Catholicae Testudines

Halloween party

You're going to a Halloween party in College Park.  What kind of a party is it? 

Is it...?
A.  A party where everyone dresses either as a whore, pimp, slut, or very unchaste version of something, or perhaps as a suggestively dressed member of the opposite sex

B. A nice, innocent party where everyone dresses as something "normal" like a clown, or a vampire or werewolf, or Strong Bad or

C. A party where everyone dresses as their favorite saint

I imagine that A. is rather common round these parts, at least judging from the costumes of people I saw on the Metro last year when I was going to the Dominicans' All Saints Day vigil (which this year is at 7:30 on Monday at the D-House).  Also from a Washington Post article which seemed to take it for granted that the norm for costumes would be, as they put it, "as skanky as humanly possible" (ugh).

There will be some of B.  Some of my friends went to one.  I'm not against Halloween parties or anything, but they involve getting a costume, and I wasn't prepared to put that much effort into it.

Not having been exposed that much to Catholic culture growing up, I never realized that observant Catholics of older generations seem so strongly divided on C.  Either they think they're the only way to go, or they think they're really lame because they make you look like a dorky and uptight Halloween party-pooper who thinks regular Halloween costumes are like celebrating the Devil or something.  Some of my friends had a B.-type last year but this year they thought it would be really fun to do C.  I didn't go, but I think it's really neat that when my friends get a night where they can set aside cultural norms of how you should dress and act, they take the opportunity to dress as their favorite saints. Anyway, Pat points out that the point of Halloween costumes was ostensibly to scare away evil spirits, and besides God Himself, what is scarier to them than the saints?

P.S. I hear someone had a really gruesome St. Sebastian costume.

Happy Halloween

Flash Pumpkin carving sim.

Still good even though two years old.

Misplaced priorities

A friend of mine was telling me about a time when a priest told him about a tv news documentary program he watched once (20/20 maybe).  There were two segments in the show.  The first was about some exorcisms performed by a Catholic priest, and the second was about the debauchery of teenagers on vacation in the Caribbean.

On the show, people were very frightened by the events connected with the first (which is only natural) but they treated the events of the second as nothing more than a rite of passage.  The priest observed that while demons can be scary, being possessed does not cause one to go to hell, while sinning and being impenitent does.  So which one should they have been more worried about?

Meanings

Suppose I went around telling people that God is awful and terrible, and that the infant Jesus and the Virgin Mary are very silly.  What if in addition, I vigorously attacked people who disputed my assertions?

Would this hurt or help the spread of the authentic faith? 

What if you found out that the reason I said these things was that I learned English from people who isolated themselves intellectually in a world where 14th century (or so) English literature was the standard by which all English usage was judged, and as a result, to me, to say that something is "awful" means that it fills one with awe, "terrible" means formidable or redoubtable, and "silly" means "holy" and "good."  When you tried to remonstrate with me, explaining that I may be consistent and ok inside but by insisting on using those expressions now the way they were understood then I was isolating myself intellectually, depriving myself of the means to understand everyone else and confusing people whenever I spoke, I said, away with your sophistry! back in the day, people knew that God was awful and Mary was silly, and I wouldn't allow anyone to say the opposite.

What would you do next?

Location, location, location?

Catholic parishes are typically named for a saint or one of the holy mysteries of the faith.  So perhaps it seems especially odd to me to see a strange place name in a church name.  Like today, I saw "Savage Methodist Church," which I guess is in Savage, Maryland.  I tried different combinations like "Savage Catholic Church" or "Savage Baptist Church."  In Rome, New York I remember seeing a "Presbyterian Church of Rome" or "Roman Presbyterian Church" or something like that.

What other cities or towns can you think of that would result in an odd or amusing church name?

Not

St. Jude Thaddeus, who was called "Judas not the Iscariot" in Scripture, must be in some way a patron of people nicknamed negatively in reference to a more notorious person with the same name.  Like our friend Pat Not Lewis.

Documents

Since they came up in a recent post, here are links to Pope St. Pius X's Lamentabili Sane and Pascendi.  The latter is a bit long for a blog link, but the first is short and sweet.  If you don't read the latter (or if you do), you may find apologist Jimmy Akin's short piece on it helpful, especially his summary of erroneous tenets generally held by historical modernists:

(1) God cannot be known and proved to exist by natural reason; (2) external signs of revelation, such as miracles and prophecies, do notprove the divine origin of the Christian religion and are not suited
to the intellect of modern man; (3) Christ did not found a Church; (4) and the essential structure of the Church can change; (5) the Church's dogmas continually evolve over time so that they can change
from meaning one thing to meaning another; (6) faith is a blind religious feeling that wells up from the subconscious under the impulse of a heart and a will trained to morality, not a real assent
of the intellect to divine truth learned by hearing it from an external source.

I wasn't making this up or being paranoid when I talked of Modernism's continuing pernicious influence, or the influence of its leftovers, especially on people who don't know any better.  I remember being taught some of the propositions from Lamentabili in CCD - and not as errors either!  Fortunately, they didn't seem kosher then, and my suspicions were confirmed by further reading.  Did my teacher set out to poison our brains with Modernist doctrine?  I imagine not; I rather expect that she wanted to do a good job teaching us, so she rather innocently looked up what the latest Bible scholars had to say, and they sounded wise, so she wanted to agree with them and be wise herself.

Making a case for not liking CASE; and the heresy of Modernism

I must say that based on the literature they hand out, I have recently lost what little respect I had for the "Catholic Association of Scientists and Engineers, Fatima Chapter," a group whose flyers I encounter from time to time, but with whom I have had no actual contact.

