may 2005 $4.45 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition The Conversion tale of Fr. Self-Abandonment To Divine Providence Rev. Jean-Pierre De Caussade Probably the greatest classic on surrendering our wills to Divine Providence (God’s will). Shows how sanctity is to be attained amidst our common daily activities when performed to perfection and for the love of God. Written to help those who despair of ever becoming holy. A great and famous classic! 450pp, softcover, STK# 8084. $22.50 The Sinner’s Guide Ven. Louis of Grenada A favorite of St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and St. Vincent de Paul. St. Teresa of Avila credited this book with having converted over a million people in her time. This is the most persuasive book we know to encourage people to abandon sin and embrace repentance and virtue. The logic is relentless and effective. For mastery of subject, command of Scripture, and total impact on the reader, no book surpasses The Sinner’s Guide! 395pp, softcover, STK# 8085. $15.00 Life Everlasting: The Four Last Things Fr. Reginald GarrigouLagrange, O.P. A theological treatise for lay people on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Discusses the roots of vice and virtue, purgatory before death, final impenitence, the grace of a happy death, the particular judgment, reasons for hell, the pain of loss, the nature of eternal beatitude, etc. An enlightening study of man’s final destiny. 274pp, softcover, STK# 8082. $16.50 Right and Reason: Ethics Based on Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas Rev. Austin Fagothey, S.J. Written in non-technical language, the author zeroes in on the essentials, precisely defines the questions, and gives the soundest answers that Philosophy has to offer. In 35 chapters he covers the field of Ethics and the Natural Law: Why is lying never right? Why is divorce always wrong? When is it moral to kill another person? and more! 627pp, softcover, STK# 8079. $25.00 Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma Dr. Ludwig Ott Recognized as the greatest summary of Catholic dogma ever put between two covers. A one-volume encyclopedia of Catholic doctrine. Tells exactly what the Church teaches on any particular topic, when the pronouncement was made and gives sources from Scripture, Church Councils, Papal statements and the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. The Spiritual Combat Dom Lorenzo Scupoli A famous Catholic classic on the strategy for achieving spiritual perfection and salvation. Shows how to combat our passions and vices with an intelligent method in order to achieve a final victory. Also shows how to concentrate one’s energies to make constant progress. One of the Church’s all-time greatest books on the spiritual life and a favorite book of St. Francis de Sales. 544pp, softcover, bibliography, index, STK# 8093. $27.50 240pp, softcover, STK# 8086. $12.00 Lives of the Saints for Every Day of the Year Saints of the American Wilderness The most popular Catholic book after the Bible, the Missal and The Imitation of Christ. A Saint or two for each day of the calendar. Great for a daily meditation; each life is followed by a “lesson” to help us apply the virtues of the Saint to ourselves. Great for the entire family. All recounted in a beautiful, reverential spirit - contains no editing by Attwater or Thurston. Based upon the letters and reports written by the Jesuit missionaries themselves: the famous Jesuit Relations written between 1610 and 1672, which were published in a series of 73 volumes. In their day, the missionaries’ letters were the most powerful means of attracting new workers to the harvest. A work worthy of its subject: the Jesuit North American martyrs. Rev. Alban Butler 428pp, color hardcover, STK# 8083. $20.00 Rev. John A. O’Brien 258pp, color hardcover, Illustrated, STK# 8090. $15.95 The Three Conversions in the Spiritual Life Rev. Reginald GarrigouLagrange, O.P. Sets forth the classic Catholic traditions on the spiritual life as the full flowering of Sanctifying Grace in the soul. He explains the three stages of the spiritual life– the Purgative Way, the Illuminative Way, and the Unitive Way–showing the transitions or conversions from one period to another. 112pp, color hardcover, illustrated, STK# 8087. $7.00 The Ottaviani Intervention Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani & Cardinal Antonio Bacci One of the most important documents of the Conciliar era. It contends that the New Mass teems with dangerous errors in doctrine. In their oftquoted letter to Pope Paul VI, Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci conclude: “...the Novus Ordo Missae...represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated in Session 22 of the Council of Trent.” 63pp, softcover, STK# 8078. $8.00 “Instaurare omnia in Christo—To restore all things in Christ.” Motto of Pope St. Pius X The ngelus A JOURNAL OF ROMAN CATHOLIC TRADITION 2915 Forest Avenue “To publish Catholic journals and place them in the hands of honest men is not enough. It is necessary to spread them as far as possible that they may be read by all, and especially by those whom Christian charity demands we should tear away from the poisonous sources of evil literature.” —Pope St. Pius X May 2005 Volume XXVIII, Number 5 • Kansas City, Missouri 64109 English-language Editor and Publisher for the International Society of Saint Pius X PUBLISHER Fr. John Fullerton EDITOR Fr. Kenneth Novak ASSISTANT EDITOR Mr. James Vogel OPERATIONS AND MARKETING SIGN, FAITH, AND SOCIETY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Dr. Frederick Wilhelmsen JOB HUNTING VERSUS VOCATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Carol Robinson BISHOP FELLAY’S SERMON GIVEN AT ST. MARY’S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Mr. Christopher McCann SECRETARIES Miss Anne Stinnett Miss Lindsey Carroll CIRCULATION MANAGER Mr. Jason Greene DESIGN AND LAYOUT Mr. Simon Townshend SHIPPING AND HANDLING Canadian North American Martyrs Pilgrimage ..................................... 17 Fr. Stephen Somerville Toy Power .................................................................................................... 23 Mrs. Colleen Drippé Mr. Nick Landholt Mr. Jon Rydholm PROOFREADING Miss Anne Stinnett TRANSCRIPTIONS Miss Mirian Werrick QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Fr. Peter Scott THE CONVERSION TALE OF FR. OWEN F. DUDLEY . . 26 Fr. Owen F. Dudley NEWS FROM THE EASTERN FRONT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Fr. John Jenkins THE BLESSED VIRGIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication offices are located at 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri, 64109, (816) 753-3150, FAX (816) 753-3557. Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, Missouri. Copyright © 2005 by Angelus Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Manuscripts are welcome. They must be double-spaced and deal with the Roman Catholic Church, its history, doctrine, or present crisis. Unsolicited manuscripts will be used at the discretion of the Editorial Staff. Unused manuscripts cannot be returned unless sent with a self-addressed, stamped envelope. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Angelus, Angelus Press, 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64109-1529. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré ON OUR COVER: Fr. Owen Francis Dudley (1882-1952), famous author and convert to the Catholic Faith. His conversion story “The Conversion Tale of Fr. Owen F. Dudley” appears in this issue of The Angelus (pp.26-33). THE ANGELUS SUBSCRIPTION RATES US, Canada, & Mexico Other Foreign Countries All payments must be in US funds only. 1 YEAR 2 YEARS $34.95 $52.45 $62.90 $94.50 2 SIGN, FAITH, AND SOCIETY D r . F r e d e r i c k W i l h e l m s e n Our Holy Church through its leading theologians has always distinguished between sanctifying and actual grace, the latter being some “motion” produced in the will leading a man to accept God’s sanctifying grace, grace in the full sense of the term. This same theological tradition, without exception to my knowledge, has divided actual grace into any “person, place, or thing” which moves the whole man, intellect and will, emotions and pre-dispositions, to accept that saving grace which sanctifies. I doubt gravely whether any instructed Catholic would quarrel with these definitions. Grace does not come to a man in the abstract, not because grace is limited in its power and efficacy, but because there is no man in the abstract. Even the “anonymous Christian” of Karl Rahner must be triggered somehow into accepting salvation. God does not work in a human void because he has not created man in a void. How could He THE ANGELUS • May 2005 3 have done so? Man by his very nature is a social being, created always by a direct act producing him out of nothing, but created within a social fabric surrounding him, nourishing him, influencing him, buoying him up in the innumerable crises each man confronts in his life, or oppressing him. For the political philosopher and for the theologian of politics it is by no means difficult to arrive at the conclusion that man is saved by God or damned by himself within some society in which he is born, nurtured, raised. Epistemologically [Epistemology: The branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity–Ed.], this proposition is perhaps best validated when we take account of the truth that in man to understand is to communicate: intelligere est communicare. Receiving its highest articulation in the thought of both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, intellection is completed or terminated only in some verbum–a word of the spirit–in which each man says to himself what it is that he understands. Symbolized in our country in older cartoon strips in which a light bulb goes off in the head of someone who has now gotten the point, seen the light, because he can say to himself what he understands, St. Thomas insists that nobody understands anything until and unless he can “say it” to himself. Knowledge at its point of perfection is self-knowledge, but this communicative structure of the act of knowing in man is distended in that he says to himself what he knows through the instrumentality of signs and symbols which gesture to the world what he has come to understand. It follows that selfcommunication is consubstantial with communicating to “the other,” the other man, the human world surrounding us, the content of our understanding. It follows that understanding and the movements of the will following on and often conditioning understanding are not exercised in isolation. We live in some society and that society insinuates the corporate affirmation of its members. No man is an island, as somebody once put it. No movement of the heart towards God is done in an island. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked on an island and he kept a diary, writing down everything he did and thought, from the wood he gathered for his primitive house to his deepest meditations on his life in isolation. Ultimately he found the man whose footprint he had seen in the sand of the beach: his Man Friday. But Crusoe’s “Man Friday” in a profound sense was Crusoe himself, an artistic substantialization of his prolonged conversation with himself. I once knew, without knowing, an old man whom I saw on the bus every day at the same time when I was studying at the University of San Francisco after the War. This fellow always crouched in the back of the bus and muttered to himself: “Don’t give your money to her; put your money in the bank; don’t give it to her; put it in the bank.” This was not, as some shallow people insist, a mark of insanity. Talking in this way to yourself is a last grip on sanity. Old people do this very often because there is nobody who cares to talk to them. Communication is identically intellection in man. The poor devil who is forced to live alone necessarily invents an alter ego and he carries on a lively dialogue with this self-created puppet who is the last moving shadow on the backdrop of his consciousness, separating him from the loneliness of insanity. To understand is to communicate to both self and other and in this act man becomes himself. A Christianity cut off from the other man is not only not Christianity which is a corporate religion but it is not even human. In communicating my Faith to myself I communicate it to others. An hermetically sealed Christian affirmation is not only bad theology: it is bad psychology and bad epistemology as well. It is natural that man gesture forth to the world his faith and it is natural that the society around him gesture forth its faith to him. No man is an island. Yet a secularized Christianity, if indeed it can be called Christianity at all, would divorce the Faith from the forum and restrict the Christian to the status of a Robinson Crusoe before he found his Man Friday. If we translate these propositions, themselves metaphysical [Metaphysics: that portion of philosophy which treats of the most “Tantum Ergo Sacramentum...” THE ANGELUS • May 2005 4 general and fundamental principles underlying all reality and all knowledge.–Ed.] and epistemological, into political terms it follows that whatever an individual man knows and whatever decisions follow on his knowing are necessarily conditioned by the world surrounding him, even as he conditions that same world. After all, we can only know what there is to be known. If what is there to be known is conducive to the reception of sanctifying grace, so much the better. If what is there to be known is hostile to the reception of grace, so much the worse. The enemies of a Christian society, of an order of things inclining to the reception of grace, if indeed they be Christians (most of them today, of course, are not) must argue their case on other grounds: liberty, the pluralist society, democracy, and I know not how many other points of departure. Since the secularized society which is the norm in our age pretends to base itself upon some ultimate principles, that society– divested of the Things of God–must necessarily seek its justification elsewhere: the majoritarian principle, as though 50% plus one equals truth even though this ephemeral majority shifts with the capricious winds of fortune. The very articulation of the majoritarian principle is sufficient to disqualify it as a criterion for governing a community. Whoever found the truth of things by counting noses, or the principle of total liberty (in this case a liberty cut away from ends which are loved)? Nobody, teaches St. Thomas, is free about his ends–he is free about indifferent means to achieve his love, his end. Liberty as an end is a contradiction in terms. Nobody knew this better than Lenin when he said to Trotsky on a train outside Moscow after the revolution in answer to Trotsky’s “but now we are going to have liberty, are we not?” Lenin: “Liberty, for what?” Lenin’s ends were evil but his epistemology was exactly on target. All liberty is for the sake of what we love. Nobody is free when he is in love. He might and often does lose his love, change his love, forget his love, but so long as he loves he is not free. There is something eternal about love even if it lasts for only a moment. The secularist’s apologia for a totally secularist society on grounds of the primacy of liberty, democracy, or any other presumed good related thereto, is not only bad philosophy: it is an instance of bad faith, of a failure to understand man as he really exists. We are created to love and our liberty of choice emerges when we seek means to achieve our love. “Ab esse ad posse valet illatio–From being to possibility is a valid inference.” This basic law of logic finds a splendid verification in history if the question arises about the existence of a sacral society. Such have existed. Therefore they are possible. The more ultimate question is the following: are such societies desirable? Although their remains clutter the highways of Europe and America, such communities have largely ceased to exist. Surrounded as Europeans THE ANGELUS • May 2005 are by the visual remains of a Christian order–in architecture, in song, in customs–there is not one political state in Europe today that is confessionally Catholic. It would be interesting to postulate a visit by a man from another galaxy to Europe, a man who had already mastered our languages. What would he think when he landed at Rheims, or at the Escorial, or at St. Peter’s? What would this poor fellow think as he passed through the byways of Bavaria–with its wayside shrines, its churches? He would have to conclude–being an intelligent chap from beyond–that this continent is totally and wholly Christian, Catholic, sacral. Then he would begin to read–always a dangerous proposition; then he would study constitutions, usually a worthless occupation, and he would come up with the most contradictory conclusions: these people, in everything they built are Catholic; these people in everything they write, are anti-Catholic, or–at least–secularist. How can I, this fellow from beyond the moon, figure this out? A society whose every byway, crook and corner, expresses and breathes the Faith and a society whose written documents and laws either deny or set aside as irrelevant that same Faith. What have we got here? An enormous cultural schizophrenia–what was built was Christian: what is said and affirmed is either nonChristian or anti-Christian. The laws are against the Faith. The buildings affirm the Faith. What is visual is Catholic. What is written is not so. My man from beyond the moon is not so utterly fantastic. Take a man from America in Europe surrounded by the signs of the Faith in a continent that progressively denies it. As somebody who has done some work in the Philosophy of Communications–I wrote two books on the subject–I confess my perplexity. Visually–a continent saturated by the Faith. Given the written word and the power of the State, I confront an order that denies the very buildings in which it signs its decrees and executes its laws. Since buildings are not made by themselves, I–an American–must conclude that Europe has ceased to believe in itself. Just think of France, where it is estimated that there are more practicing Islamics than Catholics. The ambiguity of Europe in this regard is not altogether negative. Europe is materially Catholic even though it would be hard to argue that Europe today is formally Catholic. God calls upon us to rework His Creation and fashion it in such manner that it is worthy of Catholics. Europe is largely already re-worked. It bears the mark of Christian men everywhere, almost around every corner, looking out on every field, breathing over every farmhouse, celebrating every holiday which is a Holy Day, alighting on every wayside shrine, re-vivifying itself in every procession, the cross everywhere. What Europe needs to do is come home to itself, not to go anywhere else. (Something comparable can be said of our own Southwest.) It is as though we are the old barbarians camped in the ruins of Rome, 5 blind to their meaning. One human sense, the visual, is wrenched away from speech and its significance and contemporary man lives in a kind of Platonic or Cartesian duality in which part of him is ignorant of what the rest is doing. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the lights of Broadway on a clear night would be the most poetic of all visions provided we were illiterate and could not read the neon signs. In the Europe of today we see the remains of a Christian Order, and they are of an unsurpassed beauty, but we have lost faith in what they portend. SIGN LANGUAGE But all these considerations return us to our theme. In a world without the signs of salvation, salvation will be still possible, but very difficult indeed. Let us consider the nature of the sign. Every sign makes known what it signifies. This is true of traffic signs and of other neutral signs. A neutral sign is one that can be changed at will. This switching of signs is a mark of man’s spirituality but the issue is complicated when the sign becomes a symbol. Every symbol not only points to something, its signification beyond itself, but in some way it participates in the reality signified. For this reason we burn blessed palms when they are no longer of use to us for fear they might be violated by some profane hand. For this reason we abhor the violation of the flags of our own nations, their burning or being trampled in the dust. The symbol lives the life of the symbolized. John of St. Thomas put it splendidly when he insisted that the “signified” was present in “the sign” in alio esse, in a new being or existence....But when the sign becomes more than itself, when it becomes a symbol, then indeed the affirmation of John of St. Thomas takes on an awesome truth. The being signified, signed, does indeed live within the symbol in another mode of existence. The Navaho rain dance not only is a sign of rain but it is supposed to produce, effectively bring into being, the rain it signifies. All symbols are of this nature. We need only think of the plain and unattractive woman who makes herself attractive through all the magical potions of modern cosmetics. In looking attractive, she becomes attractive. Advertising is an instance, possibly at times a debased instance, of the truth in question. Very few signs indeed are totally neutral. Most of them somehow insinuate into their very reality the being of the signified. The symbol works upon the emotions, the memory of a history lived by one’s ancestors, in such fashion that it stirs the will which in turn moves the intelligence to ponder. In all of this the whole man, the human person, is affected for good or evil in the deepest recesses of his being. A wayside shrine with its cross and possibly the faded flowers at its base is easily passed by a man on a train in a hurry, looking absent-mindedly out of the window. But if that cross is come upon by a pilgrim walking slowly up the slope crowned by this simple edifice it might very well trigger into consciousness a whole theology the consequences of which finger Eternity. Such a shrine for such a man is an actual grace. FAITH IN THE FLESH Our Catholic religion is an incarnate Faith in which we believe in a God, the only God, Son of His Father, who became Man. The Incarnation of Our Lord–God-Man who broiled fish for his disciples after His Resurrection and who permitted, earlier, doubting Thomas to place his hands in the wounds of His Cross, by an internal dynamism gestures itself out to the world, both physical and social, both personal and political. As does every man communicate what he knows and loves for the world by an in-built dynamism which is one with his nature, so too do Catholics sign the world with the signature of their Faith. We bless everything that comes our way with the Sign of the Cross and in so doing some mysterious efficacy passes over into the reality thus blessed: bread at table, sons seeking the approbation of their fathers as they enter into the adventure of life, kings at coronation time for every coronation in the Catholic West is a sacramental; God is everywhere, even in the pots and pans as insisted St. Teresa of Avila. Abstractly everything in nature is neutral; existentially very little is neutral. Nature is either sacralized or de-sacralized. The world is charged with God, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manly Hopkins reiterated in his verse. The most profound ontological problem with the secularized West today is that its presuppositions operate on a purely abstract level. Church is not State. Politics is not Theology. Theology is not Philosophy. Some of these propositions can be entertained and even defended abstractly. Such distinctions are foreign to the thrust of my thinking in this article....A Catholic Order is one in being. Scholars can–indeed should– differentiate the religious from the natural, but all these distinctions–in sacral societies–are annealed into a unity of existence in such fashion that a Catholic man from afar can walk through the streets of any village in this order and experience, say to himself, I have come home: this is a Catholic Society. In talking to himself as a Catholic he is talking to and through a world itself Catholic in existence. The secularization of the West has left all of this behind even though its visual husk remains to both instruct and trouble the man from afar. I take as revealed the following proposition: God wills every man to be saved. I take it as evident that he is more easily saved in a society that buoys himself up in the Faith, that surrounds him with symbols of his salvation. Given that my major premise is evident within a Christian context, my minor premise–some societies render it easier to attain salvation than do others: i.e., sacral societies–my conclusion is THE ANGELUS • May 2005 6 Seminarians inevitable: man is better off in a sacral order than out of it. Permit me to hammer this point home. Is it better to make salvation hard by surrounding man with the pornography of the media, the atheism of state education, the savage jungle of the streets all over our world where drugs poison our youth,–is it where the inner city becomes a killing ground, better to suffer all of this in the name of a new god, “democracy,” or were it indeed better to see him reared within a thoroughly Catholic Order? To me the very posing of the alternatives permits only one answer: give us again, Lord permitting, a Catholic social order where women can walk through the streets of a city at two in the morning (I knew this in the Spain of General Franco); where little children playing on the side walks will not be the prey of perverts; where the media do not scream the desirability of extramarital sex; where decent folk can turn the corner and find the cross of Christ as a reminder of the mystery of their own lives. We need, in attempting to understand these issues and in laying them before the table, to speak plainly and not to avoid offending a world press and a mass prejudice against all things Catholic that suffocates sane discussion throughout the entire Western world. I do not defend the Catholic Enterprise because it is compatible with or torwards democracy or the free market as does Dr. Michael Novak in the US. LOOKING BACK TO GO FORWARD I am by no means suggesting that we return to the Middle Ages. No man can undo time. This irreversibility is part of its in-built sadness. Who can go home to the innocence of his childhood? But I am suggesting that every paradigm for the future is always crafted out of materials drawn from the past. Our very past is structured around the drive of our future. We remember what is of use to the intentional thrust of our existence. This at least Heidegger can teach us. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 Rushing up the hillside with Our Ascending Lord. Brother leads the band. Everything else from our past we tend to forget. Show me what a man remembers of his past, both personal and corporate, and I will tell you what kind of a man he is. Americanists look back to the late 18th century. I look back to both the High Baroque of the CounterReformation and, more distantly, to medieval Christendom. Both of us must look back when we talk about the future because the future, as future, is a blank. The present is a past the moment we think about it. This is the way we are built as men. Even Gnostics do this as did the French revolutionaries when they aspired to a new classical antiquity. I look back to Christendom. “ t 7 Childrens’ palm procession at Eucharistic Congress. “Remember man that thou art dust....” In our time a thesis has been advanced according to which an adherence to the natural law is the very best to which Christian men can aspire in our highly divided and secularized Western world. Indeed some thinkers, such as the late Jacques Maritain, confined the older sacral order to the infancy of Christianity and urged in many books a collaboration between Christians and others in the building of a secular world quickened by Christian principles but “lay,” although not “laicist” (to use Maritain’s distinction) in its institutional configuration. In our country the illustrious Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J., in his famous book We Hold These Truths defended the thesis that the natural law was the basis of the consensus that united Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. I have noted that Murray’s thesis reflected the optimism of the 1950’s in the United States. A natural law consensus for a few years did in fact seem a viable possibility but that hope soon faded away. We have a public religion in America and it is called secularism. The myriad abortuaries with their daily slaughter mounting into tens of millions over the past few decades is a living proof gainsaying the hopes of Fr. Murray. No natural law consensus exists anywhere in the West today. We must grant that abstractly the natural law could be forwarded under any kind of polity, be it democratic, aristocratic, or monarchical or in any one of the very many ways in which the goods enshrined in these diverse forms might be combined, “mixed” to use the scholastic term. But a political order dedicated to the natural law in isolation from the Faith has never worked historically. Because it has never worked historically, I am prohibited logically from denying that it ever could, but I am permitted, even commanded, to note that the natural law, itself a participation in the Divine Law, without an authoritative voice competent to interpret its very often difficult applications, is a tiger without teeth. Even more: in the severe crises each one of us faces from time to time in our lives, it is the grace of God that gets us through the adverse tides of temptation and the storms around. Although we might well be guided by the natural law, it is the grace of God proffering His Divine Will, united always with the Cross of Christ, which saves and alone saves, that pulls us through. A social and political order adhering solely to the natural law isolated from Faith has simply never worked historically in the large and certainly has never worked concretely in the anguish of decision when a man faces the awesome visage of hell or that same salvation won for us on a terrible Cross. SYSTEMS CAN SAVE OR DAMN Unless man–most men at the very least–are buoyed up by a society surrounding them that breathes the Faith THE ANGELUS • May 2005 8 symbolically they are going to fall and, in most cases, they will fall badly. I am thinking, among other things, of a system of education in which the Cross presides over the classroom. And I am utterly unconvinced by the argument of the followers of Jacques Maritain that the Cross can preside in the heart of the teacher without publicly being nailed to the wall of the classroom itself. Our Faith is incarnational and if the Cross weaves its grace into my heart and mind, then I will gesture it into physical existence by nailing it to my desk, office, place of business, and certainly in any building in which I presume to teach. An anonymous Christian à la Karl Rahner ought to be anonymous only because, if otherwise, he would be thrown in jail. Tens of thousands have died, murdered behind what until yesterday was the Iron Curtain. A secular democracy, itself not secularistic, à la Maritain, is not only defective theoretically but it is a psychological impossibility. If I know The Good News, I proclaim it everywhere. If to understand and to love are communicative, then I cannot love and understand the Faith unless I sign the world, scribble my signature, on every wall and tower, in every legislative assembly, and in every chancery to which I might be privy. Romano Guardini once wrote that there was a Catholic way to climb a tree. Frankly, I never discovered it and I, for one, in my childhood usually fell off the trees I tried to climb. But the principle annunciated by the German theologian is admirable. No man, again I repeat the truism, is an island. No Catholic ought ever to be alone. A sacral society appeals not only to the intellect and to the will but to man’s sensibility and emotions. We might recall here with benefit St. Thomas Aquinas’s insistence that the human person is the totem, the totality of any man in existence. Not even my soul is my person, argued the Common Doctor: my soul is personale, personal, and although the resurrection of the body cannot be demonstrated by natural reason, that resurrection is suggested by the very unity of the human person, body and soul, emotions and will, intellect and senses. It is the whole man standing on the soil of this earth who is the person. To dissect one part of him–the religious–from the whole–the political from the religious, man as worker from man as player: homo faber from homo ludens: the economic from the familial; the aesthetic from the social, is to sunder into smithereens him who is a unity in existence. Humpty-Dumpty once shattered on the ground below, it is impossible “to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.” So too, if man’s integral life is severed into slivers that man’s unity is gone. So too with a social and political order. Secularism in the West has divorced man’s religious affirmations from his political life. The sacral unity which once covered Christendom is now gone–except, as I pointed out earlier, in the visual reminders of what Christendom once was. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 SPLIT PERSONALITY I take it as evident that something is awry in a man who is a Catholic and who has to forget that truth when he becomes a politician or a professor or anything else. Such a man is harmed psychologically (in his mind) because he is harmed ontologically (in his being). He has to wear two or three masks at once, shifting from one to the other as he moves through life. We have become so accustomed to this masked ball, this charade, that often enough we are not even aware of the damage being wrought in the depths of our being. We have become “Sunday Catholics” and we behave ourselves at work, in our parliaments and congresses, in our daily walk through life, as though what we most deeply believe must not be articulated publicly for fear of offending secularist sensibilities. All I can say here is, let secularists look to their sensibilities; ours have been offended ever since the French Revolution and it is time that in reevangelizing the West we occupy the homes of power that are our own by inheritance. Re-evangelization demands re-sacralization. A personal regeneration in the souls of isolated and privileged individuals will not cut the ice. What is needed–I have argued the thesis here–is a corporate, including an aesthetic, restructuring of society so that the Incarnation itself–with all its consequences–signals its sacred meaning to men everywhere. The world, including the political world, must again become a Sign of Salvation. Secularization in the West can go no further. It has reached its apex. Politically and socially we could hardly secularize anything more. The curve of secularization has been drawn to its conclusion, its perfection. That very perfection is the seed of its destruction. We have spent four centuries and more in chasing God out of the forum. The whole enterprise had no other motive in mind. It succeeded and in so doing secularism will now give way to something else. We must invite the Lord back into the forum. This calls from us, I am convinced, a single response. We must convert the world to the Church of God. Each one of us must become an apostle. Were we to do this, each of us would be a sign, a symbol, an actual grace, flashing to the world his conviction that everything begins, perdures, and ends in Jesus Christ, King of Kings. In the Piazza di San Pietro in Rome, we all know there is an enormous obelisk, the largest of some dozen or so in the city. All were spoils from the pagans and under this, the greatest of all, pagan inscriptions chiseled out, are the words: Christus vincit; Christus regnat; Christus imperat. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Ph.D. received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Madrid. He was Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the University of Dallas for 30 years. This article was taken from the Summer 1994 issue of Faith & Reason and used with permission. Dr. Wilhelmsen in now deceased but was once a frequent author in The Angelus in the mid-90’s. 9 from The Magazine c a r o l r o b i n s o n JOB-HUNTING VERSUS VOCATION Nothing could be more unnatural by way of discovering one’s life work than the current, debasing system of “job-hunting.” It would be more dignified, and nearer the true ideal, to be born a slave who grows up to take his place on his master’s plantation. At least such a one has a place. Back of today’s perusal of the want-ad columns, back of today’s dreary trek from employment agency to employment agency, back even of the scheming and conniving through one’s father’s friends for “pull,” is the terrifying assumption that one is extraneous to the world’s affairs, that there is no place waiting but that an opening has to be hacked in a desperate competitive effort at survival. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 10 The Catholic idea and the currently accepted method are poles apart. The Catholic idea is vocation; our commercial reality is job-hunting. We still speak of a vocation to the religious life or the priesthood, but the term used to apply to all occupations. Why was it lost? We lost the sense of vocation, indeed the reality of vocation, in the process of changing from an organic society to a mechanical one, a change which paralleled the development of industrialism (whether or not it was an inevitable consequence of industrialism is beside the point at the moment). In an organic world everyone does what needs doing, what one seems fitted for, and what it is is usually obvious enough. One takes one’s place, a place which is already waiting. Péguy somewhere says that he can even remember as a child the last remains of such an organic economic life in France, and that then the workmen went to work singing. In such a society a young man often followed in his father’s footsteps, for his father could easily have owned his own farm or his business or his craft. There was a stability in society. One could foresee and prepare for the future. Property and wisdom and skill were passed from generation to generation. Yet it was not a rigid society, provision being made for exceptional vocations, whether religious or scholarly. Now all that is completely changed. We no longer spontaneously do what needs doing, but we frantically hasten to get in on something which might be making money. For most of us that means finding a place in someone else’s scheme for money making. There is no great permanence about the scheme itself, nor do we have security in our jobs from the point of view of being irreplaceable. An enforced security usually involves sacrifice of any interest in the job forever afterwards. If you want to get out of a routine rut you have to swing from limb to limb of the tree of success, always taking chances, always courting disaster. For the most part it is useless to try to follow one’s father’s footsteps, as he owns nothing and has no particular skill to pass on, but is often just an employee himself. One might as well start at the bottom rung of another ladder, which might even be in another social class. There is no stability anywhere, nor is there even much desire for stability. Little people, as most of us are, with dull jobs, can at least express our dissatisfaction by a restless moving from one stupid job to the next. THE FACT OF VOCATION The truth that we need reminding of is that we still all have vocations, that we are still all called by God to do His proper work where He wants us to be. This is what modern youth, almost nurtured on despair, will find it hard to believe. Our failure to believe is the measure of our lack of faith. We must never forget that God is not frustrated, either by bad economic systems, or by atomic bombs, or by THE ANGELUS • May 2005 STUDENT MOST LIKE seemingly ruined lives. It is always within the power of God to bring good out of evil. Since men of late have disobeyed God, pretty much in a body, the result is that we have made an unprecedented mess of affairs here on earth, and that probably vast numbers of souls have been lost, and are being lost, on account of it. The result is that our vocations are ever more insistently vocations connected with the reorientation of things to God. Our vocations are still there. It is just that they are harder to find