Does Anybody Really Know What Day It Is?

Today, September 8, is the date on which the Roman Catholic Church has, since approximately the Sixth Century, (in other words, for no more than about 1500 years) celebrated the birth of Our Lady, the Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary.  While it is far from the most solemn Marian feast day on the Church calendar, it's still a big one, because it's her birthday (or at least, the day we've chosen to celebrate it, because we don't really know exactly what day she was born.)  We love and honor Mary because Jesus gave her to us as our spiritual Mother as he hung in agony on the Cross, and because ever since that dark day her sole occupation has been to lead each and every one of us closer to her divine Son, all glory and honor to him forever and ever, Amen!  This, not to mention that as any good Catholic knows, we are pretty sure Jesus loves his Mother a lot, and that it makes him happy when we love her, too. 

Now, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has a nice email service that sends out the Scripture readings for each day's celebration of the Mass, very early in the morning.  They also have a general communications email service.  Anyone can subscribe to both of them at no cost by going to the USCCB website. I get the daily Mass readings and also subscribe to the general email blasts because every now and then they actually send out something really interesting or helpful.  So on the day the Church celebrates the birthday of Mary, our Blessed Mother, does the USCCB mention this, and perhaps suggest ways in which we might honor her in prayer, and ask her to intercede with her Son for us, and for others in need?  No.  In fact, there is no mention whatsoever of today's feast.

Instead, we get this:

"In light of recent incidents of violence and racial tension in communities across the United States, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has invited faith communities across the country to unite in a Day of Prayer for Peace in Our Communities on September 9th.

To assist in observance of this occasion, USCCB is offering a Prayer for Peace in Our Communities prayer card."

How nice.  But not one word about the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.  That was the best that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops could do today?

Now, don't get me wrong...I'm as big a booster as you'll find anywhere of prayer as our number one tool against everything bad in the world and in support of everything good, in this world and the next.  All prayer is good, and when groups of people get together to pray for the same things, it's even better.  It's especially handy for the salvation of souls through the redeeming grace of our Lord.  (You know, that's sort of why we think it's important to go to Mass at least once a week!)


But to the USCCB communications team I have to say: You, of all people, should be aware that in the entire liturgical year, the Church only celebrates the nativity of three people--Jesus, Mary, and St. John the Baptist.  Every other saint is honored either on the date of their death (i.e., their birth into eternal life), or some other important date, such as being ordained a bishop or being elected Pope. That would tend to suggest that, well, maybe the Church thinks those three people are kind of important, you know?  Nevertheless, your email blast completely ignored today's celebration of Mary's nativity. 

This is just poor judgment, at best.  The bishops are supposed to be the shepherds of the CATHOLIC Church in the USA, the Church that still gives the Virgin Mary the honor she deserves, when very nearly all others who profess the name of Christ have thrown her overboard except for a couple of weeks around Christmas each year.  But instead of making even the merest mention of today's celebration, a very Catholic day, the USCCB PR machine sends out a release that could have come from any Protestant.

Now, here's the other kicker, another complete swing and miss that really makes me wonder if anyone at the USCCB communications office ever looks at a Church calendar.  Did you perhaps wonder why the bishops chose tomorrow, September 9, as the day to call "faith communities" to prayer to end racial tension?  I have an idea: September 9 is the feast day of another Catholic Saint, St. Peter Claver.  Ever hear of him?  He was a 16th Century Spanish Jesuit priest, whose missionary work in South America was primarily dedicated to the corporal and spiritual needs of the thousands of Africans who were transported into Cartagena, Colombia to feed the slave trade in the New World.  He is now revered as the patron saint of slaves and African-Americans, so his feast day is a perfect time for this prayer effort. But the email communique' from the USCCB managed to miss that, too! Not a word about St. Peter Claver! 

Next year, my suggestion for the USCCB is:  By all means, have another call to ecumenical prayer for the end of racial tension in the US on September 9, the feast day of St. Peter Claver.   But try to remember to mention him in your announcement, and send it out a few days in advance.  Then, on September 8 you can send out a reminder for all us to celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  See how easy that is?

