january 2008 $4.45 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition jesus, make me worthy Originally published in 1960, Angelus Press was fortunate enough to acquire and sell thousands of originals in years past until those supplies dried up. We have now reprinted this classic in stunning full color. A prayer book for the young boy and girl in a language so simple that every child can understand, combining much useful instruction for Communion and Confirmation with a large selection of devotions and prayers. It is truly a beautiful little book. Ideal for First Holy Communions and Confirmations, but suitable for any occasion (or no occasion). Everything a Catholic child must know about the practice of the Catholic Faith & spirituality–all packed into 287 pages. Includes tons of prayers and over 90 illustrations (over half are in full color). Also includes: le b a l i a Av gain! a Crucifixion end sheet with indulgenced prayer • First Holy Communion remembrance page • Table of •movable feasts (Angelus Press supplement included to bring the table up to 2040) • Some things you must know about God • The meaning of life • “My Child, Give Me thy Heart” • Morning prayers • Evening prayers • The Holy Mass • Meaning of Mass • A method of following the Mass (profusely illustrated) • Prayers after Mass • Things every Mass server should know • Manner of Serving at Mass • The Seven Sacraments On Sin • Confession • Examination of Conscience • After Examination • Holy Communion • Prayers •before the Communion • Prayers after Communion • Preparation for First Communion • The Sacrament of Holy Confirmation • Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament • The Stations of the Cross (each Station illustrated in full color) • Litany of the Sacred Heart • Litany of the Most Holy Name of Jesus • Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary • Litany of St. Joseph • The Catholic Child and Parents • The Catholic Child and the Priest • The Catholic Child and the Religious Sister • The Catholic Child in Church • The Catholic Child and Confession • The Catholic Child and Holy Communion • The Catholic Child and the Rosary • The Catholic Child and Indulgences • The Catholic Child and the Sacred Heart • The Catholic Child and the Blessed Virgin • The Catholic Child and St. Joseph • The Catholic Child and the Saints • The Catholic Child and the Souls in Purgatory • The Catholic Child and Vocation • The Ten Commandments • The Six Precepts of the Church • The Beatitudes • A short and simple Way of Life for a Child. 287pp, 4" x 5½", sewn, gold-embossed lexotone cover, BLACK STK# 8246 $14.95 287pp, 4" x 5½", sewn, gold-embossed lexotone cover, WHITE, STK# 8248 $14.95 Mar ian CHILDR EN’S MISSAL le b a l i a Av gain! a If you have a child aged 5-10 and are looking for a Missal suited to their capabilities, look no further. Angelus Press is proud to make available what we consider the best missal for children in this age bracket. Originally published in 1958, we, at one point, acquired and sold thousands of originals. After those supplies were exhausted, we decided to reprint this classic in full color. It includes the Ordinary of the Mass in large print English (with 35 color photos), the readings for all Sundays and major Holydays (with 13 color illustrations), instructions on when to sit, stand, and kneel, prayers for before and after Holy Communion, the indulgenced prayer before a crucifix, a child’s preparation for Confession and the prayers of the priest and responses of the laity for the dialogue Mass (in Latin and English). The large print, sturdy construction, and color illustrations make it a great missal for children. 156 pp, 4" x 5½", sewn, gold-embossed burgundy lexotone cover, STK# 8239 $12.95 “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 January 2008 Volume XXXI, Number 1 • 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 Editor Fr. Kenneth Novak Assistant Editor Mr. James Vogel jack-of-all-trades Mr. Michael Sestak Editorial assistant and proofreading ireland: from saints and scholars to wild geese. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Jason T. Winschel catechism of the crisis in the church . . Part . . . . . . . .8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Fr. Matthias Gaudron THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT Miss Anne Stinnett Design and Layout Mr. Simon Townshend MARKETING Pope Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Commentaries on the Responses of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to Some Questions Regarding the Nature of the Church . . . . . 22 Mr. Christopher McCann comptroller Mr. Robert Wiemann, CPA customer service Mrs. MaryAnne Hall Mr. John Rydholm Miss Rebecca Heatwole information technology consultant Mr. Cory Bosley Shipping and Handling Mr. Jon Rydholm seven keys to the christian home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Emerson Hynes the end times ecstasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Edwin Faust what it means to have a soul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. Questions and answers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Fr. Peter Scott september/november 2007 writing contest winning entry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 The Angelus Monthly photo writing contest . . . . 44 The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication office is located at 2915 Forest Ave., Kansas City, MO 64109. PH (816) 753-3150; FAX (816) 753-3557. Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, MO. ©2008 by Angelus Press. Manuscripts are welcome and will be used at the discretion of the editors. The Angelus Subscription Rates 1 year 2 years 3 years US $35.00 Foreign Countries (inc. Canada & Mexico) $55.00 $65.00 $105.00 $100.00 $160.00 All payments must be in US funds only. Online subscriptions: $15.00/year (the online edition is available around the 10th of the preceding month). To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Register for free to access back issues 14 months and older plus many other site features.  Letter from the Editor Intellect by intellect, will by will–that is, soul by soul– Angelus Press endeavors to win back ground lost to error and deceit and to advance any hope of re-Christianizing society. One by little one. That is why I’m happy to tell you about a couple of interesting transactions of the last month. How about an Eastern Rite Catholic parish in Michigan which ordered 210 copies of Know Your Mass, our illustrated comic-book style publication explaining the Latin Mass of 1962! This is the same book which has caught the eyes of Catholics in Poland, Italy, and France, too, where publishing houses there have received our permission to translate and publish it. A Salesian Brother who teaches catechism in his Chicago diocesan parish has inquired about our recently reprinted bestseller, My Catholic Faith, wanting to use it as the class textbook. Traditional Teaching Franciscan Sr. Marie Louise of the Convent of Christ the King spent two days of class time teaching the mechanics of theme-writing to her young ladies at St. Vincent de Paul Academy in order to have each of them submit entries to the Angelus MONTHLY PHOTO Writing Contest. (Thank you, Sister, for doing what I anticipated other teachers would do, but haven’t. Is the $200 possible prize a sufficient incentive for our other teachers to do the same, or are our schoolchildren too rich, too intellectually lazy, or both? See p.44.) In all of the cases above, however, the soul is being acknowledged as existing. This is my consolation: the soul is not being practically denied. But read Fr. De Chivré (“What It Means to Have a Soul,” pp.38-41). When a man practically denies his soul, he lives as though without form. When enough men practically eliminate their form–their soul–then society is de-formed. It lives as though soulless. It desecrates all it does. It lives for externals. Men live having effectively denied their intellect and will, that is, those highest parts of the rational soul. Yet, nothing gets into the intellect except first through the senses. This means we must know really real experiences, that is, real sight of what is really real, real sound, taste, smell, and really real touch. It is due to the advances in technology that I stress “really real.” Artificiality is often so dangerously close to reality that it can be confusing. Fantasy football isn’t football; a chatroom is not romance; a video game is not adventure. Second Life is not life. A small case in point: Having been joined by two others for a meal at Cracker Barrel (which approximates an old-timey country store and eatery which it isn’t), I asked that we be seated near the realwood fire casting up real live embers burning in the real fireplace with its magnificent real-stone mantel and hearth. A mother and her five-year-old son sat down at the table next to us. Not long after, I heard the boy tell the waiter to “turn on more fire.” No doubt this child is already believing that a fire is something you plug in and adjust with a rheostat. His experience with whatever contraption he’s familiar so approximates the really real fire that he knows Cracker Barrel can turn up the flame by some hidden knob. Poor kid needs a walk in the woods with an axe and some matches. And the studies say that by the time he’s a screenager he’ll probably have quit long-form reading. What really helps our intellect is reading. But long-form reading, according to the 2007 National Endowment for the Arts report, “To Read or Not to Read,” is clearly what fewer and fewer young and old alike are doing. (It’s scary.) Only 52% of college-aged young people have ever read a book voluntarily. Only 31% of adults with bachelor’s degrees are “proficient in reading prose.” The NEA chairwoman reflects, “Reading creates people who are more active by any measure....People who don’t read, who spend more of their time watching TV or on the Internet, playing video games, seem to be significantly more passive....If kids are put into this electronic culture without any counterbalancing efforts, they will stop reading.” The overwhelming evidence of which I’m aware is that the Latin Mass and Baltimore No. 3 are in themselves no surefire guarantees against brain-death. The failure to stimulate the intellect is fatal to individuals and the society which results when individuals come together in community. Why?–because man is meant to reproduce life through thought. The work of the intellect–which we call “thinking”–used to be presumed as a natural function of any man who had a mind. The product of this thinking is an “idea.” Mr. Ed Willock says that “there is a sort of wedding between the knowledge a man has and the things he observes [by the senses–Ed.], and out of this wedding a new life is born, called an idea. Ideas, like children, must be nurtured to maturity.” If, for example, I have the thought that “God is goodness,” the idea that I should acknowledge this God in some way is born in my soul. Conclusion: I must act to worship this God and will assist at Mass. See how my rightly formed intellect presents its conclusion to my will and moves it to act rightly? Life goes on. I need really real experience; I need to read; I need to stimulate my intellect in order to move my will rightly. But if I favor the belief that I am just a chance product of physico-chemical reactions and helpless to their effect on me, then I practically deny the existence of my soul. I cannot act, nor rightly. I live a bored existence with only random exterior stimulation offering any possible relief, frustratingly momentary, and convincing me that the ultimate stimulation is to kill myself. A teacher of traditional Catholic youngsters who was encouraging her students to enter the Angelus Writing Contest told me that while the students didn’t rebel against having to write, they complained softly about not having any ideas to write down. I propose a double-dosing remedy for soul-health from two reliable sources: Bishop Richard Williamson and Fr. Frederick Faber. Bishop Williamson used to tell us seminarians that we ought to study philosophy “knee-deep in manure in order to keep yourselves real.” You get his message: the alluring disconnect from reality is to unhinge from the order of things as God created them, and mess with the soul. And, about reading, Fr. Faber says that he thought it was the activity where the work of the Holy Ghost was most directly evident. What these doctors order is to make sure we take daily doses of “R and R,” that is, Reality and Reading. Two spoonfuls a day keeps Hell away. Instaurare Omnia in Christo, Fr. Kenneth Novak 3 FROM SAINTS AND SCHOLARS TO WILD GEESE J A S O N T T . W I N S C H E L he world had ended. Rome was dead. If no one could declare it so officially, the signs roared the message. By the late 400s the Roman Empire, whose culture and degree of civilization had so exceeded all others that it considered its boundaries to be coterminous with those of the world itself, had no longer the strength to define let alone defend those borders. Roman government and society had been sacrificed to complacency, moral degradation, corruption, sloth, and the rest of the deadly sins. In the meantime, her porous borders invited the flow of German and other barbarians, a mass of immigrants hoping for a piece of the good life that Rome had to offer, only to prove a disastrous deluge to the same. But as the empire and its civilization declined and receded, other foreigners came bearing light in the darkness that followed. They were from a distant island, one that had escaped the conquering Roman 4 The Irish Catholics, like other Christians, admit a mystery in the Holy Trinity, but they may almost be said to admit an experience in the Holy Family. Their historical experience, alas, has made it seem to them not unnatural that the Holy Family should be a homeless family. They also have found that there was no room for them at the inn, or anywhere but in the jail; they also have dragged their newborn babes out of their cradles, and trailed in despair along the road to Egypt, or at least along the road to exile. They also have heard, in the dark and the distance behind them, the noise of the horsemen of Herod. (G.K. Chesterton)1 armies when the empire was at its zenith, but who had recently been converted to the Roman religion. They were the Irish. And embarking from the Island of Saints and Scholars to a benighted Europe, they spread the Catholic Faith, and they saved civilization– and untold numbers of1 souls.2 But the savior of civilization, like the Savior of man, would ultimately be rewarded with a passion of its own. By the end of the 17th century, Catholics in Ireland were all but slaves. They were excluded from just about every public occupation, from Parliament, from the bench and the bar, the army, navy, all civil offices, and from corporations. All members of religious orders as well as all bishops and representatives of the pope were kicked out of the country. Secular priests were allowed to stay, but they had to be registered; church steeples and bells were made illegal. Also criminalized were Catholic schools, Catholic burials, pilgrimages, and recognition of Catholic holydays. Laws placed serious restrictions on Catholic landholding and inheritance, and lest they try to protect or preserve these things, they were forbidden to own arms or ammunition. If these restrictions were not sufficient, Catholics were prohibited from owning a horse worth more than £5.3 Such were the penal laws that England imposed upon Catholics in Ireland. And such was the anti-Catholic spirit of many highranking English officials in the mid 1800s even after the repeal of the most onerous of these laws in the 1820s. It was to these officials that the brilliant American Catholic Orestes Brownson directed his statement at the head of this article. Thus the question upon which this article proposes to shed some light: How did Catholic Ireland, savior of civilization, hearth of vibrant monasticism, exporter of saints and scholars, come to this woeful fate? If she had simply fallen victim to a foreign power in simple military conflict, then no mystery would there be. Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, all of Cappadocia and Northern Africa for that matter, and so many other lands historically significant to the Catholic Faith had gone that unfortunate route. But Ireland’s story is frustratingly and tragically different. For she was not merely conquered by her erstwhile neighbor; as a matter of historical fact, the pope himself handed Ireland over to the English king. And that for the purpose of its spiritual and moral rejuvenation! Oops. So Ireland’s is a tale among other things of good intentions gone awry. What follows is a brief summary of that story from the 400s to the late 1600s; from Ireland’s baptism into the Catholic Faith to the “Flight of the Wild Geese” and the eviction of the last Catholic king and the Catholic nobility with all of its unhappy consequences.4 As the religious and political struggles between Ireland and England are so inextricably interlinked we shall examine both as we unearth the origins and history of the Passion of Ireland. Island of Saints and Scholars And in that flash I remembered that the men of this island had once gone forth, not with the torches of conquerors or destroyers, but as missionaries G.K. Chesterton, Irish Impressions (Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2002), p.109. Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1995). The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. “Ireland.” 4 A look at the map of Ireland today reveals an island unnaturally cloven–the eventual geographic outcome of the ongoing battle between Great Britain and the Irish nationalists. 1 2 3  in the very midnight of the Dark Ages; like a multitude of moving candles, that were the light of the world.–G.K. Chesterton, 1919  Although many speak of the “fall” of Rome, the term exceeds the reality. Rome’s decline occurred over centuries and was for the most part an internal affair. But as the core of Roman government rotted away, so too did its grip on the lands that once wrapped around the Mediterranean and across the English Channel to the south of modern Scotland. Slowly, leprosy-like, and of necessity, small areas became self-dependent and cut off from the central government and the treasures of civilization they had once known. Men, focused presently on survival, lost the leisure time provided by the protection and predictability of the old Empire. A steady degrading of all of the finer aspects of civilization followed, including primarily literacy and the production of “books.” This was the Dark Ages. Around the year 400, just as the Roman Empire was losing its grip on Britain, a 16-year-old boy was taken captive from that land and sent into slavery in Ireland. He worked–appropriately, it would turn out–as a shepherd for a local chieftain. Although raised Catholic, St. Patrick never seriously practiced his Faith. While tending the sheep, however, he was awakened by God to sincere reflection on spiritual matters, and as he relates in his autobiography, The love and fear of God more and more inflamed my heart; my faith enlarged and my spirit augmented, so that I said a hundred prayers by day and almost as many by night. After six or seven years of slavery, St. Patrick escaped, fully imbibed with the spirit of the Irish and the Catholic Faith. He proceeded to study at Lerins and Auxerre in Gaul (modern France) for about 15 years, all the while exercising his duties as a deacon. In 432 he finally received the opportunity to fulfill a vision he had had after leaving Ireland, wherein God called him to return to spread the Faith in the land of his former masters. Consecrated a bishop en route, St. Patrick set upon his mission with gusto. It is a myth to say that all of Ireland was pagan before the coming of St. Patrick, and all of it was Catholic thereafter. Indeed, St. Patrick was preceded by Palladius, who, the year before, was sent by Pope Chesterton, Irish Impressions, p.125. Hilaire Belloc supplies an excellent analysis of the events surrounding the demise of Rome and the historiography surrounding it. Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1992).  “Scripts” is a better term here as bound books as we understand them were an invention of the Medieval Period. See Regine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages, tr. by Anne Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000).  Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race (New York: The Devin–Adair Co., 1975), p.110.  Celestine “to the Scots [i.e., the Irish] that believed in Christ, to be their first bishop.” However, without question, St. Patrick set Ireland irresistibly on the path to becoming a wholly Catholic island. Curiously, Ireland converted without bloodshed. There was no martyrdom in store for St. Patrick or those who came after. No other nation can claim to have received the Gospel with docility surpassing the Irish. And by the late 400s the Catholic Faith in Ireland was secure. But, like the desert Fathers before them, there was early a concern among certain devout Catholics in Ireland about the Faith coming too easy in this newly baptized land. In Roman times, when the persecutions ceased, many early Christians, disappointed that they could not drip blood for Christ, sought other means of sacrifice. In Egypt especially, some took to the desert as hermits, seeking the maximum of self-abnegation, including the sacrifice of human society. Possibly in imitation of these desert Fathers (to whose stories they had access), the Irish followed suit. It was termed a green martyrdom as opposed to the red martyrdom of physical death. Starting in the late 400s and early 500s, many Irish renounced the world and went to live in caves and rock crevices throughout the land. There they prayed and eked out a living in isolation.10 Human nature, however, is universal. And just as the common people in Egypt and elsewhere sought out the desert Fathers for their wisdom and spiritual guidance, the Irish hermits were unable to flee their fellows for long. Hermitages, morphed into monasteries, became self-sufficient population centers, and monasteries became the centers of intellectual activity throughout the island. In these monasteries, along with their religious duties, the monks set about the task of copying scripts. Thus, while the light of literacy dimmed throughout western Europe, it thrived on the Emerald Isle at the hands of humble monks. While schools and libraries across the continent disappeared, working in the scriptoria or in the yards around the monastery, the monks of Ireland rewrote the books of the ancient world, both secular and religious, and saved these gems of civilization for their own and later generations. As if to add a personal touch, many of these books they adorned with detailed and densely evocative illuminations; the most famous undoubtedly being the Book of Kells, likely11 from  Although Palladius met with little success and died a couple of years later, his commission makes clear the pre-existence of Catholics in Ireland. Fr. John Laux, Church History (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1989), p.178. 10 Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, pp.151-155 11 The monastery of origin of the Book of Kells is not absolutely certain, though Iona is probable.  www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008  the monastery on the island of Iona off the western coast of Scotland (see The Angelus, Oct. 2003). The monastery at Iona itself was founded by the great Irish missionary St. Columcille (also known as Columba) in 563 after he had already established over 40 others throughout Ireland. From there, he would set about the conversion of the entirety of Scotland. Next came the lands that had formed the great Roman Empire. Out of Irish monasteries, missionary saints ranged all over western Europe. While St. Augustine of Canterbury (a Roman) saw to the conversion of southwest England, the northern portion of that land was evangelized by the Irish missionaries, most notably by St. Aidan of Lindisfarne, operating from Iona. Sts. Columba and Gall, meantime, rankled local bishops and civil leaders, but they and their followers also founded monasteries throughout present-day France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. Whether St. Brendan sailed to the America’s in the 600s or no, his cohorts certainly went as far as Iceland.12 Untold numbers of souls discovered the Gospel of Our lord Jesus Christ at the hands of these hardy and saintly souls. To the people of western Europe, Ireland had emerged from a land of barbarism and marauding slavers to the intellectual pinnacle of the western world. Prospective scholars flocked to her monasteries and schools from across the continent to gain an education. Once Charlemagne restored order and a strong empire to the mainland in the late 700s, Ireland in turn sent many of her own scholars back to play their part in the impressive if ephemeral Carolingian Renaissance. Even the most heralded scholar of Charlemagne’s time, Alcuin, the leader of the Palatine School, was a monk from an Irish monastery in Britain. Finally, by the 800s, all across western Europe monks and others in monasteries and schools of Irish extraction were copying and discussing the books of the ages with the ideas that could now safely be considered immortal. Thusly did Ireland earn the moniker “Island of Saints and Scholars.” Devastation of the Vineyard –the Viking Invasion At the end of the eighth century and beginning of the ninth, Viking hordes crashed upon the shores and the riverways of Charlemagne’s Empire, of Britain, and of Ireland (not to mention virtually everywhere else in Europe) almost simultaneously. Ireland’s golden age was doomed. Preserved for centuries from the destructiveness of war and barbarian intrusion, she was to feel the wrath of 12 Warren Carroll, The Building of Christendom (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 1987), pp.180-181. THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org 200 years of merciless amphibious Viking assaults which were eventually followed by invasion and settlement. Iona, by way of example, was attacked first in 794; it was put to the torch in 802; rebuilt, it was attacked again in 806 at which time the Vikings slaughtered 68 of its inhabitants. Finally, like many other coastal and island communities, the members moved inland; in this case to Kells, taking the famous illuminated codex to the place from which it gets its name.13 Iona’s story was repeated throughout Ireland. For over 50 years, every Irish monastery close to water felt the fury of the Norwegian boatmen. While the Vikings settled down and formed Ireland’s first cities, including Dublin, in the late 800s, another breed of Vikings, the Danes, commenced a new series of brutal raids that lasted through the first half of the tenth century. Eventually, these invaders also settled down. In time, the Vikings adopted the Irish tongue and the Irish adopted Viking shipbuilding and trading practices. In short, after threatening its utter destruction, the Vikings were amalgamated into Irish society. Unfortunately, this assimilation involved their engagement in the historic dynastic disputes among the clans of Ireland as well. It must be understood that Ireland, much like the rest of Europe at this time, was highly decentralized politically. Although there was a High King of Tara who theoretically had authority over the island, his power was imaginary and his position symbolic. So while the people of the island increasingly identified themselves as Irish, they gave loyalty not to an Irish king or an Irish state but to their local king and clan. This fragmentation not only led to inner-island squabbles, but it thwarted unified Irish efforts against foreign foes for the entire time frame of this article. Enter Brian Boru. A determined, wise, and courageous king from Munster, through a phenomenal series of alliances, sieges, and successful battles, Boru finally gained the military submission of all of the Vikings at the turn of the millennium. At the same time he conquered the multitudinous feuding Irish chieftains and proclaimed himself “Emperor of the Irish.” He was the last Irishman to ever make any such claim with any legitimacy. Unfortunately, at the famous Battle of Clontarf in 1014–a victory for Brian and his forces against some local Irish clans who rejected his kingship–he, his son, and his grandson were killed. The united and free Irish kingdom lasted one decade. In its wake came 150 years of internecine warfare among the clans of Ireland, all vying for the high kingship in the style of Brian Boru. Traditionally, the dark years of plunder and warfare during the Viking onslaught, combined with the civil wars that followed, have been blamed for 13 R.F. Foster, ed., Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, pp.31-38.  