PATRIOTISM IS NOT ENOUGH

More than at any other time since the 1960's, American Catholics are faced with a “see change” in the defining criteria of their own cause. I assert that this is rooted in three things:

1. A reluctance on the part of the Catholic layman who identifies with modern 'Conservatism' to invest the time to become familiar with Catholic social teaching,
2. A reliance upon so called 'conservative media' which is anything but Catholic, and
3. A lack of understanding the causes of 'cultural political trends' within contemporary American politics.

Catholic Social Teaching:
The Church pretty clearly states that while she favors no particular economic system, any system must be controlled by the people at the most local level as is possible. This is known as the principle of subsidiarity. Contrast this with a Federal education budget which is larger than any that even the most rabid liberal could legislate, but which was given to us by a Republican majority and a Republican administration. Golly, I don't remember voting for that when I voted for the present crop of 'conservatives'. Say, would anyone like some free prescription drugs while we are on the subject of spending? How about a North American Free Trade zone so that our employment dollars can be threatened by some third rate dictatorship south of the border? You didn't vote for that one either? Huh! Strange!

Catholic dogma on just war theology prescribes the principal of proportionalism. Clearly both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have gone on record as opposing the war in Iraq on the grounds of a lack of proportinalism. Yet how many 'conservative' Catholics stake out their own position on the war without checking out these statements by those two great Catholic shepherds and squaring it against the New Catechism? I was fooled myself for the longest time by my lack of diligence in this matter until I went back and read what these Catholic leaders wrote and said to our president before, during, and after the bombing of Iraq.

Patriotism without informed Catholic social and moral theology is as fluid a thing as Protestantism. In fact it is a hallmark of Protestantism. But if we have suffered the protestantization of the Mass for the last 40 years, can it be unreasonable to assume that we have suffered the protestantization of conservative political philosophy in the last 10?

The great Catholic apologist and thinker G.K. Chesterton states of the truly Catholic man that “He is loyal to his own country; indeed he is generally ardently loyal to it, such loyal affections being in other ways very natural to his religious life, with its shrines and relics. But just as the relic follows upon the religion, so the local loyalty follows on the universal brotherhood of all men. The Catholic says ' Of course we must love all men; but what do all men love?' They love their lands, their lawful boundaries, the memories of their fathers. That is the justification of being national, that it is normal'. But the Protestant patriot really never thought of any patriotism except his own. In that sense Protestantism is patriotism. It starts with it and never gets beyond it. (underline mine) We (Catholics) start with mankind and go beyond it to all the varied loves and traditions of mankind”. In like manner, Chesterton goes on to point out that many a convert to Catholicism has been called a traitor by his conservative brethren for seeing beyond mere patriotism.

Reliance Upon So Called 'Conservative Media'
Long before Catholics were picking and choosing, one Catholic columnist stands out as the standard bearer for dissident teaching. In many ways he is way ahead (chronologically) of the heretic John Kerry. For he assured Catholics that they had no moral obligation to obey MATER ET MAGISTRA

Thus we see a contradiction between the informed man in the pew who sees the Church as magisterium and Mother and for example, a pundit like William F. Buckley and his famous essay “Mater si, Magistra no!”. While I do not directly accuse Buckley of being a Freemason, indeed any Catholic who studies the many papal documents on Freemasonry can see the underlying philosophical continuity between the Ivy League Skull & Bonesman and modern day Conservatism as defined by Buckley and men like him. For those of you who are Buckley readers, I encourage you to read both his article of that title and the encyclical he was advocating disobedience toward! Liberals and neocons agree that he paved the way for the grand dissent against Paul VI's condemnation of contraception in Humanae Vitae. I have often heard Buckleys name mentioned so as to excuse away 'The Gospel of Life'.

The bottom line here is that the modern Catholic conservative is intellectually lazy. He would rather listen to Mark Levin or Michael Savage or read National Review and be entertained or feel smart than invest the time and energy on learning magisterial teaching. Perhaps that laxity was excusable before the internet... it is not excusable today.

The Causes of Social and Political Trends:
Any of us conservatives who have wisened up to the antics of the Marxist/Leftist 'I hate America' media elite crowd... remember a time when we began watching news stories and seeing them in a newer and clearer way. I remember the first time I watched the evening news as anchored by some leftist of renown while asking myself 'why are they (the media) choosing to frame the story in such and such a way'.

And yet, as conservatives we seldom are critical like that if we are reading what we personally consider to be a reputable conservative columnist. We go even further with this absurdity and will silently squirm when we see Hannity lie and insult Fr. Euteneuer and the Church over Humane Vitae, while we simultaneously become vocal and indignant as we catch Hillary in a lie or manipulation (which is not a difficult task to witness). Many well intentioned conservative Catholics will explain this dichotomy away by saying that while they may disagree with a Buckly or a Hannity on this or that, that we conservatives must hang together if we are ever going to end abortion. Yet few of us ever notice that the 'pro life carrot' gets even further away with each passing Neocon year. Why is that? It is because if the issue ever came down to winning what Ronald Reagan hoped for in a Paramount Human Life Amendment, then there really would be no single issue to distinguish modern day Republicans from Democrats. This reality is the fruit of Unitarian theology which is the offspring of three hundred years of the great secret society. And this philosophy has indeed infiltrated modern day Republicanism.

