Witnesses = Martyrs

First Martyrs of the Church of Rome (d. 68)

Lord, make me more like 'Anna'

If you want to understand the central message of my book, A Little Guide for Your Last Days, here it is:

VATICAN CITY, JUNE 28, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's visit last Sunday to San Giovanni Rotondo, where Padre Pio is buried, served to disclose the meaning of pain, a Vatican spokesman affirmed.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, noted in his weekly editorial on the Vatican Television program "Octava Dies," the "unforgettable" witness made by a woman named Anna who greeted the Pontiff during the daytrip.

"The Pope's travels are not only important because of what the Pope says and does, but also because of the sentiments and words that they stir up [in others]," the spokesman said.

Anna met the Holy Father at the entrance of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza (Home to Relieve Suffering), established by St. Pio of Pietrelcina, popularly known as Padre Pio.

"I didn’t ask myself, 'Why me?'" she told the Pope, when recounting how she reacted to a diagnosis of cancer. "But instead I said to myself, 'Why not me?'"

She said that she would pray, "God, what plan do you have for me?"

"Like the Virgin and so many other worthy and holy people," continued Anna, "I didn’t want to rebel, but wanted to say: 'Here I am. I'm ready.'"

Read more here.

BXVI - Adult Faith

Breathe some fresh air wafted from the high regions of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

Yesterday evening Pope Benedict XVI said,

"Speaking against the Magisterium of the Church is presented as courageous. In reality, however, it does not take courage for this, since you can always be sure of audience applause."

"Rather it takes courage to adhere to the faith of the Church, even if it contradicts the 'scheme' of the contemporary world," said the Pope. "It is this non-conformism of the faith that Paul calls an 'adult faith.'"

Read all of It is a Childish Faith to Oppose the Church Teaching on Life and Family.

Sts Paul and Peter

Two Scholars Disputing (Peter and Paul) - Rembrandt

Hope amid the ruins

The countryside of Tolkien and the south country of Belloc are gone. The workmen of Belbury are ubiquitous, slovenly, leering, and filthy-mouthed. The inns are torn down. The shrieking, bizarre foes of Christendom - and of Catholic truth - accost her relentlessly and gleefully, the darlings of mainstream media cameras.

Where is the place for men - and sons - to stand among the ruins?

At the Altar
And there, kneel,
Pledging fealty and fidelity
To the Once and Future
King of kings and Lord of lords.
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Marriage and Family - First Things

I posted a longer essay on the Public Square blog, the front window of the First Things site. Marriage, I contend is not a “right,” but a condition, an “estate,” as the Book of Common Prayer says it is: a human mating pair attains the condition of marriage by entering a holy congregation as bridge and groom, uniting the reproductive activity of man and woman with the eschatological hope for eternal life of the faith community. We fight off death in two ways: by raising children, and by expectation of salvation. Marriage unites both of these into a single condition. It uniquely fulfills our human nature, our need for eternal life. Without holy matrimony the human race will die, as portions of it already are dying in countries whence faith has been banished.

[ ... ]

This may be the first time in Western history in which the sacred foundation of society, whose irreducible fundamental unit is the family, faces explicit opposition. If militant secularism succeeds in banishing the sacred from social life, we will lose heart and perish, as the tragic victims of communism are perishing. There is nothing to be done for the infertile, aging peoples of the former Soviet empire. The best thing one can do for them is not to be like them. Secular Western Europe already has one foot in the demographic grave. If we lose the sacred in the United States, we will follow them into Sheol. We might as well make a stand now over the sacred character of marriage, because there is nowhere to fall back from here.

- David P. Goldman is associate editor of First Things.

New Catholic Manliness

(A) funny thing happened on the way to a testosterone-free Church, beginning perhaps in the early 1980s: Following a trail blazed first by Evangelical Protestants, in what appears to be part of another historical correction, manly Catholicism — chastened and wiser — began to make a modest comeback. Let us look at some examples of Catholic manhood's counter-offensive, how it is manifesting itself in different areas of Church life, and what it may mean for its future.

"Where did it begin? Right in the bosom of the family," says Tarek Saab, founder of Lionheart Apparel ...

Read all of The New Catholic Manliness.

Little Reality Check

If you are not only looking for a good non-fiction summer read, but a "reality check" and small book of life lessons, click to your upper right on A Little Guide for Your Last Days (see it up there? click on the image). Cheers, and God bless!

