Friday, November 29, 2013

Pope On One Of The Three Powers Of The Soul: Intellect

The Pope said that, in order to understand the signs of the times, a Christian must think not only with his head, but also with his heart and spirit. Otherwise, he cannot understand the “way of God in history”: “In the Gospel, Jesus does not become angry, but pretends to when the disciples do not understand him. At Emmaus he says: ‘How foolish and slow of heart’. ‘How foolish and slow of heart’… He who does not understand the things of God is such a person. 
The Lord wants us to understand what happens, what happens in my heart, what happens in my life, what happens in the world, in history… What is the meaning of what is happening now? These are the signs of the times! On the other hand, the spirit of the world gives us other propositions, because the spirit of the world does not want a community: it wants a mob, thoughtless, without freedom.”
While the spirit of the world wants us to take a “restricted path,” Saint Paul warns that the “spirit of the world treats us as thought we lack the ability to think for ourselves; it treats us like people who are not free”: “Restricted thought, equal thought, weak thought, a thought so widespread. The spirit of the world does not want us to ask ourselves before God: ‘But why, why this other, why did this happen?’. Or it also offers a prêt-à-porter [‘ready to wear’] way of thinking, according to personal taste: ‘I think as I like!’. This is okay, they say…. But what the spirit of the world does not want is what Jesus asks of us: free thought, the thought of a man and a women who are part of the people of God, and salvation is exactly this! Think of the prophets… ‘You were not my people, now I say my people’: so says the Lord. And this is salvation: to make us people, God’s people, to have freedom.” Pope Francis added that Jesus asks us “to think freely… in order to understand what happens.” The truth is that “we are not alone! We need the Lord’s help”. We need to “understand the signs of the times”: the Holy Spirit, he said, “gives us this present, a gift: the intelligence to understand”: "What path does the Lord want? Always with the spirit of intelligence with which to understand the signs of the times. It is beautiful to ask the Lord for this grace, who sends us this spirit of intelligence, in order that we avoid weak thought, we do not have a restricted thought and we do not have a thought according to personal preference: we only have a thought according to God. With this thought, which is a thought of the mind, of heart, and of soul. With this thought, which is the gift of the Spirit, [we] look for the meaning of things, and to understand the signs of the time well."
Link (here) to The Vatican Radio

Link (here) to more on St. Ignatius'  Three Powers Of The Soul (here), (here) and (here)

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Fr. Hugh Thwaites, S.J.

Faber To Become Jesuit Saint

Pierre Faber, a “Reformed” Jesuit priest whom Francis sees as a model figure, is to be proclaimed as saint before Christmas, Stefania Falasca reports in an article for Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire. The process for his cause in the Congregation for the Causes of Saints is complete and now all that remains is for Francis to issue the Bull of Canonization that will proclaim the first companion of St. Ignatius a saint, extending the cult of the soon-to-be-saint to the Universal Church. Faber was born in the Upper Savoy region of France in 1506 and died in Rome in 1547 just a few weeks before he was due to attend the Council of Trent. He was beatified in September 1872 with a Papal Rescript issued by the Sacred Congregation of Rites and ratified by the Society of Jesus. Now Francis is extending the liturgical cult to the Universal Church. The process followed for Faber’s canonization is called “equivalent canonization”. This is when the Pope omits the judicial process and ceremonies involved and orders a servant of God to be venerated in the Universal Church, when such a saint has been from a remote period the object of veneration, when his heroic virtues (or martyrdom) and miracles are related by reliable historians, and the fame of his miraculous intercession is uninterrupted. “Examples of this in recent history include John Paul II, who decreed 3 such canonizations, Benedict XVI who decreed 1, the last of which was that of Angela da Foligno, confirmed last 9 October by Pope Francis,”
Link (here) to Fr. Z

