Oedipus and Reality

Because of the great Dr. Sanity, and because I am surrounded by people who have created their own worlds and are completely out of touch with reality, I am inspired to write again about reality and objectivity. From a Catholic point of view, objectivity is holiness, the putting on the mind of Christ. See several posts below. Only when we are truly humble, admitting our own sin, limitations, and even small talents, can we love. Only by standing back and taking an objective  look at life, as it really is, can we love. Love does not play games, or invent parallel worlds. It intersects with the worlds of others, bringing reality, truth into situations and creating freedom.

Freedom is not available to those who want their own way and only see their reality. Freedom is being open to truth and accepting that reality which is not of one's own making, but in the case of the Christian, God's making. Assent to God's Will is reality.

I had cancer, and I had to accept the consequences. This is reality. At first, one goes into a denial, a status quo, until one cannot deny the symptoms, or the diagnosis. The quicker one accepts the truth, the more easily it is to deal with the losses which inevitably come. That God allows cancer, or death, or separation, only means that we are given an opportunity to face reality and be freedom. Deceit creates chains, unhealthy heavy chains, which hold one down to a prison of lies and unreality. Truth breaks those chains, be it through an illness, or treatment for alcoholism or psychological counseling or the Sacrament of Confession. Basically, humility is just truth. I am this and not this. I can do this and not this. I can be this and not this.

The lies of our century have created tyrannies. All tyrannies rely on propaganda, the building up and maintaining of lies. Why people assent to believe in propaganda is a mystery to me.I taught college and university levels classes, including logic for years. I gave up in 2010, when I realized that the administrators on the whole were as out of touch with reality as my students. This Post-Modern phenomenon  is the result of complete subjectivism. The world of POTUS is his world, and the world of my student Z was his world and the world of my administrator Y was her world. The thing which I do not understand is that there are many highly intelligent people in Congress and the Supreme Court, in America, in the Catholic Church, who "seem" grounded. Are they all in their own little worlds? Is this how most people survive? As a person raised on Aristotle and Aquinas, I was taught that truth begins with what is, what is natural in nature, for example, or what we perceive objectively. I am not sure how people lose objectivity. A good teacher has it, a good parent has it, and a good spouse had it. How can a person really love without objectivity? Real love is objective. It is God's Love.

How can we trust the nation to a group of people who are living in cloud-cuckoo-land? It is very scary, as some other nations, which are living in reality (are there any) could easily take advantage of our Disneyland outlook. The delusions are so broad and deep, is there any chance of this changing without great catastrophes waking us all up? Ah, the Greeks, who invented that word, catastrophe, knew all about the change of the wheel of fortune, the facing of truth for such as Oedipus, through tragedy. I do not wish for this, but it does seem, as in Greek drama, inevitable. In Greek drama, which I taught and in which my son did some acting, there is a movement of the poetry from strophe to antistrophe to catastrophe.

The prologue and the entrance ode occur followed by the strophe, the turning of the chorus, physically either on or off stage, at a different level. The antistrophe is another turn, matching the meaning of the text, the poetry, so that the physical movement imitates the words. The catastrophe is the sudden changing of the action, following some episode, where, at least in the great tragedies, a sudden event of horror occurs, such as Oedipus' realization that he killed his father and married his mother. This is followed by the stationary ode and the exit ode.  

We are headed in the States for the catastrophe. As long as people, as even the heroes or heroines in the Greek dramas, live in deceit or darkness, there is no truth. The catastrophe brings truth, light and usually, peace. 

We can only hope. Oedipus' story is told in three plays: the trilogy of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. These tragedies have three dramas to work out some type of peace and reconciliation. Do we have time?

Begging because of a sacrilege; if someone can allow a sacred object to be desecrated, it has already happened in the mind and soul of those who have lost the Faith

On Father Ray Blake's blog today is the posting of the sacrilegious selling of Church plate, and other sacred objects at the upcoming Ramsgate Abbey sale. I am horrified. My American family paid for stained glass windows, a gold tabernacle, and other sacred objects for several churches over the years in the Midwest. We assume that these things would stay in a Catholic Church. There is no excuse for selling sacred objects, some used in Adoration, such as monstrances, and even chalices and ciboria used in the Mass. Why did the monks not give those objects to local churches, or to the great abbeys at Buckfast and Downside, which would have cared for these?

