Domestic Church
Dangers in Youth: Lessons from
St. Augustine’s Confessions
The Disqualified Father
Making the Home a Church Out East

July - August 2019

Train the mind of your children. Do not
give them wrong ideas or wrong reasons for
things; whatever their questions may be, do
not answer them with evasions or untrue
statements which their minds rarely accept;
but take occasion from them lovingly and
patiently to train their minds, which want only
to open to the truth and to grasp it with the
first ingenuous gropings of their reasoning
and reflective powers. Who can say what
many a genius may not owe to the prolonged
and trustful questionings of a childhood at the
home fireside!—Pope Pius XII

Stained-glass, Church of Saint Severin, Paris, Jesus and Little Children, jorisvo / Shutterstock.com

Letter
from the
Publisher
Dear Reader,
When the enemy army is besieging a city, the first thing the defenders need to protect are
the outside walls, and when these fall, then the bastions and if these give way, one takes refuge
into the citadel. And as long as the citadel is standing, however much they have accomplished,
the enemies cannot be said to be masters of the place.
This seems to be the sad illustration of the state of our present Church. At the turn of
the 21st Century, historians will recall this low ebb of faith and morals in a huge portion of
Christendom. The spirit of the world has entered by the breaches open from within the Church
walls. Treason has done its dirty work and the city of God is dangerously threatened. And now
that the enemy is within, the good Christians are hard pressed to distinguish right from wrong
and good from evil. The lines are no longer clearly drawn and it is the time for guerilla warfare
or individual skirmish. and given up the fight for Christ the King. And, supreme irony of the
modern-day movement: in the name of humanity, they wish to blur the lines between genders, parents and children and procreation. Yet, this Godless world is fast generating a hellish
world for modern man. Bastions of the Faith have capitulated to the liberals: the universities
firstly, then some Church leaders have been mesmerized by the sirens and given up the fight
for Christ the King. And, supreme irony of the modern-day movement: in the name of humanity, they wish to blur the lines between genders, parents, children, and procreation. Yet, this
Godless world is fast generating a hellish world for modern man.
Is anything safe anymore? Is the purity of the Gospel still found anywhere? These are valid
questions and we, little flock and inheritance of Archbishop Lefebvre, would be bold to pretend
to be the only and ultimate solution. Yet, though unworthy holders of “the traditions of our forefathers,” it is our privilege and pride to bring up high and strong the unchangeable principles of
faith and morals. These have been the foundations of Christianity which have brought about
the conversion of the pagan world of Rome. They have blossomed into the wonderful flowers of
sanctity and art and doctrine of the high Middle Ages. These have been maintained despite the
rough crises of the Renaissance and Protestantism, by the multiplication of the religious orders
and genuine saints faithful to the Church of All Times.
May this humble effort of rediscovering the Christian principles of the family, which we love
to call the Domestic church, prove useful to many a reader.
Fr. Jürgen Wegner
Publisher

July - August 2019
Volume XLII, Number 4
Publisher
Fr. Jürgen Wegner
Editor-in-Chief
Mr. James Vogel
Managing Editor
Fr. Dominique Bourmaud
Assistant Editor
Mr. Gabriel Sanchez
Associate Editor
Miss Jane Carver
Design and Layout
credo.creatie
(Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
Mr. Simon Townshend
Director of Operations
Mr. Brent Klaske

		
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Contents
Letter from the Publisher

4

Theme: Domestic Church
––Dangers in Youth: Lessons from St. Augustine’s Confessions
––The Disqualified Father
––Making the Home a Church Out East: On the Icon Corner
––Davanti a Questa
––Gender Theory

6
10
14
18
22

Spirituality
––The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: The Intermediary Chant
––A Father for Our Times
––The Family: A School of Sanctity
––Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin

28
32
36
40

Christian Culture
––The Sacred Heart Basilica of Paray-le-Monial
––April 15, 2019: A Tragic Day
––Yellow Vests, I Understand You, But…
––Patience in Education
––Keeping the Home Fires Burning

46
48
54
59
61

“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

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
PO Box 217, St. Marys, KS 66536.
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.
©2019 BY ANGELUS PRESS. OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE
PRIESTLY SOCIETY OF SAINT PIUS X FOR THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

––Priestly Ordinations 2019
––Questions and Answers

66
68

News from Tradition
––Church and World
––Catholic Political Hopes
––The Last Word

72
77
87

Theme Domestic Church

Dangers
in Youth:
Lessons from St. Augustine’s Confessions

By Andrew J. Clarendon

Although he is today a saint and one of the
greatest Fathers of the Church, St. Augustine
did not start out as such; in fact, he is one of the
most famous converts in history. Officially a
catechumen for some 30 years, it was only after
a long and torturous development aided by God’s
grace that the future Doctor of the Church was
able to overcome his doubts and finally become
a Catholic. About 10 years after his baptism
on Easter of 387, Augustine wrote the story of
his life from his birth in 354 to the death of his
mother St. Monica in the autumn of 387. Written
in Latin, the work is called Confessions, the first
autobiography. As a prolonged meditation and
prayer while recounting various chronological
events, the work is a three-fold confession: a
confession of praise of God, a confession of faith
as it deals with his conversion, and a confession
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of his past sins. Since the saint reviews his life
from the beginning, there are many lessons in
the work for parents and the youth, lessons that
are universally applicable to all. Augustine first
wishes to praise God for His mercy, but he also
explicitly states that he is telling about his sins so
that “I and all who read my words may realize the
depths from which we cry to you. Your ears will
surely listen to the cry of a penitent heart.” While
describing his youth, Augustine focuses on three
basic categories that led him into danger: delay
of baptism, poor educational methods, and bad
companions.

The Path to Baptism
In Augustine’s time and place, baptism was

commonly delayed; the thinking was that if the
person was baptized, he might still fall into sin
and be in a worse state than before. Enrolled
as a catechumen by his mother when young,
Augustine states that he was “blessed regularly
from birth with the sign of the Cross and was
seasoned with God’s salt.” While still a child, he
was once so ill that he was nearly baptized but
recovered before receiving the sacrament. His
comment gives the typical thinking of the time:
“So my washing in the waters of baptism was
postponed, in the surmise that, if I continued
to live, I should defile myself again with sin
and, after baptism, the guilt of pollution would
be greater and more dangerous.” As result, he
continues his life out of the state of grace and
with his sins still on his soul like the man who
stays in his illness, refusing a cure for fear that
he will get sick again. Understandably, Augustine
later became an influential defender of infant
baptism. It is also interesting that while the
old moral theology manuals state that baptism
cannot be delayed beyond a month or so without
serious sin, in some places today, baptism is
delayed for months or even years. Speaking of
the sacraments, although there is only a glancing
reference to Confirmation in Confessions, it is of
note that while many think of it as a sacrament
to be given to adolescents, moral theologians
such as Fr. Heribert Jone write that Confirmation
“should generally be received not long after
attaining the use of reason.” Writing before the
Second Vatican Council, Fr. Jone continues that
“great stress should be laid upon the reception of
this holy Sacrament by reason of the increased
paganizing influence of our times.” At least in a
large parish such as that of St. Mary’s, Kansas,
Confirmation is often given to third-graders,
precisely to give them as many graces as possible
before facing the teenage years. Augustine,
looking back on his youth, advises families to use
every spiritual means at their disposal to cleanse
the soul and keep it healthy: “and once my soul
has received its salvation, its safety should be left
in your keeping, since its salvation has come from
you.”

Paganism Still Dominant
Another danger Augustine describes involves
the educational methods and goals of his day.
Raised in North Africa before the collapse of
the Roman Empire, paganism still had a strong
hold on the area. As his native language was
Punic, Augustine look lessons in Latin—which
he enjoyed—and Greek—which he did not.
He criticizes his teachers, however, because
after learning grammar, instruction turned
to literature, especially the greatest poem in
Latin, Virgil’s Aeneid, which was taught without
a regard for objective truth. Although in The
City of God, Augustine praises Virgil as “this
most famous and approved of all the poets,” he
notes that as a boy the focus was on memorizing
Aeneas’ voyages and lamenting “the death of
Dido, who killed herself for love.” The point is
not that Catholics should stop reading literature,
pagan or otherwise; Augustine is no advocate
for ignorance disguised as a false purity. Rather,
the whole purpose of education is to cultivate
in the soul a love for the truth and so everything
should be taught with this aim in mind. The
reading of any work should be with an eye toward
supernatural realities; as Augustine puts it later
in Confessions “verses and poems can provide
real food for thought.” Among the Fathers of
the Church, the greatest apologia for literature
is the famous letter of St. Basil the Great to his
nephews in which he writes that Catholics “must
be conversant with poets, with historians, with
orators, indeed with all men who may further
our soul’s salvation.” To present false as true or
good as evil is the real problem: the distinctions
above help to account for Augustine’s remarks
on Virgil as well as the saint’s criticism of the
sensual and pagan theater of his day. The putative
goal of Augustine’s early education also draws
his criticism. As is common still today, parents
and teachers in the fourth century were much
more concerned about the student’s ability to
be materially successful than to grow in virtue.
In Confessions the point is made as Augustine
learns rhetoric: “A man who has learnt the
traditional rules of pronunciation, or teaches
them to others, gives greater scandal if he breaks
them…than if he breaks your rules and hates
another human.” Later Augustine criticizes his
7

father Patricius who worked hard to provide the
means for his son to go to school but “took no
trouble at all to see how I was growing in [God’s]
sight or whether I was chaste or not.” To put it
in other Augustinian terms, one’s education can
either focus on the world and pull one down or
inculcate love for the higher things, helping one
to ascend.

The Peril of Bad Companions
Perhaps even more influential than the
schoolroom, however, are one’s friends; the
third danger Augustine identifies from his
youth are bad companions that led him into
vice. St. John Bosco famously told his boys to
“fly from bad companions as from the bite of
a poisonous snake.” As with so many things in
his life Augustine learned this lesson the hard
way, experiencing what we would today call
peer pressure: “among my companions I was
ashamed to be less dissolute than they were. For
I heard them bragging of their depravity, and the
greater the sin the more they gloried in it, so that
I took pleasure in the same vices not only for the
enjoyment of what I did, but also for the applause
I won.” He confesses that “I used to pretend that
I had done things I had not done at all, because
I was afraid that innocence would be taken for
cowardice and chastity for weakness.” This
admission leads Augustine to tell the famous
story of how he stole pears from an orchard for
the pleasure of “the crime itself, from the thrill
of having partners in sin.” Admitting that he
had “wandered away…and created of myself a
barren waste,” Augustine goes on in Carthage,
“a hissing cauldron of lust,” to take a mistress,
have a child out of wedlock, and spend the next
15 years struggling to find and accept the truth.
While he celebrates, along with many others, the

joys of friendship as a “delightful bond, uniting
many souls into one”—and indeed goes on to
describe some close and holy friendships—the
false friends of his youth represent “friendship
of a mostly unfriendly sort,” for such love is a
disordered one, the Augustinian definition of sin
itself.

God’s Mercy Triumphs
While recounting these falls, the consoling
truth of God’s mercy is never far from the future
saint’s mind. Not only does God prevent him from
being worse than he was, but also Providence
is continuously working to lure his soul back to
Him. Looking back on his life, Augustine can see
how the Good Lord shaped events to help him
overcome his previous falls: “You follow close
behind the fugitive and recall us to yourself in
ways we cannot understand.” Various evils are
used by Providence to put Augustine in the path
of true friends, such as when his unruly students
in Rome lead him to go to Milan and meet St.
Ambrose. Appropriately, Augustine ends the
biographical part of Confessions by praising his
mother, St. Monica, who never ceased to pray and
sacrifice for her son until he converted. While
doing our best to defend our children from the
various dangers that can have a lifelong impact,
the example of St. Monica is, of course, another
aspect of parental duty. The strength of families
is in the grace of God, through the sacraments
and through the intercession of parents; as St.
Augustine says of his mother: “In the flesh she
brought me to birth in this world: in her heart she
brought to me birth in your eternal light.” May
it be that all parents and children “will be [St.
Monica and Augustine’s] fellow citizens in the
eternal Jerusalem for which [God’s] people sigh
throughout their pilgrimage.”

St. Augustine was born at Tagaste, on November 13, 354. Tagaste, about 60 miles from Bona (ancient Hippo-Regius), was a small
free city of proconsular Numidia which had converted from Donatism. Although respectable, his family was not rich, and his
father, Patricius, one of the curiales of the city, was still a pagan. However, the admirable virtues that made Monica the ideal of
Christian mothers at length brought her husband the grace of baptism and of a holy death, about the year 371.
Stained-glass window, Cathedral of Cologne, Germany

9

Theme Domestic Church

The
Disqualified
Father
by Philippe Labriolle, Psychiatrist

Practically speaking, compared to the woman, man is weak. Although modern legislation has
withdrawn the prerogatives of the father which were those given by Aristotle and St. Paul, this fragility
has always been present, not just in today’s world.

The Fragility of the Father
In order to demonstrate this, let us go back
to Genesis. Adam senses that something is
missing. The other animals which he has just
named cannot give him the proximity for which
he yearns. God hears him, that is to say, God
agrees that Adam is incomplete, and therefore,
he plunges him into a deep sleep and fashions
Eve from his side. The first couple is made from
the incomplete Adam whose complement, Eve,
will dominate over him. This is not an imaginary
situation; this is Revelation: it really happened
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this way! Analogically, man is fragile because
he ignores the complementary object which he
needs—the object of his searchings and of his
thoughts. This complement is capable of crushing
him or, on the contrary, of withdrawing from him.
This sounds abstract, but if we observe the
birth of an infant, we see that he is the most
vulnerable creature that can exist. He cannot
live independently; he is utterly ignorant.
And whoever is utterly ignorant is insecure,
incompetent, and prey to superstition. This is
the starting point from which he needs to grow
out of progressively in order to acquire maturity,

because a man is mature when he can ensure
his subsistence, make decisions, create his
livelihood, and transmit his spirit and wisdom.
Concretely, the mother is certain. Life begins in
her material body during what we call “the time
of fusion” (mother and fetus cohabitate without
confusion). The mother is certain, but the father
is always uncertain: he does not have specific
qualities by which the infant can identify him.
The Roman axiom said “pater semper incertus—
the father is always uncertain.” This creates
great social problems if such a designation is left
to the whim of anyone and, therefore, the Law
jumps over the material designation and says: the
father is the husband of the mother. Juridically
speaking, paternity is determined.
But, because he knows nothing, the infant
cannot make such a determination himself. He
can do only two things: cry and suck. The infant
is physically and sensibly united to the mother.
It is the mother who shows the father to the
child. This is what initiates the triple relation of
father, mother, and child. Of this father the child
knows nothing except through his mother. This
means that the father can be disqualified during
the pregnancy, in a State Court, or for an entire
lifetime. The masculine function has intrinsic
fragility. A father is in need of honors given to his
valor and, if not, he turns into a bum—a man who
has not matured.

The Function of the Father
In practice, this paternal function is anterior to
the infant. Biologically speaking, it is necessary
and superior to the competency of this new
life. It is thus that the child forms a conception
of the father: of reality that overwhelms and
dominates the child. The growth of the child
unfolds in a succession of mistakes and learning,
thanks to which, the child understands the need
for competent beings­—the need for those who
have brought him into the world. Paternity is
discovered in the context of words, comportment,
and of material needs.
At the same time, the paternal function is
what presents the world to the child. He who is
weaned from his father as an infant will have

many troubles ahead of him! The royal way of
education that transmits life dictates what will
be made of this little man, as it should be done
and done well. To Bernanos, it is clear that the
bad mother is she who is selfishly possessive of
her son while the father is absent. The virtuous
mother, however, is she who speaks about the
father and thereby supports his paternal function,
dead, elsewhere, or simply out to lunch. The
father whom the mother designates becomes a
personal resource for the child.
The man who is called to paternity has the
function of a guide and must account for the
talents he received and employs with regards to
his fatherhood. This father whom the child sees is
shown to him by his mother as the one who filled
her heart, who awakened fertility in her whereby
the father and mother have both profited. This
father is able to represent the heavenly Father
whom one does not see. Of course, paternity also
shows intermediaries, like the priest and the
king, because fertility is the image (metonimia)
of creation. The heavenly Father that we don’t
see takes a symbolic place in the life of the child
in which the visible father is the lieutenant. Here
is a symbolic construction which articulates
biology with the spiritual life. A good father can
store everything he has learned with a spirit of
submission saying: “I myself have received my
name from my father!”
We understand the necessity for development
(as harmonious as possible) in a fruitful home
with a mother who is always turned toward
the father when she seeks the direction she
should take. She does not feel like this is a
mortification or a cross; it is simply the order of
complementarity according to the spirit of St.
Paul and Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics,
Aristotle explains that the mother is further away
from logos than a man. By this, it is not to say
that the home is a “boxing ring” or that equality
inevitably creates rivalry. On the contrary,
Aristotle shows that complementarity creates
harmony.
Otherwise stated, the function of the father
is verbal. We manage existence with a code, the
code of language. Language and vocabulary is the
means to feel the present, past, and future, self
and others. The mother refers to the father and
11

Theme Domestic Church
must commit herself to the education of the child
in the religion and the language of the father.
This assures the maximum cohesion among the
cracks. It ensures an orderly matrix which is not
only maternal, but which includes also, and above
all, the father. The father is the ruler who was the
seducer (in the noble sense of the term) of the
mother and of mutual love. Both parties formally
engaged themselves in establishing the contexts
conducive to fertility and the duties toward each
other.

Disqualified by the Mother
I wanted to speak a little bit about the
disqualification of the father by the mother. A
mother that doesn’t understand the essential

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role of the father harms her sons because she
deprives them of the model and the guide that
they need, and she harms her daughters creating
the illusion that only the mother is necessary for
them. So, the mother, whose child was enclosed
in her body, continues to enclose her children in
a vision which brings them back to her womb. If,
as one sees even today in traditional circles, she
repeats the phrase of the grandmother of Charles
de Gaulle: “The Lord could have invented another
means of making women mothers.” And what do
we see? The best for these disgusted women is
that they remain unmarried. For them, man is a
necessary evil for the time that he does his job.
After which, he is discarded! But this is not the
Christian order or even the natural order. Within
marriage, man is the protector. Any woman who
does not want a “boss” must not get married.

In our present times, everything concurs to
disqualify the father, because the father can and
should, in each generation, gather together all
the powers inherent to his function. The father
who shows the child the invisible heavenly Father
upsets secular society. Such a father who shows
the child the logos of existence is someone who
is ready to defend his home, to defend his wife, to
defend his child against the dangers of the world.
The father is he who is capable of identifying the
enemy of his designs.
And here is the drama of our times. For once,
it is the Church that has ignored the father of
the family. Since Gaudium et Spes the Church
“has no enemy”! With such “peace at all cost,”
the Church never stops losing ground, which is
now occupied by the enemies of the Church. It is
necessary to speak of the enemy of the Church.
By nature, the father is the defender of his home;
this is his duty. In order to bring vitality to the
home, he needs to defend it against adversity.
The Christian father is a soldier of Christ who
engenders new soldiers of Christ! But what
does Democracy want to make of the soldiers of
Christ? It fears them! Because there is no longer
need of war, there is no longer need of that which
doesn’t “drop its weapons and bow” before the
democratic religion.
For my part as a psychiatrist, I can tell you
that a good marriage begins with a girl who is
proud to follow the type of man who will act as
the boss, the protector, and she will help him to
stay strong because a man is fragile, because
man dies.
He dies in war; he dies at the bottom of a mine
shaft, or he abandons home, or spends time at
the bar, or is subject to unemployment…if he
is wounded, he can no longer work, etc. Yes,
man is fragile. He is fragile in proportion to his
elevated responsibility. If a young lady seeks a
young man just for the little seed to throw the
man away afterwards, we are no longer speaking
of a Christian marriage and this will bring about
unhappy people. In practice, each time that
one does this, it will produce the same result.
Aristotle and St. Paul knew this because it is a
natural reality. A father who is not backed up by
the mother is in an unfortunate state, whether he
is a believer or not.

