The most disturbing prospect...

Brought to my attention by Professor Beckwith over at The Catholic Thing:

"So, here is the future: if the state can declare the Johns unfit to be foster parents, and thus deny them foster children, because they may teach these children the Christian understanding of human sexuality, then the state, armed with Judge Walker’s premises, can declare any married couple unfit to be parents, and thus remove their natural children from their home, because these parents, in fact, teach their children the same lesson the Johns were forbidden from teaching. For it is a lesson that is irrational and harms others, and thus to impart it to one’s children is a form of child abuse."

The possibility of a future in which my family might be desecrated by the abduction of my own children may be the single most infuriating result of this controversy yet. 

Some thoughts on the necessity of genuine theological education...

As it happens I've recently started Blessed John Henry Newman's Idea of a University for my personal reading, both to celebrate his recent beatification and to consider such a brilliant, Catholic mind's meditations on the subject of university education, theology, and the relation between the two (the subject being peculiarly pertinent to me, obviously).  So imagine my delight at discovering this passage not forty pages into the work:

"I cannot so construct my definition of the subject-matter of University Knowledge, and so draw my boundary lines around it, as to include therein the other sciences commonly studied at Universities, and to exclude the science of Religion. For instance, are we to limit our idea of University Knowledge by the evidence of our senses? then we exclude ethics; by intuition? we exclude history; by testimony? we exclude metaphysics; by abstract reasoning? we exclude physics. Is not the being of a God reported to us by testimony, handed down by history, inferred by an inductive process, brought home to us by metaphysical necessity, urged on us by the suggestions of our conscience? It is a truth in the natural order, as well as in the supernatural. So much for its origin; and, when obtained, what is it worth? Is it a great truth or a small one? Is it a comprehensive truth? Say that no other religious idea whatever were given but it, and you have enough to fill the mind; you have at once a whole dogmatic system. The word "God" is a Theology in itself, indivisibly one, inexhaustibly various, from the vastness and the simplicity of its meaning. Admit a God, and you introduce among the subjects of your knowledge, a fact encompassing, closing in upon, absorbing, every other fact conceivable. How can we investigate any part of any order of Knowledge, and stop short of that which enters into every order? All true principles run over with it, all phenomena converge to it; it is truly the First and the Last. In word indeed, and in idea, it is easy enough to divide Knowledge into human and divine, secular and religious, and to lay down that we will address ourselves to the one without interfering with the other; but it is impossible in fact. Granting that divine truth differs in kind from human, so do human truths differ in kind one from another. If the knowledge of the Creator is in a different order from knowledge of the creature, so, in like manner, metaphysical science is in a different order from physical, physics from history, history from ethics. You will soon break up into fragments the whole circle of secular knowledge, if you begin the mutilation with divine."

Thomas Storck of the Distributist Review...

...posts a spectacular column on how the left/right spectrum locks Catholics into operating under a philosophical framework alien to that of the Church.

But what does one do with something like the prolife movement? Is it of the Right or the Left? Since it defends the most elemental rights of a defenseless part of the population, the unborn, a grave issue of social justice, one would think that it was a cause 6f the Left. But it is linked in the perceptions of many with the Right because it opposes something considered necessary for sexual freedom by those on the libertine Left. So it looks for allies and spokesmen among those on the Right and unwittingly becomes even more linked with the entire right-wing program. But the prolife movement cannot really be classed on the American/Lockean spectrum, because it is not Lockean. It is not really interested in obtaining material benefits for anyone, as if it supported the right to life only of those who would grow up to be successful. Its concerns arise from an elemental recognition of injustice.

Mark Shea on servile versus pious fear

Mark Shea writes an impressive piece on the right and wrong sorts of fear to keep around.

Saint Ignatius of Antioch on heretics:

From his Epistle to the Smyrnaeans:

"I guard you beforehand from those beasts in the shape of men, whom you must not only not receive, but, if it be possible, not even meet with; only you must pray to God for them, if by any means they may be brought to repentance, which, however, will be very difficult. Yet Jesus Christ, who is our true life, has the power of [effecting] this."

Portentuous news from Germany

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, (now once again a predominantly Catholic nation, albeit by the relatively slim margin of 0.5 million adherents, as I recently learned) has stated in no uncertain terms that multiculturalism has failed in Germany:

"'We feel tied to Christian values. Those who don't accept them don't have a place here,' said the chancellor." 

Month of the Rosary

Following the Crescat and Ink in commemoration of the Month of the Rosary, allow me to share with you one of my two Rosaries, made for me by a fellow Catholic of the finest example: