Venerable Fulton J. Sheen on the Meaning of Suffering

A Tale of Two Colleges

From The American Spectator

By  Michael Cook
 

Once in love with Karl Marx…

Frederick Douglass

Springtime has arrived, and many thousands of high school seniors, along with their parents, are preparing to confront a momentous decision: where to go to college. For months they have studied marketing brochures and consulted ranking schemes. Some have taken the trouble to visit schools and meet with admissions counselors.

But these budding collegians will discover that it isn’t always easy to differentiate among schools. The colleges that emphasize vocational courses of study — such as nursing or engineering or accountancy, for example — will tout job placement statistics. Liberal arts colleges, on the other hand, will offer bland assurances that their students will learn to think critically — without specifying what it is that their students should learn to think critically about. At today’s liberal arts colleges, subject matter doesn’t seem to matter much at all. The consensus as to what is required to become an educated citizen, and a potential leader, has broken down.

On occasion, however, a college will reveal what it deems truly worthy of attention, either by commemorating an historical event, or by celebrating the life and work of an important individual.

This is a tale of two such colleges, each of which has chosen, this school year, to mark the bicentennial of the birth of an influential figure. One is celebrating the life of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). The other has decided to honor Karl Marx (1818-1883).

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University is named for two titans of American business, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie and the financier Andrew Mellon. CMU is deservedly renowned for its focus on technical training, and the school is enjoying a prosperous moment in its history. It enrolls about 6,000 undergraduates, and a significant percentage of these are international students, whose affluent parents are willing to pay CMU’s full sticker price, which currently amounts to approximately $70,000 per year.

It was Andrew Carnegie’s intention that the school (known until 1968 as Carnegie Tech) should provide a practical education, and this mission has shielded CMU from much of the criticism leveled at higher education in America today. The supposed impracticality of the liberal arts isn’t an issue at a school where students are for the most part training to become engineers and research scientists and corporate managers.

Now, fifty years after the merger of Carnegie Tech and the Mellon Institute, the school continues to attract the patronage of practical men of business. In 2011, the steel executive and philanthropist William S. Dietrich II gave $265 million to CMU. And the grandest building on campus, now nearing completion, will house the David A. Tepper School of Business. Tepper, the billionaire hedge fund manager, is one of CMU’s most generous benefactors.

Situated some 300 miles west of Pittsburgh, in the farming country of south central Michigan, is a much smaller institution with decidedly more humble origins. Hillsdale College, founded in 1844 by abolitionists, identified its mission as offering “all persons, irrespective of nationality, color or sex… a literary and scientific education.” The men who established the college found inspiration in the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence. The preamble to Hillsdale’s Articles of Association cites “the inestimable blessings resulting from the prevalence of civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land.” It goes on to assert “that the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.”

Consistent with its mission, Hillsdale College admitted women and blacks prior to the Civil War. When the war came, some 400 Hillsdale students enlisted in the Union army — a higher proportion of its student body than any other college in the North, excepting the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Sixty Hillsdale students died while fighting for the Union; four received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Hillsdale has remained faithful to its founding mission, and it has also remained thoroughly and fiercely independent. Unlike virtually all of the nominally private colleges and universities in the United States, Hillsdale refuses both direct and indirect government funding, and students may not avail themselves of taxpayer-subsidized loans to help pay their tuition. Not coincidentally, a year at Hillsdale (tuition, room, and board) runs about $37,000 — considerably less than the inflated sticker prices at other leading, private colleges (and probably a pretty fair approximation of the true cost of a year at a private residential college in America today).

Like CMU, Hillsdale is experiencing a relatively prosperous moment in its history — but for different reasons. The college enrolls 1,450 undergraduates, compared to 1,000 twenty years ago. The school is oversubscribed, and many more young men and women than the school can accommodate wish to enroll there. Hillsdale has attracted a very large and very loyal group of private donors, and the school distinguishes itself by providing its students with something that has largely vanished from the landscape of American higher education: an authentic, traditional liberal arts curriculum.

