Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

So says Tim Padgett in a Time Magazine article entitled ” A Catholic’s Take on the Pope’s Trip.” This article is illustrative of a rationalist confusion over the proper relationship between faith and reason. In the article, Padgett summarizes his views of B16’s visit has having little effect in bringing U.S. Catholics around to accepting what he refers to as “retro dogma.”

This would be an extremely long post if I were to address each and every one of his contradictions in thought. He has many that he seems not to be aware of: his dogmatic dichotomy between the Catholic Church as an institution and the Christian religion; his ability to admire the Church’s teaching on how sexual intercourse should be entered into while rejecting its admonition that it is exclusive to complementary marriage, his apparent acceptance of the Church’s teaching about the Eucharist and its ability to confect it while rejecting its teaching authority.

The reason he is able to uncritically accept these contradictory views, it seems to me, begins with the common dissenter’s confusion about faith and reason. He suggests this much by his favorable reference to Robert McClory’s Faithful Dissenters, a contradiction in terms if there ever was one. Padgett applies McClory’s half-baked ideas to arrive at the conclusion that by rejecting Church teaching, U.S. Catholics are, in fact, being “good Catholics.” What does he mean by this and how is this related to the confusion to which I refer?

What he means is that he accepts what he thinks to be the Church’s teaching on the importance of reason in one’s faith life (though he does not explain what he accepts it). However, like most dissenters, he is confused about the structure of faith and the role of reason in faith. This allows him, when combined with sloppy history, to believe that dissenters within the Church have always used their reason to correct erroneous Church teachings. He trots out the dissenters’ favorite canard, slavery, to attempt to demonstrate this point. This, of course, is also conflated with the history of personal failings of members and leaders of the Church thereby confusing doctrinal purity with personal impeccability.

Thus, Padgett believes, individual dissenters have always been the vanguard against the Church going astray, permanently at least, in her beliefs. So now that U.S. Catholics are using their “reason” to come to their own views about such things as women’s ordination, homosexuality, contraception, sex outside of marriage, etc. (N.B. that as is usual, his list is heavily weighted with moral issues as these are most susceptible to fallen human caprice) U.S. Catholics are now filling the role of “good” Catholics from the past. Padgett thinks that this, along with the so-called “pedophile” tragedy has “made the laity’s self-reliant spirit irradicable.”

It is hard to believe that anyone who has honestly looked at the Catholic responses to such inveracity can still hold these views without some sort of emotional precommitment that requires such rationalization. Regardless, it is not coincidental that his views reflect a cacophony of Protestant nominalism, Enlightenment rationalism, modern radical individualism, and neo-modern nihilism (ala Nietzsche and Sarte by which one creates his own reality according to his will). This is, after all, the philosophical patrimony of modernism that subjugates our culture and ironically allows us to believe (or at least claim) that we are thinking when we are blindly following the proverbial pack with lemming-like abandon.

If Padgett were to realize that faith is not simply a direct fruit of reason, he might be more cautious about his self-appointment as the final arbiter of truth. Rather, appropriating a phenomenology of faith from the Church’s rich intellectual tradition would uncover for him at least three basic components. Christian faith firt requires some intellectual object for consideration. Thus, reason is brought into play.

However, the difference between Christian reason and rationalism is that faith is not the simple correspondence of proposition to the terminus of one’s rational process. Reason is employed to make reasonable one’s submitting himself in trust to the Proposer–that is, Jesus Christ Himself. In doing so, one must also submit in trust to His chosen Mediator of Truth–the Hierarchically structured Church which is the visible manifestation of His Mystical Body. Thus, the next step for Christian faith is that the Christian responds in trust to God’s initiating offer of Himself. Thus again, reason makes trust reasonable.

But trust is still not Christian faith. Faith must be supernaturalized. Faith is finally Christian when the Christian receives the theological virtue of faith, ordinarily by means of sacramental grace. This is faith through grace and it is where the rationalist often goes wrong. He rejects this gift of grace because he understands from his Protestant culture, that grace annihilates his fallen human nature and so what one knows by reason can now be overturned by faith. To the rationalist, this means, and rightly so, an annihilation of his authentic humanity. Unfortunately, the rationalist then rejects faith as anti-human.

The Liberal Protestant tradition simply segregates these two realms from one another. The modern, Catholic rationalist dissenter is less consistent. He accepts faith when it accords with his “reason” (read caprice) and rejects it other wise. Thus, he is not open in trust to the Truth of Christ and does not experience, and so cannot conceive of, faith as something more certain than reason alone.  Without this faith, this belief, he fails to understand her teaching–as St. Augustine’s sage insight tells us: “I believe that I may understand.”  The dissenter is then left to trade faith illumined reason mediated by the Church and kept pure by the Holy Spirit, for worldly wisdom which St. Paul reminds us is foolishness to God (1Cor 3:19).

However, the Christian tradition purified of this Protestant fideism (and other errors) understands that human nature is not radically corrupted but only wounded. Further, it understands that human nature is not opposed to grace. In fact, human nature is made for grace. Grace is a partaking in the divine nature (see 2 Pt 1:4). As St. Basil indicates in today’s Office of Readings, it gives us a likeness to God–divinizing us. Rather than damaging human nature, it heals fallen nature, it elevates nature, and it perfects nature.

Correcting himself on these points will be the first intellectual steps in Padgett’s becoming an authentically “good Catholic.” Perhaps he is now confused because he was initially poorly catechized by a dissenting Catholic. I do not know this but, unfortunately, that is not unlikely these days. However, dissenting faith cannot be sustained. One cannot have true communion with God while pursuing falsehoods that take one in the opposite direction from Truth Himself.

We can pray that the death of “liberal Catholicism” will open the way to the recognition that if one is to accept Christ, he must accept the Totus Christus–the Whole Christ. This includes His Mystical Body, the Church, constituted on earth with a hierarchical structure. At that point U.S. Catholics will indeed begin to know better.

Hierothee passed along a link to one of the several articles that Time has run in the wake of B16’s visit to the U.S. As usual, they select commentators (see e.g. here and here) whose individualist libertinism distorts their world view and so corrupts their ability to adequately understand the Church and so the attendant dynamics of Church life.

That is not to say, that these commentators do not adequately understand the viewpoint of those mostly affected by current culture, perhaps including the majority of Catholics in the West. However, it certainly saddles them with biases, leaving them confused and unable to adequately explain the Church’s response to cultural challenges.

In this article, David Van Beima asks if “Liberal Catholicism” is dead. The first thing to note is the uncritical acceptance of such a misleading term. Van Beima does not even try to define it, presupposing that it is universally understood. In fact, what he means by the phrase one would have to try to draw from his article.  In doing so, one would be led to suppose that he intends: those who wish to consider themselves Catholic while at the same time rejecting Church teaching AND actively working to change the Church structures and teaching to accord with their political/social agenda.

Van Beima believes that Vatican II is the watershed event in the “liberal rebellion” in American Catholicism. It is good that here he seems to limit his scope to the Catholic Church in the U.S.  Like too many U.S. journalists, he is apparently quite myopic in his view of the Church and the world, not seeing its scope beyond that of its U.S. context.  Furthermore, rebellion is the correct term.  However, this rebellion would not have been possible to have exploded to the extent it did in the wake of the Second Vatican Council had it not already been underway for some decades prior to the Council.  Thus, suggesting that Vatican II was the sole, or at least primary, cause is not defensible.

