Month: July 2019

Some say the Cardinal Newman canonization is an endorsement of Pope Francis’ policies etc.

“I can think of few suggestions more childishly perverse,” opines the astute Fr. Hunwicke.

But, he adds:

I am afraid that we are going to get more of this: as we approach the canonisation, Begoglians, illiterates, and other life-forms will crawl out of the woodwork, claiming to instruct us on the teaching, and the significance, of this great Saint. How irritating. I suggest that readers who have not already done so should educate themselves by reading Dr [Ian] Ker’s biography of JHN in the ‘Oxford Lives’ series.

Which I intend for myself, being already caught up in Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, with foreward by the same Dr. Ker, compliments of the Chicago Public Library.

Rich Miller catches the mayor in a what? Shocking word . . .

This analysis by prolific and all-knowing Rich Miller has a stunning headline in its Sun-Times version of yesterday, calling it “Lightfoot’s pension blunder” to deal as she did with Governor P.

Stunning because it’s still early in her honeymoon period to be accused so bluntly in a head, especially with her landslide victory only three months old. Jumped out at me, I know.

The head, stunning as it may be, seems justified in view of Miller’s acidulous commentary, including this:

What this rookie mayor doesn’t yet seem to quite grasp is that if she wants state help for her city then she has to make friends and allies. And you obviously don’t do that by allowing the state’s leaders to be blindsided by a tax proposal which has zero chance of being considered, let alone passed.

You also don’t make friends by setting up the governor and the General Assembly to take the blame for your own failure. They aren’t the City Council, which can be pressured into standing at the new mayor’s command during an inauguration ceremony. [Emphasis added]

So much for Miller’s perspicacity.

Time for some acidity at this end, however, in re his:

The governor has flatly ruled out any sort of state assumption of local pension liability. He explained, with strong evidence, that doing so could quickly hurtle the state’s bond rating into junk territory.

He wants to say (and surely grinds his teeth over not saying) . . . hurl? Or propel? Or maybe just send?

But hurtle? No. Things hurtle, you don’t hurtle them. It’s intransitive.

Who lost Italy (for the church)? Francis did.

It’s spelled out by a veteran

Read the whole thing. Ferraresi’s point is that not only are Francis and the Italian bishops pushing a very unpopular immigration line, but they also have more or less abandoned the field on abortion and LGBT. Into this gap steps Salvini, to the horror of Church leadership.f

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/as-the-vatican-turns-pope-francis-vigano/

Card. Gerhard Müller on the proposed reform of the Roman Curia . . .

. . . has nothing good to say about it, sums it up as this:

We cannot now invent the Church as if the Church is old-fashioned and now to be refashioned according to those calling themselves progressives, who want to build the Church according to their ideas.

Which precisely is what “those calling themselves progressives” want, in or out of the church; and no good can come of it. They have these ideas, you see . . .

Fr. Rutler’s Weekly Column: June 7, 2019

Sent as is.

Fr. Rutler’s Weekly Column
June 7, 2019
There is dark humor in counting the number of “motivational speakers” who flood public television stations, and go as quickly as they come, just like the profitable “self-help” books of the type that counsel: “God wants you to be happy.” In some churches, there is a tendency to replicate this kind of “snowflake” Gospel that shortchanges people out of the truth.
Our opioid generation, whether drugged chemically or culturally, has had more suicides than in any decade since the Second World War. It does not understand Socrates’ statement: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates was not “self-motivated” but was moved by the one True God for whom he searched as best he could long before Pentecost. Unlike modern motivational speakers who retire to Malibu or Hawaii to count their royalties, Socrates drank hemlock as a primitive, albeit heroic, sacrifice for objective truth.
There are those who would reduce Christ to a glorified motivational speaker. Thomas Jefferson edited the New Testament so that the Resurrection and Pentecost were irrelevant, making the Sermon on the Mount the pinnacle of Christ’s teaching. But this reduced the Messiah to an aphorist. Even had that been the case, there were others more verbose than any “Sage of Galilee.”
In the eighteenth century, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield wrote his son four hundred letters on how to live as a gentleman, oblivious to the fact that the youth had been born out of wedlock to a housemaid left to live in penury. A wiser author of epigrams was the last of the “Five Good Emperors,” Marcus Aurelius, who was a Stoic in the second century—and if you have to be a pagan, Stoicism is as good a way as any, if not as much fun as Epicureanism.
Both of those men warned against procrastination. Lord Chesterfield coined the phrase: “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” This was wisdom, albeit snobbish, and not unlike Benjamin Franklin’s homely advice on how to make a man “healthy, wealthy and wise.” Marcus Aurelius was almost prophetic, and remarkably so since he left words he did not expect to be recorded but which ring true to Christ, when he wrote: “Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage.”
The Gospel is not a compendium of maxims, nor is Christ an amiable motivational speaker expecting to retire in Galilee and count his royalties. When he tells the scribe to follow immediately and not bury his father, and forbids another would-be follower to tarry to say farewell to his family, he is speaking of procrastination that defers the primacy of God to tomorrow. But Christ can only be a soul’s Saviour if he saves today: “Today if you should hear his voice, harden not your hearts . . .” (Hebrews 3:15).
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The new mass: a Protestantizing of Catholic worship

Something old (not much), something new (a lot) . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

Its architect was explicit on the point.

The Novus Ordo Missae [New Order mass] was introduced in April 1969 by Pope Paul VI. From the start, this new rite was intended to have an ecumenical nature as declared by its chief architect, Fr. Annibale Bugnini in 1965 . . . 

.  . . who made no bones about his slash-and-burn philosophy.

“We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren-that is, for the Protestants.”

From which we gain an idea of where we stand with this general-in-charge of the century’s liturgical wrecking crew.

Pope Paul VI reportedly adopted the Bugnini view:

. . .  the intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to . . . the Mass was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should almost…

View original post 94 more words

Newman on how he fit in to God’s plan . . .

. . . Do what He says.

“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons,” Blessed John Henry Newman wrote.

“He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments,” he said.

“Therefore, I will trust Him… If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him… He does nothing in vain… He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.”

It’s a message to everyone. All have a vocation.