Stark Truths

Pray for me, folks, because I’m nostalgic for the Crusades.

Of course a twenty-first-century fellow can’t really be nostalgic for the eleventh or twelfth centuries, since nostalgia properly means severe homesickness, a yearning for familiar conditions from a prior period in our own lives. But there’s a secondary meaning: a wistful longing for a lost dominion. I’m idealistically attracted – as perhaps I should be – to the qualities of the knight, such as honor and bravery, and incautiously suppose – as no doubt I shouldn’t – that these qualities arose in a time and in places congenial to virtue. Chivalry! The Crusades! Something to fight for! Where the heck are my sword and my steed?

If the Crusades ever evoked appreciation – and they did – that particular lost dominion took a pretty serious blow on September 16, 2001 when in an Oval Office speech George W. Bush said: “This crusade, this war on terrorism is gonna take awhile.” The press swooned and Muslim sensibilities were outraged, encouraged perhaps by the media swarf. That’s a mere eight years ago, but the Crusades – their reputation already foundering in the multicultural chop – have all but sunk into the black hole of politically correct disdain. Even “Kingdom of Heaven,” Ridley Scott’s 2005 film about the Third Crusade, failed to make the great expedition very interesting. Many saw the film as a scolding commentary on Crusader Bush.

Enter historian Rodney Stark, riding my missing horse. His new book, God’s Battalions, is actually subtitled: The Case for the Crusades. And he makes the case! With admirable frankness and flair. He writes that the prevailing wisdom about the Crusades may indeed be that “an expansionist, imperialistic Christendom brutalized, looted, and colonized a tolerant and peaceful Islam,” but Stark’s next words are telling:

“Not so.”

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Rerum Novarum

In just a few days, we will come to the end of the first decade of the third Christian millennium. Incredible. It seems only a very short time ago that John Paul the Great called the new millennium a special moment for renewal. As usual, he focused on the central point – good to recall in this season – that made the date significant, the birth of the Savior: “Ecce natus est nobis Salvator mundi: in the Year 2000 the proclamation of this truth should resound with renewed power.” (Tertio millennio adveniente).

Renewal has been a dominant theme in the Church since Vatican II, but it’s an odd idea: neither a mere return to the past (if such were even possible), nor radical innovation, but a paradox. Creative fidelity. A new way of doing old things to make them live again.

Renewal was already on the rise with Leo XIII’s call for philosophical restoration with Aeterni patris (1879) and social reform in Rerum Novarum (1891). It bore immediate fruit in intellectual figures such as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Yves Simon, Christopher Dawson, and many others.

The kind of scholastic philosophy and social analysis they practiced are often regarded as passé now, even by many Catholics. But in their time, they had strong influence even in secular circles: Maritain lectured at Princeton and Chicago (and helped write the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights), Gilson lectured at the University of Virginia and Harvard (as did Dawson). Whatever else might be said, they represented a serious Catholic cultural force, which was also evident in writers such as Chesterton, Belloc, Waugh, Graham Greene in England; Péguy, Mauriac, Claudel, Marcel in France; O’Connor, Merton, Undset, and other distinguished names around the world.

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The secret of joy is found in the Nativity, Pope says at Angelus

Saying he shared the “secret joy” of his audience, Pope Benedict dedicated his Angelus address to the blessing of the “Bambinelli,” the baby Jesus figurines to be used in family, school and parish Nativity scenes all over Rome.

The central message of the liturgy on the Third Sunday of Advent was the apostle Paul´s invitation to the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always. I say again: rejoice the Lord is near!”

Pope Benedict XVI spoke on a cool, rain-sprinkled afternoon in Rome.

“The Mother Church,” he explained before the Angelus, “while she accompanies us towards the holy feast of Christmas, helps us rediscover the meaning and the delight of Christian joy, so different from that of the world.”

The Pope noted that so many families, teachers and catechists come to St. Peter’s Square to have their baby Jesus figurines blessed. He remarked that he is filled with great joy at their presence and interest in keeping alive the tradition. He also said it is necessary to “try to live in the everyday reality of what Christ’s Nativity represents, which is the love of Christ, his humility and his poverty.

The blessing of the Bambinelli, he added, “reminds us that the Nativity is a school of life, where we can learn the secret of true joy. This doesn’t consist of having many things, but in feeling loved by the Lord, in making ourselves a gift to others and in loving ourselves.”

Pope Benedict alluded to the Holy Family, who didn’t seem to be “a very fortunate family” but were still “filled with intimate joy because they loved and helped each other and most have all they were sure that their story is the work of God, Who is made present in little Jesus.”

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Gaudeat Ecclesia!

Celebrating Advent in a Culture of Fear

Old Soviet Joke: A new Politburo member is going through his new office drawers and finds two envelopes addressed to him. One envelope says, “Open me when you have your first major crisis.” Some weeks later, tractor production drops sharply, the New Politburo member is blamed, and he’s in deep trouble. He remembers the envelope, opens it, and reads, “Blame the current crisis on me, your predecessor.” He does so, and his job is spared. However, there remains the second envelope, which reads, “Open me when you have your second major crisis.”

