Human Qualities and Apostolic Charity

It is not sufficient to love souls in the secret of our heart, working and sacrificing ourselves for them; this love must also be manifested exteriorly by an agreeable and pleasant manner, in such a way that those who approach us may feel themselves loved, and consequently encouraged to confidence and to trust. A rude, brusque or impatient manner might even cause some to go away offended, and perhaps, even scandalized. The apostle may well have a heart of gold, rich in charity and zeal, but if he maintains a rough and sharp exterior, he closes access to souls, and considerably diminishes the good he could realize. The saints, while being very supernatural, never neglected these human qualities of charity. St. Francis de Sales liked to say that, as more flies are attracted with a drop of honey than with a barrel of vinegar, so more hearts are conquered by a little sweetness than by rough manners. And St. Teresa of Jesus, who wished her daughters to be united by the bond of pure supernatural charity, did not believe it superfluous to make recommendations of this kind: "The holier you are, the more sociable you should be with your sisters...." (The Way of Perfection) This is very useful advice for anyone who wishes to win souls for God.

~from Divine Intimacy by Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, OCD., p. 1009 Share

Capital Punishment and the Order of Reason

 From Imperator:

The Church has always upheld, in continuity with Sacred Scripture and the wisdom of the Greco‑Roman tradition, that capital punishment is just when the sword is wielded by legitimate authority and ordered to the common good.

Echoing this perennial teaching, St Thomas Aquinas teaches in the Summa Theologiae that as minister of divine justice, the civil ruler may licitly take life when a malefactor’s deeds have gravely wounded the order of justice and threaten the community.

He teaches that one who threatens the harmony of the state has, by his own deliberate act, fallen away from the order of reason and thereby forfeited his claim to those goods that exist for the wellbeing of the political community. Such a man may therefore be removed by public authority just as a surgeon amputates a gangrenous limb for the health of the whole body lest it spread corruption throughout the entire organism.

He further affirms that capital punishment is not just retributive but also protective of the common good, since it restores the order of justice and prevents the spread of further evils, whether through recidivism or by the corrupting example given to others.

Aquinas is clear that in committing such acts, the life of the malefactor is forfeit, and their possibility of repentance does not override the community’s right to safety and security, nor the authority of the civil ruler to defend the commonwealth through proportionate punishment. (Read more.)

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Muhammad & Marx

An interesting comparison, although there are those who question whether we worship the same deity as Muslims. The old crusaders saw them as pagans. From Tierney's Real News:

Look closely at how Islam began and how Communism began, and a clear pattern appears. Both took ideas that already existed and worked, then changed them so the founders and their followers could claim ownership and control. The result in both cases has been division.

Both men followed the same logic:

1. Take something that already functions.

2. Declare it incomplete or corrupt.

3. Supply a new, corrected version that puts the founder and his successors at the center.

4. Use that new version to bind followers together while separating them from everyone else.

The result is a system built for authority and control.

Both men also made a claim of exclusive, final authority. Muhammad claimed to be the last prophet, replacing Jesus Christ, and carrying all news laws from Gabriel. Marx claimed to have discovered the scientific laws of history that would end class conflict. Each claim demanded that everything before it be set aside. Nothing shows the pattern better than Muhammad’s use of Gabriel. (Read more.)

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An Aesthetic Call to Arms

 From Letters from the Old World:

Modern discourse understands that beauty and the divine are inextricably linked: as theologian and priest Hars Urs Von Balthasar said, “every experience of beauty, points to infinity”.

Why then do so many not make the connection between this truth and how they choose to dress? Is caring how you look always mere pride or vanity? Many assume so.

Often “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” is interpreted as “it’s only the inside that counts.” A moral truth is thus perverted into license for aesthetic neglect, as though appearance should not matter at all.

But you know this isn’t true. And so does God.

Consider the instructions for His sanctuary as described in Exodus; gold lamp stands decorated with flowers, colorful linen curtains, cherubim designs, leather and wood fixtures, etc.

Likewise, God commanded Aaron to wear sacred garments with “gold, and blue, purple and scarlet yarn, and fine linen” so as to “give him dignity and honor.”

Clearly, presentation matters.

This is not a God who rejects the value of aesthetics, but one who understands and uses them to his own ends. In this way, beauty in appearance can reflect a divine purpose. God wanted his temple to be beautiful because it mattered that it was beautiful.

Today, we’ll show you that dressing well isn’t vanity, but in fact one of the simplest ways you can respect yourself, improve your community, and honor God.

By the end of this article, you’ll understand the theological importance of how you dress, and why you have a sacred duty to dress your best. (Read more.)

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Justice

 I certainly won't be watching. But the popes held public executions for hundreds of years as did most Catholic monarchs, including canonized saints. It was perceived as a matter of safety for innocent people, and thus the duty of the ruler. It would not have occurred to anyone that it was a bad thing to execute a murderous criminal in the town square/marketplace. Only if the person was clearly innocent, like St. Joan of Arc, did people object. The Soviets were big on private executions. People would just disappear. Their loved ones never knew what became of them. Also, private executions can lead to doubt whether the person really died. Interesting take here from a few years ago: 

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany had become the first sovereign state to ban the death penalty in 1786, 10 years before Bugatti took up his ax. It did so under the influence of Italian essayist Cesare Beccaria, whose 1764 anti-death penalty tract “On Crimes and Punishments” is considered a classic.

