Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Bishop Ken’s Lenten rule. From here.
• On examining your conscience and the sacrament of confession. From here.
• The world, the flesh and the devil.
• Vatican and Moscow Patriarchate to hold ‘Days of Russian Spiritual Culture’ in Rome. Now that’s my kind of ecumenism.
• Classical-liberal including libertarian Catholics don’t want a confessional state, which some of the neocons co-opted into the religious right do, but George Weigel has a point that the left trying to force religion completely out of public life is insidious. What they mean by ‘freedom of worship’ instead of ‘freedom of religion’. OTOH thanks to original sin, members of the one true church have no more right to use the state to tell you what to do in this regard than anybody else. How much would you bet that this ban wouldn’t apply to Muslims for PC’s sake, no matter how outrageously they act (no-go neighbourhoods, ‘honour killings’ and real crimes against gays), and the dwindling, harmless (to the left) mainline (lots of news coverage of gay and women bishops to spite you know who)? (A fallible thus fungible church completely under the state’s control, by law or in practice, is of course no problem to such people.) Fr L’s commentary.
• Not every valid council in the history of the Church has been a fruitful one; in the last analysis, many of them have been a waste of time. Despite all the good to be found in the texts it produced, the last word about the historical value of Vatican Council II has yet to be spoken. From today’s Pope back in 1987. From Fr Z.

Labels: Anglicanism, history, libertarianism, politics, the Catholic faith