Sometime later, a tractor factory in Minsk explodes, and the New Guy gets the blame again. He rushes to read what’s in the second envelope. It says, “First, get two envelopes . . .”

So it goes. Our Ruling Classes always love to take credit for whatever is good and blame their opponents for what is wrong — and to teach us to do likewise. So, we have President Son of Man declining in the polls and doing the same Standard Politician trick. Even as he is showing himself to be Bush III in attempting to establish the Great Society abroad, he is compounding the problem at home with the marvelous budget-busting skills that made the Bush Administration such a dazzling success story. So what does he do as he flounders in his amateurism? Blame his predecessor, of course.

Meanwhile, those folks who enabled and supported the Bush Administration as it spent us into the ground exporting the “American Abstraction” abroad while it presided over bankruptcy and bailouts at home and declared “Deficits don’t matter” — what are they doing? Blaming Obama for everything, of course! History began on January 20, 2009.

There are, of course, a few shreds of health left in this approach to What’s Wrong with the World. The biggest one is the acknowledgement that there is, in fact, something wrong with the world, and that it even involves actual human responsibility for sin. True, the goal is to put the blame for the sin on the other guy. But this is at least an improvement on the attempts of brainless relativism to deny that there is any such thing as sin or squishy therapeutic doubletalk about how everybody agrees that it’s nobody’s fault. But it’s still an act of blame-shifting that goes all the way back to Adam pointing the finger at Eve, Eve pointing at the serpent — and the serpent having no fingers to point with. At the end of the day, it avoids saying, “I have sinned through my own most grievous fault.”

Suppose, just for a moment, that we apply a Catholic worldview to all this. Suppose you walked into your confessional this week and explained that everything wrong with your life was due to your older brother or sister who screwed everything up. Suppose you blamed it all on your predecessor at work, or Adam, or your father. Suppose you then followed it up with endless boasting about how right you are, how nobody appreciates your wisdom, goodness, and sincere dedication to helping other people.

Would you describe that as a spiritually healthy approach to life?

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Yes, Virginia, it’s a Christmas tree

The internet was flush with rumours recently that American President Barrack Obama plans to have a “holiday tree” at the White House this year instead of the traditional Christmas tree. As it turned out, the rumour was just a rumour. President Obama will follow tradition and have a “Christmas Tree” for the American nation to celebrate the true meaning of the holiday. Indeed, this year’s White House Christmas card even quotes the Gospel. But the rumour has taken on a life of its own on the internet with numerous netizens now arguing the merits of calling Christmas trees holiday trees.

It came to my attention on my Facebook homepage through a new poll called “President Obama says that they will have a Holiday Tree this year instead of a Christmas tree. Do you agree with this?” with friends voting Yes, and several people Liking this. It seems the very essence of Western Civilization was under threat from nouveau secularists and tyrants of the internet. But it’s time the nonsense of the anti-Christmas-ites were put to rest. And also high time Facebook made a Dislike button.

One of their main arguments for changing the nomenclature of Christmas is that it will foster a more tolerant society. Yes; that makes perfect sense – more tolerance through suppression of the dominant culture. Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus can all be invited to celebrate their differences in Western societies while the religion that made Western Civilization what it is should be suppressed… all in the name of tolerance. Oh, please.

Let me be clear. I totally support the rights of followers of other religions to follow the teachings of their faiths and to observe their holy days. But then shouldn’t Christians, too, be entitled to the same right… especially in their own countries?

Yet, it has become de rigeur for the literati to ridicule Christian religious beliefs, such as in the film Mean Girls (one of my favourite films, but this line always annoys me) which showed a group of homeschooled Christian boys saying: “And on the third day, God created the Remington bolt-action rifle so that Man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals. Amen.” Oh, witty tough guy huh? Why don’t you be original too? Try making a similar joke about Islam.

Back to the issue of the “holiday tree”. Another argument put forward by the anti-Christmas-ite netizens is that Christmas trees should be called holiday trees because Christians “stole” the tradition from the ancient pre-Christian Scandinavian tradition of Yuletide. “Stole” seems an exaggeration. Sure some ancient traditions were incorporated into various Christian holidays, but to call incorporation of local traditions into Christianity theft is absurd. Indeed, the early Christians borrowing from and incorporating local traditions into their religious holidays was a sign of the tolerance of Christianity. And, by the way, as far as I know, there is no group of pagans in Northern Europe seeking legal redress for breach of intellectual property rights. Yuletide trees have been called Christmas trees for more than a thousand years and it is absurd to suggest we should change the name now because the custom has its basis in an ancient Germanic tradition. I mean, seriously now?

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Thank you and Merry Christmas!

Dear friends,

With just days to go until the celebration of the birth of Christ, we would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a blessed, holy and joy filled Christmas.

Thank you for all of your support of our important pro-life and family work this year, may God bless you and your family abundantly over the holiday break and in the coming new year.

