My first law of traditional Catholic blogging:  when the topic of the Society of St. Pius X or Jews comes up on the Rorate Caeli blog, the probability that a blog administrator will have to disable new comments swiftly approaches one.  Anyway, good luck to the folks over there — I’d hate to have to maintain discipline when things get heated.  I only wish that we had such traffic and passionate debates on this blog!  Let’s see what we can stir up in the comments section without having to disable new comments . . .

The prayer in the old rite for the Saturday after Ash Wednesday:

Adésto, Dómine, supplicatiónibus nostris, et concéde: ut hoc solémne jejúnium, quod animábus corporibúsque curándis salúbriter institútum est, devóto servítio celebrémus.

Hearken unto our prayers, O Lord, and grant that we may celebrate this solemn fast, which was salutarily instituted for healing our souls and bodies, with faithful submission.

Notice that unless we’re actually fasting during Lent, we’re not living in harmony with the Church’s public prayer, which makes frequent reference to fasting. We might in some sense call giving up (e.g.) television for Lent “fasting”, but then where is the healing of the body of which this prayer speaks? This word in the prayer is striking: corporibusque. Since most of us (and I can speak with experience for the gentlemen in this august Society) probably eat more than we ought, the Lenten fast is, apart from its primary role in the realm of the spirit, a salutary, healthful (salubriter), yearly corrective by which the Church (when she did insist upon it) helps our bodies also. Continue reading

Given the recent discussion, and indeed sometimes a general confusion about what modernism really is, I wanted to share a selection from a paper I saw given at a Notre Dame Conference on Modernity a couple of years ago that addresses the question in a particular philosophical light. It does not offer, nor does it claim to offer, a comprehensive account. It does, however, try to explain a certain very important philosophical aspect of modernity. I’m not entirely sure it is correct in all of its particulars, but it will give one a sense of what’s going on in philosophical discussions of modernity.

Introduction

What, then, is modernity? While we all can identify various hallmarks and characteristics of modernity, it often seems as if we lack a cohesive, determinate account of what most essentially characterizes it. We are gathered here for this multi-day conference about modernity, and while the various papers explore a variety of interesting aspects of it, it is not entirely clear that we are all even talking about the same thing. In an interdisciplinary setting of this sort, perhaps the best service the philosopher can do is preparatory: laying the groundwork, defining terms. In what follows I want to offer a suggestion about what modernity is, in terms of a monumental change in epistemology that occurs in the 17th and 18th centuries. Given the size of this project what I offer can be nothing more than a roughly articulated suggestion, and as will become clear I do not claim any significant originality. However, I do hope to show that this suggestion has great explanatory power in giving us a unitary account of what modernity is and perhaps where it is lacking.

I hope to do this by exploring how modern philosophers (including contemporary analytic philosophers) conceive of the possibility of moral knowledge, and in particular how this is different from the way in which the ancients and medievals (especially St. Thomas) conceived of moral knowledge. I want to do this in part by looking at Kant’s moral philosophy, precisely because he is the greatest of the moderns, and has shaped modern philosophy more than any other thinker. If Western philosophy in general merely consists of footnotes to Plato, modern philosophy (including contemporary philosophy) consists of footnotes to Kant.

Continue reading

One can’t help but smile at this line in Ruth Gledhill’s article on Bishop Williamson in The Times on Wednesday:

In an address there last summer [Williamson] praised Pope Pius IX’s encyclical Quanta Cura of 1864, a considered analysis of the ills of Modernism, a liberal Catholic movement of the era.

Good thing we got that one behind us! And what have the liberal Catholics been up to since?

A happy coincidence that Diogenes wrote this post today?

We’re all familiar with the meaning . . . [of] the word “gospel” …: it means an incontrovertible truth, one that is axiomatically directive of human action; as the Oxford English Dictionary expresses it, “a statement to be implicitly received.” The OED cites examples of that usage going back to the 13th century.

Behind the usage was a common social understanding according to which the Gospels were regarded as the truest thing any human being had access to. This was because the Gospels, as Dei Verbum 11 puts it, “have God as their author,” or again, in Hopkins’s rendering of St. Thomas, “Truth himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true.”
Continue reading

Just read a fairly silly article about Pope Benedict in the mainstream press. Note that I only call it fairly silly, which is pretty good for that genre goes because everything the mainstream press prints about the Holy Father is at least a little bit silly. In this case, the subject is a favorite one: what’s wrong with the present pope? Why does he keep doing such foolish, offensive things? Generally speaking, I find that question is answered in one of two ways. It’s either 1) Pope Benedict is an extreme authoritarian hard-liner who is too drunk on his own power to allow for the least compromise, or 2) Pope Benedict is way out of it, and he doesn’t really know what he’s doing half the time.

Continue reading

A very curious claim – at least I myself have never seen anything along these lines – in a recent post at The Catholic Thing:

Four decades ago Latin experienced a sharp decline in the Church in reaction to Pope John XXIII’s 1962 apostolic constitution Veterum Sapientia, which actually called for a renewed vigor in teaching Latin in seminaries, and decreed that books and lectures be in Latin as well. Instead, Latin theology texts were discarded and classroom instruction proceeded in the vernacular.

If this had been the case, that is, that Veterum Sapientia had actually precipitated the decline in Latin studies and usage, I would have thought, almost beyond a doubt, that Romano Amerio would have remarked this untoward consequence in Iota Unum. Does anyone know where this claim is coming from?

So, here it is again: the day of sin!

Err… ahem. No. Of course there is no appropriate day for sinning. But traditionally (at least, in quite a number of Catholic cultures) this is a day for decadence. We have all the long hard days of Lent ahead of us, so now is the time for having one last hot fudge sundae or one last night on the town before donning your sackcloth and ashes.

Of course, precisely because Mardi Gras has come to be recognized by so many as the day of sin, I’ve heard some traditional-minded Catholics suggest that it would be most appropriate for the rest of us to spend the day in sober and fervent prayer in reparation for the sins of our misbehaving companions. Any opinions on this? Personally, though I realize that Shrove Tuesday is not a feast day properly speaking, I’m inclined to think of it as a good day for enjoying a little naughtiness (though again, not in a seriously sinful way… I’m more thinking of minor concessions to temptations of gluttony or sloth. Break your diet for this once, have one more drink than is good for you, or put off for tomorrow a task that you should probably do today. Or, for the ladies, wear pants! Ha ha, just kidding. That would be going way too far. ;))

I mean, if you try to get all penitential about it, won’t that kind of steal the thunder of Ash Wednesday? The liturgical year is all about contrast, and prefacing a penitential season with a penitential day doesn’t seem quite fitting to me.

Continue reading

The Know-Nothings were a Nativist secret society and political party in the mid-19th century.  To be a Nativist meant to hate immigrants, particularly Catholics.  The Know-Nothings acquired their name because, as a secret society, members claimed to “know nothing” about the organization.  Though they were not as violent as the later Ku Klux Klan (also Nativist and anti-Catholic), the Nativists of the mid-1800s did succeed in burning some Catholic churches and convents.  Here is what Abraham Lincoln had to say about these anti-Catholic bigots in 1855:

“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].”

In what alternate universe is this person living? From a meandering article in the Barbados Advocate:

Interestingly, while Latin remains particularly prominent in Roman Catholic liturgy, and to a lesser extent in Anglicanism . . .

I truly wonder what has inspired this remark? Or what counts as “particularly prominent”? Will Barbados become a conservative Catholic bastion after word of their “prominent” use of Latin in the liturgy gets around?