Religion

Conciliar “Theologian” – I

Conciliar “Theologian” – I on June 5, 2010

The havoc wrought upon souls throughout the world by the 1960’s collapse of the mass of Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council, is immeasurable. So one can hardly reflect too much on the essential problem, because it is still very much with us, in fact more so than ever. It threatens to send all of our souls down to Hell. Last year the Italian fortnightly periodical, Si Si No No, published an article summarising the main errors of a pioneer “theologian” of Vatican II, the French Dominican Fr. Marie-Dominique Chenu. Laid out still more briefly below, his six errors point to the heart of the problem: the putting of man in the place of God (I have changed their order – thereby hangs a tale for another “EC”):

Turning to man, as though it is God that needs to be adapted to modern man, and not modern man to God. But Catholicism strives always to fit man to God, and not the other way around.

Submitting divine Revelation to modern ways of thinking, e.g. Descartes, Kant, Hegel. No more is there any absolute, objective Truth. All religious statements become merely relative and subjective.

Submitting divine Revelation to the historical method, meaning that every truth arose merely in its historical context, so that just as every historical context was or is changing, so no truth is unchanging or unchangeable.

Believing in pantheistic evolution, meaning that God is no longer the Creator essentially distinct from creation. He becomes no different from creatures, which come into being by evolution, and by evolution are constantly changing.

Putting feelings first in matters of religion, i.e. putting religious sentimental experience above either supernatural Faith in the mind or supernatural Charity in the will.

Denying the difference between good and evil, by claiming that the mere existence of a human act makes it good. Now it is true that every human act that happens has the goodness of being, but it only has moral goodness if it is ordered to its end, which is ultimately God. Human acts not ordered to God are morally evil.

The six errors are obviously inter-connected. If (1) religion is to centre on me, then (2 & 3) I must unhook my mind from reality, where religion centres on God. With the mind crippled, then (4) “nothing is but what is not,” so everything evolves, and (5) feelings take over (whereupon religion is by the fault of men feminized, because emotion is women’s prerogative). Finally, where feelings replace truth, (6) morality collapses.

In the Vatican II documents themselves, these errors are rather implicit than explicit, because the errors had to be disguised for the documents to get the vote of the mass of Catholic bishops who were attending the Council but were not yet sufficiently up-dated. However, these errors represent the fully up-dated “spirit of Vatican II,” which is where the Council was headed, and that is why the official Church has been on a path of self-destruction for the past 45 years: 1965 to 2010. For how many more years?

Kyrie eleison.

Van Gogh’s Popularity

Van Gogh’s Popularity on April 10, 2010

At the recent exhibition of the modern Dutch artist, Vincent Van Gogh, soon to close at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, there have been continual queues of people waiting for hours to get in. How is such popularity to be explained? Certainly Van Gogh is modern without being too modern, a combination that appeals to many souls anxious today to make some sense of the crazy world around them, but surely there is also in him an even more attractive combination – he is religious without being religious – religion for apostates!

He was born in Holland in 1853, the eldest son of a Protestant pastor. For nearly three quarters of his short life all he thought of was giving himself to the service of religion, because only at the age of 27 did he discover his outstanding talent and vocation as an artist. However, from then on he devoted himself with a religious intensity to the mastery of drawing and painting, so that he would be able to express in art what he had found himself unable to express in any outwardly religious form. He said, “In all of Nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.”

He made that soul almost tangible in the painting chosen by the Royal Academy for their Exhibition flyer, “Hospital at St. Remy.” Gnarled tree trunks point upwards to their dark foliage which crowds over the bright yellow hospital building below, and interlocks with the dark blue sky above. The few human figures seem insignificant amidst a whirling dynamic of Nature, all the more dramatic for the picture’s brilliant colour-scheme, typical for Van Gogh. The same dynamic is still more visible in his famous painting,”Starry Night” (not included in this Exhibition), where landscape, cypress-trees, mountains, stars and sky are all locked together in a wild, rhythmic, yellow and violet dance, seeming to make the whole cosmos whirl.

Both paintings date from Van Gogh’s intensely productive last five years, between his move to Paris in early 1886 and his death in France in the summer of 1890. One may not like modern art, one may not like Van Gogh, but nobody can deny that his paintings from this period represent a profoundly individual and human reaction to what Wordsworth called “something far more deeply interfused” in the world of Nature that surrounds us human beings. What else is “art”? Only, whereas at the beginning of the 19th century that “something interfused” had inspired the English poet to “reflect in tranquillity,” on the contrary by the end of that apostatizing century the Dutch artist, who had also left overt religion behind him, found beauty but little peace, which makes him that much more sympathetic to our own still more restless age.

Alas, Van Gogh paid a heavy price for recognizing the prime movement in Nature without identifying the Prime Mover. The movement without the motionless Mover, the fierce dynamism without the King of Peace, ended by overwhelming him, and he died of a self-inflicted gun-wound. Divine Lord, have mercy, have mercy, on millions and millions of souls who sense you and need you, but cannot – or will not – find you. You alone know just how dangerous is their religionless religion without you!

