Penitence: In Hoc Signo Vinces.

"Did you ever hear that to conquer your enemies,

you must repent first, get down on your knees,

and beg forgiveness?  Does West Point teach that?"

                                                                                -Bob Dylan

In my last post, I discussed Evangelization as our last, best move against the way our society (or lack thereof) is moving.  I mentioned that to accomplish this, we need to get with Christ, jack up the prayers and self-mortifications.  Re-reading it, I see now that I failed specifically to mention Sacramental Confession.  My bad.  It was so much on my mind that I assumed it must have spilled over onto the page somewhere.

It really falls under the "Get with Christ" heading.  When encountered, very often the first thing the Holy Spirit does is convict us of sin (Jn. 16: 8).  Note Peter's reaction when Our Lord shows him Whom he's dealing with in the miraculous catch:  "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!" (Lk. 5: 8)  When we get with Christ, we see His goodness, and quickly realize our own is nothing but a cheap ersatz imitation, probably made in China.

I also mentioned the meeting of the USCCB going on this week, and speculated what the impact of the elections might be.  Would the bishops busy themselves with day-to-day admin-as-usual, or would they wake up?

Well, now we have our answer.

Cardinal Dolan gets it.  He soooOOOooo gets it. It's time for a spiritual tack.  It's time to evangelize, and Evangelization Begins At Home.

I stand before you this morning to say simply: first things first. We gather as disciples of, as friends of, as believers in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, "the Way, the Truth and the Life," who exhorted us to "seek first the Kingdom of God."
We cannot engage culture unless we let Him first engage us; we cannot dialogue with others unless we first dialogue with Him; we cannot challenge unless we first let Him challenge us . . .

 With this as my presidential address, I know I risk the criticism. I can hear it now: "With all the controversies and urgent matters for the Church, Dolan spoke of conversion of heart through the Sacrament of Penance. Can you believe it?" 

To which I reply, "You'd better believe it!"

Read the whole thing here.  Also, Father Z. has the audio up, if you'd rather listen.

Friday abstinence all year round, like they did before the Council?  Oh, hell, yeah!  I hope they approve it.  Yes, I know, we've always been free to do it individually, but there's something more there when you're doing it in union with the whole Church in your country.  There are all kinds of things I like about this.

1. It identifies us as Catholic, at a time when Pope Benedict is moving us toward a renewal and reclamation of Catholic identity.  Ashes on the forehead every day would be impractical, and would eventually become showpieces for spiritual pride, like the extra-wide phylacteries of the Pharisees.
2. It's a sacrifice - a self-mortification (unless you're a vegan) at a time when we need more spiritual sacrifice.  "this kind cannot be driven out by anything except prayer and fasting" (Mk. 9: 29).
3. It reminds us of our brethren here and abroad who don't have enough to eat, or to eat well.  Look at the victims of Sandy, some of them learning the joys of living in Haiti (without the heat) in the discomfort of their own homes in New York.  May I remind you that the idea behind abstinence is to take the extra you would have spent on meat and give it to the poor?  Does your Religious Ed. program teach that?  Mine never did.

In the original, pre-Monty Python quest for the Holy Grail, no one shows more enthusiasm for the idea than Sir Gawain.  He's so eager, he can't even be bothered to accept the bishop's invitation to Confession before he sets off.  There's no time, and besides, he hasn't done anything that bad.  After all, he's one of Arthur's Knights!

So off he goes, unshriven, ready to set the world to rights.  In the course of the story, he gets lost, trapped, tricked, betrayed, dazed, and confused.  Not only does he not find the Grail (and barely even finds his way back to Camelot), but he misjudges every situation, misses or misinterprets every clue, and winds up inadvertently killing several of his own friends and allies.

The long and short, kids, is this:  We need to remove the beams from our own eyes before we can see to remove the speck from the world's eye . . . or even see the forest for the trees.  Get ye Shriven!

"But it's dark and cramped in there!  It looks like a coffin!"

