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Monday 31 July 2017

Mass at the Mohawk Chapel Royal

We were privileged to celebrate Mass according to Divine Worship Mass in Her Majesty's Chapel Royal of the Mohawk, Tyendinaga (near Kingston, Ontario) with the Ordinariate Community of Christ the King.
A member of the Mohawk Band and resident of the reserve, Murray O'Coin assisted. He is an Instituted Acolyte (pictured). Murray will be ordained Deacon, D.V., in April 2018. 

Chief Don Maracle, an Ordinariate Catholic, gave us a tour and talk about the history of the Mohawk people and their long relationship with the Crown going back to Queen Anne. 


The current Chapel Royal at Tyendinaga is one of only two Chapels Royal in Canada and six outside of Britain. The other is also in the possession of the Mohawk people at Six Nations near Brantford. 
The Chapel Royal deed is held by the Mohawk Band. The Band Council has authorized Catholic worship and continuation of the Mohawk's long Anglican patrimony, now in full communion with the Holy See.

Saturday 29 July 2017

A Professor stands for Truth against the forces of egocentric nihilism

Much in the news lately, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson of the University of Toronto is receiving much support from around Canada and the world as he stands up to the free speech-hating forces which have turned from direct Marxism to gender politics.

Professor Peterson is currently giving sold-out summer lectures on the Bible as the principal source of Western culture as it relates to social and psychological health.

Connect and listen to his second lecture, on Genesis, here: JORDAN PETERSON - GENESIS

Friday 28 July 2017

God and The Tower of Gender Babble

An insightful, if disturbing, article in AMERICAN THINKER sums up the goals and tactics of self-appointed totalitarian political correctness.  An American psychologist of note outlines the political craft and cunning that bids to undermine the family and sexual identity as God-given realities through the pseudo-science of "gender" theory.

Dr. Deborah Tyler offers a blistering response to the forces of deconstruction:


