NOVEMBER 2: The assassination of President Diem

[first published November 22, 2012]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

All Souls Day: Remember, Venerate, Pray

[first published November 2, 2014]

by David Pence


We live in a reality both visible and invisible. We trust our senses so much that we can become tricked into thinking realities which are not accessible through the senses are somehow not real. Some people call that epistemological error "the Scientific Revolution." They even boast of that great sundering of Truth as progress!
                                               

                             

The Church begins the last month of the liturgical year by remembering the dead. Yesterday -- the saints. Today -- all the souls departed. Almost every human culture knew the dead were not really dead. It took modern intellectuals to deny the reality. We keep pictures of those who have passed in our homes. Other cultures keep a flame and incense. Let us learn from the veneration of ancestors that marks Chinese and other Asian cultures. (See our review of Simon Chan's Grassroots Asian Theology).

                                             

Let us embrace the Mexican tradition of gifts for the little ones on one day, and good drink for the adults on the next. Let us remember the ever-present skull in the paintings of a wiser age 500 years ago. So often the Church reminds us of the truth. On Ash Wednesday we are dressed in the ashes to remind us from whence we came and where we are headed. For Catholics the Mass is where we always, and everywhere, make trek with the dead. Let us, as Catholics, especially keep sacred the liturgy of the Mass so there is the distance and formality that allows us to live amidst the angels and the saints and truly recall the dead in our prayers. Nothing so distracts us from the invisible as too heavy an emphasis on those around us as the fundamental unit of community. There is a Capuchin church in Rome with crypts of bones on the walls. A placard in five languages reminds us of the lesson of this day: "What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be..."
                                                              

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

(first published November 1, 2014)

An interview with Dr. David Pence

Pope Pius (d. 1914)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



                                                         

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

October 15: Memorial of St. Teresa of Avila, Virgin and Doctor

[first published October 15, 2014]

 "Lord you have told us that you live forever in the hearts of the chaste. By the prayers of the virgin, Teresa, help us to live by your grace and remain a temple of your Holy Spirit."
               (Morning prayer from the Common of Virgins)


                                                     

Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) was born in the same Spanish era that sent  Columbus across an ocean to plant the  Christian cross in the Americas. Praying the Church's office of this day prepares our minds to understand the feminine and the sacral character of that other land to explore: the interior life. The Church's teaching on the romance of monogamy is always set against the deeper truths of interiority and virginal fruitfulness which are lived out in the lives of virgin saints and the present practices of religious sisters. Teresa was a Carmelite.


An excerpt from the writings of Saint Teresa:

If Christ Jesus dwells in a man as his friend and noble leader, that man can endure all things, for Christ helps and strengthens us and never abandons us. He is a true friend. And I clearly see that if we expect to please him and receive an abundance of his graces, God desires that these graces must come to us from the hands of Christ, through his most sacred humanity, in which God takes delight.

Many, many times I have perceived this through experience. The Lord has told it to me. I have definitely seen that we must enter by this gate if we wish his Sovereign Majesty to reveal to us great and hidden mysteries. A person should desire no other path, even if he is at the summit of contemplation; on this road he walks safely. All blessings come to us through our Lord. He will teach us, for in beholding his life we find that he is the best example.

What more do we desire from such a good friend at our side? Unlike our friends in the world, he will never abandon us when we are troubled or distressed. Blessed is the one who truly loves him and always keeps him near. Let us consider the glorious Saint Paul: it seems that no other name fell from his lips than that of Jesus, because the name of Jesus was fixed and embedded in his heart...



From a 1948 column by Dorothy Day in the Catholic Worker paper:

St. Teresa of Avila has a great deal to say of women's ailments. "The first thing we have to do," she writes firmly in The Way of Perfection, "and that at once, is to rid ourselves of love for this body of ours -- and some of us pamper our natures so much that this will cause us no little labor, while others are so concerned about their health that the trouble these things give us (this is especially so of poor nuns, but it applies to others as well), is amazing. Some of us, however, seem to think that we embraced the religious life for no other reason than to keep ourselves alive and each nun does all she can to that end. In this house, as a matter of fact, there is very little chance for us to act on such a principle, but I should be sorry if we even wanted to. Resolve, sisters, that it is to die for Christ, and not to practice self indulgence for Christ, that you have come here. The devil tells us that self indulgence is necessary if we are to carry out and keep the Rule of our Order, and so many of us, forsooth, try to keep our Rule by looking after our health, that we die without having kept it for as long as a month -- perhaps even for a day . . ."

Newman writes that the greatest tragedy is that so few of us have even begun to live, when we die. Not even to make a beginning! 

St. Teresa goes on, "No one need be afraid of our committing excesses here, by any chance -- for as soon as we do any penances our confessors begin to fear that we shall kill ourselves with them . . ."

                                                     

"Virgins show forth the beauty of God’s grace. They are the image of God that reflects the holiness of the Lord; they are the more illustrious members of Christ’s flock. They are the glory of mother church and manifest her fruitfulness. The more numerous her virgins are, the greater is her joy." 
          (From a sermon by St Cyprian, bishop and martyr)




UPDATE: On the celebration of her 500th birthday.

