Forward Together

You see, Buddhist priests of this temple sheltered hidden Christians during Japan's two and a half centuries of suppression:

And centuries later, when the Buddhist temple was falling into disrepair, who contributed a substantial sum of money to its rebuilding? 

 

And this Catholic church on the Gotō Islands of Nagasaki, which was one of the first to be built when the ban on Christianity was ended, who is the one to visit over twenty times a month to take care of it? 

 

A Christian - a Catholic? Nope. A Buddhist.

You see?

Fratelli Tutti.

Now take this

and sacramentalize it by reflecting on the incarnation, on the life of Jesus, on the Gospel.

What good can come out of Nazareth? If you are asleep to the ordinary, and not entering into it, in the sense of pouring yourself into it and equally receiving it and dwelling in it, you are not living the sacramental life. The sacramental life does not end in the sacraments. Indeed, the sacraments themselves have their form in ordinary matter. If you partake of the sacraments, then the sacramental life begins with the sacraments. And many, many people who do not partake of the sacraments are immersed in the sacramental life, and have much to teach Catholics. God is not bound by the sacraments. Indeed, if you partake of the sacraments, you should be all the more perceptive and sensitive to how other people are living a sacramental life who do not partake of the sacraments. Our awe of them should be like a mirror showing them the goodness, beauty, and truth in them that they might not see. Like Pope Francis said, receiving the sacraments is not like getting some kind of merit badge; it's not a reward for the perfect. Your repentance does not earn you them.

If you don't have the desire to do (which implies also enjoying) ordinary things extraordinarily well, as St. John Bosco would have it, (accepting that you will often fail, leading you to embrace more and more humbly the ordinary to the point of regarding with true awe all that is good in other cultures) then you are just not very Catholic, you are just not very universal. You are a specialist in the worst sense. Maybe you're looking to conquer the Catholic Family Thing like it was a merit badge. That's not doing it extraordinarily well. Because you're placing yourself outside of it. Or maybe you get cut off the vine through "apocalyptic fantasies"?

Maybe some of the above is how the nuclear family came about. Just think - the term extended family only came about with the term nuclear family. Extended family is not abnormal; the nuclear family is abnormal - that is, not the norm - irregular. I don't know much about history, but didn't the nuclear family come out of the second world war? I think that's where the legalization of abortion came from. It came from the forties and the fifties? The rupture between generations. The larger protective embrace of extended family was fractured and it caused a sick isolation resulting in the nuclear family, and this allowed abortion to become much more permissive; it made abortion that much more thinkable. Just remember, if abortion leads to war, then all the same, war leads to abortion.

Just think - Mary and Joseph migrating as refugees to all these places knowing their son (who they had no misconception of how special he was) was being hunted. Of all families they would be justified in being the nuclear family and totally stand offish. But they weren't. They thought Jesus was in the caravans behind when they were coming back from the Passover festival. Thousands of people. They just assumed he was with family. There was no nuclear family.

Anyways, I don't know how many times I've been to Mass in the Extraordinary Form when at some point I said to myself, "Man, this is just like the Ordinary Form!" The sense of joy that has given me is wonderful, deep, and enriching, just as Pope Emeritus Benedict would have it, not terminating in the form of the Mass, but in entering the prayer of the Church. It's totally in line with Church teaching: they are one and the same Mass.

Even in regards to talking about the liturgical forms alone, they are more alike than unlike. They are radically more alike than radically unlike, or even somewhat unlike. There is actually only likeness and complementarity to speak about them, and not difference. One comes out of the other, and that other came out of another. It's all in the safe embrace of the Church. The form of the Roman liturgy comes out of the engineering traction of ancient Rome. It's always been on the austere side, and it got caught up somewhat at a certain point with secular court theatrics, which was fine for what it was. The Ordinary Form is like a magnification. Attending the Extraordinary Form, I've been made to see the Ordinary Form within it, and to realize the movement of the Mass itself in a renewed way. So much so in fact that I'm satisfied and happy going exclusively to the Ordinary Form of the Mass. Not that I had any problems with it, which I didn't. The liturgy of the Word, and the liturgy of the Eucharist. One leads to the other, and both become more and more appreciated, loved.

