It's hard to believe the leader of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics is this childish in his thinking, but he is

He no doubt thinks that's a virtue, too. If we ban all weapons the only thing we'll have to fear is large men who kill with their bare hands.

In souls prepared . . .

In souls prepar'd, the passage is a breath

From time t'eternity, from life to death.

-- Walter Harte (1709-1774)

Virtue as mastery over the self

Virtus holding olive branch and spear, shield at his side

Fearless he sees, who is with virtue crown'd,

The tempest rage, and hears the thunder sound;

Ever the same, let fortune smile or frown.

Serenely as he liv'd resigns his breath;

Meets destiny half-way, nor shrinks at death.

-- George Granville (1666-1735)

Maybe the barbarism of Spain in the New World had something to do with its 800-year experience of Islam before Columbus

From "Islamic Spain in Middle Ages no paradise for Christians, Jews, women" by Paul Monk here:

The real thrust of Fernandez-Morera’s critique of the myth of Andalusia is that Islam in Spain, far from setting a high bar of tolerance, was characterised by plunder, domination, the harsh application of sharia law, the persecution of Christians or Jews who openly avowed their non-Muslim beliefs, and the violent suppression of ‘‘heresies’’ and apostasy within the Muslim community. ... There is no Andalusian golden age of Islam to emulate.

Bioarchaeologist blames mass child sacrifice by Chimú "civilization" in Peru in AD 1468 on the weather

And don't forget boys and girls, the real villain in the new world was the European, beginning with Christopher Columbus not three decades later, according to the author of your kid's high school history book, Howard Zinn:

How certain are we that what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew, who watched Cortes and Pizarro ride through their countryside? What did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutality visited on the Indians of the Americas? 

From the story here in National Geographic:

The layer of mud found during excavations may provide a clue, say the researchers, who suggest it was the result of severe rain and flooding on the generally arid coastline, and probably associated with a climate event related to El-Niño. ...

Haagen Klaus, a professor of anthropology at George Mason University, has excavated some of the earliest evidence for child sacrifice in the region, at the 10th- to 12th-century site of Cerro Cerillos in the Lambayeque Valley, north of Huanchaco. The bioarchaeologist, who is not a member of the Las Llamas project, suggests that societies along the northern Peruvian coast may have turned to the sacrifice of children when the sacrifice of adults wasn't enough to fend off the repeated disruptions wrought by El Niño.

"People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains. "They may have seen that [adult sacrifice] was ineffective. The rains kept coming. Maybe there was a need for a new type of sacrificial victim." 


Meanwhile, "ancient" ain't what it used to be (anything before 476 AD, the fall of the Western Roman Empire), perhaps because the arc of human barbarism keeps interfering with that other one bending toward justice somebody recently immortalized.

The one who gives up praying to God is faithless and is already "from evil"

No English translation of Luke 18:1 adequately captures the sense of μὴ ἐγκακεῖν, "don't be from evil".

Some examples:

"And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;" (KJV)

"Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up." (NIV)

"And he told them a parable, to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart." (RSV)

"Now He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart," (NASB)

"Then Jesus told them a parable to show them they should always pray and not lose heart." (NET).

These failures of translation are not surprising given the thoroughgoing effort to suppress the failed eschatological message of Jesus and reinterpret it from the beginning. As usual, however, Luke remains its rare honest reporter.

The translations suffer from reading into Luke's usage of the term, the only one in the gospels, the usage from Paul, which has already become patently psychological and introspective (e.g. 2 Cor.4:16). Luke's use, however, is plainly eschatological in its context (Luke 17:20ff. through Luke 18:8) and knows nothing of this later "introspective conscience of the West". It focuses on the behavior which springs from the inner man, not on the inner man itself. Yes, Scripture ought to interpret Scripture as the Lutherans insist, but it is Luke who ought to interpret Luke. 

The one who gives up praying to God in Luke is representative of the many faithless at the end of the world, who are literally "from evil" (ἐκ κακός) because they have given up believing in the very idea of justice in the first place. The many are all jaded and don't even bother asking for justice anymore. In fact, to them the seat of justice itself is so unhinged the effort would be doomed from the start. The representatives of justice have become such thoroughgoing individualists and laws unto themselves who do not see themselves as beings in relation to God or even to other men that it would be impossible even to make a case to them. So why even try?

