Subsequent to penning the second two paragraphs of this post, I became the owner, thanks to my indulgent wife, of an iPhone. But don’t worry, I haven’t begun to pray the new Breviary! I wanted to mention that while looking through Apple’s App store, I noticed that iBreviary wasn’t the first in the iPhone app game; Universalis was there before and it looks like they have a much nicer new Breviary on offer. The main difference is price; Universalis, at $32.99, probably isn’t going to be an impulse buy. One advantage of Universalis is that one download gives you the whole Breviary; you wouldn’t need to reconnect to the internet to download new content each day. Now for most people, especially for iPhone or iPod touch users, connecting to the internet at least once a day is hardly a rare occurrence. Anyway, if you’re interested, you can visit the App store in iTunes and read the customers’ reviews. From a few reviews that I read, iBreviary isn’t as pretty as Universalis; but iBreviary has the advantage of multiple languages (including Latin).

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If you’re looking for a good way in which to sanctify the sabbath and other festival days, remember that the edition of the Catechism of the Council of Trent which was published by Roman Catholic Books (originally published in 1923) has an outline for “a complete course in Christian doctrine” based upon the Epistle and Gospel readings for each Sunday of the year and other holy days of obligation. For each Sunday, a dogmatic and moral subject are given with page references to those topics in the catechism. The Catholic Encyclopaedia (1912) offers this hearty endorsement:

To some editions of the Roman Catechism is prefixed a “Praxis Catechismi”, i.e. a division of its contents into sermons for every Sunday of the year adapted to the Gospel of the day. There is no better sermonary. The people like to hear the voice of the Church speaking with no uncertain sound; the many Biblical texts and illustrations go straight to their hearts, and, best of all, they remember these simple sermons better than they do the oratory of famous pulpit orators.

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One of the questions that often comes up in discussions of the Resurrection is the question of animals.  I like to think that there will be animals in the Resurrection.  They, along with plants, were there in Eden.  By our very natures, we are meant to be masters of beasts and tillers of gardens.  We naturally like pets, and many saints were lovers of animals.  God took care for the plants and animals in the Deluge.  He also told Jonas that one of the reasons He did not want to destroy the guilty city of Nineve was the large number of innocent animals in the city (Jonas 4:11). 

Now, if there will be animals in the Resurrection, does that mean that animals can be resurrected?  This perplexes me, as according to Thomism plants and animals have mortal souls. Continue reading

Probably many of you have read by now the interview that Bishop Conry of Arundel and Brighton gave to The Catholic Herald. There are plenty of disturbing remarks in this, as Damian Thompson says, “astonishingly frank” interview, but here’s the one that’s making all the headlines:

“You can’t talk to young people about salvation. What’s salvation? What does salvation mean? My eternal soul? You can only talk to young people in young people’s language, really. And if you’re going to talk to them about salvation, the first thing they will understand is saving the planet. You’re talking about being saved, and they will say: ‘What about saving the planet?’”

Okay. An idiotic thing to say? In a sense yes, but on another level (a pagan level, you might say) Bishop Conry has made a very sensible observation: it isn’t easy for young people to grasp the concept of salvation, because the whole idea is quite beyond them.

Perfectly true. But, Your Excellency. It’s beyond all of us. That’s the whole point, isn’t it, of the Incarnation, and Our Lord’s great Sacrifice?

The Bishop’s words here aren’t exactly foolish, but they simply aren’t Christian. To order one’s life towards a postmortem supernatural end is a challenge indeed, and he is not wrong in this observation. But he does err in supposing that maturity is the ingredient needed to make this difficult task possible. No amount of ordinary human development would ever put that end within reach. Grace is the only thing that will serve. And that, Deo gratias, has been made available to every human creature, regardless of age.

Obviously he isn’t going to be asking my advice, but if he did, I would encourage His Excellency to meditate a bit on what the Good News really is. Perhaps he needs to regain a bit more of that childlike wonder.

Perhaps in part reflecting on Bonifacius’ Georgia post, and in part reading Mark Steyn’s latest article about the Mumbai attacks, I’ve made a decision. Traditionally-minded Catholics need to make more of a show of shaming Muslim extremists. I’m not talking about condemning terrorism. Everybody’s doing that nowadays, and nobody’s impressed by it. Condemning terrorism is practically code for “dismissing acts of terrorism and moving on down the political agenda.” Soon-to-be President Obama will no doubt be condemning terrorism on a regular basis, but we can be fairly confident that Muslim extremists will not be quaking in their boots when he does. They’re well aware that this kind of pious hand-wringing is no real threat to them; if anything it only makes them feel that much more complacent about the impotence of the West.