So strong had Italian aversion to capital punishment become that when an anarchist named Angelo Bresci assassinated King Umberto I in 1900, Italian courts sentenced him to life in prison. It was the first time a man had killed a European king (without toppling his regime) and not been executed.

Yet the Catholic church was never part of this development. The guillotine was busy up to the very last minute of the pope-king’s regime. Its final use came on July 9, 1870, just two months before Italian revolutionaries captured Rome.

What explains this stubbornness? In part, that Catholic standby -- tradition. Christian writers since the fourth century had defended capital punishment.

St. Augustine did so in The City of God. “Since the agent of authority is but a sword in the hand [of God], it is in no way contrary to the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ for the representative of the state’s authority to put criminals to death,” he wrote.

Augustine saw the death penalty as a form of charity. “Inflicting capital punishment … protects those who are undergoing it from the harm they may suffer … through increased sinning, which might continue if their life went on.”

Aquinas followed Augustine in the 13th century in Summa Contra Gentiles. “The civil rulers execute, justly and sinlessly, pestiferous men in order to protect the state,” he wrote.

The Cathechism of the Council of Trent, issued in 1566, solidly endorsed capital punishment as an act of “paramount obedience” to the fifth commandment against murder.

Nor was this tradition confined to the Middle Ages. As late as Sept. 14, 1952, Pope Pius XII echoed its logic. “It is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned of the benefit of life, in expiation of his fault, when already he has dispossessed himself of the right to live,” he said.

The leading abolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries were Enlightenment-inspired critics of revealed religion. Popes defended their right to send people to death because to do otherwise seemed tantamount to abandoning belief in eternal life.

Catholic scholar James Megivern summed up the tradition this way: “If tempted to waver, one needed only to consult the bedrock authorities from Aquinas to Suarez. Questioning it could seem an act of arrogant temerity. If one did not believe in the death penalty, what other parts of the Christian faith might one also be daring or arrogant enough to doubt or deny?”

All of which makes the shift in thinking under John Paul II astonishing.

In the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, John Paul wrote that the only time executions can be justified is when they are required “to defend society,” and that “as a result of steady improvements … in the penal system such cases are very rare if not practically nonexistent.”

When the new Catechism of the Catholic Church appeared, it did not ban capital punishment, but expressed a strong preference for “bloodless means.” Such strategies, it said, “better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.” (Read more.)

 

From The Enterprise:

Think about what we already accept. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused a public trial. In Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia (1980), Chief Justice Warren Burger traced the open courtroom from the English assizes through the colonial courthouse and concluded that “a presumption of openness inheres in the very nature of a criminal trial.” Burger’s reason had nothing to do with whether spectators enjoy trials. A judge who knows he is being watched is less likely to cut corners, a prosecutor under observation is more careful with the truth, and a public that can see justice done is more likely to believe it was done. Every one of those reasons applies with greater force to the moment when the state actually kills a man. The trial decides whether the government may take a life. The execution is the taking. We have arranged things so that the deliberation is open and the act is hidden, which is exactly backward.

For most of American history nobody would have found that arrangement natural. Colonial hangings took place in town squares and courthouse yards, usually with a sermon. Pennsylvania and New York began moving executions inside prison walls in the 1830s, and the other states followed over the next 70 years, with Virginia still hanging men publicly in Richmond until 1907. Britain made the same move in 1868 with the Capital Punishment Amendment Act. What strikes you about the 1866 parliamentary debate that preceded it is that almost nobody in the chamber wanted to abolish hanging. The question was whether the public should see it. Defenders of the old practice argued that publicity was the only guarantee the sentence was carried out, and that it was carried out the same way against a lord as against a laborer. Opponents answered that the crowds at Newgate treated the morning as a holiday. Both sides were right; the opponents won, and the rule they left behind, that the state should inform the public of executions without letting it watch, has governed Anglo-American practice ever since.

The American endpoint came on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, when something like 20,000 people turned out to see Rainey Bethea hanged. Kentucky permitted public hanging for rape but required murderers to die inside the penitentiary, so prosecutors charged Bethea with rape alone even though he had confessed to killing his victim. The crowd behaved like the Newgate crowd, with vendors and picnics, and the national press was appalled. Kentucky abolished public hanging in 1938. Since then an American execution has been witnessed by a few dozen designated people, officials, a handful of reporters, relatives of the victim, a representative of the condemned, while the rest of the country reads a wire story the next morning. (Read more.)

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Catharism, Calvary Chapel, and Catholicism

2 Cathari perfecti give the consolamentum to a dying man while fending off 2 friars

 From Nicholas Gulda:

To begin, the terms Cathar and Albigensian are synonymous.  Generally speaking, historians have understood the Cathars to be more or less what Tim referred to them as; “gnostic heretics”.  [3]  Similarly, in his Manual for Inquisitors Bernard Gui (d. A.D. 1331) referred to them as “Manichean heretics”, before giving a brief synopsis of their beliefs.[4]  The heresy itself is often associated with the Albigensian Crusade.  By the thirteenth century the targets of the maturing crusading movement had expanded to include heretics, pagans, and even political opponents of the papacy.  The targets of this particular crusade were the heretics and their Catholic protectors.

