Coincidence?

On March 22, 1970, Palm Sunday, the Novus Ordo Missae was first permitted to be used in these United States.  (It did not become mandatory until the First Sunday of Advent, 1971.)

On March 22, 2020, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the public celebration of the Novus Ordo Missae is effectively almost entirely suppressed in these U.S.A., and in much of the rest of the world, as we labor under what one priest has aptly described as God’s Interdict.

It appears that the only public Masses now being offered are the traditional Latin Masses offered by the Society of St. Pius X (at least where they are not prevented by the civil authorities).  Although the Society has less than 700 priests worldwide, it has actually increased the number of Masses in order to have fewer people attend each one.

Notice also that the Fourth Sunday of Lent is Laetare Sunday, the midpoint of Lent, when special signs of joy are permitted in the liturgy to encourage the faithful in their Lenten penance.

So, on Palm Sunday, when the Church commemorates Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem in order to undergo His Passion, she entered into the eclipse of the traditional Mass and the rise of the New Mass, in which she would become all but unrecognizable.  Exactly 50 years later, the public celebration of the new Mass is all but completely shut down, leaving only the public celebration of the traditional Mass.

Coincidence?

According to St. Padre Pio, with Divine Providence there is no coincidence.

What Does It Mean?

Masses all over the world are becoming scarce.  Dozens of dioceses all over these United States are suspending public Masses.  Just yesterday afternoon came the announcement that public Masses in the Diocese of Boise are suspended, at least through Palm Sunday (though the Cathedral parish is vastly increasing the availability of confession and Eucharistic adoration).  A few dioceses are taking the intermediate approach of carrying on with public Masses but dispensing the faithful from the Sunday obligation, or at least dispensing certain categories of people from the obligation.  The Society of St. Pius X is more or less following this middle course, though they intend to add Masses in places where their chapels are full, so that fewer people will attend each Mass.

I can only give my own, non-authoritative opinion as to what this all means.  I think it means there is an immense lack of faith and a failure to see this crisis in a supernatural light.  Some bishops in Italy, where hundreds are dying every day, have actually come out and denied even the possibility that this plague is a scourge of divine chastisement calling for repentance, conversion and propitiation.  Even some good priests say they think this is not a chastisement, despite obviously recognizing the many reasons why we so richly deserve a chastisement.  A time like this calls for an increase, not a decrease, in reception of the Sacraments and in offerings of the Propitiating Sacrifice.

Yet God, without Whose consent nothing happens, is permitting the shutting down of the Sacrifice and the restricting of access to the Sacraments even during a pandemic.  This, frankly, is a chastisement in itself, and one that I think is even more frightening than the coronavirus itself and rightly described as apocalyptic.  We should ask ourselves why God would strip us of the Mass and in some cases the Sacraments in a time of contagion.  I fear that one answer may be that, so far from propitiating God, we have actually been making the occasion of our worship a means of aggravating our guilt.

Are our hearts far away from Him, even while we honor Him with our lips?  There seems little enough to distinguish us from non-Catholics.  The Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm, says that, according to a 2011 study, 98% of Catholic women have used contraceptives at some point; 87% were currently using contraceptives; and 89% of Catholic women who have never married have had sex.  The Church has never changed her teaching on contraceptives or sex outside of marriage.  According to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, a quarter of Catholics have been divorced; 44% have lived in concubinage; 62% favor Communion for those who have divorced and remarried without an annulment.  Even our own clergy, up to the highest levels of the Church, have been outspoken proponents of Communion for the divorced and remarried, which the Church has never endorsed and cannot endorse.  A 2019 Pew study found that only 31% of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Most of these do not know the Church’s doctrine of transubstantiation; but 22% of Catholics do know it but reject it.  Is God putting the kibosh on countless multitudes of unworthy and sacrilegious Communions?

What about general irreverence in church?  The noise levels inside a Catholic church surpass anything that went on even during the crazy seventies, when all sorts of excesses ran riot in the liturgy.  The last time I was present at a priestly ordination in my diocese, several years ago, people were literally whooping and yelling inside the cathedral, during the Mass, as if they were at a football game.  No one corrected them.  (Now I come to think of it, we have had very, very few priestly ordinations in this diocese since then.)  Many of us, who do not have the excuse of having just come in from hard and unavoidable labor, appear at Mass dirty and smelly, dressed like slobs, or dressed immodestly.  Maybe God got tired of looking at tramp stamps and butt cracks and cleavage and flip flops inside His house, and smelling B.O. and listening to inane sports conversations in front of the tabernacle, and tossed us out until we have straightened up.  Wouldn’t we throw people out of our houses who came over only to behave disrespectfully and ignore us?

Also on ice are bound to be a great many Masses offered by perverted and corrupt priests and bishops, such as those who, to our shame, have been exposed in recent years, and by priests who preach errors and heresies from the pulpit.  Yes, as St. Thomas More explains in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, a bad priest does not make for an invalid Mass; but nevertheless, he also argues that it would be better to have fewer Masses than more Masses offered by bad priests.  “For though God of His goodness, however bad the priest may be, well accepts the oblation of Christ’s holy Body for the sake of other folk,” says Thomas, “He yet is highly displeased with that priest’s presumption.  And we ought never to seek our own well-being with our neighbor’s harm.  And we should, as a duty to God, rather forgo the profit that we ourselves might attain by a Mass than see His Majesty disreverenced by the bold presumption of such an odious minister as He has forbidden to come around Him.”  It is worth reflecting on what the effect is in the diocese when an evil priest is uncovered and brought to light.  Do we collectively, as a local church, put on sackcloth and ashes and try to make reparation and do justice?  Or is it business as usual?

And then there is the Mass itself, as celebrated in so many places.  We quite fail, on a constant and ongoing basis, to offer to God the best that we have.  We replace Latin with the vernacular; we replace chant with guitars and tambourines, badly played; we replace polyphony with Broadway show tunes and campfire ditties.  Consider the following from a paean to ourselves, often trotted out during Lent, in which God only gets a couple of passing mentions:

We reach out to those who are homeless/To those who live without warmth/In the coolness of evening we’ll shelter their dreams/We will clothe them in mercy and peace.

What does this morass even mean?  And then there is the gender ideology injected into the Palm Sunday Gospel reading of the Passion, where the liberal liturgists assign all the male lines to female readers, while a multitude of able-bodied men stand around mute.  Whom do we seek to please by this gender-bending?  Is God pleased?

I am among those who think depriving us of the Mass and shrinking the visibility of the Church in a time of pestilence is a failure on the part of the bishops, and the result of our experiment in bringing the Church into line with the modern world.  But whatever guilt bishops may or may not incur in this is swallowed up by the realization that none of this could have happened without the permission of Almighty God.  God has allowed this to happen for a reason.

God loves us infinitely, as though each of us were the only person who ever existed, and He sent His Son to die to unlock the gates of heaven that were closed against us on account of sin.  But He is not required to put up with our crap.

We would have no chance of making it to heaven if He did.

The Church of Cut and Run

OR: We Could Sure Use Some Toxic Masculinity Right About Now

Six and a half years ago, in this space, I complained about the effeminacy of the Spirit-of-Vatican-II liturgy and how it is designed, not to fire us up and fortify us for battle, but to make us docile and complacent and fattened up for the slaughter.  Now, fifty-plus years into this project of mushifying the Mass, the Sacraments and doctrine, we are treated to the entirely predictable spectacle of many of our shepherds turning tail and running from the coronavirus.  The same Church that holds the divine promise to prevail even over the gates of hell itself has been taken over by hirelings and turned into the Church of Cut and Run.

The Church of Cut and Run has been ceding all kinds of territory to the devil for years.  48 years ago, William F. Buckley, Jr. commented on how difficult it was for Catholics to oppose abortion while their bishops palled around with pro-abortion legislators.  Catholic bishops have backed down and even defected to the other side on issues like contraceptives, abortion, divorce, adultery, homosexuality, “gender” ideology,  socialism, subsidiarity and the rights of parents.  The result has been a popular culture that is basically a sewer, and a society that is increasingly hostile to the rights of Catholics.  The Church of Cut and Run has proven itself to be all but useless when it comes to defending its flocks against the forces of secularism.  In an age when even good people are brought up to value creature comforts over the spiritual life, it has gotten away with this.

