$4.45 $4.45 april 2007 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” of see th p. is 44 iss ue ph ot con o te es st sa y A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition Gifts for a Catholic Easter Basket Know Your Mass Fr. Demetrius Manousos A detailed, fully illustrated step-by-step explanation of the Traditional Latin Mass in full color! Presents the theology of the Mass in a manner easily understood by children. All parts of the Mass are covered: the preparation for Mass, the altar, sacred vessels & vestments, liturgical actions, the sanctuary, and some liturgical history as well. Highly recommended. 96pp, softcover, STK# 1022Q $14.95 The Mass Explained to Children My Path to Heaven Fr. Geoffrey Bliss Dramatic and detailed etchings make this a very For ages 8-5. Covers:  The Mass of the Catechumens special book for children. Based on the Ignatian retreat, & of the Faithful  The Last Supper  The Meaning of the it helps children ponder the truths of the Faith and calls Mass  Introduction to the them to lead lives of holiness Mass  Eucharistic miracles in accordance with those  History of the Mass  Activity in Heaven during Mass truths. The illustrations reveal the heroism and adventure  Meaning of the altar, altar of the Christian life, and the cloths, crucifix & candles, sacred vessels, bells, incense, questions on each chapter help children to remember vestments, and more! 116pp, hardcover, 36 illustra- what they’ve learned. 96pp, 8½" x 11", softcover, tions, STK# 7028Q $14.95 STK# 5414Q $13.95 Maria Montessori The Seven Sacraments Fr. Demetrius Manousos Fr. Manousos explains the mystery of sanctifying grace to children in a profound and memorable way. Based on St. Thomas, he compares our natural development (from babies to adults to death) to the life of our soul…our natural life and our “super-life.” At each step of our two lives, we encounter special events along the way. In our “super-life,” the life of grace, these special events are the sacraments. Each sacrament is explained in enough detail to give a basic, but very solid, understanding. The matter and form (although those words are not used) are indicated, and, very importantly, the effects of each sacrament are stated in detail. Beautifully illustrated on every page, your child will get hours of enjoyment just looking at the pictures, which, in a way, are as instructive as the text itself. Ideal for children 5 to 10 years old. 46pp, hardcover, 50+ color illustrations, STK# 6757Q $9.95 Easter, Liturgically The Liturgical Year in GREGORIAN CHANT 1962 Roman Catholic Daily Missal HAS THE CORRECT HOLY WEEK FOR USE WITH THE 1962 ALTAR MISSAL! Don’t be left in the dark during the Sacred Triduum, the most holy time of the liturgical year. The first totally retypeset, Latin-English daily missal since Vatican II. Utterly complete.  All new typesetting. Clear and crisp type.  All liturgical texts in Latin and English  All readings in English (Douay-Rheims) and Latin  Gregorian notation  Ordinary with rubrics in red  Gilt edges  5 liturgicallycolored non-fraying ribbons  Rounded corners  Reinforced 80 lb. resin-impregnated end sheets  Fully indexed. 1980pp, sewn binding, gold-embossed skivertex cover, STK# 8043. $59.95 The Sacred Triduum Missal A traditional missal for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy Week according to the 1962 rubrics for parish use. At 192 pages, this book contains the entire ceremonies for Holy Thursday evening, Good Friday’s Mass of the Pre-Sanctified and the Paschal Vigil in a continuous format, with no back and forth page turning, and complete parallel Latin and English texts with rubrics in violet. 192pp, color softcover, STK# 8029 $6.95 Produced by the Schola Bellarmina of Brussels, Belgium, under the direction of SSPX priest Fr. Bernard Lorber. These excellent recordings give you a chance to sit down and follow along at home to this great spiritual treasure of the Church. Excellent for choirs, scholas and individuals just learning to sing Gregorian Chant. VOLUME 4: Easter Vigil to Feast of the Ascension Includes Propers for Easter Vigil, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, Low Sunday, 2nd-5th Sundays after Easter, the Rogation Mass, Feast of the Ascension, and Sunday in the Octave of the Ascension. 2 CDs in case with booklet, TAP# 6613. $29.95 “Instaurare omnia in Christo—To restore all things in Christ.” Motto of Pope St. Pius X The ngelus A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition 2915 Forest Avenue “To publish Catholic journals and place them in the hands of honest men is not enough. It is necessary to spread them as far as possible that they may be read by all, and especially by those whom Christian charity demands we should tear away from the poisonous sources of evil literature.” —Pope St. Pius X April 2007 Volume XXX, Number 4 • Kansas City, Missouri 64109 English-language Editor and Publisher for the International Society of Saint Pius X letter from the editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Fr. Kenneth Novak PublisheR Fr. John Fullerton mingling with muslims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Bro. Gabriel-Marie Editor Fr. Kenneth Novak Assistant Editor understanding the age of the martyrs . . . . . . . 11 Mr. Christopher Check Mr. James Vogel business Manager Mr. Jason Greene Editorial assistant and proofreading Miss Anne Stinnett cloistered dominican nuns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Avrillé, France the resurrection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Fr. Edward Leen Design and Layout Mr. Simon Townshend The faith exiled from education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. MARKETING Mr. Christopher McCann comptroller the hands of a priest: A Meditation for Holy Thursday . 36 Fr. Michel Simoulin Miss Lisa Powell customer service Mrs. Mary Anne Hall Mr. John Rydholm Shipping and Handling Mr. Jon Rydholm The Current Ecclesiastical Situation: . . . . . . 39 An Interview with Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos book review: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Garcia Moreno by Fr. Augustine Berthe Mrs. Patti Petersen Questions and answers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Fr. Peter Scott The Angelus photo essay contest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication offices are located at 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri, 64109, (816) 753-3150, FAX (816) 753-3557. Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, Missouri. Copyright © 2007 by Angelus Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Manuscripts are welcome. They must be double-spaced and deal with the Roman Catholic Church, its history, doctrine, or present crisis. Unsolicited manuscripts will be used at the discretion of the Editorial Staff. Unused manuscripts cannot be returned unless sent with a self-addressed, stamped envelope. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Angelus, Angelus Press, 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64109-1529. Footnotes for “Letter from the Editor” (p.2) 1 Jerrold Jenkins. http://www.JenkinsGroup.com Publishers Weekly (May 26, 2003), http://www.PublishersWeekly.com. 3 Jerrold Jenkins. http://www.JenkinsGroup.com. 4 Publishers Weekly (May 12, 1997, p.13) http://www.PublishersWeekly.com. 5 2001 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing by the Book Industry Study Group, http://www.bisg.org. 6 Jerrold Jenkins. http://www.JenkinsGroup.com. 7 http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/ 2 resources/statistics.cfm. Publishers Weekly (May 26, 2003), http://www.PublishersWeekly.com. 9 Michael Levine (June 2002), http://www.LevinPR.com. 10 David Godine, Publisher. 11 Lou Aronica, Senior V-P Avon Books, Publishers Weekly (Mar. 22, 1999), http://www.Publishers Weekly.com. 12 Bookselling This Week (Nov. 10, 1997), http://news.bookweb.org/. 8 The Angelus Subscription Rates 1 year 2 years 3 years US $34.95 Foreign Countries (inc. Canada & Mexico) $54.95 $64.95 $104.95 $99.95 $159.95 All payments must be in US funds only.  Letter from the Editor The word is dying. It’s a no-brainer why. The world’s only chance at sanity is the Word made Flesh; kill the Word in the minds of men and the death of the word will follow. The recent “Reading at Risk” report from the National Endowment for the Arts concludes that literary reading will virtually disappear in half a century. The image has overcome the Word and the word. For itself, the Church uses the image to train and teach, but in the hands of the Devil to use upon men no longer speaking or reading words of Truth, images become his emotive, wordless, impressionistic, and ubiquitous tool by which to dazzle degenerating sin-scarred minds–yours and mine included. 58% of the US adult population never read another book after high school.1 Take this priest’s pill for Lent: Read. You. The spouse. Your children. To your children. Your children to you. Ten minutes a day followed by rewarding yourself with a Snicker’s bar, a Coke, a beer, or a smoke. Sacrifice these, too, as you wish, but giving up any of them is less penance for most of us than to thoughtfully read for ten continuous minutes the words of a Saint on any given day. In 2001, the average US reader spent 4.1 minutes bookreading per day.2 Fr. Frederick Faber tells us (Spiritual Conferences, TAN Books, Rockford, IL) that, next to the power of thinking, the power of reading is the most important non-supernatural qualification for an interior life. He says that it is “almost equal to grace,” gives 20 reasons why, and begs for a system of education that promotes it as a habit. 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.3 “Without it,” he says, “the ordinary difficulties of life will be multiplied by ten.” Reading is a special form of prayer, directly assisting our combat, stirring up affections to God, compelling us to love, hope, and have faith. “Knowledge and learning are two different ideas. It not easy to think out for ourselves even very obvious things. Reading suggests them to us.” 53% read fiction; 43%, non-fiction. The favorite fiction category is Mystery and Suspense at 19%.4 Reading “plants the wilderness...and irrigates what it has planted.” Reading occupies time. Maybe you fill gaps with innocent stuff. But harmlessness is no match against evil, while reading takes possession of the mind for positive good. Rage against the machine which grinds its multiple interests against you at electric pace! What takes possession of our thoughts takes possession of us. The top three book-buying categories are 55% Popular Fiction, 10% Religious Non-fiction, and 9% Cooking/Crafts.5 Reading saves us from vegging out; to sit in a LazyBoy without an object is to itch for the cell phone or keyboard, Wii wand, joystick, mouse, remote, or GameBum. “A vacant hour is always the devil’s hour.” Reading is a twofold help against temptation. Negatively, occupation of the mind leaves no room for temptations; positively, it supplies distraction while we’re being tempted. 57% of new books are not read to completion.6 Everyone judges a book by its cover. On the average, a bookstore browser spends 8 seconds looking at the front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover.7 So much for our soul. What about for our neighbor? Conversation! Books are our neighbor’s friends by making it less necessary for us to discuss him. “It is very hard for a person who does not like reading to talk without sinning,” says Fr. Faber. In any case, it makes our Faith more attractive to those around us. Father proposes that we preach the gospel in our conversation more when we speak indirectly on it than when we speak directly. “Common interests are a bond. We are better missionaries in daily society if we have a taste for reading.” Per capita spending on books per month in the US (2003) was $7.18.8 Pity the child who finds the talk of his parents “empty, shallow, gossipping, vapid, and more childish than children’s talk among themselves,” warns Father. “The taste for reading, or the absence of it, is hereditary.” Reading, like cultural restoration, starts with parents. 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.9 Only 32% of the US population has ever been in a bookstore.10 Women buy 68% of all books.11 Reading elevates us. When we’re frazzled and too weak to reach for higher things, reading un-frazzles us. And when we’re in a bind, how applicable our reading seems to become. It’s as though the Holy Ghost had chosen what we should read. In his near-final paragraph, Fr. Faber sums up how good reading enlarges our charity: [W]e free ourselves from little jealousies, from uncharitable doubts, from unworthy suspicions, from unsympathetic cautions, from ungenerous delays, from narrow criticisms, from conceited pedantries, from shallow pomposities, about others and their good works, things which are the especial diseases of little great men and little good men, and which may be said to frustrate one-third, if not more, of all the good works which are attempted in the Church. Goodness which is not greatness also is a sad misfortune. While it saves its own soul, it will not let others save theirs. What to read?–Anything by the Holy Ghost (Scripture), by the Church (your Daily Missal), by a saint (the spiritual life), by Angelus Press (Catholic Tradition), or by direction of the husband/father (authority). Cover to cover. And, yes, I’m bribing the attention of your children aged 10-18 with our monthly Photo Essay Contest (see p.44). What not to read?–Blogs. Why not?–If charity is the truth, then I let Shakespeare get the merit by my paraphrase of his Macbeth (Act 5, Scene V): [A blog’s] but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. It’s not reading; it’s info-tainment. (Like too many websites.) Blogs. Blogonauts. Blogonautism. St. Augustine was told by Heaven, “Take up and read,” not “Point and click.” Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.12 If you’ve read this far, you’re above average, and send this to the next person. Thanks for saving Word and word. Instaurare Omnia in Christo, Fr. Kenneth Novak P.S. My footnotes are on the “Table of Contents” page. B r o .  G a b r i e l - m a r i e Mingling with Muslim s There is much to be known about the history and extraordinary details of Islam,1 but as the scope of this particular treatise is to focus on how to deal with their religious errors, a short historical summary is useful for us. We would like to provide you with a sort of “quick-reference-sheet.” Islam is one of the fastest growing religions. Would you know how to defend the Faith if a conversation was struck with a Muslim? We must first know what they believe before studying how to refute their errors. In preparing this “quick reference guide,” I have tried to imagine myself actually engaged in a conversation with a Muslim. It would seem one could anticipate a certain progressive flow in our conversation starting with the authenticity of the Sacred Scriptures and the Koran. This is where I have begun. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007  FACT: The Koran itself says the Sacred Scriptures are intact. This is the place to start with a Muslim. Muslims maintain that we have corrupted the original Scriptures. They claim that what we now call the Bible is but a trace of the original Scriptures and is to be rejected. They say this because Muslims are bound to accept both the Old and New Testaments of the Sacred Scriptures (Koran 5:48,50). If he is won to accept that the Scriptures are not corrupted, then he will have to reject his error that Jesus did not die on the Cross nor resurrect. Muhammed himself has provided us with the “Magic Ayat” [i.e., “Verse”] in the Koran, Ch. 10, vss. 94-95, where he says that if the Muslims have any doubt as to the original Scriptures to go to those who have preserved them intact, that is, the “People of the Book”–the Jews and Christians. (Surely Muhammed wouldn’t refer his followers to a lie?) If Muhammed accepted the 7th-century Bible as incorrupt and true during his lifetime, then Muslims must likewise accept the Bible as we have it today because it is substantially the same. After all, the Douay-Rheims is practically a literal translation from St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, and St. Jerome lived in the 4th century. In response to this dilemma, the Muslim will say: “I cannot accept your citation of the Magic Ayat from the Koran.” He will say this and justify it by explaining that any translation of the Koran from the original Arabic is only to be considered a commentary and must be disregarded as not completely true. It is a subterfuge used to escape his predicament, a ruse by which he can accuse you of misunderstanding the Koran. Your reply can be, “You are right. Something is lost as with any translation; but the meaning is substantially the same, isn’t it?” FACT: There is no legitimate reason to accept the Koran as authentic. It is generally accepted that Muhammed is the author of the Koran.4 But no one really knows. How can we know if he really wrote the words of Allah or if he created passages himself? Who has the authority to vouch that no errors have crept into the Koran over time? Who tells men to believe in the Koran? To what authority can those men appeal? Islam has no priests, no supreme Pontiff or head Muslim, no official institution to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of the Koran and its teachings, no authority to say that the Koran is inspired. They have their teacher-leaders (imams) and their recorded traditions, but who is to say they are not engineered? Muhammed cannot guarantee to men that he is telling the truth about the Koran. THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org He founded no lasting institution, and he himself did not even name a successor. Catholics, on the other hand, believe the Bible because they believe the authority of the Catholic Church which with good reasons has declared it substantially infallible and presented it to its faithful to be believed. Along with its own interior proofs of authenticity, something outside the Holy Bible has guaranteed what’s inside it. FACT: Muslims have no original Bible. A Muslim believes he has the only true understanding of the original Scriptures. In the Koran, Christians and Jews are accused of concealing God’s word (Sura 2:39,72; 3:72), verbally distorting their Scriptures (3:72; 9:30), and not understanding their own Scriptures (2:83-85). A Muslim insists the Koran alone preserves the knowledge and spirit of the originals, and that only Muslims know what they “really said.” There are two points to address here 1) the “bible” which the Muslims possess, and 2) the position of that “bible’s” author. Consider that the Muslims themselves have no “original copy” of the Scriptures. The Koran does contain some parts of the Bible which can be easily discerned when the texts are compared. An analysis will discover, however, that the similarity results from someone copying the Bible and not from someone copying the Koran. Thus, the truth of anything contained in the Koran that is not contained in the Bible rests solely on the authority of a camel driver from the Arabian desert: Muhammed. Muslim belief in the Scriptures and its corruption by non-Muslims is based only on Muhammed’s word. Why should any belief in the Bible be based on the authority of Muhammed? He doesn’t come along until 600 years after Christ. In spite of this, a Muslim will maintain: “The Jews and Christians have corrupted their books.” It is not realistic to believe that Jews and Christians conspired together to corrupt the Old Testament. They are both quite intent on preserving the integrity of their Scriptures. In addition, both the Jews and Christians have the same Old Testament, quite independently of each other. Moreover, when could the Scriptures have been collectively altered while both groups were spread all over the world and before the advent of the printing press? They would have had to locate and change every copy in existence. There is absolutely no historical record (not even a false one) where any Jew or Christian mentions that any changes were made at all.  FACT: On the contrary, the Scripture manuscripts give evidence of authenticity. To prove how our Sacred Scriptures are authentic and have persisted through time free from error, it suffices to say a few words about the manuscripts. Here we refer to originals or the earliest known copies of those originals. It is a fact that all the Gospels are preserved in the text called the Chester Beatty Papyri, dated c.250. The New Testament as a whole is contained in the Vaticanus MS (B) that dates c.325-350. There are over 53,000 other manuscripts of the New Testament dating from the 2nd to the 15th centuries, many of them antedating Muhammed, and all containing the same substantial text. In 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, those 2000-year-old copies of parts of the Old Testament and the same substantial text which we have today in our Holy Bible. When we consider the Bible as we have it today we see that it is none other than the original. There are no grounds for the Muslim claim that the Bible has been corrupted. “Well, then,” says the Muslim: “Christians misunderstand the Scriptures.” This is a claim a Muslim makes so he can dismantle our theology. Since he believes our Scriptures are lacking, it is easy for him to think that we don’t understand the real Gospel. He will argue one thesis after another on individual points of doctrine without at the same time considering it all as a unified whole: in effect, using our own Bible against us. In order to overcome his barrage (especially against the divinity of Christ), he must be made to understand that the Scriptures are not corrupted. Once he accepts our Bible as authentic, you then have a basis on which to build up Catholic truth. But beware the greatest stumbling block for a Muslim, that is,... “Jesus Christ is not God.” A Muslim believes Catholic dogmas over-exalt Christ and make of Him a mythical figure. There are only about 90 verses in all 114 chapters of the Koran pertaining to Jesus Christ. Of these, 64 verses repetitiously pertain to His Nativity. This leaves only 26 verses from which to draw belief of Jesus Christ as God, so it is quite easy for any Muslim to have a poor notion of Jesus as He is. The Muslim will claim to revere Him, and whenever they mention His name, (if they are pious) they attach to His name in oriental fashion, “upon him be peace.” He regards Jesus as the greatest prophet short of Muhammed, but vehemently maintains that He is no God whatsoever (Sura 4:169; 5:76-77). This is rooted partially in their rejection of the Scriptures, and partly in the Islamic theology of the nature of man. To remedy this problem, it is necessary to prove the three following points: 1) Jesus died, was crucified, and was buried; 2) man is depraved (i.e., suffers from the effects of Original Sin), needs redeeming, and Jesus is that Redeemer; and 3) the Holy Trinity means unity and not diversity. There are many proofs for the Divinity of Christ. Let us provide you with a few here: 1) Jesus Himself claimed to be God and the Son of God with all God’s powers and prerogatives ( Jn. 5:18,23; 17:1-5; Mt. 25:31-33, 25:31-33; Apoc. 1:17,18). This was so clear that even the Jews were going to kill Him for saying so ( Jn. 10:31-33; Mk. 14:62; Jn. 18:5-6). He spoke with the Person of God (Mt. 5;21-22, 28:18-19; Jn. 13:34; Mt. 5:18, 24:35; Jn. 12:48) and He asked men to pray in His own Name ( Jn. 14:13-14, 15:7, 14:6; I Cor. 5:4; Acts 7:58). 