may 2006

$4.45

“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition

eSlavery
Bishop Richard Williamson

rd. 2 rlty

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“Instaurare omnia in Christo—To restore all things in Christ.”
Motto of Pope St. Pius X

The

ngelus
A JOURNAL OF ROMAN CATHOLIC TRADITION

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May 2006
Volume XXIX, Number 5

• Kansas City, Missouri 64109

English-language Editor and Publisher
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PUBLISHER

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EDITOR

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ANYWHERE BUT HERE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
The Dark Imaginations of eSlavery
Aaron D. Wolf

THE ROAD TO REALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
H.E. Bishop Richard Williamson

DESIGN AND LAYOUT

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THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

St. Pius X and the Duel Between
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Rev. Fr. Franz Schmidberger

SOPHROSYNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Timothy J. Cullen

BOOK REVIEW: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
The Valiant Woman: Conferences for Women by Msgr. Landriot
Mrs. Colleen Hammond

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Fr. Peter R. Scott

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ages, male and female, with as many curious attractions as there are souls.

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2

EJ
anywher
buthereO
A a r o n

The Dark

D

of
Imaginations

“Professing themselves to be
wise, they became fools...”
Romans 1:22

an, by nature, is limited by time, space,
and biology. I can only be where I
am, live for my appointed time, and
accomplish what I am physically capable
of accomplishing—which, according to
the natural order, means, chiefly, having a wife and
children and providing for them. I am my father’s son,
a product of my family, of the place of my birth, of the
contours of the land of my birth. Proper cultivation,
culture, inculcates the habit of living in harmony with
nature, with the world as God made it. That world is
small, and, though marred by the Curse, it remains
beautiful.
The Scriptures reflect the natural order and man’s
place within it. “All flesh is as grass,” writes Isaiah, and
“the grass withereth, and the flower fadeth.” God’s
will, on a very basic level, and apart from the greater
issue of sin and redemption, is for man to conform
to his place. The Decalogue warns us not to imagine
ourselves outside of our place—whether by making
false gods to worship, or by murdering, or by coveting
our neighbor’s wife.

m

n

3

D .

W o l f

re
eOG
of
eSlavery
s
But this is precisely where our Enlightened Age went off the rails. The

philosophes wished to be gods, knowing good from evil. They said, together

with their master, “I will be like the Most High.” And so they began to
disrupt that “harmony,” as Wendell Berry says, “of the inescapable dialogue
between culture and nature.” Their concepts of man-in-the-state-of-nature, or
man-in-the-state, was, as St. Paul put it in Romans 1, idolatry.
In the face of all of the evil unleashed throughout our “enlightened”
age, we often hear conservatives warn that God’s judgment must not be
far off. “If we don’t repent of [abortion, “gay marriage,” human cloning],
God’s gonna judge this nation!” The assumption behind this fear is that
what we are witnessing in Western society is man at his worst. The sad
reality is that, in preparation for that Great Day, God is already judging
the American people, by withdrawing a portion of His restraint. For at
least a century, God has been pouring out bowl after bowl of judgment
on our society, giving Western man over to his “vile affections,” allowing
him to enslave himself further through advanced “knowledge” of the
workings of nature which, taken apart from the created order, produce
only mutation, sickness, and death. This is the “sorcery, murder, theft,
and fornication” of which St. John speaks in the Apocalypse.
For the last century, our rulers have been on a quest to destroy our
natural relationship to the created order—time, space, and biology—
through technology. In his essay “The Abolition of Man,” C.S. Lewis
provides three examples of this sorcery: the airplane, the radio, and
the contraceptive. These attempts at conquering nature are, in fact,

The problem is what
you are not doing if the
electronic moment grows
too large–too large for
the teenager and too
large for those parents
who are equally tethered
to their gadgets. In that
case, you are not having
family dinner, you are not
having conversations, you
are not debating whether
or not to do this or that....
–Psychiatrist Edward
Hallowell

4

One gets obsessed with one’s
gadgets....We rarely have
dinner together anymore.
Everyone is in their own little
world, and we don’t get out
together to have a social
life.–Stephen Cox of Van Nuys,
California, participant in a
study of family life in America
conducted by the UCLA Center
on Everyday Lives of Families
What happens as we replace
side-by-side and eye-to-eye
human connections with quick,
disembodied e-exchanges?...
Although many aspects of
the networked life remain
scientifically uncharted,
there’s substantial literature
on how the brain handles
multitasking. And basically, it
doesn’t.

instruments of human control, even slavery. “As regards the powers
manifested in the aeroplane and the wireless, Man is as much the patient
or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for
propaganda.” Concerning contraceptives, Lewis continues, “there is a
paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are
the patients and subjects of a power wielded by those already alive.”
The airplane gives us the illusion of “mobility,” causing us to believe
that we have eliminated, to some extent, the constraints of space and
time. When your son or daughter achieves success, he is said to be
“going places.” But unmasked, “upward mobility” means hating the
soil on which I was born and leaving it behind as quickly as possible.
It means throwing off the “shackles” of living in close proximity to our
parents, grandparents, and children; yet we remain “free” to visit them,
as one does monkeys at a zoo, whenever we wish—perhaps on one of the
many three-day weekends our government graciously grants us. It means
that rootless man is taught from an early age that love for his native
people and place is something to be despised and that “provincialism” is
a relic of an unenlightened past.
In 1930, Andrew Lytle knew that the automobile and the highway
system had already accomplished this.
The good-road programs drive like a flying wedge and split the heart of this
provincialism—which prefers religion to science, handcrafts to technology, the inertia
of the fields to the acceleration of industry, and leisure to nervous prostration.

The appeal to the loss of leisure seems strange in today’s culture.
After all, aren’t we a people of leisure “amusing ourselves to death”?
Not really, because outside a harmonious relationship to nature, our
pretended leisure can only lead to “nervous prostration.” But thanks to
electricity and satellites blasting through the ether above us, we now
have hour upon hour of nervous prostration awaiting us in our cars,
living rooms, and offices. Lewis feared the “wireless,” and Mr. Lytle,
the “radio salesman” who makes use of the good-roads system and
“descends to take away the farmer’s money.” Could they have imagined
the horrors of today’s enslaving technology?
From a God’s-eye view above the towns of America, every evening
at eight, seven Central and Mountain, millions of people are sitting on
their couches and easy chairs, staring at the wall in silence. Stroll down
the streets of any subdivision in any neighborhood, North or South,
East or West, after darkness falls, and what do you see? Green lights
flash through the curtains of the picture windows in every living room
and, increasingly, out of the bedroom windows of children. Televisions,
turned on as families walk through their front doors every day, stay
on throughout the evening, with thousands of images flowing into the
minds of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters. The noise is a constant
drone in the background, stealing away precious hours of the fleeting
time granted to each man in his lifetime and lulling him to sleep at night.
Liberty—the liberty of choice—is measured in terms of the question,
Digital cable or satellite dish?
The content of these images and sounds is often the subject of
fierce debate and passionate polemics among the state’s conservative
and liberal factions. Faxes flow through machines in think tanks and
congresspersons’ offices: “Christian Morality Center Condemns Blatant
Attack on Family Values: Tonight’s episode of The S----y Girls contains
three sexually suggestive scenes, as well as two hells and one damn.”
So we devise our V-Chips, or read our favorite conservative
reviewer’s Meese-Commission-style analysis of the program, or turn
over to the Trinity Broadcasting Network, in hopes of securing Quality
Entertainment with High Production Values. What we fail to do is to
question the thing itself—that droning machine of plastic and metal that

5
relays images from centralized and anarcho-tyrannical networks located
far away in New York or Los Angeles or anywhere that is somewhere
else. Those networks give us our news, tell us what we ought to believe
about the world, who “we” are as a “nation,” which of “our stories” are
important, what CD’s and DVD’s and computers and automobiles and
vacations we should buy, and generally occupy our thoughts during our
“leisure time.”
When our thoughts are not occupied by the flashing picture tube or
plasma screen and surround-sound speakers, they are being pummeled
by the sounds of electronically recorded music. After I turn off the TV
in the morning, I can hop into my car and listen to the radio or CD’s
while I commute to work. If I am conservative, I thank God that I am
not like the publican in the car next to me, with his subwoofer pounding
away at the local noise ordinance; no, I have burned a special CD of my
own favorite music, reflecting my taste. Perhaps my music is ThoughtProvoking Pop, the Wisdom of Bono—intellectual stuff, very serious.
Or perhaps I am above all popular music, with only Bach cantatas and
Palestrina Masses in my machine. But have I ever stopped to consider
this medium of recorded music that interrupts my otherwise silent
moments? Is music—the melody, harmony, and rhythm of the scale
of nature, organized by skilled human hands and voices—meant to be
enjoyed in this manner, which is to say, consumed? Is this freedom,
to have so much at my fingertips and so little in my heart to love?
Furthermore, is it freedom to rely on others, from distant lands, who
were capable of successfully selling themselves to record-company
executives, who answer to CEO’s, who answer to shareholders—is it
freedom to be dependent on them for the music that fills my thoughts
and imagination?
The already dehumanized modern workplace is another place
where men and women sit and stare at screens. Extensive bookkeeping,
which is what so much time spent on the computer amounts to, is
itself, as Mr. Lytle taught us, the product of modernization, of placing a
crude monetary or numeric value on things that used to have intrinsic
worth. Today, we cannot operate without computers, which must be
upgraded constantly, at great expense, in order to free them of manmade viruses and man-made obsolescence. We cannot communicate
without electronic mail, because our everyday communications are not
face-to-face, because we imagine that we have conquered space. Letters
can be lost, burned up in house fires, or discarded; yet letters, because
they are by their very nature more difficult to produce, more permanent
in construction, are saved, cherished, reread, preserved. E-mail “goes
down” in one fell swoop; hard drives fail, and messages are lost forever;
CD backups are scratched and become instantly useless.
The Internet and the World Wide Web are the ultimate pretended
elimination of space. As broadband makes its way across the world like
the TVA made its way through Tennessee, like the railroads and the
Interstate Highway System made their way across the United States,
there is seemingly no limit to the transfer of “information.” Travelers
on the “information superhighway” can remain as anonymous as they
wish and go wherever they like, ostensibly undetected. And the numberone use of this space-eliminating technology is the production and
consumption of pornography. God gave us over to “vile affections” and
now, to the tune of $54 billion per year, username: anonymous is free to
dishonor his body in a dark room, in the glow of his LCD screen.
I can also join an “online community,” in which I can pretend to
fellowship with those I will never see, never hear, and never know. By
presenting an electronic impression of myself in a chat room, or on

We also saw how difficult it
was for parents to penetrate
the child’s universe. We
have so many videotapes
of parents actually backing
away, retreating from kids
who are absorbed by whatever
they’re doing.–UCLA Center on
Everyday Lives of Families
Kids are spending a larger
chunk of time using electronic
media–that is holding steady
at 6.5 hours a day...but they
are packing more media
exposure into that time: 8.5
hours’ worth, thanks to media
multitasking–listening to
iTunes, watching a DVD and
InstantMessaging friends all
at the same time.–Findings of
a 2005 survey of Americans
aged 8-18 by the Kaiser Family
Foundation

6

The ability to multiprocess has
its limits, even among young
adults. When people try to
perform two or more related
tasks either at the same time
or alternating rapidly between
them, errors go way up, and
it takes far longer–often
double the time or more–to
get the jobs done than if they
were done sequentially. The
toll in terms of slowdown is
extremely large–amazingly
so.–David E. Meyer, director of
the Brain, Cognition and Action
Laboratory at the University of
Michigan

a message board, I can live in an illusory global village, in which all
judgments on me and my character are limited to the version of myself
that I have chosen to portray—and can eliminate, by unsubscribing, if
someone should make me uncomfortable. These relationships happen
not of necessity, in a community in which I must foster harmony in order
to live, but as a form of entertainment.
There are conservative solutions, of course. I can set up Google so
that it only performs “safe searches.” I can program my e-mail so that
most of the [sicko, perverse, seductive, and sinful] messages go into my
junk box. But what guarantees that Google’s “safe search” yields for me
that which is true, lovely, honorable, and of good report? Furthermore,
this “virtual reality” is capable of consuming all of my thoughts, making
every question and whim something that I can satisfy “on demand,” with
one click of the mouse. Without memory, without soil, without kin and
community, all of this information has no context, amounting to nothing,
a chasing after the ether. In this virtual reality, there is the illusion of
freedom. We call this realm “cyberspace,” which derives from the notvery-ancient word cybernetics, which, according to Webster’s, is “the science
of communications and automatic control in both machines and living
things.”
The hallmark of our servile society is rootlessness, fickleness, and
the incapability of sustained thinking, deep feeling, and imagination.
The authority that once characterized churches in the Western
tradition, Protestant and Catholic, must now yield to the consumer
whose every thought is captive to the eCulture. Clergy of all stripes
must wrestle with the question, How do we penetrate this barrier? And far
too many have attempted to join the ranks of what C.S. Lewis called
“the Conditioners”—those who mass-produce the thought-products for
modern Western man to consume. It is easy to identify the larger-thanlife, hideous culprits: Bill Hybels and his Willow Creek model of the
contemporary, feel-good church; Rick Warren with his Tony Robbinsstyle “purpose-driven” life; and Joel Osteen grinning and guaranteeing
“your best life, now!” But beyond these empty smiles are thousands
of small, traditional parishes that are toying with subtle changes to the
“way things have always been done.” Modern man does not want to be
stuck in his parish church; he does not want to be hammered with God’s
Law and offered a crucified, bleeding Savior for his sins. And, after all,
did God really say that a little modern music in church is wrong? Can’t
I “connect” better with each and every seeker, if he sees me on a large
television screen hoisted up on the wall? Aren’t we supposed to “be all
things to all men” that we might “win some”?
This is the Babylon that our Enlightened masters have built, the
latest incarnation of the “Great Whore...with whom the kings of the earth
have committed fornication.” She hates nature and the simplicity and
smallness of life, because she hates nature’s God, and she is “drunk with
the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.” She sits
on an expansive global community, for, as St. John records, “the waters
that you saw, where the harlot is seated, are peoples and multitudes
and nations and tongues.” Her grip on the minds of men and women is
strong; however, when this culture begins to fall, which is inevitable, her
slavery will fall with her. “And the merchants of the earth shall weep and
mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The
merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and
fine linen, and...chariots, and slaves...the souls of men.”
“How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition?” asks Allen
Tate. “The answer is, by violence.” This is still true, especially in a
spiritual sense. Ridding oneself and one’s family of the chains of modern
life often requires violent amputations. It is difficult for many to live

7
without the soothing flashes of the picture tube, or to force yourself
to remain rooted in your family’s soil, or to turn aside from ether
relationships to the honesty of life among kin. And, in some ways, it is
dangerous to go on a fundamentalist rampage, destroying televisions
and computers, exorcising the present demons. Without replacing these
creatures, we leave the house swept and ready for each spirit to return
with seven others and take up permanent residence.
Wendell Berry writes, “If we want our forests to last, then we must
make wood products that last, for our forests are more threatened by
shoddy workmanship than by clear-cutting or by fire.” Similarly, families
and households are in greater danger from “shoddy fathers” than they
are from the fires of MTV or of instant messaging. It is one thing to
kick in the television set, but what happens afterward, in the silence
that follows? Love for that which naturally surrounds us, in the smallest
of spaces, is what is missing, and its absence creates the vacuum that
eSlavery is so eager to fill.
Lewis mentions contraception as one of the wicked modern attempts
at “conquering nature.” But this desire to conquer one’s own fecundity
and human legacy arises from a (perhaps unwitting) hatred of babies—
and hatred for one’s place in the natural order, which is hatred for God.
Berry says it this way: “Perhaps the greatest immediate danger lies in our
dislike of ourselves as a species....We must come to terms with the fact
that it is not natural to be disloyal to one’s own kind.”
Hatred of one’s own kind—of wife, children, parents, kin, friends,
colleagues, masters, servants—is the heart of eSlavery. In C.S. Lewis’s The
Screwtape Letters, the master tempter Uncle Screwtape advises the young
devil, Wormwood, that love for the immediate is disastrous for their
infernal cause.
The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets
every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people
he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence,
largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of the Germans
if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and
his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train.

Conversely, Thomas Fleming writes in The Morality of Everyday Life,
“Charity, so it is said, begins at home. It then radiates outward in ever
broader and weaker concentric rings until it encompasses the widest
human horizons a person is willing to acknowledge.”
God, with His still, small voice, is still found in the little things, in
the space that surrounds us, in the Creation and in procreation. Telling
our stories to our own people, our own children, helps to break the hold
of network and satellite television—the Devil’s stories, from far away.
“Taking down the fiddle,” as Mr. Lytle said, and making our own “small”
music drops the shackles that bind us to recordings made by unbelievers
and strangers for the shareholder’s profit. Loving reality, not virtual
reality, breaks the shackles of eSlavery, the modern culture that wars
against God and multiplies sin, sickness, and death. Until the end, that
culture will continue to receive judgment from the hands of God, as He
withdraws His restraint on evil, allowing man to discover new sorceries
and enslave himself all the more. And, if we do consider the greater
reality of sin and redemption, the truth of the Incarnation is the ultimate
witness to the beauty of smallness, demonstrating that, under the veil of
darkness, God is found lying in Bethlehem’s manger, among the lowly,
the least of His Creation.

