The Church Fathers - Gregorian Chant - Kyrie Eleison

A Protestant Pilgrimage to the Marian Shrine of Walsingham

Pope Leo XIII memorably stated that when England returns to Walsingham, Our Lady would return to England.

 
In the east of England lies its National Marian Shrine, Walsingham. From the Middle Ages it was a place of pilgrimage until Henry VIII suppressed the shrine. Forgotten for centuries, it was restored in the 20^th Century. Today, it is a place of pilgrimage for Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox Christians.

Walsingham boasts not one shrine but two – Catholic and Anglican. Despite ecumenical relations, each shrine, needless to say, attracts different pilgrims. It is the Anglican presence, however, which attracts the most vociferous opposition. A number come each year to protest. They must do so; after all, they are Protestants.

Each May sees the occasion for this: the annual Anglican pilgrimage. In years gone by, this act of piety attracted 15,000 souls. Today that number is less than a third. Nevertheless, since the early 1970s, the pilgrimage has also attracted a counter-demonstration. Around fifty people gather at the site of the village pump, having travelled from far and wide, some from East Anglia, others from Lancashire, as well as several from Ulster.

As the banners are unfurled, pleasantries are exchanged between those assembling. Some have been coming to demonstrate for decades. Most know each other; there is a sense of a common cause among this band, no doubt sharpened by the knowledge that they are heavily outnumbered. Their banners have Biblical tracts emblazoned upon them of the type that one would expect. Many of the protestors clutch large, black Bibles in their hands. Only the King James Version is in evidence, however. Whatever they may say about Tradition and Scripture, these Protestants have their own traditions too.

Read more at National Catholic Register >>

Daniel Hannan on the Extraordinary Bonds and Contribution of the Anglosphere

Father Rutler: The Transfiguration of Our Lord

Father George W. Rutler

The Transfiguration of our Lord did not change him into another form of nature. After the event he was the same man taking the apostles down the mountain as he was when he took them up. As for us, said St. Thomas Aquinas: “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” Christ was already perfect, and the light that transfigured him was a portent of the power that can glorify human creatures.

This confounds the Gnostic mistake of treating nature as an evil construct, destructive of the human spirit that struggles to be free of it. That perennial heresy is now a fashion in the form of gender politics. “Transgender” is a misnomer. Gender pertains to grammar and not biology: for instance, in French a pen is feminine and a pencil is masculine, but the pen is not a woman and the pencil is not a man. A Gnostic agenda treats the body as though it were merely an irrelevant noun that can be changed to what it is not. This is mutilation and not transfiguration. Mutilations are “against the moral law” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2297). The Second Vatican Council rejected Gnostic dualism: “Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity…he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.” (CCC, n. 364) Imaginary redefinition of the self has widely become a political “right” and sane rejection of that is called “hate speech.” Where is George Orwell?

The Johns Hopkins psychiatrist, Dr. Paul McHugh explains that sex change is “biologically impossible” and “people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.” Confusing children about their identity comes “close to child abuse.”

Insinuating into the Armed Forces people with such psychological problems harms them and the national defense. It was done as a political act, and to repeal that is simply a nod to reality. Taxpayer dollars could pay the Pentagon at least $1.3 billion in the next ten years for “reassignment surgery.” Nearly four hundred medical conditions can disqualify people from military service, and identity confusion is a serious one. An illness, even a mental one, is not a sin, for an illness is a material disorder, while a sin is a moral disorder. The Greek word for sin, hamartia, means missing the bull’s eye on a target. It is a sin try to move the bull’s eye, pretending that one has not missed the mark, but nature has a way of staying constant.

Current headlines tell of huge military parades in China, naval displays in Russia, and missile launches in the rogue state of North Korea. They would very much like to see more Gnostic dreaming in our armed forces. But fantasy is not the strategy that wins peace among nations or peace of soul.

Father Rutler’s book, He Spoke to Us – Discerning God's Will in People and Events, is now available in paperback through Ignatius Press.

Father Rutler’s book, The Stories of Hymns – The History Behind 100 of Christianity’s Greatest Hymns, is available through Sophia Institute Press (Paperback or eBook) and Amazon (Paperback or Kindle).

Father Rutler: Dunkirk and Spiritual Evacuation

Fr. George W. Rutler

Jan Struther (1901-1953) wrote popular hymns but is best known for the book that became the 1942 film Mrs. Miniver, starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. The Dunkirk evacuation figures in it and was emotive propaganda as the United States was just getting involved in the war. A new film about Dunkirk is educating many young people who never knew the story, and who may not realize that if it had not been for the “miracle” of events from May 26 to June 3 in 1940, the world would be unrecognizable today.

