Cardinal Ratzinger’s address to bishops of Chile

Cardinal Ratzinger’s address to bishops of Chile

Following is the translated text of an address by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, given 13 July 1988, in Santiago, Chile before that nation’s Bishops. 

“In recent months we have put a lot of work into the case of Lefebvre with the sincere intention of creating for his movement a space within the Church that would be sufficient for it to live. The Holy See has been criticized for this. It is said that it has not defended the Second Vatican Council with sufficient energy; that, while it has treated progressive movements with great severity, it has displayed an exaggerated sympathy with the traditionalist rebellion. The development of events is enough to disprove these assertions. The mythical harshness of the Vatican in the face of the deviations of the progressives is shown
to be mere empty words. Up until now, in fact, only warnings have been published; in no case have there been strict canonical penalties in the strict sense. And the fact that when the chips were down Lefebvre
denounced an agreement that had already been signed, shows that the Holy See, while it made truly generous concessions, did not grant him that complete license which he desired. Lefebvre has seen that, in the fundamental part of the agreement, he was being held to accept Vatican II and the affirmations of the post-conciliar Magisterium, according to the proper authority of each document. 

“There is a glaring contradiction in the fact that it is just the people who have let no occasion slip to allow the world to know of their disobedience to the Pope, and to the magisterial declarations of the last 20 years, who think they have the right to judge that this attitude is too mild and who wish that an absolute obedience to Vatican II had been insisted upon. In a similar way they would claim that the Vatican has
conceded a right to dissent to Lefebvre which has been obstinately denied to the promoters of a progressive tendency. In reality, the only point which is affirmed in the agreement, following Lumen Gentium 25, is the plain fact that not all documents of the Council have the same authority. For the rest, it was explicitly laid down in the text that was signed that public polemics must be avoided, and that an attitude is required of positive respect for official decisions and declarations. 

“It was conceded, in addition, that the Fraternity of St. Pius X would be able to present to the Holy See — which reserves to itself the sole right of decision — their particular difficulties in regard to interpretations of juridical and liturgical reforms. All of this shows plainly that in this difficult dialogue Rome has united generosity, in all that was negotiable, with firmness in essentials. The explanation which Msgr. Lefebvre has given, for the retraction of his agreement, is revealing. He declared that he has finally understood that the agreement he signed aimed only at integrating his foundation into the ‘Conciliar Church.’. The Catholic Church in union with the Pope is, according to him, the ‘Conciliar Church’ which has broken with its own past. It seems indeed that he is no longer able to see that we are dealing with the Catholic Church in the totality of its Tradition, and that Vatican II belongs to that. 

“Without any doubt, the problem that Lefebvre has posed has not been concluded by the rupture of June 30th. It would be too simple to take refuge in a sort of triumphalism, and to think that this difficulty has ceased to exist from the moment in which the movement led by Lefebvre has separated itself by a clean break with the Church. A Christian never can, or should, take pleasure in a rupture. Even though it is absolutely certain the fault cannot be attributed to the Holy See, it is a duty for us to examine ourselves, as to what errors we have made, and which ones we are making even now. The criteria with which we judge the past in the Vatican II decree on ecumenism must be used — as is logical — to judge the present as well. 

“One of the basic discoveries of the theology of ecumenism is that schisms can take place only when certain truths and certain values of the Christian faith are no longer lived and loved within the Church. The truth which is marginalized becomes autonomous, remains detached from the whole of the ecclesiastical structure, and a new movement then forms itself around it. We must reflect on this fact: that a large number of Catholics, far beyond the narrow circle of the Fraternity of Lefebvre, see this man as a guide,
in some sense, or at least as a useful ally. It will not do to attribute everything to political motives, to nostalgia, or to cultural factors of minor importance. These causes are not capable of explaining the attraction which is felt even by the young, and especially by the young, who come from many quite different nations, and who are surrounded by completely distinct political and cultural realities. Indeed they show what is from any point of view a restricted and one-sided outlook; but there is no doubt whatever that a phenomenon of this sort would be inconceivable unless there were good elements at work here, which in general do not find sufficient opportunity to live within the Church of today. 

“For all these reasons, we ought to see this matter primarily as the occasion for an examination of conscience. We should allow ourselves to ask fundamental questions, about the defects in the pastoral life of the Church, which are exposed by these events. Thus we will be able to offer a place within the Church
to those who are seeking and demanding it, and succeed in destroying all reason for schism. We can make such schism pointless by renewing the interior realities of the Church. There are three points, I think, that it is important to think about. 

“While there are many motives that might have led a great number of people to
seek a refuge in the traditional liturgy, the chief one is that they find the
dignity of the sacred preserved there. After the Council there were many priests
who deliberately raised ‘desacralization’ to the level of a program, on the plea
that the New Testament abolished the cult of the Temple: the veil of the Temple
which was torn from top to bottom at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross
is, according to certain people, the sign of the end of the sacred. The death of
Jesus, outside the City walls, that is to say, in the public world, is now the
true religion. Religion, if it has any being at all, must have it in the
nonsacredness of daily life, in love that is lived. Inspired by such reasoning,
they put aside the sacred vestments; they have despoiled the churches as much as
they could of that splendor which brings to mind the sacred; and they have reduced
the liturgy to the language and the gestures of ordinary life, by means of greetings,
common signs of friendship, and such things. 

“There is no doubt that, with these theories and practices, they have entirely
disregarded the true connection between the Old and the New Testaments: It is
forgotten that this world is not the Kingdom of God, and that the “Holy One of God”
(John 6:69) continues to exist in contradiction to this world; that we have need
of purification before we draw near to Him; that the profane, even after the
death and the Resurrection of Jesus, has not succeeded in becoming ‘the holy’.
The Risen One has appeared, but to those whose heart has been opened to Him,
to the Holy; He did not manifest Himself to everyone. It is in this way a new
space has been opened for the religion to which all of us would now submit;
this religion which consists in drawing near to the community of the Risen One,
at whose feet the women prostrated themselves and adored Him. I do not want
to develop this point any further now; I confine myself to coming straight to
this conclusion: we ought to get back the dimension of the sacred in the liturgy.
The liturgy is not a festivity; it is not a meeting for the purpose of having
a good time. It is of no importance that the parish priest has cudgeled his
brains to come up with suggestive ideas or imaginative novelties. The liturgy
is what makes the Thrice-Holy God present amongst us; it is the burning bush;
t is the Alliance of God with man in Jesus Christ, who has died and risen again.
The grandeur of the liturgy does not rest upon the fact that it offers an
interesting entertainment, but in rendering tangible the Totally Other, whom we
are not capable of summoning. He comes because He wills. In other words, the
essential in the liturgy is the mystery, which is realized in the common ritual
of the Church; all the rest diminishes it. Men experiment with it in lively
ashion, and find themselves deceived, when the mystery is transformed into
distraction, when the chief actor in the liturgy is not the Living God but the
priest or the liturgical director. 

“Aside from the liturgical questions, the central points of conflict at present
are Lefebvre’s attack on the decree which deals with religious liberty, and on
the so-called spirit of Assisi. Here is where Lefebvre fixes the boundaries
between his position and that of the Catholic Church today. 

“I need hardly say in so many words that what he is saying on these points is
unacceptable. Here we do not wish to consider his errors, rather we want to ask
ourselves where there is lack of clarity in ourselves. For Lefebvre what is at
stake is the warfare against ideological liberalism, against the relativization
of truth. Obviously we are not in agreement with him that — understood
according to the Pope’s intentions — the text of the Council or the prayer of
Assisi were relativizing. 

“It is a necessary task to defend the Second Vatican Council against Msgr.
Lefebvre, as valid, and as binding upon the Church. Certainly there is a
mentality of narrow views that isolate Vatican II and which has provoked this
opposition. There are many accounts of it which give the impression that, from
Vatican II onward, everything has been changed, and that what preceded it has
no value or, at best, has value only in the light of Vatican II. 

“The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living
Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero.
The truth is that this particular Council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately
chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat
it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the
importance of all the rest. 

“This idea is made stronger by things that are now happening. That which previously
was considered most holy — the form in which the liturgy was handed down —
suddenly appears as the most forbidden of all things, the one thing that can safely
be prohibited. It is intolerable to criticize decisions which have been taken
since the Council; on the other hand, if men make question of ancient rules, or
even of the great truths of the Faith — for instance, the corporal virginity of
Mary, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the immortality of the soul, etc. —
nobody complains or only does so with the greatest moderation. I myself, when
I was a professor, have seen how the very same bishop who, before the Council,
ad fired a teacher who was really irreproachable, for a certain crudeness of
speech, was not prepared, after the Council, to dismiss a professor who openly
denied certain fundamental truths of the Faith. 