But now we have a new situation.  Now our creature comforts themselves are threatened.  Now we have a contagious disease going around; and we, who failed to feel the sting of God’s wrath in the many spiritual chastisements He has sent us over the years, are now starting to feel it in the threat to our bodily health.  Worse than the disease itself, from which the vast majority of patients recover, is the panicky response to the disease.  Everyday life in many places is interrupted.  Groceries and toilet paper and other supplies are hard to find amid waves of panic-buying, even though there is no evidence that these items are in short supply.  Many of us have just plain gone off our nut.

And how are the bishops responding? Many are using the pandemic as an occasion to strike down beloved traditions and guaranteed rights of the faithful, like receiving Communion on the tongue.  And many are abandoning their flocks altogether by locking up churches and depriving them of the Mass and the Sacraments.  Italy, whose bishops have effectively imposed a self-interdict, is probably the most striking example of this.  Some of these bishops are actually justifying this by pooh-poohing the idea that the pandemic is a sign of God’s wrath.

How fearless, how manly is the Spirit-of-Vatican-II Church!  Fortified by decades of insipid liturgies, solipsistic hymns and effeminate preaching, the kinder, gentler, nicer, welcoming, accompanying Spirit-of-Vatican-II shepherds head for the hills at the first sign of danger, leaving the flocks to foot it as best they can without the consolations that once were offered by the hide-bound, rigid, doctrinaire clergy and stern, habit-wearing nuns they mercifully replaced.  How fortunate we are to have now a diluted faith that no longer pricks our consciences or stirs us to zeal for God and souls.  What great stead that stands us in in the face of every danger, both spiritual and temporal!

And the coronavirus, though dangerous to certain classes of people, like the elderly or those who are already in poor health, is nevertheless not to be compared with the Black Plague, which wiped out at least a third of Europe’s population.  But what if we did get a new Black Plague?  If a relatively mild disease like coronavirus is enough to blow “pastoral accompaniment” all to hell, what would a new Black Plague do?

But for all the efforts of the Church of Cut and Run to destroy every last vestige of the evil, hate-filled, fear-mongering pre-conciliar Church, who is it that is actually stepping forward manfully to take charge of the pandemic, care for the sheep, and, above all, propitiate the wrath of God and bring about repentance and conversion?  That would seem to be the tradition-minded sector of the Church that we have been taught for so many years to execrate.  New generations of hide-bound, rigid, doctrinaire clergy and stern, habit-wearing nuns are rising up, tired of pablum and impotence in the face of spiritual dangers and itching to take the fight to the enemy.  The tradition-minded priests, many of whom have been busy training themselves up in the old rite, are offering votive Masses for deliverance from death in time of pestilence; breaking out the Rituale Romanum and putting real holy water into the hands of as many people as possible; holding Eucharistic processions; opening churches; and making sure their people have access to the Sacraments.

Meanwhile, the bongos-and-tambourines “accompaniment” crowd is nowhere to be seen on the field of battle.  To salve their spotted consciences, they don’t even acknowledge that there is a battle.  And “accompaniment” has been proven to be nothing but a weak-tea, crybaby substitute for the fearless, “toxically masculine” self-sacrifice of a true shepherd.  Have we ever been presented with a starker contrast between who in the Church packs the gear, and who doesn’t?  Have we ever been faced with clearer proof that the aftermath of the Council has been an utter disaster, and that the Barque of Peter desperately needs to change course?

And have we ever been faced with clearer proof that the liberal prelates that have bullied us for so many decades are nothing but paper tigers?  Who says they can’t be beaten?  It’s time to get our own courage up, pick up our rosaries and our Bibles, and play our part to turn the tide.

On Opinions without Credentials

There is this insidious idea making the rounds to the effect that a lack of credentials is itself a credential.  People opine boldly, vehemently and publicly on matters like theology and canon law with little to no formal training in these fields.  We see this particularly in connection with some of those who give it as their considered opinion that Benedict XVI, not Francis, is the true Pope.  Some advocates of this position acknowledge and even revel in their lack of credentials in the fields relevant to this issue.  Some even go as far as to assert that, since the evidence in support of their conclusions is so blindingly obvious, the rejection of their opinions is tantamount to heresy and blasphemy.

What is the basis for thinking that a lack of credentials is itself a credential?  There seems to be this anti-elitist elitism, a proletarian pride that turns ignorance into a virtue and education into a vice.  It assumes bad faith on the part of the educated, and on the part of educators.  It assumes that the system of acquiring credentials is hidebound, corrupt, and invested in nothing more than furthering its own interests, while the untrained commentator, unspoilt by the taint of any Establishment agenda, is able to see truths that no one inside the Establishment can see.  It allows the anti-elitist elitist to entertain the possibility — indeed, the probability — that, because they are outsiders to the field in which they pronounce judgment, they may well be God’s instruments in bringing about True Reform.  It allows the anti-elitist elitist to dismiss the disagreement of persons with actual credentials as the product of jealousy, self-interest, or a simple unwillingness to face the truth.

I have mentioned previously in this space my frustration with people who will not listen to my legal opinions or take my advice when these don’t chime with what they want to hear.  I will not impute to them the same bad faith and criminal stupidity that they impute to me, to my face and in the most hateful language; but it is clear that they are the ones who suffer from closed minds and blindness to the truth.  They are like the anti-elitist elitists, who, the more wedded they are to their theories, the less likely they are to listen to real experts who disagree with them.

It is true that sometimes God chooses persons who are not expert, educated or even very intelligent to work His purposes; but He doesn’t always.  The Fathers of the early Church were extremely learned men.  Saints Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Alphonsus Liguori, Thomas More — all exceedingly educated, and exceedingly holy.  Alphonsus Liguori and Thomas More were lawyers.  These saints all had their particular genius; but even with all their gifts, they still studied hard and diligently.  In other words, since grace builds on and perfects nature, they still had to gain their expertise the old-fashioned way: by hard work.

What about the persons without credentials that God chooses as His instruments?  There are certainly examples in the history of the Church.  Saints Catherine of Siena and Therese of Lisieux lacked academic credentials, yet today are acclaimed as Doctors of the Church.  The Cure of Ars was a failure as a student, but outstanding in holiness as a priest.  St. Bernadette Soubirous was an ignorant shepherd girl from a dirt-poor family who conveyed heaven’s ratification of the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception, even though she did not understand what it meant.  And there was never anyone less qualified to lead armies in battle than St. Joan of Arc, yet she led the French army to victory and secured the true king of France on his throne.

But notice that when God uses these little ones, He crowns their efforts with authentic signs and wonders, to prove that they really are working for Him.  Catherine of Siena wielded enormous influence for good with the Pope.  Therese of Lisieux secured her religious vocation at a very early age, against the odds.  The Cure of Ars had to spend many hours a day in the confessional because  everyone recognized him as a holy priest.  Bernadette Soubirous uncovered a spring of miraculous healing.  Joan of Arc had gifts of prophecy and discernment, led armies to victory and confounded her persecutors.  When someone without credentials or qualifications pronounces judgment on subjects  such as who is the true Pope, consider how often he has been right about other things.  One particularly outspoken proponent of the theory that Benedict XVI is still the true Pope, for example, declared that Donald Trump was only running for president in order to dress up his resume, that he wasn’t serious about running, and predicted that he would throw the election.  Then when he didn’t throw the election, she admitted that she had erred but opined that Trump was a dim bulb who was in way over his head and was on his way out.  Three years later, Trump has so successfully confounded his enemies, and has so far advanced the cause of Christian civilization in his administration, that the Democrats have launched a bogus impeachment proceeding to try to remove him from office.

There is nothing wrong with not having credentials.  But there is something wrong with making a lack of credentials into a credential of its own.  There is nothing wrong with the fact that not everyone is qualified to render judgments about everything.  But there is something wrong with not sticking to what you know when it comes to holding forth on a subject that has implications for the well-being of souls.  Credentials are not dispositive all by themselves: it is true that there are idiots out there with degrees and licenses.

