Something other than reason and theological conviction seems to have been an influence on C. S. Lewis in this regard.

Why C.S. Lewis Never Became a Catholic

by Dave Armstrong


Was it his upbringing in Belfast, or something else entirely?

The great Anglican apologist C. S. Lewis (my favorite writer) was raised in Belfast. I believe it's “hearsay”, but for what it's worth, I once heard Catholic philosopher and apologist Peter Kreeft in a radio interview speak about a discussion between Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (ofLord of the Rings fame), in which Lewis was asked why he hadn't become a Catholic.

Lewis is reputed to have replied (paraphrase): “If you had grown up in Belfast, you'd understand and wouldn't ask me that question.” Tolkien also is reported to have referred tongue-in-cheek to Lewis' “Ulsterior motives” for not becoming Catholic.

If this is a true report, I think it is at least admirable of Lewis to honestly admit his biases (we all have them), and to acknowledge that they had a sort of irrational but profound effect on his position. Several Lewis biographers allude to very similar themes. The question comes up, among other reasons, particularly because there are reports that C. S. Lewis was very close to conversion to Catholicism especially around 1950.

For example, Joseph Pearce, in his book, C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003) stated:

In summary, Lewis's religious upbringing seems to have been characterized by an inherited anti-Catholicism, whether implicit or explicit, . . . (p. 5)

Peter Kreeft in a written interview (Jedd Medifind, “Interview with Peter Kreeft on C. S. Lewis,” Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, October, 2003), observed:

The fault is that that is the only subject Lewis didn't want to talk about, even with his friends, much less in public -- the differences between the churches, especially the differences between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. . . . he refused to deal with 1517 (or 1054, for that matter.)

Why? Both Christopher Derrick, Lewis's student [author of C. S. Lewis and the Church of Rome: Ignatius: 1981], and Joseph Pearce, Lewis's biographer, give the same answer: he was born in Belfast and knew his prejudices sat deep.

.............


Read more: www.ncregister.com

To follow Shakespeare’s reflections upon human beings and citizens, one must reflect upon the political consequences of Christian belief

Shakespeare as Political Thinker: Man’s Supernatural Destiny

by James V. Schall


Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org


What is new about our era, as opposed to the Christianity of an Augustine, of an Aquinas, or of a Shakespeare, is that now we actually see Christians themselves betraying their own traditions of political limitations…




Shakespeare as Political Thinker, edited by John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981)

For some time, political philosophy has, even to save its own integrity, needed to rediscover the classical tradition as a basis for understanding the place of politics within the human enterprise. Largely through the work of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Maritain, and Eric Voegelin, this has been accomplished, at least for those with eyes to see. But in recovering the classics—Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Xenophon, Cicero—there has been an embarrassed, unsettling silence about the place of revelation, of the Old and New Testaments especially, and also of Islam. Political philosophy in the modern era has believed it could be sufficient unto itself so that it was not even open to a hint of any intelligence not reduced to exclusively rationalist confines. The result was, since religion continued to be and even in many ways increased being a major factor in human affairs, in the lives of most men, in most places, and in most eras, an incapacity of political philosophy and those formally trained in it to account for the way men really act and why. Political theorists tried to explain human action in categories drawn exclusively from an understanding of man as abstracted from transcendent realities and considerations. This ironically resulted in a view of religion that described its motivations and institutions as “political” and thereby prevented any adequate comprehension of why men really acted in major areas of their lives. The narrowness of such modern political philosophy forced the Straussians and the Voegelinians, as the major proponents of the revival of the classics, to treat revelation with extreme care, if not actually in secret writing. No one wanted to “scandalize,” as it were, the academic moderns by appearing to take revelation too seriously, even when it was clear that faith must be taken into account if political philosophy itself were to understand even itself and its own intrinsic limits. Athens, Jerusalem, Rome—even Mecca, as Strauss recognized—loomed in the background of a discipline that prided itself on imitating modern natural science. The endeavor of being like unto science, however, did not reckon, as Stanley Jaki has shown, with the relation of this same science to the doctrines of creation and finite essence, doctrines, theological or philosophical, refined within the tradition of revelation. Modern political philosophy, consequently, has not known how to broach revelation as an intrinsic element to its own integrity, to its own understanding of itself within Western intellectual experience. The “modern project,” as Strauss called it, was simply to rid ourselves of revelation, to lower our sights, in order to erect a society according to norms which man could make “for himself,” on the grounds that only what man could know of his own power was worthy to exist in the first place. The only trouble was that the elevated goals of the Christian tradition did not cease to lure the modern political thinker even when the faith that originated and sustained them disappeared. The fruitless effort to find a “natural” substitute for supernatural motivations is, in one sense, what the “left” is about in modern political experience, both its rationale and its terrible danger.

