SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY

Originally published June 15, 2014; additive edits June 11, 2017 by Dr. David Pence

"When we speak of the Trinity, we must do so with caution and modesty, for, as St. Augustine saith, nowhere else are more dangerous errors made, or is research more difficult, or discovery more fruitful."    
                    (Saint Thomas Aquinas)

The coming of Jesus announced a Messiah for the Jews, proclaimed a new Kingdom amidst the nations, dethroned the Enemy Prince, and revealed the mystery we contemplate on this day -- that the God-made-man is one Person in a Trinity.

"Even our God is a community," said G.K. Chesterton. Humans will overcome death only by entering into this triune God as sons of the Father, incorporated into the Body of the Son. The Spirit will bind us properly if we humbly let Him act… and He acts through the sacramental Church. He indelibly conforms our souls into Christ's Body through Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders. The Trinity, marriage and the family, Holy Orders and the Church – these are the communions we know as Catholics.

Our proposal here at Anthropology of Accord is that the Communio theology which takes its origin from the metaphysical reality we celebrate today must be further developed as the theological and anthropological principle of the public life of the Church and nations. The three persons of the Trinity are revealed to us in the masculine forms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A serious theology will ponder and learn from the masculine apostolic priesthood and the male covenantal nature of the prototype nation: Israel. The Communio nature of the Eucharistic church and marriage are enriching themes of the last century. They have their champions and journals and institutes. Masculine public communio is a bit underdeveloped. Ubiquitous, fundamental, and yet (for fear of embarrassment) unmentioned.

The communal bond of men in nations is the natural polity which ensures the freedom of those more sacred bonds of Church and marriage. In different places and times in history the masculine public polity might have been fellow tribesmen and a warrior chief, or the Emperor and his subjects, or the 'polis' and its citizens. But, today, from Singapore to Germany, from Canada to China, from Brazil to Poland, and from Egypt to the Philippines, the natural bond of men in public communal work and protection has developed in the form of territorial nations. The Scriptural template of this masculine national form is the ritual of circumcision and the forging of one nation under a Law from the twelve tribes of Israel. The nation was built on a forgiving act of brotherly reconciliation. It is deeply tied to the possession of a common land. It is ordered by a common law. Leaders rise as prophets, priests or rulers to keep the communal body in concordance with God. It is our hope that Catholic theologians and philosophers would spend some fraction of their attention on history and the relationships of the natural armed authorities, which constitute public life and the legitimate State.

Possibly the next three graduate students who request to study the Theology of the Body might be reassigned to a project studying how Singapore got to be the polity it is today. We could call it the "theology of the corporate body" if that would make this ancient study of the natural polity more palatable. It was such men making civic agreement and the peace of 'Tranquillitas Ordinis' whom Christ had in mind when He said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

Marriage is an important but not all-embracing covenant. Neither the Church nor the nations are families writ large. Christ did not found His church on a sacral marriage, nor was the bond of sacred honor which forged America the union between George and Martha Washington! Both the Catholic Church  and the American nation are founded on sacral covenanted brotherhoods of adult men.  Religious and political public life are both defined by public communal and masculine loves which include the apostolic priesthood and the particular territorial loves of men for their fatherland. Christ wept over Jerusalem, not Antioch. More than 2000 years have passed and Jerusalem once again is guarded by a nation called Israel. Christ never ordered the apostolic Church to move beyond the nation. He said, "Baptize the nations." Those of us who believe the Trinity is the fundamental form of love and life can no longer ignore in our religious discourse the public form of communion -- the life of nations -- that God promised Abraham 4000 years ago.

The 20th-century Catholic thinker who best navigated in the waters of Christianity and the formation of political cultures in history was Christopher Dawson:
                                               

The most articulate explanation of the dilemma of present-day Catholic political thought, scissored between the sacral relations of marriage and the Church, has been presented by Russell Hittinger.

On Trinity Sunday let us pay heed to the nature of our communal bonds – all of which in their proper order give glory to that greatest of bonds – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.




UPDATE: Here is an earlier review of Christopher Dawson’s Judgment of the Nations.

And a fascinating address given by Professor Hittinger on the troubled interaction of nations and theology.

SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY

Originally published June 15, 2014; additive edits June 11, 2017 by Dr. David Pence

"When we speak of the Trinity, we must do so with caution and modesty, for, as St. Augustine saith, nowhere else are more dangerous errors made, or is research more difficult, or discovery more fruitful."    
                    (Saint Thomas Aquinas)

The coming of Jesus announced a Messiah for the Jews, proclaimed a new Kingdom amidst the nations, dethroned the Enemy Prince, and revealed the mystery we contemplate on this day -- that the God-made-man is one Person in a Trinity.

"Even our God is a community," said G.K. Chesterton. Humans will overcome death only by entering into this triune God as sons of the Father, incorporated into the Body of the Son. The Spirit will bind us properly if we humbly let Him act… and He acts through the sacramental Church. He indelibly conforms our souls into Christ's Body through Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders. The Trinity, marriage and the family, Holy Orders and the Church – these are the communions we know as Catholics.

Our proposal here at Anthropology of Accord is that the Communio theology which takes its origin from the metaphysical reality we celebrate today must be further developed as the theological and anthropological principle of the public life of the Church and nations. The three persons of the Trinity are revealed to us in the masculine forms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A serious theology will ponder and learn from the masculine apostolic priesthood and the male covenantal nature of the prototype nation: Israel. The Communio nature of the Eucharistic church and marriage are enriching themes of the last century. They have their champions and journals and institutes. Masculine public communio is a bit underdeveloped. Ubiquitous, fundamental, and yet (for fear of embarrassment) unmentioned.

The communal bond of men in nations is the natural polity which ensures the freedom of those more sacred bonds of Church and marriage. In different places and times in history the masculine public polity might have been fellow tribesmen and a warrior chief, or the Emperor and his subjects, or the 'polis' and its citizens. But, today, from Singapore to Germany, from Canada to China, from Brazil to Poland, and from Egypt to the Philippines, the natural bond of men in public communal work and protection has developed in the form of territorial nations. The Scriptural template of this masculine national form is the ritual of circumcision and the forging of one nation under a Law from the twelve tribes of Israel. The nation was built on a forgiving act of brotherly reconciliation. It is deeply tied to the possession of a common land. It is ordered by a common law. Leaders rise as prophets, priests or rulers to keep the communal body in concordance with God. It is our hope that Catholic theologians and philosophers would spend some fraction of their attention on history and the relationships of the natural armed authorities, which constitute public life and the legitimate State.

