The Beatitudes are the most familiar part of the New Testament. People can usually cite at least a couple of them & some bits of the Sermon on the Mount. 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth', for instance, was amusingly inverted in the song for "Camelot", "The Seven Deadly Virtues", with Mordred signing "It's not the earth the meek inherit, it's the dirt!"
'Blessed are the poor in spirit' goes against the idea of self-esteem. Being poor in spirit means having no such thing. All therapeutic guides insist that people need a sense of self-worth, but to be poor in spirit means to be indifferent to that notion altogether, not to regard one's own gifts or presence as valuable or desirable.
'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God' is likewise alien to the present time. For one thing, when people hear the word "purity" all they think of is absence of sexual relations, and they think of it as a kind of lunacy. But the purity is an absence of heterogenous motives & materials in one's way of feeling & thinking of God & the world -- of an absence of ulterior motives & suspicions about the designs of others, a reluctance to believe bad things about others, even when evidence obliges one to accept that those things are true.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
The Little Flower
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, known to Catholics as the Little Flower or St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus & the Holy Face, entered my life in the late 1990s. I had passed Lisieux, where her Carmelite congregation of nuns remains, in 1995, but knew little about her. But in 2000 her remains were brought to the United States in an attempt to shore up faith here. For Catholics, a saint is someone who has a more active life after death than before it. They aren't canonized because they simply showed holiness -- many people show holiness -- but because in addition to holiness, they continue the ministry, often even expanding it, that they had while they were in their bodies.
Three or four years ago, as my mother's lung problems forced her to retire, I asked St. Thérèse to take care of her soul & body. Perhaps had she wholly quit smoking, St. Thérèse might have worked a miracle of healing; but even saints have limited power to heal when those they pray for refuse to change their unhealthy behavior.
But she certainlty took care of my mother's soul. Mom had remained religiously neutral her whole life. Her best friends growing up were Catholic, but her mother had left the Church as a girl and her father had extreme antipathy for the Church. As a result, she stayed, when she could, in the least controversial form of worship, and she only had sporadic outbreaks of those. She went to a local church with my father when they needed to patch up their marriage; and after he died, she left that behind after a couple of years. She had a short span of attending another nearby church; but once the pastor there left, she likewise departed.
When she was taken, unconscious and barely breathing, to a local hospital, the prognosis was bad from the outset. But a eucharistic minister arrived from our parish asking whether she wanted communion while she was still in the Emergency unit. "She's not Catholic" I said. "She's on my list" he responded. I was stunned. She must have put herself down on one of her last visits to the hospital. My sister later said "Oh yes, when some nice old ladies came by to ask her what minister she wanted if she needed, she said 'Put me with the Catholics' ". That evening, I asked a priest to come by to give her extreme unction (I hate the 'anointing of the sick' neologism) & he did. When he finished he said quietly "She is going to God now." When she died a couple days later, a wheelchair bound priest who had been ordained before she was born gave her final prayers and anointing.
This was all the doing of a young woman who died young and became a globally-recognized saint. Confined to her small scope in life, she is indefatigable now. I began to become attached to the Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, and this deepened the devotion I already had to St. Thérèse. To know that my mother, who avoided all theology and all controversy and all definite religious questions in her life, asked to be "put with the Catholics" was astonishing. For her, that was the equivalent of an enyclical, or even of the Summa Theologica, and truly exemplifies St. Thérèse's "little way".
Three or four years ago, as my mother's lung problems forced her to retire, I asked St. Thérèse to take care of her soul & body. Perhaps had she wholly quit smoking, St. Thérèse might have worked a miracle of healing; but even saints have limited power to heal when those they pray for refuse to change their unhealthy behavior.
But she certainlty took care of my mother's soul. Mom had remained religiously neutral her whole life. Her best friends growing up were Catholic, but her mother had left the Church as a girl and her father had extreme antipathy for the Church. As a result, she stayed, when she could, in the least controversial form of worship, and she only had sporadic outbreaks of those. She went to a local church with my father when they needed to patch up their marriage; and after he died, she left that behind after a couple of years. She had a short span of attending another nearby church; but once the pastor there left, she likewise departed.
When she was taken, unconscious and barely breathing, to a local hospital, the prognosis was bad from the outset. But a eucharistic minister arrived from our parish asking whether she wanted communion while she was still in the Emergency unit. "She's not Catholic" I said. "She's on my list" he responded. I was stunned. She must have put herself down on one of her last visits to the hospital. My sister later said "Oh yes, when some nice old ladies came by to ask her what minister she wanted if she needed, she said 'Put me with the Catholics' ". That evening, I asked a priest to come by to give her extreme unction (I hate the 'anointing of the sick' neologism) & he did. When he finished he said quietly "She is going to God now." When she died a couple days later, a wheelchair bound priest who had been ordained before she was born gave her final prayers and anointing.
This was all the doing of a young woman who died young and became a globally-recognized saint. Confined to her small scope in life, she is indefatigable now. I began to become attached to the Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, and this deepened the devotion I already had to St. Thérèse. To know that my mother, who avoided all theology and all controversy and all definite religious questions in her life, asked to be "put with the Catholics" was astonishing. For her, that was the equivalent of an enyclical, or even of the Summa Theologica, and truly exemplifies St. Thérèse's "little way".
Unbeautiful America
I attended mass with friends last night. I usually don't go to 'vigil' masses, Saturday afternoon masses, but it was important to go with them. The homily was very good (it put their 7-year-old to sleep) but after the mass had ended, the hymn chosen was "America the Beautiful". I whispered to the 7-year-old's mother "That's not a hymn" and genuflected and left while the parishioners sang.
Singing 'America the Beautiful' these days is too much like the wicked Queen saying "Mirror, mirror, on the wall/Who's the fairest of them all?" The one mirror that will tell us that we are not a beautiful country is the faith given once for all to the apostles, and (in its better moments) the Church. Sadly, my diocese is all-too-caught up in right wing Americanism, with its idolatry of "freedom" -- by which is meant making a great deal of money and bombing and shooting people with darker skins on the other side of the globe -- and the struggle with a 'culture of death' -- by which they never mean the materialist militarist culture which they revel in -- to refuse to sing hymns to the communal self.
The Church is at all times beautiful, even when her officials may not be. But a country is only as beautiful as its ethical action, and America in this way is hideous to behold, uglier even when her citizens claim to hold the moral high ground than when they don't think at all about such things.
Singing 'America the Beautiful' these days is too much like the wicked Queen saying "Mirror, mirror, on the wall/Who's the fairest of them all?" The one mirror that will tell us that we are not a beautiful country is the faith given once for all to the apostles, and (in its better moments) the Church. Sadly, my diocese is all-too-caught up in right wing Americanism, with its idolatry of "freedom" -- by which is meant making a great deal of money and bombing and shooting people with darker skins on the other side of the globe -- and the struggle with a 'culture of death' -- by which they never mean the materialist militarist culture which they revel in -- to refuse to sing hymns to the communal self.
