“Instaurare omnia in Christo” Education Suffer the Litte Children Education as Metaphysics The Sense of the Sacred July - August 2012 Education Intellectual education must not be separated from moral and religious education. To impart knowledge or to develop mental efficiency without building up moral character is not only contrary to psychological law, which requires that all the faculties should be trained, but is also fatal both to the individual and to society. No amount of intellectual attainment or culture can serve as a substitute for virtue; on the contrary, the more thorough intellectual education becomes, the greater is the need for sound moral training. Religion should be an essential part of education; it should form not merely an adjunct to instruction in other subjects, but the center about which these are grouped and the spirit by which they are permeated. With this issue we are happy to present you a large range of articles on Christian education. © Natalia Bratslavsky / Shutterstock.com Letter from the Publisher As most of you are aware, the motto of the Society of St. Pius X is that of our patron: Instaurare omnia in Christo. Our founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, chose this motto because it summarizes well the broad mission of the Society: the restoration of all things in Christ. Although the Society’s specific charism is the priesthood and all that pertains to it, the full outpouring of God’s grace, through the hands of the priest, results in a Christian culture where everything is oriented, directly or indirectly, to the altar. For this reason, the Society has been solicitous to found schools for the Christian education of youth and to help parents form their children in a world that continues to grow hostile to the Faith. Our hope with this issue is to provide some principles and examples to further the educational goals of the Society. Although this topic is primarily relevant for parents and teachers, we must reflect on how all of us teach by example. Do we lead those we come in contact with to a love of truth, beauty, and goodness? Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Divini Illius Magistri, defines education rather broadly: “The proper and immediate end of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian” (p. 94). The Holy Father explains that education does not belong only to the family or the State, but to the Church as well. In that light, I am confident that you will find fruit for reflection in these pages regardless of your state in life. Let us take as our own the words of the Holy Father again: “Christian education takes in the whole aggregate of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and moral, individual, domestic and social, not with a view of reducing it in any way, but in order to elevate, regulate and perfect it, in accordance with the example and teaching of Christ.” In Christ the King, Fr. Arnaud Rostand, Publisher 4 The Angelus July - August 2012 July-August 2012 Volume XXXVII, Number 4 Publisher Fr. Arnaud Rostand Editor Mr. James Vogel Assistant Editor Miss Lesly Bratt Editorial Assistant Miss Anne Stinnett Editorial Team Fr. Jürgen Wegner Fr. Dominique Bourmaud Fr. Leo Boyle Fr. Pierre Duverger Design and Layout credo.creatie (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) Mr. Simon Townshend Miss Mary Werick Director of Marketing and Sales Mr. Mark Riddle Subscription Rates 1 year 2 years 3 years U.S. and Canada $35.00 $65.00 $100.00 Foreign Countries $55.00 $105.00 $160.00 All payments must be in U.S. funds only. Contents Letter from the Publisher 4 Theme: Education – Suffer the Little Children – Education as Metaphysics – Sense of the Sacred – Philosophy of Life – A Daunting Mission – Book Review: Holding the Stirrup 6 12 16 22 26 31 Faith and Morals – God Is Eternal – Learning the Virtues Through the Mass – Divini Illius Magistri 34 38 42 Spirituality – Pius XI Speaks to Us Today – St. Maria Goretti 46 50 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” Online subscriptions: $20.00/year. To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Register for free to access back issues 14 months and older. All subscribers to the print version of the magazine have full access to the online version. The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published bi-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. Manuscripts and letters to the editor are welcome and will be used at the discretion of the editors. The authors of the articles presented here are solely responsible for their judgments and opinions. Postmaster sends address changes to the address above. Christian Culture – Polymath Priest – Passing by the Dragon – Parenting Your College-Age Child 54 58 64 – Questions and Answers – Church and World – Death in a Technological Age – Letters to the Editor – The Last Word 68 71 75 86 87 ©2012 by Angelus Press. Official Publication of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X for the United States and Canada 5 Theme Education Suffer the Little Children by Fr. Jürgen Wegner, SSPX “And they brought to him young children, that he might touch them. And the disciples rebuked them that brought them. Whom when Jesus saw, he was much displeased, and saith to them: Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. Amen I say to you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall not enter into it. And embracing them, and laying his hands upon them, he blessed them” (Mk. 10:13-16). Let us look briefly at this important passage from Scripture and draw a few conclusions about how Christ wants us to care for our own children. Parents Act for Their Children’s Benefit The above Gospel account does not tell us how many children were present, nor does it mention their age. We can suppose, however, that they were little, small enough for our Lord to take them up into His arms and embrace them. Those who brought the children were probably their parents or nurses. They led their children before Christ, a testimony to the great respect and esteem they had for Jesus. By seeking Christ’s blessing, they 6 The Angelus July - August 2012 1 I have cited this gloss as it is found in St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea in Quattuor Evangelia, (Rome: Ed. Marietti, 1953), 509: “Chrysostomus. Bene autem amplexatur eos ad benedictionem tamquam in proprium sinum elevans, propitiatus facturam suam ab eo cadentem ab initio, et divisam. Imponit autem parvulis manus, docens divinae virtutis operationem. Et quidem secundum consuetudinem aliorum manus imponit; sed non secundum consuetudinem operatur: Deus enim existens, humanum modum servabat tamquam verus homo factus.” hoped to bring some spiritual benefit to their children, even if they only considered our Lord a prophet and did not realize that He was also king, high priest, and God. Parents, on numerous other occasions, brought their children to Christ to be healed from their sicknesses. Here, however, the children seem not to have been suffering any illness. Our Lord thus teaches us that we too should come to Him often and seek Him freely, not only when a crisis drives us in our dire need to beg His aid. In this way we profess our general dependence on Him, our persistent love, and our unwavering faith. The disciples, however, rejected the parents’ request as vain and frivolous, seeing these simple people as impertinent and troublesome. They either thought it below their master to take notice of little children, or they thought He was too busy with other, more important work and did not wish to be disturbed. Jesus reprimanded the disciples: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not!” God here corrected the short-sightedness of man. Our Lord wants children; even those who have not reached the age of reason should be brought before Him. Parents are the trustees of their children’s wills and by the rights of nature act on their behalf and, hopefully, for their benefit. Christ, in this sense, considers the actions parents perform on their children’s behalf as if the children had performed them themselves. Likewise, those parents who neglect the duty of seeking good things for the children entrusted to their care displease Christ. Foster a Sense of Beauty, Mystery, and Reverence But let us further consider this passage following the comment on St. Mark, once attributed to St. John Chrysostom.1 This gloss expands upon three aspects of the encounter between the children and Christ. First, the gloss notes: “Being God, he still acted as a man, for he truly became man.” Jesus’ conduct accords with our physical, emotional nature. He takes the children into his arms and imposes his hands on them. Christ still wants children to be close to him today. He therefore wants parents to bring their children to church and have them surround the altar, so they can take part in the liturgy and physically enter the world of God. This is an important first step. The gloss also notes: “Indeed, Christ imposed his hands on the children as was the custom of other men, but he accomplished what no other man could.” Christ, with this loving gesture, stirs our hearts. There is a fundamental difference between Christ’s action and those of all other men. Jesus Christ is God! Children, in accordance to their powers, must be taught to recognize that Jesus is different, above all other men. Likewise, they must learn that his house, the church, is a holy place, above all other dwellings. The rites celebrated within God’s special house of prayer belong to the supernatural world and are greater than all purely human actions. Children must learn reverence for God and for his house as best they can, and as early as they can. Most importantly, they have to develop a sense of the mysterious, 7 Theme Education a sense of something beyond their powers to fully comprehend, a sense of overwhelming beauty and majesty. The gloss finally explains that God desires to draw little children up to Him: “Jesus fittingly takes them up into his arms to bless them, drawing them close to his chest.” God reaches out lovingly to the souls He created in order to draw them nearer and nearer to His heart, though He will normally only do so when He finds them attentive and well prepared. Parents possess a far-reaching responsibility as God’s collaborators in the sanctification of their children. They should gradually instill into them the knowledge of God’s presence so as to prepare them for God’s loving call. Difficulties Are Inevitable but Can Be Overcome This brief gloss on St. Mark’s Gospel demonstrates Catholic parents’ duty to bring their children to church and to teach them about God. There will, of course, be difficulties, just as the apostles initially put up resistance. These difficulties arise from the nature of children, from the fact that many parents are charged with the care of several young ones simultaneously, and of course from the parents’ own weakness. Babies and young children are unpredictable. They make strange noises whenever they please and at times even seem to relish a good screaming fit. Soon they will crawl, then walk... then run. As toddlers they tend to ask questions constantly. Many have a hard time sitting still or kneeling during High Mass. Children find it torturous to keep silent and to listen to long sermons. Parents, for their part, cannot always keep track of all their numerous offspring and at times become either impatient or overly indulgent, failing to discipline their children fairly, firmly, and (most important of all) consistently. 8 The Angelus July - August 2012 Children First Learn through the Senses The liturgy, however, is a great aid. It is sublimely sensory, with its holy signs and gestures, its grand music, beautiful vestments, lifelike statues, and ornately decorated altars. These all impress children. Children love and fear the moment when the priest sprinkles water in their faces during the Asperges. Most children carefully scrutinize the priest when he is speaking at the altar. They are amazed by the reflections of light on the golden vessels. They generally love fire and candles (especially the boys). With eyes wide open they admire the priest in his colorful and solemn vestments. He impresses them as he speaks from the elevated pulpit, even when they cannot understand what he is saying. Children are also fascinated with music and singing. They gaze curiously at statues, eager to hear the heroic stories behind each of these great saints. Finally, what a joy and honor for a young boy to be admitted to the service of the altar, to be vested in cassock and surplice, to carry the incense boat or candle! Children clearly learn to love the Mass through their senses. Rather than fully understand, they “feel” the sanctity, awe, and mystery of this very house of God. They learn to love and respect God based on these beautiful sensory experiences. Parents should encourage their children in this holy “play.” They should promote a reverent yet childlike participation in Mass and should even share in this innocent joy. When children do attain the use of reason, parents can then build an intellectual appreciation of the Faith upon the important foundation provided by these early (and indispensable) experiences drawn from the senses. 9 Theme Education Parents, however, must first prepare their children for church at home. For example, parents should show children how to sign themselves with holy water when they come in, how and when to genuflect, how to make the sign of the cross, how to walk and sit in church, how to recite the different prayers, etc. The church is not a training-grounds or classroom but the holy and awe-inspiring house of God and home of saints. Children must realize that any action which does not correspond to the sanctity of the church will result in exclusion and punishment. Along this way they will recognize— before they enter the church—that the house of God is fundamentally different from all the other places they know. Parents who are lax in this regard dishonor God and do a great disservice to their children. What small children learn by example is more important than any verbal instruction. When Dad puts on his best suit and helps his son to do likewise, when mom leaves all toys and food at home or in the car, children understand that church is something different, something important, and something grand. Practical Rules -- Stay in the church with your child as long as he remains still and behaves well. If your child cannot be quiet, he cannot stay in the church. -- Go outside as soon as you see that your child is becoming restless. He should realize that going out of the church is an act of exclusion from the community and thus a punishment and dishonor. -- Never tolerate any misbehavior inside the church. This includes: excessive fidgeting, lying or playing on the floor, standing on the pew, making faces at his siblings, sleeping, gazing distractedly backwards, etc. -- Never discipline your child in the church as it is the place of God’s mercy. Do this outside. -- During Mass, point out discreetly to your child where he should look, what actions are most important, where the statue of his patron saint is, etc. -- Do not remotely tolerate any activity—even if your child does it silently— which is not befitting of the house of God. -- Never bring anything mundane into the church. No toys, no profane reading materials, no sketch pads, and most importantly, no food or drink. -- If you have several children, perhaps entrust some of them to other adults who will carefully guide and watch over them. -- The parents’ behavior must always set a good example which the children will then naturally imitate. -- Where possible, consider attending High Mass instead of Low Mass. Even though longer, the music, the incense, and extra additions may capture a child’s imagination and attention. -- Children should be brought back into the church itself as soon as possible. 10 The Angelus July - August 2012 Join Us for our Third Annual Conference for Catholic Tradition The Papacy When: October 19 – 21, 2012 Where: Kansas City, Missouri Speakers Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General, SSPX Fr. Arnaud Rostand, U.S. District Superior, SSPX Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara, SSPX Fr. Daniel Themann, SSPX Fr. Albert, O.P. Dr. John Rao, Professor of History, St. John’s Christopher Check, VP, the Rockford Institute Joshua Hayes, Professor of History, La Salette Mr. Andrew Clarendon, Teacher, Saint Mary’s Academy Topics The Catholic Church: Heir of the Roman Empire Scriptural Foundations of the Papacy St. Catherine of Siena The Great Western Schism and the Lesson for Today The History of Papal Infallibility St. Pius X: History and Biography The SSPX and the Spirit of St. Pius X The Papacy of Pius XII The Question of Collegiality Sedevacantism Come join us at the beautiful Marriot Hotel located conveniently close to the Kansas City Airport for a weekend of enlightening and exciting talks, daily Mass and Rosary, and good conversation with fellow Catholics. The entire weekend will be crowned by a Pontifical High Mass at St. Vincent’s Church, offered by His Excellency, Bishop Bernard Fellay. Space is limited, so to reserve a spot, call today! For more information on the conference, and for information on how to register, visit www.angeluspress.org/conference, or call 1-800-966-7337 Theme Education Education as Metaphysics by Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX 1 12 “On the mere plane of natural knowledge, [the University’s] task is to master a diversity of subjects, to promote wisdom, and to form the intellectual personality of the student. It should be on its guard, therefore, lest it fail in its highest mission, namely, that of giving young minds a respect for truth, and of guiding them to independent lines of thought, indispensable for their intellectual maturity.” Pope Pius XII, Quel motif de joie (August 12, 1952). The Angelus July - August 2012 Metaphysics is the loving pursuit of wisdom. And the wise man is one who sees all reality from a single point, as far as is possible. Any true education must seek to make students wise.1 But modern education denies that there is any unifying principle in reality, and thus presents it as a series of disconnected pieces. Herein lies the rub. Reality as Mosaic The tiles of a mosaic, working together, can form a stunning work of art. And while each of the tiles has value on its own, in that each one displays a certain color and pattern, that value is insignificant and negligible compared to the impact of the whole, which is much greater than the sum of the parts. Similarly, geography, mathematics, biology, and English, each has its own meaning, but that meaning only becomes clear and fully illuminating when seen in the perspective of all reality. Now, modern education treats each subject as an end in itself and as completely disassociated from every other subject. The purpose of English class is to learn English as best as possible. Nothing more. And while it is certainly good to learn English, it is yet much greater to learn life. An English expert can get a job, but not necessarily get a life. For this, he must be wise. For any education to be able to zoom out from the details of individual subjects to give a unified picture of the whole, it must first admit that there is some unifying principle linking one subject to another, then find that principle, and finally integrate that principle into the entire body of education. It is like breathing life into a dead corpse, giving a soul to coordinate all the members of the body. But modern man has made such an education of universal vision impossible by denying the existence of any such principle. In fact, for him, there is nothing higher than the mind of man, and the universe being just a product of billions of years of fortuitous chaos, it is up to each individual to give unity to reality, according to his own subjective perceptions. Thus, for example, he does not admit the existence of a human nature common to all humans. There is no gender, natural sociability, natural union between the 13 Theme Education 2 Edward Leen, What is True Education? (Sainte Croix du Mont, France: Tradibooks, 2008), p. 95 (emphasis added). 3 Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), p. 133. 4 Fr. Leen, What is True Education?. p. 38. 5 “Practically speaking, it is much more important, in the interest of the individual as well as of society in general, to know how to live a good life than it is to know a great deal” (Pope Benedict XV, Letter Compluribus quidem, February 10, 1917). sexes, or universal moral code that pertains to all men. It remains for each individual to decide whether to be male, female, or both or neither; whether to follow society or not; whether to be heterosexual or homosexual; and even to decide his own laws of behavior. If there in fact existed a human nature, common to all men, it would be important for young students to understand that nature and live by it, and education would expend great efforts toward that end. Otherwise, the students could know many things, but would not know how to be human. But if no such nature existed, then students would only be enabled and encouraged to make themselves, in other words, not to live according to what they are, but to be according to how they want to live. Broadly speaking, today’s education not only leaves out telling students about their own human nature, but but reduces all learning a heap of tiles without relation, a mass of material without life. The Whole Enchilada “All branches of knowledge,” says Fr. Edward Leen, the 20th-century Catholic writer, “should be pursued harmoniously in view of attaining a clearly conceived and clearly defined objective. That objective is the creation of habits of thought that impart to the person the power to deal successfully with life.”2 This paradigm of education does not see the student as a mere brain to be stuffed with unrelated facts, but as a human being who needs to be equipped to fulfill his sublime destiny. This point of focus makes all the difference in the world: modern education gives you a skill set, while true education gives you yourself. Now, Josef Pieper makes it clear that, for rational men, dealing with life means dealing with all that is. “In the tradition of Western philosophy,” he says, “the capacity for spiritual knowledge has always been understood to mean the power of establishing relations with the whole of reality, with all things existing.…Spirit, it might be said, is the power and capacity to relate itself to the totality of being.”3 Thus, the power of thinking enables man to connect with reality as a whole and not just disjointedly as the animals do. The life of reason is the distinctively human life and so education—as preparation for life—seeks primarily to form (not fill!) the intellect. The chief work of the educator is fitting the mind for the reception of truth.4 Being taught how to learn is more important than learning what is taught.5 Newly crowned with a mortar board and clutching his diploma scroll, the graduate walks away from his alma mater to enter the world and take on life. Is he ready for all that the future will bring him? Can he judge situations or will he only react to them? Can he make good choices and commit himself to them or will he simply follow happenstance? Can he clearly distinguish good from evil, true from false, beautiful from ugly, or will he see everything only at face value? In short, does he have wisdom or does he just have skill? Each answer depends on whether his education was a formation or a training. The former sends forth a person, and the latter a worker. 14 The Angelus July - August 2012 6 “The ‘teacher’ is a person who knows how to create a close relationship between his own soul and the soul of a child. It is he who personally devotes himself to guiding the inexperienced pupil towards truth and virtue. It is he, in a word, who molds the pupil’s intellect and will so as to fashion as best he can a being of human and Christian perfection” (Pope Pius XII, Allocution to the Italian Catholic Elementary School Teachers’ Association, November 4, 1955). “It is, however, evident that teachers will never be worthy of their profession, if, although possessing adequate cultural preparation they should limit their work to instruction in the strict sense of the word, and feel themselves under no obligation to provide the deeper and more comprehensive instruction that is education. Everything in the school must be educative. If it is not to fall short of its purpose, it must be made educative in its every aspect” (Letter from Secretariat of State, September, 1955). 7 “It must never be forgotten that the subject of Christian education is man whole and entire, soul united to body in unity of nature, with all his faculties natural and supernatural, such as right reason and revelation show him to be” (Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, Dec. 31, 1929). “Even where natural knowledge is concerned, the discovery of the truth is not merely a matter of hard thinking, and when the truth concerns the meaning of the world, a good brain is not enough: the whole human personality is involved” (Pieper, Leisure). 8 “Education consists essentially in preparing man for what he must be and for what he must do here below, in order to attain the sublime goal for which he was created” (Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri). An Example The practical implementation of this true notion of education is what makes it an art. Any mechanical system built solely on material means, such as buildings, equipment, course schedules, desks, and textbooks, can systematically produce a uniform skill in its students. To form a human person, however, requires a teaching vocation—a life, not a system, is needed to form a life.6 Dr. David Allen White, the famous Catholic literature professor, speaks of just such a person in some of his conferences—his eighth grade teacher, a terrifying and delightful schoolmarm. She imparted to him, at that young age, some of her own love for good literature and, in doing so, opened his soul to the true and beautiful such that, later in life, he was able to recognize it on his own, not only in literature, but also in the Catholic Faith. This one good teacher was able, in a single year, to set him on the track of his own life’s teaching vocation, but also on the track of his eternal salvation and that of many others for whom he provided the same love. What he received from her was much less learning than an attitude; it was not so much a skill as it was a focus. A process cannot do this, but a true teacher can. Conclusion The scope of education must not be reduced either in its subject or its object. The student is not a brain, but a human being,7 and he is not to be presented a heap of unrelated knowledge, but to be readied for life.8 The accomplishment of this great work is the true aim of education. Fr. Robinson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and entered the Seminary in Winona in 2000, two years after completing a Master’s in Computer Science Engineering. He was ordained in 2006 by Bishop Bernard Fellay and is currently a professor at Holy Cross Seminary in Goulburn, Australia. 