motherhood, mothers

Blasting Ahead

Blasting Ahead on January 7, 2012

If some readers found last week’s “Eleison Comments” a little dark for the beginning of a new year, I do apologize, and I promise that this week’s will end on a more hopeful quote. But the truth of the matter is that, as I am told, many people are still blissfully unaware of how serious is the world’s impending economic calamity. Worse, they do not grasp the pre-apocalyptic gravity of the crisis in the Church. Let us dwell for a moment on the latter.

The vision even of some priests within the Society of St Pius X is that the SSPX is a normal religious Congregation while today’s Rome is not excessively abnormal. It is true that Archbishop Lefebvre spoke very harshly of Vatican II and of the “antichrists” in the Vatican, but in the 20 years that have passed since his death, things have changed for the better. We now have a Pope, they think, who is a Traditionalist at heart, as is proved by his liberation of the Tridentine Mass and by his “remission” of the 1988 “excommunication” of the four SSPX bishops. So with just a little flexibility on each side surely Rome and the SSPX can arrive at some arrangement whereby Rome gives back to the SSPX that respectability which it should never have lost, while the SSPX can re-enter Rome in a triumphal procession on the way to the two together re-conquering the world for Christ. The Doctrinal Discussions of 2009–2011 may have highlighted an absolute doctrinal divergence, but that merely proves that the arrangement needs to be purely practical (!).

Alas, priests allowing themselves to be lulled by any such dream have either not read Pascendi or not understood what they read. In his great Encyclical Letter of 1907 St Pius X warned that Modernism represented a major threat to the Church’s existence, because Modernism is the end of the road in cutting off the soul from reality, natural or supernatural. It is the ultimate self-sealing of the mind within its God-less dreamland. Error can go no further. Here is an example of the self-sealing:—

Towards the end of the section on the Modernist theologian, Pascendi explains how the Modernist rejoices in being condemned by Church authority. Just as a garden-hose must not be separated from the tap that enables it to water, so the Church must not be cut off from its source in Tradition. The Church needs then to progress by an inter-play between Modernism and Tradition. Therefore the Modernists need authority to be Traditional, and to do the Traditional thing by condemning them as Modernists. So if the Pope does not condemn them, they will forge ahead, and if he does condemn them they will go ahead anyway because by their very condemnation he is contributing to the progress of the Church! Heads he loses, tails they win. That is self-sealing error. God cannot win.

Well, the great and good God has a surprise in store for those who think so. To save souls he washed out men’s whole wretched system in the time of Noah, and to save souls again he may this time round blast it clean. The blasting may or may not start in 2012. And the consoling quote? –

“When these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift your heads, because your redemption is at hand.” (Lk.XXI, 28). The hour is darkest, they say, just before dawn.

Kyrie eleison.

Tomato Stakes – I

Tomato Stakes – I on September 10, 2011

A little while back a family wife and mother told me she was having a hard time communicating with her husband. They could hardly talk to one another about what was going wrong without ending up mad at each other. Rightly or wrongly, I sensed that her problem was this universal, deliberate and diabolical denial of the marvellously complementary role designed by God for man and woman in marriage. Here is what I wrote for her. She said it helped her. May it help others. By the way, ladies, I do NOT think all the problem is on your side!

I am sorry to hear of a rough passage in your marriage. Rule number One: never argue with your husband in front of, or within earshot of, the children. They come first. You cannot help the family by pulling down your husband, or arguing with him in front of them. On the contrary.

Rule number Two: RESPECT your husband, even if he may not always deserve it. Women run on love, men on ego, a huge difference. That is why St Paul – WORD OF GOD – says, “Wives, obey your husbands, husbands, cherish your wives.” Huge difference! In any marriage where the husband shows love for his wife and where the wife respects her husband, normally the essence of a contented marriage is there. And if he does not show love for you, at least make yourself lovable, which you will never do by fighting with him.

