Where would we be without priests? Terrible to even consider. Ever since the Year for Priests held in 2009-2010, I have tried to remember priests in my intentions much more frequently than before, especially those brilliant priests who’ve had an influence in my life in Scotland, South Africa, New York, and elsewhere.

Fr Mark over at Vultus Christi posted this prayer to Saint Joseph for priests a few weeks back, and it seems worth reblogging.

O glorious Saint Joseph,
who, on the word of the angel
speaking to you in the night,
put fear aside to take your Virgin Bride into your home,
show yourself today the advocate and protector of priests.
Protector of the Infant Christ,
defend them against every attack of the enemy,
preserve them from the dangers that surround them
on every side.
Remember Herod’s threats against the Child,
the anguish of the flight into Egypt by night,
and the hardships of your exile.
Stand by the accused;
stretch out your hand to those who have fallen;
comfort the fearful;
forsake not the weak;
and visit the lonely.
Let all priests know that in you
God has given them a model
of faith in the night, obedience in adversity,
chastity in tenderness, and hope in uncertainty.
You are the terror of demons
and the healer of those wounded in spiritual combat.
Come to the defence of every priest in need;
overcome evil with good.
Where there are curses, put blessings,
where harm has been done, do good.
Let there be joy for the priests of the Church,
and peace for all under your gracious protection.
Amen.

The Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

GOOD ARCHITECTURE requires a combination of willpower, taste, and resources. This nexus used to occur quite often; instances from the Renaissance and the long nineteenth century come most easily to mind. A late twilight of this combination is found in the magnum opus of the Italian architect Armando Brasini: the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Rome’s swish Parioli neighbourhood.

The church, a modern expression of the Baroque, has somewhat curious and disjointed origins. Every age has left its imprint on Rome in one way or another: the Rome of the Republic, the Rome of the Empire, the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of the Liberals, the Rome of the Fascists, the Rome of the Italian Republic. In the 1900s, it was realised that the Church had not made a significant contribution to the great architecture of Rome for some time. Worse: the more significant structures of the past century were mostly built by the government of the Sardinian kingdom that conquered Rome and gave itself the fanciful, if geographically correct, name of ‘Italy’. A new church was needed, on a monumental scale, to be the age’s contribution to the great churches of Rome. Originally, the church was to be dedicated to St. James the Greater, but as preparations increased for the International Marian Year of 1924, it was decided the cult of the Immaculate Heart of Mary would take precedence instead. (more…)

The other day I stumbled upon this blog post from the Chairman of the LMS which included a segment from Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, the hebdomodal programme shown on PBS in the States. The R&E spoke with Dr. John Rao, associate professor of history at St. John’s University in New York and director of the Roman Forum, about the annual Paris-Chartres pilgrimage which unites tradition-minded Catholics from across the globe every Pentecost. You can watch the segment or read the transcript here on the PBS website. It’s also available on gloria.tv here.

I’ve already commended any New York readers of andrewcusack.com to attend the series of historical lectures in Greenwich Village organised by the Roman Forum. It’s time already to consider the annual summer symposium in Gardone on Lake Garda in Italy. This isn’t a boring academic conference where stuffy professors will present papers, this is a symposium in the truest sense. The root of the Greek word means literally “to drink together”, and that more closely reflects the Gardone spirit: a jovial meeting of minds where matters high and low can be discussed in a convivial attitude surrounded by the beauty of the Italian lakes.

Everyone I know who’s attended the Gardone symposium has come back with rave reviews, and many add it to their annual calendar. I’m really, really hoping to make it there this year for the first time, and I hope others will give it a go as well. From June 30th through July 11th, 2011. Click here for more info.