15 Theme Education Sense of the Sacred by Ann Marie Temple 1 Sydney Taylor, All-of-aKind Family. Tranquility of Order “At home, the kitchen was warm with the smell of fresh-baked bread. The room sparkled with cleanliness. The table now had on a snowy tablecloth. Mama set two braided loaves at Papa’s place. The children stood around the table watching her. A lovely feeling of peace and contentment seemed to flow from Mama to them.”1 Why is this little excerpt so pleasant for us to read? We can almost smell the bread from the oven; the crisp cleanliness of the tablecloth, the warmth of the family setting, build a harmony which seems to welcome us into the room alongside the children, waiting for Papa to receive the bread. The author speaks of a “feeling of peace and contentment,” but the scene offers more than that: we are watching also, silently, even solemnly, because there is an atmosphere of ritual to the scene, as though Papa were most certainly going to fulfill his role now—of blessing the bread? of breaking the loaf open with his hands so the steam rolls up from the soft, airy center? of handing a piece to each member of the family in order? Certainly he would hand them in order; how could it be otherwise? With the word order we are closer 16 The Angelus July - August 2012 2 Carolyn S. Bailey, Children of the Handcrafts. to the secret beauty of the passage. Peace is “the tranquility of order,” and contentment is the awareness that nothing is lacking, all is as it should be, in perfect order and measure. There is another element penetrating the scene: the element of respect… dare we say, for the “sacred”? Each member of the family is stepping into a role laid out by a tradition; were any one of them to speak out of turn, take the role of another, act with precipitation, set something untidy or unworthy on the table, it would be a jarring violation of how things should be; it would be suddenly breaking the atmosphere and chasing away the peace and contentment at the same time. An Echo of the Soul How can we apply the word “sacred” to a passage which nowhere mentions God or religion? There is an echo of religious solemnity in the family scene, and perhaps the family is waiting for the father to say a blessing; yet it represents a family gathering, not a religious ceremony. In the following passage the same element of respect is present, with no religious aspect: “Ebenezer, the clock-maker, reached in the great pocket of his apron and took from it a small, beautifully formed hammer, the wooden handle as smooth as satin from usage, and the steel hand gleaming like silver. He held it for a moment as if he loved it. ‘This was given me by my master, Bogardus, the clock-maker of New York,’ he told the boys. ‘True hammering is a great qualification in our trade and it happens that, after a long time, the skill of our hands is transferred to the tools with which we work. A good man makes a good tool, and this hammer is one of the best of its kind.’ He held it out to Macock Ward. ‘Take this hammer, lad, and work beside Abel at the anvil.’ ”2 We can imagine the care with which the young apprentice received his master’s hammer—and with which a young Ebenezer surely received it from Bogardus of New York. This passage represents to us quite literally a tradition; the handing down of a tool made an object of respect and even love by its long participation in the artistry of the clock-maker. The hammer has become “sacred” to Ebenezer, and now to Macock, not only because of the giver, but because of the skill of human hands which it has absorbed over the generations. The very material of which it is made has slowly come to reflect the artistry in the hands and in the mind of the artist. Its acquired aptness to participate in the artist’s designs has given it some participation in the respect due to the art itself—an art which is first and primarily in the mind and will, before it passes to the hands. So the little hammer is raised above others in the eyes of Ebenezer and his apprentice, for having taken on so much of the soul of the masters before them. Something analogous gives sacredness to the family scene. Alone, the bread, the clean tablecloth, the relative positions of the family members around the table, are not enough to explain the respect; it is something of the soul, the love of something non-material, which orders the material elements and is respected through them: the honor of the forefathers; the care of the 17 Theme Education 3 Eva-Lis Wuorio, The Land of Right Up and Down. 4 Eric Kelly, The Trumpeter of Krakow. mother; her deference in placing the loaves before the father; the docility of the children… These qualities of the soul hover over the scene and fill the air like the church bells in the following passage: “All around them rang the soft chorus of cowbells as the herds made their way down from the various pastures. The river roared louder as they came close to it. From the valleys below echoed the Angelus bells of distant churches.”3 Our soul is natural, as the pastures and the valleys and the river are natural; meals are natural, as the working of the land, the herding of the cows, the fashioning of clocks are natural. The human soul gives life to the human body and allows us to think and choose—it makes us “spiritual beings.” Capax Dei Yet, like the Angelus bells, the soul is an echo of God’s presence. The soul is natural, but it is naturally infinite in its object and desire. The natural longing of the soul is for the absolute, the immeasurable, the never-ending. For this reason the soul may be raised to the level of God’s life and make us live supernaturally. This infinity makes the soul a “capacity for God,” capax Dei. Nothing purely material can ever satisfy our mind or our will, and by its openness onto the infinite, its natural desire for God—like that of the angels—the soul may be itself called “sacred,” of a sacredness derived from God. The spiritual element in the passages above—the element “touched by the soul”—family meal, fatherhood, motherhood, skill of the artist—bestows an atmosphere of sacredness, and so inspires a respect which is indeed an echo of the respect we owe to God. As the Angelus bells echo over the pastoral scene above and remind us of the Christian civilization which gives order and meaning to the life of the peasants, so the qualities of the soul are meant to harmonize and elevate and give a touch of sacredness to all of our activities. As the echo of the Angelus bell reaches unequally through the valleys and over the rush of the river, so the sacredness of the human soul, the echo of God, touches unequally our daily lives. The human activities described above are unequally “sacred” in this natural sense, depending on how close they are to the source of sacredness, God Himself. In the passage below, we see the natural sacredness of fidelity to duty and homeland coincide with the supernatural sacredness of fidelity to God: “And then it came to him, young as he was, that he was part of the glorious company of Polish men that was fighting for all Christendom against brutal and savage invaders. He had not seen much of death before that minute. And now, he himself was perhaps going to meet it, because of his oath, because of his love for the Church, because of his love for Poland. “I shall keep my word, he mused. If I die it shall be for that. My word is as good as my life. “Had a painter caught his expression then, he would have caught only the expression of a very great peace—an expression that signified somehow that God was very close.”4 18 The Angelus July - August 2012 5 “Just as a father according to the flesh participates, in a particular manner, in the character of a principle possessed by God in a universal manner; so also a person who in any way takes care of us [exercises providence], in a certain way participates in fatherhood, since the father is the principle of generation, of education, of learning and of all that pertains to the perfection of human life,” Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 102, Art. 1. The peace of the young trumpeter brings us back to the peace of the family scene, sacred by its fidelity to tradition and by the beautiful harmony and warmth of the family affections, shining through the solemnity. Somehow, God is very close—close also to the young apprentice, receiving the precious hammer from the hands of his new master and preparing to make his own mind and hands docile to the laws of his art, for the creation of perfect and beautiful time-keepers. God is very close also, blessing the details of the lives of the peasants by the sound of the bells, reaching to the ends of the valleys. He is very close, but in different ways, penetrating every level of human activity as far as the soul penetrates. No aspect of creation is entirely foreign to this sacred touch of God, as no part of the human body escapes the penetration of the soul. Penetration of the Sacred These passages reflect the reality of our incarnate soul, and the respect and sense of the sacred which they evoke are not the stuff of fiction. But how often in our daily existence do we allow ourselves to see the penetration of the sacred—from meals to duty to friendship? Yet, without that echoing of the Angelus bells, louder or lower, throughout our life, how many of our material activities are we leaving inanimate? How much of our life is relegated to the vulgarity and selfishness of the purely physical? It is quite normal that there be a vast terrain of human life untouched by any notion of the sacred soul in a society which refuses God our Father, the Source of the sacred. And for us, Catholics, how much of our activity do we respect as penetrated by the soul, between our animal emotions and our daily rosary? The education of the whole man is a gradual and constant strengthening of every human power, to render all human activity docile to the command of the mind and will, in the light of eternal Truth. As St. Thomas says, the educator participates to a certain degree in the sacred Fatherhood of God, bringing the child to the perfection of his activity as a human being.5 The fatherhood of the educator will consist in fostering the echo of the sacred in every aspect of the child’s life, opening his mind and heart to the infinite beauty scattered throughout creation and calling to the infinite of his own young soul. As he helps the child perform those actions of body, mind and will which form lasting qualities of self-possession, he is slowly reducing that vast terrain of fallen human existence and cultivating it with the sacredness of the soul—so that, one day, when the Absolute Source of all sacredness calls to the child in the depths of his infinite soul, he will recognize the voice and know the respect and the affection to offer to his Father. Ann Marie Temple has been working with traditional Catholic schools in France and the United States since 1997. She is primarily a teacher of modern and ancient languages but has taught at all levels, and spent time as the principal of St. Anthony Academy in Manassas, Virginia. She is a graduate of Christendom College in Front Royal, VA (B.A. in philosophy), the Institut Saint-Pie X, Paris (Maitrise in the philosophy of education), and the University of Paris IV, Sorbonne (Master’s in Thomistic philosophy). She is currently working as a curriculum advisor for the Society of Saint Pius X. She is a freelance translator in her spare time. 19 A Prayer for a Family O dear Jesus, I humbly implore You to grant Your special graces to our family. May our home be the shrine of peace, purity, love, labor and faith. I beg You, dear Jesus, to protect and bless all of us, absent and present, living and dead. O Mary, loving Mother of Jesus, and our Mother, pray to Jesus for our family, for all the families of the world, to guard the cradle of the newborn, the schools of the young and their vocations. Blessed Saint Joseph, holy guardian of Jesus and Mary, assist us by your prayers in all the necessities of life. Ask of Jesus that special grace which He granted to you, to watch over our home at the pillow of the sick and the dying, so that with Mary and with you, heaven may find our family unbroken in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Amen. Theme Education Philosophy of Life by Fr. Peter Scott, SSPX “The world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof, but he that doth the will of God abideth forever.” I Jn. 2:17 We are all pressed from every direction by the strange dichotomy, so well summarized by Our Divine Savior in His priestly prayer, namely that we must be in the world, yet we cannot be of the world, as Christ was not of the world (Jn. 17:16); that we are surrounded by evil, yet we must keep ourselves free from evil; that we are sinners, yet we must sanctify ourselves in the likeness of our Divine Savior. We are very much aware that the spirit of the world, worldliness as we call it, corrupts, undermines, destroys the Catholic and supernatural life of grace, and that we cannot be the Catholics we desire to be if we seek the world’s pleasures, possessions, comforts, ambitions. The worldly Catholic will sooner or later fall into mortal sin, and betray his Lord and his God. The worldly Catholic will not be faithful to Tradition, for he does not live by the supernatural. 22 The Angelus July - August 2012 1 What is True Education? p. 195. Worldliness versus Education However, there is a worldliness that is much more dangerous, lethal, poisonous and destructive than the moral one with which we are all too familiar; an influence of the world much more profound than rock music, immodesty, dating, occasions of sin, and parties; an influence that our education must face head on, or fail entirely, and it is the dumbing down of the intellect, the soullessness of a mind that has nothing to long for, the evacuation of the search for truth, for beauty, for goodness, for all those perfections that reflect God, and that are as everlasting and unchanging as God Himself. This is the materialism and secularism of the modern world, which destroys that which is both the most sacred and also the most human in our lives. This worldliness is the preoccupation with the vulgar, empty. It is the lack of appreciation for that which is lofty and noble, for the idealism that is most elevated. It reduces man to the lowest common denominator of his purely physical existence, in a meaningless and futureless comfort zone, which regards the self-sacrifice and self-denial required for any great achievement—academic, artistic, musical, spiritual—as not only unnecessary, but a folly. Such persons can have the Faith, but the Faith, as Fr. Edward Leen points out, is for them “not an inspiration to living life nobly and excellently, but a commercial insurance against possible risks in the world beyond the grave. The Faith is literally not a life, but a life insurance.”1 It is precisely this worldliness that any true education must cut out at its very roots. It can only be done in one way, and this by a love of the truth, as the foundation of all human and supernatural integrity. Did Our Lord not indicate this when He prayed to His Father in heaven: “Sanctify them in truth....For them do I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth” (Jn. 17:17, 19). It is precisely this worldliness that has most damaged the post-conciliar church, penetrated as it is by ambiguities and half-truths, by the modernist and relativist notion that each man can have his own truth and that they can all be right, that has embraced secularism and has thus made its own the pharisaical hypocrisy that separates religion and life. This is the error of Communism that Russia has successfully spread throughout the world, namely that there can be no higher goal than the evolving temporal good of the collectivity, making slaves of every citizen for the sake of material gain. True education worth its name is a life-and-death struggle against this worldliness; a worldliness that manifests itself by denying the highest ideal—the truth; a worldliness that can be summed up as simply being practical, being realistic, showing kindness, getting along with people, showing tolerance, being normal, having fun, living my own life, following the lesser evil, and such maxims. In point of fact, this is a false prudence that avoids principles and is typically characteristic of Catholic liberalism; the hypocrisy of those who desire to reconcile the principles of the world with those of Christ. It is the essential humanism of Gaudium et Spes, the Vatican II document which attempts to reconcile the Church and the principles of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity. 23 Theme Education 2 A Philosophy of Life Ibid., p. 196. If we are to stand firm against such false prudence, it will only be by having a philosophy of life, a way of thinking about our lives and how to order them, or rather a wisdom and theology, that directs all that we do. This is what Father Leen has to say about such a philosophy: “The baneful heresy that so captivates the modern mind can be checked and overcome only by social bodies in which, through an integrally Christian education, spiritual and supernatural values are set in their rightful position; that is, when they are made supreme over all others.”2 Here lies the true goal of a Catholic school: to form in children a character that has ideals and principles, that has the zeal for the truth, the love of knowledge, the desire for perfection, but most especially the ideal of living a life in harmony with truth, with religion, with the Creator, in dependence on the Redeemer, integral in its fidelity to Christ the King; that is a philosophy of life that is eminently practical precisely because it is not motivated by being practical, but because it is based upon principles, because it centers all things on God and none on self; a philosophy of life that because it is profoundly anti-liberal, is in fundamental concord with reality, both natural and supernatural. In precisely this philosophy of life lies the real difference between Catholic education and every other kind of education. Any education can have a belief in God. Any education, like any false religion, can ask God to do something for us. But Catholic education is exactly the contrary. Through it, we can do something for God. It creates a social order within the school that directs the students’ efforts, and thus establishes an order for God in their souls. It does not just believe in a far-away God, but in a Trinity that dwells in our souls so that It might transform them into Its own likeness. It lives the reality of the Incarnate God made flesh that we might participate in His divine Life. Its opposition to the world is consequently not at all a negation of earthly life and interests, temporal efforts and struggles. To the contrary, it gives sense and purpose to all of them. It transfigures all that is human, purifying from the disorders of passion and self-love, ignorance and sloth, thus enabling it to share in the divine, that in our very human lives we “may be made partakers of the divine nature” (II Pet. 1:4). Two Ideals Such an education is far more than simply assisting at Mass, receiving the sacraments, learning catechism, knowing the commandments, as necessary as all these are. It is the integration of these supernatural elements into the formation of a character, penetrated by two great ideals without which we cannot be sanctified in the truth. The first ideal is the love of wisdom, the ordering of all knowledge, natural and supernatural, to the highest cause, God. This ideal is radically opposed to the falseness of the liberal mind that cannot comprehend absolutes, that has no yearning for the Truth, and that has no other principle than being practical. To quote Father Roussel: “An upright mind is the one who humbly conforms to theoretical truth and 24 The Angelus July - August 2012 3 Liberalism & Catholicism, p. 74. 4 Ibid., p. 202. to practical truth; one who believes what the Church believes, loves what She loves...one who clearly sees by reason and the light of faith, the last end to which God directs all men...one who judges everything according to the Eternal and natural law, and derived positive law.”3 It is the unambiguous simplicity taught by Our Lord when He declared: “Let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these is of evil, that you fall not under judgment” (Mt. 5:37, Jac. 5:12). If this is necessary in the natural order for any student of science or philosophy, how much more in the supernatural order for any student of theology or history! The second ideal is the purity of intention of one whose only desire is to please God, to use his God-given abilities and graces not for himself but for the Almighty. Without this purity of intention, we are false to ourselves as God’s redeemed children. Our learning is self-serving. We fall into the failure of evil just as much as if we did not care about the truth. However, if our learning is with a pure intention, to quote Father Leen again, we will have “the positive ambition for uprightness. These dispositions inspire the will to observe justice in all one’s relations to life, to think what is right, and to chose what is good. They connote, or ought to connote, the desire on the part of the man to be a truly manly man, and the desire on the part of a woman to conform to the ideal of true womanhood.”4 The educated man’s philosophy of life is truly manly if it has the wisdom and purity of intention to take responsibility for himself, his family and society. The educated woman’s philosophy and character are truly womanly if she has the wisdom and single-mindedness to cooperate with grace and to engender God’s life and truth in souls by the meek and humble firmness of her love of truth. Let all those involved in the work of education, teachers, parents, and students, examine themselves on their philosophy of life, to see if they all strive for those ideals infused into our souls with sanctifying grace; the love of the Faith, that it might constantly, repeatedly, insistently, consistently vanquish the tenets of the world; the longing for the supernatural uprightness that makes our most human activities and efforts so profoundly divine in their motive, effects, merit and reward. 25 Theme Education A Daunting Mission by Fr. Gerard Beck, SSPX “We have fallen upon times when a violent and well-nigh daily battle is being fought about matters of highest moment, a battle in which it is hard not to be sometimes deceived, not to go astray and, for many, not to lose heart....” Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae It was well over a century ago that Pope Leo XIII spoke these words, so stark in their description of the reality faced by Catholics the world over. True then, they are even truer now. For never have the enemies of Christ and of His Church shown themselves more bold than today, and never has the mass of men been more easily led by them to destruction. It is indeed a sobering picture, even more so when we think of our little ones, as yet innocent and naïve, being obliged to face this reality. Yet this is the world in which God in His Loving Providence has placed them, the world in which they are to make their way, make a difference, save their souls. Theirs is a daunting mission…, and equally so is that of the Catholic educator. For it is his affair to see that they are up to the task. 26 The Angelus July - August 2012 1 Edward Leen, C.S.Sp., What is Education? (Sheed and Ward, 1944), p. 47. 2 Ibid., p. 57. 3 Ibid., p. 35. What Is Education? Fr. Edward Leen, a Holy Ghost Father renowned for his spiritual writings, but equally qualified to write on the subject of education, described the process and mission of education as follows: “Christian education is a cultural process by which the reasonable being ushered into this world is prepared, during the years of childhood and adolescence, to play his part worthily as a citizen of the city of men and as a citizen of the city of God. It is an all-embracing process concerned with the whole man, with his intellect, his will, his emotions, and his physical powers: it aims at securing, by a balanced cultivation and development of all these, that the person may not, in the arena of life, prove a traitor either to his manhood or his Christianity.”1 It is a noble vision, and one that looks to the essential. A true education is one that prepares a child for the great task of living as it becomes a Catholic man to live. Marked by our materialistic, comfort-driven world, we easily lose sight of this. Education is too often reduced to the very pragmatic “Will it help me in the long run get a better job?” A person’s life is not defined by level of professional success, dollars earned, and social status achieved; it is defined by how a person lives, and what he becomes. Certainly no education can be called complete that does not equip a young person with the tools he needs to earn a living. But a job is not a life. “The needs of the man must not be forgotten in providing for the needs of the breadwinner. The calling is only an element in the whole undertaking of living a life truly human. In the end the enterprise will have proved vain, if the professional task has been a success and the life task a failure.”2 A Man Formed in Mind Man is a rational creature; he desires, by his very nature, to know truth. Wounded by original sin, however, man finds the acquisition of knowledge difficult, and he is prone to see things other than they are. His intellect, then, needs to be formed, and this is the first task of the educator. “The distinctively human life is the life of reason, and, in consequence, the principle task in preparation for it is the right formation of the intellect, the instrument of reasoning. The chief function of the educator is the forming of the mind to truth, for truth is the health of the intelligence, as falsehood is its disease and corruption.”3 The truth we refer to here is not an interminable list of facts, to be crammed into the child’s mind as if it were a kind of mass storage device from which bits of information can be retrieved and spit back at will. Nor is it a “system” of knowing, a sort of “trick” or “formula” that allows him to compute the “right answer” in a given circumstance. Truth is, rather, a vision: a vision of the big picture, one that corresponds to the reality of things. It is a vision that sees what is higher and what is lower, sees how ideas and events fit together, sees beneath and beyond the superficial appearances. 27 Theme Education 4 Ibid., p. 58. 5 Ibid., p. 26. 6 George MacDonald, The Gifts of the Christ Child (London, 1882). 7 Edward Leen, C.S.Sp., The Voice of a Priest (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1946). 