Christ Is The Only Firm Foundation For Western Civilization

Given the crisis surrounding the current influx of refugees from Syria and other Muslim countries into Europe, it seems Worth Revisiting this post from August 12th, 2014 (originally titled "If they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”). To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

It's never really safe to be a Christian

It’s never completely safe to be a Christian in this world.  In my recent Sunday Snippets post [here] I briefly discussed the plight of Christians in Iraq, who are facing brutal persecution at the hands of ISIS, an armed movement embracing a particularly virulent strain of radical Islam. I illustrated the post with the Arabic “N”, with which ISIS terrorists target Christian homes, and which has since become an emblem of solidarity and a badge of honor for Christians around the world.

The Fall of Rome

     That explicit identification as Christians, and with other Christians, is vitally important. I made the point the week before [here] that radical Islam would pose little threat to “a Christendom united in Faith and fortified with Prayer”. Unfortunately, what had been Christendom is rapidly de-Christianizing, which creates a twofold threat, both from within and from without.  The external threat, a radicalized and aggressive Islam, still looks relatively distant to those of us in the United States; it seems a lot more formidable in Europe.  There, a growing, poorly assimilated, and increasingly alienated and hostile  Muslim population  is combining with the forces of societal destruction under the guise of secularism and “multiculturism” to attack the very basis of historic (which means, essentially, Christian) European culture, as described by Joseph Pearce in a piece that is appearing on Life Site News [here].  The article is well worth reading in its entirety; the best summation of Pearce’s point comes in a quote from actor John Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf Gimli in the screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  Rhys-Davies says: “I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged, and if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”.  Since the actor first spoke these words several years ago, the concrete evidence of their truth has been rapidly multiplying, and so although the multi-culti wrecking ball pounds on, an increasing number of Europeans are starting to see multiculturalism for the civilizational suicide that it is.

"If we falter and lose our freedoms, 

it will be because we destroyed ourselves" -Abraham Lincoln

     To those of us in the United States the threat of islamism, although real, still seems remote.  The incidence of jihadism here can be seen as sporadic, with only a few serious incidents (9/11, the Fort Hood Massacre), and the local Muslim population is still quite small and has shown only scattered signs of radicalization – so far.  The heedless dismantling of our culture from within, however, proceeds apace.  I’ll provide just two recent examples.  First, the College Board, which through the content of its Advanced Placement (AP) exams determines the curriculum of thousands of high school classes around the country, has come with a new AP American History course [article here] that ignores great Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King, jr.  Instead it emphasizes impersonal “historical forces” - and not so much those familiar to earlier generations of students like the development of democratic institutions, or religious tolerance.  From the Fox News article: 

“ . . . you’re not going to find Thomas Jefferson and the House of Burgesses and the cradle of democracy either,” said Larry Krieger, who retired in 2005 after more than three decades in the classroom.  And finally, you’re not going to find Benjamin Franklin and the birth of American entrepreneurialism . . . what you’re going to find is our nation’s founders portrayed as bigots who developed a belief in white superiority . . .”

The article adds that students will find, overall, “a narrative laden with tyranny and subjugation.”  
     As if it’s not enough that individual classes are convincing young people that their country is and always has been irredeemably corrupt, we now have entire schools dedicated to the purpose – at your expense.  We now have “social justice” charter schools [here], government schools funded with taxpayer money.  And while the term social justice has an honorable origin in Catholic social teaching, it has long since been hijacked by the left.  No, the students at these schools won’t be studying Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, they’ll be training in “social activism”, a.k.a. leftist political agitation.  All of which means that in certain localities in the United States we’ll have the curious phenomenon of the government expending public funds to set up public schools dedicated to training young people to tear it all down. 

"The Church of the Living God, the pillar 

and the foundation of the Truth." -1 Timothy 3:15

     Tearing it all down seems to be the program of the cultural and political left, whether we’re talking about multi-culturalism, the redefinition of marriage, revisionist history, or Robin Hood economic activism.  Very often, they don’t even seem to pretend anymore to have a coherent positive vision of what might replace all the institutions they seek to eradicate.  Not that it would help much if they did: every attempt to destroy a society that had developed over time in response to the real needs and experiences of human beings and construct on its ruins a society hatched in the brains of men (e.g., the French Revolution, Soviet Communism) has been a disaster; bloody, inhuman disaster, such as is still playing out in North Korea.  In similar fashion, the man-made religion of Islam has had a track record over the past millennium and a half of spawning anti-human horrors such the one currently on display in Iraq and Syria.
     The most profound and radical revolution in human history, on the other hand, was the transformation of the Greco-Roman civilization by the unlikely spread of Christianity.  It was no mere human idea, but the revelation of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ that subdued “the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome” (props to Edgar Allan Poe).  And notice that the Church didn’t so much destroy and replace the institutions of the Roman Empire as it “baptized” them and made them the bulwarks of a more humane culture [for more on that, see here and here].  When Rome did fall to invaders from the North, the Church worked the same transformation on the newcomers.

