$4.45 $4.45 june 2007 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition inside: ue w Can you write 200 words about this picture? See p.44 co ri t n s of ee t in th p. es g is 44 t iss The Death of the Mind Chesterton Unplugged Fathers’ First Impressions Handmaids of St. John the Baptist Singapore and Malaysia ssed o b m E Gold ardcover H The Haydock Bible A larger-print (12 point) Douay-Rheims Bible from the 1859 edition of Fr. Haydock, whose superb explanations and commentary take up about one-half to two-thirds of each page. The commentary is drawn largely from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church–ABSOLUTELY INVALUABLE. The commentary (which is NOT large print) makes it the best Bible available if you want to understand Scripture. If you want a Bible that is not just the Word of God but will help you to understand the Word of God, then look no further! Old Testament with engravings and illustrations, record births, marriages, and deaths, Tables (Biblical weights & measures, etc.), Historical and Chronological Index, New Testament with illustrated Bible Dictionary, Historical and Chronological Index and History of the Books of the Catholic Bible. PERFECT FOR CONFIRMATION, WEDDING, CONVERT GIFTS, etc. One burgundy leather hardcover volume on fine Bible paper with satin ribbon marker. A UA T C L T E XT S I ZE 1,968pp, 8½" x 11", Gold-embossed Hardcover, STK# 5456✱ $125.00 SINS OF PARENTS Fr. Charles Hugo Doyle In two parts: “Sins of Commission” (e.g., broken homes, alcoholism, contraception) and “Sins of Omission” (e.g., failure to teach virtue, etc.). It is obvious that most serious Catholics will have overcome or avoided the major sins of commission, but even the best Catholic parents regularly commit the sins of omission, oftentimes without even knowing it. Discover... 31 “don’ts” of child-rearing 21 character traits of good parents One rule you must never break in disciplining your child Harmful notions about marriage that even faithful Catholic couples unwittingly derive from society and the media The three parental attitudes that are most damaging to children Adverse effects of mothers working How parental quarreling hurts kids Find yourself shouting at your children more and more?...here’s what you’re almost certainly doing wrong Homosexuality: why bad parenting is often the cause The best way to train your child in the virtues What to do if you catch a child lying or stealing Devastating effects of an absent father or mother Why wives should never undermine their husbands’ standing in the eyes of the children. Full of witticisms–not only informative but very entertaining also. An excellent book that we highly recommend to all parents! • • • • • • • • • • MOTHER’S LITTLE HELPER • • • 206pp, hardcover, gold-foil stamped, STK# 6762✱ $19.95 ANGELUS PRESS 2915 Forest Ave., Kansas City, MO 64109 LOCAL CALL (816) 753-3150 FAX (816) 753-3557 www.angeluspress.org 1-8 00-9 6 6-73 37 (Office hours: Mon-Fri, 8:00am-12:30pm & 1:00-4:30pm CST) ck a B in t in Pr 12 heart-to-heart talks to be given by Mom to her daughters about the mysterious processes of reproducing life. Presents timeless supernatural attitude in accordance with Catholic principles. Helps Moms instruct and train their growing daughters. Places the exact words on Mom’s lips. Arms girls sufficiently and supernaturally to control passions and to avoid sinful occasions. No crude language. Suggestions for preserving purity. Graduated structure in three parts: ages 9-12; 12-14; 14-16. 76pp, softcover, STK# 5105✱ $5.00 LISTEN, SON 12 heart-to-heart talks to be given by Dad to his boys and young men about the mysterious processes of reproducing life. Presents timeless supernatural attitude in accord with Catholic principles. No crude language. Graduated structure in three parts: ages 9-13; 14-16; 16-19. Suggestions for preserving purity. 75pp, softcover, STK# 5104✱ $4.95 “Instaurare omnia in Christo—To restore all things in Christ.” Motto of Pope St. Pius X The ngelus A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition 2915 Forest Avenue “To publish Catholic journals and place them in the hands of honest men is not enough. It is necessary to spread them as far as possible that they may be read by all, and especially by those whom Christian charity demands we should tear away from the poisonous sources of evil literature.” —Pope St. Pius X June 2007 Volume XXX, Number 6 • Kansas City, Missouri 64109 English-language Editor and Publisher for the International Society of Saint Pius X diagram from the editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Fr. Kenneth Novak PublisheR Fr. John Fullerton Editor Fr. Kenneth Novak Assistant Editor Mr. James Vogel business Manager Mr. Jason Greene Editorial assistant and proofreading Miss Anne Stinnett Design and Layout Mr. Simon Townshend MARKETING Mr. Christopher McCann mundus disneyii: the intellect in danger of death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Marcel de Corte chesterton unplugged . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Christopher Check NEWS “our main concern Christendom is to help the priests” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Angelus Press Edition little handmaids of st. john the baptist . . . . 19 Le Rafflay, France catechism of the crisis in the church . . . . . . . . . 27 Fr. Matthias Gaudron comptroller Miss Lisa Cavossa customer service Mrs. Mary Anne Hall Mr. John Rydholm Shipping and Handling Mr. Jon Rydholm faith and the gift of self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. NEWS The society of St. pius x Christendom in Singapore and malaysia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Angelus Press Edition Christendom Questions and answers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Fr. Peter Scott march 2007 writing contest winning essay . . . . . 43 The Angelus Monthly photo writing contest . . . 44 The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication offices are located at 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri, 64109, (816) 753-3150, FAX (816) 753-3557. Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, Missouri. Copyright © 2007 by Angelus Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Manuscripts are welcome. They must be double-spaced and deal with the Roman Catholic Church, its history, doctrine, or present crisis. Unsolicited manuscripts will be used at the discretion of the Editorial Staff. Unused manuscripts cannot be returned unless sent with a self-addressed, stamped envelope. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Angelus, Angelus Press, 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64109-1529. ON OUR COVER: The Writing Contest picture (see p.44). The Angelus Subscription Rates 1 year 2 years 3 years US $34.95 Foreign Countries (inc. Canada & Mexico) $54.95 $64.95 $104.95 $99.95 $159.95 All payments must be in US funds only. Online subscriptions: $14.95/year (the online edition is available around the 10th of the preceding month). To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Register for free to access back issues 14 months and older plus many other site features.  Diagram from the Editor MVndVs Disneyii  The Intelligence in Danger of Death M a r c e l D e C o r t e A certain type of man—different from all the other types of men which had ever gone before—has suddenly been placed on a pedestal as a model to the world: the intellectual. Not the man who makes use of his intelligence to understand the outside world and to submit to what it is by essence, but the man who pieces together a new world in conformity with his dream worlds and with the appearance he thinks it ought to have. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007  contagion spreading all over the planet some kind of new, ultra-specialized machines operated only by an elite of experienced technicians. These machines are already on site. The disease afflicting us touches every aspect of human life and our only hope, according to most of the intellectuals, is to reinforce all of those mechanisms which caused it in the first place. Sooner or later, the truly living will be more and more eclipsed by the machine, the concrete by the abstract, and reality by dream-worlds. Who even speaks of the real anymore? We want to make our modern pseudo-society function without rites or ceremonies (especially without religious ceremonies), without appealing to patriotic faith, to the nation, but counting on industry and commerce alone (which, for that very reason, we can expect to see an increase in already large numbers of unemployment), which will be less and less enfleshed in mom-and-pop businesses to settle definitively into a few rare gigantic enterprises or in the universal socialist State. Rational language will be reduced to a specialized technical vocabulary accessible only to the privileged few. Everyday language will become pure jargon– “things, stuff, junk, whatever”–because it will no longer be a bearer of reality. Production and consumption will be the sole law of human life according to the advertising communicated by the media. Being a citizen will mean being an unskilled worker, an engineer, a creator of strictly material goods and a buyer of the same, in a never-ending circle. Everywhere, the self-renewing utopia will replace social reality properly so-called, to the benefit of the new-style “intellectuals” alone, thus provoking an even graver crisis in which it will become impossible to distinguish the prefabricated fiction from the reality that still remains. The unified Europe that blind politicians offer us in place of our homelands, a vast continent on which nobody will really know anybody else, is the utopia within a utopia. Marcel de Corte, a Belgian, is considered to be one of the four greatThe majority of men est Thomistic philosophers of the 20th century writing in the French today are severed from the language. A graduate of the French École Normale Supérieure (a topsocial reality thanks to the notch school for training the elite), he held academic posts including industrial and commercial Rector of the University of Liège in his native Belgium. He taught engineers; the bankers, Moral Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. To his friends and whose docile faithful they admirers he was known as “The Aristotelian.” too often become; the He published some 20 works, including philosophical studies, nations, reduced to simple political essays, a biography of a son who died in his teens (Become What You Are), and money-managers; all the studies of each of the cardinal virtues. He was deeply affected by the post-conciliar thurifers of the “new world” religious crisis and published a remarkable analysis of it in a series of articles in the emerging in spite of the French journal Itinéraires. He was also a monarchist and political activist, writing at times for the daily La Libre Belgique and La Nation Française. crises afflicting it. Those But who has heard of De Corte? Professor Thomas Molnar, a teacher at the Unigoverning us today are no versity of New York and a friend of Marcel De Corte, had this to say on the occasion longer open to the multiof De Corte’s retirement: “In better times, the name of Marcel De Corte would be faceted reality all around as universally known and cited as the names of Sartre and Teilhard are today.” What appears to be emerging is an earthly paradise, without precedent in the history of man, with a new humanity as its unmoving center of gravity, according to the wish uttered by the thinkers who inaugurated this modern age in which we live, the handiwork of the human mind alone, in some way divinized. Man is no longer an intelligent being living with a world which does not depend on him and with the divine Principle of this world, but a sovereign being who continually transforms the world in order ultimately to submit it to the domination of his mind. The present crisis whose effects we are now enduring was only the beginning. Since then it has taken on speed at a rate unparalleled in the rise and fall of all preceding civilizations and which, as we propose, is the first phase of the fall of “man” (e.g., a rational animal living in society, as the ancients defined him) and his replacement by inventions all ultimately doomed to failure, resulting in the end of humanity as such, if no other reaction intervenes. Man today, reduced to transforming the world according to his most material desires under the mask of “humanism,” finds himself face to face with a catastrophe daily growing in proportions. His transforming intelligence, fabricating a new world, dominates nearly exclusively. Yet this crisis which will kill us if no new life is breathed into our morals, especially our intellectual morals, is scarcely mentioned among the scholars who set it in motion and who have pieced together a more and more artificial world all around us, and even within us. On the contrary, when they bow to acknowledge its existence, it is only to urge the patient to re-start the same failed attempts at the same dream-world level. I’ve read about a group of scholars who have proposed as a cure to the modern Marcel De Corte (1905-94) THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org  them and to its supreme Cause. They are for the most part the vassals of our pseudo-democracy (in word only), that is to say of the union leaders (not the unions themselves) and of the apparent and especially the effective leaders of the political parties (not the parties themselves and even less so the voters of those parties). Since they are no longer incarnated in true social realities (family, region, homeland); since they no longer communicate with those realities which made the world go round not so long ago; since they no longer have any relation except with anonymous individuals on the same road to disincarnation, they no longer dispense anything but sloganeering or else the effective or disguised violence concealed by new, supposedly salvific laws, in order to satisfy their will to domination. The only ones ruling today are those who know how to speak well and the ones who know how to manipulate the masses. This is the return of romanticism under the mask of science or, more exactly, of the new conception of the world fabricated from the sole viewpoint of technical skill and so-called poetic activity, those two builders of the new humanity.... We live amidst man-centered worlds which wrap themselves up in that character of divinity which humankind has always reserved to the realities that transcend it and rule over it. Today men turn less than ever towards the great, authentically social successes of the past or the God who drew them from human nature. They turn towards a world which they built for themselves, unhinged from reality and deprived of all that is above them, and exchanged for an integral man-centeredness where they are the center of their dream-worlds. “Romantic rationalism” [that is, “dream-world reasoning”–Ed.] is no joke. It is hostile to all metaphysics and morality. It uses instrumental reason as its sole foundation, building (it thinks) a perfectly calculated new world corresponding to this primacy of the poetic imagination: strictly human “making” and “building” to replace the reality which poses obvious obstacles. We have greater and greater confidence– in spite of the crisis and because of it–in this world which we are piecing together and of which we hope to be the masters, even as it subjects us to the most obvious slavery....The proof is in our unshaken belief in Democracy with a capital “D” upon which the modern liberals and socialist-communists grow more drunk every day. “Democracy” has no real existence outside of human speech. Despite this, most people today assume it to be the ultimate, transcendent political system, and even, for some, “the voice of God.” A number of Pope Pius XII’s encyclicals and allocutions show that democracy is a legitimate regime but only workable within a limited, specific territory. Yet, he could have spared himself the effort; what more and more men are dreaming of today is universal democracy. We have only to read the newspapers to be convinced of it. How could it be otherwise? When regimes founded on family, region, handicraft, country, and homeland disappear, nothing remains but individuals separated from one another, each one going to vote in his separate little polling booth along with their disincarnate conceptions of the pseudo-reality they would like to see emerge. How can you unite such disincarnate individuals, who have broken with the genuine social realities inscribed in their human nature, except through false promises of a perfect future, through unreal dreams and unreal words? This explains all the talk about “democracy” which riddles our contemporary literature–or what passes for literature. It claims that the crisis comes from our not being “democratic” enough and that “universal democracy” will save us from the swamp that is swallowing us up. The least little nation emerging today has to be “democratic” under pain of incurring the most violent criticism. What else do we read every day? What else do we constantly hear from the mass media, ...[which at the same time seems] to require of us no other effort than that of “struggling” to satisfy our own personal needs even should society perish–or what remains of it? The enormous Social Security debt crushing the majority of countries around the globe comes from the same dream-world sickness. We construct an outrageous bureaucratic structure, a kind of gigantic bureaucratic abstraction destined to provide definitively for the individuals incapable of working any longer for whatsoever reason, and as the crisis increases their number the machine proves unequal to the task. All of this in favor of a dreamworld instead of leaving the workers themselves to manage what kind of insurance they choose within associations under their own control. At the same time, however, the individual is becoming incapable of the simple management still remaining to his control and irresponsible in whatever ties him effectively to anyone else. Social Security is gnawing away at the modern socialistic State to the point of emptying it of all substance. The fact of “deforming information” remains undeniably pertinent to anyone in the least degree observant. We will only speak very briefly here of contemporary religious art or of contemporary art, period. If any aspect of today’s dis-society can be held up as proof of my entire analysis, it is art. Art has become hard to understand, incommunicable, and incomprehensible, because it is founded on its sole individual author separated from other men and from the universe. But art is not to be founded on its author as an individual; it is founded on what we have to call the “being with” of the artist www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007  who lives with all the other beings around him. The creativity of such an artist allows communication with others whom his work will attract as they discover their own “being with” rather than shutting themselves up in their individuality and closing upon themselves, as the modern world invites them to do. Most modern art “informs” others in perpetually attempting to deform them. The individuality of the artist tries in vain to reach out to others, which by definition it is incapable of doing. It can only horrify, shock, surprise, and, ultimately, close him within himself and his own silent misunderstanding. It is no exaggeration to say that, for the first time in history, even in periods of decadence, art is on the path to extinction. As was to be expected, the majority of art and literature critics have not diagnosed this mortal illness and have even presented it as an undeniable renewal of the intellectual health of modern man. A clear proof of this fact is the near total disappearance of a poetry worthy of the name and capable of uniting the poet and his reader with the poetic universe. Poetry in its contemporary deforming form has had its day. The same is true of the formative mission which the modern State has claimed for itself. It has become deformative. The US National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) exams known as the “nation’s report card” tested 21,000 high school seniors attending 900 public and private schools from January to March 2005. Only 35% of high school seniors read at a “proficient” level; only 16% of black students and 20% of Hispanic students were proficient. Only 29% of whites, 10% of Hispanics and 6% of blacks were proficient in math. Factor in dropouts and what the NAEP test suggests is that, of black children starting in first grade, 1 in 8 will be able to read at the level of a high school senior after 12 years, and 1 in 33 able to do the math. Among Hispanic kids, 1 in 10 will be able to read at a highschool senior level, but only 1 in 20 able to do the high-school math. [The education establishment is complicit in a monstrous fraud.–Ed.] Modern pedagogy is not in the least concerned. It forges ahead toward the establishment of an intellectual disorder of the worst kind by inventing new writing and counting machines to replace and perfect the human brain. I can see the effects in some of my grandchildren who are subjected to these methods and whose parents are obliged day after day to repair the spelling and mathematical damages. Pedagogical dictatorship has advanced by leaps and bounds in the deformation it manages to impose on helpless, obedient minds. The State has never seemed to worry. More and more, it concentrates purely on the economic crisis which is staggering it and which it often only accentuates. [Under President Bush, US Department of Education funding has THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org risen 92% in six years, from $35.5 billion in 2001 to $68 billion in 2007. In the last 25 years, taxpayers have raised their annual contribution to education by over 65% in inflation-adjusted dollars.–Ed.]. In many schools, the idea of a homeland, for example, is ridiculed and presented as a form of xenophobia or racism....