“Instaurare omnia in Christo” Christophobia: The War Against the Faith The Phenomenon of Christophobia The Earshattering Silence of the Church May - June 2012 Christophobia In the book Genesis we read that God had respect to Abel and to his offerings. Cain, his brother, whose offerings were not accepted, got exceedingly angry and lost his countenance. Revolted against God he killed his brother. For the first time in the history of mankind the God-fearing, because he pleases God, undergoes persecution and suffers homicide. Ever since and until the end of the time “the world” aggresses the faithful. Modern times claim to be enlightened and to have overcome the “dark Middle-Ages.” And again in our days in many countries we experience the “renaissance” of the persecution of Christians. © Zvonimir Atletic / Shutterstock.com Letter from the Publisher Our Lord tells us in the Gospel that “if the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you” (Jn. 15:18). Indeed, the persecution of the Faith and the hatred of Our Lord and His Church are relatively constant throughout history, though it has taken different forms: the pagans of early Rome, the Muslim invasions of the Middle Ages, and the French Revolution are different chapters of the same story. In recent years, this hatred has been especially noticeable in civil laws, arts, music, and culture at large, and has been given the name Christophobia or Christianophobia. As society continues to retreat from Christian principles, what has arisen in its place is not nothing, but rather a vulgar opposition to anything which reminds people of the Faith. The image and representation of Our Lord Himself has been the subject of sacrilegious and blasphemous displays, many of which are too vile even to be mentioned in these pages. We present some considerations on this question, not to give the devil his due or to discourage you about the state of the world. Every epoch of history has its Catholic response to its unique situations: the martyrs of the early Church, the Crusades of the Middle Ages, and the witness of the Catholic counter-revolutionaries all present examples of Christians who publicly stand up for the honor of Our Lord. The work of Catholic resistance of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the Society of Saint Pius X in these times of apostasy is another example. The question of what to do specifically is largely a question of prudence, especially since you all have unique manifestations of this evil where you live. In order to exercise that prudence and determine the particular solution that must exist in varying concrete circumstances, we must first have a formation in the Faith. In today’s world that means especially an understanding of the great modern errors attacking the Church and society, and the traditional teachings that can pull the Church and society out of the great crises in which we find ourselves. To defeat the great evils that face us in the world, we must be true lovers of Christ, Who is the Truth. That’s why above all I would encourage you to pray, read, learn, and study, so that when the battle comes to your town, or your state, or your country, you will be ready. In Christ the King, Fr. Arnaud Rostand, Publisher May-June 2012 Volume XXXV, Number 3 Publisher Fr. Arnaud Rostand Editor Mr. James Vogel Editorial Assistant Miss Anne Stinnett Editorial Team Fr. Jürgen Wegner Fr. Dominique Bourmaud Fr. Leo Boyle Fr. Pierre Duverger Design and Layout credo.creatie (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) Mr. Simon Townshend Miss Mary Werick Director of Marketing and Sales Mr. Mark Riddle Subscription Rates 1 year 2 years 3 years U.S. and Canada $35.00 $65.00 $100.00 Foreign Countries $55.00 $105.00 $160.00 All payments must be in U.S. funds only. Contents Letter from the Publisher 4 Theme: Christophobia – The Phenomenon of Christophobia – Stephen Hawking’s Flight from God: Quark Ex Nihilo? – The Earshattering Silence of the Church – Jacques Maritain, the HHS Mandate, and the Failure of AmericanPluralism – Book Review: Duties of the Catholic State 6 10 16 20 24 Faith and Morals – Doctrine: God Is Good – Liturgy: The Goal of All Liturgy – Social Doctrine: Christophobia, Catholic Action, and Christophilia – Acts of the Magisterium: Il Fermo Proposito 26 30 34 38 Spirituality – Lives of the Saints: St. John Vianney, Unintimidating Saint – Lives of the Saints: Devotion to the Sacred Heart 42 46 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” Online subscriptions: $20.00/year. To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Register for free to access back issues 14 months and older. All subscribers to the print version of the magazine have full access to the online version. The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published bi-monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication office is located at 2915 Forest Ave., Kansas City, MO 64109. PH (816) 753-3150; FAX (816) 753-3557. Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, MO. Manuscripts and letters to the editor are welcome and will be used at the discretion of the editors. The authors of the articles presented here are solely responsible for their judgments and opinions. Postmaster sends address changes to the address above. ©2012 by Angelus Press. Official Publication of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X for the United States and Canada Christian Culture – History: A Bishop for All Seasons – Education: Is Your Parenting Style Working? – Family Life: The Key to a Long and Fruitful Marriage 54 58 62 – Questions and Answers – Church and World – SiSiNoNo: Laicity and Liberalism – Letters to the Editor – The Last Word 66 69 74 84 87 Theme Christophobia The Phenomenon of Christophobia by Claude Polin This past fall and part of the winter, it has been seen fit for the intellectual glamour of Paris, notably by the mayor of the capital, that some theaters be awarded public subsidies to promote a new war on Christians. Three different plays were first performed in different provinces and finally in Paris, under such revealing titles as Golgotha Picnic, or Piss Christ, the third one being The Concept of the Face of the Son of God (a pretentious title for presenting a caricature of the Holy Face). The New War on Christians The war on Christianity is nothing new. But on the whole the main targets used to be on one hand the Catholic Church, both as an institution 6 The Angelus May - June 2012 and as the guardian of a partial form of Christian faith (the French in particular are famous for their anti clericalism), or, on the other hand, religious faith in general (atheists do not usually bear a particular grudge against Christianity specifically). This new war is different. The hostility to religion, or to the Church, was traditionally kindled by the arrogance of consciously assumed human pride, harbored by men claiming the right to unfettered freedom and trying to rest their case on what they thought was a philosophy, a well thought justification for their revolt against God. These were articulate sinners. The new enemies of Christianity do not trouble themselves any more with words bearing any semblance of an idea. Assaulting directly the very person of Christ Himself, incapable even of articulate insults, they resort to expressing their rage by the vilest language and the crassest acts that come to their befuddled brains. They actually turn the stage they are supposed to be standing on into a sort of latrine that is not shielded from view: no more acting, no more meaningful dialogue, no more unraveling of a plot; they move about with no other visible purpose than to actually urinate into stoups and throw their own excrement, not at the proverbial fan—since they don’t seem able to think of using one—but at a giant painting of Christ’s face exhibited in the background. In other times, such sick displays of ghastly taste and profanity would have earned these selfproclaimed artists nothing but contempt, public shame, or at least a severe punishment. Today what cannot be ignored is the attention attracted by this exalted disclosure of a passion for emitting bodily waste in public. Three things must then be pointed out. One is that far from being regarded as a display of mental backwardness, this public worship of scatology is supposed to be a form of art, worthy of an audience—so much so that, again, it must be subsidized as such by the taxpayer’s money. The other is the unmentionable coarseness, abysmal vulgarity, and subhuman grossness (Freud would find himself in a scientific trance if he could behold such empirical proof that there is in the mental development of man an anal stage that some are unable to overcome). And the third is the depth of the anti-Christian resentment all the more remarkable as it is obviously unable to attain anything resembling thought. Stretch Tolerance to Its Limits These are the facts. They raise one main question. Why did this come about? What is the motivation for the production and the imposition of the product upon the public with the enthusiastic assistance of the authorities? Let us try to review and assess some possible answers. One may discard some kind of Islamic desecration of Christ. Even though Christianity is obviously the prime target of the perpetrators of these expectorations, they make it clear they don’t mind offending any religious faith, and are no Islamists; and whatever one may think of Islam, it is not thinkable that Islamists, whatever grudge they may harbor against Christ being God, can afford to be considered irreligious, not to mention atheistic, pure and simple. There may be a willingness to try out and stretch to its limits one of the fundamental dogmas of our self-proclaimed modern culture, which is freedom of thought and correlative tolerance. A true artist these days is supposed to be one who is eager to unearth prejudices the better to combat them: one has to be a rebel to be considered an artist (whether there are true errors or not is irrelevant). But again assuming there is something intellectual in their activities, and even though these disciples of modernity obviously do not care about religion and religious faith in general, it is clear that, whatever their tolerance for other creeds, they harbor none for Christianity. They are true to the Jacobin sectarian spirit that used to proclaim: “there shall be no freedom for the enemies of freedom.” They don’t make a show of tolerance, but rather of undisguised intolerance. Shock to Promote There is another way to look at their acts, since we are dealing with simpletons rather than high-flying intellects. As a matter of fact, as their biography shows, the so-called authors of these so-called plays are all people whose original profession was advertising. They are therefore the ones, if any, to know how to promote a product, which means primarily, since in this particular case they aren’t selling anything, how to promote themselves. Their techniques all boil down to one device: to shock. A good ad must attract attention, therefore it must display something out of the ordinary, it must unsettle the passerby, it must stop him dead in his tracks. Hence the notion of inflicting the vilest treatment on what the passer-by supposedly most reveres. These disgusting and offensive acts would then be simply a kind of perfect ad. But there is a catch. > 7 Theme Christophobia Wittingly or not, such an advertising campaign presupposes our societies still to be Christian enough to be offended by profanity, but are they? I think it difficult not to see that indifference to religion runs deep in the public soul. Some may argue that our societies don’t suffer from a lack of exotic new faiths, but to me this only means that what attracts the new converts to these pseudo religious creeds is that these faiths somehow satisfy their egos. Hatred for Whatever Is Noble Then dawns another possible explanation for these self-proclaimed artists taking such pains, and to me a more convincing one. It may be that our pseudo freethinkers perceive our societies not only as still Christian, insufficiently de-Christianized, so much so that they wish to contribute to the acceleration of their deChristianization. Which then implies they are moved by a hatred of Christianity. One can indeed feel, as I do, that, lurking under the apparent desire to shock, there lies, deep in the heart of such obviously intellectually and morally mediocre individuals, a sort of half realized but intensely active hatred for whatever is noble and inspiring to men. A hatred for whatever calls men to go beyond their immediate contentment with themselves and to realize the pettiness of their own individual world. A hatred for whatever prevents them from resting satisfied with what they are. A plebeian hatred for whatever allows some men to become more accomplished than others, to become therefore both models and incentives for others, because they cannot at the same time help becoming an occasion for others to take stock of what they are, as compared to what they should be. Such hatred makes it understandable why they hate Christ Himself first of all: what they perceive in Him is not so much God incarnate as the perfect man created by God, the perfection of man’s nature humbling the others in their imperfections and making them ashamed of themselves. To put it in a nutshell: we hate Christ because He prevents us 8 The Angelus May - June 2012 from reveling in our excrement, to use their own favorite tool. If this is the case, it is no wonder their productions smack of a sort of half-conscious nihilism. For it is in the nature of things that, unless he turns schizophrenic, a man without a cause outside of himself cannot but fail to find enough meaning in himself to make it worth living. In other words, these ghastly happenings, whatever their abysmal indignity on all counts (and first of all the intellectual one), may nevertheless teach us two lessons. First, that there is in human nature a propensity to debase what is high, because the appeal of the animal within any man is part of his nature. And second, that in our democratic societies, where the people have become the only god for the people, and where therefore everything is permitted, there is a propensity, well-rooted in their own god-like sovereignty, to extol as the perfection of man’s freedom what used to be considered his animal instincts, which are amongst his different possible urges, the easiest ones to yield to. It is remarkable that ever since the revealingly called “Renaissance,” which was basically a revival of Man as opposed to God, there is no lack of writers expressing the view that animals are more perfect creatures than men. The famous Montaigne, the god of the Renaissance, defended the notion that there are more moral virtues in elephants, eagles, dogs, or geese than in men. And was it not J. J. Rousseau, the god of the Enlightenment, who declared: “A man who thinks is a depraved animal”? “He who wants to play the angel ends up as a beast,” wrote Pascal. Which is probably why he also wrote: “Misery of man without God...” In another article in this issue we shall consider the reactions to what our self-proclaimed artists would like to consider a provocation, which means examining the religious state of the French union. Claude Polin has been a professor of political philosophy at the University of Paris, Sorbonne since 1966. 348pp (Book) – Ten Encyclicals – Color Softcovers – STK# 5308 – $34.95 Against the Heresies Set Complete Set of the Most Important Encyclicals The Wisdom of the Popes: The Only Solution for a World Gone Mad 10 of the Most Profound Encyclicals Condemning Modern Errors This complete set contains Against the Heresies by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, as well as the ten beautiful encyclicals on which he comments. In this incisive work, Archbishop Lefebvre analyzes the various aspects of Liberalism in the same way that St. Irenaeus did of Gnosticism. As St. Irenaeus addressed the philosophical errors and presented the Catholic response, which is the rule of the Catholic Faith in the Creed, so Archbishop Lefebvre also shows how the modern errors in the Church and Society are so opposed to our unchanging Catholic Faith. The solution is the same: Catholic tradition; The Deposit of Faith; the authority of the Holy See. -E Supremi Apostolatus (On the Restoration of All Things in Christ) -Quo Graviora (Condemnation of Freemasonry) -Qui Pluribus (On Faith and Religion) -Humanum Genus (On Freemasonry) -Custodi di quella Fede (Guardians of that Faith) -Libertas Praestantissimum (On the Nature of Human Liberty) -Mirari Vos (On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism) -Quanta Cura & the Syllabus of Errors (Condeming Modern Errors) -Notre Charge Apostolique (Our Apostolic Mandate) -Divini Redemptoris (On Atheistic Communism) www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music Theme Christophobia Stephen Hawking’s Flight from God Quark Ex Nihilo? by Peter Chojnowski, Ph.D. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Albert Einstein Even though he was scheduled to speak at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia, in mid-April 2012, Richard Dawkins, one of the illuminati of the new British atheist movement, has been forced recently to admit that he is not an atheist at all but rather an agnostic. This recent admission by one of the high priests of atheism that he “cannot be sure that there is no God,” was made during a “discussion” at Oxford University with Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Even though most of the discussion involved simply Dawkins expounding on evolution, and the Archbishop sitting by passively in perfect acquiescence, Dawkins was forced to admit that he was not certain that there was no God, but was “6.9 out of 7” sure of his position. When the moderator, Sir Anthony Kenny, interrupted and said, “Why don’t you call yourself an agnostic?” Dawkins said that he did. When Sir Anthony retorted, “But you are known as the world’s greatest 10 The Angelus May - June 2012 1 John Bingham, “Richard Dawkins: I cannot be sure that God does not exist,” Telegraph (London), February 24, 2012. 2 Anthony Flew, “My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism,” Philosophia Christi, Winter 2005. 3 Ibid. See here Flew’s rejection of Islam, not because it is false, but rather, because “it wants to conquer the world.” 4 Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), p. 5. atheist,” Dawkins tried to justify his seeming revocation of a position that most of mankind has found to be completely counter-intuitive by stating, “I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low.”1 The recent death of Christopher Hitchens and the complaint of the chairman of the British Conservative Party, Baroness Warsi, about “a tide of militant secularism challenging the religious foundations of British society,” has focused attention on a debate raging in Britain concerning the place of religion in British society and the very reality of God Himself. As regards this current manifestation of the apostasy of Great Britain from its foundational traditional Catholic faith, there has been a positive breakthrough which should not escape our notice. Professor Anthony Flew, another one of the Englishmen praised as “the world’s most famous atheist” and a philosophic expert on “debunking” miracles, including the miracle of Our Lord Jesus Christ’s Resurrection, has in recent years completely dropped his atheism and has had to admit that he believes there is a Creator who is both omnipotent and omnipresent, since these two attributes must be present to a Deity that has brought forth all things from nothing. Even though he still shies away from anything other than affirming the raw existence of a Creator God, namely anything relating to Divine Revelation, an after-life, the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, or, even, the attribution of basic goodness to God, Flew, in an interview with Dr. Gary Habermas, has affirmed that it has been due to recent scientific advancements, he mentions specifically the research into DNA, that he has had to admit the existence of an all-knowing and allpowerful Creator.2 After reading some of the various writings and interviews of the New British Atheists, I have found it to be evident that the most profitable encounter for a Catholic critique of this movement would be one with a mind that uses modern science, or at least his spin on modern science, particularly quantum mechanics, to substantiate his conclusion that there is no God. Much of what the other British atheists use to “debunk” God’s existence are psychological “proofs,” which tell us what it is about God that does not appeal to the post-modern domesticated British intellectual, like the existence of Hell or the prevalence of evil in the world, or, if a debate is going poorly, the Crusades.3 Hawking’s Dislocation of Common Sense It is for this reason that I have decided to focus my attention on the writings of Stephen Hawking, the Oxford celebrity physicist, and, in particular, his most recent work, written in 2010, The Grand Design. It is here where Hawking makes his most forceful apologetic for a scientificallybased atheistic nihilism, which is meant to be a final patronizing “farewell” to the idea of a Creator God and a purposeful universe. What we will also find in this work is an attempt by Hawking to draw the “proper” conclusions from his attempt at deicide. Hence his claim that his book will attempt to answer, “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”4 What is incredible about Hawking’s text is not only the title The Grand 11 Theme Christophobia 12 5 Ibid., pp. 159-162. 6 Ibid., pp. 152. 7 Ibid., p. 153. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., pp. 17-21. The Angelus May - June 2012 Design, while the whole book is dedicated to arguing against the existence of a Grand Designer. What is more, much of the text is dedicated to presenting overwhelming evidence supporting the Anthropic Principle, the scientific and philosophic principle which holds that the entire solar system, and indeed the whole universe is constructed in such a singular way that even the slightest changes in the microcosmic and macrocosmic aspects of its structure would render human life on our planet impossible. In other words, modern science is coming to realize that the entire universe is exactly structured in order to render human life possible. For example, even though Hawking will try to use what happens at the sub-atomic level as “proof” that something can come from nothing “spontaneously,” it is specifically the precise order that can be found at the subatomic level which provides an astonishing confirmation of the Anthropic Principle. According to the evidence cited by Hawking himself in his book, “Most of the fundamental constants in our theories appear finetuned in the sense that if they were altered, by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life.”5 Again to quote Hawking, “calculations show that a change of as little as .5% in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4% in the electric force would destroy nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it.” Thus the perfect order at the mico-level; at the macro-level we find the same kind of order “amazingly” prepared for the existence of rational life on earth. Quoting Hawking himself again, “We are lucky in our relationship to our sun’s mass to our distance from it. And yet, assuming the earth-sun distance as a given, if our sun was just 20% less or more massive, the earth would be colder than present-day Mars or hotter than present day Venus.”6 The habitable zone is sometimes called by cosmologists the “Goldilocks zone,” because “the requirement that liquid water exist means that, like Goldilocks, the development of intelligent life requires that planetary temperatures be ‘just right’. The habitable zone in our solar system…is tiny. Fortunately, for those of us who are intelligent life forms, the earth fell within it.”7 What is interesting about the missionary atheist Hawking, however, is the way in which he does not draw from this order the obvious conclusion that was drawn, for example, by Sir Isaac Newton who said that our habitable solar system did not “arise out of chaos by the mere laws of nature.”8 It is on page 17 of a 185-page text that Hawking gives the “conclusion” of his “scientific” analysis of the results of modern physics. It comes in his presentation of a view of history that perfectly fits his ultimate conclusion. History is the movement of the human mind towards a rejection of belief in God. Or to quote exactly the beginning of his analysis of human history up until the time of the rise of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920s, “Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.”9 We must, therefore, wonder whether it is really Hawking’s own dislike of God “lording it over” “every aspect of his life” that is the true reason for his refusal of God’s existence. When we begin to read Hawking’s history of mankind, a history that will progress towards the emergence of a complete nihilism, we find that his 10 Ibid., p. 18. 11 Ibid., p. 24. 12 Ibid., p. 5. seeming purpose is to render intellectually illicit any appeal to common human history and common human experience against his own atheistic conclusions. Not only are almost all ages of man labeled as intellectually unproductive, but the human apparatus for knowing itself, our senses and our intellectual reflection on the world testified to by our own senses, is rendered invalid. For example, after indicating that during the first 191,000 years of supposed human existence there was absolutely no written culture created, Hawking goes on to relegate 197,500 years of the existence of our species Homo Sapiens as being without “scientific thought.”10 After gaining knowledge of the Pythagorean law of strings and a few laws detailed by Archimedes, the world was plunged into 2,000 years of fruitless Aristotelian thought. In this regard, even though the Classical Physicists of the 1600s, like Newton, Descartes, and Galileo, were right about reducing science to measuring quantitative aspects of things, their thought must also be rejected as useless in discovering the true nature of the universe.11 Hawking’s Non-Sense: Why Can’t We Know God by the Things He Has Made? The reason that Newtonian and Galilean physics can no longer tell us what the world is like, according to Hawking, is the same reason that our everyday experience of the world as human beings cannot tell us what the world is really like. To quote Hawking directly: “Until the advent of modern physics it was generally thought…that things are what they seem, as perceived through our senses.” What is critical here are the individuals that Hawking would cut off from the rational discussion of whether God exists or not. Within five pages, philosophy, and more relevantly natural theology, is relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history because it has “not kept up with modern developments in science; particularly physics.” Therefore, “philosophy is dead.”12 Since philosophical reasoning about what is testified to by the senses is the essence of St. Thomas’s Five Ways, any common sense and reasoned approach (i.e., any approach to the reality of God for the normal non-mathematician mortal) is from the beginning identified as irrelevant and illusory. Hawking is here ensuring that the battle over the existence of God, which is what his latest book is about, will be fought on his own ground of mathematical probabilities. The newborn lamb’s unthinking directedness to suckle within an hour of birth (à la the Fifth Way) is apparently irrelevant to determining whether or not there is an all-powerful and provident creator God. Sadly, these “new Atheists” are not going away; on the contrary, they are more and more seen as the experts to whom modern men can turn to for reassurance that there is no God. Every Catholic who learns the old proofs for the existence of God, proofs which have not lost any salt, can fight against this manifestation of Christophobia. 