The few who will be saved, however, are like the persistent widow of this narrative. She alone among all her peers has not given up on the idea of a justice which is outside herself and represents the ground of being. No one else but she even bothers to try anymore. No one else but she even believes that a decent case can be made for it. She is ridiculously outnumbered. The capriciousness of unjust justice she faces at the fullness of time, at the end of the world, is shown in that it is moved no longer by principles of God or man but only by its own exhaustion with this harpy. This lone defender of Absolutes wins because she is stronger and more enduring because of the Absolutes, not because of her faith in the Absolutes. She simply knows the strength of her case, and refuses to give it up. She knows it can't be beaten, and that it will win. That Jesus must admonish even his own closest disciples to be like her and not join the many in their backsliding behavior is very telling. His promises of the imminent consummation were beginning to ring hollow even in their ears.

It calls to mind Jesus' instruction to his disciples elsewhere about the paradigmatic discipleship of a widow, who put into the treasury (ὅλον τὸν βίον αὐτῆς) "her whole life" (Mark 12:44/Luke 21:4), perhaps the most important two cents in the history of the West. For whatever else might be said about the failure of the kingdom of God to appear, Christendom yet stands for that same transcendent, unshakeable moral order for which a widow sacrificed everything that she had.

The human capacity for and ubiquity of evil were taken for granted by Jesus. What remains remarkable is that he believed some could repent, and no longer "be bad".

The good news is the bad news: "It is FIRE which I came to throw upon the earth!"

πῦρ ἦλθον βαλεῖν ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν -- Luke 12:49

His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. -- Matthew 3:12

His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. -- Luke 3:17

On success

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.

-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), from the conclusion to Walden

A Catholic joins Pope Francis in misunderstanding "ideology" as single issue voting

One Paul Moses, here in Commonweal:

[Bishop Murphy] thus subordinated many other concerns of Catholic social teaching—and signaled to Catholic voters in the two suburban counties on Long Island to do the same. (Murphy was not available for comment in a phone call to his residence.) It was no small matter, given that Catholics are a majority within the diocese’s borders, that polling shows nearly nine in ten of them say religion is “very important” in their lives, and that many are the sort of moderate suburban voters who swing close elections in New York state.

In his apostolic exhortation Rejoice and be glad, Pope Francis warns against elevating any single social issue, including abortion, above all others. He includes this in a passage that assails two “ideologies striking at the heart of the Gospel.” The first is seen in those who elevate the quest for social justice over faith, over openness to grace. The second is found in those who see social engagement as “superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist,” he wrote. “Or they relativize it, as if there are other more important matters, or the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend.”

Single issue voting is hardly the same thing as "ideology". That is quite simply a terrible simplification of ideology.

What marks out ideological thinking from mere single issue voting is the overarching, undergirding character of an ideology's flight from reality, indeed, its denial of reality, over against those who accept the features of reality which happen to be the impediments to the ideology's realization.

In the case of abortion, the denial of reality is all on the side of its advocates, not its opponents. Its advocates say that the unborn child isn't a child, merely a fetus. And therefore when one terminates a pregnancy one isn't committing murder. To which the opponents reply, If it isn't really alive why do you have to kill it? The hoops one must jump through to deny the evidence plainly in view are self-evident. It's the abortion advocates who are the ideologues, not the advocates for life.

The case is similar with illegal immigration, the real subject of Paul Moses' advocacy. The ideologues deny the reality and legitimacy of nation states, their borders and the rule of law, and redefine the transgressors of same as "migrants" or "strangers" instead of what they really are, "illegals".

One suspects that this attack on single issue voting as ideology is not just another example of the penchant for projection characteristic of human nature when caught in a fault, but of contemporary liberalism generally. Frustrated with an ever intractable reality, the representatives of reality must be marginalized, maligned and disarmed if the liberal agenda is to have any hope of advancement.

Catholics used to be smarter than to fall for this sort of thing.    

