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Second Sunday of Advent
St. Peter Chrysologus - Bishop, Confessor, Doctor
J.M.J.
LIFE, LITURGY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Alex is only seven years old. Nevertheless, Alex is a heretic. His heresy is
as much a part of him as the Faith is a part of the children who live next
door to him. This creates a problem for the parents of those children, who
are concerned that Alex will jeopardize the faith of their children. So they
work up the courage to talk to Alex's parents. They fear that Alex, steeped
in the unbelief that characterizes his whole family, will menace the
innocence of their children and they would like Alex's parents to counsel
the boy so as to avoid the unthinkable. The parents are accountable for
Alex's heresy. They have not merely failed to instruct their boy, they have
positively inculcated in him utter disbelief in the providence, the
omnipotence, the goodness, the very existence...of...Santa Claus. Alex must
be instructed to keep his little secret to himself. Because the neighbors
cannot abide his heresy.
Come now, you may be thinking. What harm is there in a cute story? Pehaps
none at all, but then again, consider this: Our Lord tells us that we adults
must have the faith of little children. The child believes what he is told
because he is a child. If you tell him that reindeer fly or that a fat man
living at the North Pole makes toys for all the children of the world and
delivers them on Christmas Eve, he will believe you because he is a child.
If you tell him that at midnight, in Bethlehem, in the piercing cold, God
almighty, Creator, Lord and Master of the universe was born into this world
as a tiny baby, he will believe you because he is a child.
God makes children innocent. He makes them guileless. He makes them
believing - all the better so that they will believe what their parents tell
them, especially when they tell them the mysteries and marvelous truths of
the Catholic Faith. For some strange reason, when our children will most
readily believe whatever we tell them, we tell them this silly story about
Santa Claus. They accept the Santa Lie with as much simplicity and faith as
they accept the truth of Christ's birth in a manger in Bethlehem.
Side-by-side with the Great Truth of the Incarnation, they believe the Santa
Lie.
Perhaps you may object to calling it the Santa Lie, but from the point of
view of a child, what exactly is the difference between lying and
pretending? We tell him that we pretended about Santa, but not about baby
Jesus. Why should he believe you in either case? It might even be easier for
him to believe that reindeer fly than that God Himself was born in a stable
cave.
The child who trusts, who believes so readily, will not always be a child,
and he will not always have childlike faith. Our children are growing up in
a world filled with doubt. Doubt is fundamental to modernism. We all
recognize Descartes' "I think, therefore I am," but we should also know that
in Descartes' philosophy he might as well have said, "I doubt, therefore I
think; I think, therefore I am." Doubt itself is given as the rational basis
of one's existence. Our culture demands that we doubt, and that we doubt
absolutely everything. In this climate, it is insane to give a child a
reason to doubt, and to tell a child the story of the birth of our Lord
side-by-side with the Santa Lie indeed gives a child a reason to doubt.
The problem isn't in pretending per se. It's in pretending in something that
detracts from the truth. It's in the juxtaposition of the lie with the
truth, thereby Âcasting doubt on the truth. Christmas celebrates the fact
that God has become a man. Isn't this marvel enough? Why do we have to
invent this story about a man who has become a god? Santa is omniscient. "He
sees you when you're sleeping; he knows when you're awake; he knows if
you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake." Santa dispenses
justice "You'd, better watch out, better not pout, better not cry. I'm
telling you why..." And if he's not omnipresent, as is God, then he
certainly has the agility of the angel: The problem is not that we pretend
that there is a Santa. The problem is that we do so in opposition to the
Incarnation.
The name of Santa Claus is a linguistic corruption of Sinter Klaas, itself a
corruption of the name of St. Nicholas in the Dutch language. Yes, St.
Nicholas was particularly generous to children. He was not fat, however; he
was thin from fasting, which he did even from his infancy. He wasn't married
to a Mrs. Claus; he was celibate. He wore red because he was a bishop, but
he did not wear a red stocking cap. He did not live at or anywhere near the
North Pole; on the contrary, he lived in Myra (a provincial capital in Asia
Minor), and his feastday is nearly three weeks before Christmas. This fellow
we call Santa Claus is not St. Nicholas, but rather is a perversion of St.
Nicholas.
We all bemoan the commercialization of Christmas. But to say that Christmas
is commercialized is to stop short of the bigger problem. We should not
lament the commercialization of Christmas but rather its paganization. It is
our duty to restore the truly Catholic observance of Christmas, to strip
away all that is pagan in its celebration. That duty begins in our Catholic
homes.
Consider that we hesitate to say "Merry Christmas," in order not to offend.
Rather, we say, "Happy Holidays," or "Season's Greetings." We would edify
our neighbor if, instead, we were to emphasize the Catholic nature of the
feast by wishing him "...a blessed and holy Christ-Mass." It is ironic that
folks have lost the connection between holiday and holiness.
And so begins the holiday season: There's the office holiday party, the
neighborhood holiday party, the church holiday party and the club holiday
party. On it goes, from one holiday party to the next, all during what, in
days of more restraint, was a penitential season. Then we go shopping. Out
come the lists. Who did we buy what for last year and who bought what for
us? How much did they spend, and how much did we spend? There's Mum and Dad,
Gran and Grandpa, Dad's new wife, Aunt Marie, eight other aunts and uncles,
and the cousins and the brothers and the sisters. We find ourselves with one
last thing to buy along with all the other nuts 15 minutes before closing on
Christmas Eve in the Wal-Mart in a blind stupor asking ourselves why we are
buying this? Why? Because it's Christmas!
A lady at work told me that her Christmas gift budget for her three children
was $1000 per child. Here's a lady, a secretary, who has to work a long,
long time to scratch together $3000 after taxes, and I wondered why she just
didn't quit work and give her kids some of her time as their Christmas
present. I suppose we do as we must to assuage our guilt.
During the holiday season, the radio stations play this really silly, that
is to say, secular, Christmas music. Think of it. Secular Christmas music;
what a concept. The big day approaches. The advertising section in the paper
grows bigger; the Wal-Mart becomes intolerably more crowded; the suicide
rate climbs to its annual peak; holiday music saturates the airwaves. Mommy
is hyper-baking and sending Christmas cards and wrapping presents. Garlands
are strung out and so are Mom and Dad. Daddy's putting toys together and
trimming the tree and hanging the lights and putting up decorations, and now
its Christmas Eve. The tree is wired up with lights and the kiddies are
wired up on sugar. The camcorder batteries are fully charged and so is the
MasterCard. The camera is loaded with film and Daddy's a little loaded
himself. We've been to all the parties, visited all the friends; the
presents are under the tree; and now it's the dawn of Christmas Day. And
after so many days of rabid expectation, it all ends in one anticlimactic
and disappointing morning. How can Christmas ever live up to our
expectations? As a metaphor of our disappointment, the exalted tree will be
out on the curb tomorrow morning.
A Protestant work colleague of mine asked once, "What do you traditional
Catholics do for holidays? Do you celebrate?" I took a moment to reflect on
how our holy time, our ChristMass, fundamentally and quintessentially
liturgical, has been appropriated, perverted, and bastardized by usurpers. I
shook my head and said to him, "Ray, the problem with you Protestant folk is
that you just don't know how to party." And I thought about how well-ordered
and sensible the Catholic Liturgy is.
We begin our Catholic observance of Christ's birth with the beginning of a
new liturgical year. We commemorate 4,000 years of longing for the Messias
with the four weeks of Advent, a time of penance and restraint. We fast on
Christmas Eve. There are three separate Masses on Christmas Day; one at
midnight, one at dawn, and one during the day. All that Christmas means
could never be grasped and commemorated in a single day. That is why the
Church gives us the Twelve Days of Christmas to celebrate. Beyond these, we
have the entire Christmastide in which to rejoice. And when the 40 days of
the Blessed Mother's purification have been completed, we conclude our
Christmas season with the blessing and procession of Candlemas (February 2).
No matter what our ethnic background, we all have customs and traditions
associated with Christmas that are uniquely and distinctively Catholic. What
customs do you observe for Christmas in your homes? Are they distinctively
and evidently Catholic? Do you have a nativity scene? It should be the
outstanding feature of our Christmas decorating.
Yes, Christmas has been commercialized, secularized, and paganized, but that
is not the whole of our problem; it is only one manifestation of our
problem. Christmas, like the Mass itself, is part of a greater whole. It is
only one aspect of the Liturgy. Our problem lies in the fact that we have
ceased to live the liturgical lives of our ancestors. Their every day was
quickened by the Liturgy, most of it committed to memory. Their thoughts
flowed from the wellspring of the official prayer of the Church and from the
psalms, which they chanted freely in the fields and at the hearth. The
perennial Liturgy, however, has been snatched from us. We have been robbed.
