St. Austin Review: Reclaiming Culture

February 3rd, 2012C.S. Lewis and Friendsby Joseph Pearce

Further to my post about Shadowlands, I thought I'd share this e-mail just received from the organisers of an annual conference on C. S. Lewis and Friends, at which I've been privileged to speak in the past. Admirers of Lewis and Tolkien might want to consider attending.

Hello, everyone!

The Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis and Friends is excited to announce that the website for the 2012 Frances White Ewbank Colloquium is now up and running. You can browse the website and find valuable information about this year’s Colloquium by clicking this link.

The 2012 Colloquium will take place May 31 ‐ June 2 and the speakers include Alan Jacobs (Wheaton College), David Downing (Elizabeth College), and Ron Reed (playwright and founder of the Pacific Theatre). We have a very exciting event planned this year, and we hope you can join us for the fun! To register for the 2012 Colloquium, go to http://lewisconference.zondervanlibrary.org/registration/stage1/.

Please feel free to email me with any questions you may have regarding this event. We look forward to seeing you in May!

Laura Constantine
Assistant, Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis and Friends
Taylor University
Upland, Indiana 46989
(765) 998-4690
The Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis and Friends - Taylor University

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February 3rd, 2012Secular Fundamentalism and Religious Freedomby Joseph Pearce

Just received from Tony Ryan of Ignatius Press (see below).

Friends,

See this strong letter from Bishop Jenky in Peoria regarding the latest attack by President Obama on the Church and its pro-life principles. Then do all that you can to help stop this outrageous assault by this administration on the moral convictions of our faith.

Bishop Jenky's words in his letter are similar to "Iniquis Afflictisque" - the Encyclical letter sent to all faithful in Mexico during the persecution of the Catholic Church in the 1920s. That Encyclical is also included for you to read and pass along.

On a side note, a powerful new movie about the martyrs of the Cristeros war of Mexico is releasing in the movie theaters in June. Initially titled "Cristiada" it is now titled "For Greater Glory". It stars Andy Garcia, Peter O'Toole, Eduardo Verastegui, Eva Longoria and others. Watch for it.

Here is a link to the current film website, and trailer. 

Anthony J. Ryan
Marketing Director
Ignatius Press
1348 10th Ave
San Francisco, CA. 94122-2304
415-387-2324, ex. 201
www.ignatius.com

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February 2nd, 2012From the Red Devils to the Priesthoodby Joseph Pearce

As an Englishman, I am passionate about football, i.e. soccer to those on the American side of the Pond. Ever since I was about seven-years-old, I've been a keen supporter of Chelsea, currently one of the best teams in Europe, though I've followed the team through the bad times when the team plumbed depths of ineptitude. One of Chelsea's biggest rivals are Manchester United, also known as the Red Devils, indicative no doubt of their infernal origins. In any event, I was greatly intrigued and encouraged to see that a former Manchester United player is now studying for the priesthood. It goes to show that there is life after death! Here's the article:

Former Manchester Utd player swaps Old Trafford for the Vatican

The shocking story of Phil Mulryne, the former Manchester United footballer who is training to become a priest, to the great surprise of a former teammate

Mauro Pianta,
Rome.

He has played alongside football champions such as David Beckham and Ryan Giggs, wearing the stripes of a top football team like Manchester United. During his football playing days he even dated supermodel Nicola Chapman and certainly lived the fast life. Today, however, 34 year old Phil Mulryne from Ireland, whose career was cut short by an injury in 2008, is undergoing a somewhat different type of "training". The former midfielder is studying. Studying to become a priest. He has enrolled at the Pontifical Irish College in Rome.

The Catholic Herald reported a statement by former Norwich teammate, Paul Mc Veigh who met Mulryne in Rome: "When I arrived in Rome, I was met by a very contented-looking Phil who took me back to the Irish college where he was to be based for the next four years." "I know for a fact that this is not something he took lightly as the training to be ordained as a Catholic priest consists of a two-year philosophy degree, followed by a four-year theology degree and only after that will he finally be qualified as a priest... it was a complete shock that he felt this was his calling." In an interview with a British newspaper, Mulryne's mother said her son's choice to follow his vocation was a "big decision."

The footballer turned his life around after the injury which put an end to his football career. His friendship with Noel Treanor, the bishop of the Diocese of Down and Connor, in Northern Ireland, was fundamental during that difficult period. It was Treanor who got him involved in charity work and helped him make this life changing decision. Mulryne's got the ball now and this time he's heading for the Vatican.

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February 2nd, 2012Obama’s War on Religionby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

In the words of John Paul II (Veritatis Splendor, N. 101):

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February 2nd, 2012Their Last Communionby Fr. Simon Henry

‘The stark fact is that of the Diocese’s 100,000 Catholics, around 80,000 are lapsed from the practice of the faith. To be honest, the word ‘lapsed’ is inaccurate for many because it suggests that these 80,000 once practised the faith though regular participation in the Mass. The truth is that the majority of Catholics come from families who for generations have never practised the faith and only have their children baptised, confirmed and make their First Holy Communion out of social convention. A useful model to understand this is the ‘cycle of deprivation’ that describes how generations of unemployment lead families into intense poverty and an inability to work entrenched and enabled by the welfare state.

In a similar way, the existence of 5 million lapsed Catholics in England and Wales, with only 880,000 practising, reflects the dynamics of a ‘cycle of faith deprivation’ in which there is a generational impoverishment about the faith and a disinclination to practice entrenched and enabled by our parish sacramental system and Catholic schools.

Simply put, we have created a sacramental and educational system that has created a startling 5 million Catholics who have never practised the faith, never had a living relationship with Jesus Christ. The real problem is that this huge group of nominal Catholics have the social convention of presenting their children for the sacraments but with no intention of raising them in the faith because they themselves have no experience of practising the Faith. Furthermore, baptismal certificates are highly sought after by many as passports Catholic schools system. The reality in Lancaster Diocesan schools is:you don’t need any baptism because you get in anyway if you want to!

Canon Law states that children should only receive the sacrament of baptism if there is ‘a well-founded hope that the child will be brought up in the catholic religion’ (Can. 868). Maybe when non-practising families present their children for baptism the Diocese’s clergy think there is a well-founded hope that the children will be brought up in the catholic religion because they have made contact with the parish and will attend Catholic schools in the future. The fact that there are now 80,000 non-practicing Catholics in the diocese suggests that this hope in the majority of cases was not well founded.

The truth of the matter is, as Bishop O’Donoghue put it so well in Fit for Mission? Schools, tens of thousands of children leave the Catholic school system just as lapsed as they were when they entered our schools. Two of the questions we need to ask of the Diocese’s clergy and school Heads and Heads of RE is how many children, and their families, experience conversion to the Faith and engaged with parish life? How many children from practising families lose their faith while attending their schools?

The Catholic Voice of Lancaster has learnt that it is not uncommon for children from practising families to be bullied by other children because they are a such a tiny minority in schools in which the majority of children, and teachers, are either non-practising or non Catholic.Furthermore, it is common experience that young people are so scarce in the parishes that those who do attend can feel out of place and alien, surrounded as they are by mainly grandparents. Bishop Campbell is right to ask the question is it just and honest that 21,000 practicing Catholics support and maintain schools that are Catholic in name only. If these schools are not powerhouses of the Faith, building up those children who have faith, and encouraging conversion in the rest, what is the point of them? If young people are not an essential part of parish life, what will be the future of the parish?

It’s time that the Catholic project of mass education rediscovered its vitality be insisting on a vibrant Catholic ethos in our schools, based on the Four Pillars of the Faith – Creed, Liturgy, Moral Life and prayer, while the connection with the local parishes becomes ever more strengthened, not gradually growing apart. If this doesn’t soon show signs of taking hold in our schools maybe it’s time that the Catholic project of mass education comes to an end.

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February 1st, 2012A Grief Observedby Joseph Pearce

Last night, having watched the episode of Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, which was the subject of my previous post, I also watched the BBC adaptation of Shadowlands, starring Joss Ackland and Clare Bloom, as C. S. Lewis and Joy Gresham respectively. This version is so much the superior of the later Hollywood version, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, that the two do not even warrant serious comparison.

Although based on real-life events, Shadowlands is nonetheless a dramatic fiction that romanticizes the relationship of Jack and Joy as much as it dramatizes it. Joy gets many of the best lines and is seen as being not only smarter than the incomparable Lewis but stronger in courage and faith also. In the Hollywood version, this discrepancy is accentuated to such an absurd degree in the service of a propagandized feminist agenda that it is almost laughable. Hopkins' Lewis is little more than a buffoon beside the quipping wit of Winger's thoroughly modern Joy. In the BBC version, the acting is not only much better but the relationship between Jack and Joy is treated with much more subtlety and panache. In consequence, we are not particularly irritated by Joy's evident superiority because it is subsumed within the wider story and the problem of pain with which it grapples. Even if we know that Lewis is being treated somewhat unjustly, we are willing to suspend our disbelief in order to enjoy the story and the lessons it teaches.

Shadowlands brings to idealized life one of the great love stories of the twentieth century and shows us faith and reason struggling with the problem of pain. In order to understand it on a deeper level, we need to familiarize ourselves with Lewis' two great works, The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed. The first discusses the problem in the abstract and in the light of pure reason; the latter looks at the same problem through the personal experience of great grief and suffering. The two complement each other superbly. The objectivity of the first is confirmed by the subjectivity of the second. The first uses reason to show suffering in the light of faith; the second shows the experience of great suffering leading ultimately, via an agony in the garden of bereavement, to the same conclusion about the truth of faith to which reason had led.

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February 1st, 2012Mea Culpa ... But Not Maxima Culpaby Joseph Pearce

I note that my less than ringing endorsement of Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation has caused a ripple of irritation in certain quarters. So be it. I stand by what I said. I would, however, like to confess an element of prejudice and presumption. Having made my judgment solely on the basis of the first six episodes that I had seen, and not on the remaining seven that I had not, I was prejudging the case before hearing all the evidence and presuming guilt on the basis of this incomplete evidence.

Last night I watched episode seven, "Grandeur and Obedience", which covered the baroque and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. It was really excellent and Clark's almost gushing defence of Catholic art against the iconoclasm of the Protestant north was not only edifying and refreshing but served as an early prophecy of his future reception into the Church. True to form, his defence of the Catholic baroque was an aesthete's defence and not a theologian's or a philosopher's. It was, therefore, incomplete. It was also marred somewhat by the barbed comments at the episode's conclusion, in which Clark seemed keen to distance himself from any charges of "popery". Nonetheless, and to give credit where it's due, this particular episode was a rare example of secular television paying tribute to the majesty of Rome. Bravo, Sir Kenneth. Bravo!

Mea culpa ... but ...

I suspect that my overall judgment of the series will not be very different from that which I formed after watching the first six episodes. I have little confidence that Clark's inarticulate grasp of the rational foundations for faith will be sufficient to grapple with the complexities of the Enlightenment, utilitarianism, romanticism, impressionism, secular progressivism and the other isms that have beset civilization over the past three hundred years. Since these form the basis of the remaining six episodes, I expect to revert to my role as curmudgeon as I watch future episodes.

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February 1st, 2012Thou Shall Use Canvas Bags – and Other Green Commandmentsby Lorraine V. Murray

In the beginning there were paper bags. Shoppers used them without thinking much about it. Kids turned them into makeshift covers for school books.

Then someone invented plastic bags, and soon a question arose during each shopping expedition: “Paper or plastic?”

Shoppers who wanted to help Mother Earth insisted on paper and felt rather virtuous since they weren’t clogging up landfills with that awful plastic stuff. Yes, it’s true that plastic bags can be recycled, but sometimes you’re just too busy.

But then one day they started wondering if perhaps they were encouraging the destruction of millions of trees through the supposedly environmentally-friendly choice of paper.

And so, when the bag boy chimed in with “paper or plastic?” many shoppers ended up mentally wringing their hands, wanting to scream, “It’s too big a decision!”

Recently, I’ve noticed shoppers who pride themselves on being “green” hauling in their own canvas bags—and thereby evading the whole “paper or plastic?” dilemma.

Canvas seems like the perfect solution—but is it really? After all, the bags will get tattered and worn and will need replacement—and if the cotton used to make them isn't grown organically, won’t this be taxing on the soil?

Please. Let’s stop, take a deep breath, and repeat to ourselves: Something is terribly wrong here.

Instead of being concerned about the truly appalling things happening in the world—such as, say the destruction of millions of babies in the womb or the bombing of churches in the Middle East—Greenies suffer excruciating guilt pangs for all the wrong reasons. These include taking a long shower or (gasp!) driving to work instead of biking.

Mr. and Mrs. Green also feel terribly guilty because they filled two extra-large bags with garbage this week, unlike their oh-so-much-greener neighbors who had only one bag for their entire family—and there are eight of them.

Oh, eight, you say? But isn’t that cause for alarm? In the Green religion, large families, you see, are inherently bad.

Greenies ardently believe it is far preferable for couples to forgo having babies entirely—but if they absolutely must reproduce, then, please, just have one. This way, there will be more room on the planet for all the endangered animals.

In fact, if the entire human race were in danger of dying out, many disciples of the Green religion would secretly think, “Well, it serves us right. Humans are the bad guys anyway.”

I think it’s wonderful when a person does something truly virtuous and feels good about it.

Giving food and clothing to a poor family, for example, is certainly a virtuous cause, as is cheering up an elderly friend in a nursing home.

Problem is, with the Green religion, virtue often is associated with actions that have nothing to do with other human beings.

Mr. Green thinks he’s done his good deed for the day because his morning coffee was grown organically, brewed with clarified water and served in a cup made of recycled cardboard.

Mrs. Green prides herself on limiting the length of her showers to five minutes.

Of course, there are plenty of Christians who perform virtuous acts—such as helping the poor and visiting the sick—while also showing a rational level of concern for the environment. It is certainly not an either-or situation.

In fact, the catechism of the Catholic Church emphasizes that we should be good stewards of the earth. We should care for the world God has created by making good use of natural resources and trying not to pollute the world.

But this is a far cry from turning nature into a god, as Greenies do.

Radical environmentalists will talk about the “sins” of wasting resources and endangering species—but you don’t hear them fretting about breaking the Ten Commandments, which concern our relationship with God and our treatment of other human beings.

Maybe this is because Greenies are busy constructing their own commandments, such as: “Thou shall not consume too much energy,” “Thou shall not drive a big car” and “Thou shall carry thy own canvas bags into the supermarket.”

And the most basic commandment for the Greenies? It might be summed up as “I am Mother Earth, thy goddess. Worship me above everything else.”

--

Lorraine’s latest books include “The Abbess of Andalusia,” a biography of Flannery O’Connor, and “Death of a Liturgist,” a wild and wacky mystery featuring the rather satisfying demise of a layman who tries to make Sunday mass more groovy.

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February 1st, 2012Consequences Continue—and so Does the Silenceby Dena Hunt

Pursuant to an earlier post a few days ago (“Why I’m Opposed to the Environment”), I am once again struck by the depth of my naivete. In this morning’s headlines, I discovered that the huge pink-ribbon charity for breast cancer research (the Komen Foundation) has been in partnership with Planned Parenthood all along. It turns out that donations made to breast cancer research have been going to Planned Parenthood in the form of grants.

Obviously, I shouldn’t have been surprised, therefore, by the silence about the strong link between abortion and breast cancer. It wasn’t the link that bothered me—that’s not surprising—it was the charity’s silence about it. Now I know why no one ever mentioned it.

The headline says that the Komen Foundation has severed its partnership with PP (a partnership we didn’t know existed until now). The Foundation claims its action was caused by a “conservative” congressman’s investigation of PP’s public funding. Meanwhile, PP blames “conservative” pro-lifers for the Foundation’s decision. A heart-rending quote from a PP spokesman implies that the lack of a cure for breast cancer is the fault of “conservatives”. It apparently doesn’t occur to anyone to blame abortion for its breast-cancer consequences—the only authentic non-political, non-financial cause and effect relationship in the whole story—and the only one still not mentioned by anybody.

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February 1st, 2012Why American Don’t Do Darwinby Ed West | http://www.edwestonline.com

Despite the economic collapse of our continent and a vaguely hysterical populist campaign against the bankers who helped to bankrupt our country, the British are still glued to the US presidential election, with Mitt Romney’s image rarely off most UK news sites’ home pages.

American politics fascinates the British for a number of reasons; the sheer spectacle of the long, gruelling and expensive race, carried out over a physically enormous area; the glamour of the candidates; the strange attachment to morality as a central issue; the talk of God.

The strangest issue for Britons to comprehend is Americans’ views on evolution, as was expressed by my Telegraph colleague Tom Chivers in this piece “Republicans turn their back on the Enlightenment”.

To Europeans American arguments over Darwin seem genuinely baffling and depressing, while in reverse British secularists often appear like intellectual snobs, as was illustrated during the Guardian’s hilariously bad Clark Country campaign (although I should add, if it’s not clear to the reader, that Tom is very much not the stereotypical British intellectual snob and, though an atheist, does not dismiss the religious).

Yet it is understandable, if one looks at what Darwin actually entails as a package.

In the latest Catholic Herald Dennis Sewell explains just why Americans dislike Darwin:

Two years earlier, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life had published evidence that only 26 per cent of adult Americans accepted Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as it is understood by scientists and taught in public schools. Or, to put it another way, almost three in four American voters did not. The polling firm Gallup found Pew’s figure to be a considerable overstatement of support for the science side of the argument. According to its own 2006 survey, only 13 per cent of Americans accepted the truth of evolution.

For this year’s election, Gallup has been digging beneath the surface to produce numbers that allow candidates to optimise their responses to the inevitable evolution questions along the campaign trail. Voters were invited to choose between three options: “God created humans in present form within the past 10,000 years” “Humans evolved, God had no part in the process” or “Humans evolved, God guided the process”. The first of these is full-on Creationism. The second represents orthodox Darwinian science, while the third could be seen as congruent with Intelligent Design, but is not necessarily so, offering space for more nuanced theological and scientific positioning.

Gallup’s findings pose some radical challenges to the reflexive assumptions of secular, liberal commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. For a start, those rejecting the scientific orthodoxy do not all conform to the media stereotype of an inbred, Right-wing, Christian fundamentalist redneck. Support for the “God guided” option is, for instance, stronger among Democrats (40 per cent) and Independents (39 per cent) than it is among Republican voters (36 per cent).

Sewell is the author of The Political Gene, one of the most fascinating books of recent years, and one every Catholic should have in their rhetorical armoury. Focusing less on the well-trodden path between Darwin and Hitler, he looked at how social Darwinism in the United States inspired (most Left-wing) eugenicists to instigate campaigns of sterilisation against the poor.

And yet this dark, shameful story has disappeared down a historical wormhole, while our collective memory of the most famous Creationist v. Darwinist set piece, the Scopes Trial, is totally distorted.

In fact, Sewell wrote, John Thomas Scopes was just a football coach with “no special commitment to his pupils, and was not planning on staying in Dayton very long”, and probably never taught his class about evolution. The trial was a “cynical contrivance”, a plot hatched by local businessmen to make Dayton famous, and responding to an advert by eugenicists wishing to challenge the anti-evolution Butler Act. That Act, rather than being some ancient, outdated law, had only been signed into law by the Governor, less than 2 months previously, passed by overwhelming margins by both houses.

As Sewell pointed out:

These margins reflected the Butler Act’s enormous popularity among the people of Tennessee. In 1925, the nationwide eugenics campaign was at its height. In the rural areas of Tennessee folk may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwinian science, but they knew the eugenicists who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them “imbeciles” and “defectives” and would sterilise them if they got the chance. They knew they despised God and the Bible too. Now they wanted to teach children that grandpa was descended from an ape. But America was a democracy, and that meant that simple people, if they made their views plain, could fight.

The First World War probably played a part, the trauma of which caused different countries to behave in different ways (in France and Britain pacifism and self-hatred, in Germany revenge). Americans were especially influenced by a pacifist called Vernon Kellogg who went over to Belgium in 1915 on a humanitarian mission and, having spent much time with the German high command, came to see how Darwinian philosophy had poisoned their thinking. “The creed of natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the Gospel of the German intellectuals,” he wrote, his words coming to influence American public opinion then and for a long time after.

As Sewell concludes in his piec, Americans clearly aren’t stupid and are nor are they anti-science, but they are foremost a Christian people and are never prepared to sacrifice a Christian worldview.

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January 31st, 2012Faith at Work and Working the Faithby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Over the weekend, while driving to perform shows, my actress and I listened to audio recordings of EWTN's The Journey Home, one of my favorite television shows, hosted by Marcus Grodi (whose novels I just recorded as audio books, but more on that in an upcoming post).

One of the Journey Home segments was an interview with Kevin Lowry (pictured here) and his father Douglas, two Canadians converts who had fascinating stories to tell.

The highlight of the interview for me was when the elder Lowry threw out, almost as an aside, his definition of "love", which I can not repeat word for word as I was driving while listening and so could not take notes. But it went something like this ...

LOVE - The persistent and freely willed decision to sacrifice one's self for the good of another.

Dr. Lowry emphasized the "persistence" of this act. Love is not just a feeling or a mood, but a deliberate commitment to persist in offering one's self for the good of another.

And anyone who's married knows how hard this can be - and yet how transcendent such a decision is, particularly when you're on the receiving end. To know that you have a wife (as I do) who would always and everywhere give of herself in small ways and big ways for your own good is to know love.

But not only is the love between husband and wife part of "marriage" - our faith itself is a "marriage". Christ is the bridegroom of the Body of Christ, His Church, which is being prepared for His coming. Thus we must imitate Christ in offering ourselves for Him; we must make the decision to love Him, to persist in offering ourselves for His sake and for the sake of our neighbors - for He is the husband of His Church.

And, as in marriage and the love of our spouse, the real challenge of our love of God is the daily ups and downs we face. Making great sacrifices even unto a dramatic and bloody martyrdom is sometimes easier than not snapping back when the missus is crabby - but these little things are the true test of our love, for he who is faithful in little things will be faithful in big ones.

With this in mind, perhaps the greatest challenge for most of us is persisting in love, persisting in our faith, at work - at our daily calling in the secular world.

Thus, Kevin Lowry has written a book called Faith at Work - Finding Purpose Beyond the Paycheck. This is an easy read, and a book written with chapter summaries in the form of bullet points and questions to engage the reader so that he might begin to apply the Faith in an area where we're supposed to keep our mouths shut.

The book is filled with little gems, such as the lesson Kevin learned early in his career from Sam, the managing stockholder of the company where Kevin was working, "a gruff, yet gold-hearted man," who had "built up a substantial firm from nothing over a long and storied career." Kevin writes ...

"One day, one of the administrative assistants lost her purse, and Sam found her crying in the lunchroom. Despite deadlines and other pressing needs, Sam dropped everything and assisted the desperate woman in finding the purse. It took hours, but finally the wayward purse was found.

"That story circulated throughout the firm and became part of the legacy handed down to successive classes of newly minted accountants. In fact, this firm legend taught me one of the most valuable lessons I have ever absorbed in the business world: the importance of taking a sincere, personal interest in others".

Indeed, as Kevin points out, this is the best way of "witnessing" at work, particularly when employees are supposed to avoid talking about religion.

"When we enter the workplace, we aren't always in a position to quote Bible verses or to illustrate our points with citations from encyclicals. But we're always able to conduct ourselves with virtue and honor."

And what's impressive here is that Kevin Lowry not only writes about these things, he practices them. Kevin works for Marcus Grodi's Coming Home Network International, and I've been dealing with him regularly during the course of our audio book project. He is delightful and kind and I come away with the feeling that I'm not just dealing with a business relationship, but with a caring relationship, with a Christian, with a man who sees his work as a form of service, a way of loving others.

Of course in much of the business world, and especially in show business, this is really rare. For instance, in show biz, actors have a strange love-hate relationship with their audiences. While we are dependent on them to buy tickets and to come see our shows, to watch what we do and give us the approval we're so hungry for by applauding wildly and cheering, we talk about "killing" them or "knocking them dead", and there exists a kind of brutality in backstage chat regarding these audiences, our primary "clients".

So it's quite tempting to use others as "objects" the way we "objectify" our careers, as mere means to an end.

But the techniques suggested in Faith at Work are a way around this, a way to keep our faith alive in everything we do, a way to persist in love. Kevin O’Brien President & Artistic Director Theater of the Word Incorporated PO Box 29510 St. Louis, MO 63126 314-842-5231 / 1-888-840-WORD Fax: 314-270-3958 www.thewordinc.org Click here to find us on Facebook!

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January 31st, 2012Can’t We All Just Ignore This?by Dena Hunt

The trouble with the Democratic religious persecution of Catholics (Be honest—it’s bigger than just Obama. It even includes Catholics—a lot of them) is that it’s so in-your-face now. When it started to become visible—I’d estimate that time to be during the presidential campaign of 2008—we could just say, “Hmm. That Chicago preacher is such a hateful man. We must pray for him.” And we convinced ourselves that, after all, Obama himself didn’t say those hateful things—he just attended the church, even as we nervously asked ourselves, “…but why did he attend it?” That priest who often spoke there—what was his name? Felcher? Fletcher? Whatever—was an item of greater concern because he was just so embarrassing, you know, with his adolescent posturing and his public acting out of his MLK-like fantasies of himself. And people in the Church hierarchy praised Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden—so we knew that it must be that we just don’t understand some things, the problem must be with us, not with them…. It’ll probably all work out, we said. After all, Notre Dame is giving him an honorary degree…. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t know some things that we don’t know.

Some stronger-minded Catholic bloggers demurred, like William Oddie in England, and now we get some some I-told-you-so’s—here, for example:

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/01/27/now-obama-has-proved-it-he-really-is-an-enemy-of-the-catholic-church-but-how-will-that-affect-the-54-per-cent-of-catholics-who-voted-for-him-last-time/

And others, less reactionary, perhaps, or more reflective, recalled rather striking similarities between contemporary Democratic political policy toward Catholics and the political policy toward German Jews prior to Kristallnacht, noting that even after that night visit from hell, placating rabbis and pooh-poohing prominent members of the Jewish community made excuses, condemned “reactionary” fellow Jews as fear-mongers, etc. But I think what they really objected to was that the persecution by their new German leader and his party had become impossible to ignore, and they couldn’t do that any more, and it upset them.

We all know that feeling, that resentment of someone else’s honesty—especially the honesty of those who wish us ill, or even do us actual ill—because it’s a greater honesty than our own. It’s as if we’re saying, “Okay, it’s all right with me if you despise me, if you assault my rights, if you even break the laws of our Constitution in order to harm me. It’s okay for you to hate me and to harm me as you will—it’s okay. Just don’t, don’t make me acknowledge it. Just please allow me to believe only good things. I don’t want to see this. That’s all I ask. Please lie to me—as you did when you said religious conscience would be protected in your new healthcare, as you lied to Archbishop Dolan when he visited you with a personal plea for your reassurance of that protection—and you gave it to him, and he went away happy. You lied, I know, but please give me an excuse to disregard it—maybe something like, okay, we have until August to sort this all out (even though I know it was supposed to be already sorted).  I hate discord, you see. Anger is not just a sin; it’s uncomfortable, you know.

But last night at Mass, our priest read us a letter from our new bishop. We’ve been a little curious about him. We’re so accustomed to our former bishop of Savannah—such a nice man, very popular with the protestants here in the deep south, never said anything to disturb our peace and harmony. He didn’t talk about things like contraception or abortion—embarrassing things like that, you know—and certainly not political things. I don’t think he ever wrote us letters about anything except the annual Diocesan Appeal, which we always responded to very well—we liked him.

Our priest shrugged his shoulders a little and made no comment on the letter. Well, what could the poor man say? After all, he had to read the thing, you know—it was none of his doing. The letter addressed the mandate requiring Catholic employers to provide contraceptives and abortifacient drugs in their health insurance coverage. It even explained that escape hatches have been cut off: the law requires that health insurance be provided. You could hire only Catholics and get out of it, but then you’d be discriminating and you’d break that law. The letter left no doubt that all possibilities of escape have been systematically eliminated. It even used the phrase “direct attack” on our religious freedom.

Personally, I hate to say this, but I don’t think we’re going to like our new bishop.  

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January 31st, 2012A New Aristocracy that Can Offend But Cannot Be Offendedby Joseph Pearce

Yestrerday I posted a response to claims that Shakespeare was a homosexual. I've received a reply from my correspondent that I'm going to share, principally because of her perceptive description of the homosexual lobby as "a new aristocracy that is allowed to offend but cannot be offended". Brilliant! I would also refer anyone interested in putting this "new aristocracy" into biblical perspective to Kevin O'Brien's post on "the problem of love", posted yesterday. It's a superb, succinct and witty discussion of onanism in its various manifestations. Here's the text of my correspondent's e-mail:

Many thanks for your learned comments on this. I'm not familiar with this Sonnet but thought it a bit strange that he would have written something so overtly homosexual, and given that he used coded language to express his Catholic sympathies, thought it might have something to do with that. On a political note, it has always struck me that the fear of homosexuality was a lot to do with the perception that it was an elitist thing, something that powerful kings or emperors sometimes forced on male subjects they happened to fancy. As you say, only in recent years has it been reinvented as some sort of egalitarian thing - but more to do, I suspect, with the population controllers' interest in its non-reproductive aspects. Now it is almost a new aristocracy that is allowed to offend but cannot be offended!

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January 30th, 2012“Gay History” and the “Pinking” of the Bardby Joseph Pearce

I've just received an e-mail from someone concerned about claims that Shakespeare was a homosexual. My correspondent wrote that, at the place at which she teaches, "we are mired in Gay History Month and its anticipations, and references are being made to Shakespeare's Sonnet 20. I wondered if you could shed any light on this?"

Here's my response:

The problem with "gay history" is that it is an invention of the last fifty years. It never existed prior to its invention. This is not to say that homosexual practice did not exist, of course, though it would not and could not even be called "homosexual" in Shakespeare's time because that word is itself an invention of the late nineteenth century, when it was employed to signify something pathological. The word "gay", of course, is even newer, deriving from mid-twentieth century homosexual underworld slang. The point is that Shakespeare would have been baffled at first and then horrified to discover that gutter-minded "academics", employing the doubles-entendres of twentieth-century adolescent toilet humour, had inverted his meaning to signify sodomy, which would probably be the only word he would have used to describe the practice of homosexuality.

This being said, let's humour the inventers of "gay history" by looking at the evidence they present. Sonnet 20, to which you refer, seems to be the strongest evidence that they have to offer. It does talk of "love", though love meant love to the Elizabethans, not fornication or copulation, and still less sodomy. The word "love" was not used as a mere innuendo, nor would Lennon's understanding of love as something self-centred and lacking in self-sacrifice have been comprehensible to an Elizabethan. Of course, a cad might feign "love" for vicious purposes but that would make him a liar, not a lover. Since "love" meant "love", it was often employed to describe a man's feelings towards another man. Love meant love, as in caritas, something which every Christian is commanded to feel towards every other person, male or female.

To the extent that Shakespeare uses healthy bawdiness in the sonnet, it is absolutely clear that the poet is not interested in the one thing in which homosexuals are obsessed. The "addition" of male genitalia to the person to whom the sonnet is addressed is the "adding [of] one thing to my purpose nothing", i.e. the poet has no purpose for the additional appendage, which signifies that "Nature [had] prick'd thee out for women's pleasure". Shakespeare's meaning is clear enough. Men are not interested in something that Nature has designed for women's pleasure. If Sonnet 20 is the best that "gay historians" can do to make a case for the "pinking" of the Bard, they are not likely to convince anyone other than their own in-crowd, or should that be out-crowd!

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January 30th, 2012The Problem of Love and Frozen Banana Standsby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

The problem is love.

