Ugly Churches, Uglier Music: There's a commission for that. . .

Great News from Rome!  The Congregation on Divine Worship is setting up a commission on church architecture and sacred music. 

No word yet on whether or not this commission will have police powers or the authority to dispatch albino Opus Dei Ninja Monks to "take care" of offending architects, diocesan liturgical officials, pastors, and bishops.  We can always hope, can't we?

From Andrea Tornielli:

A team has been set up, to put a stop to garage style churches, boldly shaped structures that risk denaturing modern places for Catholic worship. Its task is also to promote singing that really helps the celebration of mass. The “Liturgical art and sacred music commission” will be established by the Congregation for Divine Worship over the coming weeks. This will not be just any office, but a true and proper team, whose task will be to collaborate with the commissions in charge of evaluating construction projects for churches of various dioceses. The team will also be responsible for the further study of music and singing that accompany the celebration of mass.

I spent 13 years wandering the theological deserts of Episcopalianism b/c my local Catholic parish met in what could pass for a really ugly urology office.  We could all cite examples of Ugly Churches and Awful Music. 

Until the Church destroys the modernist notion that utility trumps beauty in our architecture and music, we will suffer from a deficiency of truth and goodness in our spiritual lives.   I'm not saying that all Catholic churches must be replicas of St Peter or St Mary Major, or that every parish must have a Gregorian Chant Choir. . .only that the stadium/retail store model must be stopped, and our use of pop music and Prot hymns must be suppressed.   

Please keep in mind that the Vatican thinks in terms of centuries not seasons, so any action on the part of the commission will likely come years from now and any results from their action probably won't be felt until the latter half of the 21st century.   Regardless, they will need our prayers!

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Coffee Bowl Browsing

Spanish voters oust their anti-Catholic, socialist prime minister.  

Dem pollsters call for Obama to withdraw from the 2012 race and turn things over to Hillary.

Lefty hypocrisy:  "climate change" guru buys 20 bedroom house. 

And yet more Lefty hypocrisy:  Lead Whiner of the Occupy Movement checks into $700/night Manhattan hotel, "Tents are not for me."

Why couldn't this sort of thing happen in the U.S. my European brothers ask?  Three word answer for them:  the Second Amendment. . .which is why our Betters hate it so.

HA!  "Chicks Don't Dig Camping Out with Smelly Losers". . .the Occupy Movement's gender gap. 

DEO GRATIS!  A liturgical commission is being set up here in Rome to review church architecture and music.  NB.  the MSM (even in Italy) can't resist the temptation to describe everything the Vatican does as a "crackdown."

From $12 million to $36 million in two years:  Nancy Pelosi's doing OK in hard times.

When will the world end?  A list of Apocalypses from 2,800 B.C. to the heat death of the universe.

Throw me higher this time!!!

Well, at least he's taking responsibility. . .

Hmmmm. . .let's think this through:  if time is the relative measure of objective motion, then. . .

Time to visit the vet. . .oh, I think not.

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From Mind to Word

A hearty Mille Grazie to those faithful HancAquam readers who have recently heeded my call for help in returning to poetry. 

As I move into full-time parish ministry, my preaching will need to be more than just philosophically astute and theologically accurate. . .it will need to be Beautiful as well!

Let the Lord shine out through both our words and deeds, and may I serve His Word with diligence and strength!

God bless, Fr. Philip

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Coffee Bowl Browsing

I don't believe in unicorns or elves, therefore, I don't spend a dime of my money or a second of my time talking, writing, protesting, and whining about them.

AP rewriting history to erase Dem support for Occupy Whiners?  

Girl Scouts embrace the Culture of Death, causing some problems for Catholics. 

Hee-lar-ree-us:  ". . .a postmortem on utopia, which died in infancy but lived long enough to evolve a familiar proto-hierarchy."  Pigs.  Equal.  More.  Others.  And all that.

Purgatory in scripture. . .yup, it's there.

I love this guy.  So few in the E.U. have his guts.

Crystal Cathedral goes to the Diocese of Orange. . .let's hope the Vatican puts a stop to this $58 million lame duck grasp for a legacy.

