Restoring the Sacred
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Monday, January 29, 2018
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column, January 28, 2018
Father Rutler's Weekly Column
Sunday, January 28, 2018
The German word “kitsch” is hard to define, other than “tacky” or “tasteless,” but as Justice Potter Stewart said of prurience, “I know it when I see it.” It is indulged sometimes even by pious Catholics. Examples of kitsch abound in the sculpture garden of the United Nations. My favorite is a huge Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver with a twisted barrel by the Swedish sculptor Carl Reuterswärd. It runs afoul of the dictum vaguely attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “Those who hammer their guns into plows, will plow for those who do not.” There is one superior work, albeit by the Soviet Realist Yevgeny Vuchetich, showing a man hammering a sword into the shape of a plowshare.
That allusion, of course, is to verses in Isaiah, Joel and Micah. Communists could pick and choose bits of the Bible when convenient. The Prince of Peace warned that those who live by the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52), but he also told his disciples to buy swords (Luke 22:36) and warned: “I did not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). The apparent contradiction is resolved by understanding that Christ speaks of swords both as defensive weapons and, more intensely, as representative of moral suffering.
At the Presentation of Christ, Simeon told Our Lady that a sword would someday pierce her heart. This was fulfilled at the Crucifixion, for if there is a pain that can be as hard as physical suffering, it is the empathy one feels when watching the suffering of a loved one.
There is much suffering in the Church, and Our Lady of Sorrows endures that, for she is Mother of the Church. In the order of places where Christians are being tormented now, North Korea ranks first, followed by Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Iran, in a list that is not exhaustive.
As Our Lady was virtually abandoned at the foot of the Cross, so have those who are suffering atrocities and genocide been scandalously ignored by many in the West until recently. Our government has announced that it will stop the State Department’s policy of directing all relief funds through ineffective agencies of the United Nations, and will work with private organizations to aid vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities.
At the Presentation of Christ, Simeon told Our Lady that a sword would someday pierce her heart. This was fulfilled at the Crucifixion, for if there is a pain that can be as hard as physical suffering, it is the empathy one feels when watching the suffering of a loved one.
There is much suffering in the Church, and Our Lady of Sorrows endures that, for she is Mother of the Church. In the order of places where Christians are being tormented now, North Korea ranks first, followed by Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Iran, in a list that is not exhaustive.
As Our Lady was virtually abandoned at the foot of the Cross, so have those who are suffering atrocities and genocide been scandalously ignored by many in the West until recently. Our government has announced that it will stop the State Department’s policy of directing all relief funds through ineffective agencies of the United Nations, and will work with private organizations to aid vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities.
St. John Paul II said that Simeon’s prediction confirms Mary’s “faith in the accomplishment of the divine promises of salvation, [while] on the other hand it also reveals to her that she will have to live her obedience of faith in suffering, at the side of the suffering Savior, and that her motherhood will be mysterious and sorrowful.”
As the pen is mightier than the sword, in Bulwer-Lytton’s adage, so is Christ the Living Word more acute and powerful than any sword that pierces those who love him.
As the pen is mightier than the sword, in Bulwer-Lytton’s adage, so is Christ the Living Word more acute and powerful than any sword that pierces those who love him.
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Copyright © 2017, All rights reserved.
Friday, January 26, 2018
Obama: The Most Corrupt President in American HIstory?
From the Manhattan Contrarian Blog today:
http://manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2018/1/26/obama-the-most-corrupt-president-in-american-history
Pope Pius XI: The Family under Communism
Pope Pius XI, who served as the Roman Catholic Pontiff from 6 February 1922 to his death in 1939, is featured today on The Catholic Thing Blog via a quote from his prescient encyclical, Divini Redemptoris (1937). Click the link below to read the quote:
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Fr. Ray Blake: Peronism and Corruption
From Fr. Ray Blake's Blog today:
Nowaday's everyone identifies the rule of Francis as in some sense Peronist, it is popular conclusion, I identified it at the beginning of his reign, if somewhat positively, as appealing to the ordinary man and trying to make the Papacy 'popular', that was a bit naive of me, it is actually Peron's Peronism, essentially about making the leader powerful.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
CONFUSING CATHOLICS: Inclusivity Trumps Morality
Down in the catacombs, Michael Matt discusses the case of a young priest in Minnesota who's taking heat for firing "married" homosexual musicians in his parish. The parish is divided, the media are outraged, and the faithful are confused. Whose fault is this? The priest's? No, he's just doing his job. The gay musicians’? No, not really—they've been working in the same parish for over ten years, and nobody objected. Michael calls on Catholics—liberal and conservative alike–to demand that the 'Church of Accompaniment' either edit and remove the Catechism of the Catholic Church's moral teaching on this question….or enforce it. There is no other way. Hate has nothing to do with it. Padre Pio and Pope John Paul were pretty clear on this question too, by the way. Are we to conclude that they too were intolerant, non-inclusive haters?
