Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column: November 12, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column November 12th, 2017

Annals new and old are filled with quotations that most people can recognize. Reaching back, there are Caesar’s “Et tu, Brute?” and Brutus’ own “Sic semper tyrannis.” Preachers recall Saint Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words.” A hymn quotes Francis as saying: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love…” To Voltaire is credited: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Poor Marie Antoinette labors under her “Let them eat cake.” Tediously over-quoted is Churchill’s jibe to Nancy Astor when she said that if he were her husband she would poison his drink: “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.” Along with that is his rather unchivalrous quip to Mrs. Braddock: “I may be drunk, Bessie, but you are ugly, and tomorrow I shall be sober.”    In our national lore, George Washington is quoted as speaking against “entangling alliances,” and Patrick Henry boldly declared: “If this be treason, make the most of it.” Actors recreate Paul Revere’s clarion cry from his horse: “The British are coming!” Ralph Waldo Emerson inspired many: “Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” We smile at Mark Twain saying: “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Soldiers were moved when General Pershing apostrophized:  “Lafayette, we are here!” Charles E. Wilson was mocked for saying: “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Ginger Rogers boasted: “I did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels,” and sportsmen take a motto from Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”    To burst a few bubbles, though, those people never uttered those words. As the inimitable Yogi Berra explained, “I really didn’t say a lot of the things I said.” More problematic than misquoting, is cherry picking actual quotes out of context. Public figures, or their speechwriters, not infrequently affect familiarity with unfamiliar sources. President Kennedy paraphrased a line from Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, and his brother later quoted the same in a campaign speech: “You see things and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’ ” In the play, these fine sounding words in fact were spoken by the serpent in the Garden, fooling Eve.    Dreams may inspire visionaries, but fantasizing about illusions is how the Prince of Lies brought sin and death into the world. Jesus, on the other hand, said, “. . . The words that I speak to you, they are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). Saint John never misquotes the Master: “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24). Subscribers, Like what you're reading? If so, please consider making a special donation to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel at 424 West 34th Street, so that we can afford to continue distributing the column! If you have Parish Pay, you can also contribute to the column by clicking the button below. Parish Pay

Western Civilization Exists for the Mass: The Liturgy Guy

From Brian Williams  -The Liturgy Guy:

Many are stunned today at the speed in which western civilization is collapsing. Coinciding with this is the post-conciliar crisis within the Church, the fourth great crisis of Christendom as it has been described by that great defender of orthodoxy, Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan. What may not be as clear too many is the connection between the destruction of the Mass and of the collapse of the Christian west.

To read the rest of the essay, click on the below link:

https://liturgyguy.com/2017/11/07/western-civilization-exists-for-the-mass/

HAPPY 242nd BIRTHDAY USMC

On Uniforms

ANATHEMA! Catholic Surrender to Protestant Revolt

From the Remnant Newspaper today.

James Kalb: What "Hate" and "Bigotry" Mean Today

James Kalb, writing today at Crisis Magazine:

What is going on? When did opposition to bigotry become so bigoted, and “hate” lose its connection to hate? How did it happen that pretty much everyone who ever lived now counts as a bigot to be ashamed of? For that matter, when did ordinary Church teaching regarding sex and the sexes, or the value of recognizing and protecting national distinctiveness, become equivalent to crimes against humanity?
At first such views seemed extreme, but more and more they are becoming the conventional wisdom, taught in the schools, proclaimed by moral leaders, assumed as a matter of course in law and public policy, and re-enforced by high and low culture and even by penal sanctions. The transformation is barely noticed, and generally taken for granted as an obvious good thing.

Such a change must have something immensely powerful behind it. But what? It’s a complicated story, but at bottom it has to do with the emerging globalized, technological, and integrated social order in which we live, and the ideals that support that order and the position of those who run it. These ideals present an image of a world reconstituted in accordance with technocratic norms and understandings, a single economic and social network ordered by global markets, certified experts, transnational bureaucracies, electronic entertainment, and electronic communications that make everyone in the world equally present to everyone else. 

In that world, the world of Facebook, Amazon, and global mobility of labor, specific inherited culture loses coherence and function. Men and women become interchangeable economic units. Family is replaced by day care, fast food, and welfare rights. Religion merges into politically correct progressivism. And common sense and the wisdom of the people—the secular equivalent of the Catholic sensus fidei fidelium—are replaced by spin, memes, propaganda, alleged expertise, and commercial pop culture.

