Happy Easter — again!
Here’s Fr John Whiteford on why Eastern Orthodox Easter often is later than the Western observance.
The Easter Sermon of St John Chrysostom
Catholic integralism is the true seamless garment.
Don't apologize for things you didn't do, to people who don't believe in forgiveness or redemption.
The Bushling could not find an “nookular” material or any other “weapon of mass destruction.”
However, he left plenty of it around for the children of Iraq.
That same day, Sunday, April 24, in all the churches of the world the Gospel reading was from the fourteenth chapter of John, in which Jesus says of himself:‘All the churches of the world’?! The churches that use the Roman Mass read part of John 16 and what of the churches that are part of big-C Churches that don’t use the Roman Rite?
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.”
I may be Western Rite Orthodox, but when I look again at St. Hedwig's, it makes me want to rush off to a full Byzantine Divine Liturgy. Popes and Patriarchs [and academics in ecumenical dialogue] may dream of union, but when ordinary Orthodox people can see this (St. Hedwig's) kind of place around any corner in any city in the western world, they just do not believe that it is the equivalent of what they have, and they want nothing to do with it .... and in Orthodoxy, they do have a say .... it (St. Hedwig's et al.) is all very depressing.- Fr Michael (Wood)
Have the Rolling Stones killed.- C. Montgomery Burns on being insulted by the Ramones
After the war [World War I] he lost his throne to the infamously unjust peace settlement that eventually led to the Second World War.- Fr Ignacio Barreiro
He deeply respected the limits that Catholic moral principles imposed in the conduct of military operations. He was completely against unrestricted submarine warfare as practised on a large scale by the Germans because they frequently failed to distinguish between military and civilian targets. He resolutely opposed the bombing of cities and did everything possible to prevent the use of chemical weapons.
Blessed Karl sought peace first and foremost because of his devotion to Christian principles, not due to any notion of pacifism. His political savvy brought him to the realization that the continuation of hostilities would be fatal for the survival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was convinced that both socialism and communism would find a propitious climate in countries torn by war and that in the ensuing chaos, different nationalistic tendencies would reignite and threaten the unity of the Austrian empire.
Blame for the disappearance of Austria-Hungary lay with the republican and anticlerical forces connected to Masonry that totally refused the peace proposals of the emperor.
"It's not about getting the sin-debt paid, the ticket punched and now you wait around to die and go to heaven. Orthodoxy is a transforming journey where every day the Christian is being enabled to bear more of God's light. That's exciting," she [Frederica Mathewes-Greene] said.Western Catholicism teaches the same thing. Coming from a charismatist version of Low Churchmanship Mrs Mathewes-Greene might not know that.
Roman Catholics believe the pope has ultimate authority, while Orthodox Christians say their council of bishops is more in line with Scripture and church tradition. (The early church had five centers of Christianity - in Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Rome and Constantinople, which is now Istanbul.)Acknowledgement of the Chair of Peter is patristic East and West but to give these dear people their due I noticed that a lot of the rhetoric recently on the changing of Popes (the flock gathered round its shepherd, spiritual fatherhood, etc.) rightly applies (primarily?) to the local bishop, perhaps (?) more than to the super-patriarch of the whole church.
Orthodox Christians also disagree with the [Roman] Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which states that Jesus' mother was born without sin herself.The truth on this matter.
Archbishop Dmitri, 81, leads the Archdiocese of Dallas and the South for the Orthodox Church in America. He grew up as Robert Royster in a Southern Baptist family in Teague, Texas, but converted to Orthodoxy as a teen because he wanted more out of faith.How he became a clergyman is an interesting story. The Antiochian Archdiocese did an experiment in the 1950s or 1960s of ordaining some converts with little or no formal training and all predictably were disasters except him. God moves in mysterious ways.
"Everything was true, but it was not complete. It wasn't that I needed to repudiate it. I just went on to find the rest of it," he said.
The Orthodox consider themselves to have a bond with other Christians but believe they have a more accurate understanding of the faith. At a recent daylong festival in Dallas about Orthodox Christianity, Archbishop Dmitri encouraged people in other denominations to cling to the elements of the historic faith that their churches uphold, but added an invitation: "If you find there are holes at the bottom and you have to abandon ship, then head for one that's still afloat," he said.
Nice, but for that odd baldacchino-type canopy. Quite unnecessary addition to an Altar with riddel posts in a reservation-dedicated chapel - the roof of which ought to be the canopy and appropriately decorated. But an English Altar with riddel posts ......with electric candles on them!!!!!!!