…and sundry other occurences

Outside of Rome, you don’t run into cardinals all that often, but last Saturday I caught sight of one of the most popular clerics in the Catholic Church: Australia’s Cardinal Pell. The occasion was the Cardinal’s reception into the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St George, which took place in the Little Oratory. His Royal Highness the Duke of Noto presided over the investiture, and if you squint your eyes enough you can make out a profile shot of Young Cusack in the background of the photo of the Duke (below). In addition to the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney’s being made a Bailiff Grand Cross of Justice, six others were invested as members of the Constantinian Order, including His Excellency Don Antonio da Silva Coelho, the Ambassador of the Order of Malta to the Republic of Peru. For more info, see the Order’s notice on the event. (more…)

THIS MONTH IT’S already three years since the death of dear Dempsey Heiner, who went to his eternal reward on 16 January 2008. Demspey was a real gem of a man: a scholar and a gentleman, capable of relaying brilliant insights easily and who, at least once, exhibited his skill in the art of the gentlest intellectual rebuke of a presumptuous young intellectual fellow-Catholic (i.e.: yours truly), backed up with a remembered citation of François Mauriac.

Dennis Clinton Graham Heiner was born in New York in 1927 to Robert Graham Heiner and Frances Eliot Cassidy, friends and fellow-travellers of Margaret Sanger, the notorious racial eugenicist & founder of Planned Parenthood. Dempsey’s parents enrolled him at St. Bernard’s, where he was in the same year as George Plimpton, the founder of the Paris Review and twentieth-century embodiment of the gilded amateur. Plimpton (who died in 2003) described Dempsey as “the brightest boy in the class, a genius” and remarked that since leaving school he remained something of an enigma. (more…)

The first-ever Nuestra Señora de Cristiandad Pilgrimage to Luján

SMALL SEEDS, IF well-planted and tended to, flower into much larger growths. On a Friday morning last month, just four pilgrims set out from the town of Rawson in the Buenos Aires province of Argentina, but by the time they reached their destination — a Latin Mass in the Marian basilica of Luján — their numbers swelled to nearly a hundred. The pilgrimage of November 5th, 6th, and 7th, under the patronage of ‘Our Lady of Christendom’ (Nuestra Señora de Cristiandad) was inspired by the traditional Paris-Chartres pilgrimage every Pentecost weekend. The organisers hope that, like the Chartres pilgrimage, this trek to Luján will become an annual recurring event.

“Renewing Christendom in Argentina” was the theme of this year’s pilgrimage, which “seeks to promote the rich tradition of the Roman Catholic Church for our times” the organisers announced in a press release after its completion.

“This new 100-kilometre pilgrimage was an act of reparation and praise to God, imploring the salvation of souls through the renewal of Christian culture and the rediscovering of the bi-millennial tradition of the Church.” (more…)

In an interview, Benedict XVI reaffirmed the immorality of using condoms, but the press have spread a lie claiming he did the exact opposite

Wow. Just wow. No matter how low my opinion of journalists and the media already is, they’ve proved that they still have the ability to astound by the depths of their depraved mendacity. The latest big giant whopper the media are dealing out is that Pope Benedict XVI has ‘changed church teaching’ by ‘lifting the absolute ban on condom use’. You should know by now that when the media report almost anything relating to the Pope or the Church, the reality is either A) the media have completely made it up, or B) the exact opposite of what the media say is true.

This one we can file under “B”: the Pope has reaffirmed the immorality of using condoms and the media have decided to claim the opposite. A new book, Light of the World is being published this week containing several interviews with the Pope by the German journalist and editor Peter Seewald.

When asked about the Church’s teaching on condoms, the Pope reaffirmed that the Church “of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution”. However, the Holy Father speculated about the intent of some condom users. (more…)

Stop blaming ‘the media’: it’s time to call out the bad apples by name

Strictly speaking, a lie is a false statement with the intent to deceive. Without the ability to read minds, it’s difficult to discern when someone who has made a false statement is intentionally lying or has merely been incorrectly informed. The intent of a journalist should be to inform — but today the deed of journalists is more often to deceive (whether intentional or otherwise). To cite but one example, Jonathan Wynne-Jones (pictured above) holds the job of Religious Affairs Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, the widely read British broadsheet which claims to be a ‘quality’ newspaper.

Read Mr Wynne-Jones’s article alleging that the Pope “has ended the Church’s absolute ban on the use of condoms”. Wynne-Jones spreads this lie from the very first sentence and continues along the same lines throughout the piece. His selective quotation is interesting, as is the fact that the fuller quotations he cites in no way back up the false contentions Wynne-Jones makes in the article.