The Successful Couple
The father has a natural function. There are
many young couples who want to live their lives
well. What must they do so that their lives do not
end in divorce, abortion, contraception which we
see everywhere around us? Each generation is
capable of starting off on a good foundation. This
good foundation is not the privilege of Christians,
but is desired also by those who would like
to benefit from this wisdom in their temporal
affairs.
In practice, all young couples can begin upon
a good foundation, but they must be aware of
both the supports and obstacles. In my day,
at age seven, I walked alone in Paris and if I
was mischievous, any passerby would have
scolded me and said: “Stop it, or you will come
with me and we will go see your father!” The
cohesion of the adult world supported discipline,
and one could rely on the secular side, even
spontaneously to enforce it. Today, even among
those close to us, we have to justify the choices
that one makes. This creates insecurity and
doubt. The more that one is in a minority, the
more that one is in doubt about the way to follow.
Among other things, a man must feel
supported in his responsibilities. If one takes
things away from him, this is not helping him
to do his job for him, because, being a man, the
more that one divests him of his responsibilities,
the less he will accomplish. Because there is
already the current legal disqualification, the
ecclesiastical disqualification, and the mother
who disowns the father. And after that, he will
suffer from his own self-disqualification: “If I am
demobilized and don’t have any responsibilities,
then I am not legitimate.”
Therefore, I conclude and affirm once again
that a couple consists of two loving beings with
different and complementary functions. This
formula has worked in the past and it stills
continues to work today. Yet, given the present
critical situation, we must be aware not only of
the obstacles but also of the supports for family
life.
Translated from the French by Managing Editor
Fr. Bourmaud and Associate Editor Jane Carver.

13

Theme Domestic Church

Making the Home a Church Out East:

On the Icon
Corner
by Gabriel S. Sanchez

“The Sunday of Orthodoxy,” that is, the
First Sunday of Great Lent in the Byzantine
Rite celebrates the triumph of the Seventh
Ecumenical Council over the heresy of
iconoclasm. Unlike the Christian West, the
East had been ravaged for over a century by
theological, practical, and political disputes
over the use of icons in divine worship. With the
ascension of Leo III to the Eastern Rome throne
in 730 AD, the iconoclast movement spread
throughout the Byzantine Empire, inspired both
by genuine concerns over uninformed popular
worship of images and a series of natural
disasters seen as God’s punishment for idolatry
in the Empire. While the Second Council of
Nicaea held in 786-87, otherwise known as the
Seventh Ecumenical Council, vindicated the
veneration (not worship) of icons, it was not
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until 843 that icons were generally restored to
churches, public places, and private homes.
Today, it is all but impossible to travel to
historically Christian areas in Eastern Europe,
the Mediterranean, and the Middle East without
finding icons of Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary,
and innumerable saints adorning public and
private spaces alike. In churches that use the
Byzantine Rite, whether Catholic or Orthodox,
screens or walls known as iconostases are
erected in front of the altar area. Moreover,
many of these churches feature numerous
frescoes depicting Old Testament events, Our
Lord’s earthly ministry, and important points of
ecclesiastical history. Icons are so inextricably
bound-up with the Eastern Christian conception
of what a church is that making their homes into

little churches, that is, spaces where the Faith
can continue to be lived in full is inconceivable
without icons.

Icons in Everyday Life
Even before the era where digital printing
and reproduction methods made icons widely
available at a relatively low price, a veritable
cottage industry of icon production sprung up in
Eastern Christian lands to meet the demands of
the faithful. After the arrival of Christianity in
Kyivan-Rus’ (modern-day Ukraine and Belarus)
in or around 988 AD, it became increasingly
common for Slavic Christians in the area to
designate a corner of their homes for the family
icon, often of Our Lord or His Mother holding the
infant Jesus. Even without widespread literacy
or the dissemination of books, these icon corners
were where simple family prayers would be
recited and devotions such as the Sign of the
Cross and repetition of the Jesus Prayer (“Lord
Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a
sinner”) would be made.
Prior to the Russian ritual reforms instituted
by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in 1666, Russian
Christians would perform a pious rite of
entering and exiting a home by facing the icon
corner and performing a series of prayers and
prostrations. While this extensive devotion has
all but disappeared, Eastern Christians continue
to cross themselves whenever they pass an icon,
whether in church, the home, or even on the
street. In Greece, for example, roadside icon
stands are met with the Sign of the Cross from
drivers hoping that the saint they depict, be it
St. Nicholas the Wonderworker or St. George the
Martyr, see them safely to their destination.

The “Home Church” in
Eastern Christianity
Since the rise of Islam in the second-half of
the first millennium, Eastern Christians have
experienced waves of persecution that often
prevented them from practicing their Faith in
public. While periods of toleration did exist,

shifts in political conditions and religious
ideology within the Islamic world could result in
Christians enduring new rounds of violence. Due
to the intrinsically iconoclastic nature of Islam,
it was not uncommon for Christian churches to
have their icons defaced and/or be converted into
mosques. The most infamous example is that of
the great church of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia
(“Holy Wisdom”), which became a mosque for 500
years before secular sensibilities led to it being
turned into a museum.

Anti-Christian persecution took on an
intensified form in the 20th Century with the
growth of atheistic communism in Eastern
Europe. Greek Catholics, that is Eastern
Christians in communion with Rome who use
the Byzantine Rite, were especially targeted
by communist regimes. Their churches were
closed, their religious iconography and liturgical
adornments were either seized or destroyed, and
Greek Catholicism was outlawed. This situation
led to the birth of the so-called “underground
church” in places such as Ukraine where
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Theme Domestic Church
private homes became centers of Catholic
worship rather than formal church buildings.
Like their persecuted brethren in the Middle
East, many Eastern Christian families relied on
their icon corners as sources of consolation and
catalysts for devotion.

Establishing an Icon Corner
Although there is no fixed “rule” for how
an icon corner should be established, it is
commonplace to select a corner of the home
facing east. Why? Because according to
Byzantine architectural norms, church buildings
are to be constructed with the iconostasis and
altar fixed so the congregation and clergy face
east during all worship services. With the icon
corner established to the east, faithful Christians
praying in their homes can mirror the direction
and form of worship normative in the Byzantine
Rite. Moreover, the east also holds a place of
special significance in salvation history as
attested in Holy Scripture:
“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward
in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had
formed” (Gen. 2:8).
“O Jerusalem, look about thee toward the east,
and behold the joy that cometh unto thee from
God” (Bar. 4:36).
“Moreover the spirit lifted me up, and brought
me unto the east gate of the Lord’s house, which
looketh eastward” (Ez. 11:1).
“For as the lightning cometh out of the east,
and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the
coming of the Son of man be” (Mt. 24:27).
As for the structure of the icon corner, many
will install a shelf on which at least an icon
of Our Lord and His Most Pure Mother rests.
While it is praiseworthy for a Christian home to
have at least one hand-painted icon, this is not
always practicable. Thankfully, cost-effective
reproductions of some of Christian antiquity’s
most famous icons are readily available, as are
more recent iterations based on time-honored
models. Whether placed on a shelf or affixed
to wall, additional icons usually depict the
baptismal saints of the family members. It is also
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common for families to keep icons of saints and
festal days near and dear to them personally.
Once an icon corner has been established,
many families will either burn votive candles
in front of the icons during periods of prayer
or, more traditionally, using a freestanding
or hanging oil-burning lamp that is never
extinguished. This “everlasting flame” and
burning of oil serves as both a reminder of the
eternal Light of Christ and as an offering of faith
and love to God. Those families who have their
icon corners blessed by a priest, often annually
following the Feast of Theophany on January 6,
will use the lamp oil as a sacramental to bless
themselves following family prayers.

Not Just an Eastern Practice
Although the development and widespread
use of icon corners is historically an Eastern
Christian phenomenon, this devotion is not off
limits to Western Christians, particularly Latin
Catholics. Many traditional Latin Catholics, for
instance, enthrone the Sacred Heart of Jesus
in a designated place in their homes. While this
enthronement may not be in an eastern corner
of the home, it still serves as a focal point
for Christian prayer and devotion in Catholic
households. Accordingly, Latin Catholics can
adorn this special place in their homes with icons
to further aid them in prayer as they beseech
Our Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and all the
saints for the heavenly graces necessary to attain
salvation.
The purpose of icon corners is to assist in
directing hearts and minds to God. They are an
aid to prayer, not an end in themselves. Whether
a family has one icon or a dozen, it matters not.
What is most important is that the icon corner
brings families together to give thanks to the
Lord whose mercy endures forever. It is a place of
gathering, of consolation, and joy. Even in times
of hardship and persecution, icon corners serve
as a spiritual gateway to numerous graces and a
reminder that even in the darkest times, Christ
has not abandoned us.

Icon of Christ Pantocrator, P. Ovchinnikov, Moscow, ca. 1890

Theme Domestic Church

Davanti
a Questa
by Pope Pius XII

Address of Pope Pius XII to the Concourse of
Women of Italy’s Catholic Action (10/26/1941).
We are glad to have this opportunity of
speaking to you in a special way, dearly beloved
daughters, because We see in mothers, and in
their expert and pious helpers, those who exert
the earliest and the most intimate influence upon
the souls of little ones and upon their growth in
piety and virtue.

The Need for Serious
Preparation
It is a curious circumstance and, as Pope Pius
XI remarked in his Encyclical, a lamentable one,
that whereas no one would dream of suddenly
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becoming a mechanic or an engineer, a doctor
or a lawyer, without any apprenticeship or
preparation, yet every day there are numbers
of young men and women who marry without
having given an instant’s thought to preparing
themselves for the arduous work of educating
their children which awaits them. And yet, if St.
Gregory the Great could speak of the government
of souls as “the art of arts,” [Regula pastor., lib. I,
c. 1] surely no art is more difficult and strenuous
than that of fashioning the souls of children;
for those souls are so very tender, so easily
disfigured through some thoughtless influence
or wrong advice, so difficult to guide aright and
so lightly led astray, more susceptible than wax
to receive a disastrous and indelible impression
through malignant influences or culpable neglect.
Fortunate the child whose mother stands by

its cradle like a guardian angel to inspire and
lead it in the path of goodness! And so while We
congratulate you upon what you have already
achieved, We cannot but exhort you warmly and
anew to develop those splendid organizations
which are doing so much to provide for every
rank and social class educators conscious of
their high mission, in mind and bearing alert
against evil and zealous to promote good. Such
sentiments in a woman and a mother give her the
right to that reverence and dignity which belong
to a man’s loyal helpmate; such a mother is like a
pillar, for she is the central support of the home;
she is like a beacon whose light gives an example
to the parish and brings illumination to the pious
associations of which she is a member.

Mother’s Work
Mothers, your sensibility is greater and your
love more tender, and therefore you will keep a
vigilant eye upon your babies throughout their
infancy, watching over their growth and over
the health of their little bodies, for they are
flesh of your flesh and the fruit of your womb.
Remember that your children are the adopted
sons of God and specially beloved of Christ;
remember that their angels look forever on the
face of the heavenly Father; [Cf. Mt. 18:10] and so
you too as you rear them must be angels in like
manner, in all your care and vigilance keeping
your eyes fixed upon Heaven. It is your task from
the cradle to begin their education in soul as well
as in body; for if you do not educate them they
will begin, for good or ill, to educate themselves.
Many of the moral characteristics which you see
in the youth or the man owe their origin to the
manner and circumstances of his first upbringing
in infancy: purely organic habits contracted at
that time may later prove a serious obstacle to
the spiritual life of the soul.
Have you observed those little eyes, wide
open, restlessly questioning, their glance darting
from this thing to that, following a movement or
a gesture, already expressing joy or pain, anger
and obstinacy, and giving other signs of those
little passions that nestle in the heart of man
even before the tiny lips have learned to utter a

word? This is perfectly natural…from that early
age a loving look, a warning word, must teach
the child not to yield to all its impressions, and as
reason dawns it must learn to discriminate and to
master the vagaries of its sensations; in a word,
under the guidance and admonition of the mother
it must begin the work of its own education.
Study the child in his tender age. If you know
him well you will educate him well; you will not
misconceive his character; you will come to
understand him, knowing when to give way and
when to be firm; a naturally good disposition
does not fall to the lot of all the sons of men.

Training of the Mind
Train the mind of your children. Do not give
them wrong ideas or wrong reasons for things;
whatever their questions may be, do not answer
them with evasions or untrue statements which
their minds rarely accept; but take occasion from
them lovingly and patiently to train their minds,
which want only to open to the truth and to
grasp it with the first ingenuous gropings of their
reasoning and reflective powers. Who can say
what many a genius may not owe to the prolonged
and trustful questionings of a childhood at the
home fireside!

Training of the Character
Train the character of your children. Correct
their faults, encourage and cultivate their good
qualities and co-ordinate them with that stability
which will make for resolution in later life. Your
children, conscious as they grow up and as they
begin to think and will, that they are guided by
a good parental will, constant and strong, free
from violence and anger, not subject to weakness
or inconsistency, will learn in time to see therein
the interpreter of another and higher will, the will
of God, and so they will plant in their souls the
seeds of those early moral habits which fashion
and sustain a character, train it to self-control
in moments of crisis and to courage in the face
of conflict or sacrifice, and imbue it with a deep
sense of Christian duty.
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Theme Domestic Church
Training of the Heart
Train their hearts. Frequently the decision of a
man’s destiny, the ruin of his character, or a grave
danger threatening him, may be traced to his
childish years when his heart was spoiled by the
fond flattery, silly fussing, and foolish indulgence
of misguided parents. The impressionable little
heart became accustomed to see all things
revolve and gravitate around it, to find all things
yielding to its will and caprice, and so there
took root in it that boundless egoism of which
the parents themselves were later to become
the first victims! All this is often the just penalty
of the selfishness of parents who deny their
only child the joy of having little brothers and
sisters who, sharing in the mother’s love, would
have accustomed him to think of others besides
himself. What deep and rich potentialities for
love, goodness, and devotion lie dormant in the
heart of a child! You, mothers, must awaken them,
foster them, direct them, raise them up to Him
who will sanctify them, to Jesus; to Jesus, and to
Mary, their heavenly Mother, who will open the
child’s heart to piety, will teach it by prayer to
offer its pure sacrifices and innocent victories to
the divine lover of little ones; she will teach it to
feel compassion for the poor and unhappy. How
joyous is the springtime of childhood, unruffled
by wind or storm!

Training of the Will
But the day will come when the childish heart
will feel fresh impulses stirring within it; new
desires will disturb the serenity of those early
years. In that time of trial, Christian mothers,
remember that to train the heart means to
train the will to resist the attacks of evil and
the insidious temptations of passion; during
that period of transition from the unconscious
purity of infancy to the triumphant purity of
adolescence you have a task of the highest
importance to fulfill. You have to prepare your
sons and daughters so that they may pass with
unfaltering step, like those who pick their
way among serpents, through that time of
crisis and physical change; and pass through it
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without losing anything of the joy of innocence,
preserving intact that natural instinct of modesty
with which Providence has girt them as a check
upon wayward passion. That sense of modesty,
which in its spontaneous abhorrence from the
impure is akin to the sense of religion, is made
of little account in these days; but you, mothers,
will take care that they do not lose it through
indecency in dress or self-adornment, through
unbecoming familiarities, or immoral spectacles;
on the contrary you will seek to make it more
delicate and alert, more upright and sincere.
Finally, with the discretion of a mother and
a teacher, and thanks to the open-hearted
confidence with which you have been able to
inspire your children, you will not fail to watch
for and to discern the moment in which certain
unspoken questions have occurred to their minds
and are troubling their senses… If imparted
by the lips of Christian parents, at the proper
time, in the proper measure, and with the proper
precautions, the revelation of the mysterious and
marvelous laws of life will be received by them
with reverence and gratitude, and will enlighten
their minds with far less danger than if they
learned them haphazard, from some disturbing
encounter, from secret conversations, through
information received from over-sophisticated
companions, or from clandestine reading, the
more dangerous and pernicious as secrecy
inflames the imagination and troubles the senses.
Your words, if they are wise and discreet, will
prove a safeguard and a warning in the midst
of the temptations and the corruption which
surround them, “because foreseen an arrow
comes more slowly.” [Dante, Par., XVII, 27]

Powerful Aid of Religion
But in this great work of the Christian
education of your sons and daughters you well
understand that training in the home, however
wise, however thorough, is not enough. It
needs to be supplemented and perfected by the
powerful aid of religion. From the moment of
baptism the priest possesses the authority of a
spiritual father and a pastor over your children.
and you must co-operate with him in teaching

them those first rudiments of catechism and piety
which are the only basis of a solid education,
and of which you, the earliest teachers of your
children, ought to have a sufficient and sure
knowledge. You cannot teach what you do not
know yourselves. Teach them to love God, to love
Christ, to love our Mother the Church and the
pastors of the Church who are your guides. Love
the catechism and teach your children to love it;
it is the great handbook of the love and fear of
God, of Christian wisdom and of eternal life.

Valiant Helpers
In your work of education, which is manysided, you will feel the need and the obligation
of having recourse to others to help you: choose
helpers who are Christians like yourselves, and
choose them with all the care that is called for
by the treasure which you are entrusting to
them: you are committing to them the Faith, the
purity, and the piety of your children. But when
you have chosen them you must not think that
you are henceforth liberated from your duty
and your vigilance; you must co-operate with
them. However eminent school teachers may be
in their profession they will have little success
in the formation of your children without your
collaboration—still less if instead of helping
and lending support to their efforts you were to
counteract and oppose them. What a misfortune
it would be if at home your indulgence and fond
weakness were to undo all that has been done at
school, at catechism, or in Catholic associations,
to form the character and foster the piety of your
children!
But—some mother may say—children are so
difficult to manage nowadays! I can do nothing
with that son of mine; that daughter of mine is
impossible! Admittedly many boys and girls at
the age of 12 or 15 show themselves intractable.
But why? Because when they were two or
three years old they were allowed to do as they
pleased. True, some temperaments are ungrateful
and rebellious; but however unresponsive,
however obstinate, he is still your child. Would
you love him any the less than his brothers and
sisters if he were sickly or deformed? God has

given him to you; see that you do not treat him
as the outcast of the family. No child is so unruly
that he cannot be trained with care, patience,
and love; and it will rarely happen that even the
stoniest and most unpromising soil will not bear
some flower of submission and virtue, if only an
unreasonable severity does not run the risk of
exterminating the seed of good will which even
the proudest soul has hidden within it. The whole
education of your children would be ruined were
they to discover in their parents—and their eyes
are sharp enough to see—any signs of favoritism,
undue preferences, or antipathies in regard to
any of them. For your own good and for the good
of the family it must be clear that, whether you
use measured severity or give encouragement
and caresses, you have an equal love for all, a
love which makes no distinction save for the
correction of evil or for the encouragement of
good. Have you not received them all equally
from God?

Conclusion
Christian mothers and beloved daughters, of
your incomparable mission—fraught in these
days with so many difficulties and obstacles—
We have been able only briefly to describe the
glories. What a majestic figure is that of the
mother in the home as she fulfills her destiny
at the cradle side, the nurse and teacher of her
little ones! Hers is truly a task full of labor, and
We should be tempted to deem her unequal to it
were it not for the grace of God which is ever at
hand to enlighten, direct, and sustain her in her
daily anxieties and toil; were it not, too, for those
other educators, mother-like in spirit and energy,
whom she calls to aid her in the formation of
these youthful souls. Imploring God to fill you to
overflowing with His graces and to give increase
to your manifold labors on behalf of the young
entrusted to you, We grant you from Our heart,
as a pledge of heavenly favors, Our fatherly
apostolic benediction.

