CRITICAL CATHOLIC COMMENTARY
in
the Twilight of Reason
Monday April 8th, 2024
The Annunciation
of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Mary, Conceived without Sin,
pray for us who have
recourse to Thee
Counsels
and Admonitions
from Saint Francis
Consilia et Admonitiones quae cessarunt tertio die
mensis Octobris anno Domini millesimo ducentesimo
vigesimo sexto, quando imago Christi compleretur in
persona Francisci servi sui.
Maker of Men
A New Series:
Saint Francis was a maker of men.
What he demanded of himself, he demanded no less of others, however much he was
filled with compassion, love, and kindness toward everyone who failed — not him
— but themselves, in their own pursuit of the perfection Christ required of them
and which they found possible in him. Those who followed St. Francis were (and
some, perhaps, still are) among the greatest examples of men God ever created:
examples of selflessness, discipline, perseverance, fortitude, courage,
determination, goodness; in a word, the best of what is manliness.
He was relentless in his pursuit of holiness, and whatever stood between him and
God was unsparingly tossed underfoot or cast aside as an affront to God and an
enemy to his salvation and the salvation of the souls God placed in his path and
in his care. He took this responsibility absolutely personally and altogether
seriously. His focus was singular: God — His glory, His honor, His most holy
will — and nothing other and nothing less.
I emphasize this to break the persistent myth surrounding narratives of St.
Francis (especially since the 1960s) that would have us see him as something of
an innocuous
“Flower
Child”
more concerned with Mother Earth, animals, and offending no one; a soft, almost
androgynous, if not feminine figure emblematic of a spirituality largely foreign
to Catholicism. Such an understanding of St. Francis does not simply fail to
agree with the reality of the person and history of this great saint, but
grossly distorts him to the point that an accurate presentation becomes so
startling that it may appear to be the fiction, rather than the
saccharine pulp presentations that have largely made him acceptable to popularly
pious sensitivities. This is a great injustice to St. Francis, although I think
that he would be the first to see the inanity in it.
But to the point: if you would really understand St. Francis, you must first (of
course) understand Jesus Christ, and three particular teachings that He
enunciates, apart from which you will never understand anything at all about St.
Francis, his life, and his history. Indeed, they are so central to the life and
spirituality of this great saint that we may say that, in a sense, they
constitute the very fabric of his being:
“Enter
at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that
leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many. How narrow
is the gate, and strait is the way that leads to life: and few
there are that find it!”
(St. Matthew 7.13-14)
“If
any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross,
and follow me. For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he
that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it.”
(St. Matthew 16.24)
“If
you had been of the world, the world would love its own: because you are
not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the
world hates you. Remember my word that I said to you: The servant is not
greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also
persecute you.”
(St. John 15.19-20)
Once we dwell upon these three points sufficiently, we can venture further, and
deeper, into — not just St. Francis — but our own lives in Christ, where they
are, where they are taking us, and where they are likely to end.
I know that this is hubris. But if I am not brave in this venture, I will
accomplish nothing good: not in my own soul, still less in the souls of those
who endure this series.
I hope for good. But only God can accomplish any good in me, and
if He does not, then all praise and glory be His forever and ever:
“Sanctus.
Sanctus. Sanctus!”
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
April 25, 2024
Feast of Saint Mark, Evangelist
_____________________________________________________
In What Consists Perfection and Perfect Joy
“The grace of overcoming oneself, and
accepting willingly, out of love for Christ, all suffering, injury,
discomfort and contempt”
1. “If, when we shall arrive
at St. Mary of the Angels, all drenched with rain and trembling with
cold, all covered with mud and exhausted from hunger; if, when we knock
at the convent-gate, the porter should come angrily and ask us who we
are; if, after we have told him, ‘We are two of the brethren,’ he should
answer angrily, ‘What ye say is not the truth; ye are but two impostors
going about to deceive the world, and take away the alms of the poor; begone I say’; if then he refuse to open to us, and leave us outside,
exposed to the snow and rain, suffering from cold and hunger till nightfall
— then, if we accept such injustice, such cruelty and such contempt
with patience, without being ruffled and without murmuring, believing
with humility and charity that the porter really knows us, and that
it is God who maketh him to speak thus against us, write down, O Brother
Leo, that this is perfect joy.