Kyrie eleison.

Truth, Farewell

Truth, Farewell on April 3, 2010

Another voice of truth risks falling silent in the United States. It is not, at least overtly, a voice of Catholic truth, but are not the great problems for truth today not problems specific to Catholics, but problems so basic that they are common to all men? Therefore when a columnist and writer of the stature of Paul Craig Roberts, who has outstanding Establishment credentials and who was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, announces that, apparently out of discouragement, he is laying aside his pen, it is a sad day for all of us.

His farewell article of about ten days ago deals precisely with the universal loss of truth. Its opening section deserves to be quoted at length: “There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword . . .when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal or financial interest. Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. They have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it” (my underlining). “Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off-limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.” Truth is an inconvenience for government . . . and for ideologues.”

He goes on, “Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it.” Examples from many domains prove that “wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money. Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda and short memories finish the job.” Further examples confirm that “Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money . . . Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.” They have been brainwashed by the mainstream media which “do not serve the truth. They serve the government and the interest groups that empower the government.”

Fascinatingly, Roberts argues that “America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, that defining event of our time, which has launched the USA on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media.It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise on which they are based” (my underlining again). I would only add the religious dimension: how can souls grasp the one true religion of God when they accept the premises on which their whole godless environment is based? In the early 2000’s many Catholics in the USA did not want to hear sermons emphasizing the fraud of 9/11, but how can souls that are unconcerned to get to the truth, get anywhere near to the true God? How can souls losing their taste for reality keep any taste for the supreme realities of the soul and the after-life?

Roberts concludes sadly, “As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.” No, dear Dr. Roberts. The pen is still, despite all appearances, mightier than the sword, only not if it is dropped. Keep writing, however few be the souls that will still read you for the sake of the truth, because such souls, like the Truth, “are mighty and will prevail.”

Kyrie eleison.

Jeremiah’s Politics

Jeremiah’s Politics on March 27, 2010

As Jeremiah is the Old Testament prophet for Passiontide, so he is also the prophet for modern times. His being the prophet for Passiontide is apparent from the Holy Week liturgy where, to express her grief for the Passion and Death of Our Lord, Mother Church draws heavily on Jeremiah’s “Lamentations” for the destruction of Jerusalem in 588 B.C. Jeremiah’s being the prophet for our own times was the view of Cardinal Mindszenty, no doubt because the Cardinal saw the sins of his own world calling even more for the denunciations of Jeremiah than did those of Judah, and leading just as surely to the destruction of our present sinful way of life.

Now in the domain of politics and economics, a number of commentators today (accessible on the Internet) clearly see that destruction coming, but they do not connect it with religion, because either they, or the bulk of their readers, starting from below, do not think upwards. Jeremiah on the contrary, starting from above with his dramatic call from God (Chapter I), sees politics, economics, everything, in the floodlight of the Lord God of Hosts. Thus after denouncing at length the horrifying perfidy of Judah and its sins against God and after announcing Judah’s punishment in general (Ch. II-XIX), he makes political prophecies in particular: the Judeans will be taken captive to Babylon (XX), with their King Sedecias (XXI), and Kings Joachaz, Joakim and Joachin will all be punished (XXII).

Such prophecies do not make Jeremiah popular. The priests of Jerusalem arrest him (XXVI), a false prophet defies him (XXVII), King Joakim himself seeks to destroy the prophet’s writings (XXXVI), and finally the princes of Judah throw him down a muddy well to die, from which he is only rescued by an Ethiopian (XXXVIII). Immediately Jeremiah ventures back into politics, by urging – in vain – King Sedecias to surrender to the Babylonians, which would have spared the King great suffering.

Obviously the secular and religious authorities of decadent Jerusalem did not like what the man of God was telling them, but at least they had enough sense of religion to take him seriously. Would not today both Church and State dismiss him as a “religious nutcase” and tell him to “stay out of politics”? Have not Church and State alike today so cut politics loose from religion that they are blind to how profoundly their godless politics are branded by their very godlessness? In other words, men’s relation to their God impregnates and governs everything they do, even when that relation is on men’s part one of utter indifference towards God.

So if any of us follow this year an Office of “Tenebrae” (“darkness”), let Jeremiah’s grief for Jerusalem laid waste evoke for us not only Mother Church’s sorrow for the Passion and Death of Our Divine Lord, but also the Sacred Heart’s own measureless grief for an entire world sinking into sins which will bring down its utter destruction, unless we heed the plaintive cry of “Tenebrae”: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn to the Lord thy God.”

Muslim Distress

Muslim Distress on February 27, 2010

A little example of a big problem came across my path last month when I met in London a Muslim born and living in France, being torn between his Mohammedan ancestry and his European environment. The clash for him between loyalty to his ancestral roots and loyalty to his land of birth was clearly agonising. Some Mohammedans might completely adopt French values, many others might completely reject them, but he could do neither.

