Wednesday, March 12, 2008

D.R.CHURCH TARGETS COMMUTERS W ADS

Dominican Republic: Church targets commuters with modern screen ads

Electronic billboard messages point to freedom through Jesus



The Adventist Church is displaying 10-electronic billboard ads throughout the capital city of Santo Domingo to remind onlookers about God's Law during the month of March. [photo: Silvestre Gonzalez/ANN]

Commuters in Santo Domingo are being greeted with a 10-second message about freedom several times a day courtesy of the Seventh-day Adventist Church there.

On March 5 the Adventist Church in the Dominican Republic began projecting electronic billboard screen ads throughout four of the busiest intersections of Santo Domingo, the capital city. The ads are designed to remind onlookers about God's law and its power to free them.

"It's a new form of evangelizing here in Santo Domingo with super modern screens," says Silvestre Gonzalez, communication director for the church in the Dominican Republic. "We want to spread a positive message to the pedestrians, drivers and passengers who travel the streets of our city every day."

Gonzalez says the ad consists of three short slides: an image of Jesus pointing to the words "The law of Freedom," an image of the 10 commandment tablets and "The Seventh-day Adventist Church" with its logo.

"We wanted to point people to the benefits of following God's Law in keeping with the celebration of the independence of the nation which began last month and will continue on during the days ahead," he says.

The 10-second electronic ads will be played 50 times per day for the next 30 days, Gonzalez says.

Although the church has made itself well known in Santo Domingo, a city with over 2 million people, through its many community ministries and through radio and television, the ads were designed to bring the church and its message to the attention of commuters.

"[The ad] is positive because it reminds human beings that there is a Law of God that puts society and the family in order," says Juana Diaz, a local commuter.

Church leaders are also planning to include ads which promote the family and education in the coming months.

There are more than 242,000 Seventh-day Adventists in the Dominican Republic worshiping in 614 churches and congregations. In Santo Domingo alone there are 103,000 members worshiping in 282 churches.


Source: Adventist News Network

Source: http://news.adventist.org/data/2008/1205258317/index.html.en

SDA CONNED CHURCHGOERS OUT OF £3M...

(Photo) http://www.romfordrecorder.co.uk/london24/assets/images/dynamicFeed/Blacke79210032008.P02.jpg

Seventh Day Adventist who conned churchgoers out of £3m is jailed for seven years

A Seventh Day Adventist who persuaded churchgoers to invest millions of pounds in a City scam that funded his extravagant lifestyle has been jailed for seven years.

Lindani Mangena, 24, of Romford, east London, was described as a "modern-day Moses" for his promises to deliver profits of up to 3,000% to fellow worshippers.

At Southwark crown court judge Peter Testar condemned Mangena as "pitiless and arrogant" for deceiving more than 1,000 Seventh Day Adventists .

Some investors, believing God had blessed him, remortgaged, only to lose their homes and life savings. Others struggled to stave off repossession. Many had to forgo holidays, and large numbers were plunged into depression. One victim even gave up his job to join the company.

The court heard that Mangena and two partners set up a City office near the Bank of England and offered a variety of bogus investments with "guaranteed" profits.

One victim lost nearly £200,000, and the sophisticated seven-month con saw clients hand over a "minimum" of £3.2m altogether.

Complaints were met with excuses or "heavies" outside headquarters.

Money flooded in so swiftly that Mangena installed a cash-counting machine at the offices, while one witness saw "piles" of notes in his luxury apartment.

Stephen Winberg, prosecuting, said £1m disappeared "supporting a wildly extravagant lifestyle ... to which the defendants had not, to put it mildly, been accustomed".

As well as having a deposit on a £4.5m apartment, Mangena rented a £650-a-week luxury flat at St George's Wharf, Vauxhall, south London.

Dean Hinkson, 29, swapped his council house for a home next to his crooked boss and spent £24,700 on a Mercedes and personalised number plate. He also joined Mangena on a £10,000 jaunt to the five-star Sheraton hotel in Abu Dhabi, and spent £55,815 on a one-day stay in the royal suite at Dubai's seven-star Burj al Arab hotel. He was jailed for 15 months. So, too, was Curtis Powell, 31, who blew £25,000 on a BMW 330i and a further £35,000 on a BMW X5 for his mother. Police have recovered £900,000 and are hunting for more.

Despite blaming his co-defendants, Mangena was convicted of fraudulent trading between July 31 2003 and March 1 2004, money laundering and carrying on an unauthorised investment business.

Hinkson, of Croydon, south London, and Powell, of Thornton Heath, south London, were found guilty of "communicating an invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity".

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/11/ukcrime.religion




REGAN REESTABLISHED NEXUS WITH ROME


Reagan re-established diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1984!!


Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Vatican were broken off in 1865 because of the Vatican's support for the Confederacy and because the Pope sheltered John Surraett— the murderer of President Lincoln. The U.S. government decided to downplay the role of the Vatican in the rebellion lest there be a religious war in the country. The people were tired of fighting but they loved Lincoln so much that they would driven every Roman Catholic out of the country forever!!


In 1984, the Vatican sent a papal nuncio or Papal LEGATE to Washington and the U.S. sent an ambassador to Vatican City. The Italian government based in Rome already had an ambassador to this country. He is the ONLY legal representative of Rome and Italy to the United States. This didn't seem to bother Reagan because his first allegiance was to the Pope.


Source: http://www.reformation.org/reagan-and-pope.html

Note: a---Spelling corrected! Blogman.

BRAZILIAN WOMEN DESTROY GM CROPS

Genetically modified corn crops

Brazilian protesters destroy GM crops: group

SAO PAULO (AFP) — Around 300 women rural residents in Brazil burst into a property owned by the US company Monsanto and destroyed a plant nursery and crops containing genetically modified corn, their organization said.

The women were protesting what they saw as environmental damage by the crops.

They trashed the plants within 30 minutes and left before police arrived at the site in the southern state of Sao Paulo, a member of the Landless Workers' Movement, Igor Foride, told AFP.

The Brazilian government had "caved in to pressure from agrobusinesses" by recently allowing tinkered crops to be grown in the country, he said.

In Brasilia, a protest by another 400 women from an umbrella group, Via Campesina (the Rural Way), was held in front of the Swiss embassy against Syngenta, a Swiss company that is selling genetically modified seeds in Brazil.

The demonstrators called attention to an October 2007 incident in which private guards working for Syngenta killed a protester taking part in an occupation of land owned by the company.

Via Campesina said in a statement that "no scientific studies exist that guarantee that genetically modified crops won't have negative effects on human health and on nature."

It added that on Tuesday, another 900 of its members had entered a property owned by the Swedish-Finnish paper giant Stora Enso and ripped out non-modified eucalyptus saplings they claimed were illegally planted.

Source: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hvtDDl9a9iCkFAdiI_O-5mBDtCLA

RON PAUL: LET'S FINISH WHAT WE STARTED

Ron Paul Revolution: Let's Finish What We Started By Dana Gabriel
For those Ron Paul supporters who are feeling weary, we need not be discouraged. There is nothing to feel sorry about and all our hard work has not been in vain. In many ways this revolution for change has only just begun. Ron Paul has further passed on the baton to us and what we do with it will ultimately shape our future. We have not been abandoned and he will continue to fight for the Constitution and freedom like he has for the last 30 years.

With insurmountable odds we have put a dent in the establishments armor and have changed the rules and the political landscape forever. We are not alone and our voices will be heard. The power is in the people and together there is no limit to what we can accomplish.

This movement was always more than about Ron Paul - it is about getting proactive and taking action on our own at a grassroots level. We have him to thank for all the ideas and issues he has injected into the campaign that would have never otherwise seen the light of day.

This has been a learning curve and along the way some mistakes have been made, but this will only help us in the long run and make us stronger. Real everlasting change will not come easy, but it is attainable. This is not the end but the beginning, the first stages of this peaceful revolution.

This whole election season, I have likened Ron Paul's campaign to the Star Wars movie, A New Hope, and in particular a certain scene. During the lightsaber duel on the Death Star, Obi-Wan Kenobi says to Darth Vader, “You can't win Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” We have not been defeated as this movement will go forward and continue to grow.

We stand on the threshold of change, and by continuing to plant seeds we will win over more hearts and minds. Together we can and will take back this country - one district, one county, one city, one state, and one mind at a time. Thank you Ron Paul and supporters for giving America hope. Now let's finish what we started.

Source: http://www.newworldordermustbestopped.com/DanasBlog.html

INDIA: 50 LOSE SIGHT SEARCHING FOR 'MARY'



50 people looking for solar image of Mary lose sight


50 people looking for solar image of Mary lose sight

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: At least 50 people in Kottayam district have reportedly lost their vision after gazing at the sun looking for an image of Virgin Mary.