Let’s have a look at the article. (more…)

Or: A Lesson in Corroborating Your Sources

AS IF, WITH THE recent announcement that a certain St Andrean couple are getting engaged, there wasn’t enough for us to expend our idle chatter about, the University of St Andrews is thrust into the fore on an entirely separate matter. Damian Thompson, the provocative and informative Catholic Herald editor and indispensable Daily Telegraph blogger wrote a blog entry — Catholic students at St Andrews ‘can’t have the Latin Mass’ — relaying the claims of a student that he and a stable group of students have asked to have a monthly Mass in the Extraordinary Form, found a priest willing to say it, and have been denied. Fr. Z, the world’s most famous clerical blogger, soon picked up the story as well and made a few comments of his own.

The reality of the situation, it appears, is far removed from the one student’s claims. (more…)

TODAY IS THE first feast of Blessed Charles since the announcement last December that the cause for the canonisation of his wife, Zita of Bourbon-Parma, has been opened as well. In an age when most people in government and public leadership seem barely even decent, let alone saints, it is all the more important to seek the prayers and intercession of Charles and Zita — husband and wife, mother and father, Emperor and Empress — for the preservation of peace, the prevention of war, and the renovation of our families as well as our societies at large. (more…)

Benedict XVI has “Done More to Protect Young Children” Than Any Other Pope According to Harvard Law Professor

The Harvard Law School professor & criminal appellant attorney Alan Dershowitz has defended Pope Benedict XVI while speaking to a television news programme in Australia. Dershowitz travelled to the continent to take part in a debate with the lawyer & activist Geoffrey Robinson QC who has waged a campaign to have the Pope tried under international law as culpable for the abuse of children by Catholic priests.

Robinson (a dual citizen of Australia and Great Britain) is well-known in legal and intellectual circles, where he has defended the use of kangaroo courts to try and convict alleged perpetrators of great crimes: his 2005 book The Tyrannicide Brief defended John Cooke, the solicitor general who prosecuted Charles I of England for treason. The Australian academic has also defended the practice of more powerful nations waging war against smaller ones to prevent the latter from committing crimes against humanity, and has argued in favour of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dershowitz told the Australina Broadcasting Corporarion’s Tony Jones that Robertson’s attempt to have Pope Benedict tried before under international law was “wrong”.

International law deals with war crimes, it deals with systematic efforts by governments to do what happened, for example, in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, in Darfur and Cambodia. This is not in any way related to that. … This is not a crime against humanity, this is a series of crimes by individual priests and others throughout the world and failures by institutions to come to grips with it quickly enough.

Prof. Dershowitz said he thought Benedict has “probably done more to protect young children since becoming Pope than any previous Pope”. (more…)

In an article about the soon-to-be-canonised Australian nun, Mary McKillop, the Daily Telegraph exhibits a peculiar example of the lows of newspaper journalism today.

The headline boldly states “Australian nun ‘to be made patron saint of abuse victims'” only for the sub-headline — “An Australian nun who will be canonised by the Pope next month should be made the patron saint of clerical sex abuse victims, Catholics have suggested.” — to directly contradict this.

Is Mary McKillop “to be” the patron saint of the abused or has it merely been “suggested”? The headline-writer put the ‘to be’ in quotation marks, but the article doesn’t supply a single quotation or piece of evidence showing this decision has been reached, only a quotation suggesting it would be a wise course of action.

I’ve read numerous examples of newspaper articles offering contradictory facts unreconciled, but to do so before the article has even started seems particularly bizarre.

What are the best ways of following the Pope’s visit to Great Britain? The official website is offering a live webcast of all events, with highlights from the day interspersed between events. The Daily Telegraph is live-blogging the papal events each day, with frequent updates; today can be found here. The Catholic Herald is also live-blogging the Papal Visit, and updates on today’s events can be found here.

Check catholicherald.co.uk and telegraph.co.uk for more throughout the visit.

