Daily Archives: November 12, 2019

Last month the Vatican and Pope Francis hosted the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region, a meeting to discuss the challenges facing Amazonia and the Catholic Church therein that managed to be extremely wild and extremely predictable at once.

The wild part featured not just the expected debates about married priests and female deacons, but an extended meltdown over whether a wooden statue of a naked, kneeling pregnant woman, used in a ritual on the Vatican grounds, embodied indigenous reverence for the Virgin Mary or indigenous pantheism and nature-worship. Vatican officials seemed determined not to clarify the matter, traditionalist outrage ran wild, and eventually a young traditionalist swiped one of the statues from a Roman church and pitched it into the River Tiber making himself either a successor of Saint Boniface or a racist iconoclast, depending on which faction of Catholic media you believed.

All exciting stuff but also a bit irrelevant to the actual outcome of the synod, which featured little of the conservative resistance that characterized earlier synodal battles over divorce and remarriage, and eventually produced a document backing the major project of the Francis era: the decentralization of doctrine and discipline, with priestly celibacy the latest rule thats likely to soon vary across different Roman Catholic regions, as the interpretation of church teaching on divorce and remarriage already does.

And even the act of traditionalist defiance was part of the predictability of the proceedings. As conservative resistance to Francis has grown more intense, it has also grown more marginal, defined by symbolic gestures rather than practical strategies, burning ever-hotter on the internet even as resistance within the hierarchy has faded with retirements, firings, deaths.

Four years ago I wrote an essay describing the Francis era as a crisis for conservative Catholicism or at least the conservative Catholicism that believed John Paul II had permanently settled debates over celibacy, divorce, intercommunion and female ordination. That crisis is worse now, manifest in furious arguments within the Catholic right as much as in online opposition to the pope himself. And I dont think were any closer to a definite answer to what happens to conservative Catholicism when it no longer seems to have the papacy on its side.

While the synod was going on, I conducted a long interview with one of the popes most prominent conservative critics, Cardinal Raymond Burke. I had never met him before, but he was as I anticipated: at once obdurate and guileless, without the usual church politicians affect, and with a straightforward bullet-biting to his criticism of the pope.

The Burke critique is simple enough. Church teaching on questions like marriages indissolubility is supposed to be unchanging, and thats what hes upholding: "I havent changed. Im still teaching the same things I always taught and theyre not my ideas." What is unchanging certainly cant be altered by an individual pontiff: "The pope is not a revolutionary, elected to change the churchs teaching." And thus if Francis seems to be tacitly encouraging changes, through some sort of decentralizing process, it means "theres a breakdown of the central teaching authority of the Roman pontiff," and that the pope has effectively "refused to exercise [his] office."

This is a position with some precedents in Catholic history. John Henry Newman, the Victorian convert, theologian and cardinal recently sainted by Francis, once suggested that there had been a "temporary suspense" of the churchs magisterium, its teaching authority, during eras in which the papacy failed to teach definitively or exercise discipline on controversial subjects. And the churchs saints from such periods include bishops who stood alone in defense of orthodoxy, sometimes against misguided papal pressure.

But you can also see in my conversation with the cardinal how hard it is to sustain a Catholicism that is orthodox against the pope. For instance, Burke himself brought up a hypothetical scenario where Francis endorses a document that includes what the cardinal considers heresy. "People say if you dont accept that, youll be in schism," Burke said, when "my point would be the document is schismatic. Im not."

But this implies that, in effect, the pope could lead a schism, even though schism by definition involves breaking with the pope. This is an idea that several conservative Catholic theologians have brought up recently; it does not become more persuasive with elaboration. And Burke himself acknowledges as much: It would be a "total contradiction" with no precedent or explanation in church law.

The pull of such ideas, though, explains why you need only take a step beyond Burkes position to end up as a kind of de facto sedevacantist, a believer that the pope is not really the pope or, alternatively, that the church is so corrupted and compromised by modernity that the pope might technically still be pope but his authority doesnt matter anymore. This is the flavor of a lot of very-online traditionalism, and its hard to see how it wouldnt (eventually) lead many of its adherents to a separation from the larger church, joining the traditionalist quasi-exile pioneered after Vatican II by the Society of Saint Pius X.