8 Leen, What is Education? p. 243. The strong intellect “is not content with what appears; it seeks what is,” says Father Leen.4 “The main thing which we ought to teach our youth is to see something and not merely to say something.”5 Thus the importance, in a school, of emphasizing quality of teaching over quantity of facts given, depth of understanding over breadth of information, reflection over regurgitation. A Man Formed in Heart and Will Seeing the reality of things is not enough, of course. Truth has consequences, and being a rational creature, man’s actions are meant to be guided by reason—not a given, for “a man may have light in the brain and darkness in the heart.”6 Thus the importance of training not only the intellect, but also the will. By discipline, structure, and follow-through, the educator must work to instill discipline in the child. A man must be master of himself, able to resist, when duty calls, the siren song of pleasure and ease; able likewise to oblige himself to do the difficult. Without this inner strength, he will be a slave to passion: to fear, to desire, and, ultimately, to despair. The educator must thus resist the sentimental inclination to over-protect the child, and to shield him from the suffering of effort and consequences. He must, by delegating responsibility and by obliging perseverance in difficulty, help the child acquire the strength and confidence life will demand of him. Real inner strength is not a question, however, of an “iron will.” A will can be strong in pursuit of the wrong things; a heart can be determined but selfish. True strength is the strength of virtue: love of the right things for the right reasons; noble love determining right choices, even if the cost be great. It is a strength that requires not only self-discipline, but also rightness of view. “It has been truly said that it is in terms of the heart that a man is great. This means that grandeur of soul is marked by the nobility of the objects to which the affections of the soul are given. But warmth of heart and power of affection do not ennoble of themselves alone. They can do the very opposite. There is need of a strong and cultivated intelligence if the noble and the first-rate are to be sharply distinguished from the commonplace and the second-rate. Nobility of affection is dependent on loftiness of view. The will has to wait on the intelligence. If one is to live highly, one must see truly and grandly.”7 The soul that has been given this grandeur of vision and taught to love what is beautiful, ordered, and noble, is a soul that is disposed to virtue and goodness. “A mind attuned to the true and the beautiful, and out of sympathy with the false and the ignoble, is a necessary instrument of right living. Vulgarity is the great enemy of elevation of mind and heart.”8 “Pleasure is the great bait that tempts men to be traitors to virtue. Train men to find their pleasures in what is ennobling, in what is at once true and beautiful, and the bait is robbed of its harmfulness.”9 28 The Angelus July - August 2012 9 Ibid., p. 253. 10 Ruskin: Modern Painters, Vol. IV, Appendix. 11 Leen, What is Education? p. 7. Hence the importance of nourishing the imagination and the affections of a child with what is good, noble, and beautiful. This must be from the earliest age, for the young child is marked heavily by the first years of his life; “there is not an hour of it but is trembling with destiny.”10 Every effort must be made from the start to form in the child a Catholic appreciation for beauty and order, and tastes which are in accord with the Reality of the God he professes. Thus the emphasis, in the Catholic school, on the arts: music, literature, poetry, drama... Thus too the insistence on art that is elevated in its form, and the refusal to stay simply on the level of art which may be termed “popular.” All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring The Christian Man of Character The tragedy of our world is that Catholics no longer know what it is to be Catholic. The great majority of Catholics today are not only ignorant of Catholic truth, but bereft of Catholic principle; they are Catholic in name, but they see, judge, and choose in a way, did they but know it, that is irreconcilable with their Faith. The line of demarcation between Catholic and non-Catholic has, in consequence, all but disappeared, and the world slides with frightening rapidity toward the abyss. “Without a vision, the nation will perish” (Pascal). The mission of the Catholic school is to impart to the youth a philosophy of life consistent with the Faith: “A man who has received a truly Christian education is one who has been trained to test the worth of all things, whether of conduct, achievement, projects, art, literature, and institutions, by values based on Christianity. In short he must have a Christian mind: he must have a Christian approach to all facts and problems.”11 We might go further: he must be Catholic in both worldview and in heart. He must see as God sees and love as God loves. He must be concerned, not only with his own life, or even with his own salvation, but also with the lives and salvation of others. He must care about something bigger than himself— about his family, the Church, Christendom—and he must be driven to give of himself for their good. “[A school] should not conceive that its task is rightly done, unless it has adopted all the means available to provide its alumni with the full mental, moral, and spiritual equipment requisite to make them an effective force in the world. Alumni of Catholic schools ought to have the ambition not 29 Theme Education 12 Ibid., p. 79. 13 Bishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M., Homily at the Inaugural Mass of Wyo­m ing Catholic College, September 10, 2007 (on-line at www. firsthings.com). 14 Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri. 15 Fr. Yves le Roux, Rector, St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, Letter to Friends and Benefactors (January 2011). only to be good in themselves, but also to make others good, be these other persons or social institutions.”12 “Life is a struggle for the soul of the world, and God calls each of us to be part of that struggle.…The vocation of every Christian life is to change the world: to open the eyes of the world; to bring the world to Jesus Christ.”13 “Hence the true Christian, product of Christian education, is the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ; in other words, to use the current term, the true and finished man of character.”14 Forming a Catholic Elite: A Noble Mission The youth of today are future soldiers of Christ the King. Lose them, and we lose the future of Christendom. Win them to the Cause of Christ, and we gain the leaders of tomorrow our world so desperately needs, leaders who by their competence, integrity, and heart will have a real impact on the world. It is with this in mind that we must approach the education we give them. Our efforts aim at forming an elite; young people taking to heart Our Lord’s exhortation that they be “the salt of the earth” (Mt. 5:13) and “the light of the world” (Mt. 5:14); young people “elevated, by an inspiration of greatness and nobility, to fight against the surrounding vulgarity that withers the soul.”15 Such being the goal, it is clear that mediocrity in any of its varied forms has no place in our schools, or, by extension, in our homes. Sloppiness, lethargy, the “just get by” mentality that is such a mark of the world today— all are destructive of both mind and will, all compromise the formation of Catholic men and women of true character. “The way to love anything,” Chesterton says, “is realize that it might be lost.” Loving our children, let us invest everything we have in their formation. Fr. Gerard Beck is Rector of St. Mary’s Academy and College. 30 The Angelus July - August 2012 Book Review Holding the Stirrup by Dr. Peter E. Chojnowski The very name of the author of the text Holding the Stirrup, Baroness Elisabeth von und zu Guttenberg is educative for English-speakers unfamiliar with the texture of traditional European culture. The “von” indicating, in the Baroness’s case, that her husband’s family was from the castle of Guttenberg, while the “und zu” or “and at,” indicate that they are still in possession of the castle from which their family originated. The Baroness Elisabeth herself was born Elisabeth von und zu der Tann-Rathsamhausen, a direct descendant of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and daughter to a baron who would come out of retirement to be the military commander of Munich during the First World War. I have always thought that the most salient problem with most history texts and academic historians is their inability to “put themselves in the shoes” of the people living at the times they portray. What did it “feel” like, what was it like to grab the hands or look into the faces of the people “making” history by their free actions and concrete choices? Baroness Elizabeth von Guttenberg gives us a lived account of the tragic European drama as it “progressed” from her childhood visits to the “fairylike” Nymphenburg Castle as a guest of King Ludwig III of Bavaria, and her frequent excursions to see her uncle, Bishop Count John Mikes during the pre-World War I “long peace” in Hungary, through her romantic marriage to Baron George-Enoch von Guttenberg, a leading figure in the Monarchist movement to restore the Bavarian monarchy during the economic and political chaos of the pre-Hitler period, to, finally, her heart-rending account of the desperate attempt on the part of her sister-in-law’s brotherin-law Count Claus von Stauffenberg to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the attempted rising on July 20, 1944. Besides the riveting account of the decades-long friendship between the Baroness and the Catholic mystic and stigmatist Theresa Neumann, the main benefit which American and other English-speaking readers can draw from this book is the historical fact, more or less unknown, that it was primarily the traditional Catholic elites of Germany, noblemen, who were normally Monarchists and Corporatists (i.e., “right-wingers”), who risked both their lives and those of their families to rid Germany of Adolf Hitler, whose ideology of National Socialism was another modern attempt to establish a civilization which was to be an anti-Christendom. If the almost dreamlike account of Baroness von Guttenberg’s childhood and early wedded life amidst the still flourishing aristocratic circles of Europe puts the reader off, wait. The conspiracy to end Germany’s nightmare by means of the death of Adolf Hitler will hold the reader in an agonizing grip. From the scene in which Elisabeth and Enoch hear a Nazi mob outside their window shouting “Enoch, we don’t want your king,” indicating that the final attempt to thwart Hitler’s take over in Bavaria in 1933 had failed, to the Baroness’s bold visits to Gestapo headquarters in order to try to locate and save members of the Stauffenberg family who had been set for execution under Hitler’s post-coup attempt “punishment of the tribe” decree, we are unable to disengage from the text. After being involved, through her husband, sons, and male in-laws, in the conspiracy, we are at a loss to describe our emotions when we hear on the radio, with her, Hitler himself speak the words “The bomb, which was planted by Colonel Count von Stauffenberg…injured several of my colleagues.…I, myself, am wholly unhurt.” The Noble Rising had completely failed. It is, however, the Baroness’s abiding and sincere love for her husband Enoch and her fearless assumption of his chivalric cause, her “holding of his stirrup,” which presents to us an ideal of womanhood that is one of the finest fruits of our glorious Christian past. Dr. Peter E. Chojnowski This charming tale of truly Catholic nobility is available at www.angeluspress.org for only $23.45. 31 These things command and teach. Let no man despise thy youth: but be thou an example of the faithful in word, in conversation, in charity, in faith, in chastity. Till I come, attend unto reading, to exhortation, and to doctrine. (1 Tim. 4:12) Faith and Morals God Is Eternal by Fr. Albert, O,P. “1. A creator must exist in time prior to its creation. 2. A creation does not exist before it is created. 3. From 1: if time were a creation then it would exist before it is created. 4. From 2 and 3: if time is a creation then it existed before it was created and it did not exist before it was created. 5. The law of non-contradiction. 6. From 4 and 5: time is not a creation. 7. If God exists then time is a creation. C. From 6 and 7: God does not exist.” Believe it or not, this argument was seriously, and even pompously, presented recently in a letter by an atheist to a traditional Catholic as an obviously invincible proof that God does not exist. As often happens, especially today, this sort of arrogance is solidly rooted in base ignorance. The flaw in the argument is in the very first premise, as appears immediately to anyone who has studied philosophy (that is, real philosophy, and not the anti-philosophy which has usurped its place for the last five centuries or so). No, it is not necessary that “a creator exist in time prior to its creation.” 34 The Angelus July - August 2012 1 I, q. 9 and q. 10. 2 “As when what changes from white to black remains the same as far as its substance is concerned,” explains St. Thomas. 3 Fr. Walter Farrell, O.P., A Companion to the Summa, Volume I (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1941), p. 66. Fr. GarrigouLagrange makes a similar remark: “Although this immutability is expressed in negative terms (inasmuch as our knowledge is first of mutable things), yet in itself it is something absolutely positive; and it can be expressed by the word “stability”, whereas the mutability of things in the world is their instability. Evolutionist philosophy does its utmost to eliminate the word stability, for it maintains that all immutability is imperfect, being like the immobility of an inert, lifeless thing. On the contrary, supreme life is absolutely immutable or supremely stable” (The One God, trans. Dom Bede Rose, O.S.B. [St. Louis: Herder, 1943], p. 268). 4 The Creator does not exist in time; He creates time with His creation, for time is simply a measure of movement, and therefore when things that move were created, time began. Before that, there was no time, for there was no movement, because in God there is no movement or, to say the same thing in one word, God is eternal. Certain Knowledge of God To understand this better, we can simply turn again to the First Part of St. Thomas’s Summa, where, after proving that God is, he explains how He is, His mode of being. He does this, as we have seen, not by saying what God is, because we can’t know what God is, but by saying what He is not, by denying of Him different things that we do know. We may not know what God is, but there are different things that we certainly do know and so we can come to a certain knowledge of God by denying of Him these things that we do know. That may not appear like much, but God is so great that it is infinitely better to know what He is not than to know perfectly about anything else what it is. After having shown that there is no composition in God (He is simple) and that there is no imperfection in Him (and so He is good, because He is absolutely perfect), St. Thomas goes on to show that there is no movement in God and that, as a consequence, He is eternal.1 That God is absolutely immutable follows from what has been proven about Him before. Firstly, it has been shown that God is the very first being, Physics, Bk. IV, chap. 11 (lect. 20 in the commentary of St. Thomas). 35 Faith and Morals 5 “Simultaneously whole” is the attempted English equivalent of “tota simul” in Latin, which means, literally “everything at the same time.” In eternity, everything happens at the same time, there is no before and after. This, of course, makes absolutely no sense to us, but that is perfectly normal: if it did make sense, that would be a sure sign that we hadn’t understood. since He is that which must be posited in order to account for the existence of everything else. It necessarily follows from this that He cannot change, for to be able to change means to be in potency to some act, which could not be possible unless this act was before the potency that was to receive it (otherwise, how could it ever be received?). Furthermore, it has been shown that God is absolutely simple, having no composition whatsoever. Therefore change is impossible in Him, because when something changes there is a certain division that takes place between what remains in it and what leaves to be replaced by something else.2 Finally, it has been shown that God is absolutely perfect, and thus He cannot change, because if He did it would mean that either He acquired some new perfection (and therefore wasn’t perfect before) or that He lost some perfection that He had (and therefore would no longer be perfect after). Absolute Immutability This absolute immutability of God is not very popular with modern man, as Fr. Farrell explains: “To the modern philosopher this notion makes God completely static; if this be true, then this is a dull, stagnating, deteriorating God. In his own little world of creatures, the modern philosopher sees clearly that there must be change for progress, that immutability is closely akin to stagnation and deterioration. The point is that he is provincial enough to judge everything, even God, by the standards of that created world. It is true that change is inseparable from perfection in the world of unrealized potentialities; but it is also true that such a world is inconceivable without a Being of pure actuality, a Being Who is pure activity, Who has no potentiality, no possibility of losing or gaining but is a white flame of perfection. Such a Being is not in a state of static inertia; His is an activity so intense that change of any kind is impossible to it.”3 God Is Eternal St. Thomas goes on to explain how the eternity of God follows directly from His immutability, starting by defining what eternity is. Following, as always, the “way of negation,” he says that, just as we can come to know simplicity only through the negation of composition (because we have no direct knowledge of simple things but only of composite things), so also we can come to know eternity only by its opposite, namely time. Now time, as Aristotle says, is “the measure of movement according to before and after.”4 Therefore eternity must be defined by denying of it, firstly, any succession and thus it is said to be “simultaneously whole.” 5 In that which lacks all motion and is always the same, St. Thomas explains, there is no before and after. Therefore just as the essence of time consists in the numbering of before and after in motion, so the essence of eternity consists in the apprehension of the uniformity of that which is 36 The Angelus July - August 2012 6 I, q. 10, a. 1. 7 Ibid. Thus St. Thomas says a little later that if, as Aristotle thought, the world was eternal, “time would not measure it according to its total duration, since what is infinite is not measurable, but rather would measure a certain portion of it (“quamlibet circulationem”) which had a beginning and an end” (a. 4). 8 “Life” rather than just “being” because duration is taken more with regard to the operation of a thing and not just to its being (thus time is taken with regard to a thing’s motion and not just its being), and life involves operation whereas being does not (cf. q. 10, a. 1 ad 2). 9 The One God, p. 276. He adds a bit later: “St. Thomas holds that eternity is God’s duration. Wherefore the notion of duration is far more universal than that of time. Duration is predicated analogically of eternity, of our continuous time, and of the discrete time of the angels” (ibid., p. 283). 10 I, q. 10, a. 3. As regards hell, on the contrary, St. Thomas says: “The fire of hell is said to be eternal only because it never ends. There is, however, change in their pains according to the words ‘To extreme heat they will pass from snowy waters’ (Job 24:19). Hence in hell there is no true eternity, but rather time, according to the Psalm: ‘Their time will be forever’ (Ps. 80:16).” completely outside all motion.6 Secondly must be denied another essential aspect of time, namely that it has a beginning and an end, and thus eternity is said to be “interminable.” Also, those things are said to be measured by time which have a beginning and an end in time because everything that moves has a certain beginning and an end. But what is altogether immutable, just as it has no succession, has no beginning nor end either.7 Thus the classical definition of eternity is that of Boethius, which St. Thomas adopts: eternity is the simultaneously whole and perfect possession of interminable life.8 Garrigou-Lagrange puts it more simply saying: “Eternity is the duration of the absolutely immobile being.”9 Since God, then, is the only absolutely immobile being, He alone is eternal, strictly speaking. Creatures are said to be eternal only in the sense that they share in some way in God’s immutability. This applies especially to the angels and saints in heaven of whom St. Thomas says: “They share more fully than others in the nature of eternity inasmuch as they possess unchangeableness in operation in enjoying the Word, because as regards the vision of the Word, no changing thoughts exist in the Saints, as Augustine says (De Trin., XV). Hence those who see God are said to have eternal life, according to that text: ‘This is eternal life, that they may know thee’ (Jn. 17: 3).”10 Two consequences can be drawn from all this, one doctrinal and one spiritual. As far as doctrine goes, since God is eternal, the teaching given to us about Him by the Church cannot change, except to become more explicit. It is the famous rule of the development of dogma formulated by St. Vincent of Lerins: it must always develop “eodem sensu eademque sententia— with the same sense and the same meaning.” Thus is ruled out not only the “hermeneutic of discontinuity” but the “hermeneutic of reform” as well. It is not just a matter of the truth not changing too quickly: the truth cannot change at all. Spiritual Consequence The spiritual consequence is similar to the one which follows from God’s simplicity. Just as our prayer, as it progresses, becomes more simple, because it unites us to God who is absolutely simple, so it also becomes more uniform. That is why the liturgical prayer of the Church is traditionally always the same. The Mass is always said, as far as essentials go, in the same way and not “à la carte” as in the Novus Ordo Missae; the liturgical year always remains the same, there is no three year cycle, etc. Similarly, personal prayer becomes less and less linear (discursive) and more and more circular (contemplative): one turns around and around the same point and penetrates it more and more deeply. Like Our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane, we come to the point where we are always “saying the selfsame word” (Mt. 26: 44). 37 Faith and Morals Learning the Virtues Through the Mass by Fr. Michael Fortin, SSPX For Christians, our goal is the glory of our heavenly Father through sanctification by the Blood flowing from the Priestly sacrifice. Let the Mass be your addictive drug, and hence the redemptive Blood of the God-man will sanctify you, your family, and in God’s good time, your country. This brings us to the first of the “religious” virtues which we will ponder. Obedience is our calling as we are creatures made for loving service toward our Creator; in this lies not only our judgment at death, but furthermore our happy freedom in life. Only the children who willingly submit their minds and wills to the reality of the established order can live out who and what they are. Otherwise, we are proud monstrosities breathing a fatal illusion which transforms us into slaves dependent on the world, the flesh, and 38 The Angelus July - August 2012 the devil. This horror has the popular misnomer of “liberalism.” Our Lord Jesus Christ is King; “Rex tremendae,” “Rex gloriae,” and He is the arch­ enemy of independence from the divine will. At the same time, He is our means and exemplar for salvific obedience. What an impressive and beautiful figure that inspires awe! Humanity in perfection endowed with superabundant gifts and powers above and over nature…obedient… obediens usque ad mortem. To obey is to rule. A religious son or daughter promises obedience in harmony with the life of the Savior; wishing to surrender his will to the will of the Divine. He knows with absolute certainty that His beloved Father can only will the good of His children: “My delight is to be amongst the children of men.” Did Christ feel like obeying the divine will in the accomplishment of the frightful Passion? “Father, take this cup away.” Yet He knew that the Father willed the glory of His Son and the salvation of countless sons and daughters by it: “Not My will, but Thine be done.” Sacrifice of Obedience However, we find it difficult to obey; we are children of disobedient first parents. Whether it is toward the commandments or precepts, toward superiors, toward a husband, or even at times toward just laws of the state, we incline so readily to say in effect “not Thy will, but mine!” Where then shall we turn? Daily Mass, daily living out our participation in the sacrifice of obedience. We must realize that the august bloody Sacrifice of Jesus Christ has been once accomplished. The daily unbloody extension of the same Sacrifice on the Church altars until the end of time is accomplished perfectly by the never ceasing oblation (offering) of the will of the High Priest and Victim. Obedience makes the Mass possible. We can only be made pleasing to God through, with, and in the chalice of His Precious Blood. Therefore, it is the Mass whereby we firstly learn the virtue of obedience and gain the strength toward Christological harmonization; “not my will, but Thine be done”… in season and out of season… when we feel like doing so and when we do not feel like doing so. Obedience (that of the God-man) makes the Mass not only a possibility but also a living reality. From this we may safely conclude (even as does Satan) that to be rid of the Mass is to be rid of the religious virtue of obedience. History speaks of this sad fact. “From the disobedience of one man, sin entered the world, and sin wrought death. From the obedience of one Man, grace entered the world, and grace wrought eternal life.” The Mass is the source of all grace; it is the gift of God which we shall never comprehend. It is the worst enemy of the prince of darkness. The true Mass robs him of souls to devour in the infernal hatred of hell. As the Good God is pleased to use instruments in the work of redemption, so the cunning serpent in perverse imitation does not hesitate to find destructive instruments. The Evil One found and prepared a pitiable slave (amongst his countless others) in the person of Luther. Protestantism was born, this monstrosity of the 16th century continues in the anti-Christ spirit of revulsion to humble obedience and to the Mass. The authority of Holy Mother Church was undermined and replaced with the very fallible and misleading authoritative guide of self. Oh yes, we say, those poor blind Protestants! But this is to miss completely the point: we are the poor Protestants imbued and wrapped in the shedding serpent skin! Look how we mistrust authority, whether it be ecclesiastical, educational, or secular authority. But our selfappointed barrister (our self) righteously cries out: “Just look at the corruption in the Church, on the level of faith and morals! Just look at what teachers portray to our children today… sex education to grade-schoolers! Disgusting! Just look at what the state promotes…abortion, homosexuality, etc.! Do you expect me to have any trust in these jokers!” We now have the makings of a good protestant with pious sentiments. The coils of mistrust in authority squeeze tighter and tighter as we more and more form our own ideas of how things ought to be done. Spirit of Utter Trust See, dear sons and daughters, how innocuously dangerous is the air we breathe. Yes, it is true, that many pastors have become frightening wolves, that many educators are now leading the little ones into the darkness of lies and depravity, and that many government leaders abuse their authority; but this is precisely the argument of Martin Luther which caught the minds and hearts of numberless souls with its taint of truth. Will we fall into the same trap in our mistrust of authority? We must turn and run to the spirit of the Mass. It is the spirit of utter trust and dependence on the authority of our heavenly Father, whether the authority is direct or intermediate (i.e. in the 39 Faith and Morals hands of a superior). Notice how the Sacrifice is offered each time to stringent rubrics laid down for each celebrant, notice how he must preach not his own doctrine but the word of God, notice how he is dependent on servers to assist him at the altar, and see how he kneels in submission to the High Priest. The splendor of the Sacrifice consists of hundreds of acts of obedience demanded