$4.45 march 2009 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition inside Interview with Bishop Fellay Sr. Blandina Meets “Billy the Kid” Music in America Music in America Communion in the Hand The Annunciation of the Lord & & Classic Games Classic Games video Games video Games ed! redasu$c37.00 w Marcel Lefebvre Definitive biography of Archbishop Lefebvre Iota Unum A study of changes in the Catholic Church in the 20th century now 5 $22.9 Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais This is the definitive biography of the Archbishop, written by one of his closest friends. Critics have said: “magisterial,” “well-researched, serious, and honest,” “reveals unsuspected facets. A very complete work,” “a rich, important contribution to contemporary religious history,” “a literary event,” “a landmark.” Influential French Catholic publisher Jean Madiran said, “...the fruit of several years of labor. The book is rich in documentation, often unpublished, and in many theological observations.” 718pp. Sewn softcover with French flaps. 54 photographs, 16 Maps and Charts. STK# 8035✱ $37.00 $22.95 ✗ b est r s e lle reduc ed! .00 as $30 s ver w oftco .95 w $23 no r was cove Hard n 0 $40.0 3.95 ow $3 Romano Amerio Archbishop Lefebvre on Iota Unum: “In my opinion, it is the most perfect book that has been written since the Council on the Council, its consequences, and everything that has been happening in the Church since. He examines every subject with a truly remarkable perfection..... I do not see how the current attitudes of Rome can still persist after the appearance of such a book. texts....The whole is absolutely magnificent.” ✗ 816pp. Softcover. STK# 6700✱ $30.00 $23.95 Color Hardcover. STK# 6700H✱ $40.00 $33.95 Conversion stories Every Catholic who has found refuge in the traditions of the Church has a story. Now they have a voice. Read the narratives written by Roman Catholics who have discovered or rediscovered the riches of the ancient liturgy and traditions of Holy Mother Church! 192pp. Softcover. STK# 8340✱ $14.95 John Vennari l Dr. David Allen White l Edwin Faust l Michael Matt l Dr. John C. Rao l Dr. Andrew Childs l Dr. Kenton Craven l Joseph O’Brien l Michael Larson l Mary Ann Kreitzer l Richard Cowden Guido l T. Renée Kozinski l Brian Douglass “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 March 2009 Volume XXXII, Number 3 • Kansas City, Missouri 64109 English-language Editor and Publisher for the International Society of Saint Pius X PublisheR Fr. Arnaud Rostand Editor Fr. Markus Heggenberger books and marketing Fr. Kenneth Novak Assistant Editor Mr. James Vogel operations manager Mr. Michael Sestak Editorial assistant Letter from the editor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Fr. Markus Heggenberger Interview with Bishop Bernard fellay . . . . . . . . . . 3 Interview with Angelus Press interview with Fr. Maehlmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Sr. blandina meets “Billy the kid” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Sr. Blandina Segale music in america. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Dr. Andrew Childs requiem at Ecône. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Miss Anne Stinnett Design and Layout Mr. Simon Townshend comptroller Mr. Robert Wiemann, CPA customer service Mrs. MaryAnne Hall Mr. John Rydholm Miss Rebecca Heatwole Shipping and Handling Mr. Jon Rydholm THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT The State of Necessity. PART 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Limbo Is Not a Theological Hypothesis But a Truth Taught by the Apostolic Magisterium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 classic games and video games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Pierre Delpos Jesus Promises to give the bread of life . . . . . . 30 Bishop Frederick Justus Knecht, D.D. the annunciation of the lord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 The Golden Legend Part 21 37 catechism of the crisis in the church . . . . . . . . . . . . Fr. Matthias Gaudron Questions and answers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Fr. Peter Scott 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. ©2009 by Angelus Press. Manuscripts are welcome and will be used at the discretion of the editors. Postmaster sends address changes to the address above. 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. 2 Letter from the Editor The press has been described as the “Fourth Estate” because of its considerable influence over public opinion; modern wars are not merely wars of physical weapons, but wars of information; sometimes what is reported is more important than what actually happens. Reported reality takes over the reality of the report, published opinion over public opinion. The application of these principles to the situation of the media spotlight on the SSPX is known to everyone. The Catholic bishops, after seeing to their dismay the spearhead of the traditionalist movement (the SSPX) encouraged and even exonerated by the Pope–first the permission to offer the traditional Latin Mass worldwide by any priest, then the lifting of ecclesiastical censures against the SSPX bishops–found a ready handmaid for their intentions in the press. After the killer-label of “schismatic” is gone, progressive Church leaders needed a new one; and they found it in the catchword of “antiSemitic,” which is actually more a political label than a religious one. It doesn’t matter: it serves the purpose of being used against Tradition. This view was recently supported from a somewhat unexpected quarter. Rabbi Yehuda Levin, the head of a group of 800 Orthodox rabbis in the US and Canada, said that “the dissident, leftist movement in the Catholic Church over the last 40 years has severely undermined the teaching of the Catholic Church on moral teachings on life and family issues.” Rabbi Yehuda Levin says he sees the media attack on Pope Benedict as being more about the influx of morally conservative Catholics into the mainstream of the Catholic Church rather than anything else, including the Holocaust denial of one of the SSPX bishops, which has received widespread media coverage… The SSPX faithful, in addition to offering the Mass in its ancient Latin form, are also known for their orthodoxy on moral matters. The mainstreaming of such Catholics into the Church would boost the numbers of pro-life and pro-family Catholics significantly, especially in Europe.… Rabbi Levin suggests that there is a “silver lining” within the crisis. It has now become very clear, for all to see, the extreme danger that having some who hold high positions in the church seeking to destroy their own church and attack their own pope. He added: “The silver lining is that it is now that the battle lines have been drawn....” “The most important issue,” he said, is the work the Church is doing “to save babies from abortion, and save children’s minds, and young people’s minds, helping them to know right and wrong on the life and family issues.” “That’s where ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue has to go.” At that point we should pray for all who have responsibility in this matter, and I would like to strongly recommend Bishop Williamson to your prayers. But the question remains whether the “Holocaust” is an essential question for a traditional Catholic. To put it this way: Is the Fourth Estate rightly insinuating that traditional Catholics are “Holocaust deniers”? The January 2009 issue of The Angelus defended (on pp.31-33) Pope Pius XII against the unjust contemporary attack of having been silent about the killing of Jews during WWII. Pinchas Lapide (1922-97), a Jewish historian and theologian was quoted: No Pope in history has been thanked more heartily by Jews. Upon his death in 1958, several suggested in open letters that a Pope Pius XII forest of 860,000 trees be planted on the hills of Judea in order to fittingly honor the memory of the late Pontiff because the Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving the lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands. The example of Christians in the Roman Empire shows that they kept a distance from certain political questions of their day, even though they were unjustly persecuted. We do not read about Christians being upset with the policies of the emperors of the Late Roman Empire. One of the few instances when a Catholic bishop acted politically was when St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, demanded Emperor Theodosius to do public penance for his exaggerated action against the murderers of the Roman governor in Thessalonica (Theodosius had 7,000 people killed). But this intervention of St. Ambrose was a question of general justice or Natural Law, like the intervention of Pope Pius XII for the Jews. The Catholic Church in Germany was a persecuted Church. In his book Christ in Dachau, Fr. John M. Lenz describes the “priest block” in the concentration camp of Dachau. Catholic priests of various nationalities, especially from Germany, Austria, Poland and France, suffered and died. Famous bishops spoke out against the regime. One of the most famous of them, Bishop von Galen, nicknamed “the Lion of Münster” (because of his valiant and public struggle against the National Socialist ideology), was persecuted; his sermons were passed among Catholics under the table (the possession of them was, of course, forbidden). These men certainly had no interest whatsoever in denying the persecution which Pius XII and the Catholic Church–as the only international power in the world–were fighting with insufficient means… To summarize: The international uproar about a historical opinion is readily supported by those Catholics who do not wish to discuss the problems in the Church and the necessity of a reform. We must insist: the SSPX exists to help bring about this reform in the Catholic Church and not to debate historical questions which were decided two generations ago and are therefore not really of general interest, but are only artificially styled as such. Instaurare Omnia in Christo, Fr. Markus Heggenberger 3 Interview With Bishop Fellay With the news of the lifting of the excommunications in January, there has been a flurry of media coverage regarding the Society of St. Pius X. Bishop Fellay, as Superior General, has granted interviews to a variety of publications, secular and religious. We asked Bishop Fellay to answer a few questions which may be on our readers’ minds. Do you think the lifting of the excommunications was a more difficult “achievement” than the upcoming doctrinal discussions? No, I do not think so. In the first case, it was only a matter of a juridical act which the Pope has the power to perform. This is what he did, and for this we immediately thanked him. In the second case, it is quite a different matter. As the Pope specified in the Decree of January 21, it is a question of “going further in the necessary discussions with the Authorities of the Holy See concerning the issues still pending.” Fundamental issues, as much for the Faith as for the very life of the Church, cannot be resolved without a profound study, as the document states. And, to use your own word, this is more difficult than signing a juridical act, even if this precise act–as we have already said–must have required of the Holy Father both strength and courage. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 4 What is the goal of these doctrinal discussions? Is it simply to be allowed the freedom to preach about and discuss the doctrinal reservations the Society has? The goal of these doctrinal discussions is to examine the causes of the present situation so as to be able to bring a remedy which is not applied only to the symptoms. How long do you anticipate these doctrinal discussions lasting? As I have hinted above, this will take time; certainly some months, even years if necessary. What form will these doctrinal discussions take? We are considering having both working groups to which will be entrusted the task of studying the main themes in greater depth and a commission of theologians of the Society more directly in charge of presenting to Rome the conclusions of the working groups. The bishops will, by right, be involved in these studies. What kind of a canonical solution is being proposed, if any? It is still too early to say anything precise. We know that Rome has been working for a long time on this canonical project, and that a proposal will be made to us in due time. Here again, it is not difficult for Rome to find the adequate solution for the Society of Saint Pius X. According to our road map, this should come after the resolution of the major problems to be solved in the discussions. Is it possible that temporary faculties would be given to the Society while the doctrinal discussions were underway? Once again, though I may sound like a broken record, I would say that it is still too early to say. We think that some time from now we will receive more specific details on this point. There would certainly be a danger in reducing the problem of the Society to a matter of Canon Law. It is the whole crisis of the Church which explains and justifies what we are doing. If the Society is “regularized” and a canonical solution adopted, what will happen to the religious orders in the “family of Tradition” that work alongside us, such as the Benedictines, Dominicans, etc.? There is no question for us of separating our regularization from that of communities friendly to us. It is in this perspective that, on February 5, I met with the superiors of these communities to explain what was presently going on not only for Tradition but also for the Church. THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org Is it not true that, contrary to some opinions, there is an essential unity inside the Society on these matters? We can say that, no matter what Rome’s answer had been regarding our request of lifting the decree of excommunications, there would have been discontentment. The priests of the SSPX who, up to now, have voiced any opposition are few in number, and their reaction often comes from a consideration of the situation which is too rash and too univocal. However–and this is comforting–the greatest majority of the priests of the Society and of the friendly communities agree with the general line of conduct of the Society in this new phase of our combat. We are disposed to receive any remark our fellow priests may wish to address to us, but we ask them before all to find strength in a greater union with God, and to trust those whom Divine Providence has chosen to bring these matters to a happy conclusion. What has changed between the pontificate of John Paul II and Benedict XVI regarding the SSPX? Even if, since the year 2000, something had changed in our relations with Rome in the wake of the great pilgrimage we organized on the occasion of the Jubilee, relations with Pope John Paul II were practically non-existent since 1988. As we stated in an official press release, after the election of Cardinal Ratzinger on April 19, 2005, we saw in this election a gleam of hope to get out of the deep crisis which is shaking the Catholic Church, a crisis of which some aspects were raised by the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and recently, in his meditations for the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. We added that we particularly hoped for a complete freedom of the Mass (this happened, though imperfectly, with the Motu Proprio of July 7, 2007) and next for the withdrawal of the excommunications pronounced by the Holy See in 1988 (this occurred this past January 21). We owe the fulfillment of these two pre-conditions certainly to the determination of Benedict XVI, but even more to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, to whom we had entrusted those two intentions and for which you have offered your prayers. Today, the great obstacle remains “the understanding of the Second Vatican Council.” Yet, I am optimistic because I think that the Pope is deeply convinced of the necessity of a theological dialogue on difficult issues, and that the critical consideration which the Society can bring in this respect can be a treasure for the Church. Consequently, I can say without any doubt that, for Benedict XVI, doctrine has more importance than it had for John Paul II, and in this respect, something has changed, even though this has begun to be felt especially in the life and discipline of the Church. 5 Do you think that Pope Benedict sees a decline in the “post-conciliar Church” and that this affected his attitude towards Tradition and the SSPX? I think that Benedict XVI has a true perception, if not of the decline of the post-conciliar Church, at least of the deep crisis it is undergoing today. It was the future Benedict XVI who said of the Church that it was like “a boat taking in water on every side.” On this point we are in agreement. It remains for us to agree on the cause of the crisis. Rome only considers our secularized, hedonist, consumerist society to be mainly responsible, whereas we affirm that the Second Vatican Council caused principles contrary to the message of the Gospel to enter the very bosom of the Church and to be responsible for the present situation. For Pope Benedict, is the SSPX the chief promoter of Tradition? We are convinced–and facts show it daily–that the Society, beyond what it represents in figures, has an essential part to play in the resolution of the crisis. In this sense, I can answer yes to your question. What value does the Pope give to religious societies such as the Fraternity of St. Peter or the Institute of Christ the King? Inasmuch as these societies defend a certain order and transmit certain traditions, in the broad sense, to which Benedict XVI is attached, as he often said, wrote, or achieved in facts–indeed, we have been seeing many changes in pontifical ceremonies since 2005–he seems to grant them some value and even to encourage them in a way. Last fall a Trappist monastery in Germany announced their return to the traditional Mass and traditional monastic discipline. Do you think this might inspire other monasteries or convents to follow the same way? T oday, the great obstacle remains “the understanding of the Second Vatican Council.” Yet, I am optimistic because I think that the Pope is deeply convinced of the necessity of a theological dialogue on difficult issues, and that the critical consideration which the Society can bring in this respect can be a treasure for the Church.... We are convinced of this. Many are those who, in monasteries and convents, watch what is going on presently with the greatest attention. Do you expect a number of priests to join the SSPX after the official lifting of the excommunication? It is not something impossible. Yet we must be prudent. A return to a true celebration of the traditional Mass can only go in hand with a return to the corresponding theological formation. Many such priests who have contacted us are aware of this, and some, even if they are yet few, do not hesitate to come and stay in our seminaries or priories so as to remedy their lack of formation. To help such priests is one of the goals of the Society clearly stated by our founder. Beyond praying to Our Lady for continued assistance in the crisis, what can faithful Catholics who wish to help the Society do? Prayer remains essential because it is the means willed by God to give us in time what He meant to give us from all eternity and which He will give us only by this means. Hence we rely more than ever on their prayers for the Holy Father and for all those whom Providence has chosen to achieve, even remotely, this task necessary for the salvation of their souls and of the souls entrusted to them. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 6 The following interview deals with an urgent problem that has appeared due to the return of the old Liturgy to churches which have been transformed by the Novus Ordo: the reception of Holy Communion. The Catholic Church in the West for centuries upheld the reception of Holy Communion on the tongue while kneeling for dogmatic reasons, especially against the Protestant reformers and the “enlightenment” philosophers. The new theology has brought forth not only a corresponding new Mass, but also a new practice regarding the reception of Holy Communion. This happened, however, with disastrous consequences for faith in the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist. Many prelates insist–if they do not place themselves in open disobedience to the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum–on the reception of Holy Communion in the hand also at Masses celebrated according to the traditional Missal. A Retu Fr. Maehlmann, the question how to receive Communion is an important question today. The Pope himself, through his Master of Ceremonies, Guido Marini, has let it be known that in public papal Masses he wishes to distribute Communion only on the tongue and no longer in the hand. Yes. Through his example the Pope raises the discussion of the correct method of receiving the Body of Christ. We need this because the crisis of the past 40 years of the “reformed” liturgy is a crisis of disrespect for the most holy Sacrament of the altar. This is the only chance for the survival of the belief in the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist: a return to reverence. Fr. Maehlmann is an SSPX priest in Germany (ordained in 2001). Since 2006 he has been involved in various campaigns of the German district of the SSPX, providing information nationwide to Catholic priests about the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, etc. The interview is aimed at those who are involved in the Novus Ordo and are struggling with the question of how to receive Holy Communion. THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org The fact that, from now on, in papal masses Communion will be distributed only on the tongue raises the question whether a priest, in general, has the right to refuse to give Communion to someone who insists on receiving Communion in the hand. In the past, in those countries where Communion in the hand was introduced and “permitted” by the hierarchy, a 7 priest could in praxis not call upon his conscience in order to avoid giving out Communion in the hand. This put many priests in a difficult situation, and there were not a few who broke because of this. Modernist general vicars all of a sudden did not want to hear about tolerance, which they normally conceded generously to seriously sinful behavior, for example, in the matter of artificial birth control. Extreme measures were taken against these priests who maintained the traditional Mass and the custom of receiving Communion on the tongue kneeling; suddenly repressive and harsh methods, which could be described as “zero tolerance,” seemed to be much more appealing to a certain type of prelate. And are public cases in which provocateurs have demanded Communion in the hand during the old Mass. Is the priest required to give in to this? This is in fact a new problematic situation due to the increasing availability of the traditional Mass, which in France is fittingly called the Messe de toujours (i.e., the Mass of all time). As an example, in the diocese of Freiburg (Germany), it happened that a celebrating priest provocatively stood before the communion rail and in a loud voice explained that Communion in the hand and Communion on the tongue are of equal value, and for that reason both are permissible. The people urn to Reverence this was applied to liturgical customs that were the standard throughout many centuries in the Church. Why, all of a sudden, were there extreme measures against one’s own tradition? Could you give examples where priests suffered because of Communion in the hand? I myself was a witness to a shocking accusation of an old veteran priest, who touched his head and said despairingly: “What can I do now? I give out Communion in the hand! The entire world can call on their consciences but not we priests!” Another priest informed me regretfully that with fear he watches each time Communion is distributed. He returns from Communion with shaking hands; I can understand why. He has upheld the Faith of his ordination and is now forced to act against his convictions. This is inhumane. Unfortunately the above-mentioned kinds of general vicars, pastoral ministers, and bishops have not died out. God leaves them some time to think about what they can make good again. It is a true concern to pray that they change their minds and that they don’t use their time to “make