and to fulfill. When God asks hard things He gives us the grace to do them. We shall need the grace. The key to understanding our times is to realize that mediocrity is impossible: either you are holy or you are lost, either you are with God or you are against Him. THE UNIQUE NATURE OF TODAY’S VOCATIONS There is no point in crying over spilt milk or sighing for a more ordered society. You ought not to wish that you were a gently-bred English aristocrat instead of a New York City office girl with a Brooklyn accent. We are called to be saints, not culture vultures; and Brooklynese, previous personal experience as an alcoholic, night-school at Hunter College, and stillunmarried-at-twenty-eight, may prove to be more LIKELY TO SUCCEED useful states in the economy of today’s salvation than a perfect command of the French language, classical features, or a Ph.D. in Psychology. It certainly would have been unseemly of Joan of Arc to have refused to command an army on the grounds that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. The important thing is to do the will of God, to allow ourselves to be called to the vocations which God wishes, and for which we may find we were remotely preparing (according to the mysterious economy of God’s Providence) even in the midst of heartache and darkness. We may not want to live in our own time, but God is always operating in the present, nor can it truthfully be said that we are unfortunate in the choice of our generation. Pius XI thought it a singular privilege to live in such exciting times. And so it is. It is a time for saints. The thing which is hard today, which is virtually impossible, is to muddle along. Certain generalizations can be made about today’s vocations, just from viewing the times. Certain it is that you will not be swimming with the crowd. You will definitely be going against the tide–at least until we succeed in changing the direction of the current. That is why job-hunting is so futile. The sort of jobs that are open are all jobs within the system, but we have to change the system, and most of the work will not be done from within. This is also why the 11 educational system is off the beam. In general it is preparing us to fit in, where it ought to be preparing us to make over. There will be, and in fact there already is, an increase in religious vocations to the contemplative life. The Trappist Monasteries, and the Carmels, are filling up, or are already full. The penance and prayer therein will form the basis for the work of those whose vocations are in the world. There will also be an increase in vocations of suffering in the world. There certainly is an increase in suffering, which seems to indicate (to the cancer victims, the starving and the oppressed) a vocation to suffer willingly that the world may turn again to God. There are no real secular vocations today, that is, vocations to do the work of the world (which could be good in itself, of course) without regard to religious considerations. This is especially true among the young, and it is what is meant by a general call to the lay apostolate. Today’s street cleaner will have to work to convert his fellow street cleaners; today’s doctor will have to restore Christian ideals of medicine; today’s millionaire will have to start, for example, a movie company to tell of God; today’s mother will have to raise saints (and stop undue worry about health, education, and manners); today’s writer will have to write the Good News; and vast numbers of us will have to get out of what we are doing or what we are trained to do, in order to initiate or cooperate with some other work we haven’t yet dreamt of. Now the basic reason for this change from secularism is that all the problems that are important problems today are spiritual problems at their roots, and we Catholics have to attack the problems at their roots. That means that not only must we have religious motives and spiritual development, but what we are doing must have as its discernible end the restoration of all things in Christ. FINDING YOUR VOCATION As we have said, it is harder than usual to find one’s vocation. It is hard because it is hard to know, to find out; and it is hard because it takes sacrifice and faith to accept it. The rules for finding one’s vocation can be derived from the word vocation itself. A vocation is, literally, a “calling,” and the person who is doing the calling is God. The chief rules are three: 1) Get within earshot; 2) Listen carefully; 3) Believe what you hear. RULE 1: GET WITHIN EARSHOT If God is going to speak to us, we have to get near enough to Him to be able to hear. The chief reason that people go around wringing their hands and saying “Oh, I don’t know what to do with my life,” is THE ANGELUS • May 2005 12 that they are spiritually too under-developed to find out. Very many people miss their vocations entirely by not developing their spiritual life. What happens is that they try to find out what to do with themselves on a superficial intellectual plane. They decide, in effect, “Wouldn’t it be nice for God if I wrote a radio play about His birth, because after all I can write (I’ve been writing Pepsi-Cola ads for years) and Christmas ought to have a religious note to it.” So they write the radio play, and it is done in a very worldly way, using all the usual radio tricks, borrowing a cast from “John’s Other Wife,” and edifying no one. The unbelievers who happen to tune in are confirmed in their suspicions that Christianity is dull and dead. A few pharisaical church-goers consider that they have pleased God by listening. Meanwhile, a radiojournalist (himself a fallen-away Mormon) hails the playwright as a “prominent Catholic litterateur,” which goes to our author’s head, and he eventually develops a state of consummate pride. So the idea is not to think up something nice to do for God, but to approach God with some humility in the hope that He will give you a task. The way to do it is through the Sacraments. Anyone who really wants to learn his vocation ought certainly to start going to daily Mass and Communion if this is at all possible, to go regularly (probably weekly) to confession, to seek out a good spiritual director, to do good spiritual reading and to learn to pray. If no obstacle is put in the way, the Sacraments will act gradually to transform such a person, to make him increasingly docile to the inspirations of the Holy Ghost, to give him more and more insight into contemporary life. From this it can be seen that one cannot find one’s vocation overnight. Finding a vocation is not like consulting a job clinic, where for $10 or so you can take a few tests to learn where you can fit into the system with the least pain and the most profit. No, if you are a person who has not seriously cultivated his interior life to date, it would be well to set aside six months or a year just for the purification process, wherein the Sacraments have some effect, preferably unmolested by strong interference from radio and movies. RULE 2: LISTEN CAREFULLY God shouts. Hearing God’s call is not like straining for an overseas shortwave broadcast. It is perfectly clear and local once you are within earshot. It is characteristic of the saints that they are sensitive to the slightest prompting of grace. Will an inner voice speak? No. God will first of all use natural means. Chief of these natural means is your intellect. It is absolutely requisite that you start thinking. Start reading the good Catholic books and pondering them in the light of your own experience. Start reading up on Catholic Action. Start asking yourself, or discussing with your friends, the proper THE ANGELUS • May 2005 questions about your own life. Ask yourself what you are doing in your present job, whether or not it has a worthy end, whether or not it is completely honest. Start meditating on the Bible. Ask yourself what it means to seek first the kingdom of heaven, to live by faith. Thrash all these things out. Another nudge from God is your desires. Now it is the way of the world to crush all normal desires in the interest of developing dutiful, dull bookkeepers. Try to imagine what you would do if you were perfectly free, whether it paid or not, and whether such an occupation already existed or not. If you have a dull job, just walk out on it for a day sometime to get a sense of freedom (that is, do this if you are the over-conscientious type. If you are already lax in your duties you had better work overtime instead, to develop your sense of responsibility). Usually it is what you once longed for, and never dared hope for, which was really in line with your vocation. The person who is aching to get married is usually meant to marry. If you love to take care of the sick, give speeches, teach people, plant flowers, play instruments or carve statues, that usually means something. No one has a persistent inner compulsion to file premium coupons, sort toll-call numbers, watch professional baseball, or talk about silly things in crowded, stuffy, little night-club rooms at wee hours of the morning. If you can’t think of anything you want to do, you are probably suffering from despair. You should cultivate the virtues of faith and hope, and start dreaming again. If all you want to do is lie on beaches in Florida or sip tall drinks in steamer chairs, you have been thoroughly corrupted by the advertisements and would do well to take a “cure,” in the form of giving alms, fasting for Lent and abstaining from masscirculation magazines. Recreation is not an end in itself. Besides using your head and your wishes to find your vocation, you must take careful note of circumstances. God doesn’t say “Yes, Johnny,” or “No, Johnny,” in so many words. He says them, in effect, in circumstances. If you suffer a severe disappointment, that’s usually God saying “No, Johnny.” Disappointment in love, loss of your job, failure to get a promotion, especially when these things come through no fault of your own, indicate the will of God, and are therefore blessings in disguise. If we were saints we would praise God for them, seeing that they are all useful toward our final end. All things work together for good for those who love God. On the other hand, God often gives opportunities, and then He is beckoning us. Seemingly chance meetings with people of like mind, invitations to join Catholic Action groups, and such things God uses to maneuver us into our vocations. As a person becomes docile to God’s Will, such opportunities present themselves more and more often, and it becomes impossible not to see the guiding hand of God. 13 RULE 3: BELIEVE WHAT YOU HEAR HOW TO KNOW YOU’VE FOUND YOUR VOCATION God does not sit down with you and say, “Now Mary, I want you to found a religious order to take care of some sick people on Easter Island. First I want you to quit your job in the telephone company, then I want you to go to nursing school, then I want you to enter such-and-such a religious order–but you will leave there after six months, it’s just to give you training–and then I will arrange for you to have Father X, who is coming over from China, as your spiritual director, and he will tell you about the Easter Island people.” No, God does not tell us where He is leading us. That’s the whole point, we have to go from step to step by faith. The supreme thing that God asks of us is faith, that we do not falter or lose confidence while He leads us through the darkness. That is why we have to be interiorly developed, to have strong virtues which will keep us from losing confidence. In the days of a Christianly ordered society most men could see clearly where they were going. Now very few of us can see God’s way. The pagans think they know where they are going because they are trying to construct the road themselves; but they are in for some surprises. So in consequence we have to proceed from step to step darkly. If it seems that God badly wants you to quit your job, you had better quit it, even if you haven’t got another one. If the next step seems to be washing dishes at $10 a week, wash dishes at $10 a week and be cheerful about it–maybe you are getting some indispensable purification in the matter of poverty. If you have to give up your worldly friends, do so without reluctance. Just giving up something that is bad because you are now sure it isn’t pleasing to God may be the very act of faith that will start a chain of events leading in the right direction. We live in a world that has faith only in money. We have got to have faith only in God. We have to be instruments, and so our chief virtue must be docility (which is something quite other than the sloth born of despair). Who has not felt the internal disquiet that comes from pursuing a course which everyone accepts but which seems phony to you? Who has not sensed the degradation of trying to “sell yourself” to some impressive employment manager? Well, when you set out on your vocation you will have the opposite feeling. Everything inside will be in order. You will feel you are doing right, and it will make sense to your mind, at least some sense. But outside you may run into a riot. There will be people to tell you that you are betraying your social class. There will be your family to say you are throwing away your chances of success. There will be your father wondering why he sent you to college anyhow. When you get there you will know you have arrived at your goal by the sense of rest and relaxation that will set in. There will be a peace such that it will almost sing out “I belong here,” and there will be this peace even if “here” turns out to be on a martyr’s gibbet set up in Times Square, or a soapbox set up in front of a howling mob of Communists, or if it turns out to be a cave in a barren waste some place. What’s more, you will find that you are not envious of what anyone else is doing, even if it is in itself more interesting or important. All the unengaged girls are envious of the one who captures the local Clark Gable, but let Mary find the man God has chosen for her and whom she sincerely loves, and, be he crosseyed, she will not covet any other man. It is plain to be seen that the world’s unhappiness is at present greatly intensified by the fact that most people have not found their vocations. As long as you are not in your right place you envy everyone who has any sort of desirable place; everyone wants to be a millionaire, marry a movie actor, get a raise and have an interesting job. Now the second way to tell you have found your vocation is that the work will come easy to you. It may be building bridges or commanding armies or negotiating peace or editing a newspaper or nursing the insane; no matter how hard these things are in themselves, there will be a naturalness and ease in the way you do them. You will have to work hard, but it will be a pleasure and it won’t go against the grain the way things in the past (much easier in themselves) have gone against the grain. Most of us need kicking upstairs. We make a mess of filing (which, if it must be done, needs a phlegmatic temperament) whereas we would be very good actresses or surgeons. The world’s tendency is, since we have so disgracefully failed in filing, to degrade us still further into sorting papers. A lot of neurotics go from bad to worse on this score. God will, if we trust Him, transport us into some sort of fairyland, better than our wildest dreams. Really that is our big sin against God, that we underestimate Him. We have an inferiority complex about religion when the reality of God is beyond our imagining. We have set our hearts on a new Buick, whereas eye has not seen, nor ear heard, the things He has prepared for those who love Him. We hope for so little for ourselves. The goal that God has set us is to become saints. This article is reprinted from This Perverse Generation (Sheed & Ward, 1949, pp.37-47), written by Peter Michaels, the pseudonym of Carol Robinson who was the co-founder of Integrity magazine (1945-55). Before her death in 2003, she attended the Latin Mass at St. Ignatius Retreat House, Ridgefield, Conneticut. For more writing in the style of this article, see My Life with Thomas Aquinas, Raising Your Children, and Fatherhood and Family (available from Angelus Press). Drawings by Ed Willock, The Willock Book: Cartoons and Jingles from Integrity (Integrity Publishing Co., Inc., 1953). THE ANGELUS • May 2005 14 BISHOP FELLAY’S SERMON GIVEN AT ST. MARY’S March 7, 2005 In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Dear Fathers, dear Sisters, dear Professors and Teachers, dear Students, my dear Brethren: We have the great, great happiness and honor to venerate today St. Thomas Aquinas, patron of the schools–Catholic schools. And at this occasion I would like to quote from a very beautiful, very delicate letter from St. Thomas, a letter about the way to study. How should we study? It is very interesting to see that the Angelic Doctor, the Doctor who amongst human beings is one of the those who had gotten the closest to the angels, starts by saying that if we want to learn something we must start with the little streams and not throw ourselves in the sea: “ut per rivulos, non statim in mare, eligas introire, quia per faciliora ad difficiliora oportet devenire–because it is wise to work upward from the easier to the more difficult.” We have to start with little things. Yes, knowledge starts with humility. And humility is, I THE ANGELUS • May 2005 may say, the truth, the reality. We are not angels. We certainly have an intelligence because we have a soul, a spirit, but this spirit is deeply connected to the body. More than that, the way reality will come to our intelligence will be in a very, very special way: it has to go through the body, through the senses. The angels have infused knowledge. They have a way to know things which is totally different from human beings. And so if we want to know something, we have to start with the most evident, the most simple things. And any kind of educational program has to follow this. This is evident. But we see especially in modern thinking, modern philosophy, this tendency of human pride to pretend to go through other ways. And so the modern thinkers have finished by enclosing the human intelligence in itself. They have gone even further and have pretended that, finally, it’s my intelligence which creates the world–which is obviously a total craziness. St. Thomas is first going to give us advice about focusing on what we want to know. Avoid dispersion. It is true our intelligence has an almost infinite capacity to know. We can add and add and add knowledge. But we are like a kind of bottle. If the contents are quasi infinite, we have to go 15 through a little hole. We cannot know everything at the same time. And so, St. Thomas will tell us that we have to stay in our room. We must not go out: “Cellam frequenter diligas si vis in cellam vinariam introduci. Love to stay in your own room, the place where you study, if you want to come one day into the wine cellar,” which, of course, is heaven, finally. “Nihil quaere penitus de factis aliorum. Never pry into other people’s business.” Take care of yourself, you have enough to learn. There are plenty of things which are totally useless. All this gossiping about what others do, just forget that if you want to really know what you have to know. “De verbis et factis saecularium nullatenus te intromittas. Don’t throw yourself into worldly things.” Don’t care, once again, about the world and worldly things. “Discursus super omnia fugias. Fly away from these disputes,” we may say, “these endless discussions.” “Non respicias a quo audias, sed quidquid boni dicatur, memoriae recommenda. Don’t concentrate on the personality of the speaker, but treasure up in your mind anything profitable he may happen to say.” It’s a very important principle. We have the tendency to accept what comes from, let’s say, a good person. We must remember that knowledge may come also (especially when we speak of human knowledge) through other persons. This could be a little bit in contradiction with another principle which is very, very important in the principles given by St. Thomas; it’s the second one: “Conscientiae puritatem amplectere. Cherish purity of conscience.” We know that St. Thomas had a very special temptation while he was a young man. He had just entered religion and his brother and the family, which was not happy with this, kidnapped