The Church is at all times beautiful, even when her officials may not be. But a country is only as beautiful as its ethical action, and America in this way is hideous to behold, uglier even when her citizens claim to hold the moral high ground than when they don't think at all about such things.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
The Un-Autobiographical Catholic
While Protestant devotional literature abounds with people telling stories about their lives & themselves & their beliefs etc., Catholic spiritual life has an anti-autobiographical basis. The Imitation of Christ is one of the central books of devotion because the goal of Catholic life is to lose all personal detail and to be wholly taken into the internal life with Christ, to lose the world, not to further attach oneself to the world by telling the tale of one's journey through it. Books that talk about one's "spiritual journey" are always monuments to the ego of the person writing them. The sole reason Blessed John Henry Newman wrote Apologia pro vita sua was to defend Holy Church. His veracity and devotion to Truth was casually written off by Charles Kingsley as things that Catholics always sacrificed to become perverts (the Anglican/Episcopalian term of contempt which is still operative today, tho' they keep it mostly to themselves). The goal of the sacraments & the spiritual life in Christ is divesting oneself of the things which are always entwined with the ego & with the ambitions & scheming of this world, and nothing is more exemplary of the ego of anti-Catholics than the exaltation of the Self under the guise of proving oneself a disciple of Christ. Christ, God the Son and Crucified outcast & sacred Victim on the altar, is tricked out, in Protestant autobiography, with all the accoutrements the spiritual autobiographer has chosen for him. So when Protestants read Catholic autobiography, they're dissatisfied -- they want more juicy tidbits about the "spiritual journey" of the writer, and a lot more fulsome material about God, rather than what they are likely to find. They also completely misread the posthumous book of Mother Teresa's letters which talked about the absence of spiritual consolatoins, overlaying it with their own lack of faith, saying that Mother Teresa had doubts. She never had doubts: she had the agony of knowing that Christ was always present in the Host, but never experiencing this emotionally, imaginatively, or through any visionary comfort -- this was the consequence of a first visitation from Him & a vow to serve Him among the destitute. This is unintelligible from the Protestant position, which absolutely requires having effusive feelings about God and expressing those feelings, even imposing them on friends & family members whether they're welcome or not. All normal encounters, family reunions or chance conversations, become the Protestant's pretext for telling more stories about themselves, in absorbing the reality of the others' lives in order to firm up their authenticity as believers in Christ.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
'Why aren't you Catholic yet?'
For five hundred years, the fall of the Roman Catholic Church has been imminent, right around the corner, because she has been too corrupt & too cruel & too voluptuous & too removed from common life & too ascetic & too effeminate & too masculinist to survive.
Spanish troops sacked Rome to the delight of Luther. who was sure that the reign of the Antichrist that had trained him & fed him & his ancestors was at an end.
French Revolutionaries declared an end to the Church & expelled her from France & instituted a cult of Reason & Nature; Napoleon captured the papal states & Pope Pius VII, and it was certain then that the Church was finished.
Italian Revolutionaries decades later unified Italy under secular rule & Pope Pius IX spent his last years as 'prisoner of the Vatican' & it was certain that the power of the popes had gone with the papal state, and that the Church was at an end.
A German ambassador witnessing the installation of Pius XII, author of the anti-Nazi encyclical condemning the pagan state & its racism & brutality, said 'What a magnificent ceremony -- too bad it's the last one.' At the time, the Thousand Year Reich was already half done its course.
After the war during negotiations, Stalin smirked "The pope? How many divisions has the pope got?" The USSR is gone.
When I was a child, the Church began bleeding vocations as priests & religious left in droves and Catholics abandoned the faith because altars were being smashed & the ritual they had been taught was the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven all but vanished & devotion to the Mother of God had all but disappeared. The pope was irrelevant, the world was going to be new & full of peace & love, and the Roman Church was at an end.
Now I'm nearing my half-century, and the ancient rite of mass is slow growing again & all the forgotten devotions have returned, and again anti-Catholics cry down the Church & allege that all clergy are perverts & the pope a criminal, and once again, the Church is at an end.
Come back in 500 more years, and you'll find again the same story -- scandal, weakness, the Church rocked and wracked with uncertainty & anguish -- and the same prophets and victors crying 'Babylon the great is about to fall! She's going at last!' and the Church of the year 2510 will once more be about to fall.
And why aren't you a Catholic yet?
Spanish troops sacked Rome to the delight of Luther. who was sure that the reign of the Antichrist that had trained him & fed him & his ancestors was at an end.
French Revolutionaries declared an end to the Church & expelled her from France & instituted a cult of Reason & Nature; Napoleon captured the papal states & Pope Pius VII, and it was certain then that the Church was finished.
Italian Revolutionaries decades later unified Italy under secular rule & Pope Pius IX spent his last years as 'prisoner of the Vatican' & it was certain that the power of the popes had gone with the papal state, and that the Church was at an end.
A German ambassador witnessing the installation of Pius XII, author of the anti-Nazi encyclical condemning the pagan state & its racism & brutality, said 'What a magnificent ceremony -- too bad it's the last one.' At the time, the Thousand Year Reich was already half done its course.
After the war during negotiations, Stalin smirked "The pope? How many divisions has the pope got?" The USSR is gone.
When I was a child, the Church began bleeding vocations as priests & religious left in droves and Catholics abandoned the faith because altars were being smashed & the ritual they had been taught was the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven all but vanished & devotion to the Mother of God had all but disappeared. The pope was irrelevant, the world was going to be new & full of peace & love, and the Roman Church was at an end.
Now I'm nearing my half-century, and the ancient rite of mass is slow growing again & all the forgotten devotions have returned, and again anti-Catholics cry down the Church & allege that all clergy are perverts & the pope a criminal, and once again, the Church is at an end.
Come back in 500 more years, and you'll find again the same story -- scandal, weakness, the Church rocked and wracked with uncertainty & anguish -- and the same prophets and victors crying 'Babylon the great is about to fall! She's going at last!' and the Church of the year 2510 will once more be about to fall.
And why aren't you a Catholic yet?
Friday, April 2, 2010
Deliver us from evil
In the face of Obama's candidacy and election, the right wing has brought to a boil all the worst passions in supporters and voters, and we've seen them nightly on the news.
Now, however, it's the left wing in the US, which is deliberately bring to boil the worst passions in its supporters and voters, both in America & in Europe, with the oldest of appeals in American culture: hatred of the pope and the Catholic Church.
During the years when the crisis of the misuse of bishops' authority in treating & overlooking the crisis of sexual abuse in the clergy was in the press, I was in a crisis of my own concerning faith; but my own attachment to the Church made me feel the justice of the complaints made against many of her clerical officials. Faithful Catholics had been complaining ever since Vatican II that bishops were not responding to ANY of the concerns that they felt as bishops & theologians told them that they had to update their faith and open up to the World. Paul VI took a laissez-faire approach to all these problems, ignoring the discontent felt with the rite of mass, ignoring the absence of regular confession, ignoring the degree to which seminary teachers & bishops were neglecting priestly education & especially moral theology. He exiled or marginalized all of the critics who suggested that he was failing to uphold the faith, while standing firm only on two positions: the traditional teaching on ethics relating to sex & reproduction, and obedience to the pope only when it came to obedience to his own innovations in liturgical practice.
