Beauty and Abortion

Aggie Catholic on Beauty and Abortion

Great post

Exciting Announcements!

Courtesy of Drudge, we now know that Pope Benedict XVI is coming to the US! He will be visiting the UN in New York and speaking there. The dates are still not set but be watching for it. The story is here. New York would make a great Parousian field trip, eh?

However, we have another story to celebrate! Today I received verification that the Parousians have become an official organization at LSU! woohoo! This means we'll get to do lots of cool stuff and receive money from SG (perhaps for a field trip to New York lol). This is pretty good news and has been a while in the making so thanks to everyone who made it happen.

Emily Byers on Pro-Life & Pro-Woman

Pro Life & Pro-Woman

How to defend the faith

How to Defend the Catholic Faith

Really good post by Katerina over at Evangelical Catholicism. The big thing I got from this is not letting the easy attacks provoke but be indifferent. I have too much of what like to call the "St. Michael tendency" which is when someone says something stupid, I want to personally cast them into hell by ripping them apart. But that's not "saintly" at all; love instead is the answer.

Virginia Tech

Fr. Schall on the Virginia Tech Killings

This is a very thoughtful meditation on the impacts of killings at Virginia Tech & all deaths of young people on our faith.

Vatican Releases Document on Limbo

H/t American Papist

Vatican report on limbo comes out

Another Great Showing By the Parousians

Our own Angela Miceli was invited to participate in a panel tonight entitled "Women in Religion." In short, she was supposed to discuss how it is to be a Roman Catholic woman. Other panelists included a Sunni Muslim, an Atheist, and a Wiccan/Buddhist/Unitarian (and no, that's not a joke. She's a Wiccan who loves Buddhist dancing and incorporates it into her spirituality which she uses as a professional youth minister in the Unitarian Church).

This event was sponsored by W.O.W., Women Organizing Women, a very feminist group. As a result, we knew Angela would face some opposition at the panel so we endeavored to try to get as many Catholics to come and support her. We've had success with this already this year, successfully matching VOX (the campus chapter of Planned Parenthood which is incidentally run by the same person) person for person. e

Not only did we duplicate that result, we exceeded it. The room count was, including the Atheist and Unitarian, 11 people against Catholicism. This did include 2 Protestants, so WOW only got about 9 of their people there. We had 15. So that's 6 more people then WOW could get and 4 more people overall in the room. That's assuming some of the people I didn't know were in fact not Catholic.

So the panel started and Angela did not fail to impress the now home crowd. She was obviously the best prepared and most consistent speaker there. A few Parousians asked really intelligent questions to the panel. To be frank, the panel doesn't flow without us there.

This is exactly what we want to do by engaging the community. We helped make the dialogue richer by adding to it the truth of the Catholic faith. We hope to be able to put on some panels of our own next year.

Once again, I was very impressed with the LSU Parousians. Thanks to everyone who managed to come out. Thanks to Mary-Grace & Emily specifically for helping to tell us about the event and inviting people to make sure that we had the turnout we did. And special thanks to Angela and everyone who helped her this week for putting on an incredible defense of the faith.

Emily Byers Analyzes Supreme Court Decision Upholding Partial Birth Abortion Ban

Ban may lead to abortion law change

Empowerment and Liberation

Part two of Melinda Selmys's article from National Catholic Register on feminism, titled: Faith & Feminism, Part 2: Liberation and Empowerment. She discusses the feminist goals of achieving "empowerment" and "liberation" for women and how the Church offers true empowerment and liberation that isn't vague and doesn't depend on external circumstances.

Thanksgiving!

Supreme Court UPHOLDS the BAN on Partial Birth Abortion

#15 Screwtape Letters: the Present

Screwtape brings back the subject of the war. There is a lull in the war and Wormwood wants to know how to take advantage of this, whether to pursue “tortured fear” or “stupid confidence?” For Screwtape this brings up the question of time. He explains,

“The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the present is the point at time at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them…either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.”

So Screwtape’s advice is to get the patient off from the Present. The past is a possibility but limited because the past itself is limited. So the future holds the most promise. It is, “the least like eternity” because it most invites us to think entirely imaginary. Sin itself is a type of looking to the future as we are concerned with the future pleasures when we commit to sin. As Screwtape says,

“Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and amibition look ahead…When the present pleasure arrives, the sin is already over.”

Now, Screwtape is not looking forward to encourage all types of thinking about the future. Planning for the future is good. What Screwtape wants is agonizing & focusing on the future even after the planning so that the patient will be

“haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell on earth…We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of a rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”

Thus Screwtape succeeds twofold when we look too much towards the future. 1) We miss out on the graces that are being offered right now to us which prevents us from growing closer to God. 2) We become obsessed with a unreal world and the pleasures of it which makes us more likely to sin as sin is based on the hope of future pleasures.

I want to conclude using the lyrics of a Garth Brooks song:

If tomorrow never comes
Will she know how much I loved her
Did I try in every way to show her every day
That shes my only one
And if my time on earth were through
And she must face the world without me
Is the love I gave her in the past
Gonna be enough to last.

