To Love God is to Know Him

How do we know He’s there?

     In our present skeptical age Christians are often asked how we can know that God is there?  What and how we know is, of course, the matter of epistemology and related branches of philosophy, and the vast majority of us don’t have the academic training to engage in high-powered epistemological debate.    Nonetheless, we all conduct our lives guided by things we know are true, and reject others as false, and we Christians stake everything on certain very definite truth claims.  How can we justify our confidence in Christian Truth in a clear but comprehensible way that does not require formal philosophical training?

How do we know at all?

     We need to start with the understanding that the prevailing world-view today, even among many people who don’t consciously embrace materialism, is materialistic.  It’s just assumed that we can only know about things that can be observed, measured, and be proven using what we might call “scientific” proof.

The Holy Trinity: One God, three Persons in loving relationship

     How does one respond to this fairly common point of view?  I’ve discussed a number of approaches to this problem on previous occasions (see below); here’s a more comprehensive tack.  We can start by pointing out that the argument above arbitrarily limits “knowledge” to a very narrow class of things.  There is no scientific proof, for instance, for justice (an example used by St. Augustine), or for love.  Nevertheless, even strict materialists can be certain that they know when justice has been done (some of them are particularly vocal about injustices that they are convinced have been committed by the Church), or when they are loved.  Scientific knowledge (knowledge about things) is what philosophers call “propositional knowledge”, but that doesn’t apply at all to an abstract reality such as love, which is a matter of “acquaintance knowledge”. The question, then, is whether knowledge of God is a question of propositional knowledge, or knowledge of another sort.

     Before moving on, it’s worth pointing out that even scientific knowledge is not as straightforward as it may seem.  People often say things like “Science tells us that . . .”, but “science” itself can “tell” us nothing: it is simply a method by which we, with our limited and fallible intellects, interpret the phenomena of the natural world.  However carefully we have formed scientific propositions, they can only be considered knowledge when they have been confirmed by repeated experiment.  And even then, scientific “truths” can be displaced by newer discoveries.  Scientific knowledge, then, is very often more a matter of evidence than of iron-clad proof.

Proof or Evidence?

     We also need to recall that there are different kinds of evidence.  For instance, how can we be sure enough to convict somebody of a crime, even condemn them to long imprisonment or death, without direct physical proof?  The answer, of course, is that the evidence of witnesses, if they are known to be reliable, can secure a conviction (and it’s hard to conceive of an adequate system of criminal justice that does not admit eye-witness testimony as evidence).  We can also make reasonable conclusions about something we can’t detect directly, based on its effects on things that we can apprehend (I discuss this kind of evidence at greater length in my post “A Dark Matter: ‘Proving’ God in a Materialist World”). 

    At this point, we can consider the question of how we can have knowledge of God.  First of all, science is a method for interpreting natural phenomena, and if God is the creator of nature, he isn’t part of it, and is therefore necessarily outside the scope of scientific inquiry (see “Looking For God In All The Wrong Places”).  What about the other kinds of evidence we looked at above?  The first converts to Christianity were convinced by the eye-witness testimony of the Apostles and other Disciples who had known Jesus personally, and were convinced of these witnesses’ reliability both by their manifest integrity, and by their willingness to suffer excruciating deaths for the Gospel (the word “martyr” itself comes from the Greek word for “witness”).  Over the intervening centuries, countless others have been drawn to the Church by the testimony of Christian witnesses to the power of the Risen Christ (often, like the Apostles, witnessing with their lives: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”, as Tertullian said).  Having accepted Christ, they see the fulfillment of his promises in their own lives, thus gaining experiential knowledge.

     We should also consider whether the Christian explanation fits reality better than the materialist one.  The better fit is more likely to be true.  Societies and individuals who embrace the Christian worldview tend to be more successful by any number of objective measures (see “What Would Darwin Do?”).  The evidence shows that Christianity is more conducive to human flourishing, and so is more likely to be true.

God is Love

     One thing we should avoid is trying to rely on scientific arguments to prove the existence of God (notice that the discussion of Dark Matter to which I link above is an analogy, not proof).  Theological truths are simply beyond the scope of science, and an argument based on science is unlikely to be persuasive.  Not that any purely intellectual argument is going convert many people. Let’s go back to our discussion above about kinds of knowledge.  As Christians we understand that God is a Trinity of Persons, that God is Love (1 John 4:8): knowledge of God, therefore,  is  “relational knowledge” , and we know him through the God/Man Jesus Christ, Second Person of the Holy Trinity.  Father Larry Richards is known to wind up discussions of this sort by saying that he knows that God is there because he knows him.  For every one of us, that’s the only kind of “proof” that will lead to real faith.  We can show through our arguments that belief in God is reasonable, but we can only really “know” when we return his loving embrace.

