Paenitentia

Where in the world...

2012-01-08T20:17:00.002-05:00

Bob Villa Hiatus.

For the past several weeks -- and several more to come -- I have been restoring a wonderful 1909 Dutch Revival home. As such, all of time and attention has been diverted from my first love, which is writing to my new love, "this old house."

Please pray for this author -- he is in way over his head.

God willing -- more to follow in the spring.

The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics by Gilad Atzmon.

2011-11-13T21:30:00.007-05:00

“While in the past an ‘anti-semite’ was someone who hates Jews, nowadays it is the other way around, an anti-Semite is someone that the Jews hate.”

The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics by Gilad Atzmon.

I learned of this little book and its author on, of all places, the website of The New Republic. The context for TNR’s mention of it was hardly an endorsement. In fact, it was an brief article demonizing Professors John Mearsheimer (who wrote the very compelling The Israel Lobby) and Richard Falk for merely providing a dust jacket blurb for The Wandering Who? The hit job, which was really directed at the two professors, was written by none other than one of the world’s foremost jerks, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz. As it turns out, Dershowitz does not care about about Gilad Atzmon’s book -- from his rarified post, he does not take it seriously; rather, Mearsheimer’s limited connection with Atzmon’s book was another way for Dershowitz to slander Mearsheimer and Falk. Given the topic of the book, an analysis of Jewish identity politics, an endorser (Mearsheimer) who I admire, and a bullying detractor (Dershowitz) who I loathe, I immediately ordered my copy. I was not disappointed and am so happy that Dershowitz took his valuable time to condemn it and its endorsers.

Gilad Atzmon is a Jerusalem-born ex-pat who now resides in London by choice. He hails from a family of Zionist settlers and served as a solder in the Israeli Defense Force. He is a well-known Jazz musician (concededly, I do not know much of his music) and a writer (both fiction and non-fiction). He is also rabidly anti-Zionist and quite proudly wears the moniker of a “self-hating Jew.” Much like Norman Finkelstein, who is an incredible pest and thorn to American Zionists (like Dershowitz), Atzmon is derided by the vast majority of his fellow Jews, who identify Israel as “holy” ground (albeit not always for religious reasons).

Make no mistake: The Wandering Who? is a controversial book for good reason. It carves up a host of sacred cows: all in a style that is gratuitously politically incorrect. If anyone took the time to read the book, however, and see through his over-the-top phraseology, they would find a thinker genuinely struggling with the question of what “Jewishness” means. To be anti-Zionist is not the same as being anti-semitic although Zionists are desperate to combine the two whenever possible. In my opinion, it is absurd to call Atzmon an anti-semite any more that it is to call the prophet Isaiah an anti-Israelite: Atzmon is, in his own estimation, albeit secular terms, calling Israel and its supporters to account for the crimes of ethnically cleansing a population, for committing war crimes, and for imposing collective punishment on civilians. There is a reason that most prophets are killed for delivering the message of divine judgment -- those who are subject to it hate the message and the messenger.

Before I begin address some of Atzmon’s ideas and arguments in The Wandering Who?, critiquing Jewish identity politics and Zionism invariably -- indeed, if talking about anything “Jewish” in less than panegyric terms -- is likely to being labeled anti-semitic. Indeed, the “anti-semite” canard itself is a theme in Atzmon’s book; a rampant political correctness serves to insulate these questions from debate by destroying people who may be critical of both Israeli policies and American Zionist support thereof. But the political reality is that I do not want my tax dollars to subsidize a regime that is predicated on apartheid. I am also appalled that the United States Congress appears to be little more than a rubber stamp for these human rights abuses. Finally, I openly question whether it is acceptable for Americans to pursue a policies on behalf of a foreign sovereign that are clearly antithetical to American interests. Am I allowed to think that certain hardcore American Zionists display a dangerous dual loyalty -- one that would appear primarily Israeli at the expense of American interests?

The Wandering Who? is more or less a series of essays on the related questions of the political, social and philosophical foundations and ramifications of “Jewishness” and Zionism. Part of his analysis is drawn from Atzmon’s personal experience; both the experience of being an Israeli in the metaphysical sense of the term as well as the practical lived-out experiences of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The rest is drawn on certain philosophical conclusions he draws about Zionism and “Jewishness” -- its past and its present. Atzmon’s main target is Zionism, which he defines as essentially separatist: “Zionism is all about the abolition of the other, the re-creation of the conditions in which Jews celebrate their symptoms, in which they can love themselves for who they are -- or, at least, who they think they are.”

Atzmon calls this separatist ideology “third-category Jewishness.” The first two types of Jewish existence, which he finds neither problematic nor comment worthy per se, are (i) Jews who follow religious Judaism and (ii) those who happen to regard themselves as of Jewish origin (perhaps in similarity to my view of “Irish-ness” as a second-generation American). Third-category Jewishness is a Zionist ideology that comprises those Jews “who put their Jewish-ness over and above all other traits.” He writes:

The third category is problematic. Its definition may sound inflammatory to some. And yet, bizarrely enough, it was the formulation given on the eve of the 20th century by Chaim Weizmann, a prominent early Zionist figure and later the first Israeli President: ‘There is no English, French, German or American Jews, but only Jews living in England, France, Germany or America.’ In just a few words, Weizmann managed to categorically define the essence of Jewish-ness. It is basically a ‘primary quality.’

He traces the beginnings of Zionism as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment and corresponding emancipation of the Jews during the Nineteenth Century. Following the French Revolution and the emancipation of the Jews, the Jews, who were once ghettoized were more or less free to become one of the “new” Europeans who were then throwing off the so-called yokes of crowns and cassocks. When we factor that the emancipation of the Jews in Europe was predicated primarily on non-religious grounds, e.g., drawn from such ideals as those of Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen adopted by the revolutionary French National Assembly in 1789, the threat to Jewish disappearance through assimilation too was non-religious; it would not happen, as it were, in the midst of a mass conversion to Christianity, but rather in the withering of religious Judaism (consistent with the general anti-clerical nature of the times) coupled with a melding of Jews with non-Jews in a new humanity premised on Western liberal ideals. If assimilated and mixed, the great-grandchildren of emancipated Jews might abandon any notion of Jewishness.

As the “chosen-ness” of religious Judaism was coming to a close, at least in the minds of those among a new breed of intellectual and influential European Jews, something had to provide the rationale for remaining Jewish in any meaningful way. Into the abyss, Atzmon writes, “is exactly where Zionism interfered. It was there to set up the Jews in a project that aimed towards an authentic identification. Zionism was there to let the Jew think in terms of ‘belonging.’” If this sounds vaguely familiar, it is because this “project,” as it were, is not strictly speaking a Jewish one. The whole enterprise of Modernism has been been to throw off the “shackles” of religiosity in favor of a new meaning, a self-created meaning: it is to find a foundation for man, an anchor for his existence that is divorced from God. From a Catholic perspective, this search is bound to be fruitless until it is concluded in reality, which is prostration before the living God. Anything short of that is utterly futile and will continue to haunt man -- both individually and as collectively.

This idea of Jewishness sans Judaism is a critical one. Atzmon contends that “[o]nce Judaism is renounced, what remains of Jewish identity is pretty threadbare ... all that is left of Jewish-ness is a template of negation fuelled [sic] by racial orientation and spiced up with some light cultural references such as matza balls and chicken soup.” The refusal to believe the bible, to take serious the accounts of Creation and to doubt that God who took a personal interest in the world of men was endemic (and remains so) for the intellectual -- Jew and Christian alike. What he appears to be getting at in his condemnation of “Jewishness” without Judaism is in fact its parochialism. He goes even further -- and harsher -- in proclaiming that, [w]hile the religious (Judaic) understanding of Chosen-ness is interpreted as a moral burden in which the Jews are ordered by God to stand as an exemplary model of ethical behaviour, the secular Jewish interpretation has been reduced to a crude, ethno-centric, blood-oriented chauvinism.”

Atzmon attacks Zionism’s historical predicate; maintaining that the Jewish people were never a nation as such. He draws on the work of certain historians who now claim that there was no Roman exile of the Jews, that the vast majority of European Jews are not descended from biblical Israelites but rather Eastern European converts, and that the actual descendants of ancient Israelites are most likely the indigenous peoples of Palestine, i.e., the current Palestinians. He points out the following irony, citing an Israeli historian, that “there were times in Europe when anyone who argued that all Jews belonged to a nation of alien origin would have been classified at once as an anti-semite. Nowadays, anyone who dares to suggest that the people known in the worlds as Jews (as distinct from today’s Israelis) have have been, and are still not, a people or a nation is immediately denounced as a Jew-hater.”

Zionism’s ethical limitations failure to furnish an ethic that transcends merely whether some immediate action is good or not for the Jews is a related point. In that sense, Atzmon condemns Zionism’s smallness. He writes, “it is not the idea of being unethical that torments Israelis and their supporters, but the idea of being ‘caught out’ as such.” While appealing to certain universal values, Zionism runs headlong into other values. As it relates to the idea of self-determination, Atzmon contends that it essentially meaningless within what he considers to be Zionism’s “tribal discourse” in which the right to self-determination opposes tribal culture. More generally, he locates the error as follows:

Zionism as a movement can be described theoretically as a dialectical struggle between tribal praxis that aims for insularity, and the universal promise of openness and tolerance. It is an ongoing debate between Jerusalem and Athens, that tries to promise both, but it is doomed to failure because tribalism and universalism are like oil and water, they don’t mix well.

A concrete example of Zionism’s ethical limitations is that while it, and its supporters, parrot national self-determination as a basis for continued Israeli occupation, they are either blind or willful in refusing to see the reality of the Palestinians’ right to the same national self-determination. He laments that it is strange indeed that a people that had survived an international persecution of such grotesque proportions could -- in the space of three years (1945 to 1948) -- preside over the wholesale ethnic cleansing of the local indigenous populations of Palestine. In other words, how could a people so sensitized to suffering dole out the Nakba? He continually uses this argument against any talk that denying the right of Israel to exist is denying the Jewish people what all other nations possess in sovereign autonomy: he seems to says fine, have it, but it cannot come at the literal expense of the people who lived there before you and whom you evicted and stole their land. In other words, don’t baldly assert rights about the righteousness of Jewish self-determination while the same rights of Palestinians are denied and trampled.

One suspects that hostility Atzmon has towards Zionism is only incidentally connecting to the laundry list of crimes that he attributes to Israel relating to Palestinians. He argues that “if we redefine Judaism as a modern form of Jewish activism that aims to halt assimilation, we can then reassess all Jewish tribal activity as an internal debate within a diverse Zionist political movement -- the colonizing of Palestine can then be considered as just one of the faces of Zionism.” (p. 76.) Stated differently, even if history had played itself out quite differently and Israel had been placed, for example, in an abandoned stretch of 1,000 square miles of Montana, Atzmon, or so it seems, would still be hostile to it. It is the faulty rationale behind the fact of separation he laments, not the circumstances by which the separation have occurred. That Zionism has occurred -- and still does -- through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is merely an emphatic exclamation point in support of his other arguments.

One last prominent theme of Atzmon’s critique of Zionism is that its ideology of separation requires a continuing perception of -- and even manufacturing of -- hostility towards the rest of the world. As a Jew divorced from religious Judaism is essentially a negation, according to Atzmon, then Zionism as collective Jewishness is essentially an ideology premised on negation. Here, Atzmon makes probably his most controversial points. He argues that the the Holocaust was a Zionist victory just as every rape is a victory for radical feminist ideology. He says that, “[i]f there were no burned synagogues, Mossad would go so far as burning some itself.” (p. 43.) Atzmon’s point here, while admittedly hyperbolic, is that those who traffic in identity politics -- whether it be Feminist, Black, Hispanic or Jewish -- rely on hostility (real or imagined) to justify further separation. For identity ideologue himself, like Abraham Foxman or Jesse Jackson for example, the continued selling of hostility becomes the raison d’etre for continued relevance. Like many conservatives, I detest identity politics and the way it poisons discourse and begets mistrust -- the way it hyphenates Americans and creates dual and false loyalties. Zionism, it would appear, is the granddaddy of identity politics itself.

In many ways, I can understand the Zionist and Jewish antipathy towards Atzmon: his work reads like a traitorous treatise -- a full public airing of every single piece of dirty laundry with the attribution towards Zionists of the worst possible motives. He is like a whistleblower against his own people. Maybe he just doesn’t like Jews and the fact that he is a Jew should not insulate him from the anti-semitism charge. After all, he draws on virtually every negative stereotype and canard against the Jews. I can see the argument but I think it is wrong -- and wrong in a critical way. Atzmon, it seems to me, seeks to transcend his “Jewishness” -- to not be seen as a “Jew” in an existential way. He wants instead to be a “human being;” someone who belongs to the human family -- not in a hyphenated sense, but in a full sense. And he sees in Zionism a relic of the old, tribal worldview that constrains progress, constrains the human family, limits a true human connectedness with what I think he would characterize as artificial distinctions that, in the end, amount to no more than a sense of racial superiority. Zionism is the object of his furor because he sees it as a human retrogression and all of the machinations to prop it up, which he concedes are in the open for everyone to see, damage both Jew and Palestinian alike. Therefore, Atzmon is not a Jew-hater or anti-semite; not in the strict sense of the term. Rather, he is opposed to the idea of “Jewishness;” not because it is inherently evil, but because it is anachronistic and imprisoning.

One area that Atzmon is mistaken is in his seeming denial of the existence itself of the Israelite nation itself. While he correctly sees the difference between Zionism’s chosen-ness and that of religious Judaism’s concept of the same, he obviously does not believe in the latter. As perhaps an atheist (or, at least, as an unbelieving Jew), on what basis does he summon the moral outrage at Zionist racism? It is no use to summon so-called “universal” Western liberal values -- there are no such universal things. In reality, if there is no God -- or at least no God with a personal interest in humanity -- than what exactly is Atzmon griping about? His lament only makes sense if we see that all human beings have an inherent dignity, that the truth is the most important touchstone for human societies, and that the very idea of crime exists and should be punished. Where else but from God can these concepts emanate?

The Wandering Who? is a book that I would recommend with some important caveats. It is hurtful to many Jews for good reason, but, at the same time, the author offers a powerful rejoinder to those who lionize Israel and the ideology of Zionism. At the very least, he is a prophetic if blunt voice for the secular anti-Zionist who screams, “not in my name.” Atzmon’s almost-existential longing for something more than the “Tribe” -- for the human family is right, and that is why he, as a moralist, has traction in any number of his points. The outlet for that belonging cannot, however be a tired Western liberalism that is on the point of collapse at the very moment Atzmon is making his point. The human family he seeks can find only one Father. There is an authentic identity for human beings, an authentic relationship with one another that is possible if only they will see reality for what it is. Only the Gospel that espouses a universal solution (forgiveness and redemption) to the universal problem of man (his fall and the reality of sin) can provide this authenticity.

In response to what is Atzmon’s search for meaning, the only words I can think of are those of Karl Stern, the well-known German Jewish Catholic convert. While in exile in England in 1939, Stern had essentially become a convert of heart. He wrote eloquently of the mystery and meaning of our Lord as Messiah:

I used to sit on a bench on Primrose Hill and look over the City of London. If it were true, I used to think, that God became man, and that His life and death had a personal meaning to every single person among all those millions of existences spent in the stench of slums, in horizonless world, in suffocating anguish of enmities, sickness and dying -- if that were true, it would be something tremendously worth living for. To think that someone knocked at all those millions of dark doors, beckoning and promising to each in an altogether unique way. Christ challenged not only the apparent chaos of history but the meaninglessness of personal existence.

(Karl Stern, The Pillar of Fire.)

Perhaps Gilad Atzmon should seek out that same park bench -- Christ is still knocking at those doors.

So I come full circle on Atzmon’s work: he has written a stinging rebuke of the modern Zionist project albeit in controversial terms yet his overarching denial of the uniqueness of any aspect of Judaism is exactly the reason he is consigned never to enjoy the universality of meaning he so desires. The gift of the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

2011-11-06T14:40:00.003-05:00

Long before anarchists arrogated his image, I have been fascinated by Guy Fawkes. Fawkes, the English Catholic soldier, was a member of the “Gunpowder Plot” in which King James and the various members of Parliament were to be blown up: it has been a source of interest for hundreds and hundreds of years to people everywhere. Fawkes was captured on November 5, 1605 and the Gunpowder Plot was derailed prior to delivering its blow. The people of Great Britain celebrate “the Fifth of November” every year as a sort of Independence Day by shooting off fireworks and burning Fawkes in effigy. The only independence that was cemented on that day was the English nation’s continued estrangement from the Roman Catholic Church. Why would anyone want to celebrate the torture and execution of a man whose goal was to restore England to its rightful place among Christian nations? I celebrate November 5th -- not for his capture -- but for his moxie. I may (or may not) agree with his tactics, but who can argue with his goals? And he was no terrorist: the target was decidedly political.

Because of the “celebrations” of November 5th each year, the effigy and likeness of Fawkes has lived on -- indeed, he is far more recognizable in effigy that almost any other sixteenth century figure. This likeness has been used in recent times in fiction and in real life to represent those shadowy figures who hate organized government and want to make havoc for us -- the middle class. There is an irony that a Catholic and English patriot (a reactionary by any measure) is now the face of anarchy but these are the nonsensical times in which we live. Guy’s image lives on among the more violent types hanging about the various “Occupy Wall Street” gatherings. Perhaps that is fitting on some level as we are slaves to a distorted monied cabal that is, at its very core, at war with the Catholic state.

On this day, when the now bankrupt (morally and fiscally) Brits blast off fireworks to celebrate his death, I pay homage to this solider. I pray for this soul in this holy month of November -- perhaps he already among the blessed but he may also be in need of prayers to speed him on his purgatorial path towards the beatific vision. Guy Fawkes may have been many things, but he was courageous and he was a true believer from everything I have been able to study. And what has England gained in its four hundred year experiment with Protestantism? It is a state in which Christianity is soon to be outnumbered by Muslims. It is a state that was once known for its collective piety and is now known for its bawdy television programs and alcoholism. It is a state that was also once known for its manners and is now a state known for its drunken hooligans. Truly, whatever conservative element is left in the U.K. should recognize that the path to national recovery must begin with an embrace of the ancestral religion.

Guy Fawkes, pray for your Motherland. Pray that she will rise again as a Catholic nation.

Christendom, pray for Guy Fawkes and his fellow fallen compatriots.

Helena by Evelyn Waugh

2011-11-05T07:39:00.001-04:00

In famed author’s historical novel, Helena, Evelyn Waugh takes a number of admitted liberties in writing the story of the Saint Helena, mother to Constantine the Great. The story itself, outside of author Waugh’s hands, is interesting enough. Saint Helena’s life straddles one of the most important epochs in church history -- when the Church of God went from persecuted outlaw religion to tolerated by civil authorities to de facto state religion. We do not know a lot about Helena from an historical point of view, but we do know from all accounts that she was a devout benefactor to the Church. Her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, we also know, culminated in the excavation of the True Cross, which remains one of Christendom’s most treasured relics. The vacuum of other information provides Waugh ample room craft his story.

Waugh makes a number of choices in imagining the story of Saint Helena. First, and most importantly, he drafts her as a fellow Briton. While the case, we are told by professional historians, for Helena’s british origins is weak (she was likely from the East), it always possible that Constantine’s father took her as his wife when he was stationed in Britain. Waugh studiously avoids detailing the conversion of Helena, which is something that itself could have been interested.

The good of the book, and why I persevered in reading it, was the description of how Saint Helena came to discover the True Cross. But in the whole, I was disappointed with Waugh’s treatment of the story. For those familiar with Waugh’s considerable literary talents, my sense is most others will be disappointed by it. The chronology seems disjointed, the dialogue seems forced, and the characters often lack even imaginary realism. While I wanted quite badly for Waugh to transport me to Roman Empire, I could not help but feel he had transported me to an obvious fictional account. None of the depth that a Waugh reader would expect is there.

Admittedly, the bar for my expectations for this book were high. I expected a great and compelling little novel from Waugh and I was disappointed. That said, there is such a dearth of Catholic fiction -- and a Catholic fiction that takes seriously the rich Catholic past -- that I would still recommend this book.

Original Sin and the "New" Normal

2011-10-28T20:30:00.006-04:00

If anyone asserts that the transgression of Adam injured him alone and not his posterity,[7] and that the holiness and justice which he received from God, which he lost, he lost for himself alone and not for us also; or that he, being defiled by the sin of disobedience, has transfused only death and the pains of the body into the whole human race, but not sin also, which is the death of the soul, let him be anathema, since he contradicts the Apostle who says: By one man sin entered into the world and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.

(Council of Trent; Session V "Decree Concerning Original Sin")

I was recently enjoyed a novel, and, in particular, a vignette involving a young man's feelings of bliss upon learning that the love of his life returned his affections and that the two would soon marry. The author detailed the overwhelming impact that new romantic love played at that moment in the young man's life. As any good novel should, this piece of fiction reminded me of my own life, of my own feelings at similar moments in time, when I believed that I had discovered a happiness that was so profound, so life-changing and so complete that I could not imagine ever experiencing a melancholy moment again. I thought specifically of my wife and how the much the moment that we were began a life together meant to me: how I pondered at the moment that all of the useless relationships, the mis-fires, the mistakes I had made seemed to be corrected in a relationship with this one person. I remember feeling that this young woman was everything I had ever wanted and was everything I would ever want. I could not imagine ever wanted anything else again.

Fast forward eighteen years: I am happily married to that same (not so) young woman. Six beautiful children has sprung from our union. It is no exaggeration that my wife and I literally grew up with one another -- we went from glorified adolescents to a creaky married mother and father. The time that separates those first exhilarating moments and today have been filled with joys and tears, with great triumphs and miserable failures -- they have been filled with the "stuff" of fallen human beings learning the hard way to "get on" in the world. It hasn't always been pretty, and it has always been filled with the unexpected, but we persevere together. Only God knows how difficult at times it has been, but the thing about our marriage is that we were uniquely situated -- by personality type, by past experiences, by present interests, by intellectual curiosities -- to find God with one another. Of virtually all of the women I could have married if life had taken just a slightly different trajectory, I am quite sure that I would have essentially rejected faith and its demands. For my wife, the same would seem to be true. But together -- and not in a neat line but rather in a jagged and often circuitous line -- we grew in faith. It is no accident, none at all, that I met my wife exactly when I did -- my literal salvation depended on her

But this point brings me back to the reason of this post: that we often have these moments, seminal moments, in which we are so happy, so complete, so satisfied that we cannot imagine unhappiness in any conceivable way. I think of the day that my first child was born -- what a new and completely unexpected experience. What joy I felt when I held for the first time a child of my own. I thought of the day that I graduated law school; surrounded by family and friends, it seemed on that bright sunny day in May that my whole future lay happily before me. I thought of other days as well.

These happy days, as we all know, give way to more sober and sometimes depressing days. How is it that I so quickly forget how thankful I was that God gave me a spouse that without I was so miserable? How is that the joy that God gave me on the day I became a father has been, more often than not, replaced with the frustration that accompanies being a father? Why, in the hum-drum ordinariness of my life, do I forget all of these things? Why do I so easily focus on those things that are both trivial and annoying but forget those weighty things that are gifts from a Loving God?

There are many anecdotal proofs for the reality of "original sin." That human beings, while not being wholly depraved, are incapable of getting things right -- in both small and big ways -- is so evident, so perceptive and so right that even atheists do not disagree.

It occurred to me that another proof of the manifestation of original sin occurs in what I would call acclimating to the "new" normal. Original sin is, of course, not that same as actual sin: it is not as if babies in a state of ignorance are culpable of sin. Rather, it is a nature, a fallen nature, that is inclined towards the sinful. Unadorned human experience testifies that man is pulled towards vice. He has to work diligently and carefully -- in what amounts to a lifelong task -- to overcome his disposition towards sinfulness. And, of course, that will not be enough. Without the grace of God, man cannot overcome his nature.

The certainty that man will forget his blessings and grumble in the face of them testifies to our fallen nature. For example, at one time of my life, I wanted meaningful companionship. When I was single, I thought about this and hoped for it. The elation in finding it with my future wife satiated that desire, and ever-so-slowly, the elation ebbed into the "new" normal. That need I once had was requited such that it was no longer needed or even, eventually, appreciated. I acclimated to my wife and imperceptibly took the gift that she was in my life for granted. I did the same -- often on a lesser scale -- with a thousand things. New ideas and new desires took hold of my imagination as they often do. "I would be so happy if I had X" and so on. Once the "new" normal takes hold, all of those previous blessings are forgotten and replaced with new wants.

Because we are fallen, none of us can know with certainty what the preternatural gifts of our first parents was like. Yes, we know certain things about them -- about the strength of the natural virtues, etc. but what it really meant to have preternatural gifts, how "we" would be different is difficult to imagine. One thing, it seems to me, that those gifts would confer is the ability to appreciate -- in perpetuity -- the gifts of God freely given that we desired. For example, before the fall, it must have been for Adam an ever-present recollection of how gracious God had been to give him a companion in Eve. He never acquired the "new" normal. The preternatural "normal" would have been an ever-present sense of thanksgiving. Think of what life would be like if we could recall -- if our natures would allow -- all of the good things that the Lord freely gave us. It would be vastly different than the one that we currently live

Resolutions: we often make them and upon reflection I make one now. I resolve to remember how good God was to give my wife, my children, my parents, my talents, and so on. All of the things that make my life what it is, I resolve to remember and appreciate and the next moment that the inevitable pang of dissatisfaction creeps into my mind, I resolve to meet it with an Act of Thanksgiving for all that God has given me. While we are prisoners, by our very nature, of the "new" normal and art of complaining, we can and should ask God to free us from our fallen natures. We should remember to confess all of those moments we have presumed on God's gifts, ignored them or even despised them. The fact that this happens should force us to our knees with contrition in our hearts.

May God help me keep this resolution.

The Connecticut Declaration

2011-10-23T11:11:00.006-04:00

Preamble

The bourgeoning American military budgets coupled with the growing global military-industrial complexes is a problem for all Americans. While America's diverse political landscape -- both left and right -- disagree on many facets of American culture and governance, many on both sides agree in near unison that the growth of a bellicose American military global machine has destroyed the worldwide credibility of the United States, bankrupted future generations, and exacerbated -- and not mitigated -- the global issues of security and understanding. American exceptionalism, however that term is defined and understood, should not be imposed by force.

We start with the premise that the United States is a nation bound by the rule of law. No one is above it -- including the President of the United States. Both Democratic or Republican presidents have engaged, for a nearly unbroken sixty year period, in undeclared military action after undeclared military action. We have witnessed an explosion of military spending and base-building while American infrastructure, i.e., transportation, technological and educational, has crumbled. While crippling national debt has become a political buzzword for both major political parties, the reality is neither is willing to address out-of-control military spending, which accounts for one of the largest, if not largest, components of the federal budget. The economic reality is that the United States government can no longer finance a worldwide military presence. The political reality is that a rampant military-industrial complex of war profiteers and defense-based industries and accompanying lobbyists are caustic ingredients to a small "d" democratic body politic.

We, the signers of this Declaration, desire peacefully to make common cause to see an end to the era of endless undeclared American military engagements and destructive effect of the military-industrial complex. While the signers hereto may disagree on how the United States government should address issues of chronic American poverty, we believe that it is the responsibility of the American people to address it with their collective resources and ideas prior to funding foreign governments and causes, many of which are openly corrupt. This latter point applies especially in the context of the American exportation of the implements of war, which is often subsidized.

We, the signers of this Declaration, do hereby declare the following five principles that should guide American military policy:

1. No military engagements, including but not limited to, the use of drones or air power, against a sovereign nation, without a declaration of war by Congress with the only exception being the Presidential engagement of military forces to repulse an attack by an enemy.