[L]anguage, which is but a means at the service of thought, is henceforth the be-all and endall, a deformer of the reality to which it is meant to submit. Who can fail to see that modern youth, cut off from their natural relation with the real world all around them and with its transcendent God, is closing itself off and abandoning itself to drugs that foster an isolation of the individual within his pure individuality, separated from everything else? This kind of pathological deforming “information” is directly tied to the first. Our poor youth are deprived of everything but their “Me” emptied of all relation to whatever is not itself and bored of their daydreams. They are imprisoned within themselves. Set loose in a realm of mere economics, of mere production and consumption of things–food, drink, clothing, medicine, leisure, etc.–they are continually urged to digest all of the deforming informations raining constantly down upon them. In a dis-society more and more focused on the isolated individual, deprived of all spiritual and physical bonds with its peers, it is understandable that physical pleasure, first of all, and then the cerebral pleasure of illusion should play a more and more significant role, considering that pleasure as such is indissociable from the “Me” and closes man in upon himself. However, it is within the Catholic Church that the deforming information, cut off from its constitutive relation with supernatural revelation, is the most evident, along with its immediate consequence: a rupture with the nature of man and of that society in which he is born and develops. Nature and supernature go hand in hand: you cannot have one without the other. Where is the supernatural to be incarnated, if not within what is natural to man: his intelligence, his will, his very flesh? How is nature to attain its fullness of existence if not by the supernatural, which is grafted onto it as onto a solid foundation, in realizing all of its potential? The notions of “nature” and “supernature” have vanished, with rare exception, from the vocabulary of today’s churchmen at every level of the hierarchy. How is it possible to restore the nature of man denatured by the purely economic mindset imposed by the political leaders? How could the supernatural ever be solidly incarnated within it? Clerical verbalism continually tries to replace the divine transcendent realities; their long-winded, verbose informations inevitably twist their way into a deformation of something as essential  as the theological virtues. In most cases, today’s theologians no longer even speak of them, nor do the modern clergy, blindly obedient to their leaders. Dom Gerard, a Benedictine monk, corroborates our analysis. “I am convinced,” he wrote not long ago, “that the divine transcendence has been lost in the mist for 30 years and that those who no longer remember it have abdicated the dignity of sons, zealous for their Father’s honor.” The situation of the Church since Vatican II shows us that this modern heresy, which puts in parentheses the most essential theological truths, is sapping away all supernatural belief, to the Olympian unconcern of the higher clergy. The finality of this new, abstract Christianity, put out of touch with its essential and existential orientation on the God of Revelation, is man in general and the temporal goods with which he must henceforth be provided. It is no longer a question of man considered as a member of a family, of a region, of a homeland–these notions have practically disappeared from the ecclesiastical mind along with the duties they imply and the ties they bind. It is a question of the conceptual Man born of the French Revolution, of communism and of Freemasonry, whose themes have been so completely adopted as to form an effective alliance with their deforming informations–in many cases, with no real criticism from the Catholic hierarchy. Against the dream-worlders, the modern Church no longer has any of the protections that duly obeyed laws constituted. Anarchy reigns, crowned–especially in France–by the dictatorship of a high clergy that has firmly opted for Democratic Man and whose members, like vulgar politicians, appeal to the individual abstracted from all of his eternal social conditions to grind him down and force him into the mold of pseudo-religious deforming information in order to master him. The excommunication declared by Msgr. Boucheix against the traditional monastery of St. Magdalene and the one thundered, with the help of the police, against the parish community of Port-Marly, whose priest was violently dragged away from the altar where he was celebrating Mass, prove to us that the French clergy is dominated by a communistic “fascism” that dares not say its name. These measures of force are approved by the Cardinal Primate of the Gauls, His Eminence Albert Cardinal Decourtray (1923-94). Deforming information is henceforth the official language of the French clergy. It is tending to become that of the universal Catholic clergy as well, under the direction of the present pope [then Pope John Paul II–Ed.], whose entire philosophy, underlying his theology, is founded on the primacy of the individual camouflaged as a “person,” contrary to the Augustinian and Thomistic traditions of the Church of all time. Pope John Paul II is undoubtedly a pious priest, but his piety is above all an individual sentiment which is seriously threatening to transform the teaching of the Gospel if it remains unfortified by philosophical and theological realism, as proven by the example of Vatican II, the massive introduction of the New Mass throughout the Catholic world, and the attenuation (if not the elimination) of the differences between Catholic and Protestant rituals. The Pope very silently supports the interdiction of the traditional Mass imposed by the bishops, especially the French bishops. With the same tacit approval, he supports the interdiction cast by the heterodox clergy upon the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the Catechism of Saint Pius X. He supports all that Jean Madiran criticizes in the modern clergy with “its complacency with socialism, its approval of the CCFD [The Catholic Committee Against Hunger and for Development], its mindless campaign for immigrant voting rights, and its public alliance with radical left-wing Freemasonry (November 1985)”–acts which have completely undermined its moral and religious authority, emptying and closing down numerous churches, seminaries, and monasteries. Once again, deforming information, the negation of the supernatural, human–too human– pseudo-creationism, and unhealthy clericalism have triumphed without there having been any kind of official struggle on the part of the papacy to contain the disaster. What we need is a new St. Pius X to reinvigorate the Catholic Church and settle it back on the solid foundation of Tradition. The proof is in the ecumenical gathering at Assisi (1986) set in motion by Pope John Paul II. Qualified representatives of the various Christian and pagan religions assembled to announce–as we have always known–that belief in God is a normal phenomenon in the life of humanity and that it is necessary to restore it. Such a “council” obviously empties the Catholic religion of all supernatural character revealed to her alone. The information spread by this “synod” is certainly a dissimulation of the historical fact that the Catholic Church is the only one to possess divine truth. Tragically, it informs and deforms at the same time, with all the authority which still remains to the modern popes since Pope Paul VI. Let us repeat unceasingly: it is vital that we resist and that we cling to the integral human nature that we possess and to the Supernatural that has been revealed to us. Let us pray unceasingly. Translated for the first time into English exclusively by Angelus Press from L’Intelligence en péril de mort (Dismas, 1987), pp.9-22. In behalf of our readers, some editions were made for clarity and relevance by Mr. James Vogel and Fr. Kenneth Novak. NAEP statistics gleaned from “Dumbing- Down of America” by Patrick Buchanan (posted March 3, 2007) were used in substitution for the dated and less applicable French material. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 8 Liberating Ourselves from eSlavery C h r i s t o p h e r photomontage by simon townshend The ANgelus • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org C h e c k 9 I photomontage by simon townshend n the northwest corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Keweenaw Peninsula reaches some 70 miles out into the world’s largest body of fresh water, Lake Superior. Hearing the name of one of Keweenaw’s little villages, Laurium, should make the heart of any Notre Dame grad race. Laurium is the home of George Gipp–“The Gipper”–who, during his 4-year, 32-game career, scored no fewer than 83 touchdowns. Of those 32 games, the Fighting Irish lost only two. The name Laurium should fire the imaginations of Hellenophiles, as well, and also stir the souls of classicists, lovers of ancient history, and all citizens of Western civilization. In 483 BC, Herodotus tells us, a tribe of independent-minded folks called Athenians discovered silver in another Laurium, a small town southeast of Athens on the Aegean coast. A smart Athenian named Themistocles convinced his fellow citizens to use the Laurium silver to finance the building of a great navy. Four years later, that navy defeated the much larger Persian fleet at the battle of Salamis. Without that victory, the Greeks would have been swallowed up by the Persian Empire. Instead, freedom flowered in Attica, and all that is great and graceful in the West was born. There is no silver in Laurium, Michigan, but it is rich in copper. A century ago, copper boomed so big in the region that two trains a day traveled over 400 miles from Chicago to Laurium’s neighbor, Calumet. In 1895, when the city fathers incorporated Laurium, they honored their mining heritage by naming their village after a great town in mining history. Not long ago, even American mining plutocrats read Herodotus, maybe even in Greek, and they understood America as a legacy of Greece and Rome. A century later, that legacy has been displaced by something more shallow and sinister. In the summer of 2005, American astronomers claimed to have discovered a tenth planet. The discoverers of this new planet, like the city fathers of Laurium 110 years before, had an opportunity to name something. They named the planet “Xena” after the immodestly clad female lead in the television series Xena: Warrior Princess. In 1895, Michigan copper barons named their mining village after an ancient Greek mining village central to the story of the West. In 2005, NASA astronomers named a giant ball of something in outer space after a character in a television program that five years from now will be forgotten. What happened? Television happened. Luring Western man to lose interest in his history, thus forgetting who he is, is only one of television’s harmful effects. Nearly as ubiquitous today are newer machines of modern information technology, chiefly the computer and its attendant devices that exacerbate the social and moral chaos that began with television. These machines promise freedom when, in fact, they enslave us. They dissolve tradition. Rather than strengthening human relationships, they render them more abstract. They encourage isolation. They divorce us from reality. They make the truth hard to uncover. They serve as obstacles to our relationship with the Divine. These effects are interrelated and demand more lengthy and careful treatment than a single essay can provide. Nonetheless, the observations of G.K. Chesterton on technology and on the systems of communication in his own day provide a point of departure for confronting the effects of modern communication technology, the machines and systems which we have embraced with so much enthusiasm and so little examination. English historian Christopher Dawson, who attributed his conversion to Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, considered at length the social, cultural, and political effects of technology. He concluded that technology had replaced classical liberalism, which had replaced Christianity, as the thing that www.angeluspress.org The ANgelus • June 2007 10 managed modern human life. Russell Hittinger in “Christopher Dawson on Technology and the Demise of Liberalism,” cites correspondence from a British Army officer serving in India in 1870: Railways are opening the eyes of the people who are within reach of them....They teach them that time is worth money, and induce them to economize that which they had been in the habit of slighting and wasting; they teach them that speed attained is time, and therefore money, saved or made....Above all they induce in them habits of self-dependence causing them to act for themselves and not lean on others. “What is striking about this statement,” writes Hittinger, is that the machine is regarded as the proximate cause of the liberal virtues; habits of self-dependence are the effect of the application of a technology. The benighted peoples of the subcontinent are to be civilized, not by reading Cicero, not by conversion to the Church of England, not even by adopting the liberal faith, but by receiving the discipline of trains and clocks. The machine is both the exemplar and the proximate cause of individual and cultural perfection. Like the train in 1870 India, the personal computer and its related paraphernalia and systems have become both the model and the cause of human behavior. E-mail, the Internet, the World Wide Web, text messaging, iPods, pda’s, mp3’s, cellular phones, and the rest manage modern human life. The people at Apple Computers call the whole business “iLife.” A better word, coined by my colleague Aaron Wolf, is “eSlavery.” Computers run our offices and our homes. Few, if any, professions can be pursued today without computers, and even young school children are expected to use them. Computers have boosted to escape-velocity the new religion called time management, a modern religion because it is a billion dollar industry, and because it promises selffulfillment, leisure, and freedom. Chesterton saw technology’s false promise of leisure for what it truly was. Writing on March 21, 1925, in the Illustrated London News, he identified technology’s chief dangers. But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might. But it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced. To Chesterton, the two chief effects of technology are: one, it controls human behavior even as it appears to promise freedom (as with the clocks THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org and trains leading to self-dependence), and two, it displaces and eventually replaces human acts. C.S. Lewis would draw the same conclusion in The Abolition of Man, where he identified three technologies–the airplane, the wireless radio, and the contraceptive–that promise freedom, but which, in practice, give a few men control of the lives of many men. Anyone who has received an e-mail and felt the obligation to respond and respond quickly, knows that it is difficult to confine the computer to role of tool and not allow it to become master. Anyone who has surfed the Internet and then wondered where the last 90 minutes went knows that computers can lead us around in far more subtle and dangerous ways than merely managing our schedules or obligating us to correspond. Chesterton’s Leisure State machine illustrates how a technology creates a dependence on itself: The machine erases human knowledge and understanding by taking over the human acts through which skill, knowledge, tradition, understanding, and belief are preserved and transmitted. Technology is the solvent of tradition. In Chesterton’s example, practical knowledge in the realm of food production handed down from one generation to the next is dissolved in the machine. Much is made of the output of modern agriculture with little thought of the human cost. “People who get too far from fundamental things,” wrote Chesterton, “from ploughing and reaping and rearing children, lose something that is never restored by any progress or civilization.” We grow distant from these fundamental things as our relationship to them is altered by modern machines. In the realm of information technology the problem is acute. Watching a baseball game on television is not the same experience as attending one at the local park. It is a lesser one because it is more abstract. For the same reason, listening to a symphony on an iPod is not the same as hearing it in a concert hall. It is worth reflecting on the fact that the greatest music in history was not written to be recorded, let alone to be corrupted into a ringtone. Not only do the devices of modern communication technology render our relationships with human experiences more abstract, they render these experiences more impersonal. Travelers once recorded their adventures with some carefully chosen prose, maybe even some verse, accompanied by a sketch or two scratched on the plain white stock of a journal page. The result was at least a treasured keepsake, perhaps a family heirloom, possibly an historical document. The camera fundamentally changed how we record our adventures, and not only by replacing the once common skill of drawing. As the film camera rendered drawing obsolete, it has, in turn, been rendered obsolete by the digital camera, which has all but removed, so far as the amateur 11 is concerned, any artistic, that is, personal, quality associated with photography. Once constrained by the cost of film and processing, a photographer would take some care to compose a picture. He no longer needs to. With a digital camera he can carelessly snap away. Similarly, the traveler need not take any care in logging his impressions. He can spew them into a digital recorder instead of writing them down. But the act is less personal, and less meaningful. Shoeboxes, to say nothing of hard drives, full of photographic images that are rarely if ever looked at testify to the truth that without limits there can be no joy. When we do write, it is not with a pen. Two generations ago, middle-school students learned calligraphy. American school children today devote some time to handwriting but spend a great deal more time in front of computers, which have fundamentally altered the human act of writing. In front of a computer, writing can be an endless series of fits, starts, and revisions. Writing with a pen, or even a typewriter, requires coherent, measured thinking, at least a paragraph at a time. It is fitting that we no longer call it writing. When “word processing” first appeared, it promised easy revision and with that, better prose, but our own time has not produced a Shakespeare or a Dickens or a Chesterton. Nor does any evidence exist that the common American today writes with more clarity and style than did previous generations who had no word processors. The evidence suggests that the opposite is true. E-mail, where punctuation, capitalization, salutations, and spelling have been abandoned, and text messaging, with its deliberately misspelled shorthand, and Internet “chat rooms,” are damaging not only literacy, but also human social interaction. Office colleagues and family members hide behind e-mail messages to avoid face-to-face meetings concerning disagreements, and the haste with which e-mail is dispatched often exacerbates social conflict. Adolescents today prefer text messaging to the telephone, a device that replaced written correspondence and face-to-face conversation. Even social sins have become more abstract as today’s teenagers seduce one another using suggestive text messages. Historians should mourn the loss of the art of correspondence, replaced by the vulgarity and sloppiness of e-mail. Letters were once a significant primary source document. When the historians of the future look back at our own time they will have to sift through millions of blogs written by people whose vanity has convinced them that the whole of cyberworld is interested in their shopping and sexual habits. Confronted with so much data, the historians of the future will discover something terrible about modern times, something Chesterton knew almost a century ago: “The world has discovered how to say everything, everywhere at the very moment in all history when it has nothing to say.” “An Englishman can communicate with Manhattan by wireless,” wrote Chesterton “and he may yet communicate with Mars by wireless; and, in both cases, nothing remains but the deeper and darker problem of thinking of something to say.” And again, “It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.” Nothing to say with every means to say it. Walk through an airport and count the cellphone users. Turn on Fox News for yet another non-update update on that poor girl who went missing in Aruba. Scan the “Corner” at National Review Online to see what juvenilia Jonah Goldberg and his colleagues are offering. Dial up Freerepublic.com, where posters with screen names like BlackElk, Antigov, and Beaversmom weigh in on the latest Ann Coulter outrage or Rush Limbaugh scandal. Common among the citizens of cyberworld is the mistaken belief that they have something meaningful and effective to say and that their “participating in the process” is achieving some good. The opposite is true. “There never was a time in history when the few counted for so much, and the many for so little,” wrote Chesterton, almost a century ago. Modern communication technology has made the problem worse by creating the illusion that its media are a force for democratic good. After more than a decade, the returns on the World Wide Web as a mechanism for political or social change for the good might be discerned by counting up the number of pro-life websites (“pro-life” typed into the Google search engine yields 8.8 million pages). Has there been a correlated drop in the number of abortions? If the Internet has decentralized political life, why did the last presidential election offer two pro-war, pro-free trade, pro-big government, pro-immigration candidates? The ideas of the minority of bloggers who do have something to say are lost in the relentless pursuit of novelty that is at the core of the medium’s nature. Their thoughts are rendered old the moment they are posted. The World Wide Web is both the exemplar and the cause of our demand for novelty. Nonetheless, as Chesterton observed, “the very fury with which people go on seeking pleasures is a proof that they have not found it.” And in The Napoleon of Notting Hill he wrote, “It is of the new things that men tire... of fashions and proposals and improvements and change.” Even as we tire of the novelties of the Web we desperately seek more of them: the next page, the next post.   