The merit of Shakespeare as Political Thinker, and it is an inestimable merit, is to have discovered, almost from outside of political theory itself—though the relation of art to politics is, as Charles N.R. McCoy reminded us, a basic one—a way to treat legitimately the question of the relation of classical, of medieval, and of modern thought without ignoring or distorting the Judaeo-Christian revelational factor, which itself, as much as the classics, made Western civilization unique and gave truth a further universal, not merely parochial or cultural, claim. This remarkable book lies squarely within the tradition of Leo Strauss in particular. That is to say, it lies within the only academic tradition that is intellectually willing and, more importantly, able to ask what difference Christianity makes to the classics and to modern theory. The Thomist tradition used to be a major factor here, as Strauss recognized, but with the exception of the papacy and a few advanced places like the University of Dallas, from where many of these essays originated, this tradition has largely been abandoned or rejected by believers themselves, who, under the aegis of liberation theology, or ecology, or liberalism, have largely embraced the “modern project” itself, as if the Enlightenment were what religion is now about. This book also represents one of the few remaining avenues by which revelation can begin to be understood even by the intellectual representatives of religion, who no longer understand what they are about in the world of politics.

These fifteen essays on Shakespeare, and on how political life appears in his tragedies, comedies, histories, and poems, are the most perceptive and brilliant efforts in recent decades to locate within the Western tradition a way to reintroduce the factor of revelation as an element with which to understand politics, its limits, what lies beneath (the family) and beyond it. The only comparable endeavor, I think, was the neo-Thomist movement of a half a century ago, a movement itself intrinsic to the understanding of the significance of this penetrating book. Shakespeare, however, has the advantage of having lain fallow for so many years, outside the usual ken of political thinkers, so that the abundance of what can grow out of his wisdom is both fresh and almost unlimited. We are not accustomed to reflect upon art as itself a way to comprehend politics, even though we recall that an Aristotle wrote the Poetics and Plato never ceased to worry about Homer.

Harry Jaffa’s and Michael Platt’s essays on this relationship are simply remarkable. These essays were in part written for an Intercollegiate Studies Institute Conference at the University of Dallas, in part written for the book itself. They treat the major political works of Shakespeare—his tyrants, best kings, common men, bishops, matrons, and villains. The realization that Shakespeare is as profound as Cicero or Aristotle in political things should come as a surprise to no one. Yet, it is a surprise, as political thinkers have left Shakespeare largely to the literary scholars, just as they have left the Bible largely to the theologians, that is to say, in both cases, to people themselves largely ignorant of political things. Political science, the highest of the practical sciences as Aristotle called it in The Ethics, has in the modern era acted as if its area of reality were meant to narrow itself so that it focused only on the “political,” whereas it was meant, by its own reality, to expand itself so that it could see and account for all there was, even something that came from no known political source. Politics had to be humble enough to leave metaphysics and theology to their practitioners, provided these latter themselves, as Aquinas knew, understood, as politicians do, how most men really are. This is also why there is no Christian political theory without Augustine.

“In the plays set before the advent of Christianity,” John Alvis writes in the first essay,

human lives take shape from individual propensities responding to the laws of cities. In the plays set within Christian times, Shakespeare’s characters consult not only their native inclinations and laws of their state, but, concurrently, certain transcendent prescriptions decreed by their Scriptural God. To follow Shakespeare’s reflections upon human beings and citizens, one must reflect upon the political consequences of Christian belief. The political subject necessarily embraces the religious subject.