Good thing the bishops have me around to straighten them out, right?  :)

Laudator Jesus Christus! 

Re-Posting: The Coming Tribulation?

This was originally posted in November, 2015.  Now seems like a good time to review these observations.  One introductory paragraph has been deleted since it no longer applies.  The rest is copied mostly verbatim.
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“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

Francis Cardinal George, former Archbishop of Chicago (d. 2015)

I continue to be intrigued by one thread that seems to be running through many of the blog posts and comments I've been seeing: the idea that the Church is facing a crisis unlike any other in its history, and that the resemblance of the present situation to apocalyptic prophecies in 20th Century private revelations, especially Our Lady's appearances at Fatima and Akita, is strong enough to warrant the most serious concern.  The End is near!  Fear, fire, foes! Awake! (Apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien.)

Well, OK then.  It does seem clear to many (most?) of an orthodox mindset that the Church is indeed in a state of crisis, and I have a hard time disagreeing with such an assessment. See my August 10 (2015) post, for example.  To run through another brief summary of the "bad stuff":  In recent times we have witnessed the violent slaughter of many thousands of Christians (mostly Catholics and Orthodox) in the very birthplace of the Faith, together with wanton destruction of their churches and holy treasures, by barbaric Jihadists bent on eradication of everything and everyone that is not Muslim; the near total collapse of European Christendom; a seeming rush of North and South America to follow suit via declining Mass attendance, millions of annual defections to "evangelical" or "none" status, the enshrinement in secular law of false marriages and the concomitant state and media persecution of Catholics and Catholic institutions who refuse to affirm them; and a papacy that praises material heretics (e.g. certain German Cardinals) while excoriating as "pharisees" those who stand for traditional doctrine and practice, and which sometimes seems more concerned with pleasing the international secular media than with the salvation of souls and the preservation of the deposit of faith.  To be fair, at other times we hear strikingly orthodox statements and exhortations of the type to which we have grown accustomed over the past several pontificates.  (Confused?  So am I.)

Even so, however, is it really as bad as some maintain?  Stated another way, whatever the magnitude of the crisis, is it in fact unprecedented?  Or is it just another day in the life of the Church that Our Lord promised would prevail to "the close of the age" (Cf. Mt 16:18, 28:20), despite being constantly under attack? (Cf. Mt 5:10-11; 10:16-23).

After all, the Arian heresy had most of the bishops in the world in its grasp at one point, and it took not one, but two ecumenical Councils (Nicea and Constantinople) to put it to rest.  (See here.)  In fact, legend has it that the Council of Nicea included the spectacle of Saint Nicholas (yes, that Saint Nicholas) punching out the heresiarch himself, in full view of the entire assembly.  Indeed, one could argue that at least a stepchild of Arianism survives to this day in certain quarters, where Modernists (see extensive discussion of Modernism here) insist upon a distinction between "the historical Jesus" and "the Christ of faith."  The former, these enlightened scholars solemnly inform us, was merely a man, albeit a wise man and great teacher, while the latter, the Son of God co-equal and consubstantial with the Father, is a mythical construct of a self-interested Church fearful of "reason and truth", which virtues the Modernist claims as exclusively his own. We beg to differ.

In any case, there were other serious heresies throughout the early Church, not to mention two major schisms, first the departure of the Eastern churches in the Eleventh Century A.D., followed by the Protestant revolt in the Sixteenth.  Finally, let's not forget how close Christendom came to being swallowed up by the Muslim hordes, not long after Luther and Calvin took their toys and went home.  The Battle of Lepanto, at which a massive Ottoman fleet bent on the sack of Vienna was defeated by a coalition put together by Pope St. Pius V, was a close-run thing, and many (including St. Pius V) believed the victory to have been secured only through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin. (See here.)  Now, those were crises!  Can today's situation match up, and more importantly, are we really on the verge of the Last Days?