St. Thomas. He was, so to say, more or less put in prison and there the brother tried to send bad girls to St. Thomas to really corrupt him, and St. Thomas reacted very logically against this temptation. After having fought, he fell asleep and an angel came with a very special cincture, and from this time on St. Thomas had no temptation of the flesh. And it is very clear when we read the teaching of St. Thomas that he makes a very special link between purity of heart and clarity of knowledge. And on the other hand, he will say that if somebody’s throwing himself in the dirt of the world, he will finish by being stupid. He will end up in stupidity. Of course, there are many degrees there. But there is a link, my dear Brethren, my dear Children, there is a very important link between your moral life and what you know, your knowledge, the way your intelligence works. That does not mean that if you are pure of heart you will know all the sciences. What is natural remains at the natural level. But it means that you will have the knowledge which brings you to heaven. And the good Lord will give you through another channel the light and knowledge which lead to heaven. Our Lord said to His Apostles: “The Holy Ghost shall teach you everything, all that I have taught you.” The Holy Ghost gives to the soul, communicates to the soul in the state of grace the higher knowledge which is not of this earth, which is, of course, of the Faith. And if we want to have this knowledge which is the highest, which is to know about God, about our end, we need to foster more than anything this purity of conscience. What is very interesting when we read this letter of St. Thomas is that he is not only speaking of purity. “Omnibus te amabilem exhibe. Show yourself amiable, affable, gentle, to everybody.” Be kind. Practice charity. St. Thomas is giving us as a means to knowledge the practice of charity. He’s also going to say that: “Nemini te multum familiarem ostendas, quia nimia familiaritas parit contemptum. We should not show too much familiarity, because familiarity breeds contempt.” THE ANGELUS • May 2005 16 “Sanctorum et bonorum imitari vestigia non omitas. Don’t forget to imitate the examples of the saints and of the good.” Isn’t it surprising to see all this advice which is totally linked with the moral life. And St. Thomas is insisting on this level too, if we want to know and to know better. We have to remember all these connections between the virtues. All the virtues are linked together, and this is more than ever true on the level of the supernatural level of grace. And we know that all these virtues with grace grow together. That means if we grow in charity, at the same time God is going to make us grow in faith. If we grow in faith, at the same time we will grow in hope, in justice, in charity. They are all linked and connected. It is not the same with defects, but nevertheless we can understand that if we don’t care about advancing, of straining towards perfection, we will not get to knowledge as perfectly as we are expected to. “Ea quae legis et audis, fac ut intelligas. What you hear and what you read, take care to understand.” If you leave in your mind things in doubt, if they are not clear to you, you will not remember them. They will just stay there foggy, and you will not go ahead. “De dubiis te certifica–and if you have something which leaves you in doubt, take care to resolve this doubt.” “Et quidquid poteris in armariolo mentis reponere satage–and take care to put in the drawers of your mind all that you can.” Make use of your memory. Remember. Be attentive. “Altiora te ne quaesieris.” That’s the last advice. “Don’t look for things which are too high for you.” Stay in your place. This is the best way to go ahead. “Illa sequens vestigia, frondes et fructus in vinea Domini Sabaoth utiles, quandiu vitam habueris, proferes et produces. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 Haec sectatus fueris, ad id attingere poteris, quod affectas. By following this path, you will throw out leaves and bear serviceable fruit in the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts all the days of your life. If you stick to these counsels, you will reach the goal of your desires.” If you follow this advice given by St. Thomas, you will reach this knowledge, you will follow St. Thomas, a saint. He is one of the brightest intelligences which the Catholic Church enjoys. At the time of the Council of Trent two books were put on the altar during this council: the Holy Scripture and his Summa. And Pope Leo XIII, who insisted on reviving the teaching of St. Thomas in the 19th century, said that every article of the Summa, which is just one of the many books he wrote but the best known article–and there are about 3,000 of these articles in the Summa–is a miracle. We know that when he had a problem, when he had a difficulty, St. Thomas went to the tabernacle to get the answer. Well, he even went into the tabernacle, which is, of course, something we can just admire and not imitate. He did put his head into the tabernacle! we may say, to be as close as possible to our Lord. Of course, that’s the physical expression, but which says a lot. Be close to God. Be close to the Word of God. The Word of God is our Lord Jesus Christ. Word means knowledge. God Who knows Himself–that’s Jesus: He is Science. He wants to communicate to us this science which saves. He wants to communicate to us what He knows of God, which is the highest knowledge, which is the one which, if we know it, we know everything, and if we don’t have it, we know nothing. So let us go today to St. Thomas, and let us ask him for his intercession that we may follow this imitation, that we may at the same time, of course, form our reason, our intelligence in this knowledge which God wants us, which He wants you to learn! He wants you to know! And first of all He wants you to know Himself. So let us ask St. Thomas that we may go through all the steps of human knowledge, of the knowledge of the Faith, to one day the highest knowledge, which is to see God as He is in heaven; at the same time linked, bound, with this knowledge, that we may practice all the virtues and especially the virtues towards our neighbor and towards ourselves so that we may all one day be saved and enjoy eternal happiness. Amen. Transcribed exclusively for Angelus Press by Miss Miriam Werick. To find this letter and more from other saints, see The Saints, Humanly Speaking, selected and arranged by Felicitas Corrigan, OSB (out of print). For lack of the availability of a picture of Bishop Fellay giving this sermon, the Editor has taken license to use one from His Excellency’s Magisterial Lesson given at St. Mary’s during the same visit (March, 2005). Catholic y l i Fam Angelus Press IN CANADA NORTH AMERICAN MARTYRS PILGRIMAGE Fr. Stephen Somerville’s sermon at the Pilgrimage Mass to honor the Canadian Martyrs (Sept. 25, 2004) at the St. Ignace Mission site, near Midland, Ontario. Reverend Fathers, Reverend Deacons and Brothers and Sisters, Distinguished visitors, Dear Brethren in the Lord. I greet you today in Jesus. I salute you, a great and faithful gathering of Jesus’ friends. I welcome you with all the joy and reverence of my Catholic heart as you come on pilgrimage to this holy ground of venerable Christian history. I recognize most specially the community of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary on Quarry Hill Road, in the countryside outside of Winona, Minnesota. Special welcome to you, Fathers, Professors, and Seminarians, after your long journey from home to these holy places of the Canadian and North 18 Divine Blood crying ou American Jesuit Martyrs. Welcome to all travelers from London, Sudbury, Wyoming, Orillia, St. Catharine’s, Quebec, Toronto, Buffalo, and other places. These Martyrs prayed and served and suffered here, some on the very ground where we now stand. They were a team of eight brave captains for Christ, and they led a spiritual army of many thousands in a campaign to win heaven for the native people with heroism and holiness. As you know, three of them, including the great St. Isaac Jogues, made red the soil of upper New York State, near Auriesville, with the blood of their martyrdom. Here in Ontario Province, near Midland, the five other priests shed their blood. This site of St. Ignace village shines out with special brilliance for the sacred Passion of St. John de Brebeuf and St. Gabriel Lalemant. They were tortured and burned at the stake for many hours, probably only a few steps from this spot. Remembering the witness of those eight glorious missionaries, we recall the entrance song of this Holy Festive Mass: These are they who are come out of great tribulations, and have washed their robes, and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb. [Apoc. 7:14] At the very beginning of Sacred Scripture we read of the murder by Cain of his brother Abel, because of Cain’s jealousy and anger at God’s favour for Abel. And God called out to Cain, “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth to me from the earth” (Gen.4:10). Today, my dear brethren, some 350 years after the glorious martyrdom, the voice of our martyred heroes continues to cry out from this sacred earth in a glorious hymn of victory. We echo that holy and heavenly song, sometimes by the good words, Faith of our Fathers, living still, In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword; O how our hearts beat high with joy, whene’er we hear that glorious word. Almighty God filled St. John, St. Isaac, St. Gabriel and the rest with fortitude until their last day on earth. May God also now fill all our hearts on this holy day of pilgrimage and praise. May every breath of your praying, every step of your walking, every note of your singing, and every leaf and flower along your path, bring a touch of joy and trust and exultation for your pilgrim day. I hope you will take my good wishes for you from heart to heart, from my heart to your heart. I say this because the privilege of welcoming you to this ancient Christian land of Huronia and the Martyrs is for me a heartfelt THE ANGELUS • May 2005 Catholic Family 19 PILGRIMAGE NOTES ng out. Saturday, September 25 (2004), marked the annual pilgrimage of the Canadian District of the Society of St. Pius X to the Martyrs Shrine in Midland, Ontario, around 100 miles north of Toronto. This Pilgrimage began over ten years ago, headed by the District Superior of that time, Fr. Jacques Emily. As with all pilgrimages, it is performed in the spirit of penance and reparation. The special intentions for 2004 were for the Society of Saint Pius X, especially the District of Canada, and for vocations. The pilgrimage is made on the last Saturday in September, because it is the Saturday which usually falls the closest to the feast of the Canadian Martyrs (Sept. 26). This pilgrimage has always commenced with the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at a field about six miles from Midland, called St. Ignace II, where Sts. John de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were martyred. The walk to the Martyrs Shrine follows (see p.20ff.). Here large relics of these saints in ornate reliquaries rest, including the skull of St. John de Brebeuf and the major relics of St. Charles Garnier. The pilgrimage concludes with the Stations of the Cross at a large outdoor display. The highlight of the 2004 pilgrimage was that Fr. Yves Le Roux and Fr. James Doran came from St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary with 36 Seminarians and 2 brothers. In addition, a record number of faithful attended, which brought the attendance of this year’s pilgrimage to around 300. privilege. My life has been entwined in this part of my country for a good 70 years. When my father, Henry Somerville, moved his family from England to Toronto to be the new Catholic weekly newspaper editor there, he very soon made friends with the editor of the local Midland Free Press. It became a double family friendship, and one of my earliest childhood memories is visiting the distinguished Herbert Cranston home on Sixth St. in Midland. Occasional visits continued thereafter to this historic corner of Ontario with its earliest This pilgrimage has been received by the Jesuit Fathers who operate the Martyrs Shrine with mixed reactions. Mass has always been offered at St. Ignace II. In 2003, the Society of Saint Pius X offered Mass at St. Ignace II and then concluded the pilgrimage with Mass on the Shrine grounds. In 2004, the Society was forbidden to offer Mass at either location. Providentially, there was a campground immediately next to St. Ignace II which belonged to the United Church Centre, who welcomed the SSPX, so Mass was offered there by Fr. Stephen Somerville. THE ANGELUS • January 2005 20 Fr. Sulzen makes sure everyone knows what a pilgrimage is all about. European settlement in the whole province. That is the mission village of Ste. Marie Among the Hurons, which you will visit later today, painstakingly and authentically reconstructed in all its early French detail. Do pray in its two chapels. Be sure to pray at the one-time grave of St. John de Brebeuf in the chapel of the Huron Indians. My involvement here took a great leap forward in 1979, when I was named Pastor for six years of St. Margaret’s Parish Church in the adjacent town of Midland. In 1982, I participated in the historic re-enactment of the 1648 missionary supply journey 800 miles from Quebec City to Midland–more precisely, to Ste. Marie Village. It was a 40-day trip in canoes, and we wore period clothing. My role was that of Fr. Francesco Bressani, Jesuit, who laboured here for eight years and was tortured by the enemy to near death in 1644. He was rescued and recovered, he gave gifts to his tormentors in a later peace treaty, and continued his missionary work for six more years, with all but one finger reduced to stubs from his earlier frightful torture sessions. Fr. Bressani was a walking sermon. Would that he could be recognized as the ninth North American Martyr! Still another binding of my heart to Martyrs’ Shrine took place in 1984, two years after the canoe trip. It was during the solemn visit of the Pope, John Paul II, to Canada. He flew by helicopter from Toronto to the Martyrs’ Shrine for a solemn prayer service, and it was THE ANGELUS • May 2005 Pilgrims enter the Martyrs’ Shrine, disallowed from assisting at a Latin Mass, but able to venerate the major relics of several North American Martyrs.The walls are sheathed with the same birchbark from which the Hurons’ canoes were made. Fr. Somerville had words about the picture above the Shrine’s main altar. Catholic Family 21 Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario. my happy privilege to be the director of the sixhundred-voice choir on that occasion. From 1985, the following year, early September, the Jesuits have commemorated that papal visit with a huge outdoor Living Rosary service, Holy Hour, and Benediction. Until 1999, it was my function each year to be the director of the congregational singing. Fr. Bressani and his future martyr confreres in the 1640’s knew very well they were facing danger. They were ready and prayerful in the face of it. Fr. Brebeuf wrote a spiritual declaration that he longed to suffer, he longed to experience all the torments inflicted by these ferocious natives, the Iroquois. Martyrdom for the Jesuits was not an unfortunate accident, but a glorious conclusion. Let me remind the seminarians and supporters of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary here today, that your Superior, Fr. Yves le Roux, has just sent us a printed meditation letter on tribulation and trial, especially that which befalls us unexpectedly. He teaches us that since Jesus has embraced suffering, this has now become an instrument for our redemption from sin and sorrow. He says, “We can discover in our sufferings the face of Christ suffering and merciful.” We are able to make up in our bodies, as St. Paul teaches, the things that are lacking in the sufferings of Christ (Col. 1:24). Yes, suffering is bodily, not just mental or spiritual. The Martyrs really did shed their blood at the hand of real torturers. In the Martyrs’ Shrine Church later today, when we arrive footsore and happy at our goal, we shall see over the main altar of the Church a large painting. It is a picture of the eight martyrs in the glory of heaven. Their bodies are whole and healthy. There is no blood, there are no fearful wounds. Nevertheless, the artist had a larger idea when he painted this. At the bottom of his canvas, he pictured the Huronia countryside, with the Jesuit and Indian individuals depicted in their respective hours of torturing and death. But all of this horrendous yet candid display of heroism and realism is hidden from your gaze by the giant white frame around the picture (see picture of shrine interior on this page). All that nasty unpleasant stuff has been whitewashed. All gestures that might cast aspersions or disfavor on the Indian A Huron longhouse in the reconstructed mission village of Ste. Marie Among the Hurons. Catholic Family THE ANGELUS • May 2005 22 The large reliquary displays what remains of St. John de Brebeuf ’s skull. This site at Ste. Marie Among the Hurons marks the first graves of Sts. John de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant. native peoples of today are swept away. All that might stir the indignation of some human rights committee or of some anti-hatred officer, as being politically incorrect, all this artistic portrayal of the somber truth of human wretchedness and depravity–notice I say “human” and not “native” or “Amerindian” or whatever, all this reminder of sin is to be suppressed. I am sure you know of many a Catholic Church that today has got rid of the crucifix and replaced it with a statue of the risen Christ. You must know furthermore that the new theological notion of Paschal Mystery, replacing that of the Redemption, gives the credit for our being saved mainly to the resurrection, rather than to the crucifixion. Some go further and say that all religions are a search for God and are able to save us. They even say that all men are saved and no one goes to hell. They say that ecumenism will make firm friends of contradictory religions. Against this siren song of modernist heresy, the blood of our brothers the Martyrs continues to cry out from the earth. And there are new martyrs for Christ in our time, even though most of the media unite in suppressing the news of these martyrdoms. The new order of the post-Vatican II Mass has eliminated the names of 32 martyrs from the Roman Canon, a canon which furthermore is now hardly ever heard or used in the Novus Ordo churches. For not only is it seen as too lengthy, but it speaks far too clearly of sacrifice and of real victim body and blood. Such an offence against those who deny the perpetual sacrifice, against those who THE ANGELUS • May 2005 see only the Last Supper in the Eucharist, and not the oblation of the real victim of Calvary, such a Canon, such a Rule of Prayer, is to be eliminated, to be done away with. Let us invite St. John de Brebeuf and St. Gabriel Lalemant, who suffered here, to come before our sight for a moment in their final agony. Let us ask their own contemporary superior, Fr. Paul Ragueneau, to speak reverently from 1648 of their Passover through death to glorious life. Fr. Ragueneau’s words are taken from the official chronicle in the Jesuit Relations of the period. Fr. John de Brebeuf had the skin of his skull torn from his head. He had his feet cut off, the flesh torn from his thighs right to the bone and one of his jaws split in two with a hatchet. Fr. Gabriel Lalemant received over his left ear a blow of a hatchet that went through to the brain exposing it to sight. From head to foot every part of his body was broiled and burned raw and even his eyes had live coals forced into them by these demons. At different times they forced flaming brands and torches of bark into their victims mouths and burned their tongues to prevent them from invoking, in their dying moments Him, for Whom they were suffering and who could never die in their hearts. I have learned all this from people worthy of belief, who knew whereof they spoke and who reported it to me personally. They had been captives with the Fathers and had been reserved for torture at some later date but