Father Rutler: The Russian Revolution

Fr. George Rutler Celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 was awkward and unlike our nation’s festivities of 1976, because the American Revolution did not have a Reign of Terror. The Russian people are in a situation even more perplexing when it comes to the one-hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7. (The dating confusion is because Russia was still on the old Julian calendar in 1917.) The Russian Revolution unleashed the horrors of Communism that led to the deaths of at least 94 million people in various countries, by genocide, execution, purges and famines caused by collectivization.  History is not ardently pursued in our schools these days, and when it is modified as Social Science, it often distorts historical reality. In a survey of youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, twenty-eight per cent had never heard of Lenin, and fully half had never heard of Stalin, while nearly two-thirds were unaware of the existence of history’s worst mass murderer (65 million deaths), Mao Tse-Tung. The death of Fidel Castro was marked by many media commentators as something to be mourned, and Che Guevara appears on t-shirts as a chic hero. In countries at least nominally Christian, the assaults on the Church by revolutionaries took a more subtle form through subversion. There is the witness of Bella Dodd, an organizer of the Communist Party in the United States and head of the New York State Teachers Union. After her return to the Church in 1952 under the guidance of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, she detailed how the Communist Party in the 1920’s and 1930’s strove to infiltrate American seminaries and other church institutions, often through the exploitation of the naïve and what, according to Soviet expert Vladimir Bukovsky, Lenin had called “useful idiots.” There still are Russians old enough to remember seeing priests nailed to the doors of their churches. Their nation remains conflicted about their revolution, and still hesitant about what to do with the repeatedly embalmed corpse of Lenin; but facing his tomb from across the great square, Krásnaya plóshchad, is the Kazan Cathedral, restored in 1993. On its façade is written in bold Cyrillic letters: “Christ is Risen.” Since the “Second Baptism of Russia” when the old Soviet Union fell in 1988, 29,000 churches have been built there, at the rate of three per day. In that period the number of seminaries has increased from three to over fifty. That is a picture far different from many places in the West, where innocuous Christianity has failed to resist the bacillus of secularism, as churches close and seminaries shrink. People who have suffered the consequences of evil in the East have expressions more ponderous and sober than the chuckling countenances of soft spokesmen for Christ in the West. The centenary of the Russian Revolution should be a time for reflection and resolve.

Barbara Bonney - "Pie Jesu" - Gabriel Fauré

Ex-Bishops’ Doctrine Chief Says Darkness Coming to Light Under Francis

Capuchin Father Thomas Weinandy, a former chief of staff for the U.S. Bishops' Committee on Doctrine and a current member of the Vatican's International Theological Commission, has written Pope Francis to say the pontiff is causing "chronic confusion," appointing bishops who "scandalize" the faithful, and prompting ordinary Catholics to "lose confidence in their supreme shepherd."

A former chief of staff for the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, and a current member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission, has written Pope Francis to say that his pontificate “has given those who hold harmful theological and pastoral views the license and confidence to come into the light and expose their previously hidden darkness,” which, one day, will have to be corrected.

While expressing loyalty to Francis as the “Vicar of Christ on earth, the shepherd of his flock,” Capuchin Father Thomas Weinandy nevertheless charges that the pope is:

• Fostering “chronic confusion.”
• “Demeaning” the importance of doctrine.
• Appointing bishops who “scandalize” believers with dubious “teaching and pastoral practice.”
• Giving prelates who object the impression they’ll be “marginalized or worse” if they speak out.
• Causing faithful Catholics to “lose confidence in their supreme shepherd.”

“In recognizing this darkness, the Church will humbly need to renew itself, and so continue to grow in holiness,” Weinandy wrote in the letter, which is dated July 31, the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the pope’s Jesuit order.

Read more at Crux >> 

 

 

The Solemnity of All Saints - "For All the Saints" - Choir of King's College, Cambridge

A recording of the great Vaughan Williams tune (SINE NOMINE) by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge.

Father Rutler: The Working Man

Fr. George Rutler

The Roman magistrate Appius Claudius Caecus, who died in 273 B.C., accomplished much despite physical infirmities: “caecus” means blind. His greatest monuments were Rome’s first aqueduct (Aqua Appia) and first highway (Via Appia), which is still in use today. He was also a literary man, who wrote of the working man (homo faber) and gave moral significance to the human ability to build: “Every man is the architect of his own fortune.”
 

In his youth Saint John Paul II had been a factory worker in a chemical plant, virtually a slave laborer under the Nazis, an experience that gave poignancy to his encyclical on work, Laborem Exercens, written in 1981: “ ‘In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread’ (Genesis 3:19). These words refer to the sometimes heavy toil that from [Eden] onwards has accompanied human work . . . And yet, in spite of all this toil—perhaps, in a sense, because of it—work is a good thing for man. . . . through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being.’ ”
 

Made in the image of God, human beings do not merely toil, for they can use their imagination and reason to design and create. New York City is a virtual hymn to that ability, symbolized by the Empire State Building right up the street from our church. Despite the Depression and lack of the advanced power tools we have today, it took only 410 days to finish in 1931; in one spurt, fourteen floors went up in ten days. Thousands of workers, including Mohawks who have a talent for managing heights, completed it for $41 million, $19 million less than estimated. Hard hats were not used in those days, yet remarkably only five workers were killed—five too many, but still a tribute to skill and caution.
 

Our church is now in the heart of the largest building development in our nation’s history. Sixteen skyscrapers are rising in this Hudson Yards project, one taller than the Empire State Building. It will bring 12,700,000 square feet of office, residential and retail space, and an estimated 65,000 visitors daily. The sacrifices involved to build this cannot be overstated. In recent days three young workers were killed, and hundreds of devout laborers asked me to gather with them in the midst of the steel girders and concrete to lead them with prayers and Holy Water, for their work is more than mere toil.
 

Our Lord, who was a carpenter, certainly challenges all of us to do his work in this gigantic new chance to let his light shine. With all this engineering and commercial display, “homo faber” can only know himself rightly by knowing that he is a helper of God the Creator. “Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it” (Psalm 127:1).

‘Darkest Hour’ Gets Endorsed by Churchill Family and Experts

“Darkest Hour” is getting some key endorsements as it revs up its awards season campaign.

The historical drama about Winston Churchill’s efforts to rally the British people in the bleakest days of World War II has been embraced by members of the prime minister’s family and by Churchill experts. They believe that the film, with a few dramatic embellishments, is a good faith effort to capture a vital period in Churchill’s prime ministership — a time when he was being pressured to sign a peace agreement with Adolf Hitler and did not yet have the popular and political support he needed to wage the war.

“My take is overwhelmingly positive,” said Michael Bishop, executive director of the International Churchill Society and the director of the National Churchill Library at George Washington University. “It’s a great opportunity to spark renewed interest in Churchill.”

Read more at Variety >> 

Father Rutler: The Death Penalty Belongs to the Just Domain of the Government

Father George Rutler

“Use your brain” is a maxim often heard, but often resented. Such was the case when our Lord confronted professional debaters. At the age of twelve his rhetorical skill astonished the rabbis, who presumably thought that he was just a child prodigy. But later on, the legal experts were not amused when he challenged their logical fallacies; yet he came into the world to win souls and not to win debates. Those experts did not think their souls needed saving, so they cynically used syllogisms to “entrap him in speech” (Matthew 22:15). They posed a trick question about paying taxes, to which Christ responded that they should use their brains: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21).
 

Using the brain to figure out things of Caesar and of God does not easily answer the question, but it does establish some solid principles. Take for instance the neuralgic challenges to capital punishment. Well-used brains have understood that the death penalty belongs to the just domain of the government. The Catechism affirms this (CCC #2267).
 

This principle belongs to natural law, which in classical philosophy, is “. . . the universal, practical obligatory judgments of reason, knowable by all men as binding them to do good and avoid evil.” Saint Paul appealed to natural law: “Ever since the creation of the world, [God’s] invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Romans 1:20).
 

Governments exist to maintain “the tranquility of order.” When popes governed the Papal States, they measured out punishments including death. One papal executioner, Giovanni Battista Bugatti, served six popes, including Blessed Pius IX, and personally executed 516 felons.
 

That was the civil side of ruling; the spiritual side did everything possible to bring the guilty to confession and a state of grace before meeting God, because happiness is the realization of the purpose of life and is not mere pleasure; and unhappiness is the contradiction of that purpose, and not mere pain. Without that perspective, the death penalty seems an arrogant violation of life, and that is why today opposition to the death penalty increases as religious faith decreases. That dangerous alchemy substitutes emotion for truth and platitudes for reason. Such lax use of the brain is to theology what Barney the Dinosaur is to paleontology. 

Two professors, Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette, have published an excellent book: By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed. Such right use of the brain explains that abuses of punishment are intolerable, and the application of mercy is a permissible use of prudential opinion. But to posit the death penalty as intrinsically evil contradicts laws natural and divine, and no authorities, be they of the State or the Church, have the right to deny what is right by asserting that.