NEAR THE END, there in his bunker beneath the garden of the old Reich Chancellery building at Wilhelmstraße 77, Adolph Hitler ordered his minister of armaments, Albert Speer, to carry out a nationwide scorched earth policy, in what became known as the Nero Order. Hitler felt that the German people had shown themselves to be weak, and undeserving of a leader such as himself. Having failed their test of character, they should be condemned to destruction.
Nevertheless, one must work like there is no praying, and pray like there is no working. On current events, I am at one with Creative Minority Report on this. There will be ample opportunities to answer the man testing Our Lord (!) in Luke 10: "Who is my neighbor?"
... the computer comes to represent an ideal, in light of which real thinking perversely begins to look deficient. Thus, when the postindustrial visionary reasons from the fact that complex systems involve "the interaction of too many variables for the mind to hold in correct order simultaneously" to the conclusion that "one has to use algorithms, rather than intuitive judgments, in making decisions," he argues from the fact that the mind does not do what a computer does to an assertion about the incompetence of the mind. This seems to express an irrational prejudice against people.
- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft [171]
In his much anticipated third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (Love in Truth), Pope Benedict XVI does not focus on specific systems of economics -- he is not attempting to shore up anyone's political agenda. He is rather concerned with morality and the theological foundation of culture. The context is of course a global economic crisis -- a crisis that's taken place in a moral vacuum, where the love of truth has been abandoned in favor of a crude materialism. The pope urges that this crisis become "an opportunity for discernment, in which to shape a new vision for the future."
Yet his encyclical contains no talk of seeking a third way between markets and socialism. Words like greed and capitalism make no appearance here, despite press headlines following the publication of the encyclical earlier this week. People seeking a blueprint for the political restructuring of the world economy won't find it here. But if they look to this document as a means for the moral reconstruction of the world's cultures and societies, which in turn influence economic events, they will find much to reflect upon.
Caritas in Veritate is an eloquent restatement of old truths casually dismissed in modern times. The pope is pointing to a path neglected in all the talk of economic stimulus, namely a global embrace of truth-filled charity. More >>
Benedict XVI affirmed the good news about Original Sin. The Christian explanation of evil and original sin is a happy proclamation, since it affirms that life and living is good."Evil comes from a subordinate source. With his light, God is stronger and, because of this, evil can be overcome. Therefore, the creature, man, is curable; […] man is not only curable, he is in fact cured. God has introduced healing. He entered in person into history. To the permanent source of evil he has opposed a source of pure good. Christ crucified and risen, the new Adam."
(Big O's) public remarks on the freedom of religion and constitutional law demonstrate little awareness of the significance of the first freedom of the First Amendment in America’s law and lived experience. Moreover, after more than three decades of the most passionate public debate of these matters, Obama declared during the election that the moral and legal status of the unborn child are questions “above my pay grade.”The truly ominous possibility, indeed likelihood, is that Obama does not see his extreme positions on abortion as being extreme at all. They are the entrenched orthodoxies of the parties that got him to where he is. Those in opposition are viewed as a recalcitrant minority guilty of perpetuating divisiveness, and the time has come to break their back once and for all. I hope I am wrong, but this strikes me as the more plausible understanding of the Freedom of Choice Act and other measures aimed at “bringing us together again.”
[ ... ]
The Church is not merely a voluntary association of the spiritually like-minded catering to the indulgence of private sensibilities in one of Babylon’s many enclaves of choice. The Church is the Body of Christ through time proposing to the world the new creation inaugurated in his cross and resurrection and promised return. Whether against, above, in paradox, or transforming, she is always critically engaged—never surrendering to the cultural captivity that is the delusion of “Christ without culture.”
Yes, the imminent Kulturkampf, if that is what is in the offing, will require legal talent, political strategizing, relentless persuasion, and all the other means compatible with our constitutional order. Most of all, however, it requires the courage born of faith that the Church really is the Body of Christ through time, a distinct and public community bearing public witness to public truths about the right ordering of life both public and personal. In Catholic history, the cry through the centuries is for libertas ecclesiae—the freedom of the Church to be the Church. For Catholics and others, that freedom now faces a time of severe testing. In the defense of that freedom there have been through the centuries martyrs beyond numbering. We do not know what will happen in the months and years ahead, except that now it may be our turn.
14th century wall-painting in the Timios Stavros Church in Pelendri.When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, "Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled."
Christian asceticism is not, after all, a cruel disfigurement of the will, contaminated by the world-weariness or malice towards creation that one can justly ascribe to many other varieties of religious detachment. It is, rather, the cultivation of the pure heart and pure eye, which allows one to receive the world, and rejoice in it, not as a possession of the will or an occasion for the exercise of power, but as the good gift of God. It is, so to speak, a kind of “Marian” waiting upon the Word of God and its fruitfulness.
This is the simple fact of the matter, gruesome though it be. Those so inclined to be praying folk would do well to employ their efforts in that area, recalling that the biblical G*d is One of astonishing forbearance, mercy and steadfast love [hesed, agapn].
I would go so far as to say that if there was no purgatory, then we would have to invent it, for who would dare say of himself that he was able to stand directly before God. And yet we don't want to be, to use an image from Scripture, 'a pot that turned out wrong,' that has to be thrown away; we want to be able to be put right. Purgatory basically means that God can put the pieces back together again. That he can cleanse us in such a way that we are able to be with him and can stand there in the fullness of life. Purgatory strips off from one person what is unbearable and from another the inability to bear certain things, so that in each of them a pure heart is revealed, and we can see that we all belong together in one enormous symphony of being.
A beautifully written essay by Paul Belien at Taki's, plaintively entitled, Lost Continent.Since you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I am going to spit you out of my mouth. You say, “I am rich. I have become wealthy. I don’t need anything.” Yet you don’t realize that you are miserable, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. (Revelation 3:16-17)
While 44 per cent of Americans attend a place of worship once a week—and this is mostly a Christian place of worship—only 15 per cent of Europeans do so—and many of them go to a mosque instead of a church. The European disease was aptly analyzed by Pope Benedict XVI who said that it was caused by “the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations.”
Here lies the explanation for Europe’s current predicament. What we see happening today in Europe is not Islam replacing Christianity; during the past decades secularism replaced Christianity. What we see happening now is Islam replacing post-Christian secularism.
In an interview in the German newspaper Die Welt last month, Father Notker Wolf, the German professor and monk who is the head of the Benedictine monks worldwide, suggested that Islam might perhaps be “a provocation from God.” Father Notker implies that Islamization can only be stopped if Europe rediscovers its Christian roots.
... And pray like there's no working.
The Vigil - Percy W. Muncy (Weidensall Hall - Gettysburg College)
