Catholics, Jews & Israel

We are, in fact, brothers and sisters of the Book and the pairing of the Old Law with the New is proof of that, as is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states:

1. The Old Law

1961 God, our Creator and Redeemer, chose Israel for himself to be his people and revealed his Law to them, thus preparing for the coming of Christ. the Law of Moses expresses many truths naturally accessible to reason. These are stated and authenticated within the covenant of salvation.

1962 The Old Law is the first stage of revealed Law. Its moral prescriptions are summed up in the Ten Commandments. the precepts of the Decalogue lay the foundations for the vocation of man fashioned in the image of God; they prohibit what is contrary to the love of God and neighbor and prescribe what is essential to it. the Decalogue is a light offered to the conscience of every man to make God’s call and ways known to him and to protect him against evil:

God wrote on the tables of the Law what men did not read in their hearts.¹³

1963 According to Christian tradition, the Law is holy, spiritual, and good,¹⁴ yet still imperfect. Like a tutor¹⁵ it shows what must be done, but does not of itself give the strength, the grace of the Spirit, to fulfill it. Because of sin, which it cannot remove, it remains a law of bondage. According to St. Paul, its special function is to denounce and disclose sin, which constitutes a “law of concupiscence” in the human heart.¹⁶ However, the Law remains the first stage on the way to the kingdom. It prepares and disposes the chosen people and each Christian for conversion and faith in the Savior God. It provides a teaching which endures for ever, like the Word of God.

1964 The Old Law is a preparation for the Gospel. “The Law is a pedagogy and a prophecy of things to come.”¹⁷ It prophesies and presages the work of liberation from sin which will be fulfilled in Christ: it provides the New Testament with images, “types,” and symbols for expressing the life according to the Spirit. Finally, the Law is completed by the teaching of the sapiential books and the prophets which set its course toward the New Covenant and the Kingdom of heaven.

There were . . . under the regimen of the Old Covenant, people who possessed the charity and grace of the Holy Spirit and longed above all for the spiritual and eternal promises by which they were associated with the New Law. Conversely, there exist carnal men under the New Covenant still distanced from the perfection of the New Law: the fear of punishment and certain temporal promises have been necessary, even under the New Covenant, to incite them to virtuous works. In any case, even though the Old Law prescribed charity, it did not give the Holy Spirit, through whom “God’s charity has been poured into our hearts.”¹⁸

13 St. Augustine, En. in Ps. 57, 1: PL 36, 673.

14 Cf. ⇒ Rom 7:12, ⇒ 14, ⇒ 16.

15 Cf. ⇒ Gal 3:24.

16 Cf. ⇒ Rom 7.

17 St. Irenaeus, Adv. haeres. 4, 15, 1: PG 7/1, 1012.

18 St. Thomas Aquinas, STh I-II, 107, 1 ad 2; cf. ⇒ Rom 5:5.

Retrieved June 26, 2018 from http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P6V.HTM

This column by the best thinking on current affairs in Israel and its relation with the United States comes from Susan Glick, who wrote recently:

National Security Advisor John Bolton said last Wednesday that while discussion of President Donald Trump’s decision to leave the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has centered on the administration’s revulsion with its institutional anti-Israel bias, the move was really about restoring American control over U.S. foreign policy.

In his words: “We did talk about Israel [in setting out our reasons for leaving the UNHRC] because it’s singled out unfairly. But in many respects, Israel is, as the saying goes, ‘the canary in the mine shaft’ for the United States. Countries that attack Israel do so because they think it’s easier, but much of their criticism is really aimed at us.”

Bolton added, “Getting off of the council is an assertion of America’s determination to stick to its Constitution and not to recognize that there’s some ‘higher authority’ at the UN … to judge our performance or to give us advice on how to implement the constitution … That’s what this is about: self-government.”

The Trump administration’s determination to restore American power and independence in the international arena places it on a collision course with the European Union, whose perspective on the proper goal of international affairs is diametrically opposed to the administration’s.

American power abroad rests on military and economic power. Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has been militarily dependent on the U.S.

Rather than build their own military power to secure their interests and enable them to play a leading role in world affairs, European leaders have based their international position on their power as a voting bloc in international and transnational institutions, and on their collective financial power.

Since the mid-1970s, Europe has used its power in international institutions and its financial power to advance one consistent policy position: hostility towards Israel.

The UNHRC is a perfect vehicle for advancing Europe’s foreign policy. Its name gives it a do-gooder halo effect. The notion that a “human rights council” could be anything but a force for good in the world is hard to accept.