The real problem is that the "Lady Chapel" was originally the equivalent to the eastern proskomedia (жертвенникъ) - a table of preparation of the elements of the Sacrifice - and a place of reservation. It was not intended as an Altar for celebration.
The new Pope has taken the name last taken by the preconciliar pontiff whose advice, had it been heeded by the world, would have avoided the bloodbath of World War I, the triumph of “democracy” under the tank treads of Woodrow Wilson’s armies, and the final toppling of altar and throne in Europe.- Christopher Ferrara
Some years ago, the late Michael Davies approached me with an odd request. He asked me to stop publishing criticisms of Cardinal Ratzinger in The Remnant. He acknowledged that the Cardinal had positions which were problematic to traditionalists, but nevertheless asked that we consider moving away from criticizing him publicly. It was Michael’s adamant contention that Cardinal Ratzinger would prove a great friend of tradition in the end. “He’s on our side, more than you know,” he assured me.Once again, I’m hopeful.
However, South Africa's Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said he was sad that the new pope was unlikely to end the church's opposition to condoms.Where can one start?
He said this was more important than the fact that the Pope was not African.
"We would have hoped for someone more open to the more recent developments in the world, the whole question of the ministry of women and a more reasonable position with regards to condoms and HIV/Aids," Archbishop Tutu said.
"The voice has been shackled. We can't even have a conversation about this," said Drina Nikolai, also of the ordination conference.The metaphor has been mixed.
Many believe that before women are ordained, the church will allow married men to become priests, Vatis reported.Many haven’t been taught very well. The Roman Rite may well change over to the Orthodox discipline (not doctrine) on this as indeed it has for its few married deacons. (And that discipline is: a married man may be ordained to major orders but a man in major orders may not marry.) The former issue, however, is beyond anybody’s authority to change.
We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.- Pope Benedict XVI in a sermon just before he was elected
Our Churches, which have authority and influence, should unite their efforts to spread Christian values to modern humankind. The secular world is losing its spiritual way and needs our joint testimony as never before.- His Beatitude Alexis II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, the Church of Russia
While some American [Roman] Catholics may be nervous about the new pope's conservative positions, that very philosophy makes him popular among Eastern Orthodox church leaders, who in recent years forged a friendly relationship with the Vatican.Of course this Pope isn’t Byzantine Rite but what the metropolitan means is that in substance like recognizes like.
"I don't like to use the word conservative," said Metropolitan Nicholas, bishop of the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese of Johnstown [Pa.], who has met Ratzinger several times, "but he very much follows the Orthodox tradition."
No state is justified any longer in resorting to warfare when some right has not been given its full due.Again, this isn’t a pacifist blog but like the Pope, quoted here yesterday, he shows a connexion between the two issues, that the commitment to peace flows from the full Catholic faith. Something neither the liberals nor the Novus Ordo neocons want to hear:
While addressing the Council on his concerns regarding the proposed liturgical alterations, his microphone was extinguished. This flip of the switch was to become characteristic of the "new openness" in many Church quarters following Vatican II.Like the stockholders’ meeting in Roger and Me.
Perhaps cynicism comes a little too easily to this disgruntled trad. It's just that RC conservatives and traditionalists have had the rug pulled out from under their feet so many times...- Joseph Oliveri
Once burned twice shy. Besides, Cardinal Ratzinger was a peritus at Vatican II of a German bishop. Those Krauts were the ones who upended the Council's [original, conservative] schemata.- Jim Coffey
The concept of a 'preventive war' does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church....
There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a 'just war'.
Not all valid councils, after being tested by the facts of history, have shown themselves to be useful councils; in the final analysis, all that was left of some was a great nothing.On Vatican II specifically:
The truth is that this particular Council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the importance of all the rest.On the eastward-facing celebration of Mass:
When we rise to pray, we turn east, where heaven begins. And we do this not because God is there, as if He had moved away from the other directions on earth …, but rather to help us remember to turn our mind towards a higher order, that is, to God....On the Roman Mass:
The original meaning of what nowadays is called ‘the priest turning his back on the people’ is, in fact–as J. A. Jungmann has consistently shown–the priest and people together facing the same way in a common act of trinitarian worship, such as Augustine introduced, following the sermon, by the prayer ‘Conversi ad Dominum’....
