Filed under: Uncategorized
I’ve been on a bit of a blogging haitus for the past week or so, drowned as I was with poorly timed midterm exams and trying to drink responsibly.
Things are going well, though. Kelli and I are both fasting for Lent — it’s been an easier thing so far than I expected. Last time I tried to do a “traditional fast,” I couldn’t stop thinking of food all day. Perhaps now, there’s just more important things on my mind than homeostasis, like Latin. And Gregorian Chant. Hm.
From Catholic News Agency:
.- House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s photo-op with Pope Benedict XVI turned sour when the Pontiff used the 15-minute meeting to reaffirm the teachings of the Catholic Church on the right to life and the duty to protect the unborn.
No photo of Nancy Pelosi and the Pope will be forthcoming, since the meeting was closed to reporters and photographers. The two met in a small room in the Vatican just after the Pope’s weekly public audience.
Immediately after the meeting, the Holy See’s press office released a statement saying, “following the general audience the Holy Father briefly greeted Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, together with her entourage.”
“His Holiness took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the Church’s consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death which enjoin all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in co-operation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of its development.”
A significant number of Catholic and pro-life organizations expressed concern over how Pelosi would use the meeting with Pope Benedict to further her position that it is possible to be Catholic and pro-abortion.
Last August, Pelosi was rebuked by several U.S. bishops for attempting to theologically justify her position during an interview with “Meet the Press.”
On Tuesday, Jon O’Brien, president of “Catholics for Choice,” a small, well-funded organization that provides theological arguments to pro-abortion Catholic politicians, told The Hill that today’s visit between the Speaker and Pope Benedict would be an opportunity to highlight that one can be pro-choice and Catholic, and that there are much bigger issues out there to discuss, such as the fate of the poor in the global economic downturn.
“That would be a real conversation about choice, instead of this micro-obsession with abortion,” O’Brien said.
Nevertheless, according to the Holy See’s statement, the Pope spent the whole 15 minute conversation talking with Pelosi about the right to life and the need to defend the unborn.
A spokesman for Pelosi, who is now headed to Southern Italy as part of her Italian tour, said she would issue a statement later in the day regarding her meeting with the Pope.
I remember my gut reaction earlier this week when I heard that Pelosi would meet with the Holy Father. I thought “Great — this is just what the world needs; a pro-choice Catholic getting a handshake from the Pope.” At least, I figured even if he admonished her, the photo-op would provide a hundred thousand words saying otherwise. Our Papa did not disappointment, though, reaffirming the unchanging, unflinching, uncompromising mind of Christ. God bless him!
I am a Southerner.
These are words which, for the better part of my quasi and full-time adulthood, I have tried to evade. I have tried to shroud my accent in some sort of unregionalized, sterilized dialect of news-anchor English. I’ve taken pride that a particular shuttle driver in Colorado once remarked that he “couldn’t tell where [I] was from.” I’ve spent each and every summer looking longingly toward the North, hoping as the Rich Man in Hell might, for just a puff of arctic air. I’ve idolized the ancients and trapsed in Guatemalan peublos — squeezing blood from the stone of any culture but my own.
I am, as my extensively gentile roommate says, a “man without roots.” And it’s true — the roots of the Carruth family do not strike the Southern soil very deep. Originally from Northern U.K., we’ve lived in both North, South, East and West. We are a family which lacks centrality; we are mole-rats with no burrow; we are a flock which migrates but never lands. None of us Carruths have thick southern accents — we are all mingled with non-distinct Texas and nasally yankee. We are a blank people, which might be the most tragic thing a family can be.
And so I find myself in southwest Louisiana growing up. I’m only the second generation in Louisiana — my paternal grandmother was born in Eunice, while my paternal grandfather only moved here for military reasons. A broken engagement and a shotgun wedding, and the rest — you might say — is history. My Mom moved down here with my Meemaw from Virginia (which, if you ask me, is part of the South but is now scarcely “Southern”) some time in the early 80s. We have no deep family history, and whatever we had died with my dear Mamaw Bobbie. I never had a love for eating boiled crawfish — and never, ever, never did I suck a head. I took and still take much of the happenings of my land as a dislocated yankee might — remarks about the intolerable blankets of heat which smother the parishes 9 months a year, with complimentary remarks about jambalaya and crawfish etouffee.