Mind your manners

 

 

 

 In simple manners all the secret lies;

Be kind and virtuous, you'll be blest and wise.

-- Edward Young (1683-1765)

The simplest of creeds

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. -- Hebrews 11:6

Some books are more equal than others

The Sickness Unto Death was political before it was existential

To see whole bodies of men breaking a constitution; in short, to be encompassed with the greatest dangers from without, to be torn by many virulent factions within, then to be secure and senseless, are the most likely symptoms, in a state, of sickness unto death.

-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

αὕτη ἡ ἀσθένεια οὐκ ἔστιν πρὸς θάνατον -- John 11:4

True love's inferiors

Αφροδίτη της Μήλου

Love's subalterns, a duteous band,

Like watchmen round their chief appear;

Each had his lanthorn in his hand,

And Venus, mask'd, brought up the rear.

-- Matthew Prior

On the origin of "The West"

"What is Europe?" is an interesting question.

Old it certainly is, and we conservatives tend to think of Europe as the center of everything as a consequence of a long historical development, especially in the wake of the rise of America as the western outpost of "The West" to become the leader of the free world. But from the beginning, obviously, it was not so, but how?

The Greek mythology put the navel of the world, the center, at Delphi, to which east and west came to consult the famous oracle. From this mythology Europe specifically was first associated with the west conceptually from the simple geographic situation of the oracle's position beneath Parnassus to its west, as first expressed in the "Homeric" Hymn to Pythian Apollo, perhaps dating to as early as the 6th century BC:

"Further yet you went, far-shooting Apollo, until you came to the town of the presumptuous Phlegyae who dwell on this earth in a lovely glade near the Cephisian lake, caring not for Zeus. And thence you went speeding swiftly to the mountain ridge, and came to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus, a foothill turned towards the west: a cliff hangs over it from above, and a hollow, rugged glade runs under. There the lord Phoebus Apollo resolved to make his lovely temple, and thus he said:

'In this place I am minded to build a glorious temple to be an oracle for men, and here they will always bring perfect hecatombs, both they who dwell in rich Peloponnesus and the men of Europe and from all the wave-washed isles, coming to question me. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, answering them in my rich temple.'”

And so we "of the west", of Europe, are so because the Greeks originally said so.

The Romans were the first westerners to acknowledge their debt to Greece, and they demonstrated it in so many ways, but chiefly through imitation of Greece's literature and art, the surest form of flattery. Through conquest of Europe they spread that sense of debt to Greece to all the peoples of the continent, and beyond.

That is why we still feel the pull of Europe, despite all the forces arrayed against us seeking to break its spell over us. But the center is really Greece. If we want to be stronger as the people of The West, we ought to take a cue from those old Romans and commit ourselves anew to imitating the best ourselves, just as the great men of the Renaissance did. And one can do it in English, too, simply by immersing oneself in the authors which formed the basis of Johnson's Dictionary, for example. It's what I do everyday, just to anchor myself to the best of the past in order to make the best a part of my too often sorry, vulgar present.

No blemish but the mind

 

 

In nature there's no blemish but the mind;

None can be call'd deform'd, but the unkind.

-- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, Act III, Scene 4

Anthropocentric twaddle on hell from Thomas Reese of the Religion News Service

"God did not create hell; we did. On the other hand, some theologians think that hell is empty because once we meet God, we will choose him."

Here.

The unspoken corollary is that we also created heaven.

Which is fine if you're an atheist, who typically maintains that religion is not the stuff of revelation but is a human creation. But such talk is hardly compatible with the teaching and perspective of Jesus, who was anything but sanguine about human nature, or its fate.

"For many are called, but few are chosen."

"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."

It's no surprise that the many would disagree with this. The offense of the gospel is not the cross, it's the exclusiveness of the club. St. Paul tried to ameliorate this by opening the club to the Gentiles, and the universalists among us carry it a step further, opening the club to the denizens of hell, but at which point nothing Jesus has to say matters much anymore.

And yet they claim to be his worshipers, or at least his followers.

They are neither.

True man, the glory, jest, and riddle of the world

 

 

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd: 

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

-- Alexander Pope