There’s an extraordinary fit
between the medium and the
moment, a heady, giddy fit in
terms of social needs. Things
get too hot, you log off, while
in real time and space, you
have consequences.–Sherry
Turkle, author of The Second
Self: Computers and the
Human Spirit
According to the Kaiser survey,
only 23% of 7-12th-graders
say their family has rules
about computer activity; just
17% say they have restrictions
on video-game time.–Time
(March 27, 2006)

Aaron D. Wolf is the associate editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by The Rockford Institute. This article first
appeared in the April 2006 issue of Chronicles and is reprinted with permission. The father of four children, Mr. Wolf holds a graduate degree
in Church History from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. His chapter, “Christian Zionism: An Obstacle to Peace,” appears in The Rockford
Institute’s book Peace in the Promised Land: A Realist Scenario (2006).

8

R
theroadS
toreali
B i s h o p

R i c h a r d

© F. Eichenbert/VAGA

Their belief in the simple
answer, put together in
a visual way, is, I think,
dangerous. It’s as if they have
too many windows open on
their hard drive. In order to
have a taste for sifting through
different layers of truth, you
have to stay with a topic and
pursue it deeply, rather than
go across the surface with
your toolbar.–Claudia Koonz,
Professor of History at Duke
University

W i l l

9

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i l l i a m s o n

Knowing that the article previous to this one is true, what do
we do and where do we go. In this interview given by Bishop
Williamson, we get a map directing us on the road to reality.
A limited quantity of the audio version is available from
Angelus Press and the interviewer himself (see end of article).

Let’s begin this interview by defining, for our listeners,
the definition of an idol. A false idol is not necessarily a golden calf, is it?

No, not necessarily. An obvious example of an idol is the golden calf. In other words, it’s a material
object which is usually an animal, whether a snake, cow, or goat. (Think of a totem pole.) These idols
the devil encourages people to worship as gods. This kind of idolatry, however, is a very clear and open
form. Anything, however, which people put first in their lives instead of God can be defined in a broad
sense as an idol.

So money, pleasure, golf, or any inordinate attachment could be defined as an idol, then?

Anything that takes the first place in people’s hearts and minds that is not God can be broadly
defined as an idol. Placing these things first in someone’s life to give them most honor and respect, in
effect, replaces God. “I am a jealous God,” says the Lord God in Scripture, “and I want no other gods
before me.” In other words, we must simply put God first in our lives.

Couldn’t you define the whole history of the modern world in these terms?
We seem to get more and more fascinated with various idols.

I think you can. It goes back at least to the 17th century when modern science “took off.” Actually,
it should be called “science” in inverted commas, because true science involves saying the truth, but
modern “science” strongly suggests that only the material world is real. This is a tremendous falsehood.

10

What do you think of the worldliness of many traditional Catholics? Is there
a danger, even for a soul that attends Mass regularly and seems to practice
the Faith, to fall into a worldly mindset?

You have intermittent, variable
reinforcement. You are not
sure you are going to get a
reward every time or how
often you will, so you keep
pulling that handle. Why
else do people get up in the
middle of the night to check
their email?–Patricia Wallace,
a techno-psychologist who
directs the Johns Hopkins
Center for Talented Youth
program, who believes part of
the allure of email–for adults
as well as teens–is similar to
that of a slot machine.

Yes, there is a great danger, especially if they read modern newspapers
or watch television. This danger arises because they are essentially feeding
their minds on modern newspapers and television. Through these media,
they will absorb modern and anti-Catholic ideas and principles usually
without even noticing it. Hence, the great danger. Therefore, the effect
will be to push religion simply to a Sunday morning affair. They may go
to Mass, they may even receive the Sacraments, but unless the religion of
Sunday morning extends its influence and has its rights throughout the rest
of the week, we are simply back to idolatry. God occupies the first place
only on Sunday mornings. Thus we have the phenomenon of “Sunday
Catholics,” which is very dangerous.
The modern world is certainly more glitzy and glamorous every day.
The modern world convinces more and more people to follow it. The
modern world becomes more and more “normal” even though it’s in reality
highly abnormal and unnatural. But because each day it appears more
natural and normal, the temptation to go with the flow becomes stronger
every day. The pressure is subtle and pernicious as well as being open and
blatant. Catholics face an increasing pressure to abandon, diminish or dilute
their Faith. Unless they “watch and pray” as Our Lord commands us, they
can easily slide into the universal apostasy with the rest of mankind.

Do you think the devil often works through distractions, then?

Very much so. The devil seeks to occupy our minds with anything
except the things that truly matter. Sports are especially distracting. How
many men spend how much time reading, thinking and dreaming about
sports? Of course, sports are relatively healthy compared with a number of
other activities, but they still consume an immense amount of both time and
money. At the end of the day, they do very little in themselves for people’s
eternal salvation. At their best they can provide sane and healthy recreation,
but they should be strictly recreational. In fact, modern-day sports heroes
become essentially idols.

How is it, then, that many good Catholic men and women seem to slide into
a mindset where they put much more effort into improving a golf game or
hairstyle than their eternal salvation? How does this happen?

Usually it happens little by little in everyday life. For example, you
begin picking up the newspaper each morning and read it for five minutes.
Then it becomes ten minutes. Then it becomes fifteen minutes. You become
more and more engrossed in the concerns and way of thinking which the
newspaper provides. The exact same thing is true of television. You can
allow your heart and mind to be essentially swallowed up by television
because it’s so engrossing.
But another thing that is incredibly important is education. If a soul has
never had a decent Catholic education, then it starts at a “10” on a scale of,
let’s say, 100, which means if it loses 10, it’s down to zero. But if a soul has
had a good Catholic education, it starts at a 50, let’s say; 50 will normally
take longer to wear away than 10. A good Catholic education is the prime
way of learning how to stand up against the world. However, if you haven’t
been taught how to keep and protect the Faith, then you must learn by
yourself. You must read.
This is a very important point: Catholic souls today must not only pray,
but they also must read. They’ll never understand what’s going on in the
Church unless they read. There’s plenty of good literature concerning the
problems in the Church and the world and plenty of good explanations. If
souls read and continue reading, and pray and continue praying–especially
for light from the Mother of God through the daily Rosary–eventually they

11
will begin to see the whole picture. Modern life is an entire ball game and
Catholic life is an entirely different ball game. The two ball games don’t
mix.

What books would you most strongly recommend?

There are many, so it’s difficult to recommend any one in particular.
Everything that Archbishop Lefebvre wrote is usually very accessible, very
true, and very balanced. But in addition to the Archbishop, Angelus Press
publishes many good books, all of which I recommend. Some of them are
more difficult, but a lot of them are not too difficult.
If the reading life is difficult for someone, that soul must still grapple
with these problems and make an effort to understand them. There’s no
quick fix for understanding what’s going on in the Church and the world,
and there’s no easy solution. There’s no “I’ll read two or three books and
understand it all” solution. No, there is a whole steady effort which must be
made over even several years before a soul can grasp what is going on.

Why should Catholics place emphasis on the salvation of their souls?
Because this life is incredibly short and eternity lasts forever.

Parents, of course, realize how fast children grow up.

Yes, and this demonstrates how much of a serious responsibility parents
have towards the education of their children. Those years go by very fast
for parents because usually they are very happy years. As they say, time
goes quickly when you’re having a good time. Parents are occupied raising
their children but they must do everything they can to put their children
on the right path because what the children learn in their early years has
an immense importance for the rest of their lives. And all of us–parents
and children–are here only for the purpose of saving our souls and to enjoy
being with God for eternity.

How is it that our short lives have such an impact for all
of eternity? Certainly it is one of the mysteries of the Faith.

If you stop and think about it, when we die, every one of us will have
been given sufficient time–this short life, however short it is–to make up our
minds whether we want to spend eternity with God or without God. Either
we want to spend our own eternity without God or we want to spend God’s
eternity with God. That decision is such a serious decision that it takes a
lifetime to make it, but a lifetime is enough. The proof is that God takes
some people out of this life at the age of 5, some at the age of 15, some at
the age of 25, and so on. However briefly we live, if God allows that we die
at a younger age, that will have been long enough for that soul to make up
his mind.

So God gives us the time that we need?

Yes, the time we need to make up our minds whether we want to spend
eternity with Him or not.

And this is a very big decision.

Yes, that’s right. The stakes are extremely high for the whole of our
eternity depends upon this little, little life we live. And this little life, for
each person, depends upon our last moment. It’s how we die that matters,
and all of our life is a preparation for how we die. All of our life is building
that decision with which we will die.

Is St. Alphonsus’s Preparation for Death a good treatment of this subject?

Yes, it’s a classic. Unfortunately for modern readers, it uses 18th-century
examples, but as to the content, it belongs to all time.

87% of 21 million Americans
aged 12-17 go online. Internet
access by grade:
6th: 60%
7th: 82%
8th: 85%
9th: 87%
10th: 90%
11th: 94%
12th: 94%
Internet use by location:
Home: 87%
School: 78%
Friend's House: 74%
Library: 54%
Other: 9%
Amanda Lenhart, Mary
Madden, and Paul Hitlin,
Teens and Technology: Youth
are leading the transition
to a fully wired and mobile
nation (Washington, D.C.:
Pew Internet & American Life
Project, July 27, 2005)

12

Online social networks
have become, almost
overnight, booming teen
magnets exerting an almost
irresistible pull on kids’ time
and attention. Though both
sites are only two years old,
MySpace is the No.2 most
trafficked stop on the Internet;
Facebook is No.7, right behind
Google. MySpace is open to
anyone with an email address;
Facebook requires members
to be affiliated with a college
or high school,...Facebook
has seven million members.
Like all secret societies
[Facebook] has its own
language, passageways and
handshakes....–Time (March
27, 2006)

What are some of the things we can do to make sure that
we do keep our attention on our march towards our salvation
and on making that decision to stay with God and not get distracted?

The first thing is prayer. The second thing is reading or the sacraments.
For someone who has been away from prayer for a long time, reading is the
second thing in order to understand the necessity of the Catholic Church
and the sacraments. But if prayer is enough to remind us of the necessity
of the Church and the sacraments, then a return to the sacraments is the
second thing. Of course, perseverance with prayer, sacraments, and reading
is essential.

Wouldn’t you also say that retreats are a good way
to get back on track after drifting into a worldly mindset?

It’s an extremely good way of getting back on track, especially the
retreats of St. Ignatius. These came from the Lord God during the time of
St. Ignatius of Loyola, which was the first half of the 16th century, precisely
as a counterweight and antidote to Protestantism, which launched the
modern world.

Were retreats originally intended just for priests?

No, St. Ignatius of Loyola gave retreats both to priests and laity. In
fact, he gave them especially to the laity if they had a vocation. But they’re
definitely for both. Priests have a special need to stay in touch with the
things of God, but the laity may definitely need a retreat in order to stay
on track. Some laity are aware that they need to make a good, solid retreat
once a year in order to stay on track.

But they were distilled to five days for the laity, were they not?

Fr. Vallet, a Spanish priest in the early 20th century, bequeathed to us
the five-day version of the Spiritual Exercises. This is because most men
even today can find five days in a year to get the essentials of the Exercises.

Was there not a priest who introduced the five-day
version of the Exercises to the Society of St. Pius X?

Yes, Father Barrielle, a Frenchman who worked with Fr. Vallet himself.
Fr. Vallet was working in France in the 1930’s and 1940’s, which is where
Fr. Barrielle met him. Fr. Barrielle had been a parish priest who was not
satisfied with his ability to reach his parishioners in Marseille. He was thus
looking for some way to get to them, which is when he discovered that
Fr. Vallet’s five-day Spiritual Exercises were a perfect way to do this. Fr.
Barrielle then joined Fr. Vallet’s congregation and spent two or three years
by Fr. Vallet’s side in France. By the time Fr. Vallet had to flee to Spain to
escape the Communists, Fr. Barrielle had already learned from him the art
of the Exercises.
In the early 1970’s, then, Archbishop Lefebvre invited Fr. Barrielle to
come to Ecône and help teach the Exercises to the seminarians. This is how
the legacy of Fr. Vallet has been preserved by the Society of St. Pius X. The
SSPX has been preaching these five-day retreats all over the world ever
since.

It could be said that in modern times most people have
a foggy notion of reality and eternity. How has this happened?

What has happened has been built up little by little over the centuries in
the modern world. The devil is working towards his masterpiece, which will
be the Antichrist. God is allowing it as a just punishment for a world which
has turned away from Him. It is something which has been happening for
a long time, which is why it’s false to say Vatican II was some kind of a
surprise. Vatican II was, in a way, inevitable. If men continued to slip away
from God, it was only a matter of time before the Catholic churchmen

13
would also slip away from God. The process took a great jump forward in
the 1960’s with Vatican II, of course, and it’s been going on ever since. But
it has continued to happen day by day, month by month, year by year, over
many centuries.

Do you think that the mass media have played a large role in all of this?

Yes. Newspapers appeared first in the 18th century as, essentially, an
effect of liberalism. They have served as an instrument of liberalism. You’ve
asked if the Catholic Church can use television. Of course it can. Can the
Catholic Church use newspapers? Yes, it can, but these modern media in
themselves do not work for the Catholic Church. In themselves, I would
argue that there is something in their nature which inclines them to work for
original sin rather than for the salvation of souls. That’s why I always say
that the media of Our Lord are the pulpit and the confessional.

Do you think that television is the worst of these technologies?

Well, television is easily very bad and very easily does a great deal of
harm to very many souls. But people who know both say that the Internet
can be even worse. I don’t know exactly why they say that, but when
it comes to competition about how much harm they do to the eternal
salvation of souls, I think the Internet has overtaken television.

Is this because of the large amount of filth on the Internet?

Very possibly, since the filth is more easily accessible and since there’s
such a vast quantity of it. But also those who use the Internet are in control
of what they see and organize it as they like, whereas public programs on
television are not under control, although video-tapes are. So the Internet
makes those kinds of sins, say, watching and listening to impurity, even
easier than television. However, there may be more to it than just the
problem of impurity.

Perhaps part of the problem with both television and the Internet
is that they can both be very involving, especially the Internet.

That’s right, people get swallowed up in the Internet. People are more
active with the Internet; whereas with television, you’re purely passive. It’s
one of the problems with television and one advantage of the Internet, as it
makes people less purely passive. At the same time, this makes the Internet
more engrossing. Just think: people must have collectively wasted millions
of years with the Internet and television. Besides the obvious attack on
morality, the senses, and purity of thought, the factor of time wasted is a
major consideration.

Could a bit of discernment be in order here?

No doubt, both television and the Internet do not intrinsically serve the
Evil One. They can both be made to serve good. For instance, still now,
a great deal of true information is available on the Internet which is not
available in newspapers. The newspapers and television are entirely under
the control of the globalists and the enemies of God. The Internet is not yet
under this control. I don’t know how long this will last; the bad guys most
likely will get control of it at some point. But at the moment it seems very
difficult. So, here and now, if you look for the right websites, you can find a
wealth of information which you can’t find in the mass media and published
books.

So then would you say that the Internet is a mix of both good and bad,
while the television is almost all bad or at least useless?

Even on TV, there can still be some good things. Satan is not stupid.
He’s going to bait the hook with a nice, juicy worm. Families, however,
should undoubtedly keep the television set outside of the home. Period.
Especially if there are young children. The television set must go.

...Facebookers share their
hobbies, obsessions great
and small, or inside jokes.
And then there’s “the wall,”
which may be Facebook’s
most distinctive feature. It’s
the place on every member’s
site where friends can post
messages, have conversations,
and just generally keep up.
The wall makes sense in one
respect: it’s easy and fun to
spot an incoming message.
But in another it’s curious:
you can peruse the postings
of everyone else at your
school. Which means the
wall is one of those giveaway
clues about Generation
M[ultitask]: teenagers think
their lives are private just so
long as their parents aren’t
tuning in.–Time (March 27,
2006)

14

I would like to discuss the subject of families and raising children. Parents
say they desire that their children will practice the Faith. Have you noticed
any factors which help families pass on the Faith to their children?

I think, without any doubt, that the most important thing is the personal
example of the parents. For the boys in particular, the personal example of
the father is decisive. If you want vocations, all you need is fathers who take
the Faith seriously. Automatically, the boys follow Dad. They may not have
vocations, but if you have a number of fathers who are serious about their
religion, there will be vocations amongst the boys.
The father and mother, by their personal example, and by the
seriousness with which they take the Faith and their own personal salvation,
are the most important factor for children. If, however, they see Mom and
Dad go to Mass on Sunday, but otherwise not bothering too much about
the Faith–even if the parents respect God, love God, and honor God–the
children will easily drift away later. This is because they will realize the
parents do not take the Faith seriously. If they see the father and mother
taking the Faith seriously in the way they run the home and with every
situation in everyday life, that’s what really helps children keep the Faith.
Dad may have all kinds of faults, but if he puts himself out for the love
of God, and his boys see him doing that, the children will keep the Faith.

A very important factor in all of this is the daily Rosary, correct?

