AUGUST 4 MEMORIAL OF ST. JOHN VIANNEY: Priest, Parish, and Practicing Catholics

[first published August 4, 2014]


by David Pence


John Vianney (1786-1859) is the patron saint of parish priests. He worked in a French town of less than 500 souls called Ars, and is often called the Cure of Ars. [It is about 90 miles west of Geneva, Switzerland].

'Cure' in French means priest. The Webster word history is instructive. The old Latin word 'cura' meant "the care given to someone, often medical." Christians expropriated the word to mean "the care of souls." The Latin root passed into French, and then English, with this spiritual meaning as cure in French meaning priest and curate in English meaning "one who takes care of souls, a member of the clergy." This word history reminds us that cultures can sacralize language as well as debase it. What a culture does to the words it receives, depends on what kind of life the people are living in that culture.

Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney was no star in his seminary studies. Thank God his superiors recognized his great soul garbed with a modest mind. He received his earliest sacraments in the underground French Church, avoided Napoleon’s draft to fight the disastrous war against Spain, and was ordained in 1815. His piety, prayer, and penance made his parish a gravitational center for Catholic renewal in post-revolutionary France. He knew the basics. God had become man in Christ; the priest had become sacred in ordination; and the souls of his parishioners would be sanctified only through prayer and penance.

The humble priest provides for us an antidote to living public life "as if God doesn’t exist." The French priest had a cure for practical atheism. He built his life on prayer. He centralized the tabernacle’s sacred space in gesture and building to proclaim Jesus present. He saw men as souls. In his celebration of the Mass, he directed all present to the reality of the Triune God. In the confessional he did not turn his head from the hold of Satan on unresolved penitents. He chastised those who repeatedly failed to "amend my life."
                     

The local parish is still today the physical and communal form of Christ’s Presence shining through the sulfurous mist of practical atheism. The priest is a watchman for the city of God whenever he mounts the walls of the confessional to beat back Satan assaulting the people. The Catholic life is a daily, weekly, and annual set of practices organizing a community of prayer around a sacred space and Personage. The priest prays the daily office of Church in communion with the worldwide apostolic priesthood, and puts on the mind of Christ for his local flock by this practice. Keeping Catholic time draws the local face-to-face body into the Universal Church, and the day-to-day calendar into the timeline of the Divine Drama. The antidotes to the foggy atmosphere of practical atheism are the tabernacle lights of countless parochial sacred hills where men worship the Father. As Jesus promised the woman at the well, there shall come a time when worship is no longer restricted to the mountains of Jerusalem and Samaria. That time has been achieved through the coming of the Spirit in the sacramental Church. Let us rejoice and be glad!

The priest is not a community organizer urging his parishioners to do public service projects or postcard-campaigns to lobby the civil authorities. He mans an ark and pulls us into a sacred space where we are set apart from the corrupting flood-waters of the world. Once in the ark, man can finally see reality with his head above the waters. He has been saved and is enlightened. He understands his purpose because, finally, he stands and kneels where he is fully oriented in space and time to the Divine Person. The parish priest directs hearts to God and cleanses souls of sin. He leads us in prayer, integrates us in the sacramental order of the Church, and teaches us the pillars of the faith -- which explain Nature, History, and Person in the light of Christ. The practicing Catholic becomes a new personality. These new Christian personalities shaped by communal liturgy and prayer will feed the hungry, heal the sick, enlighten the ignorant, protect the widows and orphans, and shelter the immigrant. The men will build cities and nations while the women will build homes, schools, and hospitals. The men will be apostolic in their communal public character, and the women will be virginal in their interior lives and maternal in their care of others. Catholic practice shapes Catholic personalities, and that practice is as tactile as it is local.

Seek first the things above and all else will follow. Holy priests make holy men and holy women. There is only one kind of village that explains the Cosmos -- the parish at prayer. The local parish has never been the end game of the careerist. But it remains the locus of prayer and penance where practicing Catholics muster in the formations which proclaim the Sacramental Presence of Christ in those golden tabernacles, and herald the Final Coming of our Lord and King just over the horizon.

From the Catechetical Instructions by St. John Mary Vianney: 

Man has a noble task: that of prayer and love. To pray and to love, that is the happiness of man on earth. 

Prayer is nothing else than union with God. When the heart is pure and united with God it is consoled and filled with sweetness; it is dazzled by a marvellous light. In this intimate union God and the soul are like two pieces of wax moulded into one; they cannot any more be separated. It is a very wonderful thing, this union of God with his insignificant creature, a happiness passing all understanding... 