     And now here we are in a society that wants to do away with both the Church of Jesus Christ and the institutions passed on by our ancestors.  Do we really think that the empty shell that will be left can stand against the legions of the New Caliphate, or any other motivated and determined conqueror from without or within?

    

"We Came, We Saw, God Conquered"

King John Sobieski blessing his army at the Battle of Vienna

          Today is September 12th. On this date in 1683 a Christian army led by Polish King John III Sobieski defeated the Muslim Ottoman Turks in battle, freeing the city of Vienna from a two months long siege and freeing Europe, for a time, from the fear of Islamic conquest. 

     The siege of Vienna in 1683 was the final salvo of a period lasting almost a millennium, starting when Charles Martel’s victory at Tours in 732 stemmed the first Muslim incursion into Europe, during which the Christian West was constantly under the threat of subjugation by the followers of Mohammed. Had Charles Martel failed, or Sobieski, or any of the other Christian commanders in between, our world today would be very different. Consider what Tunisia, Libya, or Egypt might be like today – or Syria – if they had remained part of Christendom. Does anyone doubt that things there would be better, probably much better?

     And we need to bear in mind that this was really a struggle not simply of peoples or of nations, but between Christendom and Islam. Sobieski’s force was called The Holy League, the same name borne by that alliance which defeated the Turks in the naval battle of Lepanto in the previous century. Like those earlier Christian soldiers, who prayed the Rosary before going into battle with the Turkish fleet, Sobieski’s army prayed: they attended Mass, after which Sobieski formed up his army and “commended their mission and their souls to the care of the Blessed Virgin.” After victory was achieved he informed the Pope that “we came, we saw, God conquered”, turning Julius Caesar’s proud boast to the Roman Senate into a humble acknowledgement of God’s saving Grace.

     There are two points that stand out here. One is that we need to recognize that sometimes it is necessary to fight; our opponents have been at it for almost a millennium and a half, and there’s no indication that they are any more interested in compromise, or anything short of total victory, than they were at any point since Mohammed emerged from his cave with the Koran. Certainly the outlook and behavior we’re seeing from the Taliban or ISIS is nothing new: during the battle for Vienna, the Turks murdered 30,000 defenseless Christian hostages. The second point is that we will fail unless we rely on God: “Unless the LORD builds the house”, says Psalm 127,“those who build it labor in vain.” Our prevailing secular culture has shown it can’t do the job. Today’s Muslims, enabled by the moral decay and post-Christian depopulation of the continent, are gradually achieving by peaceful migration (although it’s becoming less peaceful) the capture of Europe that eluded the strongest armies of their forebears. Our only hope is to return to God and, as did John Sobieski, to make Jesus Christ the general of our armies.

Resist Him, Steadfast In Faith

   The Communion of Saints is one of Christ’s great gifts to the Church; we have more than enough intercessors and models of heroic virtue for any one of us. I like to go to Catholic Online (Catholic.org) and look at the biographies of some of the lesser-known saints, some of whom have led to posts on this blog (here, for instance, and here). There are 59 separate entries for today, September 10th. While many of them are from the same persecution in Japan in 1622, a random sampling finds Saints, mostly martyrs, from throughout the history of the Church; it is interesting how, as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. For instance:

St. Nemesian, Felix, and Companions

A group of Nicomedian martyrs condemned to labor in the marble quarries of Sigum. They all died in this arduous servitude. The group was comprised of nine bishops from Numidia, along with other clergy and laity. The bishops include Lucius, Litteus, Polyanus, Victor, Jader, Dativus, and a second Felix. St. Cyprian wrote to them from his place of exile. (c. 250?)

We are all familiar with the first three centuries of the Church as a time of persecution. The Romans took particular care to target the leaders of the Christian movement, the bishops.  There are places today (most notably Syria and Iraq) where Christians are persecuted with a ferocity equal to, or even greater than, that under the Romans.

St. Theodard of Maastricht

Bishop and martyr. A disciple of St. Remaclus in the Benedictine abbey of Malniely. Stavelot, Belgium, he succeeded him as abbot in 635, receiving appointment as bishop of Maastricht, Netherlands, in 662. He was murdered by a band of robbers in the forest of Bienwald, near Speyer, Germany, while on his way to defend the rights of the Church against the harsh confiscatory policies of King Childeric II (r. 662-675) of Austrasia. (670)

Imagine needing to “defend the rights of the Church against . . . harsh confiscatory policies”. We can’t think of anywhere today where the state is encroaching on the Church, can we?  In any case, here’s a Saint and who didn’t hesitate to stand up for Christ’s Church in the public square.

