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lunes, 30 de abril de 2018

The European Commission President will give a speech to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth.


In a Display of Moral Blindness, President of European Commission Celebrates Marxist Totalitarianism
The evil ideology known as communism left a track record of unimaginable horror. Experts estimate that 100 million people were killed by Marxist regimes.
Some were murdered. Other starved to death because of the pervasive economic failure of communism.
Yet there are dupes and apologists who overlook all this death and misery.
One of them is Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission. A few days from now, this über-bureaucrat will help celebrate the 200th birthday of Karl Marx.
"The European Commission President will travel to Trier, Germany, where he will give a speech to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth. …The Commission President will give a speech at the opening ceremony of the Karl Marx exhibition in the city. …The chief eurocrat’s trip has received critics, who have suggested the 63-year-old forgetting how Marx’s “warped ideology” led to millions of deaths across the world. Ukip MEP and the party’s former leader Paul Nuttall said: “It is appalling that Jean-Claude Juncker feels it necessary to commemorate a man whose ideology – Marxism/Communism – led to more than 100 million deaths. …Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski…, who as a seven-year-old boy fled to Britain with his family from the Communist regime in Poland, said Mr Juncker should reject any invitations to commemorate the event. He said: “I think it’s in very poor taste we have to remember that Marxism was all about ripping power and individual means away from people and giving to State. “Marxism led to the killing of millions around the world as it allowed a small band of fanatics to suppress the people we must learn the lessons from this and share with our children.”
How disgusting.
And let’s not forget that communism is still claiming victims in places such asCuba and North Korea.
Here’s the part of the story that caused my jaw to drop.
A commission spokeswoman defending Mr Juncker’s visit… She said: …“I think that nobody can deny that Karl Marx is a figure who shaped history in one way or the other.
In that case, why not celebrate Hitler’s birthday as well?
Writing for the Atlas Society, Alan Charles Kors expresses dismay that communism does not receive the same treatment as its sister ideology of National Socialism.
No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. …The West accepts an epochal, monstrous, unforgivable double standard. We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere. We insisted upon “de-Nazification,” and we excoriate those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never has been and never will be a similar “de-Communization,” although the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, and although those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down ninety-year-old men because “the bones cry out” for justice. In the case of Communism, we insisted on “no witch hunts”… The Communist holocaust should have brought forth a flowering of Western art, and witness, and sympathy. It should have called forth an overflowing ocean of tears. Instead, it has called forth a glacier of indifference. Kids who in the 1960s had portraits of Mao and Che on their college walls —the moral equivalent of having hung portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, or Horst Wessel in one’s dorm—now teach our children about the moral superiority of their political generation. Every historical textbook lingers on the crimes of Nazism, seeks their root causes, and announces a lesson that should be learned. Everyone knows the number “six million.” By contrast, it is always “the mistakes” of Communism or of Stalinism (repeated, by mistake, again, and again, and again). Ask college freshmen how many died under Stalin’s regime, and they will answer, even now, “Thousands? Tens of thousands?”
Of course, some of these kids are probably wearing t-shirts celebrating Che Guevara, so it goes without saying that they are ignorant.
Or, if they actually know Che’s track record, the kids are immoral punks.
In any event, Jean-Claude Juncker should know better. Sounds like he wants his name to be added to the biggest-clown-in-Brussels contest.
P.S. I’m embarrassed to admit that some economists were apologists for communism.
P.P.S. There’s a very small silver lining to the dark cloud of communism. You can click hereherehere, and here to enjoy some clever anti-communism humor.


The Theological-Political Problem


Taking Religion Seriously


by RÉMI BRAGUE, PIERRE MANENT, DANIEL J. MAHONEY, PAUL SEATON

Editor’s Note: This exchange between French philosophers Pierre Manent and Rémi Brague originally appeared in the January issue of the French journal L’Incorrect as “Rémi Brague & Pierre Manent: Duel de Géants” in January. L’Incorrect is a new conservative-minded journal of ideas in France that challenges the presuppositions of political correctness. We are grateful to the editors of L’Incorrect for permission to reprint this important discussion and to Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton for their translation.