His problem is of course much more than just cultural or political or even historical. It is religious. Islam began some 1400 years ago as a breakaway from Catholic Christendom in the Middle East. Rooted in the Monophysite heresy which holds that there is only one Person in God, it spread like wildfire through a dried out Christendom in the Middle East and North Africa, occupied Spain for many centuries and broke briefly into France. A simple and violent religion, it seeks to conquer the whole world by the sword. It is a scourge of God, which for a thousand years Christendom could only hold at bay by the sword.

However, now that the European Christians themselves are losing nearly all belief in Christ or in Christendom, they are allowing – and their anti-Christian governments are positively encouraging – Mohammedans to come back into Europe, not by the sword but by immigration, which is how this young man’s family have been in France for two or three generations. What is behind this immigration? The Globalists want it to help dissolve the once glorious Christian nations, and melt them down into the New World Order. Liberals want it to proclaim their folly that men’s differences of race or religion are insignificant. The Mohammedans want it to enable them to take over Europe.

Yet even though Europe is daily more rotten, still there are traces of its ancient glory, a glory which it owed to the Catholic Church. These traces are enough on the one hand to inspire in someone like this young man a loyalty of patriotism rivalling the loyalty of blood to his ancestors, on the other hand to rouse still in many Europeans such a love of their own way of life that they will defend it with a bloodbath if it seems or becomes too threatened from outside. Satan is no doubt planning for that bloodbath. God may allow it as a punishment. It is looking more and more likely.

Meanwhile what should this young man do? Ideally, he will go to the root of the problem, which is whether Jesus Christ is the Second of the three Persons of God, or just a Prophet, however sublime. Then if he is intelligent, he will connect the gifts of France he so admires with their giver, the same Incarnate God, and if he then became a true Catholic, not only for himself would he see how to combine all true good in his roots with all true good in his land of birth, but also for others he would be able to contribute, in however limited a way, to the avoidance of the looming bloodbath.

And what should the ancestral Europeans do to avoid it? Return to their ancestral Faith and to its practice, which alone has the power to unite all peoples and races in the Truth, in justice and in peace. This is their ancient responsibility and vocation from God, to give such an example as will draw the whole world to Our Lord Jesus Christ. If they continue to be unfaithful, the blood is sure to flow.

Kyrie eleison.

Mane, Thecel . . .

Mane, Thecel . . . on February 13, 2010

Should a Catholic bishop leave to one side matters of economics on the grounds that he should keep to matters of religion? By no means! What a narrow view of religion one must take in order not to see that economics, or the art of managing the material goods necessary for life, is entirely governed by the view one takes of life, and the view one takes of life depends on religion. For how can religion (or its lack) be adequately understood except as the total view of life by which a man binds himself (or refuses to be bound) to the God who gave and gives him his life?

If multitudes of men today think that economics have nothing to do with God, it is only because beforehand they think that he is either non-existent or insignificant. And supposing that there is an after-life, think they, then Hell is either non-existent (“We all go to Heaven”) or unimportant (“At least all my friends will be there,” they joke). Upon which presuppositions follow the shift from the economics of yesterday, economics of thrift, to those of today, spendthrift economics.

Yesterday, do not spend more than you earn. Save, and do not borrow, to invest. Do not solve debt with more debt. Today, it is patriotic to spend. Everybody will be prosperous if you spend regardless of what you earn. Do not save, because idle money benefits nobody. By all means borrow to make profitable investments. And if your debts turn sour, borrow more to get out of them.

These eat-drink-and-be-merry economics were intellectualised in particular by the highly influential British economist, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), who once famously said, “In the end we all die.” By the 1970’s President Nixon (1913–1994) was saying, “We are all Keynesians now.” And since the 1970’s the Keynesian build-up has been continuous all the way to the 2000’s orgy of lending, borrowing and spending, made possible only by the people’s having given up on the old common sense of not spending more than you earn, and of shunning debt – “Owe no man anything but to love one another,” says the Word of God (Rom. XIII, 8), and “The borrower is servant to him that lendeth” (Prov. XXII, 7).

Right now the world is enslaving itself to the money-men, the orgy is collapsing, and the collapse is by no means over. Unemployment is far higher than the politicians can afford to admit, yet still they garner votes by promising jobs and free lunches for the people. The politicians have encouraged these unreal expectations by which they rise to power but on which they will not be able to deliver. The people are about to rise up, are rising up, in anger. The politicians will have to start foreign wars to take the people’s mind off domestic troubles. War is around the corner, to be followed, if God permits, by the usurers’ World Government. All because the people thought that God had nothing to do with life, and life nothing to do with God.

But see Daniel V, 5–6 and 24–28! The Lord God has our number (“Mane”), we have been weighed in his balance and found wanting (“Thecel”), our fun-land is over (“Phares”). It remains for us to take our medicine.

Kyrie eleison.