity, Palmer had known Pope Francis since his days in Buenos Aires where he and then-Archbishop Bergoglio had become friends in 2008 when Palmer was a missionary in Argentina and has asked the future Pope’s permission to work with charismatic Catholics in the city. Prior to becoming a Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches bishop, Palmer, married to Emiliana Serzio Palmer, an Italian Roman Catholic, was the director of the Kenneth Copeland Ministries’ office in South Africa. Palmer also served as the director of The Ark Community, an international interdenominational convergent church online community.

During their extended breakfast the Pope asked Palmer what he could do to encourage unity with evangelical Protestants and Palmer pulled out his iPhone and said, “Why not record a video greeting to the group of influential charismatic Christians I am going to meet at a conference in Texas next week?” Palmer was en route to a charismatic conference hosted by Copeland, the well-known American television evangelist who heads up Kenneth Copeland Ministries, at his Eagle Mountain International Church, near Fort Worth. With Palmer holding the iPhone, Pope Francis refers to him as “my brother, a bishop-brother,” saying they had been friends for years.

In that video, which was released publicly in February 2014, Pope Francis says to the evangelicals gathered at the Copeland conference, “Let’s give each other a spiritual hug.”

In introducing the Pope’s video at the Copeland meeting, Palmer pointedly remarked: “Brothers and sisters, Luther’s protest is over. Is yours?”

Pope Francis wound up meeting privately again on June 24, 2014 – a year ago today – with Palmer, and also this time with Copeland, co-host of Believer’s Voice of Victory, James and Betty Robison, co-hosts of the Life Today television program, Rev. Geoff Tunnicliff, chief executive office of the World Evangelical Alliance; well-known Canadian evangelical leader Brian Stiller, Rev. Thomas Schirrmacher, also from the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. John Arnott and his wife, Carol, co-founders of Partners for Harvest ministries in Toronto. That meeting also lasted almost three hours and included a private luncheon with Pope Francis.

The Pope told the evangelicals he believed the division in Christianity was not now between Catholics and Protestants but between those Christians who believe in a revealed religion and those who believe in a relative religion. “The real divide is between progressives who wish to alter the historic faith according to the spirit of the age, and those who believe the spirit of the age should be challenged by the eternal and unchanging truth of the Christian gospel.”

James Robison was baptized as a child in the Episcopal (Anglican) Church but as an adult became a Southern Baptist and in the 1980s was one of the first prominent Southern Baptist ministers to openly proclaim he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

He told the Fort Worth Star Telegram after the meeting last June with Pope Francis, “This meeting was a miracle … This is something God has done. God wants his arms around the world. And he wants Christians to put his arms around the world by working together.”

Tragically, Palmer, 48, died less than a month later on July 20, 2014 in hospital following hours of surgery after a motorcycle accident.

About a week later, Pope Francis made a private visit to the Pentecostal Church of Reconciliation, still under construction in Caserta in southern Italy to meet with Giovanni Traettino, its pastor, and 200 people, including members of Traettino’s congregation, other Italian evangelicals and representatives of Pentecostal ministries in Argentina and the United States.

The pope and Traettino first met in Buenos Aires in the late 1990s when Traettino was establishing ties between charismatic Catholics and Pentecostals. The then-Cardinal Bergoglio and Traettino also appeared together at a large ecumenical charismatic gathering in Buenos Aires in 2006. Traettino was present on June 1, 2014 in Rome’s Olympic Stadium when Pope Francis spoke to an international gathering of Catholic charismatics.

At the meeting with Traettino at the Pentecostal Church of Reconciliation, Pope Francis apologized for the the complicity of some Catholics in the fascist-era persecution of Italian Pentecostals and evangelicals.

“Among those who persecuted and denounced the Pentecostals, almost as if they were crazies who would ruin the race, there were some Catholics. As the pastor of the Catholics, I ask forgiveness for those Catholic brothers and sisters who did not understand and were tempted by the devil.”

Pope Francis made a similar apology two days ago on Monday of this week to the small Italian Waldensian evangelical community, seeking forgiveness for the Catholic Church’s persecution of members of the community whose leader was excommunicated and his followers branded as heretics during the Middle Ages.