Possibly the next three graduate students who request to study the Theology of the Body might be reassigned to a project studying how Singapore got to be the polity it is today. We could call it the "theology of the corporate body" if that would make this ancient study of the natural polity more palatable. It was such men making civic agreement and the peace of 'Tranquillitas Ordinis' whom Christ had in mind when He said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

Marriage is an important but not all-embracing covenant. Neither the Church nor the nations are families writ large. Christ did not found His church on a sacral marriage, nor was the bond of sacred honor which forged America the union between George and Martha Washington! Both the Catholic Church  and the American nation are founded on sacral covenanted brotherhoods of adult men.  Religious and political public life are both defined by public communal and masculine loves which include the apostolic priesthood and the particular territorial loves of men for their fatherland. Christ wept over Jerusalem, not Antioch. More than 2000 years have passed and Jerusalem once again is guarded by a nation called Israel. Christ never ordered the apostolic Church to move beyond the nation. He said, "Baptize the nations." Those of us who believe the Trinity is the fundamental form of love and life can no longer ignore in our religious discourse the public form of communion -- the life of nations -- that God promised Abraham 4000 years ago.

The 20th-century Catholic thinker who best navigated in the waters of Christianity and the formation of political cultures in history was Christopher Dawson:
                                               

The most articulate explanation of the dilemma of present-day Catholic political thought, scissored between the sacral relations of marriage and the Church, has been presented by Russell Hittinger.

On Trinity Sunday let us pay heed to the nature of our communal bonds – all of which in their proper order give glory to that greatest of bonds – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.




UPDATE: Here is an earlier review of Christopher Dawson’s Judgment of the Nations.

And a fascinating address given by Professor Hittinger on the troubled interaction of nations and theology.

Religion, Nations, and Geopolitical Review: SATURDAY, JANUARY 11

by A. Joseph Lynch

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

SPAIN'S MARRIAGE PREP: Noting that it takes a man seven years in seminary to become a priest, Spain's sky-high divorce rate has led the nation's bishop to create a multi-year marriage preparation process.

MCCARRICK MISSING: He's not in Kansas anymore, Toto. More from Church Militant.

NO CRIMINAL SECRETS: Buffulo's interim bishop has said that "criminality is not entitled to secrecy." While certainly true, we must hold the ordained to higher standards than criminality. There are certain acts - some that are not illegal - that "divorces [the priest] from the fraternal communion of priests."

II. PRESIDENT TRUMP AND AMERICA

TRUMP'S NEW ALLY: Trump is coming to the defense of Jeff Van Drew, the New Jersey Democrat who switched parties after the impeachment farce in the House. Trump, who values loyalty, will campaign for Van Drew in New Jersey this month. This act proves Trump's own loyalty and should be seen as an olive branch to other moderate Democrats.

CENTER-RIGHT AMERICA: A report last February from Gallup revealed conservatives greatly outnumbered liberals in 19 states. Gallup's new data regarding 2019 shows the US has remained a center-right nation.

GOOD ECONOMIC NEWS: You know the economy is running like gangbusters when Taco Bell plans to start giving six-figure salaries to store managers and 24 hours of paid sick leave to all its store employees. With historically low unemployment, companies like Taco Bell must give better benefits in order to keep employees.

IRAQ - TIME TO LEAVE: From Pat Buchanan.

III. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

COVINGTON SETTLED: CNN has settled with Covington Catholic student, Nick Sandmann. FoxNEWS calls it a win for the little guy, but what impact will a sealed settlement have on the Fake News industry?

REGRET AT CHICK-FIL-A: Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-A, must have thought Left-wing attacks on his company would end after he turned his company's back on charitable giving to Christian organizations. It didn't. Leftists will continue fighting the company until they embrace the radical Left - such as giving to radical organizations. Cathy now regrets his decision.

HOLLYWOOD SLAMMED: Comedian Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globe awards this week. In his opening monologue he had the following to say about Hollywood and politics: "...if you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech. You're in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg." He might have added that it is precisely these partisan speeches that has tanked award show viewership...

SMOLLETT UPDATE: Kim Foxx, the Cook County state's attorney who attempted to let Jussie Smollett off the hook, is now using tax payer dollars to lawyer up. Smollett was accused of faking an racist assault by Trump supporters. We now learn that a judge has ordered Google to turn over Smollett's email records and data to a special prosecutor. Is justice finally at hand?

SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY

Originally published June 15, 2014; additive edits June 11, 2017 by Dr. David Pence

"When we speak of the Trinity, we must do so with caution and modesty, for, as St. Augustine saith, nowhere else are more dangerous errors made, or is research more difficult, or discovery more fruitful."    
                    (Saint Thomas Aquinas)

The coming of Jesus announced a Messiah for the Jews, proclaimed a new Kingdom amidst the nations, dethroned the Enemy Prince, and revealed the mystery we contemplate on this day -- that the God-made-man is one Person in a Trinity.

"Even our God is a community," said G.K. Chesterton. Humans will overcome death only by entering into this triune God as sons of the Father, incorporated into the Body of the Son. The Spirit will bind us properly if we humbly let Him act… and He acts through the sacramental Church. He indelibly conforms our souls into Christ's Body through Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders. The Trinity, marriage and the family, Holy Orders and the Church – these are the communions we know as Catholics.

Our proposal here at Anthropology of Accord is that the Communio theology which takes its origin from the metaphysical reality we celebrate today must be further developed as the theological and anthropological principle of the public life of the Church and nations. The three persons of the Trinity are revealed to us in the masculine forms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A serious theology will ponder and learn from the masculine apostolic priesthood and the male covenantal nature of the prototype nation: Israel. The Communio nature of the Eucharistic church and marriage are enriching themes of the last century. They have their champions and journals and institutes. Masculine public communio is a bit underdeveloped. Ubiquitous, fundamental, and yet (for fear of embarrassment) unmentioned.

The communal bond of men in nations is the natural polity which ensures the freedom of those more sacred bonds of Church and marriage. In different places and times in history the masculine public polity might have been fellow tribesmen and a warrior chief, or the Emperor and his subjects, or the 'polis' and its citizens. But, today, from Singapore to Germany, from Canada to China, from Brazil to Poland, and from Egypt to the Philippines, the natural bond of men in public communal work and protection has developed in the form of territorial nations. The Scriptural template of this masculine national form is the ritual of circumcision and the forging of one nation under a Law from the twelve tribes of Israel. The nation was built on a forgiving act of brotherly reconciliation. It is deeply tied to the possession of a common land. It is ordered by a common law. Leaders rise as prophets, priests or rulers to keep the communal body in concordance with God. It is our hope that Catholic theologians and philosophers would spend some fraction of their attention on history and the relationships of the natural armed authorities, which constitute public life and the legitimate State.

