Sunrise

No deep thoughts today, just a photo of a lovely sunrise.

Book Review: ManAlive! by G.K. Chesterton

In a world of walking zombies, being alive may mean more than simply being ambulatory. It may mean being alive by way of something, to something, for something.

In ManAlive!, Chesterton immerses us in a kind of dream world that has us circling the entire globe (literally!) while remaining in the comfortable confines of an English boarding house drawing room. We are presented with a menagerie of characters, each an aspect or image of the Modern Man, who reveal the absurdity living life without a purpose, & without even trying to discover the purpose. In the end, we remain with a question: Are we alive?

Part of Chesterton’s genius is the reverse play: the only one who is truly alive in this very tall tale appears at first to be a buffoonish, murderous, philandering thief doing business under the name Innocent. Naturally, there’s more to the story than first appears. Sometimes a fellow really does have to hoof it around the whole world just to come back around to his house (Believe me! I know a thing or two about that!). Perhaps there is a lesson here regarding what a truly Christian life would look like. As was famously said, “Holiness always looks mad by earthly standards.”

Blowing in with the westerly wind are a host of classic Chesterton quotes, each a jewel in itself, but even more precious when positioned within their proper place in the story...

“I mean,” he said with increasing vehemence, “that if there is a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp post and a hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp post and a hedge. I mean God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praises of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp post after all.” – Innocent Smith

“Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction.” – Michael Moon

“As too many British officers treat the Army as a review, so I had treated the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant… Then I realized that for 1,800 years the Church Militant had not been a pageant, but a riot – and a suppressed riot… In the face of that I had to become revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious.” – Curate Percy

“Do you, perhaps,” inquired Pym with austere irony, “maintain that your client was a bird of some sort – say, a flamingo?”

“In the matter of his being a flamingo,” said Mood with sudden serverity, “my client reserves his defence.”

People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

“I will not be so uncivil as to suggest that Dr. Pym has no common sense; I confine myself to recording the chronological accident that he has not shown us any so far.” – Michael Moon

“If it be true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to murder, is it not equally true -” here he lowered his voice and spoke with crushing quietude and earnestness, “is it not equally true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to get murdered?” – Michael Moon

“There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors. For a mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one. In the highest sense indeed, all thought is reflection... This is the real truth in the saying that second thoughts are best. Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp post. Man alone is able to see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat) the inmost thing of human philosophy. There is a mystical, even a monstrous truth in the statement that two heads are better than one. But they ought both to grow on the same body.” - Curate Percy

Will you kindly tell me what the deuce is the good of a jewel except that it looks like a jewel? You can’t fight with golden swords or eat golden biscuits; you can only look at it.

Things look so bright just before they burst.

Only saints and sages ought to be robbed. They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little worldly people of the things that are their poor little pride.

"There should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet." - Curate Percy

H.E. Rating: 4 aspergillum shakes

Top Eleven Reasons to Speak Latin, esp. at Mass

Most people, after discovering I am an adherent to the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, complain, "Why would I want a liturgy in a language I can't understand?" or "Why would I want to speak a dead language?" Below are some of my responses, some of which are quite snarky & others I just say quietly in my head...

11. That's surprising, since your obvious mastery of the English language led me to believe you were quite the language scholar! While English descends most directly from German, over half of the words in English are derived from Latin. Learn one & you learn something of the other.

10. I'm sorry, I didn't know about your learning disability. After you've prayed & sung them a thousand times, you do know them, even if you can't converse with your friends in Latin on street corners (though wouldn't that be fun!). I teach my 6th grade catechism students a few standard prayers & sayings in Latin each year, & it only takes a few classes before they don't really need their guide sheets anymore.

9. Where exactly did you go to school? America is one of the most affluent & educated countries in the world. I hold it to be a failure of the educational system - along with a big dose of cultivated personal laziness - that Latin isn't better known by anyone with a high school diploma & especially a college degree.

8. You're right - all that Cicero, Caesar, Augustine stuff is probably just a load of crap anyway. In a day when people are supposedly smarter than ever before, why in the world would we consign all the foundational writings of western civilization to the pyre! At work just last week I was asked by a whole group of engineers & technicians what "E Pluribus Unum" on our coinage means!

7. I don't like to pray together with those "other" people either! Why don't we all just fragment into our own little social-racial-linguistic factions, which I'm sure is what the Lord & his Church intends. I hear all the time that this was a big problem in the Old Days - Irish, Germans, Italians, & Polish all had their own ethnic parishes & ne'er shall they meet. This kind of Euro-factionalism isn't so common today, but often Spanish or Philippino speakers get the shaft on Mass times & run the risk of becoming a parish-within-a-parish. Can't we just pray Mass together? Plus, why would we want to lose a connection with Catholics around the world?

