Blessings, ֎, Calendars and Christmas

LINKS Declaration “Fiducia Supplicans” on the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings:

https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2023/12/18/231218b.html

Vatican News write-up on Calendar Change For UGCC

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2023-02/ukrainian-greek-catholics-to-celebrate-christmas-on-december-25.html

"CardiNEWS" Background music by David Fesliyan. www.fesliyanstudios.com

Tsar Power:

https://tsarpowerpod.weebly.com/

The History of Saqartvelo Georgia: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-saqartvelo-georgia/id1567806651

TRANSCRIPT

Hello everyone,

First, some CardiNEWS! A few days ago, Cardinal Fernández, who, I should note, already made it into the next round of Cardinal Numbers so he's just running up his score at this point, issued a high level document in his capacity as the head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith–aka the Vatican’s Head Theology Guy–that explicitly allows for the informal blessing of homosexual couples with certain conditions.

The document was at pains to stress that it does not represent a change in church teaching. I'll defer to the theologians on that, but in the end I've seen takeaways ranging from “this is definitely a change in church teaching” in an excited tone from the more liberally inclined both inside and outside the Church and the same takeaway in a despairing tone from those more conservatively inclined. Then there are those who say “this is definitely NOT a change in Church teaching”, a take that comes mainly from more centrist folks and but also from the hard left who think allowing informal blessings of gay couples while being at pains to distinguish them from marriage isn't even close to the kind of change they want to see.

Basically, whether you think this document represents Pope Francis changing doctrine seems to boil down to whether you were already expecting Pope Francis to change doctrine. Folks seem to be seeing what they expected to see. For my part, I was actually genuinely surprised, mainly because there had been none of the usual rumors preceding the release of the document. Usually you get more smoke before the fire.

In the end, I am perfectly willing to say that blessings are good, get them if you can and are inclined to seek them. They're more readily available now than they were last week.

The second topic tonight is something I meant to cover in my what to expect update but, well, forgot. I've started labeling my Cardinal Numbers posts with a special symbol, and I do mean special. Roberto from Tsar Power help me out *** thanks Roberto who is also from The History of Saqartvelo Georgia. So yes, the Arevakhach (֎) is an Armenian symbol symbolizing eternity, used in contexts from the Christian to the Neo-Pagan to the secular, always tied to Armenia, so it's kind of a national symbol for them.

I admit I'm borrowing it for pretty much entirely unrelated purposes, namely that it's a distinctive looking symbol that also works in UNICODE and should therefore be able to render properly for ya'll pretty much regardless of device, plus outside Armenia it doesn't really have an established meaning that might confuse folks, so all in all those things add up to make it a useful symbol to use to make my Cardinals episodes stand out from the rest at a quick glance. So, with thanks to Armenian culture and my Armenian and quasi-Armenian contacts who assured me it would not be offensive to use the Arevakhach for that purpose as long as I took a moment to explain its place in Armenian culture and as a national symbol, I'll be using it to flag Cardinal Numbers content moving forward, starting with, well, starting with the back catalog stuff I've already started flagging, but then after that starting with the next batch of 12 cardinals which I am hoping but not guaranteeing will begin releasing tomorrow, as I present to you the 12 Cardinals of Christmas!

Oh, and mentioning Christmas brings me to one other milestone I wanted to note. One consequence of Putin's invasion of Ukraine is the fact that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has decided to partially adopt the Gregorian Calendar, 441 years after its introduction under Pope Gregory XIII. Orthodox Churches under the Moscow Patriarchate are among the few institutions still using the Julian Calendar, which Pope Gregory revised to reflect solar reality as Easter had begun to drift out of its springtime home. The move is not complete, as the present adoption of the new calendar actually doesn't apply to the dating of Easter in this case, but there is hope that the dating of Easter will be resolved a couple years from now, in 2025, for the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the first great council of the Christian Church. I'm not going to hold my breath on the Easter controversy being fully resolved in my lifetime since it's one of the longest-running points of contention in the history of Christianity, but for now if you know any Ukrainian Greek Catholics, be sure to welcome them to Christmas in the Gregorian Calendar. З Різдвом (Христовим), or, Merry Christmas!