Possibly the next three graduate students who request to study the Theology of the Body might be reassigned to a project studying how Singapore got to be the polity it is today. We could call it the "theology of the corporate body" if that would make this ancient study of the natural polity more palatable. It was such men making civic agreement and the peace of 'Tranquillitas Ordinis' whom Christ had in mind when He said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

Marriage is an important but not all-embracing covenant. Neither the Church nor the nations are families writ large. Christ did not found His church on a sacral marriage, nor was the bond of sacred honor which forged America the union between George and Martha Washington! Both the Catholic Church  and the American nation are founded on sacral covenanted brotherhoods of adult men.  Religious and political public life are both defined by public communal and masculine loves which include the apostolic priesthood and the particular territorial loves of men for their fatherland. Christ wept over Jerusalem, not Antioch. More than 2000 years have passed and Jerusalem once again is guarded by a nation called Israel. Christ never ordered the apostolic Church to move beyond the nation. He said, "Baptize the nations." Those of us who believe the Trinity is the fundamental form of love and life can no longer ignore in our religious discourse the public form of communion -- the life of nations -- that God promised Abraham 4000 years ago.

The 20th-century Catholic thinker who best navigated in the waters of Christianity and the formation of political cultures in history was Christopher Dawson:
                                               

The most articulate explanation of the dilemma of present-day Catholic political thought, scissored between the sacral relations of marriage and the Church, has been presented by Russell Hittinger.

On Trinity Sunday let us pay heed to the nature of our communal bonds – all of which in their proper order give glory to that greatest of bonds – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.




UPDATE: Here is an earlier review of Christopher Dawson’s Judgment of the Nations.

And a fascinating address given by Professor Hittinger on the troubled interaction of nations and theology.

The Strategic Dilemma for American Foreign Policy: Religious Nations or the Atheist West

[first published March 20, 2014]


by Dr. David Pence

Throughout the world there is an awakening of nations aligning themselves in terms of their religious and cultural heritages into communal bodies.

The Muslims have nations in Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, and the "-stans" of central Asia. The Muslim Arabs have a nation in Egypt, but still flounder elsewhere as the impossible dream of a micro-state of Palestine obfuscates a strategy to form the larger Muslim Arabic State needed to function as a serious nation in the Levant.

Later this spring, India will likely elect a Hindu nationalist as its next Prime Minister.
[Ed note: May 2014 Narendra Modi won a landslide victory]  He is going to stand for parliamentary election in a holy city to show this is no longer the secular Left of the Gandhi clan. Mr Modi is also a strong supporter of Israel].
                                                                 
This cultural nationalist revival has already been experienced in Japan (especially under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe) as well as China. Religion, nations, ethnic ties and men who will fight for them have not been eliminated by entering some new time-zone called 'modernity' or the twentieth-first century.

Mr Abe, pictured in center, during his visit to India earlier this year

                                   
America is not, in her deepest soul, part of any atheist crusade for modernity. We are the continent of territorial religious nations. We are white, brown, black, and yellow; and our soldiers need not defend a European death cult whose men will not fight and whose women will not bear children. In the war of the atheist European superstate against the Christian governments of Nigeria and Uganda, should we support the white atheists in their economic threats against black Christian men who stigmatize rather than sacralize sodomy? We are tied much more deeply to our American brothers through the continent, and the Christians East and South, who fight the nagging hectoring godless Witch of the West. Americans must decide if we are trying to make the nations safe for public worship and private family life, or if we are strengthening international courts to diminish national authorities to elevate individual autonomy for abortion and sodomy. Each strategy would push a different "re-start" button in our relations with Orthodox Russia and Persian Shiite Iran.

Russia, Crimea, and Ukraine

The Russian nation has a Christian soul, baptized by water and confirmed in blood. Both the waters of baptism and the blood of martyrs have sacralized Crimea in the Russian motherland. Crimea is a different communal body than both eastern and western Ukraine. Crimea has returned to Russia. Most American news commentators and senators seem to have no sense of either the historical timelines, nor maps nor religious history, that belie the fable of Crimea and Ukraine as a national community. Liberal scholars who have studied Russian history (e.g., here and here) and conservative journalists (here and here) who respect ethnicity, religion, and nationalism are the voices of reason in this debate as Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly and Democratic Lady-in-Waiting Hillary Clinton emote from the shallow end of the strategic foreign policy pool.    

Crimean citizens overwhelmingly and freely voted to rejoin Russia and assume the older citizenship their grandparents knew. A Russian Christian military won the peninsula 250 years ago from the Crimean Khanate (Turkish-speaking Islamic Tatars who were military superiors to both Moscow and Kiev for several centuries). Sevastopol is a city rich in Russian history and drenched in the blood of Russian soldiers. It is a key port for their naval fleet and legally could house 25,000 Russian troops -- which is why the Russians said they never "invaded Crimea."

The Ukraine has much deeper fraternal ties to Russia than Poland or Hungary -- but unlike Crimea, it is known as a distinct nation. A common Slavic Orthodox Christianity, which was baptized in Kiev, ties the Ukraine and Russia together as fraternal nations.

                                         

Kiev's Monastery of the Caves, founded in the 11th century

Ukraine cannot become what it is meant to be unless both America and Russia play their roles in allowing this nation to live. It will be just as crucial that serious Christian thinkers in America develop a more mature and comprehensive narrative of the Church amidst the nations in contemporary international relations.

The religious split of the Latin Catholics and Kievan Orthodox (major religions of Western Ukraine) from the Moscow patriarchate Orthodox (religion of the East) could fracture the Ukraine. This would be a tragic failure for the nation whose destiny as a state is to bridge the rupture of Christian believers. That Great Schism led to the loss of Christian Mideast lands to Islam in the first millennium, and Christian Eurasia to the militarized atheist states at the end of the second. Re-joining the two lungs of Christianity animated the world historical visions of Pope John XXIII, John Paul II, and the Second Vatican Council. Ukraine is a pivotal natural meeting place for that union, but it could just as easily split East and West if a larger religious vision is not brought to bear on the crisis.


The Emergence of Russia

The Soviet Union and the USA split peoples all over the globe in the blood-drenched Cold War. That may have been necessary then; it is madness today. The Russian nation is not the new Soviet Union -- they are the Christian nation emerging from the atheist Gulag. Orthodox Russia is not the heir of the Soviets -- she was its bloodiest victim. She doesn't look pretty emerging from the rubble, but can't we rejoice that she still lives?

The Russians are our Christian brothers. What irony that the materialist atheism of "the West" now aligns the European Union and NATO against the Christian nations of Africa and the Eastern Orthodox nations of Eurasia. America's men must reclaim our national foreign policy from the "drone and bomb" sexual Left and the bellicose neo-con Right. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union we have lacked a strategic foreign policy driven by a deep understanding of geography, history, and a Biblical sense of the role our Christian country plays amidst all the earth's nations (the grandsons of Noah in our tradition).