St. Cosmas of Aphrodisia

A bishop and martyr, born in Palermo, on Sicily. He was named bishop of Aphrodisia, ordained by Pope Eugene III. When the Saracens captured his see, Cosmas was seized and died as a result of harsh abuse. His cult was approved by Pope Leo XIII. (1160)

Speaking of Syria and Iraq, here we see a Catholic Bishop murdered by the Muslim jihadists of the day. While not always as virulent as it is under ISIS, persecution of Christians is endemic throughout the Islamic world.

St. Joseph of St. Hyacinth

Dominican martyr of Japan. He was born in Villareal, Spain. The provincial vicar of the Dominicans in Japan, he spoke perfect Japanese. Joseph was burned alive at Nagasaki.  He was beatified in 1867. (1622)

Bl. Lucy de Freitas

Martyr of Japan. A native Japanese, she was the widow of Philip de Freitas. Lucy, a Franciscan tertiary, was arrested for sheltering Blessed Richard of St. Anne, a Franciscan priest. Although advanced in age, Lucy defended the faith before the authorities and was burned to death for it at Nagasaki, Japan, on September 10. She was beatified in 1867. (1622)

St. Joseph and Blessed Lucy are just two of a large number of Christians martyred at Nagasaki in 1622; there is no part of the world that has not been baptized with the blood of Christian martyrs.

     Jesus says: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” (Matthew 5:11) It’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s as ugly and brutal as it was for the Saints above, or as it is for many Christians in the Middle East today; sometimes it’s a much milder variety of uttering “all kinds of evil against you falsely”, as is becoming more common in the United States and other Western countries.  Nonetheless our own sufferings for the name of Christ, even when they don’t rise to the level of serious persecution, are still hardships and injustices. As St. Peter wrote:

Be sober and vigilant. Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in faith, knowing that your fellow believers throughout the world undergo the same sufferings. (1Peter 5:8-11)

The example of our brothers and sisters in Christ who have undergone, and are undergoing, much worse than we are shows us that we, too, can stand firm.

St. Ignatius Loyola, Soldier for Christ

 I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)  

Saint of the Week, St. Ignatius of Loyola

     When I think of today's saint, St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, I think of the quote above from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians.  The impoverished Spanish nobleman Inigo Lopez was indeed reborn as a different man when he became Ignatius. 

      Like St. Martin of Tours, St. Ignatius had been a soldier before he turned his life over to  God.  After his conversion he sought to live his life in a different way.  Instead of the military officer’s stern and harsh way of addressing his subordinates, for instance, he employed a humble and gentle mode, even when administering necessary discipline.  At the same time, he never lost his “fighting spirit”, even if he expressed it in a different way; and instead of directing his fire at human enemies, he was now concerned with “the principalities, . .  .the powers, . . . the world rulers of this present darkness, . . . the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12)

     In fact he saw the inner life of every believer as a battlefield, where each one of us must choose between following the battle standard of Christ, or that of Satan.  His distinctive spirituality includes an emphasis on the “discernment of spirits”, which is a prayerful sifting of feelings and other influences to determine whether they are from the Spirit of God or the Spirit of the Devil.  Drawing on his own experience of conversion, St. Ignatius forged an extraordinarily effective weapon to assist followers of Christ in this internal combat: the Spiritual Exercises, a potent mix of imagery, prayer, self-examination, and spiritual direction.

     Having self-disciplined himself in this way, Ignatius believed that the Christian should then, like a good soldier, submit to his superiors in obedience:  “ . . . we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it”, St. Ignatius says in that part of his Spiritual Exercises called “To Have the True Sentiment Which We Ought to Have in the Church Militant”.  This is not, however, simply the outward obedience that is required of the man under arms, but also the inner obedience of both the Will and the Intellect, as he explains in his famous Letter on Obedience [text here] . In other words, an obedience born of love, not fear.

     This seems a good time to remember the concept of the “Church Militant”, and that each of us is called to be a Soldier for Christ.  I’m not talking about soldiering in a literal sense, although with our ancient rivalry with Islam heating up again it’s possible that there will be an increasing need for that.  I’m thinking more of the war to defend our souls and the souls of others against the “spiritual hosts of wickedness” that St. Paul mentions in his letter to the Ephesians.  Of course, the two kinds of warfare are not unrelated: the Jihadists and their allies can see the spiritual decay in our culture, which only serves to embolden them (just as Osama Bin Laden says he was inspired by the apparent weakness of the United States after our inelegant withdrawal from Somalia).  As the forces of Jihad discovered at Lepanto, however, they can’t hope to succeed against a Christendom united in Faith and fortified with Prayer; but against Secularism, well, what’s to stop them?  

