Will the EU repress Hungary as did the Warsaw Pact?

An interesting comparison between the Warsaw Pact's intervention in Hungary in the 1950s and the EU's power-play to "ensure Hungary complies with European principles" -- doubtless animated by fear of Hungary's "terrifying" new constitution.

What, one cannot be too cautious these days, with the possibility that any of these EU member nations might see a recrudescence of incorrect medieval sentiments expressed in such "terrifying" utterances as: "God bless the Hungarians," or "We recognize the role of Christianity in preserving our nationhood." The very prospect conjures up nefarious memories of THE INQUISITION, if not THE CRUSADES!! Eeeeek!

Seminal history of Vatican II now in German

Roberto de Mattei's groundbreaking book on the history of Vatican II, Il Concilio Vaticano II: una storia mai scritta (The Second Vatican Council – a never before written history), Turin, Lindau, 2010, is available in German - its first published translation, a wonderful gift for all your German-speaking friends, according to New Catholic, "Trickling Down" (Rorate Caeli, January 12, 2012).

He adds: "We hope it will soon become available in all major languages, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the last ecumenical Council."

The German title is: Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil: Eine bislang ungeschriebene Geschichte (Canisius-Werk, 2011).

Barak and Michelle's top 5 "let them eat cake" moments

Patrick Hruby, in The Washington Times (Jan. 11, 2012).

SCOTUS unanimous decision upholding religious liberty, “ministerial exception”

In what may be its most significant religious liberty decision in decades, the Supreme Court of the United States today, by a unanimous decision, recognized a “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination law, saying that churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference. (See NYT, and WDTPRS)

Cardinal George recants comparing Gay Pride to KKK

As seen in these reports by The Washington Post (Jan. 9, 2012), Fox News (Jan. 6, 2012), and Catholic News Roundup (January 9, 2012).

For the record: Voris update (+updates)

• Prayers for Detroit (Vortex, January 9, 2012) -- official response from St. Michael's Media to the latest press releases from the Archdiocese of Detroit
  
  
• "Archdiocesan canon lawyers differ on asking RealCatholicTV.com to drop ‘Catholic’ name" (LifeSiteNews.com, January 9, 2012)
  
  
• Dr. Ed Peters, "Some thoughts on the ‘jurisdiction’ question in the AOD – Voris/RCTV matter" (In the Light of the Law, January 9, 2012)

As I've suggested in an earlier post on the subject, I have neither any reason nor competency for questioning the juridical reasoning of the Archdiocese of Detroit or its eminently capable canonist, Ed Peters. Yet I would also argue that non-canonical questions may be at issue here that are no less interesting and every bit as important, as I am sure Peters and others would concur.

This whole incident over Real Catholic TV could have an eminently salutary effect, it seems to me, if it became a vehicle for smoking out the really serious culprits, the dissembling dissenters and saboteurs of the Faith among the etiolated remnant of the church-going Catholics, whose thin, watered-down catechetical consommé has become the shallow puddle of our experience in too many regions of AmChurch today.

In this light, the call to prayer (and, I would add, penance), not only for Detroit but for the whole Roman Catholic Church, is certainly one that any faithful Catholic should welcome.

The Counts of Jesu Christo, Part II

The Massacre of the Holy Innocents by Fra Angelico
By Michael P. Foley

This article is a companion to an article of the same name in the christmas 2008 issue of the Latin Mass.

It might seem odd to think of anyone else besides the Infant Jesus or the Holy Family during the octave of Our Lord’s Nativity, but the Church in her wisdom does precisely that. Immediately following Christmas Day are the feasts of several holy men and boys known as the comites Christi, “the comrades of Christ.” Comes not only means “companion” but it is also the Latin word for the noble title of count. As this would suggest, the comites Christi are somehow close to their Lord in the way that a royal entourage is close to its king. The Church acknowledges a spiritual intimacy by placing the feasts of certain saints close to that of the birthday of their Sovereign: the Byzantine rite, for example, pays special honor to the Princes of the Apostles, Peter and Paul, by celebrating their feast on December 28.

* * * * * * *
It might seem odd to think of anyone else besides the Infant Jesus or the Holy Family during the octave of Our Lord’s Nativity, but the Church in her wisdom does precisely that.