The Feast of October 12th—Mary, Columbus, Catholic America, and the Cosmic Race

(first published on October 12, 2012)

The practice of turning specific national days of remembrance into long family weekends by observing the nearest Monday domesticates the public liturgy of civic life. It also diminishes other ties that may resonate with the date itself. October 12 is one such day.  The 12th of October is the most important Marian feast day of Spain. Our Lady of the Pillar appeared to St. James there in the earliest evangelization of the Iberian peninsula. It is the only reported apparition of Our Lady before her assumption into heaven. [James returned to Judea, where he was executed in the year 44 -- the first Apostle to be martyred].

In 1492, the Genoan explorer Christopher Columbus sailed west under the sponsorship of Spanish monarchs to find a route to the Indies unobstructed by Muslim threats. The Moors (North African and Spanish Muslims) had just been expelled from Spain after centuries of war.  Columbus had told his seamen after two months at sea if they did not see land by the feast of Our Lady of Pillar, they would turn back.

On October 11, 1492, an island in the present day Bahamas was sighted. They set foot on land the next day.

In Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and many other countries of Hispanic America, October 12 is celebrated as Dies de Raza: “the day of the race.”  This term was used by a Mexican philosopher, Antonio Caso, in 1918 to celebrate the mixture of Spanish and indigenous cultures to shape “the Mexican mestizo race.”  Caso wrote eloquently against the Darwinian notion of survival of fittest and scientific empiricism as the only way to knowledge. He included his philosophical life as an apostle of intuition and love as the highest human expression.  In more recent years the American  mixing of bloods has been given a more malignant interpretation. Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez, in 2002, changed the day to the Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance). The noble savage and purity of Indian blood prevails!

Christopher Dawson said, “The Catholic and Protestant worlds have been divided from one another by centuries of war and power politics… nowhere is this state of things more striking than in America, where the English Protestant North and the Spanish Catholic South formed two completely different worlds which had no mental contact with one another.”

October 12 is a perfect  day to celebrate how we Americans are going to bridge that gap under the inspiration of Our Lady of the Pillar – and Our Lady of Guadalupe who reappeared 1500 years later in a different dress to show us the next steps on the same path. For sure it is a great day to celebrate the unmitigated blessing of bringing the good news of Christianity to the Americas. On October 12, Columbus the bearer of Christ had a great REUNION with long lost relatives mutually  descendant from Adam and Eve. The Reunion of humanity will occur when we recognize the  Fatherhood of God and the Kingship of Christ, Head of the  Church, and alpha male of the human race(species).



UPDATE: Walter Russell Mead does a good job of explaining the Catholic fraternal origins of Columbus Day in America.

Our review of a book on Columbus by Samuel Eliot Morison.

2017 update: In light of Catalonia vote for independence from Spain this year's October 12 National Day celebration(for the nation of Spain) took on a renewed vigor. Unfortunately the real binding force of Spain-the Catholic religion-is still underplayed in secularist Spain.  One third of the clerical killings during the Red Terror of the Spanish Civil War occurred in Catalonia.

2108 Update:
The most famous philosopher of La Raza is Jose Vasconcelos (1882-1959).  He wrote The Cosmic Race ( La Raza Cosmica) in 1925.  He sees the spiritual role of the Americas to be the grounds where all the races are reconciled through intermarriage in a new spiritual "cosmic race". He contrasts this with the Anglo Saxon approach of trying to create a separate utilitarian superior race forever.  He thought Hitler understood race and spirituality better than the technocratic and soulless British and Western allies. He has been tarred as a Nazi by many modern critics.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is the feminine face of racial reconciliation as a unique mark of the Americas.  The dark skinned virgin reminds us that the Church like the Americas is the place of racial reconciliation under God.

October 7: The Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary

The Church celebrates the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary in commemoration of the victory of Christian forces at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. The call to arms against the Ottoman Muslim Turks was sounded by a Dominican Pope: Pius V. It was largely Catholic city-states and military orders who answered his call. They were led by Don Juan of Austria. The events are memorialized in G.K. Chesterton's poem on Lepanto.

Rather than act as the military commander, Pope Pius V called on laymen to do their protective duties as holders of the civic sword. The Pope led Rome and the Christian world in prayers -- notably the beautiful reflection on the life of Christ known as the Rosary

The Church dedicates this day not to the men of the sword, but to Our Lady of the Rosary. This is not a day to  forget the men of the sword, but to keep the sword under religious discipline. There is great significance in tying devotion to Our Lady with the martial vigor of statesmen-warriors. It is a feast day reminding us and celebrating the Christian order of chivalry.

The lessons for men today should be obvious. The duty of clergymen to lead us in the sacrifice of prayer must often be matched by the duty of laymen to lead us in the sacrifice of protective wars.


Video Update: Spanish-speaking Catholics deepen our sense of history in reminding us that before Lepanto there was the centuries-long battle to evict the Muslim Moors from Spain (completed 1492 just before Columbus discovered the New World). From Lepanto came Miguel de Cervantes who would write the great Spanish classic, Don Quixote. Here is an excellent short video on the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the historic battle:

UPDATE: There are two other events which we commemorate as victories of Christian men in arms against Islamic invasion. The first is the Battle of Tours in 732 (a century after the death of Muhammad) in which the Muslim forces were stopped in France by Charles "The Hammer" Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne.

And the other is the Battle of Vienna in 1683, which ended the threat posed by the Ottoman Turks. The Polish king, John Sobieski, was hailed by pope and common folk as the savior of Christendom.

