As I have mentioned previously, Cardinal Sarah, the head of the Congregation of Divine Worship (so the highest authority in these matters besides the Pope himself) has asked for priests to return to the ad orientem mode of saying Mass, worshiping ‘with the people’, facing the ‘East’ and the return of Christ, as was done for millennia prior to the revision after the Second Vatican Council.  As this article by Christopher Ruddy in First Things makes clear, sadly, the Cardinal’s suggestion has been quickly shot down by the highest authorities in Rome, for reasons that are not made so clear. I think Ruddy is correct, that we have lost much of the eschatological, eternal orientation of the pilgrim Church.  It is all about here and now, our feelings, the immediate payoff, charisma and personality. Hence, also , the rejection of meditative ‘other worldly’ Gregorian chant, polyphony, splendid vestments, clear and direct sermons that challenge one to perfection and so on.  We are way too absorbed in clappy-hands, guitars, emotive ballads, inclusivity and feelin’ good.

I hope that the good Cardinal Sarah’s sober words, which go far beyond ad orientem , into the very nature of what it means to be and to worship as a Church, have influence beyond the ‘here and now’.  May they seep into hearts that are perhaps a little too focused on fruit that does not last.

And while we’re at it, to paraphrase the late great Father Neuhaus, one should also peruse the article by Tom Holland on the need to re-bastion Europe against the rising tide of uncontrolled mass immigration.  As I have also written before, Christian and non-Christian, that is, pagan and unbaptized, cultures just do not mix, unless assimilation occurs, one would hope in the Christian direction.  Historically and into the present, this applies to Christians and Muslims, but also between Christians and non-Christians, namely, the neo-pagans who now fill the halls of our universities, parliament and media.

The problem, as we are all aware and Holland emphasizes, is that Europe is hardly Christian anymore.  Can an agnostic paganism carry the day? To what possibly could the Muslim immigrants assimilate, even if they were inclined to?  See the last paragraph above.  Who are we as a Church, and, more broadly, as a civilization?

Another black man was shot by a white officer.  This time, the black man, Charles Kinsey, a therapist at a group home, was helping an autistic man on the street when officers, an entire SWAT team apparently, were called.  Mr. Kinsey had his hands in the air and was shouting that he and his patient were unarmed, explaining the situation, when three shots rang out, one bullet ripping through Kinsey’s leg.  Fortunately, he survived, and was conscious throughout.

Besides this, two other things are troubling:  When he asked the officer why he shot him, he replied ‘I don’t know’.  Hmmm.

Then, the officers handcuffed Kinsey, purportedly leaving him bleeding on the street for 20 minutes.

Now, I admit, I do not know ‘all the details’ for all the cops-can-do-no-wrong  crowds out there.  It turns out now that the sniper was aiming for the autistic patient, who was playing with a plastic truck. Is this police procedure?  I am glad he had bad aim, at least in this instance.  If a man with his hands in the air can get shot with a high-powered bullet, what has happened to the rule of law?  We must be able to trust our executive branch to act in a way that is at least somewhat predictable, for if they become chaotic, there is no longer any order to stem the external chaos outside the ‘rule of law’.  And we are entering rather chaotic times.

And, as the spectacle of the Republican Convention wraps up, we witness the ‘Trumps’ in full display.  Ted Cruz failing to endorse Trump was the high or low-light, depending on your perspective; Cruz was booed, whether spontaneously or, by plan.  As was the plagiarism of Melanie Trump, or her speechwriter, from Michelle Obama’s speech of eight years ago.  Donald Trump is now officially the Republican nominee. America is entering some interesting waters, as they face the unenviable choice of Trump or Hillary. Well, there can really be no choice for Hillary, as vehemently pro-abortion.  So what does one do? Well, declaring your own nation is one option, as this enterprising Native Chief ‘His Excellency’ Carle has apparently done.  I have actually thought of that, even within the precincts of my own home, which should be a man’s castle.  Long live freedom!

