...the key to the last 500 (or 700) years of the history of mankind has been its apostasy, its slow but steady turning away from God, in particular from his divine Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. This eliminating of the true Messiah has left in men's lives an enormous gap to be filled, a gap unknown before the Incarnation. Hence a variety of false messianisms in modern times.
Communism is an outstanding example. It is the messianism of materialism. For it may be just as materialistic as the bourgeois society it seeks to destroy, even more so; and it certainly has nothing better with which to replace the residual human values of that society. Yet Communists are driven by a quasi-messianic urge to create their horrible new world. It is as though they are saying, "Better no god than your false hypocritical 'God'!" And to the extent that the God of the bourgeoisie is a false god, the Communist messianism rejecting it is not false. In this respect Communists may at least be credited with a messianic dimension. Similarly in the scream of protest of Rock musicians there is something just, however negative their protest proves finally to be.
Now Art, Literature, History, Culture, Music, each of them with a capital letter, are all worshipped as substitute religions by modern devotees who, because they have no present religion, pump up these by-products of true religion in the past to take its place. Hence the Dadaists' refusal of "Art", and their "re-definition" of art. "What is your Art?" they ask. "It is our godless god", say the Art-worshippers. "Your godless god is a urinal!" snorts Dada.
-- Bishop Williamson
2008-04-12
Documenting Distress
2008-04-09
England
More than in Faith's pure fame!
Oh. trust not crafty fort nor rock renowned
Earned upon hostile ground;
Wielding Trade's master-keys, at thy proud will
To lock or loose its waters, England! trust not still.
Dread thine own power! Since haughty Babel's prime,
High towers have been man's crime.
Since her hoar age, when the huge moat lay bare,
Strongholds have been man's snare.
Thy nest is in the crags; ah, refuge frail!
Mad counsel in its hour, or traitors, will prevail.
He who scanned Sodom for His righteous men
Still spares thee for thy ten;
But, should vain tongues the Bride of Heaven defy,
He will not pass thee by;
For, as earth's kings welcome their spotless guest,
So gives He them by turn, to suffer or be blest.
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
(from Catholic Church Conservation)
2008-03-16
Enough!
"At the end of this solemn Celebration, in which we have meditated upon the Passion of Christ, I wish to remember the late Archbishop of Mosul of the Chaldeans, Paulos Faraj Rahho, who died tragically a few days ago. His beautiful testimony of faithfulness to Christ, to the Church, and to his people, whom he had not wanted to leave, despite numerous threats, prompts me to raise a strong and heartfelt cry: enough with the bloodshed, enough with the violence, enough with the hatred in Iraq!Benedict XVI - Angelus (March 16, 2008)
2008-02-28
A Fifth of the Good Stuff
Mike Aquilina - on his The Way of the Fathers blog - today offers us a translation of the fifth and concluding part of Pope Benedict's weekly meditations on St Augustine. (Apparently, in Rome, "there were so many pilgrims that the overflow had to be gathered into St. Peter's!") As always with this great pastor and theologian, there is much of an inspirational nature to consider:
Today I would like to conclude my presentation of St. Augustine. After having dwelt on his life, his works, and some aspects of his thought, I wish to go back today to his interior life which made him one of the greatest converts in Christian history.
To this interior experience, I particularly devoted my reflections during the pilgrimage I made to Pavia last year to venerate the mortal remains of this Father of the Church. I wanted to express the homage of the entire Catholic Church but also to show my personal devotion and acknowledgment of a figure to whom I feel very much connected for the part that he has played in my life as a theologian, priest and pastor.
Even today we can retrace the experiences of St. Augustine, thanks above all to his Confessions, written in praise of God and which originated one of the most specific literary forms of the West, the autobiography, that is, a personal expression of one's consciousness about oneself.
Whoever reads this extraordinary and fascinating book, which is still widely read today, will easily realize that Augustine's conversion was neither sudden nor fully realized immediately, but that it could be better defined as a true and proper journey, which remains a model for each of us.
This itinerary certainly culminated in his conversion and baptism, but it did not end on that Easter Vigil of 387 when the African rhetorician was baptized by Bishop Ambrose in Milan.
Augustine's journey of conversion, in fact, continued humbly until the end of his life, so that one can say that its various stages - one can easily distinguish three - made up a unique act of conversion.
