Sunday, June 07, 2015

“Look, Dad, the sun is rising just like on TV”

Fr. Rutler, in his most recent column (June 7, 2015), offers another gem:
A young city boy on his first camping trip awoke his father at dawn and said, as he gazed out of his tent, “Look, Dad, the sun is rising just like on TV.” Our present generation, of which we are privileged to be a laggard part, does not find it easy to distinguish actuality from artifice. In the background is a reluctance to acknowledge that an impression of reality is not the same as reality itself. This is symptomatic of what Pope Benedict XVI called the “dictatorship of relativism.”

By that he meant the notion absorbed by people bereft of logic, that what one wants something to be, comes to be simply by the wanting. This has immediate and desultory influence on moral conduct. So, like the little boy who thought that the real sun looked like the cartoon sun on television (or, like the nice woman who told me that the altar flowers were so lovely that she though they were artificial), people may reject the concrete facts of nature and posture that their desires are legitimate just because they are desired. A lurid example of this is the redefinition of marriage to make that organic and divine institution nothing more than a fantasy of one’s arrested emotional development, the product of a plebiscite, and the opinion of judges in solemn robes. Polls and parliaments are willing tyrants when the mob consents to be tyrannized by their opinions and decrees.

G.K. Chesterton gently slapped his readers back to reality from egoistic comas when he wrote in his A Short History of England: “To have the right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” So when someone says, “I am free to do what I want with my body,” you may be impelled by charity and justice to reply that he is indeed so free, but if he defies the law of gravity, the pavement quickly will be of a different opinion, and if he says there is no difference between a man and a woman, two shades named Adam and Eve will rise up with mocking smiles.

Those who have long sipped the intoxicating nectar of false perception may hesitate to draw a line between desire and dogma, fabrication and fact. If reality is nothing more than the visible costume of an impression, impressive tyrants will orchestrate that fantasy from their balconies, with rhetoric to mold malleable minds. The long legacy of demagoguery attests that weak points persuade people if the points are shouted loudly enough to overwhelm reason. Opinion polls shout, and network “talking heads” shout, and Internet pundits shout, but then there is a “still small voice” that does not fade away: the long and logical echo of “Fiat Lux” uttered by the real Creator of the real universe.
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2nd Sunday after Pentecost - Holy Fear

Fr. Zuhlsdorf, with some interesting observations on holy days and prayers, as usual:
It isn’t really Corpus Christi in the traditional Roman calendar, though it is often transferred to this Sunday. It is really the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost. Corpus Christi was Thursday, the Thursday after Trinity Sunday.

Let’s see today’s quintessentially Roman style Collect for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost in the 1962 Missale Romanum. This week’s Collect survived the slash and burn expertise of the liturgists of the Consilium to live on unscathed for the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time in the Novus Ordo. It was already in the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary on the Sunday after the Ascension (which everyone knows is also supposed to be on a Thursday). This prayer is also prayed at the end of the Litany of the Most Holy Name of Jesus.

This is a marvelous prayer to sing in Latin! It is simultaneously stark and lavish. Its elements are carefully balanced. It is perfectly Roman.

COLLECT – (1962MR):
Sancti nominis tui, Domine, timorem pariter et amorem fac nos habere perpetuum: quia numquam tua gubernatione destituis, quos in soliditate tuae dilectionis instituis.
Your bulky editions of the Lewis & Short Dictionary contain the entry, the lemma, for timor: “fear, dread, apprehension, alarm, anxiety” and, in a good sense of “fear”, “awe, reverence, veneration”....

LITERAL ATTEMPT:
Make us to have, O Lord, constant fear and, in equal degree, love of Your Holy Name: for You never abandon with Your steering those whom You establish in the firmness of Your love.
Do you see how the concepts are balanced? Timor/amor (fear and love) and instituo/destituo (establish and abandon)? ....

Novus Ordo 12th Sunday OBSOLETE ICEL (1973):
Father, guide and protector of your people, grant us an unfailing respect for your name, and keep us always in your love.
Can you believe we had this rubbish for so many years?

