Calx Mariae magazine issue 7, Winter 2019

S UG G EST ED D ONAT I ON £ 4 .50 - S EE PAG E 63 FOR M ORE D ETA I LS

MARIAE CALX

Rebuilding our Christian civilisation

FOCUS:

Church Militant

FIGHTING AS THE

INCLUDING:

THE PRIMACY OF THE FATHER

Universal Church vs

GLOBALIST CHURCH

THE SOUL OF THE APOSTOLATE 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 7

WINTER 2019

ROME LIFE FORUM 2020 2 0 & 2 1 M AY, A N G E L I C U M , R O M E

Opening the door to the virtue of purity and closing the door upon vice Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri

F O L LOW E D BY:

21 May: Concert for Life with the choir of Mgr Pablo Colino (Former Prefect of Music of St Peter’s Basilica) 22 May: Voice of the Family roundtable discussion Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in preparation for the March for Life 23 May: Rome March for Life (10th anniversary!)

S AV E T H E D AT E The Forum is open to all those who have leadership roles in the pro-life and pro-family movement or in movements concerned with the defence and diffusion of Catholic moral and social teaching. We look forward to seeing you there!

w w w. v o i c e o f t h e f a m i ly. c o m

MARIAE CALX

ISSUE 7

WINTER 2019

CONTENTS 2 From the editor 3 Pro-life action 4 Universal Church vs globalist church

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11 FOCUS: Fighting as the Church Militant 12 The soul of the apostolate

by Prof. Roberto de Mattei 20 Angels and demons in spiritual warfare

by Fr Anthony Pillari 28 Created for Heaven: The mission of Catholic young adults in today’s world

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34 Our Church - reformed or deformed?

A roundtable discussion

44 The primacy of the father

by Sebastian Morello 53 Evangelisation through the liturgy

by Dr Joseph Shaw

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34

55 The myth of the Andalusian paradise

by Matthew McCusker 59 St Monica & St Rita - graceful agents of conversions

by Maria Madise

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COVER PHOTO: Way of the Cross, organised by Institute of the Good Shepherd at the Church of St Louis of the French during the Populos Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage 2019.

PHOTO CREDIT: don Elvir Tabaković, Can. Reg.

FROM THE EDITOR

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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

© VOICE OF THE FAMILY 2019

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.

ISSN:2517-6455

hy does Our Lord allow idolatry on the Tomb of St Peter, sacrilege and public scandal in His churches? Why does He not intervene to end the countless offences against Himself and His Blessed Mother?

We cannot say. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts: nor your ways my ways.” (Is. 55:8) However, the new liturgical year which has just begun brings a sense of a “new chance” for reparation. Now is the time to prepare the way of the Lord and make straight his paths. (Is. 40:3) On returning home after weeks in “Amazonian” Rome, a lady quietly handed me a beautiful card after Mass. It was a simple thank you to all those who “went to Rome to pray the rosary to fight for the Truth”. She was referring to Acies Ordinata (Song of Songs 6:3,9), the witness of lay Catholics at Castel Sant’Angelo. Two hundred of us, standing in battle array, called on St Michael and his angels to protect the Church and to disperse the enemy’s forces.

The lady who gave me the note is always in the church, veiled and praying whenever I go there. We have probably attended daily Mass together for some years but never exchanged a word. There are other veiled ladies like her throughout the church. They are the real warriors, Acies Ordinata, ceaselessly praying for the Immaculate Heart to triumph soon.

In my homeland of Estonia, the Soviet occupation virtually wiped out what little Catholicism there was. The KGB office overlooked the entrance to the solitary Catholic church that no-one entered. The only sign of faith that remained was the “little old Polish ladies” who seemed too unimportant for the regime to bother with. For decades they went on praying the rosary. Then, in the mid-1970s, the first five Estonian converts approached the Catholic church.

It was the “little old Polish ladies” who kept the faith alive for us. It is, perhaps, their counterparts in our parishes today who have gained for us more time to make acts of reparation.

No doubt many of the roughly 5300 Catholic bishops and 220 cardinals across the world were disturbed by the sacrilegious acts of the Amazon synod but less than ten reacted publicly. Those who did speak out, urged fasts, rosaries, Masses of reparation and this we must do. But we must also pray that the silent shepherds will arise and go in haste to Bethlehem to adore the Word Incarnate, rather than remain unmoved.

The FOCUS of this issue is fighting as the Church Militant p.11. Today’s fight is for our families, our Church and the salvation of our own souls. The Catholic Church is universal, not globalist. The stark contrast between these two incompatible ideas is examined in the analysis on p.4. The right order of family governance, which enables the Christian civilisation to flourish, is eloquently discussed in Sebastian Morello’s reflection on the primacy of fathers on p.44.

Love in the spiritual life is what blood is in physical life. Without blood the body dies, without love, faith is dead. Christ was born to shed all His blood for each one of us. This is the measure of His love. Now is the time to surrender our hearts in return. Now is the time for our acts of love and reparation for all the offences which He foresaw in the Garden of Gethsemane. Now is “the hour for us to rise from sleep. For now our salvation is nearer than when we believed.” (Rom. 13: 11) Let us take Our Blessed Mother as our example. Closest to the manger and closest to the Cross, it is she who is terrible in the eyes of the enemy as an army set in battle array, and it is she who bids us approach her son, not as the God of Justice but as a newborn child.

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: 9 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.

9 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.

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

by LIAM GIBSON

pro-life action

FROM CONCEPTION without exception t the stroke of midnight on Tuesday 22 October 2019, Northern Ireland’s unborn babies were stripped of all meaningful legal protection “until capable of being born alive”.1 Abortion, which just moments before, had been presumptively unlawful was suddenly decriminalised and the Province was faced with the prospect of the most extreme abortion regime in Europe.

On 4 November, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland launched a public consultation on the shape of new regulations due to be introduced by 31 March 2020. By examining these proposals, we can see the kind of framework the abortion industry is now working vigorously to impose across the whole of the United Kingdom.

• For the most part, abortion will be available on demand. Two “healthcare professionals”, rather than registered medical practitioners, would rubber-stamp each request - no questions asked.

• While the sale of abortifacient drugs without a prescription will remain unlawful, their use will not be an offence. This anomaly is likely to incentivise self-induced abortions.

• So-called flexibility within the system is also likely to allow abortions to take place in a greater variety of locations than currently permitted by the Abortion Act. • There is flexibility too on the question of timelimits. While the proposals envisage abortion on demand until 12 to 14 weeks gestation (around 90 per cent of abortions in England and Wales are performed before week 13), abortion would still be available up to the 22 to 24-week period, and perhaps even later, for a range of vague excuses.

However, there would be no fixed upper limit for children diagnosed with an allegedly serious mental or physical impairment.

Such a shocking regime will cause some people to call for restrictions on time limits or argue that healthy babies of healthy mothers shouldn’t be aborted. This

© LIFE ISSUES INSTITUTE

A

A BABY ELEVEN WEEKS FROM CONCEPTION (IMAGE ENLARGED)

would be a serious mistake. Abortion is always a violent attack on a vulnerable child and there is no acceptable level of violence against children. Since every member of the human family shares an equal right to life, the law must protect all unborn children regardless of their disabilities, the stage of their development or the circumstances of their conception. If respect for human life is ever to be restored the pro-life movement must insist on this without equivocation or apology.

The failure to defend the weakest and most vulnerable of our children has helped to normalise abortion.

And it is this normalisation which, more than anything else, has paved the way for decriminalisation. Only when the pro-life movement demands that the law protects all unborn babies from the lethal violence of abortion will society recognise it for what it is. And only when we elect lawmakers who are genuinely committed to defending all children without exception can we hope to defeat it.

As we busily prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ, we must not forget the hundreds of thousands of innocent children created in His image who are threatened by the evil of abortion.

1.

Section 25 of the Criminal Justice (Northern Ireland) Act 1945 continues to prohibit the destruction of a child “capable of being born alive”.

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Universal Church vs GLOBALIST CHURCH b y V O I C E O F T H E FA M I LY S TA F F

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t had little to do with the Amazon and nothing to do with evangelising the indigenous people in the region. It was not even about female ordinations or the disturbing emergence of Pachamama. What then was the Amazonian synod really about?

History is comprised of events and processes.

While events are more noticeable, it is the underlying current of ideas which cause and connect the events. The current flowing beneath the surface of the Amazon synod, and which still steers the Bark of Peter, is globalisation. It is the agenda of powerful international institutions inspired by Marxist and Masonic dreams of a utopian one world family of nations, under one government and united in one religion.

For this global one world order (which without God will be disorder) to come about the universal Church needs to be dismembered and her spiritual and moral authority dissolved in the one world power.

Since the beginning of this pontificate, advocates of globalism have enjoyed a growing influence in the Vatican. They speak regularly at events organised by the Holy See on the “critical” problems the UN says are facing humanity today. They preach against ecological “sins” – overpopulation, pollution and climate change – and hold out the promise of a happy, fulfilling life for everyone on earth. In this ideology, human suffering has no value and eternity very little relevance. By exploiting synodal proceedings, globalist ideas have been woven into Church documents in an effort to provide moral legitimacy for the agenda of saving the world from mankind. All this differs radically from the Church’s God-given “agenda” to make disciples of all nations and teach them all that Christ has commanded. (Mt. 28:18-20) Tragically, the successor of Peter has himself rejected the universal character of the Church as

WHAT ARE THE UN SDGs AND WHY IS THERE A PROBLEM? The Sustainable Development Goals, approved by the UN on 25 September 2015, consist of 17 goals and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030. While some of these goals may seem laudable, if utopian – such as ending poverty and hunger in the world, establishing equality, ensuring good health and education for everyone, everywhere by 2030 – others include targets that call for “universal access to sexual and reproductive health”.

The term “sexual and reproductive health” is commonly used by UN bodies, and by many national governments and international agencies to refer, inter alia, to access to abortion and contraception, including contraception that can have an abortifacient mode of action.

The definition of this phrase accepted by UN member states (with reservations from a number of nations) is that found in the Programme of Action of the United Nations’ International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994.4 Contraception is considered an integral part of

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“reproductive health”;5 it also states that “abortion” is a “basic component of reproductive health care services”.6 The World Health Organisation (WHO), an agency of the United Nations, also considers abortion to be an integral part of “sexual and reproductive health”. The WHO states as part of its work in the area of “sexual and reproductive health”, abortion when necessary, should be “accessible and safe”.7 Under the guise of “universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services”, UN bodies have worked unceasingly for a radical increase in the use of contraception and access to abortion worldwide.

Goal 3 of the SDGs aims to: “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.” Target 7 of this goal calls for states to: “ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes”.

Goal 5 seeks to: “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” Target 6 of this goal commits states to: “ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences”.8 Through these targets “comprehensive sexuality education programmes” which corrupt children and alienate them from their parents, are also relentlessly promoted. The course set by the UN in this area is then pursued by national governments and the collaboration of the Vatican is translated into the direction taken by the local bishops’ conferences. This is illustrated perfectly in the UK by the passage of the Children and Social Work Act 2017. One aim of this legislation, which has made Relationships Education compulsory throughout the school years and Sex Ed-

the supreme moral and spiritual authority. In May 2019, Pope Francis called for a supra-national body to enforce United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and “climate change” policies.1 Then, in September, during an inflight press conference on his return from an apostolic visit to Africa, the Holy Father said that it is our “duty” to “obey international institutions”, such as the United Nations and the European Union.2 And, the day after the Amazon synod closed, the Pontifical Academy for Sciences, members of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and governors of the Pan-Amazonian region signed a common declaration pledging to implement the UN SDGs in the Amazon.3

analysis

“By exploiting synodal proceedings, globalist ideas have been woven into Church documents in an effort to provide moral legitimacy for the agenda of saving the world from mankind. All this differs radically from the Church’s God-given ‘agenda’ to make disciples of all nations and teach them all that Christ has commanded.”

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analysis

“Under the guise of ‘universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services’ , UN bodies have worked unceasingly for a radical increase in the use of contraception and access to abortion worldwide.”

ucation compulsory in secondary schools, including Catholic schools, is to ensure that school children know “how to get further advice, including how and where to access confidential sexual and reproductive health advice and treatment”, that is, how to obtain contraception and abortion without their parents’ knowledge. They will also be taught how to pursue the sexual lifestyle of their choice in full accordance with LGBT ideology. As the Holy See has proclaimed its support for the SDGs, is it surprising that bishops in Britain have welcomed the government’s compulsory sex education curriculum?9 Yet the corruption of our children through the anti-life and anti-family sex education programmes is arguably the worst weapon used by those promoting the culture of death. As Our Saviour taught us: “And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

(Mt. 10:28) HOW DID THE AMAZON SYNOD ENDORSE THE UN AGENDA? Through its intercultural, inter-religious and ecological emphasis, the Amazon synod proved to be a major vehicle to advance the UN agenda within the Vatican.

As with the UN, the main sessions of the synod were supplemented by side events. At the UN the parallel programme is where the pro-life and pro-family groups try to influence the negotiations in spite of the efforts of organisations like International Planned Parenthood to shut them out. UN envoys also set up parallel events in the Vatican, although by no means seeking to challenge the synod’s proceedings. These events, which place the deliberations of the synod in a wider context, include: First Summit of Amazonian Governors On 28 October, the day after the synod closed, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, members of a UN

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Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), and governors of the Pan-Amazonian region (all from socialist parties) signed a common declaration to enforce the SDGs in the Amazon.

Present at the meeting was Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, a special advisor to the UN Secretary-General António Guterres on the SDGs and the head of the Sustainable Solutions Network, which played a central role in drafting the SDGs. In his book The Age of Sustainable Development, published in March 2015, Sachs argued for reducing the birth rate in Africa and called for governments to encourage their populations to lower family size by promoting birth control and providing access to free or low-cost contraception and family planning.10 In 2011 he called for the Nigerian government “to work towards attaining a maximum of three children [per family].”11 His 2008 book, Commonwealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, argued that abortion was a cost-effective way to eliminate “unwanted children” and reduce a country’s total fertility rates “by as much as half a child on average.”12 Prof. Sachs has given around twenty-five talks in the Vatican during the current pontificate. Archbishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, has justified the role increasingly played by Sachs in Holy See events.

Apparently oblivious to the warning from St James that: “whosoever shall keep the whole law, but offend in one point, is become guilty of all” (Jm. 2:10), the Archbishop has insisted that Sachs does not express his pro-abortion opinions on these occasions.13 The 28 October declaration claims that the world’s “climate and humanitarian crisis” demands “rapid, integrated and urgent action”. Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register reported that the terms “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights” were not mentioned in the governors’ dec-

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laration: “Instead, all the pledges are temporal in nature relating to the environment, science and socioeconomics.”14 However, as another source in Pentin’s report also implied, what is important for the globalist powers, is to forge collaboration in the areas such as climate change, deemed “critical” by both the UN and the pope. Once there is a co-operation in these well-funded areas, the diminishing number of policy differences can be dealt with in due course.

Pentin also noted that during the 28 October meeting, “the governors expressed a wish to partner with the Church and any organisation that sought to preserve the Amazon”.15 A partnership on such terms can no doubt be extended to bodies that differ diametrically from the Catholic Church in their goals and values. For example, Diane Montagna reports that the donors and partners of the Amazonian branch of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN-A) include the pro-abortion, pro-gender theory Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.16 Pentin revealed that the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM), which effectively ran the Amazon Synod, accepted generous funding from the pro-abortion and pro-gender theory Ford Foundation that has Cecile Richards, the former CEO of Planned Parenthood, on its board of trustees.17 The Ford Foundation, not surprisingly, features in the partnership platform of a number of UN initiatives set up to implement the SDGs. H.E. Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, the relator general of the Amazon synod and president of REPAM and H.E. Cardinal Pedro R Barreto, its vice president, were also present at the 28 October meeting.

A week later, perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, 11,000 scientists endorsed an article declaring that the world population must be stabilised and then reduced because a “climate emergency” threatens “the fate of humanity”. The article, written by the Alliance of World Scientists and published in BioScience, stated: “Still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 per day...the world population must be stabilised - and, ideally, gradually reduced within a framework that ensures social integrity”.18 Claire Chretien of LifeSiteNews also pointed out that the authors cite John Bongaarts, a population control activist, who spoke at the Vatican in 2017:

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“There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss.

These policies make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women.”

Special guests at the Amazon synod Joining Jeffrey Sachs as a special invitee to the Amazon synod was the former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon who has promoted the “right to abortion” worldwide19 and violated the UN consensus that the abortion issue should be left to individual nations when he criticised the lack of “safe abortion” in war-zones. Among other invitees was Prof. Hans J. Schellnhuber, a climate alarmist and promoter of one world government, who advised Pope Francis when he wrote Laudato si and was also on the panel presenting the encyclical in the Vatican.

Brazilian deputies’ meeting with the synod fathers On 14 October, a group of Brazilian bishops received a delegation of leftist and communist politicians, invited to Rome by REPAM, for a parallel meeting.

Among these Brazilian deputies was Jandira Feghali, known for her strong pro-abortion views and even for opposing legislation criminalising infanticide among some Amazonian tribes.20 Feghali also participated at the 28 October meeting.21 Vatican youth symposium Halfway through the synod, the Holy See and the SDSN hosted a Vatican youth symposium at the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

This conference, which reportedly took place in the Vatican for the fourth consecutive year, was set up to discuss the promotion of the SDGs. Diane Montagna of LifeSiteNews pointed out that the SDSNYouth website features a young lawyer boasting of travelling around India promoting contraception and abortion.22 Montagna also reported that the meeting, which was opened by Bishop Sorondo and Jeffrey Sachs, highlighted the important role education will play in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals. SDSN has already established a wide network 7

analysis

that targets universities and schools through its Global Schools Program, she wrote.

“Global Pact” for “new humanism” In September, just before the synod, Pope Francis announced his initiative for a “Global Pact” to create a “new humanism”. The theme of this event, to take place at the Vatican on 14 May 2020, is Reinventing the Global Educational Alliance. According to the Vatican, the Pope is inviting representatives of the main religions, international organisations and various humanitarian institutions, as well as key figures from the world of politics, economics and academia, and prominent athletes, scientists and sociologists. Diane Montagna of LifeSiteNews reported that participants will sign a “Global Pact on Education” so as to “hand on to younger generations a united and fraternal common home”. In a video message to launch the initiative, Pope Francis quoted an aphorism often used by Hillary Clinton: “It takes a village to raise a child”, and asserted the need to create an “educational village”, in which “all people, according to their respective roles, share the task of forming a network of open, human relationships”.23 The Pope has tasked the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education with organising the Global Educational Alliance initiative.

Vatican endorsement of the SDGs prior to the Amazon Synod Pope Francis addressed the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2015, on the day the SDGs were formally approved. He said: “The adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the World Summit, which opens today, is an important sign of hope”.24 On 1 September 2016, Pope Francis gave his strong endorsement to the SDGs, stating he was “gratified that in September 2015 the nations of the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, and that, in December 2015, they approved the Paris Agreement on climate change”.25 Since that date he has publicly endorsed on the SDGs on a number of other occasions.

His support for the SDGs is reflected by that offered by various other organs of the Holy See, and especially by Pontifical Academy of Science (PAS) and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS).

These bodies have hosted regular events promoting the agenda of the SDGs, at which key proponents 8

of abortion and population control, including SDG drafter Jeffrey Sachs, have played a leading role.