 The Cathars/Albigenses of the Languedoc region in the South of France ultimately drew the ire of the papacy.  They had entrenched themselves within the nobility there, facilitated by the fact that it was largely independent of the Capetian monarch to the North.  Initially, the Church’s response of preaching, and public debating seemed to make little headway in rolling back the heresy, and the conventional wisdom was that force was needed.  After the papal legate to the region was assassinated,– apparently on the orders of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (a protector of heretics)­, Pope Innocent III issued the indulgence for what became known as the Albigensian Crusade (ca. A.D. 1209-1229).

 Some omissions aside for brevity’s sake, this is more or less how the origins of the Albigensian Crusade is presented in standard survey works on the subject of the Crusades, such as the late Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A History (2005), or Thomas Madden’s The Concise History of the Crusades.  Both authors are well known Crusade historians, and both are/were university professors.  Both were recommended reading on a syllabus in a colloquium on the Crusades I took at a secular university.  Both present Catharism as a non-Christian, dualistic religion.[5]  Both happen to be Catholics.

 Additionally, both scholars above have influenced the historiography of the Crusades, are peer reviewed, have reputations to uphold, and are top notch.  Madden also was a contributor to the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry on the Albigensian Crusade (hardly a pro-Catholic source).  Nevertheless, since the very notion that Catharism was a non-Christian dualistic religion has been called “a Catholic lie”, we will look elsewhere for a basic understanding of this medieval heresy.

 “Catharism was the greatest heretical challenge faced by the Catholic Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries”.[6]  Thus reads the first line of Malcolm Barber’s work, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages.  He notes that the common view is that it was transplanted from the East in the form of Bogomilism, though some like R. I. Moore believe that it was a home grown dualism.[7]  That it was a form of dualism is a given throughout the first chapter on the topic of the origins/ pedigree of Catharism.[8]

 Like Madden and Riley-Smith, Barber affirms that the Cathars [aka Albigenses] denied the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and that they had a rite known as consolamentum.  After receiving this rite, the mere “believer” became one of the initiated (perfecti), and it was often delayed until just before death.[9]  Like his discussion on the pedigree of Catharism in the first chapter, he includes a robust discussion of Cathar beliefs and practices in the third chapter.  The evidence discussed there contradicts any notion of the Cathars/Albigenses being akin to modern day Evangelicals, as Yardley’s position seems to imply.

 Though I don’t suspect that Mark Pegg would endorse Baptist successionism, he is nevertheless a historian who might possibly be coopted by its proponents.  One major argument in his book A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom is that “a very distinct Christian culture…was accused of being heretical by the Catholic Church”.[10]  He called for a revision of Christian history, arguing that “The Albigensian Crusade…was not a martial pilgrimage against a discrete religion with an organized heretical ‘Church’”.[11]

A survey of three reviews published about Pegg’s book shows that they were overwhelmingly critical regarding this particular aspect of it.  One reviewer said that it was against “academic consensus”, and that the evidence presented failed to convince with respect to the historical revision.[12]  While too mentioning that the scholarship is stacked against Pegg, another reviewer was also critical of his “dismissal of so many primary sources that support a Cathar church because he constantly suspects orthodox intent”.[13]  Of the three reviews, it was the one in the Catholic academic journal which was arguably most sympathetic on the topic of Catharism, but even there the reviewer acknowledges that Pegg is contradicting notable scholars on this topic.[14]

 For Barber, Cathar sources take a primacy when reconstructing Catharism, but “even orthodox [i.e. Catholic] attacks on Cathar belief are important since they were particularly concerned to define it accurately in order to give weight to their refutations”.[15]  He posits a “moderate dualism” extant in the West up until a Cathar Council at St Félix de Caraman  (ca. 1167) attended by envoys from the Bogomil Church in Constantinople changed the religious landscape to one dominated by “absolute dualism”.  The Charter of Niquinta which emanated from that Cathar gathering seems to be a main component of his argument.[16]

Ultimately, Barber says, it was this absolute dualism that really drew negative attention from the Catholic hierarchy.[17]  Though he argues that there were already established Cathar bishops in places like Albi [hence “Albigensian”] in the South of France, after the Council at St Félix de Caraman there would be a network of sixteen dioceses stretching from Tuolouse to Constantinople.[18]  It is generally said that the Inquisition was the tool that the Catholic Church (in concert with the secular authorities) utilized to ultimately vanquish the heresy.  Barber posits that both the moderate and absolute varieties of it may have survived up until the end of the fourteenth century.[19]

Whatever the case may be, Staples was certainly correct when he rejected the notion that, as he paraphrased Yardley), “the Albigensians are some sort of link in true Christians”.  As Barber indicates, almost since the inception of the Reformation, Protestant authors have been concerned with establishing some basis for historical continuity in response to the charges of novelty coming from their Catholic opponents.  Evidently, the first to attempt to link Protestantism with Catharism in a direct line was Jean-Paul Perrin, who in his work Histoire de Vaudois (1618), erroneously conflated the Cathars with the Waldenses [as the title indicates].