Our prayer is an incense that is delightful to God... My children, your hearts are small, but prayer enlarges them and renders them capable of loving God... In a prayer well made, troubles vanish like snow under the rays of the sun.

May Saint John Vianney guide many parishes and their local priests into a prayerful weekly rhythm of the Catholic sacramental order: Baptism, Confession, and the Eucharist.

                                       

"I will show you the way to heaven!"

                                                                                                           

AUGUST 4 MEMORIAL OF ST. JOHN VIANNEY: Priest, Parish, and Practicing Catholics

[first published August 4, 2014]


by David Pence


John Vianney (1786-1859) is the patron saint of parish priests. He worked in a French town of less than 500 souls called Ars, and is often called the Cure of Ars. [It is about 90 miles west of Geneva, Switzerland].

'Cure' in French means priest. The Webster word history is instructive. The old Latin word 'cura' meant "the care given to someone, often medical." Christians expropriated the word to mean "the care of souls." The Latin root passed into French, and then English, with this spiritual meaning as cure in French meaning priest and curate in English meaning "one who takes care of souls, a member of the clergy." This word history reminds us that cultures can sacralize language as well as debase it. What a culture does to the words it receives, depends on what kind of life the people are living in that culture.

Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney was no star in his seminary studies. Thank God his superiors recognized his great soul garbed with a modest mind. He received his earliest sacraments in the underground French Church, avoided Napoleon’s draft to fight the disastrous war against Spain, and was ordained in 1815. His piety, prayer, and penance made his parish a gravitational center for Catholic renewal in post-revolutionary France. He knew the basics. God had become man in Christ; the priest had become sacred in ordination; and the souls of his parishioners would be sanctified only through prayer and penance.

The humble priest provides for us an antidote to living public life "as if God doesn’t exist." The French priest had a cure for practical atheism. He built his life on prayer. He centralized the tabernacle’s sacred space in gesture and building to proclaim Jesus present. He saw men as souls. In his celebration of the Mass, he directed all present to the reality of the Triune God. In the confessional he did not turn his head from the hold of Satan on unresolved penitents. He chastised those who repeatedly failed to "amend my life."
                     

The local parish is still today the physical and communal form of Christ’s Presence shining through the sulfurous mist of practical atheism. The priest is a watchman for the city of God whenever he mounts the walls of the confessional to beat back Satan assaulting the people. The Catholic life is a daily, weekly, and annual set of practices organizing a community of prayer around a sacred space and Personage. The priest prays the daily office of Church in communion with the worldwide apostolic priesthood, and puts on the mind of Christ for his local flock by this practice. Keeping Catholic time draws the local face-to-face body into the Universal Church, and the day-to-day calendar into the timeline of the Divine Drama. The antidotes to the foggy atmosphere of practical atheism are the tabernacle lights of countless parochial sacred hills where men worship the Father. As Jesus promised the woman at the well, there shall come a time when worship is no longer restricted to the mountains of Jerusalem and Samaria. That time has been achieved through the coming of the Spirit in the sacramental Church. Let us rejoice and be glad!

The priest is not a community organizer urging his parishioners to do public service projects or postcard-campaigns to lobby the civil authorities. He mans an ark and pulls us into a sacred space where we are set apart from the corrupting flood-waters of the world. Once in the ark, man can finally see reality with his head above the waters. He has been saved and is enlightened. He understands his purpose because, finally, he stands and kneels where he is fully oriented in space and time to the Divine Person. The parish priest directs hearts to God and cleanses souls of sin. He leads us in prayer, integrates us in the sacramental order of the Church, and teaches us the pillars of the faith -- which explain Nature, History, and Person in the light of Christ. The practicing Catholic becomes a new personality. These new Christian personalities shaped by communal liturgy and prayer will feed the hungry, heal the sick, enlighten the ignorant, protect the widows and orphans, and shelter the immigrant. The men will build cities and nations while the women will build homes, schools, and hospitals. The men will be apostolic in their communal public character, and the women will be virginal in their interior lives and maternal in their care of others. Catholic practice shapes Catholic personalities, and that practice is as tactile as it is local.

Seek first the things above and all else will follow. Holy priests make holy men and holy women. There is only one kind of village that explains the Cosmos -- the parish at prayer. The local parish has never been the end game of the careerist. But it remains the locus of prayer and penance where practicing Catholics muster in the formations which proclaim the Sacramental Presence of Christ in those golden tabernacles, and herald the Final Coming of our Lord and King just over the horizon.