Novus Ordo 12th Sunday CURRENT ICEL (2011):
Grant, O Lord, that we may always revere and love your holy name, for you never deprive of your guidance those you set firm on the foundation of your love.
[Still no "fear," but Father adds:] ... God’s Holy Name is sacred. “God fearing” men and women need not have terror of the Lord, but speaking and hearing His Holy Name will warm them with His love.
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Pope's "Paul VI staff" breaks; repaired with adhesive tape

Fr. Zuhlsdorf, "Staff breaks? Staff it out!" (Fr. Z's Blog, June 6, 2015):
So… Pope goes to Sarajevo. He was to use the Paul VI style pastoral staff/crucifix along with his most favoritest vestments, which we all are now so very very familiar. Via Vatican Insider.

Problem: the Paul VI staff broke!

Oh dear… what a shame!

Thinking fast, Msgr. Guido Marini, head of the Pope’s liturgy staff, working against the clock, fixed it the staff with … I’m not making this up… adhesive tape.

One of my friends from Rome tweeted: “Even Paul VI must have thought, ‘I don’t want my ferula to be part of this.”

I dunno… which would be better. Enter without a staff, or enter with a staff fixed with sticky tape?
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Tridentine Community News - Morning prayers, Prayers from the Blessed Sacrament Prayerbook, Prayers from the Manual of Indulgences, Mass times


"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"

Tridentine Community News by Alex Begin (June 7, 2015):
Morning Prayers

It is a laudable practice for Catholics to begin their day with some Morning Prayers. What sort of prayers are fitting for this purpose? Spontaneous prayers crafted around one’s personal intentions are certainly appropriate. In conjunction with those, it is beneficial to include some formulaic prayers which express timeless aspirations according to Catholic principles.

Prayers from the Blessed Sacrament Prayerbook

One of the best sources for traditionally-worded prayers of all sorts is Fr. Lasance’s Blessed Sacrament Prayerbook, republished by Loreto Publications. It contains pages upon pages of morning prayers. Below are a few for your consideration; they are worth reading slowly and thoughtfully to take in their full meaning.
O my God, I most humbly thank Thee for all the favors Thou hast bestowed upon me up to the present moment. I give Thee thanks from the bottom of my heart that Thou hast created me after Thine own image and likeness, that Thou hast redeemed me by the Precious Blood of Thy dear Son, and that Thou hast preserved me and brought me safe to the beginning of another day. I offer to Thee, O Lord, my whole being, and in particular all my thoughts, words, actions, and sufferings of this day. I consecrate them all to the glory of Thy name, beseeching Thee that through the infinite merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, they may all find acceptance in Thy sight. May Thy divine love animate them, and may they all tend to Thy greater glory.

Adorable Jesus, my Saviour and Master, model of all perfection, I resolve and will endeavor this day to imitate Thy example; to be, like Thee, mild, humble, chaste, zealous, charitable, and resigned. I will redouble my efforts that I may not fall this day into any of those sins which I have heretofore committed (here mention any besetting sin), and which I sincerely desire to forsake. I have the intention to gain all the indulgences I can in favor of the Poor Souls in Purgatory.

O my God, Thou knowest my poverty and weakness, and that I am unable to do anything good without Thee; deny me not, O God, the help of Thy grace; proportion it to my necessities, give me strength to avoid anything evil which Thou forbiddest, and to practice the good which Thou hast commanded, and enable me to bear patiently all the trials which it may please Thee to send me.

I adore Thee, O my God – one God in three Persons; I annihilate myself before Thy majesty. Thou alone art being, life, truth, beauty, and goodness. I glorify Thee, I praise Thee, I thank Thee, and I love Thee, all incapable and unworthy as I am, in union with Thy dear Son, Jesus Christ, our Saviour and our Father, in the mercifulness of His Heart and through His infinite merits. I wish to serve Thee, to please Thee, to obey Thee, and to love Thee always, in union with Mary Immaculate, Mother of God and our mother, loving also and serving my neighbor for Thy sake. Therefore, give me Thy Holy Spirit to enlighten, correct, and guide me in the way of Thy commandments, and in all perfection, until we come to the happiness of heaven, where we shall glorify Thee for ever. Amen.

O Divine Heart of Jesus, grant, we beseech Thee, eternal rest to the souls in Purgatory, the final grace to those who shall die today, true repentance to sinners, the light of the Faith to pagans, and Thy blessing to me and mine. To Thee, O most compassionate Heart of Jesus, I commend all these souls, and I offer to Thee on their behalf all Thy merits, together with the merits of Thy most holy Mother and of all the Saints and Angels, and all the sacrifices of the Holy Mass, Communions, prayers, and good works, which shall be accomplished today throughout the Christian world.

