Ave Maria!

The AirMaria Crew (minus our Roving Reporter, friar Roderic) recently went to Cleveland, Ohio, for the Catholic Marketing Network’s Trade Show.

Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J. was the principal celebrant for the Holy Mass on Thursday morning, and afterwards we caught up with him, to do a series of several parts, on the recent documents released by Pope Benedict XVI. Fr. Fessio is a close friend of the Holy Father and in this short series he explains these documents with insights from this unique perspective.

This first episode is an explanation of the very recent Apostolic Letter “Motu Proprio”? Summorum Pontificum which our Holy Father, Pope Benedict released on 07/07/07 concerning the use of the Roman Missal promulgated by John XXIII in 1962.

We are very blessed to have Fr. Fessio agree to do this series for AirMaria and we hope you will not only enjoy it, but will gain a higher appreciation for how our Holy Father is guiding his flock with wisdom and prudence.

Ave Maria!

The post Video: Extra #1 – Fr Joseph Fessio, S.J.: Recent Vatican Documents #1: Motu Proprio first appeared on AirMaria.com.

Ave Maria!

In this segment of our mini series on Recent Vatican Documents Fr. Fessio discusses the Cover Letter to the “Motu Proprio” Summorum Pontificum. In this letter pope Benedict XVI addresses confusing and speculative reports in the media prior to the release of the Motu Proprio and strong reaction to these reports both positive and negative. The pope says the two fears that sparked most of the opposition are that allowing the old rite would:

1. be a detraction from the authority of the Second Vatican Council and its liturgical reform, and

2. lead to disarray and division in parish communities.

Come listen to Fr. Fessio as he covers the thoughts of the Holy Father in regard to these fears based on the Cover Letter but also based on his own familiarity with the pope’s position on the liturgy. In the process he covers the true nature of the reform of Vatican II, the bad interpretations of that reform (and resulting damage) and where the Holy Father wants the reform of the reform to go in relation to the old liturgy. Fr. Fessio also adds many of his own insights.

Ave Maria!

The post Video: Extra #2 – Fr Joseph Fessio, S.J.: Recent Vatican Docs #2: Cover Letter first appeared on AirMaria.com.

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Fr. Fessio referring to Cardinal Ratzinger’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy and to Moses in the Old Testament and the purpose of the Exodus outlines the fullest possible context to and significance of the Motu Proprio. He says the most important element for the liturgy is reverence and the understanding that its form comes from heaven. Without this the liturgy becomes merely human, then humanistic and finally anti-human, something that imprisons rather than frees.

Fr. Fessio covers the importance for celebrating the mass Ad Orientum and the fallacious reasons put forth for abandoning it. The Motu Proprio is then an opportunity for people to celebrate the mass facing east and so should be an important vehicle for healing rifts and for reform within the Church.

Fr. Fessio ends this video by stating that the Motu Proprio:

“may be as significant for the first half of the 21st Century as Humanae Vitae was for the second half of the 20th Century”

Ave Maria!

The post Video: Fr Joseph Fessio, S.J.: Recent Vatican Docs #3: Significance of Motu Proprio first appeared on AirMaria.com.

Ave Maria!

This second to last part of our series by Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J., on recent Vatican documents covers the document issued July 9th, two days after the Motu Proprio, by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith entitled “Responses to some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Document on the Church” i.e. Lumen Gentium

This document was issued by the Congregation to clarify some points of confusion since the close of the Second Vatican Council.

Questions addressed in this talk are:

• Did the Second Vatican Council change the Catholic Doctrine on the Church?”
• What is the meaning of the word ‘subsists’ in the statement the “Church … subsists in the Catholic Church” LG 8
• Why the word subsist was used instead of ‘is’.
• Why does the council use the word ‘churches’ for the separated Eastern Orthodox?
• Why does the Council not use the word Church for the Protestant communities?

In answer to the first question Fr. Fessio quotes Pope Paul VI, who after the Council says, “What Christ willed, we also will. What was, still is. What the Church has taught down the centuries, we also teach.”

AMEN!

Ave Maria!

The post Fr. Fessio – Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith Document first appeared on AirMaria.com.

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Referring to a Washington Post article from the Religious News Service called Papal Mystery: Is Benedict Downplaying Vatican II by Decrees? which Fr. Fessio finds is the best summary of the objections to the Motu Proprio as expressed by two Catholic priests:

1. Rev. James F. Puglisi from the Center for Union in Rome who says:

… the Good Friday liturgy in the Tridentine Missal contains a prayer for the conversion of the Jews that refers to their “blindness” and the “veil [on] their hearts.”

and thus undoing the more conciliatory phrasing of the new liturgy and so undoing Vatican II

But Fr. Fessio says that the reference to the Jews is in the Gospel not just the Council of Trent and it also in the Vatican II documents but expressed in different terms. And to want to convert someone to your religion is to love that person.

2. Rev. William Henn from Pontifical Gregorian University says that stressing an interpretation in Continuity with past Councils would be to say there is nothing new in Vatican II.

To this Fr. Fessio responds, Vatican II is in continuity with past councils but is new in that it clarifies things in the light of current concerns.

He further clarifies the recent document on ecumenism by quoting the Vatican document Unitatis Redintegratio that shows that what the Congregation of the Doctrine and Faith wrote under the direction of Pope Benedict is in full agreement with Vatican II and he is just dispelling confusion and misinformation regarding the Council.

Come listen to this very informative video.

Ave Maria!

The post Video – Fr. Fessio, S.J. Objections to the Motu Proprio first appeared on AirMaria.com.

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Fr. Angelo Mary Geiger returns to his regular postings of Standing Fast after a small hiatus due to numerous other commitments such as the Fall Encampment and Doug Barry Boot Camp at the friary in CT, the Coredemption Conference in Indiana, and getting involved in the fray over the Plan B controversy in CT.

The inspiration for this entry is a post he made on MaryVictrix. The popular notion of the Knights Templar is imbued with the mystique of hidden secrets and grand conspiracy. And while the Vatican has released a document that pretty much absolve the order of the many accusations made against them, modern conspiracy theorists still hang on to their pet fantasies. The real virtues of the Knights Templar are far more simple, and much more profound.

The post Video – Fr. Angelo – Standing Fast #15: Templar Baloney first appeared on AirMaria.com.

Homily #081130 ( 12min) Play – On this first Sunday of Advent, Fr. Ignatius preaches on the need to look back on the past year and then make resolutions to achieve new levels of holiness for this new liturgical year, knowing that the world, the flesh and the Devil is warring against us. To highlight this, he mentions the comments carelessly made to an Inside the Vatican reporter by Hollywood representatives.
Ave Maria!
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Instruction “Dignitas personæ“

on some bioethical questions

Introduction

1. The dignity of a person must be recognized in every human being from conception to natural death. This fundamental principle expresses a great “yes” to human life and must be at the center of ethical reflection on biomedical research, which has an ever greater importance in today’s world. The Church’s Magisterium has frequently intervened to clarify and resolve moral questions in this area. The Instruction Donum vitae was particularly significant. And now, twenty years after its publication, it is appropriate to bring it up to date.

The teaching of Donum vitae remains completely valid, both with regard to the principles on which it is based and the moral evaluations which it expresses. However, new biomedical technologies which have been introduced in the critical area of human life and the family have given rise to further questions, in particular in the field of research on human embryos, the use of stem cells for therapeutic purposes, as well as in other areas of experimental medicine. These new questions require answers.

http://www.usccb.org/comm/Dignitaspersonae/Dignitas_Personae.pdf

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Pope St. Pius X

Feast day is August 21st

Pope St. Pius X was born as Giuseppe Sarto to a poor family in 1835. He was ordained to the holy priesthood in 1858 was elected Pope in 1903. One biography says this on his pontificate: He lowered the age of First Communion to the age of 7 and encouraged frequent, even daily Communion. He reformed the liturgy, promoted clear and simple homilies, and brought Gregorian chant back to services. He revised the Breviary, and the teaching of the Catechism. He fought Modernism, which he denounced as “the summation of all heresies”. He reorganized the Roman curia and initiated the codification of canon law. He promoted the reading of Sacred Scripture and the foreign missions. His will read: “I was born poor; I lived poor; I wish to die poor.” He died in August of 1914.  He is known as the Pope of the Blessed Sacrament and also as the Pope who suppressed modernism and that suppression lasted for decades until  it roared again to life in the turbulent times following the second Vatican Council.

His great encyclical addressing and condemning modernism can be found at

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10pasce.htm

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excerpts from

PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE MODERNISTS ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS X, SEPTEMBER 8, 1907

VENERABLE BRETHREN, HEALTH AND THE APOSTOLIC BLESSING:

1. One of the primary obligations assigned by Christ to the office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock is that of guarding with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and the gainsaying of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body, for owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking men speaking perverse things, vain talkers and seducers,erring and driving into error.

It must, however, be confessed that these latter days have witnessed a notable increase in the number of the enemies of the Cross of Christ, who, by arts entirely new and full of deceit, are striving to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, as far as in them lies, utterly to subvert the very Kingdom of Christ. Wherefore We may no longer keep silence, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be set down to lack of diligence in the discharge of Our office.

2. That We should act without delay in this matter is made imperative especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies; but, what is to be most dreaded and deplored, in her very bosom, and are the more mischievous the less they keep in the open. We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, and, what is much more sad, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, animated by a false zeal for the Church, lacking the solid safeguards of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, put themselves forward as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the Person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious audacity, they degrade to the condition of a simple and ordinary man.

3….Nor indeed would he be wrong in regarding them as the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church. For, as We have said, they put into operation their designs for her undoing, not from without but from within. Hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain from the very fact that their knowledge of her is more intimate.

Moreover, they lay the ax not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fibers. And once having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to diffuse poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth which they leave untouched, none that they do not strive to corrupt. Further, none is more skillful, none more astute than they, in the employment of a thousand noxious devices; for they play the double part of rationalist and Catholic, and this so craftily that they easily lead the unwary into error; and as audacity is their chief characteristic,

10….In hearing these things we shudder indeed at so great an audacity of assertion and so great a sacrilege. And yet, Venerable Brethren, these are not merely the foolish babblings of unbelievers. There are Catholics, yea, and priests too, who say these things openly; and they boast that they are going to reform the Church by these ravings!

14….Destruction of one, true religion: these errors, combined with those which we have already mentioned, open wide the way to Atheism. Here it is well to note at once that, given this doctrine of experience united with that of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true….But what is most amazing is that there are Catholics and priests, who, We would fain believe, and yet act as if they fully approved of them. For they lavish such praise and bestow such public honor on the teachers of these errors as to convey the belief that their admiration is not meant merely for the persons, who are perhaps not devoid of a certain merit, but rather for the sake of the errors which these persons openly profess and which they do all in their power to propagate.

21….But for the Modernists, sacraments are bare symbols or signs, though not devoid of a certain efficacy — an efficacy, they tell us, like that of certain phrases vulgarly described as having caught the popular ear, inasmuch as they have the power of putting certain leading ideas into circulation, and of making a marked impression upon the mind. What the phrases are to the ideas, that the sacraments are to the religious sense, that and nothing more.

The Modernists would express their mind more clearly were they to affirm that the sacraments are instituted solely to foster the faith but this is condemned by the Council of Trent: If anyone says that these sacraments are instituted solely to foster the faith, let him be anathema.

22….For if we take the Bible, according to the standards of agnosticism, namely, as a human work, made by men for men, albeit the theologian is allowed to proclaim that it is divine by immanence, what room is there left in it for inspiration? The Modernists assert a general inspiration of the Sacred Books, but they admit no inspiration in the Catholic sense.

27….The progressive force, on the contrary, which responds to the inner needs, lies in the individual consciences and works in them — especially in such of them as are in more close and intimate contact with life. Already we observe, Venerable Brethren, the introduction of that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity the factor of progress in the Church…

With all this in mind, one understands how it is that the Modernists express astonishment when they are reprimanded or punished. What is imputed to them as a fault they regard as a sacred duty. They understand the needs of consciences better than anyone else, since they come into closer touch with them than does the ecclesiastical authority. Nay, they embody them, so to speak, in themselves. Hence, for them to speak and to write publicly is a bounden duty. Let authority rebuke them if it pleases — they have their own conscience on their side and an intimate experience which tells them with certainty that what they deserve is not blame but praise.

34….The Modernists have no hesitation in affirming generally that these books, and especially the Pentateuch and the first three Gospels, have been gradually formed from a primitive brief narration, by additions, by interpolations of theological or allegorical interpretations, or parts introduced only for the purpose of joining different passages together. This means, to put it briefly and clearly, that in the Sacred Books we must admit a vital evolution, springing from and corresponding with the evolution of faith…To hear them descant of their works on the Sacred Books, in which they have been able to discover so much that is defective, one would imagine that before them nobody ever even turned over the pages of Scripture.

38….They insist that both outwardly and inwardly it (the Church) must be brought into harmony with the modern conscience which now wholly tends towards democracy; a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy and even to the laity and authority which is too much concentrated should be decentralized…As for history, it must be written and taught only according to their methods and modern principles. Dogmas and their evolution, they affirm, are to be harmonized with science and history.