It is a coffin!  That's where we bury the old man when we put off what's earthly in us! (Col. 3: 5-10)

"But why do I need to go to some man?  Can't I just pray to Jesus and be forgiven?"

Of course, you can pray to Him, and should!  There's just two little things:

1. The little matter of John 20: 22ff:  "Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are  forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.  Or, they can just pray to me, and I'll take care of it.  So there's really no point in my giving you this authority, I'm just saying. . ."
2. You are praying to Jesus when you go to Confession.  When Christ came to earth, He took on a human nature to get around and do His work in.  And He's still doing just that.  Only now, it's not His physical Body He's using; it's His Mystical Body - the Church.  It's Jesus Christ Himself Who hears your Confession, prescribes your penance, and absolves you.  The priest is just loaning himself to God for the purpose.

And He stays with you, by the way.  Once He's cleaned out all that sin to make a little room for Himself, He's the one who really does your good works.  And it's through you that He's going to spread his gospel to the world.  You're the weapon in this holy war, but Christ is the warrior. That's what Gawain forgot.  You can't find the Grail, but He can.  And he'll do it through you, if you'll let Him.

Get.  With.  Christ.

Evangelize. Now. Or Die.

And so, the verdict is in.  A majority of Americans, and a majority of Catholic Americans, has re-elected a regime that has mandated the faithful to fund infanticide, sacralized sodomy, and is poised to drive religion, not only from the public square, but from health care, education, and charity work as well.

Fedora-tip to Mark Shea for this image.

If you're within shouting distance of my generation, you may remember watching the Berlin Wall come down in 1989.  Like me, you may very well have rejoiced that the Cold War was finally over.

Bet you didn't realize we'd lost.  I know I didn't.

When President Obama said that America was no longer a Christian nation, we called it an outrageous lie.  In fact, the president was merely telling us, correctly, what time it was.

It is twilight - evening in America.

Welcome to the Great Rude Awakening.  We are no longer a center-right nation that values hard work and fair play.  We are now a center-left nation that values fair work and hard play.  Religion is the new porn, and vice versa.  Life begins when you're old enough to vote, and ends when you're voted off the island.  Individualism is selfishness, the Gospel is hate speech, and self-denial is genocide.

Welcome to the United Soviet States of America.

And it's all the will of the people.  Vox populi, vox diaboli.  The "silent majority" that gave Nixon his landslide forty years ago, that gave Reagan his mandate thirty years ago?  A lot of them are dead now, and their descendants do not share their fathers' values.  We are a minority.  Not even a minority.  We are a small fringe that makes up part of a minority, together with libertarians, hard-money activists, protectionists, Ayn Randians, military adventurers, and yes, sad to say, even a few white supremacists.  Even if we somehow take back the reins of power, what could we do?  Ban abortion and gay marriage, drive the social engineers out of our schools and replace them with effective teachers, re-establish blue laws to encourage church attendance?  How?  How do you enforce a law, however just, that most of society doesn't want and will not back up?  Look at Prohibition.  There's no way to enact such laws without becoming the dictatorial police state we most fear.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops must be in a similar quandary.  The conference goes into its Fall General Assembly next week knowing that more than half its flock are giving it the finger and are de facto apostates and/or schismatics who will drop the name of Catholic the minute it works to their disadvantage.  It would seem that the bishops must either put in their teeth and start laying down the law, or resign themselves to being not so much a prophetic voice in the wilderness as a tree falling in the forest that no one hears.

Locutus, president of catholicsforchoice.borg

So what to do?  Politically, we're beaten; it's hopeless.  I'm not saying we shouldn't still vote.  I'm not saying we should turn our backs on society, retreat to our Catholic ghettos of old, and wait for the Huns to arrive and start Middle Ages II.  For one thing, the Visigoths and Vandals are already here.  They're us.  Without the sanctifying grace of Christ and His Church, we're devolving back into the barbarian hordes our ancestors were.