Comment: We are a nation under the rule of law. The Congress has an affirmative duty to oversee the war-making powers of the Executive Branch by, among other things, the constitutional power to declare war on another sovereign nation. For the period ending the Second World War until present, there have been a series of military engagements, some of which have persisted years, that may only be described as "wars." Yet there has not been a single declaration of war by any Congress since 1941. American presidents have deployed ground/invasion troops into Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan. Numerous other bombing campaigns have been waged against other nations as well. To say we live in an age of virtually unchecked Executive war-making is not hyperbolic: it is merely descriptive of the constant military engagements.

This unilateral war-making must stop and Congress should again reassert its proper and constitutional role as guardian of American peace. Moreover, American military might should not be employed against countries that do not attack the United States. The use of American force as "diplomacy by other means" has undoubtedly led to the worldwide collapse of American prestige around the world.

2. The closure of all military installations or bases in any foreign jurisdiction in times of peace (i.e., in the absence of an undeclared war), including Iraq and Afghanistan.

3. No foreign aid, military or otherwise, to any nation or cause while the poverty rate remains above 5% in the United States.

4. An immediate fifty percent reduction in the Department of Defense budget with commensurate cuts to military personnel, bases and hardware.

5. An immediate cancellation of the membership in NATO by the United States.

What you need to know about "Occupy Wall Street"

2011-10-23T10:06:00.004-04:00

"What do we want?!?!"

"We're not really sure!!!"

"When do we want it?!?!"

"NOW!!!!"

Let us be honest: the "Occupy Wall Street" (OWS) miscreants camping out in public parks in various American cities are a collection of warmed-over 1960s retreads and other professional (and I use that term loosely) protestors with neither a clue or point. One might surmise that the ghosts of the Vietnam protests from Berkeley and Ann Arbor have come back to haunt us forty years later but in a farcical and ridiculous way. We should criticize Tom Hayden and the other Chicago terrorists from 1968 but we can say that the Port Huron Statement and Students for a Democratic Society were at least organized. What is happening now is beyond farce -- it is a smattering of pseudo-intellectual malcontents for all to see in something that uniquely fits the age of reality television.

Say what you want but in a county of three-hundred million, it is not to hard to find several thousand people who care deeply for just about anything. There are probably more Americans who care more deeply about Dungeons and Dragons than do about OWS. Parenthetically, when I lived in Nashville in the mid-1990s, there was a large group of people who would meet on Sundays in a local park and act out the various roles from D&D as we used to call it when I was a kid. I do not recall the press covering it in any meaningful way but I am sure they had a more coherent worldview than do the OWS protestors.

Today, the OWS generation could care less about the few thousand clowns who gather together to say everything or nothing. The peers of the OWS crowd are too busy playing video games, partying, posting on Facebook and tweeting nonsense. Even though it would appear all that they have is time, the teens and twenty-somethings have decided in virtual collective unison that they do not have time to take part in the OWS "protests."

But what is the story here? Why I am even bothering to record my thoughts on OWS? For one very simple reason: this is not the story of a protest movement, it is the story of a mass media concoction. That we are bombarded, day after day, by the banal machinations of a few tired and brain dead grad students (from interesting majors such as biological anthropology or evolutionary sociology, no doubt), is a testament to how the Press is an ideological tool of the Leftist, atheistic forces. Now that may not seem like a particularly novel point (I concede that), but that should be the story here, i.e., not "OWS hits a nerve among young people;" rather, "Media abets great fraud on American Public with OWS farce."

Contrast the few losers camping out against capitalism, which, as we know, have been showered with constant media attention and liberal handwringing in the form of opinion pieces and variety shows trying to divine the "true" meaning of the OWS "movement" to the pro-life movement. Today's media considers "deeply" the significance OWS from the silly -- trying to analogize the OWS protestors to the violent uprisings in the Middle East -- to the truly absurd in analogizing the OWS to an epoch-making event heralding a new age of citizen participation and socialist bliss. Whatever form it takes, and it is mostly ridiculous, it is nonetheless a seeming omnipresent consideration that we are subjected in today's world of the twenty-four hour news cycle.

By comparison, a half million people peacefully gather in Washington every January to protest the civil rights issue of our day -- abortion -- and they are utterly ignored by the media. The staying power of the pro-life movement is legendary: for nearly forty years, it has been a thorn in the side of those eugenicists among us who would have marched us off to the Brave New World. From the elderly woman praying her beads outside of any abortuary in any city in any weather to the Washington March, the pro-life movement is a real movement unlike a few unemployed hippies engaging in urban camping without a message or a clue.

The OWS phenomenon has created some interesting ironies like the Wall Street fund-raiser in-chief's, President Obama, implicit endorsement of this non-movement, or, after years of vilification, the Democratic Party trying to analogize OWS to the Tea Party movement. For my own part, and now I am joining the media's consideration of the OWS moment, I still think a robust market-based economy provides man with the best manner to maximize the material betterment of his life. I am aware of the arguments between those Catholics espousing "distributism" and those promoting some version of economic libertarianism (like the Austrian school). Quite frankly, I have not been able to choose my side in that debate beyond the strong distaste for the federal government, foreign aid, military interventionism, the United Nations, unions, security measures in airports and public places, and so forth. I find myself nodding my head in wholehearted agreement with Ron Paul every time he speaks. I am not sure that I am a libertarian (certainly not when it comes to questions of life, marriage, divorce, contraception, etc.), but when it comes to economic matters, the road to serfdom would appear paved with skulls of well-meaning liberal weenies whose only answer to any economic question is more and more governmental control and intervention.

Mirror of Justice, pray for those people, especially young people, who have been seduced by all of the various "-isms" of the day.

The Death of Steve Jobs.

2011-10-09T14:44:00.003-04:00

In what must rival the deaths of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell or the Wright brothers, Steve Jobs, the iconic founder and chief executive of Apple Computer, died this week. For good or for bad, there is little of modern Western culture that Jobs did not touch.

Like many, I felt a personal connection to Jobs as his company’s products had become so integral in my life. When I was seven or eights years old in Rochester, New York, I recall vividly walking into my elementary school’s library and sidling up to what was an Apple II computer. We collectively held our mouths agape looking at a real-life computer in our presence. For thirty or so seconds each, we were allowed to do this or that with the computer. In a very real way, the computer age “for the rest of us” had begun.

Unlike so of my other boys my age, I did not become a computer geek. If I had done so, I would have been the right age to become very wealthy but alas it was not to be. The pre-internet age computer industry was quite varied -- much like the first days of the automobile industry with makers starting up and closing down regularly. For regular people, computers were little more than a very expensive word processor. If we consider what $2,000 would have bought in 1985, it is little wonder why my financially modest parents did not have one until I was long out of the house.

Fast forward several years, 1998 to be exact, my wife and I bought an iMac -- one of the very early ones. At that point, as a first year law student, I had grown accustomed to a “PC” computing environment and bought the Mac for the combination of curiosity and my Mac-snob wife’s sake. We used at it was largely intended -- as an early internet computer.

While I resisted further forays into the Apple world, I relented full stop in early 2002 when my wife began doing freelance design work from home. I researched the various Macs and purchased a high-end Macbook Pro. I also bought what was then a first generation iPod. This time coincided with the onset of Mac OS X, which was an operating system that was far easier for Windows users to adjust.

I became, in very short order, totally hooked.

From that point forward, I have in one variety or another, a plethora of Mac machines. You could say that we were very early “switchers” to what would later become a stampede away from PCs to Macs.

It is hard to explain exactly why using a Mac is so much more satisfying than using a PC. Yes, they have a better-looking design, Yes, they have a feel of quality compared with cheaply made PCs. But it is more than design and quality: as computers have become an extension of our lives, Apple, which makes both the hardware and software, represents a well-oiled closed universe. It is the safe confines of a wholly Apple world where everything works, everything looks nice, and everything is well-made -- and everything is made to work together. Compared to the clumsy world of a Microsoft OS engrafted on any number of machines made by a host of other companies -- with all of the associated licenses and limitations -- Apple is like stepping into another world altogether: a world that is beautiful, integrated and useful.

The appeal of that Apple closed universe -- why it is preferred to the rough and tumble world of variety in the PC world -- says a lot about us. We prefer order even if it is imposed on us. And it works if we have a philosopher king in charge: someone who deeply cares about the brand and quality; someone who wants that closed universe to be as perfect as humanly possible. That philosopher king was Steve Jobs.

In the wake of his death, two recurring thoughts have come to me. First, the liberal media’s love for him -- after all, he was one of them in many ways -- is misplaced for two important reasons. Initially, Jobs proves that the every life can make a difference -- even when that life is conceived in the unmarried womb of a college student. Had Steve Jobs been conceived in 1976 versus 1956, he very likely would never have seen the light of life. Abortion was of course illegal in 1956, and his mother had little choice but to give him life. Steve Jobs, in one small way, proves that adoption is no impediment to great success and that the greatest pioneer of industry in the last one-hundred years likely would have been snuffed out in the womb had he been conceived today. How many other genii are we killing by favoring abortion over adoption? How many Steve Jobs will never get to share the gifts that God gave him because we have a culture that tolerates killing babies in utero? That Jobs never saw that -- that he never became an opponent of an abortion -- is a testament to how blinding the culture of death really is. The other aspect of Job’s life that the fawning liberal media has ignored is that Job’s life is a testimony in fact against the relentless egalitarianism that is peddled by the Left ad nauseum. Jobs was a ruthless genius -- the very epitome of “my way or the high way.” His personality lorded over Apple: he was not for dialogue, for collaboration, for many voices. No, in many ways, Steve Jobs was Ayn Rand’s Howard Rourke -- fanatically committed to his vision with no patience for any contrary view. The genius we celebrate in Steve Jobs is something that was possible only in a vibrantly capitalistic society. So forget the veneer of hippie San Francisco and flower power, Steve Jobs was an SOB capitalist and innovator that would rival any robber barren from the gilded age. Jobs made stuff and he made his way.

Thinking about Jobs, thinking about his type, has lent me to wondering whether his type of single-mindedness, his obsession if you will, is possible in a committed Catholic. Certainly, the great saints were single-minded in their pursuit of the Lord, in their love of the cross; but can someone be both committed to Holy Mother Church also be so single-minded in a secular pursuit? I ask this question with no pretense: I genuinely do not know the answer. We are of course called to be good at what we do; to serve our masters honestly and capably. We are called to be good stewards. But does one lose their soul to pursue a secular goal with such intensity? Is it inevitable?

We could look at the great artists of the world for a similar case study. The analogy falls apart when we consider that the otherworldly demands they put on their output was done in service of the Church. We are glad that Michelangelo was so demanding in creating the Sistene Chapel and we do not reflexively believe that his superhuman demands, in and of themselves, jeopardized his soul. But had he funneled his drive to the creation of the automobile or the telegraph, would we feel the same way? Were not these created things -- albeit indirectly -- a testament to God’s genius? Was the light bulb any less remarkable and important than many works of fine arts? Are fine arts simply elevated because they do not have any utility?

I do not have the answers to the questions I ask. And perhaps I am insulting to great Catholic genii by suggesting that the doggedness of their genius is incompatible with genuine faith. Is a genius like Jobs closer to God than someone like me who is a model of “moderation” (or perhaps mediocrity)? I am not so sure. Perhaps Steve Jobs should have not been so dogged -- but perhaps I should have worked a little harder to stake a claim in the world. One of the key differences between me and Steve Jobs -- at least as I understand the story -- is that I believe in the King of the Universe. I believe in the one who saves. So while I am admittedly not a world-beater, this concept was never a requirement demanded by a merciful God.

St. Thomas, pray for us and pray for Steve Jobs.

Sodom in the Offing.

2011-10-02T09:31:00.003-04:00

It is only a matter of time.

We live in a society that lost virtually all of its moral moorings and is has a populace that cannot distinguish between virtue and vice or good and evil. Abortion, contraception, divorce, pornography, and sodomy are all actions that are not only tolerated; but now celebrated by wide swaths of Americans as if they were goods.

Seemingly every day brings with it new outrages against the moral order. For example, the Pentagon now will allow sodomite "marriage" in military chapels presided by military chaplains. More can be found here, but we should not be surprised. The sodomite lobby, with Satan at its head, has largely succeeding in convincing the society that sodomy is a status -- not revolting conduct. Once it was defined as a status, the war against this sin was lost.

God's justice will not be mocked for long. It is only a matter of time, and that is all it is, until God's justice will be vindicated. It will come by natural or supernatural means: by natural I mean that a society that gives itself over to these types of outrages is naturally enervated and hollowed out until it collapses in a groan under its own flabby weight. The economic collapse that runs in parallel with the moral collapse is not an accident of chance by any means. By supernatural, perhaps God will rain down brimstone and fire on this licentious generation. While we do not know; we can make no mistake, the end of this age is coming. In the infamous words of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, the end is coming, "whether you like it or not."

O Lord, save me from this wicked generation.

Preserve us O Lord.Save my fellow Catholics from this filth.

Lord, we pray especially for those fallen away Catholics who have embraced these moral retrogressions as "goods" when we know that they are evils. O Lord, save them from their blindness before it is too late.

O Mother Most Pure, Pray for Us.

"It does not 'get better'" for the Boston Red Sox

2011-09-30T19:14:00.005-04:00

I am a baseball fan and have been for as long as I can remember.

My first baseball memories were during the 1978 World Series in which the New York Yankees repeated as world champions with names such as Reggie Jackson, Ron Guidry, Thurman Munson, Goose Gossage, and Craig Nettles. My love affair with the Yankees was cemented at the tender age of seven. It would be another eighteen years until they won another World Championship.

Being a fan of the Yankees means, almost universally, that you "hate" the Boston Red Sox. It simply comes with the territory. Over the last dozen or so years, these two teams have locked into epic battles for the baseball ages with teams evenly matched. I joyfully watched in 2003 when the Red Sox imploded in the final game of the American League Championship Series. The following year, I sat in the stands way out in Left Field to watch the Yankees suffer through the greatest collapse in post-season history -- surrendering a three-oh best of seven lead.

On Wednesday night, the Boston Red Sox completed what is the greatest collapse in baseball history (which is saying something). They led the Tampa Bay Rays on September 1, 2011 by nine games with twenty-seven left to play. By the final game of the season, the two teams were tied. On the final night, defying any conceivable statistical probability (which, after all, is what baseball is about), the Red Sox coughed up a one run lead in the bottom of the ninth against one of the worst teams in the league. Down to their last strike, the Baltimore Orioles rallied for the win. Meanwhile in Tampa -- at nearly the same time -- the Rays clawed back from a seven-oh deficit in the late innings -- hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and two strikes by a batter who was known only for his lousy hitting. They would later hit another home run and win the game and eliminate the Red Sox from the post season.

This particular Boston team was not a likeable one. Any baseball fan could not help but admire the moxie of the 2004 and 2007 Red Sox with characters such as Johnny Damon, Curt Schilling, and David Ortiz. This team felt like baseball's version of Daniel Snyder's Washington Redskins -- manufactured and banal. That may seem like some statement coming from a fan of the free-spending Yankees, but Carl Crawford and John Lackey? These guys are millionaire babies that epitomize what is wrong with professional sports. So without any divine reason, I was glad to see this particular team fail this way.

This summary presents a lot of detail, I admit it. And baseball is simply a past-time; it has become endemic of the bread & circus culture we modern men inhabit. But let me connect the divine with the temporal for one moment -- and interpose a cause and effect between baseball and cosmic infamy. On July 1, 2011, the Boston Red Sox were firmly in first place in the American League Eastern Division. Anyone with more than a passing interest in baseball would have told you at that time that the Red Sox were a tremendous baseball team and very likely to later play in the World Series. They also cut a video on July 1, 2011; here it is:

If you could stomach watching this video, you know what a vile "project" the so-called "It's gets better" project is -- as if the greater and greater exposure to a sin like sodomy could get better. But there you have it from infamous and particularly vile sodomite Dan Savage who created this diabolical youth-oriented sodomy project. I have written the topic here.

The "It's get better" project is evil -- that the Boston Red Sox endorsed is lamentable. And today the manager of the Boston Red Sox (the first person on the video) was essentially fired. So there you have it: perhaps it was divine justice for the venerable Boston Red Sox to fail in almost miraculous fashion because they openly and publicly encouraged young people to continue in sodomy.

P.S. If the New York Yankees make such a video, I will have watched my last professional baseball game. With the ways things are regressing in the society at large, I expect sadly that day is not long off.

The Appalling Logic of Legalized Infanticide

2011-09-18T21:55:00.001-04:00

In 1973, the United States Supreme Court infamously decriminalized every state law banning the horrid practice of butchering babies in utero in the case of Roe v. Wade. What has followed in its wake may be described as a virtual war in the womb of the American woman: more than 53,000,000 babies have been exterminated by their mothers since the so-called legalization of abortion in 1973. (http://www.nrlc.org/news_and_views/Jan2011/nv012711.html). In what amounts to a single generation, fully one-sixth of the American population has been wiped out.

The cult of modernism, which provided the so-called moral basis for abortion, is in many ways the inversion of the moral reality: the identification of good as evil and evil as good. We now live in a uniquely debauched age of history: actions that have been long accepted as sin -- indeed nature itself testifies as much -- are trumpeted as social goods; and actions that have long been identified as virtuous are now condemned and punished as anti-social. From so-called same-sex “marriage” to the availability to the most vile and obscene pornography in virtually any hotel, what was once viewed as evil or unnatural is now liberating or open-minded. Above all others, abortion is the capital sacrament of the modern leftist: the one “right” that must be protected at all costs. One only has to remember that President Obama showed a great deal of flexibility in discussing cuts to various budgetary sacred cows of the Democratic Party in the recent congressional showdowns over the federal spend; but there was only one agenda item for which he was willing to shut the entire United States government down: funding for Planned Parenthood, our national abortuary. (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/264279/abortion-rights-activists-are-poised-shut-down-government-kathryn-jean-lopez)

Why abortion is the paramount “right” to left wing atheists should be no surprise: the traditional family and children are the cornerstone of any well ordered society. That they attack marriage through divorce, obscenity, homosexuality, and feminism is all part of a well coordinated strategy to destroy the divine order in a fit of spite. Children are the fruit of traditional marriage -- the very future of mankind. Scratch a leftist ideologue only a little and what you will find very close to the surface is a first rate misanthrope. It is no wonder that eliminating children is a prime goal of modernist thought: initially, by scaring us to not have children us with tales of the Malthusian population bomb; to then wooing us with the promise of unburdened sex with the aid of artificial contraception; and, finally, to convincing us -- against our very natures -- that destroying a child in utero is a blameless act of convenience that does not differ all that much from the extraction of a wisdom tooth.

While abortion advocates, at least in the United States, have maintained permissive abortion laws through resort to court opinions, as opposed to popular opinion, they have nonetheless been able to convince a significant minority of people that this objective evil is, at the very least, a necessary one. Their focus has been relentlessly dishonest -- both about what actually happens during an abortion and the reality of exactly who a fetus is (i.e., a baby not yet born). They have also appealed to the idea that a woman has a “right” to destroy the baby if that woman no longer chooses to have the burden of pregnancy; that being a mother is in and of itself a burden that one should be able to opt out of any time (just as one ought to be able to opt out of a marriage at any time). Former President Bill Clinton, a consummate politician, put his triangulated finger on the pulse of the generalized support and unease for abortion by declaring a national abortion policy of “safe, legal and rare.” “Safe” and “legal” stressed the “necessary” part of the equation while “rare” reflected the “evil” part. In the real world, however, abortionists advocates could care less about rarity: indeed, diabolic institutions like Planned Parenthood and other abortionist outfits earn blood money by killing babies -- they certainly do not want it “rare” by any measure.

The reality is that legalized abortion is a destructive lie. It is also a policy that is an intellectual morass in desperate need of a logic. The pro-life community quite sanely points out year-after-year that science and morality converge on the point that if “life” is to be protected, “life” is created at the moment of conception. It is an utterly well-ordered statement of both natural and divine law. For the abortion advocate, “life” is a slippery concept and it is a conversation that they urgently try to avoid. Is it when the baby’s heart begins to beat? (No, that fourth week milestone is far to early for abortion-on-demand). No, in fact, they do not want to discuss any aspect of fetal development as it relates to defining “life;” if forced, they will typically define it in relation to the mother -- of when the fetus no longer requires the mother in order to live (i.e., post-viability). But make no mistake, the post-viability concept is an abortion advocate’s cover story -- it is offered defensively to prevent their callousness from being on full display. Instead, to know one of these people is to know that they really believe a woman should be able to “terminate” a pregnancy until moments before -- or even after -- birth.

The slippery slope in any permissive abortion regime is, of course, that there is no principled line dividing “life” and “non-life” apart from conception. As such, the abortion debate, at least for the abortionist, has nothing philosophically to do with “life” as such. Beyond a fundamental misanthropy that has no mercy or regard for human babies, the abortion advocate’s position has everything to do with power and a radical individualism that posits forcefully that nothing may impose on “me” -- nothing.

So while there is predictable hand-wringing among otherwise pro-abortion advocates when an abortion doctor like Philadelphia’s Kermit Gosnell is exposed for killing not only post-viable babies -- but killing babies actually delivered with scissors (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/philadelphia-abortion-doctor-accused-killing-babies-scissors-charged/story?id=12649868), the fact is that what Dr. Gosnell did to warrant murder charges by infanticide immediately following a botched abortion is the same as the butchery that abortionists contend is a sacred “constitutional right.” The truth is that they condemn a Dr. Gosnell because they have to -- not because they genuinely see a distinction between abortion and infanticide. Indeed, the only difference between the two is the location of the killing: one being outside of the womb and other being inside. To be even more blunt, abortion is infanticide.

We are fast reaching the point that our collective consciences have become so seared by living in nations that permit this wholesale slaughter of innocents that the intelligentsia often loses sight of the charade that abortion and infanticide are not one in the same. Indeed, every now and then, an abortion advocate -- usually on one of the endless talking heads political programs -- will slip up and jeopardize the whole facade by impatiently insisting that a woman’s right to choose death for her child ought to extend for the entire pregnancy -- regardless of viability. More recently, this slip up occurred by a Canadian judge who honestly could not differentiate the rationale between post-birth infanticide and pre-birth abortion.

All such circumstances that lead to court cases of this kind are, in and of themselves, shocking and repugnant: this one is no different. On April 13, 2005, Katrina Effert, a Canadian nineteen year woman, gave birth to a newborn son. Instead of greeting this child as the gift from God that he was, this young woman instead strangled her defenseless newborn son with her thong panties during his first few hours of life in order to conceal his existence (as she had concealed her pregnancy from her parents during its duration). She tossed her newborn son’s lifeless body over her parent’s fence and sought to go on with her life. After her neighbors made the gruesome discovery, the young woman repeatedly lied about her role in her child’s death; she denied being pregnant and then blamed her boyfriend for the strangulation.

This one woman’s gruesome infanticidal act would not be international news per se given that infanticide itself is, unfortunately, a relatively common phenomenon. For example, a Tennessee mother recently smothered her newborn twins on September 12, 2011 in a story similar to Katrina Effert’s and currently faces double murder charges. (http://articles.cnn.com/2011-09-16/justice/justice_tennessee-twins-killed_1_newborn-twins-affidavit-sumner-county?_s=PM:JUSTICE) But what is remarkable about Katrina Effert’s infanticide is the Canadian criminal justice system’s treatment of it, and, more disturbing, its justification thereof.

Initially, Effert was found guilty of second degree murder by two separate juries and sentenced to life in prison only to have the sentence overturned by an appellate court. Following the appellate court’s decision to reduce the murder conviction to the lesser offense of “infanticide,” which under Canadian law is something akin to manslaughter of an infant due to the diminished capacity of the mother following labor. It carries a prison term not to exceed five years. During sentencing for Effert’s conviction of infanticide, Judge Joanne Veit, sentenced her to a three year suspended sentence, which is simply another way to say that there will be no jail time for Effert’s infanticidal act.

In justifying no jail time for the killing of an innocent Canadian citizen, Judge Veit quite correctly -- yet nonetheless appallingly -- connected the dots between abortion and infanticide; she writes: "while many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support." (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2011/09/09/edmonton-effert-infanticide-suspended-sentence.html) Judge Veit continues, “Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant's death, especially at the hands of the infant's mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother." What is remarkable is that this liberal judge admits that the rationale for not punishing Efferts is that her act was so closely related to a legally permissible abortion. Stated differently, Judge Veit could not tell the difference between the two.

In the Effert’s decision, which the American mainstream media has predictably ignored, we have now transcended merely apologizing for the mother who kills her baby in utero with the help of an abortionist; we are now apologizing for the mother who actually does the killing herself after the baby is born and long after the law (imperfect though it is) recognizes the child’s right to live -- a right that is not and should not be -- qualitatively different from yours or mine. Equally appalling is the fact that had Katrina Effert choked a puppy to death or killed an endangered Lake Erie Water Snake, there is little chance that Judge Veit would have been so forgiving. That modern Western nations value the lives of animals more than human beings is all you need to know to draw the necessary conclusions about our moral fabric as well as our immediate future. The Effert case is a revealing albeit revolting peek into the mind of the modern abortion supporter, which I have no doubt accurately characterizes Judge Veit. As aptly put by National Review writer Mark Steyn, we have now been introduced to the concept of a “Fourth-Trimester Abortion.” (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/277027/fourth-trimester-abortion-mark-steyn) The reality is that abortion advocates cannot distinguish between the abortion and infanticide, and, coincidentally, neither should we.

So as our advanced Western nations cross the Rubicon by working out the logical extension of the amoral theory underlying the legalized abortion industry, we can expect that future outrages are in the not-too-distant offering: further legal sanction to the killing of the young, the disabled, and the elderly, i.e., the weakest members of our community killed by the stronger for what amounts to no more than convenience. But we should not despair: we know, by the grace of God, that to be a parent is a divine gift beyond measure. Indeed, it is more than a gift; it is an opportunity to cooperate with this loving God -- to offer our wills in union with His in order to bring forth another soul who is made to spend eternity in heavenly bliss glorifying and worshiping the living God. For a married couple, children are a literal testament to the sacramental reality that “a man ... shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in on flesh.” (Book of Genesis; 2:24). For in their child, the husband and wife have literally become one flesh. We further know that “[t]he Lord is the keeper of little ones,” (Book of Psalms; 114:6) and that God’s justice and mercy will be demonstrated completely in the fullness of time. So the modernist would seem to have the upper-hand, it only seems that way.

Pray for Katrina Effert and Joanne Veit: their unlikely cooperation has exposed the gruesome logic connecting abortion and infanticide.

Mother most pure, pray for us.

The Antidote to Modernity.

2011-09-11T14:10:00.001-04:00

I have an active mind. My mind races with dizzying speed: from project to project; responsibility to responsibility; job to home; and from the secular to the profane. While I thank God for the gift of reason and the ability to think; my particular mind is not an altogether blessing. Anyone who has a mind prone to distraction, who lacks the discipline to stay focused on an important task long enough to give it its due will understand that an “active” mind is one that can often be difficult to manage and -- at other times -- downright maddening.

The problem for people like me is that we also live in a world that uniquely exacerbates the mental disorganization of the active mind. The modern world moves fast -- unnaturally fast. In the United States especially, everything needs be done with fast foot speed. We have invented whole new concepts to deal with the pressures and pacing of modernity. For parents, there is the concept of “quality time,” which is a way to describe compressing time spent with one’s children to make up for other time spent away. If we want something today, we buy it. Older concepts, like “deferred gratification” are distinctly out of vogue.

