Dear All,
I want to apologize for the time it has taken me to respond to e-mails and other messages over the past month or so. Between work and personal matters there simply has not been sufficient time to keep up. Please know that I will do my very best to catch up on my correspondence over the next week and that any silence on my part was not intended as an insult. Thank you.
There are many who say that drunkenness is no sin. It is not considered by those outside the Church as a sin, but as a weakness : men speak of it as a misfortune ; physicians class it as a simple mania, to be pitied rather than condemned. Instead of giving to it, as a moral disease, a moral remedy, they encourage it by taking away its enormity. But what says the “Word of God”? It tells us that drunkenness is a mortal sin. St. Paul says : “The drunkard shall not possess the kingdom of God.” And why shall not the. drunkard possess the kingdom of God? Because the sin of drunkenness of which he becomes guilty is a grievous sin against nature, against religion, against himself, against the family, and therefore against God, the Author of nature, the Spirit of religion, and the Founder of the family. It goes against nature, be cause it ruins the body, corrupts the soul, and changes the image of God in man into the likeness of a brute.
– Fr. Michael Mueller, C.S.S.R., Sinners Return to God
First, Opus Publicum has its own domain name: www.opuspublicum.com
Second, the “About” page has been updated.
And third, in due course I will be listing a number of books on here at a modest discount before they make their way onto eBay, Alibris, Amazon, etc. Some of the “hot” items include several old breviary sets, liturgical music books, and a number of other items that will no doubt be of interest to my Catholic readers.
My apologies. Life has been more hectic the past week than anticipated, hence the lack of posting. Hopefully stability and normalcy will return shortly, but for the time being I am still on unintended break. Expect a flurry of posts soon, however.
Addendum: Nothing below should be construed as a declaration that I am leaving the Holy Catholic Church. I am sorry for the confusion some remarks in the post created.
Life has turned busy again during the opening of the Paschal season and so posts may be a tad scarce around Opus Publicum for a few days. Even so, some recent “discussions” on Facebook brought to mind that while certain Catholics who are by and large orthodox on everything except the Church’s social magisterium are routinely excoriated as hypocrites, the opposite is rarely true. That is to say, certain Catholics who have made it their business to publicly defend, promote, and interpret Catholic social teaching are rarely if ever called to the carpet for holding opinions which are contrary to the Faith. Is that not, too, hypocrisy? What virtue is there in someone claiming to believe in just wages, solidarity, and subsidiarity if they simultaneously reject the physical Resurrection of Christ or the Church’s teaching on contraception? The cafeteria is closed. Nay, it was never open in the first place.
If Jesus Christ had come to save anything less than our immortal souls, His Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection would be absurd. “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” No one who has read seriously the works of St. Alphonsus Liguori, or listened to sermons and conferences given in the authentic Redemptorist tradition, can deny that these two verses and all the words of our Lord which point to the perilousness of salvation should be on the minds of all Catholics daily, even hourly. God, in His infinite love, holds that every human soul is a precious treasure, and yet we do not. We are flippant in the face of sin and the contempt we show God by breaking His commandments, from the least to the greatest, with a smile. There is scarcely a nation left on earth that does not legally protect every sin which cries to Heaven for vengeance. Had God not covenanted with Noah, He might have flooded the earth several times over already. Here, however, we remain, with gadgets, diet plans, fashion accessories, and enough craft beer to make alcoholics of us all. It’s difficult to imagine how any of this would be possible if the one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, established through the Apostles, and promised perpetuity until the Second Coming had not lost its way sometime during the course of the last century. May she find her way back soon.
A friend queried me the other day as to why Left-leaning blogs are, on average, more fun to read than Right-leaning ones. Because I am quite aware of his politics, I am confident he meant something else other than, “Why are Democratic blogs more fun to read than Republican ones?” Still, the categories “Left” and “Right” are often difficult to define, especially when applied to bloggers who write about more than just politics. I’ll start here. Is Opus Publicum a Right-leaning blog? Regardless of whether or not my posts are fun to read, the views they express are integrally bound up with the Catholic Faith. If I read an academic article and comment on it, I do so as a Catholic. If I read a book and review it, I do so as a Catholic. And when I discuss socio-economic matters, whether in the form of critiquing liberalism or championing alternative avenues, I do so as a Catholic. Given all of that, it seems that Opus Publicum can be safely categorized as Right-leaning, which maybe also means that it’s foolhardy for me to advertise its contents as “fun” to a single, well-adjusted human being.
Several acquaintances of mine have been discussing the recent firing of Jared Keller, News Director for the online millennial news site Mic. (No, I am not a reader.) The cause? Plagiarism. According to Gawker (another site I don’t normally visit), Keller either plagiarized or improperly attributed sources at least 20 times over the past several months. Contrary to those who are reveling in Keller’s downfall while yammering on about the importance of “journalistic integrity,” I don’t see much of an issue with Keller’s cut-and-paste approach to journalism. As best as I can tell from briefly (and I do mean briefly) perusing Gawker’s list, not a shred of the information Keller lifted was unique to the original source; it appears Keller was just too lazy to go find it on his own. As for using someone else’s writing, well, none of the stolen prose was breaking new stylistic ground. Keller may have made his days run a little smoother by playing fast n’ loose with the time-honored rules of journalism, but he certainly wasn’t setting himself up for the Pulitzer.
I write to report that on the 12th day of January, in the year of our Lord 2015, Modestinus, the worst kept secret identity in blogdom, cyber-reposed after a long battle with irrelevancy. Having outlived his usefulness, Modestinus has decided to hand the reins of Opus Publicum over to one Gabriel Sanchez, occasional contributor to various publications and self-proclaimed know-it-all on aviation law. A traditional Viking funeral will be held in Modestinus’s honor on the banks of the Grand River in due course.