Pope Francis made the appeal June 22 during the first-ever visit by a pope to a Waldensian house of worship.

The Waldensian church was founded in the 12th century by Pierre Valdo, a wealthy merchant from Lyon in France, who gave up his belongings to preach a Gospel of simplicity and poverty that condemned papal excesses. He was excommunicated and his followers persecuted as heretics by Rome.

The Waldensians today are united with the Methodist Church of Italy and claim 45,000 followers, mostly in Italy, Argentina and Uruguay.

“On the part of the Catholic Church,” said Pope Francis, “I ask your forgiveness, I ask it for the non-Christian and even inhuman attitudes and behavior that we have showed you. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, forgive us!”

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C.S. Lewis’ 1947 essay ‘On Forgiveness’: Written for the parish magazine of the Church of St. Mary, Sawston, Cambridgeshire

As the parish church of Sawston, Cambridgeshire’s largest village, situated on the River Cam seven miles south of Cambridge, St. Mary’s is part of the Diocese of Ely, which is one of 44 dioceses of the Church of England, with more than 300 parishes in the county of Cambridgeshire, together with the western quarter of Norfolk, and a few parishes in Peterborough, Essex and Bedfordshire counties in the East of England.

The Church of England belongs to that part of the Christian tradition known as the Anglican Communion, representing those in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury and deriving their forms of worship and the orders of their bishops, priests and deacons from the Reformation settlement in England.

The 44 Church of England dioceses are divided into two Provinces, the Province of Canterbury (with 30 dioceses of which Ely is one) and the Province of York (with 14 dioceses). The archbishops of Canterbury and York have pastoral oversight over the bishops within their province. The structure of dioceses within the Church of England was inherited from the Roman Catholic Church. The See of Ely was created in 1109 out of part of the Diocese of Lincoln.

In the centre of St. Mary’s lies the memorial slab to William de Sawston which was probably put in place between 1325 and 1340. Around the edge it reads ‘Here lies Sir William de Sawston for whom whoever passes by may say a Paternoster (Our Father)’.

The Black Death came to Sawston in the middle of the 14th century and killed at least 28 peasants, probably considerably more. After the Protestant Reformation and the visit of Puritan William Dowsing, inscriptions, stained glass and crucifixes in St. Mary’s were destroyed in 1643. Restoration wouldn’t come until the Victorian era of the late 19th century. In 1963, two memorials to Jesuit priests who had served at Sawston Hall were rediscovered during further renovations.

C.S. Lewis’ essay “On Forgiveness” was written for the parish magazine of St. Mary’s  and sent to Father Patrick Kevin Irwin on Aug. 28, 1947. In the short essay, which runs around 1,350 words, he wrote about the phrase in the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe … in the forgiveness of sins.” He distinguished between forgiving and excusing, calling them almost opposites, neatly drawing out the difference between asking God’s forgiveness and merely asking Him to excuse our behaviour:

“I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different,” Lewis wrote. “I am asking him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. Forgiveness says, ‘Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.’ If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites. Of course, in dozens of cases, either between God and man, or between one man and another, there may be a mixture of the two. Part of what at first seemed to be the sins turns out to be really nobody’s fault and is excused; the bit that is left over is forgiven. If you had a perfect excuse, you would not need forgiveness; if the whole of your actions needs forgiveness, then there was no excuse for it. But the trouble is that what we call ‘asking God’s forgiveness’ very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses. What leads us into this mistake is the fact that there usually is some amount of excuse, some ‘extenuating circumstances.’ We are so very anxious to point these things out to God (and to ourselves) that we are apt to forget the very important thing; that is, the bit left over, the bit which excuses don’t cover, the bit which is inexcusable but not, thank God, unforgivable. And if we forget this, we shall go away imagining that we have repented and been forgiven when all that has really happened is that we have satisfied ourselves without own excuses. They may be very bad excuses; we are all too easily satisfied about ourselves.”

