CMT: What is Happiness? by Charles Camosy

How does one relate goods to ends and activities? Some precision would be helpful.

From December of last year: In Defense of Human Dignity – on the 500th Anniversary of the Preaching of the Dominican Friars in Hispaniola

Related: Dominicans in the Americas
Join us in celebrating our 500th anniversary!
(Update)

Happiness and Its Discontents by Fr. Michael Sherwin, OP

(Logos)

Zenit: Pope's Message to Rimini Meeting
"Not only my soul, but even every fiber of my flesh is made to find its peace, its fulfillment in God"

Thus do we discover the truest dimension of human existence, that to which the Servant of God Luigi Giussani continually referred: life as vocation. Everything, every relationship, every joy, as well as every difficulty, finds its ultimate meaning in being an opportunity for a relationship with the Infinite, a voice of God that continually calls to us and invites us to lift our gaze, to find the complete fulfillment of our humanity in belonging to Him. “You have made us for Yourself – wrote St. Augustine – and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (Confessions I, 1,1). We need not be afraid of what God asks of us, through the circumstance of our lives, were it even the dedication of ourselves in a special form of following and imitating Christ, in the priesthood or religious life. The Lord, in calling some to live totally for Him, calls everyone to recognize the essence of our own nature as human beings: we are made for the Infinite. And God has our happiness at heart, and our complete human fulfillment. Let us ask, then, to enter in and to remain in the gaze of faith that characterized the saints, in order that we might be able to discover the good seed that the Lord scatters along the path of our lives and joyfully adhere to our vocation.

Dominicana: J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., “Theological Method and the Magisterium of the Church,” Dominicana 54:2 (2011), 51-61.

Tired of the Conflict Between Catholics

Spiritual Consumers by Matthew Cantirino

One of my mom's friends had recounted to my mother how a priest had admonished people for being picky and choosey as to which Masses they attended.

It can be rather easy to do some amateur "psychologizing" about groups of people, in order to draw some sort of moral point. I've done it as well. But it has to be couched in terms of hypotheticals; and is it really that helpful for the intended audience? It can easily degenerate into condemnation of the "other." But it does get boring, whether it be from the right or the left, when there is a failure to grasp reality and the nature of the problem. Are both just different forms of Americanism? Do older, "left-leaning" Catholics really think institutionally? Or is their comfort level first and foremost?

Mr. Cantirino writes:

This is anecdotal, but virtually all of the youngish (say, under-35) orthodox Catholics I know, for example, don’t attend Mass at their local parish. They’ll travel long distances–sometimes, clear across cities–to certain “special” chapels or “traditionalist parishes” or order houses where a dynamic priest keeps them coming back. In many ways this is highly commendable: That someone is willing to take significant additional time out of their day to commute to church signifies a deep commitment to the liturgy and an impressive grasp of its importance. And it’s a sympathetic dilemma: Certainly, young people don’t do this to spite their canon-law pastor, but they do often find the services on offer in their bailiwick in some sense impoverished, or the preaching theologically wayward, or the architecture grossly midcentury, and for the good of their spiritual health decide they can and must find a home elsewhere.

But should this be the end goal? Might it be fruitful to encourage a way of thinking that emphasizes not only the individual’s conscious embrace of orthodoxy (key though individual response has always been in Catholicism), but which also sees this commitment as eventually settling, becoming the norm, and integrating itself into the existing framework rather than subsisting outside of or in a subculture of it? This, then, would seem to be an emerging challenge for the “movement” back towards orthodoxy. We’ve become, maybe by accident, accustomed to a sort of “remnant” mindset rather than an institutional one, to prophetic denunciations from without but with not enough “working within.” So perhaps it’s time for “self-conscious” young Catholics to start seeing themselves less as dissidents and “choosers” and more simply as part of the future of the Church, and begin working out what that means.

Traddies and conservative Catholics may put a premium on orthodoxy and good liturgical praxis and sometimes, their ability to live as a community suffers since they have to travel over long distances to their church. Many may be ignorant that this is not the idea, but even if they are aware of the problem, when looking to the good of their family, a strong parish life may not compare. Sure, some may have a mindset which is opposed to an awareness of communion with those who are ignorant. But should the burden be on them or on the priests and ultimately the bishop of the local Church?

