All Things Catholic

Tomorrow Benedict XVI
travels to Valencia, Spain, for one of the briefest papal trips of recent
memory -- just 26 hours from his arrival at 11:30 am Saturday to wheels-up
again at 1:30 pm Sunday.

Those 26 hours, however, promise to be packed with drama.

The highlight, at least in terms of press interest, is likely to come
at 6:30 p.m. Saturday local time, when Pope Benedict meets José Luis
Rodr'guez Zapatero, the Socialist Prime Minister and bête noire of
European Catholicism. Since taking office in 2004, Zapatero's government
has either adopted or discussed legislation in favor of:

• Same-sex marriage legislation;
  
• Fast-track divorces;
  
• Curbing religious education in state schools;
  
• Supporting embryonic stem-cell research;
  
• Easing abortion laws;
  
• Reducing or eliminating public funding for the church.

The latest such move came just a month ago, when the government
proposed allowing transsexuals to legally change their gender without
undergoing surgery.

One intriguing sidebar to
the Spain trip is that the Cathedral of Valencia, which Benedict XVI will
visit Saturday, houses what is traditionally believed to be the Holy Grail
itself, i.e., the cup used by Christ to celebrate the Last Supper.

Believers regard it as a relic equal in importance to the Shroud of
Turin, the reputed burial cloth of Christ.

In its current form, the storied "Holy Chalice of Valencia" consists of
two parts.

The upper cup, regarded as the original cup of Christ, is made of red
agate stone, semi-spherical in shape, sometimes described as the size of
half an orange. According to the tradition, the cup was sent to Spain by
St. Lawrence, himself a Spaniard, during anti-Christian persecutions under
Emperor Valerian in 258 AD.

Another Catholic
missionary has been attacked in Turkey. Fr. Pierre Brunissen, a Frenchman,
was stabbed outside the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows in Samsun, on the
Black Sea coast.

Brunissen survived, with a gash in his thigh about 10 centimeters long.

The incident comes on the heels of the murder of Italian missionary Fr.
Andrea Santoro on Feb. 5 in Trabzon.

Several years ago, I was
on a panel in Montreal with Jesuit Fr. Bill Cain, head writer of ABC-TV's
short-lived series "Nothing Sacred." Cain described the negative reaction
the show had received in some Catholic circles, but expressed confidence
that someday its value would be recognized.

"Today they silence you, and in 200 years they beatify you," Cain
joked. "That seems to be the way it goes in the church."

"Cain's Law" is hardly universal, but it is spot-on for the early 19th
century Italian philosopher and theologian Fr. Antonio Rosmini, whose
works were censured during and after his life, but who today stands on the
brink of sainthood.

On Monday, 155 years after Rosmini's death, Benedict XVI signed a
"decree of heroic virtue," clearing the first hurdle towards Rosmini's
beatification. In fact, Benedict approved 19 decrees on Monday, moving
forward the causes of 162 candidates.

In his famous 1848 work The Five Wounds of the Church, Rosmini
identified the most grave challenges facing the church of his day as he
saw them:

• The division of the people from the clergy in worship (due to
  ignorance and the use of Latin),
  
• The defective education of the clergy,
  
• The disunion of bishops (due to territorialism, nationalism and
  wealth),
  
• The nomination of bishops by the secular power (rather than by
  election), and
  
• The enslavement of the church by riches (due to the long shadow of
  feudalism).

These positions may seem unremarkable today, but at the time they
generated enormous controversy, and left Rosmini under a cloud. In 1887,
22 years after Rosmini's death, the Holy Office issued a decree Post
obitum in which 40 "propositions" lifted from Rosmini's work were
condemned. For example, Rosmini was accused of favoring "ontologism," a
sort of philosophical form of pantheism. While the "propositions" largely
had to do with the mystery of God and creation, the politics of the 19th
century hovered in the background, especially Rosmini's openness to
Italian unification over against defenders of the temporal power of the
papacy.

For more than a century, Rosmini's supporters, including the Institute
of Charity which he founded, pushed for a reevaluation.

In 1984, John Paul II approved the opening of a beatification cause for
Rosmini, and in his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, John Paul
referred to Rosmini as an example of the "fruitful relationship between
philosophy and the word of God in the courageous research pursued by more
recent thinkers." (Also included on that list was John Henry Newman,
another churchman who stood under a cloud for a period of time.)

All this led to a nota of the Congregation of the Doctrine of
Faith dated July 1, 2001, which declared that the motives that led to the
1887 condemnation "can now be considered superseded," concluding that the
aberrant material in the 40 propositions "does not belong to the authentic
position of Rosmini." In effect, the nota amounted to an official
rehabilitation.

With Monday's action by Benedict XVI, Rosmini is now an authenticated
miracle away from beatification, and two from officially being declared a
saint.

One lesson the Rosmini saga may suggest is caution about hurling
accusations against today's disputed writers and activists, of whatever
stripe. While "Cain's Law" doesn't apply in every case, nevertheless
history indicates that often time has to pass before the church can reach
final judgment.

On June 29, the Feast of
Sts. Peter and Paul, Benedict XVI imposed the pallium, the symbol of a
metropolitan archbishop's office, on 27 archbishops appointed during the
last year.

The pallium, which also symbolizes the link between the metropolitan
and the See of Peter, is a circular band about two inches wide, with two
pendants hanging down front and back. It's ornamented with six dark
crosses of silk, and is worn over liturgical vestments. The pallium is
given to metropolitan archbishops appointed during the last year, and can
be worn only within their ecclesiastical province.