had managed to escape. But, enough of these objects of horror and monsters of cruelty, because some day all these events will shine in immortal glory and the intensity of their tortures will be the measure of their happiness. Even now they enjoy the repose of the Saints and will enjoy it forever. We buried their precious relics on Sunday, the 21st of March. All those who assisted at their obsequies where filled with such consolation and tender devotion that, far from being afraid, they hoped for a like death themselves. They were even quite happy to be in a place where perhaps in two days from then God would give them the grace of shedding their blood and laying down their lives under similar circumstances. Not one of us could ever force himself to pray for them as if they in any way needed our prayers, but our thoughts were carried straight to Heaven, where, we had no doubt, dwelt their souls. And Fr. Ragueneau concludes his testimony with these words: “Be that as it may, I pray God that, until death, He may accomplish in us His Holy Will as he did in them.” (Citation from Rev. Paul Ragueneau, Shadows over Huronia, trans. J. Fallon, S.J. [Midland, Ont.: Martyrs’ Shrine, 1972] pp.4041.) CF The 2005 Canadian Pilgrimage to the North American Martyrs’ Shrine, Midland, Ontario, Canada, will be held Saturday, September 24. For more information contact: St. Michael’s Priory, 45 Guthrie Ave., Toronto, ON M8Y 3L2. Phone: 416-251-0499. The 2005 North American Martyrs Pilgrimage to Auriesville, New York (USA) will be held Saturday, June 11 (activities precede on Friday, the 10th, and a High Mass is scheduled for Sunday, June 12). For more information contact: Sal Farfaglia, Pilgrimage Chapter Coordinator. Phone: 607-6484684 or Richard McCormack, 203-431-0201. Catholic Family 23 o y e, e N k h, n 8- Colleen Drippé TOY POWER Toys have been around since the beginning of recorded history–and probably longer than that. I’m sure Cain and Abel played with toys. Certainly the children of ancient Egypt did. You may still see them in museums–boats and dolls and board games. Ancient people made toy soldiers. Even Caligula had a set and played with them when he should have been tending to business. Probably Cleopatra had a doll or two when she was little. And who knows what sort of games were popular when Moses was growing up? The very best toys have not been preserved, just as your own best toys are probably long gone. Children play hard, and a favorite toy is eventually worn out. And then, for the children of ordinary people, toys would have been much less elaborate. A corn cob doll would have satisfied an Aztec girl, a stick-sword, a Roman boy. Little cities might have been laid out with pebbles, Daddy could have made a small, carved horse or a little cooking pot–but what is left? Well, actually a great deal was left: the child. The boy, if he lived to grow up, learned to ride a real horse, build a real city, fight a real war. The girl nursed a real baby. Many of the people who had been children lived to have children of their own. And those children played with toys too. Toys have a big Catholic Family role in passing on culture, in preparing children for their duties in the adult world. A child will play, whether you give it toys or not. And a child will imitate. If you are around, the child will imitate you. Your son, even without toys of his own, will garden with acorns or leaves, will “drive” a chair or an empty box, will hammer with sticks or rocks. Your daughter will make mud pies, mother the cat, and divide the back yard into the rooms of her house. Play is practise. It is a way of “trying on” roles, of figuring out what things are all about. Naturally, we like to give our children toys. The best ones are homemade–especially if the child can watch us make them. Two of my sons are carpenters because they watched while my husband and I built some of their toys. Two of my children are artists, for pretty much the same reason. When some small thing was required for a game they were playing, one of us made it out of scraps and glue. Soon they were making their own toys. This does not mean there were no store-bought toys in our home. We bought them, relatives bought them, we found them at the good will store, friends gave them to our children for birthdays. Some we sorted out and quietly disposed of. Some we modified. Some the children broke or lost. While a toy can be a very powerful builder of culture, it can also destroy. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 24 How on earth do you buy a good toy for your child? And is it possible, when buying for other people’s children, to have a good influence–especially if a good influence is needed? You bet. Toys tend to fall into three categories, and all of them have a place in your child’s development. First there are the “tools”–copies of real things an adult would use. Here you find everything from dishes to rifles, from farm machinery (and animals) to brooms. You also find make-up sets, pretend office equipment and cash registers, and costumes and accessories for a variety of “careers.” There is a certain amount of role playing when a child uses these toys, so it is necessary to be careful to present a role you want your child to play. Many modern educators encourage giving your girls masculine roles and your boys feminine roles. They say this will make the girls more independent and the boys more “sensitive.” Role changing is much more likely to make the children discontented with normal sexual roles and totally incapable of stable family life. Certainly you can try a little to influence your son’s career choice when you give him toys. A tool set may lead to a real interest in building things later. There are doctor kits, chain saws, farm sets, engineering toys. Have you thought of making or buying little vestments or the habit of a religious order? Plenty of children who later became saints have played at saying Mass or decorating altars. Playing store is good for all children, boys and girls. You buy or make the play money and then save your empty cans and boxes for the “groceries.” A red wagon makes a good grocery cart and the whole thing can be set up in your garage. For your girls there are still some very good toys available–dolls, dishes, little appliances and sewing kits. Doll furniture is not hard to make from boxes and scraps, and the little mothers will soon learn to sew whatever special things they need for their “children.” And again–there is nothing to stop you from providing props for a school or convent. The second category of toys is similar to the first, but the role playing element is a bit different. When a girl is given a Barbie doll, she does not become the doll’s mother. She is, in some mystical way, the doll itself. She (as the doll) acts out adult life as seen by the maker of the doll–through accessories, furniture, doll houses, and cars. This also applies to a whole series of smaller dolls–teenagers, rock stars, public school girls. Many of these are deformed of face and body, dressed in the flashiest of outfits. A boy, on the other hand, may become almost any sort of monster, galactic criminal, freedom fighter, alien, or just plain rowdy, through the many action figures available. These too come with accessories and often are derived from unsuitable movies or TV shows. This sort of role playing does not lead anyone into adult life, mainly because no such adult roles THE ANGELUS • May 2005 are available. Children who grow up with toys like these may never acquire a firm grip on reality. These “grown-up” children make as much money as possible, marry and divorce often, take drugs, play video games, neglect their own children, and, in the end, wonder what went wrong with their lives. Are there “remote” role-playing games that are good for your child? Maybe a few. Miniature copies of real things are fun to have and to build. They give your child a safe way to manipulate some of the bigger (and scarier) things until he gets used to them. A miniature toy hospital can take a certain amount of fear out of going to the doctor–especially if the child is the doctor. A miniature school may inspire more study, but you have to be careful the children don’t just use it to “act out” bad behavior they are afraid to try in real life. In role playing of any sort, it is usually best to have the child be an adult–not another child. The third kind of toy is one even grown-ups can enjoy–the recreational toy. Oh yes, you interact with your child, or children play together and learn sportsmanship. Or maybe they just get exercise. But sports equipment (not connected with commercial sports or with “school” sports) is mainly intended just to have fun. So are many games. You need to be aware, however, that some games are not healthy, and some are actually designed to influence your children adversely. There are some “career” games which teach warped values, some “Dungeons-and-Dragons” type games that teach even worse things, and some games which are so ugly or require such undignified behavior that they have no place in your home. Of course there are also games that “teach” Catholic doctrine and promote good behavior. The ones I have seen were simple like Candy Land. Some children like these, some find them a bit boring. Read the rules before you buy–there may be more satisfying games out there. By its nature, a board or card game involves competition. I have never heard that it is sinful to beat your opponent in Monopoly or Risk. Games like these let off steam–as long as everyone is a good sport. Checkers and chess are also excellent. For children of school age or older, a good rule of thumb is to determine whether you, yourself, would enjoy the game. If it is too ugly, brainless, or silly, don’t buy it. Just as the child is father to the man (or woman) so is the play world father to the real world. Toys don’t just preserve civilization, they build it. It’s a good thing to keep in mind, next time you pass the toy aisle. CF Mrs. Drippé is a free-lance writer and author of several children’s books. She lives with her family in St. Mary’s, Kansas, where she teaches First Grade at St. Mary’s Academy. Catholic Family F R . p e t e r Some people maintain that the withdrawal of hydration and nutrition from Terri Schiavo (+March 30, 2005) was not immoral. Do they have any solid reason for affirming this? Those who dare deny the necessity of hydration and nutrition in those persons considered to be in a vegetative condition have done so on the basis of one of two reasons. The first excuse is the subjective one of “quality of life,” which is all important for the humanist way of thinking. A person’s life is to be considered as lacking in quality, unproductive, and not worth living because of brain damage or mental retardation. It is no secret to anyone that such a materialistic, pragmatic conception is directly opposed to the sovereign right that God alone has over life and death, and consequently to the fifth commandment. The second reason that is given is that artificial nutrition and hydration can be considered in certain circumstances (e.g., incurable vegetative state) as extraordinary means, on account of the cost and effort required, and consequently disproportionate to the benefit that can reasonably be expected–the prolongation of life–and that consequently they would not be obligatory in conscience. The resolution of this question depends upon the clear distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means. It was treated very thoroughly by Fr. Iscara in the July 1997 issue of The Angelus, in which he established that feeding and hydration are always ordinary means and consequently obligatory in conscience, regardless of the condition of the person. He there describes the liberal evolution of these concepts over the past half century. It is certainly true that if all admit the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means, nevertheless the judgment of which are extraordinary and which are ordinary means has not in general been defined by the Church. Moreover, this distinction is not absolute, nor identical in every case, for a means might be ordinary for some people but extraordinary for others, due to variable considerations such as excessive cost, pain and discomfort, location and difficulty in using the means, danger of complications and high chance of failure. However, traditionally, and rightly so, the essential consideration is an objective one. An ordinary means is one that can be procured by ordinary effort and diligence, whereas an extraordinary means requires that effort which is out of the common order of things. A person who does not follow the quality of life theory could consequently only allege that hydration and nutrition were not obligatory by establishing that they are extraordinary means on account of the great cost, effort and/or suffering involved. This could certainly be said for the case of intravenous feeding, but not for intragastric feeding, which is simple, uncomplicated and relatively inexpensive. The withdrawal of such nutrition and hydration can consequently not be considered as R . s c o t t 25 anything other than indirect euthanasia, a grave sin against the fifth commandment. Moreover, this whole question was resolved authoritatively by Pope John Paul II in a discourse that he gave to the participants in the International Congress on “Life-Sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas” (March 20, 2004). He there teaches that the quality of life is irrelevant (§3). He states that it is irrelevant to human dignity, which is true, but we would have preferred that he had pointed out that it is irrelevant to the practice of charity and the observance of the law of God. However, his clearest statement concerns the use of the term “ordinary means” with respect to nutrition and hydration. He states that, unlike other medical treatments, nutrition and hydration are like nursing care: they are always and necessarily an ordinary means, and they cannot be considered to be an extraordinary means, no matter what they cost. Here is the text: The sick person in a vegetative state, awaiting recovery or a natural end, still has the right to basic health care (nutrition, hydration, cleanliness, warmth, etc.) and to the prevention of complications related to his confinement to bed….I should like particularly to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act. Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and as such morally obligatory, insofar as and until it is seen to have attained its proper finality, which in the present case consists in providing nourishment to the patient and alleviation of his suffering….The evaluation of probabilities, founded on waning hopes for recovery when the vegetative state is prolonged beyond a year, cannot ethically justify the cessation or interruption of minimal care for the patient, including nutrition and hydration. Death by starvation or dehydration is, in fact, the only possible outcome as a result of their withdrawal. In this sense it ends up becoming, if done knowingly and willingly, true and proper euthanasia by omission (ibid., §4). Although not a formal definition, this is a statement of the Church’s highest authority, clarifying a question of morals. It must be accepted, given that it is in line with Catholic Tradition. Consequently, there can no longer be any doubt as to whether or not hydration and nutrition constitute ordinary means. They are always ordinary, and they are always obligatory in just the same way as nursing care is obligatory, regardless of how much it might cost to hire nursing staff. The outrage that Catholics in the US have felt and expressed concerning the apparent inability of the executive and judicial powers to stop this tragic euthanasia is perfectly justified, and any person who does not feel this way needs to return to the Gospel of St. Matthew and ask for charity: “For I was hungry and you gave me not to eat: I was thirsty, and you gave me not to drink.…Amen I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me” (Mt. 25:42,45). THE ANGELUS • May 2005 26 THE CONVERSION TALE OF FR. OWEN F. DUDLEY A Masterful Story of Tragedy and Triumph as told by HIMSELF Author of “The Shadow on the Earth” “The Masterful Monk” “Pageant of Life” “The Coming of the Monster” “The Tremaynes and the Masterful Monk” now available from ANGELUS PRESS 27 FR. OWEN F. DUDLEY (1882-1952), an Englishman, was educated at Monmouth Grammar School and at Lichfield Theological College, and obtained the Licentiate of Theology at Durham University. He served in the Anglican ministry from 1911 until he became a Catholic in 1915. After studying for the Catholic priesthood at the Beda College in Rome he was ordained in 1917. He served as Chaplain to the British Gunners on the French and Italian fronts in the First World War. After recovering from war wounds, he joined the Catholic Missionary Society in 1919 and was Superior of the Society from 1933 to 1946. Fr. Dudley lectured on philosophy and theology to large audiences, both Catholic and non-Catholic, throughout England, Wales, Canada, the US, and the Far East. He wrote some very popular books, available again from Angelus Press, favorites among Catholic adults. My first introduction to the Catholic Church was being spat in the eye by a Roman Catholic boy at school. He was bigger than I; so I let it pass. But I remembered he was a Roman Catholic. My next was at a magic-lantern entertainment to which I was taken by my mother. In the course of it there appeared on the screen the picture of a very old man in a large hat and a long white soutane. I must have asked my mother who it was, and been informed briefly that it was the “Pope of Rome.” I don’t quite know how, but the impression left in my mind was that there was something fishy about the “Pope of Rome.” At school, I learned in English history (which I discovered later was not altogether English and not altogether history) that there was something fishy not only about the Pope of Rome, but about the whole of the Pope’s Church. I gathered that for a thousand years or more the Pope had held all England in his grip, and not only England but all Europe; also that during that period the “Roman,” “Romish,” or “Roman Catholic” Church had become more and more corrupt, until finally the original Christianity of Christ had almost disappeared; that idols were worshipped instead of God; that everywhere superstition held sway. No education; no science. Everything and everybody priest-ridden. I read of how at last the “Glorious Reformation” had come; how the light of the Morning Star had burst upon the darkness; how the Pope’s yoke had been flung off, and with it all the trappings and corruptions of popery; of the triumph of the Reformation in England; of the restoration of the primitive doctrines of Christ and the “light of the pure Gospel”; of the progress and prosperity that followed in the reign of “good Queen Bess”; of the freeing of men’s minds and the expansion of thought released from the tyranny of Rome. All this, as an English schoolboy, I drank in. And I believed it. Next I did a thing that we all have to do: I grew up. And I grew up without questioning the truth of what I had been taught. The time came when I decided to become a Church of England clergyman. For this purpose I entered an Anglican theological college. And there I must confess I began to get somewhat muddled; for I could not find out what I should have to teach when I became an Anglican clergyman. Even to my youthful mind it became abundantly clear that my various tutors were contradicting each other on vital matters of Christian doctrine. My own fellow students were perpetually arguing on most fundamental points of religion. I finally emerged from that theological college feeling somewhat like an addled egg, and only dimly realizing that the Church of England had given me no theology. I appreciated later that it had no system of theology to give. It was during that period at college that I first of all went out to Rome, on a holiday. And while there I managed to see no less a person than the Pope of Rome himself. It was Pope Pius X–being borne into St. Peter’s on the sedia gestatoria. He passed quite close to where I was standing, and I could see his face very clearly. It was the face of a saint. I could only suppose that somehow he had managed to keep good in spite of being the Pope of Rome. That incident left a deeper impression on my mind than I was aware of at the time. I kept a diary of all that I saw in Rome, and wrote in it: “I can quite imagine a susceptible young man being carried away by all this, and wanting to become a Roman Catholic.” I myself was safe from the lure of popery, of course. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 28 This present volume is the second of a series. Though complete in itself, it deals with only one aspect of a very big matter–the problem of human happiness. It should be read in conjunction with “Will Men be like Gods?” the first of the series, which it follows. May I mention that I am fully aware of the sensational character of much that I have related here. I make no apology for the same. It is unavoidable. I am dealing with a terrific thing. I am dealing with life as it is. The problem of pain and suffering, with which this book is concerned, is prominent in the minds of men today. Unfortunately many only know it as presented by life’s rebels–coloured with malice, twisted with cunning sophisms. It would seem to be the delight of certain writers to dangle the problem on the point of a vitriolic pen and hurl it at the heavens in defiance. These rebels offer no solution of the problem of pain and suffering. Instead, they sound the clarion of revolt. They have no solution to offer. There is a solution, however. It is offered in these pages. As a full–fledged Anglican clergyman I first of all worked in a country parish. At the end of a year, however, my vicar and I came to the conclusion that it would be wiser to part company; for we were disagreed as to what the Christian religion was. I then went to a parish in the East End of London, down among the costers, hop pickers, and dock laborers. I went down there full of zeal, determined to set the Thames on fire. I very soon discovered, though, that the vast mass of East Enders had no interest at all in the religion that I professed. Out of the 6,000 or so in the parish not more than 100 or 200 even came near the church. Our hoppers’ socials in the Parish Hall were well patronized, however. Great nights, and a thrilling din of barrel organ, dancing, and singing. I found the Donkey Row hoppers immensely lovable and affectionate. We had wonderful days with them each September in the hop fields of Kent. It was social work. The mass of them we could not even touch with religion. I grew somewhat “extreme” in this parish under the influence of my vicar, to whom at first I was too “Protestant.” I remember he disliked the hat I arrived in–a round, flat one. The vicarage dog ate the hat, and I bought a more “priestly” one. For a year or two things went fairly smoothly and I suffered from no qualms about the Anglican religion. How far I sincerely believed that I was a “Catholic” during that period I find it difficult to estimate now. Sufficiently at any rate to argue heatedly with Low Church and “modernist” clergy in defense of my claim. And sufficiently to be thoroughly annoyed–with a Roman Catholic lady who, whenever we met, told me she was praying for my conversion to the “True Church,” and a Franciscan friar in the hop fields who told me the same. I felt like telling them they could pray until they were black in the face. I remember, too, that whenever I met a Roman Catholic priest I experienced a sense of inferiority and a vague feeling of not quite being the real thing, or at least of there being an indefinable but marked difference between us. It was when I could no longer avoid certain unpleasant facts with which I was confronted in my work as an Anglican clergyman that the first uneasiness came. One day I was in the house of a certain dock laborer who lived exactly opposite our church but never darkened its doors. I chose the occasion to ask him why not? His reply flattened me out; it was to the effect that he could see no valid reason for believing what I taught in preference to what the “Low Church bloke dohn the road” taught. I could not give a satisfactory answer to his challenge. I don’t suppose he believed in either of us really; but he had placed me in a quandary. We were both Anglican clergymen, and we were both flatly contradicting each other from our respective pulpits. It set a question simmering in my mind: “Why should anybody believe what I taught?” And a further question: “What authority had I for what I was teaching?” I began, for the first time with real anxiety, to examine the Anglican Church. And with that examination I found I could no longer blind myself to certain patent facts, which hitherto I had brushed aside. The Established Church was a church of contradictions, of parties, each of which had an equal claim to represent it, and all of which were destructive of its general claim to be part of the Church of Christ. As far as authority was concerned, it was possible to believe anything or nothing without ecclesiastical interference. You could be an extreme “Anglo-Catholic” and hold all the doctrines of the Catholic Church except the inconvenient ones like papal infallibility; you could be an extreme modernist and deny (while retaining Christian terms ) all the doctrines of the Christian religion. No bishop said yes or no imperatively to any party. The bishops were as divided as the parties. For practical purposes, if bishops did interfere, they were ignored, even by their own clergy. If the Holy Ghost, as claimed, was with the Church of England then logically the Holy Ghost was the author of contradictions: for each party claimed His guidance. These facts presented me with a quandary which appeared insurmountable, and which remained insurmountable. I have often been asked, since my conversion, how, in view of them, Anglican clergy can be sincere in remaining where they are. My reply has been–they are sincere. There is a state of mental blindness in which one is incapable of seeing the plain logic of facts. I only know that it was over a year before I acted on those facts myself. And I honestly believe I was sincere during that period. Only those who have been Protestants can appreciate the thick veil of prejudice, fear, and mistrust of “Rome” which hampers every groping toward the truth. It was about this time that there fell into my hands a book written by a Catholic priest, who himself had once been an Anglican clergyman, who had been faced by the same difficulties, and who had found the solution of them in the Catholic Church. “But the Catholic Church can’t be the solution,” I said. And there rose before my mind a vision of all I had been taught about her from my boyhood upward: her false teaching, her corruptions of the doctrines of Christ. The Catholic Church, though, was the church of the overwhelming majority of Christians, and always had been. If what I had been taught was true, then for nearly 2,000 years the great mass of Christians had been deluded and deceived by lies. Could Christ have allowed a hoax, an imposture of that magnitude? In His name? The Catholic Church was either an imposture or–Or what? I began to buy Catholic books. To study Catholic doctrines. To read history from the Catholic standpoint. The day came when I sat looking into the fire asking myself: “Is what the world says of the Catholic Church true? Or what the Catholic Church says of herself? Have I all these years been shaking my fist at a phantom of my own imagining, fed on prejudice and ignorance?” I compared her unity with the complete lack of it outside. Her authority with the absence of anything approaching real authority in the church of which I was a member and a minister. The unchangeable moral code she proclaimed with the wavering, shilly-shallying moral expediency that Protestantism allowed. She began to look so very much more like the church that God would have made, just as the Established Church began to look so very much more like the church that man would have made. When I was passing Westminster Cathedral one day I went in and knelt for half an hour before the Blessed Sacrament. I came out terribly shaken–spiritually shaken. It is impossible to describe; but in that short half hour what, until now, I had contemplated as a problem had suddenly assumed an aspect of imperativeness. A problem that had to be solved, not played with. For within those four walls there had loomed up before my spiritual vision an immensity, a vast reality, before which everything else had shrunk away. The church whose clergyman I was seemed to have slipped from under my feet. I returned to the East End dazed. That night amongst the hoppers I felt like a stranger moving about. I went about for weeks in a state of uncertainty, undecided in my conscience as to whether I was morally bound to face things out or not– wretched under the suspicion that what “Rome” said might be true–that I was no priest; that my “Mass” was no Mass at all; that I was genuflecting before...? That my “absolutions” were worthless. The more I prayed about it, the more unreal my ministry appeared. I decided to consult a certain very “extreme” clergyman, whom I believed to be sincere beyond question (as he was), and a man of deep spiritual piety. I had three or four talks with him in all, the general result of which was to leave me more confused intellectually than ever, but spiritually more at peace; though it took me months before I realized that this peace was a false one, and that I had shelved the matter not from its intellectual difficulties, but for worldly reasons. For those talks had opened for me an unpleasant vista of what “The Masterful Monk” is a romance with a very definite purpose. I am hitting very hard at the modern materialistic conception of love between men and women. I am contrasting vividly the notion of love as a passing passion with that of love as something permanent, sublime and spiritualized. I am foreshadowing what the future may hold if love is dethroned by sensuality. There is no over-moralizing. Rather, incident is flung upon incident and climax upon climax to unfold the theme and force the moral issue. In “The Masterful Monk” I have endeavoured to meet the modern attack upon Man and his moral nature launched by those who would degrade him to the level of an animal. I would like to mention that “Julian Verrers” in this tale is neither a literary affectation nor an exaggeration. He is a spokesman delivering faithfully the ideas of certain materialistic scientists, philosophers, and leaders of thought, whose names are before the public today, and whose writings are everywhere on sale. He speaks as they speak and says what they say. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 30 The task I have undertaken in these pages is that of disclosing an absorbingly lovable, difficult, and pathetic character; and of a mystery underlying that character. A mystery not often held in the human soul. My task is difficult because Cyril Rodney is difficult. I have never known a personality quite so baffling; so hidden by reserve and yet so strangely attractive and compelling; so human and yet so alone. In “Pageant of Life,” I have endeavoured to present, in addition to the human interest of the happenings related, an antithesis to that modern cowardice which manifests itself in the vogue for the vague and noncommittal; the convenient dilettantism which questions everything, holds nothing, and funks the hard facts of truth. If my antithesis appears violent, it is unavoidably so for violence is the inevitable accompaniment of an act of moral heroism such as I have described. May I mention, in case of possible doubt, that the “Fr. Anselm Thornton” of these pages is the “Masterful Monk” of later years. might happen if I went “over to Rome”–the loss of my position, my salary, friends and all; not only the burning of all my boats but the wounding of my mother and father cruelly. Even more, “Rome” might not accept me for her priesthood; in any case it would be starting all over again, possibly from baptism. If she did not want me for a priest, I should have to... My whole being revolted against the prospect. It was impossible–such a demand. I had been carried away by my emotions. It was a snare of Satan. I should be a traitor to the church of my baptism. God had placed me here in the Church of England. He was blessing my work as its minister. He had given me endless graces. I buried myself in that work again, and for a time succeeded in forgetting, or at least stifling, the fears that had been my torment–until the haphazard remark of a photographer (registering my features), an agnostic, I believe, opened my eyes to my inability honestly to defend the Established Church’s position; it was to the effect that if Christianity were true, obviously the Roman Catholic Church, with her authority, was right. It was the testimony of a man who had no ax to grind. A Jewish dentist made the same remark in effect to me shortly afterward. The man in the street testified the same with his: “If I were religious, I’d be a Roman Catholic.” Whether it was the photographer or not, my fears were released once more from their repression, abruptly and acutely, and this time I resolved that it should be a fight to the finish, either way–that no worldly or material considerations should interfere. The clergyman whom I had consulted had already made one thing clear in my mind–that the issue between Rome and Canterbury, the crux of the whole problem, was the claim of Rome to be the infallible teaching authority appointed by God, and the denial by Canterbury of that claim. The whole question boiled down to the question of infallibility, and on that everything else hung. I entered upon an intensive study of the point. I read the history of the doctrine, the Fathers and the Councils of the Church, and what they had to say; examined its rationality. At the end of some months I came to this conclusion: that, as far as Holy Scripture, history, and reason were concerned, the Catholic Church could prove her claim to be God’s infallible teacher up to the hilt. It is difficult after all these years to recapture the exact mode of its appeal to my reason; but it was the appeal that the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church inevitably presents to any man who is prepared to lay aside bias, prejudice, and preconceptions. I will try to state it in the fewest words possible. Infallibility is the only guarantee we have that the Christian religion is true. Actually, if I, at this moment, did not believe in an infallible teacher appointed by God then nothing on earth would induce me to believe in the Christian religion. If, as outside the Catholic Church, Christian doctrines are a matter of private judgment, and therefore the Christian religion a mere matter of human opinion, then there is no obligation upon any living soul to believe in it. Why should I stake my immortal soul upon human opinion? For that is all you have if you refuse the infallible Church. In itself her claim may be reduced to this: the Catholic Church, when she defines a doctrine of faith or morals, when she tells us what to believe and what to do–in a word, what the Christian religion is–then, and then only, she is prevented by God from making a mistake, from teaching untruth. The Church is God’s mouthpiece–His voice. Could God’s voice speak untruth? Protestantism, claiming the Holy Ghost and presenting a jumble of contradictions, declares, in effect, that God does speak untruth. And only blinded reason prevents its adherents from seeing and admitting that unpalatable fact. Sanity alone should compel every thinking man to halt before the Catholic Church’s very claim. It is commonly assumed that submission to an infallible authority in religion involves slavery, that Catholics cannot think for themselves, that their reason is stifled, that they commit intellectual suicide. “No educated man could accept the medieval dogmas of the Catholic Church.” Examined in the light of horse sense and human reason, that shibboleth of the modernist leaders is revealed in all its naked stupidity, as an irrational and unscientific piece of snobbery for gulling the masses and blinding them to the claims of the Catholic Church. In intent, since the dogmas are the same today, it means: “No educated man could submit to what the Catholic Church claims to be infallibly true”: or, more simply, “No educated man could submit to infallibility in the matter of religion.” For acceptance involves submission to the one Church that claims it. The obvious reply is: “In the name of all that is sane, why not?” When in every other department of life he is submitting to infallible truth already? Is slavery involved; is reason stifled; is it intellectual suicide to submit to the infallible truth of the law of gravity; do men jump off cliffs on the chance of going up instead of down? To submit, as every scientist does, to the fixed data of science, believing them to be infallibly true; could he be a scientist at all, if he refused to submit? To submit, as every educated man does, by eating, to the infallible truth that the human body needs food? To submit, even if he was not there and never saw it, to the infallible truth of the Great War? To submit, as every mathematician does, to the multiplication table? To the axioms of Euclid? To submit, as every honest businessman does, to the infallible principles of business honesty? As all businessmen do to the infallible requirements to conduct a business at all? Were a businessman to conduct his business as the modernists conduct their religion, he would close down as the modernists have closed down Christianity for themselves and their adherents. Examples could be multiplied to show that in every department of life every rational being is already submitting to infallible truth. Is it rational or irrational to proclaim that no educated man could submit in the hundredth case, that of religion, when he submits in the other ninetynine? On the face of it the rationality lies with those who submit in the hundredth and most vital case of all. Is it a sign of education to submit to human opinions in preference to the revealed truths of God, who Himself declared that they were to be taught and accepted or refused under pain of eternal damnation? To prefer the negations of modernism to the dogmas of the Church that must teach infallibly if she teaches Christianity, i.e., the revealed truths of God? Of the Church that must be infallible when she teaches truth, since truth is an infallible thing? When, as far as reason was concerned, I was satisfied as to the unique claim of Rome, upon This interesting newspaper article, untitled and undated, was found between the pages of an old Fr. Dudley edition. which all else depended, I decided to present my case for no longer remaining in the Church of England to one or two prominent scholars among its clergy. I did so. As far as I can recollect, the “refutation” given me made no impression whatever. Though easily my superiors in scholarship, I had sufficient knowledge and logic to perceive that the great chain of scriptural and historical evidence for the Catholic claim remained unbroken by excerpts from St. Augustine, St. Cyprian, and others, THE ANGELUS • May 2005 32 Fr. Anselm Thornton, the Masterful Monk, reappears to enter the lives of Captain Louis Vivien, of the French Intelligence Service, and Verna Wray, the girl of the tale. The theme is the growing revolt against God and the moral law which is now spreading openly or in subtle forms throughout the world. An unusual love story is interwoven, the setting of which lies mainly in England, with incidental work in Leningrad, Paris, Lourdes and Hollywood. The tale works up to a love-climax, and to a startling ending, consequent upon the detective work of Captain Louis Vivien and certain acts of the Masterful Monk. “The Coming of the Monster” is a study of events. I am writing for such as have eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds unshackled by intelligentsia’s chains. I have deliberately adopted and adapted the Screen method for intensifying theme and incident by the interspersion of cascades of events in rapid superimposition. May I mention, to forestall doubt, that the descriptions contained in these events are almost wholly from actual life. conveniently interpreted according to the will of the reader and not to the mind of the author. It is little less than amazing to me now that scholars of repute should endeavor