Advent I

+JMJ

We do not preach only one coming of Christ, but a second as well, much more glorious than the first.

The first coming was marked by patience; the second will bring the crown of a divine kingdom. In general, whatever relates to our Lord Jesus Christ has two aspects. There is a birth from God before the ages, and a birth from a virgin at the fullness of time.
There is a hidden coming, like that of rain on fleece, and a coming before all eyes, still in the future.

At the first coming he was wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger. At his second coming he will be clothed in light as in a garment. In the first coming he endured the cross, despising the shame; in the second coming he will be in glory, escorted by an army of angels.

We look then beyond the first coming and await the second. At the first coming we said: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. At the second we shall say it again; we shall go out with the angels to meet the Lord and cry out in adoration: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. The Saviour will not come to be judged again, but to judge those by whom he was judged. At his own judgement he was silent; then he will address those who committed the outrages against him when they crucified him and will remind them: You did these things, and I was silent. His first coming was to fulfil his plan of love, to teach men by gentle persuasion. This time, whether men like it or not, they will be subjects of his kingdom by necessity.

The prophet Malachi speaks of the two comings. And the Lord whom you seek will come suddenly to his temple: that is one coming. Again he says of another coming: Look, the Lord almighty will come, and who will endure the day of his entry, or who will stand in his sight? Because he comes like a refiner’s fire, a fuller’s herb, and he will sit refining and cleansing.

These two comings are also referred to by Paul in writing to Titus: The grace of God the Saviour has appeared to all men, instructing us to put aside impiety and worldly desires and live temperately, uprightly, and religiously in this present age, waiting for the joyful hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Notice how he speaks of a first coming for which he gives thanks, and a second, the one we still await. That is why the faith we profess has been handed on to you in these words: He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

Our Lord Jesus Christ will therefore come from heaven. He will come at the end of the world, in glory, at the last day. For there will be an end to this world, and the created world will be made new.

- from "The Two-Fold Coming of Christ" by St. Cyril of Jerusalem

Catholics and the Supreme Court (Part II)

+ JMJ

Recently I wrote an article on Catholics and the Supreme Court. I have received several emails and a couple of comments on this blog concerning this article. Therefore, I felt it needed to restate my point on this matter and perhaps make it clearer.

There are diverse cultures and religions in these United States of America. However, this country was founded on fundamental Judeo-Christian ideals. Thus, we need representatives in our courts and Congress and White House to continue these morals in our country. We were founded as a nation under God – the God of the Old and New Testament of Sacred Scripture. Whether one is a Protestant, Catholic, or Jew, he or she must be faithful to the Scriptures and the founding ideals of this country and carry on this legacy that has been given to us through the ages.

One gentleman made reference to the Klan and called our founding fathers infidels. They were fundamental Christians. They were rooted in Judeo-Christian beliefs, and thus founded our nation upon such a rock. We seem to hear the word infidel quite a lot recently, mostly at the mouths of Mohammedans, who in fact, are the epitome of true infidels themselves. The Klan has nothing to do with this article and I can’t understand what was meant by this seeing the writer doesn’t seem proficient in the English language.

+ Mason

Why is it Virtually Impossible to be a Christian and an Episcopalian?

+JMJ

Someone once asked me why you can't be a Christian and an Episcopalian. Here is a good article to read that may shed some light on the fact:

+ Mason

The Peculiar Peculations of PECUSA
By Thomas Lipscomb
11/14/2005

In a meeting last week in Pittsburgh, an international panel of prominent Anglicans has called for an open break between members of the Anglican Communion and what they view as the wayward Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States. The meeting was hosted by the Bishop Duncan of Pittsburgh and presided over by seven archbishops from the West Indies, South East Asia, and Africa.

The collapse of the authority and membership of mainstream churches in the United States has paralleled the collapse of the influence of other institutions from the media to academia as a yawning gap has continued to open up in the past half century between their actions and their announced goals.