What is the solution to the problem of love? Scripture shows us some solutions as offered by man since the fall.

Onan's solution is the favorite of the modern day. Onan was called to raise up progeny for his dead brother (see Genesis 38). This call to give of oneself for the good of another, this call to will a gift of self, this offering of self-sacrifice, is love. But Onan, like your contraceptive using Catholic neighbor, like the fornicating teens you see bleary-eyed at noon on Sundays at the breakfast cafe, like the Yuppies downtown who want Cappuccinos more than kids, spilled his seed. He went through the motions but made sure his "act of love" was certain to be sterile. Onan would have been hailed as morally responsible in our era, an era that encourages consumerism and self-indulgence rather than producer-ism and self-giving.

Onan is the archetypical metro-sexual, the first modern urban man. We'd put him on all the talk shows.

God struck him dead.

Fast forward to Matthew 25, the other end of the Bible. Here Our Lord gives the Parable of the Talents. Three stewards are given talents to invest while the Master is away. Two of them invest and reap a double reward. One takes his talent, digs a hole in the ground, and buries it. Here we see an early Gollum, a proto-Scrooge; here perhaps we see even ourselves. He tells the Master he buried his talent out of fear. Well, in avoiding fear he inherits fear and is sent to hell.

I have often wondered what would have happened in this Parable if one of the stewards had said, "Well, Lord, I took the talents you gave me and invested them in a frozen banana stand on the beach. I worked day and night, put up flyers, rented billboards. I even dressed in a full-size banana suit and passed out from heat stroke, but the only ones who came were the paramedics and even they didn't buy any bananas. I'm really sorry, Lord, but not only are your talents gone, I also mortgaged my house and they're taking that away from me too." Would he have received a "Well done, good and faithful servant?"

The answer is yes.

You're only sent to hell if you bury the talents, not if you invest them and lose them. In fact, it is impossible to invest them and lose them.

Somewhere in between Onan and the Talents we are told why. Isaiah 55:

So shall my word be that goes forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.

Now I've had a few talents in my day. I've buried many and invested many. No frozen banana stands, but I've started and run a singing telegram business, a dinner theater production company, and (most foolishly) a touring troupe that evangelizes through drama. In each case I've learned that the business world is unpredictable, you will be required to work harder than you ever thought possible, you won't be investing just money but every aspect of your life and every fiber of your being, and if you look for your reward to be worldly, you will be miserable and unhappy.

It's kind of like love.

For a long time in my youth, I read a lot of psychology, including much of Freud, the collected works of C. G. Jung, and a lot by folks like Rollo May and others who took a kind of philosophical approach to the human soul. The one thing they're really all writing about is love. For Freud, love was "libido", which was simply sexual desire. For Jung, "libido" was psychic energy, or interest in anything. May talked a lot about Eros, by which he meant something more than just lust.

What they all saw was the Problem of Desire. How do we get what we want? What if what we want is something we can't get or should not have?

Of course, historically, the Stoics and the Buddhists have solved this problem by rejecting Desire, by digging a hole and burying it.

The Modernists, by contrast, have gone in the other direction. They have looked not to the Parable of the Talents, but to the story of Onan mixed with the first part of the Prodigal Son - Masturbation meets Dissipation - or "follow your desire but frustrate the end toward which your desire is drawing you" - which is, if you think about it, Puritanism and Paganism wed.

All of this is quite interesting, but nowhere in history or philosophy or religion do you really find an answer to the problem of Love ... until you get to the Cross.

Christ neither rejects desire, nor does he indulge it. He takes upon Himself the self-centered twisted evil of our fallen desire and crucifies it. He offers Himself for us, feeds Himself to us, and shows us how to love, shows us that love and pain, love and self-giving even unto death, will always go together, will lift us out of the holes we dig for our talents and ourselves, will lift us out of our graves.

The Law that is written in our hearts gives us the channel or the boundaries in which to pour ourselves. While many a middle-aged married man thinks an affair with his 22-year-old secretary will solve the Problem of Love and make him happy, this would instead be a spilling of seed. While many a sensitive youth thinks that staying out of trouble and hiding behind a screen name will save him, this would instead be a burying of talents.

Instead, the old guy is called to love his missus, the old gal he's with, though this may be as appealing to him as Onan's call was way back when. The young guy is called to get off the internet and maybe get his heart broken in the real world, and learn that even if you love your banana stand, you're going to get hurt.

In short, the only mature psychology is the psychology of Christ.

The only answer to the Problem of Love is the Cross. Kevin O’Brien President & Artistic Director Theater of the Word Incorporated PO Box 29510 St. Louis, MO 63126 314-842-5231 / 1-888-840-WORD Fax: 314-270-3958 www.thewordinc.org Click here to find us on Facebook!

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January 27th, 2012Why I’m Opposed to the Environmentby Dena Hunt

The “environmental movement” began back in the 60s. That generation was the largest and loudest in American history. “Boomers” were born during the post-war baby boom and raised by Dr. Spock never to hear the word “no” from parental lips. They reached puberty virtually en masse, and seeking a cause on which to focus the moral superiority characteristic of pubescence, they found what they called “the environment.” The cause of the environment was thus adopted—and nature was thereby lost.

They spoke with the authority of scientists, of “ecologists.” They knew. You didn’t. It was politically dangerous to ignore them because of their numbers, their righteousness, and their volume. And so they were duly fed that toxic puritan wine of moral flattery, assured that they, and only they, really “cared.” Thus they became a part of that political party whose business it is to condemn others as uncaring.

Hijacked for political purposes, nature’s politicization assured its death. (Politicization kills via two distinct deadly forces: First, because of its exclusionary nature, it divides, and thus sets up its own opposing force; second, because of a problem’s perceived political usefulness as an issue, no solution is ever found.) “Nature” was thus lost to all who loved it; it had been abducted by a political party who changed its name to “the environment” and used it to gain political power.

But let’s think about that term “environment” for a moment. Your environment is the room you’re sitting in right now. And there’s no such thing as a remote environment. That’s an oxymoron. Whereas biology is the study of nature and includes us, ecology, as the study of our “environment,” doesn’t include us. We are thus unnaturally divorced from nature. “Environment” by its definition separates us; we are not part of it.

The word has now replaced the word “nature” in all but poetic contexts, and that’s significant. Nature is non-scientific, dirty, fecund, and it includes us in ways that are often very humbling—mortality, for example. Moreover, nature can’t be contemplated exclusive of the laws which govern it (and us). “Environment,” however, is scientific, clean, sterilized, and we can think of it in terms of our power over it, for good or ill. Because it’s not part of us and we are not part of it, it gives us the illusion that we are not subject to natural law, the illusion of immortality.

By those laws which govern it (and should govern us, if we were not removed from it), nature is orderly, logical. Conversely, environment can be as illogical as it likes, so long as it looks like, sounds like, a righteous concern. Here’s one example of righteous environmental illogic: Environmentalists tell us to “go paperless” to save the trees. Does anyone ever ask why timber farmers grow trees? No other single environmental campaign so completely guarantees the destruction of forests as the campaign to “go paperless.”

Aligned politically with anti-life, “the environment” works against life. Here’s an example I heard about recently (I haven’t checked it out, but I believe it): Chemical birth control has been excreted into our groundwater for some time now, though nobody has mentioned it. The problem is that it can’t be eliminated. (It’s in bottled water, too, so you can’t escape consumption.) Fish are dying. They’ve stopped reproducing. Little girls are reaching puberty now at eight years old, and our children are sexualized too young (It’s not just pop culture, it’s chemistry.) Another effect is the feminization of men—loss of height, muscle mass, and facial hair, an increase in both sterility and impotence (Maybe it’s not just the advent of feminism, but also a little chemistry?) And estrogen is the hormonal contributor to body fat; excessive estrogen causes obesity. Chemical birth control has caused the rate of breast cancer—which used to be a rare disease—to skyrocket. And speaking of breast cancer, never mind what the “experts” tell you about diet—do they mention that a single abortion increases your risk by 40 percent? Just think what several will do for you. (Don’t give those pink ribbons another dime until they start telling the truth.)

In reaction to the politics with which the “environmentalists”long ago aligned themselves, people like me have been derisively called “tree-huggers.” I confess it’s true: I love nature. I’m part of it, and it’s part of me. Together—one thing and not two—we are the creation of a loving God. And the environment is killing nature. That’s why I’m opposed it.

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January 27th, 2012Theology and Sanityby Joseph Pearce

Continuing my recent foraging through the dusty recesses of my personal library, I pulled from the shelf Frank Sheed's Theology & Sanity. Browsing through its pages I was reminded once again of the richness and vigour of Sheed's apologetics and the way it epitomized the vibrant Catholic evangelism of the pre-Vatican II Church. Sheed is particularly strong in his imaginative use of analogy to make complex theological points. Here is but one example of many in this wonderful book:

But great soul or small, we shall all be filled. In our total contact with God we shall be wholly happy, and imperishably happy. There are two possibilities of misunderstanding here. One may feel that some more substantial sort of happiness than knowledge and love of God would suit us better; or one may feel that eternity is too long for us, anyhow.

The first feeling is commoner: as we think upon the things we have enjoyed in this life, the joys of heaven seem noble, of course, but definitely thin: with a slight sinking in the pit of the heart, we find ourselves hoping that it may turn out better than it sounds. This is an amiable weakness, much as if a small child, learning that adults enjoy poetry or science or mathematics, should feel how ill such things compare with tin soldiers and the rocking-horse and the plum tarts of his own ecstasy ...

The second feeling was expressed by Karl Marx's friend Engels in his jibe at "the tedium of personal immortality". The error arises from a profound sense of the emptiness of life upon earth, combined with a notion of eternity as time that does not end - Macbeth's tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeping on their petty pace from day to day. But the "pace" of heaven is not petty. And there is no succession of tomorrows. In heaven we shall not be in eternity, the changeless Now of God; but we shall be out of the ceaseless flow of change that time measures.

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January 27th, 2012Promoting social justiceby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

...free modern societies are so complex that no one authority can can possibly control their manifold outcomes, whether regarding supply and demand, or prices, or the distribution of income. The failures of socialism (so visible after 1989) make all this plain. To attribute all social outcomes to someone's personal intention or capacity to control is, therefore, far too simple. Consequently, say Hayek and other objectors, to claim to be speaking for social justice can only be to advance one's own abstract preferences. Those who claim to speak for social justice prejudice arguments concerning means and ends by defining their opponents as "unjust." In brief, use of the term social justice is moral imperialism by the imposition of abstraction.

Social justice is a specific modern form of the ancient virtue of justice (pp.77-78).

Men and women exercise this specific social habit when they (a) join with others (b) to change the institutions of society. The practice of social justice means activism; it means organizing; it means trying to make the system better (p. 78).

Social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people. Social workers’ social change efforts are focused primarily on issues of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice.

[The practice of social justice] does not necessarily mean enlarging the state; on the contrary, it means enlarging civil society (p. 78).

The habit of social justice has as its aim the improvement of some feature of the common good--possibly of the social system in whole or in part (the welfare system, say), but possibly as well of some nonofficial feature (putting up a statue in a public park, organizing a dramatic society in a college, etc.). To tutor a disadvantaged person in the inner city could be a work of social justice; to organize to protect workers' rights; to organize a referendum to prevent the building of a nightclub on a residential street might be another. To build a factory in a poor area; to organize a pro life or prochoice group--all these and other analogous activities are prima facie instances of the exercise of social justice (p. 79).

In order to be just, an act must be correct in every aspect--manner, timing, motive, accuracy of perception, and all the other qualities of action; otherwise it is defective. Thus, to show someone that what he or she claims to be a virtue falls short of either some or all of the demands of virtue is to affirm the ideal of social justice as a standard of moral judgment" (p.79).

To claim to give priority to the interests of the poor as a matter of social justice--as liberation theology did--does not exempt one from criticism on the grounds that one has a false analysis of reality or of the dynamics of social change, lacks practical judgment (prudence, phronesis) in assessing the likely outcomes of one's activity. The virtues are interdependent and "talk to each other" as Deirdre McCloskey puts it. "One need not accept uncritically [liberation theology's - or any other] claim to be practicing social justice" (Novak, p. 79). Social justice in this definition does not stop conversation or assume a particular political program. It is a moral virtue but not a regulatory principle of the state or its bureaucratic-professional agents. It is nevertheless clearly visible in its absence, say in a low-income disorganized neighborhood; or a southern Italian community where no-one trusts anyone beyond the family or takes any civic responsibility or initiative; or a communist or fascist state where non-state associations are tightly controlled or suppressed by the state. The key strategy of East European democratic reformers like the Civic Forum in Czechoslavakia, was precisely the reawakening of civil society. The movement, which led to the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, was for the freedom and social space to exercise the virtue of social justice.

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January 26th, 2012Sir Kenneth Clark’s Mindless Civilisationby Joseph Pearce

My recent post on Clark's "Civilisation" was cut off half way through. This is the full version.

I'm currently in the midst of watching Sir Kenneth Clark's celebrated Civilisation, first broadcast by the BBC in 1969 and subsequently by PBS. I had heard so much about it, and remember watching it as a child, and was looking forward to having a guided tour of Western Civilisation by one of its most outspoken advocates. Unfortunately the tour, thus far, has been something of a disappointment.

The first disappointment is that Clark skips over the first thousand years of the Civilisation he is celebrating by choosing to begin in the so-called Dark Ages. There is no mention of Homer and his timeless and peerless epics; no mention of Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripedes; no mention of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. For that matter, though perhaps less surprisingly, there's no mention of the wisdom enshrined in the Old Testament. Like Greece, Rome is barely mentioned. The impression is that Clark has plucked his starting point from thin air, in which it floats without foundations. These great civilisations are parenthetical afterthoughts; they are the footnotes to Clark's civilisation and not its foundations. Like Homer, Virgil is overlooked, as are Boethius and Augustine. Clark is not consoled by philosophy; he is confused by it. His discussion of Aquinas is so brief and vacuous that one would think that scholasticism had played no role in shaping civilisation. There is no discussion of the Church Fathers, rendering Clark's civilisation fatherless, a bastard child of subjective aesthetics.

The series begins bizarrely on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, signifying that civilisation had all but been wiped out by the barbarians and that only a handful of Irish monks were keeping the flames of faith and civilisation alive. One would think that the Benedictines never existed, or that there was no pope in Rome. One would think that England had not been baptized in the late sixth century by the great St. Austin of Canterbury, who had been sent by the pope, St. Gregory the Great, or that the great English saint, St. Boniface, had not sallied forth to convert the Germans a century or so later.

Clark is in his element when waxing eloquently on art or architecture but seems to flail around like a man out of his depth when discussing music or literature. His treatment of Dante, for instance, is banal. He states that Dante's use of the imagery of light is the aspect of his work which "we" like best, speaking on "our" behalf. "Speak for yourself!", I snorted upon hearing this judgment of Dante on my behalf. The problem is that Clark's woeful ignorance of Thomistic theology and philosophy makes Dante inaccessible to him. The problem is compounded because such ignorance is as applicable to mediaeval and early-Renaissance art as it is to mediaeval and Renaissance literature. Such art speaks to us through the power of theological symbolism. If we don't know the theology, we will not see the symbolism. We will not understand the painting.

Clark's ignorance of the unity of faith and reason inherent in the philosophy and theology of Christendom leaves him speechless, literally, when discussing the great Shakespeare. He simply selects three speeches from the Bard's works (from Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth), suggesting that Shakespeare's philosophy can be gleaned from the speeches themselves, the last of which is Macbeth's famous assertion that "life ... is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" . Clark concludes that Shakespeare was the first great writer for whom religion was unimportant, implying that Macbeth's words represent the Bard's own nihilism. Why, one wonders, should the words of a mad and desperate mass murderer, moments before he receives his just deserts, be a representation of the weltanschauung of the playwright?

The truth is that Clark is a decidedly modern man who sees history and civilisation through the superciliously defective lens of post-"enlightened", i.e. disenchanted, culture. Although not quite Eliot's "hollow man" or Waugh's "Hooper", his vision is sullied by the sundering of reason from faith and feeling. For all his love of the Renaissance, he is a child of the enlightenment and is the slave of that particularly pernicious zeitgeist.

Perhaps I'm being a little harsh on a man who at least loved the beauty of western civilization, even if he did not understand the goodness and truth that gave the beauty its form. It is significant, perhaps, that Clark was received into the Catholic Church on his death bed, fourteen years after his seminal television series was first broadcast. It is also difficult to dislike a man who fearlessly attacked Marxism, postmodernism and their "hippy" children in the late sixties, when these destructive and deconstructive forces were at their most powerful and pervasive. His comments on the subject of 1960s radical University students, in the penultimate episode of Civilisation, are priceless: "I can see them [the students] still through the University of the Sorbonne, impatient to change the world, vivid in hope, although what precisely they hope for, or believe in, I don't know." There is, however, a grim irony in the very criticism that he levels against his postmodern enemies. Clark is himself "vivid in hope, although what precisely he hopes for, or believes in, we don't know".

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January 26th, 2012The Lord of Failureby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Think about this: the cross was a means of terrible, ignominious defeat. But this sign of defeat has become the means of victory. There is no defeat or worldy despair in which Christ is not present. He is the Lord of Failure. He has taken on all of our mis-shapen, twisted disappointments, and through Him not even unrequited love, not even abandonment, not even meaninglessness can triumph. What triumphs is the cross - and the cross is the persistence of love in the midst of annihilation and death.

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January 26th, 2012Back to the Futureby Joseph Pearce

I feel an irresistible urge to share the brilliance of some sermons on the theology of the Creation narrative in Genesis. I was privileged to be present at these sermons and was gripped instantly by the sheer brilliance of the priest and the way in which he systematically and logically dissected the key issues.

In the first of the four sermons he looked at "God the Creator", distinguishing between the form and content of the Creation narrative. Genesis must be read, he insisted, in light of the unity of the Bible as a whole. If we read the Bible without an understanding of the unity of the whole text we literally read it out of context. Brilliant! Furthermore, the priest insisted, the unity of the Bible is centred on the Person of Christ. Without a correct Christology we cannot make sense of the Bible or any of its parts, including Genesis.

In the second sermon he insisted on the fusion of fides et ratio in the biblical narratives, stressing that faith in Creation is eminently rational. The remainder of the sermon highlighted the enduring significance of the symbolic dimension of the biblical account of Creation.

The third sermon centred on the Creation of Man, highlighting his "earthiness" and the divinity of the image in which he is made, and ended with an incisive discussion of Creation and Evolution.

The fourth and final sermon grappled with "Sin and Salvation", discussing with eloquent precision the freedoms and limitations inherent in humanity and the nature and consequences of Original Sin. Finally, and practicing the exegetical principles established in the first sermon, this wonderful priest showed how the Creation narrative in Genesis can only be understood in the light of Christ as illumined in the New Testament.

"Wow!" I kept saying to myself as my eyes were opened in new ways to the timeless truths of salvation history. Wow! If only priests like this could have a real influence on the Church. What a difference they could make.

And now for the confession.

I was only "present" at these sermons insofar as I read them in a slim volume discovered on one of the neglected bookshelves in my home. In order to have been present physically I would have needed to go back in time to 1981. The sermons were given during Lent of that year by a priest by the name of Joseph Ratzinger. I wonder if anyone in the congregation that day had wondered what a difference it would make if such priests were ever given positions of authority in the Church ...

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January 25th, 2012Catholic Coursesby Joseph Pearce

I'm delighted to see that the Catholic Courses, recently launched by St. Benedict Press and of which I am executive director, have received great coverage in the National Catholic Register. Here's the link: http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/catholic-wisdom-presented-with-flair/ 

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January 25th, 2012Why Republicans Will Never End Abortionby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

My friend Scott P. Richert has an excellent article on about.com Catholicism entitled Put Not Your Trust in Princes.

In it, he makes the perceptive point that Republicans will never end abortion in this country, any more than Democrats ever will, "because Republican politicians, just as surely as Democratic ones, have no desire to lose an 'issue' that reliably brings them millions of votes in every national election." He illustrates this by showing the anti-life antics of both George W. Bush and most of the current Republican contenders.

And yet Scott remains optimistic about ending abortion in this country.

Why?

Read his article to find out!

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January 25th, 2012The Chapel of the Soulby Pavel Chichikov

I’ve just come across a news item here.

It describes how a new Russian nuclear submarine, the Saint Aleksandr Nevsky, will be fitted with an Orthodox chapel as soon as it completes its sea trials. This will be the sixth consecrated military chapel in the Russian Navy. That would have been inconceivable twenty years ago, and for the previous seventy.

Years back, I met one of the original Soviet nuclear sub designers, George Svyatov, who was living in Bethesda, Maryland at the time. It goes without saying that the submarines George designed in the 1950s would never have including a religious chapel, but they may very well have included a Red Corner, with pictures and memorabilia of Lenin, if there had been the room to include it.

The story about the Saint Aleksandr Nevsky also made me recall the sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, in August of 2000. All hands were lost in that disaster. US submariners knew how the sinking of the Kursk would have affected the families of the deceased, and as I remember they subscribed to a collection for the families.

I don’t know if the Kursk had a chapel on board. But in those last hours, before they perished, perhaps each man retired into the chapel of the soul, and there met the One whose presence in the tabernacle sanctifies both the Orthodox and Catholic faiths. I believe that each one of us will enter that chapel when our last moment in this life has come. There we will meet Jesus Christ, the Lord of Life, who is everywhere, even under the sea.

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January 24th, 2012Those are Some “Awfully Nice” “Loose Tights”: Why Paradox Gets Usby Deirdre Littleton

A piece of old news has just been uncovered regarding a student teacher who was found missing on a hot summer evening last June. She was last sighted all alone grading stacks of exams in a dingy dim lit classroom on Walnut Street. Friends and acquaintances report that her unusually severe case of schizophrenia had become progressively worse with time, and the night before her disappearance, she had been clearly confused, and had displayed a passive aggressive temper which was quite unlike her. This case has drawn the attention of the public once again because of a recent strangely familiar case involving an air force pilot. Suffering from the same syndrome, he is reported to have lost his usual level-headed equanimity, and begun to display a frazzled emotional reasoning in his decision making in the last few days. These strange events culminated in a dangerous crash landing just off the coast of Miami last night, which he survived but which has terminated his career in perfect failure. The similarity between the conditions of the student teacher and the pilot, as well as both of their tragic circumstances, has led psychologists and government authorities to investigate the potential dangers of schizophrenia more closely.

Oh, by the way- none of that is true. In fact, it's all a genuine falsehood. But it grabbed your attention, didn't it? That may be because the passage is simply dripping with oxymorons. One thing I've found as a literature major: people practically adore paradox. There is something about contradiction that captivates the mind. Maybe it's the fact that the meaning isn't handed to you on a silver platter; you have to work for it, and that's the good old American dream.

Last semester, each person in my Poetics class had to do a presentation on a poem. On the big day, before the first presenter began, a whisper went around the room: include the word "paradox" in your presentation, and you've got it in the bag. It was true- the moment a paradox was pointed out, ears perked up and the discussion became heated. Oxymorons are such proficient attention-getters that I'm surprised they're not used more often in pick-up lines.

So here's a new paradox for the American public to mull over, and I sincerely hope it will call some attention. Abortion: I consider this the greatest oxymoron of the century. Ending the life of another for the sake of one's own greater quality of life has always been frowned on by civilized societies. Some like to call it "murder," and the pronouncement of that word causes people to jump from their seats with their hair standing on end. Yet this very act is occurring daily all over the world, a few blocks away from home at most, and people continue to sip their coffee, unruffled. Nobody likes to call abortion "murder;" nobody likes to admit that an unborn child is a living human being with the same rights as you and me. Perhaps if we call the weeds infesting the garden "roses," they may start to look beautiful and stop choking the real roses by the roots. Something tells me this is naïve, wishful thinking.

Yesterday, a large group of my friends and classmates marched in Washington D.C. to take a stand and protect these young lives- these babies who are too small to defend themselves. I consider those who devote themselves to the pro-life cause to be true American heroes, for their actions stem from a firm belief in man's equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of age or size. Our country is founded on freedom and equal opportunity; we are straying from our roots if we are allowing the most fundamental right to be stifled, the right to life.

I hope the paradox of abortion will at least spark the curiosity of Americans and politicians today. The time has come for people to recognize the severity of killing an unborn baby, to experience good grief in response to all the lives lost, and to join in the fight to give these children what they so deserve: simply a chance to live.

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January 23rd, 2012Chesterton in Italyby Joseph Pearce

I just received notice of the following lecture from the Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture.

 

 

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January 22nd, 2012J.R.R. Tolkien: A Teenager in Loveby Joseph Pearce

A correspondent from Australia has sent me a very interesting article which makes an unlikely connection between the Jesuit modernist, George Tyrrell, destined to be excommunicated for his criticisms of Pope St. Pius X, and J.R.R. Tolkien's secret teenage love affair. If the connection between the sublimely orthodox JRRT and the sadly heterodox Tyrrell has whetted your curiosity, read on: 

http://www.therecord.com.au/site/index.php/Features/jrr-tolkien-edith-bratt-fr-francis-morgan-love

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January 21st, 2012Etsuro Sotooby Fr. Simon Henry

Video: "Etsuro Sotoo, the sculptor who became Catholic thanks to Gaudí's Sagrada Familia"

I came across this interesting piece on Rome Reports.

Etsuro Sotoo was a professor of art at Kyoto University when he decided to travel in Europe. He arrived in Barcelona in 1978, he was so impressed with Gaudí's Sagrada Familia that he dropped everything to follow in the work of Gaudí as a sculptor. Ever since then he continued to learn more and more about the architect. Etsuro came from a cultural and religious tradition very different from that of Europe. As a result he had trouble connecting with the project in a manner faithful to the spirit of Gaudí. When he finally understood his real intention with the Sagrada Familia, it changed his life. Sotoo says that his commitment to architecture was the first step by which Gaudí helped him to rethink his values. After some time he converted to Catholicism. He is currently working on the main sculptures of the Sagrada Familia. A work that changed the course of his life.

I'm a little ambivalent about the architecture of the Sagrada Familia, although it was some years before the Holy Father consecrated the main church in 2010 that I last saw it. Although undeniably new in style it references the tradition of church buildings and its conception came from a mind that created it out of love of God. It is not a building thrown up at the cheapest possible cost but gives something of the best of the human spirit back to the Creator. It was a work of love and devotion for Gaudi and now for those who continue in his tradition.

In recent times we seem to have lost an appreciation of sacred space and architecture as a means of inspiration and evangelisation, with the focus shifting to the community that meets within the space. But this should surely not render the space itself of no interest or reduce it to the merely functional. A family that lives in a house is much more important than the house itself but the fact that the family lives there makes it a home and makes that building important, in its layout, in how we choose to beatify it - it becomes precious because of what we experience within its walls. The same must surely apply to our churches. The fact that we now build and remodel churches that are either purely functional or mimic secular buildings says that we have lost confidence. Lost confidence in the ability of the Faith to speak to others (and to us?) and therefore have lost confidence in the buildings in which we articulate that Faith. That we ignore a consecrated altar carrying within it the relics of some hero of the Faith and offer the Holy Sacrifice on a temporary wooden table is a weird situation to find ourselves in. To use the home analogy again, we ignore a fine dining room and always have a T.V. dinner on a tray.

Let's get back to some fine dining!

Etsuro Sotoo
Sculptor
“I know all the works, all the words, all the models, but I can't take another step. I can't come close to Gaudí. I decided not to look to him. So then where do I look? I tried to look in the way that Gaudí did. I'm a sculptor, I tried to do what he would have done. This was the magnificent and miraculous moment.”

“I invite everyone who wants to understand Gaudí to not pick the wrong door. If you really want to know him, find the the door of spirit and faith.”

“Why do we build the temple of the Sagrada Familia? A simple question: why do we build? We don't seek beauty in vanity of men. No, The Sagrada Familia is a tool for building us. Gaudí left the temple half finished, the temple of the Sagrada Familia perfectly built the man Gaudí.”

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January 21st, 2012Two New Books for Distributistsby Richard Aleman | http://www.distributistreview.com/mag

The Sun of Justice (An Essay on the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church) by Harold Robbins (1888-1954) is a classic Distributist text. Robbins, Chairman of the Birmingham branch of the Distributist League and editor for Cross and the Plough, the official organ of the Catholic Land Federation, wrote what Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day described as, “the best thinking ever done on Distributism.” Using the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Leo XIII’s encyclicals, and other authoritative sources, Robbins lends his pen with the goal of demonstrating just how crucial social justice is for the future of the faith, the family, self-sufficiency, and to help us understand the proper role of our public institutions.

This Kindle edition, edited by Joshua Wilson, is a steal at $2.99.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Sun-of-Justice-ebook/dp/B005FYZGHS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321451375&sr=8-1

 
The Workingman’s Guilds of the Middle Ages by Dr. Godefroid Kurth is our second book recommendation for the week. Published by Loreto Publications ($6.95), Kurth’s 64-page book covers the functioning guild from apprentice to journeyman, from guilds in society to the operation of workshops and the management of production. The book ends with an exciting chapter on the revival of guilds.

http://www.loretopubs.org/workingmans-guilds-of-the-middle-ages-the.html

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January 20th, 2012Alban Roe & Nicholas Woodfen - English Martyrsby Joseph Pearce

As mentioned in an earlier post, I am speaking tomorrow, along with Joanna Bogle and Father Dwight Longenecker, at a conference on English Catholicism in Greenville, South Carolina. Providentially the date of the conference coincides with the feast day of two English Martyrs.

Saint Alban Roe was born in 1583 in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds, which, as its name suggests, was the shrine of an earlier English martyr, killed by the pagan Danes. Raised in a conformist Anglican home, he visited the Abbey of St Alban (the first English martyr), which was being used to imprison Catholics. Following a discussion with an unknown prisoner, he was inspired to study the claims of the Church and converted to the Faith of his forefathers. He left for France to study for the priesthood and was accepted into a community of English Benedictines, who had been forced into exile during the reign of Henry VIII. Returning to England, he ministered to Catholic prisoners until his arrest. He was hanged on January 21, 1642, the year in which England was plunged into its fratricidal Civil War.

Blessed Nicholas Woodfen was born at Leominster in Herefordshire in around 1550. He studied for the priesthood at the English College at Rheims in France and was ordained by the Bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne on the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25), 1581. The newly-ordained priest returned to England and ministered to lawyers and law students at the Inns of Court in London. He was captured by the authorities after several years of successful ministry and condemned to death for his priesthood. He was hanged, drawn and quartered on January 21, 1586.

May Saint Alban Roe and Blessed Nicholas Woodfen serve as patrons of tomorrow's conference and, through their intercession, may those in attendance grow in the Faith for which they laid down their lives. Saint Alban Roe and Blessed Nicholas Woodfen, pray for us.

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January 20th, 2012Remembering Roy Campbellby Joseph Pearce

In a breach of normal practice, I'm posting the text of a book review that is published in the latest issue of the Saint Austin Review. Although we normally publish only one article from the print edition, together with the table of contents, I feel that the great Roy Campbell is so neglected that Dena Hunt's excellent review of the book warrants the widest audience possible. For those visitors to this site who have committed the cultural sin of not yet subscribing to the magazine, I urge you to do so. In the interim, I urge you to learn more about the neglected and much-maligned poet, Roy Campbell, by reading the following review.