Are there alternatives to Burkes tenuous position or the schismatic plunge? At the moment there are two: One is a conservative Catholicism that strains more mightily than Burke to interpret all of Francis moves in continuity with his predecessors, while arguing that the popes liberalizing allies and appointees are somehow misinterpreting him. This was the default conservative position early in the Francis pontificate; it has since become more difficult to sustain. But it persists in the hope of a kind of snapping-back moment, when Francis or a successor decides that Catholic bishops in countries like Germany are pushing things too far, at which point there can be a kind of restoration of the John Paul II-era battle lines, with the papacy despite Francis experiments reinterpreted to have always been on the side of orthodoxy.

Another alternative is a conservatism that simply resolves the apparent conflict between tradition and papal power in favor of the latter, submitting its private judgment to papal authority in 19th-century style even if that submission requires accepting shifts on sex, marriage, celibacy and other issues that look awfully like the sort of liberal Protestantism that the 19th-century popes opposed. This would be a conservatism of structure more than doctrine, as suggested by the title of a website that champions its approach: "Where Peter Is." But it would still need, for its long-term coherence, an account of how doctrine can and cannot change beyond just papal fiat. So it, too, awaits clarifications that this papacy has conspicuously not supplied.

The importance of that waiting is the only definite conclusion that I can draw from the whole mess. Where conservative Catholics have the power to resist what seem like false ideas or disastrous innovations they must do so. But they also need to see their relative powerlessness through their own religions lens. That means treating it as a possible purgation, a lesson in the insufficiency of human strategies and wisdom, and a reason to embrace T.S. Eliots poetic admonition: There is yet faith, but the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.

Ross Douthat (@NYTDouthat) writes for The New York Times.

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Ross Douthat: What will happen to conservative Catholicism? - The Register-Guard

Iqbal: The Metaphysics and The Reconstruction- Part I

The difficulty of research on Iqbals The Development of Metaphysics in Persia -- his doctoral dissertation -- is as great as the paucity of material on it. We are told by some Iqbal biographers that it was praised highly by orientalists such as T.W. Arnold and R. A. Nicholson etc. Such praise may have been incidental to what else was being said about Iqbal in the beginning of the 20th Century, for the work as a whole seems to have gone without much detailed commentary, even by the said orientalists themselves.

In the more than one hundred years since, the situation hasnt changed much. As far as I have been able to see, apart from some valuable and mostly recent contributions of a few pages in some edited volumes on Iqbal, there is very little dedicated entirely to the study of Iqbals dissertation. One reason for this would perhaps be what Iqbal Singh said of this work: It is somewhat unsatisfying. It leaves the reader with the impression of something that he can neither accept as serious work nor reject as something trivial and unworthy of attention. For a research thesis its scope is too wide; and for an original and interpretative study of the subject it seems too sketchy, too descriptive

Some of the points raised by Singh may be relevant to the fact that the Munich examiners were not greatly impressed by Iqbals mastery of Zoroastrian and medieval sources. But they passed it because they felt that it drew sufficiently upon manuscript research and because they trusted the judgment of experts such as Arnold (Rizvi 2015 with reference to Durrani 2003). Arnold, Iqbals teacher in Lahore and London, had put in a good word for Iqbal. The work was treated as a dissertation in oriental philology and not philosophy because the committee was not satisfied with its quality in the latter area (Rizvi 2015).

Singh, like others after him, also finds that the work dates badly. How the work dates is a tricky question. Those who point to this problem fall short of discussing the issue in detail. Singh himself says nothing further. But there is another, personal sense in which the work dates and which may explain the lack of attention that befell this work. Almost immediately after the dissertation appeared (perhaps even at the time Iqbal submitted it) he had started undergoing a change and very soon abandoned the pantheistic outlook that is understood to mark this work.

The Urdu translation of this 1908 work appeared in 1936. In 1927, Iqbal told the translator that he didnt think much of it because his ideas had undergone a revolution and in German separate books had been written on Ghazali, Tusi, etc., leaving very little in the book that could survive criticism. Iqbal did not specify what that German research was, and that poses a few problems, if we take his 1930-34 The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam to be the work where that new research would find mention.

Tusi can be safely put aside because he does not figure much in The Metaphysics and in The Reconstruction appears in a very different context. There does not appear to be a huge difference between the Ghazali of The Metaphysics and the Ghazali of The Reconstruction. In The Metaphysics Ghazali is one of the greatest personalities of Islam who anticipated Descartes and Hume, systematically refuted philosophy and completely annihilated the dread of intellectualism (read reason and philosophy) which had characterized the orthodoxy. He put dogma and metaphysics together into an education system that produced great men of intellect. He examined all the various claimants of "Certain Knowledge" and finally found it in Sufism. ((I do not know if the irony of the comparisons involving Ghazali, Iqbals celebrated destroyer of rationalism, on the one hand, and Descartes, the founder of modern rationalism and Hume the atheist on the other, was truly lost on Iqbal. But such time-less and ahistorical comparisons are Iqbals permanent hallmark visible in The Metaphysics and omnipresent in The Reconstruction).