13 1600-year-old mosaics in Galla Placidia’s mausoleum above her sarcophagus, showing a saint about to be martyred on a pyre. Theme Christophobia The Earshattering Silence of the Church by Claude Polin In my previous article about the gross “artistic” aggressions against the Catholic faith that recently took place in France, I tried to weigh the motives of the self-proclaimed artists responsible for them. Now I shall turn to the reactions they provoked, both among the public at large and within the Catholic Church itself. Striking Silence Seen from a dispassionate point of view, I think one word is sufficient to sum them up: apart from the demonstrations of protest staged by Catholic traditionalists, what was heard was silence, total deafening silence. A silence all the more striking as one can hardly argue it was a natural reaction to the aloofness or intellectual delicacy of esoteric 16 The Angelus May - June 2012 masterpieces. A silence all the more intriguing as it verges on the systematic: according to the French Gendarmerie, which reluctantly released the figures, one act of desecration currently occurs every day in France, but with no public reaction. Then the question is obvious: why this total absence of reaction? There are different possible explanations for this fact, the most dismal of which is, I fear, the most convincing. Apart from the few rabid anti-Christians, who are of the same breed as the aforementioned half-witted artists, no doubt there are people snooty and stupid enough to claim they see significance in something that has none, and who consider as proof of high intellectual standing not to be shocked by something which in fact has no other intention than to shock. The story of the emperor who wore no clothes is an old one. There is also in France a much greater number of people who have simply been brain-washed, with ever increasing intensity as the years go by, by decades of subjection to politically correct public education, the press, and state-controlled television. Thus they have been induced to think of Pope Pius XII as an accomplice of the Nazis, Catholic priests as child abusers, Catholic churchgoers as members of the KKK, and Catholicism as a front for the protection of the rich and Jew-haters. In opposition to this more and more orchestrated propaganda, what resistance can be offered by people who are less and less equipped to form their own opinions? Ironically enough, this is particularly the case with the waning of truly Catholic (or truly religious) education, whose aim was to provide the citizens with some criterion of what is true or false, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Anticlericalism It is conceivable that there is a third reason—a typically French one—for the silence of the public, even the supposedly Catholic public. Anticlericalism has been a resilient, time-honored tradition in France since the eighteenth century and the merry events in which it culminated: it has been current opinion since the French Revolution that faith is by itself respectable, as opposed to the Catholic Church which usurps it. Since many of the so-called actors of the socalled plays were portrayed as priests, one may suppose that to a fair proportion of the viewers the whole performance was just a remake, be it a particularly vulgar one, of the age-old debunking of the clergy, a newer version of traditional jokes about them. I’m afraid though that such tentative accounts of the basic evidence are somehow too optimistic, for they imply more or less explicitly that the public has either been somehow “framed” (literally and figuratively), or entertains no definite nor new hostility towards Christianity, but is simply ready to welcome a new style of knockabout farce. I’m afraid we are facing here not the paternal silent smile of elders used to the pranks of youngsters, but the silence of jellyfish drifting about with a total lack of interest in what lies beyond the reach of their tentacles— the silence of passengers riding a train with headphones on, iPod in hand, beating the measure of the noise that engulfs them without bothering to glance at their neighbors or the landscape. We are facing indifference to religion pure and simple. Neither active atheism, nor hostility to religious creeds, but sheer inability to consider faith important for men and society, particularly compared with real worries like the price of gasoline or the score of the upcoming soccer match. In other words, the silence of the French in this particular case seems to me to mean that the average Frenchman is not even Pascal’s “thinking reed” (“roseau pensant”) any more. (One might argue that there is an obvious interest in France for what I would call exotic creeds, but the answer to this objection will have to wait for a later issue.) To turn now to the reaction, or, rather, the absence of reaction, from those most directly concerned with the desecration of Christ, i.e. the Catholic Church, and notably the French bishops, its meaning is no less appalling. Only Two Bishops Spoke Up The silence of the official Church—for the traditionalist Catholics were not silent—was, I repeat, simply ear-splitting. Of the hundreds of French bishops, there were only two, to my knowledge, who raised any objection, and one of them in rather circumlocutory terms, to put it mildly. Whenever the events happened to be alluded to by various spiritual authorities, it was to alleviate the seriousness of the offense, and I even heard a particularly original opinion suggesting one should consider the hatred displayed as an unwitting plea for spiritual assistance, to be understood with sympathy. There was moreover a general consensus among the hierarchy to blame the traditionalist French Catholics for taking the issue to the streets by organizing demonstrations and public 17 Theme Christophobia prayer in front of the theaters. The Church, it was argued, is not a political party, and not only is it not fitting to act as one, but engaging in such public action would be a breach of law and order. This claim is as silly as it is hypocritical: since when has setting up demonstrations and public prayer been considered unnatural for the Church? If anything, the argument constitutes a symptom of a hidden will to stay put and do nothing. It is equally obvious that had the Catholic Church of France been willing to do something, a great deal was possible, and to start with, since public subsidies had been provided to her enemy under the pretext of artistic freedom, the Church could have asked for comparable subsidies to be given to the Christians to defend their creed in the name of a non-discriminatory policy. So the quasi monolithic refusal of the French Catholic Church—if not the entire Catholic Church—to face the brutal challenge hurled at her raises anew the question raised by the public’s silence: why? Again different answers come to the mind, but the most convincing seems to me to be also the most sinister. As If God Has No Rights Traditionally the Church was supposed to be a teacher, a tutor, an authority, a benevolent but ruling spiritual power. The priests used to be men endowed with a special quality, given special mysterious powers that do not pertain to men as ordinary men. However, a revolution has obviously occurred, which may be summed up by saying that the Church and her ministers now act as if vaguely ashamed not to be mere men, embarrassed not to behave like other ordinary human beings, as if averse to certain things being sacred. An example that says it all is the fact that when performing the Mass, the priests turn not towards God, but towards the people, as if to enter communion not with Christ, but with the people. It is as if the Roman Church no longer wanted men to stretch their nature towards God, but God to stoop to men. It is as if the Church did not want God to help men, but men to help 18 The Angelus May - June 2012 themselves—which they literally do when the laymen, supposedly true believers, take the Eucharistic bread in their own hands and literally feed themselves. It is as if the Church thinks God not to have rights, but men to have them, or at least men to have them first, as if the prevailing will were not God’s, but the people’s. In a word, it is as if for the Church God were, as Ernest Renan used to say, essentially “an extraordinary man.” No wonder some priests are tempted to think the spiritual question is first of all a political and social one. Like a street vendor, the Church wants to appear unassuming and pleasant as if thinking: to be a leader, one must follow the troops. Therefore the Church must nod and smile while the people throw excrement at her: the Church is afraid of the people. And it shows—oh so clearly in France—on the philosophical level. For there is something that frightens the Church more than the wrath of God: it is to appear intolerant. Tolerance, chant our bishops. Dialogue! Understanding! Openness! Freedom of conscience for every man and freedom to express it! Respect for others! Tolerance is the new law to be taught by the new prophets, the new meaning of God’s love for men, the only truthful expression of brotherhood among men. Tolerance is the lesson that must be taught now and again to the ever renascent unspeakable species of men who, claiming to have been awarded some special knowledge, dare challenge the right of any individual or any democratic majority to declare the truth. Church Fuels Animosity of the Ungodly Now, there must be no beating about the bush. Tolerance may mean that error should not be punishable by death—that does not entail leaving error uncorrected. But if it means there is no such thing as an error because everyone is entitled to his own opinion, tolerance is the death wish of the Church. To be tolerant is not, as people usually have it, to hate fanaticism, but to hate truth without showing it. To choose such tolerance is for the Church to choose the words of men over the word of Christ, the will of the people over the will of God, and, instead of taking her stand, to go down the drain—or rather, as in Paris, down the toilet. How on earth can the French bishops be so blind as to discard the evidence that their tolerance will be taken as the public confession of their doubts about their own worth? For them to be tolerant is exactly what their enemies seek and, just as fear aggravates the aggressiveness of the wild beast, the Church’s tolerance will spark and fuel the animosity of the ungodly, who usually enjoy trampling on what they once dreaded, as soon as it becomes obvious they were being frightened by a mere scarecrow. Unfortunately there may be more to the silence of the priestly lambs than a desire to be popular 264pp – Color Softcover – STK# 5240 – $15.00 They Have Uncrowned Him Is Jesus Christ Still King? In this devastating work, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre lays bare the truth about the modern betrayal that is religious liberty. Examining the origins of liberalism, the subversion of orthodoxy in our modern age, and the consequent descent into indifferentism, the Archbishop explains, in a compelling and insightful way, how the modern revolutionaries have sought to uncrown Christ, both in society and in the Church. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the modern attacks on the Church. and/or the fear they might appear antiquated or despotic. It may be that they actually have another fear, that of displaying their faith. A new instance of a too human attitude? after all Peter denied Christ three times. But it could also be that courage requires faith, and where there is no faith, there reigns supreme the deep urge to be like others, and the temptation to howl with the wolves. Then the silence of the Church may not result from an intellectual or prudential error, but from a spiritual failure. CD Audio (10 CDs) – STK# 8535 – $59.95 2011 Conference Audio On the weekend of October 7 – 9, Angelus Press hosted its second annual conference on the theme of the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. With over 400 attendees from around the country (and some international visitors), some of the greatest minds and speakers convened to examine this doctrine from a variety of angles. The result was an amazing success as those in attendance learned about Christ’s Kingship and were spurred on to Catholic Action. To help make this conference an aid for years to come, and also to assist those unable to attend, these talks have been professionally re-mastered and are now available at an affordable, introductory price of only $59.95. For more details visit angeluspress.org or call 800-966-7337 19 Theme Christophobia Jacques Maritain, the HHS Mandate, and the Failure of American Pluralism by Thaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D. “As a consequence, the State, constituted as it is, is clearly bound to act up to the manifold and weighty duties linking it to God, by the public profession of religion. Nature and reason, which command every individual devoutly to worship God in holiness, because we belong to Him and must return to Him, since from Him we came, bind also the civil community by a like law. For, men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, no less than individuals, owes gratitude to God who gave it being and maintains it and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings. Since, then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God, and since the chief duty of all men is to cling to religion in both its reaching and practice—not such religion as they may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only one true religion—it is a public crime to act as though there were no God.” —Leo XIII, Immortale Dei “The genius of the liberal state, then, is precisely its ability to afford a rather wide range of individual religious liberty, while denying the most fundamental and authentic freedom—that of a church which would presume 20 The Angelus May - June 2012 to judge and, when necessary, condemn the regime as immoral.” —Kenneth Craycraft, The American Myth of Religious Freedom The recent decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to mandate insurance coverage of contraceptives and abortifacients has evoked the public resistance of Catholic bishops and laity. The official clerical challenge to this legal attack on the Roman Catholic Church in America was articulated in the USCCB’s Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty’s document, “A Statement on Religious Liberty,” titled “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty.” It is certainly true that the HHS mandate was a direct attack on the religious liberty of Catholics, as well as any religious body, institution, or believer upholding doctrines and practices in tension with the Obama Regime’s distorted conception of the common good, fairness, sexual rights, and economic justice, which is to say, any religious body, institution, or believer that is authentically Christian. To this extent, then, the bishops’ response was understandable, insofar as it defended the right of the Catholic Church to freedom of religious belief and practice, in public as well as in private. However, insofar as the bishops neglected to include a clear articulation of the true metaphysical, political, and theological foundations of the right to religious liberty, including the unique privilege the Catholic Church has been given directly from God Himself, and which the State must recognize, to exercise without restriction her liberty, the libertas ecclesiae, their resistance will prove, I think, ultimately ineffective in the long run. This was a chance for the bishops to exercise their divine authority and put the state in its place through a firm and undiluted declaration of the Gospel, including Christ’s Social Kingship, and the fact that they appeared to pass up this chance is disconcerting. Nevertheless, that they only declared part of the Gospel in order more effectively to play the more short-term-strategic (they thought) religious freedom card, as it were, is completely predictable, for it manifests yet again—and hopefully for the last time—the American Catholic Church’s fatal embrace of the post-conciliar, Americanist, political theology of pluralism, developed and popularized by John Courtney Murray but originating in the otherwise brilliant mind of the French Thomist and mentor of Pope Paul VI, Jacques Maritain. Jacques Maritain’s vision of a Christian social and political order developed around the years of World War II. Man and the State, derived from the Walgreen lectures he presented at the University of Chicago in 1949, articulates his most mature political thought, published about twenty years before Rawls’s influential work, A Theory of Justice. At this time, some Thomistic thinkers in Europe and America, such as Yves Simon and Mortimer Adler, were hopeful that after the Allied defeat of the anti-Christian and anti-democratic ideologies of Nazism and Fascism, we might witness a rebirth of Christian democratic politics. For Maritain, there was a newly begotten awareness in the communal consciousness of a war-exhausted West of the pressing need for a revitalized politics based upon a common core of Christian-inspired democratic values. Through his writings and political activities—Maritain was the French Ambassador to the Vatican and a main architect for the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights—Maritain 21 Theme Christophobia 22 1 For a good discussion of the historical and cultural context of Maritain’s thought, see John P. Hittinger, Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), chaps. 1-2. 2 Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), p. 111. 3 Timothy Fuller and John P. Hittinger, “Maritain and the Reassessment of the Liberal State,” in Reassessing the Liberal State: Reading Maritain’s Man and the State, ed. Timothy Fuller and John P. Hittinger (Washington, D.C.: American Maritain Association, 2001), p. 3. The Angelus May - June 2012 sought to sow, both in theory and in practice, the seeds of this political rebirth. Maritain was convinced that there was sufficient intellectual agreement among Americans in the immediate post-war period, in spite of their considerable religious and philosophical differences, to “undertake a great work.”1 Widespread agreement about practical goods and values was one social fruit reaped from the otherwise social horrors of World War II. The concerted effort of the Allies to eradicate commonly accepted evils like Fascism and Nazism was inspired, for Maritain, by a devotion to commonly accepted goods, and the defeat of these evils only increased this devotion. Maritain wrote: “Thus it is that men possessing quite different, even opposite metaphysical or religious outlooks, can converge, not by virtue of any identity of doctrine, but by virtue of an analogical similitude in practical principles, toward the same practical conclusions, and can share in the same practical secular faith, provided that they similarly revere, perhaps for quite diverse reasons, truth and intelligence, human dignity, freedom, brotherly love, and the absolute value of moral good.” 2 If there were to be a reacceptance of the Gospel by a secularized, warweary West, among men holding “irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines,” it would manifest itself in the peaceful establishment of what Maritain termed a “personalist democracy.” It would indeed be a Christian political order, but not in the medieval mode; it would be, in an important sense, more authentically Christian than medieval Christendom due to the “coming of age” of the temporal order in general and the body politic in particular and the postmedieval growth, or “ferment,” of the Gospel in the social and political fabric of the West. A personalist democracy would manifest the now ripe societal and political fruit of the Gospel’s seed planted two thousand years ago in the city of Bethlehem. John Hittinger summarizes Maritain’s philosophical and political project: “Maritain’s project attempted to unite Thomistic and Aristotelian traditions with the human rights thrust of modern political philosophy. Maritain wished to reassess the liberal state in light of ancient and medieval political traditions, seeking to find what is true, enduring, and practical in the modern liberal state, while criticizing its excesses and reconceptualizing its philosophical foundations.” 3 One of the “true, enduring, and practical” features of the modern liberal state was its religious pluralism, which, for Maritain, was both God-willed and intractable. And here is where both Maritain and the post-conciliar establishment went wrong, and why the core of the American Bishops’ rhetorical resistance to the satanic state program of forcing Christians to pay for baby-murder was neither the evil of abortion and contraception, the harm to souls and the common good, nor the erroneous political principles that led to such evil and harm being promoted by political authority. For, an authentically Thomistic and Catholic interpretation of the seemingly intransigent pluralism of modern democratic regimes would deem such pluralism as precisely not intransigent, and certainly not God-willed! Indeed, it would oblige all citizens to work for its transformation into some sort of 4 Robert Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2001), p. 178. unity, ultimately, the unity of the Catholic Faith, while, of course, permitting a certain level of resignation to pluralism’s present practical reality in political toleration and compromise. However, whatever the particulars of the lessthan-ideal political order judged worthy of pursuit by such compromise and resignation, such an order, to meet Catholic standards, would still have to be deliberately oriented towards securing religious unity. This is the unmistakable and consistent political theology of the Magisterium, and it was publicly challenged by John Courtney Murray and Jacques Maritain before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. Murray and Maritain’s false interpretation of this teaching became the lens through which the postconciliar Church would see this teaching in a mirror darkly, at best, and in a distorted caricature, at worst. Maritain’s political ideal of “the democratic charter,” however, not only leaves out any attempt to unify religious division, but also seeks to erect the best possible society precisely upon and in virtue of this disunity. In this way, it supplants the authentically Christian desire for deep religious unity with the pluralist desire for a unity of a different and much lesser order: not the unity of truth but the unity of practical consensus, requiring no change in religious conviction whatsoever for the political order’s ultimate good. Such an attitude is not reconcilable with a belief in the absolute value of religious truth and its integral importance in every sphere of life, including the political, as Robert Kraynak has written: “From the perspective of ultimate truth, pluralism is a sign of imperfection that should be overcome rather than frozen in place as a right to diversity.”4 The main problem confronting the contemporary Catholic political philosopher in the United States of America is how to orient a political order to God with citizens who radically disagree about both the nature of the political order itself and of the God to whom it should be ordered. The pertinent question for Maritain was whether his requirement that political order be subordinated to spiritual order is effectible and even intelligible without a speculative consensus among the citizens about the true nature of political and spiritual order, or at least a consensus upon the desirability of such a consensus. In the absence of either an actual public consensus in truth or the political desire for one, can there be a truly just and God-pleasing regime? The answer, I would argue, following the perennial teaching of the Church, is no. As our regime becomes less and less God-pleasing, and as the Catholic Church and her members lose more and more rights and liberties, let us hope the American Bishops awake to the futility of attempting to hold back the tide of evil with declarations of religious liberty, a tide that has been accumulating ever so rapidly since the Church in America, de facto, rejected the Social Reign of Christ the King for the social chaos of secular pluralism. Thaddeus Kozinski is a professor of philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College and author of The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve it (Lexington Books, 2010). 23 Book Review Duties of the Catholic State by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani At first glance, this little booklet (based on a lecture given at the Pontifical Lateran University) by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani fulfills every cliché that the enemies of the Church ascribe to her: First, there is the serious-sounding title, Duties of the Catholic State. And then there’s the cover art depicting a— what else?—medieval king looking something like a cross between the image of Christ from the Shroud of Turin and Charlemagne. To complete the caricature, the text contains a non-stop assault on Liberal, Communist, and American finger-wagging rants on the joys of religious liberty. Scratch the surface and this booklet begins to look like a fantasy story. Duties of the Catholic State? What Catholic State? Where? Franco’s still dead, and his Catholic State has long ago been consumed by the fires of Liberalism and “progress” in Spain. The same goes for Salazar of Portugal. And the rest of Europe? It’s too depressing to even think about. Scratch further still, though, and you get to the essence of what this booklet really is: a children’s booklet. Not a booklet for children, but a booklet whose author’s message needs to be taught to children if we ever expect to “Restore all things in Christ.” There are essentially two principal points in Duties. The first is devoted to the duties of rulers in a Catholic State. In a very real aspect, modern Catholics cannot fathom what such a State would even look like. Honest Catholics probably would admit that they would be a little embarrassed were a State to declare itself Catholic, what with all the negative media and political publicity that would surely result. The second part of this booklet deals with objections of liberals against the very idea of a Catholic State. Cardinal Ottaviani addressed these objections head-on, and the result is a political and social sensibility that will encourage the hearts of all serious Catholics that a Catholic State is not only possible, it is necessary. Cardinal Ottaviani published this lecture given all the way back in 1953, yet nearly a decade before the theological and liturgical dynamiters of the Second Vatican Council wreaked havoc on both the Church and State by means of revolution. He lamented the 24 The Angelus May - June 2012 trend of some Catholics who, eager to broker a rapprochement with the modern world, rejected the timeless principles laid down by the Magisterium and redefined these principles as transitory rather than permanent. Indeed, he speaks of the “pendulum theory” which was in vogue following the Second World War. This theory allowed the liberals a chance to escape the opprobrium of the smart set, who were always ready with the charge that the Church—wait for it!—wanted to return to the Middle Ages. So, what are these so-called duties of a Catholic State? Firstly, the State has the duty of professing its religion publicly, even socially. This just makes sense. Men come together to form the State; the State does not precede men. God made us and His very first Executive Order was for us to obey Him and Him alone. We are told constantly that America is a secular country. But do you really think there’s no official religion in America? Think again. Secondly, “it is the duty of the Rulers to see to it that the moral principles of True Religion inspire the social activity of the State and its legislation.” This is eye-rolling nonsense to today’s pagans, but if there were not such an intimate connection between the moral principles of a society and the conduct of its people, why, asks Cardinal Ottaviani, would “the enemies of the Church have always striven to impede her mission”? Thirdly, “it is the duty of the Rulers of a Catholic State to ward off everything that would tend to divide or weaken the religious unity of a people.” The Cardinal notes that “reason revolts at the thought” that the demands of a small minority would be allowed to betray the majority and allow the enemies of the Church to divide the Church. The second part of the booklet treats the political conditions that modern Catholics live in. It is a well-worn objection—to the point of cliché—that the Church maintains a double-standard when it comes to the relations of the Church to the State. Where the State is Catholic, the Church demands protection for the Church. However, where Catholics form a minority, the Church claims the right of toleration in order to continue her mission. That seems downright hypo- Book Review critical. Cardinal Ottaviani demolishes the argument thusly: “It ought not, therefore, be a matter for wonder that the Church appeals to...the rights of man at least, when the rights of God are not acknowledged.” On the other hand, even the popes acknowledge that rulers in countries that are predominantly Catholic may have to grant some concessions to other forms of worship “for the sake of promoting some great good or of hindering some great evil....” Compare this attitude with the unyielding arrogance of the Obama regime’s policies towards the Church. Cardinal Ottaviani also made the sad observation that while the peace-and-tolerance crowd condemned the Church for signing an accord with Franco’s Spain, there was a comparative silence about Stalin’s aggressive and sadistic attack on religion within the Soviet Union. “Well,” you may be thinking, “this is all well and good, but we don’t live in a Catholic State and even countries with a majority of its citizens who identify themselves as Catholic don’t conduct their affairs according to Catholic principles. Why should we read this book? How is its message relevant to us?” Cardinal Ottaviani frames the issue in a way germane to the political situation of today. He decries “those who would like to determine of themselves... the Church’s sphere of action and the limits of her competence, in order to accuse her of ‘interfering in politics,’ in case she goes outside that sphere.” In other words, these are the people who will tolerate— grudgingly—the role of religion in public life so long as it’s kept to Sundays before noon. Cardinal Ottaviani notes that the Church is commanded by God Himself to “preach the Gospel to every creature,” and references Pius XII, who declared that “separation between religion and life, between the Church and the world, is contrary to the Christian and Catholic idea.” And that is why I maintain that this is a book for children. One of the consequences of the spread of liberalism and the resulting disaster at Vatican II is the lacunae in our knowledge of Catholic social principles that was created, and these principles quite naturally include the political sphere. If we are to “restore all things in Christ,” we will have to start from the ground up, which means teaching our children the correct way to look at life. Parents, let this booklet be your guide. Let it be in every home of anyone who dares call himself Catholic. Scott Quinn This clear explanation of the Church’s social doctrine is available at www.angeluspress.org for only $5.00. 25 Faith and Morals God Is Good by Fr. Albert, O.P. 26 The Angelus May - June 2012 1 I Ethics, 1094a3. 2 Cf. I, q. 2, a. 3. 3 This is just common sense, because one cannot give what one does not have. Anything given by a cause to its effect, then, must pre-exist in the cause, or it couldn’t have given it, and so every effect resembles its cause and every cause causes something similar to itself. Who says philosophy is difficult?! 4 For, as Cajetan finely remarks here: “If its resemblance is desirable, the agent itself will be much more desirable.” 5 As the prophet Osee says: “They have become abominable like the things they loved” (Os 9:10). “I was at your first Mass, Father, fifteen years ago when I was only six, but I still remember the first words of your sermon: ‘God is good.’ ” When one hears such comments one is tempted to wonder if all the trouble given to preparing sermons is really worth it. At any rate, these words must have a certain power if they impressed themselves so forcefully on the mind of this little girl that she could remember them so many years later. Yes, God is good: and it is an extremely important lesson to learn because it is the basis of our whole lives, that is, our lives in so far as they are properly human, our moral lives. For no one ever does anything except in order to attain the good, either real or apparent. It is absolutely essential, then, that we understand that God is good, so that we will make Him the object of our acts and not something else which is only an apparent good. This is especially important for children, so that they understand from the beginning that Catholic morality is not just a matter of “Do’s” and “Don’ts” but rather a pathway, and the only pathway, to happiness. To understand that God is good we have first to understand what “good” means. Aristotle tells us very simply: “Good is that which all desire.”1 Now God is the first cause of all things, 2 and therefore the forms of all things resemble Him because every effect has a certain resemblance to its cause. “Omne agens agit sibi simile,” said the ancients: “When anything does something, what it does resembles itself.”3 This form, however, in things, which is a certain resemblance to God, its cause, is the perfection of these things, and all things desire what perfects them. Thus, says St. Thomas: “All things, in desiring their own perfections, desire God Himself, in so far as the perfections of all things are certain resemblances of the divine being” (I, q. 6, a. 1 ad 2). And so we can say God is good, since all things desire Him.4 God, however, is not just good: He is Super-Good. For, as we just saw, He is good in so far as the perfections of all other things, which they desire, resemble Him. But this perfection that is in them is in Him in a way that infinitely surpasses the way it is in them, and the resemblance they bear to this perfection as it is in God is less than paltry. Nothing Is Good Save God Only St. John of the Cross speaks of this in the first book of his Ascent of Mount Carmel where he explains that to attain union with God one must be utterly detached from creatures because love causes resemblance,5 and thus one cannot love God and creatures simultaneously because one cannot resemble simultaneously two things which are infinitely distant. “By the mere fact that a soul loves something, it becomes incapable of pure union and transformation in God: for the lowness of the creature is far less capable of the height of the Creator than is darkness of light. All creatures of heaven and earth are nothing when compared to God....All the beauty of creatures compared to the infinite beauty of God is the height of ugliness. ...All the grace and elegance of creatures compared to God’s grace is utter coarseness and crudity....Compared to the infinite goodness of God, all the goodness of the creatures of the world can be called wickedness. Nothing is 27 Faith and Morals 6 Book I, chapter 4. The list goes on: “All the world’s wisdom and human ability compared to the infinite wisdom of God is pure and utter ignorance, as St. Paul writes to the Corinthians: ‘The wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight’ (I Cor. 3:19)....All the sovereignty and freedom of the world compared to the freedom and sovereignty of the Spirit of God is utter slavery, anguish and captivity....All the delights and satisfaction of the will in the things of the world compared to all the delight that is God are intense suffering, torment and bitterness. Etc.” 7 As St. Thomas says, it “is compared to other things by excess: per excessum” (I, q. 6, a. 2, ad 3). 8 An “accident” in the philosophical sense of the term is something that exists, not on its own, but in another thing that can exist on its own (called a “substance”). Color, for example, is an accident because, although it certainly exists, you will never find it existing all alone on its own, but rather as modifying something else that does exist on its own. You will never see a “brown” or a “blue” going down the street, but rather a brown or blue car or bird or flag, etc. 9 The article published recently by Fr. Gleize on the question of the magisterium of Vatican II mentions this point: “By adopting the investigative methods of modernity, the Council assumed this inversion (of subject and object) as the Declaration on Religious Freedom, for example, makes manifest: the principle and foundation of this declaration is nothing else than the primacy of ontological dignity over moral dignity, that is to say, the primacy of the subject over the object.” Courrier de Rome, December 2011, §6. good save God only (Lk. 18:19).”6 There is, in fact, no comparison between the perfections of creatures and these same perfections in God except to say that the perfection (that is, then, the good, since it is the perfection that is desired and the good is what all desire) as it is in God is “above,” that is, in good Latin: “super.”7 Thus God is, literally, Super-Good. Good by His Essence Finally, one must also say that God and only God is good by His essence, while all other things are good by participation in this essential Good which is God. This is because all things are good in three ways: 1. Firstly, in so far as they exist. Now only God exists by His essence; in all other things, their essence is distinguished from their existence. 2. Secondly, in so far as they possess the accidents8 necessary for their perfection. For example, it is not enough for a car to have the perfection of its essence in order to be a good car: it must also perform the actions that belong to its essence (which is the accident called “action”). A car that exists but doesn’t run is not a good car. It may have the perfection of its essence, but until the perfection of the accident “action” is added, the car is not “good.” God however, alone among all beings, does not have any accidents, He is perfectly simple (as we have already seen) and thus He has no need of anything to be added to His essence in order that He be good. 3. Thirdly, in so far as it attains its end. A watch, for example, that does not tell time is not a good watch because that is what watches are for. God, however, has no other end than Himself, and He is the end of everything else. And so He alone is good by His essence, while other things have to attain their end in order to be good. A very important application of this point is seen in the question of religious liberty. Traditionally, the dignity proper to men was considered to be a moral dignity, that is, a dignity that follows from the moral choice a man makes of the good. In modern philosophy, especially in personalist philosophy, man is considered to have an ontological dignity that comes, not from his moral choice, but from his being, from the very fact that he is a man. That is why the Second Vatican Council, in its document entitled Dignitatis Humanae, taught that men cannot be impeded from choosing and even publicly propagating their doctrinal errors and false morality because of their inherent human dignity that does not depend on the objective goodness of their choice but upon the very being of man.9 Man Is Not Good by His Essence The doctrine of St. Thomas here permits us to refute this error. Man is not “good” by his essence, by the simple fact of his possessing a human nature, for the reasons mentioned: 1. Firstly, he does not even have his being by his essence, it comes to him 28 The Angelus May - June 2012 10 Thus we see that his perfection is not essential to him but an accident, because “action” is an accident. 11 I, q. 6, a. 3. from outside of himself. 2. Secondly, and more pertinently, he does not have his goodness just by his essence because he has to become good by certain actions which complete his essence and bring it to its perfection. Man is not, like God, in possession of his good by the mere fact of being: he has to act in order to attain it10 and that is precisely what his moral action consists in. The free will of man is a potential good, which becomes actual if he uses it to attain his good, but if he uses it to do evil he is not a good man but an evil man and worthy of punishment, not honor and praise. 3. Thirdly, similarly, man does not possess his end automatically, like God, but must attain it by his good actions (which are “good” precisely because they make him attain his end and thus make him good). In his commentary on this article,11 John of St. Thomas, with his usual clarity, explains: “A created substance cannot have through its own self all the perfection that is due to it in a consummate and ultimate manner, unless it comes to it accidentally through something else....For the perfection that belongs to a thing is threefold: its being, its operation, and the end to which it is ordained. Now all of these perfections are accidental and not essential to the thing, and without them nothing is said to be simply perfect. That these are not essential is obvious, because existence is an accidental predicate of created things; and similarly operation as well, for it issues from the nature itself which is already constituted, and therefore does not constitute it; and similarly the end is something towards which the nature itself of a thing tends, like a rock to its centre, and so the end does not pertain to the constitution of its essence.... God, however, has all these things as essential predicates; being and operation and all things; and thus by His essence He is said to be good and perfect, even without any order or dependence on anything outside Himself.” No wonder, then, that Archbishop Lefebvre called the adepts of this doctrine of religious liberty antichrists, for the sign of this “son of perdition,” St. Paul tells us, is that “he gives himself out as if he were God” (I Thess. 2:4). Man’s “dignity,” that is, his “worthiness,” his goodness, does not consist in his mere being: he must attain it by his good actions. Only God is good by His essence. Fr. Albert, O.P., is a Dominican friar from La Haye aux Bonshommes Friary in Avrillé, France. 29 Faith and Morals The Goal of All Liturgy by Fr. Dominique Bourmaud, SSPX As you step into one of those old monasteries and convents with the air of incense and their quaint medieval sculptures, you are entering another world, completely alien to what you call ‘home.’ Here, time gives way to eternity; worries are toned down, and slowly peace and rest rush in a soul which has almost lost sight of such sentiments. The liturgy is really at home in such places. Saint Benedict, as he took the Tradition of the Church, applied it to his monks wrote in his rule: “We are establishing a school for the Lord’s service.” For this is what the holy Patriarch did: a school in which his monks would learn how to give themselves totally to God. This section on the liturgy will deal with its very purpose, which is the union of the soul with God, a communion of mind in prayer and contemplation. 30 The Angelus May - June 2012 “Seek Ye God’s Kingdom First” Lately, I had the occasion to step into a seminary to preach a thirty-day retreat, the great month of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. This is a stunning experience! You are being immersed into a foreign environment, not for a few odd days, but for a whole month, which allows you to forget what is was back then when you were ‘normal’ and one of so many battling for survival out in the ‘cold.’ The long meditation and contemplative hours spent in union with the Great Rabbi of our soul: Our Lord does become alive to the retreatants, who relish spending so much time on the same themes over and over again. At least we understood one thing coming out of this power plant: contemplation must be the soul of the Church, the soul of the apostolate, and the soul of the City, or else darkness and death set in! St. Thomas in a pregnant article (II-II, q. 182, art. 1) unveils some reasons for the primacy of contemplation over action. Such a life suits man in what is most perfect in him, that is, his mind, whereas the active life deals with outer things. The first can be more continuous, as sampled by Mary, who stood motionless at the feet of Christ (Lk. 10:39). Such life also is loved for itself, whereas the active life is ordained to something else than the profit of one’s soul. Hence Psalm 26 explains: “I asked only one thing from the Lord and I shall not seek another—that is to dwell in the house of the Lord all days of my life, to see the joy of the Lord.” It also consists in a sort of leisure and rest, according to Psalm 45: “Vacate et videte—be quiet and see how good the Lord is.” This last quote Dr. John Senior (in The Death of Christian Culture, p. 152) interestingly translates as “Be empty of all things and see that I am God.” Quoting St. Benedict, he explains that those who seek God by themselves in an undisciplined private monasticism “live in their own sheepfold and not the Lord’s.” Contemplation: The Norm of All Catholics Is that excluding all the Catholic lay folks from that contemplation which proceeds from the Holy Ghost? All Christians are indeed invited “to taste and see how good God is,” as soon as they have been imbued with faith and charity, received at Baptism. Already the theological virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost are, so to speak, at their finger tips—habits, i.e. things had and apt to be used at will! It is most normal that the knowledge by faith becomes experimental and delightful thanks to that connaturality produced by love; and this faith, now turned contemplative, inflames the virtue of charity in its turn. There is thus a mutual dependence, a ceaseless intercommunication between faith and love. Here again, Dr. Senior (idem, pp. 153-4) deserves mention. “The Catholic Church has a rich deposit of faith and a fecund life even today germinating in its soil—martyrs, monks, and theologians, all calling with the same quiet voice, not seeking publicity, calling softy but insistently from the Gulag Archipelago and the desert cells, from isolated schools, and even from the silent hearts of nameless persons in the lonely crowds who kneel before the Blessed Sacrament—if they can find it—or stop to pray in empty churches and in quiet rooms.” Contemplation: Not without Faith and Sacrifice Fr. Calmel (Revue Itinéraires, No. 183, p. 155) explains another very important point: contemplation cannot go without faith in Christ, and Him crucified. “It would be a mortal mistake to present the contemplative life as a sort of luxury reserved to intellectuals, to clerics who have the leisure of studying Metaphysics and Sacred Scripture, as a mainly higher selfish life deprived of love. On the other hand, it would be a no less pernicious mistake to pretend that the only term ‘love’ suffices to define our goal in life. It is enough indeed, but with the proviso that we know what it radically demands and which road it leads us to: It demands conversion and the cross. “But this second error which preaches Christian love as if it were not contemplative seems, today, and by far, more frequent. Let it be known indeed that the contemplation of the saints proceeds from the faith made intuitive and quasi experimental, both by charity and by the effects of the Holy Ghost. Let it be clear also that we cannot grow much unless our soul be taken by the hand of the Spirit of love and of truth, by His sevenfold gifts. These gifts of the Paraclete give us a moral life worthy of God and wholly similar to that of Christ, a life of sanctity…” This is theology in action; this is the life blood of the Church in its most perfect activity allowing the Church to subsist and to live in unity and unison with the past centuries. Dr. Senior (ibid.) again offers a good illustration of the words 31 Faith and Morals of Fr. Calmel: “The arguments of scholastic theology codified at Trent, encapsulated in catechism texts, amplified by the ordinary and extraordinary magisterium of the Church these last four hundred years—all this is based upon and animated by the experience of the spiritual life of the contemplative monk and nun and of the soldiers of the militant orders leading what St. Thomas calls the mixed life, and even of laymen like St. Thomas More who, though chancellor of England, led a hidden life, wore a hair shirt beneath his public silks, and ended up a martyr to the Faith as well. In turn, the hidden life of contemplatives seeks its consummation in death transfigured by love. It is no accident that the greatest doctor of the spiritual life is named St. John of the Cross.” Contemplation: The Ultimate Goal of Man on Earth The contemplative life, writes St. Thomas (ibid., q. 180 and 182), consists in a sort of leisure and rest, and liberty of mind, where man burns of the desire to perceive the beauty of God, and offers his soul in sacrifice. It has its principle and its end in love, deals directly and immediately with the charity of God Himself, is ordained not to any love of God but to perfect charity. In a way, it sets the way for an obscure beginning of beatitude. This is the rather theological version of the poetic text of David (Psalm 15): “You have revealed to me the ways of life; You shall fill me with joy by gazing at your face: endless delights on Your right hand.” Since contemplation is the perfect act of man on earth, contemplative houses should manifest also the perfect achievement of society and that their growth or recess will gauge the level of that society. Given our de facto atheistic—or worse, apostate—societies, it is no wonder why the Church, which has already delivered itself to the world, is experiencing more and more difficulties founding spiritual power houses. Such islands of prayers and penance, a permanent 32 The Angelus May - June 2012 rebuke to the world, will hardly be found growing in modern society where private property and properly structured and organized societies are not respected, for the profit of an abject, end-initself capitalism which is unnerving the souls of all citizens. But, thank God, these houses of prayer, however few and sparse they are, still constitute an archipelago in the ocean of indifference and Godlessness. I remember Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaking about the Russian concentration camps. He explained how, paradoxically, these were the only places where you could speak freely about the slavery they were undergoing from Comrade Stalin. The same can be said of these few religious places where, despite the aspect of fortress and prison of these cloisters, one’s soul is enjoying real freedom from the troubles of a sick world. Doubtless, today’s world is—and more so tomorrow’s world will be—the best one to run away from and turn to become an anchorite or a monk! Not everyone can run away from his duty and shut himself up. But spiritually, what prevents men from fulfilling what Dr. Senior somewhere said that, to be faithful to his mission, “the monk must pray eight hours a day, the priest four and the layman two hours.” These are no slight demands on our fast lane life style. Yet, sparing some time for our prayer life and some spiritual reading should be the order of each day so as to inflame the heart and direct the mind to “the one thing necessary.” God’s grace and a minimum of diligence can bring about this miracle of utterly gluing our soul to Our Lord and His Mother who wish for no better thing. Let us not forget the prayer Father Brebeuf had taught this old Huron squaw. When she was lying out on the icy lake all night long as she was feeling the coldness of death setting in, she repeated: “My Jesus, have mercy on me,” and a heat wave filled her half-frozen limbs right away. The next morning she was found alive against all hope by the Black Robes of the mission. Fr. Dominique Bourmaud has spent the past 26 years teaching at the Society seminaries in America, Argentina, and Australia. He is presently stationed at St. Vincent’s Priory, Kansas City, where he is in charge of the priests’ training program. Thou hast made known to me the ways of life, thou shalt fill me with joy with thy countenance: at thy right hand are delights even to the end. (Psalm 15:11) Faith and Morals Christophobia, Christophilia Catholic Action, and by John Rao, D. Phil. (Oxon.) Contemporary Christophobia No one but a Desert Father buried in the wilderness can have missed the exponential increase in the number and variety of assaults on Catholic Christianity in recent years. All too much of this campaign is fueled by ignorance: an ignorance that mindlessly receives the “wisdom” enshrined in old black legends and then has its childish fun adjusting it to suit modern issues; an ignorance that helps to maintain an anachronistic belief in a powerful Catholic Church with fearsome influence over states and societies. On the other hand, at least some of the more conscious soldiers in the current battle of the perennial War against the Word must be aware of what Catholic Christianity is really all about. They simply use the general ignorance of the 34 The Angelus May - June 2012 population to their own strategic advantage. And such warriors recognize that the contemporary “Beast of Rome” is a Paper Tiger—self-defanged, self-demoralized, and dangerous to no one except herself; an institution that exhibits all the characteristics of a harmless fraternal “club” rather than what she really is: the Mystical Body of Christ. What the first kind of hostility illustrates is the vulgar reaction of the unthinking mob to anything that disturbs its daily routine and rocks its materialist boat. What the second signifies is something that is much more chilling. It indicates that there are enemies of the Faith who are ready to intensify their hammer blows even against an emasculated Church that can no longer cause them practical harm. It reveals their sense that the time has come to silence even the mere expression of life-changing Christian thoughts once and for all. It therefore betrays an intellectual and visceral hatred of Christ for hatred’s sake. Who can be surprised when believers with blood in their veins want desperately not just to lament these increased assaults upon the Word and His Church but also to find a way to fight openly against them? What they long for is to find some way to join in that work which the Papacy in modern times has labeled “Catholic Action.” I briefly touched upon the genesis, chief concerns, and problems of this crucial and preeminently lay apostolate in my previous two articles for The Angelus. Allow me to expand upon certain aspects of that discussion in the following paragraphs with respect to the question of practical defense against an enemy who is generally ignorant and whose ignorance is very often manipulated by the consciously vicious. My point can be expressed in a quite simplistic manner—that the answer to Christophobia is a Catholic Action solidly based upon Christophilia. Christophilia and Catholic Action Christophilia is the sole efficacious response to Christophobia because it is only through a true and complete love for Christ and His mission on earth that all the knowledge that we need for success in battling our foes comes to us. Access to the knowledge that comes from passionate acceptance of Christ as King of our minds, hearts, and souls gives us the means definitively to entice from the enemy lines those whose understanding of Christ is a tragic caricature of the truth. Furthermore, it also offers the most powerful, practical, strategic guidance to winning a truly substantive victory over opponents consciously and stubbornly attached to anti-Catholic errors. I use the words definitively and substantive to serious purpose, because the history of Catholic Action is replete with what have amounted to ephemeral and hollow “victories.” Although these apparent victories have involved truly laudable individual and group heroism satisfying the demand for manly as opposed to flabby responses to evil, they nevertheless have also proved to be empty triumphs. They have ignored the fact that as the cavalry for Christ has charged unhesitatingly forward the enemy was pouring in on its undefended flanks, infiltrating the Catholic Army with Fifth Columnists and transforming its generals and rank and file into servants of the Christophobia they all thought that they were contesting and defeating. This could only have happened because in the passion to “get things done” the soldiers of God had rejected that basic training through total immersion in Christophilia that would have pointed out to them the potent dangers threatening from the barbed wire ahead, the enemy behind, and his Fifth Columnists and often quite unwitting fellow travelers within. Without a doubt, “getting things done” is always the main goal of such basic training, but it has to be a “getting things done” for the Whole Christ and not simply partial marred action for action’s sake. Knowledge that comes from the basic training provided by total immersion in Christophilia reveals two truths of special relevance to this crucial distinction. The first is that even though the Incarnation confirms the value of all the varied aspects of God’s Creation, it also teaches that nature is flawed through sin, and that the love of Christ demands the correction and transformation of every single part of it, in its entirety. The second is that resistance to such correction and transformation is immense. Moreover, the study of the history of the Mystical Body of Christ that is mandated by a serious love of the Savior and His work in time demonstrates that Catholics themselves have often helped to offer this stiff resistance. They have all too repeatedly seduced themselves into believing that one or the other particularly beloved natural idea, institution, or behavioral pattern was somehow exempt from supernatural “boat rocking.” Such an attitude has regularly provided them with an excuse to ignore their own most cherished flaws and even to bless them as positively sacred, while condemning troublesome Church teachings and the activists who dared to preach them as though they were the enemies of the Faith. This, 35 Faith and Morals in turn, has frequently allowed them to sally forth under the banner of Christ to fight one clear wrong while perpetrating another perhaps equally or more dangerous evil. And the damage they have done, which is bad under any circumstances, has been all the worse when the Church herself has not fulfilled her duty to preach, in season and out of season, the unchanging truth that Christ is King of the entire universe and to tell them that they were in error. Christophobia, Christophilia, and American Catholic Action Let us now apply these observations to our own situation in the United States of America in 2012. Anti-Catholicism—the very summit of Christophobia—has always been strong on these shores, and it is indeed more effectively virulent today than it was fifty years ago. The evil that it represents is not going to go away on its own steam. All of us should therefore encourage militant laymen and laywomen desiring actively to fight it with all our heart and soul and mind. Sad to say, however, American Catholic basic training in Christophilia has—at least until now—been sorely deficient. It has not involved a total immersion in Christ and Christ’s mission in history. The consequence is that when earnestly militant Catholics in this country march out to “get things done” against Christophobia they generally do so under two banners: that of Catholicism and that of its enemies. They are not unique in this. Following earlier examples from many other countries at many other times in Church History, they want to exempt certain ideas, institutions, and behavioral patterns from correction and transformation in Christ; like them, they even condemn Church teachings and preachers who point out flaws in “the American Way” as though these critics were the true foes of God. And tragically, as has often happened before, the damage is all the greater because contemporary American militants are attempting to “get things done” while the Church is acting more like a “clubhouse” rather than the 36 The Angelus May - June 2012 authoritative Mystical Body of Christ. It does not fully tell them what is right and what is wrong. It is too afraid of the Zeitgeist to do so. Allow me to offer what is perhaps the prime instance of what I mean by deficient American basic training in Christophilia. While seriously and admirably fighting against sexual promiscuity, birth control, abortion, and euthanasia out of love for Christ most American Catholic militants regularly do so while simultaneously espousing ideas and institutions that cannot help but encourage Christophobic behavior in many other realms—and even, ultimately, on the Right to Life Front as well. They do so by insisting not only upon exempting from correction and transformation in Christ the Founding Fathers, the political philosophy of John Locke and other “moderate” Enlightenment thinkers that these Founders endorsed, the definition of individual freedom that such a philosophy entailed, the “pluralist” spirit that it imparted to American government and social life, and the patina of totally emasculated Christian belief that this permitted and to a certain degree still allows, but also positively baptizing such forces and ideas as naturally and supernaturally blessings at home and throughout the globe; as the last, best hope of mankind. The result is that as the good Right to Life fight continues, the support of bad ideas and institutional flaws that shape the kind of grasping, materialist, Lockean, pluralist individualists who will never really understand what it is that is wrong with promiscuity, birth control, abortion, and euthanasia proceeds alongside it. Dysfunctional Catholics emerge from the onedimensional, unnatural, dysfunctional society that these uncorrected Founding Fathers created. Those dysfunctional Catholics move on to support the destruction of what remains of Christian social life elsewhere in the believing world and unjust wars and policies beyond it. Their support for a return to the supposedly conservative roots of this individualist, materialist, Enlightenment society merely indulges the hope for a Second Childhood. That Second Childhood would do nothing other than work to create the kind of “clubhouse” Pluralist Church that will not trouble anyone, with all the added damages done when an eighty-year-old tries to behave like a kindergartner. In short, they fight for a perilous Christophobic System as though it will help them achieve their laudable (but partial) militant Christophilic goals, and as though acting in this schizophrenic manner were “the only game in town.” Something has to give if the required efficacious militancy is to be attained. Somehow, our deficient basic training for Catholic Action has to be perfected, and that, I admit, is a tall, tall order. The best that I can suggest in this regard at the moment is an inner spiritual change; a massive effort to recapture the apostolic spirit of being “in” but not “of” our dysfunctional Christophobic system. The New Testament authors, the Apostolic Fathers, the Apologists, and the Church Fathers were very much aware that they were physically still “in” the Roman Empire, and had no intention whatsoever of violating laws or acts of authority intended by it for a recognizable common good. On the other hand, they also knew that they were not “of” the system any longer. They were part of a new commonwealth, the Christophilic Kingdom of God, and they quickly learned that their spiritual declaration of independence meant a great deal indeed, earning them the deep loathing of the defenders of the established order, whether from among the elite or among the masses. As they obeyed where obedience was possible and failed to obey where it was not, they were preparing for substantive regime change, laying the groundwork for a better socio-political body into which they could transplant any and all organs of the Roman system still worth saving. It is for this reason that the theoretical writings of men like Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and John Chrysostom bear upon everything from education to economics, the military, and daily problems of life in an urban society. It is for this reason that they worked militantly against—and would have been appalled by praising a return to the “Original Intent” of—what was Christophobic in their system as though this were “the last, best hope of mankind.” The argument from “Original Intent” that our purified basic training should instill is one that exalts the will of Christ, not the will of the Founders: the will of A.D. 33, not the will of 1776 and 1787. As I turn away from this article to preparation for tomorrow’s lectures at St. John’s University in New York City, allow me to entertain a long distance hope of what might emerge from a purified basic training of American Catholic militants. Let me dream that I may someday travel to my job at its Staten Island Campus on a ferry across a harbor that passes a little island adorned with a magnificent national votive church—one called Santa Maria Sopra Liberty. And as I make one last call for a definitive, successful militancy based on total immersion in Christophilia let me do so with the words of Ernst Jünger from On the Marble Cliffs that I cited on the opening page of my new book. “Now battle had to be joined, and therefore men were needed to restore a new order, and new theologians as well, to whom the evil was manifest from its outward phenomena down to its most subtle roots; then the time would come for the first stroke of the consecrated sword, piercing the darkness like a lightning flash. For this reason individuals had the duty of living in alliance with others, gathering the treasure of a new rule of law. But the alliance had to be stronger than before, and they more conscious of it.” (Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen) John Rao, Ph.D., is a professor of history at St. John’s University in New York, New York. He is the author of Removing the Blindfold, in addition to articles written for The Angelus, The Remnant, and other periodicals. 