The Church and Science
The Catholic Church and Science
Science and Beyond:
Dantean Moon Spots
He Destroyed
the Enlightenment Myth
September - October 2019

“The admirable progress which science
and technology have quickly obtained and
continue to produce without any sign of
abatement, whether in the sidereal depths
or in the bosom of the earth, and the most
secret folds of nature and life, are in reality
nothing else than the discovery and the
possession of pre-existing forces and laws,
which the Creator has disseminated in
the universe and which have been actively
operating from the beginning of creation.
Therefore, everything is the gift of God
for the benefit of man, and everything,
Heaven and earth, proclaim the glory of the
Sovereign Giver.”—Pope Pius XII, Oct 11,
1955, 60th anniversary of the invention of
telegraphy by Marconi.

Letter
from the
Publisher
Dear Reader,
Modern ears have misgivings about joining the two words, “Catholic” and “scientists.” In
reference to the high Middle Ages, we speak of the “Dark Ages.” After that came the wonderful
Renaissance and Reformation followed by the Enlightenment, all of which were reacting against
the Church-biased culture. Who hasn’t heard of the Inquisition, the Galileo trial, and the Index?
Surely then, the Catholic Church at large must stand in opposition to progress, science, and
reason.
Historically, however, in the same way as the Church was the first promoter of the arts, she
has always been the patroness of sciences. She has been prolific in the foundation of schools,
universities, and hospitals, and many clergy have been active in the sciences. And what the
Church could not do by herself, Christian lay folks and leaders promoted it too. Just think of
Charlemagne setting up the first parish schools in his empire. Think of Queen Isabel of Spain
selling her jewels to promote Columbus’ trip opening the new world to evangelization and
civilization.
The theme of “Catholic Scientists” is given both a historical and apologetical approach, and
yet, it is bound to sound polemic given the relentless attacks of atheists. As you read this issue,
you get the picture of the Church, the representative of Christ, as living on earth and yet not of
the earth. Indeed, the Church is not a faculty of science or medicine; she is Christ’s voice leading men to God. Borrowing the phrase Cardinal Baronius used when he referred to the Bible, we
can say of the Church also that “she was not set up by Christ to teach us how the heavens go,
but how to go to Heaven.”
This difference of purpose between Christ’s Church and scientific pursuit is healthy and
gives it a higher vantage point. This is what has allowed Churchmen to judge impartially the
scientists and their experiments. This outside guardrail was a protection to Catholic scientists.
Knowing that the God of nature could in no wise contradict the God of Revelation, they were
confident to launch into the wide-open field of experimentation and scientific discoveries, and
make the world a better place to live and die under the gaze of Christ.
Before I close this letter, I wish to draw your attention to the interesting article of our
Superior General, Fr. Pagliarani. Not only does he unearth the founding principles of the present crisis, he also gives some pointers as to what his Superiorship will be focused on for the
decade to come.

Fr. Jürgen Wegner
Publisher

September - October 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

Theme: The Catholic Church and Science
— The Catholic Church and Science
—Science and Beyond: Dantean Moon Spots
—He Destroyed the Enlightenment Myth
—Catholics Invented Science
—Heroism and Genius: Time for Our Second “long march
through the institutions”

4

6
10
16
22
26

Spirituality

­—The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: The Gospel
—Earthquake Priest
—The Science of Silence

32
36
40

Christian Culture
—The Sound of Silence
—A Meditation on the First and Only Church of Christ
the Scientist
—My God, I Hope…
—The Caste System in India

44
48
54
56

“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

—Building Bridges from East to West
—Questions and Answers

61
64

News from Tradition
—Church and World
—The Confusion of the Church and the World
at the Root of the Crisis
—The Last Word

68
77
87

Theme The Catholic Church and Science

The Catholic
Church and
Science
By John Dredger

Myths abound about the anti-science stance
of the Catholic Church and the supposed conflict
between faith and reason. These myths stem
from enemies of the Church who desire to depict
Catholicism as a religion of bigots manipulating
the masses by keeping them chained with the
fetters of ignorance. This mythology also comes
from a misunderstanding on the part of many
non-Catholics who do not comprehend certain
historical events and fail to discover the truth
by proper research. Misconceptions, however,
exist among Catholics as well. According to a
2014 survey by the Public Religion Research
Institute and the American Academy of Religion,
51% of American Catholics believe that “religion
and science are often in conflict.” When famous
scientists, such as Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse
Tyson, Stephen Hawking, influential writers,
6

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September - October 2019

and historical figures, including Bertrand
Russell and Thomas Jefferson repeat the myths,
people tend to listen. In addition, students find
misrepresentations of the truth in certain science
textbooks, “educational” websites like history.
com and pbs.org, and some university materials.
Bombarded by error from supposedly reputable
sources, many unsurprisingly remain ignorant of
the truth.

Preposterous Myths
The legend of Pope Callixtus III issuing a papal
bull against Halley’s Comet in 1456 presents one
of the more striking and preposterous myths of
anti-science in the Church. According to various
writers, beginning with the French astronomer

and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace,
Callixtus III excommunicated, exorcised, and
anathematized the comet in an attempt to expel
it from the sky. John W. Draper, the first president
of the American Chemical Society and a founder
of the New York University School of Medicine,
took the story and embellished it with even more
absurd details, such as the ordering of prayers
by the faithful and the ringing of church bells
all over Europe to scare the comet away. Of
course, no reliable sources exist to corroborate
the legend, yet Draper’s rendition in his book
The History of the Conflict between Religion
and Science gained widespread readership as
it appeared in several languages. Sadly, many
people, even some of the better educated, believe
such drivel when men of letters irresponsibly
promote legends without basing them on
historical fact.
The most famous set of myths stems from
the Galileo episode. In 1633, the Holy Office, or
Inquisition, sentenced the Italian astronomer
and physicist Galileo Galilei to permanent house
arrest for vehement suspicion of heresy based
on his defense of the Copernican view of the
universe, commonly called heliocentrism, the
idea that the earth revolves around the sun. The
myths range from Galileo being convicted of
heresy and imprisoned in a dungeon to being
burned at the stake. However, Galileo never
suffered any of these punishments. The Holy
Office never accused Galileo of heresy nor burned
him at the stake. For his house arrest, during
the next nine years until he died in 1642, he
resided in the countryside surrounding Florence
at his own villa, the Villa Il Gioiello, called “The
Jewel,” because of its beautiful view. Here Galileo
enjoyed full use of his books and instruments as
well as the spacious wine cellar while working
on his scientific projects and writings. The
Inquisition merely required that he not publish
any of his works.
As for the condemnation of Galileo for his
adherence to the views of Copernicus, the
inquisitors saw heliocentrism as inconsistent
with a literal interpretation of certain passages
of the Bible, such as Josue 10:12-14, which states
that the sun and moon stood still. The situation
of the time, in the midst of the Thirty Years War,

with its political and religious ramifications,
the friendship of Pope Urban VIII with Galileo,
the support and opposition of various scientists
and theologians, made the whole episode
quite complex and more than a simple trial for
suspicion of heresy. Regardless of the decision
of the inquisitors, the Galileo affair does not
display an anti-science view by the Church, but
rather a deep interest in the philosophical and
cosmological repercussions of scientific theories
and discoveries. Many cardinals of the 17th
century became patrons of men like Galileo,
procured his telescopes, and read and discussed
the latest scientific ideas.

“The Church,
therefore, far from
hindering the pursuit
of arts and sciences,
fosters and promotes
them in many ways.”

Zeal for Learning
Throughout the history of the Catholic Church,
members of both the clergy and the laity have
exhibited great zeal for learning, not only in
theology and philosophy, but also in the natural
sciences. During the late Roman Empire and
the early Middle Ages, Benedictine monks saved
and copied ancient manuscripts, including the
works of the mathematician and astronomer
Pythagoras, the naturalist Pliny the Elder, and
the astronomer and geologist Ptolemy. When the
West regained access to the works of Aristotle,
not only his philosophical treatises but also
7

Theme The Catholic Church and Science
his writings on physics and animals intrigued
the medieval scholars. Long before the Galileo
episode, Pope Sylvester II (946-1003) promoted
the learning of mathematics and astronomy.
St. Albert the Great (1206-1280), a Dominican
and the patron saint of natural sciences, wrote
works on physics and biology. The Franciscan
Roger Bacon (1214-1294) studied optics and
nature through empiricism, helping to develop

Father of Genetics. According to a 19th-century
German source, Catholic clergymen comprised
almost 10% of the natural scientist population.
These men did not act in opposition to the
Church, but rather with her full support. As the
American historian of science J. L. Heilbron said,
the “Roman Catholic Church gave more financial
aid and social support to the study of astronomy
over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient

Catholic Scientists: Louis Pasteur,
Charles Coulomb, Alessandro Volta,
Christian Doppler

the scientific method. Hundreds of other monks
and priests contributed to scientific progress
through their studies and discoveries, including
Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618-1683), a Jesuit
who discovered the diffraction of light, Bl.
Nicholas Steno (1638-1686), after whom the
Stensen duct and other parts of the human body
were named, and Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), an
Augustinian monk who became known as the
8

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September - October 2019

learning during the late Middle Ages into the
Enlightenment, than any other, and probably, all
other institutions.” This statement applies to the
other scientific fields as well.
The catalog of lay Catholic scientists also
includes many famous names: Georgius Agricola
(1494-1555), the Father of Mineralogy; the
aforementioned Galileo Galilei (1564-1642);
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806), the

physicist who discovered Coulomb’s law of the
attraction and repulsion of electrostatic force and
for whom the unit of electric charge was named;
Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), the Father of
Modern Chemistry; Alessandro Volta (1745-1827),
the inventor of the electric battery, in whose
honor the unit of electric potential was called the
volt; Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1836), a founder
of the science of classical electromagnetism, the
inventor of the solenoid and electric telegraph,
and the physicist after whom the ampere unit of
measurement is named; Christian Doppler (18031853), the physicist who discovered the Doppler
effect involving change in wave frequency; Louis
Braille (1809-1852), the inventor of braille, the
system of reading and writing for the blind; Louis
Pasteur (1822-1895), the Father of Bacteriology
and discoverer of pasteurization; Alois
Alzheimer (1864-1915), the psychiatrist known
for identifying Alzheimer’s disease. The list could
continue with hundreds of other names. Clearly,
considering the number of renowned Catholic
scientists, the accusation of anti-intellectualism
against the Church cannot be founded on truth.

Pontifical Academy of Sciences
Catholic participation in natural science has
not been limited merely to individuals. The
Pontifical Academy of Sciences traces its roots
to the Academy of Lynxes, founded in Rome in
1603 as the first exclusively scientific academy
in the world. Pope Pius IX reestablished the
academy as the Pontifical Academy of the New
Lynxes in 1847, and Pius XI reconstituted it under
its present name in 1936. The scientists of the
Pontifical Academy work primarily in the fields of
fundamental science, science and technology of
global problems, science for the problems of the
developing world, scientific policy, bioethics, and
epistemology. The Holy See covers most of the
operating expenses of the Pontifical Academy,
which includes 80 scientists from many countries.
The First Vatican Council stated the Catholic
Church’s view on natural science and its
relationship to faith:
“Faith and reason are of mutual help to each
other: by reason, well applied, the foundations

of faith are established, and, in the light of faith,
the science of divinity is built up. Faith, on the
other hand frees and preserves reason from error
and enriches it with knowledge. The Church,
therefore, far from hindering the pursuit of arts
and sciences, fosters and promotes them in many
ways. ...Nor does she prevent sciences, each in its
sphere, from making use of their own principles
and methods. Yet, while acknowledging the
freedom due to them, she tries to preserve
them from falling into errors contrary to divine
doctrine, and from overstepping their own
boundaries and throwing into confusion matters
that belong to the domain of faith. The doctrine
of faith which God has revealed is not placed
before the human mind for further elaboration,
like a philosophical system; it is a divine deposit,
handed over to the spouse of Christ, to be
faithfully guarded and infallibly declared. Hence,
the meaning once given to a sacred dogma by
holy mother Church is to be maintained forever
and not to be departed from under pretext of
more profound understanding. Let knowledge,
science, and wisdom grow with the course of
times and centuries, in individuals as well as
in the community, in each man as in the whole
Church, but in the proper manner, i.e., in the
same dogma, in the same meaning, in the same
understanding.”
Catholic scientists who uphold this view
show that there should be no conflict between
faith and reason and that Catholicism has no
anti-science stance. As all science in the true
sense of the word, which means knowledge,
both supernatural and natural, comes from God,
there can exist no opposition or contradiction.
St. Giuseppe Moscati, one of the first physicians
to use insulin in the treatment of diabetes, said,
“Only one science is unshakeable and unshaken,
the one revealed by God, the science of the
hereafter! In all your works, look to Heaven, to
the eternity of life and of the soul, and orient
yourself then much differently from the way that
merely human considerations might suggest,
and your activity will be inspired for the good.”
Catholics who adhere to this advice cannot help
but continue to make advances in natural science
while proving the true position of the Catholic
Church.
9

Theme The Catholic Church and Science

Science and Beyond:

Dantean
Moon Spots
by Andrew J. Clarendon

Dante begins the final part of his Divine
Comedy, the Paradiso, with a sweeping summary
of all reality:
The glory of the One who moves all things
penetrates all the universe, reflecting
in one part more and in another less.
This one tercet encapsulates the entire poem;
the other 14,230 lines are an extension and
application of these simple and profound words.
From the one God comes all of the many things of
creation and the diverse parts of creation point to
the unity that is God, who is Himself three Persons
in one Being. The ultimate and most complete way
of understanding creation is the realization that
everything reflects God, but not in the same way
or in the same capacity; this is the true sense of
10

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unity in diversity, the concordia discors of Horace
and ancient Greek philosophers. Or, as Fr. Gerard
Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet, puts it:
“God’s utterance of Himself in Himself is God the
Word, outside Himself is this world. This world
then is word, expression, news of God. Therefore,
its end, its purpose, its purport, its meaning is
God, and its life or work to name and praise
Him.” Although writing about the afterlife—Hell,
Purgatory, and Heaven—Dante gives many images
of the natural world firstly to add verisimilitude
to his story and secondly to make the above point
about the nature of the universe. At times writing
about what we would today call science, Dante
then extends the discussion further, insisting
that what is known about the material world is
only part of the true nature of things, expressing
eternal ideas that remain true whatever the

prevailing model of material reality.
One of the most famous ways in which Dante
makes this point is in the discussion of moon
spots in the second canto of the Paradiso, but
to understand it a word about Dante’s model
of the physical universe is in order. As Barbara
Reynolds explains in her introduction to Sayers’
translation, in Dante’s poem “the form of the
literal story is, of course, as much dictated by
contemporary science as is that of any story of
planetary adventure by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells,
or C. S. Lewis.” Cosmology in Dante’s day was as
much driven by philosophy as anything else and
so the picture used to describe the heavens was
painted accordingly. The earth is at the center
of the universe with the various heavenly bodies
arranged in perfect spheres around it: our moon,
the known planets of the solar system (Mercury to
Saturn), and our sun, then everything else in the
eighth sphere, that of the fixed stars. The ninth
and farthest circle from the earth is the Primum
Mobile, the first mover, the sphere that turns the
whole system, since the earth is motionless at the
center. The various planets and stars, being of
heavenly material, are perfect, and as they revolve
around the earth, produce a heavenly music that
we on the corrupt and mutable earth cannot
hear. Such an ordered vision of the universe,
coming first from the ancient Greeks, held sway
in the West for many centuries; Shakespeare, for
example, writing 300 years after Dante, often
alludes to this conception of the universe.

Dante’s Inaccurate Picture
Having ascended to the moon from the earth
with his guide Beatrice—herself a symbol of
theology—the Pilgrim asks about the nature of
“the dark spots...which, seen / from earth along
the surface of this body, / lead men to make up
stories” about Cain with a thorn bush or the Man
in the Moon. Following a format similar to St.
Thomas’ Summa, Beatrice begins with objections,
asking the Pilgrim what he thinks. He answers:
“The differences we see from earth, / I think, are
caused by different densities.” Since physically
speaking moon spots come from different types
of rock, the Pilgrim is perhaps not that far off,
11

Theme The Catholic Church and Science
but Beatrice points out that if parts of the moon
were simply thinner than others, “the moon could
not / fully block out the sun: in an eclipse / some
light would shine through the transparencies.”
She even invites the Pilgrim to do an experiment
about the reflection of light. With his “intellect
stripped clear,” she reveals the true reason for
the differences in the moon. In brief, the glory of
God streams forth from Him and hits the edge
of the Primum Mobile, the edge of the universe,
of space and time. While this an image of God
keeping the universe in existence, as much of
the light of God as is possible is also taken into
the sphere itself and passed on to the next. Each
sphere accepts, uses, and passes on the light, row
by row, in a celestial hierarchy, guided, Dante
adds later, by the nine angelic choirs. The spots
on the moon, along with other differences in the
universe, involve both this blending and lessening
of the glory of God and the differing ability of
various parts to receive the light. In other words,
some parts of the moon are less excellent, less of a
reflection of the glory of God than others—and so
it is for everything that exists.
Whatever the inaccuracy of Dante’s physical
picture of the heavens, the vital point is clear:
at the root of things is a qualitative difference,
a metaphysical relationship that is more
important than merely material ones. Hence,
Barbara Reynolds’ insightful comment that “It
does not follow that because Dante’s schematic
arrangement of circling spheres is an inexact
picture of the physical heavens...that the religious
and moral ideas which his cosmos allegorizes
must, logically, be discarded.” Dante, Reynolds
goes on to say, would have been perfectly
able to convey his main ideas in a heliocentric
universe, the ten-dimensions that Einstein’s law
of gravitation requires, or even the centerless
universe which would fit “conveniently enough
with the famous dictum of the Schoolmen that
‘God is a circle whose center is everywhere and
its circumference nowhere.’” Another aspect of
this qualitative difference between things is the
teleological sense of the universe; Dante, following
the rich tradition of Aristotle and St. Thomas,
both expresses the ultimate cause of things and
affirms their purpose. Modern man looks up at
the night sky and sees randomness, uncertainty,
12

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and eventual annihilation; medieval man saw
that “among all things, however disparate, / there
reigns an order, and this gives the form / that
makes the universe resemble God /...[Who] is that
great artist who so loves His art, / His gaze is fixed
on it perpetually.” The whole system, moreover,
exists not for itself and not only to give glory to
God, but also to call man back to that same God:
“The heavens wheeling round you call to you,
/ revealing their eternal beauties”; they, like all
things, bear the “imprint of Eternal Excellence— /
that goal for which the system is created.”

Purpose Beyond
Physical Creation
Now almost 700 years after his death, this
fundamental theme of Dante’s is more important
than ever: to limit our understanding of reality
to the merely material is a falsification of that
same reality. This is not to deny that science
and its various applications have achieved many
incredible things: less than 75 years passed
between the Wright brothers’ first flight and man
landing on the moon, for example. In fact, it is
because modern science, to paraphrase Fr. Paul
Robinson, is so good at describing material reality
that some have fallen into what is sometimes
called “scientism:” the idea that the physical
discoveries of science is all we can know. Dante,
along with the other poets, philosophers, and
theologians, asserts the proper domain of science;
that is, describing the glories of God’s physical
creation while realizing that the ultimate causes
and purposes are beyond. As science continues
to paint an ever more exact picture of physical
reality, the closer scientists will approach the
limits of science at summit of knowledge—where
the theologians, philosophers, and poets have
been for centuries—and all the more will they
affirm with Fr. Hopkins that “all things therefore
are charged with love, are charged with God, and
if we know how to touch them, give off sparks
and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of
Him.”

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

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The astronomical clock of the church of
St. Mary’s, Rostock (Germany) was built in
1472 by Hans Düringer, a clockmaker from
Nuremberg.
It consists of three partitions:
Top: Apostle-go-round giving an hourly
performance of the apostles crossing before
Jesus for a blessing before entry into eternal
bliss, and the last, Judas, is shut out.
Middle: Clock with daily time, zodiac, moon
phases, and month;
Bottom: Calendar, which is valid until 2150
(with beginning of 2018 this table replaced
the 4th, which lasted from 1885 to 2017).
The medieval clock is the only one of its kind
still in working condition with its original
clockworks!

