Calx Mariae magazine issue 4, Spring 2019

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MARIAE CALX

Rebuilding our Christian civilisation

FOCUS:

PARENTS AS PRIMARY EDUCATORS OF THEIR CHILDREN INCLUDING:

COMPULSORY RELATIONSHIPS & SEX EDUCATION how Catholic Church officials have betrayed parents and children

KNOW THE FAITH, LIVE WITH THE CHURCH an exclusive interview with Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Müller

LENTEN MEDITATION by Bl. John Henry Newman A V O I C E O F T H E FA M I LY P U B L I C AT I O N

ISSUE 4

SPRING 2019

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W O N R TE IS G RE

ROME LIFE FORUM ANGELICUM, ROME, 16-17 MAY, FOLLOWED BY THE ANNUAL MARCH FOR LIFE ON 18 MAY 2019

CITY OF MAN

VS

CITY OF GOD

GLOBAL ONE WORLD ORDER VS CHRISTENDOM

enquiry@voiceofthefamily.com ; + 4 4 voiceofthefamily.com/rome-life-forum F OR R E GI STR ATION

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MARIAE CALX

ISSUE 4

SPRING 2019

C ONTENTS 2 From the Editor 3 Protecting parents’ rights – so that parents can protect their children 5

5 How Catholic Church officials have betrayed parents and children by Dr Tom Rogers 15 Act of consecration by an enclosed nun 18 Focus: Parents as primary educators of their children 20 A history of revolutions and their consequences for the family by Prof. Roberto de Mattei

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28 The gift of marriage and the proper role of parents in the education and formation of their children

by Duke Paul von Oldenburg

36 Why homeschool your children? by Dr Joseph Shaw 38 Know the faith, live with the Church interview with H.E. Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Müller

44 The Incarnate Son, a Sufferer and Sacrifice a sermon by Bl. John Henry Newman 36

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50 Lessons from history a column by Matthew McCusker

54 St Joseph – Spouse of the Blessed Virgin, Patron of the Universal Church, Terror of Demons

by Maria Madise

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EDITOR Maria Madise EDITORIAL BOARD Liam Gibson Matthew McCusker John Smeaton John-Henry Westen DESIGN & PRODUCTION EDITOR Selina Fang EDITORIAL OFFICE VOICE OF THE FAMILY Unit B, 3 Whitacre Mews, Stannary Street, SE11 4AB, London, United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7820 3148 Email: editor@voiceofthefamily.com www.voiceofthefamily.com/calxmariae PUBLICATION IS SPONSORED BY:

Special thanks to: DISCLAIMER: Great care is taken to credit photos and seek permission before publishing. If you have a query regarding copyright, please contact the Editor. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission.

Donations for the continuation of this magazine in print will be gratefully received by Voice of the Family at the address above or online via:

www.voiceofthefamily.com/donate Calx Mariae seeks to contribute to the rebuilding of Christian civilisation by providing features and analysis in the areas of life, family and culture. Our aim in producing this magazine is to strengthen our readers in the faith and in their witness to the truth about human life and the family.

© VOICE OF THE FAMILY 2019

Calx Mariae is published by Voice of the Family, an international coalition of 25 prolife and pro-family organisations formed in support of Catholic teaching on the family.

The following truths are particularly at the heart of Voice of the Family’s work:

ISSN:2517-6455

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he most glorious end of marriage is to rear new citizens of heaven. In Arcanum divinae, Pope Leo XIII wrote: “By the command of Christ, it not only looks to the propagation of the human race, but to the bringing forth of children for the Church, ‘fellow citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God’ (Eph. 2:19).” This challenging work is the lot of parents as the first educators of their children. This fundamental, yet threatened, principle is the focus of this issue of Calx Mariae.

Why is this principle so fundamental? The Roman Catechism teaches us that “as the law commands children to honour, obey and respect their parents, so are there reciprocal duties which parents owe to their children.” Parents are obliged “to bring up their children in the knowledge and practice of religion, and to give them the best rules for the regulation of their lives; so that, instructed and trained in religion, they may serve God holily and constantly.” Thus the protection of parental rights is essential for defending and rebuilding our Christian civilisation.

How is it threatened? The battle against the primacy of parents is being waged by powerful governments, the United Nations and other international institutions which attempt to impose so-called “comprehensive sexuality education” programmes which promote contraception, abortion, gender ideology, homosexuality and virtually all other attacks on life and the family. Classroom sex education brings the most intimate aspects of life into the public sphere and is often designed to estrange children from their parents. It leaves Christian parents powerless to counter the indoctrination of their children.

All school subjects seek to excite interest and encourage further learning. Does anyone expect that sex education will be an exception to this rule? Do we think that what is being taught in this one class will not encourage children to experiment before they are ready to make a commitment to lifelong marriage? The evidence shows that classroom sex education does not help to prevent harmful behaviour, but encourages such experimentation. Worst of all, it destroys innocence.

From September 2020 all primary schools in England by law must teach Relationships Education and all secondary schools teach Relationships and Sex Education. This includes faith and independent schools. Now is the time for parents to fight for their right to be the first educators of their children in this most crucial area of marriage and the family (see p.3).

Sadly today, we hear from the authorities in the Church, the same language used by the enemies of the family in the world. We see opposition to the Church’s teachings on life, marriage and the family within the Church herself. The story of the betrayal of parents and children by the Catholic Education Service of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales as well as Vatican officials is told by Dr Tom Rogers on p.5.

And yet the only moral authority capable of opposing the global anti-family agenda is the Church with her authentic teaching. A general mobilisation of the Church Militant in defence of the deposit of the faith and for the temporal and eternal salvation of our families has never been more urgent. Encouragement for this is offered by Cardinal Müller’s manifesto of faith on p.42.

In this holy season of Lent, let us, above all, contemplate the parental love of God the Father, the filial love of Our Lord who was “obedient unto death, even to death on the cross” (Phil. 2:8) and the most tender motherly love of the Blessed Virgin. Let us dwell unceasingly on His Atoning Sacrifice offered for our sins, to purify our hearts and to deliver His Church on earth from all iniquity. Such is the power of the love of our heavenly Father and our Blessed Mother that by the Precious Blood of their Son it has won for all their children the prospect of everlasting happiness in Heaven.

BACK COVER: THE VIRGIN IMMACULATE (C.1600). ENGRAVING BY S.A. BOLSWERT AFTER P.P. RUBENS. CREDIT: WELLCOME COLLECTION.

From the Editor

99 Marriage, the exclusive, life-long union of one man and one woman, is the foundation of a stable and flourishing society and is the greatest protector of children, born and unborn.

99 The procreative and unitive ends of the conjugal act cannot licitly be separated; the rejection of this truth lies at the root of modern attacks on life and the family.

99 Parents are the primary educators of their children and the protection of this right is essential for building a new “culture of life”.

Pro-Life Action

PROTECTING PARENTS’ RIGHTS

– so that parents can protect their children F rom September 2020, all schools in England, including Catholic schools, must by law teach three new subjects: • Relationships Education in primary schools, • Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in secondary schools, and • Health Education in all schools.

Parents will not have the right to withdraw children from RSE or Health Education. They will still be able to withdraw them from sex education while they attend primary school but parents of children in secondary school will have to seek the permission of the headteacher.

The introduction of these changes represents a serious attempt on the part of the state to control what children will learn about marriage, family and personal relationships.

They will restrict the right of parents to raise their children in accordance with their own moral values. A child’s education in these matters should take place chiefly within the home rather than the classroom since it is parents and not the government who should decide what beliefs and values should be imparted to children. At the heart of these reforms is the state’s determination to ensure that same-sex “marriage” and homosexual activity is seen by children as healthy, normal and no different to real marriage.

Unless parents resist these proposals before they are introduced then the situation will become progressively worse in the years to come.

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In December 2017 the Department of Education opened a consultation which received more than 23,000 submissions. The response showed a groundswell of public support for real marriage between a man and a woman and significant opposition to the LGBT agenda and sex-education lobby. This forced officials to acknowledge the importance of the role of parents but major concerns over the implementation of the government’s plans still remain. These include: • Children in primary schools will be told that they must accept that families “sometimes look different from their family, but that they should respect those differences and know that other children’s families are characterised by love and care for them”. They must also understand that marriage, including same-sex “marriage” and civil partnerships, represent “a formal and legally recognised commitment of two people to each other which is intended to be lifelong”.

• In secondary schools, the RSE programme sets out a completely secular view of human sexuality. It presents high-risk unethical behaviour and lifestyles as equally valid as marriage. Abortion is portrayed simply as one of the available options during pregnancy. Pupils will be signposted to contraceptive and abortion services, without their parents even being informed. The right of parents to withdraw their children from the “sex education” parts of RSE, which the government had promised to retain, has been removed and replaced only by a right to request a withdrawal.

The final decision will be taken by the headteacher. At the age of 15 pupils will be able to overrule the wishes of their parents.

• Health education when taught in conjunction with RSE, shows that the government believes it has a role in every aspect of a child’s personal development even if that

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Pro-Life Action

risks undermining the decisions, values and beliefs of their parents.

• Child sexual exploitation should be dealt with in the most rigorous way possible. However, the alleged need for all primary school children to learn urgently about “consent” as a preventative measure against child abuse has been one of the chief justifications for compulsory Relationships Education. The overwhelming majority of children are not being abused.

Telling every child that he or she could be the victim of abuse could lead them to mistrust their parents – the people most concerned with protecting them from exploitation.

School presentations on this matter frequently leave children to decide for themselves whether they are being abused or encourage them to by-pass their parents to seek help from organisations such as Childline, which encourages contraception and presents abortion as a legitimate choice.

• Parents also need to be at the heart of strategies to protect children from online threats. They are best placed to regulate their children’s use of the internet. Talking to children in school about internet pornography could incite children to experiment by accessing sites they wouldn’t otherwise visit.

• Exaggerated claims about the extent of so-called “homophobic” bullying have long been used as an excuse to promote LGBT ideology to children and invite homosexual activists into schools. This emphasis on homophobic bullying means that bullying for other reasons, by far the majority, risks being overlooked or sidelined.

WHAT CAN PARENTS DO TO OPPOSE THESE PLANS?

If you are a parent you should engage with your child’s school now before the new subjects are introduced. Talk with your child’s teachers, their headteacher and members of the governing body about how they plan to teach these subjects:

• Ask them what the lessons will contain and what resources will be used.

• Find out which organisations will be advising the school and make clear your objections to anything inappropriate. Schools should give full disclosure to parents on these issues.

• Ask your child’s school for a consultation with parents on the content and delivery of these new subjects.

Every parent should be given a chance to contribute. This could be schoolwide at primary level and year-wide at secondary level.

• Exercise your right to withdraw your child from Sex and Relationships Education while this is still possible.

It is also critically important that MPs hear the concerns of parents in their constituencies. Further information on the government's proposals and tips for writing letters to MPs can be found at: www.safeatschool.org.uk

O W !

POSTCARDS MAKE A BIG IMPACT. PLEASE ORDER POSTCARDS AT: www.spuc.org.uk/ProtectParentsPostcard OR CALL: 02078203141

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PROTECT PARENTS’ RIGHTS: GIVE PARENTS THE RIGHT TO WITHDRAW THEIR CHILDREN FROM RELATIONSHIPS EDUCATION. Now is the time to send a strong message to the Secretary of State for Education calling for parental rights to be protected so that parents can protect their children. Parents, grandparents and all concerned citizens should send a postcard now.

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SEND A POSTCARD TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR EDUCATION

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Make your voice heard:

ANALYSIS

How Catholic Church officials HAVE BETRAYED PARENTS AND CHILDREN

BY DR TOM RO G ER S THE PARENT AS PRIMARY EDUCATOR

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acred Scripture has a great deal to say about education, which starts within the relationship between parent and child, and, in order to be purposeful and true, must also begin with knowledge and fear of the Lord (Prov. 1:7-8, Deut. 11:19, 32:46, Eph. 6:4). This principle of the parent as “primary educator”, who has both the God-given role and responsibility to teach a child “in the way he should go” (Prov. 22.6) has consequently been an established and consistent tenet of authentic Catholic teaching. It is the father and mother, through their participation in God’s work of creation, who have conferred life on their children and have the closest natural relationship with them.

The Church affirms that this God-given parental right and duty is, in the words of Pope John Paul II, “irreplaceable and inalienable, and therefore incapable of being entirely delegated to others or usurped by others”.1 They have the “right to educate their children in conformity with their religious and moral convictions” and “should also receive from society the necessary aid and assistance to perform their educational role properly”.2 This is even more so the case with “Relationships and Sex Education” (RSE), as the government now refers to this most intimate area of our children’s learning and development, especially given the potential influence of such learning not only on children’s health, well-being, purpose and fulfilment in SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

this life, but their vocation in the Spirit and eternal salvation in the next.3 Consequently, Pope John Paul II insisted that “sex education, which is a basic right and duty of parents, must always be carried out under their attentive guidance, whether at home or in educational centres chosen and controlled by them. In this regard, the Church reaffirms the law of subsidiarity, which the school is bound to observe.”4 In The truth and meaning of human sexuality, the Pontifical Council for the Family explained: “Other educators can assist in this task [of education for chastity] but they can only take the place of parents for serious reasons of physical or moral incapacity.” (Section 23) A SHIFT IN THE CHURCH’S POSITION?

Catholic parents worldwide therefore have been severely challenged by the march of the comprehensive sex education agenda, and, in many countries, the growing imposition, if not virtual takeover, by the state in this sacred area of parental responsibility. Equally disconcerting has been the more than just apparent shift of the Holy See in this important area during the pontificate of Pope Francis. His controversial post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia (2016) overlooks the Church’s previously clear teaching on the matter in its section entitled “Yes to Sex Education” (translated in the English version as “The Need for Sex Education”) (Ch.7). This section does not make any reference to the role of parents in educating their children in

DR TOM ROGERS

the area of sexuality, but only refers instead to the role of “educational institutions”. Pope Francis reaffirmed his position in a recent interview on the plane returning from World Youth Day in Panama (28 January 2019). He stated: “I believe that we must provide sex education in schools. [...] But we need to offer an objective sexual education, as it is, without ideological colonization. [...] Sex as a gift from God must be taught, not with rigidity. [...] I don’t say this without putting myself in the political problem of Panama. But they need to have sex education. The ideal is to start from home, with the parents. It is not always possible because there are so many different situations in families, and because they do not know how to do it. And so the school makes up for this, because otherwise it will remain a void that will then be filled by any ideology.”5

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ANALYSIS

The Pontifical Council for the Family also no longer abides by the Church’s perennial teaching. After the promulgation of Amoris laetitia, it published its own sex education programme, entitled “The Meeting Point” in 2016. This programme, which is intended to be taught in schools, in mixed classrooms, and not by parents, has been widely criticised by Catholic and pro-life commentators for its failure to adequately convey Catholic moral teachings, for its secularising approach, and use of inappropriate images. Psychiatrist Rick Fitzgibbons MD, who has worked extensively with Catholic youth harmed psychologically by family breakdown, sexual abuse, pornography and other consequences of the permissive society, has described the programme as being “in my professional opinion, the most dangerous threat to Catholic youth that I have seen over the past 40 years”; it “reveals an ignorance of the enormous sexual pressure upon youth today and will result in their subsequent confusion in accepting the Church’s teaching”.6 THE BISHOPS OF ENGLAND AND WALES, AND THE CES

The Bishops of England and Wales, via the Catholic Education Service (CES), have been even more advanced in this agenda. From 1999 until 2008 the Chairman of the CES was Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham (now Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster). Under the chairmanship of Archbishop Nichols the CES developed a policy that resulted in providing children in Catholic schools, including adolescents under the legal age of consent, with access to abortion and contraception services without parental knowledge or consent, through a state run confidential advice agency, named “Connexions”.

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CARDINAL VINCENT NICHOLS

Also under his chairmanship the CES joined the Sex Education Forum and agreed to policies directly contrary to Catholic teaching and the natural law. Membership of the forum required agreement with the Sex and Relationships Education Framework (2003, reissued 2005), which, for instance, “welcomes” the “diversity of society” in the area of “sexuality”, regards sex education as “an entitlement for all boys as well as girls; those who are heterosexual, lesbian, gay or bisexual” and requires that children should be given “relevant information” which “is accurate and non-judgmental” about “the potential consequences of unprotected sex” including “abortion”.

In April 2010 the CES, now under the chairmanship of Malcolm McMahon (then Bishop of Nottingham, now Archbishop of Liverpool), appointed as deputy director, Greg Pope, a former Labour member of Parliament, who had an extensive anti-life, anti-family voting record. Pope remained in that post until his promotion, in 2017, to be the Assistant General Secretary of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.

BETRAYAL OF CATHOLIC PARENTS IN ENGLAND

For Catholic parents in England recent developments are bringing the threatened state takeover of their God-given

role to a critical new reality, and the conduct of the Catholic Education Service, which should be at the vanguard of protecting their rights, as well as the God-given rights of all parents, has instead been, in certain specific ways, complicit in their betrayal.

In March 2017, Parliament passed the government’s Children and Social Work Act (2017) which made the new subjects of Relationships Education compulsory in all primary schools in England, and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) compulsory in all secondary schools in England, including faith and independent schools. It was announced that the required content of these new subjects would be subject to public consultation, although from the outset government spokespersons, including the Prime Minister, stated that Relationships Education would be “LGBT” inclusive.7 The government stated that parents would be able to withdraw their children only from the “sex education” parts of RSE at secondary school.

ARCHBISHOP MALCOLM MCMAHON

Archbishop Malcolm McMahon, chair of the Catholic Education Service for England and Wales, issued a statement welcoming the government’s announcement that it was acting to change the law:

CAL X M A R IA E

“Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) forms part of the mission of Catholic schools to educate the whole person. Our schools have a long track record of educating young people who are prepared for adult life as informed and engaged members of society, and high quality RSE plays an important part of this.

“We welcome the government’s commitment to improving Relationship and Sex Education in all schools. Catholic schools already teach age-appropriate Relationship and Sex Education in both primary and secondary schools. This is supported by a Catholic model RSE curriculum which covers the RSE curriculum from nursery all the way through to sixth form.

“We additionally welcome the government’s commitment to protect parental right of withdrawal and involve parents in all stages of the development and delivery of RSE in all schools. It is essential that parents fully support the school’s approach to these sensitive matters.

The experience of Catholic schools is that parental involvement is the basis for providing consistent and high quality RSE at home and at school.

“We look forward to working closely with the government to shape any new guidance to enable Catholic schools to continue to deliver outstanding RSE, in accordance with parents’ wishes and Church teaching.”

Despite the apparently strong statements with regard to parental involvement, it is telling how much the statement conforms, not to established Catholic teaching on the matter, but to the new secular “orthodoxy” SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

and government policy regarding this area of a child’s learning. It is now the “mission” of the school to “educate the whole person” – rather than this principally being the parents’ mission and responsibility. The parent is simply granted an “involvement” in the process, because “it is essential that parents fully support the school’s approach”. There is no reference to the fact that the “right of withdrawal” at this time was only for the “Sex Education” parts of RSE, and, in any case, the government’s actual distinction between “sex” and “relationships” education is still very much unclear.

There are echoes of all the key buzzwords of the sex education lobby in the statement – the changes are all about “improvement” and providing “high quality RSE” (by whose cri-

new secular moral code of the LGBT and sex education lobbies?

Leaving aside for a moment the assumption that all Catholic schools in England and Wales offer genuine “Catholic teaching” in every respect, what about the 90 per cent of children, including many Catholic children, who do not attend a Catholic school? Should we be concerned at all for their temporal and eternal welfare?

Does the Church not have any kind of mission to evangelise the nation, to shine the light of God’s truth into every corner of public policy?

There is a submissive ghetto mentality here reminiscent of the bishops’ role in the issue over adoption by homosexual couples. The bishops of England and Wales appeared to take the line that, of course we accept that

It is now the “mission” of the school to “educate the whole person” – rather than this principally being the parents’ mission and responsibility. The parent is simply granted an “involvement” in the process, because “it is essential that parents fully support the school’s approach”.

teria?), which is essential to prepare them “for adult life as informed and engaged members of society”, or as the Department for Education puts it, “to support all young people to stay safe and prepare for life in modern Britain”.8 After all, who wouldn’t want our children to be “safe” and “prepared for life in modern Britain”? Except do we serve them best by preparing them to either counter or conform to those aspects of “life in modern Britain” which are opposed to the Gospel? What will keep them the safest: following the true teachings of the Church in the area of sex and relationships, or following instead the

same sex couples should be allowed to adopt because that was in the Labour government’s manifesto, but we are just requesting a “bit of diversity in the system”, and requesting an opt-out for Catholic adoption agencies when it comes to same sex adoption – even though Archbishop Nichols admitted that Catholic adoption agencies had been giving up children for adoption by single (but active?) homosexuals and also by unmarried but cohabiting heterosexual couples. Moreover, the bishops had no objections to allowing Catholic adoption agencies to refer homosexual applicants to agencies that would place children with homosexual couples.9 7

ANALYSIS

Naturally in both practising and freely admitting this highly compromised position there was no witness whatsoever as to why deliberately denying an adopted child the natural situation of having a father and mother was wrong, or why the homosexual lifestyle was wrong. The government regarded such a weak, compromised and contradictory stance with absolute contempt, brushing it aside and insisting it would be done regardless.

All but one of the twelve diocesan adoption agencies either voluntarily closed themselves down or cut their ties with the church – exactly what the enemies of the Church wanted in the first place.10 This should also perhaps serve as a forewarning to us of what will happen to Catholic schools when the government wants to drive the LGBT juggernaut over a red line that is too far even for the Bishops of England and Wales.