6. Latin is a fun to speak. It's true! The vowels are all very rich & deep. A's are always "ahhhh" as in father. O's are always "ohhhh" as in boat. U's are always "oooo", like in moose. Give your R's a little roll or flip. See how often you actually make your H's silent (nearly impossible for English speakers). All very My Fair Lady-like, if you ask me. My 6th graders eat it up, for the most part.

5. Latin is easy to sing. It is very metrical & very easy to rhyme because of the standard endings on the various noun & adjective declensions & verb conjugations, such as "Resurrexit sicut dixit..." from the Regina Caeli hymn. Which brings me to another point - there is a vast & deep ocean of beautiful liturgical chants & hymns that have lain untouched for decades now, some of which go back to antiquity. And they are soooo beautiful & prayerful!

4. Latin ain't dead; it ain't even sick. There is a rediscovery of this most beautiful tongue underway. Many students are finding themselves woefully ignorant compared to their predecessors, sensing that they are missing out on something very valuable. Here's an interesting article on the situation in Ol' Blighty (England) from our friends at the Daily Telegraph. I was very surprised at the depth of study into Greek & Latin at my son's Protestant high school!

3. Yes, the Church's ancient liturgical traditions are soooo cumbersome! Yes, tradition with a little T, but some of those point to big T's. We don't manufacture our Catholic Faith. It's not a product of our times. It's been handed on from the Apostles who received it directly from the hands of Christ. I hold strongly that the Ordinaries (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus et Benedictus, Credo & Agnus Dei) should always be sung in the ancient languages to reinforce this. There still seems to be a lot of confusion about this & plenty of people eager to cast off the lines from the Rock & set sail into the abyss of "what's happenin' now!" Latin helps to keep us grounded in the ancient Faith.

2. The Church asked us to. Throughout the conciliar documents, esp. on the liturgy & the formation of priests, there are statements reaffirming the primacy of Latin as the liturgical & theological language of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Why? Probably because the Church's theology, liturgy, & laws were hammered out in Latin; it says what the Church wants to say in exactly the way she wants to say it. However, every translation, even the best, runs the danger of losing the fine shades of meaning of the original. Others may be outright wrong or corrupted - witness the need for our upcoming revised Missal. The Church requires clergy to know Latin. The Church encourages the preservation & cultivation of sacred music, especially Gregorian Chant & polyphonic music, which are in Latin by definition. Shall I go on? As I see it, at some point, it is actually a question of obedience rather than style or preference.

And now, the No. 1 response to those who can't stand Latin...

1. You're right - now that Mass is in English, I sooooo get the Mysteries of God! News flash! YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND. Thank you Father Christian for pointing this out! (see here) People these days seemed trained to be so shallow & impatient in their search for knowledge that things that aren't immediately apparent at face-value are simply bypassed for something more "accessible" or "relevant" or "inculturated" or whatever. Sorry, Amica, that simply isn't possible when approaching God. You have to let go of what you need, to receive instead of do, to learn to dwell in God's time, to be content with God's Mystery. We will never understand; but we are invited in nevertheless, because this is the only way we can be truly happy. And God wants us to be happy.

Now, I could go on & on with all kinds of things I hear all the time... "I didn't understand it then, why would I want it now?" Uh, I think you were 15 years old then. Mostly, Latin is a kind of symbol that people of a certain age & hair color used to rage against in their rebellion against all things ancient, steady, & authoritative - dare I say, things bigger than they were? Or at least their ideas. Well, the Age of Aquarius is glady over, Starflower. And while younger folks may be saddled with a lot of bad catechesis, fortunately they aren't really burdened with the radical baggage of that generation. Many are looking for stability in a rapidly changing world (some might say a world their elders send rolling downhill with a whoop & a kick). Ultimately, whether they know if or not, people are looking for God. The Church has seen age after age dawn, rage, & fade; she knows what people are looking for & how to lead them to it. In the liturgy of the Roman Church, a little Latin does nicely.

Rubbing Buddha's Belly

On Father Christian’s blog, I made a comment to the effect that the Buddhist has no answers to find, because Buddhism seemingly has no answers to give.

As with everyone who makes some bold statement hoping to sound smart, one should immediately challenge such a crass statement by asking, “Really, Mark? No answers whatsoever? All those billions who have practiced that ancient faith have never discovered any answers at all? Gosh, you’re a genius!”