It will come as no surprise, then, that Hillsdale College has chosen to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Douglass. Born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, Douglass fled north to freedom in 1838. Eventually, he became a celebrated orator, and a leading figure in the abolition movement. He embraced, as did the founders of Hillsdale College, the revolutionary principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal. All men are endowed, by operation of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, with certain unalienable rights, including liberty.

During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass became friendly with, and an informal advisor to, President Abraham Lincoln. Douglass also became a friend of Hillsdale College. He was twice an honored guest of the college. His first visit took place in January 1863, a few weeks after the final issuance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. On that occasion, Douglass delivered an address entitled “Popular Error and Unpopular Truth.”

It is rather more surprising — indeed it is jarring — to learn that Carnegie Mellon University, a school established and sustained to this day by exemplars of American capitalism, would choose to mount a year-long celebration of the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. This celebration, denominated “Marx@200,” takes the form of a series of lectures and symposia, sponsored (ironically enough) by the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The faculty organizers of Marx@200 believe that Karl Marx “has gotten a bad rap.” He was, they claim, a “great man” with an “incredibly optimistic vision.” Marx “is best understood as a liberal” who valued and promoted “individualism.” “What motivates Marx is freedom.”

These remarks reflect a very curious and disturbing appraisal of the father of communism — a political ideology that has never been implemented anywhere except at the point of a bayonet. Murderous Marxist regimes, operating in such places as Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Fidel’s Cuba, are responsible during the twentieth century for snuffing out the lives of 100 million human beings. This is scarcely the fruit of an “optimistic vision.” The organizers of the Marx@200 festivities may hold professorial appointments, but even folks without doctorates know enough to know that collectivism is not the same thing as “individualism” and that repression is not the functional equivalent of “freedom.”

Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave, managed to acquire during his lifetime a much sounder grasp of human nature than did the formally educated Karl Marx. And it would be nice to think that Douglass’ conception of human nature is the one that prevails at our institutions of higher learning. After all, is it not the aim of the liberal arts to provide the young with insights into the human condition, and an understanding of what it means to be a human being?

Tragically, the traditional liberal arts curriculum has been dismantled and largely repudiated by those now in charge of American higher education — to the point where what currently masquerades as the liberal arts is widely and roundly ridiculed as worthless by those not in charge of our colleges and universities.

The professors at CMU who put together the Marx@200 celebration are by no means atypical. Marxism, or cultural Marxism, or neo-Marxism, informs much of what is taught in English and history and economics departments throughout American higher education. The classical liberal arts curriculum that is taught at Hillsdale College (and which was taught nearly everywhere until the 1960s) has become very rare, and all the more precious for that reason.

CMU will likely survive any embarrassment that its ill-considered Marxathon may engender. At CMU, a school that emphasizes practical education, the humanities and social sciences occupy a rather lonely outpost within overall structure of the university. Still, one is tempted to wonder whether CMU’s trustees and administrative officers are supportive, or even aware, of the Marx@200 activities now underway in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. 

May 1^st is a big day on the communist calendar. It is also a big day in the lives of high school seniors, because it is the deadline by which they must declare which colleges they will attend. During the coming weeks, students will make final visits to the schools where they’ve gained admission, in an attempt to narrow down their choices. Those that visit the Hillsdale campus will encounter a newly erected bronze statue of Frederick Douglass, along with statues of the other statesmen that populate Hillsdale’s Freedom Walk: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill, Thatcher, and Reagan. They will also find, at the front entrance of campus, a bronze statue of a Union soldier, installed in 1895 to honor the sixty students who never returned.

Students who visit the Carnegie Mellon campus will not, as of this writing, encounter a statue of Karl Marx. Then, again, neither will they encounter statues of Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon.

Michael Cook is a businessman and attorney (non-practicing). He lives in Pittsburgh, a short walk from the Carnegie Mellon campus.

Jacob Rees-Mogg: I try to Say the Rosary Every Day

From The Catholic Herald (UK)

The Catholic MP also spoke of his love of the Old Rite Mass

Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has said he tries to say the rosary daily and also praised the Tridentine Mass in an interview for a political website.