Theme The Catholic Church and Science

He Destroyed the

Enlightenment
Myth
Interview with Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX

Father, who do you think was the most
important Catholic scientist of the 20th
century?
I think it would be Pierre Duhem (1861-1916).
Pierre who? I have never heard of him!
Alas, that is all too often the case. He deserves
to be much more famous than he is, especially
among Catholics.
Why so?
Because he single-handedly destroyed the
Enlightenment myth that the Catholic Middle Ages
were anti-science; that the Church is an institution
which, when she has the power to do so, ruthlessly
stifles scientific endeavor; and that scientific
knowledge must be suppressed if Catholics are to
hold on to their Faith.
16

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That’s a whopping myth! How could a single
person take it out?
In the same way that you wipe out the many
other lies of the Enlightenment: you bring forward
the facts. The paper trail revealing the true
disposition of the Middle Ages toward science had
been lost. And when the great scientists of the
“Century of Genius,” the 17th century, appeared—
scientists like Descartes, Galileo, and Newton—
they refused to acknowledge their debt to medieval
science. As such, their discoveries seemed to
appear out of nowhere.
And that opened the door for anti-Catholic
mythology, the black legend of a tyrannical,
science-hating Church?
Yes! The enemies of the Church, starting in
the second half of the 18th century, crafted a

full-blown narrative around the 17th-century
discoveries. It is like a novel with the ominous title
“The Scientific Revolution.” The tale starts with
nice, pagan, nature-worshipping Greeks who are in
love with mathematics, astronomy, and the other
natural sciences. Then, the great ogre appears,
Mother Church. She hates scientific knowledge
because it takes away her tyrannical power over
her subjects. When they study science, they realize
that she has been telling them terrible stories in
order to keep them in a bondage of fear.
And, let me guess, then Galileo and Newton
come on the scene like knights in shining
armor?
Exactly! Out of nowhere, more sudden than
Athena popping out of Jupiter’s head, Galileo,
Newton, and company drop out of the benign,
scientific heavens, and slay the multi-headed
hydra of lies that has been besetting benighted
Christendom for centuries upon centuries.
But surely people did not take such a stupid
mythology seriously.
Well, it is an interesting fact of human nature
that those who are biased against someone else
will easily swallow any lie about them. And, by
the time of the American and French Revolutions,
people outside the Church were all too ready to
take any “fake news” about the Church as the
Gospel truth, no matter how far-fetched it might
be.
Meanwhile, those who are inside the Church
cannot help but be affected by the traction that
such lies gain in society. They put Catholics
continually on the defensive, cause them to be in
doubt about some aspects of their history, and
tempt them to take unbalanced stances on the
relationship between faith and science. In the end,
only having the facts in hand is able to remedy the
problem.
Was Pierre Duhem the ultimate
fact-checker?
Indeed, he was! Duhem was teaching at the
University of Bordeaux. He had lost his wife
prematurely and was living with his daughter
Hélène, who was a mere infant when her mother
died. This left him above-average free time to

pursue his passion for science. He specifically
wanted to establish a perfect form of physics, “one
in which every mathematical detail would relate to
aspects of physical reality” (The Realist Guide to
Religion and Science, p. 155).
That sounds like a very ambitious task! Was
he successful?
No, he wasn’t! But his pursuit of that goal led
him to a success that non-Catholics would call
serendipitous, but we would call providential. He
started doing historical research at the university’s
library in order to trace the use of mathematics in
physics back to its ultimate origin.
What did he find?
Well, the main thing he discovered was that the
so-called “Scientific Revolution” did not happen
in a vacuum. Galileo and Newton were not gods
descending to dwell among mortals. Rather,
they were standing on the shoulders of giants,
as Newton himself indicated. And those giants
were medieval Catholics and, Heaven help us,
scholastics, the most hated class of intellectual for
the Enlightenment groupies!
In other words, Duhem found that the 17th
century scientists knew about and relied upon a
wealth of important and ground-breaking scientific
thought that had taken place in the 13th to the 16th
centuries. He methodically unearthed medieval
Latin manuscripts, grasped all that the authors
were saying, classified their writings, compared
them, and documented the historical scientific
bridge between Greek science and modern science,
that bridge being of medieval construction.
Can you give an example?
Certainly! Let us consider his research on
the history of statics. Statics is “the branch of
mechanics concerned with bodies at rest and
forces in equilibrium” (Oxford Dictionary of
English). According to the Enlightenment, statics
was born in the 17th century without any help from
the Middle Ages. Duhem proved that this was not
at all the case in his The Origin of Statics.
Can you quote his findings?
Gladly. In the preface to that work, he states the
following:
17

Theme The Catholic Church and Science
“At the very outset, this research led us to make
some unforeseen observations. It proved to us
that the works of Leonardo da Vinci, so rich in
new ideas on mechanics, had in no way remained
unknown to the mechanicians of the Renaissance,
as was commonly assumed. It further proved that
his works were used by many scientists of the 16th
century, in particular, by Cardan and Benedetti,
and that they furnished Cardan with his profound
insights on the operation of machines and on the
impossibility of perpetual motion.”
So, da Vinci made some important
discoveries in the late 15th and early 16th
century?
Yes. But it gets worse! Duhem continues:
“We had already commenced retracing this
development in the Revue des questions
scientifiques, when we chanced upon a text by
Tartaglia, nowhere mentioned in any history of
statics, which proved to us that what we had done
so far had to be rethought on an entirely different
level.”
What did the text of Tartaglia contain?
Plagiarism. He was a Venetian mathematician
who lived from 1500-1557. Duhem describes his
deception as follows: “It was Tartaglia who, long
before Stevin and Galileo, had determined the
apparent weight of a body on an inclined plane.
He had very correctly deduced this law from a
principle which Descartes was later to affirm
in its complete generality. But this magnificent
discovery, which no historian of mechanics
mentions, did not come from Tartaglia. It was
nothing but an impudent act of plagiarism on his
part, and Ferrari bitterly reproached him for it and
gave credit for this discovery to a 13th-century
mechanician, Jordanus Nemorarius.”
So, the main discovery was actually made in
the Middle Ages?
Yes! Duhem’s finding that Jordanus was
the genius behind that particular principle of
mechanics was momentous. Ferrari had dropped
Jordanus’s name and this led Duhem to turn the
library upside down to find Jordanus’s actual
text: “In order to determine precisely what
mechanics owed to Jordanus and his students,
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we had to go back to the contemporary sources,
to the manuscripts. Thus, we were forced to go
through all of the manuscripts dealing with statics
which we were able to find at the Bibliothèque
Mazarine.”
Thank God he undertook that incredible
effort! What did he end up finding?
What Duhem described as “totally unforeseen
conclusions,” conclusions that revolutionized his
scientific career, if you can pardon the expression.
After he discovered Jordanus in 1904, for the rest
of his life, he would expend his vast capacity
for research and writing to establish those
conclusions, and in a way so thorough that it would
be nigh impossible to refute them.
The conclusion being that science was born
in the Middle Ages?
Precisely! It turns out that medieval
Christendom was electric with a scientific
creativity that the world had never seen.
How did Duhem express it in the text that
you have been quoting?
As follows: “Not only did the Occidental
Middle Ages directly or, indirectly through Arab
intermediaries, inherit the tradition of certain
Hellenic theories concerning the lever and the
Roman balance, but through its own intellectual
activity gave birth to a statics autonomous
from and unknown in Antiquity. As early as the
beginnings of the 13th century, and perhaps even
earlier, Jordanus de Nemore had demonstrated the
law of the lever by proceeding from the following
postulate: the same work is needed to lift different
weights when the weights are in inverse proportion
to the heights which they travel through.”
And this knowledge was not lost in the
succeeding centuries?
No! On the contrary, it was passed on and built
up. “This idea, which can be found in germinal
form in the treatise of Jordanus, was progressively
developed in the works of his followers up to
Leonardo da Vinci, Cardan, Roberval, Descartes,
and Wallis, and reached its final formulation in the
letter which John Bernoulli sent to Varignon, as
well as in the Méchanique analytique of Lagrange

and in the works of Willard Gibbs. Thus, the
science which we are legitimately so proud of
today grew out of a science born around the year
1300.”
Astounding! That’s myth-busting on a
nuclear scale.
Indeed, we would find it difficult to accuse
Duhem of hyperbole when he wraps up by saying:
“The so-called [scientific] intellectual revolutions
consisted, in most cases, of nothing but an
evolution developing over long periods of time. The
so-called Renaissances were frequently nothing
but unjust and sterile reactions.”
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment
have always appeared superficial to the
Catholic mind, but it is quite nice to have
documentary proof! Did Duhem write
anything else?
Did he ever. He was a prolific writer. Besides his
many academic articles in the Revue des questions
scientifiques and even a dozen or so articles in
the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia (see especially
“History of Physics”), he produced a constant
stream of multi-volume works on the history of
science. Fr. Stanley Jaki was right to refer to his
labors as “superhuman” and put his incredible
output in context: “With no assistants to help him,
with none of the modern research conveniences—
xerox machines, microfilms, not even a typewriter
or a ball point pen—at his disposal to save most
precious time for reflection and writing, he labored
in a way inconceivable today. The least known
aspect of this related to his right hand—all too
ready to tremble during his last ten years when he
filled 120 notebooks, each 200 pages, with excerpts
from almost 100 medieval manuscripts” (Scientist
and Catholic: Pierre Duhem, pp. 88-89).
Is there any particular work that stands
out?
His magnum opus was a ten-volume, 5000 page
tome entitled Système du Monde, a history of
science on a scale the world had never seen before.
Is there anything else of interest about that
work?
Yes, the fact that only a few volumes were

published during his lifetime and his daughter
Hélène had to fight with the publisher for decades
to have the other volumes published, as promised
in the contract. Her ultimately successful efforts in
dealing with the Mexican manager of the French
publication firm (true story!) is recounted by Fr.
Jaki in Reluctant Heroine: The Life and Work of
Hélène Duhem.
What about Pierre? Is there anything about
his life that would endear him to Catholics?
There are many things: the fact of his great love
of the Faith and even holiness. He practically had
the Imitation of Christ memorized, he engaged in
many charitable works, and he bore some difficult
crosses with a supernatural patience.
Can you name some of those crosses?
Besides the sudden death of his wife and
their son, to whom she had just given birth,
Duhem suffered from a chronic stomach ailment
throughout his life. He also was the victim of
the professional jealousy of Berthelot, who was
“almost omnipotent in France in matters relating
to science at the time.” Duhem correctly argued
against Berthelot’s “principle of maximum work,”
and Berthelot responded by trying to hamstring
Duhem’s academic career, successfully blocking a
lucrative teaching position for Duhem in Paris, and
delaying his nomination to the French Academy
of Sciences until 1913. Moreover, Duhem was
plagiarized not a few times during his lifetime, but
his usual recourse in response was silence.
It sounds as if he was edifying as well as
brilliant! That’s a shame that so few Catholics
know about him.
Well, at least the readers of The Angelus are
among those few!
But have we only scratched the surface with
Duhem? You mentioned the origin of statics
in the Middle Ages. Weren’t the medieval
scholastics responsible for much more than
that?
Indeed, they invented the very tool by which
scientific investigation is conducted today, the
scientific method. To learn about that, read the
next article!
19

Pharmacy of St. John’s Hospital
The Hospital of St. John (Oud Sint-Janshospitaal) was the first
medieval hospital in Bruges. It was founded in the mid-12th
century.
Located next to the Church of Our Lady, the premises contain
some of Europe’s oldest surviving hospital buildings. The
hospital grew during the Middle Ages and was a place where sick
pilgrims and travelers were cared for.

Theme The Catholic Church and Science

Catholics
Invented
Science
by Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX

1

For the Glory of God
(2003), p. 123 (italics
in original). The same
conclusions can be found
in many other modern
works. Edward Grant’s The
Foundations of Modern
Science in the Middle Ages
and James Hannam’s The
Genesis of Science are
especially recommended.

“I argue not only that there is no inherent conflict between religion
and science, but that Christian theology was essential for the rise of
science. In demonstration of this thesis I first summarize much of the
recent historical work to the effect that not only did religion not cause the
‘Dark Ages’; nothing else did either—the story that after the ‘fall’ of Rome
a long dark night of ignorance and superstition settled over Europe is as
fictional as the Columbus story. In fact, this was an era of profound and
rapid technological progress by the end of which Europe had surpassed
the rest of the world. Moreover, the so-called Scientific Revolution of the
16th century was the normal result of developments begun by scholastic
scholars starting in the 11th century. Thus, my attention shifts to why the
scholastics were interested in science at all. Why did real science develop
in Europe at this time? Why did it not develop anywhere else? I find
answers to those questions in unique features of Christian theology.”
These are not the words of a Catholic, nor are they the words of a
lobbyist for religion. Rather, they come from the mouth of sociologist and
historian Rodney Stark, and they appear in a book he wrote for Princeton

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University Press.1 Moreover, he makes sure to say that “it was Christianity,
not Protestantism, that sustained the rise of science”; and that “some of my
central arguments have already become the conventional wisdom among
historians of science.”
In this article, we will defend Stark’s statements by explaining, firstly,
what was necessary for the rise of science; secondly, why it did not arise
before the Middle Ages; and thirdly, why Catholic theology ultimately gave
birth to science.

Rodney Stark

2

Science and Creation
(Scottish Academic Press,
1974), p. viii. I speak about
this in chapter 4 of The
Realist Guide to Religion
and Science.

Science’s Needs
Science as we know it today has a specific method for investigating
reality that involves conducting experiments with nature, measuring, and
quantifying the results, and formulating theories about the laws of nature
based on those measurements. The reason that we can speak of the “birth
of science” is that this method did not exist for the greater part of the
world’s history. For the longest time, no one saw the need to scrutinize
matter closely and no one saw how helpful measurement and mathematics
can be for understanding the fabric of the cosmological world. Ever since
the scientific method was invented, by Catholic medieval scholars, almost
all of them clerics, it has been employed with resounding success for the
advancement of human knowledge.

The Causality of Worldviews
Before we get to the success, we need to look at the failure. Why did it
take so many centuries for humans to start systematically quantifying the
properties and movements of physical bodies? The short answer is this: they
did not have the right idea about reality, the right “worldview.”
If the human intellect is often referred to as the “mind’s eye,” a person’s
worldview can be thought of as his mind’s eyepiece. It is the filter through
which he views reality. And just as an eyepiece can warp a person’s vision by
making objects appear too large or too small, or by making them too dark or
all of the same color, so too a person’s worldview can distort what he sees in
reality or even prevent him from seeing certain things at all.
In his book Science and Creation, Fr. Stanley Jaki systematically
analyzes the worldviews of the many civilizations that failed to give birth to
empirical science: the Indians, Chinese, Mayans, Incans, Greeks, Egyptians,
Babylonians, and Muslims. His conclusion is that certain common elements
of their worldviews simply prevented them from believing that there are
laws of nature, or from thinking that they should investigate the quantitative
properties of bodies in order to discover them. The two most crippling ideas
were that the world is eternal and that it turns in mindless cycles.
“Great cultures, where the scientific enterprise came to a standstill,
invariably failed to formulate the notion of physical law, or the law of
nature... Their cosmology reflected a pantheistic and animistic view of
nature caught in the treadmill of perennial, inexorable returns.”2
23

Theme The Catholic Church and Science
We do not have space here to see in any detail why those two ideas stifle
science, but suffice it to say that they make reality seem to have an irrational
inevitability about it, instead of a rational intelligibility.

Theology to the Rescue
Why did the Catholic Middle Ages succeed when so many others had
failed? Again, because of a worldview, this time a worldview that had
permeated society through the ministrations of holy mother Church. There
were two beliefs that were particularly influential in leading to the invention
of science: Creation and the Incarnation.

Creation
Firstly, it was important for the development of science that a culture
believe that a mind is behind what happens in the world, a mind that stands
outside of that world and has the power to legislate for it, to bind it with
consistent, rational laws. This is exactly what Catholics are taught about
God. They are further instructed that God made us in His image, and
specifically in the rational powers of our immaterial soul.
Thus, when a Catholic looks out on reality, he believes both that it has a
rational order in it, coming from the mind of God, and that his own mind
has been made by that same God. This view of the world engenders a great
confidence that we can discover its inherent laws.
Furthermore, the scholastics of the High Middle Ages, as opposed to those
of the decadent period that started in the 14th century, held that humans are
created in God’s image even in the very hierarchy of their faculties. Intellect
comes first, then will in humans, and so the same must be true for God: His
will must follow His intellect. And since God’s intellect is supremely wise,
then God’s will must not choose anything arbitrarily. Rather, everything that
He works in reality is accomplished with intelligible wisdom.
This further refinement of the conception of God is not a trivial one. The
Muslims likewise believe in Creation and a transcendent God, but they do
not believe in an ordered God. For them, Allah’s will is supreme over Allah’s
reason. As a result, what Allah does is arbitrary, and what is arbitrary is
impenetrable to reason. That is why the Muslim worldview did not lead to the
birth of science.

Incarnation
Muslims also did not believe in the Incarnation, a doctrine that likewise
proved crucial for the advent of science. To do science, as we mentioned,
you have to experiment with material things. But material things have
historically not inspired much confidence in researchers. The reason is that
they are constantly changing. As such, they seem to represent the opposite
of consistency and regularity—the opposite of law. This is why the many
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Bishop Robert Grosseteste

non-Catholic peoples preceding the advent of Christendom seemed to have
given little thought to the possibility of using experimentation to understand
reality.
Catholics, on the other hand, had to take matter seriously. Not only was
matter created by a rational God, but that same God Himself had assumed a
material body, died and rose from the dead in that material body, and today
reigns in Heaven in that same material body. The Catholic conviction in the
doctrine of the Incarnation makes him see both matter and the faculties by
which we look at matter—our senses—in a different light. It moves us to
have a greater respect for empirical fact than the ancient world ever knew.
One of the empirical facts it should lead us to respect is that the Catholic
worldview led to the formulation of the scientific method. Let us take an
example of a medieval figure exercising his science.

A Real Scientist
3

See The Realist Guide to
Religion and Science, p.
185.

4

R. Dales, The Scientific
Achievement of the
Middle Ages (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1973), p. 62.

One of the figures who manifested the new, medieval approach to
understanding nature was Robert Grosseteste.3 He was bishop of Lincoln,
England, and lived from about 1168 to 1253. Bishop Grosseteste employed
experiments as an integral part of his investigation, insisted that no accurate
knowledge of nature could be had without mathematics, and held that it was
the scientist’s job to form a hypothesis as to the cause of the phenomenon
being studied. Only when the scientist controls his observations in such
a way that he has eliminated all other possible explanations is he able to
conclude that his hypothesis is correct.4
This method of Bishop Grosseteste is effectively identical with the
scientific method as we know it today.

Conclusion
The scientific method did not exist for most of the world’s history,
because no one was experimenting with physical bodies and quantifying
them in order to discover the laws of nature. It took a particular
theological worldview—the Catholic worldview as incarnated in medieval
Christendom—to inspire humans with the confidence that a close
investigation of material bodies would reveal those laws. Impelled by this
confidence, scientists of the Middle Ages started humanity on a new territory
of exploration, one that has been pursued ever since and which has revealed
amazing secrets about God’s most wise design of our cosmos.
Whenever superficial accusations are hurled against the Church about her
opposition to scientific progress, let this one historical fact be recalled: it
was mother Church herself who gave birth to scientific enterprise.

25

Theme The Catholic Church and Science

Heroism and
Genius:
Time for Our Second
“long march through the institutions”

Interview with Fr. William J. Slattery, Ph.D., S.T.L.

Interview with the author of Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Helped Build and Can Help
Rebuild Western Civilization, William J. Slattery, Ph.D., S.T.L.