October 4: Feast of Saint Francis

From an essay by Samuel Gregg:

"Franciscan peace is not something saccharine. Hardly! That is not the real Saint Francis! Nor is it a kind of pantheistic harmony with forces of the cosmos. That is not Franciscan either! It is not Franciscan, but a notion that some people have invented!"

These words were not articulated by a representative of the Texas oil industry. They were spoken in a homily given by Pope Francis himself during a much-publicized visit to Assisi in October 2013. Moreover, after emphasizing how Saint Francis [d. 1226] underscored man’s need to respect the natural world and “help it grow, to become more beautiful and more like what God created it to be,” the Pope added: “above all, Saint Francis witnesses to respect for everyone, he testifies that each of us is called to protect our neighbor, that the human person is at the center of creation, at the place where God—our creator—willed that we should be.”

Such ideas about Saint Francis don’t fit well with some portrayals of the medieval hermit and friar that have emerged in recent decades. Many of these have been developed...to exploit Francis for numerous contemporary religious and political agendas, ranging from pacifism to radical environmentalism. Franco Zefferelli’s well-known 1972 film "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" presented the saint, for example, as a type of winsome eccentric who was all about shattering conventionality. In his 1982 book Francis of Assisi: A Model of Human Liberation, the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff portrayed Francis as one who, conceptually speaking, would help us move away from a world dominated by “the bourgeois class that has directed our history for the past five hundred years"...

The text to which I always turn whenever claims about Francis of Assisi are made is Augustine Thompson O.P’s meticulously researched Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (2012). The real strength of this biography is the way it rigorously analyzes the documentary record and sources and shifts out what is reliable from that which is hearsay and legend.

So what are some aspects of Saint Francis’s life detailed in Thompson’s book that will surprise many? One is that although he sought radical detachment from the world, Francis believed that he and his followers should engage in manual labor in order to procure necessities like food. Begging was always a secondary alternative (29). Another is that Francis thought that the Church’s sacramental life required careful preparation, use of the finest sacred vessels (32), and proper vestments (62). This is consistent with Francis’s conviction that one’s most direct contact with God was in the Mass, “not in nature or even in service to the poor” (61). While Francis is rightly called a peacemaker and one who loved the poor, Thompson stresses the saint’s “absolute lack of any program of legal or social reforms” (37). The word “poverty” itself appears rarely in Francis’s own writing (246). It seems Francis also thought that it was absolute rather than relative poverty which “always had a claim on compassion” (40).

When it came to Catholic dogma and doctrine, Francis was no proto-dissenter. He was, as Thompson puts it, “fiercely orthodox” (41), even insisting in later life that friars guilty of liturgical abuses or dogmatic deviations should be remanded to higher church authorities (135-136). Hence it shouldn’t surprise us that Francis’s famous conversation in Egypt in 1219 with Sultan al-Kamil and his advisors wasn’t an exercise in interfaith pleasantries. While Francis certainly did not mock Islam, the saint politely told his Muslim interlocutors that he was there to explicate the truth of the Christian faith and save the sultan’s soul (66-70). Nothing more, nothing less.

by Bernardo Strozzi (d. 1644)

Francis is of course especially remembered by Christians and others for his love of nature, so much so that another saint, John Paul II, proclaimed him the patron saint of “those who promote ecology”... Francis’s deep affinity with nature and animals was underscored by those who knew him. The killing of animals or seeing them suffer upset him deeply (56). In this regard and many others, Francis didn’t see the natural world and animals as things to be feared or treated solely as resources for use (57).

Unlike many other medieval religious reformers, however, Francis rejected abstinence from meat and wasn’t a vegetarian. Nor was there a trace of pantheism in Francis’s conception of nature (56). Francis’s references and allusions to nature in his writings, preaching, and instruction were overwhelmingly drawn from the scriptures rather than the environment itself (55). More generally, Francis saw the beauty in nature and the animal world as something that should lead to worship and praise of God (58)—not things to be invested with god-like qualities. G.K. Chesterton’s 1923 popular biography of Francis makes a similar point: though he loved nature, Francis never worshipped nature itself. Francis’s relationship to nature, Thompson observes, shouldn’t be romanticized. The saint even viewed vermin and mice, for example, as “agents of the devil” (225).

No one should be stunned by any of this. Saint Francis of Assisi was, after all, a Catholic. He therefore accepted the Jewish and Christian insight that not only is the Creator the Lord of his creation, but that the summit of his created world is man. Awareness of this basic truth, according to Saint Ignatius of Loyola—the founder of the Jesuit order to which Pope Francis belongs—is central to growing closer to God. In his 'Spiritual Exercises,' Ignatius identifies the “fundamental principle” for overcoming self as knowing that:

"Man has been created to praise, reverence and serve our Lord God, thereby saving his soul. Everything else on earth has been created for man’s sake, to help him achieve the purpose for which he has been created. So it follows that man has to use them as far as they help and abstain from them where they hinder his purpose."

Neither Ignatius of Loyola nor Francis of Assisi treated the created world as a rosy abstraction. Appreciating and respecting the environment didn’t mean disdaining everything else—including human beings, human work, and human creativity—or forgetting that, as the Church Father, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, once wrote: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

However much legend and mythology has blurred the real Francis of Assisi over time, the genuine drama of his life and the forces he unleashed in medieval Europe mean that he’s perhaps fated to have any number of ideological programs thrust upon him. In the end, however, we should remember that while Francis of Assisi continues to have many things to say to everyone today, at the core of all those things is the Catholic vision of God, man and the world.

