Pope to Promote Tridentine Mass
How timely was Tom’s blog on the Latin Mass?
I just received this holy news from Karl Keating’s newsletter:
Last Thursday Catholic World News transmitted this story, filed out of Dublin, regarding what might happen to what is commonly called the Tridentine Mass:
“Pope Benedict XVI will take action soon to allow all Catholic priests to celebrate the Latin Mass, a Cambridge historian has predicted.
“Speaking to a conference of priests in Ireland earlier this week, Eamonn Duffy said that it was ‘extremely likely that Pope Benedict will lift the restrictions on the celebration of the Tridentine liturgy,’ the Irish Independent reported.
“The Tridentine ritual, which was the universal form of the Mass prior to Vatican II, is now celebrated only with the explicit permission, or ‘indult,’ of the diocesan bishop. Some Vatican watchers speculate that Pope Benedict will announce a ‘universal indult,’ giving blanket permission for all Catholic priests to use the old ritual.
“In remarks to the National Conference of Priests of Ireland, Eamonn Duffy said that he thought the Pope would make the policy change in October, during the meeting of the Synod of Bishops. The topic for Synod discussions is the Eucharist.”
I missed the WCN story, so I thank the Lord for Keating’s update.
Coming Up on Hennessy’s View: A related, belated, and timely shot at Los Angeles’s Roger Cardinal Mahoney. Don’t miss it.
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Big Thanks to Dawn Eden
Dawn graciously linked to one of my entries, even though she disagreed with some of my over-the-top language. (Yes, everything I do is over-the-top, unfortunately.) As a result, my site is busy.
Thanks, Dawn, and keep up the terrific work.
Shocking Coldness
The New York Times Online, today, is drumming up sympathy for abortion.
Venetia Grunder, 21, viewed an ultrasound image of the fetus in her womb. She was 12 weeks pregnant, though she had taken birth control pills as directed. “I feel pretty messed up,” she said after seeing the image. “It’s different, just knowing. My husband told me not to look. This changes my feelings, but I’m sticking by it. Damn it, $650, I’m sticking by it.”
How many pieces of silver is $650?
Fisking this little paragraph, we find the whole Culture of Death in a nutshell:
“Venetia Grunder, 21, viewed ultrasound image of the fetus in her womb.”
She saw a picture of the baby she conceived by voluntarily enjoying sex with her husband.
“She was 12 weeks pregnant.”
This is what she saw:
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“My husband told me not to look.”
It’s easier to stab someone in the back. It’s easier to kill a stanger you never see.
“This changes my feelings, but I’m sticking by it.”
My husband didn’t think I had it in me to kill someone I knew, someone I’d seen. And it’s harder, but I guess my bloodlust is stronger than either one of us thought.
“Damn it, $650, I’m sticking by it.”
For $650, I’d kill anyone–even my own child.
One of the reasons I’m no longer an advocate for the death penalty is women like. As long as our society praises women who kill their own, as long as we defend the right of doctors to murder children for $650 cash, we have no business executing criminals.
This was Venetia baby after its execution:
It gets colder, though.
Kori, 26, who was having her third abortion, asked to watch the procedure on the ultrasound monitor. “I wanted to see what it was like,” she said. “It was O.K. to watch. Once you had your mind made up to do it, you just suck it up and go with it.”
You suck it up, indeed.
Kori is a triple-murderer. Like so many pathological killers, she’s learned that each murder is easier than one before. If you can work up the frothing hatred to kill one person, you can kill many, many more. It’s why we watch cops who’ve had to kill someone in the line of duty. We make sure they didn’t enjoy it the way Kori does. Clearly, Kori enjoyed the show on the ultrasound monitor.
And what of the executioners?
“My oldest son won’t let me see my grandchildren,” said Sherry Steele, 57, a surgical assistant who started working at the clinic after her daughter had two abortions.
Good for her oldest son. I wouldn’t trust my kids around a serial killer, either, even, or perhaps especially, if was my own mother.