Islam and the West
Interviewer: Michel Houellebecq recently said in Der Spiegel that in order to resolve the problem of Islam in France, Catholicism would have to become the state religion. What do you think of that suggestion?
Pierre Manent (PM): The idea seems basically on point to me. Not that Catholicism should be recognized as the religion of the State, no one seriously entertains that, but that the role of the Catholic religion in the history of France, but also in the social life of the country, in the consciousness of the country, should be recognized in public forms. However, during the past thirty years we have agreed to espouse the big lie according to which there is no Muslim problem, in fact there can’t be any problems posed by any religion, because we have found the solution to all problems of this sort: laicité or secularism.
In truth, however, depending upon whether there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims or ten million, whether the Catholic churches are full or empty, society will be radically different, even if the secular regime has not changed. We have made ourselves prisoners of a much too restrictive definition of the French regime, by reducing it to the categories of a rather aggressive secularism. We need to enlarge our understanding of ourselves and, in this enlargement, grant an adequate place to the Catholicism that played such a great role in French history and consciousness.  To be sure, that cannot take on an institutional or constitutional form, and that is where Houellebecq’s proposition goes beyond the limits of a reasonable proposal, as he himself knows very well.
This would be an essential element in giving a definite physiognomy and consistency to the community that receives Muslims. Muslims have a very strong collective awareness of their religion, one which nourishes social affects and extremely significant shared mores. One cannot give them as their only destination a society exclusively defined by individual rights, by the neutrality of the State and other institutions vis-à-vis religion, this is to invite them into an empty space, into a wasteland. Whether the society of individuals repulses or tempts them, or both, it does not bring them any new principle of association, it gives them no reason to go beyond a total and complete identification with Islam, in order to participate in a new form of community, or communion. In order for Muslims to be decently received and live happily in France, it is important that they know that they are not in a Muslim nation, that this nation possesses a Christian mark, that Jews play an eminent role here, and that religion does not give commands to the State and the State does not give commands to religion.
We therefore have a complex operation to conduct, which is to persuade the Muslims that we do want to receive them in reasonable numbers, that they do have their place in society, and that this society as a collectivity, this nation as a human association, is not and does not wish to be a Muslim society, but will remain and wants to remain a nation of a Christian mark, where the Jews play an eminent role, and where both the State and the religion embrace a regime of secularism.
Remi Brague (RB): I have not read this interview with Michel Houellebecq, but it is clear that he overstated his real thought. In speaking of Catholicism as a state religion, I believe that he was thinking, above all, not of the State, but of civil society, and of the way in which the nation ought to understand itself, and did understand itself until a rather recent date. In fact it continues to do so.  As Benedetto Croce put it after the war: “We are not able not to call ourselves Christians.” To be sure, Croce understood this in a certain way. As a good Hegelian, he wanted to say that Christianity had fulfilled itself, that one therefore ought to move on to another stage, but while still retaining a certain fidelity to the heritage. Croce, in other words, was a “faithful atheist” (in Italian a “devout atheist”). This awareness would be the way in which the true color of the painting would emerge from behind the overlays with which one wanted to cover it over, which were more or less artificial and even entirely deceptive.
I too believe that it is necessary that we no longer lie, that we cease acting as if the history of France began ex nihilo on July 14, 1789, that we stop telling these lies. I believe this would be a first step to take, to allow Muslims not to imagine that they enter into a void. Pierre Manent employed the wonderful image of a “wasteland”:  when one is in a wasteland, the best thing to do is to remain in one’s vehicle. In order to get Muslims to get out of their vehicles, one must very cordially explain that they are among human beings, that they will have to respect certain rules, just as when one is invited to take mint tea in Morocco.
I speak of actual Muslims, men and women of flesh and blood, who have with Islam a relationship that is as complex and nuanced as Christians, and those of Christian tradition, have with their own religion. I do not speak of the Islam which is presented as a system of civilization, “keys to everything in hand,” which in principle is capable of determining the right way of conducting oneself in all circumstances, including how to dress, do one’s hair, bathe, and comport oneself in family life.  Here there is a double difficulty, which Pierre Manent addresses in his book. Islam is not another religion that enters into a civilization, but a civilization that enters into another civilization.
Moreover, as I argued in a book that recently appeared, the word “religion” itself is deceptive. We have the habit of conceiving religion on the model of Christianity.  Islam would be a sort of Christianity, with some things added and some things taken away, but whose list is fairly easy to come up with. In fact, however, I believe we distort the phenomenon of Islam, because in a Christian regime we are not at all accustomed to follow rules of conduct that claim to be derived from the religion, and which are other than those of common morality. This is a rather exceptional peculiarity of Christianity, one we have a hard time seeing, because we take it for granted. Christianity does not ask men to do anything other than what the most prosaic morality requires of them. It does not have any rules for clothing, no rules for what to eat.
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Plutarch: the recovery of the political art under even the most inauspicious conditions