As Benedict XVI has worked against this problems, first as head of the Congregation of the Faith, for which he was continually scorned & cursed in the press for insisting that Catholic theologians teach Catholic theology, and laterally, as pope, that he & Church teaching in general somehow made possible the horrors committed without redress by Church authorities. Into the memory hole have gone all recollection that any time that the Vatican attempted to exercise more authority over bishops' conferences, bishops jealous of their own power and their allies in the press always attacked Cardinal Ratzinger or John Paul II for trying to exercise a retrograde & pre-Conciliar view of the papacy. Now, of course, the Vatican authorities are at fault for the very failure which heterodox bishops & anti-Catholic writers & media organizations demanded.
The author of this confusion is the fallen angel and his allies: first they sow sin, and then they blame the ones bringing the medicine for their lack of fidelity. And so for two decades, Catholics were told by the culture not to worry about sexual deviancy, and then when sexual deviants were ultimately exposed through the press, the prince of lies suggested that the sin was the consequence of the structure of the Body of Christ, not of the subversion of the authority of the Church from within.
What so many Catholics saw in the French revolution, during the oppression launched in Germany during the chancellorship of Bismarck during the Second Reich and continuing through the Third Reich, in France during the closing years of the 19th & the start of the 20th centuries, in Mexico and Spain in '10s, 20s and '30s, we now begin to see here in the US. Like the Catholics at that time who might have been active in implement the Church's teaching on social justice, but who fell victim of those who hated the Church because she was carrying out Christ's mission, so Catholics who've been critical of the failings of bishops & Vatican officials in recent years will likewise not be spared the fury of those who now feel wholly licensed to assault Catholics of all kinds, except those who deny the office of the Holy Father or the teaching of the Church.
The malice of sin is being unveiled for this generation just as Benedict XVI has been reviving the faithful to the mission of divine charity & redemption. The malice of sin is the very sign that his pastorship is having its effect: if it were not, the devils would be slumbering & those over whom the devils have power would not be indulging in the orgy of reproach, mockery, hatred, and incitement to violence that they are in these past few weeks.
The falsehoods of the headlines & the twisting of facts in order to make the fury justified carry the scent of sulphur, the longing for blood. It was the very longing for blood that Fr. Cantalamessa was decrying in his Good Friday homily -- which was immediately turned by the media into a new occasion for slandering the Holy Father & raising the accusations that this pope, whose family lived through the ordeals that German Catholics faced during the Nazi regime, is really just a neo-Nazi. Never mind that the laws of Hitler's Germany required the sterlization & murder of those judged unfit, that abortion was a means of weeding out the impure and the weak among the internal enemies of the state; never mind that two popes, Pius XI and Pius XII, were the objects of all the propaganda and deceit that Hitler's minions could muster. The contemporary world has adopted as its the lies produced, not just by Hitler, but by Stalin's and his successor's agents following the war; a saintly pope who protected all those it was in his power to protect or save from the agents of evil is now smeared as one of those conniving with it; and the man who was only 17 when the Nazi regime fell is condemned as a fellow-conspirator.
While Obama is cursed as the anti-Christ by vigilantes possessed by hatred, while he's in fact engaged Catholics on many levels (while not accepting the Church teaching as his own), so now the Church is once more cursed as the enemy of morality & as the guardian of depravity & cruelty, not by people who are truly concerned that justice be done, but those who believe that they aren't subject to God's judgment, that God does not exist, and that the holy faith is merely a means of keeping them from indulging all their own appetites and perversion. They assert that the popes & the Church as a whole are guilty, because they seek to follow Christ, and they reject as prejudice St. Paul's chastening words about the practices which bar the soul from the redemption of Christ & entrance into the kingdom of Heaven. For years, they have sought to slowly uncover those practices in the name of true ideals; and now that they've blunted & blinded many to the innate evil of those practices, and have won the approval of many for doing so, they look to take the next steps, to deafen souls to the appeal of Christ & to drag those who formerly would have renounced sin into temporal & eternal pits of misery & loss.
We've seen how readily dry souls respond to incitements to violence; the kindling among anti-Catholics is even drier, and the eagerness for violence, even among those who profess to be wanting peace, is greater.
The final part of the Lord's Prayer has never been as applicable in my lifetime as it is now: "Lead us not in the time of testing, and deliver us from evil."
Now, however, it's the left wing in the US, which is deliberately bring to boil the worst passions in its supporters and voters, both in America & in Europe, with the oldest of appeals in American culture: hatred of the pope and the Catholic Church.
During the years when the crisis of the misuse of bishops' authority in treating & overlooking the crisis of sexual abuse in the clergy was in the press, I was in a crisis of my own concerning faith; but my own attachment to the Church made me feel the justice of the complaints made against many of her clerical officials. Faithful Catholics had been complaining ever since Vatican II that bishops were not responding to ANY of the concerns that they felt as bishops & theologians told them that they had to update their faith and open up to the World. Paul VI took a laissez-faire approach to all these problems, ignoring the discontent felt with the rite of mass, ignoring the absence of regular confession, ignoring the degree to which seminary teachers & bishops were neglecting priestly education & especially moral theology. He exiled or marginalized all of the critics who suggested that he was failing to uphold the faith, while standing firm only on two positions: the traditional teaching on ethics relating to sex & reproduction, and obedience to the pope only when it came to obedience to his own innovations in liturgical practice.
As Benedict XVI has worked against this problems, first as head of the Congregation of the Faith, for which he was continually scorned & cursed in the press for insisting that Catholic theologians teach Catholic theology, and laterally, as pope, that he & Church teaching in general somehow made possible the horrors committed without redress by Church authorities. Into the memory hole have gone all recollection that any time that the Vatican attempted to exercise more authority over bishops' conferences, bishops jealous of their own power and their allies in the press always attacked Cardinal Ratzinger or John Paul II for trying to exercise a retrograde & pre-Conciliar view of the papacy. Now, of course, the Vatican authorities are at fault for the very failure which heterodox bishops & anti-Catholic writers & media organizations demanded.
The author of this confusion is the fallen angel and his allies: first they sow sin, and then they blame the ones bringing the medicine for their lack of fidelity. And so for two decades, Catholics were told by the culture not to worry about sexual deviancy, and then when sexual deviants were ultimately exposed through the press, the prince of lies suggested that the sin was the consequence of the structure of the Body of Christ, not of the subversion of the authority of the Church from within.