Morning Offering of the Apostleship of Prayer

O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer Thee my prayers, works, and sufferings of this day for all the intentions of Thy Sacred Heart, in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world, for the intentions of all our associates, and in particular for the intention recommended by our Holy Father, the Pope.
Prayers from the Manual of Indulgences

The Latin and English editions of the Manual of Indulgences contain several prayers appropriate to start the day, all of which are enriched with a Partial Indulgence:
Dómine, Deus omnípotens, qui ad princípium hujus diéi nos perveníre fecísti, tua nos hódie salva virtúte, ut in hac die ad nullum declinémus peccátum, sed semper ad tuam justítiam faciéndam nostra procédant elóquia, dirigántur cogitatiónes et ópera. Per Christum Dóminum nostrum. Amen.

Lord, God Almighty, You have brought us safely to the beginning of this day. Defend us today by Your mighty power, that we may not fall into any sin, but that all our words may so proceed and all our thoughts and actions be so directed, as to be always just in Your sight. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Actiónes nostras, quaésumus, Dómine, aspirándo praéveni et adjuvándo proséquere: ut cuncta nostra operátio a te semper incípiat et per te cœpta finiátur. Per Christum Dóminum nostrum. Amen.

Direct, we beseech Thee, O Lord, all our actions by Thy holy inspiration, carry them on by Thy gracious assistance, that every word and work of ours may always begin from Thee and by Thee be happily ended. Amen.
Tridentine Masses This Coming Week
  • Mon. 06/08 7:00 PM: Low Mass at St. Josaphat (Feria)
  • Tue. 06/09 7:00 PM: Low Mass at Holy Name of Mary (Ss. Primus & Felicianus, Martyrs)
  • Sun. 06/14 12:00 Noon: High Mass at St. Albertus (Third Sunday After Pentecost)
[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for June 7, 2015. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]
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Tridentine Masses coming to metro Detroit and east Michigan this week


Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

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Saturday, June 06, 2015

Rod Dreher: Why Catholicism is failing in America


Rod Dreher, "The Evangelical Advantage" (The American Conservative, May 20, 2015), spends some time reflecting on Tracey Rowland's 2010 book, Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed. He includes the following excerpt:
For the second half of the twentieth century (especially since 1968) and the beginning of the twenty-first he has represented Catholic theology in the face of a militant secularism and various crises internally created within the Catholic Church. With respect to the latter, Philip Blosser [yes, she quotes yours truly] offered the following indictment of post-Conciliar Catholic culture:
For more than two generations now, we [Catholics] have been robbed of the fullness of Catholicism, which is our birthright. With a few thankful exceptions, our collective acquaintance with Scripture is piecemeal, our knowledge of tradition is pathetic, our hymns are embarrassing, our religious art is ugly, our churches look like UN meditation chapels, our ethics are slipshod, and our aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities are so far from being sublime that they almost look ridiculous. … For over two generations our faith formation has been shaped by a media culture that has portrayed our Church as a dinosaur that is either an impediment to social progress or simply irrelevant.
Amidst this general condition of cultural poverty, Ratzinger never pursued a strategy of accommodation to the culture of modernity, as was the preferred option of so many of his generation, but he did set about … to recapture the essential spirit of Christianity. … The development of a Christian personalism, in Ratzinger’s case, one heavily indebted to St. Augustine and Guardini, has been one of the positive post-Conciliar developments helping to counterbalance Blosser’s long list of humiliating failures.

... The rise of Catholic Inc. — the model of the Church as a modern corporation — has in recent times fostered this “tragedy of a starved imagination” [the phrase is the Catholic poet Paul Claudel's]. The pneumatological dimension of the Church is constantly suppressed by people with narrow imaginations focused on figures, annual reports and mission statements. Against this contemporary sociological development Ratzinger constantly reiterates the importance of the prophetic Pauline charism and the personalist nature of Catholic welfare and community service. Ratzinger’s use of the phrase “our bureaucratized faith” and his many warnings against this tendency of the Church to ape the managerial processes of the corporate world represent an acute sociological observation about the source of pastoral problems in the contemporary Church.
Thus far Rowland.