But a year after it was established, the council focused its efforts not on protecting human rights, but on attacking the human rights of Jews in Israel. In 2007, the UNHRC passed Permanent Agenda Item 7. Item 7 created a separate standard for judging the Jewish state. Under Item 7, Israel is automatically subjected to condemnation for every action it takes to defend itself. Under Item 7, the council automatically embraces every Palestinian libel against Israel.

To get a sense of how this agenda item has perverted the council, from 2006-2016, the council passed 135 resolutions in total.

68 were condemnations of Israel. Syria was condemned 20 times, North Korea nine, and Iran six.

In her remarks Tuesday explaining America’s decision to leave the UNHRC, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley expressed frustration at the fact that Europe had refused to assist in the U.S.’s efforts to reform the UNHRC by, among other things, cancelling Agenda Item 7.

In her words:

There are several countries on the Human Rights Council who do share our values. Many of them strongly urged us to remain engaged in the council. They are embarrassed by the obsessive mistreatment of Israel. … Ultimately, many of these likeminded countries were unwilling to seriously challenge the status quo. We gave them opportunity after opportunity and many months of consultations, and yet they would not take a stand unless it was behind closed doors. Some even admittedly were fine with the blatant flaws of the council as long as they could pursue their own narrow agenda within the current structure.

Retrieved June 26, 2018 from http://carolineglick.com/europe-seeks-to-pin-down-president-trump-and-america/

Liberation Theology Informs Liberal Narrative

In a new book I am reading, Catholic Theology by the great Australian theologian, Tracey Rowland, she captures Liberation Theology (which informs liberal narrative in America) brilliantly, summarizing the 1984 document—authored by then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) which firmly established the Marxist roots of Liberation Theology.

“The CDF document explained the theoretical attraction of Liberation Theology by reference to three sociological developments after the Second Vatican Council. The first was the view that the existing theological Tradition was inadequate, the second was a ‘naïve belief in science which accepte3d the human sciences as a new gospel without wanting to see their limitations and endemic problems’. Specifically, ‘psychology, sociology and the Marxist interpretation of history seemed to be scientifically established and hence to become unquestionable arbiters of Christian thought’. Thirdly, ‘the criticism of tradition applied by modern Evangelical exegesis, in particular by Rudolf Bultmann, and his school, similarly became a firm theological authority, cutting off the path to theology in its prior form and so encouraging people all the more to produce new constructions’. The crucial concepts became ‘people’, ‘community’, experience’ and ‘history’. Whereas previously it was ‘the Catholic Church in her totality—a totality that spanned time and space and embraced laity (sensus fidei) and hierarchy (Magisterium)—that constituted the hermeneutical criterion’, with the Liberation Theologians influenced by Marxism it became simply the community. The biblical horizon was then fused with the Marxist idea of history such that faith is replaced by ‘fidelity to history’, hope becomes confidence in the future elimination of class conflict, and love consists in the ‘option for the poor’. Above all, it is axiomatic for Liberation Theologians that truth is realised in history and its praxis and hence ‘the only true orthodoxy is orthopraxy’.” (p. 185)

Catholic Theology (2017). Tracey Rowland. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc: London.

Being Catholic

As a convert, I have never taken the Church for granted nor failed to defend it—and I am talking about the supernatural Church here, not necessarily the institutional Church which, as formed and administered by humans, sins regularly—and this article from Catholic Culture by Dr. Jeff Mirus is exceptional, a must read.

An excerpt.

I’ve written recently about the deliberate exclusion of informed religious faith as an influence in the political and social life of the West (see “Time to give the lie to a culture in denial” and “Dangerous! Both religious exclusion and religious common cause”). Since Catholicism is unique in basing itself on a manifest public Revelation from God, complete with a Divinely ordained authority to secure the authentic transmission of that Revelation over time, we must address this exclusion. How might we counter the powerful errors in our culture, manifested both privately and publicly, which contradict what any person of good will can know that God has taught?

One common approach to the problem is to demand freedom of religion or, even more extensively, freedom of conscience. While it is true that there can be no coercion in religious belief, claims for religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the West today are often merely stop-gap measures to prevent a State which specifically authorizes grave evils from coercing everyone to participate in those evils. In other words, having failed to win the political battle in favor of just laws, we fall back on Western notions of liberty of conscience in the hope of being exempted from the program.

