benign essential tumor

Unique Delinquency – I

Unique Delinquency – I on November 21, 2009

In order to highlight once more the unique delinquency of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), two weeks will not be too many to reply to a reader’s reasonable objection to the argument of “Eleison Comments” of three weeks ago (Oct. 31). That argument maintained that the sacramental Rites of the Newchurch, introduced in the wake of the Council, are of a nature to invalidate the Church’s sacraments in the long run, because they were designed by their ambiguity to erode the Minister’s sacramental Intention, without which there can be no sacrament.

The reader objected with the Church’s classic teaching that personal failings of the sacramental Minister, even his lack of the Faith, can be made up for by the Faith of the Church in whose name he is administering the sacrament (cf. Summa Theologiae, 3a, LXIV, 9 ad 1). Thus – classic example – a Jew who has no Catholic faith at all can nevertheless validly baptize a dying friend so long as the Jew both knows that the Catholic Church does something when it baptizes, and he means to do that thing that the Church does. This Intention to do what the Church does he shows by saying the words and performing the actions laid down in the Church’s Rite of baptism.

Therefore, argued our reader, the Newchurch may have corrupted the Minister’s Catholic faith, but the Eternal Church will make up for any lack of his faith, and the sacraments he administers will still be valid. To which the first part of the reply is that if the Newchurch’s sacramental Rites attacked only the Minister’s faith, the objection would be valid, but if they also undermine his sacramental Intention, then there will be no sacrament at all.

Another classic example should make the point clear. For water to flow down a metal pipe, it does not matter if the pipe is made of gold or lead, but for the water in either case to flow, the pipe must be connected to the tap. The water is sacramental grace. The tap is the main source of that grace, God alone. The pipe is the instrumentalsource, namely the sacramental Minister, through whose action flows from God the grace of the sacrament. The gold or lead is the personal holiness or villainy of the Minister. Thus the validity of the sacrament does not depend on the personal faith or unfaith of the Minister, but it does depend on his connecting himself to the main source of the sacramental grace, God.

This connection he makes precisely by his Intention in performing the sacrament to do what the Church does. For by that Intention he puts himself as an instrument in the hands of God for God to pour the sacramental grace through him. Without that sacramental Intention he and his faith may be of gold or lead, but he is disconnected from the tap. It remains to be shown next week how Vatican II was designed and is liable to corrupt not only the Minister’s faith, but also any sacramental Intention he may have.

Kyrie eleison.

Frankfurt School

Frankfurt School on November 7, 2009

Valuable lessons for all friends or lovers of “Western civilisation” are to be culled from an analysis of the USA’s leftwards lurch in the 1960’s by a Californian Professor of Psychology, accessible at www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-WheatlandII.html . Professor Kevin MacDonald is there reviewing the critique of mass culture in a book on “The Frankfurt School in Exile.”

The Frankfurt School needs to be much better known. It was a small but highly influential group of non-Christian intellectuals who, when Hitler came to power, fled from Germany to the USA, where in conjunction with a like-minded group of New York Trotskyists they continued to exert an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. Feeling a profound alienation from the “traditional Anglo-American culture,” says MacDonald, they made war on it by promoting the individual against the family, multi-culture against White leadership, and modernism against tradition in all domains, especially the arts. “Theodor Adorno’s desire for a socialist revolution led him to favour Modernist music that left the listener feeling unsatisfied and dislocated – music that consciously avoided harmony and predictability.” The Frankfurt School wanted “the end of the order that bore the sonata.”

The Frankfurt School scorned the American people’s lack of desire for Revolution, and they blamed it on the people’s “passivity, escapism and conformism,” says the Professor, and on “late capitalist” control of the mass culture by, for instance, conservative organisations imposing moral standards on Hollywood. Yet when in the 1960’s they themselves gained control of the media, universities and politics, they exploited to the full the mass culture and Hollywood and the people’s on-going sleep-like condition to swing them to the left. The Professor laments the resulting vicious attack upon “White interests,” “White identity” and the “traditional people and culture of the West.”

The Professor is right on several counts. For instance, the war is not mainly between capitalism and communism, as the leftists originally thought, and as many Americans still think. Material comfort has lulled the American people to sleep, after the 1960’s as before them. Also, on or off the leash, Hollywood and culture play a huge part in moulding minds and masses (which is why “Eleison Comments” often treat of cultural topics). Also, there does exist a small group, conscious and resolute, of highly influential enemies of “traditional Western culture.”