... primary school children will have to demonstrate ‘respect’ for the idea and practice of homosexual relationships and not just for the people involved in them, and will be expected to agree that such relationships, including when they have children, are just as valid, positive and beneficial as those based on real marriage.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY FOR CHURCH ACTION

The government announced a public “Call for Evidence” in December 2017, which closed in February 2018, concerning what should be the content of the new compulsory subjects. Seeing as this was a public consultation, where numbers clearly matter, one would have thought it might have been a good idea to encourage Catholics, especially Catholic parents, to participate and make submissions? The message from the CES, however, seemed to be that we can just trust and leave everything to them, that everything is and will be fine with Catholic schools, and that everything the government is doing with regard to RSE is positive and can be perfectly compatible with the Church’s teaching. A number of pro-life and pro-family organisations, including SPUC, did, however, campaign hard to rally parents and their 8

supporters to respond to the “Call for Evidence”. This helped contribute to an impressive 23,000 submissions.

The government’s reporting on the results of that consultation, however, has been highly inadequate, and what it had produced showed no evidence whatsoever for any claims of consensus, especially from parents, for the agenda it is pursuing.

In July 2018 the government issued its Draft Guidance and Regulations regarding the proposed content and delivery of the new subjects, and simultaneously launched a second public consultation on their acceptability.

There was some evidence of the positive impact of campaigning by the prolife and pro-family lobby. There was an acknowledgement that parents are the primary educators in certain of the

matters covered by the new subjects, and that it would be mandatory for schools to consult with parents on RSE policies and programmes. However, where does the parent stand when, following the consultation, they are still unhappy about what the school proposes to teach? Overall the Draft Regulations and Guidance seriously undermine parental rights, and also present a completely one-sided view of human sexuality, marriage and the family which is contrary to what the Catholic faith teaches.

The children's programme of study is required to be “LGBT inclusive” throughout and present homosexual relationships and family structures in a positive manner. In primary school, children must be made to understand and accept that families “sometimes” CAL X M A R IA E

look different from their family, but that they should respect those differences and know that other children’s families are characterised by “love and care for them”; also that marriage, including same-sex “marriage” and civil partnerships, represents “a formal and legally recognised commitment of two people to each other which is intended to be lifelong”.11 In other words, primary school children will have to demonstrate “respect” for the idea and practice of homosexual relationships and not just for the people involved in them, and will be expected to agree that such relationships, including when they have children, are just as valid, positive and beneficial as those based on real marriage.

In RSE at secondary school teenagers will be further encouraged to “explore” their developing “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”.

It presents dangerous and immoral lifestyle choices as equally valid as marriage. Abortion is presented simply as one of the available options during pregnancy and pupils will be signposted to contraceptive and abortion services, without any parental knowledge or consent.

The right of parents to withdraw their children from the “sex education” parts of RSE, which the government had promised to retain, has now been removed and replaced only by a “right to request” withdrawal, with the final decision going to the headteacher.

Even this much compromised parental right is withdrawn altogether when the child reaches 15, when they will be allowed to overrule their parents’, as well as their headteachers’, wishes if they choose, as they are being given the right to have sex education provided to them by the school. Moreover, it is a statutory requirement for schools “to have regard” to the final published Guidance when delivering the new subjects, which means they have to deliver the SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

required content unless they have a “good reason” not to. The experience of a number of independent faith schools, particularly independent and Orthodox Jewish schools, who have been failed or severely penalised by OFSTED (England’s schools inspection agency)12 for not teaching LGBT issues in a satisfactory way, shows that the fact that LGBT ideology is against the tenets of the Christian, Jewish or Islamic faith is not considered a good enough reason.

CES CONTINUES TO BACK THE GOVERNMENT OVER RSE

The CES were one of the favoured selected groups listed who had been involved in the deep consultation process with the Department for Education, though that is not to say that they necessarily agreed with all of the resultant Draft Guidance. However, their public statements so far have expressed only support for the government’s plans.

Following the publication of the Draft Regulations and Guidance in July 2018 the CES issued another press release again stating that the Catholic Church “welcomes” the government’s moves to “improve” Relationships and Sex Education, as well as how “the government had used the Catholic model curriculum as examples of best practice”. It also “welcomes” how “the recommendations are clear that the right for parents right of withdrawal [sic] will be maintained”, even though the Draft Regulations only allow parents the right to request withdrawal, with a right to refuse being given to the headteacher. It also welcomed that “schools with a religious character” will be able to deliver RSE “within the tenants [sic] of their own faith”.13 However, the Children and Social Work Act (section 34:3 (b)), as well as the Draft Regulations, only stipulate that “the education is appropriate having regard to the age and the religious background of the pupils”,

which is open to interpretation and a much weaker requirement than such teaching needing to be in line with the “tenets” of a particular faith. A school may “have regard” for the fact that a pupil comes from a Catholic family, but still deem it necessary to teach the pupil things that do not conform to the tenets of the Catholic faith. The Draft Guidance uses similarly vague language and also adds that “schools must ensure they comply with the relevant provisions of the Equality Act (2010)”. OFSTED inspections have interpreted that to mean a school must clearly teach about active homosexuality and transgenderism in a positive light, so that children who may identify themselves by one of the “protected characteristics” do not feel marginalised or discriminated against, and that children are adequately prepared for “life in modern Britain”. For instance, in May 2017 Vishnitz Girls School, an Orthodox Jewish primary school, failed its third OFSTED inspection in a year specifically because the school acknowledged that it did not teach its young children (aged 3-11) about homosexuality and transgenderism. The original report stated that “the school’s approach means that pupils are shielded from learning about certain differences between people, such as sexual orientation. […] They acknowledge that they do not teach pupils about all the protected characteristics [of the Equality Act 2010], particularly those relating to gender re-assignment and sexual orientation. This means that pupils have a limited understanding of the different lifestyles and partnerships that individuals may choose in present-day society.”14 Christian schools have also been targeted by OFSTED. Pupils at Grindon Hall Christian School and Durham Free School faced intrusive questioning on transsexualism, homosexuality and same-sex “mar9

ANALYSIS

riage” by OFSTED inspectors, who then claimed that they found evidence of “homophobic behaviour” in both schools – a claim rejected by staff, pupils and parents. Despite the outcry, The Durham Free School was closed down in April 2015 and Grindon Hall – one of the best performing schools in the North East – was rated “inadequate”, and was forced by the Department for Education to be taken over by a secular trust.15 A further public consultation (July-Nov 2018) was announced regarding the Draft Regulations and Guidance for the new subjects. However, rather than initiating a campaign to encourage Catholics, and others who attend Catholic schools, to participate in this consultation, so that protections for parents could be genuinely safeguarded, the CES had already embarked on a mini-PR campaign in support of government policy, with an article which appeared on the CES website and the Catholic press informing us that the government’s proposals were only to be welcomed, that there was nothing to worry about, that Catholic schools already do a fantastic job teaching RSE (in line with the Church’s teaching), and, falsely, that the government is committed both to allowing faith schools flexibility to teach according to the tenets of their faith, and protecting the parents’ right of withdrawal.16 Given the content of the government’s Draft RSE Guidance it is very hard to conceive of how a Catholic school can deliver the subjects in a way which “has regard to the Statutory Guidance” whilst still in conformity with the tenets of the Catholic faith.

The CES’s current “model policy for RSE”, which the CES boasts has been praised by the Department for Education, features an uncomfortable mix of 10

Catholic teaching with elements of the statutory SRE Guidance (2000) and contemporary secular sex education programmes shoehorned into it. So at Key Stage 1 (ages 5 -7) children are to be taught to “identify and correctly name their ‘private parts’”; and at KS 2 (ages 7-11) they are taught “that similarities and differences between people arise from several different factors (see protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010, part 2, ch. 1, sections 4-12)”. In other words, they are taught about “sexual orientation” and “gender reassignment” (LGBT issues).17 The ambiguity of elements of the policy at the very least allow scope for teaching which is not in accordance with the faith. For example, the RSE secondary school policy stipulates teaching children about “recognising and valuing their own sexual identity and that of others”, or to “ensure RSE is sensitive to the different needs of individual pupils in respect to […] their own sexual orientation”.18 This is especially the case when we have had the scandal of homosexual lobby-group Stonewall being invited into Catholic schools and colleges to train teachers on how to deal with “homophobic bullying”.19 Although the model RSE policy stresses that “teachers will be expected to teach RSE in accordance with the Catholic Ethos of the school”,20 and the CES proclaims its confidence that authentic Catholic RSE is and will continue to be taught in Catholic schools, even after 2020; it is not clear, judging by some of the recent publications of the CES, that the CES has the same idea as many Catholic parents, or the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church, about what exactly the “tenets” of the Catholic faith are when it comes to human sexuality and the teaching of RSE.

BISHOPS AND CES PROMOTE LGBT IDEOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

An RSE guide for Catholic educators published by the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales in 2017, entitled Learning to Love, declares its admiration for Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia, as “an inspirational document, rich with insights and fresh descriptions of the Church’s teaching on this vital subject”.21 On the subject of homosexuality, the Bishops’ Learning to Love offers its own “fresh description” of the Church’s teaching: “Here we would like to emphasise that this exalted form of love exists just as powerfully in relationships between people of the same sex as it does in heterosexual relationships. We applaud the great progress that has been made in countering all forms of discrimination against homosexuality in recent times, and wish to collaborate with efforts to make such discrimination obsolete.” (p.17) Note that we are now talking about “discrimination against homosexuality” as something that should be countered, as opposed to “unjust discrimination” against homosexual persons as the Catechism states (2358). “Homosexuality” itself has now been transformed from an“inclination, which is objectively disordered” to what can be an “exalted form of love”; and what does it mean “to collaborate with efforts to make such discrimination obsolete”?

To actively promote the LGBT and Pride agenda? To shut down freedom of speech on the issue and persecute Christians and others who try to speak the truth about homosexuality?

An even more pernicious document is Made in God’s Image: Challenging homophobic and biphobic bullying in Catholic schools, a joint publication by the CES CAL X M A R IA E

and St Mary’s University, Twickenham — first published in 2017 and which has even been given a second edition, without any major alterations, despite its deep and scandalous conflicts with the Church’s teaching being widely pointed out by commentators.22 Under the guise of “guidance” for the “pastoral care of pupils”, Made in God’s Image is designed to intimidate Catholic schools into introducing a concerted LGBT indoctrination programme for children, in the form of an eight-lesson scheme of work. The sum of the message that children will take away from this is that being “lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender” is part of their God-given purpose and identity, an integral part of being Made in God’s image, something that must be celebrated, and that any true Catholic should act to report and help robustly stamp out any sign or attitudes of disapproval. An example from the introduction illustrates the strategy being taken: “The Church teaches that homosexual persons ‘must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2358). The School should be mindful that the Church teaches that homosexual inclinations are not sinful. For older pupils who may publicly identify themselves as such, Church schools should be havens of respect and custodians of the true dignity of each human being. They should be as attentive to the possibility of homosexual pupils being marginalized and bullied as they are to discrimination based on religion, gender, race or disability.”23 Although the Church does indeed teach that involuntarily experiencing same sex attraction is not itself a sin, the Catechism also adds that the inclination itself is “objectively disordered” (2358), and that authoritative CathoSPR I NG 2 0 1 9

Note that we are now talking about “discrimination against homosexuality” as something that should be countered, as opposed to “unjust discrimination” against homosexual persons as the Catechism states (2358). “Homosexuality” itself has now been transformed from an “inclination, which is objectively disordered” to what can be an “exalted form of love”.

lic teaching has also always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered”, “basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity” (2357).

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has instructed bishops that “although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”24 There

is no mention of this in the document, or indeed any mention whatsoever of Catholic doctrine on marriage, or any attempt to present the true meaning and purpose of human sexuality between man and woman. Indeed the only thing presented as sinful (although it does not directly employ the term “sin”) is the new sin of “homophobia” which “should have no place among Catholics. Catholic teaching on homosexuality is not founded on, and can never be used to justify homophobic 11

ANALYSIS

attitudes”. In one of the word games that children are encouraged to play “homophobia” is defined as: “A range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who are identified or perceived as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT). It can be expressed as antipathy, contempt, prejudice, aversion, or hatred, may be based on irrational fear, and is sometimes related to religious beliefs.” (p.16) Notice again how, as with Learning to Love, it is negative attitudes towards “homosexuality”, and not just “homosexual persons”, that is condemned here. And “homosexuality”, according to the Catechism at least, refers to “relations” between same-sex attracted men or women, including “homosexual acts”. Conveniently, if not outrageously, the actual word of God on the subject of homosexuality is never quoted or referred to.

It is undeniable that a deliberately misleading sleight of hand is in play throughout, with the document’s omissions and selective quotations from both Catholic documents and the Bible. That such a secular and distorted presentation of human sexuality, saturated with LGBT ideology, is being presented to children is hardly surprising when, as has been widely pointed out on Catholic blogs and by at least one English bishop, much of the material has been lifted directly from pre-existing propaganda programmes from Stonewall and LGBT Youth Scotland.25 Chillingly, Made in God’s Image even offers lesson material which encourages children to judge and challenge their own parents’ and families’ attitudes, based on provided examples of expressions of “homophobia”, in12

cluding typical comments made whilst watching television programmes. It is ironic that a document purported to be concerned with “anti-bullying” engages in a highly pernicious form of bullying against faithful Catholic children and their parents by labelling them “homophobes” and “bigots”.

Catholic schools. However, the small print reveals that only 12 per cent of Catholic schools responded to this survey – the whole justification of this programme therefore being based on completely unrepresentative data (p.

31). Catholic headteachers would have been rightly reluctant to respond as the

Chillingly, Made in God’s Image even offers lesson material which encourages children to judge and challenge their own parents’ and families’ attitudes, based on provided examples of expressions of “homophobia”, including typical comments made whilst watching television programmes.

The pro-LGBT Made in God’s Image programme is said to have been prompted by a survey conducted by the CES on “homophobic” bullying in

survey itself was ideologically loaded and intimidating (employing the unqualified terms “homophobic” and “transphobic” throughout), with quesCAL X M A R IA E

tions posed in a way that would make it very difficult for a faithful Catholic to respond, without compromising Christian truths on issues of sexuality.

WHERE ARE WE HEADING?

So where does this all leave us for the future if this agenda remains unchallenged? Scotland and Wales already show where the direction of travel is going in the immediate future. As a statutory part of Wales’s new curriculum which will be in place from 2022, the Welsh government announced that it is introducing “LGBTQI+ - inclusive Relationships and Sexuality Education” for all learners aged 5-16. Kirsty Williams, Welsh Education Secretary, has stated: “The days of traditional sex education are long gone; the world has moved on and our curriculum must move with it. […] Of course, thirty years on from the introduction of Section 28, we will also ensure that RSE is fully inclusive of all genders and sexualities and meets the needs of LGBTQI+ learners.”26 The Welsh government is adopting the recommendations of a specially commissioned report on the future of SRE in Wales produced by an “SRE Expert Panel”, headed by Prof. Emma Renold of Cardiff University, a sociologist whose research on child sexuality, as her university profile informs us, is characterised by “feminist, queer and post-humanist approaches”. Neither the Catholic Church, nor any other faith groups, were represented in the “expert panel” – no doubt they were not invited to be. The Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have issued no response to what is an all out assault on the childhoods of all Welsh children, including those of Catholic families.

“Post-humanism”, by the way, is one of the latest pseudo-intellectual fads of western academia. In the same way that “gender” and “sexuality” are regarded as mere social constructs, and therefore open to deconstruction, so SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

now too is the very notion of what it is to be a “human being”. The “natural” distinctions between human, animal and machine are also regarded as arbitrary boundaries to be explored, redefined and transgressed. It should not be too hard to envisage the even more disturbing future of “sexuality” once such last remaining taboos have also been removed.

The Scottish government has so far gone the furthest in Britain along this trajectory, having proudly announced recently that Scotland will become “the first country in the world to have lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) inclusive education embedded in the [whole] curriculum” – not just in relationships and sex education.27 Naturally if ideological indoctrination is to be truly effective then thought must be controlled at all times, and not just within the confines of certain lessons. Unbelievably this development was also “welcomed” by Scottish Bishops, who added that they hope the “impact of these recommendations will be positive for all.”

So how should parents respond in the face of this situation? For times like this God tells us to “rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer” (Rm. 12:12). We should hold on more strongly than ever to the fact that God Himself has still ordained us to be the primary educators of our children, a right which as Pope John Paul II reminds us “is irreplaceable and inalienable”; that the right of parents to bring up their children to know, love and serve Him is His holy will. Scripture tells us to “be strong and courageous”, to “not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deut. 31:6).

“Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more” (Rm 5:20), and we are now seeing encouraging signs of a strong and powerful parents’ rights

movement rapidly rising up to confront what Church officials have been unwilling to confront.

This is an issue which unites many people of different faiths and none.

For instance, a Parliamentary petition concerning the parental right of withdrawal from RSE recently gained in excess of 100,000 signatories, which resulted in a Parliamentary debate on the petition in February 2019. Many Muslim parents, in particular, have provided an example of peaceful, but vocal and resilient parent power, with hundreds of parents witnessing weekly outside Parkfields Primary School, Birmingham, where their children were being subjected to an LGBT propaganda programme called “No Outsiders”.

This is a time for faith not fear or compromise. In that spirit SPUC Safe at School has recently launched a major campaign in defence of the parental right to withdraw their children from Relationships and Sex Education and it has already gained tremendous support from parents from different backgrounds and communities. To find out how you can become involved visit: www.spuc.org.uk/rsebriefing Dr Tom Rogers is the SPUC Education Manager. He has been working full-time for the pro-life cause since 2016. An academic and educationalist, he previously lectured in English literature at university, and has also taught in the secondary and further education sectors. He is the author of God of Rescue: John Berryman & Christianity (2011).

He is married with two children.

13

ANALYSIS

ENDNOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

14

John Paul II, Apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio, 22 Nov 1981, 36.

Charter of the Rights of the Family, presented by the Holy See, 22 Oct 1983, Article 5.

Familiaris consortio, 37.

Familiaris consortio, 37; Charter of the Rights of the Family, Article 5, c.

Diane Montagna, “Pope Francis: ‘We must provide sex education in schools’”, LifeSiteNews, January 28 2019; https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pope-francis-wemust-provide-sex-education-in-schools Rick Fitzgibbons MD, “Psychiatrist: The Vatican’s sex ed is the most dangerous threat to youth I’ve seen in 40 years”, LifeSiteNews, 2 September 2016; https://www. lifesitenews.com/opinion/exclusive-the-new-threat-tocatholic-youth-the-meeting-point For instance, Nick Gibb MP, stated in response to a Parliamentary question (3 July 2017) that “we expect schools to ensure that all pupils, whatever their developing sexuality or gender identity, feel that relationships and sex education is relevant to them and sensitive to their needs. As part of our engagement programme, we will consider ways to ensure that our guidance and regulations are inclusive of LGBT issues. We plan to work closely with organisations such as Stonewall and the Terrence Higgins Trust, amongst others.” Prime Minister Teresa May affirmed her support for ‘LGBT inclusive’ RSE in English schools in her speech at the Pink News LGBT Awards 2017.

Department for Education, “Policy Statement: Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education, and Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education”, March 2017, (p.1).

The then Archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols, made these comments and admissions over two interviews with Jon Snow (Channel 4 News) and Jeremy Paxman (BBC 2 Newsnight) on the evening of 23 January 2007. See also “Birmingham Archbishop: ‘Oh by the way,’ Britain’s Catholic Adoption Agencies Already Adopt to Gay Singles”, LifeSiteNews, 29 Jan 2007; https://www. lifesitenews.com/news/birmingham-archbishop-oh-bythe-way-britains-catholic-adoption-agencies-alr; “UK Catholic Bishops Compromise on Gay Adoption Leads to Charges of Hypocrisy”, LifesiteNews, 23 March 2007; https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/uk-catholic-bishops-compromise-on-gay-adoption-leads-to-chargesof-hypocris Only Leeds-based Catholic Care in the diocese of Lancaster continued until forced to shut down. See Hilary White, “UK Catholic Church Agency to Cease Adoption Work As government Forces Homosexual Adoption”, LifeSiteNews, July 27, 2007; https://www.lifesitenews.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

com/news/uk-catholic-church-agency-to-cease-adoption-work-as-government-forces-homos See learning outcomes on pp.16-17 in Department for Education, “Draft Statutory Guidance on Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education”, July 2018; https://consult.education.gov.uk/ pshe/relationships-education-rse-health-education/ The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills is a non-ministerial department of the UK government, reporting to Parliament.

Catholic Education Service, “Catholic Church welcomes move to improve Relationship and Sex Education in all schools”, Press release, 19 July 2018: http://catholiceducation.org.uk/component/k2/item/1003657-catholicchurch-welcomes-move-to-improve-relationship-andsex-education-in-all-schools OFSTED, “Vishnitz Girls School: School Progress Monitoring Inspection Report”, 10 May 2017 (ref. 138516). Note, following the justifiably negative publicity on publication of this report, OFSTED subsequently replaced the original report with a redacted version (ref. 138515_5) on its website — one which had removed any direct references to ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender reassignment’, hence attempting to conceal the real reason why the school was failed.

For a summary and further details of these and similar cases, see The Christian Institute, “OFSTED and ‘British Values’”, June 2017; available online at: https://www. christian.org.uk/resource/ofsted-british-values/ Catherine Bryan, “Why Relationship and Sex Education is a must for all Catholic schools” [online article], Catholic Education Service, 20 June 2018; http://www.catholiceducation.org.uk/component/k2/item/1003652-why-relationship-and-sex-education-is-a-must-for-all-catholicschools. The same article also appeared in “The Catholic Times”, 15 June 2018, (p.28).