2) Jesus proved His claim by miracles, and 3) He was recognized by others as God and adored ( Jn. 1:1; 20:20,28; Col. 2:9; Titus 2:13; Phil. 2:5-7; Mt. 14:33; 15:25; Mk. 5:6). Mind you, there are other difficulties still to be surmounted; most Muslims believe that... “Jesus was never crucified.” Although it is not strictly of doctrine for all Muslims to accept, it is prevalent and is the basis of his misunderstanding about Jesus Christ. The Koran admits that Jesus was to die (Sura 3:48; 19:34), but a Muslim will say Jesus has been assumed into heaven without undergoing death; His death will occur when He returns at the end of the world. He says that when the resurrection of Jesus Christ is referred to in the Bible it means the general resurrection at the end of the world. Sura 4:156 sums it up: …Verily we have slain Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the apostle of GOD; yet they slew him not, neither crucified him, but he was represented by one in his likeness; and verily they who disagreed concerning him were in a doubt as to this matter, and had no sure knowledge thereof, but followed only an uncertain opinion. They did not really kill him; but GOD took him up unto himself: and GOD is mighty and wise. And there shall not be one of those who have received the Scriptures, who shall not believe in him, before his death; and on the day of resurrection he shall be a witness against them. On the contrary, a Catholic may debate from the Scriptures the following facts: 1) The Old Testament predicted His death on the Cross (Is. 53:5-10; Ps. 21:16; Dan. 9:26; Zach. 12:10); 2) Jesus fulfilled the prophecies in the Old Testament concerning His death (Mt. 4:14, 5:17-18, 8:17; Jn. 4:25-26, 5:39); and 3) the Evangelists witnessed His crucifixion (Mt. 28:31-38; Mk. 15:12-30; Lk. 23:2046; Jn. 19:16-32) and the early Christian Fathers recorded it: Polycarp (Epistle to the Philippians), Ignatius of Antioch (d.107; Epistle to the Tarsians), www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007  Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho). Most Muslims will insist that... “Jesus did not die.” Not only was Jesus not crucified, says a Muslim, but even if He was, it wasn’t on the cross that He died. Some say He never died at all, but was assumed body and soul into heaven until the end of the world. Some say someone else died in His place. You counter this by additional proofs: 1) The prophecies came true concerning His resurrection and death. Jesus Himself prophesied that He was going to die ( Jn. 2:19-21; Jn. 10:10-11,15; Mt. 12:40; Mk. 8:31), most clearly in the Gospel of Matthew: “And when they abode together in Galilee, Jesus said to them: The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of men: And they shall kill him, and the third day he shall rise again” (Mt. 17:21,22). 2) Crucifixion was designed to induce death, and the Romans were experts at crucifixion. 3) NonChristian historians record Jesus’ death and even crucifixion: Josephus (Antiquities 18:3), Cornelius Tacitus (c.55-117; Annals 15.44), Julius Africanus (c.221), Lucian (2nd century, On the Death of Peregrine). What do you reply when a Moslem tells you: “Someone else was crucified in His place.” A Muslim will have a slew of “theories” claiming that Jesus was actually replaced by someone else on the Cross. Here is the debunking: 1) These theories are not historical facts. There is no historical proof in any extant writings. They are contrary to the Gospel eyewitness accounts. Sometimes they quote the apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas, which is unreliable. 2) The theories are contrary to the ancient contemporary writings of the Fathers such as Tacitus, Josephus, Justin Martyr, and others. 3) There is no first-century testimony against the event at all; the Gnostic myths were not developed until the second century. Concerning the Resurrection and Ascension: Since a Muslim believes Christ was never crucified nor ever died, and since He was such a great prophet, he believes that Allah took Him body and soul into heaven without His dying. At the Second Coming, however, He is supposed to return to earth, and it is then that He will die. Then He will resurrect to life with everybody else in the General Resurrection at the end of time. Simply explain that as Jesus really died on the Cross and was buried, He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, according to the Scriptures. If you have proved the validity of our Bible, you can use it to show Jesus’ Ascension ( Jn. 20:17; Acts 1:3-11, 7:55; Mk. 16:19) and Resurrection (Acts THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org 1:22, 4:33; Mt. 27:53, 28:6; Mk. 16:6; Lk. 24:6-7; I Cor. 15:12-14). Generally, a Muslim will have great reverence and honor for God, so he holds that: “God would not allow Jesus’ ignominious death.” It is inconceivable to a Muslim that God in His royal omnipotence would allow one of His prophets to be so maligned. They think it an unthinkable injustice that God would not prevent His delegate from suffering abuse. To escape the Biblical account, Muhammed supplied the Koran with Sura 3:48, which reads, “When GOD said, O Jesus, verily I will cause thee to die, and I will take thee up unto me, and I will deliver thee from the unbelievers.…” Thus it is Allah who will indeed receive Jesus in death, but take Him before He is assaulted by infidels. This is a very human way of judging God. But how can finite man fully comprehend the ways of the infinite God? How are we to know He wouldn’t want His prophet to suffer? Look at Isaias 55:8: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts: nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord.” Besides, Isaias himself preached and predicted that God did indeed wish Jesus’ suffering (Is. 53:2-5; Zach. 12:10; Ps. 21:16). St. Paul said, “…the foolishness of God is wiser than men…” (I Cor. 1:25). At this point it is fitting to remind a Muslim of the humiliations suffered by Muhammed himself: how the Meccans scorned him and he had to run away like a criminal to Medina. And concerning Jesus, did not God often save Him from His enemies and, finally, rebuke death itself by the Resurrection (Acts 2:24,31; I Cor. 15:54,55)? Argue how it is most admirable for a person to give his life up in place of an innocent soul. So do soldiers die for their country and parents would die for their children: thus Jesus died for us (Rom. 5:7,8). A Muslim cherishes his conviction that warriors who die in battle receive heaven as reward (Suras 3:151-152; 9:112). Why could Allah call Muslims to die for him, but God cannot call Jesus to die for Him? The irony is very deep, for a Muslim is taught that... “Man is not so depraved as to need redeeming.” This is a major issue. Islam rejects the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin. A Muslim believes that man has no sins from which he must be saved. Although he is naturally inclined towards beauty, knowledge, and virtue, nevertheless, only through education in Islam teaches a man to choose the good. Since there is no Original Sin, then man has no need of Redemption; there is no need for Jesus Christ to be the Savior, so He is no Savior. A Muslim must be convinced that he is not sinless and, on the contrary, the sinfulness of man necessitates a Redeemer’s Redemption. Here is what we can say: 1) How can a man be guilty of sin unless he knew it was wrong? Guilt necessitates the recognition of  having committed an evil. But if it takes education for a man to recognize right from wrong, it follows that only an educated man can sin. It also follows that an uneducated man may do whatever he wants in good conscience. What sense is it that Allah would send prophets to admonish men who were not guilty? It makes little sense to counsel guiltless men on guiltlessness. 2) Why does Allah need to be merciful if man is not guilty? Mercy is a relaxation of punishment due to an offense. What is sin except an offense, and what is an offense except a debt that remains to be paid? How can Allah have the mercy to relax His punishments to men if they have no offenses for which to pay? Allah has no grounds to be merciful if men have no debt. 3) God cannot forgive someone without cause. A Muslim believes God can forgive sin without having to exact punishment. But the same Muslim believes God is all-just. Therefore, God cannot forgive sin without justly condemning it. Reparation must be made to please God’s justice, whether it be paid by ourselves (in hell) or by a Redeemer. Perhaps you have proven the need for Redeemer, but the Muslim will interrupt,... “Jesus Christ was not the Redeemer.” Prove to the Muslim that Jesus was the Redeemer: 1) Jesus was our substitute. In the case of Abraham ready to sacrifice Isaac, a substitute was provided; the ram was the price in place of Isaac–a ransom (Genesis ch. 22; Sura 37:101-107). Jesus Christ was a Victim in our place just as the ram was a victim in place of Isaac. “For the Son of man also is not come to be ministered unto: but to minister and to give his life a redemption for many” (Mt. 20:28). 2) Jesus is the willing Redeemer. A Muslim has great difficulty understanding how God could condemn an innocent and devoted man such as Jesus. This is because they don’t understand that Jesus chose to pay the debt for us ( Jn. 15:13; Mt. 20:28). He was a willing sacrifice. It can be proposed that God could have offered us Redemption in a way other than requiring Jesus Christ’s death (though this is most fitting), but reparation for sin would still have to be made somehow; 3) His Death and Resurrection manifests God’s mercy. It is by Christ’s offering of Himself that He saved men (Rom. 5:10; Titus 3:5; Jn. 15:13). It is only through God’s mercy that Jesus was sent to save us (Rom. 5:7,8). By the Resurrection Christ returns Life to us, commanding His Apostles to preach this Life and lead all souls to it. Had He left us to ourselves, we would have carried our sins with us into death and remained in death paying forever in hell. Through God’s mercy Jesus Christ frees us of sins and leads us back to God. But of this Jesus, a Muslim has the curious belief that... “Jesus was a prophet sent only to the Jews.” Islam teaches that Allah sent prophets to many peoples to lead them to the truth and to prepare them for Islam. Muhammed is the “Seal of the Prophets,” that is, he is the last and greatest of the prophets whose teachings supersede and abrogate all those before him. Thus Jesus was a prophet only unto the Jews whereas Muhammed was a prophet to the whole of mankind. Here’s your response: 1) There cannot be two truths: God is one, so His Truth is singular. Compare catechisms; Muhammed teaches something very different from what Jesus taught before him–even opposing teachings. It is not possible for Jesus to be the Son of God unto the Jews and cease to be so after the preaching of Muhammed. Clearly, no one has become a Muslim based on the teachings of Jesus. 2) A Muslim will admit Jesus was a great prophet, yet reject what He taught! Jesus plainly taught that He was the Son of God. He also taught the love of one’s enemies for the love of God (Mt. 5:44). Jesus sent the Apostles to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (Mt. 28:18,19), yet a Muslim must deny the Trinity. 3) Jesus prophesied to all of mankind. He did, however, preach to the Jews first because they were chosen for this reception from the beginning. After all, didn’t Jesus say, “I was not sent but to the sheep, that are lost of the house of Israel”? And to the poor Canaanite woman He said, “It is not good to take the bread of the children, and to cast it to the dogs.” The mission of Jesus was firstly to the Jews for it was promised to them; but Jesus came for all men, for that same woman “…came and adored him, saying: Lord, help me.…Yea, Lord; for the whelps also eat of the crumbs that fall from the table of their masters. Then Jesus answering, said to her: O woman, great is thy faith: be it done to thee as thou wilt” (Mt. 15:24-28). FACT: The Trinity is not many gods. Muslim teaching holds vehemently that God is one. It abhors any similitude to idolatry to the point of despising any imagery or symbols depicting God. The most it utilizes is some extremely handsome calligraphy and geometric design. (The crescent, by the way, is not a symbol of Islam, but rather of the Ottoman Empire.) Islam says the Catholic dogma of the Trinity is idolatry because the Church has made the unique God into a group of gods. A Muslim doesn’t understand that Catholics believe in three Persons in only one God (Deut. 6:4). We have three questions to deal with here: 1) whether the Trinity is pluralism in God (Sura 30:32,34; 4:169; 5:76-77); 2) whether the Paraclete was Muhammed or the Holy Ghost; and 3) whether Christ is part of the Trinity. You may not lead the Muslim to believe in the Trinity, but at least you can help him to understand that Catholics believe in www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007  only one God, which is a step in the right direction. But don’t allow yourself or the Muslim to forget that the Trinity is a Divine Mystery. We cannot fully understand it; we can only grasp it “by the tail.” It may help to explain also that we only know it because God Himself told us; we could never have known it otherwise. 1) Explain how “Trinity” means “unity of nature and diversity of person.” Explain how a “nature” is what something is, and a “person” is who someone is. Use the Triangle Illustration: consider a triangle and its three corners. The first corner is not the same as the second corner. The second corner is not the same as the third corner, and the third corner is not the same as the first corner. But all three corners are of the same triangle, each corner being just as much a part of the triangle as the other two corners. No corner is any less a part of the triangle than another. Illustrating the Trinity, each corner is like a person and the triangle itself is like the nature. God has one nature; there is one triangle. God has three persons; there are three corners. Each person in God is God– each corner in the triangle is triangle. Yet there is only one God and only one triangle. If you remove one of the corners, you no longer have a triangle. If you remove one of the persons from God, you no longer have God. Next, consider a triangle which is colored red. “Red” is an attribute of the triangle. Now, each corner has the same attribute. Just as each corner of a red triangle is also red, so each Person of the Trinity has the same attributes as possessed by the nature of God. So we may understand that if God is eternal, all three Persons of the Trinity are eternal, and so on with His omnipotence, omniscience, justice, mercifulness, etc. Obviously, however, the illustration limps because the triangle is finite and God is infinite. 2) Genesis mentions God using the plural tense (Gen. 1:26). Once the illustration of the Trinity is explained, you can speak of the Holy Spirit being spoken of in Scripture as distinct from the other Persons of the Trinity (Mt. 17:5; Jn. 14:26; Jn. 16:13-15). 3) The Holy Ghost is indeed a Person (as opposed to a non-sentient force) who acts like a person (I Cor. 2:10,11; I Cor. 12:11; Eph. 4:30). He is called “God” ( Jn. 14:26; Jn. 16:13; Acts 5:3-4), has a role in the Redemption ( Jn. 3:5-8; Rom. 8:9,10; Titus 3:5-7), and has the attributes of God (I Cor. 2:10,11). 4) There are three separate titles for the Persons of the Trinity–“Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Ghost” (Mt. 28:18,19; II Cor. 13:13). 5) The three Persons are included under the single name of God (I Cor. 2:10-12); 6) Each of the three Persons is mentioned as having a different role to play in the Redemption, that is, the Father is attributed to have conceived Salvation ( Jn. 3:16-17; Eph. 1:4), the Son to have accomplished Salvation ( Jn. 17:4; Jn. 9:30; Heb. 1:1THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org Muslim Co Ostracism Muslims are converting to Christianity by the thousands in France but face exclusion from their families and even death threats. Most converts from Islam hide their conversion and Protestant ministers do their utmost to protect new converts. It is estimated that every year in the world some six million Muslims convert to Christianity. The Muezzin call to prayer. But here in France it is no longer reaching all Muslim ears. Around 15,000 Muslims each year are converting to Christianity–around 10,000 to Catholicism and 5,000 to Protestantism. It is often a difficult and painful choice–one that can leave them excluded from their Muslim families and friends. Pastor Schluster knows what a real taboo conversion is in the Arab world. His job is to support converts by meeting them to reassure them and help them face the 3; Rom. 4:25; I Cor. 15:1-6), and the Holy Spirit to apply Salvation ( Jn. 3:5; Titus 3:5-7). FACT: The “Paraclete” is not Muhammed. A Muslim will insist that the Holy Ghost (or Paraclete) is really Muhammed (Sura 61:6, which Muslims will connect to our Jn. 14:16,17). This erroneous premise is due to the Muslim rejection of the Triune Godhead. If you successfully illustrate the Trinity, you can prove nobody was talking about Muhammed: 1) Muhammed is not mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures. In fact, nobody ever heard of Muhammed until 600 years after Christ. For those 600 years, Christians always believed the Paraclete was the Holy Ghost. Up to this time, no one ever dreamed that Jesus was speaking of Muhammed. 2) Before the Ascension, Jesus told the Apostles to wait in Jerusalem until the Paraclete came (Acts 1:4-5). But Muhammed didn’t come until six centuries later, long after the Apostles died, and he came to i S F t h a H m a O c a C Converts Face sm in France t s  © Zee News isolation from their families. Pastor Antoine Schluster, official representative of Protestant Federation for New Convert Immigrants, said: True, a conversion is not easy for the Muslims whether they are practicing or not. Simply because Islam influences their daily life. And therefore they immediately have a sense of betrayal. Comedian Siad Oujibou used to pray five times a day and was moved to convert when he found his questions about death unanswered and his desire for God stronger than for Allah. He is now a Christian pastor. But he has faced many reprisals and humiliations from his family and was even under a sentence of death. Said Oujibou: We are under this law if we change our faith. In certain countries we would be condemned to death because we have converted.... Though Muslim converts hide their conversion, the trend continues. Worldwide around six million Muslims a year convert to Christianity. Mecca, not Jerusalem. 3) Considering chronology in a different way, the Scriptures say the Paraclete already came (Acts 2:1-4), so the Paraclete couldn’t be Muhammed because he didn’t arrive on the scene for another 600 years. 4) The Paraclete is supposed to abide with us forever ( Jn. 14:26), but Muhammed died. The Holy Ghost the Paraclete presently resides with us in the Catholic Church ( Jn. 14:16,17; Jn. 16:13) as the Spirit of Truth. 5) Jesus said the world could not see or know the Paraclete ( Jn. 14:16,17), yet the world saw and knew Muhammed. (The Catholic Church knows God the Holy Ghost, but the “world,” as spoken of here by Our Lord, does not know Him.) OBJECTION: “The New Catechism says Muslims can be saved.” It does and it doesn’t. The new Catechism of the Catholic Church says: The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day (CCC 841). To a Muslim who poses this objection, you can answer that there are certain things Islam has in common with Catholicism. Muslims certainly fall into the plan of salvation insofar as they are expected to conform themselves to the truth–which isn’t Islam–like all other men in the world. The new Catechism, however, is poor in its defense of the Catholic Faith as such, and if you are forced to defend your position from a post-Vatican II catechism, refer to Lumen Gentium (§§13-16) from where the context is drawn for the quotation above. This passage refers to the way different groups of people are “related” to the Catholic Church, and not how they have separate valid paths to heaven.6 (Vatican II has a vague position with regards to pagans and heretics.) If necessary, in order to avoid confusion, concede simply that a misguided ecumenism has infected the Catholic Church and that the traditional teaching of the Church regarding Islam is not found in the new Catechism. OBJECTION: “But Pope John Paul II kissed the Koran.” A Muslim can be expected to say Islam must be good and right if the Pope kissed the Koran (which Pope John Paul II certainly did7). He will probably be aware that Pope Benedict XVI has prayed in a mosque. These imprudent actions may lead him to conclude that you have no grounds for addressing him with any misgivings about his eternal welfare. It is a problem for us to explain why our Holy Fathers have done such misleading things. They have pushed the limits of ecumenism, which is condemned by the Popes. Try to keep strictly to doctrine and deflect the issue of the problems in the conciliar Church. OBJECTION: “Muslims are descendants of Abraham.” Technically speaking, it is Arabs, not Muslims, who are descended from Abraham. Not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs. A Muslim will try to convince you how much of Islam is inherited from their fathers, going all the way back to Abraham. This is their banner and their seeming justification, but their religion is a poor version of the religion of Abraham. It is true that Abraham’s son Ishmael is the “father of Arabs,” but the “promise” of a Redeemer was made to Abraham through his other son, Isaac (Rom. 9:7ff). Nevertheless, Abraham blessed Ishmael (Gen. 17:1921; Gen. 21:13,18). There were Arabs long before there was Muhammed or were Muslims. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 10 OBJECTION: “Islam is a religion of peace.” If some modernist Muslim tries to convince you that there are peaceful Muslims, tell him that those are poor excuses for Muslims. You would say this for the effect, because modernist Muslims tend to be compromisers. By doing this, you would force him to betray his compromise in one direction or the other, allowing you to talk doctrine with him. He will try to say that Islam has nothing to do with the actions of extremist Muslim groups and that those groups are fanatic exceptions. But the Muslim who says so has objectively abandoned the teachings of Muhammed for the conveniences of liberal and modernist society. Just because a Muslim tries to reconcile Islam with living peacefully in a non-Muslim society does not mean Islam itself is peaceful; it only means such a modernist Muslim has a fanciful and false idea of Islam. A modernist Muslim will often pass off any extreme expression of faith as being only a custom in a certain region. He will attempt to “spiritualize” Islam, claiming that jihad means only the conquering of the passions. Muslims like this are usually pacifists and Muslims because it is popular–they are usually Americans. Most Muslims take the words of the Koran literally and seriously.8 To illustrate the violent nature of Islam, compare Muhammed, a warlord9 who conquered Arabia, and Jesus Christ, who never wielded a sword. Jesus was meek and humble of heart (Mt. 11:29), but Muhammed subverted people through violence. OBJECTION: “But ‘Islam’ means ‘peace.’” A Muslim will tell you that “Islam” means “peace” (salaam). It is true that Islam is based on the Arabic root s-l-m, but its usual translation means “submission,” referring to the submission of one party to another. He will maintain that peace is the submission of men to Allah via Islam, meaning all men must become Muslims for true peace to be established. Tell him Islam that cannot mean peace if God has use for the violent teachings of Muhammed. Quote some passages of the Koran to illustrate this point: When ye encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads, until ye have made a great slaughter among them; and bind them in bonds; and either give them a free dismission afterwards, or exact a ransom; until the war shall have laid down its arms. This shall ye do. Verily if GOD pleased he could take vengeance on them, without your assistance; but he commandeth you to fight his battles, that he may prove the one of you by the other. (Sura 4:4-6) O true believers, take not the Jews or Christians for your friends; they are friends the one to the other; but whoso among you taketh them for his friends, he is surely one of them: verily GOD directeth not unjust people. (Sura 5:56) THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org O true believers…[u]nless ye go forth when ye are summoned to war, God will punish you with a grievous punishment; and he will place another people in your stead, go and ye shall not hurt him at all; for GOD is almighty….Go forth to battle, both light and heavy, and employ your substance and your persons for the advancement of GOD’s religion…. (Sura 9:39,41) O true believers, wage war against such of the infidels as are near you; and let them find severity in you: and know that GOD is with those who fear him. (Sura 9:124) When ye encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads, until ye have made a great slaughter among them; and bind them in bonds; and either give them a free dismission afterwards, or exact a ransom; until the war shall have laid down its arms. This shall ye do. Verily if GOD pleased he could take vengeance on them, without your assistance; but he commandeth you to fight his battles, that he may prove the one of you by the other. (Sura 47:2-8) Brother Gabriel-Marie is a Brother of the Society of Saint Pius X and is stationed at the US District Office in Platte City, Missouri. Edited and abridged by Fr. Kenneth Novak. 1 The Koran used for this article was first translated by George Sale c. 1734 and printed as a Chandos Classics edition in England in 1877. A copy of this Koran is obtainable free from Project Gutenberg (free download at http://gutenberg.net). There is an invaluable commentary attached to this Koran, which, although written by an Anglican, is most informative as to the history of Arabs and Moslems. Note, however, that the verse numbering may vary slightly in different versions of the Koran. For a summary of what Muslims believe, see “A Quick Catechism on Islam” in The Angelus (Dec. 2006). 2 Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies, Chapter 4: “The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed,” first published in 1938. Electronic version published by Trinity Communications (Manassas, VA, 1994. 3 Ibid. This is an excellent treatise on the reasons for the spread and acceptance of Islam, and how it is rooted in an over-simplification of Catholicism. 4 This has been challenged by some! See “Islam: Is It Genuine?” The Angelus, December 1998. 5 “The Catechism on Islam,” This Rock (July-August 2002); “Brass Tacks: The Catechism on Islam” by Jimmy Akin, This Rock, Vol.13, No.6. 6 Dr. Heinz-Lothar Barth, “The Pope and Islam,” The Angelus, (Oct. 2001). This article is about Pope John Paul II. 7 Endless Jihad–The Truth about Islam and Violence (Catholic Answers, 1979-2005), Special Report. 8 Jimmy Akin, “Islam, Peace, Violence,” This Rock, Vol.13, No.8. 9 Endless Jihad–The Truth about Islam and Violence. Bibliography al-Sunnah.com (The Sunnah Islamic Page. P. O. Box 28774, Safat, State of Kuwait, 2002). This is a Muslim’s apologetics page; one can look here to see some of the prevailing Islamic apologetical attacks. Catechism of the Catholic Church. Geisler, Norman L. and Abdul Saleeb. Answering Islam. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993. Gilchrist, John. Origins and Sources of the Gospel of Barnabas. Sale, George. “Preliminary Discourse,” attached to the Koran, tr. by George Sale.‑ C h r i s t o p h e r 11 C h e c k Understanding the Age of the Martyrs Forty legionaries serving on the Armenian frontier refuse an imperial edict to burn incense before idols of the ancient Roman gods. These men are Christians. The Augustus in the West, a young man named Constantine, recently declared their religion legal, but his authority does not command the whole of the vast Roman Empire. His counterpart in the East, Licinius, resentful of Constantine’s growing power and of his growing enthusiasm for Christianity, has undertaken one last persecution. He is ignoring the lessons learned by emperors, governors, and prefects of Rome’s past three centuries: persecution has only increased the resolve and numbers of this troublesome sect. He is ignoring the words of Tertullian that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Faith. The 40 soldiers www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 12 appear before the local magistrate, who first tries persuasion. He warns them of the disgrace that will befall them should they not offer sacrifice before the pagan deities. He promises promotion to any of them that will. To the man they are adamant. No threat or bribe will induce them to forsake Christ. With one long chain, they are bound together and locked in a small cell to await their sentence. During their lengthy imprisonment, one of their number, Meletios, writes a testament on behalf of his brothers-in-arms. Each is given his say. The young men, not long out of boyhood, salute their parents. One sends his prayers to his betrothed; one other, to his wife and firstborn, still an infant. In their testament they exhort their fellow Christians to lay aside the passing things of this world and fix their hearts on the glories of heaven. Knowing that they are to be martyred, they urge their fellow Christians not to quarrel over their relics. After weeks in jail, they are sentenced. They are to be stripped of their clothes, marched to the middle of a frozen pond, and exposed to the cold and wind of the Armenian winter until they are dead. Around the pond the local governor has posted guards and set up fires and warm baths to tempt the martyrs to lapse. However, “an insurmountable barrier” stands between them and the shore: the unseen Christ, whom they would have to deny “to grasp the life that is leaving their bodies moment by moment” (Riciotti, p.212). The young soldiers pray that none of them will fail–that all 40 will gain the crown of martyrdom. After hours and hours in the dark and cold the martyrs grow weak. The faith of one falters and he crawls for the bank. He is plunged in a bath by the nero decius licinius augustus diocletian trajan constantine tiberius galerius domitian o n 13 guards, but after so many hours of exposure, the shock of the hot water takes his life. Another guard, inspired by the faith of the remaining 39, declares himself a Christian, tears off his clothes and runs out on the ice, restoring their number to 40. By morning they are all dead save the youngest, called Meliton, who dies soon after in his mother’s arms. The ordeal of the 40 Martyrs of Sebastia is the last snap of the dragon’s tail. Constantine has declared Christianity legal in the West, and within three years Licinius will fall to forces on either side of him, Goths pouring across the Danube and the armies of Constantine marching east. In his life of Constantine, Eusebius presents the war between the two Augusti as a religious conflict, with Constantine the champion of Christianity and Licinius the last defender of the ancient pagan gods. Before Constantine’s army is carried the labarum, his purple standard bearing the Chi Ro. The army of Licinius is lead by the victimarii–magicians, sorcerers, and fortune tellers whose secret rites implore the favor of the pagan gods. When Licinius is at last defeated and exiled, “the whole of the Roman Empire is now in the hands of Constantine, and he has no rivals” (Riciotti, p.215). Though it was Constantine who at last brought religious liberty to the early Church, his edicts and actions were not without precedent. It is a misunderstanding to think of the Age of the Martyrs as 300 years of persecution and torture by Roman brutes suddenly reversed by Constantine. But the image of state-driven Roman thuggery may be all too common. “The average layman,” writes historian Marta Sordi, “is still convinced that the Christians were wanted outlaws in constant conflict with a state apparatus intent on wiping them out, a kind of subversive, if nonviolent, underground organization” (Sordi, p.3). I encountered this kind of comic-book understanding of the Romans when, some years ago, I was invited to sponsor a friend’s conversion to Catholicism. On the first day, the layman who ran the RCIA class explained why the Jews so eagerly awaited the Messiah: They sought an earthly king who would deliver them from Roman rule. Fair enough, but then he went on to explain why: The Romans were the worst kind of tyrants who (and these were his words) “raped, pillaged, and plundered their way across the Holy Land.” When Mel Gibson released his Passion of the Christ, which portrayed, in accordance with the Gospel accounts, an enraged Jewish mob and Roman prefect whose appeals to restraint and the rule of law fall on deaf ears, a hue and cry arose in the popular press that it was the Romans, not the Jews, who were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. But the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ was not an expression of Roman policy. Nor was the stoning of St. Stephen, an event described by Sordi as one of “occasional acts of brutal popular justice which were unauthorized but which the Roman authorities could not always prevent” (Sordi, p.12). Indeed, in the very early years of the Church, Christians in Palestine enjoyed the protection of Roman law, central to which was the reality that the Romans reserved to themselves the authority to issue sentences of capital punishment. It is probable, Sordi argues, that when Caiaphas was deposed in the year 36 by an envoy from Tiberius, it was for the crime of executing Stephen. We read of that time in Acts, Chapter 9, that the “Church had peace throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria.” It is significant that these three regions are named since they were the ones under Roman rule. Justin Martyr describes correspondence between Pilate and the Emperor Tiberius in Rome. Pilate reports his troubles with the “illegal trials and executions organized by the intransigent Sanhedrin.” It makes political sense that Tiberius would intervene on behalf of this new religion, which was gaining in popularity and replacing the anti-Roman messianic political culture of the Jews with moral and religious ideals. There is even an old tradition, taken from Tertullian, that Tiberius was so impressed with the peaceful nature of the Christians that he proposed to the Senate that Jesus Christ be declared a “god,” in other words, that Christianity receive official recognition as a religion. The more conservative Senate, possibly out of irritation with Jews in general, refused and declared Christianity a supersititio illicita, an illegal cult. Tiberius responded with a veto “on any accusations being brought against the Christians in the future.” While many historians reject this story, one reason to maintain it is that it is the only version of how Christianity came to be illegal. Despite the Senate’s decree, Christians in Rome and in Judea for the next three decades enjoyed the protection of Tiberius’s veto. Two exceptions in Judea prove the rule: From 41-44, the Romans briefly surrendered rule of the Province of Judea to a local king, Herod Agrippa. It is during this period that we see the martyrdom of St. James the Great, the first Apostle to die for Christ, beheaded along with his accuser, who, according to St. Clement of Alexandria, moved by St. James’s courage at his trial, repented of his accusation and declared himself a Christian. Herod Agrippa, Chapter 12 of the Acts of the Apostles reports, seeing that his execution of St. James “pleased the Jews,” arrested and imprisoned St. Peter. During a similar absence of Roman rule in 62, St. James the Lesser, first Bishop of Jerusalem, and other Christians were martyred. St. James was thrown from the roof of the Temple, then stoned, www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 14 then at last dealt the death blow to the head with a club. Flavius Josephus reports that the Chief Priest, Ananius, and the Sanhedrin were taking advantage of the temporary vacancy in the Roman governor’s seat caused by the death of Porcius Festus and the delayed arrival of his successor, Albinus. Agrippa II dismissed Ananius from his post for what was a clear abuse of power. Sordi concludes: If in the year 62 AD the Chief Priest and the Sanhedrin took the absence of the Roman Governor as an auspicious moment for proceeding against Christ’s followers, this must mean that in the preceding years the Romans had made it clear that they had no intention of ever giving way again to the pressure of the Jewish authorities, as they had done at the time of the trial of Christ. (Sordi, p. 13,14) The treatment of St. Paul when he is brought by the local synagogue in Corinth before the Roman proconsul (Acts 18) and when he is twice brought before the Roman procurator in Judea by the Jewish authorities (Acts 21, 23, 25) is the same. The Romans refuse to intervene in a religious quarrel between Christians and Jews. It is in this atmosphere of something between tolerance and benevolence that Sergius Paulus, proconsul of Cyprus, moved by the preaching of Paul and Barnabas “learned to believe” (Acts 13). Paulus became a close friend of St. Paul, and he and his whole family converted. G.K. Chesterton observed that God chose for the Incarnation of His Son the moment in human history when the world was largely at peace. The baby killers in Carthage had first to be vanquished, and although the Infant Jesus escaped a baby killer, the man was not a Roman. This peace was a consequence of Roman policy and culture, one that was more tolerant than tyrannical. The Romans, though they were pagans who did not enjoy the benefit of Revelation that the Jews did, cooperated in a very real sense with the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the real reason for Augustus’ census. Christopher Dawson notes that while Greece gave Europe all in it that is distinctly Western, it required the world of the Roman political and legal order to extend this tradition of higher civilization to Western Europe. The Romans cooperated with the prosperity of the early Church. So where did things first turn dark? Things turned dark during the reign of Nero, though not right away. It is, after all, during Nero’s reign that St. Paul is acquitted at his first trial. He continues to preach the Gospel throughout the praetorium, and even in the emperor’s household. A contemporary trial further illustrates an atmosphere of toleration despite the senatorial decree of Tiberius’ reign. A Christian woman of the senatorial class, Poponia Graecina, a convert to Christianity, was declared innocent in a public trial conducted by her own husband, a military hero and former consul THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org named Plautius. She, Tacitus tells us, continued her austere way of life and passed on her Christianity to her descendants. A member of the family from the second century is buried at San Callistus on the Via Appia. Other families of the aristocratic and senatorial classes were connected to Christianity. There is sufficient reason to believe that the Pudens family, on whose home Santa Pudenziana is built, housed and fed St. Peter during his time in Rome. If Nero’s probable excuse for his persecution of Christians, a great fire in Rome in the year 64, and Nero’s probable responsibility for the fire are today subject to debate, what is certain is Nero’s wickedness and cruelty. A rapist, sodomite, and murderer, Nero had one of his wives executed and another he kicked to death. With sexual appetites and enthusiasms that would make a Turkish Sultan blush, Nero needed no more motive for his actions than his own self-indulgence or his desire to be worshiped. But whether or not he started the fire, the rumor that he did, reports Tacitus, would not go away. Needing a scapegoat, Nero chose the Christian community in Rome, which by this time included members of prominent Roman families. Christians made an easy scapegoat because they were hardly universally liked. Some viewed them as a Jewish sect, and the constant troubles in Judea were on the point of erupting into a full-scale rebellion. The Jewish religion, however, was officially protected, and Jews did not even have to serve in the Roman army because military service would conflict with their Sabbath observance. Christians, however, did not enjoy the same protection or exemption. Christians were also resented for their severe morality, which partly explains why they were accused of misanthropy, or as Tacitus puts it, “hatred of the human race.” In Chapter Four of his first epistle, St. Peter describes pagans slandering Christians in Rome for their unwillingness to participate in “lawless disorders.” The rivals and enemies of the Christians, including Jews in Rome from whom the Christians, we know from the Acts of the Apostles, kept their distance, spread wild stories of criminal activities, particularly human sacrifice and cannibalism, which were deliberate misrepresentations of Holy Communion, as well as accusations of incest, a deliberate twisting of the Christian practice of referring to one another as brother and sister. In his De Mortibus Persecutorum, the Roman historian Lactantius makes no mention of the fire, but blames the persecutions generally on the “vast” number of defections from the “worship of idols to the new religion.” For Lactantius, the problem is one of a religious, not political, conflict, a problem that will reappear later. It is probable that the fire accelerated persecutions that were already gaining 15 steam. Nero’s two most famous martyrs, St. Paul and St. Peter, seem to have been martyred the former before the fire and the latter after it, though neither mention the fire in their correspondence. When the storm at last broke, the first persecution was brutal. In his Annals, the Roman historian Tacitus, who himself was no friend of the Christians, tells the story thus: Yet no human effort, no princely largess nor offerings to the gods could make that infamous rumor disappear that Nero had somehow ordered the fire. Therefore, in order to abolish that rumor, Nero falsely accused and executed with the most exquisite punishments those people called Christians, who were infamous for their abominations. The originator of the name, Christ, was executed as a criminal by the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius; and though repressed, this destructive superstition erupted again, not only through Judea, which was the origin of this evil, but also through the city of Rome, to which all that is horrible and shameful floods together and is celebrated. Therefore, first those were seized who admitted their faith, and then, using the information they provided, a vast multitude were convicted, not so much for the crime of burning the city, but for hatred of the human race. And perishing, they were additionally made into sports: they were killed by dogs by having the hides of beasts attached to them, or they were nailed to crosses or set aflame, and, when the daylight passed away, they were used as nighttime lamps. Nero gave his own gardens for this spectacle and performed a Circus game, in the habit of a charioteer mixing with the plebs or driving about the racecourse. Even though they were clearly guilty and merited being made the most recent example of the consequences of crime, people began to pity these sufferers, because they were consumed not for the public good but on account of the fierceness of one man. Relief for the Christians came with the assassination of the crazed emperor, though by allowing Christians to be accused of Superstitio illicita, Nero created a situation that until then had only existed on the books–Christians could be brought to trial for the fact of their religion alone. It would be some time, however, before such accusations reappeared because the first two rulers of the Flavian dynasty, Vespasian and his son Titus, rejected emperor worship and tolerated the growing number of Christians, even in their own households, including Vespasian’s brother, Flavius Sabinus. Vespasian had come to know Christianity during his time in Palestine, where his own investigation concluded that Christian descendants of the House of David were not a political threat to the Empire. When Vespasian’s younger son Domitian (8196) revived the idea of the emperor as a god, he reignited the persecution of Christians, including his own cousin Flavius Clemens, a consul. Domitian, in fact, was the first emperor to deify himself while still living, and the “book of the Apocalypse was written in the midst of this storm” (Catholic Encyclopedia); thus, references, for example, to the woman “drunk with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.” But when Domitian was assassinated, his successors, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius (the period from 96 to 161), while they enforced the laws against Christianity, did not undertake any general campaign of persecution. Until the reign of Decius, persecutions were sporadic and mostly local. We get a glimpse into relations between the Church and the Empire during the reign of Trajan (98-117). Trajan was a great soldier and hardworking administrator. When troubles broke out in the province of Bithynia (in northwestern Asia Minor), he sent one of his most trusted advisors, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, or the younger Pliny, to troubleshoot. Pliny writes the emperor for advice on handling the Christian problem. The penalty for being a professing Christian was death, though enforcement was neither strict nor uniform. Their correspondence resulted in the document we know as Trajan’s Rescript. Pliny marvels at the number of Christians: For the matter seemed to me to warrant consulting you, especially because of the number involved. For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms. Because so many are becoming Christians an economic problem has arisen: the temples are doing bad business because there is less demand for sacrificial animals. Thus Christians had made enemies of, not only pagan priests, but also livestock dealers. Pliny, wanting to go by the book, asks Trajan for instructions. Since he has “never participated in trials of Christians” he does not know what “offenses it is the practice to punish or investigate.” Is age a factor? Should pardon be granted for repentance? He asks “whether the name itself [that is, Christian], even without offenses, or only the offenses associated with the name are to be punished.” He outlines the procedure he has been following when accusations are brought before him. He would interrogate the accused, and if he or she confessed, he would repeat the questioning several times in hopes of gaining repentance. The stubborn were executed, though Roman citizens were transferred to Rome, just as St. Paul had been decades prior. Pliny can find no evidence of actual wrongdoing, and he describes the Christian ceremonies: They were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing together a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food—but ordinary and innocent food. Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden secret societies. Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 16 find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, extravagant superstition. One serious problem Pliny has to deal with is anonymous denunciations, and he seeks counsel from Trajan, who tells him in his famous rescript: You observed proper procedure, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those who had been denounced to you as Christians. For it is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard. They are not to be sought out (Conquirendi non sunt); if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it–that is, by worshiping our gods–even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance. But anonymously posted accusations ought to have no place in any prosecution. For this is both a dangerous kind of precedent and out of keeping with the spirit of our age. So the practice of Christianity carried the death penalty, but the criminals were given every opportunity to repudiate their error, and no effort was made to seek them out. More particularly, no anonymous accusations could lead to an arrest. Here we see Roman bureaucracy at its best and worst: dedicated public servants working for the good of the peoples of a vast empire but trapped by precedents into killing innocent men and women for the insufficient reason of practicing a new religion. Trajan is unwilling to repudiate a law going back to the time of Tiberius, but, on the other hand, he gives Pliny a way out. It is difficult to generalize about the lot of the Christian during this period, the Age of the Antonines. On the one hand, he could always be ratted out by an informer with a cynical or malicious motive. On the other hand, informers were not very highly thought of in Roman society, and, moreover, they ran the risk of bringing down the full weight of Roman justice on themselves should their accusations go unproved. Thus, the level of persecution varied by region. In an area with a large Christian population, as Bithynia had, only a fool would openly denounce a neighbor, so Christians who laid low could well enjoy comparative security. Recall St. Paul’s injunction that Christians should not deliberately seek martyrdom. In Lyons, however, under the Antonines, matters were worse. Far worse. There is a correspondence between Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and the Roman officials in Lyons similar to that between Trajan and Pliny. In Lyons, however, where the Christian population comprised immigrants from Asia Minor, they were deeply despised by the local Gallic population. The account of the Lyons Martyrs, a contemporary letter copied over in Eusebius, describes in great detail the torture and execution in the circus of the leaders of this Christian community: THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org We cannot accurately tell or describe in detail the magnitude of the distress in this region, the fury of the heathen against the saints, or the sufferings of the blessed Witnesses... confinement in the darkest and most foul-smelling cells of the prison...in which a great many suffocated...the stretching of the feet on the stocks...the fixing of red-hot plates of brass to the most delicate parts of the body...exposure to wild beasts and roasting over a fire in an iron chair. Yet the martyrs remained firm in their confession. Most famous is Blessed Blandina. First, she was beaten and tortured to the point that her torturers were exhausted and her whole body torn open with lacerations. Next she was fastened to a stake and exposed to the wild beasts. Then she was scourged and then roasted in an iron chair. Finally, she was at last enclosed in a net and cast before a bull. She was tossed by the bull, but she didn’t feel the things which were happening to her, because of her hope and firm hold of what had been entrusted to her and her communion with Christ. Thus, she also was sacrificed. The heathens themselves confessed that never among them did woman endure so many and such terrible tortures. Sporadic persecutions continued throughout the Age of the Antonines, which came to an end with the assassination of Commodus, the depraved adopted son of Marcus Aurelius. One effect, in fact, of Commodus’ cruel policies against his political rivals was the diversion of attention from the Christians. There were even Christians in the court of Commodus, and his concubine, Marcia, who later conspired in his murder, was sympathetic. Her intervention caused the setting free of Christian slaves in the mines in Sardinia. Commodus’ successor, Septimius Severus (193211) was generally tolerant in keeping with Trajan’s rescript, but he did seek to check the growth of Christianity by making conversion to Christianity a crime. The famous convert martyrs of this period, mentioned in the Canon of the Mass, are Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas of Carthage. For decades, beginning with the reign of Caracalla (211-217) the Christians enjoyed peace. There was even a Christian Emperor during this period. Philip the Arab has been regarded as one of the Empire’s worst emperors, but the opinion may be more the result of subsequent antiChristian propaganda than an honest account of his administration, which lasted five years–unusually long for this period of unrest. He was murdered by Decius (249-251), who probably killed his reputation as well. During the barbarian invasions and struggles for the throne of the middle of the third century, Decius, believing that the growth of the sect was bringing down disfavor from the gods, tried to unify the empire against the Church. He issued an edict requiring all Christians to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods on a certain day. 17 Two decades later, Emperor Aurelian, who was also a great soldier, wished to unite the empire under the cult of Sol Invictus (the unconquered sun). He was willing, however, to tolerate the Christian Church and, on one occasion in Antioch, intervened in a dispute over ownership of a church building, ruling in favor of those Christians who were in union with the Bishop of Rome. Though the worst was yet to come under Diocletian, the way was already being cleared for peaceful coexistence. The final, bloodiest, and best documented of the great persecutions came under Diocletian (284-305) at the beginning of the fourth century, though this emperor for whom the persecution is remembered was not, at least at first, its instigator, and for most of Diocletian’s reign, Christians enjoyed peace and prosperity. There is, in fact, much to admire in Diocletian. He was a courageous general. His political innovation, the tetrarchy, which divided rule of the massive Roman Empire between two Augusti, one in the East and one in the West, and their Caesars, or executive officers, restored order to an empire that had for five decades suffered chaos, rebellious legionaries, praetorians in revolt, and full-bore civil war. Of the 28 emperors who had preceded Diocletian, 22 had been murdered. He moved the imperial capital from Rome to Nicomedia, near the Bosporus, on the grounds that the emperor was most needed on the frontier. Under Diocletian, building and public works began again in earnest throughout the Empire, including the extraordinary baths named for him in Rome. He brought inflation under control. He even issued an edict promoting the institution of marriage, holding that chastity would bring down the favor of the gods on the empire. At the end of his reign, the old emperor abdicated and went off to his farm to grow cabbages. There were Christians in Diocletian’s household. His wife, Prisca, and his daughter, Valeria, according to Lactantius, were catechumens. Officers of his court, including two chamberlains appointed by Diocletian himself, Gorgonius and Peter, were openly Christian. What is more, Diocletian had appointed Christians as governors of various provinces. Diocletian’s Caesar, however, Galerius, was a lesser soldier and a man of lesser character altogether, though he was a skilled self-promoter. A violent and very large man, he rose from illiterate shepherd to Caesar in the East, and eventually Augustus, following Diocletian’s abdication. Today we would admire his capacity to climb the corporate ladder. He even knew when to grovel. After leading a disastrous campaign against the Persians in Mesopotamia, he abased himself before Diocletian imploring a second chance, one he did not waste. His swift victory over the Persians and the subsequent expansion of the empire’s eastern border, greater than ever, endeared him to his Augustus, who gave him his daughter, Valeria, in marriage. It was not Valeria the catechumen, however, but Galerius’ mother, a Corybantic priestess, that influenced his motives. She and other diviners, oracles, and soothsayers had seen–as in Trajan’s day–their businesses suffer as Christianity spread throughout the empire. Galerius also took to heart the work of pagan pamphleteers who, sometimes with honest motives and other times with cynical ones, spoke and wrote about the threat to the empire caused by Christianity’s explicit rejection of the traditional Roman deities. In addition, Galerius viewed Christians serving in the army as a threat to unit cohesion and discipline, though there is no evidence that this was anything more than prejudice. (Many soldiers lost their lives during these persecutions, including Alexander of Bergamo.) At first Diocletian was reluctant to open a new round of persecutions. His motives were less ones of Christian sympathy than practical politics. By this stage, Christians were well integrated into all levels of Roman society, and a persecution could be political suicide. When at last Galerius prevailed on the old emperor, the result was a series of four edicts beginning in 302, each more severe than the one before. The first was similar to an edict of Valerian’s from four decades prior. Eusebius reports that this first edict ordered the tearing down of churches and the destruction of “Sacred Scriptures by fire.” It also commanded that “those who were in honourable stations should be degraded if they persevered in their adherence to Christianity.” The subsequent three edicts ordered first the imprisonment of bishops and clergy, next the torture of imprisoned bishops and clergy, and finally the torture and imprisonment of the laity. This persecution was fierce and truly empirewide. The accounts from Eusebius are horrifying. Martyrs in Egypt, for example, had their legs tied to two young trees bent toward each other and then allowed to snap back, tearing the victim in half. The persecution continued in the East through Galerius’ reign and through that of Licinius, under whom the 40 Martyrs with whom we began were frozen to death. The case of Diocletian makes an interesting lesson for political leaders concerning their place in history. The final persecution is named for him, although he was not its true author and although it continued long after his abrogation. The current president of the US will be remembered for an unjust and politically foolish war costing the lives of many thousands of innocents. George Bush’s www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 18 Galerius may be Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld or a combination of all three, but history will remember President Bush for the catastrophe called the Iraq War. In conclusion, a few final points: 1) The relationship between the Church and the Roman Empire for the first three centuries cannot accurately be described as outlaws perpetually hounded by a hostile state. There is little data to suggest that the government of Rome ever regarded Christians as a political threat. 2) From time to time, throughout the empire, depending on the temperament of the officials and the moods of the people, the Roman state found itself in the position of being a secular arm intervening in a religious conflict between Roman paganism and Christianity, but guided, even if erroneously, for the most part by legal precedent and a strong devotion to social order. 3) Most persecutions were local. Only two were empire-wide, those of Valerian and Diocletian, and even in the case of Diocletian’s, Constantius, Augustus in the West and father of Constantine, did not participate–leaving Britain, Gaul, and much of Spain at peace. 4) With the exception of Nero, the truly horrible and large-scale persecutions did not take place in Rome. Real Romans, argues the great Italian archaeological historian Rodolfo Lanciani, were simply too civilized. 5) The comic-book version of three centuries of Roman thuggery may derive from, among others, anti-classical and anti-Catholic, that is, Protestant quarters, seeking to separate the Church from the Eternal City. Such an eventuality is historically, liturgically, spiritually, traditionally, and metaphysically impossible. Concerning the Martyrs themselves, a few reflections: The Church has for two millennia made much of the study and emulation of the lives of saints, even if in recent decades the devotion and practice has been regrettably under-emphasized. What are the lessons to take to heart from martyrs of the Roman Empire? Doubtless there are many. The privations and tortures patiently endured by the martyrs bear reflecting on when minor discomforts and inconveniences move us to fits of self-pity. The extraordinary courage of the martyrs, always seasoned by charity, can inspire and guide us when we are confronted with the unpleasant tasks and persons of ordinary human life. The less courageous, among whom I count myself, can take comfort from the stories of the lapsi, those who denied Christ rather than face martyrdom, but were welcomed back into the fold after repenting. From the beginning, the Church THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org fulfilled her role as mother, ever ready to dispense understanding and forgiveness to the repentant. Above all, perhaps, it is useful to reflect on the fact that the early martyrs were not martyrs to the cause of religious freedom or religious liberty, ideas that, at least as we understand them in the modern world, had no meaning to the ancients. They were martyrs for the First Commandment. In an empire with all manner of pagan deities and syncretist philosophies reconciling so many gods and systems all to the satisfaction of most citizens, Christianity insisted on its exceptional nature: proclaiming one God in Three Persons before whom there were no others. No early Christian martyr declared to his pagan fellow citizens, “You call him Sol Invictus or Jupiter Imperator and I call him Jesus Christ, but we basically worship the same God.” Too many Christians today, however, behave as if a few insignificant semantic and doctrinal differences should not stand in the way of sharing with Muslims the same worship space at O’Hare Airport, to say nothing of permitting Islamic mosques and schools to flourish in the West. What reaction there was to the Trade Tower attacks of September 11 has largely subsided, but we might ask what few Christians are left in France how well institutionalized syncretism has served that once great nation. Even if America is not as far gone as France, it is a nation where tolerance has been elevated to the status of a dogma. Indeed, it is the only dogma. Religious tolerance of a practical sort has political value, as more than one Roman official learned, but dogmatic tolerance is a modern idea born in the Renaissance and spread by cannon and sword after the French Revolution. Those who cannot see this distinction are in no position to judge, for example, the Spanish Inquisition, much less to defend their Faith, but a time may be fast approaching when they will be called to in circuses the horror of which rivals that of Nero’s or Domitian’s. The difference will be no periods of relief from the authority of Roman law. A good prayer to offer at the bones of the Martyrs is for the clarity of intellect to appreciate the singularity of Christianity and the strength of will to defend it, if called to, even unto death. Christopher Check is executive vice-president of the Rockford Institute. A version of the above reflections was originally delivered in January 2006 as a talk at the Rockford Institute’s Inaugural Winter School in Rome, “Lions and Christians: Christians in a Pagan Empire.” The author gratefully acknowledges the guidance of Dr. Thomas Fleming in preparing these remarks. Sources: Sordi, Marta. The Christians and the Roman Empire. Translated by Annabel Bedini. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Riciotti, Abbot Giuseppe. The Age of the Martyrs: Christianity from Diocletian (284) to Constantine (337). Translated by Rev. Anthony Bull, C.R.L. Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, 1999. Traditional Religious Orders 19 Cloistered Dominican Nuns Avrillé, France F ounded in 1206 by St. Dominic himself, the Dominican nuns originated nine years before their brothers, the Preachers. The first among them were young girls converted from the Catharist heresy by the preaching of the blessed Dominic. The holy founder grouped them together at the monastery of Prouilhe in Languedoc (France; it is quite near Fanjeaux, home of the traditional Dominican Teaching Sisters), and entrusted them with the task of assisting him in the defense of the truth through their cloistered life of prayer and renunciation. He knew too well how vain is all preaching which is not made fruit­ful by immolation and sacrifice. Who better than his first daughters heard and understood his cry, faced with the distress of 20 Th souls: “What will become of sinners?” Thus came into be­ing the nuns of the Great Order–who were very soon called the “Sisters Preacheresses”–whose preaching is that of silence. Cloistered Life Like every cloistered nun, a daughter of St. Dominic is dedicated to contemplation, which is a loving knowledge of God, an anticipation in faith of the life of eternal union in heaven. But what distinguishes her from other contemplative religious is, on the one hand, a very particular thirst for the salvation of souls which gives to her prayer an eminently ap­ostolic character, and, on the other hand, the means she employs in order to fulfil her contem­plative vocation: choral recitation of the Divine Office, study, and the mo­nastic observances. For the Dominican nun the cloister is a sanctuary of prayerful compassion and of immolation. In it she offers her life in order to render fruitful the apostolate of her brothers, the Preachers, and of all the ministers of the Church, as also of the teaching religious and all consecrated souls who labor to lead souls to THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org Solemn Profession God. Set around the treasure of the Holy Sacri­fice of the Mass, the “work” pre­eminently entrusted to the nuns by the Church is the Great Office. The Do­minican nuns sing it every day using the very beautiful and ancient Gregor­ian melodies. In this way they unite themselves to the n 21 The Confiteor prayer of Our Lord Jesus Christ, offering Himself to the Father in the name of the whole Mystical Body, in a prayer of praise, adoration, and repara­tion. Together with the sacraments, this liturgical prayer is the vital nourishment of the Sisters’ life of silent prayer. Intercession for the souls in purgatory is also a heritage that is dear to our Order: every week we offer the Office of the Dead for them and a Requiem Mass. The Dominican Charism The Dominican soul is passionately devoted to light and to truth, and it experiences the need to contemplate them at their very source, which is the Blessed Trinity. In order to es­tablish this theological contemplation on the unshakable foundations of the faith, the nuns benefit from a daily period of study. Even those who are not “intellectuals” are able to find their sweet sustenance there: Sa­cred Scripture (the lectio divina of the ancients, with commentar­ies by the Fathers of the Church), Christian doctrine, theology of the school of Saint Thomas Aquinas, spiritual reading, not forgetting the weekly classes and the sermons of their Dominican Fathers. When a soul spends all its time being nourished by and contem­plating truth, it can but suffer profoundly from the errors which sully and obscure www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 22 the truth. And so we grieve over the present cri­sis in our holy Mother the Church, which is attacked on all sides, from outside and espe­cially from within. St. Pius X already was moved to remark: “The danger today is nearly in the very entrails and veins of the Church” (The Encyclical Pascendi). The Second Vatican Council, as Archbishop Lefebvre often explained, unleashed devastating havoc in the Church. And so we desire to make reparation by the gift of our lives for this almost universal loss of the Catholic faith. St. Catherine of Siena in her day la­mented: “And what good will it do me to have life if Thy people are in death?” Monastic Labors In the remaining time, the Dominican nun devotes herself to different sorts of manual or intellec­tual work. Besides the nec­essary tasks (sacristy, kitchen, laundry, etc.), the re­ligious life and the circum­stances of our foundation allow us to discover and learn all manner of “trades”: from the finishing of the buildings (plastering, painting) to illumination, from gardening to the making or repair of priestly vestments, from the making of rosaries to the minute THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org The parlor 23 Taking the habit r correction of translations and scripts. The nun has the grace to accomplish all this work in a spirit of prayer and thus to re­main profoundly united to Our Lord, to whom she has offered all her being. Finally, an immense family of saints, both men and women, and eight centuries of tra­dition have handed down to us most excellent monastic observances. These observances–which also are in the service of charity–prepare the soul for the work of contemplation, de­taching it from the world and from itself: the practice of the vows, enclosure, silence, com­mon life, the monastic fast and other penances of the Rule, and finally the two hours of si­lent prayer each day. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 “The active life in comparison with the contemplative life.” St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q.182, Art.1 Nothing prevents certain things being more excellent in themselves, whereas they are surpassed by another in some respect. Because of this....the contemplative life is simply more excellent than the active. The Philosopher [Aristotle–Ed.] proves this by eight reasons: 1) Because the contemplative life benefits man according to that which is best in him, namely the intellect, and according to its proper objects, namely intelligible things; whereas the active life is occupied with externals. Hence Rachael, by whom the contemplative life is signified, is interpreted “the one seeing the principle,” whereas St. Gregory says that the active life is signified by Lia, who was blear-eyed. 2) Because the contemplative life can be more continuous, although not as regards the highest degree of contemplation, as stated above. Thus Mary, by whom the contemplative life is signified, is described as “sitting” all the time “at the Lord’s feet.” 3) Because the contemplative life is more delightful than the active. Thus St. Augustine says that “Martha was troubled, but Mary feasted.” 4) Because in the contemplative life man is more self-sufficient, since he needs fewer things for that purpose. Thus it was said (Lk. 10:41): “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and art troubled about many things.” 5) Because the contemplative life is loved more for its own sake, while the active life is directed to something else. Hence it is written (Ps. 36:4): “One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may see the delight of the Lord.” 6) Because the contemplative life consists in leisure and rest, according to Ps. 45:11, “Be still and see that I am God.” 7) Because the contemplative life is according to divine things, whereas active life is according to human things. Thus St. Augustine says: “‘In the beginning was the Word’; to Him was Mary hearkening. ‘The Word was made flesh’; Him was Martha serving.” 8) Because the contemplative life is according to that which is most proper to man, namely his intellect; whereas in the works of the active life the lower powers also, which are common to both us and animals, have their part. Thus in Psalm 35:7, after the words, “Men and beasts Thou wilt preserve, O Lord,” that which is special to man is added (Ps. 35:10): “In Thy light we shall see light.” Our Lord adds a ninth reason (Lk. 10:42) when He says: “Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her,” which words St. Augustine explains as follows: “Not ‘Thou hast chosen badly’ but ‘She has chosen better.’ Why better? Listen–‘because it shall not be taken away from her.’ But the burden of necessity shall at length be taken from thee: whereas the sweetness of truth is eternal.” (Edited by Angelus Press) THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org 25 Daily Schedule 5:20 AM Matins and Lauds 6:20 AM Silent prayer 7:20 AM Angelus, breakfast 7:40 AM Sacred Scripture 8:15 AM Prime 8:30 AM Work 9:40 AM Terce and Mass 11:00 AM Personal study or classes 12:15 PM Sext, Angelus, lunch 1:30 PM Recreation 2:00 PM None 2:15 PM Free time with spiritual reading 3:15 PM Work 5:15 PM Gregorian chant or Latin 6:00 PM Vespers, Angelus 6:30 PM Supper 7:15 PM Compline, followed by an hour of si­lent prayer 9:00 PM Lights out From this spiritual structure a very balanced impression emerges: soli­tude and fraternal life, silent prayer and liturgical prayer, intellectual study and manual work, austerity and joy. Lay Sisters Fewer in number, there are also the lay Sisters, more particularly dedicated to manual work. In this way they allow the choir Sisters to undertake the Great Office. Manual work is their means of union with God, and the recitation of the Rosary in common takes the place of the Office for them. Their humble and laborious vo­cation continues that of St. Joseph at Nazareth. They are also responsible for the exterior service of the turn, being thus the precious guardians of our life hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). All, united beneath the watchful gaze of Our Lady, to whom Our Lord entrusted our Or­der, ceaselessly praying the mysteries of their Rosary, choir Sisters and lay Sisters live by the spirit of their father St. Dominic, which is very joyful and full of simplicity. “The religion of thy father Dominic,” said God to St. Catherine of Siena, “is a delightful garden, broad and joyous and fragrant” (The Dialogue). After ten years passed close to the cradle of our Or­der under the care of the teach­ing Dominicans of www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 26 Plans for the future The Path to Profession Fanjeaux, our foundation took root in July 1986 beside the convent of the Dominican Fathers [see The Angelus, February 2006], at Avrillé, a few hundred yards from the Martyrs’ Field, where innumerable Catholics were massacred through hatred of the faith under the French Revolution. His Grace Archbishop Lefebvre wrote to us then: May God bless your foundation. This resurrection of the Orders and Congregations is very encouraging. It is the future of the Church in the attachment to the graces given by Our Lord in the past. From this comes the importance of fidelity to the past....Today more than ever the Church needs holy men and women who shine in the darkness of the world. In our abandonment to Divine Providence (we live on alms only), St. Joseph has been from the beginning a father of incomparable solicitude: year by year–with the exem­plary support of our brothers in religion and the co-operation of admirable benefactors who are convinced of the primacy of the contemplative life–he helps us to build his monastery in which we have just completed the cloister. The church, of Romanesque inspiration, was consecrated to St. Joseph in June 1997. THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org According to our Constitutions, the minimum age of candidates is 15 years old, and the maximum is 30. Late vocations can be considered case by case, as the Constitutions do allow the age limit to be dispensed. Someone seriously considering her vocation as a Dominican nun should plan a stay of two or three weeks at the guest house as an opportunity both for her and the community to discern her vocation. Before entering as a postulant, the candidate should learn French, which she could do by staying with a traditional family near the monastery, for instance. A pre-postulancy for a while outside the cloister might be indicated, should the Mother Superior think it best. Once the candidate is admitted within the cloister, her postulancy lasts from six months to a year, while the novitiate lasts two years. Once she is admitted to profession, the nun makes vows for two three-year periods, after which she makes her perpetual profession “usque ad mortem.” Two Anniversaries In 2006, the nuns of St. Joseph’s Monastery celebrated their foundress’s 30th anniversary in religion and their 20th at Avrillé. The community now numbers some 15 Sisters, which includes two novices (one of whom is an American) and three lay Sisters. The nuns of different nationalities who make up our community truly live in a pro­found unity of soul and heart in God, according to the words of St. Augustine. By this sis­terly charity, by their life of silence and poverty, as also by the supernatural gaiety which emanates from them, they rejoice at being able to follow in the footsteps of the first daugh­ters of St. Dominic, for the joy of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the salvation of a greater number of souls. For information: Monastère Saint-Joseph 10, avenue Jeanne de Laval 49240 Avrillé, France Fax: [33] (2) 41.69.69.65 27 F r . the E d w a r d L e e n resurrection An extract from In the Likeness of Christ (pp.245-264) The Resurrection is the central dogma of Catholicism—and it is not obvious why it should be so. The Acts of the Apostles show it to be the fact in the history of Christ that is the most energetically proposed to the belief of those to whom the Apostles preached. This insistence on the resurrection in the apostolic preaching strikes us with some surprise. It is true that its value from an apologetic point of view might be sufficient explanation of its importance in the eyes of the first preachers of the Gospel. In rising from the dead, Christ proved Himself God and therefore could claim the subjection of every human intelligence to all the religious and moral truths that He had propounded to men during the three years of His public life. His Resurrection stamped all that teaching with the approval of God. It was proved true with the truth of God. It established the validity of His claim to be truly God. This reason, though it is true as far as it goes, is not quite satisfying. And it is because we see no other explanation for this passionate and reiterated proclamation of Christ’s life after having been crucified, that the instructions of the first heralds of Christianity, such as they have come down to us in the sacred writings, strike us as being singularly www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 28 cold and ineffective. They stir us scarcely at all. To us, accustomed to a different line of approach to the life of Christ, the preaching of the pioneers of the Gospel message appears to miss or, at least, to stress very insufficiently what is the chief appeal in the life of the Savior. We instinctively look for a more eloquent and enthusiastic predication of the truths that Jesus came to reveal to men, especially as the Apostles had, by the light from on high received at Pentecost, obtained a vast and deep comprehension of these truths. To their minds, enlightened by the “Spirit of Jesus,” what they had dimly and imperfectly understood as it had been spoken to them by the Lord became clear and luminous. After the descent of the Holy Ghost they acquired a grasp of the whole of Christ’s revelation in all its truths, in the details of these truths, and in the marvelous unity which bound all these dogmas into one vast, harmonious and dazzling system. Many a Catholic student feels a thrill which is akin to ecstasy, when, having mastered in detail the different treatises of Catholic theology, the perfect unity and the inexhaustible riches of the whole system are presented for the first time to his intelligence, in one comprehensive synthetic view. Such light is but darkness compared to the effulgence that irradiated the minds of the Apostles. Is it possible that under the first ecstasy of that effulgence, their preaching could be coldly apologetic? Scarcely. Their boldness, their fire, their enthusiasm was such that those who heard them believed that they were beside themselves owing to the fumes of strong wine. They were, of a truth, delirious—but delirious with the intoxication of the new understanding of things that they had received. They were drunk, not with wine, but with wisdom and knowledge. They flung themselves forth from the upper room, under the violent impulse of the Holy Spirit, to preach Catholicity—and they proclaimed the Resurrection. This being so, it needs must be that in some way or other this dogma must embrace the whole economy of redemption— must be a compendium of the Faith. St. Paul, indeed, in his words to the Corinthians implies that for him it is such. “If Christ,” he says, “be not risen again, then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain.”1 If we understood that mystery as did the Apostles, if we could see it in the light in which it was revealed to them and in which they must have set it before their hearers in their instructions, we would realize that this must needs be so. God sends trials and crosses simply to deaden in us the activity of the forces that make for the decay of the spiritual life, in order that that spiritual life may develop and expand unimpeded. According as the life of perverse nature ebbs away from us on our Cross united with Christ’s, the Divine Life that God has placed in all whom He has called begins to make itself more manifest and to display increased vigor and vitality. Our Resurrection to the newness of life, the life wholly controlled by the impulses of God’s graces, THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org comes, without any interval, straight on our death to self. It is to that Resurrection, that life in death, that God directs all the circumstances of our life—it is the object He aims at in His dealing with us. We, in our blindness, in our utter incomprehension of that rising from the dead which Our Lord speaks of to us, oppose His designs, thwart His purposes, and cling desperately to the life of self which knows no Resurrection. It is strange how history does repeat itself. Frequently, without our being aware of it, we shall be found reechoing the words of St. Peter in which he dared to expostulate with Our Lord. The Savior spoke to him of His death and of the restoration to life that was to follow hard upon it. Peter, seeing nothing in the sufferings foretold but something abhorrent; discerning no connection whatsoever between them and the state of glory to which Christ referred; and feeling no attraction for a condition of life which, however good in itself, did not seem to hold out any prospect of greatness in the world where his ambitions were centered, quarreled with his Master’s freely chosen destiny. The risen joys to follow the passion and death had for the apostle but a very cold appeal and did not seem to him a compensation for the sufferings and ignominy and rejection which paved the way for these joys. The difficulties which the apostles experienced on Easter Morn in adjusting their minds to the fact that the Christ Whom they knew, with Whom they had lived, and Who had died by a death that was made unmistakable by the soldier’s lance, was actually before them in flesh and blood, with life coursing through the Body still showing all the marks of the terrible cru­cifixion, point to the conclusion that, when our Lord had spo­ken to them of His Rising from the dead, they always under­stood His words in an eschatological sense. They deemed that the Resurrection had reference to a post‑terrestrial life: in a vague kind of a way they assumed it to be something that was to take place when the present world should be at an end. They had not grasped that it had a bearing on man’s earthly destiny. Their beliefs in this connection were, very likely, those voiced by Martha, the sister of Lazarus, when on receiving the assur­ance from the Lord that her brother would rise again she imme­diately understood Him to refer to the resurrection at the last day. They had scarcely a conception of any other rising from the dead—still less had their minds entertained any idea of a newness of life to be attained through suffering. And yet it is to lead us to this newness of life that God or­ders all the sufferings and trials He sends us in our earthly pil­grimage. Our Lord draws us towards this risen life by His ex­ample after having merited it for us by His Passion. He teaches us that to arrive at the term it is necessary that the concupis­cences in us be crucified, and that it is God’s love for us that orders and directs the execution. That tendency in us which makes us cleave to the creature to the prejudice of the 29 IN THE Fr. Edward Leen LIKENESS OF CHRIST “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn. 14:6). Catholic Truth is not a collection of dogmas and philosophical principles, nor a series of dos and don’ts; it’s a Person–Jesus Christ. If your spiritual life is dry, an all too human effort to avoid “forbiddens” and occasionally (and usually begrudgingly) checking off a “good deed” to rack up the merit count or to make a payment on the purgatory tab, then you are missing the vivifying principle of the spiritual life–an intimate and personal knowledge of Jesus Christ. “For this is eternal life...to know Christ Jesus” (Jn. 17:3). Allow Fr. Leen to lead you to a greater knowledge and love of our Lord through this collection of meditations on the life of Christ: Annunciation Nativity Epiphany • Presentation in the Temple Flight to Egypt Hidden life of Jesus St. Joseph Blessed Virgin Mary Jesus’ humility and tenderness Holy Eucharist Passion and Death Resurrection Pentecost The Way of Peace. • • • • • • • • • 320pp, color softcover, STK# 6727Q $14.95 • • • • Edward Leen was born in Ireland in 1885. He entered the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, and studied for the priesthood in France and Italy. In 1916 he received his Doctorate in Divinity, summa cum laude, and returned to Ireland for three years. He worked in the Nigerian missions between 1920-22, when he was posted to Blackrock College, Ireland. From 1925-31 he was president of Blackrock College until illness forced his retirement from the post and into an amazing, international apostolate. His first book, ProgressThrough Mental Prayer (1935), was a sensation throughout the entire English reading world. Shortly following was In the Likeness of Christ which Fr. Leen had planned as a companion volume. A further pair of writings followed: Why the Cross? and its sequel, The True Vine and Its Branches. Then came his most theological and moving work, The Holy Ghost. Lastly, his wisdom as an educator found expression in What Is Education? Fr. Leen died in 1944. Fr. Leen’s great themes concern the transforming action of Christ in the soul and the opposition mounted by self-love. Creator, which makes us elect perishable things in preference to eternal, must die. To reach the perfect freedom of this life that is all for God, there must be effected in us a detachment from all that is not of God. Pain and sorrow are the instruments of this detach­ ment. It is through them that sinful desires are dulled and con­cupiscence reduced to a state of quiescence. The attraction to evil that is in us, in consequence of origi­nal sin, cannot be made to disappear completely in this life. It continues to exist even in the saints. The repugnance we experi­ence in ourselves to what God’s laws desire of us, and to what our own will aspires to, retains us in humility and allows us to distinguish clearly between what we can do of ourselves and what God can accomplish in us by His Holy Spirit. The experi­ence of our own powerlessness in the fight against the evil ten­dencies in our nature teaches us not to attribute to our own strength, but to God’s grace, the victories we may achieve in the struggle. The ever‑renewed conflict in us convinces us of the necessity of the crucifixion of our wicked nature in order that we may be able to serve God without offending Him. To live to God we must die to sin, and this death to sin can­not be achieved without its own passion. It was through the Cross that the world was redeemed—it remains that by the Cross and the Cross only, personally borne and endured, each individual enters fully into the redemption and is sanctified. Self must die in order that God may reign in undisputed sway in us. In that lies the whole explanation of suffering in life. It is only over the hilltop of Calvary that we make our way into the brightness and splendor and glowing life of the Garden of the Resurrection. The beauty of a body, free from the corruption of sin, and the radiance of a soul filled with God’s life is that in which our Calvary finds its explanation and the term in which it issues. The Cross is the way or the means to the Resurrection. Without the one we cannot have the other. If God makes the path of our life converge on Calvary it is only in order that it may lead us into the calm and peace and light of the Resurrec­ www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 30 tion—of a life in which the germ of mortality, namely, concupi­scence, has been successfully combated by the healing virtue of the grace of Christ, working through sufferings patiently ac­cepted. But, of course, not all sufferings effect in us this wonderful transformation, which is at once an image of Christ’s glorious life, and a pledge of future immortality. There were three who under­went crucifixion together on the Hill of Calvary. One of them suf­fered and blasphemed. Guilty though he was, he rebelled against his fate. He dared to abuse God for the tortures he had brought on himself by his own misdeeds. He railed at and cursed Divine Providence for the evil that had come upon him. “And one of those robbers who were hanged blasphemed Him, saying: ‘If Thou be Christ, save Thyself and us.’”2 So there are many, who, when crushed upon the cross of life, instead of entering into themselves, acknowledging their sinfulness and humbling themselves under the Hand of God revile their Maker for al­lowing suffering to exist, or at least, for allowing it to befall them. Such men, far from being purified by their passion, plunge themselves into a worse death than that of the body. They sink from one death into one yet more profound. There are those who when they suffer accept what comes to them in a spirit of expiation. They recognize their sinfulness and acknowledge that by reason of it they deserve chastisement at the Hands of God. Like the good thief, they cast their eyes upon Jesus and consider the fearful tortures that He endured— though sinless. Contrasting His Innocence with their own guilt, they strive not to repine at the cross to which they are nailed; they simply humble themselves under the powerful Hand of God, appeal for mercy and pardon, and beg their offended Mas­ter to accept their sufferings as an expiation of their guilt. They ask the suffering Christ to sanctify their crucifixion by applying to it the virtue of His, and they thus merit to hear from the Sav­ior’s lips the promise that from the Cross they shall ascend into the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Cross they find that detachment from earth, that unworldliness by which their salvation is se­cured. Were it not for the Cross they could never have been sev­ered from the life of earth and brought to the side of Christ. There is still another class of sufferers. They