    Having said that, it is good to remember that any conflict with Islamism, secularism, or any other "ism" that threatens Christian culture in this world is secondary to the big cosmic struggle.  The outcome of that battle is not in doubt, but there will be casualties along the way. St. Ignatius, a seeker for his own glory who, by God's grace, was transformed into a soldier for Christ, shows us how to stay on the winning side, and follow the Standard of our Lord.

"If they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”

It's never really safe to be a Christian

It’s never completely safe to be a Christian in this world.  In my recent Sunday Snippets post [here] I briefly discussed the plight of Christians in Iraq, who are facing brutal persecution at the hands of ISIS, an armed movement embracing a particularly virulent strain of radical Islam. I illustrated the post with the Arabic “N”, with which ISIS terrorists target Christian homes, and which has since become an emblem of solidarity and a badge of honor for Christians around the world.

The Fall of Rome

     That explicit identification as Christians, and with other Christians, is vitally important. I made the point the week before [here] that radical Islam would pose little threat to “a Christendom united in Faith and fortified with Prayer”. Unfortunately, what had been Christendom is rapidly de-Christianizing, which creates a twofold threat, both from within and from without.  The external threat, a radicalized and aggressive Islam, still looks fairly distant to those of us in the United States; it looks a lot more formidable in Europe.  There, a growing, poorly assimilated, and increasingly alienated and hostile  Muslim population is combining with the forces of societal destruction under the guise of “multiculturism” to attack the very basis of historic (which means, essentially, Christian) European culture, as described by Joseph Pearce in a piece that is appearing on Life Site News [here].  The article is well worth reading in its entirety; the best summation of Pearce’s point comes in a quote from actor John Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf Gimli in the screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  Rhys-Davies says: “I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged, and if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”.  Since the actor first spoke these words several years ago, the concrete evidence of their truth has been rapidly multiplying, and so although the multi-culti wrecking ball pounds on, an increasing number of Europeans are starting to see multiculturalism for the civilizational suicide that it is.

"If we falter and lose our freedoms, 

it will be because we destroyed ourselves" -Abraham Lincoln

     To those of us in the United States, events in Iraq can seem very far away, especially now that there are no longer many of our countrymen serving there under arms.  The incidence of jihadism here can be seen as sporadic, with only a few serious incidents (9/11, the Fort Hood Massacre), and the local Muslim population is still quite small and has shown only scattered signs of radicalization – so far.  The heedless dismantling of our culture from within, however, proceeds apace.  I’ll provide just two recent examples.  First, the College Board, which through the content of its Advanced Placement (AP) exams determines the curriculum of thousands of high school classes around the country, has come with a new AP American History [article here] course that omits great Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King, jr.  Instead it emphasizes impersonal “historical forces” - and not so much those familiar to earlier generations of students like the development of democratic institutions and religious tolerance.  From the Fox News article: 

“ . . . you’re not going to find Thomas Jefferson and the House of Burgesses and the cradle of democracy either,” said Larry Krieger, who retired in 2005 after more than three decades in the classroom.  And finally, you’re not going to find Benjamin Franklin and the birth of American entrepreneurialism . . . what you’re going to find is our nation’s founders portrayed as bigots who developed a belief in white superiority . . .”

The article adds that students will find, overall, “a narrative laden with tyranny and subjugation.”  As if it’s not enough that individual classes are convincing young people that their country is and always has been irredeemably corrupt, we now have entire schools dedicated to the purpose – at your expense.  We now have “social justice” charter schools [here], government schools funded with taxpayer money.  And while the term social justice has an honorable origin in Catholic social teaching, it has long since been hijacked by the left.  No, the students at these schools won’t be studying Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, they’ll be training in “social activism”, a.k.a. leftist political agitation.  All of which means that in certain localities in the United States we’ll have the curious phenomenon of the government expending public funds to set up public schools dedicated to training young people to tear it all down. 

"The Church of the Living God, the pillar 

and the foundation of the Truth." -1 Timothy 3:15

     Tearing it all down is the program of the cultural and political left, whether we’re talking about multi-culturalism, the redefinition of marriage, revisionist history, or Robin Hood economic activism.  They don’t even pretend anymore to have a coherent positive vision of what might replace all the institutions they seek to eradicate.  Not that it would help much if they did: every attempt to destroy a society that had developed over time in response to the real needs and experiences of human beings and construct on its ruins a society hatched in the brains of men (e.g., the French Revolution, Soviet Communism) has been a disaster; bloody, inhuman disaster, such as is still playing out in North Korea.  In similar fashion, the man-made religion of Islam has had a track record over the past millennium and a half of spawning anti-human horrors such the one currently on display in Iraq.
     The most profound and radical revolution in human history, on the other hand, was the transformation of the Greco-Roman civilization by the unlikely spread of Christianity.  It was no mere human idea, but the revelation of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ that subdued “the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome” (props to Edgar Allan Poe).  And notice that the Church didn’t destroy and replace the institutions of the Roman Empire, but rather “baptized” them and made them the bulwarks of a more humane culture [for more on that, see here and here].  When Rome did fall to invaders from the North, the Church worked the same transformation on the newcomers.