Teenagers who fill every quiet
moment with a phone call or
some kind of e-stimulation
may not be getting that
needed reprieve. Habitual
multitasking may condition
their brain to an overexcited
state, making it difficult
to focus even when they
want to. “People lose the
skill and the will to maintain
concentration, and they get
mental antsyness.”–David E.
Meyer, University of Michigan
I tell my students not to treat
me like TV. They have to
think of me like a real person
talking. I want to have them
thinking about things we’re
talking about.–University of
Wisconsin professor Aaron
Brower

That’s another element which is very important. The Mother of God,
whenever she appears, always asks for the Rosary, and there is no question
that the Rosary is an extremely powerful prayer. The Rosary is the best
protection for the home and the family. It’s much better if Dad leads the
family than if Mom does. This is because God has made the father the
natural leader of the family. The man should not let the weight of leading
the religion fall upon his wife. The mother is naturally the more pious
because women are generally more pious than men, but she is still not
the leader. How many women would love their husbands to take the lead
and give the example! Alas, too many husbands do not do it. When the
husbands don’t do it, it’s very difficult for the mother to lead her boys even
if she is good and pious. The boys naturally look towards their father.

There is a difficulty today in raising children in that the culture that
surrounds us is hostile to the Catholic Faith and is becoming
more and more rotten. How should traditional families cope with this?

I think the answer has to be that, if the children are fortified from
within, the world cannot do too much harm to them from without. But if
the children are not fortified from within, then the world without is going
to carry them with it. And this comes back to the Rosary. Religion must be
in the home, and it must not be artificial. Religion must be natural to the
home, which is to say that the parents must take the Faith so for granted
that it’s a part of everything they do and say. If the religion is too artificial,
the children will sooner or later throw it off. Unless the religion and saying
the Rosary are totally natural and normal and are not an artificial and
irksome duty every day, the children will drift away from the Faith. And if
the children take the Rosary into their souls, the Mother of God will protect
them from an awful lot of nonsense outside the home. Parents must turn the
home into a sanctuary of supernatural–not artificial–faith, hope, and charity.

What you are talking about is similar to the Faith being an inoculation then?

Absolutely. It’s a tremendous protection. There is no doubt that by
the grace of God there are souls that can go through the sewer of modern
schools and come out smelling like roses. Now, there may not be many
who do this, but it is very clear that God and Our Lady can protect souls
if they wish. There are souls even outside the Faith who go through these
schools and come out smelling like roses. It’s obviously a protection of God.

15
What God protects, no man can harm; and what Our Lady protects, Satan
cannot harm. She has Satan under her feet. If the love of the Mother of
God and her holiness are in young souls through the Rosary, the Mass, the
Sacraments and the example of the parents, there is a limit to what Satan
will be able to do. He will throw his worst at them, but whom God protects,
no man can harm.

So the Faith comes first, but nevertheless, similar to television, there are
outside influences which parents ought to protect their children from?

If you want the home to be Catholic, you must not let the television
in. Perhaps the parents can use a television wisely once the children are
out of the house. Perhaps. It may seem a great sacrifice to some, or even
impossible to others, but the television must go. The same applies to other
electronics. I don’t think it’s wise to let children play video games because
they draw children into an electronic world of little flashing screens. From
video games, it’s a logical step to television and the Internet. This electronic
world is not the real world; it’s a virtual world. And children get used to
living off of virtual reality. Then they lose real reality, and if they lose
reality, how can they hold on to the real God?

Electronics have become the dominant force in popular culture.
Children used to gather to play football, hockey, or soccer.
Today, video and computer games in addition to CD’s have taken over.

Yes, and it’s not good. Because things like farm animals are real. Playing
soccer with other boys in the neighborhood is real. (Girls, of course, should
not play men’s sports like soccer.) Boys need to be playing sports with other
boys where they get slugged and slug in return. That’s real reality. There
is a far cry between that and electronic games, whether CD’s, Internet,
television, video games, or even movies. At least a movie, if it’s a wellselected title, may be alright once a month or so, especially for those living
in the cities. But generally, a card game or board game is much better
recreation for children and adults because you get to interact with other
real people. This way children will become socially normal, and not used to
machines or electronics. Children lose their social skills to the degree they
become familiar with electronics. I’ve heard this observation from many,
many parents and it seems reasonable.
Electronics are dazzling and glamorous; it’s one magic lantern after
another, each one more distracting than the last. They detach children
from the real world, while children adapt to a virtual world where man is
the master. We sit at our computers, masters of what we do. We become
omnipotent and omniscient. We can look at anything, we can buy anything,
we know where everything is at on the computer. But man is not in reality
omnipotent or omniscient. Children are liable to think that they are the
masters, that they can do anything or know anything with machines. And
this is not a good thing for children to think. That is the opposite of an
education for children. Children must bump up against and learn the hard
realities which they do not learn with a computer.

Do you think that for a family to move to
the country is a means of coming closer to reality?

In principle, it should be encouraged. Where there is a will, there is a
way. If a family knows clearly what they want from the country and what
they want to put into it for the sake of their children, and if they have the
will, they will find the way. But if they go to the country with a very dreamy
idea that the country is better than the city, they will come back undreamed.

So it’s a move that must be well-planned,
and there must be a sense of realism and sacrifice about it, too?

Yes, definitely. Cows don’t take holidays. If people moved from the
country to the city, there was a reason for it. The city is a softer and easier

Cell phone usage by
Americans aged 12-17:
X 57% of Americans aged
15-17 have their own cell
phone
X 32% of Americans aged
12-14 have their own cell
phone
X Of the approximately 11
million Americans aged
12-17 having a cell phone,
10% use it to connect to
the Internet
X 7% of all teens have a
personal digital device,
or handheld (such as a
Blackberry), and about
one-third of them use it to
connect to the Internet

Teens and Technology (Pew
Internet & American Life
Project, July 27, 2005)

16

Facebook is one giant time
vortex–a black hole of
chatter....–Time (March 27,
2006)
[Students] can’t go a few
minutes without talking on
their cell phones. There’s
almost a discomfort with not
being stimulated, a kind of
“I can’t stand the silence.”
–Donald Roberts, Professor
of Communications, Stanford
University
The minute the bell rings...,
the first thing most kids do
is reach into their bag and
pick up their cell phone, never
mind that the person [they’re
contacting] could be right
down the hall.–Denise Clark
Pope, Lecturer at the Stanford
School of Education

way of life, and is more suited to man’s pride, sensuality, and original sin.
This is the reason so many people have left the country. There’s no doubt
that in itself, the country is a far healthier way of life. However, it must be
realized that cows do not take holidays, which means you may not be able
to take a holiday. Now, this is just one example of the sacrifices which rural
life may bring with it. It’s exactly these sacrifices which make country life
hard that make country life worthwhile and a good lesson and upbringing
for children. Scripture says, let the young man bear the yoke because if he
comes up against reality in his youth, he will not depart from the straight
way later. The trouble with modern cities, and especially with computers, is
that they both make life too easy for children, and therefore they don’t get
an education in real life. Therefore, they are not fitted for the rest of their
days instead of being fitted as they ought.

Another thing that’s happening is that many youth, surrounded
by computers, are going to school for computer skills and none
of the hand skills or practical skills that you’ve talked about before.

It’s much better if the boys and the girls learn to do things with their
hands. For the girls, sewing, stitching and knitting, using their hands and
minds on something real and not electronic, illusory, or dreamy. Boys should
handle machines, fixing bicycles and taking apart car engines and tractors,
handle horses and animals; any of these real things are better than this world
of electronics.

Have you noticed that, outside the corporate elites, the men who do
the best financially are still tradesmen? On the other hand, many people
who have good educations and are highly qualified, are unemployed.

It’s a very interesting, although not surprising, observation. Today’s
universities are more or less useless. They cost an enormous amount of
money for nothing. They don’t train children for life, they give them degrees
in things which are unreal. The children become accustomed to having
their parents pay fabulous sums to keep them more or less idle and more or
less exposed to corruption for three or four years on end, learning dummy
subjects from dummy professors. Modern universities are a disaster.
Especially for the girls. Girls do not belong at universities at any time.
It’s a very controversial statement, but I’m prepared to back it up. A girl’s
place is in the home. A girl’s university is her home. Her great professor is
her mother. Let girls learn how to make a home, how to make a husband
happy, and how to look after the children. That is a woman’s vocation and
a woman’s happiness. This does not mean girls should be stupid, for it takes
all of a woman’s talents to raise and educate her children, to form the minds
and hearts of the future!
There are few people who are prepared to roll up their sleeves and
do real, hard work. Anybody in carpentry, plumbing, or electricity who is
prepared to do real work is much more in the world of reality, and I’m not
surprised if they earn more money than those who work for these artificial
corporations with artificial structures and artificial CEO’s. The business
world is in many respects today unreal.

These people in corporations are constantly subject to layoffs.

Well, of course, that’s reality coming back. These modern big
corporations are living in an artificial and unreal world. And reality has a
tremendous way of coming back. It takes its revenge, and if you separate
yourself too far from reality, it will always come back.

Is it a solution to the corruption in our civilization
for a family to move to some isolated corner of the country
and keep their children totally away from the outside world?

Yes and no. It works for a time if the children in that separated home
learn to handle a rejoined universe. But if, in this separated home, they learn
(continued on p.25)

si si no no
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Let your speech be, “Yes, yes,” “No, no”; whatever is beyond these comes from the evil one. (Mt. 5:37)

●

May 2006

Reprint #69

St. Pius X
and the Duel
Between
Modern
Thought
and Catholic
Theology
P r o f e s s o r

René Descartes
Isaac Newton
Johannes Kepler

M a t t e o

D ’ A m i c o

I thank you for your invitation to speak about an
undoubtedly very important subject: the relation, or rather I
should say the inevitable conflict, between modern thought, its
essential nihilism, and the eminent magisterium of Saint Pius X.
I shall devote the second part of this study to a brief analysis of
Pascendi Dominici Gregis, but I shall begin with a short historical
overview of the evolution of classical, medieval, and modern
philosophy in order to enable us to understand how we could
have arrived at the forms of thought that St. Pius X with great
firmness and severity justly condemns in Pascendi.

Pope St. Pius X
St.Thomas Aquinas
St. Augustine
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Introduction
A short preamble is in order. From a supernatural,
Catholic viewpoint, history cannot but be the history
of a single, immense conflict which incorporates all
others: the conflict between the Church and the world.
St. John Bosco used to say that history comes down to
the battle for or against the Church of Christ. Thus all
events, all facts, all cultural forms are as the backdrop
before which unfolds the history of the Church,
constantly attacked on the material and practical
level—we think of the major persecutions—but also
relentlessly attacked on the intellectual, cultural, and
philosophical levels as well. When we study history,
we are used to assigning major importance to the
periods when the Church sustained an open, frontal
attack: for instance, the major Roman persecutions of
the early centuries, Elizabethan England, the French
Revolution, the Mexican Cristeros. Indeed, she was
physically attacked, assailed, and persecuted in her
identity by force, terror, physical violence. But we
must not forget that it is perhaps even more important
to know the periods when the Church suffered attacks
against her identity on the cultural, spiritual, and
philosophical planes, for these attacks were perhaps
the most insidious. Today we do not see, at least in the
Western world, and at least for the time being, direct or
declared persecution of the Church, but we know that,
in fact, the cultural and theological slaughter which we
have, alas, witnessed has inflicted a deeper wound than
totalitarian violence; that it poses the more dangerous
and subtle threat.
The importance of a vigilant defense of the
philosophical dimension of the Faith therefore is
evident. Once the faith had grown strong with the
Church during the first centuries, the attempt to think
through and understand the certainties of the Faith
emerged, and this was done by using reason, the logos,
by using the equipment which the philosophy of the
time supplied. We all know that St. Augustine was an
attentive, studious reader of Plotinus, for example. But
in the relation between faith and reason, clearly there
are risks. The greatest risk is that the deposit of the
Faith might be bent and deformed by the exigencies
of reason, and that the interpretation and clarification
of the certainties of the Faith might lack a sufficiently
attentive and prudent exercise, an exercise which
must nevertheless preserve the distinction between
what must remain a mystery and what lends itself to a
process of elaboration by means of rational argument.
Everyone knows that the majority of heresies that
have afflicted the Church throughout history have
been, among other things, the result of erroneous
rationalization of the teachings of the Faith, the
reduction of the deposit of the Faith to the measure of
what reason can comprehend. So saying, we have in a

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certain sense stated the essence of modernism, which
can be broadly defined as the endeavor to suppress
every supernatural element from the Christian religion.

Greek Thought
In order to understand the importance for the
Catholic world of vigilance over the evolution of
philosophy in the intellectual and cultural domains,
we must briefly consider Greek thought. We must
do so because, in a certain way, philosophy speaks
Greek. Though today we use different languages, the
philosophical framework is Greek. And medieval
Christian thought, for example, is without doubt based
on the acceptance of all the fundamental aspects of
Greek thought.

Classical Realism
Greek thought was born as realist thought. The
great Greek metaphysics, and the majority of great
thinkers—Plato, Aristotle—can certainly be characterized
as realist.1 This is true of Aristotle in particular, the
thinker upon whom Scholastic thought, the thought of
St. Thomas, is founded.
Now, to speak of realism signifies from the very
first that for Greek thought—if we take as the ideal point
of reference the metaphysics of Aristotle—it would
have been simply absurd to express doubts about the
actual existence of being outside the mind, doubts
which are, on the contrary, as we shall see, typical of
modern thought. For Greek thought the problem of
epistemological doubt, that is to say, the problem of
doubt about the capacity of man to know being, does
not even arise. Being is self-evident as the original
given which precedes and establishes our cognitive act.
Some pages of Greek thought are sublime; they
constitute a veritable contemplation of what we could
call the triumph of truth and of being. Being is, in its
broadest sense, wide open to the mind of man wishing
to know it, for, as the Greeks grandly discovered: it
can be known. In fact, the mind of man is made to
open on being, to grasp its truth, and comprehend its
meaning.
To define Greek philosophy as a realist philosophy2
means that it is a philosophy open to the transcendence
of being, to the transcendence of truth over the subject:
The foundation, the absolute, and, ultimately, God,
transcend me, exist before me, and are other. To think
means to open oneself to the original luminosity of
being.3 It is not the mind that creates being, it is being
that is grasped in its truth by the mind. We can never
forget this starting point, for that would amount to
abandoning the foundation of that which, we shall see,
constitutes medieval thought.

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T

in Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Such is the
fundamental deficiency of Greek thought, yet which
did all that was possible to be done in the effort to
conceive of God without the aid of Revelation, which
is very much indeed.

Christian Thought

The School of Athens
Natural Theology
A second observation will close this evocation
of classical thought: Greek thought as it is found in
its most glorious and profound representatives—and
I emphasize once again that these are Plato and
Aristotle, but also Plotinus, a theist thinker. Without
the power and help of Revelation, by using reason
alone according to the principles of logic, which, the
Greeks themselves discovered, are inherent to thinking
(and at the same time are categories of being)—the
principle of non-contradiction, of identity—the Greeks
attained to the knowledge of God, they succeeded in
proving, starting from the observation of the world, of
nature, of reality, and of man’s soul,4 that God exists
and that He cannot not exist.
Simplifying quite a bit, this notion of theism in
Greek thought can be expressed thus: Since our first
impression is that reality is meaningful, that reality is
the splendor of truth, the splendor of the meaning that
presents itself to my gaze and to my understanding,
there cannot not be a basis to this meaningfulness, to this
truth of being; there cannot not be an absolute, and this
absolute, this first cause of all meaning and of all truth
cannot not be God. Since my mind or reason grasps
the truth of being, then Truth must be the original
condition of the possibility of being itself (just as it is
not possible to conceive of an individual being without
reference to the All or the Whole which is at its basis
and from which it proceeds). In short, there must be
an ultimate foundation to explain this extraordinary
luminosity of being which precedes the look that I cast
on it.
The Greeks, then, by the use of reason alone,
succeeded in affirming the existence of God. They
did not have Revelation; they did not know the God
who speaks to man by His prophets, who, from the
height of His majesty bends towards man in order to
reveal to him a Creator’s heart, the heart of a Father
full of mercy for His creatures. They could not possess
the plenitude of truth which would only be possible

From the beginning, the great Christian
philosophers, principally St. Augustine, remark that
to some measure Greek thought played a providential
role, that it was not by chance that Christianity, when
it encountered the Roman Empire with its law and
order, its extraordinary system of communication by
means of which Christianity was able to spread, also
encountered Greek ratiocination and philosophy.

The Classical Lacuna
But in Greek thought, as we have seen, there is
a fundamental problem: the Greeks were incapable
of conceiving the idea of nothing, and this because
they could not conceive the universe as created. It is
an idea that is radically absent from Greek thought.
The universe is not created, thus it cannot come from
nothing.5 Even in the most elevated representatives
of Greek philosophy, there is always a fundamental
equivocation, there is always a grey zone that must
also be well understood in the perspective of what
modern thought will be: if the world is not created, then
there is no radical difference between God—the origin, the
foundation—and the world itself. But then the distinction
between the two dimensions—the world and the origin,
the absolute, God—will tend to be lost. The world
will be represented in some fashion as a moment of
God’s life, or even pantheistically as God Himself.
But if, in the last analysis, there is but one substance,
and if this substance is God—please forgive the
oversimplification—then man cannot truly be a person
in the Christian meaning of the word, but he will be at
best something particular having a spark of the divine;
but, and this is important for understanding gnostic
thought, the goal of human life can only consist in
the striving to overcome one’s subjective, personal
individuation in order to meld with the first principle by
means of various techniques and modalities, thereby
abandoning this “prison” constituted by our corporeal
nature, our unique personal form, which for the
Greeks and for Plato himself, for example, is in some
measure a “malediction,” absolute “negativity.” In such
a philosophical conception, it is not good to have a
personal, individual existence, but rather it is necessary
to return to union with the principle from which we
come and that is manifest in us.