After the procedure, one woman summarized the joy of killing, the joy of freedom from consequences of one’s own actions:
I feel goofy now, but not in a bad way. I feel relieved more than anything. I know I’ll never forget it, but I’d rather do that than have a child I can’t take care of.
The next woman we meet has no qualms with killing children at the point of viability.
Karen, 29, who arrived at the clinic 20 weeks pregnant, expressed no qualms about ending her pregnancy. Like nearly half of all women who have abortions, she had had one before, when she was 18. She did not look on abortion as shameful, she said, adding, “All of your past goes into making you who you are.”
The baby Karen had murdered looked like this on the morning of its execution:
Afterward, it looked like this:
“All your past goes into making you who are,” Karen told the New York Times. Her past includes double homocide and no remorse. In my book, that makes what she is a murderer.
I am too sickened by what I’ve read to read the story any further. Perhaps I’m blinded by my beliefs, but I can’t imagine that this story in the New York Times will help the pro-abortion side. Clearly, the women who have had multiple abortions believe that it’s okay to kill for convenience. They as much as admit it when they say things like, “I’d rather do that than have a child I can’t take care of.”
VandyBlog notices the writer’s attempt to raise pity for the abortionists who have to deal with government regulation.
Aw shucks. It seems mountains of regulations are OK for every industry except abortions, eh? I am quite familiar with this regulation regime. However, the industry in which I work is regulated far more than the abortion industry. In fact, if you listen to other NY Times authors, my industry is not regulated enough. While I choose not to disclose my industry (doing so may violate my company’s Blog policy), I can assure you that decisions I make do not affect life or death.
Blogger Matt writes:
This article was posted in the New York Times, and it had what I think was the opposite effect of what the writer intended on me(though I could be wrong about that).
I assume Matt assumes (as I do) that the author intended to promote abortions and make abortionists and women who have abortions sympathetic characters. Instead, as I pointed out, he turned them into monsters. And how could he not? How could a reporter make Hitler into a hero?
Amy Welborn notes that new Missouri law may put Springfield’s abortion clinic out of business.
Somewhat related, Dawn Eden sees 60 Minutes exploiting illegal abortion on behalf of Planned Parenthood.
(Cross-posted on The Bower)
UPDATE: Some are upset at the pictures and my over-the-top language. At least they’re reading. But a couple of points that Andrea made on Least Loved Bedtime Stories demand responses.
“we’re right, you’re wrong and you deserve to suffer for your wrongness.”
First, we are right. Truth is right, false is wrong. Good is right, evil is wrong. Life is right, death is wrong. Beauty is right, ugly is wrong. Unity is right, disintegration is wrong.
Second, the only punishment I cheer for is the punishment of remorse, of repentance. Temporal punishments become meaningless compared to acceptance of one’s sins.
“I said that waving pictures of dead fetuses around, and calling people Nazis, drives people away in disgust who might otherwise be turned to support your cause.”
Do you really think that’s true? I don’t. Do you think that anyone read my blog and decided to have an abortion, just to show me? Do you think someone, even one person, read that piece and said, ‘Well, dammit, I am now pro-abortion.’ I honestly think not. But I’m sure it makes you feel compassionate.
“Like many people who are inordinately proud of the fervor of their own beliefs you become a detriment, rather than an asset, to your cause.”
Was Harriet Tubman ‘inordinately proud’ of her beliefs? How about Frederick Douglass? Or Abraham Lincoln? Or Lech Walesa? Martin Luther King? Malcolm X? Was their zeal detrimental to the causes of emancipation? democracy? civil rights? Jesus Christ was put to death because of the zeal with which he lived out His beliefs. I suppose you think Christianity would be further advanced had He been nicer to the Pharisees.
Finally, I try not to cause fights. I try to open eyes–especially those of people whose smug confidence in their own moral and intellectual superiority blinds them to the destruction of life all around them.
UPDATE: (From a comment)
Julia,
Bless you.