He interprets the Council has having “overhauled much of Catholic teaching and ritual.” Of course, no Church teaching was overhauled. In fact, there was nothing “new” from the Council in terms of Church teaching. It did clarify and make authoritative many developments that had matured over the previous centuries.  Neither can the Council be saddled with the “overhaul” of, and confusion associated with, the liturgy that occurred in its aftermath. Of course, that is the view of those whom Van Beima has in mind with his “liberal” referent. He writes:

But Vatican II meant even more to a generation of devout but restless young people in the U.S. rather than a course correction, Terrence Tilley, now head of the Fordham University’s theology department, wrote recently, his generation perceived “an interruption of history, a divine typhoon that left only the keel and structure of the church unchanged.”

Tilley confirms as appropriate the “hermeneutic of discontinuity” to which B16 often makes reference as accurately characterizing those theologians who fall into this camp. They are “liberal” precisely because they adopt the agenda to spread their disintegrating hermeneutic to the rest of the Church. What characterized these “liberals” was the desire to impose a secular political structure on the Church. Van Beima calls it democracy while I would argue their agenda was rather an oligarchy of the libertine intelligentsia. Another feature of this “liberalism” was a primacy of conscience which I would more properly characterize as a replacement of the Magisterium instituted by Christ with a magisterium of individual whim. He identifies the main organs of this movement:

Its perspectives were covered in The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal and America. Martin Sheen held down Hollywood, and the movement even boasted its own cheesy singing act: the St. Louis Jesuits. The reformers’ premier membership organization was Call to Action, but their influence was felt at the highest reaches of the American Church, as sympathetic American bishops passed left-leaning statements on nuclear weapons and economic justice.

There is no surprise here. But it is interesting to note that Van Beima clearly sees the so called St. Louis Jesuits’ and their music as an organ of “liberal rebellion.” With all there is to dispute with Van Beima’s view of the Church in this article, one observation that is not up for debate in my view is his characterization of them as “the movement['s] . . . own cheesy singing act.”

In fact, I do believe that this “cheesy” music and its imposition on the liturgy has done major damage to the laity’s self-understanding of the Church through its diminution of the transcendent experience of the Mass. When the Mass becomes the venue for campy music and the insipid taste endemic in the personal creative expression rampant during these decades (and not yet completely expunged from the scene today), it is no wonder that so many poorly catechized Catholics stopped practicing their faith and others grew in disdain for the Church which no longer seemed to mediate to them in the Mass, albeit through accidents but important accidents, the Sacrifice of Calvary but now subjected them to an aesthetic milieu that they would have turned off if it had been on the TV.

But I digress. Van Beima again quotes Tilley on the state of this movement:

Remarks Tilley, “For a couple of generations, progressivism was an [important] way to be Catholic.”

Then he adds, “But I think the end of an era is here.”

Van Beima says that “progressives” have essentially been so successful in changing the views of the average Catholic that they no longer seem relevant with any sort of unique message. He says that for a short time, they had a rallying cry around the perceived heirarchy’s complicity in the sex abuse scandal since JPII “remained mostly silent.” But now with B16’s visit and in his taking the issue on directly, he has changed the dynamic.

The first one can say is that it would be hard to argue that JPII was silent about it. He called the U.S. Cardinals to Rome within two months after the Boston Globe kicked off the press frenzy and said to them:

Like you, I too have been deeply grieved by the fact that priests and religious, whose vocation it is to help people live holy lives in the sight of God, have themselves caused such suffering and scandal to the young. Because of the great harm done by some priests and religious, the Church herself is viewed with distrust, and many are offended at the way in which the Church´s leaders are perceived to have acted in this matter. The abuse which has caused this crisis is by every standard wrong and rightly considered a crime by society; it is also an appalling sin in the eyes of God. To the victims and their families, wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern.

Regardless of the erroneous contrast between JPII and B16, it is interesting to me the way that B16’s visit and especially his words have been taken. Whether this is a watershed event in the way that the media will cover the Church in this regard and the way the Church will be viewed by the laity, I doubt. It rather reflects the fact that there has been very little in terms of new news to keep the flames fanned. Nevertheless, it is gratifying that for once, the majority in the media have allowed the Catholic Church, in the person of B16, to express without skeptical commentary, its remorse for what has happened in the past and its resolve to ensure that nothing like this happens again in the future.

Van Beima’s quoting of Fr. Thomas Reese’s observation that “reform” movements need a visible enemy against which to organize as his rationale for the lack of steam among the graying activists is worth noting. The libertine rebels did everything they could to demonize Church teachings they did not like along with the hierarchy. But JPII was even more visibly affable than B16 and this did little to change the way he was demonized. Rather, what we are seeing is the dying out of the old guard and its replacement by a worldly and largely religiously indifferent generation.

The newer generations are not the social activists that arose in the rebellious 1960s. The Gen Xer’s and later generations are not rebels in the same sense. Their parents were the rebels and so in order to reject their parents, they are more content to just indulge themselves in all that the culture of hedonism has to offer.

Nevertheless, Van Beima is correct in his general assessment. “Liberal Catholicism” is dead but this does not mean that there will be a large return to orthodoxy. Rather, there will simply be a largely impassive laity who will either stop practicing their faith or simply go to church on Sunday and do what the culture tells them they need to be doing for their self-fulfillment the rest of the time.

This provides much opportunity, however. There will be less and less confusion generated by activist dissenters within the Church as the dissenters die out. The work in pre-evangelization of the wayward Catholics who remain will no longer not need to be focused on trying to clarify the confusion within the Church and instead will be able to be focused on the authentic beauty to be found in Church teaching and the genuine joy to be attained in conforming one’s life to the truth of the Gospel.

The damage that dissenters have done to the faith has been incalculable. Perhaps some will come to recognize that their desire for an socially activist church devoid of truth and any demands for self control can never be realized. Without truth one can only offer hedonism as an attraction to fallen man. The grim fruits of hedonism is an inward turn to dehumanizing selfishness and around this no church can flourish. So yes, “liberal Catholicism,” using Van Beima’s definition, is dead. However, now the hard work toward the new springtime in the Church can begin to start showing fruit.

For you say, “I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything,” and yet do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. - Revelation 3:17

This one goes a leap beyond the believable I think, even for the most fervent Catholic haters. We become defiled through our desire for revenge. Forgiveness is an act of the will, a gift to another which comes from sorrow.

I was reading R. R. Reno’s article on Nietzsche’s On The Geneology of Morals in First Things the other day. Reno provides an insightful commentary as he summarizes Nietzsche’s work. He ends with the following conclusion:

Nietzsche’s almost unwilling final affirmation of the ascetic impulse echoes St. Augustine’s basic insight into the human condition. Our hearts are restless. The human animal wishes to give itself to something higher. It is a need more basic than our instinctual urges. It is a nature more fundamental than everything our age wishes us to affirm as natural.

Our restless hearts suggest that the real dangers of the present age are not to be found in an open-ended, nihilistic nonjudgmentalism that encourages us to imagine our world devoid of compelling truths. Such possibilities are abroad, but, as anyone who has been exposed to our educational establishment knows, it requires the constant infusion of disciplinary energy to keep young people from actually believing something.

