Mysterious Things

So, long ago, Father Alfonso Durán came to... the place where I was then living (no mysteries there; it really is just so many years ago that I cannot for the life of me recall exactly when this happened, or where-- prior to 1978 at any rate...) to meet me as I was attempting to discern vocation; he impressed me as a very pious cleric indeed.  I hope that, for the good of the members of the institute and for the Church, the problems can be dealt with justly and, now that Rome is involved directly, expeditiously.

Is the title of P. David Meconi SJ's essay in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review; he's alluding to Hans Urs von Balthasar's Razing the Bastions (of more than fifty years ago).  It is fascinating to consider that the eminent theologian could write, then, that Holy Church had to tear down the fortresses with which she had surrounded herself and go out into the lands and be Christ for the poor, disoriented people who were dispossessed of their rightful Christian patrimony, and consider the very greatly changed circumstances today, when I've seen the 'meme' bruited about that Pope Benedict XVI has 'welcomed a much smaller but more fervent Church'.  In any event, P. Meconi's article is fine indeed, about orthodoxy and charity and tolerance and, well, Our Lord having already won the battle.  And he is editor of HPR; P. Kenneth Baker SJ is editor emeritus... for how long, I wonder.  Idle Speculations g. a.

I meant of course, for how long has P. Baker been retired as editor. Tsk; this is what happens when I look into these mysterious things at the end of a long day at work.  

I thought this post at Power Line was worth spending five minutes on; John Hinderaker discusses the latest Daily Caller release of JournoList nonsense.  Evidently, Mr Andrew Sullivan is not the only public person convinced that Mrs Palin's youngest child is really her grandson or an alien or something.  I don't quite understand what it is about the woman that drives so many Left journalists crazy (although if I'm faced with a choice between Mr Obama and Mrs Palin in November, 2012 I'll vote for her without too many misgivings, so of course I've already swallowed the Kool-Aid)--but they had better check themselves into the appropriate detox or rehab facilities before it's too late.

It must be an article of decoration or devotion for the use of pilgrims to St James at Compostella, I suppose; doubt that it is a proper liturgical or episcopal vestment?  La Buhardilla de Jerónimo g. a.

 

Due to this unfortunate recreational vehicle fire was stretched south for miles and miles (that is, perhaps, an exaggeration) yesterday, but the Interstate was, happily enough, returned to its normal conditions by the time I was driving north.  I have just realised-- a very good example of what reading with a definite preconception will do to one's comprehension skills--  that this cannot have been the burning RV I saw, driving south to Dorena, yesterday, unless some people in the newspaper business have gotten their stories mixed up. As it stands, there were two burning RVs at different locations on I-5 yesterday during the three o'clock hour, one north of Eugene (toward Albany) and one south of Eugene (toward Dorena). 

In the newspaper article certainly confirm my distaste for 'human rights' bureaucracies in local government. One understands that passions aroused tend to affect perception, but how likely is it that Mr Raised By a Militant (yes, that is my gloss) Feminist is willing to publicly allow himself to cry 'racist' without some form of provocation? on the other hand, of course, it is just true that some fellows 'play well with other children' and some don't.

And every other piety but how many of the Love Parade revellers were crazy on the drugs du jour or drunk?

In some of its vulgar specifics.  I don't find it shocking really to learn that there are homosexual priests in the City, nor that homosexual priests work at offices of the Holy See: while contemporary circumstances require that bishops use an especial level of caution in ordaining men who aren't heterosexual, I don't doubt that there are worthy priests who are homosexual.  What I do find head-shakingly unbelievable and infuriating (if it should prove to be true) is that the Cardinal Vicar may have known about the public scandal given by a certain number of bad priests, and done nothing; although of course now that the business is publicised, his Eminence evidently wonders why such men bother to continue in the priesthood, and suggests that it may be because of job security and the perks.  Heaven help us, tsk.  I know nothing otherwise about Cardinal Vallini (and, of course, a press release from the Vicariate is not Cardinal Vallini speaking in his own voice; still...).

I wonder if at the base of this current scandal is a truth that Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out back in the late 60s: 'vocations' aren't the real thing if they are not total, "unconditional, unrestricted".