Saturday, November 23, 2013

A Thorough Jesuit

" Can I refuse to become holy when God Himself entreats me to be holy ? ' Walk before Me and be perfect.' ' Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.' Another great motive for becoming a saint — the wish, the command of God ! I have been called by God to be a member of the Society of His Son. To be a true Jesuit I must be a close imitator of Jesus Christ, an ' alter Christus.' The Society was instituted to glorify the Name of Jesus by its learning, by its zeal, but above all by its holiness. I must, therefore, strain after three things : to become learned, an authority on all subjects, not for self or the glory of self, but for God and the glory of God ; to become a lover of souls ; to become holy, this first and foremost, because the Jesuit without sanctity is no true son of Ignatius. " O loving Saviour, forgive me the past, accept me repentant, help me, for I am going to become with Thy assistance — A Thorough Jesuit and a Great Saint."
Link (here) to the biography of Fr. William Doyle, S.J.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

200 Year Anniversary

The miracle of Pope Pius VII 'levitating' at Mass on 15 August 1811
The superior general of the Society of Jesus, the Church’s largest male religious institute, has issued a letter commemorating the upcoming bicentennial of the institute’s restoration with the issue of Solicitudo omnium ecclesiarum. by Pope Pius VII. Founded in 1534, the Church’s largest male religious institute was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 under political pressure. Father Adolfo Nicolás, the superior, proposed five themes for the 2014 bicentennial year: “creative fidelity,” “love for our Institute,” “fraternal companionship,” “universal mission,” and “faith in Providence.” 

Link (here) to Catholic Culture

His Excellency The Marquis of Pombal, "The Slayer Of The Jesuits"