The way in which we live often accelerates an already breakneck pace. As a lawyer, my day is extremely busy with telephone calls, competing responsibilities, oddball legal situations (any lawyer will relate), and deadlines. For the professional, the days of a quasi-academic thoughtful consideration of a problem in a measured manner is over. Time is money and money is the small “g” god of our age. For the Catholic professional who is faithful to the magisterium, there are additional problems that can make his life even more harried. If he is a single breadwinner (because his wife stays home to take care of the large flock of children that he has “generously” welcomed into the world), he probably has to live farther from his employment due to the limited resources he has -- so he has something that was unknown for all of human history -- a long “commute.” When he arrives home from his busy day and long commute, he is greeted with children hanging off of the furniture and speaking in decibel ranges that immediately assaults his sensibilities because he has been otherwise in a cocoon of adults for the last twelve hours (eighteen if you count the prior night’s sleep). He is met by a wife that is absolutely worn out after a day of home-schooling six children, making dinner, cleaning up, doing laundry, and serving as the equivalent of all three branches of government to mediate the various difficulties that can arise in the human relationships of a large family.

This type of life -- harried and exhausting -- requires spiritual discipline. My active mind, however, which relentlessly turns over ideas and thoughts in a physically tiresome manner, is also prone to a far more deadlier form of distraction -- spiritual distraction. I am often so overwhelmed by the concerns of the temporal that I literally forget that I was not made for this world. The paradox, of course, is that I need God most when I am overwhelmed by the world, yet that is when I am most likely to forget to pray, forget to have a disposition of gratitude towards God, and forget to have sorrow for my many failings. I do what Americans do so well -- I compartmentalize my faith.

It is never a conscious decision on my part: if I am reminded of my faith, I am immediately refreshed (for example, if a special feast day obliges assisting at Holy Mass during the work week). But the reality is that most of the weeks during the year do not contain such a feast day. And therefore I am in a routine of modern normalcy -- Holy Mass on Sunday and temporality for the six remaining days.

There is one devotion that keeps me moored though. It has an accountability that can only be described as divine. That devotion is the Holy Rosary. Thanks be to God, I am now habituated to praying the Rosary every day and have done so for several years. I mostly pray it in my car (as part of my long commute), pray with my family on the weekends, or even pray it on a treadmill if I make it to the gym (another social invention of modernity). What amazes me about the Rosary, and believe me, consistent with the personal theme of this article, I have thought long and hard about it, is that it is always new, always full of new depths to be plumbed. At the precise moment that I have thought I have exhausted the extent of a given mystery, new and profound graces will be given to me and I will see, for example, the “Presentation” is an utterly new light. The Rosary, because it is based upon Gospel mysteries, is wholly inexhaustible.

When I revert to my “old” ways, when I return to the vomit of my selfishness or laziness (and it is a reversion to worldliness that takes a very short amount of time, e.g., hours), the Rosary serves as a bridge to my salvation. In the middle of worldliness (my own and my neighbor’s), I am reminded daily of our Lord’s life. I never am given that long to feel bad for myself (of which I have an uncanny ability) because I meditate on the Passion of our Lord at least twice a week. The accountability of the Rosary is exactly -- it literally prevents you from falling -- and remaining -- in sin. If I know that I have done something wrong, something for which deserves confession, praying the Rosary is like a weight on my soul that will only be lifted if I confess and amend. If I am habitually doing an act that is perhaps venially sinful, the Rosary gently whispers in my ear -- confess and amend. If I feel hopeless and that does happen, the Rosary shakes me out of it. If I develop a strong disliking for someone, the Rosary makes me offer prayers for that person and seek to be more charitable in my own walk. It is no exaggeration that for the layman the Rosary is a lifeline that helps us love our Lord more and cope with the worries and anxieties that crop up every day.

Stated as simply as possible, the Rosary makes me a better Christian. I am sure that many of you pray it regularly. I cannot recommend more fervently that everyone of you pray it, and pray it every single day. It is fifteen minute devotion that has a power and force that comes straight from Heaven. I often feel that I am in a cocoon of grace while I am praying it -- that in those short moments -- I cannot be touched by the evil one. As Saint Padre Pio famously commented, the rosary is my weapon. Before I prayed the Rosary regularly, I often found the divine promises attached to its devotion too fantastic, too medieval -- often to the point that I stayed away from it (intellectual conceit is also a problem for my mind). I understand now why those promises make sense: why regular devotion to the Rosary -- if persevered in -- inevitably must lead to Heaven because of the effect it has on souls.

If you do not pray the Rosary, begin and ignore the initial distractions that often afflict the neophyte. If you pray the Rosary irregularly, begin to pray it every day. In a matter of weeks and months, changes -- subtle and not-so-subtle -- will occur.

Our Lady of the Rosary, Pray for Us.

Moral Outages

2011-08-31T18:34:00.001-04:00

I am typing this article on a laptop deprived of its power-source. It operates gracefully on battery power, but, when that lithium battery is exhausted, I will be deprived of its use. You see, I am enjoying day two of a power outage provided compliments of a certain Irene. While she hardly packed the punch of which some warned, she nonetheless crippled the power grid here in the Nutmeg State. My dear wife and I are therefore making due in a much more primitive world: all of our gadgets are virtually useless. My small Honda generator provides some power to preserve our limited stock of food in our refrigerator and we have, by and large, returned to a world without modern convenience. That Hurricane Irene slammed into the Northeast on the tail of what was one of the worst three weeks in recent market memory would seem to be pure happenstance. But given my tendency to read symbols and signs into a host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, perhaps, just perhaps, the Good Lord is giving His faithful just one more chance to prepare before the coming economic and social collapse.

I am a professional; a vaulted member of the learned class. I practice law. Other people work for a living, but I practice it. Like doctors, we lawyers are a rarified group. And I do not just practice law, I practice it in the New York metropolitan area so I am not only a fancy lawyer, I am New York fancy. I have no idea how most stuff works and I would last no more than two or three days if you dropped me a remote forest but I have developed a good sense of the varieties of wine, what not to order off an Indian menu and how to participate in several dozen conference calls in a week. What separates me from my fellow professional class is not my survival skills, it is that I am traditional Catholic with six children who cannot seem to divest myself of the view that the world as we have known it -- the world of our parents and grandparents -- is about to collapse. If there really were a social and economic collapse, these skills will be less valuable.

I have this dream, silly though it may be, that one day I will buy land in upstate New York (my ancestral homeland) and live with one foot off of the grid, with some chickens, a cow or two, maybe a goat and twenty chord of firewood -- all while still somehow managing to keep my day-job downstate (as we used to call it). As my more experienced friends remind me, I know nothing about animals or farming and it is a lot harder than it looks. I cannot disagree. There is no doubt that this dream is a half-baked idea that I have shared with numerous “back to the land” intellectuals. From Walden to Belloc, the idea of escaping the “cog-ness” of modern professional existence runs deep in my romantic blood. I am willing to submit it is romance and perhaps nonsense in normal times but are we living in normal times? Whether the elite puppet-masters who orchestrate our “free” lives in the West like it or not, economics can never be divorced from morality -- indeed, economics is morality. That we as a nation could embrace a pornographic and infanticidal ideals (just to name a few) and still create an honest and hardworking citizenry is insane. And the idea that we could simply paper over the moral degradation of an entire nation by printing more money ad infinitum speaks for itself. I do not pretend to be an expert in these things -- indeed, I am an expert in almost nothing (and certainly nothing useful), but the moral implosion we have seen in the last fifty years has to be seen as bread crumbs on a trail leading to the ultimate destination of economic and social apocalypse (I refuse to speculate on whether it will be any other type of apocalypse).

In light of what appears to be the undeniable facts on the ground, maybe it is time I really explore preparing for what seems less likely a contingency, but rather a virtual eventuality. Maybe I need to buy my farmstead. Maybe my wife needs to learn how to sew -- and with an off-grid loom. Maybe my children should learn how to can vegetables while they learn Latin or The Iliad. Maybe it is time to say goodbye to the world “downstate” and begin the preparations for surely what is coming next. What keeps me here -- it is not the cultural opportunities, enlightened neighbors or sports teams -- no, it is a first rate traditional Catholic community for whom I have learned to love. Christian families that have become more relevant than my own blood relatives populated by devout little children that my children love and cherish. It is also a community filled with holy traditional Catholic priests that preach the Gospel Truth without compromise. It is a community that would be very, very hard to leave. Indeed, solid communities do not grow on trees. But there are nonetheless vulnerabilities staying here; in one of the more expensive places in the United States. If my two day sojourn without power is any indication, those vulnerabilities will become manifest in such a crisis.

How do you do it? How do you uproot your wife and children from a wonderful traditional Catholic community to put into practice an idea? It does not matter to them that I cannot afford a home here (notwithstanding my lofty practice) that fits my family or that I will never be able to afford enough land to have animals and a few rows of crops. Or further that the cost structure of “downstate” is completely rigged against me and those like me -- that it is meant for double-incomes. Single incomes with families (especially large ones) like me are not wanted here.

The truth is that I am not going anywhere. Perhaps I will have the consolation of saying I told you so, but, even now, the specter of saying as much does not have much appeal. Well, perhaps I will simply have to prepare here as much as the idea of freeze dried food is unappealing to me. To be utterly frank, I am frightened about what comes next. If it were just me, I would be less so. If anything, I have been a survivor (even if not a woodsman). But when you factor in a wife and children (and small ones at that), you are weighed down, you are slowed down. But these are forces outside of of my control, but unlike my “colleagues” wedded to dialectical materialism (even if they have no idea of its title), I at least know how this thing ends. In the ineffable glory of the Trinity.

So I wrote one thousand words to say very little. Now you can be assured I had a first class legal education.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

2011-08-02T22:16:00.000-04:00

“These historic guidelines are based on science and existing literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need,” said Kathleen Sebelius, the [Roman Catholic] secretary of health and human services.

“Insurance Coverage for Contraception is Required,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 2011.

To quote a marketing campaign from the late 1960s, we have come a long way, baby. In a short period of little more than fifty years, artificial contraception has been transformed. As late as 1965, artificial contraception was legally prohibited by many states. On August 1, 2011, artificial contraception is not only legally tolerated, the citizenry of the United States -- at the coercive direction of the federal government -- are forced to subsidize this evil through shared insurance premium increases.

What is comical are the laudatory comments made by Secretary Sebelius that “these historic guidelines” are “based on science” and “ensure woman get preventative health benefits they need.” Truly, just pondering these few words for a moment makes one’s head want to explode in a paroxysm of maddening confusion. What scientific maxim requires the commonweal to pool its resources to provide certain citizens with devices or chemicals designed solely to frustrate nature’s design? What application of the scientific method demonstrated the validity of this notion? Why should the resources of the community “ensure” that women get “health benefits” that cures neither illness nor disease? When are these devices or chemicals ever “need[ed]” when we know that fertility is a gift and not a debilitation, and, further, that abstinence is only fool proof method of avoiding both sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy?

Of course, “science” does not dictate that I pay for my neighbor’s wife’s or daughter’s decision to intentionally and artificially frustrate the natural functioning of their bodies. And it goes without saying that contraception is to health care what bulimia is to dieting. At least with respect to the latter, the poor bulimic suffers from a mental illness that is informed by a poor self image and anxiety. Coincidentally -- or not coincidentally -- both contraception and bulimia are modern problems, for the most part, of women that largely came into existence at the time of their great liberation from the patriarchal yoke of yesteryear.

What Secretary Sebelius means by these words is that the United States Government is imposing a secular moral view that contraception, i.e., the intentional and artificial avoidance of pregnancy by mechanical means, is a “good” of such capital importance that it deserves to be subsidized by all citizens’ labor (i.e., their money). Make no mistake, the only thing science has to do with the Obama Administration’s decision to mandate universal free contraception is that contraception is sometimes effective in avoiding pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. We could also say “abortions” are “based on science” in much the same way. After all, abortion, i.e., the intentionally killing of a child in utero, is scientifically proven to result in death. Indeed, abortion administered by a doctor is (almost) always effective in achieving its morbid goal. Who knows -- perhaps such sophistry will be used to justify universally tax-payer financed abortions shortly.

How far have we fallen? The rapidity of the moral collapse of the United States is astounding. Consider for a moment the great Old Testament prophet Isaias: “Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.” (Prophecy Of Isaias (Isaiah); 5:20.), Truly, we have a complete moral inversion. An inescapable law of history teaches to anyone paying attention that morally inverted societies collapse and ours is not immune from this truism. In every measure of community, the moral fabric of the United States is torn asunder and turned on its head. From the promotion of legal infanticide to the criminalizing of peaceful assemblies of citizens protesting this same crime against children; from the proliferation of so-called same-sex marriage to the economic and political persecution of those who denounce homosexual acts as sinful; and from the ubiquitous availability of obscene pornography in any American hotel or library to the banning of prayer at public ceremonies. It is no wonder -- indeed, none at all -- that a society that redefines good as evil and evil as good to such an extent also experiences -- in simultaneity -- an economic calamity. Only economists (and modernists) fail to see the connection between communal morality and economic well being. If there is one irony in the timing of the “historic” (albeit morally bankrupt) announcement of Secretary Sebelius regarding artificial contraception it is that it came on the same day that Congress and the Obama Administration were debating on the best method to raise the so-called “debt ceiling” for continued borrowing by the United States beyond its means. The symmetry between moral and economic bankruptcy was never clearer.

Holy Mother Church has taught from time immemorial that artificial contraception is a grave evil. Her predictions that societies that embraced it would suffer from the increase of fornication, adultery, homosexuality, the breakup of the family, and social and economic upheaval were positively prophetic. Contraception is the drug (pardon the pun) that allows this modernist dystopia to lumber along -- if only for a short while longer before it implodes. Contraception is also the social ill that will make it increasingly impossible for faithful Catholic men, as single breadwinners, to support their large (and non-contracepted) families. No one “innovation” has done more widespread social damage than the universal availability of contraception. We know many things about our Lord from the Gospel, but one attribute that we readily know is that he loved children. How fitting is it that our culture, which embraces so many demonic ideas, lavishes praise upon those devices and practices that either prevent or kill children. If only our current bishops would act -- as opposed to offering gentle remonstrances -- in the face of these great social evils. One small step might be the excommunication of Secretary Sebelius for her contribution to pervasiveness of this evil -- for both her good and ours.

If my analysis of our situation is correct, the announcement of Secretary Sebelius will be soon remembered another grim milestone on our nation’s road to perdition. Our commitment to that ruinous end now seems irreversible. The only remedy left is to pray and raise our children to prepare for coming persecutions.

 God save us all.

The Great Apostasy and Irrelevancy of The Conciliar Church.

2011-07-31T10:23:00.005-04:00

The now-Protestant [Tim] Pawlenty explains that, as a kid, he “attended Mass nearly every Sunday,” and not only out of familial obligation. “I took my faith seriously. I went through my first Communion, catechism, and confirmation.” After Pawlenty’s mother died of ovarian cancer when he was 16, he might have held that against the Almighty. Instead, he writes that “my faith only deepened, and my belief in the existence of a loving God carried on into college and law school.” So what happened? Pawlenty fell in love with a Protestant (though not anti-Catholic) girl named Mary Anderson. While they were courting, “Mary attended church with me, and I attended church with her and as I fell in love with Mary, I also found myself increasingly drawn to her church, Wooddale Church.”

(Tim's Pawlenty Ex-Catholic Piety, Crisis Magazine.)

What happened to Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota and current presidential Republican candidate, is all-too-common. Millions of Catholics have walked away from any meaningful observance of the rites and obligations of the Roman Catholic faith. The tragedy of the often-cited numbers of Catholic decline that has been ongoing for at least fifty years, e.g., collapsing Mass attendance, dwindling vocations, diminishing sacramental weddings, etc., is essentially a story about people and the decisions collectively they have made to create a stampede away from the Catholic Church. It is happening among white Catholics, black Catholics and Hispanic Catholics. Tim Pawlenty’s apostasy is newsworthy only because he is a former Governor and presidential candidate; if Pawlenty were an anonymous practicing lawyer in St. Could, Minnesota, he would just be one of many who drifted away -- with seemingly no consequences -- from the Catholic Church. For Pawlenty, and the millions like him, the Catholic Church has ceased to be relevant. Those decisions have also weakened the moral fabric of our nation -- just look around, the decline of Church life and moral life have moved in perfect parallel.

Is Holy Mother Church relevant? The answer to this question depends on who you ask. While admittedly conjecture on my part, many, if not most, diocesan priests would say that people like Pawlenty will not go to hell over a knowledgable decision to leave the Catholic Church and attend a non-Catholic “church.” We are, or so it seems to them, bigger than that now; we are more broad-minded than that, we have moved beyond the sectarian debates of so long ago and are one big happy Christian family making our way up the great and diverse mountain of salvation. “Denominational” titles are not what is important -- rather, the belief in one’s heart, the seriousness of one’s convictions, and the following of conscience are paramount. If that sounds like crypto-protestantism, you are paying close attention indeed.

For many years, I was greatly unnerved by stories like Pawlenty’s. I was troubled by the fact that no one seemed to care that people -- good, upright people --were leaving the Church in droves because it no longer met their needs. In a conversation with a mature and more experienced traditional Catholic than myself, he said to me in words about modern apostates that still ring in my head, “can you really blame them, what were they leaving.” His comment crystallized the idea that the Catholic faith as experienced by the overwhelming majority of Catholics in the United States (and elsewhere I suppose) has become so enervated, so wishy-washy, and so feminized that it is no wonder that baptized Catholics are leaving it in droves. In a very real sense, these apostates were not leaving the Catholic faith because they never really had it. As a lawyer, I still process information in a formal sense, but my friend reminded me that faith is not experienced in a formal sense, it is a living, breathing thing. And if it changes, if that faith becomes flabby and fit for only milquetoasts or the indolent, we should not be surprised that men of good will leave it for something seemingly less so. To be clear, my friend was not defending mass apostasy, he simply reminded me of the “facts on the ground” and provided me with the cause, which, until that point, I still did not connect.

But the tragedy exists nonetheless. Even though it is not of our making per se, and even though we oppose those churchmen who continue to create the conditions by which the apostasy grows, it is something that grieves us that well-meaning people leave the bosom of Holy Mother Church for pastures that are, in reality, not greener but filled with weeds of heresy. Something has to be done to stop it.

I submit that the essential reason for the Church's fall is one of an almost institutional and doctrinal Schizophrenia: she no longer seems to know who she really is. And because she does not know who she is, she does not know why she is here. In less opaque terms, the Church effectively denies who she is, and, by doing so, shirks her duty and mission. There are two simple questions -- ones that could be answered for the entirety of the Church's history (excepting the past fifty years) -- that cannot (or more accurately, will not) be answered today with any sense of clarity: The First Question: Is the apostolic society [i.e., church] founded by Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church one and the same? The Second Question: Does one need to be Catholic in order to be saved?

In ignoring and obfuscating the answers to these questions, the Church denies to the world who she is and what her utterly unique mission is. It creates millions of Tim Pawelentys. In part, this clouding of the Church's mission and identity is driven by the desire to please men -- to please especially those men in disagreement with the Church. By doing so, these individuals -- some of them her very trusted shepherds -- would rather please those souls in error than correct them through some sense of false charity. Many of her pastors, responsible for this dereliction, will undoubtedly rue it.

These questions posed above could be treated in formats much longer than provided here. Suffice it to say (and perhaps the subject of another article), the questions posed should be non-controversial because they have been answered affirmatively for two thousand years. The first question can be answered by the uniform answer of the Church’s Tradition. The second question too can likewise be answered (albeit with some debate over the scope of an exception to the general rule). These two rules of faith are central to the identity of what it means to be Catholic, and, more importantly for purposes of this article, why being Catholic matters.

By failing to preach the truth that the Catholic Church is the one, true Church of our Lord -- and preach it regularly -- her pastors deny a central truth of the faith: the visibility of the True Church. From the time of the Reformation (and the Pagans and Heathens before that), Protestants have either denied the visibility of the Church, or so explained it as to rob it of most of its meaning. According the (Old) Catholic Encyclopedia, it means:

In asserting that the Church of Christ is visible, we signify, first, that as a society it will at all times be conspicuous and public, and second, that it will ever be recognizable among other bodies as the Church of Christ. These two aspects of visibility are termed respectively "material" and "formal" visibility by Catholic theologians. The material visibility of the Church involves no more than that it must ever be a public, not a private profession; a society manifest to the world, not a body whose members are bound by some secret tie. Formal visibility is more than this. It implies that in all ages the true Church of Christ will be easily recognizable for that which it is, viz. as the Divine society of the Son of God, the means of salvation offered by God to men; that it possesses certain attributes which so evidently postulate a Divine origin that all who see it must know it comes from God.

Articulating this doctrine clearly (for sure, it need be articulated clearly today) is not a form of triumphalism; our "team" does not win. Nor is denying "church-hood" to other Christian communities inimical to ecumenism. Real and genuine ecumenism must start and end with the Truth. Whitewashing it does no party any favors. The truth of the exclusive Catholic claim of being the True Church is wholly tied up in the similarly exclusive claim that Jesus Christ makes to humanity. He alone is the way, and the truth, and the life. In like fashion, His society -- what we call the Church -- is similarly singular. Our proclaiming His Church to be "one" and "true" is as triumphalist as our proclaiming Him to be the only name by which man can be saved.

When the Catholic Church does not proclaim this truth about herself in clear and forceful terms, her flock begins to disintegrate. One reason for this disintegration is demonstrated by examining what has happened to Protestant communities in the last fifty years. The mainline and more liberal-minded churches have been in free-fall in terms of adherents. The more conservative minded evangelical churches (at least in terms of the centrality of their truth claims) have flourished (unfortunately, with many ex-Catholics like Tim Pawlenty in their midst). When the Catholic Church begins to act like a mainline liberal-minded church (i.e., pretend to be something that she cannot possibly be) -- she begins to die.

The one advantage the the Catholic Church has over evangelicals is that the latter only much but not all of the truth; whereas the former has all of it. In a contest therefore, the former will prevail if only her pastors will be honest about who she is. Indeed, our Lord prophesied as much in promises that the "the gates of hell shall not prevail against [his Church.]" (Gospel According to Saint Matthew 16:18) All she has to do in order to prevail is be true to herself and her founder. Then, once again, will men treat the Church as the very center of their lives, and not merely an annoyance, or, worse still, as irrelevant.

But the apostasy has dire consequences for everyone. For the remaining faithful, the body of Christ has been wounded by desertion. Much like a family member who deserts his family, the apostate’s decision leave a Church that is more weakened that it otherwise would have been.
For the apostate, we must ask what it means for him. It is a truism worth repeating that there is no controversy that if any man is saved, he is saved through the Catholic Church.

The question of formal membership as a requirement for salvation has been discussed over the centuries by learned churchmen. It was debated in a public way most recently with respect to the case of Father Feeney who appeared to go so far as to say that there can be no salvation without water baptism. On the opposite side of the spectrum, which I submit is the position maintained by many of the Church’s current leadership, churchman have all but denied that membership in the Catholic Church is relevant at all to the question of salvation. Indeed, there is no more controversial statement for the modernist Catholic than Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus: Outside the Church there is no salvation. But if we accept the first premise that the Church of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church are one and the same, this statement should be markedly less controversial. Nonetheless, no matter the context we say it, it falls excruciatingly hard on modernist Catholic ears. Whatever we can say about most of her pastors for the past fifty years, we can say without controversy that they generally detest this teaching as an anachronism of a bygone era. Indeed, they recoil at its very mention.

Considering that it has not been revealed definitively to the Church how narrow or broad the exception is to the formal membership requirement of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, we should adopt, in an abundant sense of charity, the most cautious approach and comport ourselves as if it is quite narrow. No matter who ultimately conceives of this doctrine in closer proximity to its divine reality, we would all be best served if we collectively conceived of it more narrowly than it really is. Indeed, charity is best served by erring on being cautious with heaven, not the other way around. In my humble opinion, Father Feeney's error was to construct that narrowness so as to eliminate the notion of exception altogether. Nonetheless, we should assume that the vast majority who do not become Catholics (or leave Church) are lost (even if we are ultimately wrong). Internalizing that notion will fire our missionary zeal to bring all men home to the True Church.

By analogy, if I "suspected" that you may be poisoned and die if you digested certain medicine, it would be appropriate for me, in an abundance of caution because of charity, to advise you of my concern. Perhaps you would become angry and call me foolish. But I would have done the right thing by you -- you would have been warned and taken that next step with eyes more open. Conversely, the "liberal" and "tolerant" friend who figures, "it's probably not poison" or "it's none of my business," and lets you ingest it does you a great disservice. He really shows that he is "indifferent" to you.

If matters of heaven and hell are much more important than questions of our temporal demise, how much more should we respond to this question of membership in the True Church? Presuming in any other fashion is uncharitable. And if we suffer the scorn of some for our warnings that they must get on the ark of salvation or perish, we must be ready to accept it. "Remember my word that I said to you: The servant is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you: if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also." (Gospel According to Saint John 15:20)

There is one obvious observation worth making about the Conciliar Church; her pastors effectively have defined the exception aspect of this dogma in very broad terms -- in terms so broad that the exception is now wider than the rule. In practical terms, this type of orientation has literally sucked the missionary marrow from the bones of the Church. Why go through the hassle of seeking conversions if God will simply save them where they are if they lived so-called righteous lives? Why bother upsetting our neighbor with the Truth of the Gospel and Jesus' Church if God will save all men? Why continue conceiving of the Church in such neolithic teams as the "True Church" or "Holy Mother Church," if God is pleased by all men of good will no matter where they worship (or don't)? These novel and alien theological innovations have been disasters for both the Church and those many lost souls seduced therefrom.

The intentional softening of this doctrine has had paradoxically much greater impact on Catholics than non-Catholics. When coupled with the deafening silence as to singularity of the Church's mission, the often rampant indifferentism of some leaders in the Church (or even, perhaps more, of still more leader's mild indifferentism) has convinced many Catholics that even the Church does not teach that there are any consequences for leaving. It has also convinced many that joining her is simply not necessary (even according to Holy Mother Church's dictates).

How much different would Tim Pawlenty’s analysis have been in considering leaving the Catholic Church if his priest told him bluntly, “Tim, what you are contemplating is insane -- you are thinking of leaving the true Church that our Lord founded for a facile fabrication. If you were to follow through on this decision, you would be stamping your passport to hell.” Who knows, but what Pawlenty would have done is really irrelevant, what is important is that he deserved to know what he was leaving and the divine consequences for doing so. True charity requires this honesty for all Catholics.

As I ponder the so-called “new evangelization,” I wonder if the policy wonks in the bowels of a conference room maintained by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops knew how simple this proposition really is. Splashy fliers and “Come Home” initiatives will never move anyone to commit their life to Jesus Christ and his True Church. No one makes a meaningful sacrifice for an ad campaign -- they only do it because they believe that the sacrifice is worth making. Give me one bishop, just one, who preached rigorously that the Catholic Church is God’s only true Church and the only means to salvation, and two things would happen: he would be utterly hated by the “world,” but his flock would grow in terms both of love and charity and ultimately numbers. We do not need a “new evangelization” to save the Tim Pawlentys of the world, we need the “old” one; we need the evangelization of Saint Paul -- fearless in its proclamation and truthful in its content.

Saint Paul, pray for us.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

2011-07-28T22:21:00.000-04:00

Temporal punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by some after death, by some both here and hereafter, but all of them before that last and strictest judgment. But not all who suffer temporal punishments after death will come to eternal punishments, which are to follow after that judgment.