St. Augustine was a passionate searcher for the truth - he was from the very beginning and all his life. The first stage of his journey of conversion was his progressively coming close to Christianity. Actually, he received a Christian education from his mother Monica, to whom he was always closely linked, and although he led an undisciplined life in his youth, he always felt a profound attraction to Christ, having drunk love for the name of the Lord with his mother's milk, as he himself underscored (cfr Confessiones, III, 4, 8).
But philosophy, too, especially Platonic, contributed to bring him closer to Christ by showing him the existence of the Logos, creative reason. The philosophers' books showed him that there was Reason, from which the whole world sprung, but they did not tell him how to reach this Logos which seemed so remote.
Only reading about the faith of the Catholic Church in St. Paul's letters revealed the truth fully to him. This experience was synthesized by Augustine in one of the most famous pages of the Confessions: He recounts that, in the torment of his reflections, he retired to a garden, where suddenly he heard a child's voice which repeated to him a lullaby he had never heard before, "Tolle, legge, tolle, legge" (Take and read, take and read) (VIII, 20,29).
He then remembered the conversion of St. Anthony Abbot, the father of monasticism, and with great urgency, he turned to the Pauline epistolary which he had in his hands earlier, opened it, and his glance fell on the passage from the Letter to the Romans where the Apostle exhorts the Romans to abandon the ways of the flesh and "put on the Lord Jesus Christ" (13, 13-14).
He understood that at that moment, those words were addressed to him, that it came from God through the Apostle, and showed him what to do right then. Thus, he felt the shadows of doubt dissolve and he found himself finally free to give himself completely to Christ: "You converted my being to you", he commented (Confessiones, VIII, 12,30). This was his first and decisive conversion.
The African rhetorician reached this fundamental stage of his long journey, thanks to his passion for man and for the truth, a passion which brought him to look for God, great and seemingly inaccessible. Faith in Christ made him understand that God, apparently so remote, was really not. In fact, that he had made himself close to us by becoming one of us.
In this sense, faith in Christ fulfilled Augustine's long search along the path of truth. Only a God who made himself "tangible", one of us, was a God to whom one could pray, for whom and with whom one could live. But it is a way to follow with courage as well as humility, opening us to a permanent purification of which each of us is always in need.
With that Easter Vigil Baptism of 387, as we said earlier, Augustine's journey was not done. He returned to Africa where he retired with a few friends to dedicate themselves to a life of contemplation and study. This was the dream of his life. He was called to live totally for the truth, with the truth, in friendship with Christ who is the Truth.
It was a beautiful dream that lasted three years, until when, against his wishes, he was consecrated a priest in Hippo, destined to serve the faithful, continuing to live with Christ and for Christ, but in the service of all.
This was very difficult for him, but he understood from the beginning that only by living for others, and not only for his private gratification, could he really live with Christ and for Christ. Thus, renouncing a life of pure meditation, Augustine learned, often with difficulty, to offer the fruit of his intelligence for the benefit of others.
He learned to communicate his faith to simple people, and living that way in what became his city, he carried out tirelessly a generous and onerous service that he described in these words in one of his beautiful sermons: "To preach continuously, discuss, reiterate, edify, be at the disposal of everyone - it is an enormous responsibility, a great weight, an immense effort" (Serm. 339,4).
But he took this weight on himself, understanding that this way, he was closest to Christ. To understand that one reaches others with simplicity and humility was his true and second conversion.
But there is a third stage in the Augustinian journey, a third conversion: that which brought him every day of his life to ask God's forgiveness. Initially, he had thought that once he was baptized - in a life of communion with Christ, in the Sacraments, in the celebration of the Eucharist - he would attain the life proposed in the Sermon on the Mount: the perfection given in Baptism and reconfirmed in the Eucharist.
In the latter part of his life, he understood that what he had said in his first preachings about the Sermon on the Mount - that is, that we Christians would thereafter live that ideal permanently - was wrong. That only Christ himself was the true and complete realization of the Sermon on the Mount.
We are all always in need of being "washed" by Christ, who washes our feet, and to be renewed by him. We need permanent continuing conversion. Up to the end we need the humility to recognize that we are sinners on a journey, until the Lord gives us his hand conclusively and introduces us to eternal life. In such an attitude of humility, lived day after day, Augustine died.
This attitude of profound humility before the one Lord Jesus introduced him also to the experience of intellectual humility. Augustine, in fact, who is one of the greatest figures in the history of ideas, wished during his final years to place all his numerous works under lucid critical examination.