“All this leads a great number of people to ask themselves if the Church of today
is really the same as that of yesterday, or if they have changed it for something
else without telling people. The one way in which Vatican II can be made plausible
is to present it as it is; one part of the unbroken, the unique Tradition of the
Church and of her faith. 

“In the spiritual movements of the post-concilar era, there is not the slightest
doubt that frequently there has been an obliviousness, or even a suppression, of
the issue of truth: here perhaps we confront the crucial problem for theology and
for pastoral work today. 

“The ‘truth’ is thought to be a claim that is too exalted, a ‘triumphalism’ that
cannot be permitted any longer. You see this attitude plainly in the crisis that
troubles the missionary ideal and missionary practice. If we do not point to the
truth in announcing our faith, and if this truth is no longer essential for the
salvation of Man, then the missions lose their meaning. In effect the conclusion
has been drawn, and it has been drawn today, that in the future we need only seek
that Christians should be good Christians, Moslems good Moslems, Hindus good Hindus,
and so forth. If it comes to that, how are we to know when one is a ‘good’
Christian, or a ‘good’ Moslem? 

“The idea that all religions are — if you talk seriously — only symbols of what
ultimately is incomprehensible is rapidly gaining ground in theology, and has
already penetrated into liturgical practice. When things get to this point,
faith is left behind, because faith really consists in the fact that I am
committing myself to the truth so far as it is known. So in this matter also
there is every motive to return to the right path. 

“If once again we succeed in pointing out and living the fullness of the
Catholic religion with regard to these points, we may hope that the schism
of Lefebvre will not be of long duration.”

NOVEMBER 6, 2019

Liberalism and Idolatry Go Hand in Hand

MICHAEL PAKALUK

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/FMfcgxwDsFdTkCwkLddHmzBNchpdCTDx

“Considered in itself, idolatry is the greatest of mortal sins.” So begins the old Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry on the topic. I was surprised to read that this is the greatest of all mortal sins. Was it worse than murder? Worse even than the sexual abuse of minors?

“For it is, by definition,” the entry continues,

an inroad on God’s sovereignty over the world, an attempt on His divine majesty, a rebellious setting up of a creature on the throne that belongs to Him alone. Even the simulation of idolatry, in order to escape death during persecution, is a mortal sin, because of the pernicious falsehood it involves and the scandal it causes. Of Seneca who, against his better knowledge, took part in idolatrous worship, St. Augustine says: “He was the more to be condemned for doing mendaciously what people believed him to do sincerely.”

Well (I then thought), that makes sense. 

That which violates the First Precept of Charity, and the First Commandment, is reasonably the worst sin. It is so bad, and so scandalous, that even the appearance of it, while interiorly not consented to, is a grave sin, according to St. Augustine. Thousands and maybe millions of Christians have died rather than render an offering to an idol. It is right that they did so. The Church teaches that we should avoid idolatry even at the cost of one’s life.

This truth establishes—if not a burden of proof to show otherwise—at least a reasonable claim to the right for clarification by a Catholic layperson. I am referring to the start of the Amazon synod, when an object that looked like an idol was brought into the Vatican gardens and placed at the center of what seemed to be a religious ceremony involving offerings and prostration. This same image was later placed in a church. Moreover, something that looked like an offering to this image—a bowl with plants—was brought up to the altar during the Offertory, during the closing Mass of the Synod, and placed on the altar, where it was left until the end of the Mass.

No one I know participated in any of this. It was not my initiative nor that of any of my acquaintances. We were minding our own business but found these scenes and these things thrust upon us. It would seem we had a right to ask: what was done here? It looks like an idol was involved in some way. Please explain to us why it was not an idol.

“Considered in itself, idolatry is the greatest of mortal sins.” Take any other mortal sin, less serious, and imagine a ceremony in which it looked like that sin was committed—for example, an unmentionable practice from a pagan cult as included in a non-Christian rite in the Vatican gardens. No one would be out of bounds if he found even the appearance of such a thing outrageous; if he asked for an explanation as to why it was not, after all, what it appeared to be; or if he wanted to know why something that appeared to be so objectively wrong was countenanced nonetheless.

No good account has yet been offered. During the Amazon Synod, the Vatican news service referred to a paragraph in Newman which they suggested justified the use of the “Pachamama” image. In an article last week in Crisis, I pointed out how the Newman passage did nothing of the sort. It merely observed, against low church Protestantism, that the Catholic Church over the centuries has incorporated various types of religious practices found in paganism, such as candles, the sprinkling of water, and roadside shrines. Newman was arguing against the claim that ancient Christianity lacked such practices. His view was that as the Church “developed” it incorporated various types of pagan practices. Of course, he also believed that the Church never did so when there was the possibility of confusion between pagan and Christian worship, or if some might use the Christian practice to invoke pagan deities. Always, the practice was recreated with an entirely different meaning in Christianity.

This mere fact is very much worth observing. It is as if a Christian were to say, as is true, that sexual intercourse between a husband and wife in holy matrimony has a completely new meaning. Suppose they were formerly promiscuous. Their chaste relations mean something different. Sex between them does not (of itself) conjure up the “false gods” of past lovers.—Because God is a jealous God, and anything that introduces loyalties to false gods is completely forbidden by Him.

That is why here I want to follow up and point out that the Newman passage conspicuously says nothing about idols. It mentions “images,” but surely meaning by this only that the Catholic Church, instead of rejecting graven images as did the Israelites, has made use of images of Our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints.

The reason is that Newman took the history of sound Christian practice to reflect his own horror of idolatry. For Newman and others in the Oxford Movement, everything hinged on whether the Romish Church was idolatrous or not. One had to show that it incorporated pagan modes of worship, while in no way flirting with pagan idolatry. Back then, as for many Protestants now, for the Church in Rome to show itself indulgent towards idolatry would be a decisive argument against becoming Catholic.

One of the most winsome personal recollections of Newman was by William Lockhart, who, after Newman died in 1891, wrote down his memories from student years in Oxford fifty years earlier. “When Newman read the Holy Scriptures from the lectern of St. Mary’s or at Littlemore,” Lockhart reminisced, “we felt more than ever that his words were the words of a Seer, who saw God, and the things of God.”

There was just one particular memory in this regard that Lockhart includes in his recollections: it is Newman’s reaction against idolatry. “I remember his reading the passage in the Book of Wisdom about the making of idols,” Lockhart writes, “and the sublime scorn with which he read of the ‘carving of the block of wood and the painting it with vermilion’ impressed me with the blank stupidity of the attempt to put the idea of God under any material form.”

❧

Newman’s “sublime scorn” of idols is found sharply expressed in contexts where one might antecedently expect some sympathy. For instance, in his sermon, “The Gospel Feast,” he argues that Scripture has always used a feast as an image of our relationship with God. Even pagan offerings to idols of nature and of the harvest testify to this truth, he says: “Such seems to have been the common notion of communion with God all the world over, however it was gained; viz. that we arrived at the possession of His invisible gifts by participation in His visible.”

Yet, Newman in no way admits that the pagans are doing the same thing as Christians. They testified to the truth, he is very clear, only insofar as, through a feast, they succeed in communicating with devils, just as Christians now communicate with God:

St. Paul seems to acknowledge that in that way [the pagans] did communicate, though most miserably and fearfully, with those idols, and with the evil spirits which they represented. “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God; and I would not that ye should hold communion with devils.” (1 Cor. x. 20) Here, as before, a feast is spoken of as the means of communicating with the unseen world, though, when the feast was idolatrous, it was the fellowship of evil spirits.

The basic assumption of Newman’s novel of the third century, Callista, is that obstinate rejection of offerings to idols is the touchstone of true Christianity. The magistrates know it full well: “it was only in critical times, when some idolatrous act was insisted on by the magistrate, that the specific nature of Christianity was tested and detected. Then, at length, it was seen to differ from all other religious varieties by that irrational and disgusting obstinacy, as it was felt to be, which had rather suffer torments and lose life than submit to some graceful, or touching, or at least trifling observance which the tradition of ages had sanctioned.” Callista comes to recognize it, too; I’ll say no more, to avoid a plot spoiler.

In these matters, Newman was deeply informed by his study of the Fathers and “primitive Christians.” Remarking on followers of St. Anthony, for instance, he says, “They considered that brute nature was widely subjected to the power of spirits; as, on the other hand, there had been a time when even the Creator Spirit had condescended to manifest Himself in the bodily form of a dove. Their notions concerning local demoniacal influences as existing in oracles and idols, in which they were sanctioned by Scripture, confirmed this belief.” There is no optimistic celebration here of the ‘spirits’ venerated among the Amazonian tribes, as one finds in the final Synod document.