... A vocation demands, in the Old as in the New Testament, first of all unconditional, unrestricted readiness for everything for which God could use and wishes to use the person called by him, and anywhere that he could and might wish to send him (Gn 12:1; 1 Sam 3:9; Is 6:8; Acts 9:6). Thus, if the reality, “vocation,” is at all to take place, a readiness that is first humanly limited is out of the question: I will follow God’s call and serve him, if I can do this or that, or be placed here or there. The assent to the God who calls is much too near to the act of faith in the God who reveals himself to allow for such restrictions; it is an act that must be just as boundless, made with a view to the entire truth of God, whether the human being involved understands it or not, and whether it gladdens or saddens him....

"The assent to the God who calls is much too near to the act of faith...": one very much suspects that the Church, whose faith is untaught to the many and preached with a bureaucratic attention to the tiresome inessentials, may be having the clerics it deserves these twenty and thirty years, tsk.

Has seen new movement; the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura has accepted Father Francis Michel's appeal, on its merits, as we Americans would say, Perepiscopus reports.

The short version follows. The bishop of Evreux in Normandy, pleading a lack of priests, a lack of this, the desire for that, et cetera, required Abbé Michel to acquiesce in a plan that would remove him from his pastorate and join a 'team' of clerics who would then be responsible for any number of consolidated parishes and ministries.

Abbé Michel refused, in a more or less politic way, and appealed to Rome, to the Congregation for the Clergy and to the Apostolic Signatura, which appeals were refused because of defects in their form.

This business is complicated by the fact that, according to all accounts, Abbé Michel's churches have become full and prosperous and pious and Catholic, and he paid attention to Summorum Pontificum (meaning that there have been both forms of the Roman Rite in use in them) and the Pope's 'hermeneutic of continuity'. And further complicated by the fact that when Mons Nourrichard went to Abbé Michel's church to personally explain the imposition of the 'innovations', the congregation loudly protested and wouldn't hear him.  Abbé Michel retains possession of his churches but Mons Nourrichard has announced that he will suspend him at the end of the month unless he undertakes to obey his instructions.

Mons Nourrichard was appointed by the Holy Father in 2006. (Rorate Caeli has featured an entire series of posts on this business, which can be found via today's post.) On the one hand, the diocese is decaying and it seems just, well, stupid or vindictive for Mons Nourrichard to muck about with Abbé Michel's apparently exemplary work. On the other hand, the bishop is the bishop.

There is a party which sees disaster coming and retrenches, thinking to save some by finesse and adaptation; there is another party which sees with the eyes of hope, spes contra spem: while I know where I should expect to find the finger of God, it is probably necessary to point out that it ought to be presumed that both Abbé Michel and Mons Nourrichard are acting in what each to perceives to be the cause of Religion and justice. But I haven't followed very closely in the French blogs and newspapers.

P. Robert Araujo SJ puts his finger on the fundamental issue, as articulated during the celebration of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council by P. Henri de Lubac SJ:

... Today, even some of the faithful, and even some priests (without excluding the religious), are tempted “to open themselves to the world” in such a manner that they free themselves to be invaded by it... As for non-believers, many will not neglect to say: the Church abandons little by little her dogmas. She is vaguely aware that her role is finished; thus she comes to us in order to preserve herself, without daring to yet abandon her religious phraseology....

I don't know where (the future) Cardinal de Lubac wrote those sentences, but you can be sure that the dissenters and all that lot, who have done their best to 'marginalise' his work, have, with all the cleverness and craft that the Enemy has managed to put at their disposal, chosen their target well.  In the preface to Le drame de l'humanisme athée (Editions Spes, 1950), P. de Lubac remarks that there are many versions of contemporary atheism, each of which in its own characteristic way requires a rejection of God, but that they each also issue in outcomes that are analogous to one another, "the principal one of which is the crashing destruction (écrasement) of the human person".

Watch what P. Araujo's dissenting interlocutors do, at Mirror of Justice: they will, inter alia, defend the proponents of so-called abortion 'rights', defend the so-called right to same sex 'marriage', defend those who reject the magisterium of the Church, defend a form of human conscience that has been twisted into a mockery of itself, defend the aggrandizement of the state power at the expense of the rights of the faithful, et cetera and so on and so forth.

