Cri de cœur from One Peter Five's founder about the current state of the Church

I tend to be perhaps too optimistic at times. But there's always One Peter Five to bring me back the earth of our realities, as it were. Here Steve Skojec whips up a true Cri de Coeur about the current state of Holy Church.


The Comments are good, too.

How bad are things in the Church, though, really? Pretty awful. You may think Steve is overdoing it, but he isn't. However, being the phlegmatic character that I am, somehow I'm not losing sleep over it. No matter how bad things get, after all, we (Catholics and Orthodox) still have enough validly ordained priests around confecting the sacraments that God is truly with us in the Real Presence. That's better than the Protestants and their Real Absence. 

But they're suffering miserably, as well. Apostasy is in the air: the state is pagan, Gays are in your face, and Islam is at the gates. The time for blasé Catholicism has past; the time for heroic Catholicism has come.

And there's always surprises, such as: http://wdtprs.com/blog/2017/12/nuncio-in-switzerland-the-old-latin-mass-is-the-future-of-the-church/

There's always hope. And we've always prayer. So, get to it.

Otherwise, it's back to the beginning, actually. Lions, burning stakes. Nero. Caligula. Only we've got Islam to contend with this time around.

As Yogi Bera famously said, it's "deja vu all over again".

Happy New Year.

An Préachán

Professor spanks former student hard about "Historical Jesus"

Great article here from John Dickson, responding to a former student's "Jesus never existed" article that the Washington Post published here. The latter is a marvelously embarrassing example of the New Atheist stupidity, and John Dickson "pulls no punches".


Very, very worthwhile.


Here's an excerpt:

"Mythicists" are the historical equivalent of the anti-vaccination crowd in medical science. They are controversial enough to get media attention. They have just enough doctors, or doctors in training, among them to establish a kind of "plausible deniability." But anyone who dips into the thousands of secular monographs and journal articles on the historical Jesus will quickly discover that mythicists are regarded by 99.9% of the scholarly community as complete "outliers," the fringe of the fringe. And when mainstream scholars attempt to call their bluff, the mythicists, just like the anti-vaccinationists, cry "Conspiracy!" This is precisely what Raphael does when with a wave of his hand he dismisses the apparently "atrocious methods" of historians of Jesus. It is as if he thinks he wins the game by declaring all its rules stupid and inventing his own path. No, that is how you get yourself disqualified.

Secondly, no student - let alone an aspiring scholar - could get away with suggesting that Christians "ought not to get involved" in the study of the historical Jesus. This is intellectual bigotry and has no place in academia, or journalism. I would likewise fail any Christian student who suggested that atheists should not research Jesus because they have an agenda. Nobody in the vast field of historical Jesus scholarship operates with such an us-and-them mentality. This is why the methods of history are so important. They are how we assess each other's work. We don't fret about other scholars' private beliefs and doubts. We judge their handling of the acknowledged evidence according to the rules of historical inquiry. Anything else would be zealotry.

An Préachán