Though alarmed health authorities have installed a signboard to counter the rumour that a solar image of Virgin Mary appeared to the believers, curious onlookers, including foreign travellers, have been thronging the venue of the ‘miracle’.


St Joseph’s ENT and Eye Hospital in Kanjirappally alone has recorded 48 cases of vision loss due to photochemical burns on the retina. “All our patients have similar history and symptoms. The damage is to the macula, the most sensitive part of retina. They have developed photochemical, not thermal, burns after continuously gazing at the sun,” Dr Annamma James Isaac, the hospital’s ophthalmologist, said.


The hospital has been receiving patients with these abnormal symptoms since Friday. When the doctors found a pattern in the case sheets, they reported it to the district medical officer.


The health department has now put up a signboard at the hotelier’s house near Erumeli, where the divine image is said to have appeared, warning people against exposing their eyes to sunlight.


Even the churches in the vicinity disowned the miracle during Sunday mass after health officers and doctors approached the clergy. The house in question has been the centre of local rumours for a few months. The hotelier, who has since moved to another house, had claimed that statues of Mother Mary in his house have been crying honey and bleeding oil and perfumes.


Though people have been flocking to the “blessed land” - hastily christened Rosa Mystica Mountain - for long, the mad rush for the image in the sky began a week ago.


There are quite a few people still seeking the miracle, despite the experiences of their unfortunate predecessors and strict health warnings against gazing at the sun with the naked eye.


“The patients show varying degrees of severity. They are mostly girls in 12-26 age group. Our youngest patient is 12 and the oldest 60. Most of them were looking at the sun between 2 and 4 pm, when UV1 and UV2 rays are harshest,” Dr James Isaac said. He added that they could identify the problem as solar retinopathy because they were aware of the local sensation.


“Most patients may hopefully improve their vision. But there may be long-term effects on the retina,” he added.


Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1152984

JOY IN OBEDIENCE


Joy in Obedience

I have longed for thy salvation, O Lord; and thy law is my delight. Ps. 119:174.


The true Christian will never complain that the yoke of Christ is galling to the neck. He accounts the service of Jesus as the truest freedom. The law of God is his delight. Instead of seeking to bring down the divine commands, to accord with his deficiencies, he is constantly striving to rise to the level of their perfection. {Mar 79.1}

Such an experience must be ours if we would be prepared to stand in the day of God. Now, while probation lingers, while mercy's voice is still heard, is the time for us to put away our sins.... {Mar 79.2}

God has made ample provision that we may stand perfect in His grace, wanting in nothing, waiting for the appearing of our Lord. Are you ready? Have you the wedding garment on? That garment will never cover deceit, impurity, corruption, or hypocrisy. The eye of God is upon you.... We may conceal our sins from the eyes of men, but we can hide nothing from our Maker. {Mar 79.3}

God spared not His own Son, but delivered Him to death for our offenses and raised Him again for our justification. Through Christ we may present our petitions at the throne of Grace. Through Him, unworthy as we are, we may obtain all spiritual blessings. Do we come to Him, that we may have life? {Mar 79.4}

The will of God is expressed in the precepts of His holy law, and the principles of this law are the principles of heaven. The angels of heaven attain unto no higher knowledge than to know the will of God, and to do His will is the highest service that can engage their powers. {Mar 79.5}

But in heaven, service is not rendered in the spirit of legality. When Satan rebelled against the law of Jehovah, the thought that there was a law came to the angels almost as an awakening to something unthought of. In their ministry the angels are not as servants, but as sons.... Obedience is to them no drudgery. Love for God makes their service a joy. So in every soul wherein Christ, the hope of glory, dwells, His words are re-echoed, "I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart." {Mar 79.6}

Maranatha, Ellen G. White, p.79.

JESUS' CONDEMNATION OF THE PHARISEES



Matthew 23


1Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples,

2Saying The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat:

3All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.

4For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.

5But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,

6And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,

7And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

8But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.

9And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

10Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.

11But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.

12And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

13But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

14Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

15Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

16Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!

17Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?

18And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty.

19Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?

20Whoso therefore shall swear by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon.

21And whoso shall swear by the temple, sweareth by it, and by him that dwelleth therein.

22And he that shall swear by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon.

23Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

24Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

25Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

26Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

27Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

28Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

29Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,

30And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.

31Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.

32Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.

33Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

34Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city:

35That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.

36Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.

37O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!

38Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.

39For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

VATICAN UPDATES SEVEN DEADLY SINS

Vatican updates seven deadly sins

Barney Zwartz
March 11, 2008

People who don't pick up their dogs' addition to the environment in the park may be risking more than a fine - they may be putting their souls at risk of damnation, according to a new Vatican list of seven deadly sins for the 21st century.

As the seven ancient wonders of the world were matched by seven modern wonders, the seven deadly sins have been given a modern version for a globalised world, announced by a Vatican official yesterday.

Polluting, genetic engineering, obscene riches, taking drugs, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice join the original seven deadly sins defined by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century: pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and sloth.

Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, responsible for absolving Catholics from their sins, named the new mortal sins in an interview with the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, yesterday.

He did not spell out details but said the original seven deadly sins had an individualistic dimension, while the new seven had a social resonance and showed worshippers that their vices affected other people.

"New sins have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalisation," he said.

God was offended not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbour's wife but by ruining the environment, conducting immoral scientific experiments and genetic manipulation.

Traditional Catholic doctrine divides sins into mortal and venial (lesser) and holds that mortal sins, if unrepented, lead to eternal damnation. The Catholic catechism says "mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God's law", while venial sin allows charity to subsist but offends and wounds it.

Mortal sins are not officially listed, but include murder, abortion, perjury and adultery. They can be absolved after confession, and Monsignor Girotti has acted to make this more palatable, launching a course to teach priests to be less aggressive in the confessional booth.

He wrote in the newspaper last week that many Catholics found it hard to be open about their sins to their priest, and the new course would help priests to be ministers of reconciliation.

The course includes instruction on "special cases", such as divorcees and homosexuals.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/vatican-updates-seven-deadly-sins/2008/03/10/1205125819939.html

'REDNECK SHOP' CREATES DISPUTE IN S.C.

'Redneck Shop' Creates Dispute in S.C.

Mar 10 01:50 PM US/Eastern
By KATRINA A. GOGGINS
Associated Press Writer

View smaller image

LAURENS, S.C. (AP) - A black civil rights activist is fighting to close a store that sells KKK robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. David Kennedy is confident he can make it happen. After all, he says he owns the building.

Since 1996, the Redneck Shop has operated in an old movie theater that, according to court records, was transferred in 1997 to Kennedy and the Baptist church he leads.

"Our ownership puts an end to that history as far as violence and hatred, racism being practiced in that place and also the recruiting of the Klan," Kennedy said. "This is the same place that we had to go up into the balcony to go to the movies before the Klan took it. So there's a lot of history there."

But legal documents also indicate that the man who runs the store, 62- year-old John Howard, is entitled to operate his business in the building until he dies. Now the dispute may go to court.

Kennedy, 54, has led protests outside the store since it opened but said he's never been able to close it because of the agreement that Howard can run the shop for life.

The reverend envisions the building as a potential future home for his New Beginnings Missionary Baptist Church, which now meets in a double- wide trailer.

Kennedy claims he can't even visit his own property because Howard won't let him in when he appears in the door. But that didn't happen during a recent visit with an Associated Press reporter and photographer.

"Reverend Kennedy, where you been hiding?" Howard shouted when the door opened.

Inside the store, hooded Klan robes hang on the same rack as the racist T-shirts. Pictures of men, women and children in Klan clothing and pamphlets tell a partial history of the organization.

Howard used to own the whole building. When his store first opened, he said, people threw rocks at his windows, spit in his doorway and picketed. A month later, a man intentionally crashed his van through the front windows.

"If anything turns people off, they shouldn't come in here. It's not a thing in here that's against the law," Howard said, adding that he was once the KKK's grand dragon for South Carolina and North Carolina.

To blacks, Kennedy said, the store is a reminder of this region's painful past, which includes the lynching of his great, great uncle by a white mob.

The town of Laurens, about 30 miles southeast of Greenville, was named after 18th century slave trader Henry Laurens.

Some street addresses are still marked with the letter "C" that once designated black homes as "colored." Racial tension was heightened in recent years when two white female teachers were sentenced for having sex with male students—all of them black.

Kennedy has a long history of fighting racial injustice. He protested when a South Carolina county refused to observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and he helped lobby to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome.

When people in the region allege racism, he rallies attention to the cause. A walk through the neighborhood where he was born shows that he seems a stranger to no one.

"Hey Rev," one man says as he strolls by.

"Pump it up," Kennedy responds with the phrase he uses at his protests.

Mary Redd, who lives across from the house where Kennedy was born, said blacks know to contact the pastor with their problems.