See learning outcomes 1.2.4.4 (p.7) and 2.1.3.4 (p.4) in Catholic Education Service, “A model Catholic Primary RSE curriculum”, Autumn 2016; http://catholiceducation. org.uk/schools/relationship-sex-education Catholic Education Service, “A model Catholic Secondary RSE curriculum”, Autumn 2016 (pp.3-4); http://catholiceducation.org.uk/schools/relationship-sex-education For instance, it was reported that St Mary’s Catholic Primary in Wimbledon invited Stonewall to train staff on homophobic bullying “in order to comply with OFSTED requirements”, and subsequently became a Stonewall “Primary School Champion”. “Gay rights group called in to advise primary teachers”, Evening Standard, 15 May 2013; https://www.standard.co.uk/news/education/gay-rightsgroup-called-in-to-advise-primary-teachers-8616681. html. It has also been reported that students training to be teachers were subjected to a Stonewall-run session on ‘homophobic bullying’ at the Catholic St Mary

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

University, Twickenham; https://spuc-director.blogspot. com/2013/06/stonewall-scandal-at-catholic.html CES, “Model Catholic Secondary RSE curriculum”, 2016 (p.7).

“Learning to Love: An Introduction to Catholic Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) for Catholic Educators” (2017), Department of Catholic Education and Formation and Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales; https://www.catholiceducation.org.uk/images/ Learning2love.pdf.pdf Catholic Education Service, “Made in God’s Image: Challenging homophobic and biphobic bullying in Catholic schools”, 2018 edn; http://catholiceducation.org.uk/ images/CES-Project_Homophobic-Bullying-Booklet_ JUN18_PROOF-9.pdf. For comment see, for instance, Deacon Nick Donnelly, “UK bishops’ group pushing radical LGBT propaganda in Catholic schools”, LifeSiteNews, 18 May 2017; https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/ uk-bishops-group-pushes-radical-lgbt-materials-in-catholic-schools. Also, Bishop Egan of Portsmouth has commented on the ‘ideological colonisation’ at work in our schools, including the influence of Stonewall and LGBT Youth on the CES’s “Made in God’s Image” document.

Deacon Nick Donnelly, “Interview: UK bishop questions LGBT involvement in Catholic schools’ sex-ed program”, LifesiteNews, 22 May 2017; https://www.lifesitenews. com/news/interview-english-bishop-questions-lgbt-involvement-in-catholic-schools-sex CES, “Made in God’s Image” (2018),section 2, (p.5).

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (signed by Cardinal Ratzinger), “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of the Homosexual Persons”, 1 October 1986; http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_ cfaith_doc_19861001_homosexual-persons_en.html As pointed out, for instance, in three 2017 blog posts by the “Counter Cultural Father”: https://ccfather.blogspot. com/search?q=Made+in+God%27s+Image; See also Bishop Egan’s comments in an interview in LifesiteNews, 22 May 2017; https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/interview-english-bishop-questions-lgbt-involvement-in-catholic-schools-sex Welsh government, “Kirsty Williams announces focus on healthy relationships in major reforms to ‘Relationships and Sexuality’ education”, Press release, 22 May 2018; https://gov.wales/newsroom/educationandskills/2018/ kirsty-williams-announces-focus-on-healthy-relationships-in-major-reforms-to-relationships-and-sexuality-education/?lang=en Scottish government, “LGBTI education: Scotland will lead the way in inclusive education”, Press release 8 Nov 2018; https://www.gov.scot/news/lgbti-education/

CAL X M A R IA E

B

BASILICA DI S. PIETRO, VATICANO (C.1753). GIUSEPPE VASI. LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART.

Act of consecration by an enclosed nun The following reflections by an enclosed nun were composed on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, February 2018. At her request they have been edited by her spiritual father, to whom they were entrusted.

This nun is convinced that the whole Catholic Church is confronted by a very serious doctrinal crisis, precipitated by the teaching and actions of Pope Francis. One immediate result of this crisis is a felt disunity within Catholic communities. Some people of good will instinctively take sides for the person of the holy Father, as successor of St Peter and guarantor of the Church’s Unity. Others stand for the received truths of the Catholic Faith, which they perceive this Pope to be undermining, or even attacking, in a disastrous way. She wrote:

“On the feast of the Presentation of the Lord – the World Day of Consecrated life – I received a strong inspiration, or experienced a strong desire, to offer up my life for the Church amid this crisis. I have had this desire already for some years. But now I felt an urge to do this in a concrete fashion, and in union with other nuns, monks, priests and consecrated persons in the Church who feel as I do. I feel an urge to return to the very foundations of our monastic/ religious vocation. I want to live it to the full; to be faithful to our Holy Rule and Constitutions, and to my Holy Vows; to do penance; to be very faithful in observance; to live in continual prayer and love; to keep holy silence as our Rule requires, etc. This is our duty anyway, but also it is something we can do together in order to help in this situation which is so very serious. I know that, by ourselves, we cannot do anything. But we can and must, through the holiness of our lives, implore the Lord and Our Lady to intervene.”

There follows a prayer of sacrificial offering which she desires to see spread among other religious persons who share the same concerns, resulting in a crusade of prayer in convents and monasteries throughout the whole Church. For this initiative she has the blessing and permission of her religious superior, and also of her spiritual father.

SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

15

Act of consecration for religious:

A version which can be used by lay people:

Holy Mary, Mother of the Church: I feel an urgent necessity to give myself to You for the sake of the Church. In this hour when the very foundations of our Holy Catholic Faith are questioned, even at the highest levels of the hierarchy, I want to live and die for the Church’s unity, and in support of those few faithful shepherds who defend our Faith.

Holy Mary, Mother of the Church: I feel an urgent necessity to give myself to You for the sake of the Church. In this hour when the very foundations of our Holy Catholic Faith are questioned, even at the highest levels of the hierarchy, I want to live and die for the Church’s unity, and in support of those few faithful shepherds who defend our Faith.

I am already consecrated to You, and I have already given You everything. Still, if this accords with Your plan, I want, in union with other consecrated men and women in the Church, to give you my religious life, the observance of my Holy Vows, Rule and Constitutions, my praise, my sacrifices, my penances, my sufferings and joys, my whole monastic observance, for the restoration of the Church. I wish to do this, inspired by the example, in particular, of St Francis of Assisi and St Teresa of Avila.

I consecrate myself totally to You, and I give You everything.

And if this accords with Your plan, I also want, in union with other men and women in the Church, to give you my life for the restoration of the Church. Let everything in my life – my prayer and my praise, my penances, my sacrifices, my sufferings, my joys and my work – bear fruit for the Church in this difficult time. I wish to make this offering inspired by the example, in particular, of St Francis of Assisi and St Teresa of Avila.

If You want, You may use me for this purpose. For my part, I promise to live my religious life faithfully, and to give You as much love and sacrifice as I can. I know that to be faithful in little things is very important, and therefore I promise You to do little everyday things with as much love as I can.

If You want, You may use me for this purpose. For my part, I promise to live my Catholic Christian life faithfully, and to give You as much love and sacrifice as I can. I know that to be faithful in little things is very important, and therefore I promise You to do little everyday things with as much love as I can.

I promise You to keep always before me the first precept of my Holy Rule: to live in continual prayer, in union with Jesus Christ, through You, with You, in You and for You, Holy Virgin Mary.

I consecrate to You, Holy Mother of God, my Community, and I ask You to unite us in this same desire and fervor.

Spare us in this difficult time and protect us in Your Immaculate Heart. Send us vocations who share in this zeal and love for the Church.

I know that this is nothing and that I can do nothing of myself – if I am not united with Jesus. But in union with Him everything is possible. I therefore ask You to unite me so closely with Your Divine Son that it is no longer I who live but He Who lives in me. Only in that way can this offering bear fruit in new life for the Church.

Holy and Immaculate Virgin, defend the Church and Her Faith. Uphold and strengthen those few good Shepherds who now fight and suffer for the Truth. Receive my offering as a gift, and give me the grace to be faithful in my holy vocation. Dissipate the darkness that has penetrated the Church, and send your Angels to help us in this battle.

Amen.

I promise You to strive to live in continual prayer, in union with Jesus Christ, through You, with You, in You and for You, Holy Virgin Mary.

I consecrate to You, Holy Mother of God, my family and all those whom I love, and I ask You to unite us in this same desire and fervor. Spare us in this difficult time and protect us in Your Immaculate Heart. Send people in my way who share this fervor for the Church and let us together be at Your service and help and support one another. Form an innumerable crowd who want to fight under the banner of Your Immaculate Heart.

I know that this is nothing and that I can do nothing of myself if I am not united with Jesus. But in union with Him everything is possible. I therefore ask You to unite me so closely with Your Divine Son that it is no longer I who live but He Who lives in me. Only in that way can this offering bear fruit in new life for the Church.

Holy and Immaculate Virgin, defend the Church and Her Faith. Uphold and strengthen those few good Shepherds who now fight and suffer for the Truth. Receive my offering as a gift, and give me the grace to be faithful in my holy vocation. Dissipate the darkness that has penetrated the Church, and send your Angels to help us in this battle.

Amen.

THE INTERCESSION OF CHRIST AND THE VIRGIN (C.1400). ATTRIBUTED TO LORENZO MONACO. METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK.

FOCUS Parents as primary educators of their children

T

he Church has consistently taught that parents are the first and foremost educators of their children. They have the inviolable and inalienable right and duty, given by God, to educate their children in such a way as to best ensure their healthy physical, psychological, intellectual and spiritual development. How have the theologians and Church fathers of different periods expressed this truth? Here is a selection of their teachings: “For a child is by nature part of its father: thus, at first, it is not distinct from its parents as to its body, so long as it is enfolded within its mother’s womb; and later on after birth, and before it has the use of its free-will, it is enfolded in the care of its parents, which is like a spiritual womb…

Hence it would be contrary to natural justice, if a child, before coming to the use of reason, were to be taken away from its parents’ custody, or anything done to it against its parents’ wish.”

– St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica (II-II Q.10 Art 12.) “…inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature… The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error…”

– Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, 15 May 1891

18

“Parents… have a primary right to the education of the children God has given them in the spirit of their Faith, and according to its prescriptions. Laws and measures which in school questions fail to respect this freedom of the parents go against natural law and are immoral.”

– Pius XI, Mit brennender sorge, 14 March 1937 “Since parents have given children their life, they are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognised as the primary and principal educators. This role in education is so important that only with difficulty can it be supplied where it is lacking…”

– Second Vatican Council, Gravissum educationis, 28 October 1965 “The right and duty of parents to give education is essential, since it is connected with the transmission of human life; it is original and primary with regard to the educational role of others, on account of the uniqueness of the loving relationship between parents and children; and it is irreplaceable CAL X M A R IA E

Hum anae Vitae in retr ospect

and inalienable, and therefore incapable of being entirely delegated to others or usurped by others…”

– John Paul II, Familiaris consortio, 22 November 1981 “The Pontifical Council for the Family … urges parents to have confidence in their rights and duties regarding the education of their children, so as to go forward with wisdom and knowledge, knowing that they are sustained by God’s gift.”

– Pontifical Council for the Family, The truth and meaning of human sexuality, 8 December 1995 We must consider it a tragedy that members of the Church hierarchy today, in many cases, appear to have neglected the zealous public defence of the virtue and innocence of our children, and on many occasions, even support the very structures of sin that were so seriously warned against by popes before this century. It suffices to consider the section in Amoris laetitia entitled “The need for sex education”, which has no reference to parents, to recognise the startling break with the Church’s perennial teaching on this most delicate matter.

When the concept of “sex education” – for married couples – first surfaced in the 1920s, Pope Pius XI offered wise guidance on this question in Casti connubii (1930): “[W]holesome instruction and religious training in regard to Christian marriage will be quite different from that exaggerated physiological education by means of which, in these times of ours, some reformers of married life make pretense of helping those joined in wedlock, laying much stress on these physiological matters, in which is learned rather the art of sinning in a subtle way than the virtue of living chastely.”

In his great encyclical on Christian education Divini illius magistri (1929) the same Pope Pius XI spoke much more explicitly and strikingly as if addressing directly the dangers and errors we are faced with today with regard to sex education in schools: “Another very grave danger is that naturalism which nowadays invades the field of education in that most delicate matter of purity of morals. Far too common is the error of those who with dangerous assurance and under an ugly term propagate a so-called sex-education, falsely imagining they can forearm youths against the dangers of sensuality by means purely natural, such as a foolhardy initiation and precautionary instruction for all indiscriminately, even in public; and, worse still, by exposing them at an early age to the occasions, in order to accustom them, so it is argued, and as it were to harden them against such dangers.

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“Such persons grievously err in refusing to recognise the inborn weakness of human nature, and the law of which the Apostle speaks, fighting against the law of the mind; and also in ignoring the experience of facts, from which it is clear that, particularly in young people, evil practices are the effect not so much of ignorance of intellect as of weakness of a will exposed to dangerous occasions, and unsupported by the means of grace.

“In this extremely delicate matter, if, all things considered, some private instruction is found necessary and opportune, from those who hold from God the commission to teach and who have the grace of state, every precaution must be taken.

Such precautions are well known in traditional Christian education, and are adequately described by Antoniano when he says: ‘Such is our misery and inclination to sin, that often in the very things considered to be remedies against sin, we find occasions for and inducements to sin itself. Hence it is of the highest importance that a good father, while discussing with his son a matter so delicate, should be well on his guard and not descend to details, nor refer to the various ways in which this infernal hydra destroys with its poison so large a portion of the world; otherwise it may happen that instead of extinguishing this fire, he unwittingly stirs or kindles it in the simple and tender heart of the child. Speaking generally, during the period of childhood it suffices to employ those remedies which produce the double effect of opening the door to the virtue of purity and closing the door upon vice.’”

Many of the defenders of sex education today would want as to believe that things have changed, that the complexities of modern life set out new demands for parents and educators to meet in the best interest of children. To these voices Dr Peter Kwasniewski, a parent and educator of young people, beautifully responded in his recent column on LifeSiteNews: “Human nature does not change; the demands of virtue do not change; the harm of premature and improper exposure to sexual topics, outside of the confines of the family, remains the same; the permanent damage sins of impurity cause in souls, in friendships, in families, in society as a whole, remains ever the same. Nothing of substance has changed between 1929 [the year Divini illius magistri was published] and 2019. All that has changed is that our world has become ferociously promiscuous, mired in morose delectation, addicted to carnal pleasure, steeped in iniquities that weaken the will and blind the reason. All of these effects were known to the Desert Fathers of ancient Christianity, who predicted all the consequences of self-indulgence. Far from needing to be up-to-date, we would be far wiser to look back and recover their wisdom.”

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A history of revolutions and their consequences for the family

BY PROF. ROBE RTO D E M AT T EI

This talk was originally delivered on 18 May 2017 at the Rome Life Forum on the theme “The family under attack: protecting parents as primary educators”, organised by Voice of the Family.

W

e appreciate good things when we lose them. If we do not wish to lose them, then we must appreciate them for their worth.

The family is a good thing which we are losing. This is the obvious reality from which we must start. The family in Europe and in the West is undergoing a profound crisis. Relativist sociologists do not want to speak of a crisis, because this word contains, according to them, a moral judgement on the phenomenon being analysed.

They speak, rather, of a transformation of family patterns or of an evolution of familial forms. But these words, too, contain a moral judgement. According to the relativist perspective,

cosmology, which pretends to be scientific, without being so. Evolutionism is a false philosophy which stands on a false science, and at the same time, is a pseudo-science based on an erroneous philosophical choice. Because of this, a speech on the family, like every speech, must begin with the definition of terms and concepts of which we wish to speak.

The family is a true juridical and moral society, founded on matrimony and intended for the transmission of life and the raising of children. The procreation of children is the primary end to which marriage is ordered by nature, from its very origin. The origin of the family and of matrimony is in human nature. The child is not born because of his own choice, and he is not autonomous. The law of birth and the raising of the child is dependence. Dependence, is the law of humanity reunited in society.

The family is a society whose primary end is to transmit life and to raise children. Because it is the source of life and of new human relationships, it constitutes the fundamental and irreplaceable cell of society.

all that takes place in history and in society is good. The absolute good is represented by change, evil by stability and permanence in being. Relativist morals are founded on an evolutionary 20

Everything depends on something, nothing is determined by itself. The principle of causality governs the universe. This rule belongs to the first and indemonstrable principles which Aris-

PROF. ROBERTO DE MATTEI

totle already learned from reality.1 This principle presupposes the first philosophical primacy of being, to which modern culture opposes the primacy of becoming, which is the negation of any immutable and permanent reality.

THE FAMILY IN HISTORY

The family is a society whose primary end is to transmit life and to raise children. Because it is the source of life and of new human relationships, it constitutes the fundamental and irreplaceable cell of society. All the classical philosophers and political thinkers have affirmed it, and history has confirmed it. Well before Christianity, in ancient Rome, the familia was the cell of the civitas, and matrimony assured social stability, constituting, according to the precise definition of Cicero, the seminarium rei publicae2 the seedbed of society which is born and expands from the family.

Christianity elevated matrimony to a sacrament, and when the Roman Empire fell, crushed by the barbarians, the only entity which survived CAL X M A R IA E

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Hatred for the family characterises all the heretical sects which have developed throughout history, and constitutes a supporting element, although not always an explicit one, of that Revolution which for over five centuries has assaulted the Church and Christian Civilisation.

and constituted the basis of the society which was born, was the family.

The birth of the European nations, from the beginning of the year 1000 coincided with the development of the institution of the family. The same etymology of the word “nation”(from the Latin natus) moreover, does not refer to a “choice” but to birth, and indicates a set of men who have a common origin and a blood-tie. The territory in which various authorities were exercised in medieval society – referring to the head of the family, of the feudal baron or of the king – was uniformly called in documents, the patria, the dominion of the father.3 Such a conception of the family, which survived until the French Revolution and beyond, is founded on the idea that man is born within a given historical condition, which has insurmountable limits, beginning with death; that an objective and unchangeable nature exists; that this nature has its origin in God, Creator of the order of the universe. The Catholic Church, in her teaching, has always confirmed this conception of man and of society.4 Many documents of the Church in the last two centuries reiterate this teaching, but the most ample and articulate of these are the encyclicals Arcanum (Leo XIII) of 10 February 1880,5 and Casti connubii (Pius XI) of 31 December 1930.6 This teaching would be reconfirmed in many documents of SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

Pius XII and in the apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio of John Paul II on 22 November 1981.7 THE ATTACK ON THE FAMILY

The most violent attack that the family has ever undergone in the West was with the Cultural Revolution of 1968: a revolution against the family conducted in the name of sexual liberation. But hatred for the family characterises all the heretical sects which have developed throughout history, and constitutes a supporting element, although not always an explicit one, of that Revolution which for over five centuries has assaulted the Church and Christian Civilisation.8 The act of procreation is the object of anti-Christian hate, because this affirms that man has an end which surpasses him. The negation of procreation turns Christian morals upside down and affirms a Gnostic metaphysical principle: sex as an ultimate end of man, closed up in its own immanence.

In Medieval times, one of the most noted sects was that of the Brethren of the Free Spirit. The adherents were convinced of having reached such an absolute perfection as to be incapable of sin: “In fact, one can be so united to God so as to not sin no matter what one does.”9 The focal centre of the ideology of the Free Spirit was not God, but divinised man, who is freed from the sentiment of personal sin and stands at the centre of creation.

In the 15th century, the haborites, a pre-Lutheran sect, preached, like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the return to an Adamic state, which expressed itself in nudity and sexual promiscuity. Basing itself on the affirmation of Christ regarding prostitutes and publicans (Mt. 21:31) they declared that the chaste were unworthy of entering the Messianic Kingdom. Nudism assumed a worth of “liberation” from all the brakes of law and of morality: the same worth that “free love” possesses in our day. The “spiritual” person frees himself from every moral limitation: his will identifies himself with that of God and sin loses for him every meaning.

LUTHERAN ANTINOMIANISM

But the process of the dissolution of the family had its first decisive moment in the Protestant Revolution. In Wittenberg, the city in which on 31 October 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous theses to the Cathedral door, the religious Revolution exploded in all of its virulence. While Luther was “protected” by the Elector Friedrich the Wise in the Wartburg Castle, his followers put his ideas into practice, to the extreme. Among these were the priest Andreas Bodenstein (Karlstadt, ca1480-1541) who on Christmas Day in 1521 celebrated in lay clothes the first “Evangelical Mass” of the Reform, omitting the elevation of the host and every reference to the sacrifice,10 and Johannes Schneider (1494-1566), also known as “Agricola”, who proclaimed the abolition of the ancient Mosaic law. Martin Luther fought Agricola and coined the term “Antinomian” to describe his negation of the nomos, the moral law. Agricola, however, was a disciple of his, who brought to fulfilment the Lutheran principle of sola fide. Luther had said, 21

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in fact, that man radically corrupted by sin, is incapable of observing the law, and can be saved only by faith, without good works. The sentence pecca fortiter, crede forties11 sums up Luther’s moral theology. That which counts is not sin, which is inevitable, but confidence in the mercy of God, which the believer must have before, during and after the sin. For the Antinomians, as for the Gnostics of the first centuries, the “spiritual” man is incapable of sin.

MARTIN LUTHER’S 95 THESES (1872) FERDINAND PAUWELS. EISENACH, WARTBURG

God acts in him, and every action, good or bad, becomes a divine action.

One can say that Agricola was a marginal figure in the Protestant Revolution, but one cannot say this of Anabaptism, which is one of the most famous expressions of the so-called “left wing” of the Protestant Reform. The Anabaptists did not limit themselves to expressing Antinomian ideas, they practiced them in the years 1534-35 in Münster,12 the “New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse”, where the Dutch tailor Jan Bockelson, better known as John of Leiden (1509-1536) came to power, and the upholsterer Bernhard Knipperdolling (ca 1500-1536) was made burgomaster.

