Category: Catholic Corner

J. D. Vance at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast

The Veep's performance was impressive. The man has excellent public speaking skills, is considerably more articulate than his boss, and displays natural political talent. He will make a fine successor.  On the down side, he, unlike Trump, is a professional politician. I don't have to explain what that means. Trump's astonishing effectiveness is in large part due to the fact that the man does not need the job and can't be bought. The same goes for his right-hand man, Elon Musk. Contrary to the filthy slandering of him by our political enemies, he is not in this for the money.  (As if to mock these moral and intellectual incompetents, Elon has given new life to the Hitler salute by introducing the chainsaw variant. I call it 'blue-baiting.')

Vance was right to point out the blow Trump has struck for religious liberty for all faiths. He didn't mention  Executive Order 14182 of 25 January, but I will. Enforcing the Hyde Amendment is an effective counterpunch against the corrupt and self-serving Joe Biden who, you will recall, reversed himself on his quondam support for the amendment:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1 . Purpose and Policy. For nearly five decades, the Congress has annually enacted the Hyde Amendment and similar laws that prevent Federal funding of elective abortion, reflecting a longstanding consensus that American taxpayers should not be forced to pay for that practice. However, the previous administration disregarded this established, commonsense policy by embedding forced taxpayer funding of elective abortions in a wide variety of Federal programs.

It is the policy of the United States, consistent with the Hyde Amendment, to end the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.

Now unless you are morally obtuse, or a Democrat (whichever comes first), you should be able to see right away that it is wrong for the federal government to force roughly half  the taxpayers to support what they consider to be a moral outrage. It is wrong even if abortion right up to the moment of birth ought to be legal. I am not saying that it ought to be legal. I am saying that, even if it ought to be legal, and becomes legal, it would be wrong to compel taxpayers to pay for it.  For that compulsion violates their conscience and moral judgment, a judgment that has the support of a battery of powerful arguments. (That the average Joe and Jane lack the intellectual 'chops' to produce these arguments, arguments which, by the way, needn't rely on any specifically religious premises,  is not to the point; some of us can. Do you remember that RINO mediocrity George W. Bush? He would often say, in his flat-footed way, that "Marriage is between a man and a woman." He was right, but that's all he could muster: he lacked the mental equipment to defend his position in an articulate manner. He reminded me of the affable jocks I'd have in my logic classes. In this respect Bush was like too many conservatives. They have sound intuitions but cannot rise to their argumentative defense.) 

In roughly the second half of his speech, Vice President Vance became repetitive, and what is worse, 'squishy' in the style of the 'liberal,' in his positive statements about the current pope.  It is too bad that the man is dying, and perhaps we should pray for the man. But should we pray that his papacy continue? That is not obvious. I'd say it is the exact opposite of obvious.  I don't believe I am very far off if I say that Bergoglio is to the RCC what Biden was to the USA, a disaster.  

It follows that if you pray for the man, you should not pray that he continue to live. For if he continues to live, his destructive papacy will continue. His papacy ought to end, which is not to say that the papacy ought to end.  You should pray that Bergoglio get his spiritual affairs in order, admit the damage he has done, confess his sins of omission and commission, and ask for forgiveness, lest he end up in hell, or in purgatory for a hell of a long time.

Here is the Veep's speech.

NGO Pope Commits ‘Ecclesiastical Suicide’

Rod Dreher:

Elsewhere in the epistle, Francis implicitly condemns Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, for misunderstanding the Church’s teaching on ordo amoris—the order of love. Vance, a convert who was catechized by two of the most intelligent Dominican priests in America (I introduced him personally to his first teacher), had defended the administration’s tough migration policy by referring to St. Thomas Aquinas’ teaching that the order of love requires us to love those closest to us first—not exclusively, but primarily, as God has given us the duty to care for them.

It turns out that JD Vance really is more Catholic than the pope. The Catechism teaches that the moral duty towards foreign refugees must be balanced by duties to the common good of the people within one’s own country. Yes, wealthy countries do have a moral responsibility to be generous in welcoming distressed foreigners, but they have the right to set limits on migration, and to refuse it when they judge that it harms the common good. The official Catholic teaching balances charity with common sense. 

JD Vance understands that; Pope Francis does not. The pope, in his teaching, has sanctified open borders—even, as in Europe, when those ungated frontiers allow the migration into the Christian lands of Europe of millions of Muslims who at minimum do not share the ancestral faith of Europeans, and no small number of whom are militantly hostile to it. If Francis had lived in the time of Pius V, Europe would be Islamic today. 

Last Days, Last Things

What better way to spend one's last days than by deep inquiry into the Last Things?

Would that not be a better use of time than gambling and fox hunting, and the other examples of Pascalian divertissement?

You will soon be embarking nolens volens for a permanent stay in a foreign destination, departure date unknown. Are your affairs in order?

For a good old introduction to the traditional Roman Catholic doctrine on death, the intermediate state, resurrection, judgment, and eternity, see Romano Guardini, The Last Things. 

Bergoglio on Borders

What a hypocrite this guy is! You can 'migrate' anywhere, just not into the Vatican.

Don't you love that word 'migrate'? Its use manages to elide two important distinctions in one fell swoop: the distinction between legal and illegal immigration, and that between immigration and emigration.  A worthy addition to the lexicon of the Left.