From the Catechetical Instructions by St. John Mary Vianney: 

Man has a noble task: that of prayer and love. To pray and to love, that is the happiness of man on earth. 

Prayer is nothing else than union with God. When the heart is pure and united with God it is consoled and filled with sweetness; it is dazzled by a marvellous light. In this intimate union God and the soul are like two pieces of wax moulded into one; they cannot any more be separated. It is a very wonderful thing, this union of God with his insignificant creature, a happiness passing all understanding... 

Our prayer is an incense that is delightful to God... My children, your hearts are small, but prayer enlarges them and renders them capable of loving God... In a prayer well made, troubles vanish like snow under the rays of the sun.

May Saint John Vianney guide many parishes and their local priests into a prayerful weekly rhythm of the Catholic sacramental order: Baptism, Confession, and the Eucharist.

                                       

"I will show you the way to heaven!"

                                                                                                           

A Catholic prayer to one's Guardian Angel (no age limit on who should pray it)

“How great the dignity of the soul, since each one has from his birth an angel commissioned to guard it.”   (Saint Jerome, d. 420)

"Angel of God,
my guardian dear,
To whom God's love
commits me here,
Ever this day,
be at my side,
To light and guard,
Rule and guide.
Amen."
                     

      
Be sure to know the archangels as well.

Catholic Education vs. the Modern University

by Dr. David Pence


                               

The denial – in March 2013 – by an education official at Gonzaga University (Spokane, Washington) of a student request to form a Knights of Columbus chapter is a perfect local instance of the fundamental contradiction between the communal tradition of Catholic education and the individualistic tenets of modern universities.

The Catholic tradition, grounded in the reality of God-made-man who is incarnate in every daily Mass, posits transcendent truth claims about God, man, and nature… and searches from there into the unknown. The modern university begins with the individual – whose nature is unknown – but whose autonomy is paramount. One tradition builds community from a Trinitarian communal reality. The other assembles a gathering place of atomic monads free to seek their own individual truths and, more urgently, their individual career paths.

Dr. Sue Weitz is the official. She has played multiple administrative roles in her own distinguished career, winning her PhD from Gonzaga University in a discipline called ‘Higher Education Administration.’ As Vice President for Student Life, she flawlessly recited the modern tenets in her letter turning down the request:

“The Knights of Columbus, by their very nature, is a men’s organization in which only Catholics may participate via membership… These criteria are inconsistent with the policy and practice of student organization recognition at Gonzaga University, as well as the University’s commitment to non-discrimination based on certain characteristics, one of which is religion… [I] believe strongly in the University’s commitment to non-discrimination and inclusivity… If Gonzaga was an institution that served only Catholics and limited the benefits of the collegiate experience only to them, the decision-making process may have been different… To embrace the diversity and yet endorse a group based on faith exclusivity is a challenge that cannot be reconciled at this time… It is a decision about social justice, equity, and the desire of the University to create and maintain an environment in which none are excluded.”

Dr. Weitz, in an earlier University podcast, had explained the difference between a Jesuit University and state schools: “It is total student centeredness – it’s all about the student…”
The official motto of the school actually has a different emphasis borrowing from the Jesuits: AMDG (ad majorem Dei gloriam) which means “All for the greater glory of God.”

Now, the lesson to learn from this embarrassing story is that both the hyper-individualism of student-centered culture and the fetish for inclusiveness as the crowning attribute of social life are deeply related and quite unlike the religious military spirit of Ignatius Loyola. Our new Jesuit pope has said, "The evils that, over time, happen in ecclesial institutions have their root in self-referentiality and a kind of theological narcissism."

Communal associations based on deep commitments to transcendental truths are precisely the forms which oppose the self-referentiality which is the evil of our day.

In the academic literature which reflects on the nature of community and intermediate associations like student clubs, there is a term called “social capital.”  Exclusive organizations are capable of forming the bonding kind of social capital which is the “super glue” that precedes and makes possible the bridging social capital which “oils” the broader relationships of society.

Dr. Weitz is no ogre. She is a daughter of her age, and absolutely consistent in enforcing the modern ideology:  every student an autonomous individual, and every organization a place to benefit autonomous individuals. But she should not mistake such a policy with the Jesuit or Catholic tradition. Truly, that is not how community works – especially a community aiming to increase the glory of a Living God. The Knights of Columbus (the instance at hand) were formed in 1881 to provide for the widows and orphans of deceased members. The men exclusively bonded, and the least fortunate women and children benefited.