full the measure of their evil.” We are speaking, after all, about what the Church calls the “most Holy Sacrament.” This problem turns up lately in a different way. The Pope, with his motu proprio of July 7, 2007, has allowed all priests to celebrate Mass in the traditional rite. Is then permission given automatically (to the priest) to refuse giving Communion in the hand? There present were rightly shocked at the fact that there at the old Mass they were forced to kneel on the stone floor if they wanted to receive Communion on the tongue kneeling. The essence of the problem is, according to my view, whether it is truly correct, as this priest says, that Communion in the hand and on the tongue are of equal value. If this were the case, then the priest would have no real reason, even in the old rite, to refuse Communion in the hand, and the faithful then would, in reality, have the possibility of choosing. But this is not so. Some priests who wish to return to the practice of Communion on the tongue help themselves by explaining that the old rite does not acknowledge Communion in the hand and a mixing of the Novus Ordo of Pope Paul VI with the traditional Roman rite; further, in the traditional Mass one may receive Communion only on the tongue. This is an argument that can be used in order to speak about an actual pastoral situation. This is, however, by itself quite insufficient, since it changes the question of the correct manner of receiving Communion into a question about rites in the following way: in the Novus Ordo, Communion in the hand is the correct manner of receiving and in the old Mass, it is receiving on the tongue–and you have to follow the law… I do not think it was the intention of the Holy Father to bring this line of thinking about since he www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 8 has expressed his desire to insist on the distribution of Communion only on the tongue without exception in the New Mass also. With this he gave a clear signal: “Thus is it actually right, and I wish that in general people return to this.” In this direction one must think it over, and one will come to the truth: Communion in the hand and on the tongue are not of “equal value.” But what are the reasons for this? Can you say that Communion in the hand is an unworthy way of receiving the Body of Christ and dangerous to the Faith? If you answer this question with yes, then every priest, calling on his conscience, has the right to refuse to give an individual member of the faithful who demands it Communion in the hand regardless of whether this is in the old rite or the new rite. That is correct! Although it is true that Canon Law does not mention disrespect among the reasons for refusing to give Holy Communion, let us be honest: Do we really need a special law for such a thing? Isn’t it self-evident that the most holy Sacrament that we have must be handled in a holy and honorable fashion? If you have to make up regulations for such things that are common sense, where would we end? The law of the Church cannot possibly regulate everything. It is a certain Catholic teaching that, in regard to an ecclesiastical law in a concrete situation, a priest is not bound to obey when the action could harm his own soul or the common good of the Church, for the sanctification of the soul is the highest law of the Church. And is this the case with Communion in the hand? It is obvious to me, looking at the pastoral reality, that Communion in the hand is really an unworthy way to distribute or to receive the Body of the Lord and that Communion in the hand is also responsible for the destruction of belief in the Real Presence. For this reason there exists neither for the priest nor a member of the faithful the possibility of choosing between Communion in the hand or on the tongue since we may choose only between permissible things. Can you briefly outline what the main arguments for this position are? In the first place we must note that permission for Communion in the hand was obtained by defying Church authorities; it was exercised without permission; practices were initiated which couldn’t easily be taken back, since the evil quickly spread. At that point the expression of the “power of the facts” was coined. This happened first in Holland at the instigation of priests who had already lost their belief in the Real Presence, that is, the substantial presence of the Lord under the form of bread. The THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org attitude of adoration and the “untouchability” of the most holy Sacrament that is expressed in the kneeling reception of Communion on the tongue was, to them, a thorn in their side. The old belief seemed to them to be out-dated. They were of the spirit of “modern enlightenment,” which in reality means “no longer in possession of the Catholic Faith.” Thus, Communion in the hand was in its beginnings directed against the Faith (of the Church). In fact, I would say it was against the central tenet of the life of faith, against the mystery of transubstantiation, in which the entire substance of the bread is changed into the substance of the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. How could they hope that something positive would come from an extorted permission? Certainly not with a glance back to the early Church! As new publications point out, never has Communion in the hand in the modern form been practiced in all of Church history. Never has a simple member of the faithful with unconsecrated hands and without a gesture of adoration been allowed to reach for a host. In the early Church, in order to show their adoration, the faithful took off their shoes in order to approach in a worshipful manner, and with their tongue took up the host from a cloth placed over their hands. Are there also dogmatic objections to Communion in the hand? Communion in the hand is without a doubt a practice which conflicts with dogmatic beliefs. Infallibly has the Council of Trent defined that “The entire and undivided Christ is there under the species of bread and in every part of it.” On the other hand, with Communion in the hand one must take into account that a particle (of the host) could remain on the hand or fall onto the floor and be trampled on by the faithful. That is an act against the Faith. If it is the belief of the Church that even a particle of the consecrated host is the Body of Christ, then Communion in the hand is absolutely unacceptable. One must neither put his own faith nor the faith of others in danger; above all, one must not run the risk that the Body of our Lord should suffer such ungratefulness or such a disgrace as to fall under the feet of the people. Look with what respect the Church surrounded the Sacrament of the altar in the traditional liturgy, how carefully the priest purifies the sacred vessels. That is not ritualistic folklore: we believe in what we do. 9 The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has, as recently as 1985, urged: “Attention has to be paid lest even a small piece of the host be lost.” True, but Communion in the hand does not allow such attentiveness as the priest gives the host “out of the hand” and the faithful usually do not pay attention to small pieces. They treat the host in various and sundry ways–in the worst case, you may watch on YouTube where young people, before a running camera, take Communion in the hand and in the end make a joke of it. This cannot happen when one receives Communion on the tongue; it is put directly on the tongue. Small pieces, which often fall when the priest distributes the host, are caught by the paten. The paten must, according to the rubrics of even the Novus Ordo of 1970 (which can be read in the General Instruction, §80), be readily available for the distribution of Communion. It is therefore not true at all that Communion in the hand is the specific way of distributing Communion for the new rite. It was not intended in this rite and was introduced by way of disobedience! What this disobedience enabled, we have painfully lived through: after the death of Pope John Paul II, a host consecrated at his Mass was put up for sale on eBay! Is it not terrible to be struck dumb with horror if one observes how, even in Rome, Holy Communion is distributed in Masses with large congregations? This enables the abuse. Cardinal Meissner from Cologne recently expressed the opinion in an interview that these large Masses were not good, as he several times told Pope John Paul II; he had often seen how leftover hosts were simply put in baskets with cloth inside and overturned. No one genuflected before these containers. Such a manner of treating the most holy Sacrament, of treating our LORD, is unthinkable in the confines of the traditional Mass since the traditional rite breathes the spirit of adoration from the beginning until the end of the Mass. You mentioned the ritual respect of the traditional Mass. How is belief in the Real Presence in the old rite diminished? Because of the aforementioned dogma, there are many rubrics in the traditional Mass for the priest which he must observe in order to prevent the loss of small particles of the host. In my brochure “A New Desire for the Old Mass,” I have listed these fifteen rubrics, among them one where the priest, from the moment of consecration, holds his thumb and index finger together so that the small pieces of the host that may still cling to his fingers do not fall to the floor. That is an argument from tradition. Since the Church has acted thus over many centuries, one cannot say that the Church is acting here in an unreasonable fashion, and as mentioned, the Council of Trent has sanctioned this action through a special dogma. Communion on the tongue, however, is not an invention from the Council of Trent. St. Thomas Aquinas, a reliable teacher of theology, laid out this practice in his Summa. Yes, the Summa, Part III, Question 82, Article 3, names the theological reasons whereby the priest alone is allowed to distribute the consecrated host: the possibility that each lay person might grab the host was inconceivable to the theology of the Middle Ages. According to St. Thomas, it is, in the first place, the priest who, in the person of Christ, consecrates; for that reason he is entitled to distribute Communion and respectively–to apply this to our situation–to him belongs the permission to touch the holy Sacrament. In the second place, he has the permission to touch the Blessed Sacrament, since, as a priest, he is empowered as a mediator between God and man. Thirdly, his hands were consecrated with holy oil at his ordination in order to be allowed to touch the Body of the Lord. This is how it is! The most holy Sacrament is no longer holy if everyone can lay hands on it. That would be a profanation of the Blessed Sacrament; and if this happens with free will and knowledge, this is certainly sinful. For this reason I understand very well why so many priests who are faithful to their faith and wish to spread it have such a crisis of conscience about Communion in the hand. What do you say to the priests in the Novus Ordo? It is not fitting for us to attack those priests who are pressured into distributing Communion in the hand. We must fight with all our power so that this situation in the holy Church of God is ended as soon as possible. Every priest has the inalienable right to carry out his ministry according to the Catholic Faith. I repeat, it is inhumane to reproach him about this right, for example, in the refusal to distribute Communion in the hand. This situation must be ended as soon as possible! To the priests I say: What the Holy Father does– that is, distributing Communion only on the tongue– should be an example for them. It would be a great misunderstanding if only during a papal Mass people received Communion on the tongue kneeling. Such a situation could be misinterpreted in the sense that it is a gesture of respect to the Pope (and not to the Blessed Sacrament). An official papal prohibition on distribution of Communion in the hand at traditional Masses or, respectively, to demand such, would be a first–and I say first–necessary step towards full abolition of this unfortunate way of distributing Communion in which Christ is not given what is due Him. We have only this one chance: a return to reverence! www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 Sister Blandina Meets “Billy the Kid” 10 Sister Blandina was an Italianborn immigrant to the United States who became a Sister of Charity in 1866. After teaching for several years in Ohio, she was sent by her superiors to Trinidad, Colorado in 1872 for missionary work. Among the many fascinating stories found in her memoir, At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, we have included a few pages from one of the most striking tales of Catholic charity in the Wild West THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org My scattered notes on “Billy the Kid’s Gang” are condensed, and some day you will be thrilled by their perusal. The Trinidad Enterprise–the only paper published here–in its last issue gave an exciting description of how a member of “Bill’s Gang” painted red the town of Cimarron by mounting his stallion and holding two six-­shooters aloft while shouting his commands, which everyone obeyed, not knowing when the trigger on either weapon would be lowered. This event has been the town talk, excluding every other subject, for the past week. Yesterday one of the Vigilant Committee came to where I was on our grounds–acting as umpire for a future ball game–and said: “Sister, please come to the front yard. I want you to see one of ‘Billy’s gang,’ 11 the one who caused such fright in Cimarron week before last.” My informant passed the news to the Nine and their admirers, so that it became my duty to go with the pupils, not knowing what might take place. When we reached the front yard, the object of our curiosity was still many rods from us. The air here is very rarefied, and we all are eagle-eyed in this atmosphere. We stood in our front yard, everyone trying to look indifferent, while Billy’s accomplice headed toward us. He was mounted on a spirited stallion of unusually large proportions, and was dressed as the Torreros (BullFighters) dress in old Mexico. Cowboy’s som­brero, fantastically trimmed, red velvet knee breeches, green velvet short coat, long sharp spurs, gold and green saddle cover. A figure of six feet three, on a beautiful animal, made restless by a tight bit–you need not wonder, the rider drew attention. His inten­tion was to impress you with the idea “I belong to the gang.” The impression made on me was one of intense loathing, and I will candidly acknowledge, of fear also. The figure passed from our sight. I tried to forget it, but it was not to be. Our Vigilant Club, at all times, is on the alert to be of service. William Adamson, a member of the Club, came excitedly, to say–“We have work on hand!” “What kind of work?” I asked. “You remember the man who frightened the people in Cimarron, and who passed our schoolhouse some weeks ago?” “Yes, William.” “Well, he and Happy Jack, his partner, got into a quarrel, and each got the drop on the other. They continued eyeing and following each other for three days, eating at the same table, weapon in right hand, conveying food to their mouth with left hand. “The tragedy took place when they were eating dinner. Each thought the other off guard, both fired simultaneously. Happy Jack was shot through the breast. He was put in a dug-out 3x6 ft. Schneider received a bullet in his thigh, and has been brought into Trinidad, thrown into an unused adobe hut, and left there to die. He has a very poor chance of liv­ing.” “Well, William, we shall do all we can for him. Where did this all take place?” “At Dick Wooten’s tollgate–the dividing line be­tween Colorado and New Mexico.” At the noon hour we carried nourishing food, water, castile soap and linens to the sick and neglected man. After placing on a table what we had brought, my two companions, William Adamson and Laura Men­ger, withdrew. I walked towards the bed and, looking at the sick man, I exclaimed, “I see that nothing but a bullet through your brain will finish you!” I saw a quivering smile pass over his face, and his tiger eyes gleamed. My words seemed heartless. I had gone to make up for the inhuman treatment given by others, and instead, I had added to the inhumanity by my words. After a few days of retrospection, I concluded it was not I who had spoken, but Fear, so psychologists say. At our first visit I offered to dress the wound, but to my great relief the desperado said, “I am glad to get the nourishment and the wherewith to dress my wound, but I shall attend to it myself.” Then he asked: “What shall I call you?” “Sister,” I answered. “Well, Sister, I am very glad you came to see me. Will you come again?” “Yes, two and three times a day. Good-bye.” We continued these visits for about two months, then one day the sick man asked: “Sister, why is it you never speak to me about your religion or anything else?” I looked and smiled. He continued: “I want to tell you something. I allude to the first day you came. Had you spoken to me of repentance, honesty, morals, or anything per­ taining to religion, I would have ordered you out. ‘I see that nothing but a bullet through your brain will finish you.’ Sister, you have no idea what strength and courage those words put into me. I said to my­self, ‘no shamming here, but the right stuff.’” Dear Sister Justina, imagine what a load was lifted, to know for a certainty I had not added pain to the downtrodden culprit, for so he is at present. The patient seemed to wish to talk. He asked: “Sister, do you think God would forgive me?” I repeated the words of Holy Scripture as they then came to my mind. “If your sins were as scarlet, or as numerous as the sands on the seashore, turn to Me, saith the Lord, and I will forgive.” “Sister, I would like to tell you some things I have done–then, I will ask you, if you think God can for­give me.” Seating myself, I waited, as he continued. “I have done all that a bad man can do. I have been a decoy on the Santa Fe Trail.” He saw I did not grasp his meaning, so he ex­plained: “I dressed in my best when I expected to see horse­men or private conveyance take to the Trail. Ad­dressing them politely, I would ask, ‘Do you know the road to where you are going?’ If they hesitated, I knew they were greenies. I would offer to escort them, as the Trail was familiar to me, and I was on my way to visit a friend. We would travel together, talking pleasantly, but all the while my aim was to find out if the company had enough in its possession to warrant me carrying out my purpose. “If I discovered they did not have money or val­uables I would direct the travelers how to reach the next fort. If they possessed money or jewelry, I managed to lose the trail at sunset and make for a camping place. When they slept, I murdered them and www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 12 took all valuables. The fact of being off the Trail made it next to impossible for the deed to be discovered. “Another thing I took pleasure in doing was to shoot cows and steers for their hides. I remember one time I shot several cows that belonged to a man from Kansas. I left the carcasses for the coyotes. The old man had a great deal of spunk in him, so he and his herders trailed and caught me with the hides. “They had a rope with them which they threw over the limb of a tree and placed me under the rope. Be­fore going any farther the old man said to me, ‘Say your prayers, young man; you know the law of the plains, a thief is hanged.’ I said, ‘I’m not a thief, I shot at random. When I saw my shots had taken effect, I took the hides of the animals I had shot. What would you have done?’ “‘I would not have shot at random into a bunch of cows,’ he answered. I saw some of the fellows felt sorry for me, and I added: ‘Did none of you ever make a mistake? I acknowledged I did wrong.’ All but the old man said, ‘Let the fellow go,’ and waited for the old man to speak. ‘Well, if you all think he ought to be let go, I don’t say anything against it,’ he said. So they let me go. “As soon as I got where my pals were, I told them how near I came to being strung up. They all laughed and said I had the young ones to thank that I was able to tell the tale. I added, ‘I’ll wager ten cents I’ll scalp the old man and throw the scalp on this counter.’ They laughed and took up my wager. “The next day I went to find in what direction the cattle I had fired into had gone. I soon discovered the herd trail and followed it, and at noon I saw the cattle. The old man was sitting on a stump with his back to me. I slipped up quietly behind him passed my sharp knife round his head while holding his hair, and carried his scalp on a double run to where I had left my bronco; then, whirled to where my pals were. They each had told some of the deeds he had done, and Happy Jack had just finished telling an act which I will not tell you, but I added: ‘Here is my last achieve­ ment. Scalped a man on a wager of ten cents,’ while saying this I threw the scalp on the counter. ‘Give me my dime,’ I said. “Sister, now do you think God can forgive me?” I answered: “Turn to Me in sorrow of heart and I will forgive, saith the Lord.” “Sister, I do not doubt that you believe that God will forgive me: I’m going to tell you what I think God would do. Through you, God is leading me to ask pardon for my many devilish acts. “He is enticing me, as I enticed those who had val­ uables; then, when He gets me, He will hurl me into hell, more swiftly than I sent my victims to Eternity. Now what do you think about that, Sister?” “I will answer you by asking you a question. Who was the sinner who asked Christ to remember him when He came into His Kingdom?” “I don’t know, Sister.” THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org “It was the malefactor dying at the side of Christ on the cross who called for mercy at the last moment. He was told by the very Christ–God–‘This day, thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.’” “That sounds fine, Sister; but what will my pals think of me? Me, to show a yellow streak! I would rather go to the burning flames. Anyhow, when I get there, I will have to stay chained, maybe.” “Experience is a great teacher.” “You bet it is, Sister.” “I’m going to give you an experience.” I got the fire shovel and placing two burning coals on it, brought it to the bedside of the patient. “Now place one finger over these coals, or let me tie your hand, so that one finger will burn for ten seconds, then tell me if, in either case, the pain will be diminished.” “Say, Sister, let me think this thing over.” At our next visit the patient did not allude to our last conversation. I do not speak on religious sub­jects to him unless questioned. This routine work of taking him nourishment, linens, etc., continues. We had been doing it for about four months when this particular incident took place. On a Saturday morning we arrived at our patient’s adobe house when, for the first time, we heard voices in his room. Rapping at the door, the patient in a loud irritated voice called out: “Come in, Sister, and look at these hypocrites and whited sepulchres. Do you know what brought them here? Shame! You shamed them, you, a Catholic Sister, who has been visiting me for over four months and bringing wherewith to keep me alive. You never once asked me whether I was a Jew, Indian, or devil. You shamed them into coming. They say I belong to their church!” Not noticing the aggressive language, I remarked “I’m so glad your friends have found you. Should you need us in the future, we will be at your service.” Then one of the ladies of the company said: “It was only yesterday that a member of our Methodist con­ gregation was told that the sick man was a Methodist. She went at once to our minister and he appointed this committee, and we are here, ready and willing, to at­tend to the sick man.” I told her that it made me happy to know the pa­tient will have his own visiting him. With a pleasant good-bye, we took our leave. On re­turning to the Convent, while making our program for sick calls, I remarked: “Billy the Kid’s partner has found friends. Rather they have found him, and they intend to give him all the aid he needs. So we will withdraw, but be on the alert, in case we should have to continue our visits.” This was said to a member of the Vigilant Club, who always accompanied my com­ panion and myself to this particular patient. Two weeks had elapsed when our protector of the Vigilant Committee came to the schoolhouse to say: “Sister, Billy’s pal needs us again. I visited him several times during the past two days. He told me that no one has been to see him for a week.” Trinidad, Colorado So this noon we visited the desperado, the same as we had done at first. His being neglected by those who had promised to attend to him made me think that the ladies we met in his room are perhaps mothers of families, and cannot spare the time from their home. Again, some of the ladies maybe were as much afraid of him, as I had been, so it is easy to see why they could not keep their promise, but it would have been more just to let me know they were going to discon­ tinue aiding him. Perhaps their husbands did not approve of their visiting a bandit. The general senti­ ment is, “Let the desperado die.” To-day when we got to the adobe, everything was deathly quiet and the door was ajar. I noiselessly walked in. This is the scene that met me. The pa­tient stretched full length, his eyes glazed and focused on the ceiling; his six-shooter in his right hand with the muzzle pointing to his temple. Quick as a flash I took in the situation and as quickly reached the bed­side. Placing my hand on the revolver and lowering the trigger while putting the weapon out of his reach, I remarked: “The bed is not a good place from which to practice target shooting.” He said, “Just in the nick of time, Sister.” As though we had not been absent a day. I named the different edibles we had brought him. The subject of the act he was about to commit was never men­tioned. By intuition he understood he was not to speak against those who had promised to attend him and did not do so. Another month passed by and the patient was visibly losing strength. I managed to get his mother’s address. She lives in California. After a week we resumed our visits. At the noon call our patient was quite hilarious. I surmised some­ thing unusual had taken place. He lost no time in telling me that Billy and the “gang” are to be here, Saturday at 2 P.M., and I am going to tell you why they are coming. “Do you know the four physicians who live here in Trinidad?” “I know three of them,” I answered. “Well, the ‘gang’ is going to scalp the four of them,” (and his tiger eyes gleamed with satisfaction) “be­cause not one of them would extract the bullet from my thigh.” 