A few months back, I started doing most of my Bible and Catechism reading on my computer. I find that it’s especially helpful while traveling, but even at home, I get great benefit from the search capabilities and other features.

I’ve been using Accordance, a Macintosh program. (It supposedly also works on Windows with an emulator program, but I haven’t tried that.) I like how this company offers a Catholic Collection of products, with the Catechism, the Order of Mass, the Documents of Vatican Councils I and II, etc. Accordance is also endorsed by a well regarded Catholic writer Jeff Cavins.

They even have a try-before-you-buy program, so check it out.

Catholics in the Contemporary Christian Music scene were the focus of an article in the March 15-21 National Catholic Register (page B3 in the print edition, or here in the online edition).

In case you’d like to check out these musicians and bands, here’s a list of artists quoted or mentioned in the article:

• Matt Maher
• Curtis Stephan
• Janelle
• Kelly Pease
• The Thirsting
• Jackie Francois
• Sarah Hart

Beyond this article, I’ve enjoyed the music of a few other Catholic artists, such as:

• Ceili Rain
• Popple
• Cheer Up Charlie
• Ben Walther
• Chris Padgett
• Remember Rome
• Ryan Meyers
• Josh Blakesley
• Friday Mourning
• the perfect cry
• Sarah Bauer
• Trio Mediaeval

Check ‘em out on CatholicMusicNetwork.com, NextWaveFaithful.com and SpiritandSong.com.

A recent email exchange with a non-Catholic accused Pope Pius XII of silence during the Nazi era. I explained that his claims against the Catholic Church seem to be based on urban legends, and I provided these links to articles he might want to read to get the Catholic perspective:

A Righteous Gentile: Pope Pius XII and the Jews
By Rabbi David Dalin
http://www.catholicleague.org/pius.php?id=11

Pius the Good: The brief for a much-maligned pope
By William Doino Jr.
http://www.catholicleague.org/pius.php?id=3

Pope Pius XII saved well over half-a-million Jews from Nazi extermination and was considered to be a “righteous gentile” by Jewish leaders of his day. As the Jewish Rabbi David Dalin wrote in the article above:

For Jewish leaders of a previous generation, [the modern] harsh portrayal of Pope Pius XII, and the campaign of vilification against him, would have been a source of profound shock and sadness. From the end of World War II until at least five years after his death, Pope Pius enjoyed an enviable reputation amongst Christians and Jews alike. At the end of the war, Pius XII was hailed as “the inspired moral prophet of victory,” and “enjoyed near-universal acclaim for aiding European Jews.” Numerous Jewish leaders, including Albert Einstein, Israeli Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Moshe Sharett, and Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog, expressed their public gratitude to Pius XII, praising him as a “righteous gentile,” who had saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. In his meticulously researched and comprehensive 1967 book, Three Popes and the Jews, the Israeli historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, who had served as the Israeli Counsel General in Milan, and had spoken with many Italian Jewish Holocaust survivors who owed their life to Pius, provided the empirical basis for their gratitude, concluding that Pius XII “was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” To this day, the Lapide volume remains the definitive work, by a Jewish scholar, on the subject.

The campaign of vilification against Pope Pius can be traced to the debut in Berlin in February 1963 of a play, by a young, Protestant, left-wing West German writer and playwright, Rolf Hochhuth. The Deputy, in which Hochhuth depicts Pacelli as a Nazi collaborator, guilty of moral cowardice and “silence” in the face of the Nazi onslaught, is a scathing indictment of Pope Pius XII’s alleged indifferences to the plight of European Jewry during the Holocaust.

Hochhuth’s play ignited a public controversy about Pius XII that continues this day. Despite the fact that The Deputy was a purely fictional and highly polemical play, which offered little or no historical evidence for its allegations against Pope Pius XII, it was widely discussed and acclaimed. Indeed, it inspired a new generation of revisionist journalists and scholars, who were intent on discrediting the well-documented efforts of Pope Pius XII to save Jews during the Holocaust. Their denunciation of Pius received widespread publicity with the commercial success of Hitler’s Pope, in which John Cornwell denounced him as “the most dangerous churchman in modern history,” without whom “Hitler might never have…been able to press forward with the Holocaust.” Although an unusually harsh and bitter judgment, it was one with which Pius XII’s other recent detractors, such as Wills and Zucotti, implicitly concur. Moreover, in their persistent efforts to vilify Pius, and defame his memory, his detractors have largely dismissed or completely ignored Pinchas Lapide’s seminal and comprehensive study that so conclusively documents the instrumental role played by Pope Pius XII in rescuing and sheltering Jews during the Holocaust.

The man I was corresponding with didn’t like my comment that his beliefs were based on “urban legends.” But I consider any revisionist history based on a fictional play an “urban legend.” Don’t you?

A non-Catholic (actually, a quite anti-Catholic) fellow recently asked me in an e-mail, “Do you pray to dead people?” Below is my response:

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Do I pray to dead people?

I worship God alone and pray directly to him frequently. I also ask for living saints in heaven to pray for me to the Lord, just as I ask living believers on earth to pray for me.