The first book of the Bible contains a story about a fortunate people who are delivered from the Great Flood.  After their lives are spared from the watery cataclysm, they gather together and settle in Babylonia.  They have no multicultural diversity, which enables them to achieve great works.  They become proud of their advanced technologies, and as their pride grows, they come to feel they can do anything – even rival God through the force of their own identity.   
To this end, they begin building a great tower of special bricks to reach Heaven.  To thwart this unholy ambition, God inflicts linguistic diversity upon them, casting them into balal – confusion – to prevent them from communicating with one another.  They swiftly become incapable of using advanced science and abandon building the tower.  The once proud people splinter into language groups who begin to make war against each other.
What happened on the plain of Shiner was an anti-God rebellion.  God punished this once proud people by inflicting mental confusion upon them.  And the best way to confuse the mind is to confound the mouth with babble.
American society is drowning in the dank waters of an anti-God reformation of belief, in which truth, purity, and beauty are despised while cults of selfishness and pride are venerated.  Our minds are bedeviled by the "lesbian-gay-bisexual" obsession; our mouths babble about "gender."
A paradox of human psychology is that good fortune and high favor tend to make people more likely to forget or reject God.  The twentieth century is the first time in human history in which fortune and favor have risen so high that pride has caused people not merely to reject or compete with God, but to hate Him.  This psychodynamic of egoism has not changed since the Flood.  
The job of the ego is to solve inner conflict created by the pressure of ever more wanting.  The ego accomplishes this by falsely valuing the important as unimportant and valuing the unimportant as important.  Political power and gratification of instinctual desires are unimportant to the spiritual condition, but the ego takes them to be all-important and therefore exonerates multifarious selfishness.  On the other hand, spirituality is all-important for the soul, but the ego looks upon it as unimportant.  Throughout history, the collective egoism of societies, operating much like individual egos, have deemed power and wealth to be more important than the spiritual.  Over and over, peoples have turned away from God, with tragic outcomes.
But something unique in human spirituality happened throughout the course of the twentieth century: an anti-God reformation.  In great civilizations of the West, political power reorganized around cults of self-worship.  They did not merely reject their Judeo-Christian heritage, but came to reject the idea of God altogether.  Without the moral authority of theistic religion, egoism runs wild among materialistically comfortable people, and the confining aspects of consciousness such as anger, lust, and greed, assume egoistic dominance.  In particular, the instinctual experience of sexuality is deified.  Methods of self-control such as marriage are debased, and instinct becomes the client of legal entitlements and political power.
This is the impetus of the political obsession called lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender.  The ego is never satisfied with equality, but strives for dominance.  The lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender inundation has always been about the destruction of the Judeo-Christian religions and political dominance for minority, variant, and deviant sexuality.
Of the four horsemen – lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender – the introduction of the term "gender" is entirely an artifact of the anti-God reformation.  Lesbian, gay, and bisexual can be conflated into homosexual/bisexual behaviors and consciousness.  Whether or not it is the proper role of government to promote special rights for these lust stylings, at least the words "homosexuality" and "bisexuality" refer to objective psychological realities.  The term "gender," however, is a dehumanizing obfuscation created for political purposes.  The gender hoax is again casting proud people into balal.
There is no such thing as human "genders."  Homosexuality is not "homogender attraction," nor is bisexuality "bigenderism."  The term "gender" is recently concocted politico-babble of the anti-God, anti-natural belief catastrophe.  The goal of mid-20th-century feminism was to establish the delusion that there are no significant functional differences between the two sexes.  For egoism, that falsehood was not enough, so the next step in reformation scripture was to insist that biological sex is trivial.  Now that scripture is denying the very existence of the two sexes in favor of the subjective but biologically nonexistent experience of "gender."  This nonexistent human condition was slowly introduced over the last several years – and now everybody is babbling it.
Before the ever worsening anti-God reformation, no one used the word "gender" in reference to human beings.  There was a fairer sex, the battle of the sexes, and what is the sex of your baby?  Every verbal "gender" emission is totalitarian newspeak, a psychological dirty bomb, because it is mendacious.  That is why it must be enforced by left-wing thought policing.
Hate speech expresses aversion and hostility that demean a group of people.  The terms "gender" and "transgender" are hate speech because they express antipathy to human nature itself.  Human identity is inseparable from sex identity.  To deny an individual's male or female identity is to make that person a thing, an "it."  To deny an innocent child the significance of sex identity is an abusive imprisonment in anti-natural confusion.
There are no such people as transgenders.  The promulgation of that term is a political, territorial expansion of the insatiable campaign against faith in God and gratitude for God's natural world.  There is a very rare, serious mental disorder of transsexuality.  People who suffer that disorder want only to change from one sex to another to affirm their humanity.
Karl Marx coined the pejorative and misleading term capitalism.  The vast majority of successful people in America do not owe their success to starting out with piles of capital.  The American free enterprise system has been demeaned by the term "capitalism" because of Marx's historic influence.  Gender-speak is well on its way to becoming another entrenched dehumanizing term of politico-babble unless it is stopped now.
May the Democrats continue to focus on the very special needs of lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer.  Regardless of wealth, education, or any other advantage, there can never be enough favoritism shown to every member of the irreparably underserved minority sexualities.  Non-Democrats need to understand that when they accede to the initialism "LGBT," they are kowtowing to political power of the anti-God reformation and undermining the highest spiritual possibilities of human life.
It is time to raze the tower of babble and pledge, "I solemnly swear never to use the word 'gender' again."
Deborah C. Tyler can be reached at info@jcua.us.

Tuesday 25 July 2017

The Athanasian Creed -- understanding of the Holy Trinity with song

" . . .  doctrine’s essentials can be stated (and understood!) in very clear and simple terms." 
So says Stephen Bullivant who directs the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St. Mary's University, Twickenham, UK
He goes on in a recent article in the CATHOLIC HERARD to say:
The Athanasian Creed, originating perhaps in the 6th Century. Sadly, unlike its only peers the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, the (admittedly rather long) Athanasian Creed is no longer widely known. This is a shame for many reasons, not least the fact that it includes the most useful statement of the orthodox understanding of the Trinity we have.
Ever eager to render service unto the People of God, and mindful of the catchiness of those modern hymns all the young folks are raving about, I therefore give you… a (dynamically equivalent) rendering of the first section of the Athanasian Creed, to the tune of that perennial liturgical favourite Autumn Days – preserving, I think, the spirit of each.
Whomsoever wishes to be saved,
Must above all keep the Catholic Faith.
Each must keep it whole and undefiled,
Else be damned eternally!
Keep the Catholic Faith,
Keep the Catholic Faith,
Lest be damned eternally,
Keep the Catholic Faith!
We worship one God, albeit in Trinity
(A Trinity in Unity).
Neither must we confound the three Persons,
Nor divide the one essence!
Refrain
For there is one Person of the Father,
And another of the Son,
And another of the Holy Spirit,
Though their Godhead equals one!
Refrain
The Glory of the three Persons is equal;
Their majesty, coeternal.
Just as the Father is, so’s the Son,
And so is the Spirit!
Refrain
Father, Son, and Spirit: uncreated.
And the three, they’re all unlimited.
So too are the three all eternal,
And each is almighty!
Refrain
Yet not three uncreateds or unlimiteds,
There are likewise not three eternals.
Neither are there triplicate almighties.
For there’s only one of each!
Refrain
The Father, he is God full and entire,
The Son also is really God,
Truly God too is the Holy Spirit,
But there’s only just one God!
Refrain
The Father, he’s correctly named as “Lord”,
So too should the Son be so called.
The Holy Spirit, he is Lord as well.
Nonetheless the Lord is One!
Refrain
The Father’s not created or begotten,
While the Son’s not made, but born from him.
The Spirit’s both unborn and uncreated;
He’s instead said “to proceed”!
Refrain
There’s one Father: he is not in triplicate,
There’s a lone Son, and not three of them.
The Holy Spirit, there is only one of him,
And not three cloned triplets!
Refrain
In this Trinity none has priority,
And none lags behind the rest.
Between them there is no superiority,
And none’s any the less!
Refrain
All three are coequal and coeternal,
And in all things are to be worshipped.
United, they’re a Unity in Trinity,
And the same holds vice versa!
Refrain
He (or she) who therefore is desirous,
Of gaining eternal Bliss,
Should, when thinking of the Holy Trinity,
Be mindful of all this!
Refrain