St. Athanasius, writing in his History of the Arians, a text which Newman painstakingly edited, even takes the introduction of idols into churches in the fourth-century Egyptian persecution to be the worst possible wickedness: “When was ever such iniquity heard of? when was such an evil deed ever perpetrated, even in times of persecution? They were heathens who persecuted formerly; but they did not bring their idols into the Churches. … This is a new piece of iniquity. It is not simply persecution, but more than persecution, it is a prelude and preparation for the coming of Antichrist.”

So they thought; so, I think we can grant, Newman supposed.

Newman so much abhorred idolatry that, in his broader thought, influenced by Francis Bacon, he uses the word “idol” in a metaphorical sense, to mean any falsely held belief in important matters. We end up serving this falsehood—this idol—as if serving a false god. If we cling to this “idol,” it keeps us from drawing near to the true God.

It is commonly recognized that Newman in his Biglietto Speech at the end of his life identified “liberalism” in religion as the error which he had spent his whole life battling. This impulse of his really is the unifying strand in his thought. Or, more obviously, that unifying strand is the opposite of “liberalism”—that is, his commitment to what he calls “the dogmatic principle.” This principle means that you believe there is a single truth in religion, that you seek it with courage and tenacity, and that you embrace it completely when you find it, even at cost to your life if necessary. (In Newman’s case, he gave up his standing in Oxford and his reputation in English society.)

If you see an analogy here between the First Commandment and “the dogmatic principle,” on the one hand, and idolatry and “liberalism” in religion, you would be correct. Another way to put it was that for Newman, relativism in religion was the same as polytheism, and polytheism is a kind of relativism. His battle with liberalism, and his hatred of idolatry, were one and the same.

Or one might say that Newman’s “sublime scorn” of idolatry, which he learned from the Fathers, found coordinate expression in this great Victorian’s “irrational and disgusting obstinacy” in affirming absolute truth in religion. Either way, it’s not easy to turn a passage in Newman into an explanation of apparent idolatry.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Tagged as Amazon Synod, John Henry Newman, liberalism23

By Michael Pakaluk

Michael Pakaluk is Ordinary Professor of Ethics and Social Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. A Newman scholar, he is working on a book on Newman as philosopher. His latest book is The Memoirs of St. Peter: A New Translation of the Gospel According to Mark (Regnery, 2019).

Monday, November 04, 2019

http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2019/11/is-conservative-cd-rivera-behind-fr.html

Is Conservative Cd. Rivera behind Fr. Romero’s War against Francis’s “Satanic Idol of Pachamama”?

On Sunday, Fr. Hugo Valdermar Romero, former spokeman for Cardinal Rivera Carrera who was the Archbishop of Mexico City from 1995 to 2017, burned replicated cardboard images of the Francis Vatican Pachamama idols.

In a statement translated by Bishop Rene Gracida on his website abyssus.org, Romero explained why he burned the “satanic [Pachamama] idols”:

“[W]e, as, a protest and as a sign of reparation, burn this satanic idol of the Pachamama.”

In 2016, Francis attacked the pro-life and pro-family conservative Cardinal Rivera, whose spokesman at the time was Romero, and the Cardinal’s Archdiocese of Mexico City newspaper responded saying Francis “received ‘bad advice'” according to Wikipedia.

Cardinal Rivera is the backbone of conservative Pope Benedict XVI Catholicism in Mexico. It is very probable that Fr. Romero has the backing of Rivera in rebuking the idolatry of the Francis Vatican.

Under the leadership of Cardinal Rivera over 80 percent of Mexico’s population remained Catholic unlike the destruction of the Catholic faith in Argentina and other Latin American liberal countries influenced by the Francis liberal agenda.

Cardinal Rivera is known to be one of the strongest defenders of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.

It appears that Our Lady of Guadalupe and her defenders in Mexico are ready to go to war with the Pachamama idol worshipping Francis Vatican.

Francis may have a real Mexican Catholic Cristeros war on his hands which could spread to the rest of Latin America.

Mexicans will never allow Francis to replace Our Lady of Guadalupe with his Vatican Pachamama idols!

Viva Cristo Rey!

Viva Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe!

The war appears to now be:

Our Lady of Guadalupe vs. Francis’s Pachamama idols.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church and a Hail Mary to Our Lady of Guadalupe to defeat the Francis Vatican Pachamama idols and the Francis liberal agenda.

Posted by Fred Martinez at 8:42 PM Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

Settimo Cielodi Sandro Magister 05 nov 19

Analysis. Why Franco’s Memory Is Putting the West and the Church To the Test

> Italiano
> English
> Español
> Français

> All the articles of Settimo Cielo in English

*

Published as received, with a marginal note at the end. The author, a former professor of religion at the University of Florence, philosopher and historian by training, has for years been well known to and appreciated by the readers of Settimo Cielo.

*

ON THE RELOCATION OF FRANCO’S BODY

by Pietro De Marco

I think that many have overlooked, particularly in Spain, the significance of the relocation of the body of Francisco Franco from the Valle de los Caídos, the deep public ethical framework in which it is set. The event, in fact, presupposes and circularly aggravates the removal of the tragic complexity, and of the human lesson, of the Civil War as event, from its preconditions to the long civil peace that followed it, intended by the General and, by paradox, due to him. With victims and costs, but peace, after the fratricide.

The removal, if not of the history then certainly of its significance and sacredness, is the effect of the post-Francoist civil “reconstruction” and of the “democratic” ideological pedagogies. Unfortunately the reconstructions of democracy necessary for freedom devastate nations: but we should be more aware that, as democrats, we prefer these devastations to the lack of freedom and rights. We would be more watchful.

Those who read “Thus has evil its beginning” (2014) by such a wise narrator as Javier Marías, generation 1951, run up against a vindictive attitude of memory, a paradigm of the past that is surprisingly simplified for a Spaniard; a paradigm with no self-awareness that not by coincidence pervades a recent novel. It would not surprise us, accustomed to dealing with the hubris of of the “anti-fascist” pedantry embodied in books and in public speaking. This is a matter, however, of an inverse process. Contemporary Spain is alienated from the awareness, still alive in the 1970’s, of having left behind a drama whose victors and vanquished emerged with the memory of a dirty heroism of too much innocent blood and too absurdly spilled. With a certain analogy with our lesser 1943-1946 civil war, of which today, however, we alone are aware.

And in this tragic loss of awareness Spain itself becomes spiritually subordinate to the ideological activism of the PSOE, to the armchair extremism allied with the anticlerical subcultures. These took eighty years after celebrating their political processes (on phantoms) and their posthumous purges to accomplish at a distance that which in Italy took place in 1945-46. But in Italy that settling of scores arouses today, in most people, horror and shame. They are not things to be repeated in order to make political advertising, howbeit with symbolic acts.

Reading journalism and essay writing from recent years on the monumental complex of the Valle de los Caidos (inaugurated in 1959, at the twentieth anniversary of the end of the conflict, in historic Guadarrama) one gathers well how the desecration underway, of which the exhumation of Franco’s body is a sign, is taking place at the instigation of historians and ideologues in whom postmodern apathy has obscured the idea, and the very plausibility, of what it is to fight with weapon in hand for something.

In general, in democratic narratives, there are only victims, “ours,” and butchers, the “others,” because “ours” could not have been butchers, at the most virtuous executioners. Thus, ideally, the others should all be chased out of the shrine. The latest generation of Spanish bishops also seems to live in the simplification of this subtle fog, in which the Catholic martyrs of the Civil War are no longer visible, if visible unrecognizable, and if recognizable embarrassing; perhaps also for the bishops a “cursed legacy” as for the political parties. Not so for John Paul II, who decisively launched the canonizations that even Pope Francis has continued.

And yet everybody knew it. In the tragic knot of a conflict between ultimate values, the essence of civil war, those martyrs found their butchers precisely on the “right side” and had in Franco someone who kept the Catholic martyrs from multiplying and the Spanish Church from anticipating the fate of those socialist countries. The martyrs were on the wrong side? Because, Bolsheviks and anarchists, everyone for his side, would be the right side? With what indiscretion of historical-political judgment, today, can one adopt such a parameter?

