Too Much Focus on Rome? – “Previous popes aided us in that desire for cultural resistance. This Pope does not. Therefore, perhaps it is time to forge ahead on our own to pursue a life of sanctity and prayer—in spite of whatever the latest insane pastoral advice from Rome might be. ” The Pope and the Monster of Modernity (What We Need Now – Substack)
Medically Unnecessary – “The Biden administration is admitting it has little basis for claiming that gender transition procedures are ‘life-saving’ or ‘necessary.’ HHS Offers Single 2-Pager in Support of Gender Transition Procedures for Children (Washington Stand)
Nigerian Nightmare – “A leading African prelate has stated that the lack of political will to end rising insecurity in Nigeria ‘is turning our country into one wide funeral home’.” Nigerian bishop warns country risks turning into a sprawling charnel house (Catholic Herald)
To bless is to “speak well” – “The Declaration was presented as self-sufficient but in the face of such reactions, however predictable and apparently foreseen, the Prefect had to explain himself, first in the press and then in an official communiqué from the Dicastery.” Can “Fiducia supplicans” be blessed?
As a Couple – “I got marriage wrong, twice. Here’s why I’m grateful a priest never blessed me for being in that state.” I’m Grateful a Priest Never Blessed My Same-Sex Marriage (or My Irregular One) (Crisis Magazine)
Singing the Mass – “[A] return to the Church’s tradition of sacred music is a key part of renewing liturgical and parish life … ” What exactly is sacred music? (The Pillar)
A New Albigensianism – “Philosopher Ed Feser argues that the new ‘higher gnosis’ of woke ideology, pseudo-religion and anti-politics is a lot like an older gnosticism which was once defeated — and can be again.” Wokism is the New Face of An Old Heresy, And It Can Be Defeated Again (Post Liberal Order)
A Folk-Mass Era Hymn – “With its lilting-pop melody and sweet God talk, ‘On Eagle’s Wings’ is the hymn that conservative Catholics love to hate and Catholic progressives often wave like a red flag.” Joe Biden Wants the World to Know that He’s an ‘On Eagle’s Wings’ American Catholic (Terry Mattingly’s On Religion)
Glorifying Male Camaraderie – “In certain corners of the internet, a new form of anti-feminism is gaining currency.” The Anti-Family Right (First Things)
A Wasted Opportunity – “Skittish Western elites who fretted that Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin would be a propaganda coup for the Russian leader need not have worried. It is hard to believe that Putin did himself any favors with that long interrogation.” The View from Vladimir Putin’s Seat (European Conservative)
Rave in the Nave – “A group of protesters plans to gather outside Canterbury Cathedral tomorrow evening to “peacefully” object to a dance event being held in the cathedral’s interior.” ‘Silent Disco’ at Canterbury Cathedral leads to more voluble protest (Catholic Herald)
Time to Fast: “[A]lthough there is a rich theological foundation for fasting, let me instead draw attention to some insights from philosophical anthropology that might also enrich how we think of fasting this Lent.” Fasting Means Conquering Yourself (Catholic Answers)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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If you are not convinced of the content of the writeup, why do you publish? What does it reflect?
What little love of God you have when you give in without a fight because it is not a grave sin.
– Escriva, The Way 328
Why do you see problems not there. Why refocus on a problem when solution is already in hand. Why insist on solutions that have no match to situations. Why concentrate your sources of counsel and channel that singular path. Why presuppose conversion would yield forth that and nothing else. Why imagine your opposition is only of a single class which you are singularly capable of recognizing.
Mattingly ceased his “on religion” blog as of feb 2nd
@Too Much Focus on Rome
Fr. Eric Banecker concludes by quoting St. Francis de Sales: “All of us can attain to Christian virtue and holiness, no matter in what condition of life we live and no matter what our life work may be.” [Vatican II’s “universal call to holiness”]
Yours truly FIRST is reminded of a wise comment by this Jesuit missionary on the different paths to holiness:
“Devotion must be exercised in different ways by the gentleman, the workman, the servant, the prince, the widow, the maid, and the married woman [….] I ask you, Philothea, is it fit that a bishop should lead the solitary life of a Carthusian? Or that married people should lay up no greater store of goods than the Capuchin? If a tradesman were to remain the whole day in church, like a member of a religious order, or were a religious continually exposed to encounter difficulties in the service of his neighbor, as a bishop is, would not such devotion be ridiculous, unorganized, and insupportable?” (“Introduction to the Devout Life,” Part I:III).