Instead, if Nietzsche is right, the danger we face may be idolatry. Deprived of a God worth worshipping, we will find substitutes, even to the point of ­prostrating ourselves before birds or animals or reptiles that our modern minds have transformed from graven images into shrill moral imperatives and brittle political causes.

The last century’s graveyards testify to the reality of this danger. Turned away from something truly greater than ourselves, we do not come to rest in a modest ­loyalty to humanity. Instead, as Nietzsche’s and Augustine’s insights into the human condition warn us, we fall into a devotion to subhuman primal powers that reward our service with debasement.

What comes to mind in reading this conclusion is the way in which so many in from those in politics, to the new media, to the entertainment field have piled on to the man-made global warming bandwagon. The way that these folks have embraced the theory that man-made emissions are driving the climate into a sustained and dangerous warming trend borders on religious adherence. Despite the fact that man made global warming is an unproven theory, a scientific theory based upon heuristic computer models and which requires much more evidence to either confirm or deny, the response to those who point this out ranges from being ignored to attacked as a “denier.“

Reno points out how Nietzsche reluctantly admits that there is an inherent human impulse to asceticism in the human soul. There is an innate desire in man to master his inclinations in order to subordinate them to the greater good. Reno indicates that Nietzsche has discovered man’s inclination toward the transcendent; toward the infinite. Man is naturally religious because, as St. Augustine pointed out, he has an inbuilt restlessness until he rests in God.

Neo-modern culture has bought into the European model of secularism in which God is excluded from public life and reasoned discussion. I’ll do another post on the evolution of modern thought that contributed to this later, but for now it is enough to note this presents secularists with a problem. They are trying to have culture without cult and they cannot have it. This type of secularism represses the human person and so it is rebuffed by the masses. I suspect that even the rabid secularists sense an interior dissatisfaction with their “faith.” This leaves them in desperate need of a religion, but it needs to be a godless one. Thus, we are presented with the global warming faith. I suspect that the fideistic reaction that we are seeing from this mass of secularists reveals that Al Gore has handed them the religion that they were seeking.

It is not coincidental that this “religion” is one that requires self-sacrifice for a purpose which transcends themselves. Sacrifice is at the root of religion for the reasons to which Reno’s article alludes. Thus, we see this unreasoned, “religious” rush to a self-transcending faith and an attendant “fundamentalist” reaction to those who would deny the truth of this new found faith.

The problem that these secularists will find with this faith is that it will ultimately collapse because it will be unsatisfying. One can see this in that the high priest and a good number of its prophets (see here, here, and here) want others to do the sacrificing. This is not surprising for the reason at root for the uncritical rejection of Christian faith by so many of these Western secularists is its moral demands. Whether human caused global warming will be debunked by science before it is abandoned by its religious adherents is anyone’s guess. However, any religion without self sacrifice is doomed to fail.

Atheist, Jeremy Hall claims that pressure within the Army to believe in God is so strong, it got to the point “I was ashamed to say that I was an atheist.” Hall, a recent atheist convert and school drop out, plans on leaving the Army next year and also filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. He insists, “I’m not in it for cash, I want no one else to go what I went through.” He employed the assistance of the notoriously anti-christian organization , The Military Religious Freedom Foundation to represent him.

“Our new Federal lawsuit will show the almost incomprehensible national security risks to America and the world as a result of the destruction of the wall separating Church and State in the United States armed forces. The United States military is actively engaged in a pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of the precious religious freedoms of our honorable and noble sailors, soldiers, airmen, marines, national guard, reservists and veterans. This evil is a noxious, institutional force-feeding of fundamentalist Christianity by our nation’s military command structure in complete defiance of the United States Constitution.”

The truth behind our motivations are very rarely initially understood. Given that faith in God doesn’t depend on knowledge as much as with understanding, atheism can never be the conclusion of a scientific or philosophical theory, but a premeditated act of the will. One cannot disprove that which isn’t learned, but received. God will not allow Himself to be revealed to the proud through theory and logic, but to those willing to seek Him with a sincere heart.

I believe the conversion to atheism has less to do with one’s intellectual discovery, and more to do with a calculated cop out based on a human weaknesses (sin). A term known as cognitive dissonance can be explained as the feelings we all experience when our beliefs and behaviors don’t match up. The most powerful type of dissonance are those which are based on our self-image when we experience feelings such as foolishness, shame, embarrassment, and guilt. In order to avoid these uncomfortable and most undesirable feelings about ourselves, we are left with three choices; we either change our behaviors (faith, religion), justify and rationalize our behaviors by changing the conflicting beliefs (atheism/agnostic), or justify our behaviors by adding new cognitions (heretics). Proof once again that more sin is the punishment of our sins.

“Once I taste of the spirit, all carnal things become meaningless” - The Ascent of Mount Carmel by Saint John of the Cross

Congratulations to Aquinas College, which earlier this month canceled a ‘gay activist” speaker because administrators recognized the fact that Catholic schools should never endorse anything or anyone who directly contradicts and belittles Church teachings. One of the challenges of those with deep-seated homosexual tendencies and who identify themselves as “gay” is they are incapable of recognizing the possibilities of their emotional conflicts having a direct correlation to their homosexual tendencies and attractions.

Despite the cancellation, students helped organize a speech of John Corvino off campus.

“Gay and lesbian relationships make some people happy. And I don’t just mean that they make people feel good. They are an important avenue of meaning and fulfillment in people’s lives,” said Corvino, who teaches at Wayne State University. “If we’re going to deny that experience to an entire group of people, we better have a darned good reason.”

“The way gay and lesbian people are treated in our society is morally wrong. I’m asking people to make moral judgments not on whom they love, but on whether they love.”

“Some people refer to me as a fallen Catholic. I didn’t fall. I leapt. We should not confuse complete faith in God with complete faith in our ability to discern God’s voice.”

“Of course two men can’t make a baby. But is making babies the only legitimate reason for having sex?”

“The usual response to a gay person is not ‘Hey, no fair. How come he gets to be gay and I don’t?’ We can continue to support (heterosexual marriage) while recognizing that it’s not right for everyone.”

For as long as one pursues this type of self-gratifying sexuality which is based on the desire to “love” and to be “loved” on one’s own terms, the more his psychological & spiritual health suffers up to the point of corruptness and spiritual death. Because sexuality forms an integral part of our personality, it makes sense to those who suffer from a wounded sense of sexual identity to believe sexual orientation is tied to something significantly more than the sexual act; consequently; love and acceptance becomes something that must be earned by the other but is a conditional entitlement or right which must be afforded to the self.

“I will lead you into the desert that I may speak to your heart…” (Hos 2:16)

“My grace is sufficient for you, for in weakness, power reaches perfection” (2 Cor 12:9)

The other day, while leading a mystagogy session of neophytes, one young mother came in a little late with her new born baby. Of course the baby took over the class for some time and oriented the thinking toward babies but we did get back on topic.  However, after we finished the session the focus quickly turned back to things “baby.”  We began taking turns holding the baby and talking about babies.  In the midst of this, the young woman told us about an exchange that she had with some friends from her old church.