This Protestant affinity for the Cathars would sour a little over a century later.  All of this and more Barber observes in his historiography.[20]  Still, there are those in modern times who try to link Protestantism and Catharism.  The position argued by Pegg, and seemingly by others more recently, is very different from the apparent Baptist successionism (or something in that vein) argued by Yardley.  Moreover, the academic/ historiographical argument against the traditional understanding would seem to beg the question of how exactly to define “Christian”, and who has the authority to determine that? (Read more.)

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The New Face of An Old Heresy

 This article sums up the point I make in my novel The Night's Dark Shade. From Postliberal Order:

In the early thirteenth century, a fanatical religious movement known to history as Catharism or Albigensianism spread throughout southern France.  Its fashionableness led self-interested local nobility to favor it.  But so bizarre and subversive of social order were its doctrines that political and ecclesiastical authorities beyond the region judged its suppression to be urgent.  At first the preferred methods were preaching and public disputation, with the new Dominican order taking the lead.  But these appeals to reason proved inadequate, and after a papal legate was murdered by a Cathar, a military solution seemed unavoidable.  Thus was launched the Albigensian Crusade – a venture notorious for excess and whose participants did not all have pure motives, but which did succeed in destroying the toxic movement.  

What was the content of Catharism?  It was grounded, first and foremost, in the conviction that the world is absolutely permeated by evil.  This is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, but something much darker.  For the Cathars, the natural order is not the creation of a benevolent deity from whose grace we have fallen.  Rather, they held that it always was in the first place the product of an evil power.  And they identified this evil power with the God of the Old Testament, the authority of which they rejected.  On the Cathar conception of salvation, the imperative is not to redeem the natural order but to be altogether liberated from it, and thereby to be “Pure Ones” (the literal meaning of Cathari).  

Those closest to achieving this were known as the Perfect, who took on the full weight of Catharist moral discipline.  Its chief component was renunciation of marriage and children, which were regarded as wicked insofar as they perpetuated the evil natural order of things.  Meat and dairy products were also eschewed, given their connection to procreation. Private property was rejected.  Capital punishment and war were condemned as intrinsically immoral.  Yet suicide was not only permitted but commended for those judged ready for it.  Infanticide was sometimes practiced.  And as the murder of the papal legate illustrates, the Cathars would sometimes resort to violence in order to protect the movement itself.

Most adherents of the Cathar movement (the “Believers” rather than the Perfect) were not expected immediately to adopt its austere ethic in its entirety, though.  Hence, while complete abstinence from sex was considered the ideal, sexual indulgence was tolerated among Believers as long as it did not lead to procreation.  Indeed, sexual practices of the kind that carried no risk of pregnancy were judged permissible, and extreme debauchery was frequently a part of Cathar life.  Whereas the Church favored sex when it was procreative, the Cathars favored it only when it was not procreative.

Since the God of the Old Testament was identified with the devil, biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses were dismissed as diabolical agents, and divine acts of judgment like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned as murderous.  While the Cathars regarded themselves as the Children of Light, they judged those who approved of living as human beings have always lived – marrying and having children, practicing sexual restraint outside of that context, owning property, using animals for food, resorting to war and the death penalty when justice and order made it necessary – as the Children of Darkness.  Since these things are just commonsense preconditions of the social order, it is no surprise that ecclesiastical and political authorities judged Catharism to be radically subversive of that order and in need of suppression. (Read more.)

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The Name of the Rosary

While editing and rewriting sections of my novel about medieval France I researched the development of the rosary. I came across a fascinating blog called Paternosters which was a name given to prayer beads in the medieval period. Here is an article about the origins of the the word "rosary" which I found quite interesting. To quote:

To get back to beads, however, traces of the earlier meaning of bid/bede as "a prayer" still remain. For instance, a wealthy patron in the Middle Ages may have supported poor bedesmen, who had promised to pray for the patron, and may have provided a bedehouse for bedesmen or bedeswomen to live in. Likewise, “bidding one’s bedes” in the Middle Ages does not so much mean praying with a literal string of beads, as it means praying for one’s bedes, that is, the people or requests one is obliged to pray for.

The word “rosary” originally meant a garden devoted to the growing of roses (c1440, “This mone is eke rosaries to make, with setes [seats]”)....Probably both the rose-garden concept and the book title contributed to the idea of referring to a collection of written prayers and devotions as a (metaphorical) rosary, such as the 1526 Rosary of Our Savyour Jesu or the 1533 Mystik sweet Rosary of the faytheful soule.

From here it was a short step to applying the term “rosary” to the specific prayer practice we have been discussing, including its string of beads.

Other European languages also call the rosary by a name referring to roses. In German it is a rosenkranz, in French a rosaire, in Italian and Spanish a rosario, and in Hungarian it is a rózsafüzért (literally a “rose string”). However in Austria it is more commonly a betschnur (“prayer string”) and in France, often a chapelet. (Read more.)

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The Angelic Salutation And The Black Death

The Annunciation ~ Frederic James Shields

From Aleteia:

This second part (“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death”) is believed by many to have been added during the plague to ask for the Blessed Mother’s protection from the fatal disease. Venerable Fulton J. Sheen explains this origin in his book The World’s First Love.

