For most of our readers, you already know the critical work Dr. John Rao, and The Roman Forum, do every year on behalf of the Church and traditional Catholics everywhere. Last year, we helped raise over $10,000 to keep the Forum going. This year, for obvious reasons, it is more important than ever. Please read below, and please click here to donate whatever you can.
The
Roman Forum
11
Carmine St., Apt. 2C
New
York, New York 10014
Dear Friends,
The
Roman Forum is still in need of at least $25,000 in tax-deductible donations in support of its Twenty-Fifth
Annual Summer Symposium. This program will be held from July 3rd
through July 14th, 2017 (11 nights) on the topic: Setting Right a
World Turned Upside Down---Transformation in Christ Versus a Sickness Unto
Death.
We
need this sum to provide travel, room, and board for our international faculty and
musical staff: fourteen participants at the moment, though still growing in
number and potentially to include some further and rather significant clerical
additions. No speaker receives remuneration for his participation. Funds are
also used to aid the many priests, seminarians, college students, and others
from across the globe---especially from
Africa---who would be unable to attend without some help. I cannot tell you
how significant this quarter of a century Symposium has become in creating a permanent,
worldwide, fraternal union of clergy and laity, as well as providing an annual academic
and activist strategy planning session on behalf of the Traditionalist Movement
across the globe. Those wishing to attend Gardone, 2017 can contact us through
the email address given above.
You may remember that the
Twenty-Fourth Annual Summer Symposium, Half a Millennium of Total Depravity
(1517-2017): A Critique of Luther’s Impact on the Eve of His ‘Catholic’
Apotheosis”, was dedicated to the consequences of the first “reformer’s”
thought and action. This was done so as to prepare a “truth serum” to work
against the distorted adulation of the founder of Protestantism that will most
certainly characterize the entire commemorative year of 2017. The title for the
book that this “truth serum” takes is Luther and His Progeny: 500
Years of Protestantism and Its Consequences for Church, State, and Society.
You can order it from Angelico Press (www.angelicopress.com) upon its
publication, which is targeted for March 31, 2017. It could never have become a
reality without your generous donations last year. A second book will be prepared
from donations making the lectures of Gardone, 2017 possible.
I
am tempted to preface this year’s official program title with a much more direct
one: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. The
“good” refers to the fact that 2017 will mark not only the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the Symposium, but also the tenth of Summorum pontificum,
with all that that motu proprio has contributed to the advance of the
cause of the “Mass of the Ages”. The “bad” and the “ugly” are owed to the
terrible reality that 2017 threatens to be a much more troubled moment in Catholic
and world history than 1992 or 2007. The erratic character of the current
pontificate---and fears for what may follow it---are proving to be
extraordinarily disturbing not just to the cause of the Faith but to that of
human Reason as well. One has the sense of a “free fall”, with the “salt”
having lost its savor. Meanwhile, too many Catholics, clerical and lay, happily
support a global political and social order suffering from a “sickness unto
death”; smiling as that order finds one or another useless or facile bandage to
cover its wounds, commits suicide, and works to bring the Church down with it.
The
ethos for the Symposium, as always, is the one laid out for us by Professor
Dietrich von Hildebrand, with his concern for rooting all of our work in an
ever-deeper study of the theology of the Mystical Body and the exalted
understanding of “transformation in Christ” that this probing of the full
significance of the Incarnation yields. It is that Christological approach,
closely connected with devotion to the Sacred Heart, that has made the Roman
Forum so eager to seek to cure our world’s “sickness unto death” by insisting
upon the need to infuse all aspects of natural life---philosophical, political,
economic, familial, fraternal, artistic, sportive, culinary; the serious and
the festive together---with that Catholic teaching and grace that correct their
flaws and raise them up in a hymn of praise to God. It is this approach that
caused von Hildebrand already in 1970 to insist that the Roman Forum fight for
the full restoration of “a liturgy that does not turn its back to God”. Gardone,
2017 will insist upon the necessity of following this Christological path, in
all realms of human activity, as the sole, infallible route to the fullness of
life instead of naturalist, secularist death.
2017 also marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
Roman Forum’s Church History Lectures in New York City. The 2016-2017 session
is entitled “Even Now the
Devastation Is Begun---And Half the Business of Destruction Done”, and deals with the
dramatic years between 1748 and 1799. Beginning in March, talks will be available
on Sound Cloud (https://soundcloud.com) for free
consultation by everyone.
Please
do consider giving a tax-deductible donation to support the attendance of a
speaker, a member of the clergy, a seminarian, or a student and make this twenty-fifth
anniversary session---and the second book
that will come from it---possible. Send all donations, made out to the “Roman Forum”,
either through PayPal (on our website) or directly to me at the address
indicated above. And please think of participating in our programs personally!
Sincerely yours in Christ,
John C. Rao (D.Phil., Oxford)
Chairman, Roman Forum
Associate Professor of History, St.
John's University