To read the entire essay, click on the below link:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/haters-and-haters

Fr. Nix: Sermon for November 5, 2017

Delivered yesterday at Immaculate Conception Basilica, Jacksonville.

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/06/22dpp17/

Sundays are for Beauty: Morales, Requiem Introit a 5

Sung by the Wyoming Catholic College Schola Cantorum on All Souls day.

EDWARD PENTIN: Catholic Identity Conference 2017

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column: November 5, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column

Sunday, November 5th, 2017.

Celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 was awkward and unlike our nation’s festivities of 1976, because the American Revolution did not have a Reign of Terror. The Russian people are in a situation even more perplexing when it comes to the one-hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7. (The dating confusion is because Russia was still on the old Julian calendar in 1917.) The Russian Revolution unleashed the horrors of Communism that led to the deaths of at least 94 million people in various countries, by genocide, execution, purges and famines caused by collectivization.

   

History is not ardently pursued in our schools these days, and when it is modified as Social Science, it often distorts historical reality. In a survey of youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, twenty-eight per cent had never heard of Lenin, and fully half had never heard of Stalin, while nearly two-thirds were unaware of the existence of history’s worst mass murderer (65 million deaths), Mao Tse-Tung. The death of Fidel Castro was marked by many media commentators as something to be mourned, and Che Guevara appears on t-shirts as a chic hero.

   

In countries at least nominally Christian, the assaults on the Church by revolutionaries took a more subtle form through subversion. There is the witness of Bella Dodd, an organizer of the Communist Party in the United States and head of the New York State Teachers Union. After her return to the Church in 1952 under the guidance of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, she detailed how the Communist Party in the 1920’s and 1930’s strove to infiltrate American seminaries and other church institutions, often through the exploitation of the naïve and what, according to Soviet expert Vladimir Bukovsky, Lenin had called “useful idiots.”

   

There still are Russians old enough to remember seeing priests nailed to the doors of their churches. Their nation remains conflicted about their revolution, and still hesitant about what to do with the repeatedly embalmed corpse of Lenin; but facing his tomb from across the great square, Krásnaya plóshchad, is the Kazan Cathedral, restored in 1993. On its façade is written in bold Cyrillic letters: “Christ is Risen.” Since the “Second Baptism of Russia” when the old Soviet Union fell in 1988, 29,000 churches have been built there, at the rate of three per day. In that period the number of seminaries has increased from three to over fifty.

    

That is a picture far different from many places in the West, where innocuous Christianity has failed to resist the bacillus of secularism, as churches close and seminaries shrink. People who have suffered the consequences of evil in the East have expressions more ponderous and sober than the chuckling countenances of soft spokesmen for Christ in the West. The centenary of the Russian Revolution should be a time for reflection and resolve.

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Fr. Heilman: Combat Rosaries for the White House

From Fr. Heilman's Blog, Roman Catholic Man, October 31, 2017:

COMBAT ROSARIES FOR THE WHITE HOUSE

Silver Combat Rosaries, touched to 165 first-class relics of saints (including a verified piece of the veil of the Blessed Mother), are ready to be sent the White House. These four “touched” Combat Rosaries are going to …

President Donald J. Trump

First Lady Melania Trump

Chief of Staff, General John Kelly

Special Advisor to the President, Kellyanne Conway

These are gifts to them on the First Anniversary of the election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States of America.
On that same day (November 8), many misled Americans will “Scream Helplessly at the Sky” at 6:00pm Central, 7:00pm Eastern.
I am asking all of you to join me in praying a Rosary for President Donald J. Trump at or near 6:00pm Central, 7:00pm Eastern on November 8. We will “Pray Hopefully to Heaven.”

To read the letter sent to President Trump, and the entire post, click on the link below:

https://www.romancatholicman.com/combat-rosaries-white-house/

Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy explains his critical letter to Pope Francis

From The Catholic World Report today:

Editor’s note: Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M., Cap., is a highly regarded and accomplished American theologian who is former chief of staff for the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine and a current member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission. His fields of academic specialty include Christology, Trinitarian theology, soteriology, and philosophical notions of God. He has taught at several American universities and for twelve years at the University of Oxford. The author of several books and numerous articles for both academic and popular publications, he is the current President of the Academy of Catholic Theology, and a member of the Catholic Theological Society of America, the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, the Catholic Theological Society of Great Britain, the North American Patristics Society, and the Association Internationale D’Etudes Patristiques.