But when someone declares an opinion on an important subject, credentials are relevant.  If there is some indication that someone has poured blood, toil, tears and sweat into acquiring credentials in some subject, it may be that that person’s opinion on that subject counts for more than that of someone who did not put that kind of work into it.

To Start Off the New Year: Some Facts We Can’t Deny

- Having vehemence, eloquence, passion and charisma does not mean you are right.  Adolf Hitler possessed all of those characteristics.

- Only legitimate authority can command our obedience.  We are not required to obey authority figures when they exceed the scope of their authority.  Sometimes, we even have a duty to disobey, since no one, not even the Pope, has the authority to command us to sin.

- It is a curious but undeniable fact that, by pursuing our own legitimate interests, within the bounds of the moral law, we make it possible for others to pursue theirs.  When we work to make an honest living, we create goods and services that others want and need yet lack the ability to produce efficiently on their own, and so provide them with the means of making their own honest living.  Some people are talented enough to make extra, which enables them to exercise greater than average generosity to others who cannot provide for themselves.  Everyone engaging in honest pursuits bestows on society as a whole the benefits of order, peace and tranquility — which in turn further enhance our ability to pursue our own legitimate interests.

- Where there is no private property, it is impossible for people to pursue their legitimate interests.

- The common good is greater than the good of an individual; yet it does not rule out the good of individuals.

- The purpose of the Second Amendment is, purely and simply, to prevent tyranny.  It is a mark of tyrants — whether in the government or in the conference of Catholic bishops — that they seek to disarm the populace.

- The reason we are afraid to do the right thing is because we don’t trust in God and His providence.  It’s no more complicated than that.

- Worrying about things we can’t control takes away both our energy and our motivation to deal with things we can control.  Failing to deal with the things we can control may well bring about the very results we fear when we worry about the things we can’t control.

- Jesus truly is present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, in that tiny Host that is confected on the altar in the Catholic Mass.  If you dismiss the Real Presence as medieval superstition, then consider that some of the most gifted minds mankind has ever produced over the last two thousand years have believed in it.  This side of Jesus and Mary, there has probably never been a greater intellectual than Thomas Aquinas, and he wrote some of the most beautiful paeans to the Blessed Sacrament that ever flowed from the pen of man.

- And speaking of superstition, I doubt if there was ever an epoch in human history that was less superstitious than the Middle Ages, or an epoch more superstitious than the one, still ongoing, that was ushered in by Martin Luther.

- What sign of the Zodiac you were born under has absolutely nothing to do with who you are or what your life will be like.  The Zodiac is nothing more than the stars that lie along the celestial equator, a tool for mapping out the night sky.  Your destiny is not controlled by the motions of celestial bodies.  The destruction of any one of them outside our solar system would have zero practical impact on your life.  In fact, since most of them are so far away that we are only seeing them as they looked centuries ago, it is possible that some of them do not even exist anymore.

- We currently have a bad Pope.  The evidence for this is undeniable, and it is not virtuous to try to deny what is right in front of our faces.  Yet, while the Pope is the touchstone of Christian unity, he is not, and should not be, the center of our everyday lives.  The Catholic Church is much bigger than the Pope, and not even a bad Pope can destroy her.

- Pope Francis embodies the sort of absolutism that the Church’s enemies have always falsely ascribed to the papacy itself.  Interestingly, however, these same enemies like Pope Francis and embrace him as one of their own.  This proves that it is not absolutism that they object to: in their book, in fact, anything less than absolutism in the service of their pet ideologies is treason.  What they really object to is the authentic content of the Catholic faith, so they favor Pope Francis to the extent he seems to represent a rupture from Catholicity.

- If there is a silver lining to the dark cloud of the current pontificate, it is that the enemies of the Church, both within and without, are now showing their true colors.  This is because they think that they are now having their Big Mo.  The same thing is happening, by the way, in the secular world.  President Trump is exposing the enemies of America and all the good things for which she stands by overturning the order which the entrenched political elites have set up for their own enrichment.  God is allowing all the poisons that lurk in the mud to hatch out.

I would like to close with my favorite quote from George Neumayr, a Catholic reporter who has devoted much of his career to exposing corruption within the Church:

Be as wise as serpents and gentle as doves, Jesus Christ told his disciples. In dealing with enemies, in other words, prudence is not a vice and stupidity is not a virtue. 

Francis’ Bad Emanations Do Not Mean He Is an Antipope

In these confusing times, we have to educate ourselves on our Faith.  In these times, we have particularly to educate ourselves on the scope of the Pope’s powers and prerogatives, and the limits of his authority.  It is providential that Ryan Grant, an Idaho (!) Latinist, has been busying himself with the long-overdue task of translating the works of St. Robert Bellarmine into English.  On the Roman Pontiff is a must-read for all faithful Catholics who find themselves suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous pontiffs.  We are bound to suffer even more, and needlessly, if we are laboring under misconceptions about the limits on papal authority, when the Pope can legitimately bind Catholics, and when the Pope is and is not protected by the charism of infallibility.

Taylor Marshall interviews Christopher Ferrara about the meaning of the message of Fatima for our time.  The entire interview is fascinating.  If you struggle to reconcile the errors of Pope Francis with his authenticity as Pope, then pay attention, starting at 37:28.  Here Ferrara explains why the errors of Pope Francis do not trouble him about the Church’s indefectibility, even though the current Pope’s audacity exceeds anything we have ever seen before in the history of the Church.  He explains in particular how to cope with bad teaching from the Pope, and how to distinguish teachings that are truly magisterial from those that aren’t, even if they are labeled as such.

 The key point is that God is not mocked.  He is not fooled by false labels; nor does He require us to accept false labels, even when they are applied by the Pope and his minions.  On the contrary, we are bound to reject that which is false.  Therefore, God does not put us in a Catch-22 even when He allows us to be governed by a bad Pope who purports to change doctrine.

Bring Back the Communion Rail

Thou shalt not take nor remove thy neighbor's landmark, which thy predecessors have set in thy possession, which the Lord thy God will give thee in the land that thou shalt receive to possess.

Deuteronomy 19:14

Pass not beyond the ancient bounds which thy fathers have set. 

Proverbs 22:28

Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s landmarks: and all the people shall say: Amen.  

Deuteronomy 27:17

One of the worst moves pastors and bishops made in the wake of Vatican II was to tear the Communion rails out of existing churches, and to build new churches without them.  Egalitarianism, don’t you know, dictated that there be no boundaries between the sanctuary and the rabble in the pews.  We ought not even to have to climb steps to the altar!  God should be on our level.  Everything must be flattened and horizontalized.  After all, there ought to be no barriers between us and our pal, the Man Upstairs.

But there are barriers between us and God, starting with the fact that He is the Infinite God and we are dust and ashes.  There is an infinite abyss between us and God, and only God can bridge it -- which He in fact does.  But we still have to acknowledge that we are nothing compared to Him.  Another barrier between us and God is sin.  Christ died to destroy that barrier, and Baptism removes from us the stain of original sin; but we still suffer from the effects of original sin, and we still commit personal sins.  It takes a colossal pride for us to decide to act as if we are not in fact beggars at God's doorstep, and to dictate the terms upon which we are to approach God.  

Yet that's exactly what we did after the Second Vatican Council.  We decided we were too grown-up to abase ourselves anymore before God.  Can you credit that?  After a century and a half of atheistic revolutions, two world wars, atomic bombs, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, millions of people across the world still being murdered by their own governments,  and millions of Catholics suffering under communist persecution, the need for humility and penance totally escaped us.  There we were, thinking we were Too Good to Be Lower than the Sanctuary and Kneel before God to receive Him in Holy Communion!  And Nothing is going to Keep Us Out of the Sanctuary if We Want to Go There!

But the irony is that, since most of the lay faithful do not in fact want to tramp gratuitously through the sanctuary, removing the Communion rail actually had the effect of distancing us from it.  The Communion rail is not a "barrier," but a boundary marker that shows us the point at which heaven meets earth.  The sanctuary represents heaven.  The Communion rail shows us where God comes to meet us.  How do we know where to go to meet the invisible, hidden God without a boundary marker?  The laity used to be accustomed to kneeling at the Communion rail to pray outside of Mass, so as to be as close as possible to Jesus in the tabernacle.  Now that the rails are gone, not only can we no longer kneel for Communion (with the hope of being able to get up off the floor again), we can no longer pray close to the tabernacle while keeping our proper place in the church.  Removing the Communion rail needlessly violates the sensibilities of faithful Catholics, and is thus an offense against charity.