This is surprisingly like the metaphysical reflections of a Karol Wojtyla discussing the nature of politics and faith. The shadow of Machiavelli, moreover, is not ever far from the Christian characters in Shakespeare. That is to say, we also find in the great English bard modern political theory precisely in its relation to the classics and to revelation. In the beginning ofThe City and Man Strauss remarks that we ought to study the classics in order to grasp what man can learn by his own powers so that we could learn about the limits of the queen of the social sciences. John Alvis likewise concludes: “To know what extends beyond politics, it helps to know the full scope of the political realm. Shakespeare’s poetry assists us in understanding what surpasses politics by allowing us to grasp how far politics extends in the determination of human lives.” That politics ought to be a consummation of human lives, of the mortal while he is mortal, as Hannah Arendt would say, is no more than Aristotle’s dictum that we are by nature political beings. We do what we are. But that politics ought to consume all of human life is totalitarianism, in whatever form it might appear. It is probably no accident that no Shakespearean play depicts the life of a modern totalitarian state since the latter is produced precisely by a process that denies the classic and Judaeo-Christian revelational elements in man, the religious and political subject. Yet, Shakespeare knew tyranny and corruption, ambition and vanity at a depth that few if any have ever equaled. Jaffa rightly suggests that this Shakespearean art enables us to avoid such a politics of destruction, even though we may still choose in actual deeds not to avoid it. The central theme of these essays seems to be, in essence, what is and what is not political. Once knowing this, the human mind, as Aristotle already implied, seeks to spend its life in wondering about the narrow light of the divine shining into its world. In this context, no doubt, Jaffa’s essay and that of Professor Allen Bloom are of special interest. Jaffa is surely correct in calling attention to the political implications of chastity, of what it means for love and for the city to found precisely a family. Nothing is quite so important for politics as the family, which itself is not political. This is why those theories that deny it, beginning with Plato, can be so dangerous. Bloom remarks, in his essay on Richard II, that “the exquisitely refined souls do not belong to the best political men.” This makes us wonder even with greater interest about Shakespeare’s treatment of Sir Thomas More. Bloom continues:

There are two sins mentioned in Richard II: the sin of Adam and the sin of Cain. They seem to be identical, or at least one leads to the other. Knowledge of practical things brings with it awareness that in order for the sacred to become sacred, terrible deeds must be done. Because God does not evidently rule, the founder of justice cannot himself be just.

We have here, I suppose, what Frederick D. Wilhelmsen worried about in his Christianity and Political Philosophy, the relation of Jewish to Christian intelligence, both revelational, both related to the classics, to modernity, and to each other. For the Christian intelligence, as I have suggested elsewhere (“The Christian Guardians,” Downside Review, January, 1979), the reality of a religious “elite” and of a drive to God and higher excellence is not designed to deny the normalcy of politics nor to turn against the usual expectations of common men. This is why monasteries are neither homes nor states. It is only when the monastic tradition becomes secularized in movements, parties, think-tanks, and specifically anti-family presuppositions that it can destroy politics. Caesar really is legitimate in the Christian tradition. He is just not everything, nor the highest. Thus Augustine’s notion, that the City of God—alluded to by Strauss at the beginning of The City and Man—is not the proper object of worldly politics, prevents us, in our drive for the best, from using politics as its vehicle for its advancement and achievement. The experience of fallen men is included in the political experience, just as is Aristotle’s experience of a real worldly human perfection. The current infatuations of Christian monks with politics rather than with transcendence is, as Jewish thinkers seem instinctively to sense, extremely dangerous, because they jeopardize both politics and transcendence. Jaffa’s reminder of the family, of the unworldliness of love—Hannah Arendt’s point—of the place of family autonomy, needs to be set also in the context of the City of God. Otherwise, secular monks will end up destroying both family and state. Louise Cowan puts her finger on this issue:

No man is able to perform his task perfectly; in the Biblical tradition within which Shakespeare’s imagination works, all earthly things are flawed and yet all are carriers of something flawless. Shakespeare sees the human enterprise as a series of catastrophes, brought about by the clash of human wills; yet within this turbulent and painful chronicle he testifies to the gradual mysterious growth of the kingdom.

Shakespeare shows us that human communities and political regimes exist in order to further what Allen Tate has called the ‘one lost truth that must be perpetually recovered – the supernatural destiny of man.’ It is in the constant rediscovery of shared love—between all sorts and conditions of men—that the true meaning of human history lies concealed.

The recovery of “the supernatural destiny of man,” which elites and mystics really seek to understand and to achieve, is alone what prevents these same elites, these choiceful elites, from turning on politics and destroying it by imposing truly transcendent goals among its demands. What is new about our era, as opposed to the Christianity of an Augustine, of an Aquinas, or of a Shakespeare, is that now we actually see Christians themselves betraying their own traditions of political limitations. This, too, is why the testimony of both Jews and Christians actually living under Marxist states goes unheeded in the West. Shakespeare as Political Thinker not only allows us to reintroduce the transcendent into politics, both in their proper place, but it also enables political theory to instruct theology on how to recover its own reality. “But in our age,” Strauss wrote, “it is much less urgent to show that political philosophy is the indispensable handmaid of theology than to show that political philosophy is the rightful queen of the social sciences, the sciences of man and human affairs.” Some twenty years after these remarkable lines were written. I think, this book on Shakespeare suggests, through the supreme dramatic artist of our tradition, that both theology and social sciences are in desperate need of their own handmaid. This handmaid is none other than political philosophy now lying within the ken of the religious “subject” who knows that politics produces of itself no everlasting kingdom, even when proposed by “elites,” by “theologizers,” clerical or lay. While we can agree with Strauss that “it is not sufficient for everyone to obey and to listen to the Divine message of the City of Righteousness,” reflection on the political thinking in Shakespeare will also teach us that it is not sufficient to neglect this same Divine message.


Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. 

Republished with gracious permission from Modern Age (Summer/Fall 1982 – Volume 26 Nos. 3-4).

The idea of freedom that so united us in the past now divides us

Essays of the Week

A Solution for a Fragmented America by John Horvat If there is one thing that has always united, and can even still unite Americans, it is our love for freedom. Indeed, the mere mention of freedom has always served as an inebriating rallying cry that opens up seemingly infinite possibilities of realizing dreams. This concept is found in our myths and is intertwined in our national narratives. Soldiers fight and die for freedom. However, the idea of freedom that so united us in the past now divides us. Freedom used to be the means by which we celebrated our diversity. Today, it splinters us up and set us in radical discord with each other. It has become the point of contention that is tearing the country apart. The problem is not freedom itself. It is what freedom has come to mean... [MORE] Homo Sapiens: The Unfinished Animal by George Stanciu I don’t know about you, but I wish I had been born with the user’s manual for the human being, or at least received basic instruction in school about the fundamental equipment every human being possesses. In my youth, I was incredibly ignorant about my senses, emotions, memory, imagination, intellect, and will. For me, it was like waking up alone and finding myself on board the space shuttle, and, then, through trial and error trying to figure out how to fly the machine, without much success. After a series of personal disasters that are irrelevant to report here, I was forced to write a user manual to help guide me through life. I began with a cursory glance at animals other than Homo sapiens; my once-over convinced me that they have a complete life given to them by nature. No animal except Homo sapiens has any choice in what life to live... [MORE] Lent, Laughter, and the Joyful Soul by Dwight Longenecker As we enter the solemn season of Lent it is worth stopping to remember that the saints also say that we should keep a “joyful Lent.” There is nothing wrong with jousting and jesting at the same time—especially if the one we are jousting with and jesting about is ourself. While we should take the state of our souls seriously, we needn’t take ourselves so seriously. In this world darkened by the gloom of the seriously self-righteous, what is needed more than ever is the rumbustious, rollicking good humor of men and women who have seen the eternal perspective and have therefore put this world in its proper place. When we have seen that the whole great drama is in fact a comedy (because it has a happy ending), we are able to be confident and enjoy all that the good world and the good Lord have to offer... [MORE] Awakening the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian The great fairy tales and children’s fantasy stories attractively depict character and virtue. In these stories, the virtues glimmer as if in a looking glass, and wickedness and deception are unmasked of their pretensions to goodness and truth. These stories make us face the unvarnished truth about ourselves while compelling us to consider what kind of people we want to be. Much of what passes for moral education fails to nurture the moral imagination. Yet, only a pedagogy that awakens and enlivens the moral imagination will persuade the child or the student that courage is the ultimate test of good character, that honesty is essential for trust and harmony among persons, and that humility and a magnanimous spirit are goods greater than the prizes won by selfishness, pride, or the unscrupulous exercise of position and power... [MORE] The Virtue of Irrelevance by Roger Scruton The immediate effect of the relevance revolution was to introduce into the classroom topics relevant to the interests of their teachers—topics like social justice, gender equality, nuclear disarmament, third-world poverty, gay rights. It is a sad day for education when the loss of knowledge is described, instead, as a gain—when the old curriculum, based on subjects that had proved their worth over many decades, is replaced by a curriculum based purely on the causes and effects of the day. To think that relevance, so understood, shows a respect for children that was absent from the old knowledge-based curriculum is to suffer from a singular deficiency in sympathy. Respect for children means respect for the adults that they will one day become; it means helping them to the knowledge, skills, and social graces that they will need if they are to be respected in that wider world where they will be on their own and no longer protected... [MORE] Rhetoric and Danger by Glenn Arbery Being able to speak well and move people can also be dangerous. As important as it is to use language well, it is more important to use it to move people with the truth, as Socrates argued long ago. When we think of what happened in Europe in the early decades of the past century, we recognize again how important it is to be able to listen with understanding and to speak in such a way that the oldest and highest truths move us to see the present moment rightly. How else did Churchill help England turn the European darkness into its “finest hour”? We’re grateful once again to think how healthy our curriculum is—not to mention our policy of banning cell phones. In the age of Twitter, we will continue to cultivate rhetors and writers as we prepare our students for their own heroic future... [MORE] What Is Economics? The Duty to Bear Arms The American President: From Cincinnatus to Caesar Shakespeare as Political Thinker: Man’s Supernatural Destiny The Other Election Victory: A Call for Local Action Breaking the Conservative Nostalgia Bubble Is Vladimir Putin a Killer? The Iconographic Fiction of Flannery O’Connor Support The Imaginative Conservative