Caravaggio

Saint Matthew and the Angel (1602) - Caravaggio

Light Shining in Darkness

A Corpus Christi Procession winds through a post-modern, dumbed-down suburb, proclaiming the miracle of the Eucharist. Note well the catholic - universal - nature of the participants. They come from every race and ethnic group. [ht: Curt Jester]

Kids Don't Try This at Home

Ht: Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys

Ouch

Appeaser-in-chief gets nose swatted for showing a little - a very little - backbone.

Come Home Out of the Storm

It becomes increasingly apparent that as the sacrificial vortex tightens and increases its velocity that the shreds of a Christ-haunted West will soon be totally unrecognizable. Our commander-in-chief while trying to maintain an above-the-fray mien is merely the froth on the cauldron; meaning, his leadership is a microcosm of the vortex itself. The professorial aloofness may be calming, but it bespeaks the professional priest-class nature of leadership he has assumed. In terms of the primitive sacred, let that last sentence sink in with every possible meaning.

And a host of special interests - from Greens/climate changers to ACORN types - claim prestige and therefore power. None claim truth, however. The vortex doesn't allow for truth; only prestige and power.

But please believe me on this: I do not question their sincerity, just their shamelessness. Every merely human utopian project has ended ... badly.

If persons want to reclaim anthropological (who we are as persons imago dei), epistemological (a grasp of real truth and certitude), ontological (a knowledge of our source and being, God), and soteriological (the Way of eternal salvation) mooring while living in the time of such cultural meltdown, there is only one place to find it.

Stinkin' Luciferian Thinkin'

Personally, I am opposed to ( fill in the blank ), but I don’t want to impose my moral values on others.

Scouting Sans Mischief

Things are getting so absolutely crazy, I am glad that I was a Boy Scout, Troop #69, Elkhart, Indiana.

Be Prepared is our Scouting motto. I have survived a Brown Bear attack (or encounter - it drew blood) at Philmont National Scout Ranch. I have a bow saw (MUCH better than a hand ax, trust me on this) and all the skills proffered by Scouting.

If you haven't whittled, started a fire, slept chin up under the stars, done your duty to God and to country, more's the pity.

After the Whirlwind, the Still Small Voice

My last post at Chronicles might have been misleading. It would be wrong to think that the analytical psychology of Carl G. Jung is a monolithic hermeneutical instrument (the personal unconscious work is fine; the collective unconscious hypothesis is balderdash at best, demonic at worst).

In truth, C. S. Lewis grasped President I Won more inclusively in his stupendously prescient work That Hideous Strength. Think of Lord Feverstone but wayy out of his depth - a functional atheist/pragmatist who is an astute politician and practitioner of the ways of the world.

What he and his ilk - and, I might add, the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran - do not factor in is a divine justice that is strictly and manifestly vouchsafed by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Men's hearts and minds are changed from within, not by the power and force of the state or the primitive sacred ("that hideous strength"). This the Christian faith knows. This is the truth that sets men free. This and this alone.

I would say, if I were given the occasion: Mr. President, "there are more things in Heaven and Earth [...] Than are dream't of in your (political) philosophy."

Why Do We Celebrate the Birth of John the Baptist?

In this month’s issue of Magnificat, Father Peter John Cameron, OP, provides a great litany for why we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist.

The nativity of Saint John the Baptist is a sacred reminder of the fact that I need born in my life every day:

* someone who leaps with joy before the presence of the Lord making me want to live my own relationship with Jesus with greater ardor and fervor;

* someone to prepare the way of the Lord and to give me knowledge of salvation through forgiveness of my sins;

* someone who turns my attention away from my distractions and preconceptions so that I will behold the Lamb of God as the true desire of my heart;

* someone who models for me that there is no greater joy in my life than for Jesus to increase and for me to decrease, especially as regards my self-reliance, my self-assertion, my self-importance;

* someone who is a burning and shining lamp whose radiance gives light to my path and courage to my heart, making me want to live for others;

* someone so committed to the truth that he is willing to lay down his life for the Truth-become-flesh - witnessing to me that all true happiness comes through self-sacrifice;

* someone whose sanctity proclaims that there is no man born of woman greater than he is but that I can share his greatness if I love Jesus as he did.

In the tender compassion of our God, the Dawn from on high has broken upon us through the birth of John the Baptist. - Father Peter John Cameron, OP


I read this over and over and found that each time re-reading I was identifying with yet another from Fr Cameron's list of reminders why I need born in my life and every day the birth of John the Baptist.