One can safely say that, for Saint Francis himself, any other interpretation would be impossible.

SEPTEMBER 29: FEAST OF THE ARCHANGELS

[first published 29 September 2012]




On this feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael -- some thoughts of Doc Pence on our angelic partners.  He begins with an anecdote:

   About a year ago when I was arguing with a theology professor at St. John’s in Collegeville MN about women priests and homosexuality -- it struck me.  I asked him, "Do you believe there was a first man and woman, Adam and Eve?”  He said, "No, science has proven that wrong."  I asked, "Do you believe there is a wicked angel, Lucifer, who is the devil; a real being, dedicated to evil and not redeemable?”  He said, "No, there is definitely evil in the world and in all of us but not an actual powerful spiritual evil being."  "Well, how about angels in general -- another order of beings -- purely spiritual who can know and love and who are actors in the domain of nature and history?"  I asked.  He hedged and hemmed and asked to be excused.

   I told myself, "I have been in the wrong discussion -- the problem is a lot of these guys don't have the cast of characters or central events of the Divine Drama in place.”

   What is priesthood, and who cares if it is all-male, if there is no Satan and the story of Salvation History is just a hodgepodge of Semitic texts?  I haven't gotten into arguments over women priests for a long time because I find those who favor them have a much bigger deficit that has to be first addressed.  

  Today we give thanks for the angels -- pure spirits organized in hierarchical orders -- our great elevated partners in the Divine Drama. 

God is an eternal Being outside of time: one Divine nature in three Persons. The angels are pure spirits. They have the two characteristics of spiritual beings: they can know and love.

The material world is mineral, vegetative, and animal. The minerals (atoms, chemical elements and molecules, and all non-living matter) do not have souls.  The vegetative and animal beings are living, and thus have souls. Souls are the central unifying principles of living things. All physical living beings have souls, but their souls are different. The souls of bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals die with the creature. Spiritual souls are immortal and rational. We don’t talk about an angel’s soul because a soul is a form in a material being.
 
Living Beings have interiority and agency and hierarchy. Living things act for themselves in a way that rusting iron and eroding rocks don’t (agency). All living things have an inside and an outside, from cell structure to internal body cavities to the interior spiritual life of man (interiority). All life comes from life, and exists within a structured sacral order (hierarchy).

Man is the one material being with a spiritual soul -- he can know and love. Thomas Aquinas thought one could logically argue to prove the existence of angels. He said there needs to be a created being which is spiritual but is not made of matter. (This balances the material world in which there is matter without a soul, material creatures with a “material soul,” and material beings with a spiritual soul.) Angels perfect the universe because they are created immaterial beings, which are spiritual. They too can know and love.

Angels know directly (they intuit), and desire and decide instantaneously. Their decisions are irrevocable. Angels use matter for appearances but do not become living material beings. Each angel is his own species. Angels are organized into hierarchical orders: some worshiping, some in charge of movements in nature, and some personally involved in the lives of men and nations.

When we contemplate the angels this brings us in closer contact with the hierarchical nature of the cosmos, the reality of Satan, the heroism of Michael, the ongoing active dialogue between the spiritual world and human development. We are part of a cosmic drama that started long before we got here. In this drama, the sons of Adam are given a major participatory role in the restoration of Justice after Satan’s rebellion. Man is part of a cosmological reality and so are the angels. Man cannot fully understand his role here without a robust and clarified view of the Angels in the Drama.


UPDATE: In both Jewish and Christian tradition, every nation has been assigned a guardian angel through which Divine Providence works out His purposes in history. While Pope Francis suggested that Catholic discussion be less preoccupied with homosexuality, abortion, and contraception, he has continually emphasized the present-day reality of the evil angel Lucifer. 

St. Michael, St, Raphael, and St. Gabriel: pray for us.   

ANTIETAM: America's Bloodiest Day

September 17, 2017 -  just shy of one week after 9/11 - marks the 157th anniversary of the bloodiest day in American history. It was on this day in 1862 that General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the north was turned back, Confederate recognition by Britain and France was thwarted, and the Emancipation Proclamation was ensured. The cost of this was around 23,000 American casualties, almost 4,000 of which were killed in combat. In comparison, 9/11 witnessed the deaths of 2,996 while some 80,000 Russian and French casualties resulted from the single day Battle of Borodino in 1812.

The Battle of Antietam followed a string of Confederate victories led by the newly appointed General Lee beginning in late June of 1862. In a period of one week, Lee won a series of stunning battles that drove the Union Army back from the gates of Richmond. In late August, Lee followed up his opening victories with the Battle of Second Bull Run, located south of Washington DC. In another decisive win, Lee almost outflanked and destroyed the Union Army as it withdrew over Bull Run.

With these victories in hand, Lee decided it was time to take the fight north.

As he would do in the Gettysburg campaign, Lee marched his army nearer to the mountains in northwest Virginia, using them as a screen to cover his forces moving north. Believing the Union commander, General McClellan, to be a slow and cautious leader, Lee took the risk of dividing his forces on the march. While Lee's estimation of McClellan was accurate, Lee did not know that an order containing his marching plans was accidentally discovered by Union forces. With Lee's marching orders in hand, there was little stopping McClellan from attacking the Confederate army piecemeal, and thus bring an end to the war.