The Ordinary Form is right there in the Extraordinary Form, you see it in the midst of the EF's sort of stick-on parts, the borrowings of the secular court stuff (if one wants to use the same anti-Catholic critical regard for that form as some people have for the Ordinary Form, to say stuff about the EF like "stick-on parts" etc. it can really work both ways) - not extraordinary in the sense that we typically use the word, but more like extracurricular. Enriched in our common communal prayer and worship, with the Ordinary Form being the norm, that is ordained.

Exactly

"We emerge from a night of mysterious origins"

This is the best thing I've read on the pandemic:


HUMANA COMMUNITAS in the Age of Pandemic: Untimely Meditations on Life's Rebirth


H/T: Henry Karlson

It's not summer until the lawns and fields of grass have gone bronze and tawny and glinting gold. That grass, those lawns, they should nearly reflect the sunlight, be burnished and wonderfully hurt your eyes! Come on, what's the matter with you, Pacific Northwest? Almost mid July now! But go ahead and be that way! Summer is cancelled. Fall is here! I get it! You win!

*

These so-called "fragrance free" hand sanitizers at the entrances to various places - they most definitely are not fragrance free. What is that smell? Three day stale baby vomit? Come on, put some fragrance in that shit! This is persecution!

*

Gotta love the stalwart crusaders who pontificate about not hiding your faith and how "I love the mass so much you cowards I am unafraid to tell the whole world" shaking in their boots and crying persecution over having to write their name and number on a piece of paper in the vestibule of the church. LOL.

And it's even worse, indeed, an absolute VIOLATION, if it's for confession! Like there's some stone cold commie agent pilfering parish lists and poring over them, saying, "Now I wonder what this one said in confession!"

Go to confession! they never tire of saying. You should go to confession! Don't be afraid! You need confession to be made clean! St. Damien of Molokai shouted his sins across the water and everybody heard! These are the same ones who are protesting over putting down some ink that a fellow parishioner (who also wrote down their name and number) can read (which they won't, because who the hell cares) and see that you went to confession? Like, huh? Methinks you need some fresh air.

Ooooo, "contact tracing" - that's so sinister sounding, isn't it? Well, I suppose it is, if you want to purposely remain ignorant about what it actually is and like an adolescent (as Pope Francis said) cling to your own stupid selfish paranoia instead.

Like, are you ready to be a martyr for your faith?! Are you ready to sacrifice?! Because the times are coming when...oh I have to write my name and number down? Oh but my right to privacy! My religion is my own private affair!

LOL. Not that contact tracing lists are any such thing. They are completely provisional, and after a few weeks or whatever and no one from the list came down with Covid, then you toss the lists. So scary, like the parish registry. But I guess the commies couldn't get access to the parish registries?

*

It's a twenty for your twenty. The year you got what you gave. Or something like that.

Ah, the dirty caravans seeking to get into the US - rapists and drug dealers! Many carry diseases! Close off the border! Build that wall! Keep them out!

Gotta take care of the Homeland! Like killing the pandemic response plan and letting Covid "wash over the country", making for a third of the world's death toll in three months (and rapidly escalating).

And here's the twenty to your twenty, president dipstick: both Mexico and Canada are adamantly and steadfastly keeping their borders closed to your country, refusing to hear the interests of US governors that seek to re-open them, and saying, look to your own disease petri dish backyard, because of your negligent homicidal criminal virulently destructive self-protective vile and scummy fake president cancelling every proper course of action letting the virus "wash over your country". Oh, and lots of other countries that don't share a physical border with you - yeah, they're closing their borders to you as well.

