Tag: Old Testament

Today’s Galatians

Today’s Galatians posted in Eleison Comments on June 16, 2012

“O you senseless Galatians,” cries out St Paul (Gal.III, 1), tearing a strip off one of his beloved flocks that was back-sliding, or wanting to go back from the New Testament to the Old Testament so as to satisfy Judaizers that would make them serve again “under the elements of the world” (IV, 3). It is remarkably easy to apply the Apostle’s tirade to the Traditional Catholics who are presently being tempted to slide back under Conciliar authorities so as to satisfy Nostra Aetate. But then it is the same world, flesh and devil, so with apologies to St Paul, let me adapt some verses from the Epistle to our own times:—

“O you senseless Tradcats! Who has bewitched you, that you should not follow the Tradition of Our Lord Jesus Christ, as it has been set before you? This only would I learn of you: have you been leading Catholic lives for several years thanks to Vatican II, or thanks to Catholic Tradition? Are you so foolish that having experienced the fruits of Tradition you now want to give it up by putting yourselves back under the Conciliar authorities? Were all those fruits in vain(III, 1–4)?

“I am astonished that you are so soon drifting away from the line of Archbishop Lefebvre who called you into the grace of Christ, and instead towards the new gospel of Vatican II, which is no gospel at all, but these modernists are troubling you, and they want to pervert the Gospel of Christ. But if ourselves or an angel from Heaven were to try to tell you that the Council was not really that bad, throw him out and don’t listen! Let me say it again: anyone pretending that the Archbishop would have been in favour of a deal today with Conciliar Rome should be thrown out! Whose interests are we seeking? Are we trying to please the Romans or to please God? If these Romans liked me, I would be no servant of Christ!(I, 6–10).

“Before you came to Tradition you were serving under churchmen who were turning the Church over to the world. But now, after you found Tradition, how can you be wanting to go back with the world, under the Conciliar authorities(IV, 8,9)? Am I become an enemy of the SSPX because I tell the truth? Those misleading you pretend to be looking after your interests, but they want you to forget about the Archbishop so as to serve their own interests(IV, 16,17). Stand fast, and do not come under the sway of the Council again(V, 1). You were doing well. How can you now be letting yourselves turned away from the Truth? Whoever is doing this to you is no servant of God! I do believe you will come to your senses, but whoever is misleading you bears a grave responsibility. Do you think I would be so persecuted if I was preaching the world? Whoever is corrupting Tradition needs the knife for more than just circumcision(V, 7–12)!

“Those wanting the SSPX to go through Vatican II B are merely trying to avoid being persecuted for the Cross of Christ. They want you to be worldly, keeping only the outward appearances of Tradition. They want back in with the Judaizers in Rome, but God forbid that I should want anything other than the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world. Whoever follows Tradition in this way, peace be to them, and mercy(VI, 12–16).”

Now read St Paul’s own Epistle. Let nobody pretend that the Word of God no longer applies!

Kyrie eleison.

Ancestral Pride

Ancestral Pride posted in Eleison Comments on October 15, 2011

In his second volume on the life of Jesus published several months ago, Pope Benedict XVI made remarks enabling journalists to jump to the conclusion that the Jews must no longer be held responsible for deicide, i.e. the killing of God. Worse, on May 17 the executive director of the US Bishops’ Conference’s Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs said that one cannot charge the Jewish people with deicide at any time in history without falling out of communion with the Catholic Church. Against what many people today want to believe, it is time to recall, however briefly, what the true Church always used to teach on the judicial murder of Jesus.

Firstly, the killing of Jesus was truly “deicide,” i.e. the killing of God, because Jesus was the one of the three divine Persons who in addition to his divine nature had taken a human nature. What was killed on the Cross? Only the human nature. But who was killed on the Cross in his human nature? None other than the second divine Person, i.e. God. So God was killed, deicide was committed.

Secondly, Jesus died on the Cross to save all of us sinful human beings from our sins, and in this sense all men were and are the purpose of his death. But only the Jews (leaders and people) were the prime agents of the deicide because it is obvious from the Gospels that the Gentile most involved, Pontius Pilate, would never have condemned Jesus to death had not the Jewish leaders roused the Jewish people to clamour for his crucifixion (Mt. XXVII, 20). Certainly the learned leaders were more guilty than the unlearned people, says St Thomas Aquinas (Summa III, 47, 5), but they all cried together for Jesus’ blood to come down upon them and their children (Mt. XXVII, 25).