As this was her fourth baby, all of her friends were sure that she should do something to ensure that she did not have another. She replied that her diabetes was the only reason that she was thinking that this should be her last child; but then again, God may have other plans. One lady replied: “God has nothing to say about it! He created Adam and Eve and after that He has no place in procreation.”

This was an interesting, if not surprising, response from an Evangelical Christian. It is also quite ironic that this desire to keep God isolated from one’s life is so wide spread among some Christians. After all, Christianity is all about communion with God in the Truth–His Son, Jesus Christ.  This means necessarily that God must be invited in to all aspects of every person’s life.  I remember a friend, a former Catholic who had taken up his wife’s Methodist faith, once informed me that he did not want to know God’s will for him because he was afraid of what God might want him to do.

While this certainly reveals a confused understanding of God, His solicitude and love for each person, and His Providence it also reflects the perennial problem that all human beings have suffered since the Fall. That is learning to trust God. For most believers, once one is given a correct understanding of God and His Providence it becomes a “no brainer” to choose to trust God. The difficulty lies in carrying this out.

At times it is quite easy to trust; when one comes to terms with the reality that there is no other choice. At other times, it becomes a real struggle. It is a real temptation to want to go one’s own way. I find that in my experiences.  Sometimes, I can be tempted to rationalize or even to coopt God into my own plans.  It is only with real effort that I am brought to realize this and to prayerfully discern whether a course of action is simply my will or also His. At root is fear; fear of self-denial, fear of having to die to myself.  When I fail and succumb to this fallen temptation, I subliminally accept as my own those words of the young mother’s friend, that I consciously reject: with respect to this matter at least, “God has nothing to say about it.”

The website Catholics Come Home launched in March, is credited with bringing 3,000 Catholics in the Diocese of Phoenix back to the Church in less than three weeks. Take a look around the website and while you’re there, watch the television ad called Movie (bottom of home page) - very powerful.

For the movie of our life can be used to judge us. We will sorrowfully relive the bad times and joyfully revisit the good. (Romans 2:1-16)

It is then we will fully realize how our unkind thoughts and selfish choices wounded others, and led us away from our loving Father. (Matthew 25: 31-46)

And each time we ignored God’s voice, our conscience grew more deaf, and our heart hardened. (Matthew 24:12, Hebrews 3:8,15)

No matter what you’ve done, there is good news, since Jesus came not to condemn the world, but to save it. (Isaiah 1:18; John 3:16-17; Romans 5:8)

Jesus can heal your memories and forgive your past, if you accept His mercy. You really can be freed from the addiction of sin and find lasting peace. (Matthew 11:28)

May God abundantly bless those who love enough to humbly bring others to Christ.

H/T Catholic Education Resource Center

With the ill formed consciences of “pro-choice” political leaders who also profess to be Catholic, it should be no surprise that a few of them would take the occasion of a papal Mass to demonstrate their lack of proper Catholic formation.

There were reports that Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry all at National’s Stadium, and Rudy Giulianni at St. Patrick’s in NY presented themselves for and were given Holy Communion at those two papal Masses. These acts were clearly in contradiction to canon law (CIC 915). However, the question continually arises whether something should be done to prevent these confused souls from illicitly receiving Holy Communion.

The Canon itself presents the reason for this prohibition: “. . . and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.” Now it is obvious that these politicians publicly manifest their problematic actions, aiding and abetting the procurement of abortion which is formal cooperation in grave evil. That is, they support the “right” of some women to choose whether to kill their unborn babies and they promote policies that make it easy to carry out this unbelievable crime of killing innocent, unborn babies. That is after all why they are “pro-choice.”

There is no doubt that the taking of the lives of unborn children is murder– this both common sense and authoritative Catholic teaching make clear. It is also obvious that when one cooperates with this evil in such a way that they desire that these acts be successfully carried out, this is an action that is always and every where evil.  Thus, there is no room for prudential judgment about whether one may legitimately support such an action.

Thus, these people are in states of grave sin which demands that they reconcile with God and His Church through sacramental confession prior to receiving Communion. Of course, the reason is that Holy Communion is not simply a sign, but it is a real ontological communion with God in His Son–that is, it is the sign and action par excellence of participation in divine nature (cf. 2 Pt 1:4). This is a communion that cannot exist in one who persists in grave sin and it cannot exist until the subject joins himself in truth through repentance and amendment.

So why do these “Catholics” obstinately refuse to obey the Church’s prohibition against their receiving Holy Communion?  It should be no surprise that they would reject the Church’s authority in the matter of reception of Holy Communion since their consciences have been so ill formed in so many other aspects of Church teaching.

These politicians are quite tragic manifestations of the legalism in thinking that B16 continually warns against in his locutions, especially those at the UN and Dunwoodie. The politicians most likely view freedom as an end in itself rather than a necessary precondition for morally good choices. Relativism no doubt adds to this confusion.  In other words, they are under the delusion that there is only the truth that they themselves define through the force of their wills. Nevertheless, they especially exhibit the confusion that the ultimate good is in their choosing regardless of its object (no doubt with some exceptions for which they would be hard pressed to justify in priniciple).  This is the mistaken view of freedom that B16 discussed.

John Allen is one commentator who betrays the same legalism as these politician whom he covers. He is willing to allow the US political debate over abortion to form the hermeneutic by which Church teaching on abortion, mortal sin, and Holy Communion are to be understood. The US political debate is framed around the legalistic view that positive law defines moral rightness. This is the line taken by US politicians and is what they use to justify their obstinate rejection of natural and revealed law.

It is ironic that we have commentators such as Allen covering Rome and the Holy Father’s actions and words as “experts,” but who are oblivious to the fact that B16’s admonitions against the erroneous thinking of our time are also aimed at them.

Earlier today, I was reading through the transcripts and summaries of B16’s locutions during his pilgrimage to the US which ended today. I had seen it earlier in the week, but I again happened upon the summary of his talk to Catholic educators at CUA. In that talk, B16 comments on the question as to why people are reluctant to entrust themselves to God. According to the Zenit summary, the Pope says:

“It is a complex phenomenon and one which I ponder continually,” the Pope confessed. “While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will. Subsequently we observe, with distress, the notion of freedom being distorted.

“Freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in — a participation in Being itself. Hence authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God. Such a choice would ultimately disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves.”

In these words, Benedict summarizes a fundamental problem in modern education. In modern education, we seem to have forgotten that education is not simply the imparting of knowledge. Rather, it is the cultivation of an intellect; indeed, the cultivation of a whole person. While it is a fundamental part of education then, inculcating knowledge is simply one component of it together with forming intellectual skills and the training of the will.  There are several implications arising from this authentic meaning of education.

First, children need to be taught the skills of thinking, including the ability to critically consider the messages of the culture in which they are raised. Secondly, children must be taught not only what truth is but they must be challenged continually to live in accord with this truth. Not only must a child’s education be cognitive but it must be formative and transformative of his entire person. Thus, education must include the formation of his character.

This means then, that education thus must be a cooperative effort between a child’s first educators, his parents, and those who have been charged with assisting them. That is, today’s professional educators. If this education is to be effective, it must be an education in the whole person in which parents and schools support and reinforce each other.