Incidentally, at the time of its publication, Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si was welcomed with great enthusiasm by Jeffrey Sachs and other globalist agents, who claimed that the encyclical “made possible” the passage of the SDGs in September 2015, as well as the Paris Climate Agreement in December 2015 that welcomes the SDGs.26 CONCLUSION If just one event could summarise the Amazon synod and its underlying current it would probably be the celebration and renewal of the little-known Pact of the Catacombs on 20 October. This pact, made at the close of Vatican II in 1965, marked the beginning of liberation theology and links today’s crisis with the revolutionary processes of the past. As Julio Loredo of Tradition, Family and Property explained to the National Catholic Register, one of the main tenets of liberation theology is “precisely the fusion between faith and politics”.27 Liberation theology, which seeks the eradication of poverty, not the sanctification of the poor, ran like a red thread through the synod.

Its early proponents went on to apply its method to environmental issues. Loredo said “many of the synod’s main players”, such as Cardinal Hummes, the synod’s relator general, and Bishop Erwin Kräutler, a principal synod organiser, “come from Marxist liberation theology” and that Leonardo Boff, a former priest and a “main source of inspiration” for Laudato si, has “never disavowed Marxism.”28 The new world order does not attempt to destroy religion by violence as the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century did. You can be Catholic, as long as you recognise the “real problems” dictated by the UN and commit to their global solution. The degree to which these problems are genuine is irrelevant.

What matters is that in the eyes of the world they are an existential threat that demands the exercise of global power.

There is nothing that the universal Church, the Bride of Christ, can learn or benefit from cooperating with the globalist powers of this world. There is much, however, that advocates of one world order can gain from this “partnership”; the annihilation of Catholicism. Not one of the temporal problems

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ever faced by humanity – poverty, hunger, disease, or natural disasters, tragic as these are – compares to the eternal problems caused by mortal sin. There is only one institution on earth which can save men from the eternal consequences of sin and that is the Catholic Church. The betrayal of her God-given mission to preach the Gospel and baptise all nations will only make the enemies of the Church rejoice. And there is only one critical goal for every Catholic: to grow in love for Jesus Christ so we can dwell with Him for all eternity in Heaven. “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”(Mt. 8:36)

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Diane Montagna, “Pope Francis calls for new ‘supranational’ authorities to enforce UN goals”, LifeSiteNews, 2 May 2019; https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/popefrancis-calls-for-new-supranational-authorities-to-enforce-UN-goals Pope Francis’ in-flight press conference: full text, Vatican News, 10 September 2019; https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-09/pope-francis-inflight-press-conference-full-text.html Diane Montagna, “Vatican academy promotes UN’s pro-abortion ‘sustainable development’ agenda in Amazon”, LifeSiteNews, 6 November 2019; https://www. lifesitenews.com/news/vatican-academy-promotes-uns-pro-abortion-sustainable-development-agenda-in-amazon United Nations, Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action, (Cairo, 1994).

See paragraphs 7.8, 7.10, 7.13, 7.23, 7.25, 12.15 and 13.14 of the document.

Paragraph 13.14 (b) states that “abortion (as specified in paragraph 8.25)” is a “basic component of reproductive health care services”. Paragraph 8.25 accepts abortion in jurisdictions where it is “not against the law”, in which circumstances it “should be safe”, and acknowledges that in some cases there may be a “need for abortion”. This paragraph is restated in chapter IV, section C, paragraph 106.k of the 1995 United Nations’ Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. The Beijing Platform for Action also promotes contraception, as can be seen, for example, in 106.u of the above quoted section. http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/Life-stages/sexual-and-reproductive-health/areas-of-work/abortion UN General Assembly, Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 21 October 2015. The text of the Sustainable Development Goals

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can be downloaded at: http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/ RES/70/1&Lang=E For the full account of how the Bishops of England and Wales have supported and promoted the government’s Children and Social Work Act, see Dr Tom Rogers, “Compulsory relationships and sex education – how Catholic Church Officials have betrayed parents and children”, Calx Mariae, Issue 4. Spring 2019.

Jeffrey Sachs, The Age of Sustainable Development, Kindle Edition, (2015), p. 159.

“Nigeria population: Sachs’ three-baby plan ‘tricky’”, British Broadcasting Corporation, 24 May 2011; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13530649 Jeffrey Sachs, Commonwealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Kindle Edition (2011), pp. 189-90.

Diane Montagna, “Speaker tells Vatican conference: Reducing population is best solution to climate ‘crisis’”, LifeSiteNews, 16 November 2017, https://www. lifesitenews.com/news/speaker-tells-vatican-conference-reducing-population-is-best-solution-to-cl Edward Pentin, “Pontifical Academy of Sciences Embraces UN’s ‘Sustainable Development’ Agenda”, National Catholic Register, 4 November 2019; http:// www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/pontifical-academy-of-sciences-embraces-uns-sustainable-development-agenda#When:2019-11-5 Edward Pentin, “Pontifical Academy of Sciences Embraces UN’s ‘Sustainable Development’ Agenda”, National Catholic Register, 4 November 2019.

Diane Montagna, “Vatican academy promotes UN’s pro-abortion ‘sustainable development’ agenda in Amazon”, LifeSiteNews, 6 November 2019; https://www. lifesitenews.com/news/vatican-academy-promotes-uns-pro-abortion-sustainable-development-agenda-in-amazon Edward Pentin, “Pro-Abortion Ford Foundation Major Funder of Key Synod Organizations”, National Catholic Register, 17 October 2019; http://www.ncregister. com/daily-news/ford-foundation Claire Chretien, “11,000 scientists demand population control because of ‘climate emergency’”, LifeSiteNews, 5 November 2019; https://www.lifesitenews.com/ news/11000-scientists-demand-population-control-because-of-climate-emergency In September 2010 at the Human Rights Council in Geneva and Navanethem Pillay, the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, launched a report “on discrimination against women, in law and practice, and how the issue is addressed throughout the United Nations human rights system”. In that report they called for the policing of nations worldwide to “address the refusal of physicians to perform legal abortions”.

Edward Pentin, “Key Questions About Brazilian Politicians’ Synod Visit Remain Unanswered”, National Catholic Register, 25 October 2019; http://www.ncregister. com/blog/edward-pentin/key-questions-about-brazilian-politicians-synod-visit-remain-unanswered Diane Montagna, “Vatican academy promotes UN’s pro-abortion ‘sustainable development’ agenda in Amazon”, LifeSiteNews, 6 November 2019; https://www. lifesitenews.com/news/vatican-academy-promotes-uns-pro-abortion-sustainable-development-agenda-in-amazon Diane Montagna, “Vatican hosts youth conference with pro-abortion UN activists”, LifeSiteNews, 8 November 2019; https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/vaticanhosts-youth-conference-with-pro-abortion-un-activists Diane Montagna, “Pope Francis invites religious, political leaders to sign ‘Global Pact’ for ‘new humanism’”, LifeSiteNews, 13 September 2019; https://www. lifesitenews.com/news/pope-francis-global-education-pact Address of the Holy Father, Meeting with the members of the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization, 25 September 2019; http://www.vatican. va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/september/documents/papa-francesco_20150925_onu-visita.html Voice of the Family, “Pope Francis ‘gratified’ by UN goals that demand ‘universal access to sexual and reproductive health’”, 2 September 2016; http://voiceofthefamily.com/pope-francis-gratified-by-un-goals-that-demand-universal-accessto-sexual-and-reproductive-health/ Lianne Laurence, “Pope’s climate encyclical ‘made possible’ passage of pro-abortion SDGs: UN leader”, LifeSiteNews, 22 July 2016; https://www.lifesitenews. com/news/popes-climate-encyclical-made-possible-passage-of-pro-abortionsdgs-un-lead Edward Pentin, “The Political Pan-Amazon Synod”, National Catholic Register, 15 November 2019; http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/the-political-pan-amazon-synod Edward Pentin, “The Political Pan-Amazon Synod”, National Catholic Register, 15 November 2019.

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FOCUS

PHOTO CREDIT: don Elvir Tabaković, Can. Reg.

Church Militant

FIGHTING AS THE

We are the Church Militant. But, as with any army, the soldiers must understand certain things and follow certain rules in order to do their duty, excel in their individual service and, more importantly, win the battle.

Firstly, they need to recognise that they are in a fight; that they are soldiers and that they are on a battlefield. The image of a soldier, who in the midst of a battle, ignores reality and refuses to join the fight is striking but this is essentially the position of baptised Catholics who refuse to engage in the perennial battle against our ancient enemy or even reject the idea that there is a fight at all. True, we all have different roles in this battle: some are generals, some their advisors, some soldiers on the frontline, some take care of the camp, and some are called to console and care for the wounded. While we do not all fight in the same way, we are all in the same battle.

Secondly, as members of the Church Militant, we need to know what it is we are fighting for: the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls.

Having accepted these points, there are other key principles that all the soldiers of the Church Militant need to bear in mind. Three of these principles are featured in the FOCUS section of this issue.

• The spirit of our fight needs to reflect the purpose of the fight. The soul of our apostolate determines the nature and eventual success of our fight.

• Our spiritual warfare is for each and every soul. Only if they understand the full extent of the war will our soldiers fight well.

• If we want the Church Militant to grow in numbers and in strength, we must continually mobilise new soldiers. This is why each year Voice of the Family brings a group of young Catholics to Rome for a week long programme of prayer and formation.

In the fight today, we are largely on our own. We must pray that God will send us more generals - good cardinals and bishops to lead us in battle. We are foot soldiers on the field, the little children of Our Lady, the most insignificant part of the Church Militant. But it is the most insignificant part of her body, the heel - calx Mariae - that will crush the head of the devil. At this time of trial, let Our Lady be our Commander-in-Chief. In the end, the Immaculate Heart will triumph but only if we share in the fight, shall we share in the joy of her triumph.

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apostolate

THE SOUL OF THE

b y P R O F. R O B E RTO D E M AT T E I

This talk was given at the Voice of the Family conference Created for heaven: the mission of Catholic young adults in today’s world, which was held in Rome on 1 October 2019.

THE UNEQUAL LAW OF THE UNIVERSE n 17 June 2019, the Vatican issued a preparatory document for the Synod on the Amazon which presents the earth in which we live as a gigantic biosphere, an ecosystem, which includes God within it and in which the supreme law is that of the equality and interconnection of all things. The forest of the Amazon is said to constitute the model to which the Church ought to look for inspiration.

In the document we read that the Amazon is the land where “everything is connected” (no. 20); everything is “constitutively related, forming a vital whole” (no. 21). There is no qualitative difference between God and nature, just as there is no qualitative difference between, animals, plants and men. A rapport of interconnection is said to link man to his habitat, but this rapport excludes any sense of primacy or hierarchy.

In reality, the law of the universe is inequality. In the Book of Genesis, which is the Biblical account of creation, God demonstrates his anti-egalitarianism, creating different kingdoms at their respective times.

There is a mineral kingdom, a vegetable kingdom, an animal kingdom, each distinct from the other, but each of them with their particular characteristics which make a common kingdom of them, ordained as a hierarchy towards the same end, which is God. The ordinatio ad unum, non-inter-connection, is the supreme law of the universe.

Quaestio 47 of the first part of the Summa Theologiae is dedicated to the plurality and diversity of things in general. The distinction and multiplicity of

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things, Saint Thomas explains, comes from God “who has brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures and be represented by them.”1 Every created thing comes from God and tends toward God, this is their common element. But each thing is distinct from other things because it partially reflects a diverse attribute of God. Let’s consider, for example, the star-filled night sky, the spectacle which most closely unites us to God. Each star is distinct from the other, but a myriad of stars make up the sky. The same is true if we contemplate the ocean, immense in its unity and its variety. It is one single expanse of water, but there are different movements of the waves, different depths and colours of the water, and the sound of the ocean is different depending on whether it is tranquil or in a tempest.

Now let’s imagine a day in winter when snow is falling from the sky. Not one snowflake is the same as the other. If we look at them under a microscope, each one has its own unique form. Some of these have the perfect symmetry of a star, others resemble hexagons, prisms, or other geometric forms, but together they form one substance: snow.

Then there is man. Everyone is different, but also unique and unrepeatable. It is impossible for two people to have the same DNA. It is never perfectly identical in two people, not even the DNA of two identical twins. Or, more precisely: the genetic sequence is the same, but it functions differently. And yet all people, who are each physically, psychologically, and CAL X M A R IA E

THE FRUITS OF GRACE In men, the inequality between souls is greater than that between bodies.

Every soul is different because each one has a different vocation and receives a different level of grace from God. Loving the legitimate and just inequalities means loving the work of God. St Thérèse of the Child Jesus writes: “I often asked myself why God had preferences, why all souls did not receive an equal measure of grace. I was filled with wonder when I saw extraordinary favours showered on great sinners like St

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Paul, St Augustine, St Mary Magdalene, and many others, whom he forced, so to speak, to receive His grace. In reading the lives of the saints I was surprised to see that there were certain privileged souls, whom Our Lord favoured from the cradle to the grave, allowing no obstacle in their path which might keep them from mounting towards Him, permitting no sin to soil the spotless brightness of their baptismal robe. And again it puzzled me why so many poor savages should die without having even heard the name of God. “Our Lord has deigned to explain this mystery to me. He showed me the book of nature, and I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy.

I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord’s living garden. He has been pleased to create great saints who may be compared to the lily and the rose, but He has also created lesser ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets flowering at His feet, and whose mission it is to gladden His divine eyes when He deigns to look down on them. And the more gladly they do His will the greater is their perfection.

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PHOTO CREDIT: don Elvir Tabaković, Can. Reg.

morally different from one another, have something in common: human nature, which makes each one a rational person, endowed with soul and body, sharing a common destiny. To man, as Saint Gregory says, God gives something of each creature: “being, in common with the stones; life, in common with the trees; feelings, in common with the animals; and understanding, in common with the angels.”2 From the arid sands of the desert and the tiniest living microorganisms to man and the angels, every creature has its own grade of perfection which, according to an ascensional dynamism, leads to the Creator, the ultimate transcendent and uncreated good of the universe.

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“[...] As the sun shines both on the cedar and on the floweret, so the Divine Sun illumines every soul, great and small, and all correspond to his care – just as in nature the seasons are so disposed that on the appointed day the humblest daisy shall unfold its petals.”

Thus there exists a divine predilection by which there are souls who receive greater graces because they are more loved by God. There exist people who are greater than others, but no one would be greater than another if they were not more loved by God, who is the cause of every good.3

We must not imagine that it happens in an extraordinary manner. The error of the charismatic movements is that they seek impossible shortcuts, they seek the extraordinary without understanding the ordinary movement of grace.

God, who is the first cause of all that exists, speaks to us each day through secondary causes, through all creatures, both material and spiritual, who daily exercise an influence on us which are called actual graces. God does not show us the path of our life, but he has preordained it from all eternity for our good, in every tiniest detail, because even the hairs of our head have been counted (Mt. 10:30) and not one of

“The beauty of the Church consists in the variety of vocations which are expressed within her. The number of vocations is as big as the number of rational creatures, but they all converge toward a single end, which is the glory of God, the first cause and final end of the created universe.”

The grace of God is not lacking to anyone, and if grace is taken away from someone, the cause is not God but the creature who deliberately resists his gifts.

True, even fidelity to the grace of God is a gift of God, because the good that we do comes only from God, but man alone is responsible for his infidelity because we alone are responsible for the evil that we do.

God distributes his graces in different ways, but why does Our Lord love each one of us with a unique and unrepeatable love? Because each creature reflects a fragment of the infinite divine perfection.

For this reason, the beauty of the Church consists in the variety of vocations which are expressed within her. The number of vocations is as big as the number of rational creatures, but they all converge toward a single end, which is the glory of God, the first cause and final end of the created universe.

One’s vocation is not the self-determination of a man who chooses what he wants to become. It is not what we want, but rather the response to what God wants from us.

But how are we able to know what God wants from us?

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them falls without His permission (Lk. 21:18). The union of our will with the will of God, that comes to us by means of actual graces, produces an increase of sanctifying grace, which we receive with the sacraments of the Church.

It is worthwhile to make every effort to acquire the smallest degree of sanctifying grace, and if we do not it is because the grace is not visible to our eyes. And yet, says Pope Pius XII, the world of grace is a world which we cannot grasp with our external physical senses, but which is no less true than the light of the sun which illumines our world.4 What is certain is that there is no greater good than grace, and the smallest degree of grace is worth more than all the goods of this world. Thus to bring grace to a soul means to give it a gift that is worth more than all the goods of this world.

To convert a soul, mortally wounded by sin, says Fr Scheeben, is a work that is greater than raising someone from the dead.5 Such miracles, in fact, confer material life, but grace gives spiritual life. It is only God who converts, but we must be instruments of divine grace, in order to work the miracle of the conversion of souls. For this reason, Cardinal Merry del Val said: CAL X M A R IA E

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“Da mihi animas coetera tolle” – “Give me souls and take everything else away from me”. Every member of the Church militant ought to have this spirit of the apostolate. For Dom Chautard, the essence of the apostolate is for the apostle to superabundantly develop the grace of God in his soul and transmit it to others.6 Indeed, man’s true life is not his superficial and external bodily existence that is destined to decay and die, but the immortal life of the soul. “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” the Gospel asks (Mk. 8:36-37).

Each of us ought to be a conqueror of souls, by word and example. The success of this apostolate is not born from what Cardinal Mermillod called the “heresy of good works”, but from our interior life.

Our interior life bears fruit that is not only personal and individual but also social.

The Christian civilisation that we are defending, the Christianity that we want to restore in the 21st century, is a fruit and a consequence of the interior life of our religion. As a result, the struggle for the restoration of Christian civilisation, and thus the true counter-revolution, necessarily takes place by means of the restoration and the development of the interior life.

WHAT IS THE INTERIOR LIFE? What do we mean by the interior life? We may say that the interior life is the life of the soul, but this definition is not enough. We know that man is a composite of soul and body, and we know from the Catholic faith and by right reason that the soul is the uniting and vital principle of man. The body of man lives by means of the soul. Properly speaking the death of man is nothing other than the separation of body and soul: this is not a medical thesis, this is a philosophical thesis which would be sufficient to resolve the problem of transplants or many other pseudo-scientific problems that are discussed in our days.

The moment the soul separates from the body, the body is deprived of its principle vital unifier and begins its disordering, its decomposition, and thus its death.

But if it is true that the soul is the vital principle of the body, if it is true that man is composed of a body and a soul, what is the vital principle of the soul? The vital principle of the soul is God Himself, and just as the death of the body is the separation of the body

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from the soul, the death of the soul is the separation of the soul from God; thus the life of the soul is the supernatural life, the life of God in us.

This supernatural life, this life of the soul, begins with baptism, through which the sacramental grace implants grace in us. A baptised man is the man who, by means of the supernatural gifts that he receives in baptism and other sacraments of the Church, undergoes an interior transformation, a radical renewal that overturns his scale of values, replacing the principles of the world with the principles of the Gospel.

The life of grace is a new life, that unites us to God and makes us similar to Him. It has its foundation in Jesus Christ: “I am the vine, you are the branches.”

(John 15: 5) And it is in this life that we understand the other words of Our Lord: “I am the only Way, Truth, and Life.” (John 14:1-6)

There is no true life, an authentic life, that is, a life of the soul, a supernatural life, outside of Jesus Christ who is the only Truth, the only Way. And this leads us to say that a true interior life is not possible outside of the Church and her sacraments.

The supernatural virtues that are infused by baptism in our soul develop in a man in a state of grace day by day through the use that we make of these gifts. And it is for this reason that, with a beautiful expression, Monsignor Delassus writes that “the entrance into heaven will be the birth – our birth – just as if baptism was the conception.”7

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However, the sacramental life is not sufficient.

The interior life means not only constant prayer and assiduously receiving the sacraments, but also an effort to always conform, in thought and action, to the doctrine, practice and examples of Jesus Christ and of the Catholic Church. Dom Chautard defines the interior life as “the state of activity of a soul which strives against its natural inclinations in order to regulate them, and endeavours to acquire the habit of judging and directing its movements in all things according to the light of the Gospel and the example of Our Lord.”8 This definition is important because it sets the spiritual life on an objective foundation, the Divine Law, and not on a purely individual experience.