As a tactic this may have occasional merit, but it further erodes the Catholic (or authentically Christian) position through an unspoken willingness to suspend opposition to evil as long as we can be exempted from direct participation in it by virtue of our peculiarity. The success of this approach depends in large part on our being perceived as an insignificant minority, so insignificant that the State can afford to humor us, much as it does the Amish in their enclaves or Native Americans on their reservations. This tactic is not immoral in itself, but it is primarily defensive and self-interested. It does not make a serious claim on our public life for the common good.

Another common approach is simply to move on to the next battle after each loss. In one sense this is inevitable, but it is a common related error to assume that, once a particular moral battle has been lost, we must accept the contrary state of affairs so as not to appear either shrill or disrespectful of the democratic process. Nor is this approach confined to public or political issues. We do this in our own families and among our own friends as well. Once people have severed yet another tie with the true and the good, we take it for granted that we must leave them alone in their errors. In this context, I sometimes wonder how often we even remember to continue to pray for errant friends and family members.

As I mentioned, in one sense this is inevitable. A wise person knows when his moral position has been decisively rejected (whether politically or personally), and he would be foolish indeed to continue to fight in the same way the particular battle that has now been lost. Yet too often the acceptance of one sort of defeat can cause us to withdraw entirely, to cease bearing witness, or even to refuse to remain active in those services of love which not only can soften hearts but “will heap burning coals” upon the heads of those who, in the matter at hand, have become our enemies (Rm 12:20). Authentic love, in other words, can force others to look inward, triggering a sense of shame.

The sources of conviction

But something more is needed. I would suggest that even in a hostile culture we must become known not only as emissaries of love in a comfortable sense but also as emissaries of intelligent conviction—as emissaries of truth.

In my previous essays I emphasized the objective public character of Christian Revelation and the consequent objective public character of the moral and doctrinal authority of the Catholic Church—claims that no other institution on earth can (or even does) make. The various opinions, philosophical schools, and religions of the world may deserve a fair hearing, but they are not all equally valid. Most consist of distinctive errors, lies or even fantasies dressing up a remarkably limited number of natural insights. All of these conflict in notable ways with God’s self-disclosure through the natural law, which we can know by reason, and/or with His formal Revelation in Jesus Christ, which is protected through time by the Church Christ established.

Therefore we cannot afford to accept today’s secular myths, or even to accord equal value to today’s religious myths. We cannot accept the demanded denial of Catholicism’s claim to convey clearly the true and the good as known from the God without whom there would be no reality at all. Instead we must fearlessly challenge others in both private and public situations to give an account of why they believe what they do, and to consider whether their own grounds of belief have any real merit. Our approach must be this:

Look, I can tell you exactly WHY this course of action or this law is evil rather than good. I can explain the matter with reasons drawn from the very nature of things. And if we cannot follow the natural argument, I will tell you what God has revealed about this while demonstrating that this revelation was both public and eminently credible. Now, can you give any rational account of the source and cogency of your own ideas?

Retrieved June 15, 2018 from https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/articles.cfm?id=747

 

Sexual Scandal Continues

In what looks like the most damaging report to come out about a state’s problems with abusive priests, this story from Yahoo notes a new report coming out soon.

The institutional Catholic Church—though not the supernatural Catholic Church which stands forever as Christ promised—might never recover from this long nightmare of evil priests raping children.

An excerpt.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The results of a lengthy probe into the handling of sexual abuse claims by Roman Catholic dioceses throughout Pennsylvania, which victim advocates say will be the biggest and most exhaustive ever by a U.S. state, could be made public within weeks.

A statewide grand jury spent nearly two years looking into the abuse scandal, and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro has said he plans to address the panel’s findings by the end of June.

WHAT TO EXPECT

The grand jury investigated six of the state’s eight dioceses, which collectively minister to more than 1.7 million Catholics. The report is expected to reveal details of widespread abuse and efforts to conceal and protect abusive priests.

A judge’s ruling last week gave the first real details of an investigation that started in July 2016. Judge Norman Krumenacker rejected an effort to delay the report’s release or allow people named in the report to challenge parts of it before its release.

Krumenacker, a Cambria County judge who has been overseeing the grand jury, wrote in his opinion that the investigative body had heard from dozens of witnesses and reviewed over half a million pages of internal documents from diocesan archives. The investigation involved allegations of child sexual abuse, failure of church structures to report it to law enforcement and obstruction of justice by people “associated with the Roman Catholic Church, local public officials and community leaders,” he said.

The report could be groundbreaking, said Terry McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org. Several smaller states, including Maine and New Hampshire— each with one diocese that covers the full state — have issued reports, but no state the size of Pennsylvania has conducted a full accounting, he said.