And if we knock again, and the porter come out in anger to drive us
away with oaths and blows, as if we were vile impostors, saying, ‘Begone,
miserable robbers! to the hospital, for here you shall neither eat nor
sleep!’ — and if we accept all this with patience, with joy, and with
charity, O Brother Leo, write that this indeed is perfect joy.
And if, urged by cold and hunger, we knock again, calling to the porter
and entreating him with many tears to open to us and give us shelter,
for the love of God, and if he come out more angry than before, exclaiming,
‘These are but importunate rascals, I will deal with them as they deserve’;
and taking a knotted stick, he seize us by the hood, throwing us on
the ground, rolling us in the snow, and shall beat and wound us with
the knots in the stick — if we bear all these injuries with patience
and joy, thinking of the sufferings of our Blessed Lord, which we would
share out of love for him, write, O Brother Leo, that here, finally,
is perfect joy.
And now, brother, listen to the conclusion. Above all the graces and
all the gifts of the Holy Spirit which Christ grants to his friends,
is the grace of overcoming oneself, and accepting willingly, out of
love for Christ, all suffering, injury, discomfort and contempt; for
in all other gifts of God we cannot glory, seeing they proceed not from
ourselves but from God, according to the words of the Apostle, ‘What
hast thou that thou hast not received from God? and if thou hast received
it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?’
But in the Cross of tribulation and affliction we may glory, because,
as the Apostle says again, ‘I will not glory save in the Cross of our
Lord Jesus Christ.’ Amen.”
St. Francis (Little Flowers, Chapter VIII)
How Even the Least of God’s
Creatures Serve Him Better than We Do — and what is more frightening still ...
2. “All the creatures under
Heaven,
each according to its nature, serve, know, and obey their Creator better
than you. And even the demons did not crucify Him, but you,
together with them have crucified Him and crucify Him even now by delighting
in vices and sins.
St. Francis
(The Admonitions V)
Cardinal Victor
Fernández:
“The Mystical Passion:
Spirituality and Sensuality”
(from the back cover of the book)
A Profound Disfiguration
of Mystical Theology
It is
embarrassing.
Academically as much as morally.
This is a book by a mature
36-year-old man that should never have been printed; not
because it is lascivious (it is) but because it is the product
of a mind that had no acquaintance with serious study and
no founding in Catholic primary sources — a “cardinal sin,”
if you will, of any author, especially a Catholic author
who illicitly invokes the names of saints and in so doing
pretends to adduce their support for a thesis that is not
simply contrary to their writings, but is a caricature of
them. This is damnable!
Fernández was not, as he also
pretends to be, still a formative young man who later wrote
“more serious” treatises on Mystical Theology such The
Healing Force of Mysticism and The Transforming Force
of Mysticism, neither title of which inspires me to
believe that they contain any more mature theological insights
than their “less mature” works, including
Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing.
Fernandez's grasp of Mystical
Theology is shockingly inadequate. Consider the following:
“[in] a kind of fulfilling orgasm in our relationship
with God … God manages to touch the soul-corporeal
centre of pleasure.”
Or:
“The mystical experience God touches the most
intimate centre of love and pleasure…” [emphases
added] |
These are but two absolutely
fundamental misconceptions, or complete distortions, of
the very nature and possibility of mystical
experience articulated by the sources he appeals to.
I have argued elsewhere,
with clear and indisputable citations to primary sources
that:
-
“Sensuous
negation,
or what St. John of the Cross, [the First
Doctor of Mystical Theology in the Catholic
Church], calls the “Night of the Senses.”
is therefore absolutely necessary to that
union in which the soul becomes one with
God.”