However, to defend “White interests” the Professor needs to go well beyond White interests as such. The real problem is religious. Why did White Europeans ever have so much to give Because for centuries and centuries they co-operated with God’s grace to profit best by the Catholic Faith. Why does this small group of leftists so hate “Western culture”? Because it is the lingering remains of that Faith. And why did the small group become so powerful from the 1960’s onwards? Because at Vatican II the same “Whites” were mainly responsible for the Catholic officials’ betrayal of the Faith which took place at that Council. Today’s triumph of the leftists is no more nor less than a just punishment from God.

Professor, you are not asleep. Now pick up a Rosary!

Kyrie eleison.

Fifteen Decades

Fifteen Decades on July 25, 2009

Just before “Eleison Comments” become a little more discrete (make sure to register with dinoscopus.com if you wish to be sure of continuing to receive them in private), let someone else write their last public word for me. I quote word for word from a reader to whom I had recommended praying, if at all reasonably possible, all fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary each day.

“ . . .Sometimes it is difficult to fit in, but . . . it has already made an enormous difference in my life. Certainly my faith and hope have been noticeably strengthened; they’d become weak from constant attack from every direction and no real sacramental defences (my emphasis) . . . Besides contributing to my personal sanctification I can see many other benefits . . . It is an act of reparation. It is a participation in Bishop Fellay’s Rosary Crusade . . . It frees up graces for Our Lady to use, and will help save souls (I often feel anguish thinking of how many souls, including some quite close to me, seem to be on the road to perdition, and I’ve felt utterly impotent about it – but now I feel as if I’m doing something to help).

“And finally I can see that the Rosary is a tremendously powerful weapon against Lucifer and his New World Order. I’ve known for ages that something was very wrong with the world, and within the past ten years or so, particularly since 9/11, I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about what’s really going on. When the scales dropped from my eyes I felt absolutely devastated, and close to despair. But now I feel like I’ve got my hands on some heavy artillery, and am doing some real damage to the enemy” (My emphasis).

Readers, do believe it! The Lord God is only allowing this dreadful crisis of Church and world in order to wake us out of our deadly slumbers and bring us back to him, so that we can be happy with him instead of wretched without him for all eternity. Faced with the seemingly imminent global triumph of his enemies, we can feel there is nothing we can do. Wrong! Our friend has got it right. Fifteen Mysteries a day is “heavy artillery” in all senses! As he suggests, one can prefer not to know what is going on, it is so horrid. But far better than dreaming on in the wetland of the “Sound of Music” is to re-enter reality and do what one can do about it. The bombs fall soon.

In the same vein our friend writes, “Since beginning to pray at least fifteen decades of Our Lady’s Rosary every day . . . I haven’t the stomach to step into a Novus Ordo church . . .” He says he found it a bit scary not going to Mass on Sunday, but I told him that the Third Commandment is to “keep the Sabbath holy,” and not to keep it on a slide into apostasy, and I gave him the advice Archbishop Lefebvre used to give in such cases, namely to get rather to the true Mass whenever he can. God bless him. The Cross lies ahead of him, but he has the Rosary in hand.

Kyrie eleison.

Double Virtuality

Double Virtuality on June 13, 2009

Most, if not all, of you know that in the early hours of June 1 an Air France jetliner with 228 souls on board fell out of the sky on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. An extraordinary event? Or is not the extraordinary thing rather that not all of these 100- to 150-ton monsters fall out of the sky? Has not man’s technology virtually mastered reality?

The technology of these aerial Leviathans is indeed something to be marvelled at. Every day now thousands of them all over the world defy gravity to climb six miles high and blast hundreds of passengers at a time over mountain ranges, across vast oceans, from continent to continent, mostly in complete safety. The crashes always make headlines in the media, but they are so rare when compared with the total number of flights that the passengers may fear, but never think, that they will crash.

So with confidence they step into the monsters’ bellies at the airport of departure, stepping off earth and its real time-zones into the virtual world of soothing sounds, plastic meals and – virtuality within virtuality – “in-flight entertainment,” meaning, more and more, your own selection of movies in your own seat. Wrapped in this cosy cocoon of all-embracing technology, one has, normally, only the plane’s occasional shudder or change of its engines’ pitch to remind one that there is outside, starting only a few feet away, a potentially deadly reality, not always perfectly tamed . . .

 . . .What must those last moments have been like inside the cabins of Air France # 447? Horrible to imagine! Eleven days later the exact cause of the crash is still not known. Did blocked speed sensors so confuse the fly-by-wire computers as to cause erratic changes of speed, highly dangerous on flying into turbulence? Lucky for the passengers and crew if the plane broke apart on high, so that the instant de-pressurisation will have deprived them of consciousness for the several-minute tumble through darkness down to certain death on impact with the water, which behaves in the circumstances like concrete!

