Tolerance and Diversity in Liberalism.

Bishop Baron does a great job.

//Brian Williams and Chris Matthews couldn't resist the opportunity to harp on the lack of married and women priests in the Catholic Church, as MSNBC provided live coverage of Pope Francis's open-air Mass in Philadelphia on Sunday. Williams pointed out that one of the archbishops at the Mass is "from a family, [but] he cannot go home to one. He cannot have one, and be...of service to the Catholic Church. And it is still that thing that differentiates and separates the religion from so many others." [video below]

Matthews asserted that "if you're going to have ever women priests, you have to have the first step being married priests – because only in the case where you have wives...lobbying on behalf of women priests will it ever happen." Moments later, Bishop Robert Barron of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, a NBC News contributor for the papal visit, actually schooled the two MSNBC personalities on how their premise was faulty:

BISHOP ROBERT BARRON, NBC NEWS PAPAL CONTRIBUTOR: As the celibate up here, I guess, Brian, I would say, to use a Scholastic term, 'nego majorem' – I deny your major premise – the major premise of the question – namely, that a celibate is without a family. You see this ring I'm wearing. I just got this when I became a bishop – and it's a wedding ring. And we're explicitly told, never take this ring off, because it's a sign the bishop is married to the people that he serves. It's a family relationship. And so, celibacy is not anti-family. It's a, kind of, different type of spiritual family. And a priest is very much of – a family man. Cardinal [Francis] George, a mentor of me, used to say that a priest is not a bachelor. He's a married man with children.

Newman to Birmingham to Murphy to Tolkien...

...to Colbert.

More Bartisms -

Ehrman responds to Father Robert Barron:

If The Very Reverend Robert Barron does find my book threatening, it is either because he has not read it closely enough or because he holds to fundamentalist views that have somehow or other managed to work their way into the hearts and minds of the Catholic clergy.   Or both.

Typical Bart Erhman - anyone who disagrees with him must be a fundamentalist. From my review of "Did Jesus Exist?":

Bart Ehrman has two goals in "Did Jesus Exist?" The first is responding to and rebutting the claim of "mythicists" that a person named Jesus who was the basis of the Christian movement never existed, i.e., that "Jesus" was a fictional character invented out of bits and pieces of the world's folklore. The second goal is to respond to the mythicist argument while still maintaining his prior positions that the contemporary view of Jesus held by "very conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians" (p. 72) aka "fundamentalist Christians" (p. 74) aka "well funded conservative Christians" (p. 142)aka "fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals (p. 231) - I made a game of noting the various times Ehrman "poisoned the well" and "strawmanned" opponents who were not "critical scholars" by labeling them with some variant of "conservative" - has no basis in the history of the "real" Jesus.

Also, Ehrman has never strayed very far from his fundamentalist anti-Catholic roots.

Also, what is with the repetition of "The Very Reverend" title?

I've often thought that Ehrman waives his hand at fundamentalist stereotypes of Catholicism in order to "Catholic-bait."  I wrote this in my review:

On the whole, Ehrman's characterizations concerning the "Catholic" position on the perpetual virginity of Mary are intellectually disturbing. Ehrman ought to have a more informed position inasmuch as he has taught the sub-Apostolic Father, including the Proto-Evangelium of James, for the Teaching Company. It's hard to tell with Ehrman whether his claim is just "Catholic-baiting." He may be so used to teaching to "conservative evangelicals" for whom associating anything with Catholicism makes it by definition weird and suspect that his default mode for persuasion is to make such an association with positions he wants to undermine. Alternatively, it may be as I've said, his fundamentalist assumptions still working their ways through his thought.

There is a fundie in the discussion, but it's not Father Barron.

Bart Ehrman - Super Scholar

Is Bart for real? Can he not read? Or is this just his normal disingenuous style?

He writes:

OK, so I’m a bit testy. But what really has sent me over the edge is his claim that my view is simply a re-hashing of Hugh Schonfield’s Passover Plot. Is he SERIOUS? Maybe he forgot what the thesis of the Passover Plot is. Or maybe he doesn’t care, but simply wants to tarnish me by association with an absurd thesis that someone else advanced, which in fact has nothing to do with mine//

But here's Baron's comment:

When I was a teenager, I read British Biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield’s Passover Plot, which lays out the same narrative, and just a few months ago, I read Reza Aslan’s Zealot, which pursues a very similar line, and I’m sure next Christmas or Easter I will read still another iteration of the theory. //

Barron was comparing Aslan to Schonfeld as an example of how anti-Christian arguments get recycled.

He was not comparing Ehrman to Schonfeld.

This is pretty typical, actually, of Ehrman's scholarship.

Whose side will you choose?

Father Baron on the Queenship of Mary...now with additional bible verses:

Father Baron on the "catholicity" of 007.

Liberty and Religious Faith.