"And he helps them out," added neighbor Deborah Cheeks.

Kennedy said progress has always been slow to come to Laurens.

"There are two powers in the world: the mind and the sword," he said. "In the long run, the sword is defeated by the mind. I want to destroy the concept of hatred."

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.


Source: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VANB000&show_article=1&image=large

P.S. Stories such as this that make me think that candidate Obama is confused, and doesn't really intend to be president; With stores catering to the redneck, Obama 'should protect his neck'.

How much are they paying him to put on this charade, this farce of a presidential 'race'? 10, maybe 20 million? Is it really worth it? Look around, you're not really liked; Jim Crow is alive and well, down over yonder!

So you win Mississippi? This is really an ananomaly; From where I stand the animosity for non-rednecks is thick, you can cut it with a knife. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
And I ain't whistling (Mason) Dixie!
Arsenio.

WCC - 60th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS

Heartsearching at the WCC’s 60th anniversary celebrations
The World Council of Churches celebrated its 60th anniversary 13-20 February.

It claims that, “its greatest achievement has not been a particular issue, programme or publication, but the fact that despite all that could have torn it apart, the member churches have held together, maintaining the fellowship they share through the Council. As an Asian ecumenical leader says: ‘The relationships built between churches are the WCC’s finest accomplishment. It’s not unity in the strict sense, but in building a knowledge of heritage and customs and awareness - like a family’.”

In fact little tangible has been achieved over the years. A note of desperation has crept into recent leader’s pronouncements. We suspect that private conversations and meetings behind closed doors, at which plans are made to force the cooperation of an unwilling laity, represent its greatest achievement.

The WCC’s membership has grown down the years, particularly with the accession of the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Rome refuses to join though she sits on individual WCC committees where she can advance her own interests.

However the WCC admits that it currently represents only just over 25 percent of the world’s Christians. It openly states that the mainline churches it represents are shrinking while Evangelicals and Pentecostals who shun the WCC are mushrooming, particularly in the Third World.

“Too many churches are stepping back from ecumenical to unilateral activities and positions,” said General Secretary Samuel Kobia who believes that the next Assembly should be open to non-members, particularly Rome and the Pentecostals.

New expressions of Christianity, the growing prominence of the global South, the impact of globalization and increasing religious diversity are all contributing to a rapidly changing ecclesiastical situation, said Kobia.

He himself has decided not to seek re-appointment as General secretary to the WCC when his term expires at the end of the year. There have been complaints that the WCC is not making its presence felt sufficiently. He has been criticised for travelling too much. Questions have also been raised about his doctorate from Fairfax University, Louisiana, which has been found to lack accreditation to award such degrees.

The WCC also wants to engage with its “interfaith partners” and must be a more representative body of all Christians to convince them.

It is having to cut back financially due to reduced giving and unpaid subscriptions.



British Church Newspaper

29 February 2008

Source: http://www.ianpaisley.org/new_details.asp?ID=544

LETTER FROM THE PRELATE (OPUS DEI)

Letter from the Prelate (March 2008)

With Holy Week drawing close, the Prelate invites us to redouble our efforts to grow in love for God and neighbor, like runners when they see the finish line.

March 10, 2008

My dear children: may Jesus watch over my daughters and sons for me!


Two weeks ago, I had the joy of spending forty-eight hours in The Netherlands. As always on these brief trips (as on other longer ones), I give abundant thanks to God for the tangible reality of the unity of the Work: for the cor unum et anima una,[1] one heart and one mind, and yet everyone is different. Our Father, who prayed for this diversity from the beginning, raised many acts of thanksgiving on seeing how it was becoming a reality, and also on seeing that this variety gave rise to a stronger, more joyful unity.

We are drawing close to Holy Week and Easter. Half of Lent has already gone by and we have to speed up our pace. In sporting events, athletes redouble their effort as they get close to the finish line. If they had been conserving their strength, now they pour it out generously, hoping to place well or even win the competition. The thought sometimes goes through my head that time is going more rapidly than our eagerness for sanctity, for conversion, which shouldn’t be the case, since we have to go at God’s pace.

Let’s do as the athletes do. What are these weeks but a time of training to arrive well purified at the Easter Triduum, which offers us once more the possibility of participating even more intimately in Christ’s victory over sin and over death? This well-known sporting metaphor, with its Pauline connotations,[2] has been amply developed by the Fathers of the Church. Look at how it was expressed, for example, by St. Leo the Great. Exhorting Christians to redouble their efforts "to gain the crown of victory in the race in the spiritual stadium,"[3] he gave us a reason for expending greater effort during these weeks: "None of us is so perfect and so holy that we cannot be even more perfect and more holy. Therefore, all together, without difference of dignity or distinction of merits, let us run with pious eagerness from where we are to where we have not yet arrived."[4]

Last month I urged you to be especially vigilant in your spirit of mortification and penance. Today I want to consider the practice of the works of mercy, both material and spiritual, which Lent also gives great importance to. In his message for Lent this year, the Pope centered his talk on almsgiving, stressing that this act of charity, besides providing assistance to the needy, is also an ascetical practice that helps keep the soul detached from material goods.[5]

By going to the aid of those in need, fulfilling the conditions indicated by Jesus in the Gospel,[6] we identify ourselves more and more closely with our Lord, who came to earth to free men from their miseries, above all from sin. At the same time, we offer a service to Jesus, who wanted to identify himself with his smallest brothers and sisters: I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.[7]

In the light of these words of our Lord, we see that the works of charity, and specifically almsgiving, transcend the purely material dimension and show themselves to be, above all, a manifestation of the charity with which God loves us: "Every time when, for love of God, we share our goods with our neighbor in need, we discover that the fullness of life comes from love and all is returned to us as a blessing in the form of peace, inner satisfaction and joy."[8]

Let us carry out, then, to the extent of each one’s possibilities, this work of charity that is so deeply rooted in the Gospel, to which our Lord himself has united special spiritual fruit. For love covers a multitude of sins,[9] and all of us are very much in need of God’s forgiveness.

As is logical, and this is how the Church has always understood it, charity towards our neighbor cannot be limited to the purely material sphere. In reality there are many who are poor, not in financial terms, but in terms of affection, of love—people who find themselves in a sad loneliness or surrounded by the coldness of indifference. From this perspective, the meaning of St. Josemaría’s constant teaching becomes clear: "Charity consists not so much in giving as in understanding."[10] This spiritual maxim has many applications in our daily life and is always very timely.

Even though social progress may one day lead to the most important physical requirements of people being met (food, clothes, a place to live, health care, etc.), it will never be able to provide for all the interior needs—affection, understanding, forgiveness, acceptance—that so many people experience. While the first can be addressed by government programs, the second touch on each one’s intimacy, where personal relationships are indispensable. Here we Christians can play a great role in bringing to others the consolation of Christ’s charity.

"Love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society," the Pope wrote in his first encyclical. "There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbor is indispensable. The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern."[11]

We discover this by attentively reading the Gospels. Certainly Jesus was concerned about the multitudes who had nothing to eat, about the sick who came to him to be cured, about the crowds eager to receive his saving doctrine.[12] But he was equally concerned about individuals: he helps the leper who throws himself at his feet begging for health; he speaks privately with Nicodemus, who was seeking the truth; he converses at length with the Samaritan woman by the well at Sichar, to convert her; he welcomes the repentant woman in the Pharisee’s house, filling her soul with God’s forgiveness.[13]

People said of the first Christians, with admiration: See how they love one another! [14] This praise for our first brothers and sisters in the faith should also be heard today, wherever a disciple of the Master is found. St. Josemaría’s advice is very timely: "If you think, looking at yourself now or in so many things you do each day, that you do not deserve such praise; that your heart does not respond as it should to the promptings of God, then consider that the time has come for you to put things right. Listen to St. Paul’s invitation, ‘Let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of one family with us in the faith’(Gal 6:10), who make up the Mystical Body of Christ."[15] Therefore, our Father continued, "The principal apostolate we Christians must carry out in the world, and the best witness we can give of our faith, is to help bring about a climate of genuine charity within the Church. For who indeed could feel attracted to the Gospel if those who say they preach the Good News do not really love one another, but spend their time attacking one another, spreading slander and quarrelling?"[16]

On the upcoming March 15th we will liturgically celebrate the solemnity of St. Joseph, brought forward this year because the 19th is Wednesday in Holy Week. The Patriarch’s life, completely dedicated to caring for Jesus and Mary, speaks to us of a love that reaches total forgetfulness of oneself. When renewing our dedication to God on the 19th, with the marvelous example of this just man, let us meditate deeply on St. John’s insistence that the truth of our love for God is shown in our specific deeds of charity towards our neighbor. By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But if any one has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in deed and in truth.[17]

In his message for Lent, the Pope reminds us of the widow who threw a few coins into the Temple treasury. That poor woman received Jesus’ praise for her generosity: she offered all that she had. Recalling that this event took place in the days immediately preceding our Lord’s passion and death, the greatest manifestation of God’s love, Benedict XVI suggests: "we can learn to make of our lives a total gift; imitating Him, we are able to make ourselves available, not so much in giving a part of what we possess, but our very selves.