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Theme Domestic Church

Gender
Theory
by Patricia Barrio de Villanueva

Editor’s Note: This talk, given on August 18, 2018, was the third of a series of conferences for the
young adult gathering in Córdoba, Argentina, on the subject of “Attacks on Modern Youth.” Professor
Patricia Barrio de Villanueva has given multiple conferences at young adult meetings. She is a professor
of history at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, and the mother of a Society of Saint Pius X
priest. In this conference she addresses the historical antecedents and the false foundations of so-called
“gender theory.” The oral style of the talk has been retained throughout.

A Cultural Revolution
Today we are going to speak of what we may
call a “cultural revolution.” When we speak of
revolution we must always understand that it is
a deep change, a fundamental one; and we could
also say—and in this I follow the writings of
Calderón Bouchet—that the concept of revolution
is the process of man distancing himself from
God. It is a long process that begins, first of all, in
modernism. When we speak of culture, without
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defining it too scientifically, we refer to all those
things that we do: art, customs, laws, our way of
organizing ourselves, our style of dress, our form
of interaction with our friends, husbands, boy
and girl-friends. All that which forms something
intangible but essential in the life of mankind,
all this is culture. What I am trying to say is that
we are not going to talk about the economic
revolution; we are referring to man’s space of
cultural activity and productivity.

Within this topic of the cultural revolution, we
will directly address some matters that attack
the virtues that are so dear to Christians and
personified, for example, in the Blessed Virgin:
such virtues as chastity, purity, modesty, and
even temperance.
The revolutionary process, at this point, has
reached a level of acceleration such that it has
gone far past the breaking down of all these
virtues; it proposes to overturn completely not
only Christian order, but even the pre-Christian
order—that is to say, the way society organized
itself even before the coming of Our Lord Jesus
Christ—and this especially, because all cultures
have recognized the family as the most important
basis of society for mankind: that society in
which we find procreation, the education of
offspring, and mutual help between man and
woman on the basis of complementarity. This
is the place where we are truly free, and where
we can truly reach a natural and supernatural
happiness. The family is fundamental to any
society; and cultural revolution attacks the family
directly.
The cultural revolution presents itself as a sort
of unheard-of experiment—and why unheard-of?
Because what is being proposed is something
without antecedents, something that is contra
naturam—we will explain why shortly—and
because if it comes to fruition, we have no idea
how it will end; there are no antecedents even in
Sodom and Gomorrah that can help us predict
how the society currently being proposed would
end up. I will not cover the topic exhaustively, but
we will talk about three aspects—there are many
more—of this “ideological combo” that is being
pushed, most of all, upon you.

The “Ideological Combo”
I repeat, this will not cover the topic
completely; but I would say that the “ideological
combo” that is being insisted upon begins with
the rejection of the mission of the woman, that
of procreation—I need say no more—and this,
too, has different facets; the most important of
these is the idea of abortion. This goes directly
against womanhood, and against the function

and instinct of reproduction that belongs to all
species.
The second aspect of the “combo” is the enmity
between man and woman. Everything today
is directed to the idea that we women should
hate men above all—even our fathers; all things
masculine are deeply hated, and this is one of the
most notable ideas that is promoted.
And third comes what we call gender theory
itself; which is the consideration that any sexual
orientation, and preferably homosexuality,
bisexuality and transsexuality, are perfectly
legitimate attitudes toward our sexual practices.
These three matters are all part of the same
“ideological combo” that is not only unheard of
among mankind, as we have said; but also, it
leaves man absolutely alone, because he is torn
away from the natural society that is the family,
and besides, it creates a state of permanent
conflict between us and those to whom we have
to relate, which could be women who think
differently, but especially the opposite sex which
is considered in terms of a social conflict.

Gender Theory
Now, about the concept of gender itself:
why does the question arise? The concept of
gender stems from the discussion, often taken
up in anthropology, concerning the weight of
biology and culture on human conduct. For
example, when I studied at the university, I had
an anthropology class where they told me that
man is cultural, that he has no essence. So the
professor spent the whole hour writing about
characteristics of man because he couldn’t
describe man’s essence—because if you’re
an anthropologist you simply can’t talk about
essence, it’s their philosophy—but all of this
was overcome when the human genome was
discovered, because as we already know, humans
have a truly impressive load of genes. This theory
has been publicized since the decade of the 1950s,
with some interesting proponents—for example,
Mr. Alfred Kinsey, who was in the pay of the
University of Indiana, who had a sexual conduct
department and wrote two books on “Sexual
Conduct of Man and Woman,” saying that 10%
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Theme Domestic Church

24

of the world’s population is homosexual. He
lied—this was all uncovered later. It was a bluff,
rather like that of Rubinstein in the Argentinian
Senate; but just so you can see its impact, the
laws of marriage equality in Spain would be
based on the data that Kinsey gave, even long
after that data had been completely refuted on
the basis of science.
And the idea that man is a “cultural concept”

in Spanish is feminine gender, “la sal,” and in
Italian is masculine, “il sale.” The masculine and
feminine gender in languages are conventional.
Money carries over the concept of gender,
which is normal in languages, into sexuality as
something conventional. And Money said this and
inaugurated this idea in 1951, not in 2010!
You well know what gender theory states:
that differences in ways of thinking, acting and

and therefore nature and the force of biology do
not matter, would have terrible results… Many
of you have heard of the experiment of Dr. John
Money with the Reimer twins. He said that this
little boy, who had had a botched circumcision
and would have serious issues with his male
genitalia, should be dressed as a woman—that
there would be no problems. He said this because
he was convinced that masculine and feminine
behavior is cultural, so what problem could there
be? They performed surgery on him, they dressed
him as a girl; and the poor child was a boy, and
wanted to be a boy because his nature cried out
for it, and eventually after a long struggle he
wound up committing suicide.
Now, Money created and used this concept
of gender. What does “gender” really mean? We
use “gender” as a convention in grammar: salt

self-esteem are products of culture—this is what
Money said—and of a certain period of time in
which each group of persons is assigned a series
of characteristics which are explained by the
oppressive structures set up and imposed on
each person by society; and this code of conduct
imposed upon us is called a “gender stereotype.”
Here, then, is perfectly defined what one of the
great feminist theorists, Judith Butler, says:
“Gender is a construct radically independent
of sex;” that is, something artificial, free of all
limits. In consequence, “man” and “male” can
signify a female body just as much as a male
one; “woman” and “female” can mean a male
body just as much as a female one—we may say
there is a complete rupture between what we
are biologically and how we wish to act. To be a
man or a woman is no longer natural; it ceases

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to be so; it is something constructed. I decide
what I want to be; a duckling, a tree, a boy who
wants to go to school or a man; and that must be
respected. I am absolutely autonomous over my
nature and my ideology.
Now, this whole concept took shape especially
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the 1990s, and
it took the name of lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transsexual movement: the LGBT Movement.
It came from many years back and its most
important moment came when this ideology
was incorporated into the United Nations. That
happened in 1995, at the Women’s Conference in
Peking, when abortion—that is, contraception,
abortion and gender theory—was instituted as a
right. When this “ideological combo,” with some
differences, was taken up by the United Nations,
they immediately began laying down the law to
the different countries, and so it began to really
grow wings, especially because of the money;
if you are an NGO and want to receive any
money they force you to promote gender theory,
to distribute contraceptive pills, to approve
reproductive rights in general. So this theory that
had been just for the elite began to spread vastly;
and we are dealing with it now, after 23 years of
uninterrupted growth.
In Argentina, we can note that all these things
have been implemented with the exception of
abortion, which has been stopped at least for
the time being. During the Kirchner period all
these gender perspectives were implemented;
this did not happen in the United States nor in
France. It happened here because we have a
law on Integrated Sexual Education, which now
must include gender perspectives—the priests
and those who work in schools well know what
a Damocles’ sword they have hanging over them.
Marriage equality passed into law as well. And
any day there might appear at a religious school
some man dressed as a woman with a woman’s
name, who wants to teach classes and believes he
is a woman, despite being a man.
The last step is gender identity. The last things
left for this “combo” to come to life are two: on
one hand, abortion law, which for now has been
stopped; and on the other, the political will of the
government or governments—because sometimes
it depends on the provinces—to implement these

laws with the fullest force. I repeat, this “combo”
is being enforced in Argentina, excepting
abortion, and it is completely up to the political
will of the state, on a provincial or national level,
how soon it will begin to strike at us directly. But
we cannot stop here, because a new theory has
appeared, which some of you may know about:
Queer Theory.
In 1984 the philosopher Michel Foucault wrote
his History of Sexuality—I do not recommend
it—and he proposed to deconstruct, which is a
word that signifies taking down—many of you
who study philosophy will know it—not only the
distinction between man and woman but even the
categories of “male” and “female” within the idea
of gender. Because in gender theory, this occurs:
“I am a man, biologically male, but I want to be
a woman,” so the “masculine” and “feminine”
categories continue to exist. Foucault says that
what we have to take away is the very condition
of difference between man and woman, between
what is masculine and what is feminine—and
why? Because where there is identity there is
inequality; and where there is inequality, there
is oppression. What they promote is what is
called polymorphous sexuality—which Freud
also mentions in early-childhood stages—which
means “without distinction of masculine and
feminine.” After all, as Kate Bornstein says: “Men
would not enjoy male privilege if there were
no men, and women could not be oppressed if
womanhood did not exist.” To do away with
gender is to do away with patriarchy, that is, what
must be ended—as everything is a construct.
Woman is a construct, she has nothing to do
with biology; let us be done with the construct
“woman,” the construct “man” and let us give
them this new sexuality which is polymorphous
sexuality. She says “the form in which the species
is propagated is socially determined.”
If people were biologically or sexually
polymorphous, that is, with no differences, today
I might like one thing or the other or anything.
And society would be so arranged that every form
of sexual expression would be equally permitted.
Reproduction would be the result of only certain
sexual encounters—the heterosexual ones—
and in more imaginative societies, biological
reproduction could be ensured by other means.
25

Theme Domestic Church
In this experiment—which is experimenting with
the destruction of all western civilization, not
only Christian—these people are wagering on
getting as far as thinking of a machine that can
manage, by way of implantation of ovaries or
something, to end up forming a child.
See how far this has gotten—it’s like
Frankenstein. You might ask where I got this
idea. Well, let me tell you how, in 2015, the
department of Social Sciences at the UBA did an
experiment on a group of children, a movement
they called “post-pornography.” They said,
“Post-porno will move through the hallways of
the university and sexualize everything around
it. A proposal to amplify the pornographic
imagination and experience other, sexualized
forms of inhabiting the academic space.”
I won’t even tell you what went on because
they did this on the day the kids graduated. It was
utterly disgusting what went on, so much so that I
will not describe it here.
We also have the transgender children, who
have problems as you may know; there are over
1,000 that are undergoing treatment in England
because they decided they want to know if they’re
male or female…a truly Dantesque affair.
At some point I read the writings of the
Archbishop of Poland, pontifical member of the
Council on the Family and the Academy for Life,
the late Monsignor Caffarra. In an interview with
the Italian paper Tempi in 2015, he spoke at great
length on the current moral crisis in the Western
world. You know that in Europe they talk of being
in a post-Christian era; and he said the following
(at the time, in Europe the question of marriage
equality was under discussion, which we had
already passed, so we were ahead of them in that
regard): “I have had various thoughts in mind,
springing from the motion being voted on by the
European Parliament. The first thought was this:
‘This is the end, Europe is dying, and perhaps she
does not even want to live, for there has been no
civilization that has survived the exaltation of
homosexuality—and I do not say the exercise of
homosexuality, but its exaltation.’”
In other words, it is a problem not of will, but
of intelligence. Before the present panorama,
the Cardinal asks himself out loud, “How is
it possible that such seminal evidence can
26

The Angelus

July - August 2019

be obscured in the mind of man?”—And his
response is overwhelming: “All of this is work
of the devil, literally, it is the final challenge
that Satan hurls at God the Creator, saying ‘I
will teach You how I build an alternate creation
to Yours and You will see how man says it is
better. You promise them freedom, I offer them
free-thinking. You give them love, I give them
emotions. You want justice, and I the perfect
equality that annuls all difference.’ “
We are certainly in for a very long and hard
fight; and Caffarra asks, and I ask you: Who
will be the workers in an enterprise that will
require time, ability and much sacrifice? These,
beyond a doubt, must be yourselves: knowing,
as St. Thomas Aquinas says, that the vices
contra naturam, all these of which we have
been speaking, are the obverse of the coin of the
heroic virtues—and St. Thomas calls them this,
heroic virtues; but also without a doubt, with the
grace of God and the intercession of Our Lady of
heaven, I am sure that you will be able to stand
firm, and we will be able to reconquer at least
some small part of Christendom.

146 pp. – Softcover – Illustrated – 7" x 10" – STK# 8746 – $14.95

Pepper and Salt
or Seasoning for Young Folk

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Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.

Spirituality

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass:

The
Intermediary
Chant
by Fr. Christopher Danel

The Gradual lies midway between the
mournful Tract and the exultant Alleluia: it
denotes the laborious and difficult pilgrimage of
the children of God through life to their heavenly
country. Therefore, at one time the Gradual is
connected with the Tract, at another with the
Alleluia, according as the sufferings and pains
of penance or the consolations and hopes of
future eternal rest predominate on our earthly
pilgrimage. —Monsignor Nicholas Gihr

Dogmatically, Liturgically, and Ascetically
Explained. Monsignor Gihr was a priest of
Freiburg in Breisgau whose work of liturgical
research took place during the time frame
spanning the pontificates of Popes Pius IX to
Pius XI, including that of Pope St. Pius X. The
early years of his work were contemporaneous
with the last years in the work of Dom Prosper
Guéranger. (The English translation of his study
appeared in 1902; the original is: Gihr, Nikolaus.
Messopfer dogmatisch, liturgisch und aszetisch
erklärt. Herder: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1877.)

Introduction
In this article we examine the Intermediary
Chant, presenting the work of Monsignor
Nicholas Gihr in his fundamental liturgical
commentary The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass:
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The Chant
The Church has assigned to the choir the task
of executing, in the name of the congregation,

the various parts that are to be sung. These are
very appropriately and skillfully inserted in the
liturgy of the Mass, for sacred chant is productive
of many edifying results; it makes divine worship
more solemn and more majestic, elevates the
mind, and exhilarates the heart. St. Augustine, in
his Confessions, depicts the powerful impression
made by the chant of the Ambrosian Hymns upon
his soul: “How I wept, O Lord, amid Thy hymns
and chants, greatly moved by the voices of Thy
sweetly singing Church! They poured themselves
into my ears, these voices, and like drops Thy
truth penetrated my heart: the fervor of devotion
was awakened, tears flowed, and ah, how happy I
was then!”
The chant which follows the Epistle and
precedes the Gospel is an intermediate and
connecting link between these two biblical
readings. Said intervening chant is of varied
composition at the different periods of the
ecclesiastical year, and accordingly bears
different names. The Gradual at times occurs by
itself alone; but for the most part it is connected
with an addition, namely, the Minor Alleluia
or the Tract. Sometimes the Gradual, or the
Alleluia, or the Tract, is followed by the so-called
Sequence.

parts, the first retains the name Responsorium,
the other bears the title of Versus. In most
cases both parts are taken from the Psalms, not
unfrequently passages from other books of the
Old and New Testaments are used; only a few
times do we meet with texts which are not from
the Bible.
The readings and the chant harmonize with
one another: in both the peculiarity of each
ecclesiastical celebration is reflected, but in a
different way. In the reading God descends to us
and speaks to us; in the chant, on the contrary,
we soar upwards to God. In the Gradual chant
we give appropriate expression to the various
impressions and resolutions which have been
awakened in us by the Mass in general, as well as
by the reading in particular. In a certain sense,
then, we may say that the intermediate chant is
an echo, a dying away sound of the Epistle and a
suitable transition to the Gospel.

Gradual
The word Graduale comes from gradus,
meaning step. To distinguish the Responsory
that occurs between the Epistle and the Gospel
from the Responsories of the Divine Office, it
was called Graduale from the place in which it
was sung: for the leading chanter who intoned
the longer Psalm-chant after the Epistle stood
on an elevated step, that is, on the same step of
the Ambo from which the Epistle had previously
been read.
The fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions
already prescribe a chant of Psalms after
the reading from the Old Testament. In the
Antiphonarium of St. Gregory the Great this
Psalm-chant is reduced to a few verses, as is nowa-days the case in our Missal. Even in its present
abridgment the Gradual chant has preserved its
previous responsory form; for it consists of two

Alleluja emitte Spiritum tuum, Graduale Triplex

Minor Alleluia
It is only seldom that the Gradual is sung or
recited alone, that is, on some ferial days in Lent;
usually it has an appendix, which, according to
the tenor of the ecclesiastical celebration, bears
the impress of joy or of sorrow. Expressive of joy
is the so-called Minor Alleluia, which is generally
added to the Gradual throughout the year. It
consists of two Alleluias, a verse and another
Alleluia; hence it is often called the Alleluia verse
(Versus Alleluiaticus). The verse, between
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Spirituality
the three Alleluias, is in its contents frequently
not a mere continuation, but rather a clearer
development and a more perfect expression of
the thoughts contained in the Gradual. While
the Church compiled the Gradual mostly always
wholly from the Psalms, she did not adhere so
strictly to this rule in the composition of the
Alleluia Verse, but in its make-up often employed
therein other Bible texts also: indeed and
especially in Masses celebrated in honor of the
saints, more than 30 of these verses are not taken
from Scripture, but are of ecclesiastical origin. In
this way it was easier to designate more minutely
and to mark more distinctly the subject of the
day’s celebration.

Tract
Tractus is a musical term; it relates primarily
not to the contents, but to the manner of delivery,
that is, to the peculiar, characteristic manner
of singing it. All the verses were continuously
sung by one singer, that is, without the choir
interrupting him by responding, and this was
done in a slow, protracted measure. (Tractus
means the slow drawing or “protraction” of
the words.) This uniform and measured way of
chanting is, in contrast to the animated alternate
singing of the Gradual and Alleluia Verse,
evidently suited for the expression of holy sorrow
and penitential sentiments. For this reason
the Tract has replaced the jubilant Alleluia,
and already become long ago the peculiar
characteristic of Septuagesima and Lent. What
the somber purple is to the eye on these days of
earnest sorrow and penance, the touching chant
of the Tract is to the ear a sigh of penitential
grief.
The Tract is nearly always taken from Holy
Scripture, especially from the Psalter; only
seldom is it partly or wholly of ecclesiastical
origin. Sometimes it is longer, at others shorter; it
always comprises with but few exceptions more
than two verses, on three occasions (on the first
Sunday of Lent, Palm Sunday and Good Friday)
almost an entire Psalm. The most sorrowful day
of the year, Good Friday, has a double Tract,
while at other times but one is used.
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Major Alleluia
“After these things I heard, as it were, the voice
of many multitudes in heaven, saying: Alleluia.
Salvation and power and glory is to our God”
(Apoc. 19:1). The Alleluia resounds in the liturgy
principally from Holy Saturday until the Saturday
after Pentecost; for this great octave of weeks is
of a joyful nature throughout. The Alleluia is the
outpouring of that grand Easter joy with which
our hearts are filled to overflowing; it is the
festive song, the exultant cry over the happiness
and the glory of our Redemption.
What is the form of the Alleluia chant after the
Epistle during Eastertide? While the Gradual is
still retained during Easter-week, by an unusual
custom, it is omitted on the Saturday before Low
Sunday, and thenceforth until the feast of Holy
Trinity two Alleluias are sung (as Antiphons)
followed by two verses, each with an Alleluia.
The Gradual as a wistful canticle is omitted
at Eastertide, and the exuberant Alleluia is
repeated almost without measure, to note that
salvation has been won for us by the death and
resurrection of Christ.