El secreto de Fátima: Sacrificio, penitencia, reparación por las ofensas, consagración de uno mismo... 100 años de mensaje

El cardenal Sarah explica el secreto de Fátima: «Es el Evangelio, sin compromisos con el mundo»

El cardenal Robert Sarah anima a dejarnos transformar por el llamado a la conversión en Fátima

CariFilii.es

Con ocasión del centenario de las apariciones también el Papa Francisco irá en peregrinación a Fátima, del 12 al 13 de mayo de 2017. Será el cuarto pontífice que visite el santuario portugués desde que, en 1930, la Iglesia reconociese oficialmente el carácter sobrenatural de las apariciones. Para conmemorar este extraordinario acontecimiento la editorial francesa Traditions Monastiques ha publicado un hermoso libro ilustrado destinado a los niños y titulado Fátima. María te confía el secreto de su corazón. El objetivo de esta publicación es contar a los pequeños de hoy en día la historia de Fátima y transmitirles los mensajes que la Virgen confió a los pequeños pastores hace cien años. Se trata de mensajes que siguen siendo actuales porque hablan de salvación, de conversión y de confianza en Dios en un mundo “aparentemente alegre”, pero “infinitamente triste”, “lleno de relativismo y hedonismo”, un mundo envuelto en la violencia y “contaminado por el pecado”; hablan de la fuerza de la oración (de manera particular del Santo Rosario), de la penitencia, de la entrega de uno mismo por la salvación de los pecadores y de la devoción al Corazón Inmaculado de María: estos son los puntos fundamentales del mensaje de la Virgen de Fátima. Palabras que, como afirma el cardenal Sarah en el prólogo, “más o menos hemos borrado -o prohibido-, de nuestro lenguaje”, pero que “corresponden a realidades espirituales que son esenciales” e “ineluctables” para un católico. La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana publicó el prólogo del cardenal Robert Sarah, prefecto de la Congregación para el Culto Divino, que traduce Cari Filii News: Prólogo del cardenal Robert Sarah a Fátima. María te confía el secreto de su corazón “¡Si sólo pudiera meter en el corazón de todos el fuego que tengo en el mío, que me hace amar tanto el Corazón de María!”: esto exclamaba la beata Jacinta. En 2017 se celebra el centenario de las apariciones de la Bienaventurada Virgen María en Fátima. Se nos ofrece la ocasión de hacer balance y ver cómo hemos acogido el mensaje que Dios quiso entregarnos en medio de la tempestad que sacudió a Europa a inicios del siglo XX: una guerra mundial cuyas atrocidades superan nuestra capacidad de comprensión (¡tanto que en la sola jornada del 22 de agosto de 1914 se contaron 27.000 soldados franceses muertos, convirtiéndose así en el día más sangriento de la historia de Francia!), la revolución comunista en Rusia con su miríada de masacres… De 1914 a 1918 Europa se cubrió con los cadáveres de millones de soldados y civiles inocentes: hombres, mujeres y niños… Hablamos justamente de niños: Nuestra Señora decidió hablar a tres de ellos desde mayo a octubre de 1917, tres niños pobres de un pueblo perdido en un país situado en el extremo del continente europeo y que se quedó al margen de estas masacres: Fátima en Portugal. ¿Qué dijo la Virgen María a los beatos Francisco y Jacinta Martos y a su prima Lucia Dos Santos, la futura religiosa carmelita de Coimbra? El libro que tengo la alegría de presentar lo explica a los niños de este nuevo milenio mostrando una notable capacidad pedagógica: cada capítulo presenta un aspecto del mensaje de Fátima (“Escucha”), seguido por la actuación del mismo llevada a cabo por los niños (“Entiendo”) y decisiones personales (“También yo…”). La lectura de este hermoso libro, bien ilustrado, nos hace entender que nuestros contemporáneos, cuya mentalidad está impregna de relativismo y hedonismo, necesitan