Everyone,
Christmas
greetings and blessings to all. It's been a crazy year, and isn't over
yet. So here are a few Christmas musings, for what they're worth.
What Christmas means for Christianity
Christianity
is the hardest religion to believe partly because it demands you
practice a profound moral code that puts yourself last, and others –
even those who hate you and even seek to kill you. Judaism and
especially Islam know nothing of this, but this is almost central to the
Faith and is non-negotiable. But of course most Christians do what they
can to get out of it, including leaving the Church.
Yet the above exists because of what is truly central to the Faith: our own incarnation in Christ.
Basic
Points in what that means, exactly:
·
The Incarnation: Absolutely
necessary and central to salvation
· It makes Christianity completely different from Judaism or Islam.
· Different versions of Christianity understand this a
greater or lesser degree, as is obvious not just from their theology,
but from their worship.
·
God, in His Second Person, the Logos, becomes a human person:
Jesus / Joshua: Yeshu'a (Yehoshu'a: meaning "Yahweh is salvation").
Why the Incarnation? Why
did God have to become man? It's a blasphemous idea to both Jews
and Muslims, after all. They don't remotely see the need for it. That answer: to make
Infusion of Grace possible. Christmas is significant because it is God's
public opening act in this Grace infusion program, which the Lord God
began to prepare for via His Covenants.
·
God’s Incarnation didn’t lower God so much as elevate human nature, in Christ,
enabling…
·
"Theosis" (Divinization)
which by grace – not by nature – is our incorporation into Christ, raising us
up to participate in His Divinity (as St. Peter teaches in 2 Peter 1.4).
Usually described in the Western Church as an Infusion of Grace, our natures are changed. Protestantism teaches Imputation of Grace: God assigns grace to us but doesn’t actually
divinize or change our nature.
·
St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we
might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B)
and [CCC 460]
·
St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to
make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man,
might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4)
[CCC 460]
·
This teaching is stated in many
ways throughout the New Testament, which is the teaching about the Seventh Covenant: the Most Holy Eucharist. Examples:
·
John 1:12 “But to all who received him,
who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were
born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of
God.” (Obviously, a new creation)
·
2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore,
if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is
here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4 might well put it best; see also Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24;
Colossians 3:8-12. St. John's gospel, however, teaches it best,
and John uses the Greek philosophical word "Logos" baptizing it into
God's service. (St. John knew how to speak to philosophical Greeks
better than St. Paul did!)
·
Two Old Testament examples: Isaiah 65:17; Ezekiel 36:25-26
·
Note: In general, The Baby born at Christmas grows up to demand
the impossible of “ordinary” humans. In Matthew 5, during the Sermon on the
Mount, Jesus gives the Beatitudes, then says we are “salt of the earth” and “light
of the world”, and discusses how He has come not
to do away with the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them. He discusses elevated behavior regarding anger,
adultery, divorce, making oaths and not retaliating (“turn the other cheek”)
and love our enemies. He ends with "You,
therefore, must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect."
(5:48) All that is something manifestly impossible for “normal” human beings
to do, but possible if one is incarnated into the Incarnation.
Such talk is only sane – literally – if the talker Himself is the Logos.
Logos: The
Word, the Divine Mind expressed, also equally the Decree and Mandate of
God, spoken in Himself, the faculty of speech in the Divine Mind
referenced in Genesis One: "God said, let there be light." Logos
is also the Reason, Cause, and Ground of the Divine Being manifested in
act (God is Act: He has no potential), and of course eternally expressing the Reckoning and Score and
Judgment of God, all of these is a PERSON, a Person Incarnated in a
teenage Jewish girl by the Holy Ghost and laid in a manger, a feed
trough for animals, to represent His being our new Manna, i.e. the food of our present desert for
our transformation in Christ.
Salvation “works” in us as individuals through the sacraments,
formal covenant oaths, by which we partake of the nature of God, in Christ
(God’s grace is infused in us).
- Baptism removes Original Sin, thus we’re free to…
·
Receive Christ in the Holy
Eucharist…
·
And to keep this “New Creation”
and grow in the Divine, we have Confession, a sacrament of vital importance
because it restores us to our baptismal purity.
Christmas
is significant because the Divine Logos publicly becomes one of us to
elevate us into God's nature. Theosis. That's its importance. (He began
the Incarnation when the Blessed Mother conceived Him by the power of
the Holy Ghost, but, except to family – St. Joseph, St. Elizabeth, the unborn John the Baptist – it was yet a secret.)
It
is our spiritual and conscious embrace of this doctrine, this dogma,
that enables to to do what I first mentioned: embrace all those living
men who would resist it, to the point of killing us. That's the
significance of Christmas.
The Novus Ordo
With
all this in mind, then, consider that the big religious news this
Nativity is Pope Francis' reiterated attack on the ancient liturgy, a
far more "vertical" God-focused liturgy in its nature than the usual
Protestant style of non-Grace infusing "praise and worship of a community" of the
Logos-God. The Novus Ordo is a way-station between Catholic/Orthodox
liturgical worship and Protestant worship. Intentionally set up that way by "Grace-of-Ba'al" Bugnini and accepted by Paul VI, it embodies the vertical officially
with an over-all horizontal community praise and worship service. The
community is the point of the latter worship, and thus after 50 years or
so of the NO Mass, 70-some percent of Catholics don't believe in the
Real Presence. (Or even heard of it. This should have been foreseen, and many did. But these
prophets were ignored.)
So,
obviously, the vertical TLM loses a great deal of its meaning through
its forced appearance in the horizontal NO, yet Christmas is significant
because it slaps diapers in our faces, it forces on us this monumental
meaning of the Logos nursing at a young woman's breast, looking into her
eyes, seeing humans as a Human for the first time in his Mother face, learning to speak from her: the reality-creating Logos learnig to speak from young Miriam (hence the exhalation of Mary and her title of Co-Remptrix, with
Bergoglio denies). Those are the reflections Christmas gives, if we bother to contemplate it.
