November 19: “Give rest, O Savior, to the soul of thy servant”

“…whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet…”   
                           (Ishmael in Moby Dick)

Entering this week of high anniversaries of President Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg (Nov 19, 1863) and of John Kennedy’s death in Dallas – as well as the liturgical year drawing to a close, with the Church bowing before the authority and power of Christ our King – the opening scene of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago came to mind:

They walked and walked and sang “Memory Eternal,” and whenever they stopped, the singing seemed to be carried on by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind. Passersby made way for the cortege, counted the wreaths, crossed themselves. The curious joined the procession, asked: “Who’s being buried?” “Zhivago,” came the answer. “So that’s it. Now I see.” “Not him. Her.” “It’s all the same. God rest her soul. A rich funeral.” The last minutes flashed by, numbered, irrevocable. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and those who dwell therein.” The priest, tracing a cross, threw a handful of earth onto Marya Nikolaevna. They sang “With the souls of the righteous.” A terrible bustle began. The coffin was closed, nailed shut, lowered in. A rain of clods drummed down as four shovels hastily filled the grave. Over it a small mound rose. A ten-year-old boy climbed onto it. Only in the state of torpor and insensibility that usually comes at the end of a big funeral could it have seemed that the boy wanted to speak over his mother’s grave. He raised his head and looked around from that height at the autumn wastes and the domes of the monastery with an absent gaze. His snub-nosed face became distorted. His neck stretched out. If a wolf cub had raised his head with such a movement, it would have been clear that he was about to howl. Covering his face with his hands, the boy burst into sobs. A cloud flying towards him began to lash his hands and face with the wet whips of a cold downpour. A man in black, with narrow, tight-fitting, gathered sleeves, approached the grave. This was the deceased woman’s brother and the weeping boy’s uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, a priest defrocked at his own request. He went up to the boy and led him out of the cemetery.

   
                                                 

“Alleluia. Weeping at the grave creates the song.”

The Dedication of the Basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul

[first published November 18, 2015]

by David Pence

The Catholic Church on this day each year celebrates the dedication of the churches of St Peter and St Paul in Rome.  St. Peter and St. Paul drank of the Lord's Chalice and were both martyred in Rome.  “Those two famous shoots of the Divine Seed burst forth in a great progeny.” Their sacral brotherhood of blood served as the foundation stones of the apostolic Church.

Their tombs were pilgrimage destinations from the beginning. The basilicas were built over their sacred remains by Constantine in the 4th century, and then refurbished and rededicated in later centuries. Christianity’s priesthood  is centered in Rome where the graves of the martyred blood brothers signal the early development of Christ's Body as surely as Bethlehem and Nazareth. The reclamation project of winning back territory from the Prince of this world is celebrated especially when a sacred space is carved out of the land and stone to consecrate a church.  

Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls

                                       

Interior of St Paul's

Basilica of St Peter

The Chair of Peter upheld by
Saints Ambrose, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, and Augustine

Nov. 9th -- Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome: Sacred Space and the Cleansing of the Temple

(first published November 9, 2014)


by David Pence


It may seem odd that a feast day celebrates the consecration of a church. Think of it as a time to reflect on all the ways God and his Church have set aside sacred space to bring Creator and man in closer union. Out of nothingness, he set a platform of matter where man could stand and know and love. In the hostile expanding universe, He set the solar system and earth in just the right place for life. Then, from inanimate matter he enclosed a cell: a set-aside enclosed space which is the structure of all physical life. He set aside a garden amidst the earth for the best of his handiwork.

After man was cast out from the holy place because he defiled it, Noah and his sons were instructed to set aside an ark where they could survive the Deluge. God made all the men under Abraham a set-aside sacred brotherhood when he ordered them circumcised. When He gave Moses the Ten Commandments, He also instructed him in building a new sacred space: the Ark of the Covenant. There God would dwell amidst his elected people. That holy chest of the desert wanderers eventually became the Temples of the Promised Land. And from that Jewish culture came the Virgin-Mother, the new sacred Ark. She was set aide in her beginning by her Immaculate Conception and at her earthly end by her Assumption into Heaven. She was the ultimate sacred space. And He dwelt among us.

There is a setting aside of sacred spaces, and days and persons, because the whole of matter and living beings is not destined to be drawn into the Body of Christ. There is a separation which makes this ground here, holy; and that ground over there, profane. There is a separation that will send the devil to Hell, while drawing the poor in spirit into the Body of Christ. Maintaining this separation is so crucial to the divine plan that spaces and persons which have been consecrated must be destroyed or purified if they become contaminated. The root of the word "holy" actually means "set aside or separated."