                

"O Sacred head Sore Wounded" - JS Bach (King's College, Cambridge)

Over this past Lent I have been posting clips from Mozart's Requiem and J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion that complement the penitential focus of the liturgical season. In my final music posting of Lent, we look directly at "nothing but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2)

(My penultimate music clip for Lent is “So Now My Jesus Is Taken Prisoner” from Bach’s  St. Matthew Passion, on the Principium et Finis blog) 

Abortion Myth # 7

MYTH:  “Women have a ‘right to choose’.  We have no right to tell a woman what she can do with her own body.”  

TRUTH: While this common pro-abortion pronouncement may sound good on the surface, it does not stand up to  examination on several grounds:

1)      Abortion is directed at, and kills, the body of the child, not the mother.  From the moment of conception the zygote, embryo, fetus, child, and so on is a separate body having its own process of growth, growing its own organs, and with its own DNA; no part of our bodies has its own organs, or different DNA.  Pro-life people are not trying to tell the mother what to do with her body: we are seeking to prevent others from doing deadly harm to the unborn baby’s body.

Mother and Child: two bodies

2)       A generic “right to choose”  is a non-sensical  proposition that even abortion rights supporters don’t really believe in. Any action at all can be expressed as a “choice”.   How many people, pro-life or pro-choice, support the choice to rape, murder, or steal?  Many people who call themselves  “pro-choice” don’t even want to permit the “choice” to hold a sign in front of an abortion clinic.  Choices can only be evaluated on the basis of what is being chosen, and people who go by the label “pro-choice” almost always mean no more than the choice of a mother to abort her unborn child.

3)      Likewise, even pro-choice advocates are in favor of laws restricting what people, including women, can do with their bodies.  There is no public clamor in favor of the right of women to use their bodies to drive drunk; nobody that I know of supports the right of women to use their bodies to beat their already-born children; I have never heard a pro-choice advocate support the right of women to strap explosives to their bodies and set them off in crowded marketplaces.

4)      Pro-choice supporters are inconsistently silent on the issue of women who feel they have been given no choice but abortion:

-          The Alan Guttmacher Institute (historically associated with Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest abortion provider) has found that the two most common reasons women  abort are lack of finances and emotional support.   And yet pro-choicers try to shut down the pregnancy help centers that offer emotional support and material help that’s not available anywhere else (see Pro-life Answers to Pro-choice Arguments) .

-          Mary Cunningham Agee surveyed post-abortive women about what they had really wanted.  91 0ut of 100 women said that they would have preferred to give birth, but felt that abortion was their only choice.  This survey was part of her inspiration for the founding of The Nurturing Network, an organization with thousands of volunteers providing the practical assistance that women told her they needed.

  

DON’T BUY THE LIE!

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

History, Culture, and Narcissism

Dante and Vergil in Hell

Whose Culture Is It?

 There’s an interesting piece at The Catholic Thing [here] by David Warren called “The Counter-Culture”. I find myself agreeing with his conclusion, but not with everything he says along the way.  Warren takes issue with those Catholics who disparage Western Civilization, and insists that the Church is the author of that civilization, however much it might owe to previous societies (just how much is included in that “however much” is the rub; more on that in a moment), as well as secularists who tout an oddly non-Christian interpretation of it.  He concludes that championing that culture, and particularly its Christian dimension, is the only way to counter the rapidly decaying culture of secularism that has grown up around us in recent decades.

It's Both/And, Not Either/Or

     So far, so good.  Problems arise, however, when Warren attempts to counter secularists who would draw a direct line from Greco-Roman times that, somehow, skips over the heavily Christian period from about A.D. 300 to 1968.  Warren goes overboard, however, and commits the mirror-image error of dismissing the critical importance of Greece and Rome:

The conceit of the modern “gliberal” (glib plus liberal), since Humanism began exiting the Church, is that our Civ was founded in ancient pagan Greece. There are fragments of that built into the whole, but only because Holy Mother Church preserved and adapted them, to her own purposes.

Likewise the old pagan Roman conception of open roads and tranquil freedom, under the law to the far horizon – Christendom was inspired by that. But it could equally have been inspired by the Chinese, or any other vast, ordered realm. It was Holy Church, and the minds she applied to worldly government, which transformed that model, introducing such principles as subsidiarity to make what was, in effect, a vast and extremely fertile theocracy.