An aspect of the Catholic faith that many Protestants don’t understand – or at least, I didn’t understand when I was Protestant – is the idea that the righteous departed (i.e., the saints in heaven) pray for us.

Where do we get this idea that the saints in heaven are even aware of our prayers? Consider this passage from scripture:

And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints (Revelation 5:8).

Scholars commonly understand that the “twenty-four elders” mentioned are men, most likely the twelve apostles and the twelve sons of Jacob who headed the tribes of Israel. Note what these men do: they take the “prayers of the saints” (i.e., the saints on earth) in the form of incense to the Lamb (i.e., Christ). We see here scriptural support for the Catholic understanding that saints in heaven not only hear the prayers of Christians on earth, they deliver our petitions to Christ’s throne on our behalf.

Other passages in the Old Testament also show how the saints in heaven pray for us. For example, God is asked to hear the prayers offered by the dead:

O Lord Almighty, God of Israel, hear now the prayer of the dead of Israel and of the sons of those who sinned before thee, who did not heed the voice of the Lord their God, so that calamities have clung to us (Baruch 3:4).

In the book of 2 Maccabees 15, a vision is recounted involving two of Israel’s righteous dead – the departed high priest Onias and the deceased prophet Jeremiah – praying on behalf of the Jews on the earth:

Onias was stretching out his hands and praying for the whole Jewish community (2 Maccabees 15:12).

And Onias spoke, saying, “This is a man who loves the brethren and prays much for the people and the holy city, Jeremiah, the prophet of God” (2 Maccabees 15:14).

The saints in heaven are indeed interceding for us. How comforting to know that we have friends in high places!

I’ve been involved in an email dialogue with a non-Catholic, and thought I’d share some of my messages on this blog and in the Essays section. Here is one recent writing:

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Just as God worked through men to write individual books of inspired Scripture, He worked through the authority of the Catholic Church’s Bishops to determine for us what books belong in the Bible.

All Christians must admit that their confidence that the Bible is Sacred Scripture – the inerrant and divinely inspired Word of God – stems from the authority of the Catholic Church. God made Scripture holy…but we know this because He revealed it to us through the Catholic Church.

No Consensus In the Early Church

The Bible as we have it today did not exist when the Church was first founded (circa A.D. 33). For the first decade, no book of the New Testament was written, and it was at least thirty years (perhaps several decades longer) after the Church’s founding before all of the New Testament writings were completed.

For the first several centuries, there was disagreement among Christians about which books belonged in the New Testament. Some Christians thought that certain books that are regarded today as Scripture were not inspired – such as Revelation, Hebrews, Jude and 2 Peter. Others thought that certain books were inspired, which are not considered inspired today – these included St. Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.

The Catholic Church Decided the Matter

To settle the matter about which books were Scripture and which were not, the Bishops of the Catholic Church met in the 4th Century and, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, determined the canon. At the Synod of Rome (A.D. 382), the Council of Hippo (393) and the Council of Carthage (397), the Bishops of the Catholic Church defined the canon of Scripture to be that which Catholics use today: 46 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament, totaling 73 books. In A.D. 405, Pope Innocent I approved the 73-book canon, closing discussion on the matter.

Protestants cite the Council of Carthage as the authority for the New Testament canon, yet most don’t realize that the 46-book Old Testament (the Alexandrian canon) was canonized at the same time.

Protestants Violated Scripture by Removing Books

The 73-book canon of Scripture was uncontested for the next 1,100 years until Protestants began publishing Bibles that contained only 39 Old Testament books. Even among Protestants, however, there was disagreement. Martin Luther included 73 books in his edition of the Bible (he placed the seven so-called apocryphal OT books in an appendix between the OT and NT), while his contemporary Ulrich Zwingli produced a Bible with only 66 books. The Gutenberg Bible – the first printed Bible – was a complete 73-book Catholic edition.

In English, the 73-book Bible was the norm until the 1800s. The first edition of the King James Bible in 1611 contained the so-called apocrypha (treated as an appendix between the OT and NT, but nevertheless included). It wasn’t until 1827 – more than 300 years after the Reformation – that the first major edition, published by the British and Foreign Bible Society, eliminated the deuterocanon/apocrypha altogether. It wasn’t until 1885 that the King James Bible was published as a 66-book edition.

God Used the Catholic Church’s Leadership

God worked through the Bishops of the Catholic Church, meeting at the Council of Carthage (A.D. 397), to authoritatively determine what books belong in the Bible.

One must admit that the Bible does not in and of itself tell us which books belong to it. An outside authority is necessary to determine the canon of Scripture. Fortunately, Christ left us the Catholic Church to serve as that authority.

The existence of the Bible proves the necessary authority of the Catholic Church.

Why belong to a group of Christians (Protestants) who tampered with the canon of Scripture and removed books, when you can belong to the Catholic Church, which not only codified what books are in the Bible but has protected the complete Bible down through the ages?

This is a brave young lady who gets a round of applause from me:

File this one in the “That’s Just Plain Wrong” category: votive candles featuring Obama as a saint.