McClellan, however, failed to take advantage of Lee's mistake. As he began his attack, McClellan's advance actually drove Lee's disparate forces towards one another. Their final position, however, found the Confederate army sandwiched between the large Potomac River behind them and the Antietam Creek in front of them.

Unable to rapidly retreat across the Potomac, such a situation could prove disastrous to the army should they lose the battle ahead. What's more, Lee with 40,000 men was far outnumbered by McClellan's 80,000. One large push forward with all his troops should have led to the destruction of Lee's forces.

The Battle of Antietam ended in a tactical draw. However, the repulsion of  General Lee's invasion into the North forcing his return to Virginia, was a strategic win for the Union. It was the most significant victory of the war in terms of American foreign policy objectives.  Some argue that Antietam, not Gettysburg, was the turning point in the war. Why did McClellan fail to destroy Lee at Antietam? We invite our readers to watch this short 4-minute video explaining the battle. We can summarize Antietam by describing McClellan's strategy as a rolling attack on Confederate lines from north to south (see map at left). Fighting commenced in the morning at a cornfield at the north end of the battle, then passed further south to an area called the West Woods. From here the action moved to a sunken dirt road now known as the Bloody Lane. Further south it seemed as though the tide turned as Union forces crossed the large stone bridge, pouring troops around Lee's southern (right) flank. Last minute Confederate reinforcements, however, pushed back Union forces and thus brought the battle to an end.

Antietam proved that Lee wasn't invincible - and with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the war was increasingly tied to the moral fight against racial slavery. Despite their need for Southern cotton, neither Britain nor France - both of which condemned slavery - would be giving their support to the slave-holding South.

Although the war would drag on for another three deadly years, the blood spilled in war against racial slavery would providentially reflect slavery's grim death toll. For the six million African slaves that died in the Atlantic crossings, one-tenth of that number - 600,000 - is the estimated number of American dead during the Civil War. From Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address:

"...if God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

September 14: The Triumph of the Cross

"Though He was in the form of God, 

Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. 

Rather He emptied Himself and took the form of a slave being born in the likeness of men. 

He humbled himself obediently accepting even death, death on a cross. 

Because of this God highly exalted Him and bestowed on him the name above every other name. 

So that at Jesus' name every knee shall bend in the heavens and on the earth and under the earth and every tongue proclaim to the glory of God the Father: JESUS CHRIST IS LORD!"    

                                                                                                                                 (Philippians) 

          

The Triumph of the Cross is the establishment of a new honor/shame code. The obedience of the Son -- filial piety -- conquered the disobedience of the Evil Angel and the first humans. Even more than the sacrificial love that Jesus shows for all of us in His death, it is His obedient love for His Father that is the driving dynamic of this event. Jesus obeys His Father and allows Himself to be publicly humiliated, with His mother close by as a participant in His suffering. Jesus had asked that this cup pass Him, but He submitted to the will of the Father. Obedience to a sacral order, not equality of station, is the road to Victory. This does not abolish honor codes but elevates a new King and incorporates the angels and martyrs in a new court of reputation. This does not do away with shaming and expulsion but dethrones the Prince of this world and scoffs at the glitter and glamour of sin.

The Triumph of the Cross and the Kingdom of God is established by entering into the sacramental order that flows from the side of the Pierced One. That sacramental order reconstitutes the human species as the Body of Christ. The sacramental order is built on a sacral brotherhood that Christ established to maintain His Presence and His sacrifice to the Father on earth throughout time. Through Christ's Church we are incorporated in the interpersonal love of the Trinity. As brothers in Christ we go forth to baptize the nations to effect the Kingdom of God and Triumph of the Cross. The fraternity of priests sustain the Body of Christ in the Eucharistic forms of local Church and earthly Kingdom. The laymen shape civic territorial circles of patriarchal fraternity and order - -some explicitly Christian; others patterned after other transcendental truths. Creating these concentric circles of ordered fraternity bring men into the formations that protect the Eucharistic acts of worship while preparing humanity for the final Coming and Triumph of the Lord.

 

SEPTEMBER 11: Remember, Reconsider, Redirect

by David Pence

It has been 25 years since 3,000 Americans died in the attacks of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The New York firefighters and the passenger citizens who prevented the hijacker goals on Flight 93 remind us that a fighting citizenry and local police and firemen are always the primary defense in this asymmetric form of war. The natural response to an attack is for a people to assemble in natural protective relations to safeguard the group. This religious war will be fought by a religious people organized as a nation of protectors in every city and state. A return to God as a people and a renewal of our American national identity are essential elements in our defense. Reversing the asexual modern socialization patterns of young males is just as necessary. Our civc/political failure to link male maturation and patriotic protective duty has spawned, some effeminate and others thuggish, hyper-individualized and ungrateful young males. The 9/11 attacks did bring an outpouring of gratitude and honor toward the soldier, policeman, and fireman -- the traditional male citizen protectors. Our young males need such clarity. Male maturation has nothing to do with color; it is about entering an adult male group united by religious and protective duty. Adolescents think they know it all but real men submit to spiritual authority. Boys are protected by women; grown up men protect women. To effectively protect, we must bond together as a fraternity of fathers. Reversing the cultural lessons of the sexual revolution by reasserting the spiritual meaning of manhood and national brotherhood is another essential response to 9/11.