The sad huddle of affluent bedwetters, thumbsuckers, treehuggers, social climbers, homophiles, quavery ladies, and chronic petition signers that makes up the current Episcopal Church is no exception. Historic hubs like lovely Grace Cathedral in San Francisco or St. Paul's in Richmond, Virginia, have been turned into bizarre nests of homosexual and "peace" activism, complete with rainbow and peace flags hanging in the nave and lesbian and homosexual priests ramming their agenda down the throats of the congregations along with the communion wafer.

Many think those activists continually demanding a more "inclusive" church might have paid a little attention to the majority of its communicants. The majority had proven itself perfectly willing to include minorities with equal rights. But the radical minority didn't want inclusiveness... it wanted to dominate. And if success is dominating empty churches by driving out their congregations, they have succeeded.

The reality of the "inclusiveness" of the radicals was brought home a year ago by an idiotic abuse of power by the Bishop of Washington, D.C. against a tiny tidewater Maryland parish and its brave priest. Now the radicals are the majority many places. And they control the lovely churches, seminaries, and the all-important church pension plan.

Those who have left the Episcopal Church, or are being included out, are, in a sense, "Neo-Puritans," just as they are accused of being by those trying to keep PECUSA together.

So were those part of the Reformation movement spread by Martin Luther and his successors and the original Puritans themselves. But they were protesting innovations and abuses by the hierarchies in the reigning churches of their day, including the Catholic practices of simony, benefices, the selling of indulgences, and, in the Puritans' case, the conversion of the Anglican church from a institution of God to an institutional extension of the Stuart Monarchy's recently asserted "divine right."

Their problem was a "trahison des clercs." Congregations weren't trying to reform the basic tenets of the church. If anything they were trying to return to them. Few of the Episcopal laity had any problem with the 39 Articles of Religion at the back of the Book of Common Prayer, but dozens of their bishops and priests did.

In fact they so objected to the Book itself that they destroyed it with a "revision" in the 1970s. The basic language of the BCP somehow had served almost 500 years of Episcopalians from Tudor times to Jimmy Carter's presidency, and suddenly it failed the clergy's "inclusive" test.

Besides, prominent bishops like Spong and Robinson disagreed with some of the most basic elements of the Nicene Creed, the heart of Anglican belief. Some they considered minor matters of definition, like the divinity of Christ. It made one wonder why, if the radicals clerics shared such contempt toward these unfashionable tenets of faith, they hadn't left their unenlightened laity to more orthodox priests and moved on?

The American Episcopal Church itself is a byproduct of the Reformation. It proudly called itself the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States to make that point after the American Revolution. It intentionally dispersed its authority originally through a series of local parishes that owned their own property and selected their own priests under bishops of dioceses of limited power. That way the parishes could reflect whatever the local people wanted, from "Low Church" "plain altar" evangelicals of the Puritan tradition to lush "High Church" parishes with their "smells and bells."

Over the past 50 years radical priests and allied bishops have systematically gutted parishional authority and taken over their property as one diocese after another has swung into line with the new authoritarian radical clergy. In short, the protest meeting led by the courageous Bishop of Pittsburgh was a reaction to a half century of peculation -- embezzlement led by the church establishment. But on whose behalf?

Fortunately a healthy religion is able to renew itself from time to time as required. When it isn't, a black hole like the Islam of today results that becomes the enemy of reform and enlightenment itself.

What a wonderful irony that Third World members of the Anglican Communion are more vital in this renewal than the Mother Church of England itself, much less the incredible, shrinking weirdo Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States.

--Thomas Lipscomb is an Anglo-Catholic parishioner of the Mission of Mary Magdalene in New York. This story appeared in The Spectator.

On Catholics and the Supreme Court

+JMJ

There is a very popular show on EWTN (Global Catholic Network) called “The World Over Live”. The show is hosted by Mr. Raymond Arroyo, whom I have had the pleasure of meeting in person along with my wife. The topic of this week’s show was concerning the recent nomination of yet another Pro-Life Catholic judge for the Supreme Court.

The usual proverbial feminist/liberal “peanut gallery” is calling foul to this appointment because they see Judge Alito as a radical anti-life foe. They assert that there are too many Catholics on the Supreme Court as is, and that other religions should be better represented like Islam or even atheism.

