{"id":2218,"date":"2007-04-07T13:08:17","date_gmt":"2007-04-07T13:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/as-ja-was-saying.html"},"modified":"2007-04-07T13:08:17","modified_gmt":"2007-04-07T13:08:17","slug":"as-ja-was-saying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/as-ja-was-saying.html","title":{"rendered":"As JA was saying…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of you might recall that in late February, John Allen ran an column criticizing the coverage of religion, particularly Catholicism, that we find in the British press.<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s a contender – one of many – for Exhibit A. <\/a><\/p>\n

A ridiculous and ignorant piece by the Rome <\/em>correspondent of the London Times<\/em> on the Stations of the Cross prayed last night in the Colisseum:<\/p>\n

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THE Pope risked upsetting many of the world’s Catholic faithful yesterday when he recast a central ritual of the Easter ceremonies.<\/h2>\n
The pontiff has radically revised the traditional Good Friday Stations of the Cross procession that marks Christ’s progress from prison to the crucifixion. A reference to St Veronica, who wiped Christ’s face with a veil, has been dropped, while Judas and Pontius Pilate have been introduced. <\/p>\n

But he stuck with tradition in a Holy Thursday ceremony in which he washed and dried the feet of 12 men at a service commemorating Christ’s gesture of humility to his apostles on the night before he died. <\/p>\n

The 79-year-old German Pope Benedict, approaching the second Easter of his pontificate, called on Catholics to pray for the "purification of the heart". <\/p>\n

But he courted controversy with the new itinerary for the route, also known as the Via Dolorosa, or Way of Sorrows, which had been drawn up to give more weight to "authentic" gospels, Vatican officials said. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That crazy Pope.<\/p>\n

The Telegraph was just as bad:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Pope shocked many Catholics last night with a dramatically revised version of the Stations of the Cross, one of the central rituals of the Easter ceremony.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

News Flash<\/span><\/strong>: <\/u><\/p>\n

The particular structure of the Stations used last night were first used in 1991 by Pope John Paul II <\/a>and were used 1994, 1995, 1997, in 2002 <\/a>and 2004<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n

And I’d say that the existence of JPII’s Biblical stations has not exactly been a state secr over the past 16 years, either. There are several published versions of them, you know. <\/p>\n

Not that John Paul II Biblical Stations of the Cross were uncontroversial – not quite as upsetting to some as the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, but still, there were (as there are bound to be) naysayers.<\/p>\n

So for the major Vatican writer of a major international paper to frame this story in this way, claiming that this is a)new and something b) Benedict did when c)he neither framed the structure of these Stations or even wrote the meditations…is amazingly irresponsible. Amazing, as such things always are, but not surprising. <\/p>\n

\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of you might recall that in late February, John Allen ran an column criticizing the coverage of religion, particularly Catholicism, that we find in the British press. Here’s a contender – one of many – for Exhibit A. A ridiculous and ignorant piece by the Rome correspondent of the London Times on the Stations…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nAs JA was saying... - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/as-ja-was-saying.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"As JA was saying... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Some of you might recall that in late February, John Allen ran an column criticizing the coverage of religion, particularly Catholicism, that we find in the British press. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}