From the beginning the US governmental response to the attack has misunderstood the religious animus that still motivates our enemies. This has led to strategic incoherence in picking our allies and isolating our enemies. The shock of 9/11 has misguided our tactics as well leading to a skewed emphasis on protecting airplane flights before securing our water supply and electrical grid. We have argued that we must understand the role of religion and nations in framing this conflict. We think there is much to be learned from both Barack Obama and his senior foreign policy advisor (scroll down for interview with Ben Rhodes within this link). They came to understand the failure of our own foreign policy establishment and the mistake in demonizing Shiite Iran when we are fighting a branch of Sunni Islam fostered by Saudi Arabia. This understanding has been deliberately obfuscated by Israeli and Saudi forces who wish to turn the war on terror into a war against Iran. A significant reinforcement  of their narrative is the US Marine memory of Oct 23, 1983. For many soldiers  the Iran/Syrian/ Hezbollah inspired bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut was the "real beginning of global Islamic terrorism." The event was part of the 1982 Lebanon, PLO, Israeli war in which US troops were inserted with no definitive military goals for the forces themselves. There is a great lesson to learn from our soldiers' deaths in Beirut. That lesson is not that Iran is the chief exporter of terrorism in the world.    

The war in Afghanistan is a different theatre than the struggle in the Mideast. But like the fight against ISIS in the Mideast, we will need Iran and Russia as well as India and China in helping bring negotiated peace in Afghanistan. (Scroll to Islam and Mideast in this link for good review of Afghanistan conflict).

The war of the Saudis against the Houthi of Yemen has weakened our fight against AQAP in Yemen. This is directly analogous to our long involvement in aiding jihadist Sunnis against the Assad government in Syria. Our country is an ally in the religious persecution of Shiites which animates so much of Muhammed bin Salman's new more aggressive Saudi foreign policy. This aggression is part of the young Crown Prince's effort to win favor with the Wahhabi clergy in pressing his claims for succession to the throne against his more competent elder kinsmen. The Crown Prince is also the force behind the anti-Qatar campaign (scroll to new Crown Prince). The strategic goals of the US have been obfuscated by confusing them with the goals of our traditional allies. Pakistan in South Asia, as well as Saudi Arabia and Israel in the Mideast have different goals and different enemies than the U.S.

President Trump has advocated an 'America first' foreign policy. Now we need citizens, journalists, scholars -- but most of all the US Senate -- to debate fully what that means. We owe clarity of strategy to our dead, our military, and the young men we are socializing to continue the protection.   This must include trying to resolve the almost 40-year-old Iran/Israeli war which is being confused with the global war against salafist jihadists. (See this excellent summary of Israel's geopolitical stance in which ISIS as a buffer is preferred to a stabilization of Shia-led governments in Iran, Iraq or Syria.)

We now (2018) hear officials and some newsmen say that 9/11 was caused by "radical Islamic terrorism." That is true and that is an advance but that is not enough. That brand of radical Islam which attacked us had a launching pad in Afghanistan but they had a home base as well. The Islamic radical movement which struck us comes from a particular school of Islamic law. They have a territorial address. But after 7 years under President Bush, 8 years under President Obama, and 4 years under President Trump, we have not given them a proper call back yet. Let us remember, let us reconsider, let us redirect.

{Our extended 18,000 word essay published on Sept 11, 2018 places our arguments about 9/11 in the historical context of the 20th century. It is a long illustrated piece-our culminating synthesis.}

2021 Update: In the late hours of 9/11's 20th anniversary, the FBI released a heavily redacted report revealing more links between the 9/11 hijackers and Saudi Arabia. It is the first of several documents - all hidden by Robert Mueller - expected in the months ahead. 

August 25: Saint Louis - Authority and the Ruler

by David Pence

"Knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee and I have power to release thee? Jesus answered, Thou shouldest  have no power against me  unless it were given thee from above."

On the same day Jesus rendered unto Ceasar what was his, He perfectly obeyed the authority of His Father. He conquered death in an act of authority over nature that reorganized the biological sphere under a new King. The alpha male of the human species having been born of a perfect Virgin drew a brotherhood of priests unto himself and conferred upon them the authority to maintain His Presence on earth. He made them a special band under a particular leader and ordained that communal hierarchical form of authority for public governance. The Kingdom of God was at hand. The victory of Christ is not a rebellion but a great act of authority and restoration of  proper rule. The great commission was a command to imbibe the new spiritual authority of the apostles in some way with the already existing authority of the civic rulers. The supernatural spiritual organism of the apostolic church was to transform the nations-kingdoms, republics, tribes and cities into a new level of accord.  "And Jesus came up and spoke to them, 'All authority in heaven and on earth  has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.' "
                   

King Louis IX of France

There is no personality so absent in contemporary Christian life as the ruler and man of authority. We have been blessed with priests and prophets. We have been cursed by charlatans and weaklings. We hunger for the Kings. Their absence is always a disaster for the weak and the poor. Saint Louis was a king who fought in the Crusades, cared constantly and publicly for the poor of his kingdom, and was a man of deep prayer and many fasts. Here is his beautiful instructive letter to his son that Catholics pray in the Office of Readings every year on his feast day. (A Review of Before Church and State:Social Order in the Sacramental Order of Louis IX)

It is a fundamental obligation of Christian men to rule our civic communities as well as our passions and households. How men participate in civic rule can entail faithful loyalty to a good king or taking up arms as a minuteman in a republic. The servant ruler does not mean that a ruler or citizen soldier relinquishes his sword against external enemies or internal criminals. It means the acts of the ruling authority are done for the good of the community, not the aggrandizement of the ruler. The Shepherd is not a nursemaid. Community without authority recalls the decadent Israel "when every man did as he pleased." Acts of authority are not limited to proclaiming doctrine by churchmen or laws by civil rulers. The actual body -- civic and ecclesial -- must be shaped, pruned, and ruled by the ruling authority. Men are called and promoted. Other men are released. Some men are punished and shamed. Rulers inspire loyalty that shapes men into communal bodies capable of great acts of protection and love.

