A message of hope from Hiroshima

Chiesa e Post Concilio

August 7, 2017

The testimony of Professor Hikoka Vanamuri, survivor of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945

Hikoka Vanamuri, former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo, was interviewed while on pilgrimage in Fatima. This is what he had to say:“I’ll never return to Japan. After years of study, after years of meditation I have understood that life under the tainted atmosphere of Buddha is an embittered historical testimony of blatant paganism. I converted to Catholicism. I made this decision after the explosion of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I was in Hiroshima for historical research. I was in the library when the bomb exploded. I was busy consulting a Portuguese book and my eye happened to catch an image of Our Lady of Fatima.  I had the impression that this image moved, as if to say something. All of a sudden there was a blinding light, hurting my eyes intensely. I was terrified. The cataclysm had come about. The sky had darkened and a cloud of brown dust had covered the city. The library was burning. Men were burning. Children were burning. The air itself was burning.  I didn’t even have  the slightest scratch on me.   The sign of the miracle was evident.  Yet I wasn’t able to explain what had happened.  

Here's hoping Casa Santa Marta doesn't block YouTube

"Nous y sommes... Ce n'est qu'un début." This is just the beginning

A terrorist attack and a massacre in a newspaper in Paris. The following day, to the south of the city, a related individual shoots down a female police officer. On the very next day, a hostage situation in the outskirts of the Paris airport to the north of the city. Then, hours later, another hostage situation in the Porte de Vincennes region of Paris, shutting down completely the beltway (périphérique) around the city.

Just yesterday we said that, "such events will become each time more common in the upcoming decades as frightening wars of religion of unknown violence unfold by installments throughout the cherished cities and fields of that Europe all Christians love so much." At this very moment, experts on French television and radio networks are openly using the word "guerre" (war) about the moment, and one declares openly: "Nous y sommes... Ce n'est qu'un début." (We've reached it...this is just the beginning.)

Happy Thanksgiving, you people in the country promoter of "State Terrorism"!

It is pretty much the only country that truly fits in our age the apparent description made by Pope Francis: the United States of America.

As much as many reasonable people may disagree (as we do) with many decisions of past and present United States administrations on foreign policy and war, especially with several mistaken decisions taken since September 11, 2001, it is still breathtaking to accuse the nation and its allies in several different operations (different allies in different operations) of being promoters of "State Terrorism", and therefore comparable to ISIS:

Andreas Englisch: Your Holiness, I have the honor of posing the question for the group of international journalists. You spoke often, in the speeches pronounced in Strasbourg, both of the terrorist threat as of the threat of slavery: there are behaviors [that are] typical also of the Islamic State, that threatens a large part of the Mediterranean, threaten also Rome, and even you, in your person. Do you believe that there may be dialogue also with these extremists, or do you believe that this is a lost cause?

Socci: "The Curious Phenomenon of Sudden 'Conversions' among Churchmen" - while struggle for unborn life is abandoned

Pope Bergoglio’s “Politically Correct” Peace

Antonio Socci

[for Italian daily] Libero

September 14, 2014

Moving with the new winds?

Chesterton: Is War Irrational -- or is Pacifism Feverish?

The Peace Fever

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

May 29, 1915

It is customary to talk about the war fever, but in those who still exhibit it, the peace fever is much more feverish. With these people peace is not as much a prejudice as a mania.

There is said to be a sort of person in the lunatic asylums who thinks he is a chicken. But even he is only somewhat exaggerating his legitimate claim to know his own business best. He is too modest to commit himself to the proposition that all human beings are chickens. That, however, is very much the proposition to which the extreme Pacifist commits himself: for he really talks of man as if he were talking of some other animal; as if a naturalist were to class men with poultry merely because they have two legs. Legs can be used for other purposes than that of running away; and man's highest moral and mental powers can be used for other purposes than that of keeping the peace. Mere Pacifism has in this crisis [World War I] failed fully to support anything or anybody, even its own best exponents, and that for a perfectly simple reason: that mere Pacifism is morally wrong. Mere peace does not fill the heart; it does not satisfy the conscience or even the affections. I have heard of a person having the highly unpleasant accomplishment of being able to stop his heart from beating; and men of a generous and civilised breed can only reject the case for just anger and battle by an artificial stoppage of the heart.

September 5, 1914: Péguy at 100 - I - The Mystery of Charity in War and Death

“Pope's words on War and Peace are a Radical Shift for the Catholic Church.”

Image of the Day: Pope prays in Aborted Children's Symbolic Cemetery "The Great Destroyer of Peace is Abortion"

Pope Francis visits the symbolic cemetery for abortion victims in Kkottongnae, Korea, this Saturday.