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Looking for a last-minute Christmas present for that hard-to-buy-for Catholic loved one? How about Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? and Other Questions from the Astronomers’ In-box at the Vatican Observatory by Vatican astronomers Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller

In his morning homily last May 12 at Casa Santa Marta, Pope Francis told his mostly clerical audience that they should keep an open mind to anyone or anything – seeking God. “If – for example – tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here … Martians, right? Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them … And one says, ‘But I want to be baptized!’ What would happen?” he asked parishioners. “When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, ‘No, Lord, it is not prudent! No, let’s do it this way….’”

Truth be told, while Pope Francis may have expressed it a bit unexpectedly and a bit more casually in the vernacular than usual, there is a history to this line of thought in the Vatican, especially among the religious who are astronomers at the world-renowned Vatican Observatory. Surprised? Of course, you’re not. Not if you’re Catholic, anyway. Everyone else? Yeah, well that’s a different solar system you non-Catholics are in, I daresay, when it comes to the thinking from the best scientific minds in Rome. And Pope Francis. Protestants come home!

In 2008, Father José Gabriel Funes, the director of the Vatican Observatory, one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world, wrote in L’Osservatore Romano that “believing in the possible existence of extraterrestrial life is not opposed to Catholic doctrine” in an article entitled “The Alien is my Brother.”

He said that since astronomers even Catholic ones – believe that the universe is made up of 100 billion galaxies, so it is not reasonable to discount that some could have planets. “How could it not be left out that life developed elsewhere?” he asked? “As a multiplicity of creatures exist on earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God. This does not contrast with our faith because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God. [According to] Saint Francis, if we consider earthly creatures as ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’ why cannot we also speak of an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would therefore be a part of creation.”

Two years later in 2010, fellow Vatican Observatory research astronomer and planetary scientist Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno wrote a pamphlet, Intelligent Life in the Universe? Catholic belief and the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, originally published by the Catholic Truth Society in London. In it, he explored a number of questions, including whether aliens exist, and if they do and have souls, could they be baptized?

“The limitless universe might even include other planets with other beings created by that same loving God,” Consolmagno wrote. “The idea of there being other races and other intelligences is not contrary to traditional Christian thought. There is nothing in Holy Scripture that could confirm or contradict the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.”

Fast-forward four years. Consolmagno, the co-ordinator for public relations at the Vatican Observatory, located on the grounds of the pope’s  summer residence at Castel Gandolfo in Italy, less than 24 kilometres southeast of Rome, is back with another book, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?’  and Other Questions from the Astronomers’ In-box at the Vatican Observatory, co-authored with Father Paul Mueller, a fellow astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, who is a philosopher of science and serves as superior of the Jesuit community at Castel Gandolfo.  Its dependent research centre, the Vatican Observatory Research Group, is hosted by Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona in Tucson and operates the 1.8m Alice P. Lennon Telescope with its Thomas J. Bannan Astrophysics Facility, known together as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT),  located at the Mount Graham International Observatory (MGIO) in southeastern Arizona.

A graduate of St. Xavier Jesuit High School in Cincinnati, Mueller holds a B.S. in physics from Boston University and an M.A. in philosophy from Loyola University of Chicago. He also holds M.Div and S.T.M. degrees in theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and a PhD in the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago.

In his PhD dissertation, Mueller provided a translation and commentary on Marin Mersenne’s Questions Théologiques, Physiques, Morales et Mathématiques (1634), and explored how practices and concepts of early modern science were informed and influenced by practices and concepts from biblical textual criticism.

Consolmagno is from Detroit and a graduate of Beverly Hills’ Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Catholic elementary school and University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy. He obtained his Bachelor of Science undergraduate in 1974 and the following year his Master of Science graduate degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Consolmagno recevied his PhD in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona in 1978. From 1978-80, he was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the Harvard College Observatory, and from 1980-1983 continued as a postdoctorial fellow and lecturer at MIT.

In 1983 he left MIT to join the United States Peace Corps, where he served for two years in Kenya teaching physics and astronomy. On his return to the United States in 1985, he became an assistant professor of physics at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he taught until his entry into the Jesuit order in 1989.