Merry Christmas!
The team at Family Life Life International NZ

Guess who invented ‘holiday trees’ – hint: it begins with ‘N’ and ends with ‘azis’

After decades of aggressive secularism it is received wisdom in some circles that there should be no public displays of Christian symbols supported by public funds – no Nativity displays at Christmas, and preferably no use of the word “Christmas” because it involves using the name of Christ. In recent years, despite howls of protest in some newspapers, this notion has become entrenched, and on both sides of the Atlantic, nations steeped in Christian history have been subjected to daft campaigns in both commercial companies and public officialdom insisting on the use of “happy holidays” in place of “Merry Christmas” and even references to “holiday trees” instead of “Christmas trees”.

But none of this is new. In the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, public authorities in a major European country launched major campaigns to ban all mention of Christ at Christmas time, and to create new non-religious pictures, decorations, slogans, and messages. Today’s anti-Christian censors will not have been happy to learn, recently, exactly whose company they have been travelling in.

The Nazis put massive efforts into persuading Germans to leave Christ out of Christmas: they took pains to produce booklets and newspaper features explaining that Christ was a newcomer to the scene and that Germany’s ancient pagan religions had celebrated a midwinter festival based on the solstice. Christianity was presented as an artificial imposition, disruptive of a true sense of community and respect for conscience and individual rights. Young people were urged to take part in dawn ceremonies to mark the winter solstice –much lighting of fires, sounding of music, unfurling of banners and inauguration of feasting. Church events were marginalised, and tolerated only as a private matter, not to be associated with public life or supported in any way by holders of public office.

More than this, there was an emphasis on non-Christian decorations, Christmas tree trimmings, and general Christmas paraphernalia, with a deliberate attempt to sideline the traditional Christmas crib scenes. The Christian imagery of Christmas — the child in the manger, Mary and Joseph, angels, shepherds, kings and star – were seen as belonging to something that modern-minded people should reject and abandon.

It is intriguing that the arguments used by the Nazis – that Christianity was artificially imposed on people by a takeover of older pagan festivities – are the same ones that are used by some campaigners today. They argue that the Medieval Church used the calendar with its feast-days to impose its structures, culture and norms on a reluctant populace, and that in doing so it enforced an oppressive sexual morality and made itself rich by imposing fines and tithes on people who dared not disobey or challenge an authority which claimed an invincible deity to be on its side.

The Nazis spoke this language too. Nazi booklets and propaganda, especially that aimed at the young, constantly harped on the evils of the Medieval Church, and of Christianity in general, which was presented as narrow-minded, too much concerned with sexual morality, soaked in sentimental images of Christ and his mother, and culturally inferior to long-ago pagan religions which were presented as freedom-loving, dynamic, and joyful.

Princess Tatiana Metternich, a Russian who married an anti-Nazi German aristocrat, recalled him being ordered, as an officer in the German army, to announce a celebration of a “Spring time ceremony” designed to replace Easter. Instead, he refused and announced that it was Easter Sunday, the great Christian feast. (The Metternichs were close to the July 20th plotters who almost succeeded in toppling the Nazi regime – the Berlin Diaries of Princess Tatiana’s sister, Marie, who was secretary to the leading July plotter, Adam von Trott, make fascinating reading).

Children at German schools were taught a non-religious form of “grace before meals” that specifically celebrated the earth and banned any mention of God – today’s politically-correct campaigners, including those milling about the climate summit in Copenhagen, would warmly approve of it: “Earth that did this food bestow/Sun that made it riper grow/Dearest sun and dearest earth/We will not forget your worth”.

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What’s happening over the holiday break at Semper Vita?

Dear blog watchers!

Our usual daily news updates will take a break from Tuesday 22nd December 2009, and they will resume again on Monday 25th January 2010.

During the Christmas break we will be publishing a new and interesting pro-life, marriage or family post each day.

Have a great Christmas and a happy new year!
The team at Family Life International

Permissive Abortion Laws May Be Hazardous To Mothers’ Health, Per New Report

A new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) shows that countries with restrictive abortion laws are often the leaders in reducing maternal mortality, and those with permissive laws often lag. According to the report, the pro-life nation of Ireland has topped the global rankings once again with the best maternal health performance.

Abortion advocates have attempted to push an international “right to abortion,” claiming that restrictive laws force women to seek unsafe abortion, which in turn leads to high maternal mortality.  In October, the Guttmacher Institute released a report on global abortion calling on states to “expand access to legal abortion and ensure that safe, legal abortion services are available to women in need.” Sharon Camp, president of the Guttmacher Institute, asserted that “in much of the developing world, abortion remains highly restricted, and unsafe abortion is common and continues to damage women’s health and threaten their survival.”

An examination and comparison of several countries included in the WEF survey show that legal abortion does not mean lower maternal mortality rates.

Both Ireland and Poland, favorite targets of the abortion lobby for their strong restrictions on abortion, have better maternal mortality ratios than the United States. Ireland ranks first in the survey with 1 death for every 100,000 live births. In recent years Poland has tightened its abortion law and ranks number 27 on the list with 8 deaths per 100,000. In the United States where there are virtually no restrictions on abortion, the maternal mortality ratio is 17 out of 100,000 live births.

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