Yet another excellent reason to get out of Italy. . .drug-resistant bacteria spreading.

Oops!  Documents appear to show John Kerry doing a little illegal inside trading.

Feminist "war on rape" conflates actual rape with boorish behavior.  Of course, if students would remain chaste and celibate 'til marriage none of this would matter.

European civilization is on the brink of collapse and the E.U. Nannies issue this vitally important regulation:  bottled water makers cannot claim that water hydrates. 

Hear, hear! 

If you're gonna get sprayed with a hose. . .

We all need a little now and then. . .WalMart is here to help.

Some days you just have to wear a shark on your head.

Ah, a pic of me at Thanksgiving circa 1965.

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Coffee Bowl Browsing

MSM media types are becoming a little unhinged at the thought of Newt G. being the GOP nominee. 

Woman in psychedelic moo-moo is consecrated "bishop" of Washington, D.C.

The Hunger Games:  just finished reading this novel.  The movie looks excellent!

I don't care if you're a Traddie, a Spirit of Vatican Two Peace Bonger, a recent convert, a Christmas/Easter pew warmer, or a rubber-necking agnostic/atheist:  you need to get in on this fight!  Why?  First, they came for the Jews. . .

MSM abandons OWS to its own folly:  "Funny how the left’s assertion that this was a grand political awakening has now gone down the memory hole."  Sorry.  But this is surprising how?

The natural escalation of a tantrum:  "non-violent" OWS Whiner threatens Macy's with a Molotov cocktail. 

Hope and Change become Despair and More-of-the-Same:  students abandoning B.O.  Smart kids.

What happens when a loved-one disappears from a cruise ship?  A whole lotta nothing.

Obviously, the problem here is that she didn't minor in Lower-East Asian Disability Studies.

Redneck Earthquake Early Warning System. . .not always accurate.

No, no, no. . .Jabba would never be seen in public with his curlers.

The birth of a Philosopher!

Well, this just means that no one wants to leave the Magnolia State. 

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Pray for religious liberty

On Sept. 29, 2011, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, current president of the USCCB, sent his fellow bishops a letter announcing the establishment of a committee to address B.O.'s attack on religious liberty in the U.S.

His letter reads in part:

As we returned to our dioceses from the June plenary session of our Episcopal Conference, we left with a palpable sense of unity and commitment among us regarding the urgent need we face to safeguard religious liberty inherent in the dignity of the human person. We recognized our need to protect this foundational principle of our country, one that has been enshrined in the United States Constitution, further enumerated in the First Amendment, and explicitly extended to all U.S. citizens. The Framers of the Constitution themselves understood this ―First Freedom‖ to be based on the norms inherent in Natural Law – namely, ―that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

This basic right, in its many and varied applications for Christians and people of faith, is now increasingly and in unprecedented ways under assault in America. This is most particularly so in an increasing number of federal government programs or policies that would infringe upon the right of conscience of people of faith or otherwise harm the foundational principle of religious liberty. As shepherds of over 70 million U.S. citizens we share a common and compelling responsibility to proclaim the truth of religious freedom for all, and so to protect our people from this assault which now appears to grow at an ever accelerating pace in ways most of us could never have imagined.

[. . .]

Please pray for the members of this committee as they begin the arduous task of defending our liberties as Americans and Catholics.

Episcopal members:

Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Chair
Bishop John O. Barres of Allentown, Pennsylvania
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap. of Philadelphia
Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas
Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory of Atlanta
Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of St. Paul-Minneapolis
Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix
Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield in Illinois
Archbishop Thomas J. Rodi of Mobile, Alabama
Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle
Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington.

Lay Consultants include:

Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight, Knights of Columbus
Kevin Baine, attorney, Williams & Connolly
Father Raymond J. de Souza, a priest of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario (Canada)
Richard Garnett, assoc. dean/prof of law and poli-science, University of Notre Dame Law School John Garvey, President, The Catholic University of America
Mary Ann Glendon, professor, Harvard Law School
Philip Lacovara, attorney
Judge Michael McConnell, professor, Stanford University Law School
L. Martin Nussbaum, attorney, Rothgerber Johnson & Lyons
Mary Ellen Russell, executive director, Maryland Catholic Conference.

