Say Hello To The Ordinariate Of Our Lady Of Walsingham

Oh well, today it is really one of those days one doesn’t forget so soon…..

The very first Ordinariate for former Anglicans is there. You can read the details on the “Reluctant Sinner” blog.

My first reflections as it is very late now:

1) The Ordinariate is dedicated to Our Lady. This is a clear link to England as it was before a couple of bastard kings and their gravely deluded helpers made a mess of everything. It seems to me almost as if the Vatican would say to heretics of every sort “you are nothing more than a passing embarrassment for the Only Church”.
England, the recovering Dowry of Mary. Beautiful.

2) The Ordinariate is under the patronage of Blessed John Henry Newman. This is another choice that isn’t casual in the least. Newman clearly paved the way historically – and will pave the way spiritually – for those who decide to come back to the Only Church.

3) As I have already written here, the way will not be an easy one for those who sincerely want to convert and become true Catholics. Prayer, reflection and in case time will be needed. As for ourselves, let us remember them in our daily prayers.

4) Congratulations and best wishes to father Newton, the first Ordinary after Anglicanorum Coetibus. Rome clearly signals a great deal of trust in him and in his doctrinal orthodoxy.
At the same time, it is obvious that the (largely expected) appointment of a former Anglican to the head of the Ordinariate will give a certain amount of comfort to many disaffected and perhaps suffering still-Anglicans. What Father Newton has done – and Blessed John Henry Newman has done before him – they can do too. Whatever hard decisions he had to take, they were taken by a man many ordinary Anglicans esteem and respect. This will give them reason to think harder about where they see their future.

Again, it is very late now and in the next days more reflections and news will follow as the picture becomes clearer.

I am not one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ordinariate. I see a real danger that the Ordinariate may attract chaps like this one.

But I must say that today I feel rather excited.

Mundabor

“Is There A Lesson Here?” Michael Voris On The Midterm Elections and US Catholics

Cleaning Up.

Here you’ll find Michael Voris’ take on the recent Mid-term elections. Apart from the very likeable, more directly political observations about Americans and Liberalism, I’d like to point out to some messages which I find extremely pertinent.

1) Voris maintains that Catholic churchgoers are, in their majority, Republicans. This is a very interesting assertion. I’d love to hear from US blog readers whether they agree with Voris’ take.

2) There is a link between the change that has occurred with the election and what is happening within the Church: liberals are kicked out whilst the conservative element irresistibly marches toward the restoration of sanity. I fully agree with this statement; it seems to me that the undercurrent is the same here, and that it does not limit itself to the Catholic world.

3) An additional bold statement is that Catholics in the pews get to vote about the restoration of orthodoxy. Not in the traditional, ballot-like way of course but in the more subtle, slower but rather effective way of choosing where to worship (and whose collection plate to frequent) or where to send the children to school. Such a practice would not be very successful in countries like Italy and Germany – where fund distribution is organised differently – but I can see it having much more bite in countries like the US, relying on private contributions for the upkeep of their religious personnel and structures.

4) Last important point to my eyes: the warning that the US hierarchy, still largely dominated by convenient cowardice about the Church teaching and the conversion of souls, must now choose whether to change course and embrace orthodoxy or be “swept away”. I fail to see where the sweeping would come from if the Pope continues to appoint half-liberal bishops to appease the local clerical communities; but there can be no doubt that what sweeping the Pope will not do, the demographics will in time do for him.

Enjoy the video!

Mundabor

Huge Swing In The US Catholic Vote, Says New York Times

Courageous Bishops move votes: Archbishop Charles Chaput.

The American Papist has an interesting article about the NYT’s prediction of the Catholic vote in the coming Mid-Term elections. It would appear that – among the electorate generically defining itself as “Catholic” – the swing from the Democrats to the Republican is a barely believable 34 percent.

Beside reading such forecasts cum grano salis (it’s only a forecast; Obama was an oh so  fashionable candidate two years ago; Catholics have already rather liked Republicans in the past, with George W Bush being the most recent example), we must consider that such a swing is unprecedented. Might it well be that the decline in popularity of Obama has few precedents, too, the fact still remain that when it has become clear and it has been insistently repeated that this President is nothing to do with Christian values, Christians have begun abandoning him in drove. Which drives me nicely to my point.

It is undeniable that the American Bishops, as a body, do not do enough to protect Catholic values among their sheep. Still, there are a handful of courageous Bishops who are never afraid of an “unpopular” headline and the general climate is much, much more Catholic than in the UK.

Take Archbishop Chaput for example, or the future Cardinal  Burke before he moved to Rome, or the sadly soon-to-retire Bruskewitz. They are/were all people who can make national headlines; people willing to stir the placid waters of political correctness and rampant secularism by throwing the one or other Catholic stone in the stinking pond of secularist anti-Christian values.

I cannot imagine that this hasn’t made a difference. Not a 34-point difference for sure, but a difference in the cultural climate in which Catholic are called to operate and, importantly, vote. In two words, people are starting to open their eyes and in time, even a handful of brave Bishops will not fail to awaken a growing number of up to now not properly informed or soundly asleep Catholics.

