Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• What’s with so many converts? Or why online religion usually s*cks. One of my favourite writers answers this.
• Newman: It was no heavenly body which the Eternal Son assumed, fashioned by the angels, and brought down to this lower world: no; He imbibed, He absorbed into His Divine Person, [Mary’s] blood and the substance of her flesh; by becoming man of her, He received her lineaments and features, as the appropriate character in which He was to manifest Himself to mankind. From here.
• Fr Stephen Freeman on doctrines and opinion. “Agathon, we heard that you are an adulterer and full of pride.” He answered, “Yes, that’s true.” “Are you the same Agathom who gossips and slanders?” “I am.” “Are you Agathon the heretic?” “No, I am not a heretic.” “Why did you patiently endure it when we slandered you, but refuse to be called a heretic?” Agathon answered, “Your first accusations were good for my soul, but to be a heretic is to be separated from God. I do not want to be apart from God.”
• An overview of the Roman Breviary with a nice explanation of how feasts are ranked.
• Episcopacy and the ‘Reformation’ featuring friend Dr Tighe.
• How non-monolithic Catholicism is different from broad churchmanship/‘comprehensiveness’. That’s right: the infallible church. We have many differences of opinion and sadly, we do not always enjoy unity of doctrine with every Catholic. However, that is not the point. The point is that with an infallible authority we have the resource and focus for unity of form and unity of doctrine. This unity is not the same thing as uniformity. Catholics may disagree with the infallible authority, but the authority is still there. They may disobey and dissent, but there is something to disagree with and dissent from. In the Catholic Church the authority that is there provides a rock on which to build. This is what separates Bad Catholics from Protestants and Modernists.
• On Anglicanism and polyamory in which Paul and Brother Stephen suggest the Catholic position makes more sense (if two men why not three or more people?). As a libertarian I’m all for decriminalising both homosexuality and polygamy; it’s the church’s job to teach they’re wrong, not the state’s.
• RIP Bishop Noël Jones. Like my late rector a Navy man and real Anglo-Catholic.
• Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival: Irish cathedral bans secular songs.
• To clank or not? The thurible in the Roman Rite.
• Looking east: suspended Russian bishop to be defrocked. Bishop Agafangel in the Ukraine, now apparently a metropolitan of his splinter sect (one of a few ‘true ROCORs’), was a ROCOR bishop against reunion with Russia. On different kinds of Eastern churches.

Labels: Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, history, Russia, the Catholic faith