St. Augustine (City of God)

Sin scars. In this life -- or the next -- the wounds left by sin require satisfaction. The sinner who is saved must do penance in this life or be purified in the next. Tradition and Scripture testify to this purgatorial reality. God’s law written on our hearts also testifies the reality that sin -- even forgiven sin -- has consequences. While purgatory has been attacked by Protestant “reformers” and Eastern schismatics for centuries, this doctrine is an infallible and unchangeable dogma of Holy Mother Church. To the extent those outside return to her, they must realize their error because purgatory is not a marginal doctrine: it informs the central truths to how we should live as Christians.

A restatement of purgatory may seem to be a inapposite introduction to a work by legendary novelist and Slavophile Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But in one of the more interesting literary and religious ironies, one of Dostoyevsky’s great works, The Idiot, is in fact a purgatorial story. Undoubtedly, The Idiot is a biting critique of the Russian aristocracy written fifty years before its destruction in the final Bolshevik conflagration. But Dostoyevsky is always a philosopher before he is a social commentator, and The Idiot is more profoundly a testament to the power of purgatorial justice and mercy, so ingrained in our nature, that even Dostoyevsky, a lifelong anti-Catholic, uses purgation as the primary theme without ever connecting to its dogmatic equivalent.

Set in Saint Petersburg during the 1860s, The Idiot is based upon a guileless “idiot,” Prince Leo Nikolayevich Myshkin. Rather than what we think of as a conventional “idiot,” Prince Myshkin is a sweet and loving soul. Dostoyevsky’s description of him as an idiot is a commentary on those around him rather than the Prince himself. True to another New Testament truth, Dostoyevsky’s naive Myshkin is foil to the worldly and intellectual world around him: “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong.” (1st Epistle Of Saint Paul To The Corinthians 1:27.)

The novel begins on a train – a metaphoric introduction that the characters we meet, and the story we about to read, is one about change and journey. Prince Myshkin is a threadbare traveler returning to Russia after years of treatment in Switzerland for his “idiotic” condition, i.e., epilepsy. Dostoyevsky, himself epileptic, often used epilepsy as an important character theme in his novels and the same is true of The Idiot.

What strikes the reader almost immediately about Prince Myshkin is his child-like innocence. He is returning in his late-twenties to Russia with no family, no funds, or even no semblance of how he will support himself. On the train-ride, he meets Parfyon Rogozhin, who serves throughout the novel as his rival and antagonist. Also in his late-twenties, Rogozhin is the boorish and hotheaded son of a wealthy merchant returning home following his father’s death after a short self-imposed exile against his family. Dostoyevsky creates in the juxtaposition of Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin a rich depiction of the fall of man -- Myshkin representing “Adam” before the Fall graced with preternatural gifts and Rogozhin representing “Adam” after the fall and fleshly to the core. On their trip, Rogozhin recounts his arguments with his family and his infatuation with Nastasya Fillipnova. They part in Saint Petersburg with Rogozhin’s impulsive invitation that Prince Myshkin stay with him at his home – as if to signify that Myshkin’s naivety notwithstanding he will also be protected.

Once in Saint Petersburg, Myshkin makes his way to aristocratic home of General Yepahchin, a retired General and father of three daughters of marriage-able age. His wife’s family, “Myshkin,” is of honorable and ancient lineage in Russia and possibly a distant relation. Prince Myshkin’s decision to visit the Yepahchin’s is based upon this tenuous connection. His modest reason in visiting the Yepahchin family is to inquire whether they, as successful and experienced people, will provide him some guidance on what he should do in returning to Russia.

The Yepahchin family is introduced as a microcosism of the Russia aristocracy: a “respected” family filled with duplicity, social scheming and boredom. Accordingly, in a fit of psychological projection, Prince Myshkin’s visit is viewed with considerable suspicion. After all, he cannot simply want their advice – he must be scheming for something else. While making the acquaintance of the Yepahchins, Myshkin sees a portrait of Nastasya Fillipnova and is immediately overcome by the depth of her great beauty.

Nastasya Fillipnova is connected to the Yepanchins through the General’s friend, Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky: Nastasya's foster father and her seducer. His debauchery in “adopting” Nastasya as a young girl is recounted and Totsky and Yepanchin scheme to marry her off to Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivogin (“Ganya”), Nastasya's prideful and seething suitor. Gayna is the General’s assistant of sorts -- and though he loves the General’s daughter, Aglaya, he has agreed to marry Nastasya in exchange for a payment from Totsky.

We are introduced thus to Nastasya on the eve of her decision to marry Ganya. At a cocktail party for this decision, Nastasya publically asks Myshkin whether she should marry Ganya: he advises her to say no and so she does. At that point, Rogozhin and his rowdy coherts storm the party. He announces insolently that he will give Nastasya 100,000 rubles if she will leave with him. Myshkin then offers his hand to Nastasya and announces that he has just inherited a fortune. Nastasya is touched by his offer, but deems herself too debauched for the unworldly and innocent Myshkin; she leaves with the base Rogozhin.

Over the next several months, Myshkin and Rogozhin literally trade Nastasya back and forth as she cannot make up her mind. Rogozhin’s “love” for Nastasya is all-consuming; a type of burning obsession that destroys rather than edifies. Over the course of the book, it is clear that Rogozhin both loves and hates Myshkin and a strange, foreboding friendship develops between them. He even plans to stab Myshkin but is thwarted by the latter’s sudden epileptic fit.
All the while, the guileless Myshkin is hounded by charlatans masquerading as creditors of his new found estate -- and he chooses to diminish his inheritance by paying on dubious claims rather than dishonor the dishonorable.

In the midst of his pursuit of the fickle Nastasya, Myshkin begins to fall in love with the youngest Yephanchin beautiful daughter, Aglaya, who feels the same but openly mocks him and pretends away her love for him. Her family sees through the spoiled girl’s charade and begins to treat Myshkin as her fiance. Her love for him comes out into the open, paradoxically, after he embarrasses himself at a Yephanchin aristocratic party thrown for him and Aglaya -- at which he clumsily interacts with the haughty guests and breaks an ancient Chinese vase. His night culminates with another epileptic fit.

During the courtship of sorts, Aglaya has been receiving letters from Nastassya in which the latter implores her to marry the Prince. After his disastrous introduction to the aristocracy -- as if to spite them -- Aglaya forces the issue between the Prince and Nastassya. The women seek to Prince’s decision on his choice of love and even though the Prince “loves” Aglaya in the romantic sense of the term, his compassion for the wounded Nastassya prompts him to pause (albeit for a moment). This pause is enough to convince Aglaya to flee the Prince, and, in turn, Nastassya agrees to marry him.

The marriage does not take place as Nastassya leaves him at the altar and runs off again with
Rogozhin. The Prince follows them to Saint Petersburg only to find that Rogozhin has stabbed her to death and the book ends with their vigil over her dead body. The main characters all leave Russia of sorts: Rogozhin to Siberia, Aglaya to Poland with a deceitful nobleman, and Myshkin to Switerland. The ending for the book’s central young people is a metaphor of sorts of Russia’s inability to hold her young.

For any Dostoyevsky fan, there are certain characters that repeat in his works and this one is no exception. There is the spoiled arisoctratic beauty paired with the lower class woman-child of suspect morals. There is the beautiful soul whose goodness radiates throughout the work coupled with the base Russian man of depravity. There are licentious men, superficial middle-aged psuedo-intellectuals, sickly boys, and, of course, bad Poles. Dostoyevsky has certain motifs he uses over and over again: Catholic bashing, epilepsy, murder, and grinding poverty. The gift that separates Dostoyevsky from everyone else is that he takes these same types and motifs and reinvests in characters and situations that are as fresh and compelling as the first time that you read them -- you are literally transported into his world and care deeply for his characters.

But why is this story one of purgation? Because Myshkin cannot have Nastassya: her sins persist in time and, in some measure, disqualify her for a relationship with a purer soul in Myshkin -- and her senseless fleeing from him, over and over again, was not a senseless as it seems. Nastassya knows she cannot have him -- her sins have defiled her. She flees from that which she desires most because nature, as it were, compels her to do so. His love for her was two-fold: a self-sacrificing love that seeks to heal the other and an aesthetic infatuation. But make no mistake, Myshkin’s hesitation at the novel’s inflection point was a reflection that his love for her was profound and consuming. This love is one that cannot be -- the scarring on her soul prevents its.

Another central theme in this work is that of the “attraction.” The compulsion towards it -- towards what is searing beauty is a theme that Dostoyevsky uses over and over again. As I imagine it, Nastassya was one of those rare beauties who mere presence radically changes men. They are rare indeed but they are the type of women that men will throw everything away to pursue as if drunk or hypnotized. I knew one such woman in college: her beauty was so overpowering that she attracted men of all sorts with a primal force of nature as such that I had never seen before. Someone who had gone to high school with this woman recounted how one of her teachers had been fired from pursuing her as a teenager. Knowing her and witnessing her effect had on men, I understood exactly how that could have happened. When she entered a room with friends of mine in a group, virtually all conversation ceased -- or so it seemed -- and all eyes, men and women, focused on her as if entranced. I often wondered what that type of grinding attention does to someone’s mental health. If Dostoyevsky had such a beauty in mind as I imagine Nastassya,, then I think he quite correctly captured the deleterious effect of such objectification has on a young woman.

Another theme captured by The Idiot is that of the aristocracy and service. We catch a glimpse of the death throes of an ossified aristocratic culture that has forgotten that it owes services to the greater good. The Yepahchins and their society is emblematic of the inward rot of the Russian aristocracy. It is another theme that Dostoyevsky and other great Russian writers during Russia’s Golden Age explore in near-prophetic fashion. In some ways, its later demise fifty years after Dostoyevsky finished The Idiot was anti-climatic: it was already long dead.

The Idiot is certainly not one of Dostoyevsky’s finest books, but it still is one of the better novels one will read. It is well worth the time.

The Peril of Temporal Worry

2011-07-27T20:38:00.007-04:00

Be not solicitous therefore, saying, What shall we eat: or what shall we drink, or wherewith shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the heathens seek. For your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things. Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you. Be not therefore solicitous for tomorrow; for the morrow will be solicitous for itself. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.

(Gospel According to Saint Matthew 6:31-34)

There are certain hallmarks associated with Traditional Catholicism. These marks range from the cultural (e.g., strong dislike of popular music and other forms of "bread and circus"); to the political (e.g., disproportionate believers in monarchy); to the philosophical (e.g., a belief in the superiority of scholasticism and negative view of the so-called enlightenment); to the religious (no e.g. necessary); to the social (e.g., belief in patriarchy and very traditional marital roles); and finally to the economic (e.g., belief in the gold standard and imminent economic collapse). Not coincidentally, I share with many of my fellow Traditional Catholics virtually all of these views. I hold them because I believe them to be true.

Taken as a whole, they represent a world-view. From a "positive" point of view, they engender a high view of Western culture and tradition, chivalry, honor, family and sacrifice. From a "negative" view, they condemn much of the modern world -- so much so in fact that Traditional Catholics have little in common in almost everyone around them in the values and beliefs that they hold most dear. As one of these misfits -- someone born eight-hundred years too late -- I view this community as the world's great mustard seed, which will bloom into a future glorious Christendom.

If I have any criticisms of the culture around Traditional Catholicism it consists firstly in its seeming insularity. As Traditional Catholics are naturally skeptical of the modern kool-aid and prone to living, as it were, a double-life, their sense of evangelism is muted to say the least. Perhaps it stems from the years of persecution at the hands of official Catholicism. Perhaps still it comes from a faith that is strong and ferocious but, at the same time, quiet and humble. I think rather, however, it comes from a manly sense of decorum -- of the fear of wallowing into the post-Vatican II squishy and feminine "faith-sharing" that many modern Catholics seem to relish. Speaking in crypto-evangelical protestant terms, the "new" Catholics like taking about their "faith journey" or their "faith walk" and enjoy getting to know how others "feel" about faith. It is all so therapeutic and nauseating. Traditional Catholics are too stoic for such immodest invasions of personal space. But their stoicism, which is often laudable, often lends itself to a stand-offishness. In fact, they burn with the desire to see Christendom flower again -- they would give their right hand to see Holy Mother Church restored to her rightful place -- but, beyond silent prayer and discussions among the converted, they do not know how to engage the "other" very well. In short, most Traditional Catholics are lousy missionaries.

This insularity -- no matter how well-meaning -- is a sin against charity. Their private desire to see Catholic restoration must begin slowly with the people around them. They must be prepared to indulge all types of sleights in the effort to bring others back to Tradition. The means do not, of course, need be the type of sloppy and emotional faith sharing of evangelical protestants, but they must be prepared at all times to give an accounting of their faith in a sensible and sober way. They also must radiate the joy of knowing the King of Kings. This joy does not mean a constant smile (although it could) -- it means a deep and abiding joy in the hope of our Lord's promises. It is a joy of the eminently rational: the joy of a people who understand the reality around them. But more than an accounting when asked -- or a joy in Christian truth -- the Traditional Catholic should think often of how to bring those outside within. They should invite often friends and colleagues to Holy Mass. They should invite people to confession.

I had a good friend at work who is a good family man and observant Catholic. I asked him, over the course of a number of years, to come to the Old Mass many times. Finally I asked him to attend a Traditional retreat, which, to my surprise, he attended. A year and a half later, he welcomed a new child into his family and attends, almost exclusively, the Old Mass. (Indeed, he has outstripped me in faith and devotion). My point in all of this is that we have to keep asking and asking. Prudently of course, but we have to view Traditional Catholicism as the lifeboat that it is -- charity compels us to throw the lifeline over and over again even in the face of futility.

The other aspect of Traditional Catholic culture that needs work is the concern with temporal security. Coupled with a very negative view of the pernicious culture and collapsing economy, many Traditional Catholics store food and gold, buy guns, and prepare, as it were, for a social disintegration that is in the very soon offing. Prudence is of course an appropriate disposition -- indeed, it is a virtue. Who can fault Traditional Catholics for preparing for what they view as a very real eventuality? I certainly do not. But what I do see concerning is when prudence gets unhinged from, well, prudence. Our prudence is ultimately rooted in the promises of the living God. We are not -- not ultimately anyway -- survivors. No matter what temporal calamities come, and history proves they are the rule rather than the exception, we have to steel ourselves with faith. Read the block quote taken directly from our Lord's lips cited above again; read it very carefully. God will provide. Even if we starve, He will nonetheless provide that which matters most if we are faithful. There is a reason that the Roman martyrs were so courageous in offering their lives for faith: they understood better than we do today that temporal security is only important to the extent that it furthers us towards our eternal goal.

So go ahead, prudently store food, have plenty of ammunition, and buy batteries -- I cannot condemn you for it. But remember that even if you took none of those steps, our Lord's promises would be that He will provide for you. Indeed, our faith, in and of itself, seems to be the most imprudent thing to those foolish people in world. But we believe, and go on believing, because we know we have the pearl of great price, we know the score as it really is. No matter what tribulations we suffer, no matter how terrible it gets in this world, our joy should be a constant. The Gospel is many things: it is revelation, it is history, it is prophecy but more than any of these things, it is a promise. It is a promise to the faithful of what comes next. And if what comes next is only a fraction of wonder and greatness than our finite minds can imagine, well then, we really really should not worry about how things will work themselves out in this world tomorrow.

Deo Gratias.

Father Arseny 1893-1973 Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father.

2011-06-12T15:40:00.005-04:00

This is one of Thy mysteries, Lord, which we people -- the slaves of sin -- cannot understand. This mystery is Thine. Thy ways are inscrutable. Thou alone knowest the path of each human life; our duty is to simply do good in Thy name, to walk in the statutes of the Gospel, and to pray to Thee. Then the forces of evil will be overcome. For where two or three are gathered in Thy name, there are also shalt Thou be. Have mercy on me, O Lord, according to thy abundant mercy, and forgive me my despair, my weakness and my wavering.

Father Arseny 1893-1973 Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father.

Father Arseny is a rich literary tapestry of the live of a Russian Orthodox priest who survived the Stalin death camps and became a spiritual guide to hundreds of people over the course of his long life. The book is organized uniquely: the first half is a memoir of Father Arseny, formerly known as Piotr Andreysevich Streltzov, and his travails as a secret Christian in Stalin's Soviet regime -- both before, during and after imprisonment in the notorious Soviet Gulag (prison network). The second half catalogue, in random and brief fashion, stories of his "spiritual children" that relate both to their Soviet experiences as well as their relationship with Father Arseny. It is therefore an easy book to pick up and read in short intervals as it more or less a series of short essays connected by the twin themes of Soviet repression and Father Arseny

As the defining experience in Father Arseny's life was his imprisonment in Gulag, it helps to be familiar beforehand with it. Previously, I spent the better part of six months trudging through Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. That background made gave me a familiarity with Father Arseny that I could not have had otherwise. Both Solzhenitsyn and Father Arseny were "zeks" -- political prisoners in Soviet prison during the same time period. Many of their experiences, at least as they relate to prison life and such, are also similar. One difference that stands out is that Father Arseny handled the Gulag better than Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn's view was more human, more angry, and more biting whereas Father Arseny's memoir records many of the things but he is kinder and gentler in his recollections. The difference that separates them is Father Arseny's spiritual maturity and understanding of redemptive suffering .

I am the first to admit that I am a Russophile. The Russian people have long fascinated me and I find that greatest literary writers are Russian. As such, I have spent a good part of my reading life exploring those works. Father Arseny fits nicely as an sublime example of Russian piety, which, in my estimation, has much in common with devout Roman Catholicism. I do not find it accidental at all that Our Lady's apparition at Fatima zeroed in on the Russian people: their national importance in the divine economy makes perfect sense to me if for no other reason that no people, it seems to me, have embodied both the worst and best of human understanding. They are simultaneous brutish and gracious, demonic and angelic, and great sinners or saints. And like the immense territory they hold, their national Schizophrenia is likewise immense.

The attributes of the Russia that I love -- the Orthodox Russian -- do not stem from its Orthodoxy per se; rather it is in spite of it. If one sets aside the irrational antipathy that animates Orthodoxy against Catholicism and focuses on what the Orthodox teaches and how it strives towards perfection, one can immediately recognize the blood of Catholicism coursing through the Orthodox body. While impossible to quantify, Orthodoxy in devout practice is extremely similar to devout Catholicism in practice. What I love therefore in the Russian is his latent Catholicism -- even if he does not know it.

All of that said, it is impossible to ignore the antipathy that the Orthodox have for Catholicism. In almost all of my Russian reading, there is almost a stock reference to the West that devout Orthodox characters make -- it is nearly always the same in terms of its overall negative assertion. They always find a reason, apropos to nothing, to denigrate Roman Catholicism. One could go so far to say that it is a defining characteristic of Orthodoxy that they are not Catholics. Many of their "saints" are measured by the degree of their vitriol against Roman Catholicism. Indeed, it is virtually impossible for a serious Orthodox Christian to admit the sanctity of the great Catholic saints. My experience in reading Catholic works is that you almost never encounter the same -- Catholicism, as it were, is not vindicated at the expense of Orthodoxy and Catholics can readily admit the heroic virtues of certain Orthodox Christians (albeit not found in their rabid anti-Catholicism).

For the Orthodox, however, it is almost as if there has been an implicit addendum to the Christian Creed; that is, one must confess that "I am not a Catholic." There is an irony indeed that the Orthodox purport to base their separation from Holy Mother Church is a supposed Western deviation from the Creed when they de facto have amended it. For this reason, i.e., the deeply ingrained and virtually creedal prejudice against Catholicism, as well as its lack of any unifying authority, rapprochement between East and West is virtually impossible. Stated simply, there is no with whom to resolve these issues. But as is anything is possible with God, we should continue to pray for that the schismatic East comes home to Holy Mother Church. The consecration to Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary is a necessary first step.

But if we separate ourselves from this instinctive and knee-jerk anti-Catholicism (which even Father Arseny's memoir apes), we can appreciate a people striving. Father Arseny is a man of God we can appreciate. Unlike many misguided among Orthodox, his holiness as an Christian has little to do with an anti-Catholicism. The book chronicles a series of miracles associated with this priest under severe hardship -- both miraculous conversions and miraculous events. Surviving when he should have died, preaching to those men who were abject murderers or rapists, and converting hardened Soviet officials -- his gentle demeanor and humility disarmed even the most militant atheists. Father Arseny is a testament to the power of the witness of personal and authentic holiness -- more than words, more than deeds and more than heroics. The simple humility and Christian selflessness is the power that that "world" fears. Even reposed in one man, it is like a bright light burning in a sea of darkness; attracting and nurturing the lost souls around it.

I could not help but see many similarities between our great Saint, Padre Pio, and Father Arseny. They lived during the same age, staggering miracles were attributed to them, and they developed a following, even in life, that outstripped what anyone could have reasonably anticipated. St. Padre Pio, however, lived in the bosom of Holy Mother Church, and may, in time, be recognized as one of the most important Saints of all time (I personally believe that). Father Arseny was raised with lies about Holy Mother Church, and, for that, I pray for his soul and those similarly laboring under false views of God's one true Church.

This book is a worthwhile read. It is serviceable primer on the horrors of Gulag and an inspiring read of the power of faith.

Deo Gratias.

"It Gets Better Project"

2011-06-11T22:14:00.006-04:00

Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.

(Prophecy Of Isaias (Isaiah); 5:20.)

We live in disheartening times. First world economies are collapsing. The social fabric -- nay, the minimum predicates for society itself -- are fraying at an exponential pace. A widespread moral inversion has occurred in the decadent West. We have now safely reached the age in which what is good is called evil and what is evil is called good. Imagine, it is deemed perfectly acceptable to discuss sodomy and hand out artificial contraception to eleven year old children in government-run schools, but, in those same hallowed institutions, it is verboten to mention God (let alone, pray collectively to him). O Lord, how far we have fallen.

One discrete and disturbing episode of this moral inversion is the so-called "It Gets Better Project." According to its website:

[T]he heart and soul of the project are still the over 10,000 videos created by ordinary [sodomites] —people you haven't heard of—telling their stories, offering advice, sharing their coping strategies, and, in the comments threads and via their YouTube accounts, offering many [young sodomites] something they've never had before: the ear of a sympathetic [sodomite] who understands exactly what they're going through.

Lord, save us from this filth. Old and lecherous sodomites encourage disoriented young people (how they could not be disoriented in this now-diabolic culture of meaninglessness) that "it gets better" the longer you are steeped in sodomy. To some extent, the old sodomites are right -- it presumably does get easier because their bodies and souls have become so seared by living in repeated sexual perversion that the disgust that they initially felt in committing such sins has receded from their minds. So yes, it does [appear] to get better for sodomites.

But these people -- both young and old -- will face the judgment seat of the Living God. The gross sins they committed -- openly and notoriously -- in the face of nature and revelation will be before them. If unrepentant, they will trade the lavender lifestyle for the burning fires of hell. While I am the first to disclaim that what I have written is beyond harsh -- it is nonetheless true. True charity never lies, it never obscures and it never wavers. To be honest that homosexual acts and sodomy are a sure path to perdition and ruin is true charity. The New Testament puts it even clearer:

For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy.

(Epistle Of Saint Paul To The Romans; 1:26-29.)

So, in reality, the "It Gets Better Project" is an abject lie: it does not get better. More and more sin only makes it worse and much worse at that. These older sodomites, who are actively seeking to encourage a new generation of deviants, now will bear the double-burden at judgment for their sexual sins but also those of other young people they encouraged to imbibe of this poison.

God have mercy on us.

Deo gratias.

How to Profit from our Faults by Joseph Tissot

2011-05-15T12:19:00.004-04:00

We have now caught a glimpse of how St. Francis de Sales takes discouragement by directly attacking its causes. Why do we get depressed? Because we exaggerate our weakness or because we do not recognize divine mercy. And most of the time, it is the two together. It may be said in passing that in this there occurs a strange but frequent phenomenon. The sinner falls from having ignored his own weakness and from having exaggerated God's mercy. After the fall, these two sentiments are reborn, but in reverse. Weakness acquires excessive proportions in one's eyes; it envelops the sould in what seems a mantle of sadness and confusion. The soul feels crushed. On the other hand, God, whom one had earlier offended with the greatest of ease on the assumption of an easily available pardon, now appears to be an unremitting avenger. The guilty soul fears him and is ashamed of itself. If she does not react to against these disastrous temptations, she will in a cowardly way give up the fight.

How to Profit from our Faults by Joseph Tissot.

Why do we never seem to learn from our accustomed failings?

This question is one I have pondered from the moment I began striving to live my faith with an assemblance of integrity. It is one I know others have struggled with this same question, and our plagued by the follow-on question which is how can our contrition be sincere when we make the same errors again and again. How do we hold on to that profound sadness that motivates us and shames us in the face of failure following yet another failing but which slowly and imperceptibly fades away?

How to Profit from our Faults by Joseph Tissot is an engaging and short read regarding the very practical advice on using the reality of our failings to profit by them. Originally published in France in 1878, it draws deeply from the writings of St. Francis de Sales. As often is the case with older books, its table of contents gives the reader a firm blueprint for the book's layout:

Our failings do not surprise us
Our faults do not upset us
Never be discouraged by our faults
Humility through self-knowledge
Getting to love our misery
Confidence in God's Mercy (1)
Confidence in God's Mercy (2)
Strengthening our perserverance
How to become more fervent
The practice of making satisfaction
Devotion to our Lady

These eleven chapters headings -- even if we never bothered to read the book -- would, in and of themselves, be a series of rules for increasing virtue despite the fact that we fallen creatures. I bought this book during Lent because, as if often the case, I was discouraged by the lack of progress I had been making.

If we consider our sins, and particularly, God's decision to allow it, we should consider carefully what it is about us and our disposition that God is seeking to chastise and removed. Beyond vanity and selfishness, what is God trying to extirpate? These concepts are difficult to put into practice. In the end, as it almost always is, pride and vanity are stumbling blocks to our progress. The reality of our fallen, broken natures colliding with the high esteem we hold ourselves are very difficult to swallow. But what this book reminds us is that our faults do not define us -- they would, but our Lord changed all of that. So despair is not an option -- cling to Lord above all-else, hope in the Lord for he is good and merciful and love the Lord because he made you and loves you more than you could ever understand.

Deo gratias.

Letter to Bishop Lori re: "Interfaith Prayer Service"

2011-05-15T09:00:00.005-04:00

Most Rev. William E. Lori
Diocese of Bridgeport CT
238 Jewitt Ave
Bridgeport, CT 06606-2892

Your Excellency,

Easter blessings to you Bishop Lori.

I write to you, however, on less joyous grounds. I was dismayed to read in the May 2011 issue of the Fairfield County Catholic an article entitled “Chancellor speaks at Interfaith Prayer Service.” It begins:

With prayers from the Koran, The Book of Mormon, the Bhagvad Gita, Hindu and Buddhist scriptures and the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, area clergy presided over the Annual Interfaith Service to celebrate Law Day (April 29) at St. Augustine Cathedral.

It further quotes Nancy B. Matthew, Chancellor of the Diocese of Bridgeport, addressing the gathering of local religious including a Jewish cantor, an Islamic Iman, a Hindi official, an Episcopal “priest,” a Mormon “president,” a Buddhist official and a Baptist pastor, “We are gathered as an interfaith community to celebrate Law Day and the great gift of living in the U.S.”

