Rome Again -- in memory

One year ago, today, I was in Rome, It, for a pilgrimage.  That was the beginning of this blog.

The post for last year is:
http://variousthoughtsbymart.blogspot.com/2013/10/evening-came-and-morning-followed-first.html

Repent therefore -- that your sins may be forgiven.

At National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez writes about the controversy regarding the
the St Patrick's Day Parade, in 2015.

All are welcome. The life of Christ demonstrates this — and then some. Cardinal Dolan has said this. Pope Francis said it in his Tuesday-morning homily in Rome. Across the street from Penn Station in midtown Manhattan stands St. Francis of Assisi Church, where there is a sign outside that says the same. St. Francis’s has Eucharistic Adoration from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. every weekday, and there is Confession there too, for many hours throughout the day. Be reconciled to Christ. That is the invitation. Fallen away, lost, miserable, confused, trying. Come to the healing waters of eternal life.

Yes, we are all sinners in desperate need of God's Mercy.  We must all repent of the evil we participate in.

St Peter, in the Acts of the Apostles, says to the Jewish people in Solomon's Portico: Repent therefore, that your sins may be forgiven. (Acts 3:19).

That saying is no less pertinent today than it was in 33 AD.

Cardinal George and a tale of a real and a fake church

In his column in the Diocesan Paper of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.,
writes of a tale of two churches.

The tale involves the history of the Church in this country, and some recent developments.

A Sample:

This church, a hierarchical communion, continued through history, living among different peoples and cultures, filled with sinners, but always guided in the essentials of her life and teaching by the Holy Spirit. She called herself “Catholic” because her purpose was to preach a universal faith and a universal morality, encompassing all peoples and cultures. This claim often invited conflict with the ruling classes of many countries. About 1,800 years into her often stormy history, this church found herself as a very small group in a new country in Eastern North America that promised to respect all religions because the State would not be confessional; it would not try to play the role of a religion.

This church knew that it was far from socially acceptable in this new country. One of the reasons the country was established was to protest the king of England’s permitting the public celebration of the Catholic Mass on the soil of the British Empire in the newly conquered Catholic territories of Canada. He had betrayed his coronation oath to combat Catholicism, defined as “America’s greatest enemy,” and protect Protestantism, bringing the pure religion of the colonists into danger and giving them the moral right to revolt and reject his rule.

You'll want to read it in its' entirety.

http://www.catholicnewworld.com/cnwonline/2014/0907/cardinal.aspx

Kathryn Lopez -- Beacons in the Dark

From an article on Townhall, Kathryn Lopez writes about the killing of Steven Sotloff,
in the light of a talk given by Fr. Paul Murray, an Irish Dominican.

A sample:

Fr. Murray talked, among other things, about the dangers of relativism. While it appears "apparently sane and humane," and "identified in the popular mind with such fine and necessary things as tolerance and affirmation, openness and freedom," Fr. Murray said, relativism, despite its quiet air of inevitable reason, leaves us "disarmed just at the moment when we should be armed," unable to successfully respond to challenges to faith.

"Surely, now is the time for us to hold fast to our Catholic faith and joyfully proclaim it," he said, adding that that is exactly what Catholic studies programs exist to help people do.


You will probably want to read the whole column.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput and a lesson in priorities

Saw this by the archbishop of Philadelphia about the HHS mandate(for Sterilization contraceptives and abortifacient coverage under ObamaCare) and the extermination of religious minorities in the middle east.  Here is a sample from the archbishop.

The extermination of religious minorities in the Middle East — what Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan calls “attempted genocide” — has so far drawn a very different response.

How should we as Catholics respond? We can start by realizing that a discomfort about dealing with religious liberty issues abroad has been part of the culture of America’s foreign policy bureaucracy for a long time, despite the 1998 law. Our current national leadership has simply made it worse. As much as we love our country — and Catholics have proven that love again and again in public service and in combat — our primary loyalty as Catholics is to Jesus Christ, to the Church as our community of faith and to our fellow Christians. They come first; and if in our hearts we don’t place them first, then we need to take a hard look at what we mean when we say we’re “Catholic.”
 

It is well worth reading.  Read it all.  A lesson in priorities

Unity vs. Division

I recently visited my daughter’s family, and we went to the Zoo.

My son-in-law wore a tee shirt with a quotation from Harvey Milk on the back and a supposed mathematical equation on the front saying that unity was greater than division.

I’ve been thinking about an example to show that the assertion is seriously confused.

________________________________________________________________

Consider a large, very large, chamber with knee deep water coated with a flammable substance. I’ve been thinking olive oil, since lamps have been made using it since ancient times. However, olive oil lacks the volatility, the vapor pressure one would expect from kerosene, or gasoline. The advantage is that olive oil smells pleasant, and isn’t toxic.

Back to our very large chamber filled with knee deep water coated with a thick layer of this pleasant, flammable substance.

In this chamber all the people of the world live. No one can remember ever living in any other circumstance. The world is dark, and the people like the oil they are standing in. Some like it to the point of coating themselves with it, and others around them as well.

