A den of zingers

A couple of months ago I mentioned my chance discovery of the marvellous French website catho.org which contains numerous primary sources for the study of the Catholic French including the Latin text of the 1917 Code of Canon Law and the 1996 edition of Denzinger's Dogma.

The entire site – design and content – seems to have been adopted by the Congregation for the Clergy for their site clerus.org. On their Magisterium page, they offer Denzinger in English. The text is somewhat older. It stops at what is now DS 3904 (2333 in that edition), the ruling that all must believe in the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Munificentissimus Deus, 1st November 1950 (n.45 in the English translation at the Vatican website). Much better than nothing.

(The title is a reference to a remark by Ralph McInerny.)

A cornucopia for copy and paste

My current project requires the transcription of large slabs of text, specifically Magisterial documents of the Catholic Church. I recently discovered a French website, catho.org which has the 1917 Code of Canon Law in Latin and French as well as the 1996 edition of Denzinger's Dogma. So I was able to save myself typing out DS 1247-1279 (the questions to be posed to those accused of the Hussite or Wycliffite heresies, decreed by the Council Of Constance 22nd February 1418). Also Catho.org gives the older paragraph numbers of Denzinger right next to the current number. This is useful for using pre-1963 works of theology. From the home page you navigate to the French versions but there is a little button ("Latin" hand written with a mouse it looks like) to switch to the original. It does not provide the Greek texts of the early councils. Also it only provides French texts of the Fathers. Clicking on the pair of blue semi-circular arrows (looks like a refresh button) within a given text takes you to citations of the passage which you are reading. As they say on the home page:

Un système UNIQUE AU MONDE, issu de la technologie exclusive du logiciel Ictus, permet de savoir immédiatement où un document est cité. Ainsi, vous découvrirez comment les Pères de l'Église commentent un passage des Saintes Écritures, ou bien comment un texte du Magistère (concile, encyclique) est utilisé par un autre document. … Grâce à Internet et aux techniques les plus modernes appliquées à ce trésor de textes, ayez l'érudition d'un vrai moine!

Quite so.

Meanwhile I am agog at developments on Newman Reader. Although they have adopted a rather odd looking font (looks like Papyrus) for the front page we can forgive all that because they have put PDF scans of all 32 volumes of Newman's Letters and Diaries (it would cost thousands to assemble a collection of printed copies) as well as of modern collections of Newman's miscellaneous papers. They seem to have done an OCR job on it so the text is searchable, at any rate it is as searchable as something on Google books (presumably Google did the work, since "snippet view" and "preview" versions of L&D are available on Google books). I cannot find Newman's preface to Hutton's Anglican Ministry, but I just gave you that. Nor is there the full version of his ejaculation in favour of the Papacy beginning "Deeply do I feel…"

Last, but not least, (via Chant Café) the complete four volume Missale Romanum cum lectionibus is now online.  Each volume is split into four files. They take an age to download. They have been gone through a first run with optical character recognition so you can copy and paste up to a point. It is not very accurate however. But it is better than nothing. Much better.

Immaculate Reception

See the young time traveller using an iPhone at 1:00 in this Pathé story about the proclamation of the Dogma of the Assumption on November 1st 1950.

THE ASSUMPTION PROCLAMATION

This is NOTHING like that other film from January 1928 at the premiere of a Charlie Chaplin film, showing a woman supposedly talking on a mobile telephone. There weren't any mobile phone towers back then. Obviously it is not proof of time travel. But you can use the camera function on an iPhone without needing the 3G to be working.

UPDATE: Apparently this woman visited the 1940s first. 

Easier access to the Catechism

The trouble with the Vatican website's publication of the English version of Catechism of the Catholic Church is that the index lacks the numbers used everywhere by everyne to refer to a specific passage.  Nobody uses the chapter numbers. You have to click on one of the links to to chapter, article, or section names in the approximate area and work your way from there. There is a similar problem with the French, Latin and Latvian editions. The Chinese, Malagasy, Portugese and Spanish editions all have the range of paragraph numbers next to each link for easier navigation. The Italian edition is similarly divided but in much longer ranges (the first is nn.1-1065) and the links take you to large PDFs.

 St Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Picayune, Miss. has acquired the right to publish the complete Catechism on its own website. They offer the standard table of contents (as on the Vatican website) as well as a table of contents with paragraph numbers. Both take you to the same files.

While we are on the subject here are direct links to the various indexes to the Catechism on the Vatican website (I can never find them in a hurry):

Alphabetical index
 Words arranged by frequency
 Reverse alphabetical index (i.e. by the last letter in a word)
 Words arranged by length
 Frequency statistics

I am not sure what use there is for any of these apart from the first but there they are, so there you go. 

Mankowsi: Why the Immaculate Conception?

The truth is often at right angles to the common perception. Fr Paul Mankowski sj asks "Why the Immaculate Conception?" in Women for Faith & Family, Vol v.1 (1990).

There is a strain of feminist Mariology which feels repugnance at the dogma of the Immaculate Conception because it views the notion as demeaning to women. Orthodox theologians were so scandalized by the particularly feminine dimension of sinfulness (according to this school) that they found it necessary to cook up the idea of an immaculate conception in order to sanitize the event of the incarnation. I hope I have shown that this way of thinking has got things exactly backwards. In articulating its belief that Mary was free of original sin, the Church is thrusting the Blessed Virgin into the heart of the problematic struggle of temptation and grace; it is the opposite of insulation. It is not some angelic perfection, but her humanity which is vindicated by Pius IX’s definition - her dependence on merits of Jesus Christ, her constant reenactment of the drama of Adam’s choice, a drama which is no less dramatic for its happy ending, a drama which ultimately includes us all, in the vision of the Woman clothed with the sun, crushing the serpent at the worlds’ end.

The introduction punctures a number of balloons:

Further, if we speak of the Virgin Mary as constitutionally incapable of sin, it is all the more difficult to discover in her the humanity which is by its very weakness transparent to God's power. Consequently, in an age like our own especially, she is all the more likely to be treated as precisely that sort of Ideal which cannot warm our affections or stir our courage.

One obvious, all-too-predictable solution, is to deny the Immaculate Conception and the sinlessness of Mary, under the fatuous pretense that by doing so, she will become more "human", and so more accessible to the rest of us sinners. Wrong on all counts, the most obvious being that a human who sins is less human after he succumbs that he was before. Still, there is a persistent, though imbecile, way of speaking in which some public figure who has an adulterous affair or a personal foible come to light thereby reveals a "human side" of himself. In fact, it is in keeping his commitments and displaying evidence of virtue that a man is most fully human; in giving in to temptations, even trivial or petty ones, he becomes that much more bestial.

When we fall, we fall from a human dignity, not an angelic one; our skid may well end at a level of animal savagery, but we never "tumble down" into humanity. It was natural indeed that the Legion inside the Gerasene demoniac pleaded to be cast into swine -- not because pigs are of themselves wickeder then men, but because the elevator, so to speak, was already at that floor. There is no point, then, in exploring this avenue further. I think the way out is more direct. A friend of mine is fond of saying, "Whenever I hear the word 'dialogue', I reach for my dogma." Let us, in the same spirit, reach for our dogma and see if it has anything to say to us.