are those who enter into a voluntary participation in the Passion of Christ— through love of Him and zeal for souls. They have passed the stage where the Cross has been active in promoting in them the love of Christ; it is now that very love which creates the Cross for them. These souls do not merely support with patience such trials as befall them; they will to suffer in order to be more like their Divine Master. They aspire to be united with Christ on the Cross not only that His life may reign in them, but also that, by their own sufferings united with those of the Savior, effects of salvation may flow out on others. This is the highest THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org and most sublime mode of suffering, and it is only the chosen few that enter on it. Death implies the cessation of activity. The death through which we are to reach newness of life is the cessation of the activi­ty of the principles of sin in us. Though, as a penalty of the First Transgression, the roots of sin itself cannot be torn out from our being, the vitality of sin can be destroyed. The apostle does not ask us not to be sinners, but he commands us not to be the slaves of sin. He requires that its domination over us should cease: “Let not sin reign in your mortal bodies.”3 The Christian who has passed through the crucible of suffering to a purification of soul is not exempt from the assaults of sin. The newness of life which he has reached cannot be retained without effort. Even the saints are not free from solicitude and anxiety. In spite of their sanctity they remain sinners, but they are not the slaves of sin. The reign of sin has ceased in them, in that they have ceased to obey its lusts. They maintain a constant struggle against their concupiscences, and when they suffer a momen­tary defeat they do not acquiesce in or take pleasure in the evil to which they have succumbed. They deplore their weakness, exercise themselves in humility because of it, and animate themselves with a still greater desire of union with God as a protection against it. They continue to defeat sin in its very suc­cesses.What is true of the saints in this respect is true of ourselves in a more pronounced fashion. Even when we have experienced the Passion of Christ in our limited manner there remains a hostile force within us, and if we cease to combat it we shall not remain at peace with God nor in tranquil possession of our “risen life.” The old evil inclinations, though suppressed, have not been entirely destroyed. The energy of the evil habits has diminished but has not disappeared. Even after long years of inactivity they remain ready to resume their vitality if only the occasions by which they are called into play present themselves. Things which formerly at­tracted us retain their power of attraction still, in some measure, and will exercise it once more unless we are vigilant and careful in protecting ourselves against their appeal. We must keep ourselves outside the range of their influence. If we, relying on our strength, place ourselves in the circumstances that once were a stumbling block to us, if we make any concession to the ways of acting that were associated with our failures in God’s service, if we return to the associations that proved harmful, if there is any resumption of the old conditions of life that witnessed our betrayals of God, then there is grave danger that the smouldering passions will blaze up anew from their ashes.4 If we are to preserve our new life intact we must resolutely renounce everything that once proved a temptation to us, and uncompromisingly turn our back on the old ways. We some­times think that we can safely indulge in an innocent manner an inclination which we formerly indulged in with guilt. This is 31 an error. If we yield in any way to anything evil in ourselves, we shall drift back, little by little, into the channels of sin. To die with Christ and to rise with Him we must push our detachment to the very root of these inclinations in us which if at any time indulged in set us at variance with God. We must not temporize with the things which make a strong appeal to our sensitive nature. No matter how strong we may feel, we have our strength in weakness. We can never afford to relax in our war with concupiscence. This enemy, in ourselves, cannot be fought without risk, controlled without effort, re­strained without anxiety. This strength of our weakness, this energy of what is death‑dealing in us should make us humble, vigilant and constantly mortified. Our conversion must then be wholehearted and must mean the paralysis, if not the death of the tendencies to evil in us. It is our affections that lead us astray by attaching us to what draws us from God. Having once broken these attachments we must on no pretext (and our nature will allege many a specious one) allow them to resume their mastery over us even in a very mild and modified form. Any affection that can draw us away from God or stand between us and God must be combated without truce. The most successful way to overcome these dangerous at­tractions is to set up a counter‑attraction. Life is not a negative process. It is positive. The new life must not consist in the mere cessation of loving what is evil; it must express itself in the love of what is good. Newness of life does not consist merely in the efforts to avoid sin—it means the positive endeavor to live for God. We die to sin in order to live to God. The destination of our faculties to the interests of God is the characteristic of that resurrection of the soul that follows on its dying in union with Christ. The aim of the soul that has once been purified (or converted) should be not merely to have an aversion to what is evil, but to conceive a strong love for what is good. Love of God, not mere aversion from sin, should be the controlling mo­tive in its new life. Renovation or Resurrection must mean a new love. When at our being broken on the cross, all the false idols which we worshipped in our hearts tumble into dust be­fore our eyes, we must not allow ourselves to be still and mo­tionless in the tomb of our dead selves. We must, by laying hold on Christ, rise to a new life by setting up God Himself exclu­sively as a new object of love and worship in our hearts. Devot­edness to God and His interests is the exercise of the vitality of the life that comes of the death on the Cross. It is inevitable that suffering should sooner or later present itself in the life of each individual and mingle its bitter savor with every kind of pleasure, even the purest, that one wishes to extract from existence. It did not enter into God’s original plan. It is through man’s act that it made its way into human life. Ow­ing its origin to human perversity, it is evident that it is an evil thing. It is a foretaste and a beginning of death. God’s power and goodness is shown in making this evil thing, this result of man’s wrongdoing, an instrument of good. He permits us to suffer. He does not choose to destroy the consequences of the use of our free wills. He prefers to repair these evil consequenc­es. It does not become Him to undo what He has once done—it would be on His part a confession of miscalculation, error, want of prevision. He created, foreseeing the entry into the world of sin and suffering in the train, and as the logical issue of sin, and He takes that evil thing and makes it productive of good. He permits us to suffer, not because He takes pleasure in our suffering, but because He sees that as things now are it is only by suffering that are burned away in our souls the obsta­cles to the free operations of grace. He does not take away suf­ferings, but He gives us the power and the means to turn our sufferings to good account. He makes that which is the fruit of sin itself effect the destruction of sin in our souls. He shows us His Divine Son suffering and He invites us to endure our suf­ferings with the like dispositions, promising us that if we be like Him in His death, we shall be like Him in His Resurrection from death. God exhibited to us in the risen life of the Savior the type and example of what our life on earth shall be, if we willingly undergo the trials and hardships that are its condition and its preparation. Not all sufferings are salutary: it is only those that are endured in union with Christ. Suffer we must whatever be the spirit in which we endure suffering. If we look upon the pains of this life as an evil thing only and, therefore, as something which we must struggle against desperately, we shall not assuage but intensify the bitterness of life. If, on the other hand, we look upon sufferings as the necessary instru­ ment in the purification of our souls, if we accept them from the Hands of God as such, and if we draw from Christ’s passion the strength to bear them in humble submission to God’s provi­dence, we, through them, free our souls from the contagion of mortality, and heal in our souls the wounds inflicted on them by sin. Through sufferings endured in conformity with Christ we work our way steadily back towards the condition of original justice in which sense was perfectly subject to the spirit, and the spirit to God. Through sufferings, endured supernaturally, we clothe ourselves with the justice of Christ, the new Adam. When nature is dead in us and its rebellious stirrings are quiet­ed we walk in newness of life and in the peace of the Resurrec­tion. If we consent to die with Christ, then also we shall rise from the tomb of our dead selves to live with Christ. 1 I Cor.15:17. Lk. 23:39. 3 Rom. 6:12. 4 Msgr. Benson’s novel, A Winnowing, is an interesting psychological study of this “going backwards” through the effect of “old associations.” 2 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 32 Twenty Minutes with Fr. de Chivré: The Faith Exiled from Education Sallanches [say: Sal•lawnsh´ ] is a town in France at the foot of the Alps.1 The mountains determine the activities of the town. The inhabitants will spend 50, 60, or 70 years benefitting from the mountains by their commerce. The mountains gaze down, impassive, upon the bustling humanity making use of them. Yet very few inhabitants can be called mountain-climbers, though they possess the mountains by the commercial initiatives which they draw from it. The mountain-climber himself, on the contrary, is possessed by the mountains through the particular behavior which they impose on him–equipment, health, vigor, enthusiasm, determination–until he leaves them with his heart full of memories and experience and an irresistible need to return. THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org 33 This is to illustrate that the inhabitants of Sallanches make use of the Catholic Faith without having it. If they had it, they would all be mountainclimbers. They would step out of their shops and start using all the mountain gear themselves. To believe is to realize that you cannot do otherwise than to commit yourself deliberately to a divine summit. The Faith has given us the Sallanches privilege of piercing straight to the heart of it with our mind’s eye, through the fog and the shadows, to seize there—in those moments of a blessed parting of the clouds—the splendors of the summit that is Jesus Christ. Can you imagine having the following conversation with our Lord? Continue the ascent; stay a mountain-climber; you are approaching the summit. The proof is there! Look back over your shoulder. See how far away you are from all the noise, the absurdity of the valley and its futilities. Breathe in the fresh air of moral health and of good judgment. Savor the endurance acquired in surmounting the obstacles. Feel the satisfaction of the heights from which you understand so many things. And then understand what is meant by the expression: “Pugiles fidei”–the combatants of the Faith, the perseverance of the ascent, the inner vigor of doing the right thing. Are you there? This is the liturgical calendar: The ascent of Martyrs are the streams of blood that flow from the mountain. The ascent of Virgins is the expanse of pure, white snow that covers the mountain. The ascent of Doctors is in the splendors of the atmosphere enveloping the mountain. The ascent of Confessors is the unshakable delight of the high ground. Where is your place among them? Where is your name on the calendar? “Me?–Nowhere. That is a whole other world. I don’t climb; I distribute. In Sallanches, people want to buy pickaxes, hiking boots, and ropes... Well, when I’m in the den with my children, I distribute the ready-made phrases of the Faith. I distribute catechetical comments. I distribute my own ideas about Sunday. I distribute my own ideas about morality. I’m a distributor.” And what about your children, how are they doing? “What do you expect? They are doing what children do in a store.” Ah, yes, in a store where everything is pretty, everything is new. An easy childhood: prayer is new and exciting. A difficult adolescence: prayer gets stale. An impossible youth: glad finally to get out of the shop. The Faith is not proven. At least you can prove sports. At least you can prove the world. At least you can prove men and women. At heart, all that these kids want is to become real mountain-climbers, to take mountain-climbing lessons with Mom and Dad. But Mom and Dad are behind their nice clean cash register of the conventions of the Faith. So they go and play sports some other way. If you get too tired climbing the mountains, then you can always slide down into the holes. There is a kind of sport in that, too, and the cave-explorers of the Faith dive down through the quicksands of doubt to see how it works, or into the pits of abdications and abasements to see who can hold out the longest. The only positive aspect of falsehood is the energy one expends to hold out and prove to himself that what he is doing is good. The Faith is a climb. There are no mountainclimbers without the ascent. There are no believers without a climb. There is no climb without a free and sustained choice to reach the summit with the necessary equipment, health, and love. Too many parents weep to see their children descend, and too many children suffer from not having seen their parents climb. We only follow what moves up above or down below. If nothing is moving up above him, the child will be drawn by what is down below. Children are not built for staying in the shop. I’ve been told, “I have never seen the Faith!” Have you ever seen the electricity that propels 800 tons at 80 miles per hour on those two inches of metal known as rails? www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 34 “No,” you say, “but I have seen the arrival of the train at the station.” Well, don’t you think that maybe the Church’s liturgical calendar is the arrival of men propelled by the irresistible current of the Catholic Faith? Today, there are many smart people, but their intelligence is without value. Many are graduates, but without value. Many are powerful, but without value. They are without climb, without ascent, and without the Faith. To weep over the evils of the day is cowardice if overcoming them is not a way of life. And parents are overcome by the world, and the world has overcome the children. For the world is there when you exempt yourself from the climb toward God, where the movement of your life is not an ascent, but an agitation about the distractions of the valley. The world is there when nature is killed in its capacities for the climb and indulged in its capacities for the descent. He was not made flesh to indulge the flesh (the descent of lechery) but to appease it by proofs of the absolute values (the ascent of Calvary). He was not made man to eclipse the divine nature but to nourish human nature with the power of re-establishing nature supernaturalized by the Divine. For parents, to believe is to know what the supernatural summits are so that they can be allowed to command and determine the movement of everyone up the paths of light. Standing at the end of the climb we see the Leader to Whom we adhere before all else because of the attraction which He exerts on us (the Faith). He moves us along our climb by affirmations of the spirit of faith lived by the Creed, affirmations of the heart lived by the sacraments, and affirmations of the soul lived by prayer. I say “affirmations,” that is, personal acts in harmony with the Faith, never surprised at having to keep one’s distance from the spirit of the world—that is to say, from a world without spirit. The law of the spirit is to choose. The law of choice is to hold it fast. The world holds to nothing because it samples everything. To hold fast to health is to enter the pharmacy to select a remedy which will be cause of health. To hold to nothing is to enter the pharmacy to taste all of the remedies, which become the cause of death. For if there is a pre-established harmony between aspirin and a fever, there is a pre-established suicide between all of the remedies together and a fever. The Faith is a movement of life–a life consented to, understood, and willed in pre-established agreement between your life and the best that is in man. The distaste of parents for the life of faith in the home causes in the children pre-established suicide between their secret fevers and the infinite varieties of THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org earthly experiences destined to satisfy them and put within their easy reach. “Abyss calls unto abyss.–Abyssus abyssum invocat” (Ps. 41:8). The deep yearning of a child for marvelous expectations calls out to the abyss of marvelous realizations within the Catholic Faith. To believe is to arm your thinking with the admonitions of Jesus. To believe is to fortify your health with the nourishment of the Gospel. To believe is to drink deeply from the chalices of the light of the Beatitudes. To believe is to anoint your weakness with the oil of the Creed and, so equipped, undertake the ascent of example, of moral dignity, of shining virtue, of meritorious, courageous, heroic charitable activities and to look back and see your children following you. Do your children have a distaste for God? Did you have a taste for Him?...Dad made a deal with the offers of the world, Mom made a deal with the offers of the world, and education made a deal with the offers of the world. Parents say: “We can’t do otherwise; our deals are drowning us; the diploma is at stake.” The mother of the seven boy-martyrs encouraged the youngest to hold fast in his sufferings rather than make a deal with Caesar. Descending into the arena–children, women, old men–on their way to be tortured, they were asked by Caesar; “Tell me your name.” All of them, animated by the Faith, responded: “Caesar, my name is Christian.” You are not the president of such and such a company, nor the lady in charge of parish works, nor the father with such and such a medal, nor the mother known for her entertaining. “I am a Christian.” You are Christians, my children. Blanche of Castille once said to her child, the future King St. Louis: “I would prefer to see you dead at my feet rather than guilty of a single mortal sin.” The Faith is an irresistible climb which follows the law of the climb. The horizons deepen. You perceive Providence from afar and, because of it, you keep putting one foot in front of the other despite the personal cost. Consider the reply of unit commander and French Minister of State Marshal Pétain when he was asked during a government persecution the names of his officers who attended Mass: “Impossible, Sir, since I always sit in the front row, and I am polite and never turn around.” How is the Faith a movement nourished by God alone and lived-out in our freedom? God is pure act. When He touches our mind He makes it see and warms it. Clarity and warmth are inseparable as elements of light. God makes us understand, and then God makes us verify what has been understood by “realizations” that would be beyond our strength had we not the Faith. These realizations are the way for the Faith to be an evidence in the world without putting itself 35 forward as an evidence. Let me explain: When the Angel Gabriel proposed the Incarnation, the Virgin asked for a proof. The angel refused to give her one. He needed her faith, but he replied with a certainty: “The Holy Spirit will overshadow thee.” The Virgin said yes without any evidence to the affirmation of the angel. And the shadow of the Holy Spirit in which she had believed responded with the immediate evidence of the Incarnation. To believe is to allow God, for the benefit of our ascent, to propose to us a particular attitude and ask us to cling to it because of the certainty (for our virtue of faith) that results from Jesus soliciting that attitude, and to know how the shadow of certitude announces the evidence of results. “Lord, make me see!” “Do you believe in Me?” (“Do you wish to enter into the shadow of confidence?”) “Yes, I do believe.” “I will it; see.” Too many believers, obsessed by the need for scientific verification, doubt those convictions which they would like to verify like evidence, whereas in fact those same convictions proclaim the evidence of the result the way the shadow proclaims the sun. Consider that the shadow announces the sun, and the more it is dense, thick, precise, the more surely it proceeds from an absolute light. There you are in the summertime, in the morning, opening the door of your house and seeing its shadow on the ground, so thick, precise, defined, and you whisper, “What beautiful sunshine!” The shadow proves to you the existence of the sunshine. Certainty proves to you the existence of the evidence. The evidence revealed by your cry “What beautiful sunshine!” flows from your understanding of the shadow. The evidence of the result follows from your understanding of the conviction. Today, when there is less and less conviction anymore in the expressions of the Faith, any understanding at all of convictions has become “one never knows for sure.” The evidence of results has deserted family life, the education of children, the stability of the home, the joy of being alive. Everything is reduced to the attitudes of a consumer: we weigh our chances, we measure our whims, we wrap up our reasoning with the multicolored ribbons of points of view, we make our choice of what is easiest, we calculate our selfish needs, we walk through the check-out of temporal conditions endured or accepted. We are short-sighted, shortthinking, short-deciding. We are all more or less the shopkeepers of the Faith under the banners of social propaganda. We can almost hear the commercial: Ladies and gentlemen, come in, come in. Experience an all new way of understanding the manger. Profit from new insights on the virgin birth. Come, come; empower yourself. After 20 centuries, the Gospel is finally made understandable to you. New thinking for a new humankind. Are you still stuck on the 20 centuries of ignoramuses who came before us? Seek with us a new God, a brighter Faith, and never-before-experienced confidence that you are Love’s child. Quickly open your hymnals to page whatever...The Lord is my Shepherd. And from off in the distance of history there come to us the cries of the Martyrs, the Virgins, the Confessors, and the Doctors. If we only knew what the Faith presupposes in fidelity to the unalterable meaning of unaltered words pronounced by the unchanged Word: “Not one iota of what I have said will ever pass away....” Be careful. These words defy in advance all of your explanations: “Before Abraham was, I AM.” “I am the Way.” I am not a four-lane expressway. I am a path climbing so high that no yardstick can measure it. Do not contrive any measurements or you will lose the path. “I am the Truth.” What you add disfigures It; what you cut away destroys It. Watch out that you aren’t following the example of Martin Luther. Each time, you are more small-minded than clever. You explain according to your own views and claim that your light is Mine. “I am the Life.” That is, I am not your life which is subject to death. My Life is irreplaceable, commanding over death if you acknowledge its specialty as being divine. I am the Alpha before all time, the Omega beyond all time. Bursting forth from the inexhaustible divinity, the Faith changes life into eternal vitality. The bonds of secular narrow-mindedness fall of themselves. The handcuffs of snobbery, of worldliness, open again to free the spirit into strong and peaceful independences. You are yourself. You are at home. “Thomas, blessed are they who have believed and who have not seen.” What has changed in our lives, in what we ask of a Catholic education, of catechism and its doctrine? How parents have lost the game, by the materialization of education, by its technocracy and its worldliness. What a crumbling of the Faith, brought about by a distorted view of the value of a diploma without reference to genuine value. How much an exception, a rarity, a shock, has become the life fully mobilized by the Catholic Faith. What a beautiful ascent, to re-begin above all else. What a beautiful re-ascent to will boldly. What a beautiful preference to be audacious in our generosity. And what a staggering responsibility for each one of us if we renounce what God is capable of doing in us. Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from Carnets Spirituels: L’Éducation, No.7, Jan. 2006, pp.14-23. Edited for improved clarity by Fr. Kenneth Novak. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray´) was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984. 1 Sallanches is a small town in the French Alps famous as the gateway to the Mont-Blanc Massif. http://www.mytravelguide.com/hotels/nearbycitiesandtowns-75334705-France_Sallanches_nearbycitiesandtowns.html. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 36 F r . M i c h e l S i m o u l i n The Hands Of a Priest A Meditation for Holy Thursday Dear Sisters, Children, and Families, The Church recommends that the celebrant of the Holy Thursday evening Mass give a brief sermon–brief–in order to explain a little the meaning of these ceremonies. I think, especially if we have prepared for Holy Week the way we should, that we have an idea of the meaning, the symbolism, of the ceremonies we are about to perform (besides the Holy Mass, of course); that is, to reproduce all that our Lord did on the evening of Holy Thursday just before–or rather, at the very moment He entered into His Passion. He intended, very precisely, to leave to His Apostles and to the Church the Sacrament–the Sacrament–of His Passion: the Holy Eucharist, the Mass, the priesthood, all that would be our greatest treasures and which, up to that moment, were held enclosed in the Heart of our Lord, and which He was about to confide to His Church in confiding them to His twelve Apostles. The first ceremony at which we are going to assist, or participate in, is the ceremony THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org which the Church has us read in the Gospel: the ceremony of the washing of the feet. We may be a little surprised, first of all, at our Lord’s even doing this. We can understand the surprise, the astonishment, almost the scandal of St. Peter: “What! You? You, wash my feet? How can it be?” And we may be surprised that the Church insists so much on renewing this ceremony, which, unfortunately, could even make some people smile– those, perhaps, who do not understand anything about the liturgy, whereas in fact it is a very important ceremony. So what we need to do now is to try to understand exactly why it is that our Lord, on the point of leaving to His Apostles the memorial of His Passion, on the point of leaving them Himself, already immolated in the Holy Eucharist, insisted on placing Himself at their feet in this way, in order to wash their feet. One meaning, of course, is that i n t hursday 37 our Lord is giving to His Apostles an example of humility, to teach them not to lord it over souls as masters, as dominators. That is, of course, a lesson which priests need to take from this act of humiliation on the part of our Lord, performing this menial service for His Apostles. Without a doubt, it does contain a symbol of humility. But at the same time, I believe that there is a profounder meaning, one that comes back to what the Church teaches us in the Epistle, taken from St. Paul to the Corinthians: a call for purity: a call, an invitation, to understand how much this Sacrament is pure, how much this Sacrament is holy, and how much we need to be holy and pure to dare to draw near it. Obviously, it is not a question of waiting to be a saint before receiving the Holy Eucharist, because, on the contrary, this Sacrament is what is going to sanctify us, what is going to purify us. Yet the soul has to have a certain purity, there has to be at least no serious obstacle to our Lord’s friendship. If we have been unfaithful in certain small things, it is certainly regrettable, but it should not keep us away from our Lord. On the contrary, it is in drawing near to our Lord that we allow Him to purify us. It is He, essentially, who purifies us, not by washing our feet, but interiorly, by His presence in our soul. So this ceremony definitely invites us to purity, to consider how much this sacrament is holy, how much it is pure. Yet, I believe that it is also an invitation to purity for His Apostles, for priests. And I think that we need to pray this evening most especially for our priests; our priests, who are called to a very exceptional purity; who are called to a purity and a sanctity that are nearly angelic; for they handle those things that are purest and most sacred. The priest is at the service of the purest realities that can possibly exist here below. He is at the service, precisely, of Jesus Christ–of the sanctity, of the purity of Jesus Christ; He is at the service of the Sacrament of our Lord, of the Most Holy Sacrament of our Lord Jesus Christ; and he is at the service, also, of the purest, the most delicate reality in all creation, and which is quite simply the human soul. That is what a priest is. He is placed in permanent contact with souls, which he has a duty to purify and to help them to purify themselves. He is at the service of the purest reality of all, which is God, which is Jesus Christ, which is the Most Holy Sacrament; first of all to bring it about in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and then to give it to souls who need it in order to purify themselves. Now we can understand why our Lord was so intent on purifying His Apostles. And yet, He Himself said: “You are already pure.” Certain theologians believe, and it is a fairly common teaching, that the Apostles had been baptized by our Lord and therefore had already been purified of original sin. But there certainly remained some small attachments to the world, and that is what this washing of the feet means. Why would He wash their feet? Because even the most spiritual among us, the highest on a supernatural level, necessarily has a certain contact with the ground, at least by his feet. You have to stand on the ground, and this contact with the ground by the intermediary of the feet, can leave certain marks even in the soul itself of a being who is perhaps very pure, very holy–certain attachments to things of the earth. This, then, is certainly what our Lord meant to show: that it is necessary to purify oneself absolutely. Even if we have some contact with the things of the earth, it should leave no trace at all in our soul. The priest is devoted to helping souls to live, at least to draw near to that degree of sanctity, of purity; the priest is devoted to detaching himself completely from all human affection, from all earthly affection, from all attachment to things of the earth. The priest is uniquely the man of God, totally foreign to this world in which he lives. And if he is occupied with things of this world, it should be uniquely in order to purify them. No doubt, he has to take care of material concerns, of human concerns. But in these human concerns, what is the role of the priest? To purify all of these earthly realities in order that they become an intermediary, a means to rise up to heavenly realities. What, then, must be the purity of a priest, and how much do we need to pray for our priests! The Church repeats this ceremony of the washing of the feet only once a year, but notice how she has insisted on retaining this symbolism at every single Mass. The priest must still purify himself at every Mass–in a very symbolic manner, of course. He does not purify his feet, but his fingers. Already, before putting on the sacred vestments in the sacristy, the priest is supposed to purify his fingers, his hands; and then at the altar, again, during the Offertory, the priest is supposed to purify his fingers once more. And why this insistence on purifying his fingers? Because his fingers, his hands, are holy; because his hands are consecrated; because his hands–and I wonder if the faithful realize it sufficiently–because his hands, as the priest celebrates the Mass, his hands become the place of the Sacrifice. It is between the fingers of the priest that Jesus Christ immolates Himself. And therefore, just as the chalice is consecrated to become the place of the Sacrifice, to contain the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ, likewise the hands of a priest are consecrated on the day of his ordination. It is not so much in order to be able to touch the Eucharist, to be able to give the Eucharist. Of course, that is one aspect of it, but a secondary aspect, a consequence; the essential reason for their consecration is that these hands are to become the place of the Sacrifice. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 38 They become like a living chalice, an animate chalice. Truly, these fingers become the stone of the Sacrifice. Between his poor human fingers, every day, our Lord renews His Sacrifice. That is the reason why the hands of the priest must be very pure. They must, they ought to be, occupied only with the Sacrifice. If only the priest had but that to do, could use his consecrated hands only to hold in them our Lord Jesus Christ, only to allow Jesus Christ to renew His Sacrifice! That is the reason why the priest should be very pure, should be very holy, as far as that grace is given to him, as far as it is in his strength, to be pure. And the priest should desire the most authentic purity, the most perfect purity, the most perfect holiness. That is the reason for priestly celibacy. It is not a question of being available for his parishioners or I don’t know what else. How is it possible that a priest who has been so consecrated to make of his hands the place of the Sacrifice, should use his hands for other things, for other realities, that are so distant–even if they are legitimate in themselves–but that are so distant from the reality of this Sacrifice, realized there, between his fingers, in his hands. It is also the reason why only the priest, as the minister of the Sacrifice, can be the minister of the Sacrament, because it is the same reality. The host is at the same time Sacrifice and Sacrament. It is because it was his hands that celebrated, that were the place of the Sacrifice; it is because these hands were the place of the Sacrifice, that these hands, and only these hands, can give the Sacrament to souls that desire it. That is what a priest is, essentially. All of the priest is summarized, in a way, in his hands, his consecrated hands, consecrated for the Sacrifice. It is a reality we need to call to mind when we draw near to a priest, when we have to speak with him: how much we need to pray for our priests, for all of our priests. First, the faithful priests, of course; we have to pray for them in order that they be pure, that they be more and more pure, and we have to help them to purify themselves. What a misfortune for the faithful, on the contrary, who would cause the priest to descend, in a way, from that sanctity, from that purity, to a profane level, one that is too human; to any friendship that would be overly human. What misfortune! No, on the contrary, it is necessary to help the priest to detach himself from human realities, even the holiest, even the best, even the most legitimate. No; he is made for the things of God, and we have a duty to help him in that. If nothing else, we have a duty to pray for him. Pray then, for the faithful priests, of course, but pray as well for the other priests. We must not forget them. It is not because they are perhaps unfaithful, it is not because they have fallen–who knows, perhaps because they have been victims of our age. How much they need our prayers; indeed, perhaps even THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org more than the faithful priests, because they need help in order to pull out of their wretchedness, to pull out of their sin, to pull out of their infidelity. It is not because a priest does not celebrate the “right Mass,” as we say, that he is a “bad” priest. Never say that! The poor priest. Who knows, who knows his mystery, his tragedy; why precisely he has come to that point, of celebrating in such a profane way, or at least in a much less sacred, much less holy way. He has not been given a rite of Mass that helps him to sanctify himself, that helps him to purify himself. We must never disdain those priests. It may be our duty to protect ourselves from them, but we must always maintain for them a great deal of esteem, because they are priests, whatever else they are. Even if they are unworthy of it, even if they have fallen, even if they live in sin, they conserve that indelible character in their heart and in their soul. Their hands remain consecrated to be the place of the Sacrifice. If only we could bring them back, perhaps to rediscover the Mass of their ordination, to rediscover the meaning of their priesthood! Pray for our priests, pray for all of our priests. That is, I think, the most important aspect. Let us meditate well, of course, all of these great treasures, which our Lord leaves to us this evening: the Mass, the Eucharist; but let us realize that if there are no more priests, there is no more Mass. If there is no more Mass, there is no more Eucharist. What we need, then, most of all, is holy priests. Lord, grant us priests, grant us holy priests, grant us many holy priests. That is what we should ask, later on, when we are praying before the Holy Eucharist, at the altar of repose, when we are trying to keep our Lord company in His Agony. May we realize a little bit what the life of a priest really is, and may we pray, may we have at heart to pray for our priests, in order that they be priests who are truly consolers of our Lord Jesus Christ, continuers of the Sacrifice of our Lord, on the altar but also in their lives. Let us confide our priests, then, to our Lady; our Lady who is the Mother of the priest, Queen of the Clergy. It is to her that we must confide the souls of all our priests, good or bad, faithful or unfaithful; what does it matter, they are priests, and therefore they are children of Mary, they are the favorite sons of our Lady. Pray to our Lady for our priests, in order that truly they be very holy priests. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Fr. Simoulin was ordained in 1980 by Archbishop Lefebvre. After many varied posts, including pastor of St. Nicholas du Chardonnet, seminary rector, and district superior, he is now at St. Joseph des Carmes School in France. Fr. Simoulin gave this sermon, translated for Angelus Press by Miss Ann Marie Temple, on Holy Thursday, 2004, at St. Thomas Aquinas School, Romagne, France. 39 Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos: The Current Ecclesiastical Situation Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos is President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, which was created to help “Archbishop Lefebvre’s movement to return to the Church.” The Cardinal granted this exclusive interview in December, 2006, to El Catolicismo, a diocesan newspaper in his native country, Colombia. What is the current challenge for “Ecclesia Dei”? We take care of those who did not want to follow Archbishop Lefebvre, which, strictly speaking, is not a schism. With jurisdiction in the name of the Pope, we have created institutes in France and in Germany, and we have incardinated the clergy who have returned. We must follow up on the lives of those clergy and of those communities, such as the Fraternity of St. Peter. What about those who “follow Lefebvre”? There are the associations of St. Pius X, for their reinsertion process, with permanent visits and correspondence requesting the old rite. There are 500 priests and 600,000 faithful and the numbers are rising, with monasteries and seminaries, some of them full. Today’s rite of Mass brings the faithful together around the altar, adapting to their cultural circumstances and language. Will the rite of Saint Pius V, with the priest turning his back to the people and prayed in Latin, come back? Christ’s great love is the Eucharist; it is not fair for this to divide us. The Mass of Saint Pius V was celebrated for more than a thousand years. It has never been forbidden. Even if one does not understand the words, it is not as if one understands much more when “This is My Body” is said and you see a piece www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 40 of bread; only faith makes us believe in Christ there present. The Holy Father will extend the permission for this celebration, which is not in opposition to the one of today. Is this not a step backwards? I celebrate it nowadays, and in the first part, during which I give a sermon, I am looking at the faithful, who are my brethren, and whom I must instruct; afterwards, I represent the faithful: let us now go towards God. This is the objective: to give glory to God, and we are all united. It is not a step backwards; it is the preservation of one treasure without opposing it to another. In order to make the Mass attractive for the youth of today’s visual culture, there have been initiatives such as the “disco Mass,” and dances of erotic origin have been seen in Africa. Is the traditional Mass a solution to stop these abuses? It is a component, not “the solution.” The new liturgy has not been “the solution.” Did our churches used to be fuller or emptier? They are desolated! It is true that this is not the sole cause, but the Mass has turned into one of many rites of the world, and to strike something sacred is a grave matter. The spirit of “sacrifice” has been forgotten. The Eucharist leads to the resurrection, but not without passing through the passion and death. It is a celebration of the spirit, for our redemption. The most important thing for Jesus was not for us to eat with Him, but to eat Him. Please share with us the satisfactions, frustrations, and hope of your work. Satisfactions?–To have met so many priests, individually and in groups; to celebrate the Eucharist on a ship on Lake Tiberias with 1,500 priests, and on a Maundy Thursday with 7,000 priests at St. Peter’s Square. Frustrations?–To not have been able to reach more priests, and to not have been able to help resolve some great problems which needed more time. Hope? To continue working in order to embrace the 500 priests of Lefebvre in the unity of faith and love which Christ demanded of us. This interview was conducted by the Rev. Victor Ricardo Moreno Holguin for the diocesan newspaper El Catolicismo, of Bogota, Colombia. It is reprinted with permission from PCI (please see below), and translated by Mrs. Cristina Bolton exclusively for Angelus Press. Commentary by the Editor of Panorama Católica Internacional The interview, which is not a major piece of journalism, has its difficulties. Let us clarify a few substantial mistakes: Cardinal Castrillón has been the President of the Ecclesia Dei Commission for several years [since April 2000]. It is true that he recently retired from the Congregation for the Clergy, where he was prefect also for several years. It cannot be stressed enough that this is a new public affirmation that the consecration of bishops in 1988 did not constitute “strictly speaking a schism,” and now, countless are the number of times that toplevel authorities of the Catholic Church have affirmed what those attached to Tradition have always held. Tradition is experiencing growth everywhere: Cardinal Castrillón attributes “600,000 faithful to be under the pastoral care of the Society of Saint Pius X.” There are other, larger estimates. In Paris alone, some 10,000 faithful attend Mass at SSPX chapels every Sunday. Furthermore, if we consider other movements, in line or not with the Society of Saint Pius X, the number of faithful attached to the traditional rite grows noticeably. It is far from being a group of nostalgic cenacles. Full seminaries: This is a phenomenon which is almost universal in traditional movements and also in the more conservative movements, even though they may not be of the traditional Mass. The element or component keeps Catholics in its practice, THE ANGELUS • April which 2007 www.angeluspress.org which fosters vocations, preserves good customs, etc., is the Catholic identity with its history. These phenomena take place where Catholicism is most like it used to be. There where the clergy and the faithful move away from what used to be and what is essentially proper to Catholicism, everything disintegrates; the Faith itself, good customs, the practice of the sacraments are all lost. The Church triumphs where it shows what it is like. At least we can conclude that the conciliar pastoral strategy has been a failure. Cardinal Hoyos himself admits that the new liturgy has not been “the solution.” Our churches used to be fuller. They have struck what is sacred, the sacrificial spirit of the Mass. In other words, the collapse has a direct cause, which is the liturgical reform, which is motivated by another previous, more serious cause, as has been admitted by the French bishops and the Belgian, Cardinal Danneels: it is another theology. Can there be two true Catholic theologies? All things considered, in this short interview, the President of Ecclesia Dei recognizes the main complaints of traditional Catholics directly and indirectly: the liturgical collapse, the apostolic failure, the faithful’s loss of faith. It cannot help but be encouraging. PCI (Panorama Catolica Internacional) is the Spanish-language sister publication of Kirchliche Umschau, a German newspaper friendly to Catholic Tradition. 