This is, clearly, not what is happening in England and Wales, where the Bishops are the best allies of the secular leftist society and they either actively helped Labour to push its secular agenda (say: “sex education” for children; so-called “homo marriages”; neglect of proper Catholic teaching in Catholic schools; nice jobs given to Labour MPs in need of a perk) or gave an opposition which was not strong enough and determined not to offend anyone (say: adoption agencies). All this whilst Summorum Pontificum is eagerly boycotted, and Anglicanorum Coetibus at best ignored.

The situation in the US shows us that when good shepherds start doing their job, sheep start following them. It must be so, then once the Catholic message is insistently repeated, there is no way Catholics can – giving them sufficient space to come to term with uneasy truths never told to them before – avoid being affected by it. The beauty of Catholicism is that by its very nature every sustained, repeated call to orthodoxy will always fall on attentive ears, then in Catholicism’s case there is no need to define what “orthodoxy” is, merely to know that it exists and that it demands observance. This is a much easier exercise than to, say, define “Tea Party ideals” or “Republican values”.

If our Bishops started doing their job instead of limiting themselves to be automatic distributors of platitudes and convenient soundbites, things would start changing in Blighty too. Not today and not tomorrow of course; but in time, the effect would be felt.

Today, Cameron is scared senseless from a couple of hundred thousand homosexuals who don’t even vote for him. Let him confront, say, one million angry Catholics and see how he’ll react. Methinks, he’ll become a fan of the Tridentine Mass and tell us that he has always felt that way.

The Hierarchy of E&W betrays his sheep every day. None of them, not one, is worthy of his office. What is happening in the US  exposes once more all their inadequacy, incompetence, corruption or very simply loss of faith.

Let us hope that this disgraceful generation of bad shepherds will soon be reformed or, rather less unrealistically, removed. Up to that point, we can only look at the US and sigh.

Mundabor

The Infant Jesus Of Prague

The Infant jesus of Prague is a miraculous* wax statue with a moving and edifying history. It was first donated to the Discalced Carmelites of Prague by a rich lady who, after the death of her husband, desired to dedicate herself to works of piety and charity. The lady donated the statue (very dear to her heart) to the Carmelites saying “I hereby give you what I prize most highly in this world. As long as you venerate this image you will not be in want”.  The lady’s work proved prophetic on several occasions as the following years proved that whenever the Carmelites seriously recurred to the statue, they were helped and when they neglected its proper devotion, they weren’t.

The Carmelites put the statue (made of wax itself, with rich vestments) in their oratory and performed special devotions in front of it twice a day. For some reasons, such devotions were particularly loved by the novices. Particularly by one, Cyrillus, who was through his prayers delivered from a period of spiritual dryness. But then the Thirty-Years war started to bite and in 1630 the novitiate was removed to Munich; the devotion was more and more neglected and the prosperity of the community progressively declined.

The following year, the Protestant troops of King Gustavus Adolphus took Prague. The Monastery was plundered and vandalised, the statue was damaged and thrown over a heap of rubble behind the high altar. It stayed there completely for the following seven years, years of great hardship for the community.

In 1637, Cyrillus – in the meantime Father Cyrillus – came back to Prague still occupied by the Protestant invaders. He remembered the little statue and asked of the prior to be able to search for it; the entire place was turned upside down until the statue was finally found and recovered from his pile of rubble. That the rubble had remained there for years without anyone “cleaning up” tells the story about the poverty of the times. The little statue was put in a fitting place and the devotions started again, this time with greater zeal due to the difficulties of the times.

Cyrillus was once again the most fervent disciple of this devotion and one day, whilst praying, he heard the following words:

“Have pity on me, and I will have pity on you. Give me my hands, and I will give you peace. The more you honour me, the more I will bless you”.

Only then Cyrillus noticed the missing hands of the statue behind the rich vestments that adorned it. Several attempts followed to have the statue repaired by Father Cyrillus. He asked the money for the repair from the prior, who wouldn’t open the purse of the very poor community. He begged the Blessed Virgin to help him and as a result was called to the sickbed of a wealthy man who, told of the story, donated a large sum for the repair of the statue, but the prior decided to buy a new statue instead. The new statue was accidentally (or rather: providentially) destroyed just after being put into place and the devotion to the mutilated statue was resumed, the problem of the repair still to be solved. Then a new prior was elected and Cyrillus begged for the funds once again, but once again his wish was refused. Stubbornly, he once again asked the Blessed Virgin for help and as a result received a large donation by an anonymous woman. This time, the prior took almost all of the money, leaving Cyrillus a portion insufficient to repair the statue. It really seemed that this statue was never to be restored, but our chap was of the kind that never let go and he put his trouble in front of the statue itself. Once again he heard the following words: “Place me near the entrance of the sacristy and you will receive aid”. This our Cyrillus promptly did and a short time later a stranger offered to pay for the repair. This time the prior didn’t appropriate the fund and the statue was rapidly restored.