Saint Louis (b. 1214) did not become a saint by laying down his sword or neglecting the punitive duties of his office. Men obeyed him and some men rightly feared him. Saint Louis, pray for us that God will once again give us men such as thee.
                                                                                   

     
UPDATE:  "We know from Louis’s biographers that 'From the beginning when he came to hold his realm and knew himself of discernment, he began to build churches and many religious houses …' Most celebrated was the Sainte-Chapelle, his royal chapel on the Île de la Cité in Paris."

While on crusade in North Africa, Louis died from sickness in 1270 - four years before the death of St. Thomas Aquinas.

August 22: QUEENSHIP OF MARY - Ruling from the Inside

[first published August 22, 2014]


by David Pence



Keeping sacred time with the Church means that the central events are always prepared for by a season -- Lent for Easter and Advent for Christmas. It also means that solemn feast days are never allowed to come and go with one rising and setting of the Sun. The great solemnities are celebrated as Octaves. Eight days has an ancient meaning as a unit of time signifying a new creation. So, eight days after we celebrated the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven... we are still contemplating her place in her new home as we celebrate her Queenship. A man who desires to love God our Father as a son and build brotherhood in the priesthood, city, and nation can never spend too much time contemplating the perfection of the feminine in Our Lady. These sacral sexual roles depend on each other and are clarified by contrast, complement, and communal context.

Our Lady lived the Trinitarian roles of the woman. She is the daughter of the Father, the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, and the Mother of Jesus. She humbly obeyed her Father. For all His life, she kept hold of her Son wrapped in swaddling at Bethlehem and draped in burial clothes at Gethsemane. Her perfect virginity established a perpetual barrier to the evil of sin while making her permeable to her Spouse: the Holy Spirit. She was "guarded by the angels, prefigured by the patriarchs, and promised by the prophets."

Feminism is the reigning atheist ideology of our day set against the person of Our Lady, as surely as the Dragon was set against her in Revelation. Wherever the confusing mist of feminism infiltrates the mind, statues of our Lady are put in the closet. Wherever feminist language is spoken, her songs are left unsung. Wherever she is photo-shopped into a picture of the Last Supper, the picture of her suffering heart is pulled from the wall as too gruesome. The "feminist implant" of atheist thinking has replaced the armed atheism of Marxism. This is a more devastating lie. Seven demons have filled the house that was swept clear of one. Wherever feminism reigns, Our Lady is dethroned.
 
It is hard for gentlemen to oppose even counterfeit femininity. But we must reject this anti-Marian heresy for the sake of women around the world. The white feminists of the West squandered the moral capital of the Christian interracial movement by twisting the just claims to be colorblind with the less virtuous desire to be sexually confused. The face-to-face sisterhood of Mary visiting Elizabeth was always too small a love for them. Thus they conjure the delusion that the coalition of selfish white female careerists in university, church, and government jobs is a worldwide sisterhood rivaling the masculine protective fraternity of priesthood and nations. Those who kill patriarchy multiply the widows and orphans, and at some point the dark skin of those victims will scream for justice against this racist trickery. Mary did not seek to be an apostle. She is a Queen. As Pope Francis said about women cardinals: "I don’t know where this idea sprang from. Women in the Church must be valued, not ‘clericalised.’ Whoever thinks of women as cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism."

It is an ancient tradition that after Christ’s death, the apostles hid Mary. The Roman soldiers and Jewish high priests could never lay a hand on her. Had they tried, the sword of Peter would not have stayed sheathed. Twenty centuries later the Church with her feast days, prayers, and contemplations tells the whole world who our Lady is and where she is. She is safe now, so the Apostolic Church can publicly proclaim what John and the apostles once held in secret, and the Catholic faithful affirmed in the glorious mysteries of the rosary. The Dragon and the violent world were too dominant for the apostles to speak too loudly and too clearly of her too soon. For it is always an imprudent risk to reveal a feminine beauty in an evil world if one cannot protect her from attack. But, now, let us rejoice and be glad.

Look up on this feast day and see the blue sky with white clouds in the daytime sun. Those are reflections of the Queen’s garments in Heaven. The Virgin Mother is safe up there in the midst of the Trinity, so the Church can now illuminate the world by explaining the nature of her rule. She is queen of the interior life. She rules in the vast expanse of the inner chambers opened by prayer and contemplation. The feminine rules from the inside. There is amidst the Trinity of masculine persons a feminine interior -- a whole, a beauty that is never spoken but is integral to God. That timeless feminine reality precedes Mary who is a creature. Mary is not the fourth person of the Trinity, nor is she the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. She is queen because she humbled herself before the Father. The whole world is at her feet because she opened a virgin’s heart to the wind of the Holy Spirit. In conforming herself to the will of the Father, she exercised the interior freedom of a soul in love. When men follow our mother in such acts of interior surrender we shall regain our stature as lords of creation. Only then will we fulfill the original mission of our species: to rule the Earth in his Name.

