"We have Demystified Reality Because we have Domesticated the Creator"

God and Creation: Father Robert Connor

46 minute Audio File

"The Most English of Catholic Poets and the Most Catholic of English Poets"

[William Langland] is the Catholic Englishman par excellence, at once the most English of Catholic poets and the most Catholic of English poets: a man in whom Catholic faith and national feeling are fused in a single flame.

Christopher Dawson, Mediæval Religion, 158.

Why I will not Vote

I am not going to vote because I will not not vote for Hillary.

"Put not your trust in princes." Psalm 145:2

The devil and "the democratic process" is presently toying with us.

Relativism Defined

Elias brought [the prophets of Baal] down to the torrent Cison,
and killed them there. 1 Kings 18:40

Relativism is the philosophy that truth is determined by the individual. The truth is what you think it is. A false claim, a redefining, of truth therefore. Because, if everything is truth then that means that nothing is true. The fundamental meaning of truth being it's relationality, it's inter-communicability, it's universal nature.

Relativism is to philosophy what pantheism is to theism.
If everything were god then there would be no god, because God, by definition, is the One above all, beyond all, in charge of all, Creator of all.

Exodus 32:26-28 Then standing in the gate of the camp, he said: If any man be on the Lord's side let him join with me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him:

And he said to them: Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: Put every man his sword upon his thigh: go, and return from gate to gate through the midst of the camp, and let every man kill his brother, and friend, and neighbour.

And the sons of Levi did according to the words of Moses, and there were slain that day about three and twenty thousand men.

Half-Million Mexicans March For Male/Female Family!

Why All God-fearing Americans Should Ally and Boycott the 2016 Election Charade En Masse

We are being compelled to choose between a bigoted racist and a perverse murderer.

It's a lose--lose situation.

Solution?

Let's all agree to stay home.

This thought came to me today after having to preach on today's Gospel of the rich man and Lazarus: Luke 16:19-31. In the present political climate, there was no way to preach on the evils of that rich man's neglect and the salvation of the poor man without seeming to be tacitly campaigning for Hillary. I could have avoided preaching on the Gospel altogether, but it had to be read. Anyway, what I said is that "Hillary hates the poor as much as Trump does!...because she does not care about the 60% of black children aborted in her New York City. She follows the ideas of the pioneers of our failed welfare system which destroys our cities and our blacks: Saul Alinsky, Peter Rodino and Margaret Sanger, and she promotes Planned Parenthood's sale of baby body parts."

Cf. A Wolf in Sheeps Clothing

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are Disciples of Saul Alinsky!

Saw it last night on EWTN

Shows how this communist (also a Jew) was the founding father of the anti-Catholic, anti-family so-called Catholic Campaign for Human Development and the equally anti-Catholic, anti-God, also posing as Catholic, Call to Action.

Enlightened Lies Continue

Nice thought, except it is false.

Prayer,
Penance (forgiving mercy), and...
Almsgiving....

Those are the most powerful weapons. The Cross and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Catholic Faith.

"Education" gave the world the Protestant Revolution, the First World War, the Second World War, "no-fault" divorce, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, selling baby parts, and now, total gender confusion.

No, the most important weapon is divine mercy! the cross, Jesus Christ's cross!

Troubadour Songs

Christopher Dawson says that the beginning of the Romantic Movement was a return to the Middle Ages, with its Christianity, its Chivalry and its songs. Mediæval Religion, 124.

Take a listen.

7. Cypriano de Rore (1516-1565) "Vergine Pura." 11:49-16.25 is especially sweet.

The Romantic Movement is not to be identified with "the movement of return to nature and sentiment that has its origin with Rousseau...The two are no more to be identified with one another than the Renaissance is to be identified with the Reformation."

"Indeed the relation between Humanism and Protestantism affords a very fair parallel to that between Romanticism and Rousseauism." 124

In other words, the anti-Hellenic Protestant back to the sources is just as oxymoronic as the anti-religious/anti-authority back to sources of true humanity in nature and sentiment of Rousseauism. For the sources of Christianity are thoroughly Hellenic and the sources of a true humanity are thoroughly religious and imbued with clear hierarchical order in its nobility and pristine beauty.

Women's voices.

Knowledge of Death Proof of Man's Immortal Soul

Why does man have a certain knowledge of death?
There is nothing in the future outlook of his existence (Daseins) in the world which is to him more surely known than death.
--Because he is spirit. (The animal knows nothing of death).

And why is he himself conscious of the spirituality of his essence?
Because he knows of death. (The animal is not spirit).

Spirit and death themselves help men to be reciprocally conscious.

Ferdinand Ebner, Fragmente Aufsätze Aphorismen: Zu einer Pneumatologie des Wortes in Schriften I, München: Kösel, 1936, 26.

Religion

Religion is not "an universal outlook (Anschauung) ", (of Spinoza) but rather a grasp (Auffaßung) on life--a grasp on life as coming from the hand of God. Religion is the inner solution to the discrepancy between ideas and reality.

Ferdinand Ebner, Wort und Lieb, Regensburg: Pustet, 1935, 130.

Why Protestants Should Love and Study Saint Thomas Aquinas

Protestants should embrace, study and love all of the pre-Reformation Christian writers as their own, especially the universal and common doctor!

"...I believe that the testimony of the 'universal teacher' of a still undivided Western Christianity has a special value. This lies not so much in his personal genius as in the truly creative selflessness with which he expressed the vast, contrapuntal range of possible statements about the cosmos--even as he recognized and called upon his readers to go beyond the limitations of his own vision. Marked though this thought is by an altogether extraordinary grasp and the most disciplined, dynamic, and penetrating independent thinking, there yet speaks through it less the individual writer, Thomas Aquinas, than the voice of the great tradition of human wisdom itself."