by the Church, and this beckons the Christian spirit of dependence and trust in paternal authority (ecclesiastical, educational, and secular) when not clearly abused. The Goodness of God has situated us in con­ fusing times, yet in His superabundance we have undeservingly received traditional Catholic parishes and institutes of education. Let us beware of mistrust in their leadership, which leads one to become open prey to pride and the consequential downfall of oneself and even family and future generations. May we all be candles to support the light of authority especially by our adamant desire of and attachment to the Mass and to its supremely rich fruits. “Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father” is a heavy saying of our Lord. It is not simply a wish or a request, it is a command from the Incarnate Word of God, from one who must be obeyed in all things. Who can stand it? Not very many, as is clearly manifest in the world. But the one who commands is also our Savior and omnipotent Brother who loves us with an everlasting love. He will not leave us orphans, but on the contrary will superabundantly grant unto His little ones the means and support needed to effectively strive toward holy perfection, the assimilation unto godliness. Will we trustfully take His pierced hand, or take the path of lukewarmness which is strewed with the vomit of independent and sad slavery to our own will? The command of perfection is the calling to increase and grow in the grace received at baptism, the gift of the life of God within us. When we kneel down to say the Confiteor, if we could imagine what I have just described to take place, how well we should say it! With what attention, respect, and sorrow we should ask the prayers of the saints! When we say the Confiteor, and indeed any prayer, we say it in the presence of God, and of the whole court of Heaven, though we are not in Heaven and cannot see God. The angels and saints do hear us and will pray for us. When, therefore, you are saying the Confiteor, imagine that you see all I have described, and you will never say it badly. By philosophical principle, any operation must tend toward its perfection or else it simply dies out. Let us take, by way of example, a man who decides to build a shed. He has the manpower, he has the lumber, and he has the tools. He begins the building operation with the perfect shed in his mind’s eye. The moment he ceases the whole idea of the project, the operation will die out, the perfect shed never gets built, the chickens remain homeless. And what of the operation of sanctifying grace? The seed of grace must perfect the soul or it will die! How will we protect it from the weeds of the world, from the attacks of demonic crows or from the infertile ground of the flesh? “Pray ye always!” Means Toward Perfection Prayer, dear sons and daughters, is the means toward perfection. It is time spent with our heavenly Father which allows His Spirit to transform our souls into His garden wherein He will delight to be. “My delight is to be with the sons of men,” says the Good God through the mouth of His prophet. But is it our delight to be with Him? Or, rather, is prayer for us a burden, something that has to be done, to get out of the way so I can get to more pressing duties. The Sacred Heart pleads with us as He enters the olive garden where He will be pressed into sweating blood by our boundless sins and by the fear of the approaching butchering of His pure flesh: “Watch with Me…be a loyal friend…spend time with Me…do not abandon Me to the sleep of sin…stay awake to the grace of God…allow Me to be your perfection!” The saints tell us by experience that prayer obtains every grace. Holy Mother Church orders us to pray. The man who perseveres in prayer will be saved. Do we lack a love for prayer or do we not know how to pray well? The solution to this too is to pray that we do obtain this knowledge and love. “Ask and you shall receive,” but we must ask and keep on asking on our knees with, through, and in the Anointed One. Our prayer is only pleasing to the Father as such. He will only recognize us as His sons and daughters in His only-begotten Son. The prayer of Christ is the only acceptable prayer; the Liturgy is the prayer of Christ. Disconnected from it, prayer has no life, no filial audience with the Father. Absorption in the sacred mysteries of the Liturgy (namely, the Holy Sacrifice) is par excellence the way to “watch with Me.” To pray and watch always is to be obedient to the divine Master. Participation in daily Mass is the light and sweet path of being fashioned in the spirit of Christ, the spirit of prayer, the spirit of religious obedience, the spirit of divine love. It will unfailingly fortify and support the soul to live by and to increase in grace. It will carry the soul to be faithful to God in his daily duties offered to Him for His greater honor and glory, and thereby making each moment a moment of praise to the Triune God. The mother untiringly watching her children; the father still awake awaiting the teenager out past curfew; husband and wife lovingly striving to be attentive to the needs of one another; the single one trying to constantly give of himself to God in his neighbor—all of these are to “watch with Me.” It is an immense joy for the priest to witness and administer the Body of Christ especially unto the daily Mass participant. For here is a soul that is striving to keep watch always with Christ, “for the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” Here is a soul striving to obey the will of God toward perfect fulfillment. Here is a soul that will draw other souls around the unbloody Sacrifice “to watch and pray for the time is short” and eternity is forever. Fr. Michael Fortin was born in Montreal, Quebec, and raised in Virginia. After studying aeronautics he worked in various fields before entering St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, Winona, in 2002. Ordained to the Sacred Priesthood in 2009, his first assignment was to New Zealand for a little less than three years. He is currently principal of Our Lady of Victories School in Manila, Philippines. 41 Faith and Morals Divini Illius Magistri by Pope Pius XI, Encyclical on Christian Education, December 31, 1929 Three Necessary Societies 11. Education is essentially a social and not a mere individual activity. Now there are three necessary societies, distinct from one another and yet harmoniously combined by God, into which man is born: two, namely the family and civil society, belong to the natural order; the third, the Church, to the supernatural order. 12. In the first place comes the family, instituted directly by God for its peculiar purpose, the generation and formation of offspring; for this reason it has priority of nature and therefore of rights over civil society. Nevertheless, the family is an imperfect society, since it has not in itself all the means for its own complete development; whereas civil society is a perfect society, having in itself all the means for 42 The Angelus July - August 2012 its peculiar end, which is the temporal well-being of the community; and so, in this respect, that is, in view of the common good, it has pre-eminence over the family, which finds its own suitable temporal perfection precisely in civil society. 13. The third society, into which man is born when through Baptism he reaches the divine life of grace, is the Church; a society of the supernatural order and of universal extent; a perfect society, because it has in itself all the means required for its own end, which is the eternal salvation of mankind; hence it is supreme in its own domain. 14. Consequently, education which is concerned with man as a whole, individually and socially, in the order of nature and in the order of grace, necessarily belongs to all these three societies, in due proportion, corresponding, according to the disposition of Divine Providence, to the co-ordination of their respecting ends. 15. And first of all education belongs preeminently to the Church, by reason of a double title in the supernatural order, conferred exclusively upon her by God Himself; absolutely superior therefore to any other title in the natural order. 76. This educational environment of the Church embraces the Sacraments, divinely efficacious means of grace, the sacred ritual, so wonderfully instructive, and the material fabric of her churches, whose liturgy and art have an immense educational value; but it also includes the great number and variety of schools, associations and institutions of all kinds, established for the training of youth in Christian piety, together with literature and the sciences, not omitting recreation and physical culture. And in this inexhaustible fecundity of educational works, how marvelous, how incomparable is the Church's maternal providence! So admirable too is the harmony which she maintains with the Christian family, that the Church and the family may be said to constitute together one and the same temple of Christian education. School a Subsidiary Institution 77. Since, however, the younger generations must be trained in the arts and sciences for the advantage and prosperity of civil society, and since the family of itself is unequal to this task, it was necessary to create that social institution, the school. But let it be borne in mind that this institution owes its existence to the initiative of the family and of the Church, long before it was undertaken by the State. Hence considered in its historical origin, the school is by its very nature an institution subsidiary and complementary to the family and to the Church. It follows logically and necessarily that it must not be in opposition to, but in positive accord with those other two elements, and form with them a perfect moral union, constituting one sanctuary of education, as it were, with the family and the Church. Otherwise it is doomed to fail of its purpose, and to become instead an agent of destruction. 86. In such a school, in harmony with the Church and the Christian family, the various branches of secular learning will not enter into conflict with religious instruction to the manifest detriment of education. And if, when occasion arises, it be deemed necessary to have the students read authors propounding false doctrine, for the purpose of refuting it, this will be done after due preparation and with such an antidote of sound doctrine, that it will not only do no harm, but will be an aid to the Christian formation of youth. 87. In such a school moreover, the study of the vernacular and of classical literature will do no damage to moral virtue. There the Christian teacher will imitate the bee, which takes the choicest part of the flower and leaves the rest, as St. Basil teaches in his discourse to youths on the study of the classics. Nor will this necessary caution, suggested also by the pagan Quintilian, in any way hinder the Christian teacher from gathering and turning to profit, whatever there is of real worth in the systems and methods of our modern times, mindful of the Apostle's advice: “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.” Hence in accepting the new, he will not hastily abandon the old, which the experience of centuries has found expedient and profitable. This is particularly true in the teaching of Latin, which in our days is falling more and more into disuse, because of the unreasonable rejection of methods so successfully used by that sane humanism, whose highest development was reached in the schools of the Church. These noble traditions of the past require that the youth committed to Catholic schools be fully instructed in the letters and sciences in accordance with the exigencies of the times. They also demand that the doctrine imparted be deep and solid, especially in sound philosophy, avoiding the muddled superficiality of those “who perhaps would have found the necessary, had they not gone in search of the superfluous.” In this connection Christian teachers should keep in mind what Leo XIII says in a pithy sentence: “Greater stress must be laid on the employment 43 Faith and Morals of apt and solid methods of teaching, and, what is still more important, on bringing into full conformity with the Catholic faith, what is taught in literature, in the sciences, and above all in philosophy, on which depends in great part the right orientation of the other branches of knowledge.” Moral Quality of the School 88. Perfect schools are the result not so much of good methods as of good teachers, teachers who are thoroughly prepared and well-grounded in the matter they have to teach; who possess the intellectual and moral qualifications required by their important office; who cherish a pure and holy love for the youths confided to them, because they love Jesus Christ and His Church, of which these are the children of predilection; and who have therefore sincerely at heart the true good of family and country. Indeed it fills Our soul with consolation and gratitude towards the divine Goodness to see, side by side with religious men and women engaged in teaching, such a large number of excellent lay teachers, who, for their greater spiritual advancement, are often grouped in special sodalities and associations, which are worthy of praise and encouragement as most excellent and powerful auxiliaries of “Catholic Action.” All these labor unselfishly with zeal and perseverance in what St. Gregory Nazianzen calls “the art of arts and the science of sciences,” the direction and formation of youth. Of them also it may be said in the words of the divine Master: “The harvest indeed is great, but the laborers few.” Let us then pray the Lord of the harvest to send more such workers into the field of Christian education; and let their formation be one of the principal concerns of the pastors of souls and of the superiors of Religious Orders. 99. This fact is proved by the whole history of Christianity and its institutions, which is nothing else but the history of true civilization and progress up to the present day. It stands out conspicuously in the lives of the numerous Saints, whom the Church, and she alone, 44 The Angelus July - August 2012 produces, in whom is perfectly realized the purpose of Christian education, and who have in every way ennobled and benefited human society. Indeed, the Saints have ever been, are, and ever will be the greatest benefactors of society, and perfect models for every class and profession, for every state and condition of life, from the simple and uncultured peasant to the master of sciences and letters, from the humble artisan to the commander of armies, from the father of a family to the ruler of peoples and nations, from simple maidens and matrons of the domestic hearth to queens and empresses. What shall we say of the immense work which has been accomplished even for the temporal well-being of men by missionaries of the Gospel, who have brought and still bring to barbarous tribes the benefits of civilization together with the light of the Faith? What of the founders of so many social and charitable institutions, of the vast numbers of saintly educators, men and women, who have perpetuated and multiplied their life work, by leaving after them prolific institutions of Christian education, in aid of families and for the inestimable advantage of nations? 100. Such are the fruits of Christian education. Their price and value is derived from the supernatural virtue and life in Christ which Christian education forms and develops in man. Of this life and virtue Christ our Lord and Master is the source and dispenser. By His example He is at the same time the universal model accessible to all, especially to the young in the period of His hidden life, a life of labor and obedience, adorned with all virtues, personal, domestic and social, before God and men. Gospel of Saint Mark 7:31-37 And again going out of the coasts of Tyre, he came by Sidon to the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis. And they bring to him one deaf and dumb; and they besought him that he would lay his hand upon him. And taking him from the multitude apart, he put his fingers into his ears, and spitting, he touched his tongue: And looking up to heaven, he groaned, and said to him: Ephpheta, which is, Be thou opened. And immediately his ears wereopened,andthestring of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke right. Commentary of Saint Gregory the Great, 6th century “The Spirit is called the finger of God. When the Lord puts his fingers into the ears of the deaf mute, he was opening the soul of man to faith through the gifts of the Holy Spirit.” The people’s response to this miracle testifies to Jesus’ great care for others: He has done all things well. No problem or burden was too much for Jesus’ careful consideration. The Lord treats each of us with kindness and compassion and he calls us to treat one another in like kind. The Holy Spirit who dwells within us enables us to love as Jesus loves. Do you love others and treat them with considerateness as Jesus did? Spirituality Pius XI Speaks to Us Today by Fr. Jonathan Loop, SSPX In his majestic encyclical Divini Illius Magistri, Pope Pius XI quotes St. Gregory of Nazianzen as saying that “[education] is the art of arts and the science of sciences.” In so doing, he at once highlights the importance of education, and its difficulty. The pre-eminence of education is easily seen when we consider its principal goal which, in the words of the same holy Pontiff, is intimately and necessarily connected with the last end of man. He says: “Education consists essentially in preparing man for what he must be and for what he must do here below, in order to attain the sublime end for which he was created.” The Art of Arts Education is therefore not merely concerned 46 The Angelus July - August 2012 with making a child memorize a set of facts in different branches of knowledge such as mathematics or history. In a sense, this is a rather simple task. The actual work of education is much more complex; its main task is to give a deep and lasting formation to the soul of the child entrusted to the care of the educator, which will enable him to live in a manner worthy of his Christian vocation. This means that the educator must constantly have before his eyes the goal of his labors: namely, a Catholic gentleman or lady able and willing to order every aspect of his life in light of the Catholic Faith. This already difficult task is compounded by the fact that the results of his labor are often years in the future; it thus requires immense foresight for the educator to judge properly how his actions contribute to the yet distant final goal. We may say that an educator is like a traveler whose destination lies over the horizon in a wholly unexplored territory. He may know the general direction in which he must go, but it is hardly clear if each step is leading him directly to his journey’s end. As is evident, the task of educating souls is by no means easy and carries with it an immense responsibility before God. Is it therefore a dangerous and thankless task which drains the man or woman who performs it without conferring any benefit on them in return? To answer this question, it is important to remember what is commonly said by numerous good teachers: namely, that “one never learns a subject until one has to teach it.” This is nothing other than a restatement of the classic Thomistic axiom “Nemo dat quod non habet.” If the task of the educator—whether as a parent or a teacher in a school—is to form Christ in the child committed to his care, then this duty necessarily forces him to strive to be perfectly conformed to Jesus Christ. If St. Paul could say, “My little children, of whom I am in labour again, until Christ be formed in you,” it was only inasmuch as he could truthfully claim, “And I live, now not I: but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 4:19 & 2: 20). Indeed, we may even venture to say that there are few more powerful means (outside of the Mass and sacraments) to grow in the spiritual life than generously to undertake the education of youth. A Greater Grasp For in the first place the teacher must necessarily have a greater grasp of the material— that is, Our Lord Jesus Christ—to be conveyed than do his students. Father Berto (1900-1968), the personal theologian of Archbishop Lefebvre at the Second Vatican Council, said that he had to use all the principles of dogmatic theology when preparing children for their First Communion. It is evident that he did not mean that he read to them from the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas; rather, he wished to say that in order to help these young souls learn the basic truths of the catechism he had to comprehend the deeper principles upon which they rested. Though we are not all theologians of the stature of Father Berto, nevertheless we must always strive to have a deeper understanding of the truths of our Faith than those to whom we wish to impart it; otherwise we shall be unable to help our students truly see the beauty of our religion or even to answer their questions. And questions they will have; an eminent philosopher once observed that children are like strangers newly arrived in a foreign country. Customs which inhabitants of such a land take for granted will appear to the stranger wholly inexplicable. Likewise, many truths which we assume to be evident and never think of questioning appear mysterious to the child. They will therefore want our help to understand, and if we have never cultivated the Faith we ourselves received as children, we shall only be able to answer their inquiries with “because.” In the end, this is insufficient to lead them to love the Faith. Knowledge of the Human Soul Furthermore, the instructor must supplement his knowledge of Our Lord Jesus Christ with knowledge of the human soul and, in particular, the character of his pupils, for he is not merely stamping information on uniform models which are identically receptive to his influence. He is dealing with individual souls, each one of which has its strengths and weaknesses, its native interests and aversions, and innate virtues and vices. No two souls will react in the same way to any method of instruction or correction. Thus, the educator must spare no pains to observe what manner of soul he has before himself and to adapt his methods in the manner most apt to attract it. He should be able to apply to himself the words of St. Paul, “I have made myself all things to all men in order to gain all” (I Cor. 9:22). Furthermore, he must strive to cultivate the strengths of the soul while helping it to combat its weaknesses. In a special way, he must learn not to be shocked at the occasionally glaring failures and shortcomings of the souls in his care; in this regard, he must imitate Our Lord Jesus Christ, who “broke not the broken reed nor 47 Spirituality extinguished the smoking flax” (Mt. 12:20). This knowledge and imitation of Our Lord is also reflected in the spirit of sacrifice which is at the heart of the work of any educator. One need only glance briefly at the lives of the saints who excelled in the role of educating the youth—such souls as St. John Bosco, St. John Baptist de la Salle, St. Angela Merici—to perceive that their lives were characterized by a constant selfimmolation on behalf of their charges. On a basic level, no small investment of time and energy is necessary in order to convey a true and abiding formation. Archbishop Lefebvre was known to observe that in any course of instruction, one must reasonably devote twice the amount of time to preparing the material than will be used in actually teaching it. On top of this, a teacher must spend a large amount of time in the often tedious task of correcting his pupils’ work. The need to invest so much time will necessarily require the educator to sacrifice many of his own interests. God knows how many plans, ambitions, or desires Catholic parents and instructors have had to set aside in order to give their children or pupils the attention necessary to advance in the spiritual and moral life. Spiritual Benefits of Teaching This devotion reflects a deeper level of selfsacrifice; simply put, education entails the wholehearted consecration of the instructor to the good of the souls in his care. The true educator no longer lives for himself, but for his students. This is the only explanation for why instructors are willing to teach countless students despite the ingratitude which is oftentimes their principal reward. Recently, a religious had the occasion to respond to a priest who had written her to express his gratitude for her beneficent influence. She wrote that he was the first and only one of her pupils in 45 years to have taken the time to thank her. Was this a cross for the nun? Certainly. Did it move her to abandon her noble vocation? By no means. It was rather an occasion for her to be more perfectly conformed to Our Lord Jesus Christ by “laying down her life for those 48 The Angelus July - August 2012 she loved” (Jn. 15:13). In other words, in such an educator we find an excellent embodiment of the spirit of Our Lord, who “came not to be served but to serve” (Mt. 20:28). The spiritual benefits of teaching do not end there, for when this activity is elevated to the supernatural level by grace, it becomes a participation in the mission of the Holy Ghost, whom Our Lord calls the spirit of truth. Speaking to His apostles, Our Lord says that it is the Holy Ghost who will instruct them in all truth and who will bring to mind all things which He has said to them. It is therefore the special prerogative of teachers to be the lieutenant of the Holy Ghost by opening the minds of their pupils both to the wonders of the natural realities of the world made by the Word of God and the supernatural truths revealed by Him in the Flesh. Moreover, as we are reminded in the Church’s liturgy at Pentecost, the Holy Ghost not only illumines intellects, but He also inflames hearts. In like manner, the zealous instructor not only fills the minds of his students with facts, but also awakens within their souls an ardent longing for truth and, ultimately, for perfect knowledge of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He thereby prepares the ground for the work of the Holy Ghost. It is evident that the education of the youth is an arduous task which entails no small responsibility before God. Yet it is one of the most beautiful and spiritually profitable undertakings in which men may engage. They not only imitate St. Paul by “forming Christ”—whether directly or indirectly—in their pupils, but they are also compelled to know and to love truth and Jesus Christ, to imitate Our Lord’s self-sacrifice, and to cooperate in the work of the Holy Ghost. Truly, this labor is as noble as it is taxing, and Pius XI did not speak lightly when he called it “the art of arts and the science of sciences.” Fr. Jonathan Loop was born and raised an Episcopalian. He attended college at the University of Dallas, where he received the grace to convert through the intermediary of several of his fellow students, some of whom later went on to become religious with the Dominicans of Fanjeaux. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political philosophy, he enrolled in St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, where he was ordained in June 2011. Books by James Stenson Dr. James Stenson is a Catholic educational consultant specializing in family life and family-school relationships. He has written several books for parents and regularly gives conferences throughout the world. These books will help parents to navigate the challenging, but fundamentally important task of forming children with a truly Catholic character. Successful Fathers Preparing for Peer Pressure Preparing for Adolescence Discusses the subtle but powerful ways fathers mold their children’s characters. This booklet gives men much-needed directions on problems fathers face, and reveals “twelve commandments of successful fathers.” He details what fathers must do–and not do–in order to instill the Faith in their children. A guide for parents of young children. Gives you a framework for instilling values in your children before they reach age 12. Shows you how to avoid common mistakes; how to detect signs of character weakness in your children, and helps you form your children’s character while respecting their legitimate freedom. A planning guide for parents. Explains how you can keep your children’s adolescence from being dominated by rebellion and conflict, and how to give your children clear moral direction. Includes a Q & A to help you plan for troubles before they arise. $2.99 $2.99 www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. $2.99 Spirituality Maria Goretti Virgin and Martyr (1890-1902) by Fr. Emanuel Herkel, SSPX “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” –Mt. 5:8 Violation and murder are real threats for today’s youth. This is a true story. It is vile, it is edifying, and it is recommended for all teenagers and even younger children under the direction of their parents. He Tried to Violate a Child! Alex was a morose 18-year-old boy; that means he had a bitter, unsociable temper. There is a sin called morose delectation: deliberately enjoying sexual thoughts without the desire to really act on them. Perhaps morose is the wrong word, for Alex’s hormone-driven passions led him to act on 50 The Angelus July - August 2012 his thoughts about an 11-year-old girl. Straitened Circumstances The short life of Maria Goretti was full of unfortunate events which left her in a vulnerable position. Her poor parents re-located across Italy to an area south of Rome. They signed a contract with Count Mazzoleni as tenant farmers, and Mr. Luigi Goretti worked himself to the point of sickness, which led to his death. In the days of his sickness, the Count imposed on the Goretti family two boarders who were to help with the farming. Thus Giovanni Serenelli and his son Alexander began to live in the Goretti home. In this difficult situation, Mrs. Assunta Goretti proved her strength. After the death of her husband, Luigi, she stayed on the farm with her five children. Due to poverty, she had few options, but she tried to make the best of it. She even prompted Giovanni Serenelli to relatively productive behavior, although he drank The greater problem was his boy, Alex. He had no friends. He was far older than the Goretti children. His father had little control over him and did not try to correct his moral delinquency. Alex read lurid magazines (modern-style pornography was not available in Catholic Italy, but notice the bad effect of moderately impure reading and pictures). Alex’s attitude toward women was a mixture of chauvinism and lust. His own mother had died in a lunatic asylum, and this certainly must have twisted his young mind. Mother’s Little Helper Maria did not like Alex, but she was polite to him and she did work for him, as she did work for everyone in her poor home. After the death of Luigi, Assunta and her eldest son often had to work in the fields with the Serenellis. Maria cleaned the house, cooked food, and cared for her younger brothers and sisters. There was no attempt at formal schooling. Maria never learned to read or write, but she wanted to learn her catechism well enough to receive her first Communion. A kind old woman from a nearby village helped her. Maria was bright enough to remember the answers, and she passed her oral test with the local priest. Maria made her first Communion with a group of children on the feast of Corpus Christi, 1902. All the children were about age ten, as was the custom before the reforms of Pope St. Pius X. On that special day, Father Signori preached about “purity at all costs.” Uncontrolled Passion It was the summer of 1902 when Alex began to act on his desire for Maria. Alex did not want a relationship which might lead to a good marriage. There is no record that he ever told Maria he loved her. He told her that he wanted her, and when the 11-year-old girl reacted with fear of the 18-year-old boy, he threatened to hurt her if she told anyone. Maria Goretti made one big mistake. She knew that Alex was asking her to commit a sexual sin, and she did not want to participate. But she was too afraid to tell her mother. For several weeks Maria was acting odd. Assunta noticed it, but she was too busy and tired to take her daughter aside for an intimate conversation. Alex approached Maria twice when she was working alone. She ran away from him, leaving her work undone. It was then that Alex’s thoughts turned violent. So far he had only used words to threaten her. Now he had to convince Maria that he was serious. He found an old tool and he spent his spare time sharpening it into a dagger nine and a half inches long. Murder Saturday, July 5, 1902, was a busy work day. The pea pods had been drying in the hot sun, and it was time to break them open. Lacking a machine, they used an old method: Alex drove an ox-cart in a circle over the peas, cracking them. Then even the young Goretti children could help to gather the peas. Maria was sitting on the steps of the house, watching her baby sister and mending one of Alex’s shirts. Giovanni took a break and fell 51 Spirituality asleep in the sun. Then Alex stopped the cart. “Assunta,” he shouted, “will you drive the cart for a while?” Assunta did not refuse; somebody had to do the work. Alex headed for the house and took his dagger out of its hiding place. He called Maria. She answered from the steps outside the door, but she was too close. Alex reached out and grabbed her; he pulled her in and closed the door before she tried to scream. “No! No! What are you doing, Alex? Do not touch me! It is a sin. You will go to hell!” Alex gagged her with a handkerchief and snarled with rage. She was not supposed to resist. He picked up his dagger and held it before her eyes. For a moment he paused, giving her one last chance to change her mind. Maria knew this was not an idle threat. She held up her arms to keep it away, but Alex plunged the sharp object into her, again and again. Maria collapsed, spit out the gag and cried: “O God! Mamma! Mamma!” Alex was in a rage. He stabbed her through the back, close to the heart. Maria dropped to the floor, almost dead. Alex looked down at what he had done. The baby on the steps was crying and Assunta was coming toward the house. Panic seized Alex. He ran to his room and locked the door. He threw his dagger under his dresser. The police found him there hours later. The Agony and Death of a Saint Maria died slowly over the next twenty hours. She was taken by horse-cart (ambulance) to the closest hospital at Nettuno. The doctors performed surgery in an attempt to stop her bleeding, but too many organs had been pierced. Maria had 14 stab wounds. Assunta clung to her dying child. Sometimes Maria would whisper a few words. The police came and took a statement. Father Signori brought Holy Viaticum. He was privileged to give Maria both first and last Holy Communions. This priest realized the sanctity of the little girl, and he chose to challenge her on her death bed: “Remember, my child, how Jesus died upon the cross, how He forgave everyone. And you, 52 The Angelus July - August 2012 Maria, do you forgive your murderer?” “Yes,” she answered, “for the love of Jesus, I forgive him…, and I want him to be with me in Paradise.” What Happens to a Criminal? Alex spent the next 40 years in jail. For a long time he was unrepentant. Then, one night he shouted for the guards; he wanted to see a priest! Alex later gave testimony under oath, admitting his crime, testifying that Maria had never intentionally provoked him to sin, and finally revealing the marvelous vision he had one night in the jail: Maria Goretti had appeared to Alex and offered him God’s mercy. Years later, when Alex was released from jail, he made a journey. He found the old woman, Assunta, and he begged her pardon. They received Holy Communion, side by side, on Christmas Day. Then Alex went away and spent the rest of his life as a gardener at a monastery. Reflections The story of Maria Goretti always brings tears to the eyes. We do not cry much over her wounds and blood. We cry over her words of mercy and forgiveness. Our tears are tears of joy for the love which conquers death. When Pope Pius XII canonized this new saint in 1950, he composed a prayer which summarizes our feelings: “O beautiful and lovable saint! Martyr on earth and angel in Heaven, look down from your glory on this people.…To you, therefore, powerful intercessor with the Lamb of God, we entrust these our sons and daughters…. Fathers and mothers have recourse to you, asking you to help them in their task of education. In you…the children and all the young people will find a safe refuge, trusting that they shall be protected from every contamination, and be able to walk the highways of life with that serenity of spirit and deep joy which is the heritage of those who are pure of heart. Amen.” Teach me goodness and discipline and knowledge; for I have believed thy commandments. Before I was humbled I offended; therefore have I kept thy word. Thou art good; and in thy goodness teach me thy justifications. The iniquity of the proud hath been multiplied over me: but I will seek thy commandments with my whole heart. Their heart is curdled like milk: but I have meditated on thy law. (Psalm 118:66-69) Christian Culture Samuel Mazzuchelli Polymath Priest by Christopher Check A traveler in Wisconsin even to this day need not stray far from the Interstate before he gets a good sense of the wild and uncut territory that greeted the explorers, traders, entrepreneurs, and missionary priests who first brought European civilization and its Faith to the savages who stalked the forests, roamed the prairies, and canoed the waterways of the American Midwest. To the freshly ordained Samuel Mazzuchelli, O.P., the untamed Wisconsin Frontier of 1830 could not have been more different from the culture, society, and wealth of his native Milan, all of which he renounced for love of Jesus Christ. Coming from a country teeming not only with culture but also with clergy, Father Mazzuchelli found himself, at the age of 23, the only priest in a region half the size of Italy. He would tirelessly fill the next 34 years spreading the Gospel in 54 The Angelus July - August 2012 Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois, accomplishing the work of scores of priests, if not more. Reluctant Permission Carlo Gaetano Samuele Mazzuchelli was born on November 4, 1806, the 16th of 17 children to Luigi and Rachele Mazzuchelli. His father came from a family that for two centuries had given Milan artists and writers, captains of commerce, and no small number of priests. Although named for Milan’s patron, St. Charles Borromeo, on whose feast he was born, the boy came to be called Samuel and was destined for a career in politics. Or so his father thought. Growing up but a block from Milan’s magnificent Gothic cathedral, built on the site where St. Ambrose baptized St. Augustine, Samuel cultivated a burning piety from an early age. At 17, after obtained his father’s reluctant permission to enter the religious life, he renounced his inheritance. By 19 he was in Rome studying at the Dominican college at Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill, where to this day orange trees said to have descended from those planted by St. Dominic continue to bear fruit. While in Rome, Samuel forged a bond with Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari, the future Pope Gregory XVI. Ordained subdeacon at the Lateran in 1827, Samuel was recruited for missionary service by Fr. Frederick Rese, Vicar General of the Diocese of Cincinnati, who, years later through Mazzuchelli’s intervention, would become Detroit’s first bishop as well as America’s first German-born bishop. In the summer of 1828, Samuel made for Paris to improve his French, and on October 5 of the same year boarded the ocean-going Edward Quesnel and made the Le Havre to New York crossing, a terrible tempest notwithstanding, in 40 days. Of New York City, Mazzuchelli would later write, “The splendors of this world are always closely associated with general moral corruption.” He did not linger. By coach and riverboat he traveled to Cincinnati where he was welcomed by fellow Dominican, Bishop Edward Fenwick. Fenwick, a descendant of one of Maryland’s earliest Catholic families, had escaped certain death when the French Revolution spilled into Belgium, where he was in seminary. His American citizenship saved his life to become Cincinnati’s first bishop. He ordained Samuel Mazzuchelli on September 5, 1830. A special dispensation was required as the young Milanese was but 23. One month later Samuel arrived by way of steamship from Detroit on Mackinac Island, which was to become his first base of operations in evangelizing Wisconsin. Hardly the refined resort of the present day, the island was a center of the French fur trade. Vice abounded, and the young priest witnessed first hand the effects of intemperance and also the exploitation of the Indians of the upper Midwest. Expanded Mission Field A natural builder, he immediately set about restoring the small and vacant church of St. Anne, from which he brought the Mass and the Sacraments to the island’s lapsed Catholics. He also delivered a series of 14 Sunday-evening conferences defending the Catholic Faith against the false charges of the local Presbyterian minister, a man named Reverend Ferry, who in the event packed up and left the island and eventually his ministry. By 1831, Father Mazzuchelli had expanded his mission field to Green Bay, where he built a stone church, St. John the Evangelist, and opened schools for European and Native Americans, adults and children, French and English. He also prepared texts in the Menominee language to teach the New Testament, psalms, catechism, music, geometry, arithmetic, and American history. Father Mazzuchelli was not the first priest to plant the Cross on Wisconsin soil. French Jesuits in the first half of the 18th century had been there before him, but had left in the wake of the Fox Wars. By the time Mazzuchelli arrived, however, there were at least two, if not three generations of uncatechized Catholics in the region, to say nothing of the Chippewa, Menominee, Winnebago, and Potowatomi Indians, who yet remembered, almost as legend, the Black Robes of the century before. For this reason, Mazzuchelli requested and received permission from Fenwick to set aside his Dominican whites in favor of a black cassock more identifiable to the Indian imagination and better suited to life in the field. Father Mazzuchelli also organized training for the Indians in the building of frame houses, European agricultural methods (the savages subsisted mostly on game and fish), and, for the women, sewing. Three years later, there were over 1,000 Christian Indians in the Green Bay area. While in Green Bay, Mazzuchelli heard confessions day in and day out, sometimes for 14 hours a day, hearing the sins of men who had not seen a Catholic priest for 40 years. He baptized adult children and married their parents, some 55 Christian Culture of whom had lived together for 50 years. From Green Bay, he canoed 70 miles to Sault Ste. Marie and preached to Indians and American soldiers at the fort, Protestant and Catholic alike. From there he headed west to visit Fr. Frederic Baraga, the famous “Snowshoe Priest” who evangelized the Upper Peninsula and became the first bishop of Marquette. In the wilderness the two priests heard each other’s confessions and gave one another spiritual direction. Diocese of Detroit As Bishop Fenwick’s health was fading, and the number of faithful on the western edge of his diocese growing due to Mazzuchelli’s aggressive evangelizing, the need to divide the Cincinnati Diocese became clear. It was not, however, until Mazzuchelli wrote to his old friend in Rome, now the pope, that Rome took notice of the need. The letter, a comprehensive description of the baptism of many of Wisconsin’s Indians, the restoration to the Faith of her lapsed European Catholics, and the conversion of no small number of her Protestants (including a 91-year-old Anglican), inspired Pope Gregory XVI to create the Diocese of Detroit. He appointed Rese its first bishop. For five years, Mazzuchelli worked from his base of operations on Mackinac Island ever improving his English and French, and taking his mission work farther and farther west into Wisconsin, twice as far as Prairie du Chien. To prepare for his journeys he would sleep for weeks on the floor to grow accustomed to life without a bed. His adventures by snowshoe, horseback, and canoe across Wisconsin white with winter include feats of courage and survival including eating a captured prairie rat to keep from starving. With his understated manner, Mazzuchelli described the rodent as “edible, but with an offensive odor.” The young priest made every effort to secure funding from the United States Government for a school promised the Winnebago Indians of Central Wisconsin in the Rock Island Treaty of 1831. Mazzuchelli wrote to Andrew 56 The Angelus July - August 2012 Jackson himself describing the success he had had educating Wisconsin’s Indians and the longstanding affection they had for Catholic priests. Nonetheless, the funds—some 3,000 dollars a year—went to a poorly attended Protestant school on the Yellow River. Zachary Taylor, the Indian agent at Prairie du Chien at the time, was particularly opposed to the thought of supporting the work of “an Italian Catholic Priest.” Reflecting on the event in his memoirs, Mazzuchelli predicted that the American government had no real desire to educate the Indians. “It will be their fate,” he wrote, “to continue in their wild, roving, and uncivilized state until the day when the civilized population of European origin will have filled the entire continent. Then the Indian will have left scarcely a trace of his existence in the land.” Church Builder Father Mazzuchelli’s forays into Wisconsin brought him at last to the region where his work would come to full flower: the lead region of southwestern Wisconsin, eastern Iowa, and northwestern Illinois. There, he brought the Gospel not only to Indians, but to the miners of the region, Cornish, German, and Irish, the latter group conferring honorary ethnic status on the Italian by calling him “Fr. Matthew Kelly,” a practice the first Bishop of Dubuque, Mathias Loras, would take up in official correspondence when Mazzuchelli became his first vicar general. Throughout the lead region, in cities such as Galena, Dubuque, Davenport, and Muscatine, Father Mazzuchelli designed and built over 20 churches, five of which stand today, including St. Patrick’s in Benton, Wisconsin, where his remains rest. He also designed and built a number of civic buildings, including, it seems, the original Iowa State House in Iowa City. In his memoirs, Mazzuchelli does not precisely claim authorship, but historians agree that there was no one in the region at the time capable of designing the building described as, “reminiscent of Rome.” Some say he planned the entire capital. We do know that he planned the town of Shullsberg, Wisconsin, for he named the streets there after virtues. In 1846 he founded a college for men at Sinsinawa Mound in Wisconsin, the original building of which today still stands. The college is no longer operational but the adjacent community of Dominican Sisters persists to this day, although no small number of the members have gone the way of so many American orders. There, however, they do maintain a fine exhibit on the priest’s life. Learning and Expertise Father Mazzuchelli’s final years were spent in Benton, Wisconsin, where, with the help of the Dominican Sisters, he founded the Santa Clara Academy for Girls, where even Protestant families from the East Coast would send their daughters for formation (one became Sister Charles Borromeo Stevens, a Sinsinawa Dominican). Among the many subjects he taught there was astronomy, using astronomical slides he himself made. The equipment he gathered for scientific experiments was the best of its kind, better, according to one report, than what was used at the University of Wisconsin. He also shared with his students the best of Italian culture, including the work of his contemporary Alessandro Manzoni, of whom he was a great admirer. He taught oil painting, although none of his works survive today, save, perhaps, a head of Christ above the altar at St. Patrick’s. He drilled his students on the importance of manners, insisting frequently that ladies never slam doors. Above all, he shared with them his deep devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows, an image of whom hung above his bed. “He who truly loves Jesus,” he wrote, “has a heart filled with sentiments of love, and has a tongue ever ready to tell of Mary, chosen our most tender mother by our Savior.” Supervising three parishes in his declining years he never relaxed, making frequent sick calls in the dead of winter. It was after one such call that the 57-year-old priest succumbed to pneumonia. When his friends prepared the body for burial they found an iron chain around his waist. How long he had worn it no one knows, but his skin had grown over portions of it, and it was stained with blood. It is available for veneration at Sinsinawa Mound. Mazzuchelli’s life is carefully recorded in a fine biography from 1974 written by Wisconsin poets Jo Bartels and J. Michael Alderson. Although marred by too few maps, no index, and a curious absence of page numbers, the volume makes extensive use of Mazzuchelli’s voluminous correspondence and journal entries. Declared Venerable by Pope John Paul II in 1993, Father Mazzuchelli’s cause for sainthood was completed and sent to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints by Bishop Morlino of Madison. What may well be a miraculous disappearance of a cancerous tumor in the body of Robert Usulmann of Menona, Wisconsin, is attributed to Father Mazzuchelli’s intercession. Mr. Usulmann’s cancer left his lung after he had prayed holding Mazzuchelli’s chain. The reader of his life marvels at the scope of Samuel Mazzuchelli’s learning and expertise, the variety of his skills, his capacity for languages, his physical endurance, his command of Sacred Scripture and doctrine, his drive and patience, and perhaps, most of all, his unfailing confidence in Divine Providence. He put all his talents and virtues at the service of spreading the Gospel to Wisconsin’s indigenous peoples as well as to her Irish and German immigrants. In an age when Roman Catholics were held in low regard by Protestant Americans, Father Mazzuchelli won the hearts of no small number of separated brethren. Yet even in Wisconsin, this heroic Italian priest is not well known. With his cause currently under review, however, that injustice may yet be corrected. When his memorial is at last established on the Roman Calendar, it should be observed also as a holiday in the Badger State. Christopher Check graduated from Rice University with a degree in Literature before serving for seven years as a Marine Corps officer in expeditions in the Far East and the Persian Gulf. He is the executive Vice President of the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois. His set of historical talks, The Lepanto Lectures, are available through Angelus Press. 57 Christian Culture Modern Literature in the High School Curriculum Passing by the Dragon by Andrew J. Clarendon 1 58 Cf. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Introduction to his lectures to catechumens, para. 16. This somewhat looser translation, a favorite of Flannery O’Connor’s, appears at the end of her essay, “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” All O’Connor quotations are from Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988). 2 Daniel J. Sullivan, An Introduction to Philosophy (Charlotte, NC: Tan Books, 1992), 77. 3 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Shorter 5th Ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), lines 6-7. 4 Ibid., line 4. The Angelus July - August 2012 The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.1 Mathematics teachers generally do not have to face the problem of objections to content matter. Like theology, the abstract nature of math does not involve the delicate task of conveying what St. Thomas terms “connatural”2 knowledge: an understanding of reality as it is lived and experienced among men. Since fallen man lives in a fallen world, the expression of such knowledge necessarily involves a presentation of an environment that is “bleared, smeared . . . / And wears man’s smudge and share’s man’s smell,”3 with creatures who do “not reck [God’s] rod.”4 This is so much the case that those who would shield the adolescent from any substantive description of the real world in the great works of literature would have to eliminate virtually the entire canon—from Homer and Virgil, through Dante and Shakespeare, down to Dickens and Eliot. Calls to have 5 Dante, The Divine Comedy, Vol. 1: Inferno, trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 2003), I. 8-9. 6 John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture (Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, 1983), 40. 7 Ibid., 40-41. high school students read nothing but the lives of the saints are sometimes heard, since these texts are judged to be safe, especially in matters relating to the sixth and ninth commandments, and require no critical thinking. It is analogous to suggesting students need not study philosophy because the catechism has already been memorized. The question of high school literature is thus a two-pronged problem that includes not only an important question of prudence but also the higher question of ideas. In certain circles, there is a tendency not to examine ideas at all, but merely to reject anything that is modern—whatever that might mean, exactly—precisely because modernism is a condemned heresy. However, the classical way of understanding literature is that while it reflects the world and times of the author, it must also convey truths that are applicable to all times. This is still true today, even in a disordered era in which it is now traditional to reject tradition. These considerations lead to three topics: the realistic depiction of vice in literature, a distinction between the terms modern and modernist, and some practical considerations for the inclusion of modern works in the curriculum. Innocence, Not Ignorance To be innocent is to be guilt-free, not ignorant. Literature teaches its most lasting lessons by presenting good and evil as it is experienced among men, and it is an inescapable part of the human condition to have to present vice. Dante, for example, at the beginning of the greatest poem of the Middle Ages, writes: “But if I would show the good that came of it [the journey to Paradise] / I must talk about things other than the good.”5 In other words, the problem is not when vice is discussed or even depicted, but when vice is held up as indifferent or, worse, as a good. This is one of the distinctions between 59 Christian Culture 8 O’Connor, Collected Works, 804. 