Unfortunately, in our society the tendency is to leave all education to the professionals in public education. Furthermore, the difficulties of pluralism in belief has prompted public education (at least in theory if not in practice) to take the easy way out and eliminate from curriculum and classroom any mention of God, morals, virtue, or right character. In practice however, children get formed in immorality veiled as tolerance, pluralism, social justice, civil rights, etc.

Even with Catholic schools, the emphasis is on imparting knowledge because they are so wedded to the pedagogical tools and theories of public education. Thus, knowledge is imparted but too often little attention is paid to character formation. Likewise, while parents of Catholic school children tend to be somewhat more involved in their children’s education there is still the tendency of parents to leave aside concerns for the cultivation of the whole child–intellectual knowledge, thinking skills, character development, and especially, spiritual maturation (i.e. development in holiness).

No wonder then, even children raised in Catholic homes where church attendance is faithful, the children often tend to stray from the faith. When B16 refers to the lack attention to formation of the will, it is character formation and spiritual maturation that he has in mind. When he refers to the mistaken view of freedom, he is referring to the lack of formation in a proper view of the moral life. He takes up this point again in his talk at Dunwoodie (a.k.a. St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers).

B16 links freedom to Being itself. Fr. John Richard Neuhaus, in his commentary during EWTN coverage at St. John’s explicates this link between freedom and God’s own Being in term of “freedom for excellence” and its antithesis, “freedom of indifference.” I mentioned this distinction some time ago in a post discussing the late Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P. and his coining of those terms.

Children need to be taught to overcome the legalistic thinking of our age which results in almost an allergic reaction to any demands of personal restraint. They need to be taught that authentic freedom cannot be the libertine view of freedom our culture feeds us. If it were, it would be a vacuous concept.  We know this because we can see that by simply exercising this “freedom” we lose it. Anyone who has become enslaved to his choices, like hitting the alarm continually in the morning instead of getting up and going to the gym, or like immoderate indulgence in food or drink, or like any other bad habit which can even become addictions.

We can verify from our own experiences that for freedom to be preserved one must first recognize and then obey an order to the cosmos that preexists our arbitrary choices. Neither is that cosmic order arbitrary. It arises from the “Order” of Being itself and so brings with it a structure for action that corresponds with the meaning of the human person.  Subordination to this order brings with the fruit of joy and its disregard brings eventual interior discord and, if the disregard is sufficiently grave and prolonged, moral collapse.

This is what the Holy Father has often pondered. Why have we, especially in Catholic education and Catholic homes, failed to attend sufficiently to educating/forming our children’s will’s in addition to our concern for development of their intellects (or more precisely, to development of the cognitive content of their intellects)?

Perhaps we might pray that Catholic educators and Catholic parents will appreciate, appropriate, his words and also ponder with the Holy Father, what might be done in Catholic education that will again avail itself of the great patrimony of the Catholic Church.  This is the only way that Catholic children will not only learn not to fear giving themselves over to God, but will also allow them to be powerful witnesses of courage in surrender to God for the world.

I had the chance over the last two evenings to view prescreenings of The Human Experience, Grassroots Films first full length feature film. I am not a film critic so I will limit (though not eliminate) my comments about aesthetic and cinematographic concerns and focus instead on the ability of the film to deliver its message in a high impact manner. I make this caveat because while I recognize my lack of expertise, this media is still more about appealing to the “masses” than it is for conforming to the tastes of the critics.

The first screening was to an audience of about 350 people, primarily made up of college students, on the campus of the University of Illinois. The second screening was to an off campus community of almost 900 people, primarily, but not exclusively, from the local Catholic parishes. The feedback I have received in talking to those who viewed the film has been tremendous.

After viewing the movie, students have come up to me and shared how much the film has positively impacted them and changed their outlook on everything from the way they have viewed their lives and themselves to what is really important in life.

I have also had people calling me to tell me about the reactions they have had. One person called me to tell me that the morning show personality on a local talk radio show had seen the movie with his son. This man went on and on about the film and how much it had affected him. He talked about the reorientation in thinking that this film evokes. A reorientation that he seemed to think we all need to experience. He was only sorry that he did not know how to tell people how to be able to see it.

A young mother who had been at the prescreening also called me asking how to get in touch with the orphan’s home in Peru that was depicted in the film. She was very moved by what she had seen and wanted to do something to help. She thought that it was one of those movies that you just will never be able to get out of your head.

So what is it about this movie that is affecting all of these people as it does? Well, of course, it is first the message that the documentary delivers. However, the significant point here is that the movie is able to convey its message in such a compelling manner. It is so compelling that a multitude of viewers are open to listening, understanding, and allowing themselves to be transformed by the message.

The film is in the documentary genre. It is about two brothers who were abused by their father until their teenage years when they moved into the St. Francis House in Brooklyn, NY. This is not in the film, but the St. Francis House is an apostolate of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (Fr. Groeschel’s order) and is run by a former entrepreneur/musician who is a gifted, loving, and giving man who gave up all his worldly possessions to become a father to boys and young men who have been severely damaged because they have not had good fathers, or many, because they have not known their fathers at all. Back to the film.

The two brothers, Jeffrey (the lead) and Cliff Azize, set out to find the meaning of life through various experiences: living homeless on the streets of NYC, visiting an orphanage of physically disabled “castoffs” in Peru, and finally a visit with AIDS victims and a leper colony in Ghana. These events teach them that the meaning of life is to be found in faith, hope, and love. The end of the film is a concrete expression of this meaning when Jeffrey decides he must reconcile with his father after not having seen him for over ten years.

The movie has a “raw” quality to its cinematography. It’s shots are often partial views of the subject and many times done with a moving camera. They use copious of the “special” effects which are now becoming common in media focused on younger viewers. Much of the musical score is original composition and it seems to me that the camera and score come together in such a way to convey the experiences in a powerfully affective manner, effectively getting the message across which they wish to convey. Some further comments on the message.

I don’t want to overly harmonize the content with an arbitrary scheme which I do not believe was explicitly intended. Nevertheless, I believe that Grassroots was very much motivated by John Paul II. This much is clear from discussions with them and in the questions that they propose and then set out trying to get the viewers to contemplate and struggle with. These are the ultimate questions JPII always would return to: who am I; why am I here; what is my purpose? It is perhaps not coincidental then, that the three experiences I mentioned above seem to correspond to what I believe I have discovered to be the three main keys to JPII’s view of the human person. These “hermeneutical” keys all arise from Gaudium et spes and can be paraphrased as: 1) man is created in the image of a trinitarian God; 2) Christ reveals man to Himself; and 3) man can only fulfill himself by giving himself away as a sincere gift.

Just as all three keys interpenetrate one another, so the three main experiences have all of these elements in them. They all three reveal that man is made in the image of God, that Christ reveals man to himself, and that man is made to give himself away in giving relationships. Moreover, all of these experiences reflect faith, hope, and love. However, I think that each one emphasizes one of these keys most especially.

The discussions with the homeless on the streets of NYC can best be described as eye opening. They do not give you much in the way of “new” information but they do awaken one to problematic ways in which many of us have been conditioned to react to those living on the street. The director did a fabulous job in conveying the simple humanity of the homeless; even the most troubled of them. One common thread and surprising thread among the homeless was the almost universal expression of their hope. None indicated that they thought life to be meaningless. Much the opposite. Many explicitly acknowledged that God had a plan for them. Of note here is that during the question and answer period after the showing, one woman asked how much of the editing was done in order to “cherry pick” the responses. In other words, what percentage of negative, hopeless comments did they leave on the cutting room floor? The producer answered “none.” He expressed their surprise at what they found. There was the positive affirmation of hope expressed in almost all cases, but no hopelessness.