Tomorrow might not come. We can do our greatest good now; let us not keep putting things off. We have the opportunity to tell our loved ones we love them today; we have the opportunity to love people today; we have the opportunity to love and serve God today. If tomorrow never comes we shouldn’t have to wish that it had.

Next Letter: the Liturgy

Sacred Art

Why We Need Sacred Art

We've talked a lot of about the transcendental of beauty this semester so I figured this article which talks about why Protestants largely reject the use of this transcendental would interest many of you.

Screwtape Letter #14-Humility

The patient, having recovered from the his lapse, is now more mature in the faith. No longer is he making “lavish promises of perpetual virtue” but now “only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation!” The patient then has now become humble and as Screwtape says, “This is very bad.”

Bad, but not hopeless for the demons. Humility is a difficult virtue to practice and Wormwood has a chance to ensnare him in it. Screwtape first proposes trying to get him to be prideful.

“Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride - pride at his own humility - will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt - and so on.”

This is something discussed by Christ in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee prays to God thanking Him for making him better than everyone else and more virtuous. Perhaps the best way to avoid this is not to declare that we’re not humble but simply to remind ourselves that we can be more humble and have failed to be humble in the past.

So then what is this humility that we are striving for? Screwtape says of the virtue that “By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy wants to turn the man’s attention away from self to Him, and to the man’s neighbours.” The easy way for Screwtape to counteract humility then is to pervert it so that the attention is refocused on the self.

“Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion…of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools…. their minds (are) endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.”

What Screwtape is saying is that if humility is about not taking joy in our gifts, then the focus is still on ourselves and not on God. It is also focusing on falsehood which is contrary to the truth that is Christ. Instead a realistic and accurate portrayal of our abilities is necessary.

Screwtape goes on to discuss how true humility is practiced. What it means is to be indifferent to the fact that we have the gifts. That is, if we’re arguing with the people in free speech alley, it doesn’t matter who delivers the logical blow that topples their house of cards. It matters that the blow is delivered and we should rejoice in the accomplishment in argumentation. Humility then is an indifference to the self which allows us to more fully love others and most importantly love God. The paradox is, as Screwtape points out, that “when they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors.”

Feminism

Women's Rights & Wrongs

Tonight the LSU bunch is going to have a presentation on Edith Stein's Feminism & then on Thursday many of us will be going to a panel discussion on Women in Religion hosted by the campus chapter of W.O.W. This article gives a good brief outline of feminism so I thought it would be helpful to us tonight & the rest of the week.

Latest Emily Byers Column

Workaholism presents violent problem

A Post on my Blog about a Feminist Church

Something from that my blog that was I was asked to also post here: Really Glad I'm Catholic

This is, as I say there, courtesy of Mark Shea and Fr. Bryce Sibley.

Order Through Prayer

Good Friday is the day in which the greatest disorder happened: man killed his creator. The greatest evil happened yet it was met with prayer and the even greater love. Joey Reed submitted this reflection on order and prayer a while ago, and I thought it was good enough to save for Holy Week. So enjoy:

In teaching my students about what it means to be an image of God, a much clearer view of human nature has emerged within my own spiritual vision.

What is natural to man? Is indulgence in worldly affairs natural? Is revelry in sexual adventure that which completes man? To know what is natural to man, one must first know man’s nature.

To say that something is natural, one is claiming that that which is deemed natural is in accordance with the nature of the thing being observed. For example, is it natural for a fish to swim? Of course it is. By observing the nature of the fish, the conclusion is easily reached that swimming is natural to the fish, for that is part of its nature. A fish that doesn’t swim quickly dies. A bird that doesn’t fly falls to its death. A man that doesn’t pray is crushed under the weight of the world, for he is not made for the world in both his and its present state.

This begs the question: What is man’s nature? The answer is both simple and profound -- man is an image of God. The image must tell us something of that which it reflects, and if the image is a reflection of eternity, then to reflect eternity for all eternity is what is natural to it. This is confirmed by St. Gregory of Nyssa in his Catechetical Orations in which he writes:

“If humanity is called to life in order to share in the divine nature, it must have been suitably constituted for the purpose…That is why humanity was given life, intelligence, wisdom, and all the qualities worthy of the godhead, so that each one of them should cause it to desire the godhead, so that each one of them should cause it to desire what is akin to it. And since eternity is inherent in the godhead, it was absolutely imperative that our nature should not lack it but should have in itself the principle of immortality. By virtue of this inborn faculty it could always be drawn towards what is superior to it and retain the desire for eternity.”

God is all good, and order is good. Therefore, God is Order itself. We see a reflection of the face of God in His creation. The Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement in his book “The Roots of Christian Mysticism” writes: “Each being manifests the creative word which gives it its identity and attracts it. Each being manifests a dynamic idea, something willed by God. Ultimately each thing is a created name of him who cannot be named.” There is order in creation, for its Creator is order itself. Order begets order. Man is an image of God, therefore he is made in the image of Order. Order is part of man’s nature as an image of God, therefore disorder is unnatural to man.