If then it is necessary to contextualize the collective hopes of the thirties in the communist revolution and in the USSR, it is just as necessary to contextualize the decision, and sometimes the sanctity, of those who oppose them, and the political seriousness of those who rose up against a facade of legality and a husk of a state in the hands of subversion. The legitimacy of the “uprising” is an issue that I have always wanted to discuss with calm. One can defend it with good reasons, better than those that celebrate on the left the armed insurrection for the seizure of power, in the Asturias (1934). It is striking that now the Francoist “uprising” should appear “obviously” illegitimate, as said in a recent report on Italian television. This is possible only in forgetfulness of the complexity of the past, not to mention the problem of evil in history. Forgetfulness of a past where heroes and monsters and victims are everywhere, on which it is not simple to reflect; unacceptable for the progressive discipline of public awareness.

Even the unifying religious sign of the monumental complex of the Valle today appears to be only tolerated. In fact, not only is it a sacred expression of the civil, but it is an explicitly Catholic monument, with the big church of the Holy Cross, the accompaniment of sacred art, the monastery; nor could it be otherwise because forgiveness is under the cross, and the enormous cross nudges men, of themselves not inclined to forgive. The great Pietà that overlooks the doors of the basilica is, moreover, a precise viaticum. In the shrine everything is inseparable from the rest, if it still has a meaning. The dead are not separable from the buildings, nor these from the dead, perhaps almost fifty thousand. Nor was Franco’s tomb, underground, beneath a simple slab, near the main altar, in the somewhat gloomy half-light of the great nave. The Valle de los Caídos is not far from the Escuriale.

Only a wayward civil postmodernity in search of some dignification could want the abandonment and the alteration of a religious-civil complex of such power and humility. Thus Francisco Franco, not a man of forgiveness in 1940 when the work was begun but the protagonist of the pacification (authoritarian, to be sure) until today accepted by the Spanish, is sacrificed, or concealed and normalized, for a new pacification, wordy and vindictive. I wonder and I will ask Spanish friends, certainly occupied with other things, if they are aware of this.

*

[On the Holy See’s position, see on Vatican News the statements of the cardinal secretary of state, of the nuncio in Spain, and of the director of the Vatican press office – editor’s note].

*

A MARGINAL NOTE

(p.d.m.) This reflection on Franco is not accidental. Mine is an old, long battle – with Kojève, with Voegelin, with Besançon – against the sentimentalist degradation of the West, or against that attitude of benevolent openness and understanding for all positions incapable of going beyond generic moralistic appeals, such as to produce, in the face of the problems, only theoretically and politically confused compromises, on a low level.

The excess of good sentiments, evocative but inconclusive, which we call bleeding heart, is in reality a conception of the world dominated for decades not by charity but by humanitarianism and nonviolence, associated today with all the battles for individual rights, ethical and anthropological status and options, such as they may be, against regulations and sanctions. Even euthanistic perspectives are such, and even the ethics of the good life (against those of duty), tendentially hedonistic, converge on this.

The Christology that opposed the theology of the redemptive sacrifice belongs to this “nonviolent” decline of Western Christianity, in the progressive falsification of the Old and New Testament. Today this takes place out of fear of facing the humanitarian visions and sensibilities of the culture of the “enlightened” and judgmental nonbelievers. One should, as was done until Vatican Council II, face and explain, in profundity, the profundity of the mystery  of God and of evil. On the bleeding heart path – as an ideology of the entropic process of humanity toward peace and tranquility, ends in themselves – Catholicism accommodates at the deepest levels, without realizing it, the humanitarian, socialistic, neo-Buddhist and neo-Christian tendencies of the nineteenth century and of more recent pacifism. Pope Francis is already this.Condividi:

“Neutrality” as the New Paganism

Hadley Arkes

THE CATHOLIC THING

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2019

Spinoza remarked that Moses really didn’t have to climb to the heights of Mount Sinai in order to be nearer to God, as God set out for him Ten Commandments, useful and compelling in the ordering of our lives.  God, he wrote, could have heard quite as well if Moses had remained on the plain.  For God was not afflicted by atrophying auditory nerves; nor was He hobbled by any of the other anatomical complaints that that affect fathers as they advance in age.

Spinoza would add that even if the tablets had been destroyed, on the second return from the mountain, those Commandments would still be there, still as apt, still as valid, because they were “written on the heart.”  It was an invocation of the Natural Law, the law that would be there even if it hadn’t exactly been written down.  It was the Law that St. Paul had in mind when he remarked, in Romans 2, that “when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, [they ]. . . are a law unto themselves.”

The redoubtable, late Harry Jaffa, in an essay of many years ago, offered a commentary on this scene, pointed and in jest, but it suddenly springs out with an unsettling relevance to our own age.  “Imagine Moses,” he wrote, “descending Sinai and finding the cult of the golden calf, and being told by Aaron that the people had just discovered their natural right to religious freedom.”

But what Jaffa offered as laughable has now become fully serious – and accepted even by some Catholic defenders of religious freedom.  One friend of mine, a scholar of the law who has worked in this vineyard, has remarked that “the fundamental human right to religious freedom is grounded in the truth about the human person; it is enjoyed and should be protected whether or not one’s religious beliefs are true.”

It does not ordinarily require any special genius to grasp that we can have a deep respect for people as human persons without being obliged to credit as true and plausible everything they happen to believe or consider true.   And yet this argument has stirred a new credulity, even among the professoriate when it comes to the matter of religious freedom.

In the willingness to protect a large sphere of freedom for the religious, some of my friends have been willing to accept a dramatic receding from any willingness to make judgments on the teachings that define the character of religious sects.  But as Harry Jaffa observed, “there is a rational component of any religion comprehended by the protections of the First Amendment.  The free exercise of religion does not include the right to human sacrifice, to suttee, to temple prostitution, to the use of hallucinatory drugs, or to any other of the thousand and one barbarous and savage religious practices that have been features of barbarous and savage religions.”

My friends litigating cases would accept that understanding, though they are averse to speaking of “barbarous and savage religions.”  But even so, the same friends have been willing to leave unchallenged these days the acceptance of Satanism as a sect claiming religious standing at times.  In Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014) the Supreme Court refused to find an Establishment of Religion when a town council invited ministers of local churches to offer invocations.

The Court did not object when some of the prayers were quite emphatically Christian in character, but as the practice has spread now in the land, the reigning assumption has been that the invitations to speak should be available to all sects claiming to be “religions,” with no discriminations.   There is no requirement that a religion encompass the G-word (God) or the Creator who endowed us with the standing of rights-bearing creatures.

Under this dispensation, the Satanists in the country have found a new growth industry, along with the ministers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (shown in this column on October 9).  The affirmation of radical evil, for the Satanists, no longer counts as a point of disqualification.

But what seems to be serenely unnoticed is that the willingness to acquiesce in this style of ecumenism is not at all a position of large-natured tolerance and “neutrality” toward religion.  As Gunnar Gundersen has argued, it is rather a slide back into paganism.

Imagine that we have a scheme that every day offers public celebration of another religion.  There will be days for Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists, Muslims, Satanists, and the burning of incense for new sects on the scene.   Implicit in the scheme is that none of these religious groups rests on a teaching that is arguably truer than the others.

Instead of “respecting” these religions, the scheme begins by refusing to respect the truth of these religions, or respecting the adherents of these religions as they understand themselves. At the time of the American Founding, our religion, as Jefferson said, was “practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude and the love of man.”

As Harry Jaffa put it, “the dictates of right reason [were thought to be] the voice of God no less than sacred scripture.” It was because, as he said, “religion in America acknowledged the authority of reason – of the laws of nature – no less than of revelation, that religion became the first of our political institutions.”

*Image: Descent from Mount Sinai (or Moses and the Tablets of the Law) by Cosimo Rosselli (and workshop), 1481-82 [Sistine Chapel, Vatican]

© 2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.orgThe Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

• About the Author
• Latest Articles

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Amherst College and the Founder/Director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law. Volume II of his audio lectures from The Modern Scholar, First Principles and Natural Law is now available for download.

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

CRISIS MAGAZINE

Our Patient and Indulgent Mother Church

FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER

A few decades ago, I had lunch with Daniel Carroll in Howard County, Maryland, during which he used a pop-up toaster in his grand dining room, which was hung with ancestral portraits. There were many such portraits, for Dan was a direct descendant of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Doughoregan Manor has been a private residence since it was built in the early eighteenth century, although its family chapel was open to area Catholics in days when the Faith had been proscribed. After the Civil War, the chairs in the chapel, where the signer is buried, were purchased by a maternal antecedent during a trip to Paris when the Church of the Madeleine was being renovated. I never got to go back to Doughoregan, but Dan wrote to say that he was using the incense I had given him.