-
“In the opening sequences of
Book One of
the Ascent, St. John discussed the night of
the senses
relative to the will. There we found that the disparity between God and
created nature emphasized the lack of proportion,
of commensurability, between God and the
soul in its relation to God through created
nature, and in so doing demonstrated
the inherent impossibility of a sensuous
apprehension of God. And the conclusion, of course, was that if God is to be apprehended at
all, he must be apprehended extra-naturally;
not through a sensuous manifold accessible
to the will — nor, as St. John will now
argue, through any conceptualization available
through ordinary understanding.”
-
“the
contemplative must not defer to the senses;
however credible their reports may appear.
Moreover, St. John argues, in their tangible
dimensions, these sensuous communications
cannot, in reality, bear any proportion
to, and are in fact the ontological opposite
of, the spiritual reality which they purport
to convey.”
*
|
What is more,
absolutely fundamental to Western Christian Mysticism
is the the notion of apophasis, the understanding
of God by a negation of what He is not, commonly called
the Via Negativa, or the
“Negative
Way”.
Because of the ontological disparity between man and God
inasmuch as God is eternal where man is temporal,
infinite where man in finite, God is absolute
where man is contingent, God is Uncreated Spirit
and man created spirit and flesh who was created
in imago Dei (the
image of God)
in time and not eternity, and we cannot predicate of God
anything
“corporeal”
for everything
sensible
and
corporeal
is
eo ipso
not God nor predicable of God since it is material, temporal
and finite.
The absolutely contradictory
and utterly incoherent notion of something that is “soul-corporeal”
is nothing less than an absurdity, and to argue that
it can be radicated in some imaginary “centre of pleasure”
is beyond absurd. To understand, in any measure, God reflected,
however analogically, in the completely sensual act
of sexual climax is not simply bizarre,
it is an utter failure to
grasp even the most fundamental elements in Christian theology
and philosophy.
More absurd still is that
this less than pedestrian mind is directing the very office
— the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — where
the most mature and incisive intellect is required in making
determinations concerning the very Doctrine of the Faith
itself. That it should have been given by Francis to a man
of such questionable character and limited intellectual
ability is astounding! It is the highest office in the Church
next to the papacy and should not have been given as a
reward for loyalty, or as a favor to a friend
and fellow-countryman with the same horizontal and anthropocentric
agendum. The Church is far beyond the narrow and calculated
reach of any individual who would fashion what is divine
into the marred image of a man.
That Fernández has chosen
to articulate this most superlative love of God for the
soul and the reciprocal love of the soul for God, not just
in sensuous terms, but in what is tantamount to the pornographic
terms which he appears to use in characterizing love in
any of its manifestations is not just “regrettable”, or
even “scandalous” — it is, as I have said earlier and now
say with greater vigor still, damnable.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor of the Boston Catholic Journal
and Author
of
*
The Metaphysics of Mysticism
A Commentary
on the Mystical Philosophy of
St. John of the Cross
January 12, 2024
Feast of the
Holy Martyrs Zoticus, Rogatus, Modestus, Castulus, and forty
soldiers In Africa
Printable PDF Version
Comments? Write us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
A Reflection on the Legacy of a Steward
Francis,
Ecumenism,
and the Divisions within us
All are Welcome, Except All
the Children ...
Francis
will die
— although we do not wish his death, nor the death
of any man — but it is, withal, the temporal end
of every man, pontiff or layman, commoner or king. Reflecting
on this as Francis recently celebrated his 87th birthday,
we are moved to observe something very simple about
his stewardship over the House that the Lord has entrusted
to him.