Sequences
On certain days the Alleluia’s joyful praise
or the mournful melody of the Tract continues
to resound in a prolonged canticle, which is
universally called the Sequence (Sequentia).
How did the Sequences originate, and at what
time were they inserted in the liturgy? Already
before the ninth century it was customary to
continue singing melodiously the last syllable of
the Alleluia without any further text. In the ninth
century various hymnal verses began to be set to
these joyful airs, and to them the name Sequence
was then transferred. Such religious poems
were extensively circulated; they increased
to the extent that (exclusive of Septuagesima
time) every Sunday and almost every feast had a
Sequence. The Roman Missal as revised after the
Council of Trent has retained but five Sequences,
which serve to distinguish particular feasts. The
five Sequences of our Missal belong incontestably
to the most glorious and most sublime creations

of the hymnology of the Church.
The Easter Sequence Victimae paschali,
which in the Middle Ages found numerous
imitations, is a dulce canticum dramatis, a
sweet dramatical chant, in the form of a dialogue
that sings the praises of the glorious Resurrection
of the Savior. Death and life struggled together,
engaged in a marvelous combat: the Prince of
Life, who had died, reigns in the imperishable
life of glory. Then Mary Magdalene is appealed
to as an eye-witness of the Resurrection, and
she is questioned. She testifies to the Lord’s
Resurrection: “I saw the tomb of the living one
and the glory of the Resuscitated; as witnesses
of this, I beheld the angels, the napkin and the
linen cloths.” And triumphantly she adds: “Christ,
my hope, is risen,” and she announces to the
Apostles that the Risen One will go before them
into Galilee.
The Sequence for Pentecost, Veni sancte
Spiritus is an ardent and devout supplication
to the Holy Ghost, in which, on the one hand,
His mysterious, blissful imparting of grace is
depicted in a manner uncommonly tender and
charming, and, on the other hand, the indigence
of our earthly pilgrimage is represented in a
manner exceedingly simple and touching. The
Holy Ghost is called by the Church “the finger
of God’s right hand,” that is, the Treasurer and
Dispenser of all the gifts and graces which Christ
has merited for us. But He not only donates to
our poverty His riches, but He comes Himself and
dwells in a sanctified soul as in His living temple.
The Lauda Sion is the Sequence for the feast
of Corpus Christi, composed by St. Thomas
Aquinas. One of the most useful literary
productions of St. Thomas in which the Church
even now takes great delight is the Office of
the Blessed Sacrament, which Pope Urban IV
engaged St. Thomas to compose on the occasion
of the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi.
Not only are the psalms and antiphons, lessons
and responsories chosen by him replete with
the most beautiful and fruitful references to
the mystery of the Altar, but also the hymns
composed by him, as the Pange lingua, Sacris
Solemniis, Verbum supernum and Lauda Sion,
are full of fervor and devotion and pearls beyond
price in the hymnal treasury of the Church.

How touching, how affecting is the Stabat
Mater, this doleful lamentation on the Sorrowful
Mother of God! At first the Sequence depicts
the overwhelming anguish and indescribable
compassion of the Virgin Mother with the bitter
sufferings and death of her divine Son; she had to
become the Mother of Sorrows, because her Son
was the Man of Sorrows. She stood at the foot of
the Cross wholly plunged in grief (dolorosa) and
bathed in tears (lacrymosa), while her Son was
shedding all His blood on the Cross; but she stood
there as the valiant woman and as the Queen of
Martyrs (stabat).
The grandest hymn of the Church is the chant
for the funeral rites, the Dies irae. As to contents
and form this hymn is a perfect work of art; the
judgment of all specialists designates it as the
most sublime composition that human genius
ever produced in this style of poetry. The terrors
of the general judgment are depicted in this chant
for the dead in lines of such sublimity and grand
simplicity that the soul feels penetrated with the
woes and dread of the day of tribulation. The
soul implores: “Think, kind Jesus, my salvation
caused Thy wondrous Incarnation; leave me
not to reprobation. Faint and weary Thou hast
sought me, on the Cross of suffering bought
me; shall such grace in vain be brought me?”
The concluding petition is for all the faithful
departed: “O good Lord Jesus, give rest unto
them—Pie Iesu, dona eis requiem.”

Conclusion
If we compare the varied form and
composition of the chant intervening between the
Epistle and Gospel, we cannot but admire with
what refined delicacy the Church understands
how to indicate and set forth the manifold
dispositions and shades of the soul’s interior life,
from the most profound sorrow to the height
of joy as is evident from the contents as well as
from the form and melody of the pieces of chant
chosen by her. And thus, the soul becomes ever
more worthily prepared and disposed to receive
the word of God which will be announced in the
Gospel.

31

Spirituality

A Father for
Our Times
by Fr. Gerard Beck, SSPX

The call we all knew had to come, did so on the
eve of St. Joseph’s feast, around the time of First
Vespers. My father, just returned from a walk
along the shores of beautiful Lake Chautauqua in
Western New York, where he loved to go and pray
his rosaries, had collapsed and died of a massive
heart attack. He was 72.
Paul J. Beck was, in many respects, a very
ordinary man. Quiet and unassuming, he worked
as a simple laborer all his life and enjoyed a
peaceful existence with his family out in the
country, appreciating the simple pleasures one
might expect a Catholic family man to enjoy. As
a father, however, Dad was not ordinary at all,
and it went far beyond the fact that God blessed
his marriage with seven boys (one a priest) and
10 girls (four religious sisters). All 17 of us were
profoundly marked by his fatherly example, love
32

The Angelus

July - August 2019

and leadership.

Serious About Serious Things
In a world lost in foolish frivolity, my father
took serious things seriously. Not that he couldn’t
be lighthearted—quite the contrary: we came
to recognize a certain twinkle in his eye that
invariably meant he was up to some mischief!
Often Mom was the target of playfulness that
might include a shaving cream war, or a water
fight, while we kids would whoop and holler in
laughter, and then smile happily when Dad would
end by pulling her onto his lap and presenting his
cheek for a kiss of forgiveness!
For all such moments, however, Dad’s life
was one determined by the things that truly

Mr. Paul J. Beck, RIP

mattered: his family…his Church…God. He took
his responsibilities as husband and father very
seriously, and from the time he married at 18,
took pains to equip himself to lead and take care
of his family.
Early on he bought an old fixer-upper house,
but money was scarce with a meager salary and
already several children in tow…so he borrowed
books from the local library and studied
plumbing and electrical wiring and carpentry,
and did the work himself over a period of several
decades. Not very efficient, but we children all
learned how to make do with what we had, and
how to work—invaluable lessons for any child
—and moreover, we learned how beautifully
Providence takes care of a large Catholic family!
Dad didn’t read only to acquire practical skills:
he read also to better his understanding of the
Catholic Faith, and to be better able to guide and
raise his family. It didn’t matter how busy he was;
reading a little each day was a priority. Mom at
one point was greatly struggling, worn out from
the heavy load of a half dozen little ones, and
more work than she could ever manage. She told
us that Dad advised her to stop worrying about
getting everything done: she and the family both
would be much better off, he said, if she would

put God first by making sure she took more time
for her prayers and some spiritual reading each
day. She took his advice, and found it helped her
more than she would have ever thought possible.
When we children reached a certain age, our
early teens, perhaps, we were encouraged to
follow suit. Dad was never one to say much, but
we each received a copy of My Daily Bread in
our Christmas stocking one year (mixed in, of
course, with all that one might expect to find in
a stocking!), and he suggested reading a chapter
a day. Another time it was a copy of the New
Testament, with a similar suggestion, and so on.
Although we weren’t always good about following
through, an important seed had been planted,
and one that bore much fruit even in our youth.
Dad took the time to do things well. Work
around the house, mapping out a trip, laying out
the large garden that was essential to us—all was
done deliberately and without hurry. Assigned
chores were subject to his inspection when he
came home from work, and there were times
when he would show us that our efforts were
not up to snuff. For the most part, however,
his example had taught us well: if a thing was
worth doing—be it chores, homework, a letter to
Grandma, or wrapping a present—it was worth
doing well.
My father never acted quickly, even in
relatively minor things. When we would go to
him for a permission, the answer was more often
than not, “Let me think about it.” Whether the
response that came in due time was the one we
had been hoping for or not, it was final—that
much we knew. Dad’s whole life was like that:
there was about him a quiet but very steady
determination, born of reflection and purposeful
decision. He knew what mattered more, and what
mattered less.
For many years he served as coordinator at
Our Lady of the Rosary, the Society’s mission
chapel in Buffalo. As such he worked very
closely with the priests, and at times, human
beings being what they are, things were less
than perfect. Those at home were tempted on
occasion to poke fun at certain eccentricities,
or to criticize this or that decision or flaw. Dad
would invariably say something to put things in
perspective: perhaps bringing up a mitigating
33

Spirituality
circumstance, perhaps noting his appreciation
for the priest’s sermons or catechism classes,
or saying that he had found him helpful in
confession. I never once remember Dad saying
something critical about a priest. For him, a
priest was a priest, regardless of any weaknesses
he might have.

Fatherly Affection
We were profoundly marked by Dad’s affection.
Being human, and melancholic in temperament,
the surface things were not always perfect: he
could be moody, perturbed by little things, and
impatient. All of us knew, however, beyond the
shadow of a doubt, that he loved us. His affection
was deep and real, never showy or pretentious.
His words of advice were few but weighty, his
silence measured; his concern for where each one
of us was, and what he needed to do to help us,
was unquestioned.
As we grew up, we frequently welcomed
company in the home on Friday evenings or
weekends, and our young friends and cousins
were invariably much struck by Dad’s presence
and quiet authority. “Your dad always seemed
so perfect a father,” one such visitor wrote to a
family member just weeks before Dad’s death,
“strong and scary, but so kind you always wanted
to make him happy! Honestly, how we should
feel towards God.” Informed of Dad’s death, she
added the following in a short note: “Mr. Beck
was always so kind and paternal, even to those of
us who were not his children. I consider him one
of the greatest men I have ever met, and he holds
a very dear place in my heart.”
Dad was at his best in times of great trial. My
brother Francis, 18, was killed in an automobile
accident in 2002, and it fell on me to break the
news to my parents. Mom, as any mother would,
broke down sobbing, and Dad took her into his
arms, quiet and strong, shaking his head as I
explained what had happened, but composed
and accepting. He was a beacon of strength for
all of us in the days that followed. I will never
see anything more beautiful than the careful
attention with which he put the final touches on
Francis’ grave the day we laid him to rest.
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July - August 2019

Another example of Dad at his best was
when he had his second major heart attack 12
years ago. The children still living at home were
called to his side in the middle of the night. The
ambulance had not yet arrived, and Dad, in great
pain and certain that this was his final hour,
spoke quietly to each one, telling them of his
love, encouraging each in particular efforts, and
asking pardon for his shortcomings as a father.
Cordelia’s response to her father in King Lear,
“No cause, no cause,” comes very much to mind.

Spirit of Prayer
The quiet strength in times of trial that was
so vividly manifested in Dad was not his own,
but that of the Father from whom all fatherhood
receives its name.
Dad, quietly and unobtrusively, was a man
of prayer. We children all remember watching
him pray when we were little, very much struck
by his recollection, most especially during his
thanksgiving after Mass. We would sit quietly in
the pew waiting for him to be finished, knowing
without being told that it would never do to
disturb him!
We were not the first to notice this profound
spirit of prayer. My mother, only 16 and not a
Catholic when she married my father, noticed
how he would go to his knees without fail every
morning and evening, and then again to pray his
Rosary. He did so quietly, and without comment,
but she was drawn by the example of a man who
took his Faith so seriously, and one day took it
upon herself to knock at the door of the church
rectory nearby while Dad was at work. “Can I
help you with something, Miss?” asked the priest
who answered the door. “Yes, I want to become a
Catholic,” came the reply, and she was invited in
to get things started.
Dad had a great love for the Rosary, especially
as a Dominican Tertiary, and we prayed it every
day as a family. Sometimes we were perhaps a
little hopeful that he would forget, but that never
happened. Evening would come, and at a given
point the tinkling of a bell would call us from
whatever we were doing to assemble in the living
room or on the porch. The little ones would sit

close to Dad, one in front of him, two others
on each side, the more easily to be reminded—
gently, but firmly—that this was quiet time.

Conclusion
From the time we were little, the very first
thing we did as we set out on a trip was to pray
our Rosary. Francis was killed in a car accident
just 20 minutes into a journey home, so almost
certainly right after finishing his Rosary. Dad
prayed the entire 15 decades of the Rosary for
many years, often taking a walk by himself for
this purpose. So it was that God in His most
bountiful mercy called him to Himself, as He had
Francis, just moments after one such walk in the
company of Our Lady.
Our Heavenly Father, ever compassionate and
understanding as we make our way in this valley
of tears, has a way of speaking most paternally in
times of sorrow.

35

Spirituality

The Family

A School of
Sanctity
by a Benedictine Monk

In the Rule of St. Benedict, he describes
the monastery as a “school of sanctity.” When
we think of a school, we have the concepts of
teacher, student, and knowledge, which is passed
on to the student. In spite of the very clear
hierarchy established amongst the members
of the monastery and the many teachers found
amongst the monks, the only true teacher is Our
Lord Jesus Christ. He teaches the monks sanctity,
the only subject worth learning. In the Gloria in
excelsis Deo…, we chant “… Tu solus Sanctus…”
Jesus is therefore the only one that possesses
sanctity and the only one capable of teaching that
subject. Our Holy Mother the Church is like the
mother of a family that teaches all of her children
about the life of Jesus. Her main goal is to form
in each one of us another Christ and to direct the
steps of our life towards Him. The more we learn
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July - August 2019

about the person of Christ, the more He sanctifies
us. Whether we belong to the monastic family or
to the Catholic family that forms our parishes,
Our Lord is the one who communicates life,
through the Church, to every family.
Christ has two ways of living on earth: the first
was visible, when he historically lived amongst
us 2,000 years ago, walking through Judea; the
second is mysteriously invisible as He prolongs
His life in the members of His Mystical Body, the
Church. His visible life was completely turned
towards this invisible life of grace, hidden like
leaven in the depths of souls. He openly spoke
of His upcoming passion and death as the
means of granting us life. When His historical
presence came to an end by His death on the
Cross, His spiritual life of grace was beginning
in the depths of souls. In a certain way, all that is

found in His teaching foretells His death, which
was the beginning of the life of the Church. His
death on the Cross was the means He chose to
penetrate our souls with the grace of His life. We
are called upon to prolong the life of Christ by
permitting Him to live His life within us. In order
to accomplish this goal we must participate in
His death by letting our “old man,” inclined to
sin, die. When we read the gospels, we find Our
Lord continually teaching us about the Kingdom
of Heaven found within us. We are taught to fast,

to be victorious over the temptations of the devil
in the faithful souls that cooperate with His
grace to reject the suggestions of the enemy of
mankind. He mystically continues to suffer and
die in the souls of those persecuted Christians
in the Middle East and across the globe. His life
is mysteriously prolonged by the lives of today’s
Catholics living in the state of grace. Every virtue
or good work accomplished by the human soul is,
in fact, an act accomplished by Our Lord Himself.
“You can do nothing without me.”

give alms, and pray in secret, where only the
heavenly Father will see and reward His children.
Like a treasure hidden in a field, Christ is hidden
in our minds and hearts, dwelling mysteriously in
us, living His life through our life, and sanctifying
us daily.
Jesus continues to belong mysteriously to the
history of this world, not in the same way as He
did 2,000 years ago, but by living the lives of the
members of His Church by means of His grace.
Throughout the span of history, upon every
continent, at every social level, He lives by grace
in the secret of the hearts of men that are united
to Him. He continues to teach His truth by the
mouths of His faithful bishops, priests, catechism
teachers, and mothers of families. He continues
to pray through the desires of every baptized
soul that truly seeks His kingdom. He continues

St. Benedict calls the monastery a school of
sanctity, which could be applied to the Catholic
family as well as to the entire Church. Our Lord
is the only man that is in Himself holy, He is
therefore, the only one capable of teaching this
subject. In His divine wisdom, He desires that
man become the instrument of communicating
grace to his fellow man. He has given the power
and obligation of teaching to the members of the
Church. The bishops and priests have a very grave
duty to teach the truth to the souls hungering
for God, but this duty is not exclusively reserved
to them. The parents are the first educators of
their children. They too must know the necessary
doctrine and give the example of a moral life
as a means of transmitting eternal life to their
souls. Their family must also become a school of
sanctity.
37

On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption
of Mary to be a dogma of Faith: “We pronounce, declare,
and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma that the
immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having
completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed
body and soul to heavenly glory.” The pope proclaimed
this dogma only after a broad consultation of bishops,
theologians, and laity. There were few dissenting voices.
What the pope solemnly declared was already a common
belief in the Catholic Church.
Assumption fresco, by Filippino Lippi, Church Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Carafa
Chapel, Rome, 1488-1492 - Shutterstock.com

Spirituality

Assumption
of the Most
Blessed Virgin
by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (sermon given on August 15, 1979, St. Marys, Kansas)

My dear brethren,
In a few words I would like to show you how
much the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, in this
painful crisis that the Church is going through,
should be our guide and our model. With her we
are certain not to go astray. We shall look to her,
we shall ask her what she did during the course
of her life, what she has to teach us, and we shall
see that the Most Blessed Virgin Mary teaches us
just what the Church has taught us ever since, in
the course of 20 centuries.
The first element that concerns the Most
Blessed Virgin Mary, and that announces her,
is found in the protogospel, in Genesis, where
already Mary is presented as a queen going forth
to battle, as the queen of hosts, queen of armies
who gathers about herself all the forces of God,
all the graces of God, and this to fight. To fight
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whom? To fight what? To fight the devil!
It is God Himself who announces this to the
devil: “I shall place between thee—the devil,
Satan—and the Virgin Mary an enmity.” So the
Virgin has an enemy. And not only an enmity
between the Virgin Mary and Satan, but an
enmity between the progeny of Satan and the
progeny of Mary; between the world, between
everything represented by those who are the
children of Satan, between those who struggle
against God, who detest God, and the Son of
Mary, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and all those who
will be the children of the Virgin Mary.
There are then, by the will of God, two armies
in the world: an army of the children of the Virgin
Mary, and an army of the children of Satan. And
between them, God has placed an enmity, an
enmity that will last until the end of time, until

the end of the world. Consequently, the Virgin
Mary, already, before being born, promised by
God, draws us into a combat, into her combat,
into the combat that will lead her to victory.
A combat, however, which, alas, will often be
waged in painful, in difficult, and in trying
periods. But if we follow the Virgin Mary we are
sure with her to achieve victory.
This victory that the Virgin Mary desires is a
victory against Satan and, consequently, against
sin. The Virgin Mary is the symbol of those who
do not want to sin, who do not want to disobey
God. This is the battle that the Virgin Mary is
going to wage through the ages. So it is a great
lesson that God gives us in announcing the birth
of His Mother, in announcing that we shall have
a Mother, a heavenly Mother, a Mother who will
do battle. So we shall do battle with her and we
must do battle against the common enemy who is
Satan, and all those who with Satan are against
God.
Perhaps you have observed nowadays in
modern ecclesiastical literature that they no
longer want to talk about the enemies of the
Church, they no longer want to talk about the
enemies of God, the enemies of Our Lord Jesus
Christ. They would like these enemies to become
brothers. Instead of combatting sin in them, the
sin that removes them from God, by loving them,
by seeking to convert them, it now seems that
those who believe in the Virgin Mary, that the
children of the Virgin Mary and those who are not
children of the Virgin Mary, are all brothers.
Well, this is not true. We must strive to bring
them to become children of Mary, but we cannot
recognize them as children of God if they are not
children of Mary.
The second lesson that the Most Blessed Virgin
Mary gives us, when she was visited by the Angel
Gabriel, is her faith. The first act noted for us in
the Gospel on the occasion of the Annunciation
is the faith of Mary. And her cousin Elizabeth
congratulates her: “Beata quae credidisti:
blessed art thou who hast believed.” Yes, the Most
Blessed Virgin Mary believed. She believed in
whom, in what? She believed that the Son who
was to be born of her was the Son of God; she
believed in the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ;
she believed in the divinity of her divine Son.