I cannot express the inappropriateness of this sale. It amounts to stealing.

However, I am going to beg. My own son and others in the seminaries may not have families wealthy enough to buy them the chalices necessary as gifts for their ordination days. I know a Latino son of a widow who is going to be ordained, for example, from a poor family. Also, there are missionary groups which do not have such beautiful items to use on the altar. Why not, those of you who can, buy some of these objects which have held the Body and Blood of Christ? ( And, do they believe that Christ is Truly Present at Ramsgate Abbey? ) Then, give them to a temporary deacon or missionary, or seminarian? How can the monks defend themselves, even to us lowly laity, who pay for these things?

Burning of a Consecrated Host in Church Ware at a Black Mass 

In the States, art connoisseurs buy these sacred objects for their dining room buffets, living rooms, bedrooms, entrance ways. I know of a homosexual couple who collect religious items from Catholic Churches in California. Why, I do not know. Their house is full of these items sold in auctions.

Or, Satanists buy them for Black Masses. A good friend of mine, years ago in the special branch of a police force in Minneapolis, explained this to me.

Please, Catholics -- save these items--please.
Catalogue-- here-- Save these objects from dishonor, and possible blasphemy and sacrilege.

I am not an emotional person. Ask my family, but I am sobbing while writing this posting.

The Real St. Brigid, "the Mary of the Gael"

Today is the feast day of one of Ireland's patrons, St. Brigid, 451-525. Now, since I have been in Eire, I have discovered some craziness among certain groups of Catholics and lapsed Catholics, who have become infected with the virus of New Age nonsense. Many ideas floating around this great Saint Brigid have become more popular than her real person, who in her own right without the help of New Age myth-makers, was a great leader, abbess of double monastery, (like my patron here, St. Etheldreda), and a holy woman of God.

So, now, in 2012, St. Brigid is being hailed as, (get ready), a feminist, a goddess of the Celts, the first woman priest of Eire, and a bishop, among other things. Why the pagans have captured the story of this woman, who founded the greatest monastery in Eire, Kildare, remains a mystery only clear within the Celtic talent for story, and the mixing of truth and fiction. St. Brigid was famous throughout Europe early on for her own accomplishments and love of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. A good place to start real research is found here. These strong women of the early Church in Ireland and Great Britain, such as Ss. Brigid and Etheldreda, deserve our respect for who they really were, not for our modern, political, and even silly interpretations. St. Brigid stands above all us women here in Ireland, and does not need revisionists to cloud her many achievements for Christ and His Church. But, that is the impetus of New Age cults, to take what is good and separate such things as saints and angels from the Church, so that the members can have "religion" without ethics or dogma. Neat, but deadly for the soul.

The Cradle of Modernist Heresies

In 1983, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, who was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now Pope Benedict XVI, issued a document under the name of the Declaration on Masonic Associations.  The link is on the name.

In that document, the long history of the condemnation of Freemasonry by the Church, since 1738, was reiterated and clearly defined. The original condemnation of Clement XII, In eminenti apostolatus specula  was upheld.

Since that time, I have had many Catholics, in the United States and in Europe claim that the Church had removed the automatic excommunication on a Catholic who joined the Masons. This is not and has never been so. One has to understand that the Church's condemnation of Masonry is based not merely on the fact that it is a secret organization, but that it upholds several Modernist heresies. Firstly, Cardinal Ratizinger wrote that:

Therefore the Church’s negative judgment in regard to Masonic association remains unchanged since their principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden. The faithful who enrol in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion. He went on to state that no bishop had any right to change this. It is interesting that the SSPX press, Angelus Press, has one of the best books on the evils and pitfalls of Masonry. One can find it here. However, I want to concentrate on a few of the Modernist heresies found in Freemasonry. The first is indifferentism. This heresy proclaims that all religions are the same and that religion has no place in the public life of a nation or people.Mirari Vos  On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism written in 1832 by Gregory XVI is a forgotten document of the Church. Indifferentism leads to a relativism about religion, stating that all are either the same, or so subjective as to mean only what a person sincerely believes. This pluralism leads to another aspect that because all religions are relative and the same, these beliefs have no role in the public life, cannot affect politics, or governmental decisions. Of course, as the Catholic Church is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, this heresy is condemned as contrary to both Revelation and Tradition. Indifferentism leads to a denial of the supernatural, as if all beliefs are equal or subjective, there is no hierarchy, no Revelation from God. Also denied in this heresy would be dogma, for the same reasons. It is interesting that in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907, itself peppered with some Modernist heresies, that this statement from Newman is quoted in the section on indifferentism:  No truth, however sacred, can stand against it (the Catholic Church) in the long run; and hence it is that in the Pagan world, when our Lord came, the last traces of the religious knowledge of former times were all but disappearing from those portions of the world in which the intellect had been active and had a career" (Apologia, chap. v).  The second heresy of many in Masonry is eirenism.This is what I call the forgotten heresy.  The condemnation of eirenism is found in Pope Pius XII's encyclical, Humani Generis. This great work condemns existentialism, historicism (Gramsci watch), immanentism and other isms. The point of eirenism is, in the words of the Pope: setting aside the questions which divide men, they aim not only at joining forces to repel the attacks of atheism, but also at reconciling things opposed to one another in the field of dogma. And as in former times some questioned whether the traditional apologetics That branch of the science of theology which explains the reasons for the Church's existence and doctrine of the Church did not constitute an obstacle rather than a help to the winning of souls for Christ, so today some are presumptuous enough to question seriously whether theology and theological methods, such as with the approval of ecclesiastical authority are found in our schools, should not only be perfected, but also completely reformed, in order to promote the more efficacious propagation throughout the world among men of every culture and religious opinion. This heresy clearly seeks after a type of syncretism, a religion of unity, wherein divisions vanish and people come together to worship some sort of agreed upon god. I would venture to say that eirenism leads directly to Worship of the State. This is the atmosphere of religion and philosophy in the United States at this very moment. The State declares that there is no religious right to conscience, thereby setting up its own standards for so-called moral or ethical behavior. To use an example, abortion is ok because a Supreme Court decision determined it was so, and because further legislation supports it. The State has substituted itself for the Church in matters of conscience.  Wake up, American Catholics. So, the heresies sleeping in Masonry have awakened and taken over the mind-set of the nation's leaders. Simple and neat. What is happening and has happened in Catholic education, wherein schools are rebelling against the Teaching Magisterium (look here in California today, this minute) is a direct result of the concepts of eirenism. Schools and other facilities play down differences for the sake of community unity to the detriment of Catholic Teaching.  It is too late to change this huge momentum, hidden in Masonry by choice, and held in some minds by lethargy and laziness. To take the easiest way out, to placate, to be politically correct is eirenism.  The greatest heresy in Masonry is immanentism, which destroys the Revelation of God as Trinity, replacing Him with a vague, abstract presence found in the world. Pope Pius X condemned this in  Pascendi Dominici Gregis. As Catholics, we do not have much time to read all of these documents, but what is happening today in America, with the attack on the Church from the present administration concerning freedom of religion and freedom on conscience is an attack prophesied by all the documents above. If Church leaders knew their own teaching, they would have seen this coming, or even better, stopped these idealistic heresies from fomenting in the people in the pews. And, as laymen, we only have ourselves to blame if we find ourselves marginalize, persecuted, imprisoned, martyred. See my post below on the stages of persecution and the ideologies which push these heresies. The one I have left for this posting is Freemasonry, which seems to hold many of the Modernist heresies and is able to produce these in the market place as goods. As one can tell, I taught a history of ideas, history of encyclicals, history of heresies. Nothing has changed in 2012 which was not there in 1732 or earlier. Sadly, the revisionist historians within the Catholic Church look like they have won the day. I honestly feel that we are in the times of Arianism, the greatest heresy which rocked and split the Church. However, the Church prevailed, and will, as Christ promised until the end of time. But, the Lord did not assure us it would be a large, powerful, or influential Church. Perhaps the words of one of the Desert Fathers are applicable. I think, but I am not sure, it was Abba Pambo. "When asked by a young monk if they were of the greatest generation because they saw and cast out devils, and prayed, fasted, and converted  and healed people, the Abba answered. 'No, we are not the greatest generation. We have obvious power. The next generation will see Christ establish His Kingdom among the Nations, and there will be unity for awhile. But, the greatest generation is the one, which under great persecution, will survive. They are the greatest and the last.'"