For Palm Sunday...

Alleluia: O Pimenon - Ensemble Organum

Has Wolfgang Smith gone too far?

I only noticed that he had written this book today: Christian Gnosis

From the description:

Smith maintains that Eckhart has not in fact transgressed a single Trinitarian or Christological dogma; what he does deny implicitly, he shows, is none other than the creatio ex nihilo, which in effect Eckhart replaces with the Kabbalistic creatio ex Deo. In this shift, moreover, Smith perceives the transition from ‘exoteric’ to ‘esoteric’ within the integral domain of Christian doctrine.

Pope's Homily at Mass for the 400th anniversary of Our Lady of Charity

More notes on the virtue of religion

You can see evidence for the evolution of my answer to the question of whether the virtue of religion is possible if one is not in the state of grace and in possession of the virtue of charity on the blog. In my most recent post addressing this question I maintain that one cannot have the virtue of religion without charity. Now it is clear that Aquinas maintains religion is a moral virtue and not a theological one. Is it also an infused virtue? (It seems that this ordering is required both respect to the will and practical reason. One must first know and will the end [God] before one can will the means [the acts of religion] to that end .)

If religion is not an infused virtue, but an acquired virtue, can one not still have the acquired virtue even if the infused virtue of charity is lost? Yes, but I would maintain it would not be exercised (or strengthened) when one is ostensibly performing the acts proper to it. One can perform those acts out of a sense of duty, but it is motivated by his concern with what is right/fitting (and ultimately self-love), and not out of the supernatural love of God. There would be something missing in the ratio of those acts to render them something than true acts of religion. I hesitate to call them acts of some counterfeit habit. Quasi-acts of religion?  "Paying lip service." Rendering what is due to God without the proper spirit seems futile, since acts of religion are not required for God's benefit but ours. This realization would be a reminder to us, if we are in a state of sin, that we should be converted unto Him instead of resisting.

Still, maybe I will switch back to my previous position after some more thought.

It reminds me that I should peruse Anscombe's Intention. (IEP entry on that topic)

An Anscombe bibliography.

Rome excommunicates four bishops in Ukraine- Constantinople deposes two bishops in America

Doctrinal Congregation Statement on "Greek-Catholic Bishops of Pidhirci"
"These priests continue to challenge ecclesiastical authority, causing moral and spiritual damage"

Catholic Culture
CNA
Fr. Z

Would there be any Orthodox objections to this action or to the ecclesiology it represents?

wiki

Zenit: Vatican Approves Blessing for Child in the Womb

Iraq: Our land Is a Land of Abraham
Chaldean Archbishop of Erbil Speaks About His Suffering Church

Does the Rhine Flow into the Tiber, Bosphorus, or Both? An Interview with 2 Former Lutherans

Edward Feser, What is a soul?

I usually wouldn't post a Michael Voris video, but this may be of interest --



There are probably some valid criticisms of traditionalists, but the fact that often their community is weak is not due to their fault alone, especially with the issue of Summorum Pontificum. (And given the homeschooling networks that exist, traditionalist parishes may be as strong or stronger than your typical American NO-only parish.) If bishops were concerned to foster communities of traditionalists Catholics, they should make the extraordinary form of the Roman rite more readily available in their parishes, so that traditionalists would not have to travel so far in order to attend a liturgy in the rite to which they are legitimately attached.

Committed to salvaging the legacy of the council?

Benedict XVI: " The Second Vatican Council is a true sign of God"

Given the lack of new dogmatic definitions in addition to the confusion following the council, the cynic or traditionalist may say that the fact that there hasn't been a complete abandonment by Roman-rite Catholics is a sign of God's presence. The Church is always in need of renewal and purification as its members are burdened by sin and struggle for holiness, but did the council really understand the problems of the Church as it confronted "modernity"? But might not that be part of the problem, the overintellectualizing of a spiritual and moral crisis in the Church? (Bad intellectual history leading to an incorrect assessment of both the problem and its causes?)

Roger Nutt, Recent Books on Aquinas' Theology: Matthew Levering's Contribution

Geach on the Real Distinction I

The new definition of the common good

Repeated here, and which finds support in various documents of the Church after Vatican 2: Why I am Not a Libertarian by Nathan Schlueter

The common good of the political association consists in the ensemble of conditions in which persons and associations can more easily flourish. These are nicely summarized in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: “to . . . establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

It seems to be implicitly tied to the modern conception of the (nation-)state, in which associations are not identical to the state. (An implicit recognition that the nation-state is too large?)

Peter Saul: Let’s talk about dying

TEDx

So much to read

Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty is rather useful for someone studying the development of natural law theory and rights?

Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural and Politic Law [1747]
Samuel von Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature [1673]
Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace (2005 ed.) 3 vols [1625]

American conservatives are supposed to be familiar with these texts; can they be harmonized with Catholic moral and political theology?

There are some other texts of the Scottish Enlightenment I should read...

Pufendorf condemning anger wholly: "ANGER is the most violent, as well as the most destructive of all the Passions, and is therefore to be resisted with our utmost Strength and Endeavour. It is so far from exciting Men’s Valour, and confirming their Constancy in Dangers, as some alledge, that it has a quite contrary Effect; for it is a Degree of Madness, it renders Men blind and desperate, and runs them headlong into their own Ruin."

Sacred Ambivalence: A Reflection on Remi Brague’s “Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible” by Thaddeus Kozinski

Yet, it is not clear that Christians can make complete peace with a thoroughly desacralized political order, though the Catholic Church has come a long way toward rapprochement from the time of Gregory XVI’s Mirari vos and Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. The question still remains, however, as to the limits an integrally Christian worldview places on full reconciliation with secular modernity and liberal democracy. According to St. Thomas, men cannot adequately understand in theory, let alone fulfill in practice, the detailed precepts of the natural law without the help of its author, God, and its divinely appointed interpreter, the Roman Catholic Church. With regard to a non-sacral foundation for political order, Thomist Joseph May in the 1950s stated: “The only true doctrine is that civil society cannot prescind from the ultimate end [emphasis mine] both because the temporal welfare implies an ordering to the spiritual and supernatural, and because the individual citizens are directly and positively bound to tend to it” And even Dignitatis Humanae insists that it “leaves untouched the traditional Catholic doctrine about the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ” (Sec. 1). As Pope John Paul II often reiterated, the face of Jesus Christ is the only true mirror in which man can fully and accurately contemplate and comprehend his own nature and destiny; thus, only therein can he discern the moral values and goods most perfective of himself and the political order.

How is temporal welfare defined by May? The ultimate end imperfectly realized here in this world, or some good different from the ultimate end but ordered to it? (Is it the same as the intrinsic common good of creation?)

The political common good = living [well] with others --> loving them truly, and not being an obstacle to their attainment of the ultimate end.

Angry Words By Tom Bartlett
Will one researcher's discovery deep in the Amazon destroy the foundation of modern linguistics?

The Dominicans have redesigned the look for their website. (And, another link to that missa cantata video.)

The Atlantic: Cheeky Complaints Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Manuscripts