But perhaps if we could step up to the plate, hardcore Catholics could offer something better. In fact, I’ve long considered that if anyone has a chance of “dialoguing” with the Muslims in a remotely productive way, it’s the Catholics. The idea that secular liberals might somehow make headway on this front is laughable. They represent everything that Muslim extremists hate most, and their pretense of “sympathy” with extremists’ goals only makes them that much more contemptible in the eyes of Muslim fundamentalists. It would be hard to imagine a group of people more poorly equipped to negotiate a truce with the Muslim world.

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A few things to which I would like to draw your attention.

The first is a nice lecture given in 1998 by Joseph Kerman, “Music and Politics: The Case of William Byrd” (PDF warning). Cath Con posted a link for it yesterday and it was a nice read. The author is a professor at Berkeley and he seems very keen on Byrd, not just as a musician but also as a Catholic dissident.

The second thing is that online donation is now up and running for the Institute’s restoration project in St. Louis; you can read all about it at their blog, Tradition for Tomorrow: Restoring the Landmark of South St. Louis. Even though it may be years (if ever) before we’re next in St. Louis, I myself like to support this sort of thing. It seems to me that we all have a stake in the restoration of beautiful churches around this country where the traditional forms of the sacraments will be celebrated and the Faith handed on, in all its richness, to the next generation. Beautiful churches filled with traditional liturgies also seem to me to be one of the best avenues to conversions, whether of protestants or agnostics.
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I imagine that some of you haven’t seen this before – I think that they post new ones from time to time, too. I’m not sure that I had seen it before. It is thoroughly edifying:

Could you indicate whether I can perform classic country acoustic guitar folk music for income?

1. It is perfectly permissible to perform old time country folk music for income. It is to be understood, however, that there can be no sensual or immoral themes behind the lyrics used in the songs, and that the style remains that of folk music, refusing the deformations of Jazz and Rock.
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I pass along an announcement from the Roman Forum:

(Sorry, that’s too small to read. Click on the image once, then click on it again in the next screen, and you should be able to see it in glorious detail.)

I submit for your consideration the following scenario:
     You are a nobleman and a warrior.  You come from a non-Catholic country, but you are zealous for its conversion to the True Faith.  In the meantime, however, you have been forced by circumstances to go undercover in the service of a Moslem warlord, and you assume the outward appearances of having converted to Mohammedanism.  In reality, you are attempting to attain enough military and political clout to overthrow the warlord’s Islamist regime, liberate your country from the threat of jihad, and join the (Catholic) West in a grand crusade.  The Shia warlord appoints you his commander-in-chief and sends you deep into Sunni territory (namely Kandahar, Afghanistan) on a “peacekeeping mission.”  You perform marvelously, decrease the world population of Moslems in the process, and send the Pashtun rebel leader away in chains.  However, the Afghan rebel convinces your Shia boss that you are a traitor.  While your troops are out patrolling the Afghan hills, you are ambushed in Kandahar and assassinated.  Your murderers find a book of psalms and a cross on your body and send these signs of your secret Catholicism to the Shia warlord who once trusted you.  But justice comes when the Pashtun rebel’s son and successor overthrows the Shia warlord and sets up a new Sunni dynasty in his realm.  And so the Shia who would not trust a Catholic to conquer his Sunni enemies is conquered in turn by those same Sunnis.

Sounds like some over-imaginative Papist’s take on an episode of the TV show ”24,” right?  Perhaps in these days of militant Islam and Eurabia you’ve fantasized about being in a similar situation — being a secret Catholic crusader in the midst of today’s Afghanistan or Iraq.  Perhaps some of you have actually been in a similar circumstance.  In any case, the precise situation I just described really did happen — in Georgia (the country, not the American state) in the early 1700s.  As just this summer Georgia was invaded and occupied by Russia (of “will spread her errors” fame), you may be interested to learn about the largely hidden history of Catholicism in that Eastern land.

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I plan to write a series of posts about famous works of literature in which a non-Catholic author presents Catholicism in a favorable light.  Today, we begin with Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”  As you may know, George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824) was an English poet of the Romantic Period.  Along with his friends Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, he helped define a generation of English literature.  From him derives the term ”Byronic hero,” which refers to a type of dark, brooding, tormented literary character familiar from Byron’s works.  Byron himself led a, shall we say, unconventional life, and he was not known to be the religious sort.  Indeed, he was involved in several scandals and some of his remarks were anti-Catholic in tone.  However, in one of his most famous works he expends all of seven stanzas praising St. Peter’s Basilica.  Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage tells of a young British nobleman, Childe (a term referring to a candidate for knighthood) Harold, who tours the Mediterranean and beholds the past wonders of Western Civilization.  In the Fourth Canto, he arrives in Rome.  Here is what he has to say of St. Peter’s Basilica.  Enjoy!

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