About the Kosovars and their putative independence; so far as I can tell, it is legal to recognise the state of Kosovo, and the Serbs need to give up their attempt to legally force the Kosovars back into Serbia, but if they (the Serbs) or any other nation don't want to recognise Kosovo qua sovereign, that's fine, too. The more sovereign states (e.g. Flanders, Catalonia, Brittany, Somaliland, whatever the Basques called their patria...) the better, so far as I'm concerned.

The gentleman and the lady, who both write from First Things these days, seem to have very different 'takes' on Mrs Sherrod's case.  I haven't paid enough attention to know which version of 'Mrs Sherrod' is more true to reality.

If I did or detest him (seeing a couple of his films doesn't count as 'knowing him', by the way); if he says the sort of bigoted nonsense that he is reported to say, then we wouldn't spend much time in each other's company.  The point, however, is to contrast Damian Thompson's post and Father Dwight Longenecker's post on the fellow: I appreciate the point Damian T. is trying to make, I think, but, pft, nothing the anti-Catholic media do any longer surprises or shocks me; am more sympathetic to Father's take on Mr Gibson's situation. Oremus pro invicem, in spite of the fact that the sedevacantists are infuriating.

 

Carl Olson on the Holy See's publication of new norms of canonical process at the Holy Office in matters of delicta graviora: the proper Catholic response to the secular media's (and dissenting Catholics') pious outrage is not to castigate the officials of the Papal Court. His concluding paragraph:

... I appreciate the desire and, to a certain degree, the need to continually engage with the media and try to clear away obstacles, explain Church beliefs, and so forth. But, again, I have to wonder: what really is the priority? Is handling public relations adroitly and jumping through hoops for journalists as important as defending the sacraments? Catholics should certainly be willing to address questions and seek to "clean house" in a sober and humble manner. But the temptation, it seems to me, to please certain groups and to prove ourselves to the MSM can get in the way of seeking to please God, to follow Christ, to give assent to Church teaching, to pursue lives of holiness and charity, to defend doctrine, to stand up for the sacraments and the priesthood, to put truth before "PR." It can also blind to us to the battle lines, the way the war is being waged, and the fact that some people do really hate the Catholic Church and cannot be persuaded to do otherwise by our most sincere and well-produced efforts. Isn't this, in fact, what Jesus spoke of shortly before he offered himself up on the Cross for the salvation of men?

"If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you...."

Precisely.

At Idle Speculations, illustrated with cartoons from the British Museum and featuring the venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman's analysis of the phenomenon.

Newman was also a historian. He showed how the historical claims and myths underlying "anti-Catholicism" of his time were inaccurate, false and unjustified. But it interesting that the same set of myths are still used today to justify many anti-Catholic rants despite their historical inaccuracy.  He described such a version of the historical record as "Fables" or Myths.  He showed them to be logically inconsistent and grounded in prejudice, sustained by tradition and by many institutions of the British State.  People who held to such "fables" required ignorance of the Catholic view as a protection for their own position.

Evil is believable because it deceives; we moderns imagine that we aren't susceptible to deception, tsk.

By Michael Segers, who does @MessiaenProject; who knew. The Messiaen, written on the death of Paul Dukas, that ensnared me in Tintin for too many minutes, is infra.

Of Splintered Sunrise and the Muniment Room as an element of their Excellencies's inquisition in the United States into the delicta graviora of bloggers and other online pundits; those gentlemen should be able to give them one or two invaluable bits of advice: nothing like speaking directly to the adversary (or, in this case, his near relations abroad) in these situations.  Bishops are defensive and self-defeatingly cautious when, instead of boldly putting on Christ and wielding the swords of truth and justice, they behave themselves like bureaucrats in the government of a failing state.    

So wrote the late revered Benito Mussolini.

"Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism, by intuition. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology, and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories, and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than fascism."

The quotation is from 1921's Diuturna, according to the commenter 'srdc' in Damian T.'s comment thread here (the post itself is on some awful Caitlin Moran woman's bigotry; she writes for the Times, although the quotation at the head of the post was sent out on Twitter).