Friday 14 July 2017

Dom Alcuin Reid says that Pope Benedict's Summorum Pontificum has enriched the Church.

In an article in the Catholic Herald, the noted Benedictine scholar, Dom Alcuin Reid outlines how the Church has been enriched by the usus antiquior.  Further, he describes how many young people are finding great riches in "Extraordinary Form" of the Mass.

A similar response is being found amongst young people who find spiritual sustenance in the celebration of  Mass according to DIVINE WORSHIP: THE MISSAL, the traditional English form of the Roman Rite used by the Ordinariates initiated IN Canada, the USA, Britain and Australia under the apostolic constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus.
Excerpts from Dom Alcuin's  article follow:
. . . . the modern rites as reformed following the [Second Vatican] Council remain what one ordinarily encounters in parishes to this day. There have been no widespread public burnings of the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy or of the liturgical books produced in its wake.
Another issue was the fear that a wider use of the older rites “would lead to disarray or even divisions within parish communities.” Pope Benedict replied: “This fear also strikes me as quite unfounded.” Notwithstanding some instances of pastoral imprudence by clergy imposing older (or even newer) rites on congregations without adequate preparation and formation, the Church today is not riven with parishes divided over the inclusion of the older rites in their schedule. Indeed, many people find their life of faith and worship to be enriched by this legitimate ritual diversity.
For Pope Benedict, Summorum Pontificum was “a matter of coming to an interior reconciliation in the heart of the Church”—of taking away obstacles to that communion and unity which Our Lord so desires amongst all the baptised. It is a fact that the liturgical reform following the Council was abrupt and controversial and disenfranchised many Catholics, some of whom simply stopped coming to Mass. Those small pockets of priests and laity who continued with the older rites were ostracised. When, rather than dying out, they attracted young people, they were proscribed. The divisions were real and became entrenched. In line with efforts made by St John Paul II, in 2007 the Holy Father sought to do what he could to heal these divisions, insisting that: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”
So too he noted a seemingly curious phenomenon: “Immediately after the Second Vatican Council,” he observed, “it was presumed that requests for the use of the 1962 Missal would be limited to the older generation which had grown up with it, but in the meantime it has clearly been demonstrated that young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them.”
This is an oft-missed element of Summorum Pontificum. Pope Benedict’s authoritative establishment in Church law that all of the faithful have the legal right to the older liturgical ceremonies, including the sacraments, and that parish priests and not bishops had both the duty to provide these and the authority otherwise to decide when their celebration is appropriate, is not motivated by nostalgia. Rather, it is a response to the new and somewhat unexpected reality of the Church at the beginning of the twenty-first century where young people who never knew the older liturgy (or even the battles fought over it) find that at celebrations of it—often much more so than in some other liturgical celebrations they have experienced—they are able fully, consciously and actively to participate in the Sacred Liturgy, the “primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit,” precisely as the Second Vatican Council desired. Accordingly, Pope Benedict wrote: “It behoves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.”