convertir su corazón si quieren entender el significado más profundo del mensaje de Fátima. Sin embargo, los autores apuestan sobre el hecho de que los niños, sin duda de manera más fácil que los adultos, son capaces de adherirse espontáneamente a los aspectos que pueden parecer más duros o austeros del mensaje de Fátima. Y tienen razón en creerlo. Nuestra Madre celestial, en Fátima como en Lourdes, en Pontmain como en La Salette -por citar sólo algunas de las apariciones marianas más conocidas- ¿acaso no eligió a niños, y a niños pobres, para revelarnos el secreto de su Corazón Inmaculado? ¿Y cuál es este secreto? Nada más que el Evangelio, pero el Evangelio sin oropeles, sin acomodarse ni comprometerse con el espíritu de un mundo que se abre a todas las corrientes, tolerante, irreligioso y amoral, porque esta Buena Nueva del Evangelio es el anuncio de la salvación. Y nosotros sabemos que los beatos Francisco y Jacinta se tomaron tan en serio la salvación de las almas que cada día ofrecían sacrificios, a menudo difíciles para niños tan pequeños, “por la conversión de los pecadores”, hasta entregar totalmente su joven vida a la enfermedad que se los llevó con diez años de edad. El beato Francisco, que había entendido el sentido de las palabras “sacrificio” y “entrega”, ¿acaso no decía: “La Virgen María y Dios están muy tristes. Debemos ser nosotros quienes les consolemos”? También este mundo, aparentemente feliz, inundado de luces de todos los colores, borracho de felicidad, es un mundo infinitamente triste porque está contaminado por el pecado y la violencia ciega. Sólo la pureza y los sacrificios de los niños pueden devolver al mundo la verdadera alegría, la que viene del Cielo. Lucía, como Bernadette Soubirous, se retirará al silencio y a la oración de un convento hasta su muerte, en 2005. De hecho, la Virgen María le dijo que viviría mucho tiempo para difundir, a través de una vida ofrecida en holocausto de amor, la devoción a su Corazón Inmaculado. Sacrificio, penitencia, reparación por las ofensas, consagración de uno mismo: ¿estamos preparados para acoger estas palabras que, más o menos, hemos borrado -o prohibido-, de nuestro lenguaje? Y, sin embargo, estas palabras corresponden a realidades espirituales que son esenciales, porque están todas ellas presentes y asumidas en la Cruz de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo. Soy muy sensible a la preocupación de todos esos padres que desean que la educación de sus hijos esté impregnada de estas realidades ineluctables, signo de alegría en esta tierra y de felicidad eterna en la patria definitiva hacia la que nos encaminamos todos. Estos son los caminos de santificación que las autoras, Élisabeth Tollet y Jeanne-Marie Storez, nos ofrecen con este libro, son los medios del cristiano que es consciente del hecho que, como dijo el Señor a la Beata Angela de Foligno (gran mística italiana que vivió en el siglo XIII): “No te he amado en broma”. Sí, lo que puede salvar a los pecadores de la desesperación y, por lo tanto, del infierno -que los tres niños de Fátima pudieron ver- es sólo Jesús, y Jesús crucificado. Como los pastorcillos de Fátima nos han mostrado con su vida, se trata de dejarse transformar por el Amor de Dios, por su Misericordia, que nos ha sido plenamente revelada en la Cruz de Cristo. Contemplando las llagas del Señor Jesús, y de manera particular la de su corazón traspasado, al que está íntimamente unido el Corazón Inmaculado y doloroso de María, estamos llamados a dejarnos plasmar por Aquel que es el Cordero sin mancha, hasta convertirnos en una sola cosa con Él. Traducción de Helena Faccia Serrano (diócesis de Alcalá de Henares) parawww.carifilii.es. Texto del prólogo tomado de La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana. Fuente: www.religionenlibertad.com

