Forever

"What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and to lose his soul?"
 -Mark 8:36

Since Halloween is coming up here in the US, we are reminded that this day stands for All Hallows Eve which has unofficially been a day to recall the reality of hell and how souls that die in mortal sin actually do reside in such a place FOREVER.

FOREVER.  Think about it. 

Headland of Rock

“Be like a headland of rock on which the waves break incessantly; but it stands fast and around it the seething of the waters sink to rest”

-Marcus Aurelius 

Baseball is beautiful

What a game last night.  This should be a great World Series.

The Ultimate Trial

"Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.  The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.

The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.  The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.  God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world."

CCC 675-677

I have always found this passage to be the most terrifying in the whole Catechism.  May God have mercy on us.

Struggle

"You think it very hard to lead a life of such restraint unless you keep your eye of faith always open. Perseverance is a great grace. To go on gaining and advancing every day, we must be resolute, and bear and suffer as our blessed forerunners did. Which of them gained heaven without a struggle?"

-St. Elizabeth Ann Seton 

A Good Thing

So unless you are a Ultramontane or a liberal "Catholic" (who are not Catholics of course), it should be obvious to you that something is quite rotten in our beloved Church.  St. Pius X's condemnation of Modernism in the early part of the twentith century showed us that there were roaches in the very heart of the Church, that is to say in the priesthood and amongst the bishops.  They laid hidden until the creation of the Second Vatican Council where they were finally let out and spread their venom all across the Church.  Now, in this time, I am realizing that it might be a good thing to have the enemy so out in the clear.  It is good for us to know which bishops are enemies of the Church because now they feel confident that they can make their stances in the public. 

Even though I am distressed by this dirty business, let us remember that Our Lord will finish the human drama in the way He seems fit.  We might have to suffer under unholy priests, bishops, and popes but we know what the Church teaches and they cannot change these teachings no matter how hard they try.

World Mission Sunday

"As for Ourselves, Venerable Brothers, you well know that, from the beginning of Our Pontificate, We determined to leave nothing undone which might, by means of apostolic preachers, extend farther and farther the light of the Gospel and make easy for heathen nations the way unto salvation. It seems to Us that two special objectives ought to be aimed at in all missionary work, both of which are not only timely but necessary and closely connected with each other; namely, that a much larger number than heretofore of missionaries, well trained in the different fields of knowledge, be sent into the vast regions which are still deprived of the civilizing influence of the Christian religion; and secondly, that the faithful be brought to understand with what zeal, constancy in prayer, and with what generosity they too must co-operate in a work which is so holy and fruitful."

-Pope Pius XI, Rerum Ecclesiae, #3

Consequences

"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."

-Marcus Aurelius 

Beautiful

Commercials

I try not to watch too much TV however whenever baseball season is on, I tend to watch it a little more than the rest of the year.  One thing I am noticing is the complete lack of modesty and respect for the human body coming out of the screen.  Even commercials that should be innocuous, are now filled with a great number of sinful images.  What the heck is going on with our society?  Why can't companies produce commercials that promote their product using clean avenues?  Why are companies that produce sinful products allowed to publish this garbage for all to see?

Everyone can be corrupted by this but how about the small lads all around the country?  Those who have not build a discipline regarding custody of the eyes?  Oh dear.  It is becoming more clear to me now.  What Our Lady said at Fatima makes total sense.  Many people will go to hell because of sins against purity.  How our current times prove that.

Lord, please spare me, a sinner!

Harsh

"This is the fourth year of the double-wild-card system, and, for the losing players and fans alike, these harsh sudden endings impose a quietus upon the pleasures and recollections of a season, and cast the winning pitchers as executioners. Nothing will be done about this—the arrangement is there to disguise too many teams competing for too few slots in October—but the gimmick makes for harsh feelings not common to the pastime. I unhappily recall an undue coolness or amused hauteur in my own brief description of the Giants’ Madison Bumgarner shutting down the Pirates, 8–0, in last year’s National League wild-card event, before a silenced and horrified home crowd of Pittsburgh loyalists."