Now Dreher's money quote:
My sense is that Rowland’s take on Benedict’s worldview tells us a lot of why Catholicism is failing in America (and highlights the tragedy of the brevity of the great man’s papacy). The leadership class of the Catholic Church — bishops, theologians, and so forth — “gave themselves up to modernity just as the real avant-garde was beginning to critique it. They came out of their bunkers with their hands in the air as the enemy was departing for a new battlefield. The Catholic elite of this generation was left to look effete and irrelevant.” In an effort to be relevant to modernity, they surrendered the Catholic distinctives that stood in contradiction to the currents of modernity. Thus while Catholic theology remains intact, the transmission of that theology in the lived experience of the parish — both in worship and in catechetics — has badly broken down. Paradoxically, in many parishes, a worshiper in this most sacramentally-oriented of the major American Christian churches may find himself having to hold on to the truths of his faith by exercising his will and his imagination to an extraordinary degree, because what he sees happening around him does not convey what the Church proclaims to be true.
Read more >>

[Hat tip to JM]
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If you continue to consume trash, you will lose your love of beauty and God's great gift of joy

Guest column by J.M.

I am not sure what to say, but I feel like someone needs to point something out (Uh-oh, I know)…

Let’s survey the landscape:

The esteemed Peter Leithart over at First Things tells us we need to not shrink from 'preaching about Bruce Jenner’ (italicize the various parts of that sentence to appreciate it a bit more).

Meanwhile, seminary president Fr. Robert Barron, heir to the mantle of Fulton J. Sheen and celebrated face of Modern Straight Catholicism, now opines on the lessons of the series Mad Men. This not long after weighing in on the merits to the comic book film The Avengers.

Does this culturally-aware approach reach people? I think maybe it sort of does. Which alarms me. Neil Postman warned that are Amusing Ourselves To Death; and if we are now sort of dead, how are we even to strategize reaching the deceased? Does anyone but me find it cause for concern that our most erudite voices now feel compelled to offer commentary on adult soap operas featuring oral sex and comic book movies catering to 14 year olds? Does anyone but me find it disconcerting to see a church marquee that reads “SOAP OPERA SERMONS: This Week, ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’”

If adults are conditioned to think and act like high schoolers, is there even hope to get them to listen to a more adult message? I hope so, but I am not so sure. Chesterton in Saint Francis of Assisi (which for me beats out Orthodoxy as his masterstroke, being a perfectly felicitous pairing of author and subject), spoke of the Greeks having so contaminated their imaginations — with sex — that only a soul purging as severe as the retreat to monasticism suggested hope of a cure. Are we to the point now, with the Duggars, the Kardashians, the Wests, the procession of gritty TV dramas from The Sopranos and Sons of Anarchy to Mad Men, that Cold Turkey is the only cure? Can you really talk about sin and morality and holiness with minds that are fed most on Vanity Fair covers of man-girls and TV shows where oral sex is a mainstay or bloodshed is so intense as to be stupefying? I know Christians converted Romans raised on gladiatorial games, but that was when Christians were very Other. Not when preachers gave illustrations based on the Emperor’s most recent orgies.

I’ve shared this before, a blurb from the autobiography of A. Wetherell Johnson, a woman I consider to have been a saint and something of a Protestant cross between Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day. In Created for Commitment she looks back and shares:
One day at school I was introduced by my peers to an undesirable magazine called Peg's Papers. I hid it under my mattress and devoured it in order to be "in" with the gang. I was delighted with my secret hoard. But, alas, my sister Kitty discovered it. At that time we were studying Tennyson at school. I was enraptured with "The Lady of Shalon." I returned home and said, "Kitty, have you ever heard of anything as beautiful as:
Lying robed in snowy white / That loosely flew from left to right / The leases upon her falling light / A gleaming shape she floated by / To many towered Camelot...
Kitty replied, "Let me tell you something. If you continue to read trash like Peg's Papers, you will lose your love for beauty in literature and lose one of God's great gifts of Joy.- This scared me so that never again was I able to indulge in reading trashy magazines or really empty books, although now I do read 'non-religious' books for a "change of pace."
Trash… What now falls under that classification? Not much it seems, given the subjects even our religious commentators choose to have us discuss. You’d almost thing sin is nothing more than a clinical concept, and not an infectious disease. But then we here talk of the Church being a field hospital. Somewhere there is a real disconnect. A former professor told me that when something abnormal is referenced long enough, it becomes normal. In a similar sense, I think we have allowed ourselves to contribute to things immoral coming to be seen as moral. A religious friend of mine, asked about Bruce Jenner, said ‘Good for him!’ Cardinal Dolan, call your office.
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Friday, June 05, 2015