"Cannot the entire Gospel be summarized perhaps in the one commandment of love? The Lenten practice of almsgiving thus becomes a means to deepen our Christian vocation. In gratuitously offering himself, the Christian bears witness that it is love and not material richness that determines the laws of his existence."[18]

I pray that our devout participation in the liturgical rites of the Holy Triduum will lead us, on the one hand, to renew our sorrow for sin, which was the cause of our Lord’s surrendering himself to the Passion. And on the other hand, that it will deepen our love and gratitude to God, spurring us to make an ever greater effort to provide material and spiritual assistance to those God places at our side. How have you resolved to accompany Jesus during these days? Are you determined not to overlook even a single gesture of the Master, to stand vigil over his holy Body when it lies in the tomb, with the refinement of your prayer and your expiation, which are two ways of loving?

In addition to these liturgical feasts, we have other commemorations in the month of March. The 11th is the anniversary of the birth of our beloved Don Alvaro; and the 23rd, of his passage to our home in heaven, fourteen years ago now. During the days just prior to this, he walked in the footsteps of our Lord through the Holy Land, leaving us a marvelous example of piety. Let us ask God to grant us, each and every one of us, a fidelity to the spirit of the Work as great as that which shone in the life of this most faithful Father and Shepherd of Opus Dei.

I cannot fail to mention that the 19th is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the implementation of the Pontifical Bull erecting Opus Dei as a personal prelature. We need only cast a glance at the past quarter century to discover (and we don’t know all of them!) so many reasons for giving thanks to the Blessed Trinity. Let us put our whole heart into caring for the Work, my daughters and sons, frequently repeating that aspiration of St. Josemaría, completed by his first successor: Cor Mariae Dulcissimum, iter para et serva tutum! Most sweet heart of Mary, prepare and preserve a safe path for us! And let us thank the Servant of God John Paul II for having been a docile instrument in our Lord’s hands. St. Josemaría brought this intention to his Mass every day, and we naturally want to unite ourselves to his Eucharistic piety, also taking advantage of the anniversary of his priestly ordination on the 28th of this month.

Today I just finished my retreat. I ask you for the support of your prayers so that I too may undergo a deep conversion this Lent and reach the Easter celebration well purified, enkindled with love for God, for my daughters and sons, and for all souls.

With all my affection, I bless you,

Your Father

+ Javier

Rome, March 1, 2008



1. Acts 4:32 (Vulg.)

2. Cf. 1 Cor 9:24-27; Phil 3:12-14.

3. Leo the Great, Homily 7 on Lent.

4. Leo the Great, Homily 2 on Lent.

5. Cf. Benedict XVI, Message for Lent 2008, October 30, 2007, no. 1.

6. Cf. Mt 6:2-4.

7. Mt 25:35-36.

8. Benedict XVI, Message for Lent 2008, October 30, 2007, no. 4.

9. 1 Pet 4:8.

10. St. Josemaría, The Way,no. 463.

11. Benedict XVI, Encyclical Deus Caritas Est,December 25, 2005, no. 28.

12. Cf. Mt 14:13-21; Mk 1:32-34; Mk 6:33-34.

13. Cf. Mt 8:1-4; Jn 3:1-21; Jn 4:7-30; Lk 7: 36-50.

14. Tertullian, Apologia, 39.

15. St. Josemaría, Friends of God,no. 225.

16. Ibid., no. 226.

17. 1 Jn 3:16-18.

18. Benedict XVI, Message for Lent 2008, October 30, 2007, no. 5.



Source: http://www.opusdei.us/art.php?p=26763

KNIGHTS OF MALTA ELECT ENGLISHMAN (GM)

KNIGHTS-ELECTION Mar-11-2008 (740 words) xxxi

Knights of Malta elect Englishman as new grand master

By John Thavis
Catholic News Service

ROME (CNS) -- In a secret and swift election, the Knights of Malta elected an Englishman as their 79th grand master.

Matthew Festing, who had been the Knights' grand prior of England, was chosen March 11 to replace Andrew W.N. Bertie, who died in February.

Festing, 59, will head the world's oldest chivalric order, founded in the 11th century. He is only the second Englishman to hold the post of grand master; Bertie was the first.

Known officially as the Sovereign Military Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, the organization was established to care for pilgrims during the Crusades. It lives on today as a lay Catholic religious order and a worldwide humanitarian network.

The order is also a sovereign state, holding observer status at the United Nations and maintaining diplomatic relations with 100 countries.

Festing, an expert in art and history, joined the Knights in 1977 and in 1991 became a "professed" knight, taking religious vows. He is a descendent of Blessed Adrian Fortescue, a Knight of Malta who was martyred in the 16th century.

As head of the English priory, Festing organized humanitarian assistance missions to Lebanon and Kosovo and led a delegation on the order's annual pilgrimage with the sick to Lourdes.

In a statement issued after his election, the new grand master said he wanted to continue the work of his predecessor, who was credited with expanding the order's humanitarian services and its diplomatic connections.

Pope Benedict XVI was informed of Festing's election before it was announced to the world.

The election of a grand master is a major event in Rome. Fifty electors, representing the 12,500 male and female members of the order, filed into the Knights' villa on Rome's Aventine Hill, wearing their distinctive red robes decorated with the Maltese cross.

The election, which began with a Mass, had similarities to a papal conclave. The grand master had to be chosen from among the order's approximately 50 professed Knights.

The voting was done by a secret ballot, after nonvoters were asked to leave. No politicking was allowed, and the new grand master had to receive a "majority plus one" of the total votes -- at least 27 out of 50.

At a press conference a few days before the election, leading Knights said the order is often wrongly depicted as an elite, wealthy secret society.

"In many ways, we are misunderstood," said Winfried Henckel von Donnersmark, a member of the order's sovereign council. In part, that's because of the unusual nature of the organization, he said.

The Knights are a religious order, yet the vast majority of members are lay, he pointed out. It is a Catholic organization, but its humanitarian operations are open to people of all faiths. And while it does have some property and patrimony, it has to continually raise funds to support its annual $1 billion in charity works around the world, he said.

Membership in the order is by invitation. Knights and Dames are practicing Catholics and devote part of their time to doing works of mercy.

The professed members are all male, but women form an increasingly important part of the order, officials said.

According to Albrecht von Boeselager, one of the order's chief officials, the Knights have about 80,000 local volunteers working in 120 countries throughout the world. The organization is welcomed by so many governments -- even by the military regime in Myanmar, for example -- because it adheres to strict neutrality on political issues, he said.

"We don't consider ourselves a human rights organization. If making accusations on human rights issues would prevent us from assisting the needy, we would prefer to be silent," von Boeselager said.

In the Middle East and Asia, however, the Knights' neutrality has recently been called into question by extremist propaganda, he said.

"We have been accused of being part of a 'new crusade,' and even of having mercenaries fighting in Iraq. That is totally untrue, and it endangers our personnel in Muslim countries," he said.

Noreen Falcone, president of the Knights' U.S. federal association, said the order's organizational structure gives it the ability to move quickly into disaster areas. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, for example, the order went to work immediately.

"We're still there, building homes and helping to give people back their self-respect," she said.

END

Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.


Source: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0801371.htm


*---------------------------------------*

Fra Matthew Festing

In an unprecedented move an Englishman has been elected for the second time running as Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, the Roman Catholic order which traces its origins to the Crusades nearly a thousand years ago.

Fra Matthew Festing OBE, 58, an art expert and former army officer who leads the order in Britain as Grand Prior and is regarded as a forward looking reformer, was chosen today. The secret ballot took place today at a papal-style conclave in the Knights' secluded headquarters on the Aventine Hill in Rome.

The Knight's inner council, dressed in black robes embroidered with a white eight-pointed cross elected the new leader of the order of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, as the Knights are also known. The 79th Grand Master, with the title "His Most Eminent Highness", takes over an organisation which is noted for its humanitarian work in conflict zones.

The order is also fighting a campaign to dispel the "myth" that it is rich, powerful and secretive. The election took only a few hours, seen as a sign of unanimity over reported plans to make the order more "open and transparent" and better known globally for its charitable and medical relief operations in 120 countries.

Grand Masters, like Popes, are elected for life. The move was announced after it had been approved by Pope Benedict XVI. It comes a month after the death of Fra' Andrew Bertie, a former schoolmaster and descendant of the Stuart dynasty who was the first Englishman to lead the order and served as its Grand Master for nearly 20 years.