13 Can you imagine, Sister Justina, the feeling that came over me? One of the gentlemen is our Convent physician! I looked at the sick man for a few seconds, then said: “Do you believe that with this knowledge I’m going to keep still?” “What are you going to do about it?” “Meet your gang at 2 P.M. next Saturday.” He laughed as heartily as a sick man could laugh and said, “Why, Sister, Billy and the gang will be pleased to meet you. I’ve told them about you and the others, too, who call themselves my church people,” but seeing the conversation did not please, he said no more. In the interval between this visit and the Saturday 2 P.M., which was to be such a memorable day for me, I wrote to his mother not in an alarming strain, but enough to give her to understand he might not recover. Fourteen days later, she arrived. That was quick time, for she depended on mules and horses for conveyance. I cannot give you any idea of the anxiety of the days previous to the coming ordeal of meeting the gang. Saturday, 2 P.M., came, and I went to meet Billy and his gang. When I got to the patient’s room, the men were around his bed. The introduction was given, I can only remember, “Billy, our Captain, and Chism.” I was not prepared to see the men that met me, which must account for my not being able to recall their names. The leader, Billy, has steel-blue eyes, peach complex­ion, is young, one would take him to be seventeen–innocent-looking, save for the corners of his eyes, which tell a set purpose, good or bad. Mr. Chism, of course this is not his real name, has a most bashful appearance. I judge he has sisters. The others, all fine looking young men. My glance took this description in while “Billy” was saying: “We are all glad to see you, Sister, and I want to say, it would give me pleas­ure to be able to do you any favor.” I answered, “Yes, there is a favor you can grant me.” He reached his hand toward me with the words “The favor is granted.” I took the hand, saying: “I understand you have come to scalp our Trinidad physicians, which act I ask you to cancel.” Billy looked down at the sick man who remarked: “She is game.” What he meant by that I am yet at a loss to under­ stand. Billy then said: “I granted the favor before I knew what it was, and it stands. Not only that, Sister, but at any time my pals and I can serve you, you will find us ready.” Taken from At the End of the Santa Fe Trail by Sister Blandina Segale (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), pp.72-83. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 14 D r . A n d r e w C h i l d s Music in America On the level of ideas, confusion surrounds the attempt to find a truly American voice, mirroring in many ways the contradictions inherent to philosophies and modes of governance often violently opposed to Catholic truth. Culture reflects ideas. In the case of Christendom, definitive culture reflects absolute truth. In the case of modern America, a cultural void reflects an absence of truth. In an attempt to fill this void and restore truth, we must understand the ideas that American culture has traditionally reflected. Protestantism, modernism, Americanism, and transcendental humanism form America’s philosophical and cultural bedrock. Success in understanding the development of America’s cultural voice lies in deciphering how these ideologies are connected as a way of explaining the divisions that define American cultural development in the 19th and 20th centuries: tradition and progress, substance and style, concrete and abstract thought, cultivated and vernacular idioms. In order to guard our Catholic inheritance from our non-Catholic cultural heritage, we must understand the ideological roots of the problem; the process starts with understanding how we came to be where we are. THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org American Transcendentalism The American mind, modern in its essence, intuitively grasps the European humanist thinkers— Hobbes and Locke, Descartes and Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, Mill and Comte, Nietzsche and Freud— distilled and adapted for a new world by Emerson and Thoreau, Jefferson and Washington, and the American philosophers William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey. It also understands paradox. George Washington—aware of the instability inherent in a centralized government established by a revolution fought against the concept of centralized government— wrote in his Farewell Address, “The very idea of the power and the right of the People to establish Government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government.” Washington knew the spirit of “non serviam—I will not serve” intimately, and understood the very real danger that lay in the void created by the separation of Church and State: without true moral balance in government, very little separates totalitarianism from anarchy. Thinkers since the Enlightenment had argued that man’s position had shifted relative to God, or, more importantly, that the essence of God had somehow 15 changed as the result of man’s evolving perception of Him. Though Ralph Waldo Emerson and other philosophers of the 19th century often invoked God, they supported or opposed a deity vaguely perceptible in nature, not an exclusive Godhead in an unchangeable system of His own devising. Emerson proposed that “God did not create nature to accomplish his work and to evidence himself. Nature was God as he appeared to parts of himself.”1 American transcendentalists, especially Emerson, sought to discover man’s proper place in this dynamic new conception of nature. With unmistakable and thoroughly misguided brilliance, they combined philosophy, religion, literature, individual rhetorical narrative, Aristotelian logic, Platonic discursive style, and elements of mysticism in creating something short of a cogent system. As Guy Stroh writes in American Philosophy, For Emerson and other romanticists the term “transcendental” really referred to an infinite array of the mind’s own intuitions or direct insights. These intuitions were not only sources of knowledge, but sources of the deepest and most important truths. For Kant, however, there was no such thing as intuitive knowledge....In borrowing the term “transcendentalism” from Kant, Emerson breathed a new and essentially romantic meaning into the word...[using] “intuition” to signify the poetic faculty of seeing things creatively, seeing things with a freshness and a richness such as only the widest exercise of the imagination could contemplate. Within this broader philosophical construct based loosely on Kantian idealism, divine truth resided both inside of man as he represented a part of the divine collective, and outside of man as a vaguely benevolent cosmic essence. For the American transcendentalists, the fact that perceptions and emotion differ from person to person merely proved the subjectivity of truth.2 In denying the absolute nature of truth as it existed in the Christian model, humanist thinkers attacked the notion that conflicting philosophical points or internal inconsistencies invalidated any conclusions relative to the nature and perception of truth. For knowledge to result primarily from processing sense-perception and natural phenomena within each individual, however, the system had to allow for opposing truths to exist without negating each other. The Hegelian dialectic approach set up opposing concepts as theses and antitheses that produce new and continuously evolving future “truths,” or syntheses, after engaging in the dialectic exchange.3 For the transcendentalists, the dialectic process proved foundational for their poetic new expression of reason and understanding. Having resigned his own pulpit in 1832, Emerson delivered a sensational address to graduating Harvard Divinity School students in 1838. In it he revealed the logical end of the dialectic exchange relative to the nature of truth and God’s association with man: Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. Emerson broke no new heretical ground in speaking of Christ as only a man; by stating plainly, however— to none others than the elite of American Protestant theology—that “God incarnates himself in man,” he put forth the transcendental doctrine of man’s divinity, the true end of humanist thought. The Modern Edifice The Columbian Exposition in Chicago—which ran from May through October, 1893—stood as a beacon of electric light at a turning point in American history, and illuminated a nation more urban than rural, more industrial than agrarian, and more commercial than homemade. Visitors to the exposition came expecting a carnival and found themselves in a grand mixedmetaphor, bursting with irony and stranger-thanfiction juxtapositions. The builders of the exposition, led by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, designed a temporary campus to reflect the permanence of American modernity in neoclassical style, complete with columns and pediments. Irony hid in plain sight, lost to visitors dazzled by the whitewashed plaster facades designed to reflect whatever light shone on them. Many of the dynamos and gadgets of the future faded immediately into the past, and what remained—Cracker Jacks, Shredded Wheat, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and the Zipper—hardly changed the course of history. Susan B. Anthony and Buffalo Bill developed a mutual admiration; real American Indians rode carousel horses; Archduke Ferdinand (on whose head precariously sat the crown of Hapsburg and the last political vestiges of Christendom) rode the Ferris wheel. Scott Joplin played rags. Displays such as this one were grand, quasi-liturgical spectacles for the religion of Man, the triumph of science and technological advancement, and the fruits of centuries of “enlightened” thought. Scientific reasoning unraveled the mysteries of creation, and man claimed his divinity by building, discovery, and creation, spurred on by the belief that the entire universe—including all human life—was governed by deterministic laws discoverable only through scientific inquiry. Science, in other words, was a kind of Easter-egg hunt; once the eggs were gathered the game would be over: the laws governing the universe would be fully known.4 Positivist philosopher Auguste Comte superimposed this sense of man-made wonder on his man-made religion, replacing God with the “Great Being,” humanity. Emerson’s “Supreme Spirit,” another product of his Harvard address, represented a similar grand collective consciousness with mystical overtones, the godhead within and among men. Comte died in 1857; Emerson, in 1882; the abandoned exposition burned to the ground in July 1894. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 16 Attempts at Reflection Having survived a formative century and endured a brutal Civil War (a “cousins’ war” fought, in the words of literary historian Louis Menand, “with modern weapons and premodern tactics”), American culture found itself at the ideological crossroads of tradition and progress as the turn of the 20th century approached. The country had long struggled to define itself by way of commercial productivity rather than social refinement. “Unlike commerce and industry, national taste and accomplishment in music were more aspiration than fact,” and this aspiration manifested itself in derivation.5 “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” Emerson wrote in his essay “The American Scholar” to inspire the American mind to original greatness rather than hollow imitation, to build on the past with hope for the future. But since most serious American music depended upon European models, what would be left to inspire an American composer if he ignored the “courtly muses,” the only traditionally known sources of artistic inspiration? American composers of cultivated music lived and studied abroad out of ironic necessity, achieving artistic legitimacy as Americans only after having received training abroad. Composers sought to establish an original American style, believing one would emerge through diligent application of accepted techniques learned with the masters in Europe. No one, it seems, imagined that the pieces of an amalgamated style lay in the popular music of town squares, gazebos, saloons, and churches, and would coalesce—more passively than actively—as the result of the collective failure on the part of cultivated artists to establish a body of American-made masterworks with any predictable consistency. In true democratic fashion, traditional and progressive forces filled the vacuum created in the confusion: a battle raged between the forces of cultivated and vernacular music for the ears of America. To the horror of the musical establishment, their ramparts of European fugues and counterpoint started to crumble under the attack of ragtime and minstrelsy. With neither composers nor audience particularly convinced of the importance or appropriateness of a national culture defined by appropriated styles and techniques, true home-grown products—Protestant hymnody, and the musical styles of African lineage such as Negro spirituals, blues, and jazz that form the foundation of Rock and Roll and have come to dominate global musical culture— began to take on a sort of legitimacy due not to any substantive merit, but rather simply because America could make uncontested claims to them. The radio and other “marvels” beckoned humankind to passivity, while industrialization incrementally emaciated the human spirit that cultivated musicians had historically been charged to elevate and nourish. With the advent of Modernism and its synthesis of all heresies came Abstractism, antithesis of all beauty; many guardians of THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org culture—perhaps motivated by the need to distinguish themselves at any cost, perhaps driven by the allure of sophistication and pride—embraced the mirage. The Devil, as he often does, waited at the crossroads. The editor of this magazine has correctly stated that the Russian error of communistic materialism has indeed spread globally; capitalism, fully as materialist a form of bondage as communism, simply promises higher profits for the slave. Without God as the source of truth and law, man has become “wolf to man”6 and a God to himself. The humanist man-god looks inward and downward for his own gratification, not outward and upward towards his edification; in reflecting humanist ideas, America has spread cultural errors—debased populism and vulgar vernacularism in nearly every cultural medium—around the globe continuously for over a century. Certainly not alone in turning away from substantive culture and historical masterworks—man’s greatest attempts to express truth through beauty—America seems to share the morbid global fascination with either exclusive specialization— snobbery—or the licentious embrace of vulgarity in her intellectual and cultural pursuits. Long having been told actively and enticed passively into a false sense of intellectual superiority, men and women of the modern age remain convinced that little of the collective artistic past represents anything of value in the present: choosing to recreate nearly exclusively with vernacular forms that differ not in substance but rather in sentiment, men and women of good will fall into the trap of intellectual democratic indifferentism. This is where we are. Each Catholic must choose to reverse the progress of degradation on an individual level, embracing the culture that reflects Catholic truth, and embodying the ideas that will restore Catholicity to culture. Dr. Andrew Childs serves currently as Assistant Dean and Humanities Chair at St. Mary’s College, and as Assistant to the Director of Education for the US District of the SSPX. He lives in St. Mary’s, Kansas, with his wife and children, and two cats of legendary girth and good nature. He has taught at Yale University, the University of California at Irvine, Missouri State University, and Connecticut College. An active professional performer, he has sung over 100 performances of nearly 30 operatic roles. Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (Clarendon Press, 2001). 2 This difference also logically implied that truth might not exist. The fact that two opposing circular arguments emerge from the same major premises has posed a foundational philosophical dilemma for centuries. The ancients knew that man could not deny the concept of truth, only ignore or oppose it; modern philosophers proposed multiple possible truths as theoretical and developmental in nature. Truth accepted as absolute precludes contradiction; truth accepted as changeable results in negation. 3 The perception of truth as changeable prompted the dialectic fabrication of a metaphysical impossibility, a non-binding absolute: truth exists without any real responsibility to know it, only a vague directive to interpret it on an individual basis… 4 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (Pantheon Books, 1981), 20. 5 Stuart Feder, The Life of Charles Ives (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6 Thomas Hobbes, ironically one of the humanist architects of the God-less political system. 1 17 Requiem At Ecône The funeral of the three seminarians killed in an avalanche near the SSPX semianary in Ecône, Switzerland, took place on Saturday, February 21. They lost their lives last Wednesday, February 11, at Cleuson while on a snowshoeing hike. On Saturday at Ecône, His Excellency Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X, celebrated the funeral and requiem Mass for the repose of their souls. The big church was packed with family, friends, and faithful, while the ceremony was broadcast on a screen in the large crypt for those who could not find a place in the nave. In the choir were two catafalques and one coffin. The body of one of the victims had not yet been found, and the mortal remains of another had already been repatriated to France. Only one French seminarian of the three killed at Cleuson was laid to rest in the crypt of Ecône, where Mgr Marcel Lefebvre and other members of the SSPX already repose. The solemn ceremony, which lasted several hours, was cadenced by the sacred liturgical actions and plain chant. Bishop Fellay, a native of the Valais, was visibly very moved during his sermon in which he consoled the families and the community of Ecône, shaken by the drama. He explained that, while questions about how to prevent such things happening in future might legitimately be raised, this day they ought “to look higher,” to heaven. Vincent Pellegrini, Le Nouvelliste, Valais, Switzerland (February 16, 2009). Ecône February 12, 2009 Dear family and friends, Some of you might already have heard about this, but if only to correct partial accounts, I want to tell you about a difficult trial that hit the seminary of Ecône yesterday. Three third year seminarians died in the mountains because of an avalanche (for those who know them, Jean-Baptiste Després (22), Raymond Guérin (22) et Michaël Sabak (20 ans)). www.angeluspress.org ▲ After the end-of-semester exams, we had a break of four days when we could make whatever outings we wanted. This Wednesday 11 February, seven of us seminarians (all 3rd years and French) decided to go out THE ANGELUS • March 2009 18 ▲ for a day in the mountains. We planned to treck on snow shoes towards a mountain refuge, cook our picnic and return in the evening so as to be back at the seminary for 6.30pm. We left the seminary by car about 9am, and parked up about 10.30am. From there we went off onto the fresh snow in snowshoes, along a path that leads to a hydroelectric dam way up in the mountains. When we reached the summit about 12.45pm, a sign indicated that from that point it would ordinarily take one hour twenty minutes to reach the mountain refuge. But the path was covered with a metre and a half of snow on which nobody had walked, so much so that we had to cut the path again with our snow shoes. This path passed 50 metres above the lake (Cleuson). Two of us, being tired and hungry, didn't want to go on. So we were walking behind the others at a distance of 50 metres. Then, as the path went around an outcrop of rock above the lake, they disappeared from view. One of them, however, wanted to see what had become of us, and came again into view around the outcrop. We exchanged a few words and then caught up with him. But then, looking for the group up ahead, we could see only their footprints, which petered out about 40 metres ahead of us, and the trail of an avalanche. The ice on the lake was broken where the avalanche had come to a halt, but we could make nothing else out because of the brightness of the snow and the visibility (100 metres). We understood straightaway what had just happened. Seeing that in any case we could not help them, we went back to the dam. It was 1pm. After a few minutes of difficult walking, we reached the 'dam keepers' lodge'. The door was open, the lodge was empty, and near to the door was a phone. I then called 112 and the mountain rescue centre answered straightaway. Four people were in the avalanche and perhaps in the lake itself. In record time (15 mins), 2 'allouettes III' (helicopters) arrived at the spot and after half an hour, they brought back one of my best friends Eric Peron. He had not lost consciousness, and, though completely submerged in the snow, had managed to keep a pocket of air in front of his mouth with his arms, which saved him. Soon, he realised that the snow was whiter above him. Guessing that he was near the surface (his feet were in the lake and he was stuck from the waist up), he opened up a gap with his free arm, and actually reached the surface of the snow and he had the presence of mind to pull off his scarf and shove it through the opening. The rescuers saw it and with their dogs they got him out. He pointed out to them his fellow seminarian Raymond whose feet he could see, but Raymond was already dead. Eric was able to walk and seemed okay but Raymond was on the ground and we were not told until later that he was dead. About 3pm they took us by helicopter (my first time in one...) to the rescuers' base at Sion where the police took charge of us. Eric was already at hospital and he was well and had no broken bones. They held us a long time at the police station to make their inquiries into what had happened. As the eldest