One encounter especially stays with me. A homeless lady tells of her experience when she first became homeless. She was standing on the street with some little abandoned puppies nearby. Several people came over, concerned and took the puppies home to save them from the cold. They left her standing there. She said that she was taught by her rabbi that we are all brothers and that when your brother is in trouble you are supposed to help him. It causes one to pause and reflect on, if not convict oneself, of how he might have acted in the same situation.

Nevertheless, with all of these encounters with homeless people one over arching theme comes through. That is, they convey a reminder of the dignity of each and every human being. We know this because he is created in the image and likeness of God. Perhaps it is the contradiction of seeing these “images of God” in the least dignified of states or perhaps it is their bearing witness to being treated that way that reminds the viewer of this truth. It is because we are created in His image that we all can have hope.

The experience of the little abandoned children in Peru, most abandoned because of physical deformities or physical pathologies due to maltreatment, was a journey into love. These innocent young children reflected the joy of living. They offered themselves in unconditional love to those who cared for them. They elicited love and compassion from the young men who traveled to Peru to care volunteer at the home. Two of the children, Victor and Angela, were highlighted. Victor has only one leg and no arms. Angela was abused terribly by her father and is missing one foot. Even if they had not told me, it was clear that the Grassroots team fell in love with these children and they were able to make audience do the same. Just in experiencing the film, one discovers in a very limpid way that when one gives himself to another for their own sake, he experiences what I call the trinitarian paradox. That is, that one discovers that he can only find himself by giving himself away as a sincere gift. This is authentic love. Love is clearly a disinterested and total gift of self.

The third experience was a visit on one occasion with AIDS patients and on another, with a colony of lepers in Ghana, Africa. One scene was of a young mother holding a bright eyed, beautiful little baby. This baby had a precocious temperance. Flights of fancy might allow one to think that the baby knows and peacefully accepts his poor prospects. That is because both mother and child were infected with AIDS. It is a picture that tears at your heartstrings. However, her message was one of faith. She expresses the need to be bold, to show strength and express faith for other mothers in the same situation. Another young mother was also dying of AIDS. She was crying for almost the entire time on film. That is until one of the young cast members, Matt, a housemate of Jeff and Cliff, asked her a question.

Matt was very affected by this experience. Matt’s mom had died of AIDS when he was nine and he has never really gotten over it. He laments that he was never able to talk to his mother about her death or to be consoled by her to prepare him with words of wisdom for the rest of his life without her. In what seemed to be his attempt to avoid this for her child, and perhaps in a way, even hear the voice of his mother, he asks this young mother what she would have her child know after she is gone. For the first time she no longer cries. In fact, she seems to take strength in the faith she would choose to leave for her child. She thinks about it for a few second and then says that she would have her child know that he must always have faith in God. He must trust and obey him and it is this that he will find his happiness and prosperity.

FInally, they visit the leper colony.  Here they meet with, on a superficial level, grotesque appearances.  However, it is not long before they begin to see the beauty of the human persons they begin to come to know.  The question is asked: in such a situation in which you have been cast off by family, friends, and society and your bodies are literally decaying away, what allows you to get up in the morning.  The answer is: the community.  They are happy because they live for one another.  They also expressed joy at the visit of others.  One of those with leprosy pointed out that all were the same; the visitors were also their brothers.  This brotherhood of man in which all men live for his brothers is what Jesus Christ revealed to us about ourselves.

It is all to easy to overstate an experience when one is still in the penumbra of that experiences’ affective aura. However, I will say that I am not aware of a movie since the Passion of the Christ that seems to have such a universal affect on those who view it.  However, this is not the same jarring, visceral, emotional draining experience.  One leaves this film with uplifted hope and joy but still transformed.  The Human Experience is much more than a film; it is an intense, transforming, human experience.

“You, son of man, I have appointed watchman for the house of Israel; when you hear me say anything, you shall warn them for me. If I tell the wicked man that he shall surely die, and you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked man from his way, he (the wicked man) shall die for his guilt, but I will hold you responsible for his death. But if you warn the wicked man, trying to turn him from his way, and he refuses to turn from his way, he shall die for his guilt, but you shall save yourself.” - Ezekiel 33:7-9

According to Father Doyle, Archbishop Burke is “vindictively clubbing people with canon law”, for issuing a decree of two “canonical crimes” against him for defending two excommunicated board members from St. Stanislaus parish. According to the decree, Fr. Doyle did not adhere to the requirement of having prior approval from the Bishop to represent the excommunicated board members nor did he immediately respond to his summons to appear before him. Archbishop Burke’ is also keenly aware of Fr. Doyle’s beliefs and ideology which are inconsistent with Catholic teaching.

In his defense, Father Doyle responded to the charges of negligence on his behalf.

“He’s making a mockery of the role of the bishop, a mockery of himself, and the role of leadership in the church when it comes to resolving disputes and problems.”

Doyle said he didn’t get Burke’s approval to represent Krauze and Rozanski because he was already representing other board members in their appeal to the Vatican. “He exaggerated it,” he said. “It’s total nonsense.”

Doyle also objected to Burke’s contention that he has publicly taken a position contrary to the infallible teachings of the church. “My faith and what I believe, and how I believe is none of his business,” he said. “It’s personal. “My obedience to him has nothing to do with my standing with the higher power.”

Our previous experience with Fr. Doyle and his response to our unfavorable view of his role as a Catholic priest can be read here.

God created us in His own image and likeness, making us a unique individual, as we represent a special attribute and characteristic of His, never before created and never again to be reproduced. We reflect God in a way that nobody else can or will again. The more we do His will, the more his splendor shines out in us. - Rosary Meditations from Mother Theresa of Calcutta

Eco-terrorist Paul Watson mourned the loss of seals, after hearing about the death of 4 seal hunters, while seeing his fellow man as nothing more than a virus infecting mother earth. His hope is a future, where the world population would drop below the 1 Billion mark and insists that no human community should ever be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas where other species are free to evolve without human interference.

From Hug the Earth, kill the humans

Watson is the symbol of a movement that originated in a desire to improve the planet’s physical condition, but transmogrified into the zero-sum dogma of eco-spirituality, in which the object of worship is the environment, and the messianic goal its return to a pre-civilization Edenic state. In this scenario, Earth is perennial victim, mankind eternal villain, the consumption of natural resources original sin. No emotionally manipulative appeal is beyond the pale for this pagan religion’s demagogues, even the shameful appropriation of racist tropes. Alpha eco-spiritualist novelist Alice Walker claims, “the Earth is the nigger of the world.”

Violence is nothing more than a fear of love. And when you fear love, where do you turn ?

“There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist as long as you win. Then you write the history”

We’re at war, and we’ll do what we need to win.

[I see] a spark of hope in every broken window, every torched police car.

Animal Liberation Front tactics are going to continue. There’s not a damned thing you can do about it, you’re not going to stop it. So you might as well incorporate it into the movement.

I don’t think you’d have to kill — assassinate — too many [doctors involved with animal testing] … I think for 5 lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives.