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Unexpected Consequence
The most important consequence of this
metaphysical hypothesis is that a true notion of liberty
is no longer possible. There can be no liberty in the
full meaning of the term, which is uniquely Christian,
without the original creative act of God. Liberty is not
possible in the Christian sense of the word—personal,
spiritual—except where there is actually creation ex
nihilo–from nothing, and where the Absolute does not
coincide with the world, but, on the contrary, where
God and the world are separated by the abyss of
nothing whence all that exists has been brought forth
by the divine creative deed. In other words: liberty is
not possible except as created liberty.

Concept of Creation
The divide between the Greek vision and the
Christian vision, already clearly set forth by St.
Augustine, is given by the idea of creation. The idea
of creation was precisely something inconceivable to
the Greek mind, but perhaps it is inconceivable in
general for all who are without Revelation and the life
of faith. For the Greeks, the universe—and man in the
universe—had a cyclical, circular, eternal life, and all
was eternally destined to return and repeat a “great
year” from which no escape was possible, and where
the possibility of nothing was inconceivable. Greek
thought is characterized by an abhorrence of the void,
by an entirely understandable refusal of nothingness,
which affected everything. This abhorrence even
influenced mathematics, for example, which did not
develop because they lacked the concept of zero,
which came later in the development of mathematics,
and which is one of the fruits of monotheistic culture.
Now, we know that it is on this fundamental idea that
Christian thought is built. The infinite power of the
creative act of God opens a new perspective to man,
and makes possible a new conception of being and of
the absolute.
In speaking of creation, it is nevertheless necessary
to situate the notion between two essentially nonChristian perspectives. The first one, which constitutes
a recurring temptation even for Christian thinkers
(one well-known theologian who succumbed to this
temptation was Teilhard de Chardin) is an evolutionary
conception of the universe. The risk constituted by
all evolutionary conceptions of the cosmos, of nature,
and of history, which are often combined or overlap
in a non-orthodox way, is that they very seriously
alter the deposit of Faith. The first risk is a failure to
keep a right separation between God and the world,
and thus also between God and man, which results
from a failure to think with sufficient intellectual vigor
about the transcendence of God. For if we fail to do

20

this, then, lo and behold, we find ourselves slipping
albeit imperceptibly into more or less explicit forms
of pantheism: God is no longer thought of as truly
separate or distinct from the world.
The second risk incurred when thinking about
creation is interesting, and it is important to understand
it. It is the typical risk of certain forms of Gnosis, in
which God is considered to be totally other; He is the
totally other (Ganz andere), totally separated from this
fallen, negative world, fruit of a malevolent demiurge
and oppressor of man, in whom matter, flesh, all is
radically bad, because the world is totally bereft of
God. This vision, which is typical of certain forms of
ancient Gnosis, is interesting because it is profoundly
anti-Christian. For while the Christian God is indeed
other in relation to man and to the world, yet He is not
the “totally other” taught by some forms of Gnosis.6
If we accept this excess of divine remoteness, which
reappears in postmodern and nihilistic philosophy and
theology, if we think of God as “totally other,” then
the entire sacramental dynamic collapses, and with it
the ecclesiastical dynamic. The Christian sacraments,
based as they are upon the incarnation, passion, death
and resurrection of the Son of God, the Second Person
of the Blessed Trinity, are the greatest example of the
manner by which this God, who is indeed radically
other in relation to man and the world, is not thereby
the “totally other.”

The Thomistic Insight
This second risk, then, is to posit the total
otherness of God. But assisted by the Holy Ghost,
the great Christian thinkers in their investigation of
being and reality have clearly known how to find the
right balance between divine immanence and the total
otherness of God. The thinker who was able to find this
middle point with exemplary intellectual rigor is none
other than St. Thomas Aquinas, with his doctrine of
participation and his reinterpretation of the Aristotelian
doctrine of the analogy of being, which St. Thomas
examined thoroughly in light of the key category of
creation.
The scope of this essay precludes a full treatment
of these subtle notions about being and the precise
terminology that was developed to express them. Let it
suffice to say that the analogy of being expresses the idea
of “a representation” of the essence of beings and the
world for which, though they are separate from God,
there exists a relation of analogy or likeness to God,
in that beings and things exist only insofar as they
participate in the supreme being, that is, God.
God is absolute Being, but [limited] beings also
have a participation of this Being. Naturally, one of
the results of this concept of participated being is to
preclude the risk of falling into pantheism.7 If all that
we have said so far is sufficiently clear, then we are
ready to take a step forward.

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Right Reason Rehabilitated
When we consider the Summa Theologica of
St. Thomas, we find ourselves presented with
something so great, so complete, so luminous,
that it seems incredible that the word Scholastic
should have come to be synonymous with
abstruse, boring, useless, or out-dated. Except
for a few brilliant minds like Fabro, whom we
just cited, rare is the philosopher today who
would have the courage to take St. Thomas
and the other great medieval thinkers as the
guiding lights of his investigations. Even in the
seminaries, no one studies them anymore. On
the contrary, all the young priests have read
Heidegger and Nietzsche, or else even Freud,
with what consequences for their vocations
and ministry it is easy to envisage.
And indeed experience would indicate
that it is impossible to revive the Scholastic
tradition on the theoretical level without first
restoring in our own minds the ability to see
the glory that envelops our own past, to see
the halo that enshrines that which preceded
us over the course of centuries. The Summa
is extraordinary in this: it can be taken as
the greatest example of intellectual honesty
in the domain of philosophical investigation.
Consider that, for 3,000 affirmations, more
than 10,000 objections are raised! The
Scholastic method–which is especially
manifested in St. Thomas’s work–is the only
example of philosophical reasoning that
requires the extensive incorporation, with
detailed citations, of all philosophical or
theological objections to what the philosopher
wants to posit. It is almost impossible
to comprehend the incredible spiritual
transparency and holiness of one who would
have the courage to philosophize in this
manner.
It would be as if today certain sophists–I
apologize for using such a strong word, but
sometimes we find ourselves confronted by
the most vulgar sophists, who dare write
philosophical treatises–would not admit any of
their own theses without first integrally citing
and then refuting all objections; and not just
with a cursory refutation, but with a developed
argument that takes the adversary’s premises
as true and then proceeds to demonstrate that
by following them contradictions inevitably
result. I hope that I have managed to convey
a clear idea of what intellectual vigor, rational
method, and moral discipline adoption of the
Scholastic method implies.
Now, after the attainment of the immense
edifice of the Summa Theologica–the only book

Cover of the book Portae Lucis [Doors of Light]
translated into Latin by Paulus Ricius. In the illustration,
a man holds the tree of the ten Sephiroth. A Sephira can
be defined as a divine, creative number: God supposedly
made His works by pronouncing certain numbers the
sole utterance of which possesses a creative power.
But a Sephira is also a more or less personalized divine
attribute or emanation.The entities comprising the
Sephirothic Tree can be, they say, divided into two
groups: a masculine group on the right and a feminine
group on the left. In this way the Sephirothic Tree is
androgynous, having a male side and a female side. It
follows that for the Jewish cabalists, the Godhead...is
androgynous in the same way as in the pagan myths of
antiquity (cf. works by Gershom Scholem). Illustration
and caption taken from the work Masonry and Secret
Societies:The Hidden Side of History (French) (Versailles:
Courrier de Rome Publications, 1998), p.34.

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found worthy to be placed upon the altar beside the
Gospel–as well as all Scholastic thought, the question
we must ask ourselves is how did what happen come
to pass, namely, that in the space of a century and a
half a sort of intellectual apostasy from the grandeur of
Catholic thought commenced.

The Influence of Jewish
Cabalistic Thought, Renaissance
Magic, Galilean Science: Towards
the Genesis of Modern Thought
Some historians and philosophers, like Julio
Meinvielle,8 for example, an Argentinian priest and
indefatigable defender of Tradition, or Francis Secret,
author of the book Cabalist Christians of the Renaissance,
dress an impressive inventory of Christian cabalistic
authors, that is to say, thinkers and men of Christian
culture who, during the 15th and 16th centuries began
to devote themselves to the study of Jewish Cabala, to
the study of apocryphal Jewish gnosis. This apocryphal
gnosis, according to the historians, in fact existed
long before the coming of Christ and the foundation
of Christianity. According to one very interesting
interpretation, certain passages of the Gospel in
which Jesus fulminates against the Pharisees who
close the door that leads to salvation and who impose
unbearable burdens on others that they themselves
do not bear can be reinterpreted as an allusion to this
gnosis which even during Jesus’ time dominated part
of the Jewish clergy, who had secretly conserved some
of the idolatrous cults learned during the long years of
the Babylonian exile.9
The Cabala spread especially to Italy, where it
seduced even personages of the highest rank of the
clergy, for example, the Roman Curia. Everyone
was more or less fascinated by this particular gnostic
vision, and the list of the leading men of society who
had contacts with the Cabala is impressive: there are
dozens and dozens of men of letters and of churchmen
(the two categories were, moreover, nearly equivalent)
who became involved in this form of Jewish gnosis.
The most famous are fairly well-known: Ramon Lull
[1236-1315], Pico della Mirandola [1463-94], Marsilio
Ficino [1433-99], and, for a certain period of his life,
even the Englishman Thomas More [1478-1535], who
would die a martyr, but who had studied the writings
of Pico della Mirandola. Erasmus of Rotterdam [1469?1536] also had contact with these writings.
In this we witness the dissemination of a very
particular doctrine that influenced modern science.
Indeed, it has been demonstrated once and for
all, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that modern
science owes much to the magic practiced during the
Renaissance and to its great cultural influence. But

22

Renaissance magic is the natural daughter of Jewish
Cabala. Let’s take a single, somewhat banal, wellknown example: Kepler [1571-1630], who developed
the great fundamental theorems of astrophysics later
used by Newton [1642-1727], was a magician. His
work consisted in doing the horoscopes of princes,
counts, and dukes; he was even invited to the court of
Rudolph of Hapsburg, the emperor who subsequently
went insane, who at his court in Prague had created a
cenacle of soothsayers and magicians, where Giordano
Bruno [1548-1600] was also to put in an appearance.
Kepler’s mother was tried for witchcraft; that fact may
seem secondary, but it is curious that it happened to
this man in particular.
As for Sir Isaac Newton, he is above suspicion
when it comes to the scientific worth of his endeavors;
but perhaps not everyone is aware that his true passion
was alchemy and all the esoteric disciplines. For many
years, he studied St. John’s Apocalypse according
to cabalistic, numerological, and magical rules, and,
according to a recently studied text of his, he even
succeeded in identifying the year 2020 as the end of
the world based upon his esoteric calculations.10 This
cannot but surprise us: What? Newton, the founder of
the modern scientific method, engrossed by the Cabala
and numerology? The fact is that there is practically
no philosopher or great scientist of the 16th century
that did not have significant connections, organic
connections, with magical thought. And the roots of
this magical thought are in reality found in the Jewish
Cabala, in the Zohar, and in a whole series of texts
that emerged during that period. The masters of these
philosophers were in fact Jewish rabbis who taught
Hebrew, and who also taught the secret doctrines tied
to their Talmudic, esoteric religion.
In her most well-known study,11 the English
historian Frances Yates reconstructs the course of this
almost unbelievable diffusion of magical thought in
Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries.12
It is necessary for us to better understand what is
the veritable connection between magic and science,
for it is a crux of all modern thought. Modern science
is, in a certain measure, the only really great cultural
novelty, in which Descartes and the other thinks who
followed him until Kant, by the effort which they
deployed to think through and to found this science,
manipulated classical Greco-Christian ontology on an
essential point, which will be identified below.13
Science, with its methodological theses, implies,
in short, a radical modification of Greco-Christian
ontology, a radical change of the medieval gnostical
[epistemological] and metaphysical paradigm. It
follows that we cannot understand modern thought
if we do not think about it in light of the profound
rupture provoked by science. But we must clarify
more precisely at what level the connection between
science and magic occurs. Let us begin by an initial
analysis. We know that there would have been no
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Italian Renaissance without the great translations of
the Platonic and Neoplatonic texts made by Marsilio
Ficini for the court of the Medicis, a court, like all
the courts of the Renaissance, abounding in magical
motifs in the architecture, statues, and buildings.
The fall of Byzantium in 1453 caused a massive
flight of Byzantine scholars towards Italy, where,
bearing texts of singular importance, they were
received at the Italian courts. Now, when Cosimo de’
Medici ordered Ficino to translate theses texts–among
others, all of Plato, all of Plotinus, Proclus, and the
magical texts of the Corpus Hermeticum–there is one
very interesting detail that must be pointed out. We
would think instinctively that it would have been
opportune to translate the works of Plato first; on
the contrary, the order was given to translate first
the magical texts attributed to the mythical figure of
Hermes Trismegistus.14 Consequently, the reading
of Plato, of Platonic, Neoplatonic and Pythagorean
metaphysics, was a reading developed with keys
to interpretation of magical, hermetic type. The
Renaissance reads the great Platonic and Neoplatonic
metaphysics in a magical sense; thus, in fact, it makes
a reading that is intrinsically gnostic, or, if you prefer,
“gnosticizing,” tangentially gnostic. What does this
“gnosticizing” reading consist in? Or, in other words,
how does magic influence metaphysics?
Let us begin by noting that through Iamblichus [d.
circa 330, a Syrian philosopher and leading exponent
of Neoplatonism] and other thinkers, the other
specialists of magic and the magicians of antiquity
were rediscovered (and placed beside the cabalistic
texts already cited), and the reading of metaphysics
was given a Platonic orientation or spin, while St.
Thomas’s metaphysics definitely has an Aristotelian
and thus more realistic barycenter.15 But this is not
all: The Plato that emerges from this rediscovery is
a “Pythagorean” Plato, that is to say, a numerologist
Plato, a Plato who educates the scientists of this
time, who are for the most part also magicians, or
at least initiated into hermeticism, to reading reality
as if what is true in reality were not what seems, but
what is encrypted, hidden, buried under the sensible
appearance. At its dawn, modern science, in the wake
of this magical, numerological, gnosticizing approach,
this fundamentally Pythagorean inspiration, reads
sensible reality, the testimony of the senses, as a “dead
moment” on the level of cognition, a sterile moment
incapable of giving access to the splendor of the truth of
which nonetheless Plato and Aristotle spoke. Reality
is hidden beyond the sensible appearance and thus,
it goes without saying, only the initiated, only the
magician–or, soon, only the scientist–can reach this
reality.
On the basis of premises developed to this point,
we are now in a position to understand that modern
science is profoundly different from classical Greek
and Christian thought in this regard: it is radically
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May 2006

anti-intuitive. Classical thought–it suffices to read
Aristotle, Seneca, or St. Thomas Aquinas to become
aware of it–is such that anyone who makes the effort
to take these works in hand feels, so to speak, at ease,
for there is a natural correspondence, a homogeneity,
between common sense and classical metaphysics.
Classical metaphysics, even in its most elevated
or abstract points, remains intelligible; it remains
communicable, because my common sense feels at
home, and understands its fundamental conceptuality.
Inversely, modern science is radically anti-intuitive;
it is a discourse on man that denies the most
immediate experience, and adopts as its fundamental
methodological principle this negation. In this way
is born the image of the world posited by the new
Galilean science, inside of which the senses no longer
guarantee us meaningful access to being and truth,16
and where the problem is no longer the knowledge of
the truth of being, but the measurability, the reduction
to quantitative proportions of being itself (on the basis
of a new gnostic paradigm for which only that which
is measurable is true).
Now we are in a position to understand the
modern notion of immanence, a term that is a little
difficult to understand, but which I would like
develop, because the encyclical Pascendi frequently
refers to this notion. We have labored a bit in order
to reach this point in our study, but now we have the
groundwork laid for understanding what has been
“simmering under the kettle’s lid,” what is about
to enter onto the scene of philosophy and what is
happening now, which I shall try to describe as
simply as possible: we shall see that it has a singular
importance for theology.
Translated exclusively by Angelus Press from the French edition of SISINONO,
Courrier de Rome (Dec. 2005). This lecture was presented by Prof. D’Amico
at the Eleventh Congress of Catholic Studies held at Rimini, October 25-26,
2003 on the theme: “The Modern World in the Light of the Magisterium of
St. Pius X.” DICI called this lecture “a masterly synthesis on the philosophic
genesis of modernism.”
1

Plato can and must, with good reason, be classed as a realist thinker insofar
as his idealism remains solidly anchored in the principle according to which
the relation between knowing subject and object known does not modify
the entities between which this relation exists [that is, the subject and the
object]. Ideas, indeed, are conceived of as objective entities transcending
the subject and also existing outside the cognitive relation itself. To refuse
Plato the title of realist thinker would be tantamount to crassly confusing
metaphysical realism with materialism.
2
This definition is very general, and obviously does not imply the denial of
the presence, in the very rich panorama of Greek thought, of materialists,
skeptics, nihilists, etc. We just mean that the greatest thinkers are all realists.
3
The original relation with what we have called the luminosity of being is
magisterially defined by Aristotle as wonder in the celebrated passage of
the Metaphysics: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin
and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious
difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