Attacking people's faith is also an offense against charity.  It is practically impossible to view the changes to the reception of Holy Communion, including removing the rail, as anything but an attack on people's faith, especially in view of the boldness of many members of the hierarchy in our time who now openly display their lack of faith.  If the prelates responsible for these changes truly believed in the Real Presence, why would they want people to disrespect our Lord by approaching Holy Communion in a less reverent manner?  And let us not deconstruct the difference between kneeling and standing by pointing to the practice of Eastern Catholics.  We in the Latin Rite are not Eastern, and we do not receive Holy Communion in the same manner.  In the Latin Rite, kneeling is clearly more reverential than standing; and when you purport to abolish a more reverent posture in favor of a less reverent one, you are sending a message.  The message has clearly been received: now a majority of Catholics disbelieve in the Real Presence.  Incidentally, you also encourage non-Catholics to get into the Communion line, thus exposing the Sacrament to a heightened risk of profanation by people who simply do not know what to do with It.

Holy Scripture clearly anathematizes the removal of boundary markers.  We have now spent the last half-century learning the reasons.  Take away boundary markers, and you have to learn the hard way why they were there in the first place.  You also get to find out how hard, and how costly, it is to put them back.  It is high time we faced up to the difficulties of doing the right thing and accept them as a penance.

And all the people shall say: Amen.

Repost: Potuit, Decuit, ergo Fecit: Why the Immaculate Conception Must Be True

I will shew thee all good, and I will proclaim in the name of the Lord before thee: and I will have mercy on whom I will, and I will be merciful to whom it shall please me.  

Exodus 33:19

Once in a while, a comment comes along that deserves a post-length response.  Here, from a self-professed ex-Catholic turned non-denominational, is one that just came in on my post about the appalling song "Mary, Did You Know?":

Mary had to have sinned. She called Jesus "my Savior" and what is Jesus the Savior for? Sinners. She had sinned. And there is no biblical evidence for her having no sin.

Sigh.

Those of you with a kick against the Immaculate Conception always want to set limitations on God.  You generally have no problem acknowledging in theory that God is infinitely good, infinitely holy, infinitely perfect, infinitely merciful and infinitely powerful; but in practice, what you really want is a sort of bite-sized God, One that we can wrap our woefully inadequate brains around and Who does not confound our puny capabilities.  So when God actually goes and does something that only an infinitely good, holy, perfect, merciful and powerful Being could do, you protest.  The fact, however, is that God can do whatever He wants; and whatever is fitting, we may be sure that He will do.

God can do the impossible more rapidly and easily than we can blink our eyes or draw a breath.  It was perfectly within His power to preserve Mary free from the taint of sin from the instant of her conception.  This singular privilege of His grace was purchased for her by the limitless merits of Christ's suffering and death on the Cross.  God, not bound by the constraints of time or space, was perfectly capable of applying these merits beforehand and granting this privilege in advance of the Crucifixion.  Thus God really was Mary's Savior, and did not need her to sin in order to be her Savior: His intervention to prevent her from receiving the taint of sin that she would otherwise have contracted as a descendant of Adam was also a salvific act.  Have you never been prevented from committing sins -- by being deprived of means or opportunity, or because you have never experienced the temptation to commit particular sins?  These are also interventions of God's grace.  So you should know from experience that God saves us, not only by forgiving sins we have actually committed, but also by preventing us from committing sins we would otherwise have committed, perhaps to our eternal ruin.   Why, then, should it be so hard to accept that God, out of the abyss of His goodness and mercy, could exercise His infinite power to prevent the Mother of His Son from being tainted by the least stain of iniquity from the very instant she began to exist?

It is altogether fitting that God should preserve Mary inviolate and immaculate from the first instant of her life.  God always gives us the grace we need to do the work He gives us: the greater the work, the greater the grace given to carry it out.  Was ever a more important mission given to a mere human being than that entrusted to Mary?  It was her task to supply the matter out of which the all-holy Son of God would take flesh, to bear Him in her womb, to nurse Him and to rear Him to manhood, and to share in her soul in the agonies of His Passion.  This touches on a point raised by my correspondent in a follow-up comment:

Jesus was the perfect sacrifice for dying for our sins because He was without blemish. If Mary had no blemish either, that would pretty much validate her for crucifixion too. Which would make Jesus less important.

Here my correspondent, though off the rails in the implications for the importance of Jesus, hits on an important truth.  Mary did in fact suffer with her divine Son, more than any other human being could have.  The saints (e.g., St. Alphonsus Liguori) are of the opinion that her sufferings were greater than that of all other men who have ever lived or will ever live put together, and that only a miracle kept her from dying of grief.  This is why Catholics honor her under the titles of Mother of Sorrows and Queen of Martyrs: only her Son's sufferings exceeded hers.  When she presented her Son in the Temple, holy Simeon prophesied that a sword would pierce her soul, that out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed (Luke 2:35).  It makes sense that she should bear so great a share in her Son's Passion: not only was she his loving mother; she was also fully aware that He was God, and therefore of the horrible outrage that He should be murdered by His own creatures.  Moreover, would it have been possible for her to suffer entirely for his sake and not at all for her own if she herself had had a share in the sins that caused Him to be nailed to the Cross?  Still, this share of hers in Christ's suffering does not in any way diminish Him.  Jesus was the perfect Sacrifice not only because He was without blemish, but because He was God.  Mankind had outraged the infinite God, and therefore it would take infinite merits to repair the outrage; these could only be offered by the Son of God. 

If you do not accept the Immaculate Conception, then I am bound to ask you why you would want the Mother of God to have been a sinner.  Is this not tantamount to wanting an unworthy vessel for the Incarnate God?   Does it make sense for the woman entrusted with bearing and caring for and suffering alongside the Son of God to have spent even a single instant under the dominion of hell?  No: especially when you consider that the Woman of Genesis 3:15, between whom and the serpent God put enmity is none other than the Mother of God, and her Seed is none other than Jesus Christ:

I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.

Here is scriptural proof of the Immaculate Conception.  If God creates perfect and implacable enmity between the Woman and the serpent -- and surely it is unthinkable that if God creates enmity between the Mother of God and evil, this enmity will be imperfect and half-hearted -- then it follows that she could never be under the serpent's sway, or in allegiance with him, as she must be if she had sinned.  Thus it was fitting for God to preserve her without sin from the very beginning.

Since it was perfectly possible for God to preserve Mary free from sin from the moment of her conception, and it was fitting that He should do so, it follows that He in fact did do so.  It would be a gross omission on God's part, and incompatible with His infinite perfection, if He should leave undone that which was fitting.  Therefore, we may safely take it that He did not leave it undone.  

Potuit, decuit, ergo fecit! He could; it was fitting; therefore, He did it!

H/T Canterbury Tales. 

Repost: Mary, Conceived without Sin, You DID Know

Raise your hand if you have ever heard the song "Mary, Did You Know?" within the precincts of a Catholic church.  I can't see you, but I know you're out there.  My hand is also up.  Somehow, because this song mentions the Mother of God, it has become a Christmas tradition in some parishes.  But although the gentleman who wrote "Mary, Did You Know?" clearly means well, this song is both musically inappropriate for Mass and subversive of the Catholic faith.

From a musical standpoint, "Mary, Did You Know?" is basically a pop song, and although the Mass has been saturated with such for a couple of generations now, the fact remains that it is not sacred music suited for use at Mass.  But even more objectionable, from the Catholic point of view, is the lyrical content.  