I suppose I should have written a bit more. Your rightly ask, “But Bill, why do you make these poor souls the targets of your venom? Where is your indictment of the fathers?”
I will respond with an update to the original post, but I want to address you directly.
My venom, as you aptly put it, is really, truly directed at a) abortion’s many apologists, and b) those who make a living at the practice. My literary fireballing the women in the article was intended to point out the callousness of some of their attitudes: $650? It’s okay to watch your third abortion? As you point out, these women allow society’s complex system of justifications override their innate sense of right and wrong. My words were meant like Patton’s slapping of the shell-shocked soldiers–not to humiliate them, but to wake them up.
Second, the men. Lord spare us from the modern American male. Predatory, cowardly men have done more to destroy our sense of sexual proportion than Caligula. It is men who want free and easy sex with no strings. It is men who (frequently) finance abortions. It is men who coined the phrase “take care of it.”
I’m not for rounding up and jailing those who’ve had abortions. God forbid I should receive temporal punishment for my litany of sins that stretched from here to eternity. (This blog documents the depths of my depravity. I pray that God does not give me what I deserve, as I pray he withholds justice from the targets of my attacks.)
Someone once called me a monster. She was right. I have spent more than a year recovering, not from the slap of that label, but from my monstrous sins. As we say in our Confiteor, “I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sister, that I have through my own fault, in my thoughts, in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to.”
Julia, thank you for your honesty, and God bless you and your family. The Almighty has done great things for you, and holy is His name. If I have hurt you with my words, I beg your forgiveness. I promise that you have in no way harmed me, and I thank you for that, too.
UPDATE: Andrea over at Least Loved Bedtime Stories has fired one last salvo and shut down comments. While I am saddened that the pro-abortionists have gone to wishing rapes on others, racism, and attacks on the mentally disabled, I’m not shutting down comments. If I couldn’t handle other contrary opinions, I’d simply stop writing. Also, not so long ago, I wrote some things that sounded much like Andrea.
Another Sort of Confirmation Hearing
Listening to Fr. Frank Pavone’s homily on EWTN’s daily Mass today, my mind wandered to the Roberts confirmation hearing. Well, not to Roberts’s, but to another Supreme Court nonimee’s: a nominee whose public statements on Roe vs. Wade tow the liberal line.
Chairman: The chair yields to the senior Senator from Missouri for ten minutes. Senator Bond.
Bond: Thank you Mr. Chairman, colleagues, Judge Smeal. (Sifting through notes) Judge Smeal, have you ever seen photos or diagrams of an abortion in progress?
Smeal: I don’t recall, Senator.
Bond: I see. Judge, did you know that most abortions take place during week eight of pregnancy?
Smeal: Yes, I believe that’s correct.
Bond: Now, judge, please look at the monitor in front of you. I’d like to ask if you know the gestitional age of the baby on the screen.
(Oohs and ahs from the gallery)
Bond: Judge? Can you idetnify the age of that child?
Smeal: Well, Senator, I’m not a doctor. So, no.
Bond: I understand, Judge, that you’re not a doctor, but would you mind taking an educated guess?
Smeal: I’d rather not, Senator.
Bond: Would you be surprised to learn that this baby’s gestiational age it 8 months?
Smeal: (pause) I . . . well . . . as I said, I’m not a doctor.
Bond: For the information of the committee, this photograph is medically certified to deptict an actual baby at 8 weeks gestation. Mr. Chairman, if the photo and document could be entered into evidence.
Chairman: So ordered.
Bond: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. (to nominee) Now, Judge, do you accept that this is a picture of a human baby at 8 weeks’ gestation?
Smeal: Well, if you say so, Senator.
Bond: What if a doctor says so?
Smeal: Well, in court, I’d have to determine the doctor’s qualif . . .
Bond: (interrupting) The doctor who authenticated these photos is a board certified OB/GYN on staff at Yale-New Haven hospital, as the documentation states, Judge.