the disintegration of the holy citadel that Ireland had been. On the other hand, some scholars of late suggest that the problems of the Irish church and society (to be described below) that manifested themselves to the resurgent Church of the High Middle Ages originated much earlier, even during the golden age of the Emerald Isle. They suggest that the Irish Church was always the black sheep, flying, full of warts, under the radar for centuries while the Church on the continent dealt with troubles there. Whatever the case, the Viking invasions destroyed the momentum that the Irish built up since the time of St. Patrick. Ireland lost her cultural and spiritual leadership role amidst the plunder and rapine; her guiding light was smothered by the smoke of centuries of war. But this was not all. Ireland’s Church had not only fallen from her post up front, she arguably had fallen into de facto schism. The origins of this situation run deep. When the Church organized its hierarchy on the continent they followed the civil organization that had pre-existed in the Roman Empire. In other words, the archbishoprics were in the big cities, bishoprics in the smaller, and so forth, and all maintained some contact with Rome. A degree of uniformity of development, teaching, and practice was ensured by this arrangement. As we have seen, however, Ireland had no cities until the coming of the Vikings and after the fall of the Roman Empire, when Ireland was first baptized, little contact with Rome. Because political power rested with the multitudes of clans, there was no significant central power around which to develop a diocesan system and the normal hierarchy. Instead, the population grew around the monasteries, and consequently, the abbots who led them had tremendous power; the bishops, whose jurisdiction remained cloudy, much less. When cut off from the continent and Rome, this situation lent itself to a unique divergence in maturation14 and eventually to serious abuse. The civil wars among the various clan leaders took advantage of the former to maximize the latter. To illustrate the consequences, we have a most noteworthy chronicler who detailed the scene in Ireland at this time. 14 The Synod of Whitby (664 AD) epitomizes the differences that emerged early on between the culture of the Church in Ireland and that on the continent. When St. Augustine of Canterbury’s successors (of Roman/ continental origin) ran into the Irish monks while evangelizing England from opposite directions, they found that they had a number of different practices that needed to be reconciled. In order to relieve the confusion that had arisen primarily from the different means of calculating the feast of Easter, they met in council and decided it was safer to follow the successors of St. Peter instead of St. Columba. Even so, Colman, the leader of the Irish monks, sped off with 30 or more of his monks and refused to acknowledge the verdict. It took over a century for all of England and Ireland to fall in line with Rome. See Laux, Church History, pp.212-213. St. Malachy O’More (perhaps most famous now for his papal prophecies), the great archbishop of St. Patrick’s former see of Armagh, arrived at legendary Clairvaux in 1139 to pay his respects to St. Bernard. He was on his way to Rome to report on the status of the Church in Ireland and to seek approval for some of his reforms and appointments there. His story was a tale of woe. After the death of Brian Boru, when the civil wars tore apart Ireland during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the local chieftains (kings) consolidated their provincial power. As St. Malachy was to relate: In many cases the local king took over the churches and their revenues; they installed their own bishops and abbots at will; hereditary succession (among bishops and abbots who were married laymen!) was the rule in many places, including eight generations in Armagh itself prior to St. Malachy’s immediate predecessor; simony and corrupt bishops without sees were common occurrences; abbots ruled over bishops; and many of the sacraments were administered improperly. By the end of a century and a half of civil war, the Island of Saints and Scholars was adrift in a sea of corruption.15 Introduction of the English –the Norman Invasion I’ve learned all my life, cruel England to blame So now I’m a part of the Patriot Game. –Dominic Behan16 Most all of Irish descent (and all in Ireland proper) have been catechized on the historic cruelty of the English landlords and government toward the Irish. But how did the English become involved in Ireland in the first place? How did they come into possession of the land such that they could so mishandle the people upon it? The answer lies in a conspiracy of the political and religious events on the Emerald Isle that we have just related. For the religious problems of Ireland cried out for resolution. The answer came, sadly as things would turn out, from across the Irish Sea. As a human instrument the Church has had periods of great success in her monumental mission and periods of scandal and decadence. In the case of the latter, almost without fail, the monasteries have been the leaven of reform that pulls the Church back into focus and reinvigorates its members. The ninth and tenth centuries were not just bad for Ireland, but for the Church as a whole. The papacy lived through the period known as its “Iron Age,” where simony, murder, and state interference ruled Warren Carroll, The Glory of Christendom (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 1993), p.50. The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Ireland.” 16 From the Song “The Patriot Game” by Dominic Behan. 15 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008  the day. One pope, Formosus, had his body dug up, dressed up, tried, and finally condemned to an unadorned grave–by his successor, Pope Stephen VII. But Formosus got the last laugh, if laughter could overcome the shame, when Stephen was chained and strangled to death while Formosus’ corpse was resurrected for yet another burial, this time with solemn rites.17 Onto such a scene burst the monastery of Cluny, founded in 910, to meet the challenge thus posed by the decaying institutions around her. As Dom Gueranger wrote, “there alone could be found zeal for the liberty of the Church, and the genuine traditions of monastic life. It was there that…God had been secretly providing for the regeneration of Christian morals.”18 In short order, over 2,000 abbeys across Europe were affiliated with Cluny. From these monasteries arose Hildebrand, the future Pope St. Gregory VII, the greatest reformer of the Church of his day. Much as the Irish monasteries brought light to the Dark Ages, Cluny was to bring the same to the Iron Ages. During and shortly after Gregory’s reign the Carthusians (1084) and Cistercians (1098) also came into existence full of the spirit of reform. The Cistercians first house was at Citeaux, where they formed as an offshoot of the Cluny family. Drawn by the austerity practiced there, it was to Citeaux that St. Bernard and his compatriots applied for admission in 1112. Within a few years St. Bernard founded a daughterhouse of Citeaux at Clairvaux or “valley of light.” It was the turn of the continent to bring light to Ireland. Clairvaux would be the staging area. St. Malachy and his predecessor as Archbishop of Armagh, St. Celsus, had spent decades attempting to reverse the scandalous activities of churchman and chieftain in Ireland. In 1139, St. Malachy visited both St. Bernard and Pope Innocent II. When Malachy arrived at Clairvaux, he was so taken in that he even requested entrance to the order. But the pope refused; he wanted Malachy to remain where he was, continuing his indispensable, if grueling, work of reform. Malachy left behind some of his coterie, however, and shortly thereafter, they returned to Ireland to begin the founding of the Cistercian monasteries that would soon bespeckle the Irish landscape. But this was not all that the papacy had in store for righting the ship of Ireland. By 1155, word had arrived in Rome of the defects in the Irish Church not just from St. Malachy, but other sources as well, including John of Salisbury, the secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury. John reiterated and amplified all of the horrors described by St. Malachy, the likes of which continued in spite of the heroic efforts of Saint Gregory VII: Pope, in the Notre Dame Series of the Lives of the Saints (London, Sands & Co., 1921), p.16. 18 Ibid. p.22. 17 THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org the latter, who had died in 1148. In consequence, the new pope, Adrian IV, the only English pope in the history of the Church, determined that greater effort had to be made to bring about the Gregorian reforms in Ireland. To accomplish his goals, he turned over Ireland to the English king Henry II. “With a view to...restraining the downward course of vice, correcting evil customs and planting virtue, and for the increase of the Christian religion, you shall enter that island and execute whatsoever may tend to the honour of God and the welfare of the land,” declared the Papal Bull Laudabiliter to King Henry. Significantly, the king was also expected to preserve “the rights of the churches…whole and inviolate.”19 Since for centuries the papacy claimed Ireland as her own, and the Irish in general acknowledged the same, in a concrete, if distant and formerly inconsequential way, there was no question of the pope’s authority to make this land a fiefdom of Henry’s. The consequences would prove tragic. In the meantime, the religious portion of the conspiracy of circumstances that brought England to Ireland had played out. By 1169 it was time for the political part to come into play. Ever since the renowned Brian Boru ascended to the kingship of Ireland by violence at the turn of the 1000s, Ireland had been ravaged by wars among the chieftains in search of the same position.20 These ugly, vicious, fratricidal wars generally stayed in house. Until 1169. Prior to that fateful year–17 years before, in fact–a war had erupted between the Irish High King Rory O’Connor and the Irish King of Leinster (southeastern Ireland), Dermot Macmurrough. Macmurrough was by all accounts a violent man and treacherous leader. In 1152 he dragged off and raped the wife of another provincial leader, thus setting the present conflict in motion. By the mid 1160s Macmurrough had been thoroughly routed and banished from the country. He fled to England and implored the aid of Henry II. So, in 1169 Timothy O’Donnell. Swords Around the Cross: The Nine Years War (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 1987), p.15. 20 It should be remembered here and for all the time period with which this essay deals that while culturally, religiously and ethnically united, the isle of Ireland was not politically one. As Metternich would famously say of Italy in the 1800s, Ireland was merely “a geographic expression.” It was in many ways like a fractured mirror where each shard of glass is concerned primarily with its own well-being. All of Europe was this way in the Middle Ages, but as nation-states developed on the continent under stronger central leadership, Ireland remained as disunited as ever. Her lack of unity, as we shall see, would contribute heavily to England’s ability to align herself with one Irish chieftain against another to the eventual misfortune of the entire island. Even the vaunted hero of Irish resistance to English rule, Hugh O’Neill, whom we shall meet later, sided with the English against the Irish of Munster prior to his own revolution. Ultimately, the splintered nature of the Irish political arrangement would lead to her repeated military failure. On the other hand, it can be argued that this same disunity made it more difficult for England to conquer the island in one fell swoop because there was no single central authority that they could defeat! 19  began the Anglo-Norman (called Norman because the Normans21 had recently conquered Britain) Invasion.22 Thus we see completed the very pinnacle of historical irony. The Irish Catholics who have suffered so horribly at the hands of the English, upon consulting their history, will find that the English entrance into Ireland came at the behest of an Irish king and a Catholic Pope! The initial English assault by a small band of knights and archers caught the Irish by surprise, as they had never witnessed the use of military armor or archery. The next year the Earl of Pembroke, Richard de Clare (or Strongbow) arrived to complete the mission. (In return for his efforts Strongbow had been promised by Macmurrough the kingship of Leinster upon MacMurrough’s death, thus consummating the English conquest of Irish land.) Soon after King Henry arrived on the Emerald Isle in person the next year (1171), almost every king on the island, including the High King Rory O’Connor, granted him submission and fealty. Only the kings of Tyrone and Tyrconnell23 in the northern province of Ulster held out. The next year, at the Council of Cashel, the Irish Catholic hierarchy acknowledged Henry’s position as lord of Ireland and confirmed the existence of the various ills that he was come to correct. The English were in Ireland to stay. It would not be a happy stay as evidence immediately made clear. Several times in the history of English-Irish relations the leaders of Ireland have consented to a decision that they quickly regretted. Each time it has led to further violence. It happened when the Irish Parliament declared Henry VIII king of Ireland in 1541; it occurred in the 20th century when they agreed to the dismemberment of Ireland and the creation of the Irish Free State;24 it happened here in 1172. Several united chieftains resumed arms, and within three years the English King Henry was coaxed into signing the Treaty of Windsor according to which over 80% of Ireland was under the symbolic overlordship of High King Rory O’Connor (although he was subject to Henry), and the rest left directly in English hands and run by English authorities. Over the course of the next two centuries the English followed a policy of expanding their direct holdings in Ireland while the Irish opposed this intrusion, each chieftain in his own way and to his own particular extent. The English strategy consisted of three major tactics: encastlement, enfeoffdom, and colonization. The first referred to the classic Norman policy of building castles as an offensive military maneuver. The second referred to forcing the Irish “nobles” to submit to a continental form of feudalism with the English king at the top of the pyramid, and the third to the importation of foreigners, usually Scots or English to do the work of peasants or artisans alongside the newly enserfed native Irish. These tactics met with fairly peaceful success through the reign and until the death of King John in 1216. But events would turn in the favor of the Irish by mid-century. To dramatically oversimplify, conflict resumed between the Irish and the English, between the English and the English, between the Irish and the Irish, and amongst all kinds of combinations of the two. In addition, the English colonists and nobles often found themselves at odds with the English crown. Among the native Irish, at various times a sort of primitive nationalism flared up, at others it was subdued to political and economic ambition or prudence. Perhaps the most famous campaign occurred when Edward Bruce, brother of the famous Scottish king Robert Bruce, joined the fray in 1315, taking as his title, “King of Ireland.” His effort to bring independence to Ireland (as his brother eventually brought to Scotland) died with him in battle in 1318.25 But by this time the tide of the conflict had clearly turned and momentum shifted back to the Irish. 26 For while the battles raged intermittently across the countryside, the Irish were conquering the English by assimilation, much as they had the Vikings before them. Although at first the Norman-English invaders despised the Irish culture, language, and traditions, they came in time to accept them as their own. Through intermarriage, fostering (the nursing of another’s child, which thus resulted in foster-siblings), and Gossipred (“the relationship forged by standing Godparent at a baptism”),27 the two races became united in all but ancient origin. Many of the great English nobles altered their names to an Irish form as if to give symbol to the convergence of manners, customs, and general culture. So revolting were these circumstances to the more chauvinistic English, the Kilkenny Parliament, at the urging of the son and lieutenant of the English King Edward, passed statutes in 1366 bemoaning the fact that the English in Ireland had discarded “the English tongue, manners, style of riding, laws Normans were Vikings or Norsemen who had settled in France in what is called Normandy. The famous Norman Invasion of England (led by William the Conqueror) that culminated in the successful Battle of Hastings in 1066 marked the last time that England was conquered by a foreign invader. 22 MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race, pp.321-323 23 The forerunners of the O’Donnell and O’Neill whom we will meet later. 24 Recently popularized in the movie Michael Collins. 25 21 It should be noted that while the Irish king O’Neill invited Bruce, many of his fellow Irish kings rejected and even actively opposed him on the battlefield, seeing him as merely another foreign intruder. The Irish Annals of 1318 speak of Bruce as “the destroyer of Ireland in general” and verily rejoice in his death and its benefits for Ireland. Peter Neville, A Traveller’s History of Ireland (New York: Interlink Books, 1993), pp.6468. 26 Foster, Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, pp.60-96. 27 Ibid., p.80. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 10 and usages,” all the while taking up Irish variations of the same, all to the exaltation of their “Irish enemies,” and “contrary to reason.” In an effort to retard these developments, intermarriage with the Irish, Gossipred, and fosterage were made illegal, as were Irish minstrels (or bards), Irish law and judges, and just about anything else smacking of Irish culture. If the temporal punishment was insufficient, the English Bishops, who systematically replaced the Irish-born in those areas under direct English G France, and the War of the Roses (1455-1487), a civil war between competing claimants to the throne. During that period, King Richard II alone among her monarchs went to Ireland to try to pacify that beleaguered island. He failed. No one else could overcome the distractions long enough to try. In the meantime, by assimilation and conquest, and by simply swallowing up the lands from which the English colonists retreated and from which the English rulers were absent,30 the31Irish chieftains reat Britain is the main stay of the enemies of God and his Christ; she is drunk with the blood of martyrs; and in the approaching contest [with Irish and English Catholics suffering from her persecution] the prayers of two hundred millions of Catholics throughout the world will daily and hourly ascend for their defeat. Of English descent, a warm admirer of many traits in the character of Englishmen, speaking the English language for our mother tongue, and nurtured from early childhood in English literature, we have personally no hostility to England,.. but we cannot deny that we should not grieve to see her humbled, for till she is humbled we cannot hope to see her return to the bosom of Catholic unity. She is and has been the bulwark of the Protestant rebellion against the church, and of all the nations that broke the unity of faith and discipline in the 16th century she has been the most cruel and barbarous in her treatment of Catholics. How, then, should we grieve to see her weeping in sackcloth and ashes her apostasy and cruelty to the people of God? Sorry are we that she needs punishment, but since need it she does, we cannot be sorry to see it inflicted, and warmer sympathy than ours she need expect from no Catholic heart. These prayers of Catholics she may, indeed, make light of, but they will not ascend in vain. They will be heard in heaven. Not nations any more than individuals can always go on sinning with impunity. (Orestes Brownson)31 control, declared excommunication on those who failed to comply with the law. 28 To a large extent, the Statutes of 1366 made law the discriminatory policies that English authorities had desired in Ireland long beforehand as a means of civilizing that land.29 The pope tried to intervene with the English king Edward to bring fairness and justice to Ireland, but alas, to no avail. Out of necessity then the Irish took matters into their own hands, taking advantage of the conflicts that diverted the attention of the English. For throughout the 14th and 15th centuries England was awash in two epic wars; the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) with MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race, pp.338-339. The Statutes proved ineffective as fraternization and assimilation continued apace. Neville, p.72. 29 Fifty years earlier, in 1317, a number of Irish kings made their famous “Remonstrance” to the man whom they all recognized as the final authority in Ireland, the pope; in this case, John XXII. They complained of the duplicity of the law as enforced by the English “civilizers.” They spoke of the murder of an Irishman being cause for celebration among the English authorities, even the clergy, proportional to the eminence of the victim. MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race, p.331 28 The ANgeluS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org regained their sway. By the time Henry Tudor, the victor in the War of the Roses, acceded to the throne of England, so reduced was the power of the English authorities that they were compelled to resort to bribing the Irish chieftains (what were called “blackrents”) in exchange for peace. Direct English authority remained only over the area (of approximately 1,000 square miles) surrounding Dublin, on the east coast. In retreat, the English had built a defensive rampart around this area, which came to be known as the Pale. Outside the Pale, Ireland, fractured as ever, was effectively ruled by 60 chiefs of Irish descent and 30 of English descent, the English–commonly referred to as Anglo-Irish– having been greatly assimilated.32 In the meantime, arguably in spite of the English and the Bull Laudabiliter, the monasteries in Gaelic By 1360, 80% of English landholders in Ireland were absentee landlords. Neville, A Traveller’s History of Ireland, p.71 Orestes Brownson, Brownson’s Quarterly Review ( Jan., 1853). Orestes Brownson Society, Louisville, KY, www.orestesbrownson.com. 32 Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Ireland.” 