He didn't just ignore or "did nothing", in the sense of a negative. He actively jettisoned and obstructed any and all proper courses of action. You want to see cancel culture? Look no further than Don the Con.

Trump is one who dirties the waters. He is one who dirties the waters as his first step in every single circumstance, and it's a form of self-protection.

That's why the US has the numbers it has. But that is not why the other countries are closing their borders to the US. They are keeping their borders closed to the US simply for the protection of their own countries. Those countries cannot afford to have their effective courses of action (and they are effective) turned to nothing by infection from a country that, because its "president" carries a deadly moral virus, is in the worst state in all the countries of the world with regards to the pandemic.

It so happens that is the same country which could have, and ought to have been, with all that is available and at its disposal, a leader and trailblazer, in cancelling the Covid pandemic.

*

You know the champs who valiantly come to the defense of Capitalism, saying how it raised us out of poverty and disease, how we would all be dead at thirty and dropping dead from all the various diseases that Capitalism progressively cured us of and vaccinated us against, and so on in pioneering this cure, and so forth in developing that vaccine, bringing us general longevity and relative ease?

Yeah, those are the same people who are anti-vaxxers.

Interesting: air-conditioning is contributing much to global warming

pumping out heat into the air, like turning on a heater in the summertime.

Every man dies. Not every man really makes it to the Era of Peace

Who exactly are these anonymous ex cathedra spiritual directors of the fake prophets and locutionists with their matchstick assortment of global spirit daily apparitions, apocalyptic rapture, and hodgepodge of cut-and-paste perturbations from infallible mystics?

Imagine that: anonymous locutionists mentored to maintain anonymity by their anonymous spiritual directors. Are these anonymous spiritual directors like masonic infiltrators?

The conspiracist grifters who condescendingly relativize the authority of Pope, hedging around him with selective, distant, self-reliant interpretations while privately considering Vigano a true prophet, yet bend over backwards to dogmatize their own dubious locutions - what of these people?

I don't stand by them. I stand with the Pope.

“It is important to bring together scientific capacities, in a transparent and impartial way, to find vaccines and treatments and to guarantee universal access to essential technologies that will enable every infected person, in every part of the world, to receive the necessary health care.” --Pope Francis

"Let us pray together for government leaders, scientists and politicians who are beginning to study a way out of the pandemic, though its "aftermath" has already begun. May they find the right way, always for the good of their people." --Pope Francis


"I wish to express again my closeness to those who are ill with the coronavirus and to healthcare workers who are caring for them, as well as to civil authorities and all those involved in assisting patients and in containing the spread of the virus." --Pope Francis

The ironic thing about conspiracism is that the many supposed threads the conspiricist supposedly connects leads to contradictory incoherence, and contradictory incoherence only reinforces the conspiricist impulse; it does not lead to a picture of the whole truth which demands your response in proportion to it.

Rather, there is a kind of circulatory constant carpet bombing of things taken more and more out of context, while the context is more and more replaced with that of the conspiricist's. This is to the conspiricist's benefit, as it is the means by which he absolves himself of the consequences of his speech and influence, and transmits this absolution to his disciples. One of the big attractions of conspiracism is that the receiver is not required to own the supposed truth to which he makes claims.

The truth is a door that opens for you to enter it, and entering it brings to light in you what hasn't been brought into the light, while bringing a new light to what has already been brought into the light. But it also makes a kind of ontological marriage, in that what light you have received requires your further truthfulness in keeping it - that is, your responsibility for it. Conspiracy theory warps this: it seeks to order reality before entering it.

But the Christian is called to form matter in this way: by entering into reality before ordering it. This is in fact the very way that God forms matter, by entering into it. This entrance declines any trace in one that smacks of mastery, of having figured things out. The great timeless miracle of the Christian is that he transforms and brings a greater good out of evil and harm, not by seeking to master it, but by entering into reality as a servant. We mirror the way God is working in us; indeed, God working in us is the very confidence by which we enter into reality before ordering it. Conspiricism shuts out God from working in one.

