From the Pastor - 'The Transfiguration'

A weekly column by Father George Rutler

Transfiguration by Lorenzo Lotto (1510-12)
Pinacoteca Comunale, Recanati

Churches dedicated to Our Saviour traditionally celebrate the Transfiguration on August 6 as their annual parish feast. The catastrophic earthquake in Japan recalls the force of the bomb there on the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1945 when the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted Vishnu: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” A different kind of power radiated from the transfigured Christ: “God from God, Light from Light.” The Church enters this radiance in every sacrament, and retells the mystery in the Gospel proclamation for the Second Sunday of Lent.

In the Transfiguration, Moses the Lawgiver and Elijah the Prophet flank Christ. Representing the life of the intellect — practical and prophetic, social and scientific — they worship Him as their source and inspiration. “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world” (John 1: 9). A man whose mind is without God is out of his mind. Memory of that kept St. Peter sane the rest of his life: “And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount” (2 Peter 1:18).

As a child, I enjoyed the early television puppet show, “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” so different from the TV fare in our present coarsened culture. As the best children’s entertainments are aimed at adults through the children, the puppets' fans included John Steinbeck, James Thurber, Adlai Stevenson and Orson Welles. One day the absent-minded witch Beulah threw down her broom and announced that she was abandoning magic to embrace the wonderful world of empiricism. That is a good thing to do, but empiricism, or knowledge from sensory experience, is not wonderful if it does not connect mental brilliance with the “Light from Light.” The wrong use of the intellect leads to death, not life.

In The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Prospero also repents of magic at the end, but only after he has dissolved spirits into thin air. Then he tells his daughter Miranda and her fiancé Ferdinand: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” That enchanting empirical perception of the brevity of life is also melancholic for its lack of supernatural light. In the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah disappeared, not banished by Christ like magic, but subsumed into his eternal radiance. This dumbfounded Peter, James and John, until our Saviour touched them with his human hand and led them back down the mountain. Eusebius of Caesarea calculated that this happened forty days before the Passion. The Church walks with Christ for forty days in Lent, with the light of Heaven in memory and the shadow of the Cross in prospect. This is God’s way of instructing the intellect that victory over death comes through death, not in spite of it. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

Father George W. Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York City. His latest book, Cloud of Witnesses: Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive, is available from Crossroads Publishing.

Book Review: Allah Is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion

From Global Politician

By A. Millar

Books on Islam is a saturated market, an editor friend of mine told me a few months ago. At the time I though she might be right. I had only recently read a couple of works that, for want of a better description, read like second rate Bruce Bawers. Maudlin and self-absorbed, these books (which shall remain nameless) tell us more about the authors than they do about radical Islam. Former boyfriends, Holland in the Springtime, and hints that the Pulitzer Prize went to the wrong author, are punctuated with references to female genital mutilation, terrorist acts, and hook-handed radical preachers.

It is as if one were wandering around an Impressionist exhibition only to discover someone has scribbled images of Palestinian terrorists in thick black marker pen all over the Monets. Yes, the juxtapositions is jarring, but the average person living in the West is assaulted by contradictory messages every day, whether on the stream of billboard adverts he passes on the way to work or in an evening’s television-watching. Consequently, such books fail to shock, and, indeed, to force us to see the crisis of the West as an existential threat.

Our jaded culture, and cultural relativism, allows us to believe that the graffiti might be the real art. And one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter anyway. So what’s the problem?

It’s this kind of cultural relativism, and cultural suicidal tendencies, that Rebecca Bynum confronts in Allah Is Dead: Why Islam is not a Religion (New English Review Press). At 152 pages, this work is slimmer than those like the aforementioned, but it is denser and far more challenging. Few, if any, will agree with everything that is said. But this book was not written to be agreed with. It was written to shake things up, and push the reader outside of his comfort zone. An engaged mind is more important to Bynum than a nodding head.

The Solemnity of Saint Joseph

Go To Joseph!

by Saint Teresa of Avila

(From her Autobiography, Chapter VI)

Finding myself so crippled and so young too, and earthly doctors having failed to cure me, I looked to heavenly physicians for help...

I took for my advocate and comforter the glorious Saint Joseph, and commended myself fervently to him; and I clearly saw that it was he who both cured me of my sickness and delivered me from great dangers that threatened my good name and the loss of my soul. His aid has brought me more good than I ever desired to receive from him. I do not remember at any time having asked him for anything which he did not grant. I am quite amazed at the great favors Our Lord has given me, and the many dangers, both of soul and body, from which He has delivered me through the intercession of this blessed saint. Our Lord seems to have given to other saints the power to help us in only one kind of necessity, but I know from experience that this glorious Saint Joseph helps us in all kinds of needs. It appears then that God wishes us to understand that as He was obedient to Joseph when He was on earth (for Saint Joseph was called His father and he could command Him) so now in Heaven God grants whatever Joseph asks.

Others, on my advice, have turned to Saint Joseph and they have had the same experience; and now there are many people who honor him and keep discovering the truth of what I have told them.