Smeal: I see that, Senator. (Seething). What is your point?
Bond: I’ll ask the questions, if you don’t mind, Judge.
Leahy: Mr. Chairman, I object to the Senator from Missouri’s tone toward our guest.
Chairman: I thank the Senator from Vermont. I understand your objection, but the chair would point out that it is the job of the committee to question the witness. Senator Bond.
Bond: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Judge, I’d ask you, once again, to look at the monitor. This image, also medically certified, is also an 8-week-old baby.
(Gasps from the gallery.)
Leahy: (Standing, shouting) Mr. Chairman, I must object strongly. This is a disgrace. There are children in classrooms watching these proceedings. The Senator from Missouri is obscene. This has nothing to do with the judge’s testimony before this committee.
(Chairman pounding gavel as gallery raises volume)
Chairman: Senator Leahy, please sit down. You are out of order, Senator Leahy.
(Leahy kicks his chair backwards and storms from the room)
Chairman: Senator Bond, please proceed. I would first ask our guests to compose themselves. Senator.
Bond: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Now, judge, you have testified that, as a judge, you consider the mutilation and death of the child just depicted in these photographs to be a practice endorsed and ordained by the drafters, signers, and ratifiers of the Constitution, is that correct?
Smeal: Well, no, Senator. I never said that. The law deals with abstractions. In the abstract sense of the law, the Constitution protects a woman’s right to privacy.
Bond: So, judge, if the framers did not endorse the kind of slaughter we witnessed in these photographs, because they were dealing in abstractions, I would assume that you personally endorse the outcome seen in the second photograph?
Smeal: Senator, I don’t understand the question.
Bond: Let me put it like this. If someone showed you the first picture and asked you to sign the order allowing the actions that resulted in the second photograph, would you sign it?
Smeal: Senator, I cannot answer questions that may come before me were I confirmed.
Bond: You already have, Judge. You already have. (To chairman) I yield back the balance of my time, Mr. Chairman.
Others:
GOPBloggers notices the difference between Democrat treatment of Ginsberg and Roberts.
La Shawn Barber summerizes Roberts’s answers on abortion.
Amy Welborn finds Charles Krauthammer’s prediction of Roberts’s stance on Roe v. Wade disconcerting.
Jay Anderson has some questions for Judge Roberts about Joe Biden’s endorsement.
AfterAbortion’s follow-up on fetal pain might have given the fictitious Sen. Bond more questions for the fictitious Judge Smeal.
Planned Parenthood wants to deny women the right to see sonograms of their babies.
No Small Task
Once upon a time, men and women separated themselves from society in order to pray. Often, their piety attracted like-minded individuals to join them. Among early Christians, the practice became fairly common, and continued through the middle ages and even after the Reformation. While that may not be an official definition of monasticism, it fits.
One can only imagine that forming a new religious order was easier in the days of the great kings of Europe than it would be today. Monarchs were by and large Catholic and in close allegiance with the Church. Non-ascetic life was a drudgery, and while the ascetics gave up worldly pleasures, the worldly pleasures of first century Europe were not all the great. One thinks of plowing fields by hand, milking goats, and dying of common colds, . In the monastery, he plowed fields by hand, milked goats, died of common colds, and prayed often. (Were a modern sentenced to a life of the first three, he would almost certainly add the third if, for no other reason, escape.)
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, monasticism finds its roots in the New Testament:
I John, ii, 15-17: “Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not of the father but is of the world. And the world passeth away and the concupiscence thereof. But he that doeth the will of God abideth forever”
Since August, I have grown spiritually closer and closer to an organization called the Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem. The reasons for this gravitation are manifold, but the boldness of the task taken on by Dom Daniel Oppenheimer is most impressive. He has founded a new religious order dedicated to some traditions that most Catholics in America consider anachronistic and unnecessary.
The Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem (CRNJ) is a clerical institute of consecrated life whose members (known as canons) pursue the proper apostolic ends of their religious society. By pronouncing the ancient vows of Stability, Conversion of Life and Obedience and living a common life according to the specific form of the institute, each member consciously strives towards the perfection of charity.
At each Sunday’s Mass, the personable Oppenheimer reminds us that founding an order is no easy task, reminding me of Chesterton’s defense of rash vows.
If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill’s ‘Liberty’ seventy-six times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes expressed, was ‘an artist in life.’ Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures in civic and national civilization — by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get there.
Like me, Chesterton, though writing a century ago, recognized that modern man is less accepting of these kinds of things. Like me, he laments this fact.
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one’s self, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea.
The Canons make rash vows to divorce themselves, in key ways, from the decadence of modern man. Such vows are risky, as Al Gore might say. Consider the life the young novitiate vows to live:
a life-long commitment to asceticism and virtue, community life and the exercise of a faithful and authentic Roman Catholic priestly life (cf. Presbyterorum Ordinis) in the perfection of charity. The entire work is undertaken for the greater glory of God and the sanctification of the Church and the world.
These young men escape nothing, really. The decadent world surrounds them still, just as the goat, the field, and the virus surrounded the 8th century monk. To me, though, the Internet, video games, sex, fast cars, and leisure are more attractive than the diversions available to St. Francis. Thus, the Canons of the New Jerusalem are giving up much, though they don’t see it that way.
Vows are not a repudiation of things material because they are evil but freely chosen means by which one abandons lesser goods for those which are eternal. Through his vows the religious priest freely engages himself to a lifelong pursuit of charity in its every dimension.
Thus, thus votive life moves toward Christ and Heaven, greedily devouring the meals of holiness and charity. They do not turn away from the world except so as to turn more squarely toward God. In this sense, it is the world that divorces itself from the truth these men know, thus taking itself out of their line of sight—or at least moving itself to the periphery.
Among modern language’s many flaws is the tendency to abuse superlatives and praise. Still, the ambition required to start such a movement in 21st century America must be considered heroic in the Homeric sense. One person vowing to surrender his life to the service of God is dramatic. One man and one bishop vowing to found an order of men who will take and practice such vows is a true mystery which demands returning to Chesterton.
There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the aesthetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.
In Chesterfield, Missouri, atop a forested hill, sits a little house containing three men who know this thrill, men who have burnt or are burning their ships. Their cowardice is behind them, as they have dared to turn their eyes away from Playboy and toward the Light that was in the beginning and with God and was God and remains God. Perhaps their blindness to worldly things, then, is not so much a matter of position but of perception. Once having seen the true Light, how dark the material objects under artificial luminescence must appear.
Father Oppenheimer’s ambitions deserve great respect, not only from serious Catholics, but from anyone who admires heroic sacrifice. His ambition is to build a strict and holy religious order that will turn the attentions of many, many people toward the eternal Light of God, to turn their little house in the woods into shining City on the Hill which modulates that light for us until our eyes adjust to its indescribable brilliance. Even an ardent atheist must appreciate such devotion to a cause.
Readers are encouraged to visit the Canons’ web site. More importantly, Catholics and those interested in the faith need to attend their beautiful Latin Mass, and soon. Until the new chapel is complete, Sunday Mass is celebrated at the Passionist Nuns Chapel on Clayton Rd. in Ellisville, Missouri, just east of Clarkson. Fr. Oppenheimer will soon begin a catechism course, details to be posted when classroom space becomes available.
St. Louisans should register now for the Canons Regular symposium on conversion. The list of speakers is a gift from God, including Alice von Hildebrand, Dr. Lawrence Feingold, Dom Daniel Oppenheimer, and Roy Shoeman, author of Salvation is From the Jews. To register, call 636-536-3229
See Rome of the West for more details.
RomanCatholicBlog has this story on energizing the Church Militant.
I can’t imagine a CRNJ doing these kinds of things, brought to us by Angry Twins.
Read the Beltway Traffic Jam religiously.
Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem
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