The first blow came with the Reformation, when monasteries and churches
throughout Europe fell to the axe of the so-called reformers. Even in
countries that remained Catholic, the Liturgy was weakened by the
rationalism that emphasized action over prayer. The final blow came with the
liturgical revolution wrought by the Novus Ordo Missae. Without the
monasteries and convents, the Liturgy lost its substance and objectivity and
no longer overflows to fill our hearts, our homes, and our entire lives.
If we are to understand the solution to restoring liturgical life and its
holy days, we must first understand the problem. I believe there are five
distinct aspects of the same problem.
The first aspect of the problem is that those holy days that have survived
the onslaught are slowly but surely being secularized and perverted, most
notable among these, I include Christmas, Easter, and Halloween.
The second aspect of the problem is that new, secular, quasi-religious
feasts have been introduced, which serve as poor substitutes for genuine
Catholic holy days. These include Mother's Day, Father's Day, Thanksgiving,
and others.
The third aspect of the problem is that totally secular or even pagan feasts
have been introduced that celebrate occasions that are not Catholic, or are
even anti-Catholic, for example, Independence Day, President's Day, Martin
Luther King Day, and Earth Day.
The fourth aspect of the problem is that countless saints' days, fasts,
feasts, seasons, and traditions are completely forgotten or ignored.
Examples of these include the Ember Days and the Rogation Days.
The fifth and certainly the most far-reaching aspect of the problem is that
the most important and frequently recurring holy day, namely, Sunday, has
lost its meaning in the modern world. It is routinely desecrated, and in
practice has become indistinguishable from the other six days of the week.
Likewise, the holy days of obligation are ignored and desecrated.
The restoration of Christendom will not happen apart from a restoration of
the Liturgy. Don't hold your breath waiting for your local Ordinary to lead
processions through the streets of your city for the Rogation Days or for
the Feast of Corpus Christi. Monasteries and convents are not going to send
us robust men and women to teach us Gregorian chant. It would be illegal for
the civil authorities to declare that, as a nation, we will conform the
patterns of our daily lives to the Liturgy of the Catholic Church. The
solution will have to come from within the walls of our own Catholic homes,
and we should begin by examining how we celebrate holy days and holidays.
Consider a few cases in point.
What a surprise to find, when one looks at the liturgical calendar, that
Valentine's Day is, well, the Feast of St. Valentine (February 14). A
wonderful feast it is, and it has been totally trivialized and most likely
made lustful. Catholics must not lose sight of the fact that Valentine is a
great saint of God who gave his heart to the Sacred Heart. This is the
feastday of a martyr who loved his Beloved enough to die for Him, the fact
to remember in order to give the observance of St. Valentine's Day a more
Catholic character.
But if St. Valentine's Day has been trivialized, pity poor St. Patrick. With
the possible exception of St. Nicholas, no saint has suffered so much at the
hands of the neo-pagans. In 1994, in Boston, the annual St. Patrick's Day
Parade was canceled because a group of Irish-American sodomites won a State
Supreme Court battle to be permitted to march in the St. Patrick's Day
parade there. The US Supreme Court overturned the State Supreme Court ruling
so the parade was held in 1995, without the sodomites, but not until May of
that year. How it must pain St. Patrick and all good Irish Catholics to see
the mockery that is made of his feastday as the tide of paganism once turned
back by St. Patrick seems to have turned again in its favor. We are justly
horrified at the desecration that takes place on his feastday, in parades in
his honor, and in and about the cathedral that bears his name in New York
City. There are a lot of fun things to do on St. Patrick's Day (March 17),
but do not neglect to give proper attention to the heroism and sanctity of
this truly great saint.
The Feast of St. Joseph is especially dear to Italians. His feastday (March
19) is the authentic Catholic Father's Day among Italians. The custom of the
St. Joseph's Altar used to be maintained in their parishes and homes. The
significance of decking out an altar with food and crafts in thanksgiving
or St. Joseph's intercession in our temporal affairs is now all but gone.
It is hard to understand what the world has done to Easter. The Easter bunny
is a bit too goofy even for modern man. (Little Alex has not gotten in
trouble with the neighbors for divulging the facts about the Easter bunny,
as he did for his heretical views on the Santa Lie.) I think the problem
with Easter is not that it has been co-opted, because it hasn't really.
Likewise, I don't think that the problem is that it has been commercialized
or paganized, because it hasn't really, at least not to the extent that the
other holy days have been. I think that the problem isn't with Easter at
all; the problem is with Lent. That is to say, we just don't make serious
Lents anymore. It's absolutely true that the satisfaction of our Easter is
directly proportional to the austerity of our Lent. The postmodern Catholic
Church gives up meat on Friday and fasts on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
That's all. And that's not very austere. The culmination of the Lenten
Liturgy occurs during Holy Week and in particular during the Sacred Triduum.
Now, the rites of Holy Week are opposed by the pagan rites of Spring Break.
We Catholics used to impose upon ourselves the sweet burden of penance and
reparation during Lent, sometimes heroically. This included abstaining from,
among other things, eggs. Come Easter Sunday morning, what else would one do
with all the hen-fruit but eat it, decorate it, and give it away. Easter
eggs and the new life cracking its way out of the shell symbolize the
resurrection and new life that Christ won for us on Easter. Do remember to
explain that symbolism to your children. Don't have Easter without first
having Lent and Holy Week. And don't have Lent without having Carnival. The
Church says to fast well and to feast well, too.
It's May, the month of our Blessed Mother, yet we Catholics are honoring
earthly mothers. Is this wrong? Surely we traditional Catholics with our
large families and our heroic mothers should celebrate Mother's Day. But
there is something wrong with Mother's Day American-style. It is a purely
secular feast. While it expresses a noble human sentiment, it does so on
purely a natural level. It does so entirely apart from our Liturgy. Finding
himself without the religious feasts of the Catholic liturgical year, the
neo-pagan concocts new feastdays for himself and invests them with a
non-Catholic, but still quasi-religious, character. When Mother's Day was
introduced by an Act of Congress in 1913, the reaction of the Catholic
Church in the United States was to question whether Catholics should
celebrate the day alongside their Protestant countrymen, precisely for the
reasons I have mentioned. Catholics better understood their Faith and had at
least a marginally better sense of the Liturgy and the necessity to resist
the secularization of culture. Immigrant American Catholics capitulated,
however, presumably not wanting to appear un-American. In any case, that
Americans honor mothers and celebrate motherhood one day a year is so
hypocritical as to be ludicrous. For 364 days a year we denigrate
motherhood, we despise motherhood and we despise mothers-unless of course
they have 1.2 absolutely perfect children and full-time jobs. Oh, we like
single moms, too. And we like the mother that has seven babies all at once.
We buy her a house and put her on the news every night. But heaven help a
woman who should have her seven children sequentially. She will certainly be
subject to abuse, scorn, derision, and ridicule. It has become inconceivable
that one could suggest that, for a woman to fully realize her womanhood, she
should be a mother. Why celebrate Mother's Day with a nation that is
eliminating mothers? What to do about Mother's Day? The answer might be to
downplay secular Mother's Day. I wouldn't recommend that you stop sending
flowers to your own mother on Mother's Day unless you have agreed beforehand
that, in keeping with the Liturgy, there is a more Catholic way for
Catholics to honor mothers. Two good alternatives come to mind. In many
countries, even to this day, mothers are honored on December 8, Feast of the
Immaculate Conception. In other Catholic countries in the past, mothers were
honored on Laetare Sunday, a day that was known as "Mothering Sunday." In
the Epistle for Laetare Sunday, St. Paul points out that the Catholic Church
is a Mother leading us to eternal life. There are many delightful customs we
must revive for this day, customs that honored our natural mothers; our
heavenly mother, Mary; Holy Mother Church; and even the mother church of the
diocese, the cathedral. This is a superior and Catholic alternative to a
secular sham Mother's Day.
As springtime gives way to summer, we all look forward to fireworks. The
Fourth of July is the High Holy Day of secularist America, especially so for
devotees of the goddess Liberty. Let us be reminded that there is no such
thing as secular. Things are either for God, or against Him, and this
exalted feast of liberty is anything but for Him. Yet we Catholics eagerly
celebrate an event (the signing of the Declaration of Independence) that is
fundamentally anti-Christ, implicitly anti-God, and explicitly
antiÂCatholic. If you are scandalized by my words, then consider these
words, written in response to the English Parliament's having passed the
Quebec Act:
The affair of Canada is still worse. The Romish Faith is made the
established religion of the land... The free exercise of the Protestant
faith depended upon the pleasure of the Governor and the Council... They may
as well establish Popery in New York and the other colonies as they did in
Canada. Your lives, your property, your religion, are at stake.