What so many Catholics saw in the French revolution, during the oppression launched in Germany during the chancellorship of Bismarck during the Second Reich and continuing through the Third Reich, in France during the closing years of the 19th & the start of the 20th centuries, in Mexico and Spain in '10s, 20s and '30s, we now begin to see here in the US. Like the Catholics at that time who might have been active in implement the Church's teaching on social justice, but who fell victim of those who hated the Church because she was carrying out Christ's mission, so Catholics who've been critical of the failings of bishops & Vatican officials in recent years will likewise not be spared the fury of those who now feel wholly licensed to assault Catholics of all kinds, except those who deny the office of the Holy Father or the teaching of the Church.
The malice of sin is being unveiled for this generation just as Benedict XVI has been reviving the faithful to the mission of divine charity & redemption. The malice of sin is the very sign that his pastorship is having its effect: if it were not, the devils would be slumbering & those over whom the devils have power would not be indulging in the orgy of reproach, mockery, hatred, and incitement to violence that they are in these past few weeks.
The falsehoods of the headlines & the twisting of facts in order to make the fury justified carry the scent of sulphur, the longing for blood. It was the very longing for blood that Fr. Cantalamessa was decrying in his Good Friday homily -- which was immediately turned by the media into a new occasion for slandering the Holy Father & raising the accusations that this pope, whose family lived through the ordeals that German Catholics faced during the Nazi regime, is really just a neo-Nazi. Never mind that the laws of Hitler's Germany required the sterlization & murder of those judged unfit, that abortion was a means of weeding out the impure and the weak among the internal enemies of the state; never mind that two popes, Pius XI and Pius XII, were the objects of all the propaganda and deceit that Hitler's minions could muster. The contemporary world has adopted as its the lies produced, not just by Hitler, but by Stalin's and his successor's agents following the war; a saintly pope who protected all those it was in his power to protect or save from the agents of evil is now smeared as one of those conniving with it; and the man who was only 17 when the Nazi regime fell is condemned as a fellow-conspirator.
While Obama is cursed as the anti-Christ by vigilantes possessed by hatred, while he's in fact engaged Catholics on many levels (while not accepting the Church teaching as his own), so now the Church is once more cursed as the enemy of morality & as the guardian of depravity & cruelty, not by people who are truly concerned that justice be done, but those who believe that they aren't subject to God's judgment, that God does not exist, and that the holy faith is merely a means of keeping them from indulging all their own appetites and perversion. They assert that the popes & the Church as a whole are guilty, because they seek to follow Christ, and they reject as prejudice St. Paul's chastening words about the practices which bar the soul from the redemption of Christ & entrance into the kingdom of Heaven. For years, they have sought to slowly uncover those practices in the name of true ideals; and now that they've blunted & blinded many to the innate evil of those practices, and have won the approval of many for doing so, they look to take the next steps, to deafen souls to the appeal of Christ & to drag those who formerly would have renounced sin into temporal & eternal pits of misery & loss.
We've seen how readily dry souls respond to incitements to violence; the kindling among anti-Catholics is even drier, and the eagerness for violence, even among those who profess to be wanting peace, is greater.
The final part of the Lord's Prayer has never been as applicable in my lifetime as it is now: "Lead us not in the time of testing, and deliver us from evil."
Saturday, March 27, 2010
The World, the Flesh, the Devil vs. the Church
The Lenten attack on Benedict XVI and on his response to the horrific abuse of priestly office among criminal abusers & their abbettors obliges me to confess my faith.
The Church is justified, wrote Chesterton, not because her children don't sin, but because they do. Anyone looking at these crimes & the cover-up who declines to recognize that those responsible for it labored to keep John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger in the dark is being dishonest and unjust.
The main failure of the Vatican authorities over the past four decades has been to take a laissez-faire approach to the various national councils of bishops: the national councils, intended to express "collegiality", were in large part responsible for removing any personal authority from individual bishops. Anyone who was acting more pro-actively to eliminate sexual criminals would've been tasked with being overzealous & giving scandal; all it took was for a few criminals within the national structures to dawdle, delay & extenuate crimes. And those very same dawdlers & obfuscators stand at the root of the neglect of the various sacraments which would have led earlier to the uncovery & elimination of the problem.
John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council to deal with problems that were real in the Church; but instead of a Council aimed at explicitly rejecting the remedies of the world, the bishops signed onto optimistic & concilatory statements that largely pleased the enemies of the faith. Instead of tenaciously holding to the faith that they had learned, the teaching authorities re-cast teaching in a less confrontational form, a form which still displeased those who wanted the Church & the faith to disappear entirely.
As bishops' conferences and diocesan seminaries and religious orders abandoned their obligations for a kinder, gentler catholicism with a small 'c', the wolves, already present, began to prey more brazenly on the flocks. Laxity & absence of vigilance were the word of the day; instead of carrying out the commission to preach, baptize & convert, the authorities chose 'dialogue' and 'a common path' with those whose sole purpose is ending the Church under the successor St. Peter altogether.
The Church is justified, wrote Chesterton, not because her children don't sin, but because they do. Anyone looking at these crimes & the cover-up who declines to recognize that those responsible for it labored to keep John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger in the dark is being dishonest and unjust.
The main failure of the Vatican authorities over the past four decades has been to take a laissez-faire approach to the various national councils of bishops: the national councils, intended to express "collegiality", were in large part responsible for removing any personal authority from individual bishops. Anyone who was acting more pro-actively to eliminate sexual criminals would've been tasked with being overzealous & giving scandal; all it took was for a few criminals within the national structures to dawdle, delay & extenuate crimes. And those very same dawdlers & obfuscators stand at the root of the neglect of the various sacraments which would have led earlier to the uncovery & elimination of the problem.
John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council to deal with problems that were real in the Church; but instead of a Council aimed at explicitly rejecting the remedies of the world, the bishops signed onto optimistic & concilatory statements that largely pleased the enemies of the faith. Instead of tenaciously holding to the faith that they had learned, the teaching authorities re-cast teaching in a less confrontational form, a form which still displeased those who wanted the Church & the faith to disappear entirely.
As bishops' conferences and diocesan seminaries and religious orders abandoned their obligations for a kinder, gentler catholicism with a small 'c', the wolves, already present, began to prey more brazenly on the flocks. Laxity & absence of vigilance were the word of the day; instead of carrying out the commission to preach, baptize & convert, the authorities chose 'dialogue' and 'a common path' with those whose sole purpose is ending the Church under the successor St. Peter altogether.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
The Catastrophe of Nature
Global climate catastrophe is the most forceful example of the basic danger of having nothing but Nature, and human ability to manipulate Nature, to rely on, even in matters of this life. Unrestrained human appetites are bringing the house down around our ears. The builders & sellers of technology were going to raise human beings above all the sufferings of even our recent ancestors: collectively, we've knocked holes the very tent which has protected & sustained life, through runaway material progress.
But instead of equating damaged physical nature with our damaged human nature, to show the former inevitably follows the latter, many who purport to hold normative Christian teaching concerning man's place in Nature & the effects of transgressing divine wisdom deny the very existence of the phenomenon that gives these teachings new force. Instead, the evidence that shows what damage has been done, and what further catastrophes are coming, are dismissed as delusions of a Nature-cult, of an alleged (and sometimes real) contemporary worship of planetary ecology. The climate-catastrophe deniers are devout believers in the very technological demi-paradise which they ought to hold in derision. To love God above all things ought to clarify how limited even the universe is: even the resources of all the galaxies combined are finite, not infinitely exploitable.