Commonweal and the like belong to the past, even if that crowd may feel good at the moment because a SWPL Democrat occupies the White House, because it is tied to a dying, unsustainable political economy. How many go beyond an easy, painless progressivism to make real sacrifices for others that is in accordance with the order of charity (rather than following their own notions of victim classes and the "preferential option")?

Not a “Swerve,” but a “Slouch” by Anthony Esolen
Modern atheists may think they’ve found an ally in ancient Epicureanism. They’re quite mistaken.

Feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 20 August

On the Love of God

Fr. Augustine's Book Talk Rescheduled

I saw Fr. Augustine today and asked him to sign some copies of his book. I mentioned the book talk at the DSPT and he responded that it had been rescheduled for January, so that Regis Martin could participate. (? I think I am remembering the correct name.)

Fr. Augustine may also be giving a talk at the National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi in October, but that has not been finalized yet.

Sister Vassa Larin

Sister Vassa Larin from George Kokhno on Vimeo.

John Allen on Archbishop Dolan

Lake Effect: The Mind of the Archbishop - mp3

Audio files for Orientale Lumen XVI Conference

Ancient Faith Radio - website for the annual conference


Related:
Diaconate in Christ: Orientalium ecclesiarum No. 17. Commentary Part II

Simonopetra

A Thousand Years are as One Day

NCReg: Catholic University Looks East (1851)
Ukrainian Father Mark Morozowich is the first Eastern Catholic to lead CUA’s School of Theology.

Joseph Trabbic on Maritain

Some Critical Comments on Maritain's Political Philosophy

Finally, I cannot accept Maritain’s thesis about democracy’s privileged connection to Christianity. As I read ecclesiastical history, the Church has always been very pragmatic about her relationships with the various types of political regimes, never teaching in any binding manner that some one kind of regime in particular has its roots in the Gospel. And yet, as I argued [earlier in the review], it does appear that Maritain would have to insist that Christians are in some sense bound to promote democracy. There is not the space here sufficiently to reflect on the papal teaching of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that, in fact, was quite critical of some of the same democratic tenets held by Maritain. It is ironic that in reviewing Christianity and Democracy in 1945 the prominent Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams questioned the Catholic nature of Maritain’s political thought: “How, then, does M. Maritain, the Thomist and the Roman Catholic, manage to become here the apostle and the mentor of the democracy of the future? He does it by ignoring Roman Catholicism and by ignoring the antidemocratic heritage of pre-eighteenth-century Christianity.” No doubt there are many who would say that previous Catholic teaching on political matters has since been superseded by John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris and Vatican II’s pronouncements in Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes. But if we apply the hermeneutic of continuity proposed by Benedict XVI, we might discover that the story is far more complex than the hermeneuts of discontinuity and rupture would have us believe.

I think there is an impulse to an equality rooted in fraternity "within Christianity," such that Christian polity leans towards becoming a republic whenever possible. Perhaps Maritain's bigger mistake was identifying democracy with the contingent historical form of the modern nation-state and not addressing the problem of scale with respect to community.

Fr. Spitzer, in his Ten Universal Principles, talks about adjudicating between competing rights claims. Evidence that there is a problem with contemporary rights theory, that there can be competing claims? Or is the problem in the identification of rights with a specific understanding of ownership?



More from TEDxPannonia

Fr. Augustine's Lecture Cancelled?

A book party of sorts for his biography of St. Augustine - it was scheduled for September 26, but there is no longer any mention of it.

There is some discussion of the relationship between Church and State in the combox for Thomas Storck's Liberalism and the Absence of Purpose. My short contribution: "...while it may be somewhat useful to think of the division between the sacred and the secular in terms of supernatural and natural (especially with respect to the limits of secular authority), this can lead to be problems if we do not consider the underlying reason why this division is apt, namely the goods themselves. The political common good is communal well-being, or the virtuous life of the community – civic friendship. All friendships are open to something higher serving as a source of unity joining friends together – in this case, the higher good is God Himself. While secular authority may not be able to directly bring about man’s salvation through the imparting of grace, a Christian polity can nonetheless promote conditions which facilitate the observance of the Christian life (for example, removing obstacles)."

Mount Athos • The Holy Mountain

Mauricio Kuri on Religious Freedom

Metropolitan KALLISTOS Ware Salvation in Christ - The Orthodox Approach -Lecture

Met. Kallistos Ware | PRP Special : The Jesus Prayer