These are the words of none other that Alexander Hamilton. He, and the other
Founding Fathers, used such hyperbole to stir up widespread anti-Catholic
hatred and bigotry so as to incite the people to break ties with England.
Much is made of the other four so-called Intolerable Acts, but it was this
fifth intolerable act that was so offensive to the Founding Fathers. It did
little more than allow a Catholic in a Catholic land to hold public office
without having first to renounce his Catholic Faith, which renunciation was
absolutely required of him in the other colonies and in England in
compliance with the so-called Test Act.
Perhaps it is unfair to characterize Independence Day with the words of
Alexander Hamilton, so consider also these words, penned by the author of
the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson himself, on the 50th anniversary of its
signing (July 4, 1826):
May it be to the world what I think it will be, the arousing of men to burst
the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition have persuaded
them to bind themselves, when the human mind was held in vassalage by kings,
by priests, and by nobles.
Jefferson understood that the Declaration of Independence was not so much a
declaration of independence from England but rather a declaration of
independence from Christendom. We would do well to understand it likewise. A
cursory reading of nearly all the Founding Fathers will reveal a similar
hatred for the Catholic Church.
I will leave off the Founding Fathers with these words of Benjamin Franklin
which are particularly appropriate:
I wish Christianity were more productive of good works and not holy day
keeping, and long prayers that area despised by wise men.
Roast your weenies, light your fireworks, and go to the parades if you must,
but when you talk to your Catholic children about July Fourth, stop short of
canonizing the anti-Catholic Founding Fathers, and do what you can to
diminish the pseudo-sacred character the day has been given by our national
mythology. Yes, it is a Catholic's duty in religion to love his country, and
there is much to love. Look first to honor those who sought to make this
country truly Catholic: Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortez, Frances
Cabrini, Mother Elizabeth Seton, the North American Martyrs, Juan Diego and
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Juan de Padilla, Junipero Serra, and others. Where
was the first permanent settlement in the New World? Jamestown, you say, in
1607? Fifty-six years earlier 1551) Lima, Peru, was already becoming a
thriving Spanish Catholic cultural capital. As the Jamestown Pilgrims were
barely surviving their first winter, Spanish Catholics were celebrating the
42nd anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine, Florida.
Catholics don't have to pass mid-summer without serious merrymaking.
According to our Lord, it is St. John the Baptist (not Thomas Jefferson) who
is the greatest man ever born of woman. St. John the Baptist was a martyr,
and typically it is the day of the martyr's death, and hence his birth into
eternal life, that we celebrate. But St. John was born without original sin,
sanctified in the womb by the presence of our Lord. So we celebrate his
nativity (June 24) with a Liturgy that bears a striking resemblance to that
of our Lord's Nativity six months earlier. As St. John the Baptist's
feastday comes at mid-summer, St. John begins to decrease so that our Lord,
the Light of Whom he gives witness, can increase. Thus, the custom in
Christendom was to celebrate the feast of the Baptist with bonfires. So go
ahead, roast your weenies, but roast them on the Baptist's fire. Shoot off
your fireworks, not to announce the coming of the British, but rather the
coming of the one who would announce the coming of the Messias.
Christopher Columbus brought Christ and the Catholic Church to a land that
practiced human sacrifice, yet he is despised by the world as the
quintessentially evil, white, European, Catholic male. Though their motives
need purifying, many Catholics, particularly those of Italian descent,
celebrate the voyages and discoveries of Columbus with great merrymaking.
Catholics must rejoice that he discovered our land, not because it gave rise
to the political entity that is the United States of America, but precisely
because he brought the Catholic Church to our shores.
Soon after Columbus Day, it's time for what used to be All Saints' Day,
preceded by All Hallows' Eve. Now called Halloween, it is an absolute
inversion of its original intent. Instead of praying for souls and fearing
damnation, Halloween is celebrated as though we wish to become among the
damned. Witches, devils, ghosts, ugliness-these things are satanic and are
often made to appear cute and benign. But to make evil things cute in no way
mitigates their evil. On the contrary, it makes all the more insidious.
We must reclaim Halloween. One of the most delightful alternatives is the
All Saints Party. Rather than dressing up like Power Rangers, Pocahontas,
Godzilla, anti-heroes, children and their parents dress like saints. The
secular world will never have as much material to choose from as what the
panoply of catholic saints provides.
Three or four weeks later and it's Thanksgiving. Just what can possibly be
wrong with a day given thanking God for his bounty? Consider that
'Thanksgiving was instituted by anti-Catholic Pilgrims as a reaction to and
a substitute for the "Christmas of the Papists." The celebration of
Christmas was made legal and remained so in many states well into the
1800's. Disregarding its anti-Catholic origins, we should also consider that
Thanksgiving is a favorite event of the ecumaniacs. This is the day when we
are to put side all religious differences in order to give thanks together.
This is a secular, quasi-religious feast that I think ought to be downplayed
if not ignored in the Catholic home. For Catholics, every holy Mass is a
thanksgiving. Holy Mother Church gives us the Ember Days as our days of
thanksgiving. The four Ember leeks coincide with the changing of the
seasons. We thank God for the gifts of nature and seek to use them in
moderation. And how does the Church require us to give thanks for the
earth's bounty? By fasting. Catholics show their appreciation not by
indulgence, but rather by sacrifice.
If, after the 12 Ember Days, you are still not satisfied that you have
adequately discharged your debt of gratitude, then consider also observing
the long-standing and Catholic tradition of giving special thanks for
harvest bounty at Michaelmas, the Feast of the Dedication of St. Michael
(September 29). If you insist on observing Puritan Thanksgiving, then at
least baptize it and make it a Catholic day. Sing the Te Deum, go to Mass,
teach your children about God's providence. Don't fall for the myth about
the fun-loving bunch of pilgrims who wanted nothing more than religious
liberty for all. Every last one of them would have despised you and your
"Popery." Avoid to sin of gluttony. But better still, give thanks with the
Church on the Ember Days and on Michaelmas.
The most frequently occurring holy day in the Liturgy is Sunday. We should
pause perhaps and reflect on how we spent last Sunday. Maybe the Sunday
before that. Then we should consider this from Exodus:
Remember to keep holy the Sabbath Day, six days you may labor and do your
work, but the seventh is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. Take care to keep
my Sabbath, for that is to be a token between you and me, whoever desecrates
the Sabbath shall be put to death. Six days there are for doing work, but >the seventh day is the Sabbath of complete rest, sacred to the Lord.
But sometimes it happens that our ox ends up in the ditch on the Sabbath
Day, and we're faced with the necessity of pulling it out. I suppose that if
this happens every Sunday, we should evaluate where and how we are driving
our ox.
Have a look at the Wal-Mart parking lot on a Sunday afternoon. It looks
exactly like the Wal-Mart parking lot on a Saturday afternoon. Can we
distinguish ourselves from our pagan neighbors in how we observe the Lord's
Day? Do we find our ox in the Wal-Mart parking lot on Sunday? Apart from
assisting at Mass and refraining from prohibited activities, what else might
we do? Prepare for this holy day on Saturday evening, spending half an hour
as a family reading and discussing the Epistle and Gospel of the coming
Sunday Mass. If possible, eliminate certain daily chores for the children on
Sunday. Listen to some liturgical music in the car on the way to Mass. Put
on your Sunday best as a tangible way of fostering the proper interior
dispositions. The idea is to set the day apart by sanctifying it with such
special gestures.
My wife was talking to a Novus Ordo friend recently, someone with whom she
likes to get in some friendly taunting about the Faith when they talk. Their
conversation went something like this:
So, Peggy, what are you all doing for the Rogation Days?
The what kind of days?
The Rogation Days. Three days of prayer, fasting and petition. You know, the
procession-Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension Thursday. By the
way, your kids are in Catholic schools so they'll be out of school for the
Ascension, right?
Well, actually, no.
You're kidding; why not?
Well, see, there's the problem of child care. A lot of moms have jobs, and
if the kids are off and both parents have to work, what are they going to do
with the kids? They try to keep in sync with the public schools so the
parents can be off when the kids are off. As a result they've used up all
the holidays.
What do you mean, "they've used up all the holidays?" You mean they don't
get off for Ascension Thursday but they get off for other holidays? Were
they off for Martin Luther King Day?
Well, yes.
A Catholic must question all the underlying assumptions here.
First point: What is the father doing working on a holy day of obligation?