POMBAL.
"EL MATADOR DOS PADRES."
In one of the principal squares of Lisbon may be seen the statue of King Joseph Emmanuel, son of John V., Don Sebastian Carvalho y Melho, Count d'Oeyras, Marquis de Pombal. The relative position of the figures ought to have been reversed. The minister was the tyrant of the monarch, as well as the scourge of his subjects. In the present notice we shall limit ourselves to giving an account of the manner in which the Marquis de Pombal earned his title of "Slayer of the Fathers," after enumerating the causes of his enmity against the Company of Jesus.
King of Portugal. At the foot of the statue is represented his Minister of State,
Pombal, who was a "philosophic" atheist and an encourager of the Calvinists, had certain reasons of private ambition for wishing to introduce Protestantism into Portugal. While pretending outwardly to be the enemy of the English, he was secretly doing all in his power to bring about a marriage between the Princess de Beira and the Duke of Cumberland —a marriage which would have eventually entitled the latter to the crown of Braganza. Like the rest of the Portuguese, the Jesuit Fathers were naturally opposed to English and Protestant domination in their own country. They were confessors to all the royal family, and Pombal regarded them as the chief obstacle in the way of his designs—an offence which he never forgave them.
.........Pombal was a great builder of prisons. The number of his victims demanded considerable accommodation, for at one particular time in Lisbon he had more than four thousand prisoners of state, and this in a capital of (at that period) one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Dona Eleanora, the Dowager Marchesa de Tavora, was separated from her children. Masters and servants, men and women, disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them up. In letters of the time we find that Pombal was enraged on discovering that some poor ameliorations had been made in the dreadful state of the captives by the pity of subalterns. Besides the De Tavora family a large number of hidalgos had also been arrested and thrown into dungeons that same night. 
Among them was the greatest noble of Portugal, Don Jose de Mascarenhas y Lancastre, Duke of Aveiro and cousin to Dona Eieanora. Several of the Jesuit fathers, amongst whom was the confessor of the Prince Don Pedro, Father Hyacinth da Costa, were also suddenly carried off to prison.
All Lisbon was paralyzed with terror. A hand of iron weighed upon the city. In the streets nothing but mercenary soldiers were to be seen, and the king no longer went out of his palace. Whoever dared to express doubt as to the guilt of the arrested persons, or the least pity for them, was summarily arrested also. According to the laws of Portugal accused persons had a right to be judged by their peers. Pombal denied his victims the benefit of this right. He created a tribunal composed of creatures of his own, and entirely devoid of legal authority. 
This tribunal lie named the "Court of Mistrust," and over it he appointed himself president. As it was not yet, apparently, so much a question of the Jesuits as of the nobility, the French Encyclopaedists were somewhat offended at these monstrosities, and we hear of the "bad effect" produced in the philosophic world of Paris by the frightful vagaries of Pombal, whom, nevertheless, it was desirous to excuse as far as possible, on account of his "generous ideas." Not content with presiding, Pombal took upon himself the "examination" and "instruction " of the cases. It was he who gave the verdict and pronounced the sentence, which still exists, written by his own hand. 
And how was the examination conducted? By intimidation of every kind, shamelessly employed, by "testimony invented," and witnesses forced by torture to assent to accusations which they were never allowed to retract, and thus furnishing a reason for a judicial carnage the attendant horrors of which are, perhaps, unparalleled in the history of any civilized nation. The Tavora family, as well as the other accused, remained silent under the fearful torments to which they were subjected, with the sole exception of the Duke d'Aveiro, who, in the extremity of agony, half dead as he was, and not knowing what he said, assented to whatever was put in his mouth, and thus accused his fellow-prisoners and— the Jesuits. Pombal, on hearing this, uttered an exclamation of ferocious joy. He had obtained what he wanted. What this implied we shall see further on. No sooner had the unfortunate Duke d Avei'ro recovered his senses than, learning what he had done, he retracted, declaring that excess of torment alone had wrenched from him accusations against persons who were innocent. It is needless to say that his earnest entreaties had no effect in inducing Pombal to allow his retractation. Sentence of death was pronounced against the De Tavora family, their relations and friends, as well as all their numerous domestics and dependants, on January 12, 1759. Pombal, fearing the popular indignation, had the scaffold prepared by night, outside the city, in the ■ Plaza of Belem, which was occupied by two regiments of mercenaries. 
The platform, lighted by torches, rose eighteen feet from the ground. The square and the river side were so thronged with soldiers that the spectators took refuge on the Tagus, where from hundreds of boats and other craft arose a mingled murmur of groans and curses. Thus passed the night of January 13. With the first gray sign of dawn arrived the numerous domestics of the Duke d'Aveiro. These were all bound to stakes at one corner of the scaffold and burnt alive. 
Then followed the Marchesa Eleanora de Tavora, alone; a rope round her neck, a crucifix in her hand, and her garments torn into rags by the torture. Pombal was there; for his Memoirs give, with a sort of infernal satisfaction, the full details of which he was an eye-witness on this night. With calm dignity Dona Eleanora mounted the scaffold, pressing to her heart the image of her God. The executioner approaching to bind her feet, she said to him gently : " Man, I pray you not to forget who I am. Do not touch me except to kill me." The man knelt down before her (Pombal himself relates it). Dona Eleanora was of those races who leave no service, even the last, without its recompense. Drawing her ring from her finger, she held it out to him, saying: " Every work deserves its reward. This is all I have, and 1 give it you that you may do your duty well." The executioner rose and did his duty. After this first noble blood had reddened the block the aged Marquis de Tavora, Dona Eleanora's husband, was beheaded, and next the husband of that Dona Teresa who had brought death and destruction on the noble house into which she had been welcomed as a beloved daughter. Then followed the other sons of Dona Eleanora— the youngest of whom was not twenty years old—her daughters, and her son-in-law; then the long file of officers and servants of her household, who died in their torments like brave men and Christians. Last of all, his garments nothing but tatters, came the Duke d'Aveiro, whose racked limbs could scarcely support him. He was fastened on the wheel; and for nearly an hour he struggled with this ghastly instrument of death, which slowly crushed his bones, while the clamor of his appalling agony could be heard even in Lisbon. The butchery at last consummated, the scaffold with all that was upon it was set on fire, and crumbled, with the half-burnt corpses, into the Tagus. After what has been related it matters little to know that all the friends and relations of these victims were kept in prison, their palaces and mansions razed to the ground, and the very sites they had occupied sown with salt. The arms of the De Tavora and their so-called " accopiplices " were effaced in the Hall of the Knights at Cintra, where their escutcheons still remain veiled with black, like the portrait of Faliero in the Ducal Palace at Venice. This last fact is remarkable, because the iniquitous judgment of January 12, 1759, has for long years past been annulled. Pombal lived long enough to feel even in this world the hand of God. All his victims were rehabilitated during his lifetime by decree of the High Court, solemnly given on April 7, 1781 ; and by this same decree Pombal was disgraced.
Link (here) to Catholic World