This is the great lesson that the Most Blessed
Virgin Mary gives us. Henceforth, she lives only
for the reign of her Son, for the glory of her Son,
Our Lord Jesus Christ. In the greatest humility—
she says herself that she was chosen because of
her humility.
St. Elizabeth did not hesitate to praise her
precisely for this: “Blessed art thou, O Mary,
because thou hast believed.” This should also
be our own first conviction: We must believe;
we must believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ is
the Son of God. We must believe all our Credo,
the whole faith that the Most Blessed Virgin
had transmitted, that the Most Blessed Virgin
manifested to the apostles and that the apostles
transmitted. We must keep this faith intact. Let
us ask the Virgin Mary to have faith like hers—to
have faith as deep, as firm, as courageous as that
of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary.
The third event in the life of the Virgin Mary
that shows us how we should behave is what
took place at the wedding feast of Cana. You
remember that they ran out of wine during the
feast. The servants came to tell Mary that there
was no more wine. And what did Mary tell the
servants? “Do all that He tells you; do all that my
divine Son tells you.” This is the Gospel of Mary.
All is summarized in this phrase: “Do what Jesus
tells you.”
Mary addresses these words to us as well,
not only to the servants of Cana. At the very
beginning of the period of evangelization of Our
Lord, the Most Blessed Virgin is already speaking
to us, is already speaking to those who will be
the disciples of Our Lord. And when we appeal
to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary to ask her what
we should do in the difficult circumstances of
our lives, the Most Blessed Virgin Mary will
answer us just as she answered the servants
at the wedding feast of Cana: “Do all that He
tells you. Do the will of Our Lord. Observe the
commandments of Our Lord Jesus Christ. If you
do the will of Our Lord, if you do the will of my
divine Son, then you will be saved. Then your
soul, which is perhaps like water, will be changed
into wine, a generous wine. Your soul will be
filled with the grace of the Lord. Your soul will be
filled with all that is necessary for you to fulfill
the commandments of God. This is the third
41

Spirituality
lesson that our heavenly Mother gives us.
The fourth lesson that the Most Blessed Virgin
Mary gives us is her presence on Calvary. Her
presence on Calvary, where she is not the priest
who offers the sacrifice—the priest who offers
the sacrifice is Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself—
but the Most Blessed Virgin Mary is there,
present. The apostles are absent; only St. John is
with her.
By this presence on Calvary, the Virgin Mary
shows us the importance of the sacrifice of
Calvary, and, consequently, the importance of the
Sacrifice of the Mass. She is the Mother of priests.
She is the Mother of all the faithful. And by this
presence, standing before her divine Son, who
is covered with blood, whose blood was poured
forth for our sins, the Most Blessed Virgin Mary
shows Him to us, and says to us, “See the love
He has for you: my divine Son has given all His
blood, this blood that I myself gave Him in my
womb, this blood that is now all over His body.
His heart is open. His head is pierced with thorns.
His hands are pierced; His feet pierced—all that
by love for you.” And this will continue until the
end of time through the Holy Sacrifice of the
Mass.
Thus the Most Blessed Virgin Mary teaches us
the great mystery of the love of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, realized in the sacrifice of Calvary, in
the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the Eucharist.
For the sacrifice of the Mass also gives us the
Eucharist; this Flesh and Blood of the Victim
that we must eat and drink to obtain eternal life.
It is Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself who said so;
“If you do not eat my flesh and drink my blood,
you will not have eternal life.” So Our Lord Jesus
Christ accomplished this unimaginable, the
incredible miracle of really giving us His body
and His blood to eat and drink. This is what the
great love of Our Lord Jesus Christ accomplished,
and this is the lesson that the Virgin Mary gives
us by her presence at the feet of her divine Son on
Calvary.
Finally, the last lesson that the Most Blessed
Virgin Mary gives us is that of her presence in
the midst of the apostles the day of Pentecost.
It is through her that the graces will be given
to the apostles and that the Holy Ghost will
descend upon them. The Church teaches us so.
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The apostles were sanctified on that day by the
Holy Ghost through the intercession of the Most
Blessed Virgin Mary, through her mediation.
She no longer needed to receive the Holy
Ghost. She was filled with the Holy Ghost. The
angel Gabriel had told her so: “Thou art filled
with the Holy Ghost.” She no longer needed to
receive Him. But if she was present, it is because
she wanted to communicate the Holy Ghost to
the apostles, and because Our Lord wanted Him
to be communicated to them through her—to
them and, consequently, to the Church. There she
truly became the Mother of the Church, because
it was she who by her mediation gave the Holy
Ghost to the apostles.
So the Most Blessed Virgin teaches us to love
the Church, to love the Holy Ghost—the Holy
Ghost, who is given to us by all the sacraments
instituted by Our Lord, and especially by the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass and by the Eucharist. This
is what the Most Blessed Virgin Mary teaches us.
Therefore, we must be attached to the Church,
and it is because we are attached to the Church
that we defend our holy Mother the Church. The
Roman Catholic Church is our mother. And it is
because we are the devoted sons of the Church,
because we love the Church, because we love
Rome, because we love all those who truly
represent the Holy Catholic Church, that we
defend our Faith, that we defend what the Virgin
Mary has given us.
We do not want them to change our Church.
We want no other Church. We want the Roman
Catholic Church, that which the Most Blessed
Virgin Mary communicated to the apostles
in the Holy Ghost. This is the Church that we
want. This is the Church that we love—the
Church of the Mother of Jesus, the Church of
the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, the Church of the
Immaculate Conception, the Church of Our Lady
of the Assumption. This is the Church that we
venerate, the Church to which we wish forever to
remain subject. So we beg those who have posts
of authority in the Church not to change our
Church, to remain faithful to the Church of Mary,
to remain faithful to the Most Blessed Virgin
Mary, to all the lessons that she has given us.
And I beg you, my dear brethren, to be the
leaven—the leaven of the Catholic Church, of this

love for the Catholic Church, in all your regions,
in all your families, in all your homes. Remain
children of Mary; pray to the most Blessed Virgin
Mary. Meditate on the lessons that she gives you.
Then you will be true Catholics. You cannot be
children of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, in a full
and holy manner, without being the best children
of the Catholic Church. This is what reassures
us that we are indeed true sons of the Catholic
Church.
So I am convinced that when you return home
you will be true representatives of the Catholic
Church, and that you will co all you can so that
she continues, despite the difficulties, despite
the trials, despite the contradictions. We must all
pray together today for you to be witnesses. Just
as the apostles received the Holy Ghost through
the Virgin Mary, and went forth to give witness
to the Gospel throughout the world, so you also
must be the witnesses of the Virgin Mary, of the
Holy Ghost that you have received through her,
and give witness to your faith in God, of your
faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ, of your love for the
Church, wherever you may be. This is what God
desires.
You are the Church! You are the Church! You
are the Catholic Church! So let us remain in this
Church of the Virgin Mary. Let us confide in her.
Let us confide to her our families, especially our
children, who so need the help of the Virgin Mary
to remain in the true Catholic Faith.

43

Paray-le-Monial has become a muchfrequented place of pilgrimage since
1873, as many as 100,000 pilgrims
arriving yearly from all parts of Europe
and America. The most venerated spot
is the Chapel of the Visitation, where
most of the apparitions to Blessed
Margaret Mary Alacoque took place.
Next comes the Basilica of the Sacred
Heart, in charge of secular chaplains,
formerly the church of the monks, which
is one of the most beautiful monuments
of Cluniac architecture (10th or 11th
century).

Christian Culture

The Sacred
Heart Basilica
of Paray-le-Monial

by Dr. Marie France Hilgar

In 973, a Benedictine Abbey was created in
Paray. A few years later, the monastery was
donated to the Order of Cluny. Soon after, a
church was consecrated. A new priory church
was built in 1092. It is the replica of Cluny III.
During the Revolution, the monks left Paray and
the City Council bought the building. In 1794,
the monks’ church became a parish church. It
was classified a Historical Monument in 1846.
Pope Pius IX promoted the church to the status
of minor basilica in 1875, and dedicated it to the
Sacred Heart in remembrance of the apparitions
of Christ in the 17th century to St. Margaret
Mary Alacoque, a Visitation nun and of the great
pilgrimages following these apparitions. It was
restored in the 19th century. In 1992, Paray
celebrated with great pomp the 9th centennial of
the building.
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Outside, stand facing the west side of the
basilica, and notice the difference between the
two towers. The one on the right dates back to
the 11th century and is the remains of the first
church. The one on the left is from the 12th
century. As you walk along the northern side, you
come to the side doorway the most ornate. Note
the richness and the beauty of the sculptures:
the friezes of roses, the motifs on the columns.
Continue your outside visit and admire the
pyramid-shaped chevet, a pure Romanesque
masterpiece. The radiating chapels, the
successive offsets from the ground level to the
bell tower, the balance between the shapes and
the volumes are of a rare harmony. The southern
doorway leads to the cloister of the priory, the
last Cluny Benedictine priory built in the 18th
century.

You will enter the church through the narthex.
As you walk into the nave you will be struck by
the simplicity of the decoration. The important
height, made possible by the pointed barrel vault,
results in the good lighting of the building. The
transept crossing is a dome on squinches (an
arch, lintel, corbeling, or the like, carried across
the corner of a room to support a superimposed
mass). On the semi-dome vault of the choir a
painting, discovered in 1935, represents the
Pantocrator, Christ in glory, of Byzantine
inspiration, perhaps from the 14th century. It was
unfortunately being renovated and hidden when I
was there. All around the choir, the ambulatory is

remarkably elegant with its slender columns, its
rows of checked pattern billets, and its groined
vault. The Gothic chapel of the southern arm
of the transept was built in the 15th century
as a burial chapel. It is the chapel of the Holy
Sacrament. On the left of the transept, the monks’
granite hand-basin of the 15th century is now
used as a holy water font. In summer, the visitor
may also walk upstairs to the high chapel over
the narthex which offers a very good view of the
nave.
Walking, sitting, contemplating, all here
contributes to the charm and lightness of this
monument built in the very heart of the Val d’Or.
47

Christian Culture

April 15, 2019

A Tragic Day
by Louis du Fayet de la Tour

In a single and tragic day the temple of the
light, known as Notre Dame, evaporated like
smoke into the fiery air. Her sacred roof was
devoured by an odious blaze which burned and
billowed like a monster amidst the throes of
death. Profaned by these furious and chaotic
flames the millenary roof of this Lady of Stone
was ripped away causing her spire to fall and her
ancient vaults to lie broken. The 15th of April,
Holy Monday, was the day when, during the night,
the light disappeared and was drowned in a field
of shadow.
Faced with this sad spectacle, modern man
could only hold up his camera to capture the
image of this edifice in agony. He tweeted it; he
liked it; but all he shared was his confusion. He
sent his ethereal messages—a mere second of
emotion facing a dying eternity. Others, already
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sons of Hell, spread their hatred or indifference,
jibing the sacred which was in flame: these are
the sons of the Pharisees who mocked Christ
upon the Cross. But those who cried, who sighed,
or even those who sneered, all contemplated the
vast grave silhouette of the great Lady of Stone
who emerged from the torment of fire, somewhat
stunned but standing still amid this Dante-like
dance among the deformed shadows. But the
man of 2019, does he really know what it is that
he sees? Or does he merely gaze while grasping
nothing?
Because he who looks without truly seeing
doesn’t understand that it is beauty that draws
itself away from the city of art; it is twilight of
the now banished light of Paris; it is God Himself
who is going away, God who is leaving France—
His ungrateful daughter who has so denied Him.

A Premonition to Visit
A few weeks ago, I had the chance (or the
premonition) to go visit the cathedral. With my
spouse, we stayed seated for several minutes
below the high roof, between the walls kissed by
light. Then, at the back in the chapel where one
hides God, we recited our rosary behind a pillar
under the gaze of the windows of a thousand
faces. These people tell the story of a nation of
builders; they tell of the hunt of St. Hubert, the
harvest, or the martyrs of the first centuries.
What splendor! Does one realize what this
cathedral envelops between its walls? The Gothic
cathedral, the French geniuses of their times
who loved God; it is the temple of truth, of light
given to men, of Revelation that nourishes our
intelligences, of charity that transcends our will,
of grace that penetrates the depths of our hearts.
The Word of God was made flesh and the Faith

was made stone. The cathedral is the temple
constructed by free men, from the rural lands and
from all over the nation in order to build its high
walls, to open its immense bays on the colorful
perfumes of paradise to touch the heavens with
its towers. The cathedral is a catechism in stone;
it is the Church who sees and who teaches.
The cathedral is Heaven opened upon the
earth; it is the chest of a thousand colors,
scintillating with all of its fire, protecting within
its womb the miracle of religion. If God died upon
wood, He is resurrected in stone and this stone
came from the entrails of the earth, formed at the
dawn of time. It is the stone of the altar; it is the
eternal stone that carries the Holy Sacrifice. The
French, out of love for God, dug up the earth to
extract the stones coming from the foundation
of ages. They carved them and mounted them
upon pillars, designed the audacious arches,
invented the flying buttresses that carry the
49

sanctuary, sculpted the faces, signed the keys
of the vaults that join the sweet section for the
faithful like a long coat, like the hand of God
protecting His children, powerful but light, kind
but full of audacity. The pillars of the cathedral
carry the earth itself, their aisles navigate in the
sky, their windows capture the light and make it
glitter upon the walls, they elevate its heart in a
thousand colors, as religion and grace make the
perfume of God and the saints rain into the souls
of the baptized.

A Truly Catholic Symbol
The cathedral cannot be anything other than
Catholic. It is universal because that which it
tells is the truth itself. It carries eternity under
its roof; it is the dwelling place of God. But the
roof is melted up to the location of the transept—
there where the two arms of the cross join, at
the level of the heart of Christ—there where the
lance transpierced the divine victim and made
blood and water, love and grace run upon the
earth. Christian transcendence in its entirety is
contained in the lines of the Cross: a vertical line
planted in the earth and pointed toward Heaven,
a horizontal line to lovingly embrace humanity.
The cross of the cathedral is this: from the Orient
to the Occident, from the rising of the sun until
it sets, from the beginning until the end of time,
it is eternity designed upon earth. But eternity is
gone; death took it away. Night has beaten upon
the city of lights and the man of 2019 has shed his
tear. He shares his “emotion,” and he reassures
himself by telling himself that he is not the only
one to cry, that he is in communion with all men,
because the cathedral is the temple of all, the
temple of art and history.
The bishop rejoiced when the grand Rabbi of
Paris himself witnessed with his own emotion,
then he spoke of mankind, of the symbol that
represents the grand Lady of Stone in the
universal imagination. Then, he gave an accolade
to the president in order to thank him for his will
to rebuild the cathedral. All of these words were
empty. They were full of emotion, but empty of
sense, empty of truth. Eight hundred years ago,
rural areas raised and built churches of stone

while chanting the psalms. Today, in 2019, rural
areas don’t pray anymore but despair, the cities
damage and damn themselves in the incessant
noise and deafening of their screens. Eight
hundred years ago, the French who loved God
raised the bell towers of stone in honor of God.
Today, the French who have forgotten God drown
their souls while those among them profane the
churches of stone.
Man of 2019, do you see how you are far from
your ancestors? How were you able to forget until
now? One does not rebuild a cathedral like one
builds a bridge! The cathedral is not the temple
of men; it is the temple of God! It is the image of
His eternal glory; it is the symbol of His grandeur,
it witnesses the truth who was made flesh; it is
in the shape of the gibbet that saved humanity;
it is dedicated to the Mother of God, the pure
Virgin; it is the driving force of the faith of a
nation. It is not a museum, a stage set, a store, an
expense item for the State budget, a photography
subject, an unavoidable tourist attraction, no!
It is the temple of God! It is the standard of the
truth of salvation! The men who built it knew
this because they loved God. And that which they
built is eternal and will never die. Behold our
hope: in building a temple of stone, the French
who loved God saved their souls, confirmed a
nation forever, and this nation is that of Heaven.
Thus, God can give to the men of 2019 the grace
to see the truth. Then God will come back to
dwell in Paris, then beauty will once again find its
colors in its diadem of stone, then Paris will heal
its wound and find, again, its light.
Let us pray to the Blessed Virgin that France
finds the faith in its ancestors who loved God.
And you, man of 2019 who will rebuild, may you
find the strength in this project to rebuild your
heart, then can we rebuild the grand lady of
stone! But perhaps that is what is happening…
we have seen the people praying on their knees
before the great blaze. A glow of hope. Like the
glow that was filtered through the great rose
window this morning, the 16th of April. It still
shines, it still continues to distil its sweet light
that comes to rest itself on the rubble like a
healing balm. O thou, grand Lady of Stone, be
reborn from your ashes!
Translated from the French by Associate Editor Jane Carver.
51

A fire ravaged Notre-Dame cathedral in
Paris in April and left a scarred skyline
that one of the French capital’s most iconic
structures had graced for centuries. Gone
is the cathedral’s soaring, delicate 300-foot
spire, which collapsed in the flames. The
cathedral’s wooden roof is now blackened
and charred.

Christian Culture

Yellow Vests,
I Understand
You, But…
by Fr. Xavier Beauvais, SSPX

Editor’s Note: This text originally appeared in the January 2019 publication L’Acampado.

One of the characteristics of modern man
is to qualify himself as a consumer, or a man
who integrates into a society of consummation.
Tocqueville, in the 19th century, already
predicted that man—and the society of the 20th
century—would be of weak spiritual stature who
is always on the lookout for material usefulness
in things or personal interests, beneath a State
of paternal appearance, but totalitarian at its
core. This particularity of modern man permits
us to qualify him as a “homo economicus.”
When money seductively dominates those who
live in society and when it is placed above man’s
natural end (which determines equivalence
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among things) society converts itself into a grand
shopping center and the citizen into a producer
and consumer being.

What are the Traits of
an Entrepreneur?
His principal goal is not always gaining
the bait. What preoccupies and absorbs the
businessman, what fills his life and gives
motivation to his activity is the interest of
his business. This is where the business man
concentrates his work, his preoccupations;

what do his pride and desire rest upon? His
business. Business for him is a being of flesh
and bones which, thanks to his responsibility,
organization, and commercial contracts, drives
his independent, economic existence. The
businessman does not know any other end nor
does he have any other preoccupation except to
watch his trade grow until it is converted into a
strong, prosperous, and blossoming organism.
The vast majority of masters of industry do not
have any other aspiration other than amplifying
their trade. If someone asks them why they are
doing all of this, what is the object of all their
preoccupations? They would stare with a gaping
mouth and reply in an irritated manner that no
explanation is needed. Their business simply
requires economic development; it requires
progress. Such an analysis for the impartial
observer with such a response appears absurd
and even implicates regression to childhood i.e.
to the elementary state of a childish soul. A child
has four ideals that direct his life.
—Firstly, it is the inherent grandeur in mature
adults, and finally, by the bigger person or “grown
up.” We find this in the quantitative valorization
proper to businessmen. For him, being successful
signifies having advantages over others, being
greater than one’s neighbor, being bigger—a
childish desire, a certain searching for the infinite
which is sometimes the signature of the spirit of
avarice.
—The second ideal proper to children is that
of rapid movement. The promptness of carrying
out his economic plans interests the modern
businessman as much as his massive and
quantitative character; the concept of setting new
records enters his business.
—The third ideal of the child is novelty.
The child gets tired of his projects quickly. He
will leave it to take up another. Equally, the
businessman of our times is drawn by what is
new, because what is novel is original.
—Finally, the child tries to feel that he has a
certain power, and for this, he gives orders to
his little brothers or makes the dog do tricks.
The seeking of power is the fourth tendency of
the businessman. Thus, the head of a modern
company who is obsessed with his trade has
tainted morals which are similar to those of

children. Therefore, there is a certain childishness
in him. Certainly, not all business owners behave
like this. There are exemplary examples in their
fields, but for the most part among them, they give
themselves feverishly to their activity and push
themselves to the limit of human possibility—to
the detriment of their family, and above all to the
detriment of their spiritual life. Each and every
moment of the day, of love, of life, each aspiration
of the mind, all preoccupations and worries
are consecrated to one thing: production. This
excess of activity ends in destroying the body and
corrupting the soul.
Behold a man who lives by the coming and
goings of his wallet. He finds himself upon his
deathbed; his eyes are already closed. All of a
sudden, he opens his eyes and with what little he
has left of his voice he addresses one of his sons
and asks, “How much is the dollar worth today?”
Those were his last words. The same obsession
with earnings makes this type of businessman,
who dominates today, completely ignorant
regarding all foreign considerations to things
other than earnings. He is convinced that they
are of the superior lucrative value above all other
values. No scruples exist on the moral, aesthetic,
or sentimental levels.