“You’re going to learn a lot about this crisis that you never knew before,” he said. “Another thing you are going to see in a report of this geographic scope is an accounting of the geographic solution, meaning within the Pennsylvania dioceses there is a certain amount of mobility, and priests who have trouble in one diocese might be transferred to another within the state. There hopefully will be some accounting of that.”

Two priests have been arrested on child sexual abuse charges as a result of the probe, one each in the Erie and Greensburg dioceses. Prosecutors have said one of those priests assaulted a boy more than 20 times as he was serving as an altar boy and would later require the boy to confess the abuse to him.

The overall investigation involves the dioceses of Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton.

STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS

It is unclear whether there will be any other charges filed as a result of the report, because of Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations on child sexual abuse crimes.

Under state law, criminal charges can be filed up to the time the person making the claim of child sexual abuse is 50 years old. Civil claims can be filed for child sexual abuse until the person alleging the abuse turns 30.

Previously release grand jury reports on the other two Pennsylvania dioceses — Philadelphia and Altoona-Johnstown— advocated a two-year window to allow people alleging long-ago abuse to pursue civil claims. Efforts to pass that legislation have stalled or been blocked.

Rep. Mark Rozzi, who put forward the legislation, said he testified about his own experience of abuse at the hands of a priest in the Allentown diocese. Rozzi said he plans to reintroduce legislation to extend the statute of limitations. The church has said changing the statute of limitations would be unfair to schools and parishes and could be financially crippling.

PREVIOUS GRAND JURIES

In 2005, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office released a scathing grand jury report that said allegations against more than 100 priests and other clergy had been looked into by the panel. The report criticized internal practices of moving priests and not reporting allegations to law enforcement.

In 2011, the office released another report, having instructed a second grand jury to examine whether the diocese had changed its practices. The investigation resulted in several priests and members of the clergy being charged with crimes related to child sexual abuse, including Monsignor William Lynn, who was charged with endangering children for allegedly moving priests from parish to parish instead of removing them or reporting allegations to police.

Retrieved June 11, 2018 from https://www.yahoo.com/news/report-pennsylvania-priest-abuse-most-extensive-yet-145523867.html

 

Pentecost Sunday

It was this past Sunday and this article from Crisis Magazine gives us a good overview of its importance; huge, birth of the Church.

An excerpt.

Pentecost celebrates the birth of the Church with the coming of the Holy Spirit in fulfillment of Jesus’s promise to his disciples.

Yet, few doctrines of the Church are as misunderstood as that of the Holy Spirit. I suspect this is partly due to the fuzzy image connoted by a name that conjures up notions of wraiths, mysterious life-forces, and formless impersonal beings which incline us to think of the Holy Spirit as “it” rather than “him.”

There’s also the matter of instruction. Although we give the Holy Spirit a nod in our slogans, mission statements, and church talk, he is largely ignored in our teaching. In my long Christian life, over a number of denominations, I recall hearing only one sermon devoted to the comprehensive ministry of the Spirit.

He Creates
For folks who think of the Holy Spirit only as a New Testament gift to believers, his involvement throughout the Old Testament can come as a surprise.

In the opening verses of Genesis, the Holy Spirit is seen “hovering over the waters” of the unformed earth. When Elohim (the Hebrew plural name, in form, for God) said, “Let us make man in our image,” he was referring to the triune partnership of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Job’s friend, Elihu, confirms the Spirit’s creative role in his counsel to Job: “The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.”

From Creation to the Incarnation, the scriptures tell of the Spirit descending upon individuals who are tagged for some divine task: defeat a pagan foe, lead a rebellious nation, or speak a prophetic word. In contrast to the “indwelling” of believers in the Church Age, the Spirit’s “ondwelling” was temporary and selective.

But whether by “ondwelling” or “indwelling,” the Holy Spirit empowers humans to accomplish things that are humanly impossible, thus giving witness to the God “who is.”

He Inspires
The second letter of Peter is addressed to a church that was scattered, suffering, and swaying under the influence of heresies. To encourage the believers and help shore up their faith, Peter reminded them of the apostles’ accounts of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection; eyewitness accounts detailing the fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies.

Peter went on to explain the Source of the prophetic accuracy: “No prophesy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

Retrieved May 21, 2018 from https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/pentecost-ministry-holy-spirit

Ring Catholic Bells

A marvelous story from First Things.

An excerpt.