Of course, If there's a buck to be made, his employer won't be closed to
commemorate the event. But, the father knows that the Ascension is a holy
day of obligation. Assuming he gets a few days vacation, shouldn't he have
planned for the occasion?
Second point: What is the mother doing working on a holy day of obligation?
Same argument. Couldn't she have arranged to have the day off?
Third point: What is the mother doing working when she has school-aged
children? Perhaps she means to earn a few extra bucks so the family can send
the children to a "Catholic" school. But there's something wrong when that
school doesn't have off on Ascension Thursday.
Fourth point: what is the school doing working on a holy day of obligation?
The children, along with their parents and the school, are celebrating
secular feasts and desecrating genuine Catholic holy days, all with the
approbation of the Chancery Office. Do you think it is even remotely
possible, when these kids leave that school and then their homes, that they
will have any sense of the liturgical year, any notion of what it means to
be Catholic?
What is true of Sundays is true of the holy days of obligation. The
distinction is that most of us do not have to work on Sundays. The fact is
that we probably don't have to work on the holy days either. We can go
through our calendars at the beginning of the year and mark the holy days
(those of obligation and otherwise). We can make our plans to take vacation
for the holy days. What a message this will send to our co-workers, to our
bosses, and to our children. And, we might even keep our ox out of the
Wal-Mart parking lot on holy days, too.
As so-called traditional Catholics, we know the way we pray reflects what we
believe-Lex orandi, lex credendi. Similarly, the way we celebrate reflects
what we believe, too-Lex convivendi, lex credendi.
The secular, pagan, anti-Catholic world will have its celebrations, its
feasts, its own diabolical anti-liturgy And what will we do? Will we
renounce it in favor of the celebrations, the feasts, the commemorations,
the prayers of the Catholic Church? As it is natural to man to celebrate,
likewise it is natural to man to use his celebrations to teach. The holy
days instruct. They teach us and our children. We must decide which lesson
plan we will use, which curriculum will form the basis of our instruction.
Holy Mother the Church, guided by the Holy Ghost, has sanctioned the pious
customs of her people. She has integrated them into her Liturgy, and made of
her Liturgy a whole that speaks to man as God wants us to hear Him-simply,
as children, united with Christ, in sorrow and in joy, in prayer and in
song, in fasts and in feasts. Our genuine Catholic holy days must be
restored. Our genuine Catholic holy days have been replaced by secular, and
therefore necessarily anti-Catholic festivals. If our Lord Himself tells us
we are either for Him or against Him, then there is no middle ground.
Nothing is neutral. Nothing is truly secular. Secular is a myth. Secular is
a lie. Secular is not for Christ, therefore, secular is against Christ.
These so-called secular feasts must either be baptized and made Catholic, or
they must be eliminated from our homes and our lives.
To make our homes truly Catholic we will have to make radical changes. We
will have to make concerted efforts to rethink and redirect the focus of our
holiday celebrations. Change is the mantra of the modern world. We're
constantly reminded that everything must change, that change is the only
thing that is constant. The destruction of the Catholic Liturgy took change.
The destruction of Christendom took change. And, the restoration of it all
will take change, too. A change back. That will take courage, and it must
begin with the resolution to change, with the resolution to restore Christ
first to His rightful place in our hearts and then in our homes.
No one can described our current situation better than did the incomparable
and prophetic Dom Gueranger:
But now for many ages past, Christians have grown too solicitous about
earthly things to frequent the holy vigils, and the mystical hours of the
day. Each new generation increased in indifference for that which their
forefathers in the Faith had loved as their best and strongest food.
Chanting, which is the natural expression of the prayers and even the
sorrows of the Church, became limited to the solemn Feasts; that was the
first sad revolution in the Christian world.
But even then Christendom was still rich in churches and monasteries; and
there, day and night, was still heard the sound of the same venerable
prayers which the Church had used through all the past ages. So many hands
lifted up to God drew down upon the earth the dew of heaven, averted storms
and won victory for those who were in battle. These servants of God, who
thus kept up an untiring choir that sung the divine praises, were considered
as solemnly deputed by the people, which was still Catholic, to pay full
tribute of homage and thanksgiving due to God, His Blessed Mother and the
saints.
Then came the Reformation, and at the outset, it attacked the very life of
Christianity. It would put an end to man's sacrifice of praise to God. It
strewed many countries with the ruins of churches. The clergy, the monks,
the virgins consecrated to God, were banished or put to death, and in the
churches which were spared, the Divine Offices were not permitted. In other
countries, where the persecutions were not so violent, many sanctuaries were
devastated and irremediably ruined, so that the life and voice of prayer
grew faint. Faith, too, was weakened. Rationalism became fearfully
developed. And now our own age seems threatened by what is the result of
these evils, the subversion of all social order (Dom Gueranger, The
Liturgical Year, Vol. 1, "Advent," General Preface).
And thus it has come to pass.
The world is again as universally evil as it was in the time of Noe. The
Sacrifice of the Mass is disappearing and the "abomination of desolation" is
at hand. Once again let us listen to Dom Gueranger:
The Liturgy is essentially and intimately connected with the Eucharist."
Where the dogma of the Real Presence has ceased to be believed, there also
have the canonical hours ceased and could not but cease [emphasis added]
(ibid).
We should not be surprised. The majority of Catholics today no longer
believe in the Real Presence. And "...there also have the canonical hours
ceased and could not but cease."
Our world is once again pagan. Our world is once again barbarian. It was the
Liturgy in the monasteries that rescued the world from barbarism into the
light of the Middle Ages. It will be the Liturgy that rescues us from the
barbarism of the postmodern age.
The Reformation began with physical violence and attacks on the Liturgy. The
violence eventually subsided, but the attacks on the Liturgy continued.
Again, hear Dom Gueranger:
For when the Reformation had abated the violence of its persecution, it had
other weapons wherewith to attack the Church. By these several countries
that had continued to be Catholic were infected with the spirit of pride,
which is the enemy of prayer. The modern spirit would have it that prayer is
not action.
There were found men who said "Let us abolish all the festival days of God
from the earth"; and then came upon us that calamity which brings all others
with it, and which the good Mardochai besought God to avert from his nation,
when he said: "Shut not, O Lord, the mouths of them that sing to Thee!"
(ibid.).
The monasteries are silent; the convents are silent; the seminaries are
silent; and in our churches we are dumb to singing the chant of St. Gregory.
The festival days of God have been abolished from the earth, and the mouths
of them that sing to the Lord God of Hosts have been decisively shut.
Imagine that in the time of David, 4,000 men-ÂLevites-daily chanted the
Liturgy in the Temple, the type for our holy Mass. Imagine that in the time
of our Lord, four times a day, 500 priests and 500 Levites, forming two
mighty and magnificent choirs, chanted David's Psalms together. Their entire
existence was given over to perfecting the singing of the praises of
Almighty God. In the ages of faith, hundreds of thousands of men and women
who had consecrated themselves, who had given their very lives to God, paid
homage at all hours of the day and night to Him, His Mother, and His saints,
by chanting the Divine Office. This is how the mighty and good God should be
glorified.
And today? Today, the monasteries, the convents, the seminaries are
silent-because they are empty. And they will stay silent and they will stay
empty until we fill them with our sons and our daughters. But our sons and
our daughters will not go there if they do not understand what it means to
be Catholic. And they will not understand what it means to be Catholic if
they do not understand the Liturgy. And they will certainly not understand
the Liturgy if they have not lived the Liturgy. And they will never have
lived the Liturgy if they have not lived it in their own homes-in our homes.
This is not about vacuous customs and quaint ways to pass the time during
the year. This is about war. And not war against flesh and blood, but
against principalities and powers. We are in the army and the City of God is
under siege. This is about restoring the edifice of Christendom, one small
liturgical stone upon the other. This is about having the courage to change
our lives to make that happen. The restoration must come, by the grace of
God, beginning in us and in our homes. Christ must reign. Our homes must
become the monasteries and convents of our age.
With the help of God we must live fully and entirely Catholic lives, not
secular lives with a few Catholic adornments. We must live the Liturgy. We
must make our homes schools wherein the Liturgy teaches us our Faith. Our
Catholic homes must be islands of liturgical beauty in a sea of secular
ugliness. Our homes must be havens of godly sanity in a world gone mad. Our
homes must be bulwarks against barbarism, founded solidly on the Liturgy.
God, give us strength. God, give us the courage to restore Thy festival days
upon earth, to once again open our mouths and sing to Thee. By Thy good
grace we will fast, we will pray, and we will sing with the Church,
sorrowfully, and joyfully, and we will feast; we will feast heartily, like
good Catholics, in anticipation of the heavenly banquet of eternity.