                                       

UPDATE: See the Assumption of Mary. And our review of Hildebrand’s classic study of purity and virginity in Catholic culture.

August 15 -- THE SOLEMNITY OF THE ASSUMPTION: Femininity Shatters the Glass Ceiling

[first published August 15, 2014]


by David Pence

"By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly declaration of glory.”                (Pope Pius XII, November 1, 1950)

When Christ asked Peter who the apostles thought he was, Peter made the first infallible papal statement. He said, “Thou art the Son of the living God.” Christ made it clear it was not personal insight which allowed this Petrine testimony without error. “Not flesh and Blood but my Father in heaven” had allowed Peter to proclaim this central truth of our Faith for the brethren. And so again, 2000 years later, Pius XII did not wake up one November morning in 1950 and introduce to the flock a novel teaching he and some cardinals had been concocting about Our Lady. He stated what the praying Church had known devotionally for centuries. The pope, though, with a singular voice spoke the Truth from Rome as Peter had spoken for all the apostles at Caesarea Philippi.

The Pope in a few terse words described the perfection of matter -- the most perfect blossom of the tree of Jesse.  She was Immaculate -- conceived without sin. She is the Mother of God -- the locus of the Incarnation where God came into flesh to draw human flesh into his Body. She is ever Virgin -- an intact virgin not entered by man nor torn asunder by birth. And yet in the unity and holiness which the intactness of virginity represents there is a permeability to the Spirit which brings forth the Son. This moment in history of uncorrupted feminine flesh reminds all men of our original nature in Eden and of our present capacity for perfection. This Marian perfection of matter was never allowed to be corrupted by death. In this modern era when the corrupted mist of the world seems omnipresent, the Church reminds us that purity is possible. The person separated from Evil can bear Christ on earth and will be drawn into Him where he sits at the right hand of the Father. Purity on earth is possible and the spiritual ordering of the flesh leads to Eternal life. Humans are not evolving to some higher form; perfection comes from imitating a form who was already here in a specific time and place. Let us sing of Mary.
                                         

Of heaven there is less to say. How will she reign where her son is the King and the King has a Father? She might be drawn to some inner chamber where the feminine holds the three masculine persons of the Trinity in One.  C.S. Lewis described heaven as going higher and higher and deeper and deeper. Mary is not a Queen on a throne; she is the Queen of those depths. There is some inner chamber of the hidden God which we never name with a pronoun… but if we did it would be feminine. For the feminine is interiority.

There is an intact interior that separates God from all creation. This radical separation is the meaning of HOLY. Mary and the consecrated virgins of the Church seek not crowns for their heads, but an interior milieu where their hearts can come to final rest and ponder anew. Come, let us sing of Mary -- who on this day turns our eyes to Heaven where she abides with her Son. Let us admire from a distance the beauty of the Church’s consecrated virgins who keep us vigilant for our returning King by waiting for Him as their Bridegroom.

"Neither the tomb, nor death could hold the Theotokos,
Who is constant in prayer and our firm hope in her intercessions.
For being the Mother of Life,
She was translated to life by the One who dwelt in her virginal womb."


UPDATE: Take notice of what Christ is holding [click on the image above]: a small child clothed in white representing the soul of the Virgin Mary.
Taylor Marshall on the traditional teaching of the Church.

It is a good feast to remember  Dietrich von Hildebrand’s classic reflection on purity and virginity in Catholic culture. 

Here is an August 15th sermon by Monsignor Ronald Knox (d. 1957). A 2017 sermon by Fr Stravinskas.

August 8 - MEMORIAL OF SAINT DOMINIC: Teacher and Priest

[first published August 8, 2014]

                             

Dominic (pictured meeting with Francis of Assisi early in the 13th century) gathered a fraternity of preachers and teachers. He recognized that heresies could only be countered by knowledge of the Real Truth and delivery of this Truth by holy preachers. Thus the Dominican motto: VERITAS.

What was particularly lacking in Saint Dominic's day was articulate and intelligent doctrinal preaching. The whole reason of being for the Dominicans was spreading the Good News of our Lord.
(A good summary of his life and an explanation of why Dominicans celebrate another feast day for their founder.)

I came across a sermon by a Polish preacher in which he described Dominic as "God's athlete" for his implacable struggle against the Dragon who tries to deceive us and deliver us to eternal darkness. He mentioned three ways that the Spanish saint did this:

• as is shown by the painting (below) by Blessed Fra Angelico – St. Dominic eagerly adored the cross as the venue where Christ defeated death;

• through the preaching of the Word of truth and life for the conversion of others, St. Dominic tied up the demon by the Word of God, giving to the seekers the light of the true Gospel;

• as one of the Dominican legends says, when Satan visited one of the first convents, he got scared of the 'capitular' – the place where brothers confess their faults; the life rooted in humility, the awareness of the fact of how much a person needs the Savior, this is the moment when Satan loses.

                                               

                                         

"A man who governs his passions is master of his world. We must either command them or be enslaved by them. It is better to be a hammer than an anvil."                                (St. Dominic, d. 1221)

Fra Angelico (d. 1455) was one of the countless simple  souls whose spiritual gaze became more luminous through their association with the Dominicans. Pope John Paul II beatified the Florentine painter, naming him the patron of Catholic artists. Here is his free rendition of the Transfiguration of the Lord, with the inclusion of the Virgin Mary and Saint Dominic on either side: