A Synod for the media or the Church?

 

Orthodox Catholics should get involved in the Synodal Journey

Here are some thoughts on what this synod is all about:

As Christians we are called as an act of charity to welcome and accept everyone, however the key word is "Christian". A Christian is a disciple of Jesus Christ and a disciple therefore must be disciplined in the ways and teachings of the Catholic Church.

What is true Christian Love and Charity?

Charity toward all mankind no matter who or what they are is what I believe to be the governing factor in how the Holy Spirit is moving us. However, what is the best way to show true love and welcome all into the Church?

If we do not remain true to the faith will the Church die?

It has been noted many times that when the Catholic Church or any other Church does not follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Church it loses members and closes churches. This can be seen very clearly in the Anglican church; the ordination of women and an acceptance of homosexual acts has not made this denomination attractive particularly to the young but has repulsed many of them. The Methodist church as well has been split down the middle by actually carrying out same-sex blessings and again have had to close churches and lost members. The Anglican Church plan to close 400 churches in the next decade, they have closed 1000 in the last 30 years, this church used to claim 40% of England population it is now down to 12%.

How can the Church truly welcome and accept everyone?

The Catholic Church can show that it welcomes and accepts everyone by being faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and teachings of His disciples. Jesus said, "go forth and teach all nations." Some translations of Matthew 28:19 says, "Make disciples of all nations". Therefore, we are asked by Jesus Himself to teach and make disciples of all people, to be a disciple one must be disciplined and follow the teachings. Therefore, we can only truly love, teach and welcome everyone into the Catholic Church by being faithful to her teachings, including by following her teachings on an all-male priesthood, that homosexual acts cannot be accepted and the teachings on contraception and abortion must be affirmed. The liturgy too must be respectful and create a sense of the sacred whether in the New Rite or the Traditional Latin Mass. Traditionis Custodes should be modified or abandoned as it gives the impression that faithful Catholics who have an attachment to the Latin Mass are not welcome and accepted. I believe that the Holy Spirit is showing us by the huge growth in people (particularly young people) attending the Traditional Latin Mass that this liturgy and traditional family values are the way forward for the Church.

What is true Christian welcoming and acceptance?

Homosexuals in the Priesthood have caused great harm. This is not an assertion but a fact, for in study after study where the Church has been in crisis due to child sex abuse has shown that over 80% of the abuse has been of a male-on-male nature therefore homosexual. Studies throughout the world particularly in England, France, Germany, and the USA have proved this, therefore Homosexuals should not be allowed into the priesthood, even if they are celibate for Jesus says in the Lord's prayer "lead us not into temptation". And yet women or married priests are not the answer as Jesus our great high priest was a celibate man as were all of his apostles. The blessing of same-sex couples in Catholic Church as proposed by the German church is not compatible with both the Old and New Testaments and the entire 2000-year history of the Catholic Church.

If the Synod on Synodality does anything, it should correct the German Synodal way, and expose those ideologues as heretical and damaging to the Church. The German Church appears to have too few faithful Catholics and too much money which is raised through the secular tax system. A Church that has corrupted the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Church is not welcoming and accepting but on the contrary repulsive. It is a true act of Christian charity and love to be faithful to the teachings of the Church and not of the world.

Here is the link to the Bishop's Conference of England and Wales website for the Synod Contacts, please see who your contact is:

https://www.cbcew.org.uk/diocesan-synod-contacts/

Here is the Christian Rising video in which we discuss the Synod: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcnVnyLsDYs

Here is their hideous (rainbow flag resonating) logo:

Of Arts and the Animal part 2

 A Christian Essay in Aesthetic Value

The divine simplicity contains in itself all complexities. The creature does not represent God merely in a generic sense, the richness of the divine perfection is such that it is not exhausted although every creature ever created communicates unique aspects of the divine essence in the very haeccitas that constitutes it an individual creature distinct from all others. This is true of you and me and the tree on the corner; whilst, unlike her Calcutta cousin, the Lord’s pavilion cat makes no claim to be divine, she is shot through with divinity in every aspect of her being and dwells ever in the divine presence, sharing with the redeemed in the ‘liberty of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom VIII). Furthermore, she and the Mountains of Mourne, as words of God entirely contained within the Eternal Word, find their place at the heart of our faith as we kneel before the Eucharistic presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

What does all of this mean for us, who stand within the created order as the audience God has created for the communication He offers in His creation? To start with it enables us to find our place in the world, to orientate ourselves, which means to know where we stand in relation to Christ the Oriens, “O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis”. O Dayspring splendour of eternal light and sun of justice come and enlighten those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death (commemoration at 2^nd Vespers of St Thomas 21 Dec).

We begin by acknowledging that we are by nature utterly dependent upon the things of this world and see that this dependency is a sacramental symbol of the manner in which we are sustained by our Creator and theirs. We receive from Him not only that which makes our way of life possible, our daily bread, but that life itself, our human nature, and our existence.

The first consideration arising from this is that in our limitations and our dependence upon the divine bounty for all that we are and all that we need we are truly very nearly nothing at all; each of us is but a little gobbet of something delineated against the world (and still more, against a nothingness we can hardly imagine, but into which all creation would resolve itself were it not subject to God’s constant care). The second consideration is of the divine fruitfulness from which we have received and continue to receive all things, on which account we may be confident that we shall continue to receive still further blessings as we take our place in the reception and communication of the divine goodness. Turning from the dogmatic to the ascetic, we learn from St Bonaventure’s great work on the spiritual life the Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum, that meditation upon these twin considerations is the highest form of prayerful contemplation because by enabling those who would reflect upon the attributes of God to understand this world of creatures, their own environment, in terms of the action and manifestation of the divine goodness, this ‘cherubic meditation’ allows them to see and to relate to God in all things and through all things, dwelling (like Puss) always in His presence until, finding Him in themselves and themselves in Him, they may reach the heights of a mystic union with God that goes beyond all conscious thought and holds them even in this life as close to the throne of heaven as the seraphim. The life of St Francis was spent in precisely this meditation upon the divine seen through the natural; “led by the footprints he found in creatures he followed the Beloved everywhere” (Vita St. Francis by St. Bonaventure quoted in St. John Paul II’s Letter to Artists). It is this reflection upon the divine bounty and the contingent nature of our existence that gives meaning to the evangelical counsel of poverty, enabling those of us who are not monks or friars to share in the spirit of their vows, developing a sense of detachment from that which belongs to the divine bounty so that it serves us in its usefulness rather than have us serve it in our vanity – the liturgy gives us St Dominic for our example as it speaks of his crossing the wave of vanity in the ark of poverty for the welfare of the people. “In fiscella paupertatis flumen transit vanitatis, pro salute populi” (Dominican Missal).

            The prerequisites for such a meditation are, clearly, that one should be able to appreciate one’s own utter dependence upon the gifts of the divine bounty given through the natural world rather than believing in a mythical self-sufficiency of technological progress; and also the possibility of relating to our fellow creatures of every species in a direct, personal and unmediated fashion in order to receive the divine self-communication in them rather than simply to reinforce an artificial narrative derived from our own intellectual constructs. I will leave it to you to decide how far our media culture militates against the fulfilment of these prerequisites and move on to my next point.

To be continued...

By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard

Of Arts and the Animal - Part One

 A Christian Essay in Aesthetic Value

 Aesthetics is the science of beauty and the arts, which are generally regarded as utterly trivial matters. If people have anything at all to say on the subject it is usually to deny the importance, or even the possibility, of making aesthetic judgements: “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, “to each his own”. I would, however, contend that a theological appreciation of the nature of art allows us to grasp that the arts are at the centre of the human vocation; and that a philosophical understanding of the purpose of art enables us to see that aesthetic judgements are not merely possible but spiritually and intellectually essential. The television question must be viewed in this light.

To begin at the beginning: Animals and the environment are media staples and subjects of popular discussion, and they have already made an appearance in the CUT Newsletter, but further examination is necessary for people to understand that they are in many ways key to our concerns.

What is a creature? It is that which God has created, an expression of the divine creativity brought into being by the divine will; it is a word of God spoken into the cosmos of His creation to be received by the audience He creates within the cosmic whole, by which I mean us. It is a communication, a self-revelation of the divine by which God makes Himself known to us, and not only to us, but in us and through us. It is a semantic unit irreducibly complex in its totality, whatever strands of meaning might be discerned within it; the rabbit is more than the sum of his ears and whiskers.

Whilst God certainly addresses us through His creation, He does not do so in a simple manner, which is to say that He does not, like a Laputan professor, present us with things for want of any spoken or written language with which to represent them. Rather, in the act of the creation, of communication or expression, the created order in which we are born is drawn into the circumincessionary heart of the Most Blessed Trinity, into the intimacy of the Godhead: it is not that a creature is given to us instead of the word that might represent it, but that it itself is the word by which God represents that which is of Himself. The creature we see makes present to us in the concrete that which in the ideal is found perfect in the ever-fruitful goodness of God. It is a word spoken into, and contained within, the Word in which all things are created in the reflection of the Father in the Son (Col. 1, 16:19) and expressed into the created order through the power of the will to action, the desire, the love that, proceeding from the Father through the Son, is the Holy Ghost. It makes manifest that the absolute good reflected in the absolute good is not self-contained in goodness, that God is not limited by His own completeness-in Himself, but is absolute in fruitfulness, for to be good is to wish to communicate goodness. The divine simplicity contains in itself all complexities. The creature does not represent God merely in a generic sense, the richness of the divine perfection is such that it is not exhausted although every creature ever created communicates unique aspects of the divine essence in the very haeccitas that constitutes it an individual creature distinct from all others. This is true of you and me and the tree on the corner; whilst, unlike her Calcutta cousin, the Lord’s pavilion cat makes no claim to be divine, she is shot through with divinity in every aspect of her being and dwells ever in the divine presence, sharing with the redeemed in the ‘liberty of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom VIII). Furthermore, she and the Mountains of Mourne, as words of God entirely contained within the Eternal Word, find their place at the heart of our faith as we kneel before the Eucharistic presence of the Blessed Sacrament.