Let it cost you what it may, respect your husband. He needs your respect more than he needs your love. You need his love more than you need his respect. Obey him. Never show that you are telling him what to do. Get him to decide to do what you want him to do. And for the wife to work outside the home is not a good thing, especially if she earns more than he does. If you have to earn, and do earn more, NEVER let it show. Disguise the fact. A man needs to see himself as the breadwinner, as the head of the house. You are the heart, just as necessary as the head for the family, maybe more so, but you are not the head. And if you are sometimes forced to act as the head, do not let it show, BUT DISGUISE IT.

I would be surprised if you could not make the marriage work. It usually depends on the woman to adapt herself to the man, and not the other way round. Russian proverb –“As the tomato plant is to the stake (around which it climbs),so the woman is to the man.” If he is not a stake, do all you can to make him into one. And if you cannot, then once more disguise the fact. God makes women more adaptable than men, so that they will adapt to their men.

You once said that the family needed money to educate the children. Has it occurred to you that the best and most important education of your girls is in their mother’s kitchen? Assuming that the mother is at home. You have much more to give your girls by your example than any school outside the home can give them. And give them the precious example of a wife and mother that obeys and respects her husband despite everything. Children are very observant. Your example is of crucial importance for the happiness of their future marriages and homes.

Argue with your husband if you like, but quietly, respectfully, and away from the children. And do not say, “I too have been out working all day long, I too need understanding at home.” For mothers to work outside the home is not normal, and the men sense it, even if it is their own fault. Men are what they are. This is the man that God appointed for you to marry. Give your children the example of respecting him. That is a precious gift, especially to your girls. All families today need a lot of prayer. Mother of God, help!

Kyrie eleison.

Men’s Authority

Men’s Authority on May 28, 2011

Two young men, uncertain of getting married, begged me the other day to write a manual on how men should be men. Theirs was a real cry of distress: “When should we be nice with women, and when should we be firm? We just don’t know any longer!” Yesteryear the answer to that question was common sense for many a man, but authority today has been so widely undermined by liberal propaganda that the problem of exercising it in marriage may be one reason why now numbers of young folk prefer simply to live together rather than get married. What follows is not a manual, but it may at least point our two musketeers in the right direction.

St. Paul says: “I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. III, 14,15). In other words all fatherhood or authority amongst God’s creatures is modelled upon and derives from the fatherhood and authority of God himself. As Dostoevsky has one of his characters say, “If God does not exist, then I have no business being an army officer.” So it stands to reason that if men chase God out of their society, as he is being chased today out of the whole wide world, then all authority is radically undermined. In the individual, reason will be unable to govern the passions, in the family the father will be unable to control his household, and in the State democracy will come to seem the only legitimate form of government.

Now within the family, who, observing daily life, can deny that men are stronger than women in the use of reason, while women are stronger than men in intuition and emotion? Watch any sitcom if you doubt it. Now feelings have their rightful place in life and they are scorned, like one’s wife, at one’s peril, but they come and go, they are unstable and as such they are a guide, but not a reliable guide, to action. On the contrary if reason discerns what is objectively true and just, it is stabilized by the fact that objective truth and justice are above any individual or his feelings. Therefore reason may listen to feelings, but it must rule them. That is why men have, as men, a natural authority possessed only exceptionally by women, who have as a rule other qualities. That is why the man is naturally the head of the family and home, while the woman is naturally its heart.

But the liberalism which rules the modern world dissolves all sense of objective truth or justice. By so doing it deprives the reason of its object, and of its objective anchor in a reality above and independent of the reasoning subject. Reason being the prerogative of men, liberalism hits the men before it hits the women, whose feminine instincts are not dependent on reason. By the same token liberalism undercuts the authority of men which comes down from conforming to what is above them, ultimately divine Truth and Justice, and it makes all use of authority become arbitrary.

Therefore, young men, in all your dealings with men or women, seek to be true and just, and turn to God for the help necessary to discern truth and justice amidst so much untruth and injustice and arbitrary misuse of authority all around us today. Then act upon what you discern, and you will re-build your manly authority from above, in a world undercutting it from below. In brief, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Mt. VI, 33).

Kyrie eleison.