That was the origin of Retractiones (Revisions) which, in this way, placed his theological thinking, which was truly great, within the humble and holy faith of what he called simply with the name Catholic, that is, the Church.
"I understood," he wrote in this very original book (I, 19,1-3), "that only one is truly perfect, and that the words of the Sermon on the Mount are completely realized only in one - in Jesus Christ himself. The whole Church, instead - all of us, including the Apostles - must pray every day: forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."
Converted to Christ, who is truth and love, Augustine followed him the rest of his life and has become a model for every human being, for all of us in search of God.
That is why I wished to conclude my pilgrimage to Pavia by symbolically offering to the Church and to the world, at the tomb of this great lover of God, my first encyclical, Deus caritas est.
In fact, the encyclical owes a great deal, especially in the first part, to the thought of St. Augustine. Even today, as in his time, mankind needs to recognize, and above all, to live, this fundamental reality: God is love, and the encounter with him is the only response to the anxieties of the human heart. A heart that is inhabited by hope, perhaps still obscure and even unconscious in many of our contemporaries, but which for us Christians, already opens the future, such that St. Paul wrote, "in hope we are saved" (Rom 8,24).
I dedicated my second encyclical, Spe salvi, to hope, and even that owes a great deal to Augustine's thoughts and his encounter with God.
In a very beautiful text, Augustine defined prayer as the expression of desire, and stated that God responds by opening up our hearts to him. On our part, we should purify our desires and our hopes in order to receive the kindness of God (cfr In I Ioannis, 4, 6). Only this, in fact, opening us up to others, saves us.
Let us pray therefore that in our life we may be granted to follow everyday the example of this great convert, encountering like him, in every moment of our life, the Lord Jesus, the only one who saves us, purifies us, and gives us true joy and true life.
2008-02-22
Quote of the Day - Fulton J. Sheen
"One way to make enemies and antagonize people is to challenge the spirit of the world. The world has a spirit, as each age has a spirit. There are certain unanalyzed assumptions which govern the conduct of the world. Anyone who challenges these worldly maxims, such as, 'you only live once,' 'get as much out of life as you can,' 'who will ever know about it?' 'what is sex for if not for pleasure?' is bound to make himself unpopular...
"To marry one age is to be a widow in the next. Because [Jesus Christ] suited no age, He was the model for all ages."
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ
2008-02-17
About the Benedictines
2008-02-09
The Justice - and Mercy - of God
We all desire a fair world. But we cannot repair all the destructions of the past, all the people unjustly tormented and killed. Only God himself can create justice, which must be justice for all, even for the dead. And, as Adorno, a great Marxist, says, only the resurrection of the flesh, which he considers unreal, could create justice.
We believe in this resurrection of the flesh, in which not all will be equal. It is common to think today: whatever is sin, God is magnificent, he knows us, therefore sin does not matter, in the end God will be nice with everyone. It is a beautiful hope. Yet, there is justice, and there is true guilt. Those who have destroyed man and earth cannot suddenly sit beside their victims at the table of God. God creates justice. We must have this present.
It seemed thus important for me to write also this text [Spe Salvi] on purgatory, which for me is such an obvious truth, so clear and also so necessary and consoling that is cannot be forgotten. I tried to say: perhaps there are not so many who have destroyed themselves thus, who are forever incurable, who do not have any element left upon which the love of God may rest, who do not have in themselves a minimum capacity for loving. This would be hell.
On the other hand, they are certainly few - or at least not many - those who are so pure as to be able to immediately enter in the communion with God. Very many of us hope that there be something curable in us, that there be a final desire to serve God and to serve men, of living according to God. But there are so many wounds, so much filth. We have the need of being ready, of being purified. This is our hope: even with so much filth in our souls, in the end the Lord gives us the possibility, cleanses us finally with his goodness which comes from his cross. He thus renders us capable of being forever with him. And therefore heaven is hope, it is justice finally realized. And he gives us also the criteria for living so that this [present] time may also be, in a certain way, heaven, a first light of heaven.
Wherever men live according to these criteria, a speck of heaven appears in the world, and this is visible. It seems to me also an evidence of the truth of faith, of the need to follow the way of the commandments, of which we should speak more often. They are truly road signs and show us how to live well, how to choose life. Therefore, we must also speak of sin and of the sacrament of forgiveness and reconciliation. A sincere man knows that he is guilty, that he should start anew, that he should be purified. And this is the wonderful reality which the Lord offers us: there is a possibility for renewal, of being new. The Lord starts anew with us and we can thus start anew also with the others in our life.