30 31 11 (as opposed to English-Norman) Ireland sprung up in force. The years 1420-1530 witnessed about 100 new religious foundations (Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans) sprout up across the Emerald Isle, but almost exclusively in those areas where the English and the English bishops held no sway.33 So, while England generally failed in its role of reviving Faith and reforming the Church in Ireland, the monks from the continent were actually doing the job. A King for Ireland–the Anglican Invasion and Irish counterrevolution (1500-1695) The Catholic, reading his history…notes the keenness of the fight [when the new Anglican religion was foisted upon the English people] in England and its long endurance....Ultimately he sees the great nobles and merchants victorious and the people cut off, apparently forever, from the life by which they had lived, the food upon which they had fed. Side by side with all this he notes that, next to Britain, one land only that was never Roman land, by an accident inexplicable or miraculous, preserves the Faith, and, as Britain is lost, he sees side by side with that loss the preservation of Ireland. (Hilaire Belloc, 1920)34 By 1485 when the Tudors had come to reign over England as kings and Ireland (at least in theory) as lords, Ireland’s difficulties with English authorities were mainly political, resulting from English antipathy toward Irish ways and their efforts at subduing the island. The next 200 years would witness the conflation of this conflict with the sectarian struggle with which we are familiar to this day. It should be remembered that Laudabiliter had two principle objectives for Ireland: the restoration of civil order and promotion of the Catholic religion. The Pope’s Bull implied both a political and a religious dimension, and so the relation between England and Ireland would be a twodimensional affair. No religious reform was ever speculated upon without a concomitant political conquest. Unfortunately, in practice the latter required Irish acquiescence to the imposition of a foreign culture under foreign rule upon a people with a proud and storied heritage–in short, it begged for the violent response we have seen above. The religious prerogative arguably should not have been disastrous since the same Faith was common to both parties. Moreover, when England first subjugated portions of Ireland politically, not only were both Catholic, but with the rest of Christendom they could not even fathom a world that was not 33 34 Foster, Oxford Illustrated History, pp.97-100. Belloc, Europe and the Faith, p.14 integrally and exclusively so. To the extent that religious friction existed, as we have seen, it was more a result of personnel disputes and ethnic rivalry as English clergy replaced the native-born, and human jealousies and prejudices encroached (as they always do) on the divine mission. Among fallible men, such squabbling must have been expected; but no one could have anticipated the cleaving of the papally appointed promoters of the Faith (the English government) from that very Faith and its catastrophic consequences. When high astride the English throne, Henry VIII betrayed Mother Church and commenced the Anglican schism, demanding that all of his subjects, Irish as well as English, accept him as the head of the Church,35 he plunged the loyal Catholics of Ireland (whether Gaelic or Anglo-Irish) into centuries of “war and death, plundering and pillage,”36 famine, eviction, and privation of every sort. Never content to accept foreign domination in the first place, Ireland’s revolt against and revulsion to political suppression gained added urgency with the introduction of this religious division. Ireland’s society and sovereignty had long been under siege; as of the 16th century so too was her soul. If she had suffered since the English invasion, Ireland was now to be martyred for Jesus Christ and His holy Church at the hands initially of the English Judas-king and the interests of royal power, and later those of the reigning oligarchs of England. But her fate was not immediately decided; her submission to this foreign horde did not come without a fight. The decision was 150 years in the making. Four major wars led by Irish nobles and kings between 1575 and 1691 crowned the undying efforts of the Irish peasantry to maintain the Faith in the face of their oppressors and all the machinery of the English government. For 150 years, individuals, parishes, clans, and the Emerald Isle as a practical whole, unsheathed their respective swords in defense of home and religion against the violent onslaught of the impostor Anglican intruders. As noted above, the new state of affairs commenced in 1534 when Henry VIII had himself proclaimed head of the Church of England. As with all of the Protestant “reformer” kings and princes on the continent, among his first acts was to ban the religious orders, shut down the monasteries, and confiscate Church lands in England. He required an Oath of Allegiance to himself of all other clerics and quickly substituted his own hierarchy for those who remained loyal to the Pope. Martyrdom was in store for St. John Fischer (the only bishop who refused Since there was no notion of religious freedom at this time, Christian subjects were to have the same religion as their king. Consequently, Henry’s apostasy meant all Englishmen were to either follow him into error or face persecution. 36 From the song “Four Green Fields” by Tommy Makem. 35 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 12 the oath), St. Thomas More, and many others, but the gradual extension of the new religious order in England continued inexorably. Henry planned the same routine in Ireland. Shockingly, he almost succeeded. The motivations behind Henry’s schism are well known. The inspiration behind an Irish parliament’s decision to make the schismatic Henry their official king on the other hand is baffling. And yet, in 1541, in a startling sacrifice of Faith to political expediency, the ruler of England was raised up from his status as lord over Ireland to its king. This decision is most onerous in light of the prevailing law of nations in Europe at that time, which was concisely summed up in the soon to be coined phrase, cuius regio, eius religio–“whose rule, his religion.” In other words the religion of the king is the religion of the land. Ireland seemed poised to be a repeat performance of what had occurred in England with the imposition of Anglicanism and its so-called reforms. But it was not to be. Almost immediately, the kings and people of Ireland effectively reversed their parliament’s decision and rejected Henry’s kingship and his attempted reforms. Refusal to take the Oath of Allegiance was nearly universal. While the bishops of England quickly traded allegiance to the Church of Christ for the Church of Henry VIII, the bishops of Ireland and their faithful as quickly smelled the rat and evicted him from their house. Anglican bishops who attempted to replace the legitimate Catholic prelates were sent scurrying for their lives. Meanwhile, having closed all the Catholic monasteries in Ireland (at least those within his grasp) and stolen their land, Henry attempted to buy support from the Irish with his loot as he had in England; but almost without exception they snubbed the offer, refusing to trade their souls for sacrilegiously begotten land. By standing for the True Faith, by rejecting the errors of their new English king, the Irish had placed themselves in a state of de facto rebellion. The unrelenting force of the monarchy was to bear down on them as a consequence. But not yet. The reign of Henry VIII initiated, but did not effectively implant Anglicanism in Ireland. That was left to his daughter, Elizabeth I, whose reign lasted from 1558 through 1603. However, in Henry’s time, two major steps were taken in the enduring efforts at conquest of the island. The first was the eviction of the religious orders and the theft of their land, the doling out of which to the rich of England (the Irish, as we have seen, having rejected the offer) resulted in a new group of landholders in Ireland beholden to the English throne. It was the beginning of the decline of the Irish Catholic landholder.37 The 37 In the ensuing centuries, percentage of land in Ireland owned by Catholics would be reduced to seven. THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org second was his policy of “surrender and regrant,” begun in 1541. According to this policy, Irish “kings” promised loyalty to the English monarch and surrendered their centuries-long contests with the monarch over ownership of their land in return for “officially recognized” control of that land and an English title (usually Earl of whatever). On the whole and in spite of these efforts, however, the rule of Henry witnessed the general recession of English sway over the affairs of Ireland. By the time Elizabeth came to the throne (1558), the Anglican religion was practically unknown in Ireland, and the English government had virtually no say over the overwhelming majority of the land. In the next century and a half, English efforts to impose their new religion (Anglicanism when the monarchs ruled, Puritanism during the Cromwellian dictatorship) and to compel Irish acquiescence to their rule intensified. Their vigor was matched by that of the Irish (again, both native and Anglo-Irish) in opposition to those goals. The Irish resisted the English onslaught in four major wars between 1575 and 1691. In these conflicts, freedom for the True Church and True Faith topped every list of Irish demands, eventually followed by self-determination for the island. And in spite of the ancient Bull, Laudabiliter, which placed Ireland under English rule in the first place, demand for self-determination did not contradict any Catholic obligations to honor the legitimate rulers. For in 1570 Pope St. Pius V issued his Bull, Regnans in excelsis, excommunicating Queen Elizabeth. This act of its very nature, and as explicitly stated in its text, freed all of the queen’s Catholic subjects from any loyalty they formerly owed to her. Thus, after 400 years the English lost the papal sanction of their efforts in Ireland. Pius V’s bull of excommunication left Laudabiliter obsolete. On the other hand, with this act of excommunication as its greatest impetus, the monarchs of England came to see a conspiracy to overthrow them beneath every priest’s cassock and inside every loyal Catholic’s cupboards. As determined as the Irish were to maintain the True religion, then, the English government was determined to snuff it out–as a matter of unity and self-aggrandizement, but also of self-preservation.38 Swords first clashed in 1579 in Munster. The Geraldine Uprising (aka Desmond War) started in the southwest of Ireland and continued through four years. Fighting, “not against the lawful scepter and honorable throne of England, but against a tyrant who refuses to hear Christ speaking through His Vicar,”39 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald inspired his The uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot, an effort by some over-zealous Catholics to blow up the king and Parliament, in 1605 only further exacerbated the situation of distrust followed by repression. 39 Warren Carroll, The Cleaving of Christendom (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2000), p.242. 38 13 growing band with unmatched personal bravery and the cry of “Papa Abu!” (the Pope to victory!). As usual, the rebellion was hampered by a lack of unity among the Irish clans, chieftains and nobles, which contributed to its remaining only a provincial affair. Fitzmaurice’s untimely death in battle in 1580 hurt the effort further, but the rebellion continued under the leadership of the Earl of Desmond. When he too was hunted down and killed in 1583, the papal crusade died. Munster was laid waste. Illustrative of the chronic disunity among the Irish was the fact that one of the principal allies of the British in the Geraldine Uprising was Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone. This chief from the northern part of the island would see the light, and along with the spirited Red Hugh O’Donnell40 he led another uprising in the 1590s. During the Nine Years’ War, as it came to be known, the two Hughs swept across the isle, inspiring and almost miraculously uniting their countrymen. With Spanish aid in the form of supplies and eventually troops (albeit too little, too late, and far short of expectations) the united Irish effort secured victory after victory and dominance on the island until finally it too fell, exhausted in 1603. The terms of peace, however, were happy ones in at least one sense. The English guaranteed to the Irish free practice of the Catholic Faith. Prospects seemed ever happier when the treacherous Queen Elizabeth died and brought an end to the Tudor dynasty. The new Stuart king, James I, buoyed Catholic hopes in Ireland with his sympathetic words and pacific actions. Within two years, however he donned the cloak of his predecessors and shot his lance through the hearts and hopes of the Irish Catholics. On September 28, 1605, James officially proclaimed: We hereby make known to our subjects in Ireland that no toleration shall ever be granted by us. This we do for the purpose of cutting off all hope that any other religion shall be allowed, save that which is in consonant to the laws and statutes of this realm.41 English magistrates in Ireland proceeded to enforce this decree with rapacious, vengeful glee, imprisoning and torturing multitudes, while stealing valuables on bogus pretexts. The terms of the peace of Melifont having been defied and their security seriously jeopardized, a number of Irish nobles, particularly Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell (Red Hugh’s younger brother and successor), fled to the continent for their lives, with hopes of an eventual return. The event came to be known as the Flight of the Earls. The Earls never returned but died and Red Hugh was the charismatic 20 year-old heir to the chiefdom of the O’Donnell clan at the outset of the Nine Years’ War. He apparently fulfilled the prophecy of St. Columcille who spoke of a glorious, pure, exalted and god-like prince who would be king for nine years. Indeed, Red Hugh died nine years after his accession. O’Donnell, Swords Around the Cross, pp.34-35. 41 Quoted in O’Donnell, Swords Around the Cross, p.255. 40 were buried in Rome where they had lived in exile, having sacrificed all for their beloved Faith. Again, in the 1640s, the Irish made an effort to regain control of their island. By this time, the English had confiscated even more Irish land– especially in Ulster after the Earls had fled–and were promising to confiscate much more. These policies created a rich Protestant foreign minority and a resentful Catholic native majority that had been dispossessed of their land and means of free sustenance. The uprising broke out in 1641 just as tensions in England between King Charles I and Parliament were catapulting that island into the English Civil War. The Puritan parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell, who had taken control of England after winning the Civil War, saw to the murder of Charles I in 1649 and then set his sights on finally subduing Ireland. In the decade of Cromwellian rule, the Puritans proved themselves even more despicable than the Anglicans. After they laid waste to the town of Drogheda, they compelled the submission of the remainder of the island. They then evicted all Catholic Irish landowners from Ulster and placed them on a form of reservation in the western province of Connaught. The division between the Protestant aristocracy and the Catholic poor grew more acute. Finally, with the monarchy restored and the eventual ascension of the Catholic James II to the throne the Irish anticipated relief. Their hopes were buoyed when James began the restoration of lands stolen in the 1650s under Cromwell and appointed Catholic officials in Ireland; they were dashed when James was deposed by the anti-Catholic parliament in the “Glorious Revolution”; revived again when he staged a comeback in a war fought in Ireland with Irish support for the legitimate English king over his usurping son-in-law, William of Orange; and destroyed with the failure of that effort-in-arms. And the Wild Geese fled,42 but not before securing a promise of religious freedom for the Catholics of Ireland in the 1691 Treaty of Limerick, ending the war. With the Anti-Catholic English Parliament back dominating English policy-making, and an Irish Parliament stacked with rabidly anti-Catholic Protestants, the Treaty of Limerick proved as worthless as any other treaty to which the English were signatories in this epic affair, and the Catholic freedom of worship was illusory as ever. Instead, the great Passion of Ireland continued. Far from being free, she paid dearly in blood and privation for her religion for two more centuries. When this chapter (1535-1714) of Ireland’s saga closed, her Catholics owned less than 10 percent of her land–the rest living generally under tyrannical 42 This is the name given to King James’s Irish army, which was allowed to follow him to France. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 14 English landlords, and all crawling under the Satanic penal laws mentioned at the beginning of this article; her population had dropped by a quarter from 2,300,000 in the 1550s to 1,700,000 in 1702; her natural leaders left in droves during the 1610 Flight of the Earls; and her army at the end chose service on the continent to subservience in Ireland in the 1691 Flight of the Wild Geese. England’s domination of Ireland’s land and government was complete. Thus was the Emerald Isle subjugated beneath the iron fist of English tyranny. Several times in ensuing centuries she attempted to shake the yoke by violence, but to no appreciable avail. Increasingly her pleas for self-rule and religious freedom came to be couched in Enlightenment terms. The appeal to political liberalism had some fruits in time, and the British gradually backpedaled on the religious front in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Finally, in the 1920s, three-quarters of Ireland attained the political freedom sought by so many of their forebears in centuries gone by. The Catholic Faith resumed its proper place in the public sphere, and a genuinely Catholic polity was put in place. The Silver Lining –The Good Old Days!? When it was poor, Ireland’s main export was people. Among them were many priests. Irish seminaries produced far more priests than the country needed.... These days, Irish seminaries are nearly empty. Last year, for the first time, the Dublin archdiocese ordained no priests.–Tom Hundley (Chicago Tribune, July 14, 2006) “The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.” Thus spoke Tertullian in regard to the Roman persecutions that failed during the first few centuries AD to stymie the new Catholic religion, but gave birth to thousands more converts. Persecution often provides focus and dispels lukewarmness among the faithful. The holy zeal of many traditional Catholics today under the persecution of the Conciliar Church and society at large bears modern witness to this phenomenon. Similarly, for centuries Ireland’s faithful clung heroically to their dear Catholic Faith in the face of monumental assaults. Yet today, outside of the six counties of the north still “under John Bull’s tyranny,”43 the Faith in Ireland is free. But free at what cost? In the years of persecution, England had control of Irish government, land and bodies, but like the devil, she had no power over the Irish souls. Through it all, the Irish faithful persevered. And the Catholic Faith thrived. It lived unhampered by the various heresies and “isms” that swept across all or part of Christendom at one time or another. Ireland’s sons and daughters left their homeland in droves to join religious orders throughout the world. Blood was willingly shed for the Faith and in defense of the rights of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Holy Church. Souls, unhappy in this world, surely found their eternal home well worth the wear. In 1920, Hilaire Belloc could exult: The efforts to destroy the Faith in Ireland have exceeded in violence, persistence, and cruelty any persecution in any part or time of the world. They have failed….For the Irish race alone of all Europe has maintained a perfect integrity and has kept serene, without internal reactions and without their consequent disturbances, the soul of Europe which is the Catholic Church.44 In persecution’s absence, the Faith has decayed. Legislation completely at odds with Catholic religious and social tenets has swept like a tidal wave onto the law books of Mammon in Dublin. Mass attendance has dropped to 25%, and Ireland, once filled with vocations, has been forced to accept priests from foreign countries. Referring to the morass of the late 20th century, Archbishop Martin of Dublin recognized that “the church wasn’t able to maintain its own sense of purpose.…The faith of the church had become rather shallow. It didn’t seem to have the roots that were needed at the time.”45 What is missing from this analysis is a clear and uncompromising acceptance that the modern hierarchy was largely responsible for that “shallow faith” that they now bewail. The archbishop’s solution to this crisis involves not a call to the example and sacrifice of the Mass Rocks, to the penitential pilgrimages of Loch Dearg and Croagh Patrick, to a courageous Irish Catholic patriotism, but to erect a system of lay parish councils and create a spiritual community that emphasizes to the faithful its desire for them “to be free, responsible and fully human.”46 This solution is no solution at all, but is merely the public acknowledgement of the Irish hierarchy’s final betrayal of the Irish people who shed oceans of blood and tears for the sake of the Faith in dark days, whilst the modern hierarchy is shedding a puddle of crocodile tears. But Ireland still has real men and women in its ranks. They want the return of the monks and the Mass, and they retain the tenacity of “the fighting Irish” that once shook a World Empire to its foundations–and which can do so again. Jason T. Winschel is a high school European History teacher in the North Allegheny School District in Southwestern Pennsylvania. He holds degrees in History and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Along with his wife Christina and their six children, he assists at Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Church in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. Belloc, Europe and the Faith, pp.181-182. Tom Hundley article in the Chicago Tribune, July 14, 2006. 46 Ibid. 44 45 43 From the song Patriot Game by Dominic Behan. THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org PART 8 15 F r . M a t t h i a s G a u d r o n Our serialization continues with the chapter of the Cathechism devoted to questions of civil society. The relationship between Church and State and the idea of religious liberty are discussed, with a special emphasis on the contemporary debate about the latter. Catechism Of the Crisis In the Church 35) What ought to be the relations between the Church and the State? In practice, the relations between the Church and the State depend upon the religious composition of the population. Normally, when the population is predominantly Catholic, the State ought to be Catholic officially. It should then adhere to the Catholic religion and proclaim it the religion of the State, protect and favor it, and make its feast days public holidays. Its representatives should participate in their official capacity in liturgical celebrations. Moreover, it should assist Catholic schools and charitable institutions, and assure that the Commandments of God be expressed in civil laws, such as the observance of Sunday and the prohibition of divorce, contraception, and abortion. l Are the normal relations between the Church and the State always applicable? The integral application of the normal relations between the Church and the State is not always possible or prudent. It could sometimes even lead to civil war. A nation’s circumstances must be prudently taken into account. Yet, at the very least, the government should protect the freedom of the Catholic Church and enforce respect for the tenets of the natural law by forbidding divorce, abortion, and the other immoral practices that were prohibited in most States until recent decades. l How might one sum up the normal duties of the State to the Church? Leo XIII summarized these duties thus: All who rule, therefore, would hold in honour the holy name of God, and one of their chief duties must be to favour religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws, and neither to organize nor enact any measure that may compromise its safety. This is the bounden duty of rulers to the people over whom they rule.1 36) In a Catholic State, must all the citizens be Catholic? When a very great majority of a people are Catholic, Catholicism ought to be the religion of the State, but this does not mean that all the citizens www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 16 must be forced to embrace the Catholic Faith. Forced conversions are, to the contrary, strictly forbidden, because the act of faith must be an act of free will and cannot be compelled. l Ought a Catholic State to allow its subjects freedom in religious matters? In principle, the State is only concerned with what pertains to social life. Hence it has no authority to scrutinize consciences or the private exercise of cult. But it cannot disregard the public exercise of religious activities. l Ought a Catholic State to forbid the public exercise of false cults? The false religions are an evil from which the Catholic State must protect its citizens. It ought therefore to prohibit or limit as much as possible their public exercise and propaganda. However, it can (and sometimes must) tolerate them if that results in safeguarding a greater good or avoiding a greater evil. l What is tolerance? Tolerance is the patient endurance of an evil. l Isn’t it unjust to bear an evil? Justice is not the supreme virtue: it must be regulated by prudence and animated by charity. Tolerance is not exercised in the name of justice, but in the name of prudence and charity. l But isn’t the tolerance of an evil an imperfection? If it is really prudent, the tolerance of evil is in itself good and praiseworthy, but it is the result and sign of imperfection in a society. Leo XIII teaches that the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection.2 l What are the limits of this tolerance of false religions? It is incumbent upon the prudence of the head of state to establish, according to the circumstances, more or less broad limits to the exercise of false cults. The general rule is that evil must be tolerated only in as much as the common good requires. Leo XIII declares that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare, requires.3 37) Is there, then, no right to the free exercise of religion? The true religion possesses the absolute right to develop and to be practiced freely, for no one can be impeded from serving God in the way He Himself has prescribed. It is an exigency of the natural law. The false religions, to the contrary, have no real right to be practiced precisely because they are false and THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org erroneous. Error can never have any right; only the truth has rights. Heads of state, therefore, are not obliged in justice (based upon natural law) to practice tolerance towards the false religions, but they may do so from prudence or Christian charity. l Is it certain that error has no rights? Leo XIII teaches very clearly that error cannot have any rights: While not conceding any right to anything save what is true and honest, [the Church] does not forbid public authority to tolerate what is at variance with truth and justice, for the sake of avoiding some greater evil, or of obtaining or preserving some greater good.4 Pius XII teaches that what does not correspond to the truth and to the moral standards has, objectively, no right to exist, to be taught, or to be done.5 l Hence the toleration of false religions cannot be guaranteed by law? The toleration of false religions may find expression in civil law. A Catholic State may, if so required, guarantee it by law, but that grant would be something completely different from a natural right. l Can you expound the difference between natural law and civil law? The natural law is founded directly upon the nature of man and the duties that flow from it (an act contrary to the natural law is per se morally bad or unjust). But the natural law is not entirely sufficient for the governance of society. It must be completed and particularized by civil law, decreed by the political authority for the sake of the common good of a particular society. The virtue of prudence comes into play in the establishment of the positive civil law (another society might, for particular reasons, establish contrary rules, which would not for that reason be unjust). For prudential reasons (principally for the sake of peace), the free exercise of false religions may in certain cases be guaranteed by the civil law of a Catholic country, but it can never be a natural right. 