* * * * * * *
During the same week, the Western Church honors St. Stephen (December 26), the first martyr in both act and desire and hence the first to be honored after Christmas; St. John the Evangelist (December 27), the disciple closest to Christ during the Last Supper; the Holy Innocents (December 28), close to the Infant Jesus by their martyrdom; St. Thomas Becket (December 29), whose death at the hands of a Christian king on this day in 1170 so shocked Christendom that his feast day was given the privilege of remaining within the Christmas octave; and St. Sylvester (December 31), the Pope who lived to see the civic peace that followed the Roman persecutions and whose feast thus aptly gives voice to our prayers for the new civic year.

Three years ago, we looked at the feasts of two such counts, Saints Stephen the Proto-Martyr and John the Apostle.¹ This year we turn our attention to the rest of the Roman rite’s Christmas Camelot: the Holy Infants, St. Thomas Becket, and Pope St. Sylvester.

CDF pastoral recommendations for V-II anniversary

Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, William Cardinal Levada, has issued a Note with pastoral recommendations for the Year of Faith:

"With the Apostolic Letter of 11 October 2011, Porta fidei, Pope Benedict XVI declared a Year of Faith. This year will begin on 11 October 2012, on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Ecumenical Vatican Council, and will conclude on 24 November 2013, the Solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King...." Read more >>

So ... we have a national Presidential election to contend with; and then this. I wonder, which will hold more surprises?

Criminal serving time with monks begs to be sent back to prison

And they used to call them "hardened criminals" ...

"Criminal serving his sentence with monks pleads to be sent back to prison... because monastery life is too hard" (Mail Online, January 5, 2012):

Thief David Catalano, 31, was sent to a Santa Maria degli Angeli community run by Capuchin monks in Sicily last November.

But he found their austere lifetstyle too tough to handle and soon escaped. After a short while on the run he was caught by police and sent back.


On Monday he fled for the second time in six weeks, only to swiftly turn himself in at a police station and beg officers to send him back to jail in the nearby town of Nicosia.

He told the stunned policemen: 'Prison is better than being at that hostel run by monks.'

A police spokesman said: 'Catalano arrived out of the blue and said there was no way he could stay on with the monks.

[Hat tip to Fr. Z.]

Pray for the people of Los Angeles and for Archbp. Gomez.

As Blogsville is already achatter over the resignation of LA's Aux. Bp. Most Rev. Gabino Zavala after two of his teenage children were discovered, I need say little about it. How very sad.

Pictured below is the Bishop with altar serves of the Campus Ministry Mount Saint Mary's College following the "Closing Liturgy" in a past edition of the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. [Source]



Fr. John Zuhlsdorff notes that Bp. Zavala also presided over the closing liturgy of the "Three Days of Darkness" Education Conference in LA a couple years back. Who could forget?



And, yes, Fr. Z also called this, back when it happened, "reason #65648 for Summorum Pontificum," be that as it may.

An apologia for the new Missal translation

This from a commentator named "Spero" over at Rorate Caeli, a counter-point to the main post by Adfero:

Yes, the new translation will not fix the way the new Mass is said in most places. Yes, there are problems even in the Latin. However, as a recently ordained diocesan priest, I have to say that the new translation is not nothing. It may be nothing in terms of forcing an real end to the liturgical debacle. However, at our parish's small daily Masses, where we never have extraordinary ministers, where I rarely look up toward the people outside of the homily, where nothing is sung except the hymn I pick for the recessional, and at which I use the Roman Canon daily, omit the general intercessions, and always use the Confiteor and the entrance and communion antiphons, it has made a difference to me.

You are right, it has not changed the way I say Mass. I used the same "options" with the old translation. You are right, it is still the Novus Ordo with all the issues that that entails. However, I have found that sacrificial language of the new translation of the Roman Canon very edifying. I am able to say each day and my parishioners hear at each of my Masses, "and bless these gifts, these offerings the holy and unblemished sacrifices," "bless, acknowledge and approve this offering in every respect," "accept this oblation of our service," "we...offer to your glorious majesty...this pure victim, this holy victim, this spotless victim, the holy Bread of eternal life and the Chalice of everlasting salvation; Be pleased to look upon these offerings with a serene and kindly countenance and accept them...and the offering of your high priest Melchizedek, a holy sacrifice, a spotless victim." In addition, the orations are translated far more accurately. I have many times found orations which are identical to those found in the TLM. With the new translation it is much easier to preach on these texts. The old translation mangled them so badly that even where the Novus Ordo made us of traditional orations, the translation made them unrecognizable and often altered their theology.