In a wide-ranging discussion on his faith with the website ConservativeHome, Rees-Mogg that although he tries to keep his Catholic faith a private matter, he feels obliged to answer honestly when people ask him about it.

“I don’t aim to ‘do God’,” he said, but “I get asked questions that relate to my faith and I answer the questions that I am asked.

“I don’t see my role as being a proselytising role or a theological role or a teaching role, but I think one has to admit and bear witness to what one believes.”

He said that he has never had any real doubts about the faith, nor wondered whether it was all true. “I’ve always believed it, even though as a child I did not enjoy going to church,” he said.

The MP also confirmed that he did not have a Tridentine Mass at his wedding, despite repeated claims, but instead had a Novus Ordo Mass in Latin. He explained that the celebrant thought that people unfamiliar with going to church would start chatting during the long periods of silence.

“I do go to the Tridentine Rite when it is available near me in Somerset,” he said, however he does not go out of his way to look for an Old Rite Mass. “The New Rite is in all senses valid, it is not a lesser rite, it is not a subsidiary rite,” he added.

Nonetheless, the Old Rite still has a particular appeal. “I think it is richer, the texts are fuller – a lot has been taken out for the New Rite – it focuses more centrally on the Eucharist, rather than on the other parts of the Mass which in my view are less central, and it is more thoughtful – there is more silence.”

In terms of his own prayer life, Rees-Mogg said that he tries to pray the rosary every day, although not the “full 200 Hail Marys”.

The Catholic politician faced a media storm last summer when, in an interview, he stated his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. However, Rees-Mogg said that as a backbencher he has little say over such issues.

“The issue is whether you would try and make it party policy, not whether you would vote one way or another as a matter of conscience.” He explained that many parliamentary votes depend on what the party leadership says, rather than individual MPs.

“I think what people are worried about is that somebody who is Catholic might influence the party bosses to make them insist that their religious view became a whipped vote. I am very clear that I would not seek to do [that], I think that is a matter for people’s consciences.”

“There is clearly in parliament no majority for my views on life,” he added, “but as an individual MP I would vote in favour of life.”

Churchill: The Forgotten Years, 1945-65

A superb documentary covering the last two decades of Winston Churchill's extraordinary life. It focuses on his astonishing defeat in the 1945 election, his political recovery at Fulton, Missouri, and then his political victory in 1951 when he again became Prime Minister. Presented by the ever-excellent Professor David Reynolds, it is first-class material for students of the man and the period.

 

 

 

Father Rutler: God's Perfect Consistency

Ralph Waldo Emerson had moments more perceptive than his vague religiosity: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” He spoke not of consistency itself, but of a “foolish” consistency. As True God and True Man, Christ was perfectly consistent, but from the platform of a fallen world, that consistency could seem inconsistent.
 

Consider how reluctant he was to let his divinity be known. He spoke of it cryptically in the synagogue at Nazareth, but insinuated enough to enrage his neighbors. Then he went into hiding. When he healed the leprous and blind, he ordered them sternly to tell no one. When he cured the paralytic at the Siloam Pool, he slipped into the shadows of the Temple like a fugitive. And he sternly ordered Peter and James and John not to reveal what they had seen on the mountain.
 

Was it inconsistent then that he made a spectacle of himself when he entered Jerusalem? It was a flagrant publicity stunt, encouraging the cheers of children who enjoyed a good show: with a theatrical entrance foolish enough for some to mock him with a crown of thorns, and shocking enough for others to cut his nerves with nails on a cross. If he was so reticent, why did he suddenly burst into the city in a way that seemed to some like a circus come to town, and to others like an anarchist about to blow everything up?
 

God is not inconsistent to those who listen carefully: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). With a consistency more perfect than human consistency, because it is from outside time, the hour of which he spoke at the Wedding in Cana had come, and the only clock that could measure it was his Love. His human will dreaded that hour, but his divine will embraced it, and in that valiant act, the selfish pride that brought sin and death in the world was confused, confounded, and ultimately washed away in blood.
 

