Tuesday, November 24, 2009

We've Come a Long Way, Baby

Yesterday on CNN, Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J. and Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J. debated whether pro-abortion politicians should receive Holy Communion.  Fr. Pacwa is against Communion for pro-aborts; Fr. Reese thinks otherwise.

How did we ever get to the point where two Jesuits could lock horns on this painfully obvious issue?

8 comments:

  1. Um, because Fr. Pacwa doesn't realize he's a Jesuit? Here's hopin he never learns.

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  2. Good point! I've only know Jesuits to be devout and orthodox as well as obedient and entirely devoted to the Gospel. ... wait....I'm not from the late 1500s....that's when Jesuits used to say things like this:


    "Be it known to you that we have made a league -- all the Jesuits (then the heroes of Catholicism) in the world -- cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: so it must be restored."

    St Edmund Campion

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  3. Fr. Pacwa is a rare breed.

    One of the most disheartening things in the last 40+ years has been the radicalization of the Jesuits. One would think, given their long and rigorous intellectual/spiritual training, that most would not have been suckered in by such obvious pseudo-intellectual fallacies as liberation theology (the inherent Marxism is obvious, even an idiot like me can see that).

    In the past - the works that they did were incredible... the teaching, the scientific research, the brilliant defense of the Holy Faith, etc. Up here in Canada there is a popular martyrs shrine for those expeditionary Jesuits who came to Canada in the 1600s, for the purposes of converting the pagans. They are holy martyrs because they were literally skinned alive by the Iroquois Indians.

    But all this is gone, long gone, way long gone. All we are mostly left with is the crap that one can read in America magazine.

    Not only is this contemporary situation with the Jesuits disheartening. It is also enraging. I pray to Our Lord that this once great order may return to its former glory and decimate the ideological Huns of today.

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  4. Thing is, it really wasn't all that long ago that Jesuits were authentic heroes. Just look at Willie Doyle, S.J., the "Trench Priest" of World War I, whose fondest wish (granted on August 17, 1917) was to die a Jesuit martyr.

    (Fr. Doyle's biography, incidentally, is available online in several formats -- the PDF is 32 MB.)

    http://www.archive.org/stream/fatherwilliamdoy00orahuoft/fatherwilliamdoy00orahuoft_djvu.txt

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  5. P.S. When TH2 said "decimate" - he meant that in a ideational-spiritual sense, not in a violent one. "Distinction", Anita...

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  6. Will take a gander at Fr. Doyle's bio. Also, I did check out Twain's essay on German upon your recommendation. Very interesting. Thanks.

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  7. Look at the bright side -- and there is a bright side -- at least there is one Jesuit left to publicly take on and attempt to correct his misguided brother! And somebody on CNN actually called Fr. Pacwa to come to debate the issue? WOW!! Frankly, I'm shocked it happened -- and delighted. There is hope!

    And there are a number of new young Jesuits, as I understand it, coming into the ranks who love their faith and are loyal to the Church of Rome. As for Reese, he's always enjoyed being invited to the Georgetown cool crowd cocktail parties as the "acceptable" Catholic. I went to a Jesuit university in California (University of San Francisco) where I studied under Father Fessio and several other wonderful Jesuits. The rest of them were, to be blunt, fruitcakes and freaks who there because the Jesuits provided a nice house, a stipend and the chance to live in San Francisco. So many of them are gone now -- they've left the order like a sickness finally leaving the body. The desperately need our prayers (remember - a lot these guys did not start out on the wrong track but got seriously screwed up (and preyed upon) in seminary. The church is being reborn before out eyes and the Reese's of the world are receding.

    And Fr. Fessio and the St. Ignatius Institute at USF and the Ignatius Press have kept the flame of the Jesuit spirit alive and pure. Go get `em Father Pacwa! And thanks for giving Father Reese a chance to take his moth eaten collar out of the closet and give it a little use...

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