The World Wide Web’s 15-billion-dollar pornography trade feeds off the addict’s slavery to novelty. Since he cannot love one woman for life, he calls up from the machine an ever greater variety and www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 12 number of imaginary lovers, yet he is inevitably left tired and unsatisfied. With its false promise of infinite content, the Internet has magnified the pathology of the television remote control. Once the man on the couch was confined to his hundred or so cable channels, which he flipped through–hope triumphing over experience–that he would find something to satisfy. He had the illusion that he was in control, but the thing being controlled remotely was he. So it is all the more with the web browser with its promise of something new and untried and instantly around the corner. “Living in a world that worships swiftness and success no longer means living in a world of new things,” wrote Chesterton, “Rather it means living in a world of old things; of things that very swiftly grow old. The actual sensation of novelty lasts for a much shorter time than it does in a world where there are fewer sensations.” Our desire for novelty is only increased by the proliferation of machines that promise it. The synergy between modern communication technology and novelty is one reason why media such as the World Wide Web and television are doubtful agents for beneficial social or political change. Even the best content online or on the television swiftly grows old and is forgotten. The Bill O’Reilly fan whose blood boils when his hero exposes the latest cultural outrage should try to remember what it was that O’Reilly was in a lather about the week before, or the day before. “Men invent new ideals,” wrote Chesterton, “because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.” Novelty undermines our sense of our history, which takes work to uncover, work to preserve, work to pass on (Chesterton called education the “soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another”), and history does not always go down easily. Rather than uncover the real past (Galileo was an arrogant pain in the neck who did not know when to shut up), we make up a false past (The Catholic Church was a wicked institution that suppressed science and learning). Because of its power of visual images, especially moving ones, to suggest, modern communication technology makes easy the fabrication of a false history. Read enough books and you could learn the truth. Watch the movie and imbibe the version that the man who made the movie has contrived for his audience. Writing in The Well and the Shallows on the very question, Chesterton wrote: My contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be “free” to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word “free.” By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org expressing the most vulgar millionaires’ notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have. “The impotence of the receptive party.” The phrase perfectly describe man’s servile relationship with the images and sounds of the carefully prepared media of modern communication technology, media that create an alternate history and consequent alternate reality. Last spring, my wife and I took our four boys to Chicago for the day. We rode the double-decker bus around the city admiring the unusual buildings that make up what must be America’s most magnificent skyline. Our guide, however, was thin on Chicago history. Much of his patter included bits and pieces on America’s number one TV personality: Oprah. Where Oprah lives. Where Oprah tapes her show. Where Oprah shops. Where Oprah walks her dog. Where Oprah eats. The balance of the tour was movies. As we passed the Wrigley Building, we learned that this is where Tom Hanks went to visit somebody or other in a movie called Road to Perdition. On a bridge over the Chicago River is where Sandra Bullock kissed so and so in While You Were Sleeping. Off the Marina Towers Steve McQueen drove a car into the Chicago River in the Bounty Hunter. Across the square with the ugly Picasso sculpture ran Dan Akroyd and Jim Belushi in The Blues Brothers. Under Wacker Drive took place the chase scene in Batman Beyond. (One sure sign of our impoverished age: Aeschylus had Homer for a muse; Shakespeare had Plutarch; today’s filmmakers draw their inspiration from comic books.) “My friend!” I wanted to call out to the guide. “These things did not happen. These are movies. They are not real! Is there no Chicago history more captivating than a Sandra Bullock chick flick? Of course there is: there were gangsters and graft, bootlegging, slaughterhouses that were a menace to public health and cops cracking the heads of political protesters with their nightsticks. There was a great fire and a skyline that rose pheonix-like out of its ashes!” Our history is fabricated by “the most vulgar millionaires” in Hollywood and all too readily consumed by “the most vulgar millions.” Moving images so influence or lives that we conform our tastes, our clothes, our manners, our behavior after that of our favorite stars. People name their children after movie characters or sports celebrities. People read the books that Oprah, a television star, tells them 13 to. Once the people who recommended books were teachers or librarians. Some Americans are perpetually starring in the movie about their own lives. To provide the soundtrack to the fantasy, man has devised the iPods. On March 14, 2006, writing in the Chicago Tribune, a Kevin Pang wrote a “Requiem for an iPod” the hard drive of which had crashed. With melancholy Kevin recalled all the “good times” he and his iPod shared: the time that he “jogged along the lake shore with Outkast blaring its deep South brand of hip hop”; the time he escaped the chatter of office life aided by Coldplay. His iPod helped him ignore the panhandlers on the streets of Chicago. In other words, his iPod abstracted him from the reality of the waves of Lake Michigan, the drudgery of office life, and the tragedy of a beggar, and provided an alternate reality. For Chesterton the machines of modern media present two dangers. One, because our participation in them is passive, before these technologies ours is a posture of suggestibility. Two, their content is centrally produced, and our participation in them is passive. The World Wide Web, we are told, is the antidote. Its content comes from all over the place. There may be 40 million distinct websites. Can these offer the means for us to bypass the notions of the vulgar millionaires so that we can get at the good, the beautiful, and the true? So far, they have not. Far from making the truth more available, the Internet has made it more difficult to find. Far from stopping gossip, it has accelerated it as the barrage of forwarded e-mails spreading urban legends testifies. (My favorite: Traveling businessmen are being seduced by women who drug them in their hotel rooms and harvest their kidneys.) “It actually takes the truth a very long time to trickle through,” Chesterton said, “the tangle of rumors and reports, in spite of all the supposed promptitude and practicality of modern communications.” His criticism was leveled at a press that still maintained a system of editing and fact checking. No such system regulates the World Wide Web. In Eugenics and other Evils, he wrote: The quicker goes the journalist, the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which everyday is less worth delivering at all. Chesterton accused the journalists of his day of a “blind idolatry of speed.” What judgment, we should ask, would Chesterton render upon blogs, chat rooms, write backs, and other fora of the World Wide Web? These operate at a pace infinitely faster than the dailies of G.K.’s day, a pace that might best be described as angelic–or is it demonic?–that is, instantaneously, altogether unrestricted by time and space. The moment I can think a thought, or think something that should not be called a thought, I can spew it into cyberspace, with no consideration or contemplation of whether it is worth saying, to say nothing of whether it is truly good or edifying. Maybe I recognize so much of the Web’s partisan politics chatter is at once a great din and a great void. Instead, what if my focus is the state of the Church? That’s good, right? There are ample blogs for me to spend my hours lamenting the troubled state of the Bark of Peter. I can sound off on the wicked Archbishop’s affair with his partner, or the seminaries that seem more like brothels. I can read and forward to others the dirty details of the scandalous past of the founder of such and such religious congregation, or comment on a magazine editor’s marital infidelity. Perhaps I’m above that prurience. If so, I can weigh in on the obvious failure of the Holy See to reconcile with this or that traditionalist society. Or I can blame the hardheadedness of the leaders of that society for failing to reconcile with Rome. No matter my brand of curiosity, there’s a place for me on the web. In all of my participation, however, I will have failed to realize that the medium of so much chatter has helped to transform the Church into a movement. I’m part of that movement, and I’m going to do something in that movement. I have forgotten that the Church is an institution created by Jesus Christ for the care of souls, and I have forgotten that for that supernatural aid, I should be first in line. St. Augustine identified this human failing long ago, in Book Ten of his Confessions. He called it lust of the eyes. Our desire to know about things that in the end only drive us further from the Divine because they crowd our imaginations when our imaginations should be filled with the contemplation of God. As long as I stay plugged into the noise, the flashing images, and the gossip, I do not risk facing the terrifying silence during which I would be forced to confront that which is most real–the state of my interior life. If my iPod headphones are blaring, I need not acknowledge the supplication of the beggar. If my iPod headphones are blaring, I will not recognize the beggar that my soul would seem if I could see it as God does. The highest human act is prayer because it is union with God. It requires, as Monsignor Romano Guardini points out, “collectedness.” This requires silence and a capacity for silence. Like Elijah we need to be silent to hear God’s whispers, but the din of so much electronic noise has pushed God out. “We need to find God,” said Mother Teresa, “and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence.” Our sanctuaries, especially if we belong to a megachurch, are really auditoriums for sound and light shows. Catholics who think they have escaped this curse should recall that the Novus Ordo is made possible by and driven by the microphone. Two decades ago, well before the pace of electronic communication reached the frenzy of today, the Holy See’s Congregation for Catholic www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 14 Education expressed grave concern over the formation of young seminarians reared in a culture of “constant acceleration...of instantaneous communication.” A 1986 Vatican document, Guide to the Training of Future Priests Concerning the Instruments of Social Communication, noted that None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia...have any power except over the people who choose to use them. [i]n the past few decades, the instruments of social communication have come to the point of exercising an enormous and profound influence on practically every aspect, sector and relationship of society. Do something radical. Throw your iPod, your PDA, and your cell phone in the nearest river. Check you e-mail once or twice a day, and do not check it at home. Wait a few days before answering an e-mail. Use formal salutations and closings when writing e-mails. Do not send an e-mail when the matter can be discussed face to face. Do not use e-mail for thank-you notes. Set your home free from broadband Internet access. Do not answer the phone after 8pm. Stop downloading songs from iTunes. Throw your television in the street. Fill the space and quiet you have created with things that never grow old: the Mass, the Divine Office, Holy Hours before the Blessed Sacrament. Read and shop for good books. Learn calligraphy or how to draw. Learn the guitar and some folk songs. Learn John Henry about the man who died in a heroic contest with a machine. If you must go online and participate in chat groups, use your real name. Anything else is a deception. Look things up online on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, or Mondays and Wednesdays. Before dialing up the Internet recite a prayer consecrating your time online to the work of God. Write letters. Writing a letter is an incarnational act. So is drawing a cathedral, or a piazza, or a landscape in your travel journal–even if it’s done badly. “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” wrote Chesterton. Chesterton said: While acknowledging that sins against chastity were a considerable part of the culture of modern communication, the document went on to declare that treatment of the “moral aspects of Mass Media should not be reduced to a consideration merely of sexual morality.” The document identified more fundamental human costs of too much electronic visual and auditory stimuli, and stated the need in seminarian formation to find “remedies for past excessive use or misuse of the mass media....As an antidote to timewasting and sometimes even alienating indulgence in superficial media programmes,” the document proposed that the students should be guided to the love and practice of reading, study, silence, and meditation. They should be encouraged, and be provided with the necessary conditions for community dialogue and prayer. This will serve to remedy the isolation and self-absorption caused by the unidirectional communication of the mass media, and will revive the authentic and absolute value proper to the Christian profession and the priestly ministry, particularly those of obedience and evangelic poverty, which the materialist and consumerist vision of human existence offered by the instruments of social communication very often rejects or ignores. The document prescribed as a corrective to the social malformation modeled and caused by modern communications, that the students be trained to engage in frequent interpersonal and group conversation, in which they will give special attention to correctness of language, clearness of exposition and logical argumentation. This will serve as a corrective to the passivity which can be occasioned by the unidirectional communications and images of the mass media. Addressing the deepest matter, the document required that the students should be educated in interior silence, necessary for the spiritual as well as the intellectual life, and to shut out the enervating din of the daily clamouring media of communications. In confronting the dangers of modern communication technology, Christians can never be without hope. Chesterton reminds us that there are “no bad things, only bad uses of things.” He also wrote: THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org Thus, we should take seriously his counsel that [it] is always hard to correct the exaggeration without exaggerating the correction. An army cannot march on forever when its communications are cut and it has lost touch with its base. In the human army, the communications are called traditions, and the base is what the romantics called nature; the real world that God made for men. Modern electronic communication technology has dissolved our traditions and abstracted the real world. We have more means than ever to communicate, but they have only made it more difficult for us to communicate with our history, our traditions, with one another, and with God. Christopher Check is executive vice president of the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois. A version of these remarks was delivered in June 2006 at the annual meeting of the American Chesterton Society in St. Paul, Minnesota. The author gratefully acknowledges the invaluable aid of the Society’s president, Dale Ahlquist. 15 Christendom NEWS Angelus Press Edition (Right) Fr. Nély has lunch at a fisherman’s house in Gabon. (Left) Fr. Pfluger in Africa. Last Summer, the General Chapter of the Society of Saint Pius X elected Fr. Niklaus Pfluger as first assistant and Fr. Alain-Marc Nély as second assistant to the General Superior, Bishop Bernard Fellay. Christendom had the opportunity to ask for their first impressions and their projects. “Our Main Concern Is To Help the Priests” What was your schedule like during the first six months following your election? Fr. Niklaus Pfluger: I went to Austria for a priests’ meeting, where I gave a conference and talked with them. Then I journeyed to southern France, to Nice and Marseille, where I had long conversations with our priests. Next I accompanied Bishop Fellay to Southern Africa where we visited our priories in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and we also went to Namibia. I also flew to Chile, to Buenos Aires in Argentina, and to Brazil to visit the new priories. And lastly, I went to England where I devoted all my time to visiting the priories and meeting with our priests. And you, Fr. Nély, what have you been doing since your election? Which countries have you already visited? Fr. Alain-Marc Nély: The first country I went to was a “white” country, since I went to preach a retreat to the Sisters of Brignoles (teaching Dominicans Sisters, in southern France), almost on the day after the General Chapter. In August, www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 16 (Above) Fr. Nély gives a conference in Kansas City, Missouri. (Right) Fr. Nély blessing a fisherman’s boat in Gabon. New Zealand:Visit to the school in Wanganui. From left to right: Fr. Nély, Fr. Laisney, Bishop Fellay. I flew to Libreville to preach the priests’ retreat to our confrères of the Gabon mission. I took advantage of this opportunity to visit the country and go to Lambaréné in the footsteps of Archbishop Lefebvre together with Fr. Groche. We also toured the islands. Then I went back to Italy to finish packing my belongings and hand everything over to my successor, Fr. Davide Pagliarani. I arrived in Menzingen in October, and I went immediately to the United States to give a conference to the seminarians and take part in the celebrations for the ordination anniversary of Fr. Iscara. Next, I went to Kenya to preach a retreat to the faithful, and I also visited Uganda, where we have a long-term project for a foundation, maybe an orphanage. While in Africa I met with two bishops: the bishop of Nairobi, who received us very kindly. He is at the end of his career since he is thinking of retiring next year. And I also met the bishop of Kampala, who had just been appointed. He received us with evident curiosity but very warmly and gave us his blessing. However, we THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org Fr. Pfluger with the community of priests, Brothers, and Sisters of the St. Pius X Mission in Libreville, the capital city of Gabon, Africa. parted with something of a question mark over the visit. Back from Africa, I went to preach the retreat prior to the taking of the cassock in Flavigny at the end of January. It was a very nice experience to be with those very young aspirants to the priesthood. What are your first impressions as you discover your new charge? Is it exhausting, exciting? Fr. Nély: It is exciting, because the confrères are happy to receive us. As a rule, they ask for our visit, and it is an occasion for us to encourage them. They are happy to show us the progress in their mission, and occasionally they take advantage of our presence to request conferences, Masses, and retreats. It is also exhausting, and I must admit that I feel my age. But it is quite a different experience from the life I have known up to now. I think we feel closer to our priests, and it changes many things in our spiritual life: in prayer, in the concern we have for their good, and the good we can do to them. I have three retreats scheduled for this summer, and 17 Fr. Pfluger at the equator in Gabon. (One kilometer is approximately two-thirds of a mile.) I can tell you that I am already working on them, because I want to give to my confrères what I think they need and expect from us. We have to rekindle, or rather to feed their desire for holiness, their desire to be good priests. Do you have any anecdotes to tell about your journeys? Fr. Nély: I was very much enthused by my visits to Africa, by this candor and natural joy that Africans retain despite the precarious living conditions most of them experience. Apart from a few well-off families, we mainly have contacts with very simple people to whom our priests often give material help as well. During my journeys, I was often surprised by the food. You have to eat some bizarre things. For instance, in Gabon, we ate snake and crocodile. The fishermen with whom we were staying on the island near Lambaréné caught in their net a little crocodile that was too keen on eating their catch of fish. There was a great commotion on the island, so we all went down to the seashore. The fishermen killed the crocodile, cut it up and served it that same evening! The meat was a little too raw, and quite uneatable. Fortunately, there were chickens in the vicinity! What struck me very much in Kenya was the pastoral ministry in the slums. I could see that they live in relative poverty, but life is not that bad with the little they have. They do not look too unhappy; they are content with little, and they are joyful. During the retreat I preached, I became acquainted with the faithful, of whom there were 34 on the retreat. I established ties of friendship with them. I am paying the tuition for two young converts who serve Mass almost every Sunday. With $25 (US) you can pay tuition for one month in a private school. I keep in touch with the boys, and I hope to go to Africa a third time before the end of the year, probably in November. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 18 Do you have other journeys scheduled for the year? Fr. Nély: [This intreview was conducted for the March-April issue of Christendom.] I am going to Singapore with Bishop Fellay, and from there we will visit New Caledonia [an island in the southwest Pacific–Ed.], Australia, New Zealand, and the Fiji Islands. After spending a few days in each of these countries we will go back to Singapore and from there to Menzingen. Nine days later I will start out for St. Mary’s in the United States to meet with the priests of the US District, give conferences to the faithful. Then I will head further west to Post Falls for the last three days of Holy Week and Easter. On Easter Monday and Tuesday I will visit the Carmelites in Spokane, Washington and the Dominican Sisters in Post Falls, Idaho. Back in Europe I will answer Fr. Pagliarani’s invitation and go to Italy for the inauguration of the new chapel in Albano. It will also be for me a good opportunity to make the pilgrimage of the seven Basilicas in Rome. I may go to Canada for their three-day Pentecost pilgrimage–it is the Canadian counterpart of the Chartres Pilgrimage–and to Calgary, where Fr. Ockerse has built a new chapel dedicated to St. Joseph. In August, I am due to preach a retreat to the priests of the US District in California, and I will also travel north to Canada. I will preach the retreat to the SiSiNoNo Sisters in Italy. And from midNovember to mid-December I will discover a new country, India, where I will preach a retreat and visit the priests. Fr. Pfluger: As for me, I am going to Gabon at the beginning of March. Then around Easter, I will start out for a three-week visit to Canada. I will travel both through English-speaking and French-speaking Canada. Summer is the time for the ordinations; I will remain in Europe. In the fall, I heard about a possible journey to Asia, but nothing is settled yet. And one of us will go to Mexico, but there again the decision is in the offing. When you thus visit the Society, which is developing all over the world, do you have a particular concern? Fr. Pfluger: During our visits to the priories we can establish contacts with the priests more on a fraternal than a hierarchical level. It is not merely for us a matter of making canonical visits. Fr. Nély: My main concern is to help the priests, our priests who are sometimes very much isolated. I think my age is also an advantage: most of the confrères being younger than I, they confide more easily to an older priest. Of course, we also have a concern for vocations, as for instance in Africa. If those two boys decide to enter the seminary, I will THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org be very happy. But the concern for the confrère remains the highest priority. As assistants to the Superior General, you reside at the Motherhouse when you are not traveling. In Menzingen, do you have the impression of being at the General Headquarters, from where you can see the whole Society? Is it not too bureaucratic a life? Fr. Nély: Precisely, I did not want to have too much of a bureaucratic existence. And I think I can tell this attitude does not exist here, not even among the secretaries. We would like our priests to come more often to the Motherhouse, but even when we talk to them over the phone, there is always a way of saying things outside of the more official aspect of our conversations. No, I do not feel like I am living in headquarters surrounded by watchtowers–not at all! The Society is living, and from the Motherhouse you realize to what extent there would still be much more to do if there were more of us. We can see this everywhere. For instance, there are presently only two priests in Kenya. They go to Uganda, Tanzania; their visit is requested in other nearby countries. People want a school; a chapel has just been built; they have to give catechism classes… If there were four of them, there would be enough work for all. As for you, Fr. Pfluger, how do you see your function near the priests? Are you the “eye of Menzingen”? Fr. Pfluger: The most important thing is to maintain contact with the confrères. It is of utmost importance to know them, to listen to them in order to understand their worries and be able to counsel them. It is also necessary to know them well to make the right choice for nominations and transfers. We are always welcomed by the priests when we visit them, and as assistants we must be at their disposal. Far from being a bureaucratic task, it is essentially a matter of making ourselves completely available to them and of being counselors. Archbishop Lefebvre used to say: “The priest has two duties: the desire for holiness, and the desire to convert souls,” which are mutually enhancing. We are here to help the priest to accomplish his priestly vocation. Because, added the Archbishop, there are three conditions for priestly holiness: the desire for sanctity, the liturgical life, and the life in common. Zeal for souls causes this desire for holiness to bear fruits, and we must help priests to keep up this enthusiasm, this momentum. Exclusive Interview with the General Assistants of the SSPX. From Christendom, No.10. Christendom is a publication of DICI, the press bureau of the Society of Saint Pius X (www.dici.org). Traditional Religious Orders 19 Little Handmaids of St. John the Baptist Le Rafflay, France T he Little Handmaids of St. John the Baptist is a community of active Sisters with a health and social services vocation, broadly speaking. In the old days, active Sisters were a familiar sight. They went everywhere, bringing help of all kinds to persons and families in need: nursing care and counseling and practical advice. They often had access to non-practicing Catholics, where their activities smoothed the way for a priest’s visit. This is a community of Sisters that is not trying to reinvent a new way of life, but that wishes to remain faithful to the program set in place by their founder. Angelus Press received the following answers to a questionnaire it sent them recently. Gathering the hay 20 The Motherhouse Who is your founder? Our founder is Fr. René-Marie de la Chevasnerie [say: Shŭv-ŏn-ẽri´] (18891968). He founded the Institute of the Little Handmaids of the Lamb of God at Brest, in Brittany (France) in 1945. He was a Jesuit and a doctor of theology whose passion was the gospel. He visited the Holy Land several times, and was charged by his superior with making the gospel accessible to simple people. Thanks to Mother Marie de Magdala, our foundress, the former bursar general of the Institute of the Lamb of God who left the Institute as a result of the crisis in the Church, we have in our possession all the writings of Fr. de la Chevasnerie. How did you fare during the crisis in the Church? The Institute of the Lamb of God was canonically recognized by Rome in 1967. Unfortunately, the ravages of the Council and aggiornamento began to make themselves felt. In 1969, Mother Marie de Magdala went to Cameroon to found a mission. She stayed there for five years, under the authority of Bishop Zoe, setting up a dispensary and a home economics school. Returning to France for health reasons, she discovered that her community had gradually become quite modern. She was even invited to look for a job and give up her religious habit. She did seek employment, but did not give up the THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org St. Joseph’s Chapel Our Spirituality “Whereas she could have prided herself on her divine maternity or gloried in her exceptional gifts, she finds only one expression by which to call herself: ‘Behold the Handmaid of the Lord.’” Follow the Lamb of God, meek and humble of heart: “For us, humility is our life, our breath. Normally, a lamb should be humble.”–Fr. de la Chevasnerie Evangelize: “You must be models of the gospel, living gospels by your piety, your charity, and your renunciation. These are the great means of apostolic activity that you have in your hands. Even if you do not talk about the Gospel for a year, you preach it by living it.”–Fr. de la Chevasnerie Aid Vocations: “The admission of frail candidates, that is to say, without regard to age limit or good health, provided that the vocation be genuine with a serious aptitude to humble docility of heart, is the essential mark of the Congregation.”–The Constitutions The Vows: “By them, I bind myself to the divine Omnipotence in which all weakness is absorbed.”–Mother Marie de Magdala Poverty: “Place yourself before the Blessed Sacrament: In the appearances of bread, there is nothing, not even the reality of bread...they are simple appearances...nothing more. He is totally poor.” Chastity: “In the divine Lamb on the altar we possess the most sublime ideal of total purity, absolutely without alloy.” Obedience: “Neither Mary nor Joseph allowed himself to judge, even interiorly, Heaven’s order, or to say to himself that they could have hid themselves much closer, while Egypt is so far away. No, Mary and Joseph have no other desire than God’s good pleasure, and their thoughts are one with those of the Father.”–Fr. de la Chevasnerie 21 habit. She became a social worker, and worked for several years in a kindergarten in Nantes. In 1979 she left her community in order to create a traditional branch of the Institute. And that is how the Community of the Little Handmaids of St. John the Baptist came to settle at Le Rafflay, in Château-Thébaud (240 miles southeast of Paris, and about 10 miles northeast of Nantes, south of the Loire river). What is the special feature of your Community? Fr. de la Chevasnerie frequently preached retreats in French boarding schools especially in the west of France, and he was struck by the number of vocations that did not come to fruition because of health problems and the like. His work and his observations during retreats made him understand the need for a feminine congregation based on the doctrine of the immolated Lamb of God, that would apply the Lord’s exhortation: “Learn of Me, for I am meek and humble of heart” (Mt. 11:29). Unlike many active congregations, it is not the chosen apostolate that unites us, but the doctrine of docility and humility of heart. For us, the apostolate comes after as a response to the needs that exist at the time we are looking for some good work to undertake. Thus the main reason for this Community’s existence is to make known the gospel by living according to its precepts of docility and humility of heart. 22 The second purpose of the Community, which is specific to our Community, is to accept as members persons of every age, background, and educational attainment; the healthy, but also the infirm and feeble, provided, of course, that they have a genuine religious vocation. This mix of cultures and classes, and the presence of the feeble and infirm in our midst, is the Community’s source of mortification. For the infirm and feeble, they have the mortification of accepting themselves as they are; for the healthy, it is to accept living with them, with all the accommodations this entails. That is why it was necessary to have, not just an activity, but a doctrine to bind us together. It is often very much easier to take the discipline than to live in close quarters with a handicapped person day in and day out. It is not always very easy. Fr. de la Chevasnerie was quite aware of the difficulties that this would raise, and he really thought through our life, our statutes, and our constitutions in detail. Thinking of what our life would be like, he composed an Office that is simple. Mother Most Amiable “And Mary rising up in those days, went into the hill country with haste into a city of Juda. And she entered into the house of Zachary, and saluted Elizabeth.” Isn’t it touching to see that Mary’s first charitable deed after the Annunciation was on behalf of her own family? And it is “with haste,” as the Gospel tells us, that she sets out for the little town in the hill country of Judea to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Let us not lose this precious lesson given us by the Virgin, our model, who shows herself to be amiable firstly towards her own. For it could happen that we might reserve the kindnesses of our charity for strangers while forgetting our nearest neighbor, our “proximus,” who oftentimes is right at our side, quite near. Let us strive to have the amiableness of Mary in our dealings with those who are nearest. To go and visit her cousin, the young Virgin does not hesitate to undertake the long and difficult journey in the midst of winter. She goes “with haste” in order to share her happiness as soon as possible; it is she who greets her cousin first, with an amiable charm that attracts us by its humility. That is why, as soon as she hears her cousin’s greeting, Elizabeth felt her soul rejoice under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Wasn’t it really through the sanctifying greeting THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org of the “Handmaid of the Lord, blessed among women” Corpus Christi procession who, to obey the Master’s good pleasure, hastened to come and communicate to her kinswoman the joy of which she possesses the source? Let us never forget this order in charity, especially, perhaps, when we feel ourselves carried away by immense desires for the salvation of souls: magnificent dreams, certainly, that should be encouraged, while at the same time we remind ourselves that the starting point of the most fruitful ministry or mission is generally to be found nearby, in our closest circle of acquaintances: the family or community, our office, our workshop, our duties, according to the order established by God. It is then that our charity will become fruitful because it will be practised according to the Master’s desires. What influence a soul then acquires among her own! To all, but especially to those who suffer, she brings the consolation of her communicative cheerfulness. “To all, but especially to those who suffer!” This is the second lesson which, with perfect reserve, the Virgin Mary gives us when, in the Visitation, her kindness allays the sorrows of her own. Indeed, Elizabeth and Zachary are “well advanced in years”: and this age, with its inevitable cortege of infirmities and pains is indeed a primary source of suffering. Those who are elderly like Elizabeth and Zachary could itemize for us the multiple causes: suffering from no longer being able to hear people talk about persons and events the way they used to talk when they were young. It often seems to them that people no longer see things as they do, that people no longer think or love as they used to think and love. And this gap they think they perceive between their souls on 23 What are the requirements for entering your Community? six years in temporary vows, after which the Sister makes her perpetual vows. In addition to the general qualities for a religious vocation, the aspirant should have a particular aptitude for humility and docility in order to correspond to the spirituality desired by our founder. We have no age limit. To enter, it is indispensable that the candidate speak French fluently, since difficulty with the language would make discussion and spiritual advancement impossible. It is illusory to think that a foreign language can be learned in a convent. What formation do the Sisters receive? During the postulancy and the novitiate, the Sisters devote part of their work time to the study of the catechism, sacred history, and the Gospels, with particular emphasis on the doctrine of the Lamb, a study that is facilitated by the abundance of Fr. de la Chevasnerie’s writings. What are the stages in the What Office is recited religious life in your Community? by the Community? First there is a pre-postulancy, which can be accomplished by visits made before entering, or upon her arrival. The length of the pre-postulancy varies according to each situation. The postulancy itself lasts from six months to a year, during which the postulant begins to become habituated to the religious life (a daily schedule, common life). This period concludes with the reception of the habit. Then follows the novitiate, which lasts for two years, at the end of which the first temporary vows are made. Then follow The Office of the Lamb. Sometimes people reproach us for not reciting the great Office. First of all, the recitation of the Divine Office is not very compatible with the active life, and it is even less compatible for weak or sickly persons. Fr. de la Chevasnerie composed for us an Office that is simple, which selects texts from both the Old and New Testamtents pertaining to the doctrine of the Lamb of God. and those of their grandchildren is experienced as a painful shock. There is for them another suffering, no less vivid and often more bitter than their infirmities: our poor old people feel that they are always a burden to their family, no matter how well disposed it might be. Now, it was to just such a person that Mary hastened, in obedience to the divine will, to exercise her amiable charity. For Zachary has been mute since the passage of the Angel. What is more, as far as we can tell from the context of the Gospel, he is also deaf. When they discuss what name the newborn son should receive in front of his father, Zachary remains so outside the discussion that it is necessary “to make signs to him” to learn his opinion. Deaf and dumb! Let us imagine the suffering of this double infirmity, of which deafness is perhaps the most painful because it stands like a wall between those we love and our souls, avid to hear them even more than to speak to them! Consider Mary taking care of the stricken man during these three months while his crucifying trial continues, a suffering made all the more humiliating because it is a punishment for this soul that was too slow to believe. How the amiable Virgin’s smile relieved the old man’s anguish. And how often must the prayer of our Lady have ascended to the very heart of God on behalf of this immured soul, suffering without being able to express it and without being able to hear the least word of consolation. O amiable Virgin, if we ever encounter around us one of these poor, infirm people, deaf and dumb of body or of soul, make us kind and good like you... Teach us to quietly console these brothers or sisters in Christ and restore to them the joyous confidence of children of God, our Father! This charity will be, O Mother, one of the most sincere proofs that henceforth we want to serve Him, following your example. Lastly, O amiable Mother, teach us to give, like you, the only real motive of courage and peace: our Lord Jesus Christ. For above all the most touching human consolations, it is Jesus your Son whom you brought to the elderly couple. It is He, it is Jesus, who at the first words of your salutation, made John the Baptist, His Precursor, leap for joy. It is He who, through you, filled Elizabeth with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and invited her to bless you “amongst women.” It is He who, for the consolation of the lowly and the infirm, the simple of heart, and those who trust in the Father and surrender themselves to His good pleasure, inspired in His Mother, the humble “Handmaid of the Lord,” the canticle of children, the Magnificat that generations recite from age to age as the most perfect expression of supernatural amiableness: My soul magnifies the Lord, And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour, Because He has looked down on the lowliness of His handmaid... He has exalted the lowly, And filled the hungry with good things.... O amiable Virgin, teach us your filial and smiling care for all those who suffer. Deign to remind us that most often our first neighbor is nearby, and that to console him without disappointment, it is above all the Lord Jesus whom we should give. But to help us succeed in this divine task, O amiable Mother, deign to pray for us. Amen. (Fr. de la Chevasnerie, Chapter VII of the book The Handmaid of the Lord.) www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007  Harvesting the corn This Office is recited thrice a day: in the morning, at noon after the meal, and in the evening before retiring for the night. The Offices are short, each taking about a quarter of an hour. The noon Office is preceded by the recitation of the rosary, as is the evening office, Compline. Every day in the morning the Sisters together make a meditation written by Fr. de la Chevasnerie. These meditations are greatly influenced by St. Ignatius, and follow the Ignatian method. Three points are considered: 1) a page of the Gospel taken from the day’s Gospel; 2) a page on the Blessed Sacrament in which he relates the first point to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament; 3) a page of personal reflection which concludes with a colloquy with the Virgin Mary. It is extremely simple, and extremely profound. He leaves us with his “word of light” on which we can reflect throughout the day and so recapture the essence of the morning meditation. In the afternoon each Sister makes a half hour of adoration, the time varying according to her activities. Of course, the most important time for prayer is during holy Mass, which we have every day. Finally, there is an important devotion to the Blessed The ANgelus • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org the Sisters teach home economics to girls and young women wanting to learn how to take care of a family.the classes teach cooking, knitting, sewing, housekeeping, ironing, entertaining, infant care, budgeting, and the role of women in civic life. 25 Daily Schedule 6:15 AM Rise 6:45 AM Meditation 7:15 AM Office 7:30 AM Breakfast, Work 10:30 AM Instruction by the chaplain 11:00 AM Mass 12:00 AM Spiritual Reading 12:30 PM Lunch Fundraising on a Paris street Sacrament, each Sister making an hour of adoration weekly to pray especially for vocations. And once a month, there is night adoration before the Blessed Sacrament exposed. Is it necessary to be a nurse or healthcare worker to become a member of your Community? No, of course not, because all sorts are needed in our Community. Sometimes we are presented as uniquely hospital Sisters, but that is false. We have a few Sisters who are nurses, but they are not all practising their profession presently. Every sort of skill is needed in our house, and we do not want to have religious personnel exclusively: we need cooks and laundresses and gardeners... So the door is wide open to all. What are your current activities? First of all, we have a small agricultural enterprise (cows, goats, pig, rabbits...) which helps us to live because we do not buy our milk, butter, or meat. A few years ago we built an inn, which was conceived of as a hospitality house for the sick and convalescents, but also for people needing a place to rest or for families on vacation, etc. Periodically, our guest house is used to host spiritual retreats preached by the Dominican Fathers or by the priests of the SSPX. A few years ago, we launched a program of classes for homemakers, offered to girls or young women wanting to learn how to take care of a family. These Rosary and Office Recreation (half an hour) Work Adoration (half an hour) 7:30 PM Dinner 9:00 PM Rosary and Compline classes teach such things as cooking, knitting, sewing, housekeeping, ironing, entertaining, infant care, budgeting, and the role of women in civic life. In 1998, we opened a bookbindery, where we do repairs as well as complete bookbinding. To make the community better known, we travel to different places in France, selling at the doors of SSPX chapels the wares produced by our Community, which may be anything from Christmas cards to patés and cakes and cheese, or from children’s clothing to rosaries and holy cards. Also, having obtained the necessary rights, we sell the writings of our founder which he wrote for the general public. Every year since the year 2000, we have been organizing the chapter of the sick for the SSPX’s international pilgrimage to Lourdes, requested by the Blessed Virgin, who appeared to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858. Having taken 42 sick people the first year, this year we hope to have 150, since the number of participants has been steadily growing from year to year. The sick come from all over France, and we receive them in a big hospital placed at our disposition, with the nursing care and house keeping taken care of by us and by volunteers. Do you plan on starting other foundations? Certainly, but first it is necessary to reach a certain number of Sisters. For the moment, we are consolidating our Community, hoping that the good God will send us numerous vocations. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 26 “Sicut Parvuli ”–“As little Children” (Mt. 18:3) As little children towards the Lord Jesus, entrusted to Him for all that He wants, as He wishes, when He wills, for as long as He wants, out of love, “to please Him!” Like Him in respect to His Father: “I do always the things that please my Father!” (Jn. 8:29). As little children, like Jesus still, towards our dear neighbor, by an unfailing kindness, like that of the good Master in our thoughts, benevolent like His; in our looks, encouraging like His divine gaze; in our words, firm and gentle like His words; in our actions, simple and upright like His; in our love for souls, like His, unto death; with a smile, “to please our neighbor to please Jesus!” “When you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to Me! (Mt. 25:40). As little children, lastly, like Him, among ourselves by complete self-forgetfulness, so that Jesus alone may live in us so well that in seeing us, one sees Him, in listening to us, one hears Him, in loving us, one loves Him. I am nothing: He is all! “And I live; or rather, not I; it is Christ that lives in me!” (St. Paul, Gal. 2:20). Like the humble “Handmaid of the Lord,” the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, my Mother, and by Her, I want to be a little victim united to the divine Victim in the Crib, on the Cross, on the Altar! O Jesus, King of Love, I trust in Thy merciful Goodness! Procession with the sick at Lourdes How many are you now? We have 25 Sisters, of whom 22 are professed, two are novices, and one is a postulant. We hope to be receiving some other postulants soon. Several nationalities are represented. After the majority of French, we have Sisters from Mexico and Guadalupe, Gabon, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand. Who is your chaplain? A priest of the SSPX is our chaplain, currently Fr. Jean-Pierre Putois, who is in full-time residency. What is your daily schedule? All the Sisters follow the same schedule. The study time is included in the work of novices and postulants. THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org For information: Mother Superior Les Petites Servantes de St Jean-Baptiste Le Rafflay 44690 Château-Thébaud, France Telephone: [33] (2) 40.06.51.68 Fax: [33] (2) 40.06.59.15 part 2  F r . M a t t h i a s G a u d r o n The Angelus continues the installments of Fr. Gaudron’s Catechism of the Crisis in the Church with Part 2 on the nature of “faith.” What is faith? What has happened to faith today? Is faith a sentiment? Can it change? Find the answers to these and other common questions in the next pages. catechism of the crisis in the church www.angeluspress.org The ANgelus • June 2007 28 6) What is Faith? Faith is a supernatural virtue through which, relying on the authority of God Himself and moved by His grace, we hold everything He has revealed as absolutely true. l Does faith presuppose divine revelation? Yes, faith is the response of man to the revelation of God. l How did God reveal Himself to men? God spoke to men through Moses, the prophets, and above all through His only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. l What are the truths that man knows thanks to divine Revelation? Thanks to Revelation, we know the attributes of God and His trinitary essence. We also know our own eternal destiny, which is the vision of God in heaven. Revelation shows us the path we must follow to arrive at this end: observance of the commandments of God and reception of the sacraments, the means of salvation instituted by God. l Why is faith called supernatural? The truths revealed by God, which are the object of faith, exceed the natural capacity of our intelligence. It is thus not possible to adhere to them without the supernatural help of God, called grace. l On what grounds do we adhere to the truths revealed by God? The reason for faith is nothing but the authority of God who reveals Himself. We believe the truths of the Faith because God has affirmed them and not because we could not have any knowledge of them through our own efforts. We believe, for example, in the Holy Trinity or the divinity of Jesus Christ, not because we have discovered those truths through our intelligence, but because God has revealed them to us. 7) How is the Faith communicated to us? One source of the Faith is Sacred Scripture or the Bible. It is divided into two parts: the Old Testament, containing the Revelation of God to the Hebrews before the advent of Christ, and the New Testament, which explicitly transmits Christian Revelation. l How is Sacred Scripture distinct from other religious writings? Sacred Scripture is inspired by the Holy Ghost. This means that it is not a merely human text, but that behind the human THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org author stands God Himself, who has guided the men who composed it in a mysterious way. For this reason Sacred Scripture is really and truly the Word of God. 8) Is Sacred Scripture the only source of Revelation? To say that Sacred Scripture is the only source of Revelation is a Protestant error. The teaching orally transmitted by the Apostles, called Apostolic Tradition, is also, next to Sacred Scripture, a true source of Revelation. l Is there any mention in Sacred Scripture itself of another source of Revelation? Everything Jesus Christ said and ordained is not found in Sacred Scripture. Scripture itself says so: But there are also many other things which Jesus did; which, if they were written every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written ( Jn. 21:25). In those days, less was committed to writing than today, and thus oral tradition had a higher status. l What other reason can be invoked to show the necessity of Tradition? It is only by Tradition that we know certain truths revealed by God, and notably what books belong to Sacred Scripture. There are in fact other “Gospels” and pretended letters of the Apostles which are not authentic Biblical writings. Protestants, who would recognize only the Bible as a source of Faith, are obliged to have recourse to Tradition at least in this respect, for it is their only basis for receiving Sacred Scripture. l Which is the first of the two sources of Revelation, Sacred Scripture or Apostolic Tradition? Tradition is the first of the two sources of Revelation by virtue of its antiquity (the Apostles began by preaching), its fullness (being itself the source of Scripture, Tradition contains all the truths revealed by God) and by its sufficiency (Tradition has no need of Scripture as the basis of its divine authority; on the contrary, it is Tradition that gives us the list of the books inspired by God and which permits us to know its authentic meaning). 9) Who can authoritatively tell us what belongs to Revelation? Only the Magisterium of the Church, which resides first of all in the pope, can tell us with certitude what is to be believed and what is 29 erroneous in regard to disputed matters. It was to Peter and his successors that Christ said: “Thou are Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Mt. 16:18). He likewise gave Peter the mission of confirming his brothers in the faith: “But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren” (Lk. 22:32). A doctrine that the Church has defined as belonging definitively to divine Revelation is called a dogma. l What does Sacred Scripture say about the manner in which it should be interpreted? St. Peter says in his second epistle: ...no prophecy of scripture is made by private interpretation. For prophecy came not by the will of man at any time: but the holy men of God spoke, inspired by the Holy Ghost” (II Pet. 1:20-21). This passage shows both the inspiration of Sacred Scripture by the Holy Ghost and the fact that we cannot interpret it as we please. This, however, is exactly what the Protestants do: everyone interprets the Bible and, naturally, everyone understands it in a different way. l Can the existence of an infallible magisterium in the Church be proven in a different way? Simple reflection suffices to show the necessity of an infallible magisterium. Christ did not want to speak to His contemporaries in Palestine alone, but to all men of all times to come and of all regions of the earth. But His doctrine could not have been preserved unchanged over the course of centuries had he not instituted a competent authority to resolve the disputes that would arise. Thus this authority was established. l Are there other indications of the necessity of this institution? The example of the Protestants shows in practice what we have just explained. Among them there is no magisterium, but each individual is in a certain way his own pope. This is why the Protestants are divided into a multitude of groupings, each believing differently from the others. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, has preserved intact the faith of the first Christians. 10) What is the consequence of denying a dogma? Whoever denies a single dogma has lost the Faith, for he does not receive the Revelation of God but sets himself up as judge of what is to be believed. l Can one not deny one dogma while continuing to believe in the others and thus conserve the Faith, at least partially? As we saw above, the Faith does not depend on our personal judgment, but on the authority of God who reveals Himself and Who can neither deceive nor be deceived. Thus it is necessary to receive everything that God has revealed and not take only that which seems good to us. Therefore someone who makes a choice about the revealed deposit of faith and does not want to accept it as a whole imposes a limit on God, for he lets his reason have the last word. He who acts in this way no longer has supernatural faith, but only a human faith, however numerous the points on which it may be in accord with supernatural faith. l Can papal teachings be cited on this point? When Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary in 1854 he said: Hence, if anyone shall dare–which God forbid!–to think otherwise than as has been defined by us, let him know and understand that he is condemned by his own judgment; that he has suffered shipwreck in the faith; that he has separated from the unity of the Church. Leo XIII taught the same thing: He who denies one of the truths of the faith, even in a single point, in reality loses the whole of the faith, for he refuses to respect God as supreme Truth and formal grounds of the faith. The pope further cites St. Augustine who said, with regard to heretics: They are in agreement with me on many things, and we disagree on but a few things. But because of those few things in which they are not in agreement with me, the many points of agreement are of no value to them. l In matters of faith then, is it all or nothing? One cannot be 70 or 99% Catholic; one accepts the whole of Revelation or one does not, in which case one possesses only a human faith which one has fabricated for oneself. To choose some truths out of the ensemble of the truths of the Faith is called heresy (in Greek, choice). l What should one make of the now popular slogan to the effect that, in our relations with “separated Christians,” we should look to what unites rather www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 30 than to what divides us? It is altogether false and contrary to the traditional teaching of the Church to say, with regard to non-Catholics, that one must look to what unites rather than to what divides us. This creates the impression that differences relate only to details without importance, when in fact the fullness of revealed truth is at stake. 11) Is not faith primarily a sentiment? It is one of the errors of modernism, condemned by St. Pius X in 1907 in the Encyclical Pascendi, to say that faith is a sentiment issued from the subconscious, arising from some need for the divine. In fact, the act of faith is not a sentiment but a form of understanding, the conscious and voluntary reception of divine Revelation as it is has been presented to man in Sacred Scripture and Tradition. l What is Revelation for the modernists? For the modernists revelation is created when the religious sentiment passes from the realm of the subconscious to the conscious mind. Faith would thus be something sentimental and subjective. Revelation would not come from the outside (from on high) but would arise from the interior of man. l What then is the role of Christ in Revelation for the modernists? Modernists believe that, at the origins of Christianity, there was the religious experience of Jesus Christ (who, to be sure, is not thought of as true God). He shared His experience with others, who lived it themselves and communicated it to others in turn. From this need of the faithful to communicate their religious experiences to others and to form a community was born the Church. The Church is thus not a divine institution; she, like the sacraments, the papacy, the dogmas, is only the result of the religious needs of believers. l Is is not true that man naturally has a religious sentiment? The natural religious sentiment must be carefully distinguished from the supernatural faith of the Catholic. There is certainly a need for God in the human heart, but if God does not really respond to this need, it remains an empty sentiment. Furthermore, like everything that is natural in us, the religious sentiment is wounded by original sin: it can easily lead to error and even to sin (superstition, idolatry, etc.). l Is the Faith not linked to the religious sentiment all the same? It is true that a sentiment of security and well-being is linked to the Faith, but this is not the essence of the Faith. This sentiment, like all other sentiments, is THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org changeable, sometimes waxing and sometimes waning; at times it can even disappear altogether. Great saints, like St. Vincent de Paul or St. Theresa of the Child Jesus, have sometimes been deprived of this sensible certainty, without however becoming hesitant in their belief in the truth and the certitude of the Faith. l Where can one find the certain teaching of the Church on this matter? In the Anti-modernist Oath that, until 1967, all priests were obliged to pronounce before their ordination: I hold with certainty and sincerely confess that faith is not a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality; but faith is a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source. By this assent, because of the authority of the supremely truthful God, we believe to be true that which has been revealed and attested to by a personal God, our Creator and Lord. 12) Can the Faith change? According to modernist doctrine the Faith can change, for dogmas are only the expression of a sentiment of interior faith and of a religious need. They thus need to be adapted and formulated in a new manner when religious sentiments and needs change. If, however, as the Church teaches, dogmas express the truths of the Faith in an infallible manner, it is evident that they cannot be changed, for what was true yesterday cannot be false today and vice versa. As truth is immutable, so is the true Faith. Thus St. Paul writes: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema” (Gal. 1.8). “Jesus Christus heri et hodie ipse et in saecula–Jesus Christ yesterday, and today, and the same for ever” (Heb. 13:8). l Is there not progress in the Faith? Progress of the doctrine of the Faith is possible only in the sense that the truths of the Faith are better understood and explicated. Such a development was predicted by Jesus Christ for His Church when He said: But the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you ( Jn. 14:26). l Doesn’t the Holy Ghost teach new truths to the Church? Revelation was finished with the death of the last Apostle. Since then, the Holy Ghost 31 does not teach new truths, but rather makes the Church enter ever more profoundly into the truth brought by Christ. Thus revealed truths that at a certain period played only a secondary role in the life of the Church may assume a primary importance in another age. The controversies that opposed the Church to heretics also forced her to set forth the truths of the Faith in a more precise and clear manner, making explicit truths that up to then were implicitly held, but never adding to the deposit of faith (depositum fidei) as revealed to the Apostles. l What are the rules of this development of the Faith? The development of doctrine can elaborate that which was taught in the past, but it can never contradict or modify it. There can be no opposition to what has been taught. Once a dogma has been defined it cannot later become false, void, or take on a new meaning. l When she teaches a new dogma, does not the Church reveal new truths? When the Church defines a new dogma, she does not reveal new truths, but she explains and puts the accent in a new manner on that which, fundamentally, has always been believed. It is always “the same belief, in the same sense, with the same meaning.” The First Vatican Council clearly teaches: The Holy Ghost has not been promised to the successors of Peter that under His revelation they should reveal new doctrine, but that with His assistance they might in a holy manner guard and faithfully set forth Revelation as transmitted by the apostles, that is to say the deposit of the faith. 13) Can several religions possess the true Faith? From the fact that different religions contradict themselves on fundamental points it follows that several of them cannot be true. Only one religion can be true, and that is the Catholic religion. God revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, not in Buddha or Mohammed; and Christ founded only one Church which must communicate His teaching and His grace until the end of the world. Faith in a trinitary God, in Christ and in the Church thus forms an indivisible unity. l Do the different religions really contradict one another? God is either the Trinity, or He is not. If He is the Trinity, all non-Christian religions are false. But Christian confessions also contradict one another: some do not believe in the divinity of Christ, many do not believe in the real presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist, etc. Such opposite beliefs are not compatible. 