The New Week

 Last week, it was a series of strolls down memory lane, and I am not sure as we begin the final week of August if I will have any such pangs of inspiration, but we will see where it goes.  There are a few other things to reflect upon though so we will start with that.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I am beginning to have some disappointment with the Roman Catholic Church in this city, or at least how it is represented.  Hearing a Dominican friar of all things go on a rant in a church bulletin about the SSPX and the bishop consecration issues a few weeks ago, especially when there are more pressing issues the Church has than that, led to to re-evaluate my relationship with the Vatican.  For the time being, beginning yesterday I have decided to go back to something that felt good and was more connected to ancient tradition - I attended Divine Liturgy at St. Michael's Church yesterday, a Byzantine-rite Ukrainian parish in town here.  You would think that a city the size of Baltimore would have more Eastern-rite churches, but in reality there are few of them here.  There are a couple of Orthodox parishes, and a Coptic, two Malankara Syrian, and 7 Ethiopian/Eritrean parishes in the area, but many of those are in the suburbs of the city and not as close as I would like.  A city the size of Baltimore, especially given its unique geographical position between Philadelphia and DC, should be teeming with Eastern-rite churches, but it isn't.  However, the Ukrainian parish will do just fine, especially since they have English-language liturgies on Sundays, and I think we will go there for the time being until more of God's plan about where he wants us to be is revealed (more on that will be forthcoming on Sunday next, as I have an important meeting in DC then).  It felt very nice to be back in a Byzantine-rite setting again, and although it has been about 7 years since last attending an Eastern Catholic church (the last one was St. Mary in Weirton, WV, when I graduated with my Master's from Steubenville), the order of the liturgy came back to me easily, and I felt at peace.  Oddly, the priest there, Fr. Yuriye, is a married priest, something I am glad to see the American parishes of the Eastern rites are re-implementing after years of letting local Roman ordinaries dictate policies to them.  His wife was acting as cantor during Mass yesterday (the liturgy in this case was not sung, as the crowd was rather small - there may have been a dozen of us there for the English-language Mass), and despite a small number of people, they were very friendly to us.  Until I get some clear direction as to where I am going and when I need to get there, I think this beautiful Ukrainian parish will be my church home. 

Also over the weekend, I had a couple of interesting exchanges, and wanted to talk about one in particular.  Despite my sympathies for the TLM and the fact I believe in people's rights to attend it if they so choose, I have to admit there are some crazy people at times on that side of the issue too.  Some of the younger crowd who decide by conviction to attend the TLM get a bit radical, and I came across one of those Saturday.  The discussion began with a post the moderator of the group (a nice guy in Florida named William, who has been a good friend for several years) posted something about the late actress Katherine Hepburn.  Although she was a legend as an actress, let's be honest - Kate's legacy was not a flawless one.  She was a professed atheist during much of her career, and she was openly bisexual, having relationships with both men and women in her younger days.  When that fact was brought up, one of these young radicals accused myself and a couple of others of "judging" her, despite the fact we were not being judgmental but were stating facts that the woman was open about herself when she was alive.  I told the guy essentially - he was a young, dumb hothead who thinks he has all his crap together but he doesn't - to go relax and get a cup of coffee or something.  He then proceeded to go apocalyptic on me and said essentially that "on the battlefield of World War III" he was going to "make sure I met judgment," which in reality was a serious threat.  On both the Left and the Right these days, you have these crazy people that tend to take things to extremes, and all they want to do is "vanquish their enemies" and they almost have a blood lust doing so.  This young and very stupid man was no different - he sounds like he listens a lot to Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens too much, and the poor fool probably would canonize Hitler (some more radical Trads have went there!) because he considers the Jews as an enemy.  A few years back, a similar person even said he could "hate" Jews because Jesus told him to - I would like to know what Gospel he read that in.   It is OK to have strong convictions and standards - I certainly do, as many of you may have guessed - but when you start crossing a line into hatred and violence in the name of our faith, you essentially cease being a true Catholic and you become for all intents a jihadi of some sort.  The name for people like this was coined by some commentators as "the woke Right," and it is unfortunately about as volatile as the purple-haired DSA antifa terrorists on the left.   In reality though, the "woke Right" is not truly conservative, and should not be thought of as such - they are more or less embracing the same wacky garbage their Leftist counterparts spout.  This means that in reality, there is no difference between Nick Fuentes and Hassan Piker - they are, to me, the same despite what they call themselves.  It is integral to understand that if you take a position on something, there has to be room for maturity - you can be as staunch as you want, but at least be grounded.  This young "rad Trad" Saturday was not that at all - if anything, I bet the poor fool listens to people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, and in time it will destroy him without the necessity of any help.  This leads to a little discussion now I wanted to have today.