The celebration of Hanukkah by the Jews is an 8-day commemoration of the Purification of the Temple after it had been defiled by a desecrating Greek king. When the Maccabees cleansed the temple altar from the Greek abominations, they destroyed the old altar and then rebuilt a new one. The Maccabees could end the desecrations only by warfare. They were led by a father and his sons. Once again we hear the biblical lesson that without a fighting patriarchal fraternity there is no defense of the sacred center. (Hanukkah really isn't "the Jewish Christmas.")

The liturgy of this day reminds us that human beings are temples of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit of God dwells within us. Ezekiel has his vision of the sanctifying sacramental graces flowing like a river from the new temple of the Church. This day's Gospel recalls the Maccabees. Christ swings a purging whip to cleanse his Father’s house. In that same week on the night before he dies, he will do his other great pre-Crucifixion purifying act when he cleanses his sacred Apostles of the Judas-priest and orders them to do the same through the ages. Today, let us reflect on sacred spaces and our duty to keep them pure.

                                       

by El Greco (d. 1614)

                                                               



UPDATE: The Lateran in Rome  was dedicated in November 324. It was the first  Church built in Rome after Constantine's Edict in 313 allowed Christianity a recognized public identity.  Emperor Constantine convoked the first Ecumenical Council - at Nicaea -- the following May.

"The beauty and harmony of the churches, destined to give praise to God, also draws us human beings, limited and sinful, to convert to form a “cosmos,” a well-ordered structure, in intimate communion with Jesus, who is the true Saint of saints. This happens in a culminating way in the Eucharistic liturgy, in which the “ecclesia,” that is, the community of the baptized, come together in a unified way to listen to the Word of God and nourish themselves with the Body and Blood of Christ. From these two tables the Church of living stones is built up in truth and charity and is internally formed by the Holy Spirit transforming herself into what she receives, conforming herself more and more to the Lord Jesus Christ. She herself, if she lives in sincere and fraternal unity, in this way becomes the spiritual sacrifice pleasing to God.

Dear friends, today’s feast celebrates a mystery that is always relevant: God’s desire to build a spiritual temple in the world, a community that worships him in spirit and truth (cf. John 4:23-24). But this observance also reminds us of the importance of the material buildings in which the community gathers to celebrate the praises of God. Every community therefore has the duty to take special care of its own sacred buildings, which are a precious religious and historical patrimony. For this we call upon the intercession of Mary Most Holy, that she help us to become, like her, the “house of God,” living temple of his love. "

— Benedict XVI, Angelus Address, November 9, 2008

NOVEMBER 2: The assassination of President Diem

[first published November 22, 2012]

The tumultuous November of 1963 began with the assassination of a Catholic president: Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Three weeks later, another fell.

For years the U.S. strongly supported Diem, but the turning point was JFK’s appointment of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (Nixon’s running mate in 1960) as our ambassador – replacing Frederick Nolting.

Lodge – with allies such as Averell Harriman and newspaper reporter David Halberstam – completely undermined the Vietnamese leader.

Diem’s younger brother and top advisor, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was killed along with him. The widow of the latter, Madame Nhu, had acted as first lady since 1955 when the unmarried Diem had become the country’s first president.

(The always colorful Madame Nhu lived long in exile; she died last year in Rome on Easter Sunday.  After the Saigon assassinations on the second day of November, All Souls Day 1963, she said: "Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need enemies.")

Dr. Pence says that JFK’s greatest failure as a public leader was his betrayal of our ally, President Diem. Kennedy was never proud of having allowed his underlings to give the green light to the coup; and in a mysterious way, it marked the loss of the American leader’s ‘Mandate of Heaven’…

[Diem’s older brother, Thuc (d. 1984), was the archbishop of Hue. One of the nephews of Diem was Cardinal Thuan (d. 2002), who after being imprisoned for years in the North, served as head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace].

Check out this interview with Ambassador Nolting, in which he calls our involvement in Diem's overthrow "disastrous."


 Here is a review of Philip Catton's book, Diem's Final Failure: Prelude to America's War in Vietnam.