The article further reports that Msgr. J. James Cuneo, Judicial Vicar of the Diocese of Bridgeport, delivered the invocation, which, according to the Diocese's website .pdf copy of the same, had the following prayer:

Almighty God, in this gathering we know You by various names: God, Father, Great Spirit, Adonai, Allah, the Unity of All Being, Source and Center of Life, the Deity, the Guy Upstairs. Almighty God, as human beings we contemplate divine actions in various modes of causality or power or influence or imminence or transcendence. Almighty God, you are Creator of all that exists ... You are first cause of being, before which You alone exist, and without You there is nothing. You are in Heaven and All is right with the world. You are the Source of our Beginning and continue to be provident and sustaining with care. You are shepherd. You are Judge. You are Savior. You are Healer. You are Intelligent Designer. You are Wisdom. You are Mother Nature or Nature’s Mother. You are Ultimate Meaning. You are Truth. You are Total enveloping Peace and Harmony and Power of Being, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the Eternal, Supreme, Highest Good.

(http://www.bridgeportdiocese.com/index.php/fcc/article/2011_0503lawday)

The prayer, in the context in which it was offered, is scandalous: it pretends that all religions adore one and the same true God. Moreover, this prayer, offered by a Catholic priest, which is effusive in the many names of God, is ironic in that it omits the only name by which men may be saved, Jesus Christ.

It would seem to me that the temptation to offer such prayers are especially present in interfaith gatherings. Pope Pius XI, in Mortalium Animos, Jan. 6, 1928, utterly condemned interfaith meetings and ecumenical sharing on doctrinal grounds, holding these meetings not only forbidden, but equivalent to—in his words—a rejection of the true idea of religion—that is, apostasy. He writes, “Such efforts can meet with no kind of approval among Catholics. They presuppose the erroneous view that all religions are more or less good and praiseworthy, inasmuch as all give expression, under various forms, to that innate sense which leads men to God and to the obedient acknowledgement of His rule. Those who hold such a view are not only in error; they distort the true idea of religion, and thus reject it….To favor this opinion, therefore, and to encourage such undertakings is tantamount to abandoning the religion revealed by God.”

As your faithful servant, I am very discouraged that such an "interfaith meeting" took place with Catholic clergy leading prayers in union with false religions and teachers of false doctrines -- and, no less, in the Cathedral. While I do not profess to be any expert whatsoever in these matters, I bring my considerable concern and confusion to you because the actions that took place would appear to be rife with religious indifferentism and twinged with a spirit of syncretism. At the very least, the recent "interfaith meeting," which the Fairfield County Catholic trumpets in a positive light, certainly gives scandal to many faithful Catholics. The scandal takes on special character when it includes not only non-Catholic Christians obstinately reject communion with the Holy Father, but leaders from other religions who deny the divinity of our Lord and reject the Trinity. The thought of prayers from such leaders -- leaders who resist the teaching of Christ and counsel others to deny his divinity or the teaching power of Holy Mother Church -- being offered in our Cathedral is disheartening to the faithful.

You are my Bishop, standing in the shoes of the Apostles who came before you, and to whom my allegiance and duty is owed. Unlike the religious leaders of false gods and false teachings, you, after all, are the teacher of the one, true Living God and the representative of the one, true living Church. While I do not presume to teach you in any matter, I believe it is my Christian duty to raise these issues with you. I pray that the time will come (and soon) that such offensive gatherings and such offensive prayers will be condemned again as was the teaching of Pope Pius XI. I pray also that the time will come when the priests in your charge will preach fearlessly the utterly unique salvific power of Jesus Christ to all with ears to hear them.

If my inartful communication t has appeared impertinent or disrespectful in any way, I beg your pardon and reiterate that my presumption in bringing these matters to your attention was motivated solely by my love of Holy Mother Church and the deep and abiding respect to which I hold your solemn teaching office.

With filial devotion,

/s/

cc: Nancy B. Matthew, Chancellor of the Diocese of Bridgeport
Msgr. J. James Cuneo, Judicial Vicar of the Diocese of Bridgeport

He has Risen.

2011-04-24T07:15:00.006-04:00

O God, who, on this day, through Thine only-begotten Son, hast conquered death, and thrown open to us the gate of everlasting life, give effect by thine aid to our desires, which Thou dost anticipate and inspire. Through the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost . . .

(Collect, Easter Sunday)

The trials of the desert of Lent, the torment of our Lord's passion, and the horror of His crucifixion, have all, liturgically, passed. On Good Friday, our Lord accomplished the redemption of the elect. On Easter Sunday, He rises from the dead to the inexpressible joy of His crestfallen disciples. Loneliness and despair are replaced by an overwhelming happiness.

God is so good. My heart overflows with gratitude that God saw fit to save me. I marvel that He gave humanity His Church in which we can know Him, love Him and serve Him. All who know me -- and it really is not different from anyone else -- anyone who knew the depths of my travails and failings should see the wonder of God's mercy. I am a haughty, proud, insufferable soul: the most undeserving of His followers. That may sound like hyperbole, but it is not. My soul is overwhelmed by His mercy, which I did not deserve. Praise His Glory.

I praise God today with all of my might. The God of Abraham, the God of Issac, the God of Jacob. I praise my God with my whole soul. The God of the Incarnation. The God who walked in the Galilean foothills and worked with His hands in His foster-father's workshop. I praise God with my whole soul. The God who healed the sick, cured the blind and the deaf, restored the lame, and raised the dead to life. I praise God with my whole soul. The God who endured His passion and execution at the hands of sinners so that we might have life and have it abundantly. I praise with my whole soul.

The "world" is opposed to His rescue mission. The so-called wise and learned are, in reality, fools. All of them -- stupid fools. We live in an important age: a penultimate age, it would seem, in which the forces of darkness appear to have reached the pinnacle of power. For mysterious reasons, we Christians were born now to contend for faith and hope in this debauched age. But so we contend. What is required is a hero's heart of courage clothed in the sackcloth of humility. Our humility must be our predominant character: we must recognize that, compared to God, we are nothing . We should fall prostrate before the power and glory of the living God. Who are we, selfish sinners, to make demands of God?

What we have to reject, in all of its forms, is fear and despair. Never, ever lose hope. God is infinitely greater than His enemies, He is also greater than your enemies. His mercy is an endless ocean of mercy that engulfs your islands of sin. He wills us into existence and wills to forgive if there is authentic repentance. We should serve this God and this God alone.

Fear is the commodity of the dark one. The great liar is still whispering to us; still intimating that God is not everything we know Him to be. Our best weapon against the liar is hope -- to doggedly follow God despite our failings. We are not His because of our righteousness: we were never righteous. We are not His because of our goodness: we were never good. No, we are His as miserable sinners without any hope otherwise. Our God looked upon His creation and saw man, His special creation, mired in misery, confusion and sin and He was merciful. Jesus testifies to this truth

On this Easter Sunday, which finds me on the cusp of forty years, I recommit myself with all of my heart and soul to my good God who has done so much for His lowly servant. So even though I have disappointed my Lord with serious sin, from which I do not shirk or minimize (indeed, I confess them to be great), I praise and hope in my Lord. I believe He will save me. His glory, holiness and mercy are much, much greater than my wickedness and infirmity. I praise and thank my God for all He has done. And when His glory was made most manifest on the day of Resurrection, I praise Him. He is good and kind and loving, and I praise Him.

Christ the King, have mercy on us.

Good Friday 2011

2011-04-22T08:05:00.005-04:00

O God, from whom Judas received the punishment of his guilt, and the thief the reward of his confession: grant unto us the full fruit of Thy clemency; that even as in His Passion, our Lord Jesus Christ gave to each a retribution according to his merits, so having taken away our old sins, He may bestow upon us the grace of His Resurrection. Who with Thee liveth and reigneth in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.

(Collect, Good Friday: Mass of the Presanctified)

What would the world be like without Jesus Christ?

On Good Friday and Holy Saturday, we should experience, at least liturgically, what the profound absence of our Lord would mean.

For many years, I lived without regard for our Lord -- I lived as if His life, death and resurrection had no meaning. The fruits of such a life can be expected. But for reasons I do not understand, God threw me, his most undeserving servant, a lifeline in the form of faith. I know all too well what it means to life without Him, so Good Friday has a dimension to which I can relate that perhaps other, less defiled human beings have experienced.

If we look at much of the world around us, it proceeds largely in an atheistic denial of the Trinitarian reality around it. And what reigns? Confusion, immorality, anger, violence, and distrust to name a few. For the modern man that has thrown off the mantle of God and Church, he, ironically in his smugness, it utterly without a rudder. The small "g" gods of technology etc. only provide an imperfect deity -- they are still subject to the whim of God's power in nature. Look only at the Japanese tsunami: one of the world's most advanced (and godless) societies was thrown into complete disarray with its super-advanced nuclear infrastructure in ruins. I am not one to necessarily attribute every natural disaster to God's master plan, but one can surmise with some degree of certainty that more Japanese fell down on their knees to pray to God in the wake of the disaster than would have otherwise been.

Speaking from experience, life without Jesus Christ is not without its own sense of morality. Indeed, there are a multiplicity of moralities that have arisen without him. Modern men and women often see themselves as intensely moral -- they are often hyper-sanctimonious in their belief in the equality of animals, the reality of global warming, the necessity of hybrid cars or the "right" to all variety of abominations like abortion, sodomy or obscenity. For the remainder of moderns, life is a series of distractions: for men, it is often sports and carousing; for women, shopping and dining and travel. If there is one predominant theme, it is the undeniable collective confusion -- a discordant note that rings throughout and serves as notice that we do not have a "community" in any sense of the word.

So when we contemplate the absence of our Lord -- on the altars of all of His churches today and tomorrow -- pray for your friends and family who live mired in this absence every day of the year. We Christians can bear it because we know the end of the story; we know how this ends and joy will follow the depths of sadness. Those ones out there live only in the darkness of his absence.

For all of those that need my prayer -- more than I can often remember -- I pray for you today. O Lord, make me a faithful Christian. Forge again my heart from its current hardness into something more pleasing to you.

Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

2011-04-02T10:29:00.003-04:00

"A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.”

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

I have read my fair share of books over the course of my life. While I do not read "comedy" per se, I can honestly say that only two books have ever elicited out-loud laughter. The first was Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and the other was Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. It is that funny; and its humor increases in direct proportion to the reader's sense of literary and historic trivia.

The story of this work's postumous publication is, in and of itself, worthy of its own treatment. The tragic tale of Toole's suicide followed by his mother's dogged efforts to see her dead son's book published with the assistance of famed author Walker Percy is almost too far-fetched to believe. But it all happened, and Toole won a pulitzer prize in 1980 eleven years after he gave up the ghost.

It is hard to explain what exactly Conferacy of Dunces is. It is easy to understand why many publishers shied away from publishing it in the mid-1960s: it defies an easy categorizaion. It was ahead of its time -- a book seemingly about nothing in particular.

Ignatius Reilly looms large in Confederacy of Dunces -- both metaphorically and literally. He is a study in duality He is both hero and anti-hero in one. He is sage and fool. He is charmed and cursed. Fortuna's cruel hand of fate has crushed him -- or has she. Ignatius Reilly is many things, but he is a man born one-thousand too late. An obscure medievalist, born to ponder the weighty metaphysical questions of life with no patience for the mundane, is thrust into existance in the banality of the mid-twentieth century. So much of the comedy of this book finds itself in the disconnect precisely between the medieval and modern worldview colliding. While Confederacy of Dunces has a certain slapstick quality on account thereof, Reilly is no modern day Don Quixote, there is more tragic quality to Reilly and this book. In a literary sense, the tragedy finds itself in the scenes that have all of the earmarks of humor but, instead of laughing, we cringe. For those of you that have ever watched "The Office" may know what I mean -- those moments that are not funny at all but make our skin crawl at the sheer breakdown of social convention. Reilly has moments just such as these.

The setting for this temporally challenged misfit is New Orleans. Toole is positively masterful in transporting us in full living color to a New Orleans with a cast of characters that make us feel that we know what it was like to walk the crooked streets of the Crescent City during the Kennedy administration. His characters are not the scions of New Orleans aristocracy: no, they are the underbelly of the city. He paints them so vividly in their interactions with Ignatius Reilly that we just do not want the book to end.

The driver of the story is that the thirty year old over-educated, slovenly misfit hero -- still living at home -- is compelled to find a "job" after his mother incurs a debt after smashing her fifteen year old Dodge into a building during an argument with this same large and tempestous son. His attempts to interact with the real world, in real places for real money is priceless. All the while, Reilly is carrying on a war of correspondence with his former "sort-of" girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff. Myrna is Ignatius's only serious challenger -- her worldview is diametrically opposed to his.

This book is one suffused with Catholicism. It is a Catholicism that is neither exalted nor condemned. It is simply the atmosphere of New Orleans. Reilly, being the medievalist, has a bizarre but interesting form of faith. In some ways, Confederacy would have been impossible without Catholicism. Moreover, the book, while far from a lament against modernism, cannot but help provide a context that the changing world -- the modernizing world -- is in some way a retrogression for mankind.

I would recommend this book with some reservation. It is a comedic masterpiece with occasional moment of darkness. It is often highly irreverent. But it is also true to life. Coming from a large immigrant family, the loud and obnoxious characters that round of Confederacy are a genuine slice of Americana in its most unscripted. Toole is in many ways the painter of a still life -- his book recreates scenes of life without any editorializing. Reilly is, of course, his commentary on all of this stuff of life as we know it. But overall this book will resonate with readers not for its absurdity (and it is very absurd), but in its realism.

It is a shame indeed that John Kennedy Toole took his life. Perhaps had he not we would have never known him. But there were surely other books he would have written. I pray that the young man who took his life in 1969 was mentally ill and that his act of self destruction was mitigated somehow.

Our Lady, Mirror of Justice, Pray for Us.

Brief Hiatus

2011-02-26T06:50:00.001-05:00

I haven't written for about a month: my brain needed a break.

Pending are two book reviews, Confederacy of Dunces and The Idiot.

May God bless you.

The Lost Boys

2011-01-29T23:59:00.003-05:00

And they came to Jericho: and as he went out of Jericho, with his disciples, and a very great multitude, Bartimeus the blind man, the son of Timeus, sat by the way side begging. Who when he had heard, that it was Jesus of Nazareth, began to cry out, and to say: Jesus son of David, have mercy on me. And many rebuked him, that he might hold his peace; but he cried a great deal the more: Son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus, standing still, commanded him to be called. And they call the blind man, saying to him: Be of better comfort: arise, he calleth thee. W ho casting off his garment leaped up, and came to him. And Jesus answering, said to him: What wilt thou that I should do to thee? And the blind man said to him: Rabboni, that I may see. And Jesus saith to him: Go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he saw, and followed him in the way.

(Gospel According to Saint Mark 10: 46-52)

I am spiritually blind.

Like many of my generation, the ethos of our materialist age defines the bounds of my cultural experience and informs my views at the deepest recesses of my being. Like the air we breathe, I was born, raised, and educated into the suffocating culture of modernism. The stuff of modern culture, i.e., music, film, art, style, ethics, morality, and politics, speaks to me and serves a subconscious point of departure for analyzing and experiencing everything around me. From what I value, to what outrages me, or to what tugs at my heartstrings has been programmed in me in a macro-sense. I did not choose it – it was an accident of my birth. After all, who would choose in a metaphysical bargain to enter the world at a time when the culture ensconcing one would be a cesspool of nihilism and base primal-ism. But here I am – in this cultural moment of rot.

Culture informs everything: our views of the trivial to the sublime. Cultures, like men, do not exist in a vacuum -- they reflect in part what once was, what exists now, and what is becoming. Even our decadent culture is not wholly depraved: it even is a distant and shadowy reflection of glorious Christendom. Indeed, if it is good at all, it must reflect Christendom. That it is sinking under the weight of barbarism and licentiousness is obvious, but it retains some value nonetheless. While we aspire for a renewed culture, we cannot escape the one imposed on us from without.

I grew up unchurched in an American middle class lapsed Catholic family in 1970s and 1980s. A product of the public schools, I was an unexceptional boy: a virile and headstrong jock. Like many underachieving and immature boys, I mistook rebellion as a sign of authenticity – of being actually alive. I was no automaton, or so I thought, and I seethed against conventionality. As a teenager and college student, I stumbled and groped about: seeking relief for the gaping hole in my soul through only some of the distractions modernism provides: drinking, carousing, skirt chasing, sports, movies, television, and music. I was dissipated before I even knew what dissipation was. Despite my efforts, I was an automaton: a very pedestrian product of a cultural machine. My whole life lay before me – I could have passed through it all without ever knowing that I was the captive of a demonic cultural matrix – and that none of it was accidental at all.

Twenty-years later I am a home schooling father of six who exclusively attends the old Mass. From a secular point of view, I am a backward and insufferable reactionary curmudgeon (thanks be to God). How did I get off the cultural path perdition? There are many reasons (like a good wife), but like how we will face the judgment seat of God, I made this choice alone by the grace of God. Believing in God, i.e., in a creator generally, was the easy part. Rejection of God in the most general sense is something that has to be learned: it is unnatural. For the sentient being, the complexity, beauty, and grandeur of creation are a living testament to a creator. Those who actively disbelieve in God do not do so for intellectual reasons – rather, they disbelieve in spite of His obviousness – because they rage and will not believe.

Even the general and vague notion of “God” has been handled by our culture. It seems to say that if you cannot accept the materialist premise of atheism, at least reduce God to a distant and nebulous force that only cares, if at all, that we tolerate one another. The modernist notion of God does not opine on personal issues of morality or the social phenomena of, for example, divorce, abortion or homosexuality. Indeed, this notion is the perfect expression of what the American framers evidently would have wanted God to be: an aloof clockmaker. So even if you happen wake up to the reality of a creator, you are not out of the woods – not by a long shot. Even mainstream “religious” institutions, certain Catholic ones included, work to anesthetize those looking for an authentic and full expression of God. They too have been captured by the culture and are now as much as product of a defective environment as the rest of us are.

But some of us -- for reasons we will never fully understand in this life -- escape. For me, an openness to God, a willingness to listen to people of faith, and a slew of good books slowly led from one thing to another until I now find myself now praying the Pater Noster every Sunday at a church an hour from my home. More than anything, I did not want to live with compromise. I wanted to follow this “God” down the rabbit-hole no matter where He led me. All “Trads” are, in a sense, “converts.” But some of us are double-converts: we converted first to the Catholic Church in the ordinary sense. We went through our local parish’s RCIA program and experienced the Church first through the new liturgy and accompanying new theology. We then converted, as it were, to Tradition.

The excitement of coming to Tradition is exhilarating. Knowing Him -- knowing now what to live for and how to live is the pearl of great price. The difference between post- and pre-conciliar Catholicism is, of course, liturgical and theological. But for the layman, like me, it is most importantly differentiated by emphasis: The Church before the Council expected its adherents to value and live Catholicism as the defining aspect of their lives. That not all did misses the point entirely – from the depths of the Church, we were called to be saints. The post-conciliar Church is one in practice that no longer puts that burden on its dwindling members. What was once a cult seeking perfection is now a pastoral association satisfied with mediocrity. Heroism is out – hugs and sharing are in. Whatever I wanted from this life, whatever it was, it was never mediocrity. I suspect why men in particular have left the Church in droves is because they instinctively recoil at this new cult of soppy mediocrity.

I now know what Christendom is – it is the meaty and all-encompassing challenge to live life heroically in God’s one true Church – and I want to live it. I emphatically want to raise my family for something different – something good – something better than I had. Not only do I want my children to live life abundantly and be with God forever, I want my children to avoid the scars that I bear on my soul and plague me still.

So into this new life, we build a new culture. Life centered on the sacrifice of the Holy Mass, the rosary, the liturgical calendar and other traditional devotions are, in and of themselves, cultural expressions. Home schooling is as much a cultural expression as it is a negation of the predominant anti-culture around us. For example, I raise my children to learn classical and sacred music (even if I knew neither in my youth). I want them to learn Latin and read the Great Books (of which I was also ignorant). I want them to go to Washington every January to see that others too are fighting for a culture of life. I want them to grow up as women and men – as those terms were understood not so long ago. As it relates to negation, I am ruthless in what I cut out in terms of cultural poison. Our family has no television. Our children do not, for the most part, listen to contemporary music. We allow no sleepovers. While we are no Luddites (indeed, we are as wired as they come), our children have no email accounts, no Facebook accounts, and certainly no mobile telephones. Access to the Internet is strictly limited. We understand that there are different parenting views on the extent children should be exposed to cultural messages – they cannot, after all, be raised hermetically sealed from the “world,” nor would we want them to be – but if we err, we err on the side that less outside culture is better than more for our children. All of these things are very different from my own upbringing -- improvements undoubtedly.

But the point is that I am part of a movement that is seeking to both regenerate a culture in real time and live in it simultaneously. Let me be clear: while I eagerly seek to raise my children in the fullness of Catholic life and a corresponding culture of beauty and truth, I am nonetheless in search of a culture I have never known. As a father, I am blind man leading my family in search of the right way to live culturally.

It is easy to say I reject the “culture;” collectively, the cultures of death, irreverence, decadence, greed, violence, lust and disrespect. Indeed, I will to reject it. I will to experience life in a cultural expression that is the antithesis of the zeitgeist I knew before. But the problem is that the cultural rot is in my bones. It is not an attitude to throw off – like some bad habit. No; a lifetime of corrupt inculturation is more akin to a debilitating disease. It is the invisible chains that bind and confound. A culture of nihilism compounded with original sin and past actual sin result in a lethal cocktail of confusion and despair for people seeking safe harbor and meaning in this life.

The fact that I am not free from this “culture” was made recently clear to me. I was driving a rental car with satellite radio on a long ride and flipping stations. When I reached the “80s” station (my temporal home if you will), I listened to it, which I almost never do anymore. Intellectually, it was drivel: bad poetry with disorienting syncopation. Morally, it was trash: base sexual messages and an overindulgent sense of self. But it still resonated with me – despite this same intellectual or moral recognition. It literally transported me to an earlier stage in my life. As I turned it off, I was disgusted by its content but more so because I realized it is still in me. The culture – with all of its vulgar baseness – is still coursing imperceptibly through my veins.

This anecdote should be cautionary on several levels. Obviously, it serves a testament to why we should raise our children shielded from this cultural wasteland. It is hard enough to stay on the narrow path of salvation – why make it any harder for our children. The cultural toxins stay in one’s system for a long time and do exactly that. Speaking from personal experience, we, the dramatic conversions from a misspent youth, hang by a spiritual thread. Our kind has two additional spiritual obstacles that you who were raised in the Church do not have: we lived this culture of death and we sinned in it. So as I contend with the same dark and demonic forces dedicated to our collective destruction with a soul weakened by original sin like everyone else, I further contend with a culture of death impressed – and still disorienting – on my soul. Moreover, I walk wounded from my actual sinful interactions with it.

This is a reality I can neither escape nor pretend away. But strange as it may sound, my visceral disgust in recognizing my cultural prison was a moment of grace. It reminded me that my battle is – and will remain – a difficult one. I am reminded how much more I must buffet my body and soul so that I may not ultimately be cast off. So perhaps more than most, I intimately know the need for a savior. I knew a long time ago that left to my own devices, I have no hope – none. But I am not left alone to languish: He came for the sick. He came for the wounded. He came for me, and he came for you. And when I feel that that spiritual thread is frayed beyond repair, I recall the words of St. Peter to our Lord, “Lord, to whom should we go?” and once again I throw myself at the feet of God’s mercy. There is no other way – despair is not an option.

The title to this essay is more than an obscure reference to the cult 1980s movies, it is a description of my generation’s cultural privations – I am one of those lost boys. Thus what I help build into the cultural abyss with my family and like-minded travelers is something ultimately predicated on faith – it is something I have never seen firsthand. May God help us rebuild what was lost: the innocence in our greater culture and in each of us.

Deo Gratias.

Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy.

2011-01-19T21:27:00.004-05:00

“You want to know where it all began to go wrong?” Moon asks me, nodding towards a foursome of sepia golfers.

“Where?”

“It started when we abandoned the Latin mass.”

Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy.

We stand on the precipice of social disaster. The world we knew; the world our parents and grandparents knew is coming rapidly to an end. The inevitability of the United States as both place and idea is ending. What comes next is hard to say: but whatever it is, it will be harder on our children than it was on us.

When we are most vulnerable – when we have finally arrived at the generation of men and women who do not know how to do virtually anything with their hands – our manmade gods of the state, the market, fiat currency and technology will fail us. It took roughly three generations to wipe out thousands of years of practical knowledge of how to live without modern conveniences. Today’s men and women cannot do anything let alone sew a hem, can a jar of fruit, fix an engine, sow a field, raise a barn or butcher a cow or chicken. The time is fast approaching when these skills will be as valuable as those professional skills now so highly sought.

Many have prognosticated American destruction that now seems now to be a question of when as opposed to if. Some have been dour about our end; with a toddy in his hand, Walker Percy approached it with a smile and a wink.

Love in the Ruins, published in 1971, is a largely comedic dystopian look a future United States in ruin. It is essentially about fragmentation: the country’s fragmentation along racial, religious and political lines. Percy’s dystopia is a creeping apocalypse. The world as we knew exists in aspects, but mostly everything is broken or breaking. There is still a sense of order – even ordinariness – but the social fabric of our future in Love in the Ruins is badly frayed. The cult of technology, well on its way in 1971, is well represented. The idea that machines will eventually replace -- or at least serve as necessary intermediaries -- the most intimate human experiences and relationships is not lost on Percy. While Percy’s account is not intended to be prophetic, the slow breakdown of social order is how it will happen – and is happening now.

Percy’s book is strange – with an almost otherworldly science fiction quality to it – but he is primarily interested in the fragmentation of man individually. The protagonist is Dr. Thomas More: a descendant of the great English saint and martyr. He describes himself as follows:

I, for example, am a Roman Catholic, albeit a bad one. I believe in the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, in God the Father, in the election of the Jews, in Jesus Christ His Son our Lord, who founded the Church on Peter his first vicar, which will last until the end of the world. Some years ago, however, I stopped eating Christ in Communion, stopped going to mass, and have since fallen into a disorderly life. I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all. Generally I do as I please. A man, wrote John, who says he believes in God and does not keep his commandments is a liar. If John is right, then I am a liar. Nevertheless, I still believe.

Dr. More is more than a lapsed Catholic. He was the abandoned husband of a now-deceased wife who left him to “find herself” in eastern religions taught by western posers. He is a forty-five year old heavy drinker grieving over his deceased only daughter. He is also an occasional mental patient. He is also an inventor: his invention, More’s Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer (MQQOL) measures the soul from “angelism” to “bestialism.” This “stethoscope” for the soul is as odd as it sounds -- a literary symbol for the incongruity between materialism and spiritualism. Whether his machine works is not as important as the fact that scientism is at war with the idea of the soul.

Like the broader society that Percy depicts: More’s life is a metaphor to the disordered stupor around him. Whether More is sane or insane, drunk or sober, dreaming or wakeful, there is an element throughout the book that More may not be the most reliable guide to the world around him. Whether the MQQOL does all of the things that More believes it does -- or whether its misuse can cause Armageddon -- is never clear.

More is a lustful and self-destructive man but he is honest all the same. He is honest in his lustfulness and his self-destruction through drink. He is even honest about his sincerity as a human being. In one of the more powerful passages, More recounts:

I wonder: did it break my heart when Samantha died? Yes. THere was even the knowledge and foreknowledge of it while she still lived, knowledge that while she lived, life still had its peculiar tentativeness, people living as usual by fits and starts, aiming and missing, while present time when humming, and foreknowledge that the second she died, remorse would come and give past time its better specious wholeness. If only -- If only we hadn’t been defeated by humdrum humming present time and missed it, missed ourselves, missed everything. I had the foreknowledge while she lived. Still, present time went humming. Then she died and here came sweet remorse like a blade between the ribs.

But is there not also a compensation, a secret satisfaction to be taken in her death, a delectation of tragedy, a license for drink, a taste of both for taste’s sake? ...

Samantha, forgive me. I am sorry you suffered and died, my heart broke, but there have been times when I was not above enjoying it.

 Either you understand the horror and honesty of that sentiment or you don’t. There a number of nuggets like the above in Love in the Ruins. They are mostly found in More’s self-reflection on his own motivations or those people around him. In these moments, Percy is at his best -- and they alone are worth the time to read Love in the Ruins.

If there is one shortcoming of the book, the elaborate dystopia that Percy creates -- in terms of its political, racial and religious observations -- is disjointed and scatterbrained. Perhaps that was the point, the disorder in the novel itself is a metaphor for “Paradise,” Louisiana. Perhaps not. But even when the disorder becomes predominant and the reader is left wondering what in fact I am reading, it is still interesting all the same.

In the end, More’s life is reordered by starting over again. He begins to live again -- with wife, children and poverty. For More, simplification is the means by which he starts society -- both large and small - over again.

 Love in the Ruins is no by means a diatribe against technology per se; rather it is a screed against those who in the name of technology and science would divest man of his soul. When a social order does that -- it falls into ruins and must begin again simply.

I would not recommend this book to everyone -- it would be a recommendation made with real and genuine caveats. Still, Walker Percy has a fresh and honest take on a human condition. He is worth the time.

Nihilists at the Gate

2011-01-16T12:35:00.001-05:00

“A nihilist,” said Nicholas Petrovich. “This word must come from the Latin Nihil, nothing, as far I as can judge; and consequently it signifies a man who ... who recognizes nothing?”

“Or rather who respect nothing,” said Paul Petrovich ...

“A man who looks at everything from a critical point of view,” said Arcadi ... “[A] nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, now matter what credit the principle has.”

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862) (coining the term “nihilism”)

On January 7, 2010, Jared Lee Loughner became infamous. The 22-year old college dropout murdered at least six Americans in Tuscon, Arizona, including a United States federal judge and a nine-year old girl. He wounded dozens others at a congressional “meet and greet” at, of all places, Safeway. For a small “r” republic that depends upon citizen-officeholders, Loughner’s crime is more than mass murder -- it is a deed that strikes at the heart of the American way of life.

In the face of this tragedy, pundits and careerist political hacks opportunistically tried to connect the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others to the “Tea Party” movement or the so-called overheated political rhetoric during the run-up to the last mid-term election. The unsubstantiated allegation is that right-wing zealots created a climate of hostility and violence conducive to this act in particular. Even President Obama’s speech at the memorial for the victims on January 13, 2011 called for a kinder, gentler national discourse with renewed civility. While these are laudable ideals at any time, his timing was odd. Why did he view the memorial service for the Tuscon Memorial as the appropriate time to discuss “national civility?” Why not use the Tuscon Memorial for a national call for improved treatment for the mentally ill? Why not use it for the renewed call for gun control? Why was “political discourse” the predominant theme? While I understand generally that losing political parties are always the first to call for speech codes to silence their critics (e.g,, “calls for a kinder, gentler discourse”), there was something deeply offensive about President Obama’s timing in connecting the Tuscon shooting to political discourse: it implicitly provided his imprimatur that Loughner’s actions and the heated, full-throated criticism of his administration were related.

The pundits’ connection between Jared Loughner and political incivility has one inconvenient obstacle: Jared Lee Loughner was no right-wing zealot. Instead, while Lougher is certainly mentally ill; he was described by friends as a “pot head” and “left-wing” radical and atheist. Parenthetically, this point has been generally scrubbed from the mainstream media’s description -- after all, how does “left-wing pot head” fit with the conventional wisdom that now is the time to condemn right-wing political criticism. So even though the facts surrounding this tragedy do not support the allegation of a dangerous, superheated national discourse, these same pundits will continue to beat the drum that this event is somehow a right-wing tragedy in the making. When confronted with these inconvenient facts, they seem to argue, much like President Obama’s speech, that “national civility” is still a timely subject because this tragedy easily could have been a right-wing tragedy.

But there is more to this story. A perusal of Loughner’s cyber-life reveals a deeply confused young man. Apparently he identified his favorite books as including The Republic, The Odyssey, The Communist Manifesto, and Mein Kampf. Other sources identify his favorite authors as Ayn Rand. Any one of those books could be the favorite of someone -- the fact that all were his favorites demonstrates that he had not read them very carefully. His list is not surprising for an alienated, young misanthrope.

If there is a macro-theme to be drawn from the Loughner shooting, it is not that “Tea Party” types attend boisterous and carnival-like rallies supporting lower taxes and the Second Amendment. In fact, the speed by which professional Leftists (including our President) pointed the finger at political speech as a social explanation for this young man’s actions is very telling. No, but there is a lesson to be learned. The reality is that the Left -- animated by a defiant and diabolical demeanor -- is responsible for creating a modernist culture by which Jared Loughner (and countless other young people) are warped into believing their lives -- and the lives of others -- have essentially no meaning.

As we all know too well, our modernist culture is base. It literally inverts good and bad and virtue and vice -- and it is a direct byproduct from the Leftist hothouse of ideology. The most vile pornography is now celebrated as a First Amendment expression -- and it is impossible to even define legally what obscenity means. Fornication is now a rewarding experience of exploration for young people. And if the school-sponsored birth control should fail (which often happens), there is no need for concern, the local Planned Parenthood clinic will “dispose” of the inconvenient mess by way of legal abortion for $500. Marriage is now redefined to make Sodom look like Mayberry, North Carolina. Divorce is now a much more likely outcome for marriage than is spending your golden years surrounded by your wife, children, and grandchildren. All of these social retrogressions, of which the media and schools fill young people’s heads, create a culture that is, at core, animalistic. If reduces man to simply instinct -- and even a moderately intelligent young person knows that there is no moral culpability for animals or the deterministic hand of instinct.

Ivan Turgenev, quoted above, gave his nihilist main character in Fathers and Sons, Bazarov, the foregoing observation about man:

“Hey! Well, Arkady Nikolaevich, I see you understand love like all our modern young men: ‘Here, chick, chick! Here, chick, chick!’ But as soon as the chick starts to approach, you run like hell! I'm not like that. . . . Look! Here's a heroic ant dragging away a half-dead fly. Go on, brother, pull! Don't pay any attention to her resistance; take advantage of the fact that as an animal you have the right not to feel any compassion, unlike us, self-destructive creatures that we are”

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862) quoting Yevgeny Vasil’evich Bazarov. For Bazarov, animals are superior because they do not suffer from the self-destructive anachronism of “compassion” that human beings exhibit.

But while the “animalizing” of man through the projection of base images and thoughts upon young and sensitive minds is bad enough, it is complemented by a prevailing ideology that instructs that man is not only an animal, he has no worth and his life and world around him are meaningless.

What these two complementary prongs do is reduce man first to an animal and second to worthlessness. As such, they are an assault on reason and reality as it is, because, as we know and believe, God created the universe in an ordered and largely knowable way. The modernist culture thus is a cauldron of contradictions and half-truths -- raging all the time in this way or that way and denying the reality and meaning of everything. Of all the scuttlebutt circulating about this isolated and disturbed young man, one thing struck above all as definitive about him and his worldview:

In June [2010], a [Pima Community College] counselor investigated an incident in which Loughner had disrupted a math class. When she inquired, Loughner first said that he was offended by the inquiry, then explained, "My instructor said he called a number 6, and I said I call it 18." He said he also asked the instructor to explain, "How can you deny math instead of accept it?"

While the mental health establishment will likely diagnose Loughner as a paranoid schizophrenic, there is more here (which, ironically enough, the mental health establishment helped create). There is pure negation in his answer -- there is unadulterated nihilism in his outlook. Not only every facet of social interaction become meaningless and undefinable in Loughner’s world; simple facts of the world became meaningless and re-definable by exertion of the will. We have moved now from a cultural nihilism that has denied the authority and reality of first of Church and God; second, state and government; third, parents and family; and lastly, now even the very material facts that served as the basis for rejecting the first three.

Jared Loughner is undoubtedly mentally ill; but the context for his mental illness is a modern world witnessing the fruits of a social ideology predicated upon negation. Every time one of the young nihilists acts out in horrifying fashion -- like Jared Loughner or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School almost twelve years earlier -- the Left desperately wants to change the discussion from the root cause. But that is the discussion we should be having.

While we live in dark times, one benefit is that the lines between the darkness and light are becoming sharper. This demonic age has embraced nihilism as its managing principle -- nothingness, nothingness and nothingness. The difference between that and God’s reign and plan for the elect could not be more stark. Instead of dissolving into cosmic nothingness, God’s children will be restored to celestial bliss for eternity. Instead of wailing and gnashing in anger and confusion, God’s children will know Him in peace and joy. What right-thinking human being would ever apply their faculties in favor of nihilism? Yet we nonetheless see a broad and wide vineyard of nihilists-in-training.

Jared Loughner is symbolic of how far our culture has collapsed. Into this abyss we must expect the Church to rise. Man has never been more ripe to hear the authentic Gospel of Jesus Christ and the reality of his one, true Church on Earth if only her pastors would preach it. Now is not the time to make nice with a culture in its death throes spitefully looking to share its misery with every conceivable soul. Now is not the time for a soft and pudgy cultural Christianity that seeks to “understand” and “comfort” the world in her misery. No, we need Church Fathers with courage and resolve to prophetically challenge this culture. But in order to do that, we need Church Fathers who recognize, as St. Pius X so recently taught, that modernism is the problem. Like our forefathers who converted the barbarians during the Roman Empire’s collapse, our generation’s obligations is to convert the new barbarians -- the nihilists at the gate.

Our Lady of Fatima, Pray for Us.

The End of History and the Last Republican

2011-01-09T14:27:00.001-05:00

These should be halcyon days for the Republican Party.

In less than four years in the political wilderness, 2010 has seen the GOP resurrected as the ascendant political party. Moreover, in the thirty years since the Reagan Revolution, the Republican Party has controlled the Presidency or at least one house of Congress in all but two years. The manifesto of that revolution was predicated upon, among other things, reigning in government, limiting taxation and building a strong national defense. As political themes, they have monopolized the public policy questions of our day. Even in opposition, the Democratic Party has defined itself largely in terms of these questions. President William Clinton’s statement that, “the era of big government is over” was emblematic of the Republican monopoly of the terms for public discourse.

Coming off historic gains in the 2010 mid-term elections, the Republican Party would seem the party of ideas -- and the party of the recent past and immediate future. But appearances are deceiving: the Republican Party is in fact at the crest of its rear-guard action: its future is bleak. A host of factors drive this prediction. For example, future demographics do not ultimately favor a party that is based upon the voting power of white men. But the death knell for the Republican Party does not lie in realpolitik considerations; rather, it will recede to the margins of American political life because it ultimately bereft of meaningful ideas.

I am not one its detractors: I am registered Republican who has never, at least as far as I can remember, ever voted for Democratic candidate in any election. I am also not a soft Republican a la Lincoln Chafee or Susan Collins. No, I do no recoil at the challenging social policy positions taken by the Republican Party that bring liberal Republicans to feats of self-flagellation before their liberal friends. So my conclusion is not driven by hope: I have no personal stake in the GOP’s demise.

While I disagree with the Democratic Party’s vision, it is not a party of negation. It has become a total political movement: seeking to address every issue of man’s life in both practical and moral terms. Stated differently, the American left, which comprises the Democratic Party’s heart and soul, has a sense of “cult.” Culture may broadly be defined as the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that comprise, among other things, a nation. The American left understands correctly that most of their fellow men aspire to live for “something.” Accordingly, they seek to build a culture of their own making that defines society in moral terms.

The use of words like “cult” and “moral” may seem ill-fitting to a party identified by its irreligiosity and anti-traditional morality, but these words are broad enough to encompass a worldview that is aggressively moral and religious in its own way. For example, the environmental “whacko,” for the lack of a better term, is typically a leftist whose personal opinions and behavior are defined by a strong sense of personal morality. The same is true for the feminist abortion crusader who frames the issue in terms of its own moral understanding, i.e., the moral right to live life according to one’s own dictates. These issues are ultimately framed in terms of culture. All one has to do is peruse this week’s The Nation to see that the left is a movement that defines itself in terms of “cultus.”

Professor Francis Fukuyama famously argued in The End of History and the Last Man that liberal democracy is the last evolutionary step in the ordering of human societies. His thesis, which draws deeply from the wellspring of Hegelian thought, rejects culture as a driver in future social ordering. Others, like Professor Samuel Huntington, have strongly disputed Fukuyama’s view and placed culture as the main driver in international relations. And how could it not be?

Notwithstanding its current successes in both state and federal elections, the GOP is essentially a party of negation. To its detractors, it is the party of “no;” and that moniker is more accurate than one might initially suspect. The Republican Party has more or less adopted Fukuyama’s low view of culture. This is true as it relates discretely to American foreign policy: the so-called neo-conservatives aggressively seek to export liberal democracy to the rest of the world (and the Middle East in particular) as if it can be shoe-horned by American diplomats (or worse, by American tanks). But more broadly, the Republican Party’s vision of culture is non-existent: it has no positive ideas to offer. It is almost as if no one knows for what purpose the GOP wants limited government? Lower taxes is inherently a relative concept: a political movement that defines itself in pursuit of a relative concept is doomed just as much as a political movement that has no idea of to what commonweal it aspires? The central question is to what human flourishing does the GOP appeal? This vision deficit will eventually destroy the GOP because every political movement must define itself in terms of the social order it wants to perpetuate it. You can only be the party of “no” for just so long.

Culture matters. The American left understands this concept -- the Republican Party does not. A party defined by “no” is eventually destined for destruction. Eventually and inevitably, the Democratic Party will resume it status as dominant party if for no other reason that it offers a social ordering that is morally derived. Americans -- and all people for that matter -- want a society that is ultimately moral. Until the Republican Party understands that and offers a competing moral vision, it has no future.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

2011-01-07T14:14:00.002-05:00

And you, Russia of mine—are not you also speeding like a troika which nought can overtake? Is not the road smoking beneath your wheels, and the bridges thundering as you cross them, and everything being left in the rear, and the spectators, struck with the portent, halting to wonder whether you be not a thunderbolt launched from heaven? What does that awe-inspiring progress of yours foretell? What is the unknown force which lies within your mysterious steeds? Surely the winds themselves must abide in their manes, and every vein in their bodies be an ear stretched to catch the celestial message which bids them, with iron-girded breasts, and hooves which barely touch the earth as they gallop, fly forward on a mission of God? Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes—only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol.

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s Dead Souls is a fascinating work with vivid characters. According to a treatise on Russian literature, Gogol:

was born in the Mirgorod district of the Ukraine in 1809. His early life was spent on his father's country estate. Nikolai Gogol moved to St. Petersburg in 1828 with the intention of becoming a full-time professional writer. His first published work, a long narrative in verse, was received with indifference by the critics, and the sensitive Gogol fled from Russia in shame. When he returned from Europe in 1829, Gogol first tried to find work as an actor, but was eventually forced to take a minor post in the civil service to support himself. His experiences in the government bureaucracy are reflected in some of his later stories, especially "The Nose" and "The Overcoat." Gogol began working on Dead Souls in 1835. The basic idea of the story was suggested to Gogol by AlexanderPushkin. Pushkin seems to have understood Gogol as a writer quite well; Pushkin felt that the idea of a man travelling all over Russia buying up the ownership rights to serfs who had died would allow Gogol what would be most conducive to Gogol's literary success-- the opportunity to introduce a multitude of characters, varied settings, mountains of detail, and the scope within which to be able to elaborate the anecdotal kernel of the work to his heart's content. For the next six years, Gogol devoted almost all of his creative energy to this novel. His compulsive craftsmanship is evident in that the entire work was revised at least five times; the author stated that some passages had been rewritten as many as twenty times. Only the first part of Dead Souls, (twelve chapters in all) was completed by Gogol. The second part, as we know it, (some chapters of which are often published with the first part) is a recreation from various sources of what Gogol might have done with the continuation of his work; he burned what he actually had written of the second part just nine days before his death.

The treatise continues:

Part One of Dead Souls was completed and published in 1842. This version was titled The Adventures of Chichikov because the religious censorship objected to the phrase "dead souls" as being theologically contradictory. However, in later editions the censors relented, and the work appeared with the original title Gogol had given it, Dead Souls: An Epic. Some critics found the novel to be, in fact, a modern-day epic; others thought it ridiculous at best and offensive at worst to claim such a status for the novel. (You must draw your own conclusions regarding this question, and to do so you will need some idea of the traits associated with traditional epic poetry. You may want to consult a standard reference of literary terms, such as Holman and Harmon's A Handbook to Literature. The situation from which the novel develops is based upon a scheme which theoretically was possible in Gogol's day. The government had a policy of loaning money to landowners, feeling that this class was its strongest support. Lands owned, however, were measured not in acres, but by the number of "souls" (that is, serfs) residing on them. Landowners were, then, really serf owners. The government was ready to accept the land (that is, the serfs) of an individual as collateral for a loan. Thus, a method was required by which the holdings of an individual landowner could be established at any given time. This method stated that an individual possessed the number of serfs recorded as belonging to him or her in the most recent census. The census was taken every ten years, which meant that near the end of the ten-year cycle almost every landowner would have some serfs who were not recorded in the preceding census because they had recently been born, and some serfs still recorded even though they had died since the last census. In Dead Souls, the main character, Chichikov, schemes to buy from the serf holders a number of those "souls" who had died but were still counted as living until the next census. Once Chichikov had a number of such souls, he would apply to the government bank for a loan, using the "souls" as his collateral. With this low-interest loan in hand he would then buy and work an actual country estate, eventually paying back the loan and purchasing living souls to work the land.

The story is related by a narrator who seems at times to be omniscient, at other times not. The general tone is humorously ironic. The characters and their actions seem to be an open book to the narrator, and while he overtly shows them great respect, he manages as well to illustrate their folly, coarseness, and often their ugliness. At times the narrator seems to abandon his usual posture of detailed, almost microscopic, scrutiny and to rise above the world he has created and view it in a much broader perspective. At these moments the ironic tone is replaced by a lyricism and enthusiasm which at first seem to contradict or at least to have little justification or basis in the main flow of the narrative. Such, for instance, is the lengthy passage on Russia and her destiny (end of Part One) and the passage on the special greatness of the Russian word (Chapter Six). Dead Souls is a remarkable work. It has called forth a great variety of critical reactions: it has been praised for its critical boldness in exposing the inequities of an unjust social order and condemned as a vicious slander on the Russian homeland; it has been understood as a satirical account of contemporary reality and as a modern-day national epic; it may be no more or less than an account of the world as seen by one convinced of its absurdity.

I enjoyed this work immensely. It is a quixotic look at Russia that has literally "laugh-out-loud" moments. It is a great loss that Gogol never lived to complete it. Considering that the Russians are the greatest writers; this book should be read if for no other reason that the pantheon of Russian authors all read him and drew on him in one way or another.

Letter To A Local Pastor

2011-01-05T21:48:00.008-05:00

Dear Father [],

Christmas greetings to you! I am writing to you today with a recommendation. While I am a not a parishioner of [], I have had the opportunity to attend Holy Mass there occasionally and frequent the sacrament of penance. I have also had the opportunity to meet you casually at []'s home following the baptism of his child a few years ago. I have been impressed with you.

By way of background, I am a married attorney and father of six beautiful home-schooled children in nearby []. I regularly attend the extraordinary form of Holy Mass in [] or in []. Father [] introduced me to the old “Latin” Mass several years ago when he was a priest in the Diocese of []. The ancient liturgy with its rich calendar and splendid – even timeless – music has had a transformative effect on me and my family. I am a relatively latecomer to Holy Mother Church; having been received into her bosom in my late twenties. As a essentially a convert (“re-vert” to be exact), I read my way into the Church; reading the Church fathers, lives of the saints, and other apologetic works like Chesterton or Belloc. The whole of Catholicism – its depth and holiness – finally made sense to me when I first opened my eyes to the old liturgy. Perhaps my view is informed by an aesthetic sensibility, but I think it is much deeper than that. I think rather that the old liturgy is more challenging and brings within it a heroic call to holiness: the theology that flows from it is generally more demanding, more austere, more other-worldly and more humbling. From my experience, it calls the whole of me to conversion.

As a thirty-nine year old, I was born after the close of the Second Vatican Council and after the implementation of the “new” Mass. While my opinion of the “new” Mass has changed since I entered into the Church in 1998, I recognize it as the “ordinary” form of the Roman Rite. I occasionally assist at it – like New Year’s Day when I assisted at [], which brings me to my decision to write you. My favorable impression of you leads me to speculate on several things. First, I believe that you are a holy priest – I believe that you want to please God first. Second, as a holy priest and shepherd, I believe that you want to lead your flock to greater holiness and, ultimately, to Heaven. Third, I believe that you rightly admire our Holy Father and want to emulate his efforts to purify and sanctify Holy Mother Church.

Like you, I too am a father. My domestic flock is smaller than yours – I have my wife and children. But my goal is the same for them as yours is for your flock. I want them to go to Heaven and enjoy bliss for eternity with our Lord, His blessed Mother and all of the saints. Many aspects of Catholicism – tried and true ways to achieve sanctity in this life – were imprudently discarded in favor of novelties that swept the Church in the 1960s and 1970s: Devotion to the rosary, making holy hours, observing the Eucharistic fast, making frequent confessions, Friday abstinence, the Baltimore Catechism, regular liturgical processions, Holy Name Society, to name a few – not to mention the manner in which a Catholic should comport themselves in the church itself – with prayerful reverence and awe for our Lord in the tabernacle. Setting aside whether these changes are responsible for crises engulfing Holy Mother Church in our time; they nonetheless are battle-tested ways our forefathers used with success.

So with all of these assumptions and observations, I humbly ask you to begin offering the extraordinary form of the liturgy at []. I suspect that you may not know how to offer it given that most priests do not. In the interim period of time, there are several holy priests in the area that you would likely assist you if you added a regular mass dedicated to the extraordinary form. I know several who would likely be more than willing to teach you – it will take some time but you could learn in a relatively short period of time. I ask you to form a schola to offer Gregorian chant – ageless music that comes from the heart of the Church. When the outside world offers noxious and offensive sounds masquerading as “music,” God’s people are all the more refreshed by the Church’s chant that calms and inspires the soul. I ask you to consider re-installing the altar rail at [] and distribute Holy Communion in the manner after the Holy Father now distributes it to the faithful – kneeling on the tongue. In short, I ask you to reinstate some of the traditions and devotions for which the very church that you now pastor was built.

If you heed my advice, I firmly believe that you would play a small part in the restoration of our Catholic culture, and, further, enrich your flock with a part of their rightful patrimony that nurtured some of our greatest saints. I also firmly believe that you would encourage vocations and increase the fervor of your flock.

Father, I apologize if my letter has been too bold. After all, I really do not know you that well, nor am I even one of your flock, so to speak. Quite frankly, I have never written a priest such a letter – for all I know, it will be promptly thrown out. Without the pretense of melodrama, I genuinely intuited that my recommendations would be well received by you in particular. Following the Holy Father’s issuance of the Summorum Pontificum, it is now your priestly right to offer Holy Mass in the same manner that countless saints and holy priests offered it for centuries. What a wonderful time of restoration we live in!

I will pray for you Father and petition our Lady to take special care of your priestly ministry. I wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Springtime in Pottersville

2010-12-13T20:38:00.013-05:00

Even so at this present time also, there is a remnant saved according to the election of grace.

Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans (11:5)

In the middle of a weekday, I recently found myself before an old Roman Catholic Church and School. This Catholic church and school was not so remarkable; in fact, it was typical of scores of churches and schools that were built in the Northeastern United States during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century by immigrant Catholics pooling their dimes and nickels. If I looked around a little more, I probably would have been able to figure out what nearby building once housed the convent in which the sisters lived who once taught at the school. The impressive stone facade of the church along with the neatly ordered red brick school building were obviously built to stand the test of time, and, indeed, have so withstood. The craftsmanship of buildings like these has long since vanished. The poor Catholics who built their towering churches and solid schools wanted them to be beautiful. Perhaps there was an element of ethnic pride -- a statement to the haughty Protestants around them that we Catholics had arrived. More likely is that they built these churches in such a grand fashion because they understood that their churches housed the real presence of our Lord.

Like so many such Catholic complexes, they were built in urban neighborhoods, and the schools have long since closed -- turned into apartments or community centers or simply shuttered. Even today, where they could still be an oasis of refreshment and light in a desert of urban blight, churches like these are likely to be padlocked most of the time.

These campuses are now hauntingly silent. When I closed my eyes, I can imagine the energy and activity that once surrounded them a hundred years ago: the children of immigrant Irish or Italian dressed neatly in school uniforms with Baltimore Catechism in hand, in tow with young nuns in full habits aside fresh-faced priests in cassocks. I can almost hear the bells ring and smell the incense that lingers over the the holy sacrifices offered there daily. Yes, I can almost see the life of my forefathers that once inhabited this now seemingly dead place. Strange to say, but these men actually made things in America. They toiled honestly with their hands for long hours six or seven days a week. Their wives also made due with considerable hardship and suffering. While this culture lionizes the "Greatest Generation" as the wise-cracking World War II soldier, I submit that the last century's generations of immigrants who eked out hardscrabble existences in a country that neither valued or appreciated them, raised families in chronic poverty yet persevered in growing and literally building their faith, and did so with little complaint are more deserving of the accolade. The sacrifice they expended in creating these churches and schools still echoes. The death of places like these, of course, makes me cringe. What did we do so wrong to throw away venerable places of worship and education like these?

In the hundred and twenty-five years of time that separate me from the hope and optimism of the beaming Christian people who laid the cornerstone for these buildings as a down-payment for a brighter Catholic future and the bleak and barren moment of decay comprising the Catholic moment today, something clearly dreadful happened. While it is obvious to me what that dreadful thing was, I am struck by incredulity that it is not obvious to everyone else.

Like almost anyone born after the Second Vatican Council, I am a "convert" to Tradition. Indeed, I was born (1971) at the period of time that one might surmise was the high water mark of the optimism of the post-Conciliar period. The new man-made Pentecost was in full bloom. No change in that which had been thought unchangeable was off-limits. The very soul of Holy Mother Church shook from the veritable tremors of novelty and transformation. The new theology was boring, bland and modern. If you want to see the physical manifestation of this theology -- look at the churches that were built in the early 1970s and you'll see what I mean. It was also a theology that detested "old" Catholicism with its clear doctrine, rich liturgies, and "otherworldliness." Truly, I entered the world at a dreadful hour.

Like almost all of my generation, for most of my life, I never knew another Catholicism had existed. Like the prisoners in Plato's cave, I genuinely believed that the shadows of Catholicism -- existing in the new and heretofore unrecognizable forms -- were the real thing. I did not know that the priest used to face the altar or that the prayers were once offered in an ancient tongue. I never knew that priestly vestments were anything other than polyester bed-sheets or that communion was distributed to the faithful in any other manner but in the hands of faithful dressed in Led Zeppelin tee shirts and ripped jeans. The things that I now take for granted and love about the faith are virtually the same things of which I was was utterly ignorant. Verily, an entire generation of Catholics of which I am a member were robbed of their birthright for a modernist mess of pottage.

Long after my re-version to the Catholic Church, after years of reading Church Fathers and the lives of the saints, I still did not know. Perhaps some can relate to me in this observation, for an intellectual type, re-version to the modern Church after reading the saints of old and other works of solid theology can be a confusing experience. While you read of great men and women of faith ready to sacrifice their life for our Lord, your encounter with the modern Church is filled with many people who seem to be going through the motions. Your enthusiasm runs into strong headwinds of aging hippie holdover priests who tell you that the Church you are reading about -- you know, the Catholic Church of old -- does not exist anymore and that the new Church doesn't condemn the world, she embraces it. Or the RCIA teacher who told me that "purgatory" was a doctrine on the way out or that artificial birth control is not wrong if you do not believe it is wrong for you. The disconnect between these two realities -- the Church of old as memorialized by her saints and doctors and the Church as she is experienced today by most Catholics -- could not be more stark.