Münster became a sort of “sacred city” for the “sons of Jacob” who had to help God to establish His Kingdom punishing the “sons of Esau”. In an atmosphere of terror, the private pos22

session of money was abolished, and measures were adopted, aimed at instituting the collective possession of goods and obligatory polygamy. To symbolise the rupture with the past, all the books of the city, with the exception of the Bible, were brought to the Cathedral square and burned in a bonfire. Orgies and the worst sexual license were presented as a “baptism of fire” which had to substitute that of water. John of Leiden became king of the “holy City” while Knipperdolling, armed with a heavy sword administered “justice” by decapitating recalcitrants.

The Anabaptist community was repressed with the iron and fire of united Catholics and Lutherans, but the utopia did not disappear. “Moderated” Protestantism rejects the violent and extremist methods of the Münster Anabaptists as a heresy. However, what is refuted is not the doctrinal substance, but the tragic failure of the experience. Münster remains a betrayed dream for many Protestants, analogous to the city of Paris for the socialists in the 19th century.

Shortly after 1540 in Emden, a centre of eastern Friesland, there began another Anabaptist sect, that of the “Familists” founded by Hendrik Niclaes (1502 – ca 1580).13 He gathered around himself a clandestinely organised community, under the name of Familia caritatis (Family of Love, Huis der Liefde) in which an ecumenical pantheism was professed and the sharing of goods and free love were practiced. Niclaes based this on the principle of mystical union with God meant for the absolute identification of the creature with the Creator and by this metaphysical principle, deduced that sin could not exist in the hearts of the regenerated. He held himself to be the third and last great prophet, after

Moses and Jesus. His mission consisted in revealing the fullness of love, the work of the spirit.

In England, the same world vision was expressed in the pantheistic and libertine sects, which in the 17th century represented the extreme Puritanical left, known as the “Ranters”.14 Against the “Ranters”, libertines and “blasphemers”, the English Parliament promulgated the famous Blasphemy Act on 9 August 1650, by which all those who held that acts of “homicide, adultery, incest and sodomy” were not sinful but sanctioned by God Himself, would incur the wrath of the law.15 Sexual promiscuity, nudism, and free love became a fundamental ritual in these sects. Thanks to interior illumination, they said, man becomes “deified” and recovers his Adamic integrity, i.e. the state of innocence enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the fall.

In this sense, sexual promiscuity and the sharing of women is a fundamental point of Anabaptist doctrine, as theologian François Vernet observed.16 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Pan-sexualist utopia also accompanied the revolutionary process in 1789 when it passed from the religious level to the political one. The fateful date of the French Revolution was 14 July 1789, the day on which the Bastille fell – a fortress which the revolutionaries believed was overflowing with political prisoners, holding instead only seven common criminals, among whom was the Marquis Alphonse-François de Sade (1740-1814).

The name of the Marquis de Sade, author of pornographic novels, is tied to sexual perversion. In reality he was a “philosopher” who, after having been freed, actively participated in the Revolution. On 1 July 1790 he became an “active citizen” of the Jacobin section CAL X M A R IA E

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of Place Vendôme which went down in history as the “square of the beatings”. On 3 September 1792 while the famous “September massacres” began, he was named secretary and a year later, president of the section.

PORTRAIT OF MARQUIS DE SADE (1760) CHARLES AMÉDÉE PHILIPPE VAN LOO

Citizen Sade composed numerous political writings during the Revolution, of which the most famous is called “Yet another effort, Frenchmen, if you would become Republicans” (Français, encore un effort si vous voulez etre républicains).17 In this text, he invited the French people to put into practice all the principles of 1789 and extirpate the roots of Christianity: “O you who have the scythe in hand, deal the last blow to the tree of superstition;”18 “Europe expects you to be delivered at once from the sceptre and the thurible.”19 The ideology is that of 1789.

Once freedom of conscience and of the press is admitted, it was necessary to give to all the freedom to act (of expression). If everything can be said, everything can be allowed.

De Sade listed as revolutionary achievements the following: blasphemy, theft, homicide and every type of sexual perversion, incest, rape, sodomy: “Never was lust considered as criminal in any of the wise nations of the earth… All philosophers know very well that its being declared a crime was because of Christian imSPR I NG 2 0 1 9

postors.”20 He imagines building places in all the towns, where “all sexes, all ages, all creatures will be offered to the whims of the libertines who will come to enjoy themselves, and the most complete submission will be the rule of those present, the slightest refusal will be punished immediately by the one who has experienced it [the refusal].”21 One can freely vent impulses and desires, including mating with animals, since there is no qualitative difference between men and animals: both are born, procreate, and deteriorate. For Sade, life is nothing else but matter in movement. Death is no more than a “transmutation” at the foundation of which is “the perpetual movement that is the true essence of matter.”

De Sade does not merely propose pleasure as the individual’s ultimate goal, but goes far beyond this. He wants to convince us that vice is a virtue, that horror is beautiful, and that torment is pleasure. In this sense, his vision of the world is satanic. The devil at first seems an angel of light to be worshipped, but will achieve his final triumph when he is worshipped in all his horror, making us believe that the sufferings in hell are the peak of pleasure. This is the philosophy underlying The 120 days of Sodom, where men and women, old people and small children, mothers and their children, and fathers and their children decide to practice incest, rape, coprophagia, necrophilia, and all kinds of aberration.

Every sexual difference is obliterated. The supreme goal is to abolish all differences and inequalities in order to bring society to primordial chaos.

Noirceu, a character of (De Sade’s book) Juliette says: “I want to marry twice in the same day. At 10 in the morning, dressed as a woman, I want to marry a man; at 12, dressed as a

man, I want to marry a homosexual dressed as a woman.”23 All “gender theory” is already contained in these words.

De Sade spent the last years of his life in an insane asylum. His lucid folly made him a prophet of the Revolution. Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn defines him as “the patron saint of all leftist movements.”24 The last two centuries have seen his plans realised, to a great extent. That which still hasn’t come to pass is, perhaps, part of our future.

We owe him for not having left us in the dark about any of the goals of the Revolution.25 While with De Sade revolutionary pan-sexualism was theorised, the French Revolution started, with the introduction of divorce in 1791, a process of radical reform of the institution of the family, which Napoleonic law would extend to the whole continent.26 The utopic socialism of De Sade and Charles Fourier (1772-1837), who in his book Phalanstère argued for the uninhibited freedom of the passions to reach the highest point of social evolution, was then surpassed by the so-called “Scientific Socialism” of Karl Marx (1818-1863) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).

FRIEDRICH ENGELS

The American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), starting from the existing family relationships 23

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among the Iroquois of North America, produced a fantastic history of the family, tracing its origins to a primitive throng, in which sexual relations were totally promiscuous and not subject to

KARL MARX

any rules. Marx and Engels enthusiastically subscribed to this materialistic idea, which confirmed Darwinian theories. Engels’ booklet The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) is an attack on the fundamental institutions of society, to bring about the utopian “classless society” which is the totally egalitarian society: without the family, without private property without the State, without God. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

The Russian Revolution brought the French Revolution to completion. In the sealed carriage that in April 1917 brought back to Petrograd the “professional revolutionaries”, with Lenin, Zinoviev and Radek, also travelled Inessa Armand (1874-1920), member of the Executive Committee of the Bolshevik party, foundress of the “Zhenotdel”, the “female department” of the party; a woman who had the absolute confidence of Lenin, her lover. She died of cholera in 1920 and had the honour of being buried in the “Red Cemetery” under the walls of the Kremlin with the principal protagonists of the Revolution. Her name is less-noted 24

than Aleksandra Kollontai’s (18721952), but her influence on Lenin was perhaps greater.27 Inessa Armand and Aleksandra Kollontai publicly advocated for free love and fought for the introduction of divorce and abortion in Russia. They were convinced that sexual liberation was a necessary premise for the bringing about of a socialist society. On 17 December 1917, a few weeks after the Bolsheviks rose to power, divorce was introduced and, in 1920, abortion was legalised in Soviet Russia for the first time in the world; prostitution and homosexuality were de-criminalised in 1922.28 Trotsky wrote in 1923 “The first destructive period is still far from being over in the life of the family. The disintegration process is still in full swing.”29 Kollontai wrote in 1920 in the second edition of the magazine Komunistka: “In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades. This is what relationships between men and women will be like in the communist society. These new relationships will ensure for humanity all the joys of a love unknown in the commercial [capitalist] society, of a love that is free and based on the

ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI

true social equality of the partners…

The red flag of the social revolution

VLADIMIR LENIN

which flies above Russia and is now being hoisted aloft in other countries of the world proclaims the approach of the heaven on earth to which humanity has been aspiring for centuries.”30 In Russia and Germany, in the 1920’s and 30’s, the transition from the Political Revolution to the Sexual Revolution was formulated.31 In 1922, a meeting was held at the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow, directed by David Ryazanov (1870-1938), to examine the concept of cultural Revolution, or a total Revolution which would involve man himself, his nature, his customs, his deepest being.

The Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow was connected to analogous institutions born in those same years.

In 1919 Dr Magnus Hirschfeld (18681935) founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) in Berlin with the goal of “normalizing” homosexuality.32 In 1921 Hirschfeld organised the First Congress for Sexual Reform, which led to the formation of the World League for Sexual Reform, a league for coordinating knowledge about the enhancement of sexual activity. Grigory Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute for Sexual Hygiene, led the Soviet delegation to the World League for Sexual Freedom’s first conference.

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In 1923 Felix Weil (1898-1975) financed the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche (First Marxist Work Week), in the German town of Ilmenau. The success of this event led him to found the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research),33 directed from 1930-1958 by Max Horkheimer. The Frankfurt Institute, a Marxist-Hegelian Frankfurt school, collaborated with the Moscow Institute for the publication of the works by Marx and Engels.

In 1929 Soviet political leaders invited a student of Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (18971957), for a series of conferences which led to the publication of his paper “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis” in Moscow, which constitutes the founding text of so-called “Marx-Freudism”. In this, as well as in his later works, Reich presented the family as the repressive social institution par excellence and affirmed that the nucleus of happiness is sexuality. For him the abolition of the family and the revolution from sex-negation to sex-affirmation were necessary.34 Reich, who dedicated the second part of The Sexual Revolution to “The Struggle for the New Life in the Soviet Union”, was a great admirer of Vera Schmidt’s nursery school (1889-1937), begun in 1921 in downtown Moscow; where small children were taught about masturbation and early sexual excitement.35 He states: “Her work was entirely in the direction of affirming infant sexuality.”36 Trotsky supported the work of Vera Schmidt and the ideas of Wilhelm Reich. Reich’s sexual revolution was an essential part of Trotsky’s permanent revolution.

Like any Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution also experienced an internal dialectic. The two tendencies were that of Stalin, who, though not giving up on terror, in order to keep power, SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

If one allows for the transgression of morals on one point, everything collapses. If morals collapse, De Sade, Reich and the Antinomians of all the centuries triumph.

was forced to moderate revolutionary radicalism, and the other was of Trotsky who accused Stalin of having betrayed the Revolution.37 Trotsky’s defeat marked the end of the Sexual Revolution in Russia, but the subsequent failure of Stalinism in the 50’s saw the victory of Trotskyism, which affirmed itself in the world with the Revolution of 1968.

WILHELM REICH

Reich’s ideas, disavowed by Stalin, spread in the West and encountered those of the Frankfurt School, the representatives of which were able to occupy key-places in important American universities like Harvard, Berkeley, and San Diego. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), researcher of the Horkheimer Institute in his best-sellers Eros and Civilization (1955) and OneDimensional Man (1964) reduced, as did Reich, human nature to free yielding to sexual impulses. These ideas were the basis of a cultural revolution which did not compromise the previous ones, but led to something worse: the tears

of a generation which lost not only its bodies, but its very souls.

1968 was the most devastating of all the preceding revolutions because it assaulted the family and transformed the everyday life of Western society.

Today the utopic dimension of 1968 has fallen, and postmodern relativism remains as its heritage, expressed by intellectuals like Michel Foucault (19261984). Foucault theorised the importance of the thought of De Sade in his 1961 work Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Histoire de la folie) and in his 1966 book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les choses). His thought, according to Thibaud Collin, “constitutes the conceptual foundation of the gay lobby”.38 Under the influence of Foucault, the American Judith Butler was one of the first authors to elaborate “gender theory”, which is the last frontier of postmodern ideologies. Evolutionary materialism remains the subjective philosophy, which sees man as changing matter, without a proper nature, able to be moulded at will according to the desires and the will of all. The final horizon is that described by De Sade and Reich.

THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

One force alone could have stopped this process of moral dissolution: the Catholic Church. But between 19621965 the Catholic Church, too, knew

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its own revolution. It was the Second Vatican Council.

On the eve of the Council convened by John XXIII, the best Catholic theologians had compiled an excellent schema on the family, which was approved by the Pope and presented in the conciliar hall.39 This schema confirmed with clarity, the end of matrimony and the duty of the family in the modern world, condemning widespread errors in the field of morals.

But a few weeks after the beginning of the Council, the schemas presented by the preparatory commission were thrown out by the bishops and theologians of Central Europe, the so-called European Alliance (Alliance européenne).40 Everything was redone from the very beginning, and the schema on the family was substituted with a new working document. This text, which became Gaudium et spes was dedicated to the contemporary world, interested in entering into dialogue with it, rather than reaffirming the doctrine of the Church against it. The birth and education of children were placed on a secondary level, following the need for love between the spouses. These needs of impulses and desires, according to some theologians, could not be closed in a juridical cage, but would justify contraception and extra-marital cohabitation. The idea of nature was substituted with that of the person as a transforming reality, in continual change. Cold rigidity began to be contrasted to the warmth and fluidity of life; realising the theory of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): the primacy of praxis over theory, of life over truth, of experience over doctrine, as many are affirming in the theological field.

We did not arrive at Pope Francis’ exhortation Amoris laetitia (2016) overnight. Fifty years were necessary, but the roots are there, in the Second 26

Vatican Council. And the Council did not do anything except search for a compromise between the doctrine of the Church and the anti-Christian theories of the modern Cultural Revolution. Today, that which is at stake is not only the institution of the family, but the existence of an absolute and immutable moral law. Four cardinals have recognised this, and have asked Pope Francis to confirm with clarity the absolutely universal and binding character of the natural and Divine Laws. If one allows for the transgression of morals on one point, everything collapses. If morals collapse, De Sade, Reich and the Antinomians of all the centuries triumph.

MEDITATE ON THE DIVINE MODEL OF THE FAMILY

In the last fifty years, the crisis of the family has assumed frightening dimensions. This crisis is founded on the idea that only through the sexualisation of society, the revolutionary process can find its fulfilment. That which renders the situation graver, is that the attacks on the family are not only external, but come from within the Church. The remedy is indicated by Pius XI in Casti connubii: meditate on the Divine idea of the family and marriage, and live in conformity to this model.

Meditating on the Divine model of the family means contemplating the truths which regulate the universe: overturning the thesis according to which praxis generates the theory; re-establishing the primacy of doctrine, that is the Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomistic primacy of contemplation over action; living in conformity with this truth. Against the new-Antinomians, spread throughout the Catholic Church, we must remember that the Magisterium of the Church either accepts the whole of Tradition,

theological and moral, or it accepts none of it.

Tradition includes Sacred Scripture correctly interpreted – Sacred Scripture and Tradition constitute the two fonts of the one Revelation of Christ of which not even one iota can be changed (Mt. 5:18); because all created things change, but God is always the same. His words do not pass away, His law does not change.

This law is carved in our hearts and we must ask God that our words will always be an echo, faint but faithful, of His own words.

Above all it is necessary that we be convinced that Tradition is a vital principle while the revolutionary process is oriented, and cannot but be oriented, towards self-destruction.

The denial of procreation leads to biological extinction; the denying of the raising of children, of education – which is the handing on of traditional values – leads to death. Today, Europe is dying not only because it is killing its own children through abortion and contraception, but because it is unable to transmit – to hand on – to those who are born, the values which daily disappear.

In his book Dialectics of Nature (1883) Engels proclaimed this principle: “all that comes into being deserves to perish”.41 Death, not life, is for him the secret of the universe. The death of humanity constitutes, according to Igor Shafarevich, the heart and the goal of socialism.42 De Sade expressed the same thought, celebrating homicide and suicide. The sexualisation of society is the death of society.

The family on the contrary, in itself, contains life. Physical life contained in the cribs which multiply; spiritual life, expressed by parents and children united in prayer to God Who can do everything.

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

THE HOLY FAMILY WITH A LAMB (1507). RAFFAELLO SANZIO. MUSEO DEL PRADO, MADRID.

28.

29.

At Fatima, Our Lady announced that Russia would spread its errors in the world. The anarchic-libertarian post-Trotskyism that dominates today in the West and the nationalist post-Stalinism that has affirmed itself in Russia have the same ideological matrix. Fatima’s message is a message against any form of gnostic and egalitarian ideology, as was socialism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The last apparition of Fatima on 13 October 1917, that of the Holy Family, constitutes in this sense a manifesto which sums up all our principles and which opposes all the errors of our time.

Roberto de Mattei is a former professor of Modern History and History of Christianity in the European University of Rome. He founded, and oversees, the Lepanto Foundation that operates in Washington and in Rome.

He directs the magazine Radici Cristiane SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

and the Corrispondenza Romana News Agency.

30.

31.

ENDNOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I. Cicero, De Officiis, I, 54.

Franz Funck-Brentano, The Old Regime in France, Fayard, Paris 1926, pp. 12-14.

Monks of Solesmes (under the direction of), Marriage, Texts of the Roman Magisterium, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1956.

Leo XIII, Arcanum divinae sapientiae, 10 February 1880 in A.S.S. 12 (1879-1880), pp. 385-402.

Pius XI, Casti connubii, 31 December 1930 in A.A.S. (1930), pp 539-590.

John Paul II, Familiaris consortio 22 November 1981 in A.A.S. (1981), pp. 81-191.

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, (Italian translation) Sugarco, Milano 2009.

Ilarino da Milano, Medieval Heresies, Maggioli, Rimini 1983, p. 26-27.

George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, Westminster Press, Philadelphia 1962, p. 40.

“Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” (Letter to Melanchthon of 1 August 1521 in Luther’s Works, vol. 48, Letters, Fortress Press, Philadelphia 1975, p. 282.)

Cf. Ernest Belfort Bax, Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, Sonneschein, London 1903; C. G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, cit., pp. 362-388.

Regarding Niclaes and the “Family of Love” see: Serge Hutin, The English Disciples of Boehme, Denoel, Paris 1960, pp. 58-61; G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, pp.

477-482; J. Dietz Moss, Godded with God, Hendrick Niclaes and His Family of Love, The American Philosophical Society,

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

Philadelphia 1981; Alistair Hamilton, The Family of Love, The Attic Press, Greenwood (S. C.) 1981.

Cf. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, Penguin, London 1991; A. L. Morton, The World of the Ranters.

Religious radicalism in the English Revolution, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1979 (1970); J. Friedmann, Blasphemy, Immorality and Anarchy. The ranters and the English Revolution, Ohio University Press, London 1987.

An Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to human Society, in Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed. by C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Stationery Office, London 1911, pp. 409-412.

François Vernet, Condorments, DTC, vol. III, 1 (1938), pp. 815-816.

A. F. de Sade, Yet another effort, Frenchmen, if you would become Republicans in Philosophy in the Bedroom, Gallimard, Paris 1976, pp. 187-267.

Sade, op. cit., p. 188.

Sade, op. cit., p. 190.

Sade, op. cit., p. 229.

Sade, op. cit., p. 221 Sade, op. cit., p. 239.

Sade, Juliette, in Complete Works (1797), Cercle du Livre Precieux, Paris 1967, vol. 9, p. 569.

Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited. From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot, Regnery, Washington 1991, p. 67.

See François Ost, Sade before the law, Odile Jacob, Paris 2005.

Xavier Martin, Human Nature and the French Revolution, from the Age of Enlightenment to Napoleonic Code, Dominique Martin Morin, Poitiers 2002.

See Letters to Lenin by Inessa Armand and Aleksandra Kollontai of March 1917 in V. I. Lenin, Opere complete, tr. It., vol. 35, Editori Runiti, Roma 1952, pp. 210-212.

Cf. Giovanni Codevilla, From the Bolshevik Revolution to the Russian Federation, Franco Angeli, Roma 1996.

Leon Trotsky, Problems of everyday life, Monad Press, New York 1986, p. 37. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm Gregory Carleton, Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

See Rodolfo de Mattei, From Sodomy to Homosexuality.

History of a Normalization, Solfanelli, Chieti 2016.

Cf. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theory and Political Significance, Carl Hanser Verlag, München-Wien 1986; Martin Jay The dialectical imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950, Little, Brown and Co. Boston 1973.

Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution, Peter Nevill-Vision Press, London 1951, p. 163.

Vera Schmidt, Report on the Experimental Nursery School of Moscow, Andromeda 2016. For psychoanalysis in the Soviet-Union, see Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998, and Alexander Etkind, Eros of the impossible: the history of psychoanalysis in Russia, Westview Press, Oxford, 1997.

Reich, The Sexual Revolution, p. 241.

Leon Trotsky, The Revolution betrayed (1936), Dover Publications, New York 2004.

Thibaud Collin, Gay Marriage. The Challenges of a Claim, Eyrolles, Paris 2005, p. 97.

See The First Schema on the Family and on Matrimony of the Second Vatican Council, ed. by R. de Mattei, Edizioni Fiducia, Roma 2015.

See R. de Mattei, The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story, Lindau, Torino 2011, pp. 203-210.

Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, pp. 37-38.

Igor Chafarévitch, The Socialist Phenomenon, Editions du Seuil, Paris 1977, p. 323.