For 10 years now, Francis
has attempted to
“renovate”
a House that is not his, but only placed in his care
as a steward. The majestic facades, the incense-imbued
silence within, dimly colored with the stained-glass
light of a late afternoon; the soaring spires that proclaimed
the great Triumph of the Cross abroad for all to see
— these were not his to depredate: they belonged to
God and to His simple servants who raised them to His
glory through the coppers they gave and through the
rough, calloused, hands that engraved every niche in
stone by dint of a devotion every bit as indestructible
as the tip of the chisel the stone yielded to.
Some of these Francis
and his bishops simply tore down; others they emptied
by
“consolidating”
them with other Catholic parishes who were equally bleeding
parishioners and sold them to Muslims whose adherents
grew as exponentially as ours diminished. Some were
sold to Evangelical Protestants (especially Hispanic),
others to developers who gutted them and turned them
into trendy condominiums. And others are left simply
abandoned and ruined. This was part of the
“growth”
spurred by the innovations of Vatican II that was supposed
to bring the Church into the World but brought, instead,
the World into the Church.
And the faithful fled,
seeing little difference between the two.
Renovation
A far more destructive
“renovation”
is much closer to the
heart of Francis, however, than the mere obliteration
of what was symbolically holy in the external presentation
of the Church. And it concerns the very heart
of the Church: its Mass and its Liturgy.
These were the two greatest impediments to the
holy grail of Vatican II: Ecumenism. And inextricably
bound up with them were the Sacred Deposit of Faith,
and Sacred Tradition. They had been quietly but
indelibly preserved in Latin despite nearly 70 years
of experimentation in the Vernacular Mass that somehow
had promised, but could not deliver upon, an
“organic
evolution”
of worship into something ecumenically acceptable to
all men in all religions.
Perhaps the New Order
of the Mass, the
“Novus
Ordo”
constructed by
Bishop Luca Brandolini
and Anabile Bugnini,1
could still lend
itself as the vehicle to a universal worship of God
under the auspices of Ecumenism: each religion to its
own god to be worshipped as the one, true god in
Catholicism — but not in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism,
or Hinduism, each of whom keep their respective
gods without conflating them with any other god,
especially the Catholic God. To use Francis’s
dismissive term for Traditional Catholics,“indietrists”2
are much too caught up in trifles like logic to enter
emotionally into the
“spirit” of Ecumenism where, apparently, the Law
of Non-Contradiction
3
is not admissible and contradictory affirmations are
compulsory.
All are Welcome ... Except All the Children
...
Certainly ,
this New Order of Mass, the Novus Ordo
of Paul VI — unlike the Latin Mass — has proven itself
to be extremely versatile and spontaneously creative,
possessing nothing of that loathsome “ridigity” so detested
by Francis in the “Old Latin Mass.” We have witnessed
this spontaneity, this tossing off of the shackles of
customary ritual in nearly every Mass; so much so, in
fact, that we never quite know what to expect at a Mass
the next town over if a Catholic Church still remains
there. It could be a “Charismatic Mass” that could vie
with, or even surpass in excess, any uninhibited Protestant
Revival Meeting. It could be a “Healing Mass,” or a
“Children’s Mass.” It may not even be in your language.
It could even be an “Ecumenical Service” with your local
Protestant Minister, Jewish Rabbi, or Muslim Imam. So
many Masses we now have! Except Latin Masses.
“All are welcome!” ... except Latin rite Catholics.
... the unwelcome step-children of Vatican II ... the
only children not allowed to “walk in accompaniment”
with Francis & Friends; a “privilege” reserved to “other”
Catholics, non-Catholics, and atheists alike. Francis's
own rigid insistence on the Novus Ordo Mass to
the exclusion of any Mass preceding Vatican II is, in
fact, completely understandable in light of his determination
to fulfill the Ecumenical pledge of Vatican II:
not just the unification of all Christians in spite
of doctrinal, ecclesiological, and Confessional differences,
but more ambitiously, the unification of all believers
in some form of transcendental reality. This is a very,
very, broad category comprising nearly everything beyond
sensibility, and even sensibility is not categorically
excluded. So understood, the term becomes so broad as
to become almost meaningless. It is much like claiming
to achieve an ultimate Hegelian synthesis that claims
to reconcile all contradictions but cannot explain how,
and so becomes unintelligible and therefore worthless.