What inspired you to write this book—
clearly the fruit of much labor and research?
Urgency! It’s time for us Catholics to do
again what we did during the first “Dark
Ages”—to begin “the long march through
the institutions” (Rudi Dutschke) in order
to recapture them from the forces of the
“Dictatorship of Relativism” (Benedict XVI) and
build a new Christian civilization.
Therefore, we must form—everywhere—
creative Catholic minorities by equipping them
with an intellectual, ascetical-mystical, and
missionary formation rooted in the millennial
tradition of Catholicism.
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Integral to this equipping will be the training
of future leaders in both Church and State
with that ability to act with that realistic
insightfulness springing from “historical
imagination.”
Winston Churchill is a clear instance of such
a leader. His principled steadfastness as an
enemy of Nazi appeasement in the 1930s despite
derision and banishment from public office was
largely due to this nurtured sense of “historical
imagination.”
As Isaiah Berlin remarked: “Mr. Churchill’s
dominant category, the single, central,
organizing principle of his moral and intellectual

universe, is a historical imagination so strong,
so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of
the present and the whole of the future in a
framework of a rich and multi-coloured past.”
As I worked on Heroism and Genius in the
17th century library of the Pontifical North
American College near the ancient Forum in
Rome, I wanted to empower young Catholics with
this “historical imagination.”
Because we Catholics have the same mission
now in this second “Dark Age” as our forefathers
did during the first “Dark Ages.”
What was your principal purpose in
writing it?
To shout that Catholicism matters!
Catholicism matters not only to the individual’s
soul but to society’s soul.
Only a civilization founded on the truths of
Catholicism has the intellectual clarity and
supernatural guts to confront, combat, and
overcome the fatalist ideology of Hegelianderived cultural Marxism with its revolutionary
lie that truth is measured by the changing events
of history, that the new is always the standard,
and that Tradition (adherence to the Natural Law
and to the divinely revealed, unchanging truths of
Catholicism and their cultural expression) must
be exiled from social institutions.
Among all the towering churchmen
you describe in its pages, do you have a
particular favourite?
Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, whose sensitive
soul described the beauty of the Atlantic waves
but who also barred the entrance of Milan
cathedral to Theodosius, emperor of the Roman
Empire, until he repented publicly of his sin.
Augustine, the intellectual par excellence,
on his deathbed urging the citizens of his city
of Hippo to fight off the besieging red-haired
Vandals of Genseric.
Leo the Great, riding out on horseback to save
Rome from Attila the Hun.
Gregory the Great, confined to bed with
painful gout, yet forcing his wearied body to plan
the conversion of England.
Idealistic youths riding to Templar castles
in order to embrace a life of warriorhood in a

monastic environment.
The group of 30 teenagers and 20 year-olds
banging at the door of the Cistercian monastery
amid the swamps of Citeaux in order to expand
an Order that centuries later even had the
blueprints for the Industrial Revolution.
The peasant’s son, Suger, who rose to be Prime
Minister of France and the founder of Gothic
architecture.
Bernard of Montjou who, at 8,000 ft above
sea level in the Swiss Alps, founded the famous
hospice at the mountain pass now known as
the “Great St. Bernard” and after whom the
magnificent dogs are also named.
Alcuin of York, the man whom Charlemagne,
emperor of the Holy Roman Empire called “my
mentor,” the educator of an empire’s educators,
strategizing to create the first system of universal
education
Louis IX, man of government par excellence,
with his 11 children at the royal court in Paris.
Their heroism and genius can speak to us
today because it is the heroism and genius
they released from Catholicism itself—the
genial creativity that is the dynamism of the
Catholic Faith and the courage that flows from
the supernatural powers of the soul sanctified
through grace.
You write about the Traditional Latin
Mass in a way that suggests you wish it had
not been removed after Vatican II; indeed,
that it is “the Mass of the Ages.” Would you
like to have it more widely revived? Is this
realistic?
The public worship of God (cult) has been
the root and soul of culture in all of history’s
civilizations.
Sociologically, Catholicism brought to birth a
new culture in Europe chiefly because its most
influential doctrines were embodied in the word
form, symbolism, and ceremonial of the Mass
according to the Church’s most ancient rite,
what we nowadays call the “traditional Latin
Mass.”
“Everything that the [Western] Christian world
possessed of doctrine and poetry, music and
art was poured into the liturgy, moulded into an
organic whole which centered round the Divine
27

Theme The Catholic Church and Science
Mysteries.” (Christopher Dawson, The Formation
of Christendom)
Realistic? Realism often requires tenacious
struggle for what is not an option but a need.
Just as the Traditional Latin Mass was at the
center of the building of Christendom in the
12th century, so it has been at the center of the
missionary expansion of Catholicism in every
century.
One of the greatest missionaries of the 20th
century once expressed how he personally had
experienced this transforming power of the
ancient Mass:
“I lived day by day, year by year, in Africa and
particularly at Gabon, where I spent 13 years
of my missionary life, first at the seminary
and then in the bush among the Africans, with
the natives. There I saw–yes, I saw–what the
grace of the Holy Mass could do... I saw it in
those pagan souls transformed by assistance
at Holy Mass... These [were] men produced
by the grace of the Mass. They assisted at the
Mass daily, communicating with great fervor
and they have become models and the light
to those about them... I was able to see these
pagan villages become Christian—being
transformed not only, I would say, spiritually

St. Ambrose versus Theodosius

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and supernaturally, but also being transformed
physically, socially, economically and politically;
because these people, pagans which they were,
became cognizant of the necessity of fulfilling
their duties, in spite of the trials, in spite of the
sacrifices; of maintaining their commitments,
and particularly their commitment in marriage.
Then the village began to be transformed, little
by little, under the influence of grace, under the
influence of the grace of the Holy Sacrifice of the
Mass…” (Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Sermon
on the occasion of his sacerdotal jubilee [English
version: Michael Davies, Apologia Pro Marcel
Lefebvre, Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1983), II,
334-35])
In the subtitle is the phrase “how priests
can help rebuild Western civilization.” Do
you hope that the current malaise in the
West, to which you refer in several places,
can be reversed?
Heroism and Genius shows why and how
we Catholics built a civilization during an age of
relative darkness. The historical circumstances
have changed, but not man’s nature nor
Catholicism’s identity. Hence, what we did
before, we can do again!

The darkest hour can come just before the
dawn because of the “conspiracy” of God’s
providential action. History, essentially a
battleground between the forces of the City of
God and the City of the Prince of Darkness, is
always His story.
However, within this drama each of us is called
to play out a role in the act of the drama assigned
to him.
Heroism and Genius narrates how, in the
history of the Dark Ages, often only a hair’s
breadth separated the West from actions or
omissions that would have prolonged the
darkness for one shudders to think how long.
It was Catholics who, alert to their providential
mission, made the difference! Why? Because they
were convinced that Catholicism is the vitally
important difference!
And back then the darkest hour did indeed
come before the dawn. The 10th century saw
the Church almost brought to her knees by
the corruption of the papacy. Barbarianism
abounded even inside the ranks of churchmen.
And yet, in the 12th century, men arose
to see Gothic spires piercing the skies of
Europe; chivalry changing “men with claws”
into Christian knights; a sublime romanticism

idealizing woman; statesmen like King Louis IX
who have often been emulated but rarely if ever
surpassed.
All because the creative minorities of
Catholics had stubbornly held their ground
against the forces of “Mordor.” Relentlessly, with
the clarity of mind from Catholic Tradition and
the supernatural vigor of the sacraments, they
converted Europe and—to their surprise—built a
new civilization.
Because their worldvision was that of divine
Providence governing events, they wasted no
time in pessimism. To Frodo’s complaint “I wish
it need not have happened in my time,” they
would all reply with Gandalf, “So do I and so do
all who live to see such times. But that is not for
them to decide. All we have to decide is what to
do with the time that is given us.”

Heroism and Genius can be obtained at Angelus Press or at
Amazon.com
The author, Fr. William J. Slattery, Ph.D., S.T.L., can be
contacted through the website www.societyofignatians.com.

29

Spirituality

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass:

The Gospel
by Fr. Christopher Danel

The Gospel bestows that heavenly wisdom
of which Solomon says: “I preferred her before
kingdoms and thrones, and esteemed riches
nothing in comparison to her. Neither did I
compare unto her any precious stone: for all
gold, in comparison to her, is as a little sand,
and silver in respect to her shall be counted as
clay. I loved her above health and beauty, and
chose to have her instead of light; for her light
cannot be put out” (Wis. 7:8-10).

Liturgically, and Ascetically Explained.
Monsignor Gihr was a priest of Freiburg im
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 Gospel of the
Mass, presenting the work of Monsignor Nicholas
Gihr in his fundamental liturgical commentary
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: Dogmatically,
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Reverence for the Gospel
The readings from the Gospel at Mass serve
not merely for instruction and edification, but

are at the same time a liturgical action by which
religious veneration and homage are paid to the
word and truth of God hence to God Himself,
who is present in His word, so to speak, as our
teacher. This explains the splendid wreath of
customs, full of meaning, wherewith the reading
of the Gospel especially at the solemn celebration
of Mass is surrounded and distinguished. Next to
the Body and Blood of the Lord in the Most Holy

mouth to the Lord. To this effect, two prayers are
now recited: the one for purification, the other for
the bestowal of the blessing. The priest stands in
the middle of the altar, raises his eyes aloft, as if
“to the mountain whence assistance comes,” and
soon lowers them again; with body profoundly
inclined and with hands joined, he prays:
“Cleanse my heart and my lips, O Almighty
God, who didst cleanse the lips of the Prophet

Sacrament and the grace of the Holy Ghost, the
Church esteems nothing so sublime and so holy
as the word of God in the holy Gospel. To the
Gospel are paid the honors of a divine service:
when it is solemnly chanted, it is enveloped
with the splendor of lights and the fragrance of
incense.

Isaias with a burning coal: vouchsafe so to
cleanse me by Thy gracious mercy, that I may
be able worthily to proclaim Thy holy Gospel.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen. Give me Thy
blessing, O Lord! The Lord be in my heart
and on my lips, that I may worthily and in a
becoming manner announce His holy Gospel.
Amen.”
First comes the petition for interior
purification (Munda cor meum). This petition
has its foundation and development in a
symbolical reference to a mysterious event in the
life of the prophet Isaias. In a marvelous vision
he beheld the glory of the God of hosts and heard
the canticle of the angels in His praise; filled
with holy awe, he acknowledged and confessed
his sinfulness and unworthiness. Then a seraph
took from the heavenly altar of incense a live

Liturgical Preparation
To announce the words of eternal life at the
Holy Sacrifice is an exalted and sublime office
(praedicare, praeconare). The solemn reading of
the Gospel at Mass, therefore, belongs since the
fourth century to the deacon, or to the priest, but
both must specially prepare themselves that they
may be worthy to lend, as it were, their heart and

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Spirituality
coal, touched therewith the lips of the prophet,
burning away all its defilement, saying these
words: “Behold! This hath touched thy lips, and
thy iniquities shall be taken away, and thy sin
shall be cleansed.” Then only did Isaias say: “Lo,
here am I, send me!”
“Give me Thy blessing, O Lord!” This blessing
asked for is twofold: that the Lord would be in
the purified heart as well as on the purified lips
of the priest. If the Lord be in the heart of the
priest, then will he worthily (digne) announce
the tidings of salvation. If the Lord be on his
lips, then will the priest announce the Gospel
competently (competenter), that is, in a proper
manner, clearly and distinctly, with power and
energy, so that all may be edified. Prepared after
this manner, the priest is a pure channel which
receives within itself the salutary waters of the
Gospel in a clear state from the fountain-source
of the Holy Ghost, and then conveys them into the
hearts of the faithful.

Heading of the Gospel
The headings of the Gospels are very ancient.
They appropriately express that one and the same
Gospel of Jesus Christ was written under the
inspiration of the Holy Ghost by the Evangelists
in a fourfold manner. This is comprised in the
little word secundum, meaning according to.
St. Bede points out that, although there are four
Evangelists, there are not four Gospels, but
rather the one Gospel of Jesus Christ put forth in
four beautiful ways. If the passage to be read is
taken from the context that follows the beginning
of the Gospel, which is most often the case,
then the announcement runs thus, for example:
“Continuation (Sequentia) of the Holy Gospel
according to St. Matthew.” The term sequentia
is not singular, but plural, meaning “ea quae
sequuntur in textu Evangelistae—those things
which follow in the text of the Evangelist.” The
acolyte thereupon answers in the name of the
people: “Gloria tibi, Domine!—Glory be to Thee,
O Lord!”
At the above words the priest with his thumb
imprints a cross on the first words of the Gospel
extract, then on his forehead, mouth and breast.
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The Sign of the Cross made on the book is
to express that the whole Gospel, the whole
doctrine and the whole work of salvation is
comprised and contained in the mystery of the
Cross. Hence St. Paul, who wished to know and
to preach nothing other than Jesus Christ and
Him crucified, calls the Gospel simply “the word
of the Cross.” The Cross with which the Gospel
in the Missal is signed, is intended to remind us
of all this. On their forehead, mouth and breast
the priest and the faithful make the Sign of the
Cross, in order to express that they wish to bear
and preserve the doctrine of the Cross and of the
Crucified in their mind, on their lips and in their
heart, and that they are not ashamed to proclaim
freely and cheerfully to the world both by word
and deed the glory of the Cross of Christ. For
the priest, who is to preach Christ crucified, this
Sign of the Cross is at the same time a serious
admonition to lead a life hidden with Christ in
God, to be attached with Christ to the Cross and
to be crucified to the world. But since the Cross
is not only a significant, but also an efficacious
sign, it can here be also conceived principally as
a protection and a defense against the evil one, to
prevent his coming and snatching the seed of the
divine word out of our hearts.

Proclamation of the Gospel
The prominent position and sublime
signification of the Gospel is clearly evident in the
ecclesiastical rite. The Gospel is read on the right
side of the altar in contrast to the left, as the right
side is generally regarded as the more honorable.
As the church and altar, in consequence of a very
ancient custom, were usually built to face the
East, the book on the Gospel side is so placed as
to be turned toward the North, and in this there
is a mystical meaning. For as the beautiful life of
Nature in the warm sunny South is a symbol of
the higher life of grace, so the reverse in Nature
is the dark and frigid North. These dormant,
snow-bound regions, enchained in the death grip
of winter’s frosts, represent in a suitable manner
the dreary and lifeless condition, the unfruitful
and desolate existence of heathenism. Thus the
Gospel is read toward the North as a sign that

the good tidings of Heaven have awakened men
to an imperishable spiritual spring of grace and
changed the icy coldness of mankind into the
mild warmth of summer.
In like manner, it is not without a deeper
meaning that all present stand when listening
to the Gospel. This rite, in all probability, dates
from the time of the apostles. By the act of
standing up at the Gospel, we would first testify
that the Gospel of the peace and of the glory of
the blessed God fills us with great joy, and that
the truth of Christ has made us truly free and
brought us spiritual resurrection. Furthermore,
standing is a mark and a practical proof of the
profound reverence, esteem and attention due
to the word of Jesus Christ. Finally, to stand is
the posture of the servant in the presence of his
master. In the Gospel, Christ Our Lord appears as
our teacher, and by the fact that we receive His
word standing, we express our obedience and our
readiness to serve Him.
During solemn high Mass the reading of the
Gospel is distinguished and honored by the
splendor of lighted candles and the fragrance of
incense. The two acolytes hold lighted candles
and stand one on each side of the book. St.
Jerome already defended the higher meaning of
this very ancient custom of lighting candles at the
Gospel, inasmuch as he insists that thereby we
should give expression to the joy and jubilation
of our hearts at the good tidings of salvation.
Above all, the light by its brightness and its glow
symbolizes Jesus Christ, the Sun that knows no
setting and the Light of the City of God as well on
earth as in Heaven.
The incensing at the Gospel is also rich in
symbolism. In the first place, the incensing of the
book of the Gospels is to be regarded as an act of
holy reverence, a religious mark of honor paid to
the words of eternal life. The fragrant clouds that
envelop the book call to mind how the good odor
of the pre-eminent knowledge of Jesus Christ is
spread by the announcement of the Gospel. The
incense furthermore admonishes us that, with
the heavenly ardor of devotion the words of the
Gospel should be announced by the deacon or the
priest, and be listened to by the faithful and laid
up in their hearts.
When the reading of the Gospel has ended, the

acolyte answers: “Laus tibi, Christe!—Praise
be to Thee, O Christ!” The priest kisses the
initial words of the extract just read, saying at
the same time: “By virtue of the words of the
Gospel may our sins be blotted out.” Thus the
reading of the holy Gospel is closed not only with
a chant of thanksgiving, but moreover with a
kiss and a prayer. What is the meaning of kissing
the Gospel? This liturgical kiss expresses what
is contained in Psalm 18, that the words of the
Lord are “more to be desired than gold and many
precious stones, and sweeter than honey and
the honeycomb.” If the Gospel is taken into the
heart and preserved therein, with all the esteem
and submission which the kissing of the book
denotes, then is the Gospel also able “to blot out
our sins.” It is self-evident that no such power
of effacing sin may be ascribed to the words
of the Gospel as is peculiar to the sacraments
of baptism and penance, but the word of God
is a sacramental which, accompanied by the
interior working of grace, exercises a redeeming,
healing and sanctifying influence on man when
he is properly disposed, by exciting faith, hope
and charity, fear, contrition, conversion, and
amendment of life.

Conclusion
St. Augustine wrote, “The Gospel is the mouth
of Christ. He sits in Heaven, but ceases not to
speak on earth” (Os Christi Evangelium est. In
coelo sedet, sed in terra loqui non cessat). The
words of the Lord are spirit and life: they are
powerful, two-edged, penetrating. “Are not my
words as a fire, saith the Lord, and as a hammer
that breaketh the rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23:29)
When Christ on the road to Emmaus opened the
meaning of the Scriptures to the two disciples,
their hearts burned within them. The word of
God has a marvelous power for enlightening the
eyes, for imparting wisdom to the lowly and the
humble, for rejoicing the heart and refreshing
the soul. In like manner, may the living and
quickening word of God, which abides forever,
impart to us salvation and protection; may it ever
more and more purify, consecrate and sanctify
our souls.
35

Spirituality

Earthquake
Priest
by Fr. William J. Slattery, Ph.D., S.T.L.

The Earthquake Priests:
Watchmen for Humanity
Hardly anyone in the population knew that
the alerts about the approaching earthquake
came from laboratories where black-robed
priests bent over oscilloscopes, wavemeters,
and vibrographs. The US Coast and Geodetic
Survey in Washington DC gratefully received
teletyped daily reports from their seismological
laboratories. “Bless those who persecute you”:
their silent service benefited even those countries
that had constitutions explicitly forbidding their
entry such as Norway and Switzerland. Indeed,
Jesuit contributions to seismology have even led
to it being called “the Jesuit science.” According
to a former president of the British Seismological
Association, the Jesuits at one time dominated
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the field of seismology in the U.S.A: in 1954 while
the US Government had eight seismological
stations, the Society of Jesus had 18 within the
country and an additional 10 elsewhere.
Frederick Louis Odenbach pioneered Jesuit
involvement in 1908 and purchased seismographs
for 15 of the order’s institutions. They soon began
gathering data and became the first professional
seismographic network in the world. From
their ranks came James Macelwane, one of the
most renowned seismologists of all time, in
whose honor the American Geophysical Union
annually awards a medal to promising young
geophysicists.
In the 20th century field of seismic
prospecting, one of the pioneers was Daniel
Linehan who became known as the “earthquake
priest” for his discovery of the “T” phase, one

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Spirituality

38

of four types of earthquake waves. He was also
the first scientist to test the theories of shallow
refraction. On all continents and at both poles he
conducted research. As a member of three U.S.
Navy expeditions to the Antarctic he measured
and mapped the polar ice cap. He also went
on a daring expedition to the North Magnetic
Pole within the Arctic in 1954. In 1969, he was
again on the cutting-edge with his conference
“Seismology in Space Mission Planning,” given at
the Second Conference on Planetology and Space
Mission Planning.
On all his scientific journeys, he was never
separated from a gold-plated chalice on the
bottom of which were inscribed key events of his
life such as “First Mass at North Magnetic Pole
1954,” “First Mass at South Pole 1958.”
The famous photographer, Margaret BourkeWhite, helped many catch a glimpse into the soul
of this priest-scientist in an article published
in Life magazine. She narrated how she had
followed him around during an entire day filled
with scientific activities but which had begun
with the Sacrifice of the Mass. At sundown the
priest had remarked to her:
“...Today, when I read my seismograph there
were only two who knew that rock was down
there under 60 feet of water. Only God and I
knew. And to think this is the same God who
came down to our altar this morning, the same
God who made that rock, who made all the rocks
in the world. I would give up all my seismology
to celebrate one such Mass as you came to this
morning…that is God. And I held Him in my
hands this morning. That’s why I’m happy.”

the Philippines under Fr. Federico Faura. There
he published the landmark study for navigators,
The Cyclones of the Far East. In 1898, after the
Battle of Manila Bay, American military leaders,
recognizing the importance of the priest’s work,
arranged for Admiral Dewey to meet with Fr.
Algué on board the flagship, the Olympia. This
meeting ensured the support of the new rulers
for the Observatory which was renamed the
Philippine Weather Service.
José María Algué became the leading
meteorologist in Asia. In 1900, he published
the most up-to-date atlas of the Philippine
archipelago. 1905 saw the foundation of the first
weather stations around the nation: during his
directorship he would launch 159, along with two
magnetic and seismic stations. Every year he sent
out an average of 20 warnings about typhoons
to an area that included Tokyo, Hong Kong, and
Shanghai.
The priest invented three instruments: the
nephoscope, an instrument for determining the
direction and speed of cloud movement; the
microseismometer, a type of microseismograph
that produces a graphic record of amplitudes
or periods, or both, of small earthquakes;
and finally, his most important invention, the
barocyclonometer, a barometer with a cyclonedetecting apparatus known as the cyclonometer.
The barometer will tell of an approaching storm
but the cyclonometer will tell even at a distance
of several hundred miles the direction in which
the center of the storm is moving.
On August 18, 1912, the New York Times
published an interview with Fr. Algué:

The Typhoon Priest: He
Saved a Million Lives

Noted Weather Prophet of The
Far East Here to Help Us

Dubbed “the Scientific Superman” by one
scholar, Fr. José María Algué, (1856 - 1930), one of
the greatest meteorologists in history, was born
in Manresa, Spain.
In 1871 the 15 year-old began his preparation
for the priesthood in the novitiate of the Society
of Jesus at Andorra, amid the Pyrenees. After
advanced scientific studies in the U.S.A., he
began work in 1894 at the Manila Observatory in

“Fr. Jose Algué of the Philippine Weather
Bureau tells of his device for detecting typhoons
that has been adopted by the US Government.
He has warned people on land and sea of the
approach of storms for the past 20 years. […]
He has saved so many lives that trying to add
them up is useless. Let them go at a million: the
probabilities are that they total up more than
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“He is Fr. Jose Algué, a Spanish Jesuit priest,
Director of the Philippine Weather Bureau at
Manila. For over 20 years all his waking hours
have been devoted to that hobby of his, lifesaving. He has pitted himself manfully against
the most dreaded of Far Eastern calamities, the
typhoon. By patient systematizing and ingenious
inventions he has pushed forward, step by step,
until it looks now as if he at last worsted the old
typhoon demon that used to sweep sea and land
at will, tearing up villages, towns and cities in his
path, strewing the beaches with shattered hulks
and the corpses of seafarers.
“Perched in the Manila observatory, Fr. Algué
schemed and calculated and pondered and jotted
down figures and erased them again until at last
he rose from his chair one day with the dream of
his life realized. He had worked out the idea for
making an instrument that would tell not only of
the approach of the typhoon but of the course it
would take. By means of this, Fr. Algué figured,
a skipper would be able to dodge the typhoon
and compel it to spend its violence miles away on
the open sea, instead of enveloping his ship in its
howling, blinding vortex, tearing out masts and
funnels and cabins, and hurling him and his men,
like as not, to the bottom.
“That instrument, which its inventor calls the
barocyclonometer, is now in use on upward of
1,000 ships that sail the waters of the Far East,
and it has carried the fame of its inventor, already
great in Manila and throughout the Philippines,
to the remotest corners of the Orient. And
now Fr. Algué is in this country, in answer to a
summons from the United States Government,
which is going to adopt the barocyclonometer
on American warships. For the past month
he has been busy in Washington and Havana,
adapting his Pacific calculations for use on the
Atlantic, where he expects that a modified form
of the instrument that has been so successful in
the East, will be equally efficacious in warning
mariners of the approach of hurricanes and other
storms, and making it possible for them to slip
out of harm’s way.
“Fr. Algué was in New York last week. He
was just back from Washington, where, with
the help of Captain Jayne, Superintendent of the
Naval Observatory, he had thoroughly satisfied

the government as to the value of his invention.
Yesterday, he sailed for London, where the first
barocyclonometer for use on the Atlantic will be
made under his personal supervision. When that
is done the busy priest will take the long journey
back to Manila, and once more devote himself to
running up his danger signals for the protection
of seafarers and landlubbers, and send out his
code messages of warning to dozens of places
that would otherwise be at the mercy of the
typhoon, and doubtless stick to this splendid life
work of his till the end of his days. Then, let us
hope, he will rest as one who has used his life for
the benefit of his fellow-men ought to rest.
“But, fortunately, he looks as if that day were
still far distant. He was hale and active, and
there was vim in his gestures and steadfastness
in his eye as he sat beside a TIMES reporter in
the reception hall of St. Francis Xavier College,
in 16th Street, where he stayed while here, and
told about the quick work of warning that must
be accomplished within the space of a few hours
if lives are to be saved. For, in spite of vigilance
and ingenuity, the typhoon is still a monster to
be dreaded. It is only a few years since he swept,
unheralded, into the harbor of Hong Kong,
packed with everything that floats, from ocean
liners to Chinese junks, and tossed them about
like playthings, piled them up on the shores like
kindling wood, and drowned or battered the life
out of 10,000 human beings. […]
“Life is better than gold—better than millions
of money!” he exclaimed. “Life is the greatest
thing there is—you can’t restore it when once it
is gone. And—now I have an appointment,” he
remarked abruptly and shook hands courteously
with the reporter and accompanied him to the
door, and then vanished into the interior of the
college with knit brows, probably revolving more
mathematical formulae in his mind, probably
meeting and overcoming an imaginary typhoon.”

39

Spirituality

The Science
of Silence
by a Benedictine monk

On Easter morning, St. Mary Magdalene
thought that Jesus Christ was a gardener. Our
Lord is very present in our life, but we treat Him
as a gardener because we are concerned about
the material aspects of life. In a certain way, this
blinds our intelligence rendering it incapable to
know God and the things of God. Silence will free
our intelligence to contemplate truth. “The Truth
will set you free…” It is in this spirit of truth
that God is to be found and once He has been
encountered, we can discover different aspects of
natural truth that He Himself has created.
The Catholic clergy and religious have
been very active in contributing to scientific
discoveries. A few examples of some Benedictine
monks that have made significant contributions
to science are amongst many others: Fr.
Andrew Gordon (+1751) who apparently made
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the first electric motor; Fr. A. Jedlik (+1895) is
considered to be the discoverer of the dynamo;
Fr. Fixlmillner (+1791), was one of the first
astronomers to compute the orbit of Uranus.
For the past 1,500 years, Benedictines have
been well known for their agricultural methods,
their technical advances of ironworking and
woodworking, and their construction of a great
variety of monasteries with very advanced
technology for their time. We could ask ourselves:
“How do they grasp such material thoughts in the
cloister?”
St. Gregory, explaining the life of St. Benedict,
gives us an answer. While contemplating God’s
beauty in the middle of the night, St. Benedict
had a vision of the created universe under a
single ray of light. St. Gregory explains: “All
creation is bound to appear small to a soul that

sees the Creator. Once it beholds a little of His
light, it finds all creatures small indeed. The light
of holy contemplation enlarges and expands the
mind in God until it stands above the world. In
fact, the soul that sees Him rises even above
itself, and as it is drawn upward in His light all its
inner powers unfold. Then, when it looks down
from above, it sees how small everything is,
that was before, beyond its grasp.” Through his
knowledge of God, St. Benedict was able to see
all of creation in a simple glance. He understood
the place of the creature within creation,
enabling him to be more perfectly detached from
creatures. Seeing the created universe in this new
light, helps the soul to understand created things
in a holy way according to the divine plan.
Once man has contemplated the beauty
of God, it is much easier for him to discover
truth concerning nature. A monk once wrote
that contemplation is when the soul becomes
immobile in admiration before something that
is more beautiful than itself. In Psalm 45 we are
told “Be still and see that I am God.” He who
contemplates is capable of seeing nature in its
true perspective before God. He understands
that nature flows out from God and will lead us
back to God. This wisdom will enable him to
grasp the meaning of his own life with respect
to God, freeing him from the illusions of pride.
The contemplative soul observes the effects of
creation and is able to determine the cause of
these effects. Being peaceful and silent interiorly,
he is able to discover more readily many hidden
mysteries of nature. Technical advancement, the
laws of physics and of nature in general are not
invented by man, but rather discovered by him.

To discover a reality we must be still interiorly in
order to make the necessary observations.
The technical advances in today’s world are
truly amazing, and seem to be reserved for men
quiet enough in mind in order to peacefully
observe the rules of creation. These laws
have always been in place, but only recently
discovered by clever men. There is, however,
a discovery infinitely more valuable that man
can make only by a gift from God. The most
important discovery that man can make is to
understand that God does exist, that He is allpowerful, all-knowing, and that He loves us.
When we understand that He really does not need
us, but that we need Him, we have surpassed all
material knowledge because we have entered into
the supernatural realm.
We are continually surrounded by God’s beauty
and truth, but it is very rare that we recognize it.
Like St. Mary Magdalene, in our materialism we
treat our Lord Jesus Christ like a gardener and
He very patiently calls us by name. He gives us
all of creation as a gift and asks us to use it with
respect and love according to His plan. Just as St.
Benedict looked upon creation under a single ray
of light, we too are invited to look upon creation
from the point of view of God. When the soul has
learned to listen and to see God in every event
of his life, he can observe nature and discover
the mysteries of science that God has placed
therein. The religious soul and the scientist share
the common factor of being able to observe
and discover God’s truth in creation. The art
of recognizing this beauty is contemplation,
enabling the soul, through silence to discover
science.
41

The construction of the Duomo of
Milan officially started in 1386 by
Bishop Antonio da Saluzzo and was
supported by the ruler of Milan Gian
Galeazzo Visconti who had grand
visions of the cathedral. Though
originally started in terracotta stone,
once the grandeur of the project was
realized Condoglian marble from
Lake Maggiore was chosen. The entire
building is made up of this pink-hued
white marble. To bring it from the
quarries of Candoglia, canals were
dug leading to the construction site,
evidence of which is still visible along
the famous navigli, the canals left over
from the network built in southern
Milan specifically for that purpose!
Thousands of artists, sculptors, and
specialized workers were involved in
the construction of the Cathedral of
Milan. Architects from across Europe
were invited to work on the project (at
least 78 different architects total).

Christian Culture

The Sound
of Science
by Dr. Andrew Childs

Art is very pretty science. Good art, certainly.
Artists can of course choose to abuse the
transcendental absolutes and create works of
ugliness, evil, and deceit, but this constitutes bad
art, and thankfully few readers of this journal
possess the intellectual flexibility—a wizardly
ability, obtained at great expense from only
the finest institutions of highest learning, to
reconcile the irreconcilable, square conceptual
circles, simultaneously embrace contradicting
points as having equal validity—to appreciate it.
Even before considering the mastery of various
techniques and media, the artist, just as the
scientist does, must submit to natural laws: if you
have a lousy tempera recipe, oil paint which turns
transparent, misfired clay, or a figure that cracks
into pieces before you can successfully free it
from the marble, you have not a masterpiece but a
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mess. If a composer chooses to ignore the laws of
mathematics and acoustics, he creates not music,
but merely noise.
Artistic technique necessarily evolves with
changing schools and developing forms over
the course of time. Sufficient to the age is the
art thereof, and we view the artist who insists
on scrupulous adherence to bygone styles and
techniques as an anachronistic oddity rather than
a champion for tradition. Though an artist through
his technique commands a legion of processes,
actions, materials, and contingencies, technique
remains a functional element of the art, though
highly individual: no two artists, given the same
blank canvas and materials—or empty page
and pen—have ever produced exactly the same
masterpiece. Technical expression—formal, if
you will—makes art “artistic.” The science in art

exists in the material elements and accompanying
natural laws—chemistry and physics of visual
art, mathematics and acoustics in music. We tend
understandably to focus on the artist, seeing art
as the inspired utterance of an individual, taking
the material forces of the art for granted. Pity, for
wonder lies beneath. Science, as it turns out, is
pretty artistic.

No Words Can Reach...
Words inspire thought, emotions follow.
Music also inspires thought, but often as a
consideration of an emotion stimulated directly
and purposefully: a good composer has your heart
in his hands. The Greeks knew this and attributed
a metaphysical character to music and its effects.
“Music,” remarked Plato, “is a moral law. It gives
soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight
to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life
and to everything.” He believed that music could
discipline the mind, just as gymnastics disciplined
the body, warning in his Republic that too much
gymnastics made one uncivilized, violent, and
ignorant (while also cautioning that too much
music made one weak and irritable). Aristotle
proposed that music had influence over the
character and the soul. Both Plato and Aristotle
treat music as an extension of philosophy; for the
scientific exploration of music by the ancients, we
look to Pythagoras and Aristoxenus.
Music historians credit Pythagoras (570495 BC) with the “discovery” of intervals, and
the development of a tuning system based
on mathematical ratios. According to legend,
Pythagoras noticed the relationship of various
tones hammered out on multiple anvils. Some
of the pitches sounded good together, others
sounded bad. Intrigued both by the consonances
and dissonances, he set out to reproduce and
systematize the relationships he heard, and the
tuning system he developed remained largely in
force for almost 2000 years. A vibrating string
held at a constant tension makes a recognizable
tone; half of the same string, a ratio of 2:1, will
produce a tone exactly one octave higher. A
ratio of 3:2 produces a Perfect fifth (C-G on a
piano keyboard), the ratio of 4:3 a Perfect fourth
(C-F), 5:4 a Major third, and so on. The simpler
the mathematical ratio between two tones, the
more pleasing the sound. By continuing to add a

given interval (Pythagoras limited himself to the
Perfect fifth, though different theorists allowed
others as well), the composer “discovers” more
distinct pitches. Given the finite ranges both of
lengths of string and of human hearing, it made
sense to contain these various pitches within a
single octave; played in order, we recognize these
series as scales or modes, three or more notes
with a recognizable pattern of intervals, usually of
varying size, either tones or semitones (now called
whole and half-steps). The various Greek modes
were said to have specific character, useful for
inciting different emotions.
Aristoxenus (375-335 BC) set out to write a
comprehensive treatise on music, the Elements
of Harmony. He did not so much contradict
Pythagoras and his scrupulous insistence on
mathematical concerns, but rather focused
on the application of fundamental elemental
relationships—between melody and harmony,
for example—based on observation rather than
pure theory. Though concerned largely with an
extinct modal system, many of his observations
and definitions remain useful, and medieval music
theory owes much to his work.
Roman theorist Ptolemy (ca. 100-170) criticized
both Pythagoras and Aristoxenus, yet practically
reconciled their two approaches in his writings.
Most Greek thinkers believed that the movement
of heavenly bodies involved both mathematical
and musical “harmony,” to the extent that each
planet emitted its own specific pitch as it moved.
As an astronomer, Ptolemy’s theories of the
universe made numerous references to musical
elements; based on his work, later scientists would
continue to explore the relationship between
music and astronomy, most notably Johannes
Kepler (1571-1630).
Martianus Capella (fl. 5th century), in his
allegorical work On the Marriage of Philology
and Mercury, depicted the seven liberal arts
as bridesmaids, highlighting the importance
of music—one of the Quadrivium, along with
mathematics, geometry, and astronomy—as part
of a complete education. Boethius (ca. 480-524)
proposed a tripartite division of music in his De
institutione musica: musica mundana, the
“understood rather than perceived” music of
the universe; musica humana, a metaphysical
consideration of physical and spiritual harmony;
and finally, a section concerning the perception of
music produced either by instrument or voice.
45

Christian Culture
Preservation and Permanence
Ancient and medieval theorists had in effect
established a periodic table of musical elements.
Pitches, intervals, modes, harmonic progression,
rhythm, and rules of composition all had a place
on the chart. Once released into the air, however,
compositions—the practical end and application
of all this material—lasted only as long as a
listener could remember them, or someone could
recall how to perform them. Without notation,
entire stylistic schools and genres that existed as
part of the oral tradition came and went. Someone
had to devise a dependable way to write out the
formulas.
Benedictine monk Guido d’Arezzo (ca. 9901050) was not the first to develop a notational
system, but his organizational method provided
lasting solutions. Notation must indicate not only
pitch but duration; early systems would give a
more or less specific indication of one of these
things, but rarely both. Composers relied on
the stylistic mastery of the performer to fill in
notational gaps; singers and players would follow
what amounted to a sort of shorthand indicating
melodic shape and rhythmic relationships. Guido
developed a four-line staff to indicate pitch
location. The system is intuitively simple: the
space between lines or spaces is a fixed interval,
and by indicating the beginning note in a modal
sequence on one of the lines, the performer
could immediately determine the distribution of
the tones and semitones. This notational staff
solved the problem of preservation, but what if a
composer wanted to stray outside of a particular
mode; and what if good performers were not
necessarily advanced theorists? The answer to
highly complicated technical problems is often
obvious and organic: Guido gave the notes names,
based on their place in a sequence in a hymn the

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text to which everybody knew, “Ut queant laxis,”
which is the Vespers hymn from the Feast of St.
John the Baptist. The first syllables of the first
words of the opening six phrases of the hymn
form the pattern Ut-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La. Guido had
invented solfege (the French still use Ut instead
of Do, a 17th-century substitution), in effect
liberating compositional practice by reconciling
theory and practice with a mnemonic.

Equal Temperament
Humanist development in four steps:
1. Dismantle God’s truth or something in the
natural world;
2. Reverse-engineer it;
3. Reassemble a “sanitized” version, imposing
artificial symmetry and proportion;
4. Claim truth and nature as your own discovery
or invention, a triumph of progress and
scientific inquiry!
When composers left the still, open waters of
modal melody, enchanted by the siren song of
tonal harmony, two things happened: they wanted
to increase melodic range and tonal centers (keys);
and the modal system of melody—with its choice
of several scales, each with its own character—
had to be abandoned to allow for the emergence
of harmony as the predominant musical element.
Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Locrian—
all gone, consigned to the historical dustbin. But
this modal purge didn’t satisfy; the humanist
composer refused to be contained by nature
(tuning starts to fall apart when you stray too
far from home…). He disassembled nature
and reassembled it on a stringed percussion
instrument purposefully but absolutely predictably
out-of-tune with itself.
The multi-octave keyboard and equal

temperament were born. Composers loved them.
They now got credit for composing in all sorts of
different keys, even though all the keys—thanks
to the artificially equal size of all of the halfsteps—replicate the same single mode on a higher
or lower pitch: Ionian, the C-C mode, if you feel
happy, and Aeolian, the minor variant A-A mode if
you’re blue. Human genius paid for by nature.
Wonderful things can happen in this system,
of course. Bach counterpoint couldn’t exist
without equal temperament, and the entire canon
of musical masterworks assumes the tonal
conception, yet when science replaces nature,
strange things happen. In the case of music, the
subordination of melody to harmony allowed for
an admittedly magnificent expansion of sonority,
but at the expense of ordered forward momentum.
Composers luxuriated in epic harmonic
exploration, and one glorious, emotionally-bloated
masterwork after another—Bruckner, Mahler,
Strauss, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner—sounds as if
something will burst: emotionally, sometimes it
does. After the sumptuous sound and fury of the
Liebestod, or the Symphony of a Thousand, what
next? In a word, nothing.