Again, I am in complete agreement with his main point, which is that our civilization is not simply an updated version of Greco-Roman antiquity, but has instead built something completely new on the remains of those cultures, about which the most important and essential fact is the intervention of Christ in history and the Church he left behind.  The problem here is that Warren would have us believe that Christ erased history, or at the very least that the particular matter of that history is unimportant, and that there is no (or little) organic connection between the civilization of the Roman Empire and the Christian civilization that succeeded it.  This is simply bad historiography. Certainly everyone from the Franks and Visigoths crashing across the frontiers (not intending to destroy so much as to grab their own share of Romanitas), to medieval monks busily copying Vergil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Odes in their scriptoria, to the great Catholic poet Dante, whose guide through Hell and Purgatory in his magnum opus, the Commedia, is none other than that same Vergil, to Thomas Aquinas and his successors imbibing and baptizing the thought of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, to the 18th century American who needed to know Latin and Greek to enter Harvard College – none of them doubted that they were heirs to the great pre-Christian civilizations of the West. The Church grew and formed for its first few centuries within the Roman Empire, and the templates, at least, of all her major institutions were formed before Alaric swept into Rome in A. D. 410. God could certainly have established his Church in China or in some other culture, but it would have been a very different Church, and would have authored a very different culture.

"Behold, I Make All Things New" (Revelation 21:5)

     That’s the strictly historical perspective, but I think Warren is missing something else, something about our understanding of how God intervenes in our world.  The Church that could have developed out of any “vast, ordered realm” is an abstraction, but both revelation and our experience is that we don’t have a God who deals in abstractions; He is a God of particulars.  He chose a particular people to whom he first revealed himself in order that he might incarnate himself among them in the person of the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth; he carefully chose and prepared Mary as the human mother of Jesus; he likewise chose and prepared particular individuals such as Peter and Paul to carry forward the mission of Jesus. Does it make any sense at all that he would then leave his Church, the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth, to the random inspiration of whatever vast, ordered realm happened to be at hand?  I argue that God would be as careful in this choice as in the others.

The Pantheon: pagan temple become Catholic church

      One might ask, why does it matter?  It matters, first of all, because the truth is important, and we can’t counter the untruths of some with distortions of our own.  Second, Warren is absolutely correct that the Church is the primary creator of Western Culture, and that what is has created far transcends anything that might have developed from Greco-Roman culture in its absence, which is to say the absence of Christ.  Jesus says, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5). For all its flaws, the civilization that was nurtured by his Church is new in human history, and uniquely bears his stamp.  It’s our best resource in the culture war that is raging in this world, which is at its root a spiritual battle, but one which is fought out in the material world: it can’t be fought with abstractions.  Warren himself says in his conclusion:

To the “culture of narcissism” by which we are surrounded, in a Western world that has denied Christ, we must oppose a counter-culture.  And we must oppose on every level: in our literature, our music, our art, our architecture, even our science.  Whether or not it is our intention, we cannot plausibly be Catholic Christian without becoming civilized again.

And, I would add, we can only only use the actual culture that has been given to us, in which Rome and Athens have not been razed to the ground, but raised up to serve Jerusalem.  

(an earlier version of this post appeared on the blog Principium et Finis 2 July 2014)

"Let It Be Done To Me According To Thy Word"

      

     I’ve often admired the stained glass window depicting the Annunciation that looks down on the sanctuary in my local cathedral.  We see the young woman Mary, kneeling on the floor and surrounded by angels, while God the father looks down on her from above, sending forth a beam on which rests the Holy Spirit in the form of a Dove.  God the Son is there, too, although we don’t see him, a human embryo in Mary’s womb, the Omnipotent Divine wrapped in mortal human flesh.  That’s how we encounter Jesus in the Gospels: the Eternal Word in human disguise; that’s how we receive him in the Holy Eucharist: the Second Person of the Trinity in the form of simple bread.  It’s a marvelous image to contemplate as we approach the Altar of the Lord to receive Holy Communion.

       Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrated nine months before the Nativity of The Lord at Christmas.  I’ve often thought that, the current vogue for atheists and atheism notwithstanding, it’s not really that hard to believe in God.  What is difficult, very difficult in fact, is to believe that the Uncreated Creator of all Time and Space is the least bit interested in beings as small, short-lived, and insignificant as we appear to be in the vast sweep of the Universe.  That he should become a little human baby just so that he could suffer with us and die for us, well, this saying is hard; who could accept it (see John 6:60)?  And that’s not all: the Omnipotent God sought the consent of one little maiden in a small town in an insignificant corner of the world in order to do it.  Not the least of the reasons why we honor Mary is her willingness to put her very self in God’s hands: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; Let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

     Mary’s willingness to give up herself to be a part, perhaps the greatest (solely) human actor in God’s Great Drama of Salvation is the big picture; as is often the way, there’s a little picture, too, a way in which the Annunciation is reflected in our own lives.  God has a plan for all of us.  He imposes nothing, to paraphrase John Paul the Great, but always proposes (Redemptoris Missio).  He is constantly asking us to allow him in, to consent to serve him in ways big and small.  “Today if you hear the voice of the Lord, harden not your hearts” is one of the Lent antiphons in the Liturgy of the Hours.  We all hear the voice of the Lord at some point, if we’re listening; let us all not harden our hearts, but rather let it be done to us according to his word.