This is becoming too dense
for the casual reader so I will not pursue it. Nor should
the casual reader regret the omission. Really, it is
hardly worth it.
For Francis to scornfully
dismiss those who are not persuaded that his ecumenical
agendum is the principal reason behind his effectively
abolishing and outlawing the Latin Mass (although he
disingenuously — really, quite dishonestly — states
that it is to
“preserve
unity”
in the Church) is a failure in charity to acknowledge
real and legitimate issues among the faithful concerning
the very unity he pretends to seek while actively striking
discord within it. For Francis to claim that he is trying
to preserve unity through this autocratic move is both
shamefully and manifestly untruthful. That the Latin
Mass, together with the theology upon which it has been
articulated, has been so forcefully repudiated by Francis
is an indication of how desperate a measure he is willing
to resort to in order to implement, or better yet, to
force, an increasingly brittle ecumenical paradigm on
clergy and laity alike. Pieces of that ecumenical puzzle
that are not of Bergoglio's making either will not fit,
or refuse to fit, however much force he applies to them.
A Happy Failure
It will be a happy failure
that Francis could not, for all his intrigue and ill-designs,
bring to an end what faithless princes and kings, heretics
and apostates through 20 centuries had been unable to
achieve: the destruction, and the utter removal from
living memory, of the inextinguishable sanctity of the
Latin Mass of All Times and All Places. .
It will be a sad epitaph
for Francis in many ways, and history will not look
kindly upon his persecution of the faithful in the very
house given them and entrusted to him to keep them.
It is all the more sad, not that he failed to
keep them, or even that he refused to keep them,
but that he sought to drive them out. Seeking to please
men, he drove out the children. It is a tragedy of great
depth. It is also one that calls for deep, even the
most profound, prayer; prayer that must extend to the
hand that strikes, as well as to the stricken, for none
of us is without sin.
Listening to Christ, let
us put aside all contention, and remember not so much
what has been done to us, but rather what remains for
us to do:
Love your
enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray
for them that persecute and calumniate you.”
(St. Matthew 5.44)
Geoffrey
K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
January 10, 2024
Feast of Pope St. Agatho
Printable
PDF Version
Comments? Write us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
_______________________________
1
“I can’t fight back the tears.
This is the saddest moment in my life as a man, priest and
bishop”, Luca Brandolini, a member of the liturgy commission
of the Italian bishops’
conference, told Rome daily La Repubblica in an interview
on Sunday. “It’s a day of mourning, not just for me but
for the many people who worked for the Second Vatican Council.
A reform for which many people worked, with great sacrifice
and only inspired by the desire to renew the Church, has
now been cancelled.” — Bishop Luca Brandolini (principal
architect of the Novus Ordo Missae, or the Vernacular
Mass)
2
Francis’s
Italian neologism meaning:
“backwardists”.
3
Contradictory propositions cannot, at one and the same
time, and in the same sense, be both true
and not true, e.g.
“It
is true that the god worshipped by Muslims is not the same
God worshipped by Catholics.”
“It is true that the
God worshipped by Catholics is same the god worshipped by
Muslims.”
“It is true that the
God worshipped by Catholics is not the same god worshipped
by Muslims.”
“It is true that the
god worshipped by Muslims is the same God worshipped by
Catholics.”