What matters here are those chairs, for they were used at the funeral of Chopin. The “Raphael of the piano,” as Heinrich Heine called him, had requested that Mozart’s Requiem be played at his obsequies; special permission was granted for female singers, who were concealed behind a black velvet curtain, which must have posed an acoustical challenge. Pauline Viardot, who had affectionately nursed Chopin in his last illness, sang the mezzo-soprano part of the “Tuba mirum” movement. The soprano, Jenny Lind, had recently returned from America, where P.T. Barnum had paid her an unheard-of $150,000; she had vain hopes of returning to New York with Chopin. One of the pallbearers was the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, long rumored to have been the natural son of the diplomat and sometime bishop Talleyrand. Three thousand devotees packed the great Neoclassical church. For all the black crepe, Chopin’s funeral was a colorful Catholic moment.

In the peccadillos, inconsistencies, and paradoxes of celebrities like Chopin are displayed the mixture of sublimity and earthiness which constitute the moral texture of Catholicism: an elasticity of accommodation that unsubtle critics confuse with hypocrisy, and a generosity of spirit that zealots (both secular and religious) scorn as indifference. Chopin is but one of many witnesses from his own age to the patience that Catholicism has for the creative mind, and even what the Romantic Age named “genius.” Such patience is at risk today when sentimentality indulges a false mercy, not knowing the difference between steadfastness and rigidity, and confusedly loving the sin as part and parcel of loving the sinner. The Church, rather, is like the Scriptures as described by Pope Gregory the Great in his Commentary of Job: a river broad and deep, shallow enough here for the lamb to go wading, but deep enough there for the elephant to swim—planus et altus, in quo et agnus ambulet et elephas natet.

That expansiveness expresses the solicitude of Holy Mother Church in nurturing souls. That patience and indulgence is infinite, but humans are not, so her benefaction requires contrition, the lack of which is the sin of presumption compounding all particular sins. 

Chopin was born in Poland to a French father and a devout Polish mother. Chopin’s Catholicism was unquestioned but fragile when faced with the social volatility of France, where he immigrated in 1831. Not even worldly Warsaw had prepared Chopin for the louche allurements of Paris, and his string of dalliances are part of musical lore. The demanding polonaises Chopin wrote while living in France seem to sublimate elegantly his frustrations as an exile who was undeniably comfortable with the new kind of domestication offered by the swooning salonistes. Amantine Lucile Aurore Dudevant (known to us as George Sand) was, of course, the most famous of Chopin’s devotees; though the full nature of their relationship remains unclear, it could not have been what Plato proposed in the Symposium. She considered herself a Christian, albeit with an ephemeral, Romantic Christology that did little for Chopin’s theology.

Dying in his apartment at 12 Place Vendôme in Paris circa 1849 at the age of 39, probably from complications of tuberculosis, Chopin politely resisted the pleas of his friend and fellow émigré, the Polish priest Aleksander Jełowicki. Various biographies give the same account: “In order not to offend my mother,” Chopin told Jełowicki, “I would not die without the sacraments, but for my part I do not regard them in the sense that you desire. I understand the blessing of the confession in so far as it is unburdening of a heavy heart into a friendly hand, but not as a sacrament. I am ready to confess to you if you wish it, because I love you, not because I hold it necessary.”

The priest persisted throughout Chopin’s last four days, during which Protestant friends joined Catholics praying at the bedside.

At last, Chopin professed his faith in Christ, and received the sacraments with devotion, asking those present in the room to pray for him. He told Father Jełowicki, “My friend, without you I would have died like a pig.” He called out the names of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as he clutched a crucifix, saying: “At last I have reached the source of my blessedness.”

Death came for Chopin on October 17 at 2 a.m. In accordance with his wishes, Chopin’s eldest sister Ludwika Jędrzejewicz secreted his heart in a jar of cognac back to Warsaw, where it was buried in the Church of the Holy Cross. Chopin’s heart became so potent a symbol of the Polish national spirit that it was stolen by the Nazis, who kept it until the end of WWII. During the bloodshed of the war, Chopin’s legacy remained a source of solace and strength for the Polish people. One month after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Pope Pius XII comforted the besieged Poles by invoking the genius of “the immortal Chopin,” saying: “If the art of man could achieve so much, how much more skillful must be the art of God in assuaging the grief of your souls?”

❧

Chopin’s contemporary Franz Liszt was another Catholic prodigy often unsuccessful in taming his appetites. There was a bit of give and take between the two composers, expressed on one occasion when Liszt added a few frills as a display of “sprezzatura,” or studied carelessness, to a Chopin piece. Chopin told him to stick to the score. At one point they had their eyes on the same woman, but Liszt was able to fend well enough for himself. By his mistress, the Countess Marie d’Agoult, he fathered Blandine, Daniel, and Cosima, the future second wife of Wagner. By this time Liszt was a sort of mega rock star, giving much of his stupendous earnings to philanthropies, including the restoration of Cologne Cathedral and the Church of St. Leopold in Vienna. Rather like the Irish singer Bono, Liszt performed benefit concerts after natural disasters, such as the great flood of Pest, and the fire that destroyed much of Hamburg.

Although Gregory XVI condemned the political philosophy of Lammenais, the French priest saved Liszt from becoming a diehard rationalist. Liszt was not unique in finding no inconsistency in being both a Catholic and Freemason. He had an antecedent in Mozart. According to the newspaper of the Italian Episcopal Conference, L’Avvenire,and also quoted in the Katholische Presseagentur Osterreich, in an interview at a music conference in Chieti in 2006, Cardinal Schonborn of Austria curiously denied that Mozart had been a practicing member of the Lodge: “There’s no foundation for his frequently mentioned membership in the Masons.” In Vaticanese, this “does not conform to the truth.” Indeed, Mozart’s last work was the “Little Masonic Cantata.” Truths are true, and facts are stern tutors. Later, a spokesman for the cardinal explained that he had been misunderstood, and meant to distinguish eighteenth-century Freemasonry from later forms.

In 1860, Liszt was all set to marry the Polish princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, but the Russian tsar prevailed upon Pope Pius IX not to annul the princess’s 1836 marriage to a Russian prince and military officer. Instead of marrying, Liszt became a Third Order Franciscan, taking Minor Orders as a porter, lector, exorcist, and acolyte. He was punctilious in his assigned duties. At Castel Gandolfo, the Vatican, and in his own rooms, he spent many pleasant hours with the pope, who called him “my dear Palestrina.” Liszt set about to reform the desultory condition of music in the churches, promoting Gregorian chant and polyphony, and he took some theological studies in 1868 with Don Antonio Solfanelli. When he did perform, it always was in clerical dress, and Pius IX addressed him as Abbé.

There were those who accused Liszt of having sold his soul to the Devil, because his skill seemed preternatural in such works as the Dante Sonata and Mephisto Waltzes. And he could, for instance, sight-read the score of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with his left hand while holding a cigar in his right. The same was said of Paganini and his violin. Actually, Paganini could play three octaves across four strings, because he very probably had the long bones and flexible joints typical of Marfan syndrome. Abraham Lincoln had the same.

Although Lincoln played no instruments, he learned to love opera, having seen his first in New York City two weeks before his inauguration: the American premiere of Verdi’s Masked Ball, with its violent assassination scene. During his presidency, Lincoln attended the opera thirty times and saw his favorite, Gounod’s Faust, four times. The Lincoln boys, Willie and Tad, were required to take music lessons on a new Schomacker piano in the White House’s Red Room, with Polish instructor (and Chopin devotee) Aleksander Wołowski. As an aside, Rachmaninoff almost certainly had Marfan syndrome, and there are those who think that is why he and few others could play as written the opening chords of his Piano Concerto No.2 in C. At his final recital in 1943, Rachmaninoff played Chopin’s funeral march.

As for Paganini, he was as flamboyant a showman as Liszt. He played up the rumors of diabolism by dressing in black and riding in a black coach pulled by four black horses. His gaunt appearance was heightened when he lost all his teeth by the age of 46 in 1828 due, evidently, to what morphological tests have confirmed as mercury treatment for syphilis. His appeal to the ladies increased, nonetheless. In that same year Paganini separated from his mistress Antonia Bianchi, by whom he had a son named Achille. Though ill in 1840 in Nice, he refused the ministrations of a priest sent by the bishop, for he did not think he was dying, though he soon did. Not having received the Last Rites, and compromised by rumors of diabolism, his body was refused interment in consecrated ground. Four years later, Pope Gregory XVI gave permission for burial in Genoa, and in 1876 he was grandly entombed in Parma.