How long does the madness go on before Catholics demand answers from our feckless priests, bishops and popes?
Wall Street Journal: James Comey's Ethics Class at William & Mary
By
The Editorial Board
Jan. 22, 2018 7:11 p.m. ET
The College of William & Mary in Virginia announced last week that James Comey will teach a course on “ethical leadership” starting this autumn. The former FBI director would not have been our first choice for such an assignment, but upon reflection maybe his experience as a federal prosecutor, deputy attorney general and FBI director is ideal for the task.
Mr. Comey said in a statement accompanying the news that “ethical leaders lead by seeing above the short term, above the urgent or the partisan, and with a higher loyalty to lasting values, most importantly the truth.” In that spirit, here are some suggestions on how Mr. Comey can structure his course to help students confront these profound questions.
Week One case study: The FBI is investigating a presidential candidate for mishandling classified emails as Secretary of State. The director decides on his own to violate Justice Department rules and exonerate that candidate in a public statement to the media, letting an aide replace the legally potent phrase “grossly negligent” in a draft of his statement with “extremely careless” in the final version.
Students will examine when a public official can choose to ignore rules and standards of conduct for what he considers to be higher purposes. Required reading: Former Deputy Attorney General and federal Judge Laurence Silberman’s February 2017 speech to the Columbia Law School chapter of the Federalist Society.
Breakout session topic: Having exonerated that candidate, the FBI director intervenes in the campaign again only days before Election Day, saying new evidence has required him to reopen the email case. Two days before the polls open he says that the new evidence turned out to be nothing of consequence. Was the FBI director protecting the rule of law, or his own reputation?
Ethical guides Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner will visit each breakout session to steer the discussions. (Thanks to the federal prison system for letting Mr. Weiner appear by video from Federal Medical Center Devens.)
Week Two: Amid the post-Enron political frenzy, a prosecutor indicts an investment banker not on bank-related charges but on obstruction of justice based on a snippet of an ambiguous email. The first trial ends in a hung jury but the prosecutor wins on the second try only to be overturned by an appellate court.
Students will explore the ethical demands of prosecutorial discretion. Guest lecturer: Frank Quattrone.
Week Three: FBI director Robert Mueller and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York are convinced that the man behind the 2001 anthrax mail attacks is a government virologist. They spend years pursuing him and destroying his reputation through the media, only to concede years later that they had fingered the wrong man.
Students will examine the ethics of trial-by-media and the risks to the fair administration of justice from prosecutors who ignore contrary evidence. Visiting scholars: Nicholas Kristof and Steven Jay Hatfill.
Week Four: A deputy attorney general handpicks a personal friend and godfather to one of his children, Patrick Fitzgerald, as a special counsel to investigate who leaked the name of CIA official Valerie Plame. Within days Mr. Fitzgerald learns that the leaker was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a fact he then keeps secret for years.
Instead of closing the case, the deputy AG expands Mr. Fitzgerald’s mandate. After a three-year investigation that turns up nothing new, Mr. Fitzgerald indicts a White House aide for perjury to salvage something from the effort. Reporter Judith Miller, whom Mr. Fitzgerald sent to jail for 85 days to force her testimony that was crucial in convicting the White House official, later says she testified falsely after Mr. Fitzgerald withheld crucial information from her.
Students will consider the ethics of special counsels without effective supervision, and whether Mr. Fitzgerald showed loyalty to lasting values and the truth by keeping the name of the leaker secret from the public and President George W. Bush. Special guest (invited): Scooter Libby.
We can think of many other ripe areas for ethical exploration across Mr. Comey’s long career, but this should get him off to a compelling start. If Mr. Comey decides to go in a different direction from our advice, perhaps an enterprising student can raise the issues here during discussion periods.
Appeared in the January 23, 2018, print edition.
Monday, January 22, 2018
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Fr. Nix's Sermon, Third Sunday after Epiphany
This sermon was given on the 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany in 2018. It compares liberation theology to the liberation of the soul that happens in worshipping God as He wants (and finishes with a bit on extreme unction.)