Jesus said that if the children singing to him were silenced, “the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:4). Here in our neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, the great glass skyscrapers now rising all around may seem indifferent, but the energy and skill that are building them cry out in testimony to God who
gave life and intelligence. Dante read over the gates of Hell: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate—“Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” By entering the gates of Jerusalem, Christ opened the gates of Heaven where hope is fulfilled. That is God’s perfect consistency. “Lift up your heads, O gates! And belifted up, O ancient doors! That the King of glory may come in” (Psalm 24:7).

Faithfully Yours in Christ,

Fr. George W. Rutler

My Letter to the Bishop of Charleston

Today on the Feast of Saint Joseph, Patron of the Church, I sent the following letter to the Bishop of Charleston.  The linked "Open Appeal to the Catholic Bishops of the World" is self-explanatory and involves what I believe to be one of the greatest crises ever to confront Christendom.  I hope you will consider contacting your own bishop and forwarding this appeal.  Contact information for bishops is usually found on the diocesan website.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Your Excellency:

Catholic World Report has recently published "An Open Appeal to the Catholic Bishops of the World" which I would respectfully recommend to you.  It is an urgent appeal to avert a spiritual crisis which has been foisted on the Church by corruption and heresy emanating from the very top.  The letter contains four specific recommendations as to how our spiritual shepherds can preserve and promote the Christian deposit of faith.  I prayerfully hope that you will consider acting on these recommendations.

The heretical teachings being promoted under a "new paradigm" are as old as the devil who inspires them and we have already seen the ruin they have brought to the Anglican communion.  I assure you of my prayers and eagerness to help in any way you may see fit in preserving the teachings of our Church, handed down to us by the Apostles.

Very respectfully yours in Christ,

Daniel J. Cassidy
A parishioner of St. Peter's Church, Columbia

Father Rutler: A Fact More Fabulous Than a Fable

There are those of us who remember how as schoolboys, the clever use of rhythmic dactyls in Virgil's metrical Latin verses made unforgettable the sound of horses galloping. And one of my schoolmates gained fleeting fame when our French teacher announced that, as our classmate was recovering from an appendectomy, the first words he whispered as he came out of the anesthesia were from a line in LaFontaine's fable about the Crow and the Fox: "Maître Corbeau sur un arbre perché . . ."
 

Fables have always been entertaining ways to teach children to remember moral wisdom. LaFontaine in the late 17th century drew on stories of Aesop, a Greek slave in the fifth century before Christ. Many of those fables in the Aesopica were adopted along the way in Welsh (Chwedlau Odo—“Odo’s Tales”), Middle Low German, and even Middle Scots. Moral truths have no national borders or chronological barriers. Everyone in any place can learn a lesson from Aesop’s fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, in which the tortoise defies all odds and wins the race because the hare was so smug that it took a nap.
 

The parables of our Lord are different from fables, for they are about people, while fables make animals talk. Fables enliven moral consciences while Christ’s parables make moral points but also direct attention to eternal realities. When our Lord says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like . . .” he describes a heavenly reality, and not a fantasy.
 

Commissioned as an apostle of the Good News, Saint Paul wrote: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way as to take the prize. Everyone who competes in the games trains with strict discipline. They do it for a crown that is perishable, but we do it for a crown that is imperishable” (1 Corinthians 9:24-25). This race is not a fable about tortoises and hares. Those are illusions, but Paul’s race is an allusion. He is speaking of real people in Corinth, where the Isthmian Games took place before and after the Olympic Games, and whose winner received a crown of wild celery instead of the Olympic olive leaf. And celery leaves fade fast.
 

Lent is a microcosm of life in its entirety, with all its trials. When Saint Paul speaks of discipline, he employs a Greek word used for wrestling and any struggle for victory—agonia, from which we get agony. The Anti-Christ wants us to surrender the race and tries to persuade us that life is nothing but agony without a prize. His plot is to discourage, while Christ’s Holy Church is constantly encouraging, through the Sacraments and the heavenly cheerleaders called saints and angels. Saint John Vianney was convinced of a fact more fabulous than a fable: “Not all the saints started well, but all of them ended well.”