But instead of equating damaged physical nature with our damaged human nature, to show the former inevitably follows the latter, many who purport to hold normative Christian teaching concerning man's place in Nature & the effects of transgressing divine wisdom deny the very existence of the phenomenon that gives these teachings new force. Instead, the evidence that shows what damage has been done, and what further catastrophes are coming, are dismissed as delusions of a Nature-cult, of an alleged (and sometimes real) contemporary worship of planetary ecology. The climate-catastrophe deniers are devout believers in the very technological demi-paradise which they ought to hold in derision. To love God above all things ought to clarify how limited even the universe is: even the resources of all the galaxies combined are finite, not infinitely exploitable.
Monday, November 16, 2009
world, flesh & devil
Jesus warns us that he comes to bring a sword -- not the sword of war, but the sword which divides us from our false selves. By declaring that members of families would be against each other, he idnicates how far he is from something called 'family values': such values are actually the enemy of those who desire to follow Christ. When a cleric or pastor or preacher declares himself in favor of 'family values,' he shows how little he grasps the gospel. The entire Old Testament demonstrates the division of father against son, brother against brother: the Church is to be God's family, one of self-denial rather than of self-advancement, of renunciation rather than of exercise of force, of the Holy One who does not baptize nations but holds those from all nations in a baptism which repels all local regencies & powers.
While the hierarchy has always been fond of Crusades of various types, the centrifuge of history distills the power lust from the desire to undo the works of the flesh in one's self, regardless of what the surrounding society may or may not sanction. The attempt to coerce the state back into conformity to decrees of the Church is an attempt to mix what the Spirit has separated: human beings no longer trust the state as such, which is a sign of how deeply Christ & his crucifixion at the hands of the state & clerical authority have been ingrained in the global society; but we still long, not to share in his suffering & crucifixion, but to treat earth as if it were already, or potentially, Heaven. But the apocapyptic insanity that afflicts many of those who profess Christ currently -- "Armageddon, huzzah!" -- is equally alien to the gospel & the vision of the world's consummation given to St. John. Our Lord was sorrowful unto death -- he didn't want to drink the chalice, but accepted it because it was the Father's will, and therefore his own true will. Whenever the chalice comes to us to drink, we must drink it as well, if it's the Father's will -- but the frenzy of labelling Antichrists, especially the folly & brutal ignorance of the white-rightwing's slanders, transgresses the commandment & is a form of idolatry, implying that the reverse political figure represents Christ's Kingdom. Apocalyptism is thinly disguised love of the world, not joy at the prospect of Christ's second coming.
The world, flesh & devil are ingrained in our most common thoughts & desires: the flesh lusts against the spirit & the spirit (or Spirit) against the flesh, and we should be wary of any service to the flesh, as a temptation away from sharing in the Cross & being with Christ. If we do this joylessly, we demonstrate that we don't do it from love. When we fast, we must not do it as the hypocrites do, making a show of it: if we pray on street corners, or on television, or any place to demonstrate how faithful we are, we prove that we are faithless & loveless: we believe ourselves to be some sort of prophets or saints or exemplars, when we need to imitate the tax-gatherer beating his breast & asking for mercy.
While the hierarchy has always been fond of Crusades of various types, the centrifuge of history distills the power lust from the desire to undo the works of the flesh in one's self, regardless of what the surrounding society may or may not sanction. The attempt to coerce the state back into conformity to decrees of the Church is an attempt to mix what the Spirit has separated: human beings no longer trust the state as such, which is a sign of how deeply Christ & his crucifixion at the hands of the state & clerical authority have been ingrained in the global society; but we still long, not to share in his suffering & crucifixion, but to treat earth as if it were already, or potentially, Heaven. But the apocapyptic insanity that afflicts many of those who profess Christ currently -- "Armageddon, huzzah!" -- is equally alien to the gospel & the vision of the world's consummation given to St. John. Our Lord was sorrowful unto death -- he didn't want to drink the chalice, but accepted it because it was the Father's will, and therefore his own true will. Whenever the chalice comes to us to drink, we must drink it as well, if it's the Father's will -- but the frenzy of labelling Antichrists, especially the folly & brutal ignorance of the white-rightwing's slanders, transgresses the commandment & is a form of idolatry, implying that the reverse political figure represents Christ's Kingdom. Apocalyptism is thinly disguised love of the world, not joy at the prospect of Christ's second coming.
The world, flesh & devil are ingrained in our most common thoughts & desires: the flesh lusts against the spirit & the spirit (or Spirit) against the flesh, and we should be wary of any service to the flesh, as a temptation away from sharing in the Cross & being with Christ. If we do this joylessly, we demonstrate that we don't do it from love. When we fast, we must not do it as the hypocrites do, making a show of it: if we pray on street corners, or on television, or any place to demonstrate how faithful we are, we prove that we are faithless & loveless: we believe ourselves to be some sort of prophets or saints or exemplars, when we need to imitate the tax-gatherer beating his breast & asking for mercy.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Little Flower
Today -- well, yesterday now -- is the traditional date of the celebration of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Carmelite nun born Thérèse Martin & who died unknown outside her community at the age 24, but knew before she died that she was going to be known across the globe.
She embodies what's invisible, ungraspable outside the gambit of faith or the willingness to accept the gambit: that the real relations in the world are not at all what we can begin to calculate, even with the aid of all the nanocircuits across the globe and over it. A saint is someone who takes the Church & the world equally by surprise, as Sister Thérèse Martin did following her death. No clerics or prelates were asking for or pushing her as a saint; if anything, the theological & canonical experts could, at first, found what she wrote mundane and even a bit sentimental, put off by initial appearances.
All that is gold does not glitter
Not all those who wander are lost,
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached from the frost --
She embodies what's invisible, ungraspable outside the gambit of faith or the willingness to accept the gambit: that the real relations in the world are not at all what we can begin to calculate, even with the aid of all the nanocircuits across the globe and over it. A saint is someone who takes the Church & the world equally by surprise, as Sister Thérèse Martin did following her death. No clerics or prelates were asking for or pushing her as a saint; if anything, the theological & canonical experts could, at first, found what she wrote mundane and even a bit sentimental, put off by initial appearances.
All that is gold does not glitter
Not all those who wander are lost,
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached from the frost --
a la recherche du temps perdu
The value of time is unrealized until you realize that you've lost too much of it.
What useless objects I spent so much of my time thinking about, the phantoms of history, both history to come & history adumbrated in our texts & pages. Power is squandered by seeking to influence the powerful, who are alien to my heart & to the things that I've loved. The one insight buried in the banality of George Lucas' 'Revenge of the Sith' is the transformation of Anakin from the idealist who so painfully wants to protect what he loves that he regards all who love him as a threat & becomes a destroyer.