Alright, I concede my own point. But there are some distinctions that need to be made, including a clarification on what one means by “answers”. First of all, it is a point of Catholic Christian Faith that the Buddhist’s practices cannot gain him salvation, which we understand to be redemption from Original & personal sins & being taken up to the eternal & immeasurable joy of standing in God’s loving presence. News flash! The Catholic’s practices can’t earn him that either, but we’ll get to that.

First of all, the story of the man now called Buddha parallels that of St. Francis in many ways: a rich young man who becomes disillusioned with the world & embraces a life of ascetism in order to allow his spirit to reach to higher realms. With all kinds of rituals, practices, & gestures intended to bring luck, love, & fortune, I can’t imagine Buddha would even recognize the thing that is today called Buddhism - especially, the weird frog-thing with the coins on its back & the fat, gluttonous Buddha who’s in desperate need of a by-pass operation & a Man-zzier. I mean, isn’t watching where you’re going & trying to be a better driver worth more than a thousand red prayer rags tied to your car’s bumper for good luck?

Now a word about Buddhist “popular piety.” Man, do they do some pretty crazy things! They put up temples with a big, gilded statue of Buddha or one of the Buddhist saints that did some excellent deed during their life, especially if they suffered for it. Then they kneel before it & pray - often making a gesture with their hands on their foreheads, their mouths, & their chests - asking for forgiveness, healing, or other intercession for themselves, their family, & others,. Then they light candles & incense in front of the image as a way of keeping their prayers going. Then they get together in groups with their strings of prayer beads, chanting their prayers together as they go along. I told you it was crazy!

Yes, Catholics &, in truth, those of almost every religion do these kinds of things, too; because we are incarnated beings – “en-fleshed” – so our worship must include a physical, bodily dimension. I think Buddhists & Catholics alike understand that these things are not magic spells that bring a desired result automatically, nor do they bring about salvation as each religion understands it, but that they are simply “holy reminders” & useful focal points for prayer. They help keep us on the path. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Well, as a sidetrack, there are some Christian - even Catholic - movements that pop up time to time that want to “purify” the incarnational nature of the Church, such as certain Gnostic movements, Marcionism, iconoclasts, & many Reformation groups. Most of these wind up lapsing into a heresy of one stripe or another, because an attack on the Church’s incarnationalism is really an attack on creation & the Incarnation. It reduces the Faith to just an airy idea out there in space somewhere on in one’s own mind. For example, if the tangible world belongs to “accident” instead of “essence,” then it doesn’t really matter if one worships Jesus or Jes-ette, because the Redeemer’s bodily sex was just an unimportant detail. Further, it doesn’t matter if two men, two women, or all of them together want to be married, because all of this body stuff is inconsequential to what really matters: our souls. I believe Pope John Paul II’s writings & teachings on creation – most famously his Theology of the Body – seek to put the right emphasis on our embodied personhood in relation to God & each other.

So, anyway, despite Buddha’s teaching of severing one’s soul from their body as completely as possible in a very-Platonic way in order to find the divine within, it seems impossible for man to actually do this; he always comes back around to needing to involve his body in his spiritual life in some way, even if it’s only as a means to help focus the mind.

So what are they focusing on? Well, frankly, nothing. Rather, the Great Nothing. In an interesting lecture/essay/book by Fr. Norris Clarke, S.J. on human personhood, he mentions that Buddhist seek to unravel all of his relational “knots” – that is, all of our ties to this earthly realm, including bodily needs, interpersonal relations, &, at some level, even our relation to ourselves. With this final unraveling, or annihilation, we are finally released to become another drop absorbed into the cosmic ocean. If you fail to achieve this Nothingness before you die, the Wheel of Reincarnation is spun & you get another go-round on this dust ball.

In this scheme, as I understand it, there is no personal god & there is no personal salvation. In fact, there aren’t any persons, either. There sure as heck won’t be any bodies. Though Plato would certainly concede this latter point, he would never agree to the former. I needn’t waste any more electrons to explain how this contrasts with the Christian understanding of all these things.

But despite the Buddhist “dogma” of total separation, there are still things to be found – dare we say “answers”? It has long been observed that a certain reining-in of the noise of the body can produce clarity of mind & soul. In contrast, everyone knows that giving in to the body’s unruly, carnal desires darkens the mind & turns one back on themselves in a self-serving way. The Buddhist practices may create the necessary dispositions for man to reach beyond his own needs & become open to “higher things.”