What I am saying is that we can't count on mere politics to save us anymore.  At best, a Romney administration would have only been a stop-gap, while we worked on building permanent solutions.  Like Original Sin or falling down a well, we got ourselves into this mess, but that doesn't mean we can get ourselves out.

If we want to save our country, our society, our civilization, there's only one move left open to us:

Do I mean preaching on street corners?  Only if you're good at it.  The world has heard all the sermons.  It's heard all the apologetics.  It's ready to deny and ignore them all.  But one thing it can't ignore is personal holiness.  For most of us, it means random acts of kindness.  The corporal and spiritual works of mercy.  Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven" (Mt. 5: 16).  We must be prepared to jack up our prayer life, and to make spiritual sacrifices and self-mortifications, for "this kind cannot be driven out by anything except prayer and fasting" (Mk. 9: 29).  We need to live close to the sacraments, so that they'll see we've been with Jesus.

That above all.  Get.  With.  Christ.  Read his love letters in the Scriptures.  Visit Him in Eucharistic Adoration.  If your parish doesn't have a Perpetual Adoration chapel, adore Him in the tabernacle.  If you can see Him through the accidents of bread and wine, a couple of metal doors should be no problem.

Get with His Mother, too.  She was the first evangelist, as Mother Theresa tells us, because the first thing she did after she received Christ was to bring him to St. Elizabeth in the Visitation.  The Rosary is Our Lady's lasso.  It has roped more souls into heaven than even the angels could count.

Bishop Sheen (forty years ago, no less!) predicted that the postmodern Church was like Gideon's army in Judges 7.  Christ is thinning his ranks, telling the cowards and the comfortable to go home.  We may be few, but He is with us:  "The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still" (Ex. 14: 14).

And for God's sake, be joyful!  Don't get into arguments.  Don't get mad at your enemies.  Pity them.  Say, like Shelley's Prometheus, "I weigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer, being evil."  Consider that, as John Paul II said, hell begins here.  If you've been far enough down the path of mortal sin, as I have, you've felt it.  You know how awful it is.  Imagine what some of these folks who hate us are going through.  Show some compassion, and remember, we're here to help.

We've got to change the culture.  That's the real transformation America needs.  If we can do that, the laws, economics, and politics will take care of themselves.

The Bibles of Babel: 4 Guidelines For a New, Improved, American Bible

If you're one of the many who still think Catholics aren't Bible-Christians, you probably don't read Catholic blogs (except mine, of course, or you wouldn't be here.  Thank you - I'm honored.)  The Catholic blogosphere is loaded with converts from Fundamentalist and Evangelical faiths who've learned the opposite is true.  The Ordinary Form of the Latin Rite employs more Scripture, and a broader range of readings, than you'll find in any other denomination.

There's just one problem:  the versions of Scripture we use are all over the place.  Different prayer groups, Scripture classes, and books on Scripture use different translations, made on different principles:  We have the New American Bible (NAB), the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (RSV-CE, 1st & 2nd editions), the New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, the Jerusalem Bible, the New English Bible, the Good News Bible, and so on.  Worse still, the version we use in the liturgy is . . .None of the above!  Will the real Word of God please stand up?

In an attempt to remedy this, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has ordered a new edition that they hope will be suitable for all and sundry.  I applaud the idea wholeheartedly, but I worry about the results.  The NAB is one of the worst, most useless translations of Scripture I know of.  One wants to ask its editors and translators just what the Bible did to them to make them hate it so.

Micah Murphy wrote a short but interesting blog on this.  Visit ye him, and take his poll.  I did, and when I was done commenting, I realized I had enough material for a post of my own.  "Blogger," said I, "blog thyself!"

So without further ado, here are four suggestions (since of course, the bishops hang on my every word, as well they should) for putting together a universal Catholic Bible in English.

1.  Vet Everyone Involved

I know, I know, background checks and loyalty oaths smack of totalitarianism.  Of course, the people you're looking to weed out already think the Church is a brutal dictatorship (except that you're not free to leave most brutal dictatorships any time you like).  I don't know how much may have changed in recent years, but back, say, in the '90s, a vast majority of Scripture scholars were de facto dissenters.  The notes and commentaries in most Bibles issued since the Council suffer from a bad case of Modernism.