of the witnesses they made me make a long statement which the two others confirmed. Meanwhile we learnt that Raymond had died and that Jean-Baptiste and Michaël had not been found. There was no hope of getting them out alive. That evening at 7pm, they took us to the funeral home where we found Eric who was with Raymond's body. At 8.30pm, we were all taken back to the seminary. The searches stopped for the night and began again this morning. That is the story of what happened. Everyone here is in shock. Three young, beautiful souls have gone to meet the Eternal Father. Four miracles–for if we had not lagged behind, we would have all been caught in the avalanche and, with nobody to raise the alarm, the searches would not have started until 7pm, which would have been too late for the seven of us, the ways of God are impenetrable–give thanks to the Lord for the life which he has given them, and mourn the death of their friends. I ask you now to pray for the dead, and for their families who are enduring a terrible trial, and to join us in thanking the mercy of heaven for sparing our lives. With my love, Benoît. THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org 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)  March 2009 Reprint #85 The State of Necessity Part II Bishop Rifan’s Incoherent Reading Confusion between Two Errors For Bishop Rifan, “there is no real contradiction between what Blessed Pius IX taught and what Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom, teaches.”1 According to him, Pius IX condemned religious liberty understood as the absence of a moral obligation for the individual conscience to embrace the true religion (the error of personal or individual religious indifferentism), while Dignitatis Humanae teaches religious liberty understood as the individual’s right to be free from constraint by civil authorities in the public exercise of religion. But the teaching of Vatican II corresponds to the error of the religious indifferentism of civil authorities, equally condemned by Pius IX. It suffices to compare the texts to realize that Bishop Rifan’s interpretation is completely unfounded. Pius IX condemned not only the error of the indifferentism of individuals, but also and more precisely the error of the indifferentism of the State based upon the principle that the civil authorities must not prevent the 19 THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT The Negative Right: A Previously Refuted Thesis exercise of false religions in the external forum, which is tantamount to denying the social kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ. The two equally condemned errors (indifferentism of the individual and of the State) are quite distinct. In theory, the second error can be professed without professing the first, even though there is a link of cause and effect between the two. This, moreover, is an attribute of both liberal Catholicism and of modernism, which (indirectly) instill the indifferentism of the individual conscience by at first restricting moral duty to the limits of the individual conscience. Even if apparently §1 of Dignitatis Humanae rejects the error of the indifferentism of individuals, even if apparently §2 of this document does not teach it, even if the expressed and various authorized declarations have stated at the time of the Council2 and afterwards3 that the documents of Vatican II did not teach the first error, it nonetheless remains that §2 of Dignitatis Humanae confirms the error of the indifferentism of the State. That is why all the passages cited by Bishop Rifan are beside the point. A Too Rapid Inference Bishop Rifan is mistaken about the real thrust of Dignitatis Humanae because in his reading of it he makes no distinction between the internal forum of acts of conscience and the external forum of acts done in public. He says: The Council teaches from the natural point of view a right not to be forced or prevented from acting within due limits in matters religious by the State. That is to say that the Council affirms that in matters of conscience the civil power lacks jurisdiction; it is relatively incompetent.4 But keeping to the exact meaning of Dignitatis Humanae, it must be said that the inference Bishop Rifan makes by linking these two phrases by means of “that is to say” is incorrect. It is true that, as he says in his second statement, the State does not have power to act directly on internal acts of conscience. But the text of Dignitatis Humanae says much more than that. In his first statement, Bishop Rifan says that the State does not have the power to compel external actions accomplished in the framework of life in society. The first assertion logically implies the second, for if one lacks the power to compel external actions, all the more so does one lack the power to compel internal acts. But the second statement does not necessarily imply the first, for it is possible to lack power to act on internal acts while possessing the power to act on external ones. That is why the two statements are not strictly equivalent, the first saying more than then second. 20 Finally, Bishop Rifan adopts the argument used by Fr. Basil of Le Barroux,5 which was refuted by Fr. Jehan de Belleville,6 also of Le Barroux. According to this argument, the Council merely affirms a negative right, without conceding any affirmative rights to persons in their acts not in conformity with the truth or the good in matters religious.7 The distinction between a negative right and an affirmative right in this context is equivalent to a distinction between the right not to be impeded from acting and the right to act. However, it is a sophistical distinction, for, as St. Thomas says,8 every negation is based on an affirmation: if one has the right not to be prevented from acting (negation) it is because one has the right to act (affirmation). To be fair, we should make it clear that Fr. Basil’s argumentation is in reality more nuanced than the short summary given by Bishop Rifan would lead one to believe. According to the Benedictine, Dignitatis Humanae proclaims not the right to act but the right not to be prevented from acting in the sense that even if an objectively bad action as such has no objective right, the person who does it has the subjective (or personal) right not to be prevented if he is in good faith. But it suffices to refer to the notion of right defined by Aristotle and St. Thomas to comprehend right away the sophism underlying this position. For in fact a right is inherently objective and not subjective; the right to act and the right not to be prevented from acting are identical, and both are ascribed not to the person who acts but to the action with its object. For it is essentially the object of an action which is at the root of a right, that is to say of the justice and hence the moral goodness of an action.9 The dispositions of the person accomplishing it (invincible ignorance, good faith, good intention) cannot remedy the intrinsic malice of an action. That is why the State ought to prevent intrinsically evil actions in the external forum of life in society even if those who accomplish them are in good faith. In practice, of course, the heads of state are unable to prevent evil always and everywhere. Human government imitates that of God, who allows evil in order not to place an obstacle to a greater good or to avoid a worse evil. But this exercise of tolerance is a matter of prudence and not of justice: it implies no strict right, either positive or negative, in favor of evil. It is this negative right “not to be restrained from acting” which is explicitly condemned as such by Pope Pius IX in Quanta Cura. The Pope condemns the proposition that liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil. This is the condemnation of the religious indifferentism of the civil authorities in the sense that they should not “restrain [anyone] from acting,” the error taught by§2 of Dignitatis Humanae in contradiction with Tradition before Vatican II and the social kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Coherence of the Conciliar Texts Thus far we have shown that the teaching of religious freedom in Dignitatis Humanae regarding the indifferentism of the State incurs Pius IX’s condemnation. We must now see whether the condemnation is limited to this error alone and examine whether §1 of Dignitatis Humanae really rejects the indifferentism of individuals or merely seems to. a. A traditional appearance It is true that this text begins by making an assertion in apparent opposition to the error of private indifferentism condemned by Gregory XVI and Pius IX: First, this sacred Synod professes its belief that God himself has made known to mankind the way in which men are to serve Him, and thus be saved in Christ and come to blessedness. We believe that this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and apostolic Church, to which the Lord Jesus committed the duty of spreading it abroad among all men. Thus He spoke to the apostles: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:19-2). On their part, all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and His Church, and to embrace the truth they come to know, and to hold fast to it. This sacred Synod likewise professes its belief that it is upon the human conscience that these obligations fall and exert their binding force. The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power. Religious freedom in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore, it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ. b. But an appearance only Apparently, then, or at least directly, the text of Dignitatis Humanae does not seem to oppose the statements of Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX concerning the condemnation of the indifferentism of individuals. But in reality, things are not quite so simple, for §1 of Dignitatis Humanae contains the ambiguous expression “subsists in,” which www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 recurs here, taking it from Lumen Gentium, §8. This expression opens the way to a new, much subtler form of private individualism and inexorably leads, albeit indirectly, to the conclusion condemned by Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos and by Pius IX in Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors: one may indeed hope for salvation outside the one true religion, since religious communities other than the Catholic Church have by no means been 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.” (Unitatis Redintegratio §3) The end of this passage is also remarkable: it states that religious freedom, the subject of the following discussion, “leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.” Here it is not a question of “the Catholic Church” in which, it is said a few lines above, the one true Church subsists; rather, it is a question of “the one Church of Christ.” This is another snare from Lumen Gentium §8. The true religion is the one exercised only in the one Church of Christ. But the Catholic Church is only the community in which this one true religion and this one Church of Christ subsist. Now, we know (thanks to a document of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of June 29, 2007,10 what the expression “subsistit in” means: to subsist means to exist fully, as opposed to existing partially. The text of §1 thus states that the religion binding on all men is the one exercised not only fully in the Catholic Church, but also more or less in the other religions, which are so many partial elements of the one Church of Christ. Dignitatis Humanae: A Text Contradicting Tradition from A to Z and from No. 2 to No. 1 Consequently, to state that “it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ” is to deny the truth. Indeed, either the text of Dignitatis Humanae understands the expressions “true religion” and “one Church of Christ” in the sense suggested by the context in parallel places of Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio, in which case the THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT 21 THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT doctrine that religious liberty leaves untouched is not the traditional Catholic doctrine; or else the text understands these same expressions in the traditional Catholic sense, in which case religious freedom does not leave untouched the doctrine they express. Contrary to the appearances, §1 of Dignitatis Humanae is perfectly coherent with §2: the moral obligation imposed on individuals does not concern the one true religion as it is preached by the one true Catholic Church; it concerns religion not only as it is preached in the Catholic Church, but also in the false religions considered as such. The indifferentism of the State which is the subject in §2 is rooted in a new, subtler form of the indifferentism of individuals discussed in §1. Benedict XVI and the Authentic Interpretation of Vatican II We can also see that the different declarations of Pope Benedict XVI do not corroborate Bishop Rifan’s rereading of the text.11 Until now, the successor of John Paul II has not yet done anything to correct the most seriously defective teachings of the Council; on the contrary. a. Benedict XVI and Religious Liberty In his Christmas Address to the Roman Curia of December 22, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI makes a distinction between the two meanings possible for “freedom of religion.” In the sense that it would be the equivalent of an independence of the conscience in relation to the divine authority fixing the objective rule of morality (thus, in the sense of the indifferentism of the individual) the expression is to be reproved,12 according to the Holy Father. But in the sense that it would be the equivalent of the absence of any and all constraint in the external forum on the part of the civil authorities, the expression is, according to him, just.13 Further on, the Pope adds: The martyrs of the early Church died for their faith in that God who was revealed in Jesus Christ, and for this very reason they also died for freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess one’s own faith: a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God’s grace in freedom of conscience. This passage could at the most have an equivocal sense, for it is true that the profession of faith cannot be imposed by the State in the internal forum of the conscience, whereas it is false that the profession of faith cannot be imposed by the State in the external forum of society. Moreover, the Pope is not speaking here of the profession of the one true faith; he is simply speaking of martyrs who claimed 22 the freedom to profess their own faith, which can be understood in the subjective sense. But subsequently, other addresses of the Pope have dispelled this ambiguity and proven that Benedict XVI speaks of freedom understood in the sense condemned by Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos and by Pius IX in Quanta Cura. Indeed, the Pope claims the right for all believers to profess their religion publicly in society without the State being able to intervene in any way whatsoever. Moreover, in his Address of 2005, Benedict XVI already said that the Vatican II had wished to ratify “an essential principle of the modern State.” This remark should prick our ears, for it strikes us as an echo of the former reflections of Cardinal Ratzinger, who presented the teachings of Vatican II on religious freedom as a “countersyllabus.”14 One year after his famous speech on the hermeneutic of the Council, Pope Benedict XVI unequivocally indicated what the meaning of this religious freedom is in the Address of November 28, 2006, to the diplomatic corps of the Turkish Republic: The civil authorities of every democratic country are duty-bound to guarantee the effective freedom of all believers and to permit them to organize freely the life of their religious communities.15 Especially during his recent trip to the United States, Benedict XVI forcefully repeated the same ideas in his Speech to the United Nations Assembly on April 18, 2008: Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom....The full guarantee of religious liberty cannot be limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the possibility of believers playing their part in building the social order. He adds that the principle of religious liberty is “directed towards attaining freedom for every believer.”16 b. Benedict XVI and Ecumenism Far from correcting the faulty teaching of Dignitatis Humanae on religious freedom, Pope Benedict XVI’s speeches clearly and forcefully confirm it. On the other hand we can see that Pope Benedict XVI, no more than did Pope John Paul II, does not flinch the consequence of this teaching; indeed, the consequence of religious freedom is ecumenism. Without entering into details about his visit to the synagogue of Cologne in 2004 or his trip to the Middle East in 2006, we can see very well that, during the ecumenical meeting held at Naples on 21 October 2007, Benedict XVI did not hide his intentions. He explained: Today’s meeting takes us back in spirit to 1986, when my venerable Predecessor John Paul II invited important Religious Representatives to the hills of St Francis to THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org pray for peace, stressing on that occasion the intrinsic ties that combine an authentic religious attitude with keen sensitivity to this fundamental good of humanity. And he added: “While respecting the differences of the various religions, we are all called to work for peace....”17 It is clear that the spirit of Benedict XVI is still the spirit of Assisi. The conclusion that interests us is the following: the declarations of Pope Benedict XVI and his ecumenical endeavors do not bring an end to the state of necessity. The authentic interpretation of Vatican II given by the present pope still upholds in principle the same errors denounced long ago by Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop de Castro Mayer in their Open Letter to Pope John Paul II.18 This letter alone reduces to nothing Bishop Rifan’s sophistry. Twenty Years after the Episcopal Consecrations: Operation Survival Continues Twenty years have passed since the episcopal consecrations of June 30, 1988. Pope Benedict XVI denounces the abuses ascribed to the spirit of the Council, but he preaches fidelity to the empoisoned letter of the Council. He declares that the traditional missal was never abrogated, but he sees in it the extraordinary expression of the liturgical law in concurrence with the protestantized Novus Ordo, “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 [1] in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs. [2] 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” (Dignitatis Humanae, §2). [Emphasis added.] Bishop Rifan, Traditions et magistère vivant (Le Barroux: Editions St. Madeleine, 2007), p.96. See also p.92, n.130: Bishop Rifan borrows this explanation from Fr. Lucien, Fr. Basil of Le Barroux, and from Fr. Louis-Marie de Blignières. For more details about this question, see Le Sel de la Terre, No. 56 (Spring 2006), pp.183-87. 2 Bishop Rifan, ibid., pp.94-95, quotes the official report given on the text of Dignitatis Humanae by Bishop Emile De Smedt on November 19, 1963. 3 Ibid., pp.99-103. Bishop Rifan quotes long passages of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) which are along the same lines as Bishop De Smedt’s report. 4 Bishop Rifan, ibid., p.96. 5 The thesis of Father Basil, La liberté religieuse et la tradition Catholique (Le Barroux: 1998) reviewed in Le Sel de la Terre, No.30) in six volumes comprising 2,960 pages and 9,154 notes, has only a material advantage, for if one has the patience to read it to the end, it becomes evident that there is a lot of hot air. A new, condensed version in one volume is not any more convincing. 6 Jehan de Belleville, O.S.B., Droit objectif dans Dignitatis Humanae: La liberté religieuse à la lumière de la doctrine juridique d’Aristote et de St. Thomas d’Aquin (Rome, 2004). 7 Bishop Rifan, Tradition et le magistère vivant, p.96. 8 Disputed question De Malo, Q.2, Art.1, ad 9. 9 See Sel de la Terre, No. 56 (Spring, 2006), pp.180-82. 10 Response of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, June 29, 2007. 1 which in his eyes remains the ordinary expression of this same law. This duality which divides Benedict XVI’s government between a faultless fidelity to the erroneous principles of the Council and an appearance of a return to order is perfectly explained in the logic of the modernist system. Modernism, which is religion in progress and perpetual evolution, results, said St. Pius X, “from the conflict of two forces, one of them tending towards progress, the other towards conservation.” The force tending towards conservation is authority, which represses abuses; the force tending towards progress is the imperatives of the Council. And we can see how the conciliar authorities are always looking for a balance and trying to counterbalance the two contradictory tendencies against each other, the progressives against the conservatives. The conservative tendency will at the most go so far as to authorize a certain personal attachment of some of the faithful to pre-conciliar Tradition. But this would not justify a conclusion that the state of necessity has ended. The dilemma remains the same, between a false blind obedience and legitimate resistance for the sake of perpetuating the Catholic Faith. Even today we must still choose the latter. Authored by Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize, SSPX. Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from Courrier de Rome, July-August, 2008, pp.6-8. Bishop Rifan (Tradition, p.103), claims nevertheless to rely on the Discourse of December 22, 2005. 12 “...if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning. Consequently, it cannot be accepted by those who believe that the human person is capable of knowing the truth about God and, on the basis of the inner dignity of the truth, is bound to this knowledge” (translation available on the Vatican’s Web site). 13 “It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction. The Second Vatican Council, recognizing and making its own an essential principle of the modern State with the Decree on Religious Freedom, has recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church” (ibid.) 14 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (1982; Ignatius Press, 1987), pp.381-82. 15 Meeting with the Diplomatic Corps to the Republic of Turkey, November 28, 2006 (online at vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches). 16 Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization, April 18, 2008 (online at vatican.va). 17 Greeting to the Heads of Delegations taking part in the International Encounter for Peace at the Episcopal Seminary of Capodimonte, October 21, 2007 (online at www.vatican. va). 18 English version: The Angelus, January 1984. 