The Queer
and Impulsive God of
Fiducia
supplicans
This “declaration on Catholic doctrine,” which is more
properly an aberration of it — is Francis’s
latest effort to appease a coterie of his most ardent supporters
by attempting to legitimize “irregular” — which is to say,
“sinful”— “unions” of actively-engaged homosexuals by invoking
“blessings” upon them. It is effectively summarized in paragraph
(31)
FS 31. “These forms of blessing express a supplication
that God may grant those aids that come from the
impulses of his Spirit—what classical theology calls
“actual grace”—so that human relationships may
mature and grow in fidelity to the Gospel, that they
may be freed from their imperfections and frailties,
and that they may express themselves in the ever-increasing
dimension of the divine love.”
There are two very serious problems with this statement.
Once concerns the manipulation of language, and one concerns
a calculated misrepresentation of the notion of Actual Grace.
Both are intended to mislead the casual reader, and to promote
an agendum (specifically, homosexuality as acceptable to
God and the Catholic Church — other supposed “irregular
unions” implied are simply intentional distractions) that
is not simply contrary to Catholic Teaching, but is militantly
hostile to it.
Let us look at the first:
“These
[so-called “pastoral”] forms of blessing express a supplication
that God
may grant those aids that come from the impulses of his
Spirit …”
This is a very queer notion. First, God does not have “impulses.”
Consider the definition of “impulse” from four respectable
sources:
-
“a sudden spontaneous inclination
or incitement to some usually
unpremeditated action”
1
-
“a sudden strong wish to do
something” 2
-
“a sudden desire to do something”
3
-
“a sudden wish or urge
that prompts an unpremeditated act
or feeling; an abrupt inclination”
4
|
Italicized above are all the words in each definition
that do not, and cannot, possibly pertain to God.
What God is Not
-
God is never “spontaneous”
[happening or done in a natural, often sudden
way, without any planning or without being
forced”]. He does not act with “out of the
blue” spontaneity. Spontaneity implies a
sudden change in God, but God does not change.
-
Neither is God ever “motivated:”
He is His own cause: nothing “other” than
Himself motivates Him.
-
Nor is God ever “inclined”
to do something or anything, for this would
imply a change within Him from potentiality
(or as the Schoolmen called it, “potency”)
to act; as it were, from His possessing
something potentially but not choosing to
actualize it, or cause it to be. But that
would mean that the Being of God is not
a pure Act, but has the potential to
be more than it is — and this is not
what we understand by “God”: that is to
say, we do not understand by God one
who can be more than He is and chooses not
to be, for such a being, capable of being
more than He is, cannot be God, for He would
be less than He could be, and such a
being we do not understand to be God.
-
Neither is God susceptible to “incitement”
for the same reasons outlined above — still
less to “unpremeditated action”
(an omniscient, all-knowing, God cannot
possibly possess anything “unpremeditated”,
i.e. something He did not know or purpose).
-
Nor is God susceptible to “desires,”
since He possesses all that could be desired
in the possession of Himself.
-
For the same reasons He does not “wish”
for anything, nor is He “inclined”
toward anything, or have “urges”
for anything. Even anthropologically understood,
they cannot be predicated of God or in any
way pertain to Him.
|
All these
things pertain to the notion of “impulses.”
No Blessings Can Come from What is Not God
There are no blessings, then, that can possibly come from
the fiction called “the impulses of his (sic, presumably
God’s) Spirit,” for God the Holy Spirit, as we have gone
to pains to demonstrate, does not have, and cannot have,
“impulses.”
Furthermore, to conflate this illegitimate and meaningless
notion of God behaving “impulsively” with the legitimate
theological concept of Actual Grace is nothing less than
an attempt at theological legerdemain (trickery). In a word,
the connection between the two is spurious.
Perhaps the most succinct description of Actual Grace
is along these lines: It is the grace given to the achievement
of, and not enduring beyond, a salutary action that
itself, as inherently good (for God will not and cannot
give us grace to do something evil), and which is granted
through the merits of Jesus Christ.