Saint Mary Magdalene, ora pro nobis!

The headline the other day read that the Anglican ‘Church of Canada’ had rejected same-sex ‘marriage’ in their recent synod by one measly vote. Now, just yesterday, lo and behold, what some might consider by a Deus ex machina recount, they realize that, in fact, some votes were not counted properly, and they have indeed endorsed same-sex marriage by the slimmest of margins.

The vote likely won’t matter all that much.  Many delegates declared that they would have gone ahead and ‘blessed’ same-sex unions regardless, while other Anglicans would continue in their belief that they are ‘depraved’.  As I have written before, truth, not least moral truths, cannot be decided by majority vote, but rather by the light of reason and faith. As John Paul II never tired of proclaiming, democracy itself stands or falls by its adherence to the truth, especially the truth about the human person.

Furthermore, Anglicans profess to be Christian, which implies a reliance upon Scripture in determining one’s beliefs and conduct, and Scripture is decidedly against homosexuality, from the early days of Sodom to the latter days of Saint Paul. This Scriptural witness continues into the Fathers, the Church Councils, the Magisterium, and so on.

But wait, are we not beyond that now? Scripture is only one source of truth, and, apparently according to some Anglicans, a flawed, erroneous and culturally hide-bound one at that. We have evolved, become more sensitive, more, well, pink and rainbow flavoured.

Think back to poor King Henry, the eighth of that name, the one who started all this, who thought he could cast off from Rome and build a Church without a Pope and Magisterium. Of course, he also plundered and ransacked monasteries, essentially destroying every religious house in England, killing and dispersing all of their inhabitants, and giving the majestic buildings away to his sycophantic courtiers; he had murdered an untold number of innocent people, including two of his own wives, in barbarous ways.  Yes, ‘good’ King Harry died with much blood dripping from his gold-furrowed brow, yet he entered whatever eternity he merited considering himself a Catholic, and, I recall, had in his will that ten thousand Masses were to be offered for his soul. Likely he thought he may well need them. Of course, with Thomas More, his most famous victim, we know not the depths of the King’s troubled conscience, but the sharp lawyerly mind of More saw where Henry’s decision to cast off from Roman and papal authority, by appointing Archbishop Cranmer to annul his marriage to Catherine in defiance of Rome, would lead.  That was why More went to the scaffold and lost his head, rather than sign the document declaring Henry ‘Head of the Church in England’.

Three centuries later, Cardinal John Henry Newman saw the effects of Henry’s schismatic decision even more clearly: In his own attempt to formulate an Anglican via media between the flatness and austerity of pure Protestantism (what was then known as latitudinarianism), and what he saw as the excesses of a too-Italian-and-florid Rome, Newman diligently read the Fathers of the Church, to find an ‘essentially properly British Christianity’ in the early Church.

But the great and truthful mind of Newman soon realized, as he put it, that to delve into history is to cease to be a Protestant, for, as he discovered, from the very earliest days the Church had a Pope, who was bishop of Rome from the get-go, a world-wide episcopacy, a Magisterium, all the sacraments and many of the sacramentals, an all-male celibate priesthood, a solid teaching and disciplinary authority, canon law, rules of marriage, all of what we call the ‘Roman Catholic Church’. There was no getting around it: Christ founded the Roman Catholic Church, with a Pope, who has full, supreme, universal authority.  There is no such thing as an ‘Anglican Church’, but rather the Catholic Church in England, of which the Pope is the head, not Henry, nor his current successor, Elizabeth.

