Filed under: Uncategorized
The film Ida, directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski, was released in 2014 to huge critical acclaim. Shot in black and white under an austere Polish sky, the young novice Anna is sent out by the superior of her convent to visit her aunt Wanda before taking the religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The Mother Superior hints that she will learn things that are important to her, and she should take as long as is necessary to learn them. The aunt subsequently reveals to Anna that her real name is Ida, that she is Jewish, that Ida’s mother was Wanda’s beloved sister and her father a man that Wanda disliked, and that they both were murdered during the war. Continue reading
Filed under: abortion, Culture and Catholicism, Uncategorized, Vatican II | Tags: abortion, divorce, Infidelity, Loveless, marriage, Run the Novel, separation of Church and state
Andrei Zvyagintsev’s new film Loveless is talking to the world-wide pro-life movement. In fact, it is screaming: support for life must be broader than current initiatives! Pro-life political demands are limited to a call for an end to legal abortion and sometimes, more faintly, for ‘support’ of women who choose not to kill their unborn infants. Loveless argues that ending abortion only results, all other things being equal, in the at least equally painful victimization of those infants who survive abortion and make it to birth.
Filed under: Vatican II | Tags: Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis, the Council, The Family, Vatican II
To start with something positive, always recommended, the authors of a recent post by ever fecund Mercatornet do really understand how special the family is. They call it the nuclear family, doubtless playing on the negative associations with the word nuclear, but it is the Christian family of which they speak, and yes, it is very very special. And they say it must be completely destroyed because it makes marriage too special. Continue reading
Was the horrific death of Father Jacques Hamel in a rural parish in Rouen, France, a martyrdom, or a murder?
It is more than an intellectual distinction both to Father Hamel–as a Get-Out-of-Purgatory-Free Card due to all bona fide martyrs–and to us. The conditions for martyrdom link to major issues: is the Church we see the True Faith? Is SSPX still strong in its opposition to Vatican II?
Filed under: Catholic Liturgy | Tags: Ad Orientem, Cardinal Sarah, Catholic, Flannery O'Connor, Islam, liturgy, secularism, traditional mass, Vatican II
I am reading Zola’s work on Lourdes. It focuses on that most extreme contradiction between our Faith and modernism, when the doctors have given up on certain hard cases, and in desperation the suffering people bring their awful pain to Our Lady at Lourdes and ask for a miracle.
A miracle. God intervening in our behalf to reverse nature and to cure us. Continue reading
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alfredo Ottaviani, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Catholic church, Catholic religious state, Catholic values, Joseph Trabbic, Vatican II
So said Crisis magazine when it published a Vatican II apologia by Dr. Joseph Trabbic, “Vatican II Does Not Contradict Ottaviani on the Matter of Church and State” (his doctorate is from Fordham, 2008). Nothing to see here, folks, just move on! This is the tiresome refrain from those who have accommodated themselves to the post-council Church. A lot of the time they’re making their living from it. Continue reading
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: abortion, birth rate, Blase Cupich, Catholic, Catholic political party, Catholic values, FIDESZ, Hungarian Constitution, Hungary, liturgy, Quadragesimo anno, Quas Primas, religious liberty, religious state, Rorate Caeli blog, SSPX, subsidiarity, Tea Party, Vatican II
A post on Italian blog Cordialiter was re-posted recently with commentary on Rorate Caeli. Cordialiter says Catholics must not get trapped in the box the media has prepared for it, a false choice between Tea Party traditionalism or Socialist-flavored modernism. The blog says on the contrary, traditionalists must be ‘”True friends of the poor” and proceeds not exactly to say how to do that, but very definitely how not to do so: by accepting the perks of middle class existence, ignoring the social issues and focusing on worthy liturgy. That would be wrong, in Cordialiter’s thinking.
Filed under: Culture and Catholicism, Uncategorized | Tags: modesty, Pentecost, prayer, religious fashion
It is Pentecost Sunday at a traditional Catholic church west of Chicago. It is June, cooler this morning than yesterday, with a little rain and thunder during the night so that the air is utterly clear of moisture, and in the diamond-bright lemon-yellow sunshine pouring full upon us from the east stained glass, every dressing of the altar is in sharp focus. Continue reading
Filed under: abortion, Culture and Catholicism, depopulation, Vatican II | Tags: abortion, anti-abortion, is the pro-life movement winning, pro-life movement, progress in pro-life movement
Joe Jensen, the youth outreach activist employed by Chicago’s venerable Pro-Life Action League, has recently written a piece for the Bellarmine Forum in which he discusses the gains the pro-life movement has achieved since 1973. It’s a lot, according to the report. Jensen lists these accomplishments: it has kept abortion and its 55 million victims in American faces on the front pages of hometown newspapers, with graphic photos and sickening details ; because of this steady media attention, more people are becoming pro-life, including most doctors, who now refuse to do abortions, and also, with all the attention to health code violations and numerous abuses, many ‘clinics’ have been shut down. Even more significant, there is a strongly growing trend in tough legislation protecting the baby at a state level. Besides all that, help is being offered to women through the many sidewalk counselors, pregnancy resource centers, and counseling initiatives like Project Rachel and Rachel’s Vineyard.
These are real achievements, and the growing anti-abortion trend is so clear that even NPR’s recent segment on abortion reported that the Supreme court has become much more ‘conservative’ and may surprise us and reverse its decades-long promotion of infant death by calling those buffer zones around clinics that limit access to sidewalk counselors to the women entering to abort ‘unconstitutional.’ Yes!
But hold the champagne. Continue reading
The White Lily Blog 