11 THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 23 THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT Limbo Is Not a Theological Hypothesis But a Truth Taught by the Apostolic Magisterium The Demolition of Orthodoxy Neomodernism is demolishing orthodoxy stone by stone, by repeated blows, blows which, through an unnameable tolerance and sometimes a veritable complicity, are allowed by those in charge, who wash their hands like Pilate. Numerous “masters in Israel” vie to create a media spectacle; there is a whole cortege of improvised disciples: neo-exegetes, neo-theologians...neo-this and neo-that, disposed to joyously trample the Faith in the name of the fairyqueen of a global, ultimately adogmatic religion. An example of this continuous demolition of the most certain truths is the attack on the doctrine of limbo. In its July-August 2007 edition, Courrier de Rome1 published an article that demonstrated in great detail the doctrinal falsity of the assertion that the existence of limbo is a mere “theological hypothesis.” In fact, it is neither an hypothesis nor a fable that the “New Evangelization” could sweep away, opening wide the gates of Paradise to all unbaptized infants. In this issue we will review the teachings of the Apostolic magisterium prior to Vatican II, with the clarification that if a rightly 24 understood, homogeneous evolution of doctrine is certainly possible, the involution and contradiction of truths already legitimately set forth ought to be rejected out of hand. It is certainly possible that a less clear truth may acquire greater clarity, but the contrary is false, given that a clearly explained truth tranquilly taught in theology and by the constant and universal magisterium of the Truth cannot undergo an involution, and still less a cancellation. In effect, the Holy Spirit, who leads the Church, does not begin by teaching a truth only to authorize its being discarded. The Voice of the Apostolic Magisterium 1) The Council of Carthage (418) energetically defends the baptism of infants (and thus the doctrine of limbo) in the following articles: Whoever says that infants fresh from their mothers’ wombs ought not to be baptized, or says that they are indeed baptized unto the remission of sins, but that they draw nothing of the original sin from Adam, which is expiated in the bath of regeneration...let him be anath- THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org ema. Since what the Apostle says: “Through one man sin entered into the world (and through sin death), and so passed into all men, in whom all have sinned” [cf. Rom. 5:12] must not to be understood otherwise than as the Catholic Church spread everywhere has always understood it. For on account of this rule of faith even infants, who in themselves thus far have not been able to commit any sin, are therefore truly baptized unto the remission of sins, so that that which they have contracted from generation may be cleansed in them by regeneration.2 It is a truth of faith, then, that infants are born with original sin (cf. Rom. 5:12); this can only be effaced by baptism (“nisi renatus fuerit ex aqua et Spiritu Sancto non potest introire in Regnum Dei”—Jn. 3:5). Baptism of desire also exists, but it is not possible except for those who have attained the use of reason, which is certainly not the case of infants and young children. If anyone says that for this reason the Lord said: “In my Father’s house there are many mansions” [ Jn. 14:2]” that it might be understood that in the kingdom of heaven there will be some middle place or some place anywhere where the blessed infants live who departed from this life without baptism, without which they cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven, which is life eternal, let him be anathema.3 The canon is formal: children who die without baptism cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven, which is eternal life. 2) Pope Innocent III (beginning of the 13th century), in an apostolic letter to the Archbishop Imbert of Arles, affirmed this among other things: We say that a distinction must be made, that sin is twofold: namely, original and actual: original, which is contracted without consent; and actual, which is committed with consent. Original, therefore, which is committed without consent, is remitted without consent through the power of the sacrament; but actual, which is contracted with consent, is not mitigated in the slightest without consent....The punishment of original sin is deprivation of the vision of God, but the punishment of actual sin is the torments of everlasting hell.4 3) The Council of Florence (1442), in the decree Pro Jacobitis, affirmed: Regarding children, indeed, because of danger of death, which can often take place, when no help can be brought to them by another remedy than through the sacrament of baptism, through which they are snatched from the domination of the Devil and adopted among the sons of God, it advises that holy baptism ought not to be deferred for forty or eighty days, or any time according to the observance of certain people, but it should be conferred as soon as it can be done conveniently, but so that, when danger of death is imminent, they be baptized in the form of the Church, early without delay, even by a layman or woman, if a priest should be lacking.5 4) Pope Pius VI (1794), in his Apostolic Constitution Auctorem Fidei, condemned 83 propositions of the Jansenist Synod of Pistoia, including the following: The doctrine which rejects as a Pelagian fable, that place of the lower regions (which the faithful generally designate by the name of the limbo of children) in which the souls of those departing with the sole guilt of original sin are punished with the punishment of the condemned exclusive of the punishment of fire, just as if, by this very fact, that these who remove the punishment of fire introduced that middle place and state free of guilt and of punishment between the kingdom of God and eternal damnation, such as that about which the Pelagians idly talk—false, rash, injurious to Catholic schools.6 5) Pope St. Pius X, in his Catechism of Christian Doctrine (1912), wrote: Children who die without baptism go to limbo, where they do not enjoy God, but neither do they suffer, for having original sin, and only this, they do not merit to enter Paradise, but neither do they merit purgatory or hell.7 In an apostolic letter to Cardinal Vicar Pietro Respighi, speaking of his Catechism, the holy pope wrote that the faithful will find it a brief, very precise summary, even in format, in which they will find explained with great simplicity the principal divine truths and the most useful Christian reflections.8 How can anyone think that limbo is a simple “theological hypothesis” that can be tranquilly suppressed? 6) Pope Pius XII, speaking of the necessity of baptism, confirms: If what We have said up to now concerns the protection and care of natural life, much more so must it concern the supernatural life, which the newly born receives with baptism. In the present economy there is no other way to communicate that life to the child who has not attained the use of reason. Above all, the state of grace is absolutely necessary at the moment of death; without it, salvation and supernatural happiness—the beatific vision of God—are impossible. An act of love is sufficient for the adult to obtain sanctifying grace and to supply the lack of baptism; to the still unborn or newly born this way is not open. A Convenient Interpretation The last act of the supreme magisterium, which officially blocked the interpretation of the doctrine of limbo as a whimsical hypothesis, could not go unmentioned by the International Theological THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 25 Commission, which in fact, in its last document aimed at suppressing the Catholic doctrine of limbo, gave its own interpretation, asserting that Pius XII rather recalled the limits within which the debate must take place and reasserted firmly the moral obligation to provide Baptism to infants in danger of death.9 In reality, the Commission did not correctly understand the pontifical message: Pius XII authorized no “debate” on limbo, but wished to confirm that baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation, for if baptism of desire exists for adults in a state of invincible ignorance, this is not the case for infants and children who have not yet reached the use of reason. And if for children without the use of reason baptism is a “conditio sine qua non” for obtaining supernatural life, this also holds true for obtaining the beatific vision; whence the traditional teaching on limbo as a strictly theological conclusion confirmed by repeated and precise statements of the magisterium, which no one can suppress on the pretext that this teaching is but a vain imagining fit only for the memory hole. The International Theological Commission cannot wander outside the rails set by biblical truth, which is of divine faith: “Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”10 That is what Fr. Michel, author of several articles on the subject published in L’Ami du Clergé, wrote: Undoubtedly, the Catholic doctrine implied in the dogma of the necessity of baptism for the remission of original sin is that children who die without baptism cannot enjoy the beatific vision. If this conclusion cannot yet be considered a dogma of faith insofar as it has not yet been proposed directly as such by the Church’s magis- terium, it is at least an immediate truth of faith susceptible of a dogmatic definition.11 Stephanus Translated from Courrier de Rome, October 2008, pp.7-8. Name of the French edition of SiSiNoNo. This article appeared in the The Angelus (Nov. 2007). 2 Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, tr. by Roy J. Deferrari from the 30th edition of Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum (1955; reprint: Loreto Publications, n.d.), 224 [hereafter abbreviated Dz.]. 3 Ibid., n. 2. 4 Dz. 410. 5 Dz. 712. 6 Dz. 1526. 7 St. Pius X, Catechism of Christian Doctrine, §100. 8 AAS, December 2, 1912, pp.690-92. 9 International Theological Commission, The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized,” §39. 10 Jn. 3:5. 11 A. Michel, “The Salvation of Children Who Die Without Baptism,” L’Ami du Clergé. 1 $2.00 per SiSiNoNo reprint. Please specify. Shipping & Handling 5-10 days 2-4 days USA Foreign Up to $50.00 $50.01 to $100.00 Over $100.00 $4.00 $6.00 Free 25% of subtotal Up to $50.00 $50.01 to $100.00 Over $100.00 $8.00 $10.00 $8.00 Flat fee! ($10.00 minimum) 48 Contiguous States only. UPS cannot ship to PO Boxes. Available from: ANGELUS PRESS 2915 Forest Ave., Kansas City, MO 64109 USA Phone: 1-800-966-7337 www.angeluspress.org & 27 Classic Games video Games P i e r r e D e l p o s This article provides an overview of the morality of games in general following the lead of St. Thomas Aquinas. It then takes a look at the main characteristics of today’s video games. It is only in light of the basic principles governing the morality of games that the moral objections usually made against video games can be examined. When considering the appropriateness or unsuitability, the morality or immorality, of video games (or electronic games), it is a good idea to start with the two words which denote the thing itself. First of all, it involves a game, and this game is played by means of electronic or audiovisual gadgets. Only an analysis based upon these two elements will give us a pertinent answer. Let’s start with games, or play in general. For St. Thomas Aquinas, play is quite a serious matter. The proof of this is that he devotes almost the entirety of a question of his Summa Theologica (II-II, Q.168, Art. 2-4) to it. He asks whether there can be a virtue concerning games: the answer is affirmative. And since all virtue is situated in the rational middle between excess and defect, he shows that one can sin by playing too much (by excess), but also by not playing enough. St. Thomas Aquinas begins by explaining why games are necessary for man. Our body, limited in strength, cannot act continuously and thus needs rest, which is provided in particular by sleep. But our soul, also limited in strength, cannot act continually either, and is in need of rest. Now, as our Doctor explains, the soul’s rest is pleasure, so the soul should be afforded a certain pleasure between tasks. And the human activity with an intellectual component but which does not have as its purpose something useful or rational, but exclusively pleasure, is called games. Games Morally Necessary St. Thomas recounts an incident reported in the life of St. John. He was amusing himself by petting a bird, and some of the faithful reproached him for doing something unseemly. “If you keep the bow continually drawn,” answered the Evangelist, “it becomes useless. Likewise, if you never relax the soul, it becomes incapable of action.” However, games, like every human activity, must be in conformity with the nature of man and his proper ends. Games can therefore never have as their object anything immoral. They must not violate man’s rational character. Finally, in order to keep games within due bounds as regards persons, time and place, and other circumstances, games must be the object of a virtue that will provide its own rule. “Eutrapelia” According to St. Thomas The virtue that orders playful actions is called eutrapelia—pleasantness or liveliness. It is the virtue by which one is able to play fittingly, neither too much nor too little. St. Thomas then wonders whether there can be excess of play. He shows that there can be, in two ways: first, by playing games involving immoral things (he specifies obscenity) or injurious to one’s neighbor (through discourtesy, insolence, or giving scandal); second, by failing to respect the circumstances that make the game moral. An example would be playing at times or in places that are not suitable, or about things that should not be made the object of fun. Playing instead of attending Sunday Mass violates the right time for play; playing in church violates the right place for play; making religion an object of jests also violates the right object of play. Too Much or Too Little Play Lastly, the holy Doctor wonders if it is possible to play too little, which would also be a matter of sin. He www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 28 answers affirmatively. St. Thomas makes this admirable statement: “In human affairs whatever is against reason is a sin. Now it is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by offering no pleasure to others, and by hindering their enjoyment.” However, he remarks, the purpose of games (hence the soul’s rest) is to be able to act better afterwards, and not the opposite: the first goal of life is not to play. Games are a spice of life, explains St. Thomas, and a little goes a long way. For games, the “not enough” is per se less easily a vice than the “too much.” Sinning Against Fun To sum up this fair teaching of the Common Doctor, we note that games, an activity having no other rules than those which provide us pleasure, are necessary to relax the soul and allow it to resume its normal activity in a better mood. Eutrapelia is the moral virtue governing play such that it is done in reasonable measure and due circumstances. One can sin against eutrapelia by defect and, more easily, by excess. We should add one point that our Doctor does not mention, namely that play is an integral and essential part of a child’s education: it is through play that the child explores reality. We shall not develop this point further, since discussion of it can be found in good books on pedagogy. Typology of Video Games Obviously, a multitude of games exist; for example, games to play alone or in groups, indoor games and outdoor games, games with rules and games without, word games or games of imagination, games needing equipment, etc. A video game is an indoor game, usually with rules, that can be played alone or by several, and that requires some equipment (a console, computer, or screen, depending). Its essential characteristic is an animated image with sound with which the child can interact by means of levers or buttons. For example, in a game of video soccer, by means of levers the child guides his chosen player while the computer or other players try to keep him from making a goal. Video games can be roughly divided into three categories. Some call for thought, analysis, culture, and, in general, mental skill. This is the case, for example, of video games that reproduce classic games (chess, Trivial Pursuit), or specific video games that involve puzzle solving. Other video games call for quick reflexes, eye-hand coordination, and visual ability. This is the case, for example, with sporting games (football, car racing, airplanes) and war games. Some appeal to the imagination, to the literary, artistic, and poetic faculties, or to the desire to explore. This is the case, for example, of games oriented towards the discovery of an artistic or literary work, as well as those that invite the players to voyage in imaginary worlds. THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org As with classic games, many video games involve all three of these kinds of games. For example, the child is going to set out to discover an unknown castle (imaginary aspect). His progress is marked by puzzles to solve that will enable him to advance to the next step (intellectual aspect). But the castle is guarded by enemies he will have to fight and defeat (quick reflexes). Upon arriving, in keeping with the classic fairytale formula, the player discovers a princess to rescue, the hidden treasure, etc. Video games can be played alone or with several players in front of the same game console (thus in physical proximity of one another) or even with several at a distance over the Internet. This last sort, rather complex, is aimed more at adults. In this kind of game, the people encountered (enemies, princesses, dragons, etc.) correspond with other players, and the game itself can last some time (like a giant jigsaw puzzle that takes weeks to complete). Currently, games billed as “massively multiplayer” gather hundreds of thousands of people and run 24/7, the player resuming the game which continued to evolve in his absence. True Video Games When examining video games, we should be aware that some of these games are partly inspired by classic games, but that a “true” video game is one that exploits specifically computer-based resources. Let’s take a universal, classic game: playing with dolls. The little girl dresses her doll, puts it to bed, feeds it at her dinette set, makes it socialize with other dolls, etc. But the game is situated exclusively in the child’s imagination and in the child’s words: the doll remains passive. In the 1960’s, there was an attempt to introduce talking dolls, but it was very limited in scope. Now let’s suppose that the doll is able to react to situations independently of the little girl. For example, the doll does not want to go to bed (it cries) and the little girl will have to find a way to get it to go to sleep (scolding, caresses, lullabies, etc.). This is the principle of an electronic toy like the “Tamagotches,” small, digital electronic animals endowed with autonomous behavior the child must respond to when the Tamagotch requires (or else it may even “die” from lack of care). Interactive Games Let’s take it a little further. Suppose a game is set up in which the player must manage a community of some sort (for example, a town). Here the player is confronted with the manifold results of each one of his actions. If he is the mayor of the town and the trash collectors go on strike to get a pay raise, he can refuse the increase to protect the town’s finances, with the risk that the community will be submerged in trash. Or he can yield to the strikers at the risk of imperiling his 29 budget. Moreover, if he wants to be re-elected he has to keep in mind the reaction of the inhabitants. You begin to see the remarkable complexity of such a game. It is called “The Sims,” and it has 20 million adepts, 40% of whom are women. But “The Sims” only partially exploits the possibilities of video games. The multi-player online game “World of Warcraft” goes a step beyond. Inspired by the universe of the book The Lord of the Rings, it involves an immense, virtual world replete with dungeons, jungles, moors, etc. In this world exist diverse beings (humans, gnomes, elves, trolls, the livingdead, etc.) as well as a variety of roles (druids, hunters, warriors, paladins, priests, etc.), without forgetting a multitude of objects necessary for certain actions (armor, bracelets, arms, vestments, etc.) that must be sought on a quest strewn with ambushes and enigmas. Every player is a character who begins to interact with the other players in trade, alliances, battles, or simply in seeking objects useful for a particular objective. It might be likened to a game of checkers (rather than a game of chess, since the basic rules are very simple), but with thousands of different-colored pieces, constantly changing boards and players, and perpetual encounters. Some 2,000 technicians offer 24-hour support to the players and continually create new objects, new game possibilities, and even off-shoots like “The Burning Crusade,” recently launched, that gives the player access to new universes with other landscapes, characters, and objects. It is not surprising that this game (after all, not very violent; the goal is not to fight but to pursue one’s quest) today attracts ten million adepts worldwide who pay a monthly fee. Second Life “World of Warcraft” may seem like the archetypal video game, yet it is about to be eclipsed by a game of a totally new conception, which opens heretofore unimagined possibilities, and perhaps defines the way in which the Internet will be presented to us tomorrow: it is called “Second Life.” The principle of the game is wonderfully simple. It involves a virtual world that offers tools enabling the players to create all kinds of objects: houses, roads, merchandise, etc. To enter the game, the player creates a persona (an “avatar”) and defines its characteristics. And then he projects himself into this virtual world. From that moment, with time and work, everything becomes possible. You can take a walk. You can meet and chat with other avatars. You can build a house, but also buy other houses (with game money that you acquire with your real credit card). You can do business, offer various services, visit expositions, watch movies, etc. In short, everything that can be done in the real world is possible in this “second life,” but without the physical constraints of real life. For example, you can get over your shyness on “Second Life” and meet people whom you’d never dare approach in real life. A modest office worker can console himself by becoming, in the game, a clever, successful capitalist. Juncture Between the Game and Reality The astonishing craze for this game (which has already attracted several millions of fans) is such that the border between reality and fantasy tends to disappear. More and more real-world realities are showing up in the game. For example, one of the best-known characters of “Second Life” is a real estate sales agent named Anshe Chung. This lady (a Chinese woman in reality named Ailin Graef, who lives in Frankfurt), buys undeveloped virtual spaces, has her (real) employees develop virtual real estate programs, and rents these virtual properties to players. The game has become her sole source of (real) income, and she is now a millionaire (in real dollars). Political groups have created presences in “Second Life.” The first to set up shop were the National Front and the Socialist party. These virtual political militants hold meetings, distribute tracts, and hold demonstrations in the middle of this virtual world. Business enterprises are beginning to invade this new universe. Reuters news agency has opened a branch there. Television stations have offices there. Dior is planning a virtual boutique (though shoppers still cannot buy anything). Dell, Nissan, Coca Cola, Toyota, Reebok, IBM, etc., all are present. In short, a new world is being built right beside us, a “second life.” It is a game. It is also reality. It is the video game of tomorrow, and perhaps also a part of tomorrow’s reality. Translated from Fideliter, May-June 2007, pp.68-73. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 30 B i s h o p f r e d e r i c k j u s t u s k n e c h t, d. d. Jesus Promises to Give the Bread of Life (Jn. 6:24-72) Many of those who had been miraculously fed by Our Lord returned next morning to Capharnaum, where they sought and found Him in the synagogue.1 Here Jesus addressed them, saying: “Amen, amen, I say to you: You seek me, not because you have seen miracles, but because you did eat of the loaves and were filled. Labour not for the meat which perisheth,2 but for that which endureth3 unto everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you.” Then they said to Him: “Lord, give us always4 this bread.” But He answered: “I am the living bread The synagogue. When they found Him, they asked: “Rabbi, when camest Thou hither?” They could not understand when and how Jesus, who, as they knew, had not embarked with His disciples, could have come to Capharnaum. He did not answer their questionings, but uttered to them a reproach which proved Him to be a discerner of their hearts. 