The Sins of the Fathers . . . And of Kings

Richard III

     530 years is a long, long time to wait.  Thursday England’s King Richard III, the last English monarch to die in battle, and one of the last English kings to die a Catholic, will, finally, receive a Christian burial.  Not a Catholic funeral, unfortunately, but his interment in the Anglican Cathedral of Leicester will be a great improvement over the hasty, unmarked burying of his desecrated corpse after the Battle of Bosworth Field 530 years ago.

     Richard remains one of the most controversial of British kings.  He assumed the throne when his twelve-year-old nephew Edward V was declared illegitimate by Parliament. Edward and his younger brother Richard were sent to live in the Tower in London (which was not yet used exclusively as a prison), and their uncle became King Richard III.  The two boys disappeared from public view and just two years after his accession Richard was deposed by Henry Tudor, who then became Henry VII.  Richard has been suspected of having the “little princes” murdered  ever since, although historians today (for instance, Paul Murray Kendall) acknowledge that there is no evidence that he had anything to do with their deaths, and that Henry Tudor had far more motive to kill them than Richard did.*

     As interesting as it would be to speculate on the probable guilt of the various parties involved (and it would be), that’s not the purpose of this blog.  Instead, I’d like to focus on what can happen when we let desires untamed by a properly formed conscience have free rein.  The connection here is that Henry VII, who drove Richard from the throne, in time bequeathed the throne to his son Henry VIII, who separated the English Church from the Universal Church and made himself its head.  Henry’s action had profound consequences, and not only the destruction of Catholic culture and a century and a half of strife and bloodshed in England (which was, in itself, more than enough).  Some historians (such as Warren Carroll)  believe that the separation of the English Church went a long way towards ensuring that the Protestant Reformation became a permanent feature of religious life in Europe, and did not remain a largely German affair.  In later years, the spread of the British Empire ensured that the split in the Latin Church was spread over the whole globe.

Henry VIII

    And all because of Henry VIII’s wandering eye.  He did not set up his own church for theological reasons (he never considered himself a Protestant), nor was he compelled by a groundswell of anti-Catholic feeling in England.  Rather, he was motivated by his failure to produce a male heir with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, coupled with a desire to indulge in a more intimate relationship with one of Catherine’s ladies, Anne Boleyn.  Anne’s price for returning the king’s affections was that she be allowed to take Catherine’s place.  Since the Pope was unwilling to grant Henry an annulment, the English monarch simply made himself the pope of England, and, as far as he was concerned, the problem was solved.  While it is possible that a Plantagenet descendant of Richard III, had he ruled instead of Henry, might also have split with Rome, it seems much less likely, since the actual break was not precipitated by external forces, but was closely tied to Henry’s character.

     However decisive Henry VIII’s libido might have been for the creation of the Anglican Church, however, there would have been no Henry VIII to have caused the split had it not been for another king’s lust.  That king is Richard III’s elder brother, Edward IV, father of the little princes who were allegedly murdered in the Tower of London.  Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a sudden and inadvisable match, came as a surprise to his family and advisors; he married her not because it was an appropriate marriage for an English monarch but because, as with Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII a couple generations

Edward IV

later, it was her price for returning the king’s affections. Elizabeth brought her family with her, of course, whose ambitions after Edward’s death were so alarming that many nobles and Parliament called upon the late king’s brother   Richard to serve as protector of the young Edward V and his brother.  Soon it seemed expedient to remove the twelve-year-old king altogether in favor of his grown-up and capable uncle, especially after another sexual indiscretion of Edward IV’s came to light which allowed Parliament to declare Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville null, and the boy-king illegitimate.  In other words, Edward’s lust-driven behavior in one instance created the unstable situation that made the deposition of his son desirable, and his libidinous behavior in another instance provided the grounds to do so.  Consequences of these indiscretions can still be seen around the globe more than half a millennium later.

     Few of us, of course, can expect our misdeeds to have anywhere near the impact of those of Edward IV or Henry VIII.  Nonetheless we can see, as Scripture tells us, how “the iniquity of fathers” is visited “upon children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation” (Numbers, 14:18). Indeed, for centuries.  The point is, we have no way to predict how far-reaching the consequences of our own sins will be, and how long they’ll last.  As we’ve seen, one of the greatest contributors to poverty and other social ills today is the break-down of sexual morality (see “Where Have All The Fathers Gone”). The next time we are tempted, we might do well to remember what happened when Edward and Henry went astray.