Sts Thomas More and John Fisher

From his book Captive Flames, here are commemorative words about Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher:

St. Thomas More had no lack of plausible excuses if he had wanted to avoid the crown of martyrdom; no lack of sincere people who urged him to take refuge in them. Never, I suppose, was man so tempted both by friends and foes to abandon his purpose. His own wife, his own daughter took the part of his enemies, and entered into a loving conspiracy to save him from himself. But to friend and foe alike he opposed the impenetrable wall of his good-natured banter.

You see, he realized, long before other men of his time, that what stood before England was a complete parting of the ways. He saw that, in the conditions of his time, you must needs throw in your lot either with the old faith or with the heresies that were beginning to spring up all over Europe; that a nation which defied the authority of the Pope, although it might do so merely in the name of national independence, would be forced, sooner or later, into the camp of the heretic.

You see, he [More] realized, long before other men of his time, that what stood before England was a complete parting of the ways. He saw that, in the conditions o fhis time, you must needs throw in your lot either with the old faith or with the heresies that were beginning to spring up all over Europe; that a nation which defied the authority of the Pope, although it might do so merely in the name of national independence, would be forced, sooner or later, into the camp of the heretic. It is amazing to us, looking back upon all the intervening centuries have brought, that so many good men of that age – men who were afterwards confessors for the faith – were hoodwinked for the moment into following the King when he incurred the guilt of schism. But perhaps if were could think ourselves back rather more successfully into the conditions of the time, we should pardon them the more readily; and for that reason we should feel even greater admiration for the few men who, like our martyr, were wise enough to see what was happening. It was a time of national crisis, a time of intellectual ferment. There were only a few people who kept their heads, and those few who kept their heads lost their heads, like St. Thomas More.

… Let us thank God’s mercy for giving us the example and the protection of a great Saint, our own fellow-countryman, who knew how to absorb all that was best in the restless culture of his day, yet knew at once, when the time came, that he must make a stand here; that he must give no quarter to the modern world here. His remembrance has long been secure in the praise of posterity; it only remained for us to be assured by the infallible voice of the Church, what we could not doubt already, that he is with our Blessed Lady and the Saints in heaven. He knows our modern needs, let us turn to him in our modern troubles; his prayers will not be lacking for the great country he loved so, for the great city in which he lived and died. ...

Let us praise God, then, for our English martyrs, Thomas More and John Fisher and the Charterhouse monks, and, from Blessed Cuthbert Mayne onward, the long line of proscribed and hunted priests. Men of our blood, they have left sayings which ring more familiarly to us than the translated pieties of the Continent; men of our latter-day civilization, they stand our with more of human personality than the mist-wreathed heroes of the medieval world. And surely, if they have not forgotten among those delights of the eternity the soft outlines and the close hedgerows and the little hills of the island that gave them birth; if in contemplating the open face of God, they have not ceased to take thought for the well-loved kingdom that exiled and disowned them, the patiently evangelized people that condemned and hurried them to the gallows, their prayers still rise especially, among all the needs of a distracted world, for the souls we love whom error blinds or sin separates from God.

— Monsignor Ronald Knox, Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes (Ignatius Press, 2001; originally published in 1940).

Beware the Doghouse

My favorite guy commercial. Forgive the overlap [ht: Mercatornet]

Now the Green Blade Riseth (?)

Does anyone truly understand what is happening in post-presidential election Iran? Does this explain anything?

I think perhaps it does. What I see, on the one hand, is a huge public disappointment with the religious leaders who they believe - rightly or wrongly - abused the trust of the people, allowing an unfair, rigged election to occur. On the other hand, I see a plaintive effort to say to those religious leaders, "Play fair! Be the religious leaders we believed, we hoped you were and you can still be!"

C. S. Lewis posited for inspection his personal findings of versions of The Golden Rule in nearly all the writings of human civilization - Treat others they way you want to be treated. (Cf. The Abolition of Man)

In this way, it may be said, the Holy Spirit is not without witness in all the world, a blessed and holy seed of the Gospel that - sometimes - is only released in the fierce heat of a forest fire of tumult.

Now is such a time in Iran. Who could have foreseen it? Is President I Won right to assume a largely laissez fair attitude? Yes, I think so, bipartisan sniping and deconstruction aside. He sees what is happening; he is a politician. Grandstanding and waving the flag of democracy is cartoon-esque.

Let's see if the Holy Spirit will fan different flames than those of mere crowd contagion in Iran.