In an article published in Legionário on 30 April 1939, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira wrote: “To think as the Church thinks, to feel as the Church feels, to act as the Church commands, and then to recognise in all this the work of God in us: behold the ideal of the interior life.”9 In an article dedicated to Pope Pius XII in the same journal on 14 March 1943, Prof. de Oliveira explained how the interior life presupposes an ascetic effort to fight the inclinations to evil and error coming from our nature corrupted by original sin. To live the interior life man needs to examine himself and his defects with a firm resolution to correct and amend himself.

“Hence the expression, ‘interior life’. Man must be engaged in constant self-analysis. He needs to know how his soul is at all times; why he is acting in this or that way; if it is licit for him to proceed in this or that way; whether feeling in this or that way regarding a certain event conforms to Catholic morals. This effort is called ‘life’ not only because it governs every man’s life but because it is so intense and should be so continuous that it is for man like a parallel existence that unfolds on a higher and deeper plane than his outer existence. And it is called ‘interior life’ precisely because it requires man to have the uninterrupted habit of analyzing and governing himself, acting and living ‘within himself ’ incessantly.”10

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INTERIOR LIFE IS NOT POSSIBLE OUTSIDE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH If, as we have seen, the interior life is the fruit of the Christian corresponding to divine grace, which has its source in Jesus Christ and its channels in the sacraments of the Church, it is evident that an authentic interior life is not possible outside of the Catholic religion.

Let us consider, for example, what are referred to as the two great monotheistic religions, Islam and Judaism.

Islam and Judaism are religions that are abysmally distant from Catholicism, not only in terms of truth and doctrine, but in terms of life, because neither of these two false religions know a true interior life; they are religions that are purely formal and exterior because they do not lead to a transformation, to a “new life” of the soul.

Thus Judaism as it developed after the death of Our Lord, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, is a religion that may be defined as “Talmudism” or as a strictly ritual cult of the law.

The same can be said for Islam. For a “conversion” to Islam what is required, apart from a generic rational profession of the so-called faith, by which one recognises in Allah the one true God, is a series of acts that are purely formal such as the pilgrimage to Mecca once a year, fasting during the time of Ramadan, almsgiving and ritual prayer. Outside of these formal prescriptions, no interior transformation of the soul is required. This perhaps explains the very close historical rapport between Islam and Judaism. They are both “religions of the book”, devoid of church, devoid of priesthood, devoid of sacrifice, devoid of supernatural life.

Let us consider instead Christianity in its history.

It is born as and qualifies as an interior religion.

The mandate that Our Lord gave to his Apostles was to go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature (Mk. 16:15). He did not speak of a holy war, he did not speak of a conquest of the world with armies, but of a propagation by means of the sacrifice and preaching of the Apostles, of the martyrs, of missionaries. In contrast with Islam, which in the course of its history expanded itself from a purely exterior point of view because it knew and knows nothing of the conquest of souls but only of Jihad, the CAL X M A R IA E

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“The Christian civilisation that we are defending, the Christianity that we want to restore in the 21st century, is a fruit and a consequence of the interior life of our religion. As a result, the struggle for the restoration of Christian civilisation, and thus the true counter-revolution, necessarily takes place by means of the restoration and the development of the interior life.” brutal conquest of force, Christianity has propagated itself during its history and continues to propagate itself still today, not by violence but by means of the conversion of souls, because brute force can impose a purely exterior adhesion, but it cannot produce a profound conversion of the heart. But, for this very reason, because of the fact that Christianity is the one religion that is truly interior, Christianity is the one religion that has civil and social fruits. Why is this?

Because Christianity converts in radice, and by converting men in radice it changes them, it transforms their entire mode of being, it produces historic fruits. The fruits are its action in society: Christian civilisation.

We can think of clear examples of this. It is enough to recall the understanding of woman in the pagan world. Christianity profoundly transformed society, recognising in woman the same spiritual dignity as in man, a dignity which is still denied by Islam, it raised marriage to a sacrament and based the Christian family on this, a family that, thanks to this transformation, became a cultural, moral, and social environment that shapes and transforms people.

Another obvious example is that of slavery. No one recalls the brutal conditions in which slavery existed in the pagan world. Today people speak much about the conditions of misery or even of slavery in which people lived in the Middle Ages, but they forget that before Christianity the majority of the human race was in chains. In the so-called “most civilised city” of the classical world, Athens, there were 30,000 free men and 400,000 slaves, that is, a ratio of free men to slaves was 1 to 20. Who was it who in the course of the centuries abolished the institution of slavery?

Was it perhaps Plato or Aristotle? Was it the philosophers of the pagan politicians? What was it if not the power of Christianity in history? And how could

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this extraordinary change that was the end of slavery have taken place, the passage from ancient slavery to the freedom of the mediaeval world, if not thanks to the work of Christianity?

The native peoples of South America practiced cannibalism, infanticide, human sacrifice. It was not the arms of the conquistadors but the words and example of the missionaries that converted and civilised them.

But what power did Christianity have to produce this? It was certainly not the force of arms, that Christianity did not have and which would not have been sufficient; but it was the interior force of Christianity.

Christianity and only Christianity is capable of transforming society, and the society transformed by Christianity is called Christian civilisation, it is called Christendom. Because Christianity is an interior religion, it is able to transform every social aspect of society. It permeates and transforms laws, institutions, customs, politics, art, economy, literature. This is what happened with the birth and affirmation of the mediaeval Christian world. It is what happened beginning with the baptism of Clovis, with the conversion of the great kings and Christian sovereigns, the baptism of entire nations, that was not a purely formal adherence to Christianity but was a complete upheaval of the entire life of these peoples, it was a passage from pagan barbarism to the great and luminous mediaeval Christian civilisation.

Christian civilisation is a social body that has a vital principle: a soul, an interior life.

THE DUTY TO DEFEND CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION It is therefore important to understand and emphasise the distinction but also the strict rapport between

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these two spheres: the interior sphere and the exterior sphere.

We may say that Christianity does not want to impose conversion exteriorly, in the sense that no one can be forced to have faith. But once this faith has conquered souls, and by means of their conversion has transformed the environments in which these souls live, Christians have the obligation to defend the social fruit of faith. Christian doctrine speaks of a just war, it speaks of legitimate self-defence. This just war and legitimate self-defence, which are permitted by Catholic doctrine for the sake of material goods, are all the more so permitted for the sake of spiritual goods.

We may give a concrete example in the life of the family. A Christian family can only be born from the conversion of a father of the family or some member of the family. Following the conversion of one man, of the father or mother, a new environment can be born.

This is a social reality, the fruit of an interior conversion. This fruit merits to be defended and should be defended, even exteriorly.

Faith cannot be imposed with force, because the kingdom of God is interior. But once the interior reign of God has produced its exterior fruits, one has the right to defend such fruits. Defend them how? Defend them by helping the good to develop where it

is spontaneously born and reproving evil wherever it manifests itself exteriorly. There is no right to the liberty of evil and error; only the truth and the good have the natural right to exist.

This was the historic role of Charlemagne and his armies, the role of the conquistadors and the crusaders. In this role, the sword did not replace the Cross, as happened in Islam or in external religions, but rather placed itself at the service of the Cross, in the sense that it defended the diffusion of the truth, permitting the social development of Christianity.

The soldiers of Charlemagne or the conquistadors permitted missionaries to carry out their mandate, and thus their own work was principally that of defending Christian civilisation. The names of Lepanto, Vienna, Budapest, the names of the great victories in the history of Christianity, are the names of battles fought – not to impose the faith – but to defend Christian civilisation from the enemy’s aggression - Islamic aggression, or any other sort of aggression.

Christian civilisation that is defended with the sword is by its nature expansive, because “bonum est diffusivum sui”. When we speak of expansion we speak of a work of diffusion, of reconquest, of restoration, not with the sword but with the Cross, that is, with the interior life. An interior life that has its foundation

CRUCIFIXION (DETAIL), 1308–1311, DUCCIO DI BUONINSEGNA, MUSEO DELL'OPERA DEL DUOMO, SIENA.

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in the Cross, because the sacrifice par excellence, that is the sacrifice on the Cross of Our Lord, is the one that opened the gates of Paradise, restored supernatural life to man that had been lost after original sin, opened to humanity the supernatural treasures that the world had been deprived of until the Incarnation.

By the effect of the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Our Lord, the soul has received the interior life, true religion, from the Church by means of the sacraments.

From the interior life then, there are derived the great social fruits of Christianity, and it is for this reason that we may legitimately say that the Middle Ages, the great Christian civilisation of centuries past, was, strictly speaking, the fruit of the Passion and Death of Our Lord, of His Precious Blood that was shed.

CHRISTIAN HEROISM The Crusaders were so called because they carried on their breast the sign of the Cross, in order to express their will to fight for Our Lord Jesus Christ even to death. Their heroism was supernatural because they fought for a good of a supernatural nature, which was the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher.

There is a natural heroism that we rightly admire, but there is also a supernatural heroism that we ought to admire even more than natural heroism. This heroism is the fruit of grace, it is holiness. Heroism, explains Fr Calmel, consists “in the greatness of the soul pushed even to the extreme point of voluntarily undergoing death for the goods that surpass us”.11 Holiness is heroic, explains the French theologian, not because every saint must undergo the torments of the martyrs, but because every saint is ready, for the love of God, to face up to suffering and death.

The heroism of holiness differs from human heroism because of its universality. Natural heroism is possible to a few, but supernatural heroism is possible for every man if he decided to correspond fully to divine grace, which is the love that Jesus has revealed to the world.

The saint is the one who “has fully accepted to be loved by God as God desires to love him and who has never ceased to respond to his love.”12 Jesus calls everyone to heroism, and heroism consists in corresponding every day to what God asks of us.

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Today God asks everyone, priests and laity, men and women, young and old, to fight in defence of the Church, humiliated, ridiculed, and disfigured by the men who have the mission of guarding her. We ask therefore for the grace of heroism and perseverance, turning to the Blessed Mother with the words with which a great apostolic man, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, addressed his prayer to Her: “O Our Mother and Our Lady, as the soldier does not choose the field of battle, but is ready to make the offering of his life on any terrain, grant also that we may know how to fight against the overt and hidden enemies of Your Name and of the Holy Church, wherever you wish to send us, whether anonymously or in glory, whether in the invisible and impalpable heroism of mundane everyday life or in the tragic clashes and pre-announced events of the message of Fatima. We implore this grace of you as a favour which we are not worthy of, and if we are not afraid of all this it is only because we know that we can trust in your Immaculate Heart with unlimited confidence: the strength of the weak, the hope of the disabled, the refuge and most sweet consolation of the humble.”

Translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino

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 and the Corrispondenza Romana News Agency.

ENDNOTES: 1.

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5.

6.

7.

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12.

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 47, a. 1.

St Gregory the Great, Homil. 29 super Evang. Gen. 2, 10, in J. P. Migne, PL, 76, 1214.

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 20, a. 3.

Pius XII, Discourse to Catholic Action, 2 November 1941.

Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Le meraviglie della grazia divina, Lateran University Press, Città del Vaticano 2008, p, 49.

Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate, Tan Books 1974, pp.

53-60.

Mons. Henri Delassus, Il problema dell’ora presente, Italian translation, Cristianità, Piacenza 1977, vol. I, p. 51.

Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate, Tan Books 1974, p.14 Legionário, 30 April 1939.

Legionário, 14 March 1943.

“Dans la grandeur d’ame portée jusqu’au point extreme de subir volontairement la mort pour des biens qui nous dépassent” (R. Th. Calmel o.p., Les mystères du Royaune de la Grace, Dominique Martin Morin, Niort 1997, p. 116).

“Le saint a pleinement accepté d’etre aimé par Dieu comme Dieu désire de l’aimer, et qu’il n’a cessé de répondre à son amour” (ibid).

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Angels and demons IN SPIRITUAL WARFARE

by FR ANTHONY PILLARI

This talk was given at the Voice of the Family conference Created for heaven: the mission of Catholic young adults in today’s world, which was held in Rome on 2 October 2019.

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e sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith.” (1 Pt. 5:8-9) St Paul declares to us: “Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” (Eph. 6:11) But St Peter gave us the very first piece of the armour in this passage where he declares that your enemy is prowling like a roaring lion: “Resist him, firm in your faith”.

The devil always wants to scare us and to stir up drama. He is terribly afraid of a soul firmly rooted in faith. Because he knows that the more we live by faith, the less power he has. The devil has no power whatsoever against the Lord and His plans. He knows that he can only harm us to the degree that we separate ourselves or draw back from Jesus Christ.

St John says in one of his letters: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” (1 John 3:8) He declares that this was the whole purpose of our Saviour’s mission on earth: to destroy the work of the devil. You see that all throughout His public ministry, our Lord performed exorcisms in different ways. And on the positive side, you see the presence of the holy angels throughout Scripture and in particular in the New Testament. Our Lord speaks of them, you see them in the Acts of the Apostles, for example, when an angel freed St Peter from prison.

And each one of you, whether you know it or not, have two angels with you. Each one of you has a guardian angel who God has assigned to you to protect you and guide along the path to Heaven. But according to the Fathers of the Church, there is some-

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one else who has assigned you a personal angel.1 Each one of you has been assigned a personal devil to tempt you throughout your life.

In this talk, I will try to give you some idea of who angels are, of who devils are, and some understanding of their activity. It is a vast topic. But I am going to try to present you with some of the key points according to the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, who is known as the Angelic Doctor because of his great development of the theology of the angels, in which he also presents to us the teaching of the Fathers of the Church. And I will be making use of a recent book by Fr Serge-Thomas Bonino, a good Dominican who teaches at the Angelicum in Rome.

He is perhaps one of the foremost experts in the world today on the thought of St Thomas Aquinas on angels and demons, and his book would be a good follow up on this topic.2 CREATION OF THE ANGELS How were the angels created? Did God create “first angelic parents” who then had offspring among angels? No. In the New Testament, the Lord tells us that at the resurrection we will be “like the angels in Heaven”, who “neither marry nor are given in marriage”.

(Mt. 22:30) God created every single angel directly.

How many angels did God create? In the instant of their creation, God made enough angels to provide a guardian angel for everyone who would ever live. That is already a vast multitude. But He did not create only guardian angels. He created many angels for other tasks, chief among them being adoring and praising Him in Heaven. In fact, since this latter purpose was CAL X M A R IA E

and is the most important purpose of an angel’s life, it is likely that there were many, many more angels created for the splendour and glory of Heaven than there were created to be guardian angels. We can easily forget that every angel, before having a mission to assist and protect us in our earthly pilgrimage, was created by God out of His infinitely generous love for them.

What are angels? What are their powers and their abilities? A simple way to think about angels is that they are spiritual persons. Think about man, a person with both body and soul, but take away his body and any corporeal aspects of his actions. That will give you some idea of an angel as a spiritual person. Yet they are incredibly more intelligent than we are. This is one reason why you should never try to dialogue with the devil because he is much smarter than we are. However, just as we can feel love, hatred or jealousy, the angels can feel these things. True, the good angels don’t feel hatred or jealousy. The bad angels do feel jealousy and they have a very particular type of hatred towards us. But the good angels can rejoice. In Scripture, Our Lord says: “Angels rejoice over every sinner who converts.” (Lk. 15:10)

At the very beginning of time, the angels were created in sanctifying grace with the ability to make acts of faith, hope and love. From the very first instant of their creation, they were in the sanctifying grace, but they weren’t yet in the beatific vision. They weren’t yet in the glory of Heaven. Because if they had been, there would have been no possibility of sinning. Anyone seeing the full beauty and glory of God, could not possibly choose to turn away. So they had sanctifying grace but they had not yet chosen. They had to make a choice: to choose to trust God, to submit themselves to Him and to live by faith, hope and love. Any angel who chose that was instantly welcomed into the glory of Heaven, into the full splendour of God’s presence, and rejoiced with indescribable joy. And they then received a fullness of revelation.

THE FALL OF THE ANGELS What was the choice though of the fallen angels?

How did they fall from grace? We know the effects of their choice from what St Peter tells us: “God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgment.” (2 Pt. 2:4) And St Jude

THE ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN (DETAIL),1475–1476, FRANCESCO BOTTICINI, THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.

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declares: “The angels did not keep their own position, but left their proper dwelling and have been kept by [God] in eternal chains in the deepest darkness until the judgement of the great day.” (Jude 1:6) What was the great sin of the fallen angels that led them to be condemned for eternity to Hell? Because of the angels’ perfect knowledge when they made their choice they were never going to change their mind whether their choice was for or against God. The ones who chose for God for all eternity are with God, are the good angels, their will is oriented forever towards God. Those who turned away from Him, they made a choice that they will never change.

Angels were created with a certain fullness of knowledge about God’s goodness on a natural level,

he also knew that to accept that happiness, that gift, he would have to accept God’s two conditions. First of all, this happiness could not be attained by any angels’ natural gifts, abilities or work. It would have to be received as a grace by abandoning himself to God in the obscurity of faith, by trusting in God. And secondly, he knew that this gift was being proposed to everyone – to all spiritual beings – even those far inferior to Satan in their natural abilities. The angels had different levels of natural abilities and degrees of intelligence. It seems that Satan was created as the highest of the angels in natural abilities. The acceptance of this gift would relativize the differences in the natural abilities, greatly diminishing the importance of Satan’s natural superiority to every other creature.

“Because of the angels’ perfect knowledge when they made their choice they were never going to change their mind whether their choice was for or against God. The ones who chose for God for all eternity are with God, are the good angels, their will is oriented forever towards God. Those who turned away from Him, they made a choice that they will never change.” as their Creator. They knew how good God was, how loving, how gratuitously He created them and what incredible gifts He had given them. But God then wanted them to make a choice to truly love Him in charity, or not. They had the freedom to choose. And in that instant, Satan and the angels that followed him chose the sin of pride. That is a disordered love of his own excellence, a love of self to a point of contempt of God; an unwillingness to be dependent upon God out of an unbridled love for his own excellence and will.

Satan wanted to be like God. He was too smart to think that he could actually be God. He knew that God had created the world and he couldn’t do that.

But he wanted to be like God insofar as he could.

He wanted to be treated like God. He wanted to be treated as the most excellent, as the most important, as the one to whom everything else was ordered. He knew that God was offering him a happiness, a beatitude beyond anything he had yet experienced. But 22

Satan chose to reject these conditions. He chose to cling to the possession of his natural perfection.

Because, first of all, it would distinguish him from others. If he clings to what is natural, in that domain he is the first and superior to others, which is what he desires above all else. Secondly, it belongs to him by natural right. In a certain sense, he is the master of his natural abilities. God has given them to him and he possesses them forever. He prefers to remain the first in the inferior order, the order of nature, rather than become one among others in a far superior order: the order of grace. He decides to determine for himself the goal of his life. He chooses as a goal one that he can attain by his natural resources: a full living out of his angelic powers and abilities, but without the help of grace, thereby showing contempt for the divine offer of supernatural happiness. He prefers to cling to what he controls rather than to be open to the divine call to “put out into the deep” – in other words, to let go of the control of his destiny, so as to CAL X M A R IA E

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receive his destiny from another, to be dependent on another for the fulfilment of his life.

Satan clings to control, to choosing the goal of his life himself. And ever since he has tried to lead men to make the same choice.

Does any of that temptation or sin sound familiar?

