What is "inspired" about a genealogy?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

What’s with all the list of names in the Bible? Things like “Mephibosheth begot Kaphuzalem who begot Habbakuk who begot…”  This stuff is inspired? I don’t find it very inspiring.

Yours ever,
Jeannie O’Lowjee

Dear Jeannie,

The lists of names in the Bible are very important. This is real history that involved real people. Admittedly our sense of history is different from theirs, but it is history none the less. Perhaps more importantly the lists of names mean that we worship a personal God with whom we have a personal relationship. He knows us by name and loves us as unique individuals. People are important. History is not just political, economic wave after wave. It is enriched or impoverished by actual persons.  I'm sure you’ve heard of the Battle of Jumonville Glen. Of course you have. Jumonville Glen changed the history of the world and caused the collapse of Western European civilization. The fact that you can’t be sure that a certain woman at work with the unusually large Adam’s apple is actually a woman is the fault of a trigger-happy colonial soldier from the English colony of Virginia who shot the French ambassador, Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville at Jumonville Glen on May 28, 1754. That trigger-happy soldier, or at least his commanding officer, was none other than Lieutenant Colonel George Washington.

I regard George Washington as one of the greatest of history’s heroes. He established our republic by laying down power not once but twice. Still, his career got off to a rocky start with one of the greatest “OOPS!” moments in history. Washington and his soldiers, along with some Native American allies, had been sent to protect a fort at what is today Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A larger French-Canadian force had captured the fort and sent a fellow named Jumonville to remind Washington that Pittsburgh belonged to France. Washington and the English ambushed the French who were camped in the glen, killing the French ambassador, Jumonville.

Britain and France were not at war at the time but after the English killed the French ambassador, things got out of hand, resulting in the Seven Years' War in 1756. France lost the war. The English taxed the American colonies to pay for the war. The colonies revolted. France helped the Americans throw off the British yoke to avenge their wounded pride. The Americans won that war, but the French monarchy went bankrupt helping the Americans. The American Revolution spread to France, but in a much more violent form. Napoleon Bonaparte was swept into power by the chaos of the French revolution. Europe was plunged into war once again, which brought the monarchy back to France. The French again revolted and elected Napoleon’s nephew to power. He attacked Germany in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian war. France lost. The French swore revenge which led to the First World War, the collapse of the Russian monarchy, the Marxist takeover of a third of the world, causing the Second World War, the cold war, nuclear proliferation and the hula hoop.

In all the chaos Christian Europe died, the moral restraints of Judeo-Christian Europe were replaced by the silliness of never ending moral revolution. We have been sweeping away the tired old philosophies of the past for about three centuries and have tried to replace the ideas that created our civilization with the worship of science unfettered by a moral law. There is an old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Nonsense! War is the mother of invention! The goddess Scientia Invicta has given us the bomb and gender re-assignment surgery. Is this what we really want to be worshipping?

So, there you have it. Jumonville Glen begot the French and Indian war in 1756 which begot the American Revolution (1775) which begot the French Revolution (1789) which begot the Napoleonic Wars (1800-1815) which begot the Franco-Prussian War (1870) which begot the First World War, (1914) which begot the de-Christianization of Europe, the death of the culture, the use of weapons of mass destruction (mustard gas etc.), the bomb, the Russian revolution and all subsequent Marxist revolutions, 20th century fascism, the global struggle for the resources of war, particularly oil, the invention of plastic and, of course the hula hoop.

I imagine that if Washington had not lit the fuse, someone else would have, but my point is that history is about people. We are living in a world that is in a kind of meltdown because of individual decisions by specific people. As life’s little conveyor belt chugs along and I get closer to the drop off point, I wonder what will become of it all. We have turned our backs on any kind of moral certainty in a desire to be politically correct. We are living in the French Revolution run amuck. Political correctness was a matter of life or death in the French Revolution. The Revolution descended into a phase called “the Terror” in which political trials were convened on street corners and if one was accused of not being revolutionary enough, after a three-minute trial, your severed head was blinking at the crowd gathered before the guillotine.

College in the sixties was a little like that. If one was not revolutionary enough, one was completely ostracized. The current theological and political climate is too. Revolutions tend to turn the crowd into the arbiter of truth, until someone like Stalin or Hitler or Napoleon comes along and volunteers to tell us what the truth is. It seems that tyranny begets revolution which eventually begets chaos which in its turn begets tyranny. That process seems inevitable. The Roman republic descended into political chaos and gave us the emperors. The French Monarchy descended into chaos and gave us Napoleon. The Tsar plunged into the Great War and gave us Lenin, Stalin. Mao, Pol Pot and now, Kim Jong Il and his nuclear bombs. The German imperial federation descended into chaos and gave us Kaiser Wilhelm and then Hitler. This seemingly unstoppable process just keeps stuttering its way through history. Will the current moral and intellectual quagmire in which we find ourselves in the Church and in the world give us a Hitler or a Stalin? 