Newman saw too that Protestantism, for all its claims to the contrary, by its own principles, leads eventually to agnosticism and secularism, as we have just witnessed in full display at the recent Anglican Synod. It is ironic that King Henry, who has claim as the founder of an Anglicanism now covered in rainbow flags, banners and stoles, was, to put it mildly, not tolerant of homosexuality. In fact, he would not be considered a Homophobe of the Highest Order.  The year 1533 saw him spearhead law which made homosexual liasons, referred to as ‘buggery’ in the law, punishable by no less than hanging.  A brutal retribution by a brutal man in a brutal age, we would say, but such was the custom of the times where even minor thefts could have you killed in even more barbarous ways (read up on what ‘hung, drawn and quartered’ really refers to). We, of course, would now universally condemn such punishment, but we nevertheless still hold as Christians, nay, even just as simple men, that same-sex eroticism is immoral, and can provide no basis for a ‘marriage’.

Sad, sad, that the Anglican community, which began in schism, drifted over the years into heresy, and now is swimming in secularity, immorality and irrelevance.

There is a big silver lining to this:  With Newman and a host of others, disaffected Anglicans who no longer have a place in their ecclesial community can always swim over to Catholicism and the one, true Church.  Pope Benedict XVI made this much easier, with his 2009 foundation of the Anglican Ordinariate, providing, as the document states, the general normative structure for regulating the institution and life of Personal Ordinariates for those Anglican faithful who desire to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church in a corporate manner.

That is, the constitution permits and even encourages Anglicans who convert to the fullness of the Faith to enter as a corporate body, keeping their liturgy, customs, music and, not least, the unmatched liturgical and Scriptural translations of the Shakespearean era.

So to all Anglicans out there, I say, welcome home, fratres in Christo.

Saint Henry, Emperor, true and faithful son of the Church, ora pro nobis!

Our poseur Prime Minister, who loves backdrops, as do most politicians I suppose, fresh from his front-and-centre presence at the licentious ‘Gay Pride’ Parade, just visited what remains of the labour/death camps at Auschwitz.  A curious juxtaposition, one might think.

I was at Auschwitz last May, and you may peruse my own thoughts if you are so inclined, but here is what Justin Trudeau, described in the National Post as “sombre and visibly moved”, while wiping away tears, penned in a memorial book on the site:

Today we bear witness to humanity’s deliberate capacity for cruelty and evil…May we ever remember this painful truth about ourselves and may it strengthen our commitment to never again allow such darkness to prevail

Fine words, one might think, but Trudeau seems ignorant of the fact that the Nazi death machine had its origins in Germany’s own fully legal-and-approved euthanasia program, run by psychiatrists and high-level government officials, to put to death mercifully those who could most benefit from such a release from apparently tragic and pointless suffering, as I also recently described.  Trudeau sees not the irony that he himself just recently spearheaded the legislation to permit similar euthanasia death laws in Canada, and, lest we forget, his support for abortion is vocal and unflinching.

The fundamental evil of the Nazis was not specifically the killing of the Jews, (for, although this is the greatest evil for which they are remembered, they did not start there, and they extended their murderous rampage to many others), but rather the denial of human dignity to particular kinds of people, not least the Jewish people. As soon as the State can determine who has the right to life, and who does not, we are already in the realm of what has unfortunately been linked with ‘Nazism’, the one go-to entity that embodies evil. But such evil is of the essence of any number of God-less authoritarian regimes, from Maoist China to Stalinist Russia, who killed far more than Hitler and his deranged henchmen.

And, we must ask, how are we much different, in denying the full rights and the dignity of humanity to the unborn, and now to the sick, frail and elderly?

Trudeau and his fellow-travelers are the very ones who are allowing ‘such darkness to prevail’, although they couch their words in fine-sounding slogans of human rights and dignity, of Canadian ‘values’ and compassion. Yet their euphemisms are largely empty, as they inexorably promote and legislate the culture of death.

We should recall the words  of the great John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae which, sadly, I do not think the Prime Minister has read:

 It is therefore urgently necessary, for the future of society and the development of a sound democracy, to rediscover those essential and innate human and moral values which flow from the very truth of the human being and express and safeguard the dignity of the person: values which no individual, no majority and no State can ever create, modify or destroy, but must only acknowledge, respect and promote.

