Friday, August 26, 2005
EMAIL FROM LEE PENN
I am adding this to the "it's possible to be too traditional" file.
Here is a group I found while researching Opus Dei:
Associação A Hora de São Jerônimo
http://www.hsjonline.com/index.htm
Click on the words on the bottom of the page to get to the sub-pages.
I did not find much of an OD link here, although the HSJ clearly is sympathetic to the far right.
I learned of the group through reading the summer 2004 newsletter of Una Voce America, a group that promotes the Tridentine Mass under the papal indult of 1988.
One of the activists in the HSJ is Prof. Carlos Ramalhete.
In the article "Nurturing traditional Catholic culture at the grass roots: the Brazilian HSI Association," he wrote (emphasis in bold added by me):
"Our work, therefore, necessarily has a double goal: to protect this traditional Catholic identity and world-view among the lower classes (less touched by secularist education and ideologies) and to foster and spread the traditional Catholic culture among the elites, especially the youth, who have been more exposed to false ideologies in their formal education. The work, both among the poor and among the rich, evidently needs to have the Holy Mass at its center.
For the poor, we will offer courses on traditional arts and crafts related to the beauty and reverence of the liturgy: embroidery and hand-made lace for traditional liturgical garb; woodworking and joinery for kneelers; rosary-making, image-painting, and sculpture - simultaneously providing them the means to make these works financially sound through internet-based global commercialization of their production.
We will teach poor Brazilian girls to make traditional paraments - completely hand-made, without a shadow of machine-made embroidery or lace.
At the same time and in the same places (basically spare rooms in favela chapels) we will offer Apologetics courses to help them protect their Faith against Protestant fundamentalism.
For the sons of the elite, we will offer courses on traditional theology and Thomistic philosophy, as well as other ways of fostering interest in these studies (essay contests on Thomistic legal theory for Law students, textbooks on Thomistic philosophical anthropology for healthcare providers), including indirect ones (swordsmanship classes conjoined with Medieval ethics, Latin classes employing liturgical and patristic texts, rhetoric classes based on Medieval logic and Thomistic ethics.)" [pp. 8-9 of the newsletter]
Words fail me.
The mentality in this article fully explains (to me) why the French Revolution occurred, and was so violent.
Lee