A common turning to the east during the Eucharistic Prayer remains essential. This is not a case of something accidental, but of what is essential. Looking at the priest has no importance. What matters is looking together at the Lord. It is not now a question of dialogue but of common worship, of setting off toward the One who is to come. What corresponds with the reality of what is happening is not the closed circle but the common movement forward, expressed in a common direction for prayer.
For fostering a true consciousness in liturgical matters, it is also important that the proscription against the form of liturgy in ... use up to 1970 should be lifted. Anyone who nowadays advocates the continuing existence of this liturgy or takes part in it is treated like a leper; all tolerance ends here. There has never been anything like this in history; in doing this we are despising and proscribing the Church's whole past. How can one trust her at present if things are that way?On the Orthodox tradition:
I am of the opinion that the old rite should be granted much more generously to all those who desire it. It's impossible to grasp what could be dangerous or unacceptable about that. A community that suddenly declares that what, until now, was its holiest and highest possession is strictly forbidden and makes the longing for it seem downright indecent, calls its very self into question.
It is good to recall here what Cardinal Newman observed, that the Church, throughout her history, has never abolished nor forbidden orthodox liturgical forms, which would be quite alien to the Spirit of the Church.
Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than had been formulated and was lived in the first millennium. When the Patriarch Athenagoras, on July 25, 1967, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit to Phanar, designated him as the successor of St. Peter, as the most esteemed among us, as one also presides in charity, this great Church leader was expressing the essential content of the doctrine of primacy as it was known in the first millennium. Rome need not ask for more. Reunion could take place in this context if, on the one hand, the East would cease to oppose as heretical the developments that took place in the West in the second millennium and would accept the [Roman] Catholic Church as legitimate and orthodox in the form she had acquired in the course of that development, while, on the other hand, the West would recognize the Church of the East as orthodox and legitimate in the form she has always had.Neither side has defined as doctrine a belief that the other side is heretical.
The [Roman] Catholic has to recognize that his own Church is not yet prepared to accept the phenomenon of multiplicity in unity; he must orient himself toward this reality …. Meantime the [Roman] Catholic Church has no right to absorb the other Churches… A basic unity—of Churches that remain Churches, yet become one Church—must replace the idea of conversion, even though conversion retains its meaningfulness for those in conscience motivated to seek it.This isn’t indifferentism. Note the big C in Church. Clearly Rome recognizes the Churchness of the Orthodox: it can do no other as such is Catholicism in 11th-century Greek theological language.
[Is] ‘the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women’, which is presented in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis to be held definitively... to be understood as belonging to the deposit of faith?As I wrote a little earlier, I’m hopeful.
Responsum: In the affirmative.
This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church.
We at the Congregation [for the Doctrine of the Faith] always asked ourselves, how can any believer accept as authentic apparitions that occur every day and for so many years? Are they still occurring every day?
Some conservatives still condemn Waco all the while cheering on Iraq, where Waco has been happening every day since the invasion.Women, wages and work
I've long believed that many Americans in their hearts don't like democracy. Or, I should say, don't like democracy when the vote doesn't please them.Which isn’t necessarily bad because as LRC has pointed out literal democracy — mob rule — is wrong and not what America’s founding fathers envisaged. They wanted a peaceful little republic run by landed gentry, which is what a lot of them were. Such activism could be seen as making a mockery of rule of law, whether based on immemorial custom as in English law (including as passed down to the US) or indirectly in the customs of the small monarchies of Catholic Europe.
The bans against abortion and school prayer are perfect examples.You’ve got to be careful with the latter because it can easily backfire on you. 19th-century Catholic immigrants to America reacted against what they perceived as teaching a state religion of generic Protestantism in the state schools. (Though I don’t see how reading the King James Bible specifically endorses Protestantism I understand the problem in principle.) A non-Mormon from Utah once told me that he remembered when, in the 1950s, the prayers in the state schools were Mormon!
Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion.That’s become a bit of a cliché in American conservative circles but it’s still true. The ‘nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ part of the First Amendment.
So it was a Catholic culture, aristocratic, and somewhat non-democratic, that shaped Mises and John Paul into top-rate intellectuals within their realms of the social sciences. Their intellectual formation — reflecting several centuries of Scholastic influence on the Continent — contrasted with the modernizing tendencies of Europe at a time when Hegel was still the most popular philosopher in Germany. Aristotelian ideas were still very strong in Austria as well as in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the decades leading up to World War I.*I understand the latest issue of Latin Mass has an article on the last emperor, Blessed Charles, and his attempt at making peace during World War I.