Plutarch and the Statesman’s Qualities of Soul

by REBECCA BURGESS

Human beings do not like human beings much in this millennium. They don’t even like to be left with themselves—creating distance from their own minds with the use of opioids and hallucinogens. They are hardly about to participate in church life or in Little League. The mediating associations Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at in America, the bulwarks of civil society, are going the way of the Dodo.
This makes it less surprising that we have soured on politics. We don’t know our political institutions, trust our politicians, or participate in political life. Erstwhile voters talk about being powerless, like subjects. We are unsure what citizenship means.
Plutarch of Chaeronea (45 AD-127 AD) was an expert on political atomization. As a Greek and appointed priest at Delphi who was also a magistrate of the Roman Empire, he strove to prevent the formerly autonomous Greek cities from “becom[ing] still less” than they were already reduced to under imperial rule. His worries were backlit by an abiding problem: the long-term failure of Greek politics and the polisdespite its philosophic claims, and the success of the Roman enterprise.
He lived at a time when Greece’s best and brightest were decamping as fast as they could for careers in Rome, the apparent master of the known world. Those left behind felt marginalized and bitter. Plutarch predicted that the apathy of the remaining citizens could only mean the petering out of liberty. “When the leg has [already] been fettered,” he thought it would be deadly to “go on and subject the neck to the yoke.”
It’s here, within the landscape of a universalizing rule under which the disaffected chafe, that Hugh Liebert situates his argument in Plutarch’s Politics: Between City and Empire.[1] The associate professor of political science at the U.S. Military Academy aims to reinstate Plutarch, who invented the literary form of the Lives as the instrument of his political teaching, in the canon of political theory relevant for contemporary discussion.
The Role of Honor in Political Life
In examining the polis, Plutarch took cues from Aristotle and Plato even as he rebelled somewhat in his approach. Lectures and dialogues suited a time when men were willing to gather together in conversation and community. Lost by Plutarch’s time was an understanding of the fundamental place of political activity in human activity, and of politics as the means by which man had “dignity” in the form of honor.
To recapture that connection required things difficult for a conquered people to access with safety: their former way of life; the honor-loving (philotimia) statesmen of the pre-imperial age; and an education in how to praise and blame properly. Greeks no longer knew how to judge between political orders and people without falling into “uncritical hagiography on the one hand, and overcritical skepticism on the other,” writes Liebert.
This situation was not going to be remedied by presenting politics from the philosopher’s vantage point, relaying a private conversation with a king about political regimes in some cloistered garden. Plutarch believed that showing the human being in political action was essential. The Life does even more, providing “an intimate portrait, replete with candid anecdotes and memorable sayings,” so that readers can see into the character of those held in the highest esteem by their peers.
Plutarch thus writes his collection of Lives of famous men from Sparta and Athens, and from Rome during the Republic, to show in the flesh the different arguments each city made about the best way of life for the human being and the community. By presenting his subjects in pairs, and rounding out each set with a Synkrisis(comparison), Plutarch leads readers to not only weigh these differences, the “strangeness of virtue” as it shows itself in lived experience, but to trace how the character of each city at its founding and in its maturity reveals what the nature of its decline or progression might be.
His project over all is to prove that Greece’s decay and Rome’s success show us how politics is intelligible, if studied. Plutarch’s narrative about Sparta and republican Rome  ends with great men displaced from their homes. Liebert notes that the “death scenes of Cleomenes, the last of Plutarch’s Spartans, and Antony, the last of Plutarch’s Romans, are both set in Alexandria, far from their native cities.” The Egyptians must interpret these strange men in their midst and act accordingly. If a foreigner can interpret an exile’s actions, then a reader of Lives of individuals in bygone political systems can also learn to his practical advantage about human character and the political through a literary encounter with them.
Liebert’s insight into the purpose of Plutarch’s scenes of exile illuminates the centuries-long popularity of theLives. He also suggests why Plutarch fell from his high place of favor, being hardly read today outside of classics departments. Plutarch’s subjects are presented as “great men,” and therefore 19th century writers interested in hagiography easily expropriated his project. Liebert does yeoman’s work in showing how Thomas Carlyle’s lectures and biographical essays promoting hero worship were thought to be inspired by Plutarch’s Lives, and how such disparate thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Alexis de Tocqueville contributed to the view of Plutarch as a storyteller of the heroic. With the advent of historical criticism, and the fall from favor of the Great Man Theory, Plutarch fell, too. Thomas Macaulay and Benjamin Constant scoffed at Plutarch’s understanding of liberty and political life as being nothing more than sententious airy-fairyness.
Not so, Liebert demonstrates. Plutarch’s appeal, he writes, was not to greatness alone but to how philotemia or the love of honor rather accounts for the behavior of outstanding individuals. Plutarch’s treatment of the honor-lover is an attempt to rescue the regime-based analysis of Socratic political philosophy for the age of political forms, when universalizing principles tied to cities and empires (and eventually nations), but not thepolis, appear to set the horizon of the political community within which human beings live.
Others who studied the polis—disciples of Socrates other than Plutarch, that is—were wont to argue that the best regime was that in which the wise ruled. They suspected philotimia for being an outward-only show that courts the public eye but leaves the individual, when in private, unhindered in the pursuit of excess.
Lycurgus and Numa 
In his in-depth analysis of one pair of Lives, Lycurgus of Sparta and Numa of Rome, Liebert responds to that suspicion. He reveals how Plutarch makes the counter-case in his Life of Lycurgus, where with a subtle nod to Xenophon, he shows how Lycurgus shaped that city so as to make Spartans be driven equally by desire for virtue as for public recognition. The key was to tie both of them to the praise and blame of fellow Spartans, eliminating all the distinctions of the private in favor of radical public spiritedness. This included citizens’ very bodies, in their tastes, pleasures, and pains. Radical public spiritedness required something else—the effectual elimination, for the Spartan, of the rest of the world’s opinions. If honor can only come from within Sparta, no Spartan will go abroad to seek it through conquest of other cities.
Lycurgus institutionalized the competition for honor in the rhythms of Spartan life, making the practice of virtue a spectacle for all to see, through the laws. Completely inward looking, Sparta becomes a “kosmos” unto itself, representing the city par excellence. In Plutarch’s telling, it’s the diverting of Sparta’s inward gaze to the larger Greek world and beyond that undoes her carefully wrought system of philotemia. When the later Lysander introduces gold and silver into their economic system, Spartans become outward-looking.