23

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

and the anti-Catholic fight against the Trinitarian idea.
Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (University
of Chicago Press, 1991). [For a discussion of Elizabethan England, cf.
Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London; Boston:
Ark Paperbacks, 1983, 1979). Cf. also Benjamin Wooley, The Queen’s
Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Adviser to Elizabeth I
(NY: Henry Holt, 2001).–Translator’s note.]
12
See also Matteo D’Amico, Giordano Bruno (Monferrato: Casale, 2000).
13
Neither can we forget an important fact: Descartes and many philosophers
after him are top-notch scientists. Descartes himself was a mathematical
genius, but he also had the dream of revolutionizing medicine–which I find
very interesting. Locke was an important philosopher, but he also in turn
practised the medical art. The same pattern could be noted for Leibniz,
Pascal, Spinoza, etc.
14
This must be pointed out not only for the esoteric content, but especially
because these texts were considered as more ancient than all the others,
constituting an ancient, primeval wisdom preceding not only that of Greek
philosophy, but also the Christian Bible itself.
15
[The barycenter (from the Greek âáñýêåíôñïí) is the center of mass of two
or more bodies which are orbiting each other, and is the point around which
both of them orbit.–Ed.]
16
The critical analysis of the metaphysical consequences induced by modern
science obviously does not mean that the value of science cannot be
acknowledged from the viewpoint of the Faith, or that its extraordinary
practical efficacy must be depreciated. This is so true that in medieval and
modern times the Church, precisely, has been the principal vector capable
of favoring the development of science (it is not mere coincidence that the
list of scientist-priests of the modern centuries is interminable).
11

greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the
sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe” (Bk. I, §2; W.
D. Ross, ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press]).
4
One need only think of the sublime demonstrations of the immortality
of the soul developed by Plato in the Phaedo, and on a similar theme, of
manifestly Socratic influence, treated of in his Apology.
5
“Indeed, it is necessary that that which comes into being (becomes) be
something, and it is necessary that that which comes from it also be something, [and so on,] and that the last of these terms not be engendered, given
that an infinite regress is not possible, and since it is impossible that from
non-being something be engendered” (Aristotle, Metaphysics).
6
“One must also add that the Greco-Christian tradition affirms the resemblance
between God and the world, the non-absolute difference; but from another
perspective, within this resemblance it affirms an even greater dissimilarity: between the world and God subsists an analogy that, while excluding
total otherness, does not admit total identity either. This is in opposition to
the anti-analogy of Gnosis, for which, once the “techniques” of salvation
have been put in place, as effectually for the individual as for the mass,
there is no reason to doubt that the world will be changed to the point of
coinciding with the Civitas Dei” (E. Samek Lodovici, Métamorphoses de
la gnose [Milan: Ed. Ares]).
7
Cornelio Fabro has developed some very interesting interpretations of this
doctrine of St. Thomas, which we can simplify thus: if created being is created
by God, we must–I paraphrase Fabro–employ the word to be transitively;
we must heed its force as a transitive verb, its dynamic dimension, in such
a way that every look at nature, the world, man, things, must be a look that
perceives in them the resonance, the echo, so to speak, of God’s creative act.
Then there would be no risk of slipping into a positivist or scientist vision
of the nature of things, which become, precisely, pure things, pure matter.
Certainly, matter is matter, but within it there is a metaphysical quiver or
vibration that makes of the world, in any case, a world that bears in itself
the image of God (cf. Fabro, Participation and Causality According to St.
Thomas Aquinas [Turin, 1960]; From Being to the Existent [Brescia, 1957];
Introduction to Modern Atheism [Rome, 1961]).
8
Cf. J. Meinvielle, Influence of Jewish Gnosticism on the Chrétien Milieu
(Rome, 1995). [One noted American historian observes: “...the reason for
the decline of philosophy in the late Middle Ages is magic, specifically the
Jewish magic known as Cabala. As Marlowe put it for his generation of
Elizabethans, “‘Tis magick, magick which hath ravish’d me.’”–Translator’s
note.]
9
Meinvielle, ibid.
10
The latest studies about the esoteric side of Newton, engrossed by Sacred
Scriptures, reveal to us the scientist’s hidden face: fascinated by magic
and alchemy, he appears as a radical heretic, as an extremist Arian in the
religious domain. He denied the Trinity, taxed the Roman Pontiff with
being the Antichrist and Catholic rites, idolatrous. He commented on the
Apocalypse in a substantially cabalistic manner (cf. www.newtonproject.
ic.ac.uk/index.html). The specialist J. Gleick describes for us a Newton
occupied by three fundamental, equivalent interests: alchemy, science,

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25

how to handle nothing but separation, then when they have to rejoin the
rest of the world, they’re going to be in trouble. Again, it depends on what
the children will learn to want in such a situation. Will they learn to want
separation? No man is an island and no family is an island. Man is a social
animal, as Aristotle taught. He’s not just an individual animal, as Rousseau
taught. This means that man naturally belongs to society, and that’s why
even a good family today is not enough on its own. A Catholic family, even
a very good Catholic family, has children who still need to live in society.
And if you haven’t taught them to live in society, they won’t be able to
survive in society. Catholic parents cannot have their children learn from
society by separating them from society.

Might part of the solution then be that traditional
Catholic families provide mutual support for each other?

Well, in the United States, you have two big centers, St. Mary’s and Post
Falls, where a lot of Catholic families have gathered together. And this is a
great help. The whole question is whether things are natural or artificial. It
must be natural. As long as it’s artificial, sooner or later it will fall to pieces
because nature takes its revenge and children will abandon it. If it has
become a natural way of life, with families bonding naturally into a Catholic
society, then children can get a good deal more of what they need. In St.
Mary’s, many students who go to school there, stay there. Often they go into
the big, bad world, see what it’s like, and then realize that what St. Mary’s
has is truly better.

This leads us to the question of what Our Lord
means with the phrase “in the world, but not of the world.”

Well, you must consider the context. The quotation comes from Chapter
17 of St. John’s Gospel. Our Lord is praying to His Father on behalf of the
Apostles, who will still be in the world after He ascends. Our Lord, however,
doesn’t want them to be “of the world.” This means that although we are in
the world physically, we are not to be of the world spiritually, in our hearts,
souls, and minds. Spiritually, in our hearts, souls, and minds, we must be
of God. But we must go into the world to bring our fellow men to God. Of
course, this has an application to children in Catholic families. They will
have to be in the world, but if the family has done its job, they will have
been fortified with faith, hope, and charity. Because of the state of grace,
they’ll be marching to a different drum than the rest of the world.

So there is a need to instill a spirit of detachment?

Yes, detachment from the world, but not without an attachment to God
and the things of God. If you are going to detach yourself from the world,
you must have something to attach yourself to. The world is attractive, and
it does pull souls to itself, so there must be a motive for this detachment.
It does no good to tell children only “Be detached,” because they must be
attached to something, and if you fill them with God, they will be naturally
detached from the world. God must be the reason for being detached from
the world.

Would it help, to give children this spirit of detachment,
to attend events like pilgrimages and ordinations?

Yes, definitely, it’s a great help. For children, what it says to go to things
like pilgrimages and ordinations if Mom and Dad go, is that this is what’s
important to Mom and Dad. To see men made priests at ordinations, or to
love and honor the saints of God on pilgrimage instead of going to sports
games every week will tell the children what really matters to their parents.
This is not to mention the other children met at ordinations and pilgrimages,
centered around God and the Faith, not the world, sports, money, or
entertainment. That is where the children will learn. It will also enable

Email usage by online
Americans aged 12-17
X 93% of online girls
use email
X 84% of online boys
use email
X 46% of online Americans
aged 12-17 prefer Instant
Messaging (IM) over
email and cell phone text
messaging for written
communications with
friends1
X 36% of Americans aged
12-17 have recieved
inappropriate email or chat
room comments
X only 21% have told
their parents about the
inappropriate exchange2

Teens and Technology
(Pew Internet & American Life
Project, July 27, 2005)
2
Web Savvy and Safety
(Penn, Schoen & Berland
Assoc., Sept. 2000)
1

26
children to be social and not merely familial. They will be able to make good
Catholic friends amongst children of their own age.

So, in a way, it sets up not only a web of friendships,
but maybe a counter-culture even?

It would go towards restoring true culture against the anti-culture which
surrounds us today. True culture, which is a result of Christian civilization,
has been replaced by the culture of the New World Order, which is Godless, sense-less, meaningless and immoral. But to visit these occasions like
pilgrimages and ordinations rebuilds a whole atmosphere around the children
in which everything is centered on God. And this is a very precious thing.

Is there a role in this Catholic culture for grandparents and singles?

The majority expressed
concerns about how pluggedin they were and the way it
takes them away from other
activities, including exercise,
meals and sleep.–David
Levy, Professor, University of
Washington Information School
Instant Messaging (IM):
X 65% of all Americans aged
12-17 use IM (about 16
million)
X 56% of these have posted
a profile (including name
and other identifying
information) where others
can see it (e.g., MySpace,
Facebook, Xanga, etc.)
X 28% (4.5 million) of these
have posted their phone
number
X 20% (3.2 million) of these
have used IM to ask
somebody out

Certainly. Concerning grandparents, the natural family is not a twodecker family. It is surely the three or even four-decker family, i.e., a family of
three generations and not simply two. The two-generation family–Mom, Dad,
and the children–is not as normal as today it looks. Coming from the threedecker family to the two-decker family, we are well on our way to the onedecker family. Even children today are mainly one-decker children. This is to
say that the children listen to each other, rely on each other, but the parents
hardly figure into the equation. This is the disintegration of the family. On the
contrary, to go in the opposite direction not only restores the natural contact
and interaction between parents and children, but also with grandparents as
well. Grandparents have a lot to give to grandchildren, especially time. And
the grandchildren have a lot to give to their grandparents too, blood of their
blood, flesh of their flesh, especially joy and life which is so important in old
age. It is amazing how grandchildren bring joy to grandparents. Ideally–
although it is not easy with mentalities today–a grandfather and grandmother
live under the same roof as their children and grandchildren.

So nurturing the extended family is a Catholic thing to do?

Surely, yes. Again, you can’t force Catholic things upon people with a
thoroughly liberal mentality because it won’t work. If the grandparents want
to be independent, and the parents want to be independent, it won’t work.
Mentalities may be too far gone at this stage. But we should at least recognize
the ideal for what it is so that we don’t glorify the two-decker family and
pretend that it’s an excellent thing for the grandparents to be pushed off into
an old folks home.

Or children sent off to a day-care institution.

Exactly. The Catholic home must be rebuilt. The mother must be the
heart of the home. If we had some mothers, who, with all their womanly
hearts’ wisdom and love, would be selfless and concentrate on looking after
the two other generations, a lot of grandparents and grandchildren would be
much happier.

Unfortunately, the school system has also become anti-Christian
and rotten. Do you think that homeschooling is the solution to this problem?

Homeschooling is the second-best. The best situation is a good school
because parents don’t usually have the knowledge, time, patience, or physical
ability to teach all their children simultaneously while they take care of their
other duties. There are, of course, some homeschooling mothers who are
absolutely heroic. But there are many drawbacks about homeschooling. For
instance, boys at a certain age need to be taught by men. Even the best of
mothers is inadequate to teach the boys after a certain age. Homeschooling,
however, is better than corruption. Good schools, nevertheless, remain the
ideal and the best situation.

So it’s important for traditional Catholics to support good Catholic schools?

Definitely. But let them trust the priests and Sisters who run their schools.
In the old days, if a boy came home and said that Sister Battle-axe had

27
whopped him, the parents whopped him a second time. After that, he never
again complained about Sister. Today, alas, if little Johnny comes home
and complains about his teachers, the parents get on to the teachers as if
it’s always their fault and never little Johnny’s. But little Johnny is a little
monkey who has original sin, which is what foolish parents today forget.

Are we in a period similar to the fall of the Roman Empire? Are the traditional
initiatives in our day, like building new chapels, schools, and communities,
similar to the efforts of St. Benedict and the monks to build islands of order?

There is a certain comparison and similarity because, as you say, the
world has fallen into disorder, and those who have the Faith are picking
themselves up and gathering together. On the other hand, there is a
big difference between monks organizing monasteries–which is a very
specialized high-powered operation from a spiritual point of view–and
ordinary families who are normally of low voltage, spiritually speaking. I
say, normally. Of course, great sanctity is possible inside families, but they
haven’t got the organization, dedication, and motivation of monks. I don’t
know whether today if families, gathering themselves together, can achieve
what the monks achieved: the creation of Christendom. But families must do
what they can do, which will serve God’s purposes. God will use the noble
efforts of single families and joint families in order to continue Christendom.
So there’s a certain comparison and a certain dissimilarity.

Then perhaps part of the solution is
that families work together with good priests?

Families that wish to keep the Faith certainly need priests. Only very
exceptionally can people make do without priests. Therefore, people must
go where the priests are, or the priests need to go where the people are. This
is why we see things like Post Falls and St. Mary’s [and Syracuse, Kansas
City, Dickinson, and Veneta–Ed.].

How important is it that the faithful
support the priests, religious, and Sisters?

It’s very important because if families take refuge with the priests and
Sisters and then undermine them, especially in front of the children, there
is little that the priests and Sisters can do. If the children see the parents
criticizing priests, the children will not think highly of the priests. It’s the
most normal thing in the world. If they see the priests looking down on the
Sisters, or the Sisters looking down on the priests, again, the children will
get the message and they will not follow those vocations. It’s thus necessary
that there be a considerable degree of cooperation, especially for a school,
between parents and priests if you want children to go in the right direction.

Is it important for the laity to pray for their priests?

Absolutely. For sure. The laity will get the priests of their prayers. In
other words, the more wisely and seriously the laity pray to have good
priests, the more sure they can be that God will grant them good priests. If
the laity don’t appreciate good priests, if they mistreat the priests, if they
unfairly and unnecessarily criticize the priests, they will lose them. The laity,
before Vatican II, did not really understand what the priests were doing for
them, and therefore, the laity lost a lot of good priests with Vatican II. And
they lost a lot of good Sisters too. There used to be a convent school on
many a block, but most of those convent schools are gone because the laity
did not truly appreciate them. Of course, the priests and Sisters were at fault
too. Very few people really understood their Faith, which is why Vatican II
happened.
This interview granted to Mr. Bernard Janzen along with other recordings of Bishop Williamson and about
Catholic Tradition are available on audiotape and CD from: Triumph Communications, Box 149, Welwyn,
SK, S0A 4L0, Canada. Phone: 306-733-2100. To purchase a CD recording of this interview from Angelus
Press call 1-800-966-7337. US$10 plus shipping and handling.

People are going to lectures
by some of the greatest
minds, and they are doing
their mail. [In my class] I tell
them this is not a place for
email, it’s not a place to do
online searches, and not a
place to set up IRC [Internet
relay chat] channels in which
to comment on the class. It’s
not going to help if there are
parallel discussions about how
boring it is. You’ve got to get
people to participate in the
world as it is.–Sherry Turkle,
Professor at M.I.T.
Decades of research (not
to mention common sense)
indicate that the quality of
one’s output and depth of
thought deteriorate as one
attends to ever more tasks.
–Time (March 27, 2006)

28

R e v .

F r .

F r a n z

S c h m i d b e r g e r

Christianization,
De-Christianization, and
Re-Christianization
Conference given at Notre Dame de
La Salette Boys’ Academy, January 19, 2006

THE ANGELUS • May 2006

www.angeluspress.org

,

29

I would like to take this opportunity to speak to
you about a subject which is very important to me,
in order that you understand our actual situation in
human society, in the Church, and here. This speech
is divided into three parts: Christianization, DeChristianization, and Re-Christianization.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, after His Passion and
Resurrection, gave the order to His Apostles to
go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to
all nations–not to all individuals. From the very
beginning, Our Lord had in mind that the Gospel
is not simply a matter of individual thinking, but
of public order. The Apostles recognized this as
you know from a little of the history of the Church.
There was the persecution of the first Christians by
the Jews; St. Stephen became the first martyr. Then
the Christians went to Rome and the emperors
began persecutions against them, including Nero,
Trajan, Decius, Diocletian, and all the others.

Christianization
Nevertheless, the blood flowing was the seed
of new Christians. The cross of Our Lord is always
fruitful. Not only did individuals accept the Gospel,
the truths and faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
but also whole nations implemented the Faith in
their Constitutions and daily life. The first nation
to become Christian as a nation was Armenia in
around 300. Then, in 313, the emperor Constantine
the Great gave the liberty to the Church to be free
from persecution. He decreed that Christians had
the same rights as pagans in the Roman Empire.
One hundred years later, the emperor
Theodosius the Great installed the Catholic religion
as the religion of the State. In this time, we see how
the whole Roman Empire was transformed and
changed from a pagan to a Christian society. For
instance, in North Africa, Christianity flourished as
the number of bishops at that time demonstrates.
In 496, Clovis, the king of the Franks, was
baptized along with 3,000 nobles of his kingdom
on Christmas day. Thus, the kingdom of the Franks
became a Christian nation.
Around 600, St. Gregory the Great sent 40
monks under the guidance of St. Augustine to the
Anglo-Saxons to convert them.
One hundred years later, a man from the AngloSaxons, St. Boniface, comes to the German tribes to
convert them.