.
Second Sunday of Advent
St. Peter Chrysologus - Bishop, Confessor, Doctor
J.M.J.
LIFE, LITURGY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Alex is only seven years old. Nevertheless, Alex is a heretic. His heresy is
as much a part of him as the Faith is a part of the children who live next
door to him. This creates a problem for the parents of those children, who
are concerned that Alex will jeopardize the faith of their children. So they
work up the courage to talk to Alex's parents. They fear that Alex, steeped
in the unbelief that characterizes his whole family, will menace the
innocence of their children and they would like Alex's parents to counsel
the boy so as to avoid the unthinkable. The parents are accountable for
Alex's heresy. They have not merely failed to instruct their boy, they have
positively inculcated in him utter disbelief in the providence, the
omnipotence, the goodness, the very existence...of...Santa Claus. Alex must
be instructed to keep his little secret to himself. Because the neighbors
cannot abide his heresy.
Come now, you may be thinking. What harm is there in a cute story? Pehaps
none at all, but then again, consider this: Our Lord tells us that we adults
must have the faith of little children. The child believes what he is told
because he is a child. If you tell him that reindeer fly or that a fat man
living at the North Pole makes toys for all the children of the world and
delivers them on Christmas Eve, he will believe you because he is a child.
If you tell him that at midnight, in Bethlehem, in the piercing cold, God
almighty, Creator, Lord and Master of the universe was born into this world
as a tiny baby, he will believe you because he is a child.
God makes children innocent. He makes them guileless. He makes them
believing - all the better so that they will believe what their parents tell
them, especially when they tell them the mysteries and marvelous truths of
the Catholic Faith. For some strange reason, when our children will most
readily believe whatever we tell them, we tell them this silly story about
Santa Claus. They accept the Santa Lie with as much simplicity and faith as
they accept the truth of Christ's birth in a manger in Bethlehem.
Side-by-side with the Great Truth of the Incarnation, they believe the Santa
Lie.
Perhaps you may object to calling it the Santa Lie, but from the point of
view of a child, what exactly is the difference between lying and
pretending? We tell him that we pretended about Santa, but not about baby
Jesus. Why should he believe you in either case? It might even be easier for
him to believe that reindeer fly than that God Himself was born in a stable
cave.
The child who trusts, who believes so readily, will not always be a child,
and he will not always have childlike faith. Our children are growing up in
a world filled with doubt. Doubt is fundamental to modernism. We all
recognize Descartes' "I think, therefore I am," but we should also know that
in Descartes' philosophy he might as well have said, "I doubt, therefore I
think; I think, therefore I am." Doubt itself is given as the rational basis
of one's existence. Our culture demands that we doubt, and that we doubt
absolutely everything. In this climate, it is insane to give a child a
reason to doubt, and to tell a child the story of the birth of our Lord
side-by-side with the Santa Lie indeed gives a child a reason to doubt.
The problem isn't in pretending per se. It's in pretending in something that
detracts from the truth. It's in the juxtaposition of the lie with the
truth, thereby Âcasting doubt on the truth. Christmas celebrates the fact
that God has become a man. Isn't this marvel enough? Why do we have to
invent this story about a man who has become a god? Santa is omniscient. "He
sees you when you're sleeping; he knows when you're awake; he knows if
you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake." Santa dispenses
justice "You'd, better watch out, better not pout, better not cry. I'm
telling you why..." And if he's not omnipresent, as is God, then he
certainly has the agility of the angel: The problem is not that we pretend
that there is a Santa. The problem is that we do so in opposition to the
Incarnation.
The name of Santa Claus is a linguistic corruption of Sinter Klaas, itself a
corruption of the name of St. Nicholas in the Dutch language. Yes, St.
Nicholas was particularly generous to children. He was not fat, however; he
was thin from fasting, which he did even from his infancy. He wasn't married
to a Mrs. Claus; he was celibate. He wore red because he was a bishop, but
he did not wear a red stocking cap. He did not live at or anywhere near the
North Pole; on the contrary, he lived in Myra (a provincial capital in Asia
Minor), and his feastday is nearly three weeks before Christmas. This fellow
we call Santa Claus is not St. Nicholas, but rather is a perversion of St.
Nicholas.
We all bemoan the commercialization of Christmas. But to say that Christmas
is commercialized is to stop short of the bigger problem. We should not
lament the commercialization of Christmas but rather its paganization. It is
our duty to restore the truly Catholic observance of Christmas, to strip
away all that is pagan in its celebration. That duty begins in our Catholic
homes.
Consider that we hesitate to say "Merry Christmas," in order not to offend.
Rather, we say, "Happy Holidays," or "Season's Greetings." We would edify
our neighbor if, instead, we were to emphasize the Catholic nature of the
feast by wishing him "...a blessed and holy Christ-Mass." It is ironic that
folks have lost the connection between holiday and holiness.
And so begins the holiday season: There's the office holiday party, the
neighborhood holiday party, the church holiday party and the club holiday
party. On it goes, from one holiday party to the next, all during what, in
days of more restraint, was a penitential season. Then we go shopping. Out
come the lists. Who did we buy what for last year and who bought what for
us? How much did they spend, and how much did we spend? There's Mum and Dad,
Gran and Grandpa, Dad's new wife, Aunt Marie, eight other aunts and uncles,
and the cousins and the brothers and the sisters. We find ourselves with one
last thing to buy along with all the other nuts 15 minutes before closing on
Christmas Eve in the Wal-Mart in a blind stupor asking ourselves why we are
buying this? Why? Because it's Christmas!
A lady at work told me that her Christmas gift budget for her three children
was $1000 per child. Here's a lady, a secretary, who has to work a long,
long time to scratch together $3000 after taxes, and I wondered why she just
didn't quit work and give her kids some of her time as their Christmas
present. I suppose we do as we must to assuage our guilt.
During the holiday season, the radio stations play this really silly, that
is to say, secular, Christmas music. Think of it. Secular Christmas music;
what a concept. The big day approaches. The advertising section in the paper
grows bigger; the Wal-Mart becomes intolerably more crowded; the suicide
rate climbs to its annual peak; holiday music saturates the airwaves. Mommy
is hyper-baking and sending Christmas cards and wrapping presents. Garlands
are strung out and so are Mom and Dad. Daddy's putting toys together and
trimming the tree and hanging the lights and putting up decorations, and now
its Christmas Eve. The tree is wired up with lights and the kiddies are
wired up on sugar. The camcorder batteries are fully charged and so is the
MasterCard. The camera is loaded with film and Daddy's a little loaded
himself. We've been to all the parties, visited all the friends; the
presents are under the tree; and now it's the dawn of Christmas Day. And
after so many days of rabid expectation, it all ends in one anticlimactic
and disappointing morning. How can Christmas ever live up to our
expectations? As a metaphor of our disappointment, the exalted tree will be
out on the curb tomorrow morning.
A Protestant work colleague of mine asked once, "What do you traditional
Catholics do for holidays? Do you celebrate?" I took a moment to reflect on
how our holy time, our ChristMass, fundamentally and quintessentially
liturgical, has been appropriated, perverted, and bastardized by usurpers. I
shook my head and said to him, "Ray, the problem with you Protestant folk is
that you just don't know how to party." And I thought about how well-ordered
and sensible the Catholic Liturgy is.
We begin our Catholic observance of Christ's birth with the beginning of a
new liturgical year. We commemorate 4,000 years of longing for the Messias
with the four weeks of Advent, a time of penance and restraint. We fast on
Christmas Eve. There are three separate Masses on Christmas Day; one at
midnight, one at dawn, and one during the day. All that Christmas means
could never be grasped and commemorated in a single day. That is why the
Church gives us the Twelve Days of Christmas to celebrate. Beyond these, we
have the entire Christmastide in which to rejoice. And when the 40 days of
the Blessed Mother's purification have been completed, we conclude our
Christmas season with the blessing and procession of Candlemas (February 2).
No matter what our ethnic background, we all have customs and traditions
associated with Christmas that are uniquely and distinctively Catholic. What
customs do you observe for Christmas in your homes? Are they distinctively
and evidently Catholic? Do you have a nativity scene? It should be the
outstanding feature of our Christmas decorating.
Yes, Christmas has been commercialized, secularized, and paganized, but that
is not the whole of our problem; it is only one manifestation of our
problem. Christmas, like the Mass itself, is part of a greater whole. It is
only one aspect of the Liturgy. Our problem lies in the fact that we have
ceased to live the liturgical lives of our ancestors. Their every day was
quickened by the Liturgy, most of it committed to memory. Their thoughts
flowed from the wellspring of the official prayer of the Church and from the
psalms, which they chanted freely in the fields and at the hearth. The
perennial Liturgy, however, has been snatched from us. We have been robbed.