37 Faith and Morals Il Fermo Proposito by Pope St. Pius X Encyclical on Catholic Action in Italy, June 11, 1905 38 3. The field of Catholic Action is extremely vast. In itself it does not exclude anything, in any manner, direct or indirect, which pertains to the divine mission of the Church. Accordingly one can plainly see how necessary it is for everyone to cooperate in such an important work, not only for the sanctification of his own soul, but also for the extension and increase of the Kingdom of God in individuals, families, and society; each one working according to his energy for the good of his neighbor by the propagation of revealed truth, by the exercise of Christian virtues, by the exercise of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy... (Col. 1:10). peace and harmony, what respectful subjection to authority and what excellent government would be obtained and maintained in the world if one could see in practice the perfect ideal of Christian civilization. Granting, however, the continual battle of the flesh against the spirit, darkness against light, Satan against God, such cannot be hoped for, at least in all its fullness. Hence, raids are continually being made on the peaceful conquests of the Church. The sadness and pain these cause is accentuated by the fact that society tends more and more to be governed by principles opposed to that very Christian ideal, and is even in danger of completely falling away from God. 5. We have no need to tell you, Venerable Brethren, what prosperity and well-being, what 7. Since We particularly dwell on this last part of the desired restoration, you clearly see, The Angelus May - June 2012 Venerable Brethren, the services rendered to the Church by those chosen bands of Catholics who aim to unite all their forces in combating antiChristian civilization by every just and lawful means. They use every means in repairing the serious disorders caused by it. They seek to restore Jesus Christ to the family, the school and society by re-establishing the principle that human authority represents the authority of God. They take to heart the interests of the people, especially those of the working and agricultural classes, not only by inculcating in the hearts of everybody a true religious spirit (the only true fount of consolation among the troubles of this life) but also by endeavoring to dry their tears, to alleviate their sufferings, and to improve their economic condition by wise measures. They strive, in a word, to make public laws conformable to justice and amend or suppress those which are not so. Finally, they defend and support in a true Catholic spirit the rights of God in all things and the no less sacred rights of the Church. 11. Above all, one must be firmly convinced that the instrument is of little value if it is not adapted to the work at hand. In regard to the things We mentioned above, Catholic Action, inasmuch as it proposes to restore all things in Christ, constitutes a real apostolate for the honor and glory of Christ Himself. To carry it out right one must have divine grace, and the apostle receives it only if he is united to Christ. Only when he has formed Jesus Christ in himself shall he more easily be able to restore Him to the family and society. Therefore, all who are called upon to direct or dedicate themselves to the Catholic cause, must be sound Catholics, firm in faith, solidly instructed in religious matters, truly submissive to the Church and especially to this supreme Apostolic See and the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They must be men of real piety, of manly virtue, and of a life so chaste and fearless that they will be a guiding example to all others. If they are not so formed it will be difficult to arouse others to do good and practically impossible to act with a good intention. The strength needed to persevere in continually bearing the weariness of every true apostolate will fail. The calumnies of enemies, the coldness and frightfully little cooperation of even good men, sometimes even the jealousy of friends and fellow workers (excusable, undoubtedly, on account of the weakness of human nature, but also harmful and a cause of discord, offense and quarrels)—all these will weaken the apostle who lacks divine grace... 12. It is also important to define clearly the works which the Catholic forces must energetically and constantly undertake. These works must be of such evident importance that they will be appreciated by everybody. They must bear such a relation to the needs of modern society and be so well adapted to moral and material interests, especially those of the people and the poorer classes, that, while arousing in promoters of Catholic Action the greatest activity for obtaining the important and certain results which are to be looked for, they may also be readily understood and gladly welcomed by all. Since the serious problems of modern social life demand a prompt and definite solution, everyone is anxious to know and understand the different ways in which these solutions can be put into practice. Discussions of one kind or another are more and more numerous and rapidly published by the press. It is, therefore, of the greatest importance that Catholic Action seize the present moment and courageously propose its own solution, strengthening it by means of solid propaganda which at the same time will be active, intelligent, disciplined and organized against all erroneous doctrine. The goodness and justice of Christian principles, the true morality which Catholics profess, their evident unconcern for their own welfare while wishing nothing but the supreme good of others, and their open and sincere ability to foster better than all others the true economic interests of the people—these qualities cannot fail to make an impression on the minds and hearts of all who hear them, and to swell their ranks so as to form a strong and compact corps, capable of boldly resisting the opposing current and of commanding the respect of their enemies. > 39 Faith and Morals 17. For Catholic Action to be most effective it is not enough that it adapt itself to social needs only. It must also employ all those practical means which the findings of social and economic studies place in its hands. It must profit from the experience gained elsewhere. It must be vitally aware of the conditions of civil society, and the public life of states. Otherwise it runs the risk of wasting time in searching for novelties and hazardous theories while overlooking the good, safe and tried means at hand. Again, perhaps it may propose institutions and methods belonging to other times but no longer understood by the people of the present day. Or, finally, it may go only half way, failing to use, in the measure in which they are granted, those civil rights which modern constitutions today offer all, and therefore also Catholics. In particular, the present constitution of states offers indiscriminately to all the right to influence public opinion, and Catholics, with due respect for the obligations imposed by the law of God and the precepts of the Church, can certainly use this to their advantage. In such a way they can prove themselves as capable as others (in fact, more capable than others) by cooperating in the material and civil welfare of the people. In so doing they shall acquire that authority and prestige which will make them capable of defending and promoting a higher good, namely, that of the soul. 20. Such, Venerable Brethren, are the characteristics, the aim and conditions of Catholic Action, considered in its most important function, namely, the solution of the social question. For that reason it demands the most energetic attention of all the Catholic forces. By no means, however, does this exclude the existence of other activities nor does it mean that other organizations should not flourish and be promoted, for each one is directed to different particular goods of society and of the people. All are united in the work of restoring Christian civilization under its various aspects. These works, rising out of the zeal of particular persons, spreading throughout many dioceses, are sometimes grouped into federations. Since the end they foster is praiseworthy, the Christian 40 The Angelus May - June 2012 principles they follow solid, and the means they adopt just, they are to be praised and encouraged in every way. At the same time, they must be permitted a certain freedom of organization (since it is impossible for so many people to be formed in the same mold and placed under the same direction). Organization, therefore, must arise spontaneously from the works themselves, otherwise it will only be an ephemeral building of fine architecture, but lacking a solid foundation and therefore quite unstable. Particular characteristics of different people must also be taken into consideration. Different uses, different tendencies are found in different places. It is of primary importance that the work be built on a good foundation of solid principles and maintained with earnestness and constancy. If this is the case, the method used and the form the various works take will be accidental. 29. Given at Saint Peter’s, Rome, on the Feast of Pentecost, June 11, 1905, the second year of Our Pontificate. It is also important to define clearly the works which the Catholic forces must energetically and constantly undertake. These works must be of such evident importance that they will be appreciated by everybody. They must bear such a relation to the needs of modern society and be so well adapted to moral and material interests, especially those of the people and the poorer classes, that, while arousing in promoters of Catholic Action the greatest activity for obtaining the important and certain results which are to be looked for, they may also be readily understood and gladly welcomed by all. Pope St. Pius X, Il Fermo Proposito 12 Spirituality St. John Vianney, Patron of Parish Priests (1786-1859) Unintimidating Saint by Fr. Emanuel Herkel, SSPX The Road to Ars A poor lost priest was wandering through the evening mist. He was on a country road not much better than the cow tracks which split off on either side. Maybe one of those was the real road. There were no signs. The last people he had seen could only tell him that the village of Ars was generally in this direction. He began to pray to St. Christopher, guide of travelers. In the next field were some children. They looked at the priest and came closer. Priests were an unusual sight in this district, and this one was clearly on the move, with all his worldly belongings in a cart beside him. The children spoke a funny dialect (patois); they did not understand him. The priest repeated his question until the most intelligent boy recog­ nized the word Ars and put him on the right path. 42 The Angelus May - June 2012 By way of thanking him, the priest said: “My young friend, you have shown me the way to Ars; I will show you the way to heaven.” Problem with Confessions This was a great promotion for John Vianney. For a few years after his ordination Father Vianney wasn’t a very useful priest; he could offer the Mass and bless rosaries, but he couldn’t hear confessions. John had done poorly in his studies, so his superiors didn’t trust him that much. He was not an intellectual. His Latin was so poor that he was sent away from the seminary to continue his studies for the priesthood in private lessons with a kind, old priest, Father Balley. If the French Revolution had not caused such a shortage of priests, he might never have been ordained. But there was a shortage, and John Baptist Marie Vianney was a pious young man. The Cardinal was absent when the Vicar General of Lyons decided to allow John to be ordained. He sent Father Vianney to be the assistant of the old priest who had been his mentor, Father Balley. Looking back over the life of our saint, it is surprising that he was not allowed to hear confessions. Perhaps God knew that he needed a break, because he certainly worked hard in the confessional in later years. By the end of his life he was hearing confessions for up to eighteen hours a day. Hundreds of pilgrims came to see him. They lined up outside his church at one o’clock in the morning, waiting to confess to “the saint” when he arose from his short sleep. St. John Vianney had the gift of reading hearts. He knew people’s sins before they spoke, and he would gently help nervous penitents to make a good confession. Sometimes he would even say, “Now will you tell me your sins or should I tell you?” of boiled potatoes his food for a week. He gave away his mattress to a poor man and slept on a blanket instead. Most of the men in the parish were farmers, so he went to visit them and he talked about agriculture and animals. This was something John knew since he grew up on a farm. At first he tried hard to memorize his Sunday sermons, but his memory failed and he had to walk away from the pulpit, leaving his parishioners with the clear sense that the sermon was incomplete. Surely he was the butt of many jokes, but no one was afraid of such a man. Thus he could approach anyone and offer his help or counsel. Soon all the people of Ars began to think of their Curé as a real spiritual father. They came to Mass and the sacraments, and Ars was soon a model Catholic village. Everyday Virtues There was a special compassion about this man. He knew how to approach people and how to win their friendship. His simplicity, his gentleness, and his humility convinced his parishioners that he was a living saint. When Father Balley died, the Cardinal decided to entrust Father Vianney with some responsibility. He appointed Father Vianney as pastor (curé) of the country-village church at Ars. This village of about 300 residents had been almost abandoned by the Church due to the lack of priests. John Vianney arrived and found an old church in need of repairs and a small rectory, well furnished by a generous benefactor. A few curious ladies came to Mass on the first morning in response to the ringing church bell. Sunday Mass attendance was not much better. The only way to convert souls is prayer and penance. So Father Vianney decided to set the example. He packed the nice furniture onto a cart and returned it to the benefactor. He ate very little, often making some milk and a pot 43 Spirituality It was this success which caused another trial. Catholics from the neighboring villages heard about the saintly Curé and they went to see him. Priests can be worse than housewives when it comes to gossip. The word went round that Father Vianney was stealing parishioners from other parishes and some of the other curés became jealous. They wrote him anonymous hate mail, listing his faults, especially his lack of education. They circulated a petition to have him removed from Ars. One priest openly denounced him from the pulpit, telling the faithful that it was wrong for them to leave their own parish and confess their sins to another priest. Someone with a sense of justice sent the petition to Father Vianney so that he could see what accusations he faced. Our saint read it with great humility, added his own signature to the bottom, and sent it on to his bishop. Partnership of Saints The pilgrims also came to Ars because St. John Vianney had a reputation for working miracles. For example, on Ash Wednesday of 1857, just after Mass, Anne Dévoluet, a poor woman, put her foot in the door of the sacristy and insisted on speaking with the Curé. The woman was carrying her son who suffered from a hip disease. Father Vianney told her to put the boy down. “But he is unable to stand,” the mother objected. “He will be able to do so now. Have confidence in St. Philomena.” Anne Dévoluet attempted to pick up her crippled child, but the Curé forbade her: “No, let him walk!” With difficulty the boy walked to the statue of St. Philomena and knelt in prayer. He stayed kneeling upright for 45 minutes. Then he stood and walked normally. Father Vianney had acquired a relic of St. Philomena and built a shrine to her in his church. He tried to blame most of his miracles on her, but the pilgrims believed it was more of a partnership between two saints. Sometimes the partnership was rough, as when the Curé forbade the virgin martyr to work miracles of physical healing at Ars. It always caused a stir of excitement and brought the Curé unwanted attention. So he 44 The Angelus May - June 2012 told St. Philomena to confine herself to spiritual miracles and cures which could take place outside of Ars. She did not always obey him. Living Word of God With time the initial failures in preaching were corrected. God gave Father Vianney a gift for preaching in a simple style that was all his own. It was more like what we expect from a sermon today: short, direct to the point, and full of pious examples from the Bible or the lives of the saints. This differed greatly from the sermons of the great French preachers of his age, such as Lacordaire, whose sermons could last over an hour. (Fr. Henri Lacordaire actually met the Curé of Ars and listened to him teach catechism. The Little Catechism of the Curé of Ars is also available in English (TAN), and it is recommended as spiritual reading.) St. John Vianney’s sermons only lasted 10 or 15 minutes. A number of these sermons were written down and they have been published in English. Let us read a few of St. John’s own words as a fitting conclusion to this story of his life: “My dear Christians, are we not astonished at what the saints have suffered, at the patience which they exhibited in all this suffering, at the longing which they showed for crosses and sufferings? And we—we complain when we have to suffer a little! We bear with impatience the slightest adversity sent to us from God. Let us remember that ‘through many tribulations we must enter into the kingdom of God,’ and let us bear the little suffering which God sends us with patience and submission, so that we may by this, like the saints, obtain the everlasting joys of heaven.” (Sermon for All Saints’ Day, Sermons of the Curé of Ars [Long Prairie, MN: Neumann Press, n.d.], p. 4.) Fr. Herkel was born in British Columbia, Canada, and graduated from boarding high school at St. Mary’s, Kansas, in 1992. He studied for the priesthood at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota, and was ordained in 2001. Since then he has been stationed in Canada. He is currently stationed at Immaculate Heart of Mary Priory in Calgary, Alberta. Join Us for our Third Annual Conference for Catholic Tradition The Papacy When: October 19 – 21, 2012 Where: Kansas City, Missouri Speakers Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General, SSPX Fr. Arnaud Rostand, U.S. District Superior, SSPX Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara, SSPX Fr. Daniel Themann, SSPX Fr. Albert, O.P. Dr. John Rao, Professor of History, St. John’s Christopher Check, VP, the Rockford Institute Joshua Hayes, Professor of History, La Salette Mr. Andrew Clarendon, Teacher, Saint Mary’s Academy Topics The Catholic Church: Heir of the Roman Empire Scriptural Foundations of the Papacy St. Catherine of Siena The Great Western Schism and the Lesson for Today The History of Papal Infallibility St. Pius X: History and Biography The SSPX and the Spirit of St. Pius X The Papacy of Pius XII The Question of Collegiality Sedevacantism Come join us at the beautiful Marriot Hotel located conveniently close to the Kansas City Airport for a weekend of enlightening and exciting talks, daily Mass and Rosary, and good conversation with fellow Catholics. The entire weekend will be crowned by a Pontifical High Mass at St. Vincent’s Church, offered by His Excellency, Bishop Bernard Fellay. Space is limited, so to reserve a spot, call today! For more information on the conference, and for information on how to register, visit www.angeluspress.org/conference, or call 1-800-966-7337 Spirituality Devotion to the Sacred Heart by Fr. Jonathan Loop, SSPX In 1689, St. Margaret Mary informed Louis XIV, then King of France, that the Sacred Heart wished to enter his royal household and to be honored by the king and his court. Furthermore, Our Lord requested that His Sacred Heart be placed on the banners and arms of France while promising the Catholic forces of France victory over her enemies. The saint wrote that the Sacred Heart willed “to reign in the King’s palace, to be painted on his standards, and engraved on his arms, in order to render him victorious over all his enemies.” As is well known, Louis XIV declined to honor the Sacred Heart in this manner. Exactly 100 years later, the French Revolution erupted and set in motion a series of events which, in the short term, ended in the murder of Louis XVI and, in the long term, inaugurated an era in which France and nearly all that remained of Christendom saw the unabated advance of a profoundly secular, anti-Christian regime. Now, over 300 years later, we live in a world wholly dominated by ideals and aspirations radically at odds with the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ. If we wish to safeguard our souls in these dangerous times, it is necessary to consider the preventive remedy which Our Lord once proposed to a formerly Catholic nation. What, then, is the devotion which Our Lord asked St. Margaret Mary 46 The Angelus May - June 2012 1 Pope Pius XII, Haurietis Aquas. 2 I John 3:1. 3 Fr. Mateo Crawley-Boevey, Father Mateo Speaks to Priests (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press), p. 88. 4 Miserentissimus Redemptor, May 8, 1928. 5 Haurietis Aquas, §120. 6 Eph. 3:18-9. Alacoque to introduce to the halls of Versailles? Is it merely the response to certain perverse doctrines—such as those of the Jansenists—which highlighted and distorted the justice of God and held that to enjoy His love and friendship was a privilege reserved to those somber few who had unswervingly held to a harsh and rigid law? No, for this would make it nothing more than a temporary solution fit to be set aside when the danger presented by such ideas had passed. In other words, it would be irrelevant to us now that Jansenism no longer holds sway over the minds of men. Is this devotion simply an appeal to make reparation for sins committed by men who do not know God, or who have long since abandoned Him, or who even claim to be His servants but whose hearts are far from Him? Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Haurietis Aquas, mentions this attitude: “Moreover there are those who consider a devotion of this kind as primarily demanding penance, expiation and the other virtues which they call ‘passive,’ meaning thereby that they produce no external results. Hence they do not think it suitable to re-enkindle the spirit of piety in modern time.”1 He goes on to say that such a belief is in entire disagreement with the teaching of the Church. While reparation is certainly an integral and necessary aspect of this devotion, this cannot explain the urgency with which Our Lord spoke to St. Margaret Mary: “Behold the Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify Its love” (apparition of June 16, 1675). What then is the special character of this devotion? Archbishop Lefebvre was accustomed to say that the Creed was the “love song” of God for men, for in it we see all that the good God has done for mankind. Everything which God has accomplished for us—whether it be the creation of man or the redemption of a fallen race—has been motivated by His ineffable will to communicate to us some share in His infinite goodness and happiness. It is for this reason that St. John wonderingly declares that “God is charity.” He exclaims, furthermore, that we ought to “behold what manner of charity the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called and should be the sons of God.” 2 Now, Fr. Mateo Crawley-Boevey, the ardent evangelist of devotion to the Sacred Heart of the early 20th century, taught that, “under the symbol of the physical heart [of Jesus] the Church teaches us the same doctrine taught by St. John: ‘Deus caritas est.’”3 In other words, the Sacred Heart is the expression of the Creed in a visual format; it is, in the words of Pius XI, a summary of all our religion and, moreover, a guide to a more perfect life.4 We may even go so far as to say that Our Lord Jesus Christ intended this devotion to be the most powerful means with which to defend ourselves in these times of silent though bitter persecution. It was the conviction of Pope Pius XII that “the devotion to the Sacred Heart is a remedy for the evils which cause sharp conflict among individuals, families, nations, and the whole world.”5 Indeed, whether we consider the profound threats to individuals or to all levels of society, we can find no better nor more appropriate protection than devotion to the Sacred Heart of Our Lord. In the first place, an intimate knowledge of the Sacred Heart places the soul in close contact with the breadth, and length and height and depth of the charity of God.6 To paraphrase the Apostle of the Gentiles: If the Father 47 Spirituality 48 7 Rom. 8:32. 8 Ibid., 8:28. 9 Ibid., 8:37-9. 10 Father Mateo Speaks to Priests, p. 146. 11 Judge Stephen Reinhardt writing for the majority in Perry v. Brown. 