From above, a gondola is lowered with a middle aged man, 33 years of age. The gondola does not reach the surface of the knee deep water covered with the olive oil. In fact no one can get into the gondola without the help of someone else boosting them up.

The man gets out of the gondola, and begins to talk with the residents. A few respond to their encounter with him, and he boosts them up, so they can get in the gondola. Once there, he cleans all the oil off of them, so that they’re clean.

He chooses twelve and sending them out by two’s, he and they go into the knee deep water and oil and engage the people still living in the chamber in conversation, telling them that they can get in the gondola and be clean too.

Those who respond are brought back to the gondola, boosted up into it and have the oil cleaned off of them.

There is a ladder that extends from the gondola up through the ceiling of the chamber, into the heavens apparently, and those who have been cleaned of the oil climb the ladder, while some return to the people still wandering about in the oil covered water.

They say to those in the water "you don’t need to stay in this place. It’s dangerous, you’ll burn."

Some in the water like the olive oil very much; they go about slathering the olive oil on other people in the chamber telling them how wonderful it is to be coated with the pleasantly smelling oil.

When they see the people in the gondola, who are clean, and those among the people who have re-entered the oil coated water to tell those who remained of the dangers they live in, the people who love the smell and feel of the olive oil become enraged.

They speak of the virtue of unity, that everyone should find joy in being coated in the oil and that those who are in the gondola are divisive and haters.

But I ask you, since those covered in the oil are going to be burned, is dividing the people so that some of them can be saved, less than the unity where all will burn eternally?

All men are called to the salvation that is in Christ, and God provides sufficient Grace for every man to be saved from the eternal fire. Will you embrace that salvation or will you degrade those who call you out of the fire?

White's 20 movies and their meanings

Movies of the Last Decade

Armond White had two articles today on National Review Online this morning dealing with movies and a break point for the culture a decode ago.  The first "The Year the Culture Broke" pointed to two movies and stated "All entertainment now reflects our political division."

The second, "Across the Ungreat Divide," lists 20 movies that "effectively destroyed art, social unity, and spiritual confidence. They constitute a corrupt, carelessly politicized canon."

In reading his list of these movies I noted that a few of them have strong characteristics of Christianity, or speak to or about the church. 

White --  2) The Dark Knight (2008) used the Batman myth to undermine heroism, overturn social mores, and embrace anarchy.

It seemed to me that The Dark Knight dealt with the dispute between anarchy and order.  In the end the dark knight takes upon himself the guilt that justly belongs on another, Harvey Dent.  I saw here a reflection of Christ taking the just punishment our sins deserve upon himself.  The Dark Knight didn't die to save Harvey, but he had to run because it was necessary for the authorities to chase him, so that Harvey's good name could be saved.  The consequences of this deception are realized in the movie's sequel, The Dark Knight Rises.

It is true that Heath Ledger's character, Joker, personifies anarchy, and the accolades Ledger received for his portrayal tended to embrace anarchy.  But, the Joker was not the protagonist, nor was he victorious in the end.  His view of the people of Gotham was debunked with the scene involving the ferries.

White -- 3) Ocean’s Twelve (2004) — Steven Soderbergh salutes land of the greedy and home of the depraved in a reboot franchise sequel, scoffing at the post-War conviction of Sinatra’s Rat Pack original.

In this film I saw a story about the Son of Man and his relationship to the Church. At the close of the film, Brad Pitt's character, Rusty Ryan, leads Catherine Zeta-Jones' character,  Isabel Lahiri to her father, whom she has had almost no relationship with since childhood.  This is the story of the Son-of-Man who like Tobiah leads his bride home to meet his blind father, Tobit.  Isabel, an image of the Church, is led home to her father who is God the Father, by her bridegroom, the Christ.

White -- 5) Wall-E (2008) — Nihilism made cute for children of all ages who know nothing about cultural history or how to sustain it.

Though this film is the "Bambi" of environmentalism, I saw in this movie a part of the story of the Church.  The church is represented by Eve as well as the ship, the Axiom.  Eve is sent to look for plant life on a desolate earth.  She doesn't find it.  However, a simple robot named Wall-E, whose job it is to clean up the mess left behind finds growing plant life, but does not know how significant it is.  He, in the process of showing Eve his greatest treasures, shows her the plant.  This causes an automatic response in Eve, and she is reclaimed by the Axiom to bring the object of her search to the Captain.

Wall-E follows.  He is like a bull in a china shop once on the Axiom producing a rag tag group of broken robots that follow him.  He and Eve are labeled rogue robots and are hunted by the authorities.  The autopilot of the Axiom, which runs the ship on behalf of the Captain, has received secret orders to NEVER return to Earth because the automated attempt to clean up the mess, has failed.  Wall-E and Eve bring the good news of the growing plant to the Captain in spite of the autopilot.  Wall-E is seriously damaged in this endeavor.

The Captain asserts his authority and launches the ship back to earth, in order to save the earth.  During the closing credits, the initial plant is shown as the basis for a growing tree and a rebuilding of life on the earth.

The tree is an image of the Church, as is Eve, as is the Axiom.   Who does Wall-E represent?