So no, the new translation will not fix our liturgical crisis. Yes, most people will find the mess at their parishes to be more or less the same. However, the new translation is still not nothing. I became a diocesan priest, rather than joining the FSSP or another community (which I seriously considered), because I believe that this is where God is asking me to be. Being where I am, I have found the new translation to be a real help in making that best of a bizarre historical situation.

[Hat tip to J.M.]

Voris update

I've been given to understand that formally and canonically, the Archdiocese of Detroit is on firm ground in referencing Canon 216 of the Roman Catholic Church's current Code of Canon Law, which holds that “no undertaking is to claim the name 'Catholic'” without authorization. If Real Catholic TV dropped the word "Catholic" from its name, there would be no canonical ground for objecting to Voris' media presentations, no matter how people felt about their content.

Their content (as well as the opposition to it) is, of course, another matter with too many unknown quantities to hazard anything like a confident judgment at this point. Nevertheless, there are some obvious candidates for what might offend: Voris' bluntness -- for example, his willingness to directly call President Obama "evil" (because of Obama's support for abortion, courting of the homosexualist lobby, opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act, and disregard for ethical positions of Catholic hospitals), or his ecumenically insensitive references to Protestantism as "heresy" (not even Belloc was willing to go that far in his book on The Great Heresies) or his willingness to call modern Judaism a "man-made religion" in the Catholic tradition of supersessionism (viewing the Church as the true spiritual Israel) -- views largely discarded in practice after Vatican II.

Some of you may remember my piece, "What's right and wrong with Michael Voris" (Musings, August 6, 2011), objecting to some all-too-superficial treatments of "Protestantism" without a nuanced appreciation of the significant differences between those traditions that may have at one time had valid (if illicit) orders, such as the Anglicans, and those that are so far removed from the sacramental tradition of the Church that they no longer even baptize or celebrate 'memorials' of the Lord's Supper, like the Quakers and membership of the Salvation Army. Further, Voris sometimes seems to lack an appreciation for the clear evidence of the life of the Holy Spirit and redemptively changed lives in some extra-ecclesial communions, such as those that produced the missionary movement of the former China Inland Mission and its yield of thousands of conversions to Christ, if not to the fullness of the Catholic Faith.

Still, I think it goes without saying that Voris' apostolate has an important place in the life of many faithful Catholics. His opposition to the "Catholicism-and-water" that prevails throughout the AmChurch world, with it's knee-jerk "we're-all-the-same-anyway" faux ecumenism, its all-too-easy accommodationism toward the culturally ascendant relativism in morals and all its "lies and falsehoods," is a breath of fresh realism for many Catholics. So, too, is Voris' appreciation of the invaluable treasures and resources that Catholic tradition has to offer.

While appreciating all of these positive features of Voris' apostolate, I see little problem with the technical canonical point that would prevent him from using the name "Catholic" without being granted permission from his local bishop. I see little problem, too, in admitting that it could be problematic to suppose that everything he says represents the official position of the Church, since some of his statements are simply too baldly unqualified. That, of course, is part of his popular appeal. His presentations often take the form of blistering jeremiads against hypocrisy and evil in high places. These are bound to offend; and those Catholic faithful, who have felt too long affronted by a discrepancy between word and deed among their leaders, quite likely feel at last a sense of vindication when this unrestrained Jeremiah stands up and calls it like he sees it, or, more-to-the-point, calls it like they see it.

The latest news, in any case, is that Real Catholic TV may be saved for the moment by a technicality of its own. According to CNA today:

... Voris maintains that Archbishop Vigneron is not the “competent ecclesiastical authority” over Real Catholic TV, which is owned by Indiana resident Marc Brammer.

“I don’t have ownership over the name of the organization. It’s not my organization. The headquarters are outside of the diocese,” Voris told LifeSiteNews in a Dec. 23 article. “It’s the wrong person, and the wrong outfit asking the wrong person the wrong question.”

Brammer told LifeSiteNews that “if all of a sudden now there’s this tussle over the use of the word 'Catholic,'” he would “deal with it through competent ecclesial authority.”