38) What does Vatican II teach about religious liberty? The Declaration of Vatican II on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae (2), affirms: This Vatican Synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs. Nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.6 17 l What is noteworthy in this passage from Vatican II? 1) First, Vatican II not only says that no one should be forced to believe (which the Church has always taught), but also claims that no one can be restrained from practicing the religion of his choice. 2) Then, and this is paramount, Vatican II no longer speaks of tolerance alone, but actually recognizes a real natural right of the adepts of all religions not to be hindered in the practice of their religion. 3) Finally, this right not only concerns practice in private, but also public worship and propagation of the religion. Thus Vatican II promotes something the Church always condemned previously. l Does Vatican II truly intend to speak of a genuine natural right of man (and not merely of a simple civil right)? Unfortunately yes, Vatican II presents the right not to be impeded from acting in accordance with one’s conscience in matters religious as a genuine natural right. It explains that this right is based on “the very dignity of the human person” (and not on a positive juridical determination); consequently it is only upon this basis that religious liberty must also be recognized as a civil right (DH 2).7 l Doesn’t Vatican II speak of “due limits” on this “right”? Vatican II does mention “due limits” circumscribing religious liberty, but the nature of the limits is not clearly stated in the document. In Paragraph 2, it seems to involve safeguarding public order; further on, Paragraph 7 speaks of “the objective moral order,” which is better, but illusory and ultimately insufficient. l Why is this mention of “the objective moral order” illusory? Taken literally, the implication of limiting religious liberty to “the objective moral order” is that only the Catholic Church could enjoy unrestricted freedom of religion because she alone conserves the natural law in its entirety (Islam authorizes polygamy; the Protestants—and even the Eastern schismatics in some cases—allow divorce; etc.). But this conclusion obviously contradicts the rest of the text. For Vatican II, having set aside the obligations of strict natural law, the only restraining limit on religious freedom is public order. As long as the cult is not a cover for terrorist attacks, criminal networks, pedophilia, or some other infringement of “the rights of man,” everything must be authorized. l Why should the mention of “the objective moral order” be considered insufficient? Even interpreted strictly, this limitation of religious liberty to the “objective moral order” is inadequate because restricted to the natural order of things, thereby omitting the consideration of the supernatural order. Such a conception of religious liberty fails to recognize the social kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the supernatural rights of His Church, and the supernatural end of man in the common good of the political order. It fails to consider that the false religions, by the mere fact that they keep souls from the Catholic Church, lead souls to hell. In a word, it is naturalism. To it can be applied what St. Pius X said about the separation of Church and State: This thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object, which is man’s eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course.8 l Does the teaching of Vatican II on religious freedom contradict the Church’s perennial teaching? The religious liberty taught by Vatican II not only contradicts the teaching of the Church, but also, and foremost, its constant practice. l How does Vatican II contradict the constant practice of the Church? The saints have never hesitated to break idols, destroy their temples, or legislate against pagan or heretical practices. The Church—without ever forcing anyone to believe or be baptized—has always recognized its right and duty to protect the faith of her children and to impede, whenever possible, the public exercise and propagation of false cults. To accept the teaching of Vatican II is to grant that, for two millennia, the popes, saints, Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the bishops, and the Catholic kings have constantly violated the natural rights of men without anyone in the Church noticing. Such a thesis is as absurd as it is impious. l Can you name some saints who would have violated the “right of religious freedom” as it is taught by Vatican II? One can cite, among many others, St. Polyeuctus, St. Christina, St. Martin, St. Benedict, St. Gall, St. Peter of Verona, St. Louis, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Casimir, St. Antonine (of Florence), St. Pius V, St. Francis Xavier, St. Louis Bertrand, St. Francis de Sales, etc., not to mention all the Doctors who justified this practice (St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas,9 St. Alphonsus, etc.). l Couldn’t we say that these saints acted under the influence of the prejudices of their age and that, with the passage of time, subsequent generations have understood the spirit of the Gospel better? Such a hypothesis is unsustainable for at least seven reasons: www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 18 1) It destroys the infallibility of the Church (which would have erred in a serious matter for more than two millennia). 2) It insults her maternal mildness (the Church would have conducted herself for centuries like a possessive mother or even a cruel stepmother). 3) It ruins her claim to holiness (practically denying the action of the Holy Ghost, who purifies the saints from their too human tendencies or conceptions, enlightens them on the true meaning of the Gospel, gives them strength and the holy liberty necessary to brave the prejudices of the world). 4) It discredits Christian charity (the natural bent of which should have prevented the violation of one of the fundamental “rights” of the human person for centuries). 5) It distorts history by gratuitously considering as a more or less unconscious prejudice imposed by the time in which they lived what was in fact a serious, solidly argued conviction held by many saints. (St. Augustine debated at length the Donatists, who were partisans of religious liberty, and thought about this question deeply; the same can be said of the 13thcentury theologians in their encounters with some Cathars). 6) It constitutes what English philosophers call “a self-refuting system.” (Why should our century have fewer prejudices than centuries past? If the prejudices linked to those centuries exercised an invincible pressure even on the Popes and Doctors of the Church, why should the non-infallible Vatican Council II have escaped any better from the [liberal] prejudices of our time than the saints of the past from the prejudices of their day?) 7) Lastly, this thesis accords the enemies of the Church (the Donatists, Cathars, Humanists, Encyclopedists, Freemasons, etc.) the extravagant privilege of having penetrated the spirit of the Gospel on this point long before the Catholic Doctors (in this regard, Voltaire would have been a better Catholic than St. Alphonsus de Liguori and the entire episcopate of the time). l What popes condemned the “liberal Catholics”? Several successive waves of “liberal Catholics” were condemned by popes during the 19th and 20th centuries. l Who condemned the first “liberal Catholic” wave? The first wave, led by Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854) was condemned by Gregory XVI in the Encyclical Mirari Vos in 1832. Lamennais left the Church and was abandoned by his disciples. l Who condemned the second “liberal Catholic” wave? The second “liberal Catholic” wave, led by Msgr. Felix Dupanloup (1802–1878, Bishop of Orleans) and the Count Charles de Montalembert (1810-70), was condemned in 1864 by Pope Pius IX’s Encyclical Quanta Cura and the catalogue of errors (the Syllabus) that accompanied it. l Who condemned the third “liberal Catholic” wave? The third “liberal Catholic” wave developed in the circles that had resisted the second wave. At the end of the pontificate of Leo XIII (especially after he called upon the French monarchists to rally to the Republic in 1892), under the pressure of the contemporary world, and unaware of it, a significant part of young French Catholics gradually adopted the ideas against which their parents had fought. The “democrat priests,” then the Sillon of Marc Sangnier (1873-1950) were at the head of this movement, which was halted by St. Pius X’s Letter on the Sillon, Our Apostolic Mandate (August 25, 1910). Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from Katholischer Katechismus zur kirchlichen Kriese by Fr. Matthias Gaudron, professor at the Herz Jesu Seminary of the Society of St. Pius X in Zaitzkofen, Germany. The original was published in 1997 by Rex Regum Press, with a preface by the District Superior of Germany, Fr. Franz Schmidberger. This translation is based on the second edition published in 1999 by Rex Regum Verlag, Schloß Jaidhof, Austria. Subdivisions and slight revisions made by the Dominican Fathers of Avrillé have been incorporated into the translation. 1 l Have there never been any defenders of religious liberty in the Church? There have always been defenders of true religious liberty in the Church (the freedom of the true religion), just as there have been of Christian tolerance, but never of religious liberty as it is preached by Vatican II. The first defenders of liberty for all religions were heretics or enemies of the Church. Its great promoters were the English philosophers of the 17th century, then the French philosophers of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The Catholics who later thought it was opportune to demand this liberty in response to persecutions, formed what were called the “liberal Catholics,” frequently condemned by the popes. THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §6. Libertas, §34. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., §33. 5 Ci Riesce, Discourse to the Convention of Italian Catholic Jurists, Dec. 6, 1953 [English version: Msgr. Joseph C. Fenton, “Pius XII and the Theological Treatise on the Church,” The American Ecclesiastical Review on line at www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm?recnum=5086]. 6 Walter M. Abbott, S.J., Editor, The Documents of Vatican II (New York: The America Press, 1966), pp.678-79. 7 The new Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms: “The right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error, but rather a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, i.e., immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities. This natural right ought to be acknowledged in the juridical order of society in such a way that it constitutes a civil right” (§2108, emphasis added). 8 St. Pius X, Encyclical Vehementer Nos (February 11, 1906), §3. 9 Of St. Thomas, see especially II-II, Q.11, Art.3. 2 THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT let your speech be, “yes, yes,” “no, no”; whatever is beyond these comes from the evil one. (Mt. 5:37) On July 7, 2007, Benedict XVI promulgated an Apostolic Letter motu proprio on the liturgy entitled Summorum Pontificum Cura. In the introduction, he acknowledges that after the promulgation of Pope Paul VI’s reform (1970), “in some regions, no small numbers of faithful...continue to adhere with great love and affection to the earlier liturgical forms.” Then in twelve articles he gives the rules for its application. We shall give the rules below, first highlighting the positive points they contain, then showing the negative. Lastly, we shall address the perplexities raised by Pope Benedict XVI’s letter presenting Summorum Pontificum to the Bishops. The Positive l “Art. 1. ...the Roman Missal promulgated by St. Pius V...must be given due honour for its venerable and ancient usage....It is, therefore, permissible to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass following the typical edition of the Roman Missal promulgated by Bl. John XXIII in 1962 and never abrogated1....The conditions for the use of this Missal as laid down by earlier documents ‘Quattuor abhinc annis’ [Indult] and ‘Ecclesia Dei,’ are substituted as follows.” l l l l l January 2008 Reprint #79 “Art. 2. In Masses celebrated without the people, each Catholic priest...may use the Roman Missal published by Bl. Pope John XXIII in 1962...and may do so on any day with the exception of the Easter Triduum [an exception that only concerns the Missa sine populo, which, moreover, is not allowed to be celebrated during the Sacred Triduum according to the new rite]. For such celebrations...the priest has no need for permission from the Apostolic See or from his Ordinary.” “Art. 3. Communities of Institutes of consecrated life...wishing to celebrate Mass in accordance with the edition of the Roman Missal promulgated in 1962, for conventual or ‘community’ celebration in their oratories, may do so.” “Art. 4. Celebrations of Mass as mentioned above in Art. 2 may...also be attended by faithful who, of their own free will, ask to be admitted.” “Art. 5. §1. In parishes, where there is a stable group of faithful who adhere to the earlier liturgical tradition, the pastor should willingly accept their requests to celebrate the Mass according to the rite of the Roman Missal published in 1962.... §2. Celebration in accordance with the Missal of Bl. John XXIII may take place on working days; while on Sundays and Pope Benedict XVI’s motU proprIo Summorum Pontificum 19 THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT l l feast days one such celebration may also be held. §3. For faithful and priests who request it, the pastor should also allow celebrations in this...form for special circumstances such as marriages, funerals or occasional celebrations, e.g. pilgrimages.” “Art. 7. If a group of lay faithful...has not obtained satisfaction to their requests from the pastor, they should inform the diocesan bishop. The bishop is strongly requested to satisfy their wishes....” “Art. 9. §1. The pastor...may also grant permission to use the earlier ritual for the administration of the Sacraments of Baptism, Marriage, Penance, and the Anointing of the Sick..... §2. Ordinaries are given the right to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation using the earlier Roman Pontifical.... §3. Clerics ordained “in sacris constitutis” may use the Roman Breviary promulgated by Bl. John XXIII in 1962.” Pope Benedict XVI concludes: “We order that everything We have established with these Apostolic Letters issued as Motu Proprio be considered as “established and decreed,” and to be observed from 14 September of this year, Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, whatever there may be to the contrary.” The Negative A distinction must be made between the Motu Proprio and the Apostolic Letter addressed to the Bishops to dispel their “fears.” It is clear that the two documents are not of equal force. It is the Motu Proprio, and not the Letter to the Bishops, that is the “juridical norm” which, beginning September 14th, 2007, replaced the conditions laid down by earlier documents (cf. Art. 1). In reality, more than a replacement, it is an annulment of the previous conditions for the simple reason that the traditional Roman rite was never “abrogated,” so that, for the celebration of this rite, “the priest has no need for permission from the Apostolic See or from his Ordinary” (Art. 2). It is on this point, in our opinion, that Summorum Pontificum essentially differs from the Indult. Because it explicitly made usage of the traditional rite contingent on the uncritical acceptance of the Council, as well as the acknowledgement of the orthodoxy of the Novus Ordo Missae, the Indult was per se unacceptable. The Motu Proprio, on the contrary, is per se, objectively, the general (for all and not just Archbishop Lefebvre’s SSPX) and unconditional liberalization of the traditional Roman rite. In the Letter to Bishops, Pope Benedict XVI speaks of the conditions that made the Indult unacceptable, and explains why he does not share the “fears” manifested by certain bishops; in this regard, the Letter to the Bishops confirms the unconditional liberalization ratified by the Motu Proprio. But there is in the Motu Proprio one unacceptable affirmation, which also appears in the Letter to the Bishops: We read in Article 1: 20 The Roman Missal promulgated by Paul VI is the ordinary expression of the “Lex orandi” (Law of prayer) of the Catholic Church of the Latin rite. Nonetheless, the Roman Missal promulgated by St. Pius V and reissued by Bl. John XXIII is to be considered as an extraordinary expression of that same “Lex orandi ”....These two expressions....are, in fact two usages of the one Roman rite. And in the Letter to the Bishops, he reaffirms that the Missal published by Paul VI...obviously is and continues to be the normal Form–the Forma ordinaria–of the Eucharistic Liturgy. The last version of the Missale Romanum prior to the Council will now be able to be used as a Forma extraordinaria of the liturgical celebration. It is not appropriate to speak of these two versions of the Roman Missal as if they were “two Rites.” Rather, it is a matter of a twofold use of one and the same rite. It ought to be noted that the recognition of continuity, and even of the identity of the Novus Ordo Missae (NOM) and the Roman rite, and in some sense the superiority of the former since the NOM remains the normal form—“ordinaria”—of the Eucharistic celebration, is not a condition impeding celebration using the earlier rite (the conditions, or more precisely, the substitutive rules follow this preliminary affirmation); consequently, acceptance of the Motu Proprio does not imply acceptance of its theological presuppositions (“a twofold use of one and the same rite”) on the basis of which the Pope proceeded to the liberalization of the Roman Missal. Perplexing Points in the Letter to the Bishops In the letter of presentation addressed to the Bishops, which, we repeat, is of no legal force, two affirmations leave us perplexed. Firstly: For that matter, the two Forms of the usage of the Roman Rite can be mutually enriching: new Saints and some of the new Prefaces can and should be inserted in the old Missal. Thus, as Pope Benedict XVI “liberalizes” usage of the traditional Roman rite, he already anticipates a “reform,” even if it merely regards secondary matters. Secondly: [I]n order to experience full communion, the priests of the communities adhering to the former usage cannot, as a matter of principle, exclude celebrating according to the new books. The total exclusion of the new rite would not in fact be consistent with the recognition of its value and holiness. We ask: what is meant by “as a matter of principle”? That de facto the non-acceptance of the NOM is licit or tolerated? Moreover, the refusal cannot be “total.” Does this mean that a “partial” refusal of the NOM is licit or tolerable? It would seem so.2 But Cardinal Camillo Ruini interpreted it this way: “Celebration according to the new Missal cannot be excluded as a matter of principle, thereby manifesting concretely acceptance of the Council” (Avvenire, July 8, 2007, p.1). Cardinal Ruini’s reading is very narrow, and allows us to surmise that once again complete and THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org unconditional acceptance of Vatican II might be asked as a condition.3 But this interpretation is not confirmed by the Motu Proprio, in which neither acceptance of the Council nor “recognition of [the NOM’s] value and holiness” is mentioned. In the Letter to the Bishops, the non-exclusion “as a matter of principle” of the new rite is only mentioned as a condition “in order to experience full communion,” so that we might say that those who totally exclude it “as a matter of principle” have been promoted from a position considered to be schismatic to one considered to be “not in full” communion! As for the Council, let us recall that when Pope Benedict XVI erected the Institute of the Good Shepherd, he granted it the right to engage in “constructive criticism” of Vatican II. Fidelity to Antiquity Resistance to Unjust Laws Cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani (September 13, 1969) and Antonio Bacci (September 28) signed the letter (dated September 3, 1969, and presented to Pope Paul VI on October 21, 1969) of introduction to the Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass in which they wrote that “the Novus Ordo Missae...represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated in Session 22 of the Council of Trent,” and they concluded: “The subject for whose benefit a law is made have always had the right, nay the duty, to ask the legislator to abrogate the law, should it prove to be harmful.” This is what we continue to do, in spite of Summorum Pontificum. A positive human law (the NOM, “religious freedom,” etc.) that contradicts the divine law (natural or positive) has no force of law; it cannot oblige in conscience. On the contrary, it is licit, if not necessary, to resist it, on condition that this resistance not exceed the bounds of preserving the common good, which must always prevail over the individual good. Consequently, in certain particular cases, to avoid scandals or serious disturbances, or to avoid falling into an abiding spirit of revolt4 and anarchy, one may refrain from active resistance.5 Unjust laws (tyranny in practice) transgress the order willed by God and right reason. Hence, in case of conflict between an unjust human law and the divine law, we must “obey God rather than men.” This principle is reconcilable with the obligation to respect habitually the established order: for actual resistance against an unjust law does not inherently imply an habitual negation of the authority. The Criteria of St. Vincent of Lerins In the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius writes (No. 318)6 that in a period of distress we are not to alter anything, but continue to act as before, “for the devil fishes in troubled waters.” Consequently, in cases of obscurity, aridity, desolation, of night of the senses and spirit, we must continue as before even without seeing; we must even rejoice at lacking light since God permits this night to purify the souls of His servants by pushing them to greater trust in Him and to “hope against hope.” St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross teach the same doctrine, which is the common teaching in ascetical and mystical theology. Similarly, in the present crisis, we must continue to do what the Church has always done without venturing into potentially dangerous novelties. St. Vincent of Lerins in his Commonitory, writes that, “if some novel contagion seeks to infect not merely an insignificant portion of the Church, but the whole,” then the faithful must “cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty” (Chap.3). This is the principal rule the Church has always followed. Nor should we pretend to see the solution to the current crisis clearly as if darkness had not fallen. Darkness is the absence of light, but what enables us to see the objects surrounding us is light. If it has been extinguished, I remain in the dark; I cannot see anything. Thus during this terrible and “obscure” crisis of Vatican II, it is not possible to see with clarity (Pope Paul VI himself spoke of the “smoke of Satan” in the Church of God). Having reaffirmed these two central points which cannot be renounced (abrogation of the NOM and “fidelity to antiquity”) we must recognize that the Motu Proprio is objectively, independently of intentions and theological motivations, a first step in the right direction. We hope that [the Sovereign Pontiff] will continue in this direction, but without wishing to delude ourselves and while awaiting confirmation by the events: neither outright refusal nor elation, the harbinger of disillusions or, worse, a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. Besides, we must admit realistically that, in the current situation, it would be impossible, de facto, even should it be desired, to abrogate the NOM immediately, considering the tempest raised in several episcopates by the Motu Proprio, and the practical problem of millions of faithful Catholics accustomed, without fault of their own, to the New Mass. How could they adjust to the Tridentine Roman rite from one day to the next without a preparatory formation? In his Letter to the Bishops, Pope Benedict XVI seems to be conscious of this when he writes that “the use of the old Missal presupposes a certain degree of liturgical formation” which is “not found very often,” so that the new Missal will remain the ordinary form of the rite “not only on account of the juridical norms, but also because of the actual situation of the communities of the faithful.” Nonetheless, the problem of the abrogation of the new rite remains de jure and will have to be resolved when the circumstances allow it. This is true as regards not only Pope Paul’s New Mass, but also the Second Vatican Council, for, just as it is impossible to admit a homogeneous continuity or development between the Roman Mass and the NOM, so also it is impossible to reconcile the ecumenism, “religious freedom,” THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 21 THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT collegiality, etc., of Vatican II with the Church’s perennial teaching. It is with good reason that Bishop Fellay wrote (Menzingen, July 7, 2007) that, “we must continue the combat for the lex credendi, the combat for the Faith, with the same firmness.” Benedict XVI seems to be aware of the seriousness of the question when, in the Letter to the Bishops, he writes that “the reasons for the break which arose over [the Mass], however, were at a deeper level.” Cardinal Siri said that it would take a hundred years to repair the disaster of Vatican II. Forty years have passed, and perhaps the first step has just been taken on the (still long) road of the liturgical question. It may take another sixty years to “see the light.” Acknowledgment of the legitimacy of “constructive criticism” of Vatican II and the declaration that the Tridentine Mass was never abrogated do constitute a first step. Commentaries on the Responses of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to Some Questions Regarding the Nature of the Church Translated exclusively by Angelus Press from the Courrier de Rome,, September 2007, pp. 1-3. 