Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? With a perfect hatred do I hate them: I account them mine enemies.

The hatred of the Faith quite often seems to include a direct hatred of Scripture. So much so that there has for a long time been a huge impulse among the lily-livered "Christians" of our time (and previous times) to edit it, to make it more palatable to modern sensitivities.

This desire was played upon mightily by the people who "reformed" the Divine Office. The little shreds, shards and fragments of the Faith that are left to us once all the difficult bits are taken out, were all neatly packaged up and re-sold (accompanied by a bunch of unsingable American Jesuit hymns) as the four-volume "Liturgy of the Hours". I was shocked to see that this monstrosity of the Church of Nice is STILL being used by a bunch of "conservative" religious orders. Mostly, I imagine, because the good sisters don't know there is anything else. Sigh...

I note it because I've been having an interesting time with my Benedictine Monastic Diurnal, an older edition of which I was given recently by some nice Benedictine nuns in Tuscany. In using it ever day, I've discovered that a previous owner, presumably a female, has gone through and minutely corrected a bunch of the English translation of the psalms in pencil, crossing out offensive parts and a bunch of the "thees-n-thous" kind of language (the "st" crossed off of "didst" etc.) and carefully re-writing them with "updated" language.

I was amused to note that the REALLY offensive bits of scripture have just been expunged. The scary bit at the end of Psalm 137, for example, is firmly crossed of with a big penciled "X".

"Thou wretched Babylon's daughter, * Blessed be who shall repay thee what thou didst to us!

Blessed be who taketh thy babes, and dasheth them against the rock!"

It's been interesting observing exactly which changes have been made by this unknown female Catholic hippie of the past. One of them that I thought telling was this: "How weighty for me are Thy thoughts, O God, * how imposing is the sum of them!" But "for me" is crossed out. It gives a tiny little insight into that kind of mind that is quite fascinating. Though depressing as all hell.

She pencilled her name in the front page: "Sue C." so maybe someone could say a prayer for her? Perhaps fortunately, she seems not to have persevered in her vocation, because the corrections and annotations can only be found in small sections of the book.

Anyway, I suppose it gives us a bit of a hint about the attitudes of a certain kind of Catholic. It should perhaps not be surprising to us when we see some members of the hierarchy telling Our Lord that His instructions, regarding marriage for instance, are just too much for modern people to handle.

"Truly I tell you that Moses only allowed you to divorce out of the hardness of your hearts..."

"Ah yeah...Thanks, dude, but we'll take it from here..."



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Bad men can't unmake The Real

I hate to disagree with a venerable and worthy priest, but I believe Fr. Ray Blake has with a single comment neatly pinpointed a big problem in the Church.

He writes on his blog in response to a commenter:

"The real question is, 'Is the Pope a Catholic?' The only possible answer is in the affirmative, therefore any 'strangeness' is impossible, otherwise..., otherwise.... well, that is impossible to imagine, and millions of Catholics have been living a lie and our faith is built on sand."

Ah, actually, no it isn't impossible to imagine, and it really, really doesn't mean anything like that.

Here is where we have one of the biggest problems in the post-Conciliar Church and a source of huge misinformation perpetuated by those who think they are doing all they can to rescue Catholics from despair and apostasy (or sedevacantism... which is pretty much the same thing).

I get it. I get that faithful Catholics are freaked out at what's been happening. But if the very worst is true, it SO doesn't mean what Fr. Blake says it means.

If the pope isn't Catholic, it doesn't mean that we are all not Catholic, or that we have to abandon the Faith, or that it is "built on sand." Only if you have got into your head the error that "the pope is the Faith" or that the Faith requires a good pope to be true can it possibly follow that a bad pope = bad or untrue religion.

This is the error of papal positivism - papolotry - at it's core, but it is opposed to the Faith.

Recite the bolded sentences below three times a day until the Parousia.

The pope does not give us the Faith.

The pope is not the Faith.

The Faith comes from God not Rome.

If the pope loses the Faith, I don't lose mine.