Under his leadership the order - which has the status of sovereign state, with its own passports and stamps - expanded its diplomatic relations from 49 to 100 countries. The order has 12,500 full members, of whom only 50 are "professed knights" who take monk-like vows of poverty, obedience and chastity.

The order said that the new Grand Master "affirms his resolve to continue the great work carried out by his predecessor". It added: "Fra' Matthew comes with a wide range of experience in Order affairs. He has been the Grand Prior of England since the Priory's re-establishment in 1993, restored after an abeyance of 450 years. In this capacity, he has led missions of humanitarian aid to Kosovo, Serbia and Croatia after the recent disturbances in those countries, and with a large delegation from Britain he attends the Order's annual pilgrimage to Lourdes with handicapped pilgrims."

He was educated at Ampleforth and St John's College Cambridge, where he read history. As a child he lived in Egypt and Singapore, where his father, Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was posted. He is also descended from Sir Adrian Fortescue, a Knight of Malta martyred in 1539.

Frà Matthew served in the Grenadier Guards and holds the rank of colonel in the Territorial Army. He was appointed OBE by the Queen and served as Deputy Lieutenant in Northumberland. He joined the order in 1977, taking solemn religious vows in 1991.

A spokeswoman for the order said he was noted for his "very British sense of humour" as well as his passion for the decorative arts and encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the Order.

Fra Matthew has promoted the teaching of Christianity in schools, observing that "We live during a strange period in history when children are taught "Comparative Religion" and leave school believing it does not matter what religion you profess .....No wonder many young people are astonished that anyone could possibly have been prepared to suffer and die for the faith".

At one time the order, which is predominantly male, was drawn from European aristocratic families. This has led conspiracy theorists to paint it as a rich and powerful cabal given to arcane rituals.

However Albrecht von Boeselager, the Grand Hospitaller in charge of the order's humanitarian arm, said this was "completely untrue". Charges that the order was conducting a secret "New Crusade" in Muslim countries and had sent mercenaries to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan were also "absolutely without foundation".

He added: "This kind of talk endangers our volunteers in the Muslim world. In Bethlehem we have a maternity hospital which delivers 3000 babies year, 80% of them Musulim. We are Catholic but neutral".

Winfried Henckel von Donnersmarck, a member of the order's Sovereign Council, said the order had 80,000 volunteers and spent £500 million a year helping the world's poor. "The only mystery is one of history. Any organisation is going to have mysteries if it has a thousand years of history behind it " he said.

He said women played a growing role, with Noreen Falcone recently becoming the first woman head of the order's national association in the US.

On its website the order's British chapter notes that there were English knights from the time of the First Crusade, with two priories established in the twelfth century , one for England, Wales and Scotland, and another for Ireland. The Grand Priory of England "received a great accession of wealth and property when the Templars were suppressed in 1312."

The order was disolved by Henry VIII in 1540, when several prominent Knights of Malta were executed. The Grand Priory's ecclesiastical seat is the Church of St. John of Jerusalem in St. John's Wood in London. It is separate from the Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem in the British Realm, founded in 1888, but the two bodies signed a co-operation agreement in 1963.

THE VATICAN AND THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR

The reality of the saga of the Knights Templar is almost as amazing as the myths that embellish it. On Thursday the Vatican added another colorful chapter by it publishing a long-misplaced, 699-year-old papal report on the medieval holy warriors. Vatican publisher Scrinium offers 799 copies (the 800th will go to the Pope), at $8,375 apiece, of a 1308 parchment titled Processus Contra Templarios (Trial Against the Templars), which chronicles the order’s sordid endgame: the accusations of heresy, the Templars’ defense, and Pope Clement V’s absolution of the order, before he did an about-face and eliminated it.

Interest in the group extends far beyond the ranks of Church historians, of course. The tale of the Templars remains a gaudy thread woven through the religion, politics and literature of Western civilization, with a recent boost from the embellishments of Dan Brown, who cast the Knights as a key part of the conspiracy to conceal Church secrets in his best-seller The Da Vinci Code.

Almost from their founding, the Templars have been rumored
a.) to still exist
b.) to be impossibly rich, and
c.) to guard the Holy Grail (the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper) and other Christian relics.

Most of these stories are probably baseless, although for 150 years in the high Middle Ages, their order was incontestably one of the most powerful and creative military and economic forces in the world.

The Templars were a creature of the Crusades, when various Christian forces sailed from Europe to fight the resident Muslims for control of the biblical Holy Land. After the first Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1096, European pilgrims began streaming into the city, and 23 years later, two veterans of the Crusade founded an order of monastic knights to protect the travelers. They were allotted a headquarters in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, viewed by Jews and many Christians as the site of the Temple of Solomon — hence the new group’s name. Initially modest (its coat of arms was two knights on one horse because that was all they could afford), its fortunes skyrocketed when the Vatican extended it extraordinary privileges, exempting it from local laws, taxes and any authority but the Pope’s. Suddenly it was bestowed with spectacular gifts of money and land and inundated by volunteers from some of Europe’s most noble families. Well-equipped and trained Templar knights became one of the most formidable fighting forces in the Holy Land — 500 Templar knights are said to have played a major role in defeating a Muslim force of 26,000 in 1177’s Battle of Montgisard.

Their non-military exploits were more ambitious still. For the convenience of the monied pilgrims they chaperoned through hostile turf, the Templars developed a system whereby they left their wealth and lands at the disposal of a Templar institution at home, in exchange for a coded invoice that was then redeemed at the group’s headquarters in Jerusalem. Researchers believe the Templars kept any revenues generated by the estates, effectively accruing interest — a practice otherwise forbidden as usury by the Church at the time. The journal American Banker wrote in 1990 that “a good case can be made for crediting [the Templars] with the birth of deposit banking, of checking, and of modern credit practices.” It certainly made them some of Europe’s richest and most powerful financiers. The Templars have been described as taking crown jewels and indeed entire kingdoms as mortgage for loans, and they maintained major branches in France, Portugal, England, Aragon, Hungary and various Mid-Eastern capitals. The group controlled as many as 9,000 estates, and left behind hundreds of buildings great and small. (The London subway stop Temple is named after one of them.)

But many of the myths attending the secretive order have less to do with their financial empire than with their most famous piece of real estate. Who knew what wonders they might have unearthed digging beneath the Mosque to the alleged Temple of Solomon, not far from where Christ was crucified? They claimed to own a piece of the True Cross; they may very well have possessed the Shroud of Turin, since it was a Templar descendant’s family that first made it public; and unsubstantiated rumor has put them in possession of both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. The latter claim provided an inexhaustible source of inspiration for fabulists from medieval romance peddlers to Dan Brown.

Unless you take The Da Vinci Code as a work of history, however, the glory didn’t last. The order lost its purpose and credibility when the Muslim warrior Saladin drove the Crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187, setting the Templars on a path of retreat that saw them give up their last Mid-Eastern foothold, in what is now Syria, in 1303. From there, the decline was precipitous: The Templars failed in an effort to take control of Cyprus, and then, in 1307, Philip IV of France found it more convenient to order the arrest and torture of the Templars to extract confessions of heresy than to repay his heavy debts to the order. This led to the trial under Pope Clement, who was based in Avignon and under the protection of Philip.

The document the Vatican will release Thursday, misplaced in its archives until 2001, is reportedly the official transcript of that trial and Clement’s 1308 verdict, which found the Templars to be immoral but not heretical. The Pope allegedly intended to reform them. But under continued pressure from his French protector, Clement instead disbanded them in 1312 and gave most of their riches to a rival military order.

The notion of that much money, power and influence vanishing at a Papal penstroke appears to have been too much for the mythic sensibility of the West, which wanted to believe that the Templars must somehow have survived, adapted, or been subsumed into another, even more secretive trans-national group. Over the centuries, the allegedly still-extant order has been portrayed as malevolent, benign, heroic and occult. Organizations all over the world, without any direct connection, have appropriated its name. (The Freemasons reportedly have an “Order of the Knights of Templar,” thus consummating a kind of conspiracy theorist’s dream marriage.) Such homages should not obscure the fact that however much power they enjoy in the realm of fiction and fantasy, it almost certainly does not equal that which they once actually possessed — and then abruptly lost.

by Alessandro Bianchi / Reuters

Source: http://templars.wordpress.com/category/vatican/

Monday, March 10, 2008

THE VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED

In June 1939, Ilse Marcus was so tantalizingly close to the saving shores of the United States that she could see the palm trees of Miami.

But the American Government refused to provide a refuge for her and the 906 other German Jews aboard the St. Louis who were fleeing their homeland's Nazi terror. The ocean liner, which had already been turned away from Cuba, was forced to return to Europe, where the passengers were dispersed to Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Britain.