CDF appoints SSPX Bishop Fellay as judge in a disciplinary case involving one of the Society's priests

In an interesting twist, as Vatican Insider reports (via Rorate), "the revelation came from the Superior-General himself a few days ago, in a sermon in a visit to Arcadia, California, and Archbishop Guido Pozzo, Secretary of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei confirmed it to La Stampa's Vatican Insider yesterday." Excerpts:
[Bp. Fellay] announced it himself during the course of a sermon at Our Lady of the Angels church in Arcadia, California, on May 10, 2015: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has appointed the Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), Bishop Bernard Fellay, as first-instance judge in a case involving a Lefebvrian priest. The former Holy Office is in charge of dealing with a number of “delicta graviora”....

What is new in this case is that the former Holy Office headed by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller has decided to entrust the case to Mgr. Fellay himself, making him first-instance trial judge. An expression of attention. A sign that the path toward full communion with the Lefebvrians continues, as Archbishop Guido Pozzo confirmed in a statement to Vatican Insider. He archbishop, who is also Secretary of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, said: “The decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does not imply that existing problems have been resolved, but it is a sign of benevolence and magnanimity. I see no contradiction here, but rather, a step toward reconciliation.”
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Crux homo news: Responsible? Catholic?

Guy Noir sent me these links:

David Gibson, "SF archbishop: Gender transitions are a threat to faith" (Crux, June 3, 2015), has emblazoned across its top that Vanity Fair photo of "Wannabe Caitlyn," which leaves me feeling contaminated and repulsed whenever I see it. It reminds me a little of the androgynous image of Satan in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

What's disturbing, I think, is the twisting and perverting of the natural male image into something it's not and really cannot be -- a phenomenon that must delight the Evil One to no end. J. Budziszewski, in What We Can't Not Know, calls this unmaking of nature, this distorting of the natural order God made, "Goetia," a Greek word for a kind of diabolical ancient sorcery.
  • LEAD: Amid the national buzz over transgender celebrity Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner revealing her new female identity, a leading culture warrior in the Catholic hierarchy has denounced the spread of “gender ideology” and warned that it threatens the very foundation of the Church’s faith.

  • LATER: Cordileone did not mention Jenner by name, but his comments landed directly in the middle of a national debate.
Then: Alan Feuer, "Firing of gay Seton Hall priest highlights a Catholic debate" (Crux, June 1, 2015).
  • FINAL SENTENCE:

    “Young people — even young Catholic people — are already on board with LGBT issues,” he said. “So even as the director of campus ministry, what could Father Hall have done or said that could have influenced them any more positively than they already are?”

  • BURIED, these gems:

    In 2011, he resigned as president of Hudson Catholic Regional High School in Jersey City after he was charged with driving while intoxicated after being involved in a traffic accident.

    Before he was dismissed from Seton Hall, Hall taught a course called “Spirituality and Sports,” which explored the Catholic tradition through athletics. He is enough of a sports fan to have posted on Twitter, shortly after revealing that he was gay, “Thanks guys! It was actually tougher to Come Out that I’m a Jets fan than this. THAT was embarrassing!”
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Thursday, June 04, 2015

What's a "good Catholic" today?

Dan Riehl, "Nancy Pelosi Paints Marco Rubio as a Bad Catholic" (Breitbart, May 29, 2015). Pelosi said, among other things:
I thoroughly disagree (with Rubio’s opposition to gay marriage), being raised in a Catholic family, raising a Catholic family, mainstream Catholic – well, the Baltimore catechism, to get back to our hometown of Baltimore, was what we were raised on. And I think that this statement by Senator Rubio is most unfortunate. It’s a polarizing statement. The fact is, is that what we’re taught was to respect people in our faith and to say that this endangers mainstream Christian thinking is so completely wrong....

And, again, it’s polarizing and I would hope that – perhaps he believes what he says, and I assume that he does – but I hope that we can persuade him differently because the country is going in a completely different direction now. And it’s very, very exciting.
If we're honest, doesn't Pelosi sound more like the mainstream Catholic today?

At another blog talking about this, someone had this blunt but hard-hitting observation: "Maybe Jason has discovered that the modernist/postmodernist Roman Church can't be defended. A church that believes everything is rather pointless, no?"