The first blow came with the Reformation, when monasteries and churches
throughout Europe fell to the axe of the so-called reformers. Even in
countries that remained Catholic, the Liturgy was weakened by the
rationalism that emphasized action over prayer. The final blow came with the
liturgical revolution wrought by the Novus Ordo Missae. Without the
monasteries and convents, the Liturgy lost its substance and objectivity and
no longer overflows to fill our hearts, our homes, and our entire lives.
If we are to understand the solution to restoring liturgical life and its
holy days, we must first understand the problem. I believe there are five
distinct aspects of the same problem.
The first aspect of the problem is that those holy days that have survived
the onslaught are slowly but surely being secularized and perverted, most
notable among these, I include Christmas, Easter, and Halloween.
The second aspect of the problem is that new, secular, quasi-religious
feasts have been introduced, which serve as poor substitutes for genuine
Catholic holy days. These include Mother's Day, Father's Day, Thanksgiving,
and others.
The third aspect of the problem is that totally secular or even pagan feasts
have been introduced that celebrate occasions that are not Catholic, or are
even anti-Catholic, for example, Independence Day, President's Day, Martin
Luther King Day, and Earth Day.
The fourth aspect of the problem is that countless saints' days, fasts,
feasts, seasons, and traditions are completely forgotten or ignored.
Examples of these include the Ember Days and the Rogation Days.
The fifth and certainly the most far-reaching aspect of the problem is that
the most important and frequently recurring holy day, namely, Sunday, has
lost its meaning in the modern world. It is routinely desecrated, and in
practice has become indistinguishable from the other six days of the week.
Likewise, the holy days of obligation are ignored and desecrated.
The restoration of Christendom will not happen apart from a restoration of
the Liturgy. Don't hold your breath waiting for your local Ordinary to lead
processions through the streets of your city for the Rogation Days or for
the Feast of Corpus Christi. Monasteries and convents are not going to send
us robust men and women to teach us Gregorian chant. It would be illegal for
the civil authorities to declare that, as a nation, we will conform the
patterns of our daily lives to the Liturgy of the Catholic Church. The
solution will have to come from within the walls of our own Catholic homes,
and we should begin by examining how we celebrate holy days and holidays.
Consider a few cases in point.
What a surprise to find, when one looks at the liturgical calendar, that
Valentine's Day is, well, the Feast of St. Valentine (February 14). A
wonderful feast it is, and it has been totally trivialized and most likely
made lustful. Catholics must not lose sight of the fact that Valentine is a
great saint of God who gave his heart to the Sacred Heart. This is the
feastday of a martyr who loved his Beloved enough to die for Him, the fact
to remember in order to give the observance of St. Valentine's Day a more
Catholic character.
But if St. Valentine's Day has been trivialized, pity poor St. Patrick. With
the possible exception of St. Nicholas, no saint has suffered so much at the
hands of the neo-pagans. In 1994, in Boston, the annual St. Patrick's Day
Parade was canceled because a group of Irish-American sodomites won a State
Supreme Court battle to be permitted to march in the St. Patrick's Day
parade there. The US Supreme Court overturned the State Supreme Court ruling
so the parade was held in 1995, without the sodomites, but not until May of
that year. How it must pain St. Patrick and all good Irish Catholics to see
the mockery that is made of his feastday as the tide of paganism once turned
back by St. Patrick seems to have turned again in its favor. We are justly
horrified at the desecration that takes place on his feastday, in parades in
his honor, and in and about the cathedral that bears his name in New York
City. There are a lot of fun things to do on St. Patrick's Day (March 17),
but do not neglect to give proper attention to the heroism and sanctity of
this truly great saint.
The Feast of St. Joseph is especially dear to Italians. His feastday (March
19) is the authentic Catholic Father's Day among Italians. The custom of the
St. Joseph's Altar used to be maintained in their parishes and homes. The
significance of decking out an altar with food and crafts in thanksgiving
or St. Joseph's intercession in our temporal affairs is now all but gone.
It is hard to understand what the world has done to Easter. The Easter bunny
is a bit too goofy even for modern man. (Little Alex has not gotten in
trouble with the neighbors for divulging the facts about the Easter bunny,
as he did for his heretical views on the Santa Lie.) I think the problem
with Easter is not that it has been co-opted, because it hasn't really.
Likewise, I don't think that the problem is that it has been commercialized
or paganized, because it hasn't really, at least not to the extent that the
other holy days have been. I think that the problem isn't with Easter at
all; the problem is with Lent. That is to say, we just don't make serious
Lents anymore. It's absolutely true that the satisfaction of our Easter is
directly proportional to the austerity of our Lent. The postmodern Catholic
Church gives up meat on Friday and fasts on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
That's all. And that's not very austere. The culmination of the Lenten
Liturgy occurs during Holy Week and in particular during the Sacred Triduum.
Now, the rites of Holy Week are opposed by the pagan rites of Spring Break.
We Catholics used to impose upon ourselves the sweet burden of penance and
reparation during Lent, sometimes heroically. This included abstaining from,
among other things, eggs. Come Easter Sunday morning, what else would one do
with all the hen-fruit but eat it, decorate it, and give it away. Easter
eggs and the new life cracking its way out of the shell symbolize the
resurrection and new life that Christ won for us on Easter. Do remember to
explain that symbolism to your children. Don't have Easter without first
having Lent and Holy Week. And don't have Lent without having Carnival. The
Church says to fast well and to feast well, too.
It's May, the month of our Blessed Mother, yet we Catholics are honoring
earthly mothers. Is this wrong? Surely we traditional Catholics with our
large families and our heroic mothers should celebrate Mother's Day. But
there is something wrong with Mother's Day American-style. It is a purely
secular feast. While it expresses a noble human sentiment, it does so on
purely a natural level. It does so entirely apart from our Liturgy. Finding
himself without the religious feasts of the Catholic liturgical year, the
neo-pagan concocts new feastdays for himself and invests them with a
non-Catholic, but still quasi-religious, character. When Mother's Day was
introduced by an Act of Congress in 1913, the reaction of the Catholic
Church in the United States was to question whether Catholics should
celebrate the day alongside their Protestant countrymen, precisely for the
reasons I have mentioned. Catholics better understood their Faith and had at
least a marginally better sense of the Liturgy and the necessity to resist
the secularization of culture. Immigrant American Catholics capitulated,
however, presumably not wanting to appear un-American. In any case, that
Americans honor mothers and celebrate motherhood one day a year is so
hypocritical as to be ludicrous. For 364 days a year we denigrate
motherhood, we despise motherhood and we despise mothers-unless of course
they have 1.2 absolutely perfect children and full-time jobs. Oh, we like
single moms, too. And we like the mother that has seven babies all at once.
We buy her a house and put her on the news every night. But heaven help a
woman who should have her seven children sequentially. She will certainly be
subject to abuse, scorn, derision, and ridicule. It has become inconceivable
that one could suggest that, for a woman to fully realize her womanhood, she
should be a mother. Why celebrate Mother's Day with a nation that is
eliminating mothers? What to do about Mother's Day? The answer might be to
downplay secular Mother's Day. I wouldn't recommend that you stop sending
flowers to your own mother on Mother's Day unless you have agreed beforehand
that, in keeping with the Liturgy, there is a more Catholic way for
Catholics to honor mothers. Two good alternatives come to mind. In many
countries, even to this day, mothers are honored on December 8, Feast of the
Immaculate Conception. In other Catholic countries in the past, mothers were
honored on Laetare Sunday, a day that was known as "Mothering Sunday." In
the Epistle for Laetare Sunday, St. Paul points out that the Catholic Church
is a Mother leading us to eternal life. There are many delightful customs we
must revive for this day, customs that honored our natural mothers; our
heavenly mother, Mary; Holy Mother Church; and even the mother church of the
diocese, the cathedral. This is a superior and Catholic alternative to a
secular sham Mother's Day.
As springtime gives way to summer, we all look forward to fireworks. The
Fourth of July is the High Holy Day of secularist America, especially so for
devotees of the goddess Liberty. Let us be reminded that there is no such
thing as secular. Things are either for God, or against Him, and this
exalted feast of liberty is anything but for Him. Yet we Catholics eagerly
celebrate an event (the signing of the Declaration of Independence) that is
fundamentally anti-Christ, implicitly anti-God, and explicitly
antiÂCatholic. If you are scandalized by my words, then consider these
words, written in response to the English Parliament's having passed the
Quebec Act:
The affair of Canada is still worse. The Romish Faith is made the
established religion of the land... The free exercise of the Protestant
faith depended upon the pleasure of the Governor and the Council... They may
as well establish Popery in New York and the other colonies as they did in
Canada. Your lives, your property, your religion, are at stake.
