September 10, 2023
/Welcome Back! We hope you had a restorative summer and very much look forward to journeying together this academic year! We are pleased to bring you another edition of CATH-Links, an initiative born from the CC@S Synodal process and the Intra Community Council (ICC). We hope this initiative will encourage reflection, engender discussion, and help members better understand and engage with the Church and the modern world.
If you are interested in submitting reflections, meditations, articles, book reviews, etc., see Submit Resources for Publication for submission guidelines. We look forward to your participation!
COFFEE & CONVERSATION—NEW SERIES
Join Us - All Are Welcome. We are happy to launch a new monthly series of open conversations about the many articles highlighted here in CATH-Links. We will gather on the last Sunday of each month from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM in front of Old Union. Please register in advance. In registering for each event, you are making a commitment to have read the monthly featured articles for informed discussions. This is not a forum for combative arguments or ad hominem attacks – the goal is to explore the authors’ perspectives and insights in true seminar fashion. We will limit the size so that we can ensure everyone can have the opportunity to speak and to be heard.
SYNODAL NEWS
In anticipation of the upcoming Synod on Synodality, this month we feature two articles by Cardinal Robert McElroy, Bishop of San Diego, and an article by Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, and founder of Word on Fire [wordonfire.org] Both will be attending the October Synod in Rome
Cardinal McElroy on ‘radical inclusion’ for LGBT people, women, and others in the Catholic Church [americamagazine.org] “We must examine the contradictions in a church of inclusion and shared belonging that have been identified by the voices of the people of God in our nation, and discern in synodality, a pathway for moving beyond them.”
Cardinal McElroy responds to his critics on sexual sin, the Eucharist, and LGBT and divorced/remarried Catholics [americamagazine.org] “Pope Francis is calling us to appreciate the vital interplay between pastoral and doctrinal aspects of Church teaching when it comes to sexual sin and the reception of the Eucharist.”
Bishop Barron on Inclusion & Exclusion [wordonfire.org] “All are welcome in the Church, but on Christ’s terms, not their own.”
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
The Catholic Intellectual Tradition – A Lecture at Harvard University [harvardcatholicforum.org] Bishop Robert Barron will preside over Convocation Mass at Saint Paul’s in Harvard Square and deliver a lecture on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Memorial Church, Harvard Yard, on Sunday, September 17, 2023. The lecture will explore some foundational themes in the Catholic intellectual tradition, including God, the human person, sin and grace, society, and freedom. All flow from Christology, our understanding of Jesus, so that, as St. Bonaventure said, “Christ is truly found at the center of all the disciplines pursued in the university.” The 1:00 PM PDT lecture will be livestreamed.
RECENT NEWS
Pope Francis recently concluded the first-ever papal visit to Mongolia [vaticannews.va], one of the world’s newest and smallest Catholic communities with only 1,450 Catholics, where he praised Mongolia’s tradition of religious freedom dating to the times of its founder, Genghis Khan.
BOOK OF INTEREST
Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “has become a classic in David Tracy’s sense in that over a period of 50 years it has spoken in shifting intellectual environments to professors of theology, college students, mothers and fathers of college students, religious searchers, to Catholics in parishes who wish to better know their Christian faith and pass it on, and to Catholics who have lapsed either because of scandals in the Church or the perception that Christian faith is not relevant to their lives. The book has exercised enormous influence because of its deep rootedness in the Catholic tradition, the simplicity of its faith, the personal warmth that it exudes, and its marvelous clarity and economy of expression.” – Cyril O’Regan, the Catherine F. Huisking Chair in Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
Full review [nd.edu]
The Genius of Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity and Why It Still Matters Today [wordonfire.org] outlines the contours of this classic and bestseller, the fruit of Pope Benedict XVI’s interactions with students from across all disciplines when he was a young university professor.