The first flyer of theirs I saw invited me to a talk on the place of extraterrestrials in Catholic theology.  Not an idle question, especially for science types, though as yet there is no practical urgency.  St. Thomas Aquinas treated the question in his Summa.  Pity it seemed so sensationalistic, though.  The next one, however, invited me to a talk on cold fusion and why Pons and Fleischman were right.  To regard cold fusion with anything other than a great deal of skepticism caused me to regard them with as much skepticism as I regard cold fusion, and to laud two scientists notorious for their lack of scientific integrity lowered the association in my estimation to about the level of Pons and Fleischman themselves. 

The final straw, though, was the latest flyer I encountered.  This one cordially invited me to a talk on the heresy of Modernism, which sounds good enough, seeing as how if you know me, you know that (though it's been a little while since I've had a post that goes off on it) I have a special hatred for the Modernist heresy, and regard it as still dangerous especially since many people who may be tempted by it are not on aware of it so as to be on guard against it.

However...

neither is it innocuous to sit in judgment upon a validly constituted Ecumenical Council, such as the Second Vatican Council, which is what CASE seems to have done.  The flyer claims that Pope Benedict (as Cardinal Ratzinger) denounced the Council as inherently Modernist, directly opposed to the proclamations of Popes Pius IX and X (perhaps I will look up the statement they refer to; I am sure that it is taken out of context - if he really thought what they said, there would be a lot more changes going on now that he's pope).  According to the flyer the speaker (and I quote) 'suggests that this acknowledgement [of Card. Ratzinger's] points to the Great Moral Flaw in both the letter and the "spirit" of Vatican II.' Had they just stuck to saying the "spirit," I might have been able to give them the benefit of the doubt because with scare quotes in place they might have been talking about the "spirit" of the Council falsely so-called that so many people invoke in order to justify their unwise personal agendas.

This is not what they did.  Worse for them, I did some research on the speaker, Dr. Raymond Marcin (a professor at CUA) since his credentials looked so good I wondered if he was really a schismatic or heretic.  So I found his article "The Oath Against Modernism and the Spirit of Vatican II." (Catholic Family News 7 (2000): 24) that was listed in the previous link to see if it said anything about a "Great Moral Flaw in the letter and 'spirit'."  Now, I was not at the talk, but based on the article this phrase seems to have been an interpretation.  The article is preserved on a few websites that presume that it argues that the Council formally taught error.  Here is one, if you would like to look at the article. It seems to me rather that although he does say "It is, of course[!], an open question as to whether all the documents of Vatican II can be interpreted consistently with Saint Pius X’s condemnations of modernist thinking within the Church", he rather takes Cardinal Ratzinger to task for a possibly imprudent statement and decides upon the following:

It may be that the participants in Vatican II who approved the documents in question saw no conflict at all between, on the one hand, what they were approving and, on the other hand, the prescriptions of the Oath Against Modernism which they had taken. But the implications here are almost as startling.

Only startling to someone who is in the habit of thinking of the Council as pro-Modernism, but maybe he is writing in order to convince people who think this way.

If nothing contrary to the prescriptions in the Oath Against Modernism was intended by the Council participants – and that is, of course, what one would like to believe – then all the Council documents must be interpreted with that fact in mind. In other words, none of the documents of Vatican II can rightly be interpreted as in any way inconsistent with Saint Pius X’s condemnations of Modernist thinking within the Church.

The point here is that any attempts at understanding the "spirit" of Vatican II and any interpretations of its documents must take into account the fact that every Vatican II Father was, at the time he approved those documents, under the prescriptions of the Oath Against Modernism, and presumably intended not to violate that oath.

So, it comes down to a question of, "whose interpretation of a particular text is the correct one?"  For any given text this is generally a hotly contested issue, since the meaning of words depends on the agreement of men (take this one up with St. Augustine if you cavil at that), and there is often no clear reason to prefer one man's authority to another.  However, when it comes to the Sacred Scriptures and the definitive doctrinal or moral statements issued by the Church, the correct interpretation is the interpretation proposed by the Catholic Church, and you are wrong if you insist on an interpretation contrary to it, because in such cases the Church does not function as just any interpretative community, but a privileged one due to the authority conferred on her in these matters by God.

The interesting thing is, if you choose to argue, and insist that, for instance, the documents of Vatican II or the Syllabus of Pope Pius X mean what you say they mean rather than what the Church says they mean, then you are as bad as a Modernist...and may even be one yourself.

Complaining

If you've ever been to a Maryland football game you know that we have (not to brag or anything) a really excellent marching band.  As you may guess, this takes a lot of practice and discipline, to which you must voluntarily submit yourself, as no one is forcing you either to sign up or remain in the band.  As you might also guess, there is a little complaining that goes on from time to time, like when we have to keep practicing even though it's forty degrees out and raining.

Can you imagine though, what would happen if Dr. Sparks allowed grumbles of "it's too long" and "it's too hard" to move him to shorten rehearsals and tolerate sloppiness, laxity, and error?  Instead of an excellent show each home game, and great fellowship and camaraderie, and the satisfaction that goes with an excellent performance, there'd be poor performance, strife and blame-casting, and disappointment that would last even after we drifted away from the band - the opposite of what even the people doing the complaining really want.

Brideshead Pre-visited

I haven't read that many Gothic or Victorian novels, so it was a new thing to me to hear that in such stories, the house is considered a character as much or more than the people.  No doubt Waugh was thinking of this as he wrote: think (If you've read it) not only of how the Brideshead mansion itself ties the story together, but how Charles is so preoccupied with architecture, and the description of the setting at various times.