12 These results ought to be compared with a similar referendum, Proposition 22, which was held in March 2000. At that time, 61 percent of Californians wished marriage to be defined as a union between a man and a woman while only 39 percent were opposed. As was noted by the Los Angeles Times, the main proponents of Proposition 8 tended to be older churchgoers while the majority of younger voters were opposed to it. 13 “Bethany of the Sacred Heart,” Father Mateo Speaks to Priests, pp. 135-147. The Angelus May - June 2012 has given us the Sacred Heart of His Son, how has He not given us all things?7 Now, if He has given us all things in the Sacred Heart, how is it possible to suspect that He might abandon us at a time when the devil seems so strong and the world seems structured precisely so as to make the Christian life impossible? After all, it is easy to become discouraged when we consider the contradictions to the Catholic way of life which we face on a daily basis from so many quarters: from the media, from the scandalous advertisements in public which all too often we cannot avoid, and perhaps even from our coworkers. Nevertheless, Our Lord assures us that He is stronger than the world while St. Paul teaches us that “all things work unto good for those who love God.”8 An individual who is penetrated with the conviction that He is loved by an eternal love cannot but exclaim in the spirit St. Paul: In all these things we overcome on account of Him who has loved us. For neither life nor death, economic crises nor the mass media, nor atheistic politicians nor unjust wars shall separate us from the charity of God which is in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ.9 Devotion to the Sacred Heart is not merely a means of strengthening isolated individuals. Rather, it is also a pledge of God’s protection of the family, which is under a heavy attack by Satan and men of the world. Writing 50 years ago, Father Mateo observed: “The rock upon which we must construct the Christian fortress is, and will always remain, the home, [which is] under attack today with a diabolical hatred.”10 At that time, the scene of the battle was the attempt to normalize and permit divorce and immoral practices such as contraception. Now the battle has moved to the very nature of marriage. Recently, the 9th District Court of Appeals overturned Proposition 8, a popular referendum in California which forbade recognition of homosexual “marriages.” In so doing, the judge who wrote for the majority explained: “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of oppositesex couples.”11 By reasoning that the union of homosexual partners is the equal of traditional marriage, the judge effectively denies the very nature of marriage, which is a society of common life whose first and principal purpose is the procreation and education of children. Given that only 52 percent of Californians opposed such “unions” to begin with and that in most public schools in the state children are already being taught that homosexuality is a normal behavior, it is only a matter of time before the majority of Californians accept the court’s reasoning.12 Families who wish to defend marriage such as it came from the hands of Our Lord thus already find themselves in a hostile environment and may soon find themselves persecuted for their fidelity to God. Where may they turn? Father Mateo points to the Sacred Heart, especially in the practice of the Enthronement. He defines the Enthronement as “the homage of adoration which the family, as the social cell, offers to the Heart of Jesus considered as King of Society; it is an homage of latria, made in a spirit of love and reparation for the modern social apostasy.”13 By consecrating their homes to the King of Kings—and living a family life worthy of this act—they both establish themselves under His protection and render testimony to the world 14 E Supremi Apostolatus, October 4, 1903. 15 This language is distressingly similar to that employed by one of the greatest of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson. 16 Annum Sacrum, May 25, 1899. 17 Heb. 12:1. 18 Father Mateo Speaks to Priests, p. 146. of their faith in the royalty of Our Lord, and thus in His right to reign over the family and over society. As is clear, the attacks directed against the family reveal a deeper problem in society, one which St. Pius X defined as “apostasy from God.”14 In the encyclical Annum Sacrum, in which he declared his intention to consecrate the entire human race to the Sacred Heart of Our Lord, Pope Leo XIII wrote: “In these latter times especially, a policy has been followed which has resulted in a sort of wall15 being raised between the Church and civil society. In the constitution and administration of states the authority of sacred and divine law is utterly disregarded, with a view to the exclusion of religion from having any constant part in public life. This policy almost tends to the removal of the Christian faith from our midst and, if that were possible, of the banishment of God Himself from the earth.”16 In the hundred or so years that separate us from Leo XIII, this effort to thrust God from human society has intensified; now there is a concerted effort to remove even certain fundamental principles of the natural law. The answer which Leo XIII proposed to this grave social disease was to promote the Social Reign of Our Lord by consecrating the world and nations to the Sacred Heart. He made clear, of course that Our Lord’s right to rule does not depend upon man’s consent; nevertheless, he taught that Our Lord would not refuse the voluntary submission to Him as the rightful King of all nations. Father Mateo summarized this idea by exclaiming, “Christ wills to reign through His Sacred Heart,” while in Litany of the Sacred Heart Our Lord is addressed as the “King and Center of all hearts.” Rather than speak about the Church’s “right of conscience,” the American bishops would do much better to consecrate as a body the United States to the Sacred Heart while encouraging the faithful to obey the gospel and to make reparation for our apostate nation. Evidently, hope is not lost. It is true that humanly speaking there are no solutions to the many and grievous dangers which threaten faithful Catholics from all sides in our day. However, let us not underestimate the precious treasure which Our Lord has conferred upon us in the devotion to His Sacred Heart. He has thereby not only provided us with an image of the charity which motivated all the mysteries which He revealed to us, but He has also endowed us with a powerful means to trod these dangers underfoot. Let us not forget that St. Margaret Mary explained that the Sacred Heart wished to make Louis XIV victorious over all of his enemies. We ought therefore run with confidence to the fight proposed to us,17 for, as Father Mateo says, “if the King of Love stand with us, who shall stand against Him, and against us?”18 Fr Jonathan Loop was born and raised an Episcopalian. He attended college at the University of Dallas, where he received the grace to convert through the intermediary of several of his fellow students, some of whom later went on to become religious with the Dominicans of Fanjeaux. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political philosophy, he enrolled in St Thomas Aquinas Seminary, where he was ordained in June 2011. 49 Act of Dedication Of the Human Race To Jesus Christ King Most sweet Jesus, Redeemer of the human race, look down upon us humbly prostrate before You. We are Yours, and Yours we wish to be; but to be more surely united with You, behold each one of us freely consecrates himself today to Your Most Sacred Heart. Many indeed have never known You; many, too, despising Your precepts, have rejected You. Have mercy on them all, most merciful Jesus, and draw them to your Sacred Heart. Be King, O Lord, not only of the faithful who have never forsaken You, but also of the prodigal children who have abandoned You; grant that they may quickly return to their Father’s house, lest they die of wretchedness and hunger. Be King of those who are deceived by erroneous opinions, or whom discord keeps aloof, and call them back to the harbor of truth and the unity of faith, so that soon there may be but one flock and one Shepherd... Grant, O Lord, to Your Church assurance of freedom and immunity from harm; give tranquility of order to all nations; make the earth resound from pole to pole with one cry: Praise to the Divine Heart that wrought our salvation; to it be glory and honour for ever. Amen. Christian Culture Francis Clement Kelley A Bishop for All Seasons by Christopher Check Among the chief poverties of life in the ruins of Christendom is an absence of the larger-than-life Catholic heroes whose sanctity, daring, brilliance, drive, and rhetorical skill fired the hearts of the faithful throughout the ages. This loss came into relief for me a decade ago when I could not answer a high-school teacher—whose students I had just addressed on the Battle of Lepanto—when he asked me, “Who are the Don Johns of Austria of our age?” I had to admit, “Our age does not produce such men.” Man of Extraordinary Mettle It was not so long ago, however, that the combination of a classical education; a European 52 The Angelus May - June 2012 culture that yet honored the good, the beautiful, and the true; a life of hard work and adventure; and a burning fervor for the Faith together made the fertile soil from which men and women of extraordinary mettle, breadth, depth, and virtue came forth. Francis Clement Kelley, founder of the Catholic Church Extension Society and second Bishop of Oklahoma, was one such man. Born in 1870, at the time just to remember the last of the town criers, Kelley came from Irish stock. His father was a sea trader, so Francis’s primary education took place not only in the one-room country school, but also in gales off the coast of Nova Scotia. In high school Kelley excelled at writing, started a newspaper, and at graduation won the English Medal. He would go on to publish 17 books, countless articles and short stories, and launch a national magazine, but he would do so as a Catholic priest, for it was while preparing for his Higher Catechism final that he felt “the unrefusable call.” At College in Quebec he mastered French and philosophy. Bishop Rodgers of New Brunswick, “a small man in height, and a big man in width,” recognized Kelley’s talent and took him into his home for a year of “Aquinas, Augustine, Dominic, Alphonsus, and Ignatius.” Kelley’s father, fallen on hard times, could not fund his formal seminary training, but Providence sent Bishop John Foley, Detroit’s first American Bishop, who footed Kelley’s seminary bill. At the age of 22, the Irish Canadian from Prince Edward Island was ordained a priest on the Feast of Saint Bartholomew, 1893. He returned to the Island to offer his first Mass and made his way to the Diocese of Detroit. With only two weeks of on-the-job pastoral training (substituting for a sick pastor in Lansing) he took over his first parish, the dilapidated condition of which set the spark to the tinder that fired his life’s work. The Lapeer parish was a run-down “dry-goods box of a church” with no sacristy, statues, or stained glass windows, but a pile of dirty vestments, “and none of certain colors at all.” To Kelley, the poverty of his parish “spoke of a cold calculating indifference to God, and a smug self-satisfaction of the things that are of this earth.” Is War Justified? The culprit was the previous pastor, removed for apostasy, who yet remained in Lapeer, writing Herbert Spencer inspired articles for the weekly paper. The 22-year-old Father Kelley gathered the disillusioned faithful of his parish with doctrinally rich sermons delivered with clarity and good humor. He rallied them to a brick-and-mortar building project, which began in earnest but soon stalled for lack of funds and remained stalled while he donned his country’s uniform. Although “no one could have had a stronger conviction that the war with Spain was not only unjust but unnecessary,” in 1898, Kelley— after insuring his life for the amount needed to complete his new church—volunteered for service as an Army chaplain with the Detroit Battalion of the First Michigan Infantry. He brought the sacraments to soldiers mired in the tropical heat, bad sanitation, snakes, mosquitoes, and typhoidmalarial fever of Tampa and Huntsville. Reflecting on war two decades later, Kelley wrote: “War is sometimes justified though not often; because not often is there a right side and a wrong side. Mostly there are only two wrong sides.” What glory there had been “in the clash of a sword on armor” had disappeared. “What is idealistic about a tank? Can poetry come out of a gas mask?” he asked. “When war becomes a matter of test tubes, and it is fast coming to that, the last vestige of idealism will have disappeared from it. The scientist is killing war, for he is preparing to make it so horrible and loathsome that mankind is bound to sicken of it and vomit it out of its mouth—Pray God forever.” Kelley, who lived to witness America vaporize some 70,000 Japanese civilians in a white-hot flash of atomic terror, went to his grave with his prayer unrealized, but we should continue to say it on our own age, when, as Kelley predicted, “a small minority with the new artillery, with airplanes and machine guns, can impose its will on a whole nation.” “Little Shanty Story” Returning to Michigan after the Spanish American War, Father Kelley put to good use his skills as an orator. He began to finance the construction of his new church with fees earned as a speaker for the Lyceum, “the answer to a call on the best minds of the country for an extension of their educational influence into the smaller cities, the towns, and the rural villages.” At first making 15 or 20 dollars a lecture, Kelley soon found himself traveling around Michigan, and then other states, his fee rising with each successive year. From 1899-1906, he sent a steady stream of cash back to his parish. His audiences included everyone from “small boys throwing peanut shells” to “old ladies who looked with disapproval at the first Catholic priest they had ever seen while wondering how he concealed his horns so cleverly.” Sharing the circuit with the likes of Bob La Follette, William Jennings Bryan, and fellow53 Christian Culture priest and Shakespeare scholar Father Lawrence Vaughan (who drew the largest audiences of all), Father Kelley met first hand middle America gathered in meeting halls, little red schoolhouses, vacant shops, and tents. And he saw first hand the miserable living and working conditions endured by Catholic priests “among the scattered people and the churchless places” of the American West and South. He resolved to found a home mission society to bring the fullness of the Catholic Faith to the many regions of America overrun with poverty, prejudice, and ignorance. A column he wrote for Ecclesiastical Review of Philadelphia launched the Catholic Extension Society. Reprinted as a pamphlet, the “Little Shanty Story” described the ramshackle rectory of a Catholic pastor in Ellsworth, Kansas. The article captured the hearts of Catholics across the Republic, and donations began to pour in. Papal Approval for Extension Society Meeting in Notre Dame the two clerics began a long friendship of mutual admiration and respect. On the Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist, 1805, the Catholic Church Extension Society was founded in Archbishop Quigley’s Chicago home. Within a year Kelley’s bishop gave him the Exeat to transfer to Chicago. Kelley excelled as a fundraiser, but his public candor about the lack of missionary spirit in the American seminaries and the American hierarchy’s neglect of Catholic rural America made him East Coast enemies, including the Papal delegate, Archbishop Falconio. Quigley stuck by Kelley, however, and expedited meetings for him in Rome to obtain Vatican approval for the Society. Kelley described Pope Pius X as, “a saint who saw no obstacle to holiness on the possession of a fund of humor” and recounts a tale of his witnessing the pope’s “listening to an American Bishop telling him an Irish story in Italian and breaking into a hearty laugh over it.” Pius X’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry 54 The Angelus May - June 2012 del Val, was “the first great and powerful Roman friend of the Extension Society.” He instructed Kelley “in the science of untying hard diplomatic knots,” lessons the priest would apply throughout his life. Del Val secured a Papal Brief of Approval for the Extension, and, although the doubters and critics did not go away, there was little they could argue when it became clear that Pius X endorsed Kelley’s work. Although entirely donated, one project critics of the Extension Society regarded as extravagant was the chapel cars: St. Anthony, St. Peter, and St. Paul. Kelley’s immediate inspiration was a Baptist train car he had seen at the St. Louis World’s Fair. In an article in Extension Magazine, Kelley argued that if the Baptists could take the Gospel on the rails so could the Catholics. The idea was older than that. Pio Nono had used a purple painted rail car, complete with throne room, to travel throughout the Papal States, and Russian Orthodox priests employed rolling chapels, exquisitely decorated, to take the Divine Liturgy to rural towns along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Kelley’s rail cars were beautifully fitted as well, with art treasures from Europe including an 11thcentury crucifix. The cars sat 70 for Mass and included confessionals as well as private quarters for their priests to dine, sleep, and study. Rolling Chapel When a chapel car rolled into town, one especially popular feature was the question box. Before a priest of the Extension would deliver a lecture or say Mass, he would answer questions, often from Protestants or Mormons, about the Catholic Faith. Some derived from innocent ignorance, such as the question put by a woman who thought that Jesus Christ had brought from heaven the Bible, whole and entire. Others were clearly the result of anti-Catholic propaganda, often spread by the Ku Klux Klan: “Is it true that a priest has to murder four people before he can be ordained?” “Do priests really have hooves like cows instead of feet?” When that question was put to an Extension Society priest visiting a town in Oregon, he took off his shoes and socks to settle the matter. Francis Clement Kelley was born in Vernon River, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He was ordained a priest for the diocese of Detroit, Michigan, in 1893. In 1905, he founded the Catholic Church Extension Society. Kelley was consecrated Bishop of Oklahoma in 1924. Blessing of the Roman Catholic chapel car St. Peter 55 Christian Culture The great achievement of Father Kelley’s rail cars is the countless number of Catholics all over rural America who had lived away from the Sacraments but now returned to the Faith. The missionary priest of the Extension Society baptized and confirmed, witnessed marriages, absolved sins, dispensed Extreme Unction, and offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for American Catholics throughout the West, Midwest, and the South. In the countless towns where the rail cars planted the seed of the Faith, chapels and churches sprang up, supported by Extension Society dollars and built by the faithful who had returned home. Extension Magazine Kelley helped finance the work of the Extension with his Extension magazine, which at its peak boasted half-a-million subscribers. A Catholic version of the Saturday Evening Post, the quarterly not only spread the word about the Society’s work, thereby attracting donations, but also included articles in apologetics, as well as original artwork, poetry, and short stories, including scores of mystery stories penned by Kelley himself. Mystery author Mary Higgins Clark would later launch her career writing for Extension Magazine. So popular and influential was Extension Magazine that when America entered the First World War, Kelley received the offer of a substantial bribe in exchange for an editorial endorsing Woodrow Wilson’s interventionist foreign policy. Kelley declined, passing up “his one and only chance to become rich” and penned instead, “The Pigs of Serbia,” a scathing rebuke of the war and its promoters on both sides of the Atlantic. Foreign Policy Provokes Anger America’s intervention in the affairs of Europe was not the only U.S. foreign policy that provoked Father Kelley’s anger. “The Mexican Question,” mishandled by American administrations 56 The Angelus May - June 2012 from Taft to Coolidge, became, along with the Extension Society, a central focus of Kelley’s life, and perhaps the one for which he is best known today. The resulting book, Blood-Drenched Altars, is the only work of Kelley’s still in print. The volume comprehensively lays out the case that Mexico under Spain was a glorious Catholic country, culturally superior to the United States well into the 19th century: “They dotted the land,” writes Kelley, “with architectural triumphs which to this day have not been equaled in the Americas.” Moreover, the book—written for and distributed to every member of the United States Congress in 1935—shows America’s considerable culpability in, to use Kelley’s words, the “great steal,” that is, the deliberate fomentation of the revolutions since the 19th century that replaced Catholic Mexico with Marxist Mexico. Kelley and his fellow bishop, Michael Joseph “Iron Mike” Curley of Baltimore were the two American bishops who opposed America’s support of Masonic revolution in Mexico and worked to relieve the suffering of clergy in a country the government of which had formally declared war on the Catholic Church. Father Kelley’s championing of the cause of the Mexican faithful took him to the highest halls of American power. William Jennings Bryan, President Wilson’s Secretary of State, began a meeting with Kelley with the charge that “the Catholic schools in Mexico were anti-American.” Producing a textbook, he opened it to a paragraph blaming Mexico’s problems on the United States. Kelley, who read Spanish, confirmed the content of the paragraph and answered, “Mr. Bryan, I should like to suggest to you that you go through the records in your office of our relations with Mexico since about the year 1810, and then try to put yourself in the place of a Mexican. You will be forced to admit that the book tells the exact truth.” Before Bryan could answer, Kelley added, “A textbook for a Catholic school would require an imprimatur opposite the title page.” Handing the book back to Bryan he asked, “Do you see one?” To the silence, he said, “I thought not. This text is in fact one used in Mexican government schools, not Catholic schools.” A meeting with Wilson himself went less well. The President, after hearing Father Kelley recount the crimes against the Church in Mexico, including the outraging of nuns, and after hearing his request that America at least not back antiCatholic revolution south of the Rio Grande, Wilson responded, “I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican Revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French Revolution. Nevertheless, out of the French Revolution came the liberal ideas that have since dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good may yet come.” Faced with the fact that Wilson is entombed in the National Cathedral in Washington, Americans should ask if our national religion traces it roots to Paris 1789 A.D. or to Jerusalem 33 A.D. Received by Roosevelt Not all of Father Kelley’s efforts to serve as advocate for Mexican Catholics fell on deaf ears. Theodore Roosevelt warmly received Kelley at Sagamore Hill and after reviewing the evidence Kelley had given him, wrote a syndicated article on the suffering of the Mexican Church. After the First World War, Kelley took his crusade for the Church in Mexico to the very discussions in Paris that resulted in the League of Nations. There he proposed a “liberty of conscience” requirement for any nation desiring membership. Kelley’s amendment was a matter of practical politics, and a wise one, not a theological proposition. In his autobiography, Kelley observes with bitterness but not surprise that at Versailles, at the modern world’s official gathering of liberalism, a chief tenet of liberalism, religious freedom, was given no quarter, scuttled by Venizelos, Clemenceau, and Wilson. The time in Paris did bear fruit. Kelley used his diplomatic skills unofficially to guide Italian Premier Vittorio Orlando to the beginnings of a just ending of the “Roman Question,” the debate over what to do with the Vatican, which had lost her lands in the Italian Risorgimento and yet insisted, quite rightly, on her sovereignty. Kelley outlined, among other things, a territorial concession, access to the sea, and recognition of sovereignty. The story, worthy of a thriller novel, began in whispered conversations on a side street in Paris, and proceeded to a tea with Orlando in the lobby of the Ritz. Next Kelley was on a train to Rome, where he put the plan before Cardinal Gasparri and Pope Benedict XV. Back in Paris, he assisted the Vatican’s representative, Archbishop Cerritti in further negotiations. Orlando, on his return to Rome, put Kelley’s proposal before the Italian Chamber of Deputies. It cost him his political career. Ten years later, the substance of Kelley’s plan was approved by Mussolini, and the sovereignty of the Holy See was restored and secured. Achieve Great Things for God In June of 1924, a man who had led the life of sailor, soldier, scholar, mission priest, political adept, international diplomat, and published author whose prose style was praised by his friend H.L. Mencken, was ordained the second bishop of Oklahoma. The mission priest was now a mission bishop, establishing the Catholic Church on the plains, and bringing a new diocese to maturity. To read the life of Francis Kelley is to see how dogged determination, a devout prayer life, and a profound humility can together achieve great things for God. Of his extraordinary work, Kelley wrote, “The thing was God’s, not mine.” To read the life of Bishop Kelley is also an opportunity for Catholics in America to start to come to terms with the reality that, her virtues notwithstanding, the United States has been at odds with Catholicism for most of her existence. The perspective the life of Archbishop Kelley gives us is invaluable in interpreting more current hostilities to the Church. Far from imaging that suddenly the American government has turned on the Catholic faithful, we should realize that the Church has had American enemies from the first, and that from time to time, they are at the very center of American power. 57 Christian Culture Is Your Parenting Style Working? by Michael J. Rayes Traditionalist Catholic parents have a lot on their minds. As with all parents, they feel the duty to provide for their children, but Traditionalists know that child-rearing is so much more than that. As Pius XI wrote in Divini Illius Magistri, No. 36, “the obligation of the family to bring up children, includes not only religious and moral education, but physical and civic education as well, principally in so far as it touches upon religion and morality.” In other words, parents are to provide for, protect, and educate their children to live in this world, but especially to prepare them for the next—Heaven. There are many ways to do that. In fact, we could categorize most parents as falling into a certain parenting style. A Jewish psychologist, Diana Baumrind, first categorized these styles 58 The Angelus May - June 2012 in the modern era. Regardless of the source, her four domains of parenting are a helpful tool when assessing one’s own parenting. • • • • Authoritarian (the parent is cold, unapproachable, and always right); Permissive (parents are responsive but undemanding); Authoritative (parents are both responsive and demanding); and Neglectful (the parent ignores the child or is simply not home enough). We will add another category later in this article. Authoritative parenting is balanced, charitable but firm, and is just right—it’s best for the child. Authoritarian parenting, on the other hand, is when cold parents only discipline a child because the parent becomes angry or irritated, not because the child needs correction to facilitate character growth. Authoritative and Authoritarian parents might both punish an errant child, and the punishment may be the same, but the motivation is different. The child will feel the difference. (Usually the cold Authoritarian parent stalls and finally punishes the child later, but the punishment is harsher.) Permissive parenting, on the other hand, is the is already confirmed. In other words, these balanced parents shield their children from unnecessary disappointment and an emotional roller-coaster. Kids will have to deal with enough disappointments in life; parents can be there to listen and coach them through it. Balanced, authoritative parenting takes more time when the kids are little and when they are school-aged, but it takes less time when the kids become older teens and young adults. These grown children tend to be a consolation for parents Parent type Behavior Permissive parents No consistent behavioral standards for their children. Loose boundaries. Authoritarian parents No consistent behavioral standards for their children. Rigid boundaries. Authoritative parents Consistent standards and clear but flexible boundaries. Neglectful parents No standards, unclear boundaries, no or very little care. lackadaisical parenting displayed by many, many parents today. This is also known as “indulgent” parenting, and it is when parents let their kids run around loose near adults, moving cars, and strangers, even when the parents are near them. There are no consistent, standard norms of good behavior. The parents otherwise take care of their kids and are very involved with them (they aren’t neglectful) except when it comes to discipline. Warm authoritative parents—the balanced parents—discipline their children to help the kids grow into responsible adults. They have somewhat high expectations of their kids, but they also make time for them, give them praise, touch them, hug them, and remind them of their boundaries and their manners. Authoritative parents, furthermore, never argue in front of their children. The parents never contradict each other’s decisions in front of the children, even if one spouse doesn’t agree. (No, you can’t go to Tyler’s house right now. Why are you asking me if Mommy already said no?) Later they can discuss a disagreement without the kids around. Authoritative parents also wait to tell their children about planned events until the event instead of a hardship. As St. Thomas Aquinas once said, “Perfect married life means the complete dedication of the parents for the benefit of their children.” The other parenting styles impose a heavier and heavier investment of emotions and time on the parents as the children grow older. Cold Authoritarian Parenting in Action Many cold, authoritarian parents in practice vacillate between authoritarian and neglectful styles. Oftentimes they are neglectful; then they finally react to the problems created by their lack of parenting with authoritarianism. Parents get angry with the child and punish him or her when the parent is aroused, not because the child violated a moral or behavioral norm. For example, a child could hit a younger sibling with a stick several times and not get in trouble even when the parent is nearby. When the parent finally becomes angry because the howling interrupted him or her enough times, the miscreant finally is punished by the inflamed parent. 