Overcoming Obstacles
We can apply here what was said about one of
the Rockefellers: “They have passed above every
moral obstacle with an almost ingenuous lack
of scruples.” John Rockefeller recalledwhose
memoirs reflect in an excellent manner that
mentality, on one occasion summed up his creed
by saying that he was disposed to pay a salary
of a million dollars to one of his agents on the
condition that he possesses—outside of the
necessary aptitudes—a deficiency of scruples
such that he will be willing to sacrifice thousands
of people without the slightest hesitation. Behold
the face of the businessman—the active face of
the consumerist spirit. Let us look at the identity
of the consumer now. He is, himself, obsessed
by economic goods, always looking for what is
useful, of quantity over quality. His call to action
is to produce and consume the maximum.
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Christian Culture
Man is a machine who is made to produce
and consume. Conversely, there is a profound
difference between economic and spiritual goods.

The nature of economic goods consists in
being exchanged and consumed. The nature of
spiritual goods consists in being expressed and
communicated. The magnanimity of a spiritual
good does not change, rather, it communicates

life. It is for this reason that it would be wrong to
denigrate, in the name of an abstract spirituality,
economic goods. It would also be wrong to
overstate, in the name of obtuse materialism,
economic goods, as is the case today. It would be
equally erroneous to put these two categories of
values on the same playing field.
—Economic goods, one makes use of;
—Spiritual goods, one savors. The expression
comes from St. Augustine, according to whom,
—Perishables, correspond to their uti, their
utility.

itself. It does not consume itself; it expresses
itself. And the more that is communicates and
expresses itself, the more it enriches, grows,
and the more powerful it becomes. On the other
hand, economic goods, money or material goods
change, are used up, and are consumed. This
signifies that they may be bought or sold. No one,
on the other hand, can buy or sell spiritual goods,
because they are not merchandise. This is not to
say that material goods are contemptible. Their
status of being bought and sold implies a just
price. This just price is established upon a basis
of moral criteria, therefore, economic exchanges
can be acts of justice.
In this case, the act of buying and selling,
which is proper to economic goods, includes
a certain spiritual value which, among nonspiritual goods becomes concrete and a part of

—The things that do not perish, corresponds
to their frui, their enjoyment.
The first are a means—to consume. The
others, by enjoying them—grow. But the
consumerist man does not establish distinctions.
For him, the only things that count are earthly
goods. It is the era of plastic: to have and use,
to use and throw away, and to buy a new one.
And of course, we must recognize this and
react against it. This metaphysics of “nothing”
is achieved by the possession of a great number
of things and the widespread death of all ideals.
The sickness of our Western, and formerly
Christian heritage, is abundance: to have all
that is material and to reduce to the maximum
all that is spiritual. Surrounded by objects,
man feels empty, the contrary of what St. Paul
wrote to the Corinthians: “Having nothing, we

The Nature of Economic Good

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possess everything.” Every civilization offers a
vision proper to man, and it is by this that one
can judge it. Thus, the civilizations of old had
their aristocracies in which a determined human
ideal was incarnated. One cannot understand,
for example, Greek civilization without knowing
the ideal of “the good and the beautiful” which
is its hallmark; in the same manner, one cannot
understand medieval culture if one does not
know anything of what was sacred, of knights
or of courtiers. Each grand civilization brought
about a certain type of man, a human model
which sometimes never becomes totally
solidified, but which the attraction remains
fascinating, sustaining the effort of all those
upon whom they radiate. Modern civilization
which does not understand man anymore, which
ignores the sense of intelligence and finds itself
amputated from all finality, may be essentially
defined as a civilization of means, a technical
civilization; the means themselves are converted
into ends. To possess the means is to possess
the end. It is evident that material riches have
always played an important role in society,
but which have never constituted an object of
admiration in themselves. Man has always sought
after silver and gold, but never before was his
“searching for and obtaining the goal” considered
as the ultimate end of human intelligence. For
traditional men, wealth was nothing other
than the means that allowed him to carry out
his creativity. Only the society of today has
exalted the figure of the consumerist man where
his final destiny is achievable on earth. This
frantic consuming of everything at our finger
tips: food, products of every species, fashion,
value, idea, neologism, novelty, information,
idol, brand name, and image, manifests within
man a profound desire to assimilate whatever
he doesn’t have, whatever the human condition
does not permit. It refers to the multitudinous
and degraded expression of a false ecstasy that
emanates from this man, to consume more every
time and to be less each time. Behold the man
who is before us today, he who is the citizen
consumer, the anxious man who satisfies his
desires, a man who is reduced to his material
necessities. Lastly, everything revolves around
passion, limited to a great extent by the goods

of consummation. It is what is proper to the
passionate man: to see nothing other than his
passions, to be blinded by them, to identify with
them. Modern propaganda has understood the
mutilating function of passion when it exits its
orbit. Today, it gives man a “light” that doesn’t
interest heroes or saints anymore. These models
are those that have triumphed economically, a
race full of things, but empty of the essential—
empty of being. Thus, one creates a mass of
people which is subject to the daily stupor of the
media, accustomed to react personably, without
the least suspicion, and fully submitted to every
type of manipulation.
The consumerist man is therefore an anxious
man. Not anxious in the same sense as explained
by St. Augustine: that the heart of man is “not
at rest until it reposes in God.” He is at unrest
because of his superior appetites, but not at rest
due to his tireless search for what is inferior.
Confronted with the spasmodic rhythm of
progress centered around technology, superficial
information, and the easy access to visual stimuli
that inundates us, the soul doesn’t develop at all;
on the contrary, it regresses, and the spiritual life
diminishes; it loses quality. Well-being increases
while spiritual development is reduced. The
overabundance breaks the heart and leaves it in
terrible sadness.
No, it is impossible to confide all our hopes
in science, technology, and economic gain. The
victory of scientific and technical civilization has
inculcated us with a sort of spiritual insecurity.
These gifts enrich us but also submit us to
slavery. Everything is reduced to our interests;
everything is a struggle for material goods, but an
interior voice tells us that we are leaving behind
something pure, superior, and fragile. We do not
discern the sense or finality of our existence
anymore. So, remember this, even as a whisper
to help us correct ourselves: busy and caught up
in this vertigo of movement—why are we alive?
The eternal questions remain, it is up to us to
fight back so that we remain free and enjoy the
freedom of the children of God. Slaves of God,
yes, because being slaves to our flesh is contrary
to our dignity. May we become more aware of this
by the ever-abundant grace of God.
Translated from the French by Associate Editor Jane Carver..
57

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Patience in
Education
by SSPX Sisters

“Patience and time do more than force and
rage,” said La Fontaine. If there is a domain
where this adage is verified, it is truly in the
education of children. Between the first cries of a
child and the moment where this child, who has
become an adult in turn, establishes a home, 25
years will pass. As knitting is done row after row,
education is done day after day.

Patience in Instruction
It is thus unnecessary to want everything right
away. One can only ask of a child that which
he is actually capable of doing or of learning to
do. For example, with a little child, the present
moment occupies all of his attention; he does
not know, or perhaps knows little, how to put

himself in the future, and thus foresee the longterm consequences of his acts. That is why he is
so thoughtless. John, six years old, has left for
school without a hat or gloves while it is snowing.
Of course, he threw snowballs with bare hands
during recess, and, certainly, he has caught a
cold. It is unnecessary to scold him for his lack
of foresight; to foresee such a chain of events
still surpasses him completely. It is unnecessary
also to try to motivate his older brother of 12
years to work in class by making the possibility
of receiving “cum laude” on his diploma or
valedictorian in his senior class shine before his
eyes. At his age, this seems so far away, while
the soccer match with his friend has a more
immediate attraction.
However, when a child becomes capable of
a task, it is not doing him a favor, quite the
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Christian Culture
opposite in fact, to treat him like a baby in not
requiring from him that which he can give. At 8
years old, Cecilia has never yet made her bed, nor
set the table! This is because her mother does not
see her daughter growing, and she does not think
of asking this of her. Thankfully, a short stay at
her Aunt Jeanne’s house has put things in order
by facilitating her comparison with her cousins.
On the same occasion, her mother has also seen
that she can be much more exigent with Anthony,
6 years old, in the manner in which he assists at
Mass. His cousin who is his same age does not
wiggle at all and is even beginning to follow well
in his little prayer book during Mass.

Do Not Expect
Immediate Results
Education is a long-term work. It is not
necessary to expect a child to correct his faults
immediately. “I have already told you 20 times
to wash your hands before coming to the table,”
protests his mother. Courage, the habit may
not be acquired until the 21st, or the 40th time.
We must show the same patience with children
that God shows to us adults, who confess the
same sins so often. But “to be patient” does
not mean “to give up.” Let us continue to ask
for the good, without tiring of the slowness of
the progress, without being discouraged by the
failures that prepare the victories of tomorrow.
By temperament, Mr. Dupont does not really see
the necessity of everything having its place; when
he was 10 years old, his mother regularly found
the contents of his backpack left on the carpet of
the living room and his dirty socks under his bed;
his father did not cease to tell him to put away
his bike somewhere else than in the middle of the
driveway. Thanks be to God, and all the better for
him, his parents were persevering. Today, without
being obsessive, he knows sufficiently how to put
away his things so as not to compromise peace in
his household.
Education is a long-term work, thus everything
is not lost if an error is made, if one too many
words are said. What is an isolated incident
compared to 20 years of affection, of care, of
good examples and good influences? Paul is
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right in the middle of the adolescent crisis; he
is sometimes so irritating that this time his
father has lost patience and said something to
him that he never should have said. Certainly,
it is regrettable, and his father may have the
impression of having ruined everything. No,
everything is not lost. Paul knows, deep down,
that his parents love him, that it was he who
pushed his father too far by his attitude. The Holy
Ghost gives the counsel of what to say to parents
who know how to ask Him.
Education is a long-term work of which
parents do not always know the final result. The
moment of establishing oneself in life gives the
indication. However, even with the best education
in the world, a child remains free, free alas to
choose evil over good. We see in good families
children who “turn bad,” abandon religious
practices or who live immorally. Nevertheless,
may the parents not be discouraged: that which
was sown in childhood will come to the surface
again someday. This is why it is important not to
spoil children, not to let them do whatever they
wish at three or four years old: the “little” years
prepare the years to come.
What a consolation on the other hand for aging
parents to see their children in turn establish
a solid household or respond to a priestly or
religious vocation! These children who owe them
their “successful” life before God form the crown
of honor of these parents, in time and in eternity.

Keeping the
Home Fires
Burning
by John Rao, PhD

Our world is all too profoundly shaped by
the anti-theological, anti-logical, and ultimately
therefore totally willful philosophical school of
Nominalism that was one of the chief pillars of
Martin Luther’s religious revolution. Operating
with this truly arbitrary and erratic intellectual
vision, modern men find it very hard to accept
clear rational judgments regarding all of the
consequences that must necessarily flow from
Luther’s radical assault on both the Mystical
Body of Christ as well as the natural order
that she works to cleanse and perfect. This
unwillingness is not very surprising, because
such consequences are so horrendous for social
order in general that Protestants quickly hunted
for expedients to flee from them, with Luther
himself at the head of the pack historically.
But want it or not, there is no possible escape

from the physical and psychological conflagration
to which one of its elements, Luther’s doctrine of
the “freedom of the Christian man,” exposes not
just the Mystical Body but each and every visible,
substantive, authoritative social “body” as well,
including the most fundamental “corporation”
of them all: the family, the domestic Church.
This deadly understanding of “freedom,” which
first stoked its fires under the always vulnerable
earthly frame of Holy Mother Church, sets
the family and every other social corporation
ablaze in exactly the same way that it torches
the mystical model serving all of them as their
common, supreme guide. It does so in three ways,
one of them straightforward in its violence, the
other two indirect in character but even more
effective in the long run. Let us examine each of
these three weapons of familial and general
61

Christian Culture
social annihilation in turn.

A Positive Understanding
of Liberty
Orthodox Catholicism has a positive
understanding of liberty that defines the free man
as one who knows and carries out the demands
of the truth about his very being in all of its
fullness. This truth mandates the carrying out
of substantive personal and communal duties
requiring the assistance of a rich network of
authoritative natural social institutions, all of
them guided by the teaching and grace of the
Church. Truth’s duty-filled demands are seen
to be a “yoke” at first glance only, since they
actually liberate the human person by clarifying,
activating, and giving practical effect to all of his
otherwise incompletely understood and clumsily
or improperly used talents. It is a “yoke” that
allows him honestly to “fulfill his potential” in
a way that modernity boasts of achieving while
actually achieving the opposite result: crippling
him in time and for eternity.
Luther’s philosophically Nominalist vision
of liberty, is, in contrast, ultimately empty
of positive meaning. Chained firmly to his
fixation upon the total depravity of mankind
after Original Sin, it “frees” the human person
only in the negative sense of cutting him loose
from all responsibilities. These are reduced
to pointlessness by stripping the individual’s
carrying out of duties to himself and to his fellow
creatures of any and all realization of “the good,”
personal or communal, possessing significance
for the Christian ascent of Mount Carmel and
eternal transformation in Christ. In the Lutheran
universe, totally depraved men and women stand
on one side of an Iron Curtain, with goodness,
holiness, and their eternal destiny on the other.
They are “free” to engage as individual agents
in nothing other than a war of all against all
in what amounts to a wicked, savage, jungle
environment. Their only salvation lies in the
hope that, regardless of their inability to please
Him by actions that will always be evil no matter
how “good” they superficially may seem to be, an
angry God will choose to allow them to enter a
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heaven where their eternally enduring depravity
will arbitrarily be ignored.
In a thorough-going Protestant world, neither
the familial “domestic Church,” nor any other
natural authoritative corporation guided by
a Body of Christ condemned as a fraudulent
usurper of the rights of God, can aid the human
person to liberate himself in a truly Christian
sense, How could they? Man’s totally depraved
nature prevents this from taking place. Far from
being helped by the family and other corporate
entities to achieve the impossible goal of pleasing
the Creator God, the hopeless sinner’s natural
awe of their venerable history and authorities
can only delay his decision to hand himself over,
through faith, entirely into the hands of the
arbitrary Deity. His “freedom” demands that the
firestorm devouring Holy Church mercilessly
whirl through their depraved edifices as well.

An Unanticipated Destruction
Logically-minded radicals understood the need
for this all-encompassing firestorm immediately,
but a shocked Martin Luther, actually quite
conservative in his instincts, had not anticipated
the full destructive import of his depravity-based
doctrine of “freedom.” He could not tolerate the
idea that the elimination of the visible Church
be allowed to drag along with it the annihilation
of the whole of the authoritative social order.
After all, one could see from Scriptures that the
all-powerful Deity had willed the existence of
societies and the authorities—like the family
and parents—ruling over them, and God’s will
was law. Men had to be forced to understand
that while their submission to the law of God
did not put them on the path to salvation and
could never make them “good,” His law must
nevertheless still fully be obeyed, schizophrenic
as such a separation of daily behavior and final
eternal outcome might seem. Other Protestants,
frightened by the endless divisions and infighting
that the literal application of their vision of
Christian liberty had engendered, along with
the disruption of social peace and the discredit
to the value of the Faith as a whole brought in
their train, came to share Luther’s conservative

concerns…although not his particular answer to
the problem.
Hence, the development of two different tools
for maintaining social order and authority, for
“keeping the home fires burning” in a positive
way, halting or reversing the conflagration
unleashed by the more logical radicals. But given
the fact that both of these strategies stubbornly
still refused to abandon the underlying
Nominalist willfulness and the Protestant
doctrine of depravity-based liberty, all that they
could really do was to guarantee the barbequing
of the entire social order in a disguised manner:
more “conservatively,” more slowly, and—
because seemingly more friendly and therefore
less openly perceived—more effectively. A glance
at both these approaches is now necessary to
complete our work.

No Solution at All
Luther’s solution to the radical consequences
of his vision of freedom was to hand over all
responsibility for the enforcement of God’s
law in the savage jungle order of nature to the
State. But what would guarantee that the State
interpreted that law correctly and punished
those breaking it justly, if no powerful Church
authorities rooting their decisions in theological
and philosophical sources that were as clear as
Nominalist and Lutheran inspired ones were
arbitrary and murky no longer existed? Would
not depraved State authorities see themselves as
the true determinants of God’s will? Certainly,
Jean Calvin thought as much, although the new
ecclesiastical regimen that he erected to perform
the task of secular guidance and enforcement
merely passed the ultimate interpreter of
God’s will into the hands of potentially wicked
“democratic” congregations and the charismatic
preachers telling their membership what
they thought. What becomes of the structure,
authority, and rights of the family—clear and
eternal in the Catholic vision of things—under
these circumstances? Whatever it is that a
monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, success
driven State indicates that they are. Is this
just? But, once again, what does justice have

to do with a jungle environment anyway, since
its rulers are inevitably evil, and assuring or
ignoring what is just will not impact upon the
eternal destiny of those responsible for it in the
slightest?
Unfortunately, destruction of the family in
a manner that ultimately turns out to be just
as tyrannical slowly results from the second
expedient appealed to historically as well—that
promoted by Protestants in the countries most
badly disturbed by the disunity and infighting
emerging from the negative concept of freedom.
These included Great Britain, whose decision
to deal with such problems by encouraging an
ever more general religious liberty denigrating
doctrinal and liturgical battling as conducive only
to the undesirable advance of a scathingly critical
atheism, then also passed into the standard
operating procedure of the newly established
United States of America. Supposedly, a peaceloving God wanted believers to avoid quarreling
with one another over non-essential doctrines,
and unite, instead, in their commitment to the
obvious, unchanging, common sense filled
Christian moral code that no one in his right
mind could contest and which alone could fight
off the atheists.
Accompanied as this anti-doctrinal expedient
necessarily was by a failure to attack the
Protestant teaching regarding liberty head on,
it could not prove to be anything other than a
self-contradictory and perilously dangerous
dream, pregnant with a myriad of woes plaguing
and dissolving the social order. Aside from the
strange resurrection by a religion rooted in the
idea of total depravity of the theme of pleasing
God through moral action, the fact remained
that the principle of freedom continued to divide
and destroy. “Free” men and women were indeed
choosing to change morality, but given that
this had been proclaimed impossible, and that
judging whether it was or was not happening
would inevitably bring back “divisive” doctrinal
squabbling displeasing to God, that reality could
not be discussed. Some Protestants from the
so-called Pietist camp developed the slippery
argument that whatever “worked” successfully
for State authorities or for individuals actually
proved God’s approval of their interpretation
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Christian Culture
of His moral law. Others, turning the negative
principle of total depravity after Original Sin
into a positive building block of social order,
claimed that freedom for individuals inevitably
seeking their self-serving goals somehow
conspired together to work for the authoritative
common good. Hence, the unchangeable was
transfigured into the changeable and the sociably
authoritative into the individually free, with the
consequence that the arbitrary demands of the
strongest wills conquered all corporate entities:
the inevitable result of a vision inspired by a
Nominalism that could not stand the idea of
definite theological and philosophical guidelines
for anything, and the mental illness guaranteed
by a doctrine of total depravity schizophrenically
disconnecting daily action from a human
person’s final end.
Under the influence of this supposedly antiatheist, anti-divisive, religion and morality
friendly strategy, the “Christian” family becomes
the helpless tool of whatever the strongest
forces “freely” manipulating it from the inside
arbitrarily will that it should be: whether these
be the passing passions of libertine parents or
adolescent children, or gay, lesbian, transvestite,
transgender, transhumanist, or posthumanist
fantasies regarding the domestic Church’s
acceptable nature. Even when remaining
respectably normal, a “Christian” family
resorting to this expedient to survive does so
with reference not to its unchangeable God-given
character and supernatural end, but, rather,
once again, to the personal choice of the family
members concerned. It retains its ties to tradition
without any foundation in what is truly real, and
continues exposed not just to further internal
redefinition, but also to outside, more organized,
and stronger ideological, consumerist, or statist
controls.
Whatever the delusions of its often wellmeaning promoters, the logic of Protestant
“freedom,” whether direct or indirect in its
action, cannot help but “keep the home fires
burning” in a negative sense that turns against
the individual along with society, against both
God and nature. It must destroy what the
Catholic vision cherishes. We can never hope
to tame it or redirect it to our advantage and
64

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must urge one another on to do with this false
freedom what Voltaire urged his supporters to
use the principle of religious liberty to do with
us: “Écrasez l’infâme.”