Since it seizes upon the two decisive moments of life: “now” and “at the hour of our death,” it suggests the spontaneous outcry of people in a great calamity. The Black Death, which ravaged all Europe and wiped out one-third of its population, prompted the faithful to cry out to the Mother of Our Lord to protect them at a time when the present moment and death were almost one.

An expert in Marian devotion, Fr. Donald H. Calloway, confirms this conclusion in his book Champions of the Rosary and explains how, “After the Black Death, the second half of the Hail Mary began to appear in the breviaries of religious communities, especially those of the Mercedarians, Camaldolese, and Franciscans … the people of the 14th century greatly needed the ‘hope-filled’ dimension of the second half of the Hail Mary prayer.” (Read more.)

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Education and the Moral Life

 From Mater et Magistra:

Practical Steps for Forming a Sound Conscience

1. Seek Wisdom, Not Just Knowledge – The study of theology, philosophy, and the lives of the saints provides a framework for understanding moral truth. Reading Scripture and the Catechism with a heart open to God’s love helps ground our moral reasoning in faith, not fear.

2. Cultivate a Relationship with God – Moral decisions should flow from love, not dread. Regular prayer, particularly the Rosary and mental prayer, fosters a deeper trust in God's mercy and guidance.

3. Practice the Virtue of Prudence – Not every decision is a moral crisis. Learning to distinguish between mortal and venial sin, and recognizing when a choice is simply a matter of prudential judgment, brings clarity and peace.

4. Confess Regularly, But Not Excessively – Frequent Confession is a gift, but for those struggling with scrupulosity, it can become a source of unnecessary distress. A regular confessor who understands this struggle can provide reassurance and help in forming a balanced conscience.

5. Trust in Divine Mercy – St. Thérèse of Lisieux reminds us that God’s mercy is greater than our weaknesses. Trusting in His love frees us from the crippling burden of perfectionism and allows us to live joyfully in His grace.

6. Avoid Unnecessary Doubt – If a person has made an honest effort to discern a moral decision and still experiences doubt, they should trust that God does not demand absolute certainty but a sincere heart. Seeking spiritual direction can also provide clarity.

7. Remember: God Calls Us to Peace – Christ repeatedly tells us, “Be not afraid.” A moral life lived in love brings peace, not endless anxiety. The more we grow in virtue, the more we can rest in the knowledge that God is guiding us.

(Read more.)

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St. Hildegard’s Encounter With Angels & Their Music

 From Catholic Exchange:

St. Hildegard of Bingen, a Doctor of the Church, was not just a Benedictine superior, mystic, diplomat, woman of letters, naturopath, and linguist but also a composer. She left us with seventy-seven liturgical chants, hymns, and sequences and a liturgical drama: The Order of the Virtues. Fr. Pierre Dumoulin wrote that these works make up one of the richest repertoires of medieval music. Yet they are not the fruit of a composition work, strictly speaking, but the transcription of celestial harmonies that the saint perceived through her visions.

Hildegard actually contemplated the heavenly myriads. “Some radiated like fire. Others were completely clear. Still others glit­tered like stars. It was a concert of voices that was like the sound of the sea.” She thought that the angel was man’s model. The angel reminded St. Hildegard that praise was her vocation: “Man, God’s creature, must praise Him because his soul is made to live in praise, like the angels.”

The Fall contributed to disturbing the original harmony whose memory lives in us and which we must rediscover: “The canticle of praise is rooted in the Church according to celestial harmony through the Holy Spirit.” St. Gregory said it before her: music is the most elevated of all hu­man activities. Hildegard believed that “when man’s spirit is well directed, he hears the song of the angels.” “The soul is itself a symphony, and it harmonizes everything.” She wrote that “the cohort of the angels yearns for God. It recognizes Him throughout the symphony of its praises and celebrates its past and present eternal mysteries.” (Read more.)

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The 4 Sins that Cry Out to Heaven for Vengeance

 From Trad West:

There are sins Scripture describes as ‘crying out to Heaven’. The Church preserves that warning in the Catechism, paragraph 1867.

Traditionally, they are grouped into four: deliberate murder [the shedding of innocent blood], the sin of Sodom, oppression of the poor, and defrauding workers of their wages.

The sin of Murder:
Start with Abel. Cain killed his brother, but burying the victim did nothing to conceal the crime from God. His brother’s blood cried out from the ground.

The Sin of Sodom:
Then we have Sodom, whose sins brought it under the judgment of God. What was their sin? Scripture gives two descriptions:
>Arrogance, greed, neglect of the poor (Ezek 16,49-50)
>Sexual immorality and perversion (Jude 1,7)

The fire that fell on Sodom was a warning for all generations. Our generation is more wicked than Sodom, some exorcists say we’re more wicked than the generation of the flood. Food for thought. (Read more.)