In the Catechism no dogmas are to be inserted except those that have been reformed and are within the capacity of the people. Regarding worship, they say, the number of external devotions is to he reduced, and steps must be taken to prevent their further increase…With regard to morals, they adopt the principle of the Americanists, that the active virtues are more important than the passive, and are to be more encouraged in practice…and there are some who, gladly listening to the teaching of their Protestant masters, would desire the suppression of the celibacy of the clergy. What is there left in the Church which is not to be reformed by them and according to their principles?

MODERNISM: SYNTHESIS OF ALL HERESIES

39….Undoubtedly, were anyone to attempt the task of collecting together all the errors that have been broached against the faith and to concentrate into one the sap and substance of them all, he could not succeed in doing so better than the Modernists have done. Nay, they have gone farther than this, for, as We have already intimated, their system means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone, but of all religion.

Hence the rationalists are not wanting in their applause, and the most frank and sincere among them congratulate themselves on having found in the Modernists the most valuable of all allies….works of ascetical theology — works for which the Modernists have but little esteem…For if all the intellectual elements, as they call them, of religion are nothing more than mere symbols of God, will not the very name of God or of divine personality be also a symbol, and if this be admitted, the personality of God will become a matter of doubt and the gate will be opened to pantheism? …Modernism leads to atheism and to the annihilation of all religion. The error of Protestantism made the first step on this path; that of Modernism makes the second; atheism makes the next.

PRIDE SITS IN THE MODERNIST HOUSE

40….But it is pride which exercises an incomparably greater sway over the soul to blind it and lead it into error, and pride sits in Modernism as in its own house, finding sustenance everywhere in its doctrines and lurking in its every aspect. It is pride which fills Modernists with that self-assurance by which they consider themselves and pose as the rule for all. It is pride which puffs them up with that vainglory which allows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge, and makes them say, elated and inflated with presumption, “We are not as the rest of men,” and which, lest they should seem as other men, leads them to embrace and to devise novelties even of the most absurd kind.

It is pride which rouses in them the spirit of disobedience and causes them to demand a compromise between authority and liberty. It is owing to their pride that they seek to be the reformers of others while they forget to reform themselves, and that they are found to be utterly wanting in respect for authority, even for the supreme authority. Truly there is no road which leads so directly and so quickly to Modernism as pride. When a Catholic layman or a priest forgets the precept of the Christian life which obliges us to renounce ourselves if we would follow Christ and neglects to tear pride from his heart, then it is he who most of all is a fully ripe subject for the errors of Modernism.

42….The Modernists pass judgment on the holy Fathers of the Church even as they do upon tradition… Finally, the Modernists try in every way to diminish and weaken the authority of the ecclesiastical magisterium itself by sacrilegiously falsifying its origin, character, and rights, and by freely repeating the calumnies of its adversaries…the Modernists vent all their bitterness and hatred on Catholics who zealously fight the battles of the Church. There is no species of insult which they do not heap upon them, but their usual course is to charge them with ignorance or obstinacy.

43….They seize upon professorships in the seminaries and universities, and gradually make of them chairs of pestilence. In sermons from the pulpit they disseminate their doctrines, although possibly in utterances which are veiled…They are to be found among the laity, and in the ranks of the clergy, and they are not wanting even in the last place where one might expect to meet them, in religious communities If they treat of biblical questions, it is upon Modernist principles…they destroy as far as they can the pious traditions of the people…they have persuaded themselves that in all this they are really serving God and the Church. In reality they only offend both…

50. It is also the duty of the Bishops to prevent writings of Modernists, or whatever savors of Modernism or promotes it, from being read when they have been published, and to hinder their publication when they have not. No books or papers or periodicals whatever of this kind are to be permitted to seminarists or university students. The injury to them would be not less than that which is caused by immoral reading — nay, it would be greater, for such writings poison Christian life at its very fount.

57….Meanwhile, Venerable Brethren, fully confident in your zeal and energy, We beseech for you with Our whole heart the abundance of heavenly light, so that in the midst of this great danger to souls from the insidious invasions of error upon every hand, you may see clearly what ought to be done, and labor to do it with all your strength and courage. May Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith, be with you in His power; and may the Immaculate Virgin, the destroyer of all heresies, be with you by her prayers and aid.

The post Pope St. Pius X addressed the heresies of Modernism first appeared on AirMaria.com.

Marycast #73 ( 10min) Play – In this episode, Dr. Miravalle discusses what the Church means when She declares that a certain apparition or private revelation is “approved,” and worthy of belief, or “condemned”.  Who in the Church discerns the authenticity of an apparition?  What crucial role does the local bishop play in the process?  Listen as Dr. Miravalle concludes this important and fascinating short series.

Ave Maria!

Audio (MP3)

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