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Father Patrick Hartin A Professor At Gonzaga On Dante’s Hell

Link
After reading the Bulletin Friday morning, I’m convinced that I’m living in Alice’s Wonderland! Instead, it’s “Wonderland” – more like Dante’s “Hell”! …. To protect themselves and others in the neighborhood, the students defended themselves by pulling out a gun (one with a legal permit). Then the students called the police (as any law-abiding GU student would), informing them they had a legal gun with a permit. The police congratulated them on their whole mature behavior and response to this incident. There, the incident should have ended (if we were in the real world). But, we enter GU’s “Wonderland” or Dante’s “Hell.” 2:00 a.m. next morning: GU’s campus security breaks into the students’ apartment and their bedrooms and seizes their weapons…. Tragically, in GU’s “Wonderland,” these young gentlemen are turned from victims into criminals….
no
What about the cura personalis that is the bedrock of GU’s ethos? We could have been mourning “Two funerals and a rape” this weekend. Instead, the heroes who avoided such a catastrophe are punished as villains. What a far cry from our Jesuit ethos! 
In the Catholic tradition, to which I ascribe, every person has a right to defend him or herself and to use appropriate means to save their lives.
Go (here) to read the full piece, Fr. Hartin is Professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga, and an ordained priest of the Diocese of Spokane, Washington.

Friday, November 15, 2013

The Lords Of Georgetown

Lord Nicholas Windsor
For those who are unaware of the splendid track record of Lord David Alton and Lord Nicholas Windsor, This link will take you to the presentation given by Lord Nicholas Windsor, Jan Graffius and David Alton at Georgetown University's Berkley Centre, Washington DC. The session was hosted and moderated by Professor Tom Farr. The presentation describes the purpose of the Christian Heritage Centre Project, the Collections held at Stonyhurst,and the challenges to contemporary religious freedom. Please share it with others.
they are both tireless warriors in defence of the unborn, doing much great work in Europe and the United Kingdom for the culture of life. Lord Nicholas Windsor, a cousin of the Queen, converted to Catholicism a few years ago and has been an indefatigable crusader for the pro-life cause ever since. Lord Alton has been supporting the pro-life cause in the House of Commons and the House of Lords for several decades.
Link (here) to the St. Austin Review

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

"Former Jesuits Now Outnumber Active Jesuits In The United States."

Were Ignatius of Loyola alive today, the Jesuit order he founded wouldn't ordain him. His once-formidable order is in the throes of a collapse as historically significant as its suppression in 1773. This disintegration, known to traditional Catholics for years (and to bishops too cowardly to stifle its corruption), is now even admitted by liberal pundits. Garry Wills' article about the book "Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits" appears in the New York Review of Books under the title, "Jesuits in Disarray." Jonathan Kirsch, a Los Angeles Times reviewer of the same book, notes that the order is in demographic free fall: "former Jesuits now outnumber active Jesuits in the United States."
society is now a corrupt club for
Meanwhile, traditional Jesuits who stay and seek to recover the order's original spark find themselves in exile. The office for the Jesuit Province in California confirmed to TAP that Joseph Fessio, the prolific San Francisco Jesuit publisher of orthodox books and publications, has been ordered to leave San Francisco for a new assignment, effective in May, at an obscure Catholic hospital in Duarte, California. Fessio's banishment coincides with his recent announcement to start a traditional Catholic school called Campion College next door to the openly dissenting Jesuit University of San Francisco, a school which in recent years has advertised such pagan oddities as a "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Student Alliance."
Duarte, California, is becoming the Devil's Island for Jesuits who don't conform to the order's liberal regime. Father Cornelius Buckley, a longtime Jesuit history professor at the University of San Francisco deemed insufficiently liberal for the school, was reassigned to Duarte, California, in the late 1990s. The order called him "divisive."  The crack-up of the liberals in the order will likely accelerate in the wake of their panicky persecution of traditional Jesuits like Fessio. Such desperate actions are in proportion to their fear of exposure and accountability. In a typical liberal irony, the dissenters in the order who rose to power through disobedience to papal authority now use their power to repress "disobedient" traditional Jesuits, lest their revolution inside the Catholic Church grind to a halt.
The Vatican cannot ignore their outrages forever, especially as costly sex abuse lawsuits (the Jesuits settled in 2000 with a seminarian who accused over a dozen Jesuit superiors of sending him pornographic cards and asking him to perform sex acts on them)and lay backlash reveal the modern Jesuits as a chief source of degeneracy and dissent in the Church.
Perhaps it is time for a Second Suppression, not to kill the order, but to save it. Unless the Father Robert Drinans are soon suppressed and replaced with Father Fessios at the head of the order, its days are numbered. The cancer of corruption is rapidly devouring it. If the bishops won't take this fact seriously from the traditional Catholics they take for granted, perhaps they will listen to the liberal cultural commentators who acknowledge it as well. "Entering the Jesuits used to take one into a stable world; but that is far from the experience of recent times," writes Garry Wills. "A thirty-five-year-old still studying theology says: 'My novice master left to marry, my formation director left for a relationship with another man, et cetera. One cannot help but get the sense that we of this generation of Jesuits may be the last of the Shakers.'"
Link (here) to the full article at The American Spectator