The Modernist Square Peg
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) began his
compositional life as a tonal composer. Something
changed; then something very bad happened.
Perhaps because he sensed the end was near—
how much further could tonal composition go?
—or perhaps because of some existential crisis
(increasingly in vogue after the turn of the 20thcentury), Schoenberg decided to pull the whole
thing down. He had help, but for the sake of
survey, he personifies the atonal techniques of the
Second Viennese School. In a nutshell: take the 12

tones (equally tempered, of course), then arrange
them in a specific order; voila, your “melody”
(which may sound awful, but no matter; genius
is afoot…). Call this a “12-tone Row.” Take the
same melody and turn it upside down; call this
an “Inverted Row.” Same series of notes, upsidedown and backwards? Sure thing; “Retrograde
Inversion.” Now, for the compositional sorcery.
Combine all these bits in the most complicated
structural scheme possible, along with some
highly dramatic—and highly rhythmically
complex—bangings, clangings, and tinklings on
various objects serving as percussion instruments,
and you have a sort of infernal counterpoint,
absolutely mathematically precise…and entirely
unlistenable.
The Romantic let his heart grow too large, but
still had a brain; though disordered, he remained
a man. The modernist solved this problem by
cutting out the heart, making himself not an angel,
but a monster. By removing the artistic skin in
order better to explore the mathematical science
beneath, he revealed not beauty, but the horror
of exposed flesh. Art—external, and science—
internal—must maintain a proper balance for
coherent beauty to emerge. The Greeks focused
on mathematical principles and philosophic
implications of music and left no aesthetic
legacy; medieval composers lost everything to
faded memory before the advent of notation;
in presuming to perfect nature, humanists lay
traps into which their modernist descendants
predictably fell. The successful composer, poet,
painter, sculptor—one who respects both the
technical and the organic elements in his craft—
works in a remarkable laboratory, subject to the
scientific laws of God’s nature, and with free
access to the artistry of His creative capacity. The
artist indeed makes the world a better place. Deo
gratias.

47

Christian Culture

A Meditation on the First and Only Church of

Christ the
Scientist
by John Rao, PhD

In the 1970’s, just at the time that I was doing
my doctorate at Oxford, Dr. Theodore Zeldin, a
fellow at St. Antony’s College, published a multivolume, multi-faceted, and extremely readable
work dealing with France in the hundred or so
years between 1848 and 1945. One of the themes
that he dealt with at length therein was medical
science. In doing so, he revealed a particularly
ironic fact debunking the 19th century’s pompous
conviction of moving ever more vigorously
from medieval darkness into modern light. For
Dr. Zeldin’s research made it clear to him that
the more medical scientific progress that was
made—and honest to goodness progress there
truly was—the sicker the French population
actually felt itself to be.
This is really not surprising, because in order
for medical science to effect a truly lasting
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improvement in mankind’s overall sense of
health, it would have to do so in a way that linked
itself together with every other branch of the
natural sciences. But the cooperative work of
each and every natural science can ultimately
only harmoniously take place under guidance
coming from solid philosophy and theology
rooted in the divine seat of all scientia; from the
Word of God, and from Him Incarnate in time.
Such aid is only then made practically available
to us through what we—with apologies to Mary
Baker Eddy—might legitimately call the First
and Only Church of Christ the Scientist. Alas, the
dominant forces in 19th century French medical
science were quite unwilling to call upon her
holistic healing arts.
Meditation upon these facts can inspire a
myriad of different questions, but the one that

should most concerns us in a discussion of the
relation of the Church and scientists, is that of
what exactly it is that contributes to building a
healthy, long-lived society. The truth, historically,
is that every active force at any given moment in
time creates such a culture. Medieval civilization,
to take an example central to my argument,
was the brilliant product of Roman, Catholic,
Byzantine, German, Celtic, and Slavic formative
influences. It would have displayed a very, very
different character had there had been no one
working hard to keep the earlier Catholic and
Roman imperial traditions alive, however vain
that labor may have seemed under the pressure
of the newer pagan and heretical barbarian forces
entering onto the scene in its infancy. And the
historian seeking to sort out exactly which of
these highly-varied elements might have been
productive of what aspects both of the brilliance
of the civilization of the Middle Ages as well as of
its inevitable human flaws finds that he does not
have an easy task ahead of him.
Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) of Cambridge
University did yeoman service pointing out
the damage done to understanding the gradual
emergence of modern civilization out of its
medieval predecessor in a classic book entitled
The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).
Here, he shows how the promoters of the Whig
spirit—another term for the vision of liberal
modernity—sought to suppress the real study
of the development of contemporary culture out
of its medieval roots. They did so by positing as
an “obvious” unexamined “given” the idea that
everything good within the modern world sprang
from their own naturalist Enlightenment axioms,
which worked progressively and inevitably to free
this budding new civilization from the stultifying
grip of obscurantist forces, with the Roman
Catholic Church at the top of the list. Since
science, in the mind of the liberals was definitely
a good thing, an irrational Catholicism, and the
civilization connected with it, “evidently” had
nothing to do with this development of wisdom
at all.
Hence, to return momentarily to our more
specific medical reference, these closed-minded
“masters of them that know” argued that the
healing arts, as a praiseworthy branch of the

purely liberal-generated natural sciences, could
not possibly have experienced any progress under
Catholic auspices. A rigid adherence to abstract
philosophical principles handed down from
Greco-Roman times having nothing to do with
practical human life was said to be the negative
medieval Catholic contribution to the backward
medicine of the dying past; a liberating spirit
of observation and experimentation with the
physical world was the positive, liberal naturalist
element propelling the modern healing arts from
one undreamed-of success to another.
It seems to me that a digestion of Butterfield’s
thesis shows this smug, self-satisfied argument
to be flawed by no less than six gross historical
errors: 1) the presumption that any scientist
doing what supposedly only liberals were able
to do could not really have been Catholic but a
hidden fellow traveler instead; 2) that the work of
any scientist proudly professing the Faith could
ipso facto be disregarded as valueless, thereby
guaranteeing that no one would ever learn of
his serious accomplishments from a liberal
historian; 3) that a medical man openly Catholic
in character who was unfortunately faulty in his
scientific approach was doubtlessly operating in
total accord with fundamental orthodox religious
principles; 4) that Catholics in general, scientists
included, knew perfectly well what such solid
Church teachings were; 5) that liberal scientists
doing admittedly fruitful labor were in no way
heavily influenced by the presuppositions of
the Catholic environment out of which budding
modern civilization emerged, but about whose
character they themselves might have been
painfully ignorant; and, 6) that the logic of
their own blindly-accepted liberal naturalist
vision was not helping the cause of the natural
sciences, but actually slowly eating away at a
broadly wisdom-friendly Catholic culture whose
continued influence alone could sustain a lasting
productive interest in all branches of knowledge.
A serious study of history, free of the
unexamined ideological axioms generating the
six gross errors indicated above, cannot help but
demonstrate the complexity of the growth of the
natural sciences in the modern world out of what
was an essentially but not completely Catholic
environment. It therefore cannot help but
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Christian Culture
encourage apologists wishing to demonstrate
the durable, holistic value of the Faith and its
practice for scientific progress and maintenance.
Let us once again turn to the medical department
of the natural sciences to underline this universal
two-fold truth and conclude our admittedly rather
heavy argument.
From the very birth of Christendom, Catholic
commitment to the health of the human person
as a whole revolutionized the care of the sick
through provision of a vast network of hospitals
that also aimed at their spiritual well being.
The work of St. Basil the Great (329-379) of
Caesarea and St. Samson the Hospitable (d. 530)
of Constantinople was crucial in this regard.
The basilias—named after the former—were
staffed by professional doctors and nurses who
dealt with various diseases in highly-specialized
wards. Byzantine political and cultural influence
in the early medieval West brought knowledge
of their standard operating procedure into Italy
and Spain, whence it passed to Frankish Gaul,
where Charlemagne ordered a basilia to be
attached to each cathedral and monastery. Once
again, this had a physical and spiritual function,
hence giving birth to the western term of a
Hotel-Dieu. Crusading fervor in Spain and the
Holy Land inspired monk-soldiers to enhance the
sophistication of the older basilias still further,
perhaps the most famous example of this further
revolution in care of the sick being that effected
by the Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem,
founded in 1099 and known today as the Knights
of Malta.
Yes, it is true that a good number of medieval
western medical researchers and health
providers promoted a rigid following of the ideas
of Galen (129-c. 200/216). Still, they did so not in
submission to Catholic teaching, but, rather, as
a result of a slavish passion for imitating GrecoRoman models that they shared with many other
learned men in varied branches of activity, most
of whom, like Marsilius of Padua (1275-1342), are
remembered for being vehement enemies of the
Church.
Meanwhile, other Catholics, such as Robert
Grosseteste (1175-1253), St. Albert the Great (c.
1193-1280), and Roger Bacon (c. 1219-c.1292)
approached their own scientific work, all of
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which had great importance for medicine as
well as other natural studies, in a spirit of
encouragement of the practical observation of
physical nature potentially highly disruptive
of dogmatic ancient secular canons. But even
here, their complexity as men of a multifaceted
Middle Ages filled with still-vibrant pagan Greek,
Roman, and barbarian influences alongside
Christian ones makes it difficult to identify
which of these particular forces shaped one
specific aspect of their work or cancelled out the
impact of all of the others. Hence, the absurdity
of attributing any of their interests that are
approved by modern liberals to the non-Catholic
side of their personalities—thereby making them
blood brothers of founders of Whig Liberalism
such as Isaac Newton (1642-1727), John Locke
(1632-1704), and Voltaire (1694-1778)—and those
of which they disapproved—such as Bacon’s
dabbling in magic—to the irrationality of a
Church that actually condemned such frequent
pagan game playing.
In any case, Catholics with medically inclined
scientific minds were always observing and
experimenting in what was supposedly a purely
naturalist liberal “modern” way. A study of the
highly-practical preventive and diagnostic work
of Guy de Chauliac (c. 1300-1368), papal physician
in Avignon at the time of the Bubonic Plague,
demonstrates just how much this was true. So
does the story of Jesuit missionaries living in
Spanish America, who noted that the powder
coming from the bark of a tree the Incas called
the quina, could be used to treat malaria. This
story became much more important once the
Spanish Jesuit Cardinal Juan de Lugo (1583-1660)
popularized what became known as quinine
to fight this disease in the area around Rome,
whose marshlands were breeding grounds for
it—at a time when medical men in England could
only use it by hiding its papist origins. And,
leaping ahead, as far as I know, so does the tale
of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), whose Catholic
Faith the lovers of modernity have repeatedly
tried to contest. For Pasteur erred more by the
riskiness of his dangerous medical experiments
than from any religious closed-mindedness,
while facing more obstacles from establishment
physicians than from priests warning penitents

against belief in the existence of germs in the
confessional. As the Literary Review of October
18th, 1902 cites him as having said: “Posterity
will one day laugh at the sublime foolishness of
modern materialistic philosophers. The more
I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the
work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at
my work in the laboratory.”
All contemporary naturalism is ideological
in character. Its devoted servants see what they
want to see. “So much the worse for the facts”
seems to be their motto when their own vaunted
principle of observation yields information
running counter to their vision. Hence, Emile
Zola’s (1840-1902) dismissal of a miracle at
Lourdes that he himself witnessed with the
comment that the beneficiary was still “unclean”
to him.
Even more valuable as an argument of the
need for those who truly love natural wisdom
to join the “First and Only Church of Christ the
Scientist” is the fact that the closed-minded
naturalist world view ultimately works to
destroy belief in a knowable natural order of
things, along with the desire practically to use
the knowledge thereof. Bl. Nicholas Steno (16381686), a European renowned Danish scientist
before becoming a Catholic and a bishop,
together with one of his prize pupils, Albert
Burgh (c. 1648-1708), who joined the Franciscans,
already sensed this from their reading and
correspondence with the granddaddy of modern
materialist atheists, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677).
If they had lived long enough, they could have
read Denis Diderot (1713-1784), editor of the
French Encyclopedia and passionate Spinoza
advocate, spell this destructive influence out for
them. While never abandoning his naturalism,
Diderot came to understand that the continually
evolving and eternal universe that Spinoza
posited made all efforts to pin nature down,
distinguishing man from woman, human
beings from other animals, and animals from
vegetables or minerals, utterly impossible. He
was a transhumanist before his time. And the
pointlessness of using a knowledge constantly
dissolving before one’s eyes comes out in a letter
to his long-term mistress where he laments the
fact that their life together was to end with her

becoming nothing other than fertilizer. Why
would the average person in such a universe want
to bother to do anything for fellow men destined
for nothing other than the dung heap?
In a naturalist-dominated world whose
medical symbols—hospitals— are money making
ventures rather than Hotel-Dieu, and whose
health care funds are often spent to perform
abortions, transform boys into girls, and figure
out how to cure AIDS while leaving the immoral
behavior causing it intact, I find myself longing
for two things: a general revival of the holistic
influence of the basilias of the past, combined
with that undoubted progress in the healing arts
witnessed in past centuries. The First and Only
Church of Christ the Scientist, through St. Basil
the Great, was fully responsible for the one. She
was very significant in ensuring the second. And
she remains absolutely indispensable for all time
for the serious maintenance of the desire to know
nature and work with it for the benefit of human
beings whom she knows to have an eternal
destiny. The great theoretical and experimental
scientist, bishop, and enemy of naturalism
Nicholas Steno said: “Fair is what we see, Fairer
what we have perceived, Fairest what is still in
veil.” It is ultimately only this belief in our eternal
destiny and the awareness that the full meaning
and glory of existence will be made known and
experienced by us in our future, supernatural
life that compel us to know, love, and cultivate
our brief passage here on earth fruitfully—and
scientifically.

51

St. Bartholomew
Of the sculptures seen in the
Milan Duomo one in particular
always creates a lot of interest.
It is the statue of “St. Bartholomew
skinned,” made by the sculptor Marco
d’Agrate in 1562 for the Veneranda Fabbrica
of the Duomo.
The saint, skinned alive, carries
what looks like a drape on his shoulders and
around his body. But it is his skin, a clear
reference to the torture inflicted. Artists
started to portray his agony from
the Renaissance onward.
The work of Marco d’Agrate is part
of a 16th-century sphere of interest:
the study and presentation of
the human anatomy.
The first scientific work on
anatomy by Andrea Vesalio, on the
autopsy study of the human body
and the dissection of corpses, was
published in Venice in 1453.
The statue was an exercise,
a careful description and a virtuous
academic essay, on the muscles and
structure of the human body.

Christian Culture

My God,
I Hope…
by the Sisters of the SSPX

Water ran across the brow of the little Eleanor
while the priest pronounced the sacramental form
of baptism, thus making her a child of God. The
Blessed Trinity now lives in the soul of this pretty
porcelain doll who, after the emotions of the
ceremony, fell back into her gentle slumber. With
her life, God has also given her three great virtues,
the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity.
Faith and charity are quite familiar to us, but
hope is often forgotten. That being said, we should
dispose ourselves by actions in our daily life to
grow in this virtue, operated by the power of God.
The act of hope which children learn as they
grow is good to repeat every day. We teach is thus:
“We expect from God, with a firm hope, Heaven
and His grace upon earth in order to obtain it.”
This is the attitude of the child: we lean upon
God in order to go to Him and receive what we
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need from Him. For a child raised in an authentic
Christian family, this virtue will be understood
more easily. Does a child not rely on his father and
mother to make progress in all domains and thus
attempt to please his parents? Does he not have
need of them for all things?

Obstacles
According to children, two main faults can
constitute an obstacle to the virtue of hope as
they grow up. Certain children will tend to have
exaggerated self-confidence. It is necessary that
children take up initiatives little by little, but
while maintaining dependence upon God and their
parents. Without this disposition, presumption
will reign and pave the way for laziness. “Why

do I have to learn this lesson? I already know it
and understand it! I don’t need to take a test.”
Sometimes the child must undergo certain trials
in order to understand his errors with the aid of
his parents: “You see, Thomas, you thought that
you could do it all by yourself, but that’s not the
case. Now, you need to remember that sometimes
you need your father’s help—he is always here for
you!”
Other children will be tempted by
discouragement: “I can’t do anything; never, I’ll
never be able to do it.” Dear mothers, your smile
and your goodness will be the first-aid treatment
to this terrible evil that can cause so much
damage. The very first efforts of the child, his first
steps and diverse progresses will build upon your
encouragements. The words you employ and your
facial expression will be powerful contributions:
children are very sensitive, even at eight or nine
years old. After a correction, don’t forget to put a
little bit of balm on their wounded heart: “It’s all
over now and abandoned in the heart of Jesus. Let
us ask for His help and I’m sure that you will do
better next time!”
The world today is hardened and difficulties
are abundant: the media works to transmit as
much darkness as possible in a world without God
and tries, therefore, to kill the Christian spirit.
Let us be watchful over our worries, political or
economic problems, misunderstandings between
parents, criticisms, etc. so that it does not infiltrate
the atmosphere of our homes. Of course, we
must not live in an illusion. But our children
could feel crushed under this mass of depressing
information that kills all hope. Little by little,
with the aid of their parents, children will learn
to regard the quantity of disaster with a Christian
spirit. This spirit considers not so much the
number of evils in the world but the indefectible
support of God for His creature. The beauty and
the grandeur of a soul in the state of grace who
loves his Creator and Father and wants to serve
Him is without comparison in a transient world
full of problems.

which is very mysterious for us who are
pilgrims upon this earth and who have not yet
contemplated this happiness. How then are we to
present Heaven to Eleanor and give her the desire
to go there? If, since the earliest age, her mother
taught her to love Jesus, to do little things that
would give Him pleasure, Heaven will be the place
where one finds Jesus in order to be with Him
forever. “With Jesus, one is always happy; one can
no longer suffer; one can only love.” In the end,
Heaven and the Christian life is before all things
a question of love. Your little ones, dear mothers,
are very open to this, more than we can imagine!
Upon the occasion of a death in the family, the
question of the afterlife can easily be brought up.
“Grandpa won’t be sitting in the corner next to the
fire anymore. His place is better in Heaven than
upon earth: he has only left us here to go to God!”
says the poet Louis Tournier beautifully and justly.
If hope flourishes within the fertile ground of
our families in these troubled times, your little
ones will become zealous apostles and joyous
Christians of this beautiful virtue. How can we
be anything else when we know that our Father
in Heaven knows all things, can do all things, and
loves us?
Translated from the French by Associate Editor Jane Carver

Eternal Happiness
The virtue of hope helps us to desire Heaven,
55

Christian Culture

The Caste
System in
India
by a Missionary

The Caste System has become a second nature to Indians, and it is not easy to eradicate the almost
inborn inclinations to it. Many Catholic missionaries have tried, but in vain. It is still there, perhaps in
some places completely subsided, while in other places causing havoc. Is the caste system intrinsically
evil? Can we do anything about it, as missionaries, to bring people to Christ under this system?
Obviously, it is a necessary question but one that involves a deeper study and prayer to obtain the right
answer. These jottings on this question are not those of a scholar, but of a simple missionary priest
whose mission is to restore all things in Christ.

Notion
Etymologically, the word “caste” means a
breed, a race. It is from the Portuguese casta,
meaning a race. Ordinarily it meant a “pure”
breed from the Latin castus, pure. Caste can
be defined as a group of families socially and
religiously united and who follow peculiar social
and religious customs, especially in matters
of diet, marriage, and social association. The
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distinction of tribes and races was expressed
in Sanskrit by the word jati in the beginning.
Later on, however, the Brahmins observed that
the Kshatriyas and Varsyas were losing the
purity of their race through their marriages
with the non-Aryans. In order that this Aryan
degeneration may be checked, the Brahmins
began to distinguish people according to their
color or varna. It is interesting to note that in

southern Tamil Nadu, it is still called “Jati,” while
in northern Tamil Nadu it is termed, “Varna.”