The notion that the conspiricist is one who follows the clues and signs to their ends is quite false; the conspiricist is forever picking them up and then abandoning them. Each time he picks them up, they are bit more distorted than before the last time he abandoned them. Conspiracy theories are the filthy suds left clinging to the sink from a paranoiac washing his hands of all the matter which constitutes reality. The real reason their patron saint is Pontius Pilate is because they love to imagine that Jesus is saying to them, "Theirs is the greater sin".

The malignant fruit resulting from their conspiracy theories (and conspiracy theories do indeed bear deadly fruit in reality) they can simply incorporate back into their constantly incoherent dramaturgy of conspiracy. He excuses himself with a swiffer of his own hand, saying that at worst all what will happen if he is wrong is that he will look like a fool (thus proving that his considerations extend only to himself).

The conspiricst sets up an alternate reality, saying that Jesus is not here in - you know - in reality. Especially not this reality. This is a version of "Look, the Messiah is out in the desert" of the false prophet.

There are people who, though they condemn the Rapture as heresy, actually believe and follow its core gnostic principle. They seem to think that God's grace and sacramental presence is a kind of rapture that takes them out of - has raptured them out of - the need to give attention to messy present matter which calls for one to enter into it before seeking to order it in order for the good to prevail in it. The conspiricist is one who seeks to embed the heresy of Rapture into the waking present.

We are rapidly entering the next phase of those who are sadly being herded under a libertarian ethos: the demonstrations, protests, vice-signalling, and so on, will become extremely fearful people taking offence at someone keeping their physical distance, and pouncing on them and beating them to death.

This is one of the fruits of conspiracism.

In conversation with a priest many years ago, he described a group of people this way: "They are like the flea on the elephant's head that thinks it's the elephant."

While I can't remember the particular group of people we were talking about, I remember being dissatisfied with the image, for it seemed to miss something, yet it sufficed.

Not having a better image right now, it certainly works as an analogy for conspiracists.

Conspiracism is fueled by spiritual narcissism. Conspiracism is the spiritual narcissist's self-absolution of his own delay in meeting reality, and then more and more a justification of it. He comes upon a future scenario for a pandemic written by some think tank a number of years ago, and says, "Ah ha! See here!"

Completely failing to realize the very ordinary realization that if a number of people from a number of expertises from around the world come together to produce what a scenario for a world pandemic might look like, chances are, they'll get it right by at least 8 out of 10 - thus proving, well, you know, their expertise - the conspiracist then proceeds to do precisely what he is accusing these supposed conspiring elites of doing. He applies and offloads an entire unspoken and hidden bias, motive, and agenda to his spoken (and error-riddled) interpretation and basically says, "Now let me write you up a future scenario! Listen to ME!"

And thanks to the previous work of the think tank which he hijacks, he begins to initiate his cult base by the narcotic of get me in on this super secret knowledge! In the Christian-Fundamentalist version this super secret knowledge is equated to "vigilance".

The look here this number-by-number future scenario - isn't it creepy! shtick by the conspiricist is precisely a page out of his own playbook. This is why the conspiricist is a consistent failure at meeting reality.

One result of the failure to meet reality at this particular moment is the psychopathic imposition of the risk of death onto other people in a pandemic by flouting safety measures. Flouting them out of narcissistic fideism makes it all the worse.

Conspiricists hear the words of experts who are merely bearing a message and they stone them. They stone the messenger. When they then meet resistance from people who feel the completely reasonable response to being offered arsenic to drink is to use their reason and say no, these conspiricists then bless themselves as martyrs and cry about how they are the messenger being stoned.

There is a reason why Jesus compared false prophets to vultures.