Remembering Roy Campbell: The Memoirs of his Daughters Anna and Tess

Edited by Judith Lütge Coullie

Winged Lion Press, 2011

349 pp., $25.00

ISBN: 978-1-936294-04-6

Reviewed by Dena Hunt

Following a preface by Joseph Pearce, author of several works on Roy Campbell, editor Judith Lütge Coullie’s introduction to this volume of the memoirs of Campbell’s daughters might seem at first glance to be unnecessarily lengthy. On the contrary, the essay is so meticulously instructive that it could stand alone as a succinct separate text. Coullie’s careful and enlightening distinctions between memoir and autobiography are very helpful, not only for the book she introduces but for other similar works as well. She clarifies, for the sake of readers’ expectations, that the memoirs are not autobiographies of the two daughters themselves, nor biographies of their famous parents; rather, they are memoirs of the daughters’ lives with their parents. The distinction is an important one. It turns out that this format of a child’s memoir can be uniquely revealing, maybe more than an impersonal biography could be.

I first became aware of Roy Campbell when I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s description of him in one of his letters to his son Christopher.1 Tolkien writes that he was having drinks and conversation with C. S. Lewis at the Eagle and Child pub when he “. . . noticed this strange, tall, gaunt man half in khaki, half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose sitting in the corner.” The conversation happened to be about Wordsworth, and Campbell finally interrupted it with a comment of his own. He was invited to join them. A few days later, they met again in Lewis’s rooms at Oxford. That evening, Tolkien was even more impressed by Campbell’s tales of his experiences in the Spanish civil war, among other things, and by Campbell himself, whom Tolkien described as “such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert”.

This book astonishes the reader just as Tolkien was astonished by Campbell. It might be imagined that such a character as Tolkien described would be anything but a family man, but again, the truth would be surprising. We learn from his daughters that this hard-drinking man (a friend of Dylan Thomas, among other famous hard-drinkers); this bullfighting, soldiering idealist (an admirer of Franco) was devoted to his wife and children. In fact, devoted seems an apt description of Campbell in all areas of his life: family, faith, work—and devoted also to his ideals, very much to his detriment, both personally and professionally.

He was an incongruous mix of a man. Add to that mix his conversion to the Catholic Church, his devotion to Our Lady of Fatima and to his rosary. Although he lived as an expatriate at various locations in Provence, Spain, and Portugal, he took his family home to England when Britain was attacked by Hitler’s blitzkrieg. (The journey alone is a saga of danger and courage.) When he wasn’t allowed to enlist immediately, due to his age, he became an air warden until the Army finally accepted him, first as a soldier, then as a worker in British Intelligence.

Campbell’s life was—to further abuse the word beyond its current cliché status—epic. A companion of gypsies in Toledo, he learned horse-trading. A friend of the Carmelite friars in the same city, he accepted manuscripts from them for safekeeping—the poetry of St. John of the Cross—when the communists overran the city. Shortly thereafter, the friars were lined up and shot while the manuscripts remained in the Campbell home just meters away. Later, when the communists invaded the Campbell home in search of Bibles, religious writings, or—even worse—hidden priests, they completely overlooked the precious manuscripts stored in a chest on which one of the soldiers sat while the others searched the house. As he sat there, the soldier chatted with Campbell about the superiority of all things “Russian”. (He’d found Dostoevsky on Campbell’s bookshelf and decided that Campbell was sympathetic to his cause.) Years later, when he finally had sufficient peace for the task, Campbell fulfilled a promise he made in prayer to St. John while the communists were sacking his home: If his family and the manuscripts were kept safe, he would translate the saint’s poems. English-speakers now enjoy the fruits of that promise and of his labor.

Campbell’s ideals and experiences, his loves and hates, were the foundation of his poetry. Both memoirs describe his working habit as very much like the life of an ascetic hermit, completely withdrawn from the world of which he was so much a gregarious part at other times. His poems are among the best the twentieth century produced, yet he is almost unknown outside his native South Africa, a situation Pearce calls in his Preface to the book a “literary scandal”. Pearce says the reason his poetry is overlooked is that Campbell had chosen the “wrong side” in Spain’s civil war.

Campbell had already incurred the ire of the Bloomsbury in-crowd when he satirized the tyranny of their homosexualized insularity in The Georgiad. But most of England’s literati at that time were also sympathetic to communism, a worldview that Campbell hated, most of all for its mandatory atheism (and he was not a man to keep his opinions to himself). When Hitler rose to power, many saw the world as divided between communists and fascists; not to be the one was to be the other. Campbell was labeled “fascist”, and much of the literary world was closed to him. He was ostracized both personally and professionally. The memoirs expose the pain of that ostracism.

As devastating as it was for that country, most of the west has little understanding of Spain’s civil war, and even less of the importance of its outcome. With the threat of Nazism before them, anything contradictory may have seemed preferable, and communism was already very fashionable. But the failure of the Soviet-driven attempted takeover of Spain was of huge consequence for all of Europe and the Americas. It stopped what would almost certainly have been a violent conquest of Europe by the Soviet Union in the years following WWII when Europe was crippled and defenseless. It is not the first time in history that Spain’s agonies have saved Europe; it was Spanish defense that saved Christendom from the Islamic hordes centuries earlier. For the Campbells, the war had little to do with political philosophy (to which Campbell remained more or less indifferent all his life), but it had everything to do with saving Christianity in Spain from complete annihilation. In their description of events that the daughters personally witnessed as well as those in the rest of the country, there can be no doubt that the primary purpose of the Nationalist forces was not class supremacy, as it was propagandized at the time. The countless lower-class soldiers who fought and died at Franco’s side tell the truth: This was a religious war, a struggle for the survival of Christianity. Perhaps it could only be won in Spain, where life and faith were one and the same—for all classes.

The memoirs of Anna and Tess Campbell shed a light that is personal, not merely historical, on the lives of their famous parents, and on life in France, England, Spain, and Portugal during some of the most horrific years of those nations’ histories. The book contains a great many family photographs taken at various locations and times, which seem to add poignancy to the daughters’ memories.

Remembering Roy Campbell is an excellent read for those who know Campbell’s poetry, and maybe especially for those who don’t.

Dena Hunt lives in Georgia. Retired from teaching at Valdosta State University, she is working on her second novel.

References

1. Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), pp. 95–96.

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January 19th, 2012Edith Nesbit - Literary Convertby Joseph Pearce

Much to my surprise, I've just discovered that the famous children's writer, Edith Nesbitt, was a literary convert. I have no idea why this fact has escaped my attention until now. I was alerted to the fact by a correspondent. Here's the text of his e-mail:

Hello Joseph,

I've been poking around the internet to find info about Edith Nesbit, since we had read The Magic City to the kids and we all greatly enjoyed it (thinking about doing an illustrated version) but I knew she was a Fabian and socialist.

Turns out later in life she married a Catholic and eventually converted. I haven't found anything more than that statement ... just wondered if she wrote anything after she converted. Do you know anything about her conversion?

And here's my reply:

Dear ____,

I urge you to buy the excellent book, Roads to Rome by John Beaumont (St. Augustine's Press, 2010). It's a mine of information about converts. Here's some of the facts that I found out about Nesbit from Beaumont's book. She married another convert, Hubert Bland, a fellow Fabian socialist with conservative leanings. Nesbitt was received into the Church in 1902, four years before the publication of her best-known work, The Railway Children. Amongst her friends were Robert Hugh Benson, Cecil Chesterton and Frederick Rolfe (a.k. Baron Corvo). She counted Bernard Shaw amongst her admirers.

I'm kicking myself that none of this came to my attention during the research for Literary Converts!

God bless,

Joseph

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January 18th, 2012A Message for the Homeby Richard Aleman | http://www.distributistreview.com/mag

“Finance wields an immediate and immense power; but it is like the power of a spell or spoken charm. The victim of the magician… is always partly to blame for his own paralysis.” – G.K. Chesterton.

In the summer of 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave a stirring speech, appropriate for today. Carter warned of a crisis of confidence in the United States striking at the very heart and soul of a nation slowly forgetting its purpose. Threatened with losing our identity, our unity, and our faith, he cautioned against replacing the value of “what one does” with “what one owns.” President Carter feared the worst: the worship of consumption eroded a country once characterized by sacrifice, thrift, and spiritual pursuit. According to Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, this materialism menaced the West and thus could not be recommended as an alternative to the material troubles in the East. Furthermore, our rally cry of “eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die,” silently chipped away at our spiritual foundations, blurring our definitions of “needs” and “wants” at the expense of our souls.

What happened? Well, here is part of the problem. In 1973 productivity soared and wages stagnated for the one-income family. In the years that followed, more family members were put to work to compensate. What we thought was prosperity in the 1980s was actually plastic and by 1998 the family wage officially flat-lined. Finance “generously” helped us shop the excess supply of goods and services. Consumer credit flowed like the river. Houses were bought and flipped at such an alarming rate that prices shot up five times their value. By the time our debt exploded, it was clear that our system combusted credit to feed the locomotive of consumption. Indeed, in 2007 the average household debt per person reached $45,000. That same year the family’s percentage of disposable income dropped to its lowest levels prior to the Second World War. Low wages, the costs of housing and education, and debt trampled the household.

Today, our $14 trillion dollar debt (and recent downgraded credit rating) is buzzing from the Beltway to the Starbucks. But political ideologues cannot see the trees for the forest or the forest for the trees. The debt isn’t really a problem. Our inability to pay it is the problem. As author John Médaille shrewdly points out,
 
“Our problem is not with the debt, but with jobs and with the balance of payment accounts. If the 15 million looking for work had work there would be no problem with the debt. But instead, this meaningless debate has [sic] kept our real problems off the agenda.”

The real problem is that the less we make, the less we employ people to do the work. No production and no jobs mean no revenue. And without income, government turns to finance to cover its operations and the social imbalances. A non-productive nation cannot sustain a debt economy anymore than the home economy can borrow to absorb the cost of everyday necessities.

The other real problem is our failure to admit the ship is sinking. Finance capital kept the magic going but the illusion couldn’t mask an unworkable system. Just as socialists refused to admit the unsustainable and ubiquitous effects of socialism, capitalists continue to present our condition as an aberration, rather than capitalism’s natural course.

Perhaps the real answer is to chuck the false band-aids (raise the debt ceiling, cut taxes) and look forward to another model that will strip our nation of its addiction to consumption and lessen the expenses and proportion of the State. Chesterton founded such a system. It is called Distributism.

Before you answer, ask yourselves a few questions. Can we honestly say that Left and Right thinking are really meaningful? Should we continue to look to the Beltway and Wall Street to solve our problems or is our future best served by decentralized, local economies? Is there any truth to the idea that “an economy run by Christian principles would destroy both the economy and the reputation of Christianity,” given that our secular economy is doing a great job of eliminating both? Isn’t it time to consider another path, one truly reflective of our faith and virtue?   

My friends, as Tolkien reminds us, these are difficult times but they are chosen for us. Just as our grandfathers once faced hard choices, let us be remembered as the men and women who resurrected the economy of “many small places and many local heroes”. We can choose a dawn where the lives of the unborn are protected and big families are cherished, where our neighbors are seen as “Christ… lovely in eyes not his,” and politics is guided by millions of human faces. We want an economy highlighted by the rights of God, advanced by the virtues in our minds and the prayers in our hearts. Tomorrow we will thrust charity against appetite, and although our numbers are small, men and women everywhere will rebuild with “the breastplate of faith and charity, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.”

Memories are easily forgotten but the families who rise to meet these challenges will remember, to the envy of those who stayed behind, and they will tell our posterity how today and the next, through sweat, tears, and fidelity, our brothers and sisters cheerfully shouted, “How thou pleasest, God, dispose the day!” This is the rallying cry of those who do not suffer disadvantages under the conditions of justice and where the unequal conditions of men and women are advantageous. And like a bridge, we will wrap our arms together with the poor, no longer trampled by political half-truths so distant from the fullness of faith, a faith so broad and yet so beautifully narrow, truth so majestic and glorious, and language so joyful and peaceful, that its champion is a lamb.

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January 17th, 2012Political Independents, Political Independenceby Dena Hunt

It’s that time again for me to realize that I’m a freak. Public spaces of all kinds are full of the differences among the various contenders for the Republican nomination for the presidency. If I could arrive at those differences, I might feel some measure of progress toward communal discussion. As it is, I’m too far behind even to think about them….

In a way, it’s none of my business. I’m not a Republican. I’m what polling-people call an Independent, which means that I have to look at Republican doings as well as the Democrats’ doings. At this point, however, I am only certain that I will not vote for the Democratic candidate. But, unless we are personally voting in the caucuses right now, are we supposed to be “choosing” a candidate at all? At the moment, I’d say that one of the contenders seems to me to be the best man; another seems to be the best candidate; and still another would, I think, make the best president.

Speeches by the contenders and their sundry spokespersons don’t help: One praises character, another praises voting records, another asserts the contender’s ability to wage verbal war against Obama, and there are still other “qualifications” to consider. The trouble is that one thing—character, for example—cannot be compared to another—ability to wage verbal war, for example. That’s apples and oranges, and even grapefruit—yet opposing contenders and all the commentary constantly engage in just that kind of illogical argument. And then there are the endless in-depth analyses, difficult even to follow, much less find (or not) some accord with. Philosophical disputations, ideological condemnations of ideology…. It makes me wonder sometimes if there’s a deliberate conspiracy to confuse. But that would probably make me just another “Paranoid.” There are Republicans who believe in Democratic conspiracies, and Democrats who believe in Republican conspiracies. Perhaps as an Independent, I believe in political conspiracies, period. 

Finally, amidst all the noise (which will only get louder), I turn the volume off altogether. I don’t like politics. I’ve never been a fan, never been into competition anyway, never participated in it willingly, much less with enthusiasm. People who get into that stuff like to call people who don’t get into it (like me) a number of names: cowardly, irresponsible, selfish, and even stupid. They may be right. But if I am any one of these, or all of them, I am not unique—at least, I don’t think so. I believe there are other people like me who don’t enjoy blood sports. Perhaps, like me, they don’t vote for anyone. I didn’t vote for George Bush; I voted against John Kerry. I didn’t vote for McCain; I voted against Obama. Political participation for us comes down to a kind of morally obligatory defense of ourselves and other Americans….

So—until the time comes when I, personally, have to make some kind of choice, I don’t listen to the illogical, pseudo-patriotic, passionate, and very expensive racket. (Think about what all this stuff costs. Don’t we have better ways to spend all those millions? One day’s campaigning for one contender could probably feed a thousand families for a year. Or maybe even reduce the national debt.)

When the time does come to make a personal choice, I will not assess anyone’s patriotism, evaluate their debating skills, inquire into their religious faith (or lack of it), calculate how much money they have behind them, consider how many supporters they have—none of that. (The very last thing I would ever have voted for is something called “change.” Talk about bandwagon mentality—that’s almost comic-strip stuff.) Because I have a vote, for that moment only, I have power.  I am a boss, as it were, interviewing applicants for an opening, and I will look at what the position requires and try to choose the best applicant for the job. For me, and for others like me, it’s that unphilosophical, that unemotional, that inexpensive, that ordinary. 

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January 17th, 2012The Resolutionsby Sophia Mason

A few months back I began doing periodic ... war bulletins, shall we say? on my blog.  Here's the latest from that master of propaganda, Slangrine:

My dear Wumpick,

So, has your patient made any New Year’s resolutions this time round? And how are they going? Please inform me at your earliest convenience. The new year is a time ripe with possibilities for us—more so than Lent, which is the closest religious equivalent to the secular world’s annual attempts at self-reform.

With Lent there is always the aura of otherworldliness, the too-constant admonitions against false motives and pride, the too-frequent spurs for the faltering, the dilatory, the failure. During Lent a man is not allowed to forget who he really is, and where he is ultimately going. New Year’s resolutions, lacking any religious veneer, are as much easier to break; and they are so much more likely to be made for the wrong reasons in the first place! The girl who fasts during Lent may incidentally achieve “the body she has always wanted,” but the girl who diets all-year round is the girl who has been encouraged to want a certain (possibly unnatural) body. The man who resolves to spend time with his wife during Lent is thinking, or is at any rate admonished to think, primarily about his duty to her; but the man who begins paying her attentions on January 1^st is far more likely to be thinking of what such behavior is going to get him. Even these secular resolutions aimed vaguely at making the resolvers “better people” are endorsed by the newspapers, the blogs, and the shops as making the resolvers simultaneously more happy. And we are not speaking here of even the good pagan sort of happiness anymore; for the only “happiness” we have taught modern man to recognize is pleasure.

The first key therefore in guiding your patient’s choice of resolutions is to see that she reads a great deal of literature about her choice. I don’t by “read” mean “read, digest, and consider critically.” If the patient were a stupider sort of person that might help to confuse her; as it is, we can’t be too careful to keep her from analyzing the suggestions that the world has to offer. See if you can’t guide her to where she’ll see or hear some of its jingles by accident. Get the language into her brain, and her head will someday follow.

The second key is to see to it if possible that she makes several resolutions, as particular and time-consuming as possible. This rule applies equally in Lent, where the theory is the same: the more inconvenient and confusing and complicated a thing is for a human, the more likely they are to trip up about it. Most of our patients are not (more’s the pity) real cowards when it comes to suffering and pain. If they were, nothing could serve our purposes better at this time than a wholesale, full-frontal attack upon religion such as the ancient emperors mounted. But I fear there are too many who, faced with a direct choice between apostasy and death, would choose wrongly; make the choice as stark as all that, and we would see many of our most promising patients suffer and die with distressing aplomb. But attack them through bureaucracy, mild prejudice, a tax here and a regulation there … ah! yes. Come at them slowly and we will see even quite decent people edging towards the line, the white line that marks off the honest from the dishonest, and the Enemy’s soldier from one of our own. Of course, we make them think too that the line is actually edging towards them, by making everyone round them move a little; it is not that they have changed their position, they think, but that circumstances themselves have changed … What matters to us is that moment of doubt, when the Enemy’s member asks him or herself, “What if, after all, they and all their science and tolerance are right?” But this moment only comes when we have blotted out the reality about them with (to borrow a phrase from one of the enemy’s own) a “cloud of unknowing.”

But—to her resolutions. As worldly as possible and as many as possible, that is the key. See that in making them her psychology (if you can’t get her soul—yet) is bent toward recreating herself in a better image. The multiplicity of resolutions necessary to achieve this “better image” will of course prevent her from ever achieving it, but even she should manage to pull the feat off we would not need to worry. The Enemy has after all made the little beggars in HIS image and threatens to repeat the performance in each with an increase of similarity (assimilation, as we know). Any conscious attempt on the patient’s part to make herself into something other than what HE has intended is an automatic disloyalty in his eyes—yes, even if the patient’s alternative images are formed on religious lines. Remember who it was that sent the Cure of Ars to become a hermit.

Your affectionate uncle,

Slangrine

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January 16th, 2012More on Martin Luther Kingby Joseph Pearce

Following my own post on MLK, I'm posting a short piece on Dr King by my friend, Cornelius Sullivan, the fine artist and sculptor whose work is featured in the latest issue of StAR. Cornelius' views are somewhat more subdued than mine! Read on ...

Images do have meaning. Martin Luther King had a dream.  Forty three years after his death he has a grand monument on the Washington Mall. It was dedicated with the first Black President of the United States present.  It is fitting in location and in monumental scale. It is a wonderful gesture of tribute to such a great man. But the art is not right. Many say that the portrait of Reverend King is more like a nightmare because it doesn’t look like him. Isn’t there in the concept of “portrait” something that should include visual information about the individual?  He was never standing still, he was always marching.  He was a visionary, a preacher; he was inspired. He was not fat and bloated like a dough boy or inflatable character. He was a small quick man. We have a wealth of photographs and videos of his impassioned speech and intense striving.

The King marble is a monumental figure coming out of the massive block. It has a look of Socialist Realism.  Denver-based artist Ed Dwight, who was on an early planning team for the memorial, told USA Today, commenting on the fact that the sculptor is Chinese, that “Dr. King would be turning over in his grave if he knew the sculptor was from a communist country”. Is this just an unreasonable prejudice?  Maybe not. The sculpture seems to be a product of the aesthetic formation of the sculptor, molded by the countless images of Chairman Mao Zedong projecting dictatorial authority. It reminds me of the new sculpture of Pope John Paul II in front of the train station in Rome. The Vatican disliked the bronze because it did not look like the pope who was seen and recognized in person by more people than anyone else in history.  Romans thought the statue looked like Mussolini.  It is an inane pose, the pope holding out his cape to envelope all.  A literature professor friend considered it Marxist, “turning the individual into the collective.”

The crossed arms of the pose of Dr. King speak more about repose than about the true gestures of the crusader, martyr, and spiritual civil rights leader who was beaten, jailed and finally assassinated. He was a visionary. Remember his determined walk as he crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Montgomery Alabama.  Remember his face and the way he leaned forward and looked out to the distance while giving the speech at the Lincoln Memorial, the “I have a dream” speech.

Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Chester French, Washington, DC

Portraiture has a base in proportion. If each feature is correct in size and shape you can have a “likeness”.  Sometimes by magic or accident, after working for a likeness, an artist can capture something of the essence, or the soul, of the individual.  The greatness of many important artists has been based upon their desire and ability to do portraits. These include Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, along with the American sculptors Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint Gaudens.

Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, Augustus Saint Guadens, Boston

One of the greatest public sculptures in the United States is the Shaw Memorial by Saint Gaudens, opposite the State House in Boston.  It is a civil rights memorial of the Civil War Massachusetts 54^th Regiment, the all black unit led by the young white Colonel Robert Gould Shaw from Boston. The portrait of Shaw is extraordinary and you are able to know the man. The soldiers are portraits done from life and they are individuals.

Shaw lived across the street on Beacon Hill and he was chosen by the Governor to lead this regiment because his parents were devoted abolitionists who had fought to end slavery for many years.

The King Monument does not look like Dr. King.  The pose is passive; he is back on his heels. It signifies rest, the job is done. King never rested, the struggle went on. As with so many prophets and martyrs, he knew his own death was imminent.  His eyes swelled up in his other unforgettable speech just before he was shot, when he said, “I might not get there with you.”

With Reverend Martin Luther King, President John F. Kennedy, and Pope John Paul II the record of photographs and movies is vast and rich with information about the appearance and movements of the person.  That is why it is such a travesty to have a sculpture of John Paul in Rome and a sculpture of Reverend King in DC that do not look like the men that we came to know.

Professor Isabel MacIlvain from Boston University has created a memorable portrait of JFK. It is right across the street from the Shaw Memorial outside the Massachusetts State House.  Her likeness of his face is perfect and she has captured his characteristic stride. She told me she wished that she could have sculpted him in a toga so there would be more ample curves and shapes to mold.  She had his actual suit and she said that the family was nervous to get it back from her.  The family was involved. She is one of many excellent known American sculptors who would have done justice to a King memorial.

It’s too late now. Why didn’t someone say in the beginning, “No, that’s a bad idea, Martin never posed like a dictator”? 

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January 16th, 2012Secular Saints and Iconsby Joseph Pearce

As Martin Luther King Day draws to a close, I can't help but utter a plaintive gibe against the rise of secular fundamentalism and its secular "saints". It's not that I have anything in particular against Dr. King, any more than I have anything in particular against Lord Nelson or Napoleon Bonaparte. It's simply that I would rather show reverence and deference to the saints in heaven, canonized by Christ's Mystical Body, the Church, than to genuflect before the secular saints of the seemingly almighty State.

I am uneasy worshiping the "civil rights" of modern secularism, with its protection of the "rights" of the practitioners of infanticide, or its insistence on the "right" of sodomites to "marry". It is indeed significant that one of Dr King's daughters is active in the pro-life movement and there is little doubt that her father would have been less than happy with much that is being forced into law in the name of "civil rights".

It should be said that I am also uneasy worshiping the imperialist "saints" of the Pax Britannica, those icons of British imperialism of which the aforementioned Nelson is a prime example. As an Englishman, I am frankly embarrassed that my country has placed a statue of Nelson on a column in the middle of London, which is higher than the column outside the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore on which the citizens of Rome have placed a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

I am not a Frenchman but we should not need reminding that the secular fundamentalist creed of liberté, egalité et fraternité led to the slaughter of the guillotine. Nor should we forget that the aforementioned Napoleon was the first of the great modern dictators, the prototype for the Stalins and Hitlers who followed in his wake.

No, I am not comfortable with the worship of secular gods, especially if they are sanctioned and canonized by the godless State. It matters little to me if the godless State is the British Empire, the French Republic or the US Federal Government, all of which, to one degree or another, are the Orwellian monsters that this deplorable epoch produces with sickening frequency. Thus, I hold my nose on Martin Luther King Day, not as a mark of disrespect against Dr King himself but as a protest against the sort of government that mandated a "day" in his honour. May Dr King rest in peace and may secular fundamentalism rot in the hell that it has prepared for itself.           

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January 16th, 2012A Moral Enterprise: America and the Irrelevance of the Tea Partyby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

I recently attended a presentation by a local Tea Party leader about the relevance of his movement.  It’s a good question, given the rapid collapse of TP’s influence, as far as can be discerned from the GOP primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.  The TP is a kind of mirror image of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Each draws support from its wing of the elite media. Both tap into resentments about crony capitalism (including “vulture capitalists,” in Rick Perry’s memorable expression) and government bailouts.  Both produced a lot of steam for a time, but lacked a piston box and piston that could channel the steam into an engine that goes somewhere.  Despite its using the term “party,” the TP lacked organization and leadership so could only trail along behind those who had it or dissipate into the atmosphere.  Neither had demands, policies, or strategies that were clear and credible.  Both tended to the quixotic and silly as well as, in my limited acquaintance, to crackpot conspiracy theories--all of which suggests the persistence on left and right of the ‘paranoid style in American politics’ and an innocence about real political and social forces.

The presentation was lamentable.  A rant against the Supreme Court, it largely ignored the issues that must concern anyone who cares about the common good--like why inequality is increasing rapidly and how this relates to the growing social divide in the U.S.  For the less affluent and less highly educated this gulf finds expression in communities where marriage is disintegrating, children are growing up without at least one of their parents, abortion is rampant, divorce and cohabitation are norms.  The evidence overwhelmingly supports the arguments of social conservatives like Rick Santorum, while liberals who claim to speak for the poor and downtrodden celebrate these developments as expressions of family diversity (not breakdown), of individual choice and freedom (for adults anyway).

On these issues Tea Partiers have little or nothing to say.  They resemble liberals who see moral questions like same-sex marriage only in terms of individual rights.  They are bound to a kind of individualism that sees nothing but aggregations of individual choices in the structures that mediate between individual and state.  These are the associations or institutions celebrated by successive popes as well as Tocqueville and the American republican liberal tradition of the framers of the Constitution (which, curiously, our Tea Party spokesman, like a biblical literalist, treated as Holy Writ in no need of interpretation).  Rather, in their view, it is all a matter of individual choice as against the collectivist state.  In Margaret Thatcher’s most memorable quote, which could be endorsed--but for its author--by the advocates of same-sex marriage or the ‘right to choose’ as much as by libertarians, “There is no such thing as society.”  

In the republican theory of Aristotle and the Founding Fathers, as well as modern communitarians like Michael Sandel, liberty depends on sharing in self-governance, which in turn “means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community.”  The habits of the heart required for and developed by self-governing members of a particular family, community, and nation are those of a situated, encumbered self.  In this narrative conception of personhood, we develop in “reciprocal indebtedness” (MacIntyre, 1999), from total dependence to a degree of autonomy through ties to family and community, culture and tradition.

In contrast, the liberalism of recent years conceives persons as free and independent selves, unencumbered by moral or civic ties they have not chosen. This conception of rights and individual autonomy assumes that freedom consists in the capacity of persons to choose their values and ends.  One key practical expression of this shift in liberalism is the subordination of the rights and needs of children to the freedoms of adults.  (On the extensiveness and significance of this shift, see Elizabeth Marquardt’s The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs.) 

All of this comes to mind again in light of the Wall Street Journal’s relentless libertarianism, which the editor of First Things magazine, R.R. Reno, takes to task today.  The WSJ had criticized Rick Santorum in these terms:

 "Most disappointing is the Pennsylvanian’s proposal to triple the tax credit for children (today $1,000), which is a hobby horse of the Christian right. This is social policy masquerading as economics. Unlike a cut in marginal tax rates, a larger tax credit does little for growth because it doesn’t change incentives to save, work or invest. It merely rewards taxpayers who have children over those who don’t." 

 “This extraordinary paragraph,” notes Reno, “echoes an earlier column by Wall Street Journal regular, Kimberley Strassel, who also attacked Santorum’s call for a larger child tax credit, “which benefits only Americans fortunate enough to have a child,” and thus, Strassel suggests, is unfair to those who do not.” 

"The underlying view of the human person in relation to society that leads to these conclusions fits with postmodern relativism, which says that we are motivated by a will-to-power or sexual desire (the two main options in postmodern theory), but not in accord with an essential human nature, and not toward any normative end. By this way of thinking there is no human nature, no natural as opposed to unnatural way to live. Society constructs norms (social engineering), and individuals do this or that in accord with their own personal wishes and desires (lifestyle choices).

Take will-to-power and domesticate it as economic self-interest, and you pretty much have the political and social vision of free-market libertarianism. I see little future for what is today a very modern social philosophy in American conservatism. Yes we’d like to be richer, but that’s not all we want. We want to live in accord with our nature as human beings, and that includes contributing to and enjoying the primitive community of the family. If free market libertarians can’t get their minds around that fact—and the fact that as we make personal choices about marriage and children we’re influenced by a manifold of social and economic incentives—then I can’t see how they will be able to formulate a governing consensus. Over the long haul people won’t vote for politicians who won’t work to  implement policies that help them live the kinds of lives their nature desires."

The fact is that states cannot be neutral about social issues like marriage, divorce, cohabitation, abortion, or children and families--treating them purely as matters of lifestyle and individual choice--any more than it could have been about the institution of slavery.  Even the strong libertarian (and radical feminist) position of privatizing or abolishing marriage altogether as a public institution--as if the state had no responsibility for the common good or the common good did not extend to such matters as optimal circumstances for having and rearing children--is a political choice (to destroy marriage).  

Tax policies that reflect a growing tendency in family law thinking and increasingly in practice, to break down the legal distinction between marriage and cohabitation, are sometimes promoted in name of individual rights, non-discrimination, and elimination of stigma.  As such, they are not alternatives to social policy or expressions of state neutrality and deference to individual understandings of the “sweet mystery of life.”  They themselves are social policies, just as much as any marriage and family policy.  They just happen to be policies that undermine marriage, our most important pro-child institution.

As Reno says, “Over the long haul people won’t vote for politicians who won’t work to implement policies that help them live the kinds of lives their nature desires.”  Sadly, events may prove him over-optimistic in this opinion.

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January 16th, 2012Marriage and Religious Freedomby Joseph Pearce

Further to my recent post about the battle to defend marriage, here's an e-mail I've just received from European Dignity Watch, an organization which is battling against the secular fundamentalism of the European Union.

European Report

Monday, January 16 2012

      European Dignity Watch

       Marriage and Religious Freedom     

Fundamental Goods That Stand or Fall Together

Dear Joseph,

Today, we exceptionally report on an US initiative that targets a problem not less relevant in Europe than across the Atlantic. In an open letter, religious leaders of the largest faith communities in the US defend marriage as the foundational institution of all societies.

The letter demonstrates the connection between marriage and religious freedom and leaves no doubt that the redefinition of marriage constitutes a direct attack on religious freedom. Either they stand or they fall together.

 The letter points out serious consequences of redefining marriage that will "arise in a broad range of legal contexts, because altering the civil definition of 'marriage' does not change one law, but hundreds, even thousands, at once. By a single stroke, every law where rights depend on marital status-such as employment discrimination, employment benefits, adoption, education, healthcare, elder care, housing, property, and taxation-will change so that same-sex sexual relationships must be treated as if they were marriage. That requirement, in turn, will apply to religious people and groups in the ordinary course of their many private or public occupations and ministries-including running schools, hospitals, nursing homes and other housing facilities, providing adoption and counseling services, and many others," they said."