There were many . . . ‘prophets of doom,’ including some bishops who summarily rejected any suggestion of their seminarians being given time to learn how to celebrate the older rites. Yet no liturgical doomsday has arrived and many seminarians seem nevertheless to have found the means to familiarise themselves with the older rites. For Summorum Pontificum established an entirely new situation in the liturgical life of the Church, one which augurs very well indeed for the Church of today and of tomorrow.
As has been noted, the Motu Proprio established that the older liturgical rites are to be freely available when the faithful request them. Today, the majority of the faithful, including myself, grew up following the Second Vatican Council. We did not know ‘the old days’—when, certainly, the usus antiquior was sometimes, indeed too often, celebrated poorly, and when sung Mass was an exception rather than the norm that it should be. When we discovered the older liturgy and continued to come back to it, it was with the expectation that we would indeed participate in its rites and prayers fully, consciously and actually and in optimal, not minimalistic, celebrations. And we discovered an immense treasury of faith and culture in which to participate—a treasury which stretches back to the early Church which had not been pushed through an ideological sieve in the 1960s.
This encounter of our post-conciliar generations with the pre-conciliar liturgy is in fact realising, at least in part, the stated aim of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy: to impart an ever-increasing vigour to the Christian life through a profound and engaged participation in the liturgy—though the irony of the means of this being the unreformed liturgy is significant. (This raises questions about the necessity and utility of the specific reforms themselves, and gives the lie to those ‘Vatican II fundamentalists’ who would idolise them—but discussion of that is for another place.) Its demands bring forth a response in us. We find that the restraint and beauty of the ritual, the silence in which we find space to pray interiorly, the music which does not attempt to imitate the world or soothe the emotions but which challenges us and facilitates worship of the divine, indeed we find the overall ritual experience of the numinous and of the sacred, to be uplifting and nourishing.
This dynamic has also changed how we approach and celebrate the reformed liturgical rites. They are, in comparison, quite ritually streamlined—too much so for some. And certainly, the theology of their texts is at times quite different or diminished. But their celebration is now being enriched by those immersed in the unreformed liturgical tradition. Pope Benedict spoke of this “mutual enrichment” in 2007 as a possible outcome of his Motu Proprio. It has been an increasing factor in the liturgical life of the Church ever since. Many young priests speak eloquently of how celebrating the usus antiquior has enabled them to celebrate the usus recentior with greater reverence and meaning. This new approach to and manner of celebrating the modern rites so that they are in greater continuity with preceding liturgical tradition is certainly more in line with the intentions of the Council than some applications and interpretations of it heretofore. This doesn’t address the greater question of a ‘reform of the liturgical reform’—a question which will not go away simply because people don’t like it—but it does do a good deal to correct the erroneous and sometimes even abusive celebrations of the modern rites we have experienced all too often.
Some commentators are just as enraged by Summorum Pontificum as they were in 2007 and claim that it promotes a “traditionalism” which is having “a negative effect on the acceptance of other documents from Vatican II, such as those on ecumenism, inter-religious dialogue and missionary activity of the Church.” (As with many “-isms,” traditionalism is an erroneous exaggeration and is to be avoided.) But if the new and life-giving encounter with unreformed liturgical tradition made possible by Pope Benedict XVI ten years ago leads to a critical reappraisal of the liturgical reform and of the implementation other Conciliar documents, who are we to judge it adversely? For if this arises from faithful Catholic clergy and laity for whom the label “traditionalist” is simply outdated, might not this new situation in the life of the Church in fact be one of the “signs of the times” of our day—a sign in which Church authorities may well hear something of what the Holy Spirit is saying in our midst? Thanks to Pope Benedict XVI, laity and clergy (should) have had access to the unreformed liturgical tradition without having to be anything other than Catholic for ten years now. The fruits of this measure are real, and they are growing—for the good of the whole Church . . . 

Dom Alcuin Reid, is a monk of the Monastère Saint-Benoît in the diocese of Fréjus-Toulon, France, and a liturgical scholar of international renown.  He is the author of “The Usus Antiquior—Its History and Importance in the Church after the Second Vatican Council,” (A. Reid, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, Bloomsbury 2016).

Wednesday 12 July 2017

The Twenty-first century “Catholic” Anglican

 (With apologies to Dr. Eric Mascall)

I am a Catholic Anglican -- non-papal --  I beseech you,

You’ll only find a trace of heresy in all that I will teach you.

The clergyman across the town has vestments so obtrusive,

My cassock-alb with rainbows is really all inclusive.



My surplice is embroidered with only a suggestion

Of the gin and lace that speaks of orientation.

My liturgy is up-to-date with all pronouns corrected

And clearly is composed to be gender selected.



I teach the children in Sunday School the Dutch Catechism,

Explaining how there is no such thing as heresy or schism.