Traditional Catholic Hymnal
Choir Edition

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Priestly Ordinations 2019
On Friday June 21, His Excellency
Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais
ordained five new priests at St. Thomas
Aquinas Seminary, Dillwyn, VA.

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67

Christian Culture

by Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara, SSPX

Considering the present
crisis of the Church, what
does it mean to pray “for the
intentions of the Holy Father”?
When, for gaining and indulgence, we pray
for the intentions of the Holy Father, we are
praying for four specific, objective intentions.
The Raccolta (a collection of indulgences that
used to be published by the Sacred Congregation
of Indulgences) states that the pope’s intention
always includes the following, very Catholic
intentions:
68

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–– The progress of the Faith and triumph of the
Church.
–– Peace and union among Christian Princes and
Rulers.
–– The conversion of sinners.
–– The uprooting of heresy.
These are the objective intentions for which
we pray, those that correspond to the faithful
discharge of his office. Whatever other personal
intentions he may have, we pray for them also,
as long as they do not contradict those already
stated intentions­—that is, do not pray for the

pope’s subjective intentions if they contradict our
Catholic Faith or otherwise harm the Church.

Can I fully participate at
Mass by praying my rosary or
doing my spiritual reading?
The question has been already magisterially
answered by Pius XII in his encyclical Mediator
Dei.
First of all, “the faithful should be aware that
to participate in the Eucharistic Sacrifice is
their chief duty and supreme dignity, and that
not in an inert and negligent fashion, giving way
to distractions and daydreaming, but with such
earnestness and concentration that they may be
united as closely as possible with the High Priest,
and together with Him and through Him let them
make their oblation, and in union with Him let
them offer up themselves” (Mediator Dei, §80).
In consequence, “they are to be praised who
with the idea of getting the Christian people
to take part more easily and more fruitfully in
the Mass, strive to make them familiar with the
Roman Missal, so that the faithful, united with
the priest, may pray together in the very words
and sentiments of the Church. They also are to
be commended who strive to make the Liturgy
even in an external way a sacred act in which all
who are present may share. This can be done in
more than one way, when, for instance, the whole
congregation in accordance with the rules of the
Liturgy, either answer the priest in an orderly
and fitting manner, or sing hymns suitable to the
different parts of the Mass, or do both, or finally
in High Masses when they answer the prayers
of the minister of Jesus Christ and also sing the
liturgical chant” (Mediator Dei, §105).
The chief aim of these methods of participation

is “to foster and promote the people’s piety
and intimate union with Christ and His visible
minister and to arouse those internal sentiments
and dispositions which should make our hearts
become like to that of the High Priest of the New
Testament” (Mediator Dei, §106).
Nonetheless, “many of the faithful are unable
to use the Roman Missal even though it is
written in the vernacular—nor are all capable
of understanding correctly the liturgical rites
and formulas. So varied and diverse are men’s
talents and characters that it is impossible for
all to be moved and attracted to the same extent
by community prayers, hymns, and liturgical
services. Moreover, the needs and inclinations
of all are not the same, nor are they always
constant in the same individual. Who then would
say, on account of such a prejudice, that all these
Christians cannot participate in the Mass nor
share its fruits? On the contrary, they can adopt
some other method which proves easier for
certain people, for instance, they can lovingly
meditate on the mysteries of Jesus Christ or
perform other exercises of piety or recite prayers
which, though they differ from the sacred rites,
are still essentially in harmony with them”
(Mediator Dei, §108).

Why has the Church
traditionally preserved the use
of Latin in the Roman liturgy?
Although there is nothing in Revelation to
prove the absolute necessity of a sacred language
(that is, a language different from the vernacular
and restricted to sacred functions), the Roman
Church has chosen to preserve Latin as its
liturgical language for the advantages it presents.
Latin, being a so-called dead language, has
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Christian Culture
the incomparable merit of being at the same time
unchangeable and mysterious.
It is unchangeable, while the languages of
the people undergo constant improvement and
remodeling, and liable to go on progressing and
altering. If the liturgical books were subjected
to perpetual change and reconstruction, if the
liturgical formulas of prayer were incessantly
remodeled and altered, the original text and
context would lose not only much of their
incomparable force and beauty, but often would
be disfigured and spoiled by incorrectness,
errors and misrepresentations. Hence it would be
impossible to preserve and maintain uniformity
of divine worship at different times among even
one and the same people, much less throughout
the world.
Since Latin has been withdrawn from daily
life, it possesses a holy, venerable, and mystic
character. Elevated above the time and place of
everyday life, is a mystic veil for the adorable
mysteries of the Mass, which here below we
acknowledge only in the obscurity of faith, but
whose clear vision shall be our portion in Heaven.
The use of Latin does not prevent the faithful
from participating in the fruits of the Sacrifice.
The liturgy of the Holy Sacrifice contains
much that is instructive, but instruction is by
no means its principal object. The Mass is not
primarily a doctrinal lecture or an instruction to
the people. The Sacrifice is essentially a liturgical
action performed by the priest for propitiating
and glorifying God, as well as for the salvation of
souls.
In this sacrifice the people should, in spiritual
union with the celebrant, join in prayer and
sacrifice. And this is not possible for them to do
without some understanding of the liturgical
celebration, but in order to acquire the requisite
knowledge, various means are at the disposal
of Catholics (oral teaching, books of instruction
and devotion). For this purpose the mere recital
of formulas of prayer in the vernacular by the
celebrant would not suffice: the translations
of the prayers would not always disclose their
hidden meaning, and might often be the occasion
of misconceptions, of misunderstandings.
As a universal language of worship, Latin is an
admirable means of presenting, preserving and
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promoting the unity of the Church in worship,
faith and conduct.
The unity of the liturgy for all time and place
can be perfectly maintained only inasmuch as
it is always and everywhere celebrated in the
same language. By the introduction of the various
national languages, the uniformity and harmony
of Catholic worship is imperiled and, in a certain
measure, rendered impossible.
The unity of the liturgical language and of the
divine worship in the Church is a very efficient
means for preserving the integrity of the Faith.
The liturgy is, indeed, a channel by which
dogmatic teaching is transmitted. Worship is
developed out of the doctrine of Faith. In the
liturgical prayers, in the rites and ceremonies of
the Church the truths of Catholic Faith find their
expression, and can be established and proved
therefrom. The more fixed, unchangeable and
inviolable the liturgical formula is, the better
it is adapted to preserve intact and to transmit
unimpaired the original deposit of Faith.

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News from Tradition
Scala Santa Uncovered
On April 11, 2019, the Scala Santa (Holy
Stairs) were opened to the public without the
wooden covering that had been in place for
some 300 years. The Scala Santa are believed
to be the stairs Our Lord climbed in order to be
brought before Pontius Pilate for trial on that
first Good Friday. The stairs were identified by
St. Helena during her visit to the Holy Land and,
along with the true Cross, brought to Rome by
her son, the emperor Constantine the Great.
The stairs were later installed in the Basilica of
St. John Lateran (the cathedral church of the
diocese of Rome) and instantly became a special
place of veneration. Traditionally, pilgrims
would ascend the stairs on their knees in an act
of penance and adoration.
The stairs are composed of various types of
marble and have small crosses carved in various
places to mark the spots where drops of Our
Lord’s Blood fell as He descended the stairs on
His way to Calvary following His scourging and
crowning with thorns. Over the centuries, the

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marble of the stairs began to wear away due to
the sheer number of pilgrims making the ascent.
In 1723, Pope Innocent XIII ordered that the
stairs be covered with wooden planks so as to
preserve them from further wearing away.
A private philanthropic organization, Patrons
of the Arts in the Vatican Museums initiated
the project to restore the stairs and the 16th
century frescos surrounding the stairs. The
organization also funded the restoration, carried
out by experts from Vatican Museums. When the
wooden planks began to be removed, restorers
found numerous notes and coins tucked into the
spaces between the planking left by pilgrims
over the past 300 years. Paolo Violini, the
director of the restoration project stated, “The
steps are made of many different kinds of marble
and cleaning them revealed their beauty.”
The Scala Santa remained uncovered until
June 9, 2019 when they were once again covered
with wooden planks to preserve the integrity of
the marble.

Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith: A Modern Day Archbishop John Hughes?
The Easter Sunday suicide bombings by
Muslim terrorists killed an estimated 320 Catholic
faithful who were gathered for Holy Mass in
various churches in Sri Lanka. A concern that the
lack of police and military security would lead
to additional loss of life of Catholic Christians
prompted Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, Archbishop
of Colombo, Sri Lanka, to order that no public
Masses be offered on Low Sunday (28 April). He
then announced that public Masses would resume
on Sunday May 5, after noting that security had
improved somewhat. His Eminence stated: “But we
will start with a smaller number of Masses and see
if we can slowly increase it depending on how the
situation develops.” When offered a bullet proof
limousine, he categorically refused indicating that
he would trust in divine protection.
The Cardinal also issued a veiled warning to the
Sri Lankan government when he stated: “All the
security forces should be involved and function
as if on war footing…I want to state that we may
not be able to keep people under control in the
absence of a stronger security program…We can’t
forever give them false promises and keep them
calm. Additional security is necessary, [Ranjith
said, so] the people don’t take the law into their
own hands.”
By making these statements, Cardinal Ranjith
seems to be repeating the very effective strategy
employed by New York Archbishop John Hughes
when New York churches were under threat of
attack by the anti-Catholic “Know Nothing Party”
in the 1840s. Hughes famously told New York
mayor James Harper that if any Catholic church
was burned in New York, the city would become “a
second Moscow” (Moscow was destroyed by fire in
1812). Hughes was also urged by some politicians
to “restrain the Irish” to which he replied, “I have
not the power, you must take care that they are not
provoked.” Just to guarantee that Old St. Patrick’s
Cathedral would not be harmed, Archbishop
Hughes requested the Ancient Order of Hibernians
to arm themselves and surround the cathedral:
1,500 men gladly responded to his request. Hughes’
strong leadership and tough public statements
ensured that no harm came to New York churches.

The same could not be said for Philadelphia where
numerous churches were burned and a number
of Catholics killed by rioting mobs of “Know
Nothings.” Bishop Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia
had told the city’s Catholics to “endure the
persecution patiently, make no response and offer
no defense or resistance.”1
We do, of course, continue to remember those
Catholics being persecuted by Muslim terrorists
in our prayers. Cardinal Ranjith has issued the
warning that Catholics will not just lie in wait for
terrorist attacks, but rather will, as a matter of self
defense, protect their families and churches from
persecution.
Anyone interested in learning more about
Archbishop John Hughes will find the biography
Dagger John: The Unquiet Life and Times of
Archbishop John Hughes of New York by Richard
Shaw (New York: Paulist Press, 1977) an excellent
resource.
1

Florence Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New
York. (Yonkers, N.Y.: United States Historical Society, 1983), pg. 56.

73

News from Tradition
The Final Verdict on Archbishop Sheen Going to Peoria
As reported in these pages in the last issue of
The Angelus, a New York Superior Court found
that the remains of Archbishop Fulton Sheen
should be allowed to be moved to Peoria, Illinois
as the Archdiocese of New York had failed to
produce sufficient evidence that the transfer
should not occur. In early May, the New York State
Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Archbishop
Sheen’s niece Joan Sheen Cunningham that the
Archbishop’s mortal remains should be transferred
to the Diocese of Peoria. This should, in all
likelihood, be the final word on the matter since
New York State’s highest court has made its ruling.
The Vicar General for the Diocese of Peoria,
Monsignor James Kruse, issued the following
statement after the Appeals Court verdict was
made public: “After almost three years of litigation,
the New York Archdiocese’s legal arguments have
now been rejected at all three levels of the New
York state court system. Although the New York
Archdiocese may technically have legal options
remaining, they are contrary to the wishes of
Archbishop Sheen and his family, and would serve
no genuine purpose except to delay the eventual
transfer of Archbishop Sheen’s remains. We call
on the Archdiocese of New York to end its litigious
endeavors and to cooperate with the efforts of the
Sheen family and Diocese of Peoria in celebrating
the beatification of The Venerable Servant of God
hopefully in this 100th year anniversary of his
ordination to the priesthood.”

Burgos Will Celebrate Its Jubilee
Pope Francis has granted the Cathedral of
Santa Maria de Burgos (Spain) the celebration
of a jubilee year on the occasion of the eighth
centenary of the laying of the foundation stone of
the building.
Bishop Fidel Herraez Vegas, Archbishop of
Burgos told the press on May 30, 2019 that the
future jubilee year will run from July 20, 2020 to
September 7, 2021.
The prelate also said that he would soon be
presenting to the Vatican a detailed program of the
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celebrations that will take place during the jubilee
that should see the center of Burgos transformed
into a pilgrimage center.
From an original Gothic style that incorporates
the canons of Spanish decorative art, the
cathedral—the fruit of three centuries of work—
is grand. Under the starry sky at the crossroads
of the transept is the tomb of El Cid and Jimena,
his wife. Burgos is a high place of pilgrimage to
Santiago de Compostela, on the French Highway.

Fr. James Schall, S.J. Dies at Age 91
Jesuit Fr. James Schall, the longtime editor
of the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, died
on April 17, 2019. Fr. Schall spent many years
faithfully defending the Church’s teaching on
contraception at a time when there was rampant
dissent among most moral theologians on the
issue. For many years he was a professor at
Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
An obituary written by the Catholic News
Service stated the following: “Fr. Schall was
‘one of the great treasures of American Catholic
academics,’ a writer for Catholic News Service
once wrote in reviewing two of his more than 30
books: The Sum Total of Human Happiness and
The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails
of Thinking, published in 2006.
“ ‘Throughout his career, Fr. Schall has
been a champion of the traditional liberal arts
education, with much of his work dedicated to
remedying the gaps in college-level curricula
that can leave even the most impressively
credentialed among us strangers to history’s
greatest intellects,’ the reviewer said. Besides his
books, Fr. Schall edited or co-edited eight other

volumes, wrote several pamphlets and authored
essays that appeared in numerous publications,
including the St. Austin Review, Homiletic and
Pastoral Review, and the National Review.
“Among the sources for many of the priest’s
lectures were Scripture, Aristotle, Plato,
Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, G.K.
Chesterton, and Pope Benedict XVI. He strongly
supported the pope’s critique of Western
culture which categorizes it as a ‘dictatorship
of relativism.’ ‘We are living in a time where
the logic of disorder is at work, rejecting
systematically the logic of being a human being,’
Fr. Schall once wrote. Fr. Schall was considered
an expert on Chesterton; the priest edited two
volumes of Chesterton’s collected works and
wrote his own volume of essays on the famous
Catholic convert.”
May he rest in peace.
Fr. James Schall delivering his last lecture “The Final
Gladness” at Georgetown before retiring in 2012. The
lecture itself may be found here: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=xN1rFyYbKak

75

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Catholic
Political
Hopes
by Luis Roldán

Editor’s Note: This is a transcript of a conference given for seminarians. The oral style has been
retained throughout.
I am going to frame this conference as if it were
a dialogue with one of these characters, trying to
use for their side the arguments I have been hearing
daily for over 30 years. But for this to work, we need
first to define what we should understand by this
term of Catholic political hope.
The word hope describes two realities: on one
hand, a passion and on the other, the theological
virtue.
The passion means that there is something for
which I hope: some good that I want, that I desire,
but that I do not yet have. St. Thomas Aquinas says
that hope has two defining factors: the object of
hope is a “bonum arduum”—a good that is cannot be

obtained without effort, without fighting for it; but
it must also be a possible good. A thing that I can
obtain easily with no bother or struggle would never
be the object of hope. And that which cannot possibly be done is also never the object of hope; except,
perhaps, for someone with some mental problem!
Regarding the theological virtue, the object is
certainly God; God hoped-for. And in this life, God
is indeed a bonum arduum—He is difficult to obtain,
He must be fought for. Battle is man’s life on earth,
as the prophet says—no one will be crowned who
has not fought valiantly, adds St. Paul. God is not an
easy prize; and if this good is a possible one, it also
means that it can be lost. To hope for something
does not mean having certainty, to be sure that we
will gain it; it means the knowledge that with effort, it
is possible. And here we do not only refer to supernatural hope.

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Theological Studies
Importance of Politics in Life?
Our friend might say, “But of course I have hope!
I have hope in eternal life. I believe I will get to
Heaven.”
We are talking about Catholic political hope. And
you may ask, “What do you mean, Catholic political hope? What does hope have to do with it?” We
can refer back to the first conference of this series,
in which Orlando Gallo reminded us that man is a
social and political animal by nature. We know that
grace does not destroy nature; and therefore, we
know that the eternal salvation of man is the salvation of someone with a political vocation. We also
know that the end of politics, the common good, is
a fully human good. And it is a good which is in the
order of the intermediate goods, which lead to the
last end.
Why, then, are politics so important? Our interlocutor would say that there is no way that man’s salvation could have anything to do with politics; why?
Because man’s salvation depends partially upon the
grace of God, which is always there; and on the other
hand, on my free will—if I want to be saved, and God
wants me to be saved, I will be saved. By way of
proof: though I live my whole life out in a convent of
cloistered Carmelites of the strictest observance,
if I don’t want to do it, I would be condemned. And
there are cases of people who have gone to Heaven
from the concentration camps of a Soviet gulag.
Therefore, politics have nothing to do with salvation.
To contradict this, the Magisterium—by the work
of Pope Pius XII—teaches us that on the form of
society, whether or not it conforms to divine law,
depends the salvation of souls. And how do people
form a society? If we take a randomly chosen group
of 100 persons of all classes and conditions, from
any historical period, we will find that the group of
persons will always end up structured in the same
way. In every group of persons there will always be
about five percent that are good and pious, who
will follow God’s will and even in the worst of circumstances will attain eternal life. If their exterior
circumstances are really bad, they will end up being
martyred. This proves the existence of free will.
Also, however Catholic the society or the city, there
will always be five-percent that reject the divine plan
and who will be condemned. What our speaker says
is correct: but taking a group of people in general, he
is only speaking correctly of ten percent of them.