Bishop Lori's testimony before Congress on the assault on religious liberty can be found here.

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Hunting for a Good Spiritual Director

A repost from 2009:

When looking for a good spiritual director, it is standard practice to interview the potential S.D. first. The idea is not to weed out those who are going to challenge you or disagree with you. The idea is find one who holds and practice the Catholic faith as taught by the Church and is able to actually help you grow in holiness.

Ask the following questions politely. There is no need to be offensive or defensive. You are not an Inquisitor. You are not hunting heresy. If it turns out that the potential S.D. is some kind of New Age kook, you are obligated to keep that assessment to yourself. The obligation to confidentiality binds both the director and the directee.

A few cautions up front:

1). Do not be impressed with S.D.'s who have credentials in spiritual direction. Most spiritual direction programs in the U.S. teach their students amateur forms of guru-ism and occult gibberish.

2). Do not be impressed by titles like "Father," "Sister," "Brother," or "Doctor." Anyone holding any of these titles can be dodgy.

3). Do not be impressed by celebrity or ecclesial status. Abbot Father Dr. Alred Boniface Schultz of the St. Labyrinth Benedominican Monastery, author of 46 books on meditation and a national speaker, can be as big a moonbat as anyone.

4). Do not be impressed by the potential S.D.'s personal piety, orthodox theology, solid publishing record with the best Catholic houses, or his/her reputation for brilliant spiritual direction. Every director/directee relationship is different. What works for you, might not work for me. And being a good S.D. takes more than unwavering allegiance to the magisterium.

5). Do not be impressed by a potential S.D.'s willingness, even eagerness, to take you on as a directee. In fact, I would interpret any sort of "salemanship" on the part of the S.D. as creepy and immediately disqualify him/her.

Questions (with the qualification that he/she may say, "'Nunya."):

--Tell me about your spiritual life, your daily spiritual routine, your prayer life.

--What are your strengths as a S.D.? Weaknesses?

--Tell me about your experience as a S.D. How many years? What sorts of directees?

--How would you describe your relationship to the Church? The local bishop? The Holy Father?

--What do you think of commonly used spiritual direction tools like the Ennegram, labrynith?

--What do you think of personal devotions like the rosary, novenas, etc.?

--What authors/books do you regularly read and recommend?

--Have you had any spiritual direction training? Where and what kind?

--What's your understanding of the sacraments, esp. Mass, confession, marriage?

--How do you understand the relationship btw God and creation?

--How do you understand holiness, goodness, morality, sin, etc.?

--Do you use fasting or other sorts of penance in your direction?

--My biggest spititual difficulty is X. How would begin to approach this problem?

--My greatest spiritual gift is X. How would you direct me to use this gift?

--Generally speaking, from what sources do you pull from for inspiration as a S.D.?

Keep in mind that you are being interviewed as well. I have turned down potential directees b/c I didn't have the particular gifts to deal with their challenges. I have also been "fired" as a S.D. for being too theologically orthodox and for being "too hard."

Do you want someone who will "kick butt and take names"?

Or someone who will be more of a gentle listener, a guide?

Or someone who will function as a teacher, a model?

Or someone who will sympathize but challenge nonetheless?

Or someone who maintains an emotional distance and directs you?

Or someone who will "get in there with you" and fight?

Or someone versatile enough to shift among these as needed?

You really have to know yourself before choosing a S.D. But you also have to be open to change and growth. I find it very difficult to get a good S.D. because I need a "kick butt and take names" kinda director. I need someone who can look me in the eye and tell me how full of crap I am. Not many of those around these days. . .sigh. . .

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Is spiritual reading enough?

Question from a faithful HancAquam reader:  "Do you really need a spiritual director or does reading the writings of the saints suffice for most of us?

There are at least three ways to think about spiritual direction (SD):

1). A visit to the E.R.

