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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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/