The bells at my parish had been silent for years. They rested in their tower quietly amid the wind, rain, and occasional flocks of pigeons. But starting two years ago, a few intrepid parishioners have been pushing the levers, awakening the bell clappers and some neighbors. Our lovely set of named bells ranges from big deep Adolphus (key of E) all the way down to tiny bright Gervaise (F-sharp). Adolphus is larger than a rather more famous bell here in Philadelphia, but he sings of a more perfect liberty. Each note on the scale is represented, but currently two bells—Elizabeth (G-sharp) and Edmund (C-sharp)—are out of commission, making renditions of “Immaculate Mary” or “Fly, Eagles, Fly” a little more difficult.

The goal is for bells to peal for daily Mass, after funerals, and for the noon and evening Angelus. We tried ringing the bells for the 6 a.m. Angelus but received angry phone calls within a few days. I thought about dropping off William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Catholic Bells” on the doorsteps of the aggrieved, but decided it was best to let sleeping neighbors lie. Sessions are conducted by a mixture of volunteers, a harried sacristan, a lazy custos (me), and enthusiastic altar servers. In good Catholic style, we sometimes ring late, sometimes early, and sometimes not at all. But more often than not our music is heard over the Victorian homes and row houses of West Philadelphia.

Why ring at all? It has been a long time since people set their watches to the noon-day pealing, and we hear of good news and bad by means of phone alerts rather than church chimes. Perhaps we do it in order to make our own contribution to the sound of the city. Daily we hear honking, laughter, sirens, birds, trolleys clanging, and the occasional drum circle. And now we hear the sound of bells, a small reminder that our urban landscape can be a spiritual landscape.

No doubt few people know the Angelus prayer and still fewer pause to pray it at our bidding. But bells remind us of churches, of joy, of loss, and perhaps of more ultimate things. As Williams writes:

Tho’ I’m no Catholic
I listen hard when the bells
in the yellow-brick tower
of their new church
ring down the leaves.

One pauses and one hears. Pausing and hearing can be the first step in faith. “Be still and know that I am God,” the psalmist says.

So we ring out in the hope that someone might hear the call and enter. We ring out to add a touch of Christianity to these secular spaces. We ring out the death toll—rich and deep with Adolphus—hoping a college student will hear and suddenly catch on to what John Donne means when he says the bell tolls for us. We let parish children ring the bells so they can feel the reverberating joy of symbols old and new. And sometimes we ring for sheer joy. When the Philadelphia Eagles triumphed in the Super Bowl, amid the cacophony of car horns, shouting fans, fireworks, and the Eagles fight song, joyous sounds came from our bell tower. And a few weeks later, as we finally sang the Gloria on the Easter Vigil, we let them brightly sing out again for the triumph of Christ. God promises a new heaven and a new earth, so we celebrate the lasting joy of the Resurrection, but also the passing excitement of a Super Bowl.

Retrieved May 17, 2018 from https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/05/ring-catholic-bells

Vatican Secret Archives

A fascinating article from The Atlantic.

An excerpt.

The Vatican Secret Archives is one of the grandest historical collections in the world. It’s also one of the most useless.

The grandeur is obvious. Located within the Vatican’s walls, next door to the Apostolic Library and just north of the Sistine Chapel, the VSA houses 53 linear miles of shelving dating back more than 12 centuries. It includes gems like the papal bull that excommunicated Martin Luther and the pleas for help that Mary Queen of Scots sent to Pope Sixtus V before her execution. In size and scope, the collection is almost peerless.

That said, the VSA isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand.

But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time. If successful, the technology could also open up untold numbers of other documents at historical archives around the world.

OCR has been used to scan books and other printed documents for years, but it’s not well suited for the material in the Secret Archives. Traditional OCR breaks words down into a series of letter-images by looking for the spaces between letters. It then compares each letter-image to the bank of letters in its memory. After deciding which letter best matches the image, the software translates the letter into computer code (ASCII) and thereby makes the text searchable.

This process, however, really only works on typeset text. It’s lousy for anything written by hand—like the vast majority of old Vatican documents. Here’s an example from the early 1200s, written in what’s called Caroline minuscule script, which looks like a mix of calligraphy and cursive:

The main problem in this example is the lack of space between letters (so-called dirty segmentation). OCR can’t tell where one letter stops and another starts, and therefore doesn’t know how many letters there are. The result is a computational deadlock, sometimes referred to as Sayre’s paradox: OCR software needs to segment a word into individual letters before it can recognize them, but in handwritten texts with connected letters, the software needs to recognize the letters in order to segment them. It’s a catch-22.