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Michaelmas

It is Michaelmas Day. According to Lives of the Saints:

St. Michael, who ranks among the seven archangels, is also one of the three angels mentioned by name in the Scriptures, the others being St. Raphael and St. Gabriel. St. Michael is spoken of twice in the Old Testament, and twice in the New. The first reference occurs in the Book of Daniel (chapter x), where Michael comes to comfort Daniel after he has had a vision, and promises to be his helper in all things. In Daniel xii, Michael is called "the great prince who standeth for the children of Thy people." In these references Michael is represented as Israel's great support during the seventy years of the Babylonian captivity. Daniel, wise and holy leader that he was, wanted his people to understand that God had not forgotten them, and that, even though enslaved, they had a royal champion. In the New Testament (Jude ix), we are told that Michael disputed with the devil over the body of Moses; this episode is not mentioned elsewhere in the Bible.

In the Apocalypse (chapter xii) we find the most dramatic reference to St. Michael. Here John recounts the great battle in Heaven, when the wicked angels under Lucifer revolt against God, and how Michael, leading the faithful angels, defeats the hosts of evil and drives them out. In this role he has been painted by many artists, and the poet Milton, in book vi of , recounts the famous struggle. Because of this victory, St. Michael is revered in Catholic tradition and liturgy as the protector of the Church, as once he was regarded as the protector of the Israelites. In the Eastern Church, as well as among many theologians in the West, St Michael is placed over all the angels, as prince of the Seraphim. He is the special patron of sick people, mariners, and grocers; in Asia Minor many curative springs were dedicated to him. His cult has also been popular in Egypt, Rome, France, and Germany. His emblems are a banner, a sword, a dragon, and scales. The name Michael is a variation of Micah, meaning in Hebrew, "Who is like God?"

The Archangel St. Michael is one of the patrons of France, partly because of his various manifestations in that country, most notably to St. Jeanne d'Arc. In the middle ages the Order of St. Michael was the highest among the orders of chivalry. Share

The Gaze That Tells Us Who We Are

 From Dominique Seraphin:

“God does not love us because we are valuable. We are valuable because God loves us.”

I have read those words many times. Each time, they seem to reach a little deeper.

It is easy to admire Fulton Sheen for what he accomplished. He was a brilliant scholar, a gifted preacher, a bishop, an author, and a pioneer who used radio and television to bring the Gospel into people’s homes. He knew how to speak about eternal things in a way that made people stop and listen.

But the part of his life that moves me most happened away from the cameras.

At his priestly ordination, Sheen promised to spend a Holy Hour each day before the Blessed Sacrament. He kept that promise for the rest of his life. Before he spoke publicly about Christ, he went to be with Christ. Before he asked others to listen, he listened. He brought his work, his questions, his gifts, and his need before Jesus in the Eucharist.

I wonder how many of his most powerful words began in that silence.

There is something beautiful about a man whose voice reached millions choosing, day after day, to be quiet before the Lord. The world knew Sheen for what he could say and do. In the chapel, he could simply be a beloved son in the presence of his Father.

Maybe that is why his words about our value carry such weight.

We hear “Jesus loves you” so often that we can forget how astonishing it is. We may readily believe that God loves humanity, the Church, our families, and the people we pray for. Yet when His love becomes personal—when we have to say, Jesus loves me, knowing everything about me—we sometimes hesitate.

We know the parts of ourselves we would rather hide. We remember the harsh words we said yesterday, the resentment we keep revisiting, the prayer we promised to make time for and didn’t. We know how quickly we compare ourselves with someone who seems more patient, more generous, more joyful, or more holy. (Read more.)

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Jesus by Another Name

 From The Logres Institute:

Unlike many other authors, we have explicit writings from Lewis explaining what he was trying to portray. In the remainder of this article, I presume that Rice is writing from a position of ignorance. To cure his lack of knowledge, I invite him to acquire a copy of Lewis’s Letters to Children before he writes about Narnia in the future. Lewis was transparent in his explanations, and his actual letters to the children who wrote to him explain why Christians are justly upset by this casting decision. You mess with Jesus, and you mess with the literal foundations of the Christian faith. Aslan is Jesus, in another world.

To truly understand Lewis, one must read Lewis; and more of his writings than just Narnia. Any claims on what he thought as he wrote the Narnia tales need to be backed by primary source material to be valid, not by opinion that fits one’s own personal narrative. Lewis’s replies to his youngest readers provide helpful insight.

In a letter written by Lewis from Magdalen College Oxford, 22nd. January 1952, Lewis writes to a child named Carol about how to pronounce Aslan and who He is:

Dear Carol,

It is a pleasure to answer your question. I found the name in the notes to Lane’s Arabian Nights: it is the Turkish for Lion. I pronounce it Ass-lan myself. And of course I meant the Lion of Judah. I am so glad you liked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I hope you will like the sequel (Prince Caspian) which came out in November.

Yours sincerely,

C.S. Lewis

(Read more.)

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Christianity in the Disembodied Age

 

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

When reading the New Testament through our usual theological lens of a grand cosmic drama, it’s easy to miss the significance of the kind of work done by most of the named protagonists. The first Apostles, Peter, Andrew, James and John are all fishermen. And Thomas, Bartholomew and Philip probably were too. Paul of Tarsus - a highly educated Pharisee and Roman citizen - is described as a tentmaker, though the Greek skēnopoios may mean something closer to a general leatherworker or maker of canvas goods, and his friends Aquila and Priscilla practised the same trade. Tabitha (also called Dorcas) was a seamstress.