Bergoglio's
actions toward the ancient Liturgy (more than a thousand years older
than the Council of Trent, BTW: it should not be called "Tridentine") is
shocking, cruel, putrescent, and so incomprehensibly stupid. Traditionis Custodes
and the just-released Roche Dubia response commentary on it are stupid
to begin with, and full of contradictions, illogic, and illegalities. As
pointed out by Roberto de Mattei in https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2021/12/motus-in-fine-velocior-2-with-divisive.html:
Furthermore, as the abbé Claude Barthe has observed, in the very act of presuming to abolish Summorum Pontificum, Traditionis custodes
condemns itself to receive the same treatment in the future, exactly as
happened for the new principle of religious freedom of Vatican II,
which in presuming to invalidate the Magisterium prior to Pius XII
relativized itself.
The
most attentive jurists have also noted how the need for synodality,
proclaimed by Pope Francis, is contradicted by the centralization of
decision-making power established by the Responsa, which, without
specific pontifical approval, nullify the operation of one of the
linchpins of Canon Law: canon 87-§1, according to which “a diocesan
bishop, whenever he judges that it contributes to their spiritual good,
is able to dispense the faithful from universal and particular
disciplinary laws issued for his territory or his subjects by the
supreme authority of the Church.”
Both the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes and the Responsa ad dubia
are therefore intrinsically illegal acts, carried out while the Supreme
Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, guardian of the Church’s canon
law, idly looks on at a massacre of the rules that seems to have become
the only rule of the pontificate.
Excellent
points, my friends, are they not? What is sauce for the goose will be
sauce for the gander, a simple principle Bergoglio and Roche are
ignorant of. They are "hoisted by their own petards" in classic
fashioned: the very things they do in hubris against their perceived
foes is exactly what Hubris (the avenging angel) will smack them down
with.
In
my spare time, I've been reading widely and my gut feeling (worth what
you paid for it) is Bergoglio, Ol' Bergi, massively overstepped himself
and will see widespread opposition and outright defiance, as he'll also
see the spineless/faithless kowtow to him. But what is that good for?
They'll cravenly kowtow to whoever replaces him, Trad or not. They're
worms, not men. 50 years of evidence that the Novus Ordo Mass doesn't work, and they still obstinately insist it does? And naturally enough, even such a disparate, stark range
of extreme reactions will overthrow what little mind the Argentine has
left. (And using that evil Arthur Roche as his foil was a mistake: that former ice skater is just loathed in the Church outside the hard Left.)
I'll provide a few links to articles I think excellently comment
insightfully on this, for those interested:
An excerpt:
Excerpt:
In
conclusion, the motu proprio, if one wishes to read it in depth, is the
recognition of a defeat. It is an apparent act of strength that covers a
basic weakness and incompetence. The reformed missal has been a
catastrophe on every level: liturgical, dogmatic, moral. The result,
plain for all to see, is that it has emptied churches, convents, and
seminaries. Not being able to impose it by virtue of tradition, which it
does not convey, one wishes to impose it by dint of law. But this is an
underhanded operation, founded on deception, and therefore destined to
fail. It is not a fatal stroke dealt against the Roman Rite, but the
euthanasia of the modern rite. It is not a death blow, but a life-giving
pruning of the missal of St Pius V, which – by the hatred it arouses
among the modernist fringes of the hierarchy – confirms that it is “the
most beautiful thing this side of Heaven”, handed down to us by our
fathers for us to pass on to our children, even if we should have to
crimson it with our blood.
Christmas for myself:
I
think it curious that I never liked the Novus Ordo. Why would that be?
Consciously, it's the only one I really remember from childhood.
Consciously, I find, but I discover the older Mass has left roots in my
unconscious mind and soul (see below). But it never "worked" for me.
Maybe I was too used to Protestant services? I knew them well, or well
enough. Thus the NO was just too Protestant for me? Or maybe I
subconsciously "mind-melded" with my very Traditionalist mother, who was
always careful never to openly denigrate the NO. Or was it something
else? Angelic influence? Or just dumb luck? I must say that after my
first restored TLM at the old Holy Family downtown in Columbus, Ohio, I
had a weird (in every sense, certainly "fated") onset of memory to
suddenly recall vivid pre-Vatican II memories I had totally forgotten.
Just amazing, and a blessing (albeit an eerie one). It was like waking
one morning to remember you had lived in Atlantis.
A few other articles:
And Fr. John Zuhlsdorf has this important info about the Bishop of Phoenix maintaining the TLMs in his diocese: https://wdtprs.com/2021/12/good-news-in-the-diocese-of-phoenix-regarding-tc-and-the-dd/ As Fr. Zuhlsdorf puts it: "In effect, this doesn’t exactly “round file” TC and the DD. It is more like to…
… leaving it out on the steps in the rain."
A "War of Position"
Perhaps.
It's obviously a holding action. Clearly many bishops who want to defend the TLM are planning an
incremental "war of position" rather than fighting a "war of maneuver."
Much depends on how long Bergoglio lives. We need true stand-up,
spit-in-your-face fighting, however, like that that unequivocal
statement by the Dominican Br. Louis-Marie de Blignières, noted above. We need the "Molon Labe" spirit! Such responses as Bishop Olmsted's are more like "running out the clock" at a ball game. We'll see.
Anyway,
this Christmas, what with the continuing Covid fraud and the Bergoglio
farce, we should probably ponder at some prayerful depth just what the
Incarnation means, and the best way to "Do this in memory of me."
Merry Christmas, friends.
An Préachán