2008-02-08
What means this word Catholic?
An interesting perspective - and one with which [I think] I largely agree - from Father Robert Hart (a "traditional" Anglican priest in Australia) at The Anglican Continuum:
"Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance." - Opening of the Athanasian Creed
"I believe in the Holy Ghost: The holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins: The Resurrection of the body: And the Life everlasting. Amen." - From the Apostle's Creed "And I believe one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church." - From the Creed called Nicene (i.e. Nicene-Constantinopolitan). From the usage of the word "Catholic" in ancient times we see that it speaks, above all, of the Church and of the Faith of that Church (namely, its doctrine). This word is used by everybody in Christianity, and is the property of no one denomination. The churches under the Pope, the Roman Catholic and the Byzantine (Eastern Rite) Catholic Churches, have been associated with this word in a denominational sense, which causes some confusion. It leads to the bad argument of Cardinal Newman, that if, in any town you asked to be taken to the Catholic Church, you would be taken to the Roman Catholic Church, which makes it, alone, the real thing. Actually, it means the cab driver reads the signs on the front of church buildings, and it proves only that he is literate, at least to that degree. Beyond that, it proves nothing. It offends some Roman Catholics that others, Anglicans, the Orthodox, the Polish National Catholic Church, sometimes even the Byzantine Catholic Churches, openly use the word "Catholic" as their own property. But, the use of this word by others is not intended as a gesture of disrespect for Roman Catholics, and neither is it used to seduce the naive of their flock into a wolf's lair- the old "bait and switch." It is, rather, respect for what we know ourselves to be, and for what we believe and teach (and the capital "C" is used in the Book of Common Prayer because, by usage, "Catholic" is a name of the Church. We need not use the lower case). We believe in the Catholic Church, and furthermore, we believe the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church (i.e. we believe what it teaches and the Truth to which it testifies). Each of us says these words in the first person: "I believe." This is not a denominational word, but a credal word. It is a word that exists in the persuasion of the mind, the depth of the heart and the power of conscience. It is theological, not cultural. And, as each person says it liturgically, by the rule of Lex Orandi Lex Credendi, each one rightly takes it as his own. We do not say we believe it as someone else's property, removed from us. We do not claim to believe a church that we do not belong to. We do not confess a Faith that we cannot own. We intend no offense or disrespect, and certainly no deception; but, we will not give up this word or what it means, for it belongs to us just as surely as Christ himself is our Lord. When we speak of branches of the Church, we do not intend even so much as to imply, let alone assert, that outward and apparent division among God's people is the plan and purpose of God. It is not of the nature of the Church that it exists in divided branches, rather it is symptomatic of the current state of all mankind this side of our promised immortality. Partly, divisions are due to the sin and foolishness of fallen man, and the problem of division was addressed long ago by St. Paul, writing to the Church in Corinth.
"For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you. Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ" (I Corinthians 1:11, 12). He did not say, "the true Church among you are those who say 'I am of Cephas.' " Neither did he say, "the true Church among you are both those who say 'I am of Cephas' and 'I am of Paul'- the double foundation o' foolish Corinthians." Even those who saw themselves as separate because they were better than the others, those who said "I am of Christ," were rebuked by the Apostle for their divisiveness. Paul attributed all of this to childishness and carnality (I Corinthians 3:3, 4). The idea that these divisions were God's plan, or that one party should be favored as right, and the others condemned as wrong, was not considered by the Apostle. Nor would he consider it today.
But, current divisions into which the Church has been driven are historical, not the fault of anyone living, and they are beyond the power of anyone simply to remedy (therefore I said "partly" above). The Anglican view is that both Rome and Orthodoxy are the One True Church, and so are we. In fact, we agree with The Catechism of the Catholic Church where it says that everyone who is baptized belongs to the Church (I Corinthians 12:13). Division is not the plan of God, but he has provided what is needed for the salvation of each soul through the Church, nonetheless. Furthermore, the divisions exist even among members of the same Communions. In the United States each major city has Orthodox Churches of various jurisdictions, answering to different bishops under different Patriarchates. And, before anyone begins to crow triumphantly, let it be remembered that in addition to the Roman (as in Latin Rite) Catholic bishop, in any given city we find any number of Byzantine Catholic bishops (and often feelings of strife exist between the Byzantine Catholics and the Latin Rite, or Roman, Catholics). Nonetheless, people in these outwardly divided bodies, none of whom created this work of history, are part of the Body of Christ and belong to one Church. The Church Militant is visible, and, for the present, visibly divided.
