4th Person of the Quadrinity?

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I found this a while back & wanted to share it...

We all know the legend about St. Patick using the Shamrock to explain the nature of the Holy Trinity.  I just wonder what the inspiration was for this?

Wasn't America sold on "Change" last election?  Any reason why that still isn't a good idea?
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Losing the Way

While reflecting on particularly disturbing news about troubled news about the cruelty of young people, it occurs to me that we, the adults, that is, have utterly failed them by creating the moral morass intp which they have been born & raised.  An opposite world where selfishness & lewdness is the norm & where the only forbidden act is to say that there actually are acts that should be forbidden.  And the Modern Enlightened Man seems to be working all the more to cast off any vestiges of the days when most people in most places in America still intuitively understood something called "decency."

From G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong With The World...

"This is the attitude which I attack.  It is the huge heresy of Precendent.  It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some time ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lost our way we must lose our map also; and because we have missed our ideal, we must forget it."
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The Way to Holiness

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I asked the Lord Jesus, "Why are my sins so unshakable?  Why can I not be rid of the evils that plague me?"

He answered, "Because you are not willing to suffer."
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We belong to Christ alone

After a meeting at the church the other Sunday, the conversation turned toward the HSS mandate. Someone who was not up on the matter asked what the issue was, & I said it was a three-pronged issue: 1) government dictating to a religion what it is & what it may do, 2) the Church’s teaching that contraception & its logical consequence of abortion are grave personal & societal evils, & 3) the widespread disobedience of Catholics regarding the Pope Paul VI’s teaching on these matters in Humanae Vitae – a fact, in this case, which the administration seems to be using to divide the faithful against their bishops.

At that point, someone chimed in that they were tired of people attacking Obama’s health care plan when the Republicans don’t offer anything better. It was so incongruous to my thought stream that I actually didn’t respond - the argument premises had been swapped too fast. I had not said anything about political party affiliations or agendas.

The truth is that Catholics do not “belong” to any political party, though the magisterial or prudential teachings of the Church may find better alignment with one party or another at any particular time. Many Catholics automatically identify themselves as Democrat, because of the work the Church did in the last century on behalf of the poor & the working man in the days of strife between capital & labor, & also in struggle for the civil rights of minorities. Perhaps the party infiltration of “progressive” & subversive elements that embrace many intrinsic evils went unnoticed by many Catholics.

These days both parties are in various ways woefully deficient in upholding Christian moral & social principles. However, not all social or moral issues are of equal weight. Some things, like war or capital punishment, for example, are incredibly serious & require the utmost consideration & care. But those that directly affect the begetting or taking of innocent human life trump all others. The Church does not outright forbid either war or capital punishment, but rather makes necessary distinctions about the conditions which must be present to make these evils permissible. The direct, intentional taking of innocent human life is never permissible or tolerable under any circumstances whatever. Nor is the redefinition of marriage. Nor is coercion by the state into the defining what a religion is, what it may believe, & how it may practice those beliefs.

So, if a certain political party offers safe haven to those who actively promote abortion, new definitions of marriage, the trampling of individual dignity & rights by the state, & a host of other perversions, then that party has ipso facto disqualified itself from electability by Catholics of informed conscience. No other issue can offset the gravity of these.

I hope more Catholics look clear-eyed at the moral state of our country & vote for the candidates that offer a vision most closely identifiable with our most deeply-held Catholic Christian principles than to vote the way they always vote because that’s how they’ve always voted & that’s how their parents & their parents’ parents always voted.

To read Humanae Vitae, click HERE.

To read the USCCB's statement Faithful Citizenship or to get the latest on the HHS mandate, click HERE.
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The Church Militant

Just got my brand-spankin'-new Pope Pius XII mug from Fr. Zuhlsdorf's blog - What Does The Prayer Really Say.  A timely message to be sure...

"We belong to the Church militant; and she is militant

because on earth the powers of darkness are ever

restless to emcompass her destruction.  Not only in the

far-off centuries of the early Church, but down through

the ages and in this our day, the enemies of God and

Christian civilization make bold to attack the Creator's

supreme domination and sacrosanct human rights."

Pope Pius XII
14 October 1953
North American College, Rome

Book Review - UnPlanned by Abby Johnson

I had this book on the shelf for several months now. To be honest, I sort of avoided it because I suspected the sorts of things it would contain - dark & dreadful things. I had read & heard a lot about abortion methods, the anguish of the child, the harm caused to women, the botched procedures, etc. But I was certainly not ready to deal with the level of grief going on in the mind & soul of a woman who spent almost a decade on the “other side of the fence.” Because Abby begins with the pivotal moment of her career as an abortion clinic director, I admit my throat had a lump in it & I was ready to weep just a few pages in. But I just couldn’t stop reading. It was getting late, but just one more page… Soon, I had covered over 200 pages & it was almost one in the morning, so I headed off to bed. Curiously, I slept like a baby.