2). A checkup with your dentist

3). A trip to the gym

Depending on what shape you're in spiritually, you will need emergency treatment, routine maintenance, or some body-building.  (How's that for mixed metaphors?!)

The idea here is that whether or not your need spiritual direction (and how often if you do) depends almost entirely how where you are in your relationship with God.  If things are going well, then keeping up with your spiritual reading is probably just about right, though it never hurts to get a check up or hit the gym on occasion.  If things are starting to look dodgy, it's a good idea to check in with some SD and see if there's anything seriously wrong that can be prevented or treated.  If, however, there's an obvious and overwhelming collapse in your pursuit of holiness, then a trip to the emergency room is required.  Follow up is mandatory. 

More often than not, a collapse in your spiritual life is due to some serious sin and making a good confession will start the ball to recovery rolling.  Of course, confession is not SD, but making a good confession is an excellent way to instill some sincerity into your repentance.  

Being a Dominican, I'm a champion of reading the saints and doctors of the Church.  One caution:  be sure that you aren't reading above or below your spiritual level.  I mean, if you're a recent convert, you might want to hold off on reading the Latin homilies of Meister Eckhart and think more along the lines of studying the Catechism.  If you're a Catholic Pro, then limiting yourself to the Catechism isn't going to challenge you.  A spiritual director can help you find your level.

Also, don't limit yourself to just one genre of spiritual reading.  I find contemporary poetry to be insightful and challenging.  A lot of Catholics read well-written sci-fi/fantasy novels as spiritual reading.  God reveals Himself using all sorts of imperfect methods!

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Coffee Bowl Browsing

What do typewriters, rotary phones, record changers, and coffee percolators have in common?

GOP Rep. caught doing a little insider-trading?  

How did Hitler lose WWII?  Remember the children's rhyme:  bean, beans the magical fruit. . .?

Obedience cures stupidity.  ("Obedience" properly understood, of course.)

Biblical proof that Zombies are real!

Portland Occupiers abandon their righteous cause in order to save their $400 tents.  Ah, dedication.

Anti-American propaganda posters from N. Korea.  Hmmm. . .maybe the OWS Whiners could use some of these.

Notice how "The REV. Dr. Martin Luther King" has lost the "Rev."?

A morphing map of the London Underground.  And yes, the modern map does distort one's
understanding of London's geography.

What's inside Fort Knox and how is it protected?

How do rednecks protect their Nascar commemorative beer can collections?

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Coffee Bowl Browsing

Occupy Movement:  this is what happens when you have a society made up entirely of "liberals"?  No, not so sure about that.  Most of the E.U. is quite liberal and it manages to remain more or less civilized.  The OWS movement is what happens when you have a society made up entirely of Wards of that State and Nanny can no longer afford to take care of them.

Case in point (see above).  Bonus:  an updated Occupy rap sheet.  200 incidents and counting.

Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois splits with the Diocese of Belleville over same-sex "marriage."  Another anti-Catholic notch in B.O.'s belt.

Speaking of B.O.'s anti-Catholic tendencies:  "The America emerging in the next several decades is likely to be much less friendly to Christian faith than anything in our country’s past. And that poses a challenge for all of us as Catholics. It’s not a question of when or if it might happen. It’s happening today."

You can't wear a U.S. flag tee-shirt if someone might be offended.  The sounds like my CPE in St Louis.  My habit offended the chaplains, yet the rainbow flag buttons and pink triangles of the Franciscan priest and UCC chaplain were just fine. 

"Working Man" Michael Moore's million dollar vacation home. . .but remember:  he's not in the 1%.

Probably the best commentary on the Penn State sex-scandal.  Must one child be raped so a football team can be successful?  Ouch.

Of course they were going to riot!  On the Penn State student-rioters:  "Imbued with a sense of victimhood, entitlement, and cultivated grievance that can only be taught, their preferred response to inconvenience is a temper tantrum."

A MUST read:  What's So Great About Catholicism?  "With Pascal I would affirm that one actually learns the Catholic faith by doing — which is why deracinated, prissy, critical philosophes standing outside will never 'get it.' The faith of the Catholic is a great drama unfolding before God, and we are the players in it." 