14) How can we recognize that the Catholic Faith is true? Christ proved the truth of His mission by the miracles that He worked. This is why He says: “Believe you not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? Otherwise believe me for the very works’ sake” ( Jn. 14:11-12). The Apostles also established themselves by their miracles: “But they going forth preached everywhere: the Lord working withal, and confirming the word with signs that followed” (Mk. 16:20). Miracles are the proof of the divine mission of the Church. l Can we be sure of the existence of miracles? There have always been miracles in the Church. In fact, the existence of these miracles has never been more certain than today when, thanks to scientific knowledge and tools of investigation, we can rule out natural explanations more easily than in the past. Self-suggestion and hallucination have no place here. The multiplication of food observed by numerous persons who have in no way been influenced in advance, the resurrection of a dead man, or the sudden cure of an organ which has been almost completely destroyed can scarcely be explained in this way. The Church never recognizes a miracle so long as the slightest possibility of a natural explanation exists. l Are all miracles of a physical nature? Next to so-called “physical” miracles (facts that cannot be physically explained by natural processes alone) there are also what can be called “moral” miracles (facts that cannot be morally explained by the forces of nature alone.) l Give some examples of moral miracles. The diffusion of Christianity is a moral miracle, for no natural explanation can account for the fact that 12 uninstructed fishermen lacking any influence could convert a great part of the world in a short period of time, notwithstanding the opposition of the rich and powerful. The multifaceted sanctity that has flourished uninterruptedly in the Church for the last 2,000 years is also a moral miracle. l Do miracles prove the truths of the Faith? Miracles cannot directly prove the truths of the Faith, nor oblige anyone to believe, for then it would no longer be faith but science. They nevertheless show that faith is not blind www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 32 confidence lacking foundation, that it is not opposed to reason, and that on the contrary it is unreasonable not to believe! l Apart from the proofs of the truth of Catholicism, are there direct proofs on the basis of the falsehood of Protestantism? The fact that the Protestant factions of Christianity cannot be true derives from the simple fact that they are relatively recent separations from the Church of Christ. Luther did not reform the Church, as he pretended, but on the contrary invented new doctrines opposed to those that Christians had always believed up to then. Christians have always been convinced, for example, that the Eucharist can only be celebrated by a man ordained a priest and that the holy Mass is a true sacrifice: how can one in truth all at once pretend otherwise, after 1,500 years? How can the Anglican Church be the true Church, when it owes its very existence to the adultery of Henry VIII? l Is it thus easy to find the true religion? As Pope Leo XIII observed: To recognize what is the true religion is not difficult for whomever would judge the matter in prudence and sincerity. In fact very numerous and striking proofs, the truth of the prophecies, the multitude of miracles, the prodigious speed of the propagation of the Faith, even amongst its enemies and in spite of the greatest obstacles, the testimony of the martyrs and other similar arguments prove clearly that the only true religion is that which Jesus Christ Himself instituted, and which He charged the Church to guard and propagate. l If it is easy to find the true religion, how is it that so many people do not find it? If so many people are unaware of the true religion, it is above all because so many sin out of negligence in this regard. They are unconcerned to know the truth about God but content themselves with the pleasures of this world, or with the habits and superstitions of where they live, which suffice to satisfy their religious sentiment. They lack thirst for the truth. Furthermore, many foresee that the true religion would demand sacrifices of them, which they do not want to make. Lastly, man is by nature a social animal: he needs help in every domain (physical, technical, intellectual, and moral) and depends a great deal on the society where he lives. If that society is Islamic or atheist (like our own), if school and the media turn him away from Christianity (and even stupefy him so as to keep him from thinking) it will be very difficult for him to swim against the tide. THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org 15) Is faith necessary for salvation? Sacred Scripture teaches that faith is absolutely necessary to obtain eternal salvation. “He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned” (Mk. 16:16). St. Paul teaches: “But without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. 11:6). l What faith is necessary for salvation? The faith necessary for salvation is not any faith whatsoever, but the true faith, which adheres in a supernatural manner to the true doctrine revealed by God. l Is the necessity of true doctrine apparent in Sacred Scripture? The necessity of keeping true doctrine is manifest in the repeated warnings of the Apostles in regard to heretics and disbelievers: For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables (II Tim. 4:3-4). l Are those who, through no fault of their own, do not adhere to revealed truths necessarily damned? God gives every man the possibility of saving himself. He who is ignorant of the truths of the Faith without any fault on his part will obtain from God, at one time or another, if he does everything possible to live well, the possibility of receiving sanctifying grace. But it is evident that anyone who does not profess the true religion by his own fault will be eternally damned. l Is the true Faith thus of sovereign importance? Indeed it is. This is not a matter of vain controversy among theologians, but of the eternal salvation or misery of immortal souls. Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from Katholischer Katechismus zur kirchlichen Kriese by Fr. Matthias Gaudron, professor at the Herz Jesu Seminary of the Society of St. Pius X in Zaitzkofen, Germany. The original was published in 1997 by Rex Regum Press, with a preface by the District Superior of Germany, Fr. Franz Schmidberger. This translation is based on the second edition published in 1999 by Rex Regum Verlag, Schloß Jaidhof, Austria. Subdivisions and slight revisions made by the Dominican Fathers of Avrillé have been incorporated into the translation. 33 Thirty Minutes with Fr. de Chivré: Faith and the Gift of Self Penetrating your own faith by distributing yourself to others I would like to speak to you about the way of distributing your faith. It is such a beautiful part to play: Distributing yourself, communicating something from inside of you, as personal to you; when you complain, when you distribute or spread the latest news, you are not really “distributing” them, you are letting them flow out of your memory, the way water flows out of a tap and spills out on the ground. The act of distributing involves a kind of teaching; it involves a knowledge of the usefulness and the significance of what you are teaching (as opposed to news); you feel yourself invested with a mission with regard to what you know, to the point of considering yourself bound to making it known. Here is a beautiful concept for you to remember, from a philosophical point of view: the more an idea strikes your judgment as being of a quality beyond dispute, the more it bears within it the law of communication. An idea of quality cannot do otherwise than express itself. Just look at artists: as soon as they see the quality of an artistic inspiration, the first thing they do is smack it onto a canvas. In the same way, the first thing an idea of quality does is express itself; and since it is quality, it will not let us remain selfish proprietors of it, because selfishness and quality are incompatible. Quality obliges us to pass from the state of proprietor to the state of depositary: one who keeps in reserve in order to distribute in due time, with full awareness of the spiritual and moral qualities of the one who is going to receive; giving in such a way as to make himself understood, by choosing the best circumstances of time and place to foster the welcome of the distribution. Who realizes anymore that he is responsible for his faith enough to appreciate it as a quality of existence obliging him to communicate himself during the course of the day, all around him—not just in some unexpected opportunity created by someone else, but in an activity expected by his conscience, by his heart, even by his sentiments, and created by him? We come to the problem of salvation, and the handsome expression of Holy Scripture: “The deposit of the Faith.” It is also the theological expression adopted www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 34 by all of the Councils, fixing in our mind the doubly solemn nature of a deposit: it was received without the slightest permission to meddle with it, under any pretext; it is received in order to be distributed in season and out of season; and the modern silences that envelope it—either formally by failing to speak of it, or else hypocritically by interpreting it in such a way as to make it appear such as it is not—fall under the judgment of God as a sinfulness infinitely more grave than drinking a glass too many. And we are all on board the adventure. The word fits: when Jesus miraculously filled up Peter’s boat, what was Peter’s first reaction? Quickly to get back to shore in order to distribute the catch. What would you have said if St. Peter had stayed in his boat for eight days without distributing the fish? A Christian soul is always a boat built to receive miraculous certainties, miraculous convictions, miraculous understandings capable of nourishing a human life, of awakening new hope and of resurrecting the dead. If instead of staying egotistically out at sea, the boat came back to the place of daily duty to which God has anchored you in order to distribute the miraculous catch that you have gathered in your morning prayer, thanksgiving, Communion, reading and reflection; and if you came back to your own shore, the shore of your office, family, business affairs, teaching post, or social function and if you considered yourself to be anchored there to distribute the catch. And you have no idea how many are waiting for you on the shore. You know very well that those poor people confide to you their temporal worries, but their temporal confidences are only a smokescreen in front of their moral and spiritual anxieties. They do not know how to say it; they are waiting for you to guess. They are trying to make themselves understood in drawing close to the truth, and they say: “If only the tone of my voice could awaken in him in some way the deposit which he has received.” Then you see the disappointment of so many people who approach you and go away again saying to themselves: “He did not speak to me any differently than anyone else, he spoke to me just like everyone else: pleasure, vacation, cost of living, the progress of science. I was expecting so much else! What did he distribute to me? Nothing; he gave me news.” That is how we manage to separate ourselves from one another, to dissociate ourselves from one another. The deposit of the good news: That’s exactly what it is! The deposit of the good news of the Faith. It’s not something you find in the papers. The deposit of the good news you find in a heart and a mind hungry for God. The handsome expression employed by St. John, “That which we have seen, which we have heard, which our hands have touched of the Word of Life, we have come to tell you,” is true, it is absolutely true, and we tell you in order that you might share our joy, because joy is the reward of the good news. While we leave the deposit of the good news dozing in a corner of our THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org heart, with a total unawareness that in so doing we are preventing vast numbers of those around us from giving that timeless cry of the man who realizes that his boat is on the point of capsizing: “Domine, salva nos, perimus!” “Please, I am capsizing in the darkness of selfishness, of error–but save me, you have the deposit of the faith!” “Save you? My poor fellow! I am awfully sorry, but I don’t even think of saving myself; I am busy living...” You can see that we are in the middle of a kind of general dislocation, with everyone in a mad rush toward the laboratories, or toward society, or toward politics, or toward the economy; everyone is glutted on curiosity, their nerves on end. And I can understand why: there is no more good news. The Christian today bears a very heavy responsibility indeed: to know what you have received in deposit in order to make it known around you, by your social positions, through your qualities, through your knowledge, yes, of course; through your education, yes, of course. But realize: the sower who keeps the seed in his pouch leaves behind him acres of thought which will never be cultivated—not by the teacher, nor by the family, nor by the mother... He has in his pouch an extraordinary seed, a tiny little seed, but whose nature is to burst forth once sown in the ground: a mustard seed. And instead you respect the sterility of the soil— because today we respect everything!—instead you respect the miserable state of the soil! For days, months, years perhaps, we crisscross the field where God has cast us; we have crisscrossed it holding in the pouch of our understanding the treasures of our baptism, the convictions of our confirmation, the nourishment of the Eucharist, the reparations of our absolutions. We have all of that, we know it, we believe it, we live it, we expect it–and we distribute nothing. The social field which we have passed through, once again crisscrossing the land, remains a field deprived (by our fault) of the springtime and the harvest for which it was created. It makes me think of the expression in Holy Scripture: “Terra desolata est...” The desolate land of Sion. And yet, the Jews were a rich people. “Terra desolata est...” They were no longer anxious for the good news. God is borne irresistibly toward Himself, with such a violence of existence that it results in three Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And God’s magnificent appreciation of Himself is so irresistibly beautiful that it cannot help but communicate itself in Creation by His power, and in the Redemption by His love. As soon as He thinks of Himself, He thinks of others, and as soon as He thinks of others, He draws them back to Himself. As soon as He communicates to us the grace of believing in His intimate life, His secret life, we in turn are thrown into motion by a longing to imitate His manner of existing; it is so sweet and so strong to “copy” God’s movement, to imitate the affirmations of Jesus, by means of our faith: Jesus affirmed, and His affirmation healed; He affirmed and His authority brought back to life; He affirmed and the 35 beatitudes appeared. He possessed the self-evidence, we have the shadow of self-evidence which is called faith. To be touched by the Faith necessarily means being thrown into motion by an interior movement which makes us bring God into the banality of our day to day and into the apparent indifference of events. If you live your faith intensely and if anyone at all approaches to you, you cannot help but be thrown into motion, within you, in order to try to raise the problem of his worries to a higher level, in order draw him out of the materialistic and temporal monotony of his anxiety and which arises in fact from infinitely more serious problems; and you will feel a longing, by the light which you possess, and which warms you, to draw gently near to that man’s parched and thirsty heart and pass over it the unction of your belief. At that moment you will realize that when you wake up in the morning, everything prepares you for the Faith. The Faith teaches us to read the secret design inscribed in every single page of our calendar: naturally you read a date, a name, and event. Today: one more day, but also a day which brings us closer to the last. A name: a complete Christian; what is your size, next to his colossal stature? The event: the inexplicable and unexplained, whatever may be the historical or scientific renderings, underlining to what extent someone called Providence walks indeed before us in the humblest of realities. The Faith is not a psychological imbecility plastering a superstition over the unexpected or the unknown; it is a constant, indisputable language spoken within us, by a judgment nourished on truths coming from above but applied by us to the truths of here below, to yield a complete language of the day, the day of those around us as much as our own. And here is where our responsibility to believe comes into play: we need to help others to translate the meaning of their day. What an incredible good you could do if you only allowed the grace of the Faith to drive home to you once and for all that you have there a whole alphabet ready to be taught to those who hear you speaking. It begins with the alpha and the omega: Christ and Christ, God and God, the Spirit and the Spirit. And you will see that what you have there goes beyond the latest novel, and the bulletin board announcements, and the scientific documentaries; it goes beyond all the value of the world, because you will have finally introduced them to the value of God. You can understand that in order to translate this sense of beauty and truth, you need to nourish yourself deliberately on reasons to believe. Do you know the reasons why you believe? Have you ever weighed the meaning of the verb to believe? Have you ever tried to form a real idea of all the martyrdoms, generosities, penances, self-oblations and heroisms to which it has given rise? Have you ever felt the weight of the word to believe? We have to lose the habit of reducing social exchanges to the blah-blah-blah of conventional conversations: “What a rain we’re having; what a heat wave; what is the world coming to; did you read in the papers this morning...” And life goes on, horrifically empty and banal, because there is no longer that superior vibration of discovering the first causes in the secondary events we are all complaining about. To believe: to know how to seize the opportunity of drawing to the forefront the intelligent designs of God, in order, by the argument of the facts, to bring people toward other conceptions of reality than those which never go beyond the level of human astonishments, calculations, complaints, deceptions, and sensations. The duty to speak: it is not a question of pretending to be a Bossuet or Lacordaire, whose duty was to speak the vital truths from the pulpit within the Church; but you have your own accent, your accent as a secret contemplative, your accent as an adorer mysteriously hidden behind a pillar five minutes a day, your accent of love timidly expressed to God, with that kind of interior torture of wondering how you are going to manage to communicate with Him, instead of staying there stalled within a force of inertia, lulling to sleep the great problems beneath the multiplicity of little problems. So many have so lost this habit of seeing and acting, that they turn their faith away from its mission to speak on a level higher than the simply human, and they use their consecration vaporously to drown the most noble realities under social presentations far more pagan than Christian. What a handsome social comportment to reinvent: becoming a preacher of the Faith in your human conversation, in order to shake awake your neighbor, or the man in the street, or your relative; expressing that authority of an idea come from above, from very far away, and settled in your heart— overwhelmed at feeling that Someone else is speaking in you because He has indeed taken up His dwelling in you, and with it His manner of thinking. We have to find again that piercing gaze able to pass through the superficiality of a conversation and draw to the surface all its meaning for God and for the one involved; that veritable prolongation of Jesus with the Samaritan woman, that exquisite tact of our Lord leading that woman—not a believer by any means—by bringing her progressively closer to the true sense of her need to draw water, using the conjugal facts of that woman to awaken her to the problem of the Prophet standing before her, silent, imperious, and good. If the conversation had stagnated on the level of social conventions, that woman would have gone away ready to get married a sixth time—had she not been told inexplicably that she was already at her fifth husband. We are all responsible for one another by a silence or by a word, by a tone of voice or by a correcting detail: “In truth, you will give an account of every word, even to the last iota.” What food for thought on the use of our words and of our silences in a single day! Who can say whether a single statement of the Faith, expressed or kept silent, may not tip the balance in the salvation or the damnation of another before whom we spend our entire day? Before this one, intelligent but misinformed, or before the other, sincerely ignorant? Before this one, struggling to stay afloat, or before the other, with the world around his finger? Before this one, www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 36 filled with despair and smiling by reflex, or before the other, in revolt, obsessed by his suffering? What are you going to say to him? Are you going to churn out the administrative answers? Are you going to dazzle him with your encyclopedic knowledge? Are you going to listen to him mechanically and give him back a mechanical answer? Or else are you going to open to him, without his even hearing the sound of the key in the lock, the secret treasure box where we keep our certitudes, grandiose affections and unselfish decisions, and draw out of it some untranslatable expression he will carry away with him like a sunrise, to dawn when the moment comes, with its particular light, full of warmth and full of life: “And they felt their heart burning within them,” St. John tells us in the story of the pilgrims of Emmaus returning home weary after their day. “Stay with us, night is coming on our energies, night is coming on our reflections, night is coming on our indecisions. Stay with us”–the beatitude of the Faith. As long as you have not understood that every time you approach a human being, you approach an adventurer of eternity, it is not human respect, or superficiality, or sarcasm that are ever going to give you the solution: they do not address the question asked. Once you have understood that you approach an adventurer of eternity, you will speak in a different way than usual. We all