Several things strike me about her account that I feel compelled to share…

- The complexity of the human being. It is all too easy to paint people with whom you disagree as one-dimensional beings. All of us are complex knots of conflicts & contrasts. We easily compartmentalize our lives, & so easily dupe ourselves or allow others to do so. I do it. You do it. Abby points that all the while she worked at P.P., she thought she was doing good for women. We should be very humble before the mystery & complexity of the human person, especially in their fallen state.

- The complexity of human relations. In light of the above, when approaching others to convince them of the evil of abortion, we need to approach them with great, great care. If, as pro-lifers, our motivation, message, or means is anything other than the love of human beings, we will fail. Abby was loved by her parents & husband, though they strongly disagreed with her. She was openly loved by many on the other side of the fence. Yet those to whom she was loyal within P.P. turned viciously against her the second her intention to leave was discovered. In all human relations, with friend or foe, cultivate love.

- The complexity of man before God. It is a colossal scandal before the world that some Christian denominations are either neutral on the matter of abortion, & God please forbid, even pro-abortion. Abby was raised in a Christian home, never considered herself anything but a seeker of God, & was very conflicted when she was asked to leave her evangelical church because she worked for P.P., & saddened again when she was encouraged to leave her Episcopalian church because she left them. All the while she was searching God’s will in her life. And yet she still worked where she did. As mentioned, we can convince ourselves of nearly anything. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, we don’t need the Church to be right when we are right, but rather when we’re wrong.

- Good triumphs over evil. This is only true if there is something that really is good & something that really is evil. I am pro-choice when picking pizza toppings - this is a matter or pure preference of little moral concern. But if we are talking life issues, a choice is always between things more or less morally right & good. Part of speaking the Gospel of Jesus Christ is simply convincing people that there is a right & a wrong, a good & an evil, completely independent of how we feel about it or the circumstances. When facing such a horrible thing as abortion & the many other violations of human dignity, we should foremost know that the pro-life cause is a godly cause. God is pro-life because life is good; therefore, in faith we can be assured of victory.

What conclusions might we draw from Abby’s story? What can we do to end this tragedy in our day?


- Be loving & kind to everyone you meet. You never know how God will one day use a kind look or smile or word as a point of grace to change someone’s heart. We all remember something in our past who brought us unexpected grace.

- Never write off anyone. This is a corollary to the above. Some of the greatest sinners have become the greatest saints. Faith & conversion are mysterious happenings. Some people are born with faith, others are converted in a flash, but many people take time to work it all out. Every human being that ever existed was & is called to union with God; never cease to hope for this.

- Persevere. Babies take time to develop & people’s minds & hearts take time to change. The continuous, patient, loving presence of pro-life people through all days, seasons, & years must be a part of the landscape. It is easy to give up hope in the glacial pace of legislative change. We may lose ground any given day, but we certainly lose all if we retreat from the field of battle. The good news is that great numbers of young people are embracing the life message. The tide may be turning. Fortitude.

- Pray & fast. Though practical action is required, ultimately, this is a spiritual battle. Rather than trusting in our own abilities & righteousness, this mission will only be successful to the degree that we turn it over to God & trust the task of saving life to Him who created it.

- Stay informed. Thing happen really fast these days. You need to know if P.P. is planning to open a clinic in your town. You need to know about legislation being introduced into state or federal legislatures. Access to good information is key. Your local Right to Life chapter or your parish’s pro-life committee can be a clearing houses for what’s going on locally. The web can connect you to things going on nationally.

- Don’t assume others are taking care of it. Your church has people that take care of the flowers in the sanctuary. You don’t have to worry about it; it just happens. Your church also has people that pray outside of the abortion clinics & distribute information. You don’t have to worry about that, someone is taking care of it, right? Dead wrong. We do not have the luxury of assuming other people are going to do this work for us. If every Christian participated, this horror would already be over.

- Get involved & take action.  Participate in the pro-life events in your area, whether through your church, the local Right to Life office, or 40 Days event. Learn enough to offer others compelling arguments about why abortion is wrong & not a personal matter for the mother alone. Know your state & federal representative’s positions on life issues. Write them (respectfully!) to let them know your pro-life views & that you expect them to do their part to uphold human life, which is rightly placed first among the self-evident truths declared in the Declaration of Independence.