If you look around the world, you don’t have to look far at all. Our society cries out: “You can be whatever you want to be! Nothing is off-limits to you. If we work together, everything is possible for us. Don’t turn to God. Look to man and to this earth for the fulfilment of all that your heart desires. You can find it. Don’t surrender to God. Don’t accept to be dependent upon God. Don’t accept to be subservient to Him, to surrender to Him, to trust Him, to sacrifice yourself for Him.” Even if we reject, with God’s grace, the full temptation the world offers, there is a subtle temptation that could be there even for devout Catholics. We really need to be docile to the general’s orders in the spiritual battle. And that means a constant dependence on God, which does not mean being unintelligent, or not using our minds – no, we need to do that very much, to be wise and prudent, but always being submissive and docile to the guidance of the Holy Ghost. That is why St Thomas Aquinas, when he asked about the most important element of the moral life, says that it is “the grace of the Holy Ghost in the hearts of the faithful”.3 This is the number one thing that we should be docile to. According to St Thomas, the whole purpose of the gifts of the Holy Ghost which are given to us, is to render our soul docile, in each moment, to the guidance of the Holy Ghost in our life. He says that is not just for great saints, but that it is essential for the salvation of every Christian – to try each moment to be docile to God’s own guidance.

At the heart of the terrible suffering of the fallen angels is that they want everything to be ordered according to what they have chosen. They wish they were not suffering, but they don’t regret their choice.

They want to be the first in their order. They do not want to follow God’s direction. They reject God. But because they desperately want everything to be ordered according to what they have chosen, they hate the fact that the world is still ordered according to God’s divine providence. They don’t fully understand God’s designs, but they can see how God at the end WI N T E R 2 0 1 9

of the day turns all things towards the good of His creatures and towards His greater glory. They hate that. The devils are allergic to reality. They want the whole world to be ordered the way they would like it to be and they detest the reality. They detest what they encounter in the world, because they realise, ultimately, even when they manage to crucify the Son of God, that this turns to their great demise. And everything else too God ultimately makes work for His glory and for the good of His creatures. And they hate the fact that God is constantly offering to us, sinful men, the grace that they rejected – a much greater order than that they have chosen to remain in. That is why they hate you so passionately. They are envious of the fact that you might enter into – or if you are living in grace you are already in – a higher order than what they have.

THE ACTION OF THE GOOD ANGELS You are not alone in the spiritual battle. You have a multitude of good angels and in a particular way, your guardian angel who is given to fight for you and to guide you in the spiritual battle.

How do the good angels act? In what way do the good angels intervene and act in your life? According to the Fathers of the Church, there are five categories: 1. Your guardian angel can ward off dangers to body and soul, either by intervening directly on the external reality or by acting on our psyche (for example, by giving you a presentiment of danger). The angels are not omniscient. They don’t know everything. They are aware of everything that happens externally. They perceive your facial expressions, your words and all such things. They are very smart, and so they can often have a good idea of what you are thinking or feeling internally, even if they cannot directly see it. Both good and bad angels have that knowledge and they can be very aware, to a degree, of what is going on inside of you, by analysing what is going on externally.

But the good angels and your guardian angel have a very particular knowledge in addition to that. By God’s grace and particular revelation, He can show them a deeper level, what is going on inside you, or what may be coming up in the future; He can reveal to them His plans for you, and can give them special knowledge to guide you. The fallen angels do not have

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that knowledge. Because they are highly intelligent they can predict with a certain degree of probability what might be coming up, but they are not aware – and that often frustrates them and leads them to fail in the battle – of what God’s plans are. Your good angel can intervene directly either on external realities, including your body, or on your psyche.

special revelation reveals them. (However, he may have a good sense of what you are thinking by his own intelligence and analysis on the basis of what he observes in your exterior appearance). Your guardian angel can influence your mind and will by suggesting or inspiring thoughts, which leads to the second major category of his action.

• How does an angel act directly on an external physical reality? In a similar way to how our soul can choose to do something and our body (normally) obeys by raising a hand or walking, or sitting, etc. – in a similar way an angel’s spirit can command not just one body but all sorts of physical objects. Angels have the power, according to God’s permission and plans, to make the physical reality move, simply by willing it. They can, if God permits it, move your body out of danger; and of course, the fallen angels can cause problems in your body. According to St Thomas and the Fathers of the Church, the good angels have the ability even to form a body out of physical realities.

They can take material elements and in certain circumstances form and assume a body and use that to move about and intervene in the world.

So, angels can act in very concrete physical ways, when they have God’s permission and when that is part of the assignment God has given them in the world. To take two examples from Scripture: 1) when an angel appears to St Peter in prison, breaks his chains, opens the iron gates, and leads him out of the prison and into the city, and then disappears – this may well have been a case of an angel not assuming a body but simply acting on material objects through his will, and letting Peter see him in the form of a body. 2) On the other hand, when the angel Raphael comes to Tobias and accompanies him throughout his long journey – looking and acting in every way like a man and interacting with all sorts of physical objects – that extensive interaction with the physical world was the sort that likely meant he formed and assumed a body.

2. Your guardian angel can incite the soul to good and turn it away from evil, primarily by instructing it. The angel enlightens the soul not by infusing ideas into it directly but by presenting certain truths to it under sensible likenesses, thus inspiring good thoughts:

• In what ways can an angel act directly on our mind or will? Your guardian angel cannot directly make you will or think something. He cannot force your will. You are always free. Nor can he read your inner thoughts, unless God through a 24

• As St Gregory says, “The good angel presents [your] spirit with the fruits of virtue, [with] everything that those who do good see in hope.”4 Your guardian angel is always trying to lead your soul to consider the blessings and treasures that God has prepared for those who accept to follow Him on this earth in suffering and sacrifice.

• One of the earliest Christian writings, of the Shepherd of Hermas, speaking of the action of your guardian angel (using the term “spirit of justice” for your angel), declares, “…The spirit of justice is mild and reserved and meek and peaceful. When he enters into your heart, he speaks at once with you of justice and modesty and temperance and kindness and pardon and charity and paternal love.

As often as these thoughts arise in your heart, know that the spirit of justice is with you.”5 This is one way you are able to discern what kind of spirit may be inspiring you at that moment.

3. The guardian angel counteracts the malevolent activity of the demons. The devil often likes to act on aspects of man conditioned by corporeality; the guardian angel counters this by his action. Insofar as your angel protects you from the enemy’s assaults, the Fathers of the Church call him the “Angel of Peace”.

Under this title, your guardian angel has the special role of protecting you – both physically and spiritually: • St Hillary writes, “Our weakness is such that, if the guardian angels had not been given to us, we could not resist the many and powerful attacks of the evil spirits. To this end, we had need of a higher nature… [God has given the angels to us so that] this divine assistance might help us against CAL X M A R IA E

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“You are not alone in the spiritual battle. You have a multitude of good angels and in a particular way, your guardian angel who is given to fight for you and to guide you in the spiritual battle.”

the powers of this world of darkness to attain the heritage of salvation.”6 • Your guardian angel can protect you from physical harms and evils. For example, the Archangel Raphael guided and protected Tobias from many evils on his journey and healed his father Tobit. There are many examples in the lives of the saints, and also in the lives of ordinary Catholics, of guardian angels protecting them from physical harm and guiding people to safety. He can also protect you from spiritual harm which is much worse than physical harm. For example, when our soul risks being overcome by agitation, despair, or irritation, the good angels can help restore interior peace in a soul. But for your guardian angel to assist you in these ways, he needs to find in your soul a living faith – that is a faith that is animated by hope and charity. As St Gregory of Nyssa declares, “…in all our perils, provided faith remains with us, we are defended by the aid of the spiritual powers.”7 4. The guardian angel presents our prayers to God – supporting them by his own fraternal intercession.

For this activity, the Fathers of the Church call him the “Angel of Prayer”. Your guardian angel is given to you to teach and guide you in prayer. To help you when prayer is difficult, and to teach you to grow in prayer. For example, he wishes to guide your heart to pray out of love for the Most Holy Trinity, out of gratitude for all that He has done for you: out of love for Him who is your Heavenly Father, out of love for the Son who gave His life for you on the Cross, who died thinking of you, out of love for the Holy Ghost, the great “gift of God”, who lives in your soul.

5. The guardian angel corrects his ward. For this activity, the Fathers call him the “Angel of Penance”.

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TOBIAS AND THE ANGEL, 1470–1480, ANDREA DEL VERROCCHIO, THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.

conversion, greatly in need of penance. Your guardian angel, if you request his aid in this area, can help you see more clearly the reality of your sins, of your vices, of your lacks of virtue. But he is not a cruel friend who would show you these things and then refuse to help.

Rather he wishes to guide and strengthen your soul along the path of penance. The path of penance is the path of conversion, the path of learning to sacrifice yourself out of a true love for God and out of a true love for your neighbour; it is the path of learning to turn away from selfish, sinful habits. The Fathers of the Church see in the parable of the Good Samaritan an image of your guardian angel. They indicate that in this parable the innkeeper represents your good angel. They say that the souls of sinners are confided in a particular way to the care of their guardian angel, who has a role of healing and nursing them back to spiritual health.

THE ACTION OF THE FALLEN ANGELS The natural powers of the fallen angels are the same as the natural powers given to the good angels, but 25

they don’t have the help of grace. Above all, they attack us through temptation – that is, by seeking to know more deeply men’s weaknesses and to use those weaknesses to more effectively lead them into sin. The fallen angels seek to deceive men in their judgments and to sully their imagination. They cannot act directly on man’s spiritual powers: on his intelligence or free will. They can only suggest things, especially through your imagination. Nor can they directly see what you are thinking or feeling, though – as mentioned for the good angels – they are extremely intelligent and can often tell what you are thinking or feeling by what they see externally. So, the enemy attacks man’s intelligence and free will by acting indirectly, by moving material realities – outside or inside of us. For example, by acting on the weak points in our bodies or minds, on the wounded “psychosomatic conditioning” of our earthly existence and spiritual activity; and also by acting on the society we live in, by striving to make everything you encounter a danger for your soul through different temptations.

Concretely, the enemy often presents morally bad objects to a man’s mind at an angle designed to make them appear as a certain good. He can act directly on the external objects presented to our senses, manipulating the things we encounter in everyday life, or act on the senses themselves (causing a sensation of pain or pleasure, etc.); or he can present to our senses objects that are ordinary in appearance but are artificially produced by him; he can even produce false miracles aimed at leading us into error. They are false because these works, extraordinary as they seem to us, do not really transcend the power of nature: they result from the intelligent use of nature’s hidden powers. In general, he strives to create structures of sin in society, to orchestrate the sins of others so that the culture tempts everyone to sin. He always presents evil under some aspect of the good.

The famous author Bernanos described the enemy’s activity by saying: “He deceives judgements, sullies the imagination, stirs up flesh and blood, makes use of our own failures and weaknesses with infinite skill, leads our joys astray, and deepens our sorrows.

But ultimately, he cannot destroy anything without our consent.” If a soul perseveres in loving God, in believing and hoping in Him, in striving to serve Him, then the enemy’s attacks not only fail, but also become the occasion of even greater good – for the man himself, for the salvation of other souls, and for God’s greater glory.

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There are other more extraordinary types of attacks, such as obsession where the enemy acts more openly in the physical realm through noises, movements, frightening apparitions or the violent attacks that the Curé of Ars and Padre Pio experienced; or possession, where the enemy seizes and uses the body and active sense faculties of a person to accomplish wicked works. But the vast majority of attacks are in the form of temptation, as briefly described above.

The enemy loves drama. He always tries to “play a movie” in your mind’s eye: whatever difficulty you are dealing with now, it is going to be like that tomorrow and the day after it is going to get worse and in ten years’ it is going to be like this… He is doing that to scare you and to get you to pull back from faith and hope and charity. Whereas God very rarely reveals what is going to happen in the future. He says rather: “Trust me now. I am giving you sufficient grace for this day. If you co-operate today and the time comes for tomorrow or months and years from now, then I will give you the grace you are going to need at that time.”

HOW TO WIN IN THE SPIRITUAL BATTLE? One of the key strategies in the spiritual battle is the one that the Church gives every priest to recite every single evening in the prayer of Compline.

This is the passage I quoted in the beginning: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

Resist him, firm in your faith.” (1 Pt. 5:8-9) That is the first and key strategy: faith. But St Peter goes on to speak of faith in the midst of great suffering that those he is addressing in his letter are going through. It is especially when living in obedience to the Faith in the midst of suffering that you allow God to conquer and crush the enemy in your life.

St Paul tells us that Jesus Christ crucified is the power and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 18:23-24) In any area of your life when you are in need of the power and wisdom of God, you are not going to find it in any other way than in Jesus Christ crucified and in being united to Him, especially through faith.

At the heart of one of the classic works of Catholic spirituality called Abandonment to Divine Providence by Fr Jean Pierre de Caussade, is surrendering to the will of God, over and over again, in what is permitted in your life. It does not mean lying down in the face of the battle. A good and strong spirit of Christian militancy is so needed in the world and in the Church today. Rather, this abandonment actually makes you CAL X M A R IA E

Fr Anthony Pillari was born in Agana Guam (USA). He is currently the chaplain for the Usus Antiquior in the Diocese of Plymouth, UK. He holds degrees in Philosophy from University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Sacred Theology from L’Institut Catholique de Toulouse, France and in Canon Law from Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Canada.

ENDNOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

See, for example, St Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, PG 44, 337 D-340 A, cited in J. Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 90.

Angels and Demons:A Catholic Introduction, Catholic University of America Press, 2015.

Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 106, art. 1, corpus.

St Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, PG 44, 337 D-340 A, cited in J. Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 90.

Mand., 6, 2, 2-5, cited in J. Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 88.

Tract. Ps. 134, cited in J. Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 82.

Tract. Ps. 137, cited in J. Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 83.

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stronger – to surrender to God’s will, to accept and embrace the Cross which the Lord has placed in your life at this day and this moment.

Concretely this means that, for whatever sufferings and temptations are present in your life, a very helpful strategy is to turn to the Lord and make an act of surrender to His will. In the midst of other prayers or steps that you may be taking to deal with that temptation, say to God: “I surrender to Your will.

Thy will be done. If it is Your will for me to have to endure this suffering or this temptation today or for whatever period of time – if that is Your will, I am willing to accept your will. I beg You take this away, I beg You to deal with this, but I surrender to Your will.

I accept in faith whatever You are permitting, even if I cannot understand it, I surrender to Your will.” The moment you do that, you turn what the devil wants to be for your spiritual ruin into something which is helping you to grow in grace. Because by surrendering to God in this way you are making powerful acts of faith, hope and charity.

The devil really loves drama, he loves for us to be afraid. God, on the other hand, calls us to a courageous faith, through which He can grant a peace beyond anything this world can give. The more we respond to this world’s trials and tribulations with faith in Jesus Christ crucified and with a willingness to unite ourselves to Him, the Lord will triumph. As St Paul tells us “God makes all things work for the good of those who love Him.” (Rom. 8:28)

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CREATED FOR HEAVEN

The mission of Catholic young adults in today’s world ROME, 28 SEPTE MBER - 2 O CTOBER 2019

PHOTO CREDIT: don Elvir Tabaković, Can. Reg.

Widespread and profound confusion on matters of faith and morals in the world and in the Church makes the formation of a new generation of Catholic leaders vital to the future of the pro-life movement and to the future of the Church. Today we need to build our Christian civilisation anew in virtually every aspect of life. Able builders are needed for this enormous task!

That is why Voice of the Family has sought to identify young men and women who are committed to the defence of life, the family and the faith at this critical time, in order to offer them formation and fellowship to help them grow in love for the faith and uphold the unchangeable teachings of the Catholic Church in the years to come.

For the second year Voice of the Family hosted its youth programme “Created for Heaven: the mission of Catholic young adults today” in Rome, 28 Sept – 2 Oct. The young men and women who participated this year were all a real sign of hope, ready to fight for everything that is true, good and beautiful. Two of the participants from the UK have shared their thoughts after the programme and if anyone wonders, what keeps gifted young people in the Church today and inspires them to work zealously for the greater glory of God and for the good of the souls, then here are some answers to that!

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Rafael Gibbons I was privileged to be able to participate in the Rome Youth Pilgrimage, a week-long programme organised by Voice of the Family, to form the next generation of pro-life Catholic leaders.

We arrived at the Lepanto Foundation on the morning of the first day. A group of around thirty young Catholics, from around the world, made their introductions. A talk from Professor Roberto de Mattei offered a prelude to the programme. He recounted the history of a great plague that befell the Roman people. However, due to an act of propitiation – namely a procession led by St Gregory the Great – the punishment was lifted. Afterwards, the saint saw a vision of St Michael sheathing his sword, a symbol that God’s fury had abated, and this same image was immortalised in a statue now standing atop Castel Sant’Angelo. In a few hours,

our group would be among two hundred Catholics in a public demonstration at the foot of the same building, calling on St Michael to heal the Church of its own modern-day plague.

That afternoon, after the “Acies Ordinata” demonstration, we made our way to La Chiesa Nuova to visit the private rooms of St Philip Neri. The first room was filled with relics from the Saint’s life: coffins, paintings, and papal correspondence. As I looked among the relics, one object, in particular, caught my eye. It was the death mask of St Philip Neri. This is a truly remarkable memento. Every contour of the face is etched with sanctity. It is a visage of unfathomable austerity, set in a perpetual sneer against the things of the world. It is also an expression of humour and unshakable peace. We made our way through the rest of the rooms, with the tour ending at the altar where the Saint celebrated Mass. At this point, I was getting rather carried away with the prospect of sainthood, so I was glad to recall a

PHOTO CREDIT: don Elvir Tabaković, Can. Reg.

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Nerian quote helpfully placed in our programme booklets: “One should not wish to become a saint in four days but step by step!”

We set off early in the morning of Monday, on the Seven Churches pilgrimage. The plan was to retrace the route of St Philip Neri on a spiritual war march through Rome. The Mass was beautiful, with Guido Reni’s St Michael Defeating Satan providing a scene for contemplation. After a prayer at St Peter’s tomb and at the Blessed Sacrament, we started off.

Our second stop was St Paul Outside the Walls.

Here, we prayed and we sang, drawing a small crowd of bemused tourists. We then travelled to St Sebastian, praying the Litany of Saints on the way. I thought again of St Philip Neri. He had apparently spent so much time praying in the nearby catacombs that a contemporary maintained he had virtually lived there for a decade. Next was St John Lateran, which I discovered was an archbasilica, mother of all churches, being the Cathedral Church of Rome.

Relics of Our Lord’s Passion were displayed at the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem: the original INRI inscription, a holy nail, a thorn from His crown, and the finger of St Thomas (the doubter).

Next, we prayed at the tomb of St Lawrence, before making our way to St Mary Major. At this last basilica, we prayed at the icon of Salus Populi Romani, the same which St Gregory carried around the city in his procession to heal the plague-stricken Rome of his day.

The following two days we received talks from many brilliant speakers on current events in the Church, and advice on how we might better pursue our vocations. John-Henry Westen offered some memorable insights on family life, which were relevant to me, as a young Catholic man making preparations for marriage. A talk on the angels, very fitting for the angelic theme of the pilgrimage, was given

by Fr Anthony Pillari. Professor de Mattei’s talk on the Soul of the Apostolate was inspiring too. In it, he pointed out that spiritual perfection is only possible in the Catholic faith since it alone develops the interior life of the soul. It is only by conforming himself continually to Christ, via the Church and its sacraments, that man can be sanctified. To defend the Church is, therefore, a sacred duty. Varro Vooglaid also gave a thrilling talk on the need for a WI N T E R 2 0 1 9

revival of the militant spirit among Catholic men, evoking the Battle of Vienna, with its winged hussars descending like angels upon the hapless Turks.

The following day, we were honoured with a talk from Raymond Cardinal Burke. It is a true comfort to be in the same room with a Prince of the Church, knowing that he sees the world in the same way.