Image source

At least twice now that I'm aware of Pope Francis has used the image of peacocks to refer to the preening vanity of a clericalized, liturgically ideologized Katholyc clique and I wonder if the fashionably traddy Flannery O'Connor appropriators are all like, "NOOOO HOW LONG OH LORD HOW LONG!!!" LOL

"No matter what our politicians do, the people are slowly learning..."

If you want some clarity, understanding, truth, and not isolate/quarantine yourself in the sectarian hothouse of conspiracy theory and apocalypticism (which feed into the rise of fascism and genocidal scapegoating) then you have to watch Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson:

"...a system whose time has come and now gone." --Richard D Wolff

"The real economy is going to be sacrificed to the financial sector." --Michael Hudson

"Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger." --Pope Francis, interview with Austen Ivereigh

Primary Cause

The more I consider it, the more it makes sense to me that the real cause of abortion is simply rupture between generations. A kind of proto-abortion of the delicate-yet-vital connection between parent and progeny, writ large, providing the vacuum context for abortion to even be conceivable. But it came before the wide practice of abortion, and caused it.

One could point to the two world wars for starters. One could point to the industrial revolution as a huge primary cause of abortion and completely bypass the sexual revolution as merely symptomatic, and that person would be more in line with the truth than a great percentage of politicized pro-lifers who have their litany of quasi-sacramental purity test talking points at the ready.

An interesting concept to think about is a legitimate reversal of St. Theresa of Calcutta's famous statement that the fruit of abortion is nuclear war. The evidence is certainly in: the fruit of all war, of intergenerational rupture, is abortion. From there it works the other way like a closed circle. I have this notion that whenever someone connects abortion with sexual immorality the devil claps his hands with delight.

The incoherence of the pro-life movement was made very apparent by its pouncing without a second of consideration on Pope Francis's words when he was asked about what were the most important issues of our day, and he answered it was youth unemployment and the disconnect from the elderly. He has talked on numerous occasions about how the new generations must keep in touch with the wisdom of the oldest generations. There is an abyss that never used to be there: that is the cause of abortion. That is the primary cause, and unless you address the primary cause, it is not going away.

The removal of care for the elderly and the unemployment of youth are connected. I think Pope Francis sees deeply and simply.

These are the symptoms of an abyss that has opened more and more between the elderly and the young. And as long as that abyss remains unbridged, the longer that abortion will be with us.

You know this is true.

You think that "build bridges and not walls" is a feel-good, fuzzy, peacenik, felt banner slogan?

That's because you're a relativist who doesn't believe in the Gospel.

Yep

Wicked Nostalgia

Whatever happened to the good old days? I miss them!

You know, the good old days, like when Pope Francis issued the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum saying that it was for the sake of Christian unity and the critics were like, "He's hijacking tradition for a Church of Nice slogan and putting modernist fingerprints on the Mass of the Ages! He's undermining it!"

And in response to Francis' statement that the intention of the Motu Proprio was for the two liturgical forms to mutually enrich each other, the critics were like, "He's advocating a Hegelian Dialect! That's modernism! That's heresy!"

Ah yes, the good olds days! I pine and yearn for them. Like when Pope Francis had the solar panels installed at the Vatican shortly after the images of animals were projected onto the walls and people were like, "He's turning the Church into a worldly eco religion replacing the sacraments with recycling and energy conservation!"

The golden aura of those halcyon days! Like when Pope Francis said on an airplane that it was possible, for instance, that a male prostitute's conversion could begin by using a condom, and the critics were like, "Bergoglio the sick anti-pope is teaching the heresy of Gradualism! The explanations are too late, for alas, the damage has been done and the faithful are confused. Who can measure the cost in souls!"

I wish we could just go back to those days.

LOL

I agree

"If one possesses real trust in Pope Francis as the rightfully elected successor of Peter and President of the Synod, then there’s no reason to not trust that October’s gathering may be guided away “false doctrine.” The deposit of faith is already guarded by Francis, as Pontiff." --Rich Raho