On October 27, 1850, one month following Pope Pius IX’s restoration of the hierarchy to England after three centuries, St. John Henry Newman used the occasion of the installation of Dr. Ullathorne as the first bishop of Birmingham in St. Chad’s Church, the work of Pugin, to defend the patient and indulgent ways of Holy Mother Church toward her beclouded children. As an experiment, I calculated that his sermon “Christ Upon the Waters” must have taken at least one hour and fifteen minutes to preach. He addressed the matter of scandals:

There are crimes enough to be found in the members of all denominations: if there are passages in our history, the like of which do not occur in the annals of Wesleyanism or of Independency, or the other religions of the day, recollect that there have been no Anabaptist pontiffs, no Methodist kings, no Congregational monasteries, no Quaker populations.

One pedantic quibble: the great Newman was wrong about no Methodist kings. Five years earlier, the very year that Newman was received into the Church, the first Methodist king of Tonga was crowned. Tu’i Kanokupolu Taufa’ahau had been converted by Wesleyan missionaries in 1831.

Tom Mozley, the husband of Newman’s oldest sister Harriet, said that his brother-in-law had “attained such proficiency on the violin that had he not become a Doctor of the Church, he would have been a Paganini.” Assuredly this was not a reference to Paganini’s domestic arrangements.

Once in Paris at the tomb of Chopin in Père Lachaise cemetery, I was approached by a woman veiled in black who asked me to place flowers on Chopin’s tomb. That I did, climbing over a railing and scaling the rather high plinth to place the roses in the arms of a mourning Euterpe, muse of music, sculpted by Auguste Clésinger. I can only say that I once prayed for Chopin’s soul and immediately I was able to play the Opus 10, No. 12 Revolutionary Etude with far fewer mistakes than usual. Now, at risk of presumption, I should ask Paganini to help with my fiddle.

Tagged as Classical Music28

By Fr. George W. Rutler

Fr. George W. Rutler is pastor of St. Michael’s church in New York City. He is the author of many books including Principalities and Powers: Spiritual Combat 1942-1943 (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press) and Hints of Heaven (Sophia Institute Press). His latest books are He Spoke To Us (Ignatius, 2016); The Stories of Hymns (EWTN Publishing, 2017); and Calm in Chaos (Ignatius, 2018).

How the Code of Canon Law upholds Liturgical Tradition

Nov4by The Editor

https://fromrome.wordpress.com/2019/11/04/how-the-code-of-canon-law-upholds-liturgical-tradition/

Pope Saint Pius X offers the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass according to the Missale Romanum of Saint Pius V, which remains still the liturgical law of the Roman Church.

The fundamental principles of the Code affirm the liturgical traditions of the Church and require that the code be understood as such.

We can see this from Canon 2, which reads in Latin:

Can. 2 — Codex plerumque non definit ritus, qui in actionibus liturgicis celebrandis sunt servandi; quare leges liturgicae hucusque vigentes vim suam retinent, nisi earum aliqua Codicis canonibus sit contraria.

Which in English translation says:

Canon 2 :  The Code does not for the most part define the rites, which are to be observed in celebrating liturgical actions: on which account the liturgical laws in force up to now retain their vigor, unless any of them be contrary to any of the canons of the Code.

Here the determinative word in the Code is liturgical laws. In the Roman Rite, as has been observed by many: the new form of the mass, the Novus Ordo, had been celebrated for 13 years at the time the new Code of Canon Law was promulgated in 1983. As such it had not yet obtained any force of law by mere custom, which requires 20 years. It also had not the support of a papal law, since Pope Paul VI in 1969, when publishing the decree, Missale Romanum, neglected to give the new form of the mass the force of law, leaving only minor aspects of the Missale to be determined by his decree and significantly — by the Hand of God — leaving unsaid in a legal act his will that it be imposed or become law.

Hence, canon 2, must be read as requiring the decree, Missale Romanum of St Pius V, to remain in force, since it was the principle liturgical law still enforce at the time the new Code was promulgated. We see this affirmed in part by the motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum, of his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, which says the ancient liturgy was never abrogated. Those who argue, that that same decree gave force of law to the new liturgy, have little to argue upon, since in it Pope Benedict limited himself to affirming the facts of law, not in promulgating new ones. That he recites a history of liturgical innovations since the reign of Pope John XXIII determines nothing, because a narrative is not a law or legal decree.

In this, we see that Pope Benedict XVI was simply manifesting the intent of John Paul II in promulgating the Code. The authentic meaning is for tradition, and all other canons need to be read in that light, in virtue of canon 17, which as has been often said here at the From Rome blog, canons need to be read in the light of canonical tradition and the mind of the legislator and their proper senses.  Since the liturgical innovations of Paul VI were not yet law or customary law in 1983, they cannot be appealed to in the reading of any canon in the present code, and those who do so are violating canons 2 and 17.

Finally, the most important thing to remember, when there arises any controversy over the liturgy at the canonical level, is that the context of the New Code approves the Ancient Liturgy. Never cede to the revolutionaries or those duped by the practice of putting praxis above law and custom, that the New Code upholds the innovations.

For example, let’s apply canon 2 and 17 to the reading of canon 938, which reads:

Can. 938 — § 1. Sanctissima Eucharistia habitualiter in uno tantum ecclesiae vel oratorii tabernaculo asservetur.

§ 2. Tabernaculum, in quo sanctissima Eucharistia asservatur, situm sit in aliqua ecclesiae vel oratorii parte insigni, conspicua, decore ornata, ad orationem apta.

§ 3. Tabernaculum, in quo habitualiter sanctissima Eucharistia asservatur, sit inamovibile, materia solida non transparenti confectum, et ita clausum ut quam maxime periculum profanationis vitetur.

§ 4. Gravi de causa, licet sanctissimam Eucharistiam, nocturno praesertim tempore, alio in loco tutiore et decoro asservare.

§ 5. Qui ecclesiae vel oratorii curam habet, prospiciat ut clavis tabernaculi, in quo sanctissima Eucharistia asservatur, diligentissime custodiatur.

And in English says:

Canon 938: §1 Let the Most Holy Eucharist be habitually reserved in only one tabernacle of the church and/or oratory.

§2. Let the tabernacle, in which the Most Holy Eucharist is reserved, be situated in some conspicuous, fittingly ornate part of the church and/or special oratory, (which is) apt for praying.

§3 Let the tabernacle, in which the Most Holy Eucharist is habitually reserved, be immovable, constructed of non transparent solid material, and so closed that the danger or profanation be most of all prohibited.

§4 For grave cause, it is licit to reserve the Most Holy Eucharist, especially at night time, in some safer and decorous place.

§5 Let he who has the care of the church and/or oratory, take care that the key to the tabernacle, in which the Most Holy Eucharist be reserved, be most diligently guarded.

Now let us examine this Canon carefully to understand what it means and does not mean.

First of all it speaks of two kinds of tabernacles, those in which the Sacrament is kept (nn. 1-5) and those in which it is kept habitually (nn.  1,3, 4). Thus it does not require that there only be one tabernacle as many have been told it means.  It only requires that for the most part, the tabernacle in which the Sacrament is habitually kept, be one. What does this mean? It means, that there should be numerically only one tabernacle in which the Sacrament is kept 24/7. However, there can be other tabernacles where the Sacrament is kept for a time, which is apt for praying (ad orationem). Here the Code uses the classical Latin term for liturgical prayer, orare, and thus signifies the Mass and any other liturgical service. But for security, another tabernacle at night time, in a more secure place can be had. So from this canon we can see at least 3 kinds of tabernacles are approved. The one for liturgical prayer, the one for habitual reservation, and the one for night time security.

Now, if we read this canon in the light of canon 2 and canon 17, which require us to understand it in continuity with liturgical and canonical tradition, we can see that it in no way at all abolishes the usage which was common for centuries of having a tabernacle on every altar (ad orationem), a tabernacle for principle reservation of the Sacrament and a tabernacle in a secure place, such as the Sacristy, for security.

In fact, when one recalls that Pope Pius XII magisterially taught that to separate the tabernacle from the altar would be an error,* we can see from canon 17, that canon 938 must be understood to include the obligation that at least the tabernacle for prayer (ad orationem) be situated upon an altar. That means, that in § 2 of Canon 938 it is requiring that it be upon an altar. And that canon 2 and canon 938 §2 is allowing it also to be upon the High Altar and every altar where public prayer is offered (ad orationem), since there is no greater praying that at the Altar where the Mass be offered.