His presence was a reminder that no matter how lost one can feel, there are still good shepherds. It is also a testament to the Cardinal personally, that he can speak without a hint of station, directly to one’s heart. At one moment, after speaking about the current difficulties in the Church, he looked at us all and said very frankly, “We need you. The Church needs you.” After a week of fostering our militant spirit, of an exorcistic demonstration, of combative talks about faith and family life, there was nothing quite so stirring as the gentle commission of a truly holy man. After the talk, we made our way to Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, to a Pontifical High Mass, celebrated by the Cardinal, followed by Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament until midnight.

Looking back, I can see that this week was a key moment in my spiritual formation. It has helped shape my thoughts on family life which is particularly apt for my current situation, offering insights about marital life, spiritual practice, and the education of children. It has also given me a renewed determination to offer my media production skill set to promote the pro-life cause and Catholic tradition.

Above all, the programme offered me a moment to remember that we are engaged in a spiritual war, and I must give myself wholly to this end. In the words of St Philip Neri, Third Apostle of Rome: “Obedience is the true holocaust which we sacrifice to God on the altar of our hearts.”

Rafael Gibbons is a London-based media professional. He has produced films and other creative content for Voice of the Family, LifeSiteNews, March for Life UK, and the Catholic Medical Association. He plays a key role in the coordination of Juventutem London events and is also regularly involved with events in the pro-life movement.

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focus

Julia Herbertson Just a week before the canonisation of Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman, Rome laid the scene for another great spiritual event, though less visible.

This was the Voice of the Family’s Youth Pilgrimage “Created for Heaven”, a programme aimed at strengthening young Catholic adults in the pro-life movement through a pilgrimage, talks, and a solemn Pontifical Mass followed by Adoration.

I was blessed to take part in this edifying experience, which started on the Vigil of Michaelmas, and which promised a week of unique Catholic formation on faith and the family. St Michael would turn out to be a central figure in the programme, his militant spirit overseeing our efforts and guiding us in our spiritual warfare against the current crisis in the Church.

I joined the group in Rome on Saturday morning at the Lepanto Foundation. There, I was greeted by the resounding voices of my fellow pilgrims singing, “Unam, Sanctam, Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam”. I knew I was in the right place but, most importantly, I knew I was among friends.

Not long after my arrival, the group gathered in the chapel of the Lepanto Foundation to celebrate Holy Mass. The chapel was welcoming, and a statue of Our Lady holding the Christ Child triumphed over the altar. There was also a relic of the True Cross present which had been donated to the Foundation, and since it was a first-class relic, I later learned, one should kneel before it.

At three o’clock we gathered for the “Acies Ordinata” demonstration at the foot of Castel Sant’Angelo.

I found myself among a group of lay Catholics, lined up like an army in a silent battle. Looking at the Vatican during the hour of silent prayer reawakened my affection for Holy Mother Church and increased my fervour. The calm and orderly disposition of the soldiers of Christ armed with the Rosary and a booklet with exorcism prayers contrasted with the general indifference of passers-by, the busy citizens of Rome.

On Monday morning the programme continued with the “Seven Churches Pilgrimage”. The day began with Mass at St Michael’s altar in St Peter’s Basilica. The youthful colour of the vestments was 32

fitting for the occasion. Above this altar, St Michael triumphs over Satan, his serene gaze tells us of an effortless victory. In his sermon, Mons. Agostini talked about three armed Saints in our tradition. The first is St Michael, rising against the proud rebel Satan.

The second is St George, who courageously killed the dragon, a symbol of paganism, and saved the princess, the Holy Church. The third is St Joseph.

I had always imagined him as a meek old man but the sermon suggested a different picture. This St Joseph was, in fact, a strong young carpenter who would carry around his tools, his weapons. With the spiritual tools given to him by God, he fulfilled God’s call as the protector of the Holy Family. St Joseph, Mirror of Patience and Protector of Virgins, as you once protected the Holy Family, now protect the family of the Church in its time of crisis and confusion! Inspired, the group marched along the route of the pilgrimage, down the Roman streets and into sublime basilicas, before ending up in Santa Maria Maggiore, where we gathered in front of the icon of the Salus Populi Romani and sung the Salve Regina.

On Tuesday the programme unfolded with a number of talks. The topics under discussion were the current situation of the Church and the Amazon Synod. Catholic journalism and its fight for the truth was also shared with us. Of the talks, one, in particular, struck me and made a lasting impact.

Its subject was the challenges for Catholic women in today’s society, principally how to counteract the feminist narrative that has taken root in our culture.

This popular ideology, a child of the Communist revolution in Russia, has proven devastating to modern women. The topic is particularly relevant to me, a midwife struggling to uphold the pro-life stance in a profession corrupted by the feministic ethos. The antidote to this venom can be found, it was argued, in the restoration of authentic Catholic femininity through prayer, devotion to Our Lady, active and generous service to others and the imitation of female saints.

Sadly, the last day of the programme arrived. In the morning the nature of angels and their role in the spiritual warfare was discussed. Since learning more about these extraordinary beings, assigned to help us in our spiritual journey, I have sought recourse to their intercession and sought their advice more frequently. I have grown particularly more devoted CAL X M A R IA E

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for my patients whilst taking care of them, if only with a short prayer in between tasks; working with order and industry, transforming my work into an offering pleasing to God; having a zeal for souls and for the conversion of colleagues and friends.

The programme also left me with a stronger desire to offer myself in the defence of the unborn, by working towards a more pro-life environment in midwifery, by developing my understanding in my bioethics studies, and by playing a more active role in the cause.

Julia Laura Maria Herbertson is a midwife working full time for the NHS. She is also a second-year Masters student in Bioethics and Medical Law at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. She is a member of the Catholic Medical Association of England and Wales and she is actively involved with its youth branch that seeks to support young Catholics in healthcare through prayer, friendship and catechesis. Throughout her professional career, she has maintained a pro-life stance and has sought to promote the sanctity of life in the working environment. She is currently preparing for marriage.

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PHOTO CREDIT: don Elvir Tabaković, Can. Reg.

to my guardian angel, whom God’s love committed to me to “light and guard, rule and guide”.

In the afternoon we had the honour to meet Cardinal Burke whom we welcomed with affection. He replied to some questions that the group had prepared in advance. I happily welcomed his wisdom on spiritual matters and was inspired by his account of his childhood. As a child he would pray regularly with his family for his vocation. I found this snapshot of family piety very touching and is something I would like to introduce in my own family in the future.

The day ended with a Pontifical High Mass celebrated by the Cardinal, followed by Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The beauty of the traditional rite of the Mass, in its highest form, offered a fitting conclusion to the programme. Adoration was an opportunity for me to bring all the experiences of the preceding days before the Blessed Sacrament.

I returned home with a renewed resolution to live out my faith in every detail of my life: praying

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reformed or deformed?

A R O U N D TA B L E D I S C U S S I O N

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n 4 October 2019, just days before the opening of the Amazon synod, Voice of the Family hosted a roundtable conference in Hotel Massimo D’Azeglio in Rome. In a three-hour discussion, which was watched online by tens of thousands of people, a panel of distinguished Catholic academics and journalists addressed critical questions facing the Church and the family. What follows is a selection of contributions made by the participants regarding the state and future of the Church. While this event took place in the run-up to the Amazon synod, the insights and perspectives offered by the panellists remain just as relevant in its aftermath.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jim Hale

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“Having been involved in the pro-life movement for 45 years on the national and international level, I have long believed that we have done good work.

We have saved lives and we have seen setbacks for the pro-abortion lobby. But you would have to be blind not to see that we are facing the biggest catastrophe – the biggest holocaust in human history. There have been more babies killed in fifty years of abortion alone than people killed in all human conflict in recorded history. The pro-life and pro-family movement cannot win the battle on its own. It needs the leadership of the Church to build a great campaign for life.

But what do we see instead? In Britain, for example, we see the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales welcoming the government’s compulsory sex education programme, which includes teaching children the LGBT agenda. In case you think that the Catholic bishops are correct in thinking that we can teach that in a manner according with the faith, they have themselves published a document called Learning to love, a document for Catholic teachers, which talks about homosexual relations being an ‘exalted form of love’ like heterosexual relations. So how does the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, which strives to lead a campaign against compulsory sex education, which amongst other things includes the requirement to give children access to abortion and contraception, how do we possibly win when the ground is taken out from beneath us?

As a family man, one of our colleagues on this panel told us that when Pope Francis spoke about cohabitating couples having the grace of marriage, his daughter who was in university at the time, called and asked: ‘Dad, is this true? Is this what the Church teaches now?’ Imagine the impact on a Catholic father hearing that tragic cry from his daughter. So these are the reasons why we are here.

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The discussion was chaired by John Smeaton of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.

Reflecting on the question: why are lay leaders in the pro-life and pro-family movement so consumed with what is going on in the highest levels of the Church? John Smeaton said: We are going to address in this panel some of the challenging questions by exercising our right and duty laid out by Canon Law. Section 213 says that Catholic faithful ‘according to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, [the faithful] have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.’

In combating errors, confusion and division, it is our role principally to develop personal holiness, prayer, devotion to the sacraments and offer sacrifices for the bishops and the pope. Because everything depends on the restoration of the Churh to full health and vigour. Not only for our work in the pro-life and pro-family movement but particularly within our own families.

Our Lady leads us in this battle. As laypeople, we are in the words of St Louis de Montfort, her humble slaves and her poor children. In a handwritten letter in 1983 or 1984, Sr Lucia said to Carlo Cardinal Cafarra: ‘Father, there will come a moment in which the decisive battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be over marriage and the family. And those who work for marriage and the family will experience persecution and tribulation. But there is no need to be afraid because Our Lady has already crushed its head.’ We are the humble slaves and poor children of Our Lady and amongst other things, also in this discussion, we are her children through prayer, devotion to the sacraments and personal sacrifices.”

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r oundtable

How and why is the perennial doctrine of the Church being reinterpreted?

Prof. Roberto de Mattei (Corrispondenza Romana, Italy)

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here are, at this moment, two religions within the Catholic Church. The first is the traditional Catholicism, the religion of those who, in the current confusion, continue to be faithful to the immutable Magisterium of the Church. The second is the Amazonian religion because, as declared by the person currently governing the Church, there is a plan to give the Church “an Amazonian face”.

What is meant by an Amazonian face? It is a matter of “reinventing” the Church in the words of Leonardo Boff. (Ecclesiogenesis. The base communities are reinventing the Church, Borla, Rome 1978). The Boff ecclesiogenesis has become a cosmogenesis in line with post-modern environmentalism. Its objective is now broader: reinvention not only of the Church, but of creation as a whole on the basis of a new “cosmic pact”. (Cry of the Earth, cry of the poor - For a cosmic ecology, Italian translation Assisi, Cittadella, 1996).

This objective is achieved through the method of reinterpretation of the truth of the Catholic faith.

Modernism had previously taught that the most effective means of denial of the truth is distortion, rather than an outright attack. Reinterpretation is an indirect negation of the teaching of the faith, more profound than outright denial, and means that the same words are ascribed a new meaning.

The new Amazonian religion reinterprets and distorts the first Article of the Creed, citing the “ancestral wisdom” of the indigenous peoples who see God in the physical elements of nature, without comprehending that God transcends these elements. They have no notion of transcendence, because they have no notion of creation, and they confuse God with nature, which for them is a Whole which contains God. Christianity has instead explained that God created everything and is in everything, yet no place can contain Him because God is immense, not in a material sense, but in a metaphysical and transcendent sense. God fills the heavens and the earth, but the heavens and the earth do not contain Him.

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The Amazonian religion not only negates the transcendence of God by including Him in nature, as do pantheism, panentheism and monism; but also denies His oneness, as does pagan polytheism.

Leonardo Boff, the liberation eco-theologian who collaborated in Laudato si affirms: “However we wish to interpret it, we have to recognise that the pagans had this extraordinary capacity: they could glimpse the presence of gods and goddesses in all things. In woods, Pan and Silvanus, in the Earth, Gaia Demeter (= Mother Earth) or Ceres, in the sun, Apollo and Phoebus, and so on” (Cry of the Earth and cry of the poor, p. 355).

With all respect owed to the ecclesiastical authorities, I accuse all those who have approved or will approve, the Instrumentum laboris on the Amazon, of polytheism and, more specifically, polydemonism because “All divinities of the gentiles are demons; our Lord has instead created the heavens” (Psalm 95:5).

Two religions cannot coexist within the same Church.

I call upon the cardinals and bishops who are still Catholic to raise their voices against this scandal. If their silence continues, we will continue to seek the intervention of the Angels and Mary Queen of Angels, to save the Holy Church from every form of reinvention, distortion and reinterpretation.

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Who is responsible for this? How and when were the human structures of the Church infiltrated?

Dr Taylor Marshall (author, USA)

F

or over a century, the organisers of Freemasonry, Liberalism, and Modernism infiltrated the Catholic Church in order to change her doctrine, her liturgy, and her mission from supernatural to secular.

Catholics are increasingly aware of a climate change in the Catholic Church. Some point to the controversial pontificate of Pope Francis. Others highlight the surprise resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013. Some are convinced that John Paul II was not who we thought him to be. Most agree that Vatican II, the Novus Ordo Mass, and the Pontificate of Paul VI brought monumental confusion to the Catholic Church. But does the fall of the first domino begin in 1962 with the opening of Vatican II? I argue that the root of the rot extends back to an agenda put in play approximately one hundred years prior to Vatican II. It is an agenda to replace the supernatural religion of the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ with the natural religion of humanism and globalism. It echoes the primaeval choice of Adam and Eve to make themselves divine by grasping at the fruits of nature, rather than kneeling in reception of the supernatural fruit of divine grace. Lucifer also rebelled against God because in his pride he sought to ascend to the throne of God, not by sharing in the supernatural life of God, but digging deep into his own nature – and thereby falling into the abyss of Hell.

Supernaturalism – relying on God who is above the natural – is Catholicism. Naturalism – relying on our created nature without the aid of God – is Satanism.

The Catholic Church is in crisis because the enemies of Christ plotted an organised effort to place a pope for Satan on the Roman Chair of Saint Peter. The enemies of Christ from Nero to Napoleon eventually discovered that to attack or murder the pope only creates sympathy and martyrs.So instead, they sought to quietly place one of their own into the papal shoes. It would require decades, even a century to create the seminaries, the priests, the bishops, the cardinal-electors, and then even the pope or popes himself – but it would be worth the wait. It has been a slow and patient plan to establish a Satanic revolution with the pope as a puppet.

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St Paul stated: “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:12) The crisis of the Catholic Church relates to the intrusion of these “rulers of this present darkness”, and she can only be purified by sanctified warfare against the demonic.

In a homily for the Mass on the feast of St Peter and St Paul (29 June 1972) and in commemoration for the ninth anniversary of being crowned as Bishop of Rome, Pope Paul VI lamented: “We would say that, through some mysterious crack – no, it’s not mysterious; through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God. There is doubt, uncertainty, problems, unrest, dissatisfaction, confrontation.” This testimony of Paul VI acknowledges not merely that the Catholic Church had experienced secularisation.

Rather, he affirms that the smoke of Satan himself had entered into the Catholic Church through a crack.

The Catholic Church has been infiltrated from within and this infiltration goes back at least to the pontificate of Pope Pius IX. It is an attack on the supernatural faith, miracles, divine revelation, and upon the origin of our creation: God’s identity of male and female, the institution of human matrimony, and the natural law precept to be fruitful and multiply with marriage. Moreover, it is a resurrection of paganism “that you might become gods”.

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r oundtable

In the current crisis, what does “New Evangelisation” mean?

Michael J. Matt (The Remnant, USA)

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ver the past half century, there has been a shift in the Catholic Church’s attitude toward missionary activity and evangelisation – a shift which, based in doctrinal reorientation, has naturally led to a dramatic decline in traditional missionary priests and religious orders throughout the world.

These days, we hear much about the New Evangelisation and no doubt much good has come from this effort, which essentially is introspective and pertains to those who are already baptised Catholics.

But the very idea of a New Evangelisation prompts two rather pressing questions: What was wrong with the old orientation? And why would the Church launch a new evangelisation unless the point and purpose of the old one had changed?

The old evangelisation, let us recall, saw Catholic missionaries from France and Spain and Portugal and Italy and from many Catholic countries over the centuries send missionary priests all over the world in an effort to lovingly lead the world’s indigenous peoples out of the darkness of paganism and into the light of Christ.

This meant conversion based not on intimidation, not on coercion, and certainly not on black legends such as “forced baptisms”, but rather on one simple reality: obedience to the great commission given to the Church by Jesus Christ Himself, who said: “Go therefore, teach all nations: baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

The Church over the past fifty years has moved away from this idea, citing as its authority the Second Vatican Council – the spirit of which more or less reneged on the Catholic Church’s own claim to be the sole means of salvation. And if there are many other roads to salvation, the Catholic missionary mandate of old is not only pointless but offensive to the Church’s dialogue partners.

At the Pan-Amazon Synod, the new and creative missionary spirit of the Church of Accompaniment (rather than conversion) will be taken to a new level from its foundational roots of 50 years of ecumenical outreach which evidently had nothing to do with

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conversion and everything to do with dialogue for endless dialogue’s sake.

Perhaps some of you have wondered as I have: What is the endgame of interfaith dialogue when it’s obviously not conversion – unless by “conversion” you mean the Church’s conversion from the missionary Church of Christ into an ecumenical Church of Man, where even false religions will be regarded as good and holy … false religions which St Paul warned in I Corinthians “make sacrifice to devils, and not to God”.

Is it any wonder that the missionary spirit itself is fading into irrelevancy when the Divine Mandate of Christ Himself has been undermined if not replaced altogether by the new and creative mandate of the Church of Accompaniment?

After all, isn’t it true that Pope Francis himself has proffered novelties no pre-conciliar pope ever imagined: that souls don't go to Hell, for example, but rather are somehow annihilated?

After Abu Dhabi, isn’t it true that Pope Francis suggested the diversity of religions is necessary and in accord with God’s permissive will, and that what God wants is a universal brotherhood of religions rather than a universal missionary campaign?

Isn’t it true that Pope Francis warns against the “solemn nonsense” of proselytism, which is nothing more than the active attempt to lead non-Catholics back into the bosom of Mother Church?

Didn’t he rather famously say that atheists can go to Heaven, as long as they are of “goodwill”?

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Given all this, is it surprising when the world begins to wonder if even the pope still believes baptism is necessary for salvation?

When missionary activity is reduced to vague invitations to non-Catholics to join our religious club if they feel like it – even though they can be saved in their own religious club if they prefer – isn’t it only natural that missionary orders would decline? After all, the imperative is, it would seem, no more.

Cardinal Walter Kasper – president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity – has said that the “ecumenism of return” is over! In other words, using truth and charity to share the good news and work to convert non-Catholics is no longer the Church’s goal.

And now we face a synod of bishops that promises to embrace an indigenous theology that would essentially abandon the Church’s missionary effort altogether while embracing an eco-theology that would send forth missionaries of climate change to teach all nations to listen to the cry of Mother Earth.

Please God, may this not come to pass, for if it does it will surely represent the Catholic Church’s formal surrender to the world and the spirit not just of the age but also the jungle.

To prevent this crisis of faith, may I suggest Catholics the world over make a special appeal to the intercession of the great St Boniface – and for obvious reasons.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jim Hale

V I D E O O F T H E D I S C U S S I O N I S AVA I L A B L E O N L I N E

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How important has redefining the priesthood been with regard to attacks on the Church?

José Antonio Ureta

(Tradition, Family and Property, France)

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n his work Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira explains that it was pride and sensuality, whose satisfaction is the pleasure of pagan life, which provoked Protestantism. The triumph of sensuality was affirmed by the introduction of divorce and the suppression of ecclesiastical celibacy, while pride led to the denial of the hierarchical priesthood, reducing it to a mere delegation of the common priesthood of the faithful.