In 800, Charlemagne is crowned Emperor by
the Pope himself on Christmas day in Rome.
The German emperors of the Holy Roman
Empire tried to convert the eastern part of Europe
and the Slavic tribes and peoples. But there were
especially two missionaries who came from Greece
who were instrumental in the conversion of the
Slavic peoples: Sts. Cyril and Methodius.
In 988, the Ruthenians, the ancestors of the
Russians and Ukrainians, became Christian after
their great prince was baptized in the Dnieper at
Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine.
There was then still one part of Europe
undergoing this process of conversion, namely, the
north, the Scandinavian countries, which converted
relatively late, between 1000 and 1100.
Thus, we can say that by the year 1200, all
of the then-known world which used to be the
Roman Empire had truly converted and had been
Christianized. This is to say that all the people living
in this area–people, tribes and nations–all adored
the Holy Trinity. They all believed in the Kingship
of Our Lord Jesus Christ, considering Him the High
Priest of the New Testament, who had power over
both individuals and public life. They all accepted
His charge that the Faith was the only true religion
founded by God. This was the state of things around
1200.
It is also evident at this time, however, that not
all was paradise on earth. Sins and crimes were
still committed, yet the official public order was a
Christian one. All these nations held the Christian
Faith, and no one would have dared to go against
Christian doctrine. Even in 1054 when the schism
of the East occurred and the Greeks and those
dependent on them, such as the Bulgars, separated
from the See of Peter, the Pope, it was nevertheless a
Christian time.
If you thus consider this development, then, you
must say that for a thousand years, from 313 (the
Edict of Milan of Constantine) until 1300, it was a
time of Christianization. Everybody had the hope
and perspective that one day the whole world would
be Christian.
It is true that already in 622, Mohammed
began his campaign to spread Islam in Palestine,
Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain and France.
Nevertheless, Christianity held firm in the
confession of the Christian Faith.

www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • May 2006

30

De-Christianization
Renaissance
In about 1300, there were cultivated people who
decided that they would also like to enrich their
culture by their knowledge of the ancient pagan
cultures and languages. They especially looked
to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. However,
they not only learned their languages and culture,
but also pagan ideas, putting man in first place,
considering man the measure of all things. We call
this the time of Renaissance, i.e., the rebirth of old
pagan cultures and Humanism, placing man in the
center.
Reformation
This was a very dramatic change in mentality.
Finally this change in mentality focused on the
Protestant Reformation and brought forth the monk
of Wittenburg, Martin Luther. Luther claimed
that Christ did not institute a visible Church or
an exterior priesthood; every Christian is his own
priest and every Christian can obtain forgiveness
of his sins if he asks for pardon from God directly.
We do not need a sacrifice of expiation since Christ
suffered once forever. We do not need a Pope since
every Christian can read and understand the Gospel
himself. Therefore, the Church became unnecessary,
as were the priesthood, the papacy, and sacrifice.
Luther thus made every Christian his own
priest and pope. The work of Redemption was
unnecessary; Redemption was made once and
forever on the Cross, and this was sufficient. There
is no need for it to be continued in time and space.
At this time, whole countries of Europe joined
this error: great parts of Germany, Switzerland,
and Holland; all of Scandinavia was lost to the
Faith. Moreover, King Henry VIII of England, a
few decades later, declared himself the Head of
the English Church–against the Pope. Thus, he
went into schism. Bishop Cranmer of Westminster
instituted the Book of Common Prayer, which
brought the errors of Protestantism to England,
which led England from schism into heresy.
This had a very dramatic and tragic result:
Everywhere in the world where one speaks the
English language, you do not find a Catholic culture,
but, rather, a Protestant culture. This is the result
of the schism of Henry VIII and Cranmer’s Book
of Common Prayer. The British Empire was spread
throughout the whole world, bringing Protestantism
with it into the colonies of America, Canada, etc.
Thus, Protestantism spread to the whole world.
The year 1517 is the date when Luther
published his theses. This new spirit of rejection
of the Church–“God and Jesus Christ, but not the
THE ANGELUS • May 2006

www.angeluspress.org

Church”–this spirit of public rebellion against the
Church was spread in other countries in Europe.
In 1717, exactly 200 years later, the first great
Freemasonic lodge was established in London.
The Freemasons do not just reject the idea of God
as long as this God is “behind the clouds,” as long
as He has nothing to do with the world, as long as
He is like an Architect who made the universe but
afterwards withdrew and stays in peace. Generally
speaking then, that is their idea of God. Their
idea of God is one who has nothing to do with the
world. Especially they reject the idea of a God who
incarnated Himself, taking a human nature, dwelling
amongst us and giving us the model of Christianity:
redeeming us on the Cross. This idea, for the
Masons, is inconceivable.
Revolution
This spirit for hatred of the Church finally
came to the Court of Versailles in Paris, France.
It fomented in French society and finally brought
forth the French Revolution in 1789; then the King
and Queen were beheaded, not just as individuals,
but as the death of a principle: the principle of the
Kingdom of Our Lord in human society. Human
society from now on had to be laicized. God no
longer had anything to do with human society.
These revolutionaries put a naked harlot on the altar
of Notre Dame in Paris, adoring her as the goddess
Reason. It is quite symbolic and important.
The year 1517 was the first step of public deChristianization; 1717 was the second important step
in the de-Christianization and laicization of society
with the Enlightenment, the Freemasons, the secret
societies and eventually the French Revolution.
The year 1917 saw the third step, with the Russian
Revolution, again, exactly 200 years later. Lenin
declared religion the opiate of the people, that
only matter exists, that God, Jesus Christ, religion
and Redemption are empty. The only work which
is important was to bring paradise to earth by a
society without classes where everyone is equal. In
the name of this equality and “paradise,” millions
of people were killed to establish Communism in
Russia and later on in other countries.
Subversion
Now, it must be said that, in 1923, there was a
certain group people with these revolutionary ideas,
most of whom were apostatized Jews, that is, Jews
who did not follow the Law of Moses, who did not
follow their religion. They founded the Institute
for Marxism in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923:
Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, Eric Fromm, and
so on. They said that the Russian Revolution was
a certain success since they had obtained power in

31
Russia. But it was not to be expected that they would
take over power in the whole world. So they tried
to devise another method to bring the Revolution to
the world. In Russia, it was achieved by weapons;
they thought it was better to achieve it through
culture: to change the culture and civilization, thus
changing the minds of the people. So, they founded
the Institute for Marxism in Frankfurt. Since they
were Jews, however, when Hitler came to power in
Germany, they fled: first to Switzerland, and then
to the United States. In America they held chairs of
universities and spread their poison everywhere.
In 1936, they began a campaign against
Christian marriage and the Christian family. They
realized that the family and marriage were bastions
that kept the Revolution from coming to fruition.
Thus, marriages and families had to disappear.
After the Second World War, some of these
men returned to Germany, founding the Institute
for Social Research, hiding their ideas a bit. Others
stayed in the United States and had a profound
influence here, studying especially how to corrupt
the youth through atonal music, music which
has no harmony. They studied how to bring the
spirit of rebellion and the spirit of hatred to the
youth so that society could be transformed in a
Communistic, revolutionary manner. They studied
this systematically.
From 1962-65, the Second Vatican Council
occurred in Rome. Here, all these movements and
orientations penetrated in a very malicious way:
Protestant ideas; rationalism (which rejects Divine
Revelation); and the notion of transforming the
Gospel into social work, i.e., Liberation theology,
which has its roots in the Council. The penetration
of these ideas is seen especially in the Declaration
of Religious Liberty by reference to which the last
Catholic States in the world were laicized: South
America, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and some cantons
of Switzerland. No longer did the Catholic religion
occupy the position of “religion of the State.”
Henceforward, all religions had to be recognized by
the State with the same public rights.
This did enormous harm to the people
and nations in South America, where, after the
Second Vatican Council, about 50 million people
apostatized and went to various sects. This is one
of the bitter fruits of the Second Vatican Council.
Another was the spirit of relativism, promoted
by the idea of ecumenism, which says that all
denominations have a certain truth and that none
has the absolute truth. Thus, they all have to join
together to form a “super-Church” or a community
where truth is not so important, only “charity.”
We see how the Church herself was invaded
by these new ideas and how the process of deChristianization continued in a dramatic manner.

We see especially, after the Second Vatican Council,
how the seminaries closed down, one after another,
since there were no vocations. We see how religious
orders decline. We see how families split up. We see
how lives are no longer lives of prayer and sacrifice,
but lives of enjoying earthly things.
There is a book called Index of Leading Catholic
Indicators [available from Angelus Press. Price
$16.95–Ed.]. It is written by a young American
who gives statistics about the life of the Church,
especially in the United States. In the last section, he
speaks about the main religious orders, comparing
the number of seminarians from 1965 to 2000. It’s
quite interesting to see. For example, in 1965, the
Jesuits had 3,559 seminarians; in 2000, they had
389. That is a decline of 89%. The Franciscans in
1965 had 2,251 seminarians; in 2000, they had 60, a
decline of 97%. The Christian Brothers in 1965 has
912 seminarians; in 2000, they had seven, a decline
of 99%. The Benedictines had 1,541 seminarians
in 1965; in 2000, they had 109, a decline of 93%.
The Redemptorists declined 98%, the Dominicans
89% (343 to 38 from 1965 to 2000). The Maryknoll
Missionary Society had 919 seminarians in 1965,
which declined in 2000 to 15, a 98% decline. The
La Salette Fathers had 552 seminarians in 1965; in
2000, they had one, a more than 99% decline.
These are dramatic declines. If things continue
like this, the religious life in America and Europe
will eventually disappear. But the religious life is
essential for the Church, for her characteristic of
sanctity, for certain works of charity, like hospitals,
and for teaching in schools. All this will completely
be finished. There will be no longer any Sisters to be
nurses in Catholic hospitals, and so on.
You can see the work of destruction, the deChristianization of society. This concerns the
Church, and you see also this de-Christianization
in the rite of Mass itself. The sacraments have been
profoundly changed. In the life of families, you’ve
seen Catholic schools close down. In society itself,
the mass media, especially television, every day
spread propaganda in favor of crime. They glorify
crime, impurity, adultery, and modes of living which
discredit the family. You see how this propaganda
affects the youth and changes society by atonal
music; perhaps especially the work of the Beatles,
but all rock music, rap, etc.
Then you see today how computers, the
Internet, and cell phones have an important impact
on people, especially our youth. We are all in
danger of losing our sense of reality. We live in
an imaginary world, a world of illusions, a world
of screens: televisions and computers. This is our
world, no longer the real world which God has
created. These things are very, very dangerous.

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THE ANGELUS • May 2006

32
Moreover, you see how the anti-baby pill
destroys morality in marriages. Divorce is more and
more common. In the United States, about half of
all marriages end in divorce. Abortion claims 50
million victims, innocent children, per year in the
world.
Then there is the whole spirit of technology
and natural sciences. Souls are no longer cultivated
souls. They are no longer trained in the humanities,
languages, literature, the arts, and music. They are
no longer cultivated in geography. They are simply
idiots of technology, that is to say, they are very
poor souls, narrow-minded, mere technicians–no
longer truly developed souls.
Then there are the pro-homosexual lobbies,
establishing other ways of life outside the family
and even against the family. Even today, these styles
of life are recognized by whole countries, officially
legalized in many European countries and to an
extent even in America.
This all constitutes an entire work against the
Church. The traditional Roman Church is like a
stumbling block against this revolutionary spirit. It
is like a bastion, so these people attack the Church
openly.
Silent Apostasy
Pope John Paul II, in 2003, wrote an encyclical,
a post-synodal writing, Ecclesia in Europa, “The
Church in Europe.” There was a synod held about
the Church in Europe, the bishops discussed these
matters in Rome, considering the good points but
acknowledging the terrible weaknesses. Afterwards,
the Pope summarized these exchanges of the
bishops’ opinions, writing the following, which is
quite interesting:
The age we are living in, with its own particular challenges,
can seem to be a time of bewilderment. Many men and
women seem disoriented, uncertain, without hope, and
not a few Christians share these feelings....Among the
aspects of this situation, so many of which were frequently
mentioned during the Synod, I would like to mention in a
particular way the loss of Europe’s Christian memory and
heritage, accompanied by a kind of practical agnosticism
and religious indifference.

That is to say, people do not care about religion;
they care about their daily lives, money, and
pleasure–practical atheism.
[M]any Europeans give the impression of living
without spiritual roots and somewhat like heirs who have
squandered a patrimony entrusted to them by history. This
loss of Christian memory is accompanied by a kind of fear
of the future....Among the troubling indications of this are
the inner emptiness that grips many people and the loss of
meaning in life.

If you ask young Europeans what the meaning of
life is, they will answer “I don’t know and I’m not
interested to know it.”
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The signs and fruits of this existential anguish include, in
particular, the diminishing number of births, the decline
in the number of vocations to the priesthood and religious
life, and the difficulty, if not the outright refusal, to make
lifelong commitments, including marriage.

That is to say, people do not want to marry any
longer; they merely want to live together.
At the root of this loss of hope is an attempt to promote
a vision of man apart from God and apart from Christ.
This sort of thinking has led to man being considered as
the absolute centre of reality, a view which makes him
occupy–falsely–the place of God and which forgets that it
is not man who creates God, but rather God who creates
man. Forgetfulness of God led to the abandonment of man.
It is therefore no wonder that in this context a vast field
has opened for the unrestrained development of nihilism
[nothing, emptiness, no values] in philosophy, of relativism
in values and morality, and of pragmatism–and even a
cynical hedonism [hedonism is the orientation to just enjoy
life and make lust the principle of your life]–in daily life.
European culture gives the impression of silent apostasy on
the part of people who have all that they need and who live
as if God does not exist.

These are the facts and signs of de-Christianization.

Re-Christianization
What then are we doing, faced with the situation
of a non-Christian world? Do we merely lament that
things are very bad? Or do we need to do more?
I think we need to do more. But what is our task?
What is our mission?
My dear friends, we must re-Christianize the
world. We have to try to transform this neo-pagan
society into a Christian society again. This is a
work that is more difficult than the first time. The
citizens of today are not merely heathens; they are
neo-heathens and neo-pagans; apostates. They have
thrown away the Faith. They were unfaithful to the
grace of God. It’s much more difficult to convert
them than it is to convert a pagan in the bush of
Africa.
1) Absolutism
The first step is to oppose this spirit of
subjectivism where everyone says things like that “It
is my personal feeling that abortion is wrong, but
my neighbor thinks it is fine, so it’s O.K. for him.”
“Since I am a Catholic, I don’t accept birth control,
but my neighbor is a Protestant, so he can use it.”
“I am a Christian, but others are Hindus, Buddhists,
Moslems or Jews; let them make their salvation in
their religion; what matters is that they are good
people.” No! These are questions of the natural
law! The natural law obliges everyone, Christian or
non-Christian, Catholic or Protestant. Four and four
make eight for everyone. Black or white, young or
old, cultivated or not, yesterday or tomorrow, it is

33
the same for everybody. It is an objective order. We
must again establish ourselves in the objective order
created by God and established by Our Lord in the
supernatural order of Redemption.
This spirit of subjectivism and relativism is
completely destroying the minds and spirits of
people. Young Catholic men must keep in mind that
the spirit of relativism and subjectivism should once
and forever be banned from our souls. Two and two
make four for everybody. It was like this a thousand
years ago, and will be so a thousand years from now.
Truth is eternal.
2) Detachment
The second point is to fight against the spirit
of the world. Our surroundings, society today, is
materialistic and is concerned only with comfort,
luxury, pleasure, fun, and holidays. It is a world
full of pride, a world which goes farther from God
every day. If we really want to re-Christianize, we
must begin with ourselves and put away the spirit
of the world. Lead a Catholic life, not just by going
to Mass and serving, but every minute in every area
of your live, whether in sports, recreation, at home,
with the family, at work, on holiday, in politics—we
must everywhere maintain a Christian attitude. This
is taught to us especially by the Social Teachings of
the Church.
We must avoid the enormous dangers of the
modern world with its technology, which has an
enormous attraction and seduction for us. Be aware
of the dangers of the computers, computer games,
cell phones, the Internet, television, and so on. They
are bad. They are truly bad. They do much more
evil to your soul than you think. Of course, you
need a computer for certain professions, but do not
use it more than it is needed.
3) Generosity
The third step is to be proud of your Catholic
Faith and to be proud of your Catholic schools,
which provide an integral Catholic education and
formation. “Yes, I am a Catholic and I am very
proud of it.” We must have the idea of constructing,
and not that of consuming. We must give, we
must do something; not merely receive. Television
makes one passive; you simply receive. But you, as
young Catholic men, must give. Do not just look
for governing and exercising power; look to serve.
Serve God and serve your neighbor. Do not forget
that the work of re-Christianization begins with
yourself, in your own heart, soul, and life. The world
will not get better without your contribution and this
must begin with yourself. Otherwise, everything is
lost.