Another day, and more mayhem, with no end in sight.  Five police officers assassinated, others wounded, by snipers at a Black Lives Matter protest, after two black men were killed recently in dubious circumstances by (white) police officers. And, of course, dozens have been killed by bombings in the Middle East, Sunni versus Shiite, and those are just the ones that make the news over here.  As you may be aware, most Islamic terrorism is committed against other Muslims, based on what (to us) seem like rather esoteric historical, genealogical and religious differences.

Yet they may say the same about us, as America descends into its own form of civil war.

The problem here is that a society can only function under the rule of law, which has two basic elements:

First, the society must be governed by well-thought-out written laws, and not by the arbitrary will of men, acting on the spur of the moment.

Second, there must be various powers and authorities that balance each other, so that no one person or group governs autocratically, with complete immunity from correction.  These balances of powers are subsumed under the legislative, the executive and the judicial branches, which, respectively, make laws, enforce laws and judge whether and how a law has been broken.

The rule of law appears to have broken down completely in most areas of the Middle East, and the same thing is, to a lesser extent, happening in America. When certain segments of the population can rely upon immunity from prosecution (Hilary Clinton, politicians in general, and, to some extent, police and the military), the populace feels they can no longer rely upon the law, which becomes arbitrary, wobbly. Then the populace feels they have to take ‘the law’ into their own hands.

But that leads to an oxymoronic situation, for if each man is his own law, then there is no law.

I have thought much about authority, which is defined as the ‘quality by which men make laws and expect obedience from others’ (CCC, #1904).  I have thought about those who seek authority, a desire which is, to my mind, somewhat pathological. “Seek not to lord it over men” said Christ, and He is stating not just a supernatural, but a natural truth.

In many ways, the last person I would choose to be a police officer, or president of the United States, is the person who most wants to be a police officer or president. Public office, especially one with lots of authority, particularly wielding lethal force, should be a service, that one takes on as a burden, not something that one seeks with mouth a-panting and eyes a-blazing.

Yet our executive branch seems filled with such pathological types who have seen way too many movies, and cannot wait to strap on a gun and ‘enforce the law’.  I did not watch the live-stream video of the death of Philando Castile, which was filmed by his girlfriend beside him, with his child in the back seat, as he was shot point-blank four times by an officer pointing a gun in the window after a traffic stop, but what I did read and the still pictures were tragic enough. The other shooting of Alton Sterling outside a strip mall where he was selling CD’s (also recorded on video), was about as tragic:  Shot point blank in the chest as he was held down by two officers; true enough, he did have a gun, but to defend himself against robbers, since the only job he could get was selling stuff on the street for cash.

Part of the problem is that many of our laws are niggling pieces of bad  and ill-considered legislation, yet enforced with lethal weapons. And the police, desperate in the panic of the moment to defend their own lives, have recourse to such lethal force all too easily.

Now, in retaliation, the killing and wounding of police officers, with more violence threatened.

What is the answer?

That is a difficult question, for we live in a society that has let go of virtue and honour, of manners and civility, of family upbringing and the ties that bind us to God, to ourselves and to others. I am not much of an advocate for gun control, but when everyone has access to high-powered weapons, with little or no limitations, one can see the situation escalating very quickly. A state of nascent civil war may be upon us.

The only answer I can see, short of total martial law (which would breed other evils) is a return to virtue and to God, even if that means suffering violence. Returning violence for violence, especially against the innocent, only leads to chaos and mayhem.

Will the United States descend into a state similar to Iraq? One never knows, but we should pray that cooler heads prevail, and the rule of law reinforced.

We are perhaps now discovering the truth taught by Pope Leo XIII in 1885:

To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from life, from laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated (Immortale Dei, #32)

And by ‘religion’, the Pope means Catholicism, and not the false premises of Islam, or other erroneous faiths. The most fundamental oxymoron in all of this is that there is such a thing as a ‘God-less’ or secular State. The only way to re-instantiate the rule of law is to re-instantiate the rule of God in the hearts and minds of the people.