In this clarity of spirit, man can hear an echo that sounds deep within him like the tolling of an old, distant temple bell, which is nothing other than the voice of God, stirring the spirit of every man, woman, & child on earth to do good & avoid evil. For those to whom Revelation has not been granted, it manifests itself as the Natural Law (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1954+). As some moral philosophers have noted, it is never really learned from the first time & can never be forgotten. Marcus Cicero said it was unchanging & everlasting, descending from on High, yet dwelling within us. It is God asking each person in the bowels of their being, “Do you love me? If you love me you will keep my commandments.”

The Church states that those who respond to this call whole-heartedly - & through no fault of their own have not been granted the knowledge & gift of Faith - may, too, be saved. This salvation would, by necessity, be by way of Christ’s redeeming sacrifice. In a sense, they would be part of the Church Universal without having formally joined it, or even knowing it! But we have to be very careful here, because there is an undeniable & unresolved (even unresolvable) tension between the God who is Love & wills not the death of any sinner and the Christ who declares that those who hear & are baptized will be saved & those who are not will not. Many would cover these persons with the mysterious phrase “Baptism of Desire,” yet, this would be a wholly new & never before used interpretation. In Roman times, this phrase came about in regards to catechumens who died before their baptism on Easter Vigil (though not a martyr’s death; that would be Baptism by Blood). To apply this meaning toward people who are not catechumens - & further, may not even want to be! – is something we should be very wary of accepting without serious consideration.

In conclusion, though the spiritual practices of both Buddhists & Catholics alike may be helpful in preparing one for an encounter with God, ultimately faith is a gift that requires a personal response. God operates in complete freedom & saves whomever he wills; however, if it is true that God saves those outside the visible confines of the Church, it a mysterious happening that occurs only between God & that individual. We can’t really say much about it; we must simply do our best to witness the Faith by word & deed & leave the rest in God’s hands.

The Bible VI: Literary Genres

Another installment from the St. Thomas Knight of Columbus newsletter series...

Literary Genres in the Bible

In our review of reading the Scriptures with the mind of the Church, we have looked at what the Bible is & how it came into being. We now turn to the theme of literary genres within the Holy Writ, because this is often a big stumbling block for people today.

The Bible contains many different types of literature, not surprisingly, because it was written by many human authors over a multitude of times, places, & historical circumstances. The Bible does not fit neatly into any of the modern categories of writing, but is a story of faith revealing God's Truth, doing so by many different ways: poems, parables, histories, saga, epics, fiction, prophecies, visions, dialogues, & others. Many of these forms, like the dialogue, have fallen out of usage, & some types, like apocalyptic or gospel, have no modern equivalent, which can make them hard to discern nowadays. It owuld be a grave mistake to approach the Bible with the same mindset as one would a text book, news paper, or a how-to-book. It just isn't that kind of literature.

Some folks, Protestant & Catholic feel that this concept of literary genre is a muddling or distorting God's word; and that's a fair concern. Often, folks desire a simpler & less-challenging "what it says is what it means" type of understanding. But that really isn't understanding at all, is it? It rules out God the Spirit's ability to speak an 'ever ancient, ever new" word to his people. Now, many passages do mean exactly what they say, but I'm referring to a whole approach that bypasses both one's own powers of intellect & prayerful discernment & the interpretive Magisterium of the Church. There simply aren't any short-cuts for understanding the word of God. Cardinal Ratzinger, before becoming pope, wrote in a commentary in Genesis that we must not imprison the Word of God in the printed words of the Bible.

God speaks on multiple planes at once, & any particular verse, chapter, or even whole book could have many valid meanings. Jesus spoke in parables. He reached people at their level of understanding, but always in a way that challenged them, as he often did with his parables. They were (& are) not beyond one's ability to understand, but the meaning isn't face-plain; they require prayerful reflection to make sense of them. After all, even his disciples were confused. In this process of reflection, we are challenged to look past our own limits & expectations, to see the world through God's eyes, to invite us into his holiness & love.

That's the purpose of god revealing himself to us: to draw us into a loving union with him. But just as this journey of faith is challenging, requiring the utmost conviction & continual discernment, so too, reading the Bible requires a serious effort, a willingness to embrace the complexity of its literary forms, & a prayerful trust that god will reach us & enlighten us through his Word.

P.S.: Postings will be scarce for the next 2 weeks, as I will be in the Orient. Till then, blessings.

Confucius says...