Abby Johnson’s story is a great one that should be widely known, a story of hope.  Read it & recommend it others. Donate a copy to your parish library. I can’t imagine myself being willing to systematically examine my own history, thoughts, & beliefs in the way Abby had done, let alone share it with the world. This was a monumental work of courage that she attributes solely to the power of God. It will change hearts & save lives. A million thanks, Abby, for telling your story.
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In the Beginning by J. Cardinal Ratzinger - Epilogue, Part II

Epilogue: Consequences of Faith in Creation, Part II

The next figure Cardinal Ratzinger considers after Bruno, Galileo, & Luther is Wilhelm Hegel, who saw God as the “process of reason (p.89),” where sin, grace, & personal salvation all evaporate before the emergence of a new humanity that pulls itself up by its own bootstraps, so to speak.  If Hegel proposed this as a theory, Marx made it a reality: “Redemption is now construed strictly as the ‘praxis’ of man… the total antithesis of faith in creation (p.90).”  Ratzinger notes two aspects of Marx’s scheme.  Firstly, the individual no longer matters; only the whole.  “Individual consciousness [& suffering] is taken up into class consciousness… All that matters is the logic of the system… a future in which humans are redeemed by their own creation work (p.91).”  A cheery prospect, no?  G.K. Chesterton in his book What’s Wrong with the World calls this not the bravest, but the most cowardly ideology of all: ever gazing toward a perfect future that never seems to arrive.  Secondly, Marx says a creation ordered toward another is dependency & weakness.  It is man that must create his own universe & destiny through work.  The Marxist is utterly forbidden to ask where the universe came from, to what it is ordered, & how man finds his place it in.  Collectivism promises freedom, but the first thing it eliminates is the freedom to ask a question.  In denying the question, it also denies the truth that answers it.  Disguised as work, Marxism admits only contempt for both man & creation.

Based on these historical observations, Ratzinger says belief in creation these days is obscured & denied three main ways: scientific rationalism, radical environmentalism, & a view of creation as hostile to grace.  The first false view would reduce creation to simply a thing to be examined through microscope & telescope, mere matter to be manipulated.  What is beyond empirical observation is “dismissed as meaningless (p.92).”  Matter has no questions to ask, no morality to struggle with, nor hopes or desires to pursue; all that remains is what science can do.  In such a view, all that is definitively human is swept aside.  Yet, isn’t every aspect of human life inseparably linked to questioning & decision making as to what it right, what it true?  Science by itself separates man from his anchor in the truth; substituting a false god of progress.

The second trend against creation we are seeing more & more today is the idolatry of radical environmentalism: the view of man “as the disease of nature (p.93).”  Even the old pagans that worshipped the earth believed that man had a place on it.   This environmentalism views the human intellect as the source of the damage, so it is a highly anti-intellectual movement.  Further, it is self-hatred of the gift that is human life.  It is ultimately a nihilism in which man finds no grace, no future, & no redemption.

The third false understanding of creation would not permit it to be redeemed by God; it remains an irredeemably corrupted obstacle for man.  Ratzinger recalls Paul’s words, “It is not the spiritual that is first but the physical, and then the spiritual (1 Cor 15:46) (p.94),” indicating that grace & creation are two poles of the Christian Faith that must never be set against one another.  Indeed, the Christian view sees creation as the gateway to the world as grace.  Understanding God as lover presupposes faith in God as creator.  Ratzinger calls this “the freedom to accept myself as well as the any other member of the Body of Christ…  it is a way of saying ‘Yes’ (p.95)” to the gift of God.

In his conclusion, Ratzinger proposes that ultimately there are really only two philosophies of creation: the Gnostic model & the Christian model.  “Gnosticism, in all its different forms and versions, [is] the repudiation of creation (p.p.96).”  Here, God’s redeeming love seems too shaky a ground on which to found our lives; it is not something we can force & control.  On the contrary, in humility & dependence the Christian receives a redeemed creation as a gift & a promise from the God who entered his own creation to save us.  The Gnostic option is, in fact, hostile to God as it aims “at power through knowledge… [it] will not entrust itself to a world already created, but only to a world still to be created.  There is no room for trust, only skill (p.97).”

The Christian truth is exactly opposite: man is dependent.  In acknowledging this, he rejects every attempt to create himself & his world from within.  However, “there is nothing degrading about dependence when it takes the form of love… for only love transforms dependence into freedom (p.98-99).”  The center of man’s redemption is Jesus Christ, the God-man, hanging on the cross.  Thus, “the doctrine of creation is, therefore, inseparably included within the doctrine of redemption (p.99),” which must be proclaimed to prevent the reduction of man to just another animal in nature & the redemption of man as the future we can build by our own powers.  With a proper understanding of the Incarnation & the Resurrection, man finds the truth of God & himself within a genuinely Christian understanding of creation.