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THE GIFT OF MARRIAGE and the proper role of parents in the education and formation of their children

BY DU K E PAU L VO N O L D EN B URG

The following article is based on the address given by His Highness Duke Paul von Oldenburg, on 18 May 2017 at the Rome Life Forum on the theme “The family under attack: protecting parents as primary educators”, organised by Voice of the Family.

W

hen, in July 1960, Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira founded the Society for the Defence of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), he well knew that the defence of innocent human life and the preservation of the sacred institution of the family would be crucial issues that conservatives in general, and Catholics in particular, would have to face in the decades to come. Since then, the associations inspired by him, now present in 30 countries throughout the world, have ceaselessly fought for life and the family,1 often in coalition with other pro-life and pro-family movements.

From the campaigns against divorce, abortion and birth control in the 1960s to his last book Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites,2 in which he analyses at length the role of the family in an organic society, Prof. de Oliveira always considered the protection of innocent human life and the preservation of the traditional family a mainstay of his struggle for Christian Civilisation.3 At Fatima in 1917, speaking to the three little shepherds and, through them, to the whole world, the Mother of God denounced the “errors of Russia” as the most dynamic feature of the 28

revolutionary process that is destroying Christian Civilisation. She specifically pointed to the assault against the family as the cutting edge of these “errors”.

The destruction of the family is a key goal of the Communist movement. The first sexual revolution was launched by Vladimir Lenin, with laws legalising divorce (1918), abortion (1920) and euthanasia (1922). Lenin eradicated the old laws regarding sexual relations, effectively legalising homosexual activity within Russia. He also allowed men who were openly homosexual to serve in government. In doing so, he was simply acting as a coherent communist.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels asserts that in the monogamous family lies the root of all evil, namely, the idea of “mine” (my wife, my husband), which gives rise to the private property of the means of production (capitalism) and, later, to the private property of authority (the State). Engels proposes promiscuous sexual intercourse, and even incest, as a means of breaking the idea of family based on “consanguinity”, turning it instead into a “pairing family”, which would usher mankind into the “next higher plane of society”.4 Later, mixing Marxism and Freudianism, post-Marxist schools presented the destruction of the family as a necessary step in the revolutionary process of “liberation”. In his 1936 book The Sexual Revolution – Sex and the Cultural

DUKE PAUL VON OLDENBURG

War, Wilhelm Reich proposed the abolition of the family through widespread sexual promiscuity, including homosexuality, as a way “towards the socialist restructuring of humans”.

The family is considered the root of all the “alienations” from which man has to “liberate” himself. “The figure of the father,” wrote Herbert Marcuse, “is the archetype of every domination; it opens the chain reaction of slavery, rebellion and forced domination that characterises the history of civilisation.”5 The so-called sexual “liberation”, therefore, is not a result of the sixties, nor of the feminist movement, nor of the pro-choice and LGBT lobbies. It is a revolutionary scheme launched a century ago, that is now reaching a climax.

It is our strict moral duty to defend innocent human life and the sacred institution of the family, both for their intrinsic worth and as a way to preserve what remains of Christian Civilisation.

The defence of the family is all the CAL X M A R IA E

Pa r e n ts a s Hu pr miamnaarey Veidt u ac e aitno r e s to rfo st pheeci t r children

more important, as it is the primary place where the next generations are educated. Change the family and you will change the future.

According to Catholic doctrine, brilliantly expounded by Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical Arcanum divinae sapientiae, the family has as its proper role procreation, and education of the offspring. This latter includes not only intellectual and moral education but also, more importantly, an initiation into Christian life. “The command of Christ,” teaches the Pontiff, “not only looks to the propagation of the human race, but to the bringing forth of children for the Church.”

with today: “It is your task, o Christian mothers, to help your children make the transition from the unconscious purity of infancy to the triumphant purity of adolescence.”

The preservation and the perfecting of this “unconscious purity of infancy”, so that it blossoms into the “triumphant purity of adolescence”, concludes Pius XII, is the essence of the parents’ role as educators, encompassing all other aspects.

Prof. de Oliveira studied at length this purity of infancy, considering it an essential element of his thinking. He called it Primeval Innocence.6 A couple of years ago, the Italian TFP pub-

It is our strict moral duty to defend innocent human life and the sacred institution of the family, both for their intrinsic worth and as a way to preserve what remains of Christian Civilisation. The defence of the family is all the more important, as it is the primary place where the next generations are educated. Change the family and you will change the future.

Much has been written about the role of the family in the education of the offspring. Pope Pius XII, for example, has some splendid allocutions on the subject, even entering into such details as how mothers should react when their daughters come of age.

How can we forget the Allocution to the mothers of Catholic Action, on 26 October 1941? Calling mothers “the prime and most intimate educators of the little ones”, the Pope insisted upon the preservation of the “purity of the family’s atmosphere” so that the children might “open their eyes and souls to the light of life”.

Halfway through the Allocution, the Pontiff utters a phrase that directly introduces us to the subject I shall deal SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

lished a book collecting his texts on the subject Primordial Innocence and the Sacral Contemplation of the Order of the Universe,7 to which I refer for further insights. Unfortunately, there is still no English version.

We read in the Gospel of St Matthew: “Jesus calling unto him a little child, set him in the midst of [the Apostles] and said: ‘Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’.” (Mt. 18:2-3) Our Lord establishes a strict connection, indeed an identity, between conversion – the condition to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven – and becoming as little children. This, of

course, does not mean we have to become immature. It means that, in order to be citizens of His Kingdom, we must preserve, or recover, the innocence we had as children.

Innocence is not only a negative prerogative, that is, the absence of sin.

Innocence is the spiritual state of he who, so to speak, has just come from the hands of God. We often see innocence associated with purity, but this is only a partial view of the richness of innocence because it is first and foremost a clear notion of how things should be and an innate comprehension of the ideal model of everything.

From here stems the soundness of the first certainties of an innocent child.

The virginal sense – that “purity of infancy” of which Pius XII spoke – affords the innocent child a natural rectitude and a capacity to have certainties. For example, he is certain that his mother will protect him in case of danger, without having to make a logical reasoning in order to conclude this.

He grasps, with full strength, the direct evidence of things. His possession of these first certainties is so strong, that he does not need to rely on a logical analysis. He knows through a sort of transparency or intuition the essence of the thing itself.

The virginal sense also perceives immediately the contrast between good and evil. A child very naturally rejects that which harms his internal order. For example, it is easy to tell a child: “Don’t do this because it is dirty.” He accepts this as a matter of fact. “Children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy,” said G.K. Chesterton. Victor Hugo went even further and wrote that “children have so little claim on hell, that if they should see it they would admire it.”

29

oc cu u ss FF o

THE HOLY FAMILY PREPARE TO FLEE FOR EGYPT. ENGRAVING BY F. POILLY AFTER G. RENI. CREDIT: WELLCOME COLLECTION.

This is actually a very deep reason why we parents, as well as catechists in their lessons and priests in their sermons, should not be afraid of telling our children about hell. Not only because fear of going to hell will help them to avoid sin, but mainly because it will strengthen in their soul this contrast between good and evil. If Our Lady showed hell to the three little seers, why should we be afraid of doing so simply because some misguided theologians and Church authorities have a unilateral vision of God, which excludes His infinite justice?

Indeed, it falls primarily on parents to confirm and strengthen the child’s first certainties, thus favouring his natural process of knowledge and the development of his moral sense.

As he grows up, of course, the child will have to face the existence of evil and react against it. This is the root 30

of all militancy. He will be tried, he will know suffering, distrust and evil, and he will need to fight. This combat should become second nature, along with innocence. It is like a second innocence that adds itself to the first one. In combat, the principle of non-contradiction, which was only implicit in the first Innocence, becomes explicit. And the person, no longer a child, becomes self-conscious.

Here, too, the role of the parents is central. A parent is not so much someone who shields his children from evil, as someone who orients his children’s battles once they begin to wage them, nurturing their sense of non-contradiction between good and evil, truth and error, beauty and ugliness. Reading fairy tales to children is excellent.

But the time comes when we need to confront evil. We cannot have a storybook view of the world.

Of course, these battles cannot be waged without supernatural assistance.

Whence, too, the need for a highly motivated spiritual life.

Another characteristic of Innocence is the tendency to see everything in a marvellous way. Essentially, the innocent child tries to find in every being, a correspondence with the matrix of beauty and order he has inside himself. Even when something is not perfect, for instance an old, rattle boned horse he sees in a field, the innocent child sees it as if it were a Pegasus, because of a perfectly logical necessity in his soul.

This explains, for example, why children love to hear fairy tales, even when they perceive they are not true.

Fairy tales speak of a marvellous world, a possible world that could well exist. They are imaginary wrappings that contain a nucleus of truth.

This is the correct way of contemplating the universe. God created the universe in His image and likeness. In everything that exists, there is at least one aspect which reflects some perfection of God. The capacity to grasp this aspect is the condition to know God on this earth. As St John says in his first epistle: “whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” (1 Jn 4:20) Contemplating a being, an innocent child naturally tends to see it in an archetypal way. It is not a dream, nor a product of subjectivism, but a perfectly legitimate and logical way of acquiring knowledge of God. And here comes the proper and primary role of parents in the education and formation of their children: they must be a representation of God to their own children. Herbert Marcuse is only partially right when he says that “the figure of the father is the archeCAL X M A R IA E

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type of every domination”. Because God is the real and supreme archetype of every domination. In his epistle to the Romans, St Paul writes: “Let every person be subordinate to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been established by God.” (Rm. 13:1) And this applies particularly to the domestic authority of the parents, because the same St Paul writes to the Ephesians: “I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” (Eph. 3:14-15) But Marcuse is right in the sense that the first figure of God’s paternity and sovereignty comes to the child through his parents and particularly the father. Obviously, I refer to parenthood in its traditional sense, when families were not “nuclear” but “patriarchal” and the institution of marriage and family were not in their present state of terminal illness requiring intensive care to survive.

For the unversed in the pedantic jargon of sociologists, a nuclear family means, – I will caricature a little, but just a little – the one proposed by Hollywood films and composed of daddy, mom, a brown-haired boy and a blonde girl, plus the dog or the cat, depending on the size of the home.

“Family home”– this expression with profound resonances brings us to the heart of the matter we are discussing.

The English word “home” comes from the Old English word hām, derived from the Germanic word heim, which actually refers to a place where many “souls” are gathered, and describes the abiding place of the affections. But in Italian, Spanish and French it derives from the Latin word focularis, the sacred and irremovable hearth of the Roman homes, where fire burned to worship the Lares, i.e.

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the ancestors, whom the ancients considered the protective gods of the domestic society.

The hearth was not only immutable, but also indivisible, transforming the original family unit into a closely-knit clan, the younger branches remaining grouped around the elder branch, near the single hearth and the common tomb. A large family could sometimes count several thousand people, but remained united because it preserved the cohesion that the worship of the ancestors commanded.

This is thoroughly described and profoundly analysed by Fustel de Coulanges in his book The Ancient City, a study of the beliefs and socio-political structures of the small pagan tribes at the dawn of humanity.

subject to his power until death. He chose the members of the family, and had the right to accept or to refuse who could be part of this community of worship, including the right to adopt as a son a person who had no blood relationship with the family, or, which amounts to roughly the same, to give consent to the marriage of his children and grandchildren.

Let us not assume in a hurry that the paterfamilias often abused the exorbitant powers which he enjoyed, for in reality these powers were tempered and controlled by the morals of the time, which made him responsible for the care, education and morality of all the members of his family. Moreover, the latter were to be consulted in a consilium, a family court, on the most

A parent is not so much someone who shields his children from evil, as someone who orients his children’s battles once they begin to wage them, nurturing their sense of non-contradiction between good and evil, truth and error, beauty and ugliness.

In these remote ages, men knew no other form of society than the family. The family was at the same time a religious society through the worship of the ancestors, an economic society through the sharing of land, a political and warrior society with a ruler, customary laws, justice and troops: in other words, a self-sufficient domestic society, something akin to a small organised state.

The paterfamilias, to take the example of Rome, exercised all the powers: religious, juridical, domestic, and patrimonial. He was the absolute master, and every member of the family was

important decisions, under penalty of nullity, because these could affect the honour of the whole clan. And we know what value a Roman patrician attached to honour! Shakespeare, Racine and others understood how to employ this sense of honour to weave the web of their tragedies.

Nor should we forget the role of the mother, which was very real and still remains in Italian family life. The mamma is in fact the direct heir of the Roman matriarchy! The Roman mother represented a“balancing or tempering power” and a “moderator” of family life, turned particularly to31

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wards the education of the children. In African families, this role of educator is still the exclusive preserve of grandmothers, which is very understandable in a culture where the transmission of knowledge is done orally.

But let us not lose sight of the fact that this family is patriarchal, not so much because it is subject to the paterfamilias, but because the father – the high priest of the domestic religion – is the representative of an external and higher authority, the protective Lares.

could understand, when the hour of Redemption arrived, the profundity of the prayer that Our Lord taught us: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”

For, purified from the stain of paganism, the father is in our Christian families, in a certain way, an Emmanuel, that is to say, “a God among us”, to whom we owe honour and obedience as the Fourth Commandment of God’s Law commands us. But in return, God the Father shows Him-

Innocence is not only a negative prerogative, that is, the absence of sin. Innocence is the spiritual state of he who, so to speak, has just come from the hands of God.

The word pater, which is the same in Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and probably dates from the time when the ancestors of the Indians, Hellenes and Romans still lived together in Central Asia, is full of lessons, says Fustel de Coulanges.

Indeed, the word pater did not refer to the present idea of paternity, for which the word genitor was used instead. In religious language, the term pater applied to all gods, and in legal language to someone who, like the gods, had supreme authority and depended on no other. It was synonymous with rex and contained the idea of power and authority, as well as of “majestic dignity”. The fact that the word pater later became the usual term for the head of the family serves to give us an idea of the veneration given to him “as to a pontiff and a sovereign” by all the members of his clan.

It is because the patriarchal family existed and was ruled by a procreator, master and provider, that humanity 32

self to us, not as an Olympian Jupiter completely alienated from our poor human worries, nor as a hideous and evil monster, ready to crush us, as in many pagan religions, but as a tender Father, a provider who watches over us and gives us our bread each day.

We must not think that the Church has thrown away the Ancient patriarchal family because its values contained religious errors, or exorbitant powers. On the contrary, by cleansing it of its wrongs and abuses and by fortifying its original bond through the sacrament of marriage, the Church further strengthened this fundamental institution of the state and uplifted it towards greater achievements, both from the point of view of the family institution itself, and its political and social role, particularly during the Middle Ages.

You may be thinking that I have gone completely away from my subject, but I hope you will soon understand that this historical detour was

necessary to explain why I was so astonished by the model of parenthood and family promoted by Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia.

I am neither a theologian nor a canon lawyer. Therefore, it is not up to me to comment on the serious theological consequences of allowing the reception of Holy Communion by notorious public sinners, affecting nothing less than three Sacraments and creating a huge confusion among the faithful.

I can only say in that respect that I fully support the dubia presented by our dear, courageous four Cardinals, and that I, like so many, am still patiently waiting for an answer to them, praying that a public, filial correction will not become necessary.

However, as a layman, a husband and a father of five children, I have a lot to complain about in the way that Amoris laetitia deals with the family in its sociological aspect, which in my view seriously undermines the proper role of parents in the education and formation of their children.

As far as I know, the only two pro-family organisations that have dealt with this issue are Voice of the Family and the Instituto Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, from Brazil.

As soon as the apostolic exhortation was released, Voice of the Family pointed out that “Amoris laetitia makes no direct reference to contraception, despite the devastating consequences of the use of contraceptives in many areas of human life, not least the killing of unborn children by abortifacient methods,” as well as the fact that “on the few occasions when the encyclical Humanae Vitae is mentioned it is in the context of ‘responsible parenthood’ and the exercise of conscience by spouses in this area,” which in another context might not be troubling, but in this case “does give cause for CAL X M A R IA E

concern given … the failure to clearly restate what the Church actually teaches about contraception.”

Furthermore, even though “Amoris laetitia does make reference to the fundamental right and duty of parents to act as the primary educators of their children,” this reference is not made in the chapter entitled “Towards a Better Education of Children”, where a whole subsection is entitled “The Need for Sex Education” and“makes no reference to the role of parents at all, though it does make reference to ‘educational institutions’.” The few “criticisms of modern sex education are grossly insufficient” if compared to the filthy subjects that are being taught to our children in those institutions.

Lack of time prevents me from elaborating on the explicit inversion of the ends of marriage contained in number 80 of Amoris laetitia, where for the first time ever in a magisterial document of the Church it is stated that “marriage is firstly an ‘intimate partnership of life and love’ which is a good for the spouses themselves, while sexuality is ‘ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman’”, placing therefore the begetting of offspring as a secondary end.

I will limit myself to quoting an astute comment by Howard Kainz, a retired Marquette University Professor, about the effect of this inversion in the present-day controversy regarding the legalisation of homosexual unions. In an article published by The Catholic Thing, entitled “The end(s) of marriage since Vatican II”, he wrote: “The ‘demotion’ of ‘primary end’ and the subsequent emphasis on ‘unitive’ aspects of marriage, has even led some priests to consecrate intentionally childless marriages. More recently, this de-emphasis on procreation in favour of ‘the unitive significance’ has SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

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certainly facilitated the slide towards obviously non-procreative ‘marriage’ between homosexuals.”8 Regarding the document issued by the Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira Institute, it dealt with the issue of the sociological model of the family favoured by Amoris laetitia. It was published on July 16, 2016 under the heading: “Amoris laetitia opens the arms of the Church and society to the planned demolition of marriage and the family – An appeal to the silent Prelates and movements”.

The second section of this document, entitled “A family without any hierarchy: the ‘community’ model of Amoris laetitia”, stresses the grossly and unfairly negative image that Pope Francis presents of the traditional family, exaggerating its supposed “sombre dimension”, in which the relation of love “turns into domination”. The document is full of disdaining references to this, such as: “it is legitimate and right to reject older forms of the traditional family marked by authoritarianism and even violence” (n. 53), or “history is burdened by the excesses of patriarchal cultures that considered women inferior” (n. 54), where “in some homes authoritarianism once reigned and, at times, even oppression” (n. 176). According to Amoris laetitia, this led modern society rightly to liberate itself from the figure of “the father as master, from the father as the representative of a law imposed from without, from the father as the arbiter of his children’s happiness and an obstacle to the emancipation and autonomy of young people” (ibid.).

Regarding the relationship between husband and wife, which in the past was based on the principle of the authority of the husband, Pope Francis rejoices “to see old forms of discrimination disappear” and that “within 34

families there is a growing reciprocity” (n. 54). “I certainly value feminism,” he writes, “but one that does not demand uniformity or negate motherhood” (n. 173), which suggests an appreciation for the differentialist stream of feminism proposed by philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and others.

“There are those who believe,” affirms the Pope, “that many of today’s problems have arisen because of female emancipation. This argument, however, is not valid, ‘it is false, untrue, a form of male chauvinism’” (n.

54). And he adds: “If certain forms of feminism have arisen which we must consider inadequate, we must nonetheless see in the women’s movement the working of the Spirit” (ibid.), which is certainly not what Pope Pius XI said in Casti connubii and which we can judge ourselves by its disastrous fruits!

This all leads the apostolic exhortation to “reinterpret” in an egalitarian sense St Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians and its precept that “wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.” (Eph. 5:22) According to Pope Francis, “this passage mirrors the cultural categories of the time,” while the “biblical text is actually concerned with encouraging everyone to overcome a complacent individualism and to be constantly mindful of others”.

To reject in principle any form of submission of a woman to her husband (and not just any abusive expression of it) amounts to challenging the essentially hierarchical structure of the family, firmly established by God Himself, as Pope Pius XII recalls in his allocution to newlywed wives: “Every family is a society; every well-ordered society needs a head; every power of headship comes from God. And so, too, the family

you have founded has a head, invested with authority by God: authority over her who has been given him as a companion to constitute the nucleus of this family, and over those who with the Lord’s blessing will come to swell it and to make it happy, like young shoots of the bole of the olive.” (10 September 1941) Furthermore, the “communitarian”, egalitarian model proposed by Amoris laetitia, when transposed to parent-child relationships, dilutes to the utmost the notions of parental authority, as well as the need of obedience and discipline on the part of children.

The document considers the family as “the primary setting for socialisation, since it is where we first learn to relate to others, to listen and share, to be patient and show respect, to help one another and live as one.” But curiously enough, in this list the verb “to obey” is absent, replaced by an egalitarian, unbalanced notion of love: “In family life, the logic of domination and competition about who is the most intelligent or powerful destroys love.” (n.

98) This opposition between authority and love is obviously forced: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” said the Lord (Jn 14:15).

Insisting arbitrarily on a supposed opposition between freedom and control, the document maintains that “obsession is not education. We cannot control every situation that a child may experience. (…) If parents are obsessed with always knowing where their children are and controlling all their movements, they will seek only to dominate space. (…) What is most important is the ability lovingly to help them grow in freedom, maturity, overall discipline and real autonomy.” (n.

261) “Inevitably,” adds Pope Francis, “each child will surprise us with ideas CAL X M A R IA E

Pa r e n t s a s p r i m a r y e d u c at or s of t h e i r c h i l d r e n

and projects born of that freedom, which challenge us to rethink our own ideas.” (n. 262) But what happens when the projects and ideas are not good at all?

Should we as parents allow our children to sink into the mudflats of this sinful world, or should we firmly exercise our authority, setting rules and applying chastisements when necessary?