9 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 17. literature that is not just modern—late nineteenth century and later, more or less—but is modernist. It is clear that adolescent students should not be exposed to works like Les Fleurs du mal or Ulysses or Lolita. What is more common among serious Catholic parents is for opinion to move to the other extreme. While no one doubts that adolescence—a word, as John Senior was fond of pointing out, that comes from a Latin word for burning6 —is a time of profound changes and challenges, there are grave dangers in leaving young adults in ignorance. Dr. Senior, in a passage born of long experience, writes: “There is no question that adolescent reading must be accompanied by strict, serious, complete dogmatic and moral teaching and by a strong, active, vigorous, rigorous gymnastics program. But a severe warning is in order for Catholic parents who, the more conservative they are in their Faith, tend toward a Jansenism in their discipline of children. . . . There are Catholic families who proudly send their eighteen-year-olds up to college carefully bound and wrapped at the emotional and spiritual age of twelve—good little boys and girls in cute dresses and panty-waists who never get into trouble or into knowledge and love.”7 This is not to say, of course, that texts must not be inspected and chosen with prudence. In this, our schools have a distinct advantage: the lists of texts, at least here in the United States, are not only approved by the headmaster of the school but also at the district level. This means that a number of priests, both with educational experience and years of hearing confessions, make a judgment on what ought to be taught in the schools. This system plots a course between dangers to purity on the one hand and ignorance on the other, using the literature to demonstrate the correctness and beauty of right morality. Revolt Against Catholic World-View More important than a portrayal of lived experience are the ideas that literature conveys. The literature curriculum really has as its aim to acquaint the student with the great ideas of Western civilization. There is no doubt that modernism represents a revolt against the entire Catholic world-view, that it rejects, insofar as it is possible, all that our civilization has built from the Greeks on. Nevertheless, it is false to claim that all modern works are a part of this chorus of chaos. Flannery O’Connor puts it this way: “The general accusation passed against [modern] writers now is that they write about rot because they love it. Some do, and their works may betray them, but it is impossible not to believe that some write about rot because they see it and recognize it for what it is.”8 In some ways, now is one of the most important times to be a writer. As in theology and philosophy, talented men and women in the arts must fight against the rot: describing it as it is, showing the consequences, and even proposing—in the terms of their craft—some remedies. The alternative is to be carried along the stream of contemporary life; as one of Samuel Beckett’s bums in the absurdist play Waiting for Godot sighs, “I get used to the muck as I go along.”9 Flannery O’Connor’s short stories about the action of grace in the modern world, 60 The Angelus July - August 2012 10 O’Connor, Collected Works, 852. 11 Ibid., 805. 12 Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 187. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s harrowing accounts of the consequences of atheistic materialism, T. S. Eliot’s verses on loss and restoration: these are modern voices speaking out against modernism; it is vital that our young people hear them. Another aspect of this argument is that it is better for our young people to hear about the errors of our time in the security of the Catholic classroom instead of in the secular university or Internet forum. It is a type of inoculation. The classroom should be a place in which ideas can be discussed and the consequences of those ideas can be shown. In this sense, for a more advanced group of students, there is even a place in the curriculum for reading modernist works; if the teacher is able to guide the students properly, to show the errors involved, then such an examination could only serve to solidify faith and right philosophy. It is also vital to note that many modern works—and certainly modernist ones—should only be studied after the student has received instruction in the canon. It makes no sense to study reactions to and rejections of tradition without knowing what the tradition is. Let the high school students read Homer and Virgil, Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden and Pope, Austen and Dickens, then move on to the moderns. The literature teacher’s responsibility is to give “a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present,”10 which is really just a modern manifestation of the same great truths literature has always conveyed. Ultimately, the goal of the literature program is to integrate with all of the other subjects in leading the student to a love for Western civilization with all that it implies. The unfortunate reality is that this story must also discuss the decline of that civilization. If it were not so, then our mission would not be to restore all things in Christ. Such a restoration is only possible by understanding where our civilization came from, how it developed, and where it is in contemporary times. In more explicitly spiritual terms, “[r]edemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.”11 In their sphere, it is for the modern writers to point the way toward such restoration and redemption. In remains true that in our day we must still pass by the dragon, a dragon powerful, dangerous, and at times seductive. As handmaids to the theologians and philosophers, the literary wielders of the word can help us along “in this waning day of the West,”12 toward the Father of Souls. Andrew J. Clarendon, M.A., holds a M.A. in English Literature from the Catholic University of America. In addition to being one of the founding faculty members of Notre Dame de La Salette Academy, he is now a professor at St. Mary’s Academy and College. 61 Fatima’s Message to the World -- Our Blessed Mother can no longer restrain the hand of her Divine Son from striking the world with a just punishment for its many crimes. -- “I have come to warn the faithful to amend their lives and ask pardon for their sins. They must not continue to offend Our Lord, Who is already too much offended.” -- “If my requests are not granted, Russia will spread her errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecutions against the Church. Many good people will be martyred, there will come another great war, and various nations will be destroyed.” -- “Wars are a punishment for the sins of mankind.” -- “More souls go to Hell because of the sins of the flesh than for any other reason.” -- “Say the Rosary every day to obtain peace for the world. And after each decade say the following prayer: ‘O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who have most need of Thy mercy.’” -- “Pray, pray a great deal, and make sacrifices for sinners, for many souls go to Hell because they have no-one to make sacrifices and pray for them.” -- “God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If people do what I tell you, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. -- “I promise to help at the hour of death with the graces needed for salvation those who, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, go to confession, receive Holy Communion, say five decades of the Rosary and keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the mysteries, with the intention of making reparation to my Immaculate Heart.” -- “Tell everybody that God gives His graces through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Tell them to ask graces from her, and that the Heart of Jesus wishes to be venerated together with the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the Lord has confided the peace of the world to her... In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph, Russia will be converted and there will be peace.” Christian Culture Parenting Your CollegeAge Child by Michael J. Rayes Difficult Transitions When children become 18-year-olds, they experience a whopper of a transition. “Yesterday I was a child; today I am an adult.” Or so they say. While a legal age of adulthood is useful as a defining point for legislated activities such as service in the military or signing a contract, it hardly conveys a psychological truth about human development. It may be seen as a culturally imposed rite of passage, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but the transition is not immediate. Your 18-year-old may play with a radiocontrolled airplane in the morning, drive a car to practice in the afternoon, pick up dinner for the family, and later argue with his little brother about a comic book. If his back-and-forth child/ 64 The Angelus July - August 2012 adult behavior confuses you, imagine how he feels. That’s why we call them “young adults.” They aren’t exactly ready to lead a Fortune 500 corporation, but they don’t need a babysitter either. This raises a question for you as the parent: How do you give your “adult” child the proper balance of space and support? Consider your child’s temperament. Many 18-year-olds with a busy, outgoing, task-oriented personality may not need a lot of support from you. They may view it as restrictive and instead look forward to the day when they move out. However, the more contemplative, brooding, detail-oriented temperament style may need more emotional support from parents. It’s really no different now than when she was little: Today she may know how to do her college homework or fill out a scholarship form, but she may need you by her side when beginning these tasks until her confidence catches up to her abilities. Let’s look at a few aspects of a young adult’s life. We’ll consider how to give them the space they want, the progression of responsibilities they need, and the support they crave. Driving and Running Errands Consider letting your young-adult offspring drive his younger siblings around. Have him pick up some groceries. This does two things: One, it teaches him how to shop, so he can do it on his own when he moves out. Two, it teaches him that he is needed as a member of the family. You may wish to let your child own a car, especially if you can figure out a way to buy an older, reliable one for cash. Your child now has to deal with oil changes, washing, maintenance, gas, and so on, which he can learn from you. Money and Work Should young adults pay room and board? If they earn money, the answer could be yes. Regardless of your 18-year-old’s financial situation, you may want to consider helping him or her open a checking account. You’ll have to explain the wiles of modern banking, or the child will have a negative balance in a hurry. Some college-age children do not attend college but rather go straight into the workforce. Others work while they are in school. Whatever their situation, they most likely will have questions for you or may just need space to “vent.” They now work with a lot of different personalities, and they might not know what to do in certain situations. St. John Vianney’s admonition about having “universal charity” for everyone is not always easy to practice. Domestic Duties Your grown child should be able to do his or her laundry. He will probably see the sense of combining his load of laundry with someone else’s. However, he will keenly feel the injustice of having to do his siblings’ or parents’ laundry separate from his own. This may embitter him. The young adult will probably be viewed by you as the perfect babysitter for the younger siblings, and for good reason. This works well most of the time and helps all the children learn to work out problems. By the time a child turns 18, he or she should basically be able to run a household. This includes dishes, laundry, cooking, cleaning, operating the heating/cooling, mowing, and so on. Once a child turns 18, you’ll want to determine how many chores he or she should perform. What’s fair? You may also wish to consider paying your child for certain chores, but others may simply be expected. At some point, you’ll notice that your 18- or 19-year-old simply does not have time to do these domestic chores and keep grades up at the same time. In my household, we gradually released our son from all his chores by the time he turned 19. He worked 20 hours a week, attended college full-time, kept up very high grades, volunteered, helped his parents with web site development, and paid money into the house from his own paycheck. When we learned he was paying his younger siblings to do all his chores, it was obvious that we needed to adjust. Catholic Action Is your 18-year-old ready to go head-to-head with a university professor? Probably not. If he hears something against Church teaching, his best approach probably will be to cast doubt in the minds of other students, discreetly, one-onone, which will be more fruitful than challenging the teacher in class. Instead of the “A” grades you expected, your daughter may end up earning “B” and “C” grades in her courses because she spent extra time volunteering with pro-life work or a rosary crusade. This is Catholic Action and adds balance to her otherwise heavy academic life. Fathers may wish to encourage their college65 Christian Culture age children to do something which expresses their Faith in a visible way. It could be prolife work, helping with processions at their chapel, or if they attend a public college, always remembering to make the sign of the cross and praying in the cafeteria before taking a meal. Archbishop Lefebvre said in his jubilee sermon on Sept. 23, 1979, that the responsibility to organize for Christ the King and train children in Catholic Action falls to the heads of families. Parental Support Support does not automatically mean money. You have an established home to which your son or daughter can come. This is a huge support for him. Another great support is having a parent who can help him pick out a car and then find a trustworthy mechanic’s shop. He will need help filling out his college forms, of which there are many. Let your child deal with the stress of life, but you may wish to sometimes intervene when you sense your child becoming overwhelmed with responsibilities. Probably the best support you can provide is a stable framework of prayer. Your son or daughter knows that at this certain hour, it’s time for the rosary. He knows that before the little kids go to bed, the family prays evening prayers together. This provides stability in his changing life. Your college-age child still needs parental discipline, but it will probably be a quick admonition (“Stop fighting with your brother, now!”). At this age, discipline is no longer physical. Serious infractions will most likely call for a loss of privileges and a serious conversation. Remind the child that he or she is older now. out. He needs space to think, and if he chooses his parents to discuss things with, you can be proud of that! You may reach an uncomfortable point with “lack of respect.” When your child was 7 years old, we called it “talking back” and stopped it; at age 19 you may not wish to force an end to the argument. Your young-adult child will disagree with you on something. At times, the child may choose a battle with you simply to flex his own ideological muscle, which is new to him. You may wish to strongly consider letting him argue his point, but stop him when he crosses the line and makes a disrespectful remark. Generally, you could disregard your own need for affirmation and respect from your children, and decide that your 18-year-old’s disagreement with you is a way for him to grow. My son and I had a 20-minute animated discussion over whether some publicly funded twisted metal was “art.” It wasn’t, of course, since it didn’t elevate the mind to specific virtue. He said it was. But the discussion helped hone his reasoning skills and made him clarify his position. Even though he was not correct, he chose that particular topic and that particular time to “do battle” with his father. I had to be there for him. College-age children can make the transition into full adulthood when given the space and support they need. This transition period gives parents an opportunity for another joyful expression of sacramental marriage, because with proper parenting, your grown children will be a consolation instead of a burden. Expression of Ideas Your collegiate child will come home and verbalize some “nutty” ideas. How you react to them will make a big difference. He needs to explore ideas and learn about the world. Your reflective “tell me more” instead of jumping in and contradicting him will help him sort things 66 The Angelus July - August 2012 Michael J. Rayes is a lifelong Catholic, a husband, and father of seven. He has been published by Rafka Press, Latin Mass Magazine, and others. St. Joan of Arc The newest audiobook in our Lepanto lecture series Why is the story of St. Joan of Arc so compelling? Did God raise a saint to intervene in a purely political conflict? Not at all! In fact, the most important aspect of St. Joan’s story is God’s direct intervention in human history, to ultimately save France from the scourge of the schism into which England fell soon after the death of the saint. Don’t miss this stirring presentation on the life, events, and consequences of St. Joan of Arc. 1 CD – 58 minutes STK# 8550 – $9.95 For more details visit angeluspress.org or call 800-966-7337. The Lepanto Lectures Our Exclusive Catholic History Audio Series! With one talk each on the following historical topics, the Lepanto Lectures partnered with renowned Catholic speaker Mr. Christopher Check to release the following talks. The Cristeros and the Martyrs of the Mexican Revolution Amidst the terrors of an anti-Catholic government, an army of faithful Catholic Mexicans arose to defend the rights of Our Lord and His holy Church. They were the Cristeros, their battle cry was “Viva Cristo Rey,” and theirs is one of the greatest Catholic war stories of all time. 1 CD – 60 minutes STK# 8499 – $9.95 Henry VIII and the Anglican Schism Almost everyone knows something about Henry VIII, his many wives, and how he began the Anglican schism, yet few today really know the full story of how England, the land of saints, was wrenched from Catholic unity. This story presents the truth about this gluttonous, decadent monarch who destroyed Catholic England. This story is deeply important for those countries descended from England! 1 CD – 60 minutes STK# 8499 – $9.95 The War of the Vendée As the French Revolution attempted to destroy both God and man, a number of French peasants from the Vendée, along with their nobility, rose up to defend the Sovereignty of Christ against the greatest terror the world had seen since the persecution of Diocletian. Truly inspiring! 1 CD – 60 minutes STK# 8499 – $9.95 www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music Questions and Answers by Fr. Peter Scott, SSPX Can scandal ever excuse a man from the culpability for his sins? If it is true that each man is responsible for his own acts, it does not follow that he is exempt from all exterior influence, nor that we cannot be accounted as responsible for others’ sins by our own faults. Scandal can be defined as any word or deed that is itself evil, or has the appearance of evil, 68 The Angelus July - August 2012 and provides the occasion of sin to another. (Prummer, Handbook of Moral Theology, §230). The scandal can be present either in the person who performs the evil or seemingly evil act, or in the person induced to sin by another’s bad example. There is fault in both the one who gives scandal and in the one who takes it, nor is it true that the person who gives bad example can claim to have no responsibility for another’s sin, on the fictitious grounds that this person has free will of his own. The human reality is that we all learn by example, good or bad, and that our wills, weak and unstable as they are, are greatly influenced by those around us, and much more readily so for evil than for good. Did Our Lord Himself not affirm this when he said: “Woe to the world because of scandals! For it must needs be that scandals come, but woe to the man through whom scandal does come!” (Mt. 18:7). However, not all scandal that is given to others is equal in gravity. If the person actually intends to lead another into sin, as for example when a man seduces a woman, or a person sends bad images across the Internet, then he is directly responsible for the other person’s sin, nor is it sufficient that he simply confess the sin against purity. He must also confess a mortal sin against charity, and also that he induced another to commit a mortal sin against chastity. That makes three mortal sins, and not just one, to his great shame. However, it frequently happens that the scandal given to another is not desired, even if it is foreseen. This would be the case if one child tells another how easy it is to steal from the supermarket, or how easy it is to cheat at a game. He is bragging, more than directly wanting to induce another to commit a sin. It remains still a sin against charity, lesser in gravity, more or less serious depending upon the gravity of the sin involved. If, consequently, the other person goes and commits the same sin, there is a real responsibility for that sin. The scandal given to others is an aspect of God’s judgment that must be reserved to the last day, when all the consequences of the bad deeds for which we have not done sufficient penance, will become manifest. Frightening indeed is it for us to reflect on our bad examples given, “for all of us must be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what he has won through the body, according to his works, whether good or evil” (II Cor. 5:10). Nevertheless, this does not free us from our obligation not to take scandal from others, for God always gives the grace to vanquish, as St. Paul teaches: “Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21). Most importantly, it is imperative that we not take scandal from actions that are not really evil at all, but simply look like it to us, on account of our ignorance—for example, when a mother misses Sunday Mass, and we are not aware of the fact that it was to take care of a sick child. Rash judgments lead to very many falsely taking scandal in others’ good actions. Likewise, let us be wary of pharisaical scandal, in the likeness of the Pharisees, who were scandalized when Our Lord ate and drank with publicans and sinners and said: “Behold a man who is a glutton, and a wine-drinker, a friend of publicans and sinners” (Lk. 7:34). Consequently, we can sin just as grievously by taking scandal as by giving it. All this is very well demonstrated by the sin of our first parents. Eve, tempted by the serpent, gave scandal by actively inducing Adam to commit her same very grievous sin of disobedience. The fact that she was tempted by the devil in no way diminishes her culpability, but the fact that she induced her husband to do likewise certainly increases it. Tragically, Adam took scandal, on account of human respect. The scandal given was certainly a real influence, without which he may not have committed the sin. However, it does not diminish his culpability, since he alone was responsible for the entire human race. The present crisis in the Church also illustrates this whole question of scandal. The promotion of liberal errors by Vatican II, by the post-conciliar hierarchy, and by the New Mass has been a profound source of scandal that has destroyed the Faith of innumerable Catholics. There is grave sin in all those responsible. However, the fact that many Catholics took scandal is their fault, for they refused to have recourse to the supernatural means to overcome the temptation to naturalism. Likewise there are many weak Catholics who take pharisaical scandal in the refusal of traditional Catholics to assist at the New Mass or to “obey” the postconciliar prelates in their destruction of the Church. Although we cannot be responsible for such pharisaical scandal, nevertheless, we must pay particular care not to scandalize the weak by harsh expressions or disrespect in our rebuttal of the modern errors. 69 Questions and Answers Can I use lard to cook food on Fridays? Although the law of abstinence frequently does not oblige every Friday in virtue of the positive law of the Church after Vatican II (with the exception of Great Britain, in which it was reintroduced in 2011), it is nevertheless our Catholic duty to keep the precepts of the Church in the traditional way, for they clearly indicate the mind of the Church and show us, amongst other things, how to do penance. It is Canon 1250 of the 1917 Code which regulates this question, and which states that “the law of abstinence forbids the eating of meat and of broth made of meat, but does not exclude 70 The Angelus July - August 2012 the use of eggs, milk and milk products, nor any seasonings of food, although made from the fat of animals.” This means that soup made by boiling meat flesh or bones of animals is forbidden on days of abstinence. It also means that lard, which is animal fat, may not be used for cooking if a substantial quantity is to be consumed. However, if a small quantity of lard is used in order to give taste to food or vegetables, or to grease a pan in cooking, then it would be considered not as food itself, but rather as seasoning of food. This is what Father Prummer has to say on the issue: “Under the name of seasoning is to be understood whatever, whether it be liquid or not, is used in a small quantity, so that the principal food acquires taste, such as a few small pieces of lard employed to give taste to vegetables” (Man. Th. Mor., II, §663). Consequently one ought not to be concerned about using a little lard for baking of cakes, bread, and other foods to be consumed on a Friday. Church and World Syria: “Besides the war on the ground, a media war is unfolding.” In an interview granted to the Catholic press service AsiaNews on June 7, Bishop Giuseppe Nazzaro, Vicar Apostolic of Aleppo, forthrightly condemns the massacre committed in Mazraat al-Qbeir and Maarzaf, in the suburb of Hama. The Italian bishop assigned to Aleppo, a city in the northwest of the country, also cites the massacre in Houla this past May 26 and denounces a veritable campaign to destroy Syria: “The United Nations (UN) have a moral duty to verify the circumstances as well as the perpetrators of these crimes, and what is behind these odious massacres.” Fury against the regime of Bashar al-Assad is fueling the spiral of violence and preventing the population and the government from finding an opportunity for a gradual transition toward democracy and reforms, he declared. The Catholic bishop points out that the Syrian people, which is being subjected to the bloody campaigns of Islamic extremists who have infiltrated the country, has no voice to express itself in the media and consequently is becoming increasingly isolated. “The UN and the Western countries,” he stated, “do not realize that with their sanctions and their support for the rebels they are causing more casualties than the regime does.” “Those who want to destroy Assad— Qatar and Saudi Arabia, as well as the other Gulf States—rule their own countries with an iron hand without any respect for human rights and religious freedom. Why, to this day, has no one ever condemned the violent acts against the Shiites in Bahrain or the arrest and sentencing of Christian migrants in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait?” On May 4, Bishop Nazzaro likewise denounced the presence of Libyan and Turkish agitators among the students of Aleppo, provoking the attack of the Syrian army against the university in that city. He asserted that foreign Islamist militants have been trying for months to cause insurrection at the universities of Aleppo for the purpose of stirring up violence in that city, which is the only one still spared confrontations between the regime and the rebels. The agency Fides explained on June 15 that its sources confirm the presence of radical Islamist Salafist groups that “intend to fight a war of religion.” These people consider Christians as renegades, confiscate their property, carry out summary executions, and are ready to unleash a sectarian war. Similarly, Fides added on June 26, the regular army is said to have struck Houla, because of the many Salafist militants and terrorists who had burned down the national hospital in the city, causing a great number of casualties, and had then used civilians as human shields. Syria is experiencing “a slow descent into hell,” Archbishop Mario Zenari, Apostolic Nuncio to Damascus, declared on June 12. “The country is running the risk of an explosion of hatred between opposing factions that will last for decades,” the representative of the Holy See explained to the Catholic press agency AsiaNews in Rome. News of massacres, torture, and violence is re-echoed by the media throughout the world, he stressed, with the risk of “exploitation by the two parties in conflict.” The international community and the UN must do everything in their power to defend these innocent victims, who are exploited both by the regime and by the rebels. Unfortunately, he added, “besides the war on the ground, a media 71 Church and World war is unfolding in which one no longer knows whom to believe.” For Archbishop Zenari, “the international community and the Christian countries must not isolate Syria. To support the conflict between the regime and the rebels is dangerous and counterproductive.” On June 21, Abp. Antoine Audo, Archbishop of Aleppo, explained to the agency I.media: “From outside, the West is always worried about wars of religion. There is nothing against the Christians as such, as some would have us think. No, there may be extremist elements, but the problem in Syria is a denominational problem, between a Muslim majority and a Muslim minority that are in conflict. Nevertheless, when there are situations of violence and anarchy, it is always the Christian minorities that pay the price. For they do not have militias and do not want to be armed.” (Sources: apic/asianews/fides/imedia – DICI, No. 258, July 20, 2012) Vatileaks: The first report of the investigation soon to be delivered to the Pope Arrested on May 23 in possession of confidential documents from the private correspondence of the pope, Paolo Gabriele is still being detained in a security room at the headquarters of the Vatican Police. The Vatican court will probably decide in early August whether it intends to try the former valet of the pope. The trial would not take place before October. Until then Paolo Gabriele could be placed under house arrest until the conclusion of the discovery phase, as his two lawyers have already requested, since his residence is situated within the walls of the Vatican. Accused of “aggravated theft” of private correspondence, he could be sentenced to between one and six years of prison. The pope can also decide to pardon him. He could also be released without charges. Without revealing its conclusion, the Vatican confirmed that the two internal investigations currently being pursued were about to conclude. 