There comes a point at which human anger is no longer sustainable and we live in angry times. There has never been a war in history that was absolutely necessary. It may be necessary to defend oneself against aggression, but why the aggression in the first place? In wars the world over people joyously marched off to battle over the flimsiest of pretexts, some anger that seems so important at the time. They are sure they will be victorious and that the war will be short and glorious. It never seems to work out that way.  Societies are smashed to bits, and the survivors sit among the ruins and mourn the dead. We are living in angry times that I fear will give way to fascism. We are willing to go to war over the silliest of things. Free speech is sure to offend someone. In the world and in the Church freedom of thought and speech are in greater danger than they have been in a very long time.

What is to be done? If my theory of history is correct, it should work for the good as well as for the bad. We have descended into a moral swamp and can’t seem to find any solid ground on which to stand.  In times like these, the greatest weapon of the truth is not the tyrant, but the saint. We think of the unity of the Church as a matter of space, the Church united throughout the world. The unity of the Church is also a matter of time, the Church united throughout history.  Perhaps you heard of the treasury of the merits of the saints? I like to think of the treasury a little differently. The lives and teachings of 2,000 years of saints are like watertight compartments on a great ship. If there are sufficient watertight compartments in such a ship when it hits an iceberg, it will stay afloat. The lives of the saints in this world are finished and unchangeable. What they have said and done remain untouched by the current chaos. Their example, their teaching and their prayers for us stand as unshakeable reminders of how to live out the Gospel. The present age doesn't need more study groups, committees, programs or meetings. Saints are what the world and the Church most desperately need. People change things. 

The Arian heresy had overtaken the whole Church, but one man, St. Athanasius, stood up and was willing to suffer for truth. In 452, the Christianized Roman Empire was in state of collapse. Invaders from the east, Attila and the Huns, were bearing down on Rome. Pope Leo took his life in his hands and single handedly confronted the invader who turned back from the conquest of Rome. The list goes on and on.

Around 500 AD, St. Benedict of Nursia established western monasticism which recreated the Christian world after it had collapsed. He had no armies, no committees, no study groups. He simply left the world and went off to Mount Subiaco to dedicate his life to prayer and holiness. In so doing he created western monasticism which sustained Europe in the darkest times and brought the faith to the barbarian world. 

When you look at the chaos of the current age, there is something you can do. Offer your life to the Lord to use in whatever way He wants. We recently had a pope, St. John Paul the Great who was a visionary and a wonder worker. When the Marxist/Fascist government of Poland decreed that there would be no Catholic Church in Nowa Huta, he picked up a shovel, went to Nowa Huta, started digging the foundation of a church, and dared the authorities to kill him. The entire empire of Marxism in Europe started to unravel right then and there.

One holy man changed history.  We may be living in one of the greatest ages of the faith in history. We are living in an age of saints. There has never been an age in which there have been more martyrs for the faith than now. The outlook for the world is brighter than one might think.

To be continued…

A Rabbi asks a priest a question... part 18

Continued from last week….

Liberté, égalité, fraternité!!  Liberty, equality, fraternity! But now off with your head. The French revolution lopped off the heads of at least 20,000 in an attempt to blot out the evils of the Bourbon Monarchy and Catholicism and then went on to kill hundreds of thousands more in suppressing counter revolution.

Who pray tell were the Bourbons? Remember the wars of religion? The old royal family, the Valois petered out due to insanity and debauchery, and the nearest royal cousin was, heaven forfend, a Protestant!  Henry married a Valois princess, whom he eventually divorced and promised to become a Catholic in order to escape death in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in which French Catholics slaughtered several thousand Protestants who were in Paris to celebrate the wedding as well as thousands more throughout France. He escaped Paris in 1576 and renounced Catholicism.

He rejoined the Protestant forces in the wars of religion, then so popular in Europe. He eventually became Catholic (again), saying that, “Paris was worth a Mass.” No way could he rule France and not be Catholic. His grandson was Louis XIV (1638-1715). He was the Catholic Sun King who went to daily Mass with his wife and mistresses and fought Catholic Austria with his allies the protestant swedes. His great grandson was Louis XVI who got his head cut off by the revolutionaries a few paragraphs back. The whole revolution thing was such a great success that having cut off the head of the last Bourbon king, Louis XVI in 1793 they elected Napoleon Bonaparte as their dictator in 1799.