It was the case, once, that to study the Soviet Union, we had to know Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Now we must know the Orthodox patriarchates, the Catholic Eastern Rite, Turko-Islamic traditions, and Eurasian relations of Russia, Japan, and China. The Russian patriarch Kirill has written: "What we are referring to is the Russian world, the great Russian civilization that came from the Kievan baptismal font and spread across the huge expanse of Eurasia."
                                             

The Russian president and the Orthodox patriarch see the Russian nation as having a religious destiny of securing states through Eurasia that respect Christians' ability to worship freely and live securely. They know they must also ensure the liberty of Islamic worship and the life of ethnic groups like the Tatars. (In President Putin’s address on the integration of Crimea he made sure to say that the languages of Crimea would include that of the Tatars, for they too were returning to their ancestral home.) Putin is acting as the leader of an armed Christian nation, but he understands he must govern in a region of many languages and religions. He is not of the West, for his largest emptiest land mass has borders with China and Japan -- and he needs a more capacious bridging identity to relate to them. He respects communal identities including his own; that is why he seems so foreign and frightening to television newscasters of the individualistic libertarian Right and the obsessed sexual Left.

The Orthodox have not reduced the political commentary of the Church to "War Never Again!" or "Stop Capital Punishment" or "Put away the Sword of the State." They see homosexuals and feminists as the deformed personalities of the comfortable atheists who speak of the "West" and the "twenty-first century," as if these abstractions can replace the bonds of history and place which link men to God and their fathers through the ages.The Orthodox have a realistic view of the necessity of the state's sword for the life of the church and nation. At times this has corrupted some of their churchmen. At other times it has lent sacral blessing to the sacrifice of patriots defending their homeland. Should not such heroic sacrifice be blessed? Christians had to be armed as a State to face Mongol horse warriors from the East, Islamic jihadists from the South, and German Nazis from the West. Mother Russia armed them. American Christians should not be too quick to dismiss the Orthodox tradition as "being chaplain for the Czars" given our own Catholic hierarchy’s current penchant for pacifism, and blindness toward the necessity of punishment to guarantee justice in exercising either civic or ecclesial authority. Maybe a subset of our theologians have been too obsessed with the sexual practices of intimacy while ignoring our deficient Christian public anthropology of the male fraternal relations needed to protect and baptize the nations.


Christian Realism as Foreign Policy                               

The abysmal ignorance of national senators and journalists (forget the man on the street) regarding the Crimean affair should  motivate Christian thinkers to fish deeper to grasp the fractured human and religious bonds behind the rumors of war.
American men -- especially our senators, soldiers, journalists, and scholars -- must be intellectually disciplined enough to bring as much historical knowledge and research to this unfolding of events as we do to bracket analysis for the NCAA basketball tourney.
The Christian nation strategy must first integrate our immigrants as fellow citizen-protectors and producers. It would model Catholic and Evangelical national statesmen for South America where the Marxist card has frayed, but the Christian leader card has not been played. It would seek fraternal relations among the Asian nations, and not play their border feuds off one another.
We need less venom about 'weak' Obama and 'bully' Putin. Maybe we could take time to read our forgotten hero Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the godless cowardly West as well as the Ukraine, Orthodoxy, and the Russian nation.

Thank God that President Obama has not led us into the wrong war. Let us arm our next national candidates with a pointer and a series of maps and timelines. Let us have one of the television debates as a short lecture format, with each candidate explaining the world and our particular role in it. A realistic foreign policy will be clear-eyed in assessing the present alignment of forces, and utterly Christian in proposing that nations can live together fraternally under God. We are condemned to fratricide without Him.

Pacem in Terris: Pope John XXIII on Order and Peace

[
In a speech recalling Pope John XXIII's Pacem in Terris (April 1963), Russell Hittinger listed several salient points in the notes which the good Pope John gave one of the drafters of the encyclical:

1) Peace is the tranquility of order
2) Order is obedient fidelity to the Eternal Law
3) Order is giving each thing its rightful place – in home, city, and man
4) Wretched is the People alienated from God

Christopher Dawson – in his Judgment of Nations, written during the Second World War before the founding of the UN – gave similar advice.  He warned that the next confederation of nations (unlike the League of Nations) should not attempt to include all nations, but rather, must be built on a spiritual basis of union. We got instead the United Nations which granted almost all existing States sovereignty, and awarded Security Council seats to the winners of the war. Catholics cannot invoke Christian principles in domestic pro-life or pro-immigrant policies, and then treat foreign affairs as if God does not exist.
                                       

The future Pope John was in Turkey during World War II, thinking of the role of a bishop to articulate a view of history that was "supra-nationalist." He made a note to himself to re-read Augustine. Why?

Because the great saint of Hippo in northern Africa made sense of the world for his flock in a troubled time. He knew that a bishop had a duty to view the comings and goings of the nations, and discern the “signs of the times.”  Augustine (who died in his mid-seventies in the year 430) gave his people an explanatory philosophy of history… a man in full who knew his duty as a bearer of Christ.


A lengthy article by Professor Hittinger on the subject can be found here.

Map on Monday: The Communal Loyalties that Rule Most of the World

In our opening Map on Monday post, we presented the civilizational map of Samuel Huntington. This week we examine the map printed with Dr. David Pence's editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The map (click to enlarge) is more focused than Huntington's. The multicolored key reveals the great religious identities underlying the conflicts between nations in current events. What is the gist of Professor Huntington's argument (that Dr. Pence further extends)? As the bi-polar world order of the Cold War came to an end, man's far deeper religious loyalties emerged to shape the geopolitical order in much of the world.

The most revealing combination of nations constitute the awakening Orthodox -- Russia, Greece, Serbia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. In north Africa, the Mideast, and central Asia, Sunni Islam is dominant. Israel and Iran are displayed as two minority religious islands in a Sunni sea, the former Jewish and the latter Shia Muslim. Off the map to the southeast are the nations comprising  a third of the world's population: Hindu India and Confucian-Buddhist China.

Most nations of  Europe are colored as Catholics or Protestants. They are also outlined in red and described as "the secular West" by the Star Tribune. Dr. Pence actually refers to this area as the "atheist West." Secular is a designation of time differentiated from Eternal. Secular does not mean atheist. Every nation is secular insofar as it operates in a historical era (the Latin word saeculum refers to the length of a man's general lifespan). Nations are brotherhoods of men so they are spiritual realities, but some nations, like some men, conceive of  themselves as beings without God. They are  the atheist nations. They are defined not by men sharing military duty but by individuals navigating a boundless godless sea of time and space -- the Modern West.