In God, all of His attributes are one. Because he is eternal and infinite, He cannot be made of parts, nor does He possess parts. He is one is His essence. This has infinite implications, a few being that His order is His love, His love is His justice, His justice is His love, His love is His order, etc. God is all these good things, and man being an image of God finds in them his natural habitat. It is natural for man to have order both in the world and in his mind, will, and body. It is natural for man to love, to seek justice, etc. It is unnatural for man to do anything else. Yet more often than not, we do that which is unnatural to us and claim that it is simply human nature. This couldn’t be farther from the truth! To do anything but love, seek justice, obey God, etc. is to introduce disorder into our minds, wills, and bodies. Disorder in the human soul is manifested in many and various ways, all of which are hideous to the ordered soul.

Who is the man that embraces disorder? He is the one that is confused, addicted, angry, materialistic, yet all the while convincing himself that he has found happiness and contentment. Of course, the conclusions of a disordered mind will almost always be disordered.

How must a disordered system be overcome? By introducing order into the system. When it comes to the human soul made in the image and likeness of Order, Order must be brought into the disordered soul. By an opening up of the soul to the influence of Order through the indwelling of Order can the human soul begin to banish from it the darkness of disorder. This opening up of the soul is called prayer, which is as natural to man as barking is to a dog, as flying is to a bird, as swimming is to a fish. Yet we are like dogs that do not know how to bark and fish that cannot swim. We are dominated by the world which was created to be dominated by us. How absolutely unnatural!

Prayer is our best bet for happiness as happiness can only be found in order. In fact, order is happiness. The purpose of prayer is to turn outside of ourselves, to empty the image in order to be filled with the reality. It is our nature to empty ourselves to both God and neighbor, that in emptying ourselves we may be filled. Fulfillment in emptiness! Yet another of those wonderful Christian paradoxes.

How can we know that our calling is to turn and open to others? If we were created to turn in on ourselves, then our eyes would be facing the opposite direction. We would be created to look inward. But according to nature that is not so. We look outward. It is in looking outward that we can empty ourselves just as the greatest Man, the God-man, did: “Who though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped; Rather, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave…”

Through prayer, we look outward to the Source of all order and happiness. Through prayer, we empty ourselves of our worldly accretions, placing ourselves under the direct influence of a Perfect Order. As Order begins to reign in our souls, so, too, does love, truth, joy, peace, and all other attributes of God.

We pray in order that the unnatural be overcome by the natural, that darkness might become light, and that disorder be crushed under the liberating weight of Order.

Prayer Request

I saw this on Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam and figured I should pass it on: Priest on Trial.

Keep him in your prayers you all go through the Easter celebrations.

Screwtape #13: The Role of Pleasure

Thirteen is an unlucky number and this holds true for Wormwood. The patient who had been falling away from the faith has now recommitted and Screwtape is threatening Wormwood with great torments because of it.

How did this happen? Wormwood got lazy and let the patient read a book and take a walk. Nothing dramatic it would seem but as Screwtape says this is a very real deterent from hell.

“In other words you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant as not to see the danger of this? The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method…you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem. But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet?

In other words, those under the devil are under a disguise and falsehood. Similar to the Matrix or the cave, they will persist in their ways until shown another way. Real pleasure is that the other way, the red pill or the sun. These real pleasures strike down the façade and invite the patient to connect with reality. Reality, of course, is God. This might be a helpful tool in evangelizing. We might be well advised to help people who have fallen away from the Church connect with the real first. Show them a good movie, a pretty painting, or take a walk with them. As all pleasures are from God and God is in all things any genuine pleasure will do (note that genuine does mean in the bounds of morality). Of course, this means that C.S. Lewis is ascribing to the Ignatian ideal of God in all things. That is, Lewis is a closet Jesuit 

Screwtape goes on to explain that pleasure succeeded in this way b/c created us to be in accordance with our natures (it seems Lewis is a closet Thomist as well). This creates a paradox between detaching from ourselves for His sake. He says,

“Hence, while He is delighted to see them sacrificing even their innocent Wills to His, He hates to them drifting away from their own nature for any other reason. And we should always encourage them to do so. The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting point, with which the Enemy has furnished a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the world, or convention, or fashion, for a human’s own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin.”

What Screwtape is trying to convince Wormwood to do is to cause in the patient an error similar to that committed by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins, on becoming a Jesuit priest, tried to give up his poetry and writing for the sake of his order because he considered it beneath the dignity of the order. However, he soon returned to writing and because of that decision we have many inspiring poems that have helped people in the faith. If we do something well and enjoy it then we ought to pursue it. Whether it’s being among people, football, sports, music, dancing, or writing as it is in Hopkins’s case, we are given these gifts and desires in order to experience real pleasure in accordance with our nature and in order to taste of the cup from which we shall have our full of in eternal life.

Palm Sunday

Today is Palm Sunday. A day in which we begin Holy Week in preparation for the end of Lent, the meal of Holy Thursday, the great trials of Good Friday, and the tremendous joy of Easter.

That doesn't matter right now though. For this Palm Sunday is also April's Fools Day. So what would happen to the Parousians in a crazy world. A world in which up is down and down is up. I wonder...