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I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself. And we read in the Scripture, for God says very clearly: Even if a mother could forget her child - I will not forget you - I have carved you in the palm of my hand. We are carved in the palm of His hand, so close to Him that unborn child has been carved in the hand of God. And that is what strikes me most, the beginning of that sentence, that even if a mother could forget something impossible - but even if she could forget - I will not forget you. And today the greatest means - the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And we who are standing here - our parents wanted us. We would not be here if our parents would do that to us. Our children, we want them, we love them, but what of the millions. Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child - what is left for me to kill you and you kill me - there is nothing between.

Mother Teresa

Nobel Lecture

December 11, 1979

Fontgombault Sermon and Allocution: Assumption of Our Lady, Proclamation of Love, Motherhood and Life Vow to Our Lady: a Vow for Peace and Prayerfulness

Assumption of Our Lady

Sermon of the Right Reverend Dom Jean Pateau

Abbot of Our Lady of Fontgombault

(Fontgombault, August 15, 2014)

There is more happiness in giving than in taking (cf. Acts 20:35).

God the very first has put into practice this fundamental rule of spiritual life: He gave us His Son, He gave us Mary.

In monastic life, men give themselves to God through the practice of the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. They renounce riches, the legitimate joys of a human family, and the exercise of their own will, thus giving to the world the testimony that God only suffices. Today we remember the commitment that fifty years ago two of us have made. Throughout these years God has remained faithful. Man can rely on this faithfulness to enter into a path which might seem to go beyond human strength.

Whereas current ideas incline us to zapping, to ceaseless changing, to the culture of the temporary which debars us from any long-term commitment, life’s true joy and fecundity spring from an irrevocable commitment which gives us time to grow, to ripen, to blossom. Monastic life thus emerges as a laboratory where in the contact with divine realities, in liturgical prayer, in lectio divina, in personal prayer, as well as in brotherly life, a sweet fragrance is evolved which goes up from earth towards heavens to the praise of the Maker’s glory.

It is therefore not very hard to understand why monks like to choose Mary’s feasts to commit themselves before God by the links of profession or promise, and why they cultivate a great love for her. Mary is she who has entirely been God’s possession, to the extent that God has wanted to take flesh in her. To man’s gift, to his often so poor prayer, God Who is never niggardly of His grace answers with His abundance, He gives bountifully and lavishly. Mary is full of grace and she invites her children to follow the path of abandonment to Providence.

We remember today the end of Mary’s earthly life. She has gone up to Heaven in her body and soul and she has been crowned by God as Queen of heaven and earth. 

At the end of August

At the end of the first month of the Great War:

August 29, 1914: an agonizing French Catholic soldier, in an infirmary bombarded by the Germans in the war front, asks a military chaplain, whom he believes to be a priest in a cassock, for a Crucifix. The chaplain was Chief Rabbi Abraham Bloch, who brings and presents to him the image of the Crucified Lord: moments later, both would be killed by an exploding shell. [For those who asked... the main eye-witness of the incident was Father Jamin, S.J., in whose arms Bloch finally expired. See, for instance, Maurice Barrès, Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France - published in English as The faith of France.]

1861 at 150 I - Father Joseph B. O'Hagan

Ireland has given many great gifts to the United States of America and one of them was Joseph B. O’Hagan who was born in the Olde Sod in County Tyrone on August 15, 1826, the feast of the Assumption. His family emigrating to Nova Scotia, he entered the seminary in 1844. Meeting a Boston Jesuit in 1847, he joined the order in December of that year. Finishing his theological studies in Louvain, he was ordained a priest in 1861.

Returning to the US he joined the Union Army as a chaplain for the New York Excelsior Brigade, one of the hardest fighting outfits in the Army of the Potomac. Assigned to the 73rd New York, at first Father O’Hagan didn’t think much of many of his fellow soldiers as this passage from a letter he wrote on August 7, 1861 indicates: “Such a collection of men was never before united in one body since the flood. Most of them were the scum of New York society, reeking with vice and spreading a moral malaria around them. Some had been serving terms of penal servitude on Blackwell’s Island at the outbreak of the war, but were released on condition of enlisting in the army of the Union, and had gladly accepted the alternative..” The sense of humor of Father O’Hagan is demonstrated by his account of a regiment electing a chaplain: “Over four hundred voted for a Catholic priest, one hundred and fifty-four, for any kind of a protestant minister; eleven, for a Mormon elder; and three hundred and thirty-five said they could find their way to hell without the assistance of clergy.” .

Serving as a Chaplain involved many trials, and Chaplain O’Hagan steeled himself to the task by thinking of the tribulations and obstacles that Saint Francis Xavier overcame in his day. In time he came to appreciate the courage amply displayed by his fellow soldiers on many a battlefield and how well most of them responded to military discipline and to his own efforts to encourage them to remember their religious duties.

He became good friends with a Protestant Chaplain in the Brigade, Joseph Twichell, who was rather shocked when O’Hagan took him on a visit to Georgetown and found that the Jesuits liked to eat, smoke and drink! [Read more in Almost Chosen People.]

[The New York Times: 1862 article on POW Fr. O'Hagan.]