More to the point, it is an irreconcilable contradiction
to claim that people living in objectively sinful relationships
— or the sins that Francis, Fernández & Friends prefer to
verbally sanitize as “irregular unions” — are, in
fact, capable of receiving an actual blessing that will
assist them in achieving an action that is neither
spiritually nor naturally salutary or good,
for the action (active homosexuality) is intrinsically sinful,
and as sinful, eo ipso evil.
Few
appear willing to state this inescapable conclusion for
fear of being “socially incorrect” or “hurting the feelings
of others.” However, “hurting the feelings” of others so
that their immortal souls may avoid Hell and attain to Heaven
is an inestimably good act. It is an act of love, for love
ever wills the good of the other and no evil.
Not on Merit
Since Francis is keen to
discourage piety in Catholics (dismissing reverence toward
the Holy Eucharist as an attitude of regarding it as “a
prize for the perfect” 5
— as though any Catholic deems himself perfect)
or filial adherence to long established Church teaching
as “rigidity,” “backwardness,” and more 6, we must hasten to add that
the objection to a “blessing” of the sort proposed is not
based on a matter of “merit,” since no one — absolutely
no one — “merits” the grace of God in any form, Sanctifying,
Habitual, or Actual. Francis cannot implicitly
argue (as he did, concerning the Eucharist) that heterosexual
couples (“proudly”) deem themselves meritorious of blessings
(and are therefore unworthy of them), while (“humble”) homosexual
“couples” recognize they are not worthy of them (and are
therefore worthy of them). Why? We had just stated
it: No one is deserving or worthy of them.
But for
this reason, are we to understand that the notion of sin
no longer applies to human actions? For this reason is murder,
or adultery, or active homosexuality not a sin? How did
we even arrive at the semblance such ridiculous argumentum
ad absudum?
It is
simple: the proposition — Fiducia supplicans — itself
is absurd: that God can and will bless what is sinful and
abhorrent to Him.
Geoffrey K.
Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
December
29, 2023
Feast of St. Thomas Becket
Printable PDF Version
_______________________
1
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impulse
2
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/impulse
3
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/impulse
4
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/impulse
5 Evangelium Gaudium 5.47
6 Fundamentalists [who] keep God away from accompanying
his people, they divert their minds from him and transform
him into an ideology. So, in the name of this ideological
god, they kill, they attack, destroy, slander”, “narcissists,”
idolaters”, “rebels”, “legalists”, “inflexible”, cf.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/popes-rhetoric-against-fundamentalist-catholics-could-help-pave-way-for-act/
Martyrology for Today
Semen est sanguis Christianorum (The blood of Christians
is the seed of the Church) Tertullian, Apologeticum, 50
ROMAN MARTYROLOGY
Friday
April 26th
in the Year
of Grace
2024
Within
the Octave
This Day, the Twenty-Sixth Day of April
At Rome, the birthday of blessed Cletus,
Pope who governed the Church the second after the
Apostle St. Peter, and was crowned with martyrdom in the
persecution of Domitian.
In the same city, in the time of Maximian,
St. Marcellinus, Pope and martyr,
who was beheaded for the faith of Christ,
with Claudius, Cyrinus, and Antoninus.
So great was the persecution at this time that
within a month
seventeen thousand Christians
were crowned with martyrdom.
At Amasea, in Pontus, St. Basileus,
bishop and martyr, whose illustrious martyrdom occurred
under the emperor Licinius. His body was thrown into the
sea; but being found by Elpidiphorus, through the revelation
of an angel, it was honorably entombed.
At Braga, in Portugal, St. Peter,
martyr, the first bishop of that city.
At Venice, St. Clarence, bishop and
confessor.
At Verona, St. Lucidius, bishop.
In the monastery of Centula, St. Richarius,
priest and confessor.
At Troyes, St. Exuperantia, virgin.
And elsewhere in divers places, many other holy martyrs,
confessors, and holy virgins.
Omnes sancti
Mártyres, oráte pro nobis.