Different Views on the Origin
of the Indian Caste System
This vital element in the structure of the
Indian society has been studied under many
aspects; hence the existence of many theories on
the matter. We’ll briefly mention two predominant
ones: the traditional theory and the occupational
theory.
The traditional view as elaborated by the
Indian writers of the orthodox school can
be expressed thus: Caste is of divine origin
because it is based on Vedic literature. In the
Rigveda (3000 BC) Book 10, 11-13 we read: “In
order that the human race might be (created)
and multiplied, the supreme being caused the
Brahman, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya and the
Sudhra to issue from his mouth, his arms, his
thighs, and his feet.” (Some think that this text is
a later addition intended to explain the existing
caste system. For example, Professor Roth).
And so, the distinction of men into four castes
is ultimately divine. The characteristics of the
first type of men (Brahmins) are calmness,
pose, intelligence, and goodness because the
satvic element (or the goodness) prevails in
them; hence they are fit by nature to become
thinkers, professors, priests and philosopherstatesmen. For this reason they are said to have
come out of the mouth or Brahma. They were by
nature entitled to certain privileges as regards
occupation, food, and marriage. Hence arose the
distinction of their caste based on nature and
God.
The men of the second class (Kshatriyas) are
active and always on the move because rajas (or
the active element) predominates in them. Hence
they are fit by nature to fight and defend the
country. They are said, therefore, to have come
from the arms of Brahma. The men of the third
category (Vaishyas) are dominated by impulse
and desires because tamas (or the element of
darkness) predominates in them. They are fit for
trade, commerce, and agriculture. Lastly, there
are people who do not show any characteristic

tendency; they have; therefore, aptitudes to
become servants. This is the reason why they
are said to have come out of the feet of Brahma.
These four castes were naturally regulated by
certain rules or customs as regards their food,
occupation, and marriage; owing to the breach
in such customs people were excluded from their
respective communities who formed new castes;
hence the enormous number of castes existing
in India. Obviously, this is a preposterous
explanation.
The occupational view has been advocated
by many. They contend that particular trades and
crafts gave birth to the caste system. The lowest
caste does not practice a craft, while those who
make use of metal, silver, and gold naturally
became “high caste.” It could be argued that one
can see a glimmer of similarity with the guild
system of medieval Europe. This difference of
occupation is probably the important factor in
the formation of the caste system.
We are skipping here many other views which
were proposed by many scholars. However, two
things are clear: by the very fact that there are
many theories, it is a question which does not
have an easy solution. Also, as an institution
at least 3,000 years old which has been able to
withstand the shocks of ages, it deserves our
serious consideration.

Appreciative View
The orthodox Hindus started from the
supposition that there should be parity between
the individual and social life, and as the life
of every individual embraces four stages, viz.,
that of boyhood, of manhood, of maturity, and
of senility, so social life too, which boasts of
being a living organism, has to possess actually
those four stages, or at least has to be made up
of people possessing the physical, moral, and
spiritual characteristics of men who are in those
stages. The first and lower stage of society is
represented by the Sudras whose characteristic
virtues should be those of boyhood, namely,
obedience, fidelity, reverence, service, and
industriousness. The second stage is represented
by the Vaishyas whose chief characteristics,
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Christian Culture
like those of manhood, should be an intense
love for agricultural work, trade, and commerce
thereby contributing to the common well-being
of society. The third stage is represented by
the Kshatriyas whose distinguishing virtues
should be energy, strength, and valor in order to
protect the citizens. The last stage is represented
by the Brahmins whose chief duty is to guide
the destinies of the nation by providing true
education, sound morals, and healthy religion.
Hoping that it may be of interest to readers
to know the many titles under which the caste

system has been considered useful for India,
we have thought it good to insert here a few
important opinions given by different writers.
Some have seen in this institution the essential
elements of a regular, stable and well-organized
society. Thus, Sir Henry Cotton writes: “The
system of caste, far from being the source of
all the troubles which can be traced in Hindu
society, has rendered the most important services
in the past and still continues to sustain order
and solidarity. The admirable order of Hinduism
is too valuable to be rashly sacrificed before
any Moloch of progress. Better is order without
progress, if that were possible, than progress
with disorder.” Sir Monier Williams writes
“In India, caste has been useful in promoting
self-sacrifice, in securing subordination of the
individual to an organized body, in restraining
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from vice, in preventing pauperism.” Others
consider the caste system as one of the best
means for Indian “national” and “social” unity.
Lastly, high is the appreciation of the caste
system entertained by Abbé Dubois who had a
first-hand knowledge of India and Indian things.
He writes thus:
“I believe caste division to be in many respects
the chef-d’œuvre, the happiest effort of Hindu
legislation. I am persuaded that it is simply and
solely due to the distribution of the people into
castes that India did not lapse into a state of
barbarism, and that she preserved and perfected
the arts and sciences of civilization, whilst most
other nations of the earth remained in a state of
barbarism… Such an institution was probably
the only means that the most clear-sighted
prudence could devise for maintaining a state of
civilization amongst a people endowed with the
peculiar characteristics of the Hindus… I am no
less convinced that if the Hindus were not kept
within the limits of duty and obedience by the
system of caste, and by the penal regulations
attached to each phase of it, they would soon
become just what the Parishes are, and probably
something still worse. The whole country would
necessarily fall into a state of hopeless anarchy,
and before the present generation disappeared,
this nation, so polished under present conditions,
would have to be reckoned amongst the most
uncivilized of the world. The legislators of
India, whoever they may have been, were too
wise and too well acquainted with the natural
character of the people for whom they prescribed
laws to leave it to the discretion or fancy of
each individual to cultivate what knowledge he
pleased, or to exercise, as seemed best to him,
any of the various professions, arts, or industries
which are necessary for the preservation and
well-being of a state.”
These quotations seem to give a fair idea of the
subject matter.

Depreciative View
Having seen the pros of the caste system,
it will not be out of place to point out its
cons, which Vincent A. Smith, one of the best

historians of India, sums up thus:
“Within India, caste breaks up society into
thousands of separate units, frequently hostile
one to the other, and always jealous. The
institution necessarily tends to hinder active
hearty co-operation for any purpose, religious,
political, or social. All reformers are conscious
of the difficulties thus placed in their path.
Each individual finds his personal liberty of
action checked in hundreds of ways unknown
to the dwellers in other lands. The restrictions
of caste rules collide continually with the
conditions of modern life and are the source
of endless inconveniences. The institution is
a relic of the past and does not readily adapt
itself to the requirements of the 20th century.
Although necessity compels even the strictest
Brahmans to make some concessions to practical
convenience, as, for instance, in the matters
of railway travelling and drinking pipe water,
the modifications thus introduced are merely
superficial. The innate antique sentiments of
caste exclusiveness survive in full strength and
is not weakened materially even by considerable
laxity of practice. Further, the institution
fosters intense class pride, fatal to a feeling of
brotherhood between man and man. The Malabar
Brahman who considers himself defiled if an
outcaste stand within 20 paces of him cannot
possibly be interested in a creature so despised.
The sentiment pervades all classes of Hindu
society in varying degrees of intensity. Such
objections to the caste institution with many
others which might be advanced, go far to justify,
or at any rate explain, the vigorous denunciation
of the system found abundantly in Indian
literature as well as in the writings of foreigners.”
(The Oxford History of India, p. 40)
It is a historical fact that India is, and has
ever been spiritually, socially, and politically
divided. None can deny that the most powerful of
such unfortunate divisions is the caste system.
Most of all, the missionary effort has been futile
or thwarted precisely by these divisions. Any
history book on the missionary work in India will
speak volumes on this issue.

Will the Caste System Endure?
Those who study the social and religious
history of India during these last 70 years might
have observed some change for the better in
the caste problem. It can be said that there has
been something like a 10% improvement in this
important affair. But then, with the return of a
government which is bent on bringing back the
“old glories of Hinduism,” we are bound to return
to the stone age.

Conclusion
If we consider the caste system from the
Christian viewpoint, it must be said that its
“doctrine” as well as its “spirit” are contrary to
Christianity, which does not admit distinction
between Greeks and Jews, barbarians and
Scythians, bondmen and freemen. There can be
no question of harmonizing Christianity and the
caste spirit because they are quite antagonistic to
each other. In the beginning of the last century,
there was, however, a sincere effort on the part of
the French Jesuits to make a distinction between
the religious and the social elements of caste,
between its doctrinal and its practical aspects.
It is a fact that in the minds of former orthodox
Hindus, caste and religion were essentially
connected, but at present there is a growing
tendency among the educated Hindus to consider
caste as a mere social institution. If this be the
case, if caste is divested of its former “religious”
meaning, if caste is considered as a mere “class”
or hierarchical distinction, if its secular nature—
like rules, laws and customs—are done away
with, and, if lastly, depressed classes are not
subjected to real injustices owing to their rank in
society, if all these conditions are realized, then
Christianity would not object to the caste system
as a social distinction, because in that case it
would cease to be a caste system in its former
sense, and would become a mere class system
or hierarchy (as such found in any “normal”
society), which Christianity would welcome as an
institution demanded by the peculiar conditions
and races of India.

59

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Building
Bridges from
East to West
by Anonymous

Building bridges is specifically the task of
a bishop. Bishop, in Latin, is called “Pontifex.”
And a pontifex is a bridge builder. Pontifex
comes from the two Latin words, pons, meaning
a bridge; and facio to make. In a similar way, a
pope is called a “Pontifex Maximus.” In other
words, the pope is the superlative bridge builder.
He helps earthly man cross over to heavenly
salvation. Therefore, when speaking to people
who do not have the fullness of the Catholic
Faith, using a method of bridge building is
entirely consistent with the Traditional Catholic
approach to missionary activity found in the very
title of who a bishop is supposed to be.
In this article, a small bridge will be built
between East and West. By “East” is meant the
religions of Asia. By “West” is meant Christianity
or Rome. Two common words that come from the

East will be analyzed and judged with respect to
“Western” Catholic theology. These two words
are well known to most people and have found
their way into our everyday vocabulary. They are
“karma” and “reincarnation.” In many respects,
belief in these go hand in hand. Somewhat
surprisingly, these words even find their way
onto the lips of people who call themselves
“Traditional Catholics.”
The first word that most are familiar with is
“karma.” Karma means action, work or deed.
Karma also refers to a principle of cause and
effect. According to Karmic Law, good actions
or intentions produce good influences and evil
actions or intentions produce evil outcomes. This
Karmic principle can be found in the Eastern
religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism,
Taoism, and others.
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According to data released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (2009 survey), not only do 25% of Americans believe in
reincarnation, but 24% of American Christians expressed a belief in reincarnation. This represents a significant deviation from the
traditional Judaeo-Christian belief.

The results of Karmic Law are of two kinds,
one external and one internal. The external and
visible results of Karmic Law usually occur in
this life. Whereas the results of internal Karma
that are invisible, usually show up in a future life.
Karmic Law can be summarized by saying
every action has a consequence. Since these
consequences redound to the individual
responsible for the action, Karmic Law can sound
like Newton’s third law of mechanics. Newton’s
Third Law is: for every action there is an equal
and opposite reaction. If the individual produces
a good action, an equally good action will come
back to the individual. If the individual produces
an evil action, an evil action will return to the
individual. This opposite and equal reaction will
occur either in this life or in a next life, according
to these Asian religions.
According to Karmic Law, the present situation
of an individual can be explained by reference to
their previous actions—whether those actions
occurred in their present life or in one of their
previous lives. This understanding of Karmic
law is similar to the 19th century physicist Pierre
LaPlace’s deterministic view of the universe.
Employing the laws of classical Newtonian
mechanics, LaPlace believed if an omniscient
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observer knew the position and velocities of
every particle in the universe, such an observer
could explain the state of the present and future
situations of the world. Karmic law does not
posit such an omniscient observer, but it does
hold to a fully explanatory belief that the present
and future state of affairs is entirely explainable
by past actions. Thus everything we say and
do determines what is going to happen to us in
the future. It all gets recorded (by what or by
whom this is not indicated) and the results of
this “record” will become manifest at some point
in this life or in a future life. Though, according
to Karmic Law, we cannot know how or when
the results of our actions will become manifest,
nevertheless, it is certain that its manifestations
will occur. No one, therefore, gets away with
anything.
Having briefly identified the Law of Karma as
generally held in Eastern religions, let us now
build a bridge to Christian belief. Perhaps the
classic text that is similar to Karmic Law is to be
found in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians 6:8:
“Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For what
things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap.
For he that soweth in his flesh, of the flesh also
shall reap corruption. But he that soweth in the

spirit, of the spirit shall reap life everlasting…”
St. Paul is clear—“whatsoever a man shall sow,
that also shall he reap.” If good deeds are sown
in the spirit, the harvest will also be spiritually
good. But if evil deeds are sown in the flesh, a
fleshly evil harvest will be reaped.
We will now cite various references from the
Bible to show that sacred Scripture supports
a similar belief in Karmic Law. In Christianity,
Karmic law would be called, “divine justice.”
divine justice, simply put, is defined by St. Paul
in II Cor. 5:10: “For we must appear before the
judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may
receive what is due for what he has done in the
body, whether good or evil.” Other examples
of divine justice follow. Our Lord, in St. Luke
6:38 says: “For with the measure you use it will
be measured back to you.” And in Matthew 5:7:
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive
mercy.” St. Paul again says: “For the wrongdoer
will be paid back for the wrong he has done…”
(Col. 3:25). In Job 4:8: “those who plow iniquity
and sow trouble reap the same.” In Isaiah 3:11,
“for what his hands have dealt out shall be done
to him.” And in Ps. 61 we read: “… for thou (O
Lord) wilt render to every man according to
his works” (Ps. 61:13). All of these verses are in
harmony with the notion of Karmic Law.
We also find parallels to Karmic Law in the
four necessary truths. The fourth necessary
truth, from the Baltimore Catechism, goes like
this: “God will reward the good and punish the
wicked.” This truth is very similar to Karmic Law,
for as Christians, we do not specify whether the
reward or punishment will take place in this life
or in the next.
So, what is the problem with Karma as
an Eastern Religious doctrine? One of the
problems is that this belief is tied to a broader
religious belief system in which there is not a
single personal supreme being. For example,
in Hinduism, Brahman is the highest Universal
Principle (not person) which is a “cosmic
principle.” In Buddhism, there is ultimately no
such thing as a (personal) self in any being
whatsoever. In short, if the Law of Karma
were properly understood, it would need an
“omniscient observer”—i.e. a God, for it to work
properly. Having a Law of Karma without such

a personal supreme being, would be like having
a creation without a creator, a law without a
lawgiver, and a judgment without a judge.
The other problem with Karmic belief is that
it is usually tied into another Eastern belief: that
of reincarnation. According to Asian religions,
all life forms are said to go through cycles of
births and rebirths. The quality of what one
is born into depends upon one’s karma. This
cycle continues indefinitely until one reaches
moksa—the liberation from the reincarnation
cycles of birth and rebirth. Moksa is a blissful
state of existence where all karmic bonds are
broken. Moksa certainly sounds like Heaven but
getting there is conceptually a lot simpler for the
Christian. In Christian belief there is only one life
to be lived and after this life, Heaven (or Hell) is
obtained. As St Paul writes in Hebrews 9:27, “And
it is appointed unto men once to die, and after
this the judgment.” So, while a belief in Karma
has some close affinities with Christian belief, its
ancillary belief in reincarnation, with the belief
that we have multiple lives, cannot be accepted.
Regardless of those who claim to know of their
past lives—and certainly the Christian can
accept that our present life has been influenced
by past generations—our souls have been
individually created directly by God for one and
only one life. And this single life will be judged
accordingly at its termination, with reward or
punishment.
As there is an increase in exposure to a large
variety of religious beliefs arounds the world,
the Catholic is challenged to know one’s Faith
in order to defend and propagate it. To do so,
bridges need to be built in order to speak with
people of different religions to help them accept
the truth of Christianity. This was the method
used by many Christian missionaries back in
the day when it was not a problem to evangelize
non-Christians. Some Eastern beliefs resonate
well with Christian belief and some do not. In
helping people accept the truth of Christianity,
we start building the bridge with their beliefs
that are somewhat compatible and slowly work
to the opposite shore of truth in such a way that
they can recognize their current errors and fully
accept all the truths of Christianity.

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Christian Culture

by Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara, SSPX

Since new technologies
claim to make tattoo removal
easy, cheap, and painless,
can I get one now?
Tattooing is not necessarily sinful in itself, but
neither is it morally indifferent. In any case, the
ease of removal is not the fundamental condition
for determining its morality.
The “morality” of an action is the relation that
such action has with the moral law, which is, in
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the end, the law of God. It can be determined
by considering the object of the action (what
is done), together with the end intended by
the person who performs that action and the
circumstances in which it is performed, and how
those three factors relate to the moral norm,
either by being in conformity with it (then, the
action is morally good) or by contradicting it (the
action is morally evil, a sin).
First, then, the object: what is a tattoo? A
tattoo is “a permanent mark or design made
on the body by the introduction of pigment

through ruptures in the skin” (Encyclopedia
Britannica). At different times in history, it has
been practiced throughout the world for diverse
reasons. It practically vanished in the Western
world, until rediscovered in later centuries by the
contact with American Indians and Polynesians
and even then used almost exclusively by the
less reputable, marginal parts of society. Now,
since the 1990s, tattoos seem to have become
fashionable again and even “respectable.”
Although in the Bible (Lev. 19:28) tattoos were
forbidden by God, it was because they signified
the profession of Canaanite superstitions and
pagan cults. In itself, insofar as it is a marking
on the body, a tattoo is not sinful, as it does not
violate a command from God, nor a human good
or a Church teaching.
But it may become sinful on account of
its circumstances—for example, the cost
of tattooing may be excessive in relation to
one’s means, or leave disfiguring scars if later
removed...or the image tattooed may be immoral
or obscene, even blasphemous or satanic...or it
may cover much of the body, defacing it, or it may
be on an immodest part of the body…
In turn, this brings us to consider the most
important factor in evaluating the morality of a
tattoo—the reason why we get one.
In some cultures, it has been done to provide
magical protection against some evil, or to
identify the wearer’s rank, status or membership
in a group, or even simply as bodily ornament.
The ancient Romans tattooed criminals and
slaves, and in the 19th century, released U.S.
convicts and British army deserters were
identified by tattoos. Coptic Christians tattooed
crosses on their forehands or fingers as a
profession of faith against the encroaching
Islam. Some medieval pilgrims did the same, as
testimony of having accomplished their journeys
of devotion.
But today’s apparent ubiquity of tattoos seems
to spring from very diverse, and unfortunately
base, motives—a mindless following of fads and
fashions...immaturity and imprudence...a spirit
of disobedience, of rebellion against authorities
or social conventions...out of peer pressure, the
wish not to be left out of whatever everybody else
is doing...or perhaps out of boredom or thrill-

seeking...or to attract attention...out of vanity and
ostentation, narcissism, a spirit of exhibitionism
that may even betray a deeper psychological
disturbance...All these can be easily sinful in
different degrees.
Moreover, we have a duty to respect and care
for our body, as it has been entrusted to us by
God and made by grace a temple of the Most
High: Know you not, that your members are the
temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom
you have from God; and you are not your own?
For you are bought with a great price. Glorify
and bear God in your body (I Cor. 6:19-20). Any
unnecessary, unjustified alteration or defacing
of the body is—also with different degrees of
culpability—a violation of that trust, of our duty
of stewardship.
Finally, tattooing is a way of identifying a
person with a culture and its values. Yielding
to the modern fad of tattoos is a way of
accommodating ourselves to the life of the world,
to an anti-Christian culture and to a way of life
lacking in Christian values. As St. Paul said: Be
not conformed to this world; but be reformed in
the newness of your mind, that you may prove
what is the good, and the acceptable, and the
perfect will of God (Rom. 12:2). As Catholics, we
are in the world but we do not belong to it, we
must not imitate it. Our Lord alone must be the
light and guide of our actions, not the worldly
fashions or mentality.