72 The Angelus July - August 2012 As for the one conducted by the Vatican court, the judge Pierre Antonio Bonnet needs to evaluate the personal responsibility of the former employee of the pope and dozen persons; the hearings are coming to an end and the work of composing an initial report is underway. The investigatory commission will be received in the to uncover possible conspiracies. This search for possible accomplices is the chief aim of the second investigation, entrusted since March to three experienced cardinals (Herranz, Tomko and De Giorgi). They have already listened to the testimony of several near future by the pope at Castel Gandolfo. The latter would then have more certain information about the extent of the “plot” aimed against him, insofar as its existence can be proved. The Supreme Pontiff, moreover, has reaffirmed his confidence in his Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in a letter dated July 2, 2012. In it he communicates his deep gratitude toward Cardinal Bertone for his “discreet close working relationship” and his “enlightened counsels.” They have been “particularly helpful during these past months,” according to the letter that was made public on July 4 by the Press Office of the Holy See. Whereas the Secretary of State of the Holy See found himself under fire from critics in this affair, which has been dubbed “Vatileaks” by the press, many observers predicted the departure of the Italian prelate next autumn, on the eve of his 78th birthday. With this letter it seems clear that Benedict XVI wished to put an end to these rumors about dismissal. (Sources: Apic/Imedia/Le Figaro – DICI, No. 258, July 20, 2012) Switzerland: The major seminary in Basel has become too large! The Seminary of Saint-Beat in Lucerne, which has been open since 1878 for candidates to the priesthood, not far from the Hofkirche in Lucerne, has become too large for the present needs of the Diocese of Basel. The 80 rooms of the building constructed by the local architect Walter Rüssli in 1972 were at that time all occupied by seminarians; presently residing there are 3 candidates for the priesthood, 19 theology students and 15 other students. The Diocese of Basel, which owns the building, will decide in the fall the future of the seminary. The current use of the building—including the renting of rooms not occupied by the seminary— will continue until the summer of 2013, the rector Thomas Ruckstuhl explained. All options for the future of the seminary are being studied, with a view to submitting them to the Bishop of Basel. Maintenance costs for the building amount to around 2 million Swiss francs per year. Half of the expenses are covered by rent collected on rooms and halls, 20 percent by collections, and 30 percent, or about 600,000 Swiss francs per year, is paid by the diocese. The Swiss Institute for Pastoral Sociology published in 2011 a study entitled Diocesan Priests in Switzerland: Prognostications, interpretations, perspectives (cf. DICI, No. 249, February 3, 2012). The volume shows that in Switzerland the number of diocesan priests was 2,877 in 1970, as opposed to 1,441 in 2009. “Priestly ordinations and the deaths of diocesan priests are without any doubt the two main factors influencing the trend in the number of diocesan priests in the dioceses. Over the last ten years 143 priestly ordinations were recorded in Switzerland and more than 500 deaths of diocesan priests. In other words, three times as many priests are dying than those who are being ordained,” the authors of the study explain. Since 1991 they have observed a decrease of a little more than 30 percent in the number of diocesan priests, whereby the decline has been particularly noticeable in the Dioceses of Basel, Sion, and Saint-Gall. On June 10, 2012, Bishop Felix Gmür of Basel ordained two new priests for the entire diocese. (Sources : apic/priesterseminar/spi – DICI, No. 258, July 20, 2012) 73 Church and World Senegal: Unrest after the breakthrough of Islamists in the legislative elections During the legislative elections on July 1 in Senegal, the coalitions of Islamist political parties won around a dozen seats. Although almost 90 percent of the country’s population is Muslim, these results surprised political observers. The day after the elections, the sociologist Mamadou Moustapha Wone made a connection between the breakthrough of Muslim religious and the “failure of the traditional political class.” For, he wrote in the Senegalese daily newspaper Wal fadjri, “the traditional politicians have accustomed the Senegalese to doubletalk.” In a commentary entitled “Should we fear the Islamist breakthrough in Sunday’s legislative ballot?” the Senegalese online newspaper ledakarois. net pointed out that with the entry of religious into Parliament “the worst is to be feared…. Why this rediscovery of interest for religion? Are we headed for a ‘theocratization’ of the legislative chamber or simply toward a democracy strongly tinged with religiosity? Or are the Senegalese just searching for a new ideological orientation?” These are the questions asked by the newspaper in Dakar. (Source : Apic – DICI, No.258, July 20, 2012) France: Only 15 priests for a whole diocese Dici — A survey conducted in the Diocese of Moulins on October 1-2, 2011, during the 92 Masses celebrated on Saturday evening and Sunday, reveals that 71 percent of the faithful are women, 60 percent are over 60 years of age, and that the lack of priestly ordinations should lead 74 The Angelus July - August 2012 to a precipitous fall in the number of priests in the years to come: soon there will be only fifteen or so left to carry out parish ministry. These disturbing statistics are accompanied by other alarming predictions: a deficit of 500,000 Euros in 2015, a decrease of 40 to 50 percent in the number of faithful in the next 15 years, and only 2.2 percent of the population attending church…. This survey in the form of an audit was requested by Bishop Pascal Roland, the ordinary of Moulins, who faces every day the repurposing of church buildings in his diocese and financial problems. “There were things that we suspected might happen,” he explains. “We have not made ends meet for several years now. And what is happening here is just like what is happening in the rest of the department [administrative district in France]. The renewal of the Church is experiencing a break in the transmission. This is a challenge for us all!” “We are confronted with our reality,” the spokesman of the diocese, Fr. Michel Saint-Gérand, went on to say. “We have some potential for setting things right, particularly by functioning differently. We must also get back in contact with the population.” (Sources : Le Point – DICI, No. 258, July 20, 2012) Si Si No No Death in a Technological Age By Professor Matteo D’Amico It is the destiny of every spiritually impoverished age to be no longer able to understand death; to let it drop off the cultural horizon; to lose the words, notions, and values that alone render it comprehensible and that make it possible to die like a human being; to think about it when we think about life in all its depth. At the same time, the obscuring of a right understanding of death and its banalization—which is just another way to forget about it— are the best ways to lead a civilization into barbarism. And at the risk of exaggeration or over-simplification, one might even say that barbarism consists precisely and essentially in the abolition of the idea of death. Anthropologists teach that civilization is founded on two elements: marriage ceremonies and funeral rites. Where these two institutions are lacking, civilization cannot be said to exist; it is not perchance that these two customs occur or disappear together. Today, indeed, the deteriorating condition of marriage (escalating divorce rates, increased cohabitation, childless unions, and marriage deferred) is accompanied by a serious attack on the idea of death that characterized two millennia of Christian civilization. Marriage has always regulated the union of man and woman, even in the most ancient pre-Christian civilizations, and was accompanied by severe penalties for adultery or sexual relations without marriage. And every age in which the institution of marriage was in crisis, as in the late Roman Empire, has also been an era of political and social decadence. The sexual side of man’s being is the most obvious manifestation of his belonging to the natural world; it represents a dimension of man’s life which, were it to be exempted from a moral code and social recognition, in other words if it should escape the rule of reason, it would approximate man to the beasts and nearly make him one. The fact that sexual relations are impermissible outside marriage is a natural law, and that is why even the most backward pagans have always held in high esteem the rite instituting a new marital union. This rite also always had a religious, and not only civic or social, signification: it was an act made before God, and not only before men. It cannot be by chance if, beside marriage, burial itself and the particular honors paid to the deceased and their tombs are a fundamental aspect of an authentically human society. The tomb, the place in which a body is buried, sometimes only a simple pile of stones, is 75 Si Si No No the original sacred space. It is a place that has always been held as intimately religious, a bridge of contact and of passage between the terrestrial realm and the transcendent sphere of the spiritual and divine, the underworld. Religious respect for the dead, characteristic of prehistoric societies, should not be considered superstitious or elementary or infantile: on the contrary, the most ancient peoples, who have left no written record of themselves, who were backward as regards technical development and the exterior signs of civilization, were nonetheless closer to the original revelation transmitted by Adam to his direct descendants, and they were thus capable of rendering to God worship much deeper and purer than that of the peoples who succeeded them and who quickly slid into idolatry and polytheism. What is the deepest, most hidden connection between these two dimensions—marriage and respect for the dead? Marriage, whence new life comes, as an institution the existence of which excludes the licitness of sexual acts outside it, reminds us that man is a spiritual subject, that he is not simply an element of nature because he is able to resist his urges. A society in which marriage is honored and respected in hearts and defended by law is a society more inherently spiritual than one not founded upon profound respect for marriage. The same reasoning applies to burial of the dead: it bears continuous witness to belief in the spiritual nature of man and thus points to the notion of the survival of the soul after death. It is not by chance that the idea of death has been attacked culturally by all the materialist schools of thought, from the atomism of Antiquity with Epicurus’s denial of any ontological density to the human soul and therefore his attempt to prove the folly of the fear of death in one of the key passages of his Tetrapharmakon, to the materialism of Enlightenment thinkers and the materialist tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries, with Sartre’s rehashing in his Being and Nothing the classic arguments of the earlier materialist tradition. The materialist negation of the essential importance of death is always reduced to the famous Epicurean maxim: “When we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not,” a fallacious argument because it forgets that what cannot but anguish even a materialist thinking upon his own death is not the moment of bodily death but the idea of irrevocably ceasing to exist, the idea of ending in nothingness. Naturally, Antiquity also bequeathed us the Pythagorico-Platonic tradition, which educated the Greeks and Romans to think of death as liberation from 76 The Angelus July - August 2012 the body and the passions, and as the beginning of a superior life of union with the divine. It is in the wake of the traditional image of the philosopher as positive about death, that is to say, as someone who is up to the task of demonstrating (the first to do so was Socrates as protagonist of Plato’s Socratic Apology) that death is a destiny preferable to life, given the blessed life of pure contemplation and of intellectual knowledge that awaits those who have led an upright, just life devoted to the quest for knowledge and the warfare against the passions that agitate the soul. Death and the Masonic Strategy During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Freemasonry, which behind a mask of deism open to every religious sensibility manifested itself on the practical level and in morals as impudent hedonism, fought against the Christian vision of death, first of all with the French Revolution and Napoleon, by attacking traditional cemeteries and by ordering their relocation at a distance from residential areas, then by promoting the practice of the cremation of the deceased in open contempt of the Christian dogma of the resurrection of the body. It is not useless, in this regard, to recall that the Church until Vatican Council II strictly forbade cremation, going so far as to excommunicate Catholics who practiced it in contempt of the decisions of the supreme teaching authority and of Catholic dogma. In any event it should not be forgotten that the propagation of cremation coupled with the movement for the abolition of the death penalty, still constitutes today one of the war horses of Freemasonry, which sometimes hides its activity behind front groups. Death in Christianitas Death and its cultural representation were fashioned in the Occident by the Christian faith, and until the nineteenth century it may be said that, with some slight variations, there was a constant and homogeneous reading of this phenomenon: it marks the dies natalis of the saints, the beginning of true life, the fateful and decisive moment of the meeting with God and the particular judgment, the last chance for conversion and repentance. The circumstances in which agony and death are normally undergone, the place and the persons involved in particular, reveal a precise hierarchy of values. First of all, a person most often died at home, surrounded by his family and dear ones. The approach of death was not hidden, as if it involved something shameful, but was part of a family rite, so to speak, that provided for meetings and visits with friends and neighbors, last recommendations, prayers in common—recitation of the rosary especially—in general a vital participation in a sad event. The most awaited and important figure was not the doctor but the priest, sometimes the old curate who had baptized the dying person and administered the sacraments to him his whole life. The last meeting with the priest is the decisive event, the moment of receiving extreme unction and for the last time, after confession, Holy Communion, veritable viaticum for a good death. “To die fortified with the sacraments” is the most important thing, the one decisive thing for the simple but solid wisdom of the people. At this moment, truly, great and small, nobles and peasants, rich and poor are completely equal. Every distinction disappears and loses its meaning, as shown in the famous “Triumph of Death” tableaux of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance on which great influence was exerted by, among other things, the tragedy of the great plague of the fourteenth century. When anyone received news of another’s death, the first question that came spontaneously was to learn if the person had died “with the sacraments,” that is to say, having repented and been reconciled with God. Notes by the young Giacomo Leopardi have come down to us in which he recalls that his mother, a woman of a profound, stern religious disposition had a habit of asking this question as soon as she received news of anyone’s death. The possibility of receiving the sacraments is also implicit in the invocation “A morte improvisa, libera nos, Domine,” which demonstrates that what was considered as the greatest danger was to find one’s self in the impossibility of approaching the sacraments before going before the Lord. In every historical phase of Christianitas, the presence of a physician at the side of the dying is foreseen, when economic and social circumstances allow, but his role is never the decisive one, and his personage is never the most important. Quite often the doctor’s most important duty, rather than treating a patient in the sense of “applying remedies or giving medications” (medieval medicine was of a traditional nature and was based on the use of bleeding or purgatives, therapeutic practices that have no place at the approach of death) was to observe and record the different phases of agony and to signal the arrival of the fateful moment at which it could be said with certitude that only a few hours or minutes remained of life, that is, that death was certainly imminent. It is of this kind of domestic death, experienced collectively by the extended family, that countless artistic, pictorial, and literary accounts have come down to us. It is almost a “topos” to read the last words of famous persons uttered on their deathbed, words that could be gathered precisely because one did not die alone, abandoned on an austere hospital bed, but rather passed away in the midst of one’s dear ones and supported by their ministrations. Even when, in particular during the 18th century, the system of public health began to be institutionalized, with large hospitals located in the larger cities (France counted about 2,000 before the Revolution), the personnel essentially consisted of members of religious orders that came into being over the years for the purpose of caring for the sick and dying, and the climate in which one approached death was profoundly religious. But there is a still more important notion: sickness and the suffering connected with it, long periods of confinement to bed, the treatments and operations, often very painful (let us not forget that anesthesia was introduced relatively recently, during the 19th century), and finally the anguish of agony and death were all lived within a profoundly religious horizon so deeply rooted that hospitalization did not result in the dehumanization of sickness and the sick. The Christian Ethos and the Problem of Death The Christian ethos, fundamentally like that of every great civilization, even if it is at an infinitely deeper and loftier level, is an ethos of death: a civilization is a relationship with death, a response, the highest possible, to the existential scandal of death. We could define religion—every religion, fundamentally—as a way to be able to advance toward death without despair. But no response reaches the height of the Christian answer, in which death itself may become a sacrifice offered to God, a very pure act of love, an occasion of entire surrender to His will. Death then is not something passively submitted to, an obscure reality that hovers threateningly, against which superstitious refuges are sought, but the occasion for an elevation of will and heart in a total gift of self. Death, which on a human level signifies the most serious and most irremediable abandonment and powerlessness, becomes for the Christian a supremely active moment in which is possible the 77 Si Si No No deepest and most sublime deed of love possible: that of a self-offering in the midst of the torments of agony, nailed by unspeakable pain, broken in the most intimate region of our existence, which ends. Only the religion of God made man, of the Word incarnate; only the religion that adores Christ crucified can found a spirituality of death so lofty and luminous. An exemplary passage written by a 17th-century Jesuit, Jean-Baptiste Saint-Jure, can help us comprehend what may be the consideration of death from the perspective of a radically lived Christianity: “We ought to carry our conformity to God’s will to the point of accepting our death. That we shall die is a decree against which there is no appeal. We shall die on the day and at the hour and in the manner that God decides, and it is this particular death we should accept, because it is the one most becoming His glory. One day when St. Gertrude was climbing a hill she slipped and fell down to the bottom. She was unhurt and began to climb up again saying: ‘What great happiness it would have been for me, O Lord, if this fall had been the means of bringing me sooner to thee!’ Her companions asked her if she was not afraid of dying without receiving the last sacraments. ‘I would certainly wish with all my heart to receive them in my last moments,’ she answered, ‘but I much prefer the will of God, for I am sure the best disposition for a good death is submission to His will. So I desire only the death by which He wishes me to come to Him, and I am confident that in whatever way I die, His mercy will not fail me.’ Even more, it is the teaching of great masters of the spiritual life that a person who, at the point of death, makes an act of perfect conformity to the will of God will be delivered not only from hell but also from purgatory, even if he has committed all the sins in the world. ‘The reason,’ says St. Alphonsus, ‘is that he who accepts death with perfect resignation acquires similar merit to that of a martyr who has voluntarily given his life for Christ, and even amid the greatest sufferings he will die happily and joyfully.’”1 Death and Finitude But in order to understand how death in the ages before the twentieth century and the era of secularization depended intimately on the conditions of life in general and not only on faith as such, a few considerations bordering on the domain of philosophical anthropology are in order. Death in our life is an element and the supreme 78 The Angelus July - August 2012 sign of necessity; it manifests as does no other dimension our finitude. Consequently it will be more welcomed as a part of life, more accepted in its painful reality, as life itself will have been lived in its totality and in each of its parts or each of its ages sunk in the element of necessity. An 18th-century peasant, for example, was habituated from earliest childhood to help his father with work in the fields, subject to severe domestic discipline, brought up accustomed to unremitting fatigue and hard, work, conscious from his earliest memories that food must be wrested from the earth and that it is uncertain and precarious; aware that drought or frost can destroy a harvest any minute, and therefore was accustomed to see in his daily bread the greatest of benefits and in the smell of a loaf of bread a foretaste of paradise. Such a man is long accustomed by the gravity which poverty alone imparts to a man. This gravity is expressed by a deep, primordial silence that also mysteriously underlies his speech, song, laughter, and mirth; a silence that is the unique horizon from which beauty can emerge or be contemplated. The adage that whoever has really contemplated beauty is vowed to death can also and perhaps ought to be reversed: Only someone who is absolute for death can contemplate beauty. What other explanation is there for the Gothic cathedrals, Giotto, Bellini, Tintoretto, Carpaccio, Caravaggio? The gravity of men in the age of Christianitas which we have tried to evoke in its principle traits, comes finally from the fact that he has always been besieged by the concrete possibility of dying. The average existence in every past age (even in non-Christianized societies) was marked by limit and by necessity: life was not perceived nor envisioned by anyone as a kaleidoscopic jumble of possibilities and rights, but of pressing duties, obligations, and existential difficulties escape from which was not even imaginable. But it is precisely life’s hard grip on the individual, the weight that presses down on him like an almost palpable and physically threatening reality, that liberated him and inserted him into an order transparently limpid, rendering even the least important gestures and acts grave, consistent, and full of a savor that only indigence and the primacy of duty and limit can bring forth. In these lives, already so luminously marked by limit and necessity, death had its place almost naturally. There was no need to hide it or veil it; no one was ashamed of it. It appeared and it was understood only as the greatest of limits, the most implacable of neces- sities. And in fact, all the other limits and sufferings exist because death exists: even the least pain, the slightest fever hints of the possibility of our death. The contrast between the omnipresent ease and comfort, the lack of weight and gravity in the lives of men today and the limitations on the lives of the men of every other age was understood and described in an exemplary fashion by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset in his great work, The Revolt of the Masses: “What appearance did life present to that multitudinous man who in ever-increasing abundance the XIXth Century kept producing? To start with, an appearance of universal material ease. Never had the average man been able to solve his economic problem with greater facility….That is to say, in all its primary and decisive aspects, life presented itself to the new man as exempt from restrictions. The realisation of this fact and of its importance becomes immediate when we remember that such a freedom of existence was entirely lacking to the common men of the past. On the contrary, for them life was a burdensome destiny, economically and physically. From birth, existence meant to them an accumulation of impediments which they were obliged to suffer, without possible solution other than to adapt themselves to them, to settle down in the narrow space they left available….Previously even for the rich and powerful, the world was a place of poverty, difficulty and danger. The world which surrounds the new man from his birth does not compel him to limit himself in any fashion, it sets up no veto in opposition to him; on the contrary, it incites his appetite, which in principle can increase indefinitely.”2 The man of Christian tradition does not live life and death with the same gravity because he is more profoundly tied to Christian faith, but he is on the contrary capable of a more authentic and intense religious fervor because he originally had a deeper and truer connection with life and death. So while it is true that religious faith also fashions over the centuries a new way of conceiving death and its meaning, the reverse of this statement should be borne in mind too: it is the connection with life and death that produces a type of human being apt to receive and understand the gospel tidings. That is why sometimes the lowliest, poorest, and even illiterate people of the Third World readily grasp the message adventurously brought by a missionary, while in the evolved West, streaming with well-being, the catechists have a hard time conveying even the simplest doctrinal truths or maintaining religious practice after Confirmation. Death in the Secular Age In comparison with the previous scenario of pre-industrial Western civilization, which lasted in rural areas until the end of the nineteenth century and sometimes till the beginning of the twentieth, significant fractures in the socio-economic and cultural edifice appeared which had tremendous impact on the representation of the meaning of death. The mass civilization of the 20th century, especially of the second half, was characterized by the phenomenon of advancing secularization, that is, the disappearance of traditional religious values, and in the Catholic countries especially after the Second Vatican Council, by a crisis of religious practice. Many of the pious practices that shaped the life of Catholic people died out or were hollowed out: the sacraments fell into disuse, religious vocations collapsed in proportion to regular attendance at Sunday Mass. The traditional family also experienced a crisis, from the onslaught of pornography, contraception, divorce, and abortion; the number of children in families fell to one or at most two in the nuclear family. From the 1960s, mass culture was increasingly marked by a spirit of consumption, which gradually eroded and undermined traditional moral and spiritual values and identities to the point of rendering them “incorrect” and subject to an implacable cultural condemnation. Into this scenario of advanced decadence, the anarcho-libertarian and communist revolution of 1968, coupled with the irruption of unbridled vulgarity brought by television and popular music, defined the frontiers of a veritable anthropological subversion, at the center of which was the manipulation of the feminine ideal. The change agents brought about gradually the passage from a culture of duty and sacrifice to a culture of rights and pleasure in which the primacy is given to the individual’s quest for “happiness” in a context totally disconnected from any ethical or spiritual normative dimension. Among the major causes of this violent process of secularization, a veritable silent apostasy of Christianity, is to be found the arrival of what has been called “the Age of Technology.” The characteristic signs of this age are the increasing bureaucratization of relations between government and citizen, the anonymity and impersonalism of professional and social relationships, the industrialization of everything, including cultural products and amusements, the disappearance of the idea that a man has a destiny to keep and a fundamental duty to carry out: “The comic exists wherever life has no 79 Si Si No No basis of inevitableness on which a stand is taken without reserves. The mass-man will not plant his foot on the immovably firm ground of his destiny, he prefers a fictitious existence suspended in air. Hence, never as now have we had these lives without substance or root—déracinés3 from their own destiny—which let themselves float on the lightest current.…”4 The Age of Technology is also the age of a Weberian disenchantment of the world, an age which, thanks to the dizzying progress of science, results in a rationalization of both economic and social life, in which the quest for meaning is abandoned in order to concentrate on means. In this instrumentalist vision of life, the ultimate questions no longer concern the finality of things, but the best means to reach them. Naturally, this disenchantment of the world restricts the religious representation of existence to the ghetto of the irrational, of the private, of the sphere of subjective sentiment, and prevents, or at least makes it more difficult for the individual to believe fully, by the detachment of his own religious representation of the meaning of life from the dominant collective ethos—skeptical, materialistic, hedonistic, and in fact radically opposed to any idea of transcendence. The average believer, apart from the heroism of which the individual is always capable, is forced into the position of someone who “believes that he believes”: faith ceases to be the true inspiration of life and the last word on the most decisive questions. Medicalization and Death The world’s disenchantment, or its secularization, the process of suppressing the religious meaning at the heart of life and of the transformation of the faith into something ever more tenuous and marginal in everyday existence, also finds its origin in the advancing process of the medicalization of life which the Western world has known throughout the 20th century. Indeed, it was during the 20th century that governmental control of functions once exercised most often by the Church— education and health, principally—reached its apex. Medicalization (masterfully studied in the 1960s by Ivan Illich in his famous Medical Nemesis) confiscates every moment of life, renders it pathological (as, for instance, pregnancy and childbirth), subjects it to ever more intensive, invasive, and continual check-ups and testing, nourishing an illusion of the omnipotence of medical practice over suffering, sickness, and finally death. Modern medicine, in its approach to pain and suffering, develops a kind of implicit anti-catechism: the medi- 80 The Angelus July - August 2012 cal conditions afflicting men, bad health are no longer integrated into the traditional framework of values like mortification, resignation, offering up to the Lord, surrender to divine Providence. The paradox is, then, that it is the technological and therapeutic power deployed by modern authorities of a “totalitarian” public health system that prevents the acceptance of the maladies that befall mortal men, and render their progression or incurability absurd, leaving people feeling betrayed and ultimately prey to a secret despair. The doctors, formerly the honest observers of disease’s progress, are now perceived as wizards endowed with secret, arcane knowledge and are practically elevated in people’s lives to the rank of hieratic, priestly personages whose function far exceeds that of mere technicians who assure the evaluation of specific physiological and pathological phenomena. The extraordinary and unprecedented importance of the medical corps in developed Western societies finds its explanation in such considerations. If the horizon of the hope of a “happy life” is limited to terrestrial life; if the Christian eschaton, that is to say, salvation, is thought to be immanent, as accessible in time, in history, and not beyond the here and now; as accessible thanks to our continual engagement in completely secular, self-redemptive practices, then medical science will inevitably enjoy the role of the central axis of this new mass ideology. We find ourselves before a doubly reductive process: life is reduced to terrestrial life (to the point that the adjective terrestrial itself loses its meaning, which only exists in the full sense when placed in parallel with the notion of an “ultra-terrestrial” life, the object of Christian faith and hope), and terrestrial life is reduced, in the last analysis, to the possession of a healthy young body, capable of being the receptor of the greatest quantity possible of pleasures and experiences. In this anthropocentric and somatolatrous perspective, the traditional Christian distinction between sin and virtue is replaced by the distinction between health and sickness. The dramatic tension between salvation and damnation is replaced by that between life and death understood biologically. “Salvation” coincides with being alive and in good health: it is salvation already achieved and already haunted by despair, which lasts as long as life: it is a finite salvation. In this degraded, neopagan moral and spiritual context, old age becomes unthinkable and unimaginable: the fact of aging is secretly perceived by all as a fault, as something that should be hidden or disguised as long as possible, as a subject of irony, and however that may be as an unacceptable fact. The old person is no longer honored and respected, and becomes scarcely tolerated. The key dimension is the present, an instantaneous present, disconnected, incapable of bearing within it the weight of history. If this life is all there is (and this is the secret article of faith even of those who “believe they believe”) and is not the expectation of any redemption lying beyond the horizon of a fluid and punctiform temporality, death becomes absurd; it becomes an event deprived of any meaning or intelligibility: a mute horror, an opaque, gelatinous specter that awaits us with its apocalyptic meaninglessness. Denial of Death But if death has no meaning, strategies must be found to deny it, to conceal its horror. Behold the totality of practices established to this end, and which become more and more streamlined: on one hand, the medicalization of sickness and death, a process that implies relentless therapeutics (which is the inevitable result of medicalization). In this context, death is attacked by replacing the representation of its possibility with the representation of incessant medical interventions that can push back, even if only a little, the threshold of death itself. The possible prolongation of life is substituted for possible death: death is lived at the end, even when it is very near, as improbable, as if, in any case, it should be regarded when it does come as a farce of destiny and not as a fact as natural as it is certain and inevitable. In other words, the most normal outlook, realist and natural, on the end of life (think of the wisdom of traditional medicine which culminated in the ability to foresee exactly how much time was left to live) has been reversed into an altered and unrealistic outlook, bearing in itself the seeds of a lucid folly, a look that seeks the opposite of what used to be asked of the doctor: to not hear that the person is dying, that there is no more hope, that only a few hours are left. The phenomenon of death is thus transfigured into a totally medical phenomenon, without any existential importance, to the point of being sublimated and dissolved in absurd therapies on bodies on the brink of agony. But agony itself, when the possibility of death has been denied, has also in its turn disappeared as such, completely absorbed in the pharmacological sedation of the patient, in intensive care, in pain therapy. In practice, since it is impossible to die, entrance into agony has also been made impossible: this last phase of life, this manly struggle, this last proof of courage, this face-to-face with death and with oneself which the great writers described with unparalleled finesse (think of Tolstoy’s description of the death of Prince Andrei in War and Peace) is rendered literally impossible by medicalization. If agony and death are henceforth existentially impossible, this is in large part because of hospitalization. We are so habituated to think that medicine and hospitals go together that we no longer think of the difference that exists between these two dimensions, which is enormous. The idea that the treatment of illnesses and death should occur in hospitals is of rather recent origin. In the Christian era, hospitals came about as a place in which to take care of persons without any other arrangements or without hearth or home, without anyone to take care of them: it was more a hospice than a hospital in the modern sense of the word. Historically, people died most often at home, encircled by one’s own, enriched especially by religious consolations, and maybe even with rosary in hand. In these conditions, it was possible to have an agony, to give an example, to die nobly, to teach without wishing to the children and young people and one’s own children, what it means to be a man. But today an almost absolute proscription weighs on the very idea that one should wish to die at home. Thus death comes at the hospital where the dying lie in rooms where other patients are laughing or blaspheming or watching television, in the midst of the daily barbarity of the indifference of doctors and nurses (exceptions apart), in rooms where the dying are subjected to examinations and visits, check-ups, encounters with strangers, the sounds of unfamiliar voices of people passing by in the corridors at all hours, in white, cold, anonymous rooms stuck with so many tubes like a guinea pig, attached to flasks of medicines hung on phantasmagorical metal trees. The hospital room—the place that should lend itself to recollection and silence— appears as a place the essence of which seems to be to impede any spiritual life, even the faintest glimmer thereof. The more death is assisted, the more it appears to be arid and desolating. The more powerful technology becomes and the greater blind trust in our oppressive medical technocracy grows, less and less room is left for what is authentically human. Finally one dies far from those who are nearest, our own, absurdly choosing—or better, constrained to 81 Si Si No No choose—to die among strangers, with no friendly ear to collect our last words, without even being able to say “I thirst” or “Give me your hand” to those who loved us our whole life. Euthanasia as Destiny The modern medicalized way of death creates a context in which death is an absurdity, and the dying are bereft of any moral or spiritual criteria by which to comprehend it; in this context euthanasia, the real subject behind the fable of the living will, is already emerging and will certainly become more prevalent. Euthanasia is the last act of the Masonic program that dominates our way of understanding public health (it should not be forgotten that one of the most heavily represented professions in the lodges is that of the doctor). In effect, since the current way of dying, so barbarous that no one notices it anymore, especially its victims, is completely obscene and yet is an even more obscene reminder that man must in any case die (the unbearable given in the final analysis for the godless); since it is still too strong a reminder that man is finite and that he is not all-powerful, death has to be replaced by something artificial, unnatural, by preventing it from striking without its formal subjection to the medical technology of deified man. To give oneself death, which 82 The Angelus July - August 2012 wherever euthanasia is introduced quickly becomes death administered by doctors to patients or to “lives unworthy of being lived,” is not a medical act, however unworthy it may be, but an atheistic exorcism: an attempt of the desperate, agonizing West, drugged by its liberal culture and by the dream of a right to happiness, to be liberated even from the memory of man’s mortality by the illusion of reducing it to a purely technical, and therefore controllable, phenomenon. Knowledge without charity topples into the Cainite reign of pure violence, that is to say, a violence that is ignorant of its own direction and its own goal, a smugly blind violence that no longer suffers from its own inanity, its own absolute emptiness, and its deafening nothingness. Matteo D’Amico is a professor of History and Philosophy. Translated from Quaderni di San Raffaele, No. 7, 2011. 1 Jean-Baptiste Saint-Jure, Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence. 2 José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.), pp. 55-56, 57-58. 3 In French in the original. 4 Ortega y Gasset, Revolt, p. 105. 425pp – Color Softcover – STK# 8481 – $29.95 The Pilgrim’s Guide to Rome’s Principal Churches A guided tour of fifty-one of the most important churches in Rome. Includes a history of each church, descriptions of the interior and exterior, a numbered floor plan, photographs, and details of the church’s spiritual, architectural, and artistic treasures. Whether you plan on visiting Rome and using this as a guide or reading it to learn about the “Eternal City,” this book offers the modern pilgrim essential information on the fifty-one most significant churches in the city. Special treatment is given to St. Peter’s Basilica, St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, St. Paul Outside-the-Walls, and St. Lawrence Outside-the-Walls. Joseph N. Tylenda, S.J., has spent a good part of his professional life in Rome. He earned a doctorate in theology from Rome’s Gregorian University in 1964 and taught at the same university from 1970 to 1973, while doing editorial work at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. He was appointed to Rome again in 1985 as a member of the Historical Institute of the Society of Jesus. www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. E-Books Angelus Press now offers E-Books! We're proud to bring some of our most popular Traditional Catholic titles regarding the Society of St. Pius X, Family Values, and more to the most popular E-Book format: The Kindle. Visit www.angeluspress.org/E-Books to order yours today! — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. 248pp – Color Softcover – STK# 8471 – $17.95 256pp – Softcover – STK# 6598 – $12.95 Catechism of the Crisis Integrity II Raising Your Children What can faithful Catholics do in the midst of an unprecedented crisis in the Church and in the world, and especially today in the midst of more blatant and open Christophobia? The first thing we have to do is understand the truths of the Catholic faith, and to understand the errors, both inside and outside the Church, which threaten that same Faith. This excellent work by Fr. Gaudron will help us to grasp the true roots of the modern crisis and the gravity of the problems affecting us. Originally published in order to both solidify our understanding of the principles behind the crisis and as an aid to help those who do not see the gravity of the current situation, this work follows the traditional catechetical format: Each question is followed by a succinct response, and then by a series of more detailed questions and answers that justify and elaborate the general answer. Raising children in the modern world is no easy task, and all too often we have recourse to methods or ideas that, though popular, may be at odds with the Church, or at least an integral Catholic life. Not so with this second volume from Integrity, the Catholic magazine that sought to bring the common sense of St. Thomas to everyday living. This book will help you better raise your children by examining the root cause of difficulties, the vocation of parents, generosity in marriage and parenting, teaching children how to pray, courtship, and much more. This work is sure to be an excellent help in raising integrally Catholic children. Who Are You, O Immaculata 249pp – Softcover – STK# 8234 – $12.95 There is no surer way to know, love, and serve God than through Mary. But do we truly know who she is? Do we truly give her the honor that is her due? In this excellent work, Fr. Karl Stehlin, SSPX, fully examines the privileged role of Our Lady in the order of salvation, and helps to more clearly answer the question: Who are you, O Immaculata? www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. Letters to the Editor Dear Angelus Press, There have been a lot of great and interesting articles in the issues of the “new” magazine this year. And while I love the various formats and regular features, I think someone has to address the elephant in the room. The Angelus is the magazine of the U.S. District of the Society of St. Pius X, and the Society has been in the middle of major discussions/events with Rome, and yet Angelus Press has yet to mention this one time! It just doesn’t make any sense. Can you explain this policy of silence on the part of The Angelus? Jason California Thank you for taking the time to send us a letter. Before I answer your question, I want to reiterate again that we are not only open to receiving Letters to the Editor, but we are truly happy when we receive them. As to your specific question, I think the first thing to point out is that Angelus Press has not attempted to avoid the issue of ongoing Rome-SSPX discussions, as is evidenced by the exclusive interviews we conducted with Fr. Rostand, the U.S. District Superior. There is certainly no “policy of silence” on the part of Angelus Press. But if that’s so, then why haven’t you read anything in the magazine about the ongoing discussions? There are two reasons why we have avoided putting information in the magazine surrounding this topic. First, news changes very quickly. If we attempted to put a news item in the magazine, it would be outdated before it even arrived at the printer. This situation is made more difficult by the fact that The Angelus is a bi-monthly magazine. It is becoming extremely difficult to offer news in a weekly journal; in a bi-monthly it is simply impossible. Since news is obviously out, why do we not offer commentary? The answer is related to the first. Even though our commentary would not necessarily change or become outdated, the event or information about which we would comment may have changed so drastically as to become irrelevant. And since our goal is to provide you with truly excellent Catholic content, we do not wish to go down this path. So, what do you do if you are looking for the Society’s official “take” on the ongoing discussions with Rome? The best place is to go to www.sspx.org for that information. Even better, you can simply subscribe and receive the updates in your e-mail at the same web page. We welcome all letters to the Editor. Please send us a note at editor@angeluspress.org. 86 The Angelus July - August 2012 The Last Word Dear Readers, The theological term “Incarnation” signifies that God, in the person of Jesus Christ, was born in the flesh and came into our world. Christ, when He embraced this union, never intended simply to conform himself to this fallen world; rather he sought to transform it, to elevate it. He came down from heaven in order to be the visible example of Christian perfection. Moreover, he himself became the sole way of eternal life. Only through incorporation in his Mystical Body can man be saved. Saint Thomas Aquinas thus rightly observed in the liturgy of Corpus Christi that “neither is there, nor ever was there, any nation so great, that has gods so nigh them, as our God is present with us, for the only begotten Son of God, wishing that we should be partakers of his divinity, assumed our nature and was made man that he might make men gods.” Christians, then, as true followers of Christ, must not despise this earthly life, must not fear it and flee it; instead, they should embrace it and seek to conform it in all things to the will of the Father. Faith in Christ gives Christians the strength to live fully in this world, yet still not be of it, to take on difficult tasks and responsibilities without being overwhelmed. Only a solid Catholic education, one guided unerringly by the principles of the Faith, can prepare our children to succeed in their various vocations. Proper education is thus essential. While the Church and even the State at times help provide education, responsibility for this task falls first and foremost to the parents. Parents, therefore, must train their children thoroughly, that is: physically, emotionally, intellectually, socially, and spiritually. Shortcomings in any of these categories are most often a result of negligent parenting. Parents should never consider themselves dispensed from educating their children, for this is the task God has specifically assigned to them. Parents must ensure, to the best of their abilities, that life at home, at school, in society, at Church, and even during leisure time, conforms to Christian perfection. As Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii explains, “Christian parents must understand that they are destined not only to propagate and preserve the human race on earth, indeed not only to educate any kind of worshippers of the true God, but children who are to become members of the Church of Christ, to raise up fellow-citizens of the Saints, and members of God’s household.” Solid, Catholic education thus requires heroic dedication. There is nothing more important in any parent’s life than this duty of education, first of themselves and then of their children. If we really love our children, if we really want the best for future generations, for our country, and for the Church, then we have to take our duty as educators seriously. Any carelessness in this task is, in God’s judgment, unacceptable. In Christo, Father Jürgen Wegner The Society of St. Pius X is an international priestly society of common life without vows, whose purpose is the priesthood and that which pertains to it. The main goal of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X is to preserve the Catholic faith in its fullness and purity, to teach its truths, and to diffuse its virtues. Authentic spiritual life, the sacraments, and the traditional liturgy are its primary means of bringing this life of grace to souls. The Angelus aims at forming the whole man: we aspire to help deepen your spiritual life, nourish your studies, understand the history of Christendom, and restore Christian culture in every aspect. $ 7.00 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: The Angelus, 480 McKenzie Street, Winnipeg, MB, R2W 5B9