Or were they unlucky? Of the 228 souls on AF 447, how many will have had the need to make a perfect act of contrition before losing consciousness? Of these, how many will have had the necessary faith and presence of mind, not overwhelmed by panic and fear, to do so? In brief, how many were ready to save their souls? Concerning the moment of death, Our Lord tells all of us, “Watch ye therefore, for you know not when the lord of the house cometh . . .lest coming on a sudden, he find you sleeping” (Mk.XIII,38). And concerning apparently random accidents he says, “Except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Lk,XIII,5). Penance enough today is to live by our Faith. Still too much? Anything less is haunted by AF 447.

Kyrie eleison.

Juvenal Again

Juvenal Again on November 29, 2008

Last week “Eleison Comments” drew attention to the remarkable (in a pagan) natural wisdom in matters spiritual of the Roman satirist Juvenal, who was in his prime about 100 years after Our Lord was born, but who is not known (as far as I can discover) for any contact with the Catholic religion then rising in Rome.

A first lesson drawn from the passage concluding the Tenth Satire was that grace is in line with that God-given nature of ours from which Juvenal was working. Grace is only out of line with our fallen nature, which fell with Adam and has ever since been flawed with original sin in all of us, making all too easy the succession of our personal sins. On this sinful nature, as sinful, grace does make war, but only to heal and elevate that God-given nature which necessarily underlies the sinful nature, as some apple necessarily underlies the rot of any rotten apple. That Juvenal with no apparent help from grace could write so well not only of human rot but also of the underlying nature refutes the dreadful heresy that there is nothing in human nature which is not rotten.

A second lesson for our own times was that the ancient pagan satirist who promoted natural sanity even without any notion of supernatural grace, was a better man than the mass of apostate post-Christian pagans who are today rotting and rooting out both nature and grace. Similarly, to one who visited a week ago the Washington DC Museum of Modern Art, the current exhibition of ancient artistic pieces from pagan Pompeii offered much more for the human heart and mind than did all the modern exhibits put together.

A third lesson, accentuated by modern times, might be the value of reading the classical Latin authors, such as Juvenal. When it comes to the learning of Latin, some pious souls argue that Catholic youth should be immersed rather in the abundant Latin texts of the grace-filled Church Fathers than in pagans like Juvenal. True, the Church Fathers are stainless where pagan authors are always more or less stained, but precisely because the Fathers are filled with grace, surely they cannot in the same way testify to that God-given nature in us which is prior in being, not in value, to God-given grace. Does not this nature need today all the help it can get?

Kyrie eleison.

Colonial Charm

Colonial Charm on August 23, 2008

A brief visit to Goa, former Portuguese colony half-way down the western coast of the Indian sub-continent and now a full member-state of the Republic of India, revives within me a great nostalgia, a great debate and always the same great conclusion: the Lord God is not a little lap-dog to be put on a leash!

The 1,429-square mile enclave of Goa was conquered by the Portuguese in two stages, in 1510 and 1546, as an essential link in a chain of supply-stations for their ships travelling between Europe and the Far East for the spice trade, which then brought with it immense wealth. The conquest still shows in a ring of well-designed and well-built forts surrounding the Old City of Goa, and largely visible today. The wealth still shows in a few sumptuous churches of the Old City, dating back to the early years of the Portuguese settlers when the spice trade and their Catholic Faith were in their hey-day. Goa was the base of operations in the Far East for St. Francis Xavier, whose body rests in one of the great churches. Goa is where he wanted to be buried. He still watches over it.

From the 18th century onwards Goa lost its importance for trade, but the Portuguese remained, because they had put down deep roots and had created what some have called the “Rome of the Orient.” They had successfully converted the local population. At one point they even destroyed all Hindu temples. The result was a Catholic enclave in the warmth of the tropics, peaceful and happy, with an administrative order typical of the colonies prior to their de-colonisation, and with a special charm of which traces remain to this day. Hence the nostalgia.

But time moves on. By mid-20th century the adoration of “liberty” and the onward march of “independence” was spelling the death of the European colonies and empires. At least in the Portuguese, Spanish and French empires the conquest of souls for Heaven had been a driving motivation, evident in Goa, but it is now failing in “Rome of the Occident” itself, as it puts into practice the revolutionary Second Vatican Council. Where God the Father was being stripped of His Fatherhood, any kind of paternity or paternalism was being correspondingly outlawed, and that included all paternalism of colonies and empires. “Colonialism” and “imperialism” were to be replaced by scruffy tourism and disordered socialism. Religion, or irreligion, rules.

So in 1961 the combined army, air force and navy of the new Indian Republic took over the enclave of Goa. Hinduisation is proceeding apace, Goa has been moved into the modern world, and Hindu temples are being built everywhere, with the encouragement of the Catholic priests. But is it the fault of the children or the fathers? Was not a mosque built recently right next to St. Peter’s in Rome?

Kyrie eleison.