1 This was also the opinion of the ad hoc commission of Cardinals convened by Pope John Paul II. In reality, in his allocution to the consistory of May 24, 1976, Pope Paul VI declared: “The Novus Ordo Missae was promulgated to replace the old Mass.” Pope Benedict XVI knows this very well. When he was a cardinal he wrote pages very critical of the liturgical reform of 1970. 2 One almost has the impression that Benedict XVI happened to notice the enormous gravity of the liturgical and sacramental crisis, even granting the conferral of the sacraments (sacramenta conficere)) of Baptism, Extreme Unction, and Confirmation according to the old Ritual and Pontifical. 3 Cardinal Ruini seems to be more interested in the doctrinal problem of the Council than in the liturgy. Indeed, the liturgy is a practical consequence of the Faith: we pray in accordance with our belief. The lex credendi establishes and founds the lex orandi.. The real problem is thus on a higher plane: in the orthodoxy of the conciliar documents. The battle must still be waged on this point. 4 Aristotle, Politics, II, 8, 1269, 20-24 / 1268b, 27. 5 Resistance can be either 1) non-violent: a) by not applying the law (passive resistance, which is always licit); or b) by legal active resistance, such as petitioning the government for redress of grievances and by lawsuits, etc.; .; or resistance can be 2) violent (by armed uprising, but only against the civil authority, not the religious authority). In this case, the tyranny or the unjust laws must be constant and habitual. A single unjust law is not sufficient cause to justify an armed uprising or repeated acts of civil disobedience against the public authority). Finally, the fall of a tyrannical government must not create a situation worse than the present situation, for the multitude would suffer even worse evils. 6 “In a period of distress we are not to alter anything, but should remain firm and unyielding in our resolutions and the purpose of mind in which we found ourselves on the day preceding such distress, or in the purpose in which we found ourselves in the preceding consolation....For, in times of comfort it is the good angel that guides us by his counsel, whereas, in distress, it is the evil sprit....” Cf. Rules 320, 321, and 322 [Fr. Ludovic Marie Barrielle, CP.CR.V., Rules for Discerning the Spirits (Angelus Press, 1992), pp.23-28.] 22 On July 10, 2007, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) published five responses to as many questions about the doctrine on the Church. The document, signed by the Prefect, Cardinal William Levada, and by the Secretary, Archbishop Angelo Amato, is accompanied by commentary by the same congregation. We will here try to examine the text without being influenced by the reactions it gave rise to, whether of disappointment or enthusiasm. 1) Intentions and Facts In reply to the question of whether the Second Vatican Council changed Catholic doctrine on the Church, the Congregation responds as follows: The Second Vatican Council neither changed nor intended to change this doctrine; rather it developed, deepened and more fully explained it. This was exactly what John XXIII said at the beginning of the Council. Paul VI affirmed it and commented in the act of promulgating the Constitution Lumen Gentium: “There is no better comment to make than to say that this promulgation really changes nothing of the traditional doctrine....” The Bishops repeatedly expressed and fulfilled this intention.1 The reading of this general intention to keep in continuity with the perennial Catholic teaching can only be comforting. However, it does not seem to us possible to affirm so casually that in fact the Council changed nothing in this doctrine. The CDF’s document not only does not prove this continuity, but, in spite of the proclaimed good intentions, seems to confirm the opposite. The demonstration of continuity between the perennial The ANgeluS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org g magisterium and Vatican II would require a comparison between the texts coming from the magisterium and those approved by the Council. But it suffices to glance over the documents cited to grasp that nothing of the like is involved. Of 20 references, 15 are taken from conciliar texts (three are allocutions of John XXIII and Paul VI, and one concerns the responses of the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians to the Bishops’ suggestions), and the other citations are taken from recent documents of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical Ut Unum Sint. Not a single document of the previous magisterium is referenced! This approach continues to leave unsolved the fundamental problem, namely, that of providing an effective proof of the doctrinal continuity between past and present. 2) The Problem of the “Subsistit in” Still Unresolved The second question raises the problem of interpreting the famous affirmation according to which “the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church.” The document does not resolve the problem. It tells us: Christ “established here on earth” only one Church and instituted it as a “visible and spiritual community,” that from its beginning and throughout the centuries has always existed and will always exist, and in which alone are found all the elements that Christ himself instituted. “This one Church of Christ, which we confess in the Creed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic….This Church, constituted and organised in this world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and the Bishops in communion with him” [the last quote is from Lumen Gentium]. Even an orthodox schismatic could affirm without difficulty that the Church is, according to the formula of the Creed, “one, holy, catholic and apostolic.” The problem is that the body of the response does not explicitly affirm that between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church there is no difference, and thus that the Church instituted by Christ is exclusively the Catholic Church.2 Once again, the text has recourse to the use of the “subsistit in” of Lumen Gentium or of the invenitur used in other documents of the CDF: In number 8 of the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium “subsistence” means this perduring, historical continuity and the permanence of all the elements instituted by Christ in the Catholic Church, in which the Church of Christ is concretely found on this earth. The answer implies that Christ did not found the Catholic Church, but a Church which, concretely, is to be found fully realized in the Catholic Church and partially in the others—whence the idea of different degrees of communion, rendered by expressions like “full communion,” “fully in communion,” “full identity,” etc. Consequently, a serious doubt remains as to the interchangeability of the expressions “subsistit in” and “est.” This doubt is augmented by the fact that, whereas from the traditional affirmation of the perfect identity between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church followed the non-communion of non-Catholic communities, from the new formulation are drawn consequences which are in opposition to Catholic ecclesiology. In the same response, in fact, we find the following affirmation: ...The Church of Christ is present and operative in the churches and ecclesial Communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church, on account of the elements of sanctification and truth that are present in them. This response is reaffirmed in the commentary of the third answer, which states that: The use of this expression...comes from and brings out more clearly the fact that there are “numerous elements of sanctification and of truth” which are found outside her structure, but which “as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, impel towards Catholic Unity.” It is noteworthy that the text never specifies—and this is the fundamental point—in what way the presence of these “elements” should be understood. In the 2004 doctrinal study published by the Society of St. Pius X From Ecumenism to Silent Apostasy [available from Angelus Press, $5.00–Ed.] in the section on doctrinal problems caused by ecumenism, the authors remark that The affirmation that “many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside the confines [of the Church]” is equivocal. This proposition implies in effect that the means of salvation materially present in the separated Communities possess a sanctifying power.3 Now, as regards these materially present means, the distinction is made between the sacraments that do not require a proper disposition on the part of the recipient (infant baptism), which really have a salutary effect, and those that, on the contrary, require a particular disposition. They conclude their remarks by quoting the doctrine taught by the Council of Florence: “[The Church] firmly believes, professes, and proclaims...that the unity of the ecclesiastical body is so strong that only to those remaining in it are the sacraments of the Church of benefit for salvation.” Yet, insofar as they are separated, these communities are an obstacle to this implicit desire that would render the sacraments fruitful. Thus one cannot say that these communities possess elements of sanctification and truth, except materially. It was this question that needed to be answered in order to understand if the presence of “elementa Ecclesiæ” was compatible with the dogma “Outside the Church, no salvation” and with the dogma according to which the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church and only the Catholic Church. In other words, the key question is to know whether the non-Catholics are objectively THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 23 THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT members of the Church, that is to say, whether they are or are not in communion with her. When the Council and the document we are studying speak of an equivocal “un-full Communion,” do they mean that this communion is nonetheless still objectively sufficient for salvation or not? What does the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith think of the following statement of Pope Pius IX (the Encyclical Amantissimus §3): “‘He who deserts the Church will vainly believe that he is in the Church,’4 ‘whoever eats of the lamb and is not a member of the Church, has profaned’”5; or this more recent text (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, §22): “It follows that those who are divided in faith or government cannot be living in the unity of such a Body, nor can they be living the life of its one Divine Spirit.” In reality, it is hard to see how to harmonize these statements of the perennial magisterium with this assertion of Unitatis Redintegratio (§3): The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation....For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect. The differences that exist in varying degrees between them and the Catholic Church—whether in doctrine and sometimes in discipline, or concerning the structure of the Church—do indeed create many obstacles, sometimes serious ones, to full ecclesiastical communion. The ecumenical movement is striving to overcome these obstacles. But even in spite of them it remains true that all who have been justified by faith in Baptism are members of Christ’s body...and have a right to be called Christian, and so are correctly accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church. It is equally hard to harmonize them with what Pope John Paul II stated in Ut Unum Sint (§11) regarding the division among Christians: By God’s grace, however, neither what belongs to the structure of the Church of Christ nor that communion which still exists with the other Churches and Ecclesial Communities has been destroyed. Indeed, the elements of sanctification and truth present in the other Christian Communities, in a degree which varies from one to the other, constitute the objective basis of the communion, albeit imperfect, which exists between them and the Catholic Church. To the extent that these elements are found in other Christian Communities, the one Church of Christ is effectively present in them. For this reason the Second Vatican Council speaks of a certain, though imperfect communion. If it is true that it is necessary to rein in certain extreme deviations like that of Leonardo Boff 6 and others—deviations that are probably the target of this document—it remains nonetheless true that the big problem of the conciliation of Vatican II with the traditional magisterium still remains. It is on this point that a clear declaration from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is still awaited. 24 3) Outside the Church There Is Now Salvation The first part of the response to the third question— why was the expression “subsists in” adopted instead of the simple word “is”?—was partially examined in the preceding point. But the second part remains, which raises some supplementary problems. It contains a passage from the Decree Unitatis Redintegratio (§3): It follows that the separated Churches and Communities as such, though we believe them to be deficient in some respects, have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church. This statement remains unacceptable from every point of view, because from the fact that there are elements of sanctification and truth materially in the other communities, it cannot be deduced that these same communities are used by the Holy Ghost as instruments of salvation. God, indeed, can certainly draw good from evil, but it cannot be affirmed that evil is used as an instrument of salvation, and still less that it has any legitimacy! The traditional Magisterium always underscored that the Catholic Church is the means of salvation necessary and sufficient willed by God. Outside the Church, there can only be salutary effects, and not means (unless in a purely material sense) or, still worse, salvatory communities, as it was expressed in the letter of the Holy Office to the Archbishop of Boston: Not only did the Savior command that all nations should enter the Church, but He also decreed the Church to be a means of salvation, without which no one can enter the kingdom of eternal glory. In His infinite mercy God has willed that the effects, necessary for one to be saved, of those helps to salvation which are directed toward man’s final end, not by intrinsic necessity, but only by divine institution, can also be obtained in certain circumstances when those helps are used only in desire and longing.7 Thus the Holy Ghost can save souls who are objectively outside the Church, in spite of their belonging to schismatic or heretical communities but not thanks to them. The CDF’s document seems to subscribe to the unacceptable affirmation made by Cardinal Kasper in November, 2004, at Rocca di Pappa, on the occasion of a conference organized by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Decree Unitatis Integratio: The Council went a decisive step further with the aid of the “subsistit in.” It wished to do justice to the fact that there are found outside of the Catholic Church not only individual Christians but also “elements of the church,” indeed churches and ecclesial communities which, although not in full communion, rightly belong to the one church and possess salvatory significance for their members (LG, 8, 15; UR, 3; UUS, 10-14). Thus the Council is aware that there are outside of the Catholic THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org Church forms of sanctification which even extend as far as martyrdom (LG, 15; UR, 4; UUS, 12, 83). The question of the salvation of non-Catholics is now no longer answered personally as in Mystici Corporis on the basis of the subjective desire of single individuals, but institutionally on the basis of objective ecclesiology.8 4) From Schismatic Communities to “Sister Churches” The fourth question concerns the attribution of the title “church” to the Eastern [Orthodox] Churches. In the traditional perspective of the oneness of the Church of Christ, which is the Catholic Church, the attribution of the title of Church to the Eastern schismatic communities remains unacceptable. The document affirms to the contrary that these communities “merit the title of ‘particular or local Churches,’ and are called sister Churches of the particular Catholic Churches.” And it adds: However, since communion with the Catholic Church, the visible head of which is the Bishop of Rome and the Successor of Peter, is not some external complement to a particular Church but rather one of its internal constitutive principles, these venerable Christian communities lack something in their condition as particular churches. The title of “Church” would be restored to those who broke their bond with the Sovereign Pontiff; thus communion with the pope, while remaining an internal constitutive principle, is no longer considered essential, since its lack would constitute a simple deficiency (“defectu”) that does not alter the essence of “the being Church.” 5) The Question of the Protestants This notion appears even more clearly in the response to the fifth question; in effect, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith explains that the Protestant communities cannot be defined as churches because “these Communities do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Orders, and are, therefore, deprived of a constitutive element of the Church.” It follows logically that the lack of union with the See of Peter is not considered as “a constitutive element of the Church.” Furthermore, in the commentary in response to the fourth question, we read: The Council wanted to adopt the traditional use of the term. “Because these Churches, although separated, have true sacraments and above all—because of the apostolic succession—the priesthood and the Eucharist, by means of which they remain linked to us by very close bonds,” they merit the title of “particular or local Churches,” and are called sister Churches of the particular Catholic Churches. It is through the celebration of the Eucharist of the Lord in each of these Churches that the Church of God is built up and grows in stature. The Declaration Dominus Jesus expressly calls them “true particular Churches.” Rupture of the bond with the Pope, then, would not also cause a rupture of unity with the Catholic Church. The document implies that there can be “true particular Churches” even if they do not belong to the Catholic Church through the bond of submission to the Roman Pontiff. To be a true church, it would suffice to possess apostolic succession and a validly celebrated Eucharist, while the bond with the successors of Peter would not be required for communion with the Catholic Church to become full, to use the Council’s terminology. In truth, the term church, for the Orthodox communities, can only be used in a certain way in the sense that with the apostolic succession they have conserved a hierarchical structure; however, in the Encyclical Iam Vos Omnes, Blessed Pius IX observes that this permanence of the apostolic succession detached from effective communion with the Roman Pontiff, avails nothing: Whoever thus gives proper attention and reflection to the situation which surrounds the various religious societies, divided amongst themselves and separated from the Catholic Church–which, without interruption, from the time of Christ the Lord and of His Apostles, by means of her legitimate sacred Shepherds, has always exercised, and exercises still, the divine power conferred upon Her by the Lord–it will be easy to convince [them] that in none of these societies, and not even in all of them taken together, can in some way be seen the one and Catholic Church which Christ the Lord built, constituted, and willed to exist. Neither will it ever be able to be said that they are members and part of that Church as long as they remain visibly separated from Catholic unity. The apostolic succession in these schismatic communities remains purely material, like a body without a soul, since it lacks the formal and vivifying principle that comes from the communion with the successor of Peter. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith ought to answer the following question: How is it possible to reconcile the teaching on the expression “sister Churches,” reaffirmed by the present document, with the proclamations of the traditional magisterium, among which we limit ourselves to quoting but two: May [the Armenian nation] reject error and return to the one fold of Christ in a spirit of docility and unity, a spirit clearly absent from all who are not joined with this Holy See of Peter. From this Holy See, rights of holy communion flow to all men and to it every obedience and honor must be given. Every church (that is the faithful everywhere) should come together to the See of Peter for greater authority.9 They were no longer members of the Body of Christ which is the Church, for it [the schismatic Church] was THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 25 THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT no longer in union with its visible head, the Sovereign Pontiff.10 It seems to us that Rome is attempting to set some bounds to certain excessive post-conciliar deviations. After the Motu Proprio on the Tridentine Mass ( July 7, 2007), which addresses an important point of the liturgical deviation after the Council, this document of the CDF constitutes the first attempt to address these doctrinal questions on the Church. This is a praiseworthy act in its intentions. However, it should be remarked that trying to remedy doctrinal deviations by referring to the documents of Vatican II means that it will be impossible to give thorough responses in line with Tradition, which would strike at the root of the current general apostasy. It is well known that it is not enough to cut weeds off at ground level; they must be torn out by the roots. One day the hierarchy will have to take this into consideration seriously, because, as sound philosophy teaches, to reach a proposed end, one must choose means that really lead to it. Or, in the examples given by Our Lord, one should make one’s calculations beforehand, lest having begun to build the tower one is constrained to abandon the project for having failed to calculate the expenses; or, one’s army suffers defeat for having attempted to fight with a thousand men against ten thousand. Lanterius Translated exclusively by Angelus Press from the Courrier de Rome, October 2007, pp.1-3. 1 The quotations from the CDF’s Responses are taken from the Vatican Web site. 2 Note 4 is a little clearer, since, by examining the responses of the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians to the bishops’ suggestions, the document concludes that “the commission that was supposed to evaluate the amendments to the Decree Unitatis Redintegratio, clearly expresses the identity of the Church of Christ with the Catholic Church, as well as its unicity, considering that this Society of Saint Pius X District of the United States of America Regina Coeli House 11485 N. Farley Road Platte City, Missouri 64079 ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED doctrine is founded on the Constitution Lumen Gentium.” By admitting thus that the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church and not another, it remains to be understood how the schismatic communities are considered by the Council, a consideration that pushed it to prefer the expression “subsists in” to the traditional expression. 3 The Society of Saint Pius X, From Ecumenism to Silent Apostasy (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2006), p. 29. 4 St. Cyprian, De Unitate Ecclesiae. 5 St. Jerome, Epistle 15 to Damasus. 6 Leonardo Boff, Ph.D. (b. 1938), a Brazilian, is the founder of Liberation Theology in Brazil. He taught for 22 years at the Franciscan Institute at Petropolis, Brazil, while still a Franciscan, and later at the State University of Rio de Janeiro as a layman after he was silenced by the Vatican in 1992 and left the Franciscans. Dr. Boff has been very influential in liberal and populist circles in Brazil. Cf. www.clas.ufl.edu/users/bron/PDF--Christianity/Maclean+Lorentzen--Leonardo%20Boff.pdf. 7 Protocol No. 122/49, August 8, 1949. The text of the letter in Latin and English was published in the American Ecclesiastical Review, Vol. 127, No. 1, (July 1952 ), 307-315, and as an appendix to Baptism of Desire: A Patristic Commentary (Angelus Press, 1999). 