In The Reconstruction, we are once again reminded of Ghazalis greatness as the precursor of Descartes who despite his skepticism being a rather unsafe basis for religion not wholly justified by the spirit of the Quran and despite going a little too far broke the back of that proud but shallow rationalism in the Muslim world -- much like Kant, the great gift of God to his people, who revealed the limitations of human reason and reduced the whole work of the rationalists to a heap of ruins. There is, Iqbal notes, one important difference. Kant, consistently with his principles, could not affirm the possibility of a knowledge of God. Ghazali, finding no hope in analytic thought, moved to mystic experience, and there found an independent content for religion.

In The Metaphysics, Ghazali harmonizes Sufi pantheism and the Asharite dogma of personality, a reconciliation which makes it difficult to say whether he was a Pantheist, or a Personal Pantheist of the type of Lotze. Ghazali moves towards a conception of the soul which sweeps away all difference between God and the individual soul. Realizing the Pantheistic drift of his inquiry, he preferred silence as to the ultimate nature of the soul. Iqbal does not critically engage with Ghazali here and that is typical of him in The Metaphysics for the most part. This account of Ghazalis mysticism is not rejected or modified in any way in The Reconstruction. The spiritual content of Ghazalis silence over the soul though is replaced by a philosophical account of the problem of thought and intuition, where Iqbal gives his own ideas on how the finite (thought in serial time) and the infinite (intuition) are organically linked. something that, according to Iqbal, both Ghazali and Kant failed to realize and which led to Ghazali drawing a line of cleavage between thought and intuition. Iqbal, it appears, is also trying to break through Ghazalis silence over the nature of God and soul, having restated it in a peculiar way. Iqbals own consistencies, contradictions, successes and failures in doing so, at this point, are not the issue.

We can see here that, to the extent Iqbal reproduces his account of Ghazali and his contribution in the history of thought, there is hardly any difference. The Metaphysics is meant to be a historical account whereas The Reconstruction is an interpretative endeavor -- an allegedly philosophical attempt at reconstructing Muslim thought. What is significant in our context is that Iqbal cites no new research while discussing Ghazali. What then do we make of his reference to the new research on Gazali and Tusi? Not much, I believe, by way of explanation.

(To be continued)

The writer is a student of literature and philosophy at the Forman Christian College.

Email: [emailprotected]

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Iqbal: The Metaphysics and The Reconstruction- Part I - The News International

From Marx to Gaia

By Dr. Samuel Gregg, Catholic World Report, October 23, 2019

Thirty years ago, the world rejoiced as the crack-up of Communisms grip on Eastern Europe, forever symbolized by the Berlin Wall, began. This, however, created enormous dilemmas for prominent representatives of a theology which had taken Marxism very seriously from the late-1960s onwards throughout Latin America.

Perhaps one reason why some Latin Americans have embraced various evangelical confessions is that many such movements put Christ first, and keep politics firmly in its place. Thats a lesson, however, that some Latin American liberation ecologists and their ecclesial fellow-travelers havent absorbed

What became known as liberation theology was never a monolithic movement. Nevertheless its most influential strands were influenced by Marxist thought, as many liberationists freely acknowledged. Cursory reading of Gustavo Gutirrezs 1971 classic A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation soon confirms this. That stimulus was even more apparent in the works of prominent liberationists like Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino.

Socialisms collapse in Eastern Europe created significant challenges for those liberationists who relied on Marxist analysis. While many asserted that the Soviet Bloc was a deviation from Marxist ideals, such systems had given expression to key Marxist commitments. Examples included the minimization (if not the effective abolition) of private property, laws formal subordination to Marxist ideology, and hostility to religion.

1989 didnt, however, lead some liberation theologians to question substantially their fundamental assumptions. Many simply transferred their attention to the environment. Among the things we have learned from the Amazon Synod is how far such thinking has burrowed its way into Latin American Catholicism.