The Council of Trent dealt a decisive blow to the claims of Lutheranism by defining the sacramental and indissoluble character of marriage and the divine foundation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, based on the sacrament of Holy Orders.

Pope Francis’s Amoris laetitia enacted the practical acceptance of divorce by the Catholic Church. The virtual abolition of ecclesiastical celibacy is requested in paragraph no. 129 of the Instrumentum laboris for the coming synod. The extension of such “experience” to the rest of the Church would be a matter of time.

But a neo-Lutheran offensive against priesthood and the hierarchical character of the Church has been underway since long ago. In 1973, the Eighth Week of Theology in Kinshasa already asked for “a new structuring of the ministries” and expressed “the desirability of ordaining lay people for the presidency of the Eucharist.” Shortly after, French Jesuit Joseph Moingt envisioned such restructuring through a bipartition: a few celibate priests, trained in seminaries, would exercise a permanent, universal ministry, touring the communities, while laymen would rotationally ensure the presidency of the Eucharist in each location.

Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff rehashed that “the power of Christ (exousia) lies not only in some members but in the totality of the People of God” and that “all services arise within the community and for the community”. Consequently, “the head of the community by its ad hoc delegation” should “preside over the Lord's Supper”.

In reply to all this nonsense, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote an article for the Osservatore Romano,

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stressing the need to avoid “an undervaluing of the ordained ministry and a falling into a ‘Protestantisation’ of the concepts of ministry and even of the Church herself ”.

This and other Vatican interventions did not prevent the reappearance of the old Lutheran hat of a delegated priesthood of the community under the pen of H.E. Fritz Löbinger, bishop emeritus of Aliwal (South Africa), who foresees, as a solution for the lack of vocations, two forms of priests, the “community priests” and the “diocesan priests”, similar to those imagined by Fr Moingt 50 years ago. To stress the difference between these two models, a team of community leaders should be ordained simultaneously and assume the responsibilities together, with the advantage of preserving their commoner’s lifestyle. It is “possible to combine two things: a secular profession and the priesthood,” Löbinger claims, because “there are thousands of part-time presbyters in various Christian denominations.”

The practical details of Löbinger’s formula were given by Pope Francis during an aerial interview back from Panama: “One could ordain an elderly married man, but only so that he exercises the munus sanctificandi, that is, that he celebrates Mass, that he administers the sacrament of Reconciliation and performs the Anointing of the Sick. Priestly ordination gives the three munera: regendi – to govern, the pastor –; docendi – to teach – and sanctificandi. This comes with ordination.

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The bishop would only give the faculties for the munus sanctificandi: this is the thesis.”

This thesis was transliterated into paragraph no.

127 of the Instrumentum laboris. It says that Amazonian tribes have a “high sense of equality” by which “authority is rotational” and “clericalism is not accepted in all its guises”, and thus invites us “to reconsider the notion that exercise of jurisdiction (power of government) must be linked in all areas (sacramental, judicial, administrative) and in a permanent way to the sacrament of Holy Orders.”

The German priest Paulo Suess, a member of the Synod preparatory team and one of the editors of the first Lineamenta, later insisted in the communal aspect of the proposal:

How do proposals for an ordained ministry of women further the agenda of restructuring the Church?

Jeanne Smits (journalist, France)

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he preparatory document published in 2018, when it referred to the shared priesthood of all the people of God and Christ proclaimed by Vatican II, spoke of the “urgent need to evaluate and rethink the ministries that today are required to respond to the objectives of ‘a church with an Amazonian face and the church with a native face’.” It said in particular that “it is necessary to identify the type of official ministry that can be conferred on women, taking into account the central role which women play today in the Amazonian church”.

“We can imagine a group of viri probati who collectively celebrate the Eucharist. The Church summons them and instructs them to do in common what none of them can do alone (sic!). The link with the community and for the community, within a diocese and a parish, can make the Church a ‘community of communities’.”

The Lutheran character of such new ministries emerging from the community is evident in no. 138 of the Instrumentum laboris in which the evangelical pastors are praised for having “formed small communities with a human face, where people feel personally valued” and for remaining “people like the others, easy to meet, who live the same problems and become ‘closer to’ and less ‘different from’ the rest of the community.” These Protestant pastors, the document continues, “are showing us another way of being church where the people feel that they are the protagonists and where the faithful can express themselves freely without censorship or dogmatism or ritual disciplines.”

If the Synod Fathers and Pope Francis clearly or ambiguously approve paragraph no. 127 of the Instrumentum laboris, neo-Lutheranism will have defeated the Council of Trent. But, alas! such a new ecclesiastic structure based on a non-ministerial and non-hierarchical priesthood will no longer be the Catholic Church.

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Obviously, if you add “viri probati” and women as categories of people who can play a ministerial role in the Church, you considerably augment what you might call the talent pool of possible ordained ministers. But why use the Amazon to promote this?

Lack of priests? We have that in so many places. The central role played by women? East and west of the Atlantic, we know how many parish activities have been taken over by women, and in rural France at least, very feminine “liturgical teams” are the dread of many a parish priest. It would seem the Amazon is no exception, so why should the Amazonian women be getting a special deal here?

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In fact, I couldn’t help asking myself why the Amazon is being used, rather than Western countries where gender mainstreaming and the evolution of the role of women in society, helped along by the UN, would seem to be much better arguing points. We already have girls as altar boys, after all.

The answer, you will not be surprised to hear, lies in a passing remark, and in a footnote, in the 2018 preparatory document for the Amazon synod. It said: “In the process of thinking about a Church with an Amazonian face, we dream with our feet grounded in our origins, and with our eyes open we consider the future shape of this Church, starting from its peoples’ experience of cultural diversity. Our new paths will impact ministries, liturgy, and theology (Indian theology).” (4) The footnote referred to the 6th symposium on Indian theology of the Latin American bishops in Paraguay in 2017.

Indian theology: the answer is there. A throw-off from liberation theology, very close to the “theology of the people” which Pope Francis is so fond of, it is defined by the importance it gives to land and community: the “Pachamama”, or Mother Earth. The feminine element is paramount.

A progressive Dominican from La Tourette in France, Alain Durand explains how it works: “Man and woman are made to live in harmony, never one without the other. The idea that a man or woman should be able to live without being linked to a person of the other sex is completely foreign to Indian culture. In liturgical ceremonies themselves, it is necessary that women should assume functions. One immediately sees what difficulty that creates regarding the access of the indigenous to the Catholic priesthood.”

So the whole point is to make Catholic liturgy more palatable from the point of view of traditional spirituality, that is pagan and immanentist, and that profoundly bears the mark of sexual duality. This is all the more necessary from the Indian point of view because the fundamental divinity of that culture is the Mother Earth that bears life. Fr Durand remarks that

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“in liturgies that imply indigenous populations, God can be invoked under the name of Father- Mother.”

“Faith in the God Father-Mother Creator” is precisely what is proclaimed a number 121 of the Instrumentum laboris, and as Fr Durand correctly remarks, this renewed vision of God involves acknowledging the practically divine role of Mother Earth.

Having women as ordained ministers, if not immediately as priests, is simply necessary from the point of view of Indian theology; it is within the logic of traditional indigenous spirituality, that is, paganism.

Or if you want to take it a bit further: idolatry. “For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens,” warns Psalm 96.

There is always a diabolical inversion in the wildest proposals of false religion. In this case, the idea is to have women participating actively, as ministers of a sort, in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It would be somewhat like promoting women soldiers in fighting roles. Soldiers are meant to kill enemies. Priests are meant to sacrifice the Immaculate Victim, and to lay down their own lives with Him, so that the Church, our Mother, can give us grace, that is, life. Women are meant to give life, not to kill. They share out to their children what they receive, and so does the Church.

The Amazon synod will be arguing about the role of women in the Church when the Church already has the most beautiful answer to that argument: the Virgin Mary. I profoundly believe that when God made the Cosmos – which means beauty – He was making a fitting earthly home and dowry for His Daughter, Mother and Bride. She is our Queen, the Queen of the universe and even the Queen of the Angels, much to Satan’s discontent, since he must submit to and be conquered by a mere woman, by a mother who can communicate to us eternal life through the sacrifice of her Beloved Son. Our vision of woman is defined by that. What more could we possibly want?

CAL X M A R IA E

Our church - reformed or deformed?

How should faithful Catholics react to the agenda now being pursued by Pope Francis?

John-Henry Westen (LifeSiteNews, Canada)

A

few cardinals have warned of apostasy and heresy in the working document prepared for the Synod, but most have remained silent. We, the faithful cannot remain silent because it is the salvation of our children that is being threatened. It is our right as Catholics to have the faith as it was proclaimed by Jesus Christ handed on by our priests and bishops and especially by the pope.

But, at this time we have the opposite, especially from Pope Francis. The Pope has gained the friendship of the world but at the price of betraying the truth of the Saviour. In crushing good cardinals, faithful orders, orthodox institutions and academies; by elevating and promoting heterodox prelates; by personally giving signs of approval of homosexual acts and abortionists, by proclaiming a false ecumenism, by giving false teaching on contraception, cohabitation, and adultery, the Pope has shown he allows himself to be led by a spirit contrary to that of the Gospel, rather than by the Holy Spirit Who would be available to the Pope as to no one else.

Pope Francis has encouraged pastors to have the smell of the sheep. Also however a pastor should have the smell of Christ. The sheep know the smell of a pastor in the mould of Christ. Faithful Catholics all know when we encounter a faithful son of Our Lady

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in a pastor. We see it in his devotion at Mass, in his demeanour at prayer, in his homilies and teachings, in his advice in the confessional, in his admonishing sinners and encouraging the faithful. His friends are the most faithful to Christ and those who seek to destroy the Church by remaking Her in their own image make themselves his enemies. However, the good priest prays for their conversion nonetheless.

All that is not to say that we don’t love Pope Francis. Indeed it would not be love at all to gloss over these monumental concerns and be silent about them, because they harm him most of all. He will have to answer to Christ at the judgement just like we all will.

We must continue to pray for the Pope every day, pray for his conversion.

I’m not judging his motive. In fact, I’m assuming that he believes what he is doing is benefiting the Church. But what is obvious is that what is being set up is a false church and a false image of Christ.

A ‘reasonable’ church that contravenes doctrine in hard cases, a church which suggests that hell is empty, a church which sows doubt about the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a church which puts political considerations such as immigration policy above non-negotiable teachings on abortion, is a false church.

These are serious charges but it doesn’t take a theologian to recognise when the faith is being distorted.

We won’t leave the Church; it is the One True Church and there is no other. We shall fight for Christ’s Truth in the Church because we are ready to die for this faith.

We pledge to be truly devoted to Our Lady as we have never been before. For we know in the end Her Immaculate Heart will triumph. She warned us these times were coming... that the final battle between Our Lord and the reign of Satan would be over marriage and the family. It is here. Standing with Our Lady we are not fearful. We say with Her: “Amen – so be it – to all that the Father allows in the suffering of the Mystical Body of Christ.”

We know the resurrection follows. We can rejoice even now in that knowledge since the depths of the sufferings make the ultimate victory more miraculous.

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The primacy of

THE FATHER

b y S E B A S T I A N M O R E L LO

THE PRIMACY OF THE FATHER IN THE DOMESTIC SOCIETY here are three elementary societies. That is to say, all societies other than these three are artificial societies. I do not mean to say that artificial societies are bad – in fact in most cases they are very good – but only that such societies simply arise by human contrivance and invention, like any sports club, business, guild, or hobby association for example. Whereas the family and the state arise out of human nature, and are therefore societies properly speaking, just as the Church is a society, but derived not from nature, but from supernature. The family and the state are natural societies for man comes into existence belonging to both, and cannot achieve his proper finality – cannot live a life proper to the human person – independently from these societies. In regard to the Church, man is cut off from his supernatural end, namely participation in the divine life of the Triune God, nor can he fulfil the requirements of nature, without this holy society.

These three, therefore, comprise the elementary societies necessary for man to achieve his proper finality. They relate to each other, ideally, on the model of the human person, for whom they exist. The family is to the state what the cell is to the body, and the state is to the Church what the body is to the soul.

Supposing that these are the elementary societies, how are we to present a definition of the term “society” which is fittingly applicable to all three of these societies? Well, a fairly classical definition of a society does just that:

T

A society is an aggregate of persons forming an ordered community for the attainment of man’s end, with its own geographical and juridical dominion; its own hierarchy, government and ultimate legislator; its own laws, customs, and right to direct, coerce and punish its subjects.

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What does this definition tell us when applied to the family?

First, the family is a community of persons bound by something beyond mere arbitrary choice; the members live in this society with a disposition of gratitude for this community and the benefits that are derived from it, including the very life of its members. This is what classical thought calls pietas: piety toward one’s parents and domestic antecedents. Also, we see that the family is ordered toward the attainment of man’s end. Being a complex creature – a material animal animated by a spiritual soul – man’s end can be reduced only to complex categories, but to keep things simple we can say for now that the end for which he acts is to attain happiness, that is, to flourish as the kind of creature he is. As we will see in a moment, the family must unite with other families in order to achieve this end for its members.

What else can we learn from the definition given? The family possesses by an inherent right private property in which it can realise its geographical and juridical dominion. This of course means that any state can be called unjust which not only allows, but does not take positive action to prevent the perpetuation of property-renting among families. It belongs to the very nature of any society to have a geographical jurisdiction: a territory. A building and some land has generally been understood to be the proper and basic territory for the average domestic society. It should be noted that by the 19th century the Church was strikingly clear in its social teaching that the right to possess property was intrinsic to the nature of man, CAL X M A R IA E

“Every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own… That right to property, therefore, which has been proved to belong naturally to individual persons, must in likewise belong to a man in his capacity as head of a family.”1

PHOTO CREDIT: don Elvir Tabaković, Can. Reg.

The right to possess property is not a civic right, of which the state can act as the arbiter. Property belongs by nature to families, and the state must do all it can to come to the aid of families in securing their territories.

As I said a moment ago, the family must join with other societies of the same kind, in order to achieve its end. For this reason the family has traditionally been referred to as an imperfect society, for it cannot self-perpetuate, nor sufficiently defend itself against violent attack. It cannot exist independently from the other families which constitute the polity and provide for all its own needs, and nor can its members attain their natural finality without also being members of the political society – the nation, and the nation’s political ordering by the state – for the wisdom of

the wider community can only be accessed by participation in the wider community. Unlike the family, the state within itself “contains what is necessary for fulfilling its purpose.”2 Nevertheless, the state is only a perfect society – as opposed to an imperfect society like the family – because it contains within itself families, on which it depends for its own continued existence. There is not merely, and only, a hierarchy of dependence between these two natural societies, but a relationship of co-dependence. As an aside, we can note here that the modern invention of homosexual so-called “marriage” is a direct affront to this reality, and in part arises from a lack of understanding concerning the authority of the state. The state has its own jurisdiction from which the family’s dominion is distinct, and the latter is defined independently from the former. In turn, the state has no right whatever to redefine, and in turn reconfigure, the structure of the domestic society. Such attempts at seizing control of the family indicate tyranny on the part of the state, and for centuries the Church has taught that this particular species of tyranny – that is, usurpation of domestic authority to centralise all power in the state – is the logical development of a liberal settlement.

r e f l e c t i o n

that this right was fortified insofar as he participated in family life, and that he had an obligation therefore to procure property. In 1891, Leo XIII taught the following:

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The family, whilst imperfect, is a complete society.

Pius XI presented this same position in 1929, claiming that the family is “instituted directly by God for its peculiar purpose, the generation and formation of offspring; for this reason it has priority of nature and therefore of rights over civil society.”3 This position was continually held in Catholic social teaching, and in 1983 under John Paul II the Magisterium issued the Charter of the Rights of the Family.

THE MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN, 1304–1306, GIOTTO, SCROVEGNI CHAPEL, PADUA.

As I mentioned earlier, scholars have employed a soul-body analogy to convey the desired Church-state relationship. The state-family relationship, in turn, is presented as analogical to that of body and cell.

William Newton describes this in the following way: “The State is a conglomeration of families, as a body is a conglomeration of cells. A very important consequence of this is that the family has rights prior to the State and which are not derived from the State by positive law. This means that these rights are innate (in-born) and are part of natural law; they are not given to the family by the State.”4 Inside the familial society, the father and mother form a government over the children, who are their subjects.

Parental rights are sacrosanct. Francisco de Vitoria states that “the father’s rights over his child are given

by God and any harm done to the father… is also done to God.”5 For this reason Vitoria, in his lectures on the evangelisation of South American natives, 46

states that “overriding parental consent – even if for such an important matter as baptism – is a violation of natural law, which protects parental rights.”6 Just as a number of cells form a body, so a collection of families form a nation, whose natural and rational ordering is the state. If those belonging to these natural societies are baptised, then they also form the Church, and so the family-state-Church community is a single community constituting three fundamental societal principles, analogous to cell, body, and soul in a single human person.

Finally, what can we say of familial government from our definition of a society? The family has its own hierarchy and government. It is formed not by vote, but by assent to the principles of the marital constitution by two people who can in principle procreate, under whom a hereditary dynasty is perpetuated, traditionally identified by the surname of the male ruler, which his co-ruler takes as her own and is in turn identified with his authority, which they share as a single rule.

This government, then, has traditionally been seen to have its foundation in the authority and providence of the husband and father, whom the family must serve in the home, as he serves them outside the home by sacrificing himself and the fruits of his labour for them.

Within the family, the children are ordered toward that which is their good by the directive and coercive laws of the familial government, the parents. This is not a popular way of speaking about family life, and yet I think we all know it to be true, and have indeed lived it in some way. Good parents do not live alongside their children in a perfectly egalitarian and lawless environment, in which the children may do whatever they like. So too, good parents make household rules, and enforce such rules by ensuring that there are consequences to disobeying them. If children are forbidden from doing something, and they do it, parents might withhold pocket money for example.

This is because the parental government precisely has a coercive and directive authority, and may legislate and punish in accordance with justice. Furthermore, the family has its own culture and customs, which when good should be defended, and approached with reverence. Within this little society the subjects should have piety, that is, a just gratitude, toward the family’s government.

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t h e p r i m a c y of t h e fat h e r

“The person’s governing powers have an inner order, and the heart – the will – must be in union with the primary rule of right reason.

These powers must be in union, as the good of the whole person is pursued.

So too, the wife must unite herself to the rule of the husband, as together they seek to realise the good of the whole family.”

THE PRIMACY OF THE FATHER IN THE MORAL PERSON OF THE FAMILY Note that above I merely asserted that the man’s authority was foundational, and furthermore that it was an authority primarily over the children, and not over his spouse. I pointed to how tradition and custom support the notion of male authority as primary, but nevertheless, it was little more than an assertion with nothing for its support beyond convention. From the perspective of the family as a natural society, we can well define the family and its structure, but it is difficult to develop a sense of the structure of its government, and how the complementary aspects of its government – man and woman – relate to each other. I have been brief in touching upon the foundational authority of the husband and father, precisely because I am aware that insisting upon this authority from the perspective I have so far taken gives the impression that the primacy of husband-father is somewhat arbitrary. It is not arbitrary, and both nature and Scripture teach us that it is not arbitrary, only it must be considered from a different perspective. In turn, now I will consider the family as a moral person.

Human societies are moral persons, that is, they are moral agents which must seek to realise the good, and can be held responsible and judged guilty, or commended and esteemed, for injustices and praiseworthy acts respectively. Our Lord commands the Apostles to make disciples of all nations precisely because He holds such political communities to be moral persons capable of accepting the Gospel and becoming disciples.7 So too, the family is a moral person, who can be a disciple, by having Jesus Christ reign over the domestic territory.