It's to be hoped one wakes up before losing three limbs & most of one's skin.
What useless objects I spent so much of my time thinking about, the phantoms of history, both history to come & history adumbrated in our texts & pages. Power is squandered by seeking to influence the powerful, who are alien to my heart & to the things that I've loved. The one insight buried in the banality of George Lucas' 'Revenge of the Sith' is the transformation of Anakin from the idealist who so painfully wants to protect what he loves that he regards all who love him as a threat & becomes a destroyer.
It's to be hoped one wakes up before losing three limbs & most of one's skin.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Ken Burns' at his best again in 'The National Parks'
The kids in elementary school who were ardent campers never seemed to be very pleasant. Early in life, we moved from a small suburb into a more heavily wooded area (now scarcely wooded at all, I understand) & we always had to travel by the deep waters of a reservoir. Decades later, "The Blair Witch Project" would capture my feeling about the woods of my home state, and about Nature (capital N) in general: I always feel like a stranger & intruder, not kindred at all, amazed & overwhelmed by beauty, but also sensing a huge antagonism from the life in these spaces.
The new series by Ken Burns on PBS has built a bridge to the natural world for me, by showing me the activity of those who, a century & more ago, saw the threat unchecked exploitation of resources posed to the immense & rare natural landscape of the country, and out of a love for it & for future generations, set out to do what they could to preserve it from being ravaged even further. The words of John Muir, of John Burroughs, of Theodore Roosevelt supply something that isn't in my temperament. For me, the awe has always been accompanied by a terror; partly, probably, from my feeling that mountains & rivers & forests are things without human language, apart from the human story. Through the narrative, written by Clayton Duncan, linked to these images, Ken Burns supplies the story that I haven't wished to discover on my own.
The new series by Ken Burns on PBS has built a bridge to the natural world for me, by showing me the activity of those who, a century & more ago, saw the threat unchecked exploitation of resources posed to the immense & rare natural landscape of the country, and out of a love for it & for future generations, set out to do what they could to preserve it from being ravaged even further. The words of John Muir, of John Burroughs, of Theodore Roosevelt supply something that isn't in my temperament. For me, the awe has always been accompanied by a terror; partly, probably, from my feeling that mountains & rivers & forests are things without human language, apart from the human story. Through the narrative, written by Clayton Duncan, linked to these images, Ken Burns supplies the story that I haven't wished to discover on my own.
Creation
Divine-Watchmaker sorts of arguments, in any guise, for God's existence leave me cold. What seems far more persuasive to me is the feeling that comes from the sense that comes to everyone at some point in their lives that the beauty we see, the intimacy we enjoy, the sudden overwhelming senes of what an astonishing thing it is simply To Be, makes us experience the world & creation as a gift, that a Giver specifically has handed it to us, and that this outweighs all other doubts & experiences & arguments. Just as Christ comes in a backwater stable & goes around with a dozen ill-equipped men teaching among a people under a foreign power, our clues to God come humbly, mounted on a donkey.
Monday, September 21, 2009
'Heart speaks to heart'
'Because of the increase of evildoing, the love of many will grow cold,' Jesus warns, as St. Matthew's gospel reports. It's part of a general warning that, because of persecution, many will be led into sin, will hate & betray each other, and false prophets will come & deceive many -- as a result, love, divine charity, will grow cold in the faithful.
St. Paul tells us what charity is in the famous passage in 1st Corinthians -- and this is the love that's to be practiced especially with regard to those who don't share our own faith. Even if people are up to their eyeballs in dreadful things, divine love prompts us to believe that whatever their sins or errors, they're seeking God & looking for truth. The opposite attitude is pride, the belief that we can never be "like that": but St. Paul warns us that we can fall, can be cut off from Christ, through the failure of love and its corollary, humility. Love is transient when it isn't joined to humility, to the recognition that we're fallible & changeable & wholly subject to our own passions & bigotries, without the help & mercy of God.
There is a mercilessness in the air in the U.S. and elsewhere, a madness that resembles something out of Dante's inferno. We can't drive it out: but we can make certain that it doesn't drive us. Heart needs to speak to heart, in hope & in humility, or the fiery gales will be fed by our own worst impulses.
St. Paul tells us what charity is in the famous passage in 1st Corinthians -- and this is the love that's to be practiced especially with regard to those who don't share our own faith. Even if people are up to their eyeballs in dreadful things, divine love prompts us to believe that whatever their sins or errors, they're seeking God & looking for truth. The opposite attitude is pride, the belief that we can never be "like that": but St. Paul warns us that we can fall, can be cut off from Christ, through the failure of love and its corollary, humility. Love is transient when it isn't joined to humility, to the recognition that we're fallible & changeable & wholly subject to our own passions & bigotries, without the help & mercy of God.
There is a mercilessness in the air in the U.S. and elsewhere, a madness that resembles something out of Dante's inferno. We can't drive it out: but we can make certain that it doesn't drive us. Heart needs to speak to heart, in hope & in humility, or the fiery gales will be fed by our own worst impulses.
"What is truth?" asked jesting Pilate . . .
" . . . and would not stay for answer."
Our drive to discover the truth is the defining characteristic of our nature: our capacity to reason, but more than just the capacity: the NEED for truth, and the irritation and anger we feel when we've been misled or duped or used by someone promoting something else.
The shadow that follows the truth is the delight in falsehood, misrepresentation, and the fruits of deceit, especially when the deceit is undetected: when people simply glory in a lie, and spread it eagerly, and make no attempt to discern whether it's true or false, but revel in it because they want to feel the force of a rebellion or a reaction, the power of an angry mob.
By making the search for information easier, the internet makes the discovery of truth harder. Instead of the labor involved in copying passages out for ourselves, a few keystrokes allow us to cut and paste a link or a series of paragraphs: there's no need to re-assess the material as we repeat it. Poisoned-pen letters & chain letters have nothing on email; recipients of the former might suspect more readily that the contents were unreliable; but with the excitement of being Paul Revere, people pass on emails now, and rouse all the worst passions, waking the shadow of truth, the appetite for lies that curls in us always ready for stimulation & food, ready to be poked, ready to spring into action.
Our drive to discover the truth is the defining characteristic of our nature: our capacity to reason, but more than just the capacity: the NEED for truth, and the irritation and anger we feel when we've been misled or duped or used by someone promoting something else.
The shadow that follows the truth is the delight in falsehood, misrepresentation, and the fruits of deceit, especially when the deceit is undetected: when people simply glory in a lie, and spread it eagerly, and make no attempt to discern whether it's true or false, but revel in it because they want to feel the force of a rebellion or a reaction, the power of an angry mob.
By making the search for information easier, the internet makes the discovery of truth harder. Instead of the labor involved in copying passages out for ourselves, a few keystrokes allow us to cut and paste a link or a series of paragraphs: there's no need to re-assess the material as we repeat it. Poisoned-pen letters & chain letters have nothing on email; recipients of the former might suspect more readily that the contents were unreliable; but with the excitement of being Paul Revere, people pass on emails now, and rouse all the worst passions, waking the shadow of truth, the appetite for lies that curls in us always ready for stimulation & food, ready to be poked, ready to spring into action.