Read "Gone" By Roger Angell

A Pool of Pittsburgh Tears

What a dominating performance by Jake Arrieta.  I am not a fan of the two team Wild Card because I feel like it decreases the value of the 162 game season.  However, the Giants last year, and the Cubs this year have taken advantage of it.

One must feel for Pittsburgh.  They won 98 games yet to leave the proceedings after running into Jake is just baseball for you.

Talking about summer screeching to a halt.

Slow Down

"Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset."

-St. Francis De Sales

A. Bartlett Giamatti's "The Green Fields of the Mind" (On Baseball)

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone. 

Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn't this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio--not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television--and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come. 

But out here, on Sunday, October 2, where it rains all day, Dame Mutability never loses. She was in the crowd at Fenway yesterday, a gray day full of bluster and contradiction, when the Red Sox came up in the last of the ninth trailing Baltimore 8-5, while the Yankees, rain-delayed against Detroit, only needing to win one or have Boston lose one to win it all, sat in New York washing down cold cuts with beer and watching the Boston game. Boston had won two, the Yankees had lost two, and suddenly it seemed as if the whole season might go to the last day, or beyond, except here was Boston losing 8-5, while New York sat in its family room and put its feet up. Lynn, both ankles hurting now as they had in July, hits a single down the right-field line. The crowd stirs. It is on its feet. Hobson, third baseman, former Bear Bryant quarterback, strong, quiet, over 100 RBIs, goes for three breaking balls and is out. The goddess smiles and encourages her agent, a canny journeyman named Nelson Briles.

Now comes a pinch hitter, Bernie Carbo, onetime Rookie of the Year, erratic, quick, a shade too handsome, so laid-back he is always, in his soul, stretched out in the tall grass, one arm under his head, watching the clouds and laughing; now he looks over some low stuff unworthy of him and then, uncoiling, sends one out, straight on a rising line, over the center-field wall, no cheap Fenway shot, but all of it, the physics as elegant as the arc the ball describes.
New England is on its feet, roaring. The summer will not pass. Roaring, they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1975, the sixth game of the World Series, perhaps the greatest baseball game played in the last fifty years, when Carbo, loose and easy, had uncoiled to tie the game that Fisk would win. It is 8-7, one out, and school will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck forever. Now Bailey, picked up from the National League recently, big arms, heavy gut, experienced, new to the league and the club; he fouls off two and then, checking, tentative, a big man off balance, he pops a soft liner to the first baseman. It is suddenly darker and later, and the announcer doing the game coast to coast, a New Yorker who works for a New York television station, sounds relieved. His little world, well-lit, hot-combed, split-second-timed, had no capacity to absorb this much gritty, grainy, contrary reality.

Cox swings a bat, stretches his long arms, bends his back, the rookie from Pawtucket who broke in two weeks earlier with a record six straight hits, the kid drafted ahead of Fred Lynn, rangy, smooth, cool. The count runs two and two, Briles is cagey, nothing too good, and Cox swings, the ball beginning toward the mound and then, in a jaunty, wayward dance, skipping past Briles, feinting to the right, skimming the last of the grass, finding the dirt, moving now like some small, purposeful marine creature negotiating the green deep, easily avoiding the jagged rock of second base, traveling steady and straight now out into the dark, silent recesses of center field.

The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron had said was the only one he'd seen with the ability to break his records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October. Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game--not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.
Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun."

 "The Green Fields of the Mind"

Post-season starts tomorrow!  Bittersweet to say the least! 

Words of Wisdom for the Synod

"That We make no delay in this matter is rendered necessary especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church's open enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear. We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more lamentable, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, feigning a love for the Church, lacking the firm protection 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, vaunt themselves 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 daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man."

-Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, #2

Sinatra for a Friday Night

  

You Make Me Feel So Young by Frank Sinatra

Great article on Latin

An article on the New Liturgical Movement has been posted on Latin and it's importance.   This is a topic that is very dear to me because I would love to see the growth of Latin in our beloved Roman Rite.  The introduction of the vernacular, which we see creep in the Rite with the 1951 Easter Vigil Reform under Pius XII, was truly an unfortunate development in my opinion.

Here is the article for your pleasure.