The leaders warn that redefining marriage has consequences for the religious freedom of all and urged civic leaders to defend marriage so as to defend religious liberty.

Read here the full letter. <http://mailman.pxldsk.com/tl.php?p=10o/10t/rs/xe/rw/rs//http%3A%2F%2Fwww.europeandignitywatch.org%2Findex.php%3Fid%3D43%26amp%3Btx_ttnews%255Btt_news%255D%3D249%26amp%3BcHash%3Df3808989d0bbd8c7fb61c246f483d6dc> 

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January 15th, 2012The Reception of Holy Communionby Fr. Simon Henry

Bishop Antonio Keller at Mass this Christmas

The Eponymous Flower reports on Bishop Antonio Keller of the southern Brazilian Diocese of Frederico Westphalen following the example given By Pope Benedict. Apparently, a Pastoral Letter issued for Christmas explains that in his Cathedral Holy Communion will be given, as a norm, on the tongue and kneeling. This actually only reverts to the worldwide norm for the way in which Holy Communion is administered as the allowance for receiving in the hand is given by indult - which admittedly most diocese have applied for and received permission to do. To be honest, I'm not sure if kneeling falls into the same category, except that it is always permitted to kneel and no-one can be refused communion should they kneel to receive it (Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, written on 1. Juli 2002, Notitiae 2002, S. 582-585). The Bishop's letter also draws attention to other things that apply universally: to fast at least one hour before receiving communion and the necessity of having the right disposition at the reception of Holy Eucharist.

It might be that in times past the reception of Holy Communion was too infrequent because people thought themselves unworthy in their often sinful state . Perhaps today reception of Holy Communion is too frequent because people think themselves only too worthy and have no sense of personal sin at all. This was first noted by Pope Pius XII in a radio message of October 26, 1946, speaking of the greatest sin in the world today being the loss of the sense of sin: “forse oggi il più grande peccato del mondo è perdere il senso del peccato” (Discorsi e radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio XII, vol. 8, 1955–1959) and is a modern ill that has been commented on by successive Popes. I'm not sure many people think of their disposition before coming to Holy Communion: "Am I in a long-standing enmity with a family member?"; "Have I missed Sunday Mass with no good reason?"; "Have I prayed at all since last time I received Holy Communion?"; "When did I last go to Confession?"

In the past the Church enjoined people to go to Holy Communion at least once a year (and Confession beforehand - the "Easter Duties") but this was because people were minded not to come even once a year, so great was their sense of awe for the Holy Eucharist. Obviously, a sacrament that is never received is a bit pointless but then a sacrament that is never thought about is not going to be the means of channelling all the grace that it should to the recipient.

It does seem strange that at a time when modern western culture (if we can call it a culture - as Pope Benedict says) is almost obsessed with placing blame-- "who can I sue for the fact that I tripped up on a pavement"-- and with making apologies for the past sins of our ancestors-- whether it be for colonialism or for offences committed against the long dead spirit of Galileo. We see sins out there but they are not ours. It seems that, like the greatest of the Saints, we are ready at any moment to be born, fully formed, into the glory of Heaven. As my family, friends, parishioners and, no doubt readers of this blog, might tell you - I am not!

My point is that the rules, which we seem so terrified of mentioning lest we "put anyone off" are actually means of focusing our thought, prayer and energy on the challenge of the Good News and the outward signs push us to recognise the unusual nature of what we are in contact with through the Sacraments - the awesome power and grace of God, the supernatural; literally, above nature. Certainly above our fallen human nature. A scraping of the knee and an hour's fast seem like small things to remind us of this.

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January 13th, 2012Defending Marriageby Joseph Pearce

I can't help feeling ambivalent about the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. Those who are most "pro-life" also seem to be manically attached to a neo-conservative view of foreign policy, which will plunge the United States into another disastrous war, perhaps against Iran, at first, and then against an increasingly Islamicized Arab-world. When will the neo-cons learn the lesson of recent history that radical Islam thrives on the anti-Americanism caused by hawkish US militarism? When will so-called Catholic politicians listen to the wisdom of the Popes (John Paul II and Benedict XVI) on this issue? On the other hand, the one candidate who seemingly will not drag the US into a disastrous war, is not prepared to defend marriage and the family against the secular fundamentalist fanatics who seek to destroy marriage as the cornerstone of healthy family life. This being so, one is tempted to echo the words of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet who wished "a plague o' both your houses". Nonetheless, I thought the recent e-mail from the National Organization for Marriage is worth noting. It is important that Catholic voters are informed. With this in mind, and my wider misgivings notwithstanding, I'm posting the e-mail, with its sundry links, in its entirety:

From: Brian Brown
Sent: Fri 1/13/2012 8:31 AM
To: Joseph Pearce
Subject: The Week Marriage Became a National Issue, NOM Marriage News, January 12, 2011

Thursday, January 12, 2011

My Dear Friends,

This is the week that marriage and religious liberty became national issues.

I don't know if you watched the New Hampshire debates over the weekend. I did.

And I saw two things:

For the first time, the mainstream media has decided to echo and push the idea that support for marriage makes you a bigot.

And I also saw major political figures magnificently rebut these attacks.

As you know, the National Organization for Marriage launched a Marriage Pledge last summer, asking major candidates to commit-to sign their name on paper-to five specific things:

*       To support a federal marriage amendment
*       To defend DOMA vigorously in court
*       To appoint judges who will not impose gay marriage on all 50 states
*       To investigate the increasing reports of threats to the liberty of traditional marriage supporters
*       To restore to the people of D.C. their right to vote for marriage.

Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry all agreed to be marriage champions.

(Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman refused.)

Because we adopted the Marriage Pledge as a strategy for identifying marriage champions, NOM will not be making an endorsement.

Instead, we've sought to become the voice for all marriage voters, and to make sure marriage remains a visible issue in this campaign, as in this country.

And wow, this week our marriage champions were magnificent!

ABC News's George Stephanopolous and Diane Sawyer tried to "grill" the candidates on their supposed bigotry on gay rights, and the same questions came up at the debate on NBC as well.

Here are Romney and Santorum responding on NBC

And here's an extended exchange on marriage

But I want to call your attention to something important which happened this week: The same-sex marriage attack on religious liberty became a campaign issue.

I have to give credit to Newt Gingrich for first bringing up the issue, receiving wild audience applause, and to Gov. Romney, who quickly stepped in to validate and affirm Gingrich's critique from his Massachusetts experience.

Gingrich jumped in to point out media bias: "You don't hear the opposite question asked: Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won't accept gay couples? ...Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivery of services because of the bias and bigotry of the Administration? The bigotry question goes both ways... and none of it gets covered by the media."

(He's right about that. That's why we launched our new Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance, to bring you the news the media is not covering. More on that in a second.)

Romney stepped in to strongly affirm that Gingrich was right about what happened in Massachusetts. "This decision about what we call marriage has consequences," Gov. Romney said. "...Calling it marriage creates a whole host of problems for family, for the law, for the practice of religion, for education. Let me say this: 3000 years of human history shouldn't be discarded so quickly."

Kudos to both men for braving the media firestorm, and to Rick Santorum for bravely defending marriage as well.

Here's one last video you'll just enjoy: Newt Gingrich the next morning, beating back a CNN anchor who tries to embarrass him on his position:

Do you know who else just jumped in to validate our concerns about marriage and religious liberty?

The US Catholic Bishops just released this morning an important letter from an interfaith group of religious leaders from the "Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Lutheran, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities" calling on people of good will to reject efforts to equate traditional views on sex and marriage with racial bigotry.

These leaders point out that the real danger is not that clergy will be forced to perform same-sex marriage: "While we cannot rule out this possibility entirely, we believe that the First Amendment creates a very high bar to such attempts."

Instead, they point out, "the most urgent peril is this: forcing or pressuring both individuals and religious organizations-throughout their operations, well beyond religious ceremonies-to treat same-sex sexual conduct as the moral equivalent of marital sexual conduct."

Can we really create an America where people who believe sex should be confined to the union of husband and wife are treated like racial bigots?

These leaders say the answer is yes, and the threat is "urgent":

"In short, the refusal of these religious organizations to treat same-sex sexual relationship as if it were a marriage marked them and their members as bigots, subjecting them to the full arsenal of government punishments and pressures reserved for racists."

They conclude with this call: "Therefore, we encourage all people of good will to protect marriage as the union between one man and one woman, and to consider carefully the far-reaching consequences for the religious freedom of all Americans if marriage is redefined."

For an example of the future Human Rights Campaign is working hard to create for religious people and our institutions, look no further than the state of Washington. There, Mary Margaret Haugen, a Democratic state senator who told her constituents that gay marriage would not happen in that state without a vote of the people, met with this over-the-top response from an angry pro-gay-marriage activist, according to news reports:

"One constituent likened denial of marriage rights to gays and lesbians to racial apartheid in South Africa. 'I saw apartheid, I was in South Africa and I can tell you this is different,' Haugen shot back. She recalled the 'necklacing' practice in which victims were stuffed in a tire which was then set afire."

Let's get real here!

No major spokesman or leader in America wants to hurt gay people, or deny them the civil rights we all share.

The right to redefine marriage is a made-up right, it's not real; it has no roots in our constitution, our history, our traditions, or common sense.

Being denied the right to call a same-sex relationship a marriage is not like what happened to South Africans, or African-Americans.

A movement which makes this argument is rooting itself in wishful self-aggrandizing fantasies which will backfire in the end.

The great thing about working for marriage is that it is an issue that transcends the usual political divides-of creed, of race, and of party.

Democratic leaders are stepping forward on the local level to stand proudly for marriage and we are very grateful to them for their courage!

Another such hero is Maryland Senate President Mike Miller, a lifelong Democrat, who firmly announced he opposes same-sex marriage and predicts the people of Maryland will reject it if the legislature tries to pass it.

And, of course, this week another strong voice made one of his most powerful statements on the need to protect marriage.

According to Reuters, Pope Benedict told diplomats from nearly 180 countries that the education of children needed proper "settings" and that "pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman."

"This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself," he said.

Wow.

We have fights bursting out all over in the next few weeks. Gay-marriage activists are trying to block the GOP from reversing gay marriage in New Hampshire, and push through gay marriage bills quickly in New Jersey, Washington state, and Maryland, and possibly Maine. They are laying the groundwork for a fight to push gay marriage in Illinois. We have a chance to pass a marriage amendment in Minnesota in November.

The fight is heating up all over this country, in states and on the national level:

Are we going to discard 3000 years of human history, and redefine our country's Biblical traditions on sex and marriage as the equivalent of bigotry?

Or are we going to fight for marriage-and win?

Thank you for all the victories you've made possible in this good fight.

How bad can things get if we do not show courage now?

NOM's Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance just released this incredibly moving-and yet chilling-video interviewing Eunice and Owen Johns, a black Pentecostal married couple in Great Britain whose own government told them they were not fit to foster a child unless they were willing to advocate for gay sex.

Mrs. Johns is especially tender and moving, about how much she wanted to love a child, any child-gay, straight, black or white.

The empty spare room in their modest home filled with love is a distressing example of how far government may go, in some cases, in condemning traditional Christian views on sex and marriage as bigotry and discrimination.

It's an outrage because just as with Catholic Charities and other religious adoption agencies, the true victims are some of our most vulnerable children in need of care.

Pray for me and for everyone on the front lines of this great and good fight.

Blessings,

Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage

P.S. Our fight for marriage is your fight! When you donate to NOM, you're making sure that your voice is heard. The year ahead will bring many challenges, and many new opportunities. Why not take this time to help ensure that marriage is protected-in the new year, and in the generations to come?

National Organization for Marriage Commends Mitt Romney on Impressive Victory in New Hampshire

We commend Mitt Romney on his impressive victory tonight in New Hampshire, adding to his delegate total following his victory in Iowa. Mr. Romney has signed NOM's pledge to take specific actions as president to defend traditional marriage. He has also called for the repeal of same-sex marriage in New Hampshire. Voters rewarded him and we congratulate Mr. Romney on his well-earned victory.

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National Organization for Marriage Pledges Major Fight in New Jersey to Prevent Passage of Same-Sex Marriage

Trenton, N.J. - The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) today pledged an all-out effort to prevent same-sex marriage from becoming law in New Jersey, and said it would spend upward of $500,000 to support legislators who stood to preserve traditional marriage and hold those accountable who impose same-sex marriage in the state. Backers of gay marriage today unveiled yet another legislative attempt to redefine marriage in New Jersey.

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The National Organization for Marriage Continues Campaign in New Hampshire Opposing Ron Paul's Position on Marriage

Manchester, NH - The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) today announced that it is mounting a $50,000 independent expenditure effort in New Hampshire to educate state voters about Ron Paul's "unacceptable" position on marriage. The group began running television commercials online last Friday, as well as calling tens of thousands of voters to bring Paul's position to the attention of voters.

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Latest news

Video: GOP Candidates Debate Marriage in New Hampshire

The GOP candidates all do a good job (with the exception of Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul) of defending the institution of marriage and distinguishing the reasons to support it from the false excuses used by activists to redefine it.

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Video: Romney and Santorum Repel MSM Attempts to Portray Their Marriage Views as Bigotry

NBC, not to be left out of the mainstream media effort to equate protecting marriage with bigoted views, goes after Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum for their views on marriage. Both men handle the line of attack easily. The last jab at Santorum, asking him what he would do if one of his sons were to come out to him as gay, well - see for yourself:

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Video: Newt Gingrich Responds to CNN Bias Against Religious Liberty

Newt Gingrich called out the mainstream media for bias when covering religious liberty issues at a GOP debate this weekend and defended that critique when a CNN host tried to counter his claims in an interview:

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Santorum Engages Pro-SSM NH College Students in Rational Conversation

He's rather charming here. And patient. Why doesn't marriage equality include all marriages, including polygamous marriages, if the only principle at stake here is all people have a right to have their relationships treated equally if those relationships are important to their happiness? The students have no answer, so they try to claim its not a legitimate question:

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Gronstal Continues to Block Marriage Vote in Iowa

Sen. Mike Gronstal said this week that he will not allow a vote on an amendment to the constitution that would ban gay marriage.

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New Jersey Legislature to Introduce SSM Bill Again, With Announcement Tomorrow

In a dramatic move, Democratic leaders plan to announce at a news conference tomorrow that a bill legalizing gay marriage will be the first measure introduced in the new session of the Senate and the Assembly, sources with knowledge of their intentions said last night.

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David Storobin to Challenge Lew Fidler for Disgraced Sen. Kruger's Seat

Republicans emboldened by a recent Congressional victory are eager to grab the state senate seat vacated by disgraced Sen. Carl Kruger - but they're facing a popular Democrat who

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Law Professor Alleges U. of Iowa Discriminated Against Her For Her ProLife Views

In a groundbreaking lawsuit, Teresa Wagner is alleging a public university law school discriminated against her for exercising her First Amendment rights on life and marriage, as the New York Times reports:

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New Child Trends Brief on Unwed Childbearing

Having children outside of marriage-nonmarital childbearing-is increasingly common in the United States. A new Research Brief, Childbearing Outside of Marriage: Estimates and Trends in the United States [PDF], describes how the population of women bearing children outside of marriage has changed, often in ways that challenge public perceptions. Nonmarital childbearing remains a significant public concern as it is linked to negative outcomes for women and their children across a range of measures, as well as with a reliance on public assistance.

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Pope: Redefining Marriage Threatens "The Future of Humanity"

Pope Benedict said Monday that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined "the future of humanity itself."

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Contributions or gifts to the National Organization for Marriage, a 501(c)(4) organization with QNC status, are not tax-deductible. The National Organization for Marriage does not accept contributions from business corporations, labor unions, foreign nationals, or federal contractors; however, it may accept contributions from federally registered political action committees. Donations may be used for political purposes such as supporting or opposing candidates. No funds will be earmarked or reserved for any political purpose.

This message has been authorized and paid for by the National Organization for Marriage, 2029 K Street NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20006, Brian Brown, President. This message has not been authorized or approved by any candidate.

Copyright © 2011 National Organization for Marriage.

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January 12th, 2012Batter up! A New Member on the Teamby Deirdre Littleton

Back to Florida for the final stretch—my last semester of college! I love the Sunshine State, but it's all so eerily familiar... reminds me of a recent Grinch-green Christmas back home in the Chicago suburbs. It seems like dear old Chicago got hit on the head too many times and forgot her name. She's traded in her blustery blizzards and windstorms for a trendy "Global Warming Fanatic" banner, and now she's trying to pass off as Sunshine City.

So I ditched that and arrived at Ave Maria earlier this week. I am proud to announce that my suitcase is unpacked and shoved behind the desk, and I've found a drawer, shelf, or corner under the bed for all of my belongings. Hold on, that last word did not deserve an "s" ... not even half an "s." Maybe a quarter? Speaking of which, I found a dime stuck to the grime in the mirror cabinet, compliments of a previous resident. That made my fortune swell up from a meager $6.90 (mostly coins), to an even $7! I've struck gold! Maybe I'll plant it and see what I get (don't tell my Econ professor). Anything is worth a try.

Yes, I am "one of those"—a procrastinating and impoverished college student. But I'm a lot of things. I'm size 9 in shoes, a wisdom teeth extraction survivor, the fifth daughter in a frilly family of twelve girls and two unfortunate boys, a hopeless addict to good literature, and most currently, an excited new member of the blogging team at The Ink Desk. I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you on life, literature, and the cultural revival, as well as receiving your feedback!

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January 9th, 2012Saints and Sleuths at Seton Hallby Joseph Pearce

Just received from the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture:

Saints and Sleuths VI - Catholic Life in Literature

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January 9th, 2012Catholic England Comes to the Protestant Bible Beltby Joseph Pearce

I'm delighted and honoured to be one of the speakers at a conference on English Catholicism in Greenville, SC, on Saturday, January 21st.

Greenville, amongst its other claims to fame, is home to Bob Jones University, the hub and heart of Protestant Fundamentalism. It is, therefore, a paradoxical pleasure to bring English Catholicism to the inner sanctum of the Bible Belt. The pleasure is heightened by the fact that Father Dwight Longenecker, one of the speakers at the conference, is himself a graduate of Bob Jones, though obviously long before his conversion. I'm also excited at the prospect of meeting my compatriot, Joanna Bogle, once again. Joanna is one of the brightest stars in the firmament of evangelical Catholicism in England and is best known in the States for her regular appearances on EWTN.

Father Dwight will be speaking on "Merry Ole England: Life in the English Middle Ages" and also on "C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien - Conversion and Catholicism".

Joanna Bogle will speak on "Feasts and Seasons: How to Celebrate the Catholic Faith English Style" and "Catholicism in Tension: The Catholic Church in Britain Today".

I will be speaking on "The Jolly Prophet: The Importance of G.K. Chesterton Today" and "Searching for Shakespeare: Was Shakespeare Catholic?"

I hope that visitors to this site might be tempted to attend this conference, which will be a celebration of England and Catholicism in the spirit of the English saints and martyrs. Full details are given below:

Now and in England
A Day Conference on English Catholicism Then and Now.

with EWTN personalities and authors
Joanna Bogle, Joseph Pearce and Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Saturday, January 21, 2012
at Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church
3710 Augusta Road, Greenville, South Carolina, 29605

8:30 - Registration and Refreshments
9:00 - Deacon Ballard - Opening Comments - Why English Catholicism is Important for Americans Today
9:15 - Fr Longenecker - Merry Ole' England - Life in the English Middle Ages
9:45 - Joanna Bogle - Feasts and Seasons - How to Celebrate the Catholic Faith English Style
10:30 - Break
10:45 - Joseph Pearce - The Jolly Prophet - The Importance of G.K. Chesterton Today
11:30 - Fr Longenecker - C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien - Conversion and Catholicism
12:00 - Lunch - Book Signings
12:45 - Holy Rosary Before the Image of Our Lady of Walsingham
1:15 - Joseph Pearce - Searching for Shakespeare - Was Shakespeare Catholic?
2:00 - Break
2:15 - Joanna Bogle - Catholicism in Tension - The Catholic Church in Britain Today
3:00 - Plenary Session - Questions
3:15 - Deacon Ballard - Closing Comments
3:30 – Departure

Registration: $15.00, including lunch. Call OLR Parish for reservation at 864-422-1648

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January 9th, 2012Advice to Aspiring Actorsby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

A friend of mine who's done lots of community theater emailed me about her first audition for a professional acting troupe. She did not make call-backs, and might have had a shot at chorus, but because she didn't know tap, they didn't consider her.

It struck me that my reply is filled with so many gems of wisdom, I was obliged to share it with my readers.

I wrote ...

***

You see, I can tap. It's one of those weapons you collect in your arsenal, just in case, like you, you miss the call-back for a principal role, but want to end up in chorus. And I memorized BABY GOT BACK by Sir Mix-a-Lot twenty years ago, just in case I needed filler material during a show - an emergency item from my bag of tricks. I did it tonight and it was the highlight of the show, for some reason. This is why I learned the ukulele and the nose whistle. You never know when you might have to pull something out of thin air to keep the audience from turning on you.

If you really want to take another swing at it, the key is audition all over, everywhere, every audition. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Turn the parts down if you don't want them, but audition anyway, for practice. After about a dozen auditions, you'll know exactly what to do to nail it.

So, to sum up ...

1. Learn tap

2. Learn an obscure rap song and how to play two cheap musical instruments you can carry with you anywhere. Have them handy in case you forget your lines in the middle of a show or the audience starts to turn on you.

3. Audition everywhere. Of course, this will tick off the people who cast you when you turn them down, but once you get good, you'll start to make enemies anyway, so you might as well begin now.

***

... but of course the greatest gem of wisdom I did not pass on. Stay out of show business and do something sane.

Above: The author plays a showboat on the Mighty Missouri River in the Old Days, pulling something out of his bag of tricks.

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January 8th, 2012The Year of Faithby Fr. Simon Henry

http://www.youtube.com/embed/WhMlb1kaluo

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith has published a Communique today with pastoral recommendations for the YEAR OF FAITH which is to begin on 11 October 2012, the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican Council II, and will conclude on 24 November 2013, Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ Universal King. The Holy Father's aim in promulgating this Year is to focus the attention of the Church on the theme which, since the beginning of his Pontificate, has been closest to his heart: the encounter with Jesus Christ and the beauty of having faith in Him.

Some things I noted about it - with my emphasis and comments.

The Committee for the Preparation of the Year of Faith is, by pontifical mandate, under the auspices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and includes among its members: Cardinals William Levada, Francis Arinze, Angelo Bagnasco, Ivan Dias, Francis E. George, Zenon Grocholewski, Marc Ouellet, Mauro Piacenza, Jean-Pierre Ricard, Stanisław Ryłko and Christoph Schönborn; Archbishops Salvatore Fisichella and Luis F. Ladaria; and Bishops Mario del Valle Moronta Rodríguez, Gerhard Ludwig Müller and Raffaello Martinelli.
Interesting that the Committee running the Year is under this Congregation.

After the Council the Church - under the sure guidance of the Magisterium and in continuity with the whole Tradition - set about ensuring the reception and application of the teaching of the Council in all its richness.
Stress on being in continuity with the WHOLE Tradition.

From the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI has worked decisively for a correct understanding of the Council, rejecting as erroneous the so-called "hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture" and promoting what he himself has termed "the 'hermeneutic of reform', of renewal in continuity".
Implying that there has been an INCORRECT understanding of the Council in some quarters.

The Year of Faith will be a propitious occasion to make Vatican Council II and the Catechism of the Catholic Church more widely and deeply known.
Implying that there has been something lacking in the depth and width of knowledge about the Council and the catechism.

On the level of Episcopal Conferences, attention will be given to the quality of catechesis, and efforts will be made to examine local catechisms and various catechetical supplements in use in the particular Churches . to ensure their complete conformity with the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Presuming that some local catechisms and catechetical materials NEED re-examining and that some are NOT in conformity with with the catechism. Perhaps we can all think of one or two nominations!>

At the diocesan level, the Year of Faith is considered, among other things... as a favourable time for 'penitential celebrations … in which all can ask for God's forgiveness, especially for sins against faith.
Sins against THE FAITH! Not sins against one another, not sins against the world but sins against THE FAITH.

There is usually a lot packed into Vatican language - words are chosen carefully. This Communique doesn't sound like much until you read it carefully - and look at who is on the Committee.

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January 8th, 2012The Cult of Chanceby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

I am reading as many books as I can by Fr. Stanley Jaki, in preparation for my one-man show, Science and Religion, in which I will portray Fr. Jaki at the Portsmouth Institute Conference next June.

One of the fun things about reading Fr. Jaki is that he makes intriguing off-handed comments in all of his books that you wish he'd elaborate on more, but you find you have to read more of his books to get a sense of what he's saying.

Take this aside from his Miracles and Physics (Christendom Press, 1999)

Miracles should seem to abound even today except for those who take refuge in bad philosophy of which its present most fashionable kind is steeped in the cult of chance. Only they fail to give a definition of chance which is more satisfactory than the handy use of that word to cover-up one's ignorance.

What a great phrase - The Cult of Chance. Fr. Jaki means by this the devotion to Chance as the catch-all for materialists and agnostics and Darwinists, who ascribe to "mere chance" or the "random combination of matter" everything we see around us.

What causes evolution? Chance mutations. What causes consciousness in man? Chance chemistry and random firings of neurons. What determines our fate? Chance.

But Fr. Jaki tantalizes us with the implied challenge to define Chance. Jaki himself does not do so in the paragraph from which I quote. He merely points out that the idolators of the god Chance fail to define the word, using it as a catch-all, a buzz-word to cover ignorance.

In fact, it's worse than that. The acolytes of Chance are not merely using a word to cover what's missing in their thinking, they are making what's missing into what's there, into the source of all that's there.

So before you read further, accept Fr. Jaki's implied challenge. Define Chance.

Here's my own definition, an easy one, and one helped along by St. Thomas Aquinas and his meditations on Chance. And though it's a two-word definition, I think it's an accurate one - accurate enough to reveal the sleight-of-hand behind the Randomists, if we can coin a term for those who worship that which is Random.

The definition is this. Chance is unintended events.

Now the first thing to note about this definition is that it begs the question, "unintended by whom?" St. Thomas points out that strictly speaking nothing is "unintended" by God, for example. Nothing is outside of either His positive will or His permissive will.

But leaving God outside of the question, this definition would mean "unintended by man" or "unintended by any agent capable of intentionality".

When we roll the dice, for example, the result we get is determined - determined by a jumble of causes that we can not control. The jarring back and forth of the dice, the surface of the table they land on, the atmospheric pressure - thousands of causes will determine the number the dice display when their jarring ceases. But these causes are (practically speaking) beyond our control; thus the effect is beyond the scope of our intent.

We can know something about the probability of the event, based on a mathematical analysis of the history of previous roles of the dice, extrapolated into the future. But we can not intend the result of a particular number on the dice, the way we can intend to pick up a flower or pass the mustard to the person who asks for it. (If we could, we would clean up at Vegas). Events that we have willed to do (and that turn out the way we willed them) are not chance events. Events that are beyond our will - though caused by who knows what - are (from our perspective) chance events.

Defining Chance clearly, then, reveals something interesting.

What it reveals is that nothing can happen by chance.

What I mean when I say that nothing can happen by chance is that quite literally nothing can happen by the agency of or caused by chance - for the phrase "by chance" implies that Chance is an agent, that Chance does something.

Chance does nothing. Chance, in a sense, is nothing. Chance is our word for a lack of agency. To say, "This was caused by a lack of agency" is like saying "this was caused by a lack of cause". What we mean when we say "this happened by chance" is "this event was caused by something that is beyond the scope of our intent".

Chance thus refers to the event, not the cause, except insofar as the word refers to our lack of possible participation in the cause.

Of course this opens up the shady area of the intent of creatures without free will. When a tree moves nutrients throughout its structure, this movement is not an "unintended event", though assigning "intent" to a plant is stretching what that word typically means.

The point here, without going further, is simply that "chance" refers to results that happen outside of a perceived deliberate agency, and the hallmark of all living matter is a kind of intentionality or deliberate doing - so all events intended and caused by a living agent are not chance events.

Thus, to say that evolution is caused by random or chance mutations is simply to say that evolution is caused by nothing deliberate. And this is tantamount to saying, "We don't know what causes it".

But how many evolutionists are honest enough to say, "Evolution is our word for the slow development over the eons of living things from simplicity of form and function to complexity of form and function, and we have absolutely no idea what causes it." Instead you'll hear them gloat, "We all evolved by chance."

Thereby covering their ignorance with pride and making a Something out of nothing.

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January 6th, 2012The Importance of Fantasyby Abigail C. Reimel

During this modern age it may seem like one’s time would be wasted reading tales of elves, dwarves, and dragons. Why would such smart, technically advanced people want to waste their lives on such things? Aren’t these imaginative tales of good versus evil children’s novels, to be outgrown like the crib and the rocking horse? A look at modern literature would make it seem that way. The shelves are no longer filled with black and white stories; gone are the classic westerns where the good guys always wore the white hats. No, this nation’s adolescents are sold books of gray on gray, bad versus worse, heroes who ask the dark question “What if I’m the bad guy?"[1] and heroines who overlook it. Handsome vampires replace crazed Draculas, and suddenly sleeping with blood-sucking creatures becomes something to be desired. Fiction today blurs the lines that the last generations were taught never to cross, and instead of producing wholesome citizens with a love of good and hatred of evil, today’s youth grow to become rebellious clones: all dressing the same, using the same dirty language, and indulging in the same lustful activities. Of course, not all teenagers turn into slaves of sin, but the more twisted fiction becomes—the more evil is glamourized—the more cultural clones are produced.

If fantasy has indeed taken such a negative turn, why call it important? Fantasy’s importance is found in its influence, for what children read plays a part in what they become. If a child, when looking for a book to read, reaches for tales of black magic and superstition instead of innocent rhymes and wholesome morals, he—often unwittingly—weakens his sense of right and wrong. How could one book shape a child’s future? By influencing his literary tastes, which will end up determining his interests, desires, philosophies, and decisions. In order to save the children of today from becoming the mainstream adults of tomorrow, classic literature, beautiful fantasy, must be rediscovered, the old tales dusted off and the new ones forgotten, so that right and wrong might once again find their proper places. Above all this nation must remember that at the center of every good fairy tale lies a fight to defend the honor and truth of the Ultimate Composer, and one can never outgrow the wisdom and guidance resting at the hearts of His parables.

May God have mercy on the misguided souls, and bless those who strive to restore holy fear in their hearts.

Amen.

[1] Stephanie Meyer. Twilight. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006. Print.

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January 6th, 2012The Church and the Nazisby Ed West | http://www.edwestonline.com

The year after Queen Elizabeth II's successful visit to Ireland the Republic is set to pardon 5,000 Irish soldiers who deserted to fight for the British against the Nazis.

As the BBC reported, even Sinn Fein supports the move:

Over Christmas the issue of a pardon was referred by ministers to Maire Whelan, the Attorney-General, whose decision is expected early this year. Alan Shatter, the Irish Defence Minister, who is Jewish, is thought to sympathise with a pardon.

Campaigners for a pardon said that Sinn Fein's support would help to reduce historic divisions in Ireland.

"These men who went off to fight fascism regraded themselves as patriotic Irishmen," said Gerald Morgan, a lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin. "It seems Sinn Fein have been able to recognise that."

In July 1940, as the Battle of Britain began, the IRA said in An Phoblacht, the republican newspaper, that if "German forces should land in Ireland, they will land . . . as friends and liberators of the Irish people".