    

*In brief, while Richard might fear that the princes could become a rallying point for those disaffected with his rule, they had been formally removed from the succession by act of Parliament, and he had been legally crowned.  Henry, on the other hand, came from a line that had been exc luded from the succession generations earlier by Henry IV.  He needed both Richard and the princes dead, because the justification for his rebellion was that Richard was a usurper: if so, then Edward V, and not Henry Tudor, was the rightful king; if not, then Richard III was the rightful king, and Henry simply a traitor.  Either way, no Henry VII.  

Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival (5th Sunday of Lent 2015)

   Welcome one and all to Sunday Snippets, the weekly gathering of Catholic bloggers who share their posts for the week.  The main gathering place is here, at This That and the Other Thing, home of RAnn,  who, sadly, has announced that this will be the last time she hosts Sunday Snippets.  Many thanks, RAnn, for keeping the Carnival going for so long. Ave atque Vale, Sunday Snippets.

  

We are His people, the flock He shepherds

    Before I get to the links for the week, I want to say a few words about the Season of Lent, starting with: “Today if you hear his voice, harden not your heart.”  This line is frequently used during Lent as an antiphon for the Invitatory Psalm in the Liturgy of the Hours (it comes from Psalm 95, which itself is commonly used as the Invitatory throughout the year).  We can think of this as referring to those who have turned their backs on God altogether, and so it does: we can be sure that he is calling out to them, and going after them like the shepherd going after the lost sheep (see Luke 15:4 & Matthew 15:12). But it also refers to ourselves.  God is always speaking to us.  I know that I myself need constant reminders, that every time I choose what I want to do over what I know I should do, I have “hardened my heart” and not listened to the Voice of the Lord. I am like the Hebrews the desert, who challenged and provoked the Lord, even though they had seen all his works.  It’s a timely reminder that, after all, Lent is all about repenting and turning back to the Lord. 

     Now, on to the week that was. Aside from blogging and working (several jobs), I joined with a few of my offspring recently to begin tapping our maple trees for syrup; a little late, but it’s been colder than usual (the coldest February in these parts since they started keeping records). We’ll see what sort of season we end up with. I also started a new blog. The links below are from both my original blog, Principium et Finis, and the brand new one, called Nisi Dominus.

Sunday – “Cicero At The Gym” Planet Fitness could learn a thing or two from an old pagan, Marcus Tullius Cicero (Special Bonus: Latin joke in picture caption)

Tuesday – “The Breastplate of St. Patrick: Still Relevant After 1500 Years” The world is very different today than it was 15 centuries ago, but the biggest dangers really haven’t changed 

and – “St. Patrick And Slavery To Sin” We see the difference between God’s wisdom and the “wisdom” of the world in the stories of St. Patrick and Julius Caesar 

Wednesday – “Abortion Myth # 6” Pro-abortion activists like to tell about “back-alley” abortions killing “5,000-10,000 women a year” when abortion was illegal; as it happens, the truth is rather different 

Thursday – “Litany of St. Joseph: A Prayer ForFatherhood” If there’s any saint in particular (after the Blessed mother) we should be asking for intercession right now, St. Joseph is the one 

and - “Where Have All The Fathers Gone?” And if you were wondering why we need the intercession of St. Joseph, here’s why 

Saturday - "The Opening of Bach's St. Matthew Passion" & "Bach - St. Matthew Passion (Erbarme dich)" Two clips form performances of J.S. Bach's magnificent Lenten masterpiece

Bach - St. Matthew Passion (Erbarme dich)

From J.S. Bach's St. Matthew's Passion:

Where Have All The Fathers Gone?

Today is the Solemnity of St. Joseph, which seems a good time to republish this post on the importance of Fatherhood (originally posted on Principium et Finis, January 22nd, 2014)

Decline of Fatherhood

It's not easy being the Dad . . . Federico Barrocci's Aeneas' Flight From Troy

      One of the largest elephants in the room today (if I may further abuse an already overworked metaphor) is the decline of fatherhood.  It is just one of the factors in the implosion of the traditional family, but it’s a - make that the - key one. If you google “the importance of the father” you’ll find 98,600,000 results. That’s 98 plus million. These are not mostly religious or conservative sources: most are related to various universities or government agencies, some are mainstream magazines not known for their cultural conservatism, such as Parenting and Psychology Today. Whatever their perspective they all have the same general message: growing up without a father is bad. Real bad.