The Place of Refuge
St. Augustine wrote The City of God in response to the pagan Romans who had taken refuge in the churches, which the barbarians spared in the sack of Rome, but who then blamed the Church for the abandonment of the city's old divinities.
The revisionist attempt to class Pope Pius XII as a collaborator or at least as someone who was too silent during WWII on the Nazi persecution of the Jews is a very similar smear. A member of my parish was in the army that entered Rome after driving out the German army; on being shown around one of the city's churches, he was told that he was the first to have seen the relics & historical features of the church in several years, because on Pope Pius' orders, the churches had been turned into refuges for Rome's Jewish population & all Italian Jews who could be accommodated. -- On Hitler's ascent to power, then-Cardinal Pacelli had rebuked an Italian aristocrat who said "At least he's against the communists." "Don't talk such nonsense," the future pope replied, "the Nazis are infinitely worse." The Church in Germany was viewed as a foreign & race-mixing power, and all means were used first to bind, then to harass and silence the Church in Germany; in the three years in which Hitler held sway in Europe, the heaviest blows fell on Polish Catholics. Pope John Paul II's spiritual understanding of human suffering & evil & the need for grace & mercy was formed against the backdrop of what he experienced & shared as a young man; and the father of the current pope would move continually during the Third Reich in order to keep his sons away from the satanic monstrosity which gripped Germany during those years.
Throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, the non-Catholic parties, all the anti-clerical parties, had aimed at getting the Church out of political affairs; and the same people who condemn the Church now for interfering are those who blame the Church for not stopping the Nazis or for facilitating their rise or collaboration. Pope Pius X, the first pope of the 20th century, did all that he could to try to avert the first World War; and his successor, Benedict XV, elected at the start of that war, tried to recall Europe from the holocaust of that time. Both Paul VI and John Paul II, despite the calls of militants to confront communist powers politically, both followed a path away from conflagration & to living Christ wholly, even under the circumstances in the Soviet bloc and elsewhere, to avoid plunging humanity into yet another war.
Catholics are often foolish & purblind & wayward & stubborn & dim, whether lay or clerical; but the body & mind endure & surpass the quality of its members, because it is THE body that the Holy Spirit animates & gives a divine endurance & direction, so that Christ crucified & risen always be the center, so that the cross "be not emptied" of its power. What is not The Church, capital C, is built from its members, and has only what natural qualities they have: were the Catholic Church built from its members, rather than being Christ's body on earth, it would, having suffered the many losses & defeats over the ages, have fallen long ago. It's she who shapes us & places Christ in us, and then makes more of us than we can possibly be on our own. She takes us in that we may be taken out of ourselves, and remade in Christ: any other way is building on the sand of the self. Because we are not the stuff, the substance of the sanctuary, we find sanctuary & life there.
The revisionist attempt to class Pope Pius XII as a collaborator or at least as someone who was too silent during WWII on the Nazi persecution of the Jews is a very similar smear. A member of my parish was in the army that entered Rome after driving out the German army; on being shown around one of the city's churches, he was told that he was the first to have seen the relics & historical features of the church in several years, because on Pope Pius' orders, the churches had been turned into refuges for Rome's Jewish population & all Italian Jews who could be accommodated. -- On Hitler's ascent to power, then-Cardinal Pacelli had rebuked an Italian aristocrat who said "At least he's against the communists." "Don't talk such nonsense," the future pope replied, "the Nazis are infinitely worse." The Church in Germany was viewed as a foreign & race-mixing power, and all means were used first to bind, then to harass and silence the Church in Germany; in the three years in which Hitler held sway in Europe, the heaviest blows fell on Polish Catholics. Pope John Paul II's spiritual understanding of human suffering & evil & the need for grace & mercy was formed against the backdrop of what he experienced & shared as a young man; and the father of the current pope would move continually during the Third Reich in order to keep his sons away from the satanic monstrosity which gripped Germany during those years.
Throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, the non-Catholic parties, all the anti-clerical parties, had aimed at getting the Church out of political affairs; and the same people who condemn the Church now for interfering are those who blame the Church for not stopping the Nazis or for facilitating their rise or collaboration. Pope Pius X, the first pope of the 20th century, did all that he could to try to avert the first World War; and his successor, Benedict XV, elected at the start of that war, tried to recall Europe from the holocaust of that time. Both Paul VI and John Paul II, despite the calls of militants to confront communist powers politically, both followed a path away from conflagration & to living Christ wholly, even under the circumstances in the Soviet bloc and elsewhere, to avoid plunging humanity into yet another war.
Catholics are often foolish & purblind & wayward & stubborn & dim, whether lay or clerical; but the body & mind endure & surpass the quality of its members, because it is THE body that the Holy Spirit animates & gives a divine endurance & direction, so that Christ crucified & risen always be the center, so that the cross "be not emptied" of its power. What is not The Church, capital C, is built from its members, and has only what natural qualities they have: were the Catholic Church built from its members, rather than being Christ's body on earth, it would, having suffered the many losses & defeats over the ages, have fallen long ago. It's she who shapes us & places Christ in us, and then makes more of us than we can possibly be on our own. She takes us in that we may be taken out of ourselves, and remade in Christ: any other way is building on the sand of the self. Because we are not the stuff, the substance of the sanctuary, we find sanctuary & life there.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Summer's lease hath none too short a date
A good friend told me that she's fallen under the spell of autumn the last week, as the blistering summer heat retreats. Tonight, another friend & I took in a film, "Adam", centered on the title character, a young man with Asperger's syndrome whose father has just died, but who embarks on an unexpected relationship with the young woman, Beth, who moves into his building; as she begins to help him adjust & confront living without his previous security, the story develops into a study of faithfulness & falsehood & misunderstanding. Along with "(500) Days of Summer", it's romantic without the normal steps & conclusion -- and the couples don't wind up together. Instead, each comes away changed & deepened.
These seem to be signs that the film community, creating & viewing, is changing as the dynamics of blockbusters become insupportable.
These seem to be signs that the film community, creating & viewing, is changing as the dynamics of blockbusters become insupportable.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Frank Schaeffer on the same trail
During my brief years affiliated with the evangelical right wing, I read Frank Schaeffer's fathers books, only developing a more critical understanding during college. He now provides one of the strongest warning voices about what he terms a 'fifth column' of people raised in America but taught that the main culture was satanic & could be fought by any & all means. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/glenn-beck-and-the-912-ma_b_284387.html
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Language in Chains
From a 36-year-old volume by newspaperman and speechwriter Frank Mankiewicz, "Perfectly Clear: Nixon from Whittier to Watergate":
Men achieved high rank in [the WWII] years, beyond their abilities and wildest ambitions, and were understandably loath to return to selling automobiles or settling insurance claims. Fortunes were made selling equipment and weapons to the services by men and companies to whom the swelling figures on the bbalance sheet compensated for the loss of whatever morals and ethics they may have brought to the enterprise.