The Peloponnesian War exacerbates this, creating a generation of Spartan leaders who mixed with an international elite, and learned about earning honor among other Greeks. With Sparta’s victory, Lysander and Agesilaus challenge Sparta’s foundations: “If Sparta was in fact first among Greek cities, why should she not rule her fellow Greeks?” Agesilaus glories in commanding a Panhellenic campaign against the Persians, not because he is Spartan, but because he wants to accomplish a “deed worthy of remembrance in the eyes of the Greeks,” Plutarch notes. Once Sparta self-identifies as Greek, she reaches for empire over all of Greece. Lycurgus’s system of philotemia cannot in the end accommodate Sparta’s being “Greek and a city simultaneously,” writes Liebert.
Rome’s ability to transform from a city to empire is as rooted in the legislative foundation bequeathed it by Numa as Sparta’s failure is rooted in the foundation built by Lycurgus. Numa expands the limits of honor-seeking to the whole world by making the natural kosmos present to the people of Rome. Numa shows how a multitude of peoples, or ethne, who initially disagree about what makes a city, can come together in a city.
Plutarch’s Life of Numa is a real-life version of the Platonic philosopher-king. Numa is a Sabine, a philosopher not a warrior, for he “believe[d] that true bravery consisted in the subjugation of one’s passions by reason.” He would reform the violent Romans through altering the dynamics of the city’s honor. If political life could be understood as a “field for great and noble actions, where gods are honored with magnificent virtue,” then Numa’s task was to take the essential Roman material—the pursuit of martial glory—and redirect it toward esteem of the gods. To effect the transformation of philotimia into something resembling philosophia, Numa turns to the practice of political theology.
He imbues his laws with mystery and sacredness by encouraging the Romans’ belief that he shares a mystical—and physical—communion with a goddess. Numa tames the Romans’ “fierce and warlike tempers” by “sacrifices, processions, and religious dances . . . which mingled with their solemnity a diversion full of charm and a beneficent pleasure,” Plutarch writes. Numa’s success, Liebert argues, comes from convincing the Romans that “the proper expression of the soul’s capacity to admire and to love” is found in divinity, not violent action. It also rests on the order of priests Numa installs at the center of Roman life. It’s the priests who maintain contact with the divine, and it’s their perceived task of contemplating the natural kosmos that institutionalizes within Rome the awareness of universality.
This enables Rome to become an empire after Numa’s rule ends, but this does not occur through the peaceful spread of a religion. Numa’s plan goes awry in part due to the difference between public and private honor. His Rome narrows the avenue to the highest honors to the priests, whose connection to the divine is shrouded from public view. The question seems to be whether pushing philotemia to the dark edges of public life starves it out of existence, and is a better way to control philotemia’s more problematic effects than Lycurgus’ radical publicizing of honor.
Plutarch answers this dilemma oddly, by going off on a tangent in his Life of Numa about another Greek besides Lycurgus. Numa’s placement of a class of initiates at the center of political life is compared to the story of Pythagoras, and his rise to political prominence through the establishment of a highly selective philosophical school. But Pythagoras ended badly, perishing in a fire set by a son of the city’s elite whom Pythagoras had refused to admit into his school. The digression about Pythagoras (of whom no separate Lifewas written) suggests that the Pythagorean failure was the failure of the philosopher to “give the imperfect world of politics its due.”
The lesson for Numa, Liebert argues, is that the contemplative and active life are the most difficult of all tasks to reconcile with each other: “politicized philosophy tends either to distort or to ignore political passions, with negative consequences for both.” Numa dies peacefully, but after his death the priests revert to their old Roman ways, but now with an expanded vision of the politically possible. “Numa’s failed attempt to bring the cosmos into the city thus ends up fashioning the citizens who will extend their city to the ends of the earth,” Liebert concludes.
The Ancients and Us
Plutarch makes visible the competitions for honor and the qualities of soul that such contests engaged, breathing life into the possibility for honor-seeking under political forms other than the polis. This Plutarchian insight leads Liebert to a discussion of how Enlightenment-inspired liberalism’s response to the question of honor has placed us in comparison to the men of the Roman Empire in Plutarch’s time. This is an important discussion, made necessary by Liebert’s overarching argument about Plutarch’s modern relevance. But as Liebert himself suggests, readers interested in Plutarch’s argument can skip said discussion.
It’s regrettable that for Liebert, rehabilitating Plutarch entails emphasizing one Greek city, Sparta, as a contrast with Rome, and this largely through the Lycurgus-Numa pair of Lives, with only scattered references to a handful of Plutarch’s other leading protagonists. The absence from this work of the Life of Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, and its scant treatment of Athens in general restricts our ability to appreciate what is the full character of Greece and what of Rome; how Plutarch’s distinction between the two approaches a commentary about the philosophic city in practice and the spirited or thumotic city; and crucially, why Plutarch’s emphasis on statesmanship entails showing the vital role that education plays in attaching the pursuit of honor to preservation of the regime.
Liebert’s approach also obscures somewhat that Plutarch makes an actual call to return to political life. His argument is that only through participation in political life broadly understood can the human being achieve dignity or honor. The Life shows how this is done—it gives the world of politics its due.
Managing the State, the Household, and One’s Self
Plutarch, who seldom editorializes, nonetheless places in his Synkrisis of Aristides of Athens with the Roman Senator Marcus Cato the following observation:
Questionless, there is no perfecter endowment in man than political virtue, and of this Economics is commonly esteemed not the least part; for a city, which is a collection of private households, grows into a stable commonwealth by the private means of prosperous citizens that compose it.
“Economics” is the inadequate English word for this Greek concept of the “oikos,” which has to do with how a person’s life should best be regulated (by himself and the laws). Plutarch’s Lives are replete with anecdotes of individuals tending to or abandoning their marriages and families, their possessions, and their households, their friends and neighbors. His “oikos” is the prudent management of things, requiring almost philosophic knowledge to put into practice. After all, to manage things one first has to know the nature of those things.
Political virtue for Plutarch is rooted in this economic knowledge but superior to it; it requires the politician (statesman) to take into account the people outside his own circle who have opinions about things but less knowledge of them or how to prioritize them. Managing this relationship is therefore the most difficult of all endeavors, and those who do it well warrant our study and imitation.
Statesmanship, it turns out, is not simply about great deeds but is something practiced, always with a view to its limitations. Plutarch recalls great men and their great deeds, but his purpose is the recovery of the political art under even the most inauspicious conditions. He is truly an author for our times.
[1] In the interests of full disclosure, Liebert and I have spoken many times about Plutarch, and we coauthored “From Cicero to Trump, They’re All in Plutarch’s Lives,” (Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2017).