to counter the vast weight of evidence against them with what they themselves must in honesty admit is the less likely interpretation–to fit the rock to the pebble rather than the pebble to the rock. To my case for leaving a church which was so plainly devoid, in view of its contradictions, of any divine teaching authority, I received no valid answer at all. Every conceivable argumentum ad hominem was presented; sentiment, “Roman fever,” “intellectual suicide,” treachery to the “church of my baptism,” “corruptions of Rome,” the whole well-worn gamut of objections was paraded. I had read them all, though, already and found them untrue. The great facts about the Catholic Church were left standing–unassailable. And those facts demanded submission. I have been asked again and again, since I became a Catholic, why I left the Church of England, and often the implication behind the question, if not actually expressed, has been that my motive for doing so could not have been based on reason. There is a prevalent idea that converts to Rome are in some mysterious manner “got hold of” or “caught” by “Roman priests.” I would like to assure any non-Catholic who may happen to read this that converts are not “got hold of” or “caught.” In my own case I had rarely even spoken to a “Roman priest” before, of my own free will and with my reason already convinced, I went to consult one at the London Oratory. It is true that in doing so I was still full of Protestant suspicion and imagined that he would be extremely gratified to “get hold of” a real live Anglican clergyman; I should make a splendid “catch.” The priest in question received me most calmly. He showed no sign of excitement; he did not stand on his head or caper about. He did not even appear to regard me as a particularly good “catch.” He answered my questions and invited me to come again, if I cared to, but no more. I left, feeling several sizes smaller. I learned many things, however, from that interview. It was so entirely different from the interviews with the Anglican scholars. For the priest there was no difficult case to bolster up. Not a single question that I put to him presented “difficulties.” There were no awkward corners to get around. I believe his candidness about the human side of the Catholic Church almost startled me. Never once was he on the defense. All that I had been groping toward so painfully and laboriously was so obvious to him as to leave me wondering how it could ever have not been obvious to myself. I realized, too, from that interview that “going over to Rome” would be very much more than stepping out of a small boat onto an Atlantic liner. It would be no less than coming into the kingdom of God on earth–and the Catholic Church was that kingdom of God. I was not coming in on my own terms, but on hers. I was not conferring a privilege upon her; she was conferring an inestimable privilege upon me. I was not going to make myself a Catholic, the Catholic Church was going to make me one. There would be a formal course of instruction, a real testing of my faith, and finally, a real submission to a living authority–the living authority of God on earth. I hope I am wrong, but I have sometimes suspected that there are some who have never made their submission to the Catholic Church, and yet who have reached the point at which I stood after seeing that priest; those whose reason has led them to the entrance gates of the Kingdom of God, who have seen inscribed above them that word “Submission” in all its naked, uncompromising meaning–and turned away. I wonder if they can ever forget that they once looked into their mother’s eyes–and refused. Reason may submit; the will may refuse. It is a matter of dispositions and the race of God, once conviction of the reason has been attained. Actually, it involves an unconditional surrender of the will to the will of God–no easy task for the Protestant whose whole outlook in the spiritual direction has been determined by likes and dislikes, who has been accustomed to a religion that costs him little and claims the right of private judgment, who has detested being told what to believe and what to do; in a word, who has been habitually indisposed, mentally and spiritually, for anything approaching unconditional submission of the will. I have no intention of hurting feelings, but I am convinced that the supreme difficulty for most Anglicans who would “like to go over to Rome” but do not, is their (unconscious perhaps) inability even to contemplate submission to the one Church that demands it. When the late Archbishop of Canterbury publicly proclaimed that he and the adherents of the Established Church would never pass under a doorway upon whose lintel was inscribed the word “Submission” he was precisely expressing the Protestant mind. Mercifully he was unaware that submission to the Catholic Church is submission to God. I claim no credit, in my own case, for submitting; but rather blame for delaying so long–for the moral cowardice that hesitates to lay the onus of the consequences upon Almighty God, to burn one’s boats and take the plunge. When, by divine grace, I was ready, and had made my decision, there was only one thing to do. I told my vicar, packed my bags, and left the East End. At the London Oratory I placed myself under instruction and, later on, was received. I would like to mention that my Protestant vicar and a curate who succeeded me in the parish are now also, both of them, priests of the Catholic Church. “Well–and what have you found?” I will tell you–and what I was told I should find. I was told that the Catholic Church always placed the Church before Christ–that Christ was kept in the background. I have found, on the contrary, that she places me in a personal relationship with Christ that can never be attained outside–that Christ is her very being, by Whom and for Whom she exists, and to Whom to unite her children is her one ceaseless care. I was told that if I became a Catholic my mind would be fettered, my reason stifled; I should no longer be able to think for myself. I have found on the contrary that the Catholic Church places me on a platform of truth from which even a poor mind like mine can rise to fathomless heights. I have found the truth that sets men free. I was told that in the Catholic Church it was all decay and stagnation. I have found, however, the very life of God Himself pulsing through every vein of His Mystical Body. It was like coming out of a small stuffy room with all the windows closed and striding up to the top of some great hill with all the winds of heaven roaring round. I have found life. Instead of the hard spiritual tyranny of which I was told, I have found a loving Mother who supplies my every human need. Instead of corruption, sanctity unknown outside. And sinners, too. For the Church of Christ does not break the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax. Like her Master, she ever seeks and saves that which is lost. She is big enough and loving enough to hold even sinners in the fold; if she did not, she would not be the Church of Christ. Instead of hatred, I have found compassion for those outside–for the sheep without a shepherd. And I would that I could show them right into the heart of him whom men call the Pope of Rome–the shepherd of the sheep, the Vicar of Christ on earth; for then I would show them no ambitious autocrat striving for worldly power, but a loving father loved by his children as no other man on earth is loved. And I have found the kingdom of heaven on earth. The city of God. That city that “hath no need of the sun, nor of the moon to shine in it; for the glory of God hath enlightened it, and the Lamb is the lamp thereof. “The Tremaynes and the Masterful Monk” is a character study in which Fr. Anselm Thornton influences the lives of two brothers, one lovable and generous, the other self-seeking and malicious. I have not hesitated to reveal the character of Gordon Tremayne in all its naked ugliness; otherwise the full nature of his redemption would be missed. We are apt, rather smugly I think, to place certain characters beyond redemption. My choice of Gordon Tremayne has been deliberate, for the reason that humanly he seemed unredeemable. As it happened, he proved otherwise owing to the monk acting on the principle of the potentially reclaimable deep down. The Gordon Tremaynes of this world are not uncommon, whose cruelties cry to heaven for vengeance, and yet remain untouched by law. Beyond human reach they may be, but not beyond reach of the Divine. This present volume is the sixth of a series (of nine) dealing with problems of human happiness. Reprinted with permission of The Catholic Dispatch, cdia@earthlink.net, http://home.earthlink.net/~cdia For purchase information refer to the outside back cover of this issue of the magazine. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 Fr. Stehlin gives the sermon on Palm 34 Sunday, 2005, in Warsaw. News from the Eastern Front Church and school in Warsaw under the snow. An interview with Fr. John Jenkins, an American priest of the Society of Saint Pius X in Poland. Father, you were ordained by Bishop Fellay in 1999 after six years of seminary at Winona, Minnesota. How did you get sent to Poland? Very good question! The Society is a missionary order, just as our beloved founder was, and the priests of the Society are now present in over 50 countries. The sacrament of Order gives us the grace to receive exactly that–orders. So I was sent to Poland in August 2004 as an assistant to Fr. Stehlin, who is the superior of the Society for the Eastern Countries. How do you like Poland? Do you speak Polish? What do you do to communicate with the people? As far as the language is concerned, I think that the miracle of Pentecost was more for those that heard the apostles than for the apostles themselves. The faithful manage to understand me, in spite of the American accent. Poland is a very Catholic country, and like other Catholic countries, she knows very well the mystery of the cross, having passed from the Second World War to atheistic Communism and the loss of over THE ANGELUS • May 2005 a third of its population. Since the events of 1989 Poland has changed enormously, and not always for the betterment of the Catholic Faith. Nonetheless, there are still many relics of Catholic Poland that survive to this day, and which encourage us to fight with all our strength for Tradition. Of what does your apostolate in Poland consist? Could you give us some news from the Eastern countries? Here in Warsaw we are six priests for the apostolate in Poland, the Ukraine and in Estonia. In Lithuania three other priests are responsible for the apostolate in Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Russia. I myself was nominated the pastor for the chapel in Warsaw. In Poland, the Immaculate Heart gives us many consolations at this moment. Three young men have entered the seminary at Zaitzkofen last September, and two others are trying their vocation with the Dominicans of Avrillé. This year, God willing, will be the ordination of Deacon Rafael Trytek to the priesthood. There are now three young men here at the priory who are in preparation for their eventual entry to the seminary next year. Thanks be to God and His blessed Mother for all of these vocations! Our chapel at Warsaw has been far too small for many years. At last we have been able to build a church as well as a primary school. The construction was started last April, and, God willing, the school will be blessed and the altar consecrated by Bishop de 35 Galarreta this coming May. We would like to open the school next September for the children of our families that become each year more numerous. Poland is known as a very conservative country, and the late Pope himself was Polish. Doesn’t this limit your apostolate? Firstly, one shouldn’t limit the Society of Saint Pius X as a work to resist the Pope! On the contrary, we are here to preach the Faith of all the Popes, the Catholic Faith, to offer the sacrifice of the Mass and to administer the sacraments: in short, to do everything for the salvation of souls! This implies, as throughout the entire history of the Church, raising one’s voice against the errors which destroy the supernatural life. The biggest obstacle to our work is rather the errors of Vatican II and the subsequent orientations of the hierarchy. One must say that in Poland the apostolate is made even more difficult by the sentimental attachment of the people to the first Polish Pope, which makes them very vulnerable to embrace modern errors. In order to understand this attachment, one shouldn’t forget that until 1989 the practice of the Faith–often at the risk of one’s life–was controlled by the Communist party. The visit of John Paul II in 1979 was a great victory for the Polish people. One must also note the just sentiment of gratitude for his support of Solidarity and the other movements which hastened the fall of the Iron Curtain. Poland has also benefited from a well-formed and energetic clergy for a long time. Cardinal Wyszinski, the Primate of Poland, refused and suppressed many of the abuses coming from Rome itself–such as Communion in the hand, clapping during the Mass, etc. Lastly, one can say that in a country where 98% of the people are Catholic, the consequences of ecumenism are less apparent, simply from a lack of occasion for its practice. Thus unfortunately the faithful follow blindly the hierarchy in changing their faith, even if they are very attached to Tradition. The new Mass does not form priests like Cardinal Wyszinski, priests ready to sacrifice their lives because they offer the Sacrifice. The clergy want more and more to “dialogue,” not convert the people. The percentage of faithful who assist at the Mass each Sunday is less and less every year. The external appearances still give a superficial security, but the false ideas are already well implanted and it is only a matter of time until these ideas will be logically put into practice. Last November saw the official introduction of Communion in the hand. The rector of the seminary of Krakow–one of the most conservative–discourages the seminarians from wearing the cassock, etc. We are in a certain way a little bit like Noah before the flood, some 30 years or so behind the rest of Europe. The deluge of modernism has already begun, and many conservative movements begin to approach us, especially by our written apostolate. Our books, which had before been treated as “schismatic” and boycotted are now not only read but even circulated by these conservative groups. Our printing house is known throughout the country, and our bookstore in Czestochowa is known as a source for excellent books which cannot be found elsewhere. Do you have a lot of faithful in your chapels, many young families? Our chapel at Warsaw is full of very young families. The baptismal register contains 70 entries, and our funeral register only one, and it is the inscription of a child…which gives a little idea of the dynamic of our parish! For this reason our first priority is the education of the new generation of Tradition. In this context, I would like to ask your prayers for a special intention. The director of a Catholic high school (of several hundred students) has approached us with the proposition to make us the owners of her school. She would simply like to leave the school in good hands. This implies not only the gift of the school and its buildings, but also of all the juridical base of the school. The procedure for opening a school is very difficult in Poland, and even more so for us who are not very well liked by certain people….We can hardly believe in such a thing, but the procedure for the transfer of property has THE ANGELUS • May 2005 36 T A traditional Christmas play (Jaseêka). already begun. If this comes to pass, we can only admire the greatest miracle accomplished by the Immaculate Heart for us! For this intention we all ask humbly your prayers. Elsewhere in Poland, our apostolate in the chapels at Gdansk and Rzeszow is expanding quite well thanks to the establishment of study groups. The Third Order of the Society was established two years ago, and there are at the moment 15 Third Order members. The apostolate of our Oblate Sister Marie Maksymiliana bears many fruits. A youth group for young ladies (Krucjata Niepokalanej) as well as the catechism by correspondence attract many young families. We see the effects: the chapels are quickly becoming too small! At Gdansk we have re-started the building of a church which has been in the course of construction for several years, but often interrupted for various reasons. Will we be able to finish it this time? Only with your prayers and the grace of the Immaculate Heart! Could you give us also some news from the other countries? Fr. Ivo Ounpou, the first Estonian priest for the Society of Saint Pius X, has taken upon himself the task of converting his country, which is almost completely Protestant. Before the Reformation this country was called Terra Mariana, and some 20 faithful have enrolled in the Militia Immaculata. Fr. Stehlin says that it is quite touching to see the children full of enthusiasm for the ideal of the Knighthood of Our Lady. The first fruits of this work: an important Christian school asks the Society to give courses on ethics and religion to the children in order to form them in Christian values and to counteract the terrible influence of the modern world. On the other hand, at Moscow we have suffered terrible trials that have almost destroyed THE ANGELUS • May 2005 “Procedamus in pace,” with Our Eucharistic Lord. Procession for the blessing of a new chapel. our work. We have since opened a new chapel and the number of faithful has increased. We are now trying to obtain a better juridical status so that our chapel might become a public place of worship. For the moment we are only allowed in the country with tourist visas, and the Mass is celebrated in a place considered private by the state. In the Ukraine, our friends continue the combat for survival. The Society of Saint Josaphat has suffered many trials these last few years. Fr. Basil, their superior, has lost his post as parish priest yet still holds on to his two churches. There are multiple Masses in each of them due to the number of the faithful, and at times the High Mass must be held in the garden which surrounds the church–there can be close to 10,000 faithful on Sunday. Several other priests have been thrown out and even excommunicated during this past year. Many have lost everything and must celebrate the holy liturgy in homes or in rented rooms. Some have started to build new churches. Last October Fr. Stehlin was able to preach the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius to 11 priests at the Seminary of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at Lvov, where there are currently 18 seminarians. After the recent presidential elections, the Ukraine is in a very critical situation. The media has certainly spoken of this at length. Concretely for our fellow priests and their faithful, this implies that many will suffer hunger and cold 37 themselves to Tradition, attaching them only to his person. Now that he has passed to the judgment of Him of whom he was the vicar for so many years, we hope that our work will be facilitated now that this psychological barrier has fallen. Do you see then a rapid increase in the attendance at your chapels? The faithful assist a wintery blessing of palms on Palm Sunday. The faithful arrive in their new church. these coming months. They seem to have been spared a civil war, but the situation remains very precarious. Of course all of this gives the ecclesiastical authorities more than enough to worry about without concerning themselves too much about Tradition. Thus our friends are able to show that they are there for everyone: many families present themselves to the presbytery, asking for soup….Our priest friends ask for your prayers so that all might pass through this trial purified and sanctified, and that many souls might learn about Tradition. As always, the greatest graces always come by the Cross, and through the hands of her who was at the foot of the Cross. May the Immaculate Heart of Mary inspire you to keep us in your prayers! Could you give us an update of the apostolate, especially since the death of the first Polish Pope? As you might well imagine, the death of the first Polish Pope was a great sadness for the people, though, as in all things, there are also great graces to be found therein. Every priest, no matter what his rank in the hierarchy of the Church, ought to be a window through which the light of grace passes. Yet we must say that the personality of John Paul II was more or less a wall, an obstacle hindering many souls from attaching There are many faces that I have never seen before, though we will see if they persevere...Yet we did have one distinguished visitor: for two weeks we were honored by the visit of Fr. Stephen Somerville, one of the priests who celebrated the Latin Mass for Mel Gibson. Fr. Stehlin had invited him to give some conferences in the larger cities of Poland. It was an astonishing success–every conference room was packed, to the great displeasure of the bishops. Fr. Somerville also had the privilege of suffering the rage of the modernist clergy, who had him thrown out of several conference halls...only to continue the conference in the city park. So at least he got to see some scenery as well. His witness to Tradition is extremely precious, and also an inspiration for many people who perhaps don’t have his courage. But all this shows that the modernists are more than active in Poland, and they are emboldened by the fact they have at last Communion in the hand, and without a Polish Pope (who gave at least the impression of conservatism) they will feel even more free to follow their own ideas. We have a long fight ahead of us! And what is the progress on the school project of which you make mention? Thanks to the prayers and sacrifices of many, the construction of the primary school as well as the acquisition of the secondary school progress rapidly. However, as anyone knows, education is one of the most costly projects that you ca-n ever undertake, and we have two enormous burdens to support this coming year. Fortunately we have many families who follow the example of Our Lord and the spirit of sacrifice, and how touching it is to see the children put aside their allowances for their future school. If you could add to your prayers some of your alms, we would be eternally grateful! This interview appeared firstly in the French review Nouvelles de Chrétienté and was translated into English for the Angelus Press by Fr. Jenkins. Father also updated the interview when he gave Angelus Press permission to print it. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 38 Ten Minutes with Fr. de Chivré: The Blessed Virgin If we allow God to draw us into His life, He will treat us as He did the Blessed Virgin. Let’s look at how He treated her and how she reacted. The Blessed Virgin reached a state of experimental knowledge of God by remaining faithful to the “Redemptive experiences” indispensable to that knowledge and inseparable from it. THE ANGELUS • May 2005 s : l k . . 39 As long as she had not passed through the Redemptive experience, she had a love of God, she was in the service of God, but she did not have experimental knowledge of Him. Never forget, even though we can, of course, only see God after death, it is up to us whether or not we have the vision of God already here on earth, at least an experimental knowledge of Him, arising from Redemptive experiences analogous to those through which the Blessed Virgin passed. In our own moments of “Redemptive experience,” picture it as God trying to crack the nutshell and open up our soul to the blue sky. What happened before the Annunciation?... She was a child basking in the effortless joy of a sinless childhood: a very pure, very healthy and very spontaneous joy; a joy of absolute consent in the service of the Temple. She was devoted to the service of the altar and felt that she was already lost in God. Next, she tasted the joy of an intense desire of God, which was nourished in her soul by constant fidelity. But in that she was a creature like us, she did not realize that all of these gratuitous touches of grace were not the experimental knowledge of God; they were its preludes. Yet, the charm of her fidelity is what drew God to choose her as the Mother of God: she was chosen through all of these touches of His grace. Leave the preludes behind and move on to the music, which is a sorrowful symphony: the drama of the Annunciation (for it was truly dramatic); the unexpected journey of the Visitation; Christmas night; the weariness of the flight into Egypt. The symphony moves on to separation by the death of St. Joseph; separation by the apostolate of her Son; a moral separation (“Who is My mother?”); the separation of our Lord’s arrest; separation from honor in His condemnation; the separation of His death; the separation of the Resurrection (a new step for the Blessed Virgin into the unknown); the separation of the Ascension. Strangely, however, the deeper the separation, the more she experienced God. She understood right away that as soon as Christ is conceived in a soul, that soul is nailed with Him to the Cross. It is not easy to tell a child that he is not at the end of his journey and that now is when everything starts...and that it may hurt very much. Think of those graces of her childhood and youth: graces of enthusiasm, of ease in understanding God, in serving Him, in loving Him with joy. These are the graces of starting out. God, who knows our frailty, begins everything with a prelude. We need to get it into our head that once we have said “yes” to God we move farther and farther away from the prelude and draw near to the music itself. But take heart: it is only in the real music that we come into contact with God. The great consolation of abandonment and separation is to know that they draw us, as they drew our Lady, through God’s own experience. He will need all the zeal of your faith, hope and charity, all the intensity of your zeal if you are to hold out through darkness and chaos and persevere in the ruins. The more you adopt that positive attitude, the more clearly will you discern the presence of God. The Blessed Virgin was never anxious or troubled: she wept, she suffered horribly–she is the Queen of Martyrs–but she was never discouraged. She was sure of Him. The real music begins when you are finally sure of God. I do not mean sure of His graces, but sure of Him, as St. Augustine so handsomely expressed it: “Do you seek to love the consolations of God or the God of consolations?” We need to understand one thing: from the moment we bind ourselves to God, we see that nothing is how we dreamed it would be. When we bind ourselves to God, we step away from ourselves. From that moment on, we belong to another, that is, to God. And He is going to take full advantage. Just when you imagine that you possess your ideal, He will show you that nothing is how you dreamed it would be. He will lead you exactly contrary to your inclinations. When this happened to the Blessed Virgin, she kept silent. Her response was a silence full of faith, a silence full of life for she was thinking of Him. The particular grace of contradiction is to instill in us a reflex of confidence in God. That is why contradiction unites us to God. It is the death of self. The difficulty with souls is that they always want to return to the immaturity of supernatural adolescence. On the contrary, the spiritual life is an unceasing effort, an inexplicable force pushing us forward. Perhaps early on we had pictured fewer temptations and more consolations. It is entirely the contrary. There will always be difficulties to resolve, continual bustle and commotion, not enough time to pray. And you have to keep going… Until the Annunciation, the Blessed Virgin had given herself to the Creator and not yet to the Redeemer. We must always remember this truth in all our desire for greatness of soul and of conscience: the more Christ is born in us by sanctity, the more He treats us as He treated His Mother. Take it or leave it. How did the Blessed Virgin comport herself? In a silence of faith, counting on the promise of the Archangel Gabriel: “The Most High will be with you. He will overshadow you.” Tell yourself that every engagement by which you bind yourself to God begins with the same promise of the archangel: “Be not afraid, the Most High will be with you. He will overshadow you.” It is the echo of the phrase said to those who take the religious habit: “The Lord THE ANGELUS • May 2005 40 has begun this work in you; it is He who will perfect it.” Most of all, may nothing surprise us. Let us be ready for anything. Then we will see that devotion to the Blessed Virgin suddenly becomes something solid and absolute for our mind and conscience. Our devotion will be manifest in the way we are united with Him, as she was, in the our daily struggles and trials. “Mary, full of grace,” show me the answer. “The Lord is with you”; may I not be false to my engagements. The Blessed Virgin was not bothered by the world. So much contradiction had turned her away from it that the world had no more meaning for her. She had no excessive attachment to the world. She passed through the world without being of the world. The only meaning that it had for her was the pity which it inspired in her. She had seen too much. Life on earth had no meaning for her except insofar as it could be given to her Son. Beyond the domain of her Son, it was not worth living. The same goes for ideas. For the Blessed Virgin certainly must have overheard plenty of commentary about her Son—from the Pharisees, His executioners, from everyone. She knew from experience that the most brilliant ideas were meaningless if they had no bearing on union with God. They only make sense in relation to the idea of God, in function of the good they can do in the eyes of God. We have to live like the Blessed Virgin, to seize so perfectly the nature of ideas. She was to know the greatest recompense of all: to be possessed by God. Her reflection unfolded continuously in an atmosphere made up of a vivid and calm interior affection and of an overpowering need to live by the Presence of her Son, in the firmness of experimental certainties about her Son. These certainties became something strong and peaceful. She had joy even during the cruelest torture of her heart, as her Son hung upon the Cross. If we wonder why we don’t have peace in our sufferings, live them in union with our Lord. That changes everything. Imagine a glance from the Virgin Mary; what must have been a smile from this woman; what experience of God must have shone through her gaze. (We are always trying to fashion ourselves a face: if only we would let God fashion our face.) The living, fervent, and unique empire of the Son’s presence over the Mother was indescribable. We can understand why the liturgy has named her “the All-Beautiful.” If all this is understood, then we will understand the role of prayer to the Blessed Virgin in our life and how to dwell in faith as she did. Theologically, the effect of prayer to the Blessed Virgin is very different from that of prayer to the saints. Every saint has his role. The Blessed Virgin is the Mother of the human race. Her role is one of empire over the child. The first effect of prayer to the Blessed Virgin is to exercise over us an empire of grace, to facilitate our readiness to consent, resist evil, and adhere to the good. The minute we invite her intercession, she exercises the empire which every mother has over her child. Firstly, she makes us want to shake off human considerations and their pointlessness. With her, we no longer pay attention to what the others are saying or to what the world is thinking. Her sweet empire makes everything else fade into the background. She tells us, “When I saw Him coming, my soul was joyful; when I saw Him leave, my soul was calm; when I saw Him suffering, my soul was united to Him.” Nothing else matters. Secondly, she brings a liberation. We are slowed down by the weight of our sufferings and anxieties, by the heaviness of our fatigue. Prayer to the Blessed Virgin lightens that heaviness. She puts us back on the path more robust and more genuine. She frees us from obstacles. She is the mother who prepares us for the coming of her Son. She knows very well the snares we will have to avoid. She has all the cleverness of a mother. When we are at a loss to make a decision, we need to pray to her. Thirdly, she inspires us with an affectionate shame every time we feel like giving up and throwing in the towel. Never do any such thing without first going to her. When we hear her ask us, “Did I turn around and leave Mt. Calvary?” we will never dare leave either. Stabat mater dolorosa, lacrymosa. Finally, she creates in the soul a climate favorable to the total gift of self, that is, the gift of the Cross. Let Him take the initiative as at the Annunciation, as during the apostolate of the Visitation. Like our Lady, remain with Him. Once we have made the choice to follow Him, we no longer have the right to leave. Now we see how our Rosaries guarantee God’s empire over us and our need to yield to it. May they preserve in our conscience an “anxiety” of perfection and an “anxiety” of love in our hearts. “I will help you,” the Blessed Virgin tells us, “but only on one condition: never let go of me.” “Remember, O most blessed Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy holy protection and sought thy aid was abandoned.” Translated exclusively into English for Angelus Press and published in this language for the first time. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray´) was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984. The Belloc Collection Essays of a Catholic Belloc turns his powerful mind, erudition, robust common sense and supreme confidence in the Catholic Faith to a host of topics, including the New Paganism, Legend, Usury, the Schools, the Revival of Latin, the Two Cultures of the West, the Catholic Church and the Modern State and Industrial Capitalism, etc. Belloc predicted–and explains–the chaos we now witness. 245pp, softcover, STK# 8097. $15.00 Sets forth the principle that “in the reconversion of our world to the Catholic standpoint lies the only hope for the future.” Foundation of Christendom Christendom’s zenith, and decline The Reformation and its immediate consequences Ultimate consequences of the Reformation: Capitalism and Communism Restoration: Conversion. • • • 208pp, softcover, STK# 8095. $15.00 Belloc analyzes five of the greatest heresies of all time: Arianism, Mohammedanism (Islam), Albigensianism, Protestantism, and “the Modern Attack,” showing that the world would be vastly different today if Arianism or Albigensianism had survived–and how it is different because Protestantism survived. He predicts the re-emergence of Islam; explains how the Modern Attack is the worst threat to the Catholic Church ever. 161pp, softcover, STK# 8099. $13.50 The Crisis of Civilization • The Great Heresies • How the Reformation Happened Gives the true and largely untold story which answers one of the most important historical questions in our civilization: “How did Christendom suffer shipwreck?” Traces the conflict blowby-blow from pre-Luther, through “The Flood,” “The English Accident,” and Calvin, showing the spiritual, military, political, and financial struggles which ended in a divided Europe by 1648. 180pp, softcover, STK# 8100. $13.50 William the Conqueror This book describes one of the crucial steps in the building of “Christendom,” i.e., it describes the entry of England in 1066 A.D. into the European Christian unity which was then coming to birth. It also gives a true picture of a Catholic military leader who, despite his sins, took seriously the Catholic Faith and his obligations thereto. Essential for understanding where our Western Christian civilization came from. The Crusades Belloc shows that the Crusades were a titanic struggle between Christian civilization and “the Turk,” savage Mongols who had embraced Islam. He explains the practical reasons why the Crusaders initially succeeded and why they ultimately failed; then he predicts the re-emergence of Islam, since Christendom failed to destroy it in the 12th century. 250pp, softcover, STK# 8096. $16.50 76pp, softcover, STK# 8102. $9.00 Europe and the Faith In this book, pivotal to all his historical insights, Belloc answers the question: What made Europe? He shows it was not the barbarians nor the Protestant Reformation, but the Catholic Faith...and only the Catholic Faith can rejuvenate it. It must return to that Faith or perish! This is a tremendous eye-opener on where we are today and where we must go from here! 191pp, softcover, STK# 8098. $14.00 Characters of the Reformation This may well be Belloc’s most interesting work. It includes Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, St. Thomas More, Cranmer, Calvin, Mary Tudor (“Bloody Mary”), Mary Stuart (“Queen of Scots”), Cardinal Richelieu and many others–23 in all–analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, motives and mistakes and how each changed the course of history. 372pp, softcover, STK# 8094. $15.00 Survivals and New Arrivals Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church The enemies of the Church always consist of three sorts: The “Survivals,” or those enemies whose major attacks are on the wane; the “Main Opposition,” whose attacks are presently at their peak; and the “New Arrivals,” or those enemies of the Church that are just coming into the battle. Belloc slices and dices! 167pp, color hardcover, STK# 8101. $13.00 Buy all nine (normally $124.50) Now $109.95 STK#8903. Great Catholic Literature N EW NGS ERI O FF Fr. Owen Francis Dudley was known as a penetrating thinker and a stirring novelist. Born in 1882, he studied for the Anglican ministry and was “ordained” in 1911. In 1915, he converted to the Catholic Faith, studied for the Catholic priesthood in Rome, and was ordained a priest in 1917. He served as Chaplain to the British Gunners on the French and Italian fronts in World War I. After recovering from war wounds, Fr. Dudley be­came very active in the work of the Catholic Missionary Society, of which he was Superior from 1933-46, lecturing in town halls, theaters, Hyde Park (in London, on the same street corner as Fr. Vincent McNabb), and mining club rooms. He visited the US for lecture tours. As part of his missionary apostolate, he wrote a series of novels on the abiding problems of human happiness. The Shadow on the Earth This novel depicts the different perspectives of optimism and pessimism pitted against each other–a story of good versus evil at its best. Set in a Benedictine monastery, this great read leads to a deepened understanding of the answer to the problem of pain and suffering. 143pp, hardcover, STK# 8074. $10.00 The Masterful Monk Re of t ad the his st aut famo ory con hor us ’s v sta ersio on rting n p.2 6 In a vivid portrayal of the philosophical problem of human happiness, Fr. Dudley lays out for the reader the now all-toofamiliar attack on mankind’s innate sense of morality. Temptations of materialism were never stronger than they are today, yet here they are embodied in a novel from 1945! 314pp, hardcover, STK# 8075. $12.00 Pageant of Life A tale of human respect. In this book, Fr. Dudley presents an antithesis to that modern cowardice which manifests itself in the vogue for the vague and non-committal; the convenient indifference which ques­tions everything and holds nothing. 343pp, hardcover, STK# 8076. $12.00 The Coming of the Monster Portrays the modern revolt against God and the moral law. An unusual mystery that leads you on a “journey of the mind”–and body!–with scenes set in Leningrad, Lourdes, Paris, and Hollywood. 275pp, hardcover, STK# 8077. $12.00 The Tremaynes and the Masterful Monk A character study; the story of an ugly, unlikable man who seemed unredeemable. In the event, he proved otherwise–owing to the monk acting on the principle of the potentially reclaimable deep down. 333pp, hardcover, STK# 8115. $12.00 Shipping & Handling US/Canada Foreign $.01 to $10.00 $3.95 $7.95 $10.01 to $25.00 $5.95 $9.95 $25.01 to $50.00 $6.95 $12.95 $50.01 to $100.00 $8.95 $14.95 Over $100.00 9% of order 12% of order Airmail surcharge (in addition to above) Canada 8% of subtotal; Foreign 21% of subtotal. angelus Press 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri 64109 1-800-96ORDER 1-800-966-7337 www.angeluspress.org Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.