Why Catholics Voted for Trump

A very good First Things article by Mary Eberstadt. I have only one comment. She reports, "The nation’s Catholic voters split 56 to 41 in favor of Donald Trump."

41 %  against?

Why such a large percentage? Are they 'devout Catholics' in the style of Joe Dementia and Nancy the Shredder?

The Democrat Party, besides being anti-democratic, is anti-liberty, and in particular anti-religious liberty. If you haven't noticed that yet, then you are in need of a proctologist who specializes in self-induced head injuries.

Would you like to join my old friend Joe in his catacomb? Or perhaps you are eager for martyrdom. 

An Argument for the Preservation of the Latin Rite

Étienne Gilson, writing in 1962:

Latin is the language of the Church. The sorry degradation of the liturgical texts by their translation into a gradually deteriorating vernacular emphasizes the need for the preservation of a sacred language whose very immutability protects them from the decay of taste. (The Philosopher and Theology, Cluny Media, 2020, p. 6)

Now why hadn't that argument occurred to me? It is so plainly cogent, and more apropos now than it was at the beginning of Vatican II.

'Thanks' to the internet, the degeneration of the various vernaculars is accelerating.  Attempts to hold the line are rear-guard actions in the main. There is need of a dead language to offset the liturgy's slide into the morass of leftist cultural crapola.

Death renders  immutable what was.

The Treason of the Clerics

Rod Dreher:

It’s a hell of a thing to realize that the leader of the one institution responsible more than any other for creating Western civilization — the Roman Catholic Church — is now actively working to dismantle that very civilization by opening the city gates, so to speak, wide to the invaders.

What do you even do with that if you are a Christian, Catholic or otherwise? German Reader is right. Do these sentimental clerics really think that life will go well for European Christians once the descendants of these migrants take power? How is life going for Christians in the Muslim world, eh? And even if they were to be religiously tolerant, there is still the matter of the erasure of distinct European cultures. The Great Replacement. And for what?

No Church for Old Men?

Good news, if true:

The American Catholic Church is seeing a prolonged surge of conservative young priests, leaving the aging and far more liberal Vatican II generation with no replacements.

According to a nationally representative survey conducted by the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America, of 3,500 priests ordained since 2020, “More than 80 percent of priests ordained since 2020 describe themselves as theologically ‘conservative/orthodox’ or ‘very conservative/orthodox.'” Foreign-born priests in the United States, a significant contingent due to the overall low number of ordinations in the U.S., were found to be significantly more liberal than their American counterparts.

However, perhaps most revealing, the study found that no priest ordained since 2020 described himself as “very progressive.” In addition, nearly all priests ordained in 2020 and afterward described themselves as politically moderate or conservative.

Is the fumigation of the RCC finally upon us? As I recall my pal Catacomb Joe saying back in the day, fumus sanctus!

An RCC that degenerates into just another piece of leftist cultural junk needs to be defunded and ignored.

Am I an Intellectual Glutton? Evdokimov, Jackson, Precepts, and Counsels

Study everything! proclaims the first half of my masthead motto.  I live by it. Am I an intellectual glutton? The self-critical and conflicted Tom Merton asked himself that very question in a journal entry. I put the question to myself.

Example. I am up from a nap and enjoying an iced coffee. I will soon be banging on all eight. As part of the afternoon start-up I am reading back-to-back, and back-and-forth, Paul Evdokimov (The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Orthodox Tradition, St. Vladimir's Press, 1985, orig. published in 1980 as Sacrement de L'Amour), and the Blake Bailey biography of Charles Jackson, the alcoholic, married-to-woman,  homosexual who achieved minor literary fame as the author of the thinly-veiled autobiographical booze novel, The Lost Weekend (1944).  Jackson died at age 65 having destroyed himself with drugs and alcohol.

I have long been fascinated by the utterly wild diversity of human types. There is nothing like it it the animal world, and yet we too are animals. We are in continuity with the animals but an incomprehensible rupture, saltation, jump, metabasis eis allo genos, occurred at some point in the evolutionary process that gave rise to man who is, paradoxically, both an animal and not an animal. Heidegger is right; there is an abysmal/abyssal (abgruendig) difference between man and animal. An abyss yawns between the two. Heidegger  is echoing Genesis but going deeper, and some would say, off the deep end, with his talk of man as Dasein, the Da of Sein/Seyn. More on Heidegger when I dig into Dugin.

And then there is Paul Evdokimov (1901-1970). I have Merton to thank for bringing him to my attention. Here is a passage that struck me:

There is no reason . . . to call one path [the marital state] or the other [the monastic state] the preeminent Christianity, since what is valid for all of Christendom is thereby valid for each of the two states. The East [unlike the RCC] has never made the distinction between the "precepts" and the "evangelical counsels." The Gospel in its totality is addressed to each person; everyone in his own situation is called to the absolute of the Gospel. Trying to prove the superiority of the one state over the other is therefore useless . . . The renunciation at work in both cases is as good as the positive content that the human being brings to it: the intensity of the love of God. (Evdokimov, p. 65)

For the Roman Catholic distinction between precepts and counsels of perfection that Evdokimov is rejecting, see here. "It has been denied by heretics in all ages, and especially by many Protestants in the sixteenth and following centuries . . . "