The Catholic Church is known for three meals. There is the highly restricted Eucharistic communion, available only to Catholics in a state of grace and administered by an exclusively all-male celibate priesthood. There are the KC and Holy Name pancake breakfasts open to all who will pay a small price, and promise to listen to the programmed speakers. Finally, throughout the world’s slums and city streets there are kitchens and centers whose price for drink is one’s thirst and whose charge for food is hunger. The restricted sharing of Christ’s Body on our altars is fundamentally related to the unrestricted sharing found on those streets and in those slums. We can be calmly confident the Gonzaga superiors of Dr. Weitz will correct her error – that too is the Jesuit tradition.

                                     

Practicing Catholics, Social Justice, and Educational Reform

Dr. Pence writes:

Catholic education involves a generation of parents and teachers transmitting to students a communal practice that tells them the story of the world; and introduces them to the main characters of that drama eliciting love of God, hatred of Satan, affection for Mary, admiration of the saints, and love for one another. The daily and weekly rhythm of prayer, penance, Mass, and confession introduces students to a realistic comprehensive explanation of the external world while cultivating within them the beginning of a reflective interior life. The story we tell them and the characters we introduce to them are more fantastic than any movie or play. So our challenge is to communicate that a tale so incredible is, in truth, the nature of reality.

                 
This starts with a daily insistence for young children that they are the bearers of a spiritual soul that sets them quite apart from their pets and plants. This personal awareness of the human spiritual soul and a distinct language describing the soul’s faculties and characteristics are not to be confused with “we are all special.”  The practice of examining one’s conscience and receiving the Eucharist in one’s soul are experiences of interiority that are utterly foreign to the modern psychology of personal identity. Yet many of us enjoyed a firm grasp of this interior reality at age seven – and so did our best friends.  These sacramental practices are the educational pillars of the interiority needed for young people to eventually grasp the larger reality that the physical universe manifests a spiritual cosmos.

Genuflecting in a sacred space to a Sacred Presence orients muscles and memory to a sacred order. Seeing a pregnant woman as a temple harboring a sacred life is a lot easier for children brought up genuflecting to a tabernacle holding the Body of Christ.  The special days of feast and fast – telling an annual narrative –  turn the “one thing after another” of chronos time into the historical sense of religious time imbued with both direction and purpose.  Finally, the sacralized and forbidden speech patterns of the Catholic liturgy and commandments impress upon our students the terrible power of language and the word for good or evil. We train our students with actions that inform their thoughts and words. These practices permeate the life of a normal Catholic school, parish, and family.

Prayer and public worship are the inevitable consequences of learning about and knowing God.  Proper worship orients faculty and students to the hierarchy of knowledge that orders them in relation to time, place, purpose, and person. Fortunately, these acts of religious piety do not make students or teachers forget periodic tables, geometric relationships, historical events, or English grammar. Acts of piety, keeping time together, and sharing an ordering language toward the ultimate truths establish a powerful communal lattice for learning. This corporate characteristic that gave the University its name is precisely what modern overspecialized schools have lost.  It is the unitive mark of any truly Catholic school.

The restoration of Catholic education by first insisting on Catholic practices permeating the student experience of time, space, and language will involve a serious redeployment of funds, and a renewal of religious mission from the self-serving employees' cartel that now control most of our institutions. The ecclesial duty to educate the Catholic faithful who fill our parishes (but are unable to afford our University and high school tuitions) will not be embraced by many of the lay and clerical ministers who presently absorb the bulk of our annual $12 billion parish and diocese income.  They will counter all significant movements of reform with an inflationary view of workplace justice, a parasitic generational subversion of gender equity, and an attempt to elevate bureaucratic tenure as a sacramental of infinity.

The proper disposition of land, buildings, and job opportunities is a true social justice issue which will pit Catholic careerists who have lost their faith -- but maintain control of the Catholic infrastructure -- against immigrant and large-family Catholics, as well as the urban poor, who need to be educated, married, and buried inside the dense social capital capacity of the Catholic Church and her institutions. The bishops will decide the matter after they face it.