   In order to get a sense of the immensity of the problem you can to go to site of one of the organizations set up specifically to address this problem, such as The National Fatherhood Initiative, or Fatherhood.org. They have lists of problem areas, including: poverty, emotional/behavioral problems, maternal & child health, crime & incarceration, sexual activity & teen pregnancy, child abuse, drug & alcohol abuse, childhood obesity, education. Not only do they cite studies and statistics, they have links to collections of studies and statistics for each category, a veritable mountain of information that is researched, published and . . . ignored. The information is there, its import is crystal clear, but nobody who is able to have an impact on public opinion is willing to say or do anything, largely, I suspect, from fear of the wrath of the guardians of the regnant gender ideology. That’s why I was so pleased to hear Maine Governor Paul Lepage address the issue (here) in such a forthright way at a recent public appearance.

Like Father, Like Son (and Daughter)

     Of course, while there are political dimensions to it, this is not primarily a political problem; its sources are social and cultural and therefore, on a deeper level, spiritual and religious. Which means we can’t expect governors, or senators or presidents, to fix it for us: the answers lie in our own attitudes, choices and behaviors.
     The Australian Catholic publication AD2000 (which I cited here also, in a recent post about church architecture) produced a fascinating article (here) a few years ago about a very important aspect of the fatherhood  crisis, especially for us as Catholics, called “Church Attendance: the family, feminism, and the declining role of fatherhood.”   The article focused on a survey done in Switzerland that examined  the relationship between the parents’church attendance and that of their children, and examined the different effects of the father’s religious practice (or lack thereof) and that of the mother. There are a variety of angles and permutations, but the big picture is this:

     .[I]f a father does not go to church, no matter how regular the mother is in her religious
     practice, only one child in 50 becomes a regular church attender. But if a father attends
     regularly then regardless of the practice of the mother at least one child in three will become a
     regular church attender.

Wow. Notice that this is for all children, by the way, not just boys. AD2000 goes on to quote an
Anglican clergyman named Robbie Low, who says:

     . . . when a child begins to move into that period of differentiation from home and
     engagement with the world 'out there', he (and she) looks increasingly to the father for
     that role model. Where the father is indifferent, inadequate or just plain absent, that task
     is much harder and the consequences more profound.

This has been shown to be true over and over again, of course, although one must have courage to
say so in "polite" company these days. Vicar Low points out an important way that the decline of
fatherhood has affected his church, one which we Catholics would be wise to consider:

     Emasculated liturgy, gender-free Bibles and a fatherless flock are increasingly on offer.
     In response to this, decline has, unsurprisingly, accelerated. To minister to a fatherless
     society the Church of England, in its unwisdom, has produced its own single-parent
     family parish model in the woman priest.

Lex Orandi, etc.

Guido Reni's St Joseph With The Infant Jesus 

Wow again. That’s a bulls eye.  We won’t be seeing women priests in the Catholic Church (see John Paul the Great’s Ordinatio Sacerdotalis [here], and the CDF document [here] affirming that the teaching on an the all-male priesthood is infallible). We are already seeing the emasculation of the liturgy, however, in many other ways.  At all but one of the Masses in my parish the majority of lectors and extraordinary ministers are women, in some cases all of them; in all but one Mass, most or all of the altar servers are girls (and if three of my sons didn’t serve, it might be all the Masses). Among the various other things that a priest does, he is an iconic representation of the fatherhood of God. When he is surrounded by women in the sanctuary, that image is diluted. As a more practical matter, the more something is dominated by girls, the less attractive it is to boys. That may be a regrettable reality, but a reality it remains. Over the last dozen years we have seen the male/female ratio among altar servers tip ever further in the female direction. Altar serving has historically been a first step for many men in discerning a vocation to the priesthood, so as fewer boys become servers we can expect fewer “father figures” to preside at Mass and consecrate the body and blood of Christ; also, more generally, the more the Mass is seen as a “girl thing”, the more religious belief and practice themselves will seem to be “unmanly” (lex orandi, lex credendi – “the law of praying is the law of believing”), and the fewer men will bother to show up at all.
     I’m not trying to pick a fight with those of you whose daughters are altar servers, or who serve as lectors at Mass.  I think that it’s a good thing that we’re trying to do more than pay lip service to the truth that women enjoy a dignity equal to that of men. I also appreciate the huge number of single mothers who are struggling, sometimes heroically, to do the best they can for their children.  I’m only asking that you please look at the resources I have linked above and consider that, in a society that is destroying itself because it refuses to acknowledge the difference between women and men, we as Catholics can be a prophetic voice proclaiming and celebrating the separate but complementary roles proper to each sex.

(See also: "Litany of St. Joseph: A Prayer For Fatherhood")

Abortion Myth # 6

Myth: “If abortion becomes illegal, tens of thousands of women in the U.S. will die again from back-alley and coat hanger abortions.”

 Truth:

-Women never died “by the thousands” in the United States: this figure was fabricated by pro-abortionists (see Abortion Myth #1).  The highest verified figure is 388 maternal deaths in 1948, before antibiotics became available.