He took vows as a Jesuit brother in 1991, and studied philosophy and theology at Loyola University Chicago, and physics at the University of Chicago before his assignment to the Vatican Observatory in 1993.

Consolmagno is also the curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Castel Gandolfo, one of the largest in the world, and the new president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation in Tuscon.  His research explores the connections between meteorites and asteroids, and the origin and evolution of small bodies in the solar system. In 1996, he spent six weeks collecting meteorites with a team on the blue ice of Antarctica.  In 2000 he was honored by the IAU for his contributions to the study of meteorites and asteroids with the naming of asteroid 4597 Consolmagno.

An avid reader of science fiction,  Consolmagno earlier this year received the Carl Sagan Award from the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, the first clerygyman to ever win the award, for his popular writing and speaking as a planetary scientist communicating to the general public.

Consolmagno says he has no doubt that life exists elsewhere in the universe, and when we finally do discover it, the news will come as no big surprise.

“The general public is going to be, ‘Oh, I knew that. I knew it was going to be there,’”  Consolmagno told Catholic News Service (CNS) prior to a presentation at a NASA and Library of Congress symposium on preparing for the discovery of life in the universe last Sept. 19.

You can watch a 1min25sec brief Catholic News Service (CNS) clip, “God and outer space” from  an interview with Consolmagno on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ARjTJZVw_o#t=59

The Vatican Observatory Foundation’s first Faith and Astronomy Workshop for clergy, religious, and laypeople working in parish education, is set for Jan. 19-23 in Tucson.

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The friendship of Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and St. Louis Jesuit priest Father Ed Dowling, who helped to convert American Newspaper Guild founder and union activist Heywood Broun to Catholicism

Bill Wilson, left, and Father Ed Dowling, right

Dr. Bob Smith, left, and Heywood Broun, right

The entire 12-step movement, which now totals more than 100 self-help fellowships, can be traced back to two men originally from Vermont, Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician.

The birth of Alcoholics Anonymous is dated from their meeting and Smith’s last bottle of beer on June 10, 1935. They would be affectionately known ever after as Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the co-founders of AA.

Wilson had been influenced by Ebby Thacher – or Ebby T. in the preferred anonymous parlance of 12-step programs – a friend from boarding school, who paid Wilson a visit in November 1934, while Thacher was a member of the Oxford Group, popular on college campuses in the 1920s, and founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister.

The first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, known almost universally by its informal title as simply the Big Book, was published on April 10, 1939. There were 4,730 books printed, with red cloth binding, wide columns, thick paper (which was why it was called the Big Book in the first place), and a red, yellow, black and white dust jacket, which came to be known as the “circus cover.”

Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA as it is also known, has long had an impact on the larger culture and its perhaps most famous slogan, “one day at a time,” long ago entered the public vocabulary as a sentiment to remind people feeling overwhelmed by events to pause for a moment, step back and see their lives in the present moment, not the past or future, which  has made the concept of the current 24 hours – and in a crisis sometimes even smaller units of time – a cornerstone of AA.

Wilson’s spiritual advisor and “sponsor”  for almost 20 years from November 1940 until his death in April 1960 was a Jesuit priest, Father Ed Dowling, from St. Louis.

Dowling was born in St. Louis on Sept. 1, 1898. He attended the Baden Public and the Holy Name Parochial School and went on to St. Louis University High School. In 1918, he served as a private in the First World War. In 1919, he began working as a reporter on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Later that same year, Dowling entered the Order at Florissant and followed the regular course subsequently for philosophy at St. Louis University.

Dowling was a member of the American Newspaper Guild and served as a delegate for the St. Louis local at Guild conventions in Toronto and San Francisco. He was a friend of Heywood Broun, the noted New York columnist, Guild founder and legendary union activist, and helped, along with then Father Fulton J. Sheen, to convert Broun from agnosticism to Catholicism seven months before his death in 1939.

When he decided to become a priest, Dowling reportedly told his newspaper colleagues he was entering the seminary –  the very next morning –  at an all-night cafe frequented by Globe-Democrat reporters.

Dowling’s regency from 1926 to 1929 was spent at Loyola Academy in Chicago. He was ordained in 1931 by Archbishop John Joseph Glennon of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, who was elevated to be a cardinal shortly before his death in 1946.