8 “The Decree on Ecumenism Read Anew after Forty Years,” online at the Vatican Web site. 9 Blessed Pius IX, Neminem Vestrum on the Persecution of Armenians (February 2, 1854), §14 (online at www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9nemini.htm. 10 Clement VIII, Bull Magnus Dominus (Brest-Litovsk, October 16, 1596). $1.95 per SiSiNoNo reprint. Please specify. Shipping & Handling US Foreign $.01 to $10.00 $6.95 $10.01 to $25.00 $8.95 $25.01 to $50.00 $10.95 $50.01 to $100.00 $12.95 Over $100.00 13% of order $11.95 $13.95 $15.95 $17.95 18% of order Airmail surcharge (in addition to above) Foreign 21% of subtotal. Available from: ANGELUS PRESS 2915 Forest Avenue Kansas City, MO 64109 USA Phone: 1-800-966-7337 www.angeluspress.org NON-PROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID KANSAS CITY, MO PERMIT NO. 6706  E m e r s o n H y n e s Seven Keys to a Christian Home Happy the man whose love and care, A few paternal acres bound, Happy to breathe his native air On his own ground. (Alexander Pope.) It’s lovely in Minnesota on a warm fall evening. It’s better when your house is atop a hill in the country, banked behind by a forest of birch and oak and overlooking a valley split by a lazy creek and checked with alternate patches of pasture and corn and grain stubble. It’s peaceful and quiet, and I am sitting in the easy chair reading the weekly collection of papers and magazines. As if there weren’t a thousand ways of knowing it, the periodicals state that housing is one of the biggest national problems. There are enough families,” writes one expert, “to call forth a million houses a year for the next ten years, and houses are what America is eager to buy or rent.” That’s a lot of houses, and those figures indicate that there are a lot of unhappy people living in cramped quarters. That’s too bad. But from another standpoint, the figures symbolize the possibilities of a great adventure that ten million families could have–planning and building a home. What worries me is that apparently many of the first principles of home-building have been lost in the battle for houses. There is a great difference between a house and a home. A house, according to Webster, is “a structure for human habitation”; but a home is defined as an “abode of one’s family....The abiding place of the affections....The social unit or center formed by a family living together.” www.angeluspress.org The ANgeluS • January 2008 28 The principles of house-building concern the use of materials; the problems concern the amount of lumber, brick, mortar, and pipe, and the experience of a contractor. The principles of home-building are those of providing a family social center; the problems are those of making it “the abiding place of the affections.” A house is only a means to the end–a home. Every step in building a house must be tested to determine whether it aids or hinders homemaking. It is more important, therefore, to know the principles of home-making than it is to secure land and materials. In practice, home-building and homemaking fuse. But in planning, they must be kept separate–and the principles of home-making come first. I think back on the ideas that governed our building seven years ago. We were lucky enough to be near places and persons whence sound principles could be learned. We drew from the writings of Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P., from the lectures of Monsignor Ligutti, from the tradition of Benedictine monasticism, and from families who had built homesteads during the depression. We also had three advantages then that the average young couple today may not enjoy; building supplies and labor were relatively easy to secure; my work was stable and so situated that we could build either in a rural community, a town, or a small city; and we were able to borrow $5,000 for financing [roughly $60,000 in 2008–Ed.] Difficulties have increased tremendously in the postwar years, but principles do not change. Circumstances may prevent achieving the ideal in its fullness, but the ideal is still the guide. At any rate, we made our decisions in terms of the following seven principles, and we have not found cause to regret a single one. If you disagree with some of the principles, it should still be valuable to discuss them, for it is always true that the kind of house you build should be the kind of home you want. The principles that guided us are: 1) A home should be designed for family living. 2) A home should be independently owned. 3) A home should be built for permanency and growth. 4) A home should provide privacy. 5) A home should be part of a community. 6) A home should be a productive unit. 7) A home should be beautiful. In bare outline that sounds like a simple list and perhaps not too impressive! With a moment’s reflection almost anyone could draw up as good a set of principles. What is important is to start with such a list and then discuss each point in terms of your own family and circumstances. THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org A few of the arguments and experiences referring to the principles might be significant. 1) A Home Should Be Designed for Family Living Nothing is more obvious and nothing is more neglected than the need for a home built to suit the family. A study of pioneer homes will show that they were planned to fit the needs of that way of life. Gradually, we have transformed the home from a unit for the family to an object for public display. The exterior design, the number and size of rooms, the kind and amount of furnishings, the location of the house and of the rooms in it–all these are influenced more by how it will look to outsiders than by the service and convenience it will provide for the family. The home should not be a depot or a furniture store; it is not meant to serve or to sell the public. In no way is the trend toward display-type houses so definite as in the decrease in bedroom space for children and the increase in the size of the living room. One commentator has declared that most of the modern homes are “birth control houses,” designed for families with one or two children. Space, once allowed for a third and fourth bedroom, is devoted to a hotel-lobby-type living room. Homes which are more than 25 years old rarely have less than four bedrooms. Few of the modern standard designs or structures provide that much space for children. Even if those who are building have no children or have grown children, they should think of future generations who will inhabit the house and allow sufficient bedrooms for them. Every feature of the house should be discussed in terms of the family. Should there be a basement? Our experience has been that the basement has given us the most valuable space for the lowest cost. Should there be a second story? Where should the entrance be? Where should the bathroom be? Should the dining room be combined with the kitchen? My wife believes that it should be. Meals and “dishes” are important daily jobs, and she does not want to be isolated from the family at these times. A separate dining room, which multiplies the steps the wife has to make, is often viewed as essential for “fancy” guests. But a guest worth entertaining will not mind eating in the big kitchen with the family and sitting around to visit before and after meals. Where should the bedrooms be located? We were advised to have the parental bedroom, the nursery bedroom, and bathroom on the same floor 29 as general living quarters. We did not appreciate the tremendous importance of this arrangement until after the second baby arrived. Now it seems that it would be almost impossible to take care of the children if any one of these three rooms were on a different floor level. No two families will, or should, plan their houses exactly alike. It does not make much difference what the particular arrangement is, so long as it is born of long study and planning about how to make the dwelling a home for the family. Think about how to enable this most intimate of societies to work, eat, pray, talk, play, and study together. Forget about public opinion and the fancy standards of occasional visitors. Remember that a workshop for boys is more important than a basement bar; a utility room is more important than an arty niche or a fireplace; and babies are more important than extra space for bridge parties. 2) A Home Should Be Independently Owned You might assume that everyone hopes to own his home and that only the lack of money prevents the ideal. This assumption is far from the fact. The value placed on home ownership has gradually decreased. For many the convenience of apartment living and the ease of moving from one place to another are more important than ownership. A recent book was written about the hazards of owning one’s house–and the book was a top-seller. There was a time in the United States when nearly every family owned its home, no matter how crude the dwelling was. The trend toward tenancy has increased at every census, until in 1940 only 43.3 per cent of the nation’s families owned their homes. The percentage was much less in the largest cities. The housing shortage of recent years has forced many people to buy. Since residential real estate mortgages have increased nearly six billion dollars in the last seven years, it may be assumed that more families are owners today than in 1940. Still the sum total does not include more than about half the number of American families. In face of these figures it is necessary to assert the value of ownership. The Catholic Church has always defended personal or private ownership; recent popes have repeatedly advocated reforms to secure it. According to Pope Pius XII, “nature itself has closely joined private property with the existence of human society and its true civilization, and in a very special manner with the existence and development of the family.” He called upon “all public standards” and especially the State to preserve and increase family ownership. Ownership provides the owner with more security of shelter than renting could, and security is one of the greatest needs of a growing family. It gives the owner a sense of responsibility–to maintain ownership, to add improvements, and to make repairs. Ownership also elicits personal responsibility toward society from the owner; as Thomas Jefferson believed, only the man who has something to lose will have sufficient interest in the well-being of the government to be a democratic citizen. It furnishes the owner with a basis for independence, especially if the homestead is productive; and economically it represents the soundest type of saving. Ownership creates stability for the family and enables the family to maintain continuous contact with neighbors, parish, school, and community. It develops a family tradition around the homestead or the gathering point, which descendants identify with “back home.” Those are substantial arguments, but there is still another–one which appeals to the heart. That is the pride and joy of ownership. To stand on your own land, to plant and cultivate your own garden and flowers and trees, to build your own fences, to paint and beautify your own house, simply to stand back and survey your own property–here is a value the worth of which cannot be measured. If a man feels pride in possessing an automobile planned and built by others in a factory hundreds of miles away, how much more pride can he take in a homestead he has helped to improve! Ownership is not easy for the average family to secure. For many years its gleam is misted by a mortgage. But ownership is worth the struggle. It is worth going without some of the conveniences you might like. It is worth taking a less desirable location. It is worth being satisfied with a less pretentious structure and furnishings than you might get by renting. It is worth foregoing expensive entertainment, autos, or vacations. Ownership is worth sacrifice because it has a value that none of the other things have, a value big with spiritual overtones. 3) A Home Should Be Built for Permanency and Growth One of the criticisms of houses built in the last decade is that they are constructed of inferior materials, thrown together with the hope that they will last 30 years. A house should be built of the sturdiest materials and planned to last for generations. A house that is to become a home should accumulate memories for generations. The bond of a family homestead is a great help to family unity; families need root in the security of the old home www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 30 even if some of their members can return only occasionally. Architects often estimate that the shell of a modern house is no more than one-sixth the cost of the house. It is better to build that shell of permanent materials and go without the fancy appointments, than to skimp on the frame and include the gilding. A well-constructed wooden house will last for generations, though there is always hazard of fire. Lumber, however, has become a more expensive building material than cinder or cement blocks. With modern insulation and heating, the block or stone-walled home is just as comfortable and much more permanent. We built our home of cinder block with cement floors and cinder block partitions. It’s a story and a half high, 26 feet by 36 feet, and has a full basement. Yet the total cost of all the cement and masonry work was less than $2,000 [$30,000 in 2008 dollars– Ed.] in 1941. Add the cost of windows, doors, and roof, and for about $1,000 [$14,000] more we had the essentials of a house which should last, barring catastrophe, for centuries. Heating, water, electricity, and bath at that time cost $1,500 [$20,000]. It is not necessary that everything be built when you move in. I am not sure that it is even desirable. The fun of finishing the house which has not been completed yet has been one of our deepest satisfactions. Every room has more meaning and charm to us because whatever quality it has, we gave it. A house is brick and mortar when it is built. It becomes organic through adoption by a family. As the family thinks and feels and grows, so should the house reflect the change. One of our guests, a contractor, recounted how he had built several hundred houses, row on row, varying four basic designs. He built and furnished them completely, even to planting the shrubbery outside, and–as he said–he had food in the refrigerator when the families moved in. I cannot doubt his word, but I do doubt that he sold those houses to normal people. A house is like a child in many ways. And who would want to become the parents of a full-grown Harvard student? We moved into our house when the walls were up and the roof overhead. No conveniences were available for several weeks. It was five years before the labyrinth of electric wires was connected to a power line. It was more than a year before all the downstairs rooms were painted; over six years before the two big upstairs “dormitories” were completed. During a three weeks’ vacation last year, without any outside help, we built the shell of a 20 by 26 foot addition to be used as a garage in the winter and a porch in the summer. We have added touches THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org ever since and, while it is serviceable now, it will be another two years before we have the house completed the way we want it. Then will be the time to expand in another direction. It may seem intolerable to live in a house which is not completed or which is always being improved. That would be true if the house were not your own, or if you wanted it to be a show place to impress outsiders. Many of our visitors have arched an eyebrow as they looked at the unfinished condition of our house, and I suppose some were scandalized. But if you are always planning, you don’t see things as they are but as they are going to be–and that is good. We Americans have an over-developed fastidiousness. We want to see every pin in place and everything done and finished. Nature does not work that way nor does man at his best. The medieval cathedrals took centuries to build, but the world is far richer for them than if bishops had ordered workers to put up the best structure they could finish in 90 days. The assumption that one cannot have a new house unless it is finished to the last splendid detail is a major factor in preventing construction, for it increases the cost tremendously. Over the years we have worked an average of more than an hour a day on the house. Estimated at a dollar an hour (which would be optimistic for our unskilled labor) our work has added $2,500 [$35,000] in value to the house. Work of this kind does not take any special skill. A century and a half ago every pioneer was able to plan and make nearly everything he needed. There is no evidence that our average intelligence has decreased. Any man who can shave should have a hand steady enough to saw. Anyone who can swing a golf club can swing a hammer. There are municipal regulations which require licensed workers to perform certain jobs in construction work. Yet there remain hundreds of things which a man can do for himself, and it is in these jobs that the greatest savings can be made. Perhaps it is a double saving, for one who is engrossed in building his own house is a very poor patron of taverns, movies, and costly forms of outside entertainment! Almost anyone who wants to work on his own house will have to rely upon others. Books and government publications can help you over many rough spots, but the best source is the advice of people in your community who retain knowledge of ancient skills. Such people are generous. They are proud of their art and eager to aid anyone who wants to learn. 31 4) A Home Should Provide Privacy The first step toward privacy for the family is to make the house a single-family unit. Over 99 per cent of the families in Manhattan borough live in multiple-family units; the percentage does not fall much below 33 in any city. Pressure for space accounts for some of this crowding of families into areas where they can have only a superficial privacy–at the expense of remaining anonymous. In cities even single-unit dwellings are often jammed together like slices of bakery bread. Since the decentralization of family units depends upon the decentralization of cities and industry, there is no prospect of an immediate solution to the problem. Yet privacy remains the ideal. The family home should be secluded enough that members of the family may work, eat, talk, and even quarrel without a dozen other families watching and listening. Rearing normal children is almost impossible if every sound, from baby’s cries to Sonny’s laughter, must be hushed to prevent neighbors from becoming irate. A family planning a home should put privacy high on the list. Securing land in a remote suburb or on the fringes of the town or city will mean sacrificing some conveniences, but you should weigh these disadvantages against the gain in family privacy before making a decision. Fortunately for those who want “space, light, and air” for the family, as Pope Pius XII termed it, big lots in undeveloped areas are far less expensive than small lots in crowded areas. Our house was built in its entirety for less than the estimated cost of two rooms in a Harlem slum-clearance housing project. 5) A Home Should Be Part of a Community The family needs privacy; that is primary. A family also needs neighbors. A community is a collection of families united by a common bond and acting together for similar goals. Geographic proximity is a stimulus to community spirit but it is not sufficient stimulus by itself. Families may live close to one another and yet be strangers or, worse, they may be intensely antagonistic. People with community spirit know and are interested in one another. They visit. They work together on projects for church, school, safety, and recreation. They cooperate to beautify the community. They exchange help and tools. Their children play and fight together. They have a mutual sense of security in belonging to a loyal group. Little more thought is given to community than to privacy in buying or building a house today. At best it is a negative concern, verging on snobbery and racism. We pick a location, not because of what it has but because it is guaranteed not to have people in an inferior income bracket or of a different race. Community spirit cannot arise without more vital bonds than similarity of income and color. The conventional city block style is directly opposed to family privacy and community unity. Each house is a public display, aimed to impress an impersonal audience at the expense of the family. Much of the valuable small lot is used for a front lawn where privacy is impossible. Children must keep off the grass that strangers may be edified by a prim and sterile landscape. The rear of the home is at most uninteresting, facing a dirty alley. Somewhere along the line we Americans lost a valuable principle guiding our European ancestors. They valued privacy; it was common practice for them to build their houses on the edge of the street, with all the services coming from the street, not from the alley. What we call the front of the house, they have at the rear in the form of a little court where they and their neighbors can enjoy seclusion. Ideally, families ought to plan their homes to fit into a community that already exists or they should join several families with like interests in planning a block of houses. Groups of families building in new districts could achieve community unity by facing their houses inward instead of toward the street and by replacing alleys with a common. Integrated (but not identical) architecture would increase the beauty of the surroundings. Buying and building together, they could save considerably in construction costs. And all that is involved in planning together would develop mutual understanding so that community spirit would be well under way. In such projects individuality is not lost. Uniformity on all points is not desirable. A common desire to build a Christian community where the importance of rearing children is understood would be a sound basis for cooperative planning. There are obstacles to working together and temptations to individualism. We fancied a pine-covered acreage overlooking a lake. It was alluring–but alone. No neighbors in sight. We have been grateful a thousand times for the advice not to isolate ourselves. We fitted our home into a small community of seven families, with each house about three to five hundred feet from the other. We vary in nationality, occupation, age, and size of family. No one interferes with anyone else, yet everyone is aware of and interested in the welfare of the other. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 32 A community at its best should probably be larger than ours is, but, regardless of size, it is the spirit of unity and mutual willingness to help that counts. A family that builds a house without knowledge of or concern for neighbors is creating an obstacle to the making of a home. THE HIERARCHICAL MAN ✱ 6) A Home Should Be a Productive Unit From many standpoints, no consideration in home making is more important than planning the home as a productive enterprise–productive for the wife, the husband, and the children. This is a principle to which Pope Pius XII has referred again and again. He says that no form of private property (no, not even automobiles and television sets) “is more conformable to nature...than the land, the holding in which the family lives, and from the products of which it draws all or part of its subsistence.” To have a productive unit you do not have to buy a farm, even to have ten acres and a cow, as we do, or one acre and two goats, as a friend has. A 150foot square lot can be very productive if properly planned. The concept of productiveness begins within the family itself. In planning the house, the features which will help the wife work more efficiently are much more important than the appearance of the house to outsiders. No matter how pretty certain arrangements and furnishings might be, if they mean that the wife’s cleaning load will be doubled or that she will have to take ten extra steps fifty times a day, that plan is faulty. The centers of traffic, the proximity of conveniences, the number and location of closets, and many other items should be planned to facilitate her work. Productiveness of the rest of the homestead depends upon the location and climate and amount of space. Some men may prefer to concentrate on fine work, making furniture and cabinets, so they should have a shop. Trees and shrubs can be fruit producing and not merely ornamental. Even in cities there is opportunity to raise bees, rabbits, and a garden. What a family can produce will vary. Within each family it will vary from year to year, depending on the age, experience, and free time of the parents and children. The important thing is to plan the house and its location so that productive work is possible. The most obvious arguments for a productive home are economic, since less than 10 per cent of American families have a big enough income to relieve them of worry about saving money. There are grounds for suspecting the person who always says, “It’s cheaper to buy it than to make it.” That’s true of THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org This is a man compared to a household in which, 1) the entire activity is ordered to GOD. The spiritual faculties: 2) the INTELLECT mediates so that it may make true judgments, 3) the WILL grows strong so as to make decisions, and control the PASSIONS, 4) of which some are dormant, while some are operating in an orderly way. 5) and 6). THE DISORDERED MAN This is a man compared to a disordered household, which 1) ignores God, The PASSIONS run wild 2) making true judgments impossible. 3) and 4) The WILL grows flabby and the INTELLECT does not operate. 5) There is no work, but destruction. 6) Worship is toward SENSE PLEASURES. automobiles and washing machines. That’s not true of cooking, sewing, gardening, and other household services; statistics from every state department of agriculture and home economics prove that. But the person who is producing must know how to do the work and he must not buy expensive equipment for minor tasks. A 50 by 50 foot garden will not justify a garden tractor; a canning pressure cooker is inefficient if all it processes in a year is seven quarts of beans. Another consideration is that usually a family has less and of a poorer quality when it buys than when it ✱ The diagrams by Ed Willock appear in My Life With Thomas Aquinas, available from Angelus Press: Price $15.00. It originally appeared in Integrity magazine. 