There are Christian nations in Europe which we do not place within the atheist boundaries. These include the Catholic nations of Ireland, Hungary, and Poland. Although the Church hierarchy in Ireland has been deeply corrupted, Catholic communal roots still run deep. Her island status has kept Ireland distinct but not immune from the increasingly atheist zeitgeist of the continent. Poland, too, is tempted by the EU/NATO alliance but we attribute this more to Poland's historical memory of Russia than their grasping a modern Western identity. Hungary is much more robust in emerging as a Catholic nation. The land of Saint Stephen -- which also had been crushed by Soviet tanks -- has welcomed the awakening Orthodox Russia as a fellow Christian brother confronting the confusions of the West.

Understanding the religious loyalties that shape nations is no longer simply a religious matter. It is a geopolitical necessity.

RUSSIA, CRIMEA, AND THE U.S. -- Dithering à la Hamlet while declaiming like Lear

With this map from the 'Washington Post' anchoring us, it's time to decide which experts have best cut to the quick regarding how Americans should view the developments in Ukraine.

Dmitri Simes provides a good perspective on the U.S. government's response to the crisis: speaking loudly and carrying a small stick.

The best five-minute explanation of the ramifications is given here by Professor Stephen Cohen.

Check out these maps at CNN.

And David Brooks, pulled by a troika of Russian philosophers from a century ago, sets forth some of the ideas now animating the new Russia.

"The world is even smaller today, though… across the gulfs and barriers that now divide us, we must remember that there are no permanent enemies. Hostility today is a fact, but it is not a ruling law. The supreme reality of our time is our indivisibility as children of God..."
  (President Kennedy during his visit to Ireland)

SAUDI ARABIA AND THE U.S.: a growing wariness

Dr. Pence writes:


We have questioned why in the Shiite/Sunni religious war, the United States should work to topple any of the established Shiite states (Iran or the shrinking Alawite state in coastal Syria).

We see much of the continued violence in Iraq as the refusal of Sunni terrorists to accept the elected government of a Shiite majority state. These states may turn out to be the best allies of Christians in the Mid-East and around the world against the Sunni purification movement that we call the “jihadists.” This seems to be the position of Orthodox Russia whom we see as a natural ally in the global reconfiguration occurring today – replete with nationalist actors, Islamic religious alliances, and atheistic globalists.  What is missing are Christian nations understanding themselves as the political forms of Christian civilization who should be major players in proposing a strategy for nations to enhance the tranquility of order.
               

The old arrangement of treating Saudi Arabia as our major Mid-Eastern ally must be radically reconsidered. It is hard to disagree with any of the insights in this long overdue article by Fareed Zakaria.

A Christian Awakening on the Road to Damascus

   
by Dr. David Pence 

President Obama’s decision to seek a congressional resolution to authorize a national military response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria is a credit to his character and a tribute to our deliberative institutions. This is a time for statesmen not to poll the “people,“ but to put up a map and defend or oppose this action in terms of America’s role amidst the nations.  Such debate is why men have tongues and Americans have a Senate.

                               

The conflict in Syria is complex but it is not bewildering. In this debate, men must talk in terms of maps, timelines, and the communal loyalties of religious groups and nation states. We must also talk in terms of our own communal loyalties as Americans. Some will insist foreign policy must be prudentially limited to a defense of “national interest.” Others will assert a national purpose within God’s Providence for mankind; and others will define our policy in terms of an ally’s needs or the “American values“ of modern ideologies.

Despite these very different visions of American identity and foreign policy, all of us benefit from a realistic assessment of the many converging actors on the Syrian battlefield. There are two particular loyalty patterns that all of us must consider in our national deliberation. The first pattern is the emerging religious bond of a generation of young Muslim men often alienated from their homelands who are forging an "extra-territorial identity" as fellow reformers in a fighting Islam. (They call to mind the 19th-century generation of emancipated Jewish men who hammered out their new communal identities in the "fighting faiths" of Zionism in Palestine, and of Marxism throughout Europe and Russia.)

These Muslim men form the worldwide religious purification movement in Sunni Islam associated with Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wahhabi tradition, the “jihadists” and a host of variants that see the revitalization of Islamic communal forms as obedience to the will of God in the lands of Islam. Their fathers fought British colonialists, Hindu nationalists, and Soviet communists in the last century; and now the sons depict the United States and Israel as their greatest enemies outside the Muslim fold.  These Sunni purification movements often treat the very notion of a nation state as a Jewish-Crusader imposition of an illegitimate political form on the deeper Islamic communal bond of the caliphate.

For all their hatred and attacks against the “enemy without,” this purification movement is as adamant against the “enemy within."  They include the post-WWII secular nationalist leaders who from Turkey to Egypt to Iraq and Syria created modern police and military states that opposed attempts to return to Islamic patterns of law and governance. These secular governments often employed the minority Christians in high positions of bureaucratic authority.  The heroes of Arab and Turkish nationalism (Nasser and Ataturk) were enemies of the Sunni purification movement.  A Sunni enemy within today is the Hashemite King of Jordan, who sees the protection of Christian communities as an obligation of Muslims.

The other “enemy within” for the Sunni purists are the Shiite Muslims. That split in Islam between Sunni and Shiite is a thousand years old, with the Sunni comprising 85 percent of a billion worldwide Muslims, and 2/3 of Muslims in the Mideast. Almost all Muslim countries are Sunni, and most of them by overwhelming majorities.  There are Shiite majorities in Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan.  The Shiites of Lebanon make up about a third of the population. The Lebanese Shiites are the population bases for Hezbollah—another ally of President Assad along with Iran.  The Al Qaeda prolongation of the war in Iraq was as much about a violent multi-country Sunni opposition to the majority Shiites ruling their own country, as it was a fight against American crusaders. The conflict in Syria is set on this same religious fault line.  President Assad and his Alawite clan are identified with the Shiites ruling a nation mostly of Sunnis, as well as ten percent Christians.  If the United States degrades the forces of President Assad, we are entering the Sunni/Shiite “war within” Islam and we are entering on the side of the Sunnis.  Turkey and Saudi Arabia were two Arab countries that supported the US attacking the Assad government at the September 2013 G-20 conference in Saint Petersburg.  They are both dominant Sunni powers. Saudi Arabia is the home of 15 of 19 of the hijackers, and the birthplace of the Sunni purification movement.  No country in the world is so stringent in its denial of Christian worship. There are never burnings and Sunday pillaging of Christian worship in Saudi Arabia, because no public or private Christian services are allowed!  All serious deliberations must address this basic strategic reality. In the Sunni/Shiite “war within,” shall we side with the Sunnis?