Amoris laetitia instead stresses that in the family, moral formation “should take place inductively, so that children can learn for themselves the importance of certain values, principles and norms, rather than by imposing these as absolute and unquestionable truths.” (n. 264) “Moral education has to do with cultivating freedom through ideas, incentives, practical applications, stimuli, rewards, examples, models, symbols, reflections, encouragement, dialogue and a constant rethinking of our way of doing things.” (n. 267) The liberty and spontaneity promoted by Amoris laetitia’s educational model revive that naturalism clearly and forcefully denounced by Pope Pius XI in 1929, in his encyclical Divini illius magistri on Christian education, in which he says: “Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound. Such, generally speaking, are those modern systems bearing various names which appeal to a pretended self-government and unrestrained freedom on the part of the child, and which diminish or even suppress the teacher’s authority and action, attributing to the child an exclusive primacy of initiative, and an activity independent of any higher law, natural or SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

divine, in the work of his education.” (n. 60) On the contrary, says Pius XI: “‘Folly is bound up in the heart of a child and the rod of correction shall drive it away’ (Prov. 22:15).

Disorderly inclinations then must be corrected, good tendencies encouraged and regulated from tender childhood, and above all the mind must be enlightened and the will strengthened by supernatural truth and by the means of grace, without which it is impossible to control evil impulses, impossible to attain to the full and complete perfection of education intended by the Church, which Christ has endowed so richly with divine doctrine and with the Sacraments, the efficacious means of grace.” (ibid. n. 59) Finally, it is quite surprising for a father like me to find in Amoris laetitia the following statement from a Pope: “It is not good for parents to be domineering. When children are made to feel that only their parents can be trusted, this hinders an adequate process of socialisation and growth in affective maturity.” Particularly distressing is the fact that this is said precisely in the paragraph immediately preceding the section entitled “The need for sex education”.

In conclusion, to defend the gift of marriage and our proper role in the education and formation of our children I strongly encourage all Catholic parents to oppose the deleterious teachings of Amoris laetitia and to remain staunchly faithful to the traditional, unchangeable teachings of the Church. This is the first, important step in a further battle: that of the res-

toration of Innocence. A crusade in which, we parents, have a primordial role, as custodians before God of the Innocence of our children. A crusade we all have to wage and must win for the greater glory of God. Duke Paul of Oldenburg is the director of the Brussels Bureau of the Federation Pro Europa Christiana. Duke von Oldenburg is married with five children.

ENDNOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

See Carlos Federico Ibarguren & Martín Jorge Viano, Tradición Familia Propiedad. Un ideal, un lema, una gesta, Artpress, São Paulo 1990.

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII to the Roman Patriarchate and Nobility, Hamilton Press 1993.

See Roberto de Mattei, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. The Crusader of the 20th Century, Gracewing, Herefordshire 1998.

Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in Marx/Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Dietz Verlag 1962, pp. 17-18.

Herbert Marcuse, Eros e Civilização – Uma crítica filosófica ao pensamento de Freud, Zahar Editores, Rio de Janeiro 1968, p. 36.

Not to be confused (even though it does bear some analogies) with the theological sense of "innocence", namely the primitive state of man before original sin.

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Innocenza primordiale e contemplazione sacrale dell’universo, Cantagalli, Siena 2013. https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2015/10/17/theends-of-marriage-since-vatican-ii/

35

Focus

WHY HOMESCHOOL YOUR CHILDREN?

BY DR J OS E PH S H AW

I

confess I am a reluctant home-schooler. I do not believe that schools are intrinsically problematic, or that formal education is bad.

Clearly they have their limitations in trying to cater for the individual needs, interests, and abilities of a room-full of children, but in principle they also have many advantages: the specialisation and therefore expertise of the teachers, the sharing of resources, and the interactions and group projects, from sports to drama, of the children.

If I were living in any other era where schools existed, I would be sending my children to them. So what is the problem today?

The headline issue has long been sex education, known as PHSE (“Personal, Social, and Health Education”).

Long ago I came to the conclusion that I would be wrongly abdicating my responsibility as a father if I allowed my children to be subjected to the teaching materials used in these lessons with the approval of the state and, in many cases, of the Catholic bishops.

Text-books, lesson plans, “teachers’ resources”, and videos for showing to children as young as five are not difficult to find online, although teachers themselves can be understandably reluctant to show parents what they are using. Many parents seem to prefer to remain in ignorance.

Formal sex education classes are, however, just one manifestation of the problem with education today, and it would be besides the point, even where

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it is possible, to withdraw one’s children from those lessons alone. The deeper problem is two-fold. First, the state and the educational establishment has decided that the cultural and moral education of children is a matter for them, and not for parents; second, they have simultaneously lost all confidence in traditional Western culture and morality.

On the first point, there is a strong tendency in the education establishment to regard parents as problems, not customers. The idea that parents should have some systematic input into what schools teach, and how, is regarded as laughable. Parents are aware of this and most have, over time, come to accept it. It is, after all, the easy option, to let the professionals get on with the job, and they can take the blame if things go wrong. This isn’t such a problem where parents have a real choice of school, but today usually they do not. There is very little ideological difference even between different fee-paying schools.

This is an inversion of the proper order of things. It is true that parents are not usually educational experts, but nor are they property experts or travel experts, and yet they are allowed to choose where to live and where to go on holiday. It would be salutary for educational experts to have to persuade their customers to follow this or that educational path for their children, just as other kinds of experts have to gain the confidence of their clients if

DR JOSEPH SHAW

they want their custom. The captive audience enjoyed by the education establishment does not make for humility or transparency.

On the second point, it is an unfortunate coincidence that the triumph of educational expertise over parental choice has come at a moment when the experts have lost their sense of what they wish to inculcate in our children. Monuments of Western art and literature are viewed with suspicion, and edged off the curriculum in favour of modern works whose only virtue appears to be their existential despair.

Self-doubt seems to have similarly affected the spelling and grammar of those tasked with teaching English and foreign languages. The teaching of history, meanwhile, has lost confidence in the meaning of historical narrative, and focuses instead on disconnected experiences or technological progress.

Many schools take things a step further, and do what they can to abolish the idea of separate school subjects at all. The fashion now is, especially for CAL X M A R IA E

Pa r e n t s a s p r i m a r y e d u c at or s of t h e i r c h i l d r e n

primary schools, to teach “themes”, which may make some sense to the teachers but none at all to children lacking in extensive background knowledge. It is quite something that it has fallen to the former Marxist Frank Furedi to condemn this magi-mixing of the curriculum into an incoherent goo in his appropriately titled book, Wasted.

I mention these other issues because it is not just in sex education that our children are being failed, and that failure is part of a pattern. When it comes to teaching them about “relationships”, the typical school today has no more to say to them than it has about the grand narrative of history, the structure of French verbs, or the Mona Lisa. Children are expected, rather, simply to have experiences and desires. The experiences may be pleasant or nor, but the desires cannot be judged: there is nothing to judge them by. Children are to be encouraged to

avoid contracting venereal diseases, but their right to have whatever experiences they want is constantly affirmed.

If they feel under pressure to do things they do not want to do, they must negotiate this pressure and their feelings on their own.

Aren’t they taught about “consent”? Aren’t they scolded endlessly about “sexism”? Yes, and it’s not working. According to a recent report, between 2012 and 2015, 600 rapes were recorded in UK schools. How many went unreported? The mind boggles.

The talk about male violence and only doing what you want to do becomes meaningless in a school environment where there is intense pressure to conform, and no moral restrictions.

A century ago, most schools were single-sex. Fifty years ago, potential bullies and rapists were aware that certain moral principles would be brought to bear on their actions. Today, their victims, as young as twelve, are given

the morning-after pill and taken to abortion clinics without their parents being informed.

Not all schools are as bad as the worst ones. But there is a sickness endemic in modern education which affects even the best schools. The sex education problem is the tip of an ugly iceberg.

Dr Joseph Shaw has a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford University, where he also gained a first degree in Politics and Philosophy and a graduate Diploma in Theology. He has published on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion and has edited a forthcoming book on the liturgy: The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form (Angelico Press). He is the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and Secretary of Una Voce International. He teaches Philosophy in Oxford University and lives nearby with his wife and eight children.

SAINT MARY (THE BLESSED VIRGIN) AND SAINT JOSEPH WITH THE CHRIST CHILD. ENGRAVING BY J. COUCHÉ AFTER BOREL AFTER F. ALBANI. CREDIT: WELLCOME COLLECTION.

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INTERVIEW WITH H.E. GERHARD LUDWIG CARDINAL MÜLLER

KNOW THE FAITH, LIVE WITH THE CHURCH are therefore pleased to print the full text of the Manifesto as well as the following interview that His Eminence granted to Calx Mariae.

H.E. GERHARD LUDWIG CARDINAL MÜLLER

W

e are very pleased to publish an interview with His Eminence Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Müller, KGCHS, the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2012-2017).

Cardinal Müller recently released a Manifesto of Faith to make a public testimony of the truth in the face of growing confusion about the doctrine of the Faith. In his Manifesto, the Cardinal provides most necessary clarity on a number of areas that are central to the Catholic faith and life, such as the incompatibility of other religions with the Catholic faith, the impermissibility of the reception of Holy Communion and other sacraments by divorced and civilly remarried Catholics as well as by Protestants, without conversion and amendment of life; the eternity of hell; and the importance of priestly celibacy. Furthermore, Cardinal Müller also restates the inseparable link between the Faith and the moral law, which may not be relativised, referencing several key teachings of the Catechism.

Cardinal Müller’s Manifesto of Faith, issued in seven languages worldwide, is a visible witness to the unvarnished Catholic faith. We 38

CALX MARIAE: It seems painfully clear that there is a network across the Church which has promoted or protected homosexual priests and bishops even when they’ve been guilty of abuse. It seems that this network is now so powerful that it can isolate senior clerics who try to oppose it. What can faithful priests and bishops do to resist this network and free the Church from this affliction?

CARDINAL MÜLLER: I do not know exactly whether there is something to these claims about a network of homosexual cliques. But the protagonists who “out” themselves in the public are obviously connected and collaborate in public. They try to discredit all those who profess the Christian anthropology of man and woman and defend the validity of the Sixth Commandment. It is bad when they nevertheless remain in their influential ecclesial positions and are not being hindered in their homophilic propaganda.

CM: You have also been outspoken about the dangers of allowing a homosexual subculture to develop within the priesthood. Why are most bishops silent while the acceptance of a view of human sexuality that is irreconcilable with the teachings of Christ is rapidly spreading in the world and in the Church?

CARDINAL MÜLLER: Why bishops do not live up to their mandate is unknown to me. They seem not to be able anymore to withstand the pressures to conform and think themselves able to rescue something by accommodation.

But what this something might be, they do not say. They do not understand that the price for the treason against truth will be high for the Church. “But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?” (Mt. 5:13) CM: Many young men have had their vocations corrupted or destroyed by the abuse they’ve experienced and witnessed within seminaries. What advice would you give to a young man who wants to respond to God’s call but reads with horror reports about events in seminaries in Ireland, the US, Honduras and in other parts of the world?

CARDINAL MÜLLER: They should step forward, with a free conscience before God, and request the renewal of their vocation. They can organise themselves and clearly tell the rector [of the seminary] and the bishop that homosexual acts are sinful and that they refuse to tolerate any harassment, and that they will immediately notify Rome, or even go to the public.

CM: Some commentators have blamed priestly celibacy for clerical abuse scandal and called for it to be re-examined in the light of the falling number of vocations. What would be the correct response to this?

CAL X M A R IA E

interview

CARDINAL MÜLLER: These people only waited for the occasion in order to revive their stereotypical prejudices against celibacy. One could just as easily say that each enemy of celibacy is a potential child molester because he despises chastity. What is this about one’s presenting to the world just any kind of claim, which others, in turn, must then refute? A claim either can be empirically or logically proven or refuted.

This is not possible when dealing with the thesis about celibacy as the cause of child abuse. This claim gains the trait of probability only among those who have a materialistic view of sexuality as an irresistible, nearly animalistic drive which has to be released. It is these people who partially blame the victims of sexual assaults because they are said to have aroused the offenders. If celibacy would not be possible, then marriage would not be a person’s freely chosen self-donation, but, rather, merely a pragmatic handling of the sexual drive. The unmarried state for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, on the other hand, is a charism given

by God which also includes the observance of the Sixth Commandment, so that this evangelical form of living, just like the Christian marriage, serves the perfection of the person in God. CM: One of the tactics used by the secular world to supposedly combat sexual abuse – school-based graphic “sex education” of children – actually promote ideas and behaviour that place children in greater danger of such abuse. Parents all over the world have been alarmed to see school-based sex education supported in Amoris laetitia and in papal statements. What is your advice to parents who feel that they have been betrayed by the representatives of the Church, while they wish to protect their children from the harm of sex education?

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CARDINAL MÜLLER: A separate sexual education in schools is not necessary, yes, even dangerous because it is being promoted by ideologues with a materialistic view of man. What needs to be said about this is a matter of biology lessons and of religious education, in collaboration with the parents who are the first and true educators of their child as instituted by God Himself.

CM: Some of the close collaborators of Pope Francis say it is his intention to change the Church in such a way that it will be impossible to undo those changes. The promotion of “synodality” seems to be one of the ways how to introduce such changes. The final report of the Youth Synod also indicated that the structures of the Church would soon be changed to reflect ideas about “synodality”.

Many commentators have warned that this would mean the fragmentation of the Church.

Are they right to be worried?

CARDINAL MÜLLER: Yes, there are again and again new initiatives, with the help of which one wishes to build another Church according to the ideas of those who regard themselves as the true heirs of the Second Vatican Council – of course under the banner of modernism. Synodality is nothing else but the collegiality of the bishops and not at all a process of developing into a kind of Protestant church. Only the Revelation in Christ is irreversible, or a dogmatic decision of an ecumenical council with the Pope as the principle of the Church’s unity in the truth of the revealed Word of God. The Magisterium may not teach anything else than what has been revealed. In the Extraordinary and Ordinary Magisterium, the Pope states what is to be believed as being revealed and not that his private opinions are to be believed as revealed. He presents the Church’s

teaching that is to be believed, and not his own opinion, as binding teaching.

CM: The sin of abortion is so serious that any Catholic who procures one is excommunicated latae sententiae. In 2017 a huge number of Irish Catholics voted to allow abortion. Many people were scandalised when some little girls in receiving their First Holy Communion posed for photographs wearing badges demanding the repeal of the laws protecting the unborn. More recently, politicians in the United States, who are nominally Catholic, have enacted abortion legislation that shocked even non-Catholics. Most bishops were silent but some argued that excommunication is not appropriate in such cases. First of all, can you say something about what the Church intends when excommunication is invoked?

CARDINAL MÜLLER: Unfortunately, even Catholics do not understand that their lives – just like the lives of other people – have been given by God and are therefore withdrawn from any form of manipulation. He who even promotes the killing of a human being in the form of abortion, makes himself gravely guilty before God and therefore also may not go to Holy Communion, and, if he does it anyway, he eats and drinks to his own judgment (1 Cor. 11:29), because “abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes” (Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, 51) CM: A second issue here is the apparent disregard for the Blessed Sacrament and the danger of receiving Communion sacrilegiously. This is important for all of us, not just politicians. Yet, Amoris laetitiae has been interpreted by several Episcopal conferences as permitting people in illicit unions to receive the sacraments. How can Church authorities reconcile this with the words of Our Lord and the writing of St Paul?

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interview

CARDINAL MÜLLER: When Bishops’ Conferences present this interpretation of Amoris laetitia, they are in contradiction to the teaching of Holy Scripture and to the perennial teaching of the Church. A marriage between two baptised persons – when it was contracted in a valid manner – is a sacrament and indissoluble. Adultery is a grave sin which can be forgiven with the help of the Sacrament of Penance if repentance is linked with the firm intention not to sin again. A papal document cannot stand, in its substance, on the same level as Holy Scripture and the Apostolic Tradition

and so to speak offer a new teaching.

One cannot camouflage it as a development of doctrine, because that is something completely different from adding something to Revelation, or even to correct it.

CM: Prayer is obviously very important but what else should the laity do at this time of crisis? What responsibility does the laity hold for the restoration of the Catholic Faith?

CARDINAL MÜLLER: The only thing left is to get to know the Faith and to live with the Church, in her teaching, liturgy, and in her community.

CM: What prompted you to issue the Manifesto of Faith now?

CARDINAL MÜLLER: The purpose of the Manifesto of Faith was simply to respond to the increasing pleas coming from faithful around the world and to put together a short, objective summary of the most important doctrinal teachings on the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacraments of the Church, and of the unity of Faith and life.

Translated from German by Maike Hickson

PONTIFICAL HIGH MASS IN ST PETER’S BASILICA (AT THE ALTAR OF THE CHAIR OF PETER), CELEBRATED BY MGR KOZON DURING THE SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL PILGRIMAGE TO ROME OF THE POPULOUS SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM ON 27 OCTOBER 2018.

M A N I F E S T O O F FA I T H “Let not your heart be troubled!” (John 14:1) In the face of growing confusion about the doctrine of the Faith, many bishops, priests, religious and lay people of the Catholic Church have requested that I make a public testimony about the truth of revelation.

It is the shepherds’ very own task to guide those entrusted to them on the path of salvation. This can only succeed if they know this way and follow it themselves. The words of the Apostle here apply: “For above all I have delivered unto you what I have received” (1 Cor. 15:3). Today, many Christians are no longer even aware of the basic teachings of the Faith, so there is a growing danger of missing the path to eternal life.

However, it remains the very purpose of the Church to lead humanity to Jesus Christ, the light of the nations (see LG 1). In this situation, the question of orientation arises. According to John Paul II, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is a “safe standard for the doctrine of the faith” (Fidei Depositum IV). It was written with the aim of strengthening the Faith of the brothers and sisters whose belief has been massively questioned by the “dictatorship of relativism.”1 1. THE ONE AND TRIUNE GOD REVEALED IN JESUS CHRIST The epitome of the Faith of all Christians is found in the confession of the Most Holy Trinity. We have become disciples of Jesus, children and friends of God by being baptised in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The distinction of the three persons in the divine unity (CCC 254) marks a fundamental difference in the belief in God and the image of man from that of other religions. Religions disagree precisely over this belief in Jesus the Christ. He is true God and true Man, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. The Word made flesh, the Son of God, is the only Saviour of the world (CCC 679) and the only Mediator between God and men (CCC 846). Therefore, the first letter of John refers to one who denies His divinity as an antichrist (1 John 2:22), since Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is from eternity one in being with God, His Father (CCC 663). We are to resist the relapse into ancient heresies with clear resolve, which saw in Jesus Christ only a good person, brother and friend, prophet and moralist. He is first and foremost the Word that was with God and is God, the Son of the Father, Who assumed our human nature to redeem us and Who will come to judge the living and the dead. Him alone, we worship in unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit as the Only and True God (CCC 691).

2. THE CHURCH Jesus Christ founded the Church as a visible sign and instrument of salvation realised in the Catholic Church (816). He gave His Church, which “emerged from the side of the Christ who died on the Cross” (766), a sacramental constitution that will remain until the Kingdom is fully achieved (CCC 765). Christ, the Head, and the faithful as members of the body, are a mystical person (CCC 795), which is why the Church is sacred, for the one Mediator has designed and sustained its visible structure (CCC 771). Through it the redemptive work of Christ becomes present in time and space via the celebration of the Holy Sacraments, especially in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Holy Mass (CCC 1330). The Church conveys with the authority of Christ the divine revelation, which extends to all the elements of doctrine, “including the moral teaching, without which the saving truths of the faith cannot be preserved, explained, and observed” (CCC 2035).

3. SACRAMENTAL ORDER The Church is the universal sacrament of salvation in Jesus Christ (CCC 776). She does not reflect herself, but the light of Christ, which shines on her face. But this happens only when the truth revealed in Jesus Christ becomes the point of reference, rather than the views of a majority or the spirit of the times; for Christ Himself

has entrusted the fullness of grace and truth to the Catholic Church (CCC 819), and He Himself is present in the sacraments of the Church.

The Church is not a man-made association whose structure its members voted into being at their will. It is of divine origin. “Christ himself is the author of ministry in the Church. He set her up, gave her authority and mission, orientation and goal (CCC 874). The admonition of the Apostle is still valid today, that cursed is anyone who proclaims another gospel, “even if we ourselves were to give it or an angel from heaven” (Gal 1:8). The mediation of faith is inextricably bound up with the human credibility of its messengers, who in some cases have abandoned the people entrusted to them, unsettling them and severely damaging their faith.

Here the Word of Scripture describes those who do not listen to the truth and who follow their own wishes, who flatter their ears because they cannot endure sound doctrine (cf. 2 Tim 4:3-4).

The task of the Magisterium of the Church is to “preserve God’s people from deviations and defections” in order to “guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error” (890). This is especially true with regard to all seven sacraments. The Holy Eucharist is “source and summit of the Christian life” (CCC 1324). The Eucharistic Sacrifice, in which Christ includes us in His Sacrifice of the Cross, is aimed at the most intimate union with Him (CCC 1382). Therefore, the Holy Scripture admonishes with regard to the reception of the Holy Communion: “Whoever eats unworthily of the bread and drinks from the Lord’s cup makes himself guilty of profaning the body and of the blood of the Lord” (1 Cor 11:27). “Anyone conscious of a grave sin must receive the sacrament of Reconciliation before coming to communion” (CCC 1385). From the internal logic of the sacrament, it is understood that civilly remarried divorcees, whose sacramental marriage exists before God, as well as those Christians who are not in full communion with the Catholic Faith and the Church, just as all those who are not properly disposed, cannot receive the Holy Eucharist fruitfully (CCC 1457), because it does not bring them to salvation. To point this out corresponds to the spiritual works of mercy.

The confession of sins in Holy Confession at least once a year is one of the Church’s commandments (CCC 2042). When the believers no longer confess their sins and no longer experience the absolution of their sins, salvation becomes impossible; after all, Jesus Christ became Man to redeem us from our sins. The power of forgiveness that the Risen Lord has given to the Apostles and their successors in the ministry of bishops and priests applies also for mortal and venial sins which we commit after Baptism.The current popular practice of confession makes it clear that the conscience of the faithful is not sufficiently formed. God’s mercy is given to us, that we might fulfil His Commandments to become one with His Holy Will, and not so as to avoid the call to repentance (CCC 1458).