Less than 15 percent of parish income (fifty years ago it was 63%) is dedicated to Catholic grade schools. Meanwhile, salaries for nuns and clergy in the justice ministries, hospital systems, and Catholic universities make even a previous purse-snatcher like Judas Iscariot seem like a fool for chump change.  (Annual salaries of Fr. Larry Snyder of Catholic Charities - $220,000; Sister Carol Keehan of Catholic Health Association - $600,000 with  $900,000 total compensation; Fr. Dennis Dease, President of University of St.  Thomas - $300,000. The female discrepancy here is retributive payback for historical institutional sexism).

A large subsection of the Sixties generation of clerics, nuns, and lay ministers have interrupted the great inter-generational transmission of faith, wealth, and sacrificial service which constitutes Catholic Tradition.  Those spiritual truths which they did not accept in humble gratitude, they have not transmitted with convincing authority.  Those material possessions lent to them for service to the next generation, they have expropriated for themselves as a “just wage.” This generational act of narcissistic disruption has betrayed the evangelical promise of Vatican II, and squandered the Catholic immigration potential for the Christianization of American civic culture.

The restoration of Catholic education awaits a return to the practice of the sacramental faith by Catholic educators and parents. It will involve closings and firings, and re-openings and conversions, and lots of talented volunteers and lots of very low-paid clergy and nuns. Practicing Catholics are the best social justice movement of all because we start by giving God His due in worship and end up educating and integrating the immigrants, the widows, and the orphans in the life of the Church and city.

Flannery was one wise country gal

                             

I asked Doc Pence for his reaction to some comments of the great Catholic writer, Flannery O'Connor, who died of lupus in 1964 [his words are in italics]:

"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.  The devil's greatest wile, Baudelaire has said, is to convince us that he does not exist.”

There are two insights here.

One from the novelist who reminds us there is a major character missing in the modernist story. I am learning to substitute conversations about policies and practices (like the male priesthood and heterosexual marriage) with a comparison of notes about who we think is on stage with us.

 It turns out an accurate and more complete listing of the dramatis personae – the players in the drama – is the fighting point of stasis where we should contend with the modernists. The characters most often missing are the fallen Angel – Lucifer, and the first Man – Adam. 

Secondly, she reminds us that moments of grace are often preceded and followed by other less friendly spiritual movements.  This is the only adequate explanation of the terrible hijacking of two great civic and ecclesial religious events of the last century: the American civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council. Those two workings of the Spirit have been twisted by another Force. Herod has had his murderous day, but he will not kill the baby. A resurgence of grace will eventually yield the fruits of these movements. But we cannot deny O’Connor’s insight – at every wisp of grace the devil wants his due.

   

"I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.  Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work."

Does it take these one-day rampages of mass murderers to wake us up? Miss O’Connor certainly thought that was true in novels. They say difficult cases make bad law but it may be that conversion demands the grotesque. It took some pretty terrible deeds to turn Pharoah’s heart and, even then, only for an instant.  

"It requires considerable grace for two races to live together, particularly when the population is divided about 50-50 between them and when they have our particular history.  It can't be done without a code of manners based on mutual charity.  I remember a sentence from an essay of Marshall McLuhan's.  I forgot the exact words, but the gist of it was, as I recollect it, that after the Civil War, formality became a condition of survival.  This doesn't seem to me any less true today.  Formality preserves that individual privacy which everyone needs and, in these times, is always in danger of losing.  It's particularly necessary to have in order to protect the rights of both races.  When you have a code of manners based on charity, then when the charity fails – as it is going to do constantly – you've got those manners there to preserve each race from small intrusions upon the other."

Manners, morality, civic charity and the nature of public life are all deeply related. Her emphasis here is the role of manners in keeping peace between the races in the South. I would say there is some similar problem today in employing manners to bring the natural protective order of adult authority back as a vivid daily experience. The public agreement of men who do not know each other’s name but recognize one another as fellow protectors (the basis of citizenship and masculine civic friendship) manifests itself in rituals of gestures and greetings to one another, to women and to younger males. The first school of such manners is the form of liturgical actions in religious gatherings.    

"The Hebrew genius for making the absolute concrete has conditioned the Southerner's way of looking at things.  That is one of the reasons why the South is a storytelling section.  Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac.  Both of these kinds of knowledge are necessary, but in the last four or five centuries, Catholics have overemphasized the abstract and consequently impoverished their imaginations and their capacity for prophetic insight. 

"Nothing will insure the future of Catholic fiction so much as the biblical revival that we see signs of now in Catholic life.  The Bible is held sacred in the Church, we hear it read at Mass, bits and pieces of it are exposed to us in the liturgy, but because we are not totally dependent on it, it has not penetrated very far into our consciousness nor conditioned our reactions to experience... 