33 produces for itself. When our cow is dry, our butter and milk consumption is cut by half, since it is too expensive to use as much. Even if the productive home were not a noticeable saving, it still would be needed. This necessity follows from the very nature of man, for, as Scripture tells us, “Man was born to labor and the bird to fly.” Work is necessary to development as a human person. The home is the first and most important society in which the child matures. When children are deprived of the opportunity to do constructive work, their personalities suffer. We should not be surprised if they become troublesome, irresponsible, and delinquent. The purpose of play and recreation is to enable us to work and pray better–it “re-creates” us for higher things. Yet in homes where there is no wholesome work for the children, they can only play. Children, being children, may grumble at tasks to be performed, but usually it is because we have not taken time to train them or we have not given them really responsible work to do. Anyone who has watched 4-H club youth with their livestock or garden or kitchen projects has learned that the greatest values of a productive home are not economic. This is not to disparage the use of the home as the principal place for recreation. A house planned for family living, as mentioned earlier, is necessarily planned for family play. This is rather to point out that while we give considerable thought to facilities for recreation in planning modern homes, we rarely provide opportunities for work. And work is actually more important for children than play. 7) A Home Should Be Beautiful Beauty is one of the prime properties of being. Everyone wants to achieve beauty in his home. It is hard to imagine anyone sitting down and saying, “Now let’s plan a really unbeautiful house.” At the same time, beauty does not “look after herself.” Beauty is achieved only after thought and experiment. Beauty takes patience and, sometimes, more money. There is a temptation to draw the line at the useful and to let it go at that. Or one may hold doggedly to a plan which in theory should satisfy beauty but which is “out of place” in a particular location. Or one may spend too much on some one item, like putting rubies and diamonds on a mop pail. There are many ways of offending beauty. Giving thought to the principle will help to avoid them. Beauty is the most elusive of the principles of house planning. It is hard to get agreement on what beauty is, beyond the general statement of the philosophers that “The beautiful is that which, when seen, pleases.” Beauty is related to harmony and order, though violent contrasts like churning black clouds and jagged lightning are beautiful. Beauty presupposes the good and the true; we can be guided by the knowledge that the bad and the false in themselves cannot be beautiful. False fronts and imitations which do violence to the materials from which they are made will soon reveal their ugliness and mar a house and its furnishings. Nor should one plan conventional things just because they are conventional. It is probably impossible to please all outsiders anyway; public taste is fickle and changing. The test should be–is it pleasing to you and to your family? Not, what will other people think? There is no blueprint for beauty and examples are not very useful. Beauty has to be “seen.” In building, the “seeing” is first in the imagination. No time is wasted, when you shut your eyes and try to see how this shape and these lines will look against this terrain in this community, how these colors will blend, how this furniture will look in that room. In our own experience, we believe we have failed in this principle more than in any of the others, largely because I was in too much of a hurry to get a job done. I am afraid that most of us men are too utilitarian and unconcerned with beauty, especially when it takes more time and costs more to do a job well. Wives are almost always better judges of home beauty. If they persevere with patience and tact, the home should become more and more beautiful. These seven principles, we believe, have given us the best standard for making a home. We are more convinced than ever that if we had to start over again we would try to follow the same policy. We believe that it has given us an ideal setting for trying to build a Christian family. If we fail in this environment, we cannot blame anyone but ourselves. It would be misleading to say that a house can be planned and built easily. Discouragement and obstacles and fatigue are going to win a day now and then. But the continuous process of building a home is an adventure in living, joyous and rich. It should not be approached as a worry and a headache. It should and can be a refreshing experience, calling for creative thought by the intellect, important decisions by the will, and deep personal, human satisfaction in making something for oneself, by oneself. Emerson Hynes (1915-1971) was an American Catholic writer, father of ten, and professor of philosophy at St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. This article originally appeared in The Marianist and was given the Imprimatur by Bishop Edward Daly of Des Moines, Iowa. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 34 E d w i n F a u s t THE END-TIMES ECSTASY In one of the several outposts to which I have resorted for spiritual nourishment during this famine of faith, there was among the congregation a little old man who would frequently sidle up to me while I was sipping my coffee in the church basement after Mass. He always wore a knowing smile: not an entirely pleasant smile, but one that implied he saw something you didn’t, a danger lurking over your shoulder of which you were oblivious and at which he was staring. As devout Jews of old looked for the kingdom of Heaven, he looked for the end times. And he did so eagerly, even hungrily. “You got your blessed candles ready?” he asked me once. “Blessed candles?” I asked, not knowing what he meant. “They’re the only things that will light during the three days of darkness.” “Really?” The ANgeluS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org S 3 “Yup. Get ’em ready. It’s coming.” And having delivered his advice and prophecy, he and his smile retreated. His manner was unique, but his preoccupations were not. He desired the resolution of uncertainties, the release of tensions, in fact, the end of the world. I have seen such yearning among others engaged in this long and wearying combat with the enemies of the faith, the most pernicious of whom are within the precincts of the Church. The situation is admittedly dire and tries one’s patience. When we meet someone who in the course of conversation lets it be known that he is Catholic, we cannot simply trust his admission. He may very well be Catholic in the way the vast variety of Protestants are Catholic: by assenting to some portions of the creed and rejecting others. We feel inclined to vet his convictions before granting his title. To those of us loyal to Tradition, these inquisitions of putative co-religionists can become tedious and unpleasant, and they inevitably bear in upon us how far is our own habitation from that in which dwell the members of what we call the mainstream church. Now, it is a natural and wholesome thing to desire clarity. When we have difficulty distinguishing physical objects, we consult an optometrist; but when we have difficulty discerning the members of our Church, we can only squint in perplexity. And as we cannot cross-examine everyone who claims to share our beliefs, we cannot avoid a measure of uneasiness when a stranger includes himself in the mystical body. Such uneasiness is also exacerbated greatly when a prelate betrays by public statements or acts that what he holds to be true is in stark contradiction to what the Church has always taught. It is far less taxing for us to declare a fellow layman’s proposition heretical should he claim, for instance, that the new covenant did not supersede the old covenant, than it is to level the same judgment against a cardinal or even a pope. Yet, our respect for office must bow to our loyalty to truth, and the judgment stand in both cases. But we must also admit the emotional strain of recognizing the denial of dogma by those whose duty it is to uphold it. They should carry the banner that we follow, not drag it in the mud and leave us leaderless. There is a broad gulf between that which should be and that which is when it comes to the Catholic hierarchy and, as I say, we feel it deeply: it unsettles us; it discomforts us; it makes us long for a better state of affairs. We want clear lines of cleavage: Catholics on one side and non-Catholics on the other. We earnestly wish that those who lack faith should also lack mitres. But the murkiness we all deplore, the twilight in which neither sun nor moon gives light, persists. And though all of us want to escape the twilight, some of us hope to do so by blotting out the sun and moon along with it. Some yearn for the three days of darkness. Some, out of fatigue and frustration, want the angels of the apocalypse to fulfill their terrible office and pour out upon the earth their vials of plague, the sooner the better. I have heard, with some pain, men whom I hold in high esteem speak with positive relish of the coming collapse of what remains of Western civilization. I have heard predicted, with seemingly solid conviction, that we are close to the breakdown of all those mechanisms whose continued operation provide us with the stability and comfort we presently enjoy. I have heard thundering prophecies that our economy is on the brink of a precipice and its plunge into the chasm of chaos inevitable. I know little about currency and market forces and investments, as my small income is almost entirely expended in keeping my family fed and sheltered, so I cannot explain the principles underlying such forecasts, but I dearly hope they are entirely mistaken. I have also heard it predicted, with happy anticipation, that our supply of electricity will soon run out, casting us into a darkness that will paralyze the normal functioning of society in all its aspects. Again, the basis for such speculation eludes me. There are also those whose visions of apocalypse are more cosmic and supernatural, as were those of my friend with his blessed candles; they dream of flood and famine and fire from Heaven. Now, our faith enjoins us to believe that the world will end, and we have it on the highest authority that awful occurrences will precede that end. It is salutary to think of these things on occasion, as we are thereby reminded of the transitory nature of all that is worldly and of the abiding reality of the changeless God, in whose company we all hope to find ourselves when heaven and earth are no more; but a preoccupation with apocalyptic visions is not without its danger to our mental and spiritual health. The history of the Church is punctuated by outbreaks of what might be called the end-times ecstasy. The first notable occurrence dates to the second century figure of Montanus, who retreated to Pepuza with his two prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, and announced that the new Jerusalem would descend on the spot where he and his entourage had encamped. Needless to say, some disappointment followed, but that did not discourage the recrudescence of such vagaries. Each age appears to evoke in those so predisposed new forecasts of the imminent end of time. The Church, whose dogmatic councils make no pronouncements without serious cause, deemed it incumbent upon Her to anathematize the setting of dates for the dissolution of the world. Our Lord implies such a www.angeluspress.org The ANgeluS • January 2008 36 prohibition when He tells us that it is not given to any man to know that day and time. He counsels us to be perpetually in readiness for His coming, not to engage in calculations about its exact moment. So one can say that a man who predicts, even in a broad manner, a time frame for the apocalypse is not thinking with the mind of the Church. And while contemplating the fleeting quality of all that is temporal helps to fix our hearts on that which is eternal, a longing for the destruction of the world is not similarly beneficial. Quite the opposite. A man’s motives for avidly looking forward to the Second Coming may be righteous. After all, St. John ends the book of Revelation with the words: “Come, Lord Jesus, come.” This invitation might be described as a kind of holy impatience arising from a desire to see the face of the Savior. It is akin to the feeling we have when we intensely desire to see again the face of a loved one from whom we have been separated for a long time. But I fear that there are among us those whose preoccupation with the end times is rooted in feelings of a different nature. Some languages express an aspect of the human psyche better than others. We recognize this when we make use of foreign phrases in certain instances when English falls short of the precision and connotation we are reaching for. For instance, the “joy of life” lacks the animation and sonorous power of “joie de vivre”; likewise, we have no comparable set of words that compresses all the meaning that is packed into the German compound, “schadenfreude.” The usual translation is “joy at another’s sorrow,” but such translation merely verifies the adage that to translate is to change. In some of us, a relish for the end times may be liberally spiced with schadenfreude. It can be maddening to see wicked people flourish. The spirit of justice rears up in us and demands that they be held to account, and we do have a limited license to exact justice in this world. First, in our families, as we teach our children right from wrong through punishments and rewards. Second, in society at large, that collection of families, in which we set up courts and prisons and even execution chambers so that men who do evil will pay the corresponding penalty. But a great deal goes on in this life that falls outside the jurisdiction of the family and the courthouse. There are entirely legal ways to behave as a scoundrel. Our society, for instance, sets no limit on the satisfaction of certain morally illicit appetites. A man may amass a fortune of obscene proportions and use his financial power to ruin other men, and far from being held in contempt by the public at large, he is likely to be admired, envied and emulated by those who subscribe to the perverted values of a commercial culture in which worth is measured by wealth. THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org Likewise, those who have been blessed, or possibly cursed, with a prepossessing physical beauty often use their allure to fashion careers in film and television that excite lust and encourage vanity. Again, their bad behavior is not censured by general disapprobation but richly compensated by universal celebrity. They become stars, and their fans raise their less lovely heads to gaze upon them with fascination in the firmament of the media heavens. But none of these examples rankles in our hearts as does that of a corrupt priest or bishop. That the world is wicked and, in varying measure, will always be so, we accept as the patrimony of Adam. But that the spotless bride of Christ should be wedded to faithless and feckless men we find an agonizing betrayal. Not that we expect any man, whether in or out of Holy Orders, to be sinless. We know that no one is exempt from the struggle against temptations to which our fallen nature has delivered us; but we do expect that there should be a struggle and that those who are the successors of the apostles should lead us in the contest. We expect that in this spiritual combat our churchmen should be among the most valiant, not the most easily vanquished. We expect them to teach the true faith and to live it. But our expectations have been cruelly disappointed. And as we scan the horizon in search of deliverance in the natural order and see nothing but a blank expanse, we sometimes turn to the supernatural order and yearn to see Divine justice descend from the clouds and set all aright. But there is a danger in such yearning. Imperfect as we are, our wish to see justice triumph can easily slide into a wish to see vengeance worked. We may want to see the Church rectified, but we may also want to see those who have defiled Her suffer. And our Creed does not countenance such a desire. Our Lord said many harsh things to the Pharisees and scribes, but it is impossible, even forbidden, to believe that He took pleasure in the thought of their eventual damnation; rather, we know that He would have saved them had they only come to Him, even under cover of night, as did Nicodemus. And we know that Our Lord wept over Jerusalem, she who killed the prophets and would soon kill her Lord. How He would have loved to gather His errant children under His wing and save them from their perverseness. But He made man in His own image, free. Free even to turn his will against his own salvation. One of the most moving accounts in the Gospels is the story of the woman taken in adultery. The enemies of Our Lord obviously know that He will not condemn her and intend to use His acquittal of a sinner to accuse Him of breaking the Law of Moses. But what gave them assurance that Jesus would not allow her to be stoned? Because they knew, from 37 experience, that Our Lord always looked on the sinner with pity and forgiveness, with a desire for his reclamation, not his condemnation. And with those simple words, “Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone,” He saves the sinner and frustrates the machinations of His enemies. Still, He would have even forgiven His enemies had they been moved, ever so little, to repentance. And consider their malice. They would have used an act of mercy as a weapon to destroy the font of all mercy. Yet, it may be that some among them, or perhaps only one, was healed of his malice that day; that the tenderness of Our Lord toward an adulteress softened the hardened heart of a hypocrite. It seems probable to me, and we are told by St. John that not all that Our Lord did is recorded; that were all His deeds to be written down, the world itself could not contain the books that would have to be written. It is also probable that some of His disciples, those sons of thunder, as Jesus called them in somewhat humorous reproof, would have preferred that He summon fire from heaven to consume those malicious men. But such was not Our Lord’s way, nor should it be ours, for we are to pattern ourselves after Jesus, not the boanerges. Now, if we are to imitate Our Lord in as much as we are able, this certainly means that we must not be eager to condemn the sinner and be impatient to see him punished, even if the sinner is hiding his dishonest head beneath a mitre and gripping in his traitor’s hand a crozier. To sentence another to suffer is only licit when we are charged with the administration of justice, and even then, a certain regret that it must be so seems appropriate. Under no circumstances are we to take pleasure in seeing a man writhe in pain, either in fact or fancy. Such pleasure falls under the heading of vengeance and is forbidden us. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay.” Yet, Our Lord can always count on some unsolicited helpers here below. Now, even those among us most avid for Armageddon are thankfully powerless to bring it about, save in our imagination. And some doubtless do imagine it. They envision corruption being swept away by the winds of the apocalypse, and evil men, particularly those who have betrayed their ecclesial offices, trembling in fear and saying to the earth, “Cover us” and to the mountains, “Fall down on us.” And finally, all that is loathsome and pernicious being cast into the lake of fire. And there are those aforementioned whose imagination is of a less biblical turn who envision with satisfaction the collapse of Wall Street and the great banking houses, the power grid switching off, never to be restarted, the high and mighty weeping helplessly in the darkness of their failed world. They want to see the bad men pale and tremble and, at long last, suffer greatly for all the evil they have committed. Such longings are not consonant with fraternal charity and, if nurtured too long, they will make us forget that even the most forsaken soul is still beloved of God; that our office is to pray and sacrifice for our brothers and sisters, not delight in the thought of their destruction. Of course, such charity can only be effected by grace. Vengeance is natural; loving one’s enemies is supernatural. I don’t think these end-times longings are usually shared by those of us with children to raise, but are rather reserved to people who no longer have a vested interest in the future. Parents, in most cases, do not want to see the cosmos become chaos, day become night, the earth shake and the seas rise and the stars fall from heaven. We rather hope that all will be well and our sons and daughters might live; and I think such hope justified. I know that many signs appear to point to the end times: the apostasy of the nations, for instance, and the Novus Ordo Mass as possibly the abomination of desolation in the holy place. Devotees of the apocalypse can doubtless list many more. But a little knowledge of history informs us that doomsday prophets in previous epochs assembled quite convincing cases, too. Certainly, we have no experience at present as vastly impressive as the Black Death, which by some estimates carried away three quarters of the population of Europe in the mid-14th century. And, despite the sad divisions in the Church, we are undergoing nothing so awful as the Great Schism, in which all of Christendom was rent by rival claimants to the papacy, with even saints ranged on opposite sides. And as for the general wickedness of the world and the occurrence of natural disasters, when have we lacked these? The world will indeed end, we know not when, and the saved will be separated from the damned. Justice will triumph, but it will be God’s justice tempered by God’s mercy, not our idea of justice conditioned by our resentments and anger. And as we wait for the end times, let’s not look at the sins of others, but at our own failings, and pray that when we are judged, we will find in Jesus the tenderness He showed the woman taken in adultery, for all of us are at times unfaithful. And let us hope that our names are written in the Book of Life and that on the last day, when we are gathered together by Our Lord, He will wipe away all our tears. So let us join St. John in saying “Come, Lord Jesus, come.” In your own good time. Edwin Faust is a longtime contributor to traditional Catholic publications. In addition to being a news editor for a daily newspaper, he lives with his wife and three children in New Jersey. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 Twenty Minutes 38 with Fr. de Chivré: What it Means to Have a Soul I am going to try to build on a little expression you used to hear on the radio when a boat was sinking: “S.O.S.–Save Our Souls. “Save our souls”–because it’s about time we do. Save them from what?–from being infected by what can kill them. But to save our souls, first we must believe they exist. The vast majority of right-minded folk believe that they have a soul, but they have no idea what that implies. Too many people generally tuck it neatly away in the drawer of official phrases like a family souvenir, or maybe even hide it under ecclesiastical ceremonies. But rarely do we take our souls seriously. I am going to tell you exactly what a soul is and dispel any vagueness in your notions. It holds the secret of our personality. THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org : l 39 St. Thomas Aquinas defines a soul as a place. To illustrate what St. Thomas means, I want you to imagine the sitting room in your home. What is a sitting room? It is a place–a place which is “formalized,” as they say in philosophy. It has a form, a form of which it cannot be deprived under pain of no longer being a sitting room. A form makes a thing what it is. In the case of a sitting room, its form is often four walls making a rectangle, but maybe the neighbor’s sitting room is round; another’s might be triangular. In any case, despite these differences in architecture, each sitting room has a form which distinguishes it as a sitting room (and not a kitchen, bathroom, or a garage, for instance). Curiously enough, it is the very form of any sitting room that determines the placement of the objects particular to a sitting room: the size and placement of windows, curtains, choice of paintings, the easy-chairs, bookcases, chessboard, etc. Behind it all is the mind of the homeowner from which the sitting room has originated, the homeowner who constructed the form and placed particular objects within it. Obviously the homeowner is not going to fill the sitting room with garage tools and garden implements. Despite some differences from room to room, all sitting rooms maintain their distinct destiny: they resemble a sitting room. In general, I can say that a “place” implies two realities: 1) form: the architecture of natural dispositions that all of us share, and 2) content: that which is particular to each individual spiritual form. Our soul has been received by us from God in the way a house has received its form from an architect. But our souls, equal in that each man has one, necessarily are differentiated by the unique dispositions of character or quality which you have and I don’t, or which I have and you don’t. So, as a sitting room is a sitting room, yet with variety in its furnishings and expressions, the soul as a soul is an extremely precise place, yet with each soul having a variety of responses to the Good, the Beautiful, the True, and to the Just, in its own particular manner. You, for example, will tend to express the dispositions of your soul in an artistic manner on account of the form which God has given you. Your neighbor may express certain dispositions in a more zealous manner, and another, perhaps, by stillness and contemplation. But be careful. Your soul, with its particular and unique form, is the greatest gift you have received. If you desecrate it, everything else becomes pointless. You are wasting your time. If the walls of a sitting room do not serve as a sitting room, all those objects furnishing the sitting room become pointless. They are, as it were, “wasting their time,” too. Let’s be logical. In order to take on the modern age, to communicate, to take on an apostolate, a family, or a business, you have to have a soul. Before you have real knowledge, or money, or a college degree, or power, or success, you have to know you have a soul and live in this knowledge. Why?