I suspect, however, that if I scratch the surface of my family, I may find more Southerner than I first thought. My Papaw, for instance, is a Civil War buff and lives in Mississippi in a little podunk town named Port Gibson (which finds its fame in being the only town “too beautiful to burn” on the Sherman’s March to the sea). My Nana (maternal step-grandmother, for lack of adequate term) is a quintessential southern woman — constantly cooking, or working, or socializing, and with such a tremendously charming drawal! They live in a bright-red Brick house situated on a hill with the flag flapping in the front yard.
And then there’s Kelli — the belle de la Sud in my heart. With a big family, full of accents as thick as chocolate cake and manners to match, she is to me the truest of my ties to this region. Her sugary drawal has, to my pleasure, coaxed out my own as a glacier might be coaxed forth by the bluest arctic seas. She’s a beautiful belle who loves her big hats, likes to wear dresses and heels, and can spite fire as well as the rest of us. But then, there’s something quiet, reticent, lady-like about her that seems to be indicative of the Southern woman — and seems to reflect to us unseemly, vulgar men just why it is that we tolerate this oft-intolerable region. It’s not subdued, for the southern woman doesn’t cower for fear, ready as any to pop someone in the jaw if they justly deserve. It’s a certain meekness, a particular encapsuling of the internal fire which makes Kelli wonderful — you know the fire’s in there, and sometimes the door to the furnance swings open and you see all the passions and beauties of a woman wide open. But then, more often than not, you’re content to sit by her and just feel the warmth.
I plan on writing more about this in the future — I’m not sure why, but in some sense I’m finally jutting my roots into the ground, feeling the cool soil of our southern culture. If these don’t inspire me to write something worth reading, then I’m not sure what will.
Now, back to the grindstone!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: essay, G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas
In lieu of the tremendous presentation by Mr. Paul Bernaccio on G.K. Chesterton — concise but tremendously informative and enjoyable — I found this “uncollected essay” on Aquinas by Chesterton (Thanks to the American Chesterton Society, chesterton.org). Enjoy!
St. Thomas Aquinas
by G.K. Chesterton
(This uncollected essay first appeared in THE SPECTATOR, Feb. 27, 1932, before Hodder and Stoughton commissioned Chesterton to write his book-length study of St. Thomas Aquinas.)
The difficulty of dealing with St. Thomas Aquinas in this brief article is the difficulty of selecting that aspect of a many-sided mind which will best suggest its size or scale. Because of the massive body which carried his massive brain, he was called “The Ox”; but any attempt to boil down such a brain into tabloid literature passes all possible jokes about an ox in a teacup. He was one of the two or three giants; one of the two or three greatest men who ever lived; and I should never be surprised if he turned out, quite apart from sanctity, to be the greatest of all. another way of putting the problem is to say that proportion alters according to what other men we are at the moment classing him with or pitting him against. We do not get the scale until we come to the few men in history who can be his rivals.
Thus, to begin with, we may compare him with the common life of his time; and tell the story of his adventures among his contemporaries. In this alone he shed a light on history, apart from the light he shed on philosophy. He was born in high station, related to the Imperial house, the son of a great noble of Aquino, not far from Naples, and when he expressed a wish to be a monk, it is typical of the time that everything was made smooth for him – up to a point. A great gentleman could be decorously admitted into the now ancient routine of the Benedictines; like a squire’s younger son becoming a parson. But the world had just been shaken by a religious revolution, and strange feet were on all the highways. And when young Thomas insisted on becoming a Dominican – that is a wandering and begging friar – his brothers pursued him, kidnapped him and shut him up in a gaol. It was as if the squire’s son had become a gipsy or a Communist. However, he managed to become a friar; and the favourite pupil of the great Albertus Magnus at Cologne. He afterwards proceeded to Paris, and was prominent in defending the new mendicant orders at the Sorbonne and elsewhere. From this he passed to the great central controversy on Averroes and Aristotle; in effect to the great reconciliation of Christian faith and Pagan philosophy. His external life was prodigiously preoccupied with these things. He was a big, burly, baldish man, patient and good-natured, but given to blank trances of absence of mind. When dining with St. Louis, the French King, he fell into a brown study and suddenly smote the table with a mighty fist, saying: “And that will settle the Manichees!” The King, with his fine irony of innocence, sent a secretary to take down the line of argument, lest it be forgotten.