And, SECOND, yours truly is reminded of a contrary distortion attributed to too many early Jesuits. This was the sharp divide between their apostolate to lead others to sanctity versus the much lower vocation of these others with merely lay vocations in the world. Such that, today, the Jesuits seem to have overcompensated with their malleable Jesuit spirituality, sometimes including the reduction of real contradictions into horizontal “polarities” which supposedly can be harmonized by theological word games–displacing “pastorally” and in practice (but never directly contradicting!), dogmatic truths.
THIRD, so what does it mean when Fr. Banecker also writes “For more than fifty years, Catholics in the United States have worked under the assumption that the more we blended in with secular society, the better”? How much of this “disaster” is both a Secularist and possibly a Jesuit Spirituality thing? And, then, how better should the perennial Catholic Church more faithfully evangelize/confront and leaven the urgent and deep threats imposed by a post-Christian world?
While the path to personal sanctity is always the priority, but in too much isolation is it really even possible? Conversely, how to maintain an absolute line (more than only a bridge) between the synodal “communion, participation, and mission” and–confused by some–the Marxist “mobilization and vanguard”? Banecker writes: “And in public life, there is no contradiction between acting in accordance with Catholic Social Teaching (CST, the whole thing [!], not just the parts one happens to like) and having respectful conversations with those with whom we disagree.”
SUMMARY, Yes, “the whole thing,” beginning not with deconstructing “polarities” as between der Synodal “Weg’s laity and the Apostolic Succession, and as between sound morality and Fiducia Supplican’s couples—but beginning with CST’s central and “transcendent [!] dignity of the human person” and the real Common Good.
@ Glorifying Male Camaraderie
“As marriage declines and political polarization between the sexes increases, the appeal of anti-family anti-feminism will only grow” (Schmitz).
Aside from First Things mugshot that has Compact editor Matthew Schmitz appearing like a disgruntled Prussian Schmitz addresses a significant sexual underlined conservative modernist heresy that has ancient roots. Its appearance in the Sant’Egidio cabal and elsewhere in N Italy mirrors the classic Greek model of the superiority of male friendship, including sexual relationship, that exceeds the male female in nobility.
“Soon male inventive genius will create sex robots that males will prefer to f**k rather than real women, and invent artificial wombs, so that men can create their own babies”. Schmitz takes the argument in a surreal direction, the hateful image of “females towering over us” isolates an unmasculine fear. Whereas Schmitz overly despises the male movement, he seems to tacitly agree with the complaint. He spends a worthwhile, lengthy assessment of Italian futurist Marinetti and the liberation of Man from female inherent domination, the more rights and powers they win for woman, the happy anomaly, the suffragette feminist, “the more will she be drained of love and cease to be a magnet for sentimental passion or an engine of lust”.
Shifting the argument to the Vatican duplicity phenomenon, the disparaging duality of orthodox orchestration on the family, whilst doing the utmost to destroy the family with the emphasis on legitimizing, of late sanctifying [FS] homosexuality we have overtones of futurist Marinetti, the ancient Greek model of male on male nobility all wrapped up in the aura of Prometheus Unbound. Humanity, and Earth itself, are freed once Jupiter is deposed.
@ Time to Fast
Wherever I turn Grondelski keeps appearing. Must be he’s doing a yeoman’s job. “Our embodiment is so important that the Son of God took human flesh”. Fasting argues Grondelski means mastery of our superior dimension, the spiritual intellectual over the physical body and its needs. An ancient principle that precedes the Gospels, though contained from the beginning in Genesis. The pagans also realized the importance of mastery over one’s body to master beyond oneself. Aristotle taught that principle so well to his pupil the youth Alexander that he conquered the world.
Christ conquered the world by fasting from bodily needs – and virtually unknown, from our assumed intellectual spiritual needs, to a spiritual Fast. Abeyance to recognition, respect, power, accomplishment, dominance, all now transformed by a somewhat inverse interpretation. Whereas meekness of heart, humility, respect of authority [power], poverty, and so radically against our nature in considering the good of others above our own. All embodied in life’s way of the Cross.
Fr. J. above – But Mattingly is continuing the Crossroads podcast. It’s under getreligionarchive.ca (or something like that).