El Santo Padre Francisco, dio la bendición al Prelado y al Vicario General y la hizo extensiva a todos los fieles de la Prelatura

Francisco recibe al nuevo prelado del Opus Dei y anima a priorizar las periferias de la clase media



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Fernando Ocáriz, nuevo Prelado del Opus Dei, con el Papa Francisco




El Papa Francisco recibió este viernes 3 de marzo en audiencia en el Vaticano al nuevo prelado del Opus Dei, el español Fernando Ocáriz, acompañado por el Vicario General de esta prelatura, el argentino Mariano Fazio.

Al inicio del encuentro que duró unos 25 minutos Francisco los saludó con un afectuoso abrazo. El prelado le agradeció al Papa la cercanía que manifestó tras el fallecimiento de su predecesor, Javier Echevarría, sus oraciones por el Congreso Electivo, y la confirmación que ha dado la cual lo confirmó como nuevo prelado.

A su vez, Ocáriz –señaló el comunicado de prensa del Opus Dei– le transmitió la unanimidad de unión de todos los fieles de la Obra con el Santo Padre, y le ilustró sobrelas prioridades pastorales que el Congreso ha definido para los próximos años en el Opus Dei: familia, juventud y sensibilidad activa por las personas más necesitadas.

Las periferias del mundo profesional e intelectual

El Papa Francisco agradeció la labor que la Prelatura realiza en todo el mundo, en especial la atención espiritual a cada persona, el ecumenismo en países de minoría católica y los proyectos sociales de integración. Además, según la nota del Opus Dei, animó a Ocáriz a dar prioridad a las ‘periferias’ de las clases medias y del mundo profesional e intelectual.

El Santo Padre Francisco, al dar la bendición al Prelado y al Vicario General, la hizo extensiva a todos los fieles de la Prelatura, y pidió que rezaran por él.

El Opus Dei fue fundado en 1928 por san Josemaría Escrivá, sacerdote español canonizado en 2002 por san Juan Pablo II, pontífice que estableció su condición de prelatura personal en 1982. Fomenta el carisma de la santificación personal a través del trabajo cotidiano.

Fuente: www.religionenlibertad.com

During Lent a good read is Dante's Inferno

Go to Hell!
by Fr. Dwight Longenecker

OK. I admit it. The headline was an attention grabber. 

But during Lent a good read is Dante's Inferno. 

My favorite translation used to be Dorothy Sayers,…


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Dante's Inferno and Moral Judgements

by Fr. Dwight Longenecker


People seem so confused about morality. Especially sexual morality. 

I'm reading Dante's Divine Comedy as Lenten reading and when he encounters

Francesca and Paolo in the second circle of hell where the lustful are...

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A desire to be protected from the meaning of our body has led only to a need to be protected from the ravages of reality.

Throw Off Your Rubber Chains! From Contraception to Transgenderism via Abortion

by Daniel Moody


It has taken mankind less than one hundred years to make the journey from an embrace of contraception to an embrace of “gender fluidity,” but the link between the two is not always obvious. 

To make their connection more apparent, let us consider the following analogy.

John is snuggled up on his sofa watching television. In front of him he can see moving pictures accompanied by matching sound. The presence of the pictures and sound explains why the TV is made of the materials it is, why it is the size it is, why there is a volume button, and so on. Everything about the TV makes sense. Now, let us suppose John places a layer of insulating material between plug and socket. With the flow of electricity thwarted, no pictures can be seen and no sound can be heard.

If John curls up on his sofa again and regards this picture-less version of watching TV to be valid, then we can confront him with some questions: why is the TV constructed from those materials rather than, say, sugar? why is the TV that size rather than the size of a sugar cube? and why is there a volume button?

Will John be able to supply credible answers to our questions? No. Having accepted that the flow of electricity is irrelevant to the television’s nature, he will be powerless to defend the TV’s substance, size, and so on. In short, absent the flow of electricity, nothing about the TV makes sense. John may as well snuggle up in front of a cushion from the sofa.

To transfer the analogy to contraception, we first need to recognize that the human body points in two directions. Firstly, at the level of the individual, each of us as male or female points toward another sex. (That is: independent of what we are thinking or doing, the body itself is being heterosexual.) Secondly, at the level of a sexual union, male and female point through each other, not toward another sex but toward another time: the future. Sexual difference points toward the possibility of new life. When we add in the fact that “sex” is the word by which we signify the nature of the whole of the body rather than a part or parts of it, we can say everything about being male or female makes sense.

But what happens when a layer of insulating material is placed between John and his wife, Joan? Well, if John regards this baby-less version of sexual union to be valid, then we have a couple of questions for him. Why does his wife need to be female? And why does he need to be male? Through a combination of time and the sheer weight of logic, John’s understanding of himself starts to disintegrate. If he thinks his body has nothing to do with the future, he will eventually need to accept that it has nothing to do with the other sex either.

This acceptance comes at an extortionate price. If John believes that his own sex is irrelevant to the sexual act he is performing, then he must embrace a second belief: namely, that his sex is irrelevant in all contexts. If a thing is deemed meaningless within the very context that defines its purpose, then that thing cannot be said to have any purpose at all. We are made of sex, so if the maleness of John has no meaning, then John has no meaning. This is the only logical conclusion available to him. Absent the flow of life, nothing about the body makes sense.

In placing a barrier between male and female, we also place a barrier between body and mind, with the mind no longer able to see that it is the mind of somebody who has meaning. Contraception starves the mind of ontology.