New, improved post-Roe abortionist Kermit Gosnell

-For decades prior to legalization, 90% of abortions were performed by doctors in their offices, about the same number as today. 

- Women still die from legal abortions in the United States [here, here].

- The same pro-abortion activists who warn about coat hangers and the back alley fight strenuously against any regulation of abortion clinics, even minimal health regulations, that they believe might discourage abortions (see Davis, Wendy).

-Because pro-abortion activists oppose regulation of abortion facilities, and the politicians who rely on their financial support look the other way, brutal and deadly abortionists like Kermit Gosnell are able to flourish.

-Every year more than half a million unborn women die in legal abortions in the United States.

-Poland went from 148,200 abortions in 1975 to only 253 in 1998, and maternal deaths decreased by 30%, and miscarriages decreased by 25!

Much of the information above comes from Randy Alcorn’s Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments.

DON’T BUY THE LIE!

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

The Breastplate of St. Patrick: Still Relevant After 1500 Years

     Christ with me,
     Christ before me,
     Christ behind me,
     Christ in me,
     Christ beneath me,
     Christ above me,
     Christ on my right,
     Christ on my left,
     Christ when I lie down,
     Christ when I sit down,
     Christ when I arise,
     Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
     Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
     Christ in every eye that sees me,
     Christ in every ear that hears me.

Window in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh

     Pious tradition attributes authorship of the prayer above, known as “The Breastplate of St. Patrick”, to the Apostle of Ireland himself.  As is the case with the beloved "Prayer of St. Francis", experts tell us the eponymous Saint is most likely not the real author.  I myself would much rather hang out with Pious Tradition than with The Experts any day, but for our purposes here we'll just say that it could have been written by St. Patrick.  In any case, while the prayer as you see it above is the most well-known version, it is really only a part of a much longer composition (full text here).  At one time this magnificent prayer, in its complete form, was a part of my morning devotions every day.
     "The Breastplate of St. Patrick" is, in fact, written as a morning prayer, and more: it is a statement of faith, a brief but comprehensive catechesis, and a call for Divine help against the dangers that beset us from both earthly and spiritual sources.  Those things are as necssary today as they were in 5th century Ireland, and St. Patrick's prayer is a powerful and inspiring way to start our daily journey.
     The "Breastplate" opens with "I arise today/Through a mighty strength, the invocation of
Trinity . . ." St. Patrick is famous for his emphasis on the Trinity, reportedly using the tree-leafed
shamrock to illustrate the doctrine (as memorialized in the present-day stained glass window
from the cathedral in Armagh, his primatial see).  Here, he also emphasizes "the Oneness of the
Creator of creation."  In converting a pagan people, Patrick needed to impress upon them that
there was indeed only one God, as distinct from their pagan pantheon, although expressed in
three Persons.  The Triune God is also unlike their familiar gods in that He alone is the universal
Creator, as opposed to pagan deities who were hardly less subject to greater forces than were
mortal men. In our own day we also need to be reminded that God is Love (1 John 4:8), and
Love reaches its perfection in a union of persons, but also that God the Creator is master of all
the blind forces of nature with which we wrestle.
     The next “I arise today . . .” is followed by a brief Christology: incarnation, crucifixion,
resurrection and descent to the Dead. We no less than our newly-christened forefathers need to
understand who it is we follow.
     A third “I arise today . . . .” is followed by a litany of various Angels, Patriarchs, Prophets,
and Saints, which re-establishes for us that our devotion to the Person of Jesus Christ also connects us to all the lesser persons, living and dead, in the Communion of Saints.
     Next, “I arise today/Through strength of heaven,/the light of the sun . . .” and so on, through a
list of natural forces which, St. Patrick here reminds us, come below us in the order of creation,
and are so much the more under God’s power (how often we moderns forget both of these
truths!).
     After a fifth “I arise today . . .” we see a litany of the various manifestations of God’s Providential care:

     God’s strength to pilot me,
     God’s might to uphold me,
     God’s wisdom to guide me . . .

And so on. At the end of this section we shift our focus to the various evils that beset us:

     God's host to save me
     From snares of devils,
     From temptation of vices,
     From everyone who shall wish me ill,
     Afar and near.

     In the next section we call for God’s help against these evils, which are laid out in more detail:

     I summon today
     All these powers between me and those evils,
     Against every cruel and merciless power
     That may oppose my body and soul,
     Against incantations of false prophets,
     Against black laws of pagandom,
     Against false laws of heretics,
     Against craft of idolatry,
     Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
     Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul.
     Christ shield me today
     Against poison, against burning,
     Against drowning, against wounding,
     So that there may come to me
     an abundance of reward.