     And now here we are in a society that wants to do away with both the Church of Jesus Christ and the institutions passed on by our ancestors.  Do we really think that the empty shell that will be left can stand against the legions of the New Caliphate, or any other motivated and determined conqueror from without or within?

(This Throwback was first published on 12 August 2014)

    

The Presentation of Our Lord, Atheism, and The Problem of Suffering

 And his father and his mother marveled at what was said about him; and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed." (Luke 2:33-35)

Girolamo Romanino: The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple

     The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord presents us with a paradox, or maybe a series of paradoxes, which can lead us deeper into the mystery of Christ.  On the one hand, it is our last look back at the recently concluded Christmas Season, and we experience some of the joy and wonder of that season, particularly in the prophetic utterances of Simeon. Simeon proclaims him “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel” (Luke 2:32). His final words, however, foretelling that Christ will be “a sign that is spoken against” and warning the Blessed Mother that “a sword will pierce through your own soul also” redirect us toward the quickly approaching Season of Lent and beyond to the sorrow and suffering of the Triduum.  The last thing we see in Luke’s account of the Presentation is the prophetess Anna, who pulls together the apparent contraries in Simeon’s prophecy: she “spoke of him to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:38).  In the end, the glory of Christmas and the sword of Good Friday come together on Easter Sunday: redemption only comes from the light shining through the darkness of suffering, and we catch a glimpse of the entire story in the Feast of Presentation.

     Given the above, I found it interesting that this story [here] appeared just this morning: Englishman Stephen Fry, an “outspoken atheist”, was asked what he would say if he found himself, contrary to his expectation, face to face with his Creator in the afterlife:

 “I’d say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?’” he began.

“’How dare you? How dare you create a world to which there is such misery that is not our fault,” Fry continued. “It’s not right, it’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’ That’s what I would say.”

"Outspoken Atheist" Stephen Fry

In other words, the old Problem of Suffering, which I spend a lot of time discussing with my adolescent religion students.  For us Christians this problem is resolved in the Mystery of the Cross, as we saw above: it’s a paradox that leads us to a higher understanding.  For the unbeliever, however, it is a contradiction which, if followed to its logical conclusion, leads to annihilation.  The atheist believes that all reality is reducible to matter, and that this present world is all there is.  Suffering, therefore, is the worst thing that can possibly happen:

Fry went on to question why the God of the universe would allow pain and suffering and argued that doing away with belief in God makes life “simpler, purer, cleaner, more wroth [sic] living, in my opinion.”

Doing away with belief in God, however, really only makes Fry’s problem worse: instead of leading to redemption, suffering is now random and pointless.  Not only that, but it is something that everyone experiences, it’s inescapable.  The only way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate not God, but humanity.  Fry’s fellow atheist, the philosopher David Benatar [here] proposes just this solution is his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. 

    Small wonder that The Presentation is included in the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, despite Simeon’s ominous (and alarming, no doubt, to Mary and Joseph) utterance.  We are reminded that, through his Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection, Christ has sanctified suffering, that it is no longer a random, meaningless evil, but a path to Heaven.  That is, indeed, Good News.

    

Sunday Snippets (Exaltation of the Holy Cross 2014)

Christ and the Cross, from Santa Maria Sopra Minerva

     Welcome to “Sunday Snippets – A Catholic Carnival”, a weekly swapfest for faithful Catholic bloggers of every sort, shape, and size (metaphorically speaking).  This is only my little corner of the party: the main gathering place is here at This That and the Other Thing, home of our Grand Marshall RAnn.

     I can’t fail to mention that today is the Feast of The Exaltation of the Holy Cross, a celebration centered on what is perhaps the most puzzling (apparent) contradiction in Christianity, and something that lies at the very heart of the Faith: our Salvation is only through the suffering and death of Christ on the Cross (and, by extension, through our embrace of the suffering in our own lives). This, St. Paul assures us, is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:23).

     One of the most striking artistic representations of this Mystery is Michelangelo’s Christ from the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (depicted above), in which Jesus is literally embracing the Cross.  A beautiful statue modeled on this one surmounts the baptismal font in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception here in Portland where, as it happens, we attended the vigil Mass for today’s feast last evening.  The Mass was celebrated by our Bishop, and attended by members of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jersalem [more info here], in full regalia, which consisted of long capes (white for the knights, black for the ladies) decorated with the Jersalem cross, along with black lace veils for the women. The Order is the only lay institution of the Vatican State charged with the task of providing for the needs of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and for all the activities and initiatives which are necessary to support the Christian presence in the Holy Land.