If the pope is a heretic, an apostate, a schismatic or any of those horrible things that we pray every day he is not, I don't have to be those things too. The papacy is a key unit of the Church, so having such a bad one would be a terrible thing, but absolutely no reason whatever for anyone to lose their Faith.

The notion that the pope is and must always be a personal paragon of faithfulness - and that if he is not we're really in the Spock-with-a-beard Mirror Universe and everything we thought was true isn't true - is product of a number of different historical paths and events since Vatican I (yes, I meant Vatican I, that wasn't a typo). It was greatly exacerbated by the cult of adulation that surrounded John Paul II and that long pontificate has set the scene for the current dire situation.

Since JPII we have had such a terrible situation in the Church and the world that we naturally took great comfort in looking towards the person of the pope for comfort and support. Faced with bad bishops and bad priests, bad schools and bad government, we thought we could look to Rome and say, "Well, obviously the papacy is sacrosanct and can't be corrupted." But this really just shows a dismal knowledge and understanding of both the real source of the Faith and Church history.

This doesn't mean that I am saying what people like Shea and Akin and Phil Lawler are saying ("Lalalalalalaaa skippidy doo! Everything's GREAT and Francis is the best pope EVAH!!" Yeesh!) I personally think we are in a unique situation. And by that, I mean uniquely awful.

I have asked many smarty-smart people, who know lots of history and theology, when there has been a comparably disastrous period in the Church, and each one of them has said something like, "Well, the Arian crisis comes close, but this is probably worse."

It is clear that the current worries about Francis and the general state of things are not isolated, unique or distinct from the general catastrophe that has befallen us. We're hurting more than we would have, I think, because the transition from John Paul II to Benedict XVI seemed to us like a natural progression in the Great Effort to Fix Things. That was something else that we incorrectly put our faith in, that the situation was terrible in the 70s and 80s, and since then there has been a steady restoration to sanity. All the evidence that this was not the case we tended to just sweep under our mental rug and ignore.

Well, we can't ignore it any more, can we. Francis, if I may say something so dreadful, is a symptom - or perhaps the culmination - of the overall disaster that has become the ruling principle of the world since 1965. Francis, in other words, is nothing new, and if we had not put so much energy into clamping our eyes shut against the real problems with both the last pontificates, we would not be in such a state now. We would have been able to, with the Trads, shrug and say, "Well, what can you expect. It's NuChurch."

But again, if Francis is a bad pope this has no effect on the Faith. None. The Faith is simply the Truth. The Real. The realness of the Real does not change or fade because lots and lots of people want to deny it or because powerful men try to fight it. Two and two still equal four. Marriage is still what it is. The Holy Eucharist is still the Holy Eucharist.

If the Papacy has been seized by bad men it does not mean that the things we believe are "built on sand". It means only that the papacy has been seized by bad men. Bad men will do what bad men do, and we can do nothing but maintain and continue to proclaim what we know is true throughout their reign.

Facing up to the possibility that something very bad is going on does not necessitate a loss of the Faith. Fearing that the sky will fall if there is a bad pope, fearing it so much that one tries to retreat into denial of what we see plainly before us, will do nothing to help anyone.

Facing up to what is really happening is the only way to maintain the Faith. Retreating and saying, "Oh, that couldn't possibly happen and if it did then the Real is no longer the Real," is going to allow the disaster to spread still further. Only the Real counts. And if the pope and all the cardinals and bishops of the world try to say that something other than the Word of Christ is true, then we reject that as a wicked lie. We know what is true because we have the Faith.

As laypeople (and humble parish priests) our duty is clearly before us. We don't have the power to stop bad men from doing bad things. But we have the power to continue to maintain the Faith, what we know. And to pray for a just solution to the terrible troubles of our times.

"Fabulous Wealth"

Apparently, we are going to have to start having these familiar conversations again.