There were a few representatives of what we might today call the “middle class”1. Lydia was a successful cloth merchant who specialised in the famous purple cloth of the region. Luke was a physician (and painter), Matthew and Zaccheus were both publicans (tax collectors for the Romans) a profession despised by the Jews, of course, though lucrative. Cornelius and Julius were centurions in the Roman army. Zenas (Titus 3:13) is identified as a lawyer.

Later the movement attracted members of the upper echelons, including Erastus, who is identified by Paul as the city of Corinth’s director of public works2. The wealthy, slave-owning convert Philemon was an upper-class patrician, probably a Romanised Greek and landowning civic politician in the city of Colossae. Very interestingly, Paul refers to Philemon3 as a “dear friend and fellow worker” in his letter about the escaped slave Onesimus.

But we get the general tone from Paul of how deeply work, and often manual work, was morally incorporated into early Christian thinking. “We labour, working with our own hands, (1 Corinthians). “We worked night and day,” ( 1st Thessalonians) and “if anyone will not work, neither shall he eat,” (2 Thessalonians).

In fact it would never have occurred to any person of that time that work - an occupation of some kind, whether manual or domestic labour, artisan craft or mercantile trade, or even senatorial-rank political involvement - was something embarrassing to be escaped in favour of a life of pure leisure and entertainment. On the contrary, Christians taught that whatever work you did it should be ordered to the Christian goals of salvation. (Obviously this meant there were some trades and professions you could not enter, like prostitution, gladiatorial combat, making idols for the temples, etc.) (Read more.)

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The Art of Pilgrimage

 

September is the month of Our Lady of Sorrows. From The Way of Beauty:

Pope Benedict XVI, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, identified three authentic traditions of Christian liturgical art: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. Each is a legitimate expression of the Christian understanding of the human person and our relationship to God, and each communicates that understanding through a distinct visual language, thereby promoting prayer and worship among the faithful. The iconographic tradition, which dominated Christian art in both East and West until the 12th century, portrays man as he will be in heaven: transfigured, luminous, outside ordinary space and time. The Baroque, which developed in the 17th century, portrays fallen historical man in this life, in the full drama of suffering and grace. The Gothic stands between them, and it is the art most characteristic of the high medieval period in the West.

The Gothic is an authentic and distinct style of liturgical art that developed organically in the West from the iconographic prototype. As the change was gradual, any attempt to date its beginning involves some arbitrary choice. Most commentators settle on the mid-12th century, coinciding broadly with the completion of what is generally considered the first Gothic church, the Abbey of St Denis in Paris, in 1144. The name ‘Gothic’ was coined by High Renaissance commentators as a term of contempt. They held it to be a barbaric style belonging to the period of cultural decline that they believed had begun when the Goths overran the Roman Empire in the West a thousand years earlier. Historians today do not generally share that view of cultural decline, but the name stuck. Even those of us who admire Gothic culture and art continue to use it!

The impetus for the departure from the iconographic prototype stemmed from an increased emphasis on the reliability of human experience and the value of information received through the senses. This led to a greater curiosity about and appreciation of the natural world. Such appreciation was not new: Christians had always relied on sensory information and valued the beauty of the cosmos. What was different was the degree of weight now placed upon them.

Tied to this was the conviction that our world, though fallen and imperfect, is nevertheless good, ordered, and beautiful. There may be evil and suffering in the world, and it may not be as good and beautiful as it ought to be, but it remains God’s creation. This appreciation of the natural world and confidence in our ability to know it through the senses sparked curiosity and a desire to observe it more closely. One effect was the rise of scientific inquiry; another, the one that concerns us here, was an increased naturalism in art, a greater correspondence to natural appearances. The devotion to rational inquiry bound up with this cultural movement also led to a new approach to learning and to the establishment of the great universities, among them those of Paris and Oxford. (Read more.)

 

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Saint Louis IX and Politics

 From Catholicism:

Today is the feast of King Saint Louis of France. As the formerly Christian West is sliding further into the tyranny of liberalism, it is balm to the soul to consider that the people in Louis’ France were freer than we are today. They were free from big government meddling in their lives and their wallets. And they were free in the most important way, for Saint Louis believed in a Christian order wherein the State was neither inimical nor neutral to the Church, but was the Church’s helper in securing the happiness, temporal and eternal, of her subjects.

Our modern “freedom,” by contrast, is servitude.

Sad to say, Saint Louis’ own grandson, Philip IV (“the Fair” — called so on account of his outward looks, not his inward dispositions!) was greedy to rob the Church of her influence in civil society. It has long struck me as ironic that this same Philip, who was so ill disposed to the traditional role of the Church in statecraft, was also the one who persecuted the Knights Templar, robbing them of their possessions and murdering their leaders. One of his victims was Jacques de Molay, the twenty-third and last Grand Master of the Templars. The reason I find all this ironic, is that the Freemasons, who are much closer to Philip than to de Molay in their ideology, falsely take the murdered Templar as one of their own heroes — among other ways, by naming their young men’s fraternal organization, “DeMolay International.” Philip IV, who murdered Jacques de Molay, also persecuted Pope Boniface VIII, a great pope who defended — as I’ve pointed out elsewhere — the same traditional alliance of throne and altar that Philip’s saintly grandfather believed in. That tradition, known as “the doctrine of the two swords,” was eloquently put forth in Unam Sanctam, a bull written in direct opposition to Philip the Fair.