Politicians discovered the great truth that if "defense" or "national security" is involved, or can be made to seem to be involved, rational arguments can be easily overcome. So long as a permanent crisis exists, national priorities can be permanently reversed. . .
The very change of name of the old Departments of War and Navy to a neew Department of Defense symbolizes the shift. As Eugene McCarthy has pointed out, once a department of government is called 'Defense,' it has no effective limit. A war department after all, is to wage wars, and if there are no wars, it is hard to increase its budget. But defense? There can never, by definition, be enough defense. If one is not for defense, then one must want the country to be defenseless or undefendable. . .
. . . this made for a sort of 'CIA-ization' of domestic life and politics . . . In the 'civilian' branches of government, the methods of the soldier and the spy became the standard operating procure. 'Secret,' 'Top Secret,' and 'Eyes Only' memoranda proliferated in places like the Department of Agriculture. The bureaucrat whose paper could carry no higher classification than 'Confidential' could safely be ignored. Cable traffic to and from posts overseas multiplied and became filled with code, military-sounding abbreviations, and 'hard-nosed' technical language. Software, infrastructure, interface, signoff, quantify -- everyone wanted to sound like a crisp air traffic control operator or a weary but experienced colonel seeking 'intellegence' from a series of dangerous patrols . . .
Against this backdrop of concealment and reversals of meaning, it's easy to incite many to fury, who think that by malicious & brutal explosions, they demonstrate that they're "real people".
Men achieved high rank in [the WWII] years, beyond their abilities and wildest ambitions, and were understandably loath to return to selling automobiles or settling insurance claims. Fortunes were made selling equipment and weapons to the services by men and companies to whom the swelling figures on the bbalance sheet compensated for the loss of whatever morals and ethics they may have brought to the enterprise.
Politicians discovered the great truth that if "defense" or "national security" is involved, or can be made to seem to be involved, rational arguments can be easily overcome. So long as a permanent crisis exists, national priorities can be permanently reversed. . .
The very change of name of the old Departments of War and Navy to a neew Department of Defense symbolizes the shift. As Eugene McCarthy has pointed out, once a department of government is called 'Defense,' it has no effective limit. A war department after all, is to wage wars, and if there are no wars, it is hard to increase its budget. But defense? There can never, by definition, be enough defense. If one is not for defense, then one must want the country to be defenseless or undefendable. . .
. . . this made for a sort of 'CIA-ization' of domestic life and politics . . . In the 'civilian' branches of government, the methods of the soldier and the spy became the standard operating procure. 'Secret,' 'Top Secret,' and 'Eyes Only' memoranda proliferated in places like the Department of Agriculture. The bureaucrat whose paper could carry no higher classification than 'Confidential' could safely be ignored. Cable traffic to and from posts overseas multiplied and became filled with code, military-sounding abbreviations, and 'hard-nosed' technical language. Software, infrastructure, interface, signoff, quantify -- everyone wanted to sound like a crisp air traffic control operator or a weary but experienced colonel seeking 'intellegence' from a series of dangerous patrols . . .
Against this backdrop of concealment and reversals of meaning, it's easy to incite many to fury, who think that by malicious & brutal explosions, they demonstrate that they're "real people".
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Alpha & Omega
For me, it all begins with the mass. The sacrifice of the mass, as Catholics habitually called it for centuries.
All other disputes were secondary to this one: whether Christ is offerred to his Father at each mass in a sacrifice, so that his action in assuming the whole weight of human evil & enduring the separation from God & overcoming it is perpetuated by the priest, or whether it's the community's action of praise & thanks where Christ present, not on the altar as the Victim & Offering, but in some other way.
The first is a supernatural, transcendent action, one that declares a temporal event actually enters, encompasses, and surpasses Time, and that this is a divine action, in which the Creator assumes the entirety of all the evils issuing from the Fall of all mankind.
Get rid of that, and bit by bit, shred by shred, word by word, interpretation by reinterpretation, the transcendent vanishes in favor of a 'spiritual' naturalism. When people talk of 'spirituality' today, they're talking about sensuality in theological terminology.
The great disaster for the Catholic Church was in the attempt to bridge the absolute gap between church services which are divine pep rallies intended to inspire people to reverence or to enthusiasm, and between the one in which a God opens his wounds & feeds the communicant his own eternal substance under an appearance of unleavened bread. Anything aside from this, no matter how reverent, or no matter how exalting, is mundane & even profane.
The mystery of faith, contrary to the acclamation in the laicized mass used in the vast majority of Catholic churches today, is not 'Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,' but the complete unity & identity of the priest's sacrifice at the altar with Christ's own sacrifice, the long offering of Christ's own life culminating with Calvary & the Resurrection.
Why is this the beginning and the end, the alpha & the omega? Our life, in itself, crumbles beneath its own weight. We can't make it rise, even when we make it elaborate, amazing, energetic, even when we accomplish great things. The very attempt to take on ourselves "the mystery of things" (Shakespeare) is an impossible imitation of Christ. We didn't call the universe into being: even the small fragments of time & space & desire & imagination that fall to us drive us to break them, and ourselves, in the using.
All other disputes were secondary to this one: whether Christ is offerred to his Father at each mass in a sacrifice, so that his action in assuming the whole weight of human evil & enduring the separation from God & overcoming it is perpetuated by the priest, or whether it's the community's action of praise & thanks where Christ present, not on the altar as the Victim & Offering, but in some other way.
The first is a supernatural, transcendent action, one that declares a temporal event actually enters, encompasses, and surpasses Time, and that this is a divine action, in which the Creator assumes the entirety of all the evils issuing from the Fall of all mankind.
Get rid of that, and bit by bit, shred by shred, word by word, interpretation by reinterpretation, the transcendent vanishes in favor of a 'spiritual' naturalism. When people talk of 'spirituality' today, they're talking about sensuality in theological terminology.
The great disaster for the Catholic Church was in the attempt to bridge the absolute gap between church services which are divine pep rallies intended to inspire people to reverence or to enthusiasm, and between the one in which a God opens his wounds & feeds the communicant his own eternal substance under an appearance of unleavened bread. Anything aside from this, no matter how reverent, or no matter how exalting, is mundane & even profane.
The mystery of faith, contrary to the acclamation in the laicized mass used in the vast majority of Catholic churches today, is not 'Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,' but the complete unity & identity of the priest's sacrifice at the altar with Christ's own sacrifice, the long offering of Christ's own life culminating with Calvary & the Resurrection.
Why is this the beginning and the end, the alpha & the omega? Our life, in itself, crumbles beneath its own weight. We can't make it rise, even when we make it elaborate, amazing, energetic, even when we accomplish great things. The very attempt to take on ourselves "the mystery of things" (Shakespeare) is an impossible imitation of Christ. We didn't call the universe into being: even the small fragments of time & space & desire & imagination that fall to us drive us to break them, and ourselves, in the using.
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