Friday 2 April 2010

Divine Beauty: Love Unto the End

Popule meus, quid feci tibi?
Aut in quo contristavi te? Responde mihi.
Quia eduxi te de terra Aegypti:
parasti Crucem Salvatori tuo.

My people, what have I done to thee?
Or wherein have I afflicted thee? Answer me.
Because I led thee out of the land of Egypt,
thou hast prepared a Cross for thy Saviour.



Crux fidelis, inter omnes
Arbor una nobilis:
Nulla silva talem profert,
Fronde, flore, germine.
Dulce lignum, dulce clavo,
Dulce pondus sustinens.

Faithful Cross! above all other,
one and only noble Tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
none in fruit thy peers may be;
sweetest wood and sweetest iron!
Sweetest Weight is hung on thee!

Thursday 1 April 2010

The New York Slimes, the Church, and Children

Even as we Christians celebrate the great mysteries of our redemption, I am compelled to state the following: The New York Times has gone completely off on a limb accusing Pope Benedict of being complicit in shielding a particularly gruesomly perverted US priest from justice.

The priest in question abused around 200 deaf boys in his care in the 1950's-1960's. These really are sickening and heartbreaking stories. But the Pope has nothing to do with them. First of all, they were investigated by local police at the time who did not find grounds for prosecuting; however, the priest was removed from his position and only occasionally functioned as priest thereafter.

Second, it took 20 years for the local Bishop to make the Vatican aware of his crimes, and a Church trial was in fact begun against him by the Vatican office headed by then-Cardinal Ratzinger. Only when it was clear that the priest lay dying did Ratzinger's deputy decide that it would be impossible to go ahead with the trial, and instead he was completely removed from active ministry; he died a few weeks later.

All this is perfectly clear from the NYT's own documentation, which is available on their website. It provides no support for their assertions about the Pope. This is not journalism. This is harrassment.

And as pointed out by Rorate Caeli, who the Hell do the NYT think they are to all of a sudden set themselves up as some kind of children's rights campaigners? As this article documents, they have for decades campaigned for the legal right for parents to destroy their children before they have even seen the light of day, and they have even defended the most gruesome and detestable form of abortion, that which is commonly termed 'partial-birth abortion', which even some usually pro-abortion Democrats in the US Senate a few years ago found so "close to infanticide" that they felt compelled to abolish it, Roe or no Roe. (see e.g. this book, p. 43 ff.)

Partial-birth abortion is a form of abortion where the infant is literally partially born before it is aborted, i.e. killed. The cervix of the mother is dilated, and the baby is pulled out into the birth canal until its legs are outside the mother but its head is still inside. Then the baby's skull is pierced and its brains sucked out. Before its abolition in 2003, this procedure was often performed even on perfectly healthy infants of 20 weeks gestational age and above.

And people who defend such barbaric and inhuman procedures have the gall to claim the moral high ground over the Catholic Church???

Monday 29 March 2010

The Cure for Pain and Death

The erudite Anglican priest Fr. Hunwicke* today has a post pertinent to this blog, due to its connection with the Scripture verse from which the title of the blog is taken:

"Ancient Jewish tradition held that the tree of life standing in the midst of the garden of Eden was an Olive, from which came the oil of mercy that cured both pain and death. That is why patristic sources insistently associate the Chrism [oil for anointing] of Confirmation with immortality and resurrection.

There is evidence that for the 'hippolytan' writings, the tree from which this oil flows is the tree of the Cross. It seems to me that here the images of scripture and tradition merge and mingle. The Cross, the New Tree in the New Garden, is the true tree of life, and the Anointing (Chrisma) which makes and marks us as Christians unto everlasting life flows from that tree. And it is the tree of which Venantius Fortunatus in his Pange lingua teaches us that it is itself soaked, anointed, through and through, with the blood of the lamb (...quem sacer cruor perunxit fusus agni corpore) [hymn for the Adoration of the Cross, Good Friday].

A pre-Christian Jewish writing pictures Adam begging to be given of the oil that flows from the tree in garden. He is given for anwer: 'It shall not be thine now, but at the end of the times. Then shall all flesh be raised up and God will give them of the tree of life'. Praise be to God, who, here in the end-time, gives us to be marked with the anointing of eternity."

(*Caveat for observant Catholics: Fr. Hunwicke is one of the few Anglican priests I have no problem calling "Father", since he is in fact an impeccably orthodox Catholic Christian who just happens to labour under the factual error that the Anglican Church is a schismatical church rather than a heretical sect and has valid Holy Orders.)

Thursday 11 March 2010

State Morality and the Myth of Moral Relativism

From time to time I slip into 'blog apathy' and simply can't bring myself to write posts, which is why I haven't posted since November. Things have also been rather hectic in my life recently (nothing sinister, merely purely professional challenges that I am quite happy to tackle). But the world is moving fast and lots of things are going on. No time to comment on them all, but an issue that has been addressed more and more frequently in the British Catholic blogosphere is the government's bill to teach sex education to children as young as five - including information on contraception from eight years of age and on abortion from 11 years. Initially these provisions were made mandatory also for 'faith schools' - such as Catholic schools which absolutely could not in good conscience teach a curriculum that said contraception and especially abortion were perfectly legitimate options. After much consternation, including a sharp comment from Pope Benedict, an amendment was introduced that opened up for such schools to be able to present the views of the denominations they are affiliated with - but they would still be required to present opposing views in addition to their own, including providing information to little girls about how they can have sex without getting pregnant and how they can have their babies killed if it happens anyway!!

Though the government will deny it, what it is doing is passing moral judgments in the manner of religious authorities. It is not possible to divorce sex & relationship education from morality: no matter whether you teach that abortion is acceptable or unacceptable, you are expounding a particular morality. Even if you desire to remain 'neutral' by presenting both sides of the argument and leave it to the pupils to decide you are still sending the message that both are legitimate options in their own right. This shows the flaw of Moral Relativism - though it purports to be 'neutral' and 'balanced', by arguing for the moral equivalence of multiple paths of moral reasoning, it is itself passing a moral judgment that it is perfectly legitimate for a person to abitrarily select one such path or the other. As such the very concept of Moral Relativism is self-contradictory, because it itself presupposes the existence of the very Absolutist principles it claims do not exist (it is readily demonstrable that the statement "Everything is relative" is self-contradictory because it is Absolutist - as long as one believes in logic).

(Interestingly, secular schools are not required - or even allowed - to present more than one side of the arguments on S&R issues. This does not seem particularly 'pluralist'. Indeed, most contemporary Western governments do not even base their policies upon moral relativist reasoning intended to represent a genuine plurality of viewpoints, but rather increasingly upon an agressive 'secularism' which embodies a distinctive morality of its own that a priori excludes the legitimacy of other viewpoints. Thus the 'secular' view that contraception and abortion are legitimate options is made the norm, and the 'religious' view that they are not is merely tolerated, and then only to a certain degree. This 'secularism' is thus an ideology in itself that seeks to exclude and destroy opposing ideologies and as such it is irrational to tout it as a common platform for all of society.)