He won three million of the one and a half million votes cast, thus proving that equality was the rule of the day. Your vote was as worthless as everyone else’s vote. Vive la Revolucion! Napoleon then placed himself on the imperial throne in 1804 plunging Europe and the world into a war that cost about one million lives. So where are the Jews in all this?

Up until the revolution the Jews were repeatedly exiled from France then invited to return. It seems that Jews were good for the economy. But come the revolution, and a councilor of the revolutionary parliament declared, “I believe that freedom of worship does not permit any distinction in the political rights of citizens on account of their creed. The question of the political existence of the Jews has been postponed. The men of all sects (should be) admitted to enjoy political rights in France. I demand that… a decree (be) passed that the Jews in France enjoy the privileges of full citizens.”

Judaism in France became, “nothing more than the name of a distinct religion.” French Jews were French. In gratitude for their new nationality, French Jews dedicated themselves to France, fighting in the Army of the Republic against the European enemies of their new homeland France. They contributed materially to the war effort. Candelabra of synagogues were sold, and wealthier Jews donated their jewels to the cause. They were French and proud of it. Napoleon brought Jewish emancipation and citizenship to the lands he conquered, liberating Jews from their ghettos and making them full citizens of the new Europe. In 1807, he made Judaism an official religion in France, along with Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism. Still, he may have had mixed motives. He seems to have been prone to the medieval custom of borrowing money from Jewish financiers and then welching on the debt.

In 1808, Napoleon took back some of his reforms. All debts owed to Jews were cancelled, reduced, or at least postponed. The new decrees also restricted where Jews could live. The restrictions were ultimately eased in 1811 and eventually abolished, but still…

Why dwell on Jews in France? It’s pretty much the story of Jews in Europe. You’re welcome to live here, just don’t get too comfortable. You are not us. After the revolution things were different, right? Not quite. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer who happened to have a Jewish background was sentenced to life imprisonment for sharing French military secrets with the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was imprisoned on Devil's Island in French Guiana. He was released after five years, a broken man. He was completely innocent. The real culprit was eventually exposed, but at the time it was quite convenient to blame the Jew! After all, how loyal could a Jew be? 

The Dreyfus Affair had unanticipated fruit. The Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, a Jew, was present at part of the trial, the cancellation of Dreyfus’ army rank in 1895. Herzl was convinced of the need to resolve the Jewish question. “If France, the bastion of emancipation, progress and universal socialism, can get caught up in a maelstrom of antisemitism and let the Parisian crowd chant 'Kill the Jews!' Where can they be safe once again, if not in their own country? Assimilation does not solve the problem because the Gentile world will not allow it as the Dreyfus affair has so clearly demonstrated…” If the Jew could never become part of another nation, they would have to form a nation of their own.

Christendom had broken down into political chaos and now Judaism would enter the fray. The superior nation state that had become the substitute for religious chosen-ness in the Christian world would engender the Jewish state. Christianity and Judaism were a long way from their competition as religious variations on the faith of Israel. Religion took a back seat to secularized, nominal Christianity and a secular “reformed” Judaism. Oh, by the way, Alfred Dreyfus died an old man in 1935, just before the greatest horror known to human history broke, and it broke hard on the Jews.

Next week “If you worship me, I will give you all the kingdoms of the world….”

Who is in charge when there is no pope? Part 5

So the last time I wrote, the pope was hiding in an old tomb overlooking the Tiber, the German Lutheran soldiers of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor were looting St. Peters Basilica burning Rome and doing things I would rather not discuss in a parish bulletin.

Pope Clement remained a prisoner in the tomb of the emperor Hadrian, also called the Castel Sant’Angelo,  for six months. He bribed some jailers and  escaped disguised as a peddler. When he could finally return to Rome in 1528, it was a depopulated ruin. He did his best to restore it and finally died after eating bad mushrooms in 1534.  The next 250 years the popes were not bad fellows all in all but one gets the impression that the great powers of Europe mostly ignored them. Some were better some were worse, but the bad old days of the secularized papacy seemed pretty much over.  

Around 1600, just when the nation state was really getting popular, the crowned heads of Europe claimed what they called the right of exclusion (jus exclusivae),  a veto by which a crown-cardinal, a personal representative of a Catholic European monarch could block the election of any candidate they did not approve! The royal cretins who ran Europe and most of the world didn’t get to pick the pope, but they could say who they would not accept. I suppose if they didn’t get their way, they would leave the Catholic Church like Henry VIII had done in 1530, taking England with him. 

