Insight on the News
Robes Make the Priest?
Pope John Paul II apparently feels that those who would represent his church should stand out in a crowd. His “Papal Letter on the Discipline of Ecclesiastical Dress” warned Rome’s priests, nuns and monks that they are required to wear religious garb as a means of distinguishing them ‘from the secular environment in which they live.’ “As envoys of Christ sent to announce the gospel,” he declared, “we have a message to transmit, a message which is expressed both through words and through external signs.”
Cardinal Ugo Poletti, Rome’s vicar-general, followed up with a three-page letter to those involved, stating that “the religious suit or cassock is obligatory in liturgical celebrations, in the administrations of the sacraments, in preaching (and it) is strongly recommended in the milieu of one’s own pastoral ministry.”
But we ask: Are robes or other distinctive clothing essential to ‘transmitting the message of the gospel’? Apparently Christ and his apostles were able to transmit the Christian message without looking different from their brothers. In fact, Jesus said that such frills were among the faults of his day’s religious leaders: “Everything they do is done to attract attention, like wearing broader phylacteries and longer tassels” on their garments. Rather than being visibly different from one another, Jesus emphasized that Christians “have only one Master [Christ], and you are all brothers.” Can it be said that the true spirit of brotherhood is reflected when some set themselves apart with distinctive clothing?—Matthew 23:3-12, Catholic Jerusalem Bible.
Darwinism: Why They Believe
In their new book Evolution From Space, the noted British astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe assert that the chances of life’s springing from some ancient random mixing of chemicals are so “outrageously small” as to be absurd “even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.” They write that “Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide [chain of essential life substances] right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for survival. This situation is well known to geneticists and yet nobody seems to blow the whistle decisively on the theory.”
Why have scientists aware of this failed to “blow the whistle”? “If Darwinism were not considered socially desirable . . . it would of course be otherwise,” answers the book. When an entire society “becomes committed to a particular set of concepts, educational continuity makes it exceedingly hard to change the pattern,” it adds. “You either have to believe the concepts or you will be branded a heretic.” Evolutionists fear that any retreat would “open the flood-gates” of irrationalism. In other words, even cracking the door to the only possible alternative—creation by a higher intelligence—would force them to face all the issues that such a conclusion implies.
IQ—Heredity or Environment?
A new study by staff members of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research indicates that heredity is not the major factor in determining children’s IQ scores. Children adopted into middle-class homes were compared with their brothers and/or sisters who had been raised by their natural parents, all from a lower economic class. The children had all been adopted before they reached the age of six months.
Describing the results of IQ tests on the two groups of children with similar parental background but differing environments, the magazine Scientific American said that “the observed differences between the adopted children and those reared by their biological mothers were striking.” The average IQ test scores of adopted children reared in the middle-class environment were almost 15 points above those of their natural brothers and/or sisters who were less privileged.
This French study offers further evidence that, given the same environment, people generally have the same potential, just as the Bible indicates when it states that God “made out of one man every nation of men.”—Acts 17:26.