"Mary, Did You Know?" is based on some abysmally erroneous assumptions.  To begin with, it is supposed that Mary does not know that her holy Infant is the Son of God.  Some saints -- for instance, St. Alphonsus Liguori, bishop and Doctor of the Church -- are of the opinion that even before the Annunciation, Mary had a profound understanding of prophecies and Scriptures concerning the promised Messiah.  But even without such an understanding, it would have taken a high degree of inattention on Mary's part to the message of Gabriel and the inspired greeting of her cousin Elizabeth for her to labor under ignorance of her Son's divinity.  It is further supposed that Mary does not know that her Son will suffer for the redemption of mankind.  This would have required her to utterly gloss over the prophecies of holy Simeon concerning her Son as God's salvation, a sign of contradiction, and concerning the sword of sorrow that would pierce her own soul.  The idea of the Mother of God not being in possession of the most critical facts about her divine Son, particularly in view of explicit revelations received by her, is absurd on its face.

But there is an even more blatant error in the lyrics of "Mary, Did You Know?" that ought to induce in every Catholic a sharp intake of breath.  It is a defined dogma of the Catholic faith that the Mother of God was conceived without original sin.  On December 8, 1854, in the Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception:

We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful. 

Contrast this with the following lyrics from "Mary, Did You Know?":

Mary did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?
Mary did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?
Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?
This child that you've delivered, will soon deliver you.

Whereas Catholics accept as revealed truth that Mary was free from sin from the instant of her conception by virtue of the anticipated merits of Jesus' suffering and death on the Cross, the foregoing is based on the assumption that Mary was under the sway of sin at the time she gave birth to the Christ Child, and that she would remain so until His Sacrifice of redemption.  In short, it is a flat denial of the Immaculate Conception.  As such -- and for this reason alone -- it should never be sung in a Catholic church, or find any place in any Catholic liturgy, and Catholics should not embrace it.

Perhaps a fitting way to honor today's feast of the Immaculate Conception -- in addition to fulfilling our obligation to attend Mass -- would be to defend the dogma which this feast celebrates by doing what we can to see that "Mary, Did You Know?" remains unheard in our parishes during this and every Christmas season.

Good Friday

Today is a day of fast and abstinence.  Let not the aroma of apple-wood barbecue waft its charms before your quivering nostrils.  Listen not to the hiss of rib-eye steaks landing on a hot grill.  Avert your gaze from that mouthwatering slab of juicy prime rib.  And don't even think about delicately crispy, maple-tinged bacon.

This is a time of year when one reflects on the affluence that has made us weak and effeminate.  There are only two days out of the whole year when the Church asks us to fast, and this is one.  And it is a wrench!  We devote so much time and energy to scoping out the outer limits of the Church's breathtakingly lenient regulations.  We rack our brains to come up with ways of getting away with as much as possible without actually breaking the law.  We go out of our way to avoid the slightest discomfort.

There is nothing wrong with affluence in itself, that we ought to feel guilty merely because we have everything we need, plus extra.  There is something wrong with the undue attachment to our stuff that makes it an end in itself.  There is something wrong with having the thought of parting with it, or even setting it aside for a time, disturb our peace.  And there is something wrong with not using it to further the Kingdom of God.  It all ought to further the Kingdom of God, even the stuff we keep for ourselves.  What we keep for ourselves ought ultimately to be geared toward getting us into heaven.

Am I pointing fingers?  No.  I suffer from the same disordered attachments to my stuff, of which I have far too much; and I am also far too invested in comfort and convenience.  I am a huge fan of indoor plumbing, and central heating, and iPhones, and wi-fi lights, and high-speed Internet; and I really, really love butter and bacon.  I'd hate to have to do without these things.  But, after all, that is what a fast day is about: learning to do without.  Fasting trains us in the regulation of our passions.

And, contrary to popular fears, a well-regulated fast does not hurt us.  Fasting is healthful.  

It's also very simple.  Maybe, instead of coming up with ways to play with the Church's fasting regulations, it would be a lot simpler to just not eat at all today and only drink water, tea or coffee?  Then we can know for sure we have complied with the law and not have to worry about it!

Just a thought.

Septuagesima Sunday: Pope St Gregory the Great’s Homily on Matt 20:1-16

Thanks to The Divine Lamp.

I. This Gospel containing many things which need explaining, I will try as far as possible to shorten my explanation, that it may not become tedious to you. The kingdom of heaven, so we are told by our Lord, is like to a householder, who went out early in the morning to hire laborers into his vineyard. Who, indeed, is more justly to be likened to a householder than our Creator, Who is the Head of the household of faith, ruling over those He has made, and being Master of His chosen ones in the world, as a master of those in his house? He it is that has the Church as His vineyard, a vineyard that ceases not to bring forth branches of the true Vine, from just Abel to the last of the elect that shall be born in the world. This householder, then, for the cultivation of his vineyard, goes out early in the morning, and at the third hour, the sixth, the ninth, and the eleventh, to hire laborers into his vineyard. Thus the Lord, from the beginning to the end of the world, never ceases to gather together preachers for the instruction of His faithful people. The early morning of the world was from Adam until Noah; the third hour from Noah until Abraham; the sixth from Abraham until Moses; the ninth from  Moses until the coming of the Lord; the eleventh from the coming of the Lord to the end of the world. At this eleventh hour were sent forth as preachers the Apostles, who received full wages, though they came in late. For the cultivation of His vineyard, that is, the instruction of His people, the Lord has never ceased to send laborers into it. First by the patriarchs, then by the prophets and teachers of the law, and lastly by the Apostles, He dressed and tended the lives of His people, as the owner of a vineyard dresses and tends it by means of workmen. Whoever, in whatever degree, joined to a right faith the teaching of justice, was so far one of God’s laborers in God’s vineyard. By the laborers at early morning, at the third, the sixth, and the ninth hour, may be understood God’s ancient people, the Hebrews, who, striving to worship Him with a right faith, in company with His chosen ones from the beginning of the world, continually labored in His vineyard. And now, at the eleventh hour, it was said to the Gentiles: Why stand you here all the day idle? The Lord speaks of their carelessness and indifference concerning their salvation, for they had not yet done anything to be assured of it; yet, if you ponder upon their answer to the householder sending them to his vineyard, you will have cause of being ashamed. Their answer to the householder’s question, why they stood all the day idle, was: Because no man hath hired us. Indeed, they, unlike others, had neither patriarchs nor prophets to instruct them. No one had hired them, for no one had shown them the way leading to salvation. As to us, who neglect the practice of good works, and lead an idle life, what shall we answer for our justification? For we received the true faith, so to speak, in the womb of our mother; we heard the words of life when still in the cradle, and we drank the milk of Christian doctrine, given by our holy Church at the time when, for the life of our bodies, we were sucking the breasts of our natural mothers.

II. The different hours of the parable may also be compared to the different periods of man’s life. Childhood, on account of the small sphere of knowledge, is the early hour of morning; youth may be compared to the third hour, when the sun rises and the heat of years increases; the sixth hour represents manhood, the virility, when the sun has reached the zenith of his course; by the ninth hour, showing the sun slowly retreating from his height, we recognize the elderly age of man, when he loses the strength and power of younger years; whereas old age is figured by the eleventh hour.

Now, consider how some are called, already in their childhood, to lead a perfect and holy life ; others in their youth; these in their manly age; some others in advanced years; and lastly others in their old age. Do you understand that all of us are laborers, who may at any time be sent into the vineyard of the Lord? Again, beloved brethren, consider your own lives, and ask yourselves whether you are worthy laborers of the Lord, whether you are mindful of the work you are doing, and lastly whether you labor indeed in the Lord’s vineyard. Be sure that those who work for their own interests only, have not entered the vineyard of the Lord; for those only are accounted as His laborers, who prefer the glory of God to their own profit and interest. Such worthy Christians endeavor to serve God with ardent love and sincere devotion; they strive to win souls to God, and exert themselves to take others along with them to the habitation of the Saints; whereas those who live for themselves and try to satisfy their vices and concupiscences, are condemned as idle laborers, making no effort to work in, or care for, the Lord’s vineyard.