By 1600, the English, French and the Spanish pretty much owned the world and had the popes over a barrel. Louis XIV was devoutly Catholic. He never missed Mass, nor an evening with his many mistresses, nor an opportunity to wage a pointless war of expansion to ally himself with the Muslim Turks, nor to ignore the pope. Louis had a point when he said “Apres moi, le deluge.”  (Or for the less pretentious “After me, the flood!”) Louis ruled France and the Church in France as an absolute monarch for sixty-four years during which he managed to put his grandson on the throne of Spain, so Louis and his family controlled almost all of north and south America and about half of Europe and a lot of other places. When he died in 1715, he had outlived seven popes. Nobody was afraid of the pope anymore. They were very afraid of Louis. 

The deluge he predicted came in 1788, one long life later. The French revolution and its offspring swept away the monarchies of Europe over the course of the next century, but they didn’t manage to sweep away the papacy, no matter how hard they tried. The years since the American/French Revolution have been an unremitting catalogue of wars. You already know that and the French Revolution and Napoleon tried to abolish the Church in all Europe. I have already explained how they failed. England tried to destroy Catholicism in Ireland in 1650 by means of Oliver Cromwell and war and again in 1842 by the use of mass starvation. They failed.

Germany tried to limit Catholicism after the Prussian takeover of German speaking Catholic countries in 1866 by means of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf,  then went to wars with a re- Catholicized France in 1870. Germany tried again in 1914, initiating the First World War which swept all the monarchies of Europe before it. Those crowned heads that had tried to control the papacy and the Church had by then all separated from their royal shoulders one way or another.  The monarchs were gone, but the tyrants were not. 

The “isms” and dictators of the twentieth century waged unremitting war on the successors of Peter. The only major voice to persistently resist Hitler and the Nazis was that of the papacy, no matter what you’ve heard. Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII despised national socialism and worked tirelessly against it. He was credited, in the 1967 book, “Three Popes and the Jews,” by the Israeli historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, “...with saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.”  Hitler so hated Pius that he tried to have him kidnapped and deported to Germany where he could dispose of the pope as he pleased. 

“Wait a minute,” I hear you saying, “everybody knows Pius XII was an anti-Semite!” 

Everybody knows that because Stalin, the Marxist dictator of Russia who starved millions of Ukrainians, both Catholic and Orthodox to death, and who tried to erase religion from Russian life as a prelude to erasing it from the world, realized that after the Second World war, the only force capable of resisting the Marxist takeover of Eastern Europe was the Catholic Church. He started a disinformation campaign to discredit the Church, particularly Pope Pius, and infiltrated seminaries and religious institutions, especially in places like Poland. That didn’t work either. Poland  clung to its faith and the Polish pope brought European Marxism and its slave empire to the ground by simply saying, “Do not be afraid” when he returned to Poland in 1979. When Churchill reminded Stalin to consider the Catholicism of Poland, Stalin quipped “Why? How many divisions does the pope of Rome have?” It turns out he didn’t need divisions of soldiers. 

Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, and all the petty tyrants of the 20^th century have tried and failed to control or to eliminate the Church and the papacy. We have a new kind of government in the modern world. We are ruled by the arbiters of fashion in the entertainment and news media who tell us what to think, how to act, whom to marry and whom to elect. Government by Media. I call it the Mediacracy (pronounced mee-dee-AH-kruh-see). They decided that it is time for the Catholic Church to change its ancient beliefs about the sanctity of human life and the nature of marriage. One hundred fifteen cardinals went into a locked room and two days later came out having elected a complete surprise. A man hated by -- guess who -- his leftist government which is trying to turn Argentina into the next Venezuela.

When one looks at the long list of 266 popes,  you can only come up with around ten who were scoundrels, but there are ten times as many popes who are revered for exceptional holiness, 94 certifiable saints among them (78 canonized, 16 beatified, 33 martyrs) and we Catholics are pretty picky about canonized saints.  The so called bad popes were those few who were the result of the desire of the ruling class to control the papacy whether it was Italian duke or German emperor or powerful Roman family. 

Now we have the Mediacracy trying to elect a pope pleasing to it.  Do you for one minute imagine that the mediacracy will give us a holy pope?  From Nero until now, the powers of this world have tried to control the church of Christ and the papacy that Christ established to govern it. Thus far they have failed. I doubt that the rich and fashionable, the sybarites and the media chic who think themselves above the law of Christ and His church will succeed either. 

“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt. 16:18) Christ’s promise has held true 265 times so far. I am confident for the 266^th. 

Viva el Papa Pancho! Viva Cristo Rey!