With 338,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force and the French Army in danger of being annihilated, optimists expected that no more than 30,000 could be saved. The British civilians manned every boat they could muster: barges, tugboats, pleasure crafts, lifeboats and fishing trawlers and, led by the Royal Navy, rescued 335,000 soldiers.

One of the great characters I knew, the novelist Barbara Cartland, told me stories of the period, but spoke little of her beloved brother Ronald, who was killed behind the lines at Dunkirk, an anti-appeaser and the first and youngest Member of Parliament to die in the war. She wrote his biography, and her good friend Winston Churchill wrote a preface to it.

In the House of Commons on June 4, Churchill delivered perhaps the greatest speech of the twentieth century. The text I have has 3,767 words, but every line is riveting, especially its conclusion: “Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. . . ” But what he said is disserved if his warning halfway through is forgotten: “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”

In the spiritual life, too, there must be strategic withdrawals from time to time. “. . . (f)lee from any brother who conducts himself in a disorderly way and not according to the tradition received from us” (2 Thessalonians 3:6). So the spiritual fathers enjoin us to flee from the Devil. In our own trying times, we have all the saints to help in the evacuation, like those who lent their boats for Dunkirk. But spiritual wars are not won by evacuations. The Church regroups and then charges the enemy.

Father Rutler’s book, He Spoke to Us – Discerning God's Will in People and Events, is now available in paperback through Ignatius Press.

Father Rutler’s book, The Stories of Hymns – The History Behind 100 of Christianity’s Greatest Hymns, is available through Sophia Institute Press (Paperback or eBook) and Amazon (Paperback or Kindle).

Archbishop Chaput Responds to Vatican Attack on Faithful American Catholics

'It is an odd kind of surprise when believers are attacked by their co-religionists merely for fighting for what their Churches have always held to be true,' the archbishop said

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has hit back at the controversial article by Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa in La Civiltà Cattolica, calling it an “exercise in dumbing down” and saying it fails to understand the forces that have drawn Catholics and Evangelicals together.

The archbishop said the article inadequately presents the nature of cooperation between Catholics in Evangelicals in the United States, adding that it seems “wilfully ignorant” of the cultural battles they face.

The Civiltà Cattolica article, published last week, launched a scathing attack on American conservative Catholics, accusing them of joining with Evangelical Protestants in an “ecumenism of hate” on issues such as immigration.

Read more at Catholic Herald >>

Father Rutler: The "Christ of Nations"

Fr. George Rutler

In the nineteenth century, the poet Adam Mickiewicz dramatized the theme of his suffering Poland as the “Christ of Nations” and, in an image used by many others, Poland was crucified in the twentieth century between the two thieves of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. It was not the West’s proudest moment when President Roosevelt complained to Stalin at the Yalta Conference that “Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years.” Pope John Paul II lamented Yalta in the encyclical Centesimus Annus. That will resonate in the annals of papal teaching more than recent magisterial concerns about the responsible use of air conditioning and the like.

On July 6 in Warsaw, the President spoke of a culture with which a generation of “millennials” have been unfamiliar: “Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”

Comfortable journalists, for whom the “Christ of Nations” is an enigma, resented “a tiny speech, a perfunctory racist speech,” “xenophobic” and “a catalogue of effrontery,” and a comparison was made with Mussolini. Solzhenitsyn once was pilloried for similar themes, and Reagan was advised by his Chief of Staff and National Security advisor not to tell Mr. Gorbachev to take down the Berlin Wall.

The Warsaw speech mentioned three priests: Copernicus, John Paul II and Michael Kozal. The latter was the bishop of Wloclawek who was martyred by the Nazis in Dachau along with 220 of his priests in 1943.

Among the irritations in the Warsaw speech were these words: “We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.” As that was being said, the parents of a gravely ill child, Charlie Gard, in London were tussling with government officials who did not want to release their infant to them.

A Polish philosopher, Zbigniew Stawrowski has written: “The fundamental cleavage is not the West v. Islam or the West v. the rest, but within the West itself: between those who recognize the values of Judaeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman culture and those who use terms like "democracy," "values," "rights" but pervert the latter. So it means democracy of the elites, values of secularism, rights to kill Charlie Gard, marriage that has nothing to do with sex, sex that … is a “private” matter to be funded by the confiscatory state and your duty to support this incoherence…”

The Polish king Jan III Sobieski rescued Christian civilization at the gates of Vienna in 1683. That was one of the “troubles” that Poland has caused in the past five hundred years. We survive because of such behavior.

Father Rutler’s book, He Spoke to Us – Discerning God's Will in People and Events, is now available in paperback through Ignatius Press.

Father Rutler’s book, The Stories of Hymns – The History Behind 100 of Christianity’s Greatest Hymns, is available through Sophia Institute Press (Paperback or eBook) and Amazon (Paperback or Kindle).