[Hat tip to JM]
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Eberhard Schockenhoff: The heterodox theologian behind the German bishops' revisionism

Our friend Monica Miller did some digging on the internet to find works by the German moral theologian Eberhard Schockenhoff, who is apparently on the German bishops' "A" list when it comes to advising them. She found the following items, which may be helpful in seeing what the Church is up against. His book, Natural Law and Human Dignity: Universal Ethics in an Historical World(Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2003), is not very old, but it has been said of him that he believes the Church should abandon Natural Law ethics and ambrace a new model of ethics based on human experience. His views on this were out there since 2012.

Here's the publisher's summary of his book:
Do human rights apply only to a certain culture group or can they be demanded of all cultures and religions? This discussion about a common world ethos demonstrates how relevant and explosive that question is. In his study of ethical relativism and historical thinking, Eberhard Schockenhoff shows how the universal recognition of fundamental norms that guarantee the minimum conditions for human existence can be substantiated.

Dealing critically with the two most important branches of research in present-day moral theology―autonomous morality and teleological ethics―the author presents a new theological-ethical theory of natural law. Integrating the theory of practical reason and Aquinas' understanding of natural inclinations, Schockenhoff compares this synthesis to the insights of present-day anthropology. This method allows him to re-establish a connection to classical natural law ethics. In so doing, he indicates how ethics can fulfill its most important duty: to arrive at the recognition of anthropologically grounded material norms without falling prey to a logical error. According to Schockenhoff, claims of natural law and of human rights formulate an indispensable minimum, while biblical ethics (the decalogue and the Sermon of the Mount) and the high ethos of the world religions point the way to an encompassing realization of the concept of the good life.

Renowned moral theologian Eberhard Schockenhoff is professor at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. He is the author of numerous works and managing editor of Zeitschrift für Medizinische Ethik. Brian McNeil is a parish priest in Munich and a translator of theological literature.
Also see the related article by Giacomo Galeazzi, "The Church should grant communion to divorced and remarried persons" (Vatican Insider, June 4, 2015):
"Divorced and remarried persons are entitled to receive communion." At the seminar in Salzburg by Austrian Catholic Action, the German theologian Eberhard Schockenhoff, a professor of moral theology at the University of Freiburg, has launched an appeal for a "theological re-evaluation " of divorced and remarried persons and a new way to interact with them by the Church. According to Schockenhoff, the Catholic news agency Adista reports, the Church must emphasize its readiness for reconciliation in the spirit of the biblical sources and the practice of the early Church, breaking away from an attitude of "moral condemnation" that provokes in the interested parties a "painful feeling of exclusion".

Benedict XVI himself admits that communion for divorced and remarried persons is an open question. He spoke about it in a meeting with the priests of the diocese of Aosta on July 25, 2005 and, more officially, in his speech to the Roman Rota, on 28 January 2006. Both times, the Pope urged them to "deepen" a particular case: the possible invalidity of a marriage in the Church celebrated without faith, for those who, having passed to a second union, have returned to the practice of Christian life and request communion. Read more >>
And here is a PDF file of an article by Schockenhoff interpreting St. Thomas Aquinas, "The Theological Virtue of Charity (IIa IIae, qq. 23-46)," translated by Grant Kaplan and Frederick G. Lawrence, a chapter a book edited by Stephen J. Pope, entitled The Ethics of Aquinas(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), pp. 244-257.
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Wednesday, June 03, 2015

What is the "world" in Scripture? What is our rationationship to it, and that of our shepherds?


Boniface, "Shepherds for the Whole World" (Unam Sanctam Catholicsm, May 29, 2015) - a sampling:
"And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness" (1 John 5:19).

"Adulterers, know you not that the friendship of this world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of this world, makes himself an enemy of God" (Jas. 4:4).

"Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world" (Jas. 1:27).

"If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you" (John 15:18-19).

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Eph. 6:12).

And a bit more:
You may surprised to learn that this phrase "in the world but not of the world" never appears in the New Testament. It seems to be based loosely on John 17:14-15, where Jesus prays,"I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world; as I also am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from evil." Here Jesus specifically teaches that we are "not of the world", and that though we must remain physically present in it, He prays that God would keep us from its evil. In other words, Jesus never says by way of command that we are to be engaged in the world; He merely says that since we must be physically present in the world by necessity, God should keep us from the world's evil, which is quite a different shade of meaning than that conveyed by "in but not of."