From then on, the devotion to the statue rapidly procured a great fame. The prior itself was rapidly healed by the pestilence which had befallen Prague after promising to recite Holy Mass before the statue for nine days if healed. During a successive period of great financial need, the prior ordered that the entire community should pray in front of the Divine Infant and again, generous financial help promptly came. In the meantime the popularity of the statue had started to grow, so that it was moved again from the oratory to the church to allow for its veneration by the general public. In 1641, a large donation allowed the erection of an altar to the Most Holy Trinity, with the statue of the Infant Jesus placed within it. It didn’t remain there for long, though, because the following year another generous donation allowed the erection of a chapel dedicated to the Divine Infant, completed and consecrated in 1644. Since then, the devotion has continued to spread and the favours received through its devotions have become innumerable. The devotion to the Infant Jesus grew more and more and in 1665 a crown was prepared for the statue and put in place on the Sunday after Easter.

The devotion to the Holy Infant is now spread worldwide. It has generated a series of worldwide recited prayers: the Prayer of Rev. Cyrillus, the Litany of the Miraculous Infant, the Prayer to the Infant Jesus to be said by a sick person, the Prayer of Thanksgiving for Graces Received from the Infant Jesus among them, though the most famous must be the Chaplet of the Infant Jesus of Prague. The Church of Our Lady of Victory is visited by around 500,000 pilgrims every year.

The fortune of the devotion is probably due not only to the innumerable favours granted to those devoted to it, but probably also to the favour that this devotions found among saints like Therese of Lisieux. You must also consider that the devotion to the Infant Jesus was not a new phenomenon having been widely spread during the Middle Age, with St. Francis and St. Bernhard of Citeau among its best known followers.
The idea of the Infant Jesus, so powerless and still so powerful, so little and still so big, has never failed to inspire and to this day Catholics can very well, particularly in times of need, relate to this beautiful paradox of Christianity. In addition, it is easy to see how the devotion to the Infant Jesus puts us in front of another mainstay of Christian thinking: the opportunity to pray with great candor, defenceless humility and, well, tenderly shameless confidence, that is to say with the typical attributes of a child’s prayer. In front of Jesus we are all children. We need to pray like a child does. We need to pray with exactly those qualities that can make a child’s request so difficult to refuse.

This message wants to be a small contribution to the revival of this beautiful Catholic devotion, neglected after Vatican II as almost everything unapologetically Catholic and hopefully destined to greater glory in the decades to come.

Mundabor

* In the Catholic sense, of course. Please don’t go around saying that Catholics believe that wax statues make miracles. Thanks!

Federico Lombardi tries To Reinvent Catholicism

One of the countless Popes who were wrong, says Fr Lombardi.

The Vatican spokesman has an obvious desire to feel beautiful and to let all the world see that he is.

In doing so, he

1) goes against 2000 years of Catholic teaching, and
2) contributes to the nonsense about the new and “improved humanity” so typical of the “Spirit of V-II” crowd.

Father Lombardi is not very shy. He tells us what he wants. Being Italian, he must know that the word “want” is more emotionally charged in Italian than in, say, English.
In Italy it is considered rather aggressive and in real life you do not use such words among adults because of his strong content. Even in Republican times, every child is taught that “l’erba voglio non cresce nemmeno nel giardino del Re” (or: “The “I Will”-grass doesn’t even grow in the King’s garden”).

But no, Father Lombardi doesn’t care of Catholic teaching or of “I Will”-grass. He simply wants. “Beata gioventu’ “, one would say if the chap were young and naively revolutionary. But he isn’t, so one doesn’t.

We have two phenomena here: the proclamation of “Humanity2.0″, obviously improved from the 1.0 version, and the reaction with the installation of Catholicism 2.0.

“I don’t want it in any country, in any of its forms, for any person or in any circumstance”, says our chap openly insulting the million of devout Catholics, certainly more orthodox than he himself is, at a stroke. But it is not only a matter of being rude.

This is in open contrast with the Church Teaching, the equivalent of telling oneself a pacifist in relation to the doctrine of war. This is in obvious contrast with centuries of tradition not only in all (as in: all) Christian countries, but even in the Pontifical State, who had and applied the death penalty with regularity. This was also, until 2000, official rule of the Vatican City, until an obviously senile JP II (desirous to make himself beautiful, no doubt) decided to abolish it.

Still, JP II’s decision might have had (though obviously wrong, because obviously sending the wrong signal) a practical justification. The Vatican City is rather not what you’d call a hotbed of criminality and when they renounced to exercise jurisdiction in the only case where it would have found application (Ali Agca, of course) it was obvious that the rule was meant never to be applied in practice anyway.

But this with Fr. Lombardi is different. This is at variance with the teaching of the Church. Lombardi calls this “a step further”. With this mentality, priestesses are “a step further” compared to male priesthood.

This nonsense comes from the usual mentality of the Sixties, that humanity be now oh so improved. Methinks, it is the same mentality which “helped” the one or other bishop to consider depraved priests as merely having a need for psychological treatment.

Already the CCC on the matter is extremely questionable, because – even without being openly heretical – it flirts with heresy to please the crowds (in pure JP II-style, must be said). But this is truly senseless.

And the man is not even King.

The address to which to send your protest is, as usual:

clero@cclergy.va

Mundabor