Fr. Weinandy recently made public a three-page letter he had sent to Pope Francis on July 31, 2017. The letter, posted in full below, expresses Fr. Weinandy’s concerns about several aspects of the current pontificate, including the much-debated Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia, the Holy Father’s apparent low regard for Church doctrine, and the clear sense that many bishops “fear that if they speak their mind” about their concerns, “they will be marginalized or worse.” 

I spoke for a few minutes this morning with Fr. Weinandy, and he told me that since the letter’s publication, he has received many positive and encouraging notes from theologians, priests, and lay people. However, the USCCB asked him to resign from his current position as consultant to the bishops, and he has submitted his resignation. In making such a request, the USCCB, it would appear, reinforces Fr. Weinandy’s very point about fearfulness and lack of transparency. 

Fr. Weinandy has graciously allowed CWR to publish both his letter and an explanation of how he came to write his letter; both are reprinted in full below.

To read both the letter and the explanation click on the link below:

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/11/01/fr-thomas-g-weinandy-explains-his-critical-letter-to-pope-francis/

Michael Matt Kicks Off Catholic Identity Conference

Branco Cartoon: Unsafe at Any Speed

From Legal Insurrection Blog today.

That theologian, Fr. Weinandy, was asked to resign by the USCCB

Fr. Weinandy, the theologian who sent the letter reproduced in the previous post, was asked to resign his position with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.  What a surprise!  Too bad our bishops can't handle the Truth!

The news was reported tonight by LifeSiteNews.  Here's the link:

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-u.s.-bishops-ask-theologian-to-resign-after-letter-criticizing-pop

US Theologian to Pope: Many losing confidence in you

From The Catholic Herald today:

There is a 'growing unease' and 'chronic confusion' around Amoris Laetitia, Fr Thomas Weinandy says 

A member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission has written to Pope Francis saying many Catholics are losing confidence in “their supreme shepherd” due to on-going doctrinal confusions. 

Fr Thomas Weinandy, who is also a former chief of staff for the United States bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, accuses the Pope of fostering a “growing unease” among the faithful by failing to clarify the teaching of Amoris Laetitia. 

“A chronic confusion seems to mark your pontificate,” he writes. “The light of faith, hope, and love is not absent, but too often it is obscured by the ambiguity of your words and actions.” 

“Too often your manner seems to demean the importance of Church doctrine,” he adds. “Again and again you portray doctrine as dead and bookish, and far from the pastoral concerns of everyday life.” 

On Amoris Laetitia, Fr Weinandy writes: “Your guidance at times seems intentionally ambiguous, thus inviting both a traditional interpretation of Catholic teaching on marriage and divorce as well as one that might imply a change in that teaching.” 

“To teach with such a seemingly intentional lack of clarity inevitably risks sinning against the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth,” he adds. 

He accuses Pope Francis of seemly trying to “censor and even mock” people with traditional views on divorce and remarriage by suggesting they are “Pharisaic stone-throwers who embody a merciless rigorism”. 

“This kind of calumny is alien to the nature of the Petrine ministry,” he says. 

Faithful Catholics are also demoralised by the “teaching and practice” of bishops who “seem not merely open to those who hold views counter to Christian belief, but who support and even defend them,” Fr Weinandy says. 

Pope Francis’s pontificate, he adds, has “given those who hold harmful theological and pastoral views the license and confidence to come into the light and expose their previously hidden darkness”. 

Fr Weinandy also criticises Pope Francis’s efforts at decentralisation, saying they are threating (sic) to undermine the Church’s unity. 

“Encouraging a form of ‘synodality’ that allows and promotes various doctrinal and moral options within the Church can only lead to more theological and pastoral confusion.” 

Bishops, he adds, are also too scared to speak out. 

“Bishops are quick learners, and what many have learned from your pontificate is not that you are open to criticism, but that you resent it.” 

In a post on Sandro Magister’s blog, Fr Weinandy says he was inspired to write the letter while praying at the Eucharistic Chapel in St Peter’s in Rome. 