Some computer scientists have tried to get around this problem by developing OCR to recognize whole words instead of letters. This works fine technologically—computers don’t “care” whether they’re parsing words or letters. But getting these systems up and running is a bear, because they require gargantuan memory banks. Rather than a few dozen alphabet letters, these systems have to recognize images of thousands upon thousands of common words. Which means you need a whole platoon of scholars with expertise in medieval Latin to go through old documents and capture images of each word. In fact, you need several images of each, to account for quirks in handwriting or bad lighting and other variables. It’s a daunting task.

In Codice Ratio sidesteps these problems through a new approach to handwritten OCR. The four main scientists behind the project—Paolo Merialdo, Donatella Firmani, and Elena Nieddu at Roma Tre University, and Marco Maiorino at the VSA—skirt Sayre’s paradox with an innovation called jigsaw segmentation. This process, as the team recently outlined in a paper, breaks words down not into letters but something closer to individual pen strokes. The OCR does this by dividing each word into a series of vertical and horizontal bands and looking for local minimums—the thinner portions, where there’s less ink (or really, fewer pixels). The software then carves the letters at these joints. The end result is a series of jigsaw pieces:

Retrieved May 4, 2018 from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/vatican-secret-archives-artificial-intelligence/559205/

Heroic Convert

A great story from Albanian and Catholic history, from the Remnant Newspaper.

An excerpt.

George Kastrioti Skanderbeg (May 6, 1405 – January 17, 1467), is also known by his Muslim name of Iskander, (Lord Alexander).” He was also known as the Dragon of Albania, and is the national hero of that country. His story is told at length in the new book Defenders of Christendom.

George was the son of an Albanian lord who had been forced to submit to Murad II, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He was still a young boy when he and his three brothers were turned over by his parents to the Muslim empire as part of the practice of devsirme (the practice whereby the Ottoman Empire sent military officers to take Christian boys, ages 8 to 18, from their families in order that they be raised to serve the state. This “tax of sons” or “blood tax” was imposed only on the Christian subjects of the empire, in the villages of the Balkans and Anatolia). While his three older brothers were slowly poisoned when they staunchly refused to convert to Islam, George was allowed to live, as he was only a child.

Forced to conform to the practices of Islam, George was subjected to merciless training at which he excelled, proving himself to be both a physically powerful warrior and eventually also a brilliant field commander. Rising quickly through the ranks, he was made bey generalissimo, and entrusted to command a large Muslim cavalry unit. The Ottoman sultan himself honored him by bestowing upon him the name of Iskander, “Lord Alexander,” comparing him favorably to the Macedonian conqueror, Alexander the Great.

The Hungarian commander Hunyadi was on campaign against the Ottoman Empire when he came face to face with Iskander at the city of Nish. Unknown to his commanders, Iskander had never truly accepted Islam, nor forgotten the murder of his heroic brothers. He had also been secretly communicating with Albanian noblemen from his own country, for the Muslims had failed to erase the memory of his homeland.

Upon learning of the death of his father, Iskander decided that he would join the advancing Catholic army, and fight the Turks to restore Albania. With three hundred Albanians who had been forced to serve the Turks, he defected and fought side by side with Hunyadi. Turning their swords against their Islamic oppressors, they easily defeated the Muslim army.

At this point in his career, Iskander was an impressive figure, “tall and slender with a prominent chest, wide shoulders, long neck, and high forehead. He had black hair, fiery eyes, and a powerful voice. So warlike was his nature that he truly needed to wage battle from time to time. He killed more than two thousand Turks with his own hands. He was a master of all weapons, swift and ingenious, a general with a quick and certain gaze, audacious and resolute. Naturally possessed of a fiery temper, anger would go to his head quickly and set his eyes ablaze. But he would dominate his anger, biting his lips until they bled. His courage in battle stemmed from this struggle over his evil passions. All in all, his customs were pure, his manner noble and elevated. Mary was his strength and inspiration.”

Iskander declared war on his former masters, intending to avenge his country for the atrocities it to which it had been subjected under the Ottoman Empire. His banner displayed a two-headed eagle, an image significant to his own family, but also one that had been used by the Roman Empire. It became a well-recognized emblem in the Balkans, symbolizing the refusal of the Albanian people to submit to Islam. Several of the Albanian princes revolted against their overlords and rallied under Iskander’s banner, forming the League of Lezhe, and electing Iskander to lead the Albanian army.

Iskander was an invincible opponent of Islam, and the reason for his success was no secret: he “loved the sanctuary of Mary with a devoted, enthusiastic love; and Mary in return, not only made him a model of Christian perfection, but also gave him an invincible power, which preserved not only Albania but also Christendom during his reign.”