The goal of the Christian life if holiness. Yet what is holiness? What does it meant to be holy? We understand that we are called to be loving, forgiving, etc. But what does it mean to be "holy"? Is holiness a mere sum of all other natural and supernatural virtues? And what about God? God is love, power, forgiveness, justice and so on. But what does it mean when the angels cry that God is "holy, holy, holy?"

The fundamental definition of holiness is separation. The Latin word for holiness is sanctitas, from whence sanctity. Holiness denotes separation or consecration unto God. When the angels cry "holy, holy, holy" it is because God is so far separate and distinct from all created things that awe is the only appropriate response in his presence.  
This, and a whole lot more.  This is a long and substantial post, as we've often come to expect from Boniface.  There is more, for example, about Vatican II's adopted posture of "openness" to the world and what it might mean.  Read more >>
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Fr. Ray Blake: "I blame the Bolognese"

Fr. Ray Blake, "I blame the Bolognese" (Fr. Ray Blake's Blog, May 25, 2015):
If you look at the remarks of Dr Diarmuid Martin you can see where the problem lies, and it is not just what he has said since after the vote but, maybe, always.

A friend bought an autobiography of a bishop recently and then complained how shallow, self justifying it was. How it seemed to lack any talk of Grace and seemed spiritually vacuous, as if it was written by a name dropping minor politician, rather than a Christian and a man of faith. I have yet to read it but I suspect it is typical of any apologia of any bishop today, with no attempt as Newman might have made, to reveal his method of thinking or his spiritual motivation, or the action of God in his life.

Catholics today might be divided into those influenced by the School of Bologna, who believe in rupture or discontinuity and those who believe in continuity. The documents of Vatican II as Pope Benedict suggested can be read either way, they are designed to be somewhat ambiguous, open to acceptance by even the most traditionally minded of Council Fathers but with a fair degree of play for those who would end up 'interpreting' them. There has been a great deal of talk about an actual Council and 'a Council of the media', in the same way as there is about an actual Francis and a Francis constructed by the media, I suspect that is all a little simplistic, certainly as far as the Council is concerned, one has only to look at whose hands were behind the various documents, what their intentions were. The writers invariably became the interpretors.

The hermeneutic of the Bologna School was always about rupture, its origins seem to have been in ameliorating the excesses of Mussolini's rule, of seeing the Church from the level of the poor, quite natural from Red Bologna. The problem echoes all of the movements of the early 20th century that were on the side of the poor, they created an elite to decide what the poor really wanted, and ended up by disenfranchising those whose cause they had come to power to support. We see that in Bolshevikism or Communism, Italian or Spanish Fascism, National Socialism or even in the Argentinian Pope's native Peronism. Sooner or later the poor or the 'masses' become frustrated by their new masters.

What the Church has lost, in Ireland as much as as elsewhere, are the 'toiling masses'. The Year Zero-ism that the Bologna School puts forward cuts the Church off from its roots, and not just its cultural roots but also its intellectual roots, As Monsignor Klaus Gamber says in 'Reform of the Roman liturgy' (my thanks to Viterbo).

'But what possible advantage can be gained for the pastoral care of the faithful by changing the feast days of the saints in the Church calendar, changing the way of counting Sundays during the liturgical year, or even changing the words of Consecration? What possible advantage can be gained by introducing a new Order of Readings and abolishing the old one, or by making minor and unimportant adjustments to the Traditional Rite, and then finally, by publishing a new Missal? Was all this really done because of pastoral concern about the souls of the faithful, or did it not rather represent a radical breach with the Traditional Rite, to prevent the further use of traditional liturgical texts and thus to make the celebration of the 'Tridentine Mass' impossible, because it no longer reflected the new spirit moving through the Church?" 
The act of changing the Church in fact eviscerated it, removing it even culturally from the place most of its members 'were at', as we used to say. What had stood firm for generations in its 'renewed form' was incapable of standing for a few decades after the 'New Pentecost' promised by Bl. John XXIII.

A Church that is rootless is not 'owned' by the people. A Church that is afraid to teach because it has cut itself from it previous Magisterium, and which instead sows uncertainty, has nothing to say in the daily living of its members, nor in the intellectual forum in general. In fact it is irrelevant. It has all the outward appearance that it once used for the furtherance of its mission but has lost its interior meaning. It is not so much an Emperor with no clothes, but the clothes without an Emperor, all that is left is the institution, which itself is meaningless. In Germany, as in Ireland, the real-estate portfolio seems to be what the Church is about rather than any actual teaching or revelation of Christ.