To be clear, the claim here is not that rendering the body meaningless is what makes contraception wrong. Rather, the point is that the deleterious nature of this logical effect is proof positive that the effect’s cause is also deleterious. But this is only the beginning of our journey.

From Contraception to Abortion

Upon losing sight of the fact that our embodiedness is inextricably tied both to relational identity and generations past and future, we must proceed to lose sight of two more things. Firstly, John needs to turn his back on the idea that there exists any objective reference point for sexual morality. Why? Because, in truth, marriage is the sexual right by which sexual wrongs can be known. If the use of contraception is not wrong, then an openness to new life is not right, and if marriage is not the right context for sex, then there is no right context—and, therefore, no wrong one. (Hence today’s insistence that the presence of consent is the only criterion for making a sexual act morally valid. The desire to do X justifies doing X.)

Secondly, John must abandon all possibility of locating meaningfulness in anything that flows out of the nature of the body. Meaninglessness cannot give birth to meaningfulness any more than starvation can give birth to a full stomach. If we have inwardly hidden the truth about our body, we must then destroy all external evidence of that truth. Our embrace of contraception compels us to hide the consequences of being made male and female. We must hide our babies.

The Legalization of Abortion and the End of Legal Sex

It is obvious to some, if not to all, that the legalization of abortion played a prominent part in unleashing many of the social ills prevalent today—cohabitation, a rise in sexual violence, and so forth. But just as a physical act brings about a physical effect, so too a legal act—an act of law—brings about a legal effect. Running parallel to the all-too-obvious effect of a physical act of abortion is a less obvious legal effect caused by its decriminalization. What is this legal effect?

This can be tricky terrain to negotiate, so let us break down the answer into three stages. The first stage is to remind ourselves of the relationship between personhood and sex. While it is not true that every human person is, say, male, it is true that every human male is a person—as is every human female. It follows that while there are two ways of being sexed, we can be a human person in only one way, which is to be embodied. Sex and human personhood are inseparable.

Now stage two. The state cannot suppose some persons (those in the womb) not to be persons and continue to recognize natural personhood in law. Here is why. If the state supposes that the child who is presently in the womb is not a natural person, then it also needs to suppose that I was not a natural person when, years ago, I too was a child in the womb. Either the child in the womb is a natural person and I am too, or the child in the womb is not and I am not either. Certainly, I cannot have become a natural person at some point during my own lifetime! Expressed another way, it is not possible to legally deny the natural personhood of the child in the womb only, as each of us once was that child. The state needs to come down on the side of either everybody or nobody, and through abortion laws the state decides not to pledge allegiance to everybody.

Stage three brings together stages one and two, thereby revealing the not-so-obvious legal effect of abortion. If abortion cannot be legalized while leaving intact a legal recognition of natural personhood, then a legal recognition of sex cannot survive abortion laws either, since to deny natural human personhood is to deny natural embodied personhood. The two are the same thing.

Where does this leave us? It leaves us realizing that the devil is in the detail. Signing up for legal permission to be free from the natural consequences of being sexed translates to signing away any access to legal recognition of who we naturally are. When abortion entered law, sex exited.

Thus, we arrive at our final stop: gender identity.

Gender Identity and Tyranny

If we limit the number of components in play to two—contraception and sexual morality—we can say the link between the components has been enunciated many times, perhaps most famously by Elizabeth Anscombe. Anscombe joined the dots from contraception to “gay marriage” quick as a flash—too quickly for some to follow her line of reasoning. More recently, Charles Rice added two more components: law and tyranny. In what sadly proved to be his final book, Contraception & Persecution, Rice perceptively draws attention to what we might call “the ownership of law.” He asks, if God is no longer considered to be in the business of making laws, then who is? From the state’s point of view, the answer is, well, the state.

Rice explains the link between contraception and tyranny in terms of the government filling a moral vacuum created by the acceptance of contraception. While I agree with his assessment, a second explanation is available to us if we add a fifth and final component to the mix, which is identity.

As is the case with law, the concept of human identity is a natural monopoly. It cannot have more than one owner, or else we human persons would have nothing in common with one another. If we suppose God no longer owns the patent for law, then—as Rice notes—ownership must have transferred fully to the state. The same must be true of the patent for human identity. Laws govern persons, and persons are subject to laws, so whoever owns either of the patents must in fact own both.

In requiring sex to vanish from law, abortion represents a paradigm shift in human identity: out with the old, given sexual identities of male and female, and in with the new, chosen “gender identities” of “male,” “female,” both, neither, and other. The problem with this claimed state takeover, of course, is that when we close our eyes, the world does not disappear. It just disappears from our view.

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