First of all, there can NEVER be too many Catholics standing up for the rights of our nations peoples. We don’t need a stronger Islamic representation; we don’t need a stronger atheistic representation. What this country needs is a strong Catholic representation. This country is not Islamic, it is not atheist either. At present, one out of every three people in this country are Catholic. Yes, this is a minority amongst the Protestant majority in this nation, but these "separated brethren" (the title given to Protestants by the Catechism of the Catholic Church and by the former Holy Fathers Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII) have dropped the ball in standing for fundamental biblical truths in our society today. There is no other religious body without/within Christendom that speaks with one voice against decaying morals in our time. While the Protestants are trying to make decisions out of their control regarding the illegal ordination of women, illegal ordination of homosexuals, versions of Scripture and liturgies that are more suitable to the ears of the feminist, gays, lesbians, liberals, anti-life activist, ant-family persons, pagans, and other reprobates, the Catholic Church stands firm and solid defending the old time religion with pride. What else could be expected of the one and only Church founded by Christ himself?

Secondly, just because four judges on the Supreme Court, and now possibly a fifth, state that they are Catholic doesn’t mean that they ARE Catholic; much in the same way that we have NEVER had a Catholic President nor even a Catholic candidate for President. To be Catholic means to live and believe in the teachings of the Church. In today’s society that is hard to do for many, and is not done by most. The same is true with Protestants. That being said, there aren’t as many fundamental Christians in control as we are led to believe, but there are many feminist and liberals hiding behind a mask painted like the Church that are in control. You can always tell a wolf in sheep’s clothing though, just take a closer look!

This nation is fundamental, it is conservative, it is Judeo-Christian, and we need men and women to reflect this on the bench, in Congress, and in the White House. Pray for a conservative take back of power, and pray for an end to abortion, which is what this battle is really all about in the first place!

All Souls' Day

+JMJ

The Church has encouraged prayer for the dead from the earliest times as an act of Christian charity. "If we had no care for the dead," Augustine noted, "we would not be in the habit of praying for them." Yet pre-Christian rites for the deceased kept such a strong hold on the superstitious imagination that a liturgical commemoration was not observed until the early Middle Ages, when monastic communities began to mark an annual day of prayer for the departed members.

In the middle of the 11th century, St. Odilo, abbot of Cluny (France), decreed that all Cluniac monasteries offer special prayers and sing the Office for the Dead on November 2, the day after the feast of All Saints. The custom spread from Cluny and was finally adopted throughout the Roman Church.

The theological underpinning of the feast is the acknowledgment of human frailty. Since few people achieve perfection in this life but, rather, go to the grave still scarred with traces of sinfulness, some period of purification seems necessary before a soul comes face-to-face with God. The Council of Trent affirmed this purgatory state and insisted that the prayers of the living can speed the process of purification.

Superstition still clung to the observance. Medieval popular belief held that the souls in purgatory could appear on this day in the form of witches, toads or will-o’-the-wisps. Graveside food offerings supposedly eased the rest of the dead.

Observances of a more religious nature have survived. These include public processions or private visits to cemeteries and decorating graves with flowers and lights. This feast is observed with great fervor in Mexico.

- from "Saint of the Day"

All Saints' Day

+JMJ

The earliest certain observance of a feast in honor of all the saints is an early fourth-century commemoration of "all the martyrs." In the early seventh century, after successive waves of invaders plundered the catacombs, Pope Boniface IV gathered up some 28 wagonloads of bones and reinterred them beneath the Pantheon, a Roman temple dedicated to all the gods. The pope rededicated the shrine as a Christian church. According to Venerable Bede, the pope intended "that the memory of all the saints might in the future be honored in the place which had formerly been dedicated to the worship not of gods but of demons" (On the Calculation of Time).

But the rededication of the Pantheon, like the earlier commemoration of all the martyrs, occurred in May. Many Eastern Churches still honor all the saints in the spring, either during the Easter season or immediately after Pentecost.
How the Western Church came to celebrate this feast in November is a puzzle to historians. The Anglo-Saxon theologian Alcuin observed the feast on November 1 in 800, as did his friend Arno, Bishop of Salzburg. Rome finally adopted that date in the ninth century.

- from "Saint of the Day"