2 Which perisheth. i. e. earthly food. 3 Which endureth. You seek me so as to obtain food which can sustain your mortal life. I, however, fed you in that wonderful manner in order that, your faith being awakened, you might be prepared to receive that food which will give unto you everlasting life. 4 Give us always. The Jews, being fleshly-minded, could not perceive the meaning of our Lord’s words. They thought He was promising them some 1 THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org 31 which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever. The bread which I will give is my flesh for the life5 of the world.” Hearing this, the Jews who were in the synagogue began to dispute among themselves, saying: “How can this man6 give us His flesh to eat?” Jesus, far from putting an end to their dispute, by applying a figurative meaning to His words, repeated7 with even greater earnestness and solemnity what He had spoken: “Amen, amen, I say unto you, unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His Blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood, hath everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My Flesh is meat indeed, and My Blood is drink indeed. As the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth Me, the same shall also live by Me.8 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Not as your fathers did eat manna, and died. He that eateth this bread, shall live for ever.” Many of the disciples, hearing these words, did not believe it possible that He could do what He promised; they, therefore, went away,9 saying: “This word is hard,10 and who can hear it?”11 But Jesus, knowing that they murmured at His teaching, asketh: “Doth this scandalize you? If then12 you shall see the Son of Man ascend up where He was before? It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.13 The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and mira­culous earthly food, such as the manna, the receiving of which would take away all necessity of providing for their daily bread. Therefore they exclaimed eagerly “Lord, give us always this bread!” using words very similar to those used by the woman of Samaria. 5 For the life. Thus our Lord promised 1) to give, i.e., to sacrifice His human Body (His Flesh and Blood) for the life of the world, and 2) to give His Body to be our food. And in this sense the Jews, as we shall see, understood His words. 6 How can this man. The incredulity of the Jews contrasts jarringly with the great promises of our Lord. Setting aside all respect for Him, they spoke of Him as “this man,” and loudly disputed with one another, how it was possible for Jesus to give them His flesh to eat and His Blood to drink. Our Lord wished them to believe the fact, and leave the how to Him. 7 Repeated. Our Lord does three things: 1) He insists that we must eat His flesh and drink His blood. 2) He threatens the unbeliever with loss of eternal life. 3) He comforts the believer with the assurance of eternal life. 8 Live by Me. Because His Flesh and Blood are inseparably united to Himself, the Son of God. So intimate is the union with Him of those who receive Him that He compares it to the union between the Father and the Son. God the Father has life in Himself, and I, as God, have life from Him. 9 Went away. Our Lord’s promises were by no means favourably received. Not only did the Jews remain incredulous, but even many of His disciples, who had hitherto followed Him, took scandal at His words. 10 This word is hard. Or repulsive. 11 Who can hear it? Or believe it. 12 If then. Our Lord made one more attempt to win them to faith. “Does this offend, or scandalize you?” said He. “But if you see me, the Son of Man, go up to heaven with My glorified Body, will you not then believe that I can give My Body to you to be your Food? Will you even then be so carnally-minded, and receive My words so badly?” 13 Profiteth nothing. Flesh, as flesh, cannot give life; but you must not think of the dead flesh, for it is a question of the Flesh of the Son of Man, in which dwells the Spirit of God, glorifying it and filling it with divine power. My Flesh, united to the Spirit of God, has life-giving power. life.14 But there are some of you that believe not.”15 But they were scandalized, and many of them walked no more16 with Him. Jesus, seeing this, addressed His apostles: “Will you also17 go away?” Peter answered18 in the name of all: “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. We have believed and have known that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God.” Commentary The promises made by our Lord in this discourse. He promised to give us a food, the effects of which would not be passing, but would endure for ever. This Food is Himself: He is the living and life­-giving Food which came down from heaven. He promised to give His Flesh for the life of the world, and to offer this His Flesh to be our Food. When the Jews were scandalized at the idea of His giving His Flesh to be eaten, He did not say to them: “You have mis­ understood Me.” On the contrary, He re-affirmed the very thing which had scandalized them, and asserted repeatedly that His Flesh was meat indeed and His Blood drink indeed, and that those only will have life who eat His Flesh and drink His Blood; though, at the same time, He signified that the Flesh which He would give to be our Food was His glorified Body. When many of His disciples were still offended at the idea of His giving His Flesh to eat, and refused to believe His words, our Lord preferred to let them go, rather than retract or explain away one syllable of the words He had spoken. It is therefore undeniably true that our Lord promised to give His Body, His Flesh and Blood, to be the Food of His servants. Our Lord gave this promise at the time of the third Pasch, kept during His public life, and He fulfilled it a year Spirit and life. For the Flesh which I mean is penetrated by the Spirit and united to the living Godhead. Believe not. In spite of all the miracles which they have seen. 16 Walked no more. They went back to their ordinary way of living and to their various occupations. Their chief object in following our Lord had been the hope which they built on an earthly Messias, and they cared nothing for our Lord’s spiritual and supernatural promises. From henceforward they formed a part of the unbelieving mass of Jews. However, besides the twelve apostles, there still remained faithful the seventy-two disciples, as well as some other disciples, and the holy women who followed our Lord. Thus were His disciples sifted. Those whose vocation was real, and whose faith was firm, remained with Jesus; whereas many of the weak and wavering could not stand the test to which their faith was put, and left Him. 17 Will you also. Jesus made no further attempt to keep back those who wished to leave Him. On the contrary, He searchingly asked the apostles: “Will you also go away?” He left it to their free-will to forsake Him if they chose, and forced them to make a clear and open declaration of their intentions. 18 Peter answered. Peter, the head and mouthpiece of the Church, made this beautiful answer in the name of the rest: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” (who but Thou canst lead us unto life?) Thou hast the words of eternal life, words of eternal truth which lead men to eternal life. And even if we cannot understand the mysterious words which Thou hast spoken, still we do not doubt them, but believe them, because we have believed and, through faith, have known that Thou art Christ the Son of God. Thus the apostles stood the test splendidly. They remained true to our Lord, openly confessed Him to be the Son of God, and placed themselves in opposition to their unbelieving fellow-countrymen. 14 15 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 32 later when, at the Last Supper, He instituted the most holy Sacrament of the Altar. Our Lord is entirely present in the most holy Sacrament, under the form of bread, for He says: 1) “I (Myself) am the living bread”; 2) “he that eateth Me,” and therefore he who eats His Flesh eats Him; 3) “I abide in him” (namely in him who eats My Flesh); 4) “the flesh profiteth nothing, it is the spirit that quickeneth.” His Flesh, therefore is penetrated by the Spirit, and united to His soul and divinity. Communion under one kind. It is evident from our Lord’s words: “He that eateth this Bread (My Body under the form of bread) will live for ever,” that he who receives Holy Communion under one kind, does not receive less than he who receives under both kinds. The necessity of Communion [the fourth commandment of the Church]. Our Lord makes the attainment of eternal life dependent on the receiving of His Body and Blood. “Except you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His Blood, you shall not have life in you.” “He that eateth My Flesh &c., shall live for ever.” Since it is the duty of every man to try to save his soul, and Holy Communion is necessary, as of precept, it is the duty of every man to receive Holy Communion, as soon as he is capable of understanding this divine mystery, and as soon as his will is sufficiently formed and enlightened to decide whether or no he desires to partake of this heavenly Food. The Church, therefore, is fulfilling our Lord’s command, and providing for the salvation of souls, when she commands all the faithful to receive Holy Communion. The effects of Holy Communion are rich in blessings. He who receives the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ worthily has, in His own words, everlasting life, and will be raised up by Him at the last day. “He abides in Me, and I in him. He will live in Me!” says our Lord. The Body of Christ is a living bread, which gives us supernatural and everlasting life, and is a pledge to our bodies of a glorious resurrection. Even after the sacred species have disappeared, a nourishing and vivi­fying strength is left in our souls, which is none other than the divine strength of the THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org Son of God (Grimm). St. Cyril expounds the interior union which exists between our Lord and him who receives Holy Com­munion by the following simile: “Even as melted wax unites itself to wax, mingling with it, and becoming one with it, so does he who receives the Body of the Redeemer become one with Him, so com­pletely is he united to Him.” The Blessed Sacrament the touch-stone of faith. He who does not believe in the Real Presence of our Lord in the Holy Eucharist, has no part in Him, because he has no firm belief in the Divinity of Christ. The true believer does not ask, as did the Jews: “How can this be?” but believes the words of Christ unconditionally, because he knows that Christ is the Son of God, and that with God all things are possible. Our Lord’s prophecy. In His discourse on the Blessed Sacrament, our Lord, distinctly and without using any figure, foretold the atoning Sacrifice of His death, telling those present that He would give His Flesh for the life of the world. He foretold with equal clearness His Ascension, when He said that the Son of Man (the Incarnate Son of God who came down from heaven) would (as the Son of Man, and therefore with His human nature) return to where He was before His Incarnation. Application These words of our Blessed Lord ought to move all of you who are going to make your First Communion, to prepare yourselves with the utmost care for receiving this Divine Food. Each time you enter a church where the Blessed Sacrament is preserved, excite in your hearts an act of firm and lively faith in the Real Presence of our Lord Jesus Christ. A Practical Commentary on Holy Scripture, Chapter XXXIV, “Jesus Promises to Give the Bread of Life,” pp.530-535. [Available from Angelus Press; price: $40.00–Ed.] 33 The Annunciation of the Lord The feast is so named because on this day the coming of the Son of God was announced by an angel. It was fitting that the Annunciation should precede the Incarnation, and this for three reasons. The first is that the order of reparation should correspond to the order of transgression or deviation. Therefore since the devil tempted the woman to lead her to doubt, through doubt to consent, and through consent to sinning, so the angel brought the message to the Virgin by the announcement to prompt her to believing, through believing to consent, and through consent to the conceiving of the Son of God. The second reason has to do with the angel’s ministry. The angel is God’s minister and servant, and the Blessed Virgin was chosen to be God’s mother; and as it is right for the minister to be at the service of his mistress, so it was fitting that the Annunciation be made to the Blessed Virgin by an angel. The third reason is that reparation was to be made for the fall of the angels. The Incarnation made reparation not only for human sin but for the ruin of the fallen angels. Therefore the angels were not to be excluded; and as womankind was not excluded from knowledge of the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, neither was the angelic Messenger excluded. God made both of these mysteries known through angels, the Incarnation to the Virgin Mary and the Resurrection to Mary Magdalene. The Virgin Mary lived in the Temple from her third to her fourteenth year and made a vow to live in chastity unless God otherwise disposed. Then she www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 34 was espoused to Joseph, God revealing his will by the flowering of Joseph’s staff, as is more fully set forth in our account of the birth of Blessed Mary. Joseph went to Bethlehem, the city of his origins, to make the necessary preparation for the nuptials, while Mary returned to her parents’ home in Nazareth. Nazareth means “flower”; hence Bernard says that the Flower willed to be born of a flower, in “Flower,” in the season of flowers. At Nazareth, then, the angel appeared to Mary and greeted her, saying: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee! Blessed art thou among women. Bernard says: “We are invited to salute Mary by Gabriel’s example, by John’s joyous leaping in his mother’s womb, and by the reward of being greeted in return.” Now we must first see why the Lord wanted his mother to be married. On this point Bernard gives three reasons, saying: “It was necessary that Mary be espoused to Joseph, because thereby the mystery was hidden from the demons; Mary’s virginity was confirmed by her spouse; and her modesty and good name were protected.” A fourth reason was that Mary’s espousal took away dishonor from every rank and condition of womankind, namely, the married, virgins, and widows, since she herself was married, virginal, and widowed. A fifth: she was served and cared for by her spouse; a sixth, the genealogical line was established through the husband. The angel said: Hail, full of grace! Bernard: “In her womb was the grace of the presence of God, in her heart the grace of charity, on her lips the grace of benignity, in her hands the grace of mercy and generosity.” Bernard also says: “Truly full of grace, because from her fullness all captives receive redemption, the sick receive healing, the sorrowful consolation, sinners forgiveness, the right­eous grace, the angels joy, and finally the whole Trinity receives glory and the Son of man the substance of human flesh.” The Lord is with thee. Bernard: “With you are the Lord God the Father, of whom the One you are conceiving is begotten, the Lord the Holy Spirit, of whom you conceive, and the Lord the Son, whom you clothe with your flesh.” Blessed art thou among women. Bernard goes on: “You are blessed among women, blessed indeed above all women, because you will be a virgin mother and the mother of God.” Women had come under a threefold curse, namely, the curse of reproach when they were unable to conceive, wherefore Rachel, when she conceived and bore a son, said: “God has taken away my reproach”;1 the curse of sin when they conceived, whence the Psalm says: “Behold I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins did my mother THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org conceive me”;2 and the curse of pain when they gave birth; so Genesis: “In pain you shall bring forth children.3 The Virgin Mary alone was blessed among women, because to her virginity was added fruitful­ness, to her fruitfulness in conceiving, holiness, and to her holiness in giving birth, happiness. Mary is called full of grace, as Bernard says, because four kinds of grace shone in her spirit: the devotion of her humility, the reverence of her modesty, the greatness of her faith, and the martyrdom of her heart. She is told, The Lord is with thee, because four things, as the same Bernard says, shone upon her from heaven, these being Mary’s sanctification, the angel’s salutation, the overshad­ owing of the Holy Spirit, and the incarnation of the Son of God. Moreover she is told, Blessed art thou among women, because, according to the same author, four things also shone in her body: she was the Virgin of virgins, fruitful without corruption, pregnant without heaviness, and delivered without pain. When Mary heard the angel’s words, she was troubled and thought to herself what this greeting might mean. Here we see that the Virgin was worthy of praise in her hearing the words and her reception of them, and in her pausing to think about them. She was praiseworthy for her modesty when she heard the words and remained silent, for her hesitancy at receiving the words, and for her pru­dence in her thoughtfulness, because she thought about the sense of the greet­ing. Note that she was troubled by the angel’s words, not at the sight of him: she had often seen angels but had never heard one speak as this one did. Peter of Ravenna says: “The angel had come kindly in manner but fearsome in his words,” so that while the sight of him gave her joy, hearing what he said dis­tressed her. Hence Bernard comments: “She was troubled, as befitted her vir­ ginal modesty, but not overly distressed, due to her fortitude; she was silent and thoughtful, evidence of her prudence and discretion.” To reassure her, the angel said: Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God;4 and Bernard exclaims: “What grace indeed! Peace between God and men, death destroyed, life made whole!” Behold, thou shalt conceive and bear a son and shalt call his name Jesus, which means savior, because he will save his people from their sins. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. Bernard: “This means that he, who is great God, will be great–a great man, a great teacher, a great prophet.” Mary asked the angel: How shall this be done, because I know not man?–i.e., I have no intention of knowing man. So she was virginal in her mind, in her body, and in her intentions. Here we see Mary 35 questioning, and whoever ques­tions, doubts. Why then was Zachary alone punished by being struck dumb? To this point Peter of Ravenna assigns four reasons, saying: “The One who knows sinners attended not to their words but to their hearts, and judged not what they said but what they meant. Their reasons for questioning were not the same, their hopes were different. She believed, contrary to nature; he doubted, in defense of nature. She simply asked how such a thing could happen; he decided that what God wanted could not be done. He, though pressed by examples, failed to rise to faith; she, with no example to go by, hurried to faith. She wondered how a virgin could give birth; he was dubious about a conjugal conception. It was not the fact that she questioned, but how it could come about, the process of it, because there are three ways of conceiving–the natural, the spiritual, and the miraculous–and she was asking which of these would be the mode of her conception.” The angel answered: The Holy Spirit will come upon thee, and it is he who will cause thee to conceive. Hence the child to be born of her is said to be conceived of the Holy Spirit, and this for four reasons. The first is the manifestation of bound­less love, in other words, to show that the Word of God took flesh out of God’s ineffable love; John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” That reason is given by the Master of the Sentences. The second was to make it clear that the conception proceeded from grace alone, not from merit: the angel’s words showed that since the conception was of the Holy Spirit, it came about by grace alone, being preceded by no merit of any man. This reason is Augustine’s. The third is the operative power of the Holy Spirit: the conception came about by the power and working of the Spirit: this from Ambrose. Hugh of Saint Victor adds a fourth reason, namely, the motive involved. He says that the motive leading to natural conception is the love of a man for a woman and the woman’s love for the man. So, he says, because in the Virgin’s heart there burned so great a love of the Holy Spirit, in her body the same love worked miracles. And the power of the Most High will overshadow thee. This, according to the Gloss, is explained as follows: “A shadow ordinarily is formed by light falling on a solid body, and neither the Virgin nor any pure human being could contain the fullness of the deity: but ‘the power of the Most High will overshadow thee,’ and in her the incorporeal light of the godhead took on the body of mankind, in order that she might bear God.” Bernard seems to come close to this explanation when he says: “Because God is a spirit and we are the shadow of his body, he lowered himself to us so that through the solidity of his life- giving flesh we might see the Word in the flesh, the sun in the cloud, the light in the lamp, the candle in the lantern.” Bernard also says that the angel’s words can be read as if he said: “Christ, the power of God, will conceal in the shadow of his most secret counsel the mode by which you will conceive of the Holy Spirit, so that it will be known only to him and to you. And if the angel says, ‘Why do you ask me? when you will soon experience what I am telling you!’ You will know in your­self, you will know, you will happily know, but the One who works in you will be your teacher. I have been sent to announce the virginal conception, not to create it.” Or, “will overshadow thee” means that she would be kept cool and shaded from all heat of vice. And behold, thy kinswoman Elizabeth hath also conceived a son. According to Bernard, Elizabeth’s conceiving was announced to Mary for four reasons: that she might be filled with joy, perfected in knowledge, perfected also in doctrine, and moved to a work of mercy. Jerome, indeed, says: “That her kinswoman, who was barren, had conceived was announced to Mary in order that as miracle was added to miracle, so more joy might be heaped upon her joy. Or the Virgin received the word immediately through an angel so that she might know it before it became common knowledge and not just hear it from someone else, and this lest it appear that the mother of God was kept apart from the counsels of her Son and unaware of what was happening close by on earth; or rather, so that by being fully informed of the coming, now of the forerunner and afterward of the Savior, and thus knowing the time and sequence of these events, she might later make the truth known to writers and preachers. Moreover, hearing of the older woman’s pregnancy, the younger woman would think of going to her side, and thus the unborn prophet would be given the opportunity to do homage to his Lord, and the one miracle might furnish occasion for a more wondrous one.” Now Bernard: “Quick, Virgin, give your answer! O Lady, say the word and accept the Word, offer yours and accept God’s, pronounce the transitory and embrace the everlasting, rise up, run, open yourself! Arise by faith, run by devo­tion, open by giving your consent!” Then Mary, raising her hands and her eyes to heaven, said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word. Bernard: “It is said that some have received the word of God in the mouth, others in the ear, still others in the hand. Mary received that word in her ear by the angel’s greeting, in her heart by faith, in her mouth by her confessing it, in her hand when she touched it, in her womb when it took flesh in her, in her bosom when she nursed it, in her arms when she offered it.” www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 36 Be it done unto me according to thy word. Bernard interprets this: “I will not have it done unto me as preached by some demagogue, or signified in a figure of speech, or imagined in a dream, but as silently breathed into me, in person incarnate, bodily living in my body.” And in an instant the Son of God was conceived in her womb, perfect God and perfect man, and from the very first day of his conception he had as much wisdom and as much power as he had in his thirtieth year. Then Mary arose and went into the hill country to Elizabeth, and John leapt in his mother’s womb as a way of greeting the Virgin. The Gloss notes: “Because he could not give greeting with his tongue, he leapt for joy of spirit and so began to fulfill his office as Christ’s forerunner.” Mary attended Elizabeth for three months until John was born, and lifted him from the earth with her own hands, as we read in the Book of the Just. It is said that God wrought many works on this day as it came round in the course of the years, and a poet tells them in memora­ble verses: Salve justa dies quae vulnera nostra coerces! Angelus est missus, est passus in cruce Christus, Est Adam factus et eodem tempore lapsus, Ob meritum decimae cadit Abel fratris ab ense, Offert Melchisedech, Ysaac supponitur aris, Est decollatus Christi baptista beatus, Est Petrus ereptus, Jacobus sub Herode peremptus. Corpora sanctorum cum Christo multa resurgunt, Latro dulce tamen per Christum suscipit Amen.5 A rich and noble knight renounced the world and entered the Cistercian order. He was unlettered, and the monks, not wishing to number so noble a person among the lay brothers, gave him a teacher to see if he might acquire enough learning to be received as a choir monk. He spent a long time with his teacher but could learn no more than the two words Ave Maria, which he cher­ished and repeated incessantly wherever he went and whatever he was doing. At length he died and was buried among the brothers, and behold! a beautiful lily grew up above his grave, and one leaf had the words Ave Maria inscribed on it in letters of gold. Running to see this great spectacle, the monks dug down into the grave and discovered that the root of the lily sprang from the dead man’s mouth. They then understood the depth of devotion with which he, whom God glorified with so prodigious an honor, had recited these two words. A knight had a stronghold beside the road, and pitilessly robbed every passing traveler. Every day, however, he greeted the Virgin mother of God with the Ave Maria, never letting anything prevent him from so doing. It happened that a holy monk was making his way along the road and the aforesaid THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org knight gave orders to waylay him, but the holy man begged the robbers to take him to their chief because he had a secret message to deliver to him. When he came before the knight, he asked him to summon his household and all the people in the castle, because he wished to preach the word of God to them. When they had come together, he said: “You are not all here! Someone is missing!” They told him that all were present, but he said: “Look around carefully and you will find that someone is absent!” Then one of them exclaimed that indeed the chamberlain had not come. “That’s the one who’s missing,” said the monk. Quickly they went after him and brought him out in front of everybody; but when he saw the man of God, he rolled his eyes in fright, shook his head like a madman, and dared come no closer. The holy man said to him: “I adjure you in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord to tell us who you are and to say openly why you are here!” The answer was: “Woe is me, the adjuration forces me against my will to admit that I am not a man but a demon who took human form and have stayed with the knight these fourteen years. Our prince sent me here to watch dili­gently for the day this knight would fail to recite his Ave Maria, thus falling into my power. I was to throttle him at once, and he, ending his life while engaged in wrongdoing, would be ours. Any day he recited his prayer I had no power over him; but, watch as I might, he never let a single day pass without praying to the Virgin.” When the knight heard this, his astonishment knew no bounds. He prostrated himself at the feet of the man of God, begged forgiveness for his sins, and there­after mended his ways. The holy man then said to the evil spirit: “I command you, demon, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to leave here and infest some place where you may not presume to harm anyone who invokes the glorious mother of God!” The demon vanished, and the knight reverently and gratefully allowed the holy man to resume his journey. Taken from The Golden Legend, Vol. 1, “The Annunciation of the Lord,” pp.196202. [Available from Angelus Press. Price (of the two-volume set): $49.95.–Ed.] Gen. 30:23. Ps. 50:7. 3 Gen. 3:16. 4 Lk. 1:28ff. 5 The verse begins, “Hail, good day that heals our wounds,” and commemorates the sending of the angel, Christ’s suffering and death, Adam’s creation and fall, Abel’s murder, Melchizedek’s offering, the sacrifice of Isaac, the beheading of the Baptist, Peter’s deliverance from prison, James’s martyrdom under Herod, the rising of many bodies of the saints with Christ, and the happy end granted by Christ to the good thief. 1 2 PART 21 37 F r . M a t t h i a s G a u d r o n Vatican II commenced a crisis of the Catholic priesthood that resulted in a mass exodus of priests from sanctuaries. Chapter VIII examines the essential nature of the Catholic priesthood, distinguishing it from conciliar teaching and Protestant counterparts. Catechism Of the Crisis In the Church 74) What is the Catholic priest? The Catholic priest is the minister on earth of the great eternal priest, Jesus Christ, the only mediator (pontiff: bridge-builder) between God and men. By his sacerdotal ordination, he participates in His powers. He alone is able validly to celebrate the holy sacrifice of the Mass, to forgive sins, to bless and to consecrate. The priest is therefore not first and foremost the president of an assembly; he possesses faculties the simple faithful do not. For it was to the Apostles alone and not to all the disciples that Christ said: “Do this in memory of me” (Lk. 22:19). l Where is a definition of priesthood to be found? The Epistle to the Hebrews teaches: “For every high priest taken from among men, is ordained for men in the things that appertain to God, that he may offer up gifts and sacrifices for sins” (Heb. 5:1). l What does this definition show? This definition shows that the priest is taken from among men and thus set apart to be consecrated to God; he is ordained for men, and thus entrusted with a public function: the relations of the faithful with God; he is consecrated as one who offers sacrifice. l So the priest is essentially a mediator? Yes, the priest is essentially a mediator, an intermediary between God and the faithful. (It is absurd to claim, as Luther did, that all the faithful are priests!) l What is the priest’s most important function? The priest is above all the man of sacrifice, as the Epistle to the Hebrews says. Now there is only one efficacious sacrifice in the New Testament: that of our Lord Jesus Christ, which the priest as minister may offer in His name by celebrating Mass. The priest is first of all the man of the Mass. l Where is this truth expressed? In the Ordination rite, the bishop says to the newly ordained priest when he gives him the chalice and the paten: “Receive the power to offer to God the sacrifice and to celebrate Mass for the living and the dead” (Roman Pontifical). l Why so much insistence on the link between priest and sacrifice? Since Vatican II, the Catholic priesthood has suffered a veritable identity crisis. Many priests no longer know why they were ordained. The crisis can www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 38 only be overcome by insisting on the essential: the priest is separated from other men and ordained to render to God, by the sacrifice of the Mass, the worship due Him and to communicate to the faithful, by the sacraments, the fruits of this sacrifice, notably the forgiveness of sins. l How can the priest forgive sins? The power to forgive sins was given by Christ to the Apostles and their successors after His resurrection: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent me, I also send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained. ( Jn. 20:21-23) l Who is attacking the Catholic priesthood today? The Catholic priesthood is unfortunately being attacked within the very bosom of the Church, even by priests! One priest, a Father Pesch, wrote: “Many things that appear evident to us today were unknown to the first Christian communities. There was no pope, nor bishops, nor priests, nor major or minor orders. There was no link between the validity of the Mass or absolution and certain orders.”1 l Are these attacks against the Catholic priesthood new? There is nothing original about these heretical affirmations, for the Protestants said the same thing in the 16th century. The Council of Trent solemnly condemned their errors: If anyone says that order or sacred ordination is not truly and properly a sacrament instituted by Christ the Lord, or that it is some human contrivance, devised by men unskilled in ecclesiastical matters, or that it is only a certain rite for selecting ministers of the word of God and of the sacraments: let him be anathema.2 If anyone says that in the Catholic Church a hierarchy has not been instituted by divine ordinance, which consists of the bishops, priests, and ministers: let him be anathema.3 l Is Vatican II at all to blame for the present crisis of the priesthood? Vatican II contributed to the crisis of the priesthood by its exaggerated insistence upon the “common priesthood of the faithful.” l Is it untrue that by their baptism all Christians participate in the priesthood of Christ? The expression “participate in the priesthood of Christ” can designate two very different things: 1) Benefitting from the effects of this priesthood; being able to enter into Christ’s sacrifice in order to be offered with Him and to receive the fruits of this sacrifice. This is chiefly a passive participation that does not require priesthood (in the proper sense of the word). 2) Exercising this priesthood as minister; being really able to offer Christ’s sacrifice and to bestow its fruits. This is active participation, that of the priest in the strict sense of the word. THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org l Is this distinction between active participation and passive participation of Christ’s priesthood traditional? St. Thomas Aquinas explains: The worship of God consists either in receiving Divine gifts, or in bestowing them on others. And for both these purposes some power is needed; for to bestow something on others, active power is necessary; and in order to receive, we need a passive power....But it is the sacrament of order that pertains to the sacramental agents: for it is by this sacrament that men are deputed to confer sacraments on others: while the sacrament of Baptism pertains to the recipients, since it confers on man the power to receive the other sacraments of the Church; whence it is called the “door of the sacraments.”4 l But haven’t the faithful some activity to exercise? The faithful must actively prepare to unite themselves with Christ’s sacrifice by working at their own self-sacrifice: thus they have an important activity to exercise,5 but it is not the same as the priest’s. They remain passive in relation to the essential act of Divine worship, which is the sacrifice of Christ: their own sacrifice is assumed by Christ’s without having any influence over Him. The ordained priest as minister, however, really and actively offers Christ’s sacrifice. l But don’t the faithful also offer the Divine Victim at Mass? Our Lord is offered in the name of His Mystical Body; by offering themselves with Him and for the same intentions, the faithful participate in the offering He makes of Himself; in this sense it may be said that they also offer the Divine Victim. But in the proper sense of the word, only the priest, as Christ’s minister, offers the sacrifice; he alone is the efficient (instrumental) cause. Pope Pius XII recalled these truths in the Encyclical Mediator Dei in 1947. l May it be said that the faithful exercise a certain kind of priesthood? In the strict sense, it is false that the faithful exercise a priesthood (the word exercise bespeaks an action, and the faithful benefit only passively from Christ’s priesthood). Nonetheless, it is sometimes permissible to speak figuratively. We say, for example, that a brave man is “a lion,” or that a Christian who leads an ascetic life is “a real monk”; it is a manner of speaking that is not false provided that it is understood for what it is: simply a manner of speaking, a metaphor, an image, and not an exact definition. The same is true of what is sometimes called “the priesthood of the faithful.” Since every Christian is called to worship God and to make sacrifices (which must be inserted into that of Christ), we may say that, seen from this angle, he acts as a priest. l Hasn’t the “priesthood of the faithful” some foundation in Sacred Scripture? The “priesthood of the faithful” has as foundation in Sacred Scripture a few texts which are precisely 39 metaphors. Thus, St. Peter compares the Christians to living stones of a temple and to a “royal priesthood”: these are expressive images, but images nonetheless as the context shows.6 l How did Vatican II exaggerate the “common priesthood of the faithful”? Vatican II placed an exaggerated insistence upon the “common priesthood of the faithful” in the very outline of its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. Before speaking of the hierarchy and of priesthood in the proper sense, the conciliar constitution treats of “the people of God” and its universal priesthood (Chapter 2). Only afterwards (Chapter 3), speaking of particular vocations and functions within the Church, does it treat of ministerial priesthood as a special form of the universal priesthood of which the laity (Chapter 4) would also be a particular form! l What does the order of presentation in Lumen Gentium signify? The “order” in Lumen Gentium is in reality a big disorder since priesthood strictly so-called is put on the same plane as priesthood metaphorically so-called, as if they were two species of the same genus. It clearly serves to muddle everything. l Has Vatican II’s exaggerated insistence on the “common priesthood of the faithful” any consequences? Vatican II’s exaggerated insistence on “the common priesthood of the faithful” was relayed far and wide by preaching and teaching, but also by the new Mass (1969), the new Code of Canon Law (1983), and the new Catechism (1993). Hence it has had tremendous consequences. l How did the new Mass insist upon the “common priesthood of the faithful”? One of the guiding ideas of the new Mass was precisely to show that the liturgy is an action of the whole People of God, and not just of the clergy. The “active participation” of the faithful had to be promoted. But this expression is ambiguous, as has been seen (the faithful ought to actively dispose themselves to be united to Christ’s sacrifice, of which only the priest is the minister). In fact, instead of fostering the spiritual and supernatural participation of the faithful, the new liturgy insists on their outward participation, and entrusts them with functions formerly reserved to sacred ministers (the readings, etc.). The priest is more the delegate and leader of the assembly than the minister of our Lord Jesus Christ. l Does the new Catechism also promote this error? The new Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) adopts the ideas of Vatican II. It also states: “In the celebration of the sacraments it is thus the whole assembly that is leitourgos, each according to his function” (§1144). Now, the word leitourgos is a Greek word, and in the Byzantine liturgy, it only used in reference to bishops, priests, and deacons, and never the assembly. l Does the new Code of Canon Law also exaggerate the “common priesthood of the faithful”? The new Code of Canon Law (1983) was presented by John Paul II as “a great effort to translate this same doctrine, that is, the conciliar ecclesiology, into canonical language,” especially “the doctrine, moreover, according to which all the members of the People of God, in the way suited to each of them, participate in the threefold office of Christ: priestly, prophetic and kingly.”7 l In the new Code, how is this emphasis on “the common priesthood of the faithful” translated in practice? The outline of the new Code (as also the outline of the Constitution Lumen Gentium) is very instructive. The traditional Code (1917), after a first book presenting the general norms, treated of persons in its second book. It was divided into three parts: Clerics, Religious, and the Laity. The new Code also devotes its first book to general norms, but it entitles its second book “The People of God.” It treats first of all of the faithful in general, then of the hierarchy, and finally of religious. l Does this change of outline really mark a change of doctrine? The change of order in the new Code is explained by Canon 204 (which is the first canon of Book II): The Christian faithful are those who, inasmuch as they have been incorporated in Christ through baptism, have been constituted as the people of God. For this reason, made sharers in their own way in Christ’s priestly, prophetic, and royal function, they are called to exercise the mission which God has entrusted to the Church to fulfill in the world, in accord with the condition proper to each. l What does the definition given in Canon 204 show? Like the Constitution Lumen Gentium, the new Code begins by affirming that all Christians are priests, albeit in divers ways. The ministerial priesthood (proper to priests) would only be a special modality of the universal priesthood. Likewise, all Christians are presented as participating in the power of government (“royal function”), and the role of the hierarchy is only presented afterwards as a “service” rendered to the community. l Is this new way of presenting things really opposed to Tradition? It suffices to compare it with the teaching of St. Pius X: It follows that the Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 40 directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.8 l What are the consequences of this exaggerated insistence upon “the priesthood of the faithful”? The exaggerated insistence upon “the priesthood of the faithful” obviously promotes a penury of priests. What young man would embrace such a demanding vocation had he not a glimpse its greatness? 75) Can the ministers of Protestant communities be likened to priests? The “ministers of worship” of Protestant communities are not priests, but laymen. This holds true for Anglicans, too. These ministers of worship hence do not have the power to change bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, nor to forgive sins. l Why do you say that Protestant ministers are not priests? The sacerdotal powers were conferred by the Apostles to their successors and so on to the bishops and priests of today. This is what is called the Apostolic succession. Once this succession is broken, as happened with the Protestants, these powers are lost. l How was the Apostolic succession interrupted amongst Protestants? The Apostolic succession was interrupted amongst Protestants because they ceased to believe in it (denying that orders was a sacrament instituted by our Lord Jesus Christ) and so ceased intending to transmit it. In fact, they abandoned the liturgical rites by which it was conferred. l Was the Apostolic succession also interrupted by the Anglicans? Some Anglicans today believe in the priesthood and claim that it has been preserved. However, the ritual adopted by Anglicanism during the 1550’s considerably modified the rites of ordination to the point that they no longer expressed the specific grace they were supposed to confer. Such ordinations were thus invalid, and Rome denounced them as such at the time. l Didn’t the Anglicans correct their ordination rite? Even supposing that these modifications were adequate, they nonetheless occurred too late, after the extinction of the hierarchy. Nemo dat quod non habet, as the adage says (no one can give what he does not have), and by that time the Anglicans were without the priesthood. l Is the Anglicans’ lack of priesthood absolutely sure? The nullity of Anglican ordinations having been contested during the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII commanded an inquiry, which also concluded their invalidity. On September 13, 1896, he published the THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org letter Apostolicae Curae, which definitively settled the question.9 l Are these truths under attack nowadays? The reigning ecumenical climate in place since Vatican II has led to scandalous attacks on these elementary truths. In the spring of 1977, 124 clergymen of the Diocese of Rottenburg wrote a letter to their Protestant “colleagues” (men and women) of the Evangelical Church of Wurtemberg in which they recognized them as “‘ecclesiastics’ having the same powers and the same responsibility.” It is clear that these “theologians” no longer had the Catholic conception of priesthood. l What conception of priesthood did these clergymen of Rottenburg have? The Rottenburg signatories declared: [The Church] abandoned a theory of sacrifice that might give the impression that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross had to be offered anew or renewed for the sake of our reconciliation with God....At bottom, we think that today we have an intelligent practice of the Supper based upon Scripture, which could have existed before the Reformers. l What does this declaration manifest? We see the link uniting the priesthood to the holy sacrifice of the Mass: whoever abandons the sacrifice for the sake of the Protestant Supper can no longer have a correct idea of the priesthood, nor see any difference between Catholic “presidents” and Protestant pastors. l Were the Rottenburg signatories sanctioned by the hierarchy? The “theologians” of Rottenburg proclaimed the heresies indicated above. The bishop merely remarked that they had minimized Catholic doctrine, but took no corrective measures.10 l Who else has attacked these truths? The scandal is even greater when these truths are attacked by the Pope himself, but this is what Pope John Paul II did several times by exercising liturgical functions in the company of Protestant ministers clothed with priestly or episcopal garb. Memorably, on May 29, 1982, he gave a blessing at the same time as “Monsignor” Runcie, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, wearing his pontifical insignia. As for Cardinal Ratzinger, on February 3, 1998, at Hamburg, he presided at “ecumenical vespers” together with a Protestant “bishop” wearing a stole. 76) Can a woman be ordained priest? Only a baptized man can validly receive priestly ordination. This is clear from Holy Scripture, Tradition, and the Church’s magisterium. Because the Church has no power over the essential conditions of the sacraments, it cannot authorize the ordination of women. Such an action would be invalid. 41 l How do we know that only men can be validly ordained priest? It is an undeniable fact, established by Holy Scripture, that Christ called only men to be His apostles. The Church cannot alter this choice. l Cannot the fact that Christ chose only men be explained by respect for the conventions of the time? Jesus Christ, who is God and who founded a Church destined to last until the end of the world, could not let Himself be subject to the conventions of an age. In fact, He always showed Himself to be perfectly free in regard to social conventions, and did not hesitate to contravene them on several occasions (concerning the Sabbath, the forgiveness of sins, the attitude towards public sinners, etc.). Had he wished to establish women apostles, nothing would have stopped Him. The single fact that the most Blessed Virgin Mary was never considered to be a “priest” suffices to prove that there cannot be priestesses in the Church founded by Jesus Christ. l Does Holy Scripture explicitly forbid the establishment of “women priests.” St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians: ...as also I teach in all the churches of the saints. Let women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted them to speak, but to be subject, as also the law saith. But if they would learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church. Or did the word of God come out from you? Or came it only unto you? If any seem to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him know the things that I write to you, that they are the commandments of the Lord. (I Cor. 14:33-37) Women, then, are not authorized to speak nor to officiate during religious ceremonies. St. Paul expressly justifies his exhortation by the general practice of the Church (“in all the churches of the saints”), by the law of the Old Testament (“as also the law saith”), by propriety (“it is a shame for a woman”), and above all by the commandment of the Lord. l What does the Church’s Tradition have to say on the matter? There is a unanimous consensus in Church Tradition on this subject. Tertullian (d. c. 220) wrote: It is forbidden to women to speak in church. They do not have the right to preach, to baptize, to offer sacrifice, to seek a masculine office and even less the priestly service.11 l Has there really never been ordination of women in the Church? When, during the fourth century, women were actually ordained in the sect of the Collyridians, St. Epiphanius (d. 403) reacted vigorously: In an illicit and blasphemous ceremony they ordain women and by them offer a sacrifice in the name of Mary. This means that this whole affair is blasphemous and impious; it is an alteration of the message of the Holy Ghost; in fact, the whole affair is diabolical and the work of the impure spirit....12 Nowhere has a woman fulfilled the office of priest.13 Indeed, there have never been priestesses in the Catholic Church. l If not priestesses, were there deaconesses in the Church? Deaconesses, which existed for a certain time, did not fulfill the liturgical functions of a deacon; they were employed solely to perform the anointing with oil of women before baptism and to care for sick women. According to the Apostolic Constitutions: A deaconess does not bless, nor perform anything belonging to the office of presbyters or deacons, but only is to keep the doors, and to minister to the presbyters in the baptizing of women, on account of decency.14 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 from the second edition (Schloß Jaidhof, Austria: Rex Regum Verlag, 1999) as translated, revised, and edited by the Dominican Fathers of Avrillé in collaboration with the author, with their added subdivisions. Zur Zeit, journal of the German Redemptorists, July-August 1980, p.91. The Council of Trent, Session XXIII, Canon 3 (DS 1773; Dz. 963). 