It was almost as if there had been a conspiracy of silence by the vast majority of Catholics old enough to remember what had been jettisoned in the regime of novelty such that the younger generation would never know that the very meaning of what it meant to be Catholic had been radically altered. It is only by the grace of God that I discovered a whole world of Catholicism that fit everything I read in and around Catholicism that attracted me to her. When I first participated in the old Mass, when I first heard the Gregorian Chant calming my soul, I understood that this Catholicism of old -- this heroic and changeless Catholicism -- was far from dead. I also understood why men and women of old suffered so much at the thought of losing her. This authentic Catholicism was being carried on by the spiritual equivalent of the survivors of a nuclear war. In the midst of an utterly broken and immoral world, men and women of good will were preserving the soul of Catholicism.

But I digress. I am standing before an old Catholic church and closed Catholic school that can be found in any New York neighborhood pockmarked by urban rot. I am visualizing what once was. I am lamenting what has been lost. And a thought occurs to me: maybe we Catholics are living a nightmare. Maybe we will wake up tomorrow from what was only a collective bad dream to see reality as it should be. In our churches, reverent and ancient liturgies are offered. Our Catholic schools teem with respectful wide-eyed children taught by energetic and faithful sisters. Convents and monasteries are filled with holy men and women storming the gates of heaven with powerful prayers and sacrifices. Our bishops fearlessly proclaim the utterly unique salvific power of our Lord and his one true Church. They educate Catholic and non-Catholic alike on the social kingship of our Lord and the Catholic vision of social order. Our seminaries are filled with devout young men anxious to offer their lives for the greater glory of God. Orthodox Catholic colleges educate young people in mind and soul in the greatest traditions of the Church's intellectual wellsprings and these young men and women are the seedbeds for future faithful families or vocations. Large families centered around faith are the norm -- with mothers raising their little ones and fathers supporting them by hard work. The Church's missionary work is impressive: as Protestantism continues to collapse (which was, after all, inevitable), conversions of numerous people is a regular Easter occurrence. Our society resists the temptations of divorce, abortion, obscenity and contraception. Yes, I can see it: I can see a bright, vibrant Catholic society. Surely it could have been.

But that is not the world in which we live. Indeed we live in a world where every single measure of Catholic life cited above is not flourishing -- but rather in abject decline. Instead of life, we see death. Instead of vibrancy, we see decay. Truly, in our catholic world, it is worse than mere death and decay. We have to witness the diabolic assault against our Lord's holy priesthood played out in the horrific display of the sexual abuse crisis that shakes Holy Mother Church to her very core. Bankrupt dioceses, shuttered schools, and empty seminaries: it has been an awful fifty years since the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

The whole scene in my mind -- standing before this venerable school and church -- reminded me, irreverently enough, of It's a Wonderful Life. In that fabled movie, George Bailey is provided the opportunity to see the value of his life through a vision of how the world would have been different and worse without him. The homey, if not hokey, Bedford Falls with George Bailey is transformed into the seedy, if not shameful, Pottersville without him. Setting aside that the modern world around today looks very much like Frank Capra's dreadful vision of the debauched town of Pottersville (and that, we are told, is progress), the moral of the film is that the small good we do, however insignificant, reverberates in time to change the very environment around us. How this film and idea related to me standing before a closed Catholic school and padlocked church is the thought that we must be living in a reality in which someone like George Bailey -- a Catholic George Bailey -- evidently chose not to live. We Catholics are living in a spiritual Pottersville.

Now it is hard to meet any intelligent Mass-going Catholic who would deny that the Church is in crisis. Most know -- even opaquely -- of the profound decline of Catholic life. But many refuse to lay the blame at the feet of those Church fathers who -- forgive my lack of charity -- had the audacity to arrogate to themselves the wisdom and knowledge to change virtually every aspect of the Church's identify in the compressed time period of less than a generation. What took millenia to grow organically in rites and rituals and ideas and sentiments -- all the while shaped by the hands of countless saints -- was deemed anachronistic by an imperious generation who thought they knew better both during and after the Second Vatican Council. In time, when the age of novelty is far passed, our descendants will marvel that they got away with it.

But even today with the wreckage of Catholic life so evident -- and a "cause and effect" of that same wreckage so obvious, many good Catholics recoil at the notion that the changes brought about by the Council are the cause. They seem to miss the forest for the trees. Instead of an honest appraisal of the reality around them, which is appalling, they cling to the idea that if only the Council is implemented correctly, things will get better or if only the new Mass is celebrated reverently, the liturgical crisis will abate. But if we look at the crisis in the Church as a whole -- a gestalt approach if you will -- the problem is clearly not one of execution; rather it is one of principles. I do not see the value in quibbling over whether a more honest translation of the new Mass will cure its ills: the reason I am standing before a shuttered Catholic school and a padlocked Catholic Church is very simple. The liturgy for which it was built ceased being offered and the clear Catholic doctrine that used to be preached from its pulpit ceased to be proclaimed. It is not a mistake made on the margins -- it was a wholesale change of direction and purpose with cataclysmic effect. We took the wrong path, and when you take the wrong path and realize it, you turn around and return to the right path. There is no other choice for the Church -- she must go back. Indeed, a remnant in the Church is doing exactly that right now and leading her back.

Ironically enough we are experiencing a springtime in the Church. But like so many things, it is not the springtime promised or expected. Of course, the springtime of the Council is as much of a farce as is the "new" evangelism, which is predicated, first and foremost, on this age's golden rule -- thou shalt not offend. It would not be the first time that words offered that seemed utterly nonsensical turned out to be prophetic. For example, I am told anecdotally that Pope Paul VI's famous remark in 1972 that the "smoke of satan" had entered the Church actually referred to the disobedience of traditionalists in the face of the series of unprecedented changes impacting the Church at the time, i.e., the "smoke of satan" was the Churchman protesting against the "progress" being made in the name of the Council. Many literate Catholics might logically assume the Pope was lamenting the "progress" itself that was rending the Church asunder. Thus Pope Paul VI's comment was prophetic even if the prophet did not understand the nature of the prophecy he delivered.

The same is true of our "springtime." Springtime is necessarily a period of rebirth -- and we are witnessing the rebirth of the Church in the most unlikely of places. It is not happening at ordinary Catholic parishes. It certainly is not happening at committee meetings of regional conferences of bishops. It is happening, however, on the dining room tables of home-schooled families. It is happening at three o'clock masses offered in inconvenient places according to the ancient form. It is happening among large families that reject both artificial birth control or using "natural family planning" as its surrogate. It is happening among teenaged girls wearing veils in churches. It is happening in today's young priests that are discovering the fullness of their priesthood in the old Mass. It is happening among fathers who embrace their roles as the head of the household and single provider. It is happening among mothers who once again are the bulwork of Christian homes and families. It is happening among families that once again pray the rosary together. Simply stated, it is happening among those who view their faith as the single most important part of their lives. It is happening and it is exciting -- and to the extent that you are a part of it, take heart because in the end your Lord will triumph.

Instead of the top-down Orwellian "springtime" that was as manufactured as the liturgy it was based upon, the real "springtime" is a bottom-up and organic movement of the faithful. The faithful who are coalescing around the ancient truisms of Christianity. And as miniscule as it seems now -- indeed, the proper authorities dismiss it as an irrelevancy or anachronism -- it is growing. Like the small mustard seeds of first century Christian men and women that flowered into an entire civilization because they were slavishly true to the faith, this small remnant of faithful Catholics will do the same thing. They are, as it were, on the right side of history and truth.

So while we will live in Pottersville, all hope is not lost. After all, we are a people of hope because we believe in and love him who is its very author. Rebuilding Christian civilization is going to be difficult but we have already begun.

Deo gratias.

A New Year of Grace - Advent 2010

2010-11-28T20:22:00.002-05:00

The Lord has given us another year. As we begin Advent, praised be His holy name.

What we will do with the gift of time remains to be seen. The essence of Christianity is renewal: the renewal of the face of Earth by her creator and redeemer. The renewal of every human being who would repent and live in the grace of his Church. So as we begin another year, we are given yet another opportunity to renew our lives -- to finally solve the problems that have plagued us and to embrace the sufferings in our lives and in the lives of our dear friends and family.

If God should so grant to give me another year -- such that I am reading this in one year from now on the beginning of Advent in the year of our Lord 2011 -- I pray that I finally lived as I should as a Christian husband and father during this upcoming year. I pray that I offered up my sufferings to the Lord. I pray that I learned to be quiet -- to listen. I pray that I stopped backbiting and became a strong man. I pray that my children and wife were safe and continued to grow in their faith. I pray the same for my friends and family. In short, I want this year to be the one in which my half-measures are replaced with full ones and in which I finally cooperated with the abundant grace offered to me.

This year, I want to give everything of my being to God without any reservation. Thirty-nine years is long enough -- now is the time to rise and live without hedging. To live in a way that mirrors my stated faith.

Lord, I am ready. I am finally ready. Mold me with your grace into the Christian I should be.

Deo gratias.

Glory to God in the Highest

2010-11-16T20:50:00.002-05:00

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all iniquity.

(First John 1:9)

I have not written for some time. Life, as it were, interrupted. We welcomed another beautiful child into the world. NFG is healthy and strong, and, most recently, cleansed from the stain of original sin by the healing waters of baptism. Six children has overwhelmed me, but I have so much for which to be thankful.

That brings me to the reason of my post: despair. I struggle with it. God has rained down blessings upon me and He alone knows what a failure I have been. I write this without the slightest sense of melodrama; our Lord really knows it. I know it. And in recognizing it, really seeing it for what it is, I am reminded of the scandal of Christianity. The scandal that the "world" hates: that God loves me and forgives me anyway. Not just me, of course, but any penitent sinner.

I was reminded of the glory in God's mercy in thinking about my own failings today. There is a type of sin that occurs because we lose sight of that fundamental truth of our God. We despair because we see only our failure and lose hope that God could ever love someone such as us who continues to disappoint. In those moments, we forget the meaning of Christ's sacrifice on the cross -- why it fits the mystery of our fallen human condition like a key. Christ came because we are failures. We will never be able to fully "right" the ship in this life but He loves us anyway.

I am reaching a few milestones in my life that give me renewed purpose to amend my life again. I will be married for fifteen years next week. My marriage can be neatly divided into two segments: the first was one of searching confusion. I was looking for the right path but I often looked for it in the wrong places or with the wrong people. I eventually found it in the second segment -- the right path being an obedient and uncompromising Catholicism. In this second segment, in these last seven years, God blessed me with five children (if only because I began to be open in my marriage to the gift of children). He gave me a wife who was now willing to embrace the full vocation of motherhood. He gave me a community of fellow Christians who inspired me and helped me through difficult times. He gave me a love of our Lady's rosary. He gave me children growing admirably in the faith. Really, in response to the baby step I took towards Him, He rained down blessings on me.

But paradoxically the last seven years have been trying. Knowledge of my faith outstripped the living of it. Pride swelled where humility should have been crowned. Instead of abating, temptations of all sorts increased in pugnacity and degree. When I felt strong and sure, I fell. When I felt numb, I fell. All the while, I have frequented the sacrament of penance with a stubbornness -- I assume he gave me the will to do that as well. I have needed to go because I have fallen in myriad ways over the last seven years -- the seven before that also required my going but I did not know it at the time.

While the pace of my sanctification is not entirely in my own hands; for my own part, I figure seven years is enough. Those habits that have plagued are due to be put down. I know that various types of temptation are going nowhere; I know I'll be visited by them soon enough. But today I remember I have nothing to fear in them. God will provide exactly the amount of grace needed to persevere. I am not going to live in fear of them anymore. I am not going to live in fear of my salvation anymore. God wants us to have joy. It is a bittersweet joy inasmuch as it is tempered by the realization of our own profound failings, but it is a joy nonetheless.

For the next seven years, I would be the husband and father I have always wanted to be. I would be the Christian I have always wanted to be. I would be finally the man I was made to be. So I begin again renewed with purpose and amendment. I look forward with hope and gratitude for a Father in heaven that forgives me and loves me and wills that I forgive and love others.

I will not be afraid to love and forgive -- myself and others.

May our Lord bless my intention and give me renewed strength and grace to be pleasing in His most holy sight.

The Rogue's March: John Riley and The St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-48 by Peter F. Stevens

2010-10-08T21:48:00.002-04:00

“Providence intended the New World for the Anglo-Saxon. If Mexico should oppose the decree of Heaven -- so much the worse for Mexico!”

The Rogue's March: John Riley and The St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-48 by Peter F. Stevens (citing The Philadelphia Nativist, August 1845).

Three phenomena coalesced in 1845 to create one of the most intriguing dramas of American military history. The first was the large waves of Irish immigration that poured into the United States during the 1840s. Driven by the successive failures of the potato harvest, Catholic Ireland’s sole crop, and apartheid-like conditions, the Irish left in droves and the vast majority came to the United States -- and settled in American Northeast.

The second was the explosion of the American Nativist movement that was in large measure a response to Catholic immigration. Concerned about the erosion of the Protestant underpinnings of the American Republic, Nativists were primarily anti-Catholic and secondarily xenophobic. The friction between Irish immigrants and Nativist forces often culminated in violence from the small incident to large ones -- for example, the Philadelphia Nativist riots of 1844 in which Catholic homes and churches were targeted (some successfully) with arson while the feckless “authorities” did little to stop the rampaging.

The third was the Mexican American War. In the midst of this Catholic mass immigration and counter-Nativist bile, the United States annexed Texas, which Mexico considered a renegade province. What began as a tense and seemingly spontaneous border dispute between two armies staring at one another across the Rio Grande was actually a premeditated and long-standing American strategy for a Mexican land grab in order to fulfill American delusions of “manifest destiny.” Parenthetically, the term, “manifest destiny,” was ironically coined by an Irish-American Catholic, John L. O’Sullivan, during this very period. When negotiations failed to deliver Texas and what is now the American Southwest, “politics by other means” was implemented and a war with Mexico was provoked. For the American Catholic, the Mexican American War was a double disgrace. Not only was it an exposition of might makes right -- a “manifestly” unjust war; it was fought against a peaceful Catholic neighbor with muscle provided largely by Irish Catholic immigrants. The Irony of Irish Immigrants fleeing Protestant Britain for American shores only to aid Protestant America’s crusade against Catholic Mexico was not lost on Catholic or Nativist alike.

Many American contemporaries -- not just Catholics -- saw this unjust war brought to bear on Mexico as a national disgrace. Do not take my word for it: Consider how the Republican Party described the Mexican American War in its campaign literature as late as 1880:

“Feculent, reeking Corruption” -- A long array of Defaulters in the Mexican War, it prodigious Expenditures and Plunder. The Mexican War, one of the darkest scenes in our history -- a war forced upon our and the Mexican people by the high-handed usurpation of [President] Polk in pursuit of territorial aggrandizement of the slave oligarchy -- exacted an expenditure of hundreds of millions and the lives of 25,000 of our citizens. Corruption in the Government stalked unrestrained.

The Republican Campaign Textbook for 1880 at 97, published by the Republican Congressional Committee, Washington, D.C.# Given its flag-waving Evangelical bent and anti-immigration orientation, somehow I doubt that the current Republican Party would endorse its earlier description of this “feculent” war.

The three phenomena -- Irish immigration, Nativist reaction, and the unjust war on Mexico fought in large part by Irish Catholic Immigrants “off the boat” -- serve as the context of The Rogue's March: John Riley and The St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-48 by Peter F. Stevens. Stevens, a feature columnist for the Boston Irish Reporter, painstakingly revisits one of the most controversial happenings in American military history: the story of the Irish deserters from the American army during the Mexican War that formed a Mexican foreign legion, the San Patricios (or St. Patrick’s Battalion), and fought valiantly against their old messmates throughout the Mexican War.

Steven’s interesting book is several studies in one: it is part biography (that of Irishman John Riley, leader of the San Patricios); part cultural analysis of the Nativist movement and 1840s Irish immigrant experience; part political and historical account of the American provocation of the Mexican War; and finally, The Rogue’s March is a military history of the Mexican War insofar as the San Patricios were involved (which is almost the entirety of the war). He draws carefully on a wealth of American, Mexican, British and Irish sources. His explicit objective in telling the story of the San Patricios from their perspective is to rehabilitate those men who America has long considered nefarious traitors.

The Rogue’s March is ultimately an Irish story. It begins with recounting the failure of the potato crop by Irish tenant farmers during the 1840s. The resulting Irish population drain from mass starvation and emigration was profound. With its seemingly endless bounty of land and the promise of a better future beckoning, Irish immigrants traversed the Atlantic Ocean packed like sardines in “coffin ships” to the “Golden Door” of America: only to be deposited in festering urban cesspools in Philadelphia, Boston and New York. With only the most menial work available, Irish immigrants scraped together the most meagre of existences in their new country.

Compounding the misery of Irish newcomers was the growing Nativist movement. Many “native” Americans -- Protestant and Anglo-Saxon -- despised the Catholic Irish immigrants with a fury. The idea that Protestant America might lose its moorings in a tide of Catholic immigration frightened a vocal but minority contingent of Americans. American luminaries such as Samuel F.B. Morse were rabidly anti-Catholic during the mid-Nineteeth Century and led political drives to stop immigration or, at least, slow it from predominantly Catholic countries. The “Know Nothing” phenomenon of the 1850s had earlier Nativist roots, which were planted in the soil of the massive immigration of Irish during the 1840s.

While most of the United States disdained sheer volume of Irish manpower pouring into the country during this time, one American institution welcomed them with open arms: the United States Army. Facing two looming conflicts with Great Britain in the North and Mexico in the South, American military planners needed to fill its ranks quickly. Stevens catalogues the Army’s actively recruitment Irish immigrants to fill its quotas that were otherwise lacking. By the time the United States marched its army, led by General Zachary Old Rough and Ready” Taylor, into disputed Mexican territory, it was disproportionately stocked with Catholic foreign nationals.

One of the more interesting parts of this book is that the young Army officers (West Pointers of the 1840s) that did the heavy-lifting during the Mexican American War are some very recognizable names indeed. Many would later become both Union and Confederate generals in a mere fifteen years; men like Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, Pierre Beauregard, James Longstreet, George Meade, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Many of these young officers were also influenced by the Nativist sentiment percolating in the broader American culture. As is almost always the case among military men, more still were deeply religious; one informed by a Protestantism that detested Catholicism.

The promises of military recruiters are famously overstated. Yet the promise of a fair wage, food, and citizenship enticed many Irish to fill the Army’s ranks; if only to escape the squalid conditions of their lives in their adopted country. Many had served in the British army, like John Riley. None were prepared for the teeming antipathy for all things Irish and Catholic that awaited them once in uniform. The American Army of the 1840s was one of severe discipline -- far surpassing that of the British army. Physical punishments were the norm, which, when coupled with constant abuse of ethnicity and religion were hard to bear. By the time, Taylor’s army reached the disputed Rio Grande, his Irish soldiers were a despondent lot.

The Mexicans across the river had some knowledge of the Irish sufferings and misgivings about invading Catholic Mexico. Even some of the Protestant officers viewed the war as unjust: U.S. Grant wrote to his ... “unjust war.” Almost immediately upon Taylor’s arrival, the Mexicans began a campaign to openly call for American desertion and, more boldly, for enlistment into the Mexican ranks to fight the North American aggressors. Consider the following tract written by Mexican General Arista directly aiming at Taylor’s Catholic troops:

Soldiers! you have been enlisted in time of peace to serve in that army for a specific term, but your obligation never implied that you were bound to violate the laws of God, and the most sacred rights of friends. The United States government, contrary to the wishes of a majority of all honest and honorable Americans, has ordered you take forcible possession of a friendly neighbor, who has never given her consent to such occupation ... I warn you, in the name of justice, honor, and your own interests and self-respect, to abandon their desperate and unholy cause, and become peaceful Mexican citizens. I guaranty [sic] you, in such cases, a half section of land, or 320 acres, to settle upon, gratis...

The lure for the Irishman was strong. America, or so it seemed, disdained him and his religion. Mexico welcomed him and shared his faith. Moreover, the United States was clearly the provocateur in the conflict. The Nativist abuse heard daily from his officer corps was also a powerful incentive. Clearly, Mexican efforts to entice deserters struck a chord that neither the Mexicans nor the Americans could have predicted.

Among those early to desert was one John Riley. Physically imposing, Riley was an experienced British soldier, and, from the American account, a fine and stoic soldier while in the American ranks. Riley was born about 1818 in County Galway and emigrated to Michigan in 1843. There, enticed by the lure of military service and the opportunity to fight the British (or so he thought), he joined the American army. Where other Irish immigrants snapped under the pressure of the barbaric treatment at the hands of Nativist officers, Riley, by all accounts, endured it in silence. The unjust treatment by certain officers coupled with the knowledge of the unjust nature of the American campaign against Mexico ultimately convinced Riley and many others to swim the Rio Grande for the Mexican side. Once there, he was escorted to the Mexican general staff where he made an impression. Ultimately, the Mexicans believed that they found just the man to lead a foreign regiment composed of Irish deserters. Better still, Riley was an experienced artilleryman -- something Mexico desperate needed. The success of Riley’s new regiment would soon both astound Americans and Mexicans alike.

In the first engagement, Stevens writes:

As Brown’s gunners returned fire, their eyes, sore and scarlet from the previous days smoke, burned anew with each blast. Suffering equally were the Mexican artillerymen in that nearest battery. Bragg and a few other officers trained their telescopes on the Mexican twelve-pounders to take the range and squinted through the grayish-white haze. The officers gaped at the faces of several enemy gunners. Flinging shot from the glowing brass muzzles and swabbing the smoking guns before each blast, John Riley and “some of our deserters were employed against us” Taylor would record, “and actually served guns in cannonade and bombardment of Fort [Texas].”

While the Americans ultimately withstood the Mexican attack, news quickly spread that Riley and other deserters had fired artillery on Americans. For the Nativist officers, the deserters were a source of outrage and confirmed their worst suspicions of the Irish Catholics. Accordingly, for the American-born Irish, who tried relentlessly to demonstrate their American loyalty, Riley was a headache that undermined the perception of their patriotism. For the Irish immigrants in Taylor’s army, however, Stevens recounts that many secretly cheered Riley’s boldness in firing on the American officers that they all hated. Riley had put a face on desertion for the Irish, and his personal appeal and battlefield courage would soon be a strong magnet to even greater Irish desertions.

Already hemorrhaging from Irish desertion, Taylor was rightfully concerned after Riley’s assault that the continued Mexican overtures to foreign born Catholics would seriously compromise his Mexican mission. He communicated this concern to President Polk, who decided to take matters into his own hands. Polk realized that widespread dissemination of the extent of Catholic desertion would further inflame the Nativist press against Polk’s war and the Army’s use of Irish immigrants (who were desperately needed). He summoned three Catholic bishops to the White House (including Archbishop John Hughes) to enlist their aid to staunch the flow of Catholic desertion. Polk had to move surreptitiously because Congress -- already inflamed with Nativist ire -- would never approve Catholic chaplains. Instead, Polk asked the three bishops provide him two Catholic priests that would be chaplains in every respect save name only. The prelates agreed.

The two Catholic priests traveled to Taylor’s army and worked to discourage Irish desertion. While I can appreciate both their mission and their patriotism, some of their methods leave much to be desired. Consider the following quote from an American officer: “The priests that come from the States say that they could not recognize the Catholic religion in the mummeries practiced [in Mexico]... Religion [in Mexico] is a mixture of Indian idolatry and superstition with the Catholic.” Stevens writes, “Father Rey convinced hundreds of unassimilated Irishmen and other Catholics to stay put, telling them that they would only find false promises and a “pagan” and corrupt version of Catholicism in Mexico. The Catholic bishops of America, the men were informed, supported the government and they were bound by their enlistment oaths to do likewise.” They said that Riley and the other deserters were cursed by America and God alike.

Compare with Steven’s account of the religious experience of the deserters in Mexico:

On Sundays, Riley and others could attend mass in Our Lady of Carmen Cathedral, whose tiled domes glittering blue, yellow, white and green in the sunlight. Inside, worshipers stood and knelt with both grandees and peasants amid gilded walls and statues of the saints. Catholic Germans among the deserters may have worshipped amid such Baroque or Gothic splendor in their homeland, but for Riley and fellow Irish immigrants accustomed to the rude stone churches of their homeland, Our Lady of Carmen, like the cathedral of Monterrey, drew awe-struck stares.

While the American priests undoubtedly had a mission, approved by their ordinaries, in helping to stop the flow of Catholic desertion from the United States Army, there is nonetheless a religious treason in their words that were offered to staunch temporal treason. Indeed, their Protestant country was engaging in an unjust war against a Catholic country. Both priests would die in Mexico.

Now a Mexican officer, Riley’s efforts to make a full-fledged unit began to bear fruit. The Mexicans wisely believed that a fully foreign unit would be more attractive to potential deserters than to be salted through the Mexican army. Its appeal was enhanced further because Riley had artillery. To finalize its appeal, Riley fashioned its flag described by a contemporary correspondent as follows:

The banner is of green silk, and on one side is a harp, surmounted by the Mexican coat of arms, with a scroll on which it is painted, “Liberatad por la Republica Mexicana.” Underneath the harp is the motto “Erin go Bragh. On the other side is a painting ... made to represent St. Patrick, in his left hand a key and in his right a crook or staff resting upon a serpent. Underneath is painted “San Patricio.”

Thus, Riley’s band of deserters would forever be known as the San Patricios. n the next several battles, all of which were ultimately won by the Americans, the San Patricios grew in number and continued to distinguish themselves. In the Battle of Buena Vista in particular, the San Patricios almost carried the day. Riley’s men, in the front of the lines, poured shot after shot into the American center and almost broke. Stevens writes, “[t]o the fury of Taylor and to the suffering troops on the Plateau, the ‘heavy battery ... manned by Irish deserters from our army ... the commander the notorious Reilly [sic],’ continued to rip up their old army with seemingly endless blasts.” He continues that, “[w]hat Riley did not know yet was that his performance and that of his men at Buena Vista had awed the Mexican generals and had even earned the enraged accolades of American officers.”

After the war moved south, Taylor was replaced by Winfield “Old Fuss and Feathers” Scott, who invaded Mexico from Vera Cruz and largely followed Hernan Cortez’s path to Mexico City. Riley and the San Patricios were called to defend Mexico City from the coming American army. By the time Scott marched, the Mexican appeals to his Irish-born soldiers was markedly more religious in content. For example, one tract read, in part:

Irishmen--Listen to the words of your brothers, hear the accents of a Catholic people.... Well known it is that Irishmen are a noble race; well known it is that in their own country many of them have not even bread to give up to their children. These are the chief motives that induced Irishmen to abandon their beloved country and visit the shores of the new world.... Sons of Ireland! Have you forgotten that in any Spanish country it is sufficent to claim Ireland as your home to meet with a friendly reception from authorities as well as citizens? Our religion is the strongest bonds. What! Can you fight by the side of those who put fire to your temples in Boston and Philadelphia? Did you witness such dreadful crimes and sacrileges without making a solemn vow to our Lord? ... Are Catholic Irishmen to be the destroyers of Catholic temples, the murderers of Catholic priests, and the founders of heretical rites in this pious nation?

These latter calls for desertion came too late.