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column, January 21, 2018
Father Rutler's Weekly Column
Sunday, January 21, 2018
In the late 1990s I watched the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, replicating the nineteenth-century cathedral that had been dynamited by Stalin in 1931. It can hold an estimated ten thousand worshipers (they stand throughout the long services, for pews are abhorrent to venerable tradition) and is the tallest Orthodox church in the world with a dome reaching 338 feet. Stalin’s plan to build on its site a Palace of the Soviets with a huge statue of Lenin atop its dome was never realized because of World War II. That recalls the statue of Zeus, “the Abomination of Desolation,” which the Greek ruler of Syria, Antiochus IV, erected in the Jerusalem temple after he despoiled its sacred vessels. Antiochus basked in the title Epiphanes, which means “radiance of God,” but the Jews punned that as Epimanes, or “the mad man.”
Two hundred churches are planned for Moscow, along with an estimated thousand across the nation, replacing and adding to those destroyed in the Communist period, during which priests were crucified on the church doors. These are in the classical Byzantine style, not the modern biscuit boxes and flying saucers that were the bane of the West over the last few decades. In some towns, the local people are taught iconography and mosaic art, so the churches really are the work of their own hands.
These days in China, where Christianity is oppressed, not especially for theological reasons, but because it is a threat to the political hegemony of the state, churches are being destroyed. Within the past few months, for example, in Henan Province an evangelical church was dynamited in Shangqiu, with a blithe ferocity paralleling that of Stalin.
In the West, churches are getting demolished for reasons other than political: redundancy, the lack of need for “ethnic” parishes, and the sheer cost of maintenance. Often, people who are much wealthier than their ancestors who built the churches sacrificially out of their penury, do not contribute enough for maintenance. Between 1995 and the present, the Catholic population in the United States has increased from 57 million to over 70 million. New churches are being built in the South and West where populations are growing faster than the decline in other parts of the country.
There is another factor, however, in the loss of churches in much of our nation, and it is simply indifference. The vice of sloth is a spiritual malignancy, and many of our great metropolises have become hospices for lapsed believers. When I was sent to our parish here in “Hell’s Kitchen,” which is experiencing a phenomenal population growth, I was asked, “How many Catholics live there?” The proper question is, “How many Catholics will live there?”
The Ascending Lord did not send his disciples into Catholic neighborhoods, because there were none.
Faithfully Yours in Christ, Fr. George W. Rutler
Faithfully Yours in Christ, Fr. George W. Rutler
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Friday, January 19, 2018
Mariawald Trappist Abbey Closed Down -- Summorum Undone by Current Vatican Regime
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2018/01/mariawald-trappist-abbey-closed-down.html
In a letter dated November 21, 2008, Benedict XVI granted the abbey the privilege to return to the old usages of the Trappist Order in liturgy and monastic life. This concerned especially a return to the venerable Old Rite. The pope saw this project as a "renewal of the church in the spirit of tradition". Now this renewal is over before it could get off the ground.
It is true that while the Church will survive all obstacles, religious houses, cathedrals, abbeys have been closed and destroyed many times before. Yet, we are confident in the hope that, just as abbeys ravaged by savagery, in the Reformation and in the post-conciliar storm, did not last forever, the current regime in the Vatican will not last forever either.
Fr. Ray Blake: Imagine Pastoral Opportunities
Not everyone thought the "marriage" performed by Pope Francis in mid-air. This is from Fr. Ray Blake's Blog today:
Imagine if you lived in theatreland in London or New York and had priests competing with jugglers and street magicians, offering free marriages whilst people waited for tickets.
Imagine the Marriage of Figaro with real Marriages!
Imagine, Romeo and Juliet actually getting married!
Imagine, a two for one offer at your local supermarket! Two couples at one go.
Imagine the possibilities for an airport chaplain, you could marry people as they waited to check-in, or as they wait for luggage at the carousel.
To read the whole post click on the link below:Imagine the mass weddings that could take place at the next Glastonbury Rock Festival...
http://marymagdalen.blogspot.com/2018/01/imagine-pastoral-opportunities.html
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Fr. Schall at 90
Today's post at The Catholic Thing pays tribute to the great Fr. James Schall on the upcoming occasion of his 90th birthday (January 20). It's a must read for anyone who has ever had the pleasure of reading Fr. Schall or, for that matter, anyone who never had the pleasure.
Bellarmine Forum: John Manos on Papal Awards (and Papal Bull)
John Manos, writing yesterday at the Bellarmine Forum Blog:
Pope Francis bestowed the honor of “Commander in the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great” upon Lilianne Plouman, a Dutch politician. Plouman is heralded as a global force to raise money for abortion. So, when pressured on this award, the Vatican issued a statement on January 15...