Thus this canon in no way causes or requires that other tabernacles not be used or be removed. And if anyone order that a contrary practice be executed, then the subject receiving such an order has the right to refuse its execution. If the order be given verbally and not in writing, then the subject can refuse to comply on the grounds of canon 40, which makes all compliance invalid prior to receiving the administrative act in written form. He may, but is not required, then ask that a rescript first be granted (canon 60) codifying in written form and a legal act the order. If the order be given in writing or by rescript, then if the written act does not contain reference to a grant of authority (to the one commanding) to derogate from canon 2, 17 or 938, then the one receiving the written command can refuse it on the grounds of canon 41 and 38, namely, that such an act is nullified in virtue of canon 38, because it runs contrary to the law of canon 938, and that thus in virtue of canon 41 the one receiving such a command can omit its execution.

______

* Pius XII, Allocutio, Assisi, Sept 22, 1956: “To separate tabernacle from altar is to separate two things which by their origin and nature should remain united.” (complete text here in PDF)

The link below is a Youtube video that shows a faithful and renowned priest from the Archdiocese of Mexico City (the archdiocese of our Lady of Guadalupe), Fr. Hugo Valdemar, holding a prayer gathering for reparation against the various profanations where the idol of pachamama was worshiped. In the video, Fr. Hugo explains what the pachamama statues actually mean, then he burns them as an act of repugnance, and does this right outside his parish and in broad daylight!  Fr. Hugo explains the following: “The most blessed Virgin [Mary] of Guadalupe, as we know, is a young woman who is pregnant. She has Jesus in her womb whom is to give birth to the new continent (the new world). She says that she comes to grant her love to all the inhabitants of this entire continent (not just Mexico). She is pregnant and carries Jesus who will bring us the Gospel and drive away the darkness of idolatry and the devil.” Then, Fr. Hugo, taking the statue of pachamama say: “A friend exorcist says that this idol (pachamama) is actually the figure of the antichrist; is a blasphemy and parody of Mary. Pachamama is pregnant but carries the antichrist to give birth to him in the masonic church: to destroy the sacraments which is to return to idolatry and superstition. So, this antichrist who is to give birth to a church with an amazonian face is an abomination, it is a contradiction to church doctrine, which is the dynamic into which these idolaters want to enter into now. So, in sign of repugnance to the offenses that they made to the most blessed virgin Mary in Rome, in her church of Transpontina, we, as a protest and as a sign of reparation, burn this satanic idol of the pachamama”.CLICK HERE TO WATCH FR. HUGO VALDEMAR BURN PACHAMAMA! (fast forward to minute 3:12)  

On Joe Biden and Judging Souls

Robert Royal

THE CATHOLIC THING

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2019

The political season, alas, we always have with us now, but last week it took a turn in earnest.

Father Robert E. Morey, a courageous priest in South Carolina, denied former Vice-President Joe Biden Holy Communion owing to the longstanding public scandal of his support for unlimited abortion. To my mind when Biden, as vice-president, performed the wedding ceremony for two gay White House staffers, it was a cynical move for LGBT support, but far more importantly another brazen scandal demanding a response from the Church. He has been essentially defying the American bishops for decades, knowing that it’s highly likely they won’t dare put him on the spot.

Reactions to that priest’s act fell, as always happens, along the usual political lines. But this is not a political matter. It’s a question of whether the Church, as it claims, takes seriously the most serious things, namely the nature of the Eucharist and what it means for someone to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.

There have been various dodges from the Church hierarchy on this matter. New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, for example, remarked that he would never judge the state of someone else’s soul. But that’s not what is involved in the Biden case and many others like it. The question is whether to allow someone who has publicly adopted positions – and acted on them – that are directly contrary to the teachings of the Church and constitute grave scandal – to go along just like any other Catholic.

Scandal does not mean, as it does in the tabloids, that you’ve done something spectacularly wrong. In Catholicism, it means a public stumbling block that confuses people, Catholic and not, about grave matters like abortion and God’s intentions in creating the two sexes.

Yes, as people sometimes argue, a known sinner may have been to Confession and, therefore, may receive in a state of grace. But someone who has created a serious and longstanding public scandal must do some public act of repudiation, both of his beliefs and acts. Otherwise, the scandal remains.

Dolan is hardly alone in using clichés to avoid necessary judgments, not of souls but of facts. Pope Francis set a bad example when he famously said early in his papacy, “Who am I to judge?” A question had been put to him by a secular reporter on the plane back from World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro – not about homosexuality as such, but on a specific person: Bishop Battista Ricca, who was notorious for homosexual escapades in Uruguay and had been given a high post running the Casa Santa Marta where the pope resides and a position in a key Vatican finance office.

The question, then, was whether it was wise to employ a person with that background in such sensitive positions. A cliché that addresses a different question shows right away that the person has been put on an uncomfortable spot and wants to deflect rather than answer.

We’ve seen similar rationalizations on Biden from the usual figures. Fr. James Martin tweeted out that we cannot start excluding people from Communion on the basis of their politics. Otherwise, what of Catholics who don’t follow papal teaching on immigration, the death penalty, or the environment? “Where does it stop?” he asked, not very seriously, since he knows full well that this is a red herring .

Because it stops far short of the issues he raised; those are matters of prudential judgments, not fundamental principles. You may, for example, hold that reducing the use of fossil fuels via large public subsidies is the best way to deal with environmental questions. Or you may think – many informed people do – that spending on inefficient renewable sources of energy now is actually wasted money. Research into cleaner, more efficient technologies being preferable.

There is no one Catholic approach on the matter, and the same is true of immigration, poverty, and many more subjects.

On abortion, however, the Church has spoken unequivocally. In a notorious episode a dozen years ago, Cardinal McCarrick misrepresented a letter from Cardinal Ratzinger to the American bishops. He read only parts of it, making it appear (as John Kerry, another “pro-choice Catholic,” was running for president) that abortion was just one of a range of issues Catholics need to consider in voting.

In fact, Ratzinger said, quite forthrightly, that some issues are on a different plane than others. And abortion, which is the deliberate taking of innocent human life, is prominent among them.

Even Pope Francis, who clearly has no heart for fighting the culture war, has spoken of abortion as like “hiring an assassin” to solve a problem.

Yet we read among liberal Catholic outlets that fear for the fortunes of Catholic Democrats, that the pope has also said the Eucharist is a medicine for the ailing not a “prize for the perfect.” This makes sense – if you think that assassination is a disease, not a deeply evil choice, when it’s not sheer political cynicism.

Judging the good and evil in any person is best left to the Creator. Yet as we know – to our sorrow and annoyance – one of the most common attitudes on the Internet and in social media these days is to pronounce people, sometimes whole categories of people, angels or (more likely) devils based on one or two or three things about them.

When we were better instructed in Catholic Morals, this sort of behavior came with a stern warning label: Rash judgment. Not only does it often lead to injustice towards other people, it contradicts our daily, concrete experience of the people we meet, to say nothing of our own mixed selves.

But it is not rash judgment to make the determination that a politician with decades of countenancing the destruction of tens of millions of innocents in the womb should not present himself for Communion. Nor is it rash to deny him the sacrament when, in defiance of faith and reason alike, he presents himself anyway for the Bread of Angels.

More priests and bishops need to follow that example, and be supported by lay people in their parishes and dioceses. We might be surprised at what results.

*Image: Do This in Memory of Me by Istvan Csok, 1890 [Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest]

© 2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.orgThe Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

• About the Author
• Latest Articles

Robert Royal

Dr. Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, published by Ignatius Press.  The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, is now available in paperback from Encounter Books.

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

Cardinal Sarah’s Guide to the New Counter-Reformation

MICHAEL WARREN DAVIS

CRISIS MAGAZINE

In 1577, St. John of the Cross was taken prisoner by a group of Carmelites from Toledo who were opposed to the reforms of the Order he was undertaking with St. Teresa of Ávila. For eight or nine months, he was held in a six-by-ten-foot cell. The ceiling was so low that John (not a tall man) could hardly stand up. His one tunic was constantly soaked with blood from the frequent scourgings. The food they gave him was so bad that he suspected his guards were trying to poison him; he would say an Act of Love with every bite to steel himself against calumny.

Yet it was here that he wrote the Spiritual Canticle and parts of his masterpiece, Dark Night of the Soul. He bore captivity and torture with such love, patience, and determination that the older Carmelites called him “the coward”. The younger monks—not yet poisoned by the decadence and factionalism of the 16th- century Church—wept at John’s courage in the face of suffering. “This is a saint,” they whispered among themselves.