You can justify, from a political standpoint, any type of violence you want to use.

I think that violence and nonviolence are not moral principles, they’re tactics.

So much hate and judgment among the intolerant. How can one expect to accept and love another human being despite the ugliness of our nature, when they can’t see that same ugliness within themselves?

This was passed along by Anti-contraception News Tips:

Two Youtube videos made by Fr. Frank Pavone have been causing quite a stir.

In the videos, Fr. Frank demonstrates the two most common abortion procedures, using fetal models and instruments that were actually used to kill babies.

This is Dismemberment Abortion

This is a Suction Abortion

“How often have I yearned to gather you as a mother hen gathers her young under her wing, but you refused Me.” - Mt 7:9-11

The notorious 80 year old Marxist artist Hrdlicka had his most obscene work removed from the Dommuseum of Vienna. As with most of the Utopian Narcissists who blame religion for the world’s problems while pushing their own brand of religion on the rest of us, hope for a future world without restraint, where the human person and condition can be reduced to ideological talking points and slogans - Hrdlicka, like a window into his soul, attacks the most sacred Sacrament with a sexual perversion most begotten by his “marxist” god which has incidentally killed more than 100 million people during the twentieth century.

Good, short article at the CERC called Totaled Utopia on the always angry and frustrated totalitarian left’s attempt to create a Marxist heaven on earth.

According to news sources, Bishop Carlos Sevilla of the Diocese of Yakima, WA, a Jesuit, may have knowingly hired a ex-seminarian from Mount Angel Seminary in Mount Angel, Ore. who had four charges of encouraging child sex abuse/ child pornography levied against him by the state of Oregon. Bishop Sevilla was aware of his employee’s history which included accusations against him of viewing child pornography at the seminary. The Bishop is also claimed to have known that the ex-seminarian has had contact with Catholic youth at the retreat center for several years.

Bishop Sevilla said he had always been and will continue to be deeply committed to keeping the church a safe place, but admitted that it “wasn’t a good hire,” but he also thought that the criminal charges stemmed from what could have been an “isolated episode.” The diocese has already paid out about $1.25 million to resolve sexual abuse claims involving seven priests.

Yes, when you are obedient I take away your weakness and replace it with My strength. — Jesus to St. Faustina (Diary, 381)

Having disdain for Tradition can lead to the popular fallacy that supposes that our fulfillment as human persons arises from the satisfaction of our emotional desires for self-definition and self-actualization; without any regard to objective philosophical, religious or moral truths. Further more, this therapeutic mentality defines sin as more on the level of social concerns than one of spiritual life and death, which ultimately destroys the need of our obedience and loyalty to religious authority - making one weak and useless as spiritual fathers and protectors. May God help and have mercy on all of us.

News Source(1)

News Source(2)

After Asceticism: Sex, Prayer and Deviant Priests

Most remember that St. Stanislaus Parish in St. Louis rebelled against their Bishop’s authority back in 2005 and voted “to hire” their own priest. This goes to show that the rebellion of Trusteeism that plagued the Catholic Church in the U.S., beginning in earnest in the early 19th century, is still alive today.

Trusteeism of course was the revolt of some Catholic parishes, who were affected by practical Protestant ecclesiology and the democratic culture of the U.S.  They exercised the legal authority over parish property that they had in the name of their trustees in order to usurp the authority of the Bishop.  Trustees existed in the U.S.  because of many states’ anti-Catholic laws prohibiting the property to be owned by the Catholic Diocese.

Well, it seems that St. Stanislaus has experienced a time warp and made its way from this initial anti-hierarchical Protestantism and covered a couple of centuries of doctrinal decay in a very short time. Apparently the priest that St. Stanislaus brought in had more in mind for the parish than simply continuing leading it in an otherwise Catholic manner.

An article in STL Today shows that those responsible for St. Stanislaus’ revolt are now looking to get rid of the priest that they brought in. What they wanted was a priest who limited his refusal of assent to truth solely to his recognition of the authority of the hierarchy which ordained him. They did not want one who also rejected the other dogmatic teachings on faith and morals. Not surprisingly, that is what they got.

I don’t suppose that it will become apparent to these parishioners anytime soon that they are simply reaping the inevitable consequences of their actions.  What they are seeing is the natural result of their initial denial of the truth of the authority of the Bishop over their parish.

They may have in fact lost their parish as the priest has brought in enough new dissenters, such that the original dissenters are now outnumbered. The new dissenters want to keep the priest because he has open communion, including for those who have divorced and remarried and for those who live a same sex attraction disordered lifestyle.  He also attended the attempted “ordination” of women as Catholic priests.

I cannot think of another case that has demonstrated so aptly and so quickly, the logical consequence of Protestant rebellion. Once the principle of Church organization/hierarchical authority has been ruptured, there is nothing left but the arbitrary will of those remaining to keep a community, in any degree, in union with the teachings of Christ.  St. Stanislaus, pray for us!

I have long believed that the problems that Bishop Braxton has faced in Belleville, IL since his installation were motivated by his orthodoxy and demands for fidelity to the faith. Now comes further evidence that this is so. Many have probably already read the Bishop’s Holy Thursday letter, but if not here is a link to it along with some relevant snippets:

There was, however, one experience associated with my Installation celebration that is unknown to you. It is something that I have kept to myself for nearly three years. I now think it might be helpful for you, the Christian Faithful, to know about this experience. Just days before my Installation, the Administrator of the Diocese informed me that a group of priests wanted to meet with me in the rectory of what would soon be my Cathedral Church. I went to the meeting with no knowledge of what the meeting was about. The meeting was with a group of priests who I did not know at all, having never met them or spoken to them before. They certainly did not know me. To my surprise, the purpose of the meeting was to inform me that I should reject the appointment by the Holy Father to be your Bishop that I should cancel the Installation ceremony and step aside so that a more suitable Bishop could be chosen. For a period of more than two hours, these priests told me that there was a “firestorm of hatred” against me in Belleville, that I was not welcome here, that I would never be welcome here, that very few people would attend my Installation, and that they had investigated my history and could not find even one person from anyplace where I have served around the country who had anything positive to say about me. They also told me they had incriminating information against me which might be released, if I did not heed their words. They were quite insistent that I had no choice but to leave.

I listened to their entire startling presentation without interrupting any of the speakers. Before I spoke, I asked if everyone had finished with their comments. I then informed them that it is the unique ministry of our Holy Father, the Pope, to appoint and transfer bishops, or to ask for their resignations. No one else in the Church has the authority or the responsibility to do so. I told them that in my life as a Priest and as a Bishop I have always sought to be completely obedient to the Holy Father and completely faithful to the magisterium of the Church. I stated clearly that it was my intention to serve the Diocese faithfully for as long as the Holy Father wanted me to do so. I now repeat to you today what I said to this group of priests. It is my intention to serve as Bishop of the Diocese of Belleville for as long as the Holy Father wants me to do so. Shortly after this meeting, perhaps unprecedented in the history of the Church in the United States, I received an anonymous phone call on my private line. The message was simple. “We will not rest until we get rid of you.” Recently, I received the same message from the same anonymous caller. I have shared this experience with you with some hesitance. However, it may help you to understand more recent experiences.