How upside down it is for those who deny the teaching office of the Papacy to try and bully the same office into changing what it teaches? I have heard reporters and liberal "Catholics" tell me that the Pope is not infallible, that he holds opinions that are his own and they their own. [The man, as a man, is fallible and regarding opinion that’s entirely correct but that’s not what they really mean.] In the next breath, they insist that the Pope needs to change Catholic dogma to conform with the liberal point of view. Well, come on, kiddos: if he has no power, why do you need him to make an offical change in his teachings?- A curmudgeonly priest who uses only the Roman Mass
There is nothing I want to find out and long to know with greater urgency than this: can I find God, whom I can almost grasp with my own hands in looking at the universe, also in myself?- Johannes Kepler, the 16th- to 17th-century discoverer of the orbits of the planets and a Lutheran
The report [of a US presidential commission] called Iraq "one of the most damaging intelligence failures in recent American history."From The Remnant’s spiffing new site:
But, amazingly, the whitewash committee found no one responsible for this disaster. Victory has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan.
And it is precisely these contradictions the world now exploits in its great show of adulation for one Pope above all others. What Catholic would want to assist in the exploitation by failing to protest, as a Catholic should, that no Pope is utterly inerrant, and that not everything John Paul II said and did was in the best interest of the Church or a model for other popes to follow?One of the two tents of the modern media circus, the other being the fatuous belief that the next Pope has the power to change whatever in faith or morals the secular world doesn’t like. A very Protestant tendency BTW: bend the church to approve what you’re doing. Backwards!
For 26 years the neo-Catholic establishment chanted: “John Paul II, we love you!” But did they love the Pope as a Pope should be loved, in charity and in truth, being willing, as St. Thomas teaches, to admonish even the Pope should the danger of scandal to the Faith arise? Or did they love instead the cult they themselves had built up around the man in sports stadiums and at the World Youth Days?
As he viewed the Pope lying in state in St. Peter’s Basilica during EWTN’s coverage, Marcus Grodi said that people must develop an appreciation not only for the Catholic faith, “but for the meaning of John Paul II.” When the person of a Pope is raised to the level of a “meaning” that is held to be something over and above the Faith itself, we are witnessing a process of papal deification that is foreign to our religion and must arouse in us no little fear of what is to come in the days ahead.
But not only has the Catholic Church never dogmatically imposed a scholastic understanding of God upon the Church, it has never dogmatically rejected the Palamite understanding. The Western theologians at the Council of Florence, for example, may well have thought the Palamite understanding of God to be silly, nonsensical, and flat-out wrong; but Palamism was not judged to be church-dividing. This doctrinal condition continues to this day. One can be a full-fledged, card-bearing Catholic and espouse the Palamite distinction between the divine substance and the divine energies of God (see, e.g., George Maloney’s A Theology of “Uncreated Energies”). As a result, Thomists, Franciscans, Palamites, Rahnerians, and a host of other theological schools worship and pray together in the one communion of the Catholic Church. ... The Catholic Church simply refuses to dogmatically identify itself as Western. The Catholic Church is the Church of Irenaeus, Athanasius, Basil, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure – and even Gregory Palamas.A born and lifelong Greek Orthodox who is venerated as a saint in at least one Byzantine Catholic calendar, that of the admirably authentic and observant Melkite Church.
O Lord, my God and Saviour, Who, as Thou didst endure for our salvation the outrages of those who crucified Thee, so now endurest the irreverences of those who "discern Thee not" rather than withhold Thy Sacred Presence from our Altars; grant us Thy grace to bewail, with true sorrow of heart, the indignities committed against Thee; and with devout love to repair, as far as lies in our power, the many dishonours Thou still continuest to receive in this Adorable Mystery; Who livest and reignest, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
America holds the all-time record for terrorism. America terrorized Japan into surrender. War is one or more nations terrorizing each other. This is so elementary. Saudi Arabian suicidal fanatics could crash planes into a skyscraper in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc., etc., every year and still not match the ferocity of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, of Tokyo and Dresden. No this was not war of soldiers on the field where both sides risked everything, No. No. This was outright war against civilians, conducted from out of reach of all those civilians.- The bishop
I sometimes can't stand the proclivity of some of my fellow Americans from sanctifying war if waged by America. We may be "on the right side", but our acts of war are just as egregious and despicable as the acts of war of our enemies: maybe more so, because we blindly and like automatons proclaim "Gott mit uns," that we are a Christian nation and, moreover, unlike Japan or Andorra or Liechtenstein, apparently, a "nation under God."