Vicious bear attack. . .the poor guy barely survives.

The Zombie Apocalypse comes to Sesame Street! 

How to get the police to respond to a burglary. . .call 911 and tell them you have exercised your 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. 

First World Problems. . .someone send this list to OWS. 

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No, that "justice/peace" note hasn't been disowned. . .

OY!  I'm getting dizzy.

Apparently, the behind closed doors of the Back and Forth of producing the Church's teaching is being made public.  

Now we're told that the Holy Father's Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone has not all but repudiated the recently published note from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

From CNS:  "Cardinal Bertone’s order, they said, simply stipulated that any documents bearing the pope’s signature must be released through his office. The Justice and Peace document did not fall into that category, even though its content was reviewed by the Secretariat."

This leaves the impression that there's something of an ideological struggle going on in the Vatican.  None of this Back and Forth, however, changes the magisterial status of the note.  It's a proposal from a pontifical council issued without the Holy Father's signature.  In other words, it's not binding on Catholics as a matter of faith.  

Read it, discuss it, criticize it, adopt it or reject it. 

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U.D. prof responds to justice/peace "note" (Updated)

Update:  Prof. Medaille writes to correct my misrepresentation of his LifeSiteNews article.  I misunderstood a link he posted on my Facebook page as his response to the PCJP note.  He clarifies the issues in the comments.  My apologies to him for getting this wrong.

+

University of Dallas theology prof,  John Medaille has an excellent article on LifeSiteNews about the recently published and controversial note from the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace, "Life and family issues underlie all economic issues in global debt crisis."

"According to Medaille, the crisis of the Euro is in fact a good example of the problem of replacing concrete human realities with ideologies as the foundation of modern economies."  

Prof. Medaille is an advocate of distributism.   I admit to not knowing much about this economic philosophy, but it has a number of heavy-hitting brains behind it.

Give it a read and let me know what you think.

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But some pigs are more equal than others. . .

In its academic heyday in the late 80's and early 90's, postmodernist theories about The Real and how we come to know it (or not) provided an intoxicating elixir for humanities professors who had been sobered by the real world successes of their colleagues in the natural sciences.  Perhaps a bit envious of the research grants thrown at chemists, physicists, and engineers, liberal arts profs tried to squeeze their inherently squishy disciplines into the hard mold of science.  They failed. 

Having failed to transform the study of literature, history, religion, etc. into rigorous disciplines a la physics, humanities professionals succumbed to the temptations of Not Knowing and proclaimed the advent of Universal Ignorance.  And when this proclamation proved to be too bourgeois for the faculty lounge and the conference circuit, they moved as a herd toward the cliffs of Nihilism and Despair, otherwise known as deconstructionism.

That we cannot know everything there is to know about everything approaches the axiomatic.  But to conclude from this premise that absolutely nothing is knowable is absurd.  For example, we know the distance of the sun from earth, approx. 150 million km or about 93 million miles.  We do not know the exact chemical composition of the sun; that is, we do not know precisely how many chemical compounds make up the sun and in what proportion.  That we don't know the exact chemical composition of the sun doesn't mean that we cannot know the sun's distance from the earth.  However, this is exactly what postmodernist theorist would have us believe:  any particular admission of ignorance regarding X is a universal admission that X is unknowable.  In other words, my ignorance of one thing is the same as my inability to know anything at all.

To make matters worse, pomo theorists push the absurd to the nihilistic by asserting that universal ignorance necessarily entails the denial of reality per se.  Not only am I ignorant about X and not only can I know nothing about X b/c of this ignorance, I must conclude that X doesn't exist.  Now, if these theorists really believed this and lived with some degree of integrity, we'd never hear from them again.  You'd have to insane to spend your time rattling on about a non-existent reality.  But they have the same bills to pay that the rest of us do.  Enter:  interpretative narratives.