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I want to suggest that in this moral person of the human family, we see the powers and faculties of the human person represented. Paul teaches the following (in what was the mandatory epistle for all nuptial Masses in the Roman rite until the liturgical innovations following the Second Vatican Council): “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour.”8 Here the wife is presented as the body, and the husband the head, and the body must be subject to the head. Paul points us to an analogue of this relationship in the order of supernature, namely the relationship of the Church to Our Lord. Jesus Christ sacrifices Himself for the Church, as the Church in turn serves Him. Looking at Ephesians 5, we might want to ask, where do the children fit in? One answer is that the wife and the children together are the body, for the wife is not simply the body, but rather a particular part of the body: the heart. Pius XI takes this approach in the following extended quotation from Casti Connubii: “Domestic society being confirmed, therefore, by this bond of love, there should flourish in it that ‘order of love’, as St Augustine calls it. This order includes both the primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience, which the Apostle commends in these words: ‘Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife, and Christ is the head of the Church.’

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“A society ruled by right reason, rationally ordered love, and transformed by grace, is like a glorious Christian civilisation, of which the Catholic family should be a miniature, irrespective of whether it happens to subsist within such a civilisation.”

“This subjection, however, does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor does it bid her obey her husband’s every request if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to wife; nor, in fine, does it imply that the wife should be put on a level with those persons who in law are called minors, to whom it is not customary to allow free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment, or of their ignorance of human affairs.

But it forbids that exaggerated liberty which cares not for the good of the family; it forbids that in this body which is the family, the heart be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole body and the proximate danger of ruin. For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.”9 The family, then, is the whole body, held in unity through the bond of love between its members. The aspect of government who possesses the chief duty of protecting this bond of love is the wife and mother, who is the heart of the family. Her submission is not a servile submission, but a submission of love.

In the individual, the heart – the rational appetite – cannot rule one’s operations without great disorder arising. Rather, the heart must be rationally ordered by right reason, whilst the intuitions of the former ought not to be dismissed. So too, affectivity in the family cannot be the primary governing principle, but rather must be rationally ordered by the husband and father.

In the individual, both the mind and the heart must govern, and not the lower faculties situated in the body. The person’s governing powers, however, have an inner order, and the heart – the will – must 48

be in union with the primary rule of right reason.

These powers must be in union, as the good of the whole person is pursued. So too, the wife must unite herself to the rule of the husband, as together they seek to realise the good of the whole family.

This, then, is not a case of the father ruling by the firmness of his own arbitrary will, but rather the rule of right reason. In the order of grace, this means that the aspect of government which the wife brings to the family, now elevated to the pursuit of salvation for the whole family, must be enforced, supported, and guided by the husband, in his primary rule as head of the family, as Paul teaches: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.”10 Christ rules the Church by loving Her and sacrificing Himself for Her, and by so doing He blesses Her and makes Her holy, just as the father is also chief minister – “domestic bishop”, as the Greek Fathers put it – in the family when it is elevated by sanctifying grace to the status of domestic church. Between spouses, the husband rules the wife, by loving her, providing for her, giving over the fruits of his labour, “nourishing and cherishing” her; and the wife, like the Church to Our Lord, responds in love by obeying the commandments of the husband.

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The mind and the heart must govern together.

A society ruled by human reason alone is a society tyrannised by rationalism; it is an authoritarian Stalinist-style mechanical society with no sense of purpose.

A society ruled by unfettered affectivity and appetite alone is chaos; it is like the Notting Hill Carnival, but every day, all year round. In contrast to these, a society ruled by right reason, rationally ordered love, and transformed by grace, is like a glorious Christian civilisation, of which the Catholic family should be a miniature, irrespective of whether it happens to subsist within such a civilisation.

Such a position may appear to play into the hand of crude caricaturists, who characterise women as simply emotional nitwits, and men as the logical and rational ones. Such demeaning of women is exactly the opposite of what is presented by the Church.

Rather, by attending to a widely experienced difference between the psychology of men and women, and how the recognition of such differences is supported

by Scripture, the Church presents a case for the com-

plementarity and union of the sexes, and the collaboration of the sexes in domestic government. Nonetheless, it rejects entirely modernity’s doctrine, so obviously incorrect, that there is no detectible difference between men and women. There is difference, and where there is difference there is hierarchy.

THE PRIMACY OF THE FATHER IN THE ONTOLOGY OF CREATION In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII teaches that “the child belongs to the father, and is, as it were, the continuation of the father’s personality.”11 The family is the realisation of something intrinsic to the father, and in turn the expression of his own personality. This “something” belongs to him by virtue of what he is, and is not effected by the fact that he has entered the married state, or by his wife conceiving a child.

Here I leave behind the initial argument for the primacy of the father, from the family as society, as that which is supported by custom; this is no doubt true, but it is a very weak position from which to advance

THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT , C.1515, VITTORE CARPACCIO, THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON.

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our case. So too, I leave behind the argument for the primacy of the father from the family as moral person, which hinges on a view of the sexes as psychologically complementary in such a way as to imply hierarchy.

This is certainly a stronger case than the first, but is still somewhat weak. There are many exceptions to the general rule of psychological differentiation, and with further technology any difference might amount to little practically speaking, with such technology increasingly equalising the roles of the sexes.

We may be tempted to make the argument that women must become the heart of the home, so to speak, because they cannot be fully mothers and fully providers at the same time. In turn, most will naturally opt for motherhood, leading men to provide, and therefore protect, and finally therefore to make the big decisions. This too seems somewhat changeable with technology, however, with many mothers working effectively from their iPads at home whilst raising children. Also, such a position implies that male leadership is contingent upon having children and the wife choosing not to be the primary worker: if the children do not come the spouses are equals.

I have attempted, with the use of Pius XI’s Casti Connubii, to make the case that Ephesians 5 does not exclude children when it speaks of the headship of the man, but it must be admitted that children are not in this passage mentioned by Paul, with the headship of the man presented within the context of the two spouses alone (although children are discussed in the following passage, Ephesians 6:1-4). On what then, at its deepest level, does the primacy of the father depend? I wish now to make an ontological case: I submit that a man, inasmuch as he is a man, is a father.

Fatherhood is the proper identity of man qua man.

This is because God’s Fatherhood is not an analogue of earthly fatherhood, an imperfect participation in created fatherhood. Rather, the Heavenly Father has His analogue in the created existence of men. Men cannot exist as anything other than fathers. Of course, there are degrees to which this is realised, dependent on various categories of development, but nonetheless man qua man is father: the intrinsic telos of men is fatherhood. This fatherhood must be realised, and must not be frustrated. It may be manifested via natural fatherhood through marriage and family, or assumed into – and expressed by – priestly fatherhood, 50

or in another spiritual way through the paternal care of souls by consecrated laymen in monasteries and friaries, or even in the case of men whose marriages have tragically been unfruitful, but have realised their fatherhood in care for their spouses, noble professions, and perhaps a special care for younger members of the extended family. However the fatherhood of men is to be realised, it must be realised, for man is father inasmuch as he is man.

John Paul II alludes to this very point when he writes in Familiaris Consortio that “love for his wife as mother of their children and love for the children themselves are for the man the natural way of understanding and fulfilling his own fatherhood.”12 Fatherhood is something which already belongs to him, it is convertible with his own masculinity, which he comes to understand and fulfil through family life. Furthermore, John Paul II continues, by so doing he is “revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God.”13 There is a primacy of God the Father, who proceeds from no Divine Person, and from whom the Son and Holy Ghost proceed, via the modalities of begetting and spiration respectively, with the Holy Ghost as the bond of love who unites the Father to the extension of His own personality in the Son, who in turn is the perfect image of the Father.14 God is revealed as male, and only the masculine pronoun may be used for Him, and yet He is also revealed as Father, for there is nothing potential in God, and inasmuch as He is pure act – as the metaphysicians say – He is also the perfect actuation of masculinity. The actuation of CAL X M A R IA E

t h e p r i m a c y of t h e fat h e r

masculinity is fatherhood, and therefore the pure act of the divine substance is perfect and infinite Fatherhood.

So too, man derives his earthly fatherhood from nothing extrinsic to himself, and it is not bestowed upon him by any event in his life; it is purely what he is, and his fatherhood can be realised in a multiplicity of ways. Man is what he is supposed to be when he embraces a state of government by which he seeks to realise the good of those in his care, and that is the essence of fatherhood. I do not desire to give any impression that the family is arbitrary in the realisation of man’s fatherhood, as just one path among many. It is the natural way by which he lives his fatherhood, and, by virtue of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, it is for the baptised a supernatural way of transforming by grace what is proper to him by nature. Nonetheless, it is proper to him by nature, and therefore must be realised whatever the state of life a man embraces.

considered the family as a moral person, analogical to a human being, and how the father’s role is that of reason, relating to his spouse as reason to rational appetite in the integrated human person; I suggested that the widely experienced psychological difference between the sexes supports this view. For the deepest case for the primacy of the father, however, I turned to a metaphysical – indeed, theological – case, arguing that human fatherhood is the created analogue of the only true Fatherhood, which is that of the Heavenly Father, whose icons in the world are men. Fatherhood is what man is; masculinity can only be what it truly is by finding its proper expression in paternity, which is the flowering, so to speak, of masculinity.

For this reason, the homosexualisation of our culture is so grave. Homosexuality is the perfect inversion of paternity. Its self-directing, narcissistic, sterile character is the antithesis of all that is truly paternal.

“Fatherhood is the proper identity of man qua man. This is because God’s Fatherhood is not an analogue of earthly fatherhood, an imperfect participation in created fatherhood. Rather, the Heavenly Father has His analogue in the created existence of men.”

The deepest case for the primacy of the father, then, rests not on the greater physical strength of men, nor on social custom, nor on the psychological difference between the sexes, but upon God the Father Himself, the icons of whom in the created order are men. For this reason Paul writes, “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.”15 It ought not to surprise us, therefore, that among every nation and culture we find the primacy of the father and reverence for paternity as the norm, for indirectly and implicitly the Heavenly Father is revealed in the book of nature.

CLOSING REMARKS I began by reflecting on the family as a natural society.

I think it is necessary to understand this, as fathers can take charge of what belongs to them only if they understand the nature of their own jurisdiction. I then

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Indeed, there is a growing body of psychological data – which has met with great opposition – suggesting that homosexuality arises out of a paternal deficit in one’s upbringing, or an overly matriarchal domestic milieu. The direction of our culture is making a once exceptional phenomenon the norm, and I do not only speak of explicit attempts to normalise such corruptions of masculinity, through particular efforts to have children’s playtime with drag queens, or gay-pride celebrations for a whole month of the year in every city, or every television sitcom or drama having at least one homosexual theme. I speak also of accepted currents far older and more wicked, like divorce, which enables a man to cut himself off from the realisation of his own masculinity when difficulties arise; or the use of contraception, which has transformed natural sex into a sterile and sodomising act; or abortion, enabling a man to abandon his responsibilities and return to 51

reflection

an infantilised life by taking the infant’s life. All this I call the homosexualisation of our culture, of which so-called “gay culture” is just the theatrical expression.

If men are not absolutely aware that they live within the context of a gay-integralism then they will to some degree accept its doctrines, and be corrupted by them.

Sensitivity, elegance, a love of beauty and education, these are not the enemies of masculinity: masculinity is not a synonym of machismo. The enemy of masculinity is homosexuality; that is, the enemy of masculinity is the corruption of nature and its expression in the paternal principle. One of the most subversive and subtle ways in which men have been homosexualised is through the corruption of male emotion. Men are expected either to display little emotion other than aggression, as in the machismo view of emotion, or they must reduce emotion to mere self-directed sentimentalism, with adolescent demonstrations that they are feminists or “on the right side of history” in some other way. Real male emotion is paternal emotion; it is the rational pursuit to realise the good of those in one’s care, and for this to be felt.

Perhaps the most tragic consequence of this process of homosexualisation is to be found in the Catholic priesthood. Priests who have truly realised their masculinity through spiritual fatherhood seem to be in the minority. I do not claim that all those who have failed to do so are homosexual, but it is undeniable that the clerical hierarchy has become a refuge for men with this disorder, and this internal problem together with the influence of the surrounding culture has deeply wounded the sacred priesthood.

The modern false dichotomy between doctrine and pastoral practice, with which we are often presented, arises from an un-fatherly spirit in the clerical hierarchy. Every good father of children knows that inconsistency between parental teaching and the daily life of the home is down to bad parenting. Effeminacy, inconsistency, and sentimentalism are all prominent characteristics of the contemporary Catholic priesthood, and are all signs of a homosexualist spirit corrupting the sacred priesthood of the New Covenant.

What can be practically drawn from what I have said? An answer to the problem with which I have concluded can only be found in the order of supernature, for fallen human nature can only be restored and transformed by grace. My own advice (for what it 52

is worth) regarding cooperation with this grace is as follows, and is directed at fathers of families, though could equally be for spiritual fathers too. Pray with your children; bless your family; catechise at the dining table, sitting yourself at its head; ensure your family attend worthy liturgy; have piety toward the traditions which have been handed down to you, and protect those traditions; instruct, discipline, and praise your children; cancel your TV licence.

Sebastian Morello is a lecturer and formator in London, a visiting lecturer for a number of academic institutes, and a frequent speaker at Catholic events across the UK and abroad.

He is a contributing author of a number of publications, and the author of a book on St Thomas Aquinas's metaphysics and aesthetics, The World as God's Portrait, which is to be published by Angelico Press in March 2020. Sebastian has lived in countries throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia,and converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism in India in 2009. He now lives in rural Bedfordshire with his wife and two children.

ENDNOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 6, 13.

Bernice Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 33.

Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, 12.

William Newton, A Civilization of Love (Leominster: Gracewing, 2011), p. 58.

Hamilton, Political Thought, p. 118.

André A. Alves and José M. Moreira, The Salamanca School (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 56.

Matthew 28:18-20.

Ephesians 5:22-23.

Pius XI, Cast Connubii, 26-27 (italics added).

Ephesians 5:25-30.

Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 14.

John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 25.

Ibid. 25.

John 14:9.

Ephesians 3:14-15.

CAL X M A R IA E

b y D R J O S E P H S H AW

T

he secular world ignores Easter, for the most part.

Having turned Lent into a chocolate-eating season, it sails through Holy Week without a second thought. It is not so with Christmas.

Admittedly, the seasons before and after are weirdly reversed: Advent is the season of parties and good cheer, and Christmastide the season of penance: dieting, gym membership, and “dry January”. Nevertheless, Christmas is Christmas. The world of work comes to an almost complete halt. The roads are empty. People have stocked their homes with food as if expecting to be snowed in for a month. And, most astonishing of all, churches are full. “For while all things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her course, Thy almighty Word leapt down from heaven from Thy royal throne, as a fierce conqueror into the midst of the land of destruction.” (Wisdom 18:14) It is often said that the “real message of Christmas” is lost during the festivities. There is clearly truth in this, but what should strike us more forcefully is how much of it gets through. At no other time of the year are non-religious people confronted so explicitly with the message of the Gospel, from the nativity scenes in their friends’ houses to the Christmas-themed postage stamps on their letters. They may not accept it, but they celebrate it. People who would never make a conscious effort to mark the Resurrection raise a glass to the Nativity of Jesus Christ. Those with even a very attenuated connection with the Faith make their way to church. If we imagine a graph showing the level of receptivity to Christianity by the average citizen through the year, it would peak at Christmas.

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beauty of our faith

THROUGH THE LITURGY

Evangelisation

It places a heavy responsibility on those preparing liturgies and sermons for Christmas. This is their once-a-year chance to reach deep into the parish pool of lapsed Catholics – at least, those of them who haven’t gone to an Anglican Cathedral service for the “choirboys and candles” experience. In many ways our clergy are not well prepared for this opportunity.

Whatever training in homiletics our seminaries provide, it doesn’t seem to produce very impressive results.

Furthermore, the general orientation of parish liturgy does not lend itself to welcoming the lost sheep.

On the contrary, the focus of parish liturgy seems to be on keeping the inner circle on board. Incompetent singers and readers are soothed and encouraged.

Heretical catechists are entrusted with the children’s liturgy. Hideous amateur art produced by parishioners is kept on prominent display for decades. If financial behaviour can be described in terms of the balance between fear and greed, then we might say that parish priests are motived overwhelmingly by fear: they don’t want to lose what they currently have, their key supporters. Like an investor who is terrified of losses and so buries his money in a hole in the ground, they are unwilling to take the risks which would be necessary to attract newcomers.

There is more to it than that, however. All priests know about the kind of “good liturgy” which attracts the crowds, and a significant proportion of them regard it as ideologically wrong. They think that liturgy should be “inclusive”, by which they mean something which gives people a feeling of belonging, but “belonging” to a human, rather than to a supernatural, community. Joseph Ratzinger, before becoming Pope, described it well in The Spirit of the Liturgy. He refers to the “unprecedented clericalisation” which followed the liturgical reform of the 1960s, with the new focus on the person of the priest: “We have to see him, to respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing.

53

His creativity sustains the whole thing.” This was accompanied by an attempt to involve lay people in the liturgy in a new way (p. 80): “... by assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals and entrusting the ‘creative’ planning of the liturgy to groups of people who like to, and are supposed to, ‘make their own contribution’. Less and less is God in the picture.

More and more important is what is done by the human beings who meet here and do not like to subject themselves to a ‘pre-determined pattern’.

The turning of the priest towards the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle.

In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself.”

Again, he asks: “Are we today really hopelessly huddled in our own little circle?” (p. 82).

The cosy little circle is closed. They may well say that they do their best to welcome newcomers, but what newcomers see, and what even the more marginal regular worshippers see, is not a group facing and worshipping God, which they can quietly join by slipping in at the back, but a family, or members of a tightly-knit team, with a complex and obscure hierarchy and assignation of roles. Clearly, there is an elite here, who are up in the sanctuary handling the sacred vessels, proclaiming the Scriptures, and leading the people in prayer. If you are not one of them, you clearly haven’t “made it” in the parish. It is a common experience for an “ordinary parishio-

ner” not to be allowed to talk about parish matters to the parish priest, but be firmly directed to one of his minions, depending on the subject to be raised.

On the one hand, the priest doesn’t appear to be in charge of the parish any more: most of his authority has been alienated to others. On the other hand, he has become so exalted a personage that only the elect few may discuss anything of substance with him.

The unconsciously ironic accusation that “fine liturgy” is “elitist”; the creation of a clericalized lay inner circle; the exaltation of poor or mediocre music and art as “authentic”; and the focus on the human community: these are the elements of a self-reinforcing pattern of thought which makes the typical Catholic liturgy less than attractive for newcomers.

If we want to make a positive impression on the tide of the unchurched which washes into our churches over Christmas, we would do well to focus our attention not on each other, or even on them, but on God. 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.

PHOTO CREDIT: don Elvir Tabaković, Can. Reg.

54

CAL X M A R IA E

A c o l u m n b y M AT T H E W M C C U S K E R

I

n the spring edition this column discussed how our understanding of the past profoundly influences how we understand the Church and the faith in the present.

An important book by Darío Fernández-Morera, of Northwestern University in the United States, published in 2016, demonstrates just how much our understanding of the past can be distorted by unsound, or dishonest, approaches to history.1 In his book, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, he demolishes, point by point, the widely held belief that under Islamic rule Spain enjoyed a golden age of culture, learning and religious tolerance. Using evidence from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sources, Fernández-Morera reveals the works of many modern academics to be, at best, imaginative fantasies and, at worst, deliberate falsifications of the past for ideological reasons.

I will focus on two key points in this column: the nature of the invasion and the supposed toleration showed to Christians.

In 711 Muslim armies entered Spain. Within ten years almost the whole of Spain was under Islamic rule. How had this happened?

The traditional view is that the conquest of Spain was a natural continuation of the extensive military conquests won by Arab armies over the course of the seventh century. Motivated by zeal for their new religion, Islamic armies conquered Persia and much of the Eastern Roman Empire, including north Africa and most of what we now consider the Middle East.