On a cold and rainy November night in 1940, Dowling showed up at 10 p.m. unannounced at Bill Wilson’s apartment above AA’s Twenty-Fourth Street Club in New York City.

“I’m Father Ed Dowling from St. Louis,” he said. “A Jesuit friend and I have been struck by the similarity of the AA twelve steps and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.”

Dowling would become the first American Catholic clergyman to prominently endorse AA, both in later revised editions of the Big Book, and in 1947 in The Queen’s Work, a magazine published by the Central Office of Sodalities of Our Lady.

When Dowling, as one of the originators, helped start Couples Are Not Alone (CANA), a national Catholic movement for married couples in 1942,  he borrowed heavily, he told Wilson, from AA’s 12 steps to help participants deal with mental difficulties, scruples and sexual compulsions.

As a guest speaker at AA’s St. Louis International Convention in Kiel Auditorium in 1955,  Dowling remarked: “There is a negative approach from agnosticism. This was the approach of Peter the Apostle. ‘Lord, to whom shall we go’?” I doubt if there is anybody in this hall who really ever sought sobriety. I think we were trying to get away from drunkenness. I don’t think we should despise the negative. I have a feeling that if I ever find myself in heaven, it will be from backing away from hell.”

Dowling died peacefully in his sleep in Memphis on April 3, 1960.

It has has been customary across Canada during the third week in November since 1981, which begins Sunday, Nov. 16 this year, to mark National Addictions Awareness Week and all its variants such as National Aboriginal Addictions Awareness Week and Manitoba Addictions Awareness Week (MAAW).

The federal government in 1987 first proclaimed the week. Approximately 600,000 people take part in NAAW activities throughout the country.

Much of the early work was conceptualized and developed in St. Albert, Alberta at the Nechi Training, Research & Health Promotions Institute, which is housed with Poundmaker’s Lodge, known as Canada’s first addictions treatment centre specifically for aboriginal clients.

Damian Thompson, associate editor at The Spectator in London, specializing in religion and classical music, published a book in May 2012 called, The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading our Lives and Taking Over Your World, in which he argues addictions to iPhones, painkillers, cupcakes, alcohol and Internet pornography – to name just a few – are taking over our lives. Our most casual daily habits can quickly become obsessions that move beyond our control, Thompson argued, suggesting that human desire is in the process of being reshaped.

“Already, the distinction between ‘addicts’ and ordinary people is far less clear than it was even 20 years ago, Thompson wrote in a May 28, 2012 piece for the Daily Telegraph in London, where he was editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist at the time, headlined, “Addiction: the coming epidemic,” with the “line between consumption, habit and addiction is becoming dangerously blurred The difference between old-fashioned porn and Internet porn is a bit like the difference between wine and spirits. After hundreds of years as a mild intoxicant, erotica has undergone a sudden distillation. Digital porn is the equivalent of cheap gin in Georgian England: a reliable if unhygienic hit that relieves misery and boredom. And, unlike the old ‘dirty mags,’ it is available in limitless quantities.”

Whether addiction is a disease, in the true medical sense of the word (Thompson argued it is not), a cognitive behavioural problem, or self-destructive habits borne out of poor choices, but choices nonetheless, is an ongoing debate, and while interesting, is of secondary importance. Whatever addiction is or isn’t, few would argue that it doesn’t affect entire families – and even communities – across all generational, ethnic, racial and class distinctions.

Addiction, be it to alcohol or other drugs, gambling, Internet pornography, etc., is an equal opportunity destroyer of lives. While the addict or the alcoholic may be the most obvious casualty, the collateral damage is all around them.

While it’s impossible to overstate the influence of Alcoholics Anonymous and related 12-step programs on addictions treatment and recovery, it’s not the only model in a reality where relapse is the norm.

Two steps forward, one step backwards and perhaps a step sideways is the reality of addiction.

Bill Wilson himself  was a surprisingly freethinker on a lot of this, refusing often to get bogged down in the semantics. AA worked for him, so he worked his program with a live-and-let live attitude.