These are the words of none other that Alexander Hamilton. He, and the other
Founding Fathers, used such hyperbole to stir up widespread anti-Catholic
hatred and bigotry so as to incite the people to break ties with England.
Much is made of the other four so-called Intolerable Acts, but it was this
fifth intolerable act that was so offensive to the Founding Fathers. It did
little more than allow a Catholic in a Catholic land to hold public office
without having first to renounce his Catholic Faith, which renunciation was
absolutely required of him in the other colonies and in England in
compliance with the so-called Test Act.
Perhaps it is unfair to characterize Independence Day with the words of
Alexander Hamilton, so consider also these words, penned by the author of
the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson himself, on the 50th anniversary of its
signing (July 4, 1826):
May it be to the world what I think it will be, the arousing of men to burst
the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition have persuaded
them to bind themselves, when the human mind was held in vassalage by kings,
by priests, and by nobles.
Jefferson understood that the Declaration of Independence was not so much a
declaration of independence from England but rather a declaration of
independence from Christendom. We would do well to understand it likewise. A
cursory reading of nearly all the Founding Fathers will reveal a similar
hatred for the Catholic Church.
I will leave off the Founding Fathers with these words of Benjamin Franklin
which are particularly appropriate:
I wish Christianity were more productive of good works and not holy day
keeping, and long prayers that area despised by wise men.
Roast your weenies, light your fireworks, and go to the parades if you must,
but when you talk to your Catholic children about July Fourth, stop short of
canonizing the anti-Catholic Founding Fathers, and do what you can to
diminish the pseudo-sacred character the day has been given by our national
mythology. Yes, it is a Catholic's duty in religion to love his country, and
there is much to love. Look first to honor those who sought to make this
country truly Catholic: Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortez, Frances
Cabrini, Mother Elizabeth Seton, the North American Martyrs, Juan Diego and
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Juan de Padilla, Junipero Serra, and others. Where
was the first permanent settlement in the New World? Jamestown, you say, in
1607? Fifty-six years earlier 1551) Lima, Peru, was already becoming a
thriving Spanish Catholic cultural capital. As the Jamestown Pilgrims were
barely surviving their first winter, Spanish Catholics were celebrating the
42nd anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine, Florida.
Catholics don't have to pass mid-summer without serious merrymaking.
According to our Lord, it is St. John the Baptist (not Thomas Jefferson) who
is the greatest man ever born of woman. St. John the Baptist was a martyr,
and typically it is the day of the martyr's death, and hence his birth into
eternal life, that we celebrate. But St. John was born without original sin,
sanctified in the womb by the presence of our Lord. So we celebrate his
nativity (June 24) with a Liturgy that bears a striking resemblance to that
of our Lord's Nativity six months earlier. As St. John the Baptist's
feastday comes at mid-summer, St. John begins to decrease so that our Lord,
the Light of Whom he gives witness, can increase. Thus, the custom in
Christendom was to celebrate the feast of the Baptist with bonfires. So go
ahead, roast your weenies, but roast them on the Baptist's fire. Shoot off
your fireworks, not to announce the coming of the British, but rather the
coming of the one who would announce the coming of the Messias.
Christopher Columbus brought Christ and the Catholic Church to a land that
practiced human sacrifice, yet he is despised by the world as the
quintessentially evil, white, European, Catholic male. Though their motives
need purifying, many Catholics, particularly those of Italian descent,
celebrate the voyages and discoveries of Columbus with great merrymaking.
Catholics must rejoice that he discovered our land, not because it gave rise
to the political entity that is the United States of America, but precisely
because he brought the Catholic Church to our shores.
Soon after Columbus Day, it's time for what used to be All Saints' Day,
preceded by All Hallows' Eve. Now called Halloween, it is an absolute
inversion of its original intent. Instead of praying for souls and fearing
damnation, Halloween is celebrated as though we wish to become among the
damned. Witches, devils, ghosts, ugliness-these things are satanic and are
often made to appear cute and benign. But to make evil things cute in no way
mitigates their evil. On the contrary, it makes all the more insidious.
We must reclaim Halloween. One of the most delightful alternatives is the
All Saints Party. Rather than dressing up like Power Rangers, Pocahontas,
Godzilla, anti-heroes, children and their parents dress like saints. The
secular world will never have as much material to choose from as what the
panoply of catholic saints provides.
Three or four weeks later and it's Thanksgiving. Just what can possibly be
wrong with a day given thanking God for his bounty? Consider that
'Thanksgiving was instituted by anti-Catholic Pilgrims as a reaction to and
a substitute for the "Christmas of the Papists." The celebration of
Christmas was made legal and remained so in many states well into the
1800's. Disregarding its anti-Catholic origins, we should also consider that
Thanksgiving is a favorite event of the ecumaniacs. This is the day when we
are to put side all religious differences in order to give thanks together.
This is a secular, quasi-religious feast that I think ought to be downplayed
if not ignored in the Catholic home. For Catholics, every holy Mass is a
thanksgiving. Holy Mother Church gives us the Ember Days as our days of
thanksgiving. The four Ember leeks coincide with the changing of the
seasons. We thank God for the gifts of nature and seek to use them in
moderation. And how does the Church require us to give thanks for the
earth's bounty? By fasting. Catholics show their appreciation not by
indulgence, but rather by sacrifice.
If, after the 12 Ember Days, you are still not satisfied that you have
adequately discharged your debt of gratitude, then consider also observing
the long-standing and Catholic tradition of giving special thanks for
harvest bounty at Michaelmas, the Feast of the Dedication of St. Michael
(September 29). If you insist on observing Puritan Thanksgiving, then at
least baptize it and make it a Catholic day. Sing the Te Deum, go to Mass,
teach your children about God's providence. Don't fall for the myth about
the fun-loving bunch of pilgrims who wanted nothing more than religious
liberty for all. Every last one of them would have despised you and your
"Popery." Avoid to sin of gluttony. But better still, give thanks with the
Church on the Ember Days and on Michaelmas.
The most frequently occurring holy day in the Liturgy is Sunday. We should
pause perhaps and reflect on how we spent last Sunday. Maybe the Sunday
before that. Then we should consider this from Exodus:
Remember to keep holy the Sabbath Day, six days you may labor and do your
work, but the seventh is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. Take care to keep
my Sabbath, for that is to be a token between you and me, whoever desecrates
the Sabbath shall be put to death. Six days there are for doing work, but >the seventh day is the Sabbath of complete rest, sacred to the Lord.
But sometimes it happens that our ox ends up in the ditch on the Sabbath
Day, and we're faced with the necessity of pulling it out. I suppose that if
this happens every Sunday, we should evaluate where and how we are driving
our ox.
Have a look at the Wal-Mart parking lot on a Sunday afternoon. It looks
exactly like the Wal-Mart parking lot on a Saturday afternoon. Can we
distinguish ourselves from our pagan neighbors in how we observe the Lord's
Day? Do we find our ox in the Wal-Mart parking lot on Sunday? Apart from
assisting at Mass and refraining from prohibited activities, what else might
we do? Prepare for this holy day on Saturday evening, spending half an hour
as a family reading and discussing the Epistle and Gospel of the coming
Sunday Mass. If possible, eliminate certain daily chores for the children on
Sunday. Listen to some liturgical music in the car on the way to Mass. Put
on your Sunday best as a tangible way of fostering the proper interior
dispositions. The idea is to set the day apart by sanctifying it with such
special gestures.
My wife was talking to a Novus Ordo friend recently, someone with whom she
likes to get in some friendly taunting about the Faith when they talk. Their
conversation went something like this:
So, Peggy, what are you all doing for the Rogation Days?
The what kind of days?
The Rogation Days. Three days of prayer, fasting and petition. You know, the
procession-Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension Thursday. By the
way, your kids are in Catholic schools so they'll be out of school for the
Ascension, right?
Well, actually, no.
You're kidding; why not?
Well, see, there's the problem of child care. A lot of moms have jobs, and
if the kids are off and both parents have to work, what are they going to do
with the kids? They try to keep in sync with the public schools so the
parents can be off when the kids are off. As a result they've used up all
the holidays.
What do you mean, "they've used up all the holidays?" You mean they don't
get off for Ascension Thursday but they get off for other holidays? Were
they off for Martin Luther King Day?
Well, yes.
A Catholic must question all the underlying assumptions here.
First point: What is the father doing working on a holy day of obligation?
Of course, If there's a buck to be made, his employer won't be closed to
commemorate the event. But, the father knows that the Ascension is a holy
day of obligation. Assuming he gets a few days vacation, shouldn't he have
planned for the occasion?
Second point: What is the mother doing working on a holy day of obligation?
Same argument. Couldn't she have arranged to have the day off?
Third point: What is the mother doing working when she has school-aged
children? Perhaps she means to earn a few extra bucks so the family can send
the children to a "Catholic" school. But there's something wrong when that
school doesn't have off on Ascension Thursday.
Fourth point: what is the school doing working on a holy day of obligation?
The children, along with their parents and the school, are celebrating
secular feasts and desecrating genuine Catholic holy days, all with the
approbation of the Chancery Office. Do you think it is even remotely
possible, when these kids leave that school and then their homes, that they
will have any sense of the liturgical year, any notion of what it means to
be Catholic?
What is true of Sundays is true of the holy days of obligation. The
distinction is that most of us do not have to work on Sundays. The fact is
that we probably don't have to work on the holy days either. We can go
through our calendars at the beginning of the year and mark the holy days
(those of obligation and otherwise). We can make our plans to take vacation
for the holy days. What a message this will send to our co-workers, to our
bosses, and to our children. And, we might even keep our ox out of the
Wal-Mart parking lot on holy days, too.
As so-called traditional Catholics, we know the way we pray reflects what we
believe-Lex orandi, lex credendi. Similarly, the way we celebrate reflects
what we believe, too-Lex convivendi, lex credendi.
The secular, pagan, anti-Catholic world will have its celebrations, its
feasts, its own diabolical anti-liturgy And what will we do? Will we
renounce it in favor of the celebrations, the feasts, the commemorations,
the prayers of the Catholic Church? As it is natural to man to celebrate,
likewise it is natural to man to use his celebrations to teach. The holy
days instruct. They teach us and our children. We must decide which lesson
plan we will use, which curriculum will form the basis of our instruction.
Holy Mother the Church, guided by the Holy Ghost, has sanctioned the pious
customs of her people. She has integrated them into her Liturgy, and made of
her Liturgy a whole that speaks to man as God wants us to hear Him-simply,
as children, united with Christ, in sorrow and in joy, in prayer and in
song, in fasts and in feasts. Our genuine Catholic holy days must be
restored. Our genuine Catholic holy days have been replaced by secular, and
therefore necessarily anti-Catholic festivals. If our Lord Himself tells us
we are either for Him or against Him, then there is no middle ground.
Nothing is neutral. Nothing is truly secular. Secular is a myth. Secular is
a lie. Secular is not for Christ, therefore, secular is against Christ.
These so-called secular feasts must either be baptized and made Catholic, or
they must be eliminated from our homes and our lives.
To make our homes truly Catholic we will have to make radical changes. We
will have to make concerted efforts to rethink and redirect the focus of our
holiday celebrations. Change is the mantra of the modern world. We're
constantly reminded that everything must change, that change is the only
thing that is constant. The destruction of the Catholic Liturgy took change.
The destruction of Christendom took change. And, the restoration of it all
will take change, too. A change back. That will take courage, and it must
begin with the resolution to change, with the resolution to restore Christ
first to His rightful place in our hearts and then in our homes.
No one can described our current situation better than did the incomparable
and prophetic Dom Gueranger:
But now for many ages past, Christians have grown too solicitous about
earthly things to frequent the holy vigils, and the mystical hours of the
day. Each new generation increased in indifference for that which their
forefathers in the Faith had loved as their best and strongest food.
Chanting, which is the natural expression of the prayers and even the
sorrows of the Church, became limited to the solemn Feasts; that was the
first sad revolution in the Christian world.
But even then Christendom was still rich in churches and monasteries; and
there, day and night, was still heard the sound of the same venerable
prayers which the Church had used through all the past ages. So many hands
lifted up to God drew down upon the earth the dew of heaven, averted storms
and won victory for those who were in battle. These servants of God, who
thus kept up an untiring choir that sung the divine praises, were considered
as solemnly deputed by the people, which was still Catholic, to pay full
tribute of homage and thanksgiving due to God, His Blessed Mother and the
saints.
Then came the Reformation, and at the outset, it attacked the very life of
Christianity. It would put an end to man's sacrifice of praise to God. It
strewed many countries with the ruins of churches. The clergy, the monks,
the virgins consecrated to God, were banished or put to death, and in the
churches which were spared, the Divine Offices were not permitted. In other
countries, where the persecutions were not so violent, many sanctuaries were
devastated and irremediably ruined, so that the life and voice of prayer
grew faint. Faith, too, was weakened. Rationalism became fearfully
developed. And now our own age seems threatened by what is the result of
these evils, the subversion of all social order (Dom Gueranger, The
Liturgical Year, Vol. 1, "Advent," General Preface).
And thus it has come to pass.
The world is again as universally evil as it was in the time of Noe. The
Sacrifice of the Mass is disappearing and the "abomination of desolation" is
at hand. Once again let us listen to Dom Gueranger:
The Liturgy is essentially and intimately connected with the Eucharist."
Where the dogma of the Real Presence has ceased to be believed, there also
have the canonical hours ceased and could not but cease [emphasis added]
(ibid).
We should not be surprised. The majority of Catholics today no longer
believe in the Real Presence. And "...there also have the canonical hours
ceased and could not but cease."
Our world is once again pagan. Our world is once again barbarian. It was the
Liturgy in the monasteries that rescued the world from barbarism into the
light of the Middle Ages. It will be the Liturgy that rescues us from the
barbarism of the postmodern age.
The Reformation began with physical violence and attacks on the Liturgy. The
violence eventually subsided, but the attacks on the Liturgy continued.
Again, hear Dom Gueranger:
For when the Reformation had abated the violence of its persecution, it had
other weapons wherewith to attack the Church. By these several countries
that had continued to be Catholic were infected with the spirit of pride,
which is the enemy of prayer. The modern spirit would have it that prayer is
not action.
There were found men who said "Let us abolish all the festival days of God
from the earth"; and then came upon us that calamity which brings all others
with it, and which the good Mardochai besought God to avert from his nation,
when he said: "Shut not, O Lord, the mouths of them that sing to Thee!"
(ibid.).
The monasteries are silent; the convents are silent; the seminaries are
silent; and in our churches we are dumb to singing the chant of St. Gregory.
The festival days of God have been abolished from the earth, and the mouths
of them that sing to the Lord God of Hosts have been decisively shut.
Imagine that in the time of David, 4,000 men-ÂLevites-daily chanted the
Liturgy in the Temple, the type for our holy Mass. Imagine that in the time
of our Lord, four times a day, 500 priests and 500 Levites, forming two
mighty and magnificent choirs, chanted David's Psalms together. Their entire
existence was given over to perfecting the singing of the praises of
Almighty God. In the ages of faith, hundreds of thousands of men and women
who had consecrated themselves, who had given their very lives to God, paid
homage at all hours of the day and night to Him, His Mother, and His saints,
by chanting the Divine Office. This is how the mighty and good God should be
glorified.
And today? Today, the monasteries, the convents, the seminaries are
silent-because they are empty. And they will stay silent and they will stay
empty until we fill them with our sons and our daughters. But our sons and
our daughters will not go there if they do not understand what it means to
be Catholic. And they will not understand what it means to be Catholic if
they do not understand the Liturgy. And they will certainly not understand
the Liturgy if they have not lived the Liturgy. And they will never have
lived the Liturgy if they have not lived it in their own homes-in our homes.
This is not about vacuous customs and quaint ways to pass the time during
the year. This is about war. And not war against flesh and blood, but
against principalities and powers. We are in the army and the City of God is
under siege. This is about restoring the edifice of Christendom, one small
liturgical stone upon the other. This is about having the courage to change
our lives to make that happen. The restoration must come, by the grace of
God, beginning in us and in our homes. Christ must reign. Our homes must
become the monasteries and convents of our age.
With the help of God we must live fully and entirely Catholic lives, not
secular lives with a few Catholic adornments. We must live the Liturgy. We
must make our homes schools wherein the Liturgy teaches us our Faith. Our
Catholic homes must be islands of liturgical beauty in a sea of secular
ugliness. Our homes must be havens of godly sanity in a world gone mad. Our
homes must be bulwarks against barbarism, founded solidly on the Liturgy.
God, give us strength. God, give us the courage to restore Thy festival days
upon earth, to once again open our mouths and sing to Thee. By Thy good
grace we will fast, we will pray, and we will sing with the Church,
sorrowfully, and joyfully, and we will feast; we will feast heartily, like
good Catholics, in anticipation of the heavenly banquet of eternity.
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