(“All ye Holy Martyrs,
pray for us,” from the Litaniae Sanctorum, the Litany
of the Saints)
Response: Thanks be to God.
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Roman Martyrology
by Month
Why the Martyrs Matter
Each day we bring you a calendar, a
list really, of the holy Martyrs who had suffered and died for Christ,
for His Bride the Church, and for our holy Catholic Faith; men and
women for whom — and well they knew — their Profession of Faith
would cost them their lives.
They could have repudiated all three (Christ, Church, and Catholic
Faith) and kept their lives for a short time longer (even the
lapsi * only postponed their death — and at
so great a cost!)
What would motivate men, women, even children and entire families
to willingly undergo the most evil and painfully devised tortures;
to suffer death rather than denial?
Why did they not renounce their Catholic Faith when the first flame
licked at their feet, after the first eye was plucked out, or after
they were “baptized” in mockery by boiling water or molten lead
poured over their heads? Why did they not flee to offer incense
to the pagan gods since such a ritual concession would be merely
perfunctory, having been done, after all, under duress, exacted
by the compulsion of the state? What is a little burned incense
and a few words uttered without conviction, compared to your own
life and the lives of those you love? Surely God knows that you
are merely placating the state with empty gestures …
Did they love their wives, husbands, children — their mothers, fathers
and friends less than we do? Did they value their own lives less?
Were they less sensitive to pain than we are? In a word, what did
they possess that we do not?
Nothing. They possessed what we ourselves are given in the Sacrament
of Confirmation — but cleaved to it in far greater measure than
we do: Faith and faithfulness; fortitude and valor, uncompromising
belief in the invincible reality of God, of life eternal in Him
for the faithful, of damnation everlasting apart from Him for the
unfaithful; of the ephemerality of this passing world and all within
it, and lives lived in total accord with that adamant belief.
We are the Martyrs to come! What made them so will make us so.
What they suffered we will suffer. What they died for, we will die
for. If only we will! For most us, life will be a bloodless
martyrdom, a suffering for Christ, for the sake of Christ, for the
sake of the Church in a thousand ways outside the arena. The road
to Heaven is lined on both sides with Crosses, and upon the Crosses
people, people who suffered unknown to the world, but known to God.
Catholics living in partibus infidelium, under the scourge
of Islam. Loveless marriages. Injustices on all sides. Poverty.
Illness. Old age. Dependency. They are the cruciform! Those whose
lives became Crosses because they would not flee God, the
Church, the call to, the demand for, holiness in the most ordinary
things of life made extraordinary through the grace of God. The
Martyrology we celebrate each day is just a vignette, a small, immeasurably
small, sampling of the martyrdom that has been the lives of countless
men and women whom Christ and the Angels know, but whom the world
does not know.
“Exemplum enim dedi vobis”, Christ
said to His Apostles: “I have given you an example.” And His Martyrs
give one to us — and that is why the Martyrs matter.
-
A Martyr is one who suffers
tortures and a violent death for the sake of Christ and
the Catholic Faith.
-
A Confessor is one who confesses
Christ publicly in times of persecution and who suffers torture,
or severe punishment by secular authorities as a consequence.
It is a title given only given to those who suffered
for the Faith — but was not killed
for it — and who had persevered
in the Faith until the end.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
Boston Catholic Journal
Note: We suggest that you explore our
newly edited and revised
“De
SS. Martyrum Cruciatibus — The Torments and Tortures of the Christian
Martyrs”
for an in-depth historical account of the sufferings of the Martyrs.
*
Those early Christians who renounced their Catholic Faith in
times of persecution. When confronted with the prospect of torture
and death if they held fast to their faith in Christ, they denied
Him and their Faith through an act of sacrificing (often incense)
to the pagan Roman gods and in so doing kept their lives and/or
their freedom and property.
Totally Faithful to the Sacred Deposit of
Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti
verbum Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power,
and yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My
Name.”
(Apocalypse 3.8)
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