Some months ago, on the old Opus Publicum, I called attention to Pater Edmund Waldstein’s lecture April 2014 lecture “Exhausted Democracy.” The talk is also available on Pater Edmund’s web-log, Sancrucensis, under the title “The Politics of Nostalgia”here, or in PDF here. I have been giving the contents of this talk/paper a great deal of thought lately, and I think you should as well. Perhaps liberalism isn’t the only ideology in play at the moment, but it is so dominant that it has made us effectively forget about all of the rest.
Review: The Typikon Decoded
Note: One of the “additions” I plan on making to Opus Publicum in the new year are brief book reviews. Hopefully they will prove to be of some value.
Archimandrite [Archbishop] Job Getcha, The Typikon Decoded (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2012), 313pgs.
Weekly Reading – January 9, 2015
Given the ongoing clamor over the Charlie Hebdo tragedy and its aftermath, everything below addresses those topics.
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.
Charlie Hebdo and the Illiberal Catholic
Further thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo tragedy from the Josias.
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.
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
A Brief Remark on Angry Distributists
I apologize for being “whimsical” again, but it was brought to my attention last evening by a couple of thoughtful Catholic gentlemen that Distributists are an angry lot, or at least they come off that way. This impression, it seems to me, is not entirely off base if one looks, perhaps selectively, at certain “representative voices” of the contemporary Distributist movement, though certainly Distributists hold no monopoly on anger these days.
A Followup Note on Pope Francis and Climate Change
A few days have lapsed since I posted “Pope Francis and Climate Change.” Between a couple of comments to that post, along with two other discussions which broke out concerning it on Facebook and GChat respectively, it seems important to make a few additional comments which touch not just on the climate-change issue, but where faithful Catholics should stand vis-à-vis ideologically charged issues.
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.