Environmental liberation

Of the liberation theologians who transitioned to whats called liberation ecology, Leonardo Boff has gone the furthest in trying to immerse Catholicism in environmentalist concerns and ideology. In Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (1997), Boff stated that the Church cannot enclose religious persons in dogmas and cultural representations. It must serve as an organized place where people may be initiated, accompanied, and aided [in expressing] the spirit of the age.

That the spirit of the age doesnt always accord with the truth about God isnt a question addressed by Boff. In any case, the spirit of the age, at least for Boff, was environmentalism of the deep Green variety. Boffs 1997 book, for instance, argued that the Earth is not a planet on which life exists . . . the Earth does not contain life. It is life, a living superorganism: Gaia.

The Gaia hypothesis was first articulated by the chemist James Lovelock in the 1970s. It has since made its way into other disciplines, including theology. On several occasions, Boff has acknowledged that The vision of James Lovelock . . . helped us see not only that life exists on Earth, but also that Earth itself is a living organism.

Lovelocks argument was that all living entities (animals, plants, etc.) on Earth effectively cooperate with inorganic compounds (oxygen, metals, etc.). This makes the planet a self-regulating, perhaps even self-directed entity which preserves all the essentials for life, provided humans dont interfere too much with whats going on.

By the late-1990s, the hypothesis began collapsing under the impact of heavy scientific critique. Some scientists pointed out, for example, that Gaia theory couldnt account for the fact that some parts of the natural world had naturally detrimental effects on other parts of the environment. In short, there was considerable disharmony in nature that owed nothing to human action.

Other scientists criticized Gaia theorys non-scientific and teleological aspectsfeatures which Lovelock himself waxed and waned about. Its pseudo-religious connotations emerge when we discover that Gaia is the name of one of the most primordial of Greek goddesses. In Greek mythology, Gaia (who takes the even more revealing name Terra in the equivalent Roman mythos) personified the Earth itself. Ascribing divine status to Gods creation rather than God himself has a name: i.e., pantheism.

Central to Boffs embrace of Gaia theory is his insistence that humans accept that they are not only homo sapiens (man the wise) but also, Boff claims, homo demens (man the deranged): a species whose dementedness is expressed in failure to recognize the natural world as humanitys equal. At the core of Boffs liberation ecology is thus a type of biological egalitarianism. In the forthcoming ecological and social democracy, Boff states, religion will promote the idea that it is not just humans who are citizens but all beings . . . Democracy accordingly issues in a biogracy and cosmoscracy.

How plants, animals, glaciers, fire or metals would exercise their citizenship in Boffs biogracy is unclear. After all, they lack reason and free will. But Boff did outline a distinct political structure for his eco-social democracy. It should coalesce around global bodies, such as the United Nations and its eighteen specialized agencies and fourteen worldwide programs. A highly centralized, top-down approach towards environmental questions and politics more generally was the future. As in his pre-Gaia days, the principle of subsidiarity doesnt appear to have exerted substantive influence upon Boffs thought.

Heaven on Earth

There is another characteristic of liberation ecology which was prefigured in Marxist-influenced liberation theologies. This concerns tendencies to immanentize the eschaton, to use the expression employed by the political scientist Eric Voegelin.

One feature of many pre-1989 liberation theologies was their relative silence about the life which Christianity teaches lies beyond death. It wasnt that they denied it outright. Rather, their focus was almost exclusively upon earthly injustices and overcoming them. Many liberation theologians even portrayed traditional Christian teaching about suffering as potentially redemptive in the same way that Marx presented religion: i.e., a rationalization of unjust status quos which anesthetized people to the structural unfairness surrounding them. Some liberationists subsequently held that removal of all oppressive structures would inaugurate a more natural state of affairs: a world free of alienation and remarkably similar to the earthly utopia which Marx said lay at the end of history.

Similar patterns permeate some liberation ecologists thinking. In a 2016 interview, Boff contended that the intellectual and economic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries gave rise to the idea of conquest of people and the Earth. The Earth was no longer viewed as the great Mother, alive and purposeful. Instead, it was reduced to something to be exploited by humans for wealth accumulation. From this standpoint, the pre-Enlightenment, pre-capitalist environment was a placid, almost pristine world which was naturally hospitable to humans.

Such claims are historically questionable. Humans were extensively usingand often abusingthe natural world long before the seventeenth century. That includes pre-Christian indigenous societies. In A God Within (1973), the Pulitzer-prize winning biologist Ren Dubos illustrated how Maya peoples inflicted immense ecological damage throughout southern Mexico and Central America long before the Spanish conquest. These nations had never heard of Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, or market economies.