“The honor of the Pontifical Order of St. Gregory the Great received by Mrs. Lilianne Ploumen, former Minister of Development, in June 2017 during the visit of the Dutch Royals to the Holy Father, responds to the diplomatic practice of the exchange of honors between delegations on the occasion of official visits by Heads of State or Government in the Vatican. Therefore, it is not in the slightest a placet [an expression of assent] to the politics in favor of abortion and of birth control that Mrs Ploumen promotes.”
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Fr. Nix's Sermon, January 14, 2018
This sermon was given on the Second Sunday after Epiphany, 2018. The featured picture on the blog for this sermon is from a stained glass window at my basilica of residence downtown.
A continued thanks for the music-bumpers of my sermons to the holy nuns of Ephesus.
http://padreperegrino.org/2018/01/14/2dpe18/
A continued thanks for the music-bumpers of my sermons to the holy nuns of Ephesus.
http://padreperegrino.org/2018/01/14/2dpe18/
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column, January 14, 2018
Father Rutler's Weekly Column
January 14, 2018
The romantic soul of William Wordsworth thrilled over the French Revolution: “Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy! . . . Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven!” He crossed the Channel to see it in action, but when the Terror began he fled in horror. Then there is the story of Beethoven tearing up the first page of his Sinfonia Eroica, originally dedicated to Napoleon, upon news that his hero had succumbed to the vanity of a crown. The anarchist Emma Goldman hailed the Russian Revolution, but when fact obliterated her fantasy, she acidly described the Bolshevik State “crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything.” The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact shattered the illusions of many armchair Communists.
Disillusionment can decay into cynicism, but it can also be a salvific dose of reality. Eugenicists in the last century envisioned a demographic utopia, only to find that illusion cruelly mocked by the Nazi death camps and made macabre by abortion mills today. Arthur and Elizabeth Rathburn of Grosse Point, Michigan are just the latest of people on trial for trafficking in the body parts of unborn babies. In 2013 the FBI discovered in their warehouse over one thousand heads, limbs and organs of infants. Their indictment seems to have been delayed because of what was previously a political reluctance to implicate Planned Parenthood. Increasing numbers of our population are recognizing unpleasant truths.
Recent changes by our Executive Branch mark a shift in policy—reinstating the pro-life Mexico City Policy, moving to defund the United Nations Population Fund, expanding the religious exemption to the Health and Human Services Department’s contraception mandate, and favoring a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act—as well as encouraging the annual March for Life this January 19, marking the 45th anniversary of the tragic Roe v. Wade decision. One does not want to be overly optimistic, but illusions are being shattered and, save for stone hearts, the consciences of many may be recognizing the consequences of naïvely underestimating the forces of evil cloaked as social progress.
The Scottish king Robert the Bruce provided a lesson in persistence. Defeated in battle, he was tempted to give up, but for three months he took refuge in a cave where he watched a spider persevere in building a web, after failing numerous times. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again.” The line has edified schoolchildren, but it also helped the Bruce secure his kingdom after victory at Bannockburn. Various places claim the site of the cave—Dumfriesshire, Arran Island, Craigie, Taitlin Island—but that cave is wherever people learn from their mistakes and do not succumb to cynicism. “Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2).
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Friday, January 12, 2018
Anthony Esolen: Church Teachings on Chastity
Professor Anthony Esolen writing today at Crisis Magazine Blog:
When the Church upholds the rules of chastity, she is not so much prescribing a diet, as she is identifying what is good for man’s sexual being, and what is not good. She is describing facts. You may say that these are not facts; you may not be a Roman Catholic. But we must be clear about what the Church is affirming. She says that to engage in sexual activity outside of marriage is bad for you, and by extension it is bad for the people around you, because no man is an island, and autonomy is a lie. There are things that chaste people can do and can enjoy that are spoiled or rendered impossible by the vice; and there are things that a society that expects chastity can enjoy that a society that expects vice cannot.
People who believe that the Church can change her teaching about these things do not see what is implied. They believe, it seems to me, that the teachings are arbitrary, “mere dogma” as they say. But we are arguing ultimately about facts. The Church is saying, “This here is laced with poison. It will riddle your bones. You will begin to cough and spit up blood. You might as well be bound and fettered. Here are the directives instead that will make you powerful. They work.”
Thursday, January 11, 2018
Monday, January 8, 2018
Sunday, January 7, 2018
Fr. Z: "Ad Orientem" Five Years Later
From Fr. Z's Blog today:
You long time readers might remember that I posted photos of a “table” altar being hauled by some men out of a church and over the the rectory.That was in 2013. Five years ago.