One need not venture very far to guess who these priests might have been as they have signed their names regularly and publicly to complaints against the Bishop since he first arrived.  Bishop Braxton ends his letter with words from St. Thomas More indicating that he will remain faithful to the Holy Father and the Church even in the face of this white martyrdom to which he is being subjected.  Please pray for Bishop Braxton and the Diocese of Belleville.

“How does it feel to be a pregnant man?”(link to “gay” news website - Advocate) Thomas writes in the article. “Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child . . . I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family.”

The fantasy of changing one’s personal meaning by changing one’s gender is derived from the fallacious belief that sexuality somehow frees us from our bondage to fear, inadequacies and despair. There is the tendency among many of us to cling to what can be lost or taken away, but there are those among us who invest their total being into these fears to the point where there can be no rest or satisfaction of ever receiving enough in return. To carry the burden of an external locus of control, one lives life with the constant feelings of being controlled by the actions of others and blown about by the whims of the world - being terrified of the bitter taste of losing or being denied of whatever is held in high value to them, some to the point of life itself.

Gender roles and identities are ultimately formed through the individual mind as experienced within the world which immediately surrounds us; consequently, some of us fail to recognize the potential fraud of assuming an identity in the first place. Constrained by deep insecurities and fears through reacting against the reality of one’s own sexual identity, some cling to a fantasy of there being something “wrong” with the external body vs. something being “wrong” internally, within the heart and mind. Simply speaking, Gender Identity Disorder is more of a rejection and abandonment of who one is, than the adoption of who and what one desires to be.

“Be not afraid,” because “each of us is the result of a thought of God, each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary”. - Pope Benedict XVI

I really like the ole, pseduo-Chinese proverb:

He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a student; teach him.

He who knows and knows that he knows is a teacher; follow him.

He who knows but knows not that he knows is asleep; awaken him.

He who knows not, but knows not that he knows not is a fool; fear him.

This proverb has come to mind quite a bit recently. I have been commiserating with colleagues lately about a number of issues that range from the students that we teach to the catechists that we are trying to form. Both have given us much room for discussion. In one enterprise, we have developed a new online catechetical formation program that we have directed toward students. catechists and catechetical leaders. First, I must say that we have been gratified by the response of those who have an intense desire for learning their faith. However, for everyone of these there are others who believe that all learning should be easy, entertaining, and an opportunity to emote with what they “think” (read feel) about that with which they are presented.

This is the response from not a few students of undergraduate age. That is to be expected. However, when similar attitudes are presented by the much older adult catechists and catechetical leaders who have taken it upon themselves to help teach the faith, one becomes a bit more jaundiced about the prospects for a springtime anytime soon.

Thus, when Shawn forwarded me this post by Barbara Nicolosi I decided that I would have to share it. After all, misery loves company. Here are some snippets:

I’m always pretty sharp in my critique of the Boomer Generation. I think they inherited a pretty good world and then selfishly screwed up so much that it will take a hundred years to even figure out where they left us. But, just to keep things balanced, it’s time to set the penetrating gaze on Gen X. (Of course, Gen X’s problems can mostly be laid at the feet of the Boomers, but whatever…) As somebody who has been teaching undergrads and twenty-somethings for the last decade, I have a lot of observations here. Maybe in a subsequent post I’ll flesh them out.

But let me start with one of the most serious issues that I see in Gen X. Let’s call it, “Defiantly Ignorant.” Simply put, one of the things that marks Gen Xers is the way they apprehend attempts to educate them as an assault on their personal dignity. Not everybody, but it is a generational trend. My experience with my students is that they are nearly incapable of debate, because every time you disagree with them, you suddenly find yourselves in a battle with their emotional survival. It makes many of them invincibly ignorant, I’m afraid.

An example of this comes up every time I teach Gen Xer’s this class I’ve got on the nature of beauty. Invariably, after I have gone through the three elements of the beautiful from St. Thomas - wholeness, harmony and radiance - one of the undergrads will prop a limp elbow into the air - what is it with this generation that even asking a question in class has to be a statement on how ambivalent they are about even being there? - and then he or she will issue forth, “I don’t agree.”

And then I respond, pretending all the while that this is the first time I’ve heard the astonishingness, “You don’t agree that there are elements to the beautiful? Okay, cool. Give me an argument.”

“Well, I think, you know, that any body can just decide what, you know, they like.”

“That’s not an argument.”

“I don’t need to give you an argument. It’s what I think. I have a right to my opinion.”

AHHHHHHHHHHH. There it is. The “rights” thing. And the abuse of the word “think.” There isn’t thinking going on here. There is resentment and petulance and the need to assert one’s existence. But it ain’t thinking. A huge inhibitor to great art coming out from the young generations today is that the assertion of knowable truth (including all of the skills that go into excellence of craft) comes off to Gen Xers and Millenials as an assault on their autonomy and personhood.

This is exactly on target. The intellects of young people these days seem to made in mush-melons with this deficient pedagogy that promotes the idea that everything a student says must be affirmed. Correction (unless it is a politically incorrect locution) is absolutely verboten. I would argue that this arises from the late-modern (aka post-modern) fantasy that one can create his own reality through the force of his will (ala Nietzsche and Sartre) combined with the sixties era confusion that supposes the solution to all the world’s problems is to be found through self-affirmation. But that is what we are left with.

Some have said that those involved in my enterprise today at the undergraduate level are greatly encumbered by being delivered with minds which are tabulae rasae. I would that this were the case. One could build from a blank slate. The problem today is that one has the problem of first dismantling a world view that confuses concupiscent emoting for critical thinking and before he may cultivate thinking skills. The latter takes effort and time, for neither of which does the hyperstimulated generation of today have much patience. Barbara would agree with this I suspect:

So, the two-part cause of the problem that is keeping Gen xers from adding anything really profound to the lasting cultural canon, is first that they have been so abysmally educated, that they live in chronic, probably insurmountbale double ignorance. They don’t know, and they don’t know that they don’t know. A reflection of double ignorance in Gen Xer storytelling is that they tend to say profound and then banal things back to back, and they really don’t know the difference. They don’t know when they are actually skirting and even ripping off great ideas that have been out there for three thousand years. And reciprocally, they don’t know what “obvious” means. (When I was in college, it was a funny insult to say that someone had “a keen sense of the obvious.” Today, I would kill for a room of students with that quality.)

[snip]

Secondly, they have been so wounded by the flailings around of their Boomer parents, that they are often simmering pools of resentment with the craven idol of their own hurt feelings relentlessly jerking them around. So, they don’t know, and it HURTS THEIR FEELINGS THAT THEY DON’T KNOW. When I correct my students for bad grammar, they tell me it hurts their feelings. When I call a young employee into my office for not doing her job well, she complains that it is a violation of her feelings. When I gave a student a completely unemotional notice that he had already missed his requisite three unexcused classes, he became pouty and petulant and told me I was harsh and didn’t understand him.

Yes, well sometimes reeducating these young (and unfortunately also the not so young) minds seems like a Quixotian enterprise. One is sometimes tempted to give up. It is then that I remember Mother Teresa reminder that God calls us to fidelity, not success. Then it becomes much easier to live with the marginal impact one gets to see that he makes and it becomes less burdensome to fear the masses whom we attempt to serve as they continue in the ignorance of what they do not know . . .