Insight & Irony

Wine Tasting by Eduard von Grutzner

Antony and Cleopatra

by William Shakespeare (1607)

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall!

Jordan Peterson and the Search for a Meaningful Life
from an article by Christopher Kaczor

In the Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas provided reasons to believe that God’s mind and God’s reality not only correspond to each other but are actually identical. The Divine Mind is God’s Essence, and God’s Essence is the Divine Mind. Moreover, God is the First Truth because God is the First Cause of all physical and psychological realities that we know when we understand the truth. If the antidote to suffering is truth, goodness, and beauty, then God is the antidote to suffering.

The "New Pentecost" of Vatican II

at Nick Donnelly's Twitter page

• Collapse of belief in Real Presence
• Collapse in devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary
• Collapse in Mass attendance
• Collapse in Confession
• Collapse in catechesis
• Collapse in vocations to priesthood & religious life
• Collapse in size of families

Shadows of the Liturgy

from an article by Anthony Esolen

Why must the new hymns be so wretched—poetically dreadful, theologically dubious, effeminate in affect, and impossible for congregations to sing? Why must the texts of the old hymns be revised into grammatical and poetic confusion? Why must the art not possess even the prettiness of kitsch? Why must the ordinary be sung to the same melodies, usually bouncy and incoherent, week after week? Why must the only chant the congregation ever hears be from the old Office of the Dead? Why must the Stations of the Cross be impossible to discern or even to see from where you sit in the pews? Why must the sanctuary not be visible as a sanctuary? Why must there be no convenient place to kneel and receive the Lord? Why must there be altar girls for an all-male priesthood? Why must the lectors dress as if for a barbecue?

When you attend the new rite in an old church, you can sometimes see, in shadows, in a half-window where a whole window used to be, in not quite the right number of apostles (ten, in my boyhood church), in a blank space where a room once was, in a broom closet that used to be a confessional, beauty effaced and coherence disrupted. Did it have to be that way? By what conciliar command?

Why the Novus Ordo Needs Gregorian Chant

from an article by John T. Knowles/First Things

In the U.S., unfortunately, the secular bourgeois ethos of 1970s America has come cascading over the faithful at Mass. Consider some facts about the music U.S. Anglophone Catholics typically use today. The most-played piece of liturgical music at English-language Masses in U.S. Catholic churches is Marty Haugen’s Mass of Creation, which is neither liturgical nor musical. Its rendition of “Glory to God in the Highest” is particularly ignominious. Hymns from Gather Comprehensive 2 like “All Are Welcome” and “Sing a New Church” belong more in a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office than in the Roman liturgy. And the Gloria from Dan Schutte’s Mass of Christ the Savior, as many have pointed out, really does sound like the theme from My Little Pony.

The Novus Ordo liturgy doesn’t have to be this way. 

The Real Europe: Identity and Mission

Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI

from an article by Hannah Brockhaus/CNA

“The basic certainty that mankind exists as male and female; that the transmission of life is a task assigned to mankind; that it is the community of male and female that serves this task; and that in this, beyond all differences, marriage essentially consists — it is an original certainty that has been obvious to humanity up to now,” Benedict said.

The pope emeritus wrote that the fundamental upheaval of this idea was introduced with the invention of the contraceptive pill and the possibility it gave of separating fertility from sexuality.

“This separation means, in fact, that in this way all of the forms of sexuality are equivalent,” he said. “A fundamental criterion no longer exists.”

This new message, according to Benedict, profoundly transformed men and women’s consciences — first slowly and now more clearly.

From the separation of sexuality from fertility, he continued, comes the inverse: “Fertility, naturally, can be thought of even without sexuality.”

Benedict XVI noted that it therefore seems right to no longer trust the procreation of humans to the “occasional passion of the flesh, but rather to plan and produce the human rationally.” 

Thus a human being is no longer “generated and conceived but made,” the retired pontiff underlined, which signifies that a human person is not a gift to be received but “a product planned by our doing.”

He added that if we can plan to make life, it must also be true that we can plan to destroy it, noting that the growing support for assisted suicide and euthanasia as “a planned end to one’s life is an integral part of the trend described.” 

Biden Contradicts Faith, Reason - and Himself

from an article by Michael Warsaw/NCRegister

Responding Sept. 3 to a reporter’s question about the developments in Texas, President Biden said that while he “respects” people who believe life begins at conception, “I don’t agree.” In saying this, Biden wasn’t just contradicting the Church, which unequivocally proclaims that human life begins at conception. He was contradicting a basic and undeniable physical reality.

Every sound introductory textbook on biology spells out the straightforward scientific fact that human life begins at the moment of conception. And this new person possesses a unique genetic identity that will be retained for the rest of his or her development in the womb prior to birth and throughout all the other stages of human life afterward.

Tradition, the Church, and the World

from an article by James Kalb/CWR

Modern architecture wanted to recreate buildings and cities as machines for living. It was a bad idea, because life is not mechanical, but the experts thought it would usher in utopia. They didn’t realize there is no utopia, only myriad arrangements and practices that facilitate and reconcile human needs, loves, and aspirations. Such things grow up as a system through the development of tradition.

That process gave rise to the classic and vernacular architecture that has given us built forms that people still love: the French chateau, the European cathedral, the New England village green, as well as their equivalents elsewhere in the world. But nobody is allowed to build such things today. The building codes mostly don’t allow them, and the designers think they’re all wrong. Theoreticians like Christopher Alexander offer counter-theories arguing that built forms ought to model themselves on living forms rather than machines, but so far with little result.