Then he could be compared with other saints or theologians, as mystic rather than dogmatic. For he was, like a sensible man, a mystic in private and a philosopher in public. He had “religious experience” all right; but he did not, in the modern manner, ask other people to reason from his experience. He only asked them to reason from their own experience. His experiences included well-attested cases of levitation in ecstasy; and the Blessed Virgin appeared to him, comforting him with the welcome news that he would never be a Bishop. Similarly, we might compare the Thomist scheme with others, touching on the points in which Scotus or Bonaventura differed from it. There is no space for such distinctions here, beyond the general one; that St. Thomas tends at least relatively to the rational; the others to the mystic; we might almost say the romantic. In any case, there was certainly never a greater theologian, and probably never a greater saint. But saying that he was greater than Dominic or Francis, would not (in the sense needed here) even hint at how great he was.
To understand his importance, we must pit him against the two or three alternative cosmic creeds: he is the whole Christian intellect speaking to Paganism or to Pessimism. He is arguing across the ages with Plato or with Buddha; and he has the best of the argument. His mind was so broad, and its balance so beautiful, that to suggest it would be to discuss a million things. But perhaps the best simplification is this. St. Thomas confronts other creeds of good and evil, without at all denying evil, with a theory of two levels of good. The supernatural order is the supreme good, as for any Eastern mystic; but the natural order is good; as solidly good as it is for any man in the street. That is what”settles the Manichees.” Faith is higher than reason; but reason is higher than anything else, and has supreme rights in its own domain. That is where it anticipates and answers the anti-rational cry of Luther and the rest; as a highly Pagan poet said to me: “The Reformation happened because people hadn’t the brains to understand Aquinas.” The Church is more immortally important than the State; but the State has its rights, for all that. This Christian duality had always been implicit, as in Christ’s distinction between God and Caesar, or the dogmatic distinction between the natures of Christ. But St. Thomas has the glory of having seized this double thread as the clue to a thousand things; and thereby created the only creed in which the saints can be sane. It presents itself chiefly, perhaps, to the modern world as the only creed in which the poets can be sane. For there is nobody now to settle the Manichees; and all culture is infected with a faint unclean sense that Nature and all things behind us and below us are bad; that there is only praise to the highbrow in the height. St. Thomas exalted God without lowering Man; he exalted Man without lowering Nature. Therefore, he made a cosmos of common sense; terra vientium; a land of the living. His philosophy, like his theology, is that of common sense. He does not torture the brain with desperate attempts to explain existence by explaining it away. The first steps of his mind are the first steps of any honest mind; just as the first virtues of his creed could be those of any honest peasant. For he, who combined so many things, combined also intellectual subtlety and spiritual simplicity; and the priest who attended the deathbed of this Titan of intellectual energy, whose brain had torn up the roots of the world and pierced every star and split every straw in the whole universe of thought and even of scepticism, said that in listening to the dying man’s confession, he fancied suddenly that he was listening to the first confession of a child of five.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Truth be told, I’m a terrible blogger. But you probably already knew that, seeing as I haven’t written anything in like…a week.
Stuff to talk about, though, hopefully in the future: Kelli, Charismatic Meeting, and other stuffs, too, maybe, possibly… hopefully.
Be well!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: common good, Karol Wojtyla, love, personalism, Pope John Paul II, responsibility, vet clinic
I began reading “Love and Responsibility” by Karol Wojtyla last night, and already, my mind is sufficiently blown into little Thomistic pieces. Thankful that it is stylistically worlds apart from “Theology of the Body,” Wojtyla starts at the mezzanine floor of personalism: a person is a rational being which acts freely both as a subject who acts and an object who is acted upon. Although many entities may act as subjects, man is distinguished by his interior life, which revolves about truth and goodness, and his striving “to assert himself.”
I promise — this is going somewhere, and somewhere personal at that! Now, while a person may be an object, he is never to be strictly a means to an end. Wojtyla cites examples of the employer and the employee and the commander and the soldier. It is the former of these which inspired me. Wojtyla asserts that men must be free to choose their own aims — not even God Himself thwarts this gift to man. Rather, loving God that He is, He makes His intentions known to man, in order that man may freely choose to adhere or rebel.
Seeing how God respects the decision of men (enter: hell), how does man image God in his relation to other men? How does man treat other men as objects (meaning simply that he acts upon them) without treating them as means? Wojtyla’s answer is concise: “the Bond of the Common Good.” Men subordinate themselves to a common perceived good, and thus they both act as subjects seeking a common end. This is the “core of love,” and allows freedom and ultimately all social order to function properly.
To shift gears, I’ve often wondered why my days working for a veterinarian clinic in Sulphur, LA under Dr. Terry Ford are perceived as the glory days in its 13 year tenure. Many workers have come and gone, many have quit and moved on to other jobs, some meaningful, some trivial. Dozens of high school students have knelt on its floors and scrubbed its walls, tromped in its yard and washed its dishes. But there was always something different — something set apart about the few years that I , Ryan M., Jenny, et. al. bustled about its corridors. What was different? Why are the new kennel workers so lackadaisical? Why did all, including Dr. Ford, long for the spirit (which spirit will soon be named) that hovered over the clinic?