“The priest continues the work of redemption on earth” (CCC 1589). The ordination of the priest “gives him a sacred power” (CCC 1592), which is irreplaceable, because through it Jesus becomes sacramentally present in His saving action. Therefore, priests voluntarily opt for celibacy as “a sign of new life” (CCC 1579).

It is about the self-giving in the service of Christ and His coming kingdom. With a view to receiving the ordination in the three stages of this ministry, the Church is “bound by the choice made by the Lord Himself.

That is why it is not possible to ordain women”(CCC 1577). To imply that this impossibility is somehow a form of discrimination against women shows only the lack of understanding for this sacrament, which is not about earthly power but the representation of Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church.

4. MORAL LAW Faith and life are inseparable, for Faith apart from works is dead (CCC 1815). The moral law is the work of divine wisdom and leads man to the promised blessedness (CCC 1950). Consequently, the “knowledge of the divine and natural law is necessary” to do good and reach this goal (CCC 1955). Accepting this truth is essential for all people of good will. For he who dies in mortal sin without repentance will be forever separated from God (CCC 1033). This leads to practical consequences in the lives of Christians, which are often ignored today (cf 2270-2283; 2350-2381). The moral law is not a burden, but part of that liberating truth (cf Jn 8:32) through which the Christian walks on the path of salvation and which may not be relativised.

5. ETERNAL LIFE Many wonder today what purpose the Church still has in its existence, when even bishops prefer to be politicians rather than to proclaim the Gospel as teachers of the Faith. The role of the Church must not be watered down by trivialities, but its proper place must be addressed. Every human being has an immortal soul, which in death is separated from the body, hoping for the resurrection of the dead (CCC 366). Death makes man’s decision for or against God definite. Everyone has to face the particular judgement immediately after death (CCC 1021). Either a purification is necessary, or man goes directly into heavenly bliss and is allowed to see God face to face. There is also the dreadful possibility that a person will remain opposed to God to the very end, and by definitely refusing His Love, “condemns himself immediately and forever” (CCC 1022). “God created us without us, but He did not want to save us without us” (CCC 1847). The eternity of the punishment of hell is a terrible reality, which - according to the testimony of Holy Scripture - attracts all who “die in the state of mortal sin” (CCC 1035). The Christian goes through the narrow gate, for “the gate is wide, and the way that leads to ruin is wide, and many are upon it” (Mt 7:13).

To keep silent about these and the other truths of the Faith and to teach people accordingly is the greatest deception against which the Catechism vigorously warns. It represents the last trial of the Church and leads man to a religious delusion, “the price of their apostasy” (CCC 675); it is the fraud of Antichrist. “He will deceive those who are lost by all means of injustice; for they have closed themselves to the love of the truth by which they should be saved” (2 Thess 2:10).

CALL As workers in the vineyard of the Lord, we all have a responsibility to recall these fundamental truths by clinging to what we ourselves have received. We want to give courage to go the way of Jesus Christ with determination, in order to obtain eternal life by following His commandments (CCC 2075).

Let us ask the Lord to let us know how great the gift of the Catholic Faith is, through which opens the door to eternal life. “For he that shall be ashamed of me, and of my words, in this adulterous and sinful generation: The Son of Man also will be ashamed of him, when He shall come in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:38). Therefore, we are committed to strengthening the Faith by confessing the truth which is Jesus Christ Himself.

We too, and especially we bishops and priests, are addressed when Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, gives this admonition to his companion and successor, Timothy: “I charge thee, before God and Jesus Christ, Who shall judge the living and the dead, by His coming, and His kingdom: Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine. For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables. But be thou vigilant, labour in all things, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil thy ministry. Be sober.” (2 Tim 4:1-5).

May Mary, the Mother of God, implore for us the grace to remain faithful without wavering to the confession of the truth about Jesus Christ.

United in faith and prayer

GERHARD CARDINAL MÜLLER Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2012-2017

1.

The numbers in the text refer to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Fa i t h of o u r fat h e r s

THE INCARNATE SON, A SUFFERER AND SACRIFICE A sermon preached on the Sixth Sunday in Lent by Bl. John Henry Newman “Being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.” (Phil. 2:8)

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e who thus humbled Himself – being first made man, then dying, and that upon the shameful and agonising Cross – was the same who from eternity had been “in the form of God”, and was “equal with God”, as the Apostle declares in a preceding verse. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God; the same was in the beginning with God;” thus speaks St John, a second witness to the same great and awful truth.

And he, too, goes on to say, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” And at the close of his Gospel, as we know, he gives an account of our Lord’s death upon the Cross.

We are now approaching that most sacred day when we commemorate Christ's passion and death. Let us try to fix our minds upon this great thought. Let us try, what is so very difficult, to put off other thoughts, to clear our minds of things transitory, temporal, and earthly, and to occupy them with the contemplation of the Eternal Priest and His one ever-enduring Sacrifice; – that Sacrifice which, though completed once for all on Calvary, yet ever abideth, and, in its power and its grace, is ever present among us, and is at all times gratefully and awfully to be commemorated, but now especially, when the time of year is come at which it was made. Let us look upon Him who was lifted up that He might draw us to Him; and, by being drawn one and all to Him, let us be drawn to each other, so that we may understand and feel that He has redeemed us one and all, and that, unless we love one another, we cannot really have love to Him who laid down His life for us.

With the hope, then, of suggesting to you some serious thoughts for the week which begins with this day, I will make a few remarks, such as the text suggests, upon that dreadful yet most joyful event, the passion and death of our Lord.

And, first, it ought not to be necessary to say, though it may be necessary even because it is so obvious, – (for, what is very plain is sometimes taken for granted by those who

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PORTRAIT OF BL. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1881).

SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS. ARUNDEL CASTLE.

know it, and hence is never heard by others at all,) – this, I say, in the first place, must be ever remembered, that Christ’s death was not a mere martyrdom. A martyr is one who dies for the Church, who is put to death for preaching and maintaining the truth. Christ, indeed, was put to death for preaching the Gospel; yet He was not a Martyr, but He was much more than a Martyr. Had He been a mere man, He would have been rightly called a Martyr, but as He was not a mere man, so He was not a mere Martyr. Man dies as a Martyr, but the Son of God dies as an Atoning Sacrifice.

Here then, as you see, we are at once introduced into a very mysterious subject, though one which concerns us most nearly. There was a virtue in His death, which there could be in no other, for He was God. We, indeed, could not have told beforehand what would follow from so high an event as God becoming incarnate and dying on the Cross; but that something extraordinary and high would issue from it, we might have been quite sure, though nothing had been told us. He would not have so humbled Himself for nought; He

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could not so humble Himself (if I may use the expression) without momentous consequences.

It would be well if we opened our minds to what is meant by the doctrine of the Son of God dying on the Cross for us. I do not say we shall ever be able to solve the mystery of it, but we may understand in what the Mystery consists; and that is what many men are deficient in. They have no clear views what the truth of the matter is; if they had, it would make them more serious than they are. Let it be understood, then, that the Almighty Son of God, who had been in the bosom of the Father from everlasting, became man; became man as truly as He was always God. He was God from God, as the Creed says; that is, as being the Son of the Father, He had all those infinite perfections from the Father which the Father had. He was of one substance with the Father, and was God, because the Father was God. He was truly God, but He became as truly man. He became man, yet so as not to cease in any respect being what He was before. He added a new nature to Himself, yet so intimately, that it was as if He had actually left His former self, which He did not. “The Word became flesh”: even this would seem mystery and marvel enough, but even this was not all; not only was He “made man”, but, as the Creed goes on to state, He “was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, He suffered and was buried.”

Now here, I say, is a fresh mystery in the history of His humiliation, and the thought of it will cast a new and solemn light on the chapters we shall read during the week. I have said that, after His incarnation, man's nature was as much and as truly Christ’s as His Divine attributes; St Paul even speaks of God “purchasing us with His own blood”, and of the “Lord of glory” being “killed”, expressions which, more than any other, show how absolutely and simply He had put on Him the nature of man. As the soul acts through the body as its instrument, – in a more perfect way, but as intimately, did the Eternal Word of God act through the manhood which He had taken. When He spoke, it was literally God speaking; when He suffered, it was God suffering. Not that the Divine Nature itself could suffer, any more than our soul can see or hear; but, as the soul sees and hears through the organs of the body, so God the Son suffered in that human nature which He had taken to Himself and made His own.

And in that nature He did truly suffer; as truly as He framed the worlds through His Almighty power, so through His human nature did He suffer; for when He came on earth, His manhood became as truly and personally His, as His Almighty power had been from everlasting.

Think of this, all ye light-hearted, and consider whether with this thought you can read the last chapters of the four Gospels without fear and trembling.

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For instance; “When He had thus spoken, one of the officers which stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, Answerest Thou the high priest so?” The words must be said, though I hardly dare say them, – that officer lifted up his hand against God the Son. This is not a figurative way of speaking, or a rhetorical form of words, or a harsh, extreme, and unadvisable statement; it is a literal and simple truth, it is a great Catholic doctrine.

Again: “Then they did spit in His face, and buffeted Him, and others smote Him with the palms of their hands.”

“The men that held Jesus mocked Him, and smote Him, and when they had blindfolded Him, they struck Him on the face, and asked Him, saying, Prophesy, who is it that smote Thee? and many other things blasphemously spake they against Him.” “And Herod with his men of war set Him at nought, and mocked Him, and arrayed Him in a gorgeous robe, and sent Him again to Pilate.”

“Pilate therefore took Jesus and scourged Him; and the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on His head, and a reed in His right hand, and they put on Him a purple robe, and said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote Him on the head with a reed, and did spit upon Him, and, bowing their knees, worshipped Him. Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe.”

Lastly: “When they were come to the place which is called Calvary, there they crucified Him” [Jn 18:22; Matt.

26:67; Lk 22:63-65; 23:11; Jn 19:1,2; Mt. 27:29; Mk 15:19; Lk 23:33] – between two malefactors, and even there they did not cease insulting and mocking Him; but all of them, chief priests and people, stood beholding, and bidding Him come down from the Cross.

Now I bid you consider that that Face, so ruthlessly smitten, was the Face of God Himself; the Brows bloody with the thorns, the sacred Body exposed to view and lacerated with the scourge, the Hands nailed to the Cross, and, afterwards, the Side pierced with the spear; it was the Blood, and the sacred Flesh, and the Hands, and the Temples, and the Side, and the Feet of God Himself, which the frenzied multitude then gazed upon. This is so fearful a thought, that when the mind first masters it, surely it will be difficult to think of any thing else; so that, while we think of it, we must pray God to temper it to us, and to give us strength to think of it rightly, lest it be too much for us.

Taking into account, then, that Almighty God Himself, God the Son, was the Sufferer, we shall understand better than we have hitherto the description given of Him by the Evangelists; we shall see the meaning of His general demeanour, His silence, and the words He used when He spoke, and Pilate’s awe at Him. 45

THE CRUCIFIXION (C.1420). FRA ANGELICO. METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK.

“And the high priest arose and said unto Him, Answerest Thou nothing? What is it which these witness against Thee?

But Jesus held His peace.” [Mt. 26:62:63] “When He was accused of the chief priests and elders, He answered nothing. Then said Pilate unto Him, Hearest Thou not how many things they witness against Thee? and He answered him to never a word, insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly.” [Mt.26:12-14] “The Jews answered Him, We have a law, and by our law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God. When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he was the more afraid, and went again into the judgment hall, and saith unto Jesus, Whence art Thou? But Jesus gave him no answer.” [Jn 19:7-9] “And when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see Him of a long season, because he had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by Him. Then he questioned with Him in many words, but He answered him nothing.” [Lk. 23:8-9] 46

Lastly, His words to the women who followed Him, “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold the days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.” [Lk. 23:28-30] After these passages, consider the words of the beloved disciple, in anticipation of His coming at the end of the world. “Behold He cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see Him, they also which pierced Him: and all the kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him. Even so, Amen.”

[Rev. 1:7] Yes, we shall all of us, for weal or for woe, one day see that holy Countenance which wicked men struck and dishonoured; we shall see those Hands that were nailed to the cross; that Side which was pierced. We shall see all this; and it will be the sight of the Living God. CAL X M A R IA E

This being the great mystery of Christ’s Cross and Passion, we might with reason suppose, as I have said, that some great thing would result from it. The sufferings and death of the Word Incarnate could not pass away like a dream; they could not be a mere martyrdom, or a mere display or figure of something else, they must have a virtue in them.

This we might be sure of, though nothing had been told us about the result. But that result is also revealed: it is this – our reconciliation to God, the expiation of our sins, and our new creation in holiness.

We had need of a reconciliation, for by nature we are outcasts. From the time that Adam fell, all his children have been under a curse. “In Adam all die,” as St Paul says [1 Cor. 15:22]. So that every one of us is born into this world in a state of death; such is our natural life from our very first breath; we are children of wrath; conceived in sin; shapen in iniquity. We are under the bondage of an inborn element of evil, which thwarts and stifles whatever principles remain of truth and goodness in us, directly we attempt to act according to them. This is that “body of death” under which St Paul describes the natural man as groaning, and saying, “O wretched man, who shall deliver me?” Now for ourselves, my brethren, we know (praised be God) that all of us have from our infancy been taken out of this miserable heathen state by holy baptism, which is God’s appointed means of regeneration. Still it is not less our natural state; it is the state in which every one of us was born; it is the state in which every little child is, when brought to the font. Dear as he is to those who bring him thither, and innocent as he may look, there is, till he is baptised, an evil spirit in his heart, a spirit of evil lying hid, seen of God, unseen by man (as the serpent among the trees of Eden), an evil spirit which from the first is hateful to God, and at length will be his eternal ruin. That evil spirit is cast out by Holy Baptism, without the privilege of which his birth would but be a misery to him. But whence did Baptism gain its power? From that great event we are so soon to commemorate; the death of the Son of God incarnate. Almost all religions have their outward cleansings; they feel the need of man, though they cannot supply it. Even the Jewish system, though Divine, effected nothing here; its washings were but carnal; the blood of bulls and goats was but earthly and unprofitable. Even St John’s baptism, our Lord’s forerunner, had no inward propitiatory power. Christ was not yet crucified. But when that long-expected season came, when the Son of God had solemnly set Himself apart as a Victim in the presence of His twelve Apostles, and had gone into the garden, and before three of them had undergone His agony and bloody sweat, and then had been betrayed, buffeted, spit upon, scourged, and nailed to the cross, till He died, then He with SPR I NG 2 0 1 9

His last breath said, “It is finished”; and from that time the virtue of the Highest went forth through His wounds and with His blood, for the pardon and regeneration of man; and hence it is that baptism has its power.

This is why He “humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” “Christ hath redeemed us,“says the Apostle elsewhere, “from the curse of the Law, being made a curse for us.” Again, he says that Christ has “made peace by the blood of His cross.” He has “reconciled” us “in the body of His flesh through death, to present us holy and unblameable, and unreproveable in His sight.” Or, as St John says, the saints “have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

And no one speaks more explicitly on this great mystery than the prophet Isaiah, many hundred years before it was accomplished. “Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” [Gal. 3:13; Col. 1:20-22; Rev. 7:14; Is. 53:4-6] We believe, then, that when Christ suffered on the cross, our nature suffered in Him. Human nature, fallen and corrupt, was under the wrath of God, and it was impossible that it should be restored to His favour till it had expiated its sin by suffering. Why this was necessary, we know not; but we are told expressly, that we are “all by nature children of wrath,” that “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified,” and that “the wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the people that forget God." The Son of God then took our nature on Him, that in Him it might do and suffer what in itself was impossible to it. What it could not effect of itself, it could effect in Him. He carried it about Him through a life of penance. He carried it forward to agony and death. In Him our sinful nature died and rose again.

When it died in Him on the cross, that death was its new creation. In Him it satisfied its old and heavy debt; for the presence of His Divinity gave it transcendent merit. His presence had kept it pure from sin from the first. His Hand had carefully selected the choicest specimen of our nature from the Virgin’s substance; and, separating from it all defilement, His personal indwelling hallowed it and gave it power.

And thus, when it had been offered up upon the Cross, and was made perfect by suffering, it became the first-fruits of a new man; it became a Divine leaven of holiness for the new birth and spiritual life of as many as should receive it.

And thus, as the Apostle says, “If one died for all, then did all die”; “our old man is crucified in Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed”; and “together” with Christ “when 47

we were dead in sins, hath He quickened us, and raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Thus “we are members of His body, from His flesh, and from His bones: for whosoever eateth His flesh and drinketh His blood, hath eternal life,” for His flesh is meat indeed, and His blood is drink indeed; and “he that eateth His flesh and drinketh His blood dwelleth in Him, and He in him.” [2 Cor. 5:14; Rm. 6:6; Eph. 2:5-6; 5:30; Jn 6:54] What a very different view of life do these doctrines present to us from that which the world takes. Only think of this one thing – of the eagerness of the great mass of men after matters of time, after engagements of this world, after gain, after national aggrandisement, after speculations which promise public or private advantage; and having thought of this, turn back to the contemplation of Christ's Cross, and then say, as candid men, whether the world, and all that is in the world, is not as unbelieving now as when Christ came. Does there not seem too great cause to fear that this nation, in spite of its having been baptised into the Cross of Christ, is in so unholy a state, that, did Christ come among us as He came among the Jews, we should, except a small remnant, reject Him as well as they? May we not be sure that men now-a-days, had they been alive when He came, would have disbelieved and derided the holy and mysterious doctrines which He brought? Alas! is there any doubt at all, that they would have fulfilled St John’s words, – “the darkness comprehended it not?” Their hearts are set on schemes of this world: there would have been no sympathy between them and the calm and heavenly mind of the Lord Jesus Christ. They would have said that His Gospel was strange, extravagant, incredible. The only reason they do not say so now is, that they are used to it, and do not really dwell on what they profess to believe. What! (it would have been said,) the Son of God taking human flesh, impossible! the Son of God, separate from God yet one with Him! “how can these things be?” God Himself suffering on the Cross, the Almighty Everlasting God in the form of a servant, with human flesh and blood, wounded, insulted, dying? and all this as an Expiation for human sin?

Why (they would ask) was an Expiation necessary? why could not the All-merciful Father pardon without one? why is human sin to be accounted so great an evil? We see no necessity for so marvellous a remedy; we refuse to admit a course of doctrine so utterly unlike any thing which the face of this world tells us of. These are events without parallels; they belong to a new and distinct order of things; and, while our heart has no sympathy with them, our reason utterly rejects them. And as for Christ's miracles, if they had not seen them, they would not have believed the report; if they

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had, they would have been ready enough to refer them to juggling craft, – if not, as the Jews did, to Beelzebub.

Such will the holy truths of the Gospel ever appear to those who live to this world, whether they love its pleasures, its comforts, its prizes, or its struggles; their eyes are waxen gross, they cannot see Christ spiritually. When they see Him, there is no beauty in Him that they should desire Him. Thus they become unbelieving. In our Lord’s words, “No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

[Lk. 16:13-15] When He said this, the Pharisees derided Him. And He said unto them, “Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts, for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.” God grant that we may not be of those who “justify themselves before men,” and “deride” those who preach the severe doctrine of the Cross! God grant that, if we have any misgivings about the corruptions and defects of the religion now so popular among us, we may have the grace forthwith to desire honestly to know God's will! God grant that we may not attempt to deceive our consciences, and to reconcile together, by some artifice or other, the service of this world and of God! God grant that we may not pervert and dilute His holy Word, put upon it the false interpretations of men, reason ourselves out of its strictness, and reduce religion to an ordinary common-place matter – instead of thinking it what it is, a mysterious and supernatural subject, as distinct from any thing that lies on the surface of this world, as day is from night and heaven from earth!

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RE G IS

Fa i t h of o u r fat h e r s

TE R N O W !

VO IC E O F T H E FA M I LY A N D U N I V E R SI T Y C AT HO L IC C HA P L A I N C Y, C A R D I F F

present:

HANDING ON THE DEPOSIT OF THE FAITH

The mission of the Catholic family today 6 - 8 SE P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9 N EW M A N HA L L , U N I V E R SI T Y C AT HO L IC C HA P L A I N C Y, C O LUM R D, C A R D I F F, C F 1 0 3 E F

This conference is open to all who are concerned with safeguarding the deposit of the faith in our families and in society.

Apart from discussing the particular threats to the family and ways to counter these threats, it will be an opportunity to meet fellow Catholics and to forge a fellowship that will strengthen us as individuals and families at this turbulent time.

PR AC TIC AL INFORM ATION The conference will run from Friday afternoon until Sunday lunch time.

The cost for the weekend is: £110 (includes conference fees, meals and accommodation) £60 (includes conference fees and meals)

Limited accommodation available.

For registration and further details, please visit:

FR SEBASTIAN JONES

C ardi f f Or ator y i n For mat i on , U K

FR LINUS CLOVIS

Fam i ly L i fe Inte r nat i ona l, Ne w Z e a l and

PROF. ROBERTO DE MATTEI L e p anto Fou nd at i on , It a ly

w w w. voi ce of t hef ami ly. c om / c ard i f f Discounts for students and families available, please contact us via the emaill address below.

W W W .V O I C E O F T H E F A M I L Y . C O M

MARIA MADISE

Voice of the Family, UK

enquir y@voice of t hefami ly.com; +44 (0)20 7820 31 4 8

JOHN-HENRY WESTEN LifeSiteNews, Canada

JOHN SMEATON

Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, UK

Lessons from history

LESSONS FROM HISTORY A C O LU M N B Y M AT T H E W M C C U S K E R

"It is astonishing to what an extent the historian has been Protestant, progressive, and whig." These words, from Herbert Butterfield’s classic 1931 essay The Whig Interpretation of History, will ring true with any Catholic who has spent much time reading works of history, whether academic or popular.