I have not been blogging much lately. Between business travels to China, catching up at home, & trying to finish up my Philosophy of the Human Person course with Franciscan U, I have had precious little time. I've not failed in thinking about blogging, just the doing.

On my last business trip, the owner of the company with whom I'm working gave me a book of the writings of Confucius in Chinese/English, because we spent a little time discussing some of the philosophical differences between East & West. This contrast is very enlightening, because a totally alien culture can shed much light on one's own. However, there are certainly points of similarity, because, people are people wherever you go.

The Confucian writings are like proverbs, each one disconnected from those around them. Some are parts of a dialogue where the beginning & end of the conversation are missing! So, it can be quite challenging to make sense of them. One has to read a large number of passages, then compare them against each other. There is not really an external "law" to them, like there would be in the Christian religion (that being the Faith itself, which preceded the written Scriptures); whatever enlightenment they possess can only be intuited from within them, though I am sure there are various schools of understanding & application (similar to some ultra-Scriptural-fundamentalist Christian groups).

I hope to share some of these interesting writings with you from time to time, with or without commentary. Here is the first:

Zeng Zi said, "Every day I examine myself on three counts. In what I have undertaken on another's behalf, have I failed to do my best? In dealings with my friends have I failed to be trustworthy in what I say? Have I failed to practice repeatedly what has been passed on to me?"
...

A Brief Review of Two Papal Encylicals

An amazing result of the vast technological achievements of man is that men are generally much more ignorant than they ought to be. People, including me, come out of school inexcusably poorly read in the classics of literature, history, ethics, civics, philosophy, & religion. I spend a great deal of my time attempting to make up for lost ground on these accounts.

Since I travel a lot, I've found that I can take a massive amount of great reading material with me in a very small package by taking a CD of the contents of the New Advent website. I think it costs about $20, but if one were to collect the actual books of all the material on it, I'm sure it would cost thousands & take up rooms.

Below are just a handful of thoughts on 2 very different papal encyclicals I read recently in the New Advent library archives, but both with connections to my philosophy studies (I also read Leo XIII's encyclical against duelling, Pastoralis Officii, but it was only loosely connected)...

Sublimus Dei - On slavery in the New World, Pope Paul III, 1537

Theology & philosophy from ancient times throughout the Middle Ages largely strove to understand the nature of person in the context of the Divine Persons of the Trinity, & perhaps secondarily to man, but only then with a view toward man as a species, often called the "cosmological" view. The full working-out of the nature of man as a person - including his interior life, the "personalist" view - is a rather recent happening.

So, what happens when fifteenth & sixteenth century Europeans come into contact new races of humans, whose appearance & culture are markedly different from their own? Well, the sub-title given to the papal encyclical gives a clue.

In 4 short paragraphs, the Holy Father notes that God has established that "all are capable of receiving the doctrines of the faith," and that those who hold that the "people of whom We have recent knowledge" are mere "dumb brutes" are in league with that ancient enemy of man. Of course, if these newly discovered peoples are not really human persons, but just man-like animals, then there can't be much wrong with owning or using them, right?

He declares flatly that, "the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it." He goes on to say that they shall not have their property taken nor be reduced to slavery, but "should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by the example of good and holy living." An absolutely priceless phrase that applies today as much as it did 500 years ago.

Now, I have been on record as stating that the Vatican did not officially denounce the evil of slavery until Pope Leo XIII's In Plurimis of 1888 (curiously directed toward the bishops of Brazil). Some may wonder why the 1573 decree does not decry all slavery or indentured servitude, but only as pertains to the newly-discovered peoples of the Americas. My understanding for this is that the Church does not see slavery as a direct impediment to salvation, as did not St. Paul (1 Cor 7:20-24, et al.) (though another of Leo XIII's encyclicals on slavery, Catholicae Ecclesiae, opens with numerous citations to show that the Church has always opposed slavery as evil. There is also Gregory XVI's In Supremo Apostolatus from 1839). Yet, as the Church emerged from a limited way of thinking about human persons inherited from antiquity & the Middle Ages, it has increasingly come to see not just in terms of pure salvation/damnation, but also in terms of justice due human person. Slavery itself may not be a hindrance to salvation, but it is unworthy of persons to either try to own another or to be owned by another. This fullness of understanding of the inherent value of human life continues to be worked out, as we wrestle with issues ranging from abortion to human cloning to euthanasia.