4) Catholic Action
Then you must work for the re-establishing of
Christian institutions, such as the family, where the
spirit of Our Lord reigns, where He is enthroned
and where the television is banished. We must
restore Catholic schools, and I congratulate you
for this school in St. Mary’s. You ought to be very
happy and very satisfied to be in such a school. You
must love your school. It is an enormous grace; so
few Catholics in the world have the chance that
you have! Moreover, we must restore parishes,
seminaries, houses of religious life, everything in
Christ, per Mariam, through the Blessed Virgin Mary.
5) Catholic Convictions
Please lead a prayer life. Souls need a prayer
life. But this is not sufficient. It is necessary to have a
sacramental life, to go to Confession and to receive
Holy Communion; but it is not sufficient. You must
also have a “Catholic head.” You must have Catholic
ideas, principles, and convictions that cover all of
life. Every aspect of daily life, not merely Sundays.
We do not want just a religion which affects Sunday;
our religion should affect every day. Our religion
should not just affect our private lives; it must affect
public life: life in the family, life in the office, life in
the workshop, in politics, in the arts, etc.
Only in such a way is it possible to reChristianize society, to make America a true
Catholic country. This is our most profound desire.
St. Mary’s is geographically the center of the United
States; from this point, there should be a radiation
of re-Christianization. This school is one element of
re-Christianization among many elements in other
countries, from priories, retreat houses, families, and
schools.
Young men, you are tomorrow’s workers for the
re-Christianization of the world! It would be a great
shame and a terrible betrayal if you do not want to
work in such a way for the honor of Our Lord, to
bring Him back to society as the King of all things.
He really has, in everything, the first place and the
last word. You must not renounce the idea that the
world should become a Catholic one, and that we
are the ones working for this most noble idea. I
invite you to keep as your principle Instaurare omnia
in Christo—to restore all things in Christ. Keep it in
mind, and always live and work according to this
principle.
This conference was given by Fr. Franz Schmidberger, First Assistant to the
Superior General, to the boys of Notre Dame de La Salette Boys’ Academy,
Olivet, Illinois (January 19, 2006). Angelus Press thanks Fr. Schmidberger for
his assistance in editing this written version of his speech.

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THE ANGELUS • May 2006

so • phro

34

(su-fros´-u-n

Begin with the pronunciation per Webster’s
Universal Unabridged Dictionary and phoneticized for
normal text: “seh-FROS-eh-knee.” Not a word one
often sees. Sadly, because Webster’s suggests that
one compare it with another word of Greek origin,
a far more familiar word, likely because it describes
a characteristic of governments and of “leaders” in
general: HUBRIS.
So as to give this latter word its due, Webster’s
again: “Excessive pride or self-confidence;
arrogance.” The word is derived from the Greek
hybris, generally considered to mean “insolence.”
Among its earliest manifestations is what is known in
what was once known as Christendom as “Original
Sin,” the overweening pride in human capacity that
allows one to delude oneself that humankind can “be
as gods.”
This delusion has become ever more universal
in the now thoroughly secular West. “Religion” is
ever more considered a matter of emotion, whereas
historically it was meant above all else to appeal to
reason, as it still does for those who recognize that the
human capacity to reason is limited and will always
be limited, scientific and technological progress
notwithstanding. To believe otherwise is hubris, the
antithesis of sophrosyne, a word Webster’s defines as:
“moderation; discretion; prudence,” though the word
itself has no direct translation into English. Indeed,
Plato found himself unable to offer a precise definition
even in Greek (from which the word comes); the
dialogue Charmides (subtitled On Sophrosyne) attempted
to explain it, but it is agreed that it is not precisely
defined. As was pointed out in a 1997 web posting by
Dr. Donivan Bessinger (to whom my thanks): “The
editors of The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton
University Press, 1989), in introducing Charmides,
write:
The truth is that this quality, this sophrosyne, which to
the Greeks was an ideal second to none in importance, is
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not among our ideals. We have lost the conception of it.
Enough is said about it in Greek literature for us to be able to
describe it in some fashion, but we cannot give it a name. It
was the spirit behind the two great Delphic sayings, “Know
thyself” and “Nothing in excess.” Arrogance, insolent selfassertion, was the quality most despised by the Greeks.
Sophrosyne was the exact opposite. It meant accepting
the bounds which excellence lays down for human nature,
restraining impulses to unrestricted freedom, to all excess,
obeying the inner laws of harmony and proportion.

We have lost the conception of it! It “is not among
our ideals.”
How sad and shameful. How contrary to the
ideals we find at the formative stages of Western
civilization, both classical and post-Roman, though
post-republican Roman civilization was already on
the way to losing ideals not to be fully recovered
until the triumph in the West of Catholicism, which
had preserved and enhanced the knowledge of them
throughout what we now refer to as the Dark Ages.
Sophrosyne represents the antithesis of the
following statement: “Human reason, without any
reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of
truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to
itself, and suffices, by its natural force, to secure the
welfare of men and of nations,” or so at least believed
Pope Pius IX, who characterized such a belief as
anathema in his Syllabus of Errors (Allocution Maxima
Quidem, June 9, 1862).
“Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in
being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening
of the heart must at last have softening of the brain,”
wrote Chesterton at the beginning of the 20th
century, when the hardening of the human heart had
begun to harden the arteries of human reason in the
early stages of a spiritual dementia that ends with the
terminal senility of the soul, even among men of good
will.
Sophrosyne: We have lost the conception of it.

ros • y• ne

-nē)

T i m o t h y

J .

35

C u l l e n

“A word is forgotten and cities perish.”
–G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

We had best regain it before we forget entirely
from where we have come and, more importantly,
where we are supposed to be going.
Western civilization has lost its way “because
we have lost the knowledge of some fundamental
principles which, since they are true, are the only
ones on which, today as well as in Plato’s own day,
any philosophical knowledge worthy of the name
can possibly be established,” wrote Etienne Gilson
in the preface to God and Philosophy, a collection of
lectures he gave at a time when the Second World
War was proving the truth of his statement.
Prudence? Moderation?
Think “Holocaust,” but think it in panorama:
Nazi genocide; Communist massacres and mass
enslavements; the Dresden fire-bombing depicted
in Slaughterhouse Five; Monte Cassino and Coventry
Cathedral bombed to bits…Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Now think Mutually Assured Destruction:
“MAD,” as it is known by the hubris-infected secular
“humanists” whose narcissistic world planners
dreamt it up.
Now ask yourself: For what?

“What profiteth a man to gain the world…?”
Sophrosyne: We have lost the conception of it.
Western—Euro-American—civilization evolved
from its Mediterranean, Greco-Roman classical
origins more through a process of conversion than of
conquest. A civilization is more than a society defined
by political frontiers. As the late and undeservedly
neglected historian H. Daniel-Rops (pen name of
Henri Jules Charles Petiot, member of the Academie
Française and winner of its Grand Prix) wrote about
8th-century, post Roman Empire, largely converted
to Catholicism Western Europe: “it was time to build
a Christian civilization.”
The Church “was invested with the responsibility
for this civilization” in which “the intellectual and
moral synthesis between the various elements of the
future Europe was in process of taking place and it
was the Church who was to realize this.”
This synthesis led to the development of the
culture that defined the West.
And from what do “Cultures” arise?
“Cultures spring from religions; ultimately
the vital force which maintains any culture

hu • bris
(hyōo´-bris)
˘

36
is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe…,”
wrote the equally undeservedly neglected and
maligned Hilaire Belloc (The Great Heresies), an
unapologetic and staunch defender of the civilization
once known as “Christendom,” a civilization he
correctly foresaw as having lost its way: “In the place
of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there
came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality,
the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not
enough.…”
Sophrosyne: We have lost the conception of it.
The blueprint for the civilization conceived
in sophrosyne can be found in what we may well
regard as one of the Founding Documents of the
West, second perhaps only to the New Testament:
The City of God, written by St. Augustine between the
years 412-26 of the Christian Era, as opposed to Eras
established by other cultures that have “year zero”
referents alien to those of the culture and civilization
that arose in Europe.
Augustine began his work with the sack of
Rome by the barbarian tribes pushed westward
by the advance of the Mongolo-Turkic hordes that
would assault Western civilization again and again
throughout its history. The assaults against Western
civilization today are manifold, but perhaps we
would be better advised to concentrate on the
threat posed to it by the barbarians within the gates
rather than look elsewhere for enemies. Augustine
well understood that in essence “we can separate
humanity into two types, those who live according
to the will of man, and those who live according to
the will of God.” It is the members of the former
group—whatever religion they may nominally claim
to profess—who reject sophrosyne; the latter group—
whatever religion they may profess—must never lose
sight of sophrosyne, the antidote to the poison of
hubris.
The historian Henri Daniel-Rops, in his excellent
study of The Church in the Dark Ages, paraphrases
Augustine by stating that “the effort of civilization
should be to bring man nearer his divine destination,”
adding that “Baudelaire [of all people!] summed
this up in an unsurpassed phrase, the day that he
declared that true civilization was to be found…in the
‘diminution of original sin.’”
The aforementioned Etienne Gilson (one of the
20th century’s foremost Thomist philosophers, along
with Jacques Maritain) wrote in his Spirit of Mediaeval
Philosophy a splendidly clear exposition of original
sin, basing much of it on Augustine. Those of us
who are concerned with liberty and its unquestioned
importance to human happiness and well-being
should in the interest of exercising sophrosyne take
note of a simple observation made in the course of the
exposition:
In a world in which all that is, in so far as it is, is a
good, liberty is a great good: there are lesser goods, but
still greater are conceivable. The virtues, for instance, are
superior to the freedom of the will, for it is quite impossible
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to misuse temperance and justice, whereas we can very
easily misuse our liberty.

We in the West are misusing our liberty, mistaking
it for license, and increasingly opting for a futile
search for the Garden of Earthly Delights (a place
which the 15th-century Flemish painter Hieronymous
Bosch well understood, as a close look at his painting
of that name will reveal), while losing the way to the
City of God, the original ideal and destination of
Western civilization.
An illustration of the well-governed City is to be
found in 14th-century frescoes Allegory of Good and Bad
Government, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the
Palazzo Publico of the Italian city of Siena.
The allegory begins with the “City-State Under
Tyranny,” with the three principle vices at the
top: Avarice, Pride and Vainglory, these latter two
synonymous with hubris.
Moving along to the Virtues of Good
Government, Justice is enthroned with Wisdom above
her in a manner reminiscent of illustrations of the
Holy Spirit as a Dove inspiring the Apostles. A cord
extending to the left connects her to the virtue of
distributive justice (which would gladden the hearts of
Chesterton and Belloc, leading lights of Distributism)
and to the right with the virtues of Peace, Fortitude,
Prudence and Temperance (synonymous with
sophrosyne), Magnanimity and Justice.
Next is illustrated the Good City-Republic,
characterized by merchants freely buying and
selling in the streets while the citizens celebrate
their freedom by dancing and singing, by craftsmen
working on a home, by the celebration of weddings
(men and women marrying), by persons entering
and leaving the City free of restrictions, free of fear,
by an inostentatious prosperity, by a countryside of
smallholders working their fields, olive groves and
vineyards... It may not be Shangri-la, but it represents
an ideal for community life.
Shangri-la, like Utopia, was never a lost city: it
was and will always be imaginary. The City of God is
as yet unrealized, but its design was clearly drawn for
us at the dawn of a decadent but well worth defending
Western civilization. Unlimited material progress
turned to avarice, pride, vainglory... These are not the
keys to the City of the Free nor to the City of God.
Sophrosyne—prudence, modesty, discretion—is a
key.
Sophrosyne is a word—a concept, a human
quality, a way of life—we must not forget, lest the City
perish.
Timothy Cullen, a regular contributor to The Remnant and a former equities
trader who lived for many years in Spain, is the happily married father of adult
children. He and his wife now live in a rural area in Argentina in a straw bale
house they designed themselves. Mr. Cullen is a graduate of Cornell University. The picture of Christ is a detail of Christ in Front of Pilate by Mihâly
Munkâcsy (1844-1900).

BOOK

37

REVIEW
TITLE: Valiant Woman
AUTHOR: Msgr. Landriot
PUBLISHER: Loreto Publications
DISTRIBUTED: Angelus Press. Price: $18.95
REVIEWER: Mrs. Colleen Hammond
SUMMARY: A Series of Discourses Intended For
the Use of Women Living in the World

It’s complicated being a woman. Maybe it’s
all of our hormones. But the feminist propaganda
constantly swarming around us hasn’t helped, either!
Am I the only one that has noticed that some
women, in a twisted attempt to show their superiority
over men, have adopted offensive characteristics?
Cussing, smoking, carousing, and infidelity are not
a man’s best qualities—or a woman’s. So why imitate
them? If I am going to copy any male characteristic,
it will be the ability to make decisions without my
emotions getting in the way.
The past couple of generations have lost
touch with the beauty, nobility, and privilege
of womanhood. Now, instead of learning about
womanhood from the women around us, we need a
book to help us dig into our soul to develop our Godgiven gifts.
Thankfully, we have The Valiant Woman, by the
Most Reverend Jean François Landriot. Although
not initially written for publication, the book is an
extended version of the 16 conferences he gave to a
women’s organization when he was the Archbishop of
La Rochelle in the mid-1800’s. In them, he challenges
each of us to strive to be a valiant woman, just like
our Blessed Mother.
You would never know the inner beauty of the
book by looking at its cover. A clipper ship seems
a bit odd for the front of a woman’s book, until you
understand that throughout the book Archbishop
Landriot compares a valiant woman to a ship:

She too is graceful like a well-built ship; her speech, her
motions, her gait, everything about her, partakes of the
majestic port and softly-gliding motions of a ship. She is
an ornament to her family and to society, and in worldly
assemblies presents an image of those graceful yawls.…But
beauty by itself is useless, may even become dangerous;
therefore the valiant woman, like the ship, possesses
strength; of a vigorous Christian temperament, she can
resist the utmost fury of the sea, brave the tempestuous
waves, and hold her course amidst the stormy billows; she,
too, is fortified with galvanized metal, that is to say, with
those solid virtues which can withstand the assaults of the
passions. Though she may have to abide in troubled waters,
exposed to all the dangers of life, she still rests intact, and
ever proudly maintains the honor of her name and house.…
(pp.38-39)

Once I got past the schooner on the cover, I
found that the book is densely packed with vital and
useful information. It was a bit challenging at first to
adjust to the antiquated writing style, which wasn’t
made any easier as it is a translation from the French.
But since His Excellency Archbishop Landriot knows
the heart and soul of women so well and challenges us
in such an uplifting manner, I quickly adapted to his
style.
While modern culture tells us that it’s demeaning
for a woman to stay home and raise children,
Archbishop Landriot shows that it is only the woman
who is blessed with the courage, flexibility, and
energy to handle all the difficulties of her state in
life. He encourages woman to be “queens in your
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • May 2006

38
own empire; but if you value your happiness, your
tranquility, and the success of your affairs, do not seek
to be the queens elsewhere” (pp.14-15).
I was raised listening to, among other things, an
Enjoli perfume ad on television that said I could bring
home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. Looking back I
wonder why I wanted to do both jobs! But somehow,
many of us bought into that philosophy and rushed
into the workforce to grasp the brass ring and be
“queens elsewhere.” Women are now realizing that
they’ve been duped. They may have equality in the
workplace, but there is no equality at home. Mom is
the only queen there.
The influence of a virtuous mother raising her
children is undeniable. One woman can make or
break a culture by how she raises one child. Where
would we be today if Moses’ mother had not
chosen to be the queen of her home? How about
Charlemagne’s mother, Bertha? But the opposite is
true as well. It is said that much of Karl Marx’s life of
revolt was aimed at revenge toward his manipulative
and possessive mother.
Granted, women have the indisputable gift of
multi-tasking. So, if anyone can handle running the
many facets of a home it’s a woman. But with that
gift comes a caution from Archbishop Landriot:
keep yourself occupied with good things because
the brain is always busy doing something! Is it busy
balancing domestic affairs and piety? Or are we being
sentimental and daydreamy?
Let’s face it. With us gals, if our brain isn’t
busy with something productive, it may tend to be
occupied with something to do with hair, make-up,
or fashions—or some sort of gossip. We can’t get away
from it at the check-out counter in any store.
What about e-mail? Detraction, calumny, and
backbiting have become a daily pastime. Now anyone
can rob his neighbor’s reputation by forwarding an email or posting to a chat board or group. And even if
we’re “only” reading it, we may be the guiltiest of all!
“Both the backbiter and his listener have got the devil
in them, one in his mouth and the other in his ear”
(Sins of the Tongue, Fr. Belet of the Diocese of Basle,
p.65).
Archbishop Landriot suggests that our brain must
be more active than our fingers. He proposes that we
fill our mind with good thoughts, good books, and
tranquility. If possible, we ought to “sing while you
work, and shun not the joyous canticles and simple
expressions of a happy soul” (p.22). That got me to
thinking–what songs do my children hear me singing
in our home? What books do they see me reading?
Ah, books. Here is where Archbishop Landriot
won my heart. In one of his conferences, he said,
“Nothing which elevates the mind and ennobles the
heart should be unknown to you. A woman’s soul
has the same origin as a man’s, and needs light no
less than his” (p.36). Even St. Clement of Alexandria
said that it was a duty for women to study philosophy
(p.34). And we have the female saints as examples!
THE ANGELUS • May 2006

www.angeluspress.org

From the Acts of Saint Catherine, Archbishop
Landriot quotes St. Catherine as saying that she
applied herself “to every branch of rhetoric,
philosophy, geometry, and other sciences” (p.34).
But my personal favorite is St. Monica. The
Archbishop says that
she is another admirable model for you in this respect.
She loved to discuss the highest problems of philosophy
with Saint Augustine and his companions; and she did
so with a breadth of view and elevation of thought which
astonished her hearers. (p.34)