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Jonathan Taylor Breaks Into Gonzaga Dorm Students Defend Themselves

A "mug shot" of Jonathon Taylor
In case you missed it, administrators at Gonzaga University have decided to place four students on probation, with the possibility of expulsion on the table. Their crime? Defending themselves against a six-time felon Jonathan Taylor inside their university owned apartment by brandishing a firearm (for which they have a permit). Naturally in typical academic fashion, officials are punishing their own students for fighting back and protecting themselves from a violent criminal with a long rap sheet.

The details of this story have already been covered, but what's missing is the scrutiny against the so-called "intellectuals" in this situation.
The actions taken by Gonzaga officials to punish students for a) owning a firearm and b) using that firearm in self-defense, shows us exactly how far they're willing to go in the name of their own partisan ideology. Officials at Gonzaga are clearly more interested in upholding their anti-gun agenda than keeping students safe.
Think the case of a felon on Gonzaga's campus is an isolated incident? Think again. In 2007, a young woman named Amanda Collins was raped at gunpoint just 50-feet from the campus police station at The University of Nevada-Reno. The University of Nevada-Reno is a gun free zone. At the time of the attack, Collins was in possession of her concealed weapons permit but was not in possession of her firearm due to university policies prohibiting carrying concealed weapons on campus. Her attacker, a serial rapist, went on to rape two more young women, killing one of them. Red-tape and university policies empowered her attacker while she, the victim, was punished. 
Link (here) to the full story at Townhall.com

Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., A Liberal Commentator, Has Described Archbishop Kurtz As A “Smiling Conservative”

In Louisville—and before that, as bishop of Knoxville—Archbishop Kurtz has demonstrated strong conservative values, and has been a staunch defender of Vatican directives on doctrine and liturgy. Fr. Thomas Reese, a liberal commentator who has frequently disagreed with Vatican politics, 
has described Archbishop Joseph Kurtz as a “smiling conservative” in the vein of New York’s Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, who is “very gracious but still holds the same positions” as Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
who has boldly challenged Catholic politicians who dissent from Church teachings on abortion.
Link (here) to Patheos

Saturday, November 9, 2013

19th Century Jesuits "Fervently Ultramontane, Devoted To The Sacred Heart, Fierce Defenders Of Pope Pius IX And The 1870 Definition Of Papal Infallibility And SuspiciousOf Liberalism In All Its Varieties"