English Catholic converts who experienced V-II: reactionary cranks or prescient prophets?

In his Foreword to A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes,Expanded Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), Joseph Pearce writes:

It is a singularly intriguing fact that the preconciliar Church was so effective in evangelizing modern culture, whereas the number of converts to the faith seemed to diminish in the sixties and seventies in direct proportion to the presence of the much-vaunted aggiornamento, the muddle-headed belief that the Church needed to be brought "up-to-date."

And the number of well-known literary converts from those pre-conciliar days is remarkable indeed. In the English-speaking world there were G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Dawson, Fr. Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Sheila Kay-Smith, Compton MacKenzie, Alfred Noyes, Hugh Ross Williamson, Sir Alec Guinness, and Malcolm Muggeridge -- not to mention, in the preceding generation, Cardinal Newman, Fr. F.W. Faber, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, to name a mere handful.

The numbers of well-known converts in Europe were equally impressive: Charles Péguy, Léon Bloy, François Mauriac, Henri Ghéon, Giovanni Papini, Gertrud von Le Fort, Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Sigrid Undset, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Louis Bouyer -- not to mention the likes of Maria Alphonse Ratisbonne in the previous generation.

What is no less interesting about these converts is that most of them witnessed the liturgical experimentation and innovations leading up to the liturgical changes promulgated Second Vatican Council and were appalled by them. Nobody is more familiar with this fact than Joseph Pearce who built his career around this generation of English Catholic converts.

In his review of Joseph Pearce's wonderful book, Literary Converts(London : HarperCollins, 1999; rpt., San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), reprinted by Seattle Catholic (October 11, 2004) from The Latin Mass Magazine, Fr. Eugene Dougherty observes that Pearce's book has a special appeal for those who love the Church and the traditional Latin Mass. The subtitle of the book "Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief," he says, reinforced his own faith by affording him the company of authors with whom he grew up: G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Malcolm Muggeridge, and a host of others.

Fr. Dougherty's chief interest in these authors today, he says, is that many of them "experienced" the Second Vatican Council, and that their reaction was generally the same as the fifty prominent English authors who petitioned the Holy Father to preserve the traditional Mass. (Incidentally, the petition was presented to Pope Paul VI by John Carmel Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster in London. The story goes that it was the inclusion among the signatories of the non-Catholic mystery writer Agatha Christie, whom Pope Paul VI admired, which persuaded him to agree to what amounted to a unique national exemption from the Novus Ordo, which in fact came to be known as the Agatha Christie Indult.) These 20th-century converts were attracted to the Faith, says Dougherty, by "the very things that the leadership of the Church has now rejected, in the 'spirit' of Vatican II." He writes:

Malcolm Muggeridge, we are told by biographer Joseph Pearce, "could not (at first) bring himself to be a Roman Catholic. The reason centered on his dislike of the changes instigated by the Second Vatican Council. To Muggeridge, the "spirit of Vatican II was destroying Christendom: "Catholicism, he declared, was seeking to reproduce all the "follies and fatuities of Protestantism," and he would not climb aboard a sinking ship.

Ronald Knox, who died in 1957, did not witness the Council, but he was aware of the coming destruction of the liturgy. He spoke of the liturgical reformers as "a strange alliance between archaeologists absorbed in their speculations on the rites of the second century, and modernists who wish to give the Church the character of our deplorable epoch." On one occasion someone requested him to use the vernacular in the baptismal rite. His response was, "The baby doesn't understand English and the Devil knows Latin."(emphasis added)

In the following précis of Literary Converts, Fr. Dougherty limits himself to those converts who lived long enough to witness the Council, allowing them to speak in their own voices:

On behalf of these converts to the Catholic faith from Protestantism, Evelyn Waugh asked Cardinal Heenan:

Why were we led out of the church of our childhood to find the Church of our own adoption assuming the very forms we disliked?

Christopher Dawson:

[There is] ... a philistine and patronizing attitude to Baroque Catholicism expressed by certain "modern" Catholics.

Hugh Ross Williamson:

The changes [are] echoing everything that was done at the Reformation... the Martyrs have died for nothing.

David Jones:

One year they abolish the biretta, the next year they abolish the Mass.... I can't understand it all; they'll be pulling down Chartres Cathedral next.

Cecil Gill:

The vulgarization of the Mass.... One sighs for a Low Mass instead of this brash version of the sacred liturgy.