Bishop Bernard Fellay stated that this modern Freemasonry affects even the Holy Church of Rome. Yet the good Catholic conservative would deny that the same forces successfully subverting the Church hierarchy would attempt to subvert modern conservative opinion makers... or represent their ideas in a society like Skull and Bones. Strange dichotomy of thought, no? They trust that Rome is subverted at high levels, but not that their own party is!

We now have Catholic conservative commentators joining the ranks of the leftist media in denouncing Gov. Mike Huckabee's Christmas message. Never mind that Huckabee is Americas best chance at ending abortion... “how DARE he use a Christian symbol in a political message.”

Many of us will nod and agree with the talking heads and don an air of 'false impartiality' just to show what a fair minded bunch of folks we conservatives are. Yet will we wonder as we march on some January 22nd of the future why we appear to be ineffective in our own cause.

FULL AND ACTIVE PARTICIPATION

There has been much to do on Long Island about the celebration of the Tridenting rite since our Holy Father liberated the old mass. Thank you dear Holy Father!

I'm uploading a video from what is perhaps the best example of full and activie participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is taken from the Parish of St. Nicholas of Chardonnet in Paris, France. Ironically, this is an SSPX parish. Yet they are more in conformity with Vatican's II document Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium than most parishes I have ever been to.

This clip is actually 1 of 8. I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO TAKE THE TIME TO REALLY DIGEST ALL 8 clips on Youtube. Much of what transpires surpasses the "intellectual" in beauty. If you are a priest, I ESPECIALLY urge you to examine the little details in the eyes of the flock and the anticipation of the very young in all of this sublime beauty.

Since we now have the free use of the extradordinary rite in the Church, we should look upon something like this as a model to be emulated.

Beyond this living example though, I would like today to point the reader to an excellent article that a friend of mine has posted on Wordpress about active participation. Please read and feel free to comment.

Here is the link:

http://beholdyourmother.wordpress.com/

Why I Am A Catholic (G. K. Chesterton)

G.K. Chesterton is one of the most lucid thinkers of the 20th century. In a time when "modern man" was neatly categorizing himself into "Progressive" and "Conservative", Chesterton wrote:

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

How sad and true this is today in American politics.

This short essay (obtained from The American Chesterton Society) shows us the wit and stainless steel logic with which Chesterton defends Truth against fadism of every sort.

Why I Am A Catholic
By G. K. Chesterton
From Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds (1926)
Reprinted in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 3 Ignatius Press 1990

The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, "It is the only thing that . . ." As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.

Or I might treat the matter personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really is. Numbers of much better men have been sincerely converted to much worse religions. I would much prefer to attempt to say here of the Catholic Church precisely the things that cannot be said even of its very respectable rivals. In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity of a guardian of the truth.

The other day a well-known writer, otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea. Indeed, those who complain that Catholicism cannot say anything new, seldom think it necessary to say anything new about Catholicism. As a matter of fact, a real study of history will show it to be curiously contrary to the fact. In so far as the ideas really are ideas, and in so far as any such ideas can be new, Catholics have continually suffered through supporting them when they were really new; when they were much too new to find any other support. The Catholic was not only first in the field but alone in the field; and there was as yet nobody to understand what he had found there.

Thus, for instance, nearly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, in an age devoted to the pride and praise of princes, Cardinal Bellarmine and Suarez the Spaniard laid down lucidly the whole theory of real democracy. But in that age of Divine Right they only produced the impression of being sophistical and sanguinary Jesuits, creeping about with daggers to effect the murder of kings. So, again, the Casuists of the Catholic schools said all that can really be said for the problem plays and problem novels of our own time, two hundred years before they were written. They said that there really are problems of moral conduct; but they had the misfortune to say it two hundred years too soon. In a time of tub-thumping fanaticism and free and easy vituperation, they merely got themselves called liars and shufflers for being psychologists before psychology was the fashion. It would be easy to give any number of other examples down to the present day, and the case of ideas that are still too new to be understood. There are passages in Pope Leo's Encycliacl on Labor [Also known as Rerum Novarum, released in 1891] which are only now beginning to be used as hints for social movements much newer than socialism. And when Mr. Belloc wrote about the Servile State, he advanced an economic theory so original that hardly anybody has yet realized what it is. A few centuries hence, other people will probably repeat it, and repeat it wrong. And then, if Catholics object, their protest will be easily explained by the well-known fact that Catholics never care for new ideas.

Nevertheless, the man who made that remark about Catholics meant something; and it is only fair to him to understand it rather more clearly than he stated it. What he meant was that, in the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential fashions; most of which still claim to be new, though many of them are beginning to be a little stale. In other words, in so far as he meant that the Church often attacks what the world at any given moment supports, he was perfectly right . The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this world that passes away; and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly it does pass away. But to understand exactly what is involved, it is necessary to take a rather larger view and consider the ultimate nature of the ideas in question, to consider, so to speak, the idea of the idea.