"We Catholics too much enjoy indulging ourselves in the logic that kills, in making categories smaller and smaller, in prescribing attitudes and proscribing subjects.  For the Catholic, one result of the Counter-Reformation was a practical overemphasis on the legal and logical and a consequent neglect of the Church's broader tradition.  The need for this emphasis has now diminished, and the Church is busy encouraging those biblical and liturgical revivals which should restore Catholic life to its proper fullness.  Nevertheless the scars of this legalistic approach are still upon us.  Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete..."

This great insight was a driving force of Vatican II. The Council held up the presence of Christ amidst the world – not as the conclusion of a philosophical argument, not as special friend with whom every man makes his separate peace, but as the Head of a living body acting sacramentally throughout the world in particular lands in this particular time.  The Council itself substituted the language of biblical personalism for the philosophical categories. This was not in any way a rejection of the rigor of philosophy; but there is a 'rigor mortis' and a 'rigor vitae' – and Miss O’Connor and the Holy Spirit at the Council purged the rigor mortis.  

The Council was a living icon in a place at a time marked by 1) the collegial experience of  fraternity among 2000  bishops under the office of Peter; 2) the recognition of the liturgy as the unifying life-giving actions defining the Church; 3) a new public manifestation of the Church’s renewed historical self consciousness as an apostolic body. This presence cast off any claim to temporal power, but projected an even more dramatic presence as a continued apostolic fraternity participating in the biblical narrative of history as the light to the nations. The two great world wars which mocked the fractured public church with the armed atheism of the Nazis and Soviets were answered with the reappearance of those two great biblical actors: the armed nation of Israel, and the ‘light to the nations’ -- the evangelizing Apostolic Church.

On a less dramatic note, O’Connor’s lesson must also be pondered by the thin-chested orthodox intellectuals who have eviscerated the discussion of natural law from the ordering of the world by a Living God to the verbose tracts of university professors in praise of their own reason. The same chastisement is due the Catholic political philosophers who explain public life and citizenship in tome after tome but never evoke armed men disciplined by God, courageous leaders bound to other men by law, and the fraternal friendship of shared territorial protective duty. Natural law with no Living God ordering nature and history, and Political Philosophy with no men ruling and fighting for their nations – these are the abstractions that Miss O’Connor criticized. She was never pleased with either atheism or emasculation.  

Let's end with the Lady:
"If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe… I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable… If you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it… It is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead."        (Flannery O’Connor)

Merton the monk was the son of artists

Born in France during the First World War, Thomas Merton wrote of his father:

“My father painted like Cezanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cezanne did.  His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of masses and for all the circumstances that impress an individual identity on each created thing.  His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God’s creation to bear witness for itself.  My father was a very good artist.”

                                                                                        

Praying the Liturgy of the Hours

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass – together with the Divine Office (centered around the Psalms) – constitute the official daily prayers of the Church. 
One of the simplest ways to pray them is to go to the impressive Universalis website.

Flannery on the murky mist

"If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe… I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable… If you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it… It is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead."

                             (Flannery O’Connor)

Instant forgiveness, instant potatoes -- it's all one big mash

The journalist Rod Dreher writes:

A few years ago, when I was still a Catholic, I was at mass in a parish of the Baton Rouge diocese on the first Sunday after the diocese issued a statement saying that a previous bishop, now deceased, had molested a teenager for four years. That parish had a substitute priest for the mass I attended. He read a statement from the then-bishop, as instructed. Then that priest ordered everyone in the parish not to think about this or to talk about it.

I remember very well exactly where I was sitting when I heard that disgusting instruction from the pulpit. I was so furious I nearly stood up and walked out. I thought for a split-second, “I need to say something! This is outrageous!” But of course I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to stand out. Nor did I say anything after Mass, when I ought to have confronted that priest. I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to cause a scene. I’m still ashamed of myself. I could have changed exactly nothing, but I’m ashamed that I didn’t at least say, and say out loud, "You’re wrong, Father. Shame on you.”

Reminds me of the Minneapolis parish I attended for a year, which helped fund an area parochial school -- that is, until the principal embezzled enough funds to force its closure. When the pastor announced this to the congregation, he strongly cautioned us against any ANGER, JUDGEMENT, BITTERNESS (or any other natural human reaction that might possibly delay our immediate descent into a warm bath of compassion).