In my view, the most likely answer to both queries is "no."  Nevertheless, it is not hard to understand why people are fretting.  I find myself doing it too, more often than I care to admit.  See that August 10, 2015 post again, for example.

Of course, I wasn't there for any of the events just listed, so I don't know what it was like for the lay faithful in those times.  But it seems pretty certain that most of them, given the absence of any sort of rapid communication over long distances and the general illiteracy of the vast majority of the population, didn't even know anything was wrong.  Taking the Arian case for example, if your average layman was told by his bishop that Jesus was not really a God-man, but a mere creature given great power by God the Father, he probably just shrugged or nodded and kept praying, and going to Mass on Sundays and Holy Days.  Ignorance was bliss, one might say with some degree of assurance.

For better or worse, we no longer have this luxury.  In our day and age, when even the most trivial matters can gain world-wide attention via social media in a matter of minutes or hours, we have immediate access at any given moment to more information than, until very recently, even the most industrious seeker of knowledge could have acquired in a lifetime.  We know of many things occurring in the Church at large and in the Holy See in particular that were never before open to all the world as they are now.  Frequently, the result is information overload, and unless we are very careful we can find ourselves, in the classic idiom, unable to see the forest for the trees.  In a more recent idiom, we suffer from "TMI", or "too much information."  In this light, it seems prudent to keep in mind the following:

First, we have the aforementioned guarantee of Jesus himself that his Church will survive until his return, and we should take some comfort in the fact that the Church has survived for nearly two millennia despite all the challenges She has faced.  This is not something to be taken lightly.  No human institution has ever lasted more than a few hundred years, and most didn't make it that long.  Only a Divine institution could still be around after this much time.  God is in charge; let him take care of it!

Second, recall the vast time scale of the Church and of Salvation History.  Even if we go back to the very dawn of humanity, we are only talking about a few thousand years.  This is nothing in the sight of God.  Man has a natural tendency to view all things through his own extremely limited lens, where around eighty years is an average lifetime and even a single hour, if spent with, say, an extremely boring speaker, can seem interminable.  When we add up all the bad news available to us now, we conclude rather easily that things could not possibly ever have been worse, so the end must be near.  But in the "big picture", we exist in a blink of God's eye.  Father John Zuhlsdorf, a/k/a Father Z, a prolific and excellent blogger of traditional bent, recently exhorted his readers:

I am trying to take the longer view.  I remind myself that each pontificate is a parenthesis in the long history of the Church and of our Salvation.  This parenthesis will close one day and another will open.

Wise advice from a wise and holy priest.

Third, recall and heed the advice Jesus gave the Apostles just before his Ascension:

So when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" He said to them, "It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority.  But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth." Acts 1:6-8 (Emphasis supplied.)

It is not for us to know when the Last Days will come.  In the meantime, we share in the Great Commission given by the Lord here and in Mt 28:18-20.  See next point.

Fourth, there are only a few things we lay members of the Church Militant can do, and we ought to be doing all of them anyway.  We can share the Gospel of Christ with the world.  We can obey the Commandments.  We can pray, a lot.  We can fast.  We can perform the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.  We can (must!) continue going to Mass on Sundays and Holy Days.  We can attend weekday Mass.  We can go to Confession regularly.  Cardinal Burke has encouraged us to stay faithful!  The great Twentieth Century Saint Pio (Padre Pio) frequently advised everyone to "Pray, hope and don't worry."

If we do all these things, we can rest assured of Christ's promise: the Church will prevail over the gates of Hell, and those who persevere will be saved.  In the end, it doesn't really matter when the Great Tribulation and the Second Coming will occur.  What I do know is that my Day of Judgment is coming, and even assuming I survive to a ripe old age, it's coming a lot faster than I like to think about.  The same applies to every one of us, regardless of age.

I conclude with another Scriptural quote, one of my favorites:

"Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me.  In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.  And you know the way where I am going." Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?"  Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.  If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; henceforth you know him and have seen him." Jn 14:1-7.

Laudator Jesus Christus!