Retrieved April 27, 2018 from https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/3866-iskander-dragon-of-albania

Enemies of the Church

This article from Crisis Magazine reminds us that we cannot forget them.

An excerpt.

The 1960s were extremely hard on the Catholic Church. The damage done by relativism, contraception, abortion, no-fault divorce (summed up as the Sexual Revolution) and Cultural Marxism has resonated for five decades. When dissident priests such as Fr. Charles Curran advocated for a distorted version of social justice in Catholic colleges and universities, the prophetic teaching of Humane Vitae and the true intent of the Vatican II documents were mutilated by the secular media as well as by many Catholic writers and theologians who misused their skills to attack the kingdom of God.

At a time when sound catechesis and evangelization could have impacted the largest generation of high school and college aged Catholics in the history of the US, misinformation, confusion and outright heresy prevailed in many classrooms and too many Catholic churches across the country.

“Catholic” schools have now churned out hundreds of thousands of graduates who have little or no concept of what the Church actually taught, much less the sound reasoning, science and scriptural basis for her teachings. Some of these graduates are now tenured teachers, department chairs at colleges and universities, some are in the hierarchy of the Church in the US, and some are at very high levels of our state and federal governments. Many more are the parents and grandparents to generations who received their catechesis and evangelization through the words and deeds of people who live lives of little or no witness to an orthodox Catholic faith.

Some faithful Catholics made it through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s with a firm and authentic Catholic faith, but as we look back on the decline of Christianity in the US since 1960, we see that these Catholics are the exception to the rule. Yet these faithful Catholics have been our lifeline to orthodox Catholicism.

In 1965, there were about 46 million Catholics in the United States and 55 percent of whom attended Mass on a weekly basis. Today, we have about 73 million Catholics in the country and only 23 percent of us attend Mass on a weekly basis. If you do the math, you will find that there are over 8 million fewer Catholics at Mass this weekend, than there were on the same weekend in 1965. If you compare today to 1950, the numbers are even more depressing. Some sources say the weekly Mass attendance in the 1950s was more than 70 percent.

Catholicism has been on a 70-year slide in the US. We have more people who identify as Catholic than at any time in our history, but we have less than ½ of the sacramental marriages and baptisms we had in 1965. There has also been a 37 percent decrease in the number of priests since 1965 and a 75 percent decrease in religious sisters (nuns). If the American Catholic Church was a publicly traded company on the stock exchange, our shares would be extremely cheap if they had any value at all.

Retrieved April 12, 2018 from https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/vulnerable-church-can-not-forget-enemies

Communism & the Church, Part II

Superb historical information, from Roberto de Mattei.

An excerpt.

Among the staunchest opponents of the Vatican Ostopolik, a figure of remarkable cultural and moral stature should be remembered: Father Alessio Ulisse Floridi (1930-1986).

 

A member of the Company of Jesus at a very young age, Father Floridi studied at the Pontifical Russian College, where he learned Russian perfectly and, in 1949, he was ordained a priest in the Byzantine Rite His hope was to be part of an underground apostolate in Russia, just like some of his confreres, but his superiors wanted him at La Civiltà Cattolica, the journal which was the pride and joy of the Company. Father Floridi became the sovietologist par excellence of this journal, collaborating with articles written from first-hand reading of newspapers, journals and documents coming [directly] from the Soviet Union. His articles rich in notes and personal comments, were read and appreciated for their accuracy by the Communists themselves, both in Italy and abroad.

The election of John XXIII and the calling of the Second Vatican Council were a turning point in the lives of the writers at La Civiltà Cattolica. In the obituary written for Father Floridi, on December 20 1986, the Jesuit journal writes that he had left La Civiltà Cattolica because the life of a writer was too “static and sedentary”. In reality, as Father Floridi informed me personally, he was abruptly liquidated for not bending to his superiors’ impositions. They had asked him to apply the St. Francis de Sales maxim to Communism, “a spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel of vinegar”. The same discourse had been made to Father Giovanni Caprile (1917-1993), who, on the other hand, had accepted the suggestion, and from being an implacable critic, he became an apologist for Freemasonry.

Father Floridi recalled that the Jesuit vow of obedience was not indiscriminate, as many suppose, but simply obliges: “to go wherever His Holiness sends them among the faithful and the infidels.” (Constitution § 7). And he didn’t back off when, from high places, it was decided he should be sent as far away as possible from Villa Malta, the headquarters of La Civiltà Cattolica in Rome. So he ended up first in Brazil, among the Russian refugees, and afterwards, in the United States, where he lead a fruitful mission among Ukrainian Catholics of the Oriental Rite, without ever giving in to the new trend.