III. What shall we say of those who put off their conversion to the end of their life? Are they not like those laborers standing in the market-place until the eleventh hour, to whom the householder said: Why stand you here all the day idle? Our Savior wishes them to understand that, having spent their childhood and youth in the service of the world and far from God, they are called upon to begin to turn to God, at least, now at the extreme limits of life, and with greater courage to walk on the road of justice, that leads to perfection and eternal life; for the work they are bid to do cannot last very long, since they came so late. Thus this good Householder invites them to come back to Him, and often rewards them before those who had been called from their childhood, since very often the last comers are called away the first. Remember the Good Thief (Luke 23). He came at the eleventh hour; but by the capital punishment he suffered, he obtained a reward certainly not deserved by his former sinful life.  He recognized Jesus to be the Redeemer of the world, confessed Him publicly, and almost at the same moment gave up the ghost. We see thereby that the Householder, giving the promised penny, began with the last; for the Good Thief was received into Paradise before St. Peter. The same happened to many good and pious souls living before the Law and under the Law. They had to wait for their reward, whilst those called after the coming of the Messiah, at once went to Paradise. We may also say, in all truth, that the same reward that is, a penny, was given to them that had worked one hour only, as to the others who had been working the whole day and had borne the burden of the day and the heats. For the eternal happiness, that reward given to them that worked well, will be common to all of them, both to those who came at the beginning and to those who arrived with the Redeemer. This very equality was the cause of complaints: These last have worked but one hour, and thou hast made them equal to us that have borne the burden of the day and the heats. Indeed, the first comers can say that they have borne the burden of the day and the heats, since their life was longer than ours. They came at the beginning, when the life of man was very long, and they had to fight against their own self for many years. We also feel in us the fire of concupiscence, against which we contend, and which we try to extinguish; and this continual fighting may be compared to the burden of the day and the heats.

IV. Besides all this, I ask, what is the meaning of the murmurs of those who received the reward in heaven very late? Also in what sense can we say that they murmured, since heaven will not be given to those who murmur, and since those who have entered heaven neither murmur nor complain? I answer: If I consider that the patriarchs, though leading a good and holy life, could not enter Paradise before the coming of the Son of God, Who by His death reopened the gates of heaven, we find therein, that is, in the delay preventing them to receive the reward for which they worked so hard, the real motive of their murmuring. After fighting for justice’s sake, and thus deserving the crown of glory, their souls went to limbo, a place of rest and peace. To them, therefore, we may attribute the murmurs of the laborers after their day’s work. However, after this presupposed murmuring, the souls of the just, leaving their prison, that is limbo, wherein they had been detained for a long time, receive the promised penny, namely, the happiness of the eternal kingdom, of which they take possession. As to us who, though arriving at the end of the day, receive a penny, we do not murmur like those who arrived the first. Since the coming of the Redeemer into this world, we enter into the kingdom of heaven as soon as we leave this life, and we receive without any delay the crown of glory granted to the patriarchs after their very long waiting (see note below). On this occasion the master of the house said to one of the laborers: I will also give to this last even as to thee. And, as the place in heaven assigned to a soul is an effect of His generous will, He adds: Or, is it not lawful for me to do what I will? It would be man’s greatest folly to criticize the manner in which God’s goodness deigns to act. Indeed, we could murmur against God, were He to refuse that which He is bound to give, but not when He refuses to grant what He is not in justice obliged to give. He, therefore, that murmurs, deserves this rebuke: Is thy eye evil because I am good? Hence we conclude that nobody is to boast of his work or of the time spent in doing it, for the Eternal Truth tells us: The last shall be first, and the first last. Though we be aware of our good works, we know not how strictly they will be scrutinized by the great Judge; yea, each of us ought to feel exceedingly happy to receive even the last place in the kingdom of God.

NOTE: It would be a mistake to infer from these words that St. Gregory did not believe in Purgatory. Their meaning is that a soul, leaving the body and having nothing to atone for, will be at once received into Paradise, unlike the just souls of the patriarchs which, before the coming of Christ, descended into limbo.

V. The following words of this Gospel, many are called, but few are chosen, cannot but inspire us with terror; for many receive the light of faith, but to a few only is granted the happiness of heaven. On account of the festival there are now a great many gathered together here, and there is hardly room for all within the walls of this temple. Yet, who can tell how many of them will one day be found among the number of the elect? All voices are loud in confessing Jesus, but the lives of those who confess Him do not agree with their exterior acts of faith. The greater number of those here present think it sufficient to follow Jesus in words, whilst by their acts they are separated from Him. St. Paul points them out to us, saying: They profess that they know God, but in their works they deny Him (Titus 1:16). This is confirmed by St. James: Faith without works is dead (James 2:26). And the Psalmist repeats the words of God: I have declared and I have spoken; they are multiplied above number (Ps 40:6). By these words we understand that, when the Lord calls men through His prophets, the number of believers greatly increases. However, not all those who by the gift of faith obtain the knowledge of the truth will be numbered among the elect. It is certain that when a great number of wicked Christians are gathered together with true servants of God, because of the same faith that they profess, they nevertheless do not deserve to be numbered with the faithful on account of their unchristian lives. For it cannot be denied that, though the holy Church includes in the same fold the sheep and the goats, the Eternal Judge will one day separate the just from the wicked, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats (Matt 25:32). Know ye, therefore, and recognize that none of those now given up to the pleasures of the world will be received among the elect; that the Judge will exclude them from the happy fate of the humble, since in this world they were lifted up on the wings of pride. They had received the gift of heavenly faith, but they clung to the earth, and heaven will not be opened to them.

VI. Meanwhile, though a great many people, whose lives are unchristian, may be found in the Church of God, I beseech you, beloved brethren, neither to imitate them nor to think them to be lost. We are aware of the unhappy condition of these people to-day, but we know not what they will be to-morrow. It often happens that those whom we see behind us on the road to holiness, soon precede us on account of their progress in spirituality; then it is with great difficulty that we follow those whom at some time we seemed to precede. When St. Stephen shed his blood for Christ, his murderers laid their garments at the feet of a young man whose name was Saul (Acts 7:57), and who may be accused of having also stoned St. Stephen by assisting the murderers; yet, by his great labors undertaken for the Church, Saul has gone before the holy martyr, to whose death he contributed. Let us, therefore, consider these two things greatly deserving our attention. First, knowing that many are called but few are chosen, no one can help himself without the grace of God, and, though being called by faith, no one is sure of his eternal salvation. Secondly, when we see our neighbor in the clutches of sin and vice, let us not presumptuously think that he will be lost, for God’s infinite mercy is unknown to us.

The Red Flag We Are Trained to Ignore

What are we to make of it when a priest, who has long been a darling of the “progressive” left on account of his public dissent from the teachings of the Catholic faith — and particularly the teachings of the Catholic faith on sex — is exposed as a sexual deviant?

For decades, we have been conditioned to buy into the false dichotomy between a man’s private life and his public persona.  A quarter of a century ago, we were told — all the way through to his impeachment — that Bill Clinton’s sexcapades had nothing whatsoever to do with his ability to run the country.  Similarly, Catholic liberals have for many years given us to understand that you can have heterodoxy alongside holiness — and that, in fact, heterodoxy may even be an outstanding sign of holiness, since it implies The Courage to Take On The Establishment, which is invariably The Enemy in the Struggle to Do the Right Thing.

And so we are lulled into not asking key questions and drawing key conclusions about the left’s favorite “progressive” sons in the hierarchy, such as: why does someone within the Church attack the Church’s teachings on sexual matters?  Because these teachings are out of step with our enlightened notions of “fairness” and “equality”?  Because they might give pain to some hypothetical third parties?  Because they aren’t nuanced enough?  But real life is a concrete thing, a wrecking ball too weighty for our towering yet spindly edifices of sophistry to withstand; and people’s motivations are usually quite uncomplicated, and really not so noble.  After all, who really has time or energy to take on causes without some sort of personal investment?  The most obvious and straightforward answer to the question of why is that the dissenter probably has a favorite sin he is trying to hold onto.  To which the heterodox reply will be that (a) the person drawing such a conclusion is “uncharitable” for arriving at a “rash judgment”; and (b) in any case it doesn’t matter whether the dissenter has a dog in the fight, since his motivations in no way detract from the correctness of his positions.