     The presence of the Equestrians was quite appropriate for the occasion, as Bishop Deeley pointed out in his homily. He started by observing that “we see the Cross in the whole life and mission of Christ”; we see a precursor in bronze serpent in the first reading, where what had at first brought sickness now brings healing, but Jesus on the cross not only “returns us to health, but to life, eternal life.”  We also hear “the very heart of Jesus’ message” in the hymn St. Paul quotes to the Phillipians: that “Jesus emptied himself” for our sake.  The Cross leads us to Humility and Service.  That’s where the Equestrians come in: the Bishop pointed out the Jerusalem Cross over their hearts, a large blood-red cross in the center surrounded by four smaller crosses which represents the wounds of Christ.  Through their support of the Patriarch of Jerusalem they are both a sign and a tangible means of our support, our service, on behalf of the Christians of the Middle East who are sharing so deeply in the suffering of Christ right now.  This is a mission in which we all have a part, and, as Bishop Deeley said in closing: “Jesus never leaves us alone: if he gives us a mission, he also gives us the Grace to do it.”

     There.  Now on to the snippets themselves:

Monday – At one time it was understood that liturgical music should lift us up from this world and direct our hearts and minds toward The Lord.  Is that asking too much? “William Byrd – Sanctus (Mass for 4 Voices) [here]

Wednesday – Even minor Saints can teach us Major Lessons: “Resist Him, Steadfast In Faith” [here]

Thursday – If we worked harder at building good character, we wouldn’t have to worry as much about the law: “Hidden Law, Society, And The Church (Throwback)” [here]

Friday – A reflection on John Sobieski’s rescue of Vienna in 1683, and the fate of Christian civilization today: “We came, we saw, God conquered” [here]

Saturday – Shutting out Christian groups on campus may not be mass murder, but does it really have to be in order to provoke a response? “It Doesn’t Need To Be As Bad As Iran To Be Bad Enough” [here]

                                                                

It Doesn't Need To Be As Bad As Iran To Be Bad Enough

Submit or be derecognized

      For a long time now elite opinion on college campuses has been trying to shut down speech that doesn’t stick to their script, especially religious speech.  Specifically, Christian speech.  The clampdown has now become a little more overt: the California State University system has “derecognized” the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), an Evangelical group, on all 23 of its campuses, as explained in this article [here] by Ed Stetzer in Christianity Today.  The reason for the derecognition (if such a word exists) is that the ICVF refuses to change its rules requiring leaders in the group to be believing Christians.  The state of California has said, in other words, that Christian groups will not be recognized as official groups on campus unless they open up their leadership to people who don’t share, and may even be hostile to, their very reason for existing in the first place.

InterVarsity Students spreading . . . bigotry and intolerance?

Consequences of derecognition

     You may be wondering what the consequences of derecognition are.  According to Greg Jao, National Field Director & Campus Access Coordinator, there are three main things that IVCF chapters will lose:

1)      Free access to rooms (they will now have to pay, and will be shut out if a “recognized" group wants the room).

2)      Access to student activities programs “including”, he says, “new student fairs where we meet most students.”

3)      “We also lose standing when we engage faculty, students and admimnistrators.”

He doesn’t explain in detail what that last point entails. Tish Warren led a similar IVCF group at the private Vanderbilt University a few years ago that experienced a similar fate.  In a separate Christianity Today article that Stetzer quotes at length she explains:

Because we were no longer allowed to use Vanderbilt's name, we struggled to convey that we were a community of Vanderbilt students who met near campus.

In other words, as close to invisible as they can be short of being banned altogether.

Is Christianity "Hate Speech"?

     What’s behind it all?  Stetzer says that “The university system has decided that speech with beliefs that undergird it—and shape how it is organized—has to be derecognized.”  I suppose you could put it that way, but not all “speech with beliefs” is really being targeted.  He allows Warren to be somewhat more specific.  She explains that the banned groups had “crossed a line”, one that

was drawn by two issues: creedal belief and sexual expression. If religious groups required set truths or limited sexual autonomy, they were bad—not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus.

This states the case more plainly.  Notice that it is the same in the wider world: support (not simply tolerance) of what used to be considered sexual heterodoxy is the standard by which elite opinion decides who enjoys basic rights and who does not.  Warren and Jao are both being rather too generous when they posit a desire for “democracy” as one of the motives for the anti-Christian people.  No, democracy is not a priority; these same people have no problem with federal judges overturning state laws and constitutional amendments voted in by 60-70% of the electorate, and at the university level you will not see them applying to the vegetarians, Muslims, and certainly not the LGBTQ groups the same unreasonable demands they have imposed upon the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Don't read that, kids - it might be hate speech

    And that connection to the wider world is what most concerns me. Stetzer starts out his article saying “Now, it’s not persecution”, an admonition he repeats at the end, adding: “I hope they won’t call themselves persecuted, since that lessens the persecution in, for example, Iran.”  If only we could lessen the persecution in Iran so easily!  What he means, of course, is that equating the inconveniences experienced by college students in California to the very real suffering, up to and including torture and death, suffered by Christians in the Middle East tends to diminish our proper sense of horror and outrage at the latter. Fair enough, but on the other hand injustices don’t need to rise to ISIS level, or anywhere near it, to merit condemnation.  And I don’t think he should be in such a hurry to downplay the significance of what has happened in California.