When I met him in 1977, Father Floridi was an imposing fifty-seven year old, with a black beard framing his open, jovial, good-humored face, typical of authentic “Romani de Roma ”. In 1976 he published the book Moscow and the Vatican for La Casa Matriona, afterwards translated into various languages and which is still a text of capital reference for the study of the relations between the Vatican and the Kremlin. On November 28th 1977, he gave an extensive interview to the monthly, Cristianità, which I will reproduce here in its entirety. Re-reading it, it seems to me that his historical analysis helps us understand in-depth the Ostpolitik of both yesterday and today (On the Theme of Dissent and Ostpolitik, in Cristianità, 32 (1977). Pp. 3-4).

The Interview

Q. The slant of the volume you dedicated to Moscow and the Vatican is unusual. It carries as a subtitle: The Soviet Dissidents Faced with “Dialogue”. The politics of “the easing of tensions”[détente]between the Holy See and the Kremlin, appraised, that is to say, by Soviet dissent. What is the reason for your interest in “the Soviet dissidents”?

A. It’s very simple. I have continuously studied the Soviet Union and “The Soviet Man”, a man whose nature is no different from ours, despite the “unnaturalness” of the regime in which he lives. As a result I [began] to realize that there was something happening in this world, which was starting to produce a reaction.

Q. Is this reaction limited to a cultural elite or does it extend to the Soviet people? There is in fact, the suspicion that it is not a sufficiently deep-rooted phenomenon, but almost a cultural “fashion”…

A. The phenomenon is absolutely not limited to an intellectual elite. The religious dissent especially, is diffused in large segments of the population. I’m thinking, for example, of the Ukrainian and Lithuanian Catholics, the Baptists, the underground Orthodox Church, the followers of Father Dudko, or even what is happening in Poland, where dissent is growing and spreading among the workers. It should be said, however, that the reality of dissent doesn’t always coincide necessarily with the image that is projected in the West. In fact, only a certain kind of dissent is known in the West, the one which is filtered through intellectual channels. Whereas much less is known about the reality of the religious dissent of the peoples.

Q.So then, what is the judgment of the “dissidents” with regard to the “dialogue” between Moscow and the Vatican?

A. Extremely negative. The dissidents have no trust whatsoever in this dialogue of which they actually experience the consequences. They should be the beneficiaries of these politics of détente but they are in fact its victims. Let me add that it seems inconceivable to me that, from the Catholic part there is this desire to cast a shadow of diffidence and suspicion over them. I’m referring to an article by one of my Swiss confreres, Father Hotz, which appeared in La Civiltà Cattlolica and which, for that matter, was brilliantly refuted by your journal. To me it seems paradoxical that while the dissidents are entreating Western Catholics to distrust this dialogue, it is precisely the Catholics in the West who are inviting suspicion and distrust of the dissidents.

Q. What are the Kremlin’s interests in this “dialogue”?

A. Through dialogue the Soviet Union attains the Vatican’s silence. And this silence weakens the internal and external opposition to the Communist regime, thus contributing to the consolidating of the Soviet empire’s internal positions and favoring its international expansion. It’s clear that Moscow seeks support from Rome to increase its “credibility” on the international level. The more a détente is sought the more internal tensions are intensified.

Q. In your view, on the other hand, what are the motives impelling the Vatican to seek “dialogue” with the Kremlin?

A.Here the question is more complex. I’d say that we can identify at least two strategic lines. The first is diplomatic, of concordat, and aims at attaining a modus vivendi between the Vatican and the Communist State with the goal of safeguarding international “peace” as well as the Catholic ecclesial structure in the Soviet empire’s territories. The Vatican prefers, then, to ignore the underground Church, which has been conducting a heroic apostolate behind the Iron Curtain, to establish new types of relations “in the open” with the Communist authorities. This means, for example, that Catholic bishops must have the Soviet “placet” for their nomination. This strategy is under the direction of Archbishop Casaroli and his Secretariat. Casaroli himself drew up a sufficiently explicit program in his discourse on The Holy See and Europe, delivered in Milan on January 20th 1972.

Retrieved March 24, 2018 from http://www.robertodemattei.it/en/2018/03/07/opponents-of-ostpolitik-part-2-father-alessio-ulisse-1920-1986/