It’s sanctification.

What does that mean?

Well, you know all that floating, bilocating, stigmata-getting, raising-people-from-the-dead stuff that the Really Big Saints do?

It’s that.

(And the realisation dawns in 4… 3…2..)

Yes. That’s why we are Catholics. If that’s not what we’re aiming at, we’re doing it wrong.

The rest in my latest bit for The Skodge.

The other day I had an email from an Important Monastic Personage that suggested that all our estimates about the origin of the current ecclesial crisis are way, way, WAY off. It got me thinking; what if we’re looking at all this completely wrong? Is it possible that even self-identified traditionalists are thinking without realising it like moderns?

And what if the solution is nothing like what we are thinking either? What if a great mass re-catechising of Catholics, or authentic Catholic action in politics, or a great revival of moral teaching on sex and the family, or even the complete reversal of the liturgical disaster, were all putting the cart before the horse? What if the “solution” is something completely different? Something that relies on us and our efforts in the natural realm not one whit?

You’ll have to go read the whole thing to get the answer.

But it seems to mash pretty well with this from our other friend:

On Monday morning, I called up a good friend who is far more deeply immersed in the theology of the Church than I am. I asked him for a gut check on all that is currently transpiring, and he immediately gave an impassioned response.

The problem, he said to me, is that we keep trying to address all these symptoms of the disease. We see Communion for the divorced and remarried, or the attempt to abolish the death penalty, or the revisitation of Humanae Vitae, or the anthropocentric changes in the liturgy, and we go running after them, chasing them down, trying to fight them.

“The root of it all, though,” he said to me, “is the worship of man. It’s Gaudium et Spes 12 and 24. It’s Evangelii Gaudium 161. And very few people truly see that.”

Fortunately, at least one of the people who see all this is a bishop. (At least there’s one, right? That’s something… Right?)

Bishop Gullickson says, 

I cannot blame Lehner for my reading of his work. I have concluded that the Enlightenment was little better than anthrax poisoning for monasticism. The Catholic Enlightenment is little more than a repetition in a new century (the 18th) of the iconoclastic proposals of the two prior reformation centuries with a pitiable admixture of slogans from the French revolution. It involved petty demands to suppress the tonsure which marked their consecration and trade the venerable old habit for the dandy dress of their contemporaries.

The obligations of choir, especially the night office, were opposed as an impediment to study, travel and scientific work, to be furthered by social exchanges at dinners in mixed company and by frequenting the theater. I can see now that the secularization movement, à la Joseph II Hapsburg and his like in Bavaria and elsewhere, which paved roads with monastic library materials and sought to abolish the monastic vocation as unproductive, found allies in these monastic illuminati and their like for their anti-Catholicism.

~

Today’s musical selection

seems apt, in a sort of oblique way…

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**V: “Live long and prosper.”

R: “And also with your spirit too”.**

Also, this made me laugh.  Our friend Joseph Shaw of the UK’s Latin Mass Society posted this photo to FB today, saying that it was the site of a Trad Mass in England somewhere.

Of course, what’s the VERY first thing that pops into your head?

“You’re having Mass on the bridge of the Enterprise? Umm… that’s cool, I guess.”

 I can just imagine the Vulcan Salute of Peace…

WHICH made me realise something: Novusordoism is TOTally the religion of Star Trek. It’s justice without reference to the transcendent, “compassion” instead of mercy, the worship of Man and his replacement of God.

And next time I have to go to the village NO Mass, I’m ABSOLUTELY giving the Vulcan Salute o’ Peace. Yeah… live long and prosper, baby, cause there ain’t no afterlife…

~

Kirk: Pastor’s log, Stardate 1517.3. We’re en route to the Luther system with a diplomatic envoy. Our mission is to welcome the inhabitants of Luther 5 into the Federation. Analysis, Mr. Spock. 

Spock: Curious. Despite our attempts to conform our appearance and manner of speech to their way of life … rather than accepting our attempts, they only move deeper into a societal structure radically opposed to our own. It’s as if they are hoping the Federation will cease to exist altogether.

 

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