Mit Brennender Sorge - "With Burning Sorrow," On the Church & the German Reich, Pope Pius XI, 1939

Given the recent upheaval surrounding the cause for canonization of Pope Pius XII (who is thought to have heavily contributed this encyclical while Papal Nuncio to Germany) & my own interests in this issue, I read this encyclical with wonder. I honestly can't imagine what it must have been like to live through this time in Germany.

The background of the letter is that the Holy See & the Reich had entered into a concordat in 1933 which guaranteed that the Church would be able to continue to operate freely in Germany, including the running of schools & seminaries (though I haven't read the concordat itself yet). It is clear from the language here that the government has now undertaken a campaign to actively disregard the provisions of the prior agreement & to undermine the Church's moral & spiritual authority.

While this is a long & penetrating document covering the salvation of man through Jesus Christ alone, the role of the Church in bringing Christ to the world, the Natural Law, the rights of parents to rear & educate their children as they see fit, & the condemnation of racial crimes - including a note that Jesus himself was a Jew - the thing I find intriguing & which I comment upon here is a reference to a kind of German religion set up by the Reich - a paganistic & pantheistic alternative religion which deifies the well-ordered universe as reflected in the well-ordered State & whose sacraments are scientific progress & societal purification.

The Holy Father notes quite sharply, "Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God... Neither is he a believer in God. [7]"

While circumstances have certainly changed, there are still any number of people today who hold that the earth, the universe, the collectivity of all life, or whatever is the real divine being, & that we are the ones who sin against her when we damage her with oil spills, pollution, etc. Since we are the problem, we must be contained, esp. through population control. The thing is, it all seems so reasonable at the time.

The philosophical error here, as I see it, is what Dietrich von Hildebrand calls "value judgment." It is simply the recognition & justice due a given person, thing, or circumstance. Ice cream is nice on a hot summer day, but it hardly calls for for the adoration due God. If one of your scoops falls on the ground, you may be disappointed, but it hardly calls for the same outrage as against Hitler or the same tears as over millions exterminated.

We often live for this merely "subjectively satisfying," while rarely giving due consideration to those things of real value. Many thinkers, even St. Thomas himself, seems to have failed to make this distinction among the various goods. Even the entire universe, as inconceivably vast & wonderful as it is, is still just a thing without a soul, & so does not dwell on the same plane of value merited by a single human being, of whom John Henry Cardinal Newman called, "an infinite abyss of existence." This is why we respect the dignity of all human beings: they merit it simply by being human beings. This is why we adore God - because God is inherently adoration-worthy due to his perfections. How we respond to a value placed before us has implications for our own selves. If we respect or revere a thing according to what it due it, we make something greater of ourselves. But if we either ignore or rebel against this call for a value response, or if we give a thing more honor than it deserves, then we degrade ourselves as person.

This reasoning also has something to do with why Catholics cannot participate in Masonic organizations (see papal encyclicals Humanum Genus & here & here, & the CDF's pronouncement against Masons here). Despite their various benevolent works, they are basically a rival religion, who pay homage to an unspecific, generic maker & orderer of the universe. While this sounds harmless enough, the problem is that God is not a nameless, generic deity, but a very specific Being whom we know (though we don't know everything), because he has revealed himself to us.

The Holy Father says, "Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side. [9]"

To continue to address a mysterious & nameless deity while standing in the light of full revelation is simply untenable. This is also the concern with any ecumenical movement or program that disregards or eliminates revealed truths of the Faith for the sake of an easy, though false, unity.

In a different vein, there is a little phrase that begins the last cited paragraph to which we should be attentive: "Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label..." I was really taken back to find that "My God!" is a phrase used frequently by Chinese English-speakers to denote surprise or exasperation. I'm sure they are just parroting what they have heard elsewhere - probably Western films - & know not what they do. Less forgivable is how common we've allowed the flippant use of "OMG!" to become in our own culture.

Similarly, the Holy Father notes that Christian religious language has been appropriated & given new meanings by the Reich, blurring the distinction between the Church & the new State Religion. Using the example of the term "immortality," the pope declares that, "Whoever only means by the term, the collective survival here on earth of his people for an indefinite length of time, distorts one of the fundamental notions of the Christian Faith and tampers with the very foundations of the religious concept of the universe, which requires a moral order. [24] " Immortality in the Third Reich refers not the individual, but the indefinite survival of the Reich itself.

But instead of wasting your time reading what I think these mean, go read them yourselves. There is a vast wealth of wisdom & insight to be found in all of these papal writings (including the truly brilliant ones by our most recent popes), no matter the time or circumstances in which they were written. Here we find the very best of the men who were personally called by Christ to feed his sheep & confirm the brethren.