Rebecca Burgess manages the Program on American Citizenship at the American Enterprise Institute

Source: www.libertylawsite.org

Dieu, l’Eglise, la vie spirituelle et la vie morale, la famille, le mariage, la maladie, l’histoire…


Alphabet pour ceux qui peinent


Couverture_5avril


Guillaume d'Alançon, délégué épiscopal pour la famille du diocèse de Bayonne, vient de publier un petit ouvrage* destiné aux adultes et adolescents, offrant au lecteur des centaines de pensées sur des thèmes variés : 
  • l’amour, 
  • la vie, 
  • la maladie, 
  • la mort, 
  • le mariage, 
  • la peur, 
  • le diable, 
  • l’écologie, 
  • la solitude, 
  • la paix,… 

Ce livre, présenté comme un alphabet, est préfacé par Dom Jean Pateau abbé de Notre-Dame de Fontgombault :
“Il est des livres qu’il faut lire de A à Z. Il en est d’autres où l’on picore ici ou là selon la couleur du temps. « DIEU SEUL, Alphabet incomplet » est de ceux-ci. A travers les lignes, Guillaume d’Alançon partage avec nous des réflexions écrites au jour le jour au gré des circonstances et sur des sujets aussi divers que Dieu, l’Eglise, la vie spirituelle et la vie morale, la famille, le mariage, la maladie, l’histoire… Joies, peines, moments de paix ou de combat vécus à la lumière de Dieu suscitent une pensée jetée sur le papier. L’alphabet que nous offre Guillaume d’Alançon est tel qu’il ne sert qu’à prononcer un seul mot en tout temps, en tout lieu : « AMOUR ».”
Extrait de certaines pensées :
Centrisme
La modération évangélique n’est pas forcément le centrisme politique.
Conscience
Que de crime a-t-on pu faire au nom de la bonne conscience ! « J’avais bonne conscience, j’avais la loi pour moi » … Conscience sans vérité rime avec barbarie. La conscience a besoin d’être formée par la vérité sinon elle ne rend pas libre…
 France
La France sans Dieu ressemble à un corps sans âme. Et nous savons à quoi est destiné un corps sans âme… à la décomposition, à la disparition.
Liberté
Pour nous, catholiques, la liberté d’expression n’est pas un adage invoqué de manière incantatoire mais une éthique de la liberté inséparable de la recherche de la vérité. Un droit et un devoir qui marchent la main dans la main.
Liturgie
Lex orandi, lex credendi, c’est-à-dire la loi de la prière c’est la loi de la foi. Pour être mieux comprise, la liturgie nécessite d’être étudiée dans le sens de la profondeur, d’une verticalité théocentrique, pour des retombées missionnaires immédiates : plus le chrétien cherche Dieu, plus son regard est en mesure de rejoindre ce qu’il y a d’authentique en l’homme pour l’évangéliser. Le liturgiste n’est donc pas un aventurier comme les autres. Il n’explore pas de nouvelles pistes qui ne soient déjà gravées dans le marbre du depositum fidei, le dépôt de la foi.
Militant chrétien
Le combat pour la famille, pour la vie, c’est d’abord un combat pour Dieu, une manière de le louer, de l’adorer, de mettre sa cause au-dessus de la nôtre. Dieu premier servi…
Patrie
La crise vécue ces temps-cis par l'Europe occidentale est liée au déni des valeurs qui ont fait ce qu’elle est. Le réveil des peuples d'Europe, de notre peuple, ne se fera pas sans un retour à ce qu'ils sont, à ce que nous sommes, en profondeur. Ce n'est pas de folklore que nous avons besoin en priorité, mais de vérité. Nous devons rechercher l'âme de notre patrie. C'est en effet seulement ainsi que nous pourrons respecter et aimer les patries des autres. Seuls les patriotes sont universels, car ils sont capables de reconnaître aux autres le droit et le devoir d'aimer leur pays. Refuser le patriotisme pour soi-même reviendrait à le refuser pour les autres. Il en va de la paix.

Source: lesalonbeige.blogs.com

Dieu seul

Ce livre est destiné aux adultes et adolescents. Les chapitres se succèdent par ordre alphabétique et offrent au lecteur des centaines de pensées profondes, facétieuses parfois, sur les thèmes suivants : l’amour, la vie, la maladie, la mort, le mariage, la peur, le diable, l’écologie, la solitude, la paix,…
Ces bons mots s’enchainent les uns les autres et s’enracinent dans le trésor de la foi catholique, à l’ombre de la spiritualité monastique. Ceux qui ont soif d’absolu trouveront là des portes d’entrée accessibles et sûres.
Extrait de la préface :
“Il est des livres qu’il faut lire de A à Z. Il en est d’autres où l’on picore ici ou là selon la couleur du temps. « DIEU SEUL, Alphabet incomplet » est de ceux-ci. A travers les lignes, Guillaume d’Alançon partage avec nous des réflexions écrites au jour le jour au gré des circonstances et sur des sujets aussi divers que Dieu, l’Eglise, la vie spirituelle et la vie morale, la famille, le mariage, la maladie, l’histoire… Joies, peines, moments de paix ou de combat vécus à la lumière de Dieu suscitent une pensée jetée sur le papier.L’alphabet que nous offre Guillaume d’Alançon est tel qu’il ne sert qu’à prononcer un seul mot en tout temps, en tout lieu : « AMOUR ».”
+ fr Jean Pateau abbé de Notre-Dame de Fontgombault