(more…)

The Pentecost Paris-Chartres Pilgrimage 2010

PENTECOST commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit, often considered the birthday of the Church. Each year, this great feast of the Church is marked by the pilgrimage from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on the Île de la Cité (above) to Notre-Dame de Chartres in the Orléanais by pilgrims young and old devoted to the traditional form of the Latin rite. The pilgrimage, often a feast of flags and banners, takes three days beginning on the Saturday of Pentecost weekend, continuing through the great feast itself, and arriving in Chartres on Pentecost Monday (which is still a public holiday in France). This year, Cardinal Vingt-Trois, the Archbishop of Paris, graciously led Benediction on the second day of the pilgrimage, and met with and blessed individual pilgrims. (more…)

Christian morality versus modern relativism

THREE YEARS AGO over on the New Criterion’s blog, Armavirumque, my friend and then-colleague & boss Roger Kimball and I had an interesting exchange on the morality of the bombing of Hiroshima. The debate began when Roger wrote a blog entry citing an opinion piece from Oliver Kamm of the Guardian supporting President Truman’s decision to drop the Bomb. I then responded with a post of my own pointing out that the conservative reaction at the time was one of horror at the moral depravity to which we had descended, and that the it-would-have-been-worse-if-we-didn’t school of thought essentially can be reduced to an ends-justifies-the-means argument. Roger then responded with a post arguing that, well, sometimes the ends do justify the means.

Regardless of one’s thoughts on the Hiroshima bombing, arguing that the ends justifies the means is one of the cornerstones of relativism. Christians believe that we are not allowed to do evil, even if that evil may serve a good cause. It is not simply a matter of choosing something bad over something worse. Evacuating the British Army from Dunkirk, for example, was bad, but leaving it there was worse. Yet, both were morally licit options for Churchill to make, though the prudential evidence supported the former option rather than the latter.

Innocent people inevitably die in most wars, but that cannot excuse the deliberate and intentional targeting of an entire city for destruction by a military force. That so many American Christians still excuse the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is frightening evidence that America has convinced Christians to be Americanised rather than Christianity convincing America to be Christianised. (more…)

St. Anthony’s High School, South Huntington, L.I.

“I have a general disgust for Catholic architecture since the 1950s,” says Brother Gary Cregan, the Franciscan friar who is principal of St. Anthony’s High School in South Huntington. The friar was quoted by the once-great New York Times in a 2008 article on the new chapel built by the Catholic school on Long Island, recently featured on the NLM blog. The Franciscans, according to the Times, “believe that the new chapel, with its soaring 30-foot ceilings, will teach teenagers that they are ‘worshiping God, not each other.'” Many of the chapel’s furnishings were bargain finds on eBay including the confessionals, the pews, a 110-year-old stained-glass window, and a century-old statue of St. Anthony. A new bell for the chapel’s tower would’ve cost $20,000, but Brother Gary (or “Mr. Cregan” as the newspaper referred to him) found an old one for $4,000. (more…)

Cardinal O’Brien, Scottish Primate, Preaches at Newly Ordained Priest’s First Mass in the Extraordinary Form at St. Mary’s Cathedral Edinburgh

Keith Patrick O’Brien, the Primate of Scotland and Cardinal Archbishop of St Andrews & Edinburgh, this weekend preached at the first mass offered by the recently ordained Fr. Simon Harkins of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. The mass was offered in the Cardinal’s own Cathedral of St. Mary in Edinburgh, Fr. Harkins’s own home town. The Very Rev. Fr Josef Bisig FSSP and the Very Rev. Fr. Franz-Karl Banauch FSSP assisted, and monks from the Transalpine Redemptorists of Papa Stronsay (who provided these photos) were also present, in addition to a number of diocesan priests.

I’ve spent the past eight years of my life divided between three (arch-) dioceses and I have to admit that Cardinal O’Brien is still the one I feel the greatest affection for. He’s an affable, uncomplicated fellow, and can be relied upon to defend what’s right in the media — unquestionably one of the best prelates in Britain today.

“I find him a much more approachable figure than other Scots prelates,” writes Damian Thompson, “less inclined to stand on his dignity despite (or perhaps because of) his red hat. I met him once at a party to relaunch the Scottish Catholic Observer, to whom he’s been a good friend; he didn’t sweep in surrounded by flunkeys, but hung around chatting in ordinary priest’s dress, reminding me a bit of Basil Hume in that respect.”

As it happens, I’m head of Cardinal O’Brien’s fan club on Facebook, which I encourage any Facebook users out there to join.

God bless our cardinal, and many congratulations to Fr. Hawkins! (more…)

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