We don't need no stinkin' constitution

     First of all, what the State of California is doing is a direct assault on the constitutional rights of  Christian students.  The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution starts out as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .

Telling members of a religious group whom they must choose as their leaders is an exceptionally unsubtle trespass on the free exercise of religion – and I know that courts have found all sorts of ingenious ways to make laws and constitutional provisions mean the exact opposite of their clear meaning, but if we’re not willing to fight something this blatant, we might as well run the white flag up the pole and get it over with.  Since the courts have also found that the restrictions the Bill of Rights places upon Congress also apply to all other government organs, including state run schools, this is clearly a constitutional issue (as it is not at a private school like Vanderbilt).

     This potential damage here also extends beyond the walls of the university.  The half-spoken message that California State is sending its students is that Christian belief is bad: “not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus”, as Tish Warren said of the attitude of the authorities at Vanderbilt.  If such a thing is simply a given in the environment where they are formed for four years, how many students are going to be prepared to be open to and tolerant of Christian belief when they get out . . . especially if the outside environment agrees with what they experienced at the university?

Bad is bad

     And, as I have noted in these pages many times, there is a conscious and coordinated campaign underway in the United States and the rest of the Western world to “derecognize” Christianity as a whole.  The mainstreaming of anti-Christian bigotry lays the foundation; simply holding traditional beliefs about morality and marriage makes a person fair game for the foulest and most hateful verbal abuse (see here and here).  Somehow the targets of this vileness, and not the spewers of it, are scorned by elite opinion-makers as “haters” and “bigots”.  And who is going to argue when haters and bigots are defamed, or even threatened with loss of their livelihood (here, here, here) if they oppose the dismantling of traditional morality -  or simply decline to participate actively in its destruction?  This harassment, I submit, is in fact persecution, if not on the level of Iran or Iraq, and sets the stage for worse: once Christians have been completely driven beyond the pale, what's to prevent harsher forms of persecution?  And in fact serious persecutions almost always start with little thing, and with the delegitimizing, the "derecognition", if you will, of the targeted group, 

     Finally, I haven’t discussed the fact that our colleges and universities have, in a very short time (and practically unremarked), undergone a radical change: where formerly they acted in loco parentis, a role in which they protected their students and enforced moral standards, now they actively promote promiscuity and licentiousness . . . and actually punish students for upholding morality.  How can this possibly turn out well?  

     So, to all you Ed Stetzers out there, hold your head up – we have nothing to apologize for. Nobody is confusing California State University with the Islamic Republic of Iran, but what’s happening there is bad enough, and if we allow harassment and injustice to continue, more serious persecution is sure to follow.

      

"We came, we saw, God conquered"

King John Sobieski blessing his army at the Battle of Vienna

          Today is September 12th. On this date in 1683 a Christian army led by Polish King John III Sobieski defeated the Muslim Ottoman Turks in battle, freeing the city of Vienna from a two months long siege and freeing Europe, for a time, from the fear of Islamic conquest. There is a good Catholic perspective on the battle [here] on the Catholic Exchange site.

     The siege of Vienna in 1683 was the final salvo of a period lasting almost a millennium, starting when Charles Martel’s victory at Tours in 732 stemmed the first Muslim incursion into Europe, during which the Christian West was constantly under the threat of subjugation by the followers of Mohammed. Had Charles Martel failed, or Sobieski, or any of the other Christian commanders in between, our world today would be very different. Consider what Tunisia, Libya, or Egypt might be like today – or Syria – if they had remained part of Christendom. Does anyone doubt that things there would be better, probably much better?

     And we need to bear in mind that this was really a struggle not simply of peoples or of nations, but between Christendom and Islam. Sobieski’s force was called The Holy League, the same name borne by that alliance which defeated the Turks in the naval battle of Lepanto in the previous century. Like those earlier Christian soldiers, who prayed the Rosary before going into battle with the Turkish fleet, Sobieski’s army prayed: they attended Mass, after which Sobieski formed up his army and “commended their mission and their souls to the care of the Blessed Virgin.” After victory was achieved he informed the Pope that “we came, we saw, God conquered”, turning Julius Caesar’s proud boast to Roman Senate into a humble acknowledgement of God’s saving Grace.