More generally, liberation ecology has a distinctly romantic edge to it. Its adherents seem reluctant to concede that, with or without humans, the natural world isnt a symphonic paradise. Animals, for instance, are hardly kind to each other. Millions of species have disappeared without any human involvement. Moreover, nature has inflicted enormous harm upon people for millennia through unpredictable events like earthquakes. The claim that the environment is somehow naturally benign and nurturing, save when humans disrupt it, simply isnt true.

To this we should add that neither pre-Enlightenment Judaism nor Christianity invested plants or animals with a status equivalent to humans, let alone that of a divine-like Mother. Indeed, Judaism and Christianity played the pivotal role in de-divinizing the natural world. They thus helped sweep aside the pagan religions of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Babylon which irrationally ascribed divine qualities to elements like water and activities such as war. Certainly, the Scriptures present the created world as good. But they dont portray the natural world as perfect or claim that nature is somehow intrinsically better than or equal to humans: for therein lie slippery slopes to syncretism and paganism.

No Salvation outside politics

There is, however, another important similarity between yesterdays liberation theologians and todays liberation ecologists. None have succeeded in stemming the drift of Latin Americans away from Catholicism.

Theres many reasons for this decline, but one is surely the way in which many liberation theologians and liberation ecologists locate salvations essence in politics. In remarks written in 1984, Joseph Ratzinger observed that most liberation theologians believed that nothing lay outside politics. Hence, he said, they regarded any theology which wasnt practical, i.e., not essentially political . . . as idealistic and thus lacking in reality, or else is condemned as a vehicle for the oppressors maintenance of power. Judging from their writings, many liberation ecologists embrace this position.

The problem is that politics cant answer those ultimate questions about life, death, good, evil, and humanitys ultimate origins and destiny which haunt everyones imagination. Perhaps one reason why some Latin Americans have embraced various evangelical confessions is that many such movements put Christ first, and keep politics firmly in its place. Thats a lesson, however, that some Latin American liberation ecologists and their ecclesial fellow-travelers havent absorbed. And like liberation theology, the consequent damage inflicted by radical liberation ecology upon Catholicisms abilityeven willingnessto evangelize Latin Americans is likely to be deep and lasting.

Article first appeared HERE.

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Liberation theology never went away. It morphed into liberation ecology. - Catholic Citizens of Illinois

PETITION: Call on Vatican to keep out all "pagan" symbols from St. Peter's and Vatican Property!Sign the petition here.

November 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) A friend and former student of mine sent an email to me recently that will surely resonate with many who have been dismayed, scandalized, and horrified by the paganism, syncretism, and contempt for the Catholic religion on full display during last months Synod in Rome. With his permission, I share below the email and my reply.

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski:

Im relieved. For some reason, Im happy that the evil everyone has suspected all along and warned against is finally rearing its head though it is far nastier than I thought it would be. To me, the disaster of the Amazon Synod has completely and forcefully established the failure of Vatican II, exposed the modernist influence preceding Vatican II, put a floodlight on the abuses of the current and more recent popes, and stripped bare the lukewarm, pathetic, bright-lipstick-wearing-and-hand-sanitizing-before-distributing-communion-in-the-hand kind of Catholicism that has been around since before I was born. Any compromises I was willing to make either with other people or even in myself are totally banished. Here is the polarizing point Ive been longing for. Do you think its appropriate to feel relief along with great sadness?

A different kind of question: Why do you suppose a vague pantheism has gained so much appeal in our times, becoming the most common opponent of Christianity more popular than atheism, agnosticism, or even downright satanism?

The big question: What do we do? Pray, obviously, and shuck any vestiges of non-traditional Catholicism in our lives. But I kind of want to fight. For some reason, I see this Pachamama demon as an antithesis of the Virgin Mary. Mother Earth vs. Mother Mary, or a generic cult of fertility vs. the veneration of the Theotokos. That makes me so angry. It makes me so angry that our pope, our bishops, and our cardinals are disrespecting our Mother so blatantly and viciously. It makes me so angry that I want to take the wooden idols and smash them to pieces before hurling them into the Tiber, this time for good. How can I turn that anger to constructive purposes?

Here was my reply.

