Friends,
Following
up on my earlier criticism of Professor Scott Hahn's assertion in the
Mass of the Ages 3 movie that every bishop in the world should "fall in
love with the Blessed Virgin Mary", I received a number of comments that
make me realize "What is love?" is a question that first must be
answered in order to understand how cloyingly mawkish, just plainly over- sentimental, Hahn's comment is.
- But first of all, please note he is speaking of bishops using their full Apostolic powers. In my original essay, I reported Hahn as saying, “All bishops and priests ought to fall hopelessly in love with the Blessed Virgin Mary.”
- I have now watched the MOTA3 movie, and at 39 minutes in, Prof Hahn's full quote is, "I think bishops need to really stretch themselves to move from the natural to the supernatural. The bishops ought to be in persona Christi in a way that corresponds to Vatican II defined as the plenitude of holy orders. They ought to fall hopelessly in love with the Blessed Virgin Mary. That's the only safe way they can lead us."
A
bit of a jump there, a bit tangled too, though now I understand his
comment in context. (And for me, any reliance on anything Vatican II
produces an immediate headache.)
Yet my initial observation in my original critique STILL stands: I wrote then that the majority of (at least the Western World's) bishops are chosen for their "hard-nosed" unbelief in the supernatural. All of Vatican II, especially the Novus Ordo Mass, is a desacralization of the Faith.
That was exactly what the 16th century Reformation was, and Vatican II
is exactly that revolution come again. In other words, the Modern Church
Catholics who don't know what the Eucharist is regarding the Real
Presence, they are a FEATURE of the Vatican II Church, not a BUG!
All
this is because a non-Catholic "junta" or "deep state" runs the modern
Church, and has done so since Pope John XXIII let his people he chose to manage
the Vatican II Council be removed when the Council opened and "young
Turks" took over.
This
is self-evidently obvious. To deny it is to go cross-eyed with
cognitive dissonance. And I mean that. The junta running the Church
since the '60s has never relented in its goals. It wants no-nonsense
materialist financial and "bottom-line" managers; it does not want "men of
Faith". That's why Bergoglio dumped Bishop Strickland (and others): they obviously believed.
That's why Benedict was deposed (and he was deposed.) That's why the
Vat 2 junta remains at war with the Traditional Latin Mass: that ancient
liturgy creates and inspires believers. Ergo, they want it G.O.N.E.
Love
First
of all: love, real love, is to "will the good of another", and it is to
will their good without demanding or even wanting a return on that
investment. Fr Ripperger so defines it in one of his online talks. How
simple, how direct. And so of course the Vatican II Church never uses it.
Christians use the Greek word "agápē"
for this love. It was a Greek word originally employed as just a
generic term, and Christians used it to denote their new love
revelation: God is love. This sort of "real" love is different
fundamentally from other kinds of love. "For God so loved the world that
He gave His only begotten Son..."; John 3:16. Translate that as "For God
so willed the good of the human race and His creation that He gave
Himself...".
Love in English
In
English, we can say anything from "I love you" to a spouse or a child,
or "I love ice-cream" or "I love the old Twilight Zone show" or "I love
baseball" to "I love God" or "I love my country". The Greeks had a
different word for each of those. Many languages invest in different
words precisely to avoid confusion. But English doesn't. The word "like"
is no substitute: "I like ice-cream" is quite different from "I love
ice-cream." But idiomatic phrases like "fall in love" specifically refer
to romantic love, and that's the phrasing Scott Hahn used. Note he used
"hopelessly". That's clearly used of romantic love.
But
romantic love is the cheapest and silliest of all "loves". It didn't
exist for most human beings for most of the human history. There's an
old joke about a Greek and an Italian arguing over who had the better
civilization. For every thing the Greek came up with, the Italian had
something to match it. "We created democracy" said the Greek. "We had a
republic" the Italian countered. "We had the Parthenon" said the Greek.
"We had the Pantheon" said the Italian. Finally, the Greek boasted, "You
must admit, though, that it was we Greeks who created romantic love."
The Italian thought for a bit and countered, "Yeah, OK, I'll have to
admit that. But you have to admit one tiny fact about it." "Oh," said
the Greek, "and what is that?" The Italian said, "We Italians first gave
it to women."
This
is funny precisely because it is true. What we call romantic love was a
homoerotic creation, first by the Ancient Greeks, and later by the
Muslims of Moorish Spain, where it was transferred via the Cathar heresy
to Southern France and the famous troubadours. Only later did it become
a standard affectation of average people. And of course, fiction
writers and playwrights like Shakespeare made it a nearly de jure icon men and women were supposed to experience.
Maybe
Scott Hahn didn't intend for his comment to be read this way, but he's
supposed to be a professor, a knowledgeable man. As I wrote in the
original essay, "We Catholics have the problem of too few men in the Catholic world. The world itself has that problem."
And so it is. The most important types of love: i.e. married
spousal love, parental love, patriotic love, can never be just strong
emotion and "desire". It HAS to be rational, founded in Faith in God's
Creation and in the Will, and it must be selfless, a product of the
rational mind, as the soul is itself rational. We get our emotions from
our bodies, rationality from our souls. It's our bodies that get all
passionately "love crazy." Careless "idiomatic usage" does NOT help
clarify all this.
AnP
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