The witness of the Catholics
of Nagasaki shows
God’s providence in the darkest of times. By Brother Anthony Josemaria  On August 9, 1945, God’s inscrutable providence allowed an atomic bomb named “Fat Man” to be dropped from a B-29 into the heavily populated city of Nagasaki. The epicenter of the blast was the Urakami district, the heart and soul of Catholicism in Japan since the sixteenth century. My purpose in this article is to share an insight into God’s purpose in allowing this horrible event, a discovery made from reading (the recent Ignatius Press reprint of) Fr. Paul Glynn’s marvelous book A Song for Nagasaki. The book is subtitled, The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb.1
Nagasaki is the oldest open-port city of Japan and one of the most beautiful, situated in the southernmost part of the country, on the western side of the island of Kyushu and only about fifty miles from South Korea. A natural harbor, the great port of Nagasaki is protected by several islands at its entrance, and consists of a heavily populated residential and commercial area extending a few miles up the valleys feeding the harbor and also along terraces up the hillsides. Though commercial activity declined in the twentieth century and especially after World War II (because of the closing of trade with China), industry increased greatly during the twentieth century as Nagasaki became the shipbuilding capital of Japan.
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Be confident, bold
and loving,
for Christ has won! By Fr. David Meconi, S.J.  In his 1952 Razing the Bastions (Schleifung der Bastionen) Hans Urs von Balthasar challenged the Church to replace any posturing of fear with a more world-friendly embrace.1 In what proved to be a much disputed work, von Balthasar argued that the Church must leave the security of Catholic isolation and move into a more confident involvement with anti-Catholic worldviews and biases. Sensing the call to be engaged with Protestants as well as non-believers in institutions of higher learning, in the marketplace, in laboratories and in all ranges of (legitimate) research, as well as in every aspect of society and culture, the Church left the “Catholic ghetto,” making the middle of the 20th century a unique opportunity to “take every thought captive in obedience to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). This of course meant risking a sense of surety for the entry into—but hopeful conversion of—those places of modernity where the Church was then still leery to tread.
The call foreshadowed by von Balthasar was vindicated by future popes and in part realized with the Second Vatican Council’s aggiornamento (updating). Paul VI’s first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam (1964), for example, presented God the Father’s love for sinful man as the fundamental dialogue (a term that appears eighty-one times in the English edition) in which God makes himself accessible and therefore vulnerable in the sending of his Son. Willing to enter into the “messiness” of human life, God thus invites all to a dialogue of mutual understanding and charity. God longs to bring all things into himself through his Church and, stripping himself of all glory, draws near to wherever the imperfect find themselves. Toward the end of this encyclical, Pope Paul VI called on all Catholics to continue this mission by being as catechetically learned and articulate as possible, by assuming the good will of those whom they aim to evangelize, and by being sensitive to the needs and histories of others. Above all, charity must mark this exchange, and here the Holy Father warned: It would indeed be a disgrace if our dialogue were marked by arrogance, the use of bared words or offensive bitterness. What gives it its authority is the fact that it affirms the truth, shares with others the gifts of charity, is itself an example of virtue, avoids peremptory language, makes no demands. It is peaceful, has no use for extreme methods, is patient under contradiction and inclines towards generosity.2
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Human flourishing
means seeing
what is and acting accordingly. By Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.  “A man properly nurtured in poetry will quickly spot shoddy, poorly made works and ill-grown things, and his joy and aversion will be properly placed; he’ll approve beautiful things, joyfully take them into his soul, and from their nurture grow beautiful and good; ugly ones he’ll hate and properly condemn even as a child before he can grasp the reason, and when reason comes he’ll know her and embrace her as one of his own.”
—Plato, Repub. III.401e-402a
“I guess you don’t hear Phocylides’ saying that when a man has enough to live on he should practice excellence.”
—Plato, Repub. III.407a “Well, I suppose you agree that people are deprived of bad things voluntarily and of good things involuntarily. And isn’t it bad to be deceived of the truth, but good to encounter it? Or isn’t conjecturing the truth the same as encountering it?”
—Plato, Repub. III.413a
Near the end of the Second Book of Plato’s Republic, we find Socrates telling Adeimantus, “No one would willingly accept a lie in the most vital place about the most vital things. To have that there terrifies us more than anything.” Plato’s brother is still confused. “What where?” he says, “I still don’t understand.” Socrates explains, “You do not get the point because you think I mean something highfalutin. All I mean is that no one wants to be deceived and ignorant about reality in his soul; to have a lie there instead of the truth. Everyone would hate that” (382b). Notice what is being said here. We might well lie to others in order to obtain what we want. Human beings do that, though all lies, like all error, are based in some truth. Otherwise it could not happen, since a lie presupposes that the truth is being spoken to a listener who presumes the truthfulness of the speaker. If everyone lied, we could not communicate. We would all have to shut up permanently. Thus in lying, we are, or at least we think we are, doing something for our benefit. We intend some good, usually what we think to be our own. The question posed by Socrates, however, concerns not our lying to someone else but our lying to ourselves, a different nuance. Lying about what? Lying about the most important things. An objective order judges us. The assumption is that some things are of more importance than others. Life has to do with sorting them out, the important things from the unimportant ones, not that unimportant things are not also of considerable value. To deceive ourselves about what we are, of what is important, however, stands in a different category.
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The Church’s response to this
evolving crisis has been,
at the very least, disturbing. By Daniel Cere  We live in a culture that celebrates progressive liberation from sexual taboos and constraints. The sexual transgressions of days gone by have been rapidly refashioned into the conventional sexualities of today; even more risqué sexualities like sadomasochism and polyamory are well on their way to becoming packaged and mainstreamed for popular consumption. But there are glaring exceptions to this trend, particularly when sexual relations involve abuse or exploitation. More to the point, contemporary culture now displays acutely heightened moral indignation toward one area of sexual transgression, the abuse and exploitation of children.
In Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America, historian Philip Jenkins documents a veritable “revolution” in our moral response to child sexual abuse.1 There was a time when child molesters were brushed off with dismissive smirks and tawdry jokes. However, today, moral horror, not condescending humor, marks the public response to child abuse. Furthermore, in sharp contrast to more traditional patterns of concealment and strict confidentiality, recent social developments have created a climate more disposed to the disclosure of abuse. Jenkins seems to view this growing public indignation with a certain amount of intellectual cynicism, but our heightened moral sensitivity does resonate with what we now know of the deep harm experienced by victims of abuse.
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The twentieth century was a tumultuous time in the Catholic Church for all concerned with the interpretation of the Bible. For the past few decades, this topic has been a principal concern of one prominent theologian. His interest in the topic arose at the time of the Second Vatican Council, when he was a promising young theologian from Germany who served at the Council as the theological adviser to Joseph Cardinal Frings, the archbishop of Cologne—Fr. Joseph Ratzinger. This interest has continued unabated into his reign as Pope Benedict XVI.