bear the weight of the day and the heat, but we also bear the weight of the Faith, along with the mission to use it for lightening the weight of the day for the one in difficulty before us. How to explain this disastrous silence, except by the lack of personal application to fostering in ourselves the light of the Faith? When a soul gets in the habit of nourishing his intentions with the intentions God has on his day, he slowly gains a strength of spontaneous awareness of others, a magnificent fear of letting slip the opportunity to stir up in them a Christian echo, an anxiety never to be absent or indifferent to their destiny. I have said the word: to look with faith upon someone, whether it be your husband, your child, your servant, your friend, your enemy, is to realize you are addressing a destiny. Not a position, not a cut and dry future, not a title, not a scholar or a drop-out; you are addressing a destiny: a life capable of the definitive encounter with God, a life necessarily coupled with its Creator and its Redeemer, necessarily akin to the calls, helps, secret warnings and graces with which we need to facilitate his relations or his renewal of relations. Before playing out in the sacristy, in the parish hall, or in the confessional, a destiny plays out between voyagers of eternity filling the role of an echo crying out its plaintive call like an owl in the night to awaken our neighbor to the silence of his own secret nights. But in order to do so, we have to possess a faith that renders us anxious for our own destiny all the way down to the detail of that liberating anxiety, in the form of love of God proven, actualized in the course of our day. It is the first question inseparable from the Faith taken seriously: the question of salvation, “propter nostram salutem,” because of our salvation. Not because of our THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org inhuman taxes, or our slave labor, or our planned vacations; not because of politics, or socialism, or monarchism, or Christian democracy: because of salvation, the salvation of each one us. He came to mingle with others, in their conversations, sufferings, and family celebrations, purely in view of the salvation of each one of them. The Faith acts and reacts according to its incomparable givens, purely in the service of salvation, of which it alone possesses the understanding. As for Him, in the manger, on the lake shores, on Calvary, He had a mind only for salvation, and since many had no idea or thought or conviction of it, He absorbed a torrent of criticisms and insults and blows, to such a point that, condemned to death “propter nostram salutem,” He still found the means to rise in order to drive home the significance of the word salvation, to show that it really is true: He had come for our salvation: the word by which one plays out his entire existence, the definitive reality of his existence. Compare that word with the general indifference surrounding the beds of the dying in our hospitals, the prudence invoked in suppression of the last Sacraments, the willful application to teaching children the temporality of existence without the ultimate meaning of that temporality. You will understand why we are living in the middle of a horrific absence of concern for the salvation of our neighbor, even the healthy ones. “To save our soul,” the mission of the Faith; “de profundis”: pull others from the depth of their ignorance and their sin up to the level of horizons with panoramas on the infinite, heralding those other sublime depths of inalterable existence. Help others to climb back up to the level of those panoramas, distribute the light come from the level at which your personal fidelity places you, and so oblige their gaze to rise up to Him: “Ad Te levavi oculos meos”: toward You, I have finally lifted up my eyes. But at least I finally did look toward You, and I have never been the same; something happened in my reflection ever since I started looking at You on the cross, in the manger; ever since I started looking at You in the tabernacle, something has changed in my way of thinking. No doubt, we have to accept being worked ourselves, to the point of crying out without a word, by divine penetrations setting us in order, unmoved by excuses and doubts feeding on our disloyal explanations. The man who is ignorant of his own death will never be anxious about the spiritual death of his neighbor. Experiencing the life of God means no longer being able to do otherwise than bear in oneself the imperious duty of opening others to the same experience. It is vital that you be deeply sincere with the life of God: all of the other means have turned out to be weak substitutes that have failed, whatever their nature, processes, sources, or tyrannies. You cannot replace God; you cannot replace faith in Jesus Christ, the only Son of God; You cannot replace the Church founded by Jesus Christ; you cannot replace the sacraments given by Jesus Christ; you cannot change the doctrine of Jesus Christ; you cannot psychoanalyze the grace coming from 37 Jesus Christ; you cannot improve on the civilization brought by Jesus Christ; you cannot cheat with a man’s life by preventing his participating in the life of Jesus Christ. “I am the God of the living...” It is no small thing to draw near to the God of the living, when one is dead to the truth; it is no small thing to bring to your neighbor the words of life, just as it is no small thing to deprive one’s family and one’s children of the words of life. Yet, to believe means to live, and it means to live with the realities received from the Living: from God Himself. “My words are life,” declared Jesus; and Nietzche grumbled morosely: “If only His friends acted a little more resurrected...” Resurrected: definitively living of Him, by Him, for Him. Stepping out of your luxurious tomb of spiritual self-centeredness and standing there smack in the middle of the existence of others with a style of life continuing the Presence of His life, wherever we are speaking, thinking, deciding, willing. That considerable mass of believers whom no one approaches with the thought in the back of their mind of drawing some spiritual benefit, and who approach no one with the corresponding thought in the back of their mind of eliciting a spiritual reaction... A general juxtaposition of materialized men, who no longer distribute salvation or the idea of salvation with that blessed torment pushing them to distribute their manner of thinking existence as Christians. There remains the famous objection of a schedule, to which people always say we owe in conscience a certain practical, material, economic, scientific attention. They have a point; yet what they say lacks an essential element that can shed light on the answer. What is it that allows a man to live an all-consuming schedule? Breathing: always indispensable, always the same; we put it to use without thinking about it—I was going to say without believing in it—so much do we know its necessity. And if you were to breathe your Faith throughout your schedule? To breathe the way of using that schedule... To breathe the “I believe in God”; to breathe the act of faith with all your heart... You don’t think it would penetrate your schedule, and that instead of an objection the Faith would become a solution, a source of continuity? A solution of thought and mentality, a solution of union, a solution of adoration? And you would bring with you everywhere an impression of health that no one else has anymore, thanks to the continuity of your breathing. That is the way missionaries wrote out their schedules, and those extraordinary mothers of families, like Blanche of Castille, and young girls, as well, like Joan of Arc (and Joan of Arc was busy!), and like the great Christian businessmen: Leo Harmel; like the tireless apostles: St. Dominic, St. Benedict, St. Francis: They breathed God. The whole “schedule” of the Church is filled up with this single respiration, that of the “I believe in God, the Father Almighty.” If you had faith like a mustard seed...the power to move mountains, the mountains of doubt, objections, and discouragements, in you and around you. Like all breathing, there is no going into detail: it is impalpable and indispensable, it is personal and unconditional. You breathe: you are alive; you don’t breathe: you are dead. There is no in-between. Let the secret light of the Faith filter through to others to revivify them, to prepare them for new respirations that are going to set free their mind, their heart and their destiny. It is absolutely certain that the theological virtue of faith radically elevates our judgments on our day-to-day realities, and that we are to bear witness to that elevation all around us by our way of expressing ourselves, with the humbly proud confidence that there is nothing better on earth, and that no one has the right to minimize that elevation by reducing it to mediocrities of reflection, as disastrous for the temporal order as they are for eternal salvation. Everything that happens inside of us, between God and us, is going to determine what happens in our day, around us, by us. If we only knew who we are, in relation to God, in relation to others, in relation to grace! We have to believe in love, because when there is no love, nothing is going to happen around us. And if nothing happens inside of us? That is the starting point of our responsibility as one baptized in the name of the Father and in the name of the Son and in the name of the Holy Ghost. In the name of the three Persons without whom nothing happens; what condemns Them to silence within us, and why? For the following reason, no doubt: we no longer know what we are, we no longer know of what nation we are a member, said St. Paul to the Hebrews. Of that royal nation, of that privileged nation chosen to step forward in this poor world with attitudes that oblige those around us to consider other problems than the problems of the world, but that oblige us at the same time to remain in the world, in order to draw the world higher than itself. And I conclude with this reflection of the poor man who begged Jesus to heal his son: “Do you believe?” “I do believe, Lord, but increase my faith!” Ask Him to increase your faith, and Jesus will do for you what He did for the child: “I will it! He is healed. Arise and walk.” For we are all responsible for healing others; we do not suspect the influence of our actions, the importance of the struggle, the gravity of the assistance we distribute around us; we no longer realize that our days condemn or save, and the passing time finds us just as impervious to the love of the living God in whom we are nonetheless happy to believe, without giving Him deeply enough our consent. We need to make every one of our days the opportunity to help others travel a little farther on their path toward God. Originally published in Carnets Spirituels: La Foi, No.11, December 2006, entitled “La Foi et le Don de Soi (Se distribuer aux autres pour prendre conscience de sa Foi),” pp.29-42. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray´) was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 The SocieTy of ST. PiuS X in Singapor MalaySia Christendom NEWS Angelus Press Edition The majority of the Malaysians are Muslim, and the government is officially Muslim. Being a country with a racially and religiously diverse population, they tolerate the practice of other religions, but they will not allow any proselytizing of Muslims. On the other hand, there are strict penalties for anyone who adopts the Muslim religion. Malaysian Bishops’ Recent Warning to Catholics Regarding Conversion to Islam Below is a document issued by the Malaysian Bishops that was published in August 2005 advising the faithful about the implications of converting to Islam: If you convert to Islam, there are important changes in your legal status, and what you can and cannot do. Your conversion to Islam will be registered with the Religious Department and the National Registration Department, both of which are computerized so access to this information is available throughout the country. Under Shariah enactments of most of the 13 States of Malaysia: 1) Conversion back to your former religion is either a) not allowed under the law, or b) a criminal offence, which means that you may be fined, detained, or imprisoned under most State Islamic laws. 2) If you are under 18 years of age, you require your parents’ permission to convert to Islam. 3) Your identity card will record your conversion to Islam. Therefore, even if you are no longer practicing Islam, you may be fined, whipped, detained, or imprisoned for violation of Shariah laws, such as praying in Church, eating in public during fasting month, khalwat, etc. 4) You cannot marry a non-Muslim. If you decide to divorce and attempt to convert out of Islam, you will lose custody of your children because they are Muslims. 5) Upon death, your non-Muslim relatives will lose their rights to your property, money, etc., that you want to leave to them. The corpse of a convert to Islam will be taken away from his or her non-Muslim family for Islamic rites and burial even if you have not been a practicing Muslim for many years. 6) In the event that your spouse converts to Islam, you may have no right to either children or your spouse’s property. We know that certain Christians who convert to Islam, for whatever reasons, are not aware of or do not consider seriously the implications of such conversion. Hence, the need to inform you. By this, we are neither against Islam nor the freedom of religion, which is guaranteed for all Malaysians in Article 11 of our Constitution, which gives the right to an individual to choose freely his or her religion. But to choose correctly, you need to know clearly what you choose and the consequences of your choice. Archbishop Murphy Pakiam, Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur Bishop Anthony Selvanayagam, Bishop of Penang Bishop Paul Tan, Bishop of Malacca-Johor Phnom Penh Gulf of Thailand THAILAND X in re a and Ho Chi Minh City Cebu VIETNAM PHILIPPINES South China Sea Kuala Lumpur 39 Kota Kinabalu Sabah Brunei Celebes Sea MALAYSIA Singapore Borneo Pontianak Sumatra INDONESIA Jakarta Java Sea Banda Sea East Timor Fr. Paul Kimball with university students in Kuala Lumpur who requested the supplying of the Baptismal ceremonies omitted in the new rite of Baptism. The Current Apostolate of the Society in Malaysia A recent adult convert from Thailand who was raised as a Buddhist being baptized by Fr. Davide Pagliarani. Twice every month a priest from the Society’s priory in Singapore flies to Kuala Lumpur, the capital city in Malaysia, where 40-50 parishioners attend Mass in a converted office space on the third floor of a commercial building. After ascending the narrow, white-tiled stairway, one enters a small, beautifully decorated chapel. Catechism is given each Sunday to the adults, and a class of Apologetics is given one Saturday evening per month. Most local Catholics heeded the warnings of their bishop and did not venture to visit or attend our Mass. But recently a group of university students have started attending the Masses, giving new growth to the mission. The students are from East Malaysia and are studying in the capital city. Being vastly outnumbered by the Muslims, they have formed Catholic youth groups whereby they can support each other in the faith while living far away from their more Catholic region. One group leader discovered the Society through personal research and the Society’s web page on the Internet. She succeeded in bringing five or so other students, who now come regularly. Among them is a group leader from a different University who has already brought a medical student to the Mass the last two Sundays. He himself is a convert of only six months from Buddhism and is seriously considering becoming a priest. These students requested that the ceremonies omitted in the Novus Ordo rite of Baptism be supplied and that they be conditionally confirmed by a Society bishop. They are full of questions about the crisis of the Church and are zealous in defending the faith. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 40 History of Malaysia 7th-14th Centuries: Numerous small sultanates, which are strongly Hindu, exist at river mouths. The Sri Vijaya Empire extends its great influence to the region. 1403: A prince from Sumatra, Parameswara, founds Malacca. He converts to Islam and takes the name of Sri Maharaja Mohammed Shah. 1511: Arrival of Portuguese led by Admiral Alfonso D’Alberque and the first chaplains. The Portuguese capture Malacca for its well-known spice trade. 1545-52: St. Francis Xavier preaches in Malacca. In 1557, Malacca is raised to a suffragan see (deputy diocese). 1641: Occupation of Malacca by the Dutch, who suppress Catholicism. The bishops and priests flee to Timor. 1786: Sir Francis Light takes over Penang from the Sultan of Kedah. 1809: The reopening of the College General in Penang; seminarians from all over Asia come to be trained. 1824: The Anglo-Dutch Treaty is signed and Holland exchanges Malacca for Indonesia. In 1826, Penang, Province Wellesley, Malacca, and Singapore become the Straits Settlement under British rule. 1852: The Sisters of St. Maur or the Infant Jesus Sisters (IJ) and the La Salle Brothers sail over to found Christian schools in major towns in Penang, Malaysia. The Sisters also begin orphanages. 1864: The Chinese tin miners settle at the confluence of the muddy Klang and Gombak river mouth, the beginning of Kuala Lumpur (which means “muddy confluence”). 1874: The Treaty of Pangkor marks the direct British rule over the Malay States. The sultans maintain religious sovereignty. 1881: Arrival of Mill Hill Missionaries in Sarawak and Sabah who work actively with the indigenous peoples. End 19th-20th Centuries: Massive immigration of Chinese and Indians who are invited to work in the tin mines, rubber plantation and railways by the British. 1942-45: Second World War and the Japanese occupation. Schools are closed, and the people suffer. 1948-60: Communist insurrection. Feb. 1, 1948, the Federation of Malaya Government in formed. History of Singapore Singapore is an island country founded as a British trading colony in 1819. It joined the Malaysian Federation in 1963 but separated two years later and became independent. Singapore subsequently became one of the world’s most prosperous countries with a strong international economy. It is the smallest country in South-East Asia and is located on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. It lies 85 miles north of the Equator. Its official languages are English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil, though English is widely spoken by the majority of the population. The diversity of religions practiced by Singaporeans is as follows: Buddhist 42.5%, Muslim 14.9%, Taoist 8.5%, Hindu 4%, Catholic 4.8%, other Christian 9.8%, other 0.7%, none 14.8% (2000 census). Catholic missionaries succeeded in having a lasting impact upon Malaysia by founding mission schools. Many of these schools still stand and carry the names of various Roman Catholic saints. But due to government intolerance of nonMuslim views in the public space, none of these schools have Brothers any more, and now must even teach the Muslim reliTHE ANGELUS JuneCatholicism. 2007 www.angeluspress.org gion instead• of It is forbidden to hang crucifixes in these schools that are Catholic in name only. The Current Apostolate of the Society in Singapore The Society’s mission in Singapore began in 1987 when Fr. Simonot offered the first Mass there. It was formerly served firstly from the Philippines and later from Sri Lanka. But when the priory in Sri Lanka closed it was moved to Singapore to be the new District Headquarters of Asia. Presently the District Superior and two other Society priests reside there. Property being very expensive in Singapore it has been difficult to buy a church for the 125 souls who attend the two Masses each Sunday, as well as the one to three daily Masses. Hence our small chapel is hidden away on the second floor of a commercial building near a popular shopping district. We are praying we will be able to have a more proper and visible home for the true Mass in Singapore soon. Five catechism classes are given each Saturday, adult catechism is given each week and a class on Sacred Scripture is given twice a month. Particularly well attended is the weekly Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Succor that has been begun recently. It is the most popular devotion for the Catholics in Singapore after the Rosary. Ten to fifteen thousand Catholics and even many non-Catholics attend this devotion in a Novus Ordo Redemptorist church on Novena Square in Singapore. Traffic is said to be “crazy” each Saturday in the area surrounding Novena Square. This large public display of devotion to our Lady and the favors given through this novena give even today a respect for the Catholic faith. Our priests have a steady stream of adult converts. Currently a Buddhist has asked for instruction after being scandalized by the Novus Ordo RCIA instruction he had been receiving for several years. When he was told that Martin Luther ought to be canonized, he gave up attending the New Mass and soon afterwards was brought to our Mass by one of our parishioners. He is overjoyed to see that true Catholicism exists. On November 24th a talk was given in a Novus Ordo parish within walking distance to our priory on “The Traditionalists and Traditionalism,” and more specifically on the “illicit status of the Society of St. Pius X and the dangers it poses” given by a civil lawyer with a degree in canon law. In 1998, this same speaker disrupted a talk given by Bishop Fellay on “The crisis in the Catholic Church.” One of our priests attended, and during the question and answer period, he was given an opportunity to defend the Society. The Novus Ordo faithful complimented the Society on its beautiful chapel, sermons, which do not only address the love of neighbor, and the priestly formation of its members. The Society of St. Pius X, according to Fr. C expl Mod the peo enro day. 41 Fr. Couture explaining Modernism to the 20 plus people who enrolled that day. Altar in St. Pius X Chapel in Singapore. These were the scapulars being prepared before the enrollment. We were afraid there wouldn’t be enough! Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. this group of Novus Ordo Catholics, gives to its priests a formation superior to that given to the diocesan priests. Most seemed to be afraid of opposing the local bishop but were very interested to have the opportunity to speak with a Society priest after the talk. SSPX First Official Mission Trip to Sabah Greater religious freedom is allowed in East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. It was there that Fr. Daniel Couture, the District Superior of SSPX Asia, conducted a mission trip to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, which is in the northern part of Borneo island, on November 24-27, 2006. This is the first official visit by an SSPX priest to Sabah, which is home to a significant Catholic population, most of whom are natives of the land. The purpose of the trip was for Fr. Couture to give a series of conferences on Modernism, the Virtue of Faith, the Crisis in the Church, Fatima, and the history of SSPX. The turnout was unexpectedly good for a firsttime visit, with about 25 people, ranging from 20-yearolds to those in their 60’s. Most of the attendees had never attended a Tridentine Mass, nor heard or read about the issues that Father explained. There was also a great interest in the books that Father brought with him, and they were quickly snapped up. Mass was held in the same place as the seminar, in a rented college hall on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Attendance was good on both days, being more or less about 25 people. Providentially, the choir master of Kuala Lumpur Sacred Heart SSPX Chapel was in Kota Kinabalu due to a missed flight, and so was able to conduct the schola for Sunday’s high Mass. The singing was beautifully done, even though on a lastminute basis. The regular altar-server of Kuala Lumpur served Father at all the masses. The sermon on Sunday was on the Four Last Things, with a short explanation of the Brown Scapular. After Mass, there was a mass enrollment of every attendee in the Brown Scapular, from a boy of 12 to an old man of about 80. There were about 20 people who enrolled that day. All in all, the mission was a fruitful one. May God see fit to inspire a traditionalist movement in this part of the world. Deo Gratias! From Christendom, No.10. Christendom is a publication of DICI, the press bureau of the Society of Saint Pius X (www.dici.org). www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 42 F R . p e t e r Is there a Scriptural foundation for the Church’s teaching on contraception? R . s c o t t Canon Clamer has this comment to make on this obligation: Catholic exegetes dispute as to what degree Onan was punished for breaking the law of the Levirate, and to what degree it was for his use of contraception. Nevertheless, it must be a combination of the two, for it can hardly be considered just for Almighty God to have punished Onan by death for a crime condemned by custom only, and not under pain of death. Furthermore, Onan did not refuse to take Thamar, his brother’s wife, but did actually go into her (Gen. 38:10). Consequently, the evil crime that he committed consisted not in his refusal to marry her, but in his refusal to engender children, namely his frustration of the procreative act. This selfishness, inspiring as it did a sin against the very nature itself of the marriage relationship, is manifestly the reason why God struck him dead. Consequently, this text can certainly be used, as it always has been, to establish the biblical foundation of Catholic teaching on contraception. It ought not to astonish us that other texts on this subject are not found in Sacred Scripture. The reason for this is that it is such an evident and obvious conclusion of the natural law, that it is presupposed for the supernatural revelation condemning sexual immorality. The Church has always taught that contraception is wrong because it is against nature, that is against the natural law. A few texts will establish this. In 1679 Innocent XI condemned the proposition: “Self abuse is not prohibited by the natural law. Hence, if God had not forbidden, it could have been often good and even sometimes obligatory under pain of mortal sin” (Prop. 49, DS 2149). Self-abuse is effectively the same thing as contraception, since it produces a spilling of the seed. Furthermore, in 1851 the Holy Office condemned the proposition that contraception could sometimes be justified for good reasons as “scandalous, erroneous, and contrary to the natural law of marriage” (DS 2791). Of the proposition that contraception is not prohibited by the natural law, it stated: “Scandalous, and elsewhere implicitly condemned by Innocent XI’s proposition 49” (DS 2792). In 1853, the Holy Office repeated its condemnation of contraception, giving as its reason that it is “intrinsically evil” (DS 2795). If something is intrinsically evil, it is perverse, against the natural order. There consequently can be no doubt that the Church’s firm condemnation of contraception is for this reason. Pope Paul VI repeats this teaching in his 1968 Encyclical Humanae Vitae, pointing out the intrinsic evil that makes it against the natural law even if done for a “good” intention: The obligation that arose from the law of the levirate was not so rigorous that one could not escape from it. If for one reason or another a brother-in-law did not agree to take his sister-in-law, the law, without obliging him, allowed the abandoned and outraged widow to inflict upon him a humiliation which became the sanction of law. (PirotClamer, La Sainte Bible, II, 670) Excluded is every action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible….It is an error to think that a conjugal act which is deliberately made infecund and so is intrinsically dishonest could be made honest and right by the ensemble of a fecund conjugal life. (§14) The importance of this question lies in convincing Protestants of Catholic truth on this question. For, if they sometimes see the evil of abortion, in general they approve of contraception. It is true that in the Bible there is only one explicit reference to the sin of contraception, from which it receives its technical name of Onanism. The text that describes the sin of Onan, the second son of Juda, is found in Gen. 38:8-10. Juda therefore said to Onan his son: Go in to thy brother’s wife and marry her, that thou mayst raise seed to thy brother. He knowing that the children should not be his, when he went in to his brother’s wife, spilled his seed upon the ground, lest children should be born in his brother’s name. And therefore the Lord slew him, because he did a detestable thing. Protestant apologists, however, maintain that the sin for which the Lord God slew Onan was not specifically that of spilling his seed, but spilling his seed so that he would not raise up children to his brother. However, this latter was a grave obligation promulgated in the Mosaic law. It was called the law of the levirate, according to which a man had the obligation of raising up children for a deceased brother by taking his brother’s widow for his own wife, and engendering and raising children in his brother’s name, who would legally be his brother’s (Deut. 25:5-10). The first problem with this explanation is that Onan lived in the time of the patriarchs, before the departure into Egypt, and 400 years before Moses and the promulgation of the Mosaic law that is described in the book of Deuteronomy. If it is true that the Mosaic law legally acknowledged and approved a much more ancient custom, it cannot be said that Onan’s refusal to observe this custom is a crime punishable by death by law. A further objection is that even the Mosaic law did not consider the refusal to take one’s deceased brother’s wife as punishable by death. The punishment prescribed in Deut. 25:9-10 is nothing more than a public humiliation: The woman shall come to him before the ancients, and shall take off his shoe from his foot, and spit in his face, and say: So shall it be done to the man that will not build up his brother’s house. And his name shall be called in Israel, the house of the unshod. THE ANGELUS • June 2007 www.angeluspress.org 43 When entering into discussion with Protestants, it is imperative to understand the reason why the Catholic Church condemns contraception. For Protestantism is based upon the philosophy of Nominalism, which denies the common sense and obvious fact that we can know the real natures of things. If there are no natures of things, then the distinction between nature and grace does not make sense, nor the mystery of the Trinity, three Persons with one Divine Nature, nor the Incarnation, one Person having two natures, nor the Real Presence or the whole concept of Transubstantiation, a change of substance. Equally difficult for them to comprehend is the natural law, established by the Creator, a moral ordering that is inscribed in man’s nature itself and from which he cannot escape. For them, morality is purely positive; it is simply being told what to do and what not to do, and then having to abide by it, without anything being intrinsically good or evil in itself. The Protestant will consequently not be convinced of the objective truthfulness of the Church’s teaching on contraception until he has come to understand that there is an objective order of things that we call the natural law. Just as this manifestly exists in the ordering of creation in nature, and can be clearly established, so also does it exist in the moral realm, and it regulates man’s actions and his relationships with others. Once he has understood this, he will see that there is such a thing as an intrinsically perverse act, and that contraception is such an act, taking away from the nature and final purpose of the marriage act, inscribed in nature, which is to procreate children. He will then understand why Almighty God did not repeat in Sacred Scripture this self-evident truth. Fr. Peter Scott was ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988. After assignments as seminary professor and the US District Superior, he is currently the rector of Holy Cross Seminary in Goulburn, Australia. writing Contest winner The members of the judging party (none of whom are on the Angelus Press staff) made this selection based on the strict definition of the “essay” format which is what the March 2007 contest required. Note that since then The Angelus has broadened the contest to include any poem, dialogue, short story, song lyrics, script, explanation, etc. Miss Olivia Arcia St. Anthony of Padua Mt. Holly (Charlotte), NC March 2007 During Our Lord’s Passion, His mother was deeply afflicted at the sight of her Son so wounded and scourged. What thoughts were in Our Lady’s mind when her Son was being taken down from the Cross? What sadness Our Lady must have felt while holding her Son’s crown of thorns bathed in blood. For instance, how Our Lady walked with her dead Son is how we should walk away from the death of sin and walk with the grace from our Savior to the gates of Heaven. Lord Jesus crucified, have mercy on us! Notice how the statue of Our Lord lying dead is facing Our Lady, almost saying that before Our Lord closed His eyes to give up His ghost, He turned to gaze at His mother one last time. Our Lord’s enemies gazed upon Him with malicious delight and His people watched Him, but kept far from Him. He was bruised for our cruelty and was killed for our sins. While Our Lord died for love of us, we should die for love of Him. The men, women and children of Jerusalem followed Our Lady and mourned over their Savior’s walk to Calvary, His passion and His death. What thoughts were in the minds of those weeping souls of Jerusalem while they followed Our Lady and her dead Son to the sepulcher? For example, how the weeping souls of Jerusalem followed Our Lord to His grave, is how we should not only follow Our Lord’s footsteps, but also take up our own Cross and sufferings of this life, to finally reach everlasting bliss. Consider how Our Lord was carried by Joseph and Nicodemus into the sepulcher. Our Lady bathing her Son in tears, gently folding His hands, looked upon Him for the last time and softly walked away. How Our Lord took upon Himself the iniquities of us all is how we should give Him all the roses from our daily crown of thorns, because it seems that so many www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2007 times Our Lord keeps all the thorns for Himself and gives us all the roses. The Angelus monthly photo writing contest Any member of a household aged 10-18 whose family address has a current subscription to The Angelus (either in print or online) is eligible. There may be more than one entry per address if more than one child is eligible. (Please include your family’s address and phone number, especially if you are a contestant writing from a boarding school.) Pricing for The Angelus is found at the bottom of the “Table of Contents” page. The Angelus is offering $150 for a 250-word creative writing composition on the above picture. (This may include, but is not limited to, any poem, dialogue, short story, song lyrics, script, explanation, etc.) If none is deserving of the prize, none will be awarded. The winning essay may be published if there is a winner. An extra $50 is available if one is a member of the SSPX Eucharistic Crusade (verified by your chaplain with your entry). Entrants must submit a creative-writing composition in their own words about the featured monthly picture. Submissions must be handwritten and will be judged on content, legibility, and creativity. The essays will be judged by parties outside of Angelus Press. Essays must be postmarked or faxed by june 30 and be addressed to: Attention: The Angelus Monthly Photo Writing Contest 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64109 FAX: 816-753-3557 (24-hour dedicated line) archbishop Marcel Lefebvre Writings and Addresses 1963•1976  Out of print Out of print for 13 years, A Bishop Speaks is back! Posthumous thanks are due to Mr. Michael Davies, RIP, who continually encouraged us to reprint this book while revising Pope John’s Council and Pope Paul’s New Mass. He said, “You must reprint A Bishop Speaks. It’s a very important work.” He referred to and quoted from his old copy constantly. This book is a chronological collection of key letters, sermons, conferences, and interviews (1963-1976) that are critical to understanding his founding of the SSPX, his defense of Catholic Tradition, and his opposition to Vatican II and the New Mass. “We hope that this English edition will be widely read. May it also help many Catholics–bishops, priests, and laity–to understand the tragedy that is ruining the Church, and the new betrayal of which Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Victim,” said Archbishop Lefebvre in the first English edition. for 13 years!  New, expanded edition!  Includes those parts unpublished in the original English edition Includes: 1963: Letter to Members of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost on Wearing the Cassock  Letter on the First Session of Vatican II. 1964: After the Second Session of the Vatican II. 1965: Between the Third and Fourth Sessions of Vatican II. 1968: Light on the Present Crisis in the Church  For a True Renovation of the Church  Authority in the Family and in Society as an Aid to Our Salvation. 1969: After the Council: The Church and the Moral Crisis of Today. 1970: To Remain a Good Catholic Must One Become a Protestant? 1971: The Priest and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass  The Fruits of the New Mass. 1972: The Priest and the Present Crisis in the Church. 1973: Priests for Tomorrow. 1974: Crisis of the Church or Crisis of the Priesthood? 1975: Declaration  Account of the “Three Cardinals’ Commission” in Suppressing the SSPX  Letter to Pope Paul VI (both) 1976: Letter to Pope Paul VI (three)  Ordination Sermon  The Sermon at Lille 312pp, softcover, STK# 5067Q $19.95 You and Thousands Like You “You must repr A Bishop S int pe It’s a veryaks. important work.” –Micha el Davies Fr. Owen Francis Dudley Originally printed in 1949, this book is perhaps even more relevant today than when it was first written. Written in the form of “An Open Letter to the Men and Women of Today,” this dynamic book constitutes an excellent apologia for the Catholic Faith. It shows what Christianity means and involves, and demonstrates how its practice could stave off the impending disaster which looms over our world. Fr. Dudley’s presentation is logical, forceful, and thought-provoking. He writes in a vivid and dynamic style familiar to his readers. “If certain things I shall say are resented, please believe me that it is not my intention to hurt, but only to draw attention to the truth. A quality of truth is that it hurts when refused; when accepted it no longer hurts.” 157pp, sewn hardcover, STK# 3082✱ $15.50 Highly recommended by SSPX US District Superior, Fr. John Fullerton The Rev. Owen Francis Dudley has won recognition on both sides of the Atlantic as a penetrating thinker and a novelist of distinction. Born in 1882, he studied for the Anglican ministry and was ordained in 1911. In 1915, he converted to the Catholic Faith and after study­ing for the Catholic priesthood at the Beda College in Rome, he was ordained in September of 1917. Fr. Dudley served as Chaplain to the British Gunners on the French and Italian fronts in World War I. After recovering from war wounds, Fr. Dudley be­came very active in the work of the Catholic Missionary Society, of which he was superior from 1933-1946, lecturing in town halls, theaters, Hyde Park and mining club rooms; he even visited the United States while on a lecture tour. As part of his missionary apostolate, he wrote a series of novels on the abiding Problems of Human Happiness–the desire of every heart. www.angeluspress.org l 1-8 00-9 6 6-73 37 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. Iota unum Romano Amerio (see revelation below) La Civiltà Cattolica breaks the silence on Romano Amerio! Just ed Reveal “He was the most authoritative and erudite representative of criticism of the Church in the name of Tradition, but for decades the discussion of his thought was barred. The magazine of the Rome Jesuits has broken the taboo. Authorized from on high.” These are the words of Italian journalist Sandro Magister (see www.angelusonline.org for the full article.) What follows are excerpts from his article, which is an analysis of the importance of the Civiltà Cattolica article, which itself was a positive book review of Enrico Maria Radaelli’s biography of Amerio, Romano Amerio: On Truth and Love. l ROME, April 23, 2007–In La Civiltà Cattolica, the magazine of the Rome Jesuits printed with the prior scrutiny and authorization of the Vatican Secretaiat of State, a review has been published that signals the end of a taboo...one that has obliterated from public discussion, for decades, the thought of the most authoritative and erudite representative of criticism of the 20th century Church in the name of Tradition: the Swiss philologist and philosopher Romano Amerio.... l Amerio, although he was always extremely faithful to the Church, condensed his criticisms of it in two volumes: Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century, begun in 1935 and finalized and published in 1985, and Stat Veritas, sequel to Iota Unum.... l Iota Unum, 658 pages, was reprinted three times in Italy, for a total of 7,000 copies, and was then translated into French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Dutch. It thus reached many tens of thousands of readers all over the world. But in spite of this, an almost complete blacklisting fell upon Amerio in the Church, both during and after his life. The review in La Civiltà Cattolica thus signals a turning point. Both because of where and how it was published–with the authorization of the Holy See–and because of what it says. l And the judgments are largely positive, both on “Amerio’s intellectual and moral stature,” and on “the importance of his philosophical-theological vision for the contemporary Church.” The reviewer, Giuseppe Esposito,...does not agree with Amerio in everything, but he maintains that his thought “deserves more extensive discussion,” and “without prejudice.” l In particular, he writes, “It seems simplistic to relegate his reflection–and that of Radaelli–to the sphere of nostalgic traditionalism, as a position now irrelevant, incapable of comprehending the new movements of the Spirit.” On the contrary, the reviewer maintains, Amerio’s thought “confers a form and a philosophical framework upon that ecclesial component which, following in the path of Tradition, reaches out to safeguard Christian specificity and identity.” #1006 816pp, softcover, STK# 6700✱ $30.00 Color hardcover, STK# 6700H✱ $40.00 Archbishop Lefebvre on Iota Unum: “In my opinion, it is the most perfect book that has been written since the Council on the Council, its consequences, and everything that has been happening in the Church since. He examines every subject with a truly remarkable perfection. I was stupefied to see with what serenity he discusses everything, without the passion of polemics, but with untouchable arguments.... I do not see how the current attitudes of Rome can still persist after the appearance of such a book. They are radically, definitively condemned, and with such precision, for he only uses their own texts....The whole is absolutely magnificent. “One could base an entire course on this book, on the pre-Council, the Council, and post-Council....The Popes take a licking...but he recounts their deeds, their words, everything. They stand condemned. In his epilogue he shows how the consequence is the dissolution of the Catholic religion....there must be a remnant; after all, the good God said that the Church will not perish, therefore there must be a...remnant that will keep the faith and tradition.” E-mail Updates from Angelus Press! 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