Pope Pius IX
In his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (2008), editor Thomas Worcester realized
he needed to address an imbalance in the volume: fourth-fifths of the essays addressed the history of Jesuits before their suppression in 1773.  “[T]here are relatively few good studies of the Jesuits since 1814 – in any part of the world – at least compared with the abundance of excellent work done on the history of the ‘old’ Society and its ‘corporate’ culture,” Worcester explained. “In general, the Society of Jesus, for much of the century and a half from its restoration until Vatican II, was conservative and even reactionary.” (7-8)
Just one year earlier, John McGreevy, made the point even stronger in America magazine.  Reviewing Gerald McKevitt’s Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848-1919 (Stanford, 2006), McGreevy wrote: 
“19th-century Jesuits – fervently ultramontane, devoted to the Sacred Heart, fierce defenders of Pope Pius IX and the 1870 definition of papal infallibility and suspicious of liberalism in all its varieties and the public schools that seemed to inculcate it – surely seemed unlikely role models for Jesuits and non-Jesuit scholars in the immediate postconciliar era.”
It might be difficult to identify with men whose worldview was shaped as much by the 1773-1814 suppression as by the European liberal revolutions that forced them into exile (once again) to all corners of the globe a generation later. And yet, to ignore the post-1814 Jesuits is to miss a crucial aspect of Catholic history over the last two centuries. For one thing, the story of the Jesuits in America, is a story of the Restored Society.  All but one of the twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States today – and all of the secondary schools – were founded by Restored Jesuits. But the story of the Restored Jesuits is far broader: they were a globalizing force in the “long nineteenth century,” the age reframed by C.A. Bayly, as The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (Blackwell, 2004). 2014 marks the bicentennial year of the lifting of the Suppression.  In commemoration of the Restoration, Loyola University Chicago is hosting a major conference on October 16-19, 2014.  It aims to bring together junior and senior scholars to begin a conversation about the contribution to American identity of both restored Jesuits and the women religious with whom they worked in their enterprises.  The conference aims at locating these initiatives within the specific experiential context of building an American nation. The stories of these men and women provide studies in what Thomas Tweed has termed Crossing and Dwelling (Harvard, 2006): the crossings and dwellings of refugees from European exclusions; transatlantic immigrants; multilingual and transnational identities; settlers in ethnic urban cores; boundary-dwellers in frontier peripheries.  A copy of CFP can be found here, with a February 1, 2014 deadline for proposals.
Link (here) to US Religion

Monday, November 4, 2013

Boston College's Fr. James Keenan, S.J. At Center Of Controversy

Linda Hogan
It’s worth noting that the only source cited for these reports is Fr. James Keenan, SJ, who posted Facebook his personal suggestions for a woman cardinal; he included Hogan prominently on his list of contenders, along with Sister Teresa Okure, a theology professor at the Catholic Institute of West Africa in Nigeria, and Maryanne Loughry, associate director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Australia. Google around, and you’ll find multiple reports today on the Linda Hogan rumor from a variety of news outlets; virtually every one goes back to the Keenan Facebook post as the source for Hogan’s name. There’s no one from the Vatican. No one in a position to know is quoted. This amounts to little more than wishful thinking and an educated guess. Could Linda Hogan soon be Cardinal Hogan? If the pope wants to rewrite Canon Law, sure. Anything is possible. But really: I’ll believe it when I see it. Right now, the only one who has elevated her to the rank of cardinal is a Jesuit with a Facebook page.
on

UPDATE: Then there’s this, from the Vatican: 
The Holy See yesterday dismissed as “nonsense” weekend Irish media reports that Pope Francis might nominate two Irish women as cardinals. Responding to reports in Irish and Irish-American media that Pope Francis might name both TCD ecumenics Prof Linda Hogan and former president Mary McAleese as cardinals at a future conclave, senior Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said: “This is just nonsense . . . It is simply not a realistic possibility that Pope Francis will name women cardinals for the February consistory. “Theologically and theoretically, it is possible,” he added. “Being a cardinal is one of those roles in the church for which, theoretically, you do not have to be ordained but to move from there to suggesting the pope will name women cardinals for the next consistory is not remotely realistic.”

Link (here) to the full post by 

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Sure On This Shining Night

Listen to the this beautiful classical chorale arrangement of Sure On This Shining Night
by composer Morten Lauridsen musical artists are Polyphony & Stephen Layton



Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far alone
Of shadows on the stars.