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel.

There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them.

On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not to mention any number of intellectual battle-fields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice. By this means, it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past, but which might otherwise entrap travelers again and again in the future. The Church does make herself responsible for warning her people against these; and upon these the real issue of the case depends. She does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes, those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the old mistakes. Now all these false issues have a way of looking quite fresh, especially to a fresh generation. Their first statement always sounds harmless and plausible. I will give only two examples. It sounds harmless to say, as most modern people have said: "Actions are only wrong if they are bad for society." Follow it out, and sooner or later you will have the inhumanity of a hive or a heathen city, establishing slavery as the cheapest and most certain means of production, torturing the slaves for evidence because the individual is nothing to the State, declaring that an innocent man must die for the people, as did the murderers of Christ. Then, perhaps, you will go back to Catholic definitions, and find that the Church, while she also says it is our duty to work for society, says other things also which forbid individual injustice. Or again, it sounds quite pious to say, "Our moral conflict should end with a victory of the spiritual over the material." Follow it out, and you may end in the madness of the Manicheans, saying that a suicide is good because it is a sacrifice, that a sexual perversion is good because it produces no life, that the devil made the sun and moon because they are material. Then you may begin to guess why Catholicism insists that there are evil spirits as well as good; and that materials also may be sacred, as in the Incarnation or the Mass, in the sacrament of marriage or the resurrection of the body.

Now there is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong. The policeman comes too late, when he tries to prevent men from going wrong. The doctor comes too late, for he only comes to lock up a madman, not to advise a sane man on how not to go mad. And all other sects and schools are inadequate for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but precisely because each of them does contain a truth; and is content to contain a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once.

The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present. Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. Thus, when the world went Puritan in the seventeenth century, the Church was charged with pushing charity to the point of sophistry, with making everything easy with the laxity of the confessional. Now that the world is not going Puritan but Pagan, it is the Church that is everywhere protesting against a Pagan laxity in dress or manners. It is doing what the Puritans wanted done when it is really wanted. In all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all Puritans are Pagans.

Thus, for instance, Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.

Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments or build our Utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality. Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether, and trampling on all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride. We must have the truisms everywhere recognized as true. We must prevent mere reaction and the dreary repetition of the old mistakes. We must make the intellectual world safe for democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.

FATIMA

Since this blog is dedicated to Fatima by it's very name, I thought it wold be most important to describe the significance of Fatima in our time. Here is a brief history of Fatima, Our Lady's timing, her prophecies, her requests, and an assessment of where we are today relateing to these things. I have used the resources of fatimacrusader.com because it seems to have the most complete discussion of this. I have taken the following discussion directly from that site's FAQ.

10 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT FATIMA

Cause of My Joy

Before I begin this article, I highly recommend to any reader to JUST GO! GO to Alabama and SEE what God the Lord has done with a simple nun who relied totally on His Eucharistic Providence.

It is easy to become discouraged over the political, religious and cultural wasteland which we have made for ourselves today. But through a one week encounter (for me and my family) with the nuns of Perpetual Adoration (namely the Poor Claire’s of Perpetual Adoration or PCPA) at Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Hanceville Alabama I have completely changed my outlook.

In case you are wondering… YES, this is the little community that Mother Mary Angelica (secular name Rita Rizzo) created which was originally founded in Birmingham AL. You may remember mother Angelica from EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network). The network that mother built for Jesus is still in Birmingham, but the little chapel (which served as the center of the original Birmingham monastery for so many years) is no longer a monastic chapel, though it is the chapel where EWTN broadcasts it's beautiful Mass every day... this site remains the EWTN studio location.

Instead, the Divino Nino (that is… the young Child Jesus) asked mother to build Him a temple (though she did not know what a Catholic temple was at the time that our Lord asked her). Mother was shortly thereafter approached by five different (and unrelated) families (who wish to remain anonymous ). These families contributed what must have been enormous sums of money. They stated that they wished to help her with whatever project she might have to serve the Church. Mother built this monastery in Hanceville, which is about an hour north of the EWTN network in Birmingham.

I assure you that you are unprepared for what your eyes, ears, and more importantly your interior yearnings for God are about to encounter.

I will write more about this later… and I promise to post some images and links to the PCPA nuns singing… which can only be compared to that of the Angels in Heaven.

For now... you will just have to visit them at http://www.olamshrine.com/

Don't let their fairly humble main page fool you. There is LOTS to hear and see on that website.

Your first stop should be the Photo Gallery
http://www.olamshrine.com/PhotoGallery.htm

If you just wait around at the main page... you will notice the 'What's new' rotator which changes links every few seconds. Be patient and wait for the link entitled "Listen to the Nun's singing".

Click on that and just sit back AND LISTEN. My favorite is the Battle Hymn of the Republic!

The Kingship of Christ is alive and well... we just have to look at some of these growing orthodox orders to see it.

magis laxus
(more later)



Ahhh... PS: Here are the promised images which I lifted from the olamshrine website:

The Monastary

The Inside of the Shrine (Yes, that is an 8' Monstrance)

The Nuns (average age of vocation in the 30s)