2017 UPDATE: Interview with Geoffrey Shaw, the author of  The Lost Mandate from Heaven: The Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam. This is the definitive account of the greatest blunder of the Vietnam war-the American inspired assassination of President Diem in Nov, 1963.  The man with the heart of darkness was Averell Harriman of the State Department. The young atheist news reporter David Halberstam could never understand the Catholic Confucian president who was much more an authentic nationalist than Ho Chi Minh. Replacing Ambassador Nolting with the Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge left no one to counter Halberstam's prejudicial reporting and Harriman's sinister machinations. The champions of secular liberal democracy orchestrated the murder of the one leader who could have negotiated a settlement in Vietnam. This  primal political lesson of the Vietnam War was hinted at but inexcusably misrepresented by the Ken Burns PBS series. It is easier to paint an Asian Catholic as a tyrant than accuse a liberal Democrat and secular journalist of leading roles in a generation's greatest tragedy. The wrenching Last Man Out account of the fall of Saigon.

Here are State Department documents and analysis-Did JFK order Diem assassination? by John Prados.

All Saints Day: Four Men striving to imitate our Lord, the true Man In Full

(first published November 1, 2014)

An interview with Dr. David Pence

Pope Pius (d. 1914)

You describe most men as falling into four main groups: soldiers, teachers, workers, and priests. How did you come up with that?

"Orare, laborare, studere, contendere." Those four Latin words describe the basic duties of the Catholic man. Each of us embody them in a greater or lesser fashion.

In my youth I attended  an all-boys high school, a Catholic seminary, and a federal prison. Each of those groups had different rules for finding one's place in the social order. I met the different types of men there. Some groups try to weed out certain character types. Leaving out one of these types of men always leaves a deficit. I went to a true Catholic boys school which did not define itself as "college prep." About 30 percent of the boys in our school were being prepared for college and life; the others were being prepared for life and some other kind of work. It was the most democratic and healthy maturation experience I can imagine. The modern university is, of course, dominated by teachers who -- with a vengeance -- have divorced religion from knowledge (out go the priests), military history from economic history (expel the soldiers), and the technology of the trades from engineering and science. The men who carry those disciplines are absent while bookish females are glad to fill in. Our seminaries seem to weed out warriors and workers.

Every man will have one or two of these tendencies more strongly than others, but you must know and appreciate all of them. This is also a good initial screen when your daughters are dating. My daughters and I always know pretty early with suitors which two of the four characteristics are present in their potential mates. My daughter in the convent says she has found a man who was a master carpenter, beat Satan at war, is the light of the world for knowledge, and gave the world the Our Father and the Mass as a priest. She plans to be his bride.
                                                     

We've chosen a holy man or two, as examples for each of the categories. 

THE PRIEST: Why John Vianney (19th-century France) and Pius X (the pope immediately before WWI) for the priests?

The priest mediates between man and God. Saint Pius X was the great reformer of the seminaries, and a teacher against atheistic modernism. But his greatest priestly act was centering the lives of Catholics and our parishes in the miracle of the Eucharist by encouraging earlier (age of seven) and more frequent reception. He brought Christ in the Eucharist to the center of Catholic life. The Protestant Reformation scattered the Christian sacramental order by elevating the individualistic aspects of Baptism and faith. Pius X reordered the daily practices of Catholic life and the  sacramental order around the communal priestly acts of the Eucharist.

Saint John Vianney, the patron of parish priests, was willing to stay in the confessional for hours to help set his parishioners free from sin. To be saved is to be delivered from the grip of the Flesh, the World, and the Devil. Nobody can do that on his own. On the day he rose from the dead, Jesus breathed on the apostles and gave all priests the authority to deliver us from evil. John Vianney (the Cure of Ars) reminds us that the path to the red light of the tabernacle showing Christ's true Presence passes through a priest in a confession box. I think John Vianney would measure the health of a parish more by the length of confession lines on Saturday, than percent at communion on Sunday.
                                                       

THE SOLDIER: Modern Jesuits, contra the 16th-century Spanish knight, think all problems can be cured with 'oil, soap, and caresses' (to borrow a pejorative phrase from Saint Pius). How did things go off the rails with today's company of Ignatian soldiers?

When Ignatius Loyola put away his cannons, he did not stop being a soldier. In every situation, he said, we must discern the spirits. It is not always apparent which is Satan and which is the Lord; but make no mistake, there is a battle of spirits and we are always helping one side more than the other. Chesterton once said we wake up on a battlefield, and there are hundreds of platoons and hundreds of different flags at battle. Which flag, which platoon, which battle? -- that is always the question. Ignatius is the warrior because he keeps the real enemy in front of us at all times. The modern Jesuit quit believing in Satan, and lost the emotion of hatred which is meant for Satan. Love without the discipline of a corresponding hatred becomes a syrup. It loses its ordering function. Let us hope the modern Jesuits can learn from our first Jesuit pope. Pope Francis keeps the reality of Satan and the discernment of spirits uppermost in his consciousness. One of the reasons he doesn’t draw the old lines of battle around abortion, contraception, and homosexuality is that he thinks there is a deeper line to be drawn against an Older Foe on other battlefronts we have too long ignored.