                                    

The second loyalty pattern we must address is Christianity in the Islamic blood-lands and in post-atheist Russia. The Orthodox bishops of Syria have made it clear they oppose the US “degrading” the Syrian government’s ability to govern. For part of that governance is protecting Syrian Christians from “the people,” whose real grievances against the rule of a clan have turned them into a vicious mob against the Christian allies of that clan.  The Coptic patriarch of Egypt has taken a similar, very public, position. He formally supported the military coup in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood. The Copts now face the daily violence of aggrieved mobs. The Egyptian military, like the Syrian military, has not established police control of the nation. Nor has either government enacted a political compromise with its own religiously-driven citizens. In both cases their incomplete ability to enforce the Law has been deadly for indigenous Christians who have no state of their own to protect them.

Russia has a deep historical tie to the Orthodox Christians of the Mideast. That protective role was a major impetus of the Crimean War in the mid-1850s. The fact that the British and French governments did not recognize a similar duty, and sided with Ottoman Turks against Christian Russia, does not diminish the religious motivations of pre-Communist Russia. Orthodox Christians have always had a robust view of the dynamic of Church and State. In some circumstances this has deeply compromised them. In many other historical circumstances it has been a more realistic and liberating approach to the world of political and military authority. In defending Christians, Russia has also become the defender of Shiite States from the Sunni purification movements. Their link to President Assad and Syria as well as Iran cannot be understood merely through the narrow economic prism of “warm water ports.”

The battle between the atheistic Soviet Union and Christian America colored every conflict of the 20th century. Mother Russia is just emerging from her atheistic Gulag, which demoralized the character of her people and submerged the nation in the imperial designs of Marxist ideology and historical materialism.  An armed America under God defeated the armed atheism that disfigured Russia. But in our victory, we have been subverted by the unarmed atheism of consumer materialism and sexual license which threaten our national soul. A reformed Christian America could still extend to Orthodox Russia a hand of brotherhood to awaken from the atheist nightmare of these bloody centuries. 

Neo-conservatives and leftists alike denounce Russia and President Putin, while Saudi Arabia and the Saud family remain our strange longstanding ally.  A Christian awakening might at least force debate on this peculiar arrangement. This debate must particularly shake Protestant America, which has never resonated with the sufferings of the more ancient forms of Christianity. The persecution of Catholics in the Philippines, Mexico, and Vietnam -- and of the Orthodox in Russia, Serbia, and the Mideast -- has never compelled the public sympathy of Christian America in our dominant Protestant phase. A single heroic Baptist missionary, John Birch, became a banner of courage and martyrdom while the Armenian national Church (a million Orthodox murdered to initiate the bloody 20th century) ranks hardly a mention. Christian unity evokes some painful memories.

                       

It is hard for American statesmen to conduct our nation’s affairs with a realistic and humble eye toward Providence. Our newspapers no longer use such language. Our schools have lost that vocabulary. Public culture bans national prayers, and substitutes a daily trivializing of God’s Name by major media and craven teen-age girls. Instead of reviving a serious fraternity of nations with Russian patriots, Patriarchs, and their President in Petersburg, we extend a kiss of peace to homosexual activists practicing a very different form of brotherly love. There is a Christian path to peace, which baptizes the nations as the public communities of law and authority that order men as communal peacemakers. The fantasy world of atheism has always feared and undermined this spiritual martial anthropology of masculine accord.  Religious realism recognizes the Sovereignty of one God and the multiple public communal forms of brotherhood known as nations.

Religious realism in foreign policy recognizes that most nations and men act out of self-interest.  But not all men or nations define their communal lives so narrowly.  A Christian nation seeks a fraternal relationship with other nations as common sons of Adam. This is not a pacifist path nor a self-centered one.  The nation animated by moral purposes is in continual search of new patterns of agreement with the men of other nations. The moral nation is just as assuredly in continual conflict with tyrants and criminals.      

Forty years ago President Richard Nixon and National Security adviser Henry Kissinger unfolded a large map, and employed a corresponding sense of large history, to remove the Vietnam War as the principal battlefield of conflict between Communist ideology and the United States. Their move to diplomatic accord with China upset the Soviet map of eastern alliances, which was later shrunk again when Muslim men led the first successful war of national liberation from the South against the Soviets in Afghanistan.  The final disintegration came with the military resurgence of America, and the Catholic awakening on their western front in Poland. Today we need to look again at a larger map, and the deeper religious and national loyalties that move men and nations to fight for one way of life against another.  The unarmed dissipating public atheism of American life has blinded us to our most natural allies in the fight for order and authority in the service of religious liberty. Our atheism has perverted our sense of what practices we must defend and what cults we must abhor. Our conduct of foreign policy -- as if God does not exist -- is erroneously enacted in the name of realism.  For there is no realism absent Providence.  The materialist worldview is a fantasy -- a bloody ideology -- which can only be overcome by a larger, more comprehensive, view of men and nations as spiritual actors in a Divine Drama.

Two thousand years ago, a zealous avenger radically reversed his actions and goals on the road to Damascus. May our national debate be enlightened by the Light of Christ to look at the larger map, and consider more deeply the possible agreements that could restore a new fraternity among the nations.  Let us love the Lord our God and let us love our neighbors. We will fulfill those commands through mature agreements among nations and states -- much more readily than by seeking out the protesters, the adolescents, and the libertines.  Diplomacy between nation states will not bring us complete peace.  The Sunni purification movement still attacks, and Satan roams the world in many costumes.  But true strategic diplomacy, much more than a missile attack, can (if God wills it) align the proper set of peacemakers for this historical moment.

                                       

Saul of Tarsus surrendered his prudential powers of justice to his zeal for punishment. The lightning strike chastened his wrath, and his repentance restored his eyesight. Congressional deliberation is meant to discipline our zeal for justice with prudence in how to get there. It is time to heed this Biblical lesson of ordering the virtues.

Let us deliberate. Let us repent. Should we Americans disarm one of the last Shiite states capable of fighting the Sunni drive for armed purification?  Should we leave the Syrian Christians to a fate more violent than the Iraqi Christians?  Should we provoke a retaliatory war with the largest standing Shiite government: the Iranians? Should we forsake serious negotiations and a new fraternity with Orthodox Russia in order to degrade an already disintegrating Syrian state? If our goals are regional stability and religious liberty, what new alliance should we forge? What new state or old state should we foster to protect the different religious groups in the Holy Land? How shall a Christian nation from afar safeguard our Christian neighbors in the Mideast? They see our public prayers and the awakening of Christian unity among the baptized, but they beg for the protection of a Christian state wielding an effective sword. These questions are not asked by pollsters. Congressmen must debate them in long well-attended speeches.