65

Christian Culture
Does God listen to the
prayers of a sinner?
Catholic doctrine teaches us that one of the
first conditions for our prayers to be efficacious—
that is, to obtain what they ask for—is that the
person who prays must be in the state of grace.
But, on the other hand, the Gospels tell us
of sinners whose prayers were most assuredly
heard by God—the Good Thief on Calvary,
Mary Magdalen, Zacchaeus, the publican of the
parable… In fact, throughout Scripture it is the
sinner who is more insistently encouraged to
pray, because he is the most miserable before
God and can only appeal to God’s mercy rather
than to any merit of his own.
Therefore, yes, we can be certain that God
does listen to such prayers—but, as we also read
in the Gospels, only if that prayer is accompanied
by his desire and intention of repentance.
God does not listen to the sinner when
he prays for something as a sinner, i.e., in
accordance with a sinful desire, remaining
obstinate and quite content in his sinful state,
unwilling to part with his sin or its occasions
(cf. Summa, II-II, q. 83, a. 16). The sinner who,
after offending God, persists in remaining in the
state of enmity with Him, will not be asking for
those goods that lead to forgiveness and back
to friendship with God. Still, sometimes he may
perhaps obtain what he has asked for, but the
favorable answer is not mercy or reward, but
punishment. St. Augustine tells us that there
are things that God, in His mercy, refuses us,
but that He grants in His wrath... (Tract. John
73) tansitory goods into which he has put his
heart and asks God for forgiveness. The prayer
of the sinner, to be heard, must arise from the
acknowledgment of his own misery, which will
prompt him to ask for deliverance from his sinful
state, that is, to be brought out of his sin.
The sinner will be heard if he beseeches for
himself, piously and perseveringly, those things
that are necessary for his own salvation. He
will be heard if he asks for the strength and
courage to love the true good. He will be heard
if he accepts the sacrifices that will be to make
his repentance efficacious. He may even ask for
temporal goods, as long as they pose no obstacle,
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or are conducive, to the attainment of his
conversion and eternal salvation.
And God will grant what such prayer asks, not
out of justice, because the sinner does not merit
to be heard, but out of pure mercy…

I know that euthanasia is a
sin and I will never do it, but
is there anything wrong with
wanting to “die with dignity”?
Before answering, we must clarify what we
understand by “dignity.”
Dignity is the superiority acquired by a
being (man, in this instance), on account of its
perfections and fullness, relative to other beings
of the same kind (i.e. other men) or to beings of
other kinds (i.e. dogs, birds, trees, etc.).
But a distinction must be made between two
kinds of dignity found in man.
The first, man’s radical dignity, arises from his
rational nature, from having intellect and free
will, a perfection that does not exist in beings
other than men (and angels, of course).
The second, man’s operative dignity, arises
from his own actions, because man’s faculties, to
be perfect, must attain their proper objects—that
is, the intelligence must apprehend what is true
and the will must move freely towards what is
good.
In consequence, to follow what is an error
or falsehood, or to do what is a sin is not a
manifestation of man’s perfection and excellence
(i.e., of his dignity) but quite the contrary. In fact,
such actions detract from, and even annihilate,

man’s dignity.
Now, what do we mean when we say that we
want to “die with dignity”?
In today’s increasingly un-Christian world, it
usually means to die without having to suffer the
pains and humiliations that weakness and illness
will bring upon us at the end of our lives. It may
also mean to die while still preserving the quality
of life that we judge worthwhile, or perhaps to
die while still preserving the independence that
we cherish… In practice, it means that we are
claiming the right to end our lives on our own
terms, that is, to take our lives in our own hands
and terminate them when and as we choose…

Such a supposed “right”—which, if exercised, it is
suicide, a sin—does not preserve our dignity, but
destroys it.
The Christian “death with dignity” is to reach
the end of our lives in perfect submission to
God’s will—that is, to accept that death will
come to us in the time and manner that God has
decreed, without interfering in His sovereign
dominion over life and death.

344 pp.–Hardcover–STK# 8343✱–$25.55

The Best of Questions
and Answers
The best questions and the best answers of 30 years of The Angelus. This will be a family’s
heirloom reference book for everyday Catholic living to match the Catholic Faith we believe
and the Latin Mass we attend. Over 300 answers classified under 30 subtitles.
–– Marriage, Parenting, Family Life
and Child Rearing
–– Science and Medical Matters

–– The Bible and Biblical Matters
–– The Trinity, Jesus Christ, The Virgin
Mary, Angels, and Saints

–– Life After Death

–– The Mass and the Liturgy

–– Church Practices and Customs

–– The SSPX and the Crisis

–– The Papacy and the Church Teachings

67

News from Tradition
John Henry Newman to be Canonized
Since 1983, following the promulgation of
Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution
Divinis Perfectionis Magister, the process
for canonization has been called into question,
along with a questioning of a good number of
those canonized under the new procedures
(most notably, all the post-Vatican II popes).
This questioning had become so prolific at the
time of Paul VI’s canonization in 2018, that the
theological question of whether canonizations
are infallible acts received much attention (there
are reliable theological opinions on both sides of
the question).
Unfortunately, this means that the legitimacy
of all post-1983 canonizations have been called
into question, even those whose reputation
for sanctity is well attested to (one need only
to think of Padre Pio, Damien of Molokai, and
Katherine Drexel to name just a few). It is for
this reason that the announcement that John
Henry Newman is to be raised to the glory of the
altars on October 13 is bittersweet. Bitter since
the legitimacy of the canonization can be called
into question because of the new process and
sweet because Newman’s reputation for sanctity
and his theological brilliance have long been
well noted before Vatican II.
John Henry Newman was born in London,
England on February 21, 1801 and died in
Birmingham, England on August 11 1890. An
excellent student, he eventually studied at
Trinity College, Oxford. Desiring to remain
at Oxford as a teacher, he was elected to
a fellowship (professorship in American
terminology) at Oriel College, Oxford. At the
same time, he became an Anglican clergyman
and was effectively the leader of the Oxford
Movement which sought to bring back more
Catholic practices to the Anglican church.
As Newman read more and more of the
works of the Fathers of the Church and studied
the history of the early Church (particularly
the Arian crisis) he became more and more
convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was
the only true Church and that Anglicanism,

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though it retained some Catholic external
practices, was just another Protestant false
religion. Newman was received into the Catholic
Church on October 9, 1845. In 1846, after
traveling to Rome, he was ordained a Catholic
priest (of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri) and
received the academic degree of Doctor of
Divinity from Pope Pius IX. Upon his return to
England, he founded the Oratory in Birmingham,
along with an Oratory School (one of the many
notable graduates of the school was J.R.R.
Tolkien).
All during this time, he continued to write and
give lectures on education as well as delivering
powerful sermons. Interestingly, at the time of
the First Vatican Council, Newman stated that
he was uneasy about the formal declaration of
papal infallibility, not because he did not believe
it, but rather because he thought it would give
rise to what is called in our day “papolatry” (an
idea that all things the pope says and does are
effectively infallible).
He was elevated to the College of Cardinals
by Pope Leo XIII on 12 May 1879 and died in
Birmingham of pneumonia at the age of 89.
Newman is indeed a saint for our times for a
number of reasons. The first and most obvious
is his rejection and strong critique of liberalism

(the basic tenets of which St. Pius X will
name modernism in his encyclical Pascendi)
throughout his entire life. His Biglietto Speech
(a short speech given by a new cardinal upon
the official notification of his being raised to
the College) clearly summed up the dangers of
liberalism. Newman stated:
“For 30, 40, 50 years I have resisted to the best
of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion.
Never did Holy Church need champions against
it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error
overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth; and
on this great occasion, when it is natural for one
who is in my place to look out upon the world,
and upon Holy Church as in it, and upon her
future, it will not, I hope, be considered out of
place, if I renew the protest against it which I
have made so often.
“Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that
there is no positive truth in religion, but that
one creed is as good as another, and this
is the teaching which is gaining substance
and force daily. It is inconsistent with any
recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches
that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters
of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth,
but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective
fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each
individual to make it say just what strikes his
fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on
faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to
Catholic, may get good from both and belong to
neither. They may fraternize together in spiritual
thoughts and feelings, without having any views
at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need
of them. Since, then, religion is so personal
a peculiarity and so private a possession, we
must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of
man with man. If a man puts on a new religion
every morning, what is that to you? It is as
impertinent to think about a man’s religion as
about his sources of income or his management
of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of
society.”
Another reason for seeing in Newman a
model for our time is his perennial search for
the truth. This search eventually led him to

the Catholic Church, but at great personal
sacrifice. Many in his family disowned him at
his conversion and the majority of his friends
and colleagues wanted nothing more to do
with him. Additionally, he lost his teaching
position at Oxford. Amongst the general public,
he was thought a traitor by Anglicans and an
infiltrator (sent by the Anglicans to destroy the
Catholic Church in England) by Catholics. Many
a traditional Catholic has had to deal with the
same rejection by friends and loved ones in their
search for the traditional Faith.
Newman asked that the phrase Ex umbris
et imaginibus in veritatem (Out of shadows
and phantasms into the truth) be placed on his
gravestone, which he clearly saw as epitomizing
his entire life.
All of Newman’s works may be found online
here: www.newmanreader.org

69

News from Tradition
Archbishop Sheen Returns to Peoria, Illinois
After a three-year legal battle between the
Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of
Peoria, the mortal remains of Archbishop Fulton
Sheen were removed from the crypt of St. Patrick’s
Cathedral in New York and transported to the
Cathedral of St. Mary in Peoria in the early
morning of June 27. Clearly unhappy with the
outcome of the legal battle, Cardinal Timothy
Dolan insisted that the exhumation take place at
5:00 in the morning and with no media coverage.
Only the funeral director and his staff were
present along with the rector of St. Patrick’s, the
Vicar General of the Diocese of Peoria and Sheen’s
immediate surviving family members.

The altar of Our Lady of Perpetual Help where Archbishop
Sheen’s body will be entombed.

Archbishop Sheen’s body being placed in a container for
transportation.

As has been previously reported in these pages,
the Diocese of Peoria had received assurances
from the then Archbishop of New York, Cardinal
Edward Egan, that Sheen’s remains would be
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September - October 2019

returned to Peoria in order to allow the process
for his beatification to advance (part of the
beatification process requires that the mortal
remains be positively identified and relics
obtained). For some as yet unknown reason,
Cardinal Dolan, Egan’s successor as Archbishop,
reneged on the assurance made by his predecessor
to the Diocese of Peoria. In addition, Dolan stated
he had no plans for the Archdiocese of New York
to advance the beatification process for Sheen.
Later in the day of June 27, Bishop Jenky of
Peoria welcomed the body of Archbishop Sheen
to the Cathedral of St. Mary, where a crypt had
been prepared in front of the altar of Our Lady
of Perpetual Help. Bishop Jenky also announced
that the process for Sheen’s beatification had been
reinstated. Early in July, Rome announced that
Pope Francis had approved a miracle attributed to
Sheen’s intercession and that he would be beatified
in the near future (no official date has been
announced as of this writing).

Notre Dame to be Faithfully Restored
After the devastating fire on April 15 which
destroyed all of the timber roof and much of the
stone ceiling vaulting of the Cathedral of Notre
Dame, French president Emmanuel Macron
announced that the Cathedral would be repaired.
He did not, at that time, indicate how it was to be
restored architecturally. President Macron and
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, then launched
an international competition to come up with ideas
as to how Notre Dame should be restored. In the
ensuing weeks, many bold and bizarre plans were
put forward—all of which attempted to make the
ancient Cathedral more “relevant” to 21st-century
sensibilities. The French firm of Vincent Callebaut
Architectures produced drawings showing the
Cathedral with a glass roof and spire allowing
for gardens which would produce some 21 tons of
food and make Notre Dame a “net-zero” carbon
emissions structure.
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, adamantly
insisted that Notre Dame should be restored to its
original state at the time of the fire. The mayor,
a socialist, was not so much concerned with the
Catholic heritage represented by the cathedral,
Notre Dame as a green house!

On June 15, the Archbishop of Paris, Michel Aupetit offered the
first Mass in Notre Dame following the fire.

but rather its social and historical importance to
France.
Thankfully, the French Senate introduced
and passed a bill requiring that Notre Dame be
restored to its former visual state before the fire.
The bill also stipulates that the coming restoration
must re-create Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s spire, and
that any use of new materials must be justified.
The bill also allows for the French government
to finance the restoration. It is hoped that all the
repairs will be completed by the 2024 Olympic
Games in Paris.
71

News from Tradition
Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops
for the Pan-Amazon Region
On June 17, the Instrumentum Laboris for the
October special synod of bishops for the PanAmazon Region was released. The Instrumentum
Laboris (working document) is meant to be the
blueprint to guide the discussions during the
synod.
For weeks previous to its release, many voices
had been warning that the document would
open the door to allowing married men to be
ordained in the Amazon territory due to the lack
of priests in the area, as well as the possibility of
women deacons. The warnings were completely
accurate—the document does indeed raise the
possibility of ordaining married men for the
missionary area as well as a call to review the
possibility of female deacons. There can be little
doubt that this will be a typical “camel’s nose in
the tent” tactic to introduce a married Catholic
priesthood and the elimination of mandatory
celibacy. It should be noted, that the very same
tactic was used in the 1970s when the idea of a
“permanent diaconate” (married men ordained
to the diaconate) was approved for missionary
areas where there were not a sufficient number of
priests. Within a very few years, the permanent
diaconate had proliferated—not in mission areas,
but predominantly in North America and Europe.
There is little doubt that the same thing will occur
if married men were ordained—very few will be
for missionary areas.
As disconcerting as the above is, the remainder
of the document is even more so. According to
the presenters of the Instrumentum Laboris,
the work of the synod will concentrate on
three general themes all of which center not on
Christ as the redeemer, but upon protecting the
environment, dialogue and the inculturation
into the Church of the beliefs and practices of
the Amazonian peoples (most of whom, it should
be noted, are pagan spiritualists). The Vatican
website only has the document in Italian and
Spanish—there is no official English translation—
which is another Vatican tactic to keep many

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faithful Catholics in the dark as to what is really
planned at the synod.
Cardinal Brandmüller (one of the four “dubia”
cardinals) wrote a stinging critique of the
document. He noted, in part, that in the document:
“One finds a very positive assessment of
natural religions, including indigenous healing
practices etc., even mythic-religious practices and
cult forms. In the context of the call for harmony
with nature, for example, there is even talk about
‘dialogue with the spirits’ (n. 75)… Accordingly,
the territory—the forests of the Amazon region—
even becomes a locus theologicus, a special
source of divine revelation. These are ‘epiphanic
places’ where ‘the reserve of life and wisdom
for the planet is manifest, a life and wisdom
that speaks of God’ (n. 19). The anti-rational
rejection of the ‘Western’ culture, which stresses
the importance of reason, is characteristic of
the Instrumentum Laboris. Meanwhile, the
subsequent regression from Logos to Mythos is
raised to the criterion of what the Instrumentum
Laboris calls the inculturation of the Church.
The result is a natural religion in Christian
masquerade.”
The cardinal also spoke about the issue of
married priests and female deacons:
“It is impossible to conceal that the ‘synod’
intends, above all, to help implement two most
cherished projects that heretofore have never
been implemented: namely, the abolition of
priestly celibacy and the introduction of a female
priesthood—beginning with female deacons.
In any event, it is about ‘identifying the type
of official ministry that can be conferred on
women...in the Church’ (129 a 3). In a similar
manner, ‘room is now opening up to create new
ministries appropriate to this historical moment.
It is the right moment to listen to the voice of the
Amazon…’ (n. 43).
“But the fact is omitted here that, in the end,
John Paul II also stated with highest magisterial
authority that it is not in the power of the Church

to administer the sacrament of Holy Orders
to women. Indeed, in 2,000 years, the Church
has never administered the sacrament of Holy
Orders to a woman. The demand which stands
in direct opposition to this fact shows that the
word ‘Church’ is now being used purely as a
sociological term on the part of the authors
of the Instrumentum Laboris, thus implicitly
denying the sacramental-hierarchical character of
the Church.”
Only time will tell the full damage to be done
by this latest Francis-orchestrated synod—the
previous synods under his watch produced final
documents not in line with what the bishops
approved. For those with strong constitutions,
an unofficial English translation of the
Instrumentum Laboris is available here: roratecaeli.blogspot.com/2019/06/exclusive-full-text-ofamazon-synod.html

Church Vandalism Comes to Michigan
The Sacred Heart of Jesus parish in the West
Michigan city of Grand Rapids has become the latest
victim in an ongoing series of church vandalisms
that have plagued the United States this year.
Founded by Polish immigrants in 1904, Sacred
Heart has been a staple of the west-side Grand
Rapids community for over a century. Today, it is
perhaps best known as one of the few diocesan
parishes in Michigan that offers the Traditional
Latin Mass every Sunday.
Sadly, sometime during the late evening of
Wednesday August 7, vandals sprayed satanic
imagery on the church’s doors, including the number
“666.” While investigators continue to look for the
perpetrators, Sacred Heart’s pastor has offered
forgiveness to these criminals on behalf of the
parish and hopes one day to have a discussion with
them about why they vandalized the building.
In 2019, the United States has seen a wave of
Catholic church vandalism. On May 21, the Notre
Dame de Lourdes parish in Pennsylvania was
sprayed with “pro-choice” graffiti, perhaps in
response to pro-life legislation passed recently in

Alabama. This attack was preceded by three other
known incidents during Eastern weekend where
churches in Ohio, California, and Hawaii had their
statuary and architecture targeted.
Although full statistics are not available, it has
been reported that other Catholic churches in the
Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast have also been
attacked this year. While there is no uniform reason
behind the attacks, information collected thus far
indicates anger toward the Church’s opposition to
abortion and “retaliation” for the ongoing sex-abuse
crisis. Moreover, as the United States, like much of
the West, continues to secularize, sacred spaces
such as Catholic churches are no longer held in high
regard.
This sorrowful trend resembles other waves
of anti-church vandalism still ongoing in Europe,
particularly France. While public officials often
decry these attacks, the truth is that few resources
are put into protecting ecclesiastical buildings
when compared with those devoted to upholding
the integrity and safety of other religious and nonreligious spaces.
73

With her for guide, you shall never go
astray; while invoking her, you shall
never lose heart; so long as she is in
your mind, you are safe from deception;
while she holds your hand, you cannot
fall; under her protection you have
nothing to fear; if she walks before you,
you shall not grow weary; if she shows
you favor, you shall reach the goal.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux

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Theological Studies

The Confusion of the Church and the World at the

Root of the
Crisis
by Fr. Davide Pagliarani

The 14th theological congress of the Courrier de
Rome was held in Paris on January 19, 2019 on the
theme “Francis, the pastoral pope of a non-dogmatic council.” Fr. Davide Pagliarani, Superior General of
the Society of Saint Pius X, gave the final conference
entitled “The Church, Mystical Body of Christ or
adaptation to the World?”
Here is the integral transcription of this conference. In the second part, Fr. Pagliarani responded to
the questions of Fr. Lorans.
Where do we place Pope Francis with regards
to the Council and his predecessors? I will come
back to the things which were said during the day,
but I also think that it is very interesting to situate
this pontificate within the panorama of modernism.
Where are we with regards to the evolution of the
problems of the laity? This was already stated by the
other conference members, but I will return to this

point later.
Rupture or continuity is the question. The “great
hero” who is invoked by the thousands of conservatives today, the thousands of conservatives who are
more and more critical toward Pope Francis, is John
Paul II. John Paul II is the “hero of orthodoxy.” This is
where we are today in the court of public opinion.
The Council Instituted a New Manner of
Understanding the Faith
First premise: the Council is not limited to defining new doctrine; the pope realized this concretely.
Even if the Council was presented as pastoral, it
defined new doctrines and imposed them. The
Council instituted a new way to interpret the Faith,
a dynamic Faith that subjects itself continually to
question. This is crucial for being able to accurately
place the pope in the context of modernism. The