You have expressed to perfection the way we are all feeling. It is a worldwide phenomenon, and we can indeed be thankful for the clarity with which the evil of modernism (with all of the other -isms that precede or follow it) is being exposed on the stage of the Vatican. My own polarizing point already occurred long ago, when I studied how the Novus Ordo came into existence and how much the tradition of the Church was despised during and after Vatican II. Everything that is happening now is an extrapolation of this fundamental sin against tradition. Once you reject your identity, you can become anything or nothing.

The reason for pantheisms appeal is not hard to see: it mingles enough truth in with the falsehood to appeal to the human mind, which has an instinctive apprehension of divinity. Atheism, in that sense, is always artificial and forced; it runs against the grain of our conscience and our experience. But Christian theism is much more radical and demanding than pantheism, because one has to profess ones faith in a God utterly transcendent and at the same time fearfully intimate (since His immediate presence to all things is caused by His very transcendence). Pantheism lets a person be cool with religious stuff while keeping the true God at arms length. It adds a religious veneer to an essentially secular lifestyle.

Anger always has to be channeled into thoughtful and focused efforts; otherwise, it disperses itself wastefully and harmfully. I have spoken a little bit here about what laity can do, but it boils down to a few things.

1) Dont give a red cent to any bishop or priest who does not publicly and expressly preach the orthodox Catholic faith and condemn the errors going on in the Church and at the Vatican. Their most basic job, after offering sacrifice, is to preach the truth, in season, out of season, reproving, rebuking, exhorting (cf. 2 Tim. 4:2). If a bishop or priest is not doing this, its like a parent who neglects or abuses his children and who therefore deserves to lose their affection, their support, and their collaboration even if not their prayers for his conversion. If we have any extra money, we should give it to reliable traditional religious orders and apostolates, which are the hope of the future.

2) Pray and fast more seriously. We are doing battle with evil spirits: For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places (Eph. 6:12), and about such demons, Our Lord says: This kind can go out by nothing, but by prayer and fasting (Mk. 9:28). All of us myself included! tend to talk a lot and wring our hands, but when push comes to shove, how often do we sign up for holy hours, or skip meals, or abstain from meat or alcoholic beverages or TV or other creature comforts, or pray 15 decades of the rosary, or get up for an early morning Latin Mass? Like Jesus, of whom Scripture says, He began to do and to teach (cf. Acts 1:1), we have to begin with doing.

3) Keep studying the Faith, and know it very well. Only in this way can we marvel at it, give thanks for it, live it, discuss it with others and debate its opponents, and pass it on to the next generation. This is no small thing: there is so much ignorance, error, and wishful thinking out there that an accurate knowledge of the Faith, and especially of the liturgy, is rarely to be met with. Books like Fr. Jacksons Nothing Superfluous and Mosebachs Heresy of Formlessness and my Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness; books like the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, the Catechism of Trent, and Ludwig Otts Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma and I would add Bishop Schneiders new book, Christus Vincit these ought to be in front of our eyes for some period of time each day. Extrapolating from this, one could think about starting a book group, or inviting people periodically to ones home or apartment for readings and discussions. It is the age of the laity: we are the ones doing the heavy lifting at this point in terms of evangelization, catechesis, theology, and liturgical renewal.

4) We should pray about joining ourselves more closely to a traditional community, be it as an oblate of a Benedictine monastery, the Confraternity of St. Peter (Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter), the Society of the Sacred Heart (Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest), or some other, in order to share in the spiritual riches of that community and have a more orderly rule of life to follow.

5) This may seem an odd bit of advice, but it is the advice of many saints: practice giving thanks. Thank God each day for making you a Christian and a Catholic. Thank Him for leading you away from ignorance, error, and sin. Thank Him for giving you a hunger for the truth, a desire for the good, eyes and ears for the beautiful. Thank Him for leading you to Catholic tradition, to a good education, and to good friends. Thank Him for exposing evils and stirring up resistance. Thank Him even for your feelings of anger, sadness, dismay, and perplexity, which keep us from being lukewarm and comfortable. The more we acknowledge and rejoice in His gifts to us, the more we are drawn through the hardships of this time to spiritual and eternal goods that will never fade.

I agree with Roberto de Mattei that we must have, or recover, a militant conception of Christian life: we are soldiers fighting for Christ the King, even if all we are doing at the moment is faithfully discharging a desk job. We will not be passive, indifferent, lazy, taking whatever nonsense the hierarchs of the Church decide to dump on us; we will resist, respectfully but firmly, and insist on the true Faith.

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How to properly use righteous anger about the Amazon Synod - Lifesite