As recently as 2003 Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Fein's vice-president, spoke at a memorial rally for Sean Russell, the IRA leader who went to Berlin during the war to seek Hitler's support.

Ireland's relationship with England has been transformed in the past 20 years, thanks largely to the ending of the troubles as well as Ireland's economic boom (now very much over).

But the history of World War 2 has also changed, too. Today the conflict is seen almost entirely through the prism of its later 1944-1945 rationale, as a worldwide campaign against fascism (and by extension, racism), rather than what it was in 1940, a great patriotic war for the British against foreign invaders (and from October of that year the immediate threat to Ireland receded with the end of Hitler's invasion plans, thus making the Irish less sympathetic to anti-Nazi fighters).

That changing narrative, though, is almost nothing compared to the narrative of the Church during the War. Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes, which explores the relationship between religion and politics in the 20th century, demolishes most of the accepted "wisdom" about the Vatican and the Third Reich.

One of the common myths is that the Vatican concordat with Nazi Germany (standard international procedure, and one of over 30 it conducted with states at the time) was directly responsible for the Catholic Centre Party's support for the 1934 Enabling Act. But, says Burleigh, the scholarship of Rudolf Morsey and Konrad Repgen (Burleigh is a first-class German speaker) shows that the prospect of a concordat played no part in negotiations between Centre Party and Hitler. As Burleigh wrote: "Nor when the Vatican responded in early April 1933 to vice-chancellor [Franz von] Papen's offer of negotiations for a concordat was the intention either to abandon the Centre Party or to go along with the Nazis' wish to stop all clerical participation in politics. The Vatican also took the opportunity of condemning the persecution of the Jews."

Although overshadowed by the vastly more visceral and violent hatred of the Jews, the Nazi state was very hostile to Catholicism, and the feeling was mutual. Catholics voted for the party in far smaller numbers, and there was no Catholic equivalent of the 600,000-strong Nazi-Protestant German Christian movement, for example. While the most eminent Catholic theologians of thee period, Engelbert Krebs, Wilhelm Neuss, Karl Rahner and Romano Guardini, all lost their posts when the Nazis took power. Krebs, a noted philo-Semite, was eventually imprisoned.

Catholic journalist Fritz Gerlich was to suffer a worse fate. Raised in a Calvinist family in Stettin (now the Polish Szczecin) he first published an account of Russian Communism as a form of medieval political messianism in 1920. A religious sceptic, in 1927 he visited the village stigmatic Therese Neumann, who had cured many people of illnesses, and who made cryptic utterances in Latin, Greek and what may have been biblical Aramaic. Gerlich ended up writing a two-volume refutation of her critics, and in 1931 converted to Catholicism.

After losing a job due to alcoholism, Gerlich then went to work for the magazine Catholic Action and made numerous criticisms of the Nazis, including one spoof review in which he had a character writing: "Doesn't the penetration of homosexuals into leading positions in the [Nazi] movement and in the intimidate circles of the coming Caesar provide a further shocking parallel to the Eulenburg era of Wilhelm II?" (Botho Graf zu Eulenburg was a Prussian statesman and favourite of the last Kaiser, and was rumoured to be homosexual. Criticism of the Nazis often focused on their homosexuality, with William Shirer describing the SA as being "notorious homosexual perverts", all of which sounds uncomfortable to modern ears.) In March 1933 Gerlich was taken away by SD men and the following year was taken to Dachau and murdered.

Waldemar Gurian, meanwhile, had the sense to flee in July 1933 after a Nazi journal used him as example of how "German Catholicism has allowed itself to be heavily judaised". In 1935 he wrote, with some prescience, that: "The Nuremberg Laws appear to be only a stage on the way to the full physical destruction of Jewry."

The Nazi persecution of Catholicism took many forms; in 1936 the leader of the Catholic Young Men's Association was charged with treasonable involvement with Communists.

Catholic newspapers and journals were closed and diocesan newspapers were curtailed on the pretext of paper shortages, with the number of periodicals falling from 435 in 1934 to 124 at the outbreak of war. In 1935 the SD banned Catholics from sending money to Rome, and invented songs, "currency ditties" to encourage anti-Catholicism.

Most anti-Catholic propaganda focused on sexual innuendo and claims that Catholicism was judaising Germany. The Nazi pervert-pornographer-in -chief Julius Streicher, an especially repulsive figure even for that regime, promoted anticlerical smut, his Der Stürmer calling the Black Madonna of Częstochowa "a middling thing between a negress and a Mongol woman".

The SS produced a poem about the pope called "Chief Rabbi of all Christians", while the state organised well-publicised denunciations of Catholic clergy for homosexuality and paedophilia. Between May 1936 and July 1937 there were 270 prosecutions of monks and priests, while supposed sex crimes at Catholic boarding schools and religious houses "enabled members of the government to claim that the Catholic Church was awash with sex friends". The SD and Gestapo interviewed "disgruntled religious drop-outs, ex-pupils and orphans with offers of sweets alternating with a head bashed into a wall or the threat of concentration camp to secure the appropriate testimony".

Opposition came from the top. Pope Pius XI's 1937 encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, written in German rather than Latin and read out in every Catholic Church on Palm Sunday, attacked Nazi ideas of collective racial immorality as well as the Führer cult elevating man into a god. It declared:

"He who sacrilegiously misunderstands the abyss between God and creation, between the God-man and the children of men, and dares to place beside Christ, or worse still, above Him and against Him, any mortal, even the greatest of all times, must endure to be told that he is a false prophet of whom the words of Scripture find a terrible application: 'He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them'."

The Church also hated the racial doctrines of Nazism. In April 1938 Catholic universities and theological facilities were informed that the Pope condemned the notion that "purity of blood and race had to be maintained with every means; everything that serves that goal is justified and permitted" or the idea that the aim of education was "to develop racial quality and passionate love of one's own race as the highest good of mankind".

When, in 1938, Mussolini introduced racial laws (even though a quarter of adult Italian Jews were fascists and 230 had taken part in the March on Rome), the Church made its condemnation clear. In July that year the Pope told chaplains of Catholic youth organisations: "If there is anything worse than the various theories or racialism and nationalism, it is the spirit that dictates them. There is something peculiar loathsome about this spirit of separatism and exaggerated nationalism which, precisely because it is un-Christian and irreligious, ends by being inhuman."

No wonder, then, that when Pius died, in February 1939, the Chief Rabbi of Britain wrote to Cardinal Hinsley, telling him: "Jews throughout the world will reverse the Pope's noble memory as a feared champion of righteousness against the powers of irreligion, racialism and inhumanity." The London Jewish Chronicle mourned "the loss of one of the stoutest defenders of racial tolerance in modern times".

Before succumbing Pope Pius and Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli had helped Jewish scholars affected by Italy's new racial laws. Yet Pacelli, who succeeded as Pius XII that year, has since become one of the most controversial Catholic figures in history, most famously described as "Hitler's Pope" by John Cornwell. Burleigh is one of numerous historians to crush that idea.

Between September 1933 and March 1937 Secretary of State Pacelli wrote 70 notes and memoranda protesting against Nazi violations the concordat. His first encyclical Summi pontificatus, published in October 1939, referred to the fundamental unity of the human race, quoting Galatians: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bind nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

But he went further than mere condemnations. In January 1940 Pius informed British ambassador D'Arcy Osborne that he had met representatives of various German generals who wished to overthrow Hitler, and who wanted a peace that would include a restoration of Poland and Czechoslovakia.  The British would not do anything without the French and soon lost interest. Despite this the Pope had taken considerable risks in doing so, not least for the Church inside Germany.

Of course the Church could have done and said more about Nazi inhumanity (everyone could have), but where the Church had condemned the Nazi inhumanity in Poland the Germans responded by killing priests, some 3,000 in total. And when the bishops in Holland protested about the deportations of Jews, the Nazis responded by murdering 600 Catholic Jewish converts, including St Edith Stein, within two weeks.

Afterwards Nazi deputy Fritz Schmidt announced that "Owing to these events, the Germans must consider the Roman Catholic Jews their worst enemies and arrange for their quickest possible transport to the East. This has already taken place."

As Burleigh concludes: "Experiences such as this, and what had occurred when Vatican Radio broadcast reports of atrocities in Poland, were among the considerations that inhibited a fortnight condemnations that inhibited a fortnight condemnation by Pius XII of Nazi persecution, not only of the Jews but also the Catholic Poles."

And yet in the popular imagination Pius was virtually at the Wannsee conference - so why has Pius XII's reputation sunk so low? According to the director of the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano (describe by the Italian government of Mussolini as "the faithful interpreter of Masonic Jewish democratic thought"), the "leggenda nera" surrounding Pope Pius XII and Nazism originated largely with Communist propaganda. As Zenit reported a couple of years back:

Soviet propaganda against Pius XII was powerfully re-launched in Rolf Hochhuth's play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), performed for the first time in Berlin on Feb. 20, 1963, which presented the Pope's silence as indifference to the extermination of the Jews, Vian said.

Already then, Vian continued, it was noted that the play took up many of the ideas proposed by Mikhail Markovich Scheinmann in his book "Der Vatican im Zweiten Weltkrieg" (The Vatican in the Second World War), first published in Russian by the Historical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a propaganda instrument of Communist ideology.

It is certainly the case that Soviet propaganda has had a far longer lasting influence than the USSR itself, mainly because Western intellectuals were so keen to promote it. So much of what we now accept as truth, post-1968, originated with Soviet ideas from the 1920s and 1930s, including current analysis of imperialism and racism as a continuation of class struggle.

One of the most popular is the rather tasteless comparison people make between Israel with Nazi Germany, which was invented by the Communists in the 1980s. The Soviet Union even had an "Anti-Zionist Committee of Soviet Public Opinion", which was formed in 1983 to blacken the name of Jewish anti-Soviet dissidents flocking to Israel, and also to curry favour with Arab governments at the time.

It seems that, some 20 years after the USSR collapsed, its propaganda is more successful than ever, aided of course by the decline in critical thinking and historical and theological literacy in the West.

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January 6th, 2012More Re Philanthropyby Bruce Fingerhut

Dear Friends:

I don't know whether you are familiar with Philanthropy Daily, an online newsletter edited by Jeffrey Cain, who, with Jeremy Beer, founded American Philanthropic, LLC. Below is a fine short article from Scott Walter, one that ties private philanthropy to private property. The hero of this piece is none other than Pat Moynihan, who needs no introduction. One of the unsaid points in the article is that philanthropy in America, in general, is far more centered in the private sector than the public sector. Consequently, America often gets criticized because the government itself often doesn't seem as generous as some others on a ratio of gift-to-GDP. That's because the PEOPLE of America are so much more generous than our European counterparts. That's because Europeans realize that it's their money that is being given by their government, and they stop being generous themselves. This is evident, for example, in the paltry private donations to state churches everywhere.

The Philanthropy Daily newsletter in general is well worth a look.

Best,

Bruce

Conquering the private sector

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January 5th, 2012Bishop of Lancaster on things Catholic in name onlyby Fr. Simon Henry

Bishop of Lancaster on things Catholic in name only

Bishop Michael Campbell of Lancaster has issued a Pastoral Letter which has attracted some attention. It is principally about evangelisation and how the Church is to go about it in changing circumstances. He challenges his people to think about evangelising their lapsed family, friends and neighbours.

All of us know someone - a friend, family member, classmate, work colleague or neighbour - who used to be a practising Catholic, but isn't any more. For some who initially heard the incredible proclamation of Christ alive in the Church, the message has become stale. The promises of the Gospel seem empty or unconnected to their busy lives today. So, what is our response? Surely our love and concern for them means that they should be the primary object of our missionary or evangelising efforts, our energy and resources. The Church only exists to evangelise that means buildings, churches, parishes, schools and colleges are only valuable insofar as they help the Church in that mission of salvation!!

Evangelisation out in the world is surely one of the tasks that the Second Vatican Council reminded us was among the pre-eminent works that the laity are called to (as opposed to taking over the priest's sacramental jobs on the sanctuary!) The Bishop also questions the way our Catholic schools have, for the most part, developed:

Is it right or sustainable to expect our Mass-going population of 21,000 to support our schools and colleges in which often the majority of pupils, and sometimes teachers, are not practising Catholics? Is it time for us to admit that we can no longer maintain schools that are Catholic in name only?

"Schools that are Catholic in name only." Finally, a bishop who has had the courage to say it. What is the point of us maintaining schools that have the name "Catholic" on the sign outside (or more likely the reduced epithet "R.C.") while inside few of the teachers are Catholic and ninety per cent plus of the children and their families do not practice the Faith in any meaningful way. This situation could be seen as an opportunity to evangelise and call these lapsed children and their families back to the Faith but anyone who attempts to use our school system for this purpose immediately has the rug pulled out from under their feet.

1. Catholic Schools have been forced or have bought into the prevailing secular culture and management of schools and so there is no time and no ability to push a truly Catholic agenda (we cannot decide to only employ practising Catholics as teachers, for example, and the health and safety implications of allowing children to cross the road to serve Mass are momentous, not to mention that it clashes with the numeracy or literacy hour).

2. Most diocesan education structures do not envisage this or they even work against it. I've been told in the past that it is simply not acceptable to ask children in school if they were at Mass with their families on Sunday. I've been told that the school has an equal opportunities policy and therefore I may not recruit altar servers and only ask for boys - even though this contravenes the teaching of the Church on this matter (I wonder how I can, therefore, talk about vocation to the Priesthood in school, as only boys could apply - or nuns for Religious Life, as only girls could apply!) All this apart from the actual religious education programes that are for the most part not fit for purpose.

Whatever has happened to our Catholic Schools in recent decades, the fact is they are no longer doing what they are meant to do - teach the Catholic Faith along with giving an all-round education. Watered down elements of the Christian faith may be taught in our schools but the fullness of the Catholic Faith is not lived in our schools. How could it be and why should it be by people who may not be Catholics at all? How could it be by teachers who are lapsed? A truly Catholic ethos must surely mean so much more than vaguely "helping others" by CAFOD events in Lent and joining in Red Nose Day.

To the rest of the world - and no doubt to Rome on ad limina visits - the paper fact of so many Catholic schools with so many children in them looks fantastic. The reality, as Bishop Campbell points out, is rather different. Perhaps the time has come to abandon the pretense and start again by spending the money we now spend on schools on far fewer schools for those who actually are Catholic who practise their Faith and on catechetical programmes in parishes for children. In a sense, going back to how many of our schools started - for example in my own parish here when nuns bought a large house and started classes in it back in the 1940's.

You can read further excellent comment at:

Outside In

and

Protect the Pope

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January 4th, 2012I May Not Know Much about Art, but I Know What I Don’t Likeby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Above: Colonel Sanders O'Hara and his daughter Scarlett on board My Old Kentucky Dinner Train.

Comments at my previous post have inspired me to elaborate a bit about one of the major stumbling blocks in Literary Criticism.

We were at the Missouri Governor's Mansion performing our comedy murder mystery Gone with the Passing of the Wind.

The Governor's Mansion is quite beautiful, and both the guests and the servers were in full formal attire. Indeed, the servers were milling about in tails offering drinks to the guests on silver platters - just like you see in those old movies. We were told that the servers were State prisoners on a kind of work release.

The show begins with me as Scarlett O'Hara's father, whom I play as Colonel Sanders. After giving the "top ten list" of his "eleven secret herbs and spices" (which includes "Number Ten, Grease" and "Number Six, Methyl-hydrogenated-polysorbate-butane") the Colonel bemoans the Lost Cause.

"One day," he exclaims, "the South will rise again, and we're gonna make the world safe for slavery!"

Now this is a joke.

And sometimes you have to explain a joke, which I will do now and which perhaps we should have done that night. The joke is a parody of Woodrow Wilson's rationalization of World War I, in use up until this day, that U.S. foreign wars are an attempt to "make the world safe for democracy". And so, in one line, Colonel Sanders O'Hara is poking fun both at 20th & 21st Century Imperialism as well as the less than noble institution of slavery that served as the primary issue behind the Civil War.

A week later, the director of the Mansion called us. "We received complaints about that joke," she said.

"From whom?" I asked.

"From the servers."

The servers.

In other words, the prisoners.

Indeed, most of the servers were black, and they were offended, thinking that I was somehow endorsing slavery (of course, the character I played was, but I wasn't). This is a prime example of -

Confusing the depiction of sin with the endorsement of sin.

The fact that a character in a silly little play I wrote is a racist does not mean that I am a racist, or that the play endorses that character's point of view. In fact, had the prisoners gotten the joke, they would have realized that that line is in that play specifically to make fun of racism. This is why I enumerated as one of my complaints against a Protestant worldview in my last post, "they think that art or fiction that depicts sin is itself sinful, regardless of the context in which or the purpose for which the sin is depicted".

So we have the humorlessness of the prisoners, passed along by their keepers, the politically correct and equally humorless State of Missouri (a slave state until the War, incidentally).

But we see this all the time, especially in Catholic Fiction. One of the reasons our literary output does not attract readers beyond the Catholic Ghetto is that publishers and writers these days tend to be squeamish about the role of sin in a story, and for that matter in Salvation History. We cringe at Flannery O'Connor because we really don't think Jesus Christ would lower himself quite so much as to save the utterly despicable characters in her tales.

This comes from a lingering Puritanism. It is another example of what's in the Protestant air we breathe, and air that has molded even our Catholic lungs.

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January 4th, 2012We Doth Protest Too Muchby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

I've figured it out. It explains so much. A great many of my Catholic friends are simply Protestants. They object to and Protest not only many basic Catholic teachings, but the whole tenor and worldview of the Catholic Church. Included in this are a great many self-consciously "real Catholics" and "uber-Catholics".

Now of course it's tricky "judging" another person's Catholicism. Technically speaking, every baptized person is Catholic, whether they know it or not - though most are not in full communion with the Catholic Church. This is because there's no other Church to be baptized into.

So I'm not talking literally here. I don't want to make the mistake Mr. Voris et. al. are doing in saying "I'm a REAL CATHOLIC and you're not."

So with that in mind, and using a bit of literary license, there is a Protestant worldview and a Catholic worldview, and most of my Catholic friends are steeped in the former.

They believe that a good end justifies a bad means; they endorse torture; they think that art or fiction that depicts sin is itself sinful, regardless of the context in which or the purpose for which the sin is depicted; they believe individualism trumps obedience to authority; they believe rational criticism is suspect; they are anti-intellectuals; they think activism is more important than prayer or faith; they give lip service to chastity, but they are deeply suspicious of it; they are libertarian and believe that government should not even build and maintain roads (some of them have actually said this to me); they can't tell good writing from bad; they do not understand what the fullness of Reason is.

Anyway, these are all hallmarks of the Protestant worldview.

And, to our shame, we Catholics, many of us, are marching under this banner.

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January 3rd, 2012The Best Books I Read in 2011by Joseph Pearce

Every year, Carl Olson of the Ignatius Insight website asks a selection of authors to list the best books that they've read in the preceding twelve months. Once again, I'm honoured to be included amongst these selected authors and have given my own customary list of the books I've most enjoyed reading in 2011.  

I'm posting the recommended reading lists of all the authors. The list is arranged alphabetically so my own recommendations don't appear until the third page. Those wishing to peruse the whole list will need to click the links for pages two and three at the bottom of the first page.

Here's the link: http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2012/bestbooks1_2011_jan2012.asp

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January 3rd, 2012Confident Presentation of the Faithby Fr. Simon Henry

http://www.youtube.com/embed/wk4OCzre_IY

I can't recall when I last - if ever - went to an English diocesan website and thought, "Wow, that's really good!" But if you go the the Diocese of Lancaster site the home page greets you with this video unashamedly announcing who and what the Catholic Faith is. Words and claims for the Church not seen in ages are boldly announced:

We are sacred
We are obedience
We are joy
We are tradition
We are happy
We are Papists
We are universal
We are strong
We are sacred
We are courageous
We are defenders of the Faith

... to name but a few.

The accompanying music is full-on modern and upbeat. All the images are not afraid of showing Catholics acting and dressed as Catholics - nuns, priests, marked with the Lenten ashes, Pro-Life - all positive and highlighting the vigour, youth, tradition, beauty, grandeur and struggle of the Church.

This is the sort of publicity we should be focusing on, a confident, joyful message embracing ALL of the Church's Tradition. If only we could have more like this instead of the mediocre, insipid and lowest common denominator offerings usually served up. Who knows, perhaps this sort of presentation might actually attract people to the Faith.

Confidence in the Faith and its message is something that I think has been lacking in recent times. After the turmoil induced in the years following the Second Vatican Council the great hopes the modernisers held out for did not materialise - quite the opposite. The secular media is always ready to bash the Church on premises that are occasionally real but usually false or exaggerated. Many Catholics hardly seem to know what we are for and so no wonder we have trouble telling others why they should join up - why it might be imperative that they join up. Bishops, priests and laity, certainly in the Western world, seem to have lost confidence in the power of the message and so the temptation has been t0 compromise it and fit in - in how we look, in how we think, in how we act, even in how we worship. It's only now with a new generation is more confident - not disappointed by the lack of "success" after the Second Vatican Council because they never experienced the let down feeling - only saw their elders rather tired and a bit lost for words - or at least words that meant anything. Confidence doesn't have to mean Triumphalism - it can just mean confidence that the Church really is guided by the Holy Spirit. It is now and it always has been - even before Vatican II and even (if not especially!) in the election of Pope Benedict!

Well done Lancaster Diocese!

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January 1st, 2012Secret Altars and English Martyrsby Joseph Pearce

Further to my recent post about the great English Martyr, St. Thomas Becket, a priest in Canada has sent me the link to a shrine to the English Martyrs in Lancashire. Apart from supplying some further facts about Becket, the site also shows the ingenious lengths to which recuant Catholics went in order to practise their faith in perilous times. Here's the link:

http://www.ladyewellshrine.co.uk/p_centre/reliquary.htm

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December 30th, 2011Napoleon and the Pharisees, Becket and the Innocentsby Dena Hunt

On this feast day of the Holy Innocents, I’d like to think just a bit about the “innocents”. I think our use of the term to refer to the millions of innocent children who are killed by abortionists with the permission of their mothers is not at all a misapplication, but it may be a bit narrow when we think of victims, and it may be a bit shallow when we think about the consequences of secularization.

The newly born Republic of France killed priests and religious—and the laypeople who were loyal to them—by the thousands. Napoleon kidnapped the Pope; he later forced the Pope to crown him emperor, then seized the crown from his hands and crowned himself. Why? It was Napoleon’s belief that religious law must support secular law. Secular law should take precedence over religious law. But only a few years later, after his attempt to wipe out her influence, he decided that the Church was needed after all because, without the Church, relying only on secular law, there was no morality. The secularists of our day also rely on law to enforce “morality”.

The notion that what is legal should define what is moral was not new even then. It was the situation in Judea at the time of Christ. It was what he condemned most severely in the Pharisees. The argument is an old one, not a new one.

For the sake of brevity, consider the following remarks of a young woman of my acquaintance who was being treated for clinical depression: “Yes, I’ve had three abortions, and no, I don’t feel any guilt about that. It’s legal, and therefore you have no right to condemn me. Only religious bigots condemn me. I reject your attempts to make me feel guilty. If it weren’t okay, it wouldn’t have been legal.”

On the back pages of the New Orleans Times-Picayune around the year 1982, there was an article reporting that chronic suicide attempts among a large group of young women had been found to be cyclical. They seemed to occur at the same time every year. Questions of the young women revealed that the attempts were made either on the anniversary of an abortion, or—how telling—what would have been the birthday of their aborted children. When they were asked if they felt guilty about their abortions, they all responded negatively; if it were wrong, it wouldn’t have been legal and acceptable.

Let us broaden our understanding of the (un)Holy Innocents, of the Secular Innocents, who have faith in their country and in her laws.

Happy Feast Day, St. Thomas a Becket. You knew well whereof you spoke.

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December 29th, 2011Remembering Thomas Becket and the Holy Innocentsby Joseph Pearce

Today is the feast of St. Thomas Becket who was martyred on this day in 1170. His martyrdom reminds us that secular fundamentalism is not a new phenomenon.

T. S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral" tells the story of Becket's defiance of secularism in terms that accentuate the perennial nature of the conflict between Church and State, between religion and politics, between the things that are God's and those which are Caesar's. And let's not forget that yesterday was the feast of the Holy Innocents, a timely reminder that the innocent have always suffered at the hands of sinners. Indeed, the greatest tragedy of sin is not the suffering that it brings to the sinner but the pain that it causes to the innocent. The archetype of the innocent victim of sin is of course the crucified Christ but the Holy Innocents, butchered by secularism in the wake of Christ's birth, serve as prophets of the doom that awaited the Christ Child on the Mount Doom of Golgotha.

Readers of the St. Austin Review will be reminded perhaps of the painting of the massacre of the innocents that adorned the cover of our recent issue on the theme of "religion and politics" (Sept/Oct). The selection of such a painting for such a theme makes the important connection between the destruction and deadliness of secularism, whether it be the worldliness of Herod or the wickedness of Hitler. Today, of course, we can't think of the Holy Innocents, the newborns butchered by secularism, without thinking of those other innocents, the unborn butchered by abortion. In the darkness of these thoughts, we should point an accusing finger at Margaret Sanger, the racist founder of Planned Parenthood, who sought, like Hitler, to exterminate the untermenschen. Not only did Sanger hope that abortion would reduce the number of black people in the world, a hope that has been fulfilled by Planned Parenthood's success in persuading a disproportionate number of black women to kill their babies, but she and all proponents of abortion believe that the unborn are literally untermenschen, that they are subhuman and can be destroyed at whim. The fact that this sick and sickening contempt for unborn babies flies in the face of the evidence of both science and religion does not deter the abortionists who are blinded by the ideology of the culture of death.

Enough of such darkness. Let's rejoice at the paradoxical placing of the twin feasts of St. Thomas Becket and the Holy Innocents within the octave of Christmas, the most joyful season of the Christian year. The birth of Jesus points to His Death and to the Resurrection and the Life beyond His Death. The holy martyrs and the holy innocents share in Christ's resurrection as they had shared in His Death. We don't mourn the great St. Thomas Becket, we pray to him; we don't despair at the death of the Holy Innocents because we know that they have been raised from the dead. The whole delightful paradox is summed up in four succinct lines from "The Holly and the Ivy", one of my favourite Christmas carols:

The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good.

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December 28th, 2011Be courageous in working for a return to the true liturgy of the Churchby Fr. Simon Henry

The New Liturgical Movement reports on the 20th general assembly of the FIUV (Internationalis Una Voce) held this past November 5-6 in Rome, and on December 19th the same issued their written report coming out of that general assembly. It draws particular attention to the contents of a letter which was written by Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith—former secretary of the CDW—to the participants of that assembly.

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December 28th, 2011Our Literary Magazineby Dena Hunt

We have plenty of Catholic theological, economic, political, cultural, and social commentary in books and periodicals, print and online. We have plenty of sources that talk about art from a Catholic perspective. What we don’t have is good Catholic art about which to talk! Why is that? Every so often, someone whines that there are no good Catholic writers any more—no Graham Greenes, no Flannery O’Conners. That’s not true. What’s missing is venue. Those few Catholic publishers who risk publishing fiction or poetry at all are too fearful of work that does not adhere to the commercial formulae for paper-back “Christian literature,” the kind of escapist or recreational stuff we see in check-out lines at supermarkets and discount stores, often called “young adult fiction”. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of entertaining and innocuous writing, but it’s not the stuff of Flannery or Graham. It doesn’t pretend to be.

Only a very tiny handful of Catholic publishers are willing to consider fiction at all; nearly all of them confine their publications to non-fiction, with little or no poetry. Non-fiction consists of information and opinions, and we have plenty of excellent writers who opine and inform very well. But that’s not the purpose of art. Art isn’t interested in facts or opinions; it’s interested in truth. Truth can’t be formed or shaped, dictated or fashioned by a concern about image, about public relations, or about how Catholicism might be “seen.” It can’t be judged or evaluated, accepted rejected, on the same bases that are applied to commentary. And that’s why there are no good Catholic writers these days. Those few we do have are published only by secular publishing houses—Catholic publishers are too fearful, too self-conscious.

Dappled Things is the only Catholic literary magazine there is in actual, hold-in-your-hand print. It is our literary magazine, the only one we have—even if we don’t often read fiction or poetry. Catholic publications are an endangered species in the first place, but Catholic literature is next to extinction. We have only one literary publication left that is written and published by Catholic writers and editors. This is it. Arthur Powers, gifted writer and supporter of DT, provides more information in the link below.

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=675a31a4bf325da62acb25fbc&id=dda9016bac&e=b37c570550

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December 28th, 2011The Third Day of Christmasby Susan Treacy

27 December 2011

Saint John the Evangelist

“The third day of Christmas…”   Today, although dampened by rain and cold weather, was a day of pleasures.  I met an old friend for lunch at the Belgian bakery café, Le pain quotidian.  This restaurant has delicious French- and organic-inspired cuisine, along with a simple but charming ambience.  The ambience is enhanced by the classical music that is always on in the background. 

Another pleasure today was that of seeing Stephen Spielberg’s new movie War Horse.  This is a superb, inspiring film, not to be missed.  Spielberg does not shy away from depicting the absolute horror of World War I, but he also presents ordinary human beings who find themselves involved—willingly or unwillingly—in war.  The story of Joey, the horse, is absolutely engaging—a modern-day Black Beauty.  We follow Joey from his loving upbringing by his  “boy”—young Albert in Devonshire—through his military career, to his rescue on the brink of extinction.  I won’t tell you too much because you really must see this wonderful film.  It’s rated PG-13, probably because of the war scenes, but its realism is truly real, and not something imposed for the sake of sensation.

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December 27th, 2011Celebrating Christmas Andalusian-Styleby Joseph Pearce

Yesterday I posted a link to an ancient Cypriot Christmas carol, dating back to the sixth century. Today, at the suggestion of Jorge Calvo, another colleague at Ave Maria University, I'm posting the link to an Andalusian carol. Here's Jorge Calvo's introduction to the carol:

Jorge writes: "I cannot help joining in this fun conversation with this Andalusian Carol 'Rin Rin' -- my favorite as a child.  The bridge in the middle of each verse is quite the tongue twister, even for those of us who grew up rolling our r's:

"Yo me remendaba, yo me remendé, yo me heché un remiendo, yo me lo quité."

In one of the verses (which does not appear in this version), the ox in the stable eats a worshiping Galician's hat, while in another some little mice bite holes in Saint Joseph's pants.  In both cases we call on Our Lady's help:

"Mariá, Mariá ven acá corriendo..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaASrb2LgNU

Feliz Navidad!

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December 27th, 2011Christmas Thoughtsby Susan Treacy

25 December 2011

Christmas Day

“The first day of Christmas…”    While it is still Christmas day, let me make my return to the Ink Desk after a very long absence.  I am spending Christmas with my sister and her family in the DC area, and Christmas began here for me when I attended the midnight Mass in the Extraordinary Form at Saint Mary Mother of God Church in Washington’s Chinatown.  This lovely old church building, originally a German parish, retains its high altar and the altar rail, thus making it perfect for the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass.  The reredos is so tall that an altar boy must climb stairs at the back of it in order to light the six candles placed on its upper level.  The church was nearly full, and all around the nave one could see families with young children—a beautiful and inspiring sight.  Highlights of the music at Mass were the Gregorian Propers chanted by Richard Rice’s fine men’s schola and the Renaissance choral music (Victoria, Gastoldi) sung by a vocal quartet.  A lovely custom each year is the procession at the end of midnight Mass.  During Mass the infant Jesus statue has been resting above the tabernacle, but after the Ite missa est, He is taken down and carried around the entire nave in procession, while everyone sings “Silent Night”.  Jesus is finally placed in the crèche, over on the Epistle side of the church.  I exit the church into the cold night air and revel in the joy of Jesus’s birth on another cold night so long ago.  Since arriving here I have been listening almost constantly to WETA FM, which is playing non-stop Christmas music.  This evening, in fact, we got to hear the entire Weihnachts-Oratorium (Christmas Oratorio) of J.S. Bach. 

