Thursday, November 25, 2004
TRYING TO FIGURE THIS OUT...
The turkey is roasting, the family is watching the parade, so I'm here, and having a hard time comprehending how sacramentals cause "damage" in a Catholic church. It's sort of a left-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-right-hand story.
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SECULARISM PROGRESSES IN SPAIN
according to an article at Chiesa.
The pope did not refer to it directly, but he undoubtedly had Spain partly in mind. There, the government headed by the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is carrying out substantial initiatives to make divorce easier and quicker and to make gay and lesbian unions equal to marriage, including the ability to adopt children. "There will be no turning back" was the response to protests from the Church, given by deputy Ramon Jauregui, who is in charge of Catholic-related matters for the socialist party.
But this is only the beginning. The Spanish Church's fear is that the secularist "revolución" launched by Zapatero will rapidly be extended to other areas: Catholic religious education in the schools, Church funding, embryos, abortion, euthanasia.
To raise an early alarm for the faithful against the legalization of euthanasia, the Spanish bishops' conference distributed seven million flyers on Sunday, November 7: the first part of a campaign in defense of life, freedom of education, and the family.
In opposition to the legalization of homosexual marriage, the Spanish Forum for the Family has launched a citizens' legislative campaign which has already gathered half a million signatures and is expected to reach two million.
Other associations have announced marches and demonstrations.
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SECULARISM IS AN ATTACK ON THE CHURCH
Continuing with the theme of the above story on Spain, Chiesa also reports on general conditions in Europe:
ROMA – They're more convinced of it than ever in the Vatican. There is a systematic assault by secularism against Christianity underway, centered in Europe and with the Church of Rome as its main target.
In an interview with the newspaper "la Repubblica" on November 19, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described it as follows:
"We are faced with an aggressive secularism, one that even shows intolerant characteristics sometimes. [...] In Sweden, a Protestant pastor who preached on homosexuality on the basis of a Scripture passage was jailed for a month. Secularism is no longer that element of neutrality which opens up areas of freedom for everyone. It is beginning to turn into an ideology that imposes itself through politics and leaves no public space for the Catholic and Christian vision, which thus risks becoming something purely private and essentially mutilated. We must defend religious freedom against the imposition of an ideology that presents itself as the only voice of rationality."
One month earlier, on October 18, Cardinal Renato Martino, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was even more blunt. Presenting a collection of all the diplomatic speeches of Pope John Paul II, he denounced the fact that the voice of the pope and of the Church "are deliberately made to disappear, submerged beneath the tumult and shouting orchestrated by powerful cultural, economic, and political lobbies, which are mostly motivated by prejudice against everything that is Christian."
In the judgment of the Vatican authorities, there are countless proofs of this secularist aggression. Cardinal Martino, who represented the Holy See at the United Nations for sixteen years, recalls "the attempt to eject the Vatican from the UN because the Church has always defended life and opposed abortion." As for the present situation, he added: "Just think of the carefree and cheerful manner in which these lobbies tenaciously promote the confusion of [sexual] roles in gender identity, ridicule marriage between man and woman, and attack life, which is made the object of the most extravagant experiments."
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FR. PETER JOSEPH DISCUSSES APPARITIONS - TRUE AND FALSE
and in connection with them, the capabilities of devils, at Christian Order:
What the devils can and cannot do
The devils cannot do the following:
(1) Produce any kind of truly supernatural phenomenon;
(2) Create a substance, since only God can create;
(3) Bring a dead person back to life, although they could produce the illusion of doing so;
(4) Make truly prophetic predictions, since only God knows the future absolutely, and those to whom He chooses to reveal a portion of it. However, the devil’s intelligent conjecture about the future might appear to mere mortals a prophecy;
(5) Know the secrets of a person’s mind and heart. However, their shrewd intelligence and observation may enable them to deduce many things about a person.
But the devils can do the following:
(1) Produce corporeal or imaginative visions;
(2) Falsify ecstasy;
(3) Instantaneously cure sicknesses that have been caused by diabolical influence;
(4) Produce the stigmata;
(5) Simulate miracles and the phenomena of levitation and bilocation;
(6) Make people or objects seem to disappear by interfering with a person’s sight or line of vision;
(7) Cause a person to hear sounds or voices;
(8) Cause a person to speak in tongues;
(9) Declare a fact which is hidden or distant.
Further along in the article he discusses "Signs of the divine spirit" including:
GRAVITY. God is never the cause of things that are useless, futile, frivolous, or impertinent. When his spirit moves a soul it is always for something serious and beneficial.
Sort of goes directly to the heart of discussions of mysticism, doesn't it?
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ESOTERICA JOURNAL REVIEWS CHRYSSAVGIS' BOOK
John Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2003) paperback, 163 pp.:
Although this book is not, strictly speaking, on the subject of Western esotericism, it concerns a form of esotericism, that of Eastern Orthodox monastic praxis and the spiritual struggles of the early Christian desert recluses. John Chryssavgis is himself a Greek Orthodox priest as well as a professor on the East Coast of the United States, and his earlier book is entitled Soul Mending: The Art of Spiritual Direction (2000). So it is clear that he comes to the themes of this book from a practical and personal rather than totally academic perspective. This quality lends the book a direct quality that makes it particularly compelling. Included in the book is his translation of The Reflections of Abba Zosimos that complements well this valuable book of spiritual advice. Those who wish for a more profound understanding of inner spiritual transformation in early Christianity would be wise to find themselves a copy of this work.
If you look further down the website you will find one of Cutsinger's books reviewed as well.
James S. Cutsinger, ed., Not of This World: A Treasury of Christian Mysticism, (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2003) paperback, 272 pp.
As the title suggests, this is an anthology of Christian mysticism, but it includes a number of authors whose work might not ordinarily be included—for instance, Jean Borella, Philip Sherrard, and Bernadette Roberts. The anthology is thematically organized around primary topics of "Purification" and "Illumination," and "Union," and the selections work well together. The editor, in his introduction, sets forth his central argument: that Christianity in its various contemporary denominations should recognize the significance of the traditional teaching of deification, and not encourage belief in an unbridgeable abyss between Creator and the created.
Cutsinger is the editor of _Paths to the Heart_, a topic of discussion here yesterday. Once again here is evidence of reducing belief in Christ to an equal playing field with belief in a variety of "spiritual" phenomena. Once that is the worldwide accepted notion, the next step would be to show that all of the other religions are in agreement, while the Christians refuse to cooperate, I suspect. At which point Christians will be the enemy of world peace and harmony. There seems to be a trend in this direction developing in Europe.
The current volume of "Esoterica Journal" also offers a link to "Recent Traditionalist Books" which doesn't work, unfortunately.
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I suppose I should get back to the turkey now.
Happy Thanksgiving!