Archbishop Landriot understands that study has
great advantages; “it elevates the mind,” and keeps
us away from frivolous magazines and conversations
that only focus on other people, make-up, hair styles,
and fashions. He even recognizes that the more a
woman “cares for her body, the less will she cultivate
her intellect” (p.166). It makes you wonder if he had
visions of our make-up counters at the mall, our workout clubs and weight lifting centers.
Being well read also allows us to carry on
intellectual conversations with our husbands.
Archbishop Landriot says that we can “retain the
respect and love of a husband” through a “delicate,
well-cultivated mind, which looks on all things
from the highest, the most amiable, and most holy
point of view” (p.30). That’s better than peppering
our husbands with diaper stories and news of our
girlfriends!
All of this encouragement to study and expand
our minds comes with a warning, however. Our
household duties and family affairs must come first!
Once those are accomplished, then we can find time
for study, reading, poetry, literature, fine arts, and
music. One more caveat: nothing in excess! Why?
Because “women run a risk of going to extremes in
everything” (p.25).
Maybe we tend to go to the extreme in things
because we’re so detail-oriented, which is another one
of the feminine gifts. Archbishop Landriot teaches
us that “woman often possesses more intelligence for
little details than man; she has a finer perception of a
multitude of things which wholly escape him” (p.98).
Although we have the gift of paying more
attention to the details, our job is to “foresee, to find
out, to calculate beforehand, to submit her ideas to
her husband, and act in concert with him” (p.98).
Why? Because he can cut through the emotions and
make a logical decision.
Quite frankly, that is one of the many things I
appreciate about my husband. He protects me from
my emotions! I’m sure that is why God assigned
men the duty as head of the household. Husbands
and wives are equal in dignity, separate in role
and function, and those roles and functions are
complementary. And when “the wife is acting in
concert with her husband, and…everything is decided
by mutual agreement” (p.93), all is well in the world.
I learned a number of years ago to let my
husband be the head of the home, and I stopped

39
trying to be the neck that turned the head. Instead,
I embraced the role of being the heart of the home.
As Pope Pius XI said in his encyclical on Christian
marriage: “For if the man is the head, the woman is
the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling,
so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief
place in love” (Pope Pius XI, Casti Cannubii, §27).
As queen of the home, we make sure it is the chief
place of love by keeping it brimming with harmony,
peace, and joy. I saw a bumper sticker that said, “If
Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!” Isn’t that
the truth?
Women, being more ordered to an emotional life,
are designed by God to empathize and teach children
the proper way to respond to tragedy, triumph,
and tribulations. “One single kind word said from
the heart is often enough to disperse clouds (and)
dissipate prejudices…” (p.84).
Archbishop Landriot suggests that the way a
mother ought to deal with the faults of others is to
“meet them with patience and unfailing docility;
meekness and patience will do far more than anger
and violent recrimination…” (p.85). That’s much
better than the manipulation and possessiveness that
Karl Marx supposedly experienced from his mother.
The real inner strength and character of a woman
is defined by Archbishop Landriot as “an energy of
soul which enables us to bear calmly the trials and
evils of life; which gives us courage to carry out our
designs with unshaken firmness, and preserves in
us a vigor of action which human obstacles cannot
destroy” (p.104).
Because the entire home revolves around her,
a woman needs this steadiness. “Is not the wife the
bridge for the family?” Archbishop Landriot asks.
“Does not everyone lean a little on her—husband,
children, servants, even troublesome neighbors; while
a large portion of domestic care rolls also over her,
and weighs continually on her shoulders” (p.120).
But this inner strength is not to be mistaken for
obstinacy! Matter of fact, Archbishop Landriot points
out that stubbornness is a clear sign of a weak mind.
Someone who is inflexible and keeps to his own ideas
and plans more than he should is not virtuous. But
the opposite of obstinacy is weakness, which is also
not virtuous! A woman who is feeble or susceptible
doesn’t have the fortitude to resist. Firmness is in
the middle, and consists in doing what you have
determined is the right thing without letting anything
stop you. It is an inner strength and stability that is
gentle, humble, and tranquil—not rough, haughty, or
touchy.
Since all of home life revolves around the mother,
it’s important that our bodies be well rested and
our souls well armed for our daily spiritual battles.
Archbishop Landriot devotes a few conferences to the
importance of getting a good night’s sleep and rising
early for prayer. He gives many quotes from Sacred
Scripture indicating that morning is the best time for

prayer as the mind is a clean slate. It isn’t clogged
with the happenings of the day or earthly things.
I’m a morning person, so getting up a few hours
before everyone else has never been a problem for
me. But every mother who wakes her family up in the
morning knows that what Archbishop Landriot says is
true: “The most formidable combat man has to fight is
not always on the battle-field, but is rather that which
he has to wage with his pillow” (p.57). And mothers
are on the front line of that battle every morning!
It is only with a life of prayer that we are able to
handle the trials and difficulties of life. Keeping with
his ship theme, Archbishop Landriot says that the
valiant woman ought to “let the billows of trials and
difficulties come and go, and toss about the vessel of
our life at their will. True piety, deeply rooted in the
heart, can alone give you this combined buoyancy
and energy which holds its ground all the better for
appearing to yield” (p.41).
With our emotions racing most of the time, that’s
a tough balance to maintain. We need a strong prayer
life and a good friend to lean on. Thankfully, we have
our husbands to turn to. “It is asserted that a woman
rarely—I do not like to say never—finds a true and
steady friend in the heart of another woman” (p.121).
Any mother will tell you that it seems to be a
thankless job. But Archbishop Landriot encourages us
by saying that,
A sweet reward awaits the valiant woman; it is sometimes
deferred, but is sure to crown the latter years of her life.
Her virtues, long unacknowledged, are at length fully
appreciated, and sooner or later her husband and children
unite to lavish on her every mark of respect, and proclaim
her to be the centre of their love, and the source of their
life and happiness…. (p.204)

The role of a woman, a wife, and a mother is so
monumental, so pivotal to our culture and our world
today, and there are few that seem to be embracing
it. Every woman should read and study Archbishop
Landriot’s conferences to learn more about this noble,
valiant, and multifaceted role of womanhood.
Behold the model of a woman, wife, and mother;
contemplate this beauteous character, which has two sides
apparently quite opposite, and yet which complete each
other. On one hand, a womanly mind full of feminine
delicacy, forethought, practical prudence, and gentleness;
on the other, the vigorous intelligence of a man, with the
resources, strength, energy, activity, and firm perseverance
which we admire in a masculine character: “And joining
a man’s heart to a woman’s thought” (II Mach. 7:21).
(pp.212-13)
Mrs. Dennis (Colleen) Hammond is the author of the best-selling book Dressing
with Dignity (available from Angelus Press. Price: $10.00–Ed.), and is much
in demand as a speaker at conferences, retreats, and parish events. A former
on-camera meteorologist for The Weather Channel, model, actress and Miss
Michigan National Teen-Ager, Colleen abandoned her highly successful career
in television to become a stay-at-home mother. Colleen lives in North Texas
with her husband and their four children. Visit her website at http://www.
ColleenHammond.com. Reproduced with permission.

www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • May 2006

40

F R .

p e t e r

Is it permissible for a landlord to rent an apartment or
house to an unmarried couple living in sin?

This is a case of material cooperation in somebody
else’s sin. This is not normally permissible, for obvious
reasons, and a Catholic ought to refuse to rent an
apartment if he knows that a couple is not married and is
going to live in sin in that apartment.
However, material cooperation is not the same as
formal cooperation. The difference is that in material
cooperation the Catholic (in this case, the landlord) does
not want the sin to happen, whereas in formal cooperation
he does. This is why it is permissible to rent to such
persons for a proportionately serious reason, for example,
if the civil law made it an offense to “discriminate,” and
one did not have any other “legal” reason to refuse, so
that the refusal to rent would mean a real possibility
of civil or criminal action being initiated against the
landlord.
This being said, a Catholic should do everything
in his power, including accepting a lower rent from
good tenants, or using other legally approved reasons
to exclude such tenants, in order to avoid even material
cooperation in such a sin. However, if a Catholic were
trying to do this, but got caught, and was afraid of
being sued, then he could rent it to such a couple, as
effectively having no choice. Here the principles of the
indirect voluntary apply. What is directly willed is not
the cooperation in another’s sin, but the gaining of a just
return for his investment.
This very real possibility ought not to dissuade
Catholics from owning rental properties. For to do so
is to provide a service for the poor, underprivileged
members of society, less able to take care of themselves.
Understood in this sense it is an act of charity, especially
when the landlord is willing to give the needy a break on
their monthly rent.

R .

s c o t t

only 7-8%, which is only half of modern-day wine. Also,
the Jews, like all peoples of antiquity, mixed water with
their wine in large quantities. Consequently, it was less
open to abuse and to cause alcoholism.
Present-day sacramental wine is 12-18%, which
higher concentration of alcohol gives the best natural
preservation from corruption. The main difference
between sacramental wine and table wine is that
sacramental wine must be entirely pure from any
additives or preservatives, and must not contain any
alcohol or other product that is not fermented from or
fruit of the vine. This is what the Church has to say:
In order that wine may be valid and licit matter for
consecration, it must be wine, which has been pressed from
fully ripened grapes, which has fermented, which has been
purified of sediment or dregs, which has a vinous alcoholic
content of around 12%, which has not been adulterated by the
addition of any non-vinous substance, which is neither growing
nor grown bad by acescence or putrefaction. (Matters Liturgical,
10th edition, 1959, pp.327-328)

Q

Q

Is altar wine addictive, and if so,
how could Christ have used it?

In order to avoid the error of naturalism,
must I despise natural virtues?

The Church has defined, against Jansenism, that
there is such a thing as natural virtue, that it is good,
and consequently not to be despised. However, it
cannot possibly be of itself any help towards attaining
a supernatural goal, the supernatural domain being
infinitely above the natural.
This being said, the naturally acquired cardinal
virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance,
learned by repeated efforts, and the natural virtues
associated with them, are a marvelous preparation for
the infused, supernatural virtues. When the supernatural
virtues are received, they immediately take advantage
of all the acquired good habits, which give facility in the
exercise of supernatural virtue. A person who practices
natural temperance, for example, will become very
generous in practicing the supernatural virtue when in the
state of grace, and he will have an especial ease and joy
in so doing that a person who has never practiced natural
temperance would not have.
This applies to the public, social order of the State
also. When a State promotes natural virtues, such as
temperance, fortitude, and justice, then the citizens will
have a certain preparation and facility in the supernatural
order, if they should receive the Faith and the state of
sanctifying grace. Consequently, Catholic men should
do all in their power to bring about a social order that is
based upon the practice of natural virtue, i.e., that is based
upon the natural order. It is a great help to the Church
for the salvation of souls. Strange though it may seem,
it is precisely the error of naturalism that prevents this,
because it denies the natural order and the importance
of natural virtue. Denying the reality of human nature
and the natural law as well as original sin, its wounds and
consequences, naturalism arrives at the strange paradox
of denying the very existence of natural virtue. This
perversion of nature makes it very difficult to accept the
Church and supernatural revelation, given that grace
builds on nature.

A

All alcoholic beverages are addictive in certain
persons, namely in alcoholics, but not in others. Wine is
no exception to this. Yet it is certainly true that grape wine
is natural and does have some special qualities, recalled
even by Sacred Scripture. It certainly does rejoice the
heart of man, as the Psalms say, and it does soothe nerves,
in those who do not have the predisposition to become
alcoholics.
However, with respect to its alcohol content, wine
is not any different from other alcoholic beverages,
and is easily prone to abuse. Wine-drinking persons
can certainly become alcoholics, and frequently do.
It is probably true that it is not so frequently abused
as whiskey and other spirits and stronger drinks that
alcoholics indulge in. Nevertheless, it must be counted
with those fermented drinks that can ruin a person.
Our Lord is not responsible for the abuse of this
good substance that God in His goodness provided for
us, and that Our Divine Savior elevated to become the
species under which he would give us His Precious Blood.
Nevertheless, the wine that was drunk in the time of Our
Lord was much weaker than modern-day wine–probably

A

Either red or white wine may be used for altar wine.

Time to Prepare for Confirmation!
Novena
to the Holy Ghost
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you

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Preparation for Confirmation

An excellent way to prepare for,
appreciate, and follow the rite of the
sacrament of Confirmation. Divided
into three sections: Quiz yourself in
Part 1 with regards to the minimum
knowledge necessary to receive the
Sacrament; Part 2: Q&A catechism
on the sacrament of Confirmation,
explaining its 4 principal effects, the
7 gifts and the 12 fruits of the Holy
Ghost. Part 3 explains the rite of
Confirmation.
26pp, softcover, STK# 3081 $3.95

hear “Holy Ghost”? If it’s a bird, there’s a small problem.
We suspect that 99% of even dedicated Catholics have
this same small problem. So, we are offering a small book
as the solution. This is a Novena booklet unlike any other.
Once again, we must return to the words of the motto of the
French Seminary in Rome that were so often on the lips of
Archbishop Lefebvre and his mentor, Fr. LeFloch: “pietas cum
doctrina, doctrina cum pietate,” (piety with doctrine, doctrine
with piety). Novena books are usually heavy on piety and
pretty short on doctrine YET, as St. Thomas tells us, “you
cannot love what you do not know.” How can you Love the
Holy Ghost and communicate in prayer with Him, if you do
not first know Him? If knowing the Holy Ghost puts feathers
in your mind, you don’t know Him...unfortunately, that’s most
of us.
This little 24-page treasure, like all Novenas, covers a
period of daily prayer for nine days: 1) The Holy Ghost 2)
Fear 3) Piety 4) Fortitude 5) Knowledge 6) Understanding
7) Counsel 8) Wisdom 9) Fruits. Each day has a short
Scholastic definition of each gift of the Holy Ghost, then a
profound meditation which is followed by an intense prayer
appropriate to that gift. Lastly, one recites the Our Father, Hail
Mary, Glory Be, the Act of Consecration to the Holy Ghost
and the Prayer for the Seven Gifts.
Should ESPECIALLY be in the hand of every Confirmand,
every sponsor, every parent, teacher, priest and religious.
We give gifts at Confirmation in immitation of the Holy Ghost,
who gives much greater gifts. What better gift is there than
helping the Confirmed know and love what he has received
from Him?
24pp, durable softcover, STK# 8152 $4.95

Blessed Be God

A Complete Catholic Prayer Book

Frs. Charles J. Callan & John A. McHugh
From the publisher:

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of different devotional manuals, prayer books, novena books, etc....Now the book which has been in the greatest
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Fine paper, one ribbon, in print from 1925-61. This is an exact reprint of the 1925 edition. Can’t go wrong if you want a
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754pp, index, gold-embossed hardcover, STK# 8164 $32.00

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Mothers’ Day (May 14):
Don’t forget, you have two!
Yes, one earthly and one heavenly–the Blessed Virgin. Here is something for
both–and one is free! Buy both the Art of Catholic Mothering and Eleven, Thank
God! and get a FREE copy of From the Rose Garden of Our Lady so that you
can offer to Holy Mary a more perfectly prayed rosary for Mothering Day.

The Art of Catholic Mothering:

Twelve Catholic Mothers Speak
about Motherhood, Child Rearing and the Faith
Edited by Maura Koulik

How does a Catholic mother instill the Faith in her children? How
does she deal with issues of education and discipline? How does she
maintain her own faith in the face of life’s challenges?
To answer these questions, editor Maura Koulik has gathered the
stories of twelve Catholic mothers. With grace, honesty, and humor,
these mothers tell of their struggles: Gathering their children for the
rosary, persevering when money and support are scarce, finding solid
Catholic education, surviving personal tragedies, and living a fully
Catholic life in the post-Vatican II era. The experiences of these women
will inspire all readers, not just mothers! Particularly important for any
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Typical testimonials: “I love this book. Right after I read it my husband read it cover to cover in one sitting;
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112pp, softcover, STK# 8173. $12.95

Eleven, Thank God!: Memories of a Catholic Mother
Fr. Vincent McNabb

A personal side to the great 20th-century theologian, distributist, Dominican
Friar, and last of eleven children. A moving autobiographical study of Fr.
Vincent’s early years gives us a candid look into the life of a traditional
Catholic family in the late 1800’s. From the two children born at sea, to the
McNabb boys rolling each other down the stairs in a laundry basket, hanging
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how Fr. Vincent’s mother and father handled it all and how their Catholic faith
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“Stands as a great apologia pro familia magna. A defense of the family
that could thaw the most rigorous heart of our childless Age.”–Dr. William
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78pp, softcover, STK# 8174Q $12.95

From the Rose Garden of Our Lady
A Book of Rosary Meditations

Each mystery has a beautiful illustration, several paragraphs from the
Gospels (or a Father of the Church), ten mini-meditations–one for each
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