That’s when St. Mary’s in Pine Bluff, WI, where Fr. Richard Heilman is pastor, went ad orientem.(Click on the above link to see the difference)
Fr. Jerry Pokorsky: Confronting the Gay Priest Problem
Fr. Jerry Pokorsky, one very courageous Catholic priest in the diocese of Arlington, Virginia, writing today at The Catholic Thing:
When a priest claims to be “gay and proud,” he is revealing that he has assented to his same-sex attraction. Free and deliberate thoughts have moral implications, as Jesus asserted: “But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Mt 5:28) The difference between internal assent and external action is only a matter of a sinful opportunity. An unabashed and proud “gay” priest has already committed sodomy in his heart.
Saturday, January 6, 2018
Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column: January 7, 2018
Father Rutler's Weekly Column
Sunday, January 7, 2018
When The New Yorker magazine was peerless for its combination of erudition and wit, it ran a cartoon of Lilliputians contemplating Gulliver, whom they had fastened to the ground with ropes: “Either he’s very big or we are very small.”
That is what we might say of the Creator when Epiphany directs our eyes to the stars. But while man must be humbled by the size beyond measure of the galaxies, the Creator does not humiliate us. In an interview in 1930, Einstein said: “We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how.” With the humility of a scientist who knows that there is much he does not know, that same professor wryly remarked to R. A. Thornton that he did not want to be like someone, including so many physicists, “who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest.”
Well-meaning scientists have tried to calculate a physical explanation for the Star of Bethlehem. In 1604, Johannes Kepler proposed that at the time of Christ’s birth there was a supernova simultaneous with the conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. This often is a feature of Christmas programs in astronomical observatories. There may be something to that, but saints like Chrysostom were of the opinion that this was no ordinary phenomenon, given the way it moved and came close to earth, but was “of some power endowed with reason.” For Aquinas, it is “probable that it was a newly created star, not in the heavens, but in the air near the earth, and that its movement varied according to God’s will.”
Little is known of the Magi, and for that reason they are a mine easily plundered by romantics who make them so exotic that they seem too good to be true. We do not even know their homeland; perhaps it was Persia or, according to one recent theory, what is now Yemen. We do know that God, unlike Gulliver, is beyond measure, and his grace has made us more than Lilliputians. Saint Hippolytus, before dying a hard death for Christ, said of him:
He wanted us to consider him as no different from ourselves, and so he worked, he was hungry and thirsty, he slept. . . . When we have come to know the true God, both our bodies and our souls will be immortal and incorruptible. We shall enter the kingdom of heaven, because while we lived on earth we acknowledged heaven’s King. Friends of God and co-heirs with Christ, we shall be subject to no evil desires or inclinations, or to any affliction of body or soul, for we shall have become divine.
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Fr. Gerald Murray: The Crisis We Are Living
(Cardinal Kasper and The Pope)
From The Catholic Thing today:
Here’s the problem: When a group of bishops teaches that persons in invalid second marriages are free to judge that it is not “feasible” for them to avoid committing acts of adultery, they are telling the faithful that they are not at fault for doing what the Catholic Church teaches to be gravely sinful. “Feasibility” means “the state or degree of being easily or conveniently done,” and even more precisely “capable of being done, accomplished or carried out.” The avoidance of mortal sin does involve difficulty and inconvenience. But the Church does not teach that grown-up people in their right minds are incapable of obeying God’s commandments.
To say to someone that it may be infeasible for him to refrain from acts of adultery is to advise him that, in effect, he is not subject to God’s law in this matter. When pastors tell Catholics living in sin that they are not really guilty of mortal sin as long as they decide that they cannot “feasibly” observe God’s law, the shepherds have seriously failed them.
Friday, January 5, 2018
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Fr. Nix: St. Alphonsus Liguori on Perfect Contrition
This podcast is actually a short audio-book. The great doctor of the Church wrote a small book on “Perfect Contrition: Golden Key to Paradise.” It was translated by Fr. Simon SJ to English, and it was turned into an audio recording in 1950. Because it is old, I found no copyrights, so I re-published it here. Because it is not an original, I did not publish this as a podcast, but I can say that this unknown treasure has been one of the most life-changing books in my priesthood. I think it will help everyone to discover (or re-discover!) the gift of supernatural faith. It is truly a treasure and a Golden Key to show that Perfect Contrition is not as hard as we thought.
Nota Bene: Notice that St. Alphonsus teaches that perfect contrition suffices for the relief of mortal sin (or even original sin) for eternal salvation, but not reception of Holy Communion. Confession of all mortal sins is still required for the reception of Holy Communion.