La messe du saint curé d'Ars (French Edition) by [d'Alançon, Guillaume]

Saint Anthelme (French Edition) by [d'Alançon, Guillaume]

image un-cardinal-au-cOEur-de-l-eglise-9782360403417

image l-amour-avec-louis-et-zelie-martin-9791033604433

domingo, 29 de abril de 2018

Église universelle : la surprenante réunion préparatoire à Rome du synode d’octobre sur la jeunesse



La surprenante préparation du synode sur la jeunesse


https://youtu.be/DtfciykgQcg



Source: www.renaissancecatholique.org


Église universelle : la surprenante réunion préparatoire à Rome du synode d’octobre sur la jeunesse


Du 19 au 24 mars a eu lieu à Rome une réunion préparatoire au synode des évêques qui se tiendra au mois d’octobre sur le thème : “Les jeunes, la foi, le discernement vocationnel”. Cette réunion a rassemblé autour du pape François plusieurs centaines de jeunes venus du monde entier. Jeanne Smits, rédactrice en chef de Réinformation TV explique le déroulement de ces travaux et s’interroge sur le profil des participants. Elle analyse avec rigueur le document final de cette réunion presynodale qui a pour objectif de “donner aux évêques une boussole”, en changeant cependant très sensiblement le positionnement du nord en matière de morale, de discipline et de dogme.

Église en France : Pentecôte 2018 : Vénération à Paris et à Chartres des reliques de saint Padre Pio


À l’occasion du 36e pèlerinage de chrétienté, les 19,20 et 21 mai prochains, de Notre-Dame de Paris à Notre-Dame de Chartres sera présentée à la vénération des fidèles le samedi et le lundi une relique du cœur de saint Padre Pio. François Brunatto, entremetteur discret avec le couvent de San Giovanni Rotondo, présente l’origine de cette relique, explique la nature de la vénération des reliques et donne les renseignements pratiques pour pouvoir vénérer les reliques du saint.

Église en Marche : Forum Jésus. Le Messie 26–27 mai Notre-Dame de Grâce à Passy


Président de l’association Angelus, pour la conversion des musulmans, Jean-Yves Nerriec présente le forum qui aura lieu les 26 et 27 mai prochains à Notre-Dame de Grâce à Passy. Il s’agit, lors de ce forum, avec la participation de Annie Laurent, Joseph Fadelle, Odon Lafontaine, l’abbé Pagès, etc. de donner aux chrétiens les moyens de combattre le relativisme ambiant et de répondre de leur foi face aux musulmans.
  
Cette émission est disponible sur TV Libertés

Merci à ceux qui le peuvent de diffuser cette information sur les réseaux de communication auxquels ils ont accès soit en insérant un lien soit en dupliquant cette émission.

Paris 5° - le 26 mai : formation pro-vie pour les professionnels/étudiants en santé


Peut-on contourner l´IVG lorsqu´on est professionel de santé?

NMNTP-Flyer-Formation_2018-05

NMNTP-Flyer-Formation_2018-052

« Comment être chrétien dans un monde qui ne l’est plus ? »


La laïcité d'Emmanuel Macron s’apparente à ce que Benoît XVI appelait la « dictature du relativisme »

Capture d’écran 2018-04-28 à 15.30.29

Suite à l'entretien avec Rod Dreher dans La Nef(n°299) à propos de son Pari bénédictin, puis la critique d’une dizaine d’ouvrages tournant autour de ce thème : « Comment être chrétien dans un monde qui ne l’est plus ? » (La Nef n°301), le nouveau numéro de La Nef poursuit le débat avec des personnalités et intellectuels chrétiens. Notamment Mgr Marc Aillet, qui écrit :

"Comment être chrétien dans un monde qui ne l’est plus ? Dans son Pari bénédictin, Rod Dreher tente d’y apporter une réponse que j’accueille comme une bouffée d’oxygène dont nous avons bien besoin dans un monde sécularisé et souvent hostile au dialogue avec les religions. 
Certes, le discours très habile du président Macron aux Bernardins semble rompre avec cette hostilité, au grand dam des chantres de la laïcité. 
Il reste que, tout en puisant abondamment dans notre patrimoine théologique et spirituel, il demande tout bonnement aux évêques d’éviter une attitude « injonctive » et réclame une allégeance sans compromis aux lois de la République.  
La laïcité, qu’il exprime par la liberté de croire ou de ne pas croire, pourrait bien s’apparenter ainsi à ce que le pape Benoît XVI appelait la « dictature du relativisme ». 
Sans doute le contexte de séparation des Églises et de l’État et la distinction faite par Jésus entre l’ordre temporel et l’ordre spirituel recommandent à l’Église, en tant qu’institution, de ne pas se jeter dans la bataille politique. 
Elle ne peut pas pour autant se désintéresser de la justice et elle est appelée à mettre sa sagesse au service non pas seulement du questionnement, mais bien de l’interpellation prophétique. 
En ce sens, elle doit même parfois s’opposer fermement aux lois de la République dès lors qu’elles sont contraires à la raison droite : alors, ces lois sont plus une violence que des lois, affirmait saint Thomas d’Aquin! 
C’est que l’Église n’est pas une communauté comme les autres, la mission qu’elle a reçue du Christ est universelle et concerne le salut de l’homme dans toutes ses dimensions personnelle et sociale ; elle constitue même « pour tout l’ensemble du genre humain le germe le plus sûr d’unité, d’espérance et de salut » (Lumen gentium, n. 9).  
Elle ne saurait admettre que la foi, qui est devenue culture à travers les siècles et qui constitue une « sève » toujours disponible, comme le reconnaît le président Macron, demeure cantonnée dans la sphère privée de la vie des hommes. [...]"