But in fact, the dissenter’s motivations are directly relevant to his objectivity, and therefore to his credibility.  This is why lawyers get to cross-examine witnesses on their motives for testifying.  Credibility matters a great deal in a court of law, and in public discourse.  Sometimes, credibility is the only asset an advocate has to trade on.  It is precisely in a bid to preserve the credibility of a dissenter that inquiries into his motives are suppressed; besides which, the very people who want to engage in such suppression would be the first to raise suspicions about the motivations of someone who supports Catholic doctrine.

There has to be something compelling, not merely theoretical, that drives Catholics — lay and clerical — to wage war on the doctrines of Christ’s Church.  One very distinct possibility is that they are no longer serving Christ (if indeed they ever did serve Him) but the idol that is their pet vice.  Such is their devotion to it that the titanic efforts needed to conform society to their tastes in order to salve their consciences are as nothing compared to the agony of even willing to conform their own selves to Truth.

The hard, cold reality of life is that we cannot throw out the Ten Commandments without also forfeiting the protection they afford.  After all, if we decide that there’s nothing wrong with people thinking the moral law is stupid, then we shouldn’t be surprised when those same people decline to follow it, and when they prey on others in order to feed the appetites that that law does not restrain.  If a person publicly proclaims the stupidity of the moral law, isn’t it foolish to assume that he must be privately following what he publicly derides?  Then why should we be surprised to find a priest who both publicly dissents from the teachings he has been charged to pass on and lives contrary to those same teachings?  A priest who publicly repudiates Catholic doctrines is already unfaithful in virtue of that very fact since, by consenting to receive Holy Orders, he has consented to bearing the burden of preaching those very doctrines.  And once he is unfaithful in one thing, it is easier for him to be unfaithful in other things, which paves the way for unfaithfulness in more and more things.  Sin leads to more sin.

The lesson here would seem to be twofold.  First, heterodoxy is not the mark of a free and tolerant society, but a huge red flag that we have all been trained to ignore.  Second, in case the authority of the Catholic Church to speak on behalf of Christ is in any doubt, the fruit of dissent from orthodoxy in the life of the dissenter bears strongly on the correctness of his dissenting views.  You can’t have holiness without orthodoxy.  If God is Truth, then the pursuit of something other than Truth must be the pursuit of something other than God.  But it is our business as Catholics to pursue God, and the business of our shepherds to lead us rightly in that pursuit.  If a shepherd is pursuing something other than God, then where must he be leading his sheep?  What must he be doing to his sheep while he leads them astray?  And what is to become of bishops who do not pay attention to what their priests are pursuing?

When the Sun of Culture is Low on the Horizon, Even Dwarves Cast Long Shadows

I recall hearing a priest say that once on Mother Angelica’s show.  The audience was at first stunned into silence, and then broke into applause.  It captures our age perfectly.

Scripture has another way of putting it.  Proverbs 27:7:

A soul that is full shall tread upon the honeycomb: and a soul that is hungry shall take even bitter for sweet.

When things are bad enough, and we are famished enough, our expectations plummet.  We start sniffing and scrounging and scratching and foraging for comfort.  Then, when we find even the tiniest crumb, we act as though we have stumbled upon the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  The “pot of gold” is invariably something so meager and nasty that in better times we would have despised it as trash.  But we have arrived at times so wretched that even trash looks like treasure.

Take the state of things in our beloved Catholic Church.  Into what ecstasies are we launched on those rare occasions when a priest correctly states a Catholic teaching from the pulpit.  Father actually said that marriage is between one man and one woman, and for life!  Dare we to hope — we ask ourselves — that the tide is finally turning?  But in better times, even the worst priests preached what the Church teaches.  What’s that?  Pope Francis celebrated Mass facing east?  It must be the dawn of a new era of reverence and Catholicity in the liturgy!  But in better times, even the worst priests faced east as a matter of routine and did not dare to ad lib the Mass — at least those parts of the Mass that the people could see and hear.  Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo de Borgia, led a life that can be described  only as scandalous; yet it is nowhere recorded that he tried to reinvent the divine truths he flouted, or to remake the Mass or the Sacraments to suit his tastes.  What an age we live in, when even the corrupt churchmen of the Renaissance look like saints!

But we in the pews cannot claim to be any better.  The negligent, slothful and even subversive priests and bishops that plague us today come from within our own ranks.  If we are off the rails, our shepherds will be off the rails.  Bad clergy openly flaunt the evil habits that they once kept under wraps, because we in the pews can no longer rise to the level of being shocked.  They get away with it, because we, being mired in our own evil habits, are too effete to do anything about it.

Let’s face it: we are not in the springtime of renewal in the Catholic Church.  We do ourselves and the Church a great disservice by denying this.  The fact is that those who are not in the Church can see the true state of affairs for themselves, and we make ourselves and our Mother ridiculous by trying to deny it.  But when that renewal does come, we will not need to ask ourselves whether it has in fact arrived.  About the real renewal and revival, there will be no room for doubt. 

About Atheism

1. It takes a greater leap of faith to be an atheist than to believe in God.  It takes a greater leap of faith to be an atheist than to believe that, at Mass, a little white piece of unleavened bread becomes God in the hands of a sinful priest.  What you're saying, if you're an atheist, is that in the beginning, there was Nothing.  Nothing turned its non-existent self into Something.  Something magically evolved into stars, planets, galaxies, dinosaurs and men.  By pure chance, these things all continue in being and do not wink out of existence.  Also by pure chance, they are governed by the laws of physics.  You believe all this nut stuff, explicitly or implicitly, but you, who claim to be a disciple of Science and Reason, think I'm the loon.

2. There is no such thing as a principled atheist.  St. Paul blasts that notion out of the water in the first chapter of his Letter to the Romans.  Some people disbelieve in God because that's what they were taught.  These have not arrived at atheism by an exercise of reason, but are merely taking what they have been given.  They have a duty to investigate the truth of what they have been taught.  Some people reject the existence of God because of some trauma they have suffered.  These have not arrived at atheism by an exercise of reason, but based on emotion.  They need prayers.  Some people choose to disbelieve in God because they are attached to some vice they don't want to give up.  These have not arrived at atheism by an exercise of reason, but because they are enslaved to their passions.  They know that to acknowledge the existence of a Creator means acknowledging their duties toward Him, and His claims on them.  This would get in the way of doing whatever they want.  I suspect these are the majority.  

3. Atheists like to argue that religion is evil because of all the people who have allegedly been killed in the name of religion.  This argument is generally trotted out without specifying a religion, and without distinguishing between aggressors and defenders.  It is easily disposed of.  The number of people killed in the name of religion is dwarfed by the number of people murdered in the name of atheism since the French Revolution.  It was the great atheistic republics of the last two and a half centuries that gave us murder and destruction on an industrial scale.  Over the course of three and a half centuries, the Spanish Inquisition may have turned between 3,000 and 5,000 people over to the secular arm to be executed.  This figure is dwarfed by the millions upon hundreds of millions slain by the governments of revolutionary France, the Soviet Union, Red China, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Cambodia -- every one materialist, totalitarian and officially atheistic.

4. Which brings us to the inescapable conclusion that atheists are far more insistent on shoving atheism down everyone else's throats than believers -- at any rate, Christian believers -- are at pushing their creeds.  Islam has always been notorious for sword-point conversions.  Atheism, which has enlisted swords, guns, bombs, spies, snitches, prisons and insane asylums in its wars against throne and altar, can hardly claim to be gentler. 

5. In the words of Bing Crosby's Father O'Malley in Going My Way: you even throw like atheists.  

The Problem of Evil

A lot of the news stories out of the U.K. about the terrorist attack at the Palace of Westminster in London this past week describe the perp in mental health terms, like "sick" and "maniac."  Despite the fact that ISIS has taken responsibility for this attack, a Telegraph story tracing the perp's path from popular, sporty schoolboy, through a life of hooliganism, to his murderous rampage at Parliament Square, suggests that racism is to blame:

Masood, may have eventually snapped because of racism in his village leading him to slash the face of a cafe owner.

It is thought he may have then been radicalised while in jail, eventually leading to his involvement in terrorism.   

