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.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
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.
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