Here's the move:  humanistic disciplines like literature and history cannot be stuffed into scientific molds, so the hard sciences must be liquified and poured into humanistic molds.  Science like literary criticism or historical accounting is really just a form of narrative, a story we tell one another to help us live more or less fruitful lives.  Replete with metaphors, similes, and other rhetorical devices, science does not and cannot describe a mind-independent world at all.  All it does is impose an attractive story on our ignorant observations of phenomena.  We are left with knowing nothing more than the stories we tell and all stories are equally true.  Einstein's theory of general relativity has the same truth-value as Homer's Iliad. 

In the pomo world, narratives function as meaning-giving structures, that is, they impose order, significance, and purpose.  This sounds like a good thing.  It's not.  Always on guard against any narrative that even hints at being oppressive, pomo theorists rail against certain kinds of narrative that appear to privilege classes of people over and against other classes of people.  Enter:  cultural Marxism.  Although these theorists insist on the non-existence of a mind-independent reality, they almost always fall back on the necessity of opposing the Grand Narratives of Oppression (racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc.) with the reality of radical human equality.  All human beings are exactly the same in every way and our cultural-social institutions must be shaped in such a way that no differences are recognized or celebrated.  In order to do this, ironically, all differences among humans must be celebrated and valued, except, of course, those differences that give rise to the notion that all humans are different and to be valued as individuals.  

Nonsense, you say?  Absolutely.  But nonsense always shows its chaotic face when we detach our ways of knowing from what can be known. 

You might be wondering:  why should I care what a bunch of comparative lit profs think about reality?  When we detach our ways of knowing (science, language) from what we can know (reality) we are left with nothing more than assertions about power.  With no objective measure for the true, the good, and the beautiful, subjective measures reign supreme.  In such a world, who rules?  Ultimately, if history is any predictor, those with the most money and guns.  Without a real, knowable connection between the Good and the True, those with power define the what is good and true.  To sum up with a literary allusion:  all pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others.

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Happy 6th Birthday!

Almost let this day slip by w/o noting. . .Happy 6th Anniversary to HancAquam!

Six years ago today I started this blog in order to post copies of my homilies.  

When asked for a copy of a homily I would either email it or burn it to a CD.  My intrepid intern at the time, Ms Loreena Garcia, said to me, "Fr. Philip, join the 21st century and get a blog."  

So, I did. 

You might be interested in a few H.A. stats:

Unique visitors:  618, 751 

Visitors per day:  400

Page views:  917,759

Views per day:  675

No. of posts:  2, 168

My thanks to all of H.A.'s faithful readers.  I pray for you daily!

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"Vatican" disowns controversial "justice/peace" document

The Holy Father's Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, all but disowns the recent note issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, ordering that all documents issued by Vatican offices be cleared through his office before publication.

From Chiesa:

ROME, November 10, 2011 – Precisely when the G20 summit in Cannes was coming to its weak and uncertain conclusion, on that same Friday, November 4 at the Vatican, a smaller summit convened in the secretariat of state was doing damage control on the latest of many moments of confusion in the Roman curia.

In the hot seat was the document on the global financial crisis released ten days earlier by the pontifical council for justice and peace. A document that had disturbed many, inside and outside of the Vatican.

The secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, complained that he had not known about it until the last moment. And precisely for this reason he had called that meeting in the secretariat of state.

The conclusion of the summit was that this binding order would be transmitted to all of the offices of the curia: from that point on, nothing in writing would be released unless it had been inspected and authorized by the secretariat of state.

[. . .] 

But more than these terrible grades, what has been even more irritating for many authoritative readers of the document of the pontifical council for justice and peace is the fact that it is in glaring contradiction with Benedict XVI's encyclical "Caritas in Veritate."

In the encyclical, pope Joseph Ratzinger does not in any way call for a "public authority with universal competency" over politics and the economy, that sort of great Leviathan (no telling who gets the throne, or how) so dear to the document of October 24.

In "Caritas in Veritate" the pope speaks more properly of the "governance" (meaning regulation, "moderamen" in Latin) of globalization, through subsidiary and polyarchic institutions. Nothing at all like a monocratic world government.

[. . .]

Read the whole repudiation here.  This pretty much settles the question of whether or not this note represents the "mind of the Church." 

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