We will be accused, again, of being "fabulously rich," of being in a state of sin because the Church owns so much art and fancy buildings. Again, [how tedious!] we will have to ask, "Who would you like to sell the Sistine Chapel to?" "Which Saudi prince do you think would give us the best price for the Pieta?" And "How long do you think the cash raised would last?" Perhaps we should simply raze Chartres Cathedral to the ground, since such things, while of almost inestimable cultural, social and religious value, don't actually sell very well as cash-generators in the current market.

How are we to help the poor if we have nothing ourselves? We will be forced, again, to remind our accusers that the Catholic Church already does the vast lion's share of practical charitable work of any institution in the world, far outstripping bodies like the UN.

Also, who are "the poor"? We think at first glance that it's a pretty easy question to answer in places like Jakarta, or Buenos Aires. But what about London? What about Toronto? I've met "the poor" in Toronto and I can tell you that what they lack can't be given out of a parish poor fund. What they need can't be supplied out of a food bank. They are inarguably poor, but not because they have no access to material necessities. They are culturally, morally and socially impoverished. They are ignorant and intellectually stunted. They do not read for pleasure or illumination; they have flat screen TVs but no books. They think only in terms of what they can get, not what they can do or contribute. I don't agree with Kathy, who often says, "'The poor' are the rich Jesus warned you about," but her point is well made.

Who are the poor? In what way are they poor? How much of their poverty is self-induced? How much of it is cultural or spiritual poverty? How much of my own material substance is sufficient to qualify my as "caring for the poor"? Can I love and own beautiful things without sin? How can we help people to help themselves? How can I help to enrich a person whose suffering may be moral poverty, or cultural poverty, which seems to be the most common kind in the West? There are materially wealthy people, as Mother Theresa liked to point out, who are so spiritually impoverished as to be worthy only of the most abject pity. Whose souls are stunted and enslaved by their wealth. How do we approach "poverty" in a society that regards not owning a new car a devastating deprivation?

The problem with the pope talking about "a poor Church for the poor" is that it encourages people to entertain some very simplistic ideas. It assumes we know both who these poor are, and that all they require is a bit of cash, preferably from the government. Many years ago I had a conversation with a Jesuit (not the good kind) and an anti-nun. We were at some tawdry little Novusordoist prayer group thing, and were instructed to pray for "the poor". Being me, I put up my hand and asked for specifics. Who, in our insanely wealthy society are "the poor"? And how, specifically, are we to help them? (I was unemployed because of a puzzling and chronic illness at the time and so was amusing myself by torturing stupid people.)

I was told about the people on welfare, what a rotten time they had. I suggested that perhaps they would be happier working than receiving such dubious aid from faceless, uncaring government officials. I was then told that some could not work. I said that I was currently on disability, does that make me the poor? Did that mean, therefore, that I should be the pray-ee, rather than the pray-er.

My suggestion that, before God, we are all poor, naked and helpless, was greeted by these good Socialists with scorn.

~ * ~

Fr. Blake asks for specifics:

"As for the Church being poorer, I am not sure what that means either.

"Most of our money is in real estate: buildings. Do we sell off the ancient and culturally significant buildings in city centres and the devotional art within them and move to the cheaper suburbs. Certainly we exist as a Church to proclaim Jesus Christ, we not museum keepers. But what about our Catholic schools and hospitals, again we are an NGO supplying education, medical care or any other services, should those be given away to local communities, and the equipment in them, do we just use the cheaper and less advanced, should a Catholic hospital have a highly expensive CATscan or employ expensive staff, where does poverty come here?

"As far as education is concerned, do we as Church stop sending students to the better universities in solidarity with poor and less advantaged, or even stop sending the then to university at all. Education is after all the opener to many doors and to influence and power, should we disdain all that?

"I have known old Jesuits who kept all they had in a small suit case, ready to move to do the will of their superior at a moments notice. Here poverty was an internal thing, a lack of attachment to created things. Is that what Pope Francis means by a "poorer Church", or is it a Church stripped of its artistic heritage. Is it detachment, or is it a cultural desert?"

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