Joseph Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2006, preface, xii-xiii.

Consider in this regard the position of Saint Bridget, the patroness of Sweden or Saint Thomas A' Becket and Saint Edward the Confessor in England. Why should not Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Albert the Great have at least equal veneration by the Protestant German! They are all part of the rich Christian patrimony of us all. That's ecumenism! Protestants need to cherish their true Christian heritage, which is mainly Catholic (i.e. universal and common to all places and times)!

How can you cherish Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and despise the Saint of Canterbury to whose Shrine the pilgrims progress? It is our common Christian patrimony, which cannot be despised, rejected, ignored or neglected, without great damage to ourselves.

An educated Protestant who has never read Saint Thomas Aquinas is an oxymoron, for he is ignorant of a heritage which is, in fact, his own. It's like a man who does not know who his own mother is.

This is a case similar to that of Saint Francis. There is absolutely no way a Protestant can have a problem with the Christianity of Saint Francis of Assisi. Why should he reject the school men? who were exactly the same type of Christians as Saint Francis.

Prudence

Making right choices, doing things well and keeping heaven first.

A practical virtue.

Cf. Today's OF Gospel (Luke 16:1-13).

Ex praeterito prudens ter agit ne actionem futuri deturpet.

Last days of Summer

Churchyard this morning saying the Breviary.

Plinthos.
As is his wont.

O Crux, ave, spes unica

Found by the Truth

Fr. Gottlieb Clemens Söhngen

"His deepest fearlessness comes out of his question regarding knowing, that we cannot ask for the Truth, if It has not first asked for us. We cannot search for the Truth if we have not already been found by It!"
--Joseph Ratzinger homily at the Requiem Mass of Gottlieb Söhngen, Saint Agnes Church, Cologne, November 19, 1971, cited in Alfred Läpple, Benedikt XVI und seine Wurzeln, Augsburg: Sankt Ulrich, 2006, 81. 

In other words, you don't so much discover the Truth as allow yourself to be discovered and led by It.

The Truth impresses itself upon you. The Truth comes to you, so to speak, from the outside (though it wells up also from within you). It precedes you and is larger than you. It makes demands upon you. And so, consequently, you pursue it, having been enchanted by it.

The Truth calls you.

God is the Truth. Jesus Christ is the Truth. There is no Other!

God

A Personal Prelature for the Priestly Society of Pope Saint Pius X

In the video below Bishop Fellay explains the offer by the CDF.

YouTube Pianist Worth Hearing: Valentina Lisitsa

Valentina Lisitsa Channel Videos

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Saint Mother Teresa's Dark Night of the Soul a Necessary Corollary to Divine Union

"There exists, as the mystic knows from having personally experienced them, affective states which consist in pure joys, absolutely stripped of every representative state, whether idea or image, which therefore cannot be explained by any of the causes which normal experience allow us to assign for feelings. These intense blind joys exist: either one must treat them as facts and assign them a cause, or simply recognize them and leave them unexplained. But unless, by way of an arbitrary exception, one is prepared to renounce the use of the principle of causality to explain these like any other facts, then necessarily it must be granted that the object itself is the immediate cause of the joys experienced by the mystic. Every mediate cause is negatived by the simple fact that no object is perceived, imagined or thought; but though knowledge ceases, or rather because knowledge ceases, this immeasurable joy is felt; it cannot be born of nothing, for nothing is born of nothing; it cannot be born of any representation in the mind, for there is no representation in the mind; therefore it is born of the object itself  with nothing intervening between soul and object. Thus ecstasy is the embrace, in darkness, of a Good whose being thought does not attain. 'Love goes further than vision' [amor plus se extendit quam visio]; here is the deepest meaning of the phrase..." 418

"...[W]hen all the powers of knowing are transcended, and the uttermost point of the soul has gone beyond the uttermost point of thought, one faculty of the soul still remains. it is love that goes the furthest in the soul's exploration of being; for whereas our faculty of knowing cannot pursue Being to the point  of seeing it, our love can pursue it--as Good--to the point of contact and of joy in it. The experience of God as the mystic has it is exclusively affective--ibi non intrat intellectus sed affectus; and an experience of this sort is possible precisely because, in the phrase of William of St. Thierry used by St. Bonaventure, amor plus se extendit quam visio. One can see and know only an object fully grasped by the soul; one can love an object perfectly and immediately if the soul can so much as touch it. Thus the mystic is faced with a question of fact; and the problem imposes itself on his mind as an actual experience which he must interpret." 417

"...In relation to intellectual knowledge, ecstasy is ignorance; and compared with the light by which we perceive objects, it is darkness; but for all that is is an infinite reality which the soul seizes in the depth of that darkness and because of that very ignorance. Thus it is an ignorance of wisdom that the mystic attains, and the darkness he enters is an illuminated darkness, not in the sense that the intellect or any representation plays any part whatever, but that we have only the metaphors of cognition at our disposal even when we would signify our hold of an object of which we have no cognition." 418-419

"The human soul...is of such a nature that only an infinite object is capable of satisfying it..." 422

In rapture "[the] total vision of God will of itself imply all knowledge--and by comparison Plato's contemplation and Aristotle's philosophy and the astronomy of Ptolemy will seem to us but folly and vanity, for the whole mass of what we know is but an insignificant fraction of what is unknown to us." 423

For the mystic "...it is not enough to see; he must touch and hold; in heaven as on earth all joy implies and proves the possession of its object." 425

Gilson, The Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure, Paterson: Saint Anthony Guild, 1965.