Our Congress now properly deliberates and our President may prayerfully negotiate. On the road to Damascus, let us recall a bolt of lightning that blinded a punishing zealot, and be chastised again by the haunting words he heard:  “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

1,025 years of Russian Orthodox culture

“The adoption of Christianity became a turning point in the fate of our fatherland [and] made it an inseparable part of the Christian civilization…”                                                         (Vladimir Putin)

In 988 Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity, and beginning at Kiev, all of Russia bowed before Christ and the true faith.  Today is the feast day of Vladimir.

President Putin has played a central role in the anniversary celebration.

This video shows a spiritual depth to Mr. Putin that most Americans are not aware of.

Friday BookReview: the giant who was Dawson

"The nations will fear the name of the LORD, and all the kings of the earth thy glory."  (Psalm 102)

Christopher Dawson – the towering British scholar who had converted to Catholicism in his twenties as the First World War broke out – died in 1970.

Check out David Pence’s impression of his mid-century essays on Christianity and the Nations.

                     

                 

Here is an excerpt:

"The republication of Christopher Dawson's works has come at a pivotal time in the Catholic Church's life amidst the nations. French political philosopher Pierre Manent asks if the nation is still the proper political form. America's premier Catholic political intellectual, Russell Hittinger, argues that Catholic tradition has been sparse and vague in understanding the polity as a corporate body with its own common good. He argues that while papal teachings have warned the State not to tinker with the sacral institutions of marriage and the Church, there is no recent vigorous defense of the polity as a corporate body with a common good of its own. At Vatican I, the Church relinquished the sword of the State. But the nation state is alive and well and holds its proper sword, for better or worse. Enemies of the Church, the nation, and marriage roam about the world seeking the ruin of all three institutions. Where is the sword of spirit that shall fight them?"

Red Cardinals and Bloodied Copts: True Ecumenism

by Dr. David Pence


                                           

The escalating murders of Copts in Egypt (the largest Christian group in the Middle East) reveal the continuing emasculation of Christian authority in public life that followed the separation of Church and State as religious and protective institutions.

It is good there has been a separation. But it has been a disaster for the most vulnerable – because the Christian men in the nations and the men of the Church have not formulated a more effective protective strategy for those who face religious persecution. (“Religious persecution” here is the old-fashioned kind: you get murdered trying to worship God.) The strategies for the unarmed Church and the armed nations must be very different, and yet complementary, to face this growing threat. Jesus reminded Pilate that if His Kingdom were of the world, his men would have fought back.  Nations are of this world. We are of the time (the real meaning of secular). The nations must use the sword justly and prudently – at home and abroad. Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

The churchmen do not use the sword. Their Kingdom is of a higher order – their weapons more powerful. But if they will not organize military protection for the slain, certainly they must place themselves in nonviolent confrontation with the slayers. How long can a white cardinal ask that yet another dark-skinned woman fill his place of martyrdom? The meaning of the red garments of the cardinals of the Catholic Church is that they are willing to be martyred. This was the Christian witness of Reverend Martin Luther King. Non-violent confrontation with the evil of racism was “meant to create tension.” It was a strategic tactic to dramatize an evil, and involve onlookers in an injustice that for years had seemed another’s problem. The middle-class black ministers and their flocks put themselves, as Christ had, in the place of the persecuted.

The non-violent protesters never asked the state legislators to disband their police departments! They were not fighting for a universal pacifism. Their non-violence was a way of placing them in a redemptive encounter with evil. They did not ask legitimate authority to renounce the use of force, but illegitimate authority to renounce hatred. No one in that deeply religious movement objected to President John Kennedy sending federal troops in 1962 to integrate the University of Mississippi. The armed federal marshals he first sent did not have enough protective force to prevent violence -- so he sent more military firepower to establish the tranquility of order which was necessary for justice.

The bravery of the nine children who integrated an Arkansas high school a decade earlier was supplemented by airborne federal troops and a nationalized state guard under the orders of President Eisenhower. They were all armed. No one asked to “give peace a chance.”

                                         

Sending a few cardinals to Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo (seat of the Coptic Orthodox Pope; the late holder of the office is shown welcoming John Paul in 2000) would be an ecumenical gesture of unprecedented force and meaning. It would be the kind of action that could also change the kind of man seeking the cardinal’s red. Martyrdom has always been an antidote to ecclesial careerism, which Pope Francis so abhors.  We know Cardinal Mahony has no public duties to keep him tethered to Los Angeles, and he showed us he could travel by showing up at the papal conclave. There will be some old curial hands who could join him in this act of witness for a year or two.

These intramural Catholic concerns aside, the Copts of Egypt need a strong gesture from the papal office of Christian unity.  Church unity can mean nothing if it does not mean their danger is our danger. These risky acts of witness are another reason that bishops are celibates.

Who will play the role of armed authority? Will it be Pharaoh or will a new Exodus be necessary? That is a question for the nations. Only dramatic action by the Church will force them to answer. This will cleanse the nations as well, by forcing Islamic nationalists to show their true colors – while focusing the protective authority of once Christian nations on more fundamental freedoms than the strange concerns which have become hobbyhorses of the elites.
                                 

The holy hopeful patriarch of Nigeria

If any Catholic still finds himself in a sepulchral mood by the decision of Benedict to step down as Holy Father, he should watch this short video of Cardinal Arinze.  Overflowing with the Holy Spirit – but too old to vote in the upcoming conclave – he leaves one with a more solid assurance that the good men inside the Barque of Peter will always outnumber the bad.

Seraphim the wonder-worker, pray that Russia will lead the way back to holiness

Saint Seraphim, who died in 1833, was one of the greatest ‘starets’ (holy elder in a Russian monastery).  Even a fearsome bear was calmed enough by his sanctity to receive food from his hand.

Here is a quote of St. Seraphim’s:

"When despondency seizes us, let us not give in to it. Rather, fortified and protected by the light of faith, let us with great courage say to the spirit of evil: ‘What are you to us, you who are cut off from God, a fugitive for Heaven, and a slave of evil? You dare not do anything to us: Christ, the Son of God, has dominion over us and over all. Leave us, you thing of bane. We are made steadfast by the uprightness of His Cross. Serpent, we trample on your head.’ "

Austin Ruse – consistently the best commentator on the United Nations – has an essay on the current Russian government’s efforts to withstand the secular nuttiness of that organization and of the Western elites.

And the historian Philip Jenkins puts the recent controversy over the female punkers at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour into better perspective.

Vatican II 50 years ago

Pence writes:

It was fifty years ago, today, that Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council at St. Peter’s shrine in Vatican City.