–To be sure not to desecrate everything else that you do. If you use the profound qualities God has placed in your heart only in self-interest contrary to God, for pleasure indifferent to God, for success unhinged from Calvary, you are squandering your soul, your time, and everything else. This explains why society is made up of weaklings. They may have awards, degrees, and power, but the practical denial of the soul has rendered the weaklings helpless: helpless to reorganize society because they deny in practice the principle of reorganization. They have de-formed the soul; in many cases, they have eliminated the form. They have effectively knocked down the walls of the sitting room and it is, in practice, no longer. Oh, the number of deformed Catholics, of Catholics who practically deny their form. Sometimes this, sometimes that, at the mercy of their longings, their pleasures, their reputation. We have a society that no longer believes it has a form–we have a deformed society. Can we pull ourselves out of this mess? There are two means by which we might: 1) convince a de-formed society that it really can re-form itself at the moment it decides to reconquer its form, that is, its spiritual, supernatural, qualitative, and affective form; and 2) undertake the formation of the little children from their earliest years. We must concentrate with utmost delicacy and authority on their souls–their form–and prove to them that that is what never can be deformed. Everything else is secondary. Which parents would dare to tell their son what Blanche of Castille told St. Louis: “My son, I would rather see you dead at my feet than guilty of a single mortal sin.” What did Jesus do? He created restlessness wherever He went. He led people to focus on their interior state. It’s why they crucified Him. The moment a man no longer has enough interior health to take on the blessed restlessness which arises in him, he is dead. Restlessness has the capacity to resurrect the form of the soul.1 I am telling you this for a very simple reason: We are never so much at home as when we commerce within ourselves. A soul is easily lost because all of modern life is calculated to draw it out of that home: business, distractions, television, radio, telephone, travel, meetings, etc. We are always lost in some project. The great drama of modern life is that we are rarely able, if ever, to be “at home” within ourselves. “Amen, Amen, I say to you: the Kingdom of God is within you.” We are always outside. We never hear the “new song” within our soul. We do not even know what it is. We are never at home. Even www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 40 modern liturgies drag us outside of ourselves. You can no longer make a thanksgiving after Communion, close your eyes, or pray silently. Modern life is modern life because it has an incapacity to respect souls. When a man no longer knows how to dwell in himself, when he no longer knows how to listen to anything but the television, to understand anything above his newspaper; when he no longer knows how to be silent and hear someone else speak, he is useless to society. Look at history. Those who really stirred things up were all contemplatives: St. Bernard, St. Benedict, St. Dominic, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila. These heroes and heroines took moments throughout the day to stop and listen to their soul. This explains why they could step back into the chaos of their century with such marvelous lucidity, letting them discern straight away truth from falsehood. For it is within the soul that the sense of truth develops, and not in the political persuasions of Christians; it is within the conscience that the soul develops a sense of responsibility, and not from consulting the opinion polls; it is within the person, which is marked by the seal of Baptism: “I baptize you in the Name of the Father, the Almighty; in the Name of the Son, by Whom you are redeemed; and in the Name of the Holy Ghost, Who makes you a missionary.” Outside of these, you have no reason for being. We no longer believe it. We no longer have the Faith. When the language of God and the attractions of Charity are the determining factors in a man’s life, then you are dealing with a soul. On the contrary, we have become mass-produced: the same movements, roles, functions, and–listen closely–disputes [see Internet chatrooms, for instance–Ed.]. We bicker incessantly because we have practically lost our souls. There necessarily follows a general dislocation of everything and confrontation of everyone. It is no small thing. St. Thomas Aquinas has this admirable definition: “A soul is a place where someone is always speaking.” We truly are in the image of the Word of God: “A place where S/someone is always speaking.” He breaks down the reasoning with staggering clarity. He says there are some who are always speaking with their inferior life, that is, the inveterate sinner who is always speaking with the (irrational) animal life and the sexual life. There are some who are always speaking with their natural life, conscientious but never stepping beyond what is purely natural: natural law, natural duty, natural respect. There are some, however, who speak with their supernatural life: regret, desire, attraction, ascent. Finally, there are some who speak with the life of charity, that sort of definitive entry into the habitual preference for God. THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org The question to ourselves is “What is going on in my presence?” There are three domains by which we can answer this question. Does our speech arise from the domain of the senses, of strictly the externals? For such a man, the soul has no other inhabitants beyond the domain of the senses. Then there is the domain of the intellect. By this I mean the sense of good or evil, of beauty and wonder, and of the excellent. Look at what havoc is wrought when we eliminate the beautiful. Who are these Catholics who feast on vulgarity and who rationalize their enjoyment of it? Ever since we have eliminated the beautiful, we have sunk into vulgarity. Why?– because we have eliminated the reflection of God from the soul. Beauty–good and true–is the delicate, colorful, and clear reflection of God which awakens within us a longing to rise higher. The third region is the domain of that capacity each of us has to receive more than we can possibly obtain by ourselves. It is what St. Thomas called “the obediential power.” We have a hunger to receive those things greater than ourselves such as grace, the beatitudes, the words of Jesus Christ, His soulpiercing reflections: “All you who are weary and do not know where to turn, come to Me, and I will refresh you....” This is that whole capacity to see our suffering transformed into accents of redemption, that desire for grace which is a communication of God’s mentality to our own mind, helping us to think as God thinks. This is the mind of God which penetrates a man’s heart and lifts him up above his selfishness in gestures of self-forgetfulness, liberating him from animal materiality. The vitality of a soul is staggering because it is in direct contact with God. Every single day forges our soul anew by the intermediary of grace and material events to prepare us for the very last evening. Here you touch the real gravity of life. St. Thomas Aquinas explains the difference between souls based on who is speaking there. There is always an interior speech alive in each of us. In some souls, he says, things appear as dead as a tomb. All one can hear is the growling of the beast. Concern for progress and improvement does not exist. The only remaining happiness for the majority of such souls is mealtime! We have killed in the souls of our children all sense of superior vitality, of moral and spiritual nobility. The law of the soul is to participate in the vitality of God, Who is intrepid. Christ had the intrepidity to go all the way to Calvary because He had the intrepidity of the Resurrection. And any spiritual life which claims it can avoid being intrepid is dead. It is no longer worthy of God. Such intrepidity doesn’t rule out prudence or charity. On the contrary... We will know our spiritual life to be the life of a living soul insofar as we instinctively applaud the good and refuse evil; insofar as we instinctively react 41 with sympathy for the truth and disgust for falsehood. This is not to deny nuances, the “diplomacies” of the apostolate. But, when we look at the way Jesus acted, He did not hesitate to say: “Yes, yes; no, no.” And as St. Paul said with such verve when he appeared in chains before Festus: “It is not right.” Take any one of the saints: they were full of healthy dignity. A healthy dignity is the privilege of sanctified souls: adoring, prayerful, mortified souls. It is the privilege of the spirit liberated from the flesh. It is the privilege of the flesh proudly submitted to the spirit. It is the privilege of all those who do not model their lives and their conduct on a group, a fad, or human respect, but on their spiritual life. It is exactly as St. John said: “The truth will set you free.” The prisoners among us have never rediscovered their soul. Even though souls appear dead, it is not over until it’s over. And what about the battlefield around us? I mean the lacerated affections, the wounded feelings, the shadows of night stretching out over the wounded. I mean the obscurity of darkness preventing us from seeing clearly anymore who one is, what one is, what one wants. There is the interior chaos of pitiable consciences that no longer even know if they are still a conscience. This is the battlefield upon which we are called to bring the sunlight of the Beatitudes: Blessed are they who weep, as God wept. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice, the way Jesus Christ did. Blessed are they who realize that they are being lied to, for they can call for the help of Him Who never deceives. The battlefield is made for regaining your position on the eternal victory of Jesus Christ. Then there are others who only hear noise. I mean the noise of agitation, of the passions, the noise of social organizations. We are at risk of being smothered under an excess of social-life distractions which have thrown everything out of joint because we lacked the spiritual cohesion of discernment, precise judgments, and of unyielding dignity. We are driven along by a society which we are utterly incapable of relating to God or holding up to the Faith. The value of the interior place matters little to the neo-pagan; the outside is all that counts. Are we pagans? According to St. Thomas, a pagan is a man for whom only the exterior matters. For a saint the soul is the primary interest. Once the love of God settles effectively into a conscience, that conscience ceases to be a danger–indeed, it becomes a help–to others, no matter how near or far. Such is the primary social service we can render to the world: to allow God to settle into us. Once we allow God to settle into our soul we suddenly become useful to the whole community, the whole parish, and the whole nation. The sense of God will come to us in recompense of our sense of the soul. The taste for God will come in recompense of our taste for the soul. You are outside the essential as long as your daily activities fail to influence the salvation of others and do not draw you to pose the problem of their salvation. The sense of God puts us face to face with the idea of salvation. The ultimate, real responsibility for every one of us is salvation. If you are a parent, you are responsible for the salvation of your children; the rest is secondary. If you are a business owner, you are responsible for the salvation of the poor and the humble by the justice of your proceedings. Aside from that, profit and loss are without importance. If you are a professor, you are responsible for inculcating in your students a respect for natural law, and perhaps for the supernatural law, as well. Aside from that, diplomas are without importance. We absolutely must “demythologize” the pagan cult of human success. If we do not do it, God will– and that by the shedding of blood. Catholics have to rediscover the nobility of what conquers the world, the spirit of what saves the world, that is, the clean conscience. I would like to make you understand that each time you draw near to God, God in turn—and it is the greatest honor He can do you–longs to raise you a cut above. You cannot be like everybody else. You must dare to be different from others, from failure, from false piety. You will dare to affirm yourself free to incarnate love, to incarnate truth, to incarnate nobility. We are on the lookout for men a cut above in the villages, in the countryside, in the industries. We are in desperate need of men a cut above. The whole work of the Holy Ghost is that the mustard seed become a great tree, that we find the pearl of great price, put the lost sheep upon our shoulders, and dig up the treasure in the field. This is the beauty of our destiny. I believe that living means daring to die every single day so that when the final hour comes, there is no longer anything jarring. We simply continue to die because we simply continue to live eternally. Translated by Angelus Press, but seriously edited by Fr. Kenneth Novak for clarity in an attempt to make it easier to understand. An unpublished conference from the private archives of the Association du R. P. de Chivré. 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 St. Augustine: “Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and panted for Thee. I tasted hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace” (Confessions, X:27, 38). www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 42 F R . p e t e r Can a person perform the penance received in Confession after having fallen back into mortal sin? The penance received in Confession ought to be performed as soon as possible after Confession, so that a person who delays for no reason the fulfilment of a heavy penance given for a mortal sin so as to be in danger of forgetting his penance, would commit another mortal sin. It is true that it is not necessary that the penance be performed before going to Holy Communion, and that frequently there is no time to perform the penance and the opportunity of receiving Holy Communion presents itself. There is no reason why such a person ought not to receive the Blessed Sacrament. However, the penance must be done before going back to Confession. If a person were unfortunate enough to lose the state of sanctifying grace before being able to do his penance, or through his own negligence, he would be in a difficult situation. It is probable that the penance performed in mortal sin does not have its full satisfactory value, which depends upon the union of charity between God and the soul, which union has been lost. Yet, the penitent in mortal sin is still bound to doing the work of penance before going back to Confession. The common opinion of the theologians is that the penance done after falling back into mortal sin satisfies with respect to the work imposed by the Confessor, and that it consequently does not have to be reiterated after the person has gone back to Confession and recovered the state of grace (Prummer, Man. Th. Mor. III, §402). However, a person in such a situation ought to make an act of perfect contrition, so to recover the state of sanctifying grace before doing the penance, so that this work can not only fulfill the command of the priest, but also have a real satisfactory value to make up for his sins. Q Does chewing gum break the ecclesiastical fast? The ecclesiastical fast is not the same thing as a natural fast, which is the total abstinence from all food and drink. The ecclesiastical fast is the fast that is prescribed by the Church’s positive law, and is not always as absolute as the natural fast. There are two kinds of ecclesiastical fast. The first kind is the Eucharistic Fast. Until Pope Pius XII’s Motu Proprio of 1957 (Sacram Communionem), the Eucharistic fast required by the Church was an absolute fast from the preceding midnight. This excluded the ingestion of any food and drink, even water. It did not allow of even light matter, A THE ANGELUS • January 2008 www.angeluspress.org R . s c o t t the ingestion of any food being grave matter and a mortal sin if followed by Holy Communion the same day. Pope Pius XII in the above mentioned decree allowed the three hour fast, to be counted strictly before the time of Holy Communion. This requires abstaining from all solid food and from alcoholic drinks. The rule was changed to one hour of abstinence from non-alcoholic beverages, and allowed the drinking of water at any time, without breaking the fast. These are the rules that must be kept in Tradition, the one hour fast of Pope Paul VI being truly a farce. The Eucharistic Fast does not admit of a venial sin due to the small quantity of food ingested, not even a very small quantity being interpreted as nothing. However, it is not broken by particles of food found in teeth and swallowed in saliva, nor by toothpaste. The resolution of the question of chewing gum depends on whether or not it is considered to be a food. If the gum itself is swallowed, it must be said to constitute food. Furthermore, chewing gum has large quantities of sugar, which certainly has food value. Consequently, it must be considered as breaking the Eucharistic fast, so that if a person chews gum less than three hours before receiving Holy Communion, then he must abstain from Holy Communion, under pain of sin. There is no Catholic who believes in the Real Presence who does not see how grave a disrespect it would be to chew gum and then afterwards approach the Sacred Banquet. In addition, as Pope Pius XII states, the three hour fast itself is a special mitigation and concession on the traditional practice (absolute fast from midnight), which is recommended whenever possible, and when we use these mitigations we are expected to make compensation…by becoming shining examples of the Christian life, and principally by works of penance and charity. (Matters Liturgical, 1959 edition, §366) The question of the Ecclesiastical fast prescribed for days of fast is entirely different. Here again the fast obliges under pain of mortal sin (alas, now only on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday), but allows one main meal and two snacks. Any consumption of solid food outside those times is a breaking of the fast. However, with this fast, there can be light matter when the amount of food ingested is small, so that the sin committed by deliberately doing so is only a venial sin. Moreover, the amount of food ingested can be so little as to be effectively nothing, in which case it could be considered as not breaking the fast at all. It would seem that the amount of sugar capable of nourishing contained in a chewing gum is not 43 more than that which is allowed in a cup of tea or coffee. Yet we know that this does not break the fast. Consequently, it can be considered safely that the chewing of a single chewing gum on a day of fast would not constitute a sin against this precept of the Church. However, repeated chewing of gum would amount to at least a light matter, and would constitute a venial sin. Furthermore, any Catholic who understands the most elementary principles of mortification in the spiritual life can see how inappropriate it is to stretch the Church’s fasting rules in this way. The chewing of gum, producing oral satisfaction, is a practice that demonstrates little mortification of the sense of taste. It ought, therefore, to be entirely avoided on days of penance, in which we mortify the rebellious senses that lead us into to many sins that offend the all pure Sacred Heart of Jesus. 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. Those wishing answers may please send their questions to Q & A, in care of Angelus Press, 2915 Forest Ave., Kansas City, MO 64109. writing Contest winner Bridget Miller september/november 2007 Miss Kansas City, Missouri There once lived a priest, his alias “Hank”. (We know not his name for his name tag is blank). His diet was sparse, (for his stature is thin), yet he worked hard to free his whole parish from sin. “Dear faithful” he cried, exercising his lung, “this thing without fleshiness, tonsil or tongue. I found it here lying amidst the dry grass, is it the mandibular jaw of an ass?” One day while out walking the sands in a haze, (foremost in his mind were those souls’ wayward ways), against something hard did his foot chance to scrape. It had an acute, angled boomerang shape! “I know that it is.” Fr. Hank cried, “Beware!” “these things that I’ll tell you may give you a scare. For it was with a jawbone like this, like as not, that Samson killed all of those men in one shot!” He knew not what it was. His initial reaction, was that his poor foot had, quite simply, lost traction. He confessed his mistake when he saw with chagrin, the lack of a head,–with a toothy half-grin! “Sometimes God will use things much crazier still, to put into action His almighty will. He raises from dust, humble women and men to strive for more souls to take to heaven.” He glanced down in shock, he lost all inspiration. His forehead was dampened with moist perspiration. Not long though, his soul soon was filled with a fire. He then shouted aloud, his voice meant to inspire: “If God in His wisdom makes use of a creature to perform His will,” cried the inspired preacher, “It’s much more important for us who have souls, to give glory to God, by fulfilling our roles!” www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • January 2008 The Angelus monthly photo wrItIng Contest Any member of a household aged 10-18 whose family address has a current subscription to The Angelus (either in print or online) is eligible. There may be more than one entry per address if more than one child is eligible. (Please include your family’s address and phone number, especially if you are a contestant writing from a boarding school.) Pricing for The Angelus is found at the bottom of the “Table of Contents” page. The Angelus is offering $150 for a 250-word creative writing composition on the above picture. (This may include, but is not limited to, any poem, dialogue, short story, song lyrics, script, explanation, etc.) If none is deserving of the prize, none will be awarded. The winning essay may be published if there is a winner. An extra $50 is available if one is a member of the SSPX Eucharistic Crusade (verified by your chaplain with your entry). Entrants must submit a creative-writing composition in their own words about the featured monthly picture. Submissions must be handwritten and will be judged on content, legibility, and creativity. The essays will be judged by parties outside of Angelus Press. essays must be postmarked or faxed by JAnUAry 31 and be addressed to: Attention: the Angelus monthly photo writing Contest 2915 Forest Avenue, Kansas City, mo 64109 FAX: 816-753-3557 (24-hour dedicated line) The Life of Christ Fr. Robert E. Southard W E N 96pp, softcover, 393 full color illustrations, STK# 8224 $15.00 Originally published by the Catechetical Guild in 1955 (Imprimatur Francis Cardinal Spellman), this is the “comic” book companion to Know Your Mass. Both illustrated by Addison Burbank in full color. The book presents the life of Our Lord from the Annunciation to His Ascension in a manner easily understood by children. Adults will find the seamless integration of the Gospels informative as well. An ideal companion to Know Your Mass, which presents the unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass... here, children learn to know and love Him Who is the Sacrifice. Even students who excel in religion class often do not KNOW Our Lord...they don't yet understand Scripture, the Gospels do not read like the stories they are used to. The Life of Christ introduces them to their Savior in a way they can understand–and love. Great for religion classes and makes an excellent gift for the Feast of St. Nicholas, Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, First Holy Communion, name days, birthdays, etc. Highly recommended. more Sofanctuaries Sacrifice International Altars and Churches of Catholic Tradition 10¾" x 10¾" Full color throughout, STK# CAL2008 $12.00 The 2008 Liturgical Calendar features 12 INTERNATIONAL Traditional Sanctuaries OF THE sspx with their histories and explanations. Why an altar calendar again? Because the Catholic Church considers the altar as the whole reason for the existence of the building in which it stands. Not only does she look upon it as the sacrificial stone, upon which Christ, our Priest and Victim, offers Himself daily in His Eucharistic Sacrifice, which is the central act of her liturgy; but she has proclaimed that the altar represents the Lord Himself. He is Altar, Victim, and Priest; and the reverence for the altar symbolizes the reverence due to Christ Himself. Room for your notes and appointment reminders. All the feast days of the year according to the 1962 Roman Missal are listed with class and liturgical color marked along with reminders of days of fast and abstinence. It also includes the latest directory of Latin Mass locations and traditional Catholic schools in the US and Canada. 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. ngelus Press announces the first totally retypeset, 1962 Latin-English daily missal for the laity since Vatican II. This is the most complete missal ever produced in the English language. We have included everything in a missal that is affordable while being of the highest durability. The Roman Catholic Daily Missal will become your lifelong liturgical companion—at Church, at home, and on the road.  All new typesetting—not a photographic reproduction. Clear and crisp type.  According to the 1962 juxta typica edition of the Missale Romanum  1,980 pages  All liturgical texts in Latin and English (both Propers and Ordinary)  All readings in English (Douay-Rheims) and Latin  All music in Gregorian notation  Ordinary with rubrics in red  Gilt edges  5 liturgically-colored ribbons  Smythe Sewn, rounded back binding with durable, leather-like Skivertex polymer gold-embossed flexible cover  Rounded corners on pages and cover  Reinforced 80 lb. resin-impregnated endsheets for extreme durability (which will not tear like printed paper endsheets)  Fully and thoroughly Indexed  Printed and bound in the USA  The finest natural Bible paper (imported from Portugal) 1980pp, sewn binding, gold-embossed skivertex cover, STK# 8043 $63.00 n itio d E d Thir w e! noa bl l i 0 ava r 21,00 Ove sold! Why is this the most complete missal ever?  All the Masses of the Liturgical Year according to the Roman Calendar of 1962—Temporal and Sanctoral Cycles and accompanying rites (Blessing of Ashes, Blessing of Palms, Chrism Mass, and the Blessing of Holy Oils, etc.)  Complete Holy Week Liturgy of 1962  Supplements containing the additional Masses for the United States and Canada  Feasts of particular Religious Congregations  Liturgical Calendar  Table of Movable Feasts updated to 2050 AD  Masses for the Dead (including infants), Complete Burial Service, Prayers for the Dead  Marriage Service  Special Commemorations  39 Votive Collects  17 Votive Masses  Common Masses of the Saints and the Blessed Virgin  Conclusions of Collects  Rite of Baptism  The Churching of Women  Rite of Confirmation  Rite of Extreme Unction  Various Blessings  Vespers for Sundays and Feasts  Compline for Sundays  Office of Tenebrae  The Itinerary or Office before a Journey  Various Devotions and Prayers including favorite Litanies, the Way of the Cross, prayers of the Rosary and others  Morning and Evening Prayers  Devotions for Confession  Litany of the Saints  Devotions for Communion  Anthems to the Blessed Virgin  Hymns in honor of Our Lord and Our Lady  An explanation of “The Liturgy or Public Worship of the Catholic and Roman Church”  A Summary of Christian Doctrine  Kyriale with Tones for the Most Common sets of Masses (I Lux et Origo, II Kyrie Fons Bonitatis, IV Cunctipotens Genitor Deus, VIII De Angelis, IX Cum Jubilo, XI Orbis Factor, XVII Sundays of Advent & Lent, XVIII Deus Genitor Alme)  Tones for Asperges and Vidi Aquam  Tones for three of the most common Credos—I, III, IV  Te Deum  and much much more. #1020 A E-mail Updates from Angelus Press! If you would like to receive our bi-weekly e-mail, ­updating you on new titles, sales and special offers (most available only online), simply send your e-mail address to: listmaster@angeluspress.org. You can change your e-mail reception preferences or unsubscribe at any time. Shipping & Handling USA $.01 to $25.00 $7.50 $25.01 to $50.00 $10.00 $50.01 to $100.00 $15.00 Over $100.00 15% of order Foreign 25% of order subtotal angelus Press 2915 Forest Avenue Kansas City, Missouri 64109 1-800-96ORDER 1-800-966-7337 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.