59 Christian Culture The “Nervous” Parenting Style Let’s identify another parenting style that we’ll call “Nervous.” Nervous parents tend to fall in the permissive category, not because they are lazy parents, but they lack confidence to discipline their children. Many of these parents know when they should discipline a child, but self-doubt gets in the way. (Am I doing the right thing? How will this affect my child? What will others think of me?) The blunt answer to these questions: Who cares? Just do it. Discipline your child for his or her sake, and ignore the imaginary critics. The deeper answer is to offer your selfdoubting to Mary and Joseph. This works best in front of the tabernacle, but any place will do. Then, after putting yourself in God’s hands through His Holy Family, you can search inside yourself. Where does this doubting and nervousness come from? When you are about to discipline your child (or do anything important) can you feel the weight of a critical voice in your head? This criticism does not come from God, and it is not your own. Perhaps it is a remnant of your own childhood attempts to please your elders. It could be simple shyness with the feeling that others are watching as you parent your children. Or perhaps the nervousness is a feeling that you are not making people happy—your spouse, your fussy child, your own parents. Unfortunately, the problem with nervous parents is that one (or more) of your children is definitely not nervous. Your child has no fear. Some children will deliberately provoke and defy your authority on purpose, and they will continue to do so until you either stop them or they grow tired of the challenge. You can bet on this, especially if you have more than one child. The defiant child’s first word is “but.” (But Mommy…) As toddlers, these children are the screamers. They will shriek in public when you first attempt to pick them up or drag them away from what they should not be playing with. I don’t mean a yelp and they are done. I mean they scream over and over again. This pushes the nervous parent’s buttons. (Now everyone is surely watching me and thinking what a bad parent I am.) The nervous parent immediately tries to reason 60 The Angelus May - June 2012 with the toddler. It would be far better to simply cover the child’s mouth to muffle the scream while you calmly and firmly walk away with the child. You may even look the child right in the face (with your hand still covering the child’s mouth) and say firmly, “You will not scream when I pick you up.” Notice the language used in that admonition. Begin your commands with “You will…” instead of “I want you to…” This is a subtle reminder that the child must obey moral norms of behavior for their own sake, not only because they parent said so. Someday, your child will have to behave all by himself without your presence. You could become a quadriplegic and still have the same effective parental skills once the child passes the age of six or so. Why? Because a solid foundation of “you will” and “you will not,” as well as the physical discipline of toddlerhood (picking up and moving the child; spankings on the bottom; covering the child’s mouth) forms a discipline in the child. Then he is already somewhat self-disciplined by the time he reaches school age. Generally, you should not have to move knives, cash, cigarettes, and other instruments of temptation out of reach of 10-year-olds. Simply telling the child not to touch those things should suffice for the most part. Otherwise, how can we expect them to respect private property as adults? If you want them to learn that morality must be followed out of love for our Lord and love of neighbor, they need to learn as children that moral behavior must be followed even if the child can get away without being caught. What will the child do if no one is around to punish him? What internal motivation does the child have to do the right thing? YOU as the parent are the answer. Your children are yours. They are a gift—a blessing— from God. Have the confidence you need as a parent to discipline them when you know they need it, and they will grow to do the right thing (Prov. 22:6). Michael J. Rayes is a lifelong Catholic, a husband, and father of seven. He has been published by Rafka Press, Latin Mass Magazine, and others. The Lepanto Lectures Our Exclusive Catholic History Audio Series! With one talk each on the following historical topics, the Lepanto Lectures partnered with renowned Catholic speaker Mr. Christopher Check to release the following talks. The Cristeros and the Martyrs of the Mexican Revolutions 1 CD – 60 minutes STK# 8499 – $9.95 Amidst the terrors of an anti-Catholic government, an army of faithful Catholic Mexicans arose to defend the rights of Our Lord and His holy Church. They were the Cristeros, their battle cry was “Viva Cristo Rey,” and theirs is one of the greatest Catholic war stories of all time. Henry VIII and the Anglican Schism 1 CD – 60 minutes STK# 8527 – $9.95 Almost everyone knows something about Henry VIII, his many wives, and how he began the Anglican schism; yet few today really know the full story of how this land of saints was wrenched from Catholic unity. This story presents the true story of the gluttonous, decadent monarch who destroyed Catholic England. This story is deeply important for those countries descended from England! The War of the Vendee As the French Revolution attempted to destroy both God and man, a number of French peasants from the Vendee, along with their nobility, rose up to defend the Sovereignty of Christ against the greatest terror the world had seen since the persecution of Diocletian. Truly inspiring! He tells of the French peasantry, and the nobility who joined them, who rose up to defend the Sovereignty of Christ against the greatest terror the world had seen since the persecutions of Diocletian, and nearly succeeded. www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music 1 CD – 60 minutes STK# 8546 – $9.95 Christian Culture The Key to a Fruitful Marriage by Fr. Hervé de la Tour, SSPX Sometime ago two faithful came to us to ask a special blessing for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The ceremony in the Roman Ritual is very beautiful. It first consists of the renewal of the matrimonial consent. It is always a moving sight to see two spouses joining their wrinkled hands and confirming their promise to remain faithful to each other until death. This is true love, love made strong through trials endured together. It has been said that a woman never knows the manly friendship which can be enjoyed by soldiers on the battlefield. However, Ed Willock, editor of the famous Catholic magazine Integrity, explained that long-married couples can really experience the affection of comrades at arms since they take part in a spiritual battle. It was not difficult to see in the eyes of our dear parishioners the love coming from their hearts united by the 62 The Angelus May - June 2012 sacred bond of matrimony. They could say to each other with a smile (and a few tears): “We have been through so much. Look at our bold scars...but our banners are still flying!” Wonderful Adventure Catholic marriage is indeed a wonderful adventure. But for it to be a successful adventure, you must pay the price, dear readers. And the price is self-sacrifice. This is very well expressed in the “exhortation before marriage” contained in the Ritual: “Not knowing what is before you, you take each other for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death. Truly then, these words are most serious. It is a beautiful tribute to your undoubted faith in each other, that, recognizing their full import, you are nevertheless so willing and ready to pronounce them. And because these words involve such solemn obligations, it is most fitting that you rest the security of your wedded life upon the great principle of self-sacrifice. And so you begin your married life by the voluntary and complete surrender of your individual lives in the interest of that deeper and wilder life which you are to have in common. “Henceforth, you belong to each other; you will be one in mind, one in heart, and one in affection. And whatever sacrifices you may hereafter be required to make to preserve this common life, always make them generously. Sacrifice is usually difficult and irksome. Only love can make it easy; and perfect love can make it a joy. We are willing to give in proportion as we love. And when love is perfect, the sacrifice is complete.” The ceremony also includes a few prayers of thanksgiving before the final blessing by the priest. Fidelity is indeed a grace from God. It is quite normal for husband and wife to be grateful when they reach 50 years of marriage. God gave them the courage they needed to carry their cross together. So now they can pray thus before the altar: “O God, whose mercy is infinite and whose goodness is inexhaustible, we thank Thee for all that in Thy loving majesty Thou hast given to us. We ask that Thou who always answerest those who pray, mayest in Thy mercy not abandon them, but prepare them to receive their eternal reward. Amen.” This fiftieth anniversary ceremony will be the starting point of our meditation on conjugal fidelity. Some of you may have read this quote of Chesterton: “When we defend the family we do not mean it is always a peaceful family; when we maintain the thesis of marriage we do not mean that it is always a happy marriage. We mean that it is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter. It is not so much the place where a man kills his wife as the place where he can take the equally sensational step of not killing his wife.” Who will not recognize the great truth hidden under this humorous statement? Many faithful have difficulties in their marriage. There are so many causes of hidden suffering for husbands and wives: “She does not discipline the children ...He does not show his affection for me...She finds fault with everything I do...He does not give me enough money to run the house...She cannot cook and keep the house tidy...He cares more about his mother than about me, etc.” All priests have listened to similar complaints from their parishioners, and have admired the charity with which spouses try to bear with each other’s defects. When young people enter marriage, they often think that they are entering into a life of complete and total happiness. After a few years (in some cases a few months) they quickly lose those romantic illusions when they experience the first serious difficulties. Then come frequent disagreements and quarrels leading to a breakdown in communication. Married life is definitely not the perfect bliss they had dreamed of, and coming to terms with reality is painful. But I can hear some readers sigh: “Ah, if I had a more perfect companion, things would be so different!” This is also an illusion. Sacrifice is essential in any marriage (even if you had the ideal partner). “Your whole reason for being Christians is that you may offer yourselves as victims with the Victim present on the altar. You offer all your trials, all your sufferings, all that you are. It is the sole reason for your being on earth, because by the offering of your sufferings you are saving your souls” (Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre). As you know, both Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Therese of Lisieux, were beatified. The Church formally declared their holiness. But does this mean that the life of this exemplary couple was free from suffering? On the contrary. If you read the story of their life, you will see that they too had their share in the trials of married life. Even St. Joseph had to suffer from the silence of Our Lady when she was expecting Our Lord, and Our Lady suffered from seeing the anguish of St. Joseph. This is the “Royal Way of the Cross.” Read again this beautiful chapter of the Imitation of Jesus Christ (Book II, Ch. 12). I remember a conference that John Senior 63 Christian Culture once gave on married life. It was a meditation on the twelve “fruits of the Holy Ghost” enumerated by St. Paul in his epistle to the Galatians: “charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, ­longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continence, chastity” (Gal. 5: 22-23). The Spirit of Love wants to work in us in order to produce these beautiful actions through our virtues and gifts. As Father Farrell explains: “The term ‘fruit’ is itself significant. It practically demands a bit of dreaming, as the scent of a flower in midwinter will snatch us out of ourselves into a forgotten summer day’s caress of sun and wind. We are almost doing the word an injustice if we do not have a picture of long rows of old trees, gnarled like an old woman’s hands which have seen too much hard work. And there is in the word ‘fruit’ something like the pride of accomplishment, that makes the woman forget her hands, looking back over the years and see what those hands have made possible for a son or a daughter. Just so a tired old tree could look back through the long days from the first budding leaves, through the beauty of blossom and the anxious days of young fruit, to this final day when the ripe, luscious fruit is offered as the supreme accomplishment and the tree prepares to die for another winter.” Husband and wife should work hard at cooperating with divine grace in bringing forth these precious fruits. St. Paul contrasts them with the “works of the flesh”: quarrels, dissensions, jealousy, immodesty, etc. When we look around us, we are obliged to see that many married couples are “liars in the balances,” as St. Robert Bellarmine says in his commentary of Psalm 61: “They are devoid of true wisdom and they miserably deceive themselves by willfully making use of ‘false measures.’ Indeed, the greatest good that can be secured is grace in this life, and happiness in the next. And yet, when they come to decide what to do, they often choose the apparent (natural) good and reject the real (supernatural) one.” What we need to do is put the first Commandment first, to live our Catholic Faith with generosity, to give our whole heart to God. Fidelity to your marriage vows requires grim perseverance in daily self-denial. It is not easy 64 The Angelus May - June 2012 for our fallen nature. But there is no other secret for reaching true love. And do not forget that in overcoming your selfishness, you are not only growing in your spiritual life, but also expiating your past sins. (Purgatory is a thousand times more painful than any sacrifice we impose on ourselves). G. K. Chesterton said: “The enemies of marriage imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. It is the nature of love to bind itself. There is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring selfdiscipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing.” If the tree of love is to bear fruit, it must be pruned. As Bishop Sheen says: “As the violin needs tuning, as the block of marble needs cutting before it can make a statue, so the love of husband and wife needs purification before it can rise to new heights.” Dear readers, when you experience disappointments in your married life, do not give up. Remember that “Our Lord was on His Cross for three long hours, nailed hand and foot, to merit enough grace for you to carry your cross. When the soldiers, in cruel mockery of their dying Savior, cried out: ‘Save Thy own self. Come down from the Cross,’ did He come down? Then don’t come down from yours.” John Senior has these consoling words: “You remember on the birthday or the wedding, just when you cut the cake, that was the best, the eating always seems sort of a let down. You expected who knows what and it was cake. Love is not just cake. It is the moment just before. That’s the mystery of it, because all love is a waiting for something we don’t even know about yet. Especially the love of husbands and wives will always be a yearning and a sigh.” In other words we are not wrong in wanting love, but we are wrong in thinking that a human being can completely satisfy our craving for love. What our soul longs for, without knowing it, is God. As Bishop Sheen says: “The abyss of one’s own poverty cries out to the abyss of the infinite richness of Divine Love. Instead of thinking that the other partner is to blame for this emptiness, which is so common today, one ought to peer into his own soul. He wants the ocean, and he is drinking from a cup. If there is a thorn in the flesh at this moment of life, as Our Lord gave a thorn to the flesh of Paul for the purpose of purification, the thorn is a summons to climb to the Flame of Love which is God.” Let us, therefore, turn our gaze to heaven and ask the God of goodness to help us carry our cross with patience and perseverance so that we may one day enjoy our final reward, which He has prepared for us if we are faithful: the Supreme Happiness of the Beatific Vision. Perfect Love Will Only Be for Heaven On the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, the Gospel is the one of the Wedding Feast of Cana. As Msgr. C. H. Doyle says: “Our Lord changed water into wine at the merest suggestion from His Blessed Mother. When the wine of love runs short in your marriage, turn to Our Lady for help. At her prayer, her Divine Son will change tears into the wine of love again.” In marriage, as in Cana, the best wine is kept for the last. And Perfect Love and Perfect Happiness will only be for Heaven. As John Senior said: “The way to restore the family is to bring to incandescent exercise the latent fruits of love in husbands and wives. They have received them as supernatural habits in the sacrament of marriage. These fruits are as strong as death, stronger than any poison from our enemies; with them no family ever failed, even when the war outside was lost.” “Dear readers, look at your crucifix. From the wood of the Cross Christ reigns over the household, presides over the family prayer, strengthens in time of family trial, rejoices in time of family feast, is a pillar of strength in time of family sorrow, at all times teaches the lesson of family sacrifice. Wise those parents who build their homes upon the solid foundation of the altar, for though rains fall and floods come and winds blow, their homes will not fall because they are founded on rock, and the rock is Christ” (Father Smith). Let us trust Divine Providence. We will conclude with these words of Ed Willock: “There is a strength far beyond our own that mans the helm of our family ship. Each joy and sorrow has a place in the divine scheme of things. Take one iota of trouble away, and the balance would be lost, the happiness less poignant, the peace less complete. This is Christian marriage, a stark, real, practical and full adventure; a thing of days, nights, years and eternity. The price we pay is merely to reiterate the original vow, ‘I will,’ saying over and over again ‘Yes’ to God and ‘Yes’ to each other.” Dear Newlyweds 269pp – Softcover – STK# 6730 – $15.00 Build a Marriage to Last a Lifetime Over the span of his 20 years reigning as the Vicar of Christ, Pope Pius XII took time out of his constantly busy schedule to visit with, console, and advise young newlyweds. These are those talks. Dear Newlyweds should be placed in the hands of every newly-married couple. It is a book to read, ponder, cherish, and be guided by, all through married life. Newlywed, married, and engaged couples will be inspired and uplifted by Pius XII’s explanation of Matrimony and his insight into the practical problems of everyday marriage. Dear Newlyweds is a book to turn to again and again. It is a sure guide as new difficulties arise—problems of discipline in the rearing of children, temptations against fidelity, relationships with elderly parents, and much more! For more details visit angeluspress.org or call 800-966-7337 65 Questions and Answers by Fr. Peter Scott, SSPX Is the administration of Extreme Unction valid if the priest does not anoint the hands and feet? The proximate matter of the sacraments consists in the application of the remote matter to the person receiving the sacrament. For Extreme Unction the remote matter is the Oil of the Sick. The proximate matter is the action of anointing with the holy oils. In the different rites of the 66 The Angelus May - June 2012 Church and even in the history of the Roman rite there have been different anointings, indicating the purification of the sins committed with each of the senses. The traditional Roman Ritual contains the anointing and order fixed by the tradition of the Roman Church, namely the anointing of the two organs, right first followed by the left, in the order: eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet. It is quite clear from this variation in the history and rites of the Church that Christ did not institute the remote matter in a determined way, but rather in a general way, as an external anointing of the body, symbolizing and producing the interior anointing of the soul by the grace of the sacrament. Thus it is that the Code of Canon Law states that any one anointing on any one sense, or in any one part of the body, suffices for the validity of the sacrament (Canon 947 in the 1917 Code and Canon 1000 in the 1983 Code). Consequently there can be no doubt that the omission of the anointings on the hands and the feet does not invalidate the administration of the sacrament. The question of the lawful administration of the sacrament is quite different. A distinction has to be made between the case of necessity, or the urgent case, in which there is only time for one anointing, as the person is at the immediate moment of death. In such a situation, the anointing, according to the traditional rite, must be done on the forehead, as containing all the other senses. However, if time remains afterwards, the priest is to go back and then perform all the other anointings that were omitted, for the sake of integrity. Outside the case of necessity, a further distinction must be made. The anointing of the feet may be omitted for any reasonable cause at all (Canon 947, §3), such as the simple question of modesty or inconvenience. Consequently, a person ought not to be surprised or concerned if the priest omits the anointing of the feet. This is not the case, however, with the hands, which must always be anointed, with the correct formula, for the sacrament to be lawfully administered. There can, nevertheless, be an exception even here. It happens from time to time that a person is lacking the organ that is to be anointed, such as an ear, or a hand or a foot. In such a case, the anointing is to be done on the adjoining part of the body, if it is possible. If this is not possible because there is no adjoining part of the body, then the anointing is to be omitted. For example, there is to be no anointing of the hands and feet in the extraordinary case of a person who lacks both arms and legs. Outside of these special cases, a priest who would carelessly or deliberately omit the anointing of the hands would be culpable of a fault, but the sacrament would still be both valid and fruitful for the person who received it. It is very unfortunate that the new rite for the “anointing of the sick” does not impose the traditional order of anointing, with its profound symbolism of the purification from the effects of all the sins committed with the various senses, and that as a consequence some might not appreciate the true value of the traditional order of anointing. Should a lay person have a spiritual director? Father Tanquerey in his standard textbook The Spiritual Life lists four principal exterior means of perfection that are normally necessary for the sanctification of souls. Spiritual direction is the first, for it “provides safe guidance” (p. 257). He goes on to explain that if spiritual direction is not absolutely necessary for the sanctification of the soul, it is nevertheless “one of the normal means of spiritual progress” (ibid.). The error of those who maintain that we do not need spiritual direction is in fact well refuted by Pope Leo XIII in his 1899 encyclical condemning false Americanism, Testem Benevolentiae. Speaking against the innovators, who place natural virtues above supernatural virtues and active virtues above passive virtues, he invokes the whole of Catholic Tradition in the spiritual life, and how this innovation is a refusal to be directed by our elders. He invokes, to establish his point, the case of Saul, at the moment of his conversion. He was told to go to Damascus, to find Ananias “and there it shall be told thee what thou must do” (Acts 9:7). The pope goes on to explain that God generally works upon men through the intermediary of another man, just as a spiritual director does upon those who trust in him: “God in His infinite providence has decreed that men for the most part should be saved by men; hence He has appointed that those whom He calls to 67 Questions and Answers a loftier degree of holiness should be led thereto by other men, ‘in order that’ as Chrysostom says, ‘we should be taught by God through men’” (In The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII, p. 447). All the spiritual authors admit the necessity of a spiritual director in the religious life, since it is a state of perfection, and since the religious has the obligation of tending towards holiness, and hence to have a guide to guide him and protect him from the dangers and deceit of pride, illusion, self-deception, excessive mortification, scruples, and the like. The question arises as to persons in the world, who say that they do not have the same obligation of tending towards perfection. It is certainly true that they do not have the special obligation of the vows, but they still retain the obligation of the Christian life itself, contained in the saying of Our Lord, “Be you therefore perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt. 5:48). For he who does not advance in charity will certainly fall back. The interior life cannot be static. St. Francis de Sales, the most renowned spiritual director, in his Introduction to the Devout Life, considers this to be a matter of great import: “Do you want to advance confidently along the path of perfection and the love of God? Then seek someone who can direct you. This is the most important advice I can give you. Search though you may, you will never find the will of God so surely as by the way of humble obedience” (Bk. I, Ch. 4). Spiritual direction generally goes along with confession, and it is advised for ladies to do it then and there. Yet it is not the same thing as it, but goes much further. “Confession limits itself to the accusation of faults; direction goes far beyond this. It reaches the causes of sin, deep-rooted inclinations, temperament, character, acquired habits, temptations, imprudences. This is in order to discover the right remedies, such as go to the very roots of the evil. In order to combat defects the better, direction is also concerned with virtues opposed to them, the virtues common to all Christians, and those special to each particular class of persons…” (Tanquerey, p. 262). Consequently, the simple fact of going regularly to confession does not constitute 68 The Angelus May - June 2012 spiritual direction. We need to ask our confessor to direct our soul, encourage us onwards, tame our imprudent impulses, and be the physician of one’s soul: “Why should we wish to constitute ourselves directors of our own souls when we do not undertake the management of our bodies? Have we not noticed that physicians, when ill, call other physicians to determine what remedies they require?” (Tanquerey, p. 260). A soul who is at a crossroad in life, or a soul who earnestly wishes to grow in the interior life, needs to find a spiritual guide. True, he need not be our regular confessor, yet he must be a priest who understands our soul with all its failures, weaknesses, and pettiness. How otherwise could he be our physician? If we cannot expect to have a saint as a spiritual director, let him be at least a man of God who has the necessary knowledge of ascetical and mystical theology. He needs also to understand souls from the intimate experience of years spent in the confessional. Finally, he must be a priest eager for God’s zeal who has at heart our spiritual progress. We can hardly expect proper spiritual direction from priests imbued by the errors of Vatican II and post-conciliar Modernism which have watered down all seeking for sanctity. Members of Third Orders ought to consider it a necessary means for their advancement in perfection that they have a priest who is a spiritual director, and who understands profoundly the spirituality of their order, and who preferably is a member of it. They should not fall into the trap of seeking spiritual direction from one another, but from one who is charged with this responsibility before God. If it has been said that the first spiritual director of a wife is her good and prudent husband, it remains true that a really spiritual woman needs also the second guide who, alone, has the grace of state of the confessor and director of souls. She will advance in perfection if she finds a spiritual father who, in her regular confessions, will encourage her to fight against her faults and strive to please her husband in all things. Church and World No Longer Island of Saints and Scholars Recently in Ireland, both North and South, a poll commissioned by the Association of Catholic Priests revealed sadly familiar results. – 75% find the church’s teaching on sexuality irrelevant to them or their family. – The level of disagreement among Catholics concerning sexual expression among homosexuals is very high: 60% believe there is nothing wrong with homosexuality. – There is an overwhelming majority (just under 90%) who believe that Catholics divorced or separated, and in a second relationship, should be allowed to receive Holy Communion at Mass. Only 5% agree with present Church discipline. – Just over 35% of Catholics attend Mass weekly or more often—this includes Christmas, Easter, funerals and weddings. – 87% believe priests should be allowed to marry. – 77% believe women should be ordained to the priesthood. – 72% believe mature married men should be given access to the priesthood. (Source: www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie) Analysis: Religious Liberty in Warsaw and in Cuba On March 27, 2012, during the