Notice the priority given to spiritual evils, which Christians have traditionally understood to be
far more serious dangers than the physical hazards at the end of the passage, but which are
ignored or even derided today (as I discuss here).
.
     At this point we come to the famous passage quoted at the top of this post, from which the prayer takes its name, in which we call upon Christ to surround us, to “armor” us, with his protection.
     Finally, the prayer ends by repeated the invocation with which it starts:

     I arise today,
     Through a mighty strength,
     The invocation of the Trinity,
     Through belief in the Threeness,
     Through confession of the Oneness
     Of the Creator of creation.


     As I read through this prayer, which was composed for ancient pagans who knew nothing of Christianity, I am struck by how well it is suited to our current post-Christian, neo-pagan culture.  I think I’ll start praying it more often.

(See also "St. Patrick and Slavery to Sin")

Cicero At The Gym

"Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, latrinis femineis nostris?"

O Tempora, O Mores!

Are we living in a neo-pagan culture?  One could argue that we are doing just that, or heading in that direction, given that our culture has largely abandoned God and Christianity.  If we are, then we Neo-pagans are in much sorrier shape than the Old Pagans ever were, because they had no access to the Revelation of Jesus Christ, but we do, and we are consciously rejecting it.  Along with Supernatural Truth, we are also increasingly abandoning even natural truths in a way that would have horrified the heathens of old.  Consider, for instance, what the Roman orator, philosopher, and writer Cicero has to say about what we would call Natural Law:

There is a true law, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil.  Whether it enjoins or forbids, the Good respect its injunctions, and the Wicked treat them with indifference.  This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and it is not liable either to derogation or abrogation.  Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice.  It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience.  It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing today and another tomorrow; but in all times and nations this eternal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable.  It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings.  God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer.  He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man.  For his crime he must endure the severest penalties hereafter, even if he avoid the usual misfortunes of the present life.

We live in a culture that no longer believes that: today's conventional wisdom is that we can make reality whatever we want it to be (we are like God, as the serpent promises Eve in Genesis 3:5, “knowing good from evil”). We scoff at the pagan philosopher’s assertion that the natural law “cannot be contradicted by any other law”, and we are increasingly using the power of the state (the senate and the people, as Cicero would put it) to this impose Bold New World on those who won’t accept it willingly. If Cicero were to say today what he says above, he might find himself employing his prodigious rhetorical skills to defend himself from charges of "hate speech."

Intolerance Won't Be Tolerated

     The cutting edge of the new paganism, after all, is the question of what today is called "gender".  This is no longer a function of one's biological sex, but is an "identity" chosen by individuals that need not correspond to any external reality (which frees us from the tyranny of being either male or female, there now being dozens of genders from which we can choose).  Cicero never guessed how trulya man might fly from himself, and do “violence to the very nature of man.”

   If this were simply a matter of people calling themselves what they want, it would be sad and unfortunate.  It seems, however, that those who create their own reality cannot tolerate any opposition, even the unspoken opposition of those who simply live in accord with a more traditional understanding of the nature of things.  That's why we see cases such as this one (link) in which the highest court in the state of Maine ruled that "School officials violated state anti-discrimination law when they would not allow a transgender fifth-grader to use the girls' bathroom."  There is no law, apparently, forbidding discrimination against the vast majority of girls who don't want a boy in their bathroom (the reporter refers to the student in question as "she" throughout the article, but does concede toward the end that the student "is a biological male who identified as a girl beginning at age 2").  In a similar case involving adults, “The head of Ontario’s human rights commission” defended “the right of ‘transgendered’ men to use women’s changing rooms in response to a woman’s complaint that she was ogled” by a man who was not, shall we say, adhering to traditional norms of modesty in his attire or his behavior (link, for mature audiences only).

A Non-Intimidating, Welcoming Environment . . . For Some

   Now it has gone a step further.  We heard last week (link) about a woman who was banned from her local Planet Fitness gym because she complained about a man (who "identified as a woman") in her locker room, and warned other female patrons of his presence.  The gym declared her behavior "inappropriate  and disruptive to other members", and so she was asked to leave, since “Planet Fitness is committed to creating a non-intimidating, welcoming environment for our members”.  Except for female members who object to undressing in the presence of naked men. Apparently, there is nothing inappropriate or disruptive about a man (whatever he thinks of himself) invading an area where women are accustomed to changing and showering.

   It may be that Chesterton didn't really say, "when people cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything."  It perfectly describes, however, what we're seeing in our society today, and is a reminder that "our struggle is not against flesh and blood" (Ephesians 6:12), but is at root a battle in the spiritual realm, which is why spiritual and natural Truth rise and fall together.  And so we must continue to oppose unreason with reason, but also offer prayer and sacrifice in response to unbelief and, of course, always engage our opponents in a spirit of love.