Source: lesalonbeige.blogs.com

Three books by James V. Schall: 1) Reasonable Pleasures: On the Strange Coherences of Catholicism, 2) Remembering Belloc and 3) Political Philosophy & Revelation: A Catholic Reading


Political Philosophy Needs Revelation: A Conversation with James V. Schall

By: James V. SchallKen Masugi


Retired political philosophy professor James V. Schall, S.J., recently published three books whose philosophic and theological themes help us understand Lent and Easter. This interview coincides with the conclusion of a seminar in Claremont on the principal works of Harry V. Jaffa. Returning to my pre-seminar reading, I immediately encountered Fr. Schall’s chapter “Thomism and Atheism,” from his Political Philosophy & Revelation. It begins by reference to Jaffa’s change of mind regarding Thomas Aquinas and his understanding of Aristotle—in other words, the relationship between revelation and philosophy. This subsequent wide-ranging conversation, conducted via e-mail, approaches this theme in a variety of ways. For links to earlier conversations see the previous one.https://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.826/pub_detail.asp
—Ken Masugi
Ken Masugi (KM): In noting a dimension of Jaffa’s “turn,” which many at the Jaffa seminar observed in his contrasting understandings of Abraham Lincoln and of the founding, you see as well a reconsideration of Aristotelian magnanimity and Christian humility. “Humility and truth are presupposed to each other.” How do this presupposition and the reason-revelation dynamic tension of western civilization figure into the three books you published last year?

James V. Schall (JVS): These three books—1) Reasonable Pleasures: On the Strange Coherences of Catholicism(Ignatius Press), 2) Remembering Belloc, (St. Augustine’s Press), and 3) Political Philosophy & Revelation: A Catholic Reading (The Catholic University of America Press)—were, of course, written over a course of several years. The time it takes to submit manuscripts, have them evaluated, edited, and finally published is usually a couple of years. These books were written at different times and in different ways. It is coincidence that they all came out last Fall, in the year after I retired from Georgetown University, in December 2013.
The Reasonable Pleasures book was written mostly in the Fall of 2010. I had a jaw cancer diagnosed and operated on in June of 2010. That meant that I needed at least six months to recover. The University kindly gave me an emergency leave during the Fall Semester. The whole jaw replacement, new dentures, and the healing of the bone graft took all six months and more, but I was able to teach in the Spring Semester of 2011. As I began to feel better, I had wanted to think through a project that I had been wondering about for some time. So partly to keep busy and partly because the project seemed remarkable to me, I began to write the book. I think that it was finished and submitted to the publishers in January 2011.
The title of the book, of course, is from Aristotle, as is so much of what is sane in this world. Every act is accompanied by an appropriate pleasure—eating, smelling, hearing, touching, seeing. Aristotle adds that thinking itself has its own proper pleasure. Indeed, and this is how this book touches on political philosophy, he said that the politician, if he does not, in some sense, himself experience the delight of thinking, he will  in all likelihood find his pleasures in some other less than noble activity. Aristotle would not deny that the good politician (or even the bad one) experiences a unique pleasure in ruling. But that is not the same as the pleasure of thinking. Still, the goodness or badness of an act does not depend on its pleasure. It depends on the purpose of the act in which pleasure exists or is manifested.
A reasonable life is one that experiences, at the right time and in the right place, the proper pleasure that an act allows or signifies. In an earlier book of mine, The Order of Things, I pointed out that the very meaning of wisdom is to see this order or, in the case of our moral or political lives, to put pleasures into existence but as ruled by reason. In one sense, this present book takes up the old Epicurean issue of the primacy of pleasure. When pleasure, perfectly legitimate in its place, becomes separated from the activity in which it belongs, we are in for trouble, sometimes big trouble, whether we like it or not.
But the main point is that pleasure is itself a good thing. Its natural purpose is to enhance the activity in which it belongs. Pain is also a good thing, though the opposite of pleasure. It is paradoxical to speak of the pleasure of pain. But if we did not have a toothache, we would never know the problem. It is the pain that tells us something is wrong and hence to a relief to us.
But this consideration also leads to the great questions of Greek political philosophy and Christianity; that is, whether it is better to do evil or suffer it? Our civilization is really built on the stance we take on this issue. It even brings us to Callicles in the Gorgias, to his astonishment over Socrates remark that we should want to be punished for our evil deeds. A chapter on this topic is found in Political Philosophy & Revelation.
But the essence of the present book goes back to issues like sport and humor in our lives. I have long been taken by Aristotle’s casual remark—one I have seen confirmed in the lives of many students over the years—that the closest a young man or woman gets to contemplation is in watching, being absorbed by following the action of a good ball game of some sort. Several students have said to me that no one had ever explained to them why watching a good game was not simply frivolous or a waste of time. Aristotle, as you recall, said that it was close to contemplation because it was the unexpected experience of beholding something for its own sake, and not for some useful purpose. It is in the life of leisure within the political order but beyond politics that the highest things take place. Without them, our civilization soon loses its soul.
But the book is primarily about the pleasure of thinking and its relation to beatitude. I covered some of this inThe Life of the Mind. Here I am concerned with how revelation belongs to this reality of reasonable pleasures that are, in their being, something we do not concoct for ourselves. We simply find them given in reality. 
In another sense, this book is a reflection on Benedict XVI’s Spei Salvi, a very great document, especially for political philosophy. Benedict sees clearly that modern philosophy is pretty much what Voegelin said it was, the “immanentization of the eschaton,” the attempt to reach by human means the elevated ends that human nature was given at its creation, immortality, resurrection, and eternal life. Strauss was perplexed by this “elevated” sense of nature that revelation implied.