Our first guideline, then, ought to be:  Don't let heterodox scholars anywhere near this project.  Everyone involved should be thoroughly grounded in, and consider himself bound to, the principles laid down in Dei Verbum and Divino Afflante Spiritu.  A working knowlegde of Pope Benedict's biblical theology wouldn't hurt, either.  Here's a simple test:  Get everybody together, then pass around a copy of the Catechism, blessed by a priest.  Make sure everyone touches it.  If any of the committee members burst into flames, crumble to dust, or exhibit signs of demonic possession as laid out in the Rituale Romanum, that's a good indicator you don't want them on your team. 


If the Bishops ask nicely, perhaps they could persuade Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch to let them peek at their notes for the new Ignatius Study Bible.  Once we have commentary that thinks with the Church, we can relax a little on some of the finer points of translation.  


Which leads me to:

2. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  

When we consider pastoral needs, we too often play to the lowest common denominator.  Note the arguments against the new translation of the Sacramentary, that Joe Pewsitter can't understand words like, "consubstantial."  This attitude, along with a little ivory tower arrogance, has led recent translations to abandon the traditional phrasing of well-known passages, either to simplify or clarify points which often aren't all that important.  Most parishioners hate change.  Ask any pastor:  Announce something different - however well-intended or necessary - and you'll smell the tar and feathers simmering away.  

Actually, all he said was, you can't self-intinct.

When my wife and I married, we pulled out a 1962 Missal and chose the prayers (in English) used in the Extraordinary Form (though neither the wedding nor the accompanying Mass were Extraordinary Form).  I said, "With this ring, I thee wed, and I plight unto thee my troth."  Why?  Because those are the words my father said in 1967, and his father said in 1936, and so on, back through history.  Doing something like that, realizing that, reminds you of the fact that there are no empty seats at Mass.  Any Mass.  Ever.  The saints, the angels, and our loved ones gone before are all there with us.


Small-"t" tradition has its claims.  Unless it actively hinders formation, leave it be.  Phrases like, "Hail, full of grace," "the gates of hell shall not prevail," etc. have the weight of tans-generational consistency.  Leave it to the catechists and homilists to explain, for example, that Jesus probably meant Sheol, rather than Gehenna.  In fact, we've all but eliminated the word, "hell" from our readings, which could lead folks to wonder whether we still believe in such a thing.  And that does hinder formation.


3. Stop neutering and watering down the language.  
Jesus warned about multiplying words; someone should warn translators about multiplying syllables, often in the name of mollifying sensibilities.  We see this constantly in public and political discourse.

Jesus Christ, however, didn't talk like other public figures (Matthew 7: 29).  Pope Benedict, in his Jesus of Nazareth, Vol. 1, points out that rather than "astonished," the Greek says the people were "alarmed" at Christ's teaching.  Jesus does not mince words.  Jesus does not equivocate or euphemize.  Jesus is in.  Your.  Face.  


If He doesn't make you at least a little uncomfortable, chances are you're not getting the message.


4) Please, please, in the name of all that's holy, have somebody with an ear not made of tin READ THE BLESSED THING ALOUD!  
Why is the KJV still so popular after four hundred years?  Why do we still hear it quoted so often, even by people who can barely read, despite its inkhorn words and archaic phrasing?  Because it is beautiful.  Its translators were Shakespeare's contemporaries (Some think the Bard himself may have had a hand in it).  They read it aloud as they worked, to ensure that when proclaimed, it would ring out, clear and memorable.  We need that back.  That's why, when I pray the Psalms, I go back to the Douay-Confraternity translation.  It sounds like poetry - the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, not Rod McKuen and Adrienne Rich.

We should try that sometime.

Yes, I know, it's pro-Reformation, but listen to Joss Ackland's readings, dammit!