     There are two points that stand out here. One is that we need to recognize that sometimes it is necessary to fight; our opponents have been at it for almost a millennium and a half, and there’s no indication that they are any more interested in compromise, or anything short of total victory, than they were at any point since Mohammed emerged from his cave with the Koran. Certainly the outlook and behavior we’re seeing from the Taliban or ISIS is nothing new: during the battle for Vienna, the Turks murdered 30,000 defenseless Christian hostages. The second point is that we will fail unless we rely on God: “Unless the LORD builds the house”, says Psalm 127,“those who build it labor in vain.” Our prevailing secular culture has shown it can’t do the job. Today’s Muslims, enabled by the moral decay and post-Christian depopulation of the continent, are gradually achieving by peaceful migration (although it’s becoming less peaceful) the capture of Europe that eluded the strongest armies of their forebears. Our only hope is to return to God and, as did John Sobieski, to make Jesus Christ the general of our armies.

Resist Him, Steadfast In Faith

     The Communion of Saints is one of Christ’s great gifts to the Church; we have more than enough intercessors and models of heroic virtue for any one of us. I like to go to Catholic Online (Catholic.org) and look at the biographies of some of the lesser-known saints, some of whom have led to posts on this blog (here, for instance, and here). There are 59 separate entries for today, September 10th. While many of them are from the same persecution in Japan in 1622, a random sampling finds Saints, mostly martyrs, from throughout the history of the Church; it is interesting how, as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. For instance:

St. Nemesian, Felix, and Companions

A group of Nicomedian martyrs condemned to labor in the marble quarries of Sigum. They all died in this arduous servitude. The group was comprised of nine bishops from Numidia, along with other clergy and laity. The bishops include Lucius, Litteus, Polyanus, Victor, Jader, Dativus, and a second Felix. St. Cyprian wrote to them from his place of exile. (c. 250?)

We are all familiar with the first three centuries of the Church as a time of persecution. The Romans took particular care to target the leaders of the Christian movement, the bishops.  There are places today (most notably Syria and Iraq) where Christians are persecuted with a ferocity equal to, or even greater than, that under the Romans.

St. Theodard of Maastricht

Bishop and martyr. A disciple of St. Remaclus in the Benedictine abbey of Malniely. Stavelot, Belgium, he succeeded him as abbot in 635, receiving appointment as bishop of Maastricht, Netherlands, in 662. He was murdered by a band of robbers in the forest of Bienwald, near Speyer, Germany, while on his way to defend the rights of the Church against the harsh confiscatory policies of King Childeric II (r. 662-675) of Austrasia. (670)

Imagine needing to “defend the rights of the Church against . . . harsh confiscatory policies”. We can’t think of anywhere today where the state is encroaching on the Church, can we?  In any case, here’s a Saint and who didn’t hesitate to stand up for Christ’s Church in the public square.

St. Cosmas of Aphrodisia

A bishop and martyr, born in Palermo, on Sicily. He was named bishop of Aphrodisia, ordained by Pope Eugene III. When the Saracens captured his see, Cosmas was seized and died as a result of harsh abuse. His cult was approved by Pope Leo XIII. (1160)

Speaking of Syria and Iraq, here we see a Catholic Bishop murdered by the Muslim jihadists of the day. While not always as virulent as it is under ISIS, persecution of Christians is endemic throughout the Islamic world.

St. Joseph of St. Hyacinth

Dominican martyr of Japan. He was born in Villareal, Spain. The provincial vicar of the Dominicans in Japan, he spoke perfect Japanese. Joseph was burned alive at Nagasaki.  He was beatified in 1867. (1622)

Bl. Lucy de Freitas

Martyr of Japan. A native Japanese, she was the widow of Philip de Freitas. Lucy, a Franciscan tertiary, was arrested for sheltering Blessed Richard of St. Anne, a Franciscan priest. Although advanced in age, Lucy defended the faith before the authorities and was burned to death for it at Nagasaki, Japan, on September 10. She was beatified in 1867. (1622)

St. Joseph and Blessed Lucy are just two of a large number of Christians martyred at Nagasaki in 1622; there is no part of the world that has not been baptized with the blood of Christian martyrs.

     Jesus says: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” (Matthew 5:11) It’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s as ugly and brutal as it was for the Saints above, or as it is for many Christians in the Middle East today; sometimes it’s a much milder variety of uttering “all kinds of evil against you falsely”, as is becoming more common in the United States and other Western countries.  Nonetheless our own sufferings for the name of Christ, even when they don’t rise to the level of serious persecution, are still hardships and injustices. As St. Peter wrote:

Be sober and vigilant. Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in faith, knowing that your fellow believers throughout the world undergo the same sufferings. (1Peter 5:8-11)

The example of our brothers and sisters in Christ who have undergone, and are undergoing, much worse than we are shows us that we, too, can stand firm.