Reading this book in Coffee Call last night, an angel whispered the words in my ear — “common good.” This is the answer to the employer-employee problem, and the reason why no kennel workers seem to do the job like Ryan M. and I did. We all shared a common good, and it bound us together in love. Not a sentimental, squishy sponge of an emotion, but a binding of a half-dozen free wills into a something meaningful, as spokes to a wheel.
We loved the clinic; we loved Dr. Ford; we sincerely wanted it to succeed, wanted it to bring joy, wanted it to save (animal’s) lives. That’s why we showed up on a Sunday evening (in unconscious protest of the Lord’s Day) to shake out the rugs, douse the floor in Mr. Clean, spray the counters, and wipe out the autoclave (not to mention a dozen other tasks). Our sense of common good — our sense of subordination to our love of our work and of our employer — compelled us to make the ship run smoothly. We had succeeded if Dr. Ford walked in the next morning, took a deep breathe, and grinned.
It was this love that made these days glorious, if such an elaborate term could be used; glorious, perhaps, in the sense that where persons are loving freely, God is present, for God is the source of all freedom and all love. We did not use Dr. Ford as a means to our own ends — or if we did, it was not intentional. Seeing the sacrifices which Dr. Ford had made for the graces that he was able to give, we could do nothing else than give similarly.
I realize this sounds more like a “this is what ‘Love and Responsibility’ means to me,” but I feel as though I finally have an understanding of what set us, as a crew, apart. It wasn’t simply that we worked late hours, or came in when we weren’t scheduled, for bought donuts — it was love, and love which was expressed through a common sense of purpose. That’s what made those days glorious. I think John Paul II would be glad to see such glory permeating all of society as it did in our little clinic on Maplewood Drive.
They And We
1. People say:
“They don’t do this,
they don’t do that,
they ought to do this,
this ought to do that.”
2. Always “They”
and never “I”.
3.People should say:
“They are crazy
for doing this
and not doing that
but I don’t need
to be crazy
the way they are crazy.”
4. The Communitarian Revolution
is basically
a personal revolution.
5. It starts with I
not with They.
6. One I plus one I
makes two I
and two I makes We.
7. “We” is a community
while “they” is a crowd.
Filed under: Uncategorized
There’re times I look inward and remember that I’m Catholic. This is one of those times, and it’s strange.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: christ, Christifideles Laici, Pope John Paul II
“. . . Do not be afraid! Open, in deed, open wide the doors to Christ! . . . Open to his saving power . . . Too often people are uncertain about a sense of life on earth. Invaded by doubts they are led into despair. Therefore – with humility and trust I beg and implore you – allow Christ to speak to the person in you. Only he has the words of life, yes, eternal life . . . “
Filed under: The Faith | Tags: Apostle, Augustine, Early Church, Irenaeus, unity
I would like to share a little observation of mine (not an apologia of the matter). I’ve had intermittent discussions recently with various Protestant friends and family of mine, many of which are slightly unpleasant and largely unproductive. We go through the rigmarole of Sola Scriptura, saints, Mary, Eucharist, Mass, etc. But one issue remains largely unaddressed by my friends: Apostlic unity and lineage.
To me, the unity of the Apostolic Church is the most binding argument against the Protestant Church. When Christ breathed on his Apostles and told them that whatever they bound on earth would be bound in Heaven, he did something unique and binding for all of Christendom. Christians wouldn’t have to sit in the dark, wondering if they had perhaps found the light. The Holy Spirit would be with the Church — it would be with the Bishops, it would remain unchanged through their violent defense of its principles.
Without this understanding of lineage and authority, the appeal to the Early Church Fathers — the Bishops of their day — becomes moot. For if they have no divine authority to teach, but can only surmise the truth, what separates them from the John Calvins and Martin Luthers? Or the Cathars or Manicheans? If no one can truly interpret the Holy Scriptures and the Deposit of Faith, then what are we left with?
Without the Apostolic unity, who cares what St. Augustine or St. Irenaeus wrote? Who cares that the Early Church taught all the Catholic faith?
If everyone is equally authoritative, then no one is authoritative, and thus no one could ever be called “heretic” again. The Ark wouldn’t be a set structure, but an amalgamate of little leaky crafts tarred together and sinking fast.