The truths of Vatican Two I bate not one iota.

But have yet to meet the marriage tribunal quota.



The Bishop has been active in parochial assessing.

She clearly does not distinguish in marital blessing.

The synod having declared equal marriage, then,

Women will no longer have to be married to men.



The music we perform at Mass is clearly gender neutral.

We have assorted voices with counter-tenors neutered.

Two flutes, a fiddle and a harp assist them in the gallery.

The organist left years ago, and so we save his salary.




We’ve started a ‘Sodality of Transsexual Transition’

Consisting of ten people who sing in various positions.

Depending upon how they identify their Sunday morning choices;

We have between four and eight soprano voices.



Mother Earth we extol in fervid peroration;

While the Gia Sisters support our congregation.

And, though I say I’m “Catholic,” I’m really Ang-li-can;

I trust that Henry the Eighth was not such a very bad man.



"Hitler's Pope" myth debunked

New evidence from the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, a historical research institute, has shown that  “Houses of Life” – places where Jews were sheltered during the WW II were supported heavily by the Catholic Church.  

There were more than 500 such houses in Italy, France, Hungary, Belgium and Poland. The overwhelming majority of the Houses of Life were institutions related to the Catholic Church, including convents, monasteries, boarding schools, hospitals, etc.

In Rome alone, some 4,500 people found refuge in churches, convents, monasteries and boarding schools. In Warsaw, All Saints Church sheltered Jews. This was remarkable, because the penalty for Poles for rescuing Jews was the death camp or, more likely, instant execution.

It is appropriate that a foundation named after Raoul Wallenberg should find such an extensive Catholic contribution to saving Jewish lives. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat in Budapest during the war. He and Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio to Hungary, saved 120,000 out of the city’s 150,000 Jews. 

Pope Pius XII’s statements both before and during the war were unmistakably hostile to Nazism.  The Nazis understood his meaning very well. A plan to kidnap Pius in 1944 was only averted by the unlikely intervention of SS General Karl Wolff.

The pope was also utterly clear about the evils of communism and vicious Stalinist religious persecution. But he said nothing about it during the war. Allied diplomats in the Vatican understood this, realizing that it was only the pope’s preservation of the Holy See’s neutrality which enabled him to give refuge to thousands of Jews in religious houses in Italy and the Vatican itself. It also allowed him to provide contacts so that information about prisoners of war and the Holocaust could reach the Allied powers.

All this was acknowledged during and after the war, not least by Jews. Albert Einstein, who had escaped Nazi Germany, said in 1940: “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth … I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

See the article here:

the-end-of-the-hitlers-pope-myth

Trudeau and Abortion Promotion as Canadian Foreign Policy

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada is leading his government in an activist pro-abortion policy which ignores the democratic will of the people.
Reversing the previous government's policy of giving aid to African mothers and children, the Trudeau government is pouring millions into the promotion of abortion in Africa.
This policy was announced by his foreign minister,  Chrystia Freeland, as a cornerstone of Liberal foreign policy to the horror of the Canadian population which is largely pro-life. 
"By ignoring the will of the people, this is spitting in the face of the very type of democracy we are supposed to have in African countries," Obianuju Ekeocha, the founder of Culture of Life Africa said recently to THE CATHOLIC HERALD.
Abortion “is against the will of the people,” she said. “The polls show overwhelmingly that Africans hate abortion, abhor abortion, both women and men.
This cultural imperialism exercised by Canada and other Western nations in relation to abortion is akin to colonialism in the nineteenth century.  
imposition-of-abortion-is-cultural-supremacy-says-nigerian

Tuesday 11 July 2017

Father Sandys Wason

I am reading a biography of the noted Anglo-Catholic, Fr. Sandys Wason who was long persecuted by bishops in the Church of England in the 2oth century.

Fr. Wason served for many years in Cornwall parishes.  His biography, Mr Wason, I Think” states that after he had been ordained a deacon, his bishop refused, for four years, to ordain him priest:


“so long as he insisted on using his Rosary . . . at Gunwalloe he was inhibited for prayer for the departed and at Cury for the service of Benediction.  He was wholly committed to the reunion of the Church of England with the Holy See of Peter and would have agreed with these words of Archbishop Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York in 1555, who said: ‘By the relinquishing and forsaking of the See of Rome, we must forsake and flee from all General Councils… We must forsake and flee from the unity of Christ’s Church, and by leaping out of Peter’s ship, hazard ourselves to be overwhelmed and drowned in the waters of sects and divisions.”