More than 2,500 bishops would gather over the tomb of their martyred Father in four different sessions (October 11,1962 -- December 8, 1965).

Sent forth from the Upper Room in Jerusalem and the Cross over Adam’s grave at Golgotha 2000 years ago, these men now incarnated the Eucharist across the face of the earth. Their intention was not to emphasize a particular doctrine or refute a specific error; but, rather, to present the truth of Christ, the Church, and the whole Divine Drama as an explanatory whole. They would proclaim, in the language of biblical personalism, the whole of the Divine message entrusted to the Church.  For in Christ and the Church, they held the keys to unlock the mysteries of nature, history, and the person. They called themselves “successors of the apostles gathered in single-hearted prayer with Mary, the mother of Jesus, forming one apostolic body headed by the successor of Peter.” 

Five days after the Council opened, the October Cuban missile crisis pitted the US and the USSR at the brink of nuclear war. Four days later the Fathers of the Council wrote their first collective statement. Like Peter surrounded by the apostles in the streets of Jerusalem on that first Pentecost, with a single voice they corporately addressed “all men and nations.”  They proclaimed the good news that God had become man to draw humanity back into communion with Him.

The fathers presented themselves as a kind of sacrament: “This very conciliar congress of ours, so impressive in the diversity of races, nations and languages it represents, does it not bear witness to a community of brotherly love, and shine as a visible sign of it? We are giving witness that all men are brothers, whatever their race or nation.” 

How fortunate that Vatican I in 1870 was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War causing withdrawal of French protection, the victory of Italian nationalists, and the loss of the Papal States. The Church, shorn of temporal rule, emerged from that violent era more self-conscious of Her true identity as the mystery of the Church, the People of God, a holy nation amidst the nations. This sacral public body of men, ruling no particular State, could now fulfill her mission and baptize all the nations. The brotherly love of men under God and Law is the public bond upon which Christ built His Church. The same kind of bond has formed the nations since circumcision marked the Old Covenant. The Church has a lesson for the world about the religious and sexual ordering of true Love.  After the century in which She proclaimed the spotless feminine purity of Mary in her Immaculate Conception and glorious Assumption, the Apostolic Church demonstrated the public form of hierarchical masculine communion needed to protect sacred goods.

The ringing bell of a village church beckons the believers, but can be heard by all the community.  Fifty years after Vatican II may the Light of that fraternal ecclesial event renew our Church and give sight to the nations, and all those of Adam’s sons who will open their eyes and see.    

UPDATE: Here is an article summing up the recent statements of Pope Benedict on the anniversary of the Council.  His essay of personal memories (which was published in L’Osservatore Romano) is superb!

Five most recent popes

In January 1959, a few months after being elected, John XXIII declared that he was convening an ecumenical council.  When Cardinal Montini of Milan [the eventual Paul VI] heard the stunning news, he phoned a friend:

“This holy old boy doesn’t know what a hornet’s nest he’s stirred up.”


John Paul I, the "September Pope" of 1978 who suddenly died one month into his tenure, was the first ever to use the pronoun “I” instead of the royal “we” – his motto was “Humilitas.”  This is how he began his remarks on his first full day in office:

“Yesterday morning I went to the Sistine Chapel to vote tranquilly.  Never could I have imagined what was about to happen…”


George Weigel, the biographer of John Paul II, interviewed Joseph Ratzinger in 1996 [the German cardinal became Benedict XVI a decade later] on his impressions of his boss:

“The principal theme of the Holy Father, when he was professor and also when he was pope, has been anthropology…
“His study of philosophy was always centered on and guided by this anthropological interest…
“For me, his first encyclical, ‘Redemptor Hominis,’ is really a synthesis of his thinking.  Here we can meet this passion for anthropology as not merely intellectual, but as a total passion for man… This is a key text for understanding the Holy Father as a spiritual and intellectual figure.”

As Brazil population approaches 200 million, percentage of Catholics on steep decline

In 1970, more than ninety percent of Brazilians were Roman Catholic – but the figure has dropped below two-thirds.
Evangelicals are almost a quarter of the population now.

In other words, in Brazil, Catholics are less than 8/12 and falling.  Evangelicals are nearly 3/12 and rising.


[There are about 1.2 billion Catholics in the world; half of them live in Latin America.

The five countries with the greatest number of Catholics: Brazil, Mexico, Philippines, USA, and Italy.

The five U.S. states with the greatest percentage of Catholics: Rhode Island (63 percent), Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York].


One of the churchmen mentioned as a leading contender to become the next pope: Cardinal Odilo Scherer.
He is the archbishop of Sao Paulo – the largest archdiocese in the country.  His mother’s family was originally from Germany.

[Cardinal Scherer looks like he could be a blood brother to the man who, in recent decades, has exhibited more common sense and trust in the people than anyone else in our nation's capital: Brian Lamb, C-Span's best interviewer].

                                 

Women saints who called men to act like men

Catherine of Siena (14th century) chastised the Pope to quit Avignon and return to Rome; and Joan of Arc, in the following century, stirred the men of France to finally show some backbone in defending “la patria.”

There is a fascinating section in the autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux where she recounts her stint as novice mistress in the Carmelite convent.  She saw the absolute necessity for sometimes employing a ‘cold face’:
 

"I have said that I learned a lot by teaching others.  I discovered that every soul has almost the same difficulties and that there is yet a vast difference between individual souls – a difference which means that each one must be dealt with differently.  There are some with whom I must make myself small and show myself willing to be humiliated by confessing my own struggles and defeats, for then they themselves easily confess their own faults and are pleased that I understand them through my own experience.  To be successful with others, firmness is necessary.  I must never go back on what I have said, and to humiliate myself would be regarded as weakness.

"God has given me the grace of having no fear of a fight.  I will do my duty at any cost."

Jeanne d'Arc, patroness of soldiers

Today is the feast day of Joan of Arc, burned at the stake in 1431.

In the spring of 1920, with the fields of Europe still blasted and blood-sticky, the Catholic Church declared the warrior maiden to be a saint.  A century later the Continent is a melange of irreligion, sterility, and sentimental pacifism.

Here are the concluding paragraphs of Mark Twain’s book on Saint Joan:

"With Joan of Arc love of country was more than a sentiment—it was a passion. She was the Genius of Patriotism—she was Patriotism embodied, concreted, made flesh, and palpable to the touch and visible to the eye.

"Love, Mercy, Charity, Fortitude, War, Peace, Poetry, Music—these may be symbolized as any shall prefer: by figures of either sex and of any age; but a slender girl in her first young bloom, with the martyr's crown upon her head, and in her hand the sword that severed her country's bonds—shall not this, and no other, stand for PATRIOTISM through all the ages until time shall end?"