Until recently, the fate of passengers like Mrs. Marcus was lost in a murky ether, with the passengers used as a collective symbol for the world's indifference to the fate of Europe's Jews, but bleached of their individual human stories. It was assumed, incorrectly it has turned out, that nearly all of them died after Western Europe came under the murderous sway of the Nazis.

But for three years, two research historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have been tracing what happened to every single passenger and fleshing out their stories as well as they can. They have learned that about half the passengers, Mrs. Marcus among them, managed through pluck, endurance and the whims of fortune to survive the war.

Now as the voyage's 60th anniversary approaches and the museum mounts a memorial exhibition from April 11 to Sept. 6, they are closing in on their goal of accounting for each passenger. Only 36 remain whose fate the researchers have not determined, although there are others for whom they want to compile more rounded pictures. The researchers' objective is to give shape to a lives that otherwise would be lost in a void. Though it was not their intent, their work also has a contemporary resonance in the tens of thousands of refugees now streaming out of Kosovo in Yugoslavia.

''We're trying to recover them from history,'' said Scott Miller, a researcher. ''If we want to tell the consequences of America's sending the ship back, we have to tell their stories.''

''People want some kind of finality,'' said his colleague, Sarah A. Ogilvie. ''They want to know not just that their relative died at Auschwitz, but that they died in Auschwitz on this day, at this time and by these means.''

Mrs. Marcus, they found out last fall, did not die in Auschwitz, where the Nazi records said she had been sent. For the last 50 years, she has been living in a tidy apartment in Washington Heights in Manhattan and working as a bookkeeper for the New York office of the Jesuits.

Within a year after disembarking from the St. Louis in Antwerp, Mrs. Marcus was scrambling for survival in Brussels, assuming a Belgian identity and shifting her hiding places. Eventually she, her husband, mother, father and brother were taken to concentration camps. Only Mrs. Marcus made it out alive, though she had been reduced to a skeletal 75 pounds, and had a bitter grievance against the United States that she could never relinquish.

A Grievance Lingers Against the U.S.

''It's amazing!'' said Mrs. Marcus, chatting with a deceptive geniality in her apartment. ''This country was built on immigrants and there was no room in this country for 900 people who were in danger of death.''

To unearth the individual stories in a tale that was later called ''The Voyage of the Damned,'' the museum's historical detectives have pored through the lists the Nazis kept of those deported, those registered to work, those given death certificates.

They have examined lists of inmates liberated from camps, and manifests of ships bound for the United States. They have searched through old phone books in the New York Public Library, sent E-mail to Jewish leaders in Latin America, and interviewed many of the 100 passengers (85 in the United States) who are still alive.

The paper trail they have accumulated offers a panorama of the larger Holocaust, with St. Louis passengers perishing in gas chambers, shambling out of the death camps, enduring in hiding, or secretly making their way to safety in the United States or Israel. Only for 36 does the trail run cold soon after the voyage's end.

In recent weeks, they went to Washington Heights -- the German Jewish enclave whose streets nurtured such refugees as Henry Kissinger and Ruth Westheimer -- and visited synagogues, social agencies and refugee families in hopes of gleaning shreds about passengers.

At Congregation Mount Sinai Ansche Emeth on West 187th Street, its president, Herbert Harwitt, a slightly built prewar refugee, showed the researchers 15-year-old membership lists that bore a name, Minna Muenz, resembling that of a passenger's. The researchers knew that their Meta Munz, born in 1912 in Altengronau, Germany, and her family found haven in Belgium after the St. Louis debacle. They also knew that Ms. Munz's father, Karl, died in the Gurs internment camp in France, that her mother, Sophie, and sister, Paula, were sent to Auschwitz in 1942. But they had no record of Meta Munz. Could Minna Muenz on Waldo Avenue in Riverdale be their Meta Munz?

Refugees can be suspicious. So the researchers trekked 10 blocks downtown and asked Eva Knoller, who runs the Washington Heights office of Selfhelp Community Services, to make calls for them. Mrs. Knoller, a refugee herself as a child, has a knack for disarming her compatriots, telling one that the researchers' project ''is like a big puzzle.''

''It's nothing bad, don't get scared,'' she said. ''They're just trying to trace people.''

Minna Muenz told her she was not on the St. Louis, but said there was a Walter Munz in Riverdale who might know more. Walter Munz told Mrs. Knoller that Meta Munz had been a neighbor in Altengronau, one of the village's 46 Jews, and that her brother Morris was living in Forest Hills, Queens. Mrs. Knoller called Morris Munz's number and left a message.

The next day she received a call from a Cynthia Munz in New Paltz, N.Y., who said that her father, Morris, had died last year at 87 but was indeed Meta's brother. She said her father kept locked inside him whatever he remembered about his slain family, telling her only that they died in unspecified camps. All he had to show of Meta was a yellowed photograph of a dark-haired woman with a solemn smile. Cynthia Munz could not say whether her aunt had been clever or dull, affectionate or cold.

''It's somewhat typical of children of survivors whose parents don't talk about what happened,'' Ms. Munz, a psychotherapist, said in an interview. ''I never even thought of Meta as my aunt. She wasn't a real person to me. She was my father's sister who disappeared during the war.''

Ms. Munz did leave the researchers with one promising thread: her father left behind correspondence in German about his efforts to get his family out of Europe.

The St. Louis story symbolized the world's callous response to Europe's Jews, but it was also a richly cinematic episode, with enough intrigue and colorful characters to rival ''Casablanca.'' (It resulted in a book and movie.)

There was a steel-willed captain who provided passengers with solicitous service despite Nazi protests, a malevolent Nazi spy posing as a crew member, a wealthy couple who came to the Hamburg pier in dinner jacket and gown, two young girls sent off alone by their mother to join their father in Cuba, and a headstrong American lawyer who bargained his way out of a deal that might have let more passengers reach Cuban soil.

Flying the Nazi swastika, the twin-smokestack ship left Hamburg on May 13, 1939, six months after the Kristallnacht pogroms made it clear that Jewish oppression would worsen. The 937 passengers who boarded -- about half women with children eager to join husbands who had already emigrated to Cuba -- had paid $160 apiece for ''landing permits'' signed by Cuba's immigration minister, who was pocketing the money.

''We were all very happy because we thought this was our last chance to escape terror,'' Mrs. Marcus said.

The voyage to Cuba was surreally tranquil. Capt. Gustav Schroeder and crew arranged formal dinners with veal Marengo, costume balls, even worship services for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. But when the ship arrived in Cuban waters, President Laredo Bru, worried about anti-immigrant resentment fanned by Nazi agents, refused to let it berth. He demanded authentic visas, which only 28 passengers had.

The ship anchored outside Havana for seven days while men who had arrived on previous voyages hired rowboats to take them to the St. Louis so they could shout messages to their sobbing wives and children on deck. American emissaries bargained frantically with Cuban officials, two passengers attempted suicide, and journalists flocked to the riveting drama. Among those allowed to disembark were Miriam Bonne and her two young children, Beatrice and Jack. Her husband, Martin, already in Cuba, was able to secure visas through an acquaintance married to the daughter of Havana's mayor.

''That evening I saw my husband for the first time crying,'' recalled Mrs. Bonne, a thin, red-headed woman whose daughter and son grew up in Washington Heights to become a professor and a stock consultant.

Roosevelt Refuses To Intervene

On June 2, the St. Louis raised anchor. It drifted along the Florida coast for five days while telegrams implored President Franklin D. Roosevelt to intervene. With isolationist sentiments, tinged by anti-Semitism, riding high, the pleas were rejected. That played into Goebbels's strategy to show the world that Germans had no more antipathy for Jews than anyone else did.

''Here's the country with the Statue of Liberty and here's this boat and these people are desperate and they can see the lights of Miami, and the Coast Guard is there to make sure nobody swims ashore,'' said David S. Wyman, author of ''The Abandonment of the Jews,'' a study of world response to the Holocaust. ''It's a broader picture of a world that didn't have room for Jews.''

As the ship crossed the Atlantic, a pact was reached to prevent the passengers' return to Germany. Britain accepted 287 passengers, France 224, Belgium 214 and the Netherlands 181. When three of those countries came under Nazi rule, some passengers were trapped once more.

This month, ferreting out the story of Moses Hammerschlag, the researchers visited the Washington Heights apartment of Victoria Hammerschlag Rosenberg, an Orthodox woman who escaped Germany and entered the United States as a 9-year-old in 1946 to live with her Uncle Moses in his cramped two-room apartment. The animated Mrs. Rosenberg told how Mr. Hammerschlag, sick with arteriosclerosis and heartbroken at the loss of a wife he could not get out of Germany, died in 1947 at 64.

''Isn't that a terrible thing what they did,'' she says of the American Government as she scans the list of passengers. ''It's like it's not real.''