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What happens to the ninety percent in between?
These are the people that believe—more or less;
that practice their Faith—more or less; that are not
enemies of God, to be sure; but that do not have the
strength to hold out even to the point of martyrdom
in all conditions. So—on what does the salvation
of all these people in the middle depend? For all
of these people, if they have the luck or the grace
to be born in a Catholic family and brought up by
Catholic parents, attend Catholic schools, work in
an economy that respects justice, fair trade, fair
salaries and prices; if they can live in a culture that
breathes truth, order and beauty; if they can live in a
Catholic political community, these people will end
up in Heaven; because they are not enemies of the
Church. But, if this same person has the bad luck to
be born in a broken family; to study in a totally corrupt educational system; to be forced to make his
living in a system based on lucre, speculation and
corruption; and to live in a political order completely
contrary to Christian political teaching; such people,
because they do not have a martyr’s calling, will go
to Hell.
This is why Pius XII is right! On the form of society
depends the salvation of the majority of souls. We all
read the history of the Church and see the courage
of the martyrs in the persecutions of the Roman empire. But it is also interesting to see that especially in
the last persecution—that of Diocletian—there was
a large quantity of people that apostatized, because
they were not disposed to suffer martyrdom. Were
they enemies of God? No; they were simply weak.
And this is why the Church, in Her great wisdom,
labored to transform the pagan empire into a
Christian empire; because without a Christian empire, salvation and Catholic life were in fact impossible for the majority of people. This is why it is so
important that a Christian society exist; the importance of a Catholic city; the importance of the reign
of Christ the King. The form of political organization
is not an indifferent factor for the salvation of souls.
The Need for Hope in Catholic Politics
If this is so, we can say that in fact there does
have to be a political hope for Catholics. The existence of all this disorder of the revolution cannot
be a permanent state; if this were the case it would
imply either that human nature has changed or
that God has changed plans—that He is no longer

interested in the salvation of the majority. Since
neither of these two ideas can be sustained seriously, it becomes evident that the state of affairs in
which there is not a Christian social order must be
a transitory situation; it cannot be a definitive, permanent state for humanity. And therefore I believe
that the existence of a Catholic socio-political order
is at least a secondary object of the virtue of hope.
Why? Because in the current political order, God—
the primary object of supernatural hope—cannot
be obtained by the majority of people. And we know
that God’s will first and foremost is the salvation of
all men, though not all may be saved.
And herein lies the question set forth in our
title. One of my reasons for this conference, which
I have been giving for about 20 years, was to look
at the crisis of the Council and the part the Church
played in it. When one reads, for example, the text of
Dignitatis Humanæ—the formal renunciation of the
social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ—one has
to wonder how it is possible that 2000 bishops, saving a few, could have consented to this document.
So what happened? The majority of these bishops
believed that Christ is King. But they thought it
impossible for Him to reign. They had faith; but they
lacked hope.
And this is a problem that, as we were saying, the
Church had seen coming for a long time: this sort of
divorce between the doctrine that remained orthodox until Vatican II, and an ecclesiastical political
praxis that often, as in this case of the signing of
the documents, more or less proved the saying that
the man who does not act as one thinks, winds up
thinking as he acts—as we see today. And so, he will
say in the end, “I can’t teach something that is not
possible. If it is not possible for Christ to reign, why
should we keep talking about Christ being King?”
This is Vatican II: from the loss of hope came the
loss of faith and doctrine.
First Objection: The Strength of the Revolution
Let us return to the dialogue with our traditionalist friend, over a cup of coffee after Mass. We say,
“Let’s try doing something in politics.” He says, “No.
All is lost.” Let’s have a look at his arguments. I will
mention a few, but there can be many more.
The first argument to appear is the strength of
the revolution. It dominates everything, even the
Church! Every political force, every party, every

government, every institution has been infiltrated at
least in part by the force of the anti-Christian revolution. It has taken over everything; it has power over
the media and the secret service. Against this, what
can we do? Nothing—almost nothing—practically
nothing!
But let us look a little further. The revolution has
had this power for a long time. Has it really helped?
Let us look at the testimony of the revolutionaries themselves and they believed as a rule that the
promises of the revolution were never fulfilled. Some
statements are truly laughable. In the book That
He May Reign by Jean Ousset, there is a quote from
a text of Victor Hugo, the great literato of the 19th
century, in which he said, “The 19th century was
great, but the 20th will be greater. Thanks to the
advances of technology and science there will be no
more hunger, no more illness, no more war; there
will be universal peace.” Behold the utopia that with
this perfect humanist dialogue they were going to
resolve all the world’s problems! Enter the 20th century. World War I: toxic war, bombardments. World
War II. In other words, the diagnosis and promise of
the revolutionaries was not fulfilled.
And we may cite other proofs of this. All the
literature of the Marxists offer a perfect example. If
there is one place in the world where the revolution
can be said to have reached the height of power, it is
Soviet Russia. They ruled there from 1917 until the
90s; some 70 years. They had absolute power over
politics, economy, education; they made every effort
to transform the poor little Russian into the Soviet
man. What remains of this power? It dissolved,
vanished. And we cannot just say, “Oh, well, Russia
lost a war.” They didn’t lose any war! “There was an
invasion, they had atom bombs fired at them.” None
of that! Russia went down all on her own. Alexander
Solzhenitsyn commented on this, shocked as he
was that some Western people believed in Marxism.
In Russia, he said, no one believes in Marxism; many
people live by it, but that’s another matter—there is
no one in Russia who actually believes in it.
How did this fall come about? If the Christian
social order is the order desired by God, man may
separate himself from it, because he has free will,
but he cannot escape the consequences. I can jump
from the fifth floor of a building; but what I can’t go
against is the law of gravity. The destruction of the
family, the destruction of the economy, the de-

79

Theological Studies
struction of culture all caused the Soviet system to
self-destruct. Why? There is something important to
note: that any parts of the revolutionary system that
“work,” note the quotation marks, do so because of
the goodness and truth that remains to them. As the
Christian virtues disappear, not even the revolution remains. There is a minuscule part of the order
desired by God which not even the revolution may
transgress. In Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
has his hero passing through La Mancha, and he
finds a group of robbers dividing their loot. He says,
“O, what a great thing is justice, that even robbers
use it!” Even in this band of robbers, if there is not
at least this minimal respect for natural order…the
band falls apart. They would all kill each other.
There comes a point, however, at which this
destruction of Christian order finishes off even the
revolution itself. And this is why it is so important
that in the history of the anti-Christian revolution,
every so often, they need to at least simulate a return to order to keep from disappearing. What would
the French Revolution have been without Napoleon
Bonaparte? He signed the Concordat, allowed the
return of some of the exiles and brought about some
order. Otherwise it would have collapsed. In Soviet
Russia, Stalin took some measures during World
War II, for example; he restored importance to the
Orthodox Church, added emphasis to the importance of the family.
The topic of the Soviet attitude toward the
Church and the familial order is very interesting.
When Communism came to Russia in 1917, following
especially the writings of Engels about the origins
of the family, property, and the state, they declared
that private property and inheritance should disappear. Matrimony was eliminated; free love was
promoted. In the 1930s, at the dawn of World War II,
a study was published with a report from the staff of
the Soviet army, which states that they were having
great problems with giving military instruction to
the younger men. It seems that at that moment the
population of imprisoned minors in Russia was five
times that of the political prisoners, which was far
from small. The destruction of the families brought
forth a population who were not fit for military
formation. So the system started evolving. First they
discarded socialist marriages. Then, they started allowing normal inheritance practices, because, at the
death of parents, the children would sell everything

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at any price since it would be taken by the State. So,
they initiated reforms and, in the final edition of the
civic code, they had even gotten rid of inheritance
tax; they wound up with a civic code less socialist
than those of many Western nations!
Why did this happen? Because one cannot go
permanently against the natural order! And take
note that, after 70 years of Communism, from 1990
to the present day, 4,000 cloistered Orthodox convents have been created in Russia. And this comes
from a people that just emerged from 70 years of
Communism! The President of Russia paid a visit
to France a while ago, and when he was asked why,
he said he came to venerate the relic of the Holy
Cross—and this is a man who was a member of the
Jewish bank community, and who was an important
Soviet delegate. If anyone had said in the 1960’s
that Communism would fall and Russia would return
to her Christian roots, our doubtful friend would
have said, “Impossible! The Jewish bankers and the
Soviet secret police are too powerful, and so on and
so forth…” And yet, we are seeing it happen now.
Communism went down like Goliath before David’s
stone—but with even less force than that.
Second Objection: Catholics are Poor Politicians
The other argument we will note is also taken
from history. “We Catholics always fail in politics.”
However, if we analyze history properly, it’s not so
true. Yesterday, you listened to two magnificent
conferences about Antonio de Oliveira Salazar of
Portugal; and Salazar was a man who appeared
in a country that was completely thrown off kilter
by Freemasonry, and was able to re-establish a
Christian public order that lasted practically as long
as Communism did in Russia. He did this alone—
practically isolated from international contact,
fighting against Freemasonry and the international
banking powers, in a small country. And yet he
succeeded.
Now, you may say “But eventually he fell too.”
Here on earth, we need to realize that nothing is
permanent. The full kingdom of Heaven will only
come in eternal life. But this does not mean that we
shouldn’t bother! While the earth may never come
to be paradise, we must take care, at least, that it
not be an anticipation of Hell. In a Christian regime,
there may be murders, injustices and crime. The
fundamental difference is that in a Christian society,

error and sin are not in the laws; they are not in the
customs; they are not in the fabric of society. And
because of this, sinful man always has a very great
number of chances to return to order.
The dramatic problem of the revolutionary order
is not the quantity of sin. It is that the sinner proclaims that he is right! It is that the sinner forms
the laws and calls evil good, and good evil. This is
the chief problem of a revolutionary society. And,
even though you may say that the Vendeens, the
Carlists, the Cristeros failed, a closer look reveals
that they didn’t really fail that badly. When one looks
at the Catholic reaction that is happening nowadays
in France—which is not occurring in Germany or
Italy—one has to ask whether this is not the fruit of
the blood of the martyrs of the Vendée. When one
sees the result of the Spanish Crusade of 1939, this
would never have worked without the contribution
of a well-nourished and decisive group of Carlists
who were the sons and grandsons of those who had
fought in the 19th century. Behind the triumphs of
1939 stands the blood of the martyrs of the 19th
century.
Third Objection: We Live in Apocalyptic Times
And finally comes the argument that is currently
in fashion: “We can’t do anything.” Why? “Because
the Apocalypse is at our doorstep. The Antichrist
will be here any minute…and look at the symbols,
the third toad, the fourth trumpet,…” whatever it is.
And so, of course, for these friends of ours the apostolate is transformed into a sort of ticket sale; take
your pick of the balcony seats or the boxes, to await
the arrival of the Antichrist. Since he’s coming soon,
we can’t do anything. I recall one curious fellow
to whom I said: “So are we going to do something
political?” And he said, “Oh no, no need, it’s all taken
care of. Here comes General So-and-so, and everything will be fixed.” The coup failed, and “Well, it’s
failed, now there’s nothing to be done.” So after all
the optimism, the conclusion is always in the direction of doing nothing—never getting our feet wet!
The end of the world, the coming of the
Antichrist, is a mystery that both divine Providence
and the liberty of man play into. And we can understand it, reading the Old Testament; look at the punishment of Nineveh, the city which was converted by
the intervention of Jonah; or the Hebraic haggling
of Abraham—“if there are so many just men…or a

couple fewer…or even less.” It shows that it’s not a
deterministic matter; but rather, a mystery. This is
very important, because there have been many people who, starting from the idea of the Apocalypse,
consider that there is nothing left to do.
Political Hope or Utopia?
Since I have already mentioned Jean Ousset’s
book That He May Reign, let us go back to him.
Ousset also discussed this topic in a magnificent
chapter, called O Crux Ave, Spes Unica—Hail, O
Cross, our only hope. I can’t resist the temptation to
read you a couple of paragraphs, because it is clear
that he also had to deal with such people as we have
been discussing. After discussing the reign of Christ
in the first section of his book, he adds: “the description of the thesis of the reign of Our Lord, has been
able to rouse our enthusiasm, this enthusiasm runs
the risk of being caught wrong-footed at the end of
these studies which we have just read on the revolution, its havoc and the fearsome appearance of its
armies.” In other words, after introducing the social
Kingship of Christ in this book, he speaks of the opposition, the power of the revolution.
“How would it serve us to understand the necessity of tending to an end, if it is presented
immediately after as something inaccessible? If
the distance separating desire from its fulfillment
is great, how much greater must be the distance
between the ideal prospects offered by Christian
hope and the possibilities of fulfillment presented by
current events; a difficult matter. “My friends,” they
have frequently said to us, “you have convinced me
theoretically of the Faith. But do you truly believe
that this remedy you believe is the universal remedy—can it be accepted in practice someday? And,
for that matter, that it is effective in practice? Do you
not find yourselves in the midst of a Utopia? Would
it not be better to forget this ideal that does no more
than exacerbate our troubles, since it is considered
impossible to fulfill?” ”This is the most common
way, even among the best of people; their intelligence has come to know the truth and recognizes it
as such. It is will that is lacking. The problem is not
lack of faith, it is lack of hope; because it is necessary to have a singular hope to take up the reform
of a society penetrated by the revolutionary spirit.
In fact it is not enough just to say, in an outburst of
piety, that salvation is in Catholicism because all

81

Theological Studies
other motives for hope have faded away.
This reasoning may be legitimate; but despite
this, it runs the risk of being insufficient, for it is a
manner of hoping in nothing but God, which is a very
subtle form of despair; given that this supposed
supernatural hope remains passive, slothful, sterile
and desolate. There are those who, out of the virtues
themselves, create vices. Since we live in a battle
against relativism, positivism and all that, professing
to be men of principle and of permanent doctrine,
what happens to us is often what happened to a
friend of mine who had a great stomach pain and
went to see a very pious, very Catholic physician.
He said, “Hey, I have a bad stomach-ache; why is
this happening?” “The cause is original sin!” “What
should I do?” “Well, you have to pray!” Of course,
the primary cause of all our troubles is sin, but we
can’t ignore the secondary causes! And God works,
normally, through these secondary causes.
There is Hope as for the Prodigal Son
Because of this, I believe that there are many
motives for hope. Firstly: because the revolution is failing! Look at their own studies; they
consider that they have won nothing. What they
proposed to do, they have not achieved; the case
of Russia is only one. Another country that was
under the Communist yoke is Hungary. They have
just published the best constitution in Europe;
one with reference to its Christian roots, in a
country which may not seem like much, but in
the Hungarian parliament—in the middle of the
Parliament Building—they keep the Crown of St.
Stephen. And the Constitution says, “The power
of this Parliament comes from the Crown of St.
Stephen”—a Constitution that defends the life of
the unborn child, that prohibits homosexual “marriage,” which refers, in short, back to its Christian
roots as the foundation of the Constitution. And this
all took place in the 21st century—in a country that
also went through 70 years of Communism, behind whose attempt at resistance in 1956 were the
prayers of Cardinal Mindszenty, and the prayers of
St. Stephen, King of Hungary, for his people.
Lastly, I think that there is a great support for
hope even with how bad the situation looks now. We
can make a strong comparison of history, especially
in the European and American nations of the last
two or three centuries, with one of the loveliest

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parables of the Gospel: that of the Prodigal Son.
The parable begins with the son, who lives with his
father, who tells him, “All that is mine is thine.” This
is very like the times of medieval Christendom, in
which all the good things of family, culture, art, were
present.
What happens to the prodigal son? He says one
day, “I’m tired of this. Let me have my part of the
inheritance; I’m going.” This is very similar to the
men of the Renaissance and the following centuries.
In this period, in a society which had separated from
God, in which anthropocentrism was fundamental,
there were still great works of art—magnificent
things. Then comes the period when the son goes to
the city and, using the inheritance from his father,
makes friends, has great feasts, and has a good
time. At this point the son does not feel that he has
distanced himself from the father; because he is living off his inheritance.
The parable goes on to tell that in time, the
money ran out; there was a great famine, and there
was nothing to eat. The son ends up taking care of
pigs, eating the acorns that the pigs leave behind;
and for the Jews, to care for swine was the worst
fate that could befall them. This is what has happened to us today. We have wasted our inheritance
that we received from Christendom. And we may
note that the intent of the revolution was not the
destruction of the Church. The devil knows that the
Church itself cannot be destroyed. The intent is to
destroy Christendom; because he knows that in this
social and political order, the effects of the Church’s
actions will not reach more than a small group of
people.
These, then, are the consequences; and now, it
is over. Here is where the discourse of revolutionary
naturalism fails, because deep down, revolutionary materialism does not want man to live badly. It
wants all good things, without the Cause of all good
things. And this is why Catholics fail when they try
to defend life, because they deny the reign of Christ
the King. In this there is a profound providence of
God. “If I am not the King, if I am not the center, they
will have none of the human goods.” God does not
want us to have just the additions. “Seek ye first the
Kingdom of God, and the rest will be added unto
you.” The Prodigal Son saw in the end that, separated from his father, he would be left with just the
additions. From this we can see that it is the idea of

a so-so order in which we have some sort of coexistence that is utopian, which cannot be hoped for: to
think that the society that reneges from God can live
well.
In today’s world the option we have is either
Christ the King, or the manipulation of embryos, the
slaughter of infants, of grandparents, of children;
there is no other possibility. The inheritance of the
Christian sons has been squandered. But it is in this
very situation that the son says, “I will rise up, and
go back to my father.” It may be that man in these
days may be more amenable to returning to the
Church than man of the 19th century; because the
man of the 19th century had his Christian inheritance. His money had not yet run out.
Where I work, at the City of Buenos Aires government building, all the women under 30 have partners, and all those of more than 40 are divorced.
The men are about the same. But the state they
are in—hated by their children, unable to bear the
Christmas holidays because they have to see so
many people! They say to me, “You are married, and
you have seven children—seven! All with the same
woman?!” “Yes, with the same woman.” Their eyes
widen, and I realize that they have a healthy envy
of me. They are not happy! They are living in hell on
earth.
To resolve this, something very important is
missing. It is why so many people want to do nothing
in politics. The virtues are missing; and especially
two crucial virtues. The virtue of magnanimity is the
first. Aristotle says that magnanimity is the virtue
that calls us to desire great things and to do great
things. This virtue, especially in these times, is not
possible without another even more important
virtue, which is humility. Why? Because only when I
am disposed to accept defeat, to accept being trod
on and humiliated, that my friends tell me that I have
failed over and over; when this no longer matters to
me, only then am I free to do great things. And the
greatest example of this is certainly the Blessed
Virgin. The Virgin had the magnanimity to accept
being the Mother of God, “because He regarded the
humility of His Handmaid.”

83

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The
Last
Word
Dear readers,
A man in his 50s confessed recently: “When I was a child, I was very curious about everything concerning religion. But when I approached my father to ask him a question, he would
say to me: ‘Go and ask your mother.’ And when I questioned my mother, she replied: ‘Go
and ask the priest.’ That is what made me very quickly lose my Faith. Because if dad, who
corrects me when I do something wrong and directs my studies, if mom who feeds me and
cares for me, if neither of them are interested in my religious training, it means it is something
merely optional.
A recent study has been done on the degree of perseverance in the practice of the Faith
among young people in some of our chapels. It concerns a little more than 200 young boys
and girls over a period of 17 years (1985 - 2002). The perseverance of our young people is really a universal problem that we must address, both priests and parents. Faith is a supernatural gift, and since a gift is something received, it can consequently be lost. In so many of our
families, few young people survive spiritually, that is, continue to practice their Faith seriously
when they reach adulthood. What must we do to ensure that they continue to practice their
Faith and stay on the arduous and narrow path that leads to Heaven?
The study proved without the shadow of doubt that an essential element for perseverance
was the influence of the father in the years of formation: 80% of young people whose father
regularly practices the Faith remain faithful. And when the father does not practice his Faith,
84% of his children don’t practice it either.
Another example as a conclusion. A merchant navy captain did the following research, all
the more significant as it spans a 30 years career: the crew of his ships consisted of 30 or so
sailors, most of whom were from Catholic families. But only a few practiced. The captain was
interested in the parents of his sailors and came to this conclusion: all those who practiced
always said that their father was a fervent Christian; all those, on the other hand, who had
distanced themselves from religion confessed: “My mother was a good Christian, very pious
even, but my father did not practice.” The line of demarcation between these robust men was
the virtue of their father.
O Lord, give us many good and virtuous fathers!
Fr. Daniel Couture

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