3 Ibid., Canon 6 (DS 1776; Dz. 966). 4 Summa Theologica, III, Q.63, Arts. 2 & 6 (English Dominican Fathers’ version, online at newadvent.org/summa). 5 “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing unto God, your reasonable service” (Rom. 12:1). 6 “Be you also as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.... But you are a chosen generation, a kingly priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people: that you may declare his virtues, who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (I Pet. 2:5, 9). Similarly, St. John twice states in the Apocalypse that Jesus Christ has made us “a kingdom and priests to God” (Apoc. 1:6 and 5:10). 7 John Paul II, Apostolic Constitution Sacrae Disciplinae Leges ( January 25, 1983), promulgating the new Code of Canon Law. The Pope adds: “It could indeed be said that from this there is derived that character of complementarity which the Code presents in relation to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, with particular reference to the two constitutions, the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium and the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes. Hence it follows that what constitutes the substantial ‘novelty’ of the Second Vatican Council, in line with the legislative tradition of the Church, especially in regard to ecclesiology, constitutes likewise the ‘novelty’ of the new Code.” 8 St. Pius X, Encyclical Vehementer Nos (February 11, 1906), §8 (on line at the Vatican’s Web site). 9 Dz. 1963-66. At the time, some Anglican bishops tried to have themselves re-ordained by schismatic (but real) bishops in order to “recuperate” an Apostolic succession, which, by the very fact they sought to regain it, they recognized as having been lost. The general rule nonetheless remains that enounced by Leo XIII, and so we should consider every Anglican ordination a priori invalid without formal proof that it is otherwise in a particular case. 10 See Rudolf Kraemer-Badoni, Revolution in der Kirche: Lefebvre und Rom (Munich: Herbig, 1980), p.91. 11 Tertullian, De Virginibus Velandis, 9, 1. 12 St. Epiphanius, Adversus Haereses, 78, 13, PG 42, 736. 13 Ibid., 79, 2, PG 42, 744. 14 Apostolic Constitutions, VIII, xxviii, 6; RJ 1236 [online at www.newadvent.org/fathers/]. 1 2 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 42 F R . p e t e r At what age ought the sacrament of confirmation to be administered? This question was formerly a disputed one. The Council of Trent decreed that it be administered around the age of reason, allowing nevertheless the exceptions where confirmation is administered together with baptism to infants in the Eastern rites and in Spain. However, along with the gradual elevation of the age of First Communion during the 17th-19th centuries, due in large measure to the influence of Jansenism, came a corresponding elevation in the age of confirmation, frequently delayed to the age of 14. The 1917 Code of Canon Law returned to the rule of the Council of Trent and declared: Although the administration of the sacrament of Confirmation is conveniently delayed to around the age of seven years, nevertheless it can also be administered earlier, if an infant is in danger of death, or if it seems necessary to the minister for just and grave reasons. (Canon 788) In 1931 the Pontifical Commission for the interpretation of the Code declared that the sacrament of confirmation could only be administered at an earlier age to those who fall under the conditions foreseen by the Code, which include danger of death or other grave reasons, such as the fact that the absence of a bishop or delegated priest is foreseen for sometime to come. It also approves that in countries where it is a very ancient custom to administer the sacrament of confirmation to infants, such as Spain and most of South America, this custom be maintained provided that the faithful be instructed on the common law of the Latin Rite, which provides that sufficient catechetical instruction to form the souls of the children and to strengthen them in Catholic doctrine precede the administration of confirmation. Experience indeed has established that such preparation is of great help for children to be able to profit from the grace of this sacrament that makes them strong and perfect Christians and soldiers of Christ. The Sacred Congregation of the Council, in a 1934 text that is included in the Appendix to the Roman Ritual declares, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas: It is more suitable and more in conformity with the nature and effects of the sacrament of confirmation that children not approach to receive Holy Communion for the first time unless they have first received the sacrament of confirmation, which is as it were a complement of baptism, and in which the fullness of the Holy Ghost is given. THE ANGELUS • March 2009 www.angeluspress.org R . s c o t t However, it goes on to state that children are not to be prohibited from receiving their first Communion because they have not received the sacrament of confirmation. It must be admitted that the doctrinal consideration that makes it desirable for confirmation to precede first Holy Communion is not in practice followed. This is in part because the age of First Communion has been reduced without that of confirmation being reduced accordingly. It is also in part for the practical reason that the bishop is not generally available for confirmations in the very brief period between a child’s acquiring the age of reason and his reception of his first Communion. There is also a custom established over the past couple of centuries that is contrary to the Code, although not directly prohibited by it, namely, deliberately delaying the age of confirmation to 10 or 11 years. This is frequently done for pastoral reasons, namely, that the children be better instructed in the Faith so as to be true soldiers of Christ, and that the children have another goal to work towards by preparing for a fuller understanding of the Faith than that gained through the very simple preparation required for first Communion. Since there are strong practical reasons in favor of this approach and no danger of the sacrament being admitted, this would seem to be a custom that could be tolerated, provided that the delay is not more than three years or thereabouts and that the sacrament is administered before the beginning of adolescence and the temptations that this age brings with it, for which the grace of the sacrament of confirmation is most imperatively required. The 1983 Code of Canon Law retains the same principle, namely that “the sacrament of confirmation is conferred on the faithful around the age of reason.” However, it adds a proviso giving great discretion to the Episcopal Conferences, namely “unless the Episcopal Conference determines another age.” The practical consequence of this is that confirmation is frequently delayed until the age of 16 or 17, as decided by the bishops. This is a tragic delay in the reception of this sacrament, for it leaves children for several years of their adolescence without the invaluable assistance of a sacrament they need in order to be able to overcome, as true soldiers of Christ, the ideological and moral perversities of a world penetrated by liberalism. Q Can a parent be sponsor at his own child’s confirmation? The traditional law of the Church (1917 Code) requires that there be a sponsor for confirmation if it is at all possible (Canon 793) and that there be only one sponsor (Canon 794). By these and other laws concerning sponsors the most ancient Tradition of the Church is enshrined in law. The traditional Code goes on to make a distinction that has been lost in the 1983 Code, namely of the conditions required for valid sponsorship and those required for licit sponsorship. Amongst the conditions required for the validity of sponsorship is that the sponsor be not the father, mother, or spouse of the person to be confirmed (Canon 795). Also excluded from valid sponsorship is anyone who is not himself confirmed, who has not yet attained the age of reason, who does not have the intention of being a sponsor, who belongs to a heretical or schismatic sect, who has been declared to be excommunicated, or one who has not been chosen by the confirmand, his parents, guardians, parish priest, or bishop. Consequently, if a parent, spouse, or any other of these persons attempts to be a sponsor, he is not in fact a sponsor, and no spiritual relationship arises from the confirmation. There are excellent reasons for this determination of the Church that clearly excludes sponsorship. For a parent and a spouse, it is on account of the physical relationship that exists between the two persons. This relationship does not exclude great care for the spiritual well-being of the child or spouse. To the contrary, it requires it. However, the Church has always regarded the purely spiritual relationship that arises from administering baptism or sponsorship at baptism or confirmation, as being incompatible with such close physical relationships. It is a relationship motivated purely by the love of souls and the love of God, but not by human family love, as perfectly legitimate as it certainly is. The traditional Code goes on to mention the other conditions for licitness, which do not invalidate the sponsorship. They include the age of 13 years, the knowledge of the rudiments of the Faith, that one be of the same sex as the person being confirmed and different from the baptismal sponsor, and also that one be not excluded by public sin, or by being a religious or in holy orders. The 1983 Code of Canon Law lacks the clarity of the Church’s traditional law since it makes no distinction between those who cannot validly be sponsors and those who cannot licitly be sponsors. It is said that the father and mother are not to be a sponsor (Canon 874), but makes no mention, alas, of the spouse, who, then, is allowed to be a sponsor. The other conditions for licitness are not mentioned, A 43 except that the age of 16 years is now required. There is, as might be expected, no explicit exclusion of those who belong to heretical or schismatic sects, but simply the statement that the baptized person who belongs to a non-Catholic community can only be used as a witness, and then together with a Catholic sponsor. This concession itself is a grave scandal in the reception of the sacrament that makes a soldier of Christ. This ambiguity in the 1983 Code would seem to be very serious, for it would seem to bring about a doubt as to whether a spiritual relationship exists or not. However, it really makes no difference for those who follow the post-conciliar Code. The truth of the matter is that for the post-conciliar Church there is no such thing as a spiritual relationship that arises from sponsorship for the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. This is a much more serious and scandalous deficiency, directly contrary to the most ancient ecclesiastical tradition of the Church. For the 1983 Code in fact makes no mention at all of this spiritual relationship, either with respect to baptism or to confirmation. Yet it is upon this spiritual relationship that the obligations of sponsorship depend, as Canon 797 of the 1917 Code states: The spiritual relationship between the confirmand and his sponsor arises from valid confirmation, and it is in virtue of this spiritual relationship that the sponsor is bound by the obligation or taking perpetual care of the confirmand and of seeing to his Catholic education. Without the spiritual relationship, sponsorship become a spiritually meaningless family honor or function. Given that the 1983 Code is on this question so gravely deficient and so opposed to the practice of the Faith, there can be no doubt that we must reject it and follow the traditional Code, as expressing fully and accurately the mind of the Church. A parent or spouse who attempts to be a sponsor is consequently not a sponsor at all, and does not incur a spiritual relationship with the confirmand, nor the canonical obligations that flow from it. Fr. Peter Scott was ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988. After assignments as seminary professor, US District Superior, and Rector of Holy Cross Seminary in Goulburn, Australia, he is presently Headmaster of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy in Wilmot, Ontario, Canada. Those wishing answers may please send their questions to Q &A in care of Angelus Press, 2915 Forest Ave., Kansas City, MO 64109. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • March 2009 Preparation for Lent ON THE PASSION OF CHRIST According to the Four Evangelists By the author of The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis This book is Thomas à Kempis’s lesser known reflections on 35 various Gospel passages dealing with the Passion and Death of Christ, now newly translated into English. Thomas à Kempis wrote: “If Jesus Crucified would come into our hearts, how quickly and perfectly we would be instructed in the spiritual life.” This book makes Jesus Christ Crucified accessible in ways you haven’t thought of. Each 2-5 page entry offers a prayer, a meditation, and spiritual advice, and closes with another short prayer. Each chapter is devoted to an event of the Passion as read from the Scriptures, making for powerful reflections for Septuagesima, Lent, and Holy Week. Imagine these chapter titles for your composition of place: 170pp. Color Softcover. 8" x 5¼". STK # 8337. $12.95 ✜ How the Lord Jesus went to meet His betrayer ✜ The desertion of Our Lord and the flight of the Apostles ✜ Herod’s deriding of Jesus ✜ The angry shouts Away with him! and Crucify him! ✜ The despoiling, mocking, crowning, and striking of Jesus’ head ✜ The Lord Jesus and His hanging naked, high, and long on the Cross ✜ The crowd’s insults and Jesus’ enduring perseverance on the Cross ✜ His giving of the Blessed Mary and Saint John to each other ✜ The lone dereliction of the Lord Jesus on the Cross ✜ Fulfilling the Scriptures in the death of Christ and on the words It is finished! ✜ The pitiable appearance of Jesus after His soul left His body ✜ Prayers to members of Christ’s body. Family Retreat DVD Characters of the Passion 94pp. Softcover. STK# 8258. $9.95 Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Sheen takes you back to Calvary where he dramatically brings to life brief but penetrating characterizations of those who played important roles in the Passion. Their stories teach us about trust, despair, egotism, power, politics, doubt, love, and repentance. To those wavering in their beliefs, Sheen brings comfort and strength. To others, he reaffirms the knowledge that the true Faith is the most powerful weapon today. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen The only retreat by Sheen recorded on video. 12 conferences on the following topics:  Confession  The Devil  Love  The Mass  Making the Right Choice  The Our Father  Youth and Sex  “Wasting Your Life for Christ”  Our Lady  Kenosis  “Old Pots”  The Cross. DVD, color, running time 6:04. STK# 8265. $19.95 Cross and Crown 166pp. Softcover. STK# 6718✱ $14.00 Fr. Robert Mäder Father's delivery was so powerful that he was called “The Thunder of the Holy Ghost.” In three parts: 1) Thoughts for Lent 2) Christ's Sufferings 3) Christ the King. A sampling of topics: How to make resolutions, hunger for the Blessed Sacrament, fasting, freedom from money, crucifixion of passions, detoxification through the Blessed Sacrament, obedience to Divine Providence, the “rights of God,” enthronement in the home, the “Queen Mother.” Life of Christ 476pp. Softcover. STK# 8306. $16.95 The Crucifixion of Jesus Archbishop Fulton Sheen Bishop Sheen restates old truths in vivid and appealing ways with style, insight, and depth of spirituality, the fruits of his catechizing, meditation, and preaching. A winning combination of Scripture fact, Church teaching, philosophy, reality, and composition of place. The Life of Christ was the prehistory of the Catholic Church, as the Catholic Church is the posthistory of the Life of Christ. Modern parallels drawn from timeless lessons. Sacred Triduum Missal A traditional missal for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy Week according to the 1962 rubrics. Frederick Zugibe, M.D., Ph.D. This medical examiner uses 35 years of experience as a criminal investigator to determine exactly how Our Lord died. Evidence from three continents explore His physical and psychological torments in the Garden and on the Cross. The most current analysis of the Shroud of Turin. 384pp. Softcover. Index. Bibliography. 103 illustrations. STK# 8123 $29.95 In this moving presentation he speaks about topics that apply to everyone. Listen to the Archbishop as he treats each of these topics in his usual thorough, articulate and humorous manner. Very helpful if you do not have a 1958 or later missal which contains the revised rite of Holy Week of Pope Pius XII. Contains the entire ceremonies with parallel Latin and English texts with rubrics in violet. Larger print than in a daily missal. 192pp. Softcover. STK# 8029. $8.95 science logic The Fallacy Detective Fabre’s Book of Insects 36 Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning Nathanial Bluedorn & Hans Bluedorn A book that introduces Catholic logic and critical thinking by blowing up the tricksterism of Madison Avenue advertising, campaign sloganeering, media grandstanding, product endorsements, and billboard jingoism. Fun to use. Self-teaching, not intimidating. Starts with skills you can use right way. A fallacy is an error in logic—a place where someone has made a mistake in his thinking. These are fallacies, with more in the book to smile your way to exercising your mind and learning how to identify screwy thinking. Geared for junior high and older, but it would make great table talk for whatever age. Each of the 36 lessons has exercises, with an Answer Key at the back. Includes The Fallacy Detective Game, giving you, family, and friends an entertaining way to spot and make up your own examples of fallacies. Written specifically from a Christian worldview with practical relevancy to the crisis in media bias. A surprise hit with the staff. Learn not just to think, but to think right. 233pp. Color Softcover. 6" x 9". STK# 8339. $22.00 “Catholic Bugman” at his best 168pp. Softcover. STK# 8317. $9.95 The Story Book of Science Creation is a classroom and catechism. Jean Henri Fabre Renowned Catholic scientist and bugman Fabre said, “After 87 years of thought and observation, I say not merely that I believe in God–I can even say that I see Him.” See (70 illustrations) and read what he meant in this classic nature book as “Uncle Paul” (Fabre) converses about nature’s wonders 438pp. 6" x 9". Softcover. Illustrated. STK# 8316. with three imaginary children who ask him $14.95 to tell “true stories.” evolution faith Anecdotes and Examples for the Catechism The Theory of Evolution Judged By Reason and Faith The Catholic Church VS. The Planet of the Apes Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini Cardinal Ruffini collaborated with Archbishop Lefebvre and the Coetus Internationalis Patrum (CIP) during Vatican II. The Cardinal is mentioned four times in H.E. Tissier de Mallerais’s Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre: The Biography (Angelus Press) as one of five co-founders of the CIP and a backer of Archbishop Lefebvre’s interventions at the Council. He was a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. The Cardinal uses the findings of embryology, anatomy, physiology, genetics, paleontology, etc., against the positions favoring evolution of both body and soul. Starting with its so-called proofs, Ruffini convincingly shreds all varieties of the Evolution hypothesis blow-by-blow. Uses schemas and diagrams. Complete. 205pp. Cloth Hardcover with color dustjacket. 8½" x 5½". STK# 8338. $19.00. Jean Henri Fabre No one “read the book of nature” like the author. This book was the result of countless hours devoted to observing bugs while they hunted, built nests, and fed their families. Suspensefully-written essays blending facts and picturesque folklore. With infectious enthusiasm, Fabre weaves his stories. 596pp. Foil-stamped hardcover, index. STK# 8040. $29.95 Fr. Francis Spirago The author weaves over 650 short but brilliant examples and anecdotes throughout 36 chapters drawn from the four traditional areas of catechesis: Creed, Sacraments, Commandments and Prayer. Indispensable for parents of young children. St. Joseph Altars Photographic tribute displaying the rich Catholic cultural traditions behind the St. Joseph Altar, its spiritual significance, and its accompanying delicious dishes, focusing especially on the customs of America’s Catholic immigrants. Includes 140 huge color photographs. Includes 20 pictorial recipes collected from St. Joseph Altar aficionados. 144pp. Hardcover with full color jacket. 8" x 10". STK# 8336. $24.95 2009 Calendar Blowout ed! redasu$c11.95 w now $8.95 halfe! pric 11.95 was $ now $5.95 A Catholic Calendar of Culinary Customs A liturgical calendar following the rubrics of the 1962 rite of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Dedicated to the memory of the Servant of God, Chaplain Fr. Emil Kapaun, 1st Cav. Div., US Army, it features twelve historic photos, from 19thcentury Virginia to the far-flung theaters of war of the 20th century, of Catholic chaplains exercising their ministry. 10¾ x 10¾. Full color with B/W panels. STK# 8297 WAS $11.95. Now $8.95 ✗ Something new for 2009: A Catholic Calendar of Culinary Customs highlighting the liturgical year with a special dish or dessert to serve in honor of a Saint’s Day each month. Color photographs of each dish are accompanied by a bit of legend and lore about the featured saint. Complete recipes are included for you to expand your repertoire of recipes for celebrating the Liturgical Year feast by feast. #1052 Catholic Battlefield Chaplains 10¾ x 10¾. Full color throughout. STK# 8298 WAS $11.95 Now $5.95 ✗ 2009 Benedictine Desktop Calendar Revised and full of new features ●● Holy days of obligation and feast days halfe! pric 19.95 was $ now $9.95 according to the 1962 liturgical calendar. ●● Includes the important Benedictine feasts. ●● Each day of the year is accompanied by a sepia-tone photograph and a passage from the Rule of St. Benedict. ●● Offers a glimpse into every aspect of monastic life while the passages from the Rule help you to understand the basis and principles of monasticism. ●● The perfect gift for home or office! ●● Made by the traditional Benedictine monks of Silver City, New Mexico. A substantial portion of the sale of each calendar helps support the monastery. ✗ STK# 8334 WAS $19.50. Now $9.95 Shipping & Handling 5-10 days 2-4 days USA Foreign Up to $50.00 $50.01 to $100.00 Over $100.00 $4.00 $6.00 Free 25% of subtotal Up to $50.00 $50.01 to $100.00 Over $100.00 $8.00 $10.00 $8.00 ($10.00 minimum) Flat fee! angelus Press 2915 Forest Avenue Kansas City, Missouri 64109 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.