'The War Came Before She Came'

She put the researchers in touch with her cousin, Henry Hammerschlag, 78, in Florida. By phone, he told them that his father, Moses, a cattle dealer, hid in Brussels in 1940 with a family named Steinmetz and pestered American officials to give him a visa. His wife, Miriam, who had not joined him on the St. Louis because she needed to place her father in a rest home, was on a waiting list for an American visa, but as Henry put it, ''The war came before she came.'' After 1942, Moses Hammerschlag never heard from her again. Henry Hammerschlag learned on a postwar trip to Germany that his mother had been put on a transport to Lublin, Poland, on May 12, 1942, but never arrived.

Moses Hammerschlag, the researchers have also learned, is buried in Cedar Park Cemetery in Paramus, N.J., in the eternal embrace of the land that in 1939 turned him and his fellow passengers away.

Source: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04EEDB1639F932A05750C0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

PASCAL'S PROVINCIAL LETTERS




Lettres provinciales

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Lettres provinciales (Provincial letters) are a series of eighteen letters written by French philosopher and theologian Blaise Pascal under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte. Written in the midst of the formulary controversy between the Jansenists and the Jesuits, they are a defense of the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld from Port-Royal, a friend of Pascal who in 1656 was condemned by the Faculté de Théologie at the Sorbonne in Paris for views that were claimed to be heretical. The First letter is dated January 23, 1656 and the Eighteenth March 24, 1657. A fragmentary Nineteenth letter is frequently included with the other eighteen.

In these letters, Pascal humorously attacked casuistry, a popular rhetorical method used by theologists, and accused Jesuits of moral laxity. Being quickly forced underground while writing the Provincial Letters, Pascal pretended them to be the report of a Parisian to a friend in the provinces on the moral and theological issues then exciting the intellectual and religious circles in the capital. Pascal, combining the fervor of a convert with the wit and polish of a man of the world, reached a new level of style in French prose.

Aside from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work. Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and vicious satire in his arguments made the letters ripe for public consumption, and influenced the prose of later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Brilliantly written by Pascal, the Provincial Letters were in fact the product of a collaborative work of theologians from Port-Royal, and most of the arguments used were already to be found in Arnauld's Théologie morale des Jésuites [1], which had led the Jesuit Nicolas Caussin to reply to the libel. The main source on Jesuit casuistry used by Pascal was Antonio Escobar's Summula casuum conscientiae (1627), several propositions of which would be later condemned by Pope Innocent XI.

Paradoxically, the Provincial Letters were both a success and a defeat: a defeat, on the political and theological level, and a success on the moral level [1]. Thus, King Louis XIV ordered that the book be shredded and burnt in 1660. The final letter from Pascal, in 1657, had defied the Pope himself, provoking Alexander VII to condemn the letters. But that didn't stop most of educated France from reading them. And on the other hand, even Pope Alexander, while publicly opposing them, nonetheless was persuaded by Pascal's arguments. He condemned "laxism" in the church and ordered a revision of casuistical texts just a few years later (1665–66, and then 1679 [1]).

Contents [hide]
1 Content of the letters
1.1 Fourth Letter
1.2 Casuistry
2 Reactions and legacy
3 Quotes
3.1 Quotes about the Provincial Letters
4 See also
5 Footnotes
6 Bibliography
7 External links



[edit] Content of the letters
Structurally, the first three letters ridicule the dispute between the Thomists and the Jesuits on the nature of salvation, rather asserting a Jansenist understanding of salvation. Making allusion to the Congregatio de Auxiliis, the debate concerned the respective role of grace and free will, Molinists (i.e. Jesuits) claiming that an "efficacious grace" was not necessary to save man, but only a "sufficient grace" bestowed by God to all men, while Thomists claimed that the "sufficient grace," given to all men, had to be assisted by an "efficacious grace," bestowed only to the select few (in accordance also with Augustinism). Pascal thus highlighted, in the Second Letter, that neo-Thomists and Jesuits were using the same term, "sufficient grace", with two different senses, for political reasons.


[edit] Fourth Letter
The Fourth Letter deals with the question of "actual grace," the Jesuits claiming that sin could only be committed if people were deprived of current knowledge of the evil inherent to the planned action. Pascal quoted Le Moyne, a professor to the Sorbonne from 1642 to 1654 — Le Moyne's definition had already been used by Arnauld in the Apologie pour les saints Pères [2]:

“1. On the one hand, God sheds abroad on the soul some measure of love, which gives it a bias toward the thing commanded; and on the other, a rebellious concupiscence solicits it in the opposite direction. 2. God inspires the soul with a knowledge of its own weakness. 3. God reveals the knowledge of the physician who can heal it. 4. God inspires it with a desire to be healed. 5. God inspires a desire to pray and solicit his assistance.” “And unless all these things occur and pass through the soul,” added the monk, “the action is not properly a sin, and cannot be imputed, as M. le Moine shows in the same place and in what follows.

Pascal replied, through his narrator, that this meant that all those who were complete sinners and therefore had absolutely no knowledge of God were thus excused by this doctrine; while he argued, citing the Bible [3], that those who did believe in God but were deprived of knowledge of their evil actions (and thus deprived, for a moment, of the Jesuits' "actual grace") were still sinners.

Furthermore, Pascal ridiculized Etienne Bauny, author of a Somme des péchés qui se commettent en tous états (Paris, 1634 [4]), attempt to use Aristotle to justify this doctrine of sin (which could, according to Bauny, only be effective if man possessed the knowledge of the action). Bauny thus quoted the Nicomachean Ethics, III, 1, alleging that a voluntary action needed knowledge of what was good or evil in it. Pascal replied, also quoting Aristotle (he seemingly was the only one to use this argument in this debate [5]), that Aristotle spoke only of knowledge of the actual circumstances of the act, but not at all of the capacity to discriminate between good and evil — since Aristotle stated that one who was devoided of that capacity was not excused at all, but rather considered a vicious man.


[edit] Casuistry
The rest of the letters are mainly an attack on Jesuit casuistry. The Fifth letter, published in a hurry after a police search in Jansenist-friendly publishing houses, is particularly dedicated to criticisms against the Jesuits' doctrine of moral probabilism, according to which one could adopt a "probable opinion," that is, an opinion made plausible by the authority of a theologian, even if it was less probable than another opinion — especially concerning conducts to adopt, the nature of sins, etc. Pascal relied heavily on this witty attack, composed of quotes from various books written by Jesuit casuists, in particular by Antonio Escobar y Mendoza's Summula casuum conscientiae (1627), which had enjoyed a great success [6], and also Thomas Sanchez, Vincenzo Filliucci (Jesuit and penitentiary at St Peter's), Antonino Diana, Paul Laymann, Etienne Bauny, Louis Cellot, Valerius Reginaldus, Bernard Lamy (censored on 8 October 1649 by the Faculty of Leuven for his defense of homicide), etc.

In this letter, he evoked passing-by the Chinese Rites controversy which ended with the Jesuits' condemnation and the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide's decision to prohibit idolatry under any pretexts [7]. He also alluded to the problem of the relations between Christian virtues and natural virtues, debated in particular during the first half of the 17th century. After Jean-Pierre Camus and Arnauld, Pascal attacked the Jesuit Antoine Sirmond, who had practically admitted the identity between natural virtues and Christian virtues [8].

Starting at Letter VI, dated 10 April 1656, Pascal gives a number of examples of Jesuit casuistry and of its "relaxed moral," citing abundant sources (a lot of whom came from Escobar). He illustrated casuistry by citing mostly Jesuitic texts allowing excuses to abstain from fasting (citing Vincenzo Filliucci's Moralium quaestionum de christianis officiis et casibus conscientiae... tomus, Lyon, 1622; often cited by Escobar); from giving to the poor (indirectly citing Gabriel Vasquez from Diana; for a monk temporarily defrocking himself to go to the brothel (citing an exact quote of Sanchez from Escobar, who was curving around Pius IV's Contra sollicitantes and Pius V's Contra clericos papal bulls, the latter directed against sodomite clergy [9])); in the Seventh Letter, propositions allowing homicides (even to the clergy) and duels as long as the intention is not directed for revenge; others permitting corruption of judges as long as it is not intended as corruption; others allowing usury or Mohatra contracts; casuistic propositions allowing robbery and stealing from one's master; others allowing lying through the use of rhetorical "mental reservation" (restrictio mentalis; for instance: saying, loudly "I swear that...", silenciously "I said that...", and loudly again the object of the pledge) and equivocations. A number of these scandalous propositions were later condemned by Pope Innocent XI.