The most moving story, in my opinion, comes near the end of his confinement. John’s spiritual daughter, St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross—inexplicably known even to Catholics by her secular name, Edith Stein—recalls it in The Science of the Cross:

Prior Maldonado [the “Calced” leader] came to John’s prison cell accompanied by two religious. The prisoner was so weak that he could hardly move. Thinking his jailer had entered, he did not move [to stand] up. The prior poked him with his foot and asked why he did not stand up in his presence. As John begged pardon, saying he had not known who was there, Padre Maldonado asked, “What were you thinking about since you were so absorbed?” [St. John replied,] “I was thinking that tomorrow is the feast of Our Lady and that it would be a great consolation for me if I could say Mass.” 

(It’s said that the Virgin appeared to him the next day and showed him how to pick the lock. Talk about a mother’s love!)

It has become common now to say that the Church faces her greatest crisis since the Protestant Reformation. We should remember that a very different priest—Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar—had a very different response to the corruption in the Church: he accused the Pope of being the Antichrist and attacked magisterial teaching, including the dogma of transubstantiation. He defied the bishops, incurred excommunication, and founded a brand-new church to propagate his teachings.

John knew there can be no authentic reform in the absence of obedience to one’s lawful superiors—even superiors as cruel and corrupt as Prior Maldonado. That’s why John is remembered as the greatest saint of the Counter-Reformation, and Luther as the most dangerous heretic in Christian history.

I thought of John as I read Robert Cardinal Sarah’s new book, The Day is Now Far Spent. It is dedicated to two very different pontiffs: Pope Benedict XVI (a “peerless architect of rebuilding the Church”) and Pope Francis (a “faithful and devoted son of Saint Ignatius”). Yet it is Sarah himself, I think, who lays out the finest blueprint we’re likely to see for ecclesial reform—or perhaps I should say counter-reform.

Today, the word “reform” drips with innuendo, just as it did in the time of St. John of the Cross. It signifies a desire to change the permanent teachings of the Church as a solution to institutional corruption. It uses a temporal crisis as an excuse to propagate spiritual errors. It uses moral confusion to camouflage innovation. It can also encourage disobedience in the name of theological purity: we shouldn’t forget that the original Protestants viewed themselves as conservatives.

Just because a man opposes the Maldonados in the Church it doesn’t make him a John of the Cross. He may very well be a Martin Luther.

I have no doubt that Cardinal Sarah, for one, is a John of the Cross. Like the Mystical Doctor, he takes seriously St. Paul’s warning to the Ephesians: “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Ultimately, the source of the present crisis—whether “present” means the 16th century or the 21st—isn’t new: it’s original sin.

Ultimately, then, the solution isn’t novel either: it’s the pursuit of greater holiness. As our Enemy is sin itself, the easiest sins to do battle against are those festering in our own souls. As St. Francis of Assisi put it, “the soldier of Christ must begin with victory over himself.”

The Day Is Now Far Spent is a manual for the new Counter-Reformation. As such, it’s as concerned with addressing the false solutions to the crisis as it is with the crisis itself—with refuting the Luthers as well as the Maldonados. His Eminence warns that,

No human effort, however talented or generous it may be, can transform a soul and give it the life of Christ. Only the grace and the Cross of Jesus can save and sanctify souls and make the Church grow. Multiplying human efforts, believing that methods and strategies have any efficacy in themselves, will always be a waste of time.

Cardinal Sarah isn’t recommending we ignore the crisis. On the contrary. “Let us not be afraid to say that the Church needs profound reform and that this happens through our conversion.” (Emphasis added.) “Go,” he commands; “repair by your faith, by your hope, and by your charity.”

❧

“Wait a minute, Davis,” I hear some of you saying; “This doesn’t sit right with me. What about Bergoglio? What about Pachamama and the German bishops’ ‘synodal journey’? What about the Viganò report and the unanswered dubia? Are you saying we should ignore all of this and just say the rosary?”

Well, the rosary is certainly a good place to start—and a good place to end. It’ not a bad place to stop along the way either.

It is true that no crisis has ever been solved by mere inaction. But, once we’ve resolved to act, the question becomes, How do we act most effectively? Cardinal Sarah’s answer: prayer. His book is fundamentally about the efficacy of grace.

Those who follow the daily meditations of another Discalced Carmelite, Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen’s Divine Intimacy, may remember the reflection from two Wednesdays ago on apostolic prayer. As Fr. Gabriel reminds us,

We can never be certain at all that our prayers will be answered according to our expectation, for we do not know if what we ask is conformable to God’s will; but when it is a question of apostolic prayer which asks for grace and the salvation of souls, it is a very different matter. In fact, when we pray for the aims of the apostolate, we are fitting into the plan prearranged by God Himself from all eternity, that plan for the salvation of all men which God desires to put into action infinitely more than we do; therefore, we cannot doubt the efficacy of our prayer. Because of this effectiveness, apostolic prayer is one of the most powerful means of furthering the apostolate.

For “if God has willed the distribution of grace in the world to depend upon the prayers of men,” then we can render no better service to the Church than to set about diligently distributing these graces, teaching others how to do so, and encouraging them in their efforts.

By the same token, the Enemy would be most gratified if we came to value our own “methods and strategies” above Our Lord’s. Better yet, we could distract others. We could join the secular, anti-Catholic media in amplifying the corruption within the Church, thereby leading others to become scandalized. (Nearly 40 percent of U.S. Catholics have considered leaving the Church over clerical sex abuse.) We could cause our fellow Catholics to lose faith in our spiritual fathers. (“Those who make sensational announcements of change and rupture are false prophets,” Cardinal Sarah charges.)

Our Blessed Lord’s strategy for reform is quite simple: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” Everything else is idle noise.

Of course, Cardinal Sarah isn’t suggesting we ignore the crisis in the Church. On the contrary, he writes: “Let us not be afraid to say that the Church needs profound reform and that this happens through our conversion.” Those last three words are crucial: through our conversion. “We do not reform the Church by division and hatred,” he warns; “We reform the Church when we start by changing ourselves!”

Where should our conversion lead us? To a deeper faith in Christ, as opposed to a prideful faith in our own schemes. What do we need to change in ourselves? Anything that separates us from Him. He attacks the spiritual and moral roots of the rot—roots that spread far wider than the Vatican and go further back than 2013.

At the heart of all modern corruption and decadence—both within and without the Church—is the problem of materialism. As Cardinal Sarah states rather movingly, “The supernatural is swallowed up in the desert of the natural.” This is why the real solution to the present crisis—namely, prayer and fasting—seems so quaint, perhaps even naïve. It’s as though we can’t tell the difference between an image of St. Michael armed for battle and one of Bouguereau’s putti.

The most obvious manifestation of this decadence, this pervasive materialism, is the smartphone. His Eminence asks us to consider how much time we spend “absorbed by the images, lights, [and] ghosts” it offers. He calls the ubiquitous screen “an eternal illusion, a little prison cell.” The cardinal warns that these devices

steal silence, destroy the richness of solitude, and trample on intimacy. It often happens that they snatch us away from our loving life with God to expose us to the periphery, to what is external to us in the midst of the world.

(By the way, that goes for tablets, computers, and televisions as well.)

Can we bring ourselves to get rid of our devices, deactivate our social media accounts, and dedicate those liberated hours to deepening our relationship with God? Can we accept that the Church will only grow bigger and stronger as we ourselves become smaller and meeker? Can we trust Christ enough to take Him up on His offer to cease carrying our burden and rest? Are we humble enough to admit that our burden is too heavy for us to carry, and to take up His easy yoke instead?

Martin Luther said No, and went on to appoint himself reformer of the Church. In his arrogance and disobedience, that one friar wounded our Holy Mother more grievously than all the Maldonados put together.

John of the Cross stood by the Church. He cleaned her wounds with the tears he wept over sins—most especially his own. He nourished her with his fasting. He strengthened her with his suffering. He kept her company in the dark night, even when Our Lord withdrew His sweet consolation. It was his patience, humility, and obedience—even towards Maldonado—that won the wicked prior’s monks to his cause.

“If you think that your priests and bishops are not saints,” Cardinal Sarah writes, “then be one for them.” Today, there’s only one Carmelite monastery in Toledo, and it’s Discalced.

There will be no shortage of Luthers in this generation. (I’m one of them.) But, with The Day Is Now Spent, we know there’s at least one John of the Cross in our midst.

Tagged as Cardinal Robert Sarah, Carmelite spirituality, Counter Reformation, John of the Cross, Martin Luther, Technology26

By Michael Warren Davis

Michael Warren Davis is the editor of Crisis magazine and host of The Crisis Point podcast.