“I was praying about the present state of the Church and the anxieties I had about the present Pontificate. I was beseeching Jesus and Mary, St. Peter and all of the saintly popes who are buried there to do something to rectify the confusion and turmoil within the Church today, a chaos and an uncertainty that I felt Pope Francis had himself caused.” 

He says that he asked God to give him a clear sign that he should write something. That sign turned out to be a chance meeting with an old acquaintance who had since become an archbishop. 

The archbishop said: “Keep up the good writing.” 

Fr Weinandy’s intervention comes just over a month after the publication of the “filial correction”, in which 62 scholars accused the Pope of failing to stop the spread of “heresies and other errors”. Other scholars later added their names to the list of signatories.

Fr. Nix Sermon: Feast of Christ the King

Today's sermon delivered at Immaculate Conception Basilica in Jacksonville can be accessed by clicking on the below link:

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/10/29/cksermon17/

Sundays are for Beauty: Chinese Redux

First posted here on September 6, 2009.  More than 8,000 Likes on YouTube.  Brought back today at request of Molly.

Fr. Rutler's Weeknly Column: October 29, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column

October 29th, 2017

The Roman magistrate Appius Claudius Caecus, who died in 273 B.C., accomplished much despite physical infirmities: “caecus” means blind. His greatest monuments were Rome’s first aqueduct (Aqua Appia) and first highway (Via Appia), which is still in use today. He was also a literary man, who wrote of the working man (homo faber) and gave moral significance to the human ability to build: “Every man is the architect of his own fortune.”

   

In his youth Saint John Paul II had been a factory worker in a chemical plant, virtually a slave laborer under the Nazis, an experience that gave poignancy to his encyclical on work, Laborem Exercens, written in 1981: “ ‘In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread’ (Genesis 3:19). These words refer to the sometimes heavy toil that from [Eden] onwards has accompanied human work . . . And yet, in spite of all this toil—perhaps, in a sense, because of it—work is a good thing for man. . . . through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being.’ ”

 

  Made in the image of God, human beings do not merely toil, for they can use their imagination and reason to design and create. New York City is a virtual hymn to that ability, symbolized by the Empire State Building right up the street from our church. Despite the Depression and lack of the advanced power tools we have today, it took only 410 days to finish in 1931; in one spurt, fourteen floors went up in ten days. Thousands of workers, including Mohawks who have a talent for managing heights, completed it for $41 million, $19 million less than estimated. Hard hats were not used in those days, yet remarkably only five workers were killed—five too many, but still a tribute to skill and caution.

  

Our church is now in the heart of the largest building development in our nation’s history. Sixteen skyscrapers are rising in this Hudson Yards project, one taller than the Empire State Building. It will bring 12,700,000 square feet of office, residential and retail space, and an estimated 65,000 visitors daily. The sacrifices involved to build this cannot be overstated. In recent days three young workers were killed, and hundreds of devout laborers asked me to gather with them in the midst of the steel girders and concrete to lead them with prayers and Holy Water, for their work is more than mere toil.

   

Our Lord, who was a carpenter, certainly challenges all of us to do his work in this gigantic new chance to let his light shine. With all this engineering and commercial display, “homo faber” can only know himself rightly by knowing that he is a helper of God the Creator. “Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it” (Psalm 127:1).

Subscribers,
Like what you're reading? If so, please consider making a special donation to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel at 424 West 34th Street, so that we can afford to continue distributing the column!

Fr. Mark Pilon: The Fruits of Soft Discipline

Fr. Mark Pilon posted this essay today on The Catholic Thing Blog:

When I was in the seminary in the early 1960s, we were indoctrinated in the notion that the harsh discipline of the Church over the centuries would be a thing of the past following Vatican II. Supposedly, none of this harshness had ever really worked to safeguard the teaching of the Church, so a new softer approach was needed. 

A half-century later, the results are in – and it’s indisputable that the softer approach didn’t work. In addition to the exodus of priests, nuns, and religious, there’s been a massive loss of knowledge among ordinary lay people about what the Church teaches. And no wonder, since there’s been little effort to make Church teachings clear in the flight from the bad old days of “harsh discipline.”

To continue, click on the below link:

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/10/26/the-fruits-of-soft-discipline/