KM: And how does Remi Brague, who wrote what you called “the most important book written in political philosophy” [(The Law of God (2007)], complement what Benedict has written?” I understand he took the place of Pope Benedict as speaker at a conference in Rome.
JS: Benedict carefully points out what happens when we reject hell but try to extend our lives by scientific methods to the point of denying death. These were also topics that I discussed in At the Limits of Political Philosophy. The present book’s subtitle, “On the Strange Coherences of Catholicism” comes from these considerations. Modern political philosophy is in one sense a systematic effort to avoid seeing what it is actually about. It is only when we get the “dogma” right, as the first chapter of this book has it, that we get the rest of it right. And dogma is what the mind does when it is being mind.
That is, it affirms of what is that it is, and states of what is not, that it is not.  Once our “dogma” is that no nature or no objectives of knowledge can be found, we still have unacknowledged “dogmas” but ones that lead us to incoherence. It is the suspicion that the world and our place in it is really not incoherent that runs through this book.
Remembering Belloc is a book that I much love, a real “labor of love.” It is a collection of mostly short essays that I have done over the years. I have written regular essays on Chesterton over the years, some of which are collected in my Schall on Chesterton. I had a briefer series called “Schall on Belloc” and this book contains many of these plus other essays on Belloc, including his very insightful position on Islam.
Belloc was simply the best short essayist in the English language. He walked or sailed everywhere. He has a collection about “everything” and another about “nothing.” He writes children’s tales and has a book on Danton and most of the great figures of English history. Belloc lost one son in World War I and another in World War II. His wife was an American from Napa, California. He was half French and served in the French army. He loved military history and walked every battleground. His Cruise of the Nona around England by himself in his own boat is simply charming.
No books are quite like The Path to Rome and The Four Men, the first a walk, in 1901, from his old army base in Toul in France to Rome, and second, in 1902, a walk with a Poet, a Sailor, an Old Man, and “Myself,” through Sussex County England, his home county. The four men are, of course, all Belloc. He says in The Four Men that the only way you can keep a place you once loved is to write about it, for it will soon disappear as you once knew it. A friend once gave me his Towns of Destiny and later the same friend found in an English book store his collection called Places—both wonderful books.
Belloc walked much of North Africa, Spain, France, and England. He sailed into Patmos, where he noted that all the trees were cut down. He climbed the Pyrenees and the Alps. He loved bacon, eggs, good bread, wine, and cheese. He thought one ought not to drink any strong drink invented after the Reformation. He was a born Catholic and, as he said, never lost the faith, but not without struggle. In many ways, in spite his laughter and wit, he was in many ways a sad man. His essay on Jane Austen in one of the selected collections of his essays is lovely. Belloc can move one’s soul if you let him, so he is only to be read with caution by modern men who are constrained to deal only in little thoughts and have not allowed themselves be touched by any hint of transcendence, a touching that Belloc himself found heavy.
Belloc loved the world, its ordinary things, but he hated liars. He would have considered our “non-judgmental” society to be slightly daft and probably diabolical. When you decide that the mind is not made to know what is and to judge, you decide the mind is not mind. But the title of this book is on target. When you “remember” Belloc, you remember most of the things that are worthwhile remembering in this world, and, yes, also in the next.
The third book on political philosophy and revelation is, in a way, the bringing together of most of what I have thought on these topics that are kept at bay in the academies. It was Strauss and Voegelin who made it not only possible but often necessary to think of reason and revelation, of Athens and Jerusalem, and, as I insist, also on Rome. I call this book “a Catholic reading” of the topic.
I am in part thinking of Harry Jaffa’s remark at Strauss’s funeral that the importance of Aquinas was that he kept Aristotle alive. Indeed he did, but he also saw how Aristotle and revelation were in fact related. It has been my life work, as I look back on the political philosophy essays and books that I have written, to explain how they belong together. We still must keep the proper distinctions and observations.
Without care, it is relatively easy to turn political philosophy into a theology or theology into a political form. It is, I think, the primary effect of revelation to allow politics to be just what it is, and only what it is, that it, politics. Politics is not itself, as Charles N. R. McCoy used to say, a “substitute metaphysics,” or as Voegelin and Benedict XVI say, an attempt to achieve Christian ends by political, economic or scientific means within this world by human means—the famous “immanentization of the eschaton.” This approach was also the burden of my book, The Modern Age.
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Read more: www.claremont.org