It was Boniface VIII, by the way, who canonized Saint Louis IX. (Read more.)

 

More HERE.

Also from Catholicism:

The custom of genuflecting (literally, in Latin, “bending the knee”) for the Incarnation (“…and the Word was made Flesh…”) in the Creed, was begun by Saint Louis IX, King of France, who knelt out of devotion when he heard the words sung at Mass one day. This is something of a holy mirror of the secular custom of standing for the “Hallelujah Chorus” in Handel’s Messiah. (King George II was so stirred during the performance that he rose to his feet in excitement. When the king stands, everybody stands, even during a concert.) Similarly, thanks to Louis’ piety, and the French respect for their monarch, the King of Kings is saluted with a genuflection every time his Holy Incarnation is recalled in the Credo of the Roman Rite. (Read more.)

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Traditions: The Chapel Veil

 From Catholic 365:

The chapel veil is also called a mantilla, and is worn by Catholic women to honor the Lord as truly present in the Eucharist. This is a very old tradition and is also a symbol of imitation of Mary, the Mother of God. The wearing of the Mantilla is an act of veiling a woman's physical beauty, so that the beauty of God may be glorified instead. It is also a way of emulating Mary, our mother, who is the archetype of purity and humility.  Moreover, the mantilla, or chapel veil, signifies the role of women as a life-bearing vessel.  The chalice holding the blood of Christ is veiled until the Preparation of the Gifts, and the tabernacle is veiled between Masses. Both of these vessels hold the Eucharist – the very life of Christ. (Read more.)

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The Modesty Fallacy

 Worrying about female modesty has become an obsession among many Christians. Yes, there is more flesh exposed than there was in past times. But there is such cult-like behavior in many Catholic circles, including homeschooling groups, that has nothing to do with Church teaching nor with Sacred Scripture. I knew one group of young mothers where no one could wear cologne. Another group is saying you cannot take Catholic children to the beach because of what they might see. People make up their own rules that have nothing to do with tradition but with their own irks and quirks. They are the new Puritans. And as a historian I can tell you that standards of modesty among Catholics have changed and fluctuated a great deal for 2000+ years. I will  never forget the reaction of a devout lady when she was shown the original edition of my novel Trianon with the beautiful LeBrun portrait of Marie-Antoinette and her children on the cover. "She's wearing a low-cut dress!" was the exclamation. As for immodesty being connected to rape, Muslim women are raped even when they are covered from head to toe. And what about all the nuns raped by Communists? And I have lamented about all the young Catholic women making themselves deliberately unattractive in ugly, shapeless clothes as a badge of piety.

Lindsay T. has an interesting series of articles on her substack.

The virtue of modesty is defined in the Catechism as “a virtue of the heart” which “guides how one looks at others and behaves toward them in conformity with the dignity of persons”.^[7] How men and women dress is important, but judgement of one’s degree of modesty is not the responsibility of the on-looker. In fact, the on-looker should employ modesty in how he looks and behaves towards the other person.

Pope John Paul II, in his book Love and Responsibility, also places responsibility of chaste thoughts on the on-looker:

The virtue of chastity is underdeveloped in anyone who is slow to affirm the value of the person and allows the values of sex to reign supreme: these, once they take possession of the will distort one’s whole attitude to a person of the other sex. The essence of Chastity consists in quickness to affirm the value of the person in every situation.^[8]

If an onlooker is tempted to lust by a woman wearing yoga pants or spaghetti straps, I would suggest their attitude towards the other sex has been distorted; they have allowed “the values of sex to reign supreme.” The focus should be on affirming “the value of the person in every situation.”

The culture around Franciscan University, though it professes to teach and encourage a Catholic sexual ethic, has proven repeatedly that it does not affirm “the value of the person in every situation” when it comes to cases of harassment and assault. In fact, it has repeatedly favored the perpetrator—which is most often male—and has scapegoated alleged victims—who are most often female. The questions that female students have received upon reporting harassment or assault prove the strength of the prevailing group theory: It can’t be the man’s fault. There must be something the girl did to incite, invite, or welcome that behavior.

[....]

As a Catholic woman and mother, it concerns and affects me when, at the local Catholic high school, a teacher who is also a Franciscan graduate tells a classroom that “rape culture” is a product of feminism (See Krason: “The sexual harassment frenzy… is the latest poison from the Sexual Revolution”) and many men’s lives have been ruined by false accusations. This group theory that women are responsible for men’s purity is a part of their cultural evangelism. The University’s sexual assault misinformation spreads with conviction. As long as this group theory can subsist—that women are responsible for male virtue—then the friars can sidestep accountability. A University that has protected abusers (who are overwhelmingly male) and mishandled (overwhelmingly female) students’ reports of harassment and assault will be seen as not only blameless, but as a conservative institution battling the woke, feminist agenda of “rape culture” (I hope that sounds as crazy to you as it does to me). (Read more.)

NOTE: Yes, there is a jab at Trump for something coarse he said years ago. He was saying how rich and powerful men are often able to get away with grotesque behavior towards women. He was not advocating the bad behavior, which is obvious when one hears the entire conversation.

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