I strove to celebrate his feast day [March 19] with all possible solemnity, but I must admit that there was more vanity than true devotion mixed in with the celebration, for I always wanted everything to be done impressively and properly, even though my intentions were good. But it was always a fault of mine that whenever Our Lord gave me the graces to do something good, I added many faults and imperfections with it; whereas when it was a question of doing anything vain, worthless, or bad, I spent much time and effort with it. May Our Lord pardon me!

I wish I could persuade everyone to be devoted to this glorious saint, because long experience has shown me what wonderful blessings he obtains for us from God. Of all those I have known with a true devotion to Saint Joseph, I have never known any who did not advance in virtue, for he assists in a very special way those souls who place themselves under his protection.

For many years now I have always asked favors from him and they were always granted. But if sometimes my petitions had something wrong about them, dear Saint Joseph granted something much better for my own good. Were I a person who had authority to write, I should gladly relate in detail all the favors this dear patron obtained both for me and others; but under obedience I must tell some things briefly, and at length those incidents suggested by my superiors. I only request, for the love of God, that those of you who doubt what I say will prove it for yourselves. And you will see, through experience, how great a blessing it is to commend yourselves to this glorious patriarch, and to be devoted to him. Those persons, especially, who are given to prayer should ever be devoted to him, for I do not know how anyone can think of the Queen of Angels, at the time when she suffered so much on account of the Child Jesus, and not give thanks to Saint Joseph for taking care of them the way he did.

Whoever wants a model to imitate on how to pray, let him take this glorious saint as a guide and he will not lose his way!

God grant that I have not committed any error in speaking as I have....for although I profess to be devoted to him, yet I feel I have always failed in imitating his virtues. But he acted like himself, and showed us his virtues when he enabled me to rise and walk, and to be no more a cripple, And I, by making so bad use of this favor, show what sort of person I am.

The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, sing the Litany of Saint Joseph

Reagan Library Forum with Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Donald Rumsfeld discussed his new memoir, Known and Unknown, at the Reagan Library on Wednesday, March 16. Speaking about 9-11, the former Secretary of Defense stated, "9-11 did not only stop the Department of Defense from transforming, but pushed us even harder." And when asked what one sentence should be used to describe his life, Secretary Rumsfeld replied, "He served."

For more information on the ongoing works of President Reagan's Foundation, please visit http://www.reaganfoundation.org

Lutheran Group Expresses Interest in Ordinariate

From Catholic World News

An American Lutheran group, the Anglo-Lutheran Catholic Church—has expressed a desire to enter an ordinariate established in the US for former Anglicans entering the Catholic Church. 

Leaders of the Lutheran group told Vatican officials of their wish “to undo the mistakes of Father Martin Luther and return to the one, holy, and true Catholic Church.” They were referred by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who is charged with overseeing the establishment of an American ordinariate. 

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• The Lutheran Landslide (National Catholic Register)

Italy at 150

The victory of the Risorgimento seemed a defeat for the papacy. In fact, it led to a rebirth of papal power and, ultimately, the defeat of Communism.

From National Review

By George Weigel

Rome — Italy celebrates the sesquicentennial of its birth as a unified nation today. On March 17, 1861, while Americans were preoccupied with some serious business of their own, the first Italian Parliament met in Turin and declared Rome the capital of unified Italy. That legislative act was given effect nine years later, when Italian troops took advantage of the Franco-Prussian War to enter the rump of the old Papal States.

As the Italians closed in on the city of Peter and Paul, the student body of the Pontifical North American College, the U.S. seminary in Rome, volunteered to a man to take up arms in defense of the pope. Pius IX gently thanked them and wrote back, in his own hand, that he hoped they would be victorious in fighting, not for his territory, but for the truth of Christian faith. Pio Nono ordered his own troops to fire one volley, “for honor’s sake” — to emphasize that Italy was acquiring Rome by force and not consent. And so, after a brief exchange of mis-aimed shots that prefigured Italy’s martial success in the decades to come, the papal forces retired and the Risorgimento, a secularist as well as nationalist affair, had what it wanted: the Eternal City, and the chance to try to reclaim the glory that was Rome in the days of empire. Fifty-nine years later, in the 1929 Lateran Treaty, the papacy regained a smidgeon of sovereign territory: today’s Vatican City and some extraterritorial properties like the papal summer villa at Castel Gandolfo.

Trump Doubts Obama's Birth Place

From The Patriot Update

Donald Trump, the business mogul who continues to claim he is seriously interested in mounting a bid for the White House, says he has doubts about whether President Obama was born in the United States.

In an interview with ABC, Trump said he finds it strange “nobody knew” Obama as a young child in Hawaii.

“Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country. The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew him,” Trump said in the interview that aired Thursday.

“If I got the nomination, if I decide to run, you may go back and interview people from my kindergarten. They’ll remember me. Nobody comes forward. Nobody knows who he is until later in his life. It’s very strange,” the Celebrity Apprentice host added. “The whole thing is very strange.”