Historians writing from otherwise conflicting perspectives often agree on this: the Church is behind the times, against progress, an increasing irrelevance, or is to be ignored and written out of history altogether.

The theme of this column is “lessons from history”, and it is written with the conviction that an understanding of the past, of “history”, is an absolutely indispensable precondition for a correct understanding of the present.

However, the term “history” refers not only to the events of the past, but also to the discipline by which knowledge of the past is communicated. If we are to learn “lessons from history” we must first learn how to read historical works, and for this a knowledge of historiography – the study of historical writings – is indispensable. This is especially so for those wanting to understand the way that the history of the Church is written in (or written out of) mainstream works of scholarship, and popular presentations of history. In future editions of Calx Mariae we will be exploring this question in some detail.

A good place to begin is with consideration of the “Whig Interpretation of History” of which Butterfield, a distinguished Cambridge academic, wrote in 1931. Butterfield described it as: 50

“the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.”1 The term has been used in a very broad sense, to refer to any presentation of history as the inevitable advance of “progress” or “liberty”. A restrictive sense would limit this to interpretations which give the “Glorious Revolution” a central place in English history, which is presented as a process of growth in the liberty of the people, ever defended against the encroachments of royal authority. “Whig history” traces this liberty to remote origins in Anglo-Saxon England, and records its vindication by such signal moments as the signing of Magna Carta in 1215, the English Reformation, the victory of Parliament in the Civil War, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The progress of English liberty can be traced through later historical events which, depending on the individual historian’s perspective, may include events such as the Reform Act of 1832, the increasing extension of the franchise, and Britain’s defence of liberty against a variety of totalitarian ideologies.

Historians identified as “whig” may, of course, often have little or nothing to do with the historic political party of that name, but the view of history it

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describes can only be understood with reference to that party. The origin of the Whig party lay in the opposition, including by many of the wealthiest and most influential members of the aristocracy, to the accession of James II as King of Great Britain and Ireland, and their participation in his overthrow and the invasion of England by the Dutch usurper William of Orange in 1688. They were primarily motivated by hostility to James II’s Catholic faith and by the fear that he would use royal authority on behalf that faith and against Protestant interests. They accused King James II of wanting to rule England in the absolutist manner current in many Europeans states in the seventeenth century, such as the France of Louis XIV. The revolution of 1688, which resulted in the replacement of the house of Stuart with the strongly Protestant regime of William III, which led on to the Hanoverian succession in 1714, secured Whig domination of English politics for more than half a century.

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Catholicism and absolutism. The failure of the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 to overturn the settlement of the “Revolution” strengthened Whig control. At risk of over-simplification we may say that the Whigs were the party of Protestantism, including toleration of dissenters who refused conformity to the Church of England, and of parliamentary privilege. They were opposed by the Tories, who were supporters of royal authority, of the Established Church, and who included among their number many with Jacobite sympathies.

Three leading Whig politicians wrote histories of the “Glorious Revolution” during the early nineteenth century: Charles James Fox, Lord John Russell and, less well known, Sir James Mackintosh. However, the historian most closely identified with this school is Thomas Babington Macauley (18001859), a Whig MP and cabinet minister, whose History of England from the Accession of James II traced the course of the “Glorious Revolution” from the accession of James II to the death of William III. Macauley intended to continue his work up until the Reform Act of 1832, which saw an expansion

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of the franchise and the abolition of “pocket boroughs”, thus greatly weakening the influence of aristocracy over the House of Commons. However, he died in 1859 before his work could be completed.

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The first two volumes of Macauley’s history were published in 1848, the year in which much of Europe was convulsed by revolution. England remained at peace while, as Macauley put it in the preface to his work, “the proudest capitals of western Europe… streamed with civil blood”. England’s deliverance from revolution was, Macauley was convinced, because of the peaceful “Glorious” Revolution of 1688 and the Act of 1832: “the Revolution which brought the crown into harmony with Parliament, and the Revolution which brought the Parliament into harmony with the nation.”2 In his History Macauley gave utterance to the classic “whig” view: “our revolution was a vindication of ancient rights… In almost every word and act may be discerned a profound reverence for the past…

Both the English parties agreed in treating with solemn respect the ancient constitutional traditions of the state. The only question was, in what sense were those traditions to be understood… To us who have lived in the year 1848 it may seem almost an abuse of terms to call [it]… by the terrible name of revolution. And yet this revolution, of all revolutions the least violent, has been of all revolutions the most beneficent.”

Macauley’s History profoundly influenced not only succeeding generations of English historians but also the wider public. Lord Acton, the only historian mentioned by name by Butterfield, read Macauley four times as a youth and described himself as “a raw English schoolboy, primed to the brim with Whig politics”. Acton, a Catholic, did certainly not hold to every perspective associated with “whig” history but nonetheless throughout his life he saw history primarily in terms of the growth of liberty:

“We have no thread through the enormous intricacy and complexity of modern politics, except the idea of progress towards more perfect and assured freedom”.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

Another influential historian who can be categorised as belonging to the same broad tradition is William Stubbs whose 1874 work The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development traced the development of English liberty, and the immemorial constitution which was its bedrock and defence, from its roots in the Germanic society of the Anglo-Saxons to his own day.

It is not the purpose of this short column to identify where, and to what extent, the “whig interpretation” of history is true or false and Butterfield’s essay has been criticised, rightly, for the lack of precision in the use of his term. However, there is no doubt that he identifies a number of key problems that have distorted our understanding of English history, and which can be applied to many more recent historians who have sought to find a “progressive” direction to history. It is not possible to replicate Butterfield’s argument in the space that remains but we can briefly reflect on what I consider his fundamental argument: “It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it

51

Lessons from history

For example:

THE WHIG

studies the past with reference to the present.”5 While this is, to some extent inevitable, it can prove, with insufficient self-awareness on the part of the historian: “an obstruction to historical understanding because it has been taken to mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present. Through this system of immediate reference to the present day, historical personages can easily and irresistibly be classed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it; so that a handy rule of thumb exists by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis.”

This means that “whig” history unduly emphasises those events and individuals that are considered to have been part of the chain of causation that led to the later events in which the historian has an interest: “instead of being vigilant for unlikeness… he will imagine that he has discovered a ‘root’ or an ‘anticipation’ [of his own century].”

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“Working upon the same system the whig historian can draw lines through certain events, some such line as that which leads through Martin Luther and a long succession of whigs to modern liberty; and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents something like a line of causation. The total result of this method is to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully upon the present – all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress, of which the Protestants and whigs have been the perennial allies while Catholics and tories have perpetually formed obstruction. A caricature of this result is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority – a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion. It is illustrated to perfection in the argument of a man denouncing Roman Catholicism at a street corner, who said: ‘When the Pope ruled England them was called the Dark Ages’.”

Nearly 90 years after Butterfield wrote, this is still the dominant view among the general public, opinion formers such as journalists, and many academics from other disciplines. Indeed, it still holds sway over many historians.

Butterfield continues by drawing attention to the problem faced by any historian who, presenting the fruits of detailed historical research in a more general manner, needs to “abridge”, that is, give some order to his work that makes it accessible and comprehensible to the general reader: “The whig method of approach is closely connected with the question of the abridgement of history; for both the method and the kind of history that results from it would be impossible if all the facts were told in all their fullness.”

“Abridgement” carried out according to unsound principles leads to an unbalanced, and ultimately false, presentation of the past: “it provides us in the long run with a path through the complexity of history; it really gives us a short cut through that maze of interactions by which the past was turned into our present; it helps us to circumvent the real problem of historical study. If we can exclude certain things on the ground that they have no direct bearing on the present, we have removed the most troublesome elements in the complexity and the crooked is made straight.

There is no doubt that the application of this principle must produce in history a bias in favour of the whigs and must fall unfavourably on Catholics and tories. Whig history in other words is not a genuine abridgement, for it is really based upon what is an implicit principle of selection. The adoption of this principle and this method commits us to a certain organization of the whole historical story.”

CAL X M A R IA E

Against this approach Butterfield counselled studying the past on its own terms, not primarily in terms of its relationship to our present condition. For example: “It matters very much how we start upon our labours – whether for example we take the Protestants of the sixteenth century as men who were fighting to bring about our modern world, while the Catholics were struggling to keep the medieval, or whether we take the whole present as the child of the whole past and see rather the modern world emerging from the clash of both Catholic and Protestant. If we use the present as our perpetual touchstone, we can easily divide the men of the sixteenth century into progressive and reactionary…”

However: “we are better able to discover the way in which the past was turned into our present, if we adopt the outlook of the sixteenth century upon itself… and in this case we shall tend to see not so much progressive fighting reactionary but rather two parties differing on the

question of what the next step in progress is to be. Instead of seeing the modern world emerge as the victory of the children of light over the children of darkness in any generation, it is at least better to see it emerge as the result of a clash of wills, a result which often neither party wanted or even dreamed of, a result which indeed in some cases both parties would equally have hated, but a result for the achievement of which the existence of both and the clash of both were necessary.”

Butterfield’s approach is summed up in these words: “Real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by our making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own.”

and methods employed have been manifold, but the goal is impossible to achieve perfectly. Yet the need for a truer, more real, understanding of history has perhaps never been more essential than today. This is a theme we will continue to explore in this column in future editions.

Matthew McCusker has a Master’s Degree in History from the University of York, where he specialised in ecclesiastical history. He currently works for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children as Director of Fundraising. He can be contacted at: matthewmccusker@spuc.org.uk.

ENDNOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, (London, 1931).

Thomas Babington Macauley quoted in John Burrow, A History of Histories, (London, 2007), p.369.

Thomas Babington Macauley, The History of England from the Accession of James II, Volume 4, p.517.

Lord Acton in a lecture of 1895, quoted in Burrow, History of Histories, p.405.

All the quotes that follow are from Butterfield, Whig Interpretation.

Real historical understanding, has been pursued by man from the earliest times – the historical books of the Old Testament are the oldest surviving works of written history – down to the present day. The approaches

DEPARTURE OF WILLIAM III FROM HELLEVOETSLUIS 1688. ABRAHAM STORCK (1644–1708).

NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, LONDON.

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Saints for our times

ST JOSEPH

Spouse of the Blessed Virgin, Patron of the Universal Church, Terror of Demons

BY MARIA MADISE

“Some Saints are privileged to extend to us their patronage with particular efficacy in certain needs, but not in others; but our holy patron St Joseph has the power to assist us in all cases, in every necessity, in every undertaking.” – St Thomas Aquinas

T

he power and grandeur of St Joseph exceed all human imagination. And even so, his humble life with the Word Incarnate provides us with an example to follow in every aspect of human life that we can imagine.

Everything we know about his life and his person is in relation to the Divine Child and His Blessed Mother. That is, all we know about St Joseph is his reaction to the Divine mystery unfolded beneath his eyes. There is nothing known about St Joseph that is separate from Jesus and Mary. What better model could we desire to imitate at this time of Lent in order to lose our own interests and transform everything in our lives to the service of God and His Blessed Mother, generously and totally, without reserve. Carmelite author Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen urges us to surrender ourselves to that service “with a heart filled with God, with a heart that lives with Him” and which is nourished by ceaseless prayer.1 SPOUSE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

Saint Bernardine of Siena (1380-1444) invites us to consider the noble birth of St Joseph, the bridegroom:

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“He was born of Patriarchal, Royal and Princely stock in a direct line as has been said. For St Matthew in his first chapter established a direct line with all the aforementioned fathers from Abraham to the spouse of the Virgin, clearly demonstrating that all patriarchal, royal and princely dignity come together in him…”2 The nobility of birth must be complemented with the nobility of nature.

Dr Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira notes: “To even begin to comprehend the nature of St Joseph… we must bear in mind two awe-inspiring facts. St Joseph is the virgin-husband of Our Lady and the guardian-father of Our Lord.”3 Dr de Oliveira explains the incredibility of these two facts: “The husband must be proportional to the wife. St Joseph’s spouse is the Blessed Virgin Mary, the most perfect of all creatures, and masterpiece of the Creator’s handiwork.

In her incomparable person, we find the sum of all the virtues of all the angels, and saints, indeed all creation until the end of time…

From among all men, God chose one man worthy to love and honour the Mother of His Only-Begotten Son as her husband. He was a husband proportional to his wife in love of God, purity, wisdom,

justice – in every virtue. St Joseph was that man.”4 “However,” he continues, “there remains something even more incomprehensible. The father must be proportional to his son, and, as we have noted, the Son for Whom God sought an earthly father was none other than His Own. There could be but one man fit for such an awesome responsibility, the man God created for precisely this vocation and whose soul He crowned with every virtue. That man, too, was St Joseph.”5 Even considering the royal line which St Joseph belonged to by birth, Dr Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira concludes: “It is beyond our power to imagine the grandeur of St Joseph’s exaltation.”6 PROTECTOR OF THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH

On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December 1870, Blessed Pope Pius IX, following appeals received from bishops worldwide, had declared St Joseph to be Patron of the Universal Church, “in this most sorrowful time” when “the Church herself is beset by enemies on every side and oppressed by heavy calamities, so that impious men imagine that the

CAL X M A R IA E

gates of Hell are at length prevailing against her.”7 Pope Leo XIII, to whom it was revealed in 1884 that Satan would be given, for a time, increased power to work for the destruction of the Church, instituted a new devotion to St Joseph in his encyclical letter Quamquam pluries (1889). Pope Leo XIII wrote: “During periods of stress and trial – chiefly when every lawlessness of act seems permitted to the powers of darkness – it has been the custom in the Church to plead with special fervour and perseverance to God, her author and protector, by recourse to the intercession of the saints – and chiefly of the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God – whose patronage has ever been the most efficacious.”

He further explained: “We see faith, the root of all the Christian virtues, lessening in many souls; we see charity growing cold;

the young generation daily growing in depravity of morals and views; the Church of Jesus Christ attacked on every side by open force or by craft; a relentless war waged against the Sovereign Pontiff; and the very foundations of religion undermined with a boldness which waxes daily in intensity… In circumstances so unhappy and troublous, human remedies are insufficient, and it becomes necessary, as a sole resource, to beg for assistance from the Divine power.”

Today the evils identified by Pope Leo XIII have intensified to a degree that would have been inconceivable to most people in 1889. Thousands of innocent children are slaughtered every day with the approval of the governments that ought to be defending them, the sanctity of marriage is defiled by divorce, adultery and contraception, and the bonds between parents and their children are being deliberately targeted for destruction by the most powerful states and institutions in the

world. Worst of all, the Pope himself is responsible for the spread of errors which are leading the flock away from Christ and towards eternal damnation.

However much greater the depths to which society has sunk today be, we must not look for new remedies. Pope Leo XIII urged the faithful to combat these evils through the prayer of the Holy Rosary, but he also directed the faithful towards St Joseph: “But We entertain another object, which, according to your wont, Venerable Brethren, you will advance with fervour. That God may be more favourable to Our prayers, and that He may come with bounty and promptitude to the aid of His Church, We judge it of deep utility for the Christian people, continually to invoke with great piety and trust, together with the Virgin-Mother of God, her chaste Spouse, the Blessed Joseph; and We regard it as most certain that this will be most pleasing to the Virgin herself.”

SAINT MARY (THE BLESSED VIRGIN) AND SAINT JOSEPH WITH THE CHRIST CHILD. ENGRAVING BY J. COUCHÉ AFTER ANNIBALE CARRACCI. CREDIT: WELLCOME COLLECTION.

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saints for our times

He further explained: “the divine house which Joseph ruled with the authority of a father, contained within its limits the scarce-born Church. From the same fact that the most holy Virgin is the mother of Jesus Christ is she the mother of all Christians whom she bore on Mount Calvary amid the supreme throes of the Redemption; Jesus Christ is, in a manner, the first-born of Christians, who by the adoption and Redemption are his brothers. And for such reasons the Blessed Patriarch looks upon the multitude of Christians who make up the Church as confided specially to his trust – this limitless family spread over the earth, over which, because he is the spouse of Mary and the Father of Jesus Christ he holds, as it were, a paternal authority. It is, then, natural and worthy that as the Blessed Joseph ministered to all the needs of the family at Nazareth and girt it about with his protection, he should now cover with the cloak of his heavenly patronage and defend the Church of Jesus Christ.”

On 19 March the Church presents St Joseph, the great Patriarch, to whose care God willed to entrust the most precious portion of His flock, Mary and Jesus. Because Joseph was the protector and guardian of them on earth, the Church recognises him as the guardian and protector of all Christendom.8 TERROR OF DEMONS

God chose St Joseph to be the spouse of His Mother. God placed the universal Church under his care. But why precisely are the demons terrified of him?

56

St Joseph is the terror of demons, because he is a pure man: pure in thought, pure in heart, body and soul.

He was destined to be the most chaste spouse of Mary Most Holy conceived without sin. In the face of complete purity and holiness, the ugly, filthy infernal spirits must dread and flee.

St Joseph is the terror of demons, because he is a humble man, who bore the trials of poverty, exile and rejection by unfaithful men with unwavering trust in God. The proud demons are unable to bear godly humility.

St Joseph is the terror of demons because he has unshakable faith. Joseph knew by faith that Jesus was his God. However, as Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen reminds us, he needed deep faith to deal with the perplexity aroused in his mind by Mary’s maternity, the anxieties in Bethlehem, the privations during the flight to Egypt.

These and many other trials afflicted his sensitive soul to such an extent that on several occasions an intervention of an angel was needed to sustain him and explain the depths of the divine mystery that he was part of. St Joseph allowed himself to be guided with the docility and confidence of a child, as testified in the Gospel on four occasions: 1) when the angel told him not to leave Mary, because of her mysterious maternity (Mt 1:20-24); 2) when the angel told him to flee to Egypt (Mt 2:13); 3) when the angel informed him about the death of King Herod (Mt 2:19); and 4) when the angel warned him to withdraw to Galilee (Mt 2:22).

Dr Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira has also pointed out that at all these very troubling times, when angelic intervention was needed, St Joseph slept: “Overwhelmed by an enormous suffering, he slept nevertheless. The angel appeared to him explaining the situation. He went on sleeping. At dawn, he

awoke and life went on normally. This was the height of normality, the height of coherence, the height of logic!”9 St Joseph neither hesitated nor reasoned; he made no objection; for he had complete trust in God. He believed in Him fully – in His Word and in His Divine Providence. No wonder that the demons have no power over him!

Let us imitate at this holy season of Lent, the purity, humility and spirit of prayer of St Joseph. Let us ask for strong faith from our heavenly patron in every need. Let us beg his continuous and powerful protection for the Church, Our Mother, who is being so badly afflicted on earth by demons of impurity, pride and infidelity. Having been the faithful guardian of the Holy Family on earth, we can have no doubt about St Joseph’s heavenly protection of the great Christian family, the universal Church.

St Joseph, terror of demons, pray for us!

ENDNOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, O.C.D., Divine Intimacy, Baronius Press 2008, p. 1095.

Sancti Bernardini Senensis Sermones Eximii, (Venice: in Aedibus Andreae Poletti, 1745), Vol. 4, p. 232. in Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII: A Theme Illuminating American Social History (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Documents IV, pp. 471-472.

Dr Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Saint Joseph, Martyr of Grandeur, http://www.tfp.org/saint-joseph-martyr-ofgrandeur/ Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Decree of Pius IX declaring St Joseph Patron of the Universal Church See Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, O.C.D., Divine Intimacy, Baronius Press 2008, p. 1093.

Dr Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, In Praise of St Joseph’s Logic, The American Society in Defense of Tradition, Family and Property; http://www.tfp.org/in-praise-of-st-josephs-logic/

CAL X M A R IA E

Litany of St Joseph Lord, have mercy

Lord, have mercy Christ, have mercy Christ, have mercy Lord, have mercy Lord, have mercy Christ, hear us Christ, graciously hear us God the Father of Heaven, have mercy on us.

God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.

God the Holy Spirit, have mercy on us.

Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us.

Holy Mary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Renowned offspring of David, pray for us.

Light of patriarchs, pray for us.

Spouse of the Mother of God, pray for us.

Chaste guardian of the Virgin, pray for us.

Foster-father of the Son of God, pray for us.

Diligent protector of Christ, pray for us.

Head of the holy family, pray for us.

Joseph most just, pray for us.

Joseph most chaste, pray for us.

Joseph most prudent, pray for us.

Joseph most brave, pray for us.

Joseph most obedient, pray for us.

Joseph most faithful, pray for us.

Mirror of patience, pray for us.

Lover of poverty, pray for us.

Model of artisans, pray for us.

Glory of home life, pray for us.

Guardian of virgins, pray for us.

Pillar of families, pray for us.

Solace of the wretched, pray for us.

Hope of the sick, pray for us.

Patron of the dying, pray for us.

Terror of demons, pray for us.

Protector of the holy Church, pray for us.

L

amb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

V. He made him lord of His House R. And ruler of all His possessions Let us pray

O God, Who, in Thine ineffable Providence didst vouchsafe to choose blessed Joseph to be the Spouse of Thy most holy Mother; grant, we beseech Thee, that we may be worthy to have him for our intercessor in Heaven whom, on earth, we venerate as our protector. Who livest and reignest world without end. Amen.

“It is my pleasure to welcome Voice of the Family’s magazine, Calx Mariae. Its title, with its allusion to the protoevangelium (Gen 3:15), should remind us that the Holy Virgin’s victory over our ancient enemy is already assured. I hope that its presentation of the beauty of Catholic teaching will contribute to the rebuilding of Christian civilisation. I pray that its content will help all those who read it to draw ever closer to our Blessed Mother at this time of trial for the Church - like St John, those who remain close to her will not abandon the Lord.

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