When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2:1-4)
Tongues of Fire
 |
Not everyone, it would seem, is pleased with the current Roman Pontiff. If that hadn't been clear to me already, it would certainly be apparent in many of the comments some of my recent posts (this one and this one, for instance) have received in various online venues. Who would have thought it?
St. Mathias was the thirteenth Apostle, chosen to replace Judas Iscariot after Judas betrayed the Lord then took his own life. It's interesting that our scriptural sources actually tell us very little about St. Mathias himself. The only place he is mentioned by name is the passage is the Acts of the Apostles that describes his election:
In those days Peter stood up among the brethren (the company of persons was in all about a hundred and twenty), and said . . .
[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]
Who Will Debunk the Debunkers?
The totalitarian subjugation, debasement, and enslavement of language foreseen by prophets of dystopia such as George Orwell is in full flower. I need not point out recent examples like "peaceful protest", "court-packing", and the like to show how many previously clear and serviceable expressions have been made to mean something other than what they purport to mean, sometimes even their exact opposite.
 |
| Blaise Pascal |
One such term with a long history of abuse is "debunk". This word originally meant to disprove, to show that a particular statement or argument was "bunk", i.e., nonsense. For some time now, however, I've seen certain people employ the term when they have made no serious effort to refute something, but have simply stated their disagreement. They often seem to think that if they simply invoke the word without actually making an argument, debunk will, through some numinous power of its own, refute an unwelcome assertion.
Debunk has become something of a red flag for me because of this history of abuse. It's what caught my attention a few years back when I saw a reference to an article claiming to debunk Pascal's Wager. When I looked at the article in question I found that, to their credit, the authors did in fact make the effort to present arguments in support of their positions; the problem was, their arguments were themselves largely bunk. But don't take my word for it: I make my case below in an article I first published six years ago this month, "Has Pascal's Wager Really Been 'Debunked'?" . . .
[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]
In my prior post, "What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part I)" we saw that the true Church is not reducible to the people who occupy its offices at any particular point in time, not even to those in the highest positions of authority. The true Church is the Mystical Body of Christ extending through time. We depend upon that Church for our salvation, and we can't abandon it because of the malfeasance of its temporary caretakers, whether they are priests, bishops, or even (if you can believe it) popes.
 |
| Bad popes: "Pope Formosus and Stephen VII" by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1870 |
At the same time, while the immorality and infidelity of bad clerics can't unmake the Church itself, it can do a lot of damage to members of the Church, and Church institutions, in particular times and places. It can cause souls to be lost. That was in fact the concern of the original comment that led to these posts. A father was afraid that the bad example and erroneous teaching of certain prominent churchmen (including some at a decidedly higher pay grade than his parish priest) would damage the faith of his children, and that he might need to leave the Church for their protection . . .
[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]
"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church"
You’re probably familiar with the quote above, a favorite of Pope St. John Paul II. It’s author is Tertullian (c. A.D. 160 – c. A.D. 220), one of the foremost Christian writers and apologists of his age, who also gave us such essential terms as “Trinity” (Trinitas) and “Three Persons, One Substance” (Tres Personae, Una Substantia). Despite his enormous achievements, however, and his lasting influence, Tertullian is not considered a Father of the Church; we don’t even call him “Saint” Tertullian: he chose, sadly, to follow his own judgment rather than that of the Apostolic Church, and fell into heresy in the latter part of his life.
[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]
"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68)
 |
| Is this your parish priest? |
We live in scary times. It looks like our secular institutions in the West are collapsing, to be replaced by mob rule (which really means, as always, a tyranny of the elite who manipulate the mob). More frightening still for Catholics, the institutional Church appears to be experiencing a parallel slide. A commenter on my post about the Trappists and Icarians expressed his unhappiness at attending Mass where, as he put it, the priest "preaches communism." He was not just concerned, however, that many Catholic clerics, from parish priest on up, are abandoning the Faith for a poisonous brand of politics, but also, on a more practical level, that the Catholic Church itself was not a safe place for his children.
The commenter raises some valid and important points, which deserve a better answer than I can give off the cuff in a social media combox . . . I was thinking about how to approach this topic Friday morning, when I received some timely help from the daily Mass readings. . . .
[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]
 |
| Thomas Merton |
Although vowed to silence in his everyday life in the Trappist abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Thomas Merton was a gifted writer whose literary work was first permitted, and then encouraged by his superiors. His first and best book is The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography he published in 1948. It's a beautifully written, compelling story of his conversion to Christ and to Catholicism. He was not without his failings, however, some of them rather serious. Not only that, but toward the end of his life in the mid to late 1960’s he became increasingly drawn to Zen Buddhism. It was not clear that he could still be truly considered a Catholic at the time of his unexpected death in Thailand in 1968 . . .
[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]