Common Property
It was never possible, really, for the Gospel to be preached in all nations without the Church having within it differences of culture and language. Therefore, unity has had obstacles, some of them very sad. The division of the Coptic Christians from the rest of the Church as early as the Council of Chalcedon was not about real heresy, but about perceived heresy due to a simple, or rather complicated, misunderstanding of the Greek word, ὑπόστᾰσις (hypostasis). Differences of culture have also caused problems of misunderstanding. But, for the most part, the Church was unified for a thousand years, and only in recent decades (beginning in the 1960s) have the ancient Patriarchates of Rome and Constantinople approached each other in charity with a view to reconciliation. But, they remain divided.Our common property, nonetheless, is the Apostolic Succession, both as an unbroken line of orthodox teaching, and as a sacramental link through our bishops to the Apostles and the Incarnate Christ, the Risen Christ Who breathed on them the Holy Spirit. This is the Tradition that includes all of our Scriptures with the key that unlocks their true meaning, the gift of the Holy Spirit. Our fathers died and were imprisoned during the persecution by the Empire, and they fought for the Faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) by defending and clarifying that Faith, seen most obviously in the Ecumenical Councils. They preached in times and places of peril to pagans of many tongues and strange customs, overcame opposition, and established the Church of Christ in many lands where demonic spirits demanded sacrifice to false gods, tearing down those shrines to build new holy places for the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments.
The mark of the Holy Spirit is the revelation of Jesus Christ that we find as their collective teaching, and the Gospel that was the testimony of the Apostles and other martyred eyewitnesses. The teaching has its universal and complete uniformity of meaning because of the Holy Spirit, who creates unity of mind that cuts through all the chaos of human fallenness, across times and across continents. This is "what has been believed always, everywhere and by all" clearly and obviously in a way that defies the apparent disunity of temporary polities.
This is what we mean by "the Catholic Church" and "the Catholic Faith." It is our common possession.
2008-01-28
1984 Attracts
Interesting - and, as per usual, thought-provoking if not outright inflammatory (esp. re: 9/11!?!) - commentary today from Dinoscopus:
Eleison Comments XXIXWhen in a small publication of the Society of St. Pius X in England -- circulation about 500 -- an article recently appeared describing the police-state fast closing in on Great Britain, the British authorities complained to SSPX headquarters in Switzerland! It gives one to reflect....
As people have today less and less religion, so they have less and less reason to control themselves. If I believe neither in God nor in any moral law, nor in any afterlife eternally rewarding or punishing my observance or non-observance of that law, why should I put any brake upon satisfying my selfish desires in this life? But a society of such egoists must turn into a jungle of human beasts devouring one another.
Therefore where the people have neither faith nor internal self-discipline, they must welcome any external discipline enabling their society to survive, e.g. (or i.e.) a police-state. As seminaries close, so prisons must open. Today, prisons can hardly be built fast enough.
Now in any such dissociety of course there will be villains fabricating reasons to impose and extend the police-state for their own nefarious purposes. 9/11 is a classic example. However, even in the case of 9/11 there might have been amongst the authorities some honest men who said, "Lies and fabrications are nasty, but how else can one govern a modern population ?" Alas, they would have had a point!
So the police-state may be a bad substitute for godliness, but where the people are godless, such a State may appear to be the only way to hold a society together, and whoever opposes it will then appear to be anti-social. In this respect the defenders of modern police-states may mean well, and not deserve blame. However, let them have no part in tomorrow's persecution of Christians towards which today's police-states are being steered! The Catholic Faith upheld by the SSPX is not in fact their problem, but it is of their real problem the true solution.
Bishop Richard Williamson Paris, France
2008-01-27
Ave verum corpus
Ave verum corpus natum de Maria Virgine Vere passum, immolatum in cruce pro homine Cuius latus perforatum unda fluxit sanguine Esto nobis praegustatum mortis in examine O Jesu dulcis, o Jesu pie, o Jesu fili Mariae
(Thanks to The Anchoress.)