I have said before that God does not send people to hell.  On the first glance, that almost seems like it is Universalism, until you understand the context.  God did not create hell for us at all - Scripture affirms that - but rather as a prison for Satan and the fallen angels.  However, unfortunately something happened in Genesis 3, and it led to man's forfeiture of eternal life - sin and death entered the picture, and because mankind chose to believe Satan, he also chose Satan's fate.  Remember too, that in the Garden of Eden the serpent (Satan) did not twist the arm of Eve to sin - her own free will caused that.  Much of what we attribute to Satan today - and don't get me wrong, he is still evil and is a tempter - is actually the result of our own stupidity.  The young fool I had the exchange with Saturday missed that point, and was blaming Satan for things that simple human will caused - in that regard, he is much like the more hyper-Pentecostal folks I used to see who attributed a demon under every rock and in every crack of a brick wall.  Hell is real, and it is a consequence of unresolved sin, but it is not God who sends us there - we send ourselves.  Do you think Satan cares that we use variations of "the devil made me do it" shtick to excuse our own shortcomings?  Not really - he sits back and smiles as he watches the willful rebellion of God's own creation against its Creator, and although he does tempt us and can be an influence, it is ultimately our own willful action that gets us in trouble.  And, dare I say this - Satan is the master theologian and Bible scholar too.  You are probably hyperventilating at that statement, but just hear me out - Satan knows Scripture and the body of doctrine well enough that he can use it to his advantage, dangling just that right verse in front of someone enough so they can twist it into something it does not intend to say.  Every cult that exists has resulted from that very thing - take the truth, and then that little voice "what did God really say about this?" which Satan plants in our minds, and out of that a whole faulty theology can be built around it.  And, despite the safeguards of the Deposit of Faith, some Catholics too are prone to this as well.  The young fool I debated with is a prime example of that.  He took a teaching of the Church - just war - and twisted it as a carte-blanche for hating and destroying those he deems as "enemies."   Many popular televangelists have been doing that for decades too -  Kenneth Copeland and other false teachers have taken spiritual gifts as a way to manipulate people into accepting cultic theology like the so-called "Prosperity Gospel," and they have profited lucratively from it.  This is why we have to "study to show ourselves approved," as II Timothy 2:15 admonishes us, and sharpen our own gifts of discernment to know where that blurred line is so we don't cross it.  Is God against material prosperity for instance?  I don't believe so.  However, does he guarantee it just because someone speaks "affirmations" about it over themselves?  No!  I have been a recipient on many occasions of God's provision, and I thank him for that every day, but that doesn't give me the right to be entitled to it because it is a grace God gives if he so wills.  As the late theologian Romano Guardini proposed and was correct about, the whole key to the Lord's Prayer we say every morning in our Rosaries and every week at Mass is a four-word phrase - Thy will be done.  I have heard some of these heretical televangelists actually call that a "demonic" phrase despite it being from Jesus himself, and they have even mocked people praying to discern God's will.  Yet, that is what we are actually told to do!  It also proves something else - the whole idea of Sola Scriptura that many Evangelical Protestants champion is itself a subjective concept.  I have stated, and still believe, Scripture to be divinely authored and the inspired Word of God; that will not change.  However, a strict belief in Sola Scriptura is as impossible as it is to be a true atheist - at some point, the Sola Scriptura proponent in reality believes another more man-made dogma and it is basically this "Scripture alone, but my interpretation is the ultimate authority."  Every prosperity-preaching televangelist claims their teachings are based on Sola Scriptura, and so do their Fundamentalist critics; someone is wrong, or maybe both are (I opt for the latter answer).  Even among the most staunch KJV-Only Fundamentalists, there is no standard as to what Sola Scriptura actually means - they condemn each other actually for having different views.  That being said, the whole Sola Scriptura position is essentially also a trap of Satan, because more fights have been caused over that than one could count.  And the reason is simple - even Scripture itself does not teach it.  I have already given my views on Scriptural inerrancy and inspiration, so I won't rehash that, but I can summarize it by saying that one can believe the Bible is the inerrant and infallible Word of God, divinely authored and inspired, without believing in the idea of Sola Scriptura.  Sola Scriptura is a Newtonian reaction against extremes that happened in the Catholic Church leading up to the Reformation, and had the bishops done their due diligence and addressed the root problem, then the Reformation probably would not have happened.  But, much like much of the leftism coming out of the Vatican apparatus today, nothing gets addressed properly and thus true reform is ignored - the proponents of the liberal garbage dismiss those that have concerns, and hotheaded reactionaries on the other side go full nuclear without seeing the positives of their own Church and capitalizing on them.  Both sides have been wrong, and both have allowed their own wills to be exerted over God's will, and Satan is laughing - he laughs at both radical hotheads like the young foolish man I talked to yesterday, as well as at people like James Martin who want to obliterate the traditional Church in favor of a modernist agenda.  Both of them are deceived by Satan himself, and a lot of confused people are caught in the middle.  And, that is the point.  Satan may have planted some seeds of confusion, but look who is cultivating them - it is not Satan; we tend to screw up things pretty well ourselves without his help.  Until that stark reality is seen by everyone in the debate, there will not be any true resolution.  And, it means there has to be a safe haven for many innocent people who just want to live out their faith to do so without having liberal bishops and radical traditionalists tearing at them.  That is the challenge, as well as where I am personally right now. 

The bottom line to all this is that we should always seek the truth, and seek guidance for God's true will in everything.  If we do that, it will buffer us against attacks from any direction.  Thanks for allowing me to share, and will see you next visit.