January, 2015 - Opus Publicum

January 9, 2015 Politics

Do I Hate Charlie Hebdo?

Do I hate Charlie Hebdo (CH)? The simple, and accurate, answer is, “No.” Don’t tell that to the Friendly Atheist [sic] over at Patheos. In addition to doing a hatchet job to yesterday’s post, “A Comment on Charlie Hebdo,” the blog attributes feelings to me which are not my own. In fact, the only emotions which enter the equation with respect to CH and the brutal tragedy surrounding the paper is sadness. I am sad that 12 people lost their lives at the hands of Islamic murderers. I am sad that the incident is inciting ethnic animus in France. And I am sad that the perpetrators, deluded as they are by a false religion, are continuing their terror spree as I write this brief post. Like Pope Francis, I pray for the souls of these criminals. May they see the light and repent before it is too late.

January 8, 2015 Uncategorized

Charlie Hebdo and the Illiberal Catholic

Further thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo tragedy from the Josias.

January 8, 2015 Church, Politics

A Comment on Charlie Hebdo

Let’s start with an uncontroversial claim: Charlie Hebdo (CH) is a low-class, often thoughtless, publication which any decent society should have shut down a long time ago. The failure of French society, now long broken away from its Catholic roots, to suppress the paper does not in any way, shape, or form take away from the tragedy of Muslim terrorists murdering ten CH employees and three police officers, along with the wounding many others. Hopefully the perpetrators will be apprehended, though some are skeptical on that point. Catholics are rightly mourning and praying for the victims and their families, and Pope Francis, in his care for the salvation of souls, has set the example of praying for the terrorists as well so “that the Lord might change their hearts.” The Lord invoked here is not Allah, but the one God in Three Persons, the Most Holy Trinity whose revelation at the Son of God’s Baptism in the Jordan was so beautifully celebrated yesterday by a number of Eastern Christians. Allah, as any faithful Muslim will tell you, had no son. That makes sense, for Allah is no god.

January 7, 2015 Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church

Blessed Byzantine Christmas

Thus did He manifest His Almightiness, born of the Virgin, preserving the virginity of the Virgin intact, and He was born of God with neither complication, travail, evil nor a separation of forsaking the immutable Divine Essence, born God from God. Since mankind abandoned God, in place of Him worshipping graven images of humans, God the Word thus assumed the image of man, so that in banishing error and restoring truth, He should consign to oblivion the worshipping of idols and for Himself to be accorded Divine honour, since to Him becometh all glory and honour unto ages of ages.

– St. Gregory Thaumatourgos

January 6, 2015 Church

Against Neo-Ultramontanism

I typically do not encourage readers to go check out other web-logs until my Friday “Weekly Reading” posts; but it comes as no surprise to me that Fr. John Hunwicke compels me to make an exception. Yesterday’s post, “Pope or Tradition?,” beautifully and succinctly expresses, through direct recourse to the Church’s magisterium, the authentic role of the Pope as the defender of Sacred Tradition.

Many Catholics today rightly express dismay over doctrinal dissent, but precious little effort has gone into the matter of certain prelates and laity manufacturing their own magisterium. The phenomenon of hyper-Papalism, or what I and others have referred to as “Neo-Ultramontanism,” is as real as it is troubling. For an alarmingly high number of Catholics, “the Pope is the Faith and the Faith is the Pope”; the Vicar of Christ has become the Oracle of God; and the desire for concrete representation as an earthly affirmation that the Church is “real” now loses sight of what that representation is truly of and for.

Don’t expect this grave confusion to go away this year. Expect it to intensify in the coming months.

January 2, 2015 Church, Spirituality

First Friday of 2015

The second day of January, besides once holding the honor of being the Octave of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, is, in 2015, First Friday as well. All Catholics are called to make an act of reparation on this and every First Friday, not only for their own sins but the sins of the whole world against the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. Lest one assume that such “superstitious piety” toward a “material object” is old hat, a remnant of a bygone age, it should be recalled that as recently as 1956, in his encyclical Haurietis Aquas, Pope Pius XII defended devotion to the Sacred Heart. Contemplation of the Sacred Heart is contemplation of God’s divine love for us, and our acts of reparation honor that love.