77

Theological Studies
Faith should be analyzed, the Church should be
analyzed, but by whom? Analyzed by all of us: firstly
by the faithful, after which the hierarchy should be
open to listen. This was already highlighted, so I
don’t want to insist too much on this point. But this
is modernism as it is written by Pius X (cf. Encyclical
Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907). Pope
Francis assigned a new complementary role to
the Magisterium. The Magisterium is not there to
teach transcendental truths—the revealed truths
which came from on high; the Magisterium is there
for sanctioning that which the people little by little
through the ages continually try to rethink God.
Therefore, there is one Tradition, yes, that goes back
to the apostles, but a Tradition which, at the same
time, is continually dynamic, which is open to discussion. Pope Benedict XVI made the comparison
with a river, a river that has a beginning, a source,
but a river where there is nothing, not even a drop of
water that remains in the same place.
In order to understand Pope Francis well and his
stance upon things, we must remember that the
biggest concern of the Council was to reduce the existing distance between the Church and the modern
world. Several fractures between the Church and the
world are the conflict between faith and reason, the
spiritual and the temporal…and Benedict XVI was extremely sensitive on this point. The great concern to
reduce this fracture that the Revolution provoked is a
very important point which has a theological scope,
but also an anthropological one. I will explain myself.
The laity created a dichotomy in the home; the
laity imposed, to all of the West for the past 200
years, two ways which cannot create harmony within
a person, even if they are condemned to live simultaneously in the Church and the world. Why does this
propose a humane, anthropological, and as otherwise
stated, deep problem? It is because man cannot support a dichotomy which, in a certain sense, is against
nature: modern man has separated that which is inseparable. This is the function of Revolution. Sooner
or later this fracture, which not only touched the
Church and the rights of God, but which also touched
the natural exigence of man—that which lives in
harmony between the two mediums—sooner or later
this fracture will have to be repaired. It simply must
be reduced in the correct sense. From the historical
struggle on the part of the Church, above all in the
19th century and up until the Second Vatican Council,

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in order to restore the rights of the Church in civil
societies and among individuals.
There are efforts therefore to find this harmony
between the two orders. These efforts have left the
men of the Church at a compromised point where
the whole intellectual movement in the middle of
the 19th century, without renouncing the desire
to recuperate this unity, begins to wonder about
another erroneous possibility: it is the “Maritainian”
Christianity. What is the great revolution of
Maritain? Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) began
his most famous work Humanisme integral (1936)
[Integral Humanism] with this idea: two tired giants.
It isn’t the point anymore, Maritain says, that man
will continue to try to open up in the same manner
that they have opened the Middle Ages. The moment has arrived to think of a new Christianity! And
what is this new Christianity? Precisely to recuperate the unity between the two giants, but in another
manner. We are there presently in this integration of
the sacred and the profane.
The Church Takes Worldly Values unto Herself
I would say to return to the same idea, that it is
very interesting to see how the great founders of
modern laity immediately consecrate the ideas,
icons, and ideals of the laity. So, there is evidently a
pantheon where we can find all of the symbols of the
republic. You have those individuals who like to idolize sports, sometimes their pets or other animals,
ecology, the planet…it essentially deals with attributing sacred qualities to that which is not sacred.
Why? Because man must find harmony, in a certain
manner, between that which is natural and that
which is transcendent.
Arriving at the papacy of Pope Francis, I think that
one could say that this pontificate represents the
last phase of the effort to reestablish this harmony
in yet another way. And this harmony is made in a
way that is well described. In a word, harmony is
made by listening to the world. The Church reestablishes union with the world, harmony with the world,
because it listens to the world. It listens to others
and converses. This harmony is reestablished by the
comprehension of the world, the attention to problems that affect the world: climate, migrants, pollution, air, water, and poverty…therefore the Church,
once again intervenes in the temporal world. If you
think about it, many of the discourses of bishops

today could be accused of clericalism. They make
up an ensemble of themes and subjects that are
political. Why don’t they leave this to the politicians? Because, the Church must show that she is
in harmony with whatever the politicians say and do
with the object of action in the political world. Thus,
the Church and the world are finally in communication again, but the novelty consists in a completely
different foundation. One could say opposed to that
which the Church has always held or vindicated
since the Council. The Church, in other words, has
made the values of the world her own.
The Faith is Replaced with Sincerity
From this perspective, what used to be a problem
traditionally speaking isn’t one anymore. Here is a
concrete example: the problem of vocations. It is
said that vocations have lessened 80-90% in the
last 50 years among different countries and circumstances. This decrease is shocking. Do you think
that this issue occupies the minds of the hierarchy
of today like it should? No. In this new concept of
the Church, in this new mission that the Church has
of rapport with the world, everything has to be rethought. If one rethinks the Faith, one has to rethink
everything that has come from the Faith, that is
to say all of the different aspects of the life of the
Church including the consecrated life—vocations. If
the goal of the Church is to no longer teach doctrine
(revealed truth that is real and transcendent) and to
sanctify souls in the traditional sense of the word…
if the goal of the Church is new and different, if it
is to diffuse the world, it is evident that the priesthood is no longer necessary in the same way as it
was in times past. But in these given conditions,
that which the priest must do is the same that any
lay person could do, because the latter is better
capable of listening to the world than the priest
is. Why? Because he lives in the world to a greater
extent and the priest is a good priest in the measure
that he makes himself more like a lay person—closer
to the world. You see here a very concrete example
that shows how this conception is revolutionary: this
new relationship between the Church and the world
postulates changes at every level.
The Faith, in this context, is to be “a listener.”
Truth comes from the foundation. From this perspective one could say: the Faith has been replaced
by sincerity.

Is Our Lord Unified to All Men by the Incarnation?
We have spoken a great deal about the Church
during the course of this day. It is true that the
Church is at the center of all of the attacks of the
Council. It is the Church principally who is at the
center of all of the errors to which we are subjected
today; it is the Church who is disfigured. And don’t
forget that the Church, being the mystical body
of Christ also indicates that it is Our Lord who is
attacked, dogmatically. It is interesting because
all of the heresies from the first centuries were
Christological heresies. There is a profound reason
for this. The devil knew from the beginning that he
was vanquished by the Incarnation. The Incarnation
was ordained for the Cross and therefore the demon
was virtually conquered, struck at the moment
when Our Lord took on human nature. One understands very well then why, from the beginning, the
demon attacks the Incarnation in the entire series
of heresies which confront the rapport between the
two natures—human and divine—of Our Lord and
His will.
It is the same regard, the same attention to
the Person of Our Lord in the present day as well.
Effectually, if we look at what is happening in the
Church of today, at what affects Christianity, we can
see here that the demon uses this false notion to attack the Incarnation. It is at the same time upon the
Church and the Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ that
we should direct our gaze. And we see this new idea
upon which Our Lord is united to all men through His
Incarnation: having taking on a human nature, He
has united Himself to all men. One finds this in the
Council and it is the magnum opus of the pontificate
of John Paul II, because it is one of the great axes
of the post-Conciliar era. But this is false. Upon His
Incarnation, Our Lord gave the possibility for every
man to unite himself to Him. Yes, it’s true. It is by
His personal human nature that Our Lord permits
humanity to unite itself to Him, to find harmony with
God once again, but this harmony with God presupposes the cooperation of man. That being said, Our
Lord, by the Incarnation is already united to every
man with all of the consequences that this implies.
However, that which we see today: this confusion
between the Church and the world, this assimilation
of the Church by the world, this Church that dissolves her mission into the world to construct the
world: this is false. It is right here where the root

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of the present crisis is situated: in this false idea
with all of its applications. The consequences have
already been sufficiently highlighted today in the
course of different interventions, on which I don’t
need to elaborate.
Renewing Our Love for the Church Who is Our
Mother
Why does God permit all of this? God treats us
and treats the Church according to His own divine
and supernatural economy. Unfortunately, we too
often forget this. The Church is governed by God
according to non-human laws. Ourselves, living in
the world, too often judge the Church according to
worldly categories. What is going to happen? Why all
of this disorder? How many souls damn themselves?
Yes, it’s true, but once again we must judge all of this
with a supernatural perspective in the measure that
we are able to penetrate the mysteries of God, because there is indeed a mystery in the present crisis.
Therefore, what could one respond even if one
knew ahead of time that his response would have its
limitations because he is touching upon a mystery? Error is the accidental occasion for dogmatic
progress: the more that error affects the Church,
the more the Church can react, and therefore one
can love the truth because it becomes more and
more clear. One can analogically compare this to
the Church and the current crisis. If the Church is at
the center of the attacks of the Council and postCouncil, if the notion of the Church is at the center
of all the errors that we denounce and against which
we struggle, it is to permit us to prove our love for
the Church. God wills, by this trial, to wake us up
and make us redouble our love for the Church. In
order to be faithful to the Church of today, one no
longer needs faith, we have to augment our faith; we
must enter into this supernatural vision, because if
one judges the present Church according to human
criteria, one loses their faith within the Church or, in
any case, our faith in the Church diminishes. Just as
all of the errors of history have been the occasion for
dogmatic progress, likewise here, and again, these
errors have made us suffer and tear us down. They
are therefore certainly the occasion—in the vision
of God—to prove and renew our love for the Church
who is our Mother.
It is the great explanation of Archbishop Lefebvre.
I think that which touches us the most when we lis-

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ten to him, when we read his writings—according to
the testimony of those who knew him personally—is
the harmony that one recognized in his preaching, in
his manner of speaking, between the denunciation
of error—a clear denunciation, without concession—
and at the same time his great love for the Church.
It is because he loved the Church that he denounced
her errors with the vigor with which we are familiar.
So, I would say that 50 years later, despite our
difficulties, we are all here for the same reason, to
renew our faith and our love for the Church. It is
because we love the Church that this combat must
continue, and must continue using the same means,
yes, with our fervor and renewed faith.
But, I leave the word to Fr. Lorans because, principally, this conference is more of a dialogue…
Transformation of the Ecclesia Dei Commission
Fr. Lorans: Be assured, Reverend Father Superior
General, you resemble your predecessor who asked
me to ask him questions. I can only ask two or three
during this conference, because each response
takes about 20 minutes. You are truly his successor.
On a more serious note, permit me one question
that deals with the present. The media has spoken
recently of a suppression or a transformation of the
Ecclesia Dei commission. One knows that you came
back at the end of November from an audience with
Cardinal Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith. The information has come to
us today, a Motu proprio from Pope Francis who has
put an end to the Ecclesia Dei commission. How did
you react to this information?
Fr. Pagliarani: I prefer not to react right away. The
information has come to us in a non-official manner. The noise has been circulating since the end
of the month of December. And immediately, I was
accused. The Society was accused of being behind
this maneuver for a reason that the most “clairvoyant” put online right away: that we are supposedly in
the process of finalizing an agreement with the Holy
See, and the true “favor” that the Society asks from
the Holy See, is the suppression of the Ecclesia Dei
Commission. Why? Because the Society does not
want to co-exist and therefore, with the suppression
of Ecclesia Dei, the Society demands from Rome the
capitulation of all of the Ecclesia Dei institutions!
Behold what has been circulating on the internet.
Permit me to address this. It is news like this that

immediately provokes agitation within our circles
and those outside of them. Thus, even though we
have so much to do with a congregation consisting of hundreds of priests around the world, do you
really think that our principal concern is to heal
the relations between the Ecclesia Dei Commission
and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith?
Absolutely not! This was never in question, and I
have only just today learned this news. Until the
present, it was a noise which didn’t even deserve to
be commented upon.
It is interesting though to reveal that from the moment when something doesn’t even directly touch
the Society, but rather the “traditionalist galaxy”
something that touches us only indirectly, immediately it is understood as a function of the Society…
It doesn’t do any good to listen to rumors or to be
affluent with the noise as long as there is no proof.
What is interesting is a point of the Motu proprio of
Pope Francis. There was a reminder that the Ecclesia
Dei commission was instituted to permit “full communion” with those who, persons or organizations,
did not want to follow Archbishop Lefebvre in his
supposed schism, etc. And the reason for which
one made the decision to suppress the Ecclesia
Dei Commission, (which is to be transformed into
a section of the Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith) is that the conditions today are not what
they once were. The institutions and the religious
communities who habitually celebrate the extraordinary form of the Mass have found true stability in
number and life. Thus, all of the Ecclesia Dei institutions have found their peace today, their stability in
the Church! Above all, now, under the pontificate of
Pope Francis! It seems to me that there is no need
for commentary upon this.
We Have a Duty of Charity
What should one think of the Ecclesia Dei institutions? We must recognize that they have suffered
in recent years. And it seems to me that there is
reason to distinguish this. It is true that these institutions have been created, in the beginning, to favor
“full communion” of all those who did not agree with
the Society of Saint Pius X at the time of the episcopal consecrations. As the years have passed, things
have changed a little bit and we are faced with a situation that is more heterogeneous: there are people,
above all after the Motu proprio (Summorum pon-

tificum, July 7, 2007), who have come to Tradition
upon discovering the Mass. And the Mass detangles
often, for the well-disposed—priest or laity—a reflection that clarifies the doctrinal conclusion which
comes close to those of ours. Also, I think that in
view of these last few years, we can find the interlocutors toward whom we have a duty of charity, in
order to direct them toward integral Tradition. They
should unite all of their conclusions to their adhesion
to the Tridentine Mass; for many it is well received
but when one switches between the two rites, one
cannot make great progress. So, we have the duty
to encourage these conclusions, little by little and
make progress here and there which is perhaps a
source of worry for the authorities. In effect, the hierarchy does not always control the communities of
Ecclesia Dei like one might think, and this is the reason for which it intervenes from time to time upon
this or that institution. There it is—a first lecture of
the Motu proprio. But I insist: when one speaks about
the institutions of Ecclesia Dei, one finds a little bit
of everything, sometimes a route that travels in the
right direction, from where, I think, there is a certain
worry in the Vatican. These circumstances demand
a more in-depth exposure…
Beware of the Temptation to Naturally Evaluate
that Which is Supernatural
Fr. Lorans: You have told us before in your synthesis that the Church since the Council opens herself
up to the world, adopts, and even assimilates certain
values of the world. She has a political vision and
today one sees bishops and even the pope taking
a position on ecology, migrants… Do we ourselves,
within Tradition, have a political vision? Do we see
things in a manner that is too quantitative? Do we
also lack a supernatural spirit? Can you speak more
precisely, or in depth, of what you expect from the
priests and faithful?
Fr. Pagliarani: This is inevitable. It is inevitable
that our vision is a little too natural, because we are
not angels. We work in this world; we have need of
strength, of people, schools, mothers of families…
We have need of money, and inevitably, we can be
affected by a way of calculating the present and the
future to measure our problems and their solutions
in a natural manner. Yes, in this sense, we play a
political game. In the large sense, we use the same
categories of the world. Let us take an example:

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Theological Studies
communication. In the manner of using the most
modern means, one can fall into the temptation to
treat the Society like a big business and to gauge according to statistics. Another example: if, perhaps,
the majority of families have 10 children, it is a good
sign. Yes, it is a sign of generosity, but be careful!
Afterward, one must see if there is an equivalent
generosity to carry the cross of education, to carry
the cross of struggles and great suffering. Let us
then guard ourselves against the temptation to
evaluate that which is supernatural, fundamentally
spiritual, with quantitative measures. Without a
doubt we are all a little bit affected by this…
A Renewed Caution to Priests
Fr. Lorans: You are at the beginning of your
charge as Superior General and you have begun to
travel. You will soon go to the United States. Do you
already have an idea of what needs to be taken to
souls? I know that since you have been elected, you
have spoken of the sanctification of the priests saying that by the sanctification of priests, one is able
to do good for families. It must first pass through
the priests. Can you specify this point for us that
you think expresses the mission of the Society by
the will of its founder?
Fr. Pagliarani: Yes, it is a question of fidelity to
the spirit of the Society and that which our founder
bequeaths to us: this attention is renewed to the
priests. Without a doubt Providence does not cease
to send us vocations. We must, of course support,
cultivate, and help them to persevere. I think that
in our life as priests of the Society—and indirectly
we can say for the faithful also, because this affects
them too—there are values proper to the Society
that could be rediscovered. One of those is the common life upon which our statutes particularly insist.
Our founder underlines that it is really the medium
where one practices charity. Once again the common life in itself is not always functional; it does not
harmonize with a vision of life of the priest and of
the Society according to the categories of the world.
Commercially speaking, it would be better to open
more priories. It would be better to go to more places because we must occupy the land. This happens,
and every time, the situation must be evaluated and
explained. It’s true that there really are places where
one sees that Providence opens up its doors. But at
the same time, we must know when to calmly take a

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step back and rediscover the beauty of the common life in which our founder wills that we support
each other one and all in the practice of charity.
Many difficulties could be avoided in rediscovering
the initial spirit of generosity, but always maintaining—common life is only one example—a supernatural perspective. That which saves the Church, that
which saves the Society, that which sanctifies souls,
is the spirit of the Cross, the economy of the Cross
which is at odds with the natural economy. It is this
manner of thinking which takes likeness with the
categories of the world.
God Also Wants to Save the Christian Family
Fr. Lorans: Can you please tell us, in particular,
your expectations from families?
Fr. Pagliarani: Certainly, generosity at all levels:
moral generosity, spiritual generosity, and material
generosity all have the same source in the measure
that one arrives at transmitting to souls this supernatural spirit which is the spirit of detachment.
Before anything else, detachment from ourselves,
from our will, and also sometimes, that which is in
our pockets…but there is a consequence. We must
place our material generosity in its proper place. It is
a piece in a mosaic where the sanctification of souls
and the supernatural spirit must touch all aspects of
the soul and the family.
So, what can one ask from families? Perhaps
somewhat the same thing as priests. The fight
necessitates an effort: one is sometimes tired. In
particular, I think of the families of today, unlike the
families of the 80s. In the 80s, there was sometimes
an imprudent generosity, but a generosity which
was provoked by the circumstances. Today, this
generosity, because of the circumstances which
have changed, should be the fruit of a more profound reflection because the exterior circumstances
have demanded perseverance after so many years,
in a crisis which doesn’t stop in a world which attacks families with ever-new methods.
I will not repeat my hostility with regard to electronic means, because one would believe that it is a
fixed idea of mine, but I really think that it is a cause
of spiritual laxity.
It is better to encourage souls, families with all of
the supernatural means that we have at our disposal. Above all, it is important to help them understand
that it is the Cross which increasingly assimilates

them to Our Lord. These are the difficulties proper
to our life today which will gain the graces necessary
to make saints of their children.
It is a magnificent mission.
Above all, I conclude, the last steps to the proper
dissolution of the post-Conciliar crisis have been exposed during the course of this congress: the attack
on the family and of natural morals. I think that the
most beautiful witness, more superior than anything
that we could say or denounce, is that of Christian
parents who live their marriage in all of its beauty
and in all of the integrity of the law of Our Lord. Yes,
it is a magnificent witness and much more precious
because of its rarity today, and that the men of the
Church do not really encourage it. If God wills to
save the priesthood, God will also save the family,
the Christian family; this is certain.
Fr. Lorans: Thank you very much. The hour has
come for us to part ways. We ask of you the benediction of the Superior General, after which we will sing
the Alma Redemptoris Mater. But beforehand, I say in
the name of all here present that our prayers will accompany you and that we will ask God to bless your
charge as Superior General.
  
To conserve the proper character of this conference, the oral
style has been kept. This conference has been translated from
the French by Associate Editor Miss Jane Carver.

83

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The
Last
Word
Dear readers,
Catholic scientists who have made the world a better place to live? I cannot but pay homage
to the monks of all centuries. Monasteries have always been greenhouses of knowledge, both
intellectual and practical.
Let us not forget in the first place that theology is a science, and the best, the highest! Listen
to the Angelic Doctor in the very second article of the first question of the Summa Theologica:
“The purpose of this science (Sacred Doctrine, or Theology), in so far as it is practical, is eternal bliss; to which as to an ultimate end the purposes of every practical science are directed.
Hence, it is clear that from every standpoint, it is nobler than other sciences.”
So, St. Thomas should be on our list of the greatest scientists!
Concerning practical sciences, monks have surely made the world a better place to live.
Isn’t St. Benedict called the Patron of Europe? Monasteries have always been the centers of
every science. Let us just mention a few of these:
–– of agriculture—and all the experiments and discoveries that goes with this, including
cheese, wine, beer, and liquors;
–– of architecture and acoustics (think of the Gregorian Chant and confessionals for lepers);
–– of engineering, especially revolutionary ways of harnessing energy, in particular wind, air,
and water;
–– of all the types of arts (painting, sculpture, music), e.g., the cells painted by Fra Angelico in
San Marco’s convent of Florence;
–– of book making and metal work (e.g., the incredible Book of Kells; the 8th c. Ardagh chalice)
–– of accounting—it was monks who first formalized double entry bookkeeping;
Let us thank God for monasteries and all they did and still do to make the world a better
place. And now go and have a sip of La Chartreuse and pray for vocations!
Fr. Daniel Couture

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