Set to one side the Telegraph's failure to make clear how the young Masood (then named Adrian Ajao) could at one and the same time have been very popular and well-liked by everybody, as his old schoolmate describes him, and the victim of such racism as could reasonably be expected to provoke him to commit the crime of mayhem against a cafe owner.  The two elephants in the room here are (1) the deadly ideology of radical Islamism, to which the West has recklessly opened itself up, and (2) the responsibility of human beings, rational by nature, for their own choice to do evil.  It is with Elephant Number Two that we are primarily concerned here.

We pride ourselves, in our rationalistic age, on our "scientific" and "logical" approach to the world; but in fact, rationalism is a creed whose adherents are every bit as rigid, inflexible, unseeing and hide-bound as they accuse Christians of being.  Rationalists ignore all evidence of any realities over and above nature and stubbornly insist that such do not exist.  They also ignore all evidence contrary to their beliefs that Man is a mere intelligent chunk of meat, and that consciousness is a mere concatenation of chemical reactions, and that humanity is therefore infinitely malleable according to its own whims.  This means that there is really no such thing as evil, let alone consequences for immoral behavior.  This idea that nothing has moral significance is really useful for anyone with an attachment to a vice that they don't want to give up, but when it comes to dealing with being on the receiving end of someone else's vice, its bankruptcy is -- or should be -- apparent.
      

The reality is that there are in the world evil people, and they freely choose to do evil things.  Not everyone who commits acts of horrific violence is insane.  Many are in full possession of their faculties and have deliberately chosen to do what they are doing.  The more they do evil things, the more inured to them they become -- like, for instance, the Parliament Square perp with his history of violent crimes -- and the easier it becomes.  As long as we take the position that every evildoer is necessarily crazy, we will fail to meet reality head-on.  We will continue to fail with the clinical approach to evil, treating it as a disease.  We dehumanize villains by denying their responsibility, because we cannot do this without also denying their rational nature and their free will.  Worst of all, we help lock them into their path to damnation, giving them ready-made excuses to stay right where they are, and go on doing what they are doing, and never even think about repentance and conversion.

There is in fact a system in the world that has proven highly effective in dealing with the problem of evil -- a system founded more than two thousand years ago by a Middle Eastern carpenter's Son, building upon a fisherman.  And it's the one thing that so many are completely unwilling to try.

There Are Reasons People Hate Clowns

I don't know how many of the three or four people who read this blog are priests; but if you are a priest or bishop, and you think you are there to entertain your congregation at Mass, this post is addressed to you.

Some of you priest celebrants at Mass cannot resist doing a clown act on the altar.  Some of you confine this nonsense to your sermons, which is bad enough.  Others of you pepper the liturgy with stupid jokes; or you constantly halt the liturgy in order to try to warm up the crowd with "humorous" asides.  The nervous, raised-eyebrow tittering of your congregation suggests nothing to you.

You need to cut this crap out right now.

First of all, you are living, breathing proof of what a rotten idea it was (a) to turn the priest around to face the people during Mass; (b) to give him a microphone; and (c) to cobble up a liturgy where every part of the Mass has numerous different options for how it can be done, all entirely at the discretion of the priest-celebrant.  (The new Mass has so many options to it, in fact, it is next to impossible for us in the pews to follow in the missal and know whether you are using a legitimate option or just making up your own.)  No wonder you think it's all about you.  No wonder that after decades of this kind of stuff, you are now convinced that you are supposed to be the center of everything.  And having had your ego thus stoked all these years, no wonder you fight tooth and nail to resist the traditional Mass at your parishes, no matter how much your people might want it.  You have weakened and fattened your flock up for the wolves on a steady diet of liturgical junk food, until the ones who still actually believe in the content of the Catholic faith are reduced to gritting their teeth and telling themselves that at least they are getting the Eucharist.

Somewhere along the line, you clown priests convinced yourselves that you need to spice up the Mass with your own peculiar (and I do mean peculiar) brand of humor in order to be "pastoral."  Well, let me give you the perspective from the receiving end.

You have no idea who all in your congregation is dealing with what -- not even those of you who bother to find out who your parishioners are (and not all of you do).  That man sitting way in the back, in a corner, behind a pillar, has been away from the Church and the Sacraments for years and years, and is in shock over his realization that he has been leading a bad life.  That miserable-looking, unfriendly woman who doesn't want to engage in pre-Mass ice-breakers or the sign of peace has just suffered a major bereavement.  That couple off to the side with haunted expressions on their faces have no idea where their child is or whether they will ever see her again.  Those teenagers who aren't singing along with the offertory hymn have just been told that their mother has terminal cancer.  That stony-faced father with three little kids has just lost his job.

And here you come, administering blows on top of bruises with your "pastoral" method.

In the first place, you are not cheering these people up.  You are trivializing and adding to their pain.  Proverbs 25:20: He who sings songs to a heavy heart is like one who takes off a garment on a cold day, and like vinegar on a wound.

In the second place, what these people most need, in the midst of these awful changes in their lives, is something that does not change.  At one time, and until very recently, that was the liturgy, which opened up a window onto the supernatural.  But your people can't see through that window, because you are in their face, dancing around in front of them while they are trying to look at something greater and more important than yourself.  You have no idea how jarring your "improvements" to the Mass are.  You have no idea, because you never listen.  After all, you are the priest, and therefore, you know better.  Nobody can tell you anything, so they eventually give up trying.

Since so many of the changes in the liturgy over the last 60 years or so have purported to be about going back to the "purity" of the early Church, maybe we should bring back the ancient practice of the laity rioting anytime they heard changes in the wording of the Gospel.  The time has not yet passed out of living memory when it was considered a mortal sin for a priest to make changes to the liturgy sua sponte; that's another idea whose time has come again.  It has not been considered so during this extended period of experimentation; but it's time we seriously asked ourselves whether it is possible that the objective sinful character of such acts can really have changed.  The answer surely lies in the rotten fruits of experimentation, and the real pain it has caused us in the pews.

Priests, you have got to stop playing the fool at Mass.  You are driving your flocks, and yourselves, away from the True Shepherd, and you are going to have to answer for every one.  The Bread of Life is Jesus Christ, not you.  Stop giving us stones when we come to you for the Bread.

Spring Has Sprung

At the moment this post went up, Spring began.  At 04:29 Mountain Daylight Time, the sun crossed the celestial equator in its apparent path northward in our sky.  At that moment, the plane of Earth's equator passed through the center of the sun, and the sun was exactly overhead of the equator.  Today we have equal periods of daylight and nighttime -- hence the name "equinox."

When Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar in 45 B.C., he set dates when the equinoxes and solstices were deemed to occur.  According to the Julian calendar -- followed in the Western world for more than 16 centuries, until the reforms of Pope Gregory XIII -- March 25th marked the vernal equinox.  June 25th marked the summer solstice, when the days begin to shorten; September 25th marked the autumnal equinox; and the winter solstice, when the days begin again to lengthen, fell on -- December 25th.

Note how the changes in season coincide with the great feasts of Christianity.  On March 25th, the beginning of spring, we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Word was made flesh and broke the winter of hell's dominion on earth.  Christ is also believed to have been crucified on March 25th, the same day as His Conception, so the beginning of spring also coincides with the opening of heaven's gates, previously closed by sin, and the Resurrection, when Christ conquered death.  June 25th, when the days begin to grow short, coincides with the nativity of John the Baptist, the Savior's forerunner and herald, who said that he must decrease while Christ increased -- just as daylight begins to increase with the Nativity of Jesus on December 25th.  As for September 25th, perhaps that change of season, which marks the harvest, stands for the harvest of souls, the wheat gathered into the Master's barn at the end of time.

I can almost hear the groans and tongue-clicking from persons steeped in the idiotic rationalism of our day.  No, Christians didn't make this stuff up.  Julius Caesar, who gave the world the Julian calendar, was not the pagan tool of a cabal of proto-Christians who were just waiting for the right moment to spring upon the world a new-fangled religion that would incite bloody persecutions.  Nor are we filling in the blanks with imaginative mummery just to satisfy our irrational urge for spirituality and add a little color to gray, prosaic reality.  We humans are just not smart enough to come up with these things on our own.  Only God is smart enough; though He does give us enough wits to take notice of the symbolism, and the truths it points to.