Pope’s journey to Cuba, Fr. Federico Lombardi had told the press that the Supreme Pontiff had asked President Raul Castro to allow Good Friday to be a holiday in that country (see DICI No. 253, April 20, 2012). On March 31, the spokesman for the Holy See was able to announce that this request had been promptly accepted by the Cuban authorities and that from now on Good Friday would be a holiday from work in that Communist country. During the Mass that he celebrated on March 28, 2012, on Revolution Square in Cuba, Benedict XVI had stressed “the importance of the right to religious freedom, in both its individual and community dimensions, which manifests the unity of the human person as both ‘citizen and believer,’” (see DICI No. 253, April 20, 2012). One may ask, doesn’t this defense of religious liberty promoted by Vatican II directly contradict the traditional Catholic doctrine recalled by the Polish intellectuals, whose Petition for a more in-depth study of Vatican II was published in the last issue of DICI (No. 254, May 11, 2012)? In it, in fact, one can read this question, along the same lines as the teaching of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre: “How can we reconcile the right to restrict the public worship of other religious confessions, which the predecessors of Your Holiness granted to leaders of Catholic States in order to preserve the true religion, with the right to freedom from external coercion in public worship for any religion, a right that was raised by Dignitatis Humanae to the status of natural law, declaring that it had its foundation in the dignity of the human person? (DH, 2.9.) “Is not the dignity of the human person, correctly understood, manifested when he or she adores God in the true religion?” And they added this very pertinent observation: “As Catholics who are actively engaged in the public life of Poland, we cannot refrain from remarking that the idea of the liberal State, which is essentially neutral in matters of religion, effectively stifles the legitimate aspirations of Poles and also contradicts the most deeply-rooted values in the history of the Polish nation.” The question that arises is the following: Can religious liberty, which is an evil in Poland, now that it has become Catholic again after the fall of the Soviet regime, be a good in Cuba under a government that is still openly Communist? How can one accept the notion that the condemnation 69 Church and World of religious liberty by traditional doctrine is valid in Warsaw but not in Cuba? Still at the level of principles and without in any way prejudging the subjective intentions of those who are fighting or promoting religious liberty, here is the response given by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Secretary of the Holy Office to this question: “In States where a majority of the citizens do not profess the Catholic faith or do not even know the fact of Revelation, the non-Catholic civil authority must, in matters of religion, conform at least to the precepts of the natural law. In those conditions, this non-Catholic authority must grant civil liberty to all forms of worship that are not opposed to natural religion. This liberty is not opposed then to Catholic principles, given that it is suited both to the good of the Church and to the good of the State. In States where the government does not profess the Catholic religion, the Catholic citizens have above all the Contraception Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, issued a statement in March of this year showing why pro-lifers must also oppose contraception. His argument is very easy to follow. He states, “There are two basic truths we have to admit in this life. Firstly, there is a God, and secondly, it isn’t me.” To understand this is also to realize why abortion is wrong. Only God has an absolute dominion over human life. “None of us lives as his own master, and none of us dies as his own Master” (Rom. 14:7). Pavone explains, in a clear and orthodox manner, that this is also the reason why contraception is wrong. We know that human life begins at conception. However, God’s dominion over human life does not only begin at conception, it begins in eternity. As St. Paul writes, “God chose us in Him before the world began” (Eph. 1:4) and much earlier the prophet Jeremiah wrote: “Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew you” (Jer. 1:5). We exist in time because God chose us from eternity. A human decision to prevent conception is to trespass on God’s sovereignty over human life. 70 The Angelus May - June 2012 duty to win for the Church, by their virtues and civic actions whereby, together with their fellow citizens, they promote the common good of the State, the full freedom to accomplish her divine mission. Indeed, a non-Catholic State, too, suffers no harm from the free action of the Church and even derives many distinguished benefits from it. Therefore, the Catholic citizens must strive so that the Church and the civil authority, although still separated juridically, might offer one another benevolent mutual assistance.” This document by Cardinal Ottaviani, entitled “On Relations between Church and State and on Religious Tolerance,” had been rejected at the very first session of the Second Vatican Council in favor of the schema composed by Cardinal Augustin Bea, who was President of the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians. (Source: DICI) Poland: The Bishops Are Sounding the Alarm On March 29, 2012, in Warsaw, the Polish bishops released a 70-page document entitled “Out of Concern for People and for the Common Good.” In this document they warn their countrymen against the loss of Christian values in society, stating that “the country is at a turning point in its evolution.” The bishops discuss the negative demographic curve and the international economic crisis. They single out radical capitalism and maintain that the economy must be at the service of people and respect moral rules. They denounce the “serious problem” of emigration of Poles leaving to work abroad. This report, produced by the Polish Episcopal Conference (KEP), concludes that “despite many commendable achievements, a grave crisis threatens: a crisis of values which have maintained national unity for centuries.” Without these values, “ultimately the existence of Poland itself is threatened.” (Source: DICI) Germany: Free Distribution of the Qur’an Discontinued (May 25, 2012) Since October 2011 the printing house Ebner & Spiegel, in Ulm (Germany), delivered 300,000 Qur’ans ordered by the organization Die Wahre Religion (The True Religion) and earmarked for Operation “Read!”—a large-scale, free distribution launched by Salafist circles throughout the country. A German version of the Qur’an without commentary, the 500-page volume is offered free of charge on the streets of major German cities. The objective is to make all Germans acquainted with the Qur’an, in other words, to distribute 25 million Qur’ans, one for each family. On April 12, 2012, the printing house stopped producing Qur’ans, the German daily newspaper Die Welt confirmed, thus cancelling their contract for 50,000 additional copies. According to the organizers, more than 250,000 had been distributed as of that date. For some time now this project has caused uneasiness among German government authorities and the press, who see in it a sign of religious fundamentalism. The distribution is vehemently criticized by many political and religious circles, including Muslims. The head of the parliamentary party CDUCSU, Volker Kauder, “strongly” condemned this initiative. In his view, it “exploits the Qur’an for extremist purposes.” One hears the same within the liberal party, the FDP, which deems these distributions “inexcusable.” Its spokesman, Serkan Tören, called for the extradition of “non-German Salafists who violate the fundamental law.” In the opposition party, the Social Democrats of the SPD asked that surveillance of the Salafists be conducted. “If the authorities notice that there is a violation of rights and of the law, it would then be time to think about an interdict,” declared the SPD spokesman, Michael Hartmann. “Religion must not be misappropriated for ideological purposes,” German Minister of the Interior Hans-Peter Friedrich emphasized, “or for a demonstration of force aimed at imposing a political point of view.” The delegate from the Conference of German Bishops for dialogue with the Muslims, Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke, condemned this massive distribution of Qur’ans by the Salafists on April 13 in Hamburg. “Such campaigns disturb religious peace. They awaken aggressiveness and stir up distrust.” He called on Christians to remain calm and invited them to pursue the dialogue with the Muslims. For its part, the Muslim Coordinating Council (KRM) of Germany warned, on April 13 in Cologne, against an exploitation of the book of Islam. It fears that the debate surrounding the Salafists and their campaign “are being conducted behind the backs of the local Muslims.” Ibrahim Abou Nagie is the initiator of the project to distribute Qur’ans. This 47-year-old preacher and business leader, originally from Palestine, is established in Cologne. He intends “to bring the truth into the hearts of the people” by his campaign. German intelligence services estimate that there are 2,500 Salafists in the country, according to the AFP. “The distribution of copies of the Qur’an is covered by religious liberty, but the movement hiding behind it continues to be the object of surveillance,” one security source explained. (Source: DICI) Diocese of Cleveland Bishop Richard Lennon of Cleveland, Ohio, has announced that he will re-open twelve parishes after the Vatican ruled he had acted improperly in closing them. In February, opponents of the Parish Closing decisions announced that the Vatican had upheld their suit, ruling that the parishes should never have been closed. The Bishop said that he weighed an appeal of the Vatican ruling, but decided against it because “it’s time for peace and unity in the diocese of Cleveland.” The Bishop had closed 50 parishes altogether under a re-configuration plan that Bishop Lennon himself had approved. 71 The Message of Our Lady of La Salette On September 19, 1846, a “Beautiful Lady” appeared to two children of Corps in the French Alps: Maximin Giraud, 11, and Mélanie Calvat, 14, who were watching their few cows on the slopes above the village of La Salette, about 5,800 feet above sea level. She was seated and weeping, and then she rose and spoke to the children at some length in French and in their dialect, weeping all the time. Then she climbed up a path and vanished into light. The brightness of which she was made emanated from a crucifix on her breast, surrounded by a hammer and pincers, chains, and roses... “Come closer, my children; don’t be afraid. I am here to tell you great news. “If my people refuse to submit, I will be forced to let go the arm of my Son. It is so strong and so heavy; I can no longer hold it back. How long a time I have suffered for you! If I want my Son not to abandon you, I am obliged to plead with him constantly. And as for you, you pay no heed! However much you pray, however much you do, you will never be able to recompense the pains I have taken for you.” Si Si No No Laicity and Liberalism By Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize, FSSPX This article is Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize’s preface to his translation of the third volume of Cardinal Billot’s Treatise on the Church. This volume presents the last part of the treatise, which covers the sovereignty of the Church in the temporal sphere and its implications for civil society. Cardinal Billot begins the study of the relations between the Church and the State by analyzing the fundamental principles of modern liberalism. His critical study is still authoritative. The translator’s preface highlights its importance in the context of contemporary deviations. The third and final part of Cardinal Billot’s Treatise on the Church has remained the most well known.1 In it, the learned Jesuit gets to the very bottom of the error of liberalism. Liberalism is the tap root of the dechristianization of the modern world. The societies spawned by the Revolution of 1789 reject the social reign of Christ together with the indirect sovereignty of the Church which it implies in as much as they profess the principle of liberalism inscribed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This principle itself is derived, in varying degrees, from materialist atheism.2 It is the negation and the rejection of the truth expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas: “Now the Divine will is the sole rule of God’s act, because it is not referred to any higher end. But every created will has rectitude of act so far only as it is regulated according to the Divine will, to which the last end is to be referred: 74 The Angelus May - June 2012 as every desire of a subordinate ought to be regulated by the will of his superior; for instance, the soldier’s will, according to the will of his commanding officer.”3 If, contrariwise, the exercise of human free-will carries within itself its own rule and justification, it cannot but be good, just, and legitimate. It is considered an end in itself. But in that case human free-will would be confounded with God’s: this is the very principle of liberalism, which makes of human freedom an absolute. I. Preliminary Notions The truth expressed by St. Thomas and contradicted by liberalism is a principle. A principle is a fundamental truth from which flow all the others in the same order. That is the reason why error regarding principles is always consequential. It is therefore indispensable to comprehend these principles in order to form an adequate idea of the gravity of the opposing errors. The above-quoted passage from the Summa Theologica is compact, as are all statements of principle. It cannot be well understood without first clarifying, however briefly, a few basic notions of psychology. The faculty of the will has as its proper object the good, but this object is reached under two different aspects, which govern a radical distinction at the level of acts of the will. A voluntary act regarding an object willed for itself, like health, is not of the same kind as a voluntary act regarding an object desired only for its relationship to something else, as to take medicine. The first act is called the simple will or volition, and when it regards the absolutely last end, which is the first principle of every voluntary act, the theologians name it the natural will or will as nature 4; the second is called choice or election, and the theologians name it rational will or will as reason. This diversity of acts does not diversify the faculty of the will, for both aim at the object in so far as it represents a good.5 But the difference remains on its level. The act of simple volition is differentiated from the act of choice in that the object of the former is the end, while the object of the latter is the means. A radical tending of the will toward the end is one thing, the choice of means willed dependently on this end is another; such choice is the proper act of free-will.6 Freedom is not, therefore, a power properly so-called, distinct from the will; it is one of its tendencies.7 In relation to the absolutely last end, these two tendencies are not differentiated only because each regards a specific aspect of the good according to whether it is desired as an end or as a means. The difference is also in the mode by which the tendency is exercised. The tendency of the will towards the absolutely last end, the first principle of every voluntary act, is not a deliberate act because it regards what the will desires by nature and therefore (in a certain sense) necessarily.8 The tendency of the will towards the means is a deliberate act, for it must resolve an indetermination and choose something the will does not desire by nature and hence desires freely. Let us add: there is an order between the two tendencies and their mode of exercise. The will is nature before it is deliberation; it is determined before it determines itself. It is relative firstly to the order of the end, which it does not choose, and secondly to the order of means, which it chooses. The exercise of human freedom rests, then, in the last analysis, on a certain measure of determinism or of dependence. More precisely, freedom merely makes explicit the virtualities already contained in germ in nature. The human manner of proceeding to the attainment of the end remains radically a natural operation, in the sense in which nature is defined as what is determined in its fundamental tendency toward a perfection inscribed within it. This is understandable because human will is not master of its own end: it is the Divine will that assigns it the first and necessary object of its fundamental act, which is simple willing.9 Here, after a needed digression, we rejoin St. Thomas’s initial statement: “Now the Divine will is the sole rule of God’s act, because it is not referred to any higher end. But every created will has rectitude of act only so far as it is regulated according to the Divine will, to which the last end is to be referred.”10 For liberalism, everything happens as if there were only one order, first and absolute, that of means. The will is essentially free, for its characteristic action is choice.11 Its essential manifestation would be the absolutely autonomous action, the deliberation of which is freed from any objectively natural basis; it is a deracinated act in the strict sense of the word, that is to say, cut off in principle from any determination. Autonomy becomes the criterion of life and of courage, of morality, of heroism, and of holiness. It is easy to understand that the rejection of the social kingship of Christ logically flows from this principle. But this implication calls for two remarks. II. Crucial Terminology The one end laid upon all men is the glory of God and the eternal happiness of a creature endowed with reason. The attainment of this end necessitates recourse to a certain number of means, among which is the practice of the one religion willed by God. According to Cardinal Billot’s explanation, political society is defined in terms of a proper end which is only intermediary because “temporal”: the government of rulers ought to procure the common good in such wise that men may attain as easily as possible their last end, which is “spiritual.”12 Similar considerations would justify the requisite harmony between what is commonly called “the temporal order” and “the spiritual order”—a harmony that should flow from the necessary subordination of ends. The terminology currently adopted by writers, however, calls for some clarification. Temporal is exactly opposite eternal; it designates in the strict sense of the word a reality that, being subject to movement (per se or accidentally) is measured by time. In the broad sense, it designates corruptible realities (per se or accidentally), the existence of which is of limited duration. On the other hand, eternal designates in the broad sense an incorruptible reality the existence of which is of unlimited duration (strictly speaking, the adjective eternal is proper to God alone). Spiritual is the exact opposite of corporeal or material. Supernatural is the exact opposite of natural. The supernatural is always spiritual, but the spiritual is sometimes natural and sometimes supernatural.13 The temporal is sometimes natural and sometimes supernatural. The supernatural is sometimes temporal and sometimes eternal. To designate the power of 75 Si Si No No the Church, writers, canonists or theologians speak of the “spiritual” power in opposition to the power of the State, which is called “temporal.” Likewise, they distinguish a spiritual end, which is that of the Church, in relation to a temporal end, which is that of civil society and the State; and they speak of temporal society as distinguished from the Church, which is a spiritual society. But these two adjectives do not denote sufficiently distinct notions. Therefore they cannot be used to designate adequately the distinction that exists between civil society and the Church. The word temporal is not a modifier that designates civil society alone to the exclusion of the Church. On one hand, the Church is a society in the strict sense, and like every society, it is a reality whose existence possesses a limited duration here below since at the end of the world its power will disappear (there will no longer be sacraments or hierarchy or jurisdiction in the here after): the Church on earth (the Church militant), therefore, as such is a temporal society (like every State), in opposition to the communion of saints (the Church triumphant), which is an eternal reality in the broad sense. On the other hand, the Church has a twofold end. The Church possesses an immanent end, which is temporal since it is attained uniquely here below and lasts for the time corresponding to the duration of the world: this end is, in fact, the external activity that corresponds to the threefold unity of the profession of faith, the sacraments, and the hierarchical government. Now, the faith, the sacraments, and the hierarchical government are only for here below; their duration is thus limited to this world. The Church possesses a transcendent end, which is eternal, since it is equivalent to the mystical communion of grace and glory begun here on earth but destined to last eternally here after. The proper, immediate, and essential end of the Church is its immanent end. From the standpoint of its end, the Church is defined as a reality of the temporal order. Moreover, spiritual is not a qualifier that uniquely designates the Church to the exclusion of civil society. On one hand, civil society equates to an ordered union the foundation of which is the co-operation of rational beings qua rational; this union is thus spiritual in nature. On the other hand, the end of civil society is the common good that corresponds to virtuous human life and not just to procuring a sufficiency of material goods, which is merely the condition of the virtuous life. Considered from its end, civil society is also a reality with a spiritual dimension. If it were necessary to adopt precise terminology, we should rather say that the distinction between Church and civil society (or the State) is adequately expressed 76 The Angelus May - June 2012 by the distinction between the supernatural and the natural. But this nomenclature raises another difficulty, which calls for further clarification. Concretely and in fact, Divine Wisdom ordained that these two orders, natural and supernatural, would exist together. The first might have existed without the second, but it can no longer do so without it in fact, for it presupposes it as what is perfectible presupposes its perfection. And reciprocally, the second, as it exists, cannot exist without the first, for it presupposes it and integrates it, as perfection presupposes and integrates what is perfectible.14 Civil society exists in fact and concretely within a supernatural order. The last end to which it must be ordered is of this order, which is the proper end of the Church. Within this order, the Church presupposes civil society as perfection presupposes something that can be perfected. Civil society in its turn depends on the Church and ought to be subordinate to it as that which can be perfected depends upon that which perfects it and is subordinate to it. Of course, if they are considered according to their formal causes, the two societies are not situated within a common order in which their relations would obey the same general and necessary principles. They correspond to two distinct orders, the natural order and the supernatural order. Yet, when we are considering these formal causes, it is no longer from the concrete, really existing viewpoint of their final cause. Rather, it is from the theoretical and abstract viewpoint of essential definitions. Both perspectives are legitimate, but they are not the same. It cannot be denied that civil society in fact exists concretely within the supernatural order with an ultimate end of the same order. It remains, on the other hand, that qua civil society it essentially comes within the natural order by its formal cause. It could have existed without the Church in a state of pure nature. But now in fact, it can only exist in dependence of the Church, for its concrete perfection is not that of pure nature. The concrete perfection of civil society now is gratuitous and supplementary in comparison with an end that would have been sufficient in its own order had it been left to itself; and that is why now the perfectible comes within the same order as its concrete perfection only accidentally, not essentially. The concretely existing order is a supernatural order in which the natural order is involved in the same way that something that can be perfected finds itself included in perfection. But this consideration should not induce us to deny the essential distinction that exists between grace and nature, or to confound the natural and the supernatural under the pretext that both belong to the same concrete historical design. In this way, speaking of the respective concrete ends of Church and State, their adequate distinction amounts to that which exists between the last end and an intermediate end, between the complete end and a partial end within the same order. And if we speak of the essential and abstract ends respectively of the Church and the State, their adequate distinction amounts to that which exists between a supernatural end and a natural end. The second distinction does not contradict the first, for this first distinction is to be understood precisely in a concrete state of things in which the ultimate end is of the supernatural order which subordinates to itself the natural order. This subordination being admitted in its proper perspective, the motives that render it necessary ought to be properly understood. Within the concretely existing order, civil society is dependent on the Church as something that can be perfected is dependent on its accidental perfection. But perfectibility and perfection can be taken in two ways: something is made perfect in the first sense when, having been wounded, it is healed and restored to its natural health. Something is made perfect in a second sense when, being of a lower order, it is elevated to a higher order. The supernatural is the perfection of the natural in both of these senses. Grace does not merely elevate nature to a supernatural perfection; it also restores it to itself by healing the disorder incurred from original sin. It is undoubtedly true (to a certain extent) to say that civil society favors the attainment of the supernatural final end by acting as a removens prohibens, that is to say, by removing obstacles within the social order which might hinder the Church’s action. But this presupposes the activity of the Church, acting on civil society in order to heal its wounds and restore the proper natural perfection of society. The Collect of the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost appositely reminds us that if grace follows after us, it is only in the measure that it has already made its effects felt. For one cannot perform feats of prowess before being healed, and a sick man must begin by being well again before he can become a strongman. III. Of Liberalism and Religious Freedom Does the still current demand for a civil right to religious freedom (or of a political regime with a healthy positive laicity) as it is expressed in the Vatican II declaration Dignitatis Humanae necessarily originate in the rejection of the principle enounced by St. Thomas? This is an important question since some authors15 claim that Gregory XVI, and after him Pius IX, intended to condemn freedom of conscience in matters religious only insofar as this claim flowed from liberalism and indifferentism. According to this interpretation, the condemnation of Mirari Vos and Quanta Cura would not be incurred provided that the principle of religious liberty were affirmed without its being derived from liberalism or indifferentism. Now, still according to these authors, the declaration Dignitatis Humanae teaches the right to freedom of conscience in matters religious only for those who are in good faith, and not for the adepts of indifferentism. That is why, according to this interpretation, the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae would not contradict that of Gregory XVI and Pius IX. This interpretation does not stand up to an examination of the documents. Gregory XVI and Pius IX condemned freedom of conscience in matters religious per se, regardless of its circumstantial link with liberalism and indifferentism. The essential passage of the condemnation in Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos reads: “From this infected source of indifferentism flows that absurd and erroneous maxim, or rather this delirium, that it is necessary to grant everyone freedom of conscience. [Ex hoc puditissimo indifferentismi fonte absurda illa fluit ac erronea sententia seu potius deliramentum asserendam esse ac vindicandam cuilibet libertatem conscientiæ.]” The entire passage expresses two judgments: the first affirms that the demand for a right to religious freedom flows from indifferentism as from its source, the second affirms that this demand is wrong. The two judgments are independent. The second judgment, in effect, concerns the demand for a right to religious freedom considered in itself and not in relation to indifferentism. The adjectives absurda and erronea are a predicate attributed to the subject illa sententia, which strictly equates with the demand for a right to religious freedom and nothing else. The freedom of conscience in question corresponds to self-determination of human action, that is to say, the moral usage one makes of his psychological liberty; and this moral usage is envisaged in relationship to others, in relationship to society and to the civil authority, and not in relationship to God or a transcendent moral order. The other basic reference for this issue is the essential passage of Quanta Cura that expresses the same reprobation when it condemns the following proposition: “ ‘…the liberty of conscience and of worship is the peculiar (or inalienable) right of every man, which should be proclaimed by law, and that citizens have the right to all kinds of liberty, to be restrained by no law, whether ecclesiastical or civil, by which they may be enabled to manifest openly and publicly their ideas by word of mouth, through the press, or by any other means’” [§3]. Here Pius IX denounces as con77 Si Si No No trary to the order established by God the independence of human freedom from human authority. Once this independence is claimed, even if the autonomy of the conscience from Divine authority is not posited in principle, the condemnation of Quanta Cura is incurred. These distinctions should be given their full import, for these distinctions alone are what indicate why religious freedom as taught by Vatican II is inadmissible even if it doesn’t flow directly from liberalism pure and simple. Keeping in mind the general principles given above, freedom can be understood in four different senses. First, in the sense of physical freedom, it signifies freedom of bodily movement or the absence of physical constraint. In the second sense, denoting psychological freedom, it involves free-will or the indetermination of the will as regards the choice of means, as it is dependent on the intellect which comprehends the end. In the third and fourth ways, as moral freedom, it is a question of the self-determination of free-will, that is to say, the independence of the will in its choice of means: in the third sense, it denotes a direct and absolute independence in relation to the Divine authority fixing the transcendent moral order; in the fourth sense, it designates the indirect and relative independence in relation to human civil authority, whose laws express and specify the Divine law. The principle of liberalism, as Cardinal Billot analyzes it, claims as a right freedom understood in the third sense: the principle of unmitigated liberalism, which would free human will from all authority. The principle of freedom of conscience as enunciated by Vatican II asserts a right to freedom understood in the fourth sense.16 The expression “libertas conscientiæ,” which must be claimed as a right, precisely equates to independence in relation to other men, and in relation to the coercive power of civil authority, which Fr. Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., has called “sociocivic” freedom. In his Christmas Address to the Roman Curia of December 22, 2005,17 which gives the authentic interpretation of the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae, Pope Benedict XVI makes a distinction between the third and fourth meanings of the term “freedom of religion”: Taken in the third sense, it is to be reproved: “[I]f religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning. Consequently, it cannot be accepted by those who believe that the human person is capable of knowing the truth about God and, on the basis of the inner dignity of the truth, is bound to this knowledge.” But in the fourth sense, which 78 The Angelus May - June 2012 according to the Pope is implied by the second, the expression would be correct: “It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence [the fourth sense], or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction [the fourth sense as flowing from the second]. The Second Vatican Council, recognizing and making its own an essential principle of the modern State [the fourth sense of freedom of conscience in religious matters: cujus regio ejus religio has progressively become cujus conscientia ejus religio] with the Decree on Religious Freedom, has recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church.” Further on, the Pope states even more explicitly what meaning should be attached to the term “religious freedom” taught by Vatican II: “The martyrs of the early Church died for…freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess one’s own faith—a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God’s grace in freedom of conscience.” This is indeed the freedom meant in the expression condemned by Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos and by Pius IX in Quanta Cura. Far from correcting the faulty teaching of Dignitatis Humanae on religious freedom, Benedict XVI’s Christ­ mas speech forcefully and clearly confirms it. But there is thus a direct contradiction between Benedict XVI’s statement and that of Gregory XVI. There is also and especially a utopia, that is, an impossible dream. How is it possible, at one and the same time, to affirm that man is bound by the knowledge of divine truth and proclaim that no social authority may prohibit anyone, whoever he may be, from doing that which would hinder the profession of this same truth? Man is by nature a political animal, which means that he can only connect with divine truth on condition that he live in society. If he lives in a society in which the public authorities must in principle refrain from impeding the social propagation of error, how can he remain bound, in a concrete, effective way, by the knowledge of divine truth? This is the incoherence analyzed in its root by Cardinal Billot,18 the incoherence of liberal Catholicism, which has survived in neomodernism. IV. Social Theology and Ecclesiology The Christian social order constitutes a major chapter of ecclesiology. There is nothing surprising about this. Cardinal Billot carries on the thinking of the authors of the Early Church, who had no experience of dechris- tianization such as that of the modern era. In their eyes, the Church is inseparable from civil society. Both enter into the composition of one and the same edifice. This idea is made explicit very early, as soon as the theology of the Church is elaborated. It appears already, in any case, in the very first treatise of ecclesiology, which was authored by Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (13881468).19 A figure of the distinction of these two powers as well as their indissoluble union, he says, occurs in the Old Testament in the third book of Kings.20 Solomon built the temple; Solomon is a type of Christ, an architect full of wisdom. The edifice has an atrium (figure of the Church militant) and the temple proper (figure of the Church triumphant). The atrium itself has a portico supported by two columns, which figure the two powers of the Church militant. The left column figures the less worthy power, the secular power. The right column is called Joachim, which means præparans aliis firmitatem. This expression designates the pre-eminence of the spiritual power over the secular power. Each of these two powers corresponds to a hierarchy, and at the top of each is placed a head, the pope for the spiritual power, the king for the temporal power. Juan de Torquemada concludes this description by quoting the words addressed at the end of the fifth century by Pope St. Gelasius I to Emperor Anastasius: “There are two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power. Of these that of the priests is all the more weighty, in that they have to render an account for even the kings of men in the divine judgment.”21 Here we are still a long way from religious freedom. Religious freedom has wrought, in the etymological sense of the word, decomposition; and, quite often, this is the result, in the social order as in the physical order, of corruption. In the circumstances, the corruption is even worse as it attacks the highest principles. A continuator of earlier theologians, Cardinal Billot defends the Church’s principles and stems the corruption. His work assures the transmission of a vital heritage. It ought to remain for Catholic minds one of the major expressions of the Church’s Tradition. 1 A translation of Question 17 of this treatise, devoted to the analysis of liberalism, has already been published: Louis Cardinal Billot, The Principles of 1789 and Their Consequences [French] (Téqui, 1989). 2 Cf. Billot, Treatise on the Church, III, Nos. 1141-1156, 1177-1182. (considering the first principles) and to reason (by deducing conclusions from first principles) are not two distinct faculties, but two acts proper to the same power of the intellect; hence, due allowance being made, to make an act of simple volition (by regarding the end) and to choose freely (by regarding the means) are not two distinct faculties, but two acts that are proper to the same power of the will. 3 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q. 63, Art. 1. 4 “Will of nature” and “volition,” then, are not strictly equivalent terms. End and means are only adequately distinct when the last end, that is, the one good that cannot otherwise be willed than for itself, is set apart from every other good which is willed in view of the last end. It is in this sense that the natural will is distinguished from the rational will. The object of the first is the end; and of the second, the means—the end and means here being considered as absolutely adequately distinct. But every other good beside the last end can be the object of volition as the basis of a number of choices: in this case we are speaking of intermediary ends. A good that is willed as an intermediary end is an end relatively speaking, that is to say, in relation to other goods willed for its sake and thus the object of volition, but absolutely speaking it continues to be a means in relation to the unique good which is the last end, and hence an object of the rational will. Cf. on this point James Ramirez, De Actibus Humanis, No. 464, p. 333, & No. 488, p. 352. 5 St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, III, Q. 18, Art. 3. 6 Ibid., Art. 4. 7 St. Thomas Aquinas proves this in the Summa Theologica, I, Q. 83, Art. 4, by making an argument a simili: everything happens on the level of the will as it does on the level of the reason, which means that the relationship that exists in the mental faculty of knowing, between understanding and reason, is equivalent to the relationship that exists in the appetite between volition and free-will, which is nothing else than the power to choose; now to make an act of intellection Translated from Courrier de Rome, September 2011. 8 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, 82, Art. 1, corpus: “As the intellect of necessity adheres to the first principles, the will must of necessity adhere to the last end, which is happiness: since the end is in practical matters what the principle is in speculative matters. For what befits a thing naturally and immovably must be the root and principle of all else appertaining thereto, since the nature of a thing is the first in everything, and every movement arises from something immovable.” Still, where the necessity lies needs to be clarified. The fundamental tendency of the will towards the end (the simple will) is an act that is partially necessary and partially free or contingent: It is necessary from the viewpoint of its specification or of its object because it turns on what the will desires by nature; it is free from the standpoint of its exercise and necessary only inchoatively. It is necessary in its beginning because it results from God’s moving the will, prompting it to pass into act so that it can will; it is free in its consummation or term because it is elicited by the will. The first act of simple will is necessary in as much as it is passive, and free in as much as it is active. It is free in its exercise and in its being by concomitance with a Divine motion that renders it necessary in its essence. That is why an indeliberate voluntary act and an absolutely necessary act are not the same thing: an indeliberate act can be not necessary and remain free—not, obviously, absolutely, but with regard to its exercise. It is one thing to will deliberately something and another to will freely. Every deliberate volition is free, but every free volition is not deliberate. Cf. on this point J. Ramirez, De Actibus Humanis, commentary on the ST, I-II, Q. 10, Art. 4, No. 363. 9 ST, I, 82, Art. 1, ad 3. 79 Si Si No No 10 Ibid., I, 63, Art. 1, corpus. 11 For an insightful treatment of this question, see Charles Journet, L’Esprit du protestantisme en Suisse (Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1925), pp. 186-90. 12 Cf. No. 1153 of Billot’s Treatise on the Church. 13 Cf. Charles Journet, L’Église du Verbe Incarné, Vol. II: “Its Internal Structure and Its Catholic Unity” (Desclée de Brouwer, 1951), Pt. 1, Ch. 1, p. 7: “The word spirit can be understood in two different senses.” One aspect of the new theology of Vatican II is the assimilation of “spiritual” and “supernatural,” and thus, subtly, the confounding of nature and grace. Thus, for example, in No. 23 of the Constitution Gaudium et Spes, the Church declares it has the task of fostering the spiritual progress of mankind: “Inter praecipuos mundi hodierni aspectus, mutuarum inter homines necessitudinum multiplicatio adnumeratur, ad quam evolvendam hodierni technici progressus plurimum conferunt. Tamen fraternum hominum colloquium non in istis progressibus, sed profundius in personarum communitate perficitur, quae mutuam reverentiam erga plenam earum dignitatem spiritualem exigit. Ad hanc vero communionem inter personas promovendam, Revelatio christiana magnum subsidium affert, simulque ad altiorem vitae socialis legum intelligentiam nos perducit quas Creator in natura spirituali ac morali hominis inscripsit.” 14 80 Summa Theologica, I, Q. 2, Art. 2 ad 1: “…for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected.” Natural perfection is required for supernatural perfection in the sense that it is the choice ground of supernatural perfection, the indispensable, albeit insufficient, locus without which supernatural perfection cannot take root. Grace cannot do without nature, even if nature is powerless to originate grace. The Angelus May - June 2012 15 The most famous artisan of this interpretation is Msgr. De Smedt, the official relator for the schema on religious freedom, who in his report of November 19, 1963, said: “As we see, freedom of conscience is condemned because of the ideology preached by the proponents of rationalism, based on the notion that the individual conscience is lawless, and unfettered by any divinely transmitted norm” (Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vatican II, Vol. II, Pt. 5, p. 491). 16 “This Vatican Synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs. Nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits….This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed. Thus it is to become a civil right.” [“Declaration on Religious Freedom,” The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott, S.J. (Herder and Herder, 1966), pp. 678-9.] 17 Benedict XVI, Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia and Prelature, December 22, 2005 [online at vatican.va]. 18 Cf. Billot, op. cit., Nos. 1157-1163. 19 Juan de Torquemada, Summa de Ecclesia, Bk. 1, Ch. 87. 20 III Kings 7:1-22. 21 DS 347 [English version: translated in J. H. Robinson, Readings in European History (Boston: Ginn, 1905), pp. 72-73, online at www. fordham.edu/halsall/source/gelasius1.asp]. E-Books Angelus Press now offers E-Books! We're proud to bring some of our most popular Traditional Catholic titles regarding the Society of St. Pius X, Family Values, and more to the most popular E-Book format: The Kindle. Visit www.angeluspress.org/E-Books to order yours today! — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music 425pp – Color Softcover – STK# 8481 – $29.95 The Pilgrim’s Guide to Rome’s Principal Churches A guided tour of fifty-one of the most important churches in Rome. Includes a history of each church, descriptions of the interior and exterior, a numbered floor plan, photographs, and details of the church’s spiritual, architectural, and artistic treasures. Whether you plan on visiting Rome and using this as a guide or reading it to learn about the “Eternal City,” this book offers the modern pilgrim essential information on the fifty-one most significant churches in the city. Special treatment is given to St. Peter’s Basilica, St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, St. Paul Outside-the-Walls, and St. Lawrence Outside-the-Walls. Joseph N. Tylenda, S.J., has spent a good part of his professional life in Rome. He earned a doctorate in theology from Rome’s Gregorian University in 1964 and taught at the same university from 1970 to 1973, while doing editorial work at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. He was appointed to Rome again in 1985 as a member of the Historical Institute of the Society of Jesus. 1002pp – Hardcover – STK# 8547 – $49.95 Commentary on St. Matthew’s Gospel Buy St. Thomas’ Commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew In the mid-thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas gave a series of lectures commenting on St. Matthew’s Gospel. However, when this commentary became published, it was considered “incomplete” and “defective.” This centuries-old mystery was finally resolved in 1955 with the discovery that fraudulent, sixteenth-century substitutions had tainted two chapters. A manuscript containing the actual words of Aquinas was discovered a year later in Basel, Switzerland. Now, for the first time ever in English, this edition of the Commentary presents the restored, never before seen, complete and authentic text of the Angelic Doctor’s lectures. Particularly useful as an aid for preaching sermons, this masterly commentary contains many detailed explanations and numerous cross-references to Scripture, Church Fathers, as well as other works of St. Thomas, which are continuously interwoven throughout this simple but profoundly enlightening text. 248pp – Color Softcover – STK# 8471 – $16.95 Catechism of the Crisis What can faithful Catholics do in the midst of an unprecedented crisis in the Church and in the world, and especially today in the midst of more blatant and open Christophobia? The first thing we have to do is understand the truths of the Catholic faith, and to understand the errors, both inside and outside the Church, which threaten that same Faith. This excellent work by Fr. Gaudron will help us to grasp the true roots of the modern crisis and the gravity of the problems affecting us. Originally published in order to both solidify our understanding of the principles behind the crisis and as an aid to help those who do not see the gravity of the current situation, this work follows the traditional catechetical format: Each question is followed by a succinct response, and then by a series of more detailed questions and answers that justify and elaborate the general answer. 718pp – Softcover – STK# 8035 – $22.95 Marcel Lefebvre: The Biography This comprehensive work by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais is an insightful look at the life of one of the most influential bishops in the 20 th Century and in the history of the Church. Here is a life that cannot be overlooked. The biography takes us through his early childhood in a deeply Catholic family in France, through his days in the FrenchSeminary in Rome. From there it carries us to his missionary days in Africa, and his meteoric rise through the Church’s ranks, including his role as Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers. Finally, much attention is given to the most profound and important chapter in his life: the founding and direction of the Society of St. Pius X. A true gem for anyone interested in this Athanasius of our time, and indispensable for anyone studying the history of our beautiful Catholic Church. www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music Letters to the Editor Dear Angelus Press, As a long-time subscriber to The Angelus, I’ve noticed that many of the articles have decreased in length. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’ve found the new layout to be more reader-friendly than previous issues. I was just wondering if that’s a temporary change for the past two issues, or if it’s a new style you’ve adopted. Thanks for the great work! Deborah Maryland Thank you for taking the time to send us a letter. We love hearing from our readers as it helps us to better tailor the magazine to our audience, while always maintaining the fight for Catholic Tradition. In response to your specific question, “have we intentionally shortened the articles?” the answer is yes, and there are a couple of reasons for this. First, it’s important to us that the Truth be accessible. One of the common responses we used to receive is that articles are simply too long and too in-depth for many of the fathers and mothers who make up a large segment of our audience. A shorter, more direct article that helps and educates our readers is far more important to us than a longer, more complex article that many don’t have the time to really sit down and digest. The second reason we did this is to give you more content from different experts and thinkers. In the past, we may have dealt with one major subject from one great author. In that case, the article was closer to eight or nine pages. Now we’re able to tackle the same subject (like Vatican II) from three different authors all taking different vantage points (i.e. history, doctrine, biography). We think this gives a more balanced and complete understanding of the subject being discussed. That being said, you may occasionally see articles that are longer in length when that becomes necessary. While we want to make our articles accessible to as many people as possible, we will never do that to the detriment of a full picture of the subject, or of the Truth. Our first priority and focus has been, is, and always will be the promotion of Catholic Tradition! Angelus Press 84 The Angelus May - June 2012 Dear Angelus Press, Recently I participated in a celebration of St. Patrick’s Feast at a home and I would like to comment on practicing the ideal you promoted in the latest issue of The Angelus. I had so much fun singing together with a chorus of happy men that I cannot resist quoting Hilaire Belloc on the subject: “We will note as the years continue how, while all other pleasures lose their value and gradation, Song remains, until at last the notes of singing become like a sort of sacrament outside time, not subject to decay, but always nourishing us, for Song gives a permanent sense of futurity and a permanent sense of the presence of Divine things. Nor is there any pleasure which you will take away from middle age and leave it more lonely, than the pleasure of hearing song.” G.K. Chesterton lamented the fact that families no longer get together in the evening to sing old ballads and folk songs. “One of the most marked instances of the decline of true popular sympathy is the gradual disappearance in our time of the habit of singing in chorus.” Happily this is no longer true at St. Marys. I will also quote our dear Dr. John Senior (who, by the way, would have been pleased with this evening): “Civilization is the work of music... [We need to restore Catholic culture] in the home so that boys and girls will grow up better than we did, with songs in their hearts...” I hope that the articles in this Angelus will help all of us to rediscover the feeling of satisfaction caused, as Hilaire Belloc says, by the fact that when we sing in chorus, “We are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment that I am astonished people hear of it so little. Whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can really be very happy for long – but I mean reasonably happy), and, what is more important, decent and secure of our souls.” May our parishes be places, as John Senior says, where “families are together at home in the evening and love will grow again without thinking about it, because they are moving in harmony together.... “Love only grows on the sweet sounds of music.” Keep up the good work at the Angelus. A teacher at St. Mary’s We welcome all letters to the Editor. Please send us a note at editor@angeluspress.org. 85 186pp – Softcover – STK# 8534 – $12.95 146pp – Softcover – STK# 8544 – $9.95 Minute Meditations To help us gain a truer self-knowledge, along with a deeper love for God, the Church has always recommended mental prayer as a necessary part of the spiritual life. But what do we do, when our jobs take us far from home, or the craziness of everyday life in the modern world prevents us from having an ideal amount of time to devote to that meditation? Seeing a real need for a short work to assist Catholics in this struggle, Angelus Press has reprinted Fr. J.E. Moffat’s classic Minute Meditations. Now available, this short book of daily meditations will be a simple, but profound companion and aid to your spiritual life. Reflections on the Kingship of Christ This little book provides the reader with the key texts to understand, love, and defend the Church’s constant teaching on the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Along with biographical information about the speakers at the 2011 Angelus Press Conference, this book presents the relevant encyclicals from Popes Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII in their entirety, plus articles from the late Cardinal Pie, Fr. Juan Carlos Iscara, FSSPX, and Dr. John Rao. A must-have for those Catholics committed to restoring all things in Christ. The restoration of Christ’s Social Kingship is the only antidote for today’s anti-Catholicism! 287pp – Softcover – STK# 8246 – $14.95 Jesus, Make Me Worthy Originally published in 1960, Angelus Press has reprinted this classic in stunning full color. A prayer book for young Catholics in a language so simple that every child can understand, combining much useful instruction for Communion and Confirmation with a large selection of devotions and prayers. It is truly a beautiful little book. Ideal for First Holy Communions and Confirmations, but suitable for any occasion (or no occasion). Everything a Catholic child must know about the practice of the Catholic Faith & spirituality—all packed into 287 pages. Includes tons of prayers and over 90 illustrations (over half are in full color). 156pp – Softcover – STK# 8239 – $12.95 Marian Children’s Missal The perfect missal for children 4-8. Originally published in 1958, Angelus Press has reprinted this excellent children’s missal in an attractive, easy-to-use book. Includes: – The Ordinary of the Mass – Readings for All Sundays and Major Feast Days – Prayers Before and After Holy Communion – Indulgenced Prayers – A Child’s Preparation for Confession, – Much More! www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music The Last Word Dear Readers, Today (April 24) three out of fifteen Catholic World News articles focus on the persecution of Christians. These articles touch upon a few of the many ways in which the faith and faithful are attacked in the United States, in England, and in Sudan. In America, for example, Archbishop Wenski of Miami emphasized recently that “freedom of religion is under great stress if not under outright assault” as the result of “a reductive secularism that has more in common with the French Revolution than with America’s founding.” In England, Catholic legal experts warn that, “If Great Britain recognizes same-sex marriages, churches will be compelled to solemnize such unions, regardless of the assurances that have been given by Prime Minister David Cameron.” Finally, on the evening of April 21 in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, a mob of several hundred Muslims set fire to a Catholic parish. This is yet another sign of the escalating conflict between the country’s overwhelmingly Muslim north and the largely Christian and animist south. Archbishop Lefebvre, on numerous occasions, predicted that such aggression must happen sooner or later, and that those who embrace the faith in its integrity would be the main target of these persecutions. At the time, even some of the Traditional faithful suspected that the Archbishop’s bleak description of the future must be a pessimistic exaggeration. Now, twenty years later, the signs of an imminent persecution are manifest and alarming. Once more—and unfortunately for us—Archbishop Lefebvre has proved himself a prophet. Let us face up to the facts: all those who wish truly to remain faithful to Christ and His Church will, without a doubt, have to suffer some sort of persecution for their faith. The quiet, peaceful days are over. Difficult times are upon us, and all signs indicate that they will only get worse. Should we fear the future? Yes ... and no. Yes, if we have become overly comfortable in the practice of our faith, confident in our well-furnished and smoothly running priories and chapels, forgetting that hard work and suffering are the sure routes to heaven. Too often we are content with a relatively superficial, even insufficient knowledge of the Catholic truth. Pleased, moreover, with a minimal prayer life, we run the risk of hearing the words addressed to the Christians of Ephesus: “I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first charity” (Apoc. 2:4). No, if we seriously start to transform our lives. We must cultivate an outstanding knowledge of the faith and its application to the various situations in our lives through earnest and persevering study. No, if we stay true to the disciplined practice of daily prayer. Our children, too, must be educated to ensure a bright future for the Church. The JulyAugust issue of The Angelus will thus focus on “education” and will hopefully outline the basic principles for this important work, one upon which depends the salvation of our souls. In Christo, Father Jürgen Wegner The Society of St. Pius X is an international priestly society of common life without vows, whose purpose is the priesthood and that which pertains to it. The main goal of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X is to preserve the Catholic faith in its fullness and purity, to teach its truths, and to diffuse its virtues. Authentic spiritual life, the sacraments, and the traditional liturgy are its primary means of bringing this life of grace to souls. The Angelus aims at forming the whole man: we aspire to help deepen your spiritual life, nourish your studies, understand the history of Christendom, and restore Christian culture in every aspect. $ 7.00 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: The Angelus, 480 McKenzie Street, Winnipeg, MB, R2W 5B9