Monthly Archives: July 2019

The Godless Confusion and the God of Justice — sermon material here

I’d take a sermon like this any day. Has punch, gets to the heart of a major, burning issue: how react to a society that rarely hears such talk. Society? How about parish mass-attenders?

First few ‘graphs:

According to atheist Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The God Delusion, the God of the Old Testament is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

That remark indicates far more familiarity with the dictionary than with the Bible. I wonder, how much fiction has Dawkins read? More seriously, how carefully has he actually read the Bible?

Sadly, Dawkins merely appeals to the tired notion that the “God of the Old Testament” is a cruel tyrant with little love for His creation. I suspect that even many Christians have the vague sense that such is the case. And today’s reading from the Old Testament is the sort of passage that can, rather easily, be misinterpreted to provide evidence for that view.

Etc.

Like this, I say. Would need editing, sprucing up for average Sunday attendance, explaining this and that, cutting a bit, etc. Priest would have to get it in the first place, of course.

via Catholic World Report

Inside baseball: Pope St. Paul VI’s cathedral in his home town has no altar!

Something there is that makes a fellow love it.

The newer of the two [Brescia] Cathedrals intrigues. Within it, a ‘shrine’ to S Paul VI ‘Brixiensis’ [the Brescia native]. It contains, apparently, neither relics of the Saint nor an altar.

Speculation arose in our group [of insiders, attending a convention] about whether this latter fact was a piece of subtle symbolism indicating his desire to abolish the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. [Paul had approved the new, post-Vatican 2 mass, which traditionalists abhor.]

I [Fr. Hunwicke, as insider] strongly disagreed, arguing that his condemnation of ‘Transignification‘ [denial of the orthodox-traditional transubstantiation] showed that at least his heart, or part of it, was in the right place.

And the evidence ([Louis] Bouyer [who had told his friend Paul VI of Annibal Bugnini’s duplicity] inter alios [among others]) indicates that the the worst excesses of ‘his’ [Paul’s] rite can be blamed on Hannibal’s deceptions.

I like it for various reasons. One is how it contains so much in so few references — if you know what he’s talking about. And if you didn’t before I explained it, now you do. Maybe.

How Fr. Weinandy decided to write his letter of complaint to Pope Francis

Prayer matters . . .

Blithe Spirit

In Rome in late May of 2017, arriving early for a meeting of Vatican theologians, Fr. Thomas Weinandy took himself to prayer “about the . . . state of the Church and the anxieties [he] had about the present Pontificate.”

He spent most of an afternoon in St. Peter’s,

beseeching Jesus and Mary, St. Peter and all of the saintly popes who are buried there to do something to rectify the confusion and turmoil within the Church today, a chaos and an uncertainty that I felt Pope Francis had himself caused . . . and pondering whether [to] write and publish something expressing my concerns and anxiety.

A few days later, the meeting completed, he “went again to St. Peter’s and prayed in the same manner.”

That night, he couldn’t sleep. Unable to get Francis off his mind, at 1:15 he left his room and went outside “for a short…

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The new mass: a Protestantizing of Catholic worship

Its architect was explicit on the point.

The Novus Ordo Missae [New Order mass] was introduced in April 1969 by Pope Paul VI. From the start, this new rite was intended to have an ecumenical nature as declared by its chief architect, Fr. Annibale Bugnini in 1965 . . . 

.  . . who made no bones about his slash-and-burn philosophy.

“We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren-that is, for the Protestants.”

From which we gain an idea of where we stand with this general-in-charge of the century’s liturgical wrecking crew.

Pope Paul VI reportedly adopted the Bugnini view:

. . .  the intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to . . . the Mass was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should almost coincide with the Protestant liturgy . . .  there was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic, in the traditional sense, in the Mass and, I repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist service  . . .

This is from “an intimate friend” of the pope,  Jean Guitton, referenced in October 1994, in Christian Order.  Paul VI had 116 of Guitton’s books and had made marginal study notes in 17 of them.

Along with mass-Protestantizing came belief changes, argues Michael Davies, prolific traditionalist writer and defender of the Tridentine Latin mass.

When I began work on this trilogy [Liturgical Revolution] I was concerned at the extent to which the Catholic liturgy was being Protestantized. The more detailed my study of the Revolution, the more evident it has become that it has by-passed Protestantism and its final goal is humanism.

Fighting words, to be sure.