26 December 2011

“The Feast of Stephen”

“The second day of Christmas…”    “Good King Wenceslaus looked out on the Feast of Stephen”… Both Wenceslaus and Stephen were martyrs, but one seldom thinks about this when singing this traditional carol.  The two turtledoves of the second day of Christmas suggest peace—the peace that passes all understanding, the peace that the martyrs found, following Christ.

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December 26th, 2011Celebrating Christmas Cypriot-Styleby Joseph Pearce

Daniel Nodes, my colleague at Ave Maria University, has drawn my attention to this Christmas carol from Cyprus with ancient roots, a hymn of Romanos the Melodist from the 6th century.

  The tune, as traditional as the poetry, has analogues from Ireland to India.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYgxDz4ZSVI

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December 22nd, 2011In Defense of Charityby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

Charity is under attack from all sides. Scrooge and his successors seek to replace charity in the form of voluntary or faith-based giving with public welfare or rights-based claims on the state.

Whether out of embarrassment at the religious roots of their secular profession or out of a belief that justice supersedes charity, social workers are all too willing to give short shrift to the non-professional charitable efforts of faithful Christians.

Others attack the wastefulness of charitable organizations, the excessive bureaucracy, the high proportion of income spent on raising more income and on the salaries of top executives, and the relatively small proportion that many believe—notwithstanding assurances to the contrary—goes to the intended beneficiaries.

Faith-based charitable organizations like Catholic Charities also come under fire for losing their religious identity and becoming arms of a secular government from which it receives a large majority of its funds and to whose programs, terms, and priorities it is bound.

Charity, however, has a special importance for Christians, as Pope Benedict teaches in his first encyclical, Deus caritas est--God is love. Not only is charity (caritas, love) the very definition of God. Charity, the selfless self-giving for God’s sake and for the true benefit of the other, was from the Church’s beginnings both a duty of every individual Christian (stated in no uncertain terms in the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25) and also an organized, corporate activity of the Church.

There can then be no retreat from the Church’s commitment to charity. Rather, there is a particular obligation to ensure that charitable effort is well directed and actually benefits those it is intended to help. The proper response to charity’s problems cannot be personal stinginess or random, unorganized handouts. In this regard, the problem is not so much that donations get directed to non-charitable persons or siphoned off at excessive rates for administrative costs, as it is that resources that do go to the poor and downtrodden often fail actually to help.

Now Robert D. Lupton, a pastor and urban community development leader in Atlanta, has written a book, Toxic Charity, that challenges us to examine the harm done by charity that is casual, thoughtless, and aimed primarily to make the giver feel good. Its title notwithstanding, this book is not against charity or for stinginess in personal giving. Its author has four decades’ experience of faith-based charitable work to his credit and draws on this experience as well as a host of anecdotes and research.

There is no suggestion that governmental forms of social welfare are less toxic than faith-based, voluntary programs. They are simply not the subject of this book. Rather, with multiple and compelling examples, from weeklong ‘missions’ of church youth groups to poor countries through inner-city charitable initiatives to the enormous Kroc grant to the Salvation Army, Lupton argues that this work needs to be rethought and reoriented.

As Brooks (2007) has shown, giving by religious Americans, both to church-based charities and secular agencies like the Red Cross, is extraordinarily generous by any measure, in time, treasure, and talent, compared with that of secular Americans and citizens of other affluent countries. Lupton does not disparage these efforts or their (mostly) good intentions, but argues that most of this activity does more harm than good. Given the author’s own commitment and credentials in the field, anyone engaged in this work will want to pay attention to his critique.

In some ways, Lupton echoes those 19th-century critics of ‘sentimental charity,’ who sought to replace random handouts with organized charity based on a relationship between giver and recipient that offered ‘not alms, but a friend’ (the motto of the Charity Organization Societies). Those charity reform efforts, which gave rise to the profession of social work, are widely disparaged today, not least by professional social workers. But the problem of how to help those who need help, whether through government programs or private charity, in ways that do not shame, demoralize, sap initiative, and create dependency remains, as Lupton shows, as big a challenge today as ever.

Lupton’s approach, that of asset-based community development, aims to empower and partner with those helped, recognizing and engaging their capacity to contribute to their community with their own resources, knowledge, and wisdom. Instead of flying in with a team of eager young missioners to build a well for a poor village whose women have to carry water long distances on their heads—and coming back every year to fix ‘their’ well—Lupton argues for an approach that facilitates engaging the skills and energy of the local people to fund, build, and manage their own well.

It is not a matter of being stingy rather than generous, but of helping in ways that truly help, without the enervating, dependency-creating disempowerment of much current charity (public and private) in practice. Lupton’s argument is not against charity as such, but for charity in its true Christian sense of willing the good of the other as other. This implies, Lupton shows, a consistent focus on results rather than intentions, on the good of those helped rather than the supposed benefits to the giver (e.g., the ‘life-changing experience’ of young participants in expensive mission junkets or the warm feelings of congregations that want to help by donating to a food pantry). In this view, the virtue of charity cannot stand alone. It requires the exercise of other virtues like justice and prudence, and full engagement of the head as well as the heart.

This book is a highly readable appeal to all those who, out of Christian charity, seek to help those who are poor and downtrodden, an appeal first and at least to do no harm. It challenges us to ask what truly helps and to look critically and charitably both at what we do—are we reinforcing dependence and sapping initiative in the name of helping?—and at what we fail to do to build the capacity of individuals, families, and communities. Since its origins in the Charity Organization Societies, social work has learned much and has much to teach about empowerment-, partnership-, or asset-based policy and practice. These approaches look to engaging people who have typically been passive recipients of helping efforts, instead to engage them in resolving problems and meeting needs, to see them as active contributors rather than passive recipients. It is the difference between seeing youth in poor communities as problems and seeing them as assets and contributors to their community; between organizing a food pantry in which all the active roles are played by outside donors and helping those in need to organize, fund, and operate their own food co-op.

This book calls us, not to despise organized charity, but to bring our best knowledge and wisdom to bear in correcting its toxic tendencies and making it fruitful for all those involved, not least those it is meant to help.

Brooks, A.C. (2007). Who really cares: The surprising truth about compassionate conservatism. New York: Basic Books.

Lupton, R.D. (2011). Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (and How to Reverse It). New York: Harper One.

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December 22nd, 2011Profitable Nonprofit Organizations, Competitive Charities, and Samaritansby Dena Hunt

Many years ago, there was a scandal caused by the revelation that the national director of the United Way Campaign had a chauffeur-driven limousine and a multi-million-dollar salary. That news would not be scandalous nowadays. It probably wouldn’t even get noticed now. Humanewatch.org has just publicly reported that animal shelters get less than 1% of the money donated to the Humane Society. (This was not news to anyone who has actually worked in animal rescue; we’ve always known about the HSUS.) Indeed, there’s a big international animal welfare fund that’s been in operation for years. I wonder how many contributors know that the animal preserves purchased with these funds are leased to hunting clubs. When the tsunami hit southeast Asia several years ago, and when Haiti suffered that horrendous earthquake, uncounted trillions of dollars came from every direction. People could not wait to give, and it didn’t matter who did the asking. Did any of that money actually reach people in need? Maybe a little.

Most of the money donated to charitable organizations is spent to raise more money, to hire people to raise money, and to pay high-priced tax attorneys to keep the scam going. Fundraising is a booming business, and probably the only business outside of pharmaceutical sales that virtually guarantees salaries of six figures annually to employees with minimal education or training. A local church decided to wage a stewardship campaign. The first step was to hire professional fundraising consultants. Their initial fee was over $30,000. And then there were the costs associated with mass mailings, speakers, dinners, and such. Was the campaign successful? We don’t know. We do know that it takes an awful lot of money to raise money.

“We need help,” organized charities claim. Just try to help. Nothing is so demoralizing to a volunteer trying to offer free time or labor than the rejection they get. Their help was not wanted. Only their money. And not cash. Checks or credit cards, please, for the charity’s “records” (read tax write-offs—that’s as valuable as money—often more valuable.)

There are testimonial dinners and awards given for charity. Strangely, these awards are given to fund-raisers, not to fund-givers. Praise is heaped upon people with megabucks for raising the “awareness” of people with micro-bucks to give to X charity. And strangely, nobody ever asks why the award-winner didn’t just give some of those megabucks to X charity themselves. Multi-millionaire celebrities make a televised appeal for a charity and are given awards for having “worked tirelessly.” That such TV ads are the very best kind of PR doesn’t matter, I’m sure.

I don’t know if charity does good, but it certainly does well. And I’ve often thought about the fact that the good Samaritan did not organize a charity for injured travelers. He didn’t even set up a fundraising committee. He paid in cash. And he was anonymous.

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December 20th, 2011Good News from Romeby Joseph Pearce

Soon to be raised to the glory of the altar:

KATERI TEKAKWITHA: FIRST NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN SAINT

VATICAN CITY, 20 DEC 2011 (VIS) - The Holy Father yesterday signed decrees acknowledging miracles attributed to the intervention of seven blesseds (four women and three men) who will shortly be canonised. One of the new blesseds is Kateri Tekakwitha, the first native North American to be raised to the glory of the altars.

Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in Ossernenon (present-day Auriesville, U.S.A.). Her father was a Mohawk chief and her mother a Roman Catholic Algonquian who had been educated by French missionaries. At the age of four she lost her family in a smallpox epidemic which also left her disfigured and with poor eyesight. Adopted by a relative, the chief of neighbouring clan, she continued to nurture an interest in Christianity and was baptised at the age of 20.

The members of her tribe did not understand her new religious affiliation and she was marginalised, practising physical mortification as a path of sanctity and praying for the conversion of her relatives. Having suffered persecutions which put her life at risk, she was forced to flee to a native American Christian community in Kahnawake, Quebec where she made a vow of chastity and lived a life dedicated to prayer, penance, and care for the sick and elderly. She died in 1680 at the age of 24. Her last words were: "Jesus, I love you". According to tradition, Kateri's scars disappeared after her death to reveal a woman of great beauty, and numerous sick people who participated in her funeral were miraculously healed.

The process of canonisation began in 1884. She was declared venerable by Pius XII in 1943 and beatified by John Paul II in 1980. As the first native North American to be beatified she occupies a special place in the devotion of her people. Her feast day falls on 14 July. 

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December 20th, 2011An Embarrassing Scientific Discoveryby Joseph Pearce

In an hour or two we're leaving on the road trip I mentioned in my last post. In spite of the consequent mayhem that surrounds me as I write, I felt that I had to publish the news from Italy that the Turin Shroud could not possibly be a mediaeval forgery. The latest scientific study indicates that the image on the shroud was caused by some flash of electronmagnetic energy unknown in mediaeval times and impossible to replicate in a laboratory. No doubt, those who worship the physical sciences as the only truth will find it very embarrassing that true science seems to be vindicating true religion. Here's the link to the news story:  

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8966422/Italian-study-claims-Turin-Shroud-is-Christs-authentic-burial-robe.html

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December 19th, 2011Lessons from Solzhenitsynby Joseph Pearce

As usual, the final throes of the semester at Ave Maria University have been frenetic, explaining my absence from the Ink Desk over the past week or so. Tomorrow morning my family and I leave for a road trip that will take the rest of the week and then, of course, Christmas will be upon us. I expect, therefore, that I will have little time to post to the site this week and will leave the Ink Desk in the capable hands of the constellation of bloggers who always ensure that there’s something worth reading on the site.

Before I sign off for the week, I’d like to share the text of an e-mail I’ve just received. It evokes the lessons to be learned from the life and work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

I attended your talk regarding Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Holy Rosary Church in Portland this past October. I finished reading the book recently and gained a lot of insights not just bout Mr Solzhenitsyn but about the nature of totalitarianism itself. As terrible as it was I also couldn't help but walk away with the gnawing feeling  that a soft form of totalitarianism has developed in this country and is becoming worse. A Christian and conservative understanding of man's nature helps one to see this but it seems that is lost to many people these days. To be grateful is another strong message I got from reading about Mr Solzhenitsyn. If only we took the time to be grateful, how different a world it would be!  Since I am just reconnecting again with my Catholic faith I see this issue in a different light and it is literally life transforming. I  also found your own story compelling in the way you connected with your faith ...

I appreciate having met you and getting a chance to read your book. It has also spurred me to also read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Next on my list is Small is Beautiful by EF Schumacher. 

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December 16th, 2011Perpetual adolescence goes on display in San Franciscoby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

In America's capital of the weird breaking the world record for naked Santas is no big deal. But it says a lot about the death of childhood.

For some time now, I have been following the extensive travels and adventures of a very interesting fellow I know primarily through Facebook via my daughter—social networking in action.  A researcher at a UK think tank, he was educated in Bombay/Mumbai, is an Indian Anglophile who describes himself as a “High Tory.”

Those he admires range from apostles and saints to Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill and one of my own contemporary favorites, Theodore Dalrymple.  He describes his religious views as “Evangelical within the Anglo-Catholic Tradition. Think Wilberforce.”

This little bit of background helps explain the horror of my friend’s experience recently in San Francisco, which he describes on his Facebook page under the heading, My American Horror Story:

As I walked past one of the many parks in San Francisco this afternoon, expecting nothing out of the ordinary to happen, I found myself drawn to the kaleidoscopic sight of thousands of Bay Area residents, young and old, dressed as Santa Clauses, and so glorious a sight the reds and whites made as they moved constantly upon the motionless green that my curiosity and aesthetophilia led me to walk right to the epicentre of it all to record the moment on film.

As the clock struck three, a mighty gong was sounded, and before I knew it, the crowd burst into an uproar, the thousands taking off absolutely all of their clothes and screaming "Merry Christmas!" TO MY UTTER HORROR! As if that were not enough, the event was captured by photographers from nearly every Californian news publication! So if you stumble upon articles that read "Naked Santas go for Guinness World Record in San Francisco" and see photographs of a startled-beyond-belief chap totally out of place in his blazer, chinos and cardigan and who resembles me, please pause for a moment and say a prayer for my conservative and Christian soul that has been greatly troubled today.

In other news, "the City by the Bay" made sure I was scandalized in countless unspeakable ways, and I am surprised that despite all the harsh cultural terrains my rather timid soul has had to patiently and bravely traverse through today, I still found the city to be perhaps my favorite in America - perhaps the overflow of crab chowder at the Fisherman's Wharf did the trick.

In response to the amusement his story elicited from friends imagining the shocked look on his face, he comments, “Yes, do note the point that I was in the middle of it all, which meant that I had to navigate my way to the street through hordes of screaming naked liberals!”

Two less amusing points struck me about this incongruous scene.  First is that this er, exhibition—though not very shocking or hostile by comparison—stands in the line of blasphemous art intended to shock the faithful.  It reminds me of one anti-Christian artist’s response to a question about why he only creates blasphemous works to outrage Christians and never Muslims.  He said it was because he didn’t want to get his throat cut.  We can imagine the response if the exhibitionists had chosen to mock a much-loved figure of Islamic tradition.

There is something very tired and tiresome about this kind of offensiveness that barely offends any more.  It is a reflection of the loss of religious seriousness and sensibility in the contemporary West as well as of the perpetual adolescence of those who still seek to scandalize the bourgeois (unless they are Muslim) long after their ‘art’ and antics have ceased to shock. 

Now there is no suggestion in my friend’s account that the ‘naked liberals’ he encountered were personally of the Sixties generation, but the spirit of perpetual adolescence or ‘senile avantgardism’ certainly lives on in San Francisco.

It would be wrong, however, to focus too much on the anti-Christian aspect of the self-display of naked Santas in San Francisco.  Santa himself has become so secularized, having so completely lost a felt connection to the historical St. Nicholas or the Christian story of Incarnation and salvation, that parodies of him, say at office parties,  are mere symptoms, not causes, of the degradation of Christmas in our culture.

The second, perhaps more disturbing aspect of this event is the way it mocks a cherished part of children’s experience of the Christmas holiday.  The senile avant-gardism here characteristically makes a mockery of family and childhood.  Children and their traditions have no place in this world. 

It is the world of what Kay Hymowitz calls the ‘child-man’ phenomenon.  It is an expression of men's loss of the life script that previously guided the transition to male adulthood via marriage and career.  It is the world of immature men portrayed in Seinfeld and by Will Ferrell, with its sort-of female equivalent in Sex and the City.  It is a world of autonomous adults and casual sex unencumbered by children or responsible parenthood. 

It was a celebration of a world without children, of what the recent report on The Revolution in Parenthood calls the worldwide trends in law and reproductive technologies that are leading to a redefinition of “parenthood in ways that put the interests of adults before the needs of children.”

Paul Adams recently retired from teaching social work at the University of Hawai’i. He blogs at Ethics, Culture and Policy.

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December 14th, 2011Looking from Pig to Manby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

A new Australian website called The Conversation, oriented to the “university and research sector,” has an article today by Peter Cowan, Professor at the University of Melbourne and Co-director of the Immunology Research Centre at St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne.  Its title there is “Xenotransplantation: using pigs as organ and tissue donors for humans” but the excellent dignitarian site MercatorNet posts it under the wonderfully Orwellian title, “Will pigs usher in the next medical revolution?”

The article draws attention to the shortage of human organ and tissue donors and the potential for using pigs, genetically modified to reduce rejection by human immune systems, to treat several diseases like diabetes.

Why not use primates?

Humans are primates, so the obvious choice of donor animal for xenotransplantation would appear to be another member of the primate family (chimpanzees and baboons, for instance) because of their physiological similarity. But non-human primates have been ruled out as donors for several compelling practical and ethical reasons.

One of the risks to transplant recipients is infection by viruses transmitted by the transplanted organ. As our closest cousins in the animal kingdom, primates are more likely than other animals to carry viruses capable of infecting humans; HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, originated in chimpanzees.

This “relatedness” also poses ethical problems, with the public understandably reluctant to exploit animals that share many features with humans. And even if you discount the ethical question, it’s hard to imagine being able to breed enough primates to meet the increasing demand for donor organs.

Professor Cowan does not explain how sharing many features with baboons constitutes an ethical problem with using them as “donors,” but he is doubtless right about the practical difficulties and the reluctance of the public—a nice understatement of the public relations nightmare that would ensue.

All animals are equal but, as in the Stalinized dystopia of Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others.

A reader of The Conversation already raises this objection:

I don't see why this article accepts there are ethical issues with using primates, but doesn't see these same problems with using pigs. Pigs and primates are both sentient animals who feel pain and desire to avoid suffering and death - I don't believe there is any meaningful difference between using pigs and primates.

The problem, in short, is man. Here is Animal Farm’s revolutionary pig leader (not the vegetarian graduate sociology student who wrote the above):

Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.

Still the research will go forward and pigs will be unwilling participants in the coming revolution.  How far the processes of combining pig and man will go remains to be seen, but already we can imagine a new kind of dystopian novel that would have to borrow Orwell’s ending:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

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December 14th, 2011A Meditation on TV’s Female Warriors and Wimpy Menby Lorraine V. Murray

If I see one more “girrl” on TV, I swear I’m going to scream. In case you don’t know, a “girrl” is a female who is proficient in the martial arts, who carries a gun at all times, and who is stronger and more courageous than any man around.

Backed into a corner, she doesn’t go “eek”—she growls!

But make no mistake: These female warriors are not macho wannabes sporting crew cuts, big ugly boots and lesbian “partners.” On the contrary, “girrls” tend to be wafer thin, busty and drop-dead beautiful.

It seems TV writers are taking the whole “femi-Nazi” thing one strange step forward by creating female characters who demonstrate traditional masculine behavior, while demoting their male counterparts to weary, whiny wimps.

This dreadful development is seen on “Sanctuary,” where the leading female character, Dr. Helen Magnus, is a brilliant, competent—and totally gorgeous—research scientist who also is courageous and cunning when stalking various monsters.

With her arsenal of guns and her total lack of fear, Dr. Magnus is a definite “girrl”—and so is her daughter, Ashley.

Twenty-something Ashley could easily be dismissed at first glance as a bleached-blonde bimbo until you notice she doesn’t shrink from engaging in fist fights with men twice her size, nor would she be caught dead without her gun.

Cornered by a malicious, maniacal murderer with mayhem in mind, Ashley doesn’t hesitate to vanquish him with a swift kick in the face, which she accomplishes without marring her designer high heels.

On such shows it’s not surprising that men get short shrift. After all, a female warrior does not need rescuing by a man. In fact, she is usually the one to save him.

A prime example of the kind of man these strong women hang out with is “Sanctuary’s” Dr. Will Zimmerman, a meek and mild psychiatrist who slouches about in cute T-shirts more befitting a high-school sophomore than an M.D.

There are many scenes showing Helen Magnus and her daughter with huge and hefty guns in their hands as they stalk monsters—while poor Will trails limply behind, clutching a dinky little flashlight.

So much for obvious Freudian symbols!

Then there is “Fringe,” a show whose female protagonist, Olivia Dunham, is a svelte blonde FBI agent with all the earmarks of a “girrl.”

For one thing—at least in the early seasons of the show—Olivia belongs to the ranks of other female FBI agents on TV who apparently exist in a world without hormones. These women are gorgeous and single, but never seem to have a date.

And even when they are paired off with available and attractive men at work, they show nary a spark of romantic interest. This whole phenomenon started, of course with “The X-Files,” where it took countless shows before the two main characters realized they were members of the opposite sex.

My third example is “Castle,” a show I rather enjoy because the main character, a mystery writer called Richard Castle, has a wacky and wise approach to solving crimes.

Sadly, though, Kate Beckett, the show’s female detective, displays the same mind-numbing mix of female-warrior traits that TV writers seem to love.

Beckett is shapely and beautiful, but she rarely dates. And, despite being rather weak-looking, she is adept at running after—and subduing—gruesome killers—and of course she does this while wearing shoes with stiletto heels.

Castle himself appears strong and quite fit, and certainly does not fit the wimp stereotype. Still, the writers tame his masculinity by having his teen-age daughter—and his mother—frequently get the upper hand with him. Also, he doesn’t carry a gun when he accompanies Beckett, who is always armed to the hilt.

Now I have nothing against real-world women using guns or self-defense techniques when under attack, but this extreme role reversal on TV is alarming because it seems that the stronger the women become, the weaker and more submissive the men become.

Men were once featured in chivalric tales as knights in shining armor who were eager to rescue damsels in distress.

Sadly, on too many TV shows today, they are demoted to weary wimps whining to be whisked away from all their worries by a woman.

Lorraine’s latest mystery is “Death of a Liturgist,” about a liturgist who gets his comeuppance when he tries to tweak the traditions at a fictional church in Georgia. She also authored a biography of Flannery O’Connor called “The Abbess of Andalusia.”

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December 13th, 2011Preview of the January/February Issueby Joseph Pearce

As has become customary, I’m posting a sneak preview of the highlights of the next issue of the Saint Austin Review, which is now winging its way to the printers.

The theme of the next issue is “Great Works of the Catholic Revival”. Highlights include:

Gene Sullivan gives exclusive accounts of his meetings with Roy Campbell and Father Martin D’Arcy during the 1950s.

Katie St. Hilaire discovers “The Mystery of Suffering in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’”.

Donald DeMarco meditates upon the meaning of another Hopkins poem, ‘The Windhover’.

Pamela H. Tyrrell looks into the “Mirror Darkly” at The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

Marigrace Powers wakes up to the realization that Chesterton’s Man Who was Thursday is more than a nightmare.

Jon Coutts compares The Man Who was Thursday with another Chesterton classic, The Everlasting Man.

Paula L. Gallagher examines “The Prefiguration of T. S. Eliot’s Conversion in The Waste Land”.

Anne Marie Gazzolo praises “The Spiritual Journey of Frodo of the Shire”.

Deirdre Littleton admires “The Operation of Divine Grace in Brideshead Revisited”.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker is “black and white and Greene all over” as he looks at “Film Noir and the Work of Graham Greene”.

Susan Treacy waxes lyrical about Maurice Baring’s sonnets on Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner.

Fr. Benedict Kiely defends “Belloc the Historian”.

Kevin O’Brien defines the Universe and other things with the aid of the incomparable Chesterton.

James Bemis reviews another classic movie, George Cukor’s Little Women, starring Katherine Hepburn.

The full-colour art feature focuses on the “Art of the Blessed Virgin” by Cornelius Edmund Sullivan.  

Dena Hunt exposes the curiously heterodox theology of William Young’s odd bestseller, The Shack.

Joseph Pearce examines “the Right Royal Mess” in which his native land finds itself.

Kenneth J. Howell reviews two books on the Blessed John Henry Newman.

Dena Hunt “remembers Roy Campbell” in her review of the newly published Memoirs of his daughters.

New poetry by Philip C. Kolin, Mark Amorose and James Morris.

Don’t miss out! Go to the “subscribe” section of this site and sign up for a subscription now!

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December 12th, 2011What if “Life is Good” Sued “Life Sucks”?by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

I hate people, and it turns out that might be a registered trademark.

Let me explain.

My daughter Kerry talked us into driving down to Lafayette Square last Sunday to get brunch. Lafayette Square is a trendy St. Louis neighborhood where rehabbers live, surrounded by the ghetto on four sides. But once a year all the Yuppies from West St. Louis County come down to Lafayette Square for the Lafayette Square House Tour, and for an hour or two it's safe to walk the streets - unless you fear white collar crime: for example, getting a fraudulent stock tip from a middle aged guy in trendy sweater at brunch before the house tour starts.

So there they were, hundreds of them milling about, and our little brunch place so crowded you couldn’t get in the front door.

“I hate people,” I observed to my wife Karen, who was driving.

“Should we go to Uncle Bill’s?” Karen asked, Uncle Bill’s being the only restaurant left in St. Louis that still serves buckwheat pancakes.

“It’s 1:00 on a Sunday afternoon,” I replied. “It’s impossible to get into Uncle Bills at 1:00 on a Sunday afternoon. This is the busiest time for Sunday brunch – the hour when all the churches are done, and the hour when all the pagan fornicators in their twenties are just getting out of bed and taking their sleepover partners to get more bacon, sitting there with their bleary-eyed stare, wearing last night’s outfit and trying to wake up over coffee and buckwheat pancakes, a bit too embarrassed to look each other in the eye.”

“Dad, you are so crabby,” said Kerry.

“I hate people,” I added as a rejoinder, sinking back into the passenger seat, and ready to sink into a foul temper that would last the rest of the Christian Sabbath.

And then I saw it.

A sticker in the back window of one of the cars parked along the street. It was a picture of a cloud, light blue and inside the cloud was the phrase LIFE IS GOOD.

Well, heck, even an old curmudgeon like me can be swayed by a cliché in a car window two weeks before Christmas. LIFE IS GOOD, I thought. God is simply talking to me. LIFE IS GOOD, stop complaining, stop hating people. Why am I so crabby?

And then I saw it – a little tiny “R” in a circle.

LIFE IS GOOD – REGISTERED TRADEMARK.

“This is a marketing slogan!” I exclaimed. “LIFE IS GOOD has become a marketing slogan!”

Years ago, I received a letter from a guy in Texas who told me that if I ever again produced my comedy murder mystery entitled Murder on the Disoriented Express, he would sue me, as he had a registered trademark on that phrase. And then – in the same letter – he told me that he was a playwright, too, and would I consider producing some of his plays? I am not making this up. (Did I mention I hate people?)

I wrote back and noted that it would be pretty difficult to defend a trademark that’s based on a copyrighted work by another author – in this case Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. In addition to that, copyright law does not protect titles of works, as I understand it, while it does protect parody – but after several angry emails back and forth between me and this guy’s lawyer, the whole thing reminded me of the time that Warner Brothers threatened to sue the Marx Brothers for making A Night in Casablanca, claiming it was an infringement on the Warner Brothers movie Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

Groucho wrote

***

Dear Warner Brothers,

Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca. …

I just don’t understand your attitude. Even if you plan on releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don’t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

***

The whole correspondence is quite funny and it can be found here.

But even though Groucho and I don’t take these trademark issues seriously, corporate folks do, even when they’re trying to trademark something that is not only a cliché (LIFE IS GOOD) but a tenet of the Catholic Church, taught for over 2,000 years. I mean, heck, right before God rested on His very first Sabbath Day, way back in Genesis Chapter One, He looked at life and said IT IS GOOD. Seems God the Father might have a claim on this phrase Himself, having coined it a few billion years ago, just a few God-Days after the Big Bang.

But a registered trademark the phrase indeed is.

A quick Google search indicates that LIFE IS GOOD is some sort of clothing line, some trendy feel-good fornicate-and-sleep-til-noon-save-the-planet clothing line. Oh, and they train children on how to play.

That’s right, they train children on how to play.

It’s a clothing line. And they make bumper stickers. And they train child care workers to help children release their psychological issues caused by trauma by playing.

But not just playing the way kids play. Playing the way the adults say is best for your bruised and battered psyches for you to play, dammit! Now shut up and let me teach you the only thing a kid never needs to be taught – HOW TO PLAY!

Now, seriously, I’m sure there are benefits to “play therapy”, and I’m sure the owners of LIFE IS GOOD REGISTERED TRADEMARK have the best intentions when it comes to helping traumatized children. (Actually I’m not so sure they have the best intentions; this is all corporate branding, in a way). But why they’re doing NOTHING to combat GLOBAL WARMING is beyond me. And I certainly hope they sponsor the Lafayette Square Gay Pride Parade next summer – but at least they’re doing something until then. At least they’re in the Oprah spirit, after all, if not the Christmas spirit. Still – “Child Care Worker, teach me to play …” I just can’t quite picture it.

At any rate, be warned that if you are a young Distributist selling genuine dark buckwheat pancake mix (discontinued by Aunt Jemimah and becoming almost impossible to find) at a kiosk you’ve built with your own hands on a street corner in Lafayette Square just south of downtown St. Louis, be sure to tell your customers to HAVE A NICE DAY and be sure you do not utter the phrase LIFE IS GOOD, because that observation – hell, that basic fact – is now a REGISTERED TRADEMARK protected by the Federal Court System of the United States of America, the same government that is now owned and operated by Goldman Sachs and BOA. So WATCH IT.

Well, if there’s any consolation, at least LIFE SUCKS is not registered.

Oh, wait a minute – it IS! See http://www.lifesucksinc.com/files/info.pdf - where it clearly says, “LIFE SUCKS is a registered trademark of LIFE SUCKS INC.”

Now what can I say when I’m really really crabby? “REGISTERED TRADEMARK and then you die!” Come on, that just won’t do.

Wait.

Maybe if I register as a trademark the phrase HAPPY HOLIDAYS I can get people to start saying MERRY CHRISTMAS instead, for fear of being sued.

Now that’s the Christmas spirit!

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December 12th, 2011Lucy Brightens Dark Days of Adventby Lorraine V. Murray

Here’s the question of the day: Are you ready for Christmas? As for me, I still have three-million-and-one things to do, but still I am looking forward with great anticipation to the big day.

After all, when it comes to Christmas, what’s not to like? There’s that whole jolliness thing with eggnog, cookies and the giggling of our tiny Florida cousins (once or twice removed, but who’s counting?) And don’t forget the glorious hymns singing praise to our Lord Jesus Christ!

Still, like so many other folks, I struggle with the winter blues, so I rather dread the dark weeks of Advent, and the bleakness of January.

This year, though, I’m seeking help from an Advent saint whose feast day is Dec. 13. Her name is Lucy and comes from the Latin—lux—meaning light.

Under the old Julian calendar, that day marked the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, so Lucy is associated with the gradual lengthening of days, as well as the light of Christ.

Many details about Lucy’s life are murky, but historians agree she was born in 283 A.D. in Syracuse, Sicily. She died 21 years later during the persecutions by Diocletian.

Lucy’s mother was a convert from paganism to Christianity and she raised her daughter in the faith. Evidently a pagan nobleman was eager to marry the beautiful Lucy, but she rejected him because she had taken a secret vow of virginity as a sign of her love for Christ.

Enraged, the would-be suitor denounced Lucy to the authorities, revealing her allegiance to the then-illegal Christian faith.

There are various stories about the terrible punishments this poor girl was subjected to. The authorities insisted that she reject Christ and make sacrifices to the pagan gods, and when she refused, she was condemned to work in a brothel.

The soldiers who tried to drag her there, however, were unable to budge her. They then tried to burn her to death, but the flames wouldn’t harm her. Rather than relinquish Christ, Lucy finally succumbed to a brutal death by being stabbed in the throat.

Many cultures have huge celebrations on her feast day. Sicilians are especially devoted to Lucy because in 1582 there was a famine in Syracuse, and the townspeople prayed for her intercession. When ships loaded with wheat showed up on Dec. 13, they rejoiced.

People were so hungry that they cooked and ate the wheat instead of taking the time to grind it into flour. To this day Italians celebrate the feast day of Santa Lucia by preparing a variety of delicious dishes made with cooked wheat.

In the Scandinavian countries, people mark St. Lucy’s day with splendid processions consisting of women and girls dressed as “Lucy brides” and wearing pure white dresses with red sashes. They carry lit candles, and the leader wears a crown with white candles attached.

In Croatia, the custom is to plant wheat on Dec. 13. The seeds are pressed into a small dish of soil, which is kept moist and placed in a warm spot. By Christmas Eve the green shoots of wheat should have appeared, and the pot is placed next to the manger as a gift to the one Lucy loved so much. He was called the Bread of Life and was born in Bethlehem, which means “house of bread.”

Many people also keep a candle lit all day as a tribute to the saint who kept Christ’s love aglow in her heart despite unimaginable suffering.

Lucy is a special saint for anyone who longs for Christ’s light to fill their hearts. She leads us through the darkness of Advent to the brightness of Christmas. And she surely can help us through all the bleak days of winter. St. Lucy, pray for us!

————

Lorraine’s latest books include a biography of Flannery O’Connor, “The Abbess of Andalusia,” and a fun-filled mystery set at a small parish in Decatur, “Death of a Liturgist.”

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December 12th, 2011How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Undermine Family Lifeby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

When policy analysts talk about “harmonizing work and family” through social policy they mean to expand women’s freedom and choices.  But, they assume, the harmony is to be achieved according to the male model of subordinating family to work. They absorb and take for granted a large cultural shift, a revolution in the concept and responsibilities of parenthood.

In A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life, Neil Gilbert (2008) examines how capitalism, feminism, and the state influence lifestyle choices and the changing role of motherhood. They do so, he argues, by generating norms, values, and hence social pressures that subordinate motherhood to the market. Gilbert, the social policy professor for whom I worked as a graduate student at the School of Social Welfare, U.C. Berkeley nearly forty years ago, argues that the main policy approaches to harmonizing work and family—“family-friendly” and gender-neutralizing policies—both subordinate family to work. They assume and support the male model in which paid work starts early and is continuous. The traditional model of a father who provides and protects and a woman who manages the home and nurtures the children has given way to one in which both parents give priority of time and effort to the labor market. Periods in which the mother absents herself from work in order to have children are seen as “interruptions” and the aim of policymakers and feminist pundits—is to get mothers, whether they are on welfare or pursuing high-powered careers—back into the labor market as early as possible.

Gilbert shares the general view that “something must be done” to harmonize work and family life. But what? There are, he says, two common policy approaches to this challenge:
1) So-called family-friendly policies; and
2) Gender-neutralizing policies.

1) “Family-friendly” measures to allow mothers with young children to work include, for example,
a. Early child care
b. Paid parental leave
c. Part-time work
d. Such voluntary measures as flexible hours, special family leave, telephone access.

Gilbert illustrates this approach with the example of the University of California system, which provides its tenure-track faculty with day care for toddlers; two years’ leave from the tenure track; a part-time option; paid maternity leave; and paid relief from teaching for two semesters (p.161).

2) Gender-neutralizing policies aim at modifying traditional gender roles in relation to both work and family life by such measures as:
a. Parental leave reform (so that the full benefit requires fathers to take some of the leave).

This second approach is a remarkable case of what Sowell calls the unconstrained vision of reality. Here “surrogates”—policy-makers and “gender feminists”—differ markedly from the mass of the population—in Sweden, the pioneer of such policies, as in the U.S. In both countries less than half of parents think that men and women should participate equally in paid employment and child care. Swedish men take a small percentage of the leave they are entitled to and the men who take such parental leave are concentrated among highly educated men in the public sector. There is a common notion that such fathers as do take the leaves, time them to coincide with major sporting events like the Winter Olympics. But the truth seems to be that they are taken in the summer and around Christmas as a way to extend vacation time.

The views of those who developed and passed such policies into law are in stark contrast to the views of most married parents now as in the past. Women as well as men find substantial benefits for the family in a degree of specialization and division of labor. That, as Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher (2000) argue, is an important advantage of marriage in the first place (The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially). In Sowell’s terms Waite and Gallagher respect the collective, historical wisdom implicit in the ways millions of people over many generations have shaped the institution of marriage through living out their lives and passing on to their children what they have learned from experience and the experience of earlier generations. The policy elites see the masses as lagging behind the views of the enlightened. Their policies are based, not on what women actually want, but on what enlightened elites think they should want. This divergence does not seem explicable in terms of the masses of women lagging behind their more advanced leaders but all moving in the same direction. “From 1997 to 2007,” according to a Pew Research Center study that Gilbert cites, “the percentage of both employed and at-home mothers who considered full-time work to be their ideal situation declined by one-third” (p.170).

Most important from Gilbert’s perspective, both the “family-friendly” and gender-neutralizing approaches to harmonizing work and family life do so by subordinating the latter to the former. The aim is to increase and maintain female labor force participation by moving mothers with young children into paid employment on the male model. (Hence the quotes around “family-friendly” since these policies seek to increase women’s paid work by easing the competing demands and “interruptions” of children. Thus gender feminists, in particular, favor for women an early start on their careers and continuous work to retirement with minimal or no interruption for raising even young children.

In contrast to these work-oriented policies that promote mother-child separation in order to promote lifelong paid work on the male model, Gilbert proposes an alternative. He does not seek to scrap these separationist policies (Eberstadt’s term) that ease female labor force participation, but proposes increasing the options for women in ways that allow for them to choose to give higher priority to their children.

This alternative to the male model Gilbert calls the sequential pattern of labor force participation and parenting at home. In line with the constrained vision, he does not offer either a comprehensive list of policy options or a blueprint for any particular initiative. Rather, he says, “My purpose is to broaden public perceptions of the choices and help reframe the debate...” (p.165).

Possibilities for policy that supports the sequential pattern and widens the lifestyle options for mothers of young children are:

3) Sequential pattern
a. Home care allowance (but for families without a breadwinner, this would require alternatives to employment-based health insurance)
b. Credit-sharing—e.g., community property laws and credit splitting for Social Security and pension benefits, dividing equally the rights to such assets acquired since marriage.

In her book Home Alone America, Mary Eberstadt argues that children have been the major victims of the absence of adults from their own families—fathers, mothers, and extended family. The adoption of the male model of work life—early entry and continuous employment—by mothers has been in part a result of the rise in divorce and illegitimacy. With the absence of a father to provide for his family and share the work of parenting and domestic life, many women have had no alternative but to enter the workforce full-time. But for others it has been a freer choice, an expression of the new increased options for meaningful careers outside the home and the arguments of feminists for women with higher education to Get to Work, as Linda Hirshman’s polemic puts it. In her view, women should not waste their educations raising kids. As Eberstadt observes, a large literature about this unprecedented social experiment in parent-child separation, whether enthusiastic or critical, has been focused on “grown women and what they want and need.”

Gilbert’s book, unlike Eberstadt’s, does not seek as its primary purpose to address this imbalance by illuminating the impact of absent mothers and fathers on children, young people, and society. Rather, it seeks to show how feminism, the market, and social policy shape family life. In different ways, these material and ideological pressures all work together to push women into the male career model, prioritizing work over family life from the earliest years of motherhood. Eberstadt notes that the adverse consequences of millions of individual decisions were unintended by the individuals making those choices. While Sowell emphasizes the aggregate wisdom of millions of choices made for self-interested reasons—as compared with the comprehensive-rational planning of enlightened officials—Eberstadt asks whether in this case the multiplication of millions of individual decisions results in an outcome that no-one intended. Among the outcomes, “Time in front of the screen is up; exercise and outdoor play of any kind is down; and kids, in the United States and almost all comparable countries, are fatter than ever.”

Gilbert examines the forces that shape those millions of individual decisions—feminism, capitalism, and policy. All, he argues, seek to harmonize work and family at the expense of family. They are not neutral about the matter, seeking only to expand women’s options. Like Hirshman, they all prioritize mothers’ labor force participation on the male model—work early and work continuously.

Gilbert’s book implicitly casts doubt on the notion that the market is a process whereby millions of individual choices are aggregated in such a way as to result in the common good. This in two ways. First the individual choices are not so individual as they appear: they are shaped not only by the market, but also by ideology and policy in interaction with the knowledge and wisdom that arise from relations of reciprocal indebtedness within networks of family, community, and culture.

Second, the aggregate of such individual choices, even if made for millions of individually defensible reasons, may result in aggregate results that no-one wants. For example, the March 4, 2010 Economist article on “Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls” points to three main causes of the 100 million missing baby girls as the ancient preference for boys, the modern preference for smaller families, and the modern technology of ultrasound and abortion. Even without a government one-child policy, millions of individual decisions to abort baby girls, impelled in part by the subordination of family to work on the male model as driven by market and ideological (feminist) forces, results in an unbalanced sex ratio, with the prospect of millions of “surplus” young men roaming the country untamed by the traditional lifescript of settling down, marriage, and family.

The millions of individual choices are thus 1) not the acts of autonomous unencumbered selves, and 2) result in the aggregate in a situation that no rational person could consider an expression of the collective wisdom or common good.

With admirable restraint, Gilbert does not respond to this “market failure” by proposing a comprehensive policy to provide mothers and women in general what he thinks they should want. Instead, he modestly suggests ways to widen our thinking about policy options that would widen the range of choice for women who want to have both motherhood and careers, if not all at the same time. He offers modest suggestions for bringing policy more closely into line with the preferences of the large majority of women who want to spend time with their children and who are not in any case on the fast track to brilliant and fulfilling careers, as well as the wants and needs of their children.

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December 12th, 2011“Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the Culture of Death”by Sophia Mason

I'm a fairly regular reader of the National Catholic Register online.  Recently the Review's John Burger interviewed Joseph Pearce on Solzhenitsyn: on the importance of Solzhenitsyn's Christian perspective on political and social problems, on the new edition of Joseph's book on Solzenitsyn, and on Joseph's interview with the very private author.  May the readers of StAR enjoy:

"Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the Culture of Death"

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December 11th, 2011Language, Relativity, and All that Whorfian Jazzby Dena Hunt

Within the academic field of linguistics is a small group of inquirers whose specialty is semantics. Within that group is a still smaller group who inquire into the relationship between language and thought formulation. That group is further divided into those who study anthropology and language, or sociolinguists, and psychology and language, or psycholinguists. As if such division were not sufficient, there is a group (possibly now defunct—intellectual curiosity being the fickle thing it is) who once studied specifically the “Whorf hypothesis.”

Very briefly, and vastly over-simplified, Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir theorized that language influences objective reality via subjective human perception. The famous experiment among the Hopi Indians in the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries would seem, at first glance and removed from actual historical context, to grant some measure of credibility to that theory. Specifically, an experiment in quantum physics was performed in the language of the Hopis that was impossible to perform in European languages.

Since then, the whole area of inquiry has been plundered by so many different academic special interest groups that it’s now dispersed into something of a Babel-like impossibility of verbal formulation. (There is epic irony here.) And, as if competitive academic division were not enough to destroy unified inquiry, we must also add that endowment of the so-called Enlightenment, the artificial divorce of philosophy and science, rendering further investigation impossible due to the limitations imposed by scientific method.

That such a linguistic theory has proven effective and useful in politics and in what we have come to call “social engineering” is now history. The phase-like changes from “Negro” to “black” to “African-American” could be chapter headings in the story of the assimilation of “white” and “black” peoples in America. The same language manipulation was used to implement feminist goals (“chairperson”, for example.) And the recent declaration of Hillary Clinton that homosexual rights are the same as human rights is the verbal formula for the engine of the homosexual movement. It must be mentioned, however, that this last bit of engineering involves something quite different from the preceding use of diction as a social engineering tool, because it involves a structural alteration—the obliteration of the distinction between the two discrete verb bases of our perception of reality: a confusion of doing with being. (I have already written a post on this topic.)

Since language has been proven to affect our perception of reality, such a confusion of being and doing literally constitutes a flirtation with insanity, though the basis for that dangerous flirtation has already been successfully achieved in the strange distinction between “fetus” and “human,” the same kind of nomenclature confusion that would have apples as one thing and fruit, quite another—and different—thing. One of the most remarkable examples of such agenda-driven manipulations of language is the U.N. declaration some years ago that Zionism is racism. “Racism” having become such a temptingly powerful word, that august body chose to ignore the objective reality that Jews (Zionist or not) are Semites—but so are the “Palestinians.” It was a triumph of political expedience over sanity. So is the definition of a sexual activity, [insanely] presented as a verb of being instead of the verb of doing that it actually is. But, if a fetus can be distinguished from a human, anything is possible.

The Whorf Hypothesis was pursued with vigor in the early twentieth century by the forces of ideological “racial” supremacy (misnamed “race”; humans are not a race, but a species) that provided the framework for facism, for genetic engineering, and for population control, the natural children of that ideology. Perhaps the abandonment of a God-concept left a vacuum meant for vertical, hierarchical conceptualization which—having to go somewhere or other—was thus illogically applied to the horizontal god of Humanism, becoming new categories of relative superiority vs. inferiority. (It’s no coincidence that Jews specifically should be perceived as the archenemy of such linguistic adventurism.) And so the sophistication of syntax found in the languages of civilized peoples, particularly the orderly nature of Germanic syntax, was construed as an indication of superiority over the “primitive” languages of “lesser” peoples. The belief in human evolution made possible the confusion of species and races, thus Germanic peoples were more highly “evolved” than other members of the human “race”.

The defeat of Nazism (but not of Planned Parenthood, which escaped semantic detection) is largely responsible, historically, for the demise of formal academic inquiry into the hypothesis, facism having become unpopular, but the political usefulness of the theory gained strength by going underground, as it were, where it became the powerful arm of communist ideology while that ideology lasted, and where it is now newly useful among the social engineers of our day.

At some point, we must devoutly hope that thinking people will ask themselves: What, actually, is this? (“This” may refer to literally anything.) When that happens, we return to the source of rational thought, to pre-Babel Hebrew Eden, where Adam, the first to ask this question, began the process of naming, the event that started it all: language, history, civilization, the distinction between human and animal, and what we call “sanity” by the cognition of something we call Truth.

Therein lies the supernatural source of the ancient reverence for the “Word” of God, the Holy of Holies, that is still characteristic of Judaism to this day, a characteristic that must present as a singular entity (a monotheistic) and non(read meta)physical (uncreated) concept of God, as unique today among the religions and myths of the world as it was some five thousand years ago. For Christians, the natural offspring of the Jews, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This reverence for the Word directly contradicts the hubris, the self-elevation, necessary to all who would seize control of it, for where the Word is sovereign, there can be no manipulation of it. It cannot be used to achieve an end of one’s own design. That is why the Jews (and by extension, their Christian daughter) are the perceived enemy of so many—not just now, today, but throughout all the darkness of human history. That which is seen as a stumbling block to progress by some is recognized by others as the Savior from the abyss of insanity, not metaphorical, but literal, actual—real.

So, said St. John, “In the beginning was….” What? Whatever one’s alpha answer, it is also one’s omega. 

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December 11th, 2011The Awfulness of Ayn Rand…and Malick’s Sublime Film on Nature and Grace, ‘The Tree of Life’by Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

The Awfulness of Ayn Rand...and Malick's Sublime Film on Nature and Grace, 'The Tree of Life'

At the conclusion of his essay on "The Trouble with Ayn Rand," David Bentley Hart recommends skipping the new film version of Atlas Shrugged, the novel of a writer who, like Nietzsche, despised Christian morality and exalted selfishness, who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare, and of whose own novels Hart says that what puts them in a class of their own is how sublimely awful they are.

Even so, the cardboard characters, the ludicrous dialogue, the bloated perorations, the predictable plotting, the lunatic repetitiousness and banality, the shockingly syrupy romance—it all goes to create a uniquely nauseating effect: at once mephitic and cloying, at once sulfur and cotton candy.

Instead, Hart recommends spending our money on the latest work of a real artist with a deeply religious sensibility, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.  I took his advice.  The Tree of Life is a masterpiece.  You can see the trailer of Malick's movie here:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/WXRYA1dxP_0

I was curious to see how critics saw the movie.  The only one, from my perspective, who got to the heart of the film was Fr. Robert Barron, who picked up on the opening quote from Job 38 (“Where were you..?).  Some critics saw the film as a middle-aged man’s attempt to find meaning in his life and his place in eternity and the universe.  Yes, the film is that but it is so by means of an extended meditation on God’s response to Job’s reproach about why he allows evil to happen.  God does not answer Job directly but takes him instead on a tour of the cosmos.  Malick’s mimics God’s answer.  It is a film about nature, grace, and God’s Providence.  Here is Fr. Barron's review of the Malick movie:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/Sh4FS8OOn3A

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December 10th, 2011Sleepwalking Through the Great Infanticideby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2011

Sleepwalking through the great infanticide

What is the morally significant difference between killing a baby just emerged from the womb and one about to emerge? If one is wrong, why not the other?  The utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer accepts that there is no such difference...but he endorses both in certain circumstances.  (The basic problem with this kind of utilitarianism or consequentialism, after all, is that anything at all may be justified if the price is right.) The gruesome Gosnell case discussed below by Lea Singh highlights the issue.  

When a man responsible, by his own admission, for 100.000 deaths by abortion can be awarded the high honor of the Order of Canada, what does it say about societies where all kinds of rights--all variations of the right not to be offended, as Kristina Olney argues over at First Things--but not the basic right of the most innocent and vulnerable among us to protected against being killed?

Lea Singh| Tuesday, 29 November 2011

Are we sleepwalking through the great infanticide?

The human mind can hold onto blatant contradictions, but in order to do so it must block out certain unpleasant truths. One such uncomfortable truth has now come knocking at the door in Philadelphia, where a "house of horrors" abortion clinic wasdiscovered early this year. At this clinic viable babies were outright murdered after their births had been induced and they had been fully delivered. Clinic staff have testified that on hundreds of occasions, second and third trimester babies that were breathing, moving and even crying were slaughtered by having their necks slit or their spines severed.

Almost everyone agrees that killing newborn babies constitutes murder. That is also the law, which is the main reason why clinic owner Dr Kermit Gosnell may face the death penalty if convicted. In recent weeks, five of his staff have pleaded guilty to various charges including murder, and some may be sentenced to hundreds of years in prison.

And yet, late-term abortions, effectively right up to the moment of natural birth, are not illegal in Canada or in many parts of the United States. If Gosnell had chosen to act in medically acceptable ways by dismembering or killing the fetus within the womb just before removing it, he would likely be a hero in the eyes of many for providing an essential service that empowers women. Who knows, he could have gotten the highest civilian award -- a mere three years ago we bestowed the Order of Canada upon Henry Morgentaler, a man who claims to have personally performed over 100,000 abortions.

Is it just me, or is there something sickly schizophrenic about a society that huffs and puffs in outrage at the killing of a baby in the light of day, but quietly supports it when it happens in the darkness of the womb? We are talking about the very same baby here, at the exact same moment of gestation, the only difference being the location of the demise. If we can kill a baby within the womb, why not outside of the womb? Viable babies are being put to death in late-term abortion clinics all over the United States, perhaps some in Canada. We call it "abortion" but in the light of day, these actions clearly are "murder".

The Report of the Grand Jury in the Gosnell case included some photographs of the aborted viable babies that had been found at the clinic. As the mother of three children my heart went out to these poor little ones. Just eight weeks ago I welcomed into the world my own newborn daughter, and these babies looked just like her. Fully formed babies, physically perfect and utterly helpless, they came into the world relying entirely on the care of others around them. One Gosnell employee testified (p.114) about ten of these babies that were large enough for baby clothes:

Q. And what happened to those ten babies that came out from their mother, that were big enough that you could put clothes on and take home and take care of, that moved around, what did you see happen to them?

A. He killed them.

This is the shocking reality of every late-term abortion. Not one of the beautiful, innocent babies can ever be replaced, and I mourn for their lost lives. Clearly Gosnell's practice was horrific, but we must wonder why every late-term abortionist is not being charged with the same crime.

Many abortion proponents reacted to news of the Gosnell clinic by blaming laws which restrict access to abortion. Their argument was that when late-term abortion is illegal, as it is in Pennsylvania, then desperate pregnant women must resort to filthy and dangerous abortion clinics such as the one run by Gosnell. Indeed, Gosnell is also being charged with the deaths of two women, and scores of others suffered medical complications from his procedures. But something is missing from these arguments by abortion advocates, because the best clinic conditions would still not protect the lives of those tiny babies. Obviously, the loss of those lives is acceptable to those who defend such abortions because it is part of the price they are willing to pay for a woman's "choice".

Perhaps they would tell me that the "fetus" is not really a baby, not yet, not until... when? Every person has different criteria. Some believe it is not a baby until birth, others until the arbitrary point of viability outside the womb -- a moving target that is set by the current state of medical technology. At that uncertain moment, this baby-shaped "part of a woman's body" apparently transforms into a human being. These arguments fly in the face of common sense, and I wonder how many people really believe them.

Today more than ever, it is difficult to hold on to the myth that the fetus is just a part of the woman rather than a unique individual. Technology, science and medicine have exposed the truth to us with blinding clarity. With my first pregnancy I had an ultrasound at six weeks, a point when many women don't yet even know they are pregnant, and the screen already showed a perfectly formed little baby. Genetic testing would have confirmed that this baby had its own DNA separate from my own, and any biologist would confirm that it was a living organism, already far more complex than a whole range of other organisms. And just a few short weeks later, at around 24 weeks, my baby could have been born prematurely and possibly survived.

Given all that we know about the unborn human being, it is clear to me that force of will, rather than genuine ignorance, now seems to be the driving force behind abortion. Our society simply wants abortion to stay legal regardless of the facts. It is not that we don't know the truth; rather, that we don't want to be reminded. It's a strange madness, with teams of doctors struggling to keep premature infants alive in hospitals where just a floor away, babies are being killed and discarded.

Abortion requires our society to juggle a split personality. In Canada we frequently mourn the 158 Canadian Forces personnel who died in Afghanistan since 2002. And yet according to Statistics Canada, about 100,000 babies die from abortion every single year in our country, a total of about 3 million since 1969. In the United States, countless commemorations have taken place to remember the nearly 3000 people who died in the World Trade Center attacks. Those deaths led the United States to launch a whole war on terror. And yet, each year over a million babies lose their lives to abortion, for a total of over 50 million abortions since 1973. The result? Far more often than not, the words of our news-makers and decision-makers still support, rather than oppose, abortion.

In a society where morality often seems to have ceased, it is easy to become resigned and passive in face of the overwhelming tide against us. And yet… In the short movie "180" [180movie.com] that went viral on YouTube recently, one woman discussing the Holocaust asks a poignant question: “Where was the world, where was everybody?” It seems so incomprehensible now that six million Jews could be killed in concentration camps with so little opposition from the German populace. But one day, our grandchildren may ask us a similar question with regard to our own cultural challenges: where was everybody, where were we?

Speaking up for the truth might make us look like fools. And that is just the beginning. Today, it is a sad fact that opposing abortion can cost a person their job and even their career. You might also lose your friends, your standing in a social circle, your invitations to events. One day, your position on abortion could even cost you your freedom.

To me, as a former political refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia, all this sounds eerily familiar. Back then, most people in our country were also silent, and many feared the repercussions that would follow if they openly opposed the regime. But we had a few dissidents, and they made a world of difference. One of them, Vaclav Havel, eventually became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia.

The truth is a powerful thing; over time, throughout history, it has always won the moral battles, and I have no doubt that one day, abortion will be rejected and recognized as an unspeakable evil. Until that day comes the journey continues to require courage and sacrifice on the part of those who carry the responsibility of knowing the truth. It is up to us to awaken the conscience of our society, one person at a time.

Lea Singh is a Harvard law graduate and currently full-time mother of a young family. She writes from Ottawa, Canada.

Retrieved December 10, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/are_we_sleepwalking_through_the_great_infanticide

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December 8th, 2011The Seed of Graceby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

We know that at the moment of the Immaculate Conception, the New Testament silently begins. It begins in a hidden way, without any fiat from Mary or her mother. It begins entirely with grace, as everything begins.

The Kingdom of Heaven at Mary's Immaculate Conception was smaller than a mustard seed, less noticeable than a pinch of yeast, surrounded by the darkness of a womb - a darkness that did not overcome it. And yet from this small and seemingly insignificant beginning, the Kingdom has come among us in power and clarity.

Fourteen or so years later, the Kingdom has another small and hidden beginning. John the Baptist is conceived before Our Lord begins to live in the Virgin's womb. And while we know that Mary says yes to God when the angel appears to her, we know that Zechariah breathed out a kind of no. He responds to Gabriel with a doubt.

In that doubt is the antithesis of Faith; in that doubt is the kind of No that can undo the Kingdom. And in that doubt is the last word Zechariah speaks until his lips are free to affirm God's plan at the birth of Zechariah's son. "His name is John" is Zechariah's Yes to the absurdity (in human terms) of the Providence of the Lord. His first words in nine months, his first utterance after his penance of being unable to speak are a surprising and even shocking "Yes". It is his way of saying, "I renounce my selfish and personal claim to the identity of my only son; I offer him up to this new order which is breaking through, to the glory we are beginning to glimpse behind a torn veil."

And then when Our Lady says Yes - when she gives her fiat - her action is less active than it is passive. It is an action that allows, that suffers, that permits God as the active source of grace to work his wonders through her, through His Son, and through us.

If we don't have the courage to say Yes, may we at least have the grace to stop saying No.

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December 8th, 2011Running in the Right Direction at Adventby Lorraine V. Murray

Lorraine!

Yes, Lord?

What’s that you’re so busy with?

Me? Oh, I’m checking Facebook, Lord, that’s all.

Didn’t you say the other day that you thought that was a waste of time?

Uh, yeah, I guess I did.

What are you going to do after you check Facebook?

I have a column to write, but I’m, er, going to the mall.

Why?

I don’t know, Lord, I just feel antsy today—and a little blue.

Have you been over to see me lately in the adoration chapel?

Uh, no…I’ve been kind of busy—and I know what you’re going to say! You’re going to say “You’ve been checking Facebook and going shopping, but you’re too busy to drop by and see me?”

I wasn’t going to say that, but it’s a good point.

Yeah, I know.

Well, what are you writing about?

I wanted to write about Advent, about how it should be a time of spiritual preparation for Christmas, rather than a time of shopping, baking, writing cards, going to parties ...

And what’s stopping you from writing that?

Well, I guess I wanted to go shopping and look for Christmas cards and maybe a dress.

Silence on the other end.

Lord, please don’t think badly of me. It’s just that it’s hard writing about a topic that most people hate to hear about. I mean, most folks I know don’t want some preachy message about Advent being a time of fasting and prayer. Many of them are parents, and if they don’t do some Christmas stuff now, like shopping and baking, there won’t be any time later — and the kids will be disappointed.

So you’re afraid your Advent message might be somehow uncomfortable or difficult?

Well, I don’t want to seem like Scrooge! After all, I don’t have kids, so it’s different for me. I mean, if I want to spend my time during Advent in spiritual preparation for Christmas, I can.

So why aren’t you?

Why aren’t I what, Lord?

Why aren’t you getting ready spiritually, if, as you say, you have the time?

I feel kind of scattered, Lord.

I know that, Lorraine. I know you very well.

So what should I do? Should I just be a major party-pooper and put on sackcloth and ashes? Go to my room and refuse to go to any Christmas parties?

That seems rather extreme, doesn’t it, Lorraine?

Yeah, I think so. But what should I do?

For one, you can stop running away from things.

Running away, Lord?

Lorraine, when you get angry or sad, don’t you go shopping?

Yeah.

And don’t you usually also go to Dairy Queen—and eat a medium chocolate-dipped cone?

I didn’t realize you saw that.

I’m always with you, Lorraine, even at Dairy Queen.

(Big sigh)

Lorraine, this Advent why don’t you run in a different direction?

What do you mean, Lord?

How about spending a little more time with me?

You mean praying more, don’t you?

You can also visit me in the adoration chapel.

I get so fidgety, Lord, sitting there doing nothing.

Bring a book. I don’t mind if you read something.

OK, Lord, I’ll do that. Is there anything else?

Don’t get all tied up in knots about making Advent and Christmas perfect. The first Christmas wasn’t perfect at all. It was pretty cold in that stable and uncomfortable too. And, Lorraine?

Yes, Lord?

Always remember that I love you.Oh, and one more thing: Don't feel so guilty about shopping and going to Dairy Queen. Just don’t overdo it.

I'm going to try. And, uh...

Yes, Lorraine?

I love you too.

___

Lorraine's most recent books are a biography of Flannery O'Connor, "The Abbess of Andalusia," and "Death of a Liturgist," a mystery about a liturgist who meets a rather satisfying and gruesome end after hijacking a traditional parish.

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December 6th, 2011Advice from Santa: “Keep Jesus in Your Heart Forever!”by Lorraine V. Murray

Our nephew, Noah, 8, has a real thing about Santa. Last year he was thrilled when he and his mom had breakfast with Santa at the zoo in their hometown.

The photos tell the tale. The first shows Noah with a look of ecstasy on his face as he perches on Santa’s lap, explaining in careful detail exactly what he wants. The next shot captures the boy’s expression of joyous relief because he’s delivered his important message -- and Santa seems to have gotten the point.

Despite such wonderful moments, many Catholic parents face a dilemma. Should they take the kids to see Santa at the mall and risk turning Christmas into a “buy me, get me” fest? Or should they ignore the heavily commercialized Santa and disappoint the kids?

For many parents, Santa has become a symbol of greed. He is all about elves, the North Pole, the reindeer – and that big pile of gifts. There are plenty of toys overflowing from his sack, but no evidence of a Bible.

In fact, Santa seems oblivious to the real message of Christmas –and even seems to be vying with the Christ Child for attention.

There is a way out, fortunately, and Noah’s parents have found it. This year, they located a Santa who sent the little fellow a personalized letter. And in it, Santa revealed that he knows quite a bit about Noah’s life. He mentioned the boy’s dog, Buttercup, as well as the name of Noah's teacher.

But what really made my day was the heart of Santa’s letter. “Of course, Christmas Day is all about celebrating and remembering the birth of Jesus Christ, so long ago. Jesus is very important for boys and girls – He gives us hope and loves us very, very much! Keep Jesus in your heart forever!” 