41 BOOK Review TITLE: Garcia Moreno author: Fr. Augustine Berthe Publisher: Dolorosa Press Distributor: Angelus Press. Price: $17.99 Reviewer: Mrs. Patti Petersen SUMMARY: The life of Garcia Moreno is worth studying for anyone who wishes to learn of the life of one of the great Catholic statesmen in modern times. This title, by Fr. Augustine Berthe, has been long out of print, and is considered to be the definitive English biography of Moreno. May it provide hope to those who think Catholic social principles are neither practical nor feasible today. It is difficult for Catholics today, especially those living in predominately Protestant America, to imagine a country governed according to Catholic Social Principles. Many of us have at best a very hazy idea of what Catholic social principles are, and due to our liberal, public-school education we find that the idea of governing a country according to such principles jars our “American ideals” to the very roots. It is only when we study Catholic social principles and begin to form a correct notion of the Social Kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ that we begin to see how far from those principles is the very foundation of modern government. What is Catholic Social Order? Catholic Social Order, viewed as a whole, is not primarily the political and economic organization of society. It is primarily the supernatural social organism of the Church, and then, secondarily, the temporal or natural social order resulting from the influence of Catholic doctrine on politics and economics, and from the embodiment of that influence in social institutions.1 Catholic Social Order, then, is society living the truths of the Catholic Faith in every stratum–as individuals, families, and governments. Catholic social principles are not limited to any form of government,2 and may be as successfully implemented in a democracy as in a monarchy. Contributing to our mixed-up conceptions of what government should be is the crisis afflicting the Catholic Church since the disastrous Second Vatican Council. The Church today is suffering a grave identity crisis caused by the Council and aggravated by the implementation of novel ideas and a new liturgy utterly at variance with Tradition, and therefore also opposed to the principles, both spiritual and social, of the Kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ. The religious indifference fostered and promulgated by the “New Theology” and by the practice of an ecumenism unheard of in the annals of the Church has contributed to the demoralization of the faithful at all levels of the Church. Stricken with moral paralysis, too many Catholics have given in to the idea that Catholic social order is unnecessary as well as impractical, and that the implementation of Catholic social principles on a political and economic level in government is impossible in today’s world. Just at a time when it seems that hope of establishing the Social Kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ in the world today is at an all-time low, Dolorosa Press has republished the book Garcia Moreno by Rev. Fr. Augustine Berthe. It tells the story www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 42 of a man of invincible faith and courage, Ecuadorian President Gabriel Garcia Moreno, who dared to stand up to the liberal and Freemasonic cabal and to restore the government of Ecuador on Catholic social principles. In a world groaning under the yoke of revolutionary tyranny, Garcia Moreno stands as a shining light to point the way to true and lasting political and economic peace and security under the standard of Christ the King. It is an axiom with our modern pagans that civilization consists, not in the moral and religious perfection of a people, but solely in material progress. The example of Garcia Moreno is the most striking proof of the reverse of this dogma which can be met with in modern history.3 The situation in Ecuador facing Garcia Moreno when he stepped into the presidency of that country was one of economic and political chaos. Succeeding revolutions had rocked the country to its very foundations, and the plight of the people was truly piteous. Many, unable to earn an honest livelihood, had forsaken their homes to become brigands, adding to the troubles of a country already seriously demoralized. The country, almost exclusively Catholic, had been tyrannized over by liberals and Freemasons, who between them had disorganized the Church, emptied the coffers of the State to enrich themselves, and impoverished the people to finance the numerous revolutions. Garcia Moreno found himself confronted with an empty treasury, a liberal congress, and no end of revolutionaries waiting their chance to turn the country upside down for their own gain. In 13 years he single-handedly set the country back on its feet politically, economically, and above all spiritually. A true lover of freedom, his motto was: “Liberty for everyone and for everything save for evil and evildoers.” During his time in the office of president, Garcia Moreno passed laws defining the State religion as Catholicism and forbidding the entrance of other sects into the country; renewed diplomatic ties with the Vatican and signed a concordat granting immunity to the Church; worked with the Ecuadorian bishops to establish new dioceses and to reform the Church in Ecuador; consecrated the country of Ecuador to the Sacred Heart of Jesus; raised honest and capable men to positions in government and kept strict watch to maintain a government without graft; eliminated an enormous national debt; built carriage roads to boost economic growth; and reorganized education in Ecuador so that it was based on Catholic principles and taught primarily by Religious. One may well ask where Garcia Moreno found the necessary strength for so arduous a life as was necessary to reform his homeland. An intense man of action and duty, he found inspiration and strength in an equally intense spiritual life. Daily he assisted at Mass, prayed the Rosary, and read a chapter from the Imitation of Christ. In addition to this he tried to live as much as possible in the presence of God, constantly THE ANGELUS • April 2007 www.angeluspress.org offering his heart to God. He took care never to sit while praying if it was possible to stand or kneel, and daily he practiced numerous acts of humility. Naturally impetuous, he tried “to make every effort, by the thought of Jesus and Mary, to restrain my impatience and contradict my natural inclinations. To be patient and amiable even with people who bore me; never to speak evil of my enemies.”4 In addition to this he was assiduous in receiving the Sacraments of the Church. Knowing that he could not give to his country what he himself did not possess, he guarded carefully the primacy of the spiritual first in his own life, and then in the life of his country. It should come as no surprise that so truly a Catholic statesman as Garcia Moreno had many enemies. For 13 years he held them in check, outmaneuvering them and avoiding the numerous traps they set for him. In 1875 Garcia Moreno was elected president of Ecuador for another term. It would prove to be his last, the Masonic lodges having condemned him to death. Having a presentiment of his approaching end, he wrote in his last letter to the Pope: What greater happiness can be awarded to me, most Holy Father, than to see myself detested and calumniated for the love of our Divine Redeemer? But what still greater happiness would it be if your blessing could obtain from Heaven the grace to shed my blood for Him Who, being God, has deigned to shed every drop of His at the pillar and upon the Cross.5 He would have this happiness. On August 6, 1875, as he left the Cathedral, Garcia Moreno was attacked by an assassin wielding a machete, who wounded him grievously. Other conspirators fired at the stricken president with revolvers. Garcia Moreno was carried into the Cathedral, where a surgeon tried in vain to staunch his gaping wounds. After forgiving his attackers and receiving the Sacraments of the Church, the heroic president expired. His last words were: “God does not die!”6 Such is the heroic life detailed in the book Garcia Moreno by Rev. Fr. Augustine Berthe. In addition to the stirring text, the book is a treasure-trove of pictures, many of which were taken recently by Fr. Paul Kimball, SSPX, on a pilgrimage to Ecuador, and included in the republished edition of the book. Garcia Moreno is truly a saint for our times. His life cannot help but stir the courage of every Catholic in the world today, and his accomplishments as the president of Ecuador prove that it is possible to govern nations by Catholic social principles. 1 Fr. Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World (reprint: Omni Publications), p.5. 2 Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Immortale Dei. 3 Berthe, Garcia Moreno, p.274. 4 Ibid, p.298. 5 Ibid, p.318. 6 Ibid, p.322. F R . p e t e r How can it be said that Our Lord came to preach “the acceptable year of the Lord”? This expression is a part of the prophecy of Isaias (Is. 61:2) that is read by Our Lord on the Sabbath day when he unfolded the scroll of the book of Isaias in the synagogue of Nazareth (Lk. 4:17-19). This is a directly Messianic text, referring to the person of our Divine Savior, of which Our Lord Himself stated: “This day is fulfilled this scripture in your ears” (Lk. 4:21). The complete text from Isaias, as read by Our Lord, is this: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. Wherefore He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath sent me to heal the contrite of heart, to preach deliverance to the captives, and sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.… The meaning of the first part of the text is clear, referring to our deliverance, by our Divine Savior, from the blindness and slavery of sin that has bound and bruised our wretched souls. The expression “the acceptable year of the Lord” contained in Isaias. 61:2 is in fact a reference to the law of Moses, and in particular to Leviticus 25:10, which orders a Jubilee year to be celebrated every 50 years. And thou shalt sanctify the fiftieth year, and shalt proclaim remission to all the inhabitants of thy land: for it is the year of Jubilee. Every man shall return to his possession, and every one shall go back to his former family: Because it is the jubilee and the fiftieth year. This Jubilee year was a time of remission, much more even than the sabbatical year, which came around once every seven years. According to the Mosaic Law, at the sound of the trumpet announcing the Jubilee year all debts were abolished, all lands and houses that had been alienated in any way returned to their former owners free of charge, even when the purchaser had promised them to the service of the temple. Likewise, all Israelite slaves recovered their liberty (Lev., chaps. 25-27). If it is true that this aspect of the law was most of the time a dead letter, it nevertheless is very clear that it was a part of the Mosaic Law, and that it had a profound symbolism, for it indicated to the Israelites that they were not the true owners of the land that God had entrusted to them, that all were effectively slaves of Yahweh, and that no family or corporation could accumulate wealth here on this earth. However, the real symbolism of this year of grace, the Jubilee, the year of the Lord, is the perfect remission obtained by our Divine Savior on the Cross when He freed us from the debt of our sins and opened up the gates to the promised homeland, and this not just for the Jubilee year, but for everlasting life. Q A Is it permissible for a Catholic wife and mother to take a job outside the home? It cannot be accepted as something normal and approved by the Church for a wife and mother to be free R . s c o t t 43 to take employment outside the home for as long as her children are still dependent upon her care. The working of mothers outside the home for a salary is called by Pope Pius XI “economic emancipation” in his 1930 encyclical on Christian Marriage, Casti Connubii: This, however, is not the true emancipation of women, nor that rational and exalted liberty which belongs to the noble office of a Christian woman and wife; it is rather the debasing of the womanly character and the dignity of motherhood, and indeed of the whole family, as a result of which the husband suffers the loss of his wife, the children of their mother, and the home and the whole family of an ever-watchful guardian. More than this, this false liberty and unnatural equality with the husband is to the detriment of the woman herself, for if the woman descends from her truly regal throne to which she has been raised within the walls of the home by means of the Gospel, she will soon be reduced to the old state of slavery (if not in appearance, certainly in reality) and become as amongst the pagans the mere instrument of man. (§75) Towards the end of the same encyclical the Pope is even more explicit. He talks about the evils and the injustices that discourage married couples, and compares the evil of mothers having to work with that of not being able to find a suitable home. If families, particularly those in which there are many children, have not suitable dwellings, if the husband cannot find employment and means of livelihood; if the necessities of life cannot be purchased except at exorbitant prices; if even the mother of the family to the great harm of the home, is compelled to go forth and seek a living by her own labor...it is patent to all to what an extent married people may lose heart. (§120) Clearly, we cannot judge the particular situation of mothers who experience the need to work outside the home. There can be many reasons that could make this a necessary evil, such as sickness and unemployment of the husband, or a husband not receiving a just salary, sufficient to support the family. There can also be psychological and professional reasons why a wife and mother might be obliged to stay in the workforce outside the home. However, the Church clearly teaches that this is an evil. We cannot pretend that it is a good thing, or that it is indifferent, or that it is not going to do any harm to her children and family. Moreover, no woman can be liberated from the home in this manner without changing her very awareness of what it is to be a Catholic wife and mother. Consequently, it can only be tolerated as an unavoidable and necessary evil, and provided that it be only considered a temporary, short-term arrangement, and that the utmost effort is made by the working mother and her husband to minimize the negative effects. However, it would be very wrong to claim that this is a good thing, or approved and allowed by the Church. It is at best an unavoidable and necessary evil, that one ought to be apologetic for, and never brag about. Fr. Peter Scott was ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988. After assignments as seminary professor and the US District Superior, he is currently the rector of Holy Cross Seminary in Goulburn, Australia. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2007 The Angelus monthly photo essay contest Any member of a household aged 10-18 whose family address has a current subscription to The Angelus is eligible. There may be more than one entry per address if more than one child is eligible. (Please include your family’s address and phone number, especially if you are a contestant writing from a boarding school.) The Angelus is offering $150 for a 250-word essay on the above picture. If none is deserving of the prize, none will be awarded. The winning essay may be published if there is a winner. An extra $50 is available if one is a member of the SSPX Eucharistic Crusade (and can be verified as such: include a letter from your chaplain). Entrants must attempt to briefly and clearly “explain” the picture in their own words. Submissions must be hand-written and will be judged on content, legibility, and creativity. The essays will be judged by parties outside of Angelus Press. Essays must be received by april 30 and be addressed to: Angelus Press Attention: The Angelus Photo Essay Contest 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64109 EW N one Hundred Years of Modernism A GENEALOGY OF THE PRINCIPLES of the second vatican council Fr. Dominic Bourmaud “Change” was the buzzword of the 1960’s and ‘70’s. When it hit the Catholic Church, its faithful were told to expect a glorious springtime. Instead, doubt and instability have prevailed. Where has the destruction come from? All indicators point to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) as its epicenter. To prove it, the author reconstructed a family tree–a genealogy–of Vatican II to uncover the chain of causes that resulted in this Council and its novelties. The Vatican II “effect” is related to a heresy going back one hundred years: Modernism. The modernists, actively combatted by Pope Pius X (1903-14) and condemned by the encyclical Pascendi (1907), had been working ever since to align the Church with new ideas in philosophy. But their “new ideas” had an origin, too. Following back links in the chain, the author reached the first link: Martin Luther. One Hundred Years of Modernism is an Everyman’s survey of the history of philosophical ideas from Aristotle’s sane realism to the existentialists’ insanity. In chronological order, from its roots in Luther’s principle of private judgment through its subsequent developments, it shows that modernism, prematurely declared dead after St. Pius X’s reign, revived after World War II and reached the highest levels of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy. From causes to effects and from masters to disciples. The book is divided into five historical periods: Christian Truth, Protestant critical modernism in Germany, modernism in France, neo-modernism in Europe, and triumphant modernism in Rome itself. 364pp, softcover, STK# 5242 $24.95 FR E Saint Pius X: Restorer of the Church Yves Chiron Chiron breaks new ground by establishing an exact, fair portrait of St. Pius X, who is often portrayed as a pious pope of great Faith, but “retrograde, simplistic and close-minded to modern... ideas.” In fact, he was not a pietistic simpleton, but a powerful and brilliant defender of the True Faith in the face of the Modernism that was invading the Church even in those days–the beginnings of the Liberalism that resurfaced at Vatican II. Mr. Chiron demonstrates that he was a tireless defender of the rights of the Church against secularism, a great reforming pope; restoring Gregorian chant as the sacred music of the Church; reforming the Curia; initiating the codification of Canon Law, and devoting himself especially to reforming the seminaries in order to form pious, zealous young priests, on guard against the creeping infection of Modernism. Chiron draws from many sources, especially Italian, where this man rose from being a poor farm boy to being the Vicar of Christ. The author was also able to research the Vatican Archives. There is no better “rags-to–riches” story, for he came from a poor but hardworking family and rose to the heights of spiritual riches. 352pp, 6" x 9" softcover, 24pp. of illustrations, STK# 6768Q $19.95 g es a p 4 2 tos o h p of E of hase ears c r u Y p with undred ism H n r e e On f Mod ay 31, 2007) o M ires 05 r exp # 10 STK SET (Offe Pascendi Dominici Gregis On Doctrine of the ­Modernists (1907) Pope St. Pius X The prophetic encyclical of Pius X which defined Modernism, cut it up, and let it hang out to dry. Modernists can’t hide from this light. 77pp, STK# 5306Q $3.95 Liberalism & Catholicism Fr. A. Roussel, Ph.D. As former professor of the Major Seminary of Rennes, France, Fr. Roussel was admired by Abp. Lefebvre, whom he influenced. A collection of conferences first given in Rome in 1926, now translated into English by Fr. Coenrad Daniels. It is impossible to understand the crisis in the Church, without seeing the liberal mindset which prepared the way. 155pp, softcover, STK# 6714. $11.95  Out of print “You print re . must p Speaks ho A Bist’s a very rk.” I t wo s n a t r impo hael Davie –Mic #1001 for 13 years!  New, expanded edition!  Includes those parts unpublished in the original English edition archbishop Marcel Lefebvre Writings and Addresses 1963•1976 Out of print for 13 years, A Bishop Speaks is back! Posthumous thanks are due to Mr. Michael Davies, RIP, who continually encouraged us to reprint this book while revising Pope John’s Council and Pope Paul’s New Mass. He said, “You must reprint A Bishop Speaks. It’s a very important work.” He referred to and quoted from his old copy constantly. This book is a chronological collection of key letters, sermons, conferences, and interviews (1963-1976) that are critical to understanding his founding of the SSPX, his defense of Catholic Tradition, and his opposition to Vatican II and the New Mass. “We hope that this English edition will be widely read. May it also help many Catholics–bishops, priests, and laity–to understand the tragedy that is ruining the Church, and the new betrayal of which Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Victim,” said Archbishop Lefebvre in the first English edition. Includes: 1963: Letter to Members of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost on Wearing the Cassock  Letter on the First Session of Vatican II. 1964: After the Second Session of the Vatican II. 1965: Between the Third and Fourth Sessions of Vatican II. 1968: Light on the Present Crisis in the Church  For a True Renovation of the Church  Authority in the Family and in Society as an Aid to Our Salvation. 1969: After the Council: The Church and the Moral Crisis of Today. 1970: To Remain a Good Catholic Must One Become a Protestant? 1971: The Priest and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass  The Fruits of the New Mass. 1972: The Priest and the Present Crisis in the Church. 1973: Priests for Tomorrow. 1974: Crisis of the Church or Crisis of the Priesthood? 1975: Declaration  Account of the “Three Cardinals’ Commission” in Suppressing the SSPX  Letter to Pope Paul VI (both) 1976: Letter to Pope Paul VI (three)  Ordination Sermon  The Sermon at Lille 312pp, softcover, STK# 5067Q $19.95 Pastoral Letters Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre Written from 1947 to 1968 while the Archbishop of Dakar, Senegal, these letters aimed to protect the faith of the priests and faithful of his mission field “and to strengthen them against the seductions of the world.” From “Dangers of Religious Ignorance,” to “the Church and its Social and Political Evolution” and the profound “Life and Truth.” A PERFECT companion to A Bishop Speaks. 148pp, softcover, STK# 3045 $2.50 www.angeluspress.org l 1-8 00-9 6 6-73 37 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.