Book review: Enchanted by Eternity: Recapturing the Wonder of the Catholic Worldview

Enchanted by Eternity: Recapturing the Wonder of the Catholic Worldview by Fr. William Slattery is a stunningly insightful read.

The author, whose name you might recognize from his earlier and also very fine book Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Helped Build—and Can Help Rebuild—Western Civilization, is an unusual combination: a fiery Irishman, a cold-blooded PhD in epistemology who specialized in alethic logic, a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, a historian – and a priest who is passionately in love with the Traditional Latin Mass. Listen to these words in the Acknowledgments section of his book:

2016 Lake Garda Statement

The Lake Garda Statement

Regarding the “Catholic” Apotheosis of Luther

Final Session of the 24^th Annual Roman Forum Summer Symposium

Feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius

July 7^th, 2016

Our civilization is so sick that even the best efforts to prop up its few tottering remnants manifest the pathetic illness that has step by step brought the entire structure crumbling down. The disease in question is a willful, prideful, irrational, and ignorant obsession with “freedom”. But this is a malady that gained its initial effective entry into Christendom in union with the concept of the natural world as the realm of “total depravity”.

It is crucially important that we recognize both the ultimate responsibility of this willful liberty for the destruction of our Christian and Classical culture as well as the role played by the idea that “incarnated” it historically in our midst. This is so for two reasons. The first is in order that we may attempt seriously to rid ourselves of their monstrous influence over our own minds, souls, and bodies. The second is because a massive attempt to masquerade the truth regarding their real character and practical alliance is being mounted in conjunction with the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s devastating appearance on the public scene in 1517—and this for the sake of maintaining their nefarious impact upon believers and delivering the Faith its coup de grace as a meaningful social force.

"The Modern World Degrades Everything"

Charles Péguy

Cahiers de la Quinzaine (IX)

October 6, 1907

We often forget that the modern world, under a different look, is the bourgeois world, the capitalist world. It is quite an amusing display to see the way our Socialists, anti-Christian, and particularly anti-Catholic, oblivious to the contradiction, praise the same world under the name of 'modern', and demean it, the same one, under the name of 'bourgeois'.

The 2015 Newman Lecture in Melbourne: - Newman's Conversion of Conscience and the Resolution of the Crisis of Modernity

As last year, when we provided the text of "The Inaugural Blessed John Henry Newman Lecture" delivered by Dr Stephen McInerney on Newman and the Roman Rite, this year we bring you the text of the second lecture, delivered by Fr Scot Armstrong*, a founding member of the Brisbane Oratory in Formation.

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“Newman's Conversion of Conscience

and the Resolution of the Crisis of Modernity"

Delivered at the Parish of Blessed John Henry Newman, Melbourne

17th October, 2015

“Relax and get with the times”: Christianity Lite

With the confidence born of divine faith and true ecclesiastical authority, Pope Leo XIII was able, in 1899, to diagnose one of the characteristic errors of modern times and the only proper response a Catholic can make to it:

The underlying principle of these new opinions [he is speaking of Americanism] is that, in order the more easily to attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions. Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith. They contend that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of her teaching which are of lesser importance, and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them. It does not need many words, beloved son, to prove the falsity of these ideas if the nature and origin of the doctrine which the Church proposes are recalled to mind. … Let it be far from anyone’s mind to suppress for any reason any doctrine that has been handed down. Such a policy would tend rather to separate Catholics from the Church than to bring in those who differ. (Testem Benevolentiae)

Can papal writing get clearer than this? That which belongs to the doctrine of faith and morals handed down by the Church is immutable, unassailable, always relevant, always required; it is from God as its author, for God as its final end, within man’s power by the help of God’s grace—and by it every man will be judged, for God is no respecter of persons.

Book Notice: Thomas Storck, From Christendom to Americanism and Beyond

Obergefell, the Treason of Catholics, and the Social Kingship of Christ

Destruction of Catholic images in Zurich, 1524

The superb Lake Garda Statement on the Ecclesial and Civilizational Crisis got me thinking about the broad lines of the story in which we find ourselves, characters in a divine drama of light and darkness.

Even though they may have seen it coming, many Catholics are still in a state of shock after Obergefell. How did this happen so quickly? How did we end up in the top-down legitimation of sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance, perversions that make a mockery of nature, disorders that unravel the fabric of human society? The world is clearly a mess—hardly Christian even in those lands once favored by widespread allegiance to the one true faith. It is no fairy tale: once upon a time, the Western world was permeated with Christianity through and through; governments, laws, economies, the arts and sciences, were Catholic. What happened? 

The story of modernity is inherently bound up with the politics and economics of rebellion, revolution, the false messianism of secularization and secularism. “The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together, against the Lord and against his Christ. Let us break their bonds asunder: and let us cast away their yoke from us” (Ps 2:2-3). Thanks to the naïve “opening to the world” of the Second Vatican Council, a move that eviscerated the Church’s otherworldly interior, a vast number of Catholics today view history, culture, politics, and economics as foreign to, or outside of, theology and faith, as if the Church had nothing to say about human nature and life in this world. 

Such a narrow mentality, an obvious exhibition of the vices of individualism and spiritualism, is explicitly rejected by a long line of modern Popes who saw clearly into our age. Just as no man is an island, Catholicism is not an atomistic thing but a social reality; it has always had and, where truly believed, will always have ramifications in the social order, the life and culture, the laws and structures, of peoples. Due to the fall of Adam, those very structures can become what Pope John Paul II called “structures of sin,” preventing people from hearing the Gospel or at least making it more difficult for them to live according to it.

The Lake Garda Statement

Lake Garda from Above

This year’s Summer Symposium of The Roman Forum in Gardone Riviera, on the shores of Lake Garda (See previous reports: here and here), concluded with a strong statement on the crisis in the Church and the world, and the necessity of returning to the fulness of Catholic Social Teaching in order to meet the crisis. It calls for an end to the policy of “opening to the world,” and for an end to the “fruitless collaboration with the Church’s implacable opponents” that this opening has meant, and calls for “a recovery of the Church’s traditional teaching on the Social Reign of Christ the King.” The statement is being simultaneously published on several websites. We are pleased to publish this important document in full here on Rorate Cæli. (Printable version). 

The Lake Garda Statement

On the Ecclesial and Civilizational Crisis

Preamble

Among the Catholic faithful the conviction grows that the ongoing crisis in the Church and the drastic moral decline of our civilization have entered a critical new phase which represents a turning point in the history of the world. 

In the Church, a Synod on the Family has devolved into a battle to defend the indissolubility of marriage from an attack within, pitting cardinal against cardinal and bishop against bishop. The Synod has produced a midterm relatio, approved by the Pope himself, which calls for the admission of divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion on a “case by case” basis without any renunciation of adulterous relations, contrary to the explicit teaching of Pope John Paul II in line with the perennial discipline of the Church.[1] The same document speaks of “valuing” the “homosexual orientation” while recognizing the “precious support for the life of the partners” supposedly provided by “homosexual unions.”[2] Bishop Athanasius Schneider rightly observes that “[t]his is the first time in Church History that such a heterodox text was actually published as a document of an official meeting of Catholic bishops under the guidance of a pope, even though the text only had a preliminary character.”[3]