What I find so sad about Archbishop Martin's statements is that seem to be about institutional power, and influence, the very thing that disgusted the Irish during the abuse crisis. This is what even practising Catholics seem to find so objectionable about the Irish bishops, but in fact they are like many European bishops who have nothing to say and nothing to offer except a vacuous institution; the Church preaching not Jesus Christ but simply protecting its back.

I blame the Bolognese because they have emptied the Church of meaning, leaving it ineffectual, substituting for doctrine a warm feeling, for the worship of God, a celebration of community. This what the Irish Church has been offering for decades - pap!


In a way this video says everything about what is wrong with the Church in Ireland, it is narcissistic and feel-gooding, self-neutering, incapable of reproducing itself, neither evangelising nor being self-critical. It is shallow, self-referential, lacking the ability to speak to either the mind or the heart, only to sentiment. It neither depends on or leads to Jesus Christ, in fact it becomes a replacement for him.
[Hat tip to Sir A.S.]
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When President Trueman drove himself back to Missouri, and other acts of magnificent ordinariness

Fr. George W. Rutler, "The Magnificence of Ordinary Things" (Catholic Education Resource Center, May 3, 2015):
In the days before professional sports became decadent with players paid the prodigal salaries of tycoons, the average fan did not have to take out a mortgage to take his family to a game. Players had a more temperate sense of themselves as well. When Bobby Thomson hit "the shot heard 'round the world" at the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951, he acknowledged the applause and then used a ten-cent token to take the subway home.

Simplicity was an instinct rooted in our nation's original culture, as when Thomas Jefferson took the presidential oath of office and returned to his boarding house where he waited his turn for dinner, and when Harry Truman left the White House and drove himself back to Missouri with no guards and no pension. He did not pretend to be broke because he was broke, and he refused directorships on corporations, saying it would be trafficking in the dignity of the presidential office. It cannot be said that Queen Victoria lived in penury, but she did have her own notion of domesticity when she darned socks for the Prince of Wales in Windsor Castle, humming "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." In her youth, she returned from her coronation in the gilded state coach, took off her ermine robes, put on an apron and gave her dog a bath.

Each Easter season one reflects on how the ineffable glory of the Resurrection mingled with utter ordinariness. While endowed with supernatural qualities, Christ looked like nothing more than an ordinary man, and he ate fish and a honeycomb to prove that he was not a ghost. Peter, perhaps partly out of stunned shock, reacted by doing what he had done long before the world's greatest event: "I'm going fishing." And after the Resurrection, Jesus himself did not twirl about in oriental display. He cooked fish back home in Galilee.

All this was because the Master had a plan for his Church and had to prepare his disciples to preach eternal glory to a world that calculates life in moments of time and measures eternity according to the concepts of space. Christ is too holy to appear exotic, and his mysteries are too profound to mystify. He interprets the mysteries of faith through accessible language and in cogent ways. This is the essence of his love, which is merciful and not condescending. In the sixteenth century, Saint Teresa of Ávila had mystical transports while washing dishes, and in the seventeenth century Brother Lawrence "practiced the presence of God" while doing the daily inventory of his monastery. If there is any regret at all in Heaven, it may be the realization that in our short span in this temporal world, we did not discern the magnificence of ordinary things and did not perceive our true home in the House of God.
[Hat tip to JM]
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Monday, June 01, 2015

A conservative Presbyterian responds to Catholic modernism via ... Boniface

D. G. Hart, "What A Call with Integrity Sounds Like" (Old Life, May 30, 2015).

Hart points out that some (former Presbyterian) Catholic converts who have been trying to reach out the Presbyterians like himself miss the central dynamic of modern Christianity because they keep insisting "that Protestantism and Roman Catholicism represent two distinct paradigms while not recognizing the two paradigms that exist on both sides of the Tiber — one anti-modernist and one indifferent to modernism and its effects."

And as an example of the anti-modernist Catholic paradigm, they cite Boniface, "Shepherds of the Whole World" (Unam Sanctam Catholicam, May 29, 2015).

Very telling ...

[Hat tip to JM]
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