In the Ninth Letter, the Jesuit explains to the narrator easy ways to enter Heaven, citing a book called “Paradise opened to Philagio, in a Hundred Devotions to the Mother of God, easily practised.” The Tenth Letter is dedicated to casuistic proceedals to lighten the ritual of confession and to the debate between the respective roles of attrition and contrition; the Jesuit character claiming that sole attrition combined with the sacrament of penance is sufficient for man's salvation, while the narrator insists on the necessity of contrition and of the love of God, citing extracts of the Bible often quoted by the Jansenists, the abbé de Saint-Cyran and Jansenius [10].

The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Letters criticize the Jesuits' legitimation of homicide. In the latter, Pascal abstains himself from discussing the most scandalous Jesuit propositions, legitiming tyrannicides and abortions. He quotes, among others, the Church's policies of penance for sinners guilty of willful murder officialized during the Synod of Ancyra (341).

In the Seventeeth Letter, Pascal took again the problem of the efficacious grace and of the "de facto vs de juris" debate concerning the inclusion, or not, of the 5 Propositions condemned by the Pope in the Cum Occasione papal bull, in Jansenius's work (see Formulary controversy for details). Port-Royal and Pascal argued that although the Pope had condemned these 5 Propositions as heretical, they were not to be found in Jansenius. Furthermore, they claimed that the Pope held authority only on matters of faith, and not on technical de facto matters. Thus, drawing on the Jesuits' argumentation itself, Pascal argued here that one could not be held heretical to believe that Jansenius' work did not include these 5 Propositions, and that the Papal condemnation only restricted itself to the heresy itself, not to the question of their inclusion in Jansenius' work. Thus, he recalled the Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmin's sentences concerning the authority of religious councils concerning matters of dogma versus de facto issues; he also recalled the debate between St Athanasius and St Basil concerning the interpretation of Dionysus of Alexandria, who was accused by Basil of Arianism and therefore convoked before the Pope Dionysius in 262; or the various contradictory papal interpretations given to the Scythian monks; as well as another debate concerning Pope Honorius I, who had been later anathemized by the Third Council of Constantinople, although Cardinal Bellarmin defended Honorius' orthodoxy, claiming that the condemned propositions were not to be found in Honorius.


[edit] Reactions and legacy
Further information: Formulary controversy
The reaction to the Lettres provinciales was substantial. Pascal's use of wit, humor, and mockery in attacking existing institutions made his work extremely popular. However, its publication was primarily via the underground press, and in 1660 Louis XIV banned the book and ordered it shredded and burned. Pascal himself had to enter clandestinity, living in cheap hostels. Nevertheless, the letters survived and influenced the prose of later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The extract of the Seventh Letter concerning the "direction of intention" influenced Molière's Tartuffe (Act IV, scene V, 1489-1493).

They were first translated into Latin by Antoine Arnauld, and then into many other languages, including English in 1657 (Les Provinciales, or the Mystery of Jesuitisme, discovered in certain letters written upon occasion of the present differences at Sorbonne between the jansenists and the molinists, London, Royston, 1657) by the Anglican theologian Henry Hammond, while in 1684 a polyglot translation (in French, Latin, Spanish and Italian) was published by Balthasar Winfelt [11].


[edit] Quotes
On probabilism: "“Oh, yes,” said he, “we answer just as we please; or rather, I should say, just as it may please those who ask our advice. Here are our rules, taken from Fathers Layman, Vasquez, Sanchez, and the four-and-twenty worthies, in the words of Layman: ‘A doctor, on being consulted, may give an advice, not only probable according to his own opinion, but contrary to his own opinion, provided this judgement happens to be more favourable or more agreeable to the person that consults him—si forte haec favorabilior seu exoptatior sit. Nay, I go further and say that there would be nothing unreasonable in his giving those who consult him a judgement held to be probable by some learned person, even though he should be satisfied in his own mind that it is absolutely false.’”" (Letter V)
"“In other words,” said I, “they have got maxims for the clergy, the nobility, and the commons. Well, I am quite impatient to hear them.”" (Letter VI)
"“You have a very short memory, returned the monk. “Did I not inform you a little ago that, according to our fathers Cellot and Reginald, ‘in matters of morality we are to follow, not the ancient fathers, but the modern casuists?’”" (Letter VI)
On Antonino Diana's justification of duels: "‘If a gentleman,’ says he, in a passage cited by Diana, ‘who is challenged to fight a duel, is well known to have no religion, and if the vices to which he is openly and unscrupulously addicted are such as would lead people to conclude, in the event of his refusing to fight, that he is actuated, not by the fear of God, but by cowardice, and induce them to say of him that he was a hen, and not a man, gallina, et non vir; in that case he may, to save his honour, appear at the appointed spot—not, indeed, with the express intention of fighting a duel, but merely with that of defending himself, should the person who challenged him come there unjustly to attack him. His action in this case, viewed by itself, will be perfectly indifferent; for what moral evil is there in one stepping into a field, taking a stroll in expectation of meeting a person, and defending one’s self in the event of being attacked? And thus the gentleman is guilty of no sin whatever; for in fact it cannot be called accepting a challenge at all, his intention being directed to other circumstances, and the acceptance of a challenge consisting in an express intention to fight, which we are supposing the gentleman never had.’”
“You have not kept your word with me, sir,” said I. “This is not, properly speaking, to permit duelling; on the contrary, the casuist is so persuaded that this practice is forbidden that, in licensing the action in question, he carefully avoids calling it a duel.” (Letter VII)

"“A most pious assassination!” said I. “Still, however, pious though it be, it is assassination, if a man is permitted to kill his enemy in a treacherous manner.”" (Letter VII)
On usury and witchcraft: "Usury, according to our fathers, consists in little more than the intention of taking the interest as usurious. Escobar, accordingly, shows you how you may avoid usury by a simple shift of the intention." (Letter VIII)
"“Distinguo, as Sanchez says, here. If the magician be ignorant of the diabolic art—si sit artis diabolicae ignarus—he is bound to restore: but if he is an expert sorcerer, and has done all in his power to arrive at the truth, the obligation ceases; for the industry of such a magician may be estimated at a certain sum of money.’”
“There is some sense in that,” I said; “for this is an excellent plan to induce sorcerers to aim at proficiency in their art, in the hope of making an honest livelihood, as you would say, by faithfully serving the public.”" (Letter VIII)

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."" (Letter XVI)

[edit] Quotes about the Provincial Letters
Said Voltaire concerning the greatness of the letters, "All types of eloquence are contained in these letters.". He also called them "the best-written book that has yet appeared in France."[12]
When Bossuet was asked what book he would rather have written had he not written his own, he answered, the Provincial Letters of Pascal.[13]

[edit] See also
Casuistry
Catholic moral theology
Port-Royal Logic
Formulary controversy
Jesuitism

[edit] Footnotes
^ a b c Vincent Carraud (author of Pascal et la philosophie, PUF, 1992), Le jansénisme, Société des Amis de Port-Royal, on-line since June 2007 (French)
^ See note p.314 of Ferreyrolles and Sellier's edition, Pochotèque, Classiques Garnier, 1999-2004
^ Pascal alluded to the Parable of the Faithful Servant in the Gospel of Luke, XII, 47-48, to Ecclesiastes, IX, 1, and to the First Epistle to the Corinthians, IV, 4 : Nihil enim mihi conscius sum, sed non in hoc justificatus sum
^ See note p.312 of Ferreyrolles and Sellier's edition, Pochotèque, Classiques Garnier, 1999-2004
^ See note p.324 of Ferreyrolles and Sellier's edition
^ See note p.335 of Ferreyrolles and Sellier's edition, Pochotèque, Classiques Garnier, 1999-2004. See also Karl Weiss, P. Antonio de Escobar y Mendoza als Moraltheologe in Pascals Beleuchtung und im Lichte der Wahrheit, who adopted a pro-Escobar point of view, to which replied Augustin Gazier, Blaise Pascal et Antoine Escobar, étude historique et critique.., Paris, H. et E. Champion, 1912, 76 p.
^ 9 July 1645 decree signed by Cardinal Luigi Capponi. This is allegedly the first reference in French theological debate of Chinese rites. See Classiques Garnier edition by Gérard Ferreyroles and Philippe Sellier, 1999
^ Note p.334 of Ferreyrolles and Sellier's edition
^ pp.350-351 of Ferreyrolles and Sellier's edition
^ Gospel of Matthew, 22:36 and 40, John 3:16, First Epistle to the Corinthians 16:22, First Epistle of John 3:14, John 14:24
^ On these translations, see Louis Cognet, 1965, notice re-published in Ph. Sellier's edition of Pascal (Classiques Garnier)
^ Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV 424, 358.
^ Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV 359.

[edit] Bibliography
Les Provinciales - Pensées Et Opuscules Divers, Lgf/Le Livre De Poche, La Pochothèque, 2004, edited by Philippe Sellier & Gérard Ferreyrolles (Les Provinciales are edited here after Louis Cognet's edition) (French)

[edit] External links
Provincial Letters on-line (English translation)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettres_provinciales"