At the Battle of Churubusco, Riley and the San Patricios made their final stand against the Americans at the outskirts of Mexico City in a monastery. Overmatched, Riley’s men fought frantically; pouring fire and artillery against the Americans. An American captain would record that Riley’s “battalion of American deserters ... manned teh enemy’s battery that did such fatal execution and inflicted the severe loss upon our brigade.” Moreover, in their final engagements, the San Patricios took revenge on American officers in particular. An American soldier later recounted that, “[f]or the gratification of their revenge, they aimed at no other objects [only at officers] during the engagement.” Many of their former tormentors fell at Churubusco.

When the tide of the battle turned against the Mexicans and their ammunition was spent, Stevens records the furious battle that ensued. “A Mexican tried to raise a white flag, but a deserter tore it down... Two more white flags went up. Deserters pulled them down and kept fighting with with bayonets, fists, and feet.” Most of the San Patricios were either killed or captured at Churubusco. Santa Anna, the famous Mexican general, lamented his loss: “Give me a few hundred more men like Riley’s, and I would have won the victory.”

Riley was captured at Churubusco. His captors prevented his death on the spot, and he and the other deserters were jailed awaiting trial. Virtually all were condemned to death. In a supreme irony, and to the great dismay of many American soldiers, Riley’s sentence was commuted to fifty lashes and branding with a burning cattle prod with the letter “D.” His commutation came directly from Winfield Scott -- the death penalty could not apply to Riley’s desertion because he had deserted before “official” hostilities with Mexico had begun. In other words, he did not desert during a time of war.

Riley’s captors did everything they could do to ensure his death during the lashing and branding: he was scourged by a Mexican muleteer who was offered a bounty if Riley should die during the lashing. He stoically endured it. He was branded on his cheek with the burning iron shaped like a “D,” but the “D” was administered upside down. The commanding officer ordered his other cheek branded right side up: ensuring his double-branding. At this final branding, and after being forced to watch his other men hung, Riley succumbed to the torment and passed out.

Riley was later released by the Americans and stayed in Mexico for some time thereafter and received a pension of sorts. What happened to him subsequently is not clear. The United States officially denied the existence of the San Patricios for next sixty years. Only after a congressional inquiry in 1917 did the army turn over its documents to the National Archives relating to the rampant desertion during the Mexican War and the court martial records of the San Patricios.

Needless to say, this story is very compelling. For my own part, and as an American of Irish descent, I neither commend nor condemn Riley and his San Paticios. That my country fought an unjust war against Mexico goes without saying, but the obligation one has to an oath he has sworn is of no small weight. Many Irish did not desert: they stayed and fought and died for their country. Those who remained paved the way for future Irish, like my kin, to make the United States home. Nonetheless, I cannot but admire John Riley. He was a man of courage and resolve. He was a born leader.

What strikes me about this story is its sheer implausibility today. Forty-five years after the close of the Second Vatican Council, Irish Catholicism -- both here in the States and in Ireland -- has utterly collapsed. How miserable it is that a people that hung so tenaciously to the faith of their fathers in the face of every conceivable persecution for hundreds upon hundreds of years have committed apostasy on a mass scale in roughly one generation. No one nation in the Church has suffered more from the reign of modernism than the Irish. But stories like John Riley’s are a reminder that Irishmen took their faith seriously enough -- not so long ago -- to make fateful decisions in which life and death hung in the balance. I pray that Ireland’s sons and daughters -- at home and abroad -- may one day soon return to their Mother Church and again find in her the warm embrace that sustained generations of Irish in hardships beyond compare.

Our Lady of Knock, pray for us.

The Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

2010-09-11T11:30:00.002-04:00

In our days, God has permitted a new false teacher to appear - Count Leo Tolstoy. A writer well known to the world, Russian by birth, Orthodox by baptism and education, Count Tolstoy, under the seduction of his intellectual pride, has insolently risen against the Lord and His Christ and against His holy heritage, and has publicly, in the sight of all men, repudiated the Orthodox Mother Church, which reared and educated him, and has devoted his literary activity, and the talent given to him by God, to disseminating among the people teachings repugnant to Christ and the Church, and to destroying in the minds and hearts of men their national faith, the Orthodox faith, which has been confirmed by the universe, and in which our forefathers lived and were saved, and to which till now Holy Russia has held and in which it has been strong.
....
Therefore the Church does not reckon him as its member, and cannot so reckon him, until he repents and resumes his communion with her. To this we bear witness to-day before the whole Church, for the confirmation of the faithful and the reproof of those who have gone astray, especially for the fresh reproof of Count Tolstoy himself. Many of those near to him, retaining their faith, reflect with sorrow that he, at the end of his days, remains without faith in God and in our Lord and Saviour, having rejected the blessings and prayers of the Church and all communion with her.

Decree of Excommunication of Count Leo Tolstoy Russian Orthodox Church (February 22, 1901)

Leo Tolstoy is considered by many to be one of the finest -- if not the very finest -- novelist ever to write. His novels include such monumental works as War and Peace and Anna Karenina that made him famous in his own day. Beyond his works of fiction, Tolstoy wrote a number of philosophical and theological works; most notably The Kingdom of God is Within You. While an exposition of Tolstoy’s heterodoxical views are beyond the scope of this article, his views may broadly be described as consistent with today’s liberal Christians or quasi-Christians that reject any notion of a visible, authoritative church and established dogma, the very idea of sacraments, including the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and all other liturgical expressions of faith. Tolsoy embraced extreme notions of pacifism and anti-state rhetoric. What Tolstoy did emphasize were aspects of the social aspects of Gospel with a deification of the poor and demonization of the rich -- as if class, in a static fashion -- were vice or virtue in and of itself. He also exalted “love” without any notion of repentance as historic Christianity has known it. Our Lord appears to have been little more than sage or community organizer for Tolstoy. One early reviewer synthesized Tolstoy’s theology by coining the term “Christian anarchism” to describe it.

Tolstoy’s last fictional work,The Resurrection, was published in 1899. By the time he wrote it, he had fully worked out his religious and societal views. Accordingly, it is a novel with a marked agenda. Tolsoy’s efforts to communicate a philosophy forcefully through fiction is a similar method used by many ideologues: not unlike Ayn Rand’s motivation in writing The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. But the means through which Tolstoy attempted to convey that agenda was his work as an author; and Ayn Rand was no Leo Tolstoy as a writer -- not even close. Thus whatever shortcomings The Resurrection has in terms of its pedantry, Tolstoy’s considerable literary gifts make this book a worthwhile read.

The Resurrection is a timeless story: it tells the story of Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov. Stated most succinctly, it is the story of one’s man transformation when the consequences of his sins are put directly before him. It has an authentic Christian message -- albeit Tolstoy muddles the transformation in terms of where it should lead and what should be cast off as a byproduct of conversion. While the book is not so neatly divided, it is essentially two parts: the man transformed and the transformed man. Let me unpack that idea: the first part of the book narrates the change wrought within Nekhlyudov -- how it happens, why it happens, the difficulties presented by the transformation on others, and the costs of change. The second part narrates the effects of Nekhlyudov’s transformation -- who he becomes and what he does as essentially a new creation. The first part has an authenticity that any Catholic will immediately recognize. It is searing in that we meet a man violently awoken from the seeming comforts of his mundane life. The second part is less edifying: Tolstoy uses Nekhlyudov’s conversion to frame an awakening in terms of Tolstoy’s personal -- and heretical -- theology.

Any story premised on the metamorphosis of the protagonist must frame the scope of change. Set in Russia in the 1880s, we initially meet Prince Nekhlyudov as an aristocrat who leaves much to be desired. A former military officer and aspiring artist in his late twenties, Nekhlyudov is a pampered do-nothing living off of the toil and sweat of the impoverished peasant-tenants who work the enormous estates he has inherited and of with which he has no contact. He is also alone -- both literally and metaphorically. As a bachelor, he is deciding whether to marry another aristocrat to whom he does not love -- all the while he further trying to break of an adulterous affair he is carrying on with another man’s wife.

Nekhlyudov’s vapid life is momentarily interrupted by a civil duty to which we all can relate: he is called to jury duty and assigned to a criminal case. Tolstay is masterful in detailing the seemingly irrelevant details of each personality of the court. Given the gravity of what they are called to do, he disgusts the reader by allowing a glimpse into how the judges and lawyers go through the motions in order to finish their work and get on with their lives, which, for many of them, are miserable and degenerate. For example, he describes one judge as anxiously working to finish the trial to which Nekhlyudov is assigned so he can meet his paramour who is traveling through the provincial town. Nekhlyudov is initially not much better: he wants the duty to end as quickly as possible.

The trial involves the murder-poisoning of a merchant. The defendants are two hotel employees and a prostitute, Katerina Maslova. While Tolstoy does not authoritatively declare what transpired, it is nonetheless clear that the two hotel employees used the prostitute to poison the merchant to steal from him -- she being unaware that the powder they gave her to put in his drink would do anything other than put the drunken and lecherous merchant to sleep. Maslova is the type of attractive full figured woman whose very presence instinctively attracts men in a repulsive and objectifying manner.

Upon her entrance into the court, Nekhlyudov, in horror, immediately recognizes her. He knew her years earlier as an orphan-servant in his aunt’s home. Tolstoy recounts their tortured past -- and the manner in which Nekhlyudov left her. They first met in their teens: Nekhlyudov was a bright and idealistic student and she an honorable and vivacious girl affectionately known as Katusha. Over the course of a season, they grew very close to one another in the most innocent way. Tolstoy’s recounting of their time together resembles that of the Garden of Eden: young people radiating unworldly goodness. They were utterly unaware of the viciousness out there and unaware of what to make of their physical attraction to one another. We see he was very different then -- a boy on the cusp of manhood so full of dreams and noble intentions.

The goodness in Nekhlyudov, we learn, was stamped out by the world. He leaves Katusha to join the military and the ideals he carried were crushed by a family that encourages him to sow his oats, assume his place of betterment in society, and take up the habits of gentleman. He returns to his aunt’s home a few years later for the Easter holiday as a man -- a changed man: from the sweet boy into the young profligate and carnal military officer. The innocence is lost, and much like Adam and Eve in the Garden, Nekhlyudov now sees Katusha with the eyes of sin and lust. She, however, resists his advances, which grow bolder. Symbolic of his blindness, Nekhlyudov all but forces himself upon Katusha on Easter Sunday. Embarrassed by his exploits and confused as to how he should extricate himself, he takes leave of Katusha the next day by pushing a one hundred rouble note into her hand. Unwittingly, he converts her into a prostitute.

Katusha’s last encounter with Nekhlyudov is awful: she had become pregnant and wanted desperately to meet with Nekhlyudov. From his aunt, she knew he would pass by the train station in her town late one evening; the train stopping for only a few minutes. Upon its arrival, she frantically searched for him only to find him -- behind the window pane of the first class train car -- comfortably engaged with his mates. The train left before he could recognize her. At that moment, Tolstoy tells us, she lost her faith in God and goodness.

Tolstoy reveals how Katusha’s life thereafter went into a headlong tailspin. Pregnant, she was relieved of her duties by Nekhlyudov’s aunt. Her son died a few days after birth. She went through a number of menial jobs -- leaving many because the men employing her could not keep their hands off of her. Eventually and slowly, Tolstoy recounts, she turned the albatross of her womanly allure into a livelihood. Her descent into harlotry is both believable and gut-wrenching.

Nekhlyudov is dumbfounded that Katusha -- now a beautiful woman -- is a prostitute. In an instant, he is reminded of his crime and confronted with its grim consequences. Nekhlyudov’s response to sitting in a jury judging this woman is an autonomic spasm of fright. Following the trial, the jury retires to consider the punishment. Nekhlyudov is all but paralyzed as a juryman.

Based upon a misunderstanding in the jury instruction, the jury finds her guilty of providing the poison, but without the intent to murder. The state of mind of the defendant is omitted for the jury, and, mistakenly, they convict her of murder. Based upon the omission, she is sentenced to four years of hard labor in Siberia. Nekhlyudov now is tortured by both the guilt of his secret sin and his participation on a jury that has unwittingly sent her to Siberia as a murderer.

After unsuccessfully seeking redress from the presiding judge, Nekhlyudov leaves the court bewildered and dismayed. He does not want to change -- even facing his sin squarely -- because he realizes the cost. He sees his whole life since leaving Katusha as an one selfish episode after another. The man he could have been when he was an inspired sixteen year old contrasts in his mind with the decadent aristocrat he has become. At this point, Tolstoy is at his very best in the book. Nekhlyudov’s anguish powerfully hits home because I, like many I suppose, can relate to a young man filled with hope and good intentions only to be compromised by the world. I also had a conversion in my late twenties (one, God willing, that continues) and surveying certain episodes in my own life brought me great pain. Experiencing Nekhlyudov’s searing survey of a wasted life is both authentic and cathartic.

Nekhlyudov decides to change. In his youth, he was influenced by certain writers who posited that man had no right to own property. In a fit of boyish enthusiasm, Nekhlyudov gave away the small estate to the peasant farmers that his father has passed to him. His good intentions to give his mother’s much larger estate were lost when Nekhlyudov became addicted to the money it provided him to lead a life of leisure. Faced squarely with the consequences of his actions on Katusha’s life, Nekhlyudov makes two life-changing resolutions: he will give away his mother’s land to the peasants and he will marry Katusha to right the wrong he committed twelve years earlier.

Nekhlyudov is now a man dramatically changed. His eyes are open -- the same man days early who was utterly indifferent to the suffering around him is now acutely aware of it. He hires a lawyer to work on Katusha’s appeal and resolves to visit her and propose. Meanwhile Tolstoy shows the inhumanity of Russia’s prisons through Katusha’s experiences and those around her.

The drama of their first prison visit is intense. Katusha has not thought of him in years and his plea for forgiveness strikes her odd -- as she is not someone who has thought in those terms for a long time. While she is obtuse to him during their first encounter and not inclined towards his bizarre marriage proposal, she decides to use him. If he wants to help her appeal, so be it. Further, she asks him for money and help with other prisoner friends who have had similar arbitrary treatment by the authorities. Nekhlyudov agrees, and so, almost accidentally, begins his work as prisoner advocate.

The remainder of the novel is a chronicle of the changes in both Katusha and Nekhlyudov. Once her appeal fails -- with only resort left to the Emperor -- Nekhlyudov decides to accompany Katusha, and her prison gang, to Siberia. True to his new self, Nekhlyudov throws off the comforts of his class and embarks as a man who has voluntarily embraced poverty and hardships. While he disdains using his class to better his own treatment on the arduous journey, Nekhlyudov arranges through bribes or the exertion of his standing to secure for Katusha better treatment.

Through his kindness and reflection, Katusha too begins to change. But it is, like it was for him initially, in fits and starts. Her transformation occurs on the journey to Siberia when Nekhlyudov arranges for her to be housed and transported with the political prisoners -- and away from the garden variety criminals. Influenced by their revolutionary thoughts, she rediscovers the girl she was before her calamities.

While Tolstoy does not categorically embrace the revolutionaries that Nekhlyudov meets as automatically virtuous, they are, for him, on the right side of history.. They are the foils to the self-satisfied and self-centered educated aristocracy. He agrees with their critique of Russian socity wholeheartedly -- his disagreement, if you could call it that, is one over tactics. One could liken Tolstoy’s treatment of them as that of active religious -- they are in the world effecting the change that ought to occur. It is not by accident that Katusha is made new again in their “righteous” company.

Throughout their journey, which is sometimes together but more often than not punctuated by long separation, there is a still considerable suspense relating to the question if Katusha and Nekhlyudov will marry. She grows closer to him but Tolstoy is gifted in creating an unspoken tension between them that foreshadows that their relationship is not meant for marriage. Moreover, Katusha grows close to a revolutionary and fellow prisoner, Vladimir Simonson, drawn from the gentry class. Tolstoy is at pains to relate how the revolutionaries (and he himself) have generally transcended the powers of the flesh and look down on the physical relationship between men and women. The budding relationship between Katusha and her love interest is quasi-platonic. Thus, to the uncertainty of the question of the future of Katusha and Nekhlyudov is added a love triangle.

The novel concludes in the culmination of change in both Nekhlyudov and Katusha. They are both markedly different people than when we first met them. Tolstoy wants us to consider them heroic -- the very archetype of man rising from the coldness and meanness of modern society. And after all the two young people have been through, and despite their respective “eating of the apple,” as it were, they are still relatively young. Tolstoy knows that the reader wants them together. Nekhlyudov has done everything humanly possible to atone for his sin. Katusha, for her part, has genuinely forgiven him and put her past behind her. By the end of the novel, it is almost as if we forget that she has spent her entire adult life as a prostitute.

But alas, their love is not to be; in separating them, Tolstoy canonizes them. Since his resolution, Nekhlyudov has sincerely intended to marry Katusha without second-guessing or counting the costs that such a marriage would take on him. Near the end of the book, immediately before the climatic decision by Katusha, Nekhlyudov has a lovely evening with the local officer in charge of the prison station on the route to Siberia. He is reminded for just one moment of his past life -- with its interesting discussions with educated people, the good food, the manners, and the music. After all of the debaucheries he had witnessed, he longs for refined civilization. Moreover, he meets the grandchildren of the officer and it is clear that he also wants a family.

At the point of Katusha’s decision, news of the commutation of Katusha’s sentence has been received and hard labor has been reduced to exile. After his visit with the officer and the costs of his choice have been impressed upon, Nekhlyudov nonetheless seeks Katusha’s decision. He will marry her if she so chooses, and his offer, Tolstoy makes clear, is sacrificial. Katusha, however, chooses Simonson. Nekhlyudov wonders for a moment whether she loves Simonson or is, in effect, releasing Nekhlyudov from his vow to save him from the sufferings of exile. After a few minutes of conversation, it is clearly the latter. Thus, Katusha releases the man she has grown to love again to save him from a life with her. Each character sacrifices for the other.

The book ends with Nekhlyudov’s reading the Bible and, not surprisingly, reaching the very same heretical insights that Tolstoy had been peddling in his non-fictional works for the previous twenty years. It is as overt at attempt an author will ever make to convince the reader of his worldview.

Before reaching the host of interrelated social themes that run throughout The Resurrection, it is worthwhile to discuss the one theme that serves as the catalyst for the story: you cannot escape your past. For almost all of us, whether we came to the Church later in life or were raised safely within her bosom, we all still have committed certain sins that are profoundly painful upon reflections. The power of Christianity and its almost self-evident truth is that our life experiences call out for exactly who Jesus Christ is and what he promises. We need a savior; our fallen lives demonstrate that fact not abstractly but in the mangle of human relationships in which live and breathe. For those of us who had episodes of dissipation -- even if the same were punctuated with efforts to change -- Nekhlyudov’s story through his conversion is one we can relate to in the most personal way. Tolstoy loses us, however, when he uses the fodder for conversion to reach a different -- and heretical -- place. For us, great sin can only be healed by Christ in Holy Mother Church, and that reality is the essence of conversion. Nonetheless, even it Tolstoy gets the proper destination of conversion wrong, he gets the stuff of conversion, or at least a type of conversion, right.

As far as the social themes, they are almost all revolutionary. While Tolstoy’s stated theology may be reduced to “the kingdom of heaven is within you,” his theology, as presented thematically, is properly stated, “the kingdom may be achieved on Earth.” Plain and simple, it is the revolutionary social gospel of the Left ornamented with “new age” spirituality to mask it earthiness. All of the touchstones of civilization: authority, property, traditional morality and piety, marriage, hierarchy, and justice are condemned in one way or another. When we consider that Tolstoy was himself a guilt-ridden aristocrat -- apologetic of his wealth, property and class -- we see the equivalent of those wealthy modern-day liberals who are not merely content to give away their wealth (they seldom do in any event); rather, they attack others for not reaching the same conclusions and self-flagellating themselves before the less fortunate. The stink of self-loathing is so fetid with these types.

The first theme of the unfairness of Russia’s justice system is pronounced throughout The Resurrection. Part of Nekhlyudov’s awakening is in his new-found awareness of both the inhumane treatment of prisoners and the rampant corruption of the system itself. In his role as advocate to prisoners of all stripes, he is introduced to every type of penal constituency. From the political, to the criminal, to the innocent, and to the arbitrarily imprisoned. Their treatment, which, after all, was designed to be punitive, horrifies Tolstoy.

Tolstoy is more than a penal reformer, however, he is revolutionary. His criticisms go beyond lobbying for better and more just judgments by the state: they go to the right of the state, and men for that matter, to pass judgment at all. To the obvious concern that allowing criminals run wild is answered by the assertion that there are no criminals, and if there are, it is a testament to a corrupt society based on distinctions and wealth. Love man and you will see, Tolstoy seems to tell us, that he will be a criminal no more.

Virtually everyone we meet in Nekhlyudov’s efforts to have Katusha’s conviction overturned is corrupt, and if not corrupt, than otherwise a thoroughly compromised being. It as if he does not believe that a lawyer or judge can be honest because he views the entire system as unjust and those who work within it as more or less perpetuating it. Intrigue and standing are the currency to see results: the rich and powerful can accomplish whatever they seem to want and the poor are the fodder for hard labor.

In tandem with his newly found views on the inhumanity of prison, the second theme is the destructive nature of private land ownership. Here, Nekhlyudov rediscovers his zeal to end his tenure as landowner. After fits and starts, he manages to convince his landed peasants to purchase his land. Like his thoughts on prison, Nekhlyudov, aping Tolstoy’s philosophy, is now a radical opposed to any form of land ownership. The land should be held in common or something like it, and Tolstoy creates in Nekhlyudov someone who puts his money where his mouth is.

Consistent with his views on land ownership, the third theme is that of class sin. Nekhlyudov develops a strong aversion -- and even dislike -- for his class. He deifies the peasantry and demonizes the aristocracy. Class becomes a proxy to collective sinners and saints. All of the peasants are uniformly presented as good people toiling under the thumb of wealthy do-nothings who spend their time speaking French, attending dinner parties, playing cards, and travelling abroad. Worse, the rich are oblivious to the suffering of the people who provide the very means of their luxurious lives.

Nekhlyudov’s negative view of his own class is reinforced by the reaction he receives when others in his class learn of his plans to relinquish his land and marry a prostitute. They view him as mad, and his interactions with his peers only frustrates him in their inability to see what he now sees so clearly in terms of the injustice of their society. Unlike Dostoevsky who gave real substance to those who disagreed with him by creating compelling characters who articulated strong arguments against Dostoevsky’s ultimate propositions, the adversaries of Nekhlyudov created by Tolstoy are all hollowed out straw men. Further unlike Dostoevsky, Tolstoy appears to have forgotten that those who disagree with him do not always do so because they are fools or malicious.

The final theme is Tolstoy’s assault on organized religion as shown by the ephiphany for Nekhlyudov that the Russian Orthodox Church should be condemned. He positively blasphemes the Mass and sacraments that make out the Church. God forgive me for repeating, but for Tolstoy the visible church -- with its doctrines and authority -- is itself a perversion of the message of Christ. He reasons that ritual and superstition have taken the place of the Gospel message, which he reduces to the Sermon of Mount. The institutional church for Tolstoy is a tool of the powerful and the state to exploit the masses and anesthetize them to the reality of their suffering. By his logic, we do not need baptism or confession; we do not even need a creed or even to believe in our Lord. His theology is one that denies the very idea of original sin; that fallen man tends towards sin. For Tolstoy, if we only realized that being kind to one another would eradicate man’s sorrow and heaven on earth would be attained. Well, Mr. Tolstoy, I think we all know that -- but the whole point is that man’s fallen nature continuously prevents him from consistently being kind to his neighbor and hence the need for a savior.

His vitriol towards the Russian Orthodox Church (and, by extension, the Roman Catholic Church) is not as surprising as one might think considering that Tolstoy’s new age theology is permeated by the supposed rejection of casting judgment and embracing your inner deity. But he -- even more so than most modernist liberals -- is a walking cauldron of judgment and pride with only the veneer of superficial kindness, tolerance and phony Christianity. He is, after all, a dedicated apostle of a religious view diametrically opposed to authentic Christianity -- that he should hate the real thing is no wonder.

Inasmuch as Tolstoy’s heresy was obsessed with reordering man’s social relations with an aim to eradicating poverty and injustice on earth as man’s chief objective, it is not a particularly new or novel idea. It reminds me of the following scriptural passage:

And when he was in Bethania, in the house of Simon the leper, and was at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of precious spikenard: and breaking the alabaster box, she poured it out upon his head. Now there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said: Why was this waste of the ointment made? For this ointment might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and given to the poor. And they murmured against her. But Jesus said: Let her alone, why do you molest her? She hath wrought a good work upon me. For the poor you have always with you: and whensoever you will, you may do them good: but me you have not always. She hath done what she could: she is come beforehand to anoint my body for burial. Amen, I say to you, wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, that also which she hath done, shall be told for a memorial of her. And Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went to the chief priests, to betray him to them.

(Gospel According to Saint Mark, 14:3-10)

On its face, the murmuring against the seeming waste of money on expensive ointment would seem justified when one considers the great poverty of the disciples’ fellow Jews. But our Lord rebuked them sternly for this sentiment. Why? While I do not presume to know the answer, permit me to speculate on two reasons. The first is that those who murmured (and murmured self-righteously) misunderstood that our first obedience is to worship God. The woman in this passage understood that worshiping God is primary to everything; even to relieving the suffering of humanity. By honoring our Lord in the most tender way, her priorities were rightly ordered. It is not different from when a hardscrabble community scrapes its nickles together to build a towering and glorious edifice to the glory of God -- that community intuitively understands this reality. Heretics like Tolstoy do not understand this sacrifice. Moreover, they forget that poverty is not an end nor does relief from poverty guarantee man’s happiness. Only one thing does that -- prostration before the living God. The second reason is that the murmurers forgot that poverty and all temporal suffering is essentially fleeting. Our home is not here; we are a pilgrim people whose home is divine and where all suffering will be rectified. We should seek to relieve the suffering of our neighbor, but that task is not the primary one before us. We are called first know and love and worship the true God -- and then we go into the world to do His holy will to love and serve our fellow man.

Tolstoy as a religious sage is little more than those who murmured at the woman’s offering of ointment to our Lord. In a fit of pride, they invert the priority of love of man for love of God -- all while forgetting that true relief from suffering in this world comes in the next world for those who are faithful. For this inversion, Tolstoy was rightly excommunicated. And when we meet similar types in the church -- and they are everywhere -- we should not reason or cajole with them. Instead we should rebuke them with righteous anger because they are false shepherds who counsel, unwittingly or not, the dishonor of God and his eternal promises.

All of these themes in The Resurrection -- revolutionary land and prison reform coupled with a class definition of virtue and vice and hatred of the visible Church put Tolstoy in the camp with those elements then prevailing at the fringes of Russian society who were dedicated to the destruction of Imperial Russia. Indeed, the whole of Tolstoy’s book carries a similar aim, which occurred in less than a decade of Tolstoy’s death. When we consider that Tolstoy was a legendary author in his own time, and, further, that The Resurrection was a widely read book in Russia on the eve of the Russian Revolution, there can be little doubt that Tolstoy did his part to lay the groundwork for coming Soviet regime. There is a certain irony in Tolstoy’s role in destroying Imperial Russia. He lamented its inhuman prisons and unjust sentences, unfair labor systems and ineffectual bureaucratic regimes -- had he lived to read Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipeligo, he would have understood how depraved and inhuman a prison system could be. He would have seen the evil Soviet Union that turned the whole of Russia (and its national neighbors) into a giant forced labor prison. If only he knew the blood that stained the pages of history he helped to write.

It goes without saying that The Resurrection is not for everyone -- perhaps it is not for anyone. That said, it is very well written story with engaging characters and all of the attributes of an excellent novel. It also is a testament to the societal destruction that heresies can reap.