Thirdly, at least Pope Leo XIII considered there to be a real solidarity between the Jews clamouring then for Jesus to be killed and the collectivity of Jews of modern times. Did he not in his Act of Consecration of the Human Race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus have the entire Church, from the end of the 19th century onwards, pray to God that he turn his “eyes of mercy towards the children of that race, once God’s chosen people: of old they called down upon themselves the Blood of the Saviour; may it now descend upon them a laver (i.e. washing) of redemption and life”?

But Leo XIII is by no means alone in observing such a continuity amongst Jews down the centuries. Do they themselves not lay claim today to the land of Palestine on the grounds that it is theirs by right from the God of the Old Testament? Has there ever been a race-people-nation on the face of the earth more proudly self-identifying as identical down the ages? Originally raised by God to cradle the Messiah, alas, when he came they refused, collectively, to recognize him. Collectively also, meaning there are always noble exceptions, they have remained faithful to that rejection, so that they changed their religion from that of Abraham and Moses and the Old Testament to that of Anas, Caiphas and the Talmud. Tragically, their very messianic training by God drives them to go on rejecting the one whom they hold to be a false messiah. Until they convert at the end of the world, as the Church has always taught they will do (cf. Rom. XI, 26–27), they seem bound to choose to go on acting, collectively, as enemies of the true Messiah. How can the Pope let go of such ancient truths?

Kyrie eleison.

Reading Pagans

Reading Pagans posted in Eleison Comments on June 4, 2011

Some Catholic eyebrows may have been raised a while ago when “Eleison Comments” (EC 188) recommended the reading of the pagan Greeks to get a handle on the universe’s moral framework. Why not rather read Catholic authors? But the same great realities of life, suffering and death were faced by the Greek tragedians as are faced by the Catholic Doctors: why, as it seems, are we born on this earth, only to suffer and die, and by death be separated from everything we have learned to love? The question is basic, and can be agonizing.

The Catholic answer is clear and complete: an infinitely good God gives to each of us life, free-will and time enough, if we make the right use of the suffering exactly dosed by his Providence (Mt.X, 29–31), for us to choose to spend our eternity rather with him in Heaven than without him in Hell. The Greek answer is incomplete, but not wholly wide of the mark. Instead of God the Father, they have a Father-god, Zeus, and instead of Providence they have Fate (Moira).

Now whereas for Catholics Providence is inseparable from God, the Greeks separate Zeus from Fate so that they sometimes clash. That follows from the Greeks having a too human concept of their gods. Nevertheless they do conceive of Zeus as more or less benignly directing the universe and of Fate as being unchangeable, as is Providence within the true God (Summa Ia, 23, 8; 116,3), so that they are not wholly wrong. Moreover they have more respect for their mythical gods, and for the moral order guarded by them, than do a host of modern writers, who have no respect for any god at all, and who set out to negate any trace of a moral order.

But the Greeks have one advantage even over Catholic writers. When they present great truths, these are drawn from raw life and not just – so to speak – out of the Catechism. The same holds true for any non-Catholic witness to truths taught by the Church. Just as today’s Talmudic Jews, precisely because they reject Jesus Christ, render a special witness to him by guarding jealously in their synagogues the Hebrew text of that Old Testament which speaks of Our Lord from beginning to end, so the ancient Greeks give special witness to God and his Providence when, independently of the Catechism, they demonstrate the world’s moral order in action. In this way they prove that such natural truths are accessible not only to believers, rather they belong to the very fabric of life as lived by everyone, if only it is sanely understood.

Another advantage of the ancient classics in particular is that having preceded Christ, there cannot be in them a trace of that apostasy which mars, more or less, even pious writers coming out of Christendom after the Middle Ages. Natural truths are presented by the ancients with a certain innocence and freshness which can no longer be recovered. The waters are too muddied.

In fact it was the Church’s monasteries which ensured the survival of the manuscripts of the ancient classics in medieval times. Count on the true Catholic Church to save them once more in modern times from the new barbarians, liberals! For wherever the so-called “scholarship” of the liberals prevails today, it turns all classics to dust.

Kyrie eleison.