You teach at a seminary named after a new saint [Oct. 2016]: Saint Jose Sanchez del Rio (1913-1928). You say he, too, was a soldier saint. 

He was a Mexican Cristero fighting against an atheist government. He is the patron of all American men who will fight to align our nations under the sovereignty of God. He was only 15 when he gave his horse to a commander so the "more needed" commander  could escape from government encirclement. When Sanchez was captured, they asked him why he quit shooting. His answer was not exactly that of a pacifist: "I ran out of bullets!" He was imprisoned. The soles of his feet were peeled of skin, and he was marched to a graveyard. There he was shot for not renouncing Christ his King. Viva Christo Rey! We should not let it escape us that Saint Jose Sanchez and the Cristeros were establishing the rule of Christ by reforming their nation. The nations in all their splendid diversity are the communal forms by which men organize protection and law as fellow soldiers. There is only one King but there are many national callings.



                                                         

THE TEACHER: You have been a teacher for years, along with your doctoring. Teaching the young is a high art. What, principally, do you try to pass on?

A teacher transmits the practices and wisdom of his culture to the souls of his students.
I've tried to teach them there is a God, that they have a soul, and we are a Church.


One of G.K. Chesterton's most popular smaller books is his biography of Thomas Aquinas. Give us your reaction to a few lines:

"On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible... [Luther] destroyed Reason; and substituted Suggestion."

Thomas Aquinas saw both nature and the God of nature. He explained how man fits in the whole scheme of reality. Luther feared for his soul, and squeezed the Lord into his pocket grasping the tiny rabbit's foot of personal salvation. Even if Luther had to bypass the purpose of the universe or overlook the fate of mankind, he was content if he could see his place set at the table. Aquinas got on his knees as his most natural posture, and from there he could see the universe -- and felt it his duty as a teacher to explain it to others. He was taught by the greatest natural scientist of the age, Albert the Great; and they shared the compulsion of all great teachers: to participate in external reality  and then invite students to participate with them.

"[Thomas crafted] the great central Synthesis of history... An acute observer said of Thomas Aquinas in his own time, 'He could alone restore all philosophy, if it had been burnt by fire' ...There is not a single occasion on which he indulged in a sneer. His curiously simple character, his lucid but laborious intellect, could not be better summed up than by saying that he did not know how to sneer. He was in a double sense an intellectual aristocrat: but he was never an intellectual snob."

Certain learned men accumulate knowledge like a bag of precious stones. They can display it for honor, share some with favorites, or use it to flail their foes or underlings.
There are other great teachers whose knowledge is a participation in reality. They are always inviting others: "Do you see what I see?" They are much more impressive than the bag-men; they do not seek to impress their students, but infect them. St Thomas Aquinas taught his students the unity of truth,  the reality of God and the purpose of human beings.  He is the teacher's teacher.


THE WORKER:    Benedict (d. 543) taught monks to pray, and by his rule he kept them disciplined but not fanatic. They were stable, so they could be hospitable -- and yet you identify Benedict, first, as a worker. Why?

The worker is the missing man in seminaries, universities, college-prep high schools, and both political parties. After men are ordered in prayer, they carry out God's command to cultivate the garden and subdue the earth. From the communal monastery of prayer the men set out to till fields of agriculture, and craft the shops of technology. They sanctified labor in a way the Greeks and Romans would never do. The Greeks elevated the philosopher and the Romans praised the warrior. They both consider physical labor the province of  slaves. The monks of Benedict radically changed this social norm.  This Christian form of men under God working cooperatively to produce wealth became the basis of the corporations and cites of Europe. Look outside at your city or town. Every bridge, every office  building, every house, every sewer sytem and telephone pole is the product of free men working in groups. The Benedictine monastery is all about us. Around the monasteries, communal economies become templates of productive towns and cities. This model of men linked first by prayer and then by productive work forms the Christian commonwealth. This cannot be reduced to  either capitalism or socialism. Benedict and his men show us that Christians are doing something different. Christ grew up under the tutelage of  St Joseph the  carpenter.  When he picked his apostles He chose fishermen. Benedict and his men carried this "working man’s party" of Christianity into the desolated hillsides of fallen Rome and gave us Europe.