What a wonderful concept! Here’s a Santa who’s telling children about Jesus. Wouldn't it be lovely if all parents had an option like this at Christmas time?

I think many parents would be thrilled to take their kids to see a Santa who emphasizes the real truth about the season. After all, without Jesus, there would be no Christmas parties, no carols, no trees decked out with lights, no mountain of gifts – and no Santa at all.

But the good news is that Christ did come into the world, and through him children receive a present that may not be on their list, but is still the most wondrous gift of all. You won’t find this gift under the tree, of course. You’ll find it in their hearts.

Lorraine's latest books include a biography of Flannery O'Connor, "The Abbess of Andalusia," plus two mysteries, "Death in the Choir" and "Death of a Liturgist." 

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December 5th, 2011StAR Blogger Nominated for Awardby Joseph Pearce

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December 3rd, 2011The Latest Marian Apparition—Our Front Yard!by Lorraine V. Murray

As my husband hauled her out of the box, I flinched just a bit. She was much larger than I had envisioned.

"Do we really want something that big in the front yard?" I queried nervously..

He brushed her off tenderly while glancing at me with a puzzled expression.

“I thought she’d be just right,” he said.

A little background: We had decided to transform the somewhat sunny spot in our front yard from a tomato patch into what traditionally is called a Mary garden.

It would be a little outdoor shrine dedicated to the Blessed Mother, something to call her to mind whenever we looked outside.

My husband ordered a statute, which I envisioned being about one-and-a-half feet tall and thus rather inconspicuous. But “Big Mary,” as I’ve come to think of her, was quite different from my mental image.

In fact, the statue seemed to tower over everything in the living room, even though it was, in reality, only three feet high.

And I’m rather embarrassed to admit this, but the first thought that crossed my mind as I looked at her was: “What will the neighbors think?”

Granted, some of our neighbors have St. Francis statues in their backyards, but they’re quite diminutive and easy to overlook. But Big Mary right out front? Not so much.

“Give me a little time to think about it,” I told my husband, who was eager to install the statue.

As I pondered the question of Big Mary, it wasn’t long before I realized that it wasn’t really the neighbors’ opinions I was fretting about—it was my family’s reactions.

You see, we’ve been Catholic for generations back on my mother’s and father’s side—until a big upheaval occurred when a few family members became Protestants.

And I have a fairly good inkling of what many Protestants think about Mary. They often accuse Catholics of loving her too much – and some even harbor the false notion that we worship her. I could just see my relatives rolling their eyes when they came to visit us.

Fortunately, as I reflected, it wasn’t long before the irony of my dilemma hit me full force.

Surely Mary herself might have fretted over what other people would think when an angel announced that she would become a mother. And obviously in bowing to God’s will, she opened herself up to plenty of criticism from her relatives.

As for me, here I was, being a big coward about something intended to honor her.

Frankly, I was ashamed of myself.

The next day, I gave my husband the go-ahead to install Big Mary in the yard, and he happily went to work.

Meanwhile, I found the perfect rose bushes for her little shrine—two in a deep shade of blood red called Don Juan; two perfectly white; and a Jacob’s Robe with sumptuous splashes of yellow and orange.

A few days later, my husband began the arduous task of digging the deep holes for the rose bushes, and two little neighbor girls stopped by to watch.

“That’s Mary!” Isabella exclaimed happily, while Talia, the smaller girl, looked wide-eyed with wonder at the beautiful lady serenely holding court over the front yard.

Now each morning when I open the shades, Big Mary is the first thing I see.

There she stands with arms outstretched, a lovely reminder of the peace that comes from accepting whatever God sends us –even when it turns out to be much larger than we envisioned.

She also reminds me of something St. Maximilian Kolbe said. “You should never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much. You can never love her more than Jesus did.”

Lorraine's latest books are a biography of Flannery O'Connor, "The Abbess of Andalusia," and a fun-filled mystery, "Death of a Liturgist," about a liturgist who meets an untimely, but quite satisfying, end.

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December 2nd, 2011Translationsby Dena Hunt

There are differing reactions to the new English translation of the Mass. Where I live, it’s mostly humor—people laughing at themselves when they make mistakes, laughing at Father, who laughs at his own mistakes. Some people, less inclined to find humor anywhere anyhow, get frustrated and ill-tempered, and some declare they will continue with the old responses. Why? Actually, they just don’t want to trouble themselves with learning the new, but they say things like, “This is silly. It says the same thing anyway.” Does it? Well, yes—and no.

I’m sure there are lengthy discourses already written in the blogosphere and elsewhere, minutely dissecting each small change with a view to criticism or praise, depending primarily on the predisposition of their authors. And there is likely also a good deal of philosophizing among the translation’s fans about the metaphorical appropriateness of introducing the new translation at the beginning of a new liturgical year.

Looking at those small changes, I’m struck again by the Catholic persnickety-ness in the use of words. It’s a different attitude from that of non-Catholics. For example, Episcopalians seem to take a very casual approach, as in: Well, God didn’t mean any of this literally, you know. You have to understand that it’s all metaphor (or words to that effect), allowing them to interpret rather than translate. Then we have the fundamentalist literalists: A Baptist once told me that my vegetarianism was “against the Bible.” Why? Because, she said, the Lord told Peter in a dream to slay animals and eat them. That the dream was a metaphor for spreading the Gospel to the gentiles was not considered. So, at one extreme, it’s all metaphor; at the other, it’s all literal.

But the Catholic approach to language is uniquely authoritative even if one disregarded the teaching authority of the Church. We could say that maybe it takes a couple of thousand years of dealing with translating/interpreting to become any good at it, that maybe a few hundred years just isn’t enough practice. But that would only account for the way Catholics read and write about Holy Scripture. It does not account for the great works of literature, religious and secular, within those two thousand years of Catholic history. One looks for a single characteristic trait to account for this peculiar superiority of Catholic letters. I think it lies in the Catholic view of language itself.

There is a great reverence in the Church for words, but there is also an implicit acceptance of their limitation, unlike the secular, or sometimes Protestant, attitude that tends toward dismissing words as “just semantics” or to worship words, to make of them an idol. This can lead to a kind of Babel-like apocalypse of confusion, where interpretation and translation come into argumentative play in attempts to understand Scripture, as cited above. In literature, it simply leads to shallowness. It’s an irony that when all truth is subjective, words lose all meaning, just as it’s ironic that when words are Truth itself, they can convey no truth.

Perhaps it’s the Catholic awareness of words as vessels of reality, rather than reality itself, that endows an almost glib adroitness with figurative language. It’s almost as if the intellects of a Tolkien or a Hopkins, for example, were born with a comprehending distinction between parable and the literalness of divine command, making them so adept at distinguishing one from the other that they can combine literal and figurative, and not only make perfect sense, but sub-create whole new realities. They can create a place known as Middle-Earth, they can see—and say—that God’s glory is in stippled trout and brindled cows. And then there occurs that mysterious human cognition of Truth in those who “have ears to hear.”

Words are not reality, but without them, there is no reality, for they are arks, not covenants. They are man-made abstract vessels of God-made concrete reality. To dismiss them is to dismiss the reality they contain and to descend into the insanity of meaninglessness. To adore them is to disregard their purpose, their content, and to descend into the self-worship of humanism.

It’s important to be persnickety in the use of words.

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December 1st, 2011Saint Edmund Campion: English Martyrby Joseph Pearce

Today is the feast day of St. Edmund Campion and Companions, the companions in question being the lesser known St. Alexander Briant and St. Ralph Sherwin. They were martyred on this day in 1581, 430 years ago.

St. Edmund Campion is a sadly neglected saint who was not even mentioned at today’s Mass even though the celebrant, like Campion, was a Jesuit. Recent intriguing evidence suggests that Campion may have known the teenage Shakespeare.

Ironically, considering Campion’s neglect in England and the United States, I received this moving e-mail from an Elizabethan scholar in the Czech Republic:



Saint Edmund Campion (+ 1. 12. 1581)

Scholar, poet, martyr..."a mystery whose solution lies in the busy and unevenful years at Brunn and Prague...." [Evelyn Waugh]

St Edmund Campion was canonized on 25th October 1970 (St Crispin´s Day)

This day is called the feast of CAMPION...

 
      He that shall live this day, and see old age,
      Will yearly ON THE VIGIL feast his neighbours,
      And say 'To-morrow is Saint EDMUND CAMPION:'
      Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
      And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
      Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
      But he'll remember with advantages
      What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
      Familiar in his mouth as household words
      CAMPION, BRIANT and KIRBY, SHERWINE and COTTOM,
      MARGARET CLITHEROE and ANN LINE, MAYNE and PAINE,
      WALPOLE and HOWARD, SOUTHWELL and GARNET
      Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd...   (Henry V, accordingly)

 
      ST EDMUND AND ALL ENGLISH MARTYRS PRAY FOR US
      THE DAY IS YOURS

(Prayer for all English benefactors today at 12, 15 in the Church of Asumption in Brno /Campions icon of Our Lady still on the altar.)

      PETR OSOLSOBE
      BRNO, MORAVIA



Edmund Campion

He came by vow, the cause to conquer sin.
His armour prayer. The word his targe & shield.
His confort heaven, his spoil our souls to win.
The devil his foe, the wicked word his field.
Hys triumphe joy, his wage eternall blysse,
His captayne Chryste, whiche ever blessed ys.
His natives flowers were mixed with hearb of grace.
His mild behaviour tempered well with skill.
A lowly mind possesed a lerned place.
A sugered speech, a rare and virtuous will.
A saint like man was set in earth below
The seed of truth in hearing hearts to sow.
His fare was hard, yet mild and sweet his cheer.
His prison close, yet free and loose his mind.
His torture great, yet scant or none his fear.
His offers large, yet no thing could him blind.
O constant man, O mind, O virtue strange,
Whom want, nor woe, nor fear, nor hope could change.

--Henry Walpole

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November 30th, 2011A Jacobite Lament for Saint Andrew’s Dayby Joseph Pearce

I’ve just received this e-mail from a friend. It speaks for itself.

Dear Joseph,

In honor of both St. Andrew's Day and our Jacobite sympathies, I have decided to send you what appears below. The author of the following song is Seán "Clárach" Mac Domhnaill (1691–1754), an Irish Language poet from County Clare. Composed in the conventions of a traditional "Aisling," or "Vision Poem," the poem laments the defeat and exile of Prince Charles Edward.In the link that follows, the song is performed by Mary Black. In my humble opinion, her pronunciation of the Irish language is quite good. The words in both languages also appear below.

In Christ and St. Andrew,

Brendan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDlCM_Mwtys

Lyrics

Sé mo laoch mo Ghile Mear
‘Sé mo Chaesar, Ghile Mear,
Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear.

Bímse buan ar buaidhirt gach ló,
Ag caoi go cruaidh ‘s ag tuar na ndeór
Mar scaoileadh uaim an buachaill beó
‘s ná ríomhtar tuairisc uaidh, mo bhrón

Ní labhrann cuach go suairc ar nóin
Is níl guth gadhair i gcoillte cnó,
Ná maidin shamhraidh i gcleanntaibh ceoigh
Ó d’imthigh sé uaim an buachaill beó.

Marcach uasal uaibhreach óg,
Gas gan gruaim is suairce snódh,
Glac is luaimneach, luath I ngleo
Ag teascadh an tslua ‘s ag tuargain treon.

Seinntear stair ar chlairsigh cheoil
‘s líontair táinte cárt ar bord
Le hinntinn ard gan chaim, gan cheó
chun saoghal is sláinte d’ fhagháil dom leómhan.
Ghile Mear ‘sa seal faoi chumha,
‘S Éire go léir faoi chlócaibh dubha;
Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
Ó cuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear.

Seal da rabhas im’ mhaighdean shéimh,
‘s anois im’ bhaintreach chaite thréith,
Mo chéile ag treabhadh na dtonn go tréan
De bharr na gcnoc is I n-imigcéin.

English Translation (thanks to Marina Antolioni)

Chorus
He is my hero, my dashing darling
He is my Caesar, dashing darling.
I've had no rest from forebodings
Since he went far away my darling.

Every day I am constantly sad
Weeping bitterly and shedding tears
Because our lively lad has left us
And no news from him is heard alas.

The cuckoo sings not pleasantly at noon
And the sound of hounds is not heard in nut-filled woods,
Nor summer morning in misty glen
Since he went away from me, my lively boy.

Noble, proud young horseman
Warrior unsaddened, of most pleasant countenace
A swift-moving hand, quick in a fight,
Slaying the enemy and smiting the strong.

Let a strain be played on musical harps
And let many quarts be filled
With high spirit without fault or mist
For life and health to toast my lion.

Dashing darling for a while under sorrow
And all Ireland under black cloaks
Rest or pleasure I did not get
Since he went far away my dashing darling.

For a while I was a gentle maiden
And now a spent worn-out widow
My spouse ploughing the waves strongly
Over the hills and far away.

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November 30th, 2011Life is Beautifulby Sophia Mason

Ah, Thanksgiving!  The time to give thanks for ... well, what else but secularists waking up to the folly of their secularist assumptions!  Who knew the mainstream would get so pro-life?

A Down Syndrome infant is hired by modeling agency.

The Onion gets surprisingly serious on China's one-child policy.

And Apple's "Siri" won't advise on abortion providers.

This is why we need to keep up the prayer, penance, and public discourse on the issue.  Hearts are clearly changing.  Let's get out there and change some more!

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November 30th, 2011Pigrim’s Progressby Joseph Pearce

One of the brightest young things on the Catholic blogosphere is Bronwen McShea, the animating spirit behind Pilgrim, a website, or cyber-journal, which promotes Catholic faith, art and culture. The new issue has just been posted: www.pilgrimjournal.com.

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November 30th, 2011Encouraging News from Scotland on St. Andrew’s Dayby Joseph Pearce

Visitors to this site will have noted my irritation with the English bishops for their lack of courage. Too many of them are happy to have tea with Nero, or his English equivalent, while England burns in an inferno of its own making and its own desiring. How encouraging, therefore, that our cousins and sometime enemies north of the border are setting a good and courageous example. Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow, in his address on the Feast of St. Andrew, Scotland's patron saint, has called for St. Andrew's Day to be made a national holiday and for such a holiday to be a permenent reminder of the nation's Christian roots. I suspect that we will wait in vain for a similar call from the English bishops for St. George's Day to be made a national holiday south of the border.

Here's the news story about Archbishop Conti's address. The full text of the address can be read by scrolling down to the end of the press statement:

Archbishop calls for St Andrew's Day Holiday

The leader of Scotland's largest Catholic diocese, Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow has called for St Andrew's Day to be made a national holiday but warned against such a move being an "empty gesture".

In a message for St Andrew's Day, the Archbishop said: "The Catholic Church in Scotland has made no secret of the fact that it strongly wishes this day to be made a national holiday every year ... my belief is that the cultural and spiritual case for a national saint's day is compelling.

"Scotland is a nation with an ancient history, and that history is inextricably formed in the shape of the cross; the cross of St Andrew ... To this day the St Andrew's Cross is a flag which all Scots hoist with pride, and the emblem of our patron is emblazoned on many buildings and coats of arms, logos and letterheads across our country. And so it seems logical that we should mark our dear saint—the first of the apostles to be called by Christ—through a properly recognised national holiday."

But the Archbishop called for such a move to be reflected in a new awareness of our Christian heritage.

He said: "St Andrew's Day should remind us of the Christian heritage of our society; of its history which is formed and forged on the anvil of Christian life. It is a day for remembering with pride our nationhood, but also for remembering with pride our Christian culture which crafted it."

And he went on to warn against plans to redefine marriage, which he noted, ran contrary to that Christian culture of the nation.

He said: "Today in Scotland the Catholic Church continues to preach the word of Christ in season and out of season, be its reception popular or unpopular.

"In Edinburgh, Cardinal O'Brien is launching an initiative called "Scotland for Marriage". This is an umbrella group being set up to remind politicians that some issues are not negotiable; marriage being one of them.

"Marriage, between one man and one woman is a fundamental building block of our culture and cannot be tampered with, without doing damage to the foundations and infrastructure of society."

The full text of the Archbishop's St Andrew's Day message can be found below.

For further information, contact:
Cav Ronnie Convery
Director of Communications
Archdiocese of Glasgow
196 Clyde Street
Glasgow
G1 4JY
Tel: 0141 226 5898
Fax: 0141 225 2600
www.rcag.org.uk

ENDS

Peter Kearney
Director
Catholic Media Office
5 St. Vincent Place
Glasgow
G1 2DH
0141 221 1168
07968 122291
pk@scmo.org
www.scmo.org

MASS FOR FEAST OF ST ANDREW
30 NOVEMBER 2011

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

I suspect that I do not need to tell you of the great joy I feel at being able to celebrate this Mass for you on the feast of our national patron, St Andrew,in this newly restored Cathedral Church which is dedicated to him, for the first time since its re-opening.

That joy is shared by the Chapter of Canons here with me fulfilling their proper role in the Cathedral Church, reciting the office of the day in choir and assisting the Bishop in the liturgy.

And I imagine for you too it is a great day.

The Catholic Church in Scotland has made no secret of the fact that it strongly wishes this day to be made a national holiday every year. The idea has recently been taken up by marketing gurus who say that Scotland is "missing a trick" by not making more of its national patron. They point to the commercial opportunities afforded by St Patrick's Day celebrations for the Irish economy and tell us that Scotland could do well too, by making more of its patron saint.

While the economic logic may or may not be compelling—it is not an area of competence for the Church to decide—my belief is that the cultural and spiritual case for a national saint's day IS compelling.

Scotland is a nation with an ancient history, and that history is inextricably formed in the shape of the cross; the cross of St Andrew.

From early times there has been a great pride among Scots of their heavenly patron. Indeed we read in the 700 year old text of the Declaration of Arbroath:

"The high qualities and deserts of these people, were they not otherwise manifest, gain glory enough from this: that the King of kings and Lord of lords, our Lord Jesus Christ, after His Passion and Resurrection, called them, even though settled in the uttermost parts of the earth, almost the first to His most holy faith.

"Nor would He have them confirmed in that faith by merely anyone but by the first of His Apostles by calling—though second or third in rank—the most gentle Saint Andrew, the Blessed Peter's brother, and desired him to keep them under his protection as their patron forever."

And addressing the Pope, then in Avignon, the writers added: "The Most Holy Fathers your predecessors gave careful heed to these things and bestowed many favours and numerous privileges on this same kingdom and people, as being the special charge of the Blessed Peter's brother."

To this day the St Andrew's Cross is a flag which all Scots hoist with pride, and the emblem of our patron is emblazoned on many buildings and coats of arms, logos and letterheads across our country.

And so it seems logical that we should mark our dear saint—the first of the apostles to be called by Christ—through a properly recognised national holiday.

However such a holiday cannot be allowed to become an occasion for empty tokenism; merely an occasion for the trumpetblast of "wha's like us" and a nostalgic wrapping of ourselves in tartan.

Rather a feast day should remind us of the person whose life is being recalled, and the message of that person for us—here and now.

St Andrew's life is well known, at least in outline. A worker—perhaps a small business owner—with his brother Peter in the fishing fleet of the Sea of Galilee, he followed Christ without hesitation, remaining faithful after the death and resurrection of the Lord even to the shedding of his own blood in martyrdom at Achaia in modern day Greece.

The quality that stands out in his life is fidelity. Fidelity to Christ.

St Paul is very strong on that theme in today's epistle. There we read quite clearly: "If your lips confess that Jesus is Lord and if you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, then you will be saved"

Those words are very clear. But a little later in the reading we hear expressed the nagging doubt that perhaps lingers at the back of our own minds when faced with such initial confidence ...

"Not everyone of course listens to the Good News. As Isaiah says: 'Lord, how many believed what we proclaimed?'

"So faith comes from what is preached, and what is preached comes from the word of Christ."

Today in Scotland the Catholic Church continues to preach the word of Christ in season and out of season, be its reception popular or unpopular.

In Edinburgh, Cardinal O'Brien has launched an initiative called "Scotland for Marriage". This is an umbrella group being set up to remind politicians that some issues are not negotiable; marriage being one of them.

Marriage, between one man and one woman is a fundamental building block of our culture and cannot be tampered with, without doing damage to the foundations and infrastructure of society.

As the Cardinal said: "As an institution, marriage long predates the existence of any state or government. It was not created by government and should not be changed by them. Instead, recognising the innumerable benefits which marriage brings to society they should act to protect and uphold it not attack or dismantle it."

And so, if I repeat once more the call today for St Andrew's Day to be made a national holiday, I do so with the warning that it must not be a meaningless gesture, or an occasion devoid of substance.

Rather St Andrew's Day should remind us of the Christian heritage of our society; of its history which is formed and forged on the anvil of Christian life. It is a day for remembering with pride our nationhood, but also for remembering with pride our Christian culture which crafted it.

As the visitor heads north along the Via Cassia out of Rome, leaving the historic centre of the city behind, he or she is confronted with a bold phrase picked out on the gable wall of a modern building close to the area of Nero's tomb.

It reads "Salve me bona crux"—save me good cross. The motto in question and the wall in question belong to the Pontifical Scots College, where for 411 years men have followed Christ's call in the footsteps of Andrew.

That motto is now carved here too, in our own Cathedral, on the face of the newly dedicated altar.

It should be carved also on our hearts as Scots men and women.

Salva me bona crux!

May we never grow tired of our faith, may we never lose the healthy love of our nation which marks us out, and may we never forget the culture that is ours as Scots—a culture reaching back to the shores of the Sea of Galilee and the selfless fidelity of a fisherman who went on to become a fisher of men.

Amen

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November 29th, 2011How Not to Venerate a Saintby Pavel Chichikov

I came across a video today that shows something of the vast crowd of people who have come to view and venerate a relic of the Blessed Virgin in Russia. You can see it here:

http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=43841

The fervor, faith and devotion of the people are striking and most moving. But the story also reports that certain cars pulled up to the Cathedral with sirens screaming, and the occupants went to the head of a kilometers long line, much to the justified indignation of others.

Is it surprising that some of us have no idea how our humble and self-giving Blessed Mother should be honored? We are still, as human beings, stuck up to our necks in our boggy, glutinous self-important ignorance. When we think of holiness we think of power, not renunciation.

May our faith in God’s love give us the strength to renounce our useless human faith in power, and to take up our faith in God’s unconquerable love.

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November 28th, 2011A Cathedral and a Candleby Pavel Chichikov

I recently came across the web site of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. It’s a spectacular presentation that moves in a 360 degree perspective around this holy space, in full color.

The original cathedral was blown up by the Bolsheviks. Stalin planned to erect the world’s tallest building on the site, and a statue of Lenin was supposed to perch on the top of it. But difficulties with water seepage and other problems prevented the monstrosity from ever being completed.

After Stalin died, Khrushchev had the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool constructed there. In the 1980s, while waiting to meet a friend at the Pushkin Museum, I stood in front of the pool and said hello to a father and son as they approached with their towels and bathing suits in shopping bags.

All very mundane, and one might say profane. But after the fall of the Soviet Union the property was put to proper use, and a magnificent replacement for the old Cathedral was constructed. You can see it here at:

http://www.360pano.eu/xxc/

Seeing it reminded me of a visit I paid to another church, Our Lady of Tikhvin, in another part of Moscow. Old ladies in black were there, holding their candles, standing before an icon of the Blessed Virgin and the Christ Child. It might have seemed then as if the candle of faith in Russia was sputtering out, but the glory of the new cathedral says and shows otherwise.

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November 28th, 2011More Encouraging News from Russiaby Joseph Pearce

My good friend, the very fine poet Pavel Chichikov, sent me the link to an encouraging news story about a relic of the Blessed Virgin being venerated in Russia. Surely there is hope for the future of Russia if this astonishing phenomenon is a sign of the times. Here’s the link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45419128/ns/world_news-europe/t/russians-flock-see-virgin-mary-relic/#.TtDvnvKwU91

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November 26th, 2011Paganism Baptised: The Christian Continuumby Joseph Pearce

My interesting correspondence about the relationship between Christianity and paganism continues.

Here are my friend's latest comments:

Thanks for these leads. I have downloaded the Markos book. It appears to take a different line from the Macmullen book I cite. There seem to be two lines or 'hermeneutics' on this, like Vatican II - a hermeneutics of rupture (Christianity as a revolutionary break with the pagan world - as Hart argues, with Tertullian?) and a hermeneutics of continuity (with foreshadowing, the gradual "discovery of God" through divine accommodation outside the Judeo-Christian narrative, as Stark argues in his book of that title). Interesting.

And here's my response:

On the one hand, the early Church was at pains to distance itself and differentiate itself from the pagans; on the other hand early Christians, such as St. Augustine, embraced and adopted the ideas of the neo-Platonists. The former was inevitable as the Church endeavoured to evangelize the very pagan culture in which it found itself; the latter was the necessary fruit of the Church's fidelity to both faith and reason. Christianity was a revolutionary break with the pagan world, but it was equally a revolutionary break with the Jewish world: the Incarnation was the fulfillment and consummation of both paganism and Judaism. Just as Christ did not come to abolish the Old Law of the Jews but to fulfill it; so he doesn't abolish the philosophical quest for truth but to reveal it in its fullness. St. Augustine and Boethius owed a great deal to the pagan philosophers; the bard of Beowulf owed a great deal to the classical epics; St. Thomas Aquinas was a disciple of Christ but also a follower of Aristotle; Dante was a disciple of Christ (and Aquinas) but was also a follower of Virgil. In this sense, I feel that the hermeneutics of rupture does violence to the reality that Christ reveals, whereas the hermeneutic of continuity is closer to an understanding of the fulfillment that Christ brings. The analogy is not one of rupture but of baptism. Christ makes all things new but does not do violence to anything good and noble in that which is old, whether it be in the Old Law or the Old Myths.

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November 25th, 2011Christmas on TV from Theater of the Wordby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Pictured: Theater of the Word programming director, Sid the Christmas Elf, planning Theater of the Word's televised Christmas schedule

My actress Maria Romine, who knows these things, tells me that some of the Christmas-themed programming from Theater of the Word Incorporated will air on EWTN this Advent and Christmas season.

Our episode A MORNING STAR CHRISTMAS will air on EWTN on the following dates and times ...

Tuesday, December 20 at 5:30 pm Eastern / 4:30 Central Wednesday, December 21 at 11:00 pm Eastern / 10:00 pm Central Saturday, December 24 at 4:00 am Eastern / 3:00 am Central Tuesday, December 27 at 5:00 am Eastern / 4:00 am Central

Here's a link to a clip from that episode starring me and Frank Zito

http://www.thewordinc.org/msx.htm

And then Chesterton's THE SURPRISE, in which I play the romantic lead (what else?), and which is a delightful play that's kind of a Christmas story (it's a fairy tale inspired by the Incarnation), airs on the following dates and times ...

Sunday, December 18 at 8:00 pm Eastern / 7:00 pm Central Friday, December 23 at 1:00 pm Eastern / Noon Central Monday, December 26 at 2:00 am Eastern / 1:00 am Central

And may we all have a blessed Advent and Christmas season!

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November 25th, 2011Celebrate Fiction! Second Annual Catholic Arts & Letters Awardby Joseph Pearce

Indianapolis, IN—The Catholic Writers Guild, an organization founded to promote and nurture Catholic writers and their work, is gearing up for the second annual Catholic Arts and Letters Award (CALA) for Fiction.

The CALA for Fiction is awarded to authors of works of fiction in which judges find exemplary literary merit. All submissions must first be awarded the Catholic Writers Guild's Seal of Approval, a process by which books are reviewed by a Catholic panel to certify that content does not disregard Catholic doctrine.

"The Guild's mission is to lift up Catholic writers," says CWG President Ann Margaret Lewis. "It hopes to encourage them and embolden them to create great art and compete in the world of ideas. This award recognizes well-written fiction that does just that."

At last year's CMN, the CWG awarded the first CALA for fiction in two categories. In the children's fiction category, Regina Doman was awarded for her young adult novel, Alex O'Donnell and the 40 Cyberthieves by Regina Doman. In adult fiction, it was awarded to Michelle Buckman for her novel, Rachel's Contrition.

"It was a great privilege to be the recipient of the first CALA for fiction," says Michelle Buckman, "especially given the high caliber of the other submissions. My hope is that this award is bringing attention to the availability of great Catholic novels. I encourage all writers to submit entries, and all readers to check out the growing list of Catholic fiction listed on the Catholic Writers Guild website."

Regina Doman was equally thrilled to be awarded the CALA in the Children's division.

"Catholic fiction for children and young adults provides entertainment that also reveals faith at work in our lives, and this award will hopefully make more people aware of all the great books available. I am grateful and honored to be the first to receive this award."

The deadline for 2011 book submissions is January 31, 2012. Details can be found at the CWG website—www.catholicwritersguild.com.

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November 25th, 2011Good Sense on Oxfordian Nonsenseby Joseph Pearce

Continuing our ongoing lampooning of the Hollywood film, Anonymous, and the crackpot Oxfordian theory about the authorship of Shakespeare’s play that was its banal and inane inspiration, here’s an excellent rhetorical demolition of the Oxfordian hypothesis by David Bentley Hart in First Things: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/11/mediocrityrsquos-tribute

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November 25th, 2011Pondering Paganism and Islamby Joseph Pearce

A friend and I have been discussing the similarities between the Greek law of xenia and the Christian understanding of charity. In his most recent e-mail he also appended an interesting comment about a liberal and anti-Christian acquaintance of his who “has the 'ethnomasochistic' tendency to decry everything Christian or even Western while apologizing for anything non-Western and especially Islamic”. Here’s my response:

My comment about xenia is rooted in my own reading of the Greek classics and my annual teaching of them. I am, however, not an expert. I root my overall philosophy of comparative literature on an understanding of the unity of Man, which is present in the literary criticism of Tolkien, Lewis and Chesterton. I would recommend Louis Markos’ From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics, which I have read, and William F. Lynch’s Christ and Apollo: The Dimension of the Literary Imagination, which I haven’t. I also draw your attention to the review on page 39 of the latest issue of StAR on Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretations of Ancient Greek Texts by Marie Cabaud Meaney, a book we should both make a point of reading, I suggest.

I’m afraid that I can’t help on the subject of Islam, except that I can’t fathom how ethno-masochistic liberals can admire such a “homophobic” xenophobic religion, except of course that they admire anyone or anything that hates Christendom.

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November 22nd, 2011“In Defense of Sanity”by Joseph Pearce

I recently received the following email from Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society:

Good Chestertonians, one and all!

There are certain books by G.K. Chesterton that are simply essential. We have added another one to that list.

IN DEFENSE OF SANITY: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton is now available.

Even those who love Chesterton very much forget that he is first and foremost an essayist. His detective stories, his epic poems, his books on philosophy, religion, and society are all important, but they represent only a fraction of what he wrote. The problem, of course, is where do you begin reading five thousand essays?

Begin here.

I had the daunting but delightful task - along with Joseph Pearce and Aidan Mackey - of selecting the 67 essays for this collection.  We strove to present the master essayist at his craft, showing his amazing grasp on any subject he touches from cheese to gargoyles to the advantages of having one leg. Along the way, we get a look at mysticism, architecture, and dreams.

The difference between stained glass windows and fireworks. And even the difference between the two sexes, and why that difference might even be considered important. And then are skeletons, Jane Austen, islands, Prohibition, and rotten apples. Every object is an object lesson. Every little truth points to a very big truth.

From Chesterton's earliest essays to his last, he was a consistent, comprehensive, and complete thinker who seems more relevant today than when he first penned these essays a century ago. You will be inspired, entertained, and informed. And astonished.

I urge you to get a copy, and give a copy.

Visit our store to purchase In Defense of Sanity online or call us at 1-800-343-2425 to place an order by phone.

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