George Mackey Brown:

The vernacular has robbed the Mass of its majesty and mystery... so much of its glory has been sort of shed.... There was something very mysterious about the same language being used all over the world.

Robert Speaight:

The vernacular liturgy, popular and pedestrian, intelligible and distressing, has robbed us of much that was numinous in public worship; there is less emphasis on prayer and penitence, and the personal relationship between God and man... is neglected in favor of a diffused social concern.

Sir Alec Guinness:

Much water has flown under the Tiber's bridges, carrying away splendor and mystery from Rome since the pontificate of Pius XII... [T]he banalities and translations which have ousted the sonorous Latin and Greek are of a supermarket quality which is quite unacceptable. Hand shaking and embarrassed smiles or smirks have replaced the older courtesies; kneeling is out, queuing is in, and the general tone is like BBC radio broadcast for tiny tots....

Cardinal Heenan:

If the Church is to remain truly the Catholic Church it is essential to keep a universal language.

Christopher Dawson:

The existence of a common liturgical language of some kind is a sign of the Church's mission to reverse the curse of Babel and to create a body of unity between the peoples.

Fr. Dougherty concludes:

At the present time the Holy Father is proposing both Pope Pius IX and Pope John XXIII for canonization. Pius IX, a conservative, convoked the First Vatican Council; John XXIII, a liberal, convoked the Second - which Evelyn Waugh and our other literary converts considered "a betrayal of the principles of Pio Nono," a surrender to modernism with the "home improvements" that the Council proposed.

How can we reconcile these two opposites? Was the spirit of Vatican II the work of the Heilige Geist (the Holy Ghost), or the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the times)? Literary Converts answers the question.

Are these the sentiments of reactionary cranks or prescient prophets? Perhaps neither. Yet there are some remarkable agreements that may be noted. The Oxford Declaration on Liturgy (1996) asserted that ". . . the preconciliar liturgical movement as well as the manifest intentions of Sacrosanctum Concilium have in large part been frustrated by powerful contrary forces, which could be described as bureaucratic, philistine and secularist..

Again, a year before he became pope, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his Preface to Alcuin Reid's The Organic Development of the Liturgy(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005) that those who, like himself, were moved on the even of the Council by the perception of the liturgy "as a living network of tradition" that awaited sensitive pruning by scholarly experts in order to properly flourish "can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for." (p. 11)

Yet again, in The Feast of Faith(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: "Today we might ask: Is there a Latin Rite at all any more? Certainly there is no awareness of it. To most people the liturgy seems to be rather something for the individual congregation to arrange." (p. 84)

Reactionary cranks or prescient prophets? Or neither? You decide. What's your verdict?

New Hungarian constitution: "terrifying"

New Catholic reports that the new Constitution [Fundamental Law] of Hungary went into force yesterday, and must be considered terrifying, considering the international media coverage it has garnered. Accordingly, he takes a look at its most distressing aspects:

[Preamble:]

God bless the Hungarians
...
We are proud that our king Saint Stephen built the Hungarian State on solid ground and made our country a part of Christian Europe one thousand years ago.
...
We recognise the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood. We value the various religious traditions of our country.
...
We do not recognise the suspension of our historical constitution due to foreign occupations. We deny any statute of limitations for the inhuman crimes committed against the Hungarian nation and its citizens under the National Socialist and Communist dictatorships.

We do not recognise the Communist constitution of 1949, since it was the basis for tyrannical rule; therefore we proclaim it to be invalid.
...
Article I
(1) Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman established by voluntary decision, and the family as the basis of the nation’s survival.
(2) Hungary shall encourage the commitment to have children.
...
FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY
...
Article II
Human dignity shall be inviolable. Every human being shall have the right to life and human dignity; embryonic and foetal life shall be subject to protection from the moment of conception.

For the record: links on the Neocatechumenal Way

• Sandro Magister, "Bad History, Bad Guide. The Strange Liturgy of the Neocatechumenals" (www.chiesa, January 24, 2005)
  
  
• "The Neocatechumenal Way sits for the Lord and says: 'We don't care, we already obey!'" (Rorate Caeli, January 6, 2006)
  
  
• "How the Neocatechumenal Way defended their liturgy in 2004" (Rorate Caeli, January 2, 2012)