All these lands had been conquered in the pursuit of

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lessons from history

Andalusian paradise

THE MY TH OF THE jihad, holy war, which was understood, in the words of a modern professor of Islamic studies, to mean “to make war in order to outspread the Islamic religion and implement its law throughout the entire world, and its reward is paradise.”2 Many modern scholars have been keen to deny the religious nature of the conquest of Spain. They base this on a modern interpretation of the Arab word jihad, alleging that it refers primarily to an interior struggle rather than to military conquest. Therefore, this line of argument goes, as jihad doesn’t mean holy war, the invasion of Spain could not have been a jihad.

“The pursuit of jihad as Holy War is not” writes Richard Hitchcock “a motivating factor relevant to the clashes between Muslims and the people they vanquished in the first century of Islam, at least not as far as the conquest and subsequent occupation of the Iberian peninsula is concerned.”3 In fact, the writings of medieval Muslim scholars supply abundant testimony that (i) they considered jihad to mean holy war and (ii) that the invasion of Spain was a jihad.

The eighth century legal treatise al-Muwatta, by Imam Malik Ibn Anas, the founder of the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, and one of the most influential Islamic scholars of all time, discusses jihad only in the martial sense. And so too, writes Fernández-Morera, do the succeeding works of that school.4 For example, the Risala, a Maliki text that was very influential in Islamic Spain states “[Christians and Jews] either accept Islam or pay the jizya; if not, they are to be fought.”5 And the historian of Muslim Spain, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), explained “the holy war is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”6

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lessons from history

The position adopted by academics like Hitchcock is untenable, as Fernández-Morera notes: “these scholars may be more or less knowledgeable of the true meaning of Islam than learned medieval Muslim scholars, who were closer to Islam and its origins, but this possibility of an erroneous interpretation of jihad by the medieval Muslim scholars does not change those medieval interpretations of jihad as the religious obligation to force the infidels to convert or die, or in the case of Christians and Jews, to convert, pay a special tax, or die – as evidenced in countless medieval documents that in various forms praise and justify war against the infidel for the sake of the true religion.”7 The modern interpretation also runs into the problem that the Muslim chronicles speak quite freely of the invasion of Spain as a jihad. The historian Ibn al-Qutiyya (d. 977) narrates how a Muslim commander, Tariq, was inspired by dreaming of Muhammed and before battle reminded his troops of the rewards of dying during jihad. Another early Muslim leader is described by a tenth century historian, al-Khushani, as “a courageous champion of jihad… burning in his desire to hurt the polytheists [an abusive term for Christians, due to belief in the Trinity].” And there are many other examples.8 In accord with the principle of jihad, all those who resisted Islam could be killed or, in the case of women and children enslaved, including in sexual slavery.

Massacres of those who resisted were commonplace – as at Seville, Cordoba, Merida and Orihuela. Even if Christians surrendered, there was no guarantee that they would be spared. Toledo, the capital, surrendered but the Muslim leader nonetheless executed elderly members of the nobility.9 In the face of such violence, and the breakdown of the Visigothic state, many reached peaceful accords with the invaders to try to avoid such atrocities.

These accords were made under threat of violence and universally violated by Muslim conquerors at a later date. But this hasn’t stopped some academics from using them as evidence that the conquest was “largely peaceful.”10 One of the most dishonest claims made by proponents of the “myth”, such as David Nirenberg, is that “we should think of the Muslims, in 56

some way, as a migratory wave, just like the Visigoths, except two hundred [sic] years later.”11 This is an extraordinary distortion of the truth.

Muslim and Christian chronicles alike agree on the violent and destructive nature of the invasion, recording massacres, enslavement, especially of young women as sexual slaves, looting, the burning of towns, the desecration of churches and relics and the destruction of homes, vineyards and orchards.12 Christians and Jews were presented with only three choices: death, conversion to Islam, or the acceptance of second-class social status as dhimmis accompanied by payment of the jizya, a tax “imposed on the People of the Book to humble them” as Malik Ibn Anas wrote. The jizya was “protection money” paid by dhimmis, which mean “beneficiaries of the contract of protection”. Refusal to pay would result in execution or enslavement. Payment of jizya was accompanied by ritual humiliation: “The dhimmi, standing, would present the money to the Muslim collector who would be sitting up higher on a sort of throne; this Muslim bureaucrat would hold the dhimmi by the throat telling him ‘O dhimmi, enemy of Allah, pay the jizya that you owe us for the protection and tolerance we grant you’; the other Muslims present would imitate the collector, pushing around the dhimmi and whoever other dhimmis accompanied him. To this amusing spectacle should be admitted any Muslim who wanted to enjoy it.”13 We can well imagine what modern historians would have to say of Christians who gave non-Christians the choice between death, conversion or enforced social humiliation accompanied by financial extortion. How hypocritical then is the stance that they adopt towards the jizya, pretending that this “protection money”, extorted through fear of violence and death, was in fact a genuine act of protection by the Islamic state: “the new Islamic polity not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive but, following Quranic mandate, by and large protected them”.14 Or, as another puts it, “Jews and Christians, who were ‘People of the Book’ were treated well, aside from taxes”.15 Conversion to Islam – under threat of death, slavery or social degradation – is described by another academic as CAL X M A R IA E

the myth of the adalusian paradise

“the harmonious process of conversion to Islam and consolidation of the majority group”, the existence of small numbers of surviving Christians who resisted conversion is to this author “an indication of the spirit of tolerance which characterizes the history of al-Andalus [the Muslim name for Spain].”16 Such academics tend to downplay the violence of the invasion, not least because the “myth of the Andalusian paradise” would be greatly undermined if they acknowledged that it was founded on massacre, rape and slavery. In addition, denying that Spain was brutally conquered is a way to deny legitimacy to the “Reconquista”, the reconquest of Spain by the Catholic kingdoms in the later middle ages. A third reason is that presenting the invasion as a combination of migration and peaceful takeover helps them to make the achievements of Islamic Spain look exceptional, by downplaying the achievements of the society brutally overrun by the invasion.

Spain was one of the most prosperous provinces of the Roman empire. Invaded by a number of Germanic peoples in the fifth century, it was the Visigoths who finally established themselves. Initially Arian, but ruling a Catholic Hispano-Roman population, the Visigothic king Recared was received into the Catholic Church in 589, followed by the aristocracy. Despite the devastation caused by the invasions of the fifth century much of the Roman infrastructure remained intact and eighth century Visigothic Spain was flourishing.

Medieval Muslim chronicles note the awe with which the Arab invaders entered cities such as Toledo, Seville and Cordoba. Medieval Muslim historians had an honesty that many modern academics lack, recording in detail the artistic achievements of the Spanish and contrasting it with the Arab invaders, who, by contrast, as Ibn Khaldun put it, “were barely coming out of their nomadic existence” and who “despised culture.”17 The spiritual and intellectual richness of Spanish culture is made manifest in the life and works of St Isidore of Seville (560-636).

It is only by feigning ignorance (or by being genuinely ignorant) that modern academics can make assertions like this: “a Muslim empire… accomplished what the Visigoths never could: they lifted Spain from her Dark Ages gloom and depression.”18 The conquest of Spain left the Catholic majority subjugated and humiliated, their numbers dwindling WI N T E R 2 0 1 9

as more and more either converted to Islam, were expelled or fled to the free Catholic kingdoms in the north, or were martyred. Those who converted, and their descendants after them, were inferior in social status to the descendants of Arabs. By the end of the twelfth century there were hardly any Christians left in al-Andalus. This, we are expected to accept, was the result of a society where “Muslim tolerance of People of Book was high” and which “nourished a complex culture of tolerance”.19

ST ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, 1655, BARTOLOMÉ ESTEBAN MURILLO, CATHEDRAL OF SEVILLE, SPAIN.

In Islamic Spain there was one law for Muslims, another for Christians. Muslims could testify against Christians, Christians could not testify in legal matters concerning only Muslims. Whoever calumniated a Muslim would be flogged; whoever calumniated a non-Muslim would not be flogged. A Christian would be executed for the death of a Muslim, but a Muslim would not be executed for the death of a Christian, unless “treacherous.” Christians were encouraged to convert to Islam, but converts to Christianity would be executed. Christians could not exercise political power, carry weapons, ride horses in Muslim areas, bring up their children in the faith if married to a Muslim, or breach any one of many other prohibitions of this nature.20 Christians were forbidden from celebrating their religion publicly by means of processions, they were forbidden from entering certain areas of towns and cities because they were deemed “unclean”. They 57

lessons from history

were rarely allowed even to repair their churches, never mind build new ones, and clear evidence demonstrates that many churches were destroyed despite the blithe assertions of many “scholars” to the contrary.

Yet Professor Maria Rosa Menocal, and other such academics, can write, in defiance of all the evidence, that medieval Islamic Spain “had three principal and interlocking features which are at the heart of that culture’s extraordinarily vigorous well-being: ethnic pluralism, religious tolerance and a variety of forms of what we could call cultural secularism”.21 For academics like Maria Rosa Menocal, the writing of history no longer has any intrinsic connection with the evidence actually provided by historical sources. The past can now be presented in whatever manner is convenient for their own agenda.

For many academics, hatred or contempt for the Catholic faith lies at the heart of their propagation of “the myth”. This contempt can be seen in the attitude towards Christians martyred by the Muslims in Spain. Hugh Kennedy, for example, contrasts the “tolerance and essential reasonableness of the Muslim authorities” with the “self-inflicted martyrdom” of Christians in Cordoba who insisted on publicly proclaiming the divinity of Christ in response to the execution of a young man guilty only of professing Christ and stating his belief that Islam was a false religion. Nearly fifty men and women were publicly executed for expressing their Catholic faith – some were beheaded and some boiled alive. Perhaps if they professed any other religion than that of the Catholic Church they would, as Fernández-Morera suggests, be praised by modern academics as adopting “a policy of nonviolent resistance”22 Instead they are mocked as “fanatic Christian fringe.”23 For today’s academics, the “myth of the Andalusian paradise” is a useful tool for pushing the ideology of multiculturalism. It is very helpful for them to be able to point to at least one society where Christians and Muslims were able to live peacefully together for centuries, and under Islamic rule no less. As no such society has ever existed, they have found it necessary to invent one.

The “myth” is a clear example of how the academic establishment can endorse a particular view of the past not because the historical evidence leads

58

us towards it, but because it is useful for achieving certain political ends.

There is increasing awareness that the mainstream media daily propagates “fake news” in place of real information about current affairs. We must also be fully alive to the dangers posed by the “fake history” being taught in universities by academics with no concern for truth, and repeated by those who gladly adopt the false narratives as their own.

To disentangle historical truth from manufactured falsehood we must be fully aware of (i) how different approaches to the study of the past shape the narratives we are reading and (ii) how history should really be approached if we are to learn something valuable and true about the past. That is what I hope to explore further in this column in future editions of Calx Mariae.

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 General Secretary and Director of Fundraising.

He can be contacted at: matthewmccusker@spuc.org.uk.

ENDNOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Darío Fernández-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain, (Wilmington, 2016).

Myth, p.24.

Richard Hitchcock, Professor Emeritus of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, quoted in Myth, p 23.

Myth, p.24.

Myth, p.25.

Myth, p.26.

Myth, p.243 Myth, p.31-36.

Myth, p.38.

Myth, p.241.

David Nirenberg, Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, quoted in Myth, p.19.

Myth, p.40.

Myth, p210.

Maria Rosa Menocal, quoted in Myth, p.206.

Myth, p.217.

Rafael Valencia, quoted in Myth, p.225.

Myth, p.65.

Chris Lowney, quoted in Myth, p.57.

Jane Smith, Maria Rosa Menocal, quoted in Myth, p.206.

Myth, p.211-12.

Myth, p.8.

Myth, p.231.

Myth, p.208.

CAL X M A R IA E

Graceful agents of conversions

by MARIA MADISE

S

t Monica and St Rita were born on different continents over a thousand years apart. Obviously, they could have had no contact with one another, albeit St Rita eventually entered an Augustinian convent in Cascia in central Italy, and thus became a spiritual daughter of St Monica’s son St Augustine. However, what these two great female saints share is something much greater than time and space. It is their inexhaustible work for the conversion of souls.

St Monica (331-387), mother of St Augustine, was born in Africa, in modern-day Algeria. She was raised as a Christian but given in marriage to a Roman pagan, Patricius, who is said to have had a violent temper and dissolute manners. Patricius’s quick-tempered mother also lived with them which added to Monica’s trials. Monica’s piety and prayers annoyed Patricius, but he always respected her. A year before Patricius’s death, Monica’s ceaseless prayers and sacrifices were rewarded with his baptism. Their son Augustine was then seventeen years old. However, another seventeen years of Monica’s dedicated prayers were needed for Augustine, who was led astray in heresy and impurity.

Augustine himself wrote in his Confessions that “she shed for him more tears than other mothers shed over a coffin”.1 Today we may find the Roman Catechism startling in its gentle reproach regarding our natural inclination to place the good of our physical life over the good of the spiritual life, when we read: “[i]t sometimes happens that persons feel more intense sorrow for the death of their children than for the grievousness of their sins”.2 This was certainly not the case with St Monica. A bishop whom she tried to persuade to speak to her son, in order to help to bring Augustine to a better frame of mind, consoled her: “For it might be that the child of such tears would not perish”. After Augustine’s marvellous conversion and baptism by the hand of St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, Monica saw that her work was done. She said to him:

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saints for our times

ST MONICA & ST RITA

ST AUGUSTINE TAKEN TO SCHOOL BY ST MONICA, C.1415, NICOLO DI PIETRO, PINACOTECA, THE VATICAN.

“Son, there is nothing now I care for in this life. What I shall now do or why am I here, I know not. The one reason I had for wishing to linger in this life a little longer was that I might see you a Catholic Christian before I died. This has God granted superabundantly in seeing you reject earthly happiness to become His servant. What do I here?”3 Very shortly after that, she died.

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saints for our times

St Rita (1386-1456) was born in Umbria, Italy. As a young girl, she had a strong desire for religious life, but in obedience to her parents, she married at the age of twelve. By all accounts, it was a difficult marriage, as her husband was a cruel and immoral man who had many enemies. They had two sons, tempestuous as their father. Throughout their eighteen years of marriage, St Rita was known by her patience, docility, and forbearance. Finally, her husband turned from his abusive ways but was soon murdered by a member of a feuding family. Rita gave a public pardon to the murderers, but her two sons were expected to take revenge for their father. Rita was praying that God would spare the boys from the guilt of blood. Both boys died of natural causes the following year. Thereafter, Rita sought to enter the Augustinian convent in Cascia. She was refused several times, because she was a widow and because of her association with the feud through her husband’s family, which was much feared, as there were nuns from the rivalling family in the convent. Rita implored the help of St John the Baptist, St Augustine of Hippo and St Nicholas of Tolentino and incredibly, managed to persuade both parties to sign a peace agreement and bury La Vendetta. After she had been accepted, her three patron saints were said to have carried her into the convent at night through the bolted gates. Many miracles were associated with her there which continued after her death. At the age of sixty, she received a small deep wound on her forehead as if pierced by a thorn from the crown of our Lord. This wound remained open until the day she died and united her ever more closely to the Passion of Christ for souls.

Whenever in Italy, I visit a certain cheese seller, who is originally from Cascia. His excellent produce comes all from that region. Italians’ unrivalled love for their saints is beautifully portrayed in this man.

With every piece of cheese purchased, I am assured that St Rita is deservedly the patroness for impossible causes: there is nothing she could not handle, her body is most incorrupt, she is the best. Such attitude of complete reliance and confidence in our heavenly aides seems most instructive. Time has no relevance: what was possible for Rita is possible for us if we foster proper zeal for souls.

What does this zeal consist of ? It is comprised of the desire for the good of our neighbour and the glory 60

of God. The spiritual classic Divine Intimacy instructs: “It is true that the primary end of God’s action is His own glory, but He who is infinitely good wills to obtain this glory especially through the salvation and the happiness of His creatures. In fact, nothing exalts His goodness, love and mercy more than the work of saving souls. Therefore, to love God and His glory means to love souls; it means to work and sacrifice oneself for their salvation.”4 Complementing this, Butler’s Lives of the Saints exhorts: “There is no prayer more pleasing to God than that which has for its object the conversion of those who lead lives of sin, particularly sins against the faith.”5 It would serve us well to recall the example of St Monica and St Rita as we are preparing for Christmas and thinking of gifts for our family and friends.

What is the greatest gift we have received? Is it not our Catholic faith? So glorious, so beautiful and so complete that those who embrace it will not find anything wanting. However, the reality in the world and in the Church today, inevitably means that most of us are, in some way, familiar with the situation of St Monica and St Rita – with family members and friends far from the nourishment of the true faith. What more beautiful or more necessary gift could we give them than our patient work for their conversion?

Humanly speaking, most of the time, there is little we can do. Attempts to bring about conversion by our own means would be imprudent and fruitless. God has created us free and He honours the freedom of His creatures even to the point of their rejection of Him. Rather, what is required of us is our devotion to prayer and sacrifice on their behalf. This is a real interior work that, if consistent and supported by an example of a good Christian life, can bear abundant fruit, as amply proved by St Monica and St Rita.

Of course, there are countless other saints who have been instrumental to the conversion of those around them. St Cecilia converted her new husband Valerian and his brother Tiburtius in a very short period of time. St Catharine converted the philosophers of the Emperor’s court, and St Alban his own executioners. These and many other extraordinary examples are truly inspiring but today, it is the persistence of St Monica and St Rita and their longsuffering devotion to prayer and sacrifice that we seem to be most in need of. Perhaps, like them, our efforts CAL X M A R IA E

will be met with ignorance, ingratitude, denial and disbelief for many years. And yet, when we truly love our neighbours, we must commit ourselves to their conversion, even if there seems to be no prospect of winning them for Christ. As Christians, we are called to give ourselves up unreservedly for souls, above all for those closest to us, so that they may share the true gift of faith that illuminates the way to Heaven - and perhaps especially now when the face of our beloved Church seems so disfigured and humiliated.

In Heaven, there are no passive observers. Everyone who desires to go there must become a saint. Pope Pius XI explains: “Christ has called the whole human race to the lofty heights of sanctity. (...) There are some who say that sanctity is not everyone’s vocation; on the contrary, it is everyone’s vocation, and all are called to it (...) Let no-one believe that sanctity belongs to a few chosen people, while the rest of humanity can limit itself to a lesser degree of virtue. Everyone is included in this law; no-one is exempt from it.”6 What more could we wish for those we love? How better can we reward those who love us enough to pray for our sanctification than to persevere in prayer for the conversion of souls and desire Heaven for them?

This is not a gift we can present to them on Christmas Day, but it is a gift that those who do not know the faith, are most in need of: to be summoned with the shepherds, even if only in our prayer, to the manger of our newborn Lord.

Let us never grow tired, let us never give up. In this lifelong work, let us always draw new strength and hope from the examples of St Monica and St Rita, who persevered until the end: “It is impossible to set any bounds to what persevering prayer may do. It gives man a share in the Divine Omnipotence. St Augustine’s soul lay bound in the chains of heresy and impurity, both of which had by long habit grown inveterate. They were broken by his mother’s prayers.”7 ENDNOTES:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

St Augustine Confessions, Book III, ch. 2.

The Catechism of the Council of Trent, Baronius Press, 2018, p. 254.

Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Dover Publications, 2005, p. 169.

Father Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen OCD, Divine Intimacy, Baronius Press, 2008, p. 924.

Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Dover Publications, 2005, p. 403.

Father Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen OCD, Divine Intimacy, Baronius Press, 2008, pp. 6-7.

Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Dover Publications, 2005, p. 169.

ST RITA OF CASCIA

WI N T E R 2 0 1 9

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