Big Government on the Eve of the French Revolution

Alexis D'Tocqueville always makes for excellent political reading. I found these passages from his book on the French Revolution particularly striking this morning: In Chapter 5 of his Ancien Regime and the French Revolutionhe discusses how the centralization of government happened first under the monarchy:

"About thirty or forty years before the Revolution broke out, the scene changed. Every portion of the social body seemed to quiver with internal motion. The phenomenon was unprecedented, and casual observers did not notice it; but it gradually became more characteristic and more distinct. Year after year it became more general and more violent, till the whole nation was aroused. Beware of supposing that its old life is going to be restored ! 'Tis the awakening of a new spirit, which gives life only in order to destroy.

... I have said elsewhere that the comptroller-general and the intendants of 1740 were very different personages from the comptroller-general and the intendants of 1780. This is shown in detail in the official correspondence of the time. At both periods intendants were invested with the same authority, employed the same agents, used the same arbitrary means ; but their objects were different. In 1740 intendants were engrossed with the business of keeping their province in order, levying militia, and collecting the taille; in 1780 their heads were full of schemes for enriching the public. Roads, canals, manufactures, commerce, and agriculture above all, absorbed their attention."

Enriching the public? Now that doesn't sound *quite* like the ruthless French monarchy we learned about in school, now, does it? Rather sounds.....(gasp)....like a modern socialist country.

"Day after day, the central government conquers new fields of action into which these bodies can not follow it. Novelties arise, pregnant with cases for which no precedents can be found in parliamentary routine : society, in a fever of activity, creates new demands, which the government alone can satisfy, and each of which swells its authority ; for the sphere of all other administrative bodies is defined and fixed ; that of the government alone is movable, and spreads with the extension of civilization. "

D'Tocqueville goes on to describe the efforts of the Old Regime to provide for the public welfare in this period: a "general concern for the ills of the poor", which he admits was a new thing for the time, including tens of thousands of livres in what we'd call public assistance and welfare payments. Then he sums up with describing the tenor of sentiment a decade before all hell broke loose:

No one in 1780 had any idea that France was on the decline; on the contrary, there seemed to be no bounds to its progress. It was then that the theory of the continual and indefinite perfectibility of man took its rise. Twenty years before, nothing was hoped from the future; in 1780 nothing was feared. Imagination anticipated a coming era of unheard-of felicity, diverted attention from present blessings, and concentrated it upon novelties.

In the 1780s theories abound about the indefinite perfectibility of man. In the 1790s we see the guillotines and the Reign of Terror.

So is the restless centralization and boundless activity we see in our own government right now a symptom of a new revitalization? Or is it, as it was in France 1780, an ill omen best summed up in that Biblical maxim: Pride goeth before the fall.

The Unbelievable Craziness of Incarnation

I don't care if you call yourself a believer or not: there's a certain craziness in saying that 2000 years ago, around the 25th of Kislev, the God who thought the entire Universe into being chose to become a baby human in a nondescript village called Bethlehem on a fairly nondescript planet called Earth.

The Incarnation is indeed crazy.

And is it not, therefore, exactly what we'd expect?

Because it's one thing to say that God is Love. And mean by that the kind of syrupy impersonal karma that seems to underlie all these Christmas specials where the "true meaning" of this holy day is revealed as "sharing", "caring", or any number of concepts that couldn't be more adequately explained by a nice episode of Barney.

But it's another thing to really mean God is Love.

Because there isn't a real love in the world--romantic, parental, filial, friendship--that doesn't involve a bit of crazy.

Every good story of love has it: the beloved following each other to the ends of the earth, sacrificing everything, daring and doing things far beyond normal human endurance. Caution is thrown to the wind, death is stared right in the face. The greater the crazy, the greater the love that it indicates. But we don't only find it in dramatic, cinematic experiences either. Just the mere fact that one human being has a mystical affinity to some other human being--that particular face, that particular smile, that particular laugh in ways that often make little sense to anyone else--I'm not sure we can ever explain that fact biologically with the same simple truth as the plain phrase "he's crazy about her." It may not be logical. It may not be sensible. But it's right.

In love, the impossible becomes possible. The unbelievable comes true. An ordinary person becomes an extraordinary treasure that nothing on earth could ever replace.

And it's in that context we must understand the Incarnation.

Is it crazy that God became man? You bet.

But as long as there's a thing called Love in the world, we would expect no less.

Kateri Saiatatokenti, tak8aterennaienhas.

["Saint Kateri, pray for us", in the Mohawk language]

The moment many Canadian and American Catholics, especially of American Indian descent, have been waiting for is finally on the horizon.

Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk and Algonquin woman who died in the odor of sanctity in 1680, will soon officially be known as Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, marking the first time that an American Indian north of Mexico has been raised to the dignity of the altars in the Catholic Church.

I share the profound joy of Kahnawakeronnon, whose mission I had the pleasure to visit a few years ago, and the joy of all American Indian communities over this truly monumental news that their patron saint has been found worthy of such an honor.

And I also have a request of the Saint herself.

I'd like to humbly entreat Kateri that she help complete a great work for her countrymen that she started the week after her death.

Here's the account of one of her biographers, Father Pierre Cholenec (1641-1743):

"The sixth day after the death of Catherine, this was Easter Monday, a virtuous person worthy of belief, being in prayer at four o'clock in the morning, she appeared to him surrounded with glory, bearing a pot full of maize, her radiant face lifted towards heaven as if in ecstasy....Furthermore, this same apparition was accompanied with several prophecies by as many symbols which were to be seen on each side of Catherine in her ecstasy; of which prophecies some have been already verified, others have not as yet. For example, at the right appeared a church overturned, and opposite at the left an Indian attached to a stake and burned alive...

As for the Indian seen in this apparition, attached to the stake and burned alive, that was sufficiently verified some years after, when an Indian of this mission was burned at Onondaga, and two women the two following years; and as we do not doubt at all that Catherine, who had made it known so long beforehand, obtained for these Indians the invincible constancy that they showed in their torments, we will speak of it at the end of this third book as a marvellous effect of the power she has in heaven.

Father Cholenec has left us a brief but precious account of the deaths--really martyrdoms--of these three Indians of Kateri's mission:

Steven Tegananokoa
Frances Gonannhatenha
Margaret Garongouas

Their stories were retold in various Indian-language publications in the 1800s, and their Causes were even included in a group of over 100 "Martyrs of the United States" that was submitted by the American bishops to the Vatican in 1941.

So who exactly were these three "Iroquois Martyrs" whom Cholenec believed won their crowns thanks to Kateri's intercession?

Over the course of the next week or two, this blog will tell their stories. And I pray that as Kateri's Cause nears toward completion, she will continue to intercede with God on behalf of theirs.

Categorically Unreasonable

One thing particularly struck me about this story about the Knights of Columbus putting up a sign to "Keep Christ in Christmas".

The Freedom From Religion Foundation wanted to put up a competing sign that said the following:

“At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds,” said Seidel.

Little problem here though. "Reason" is an abstract concept, a process or state of mind that cannot be verified scientifically by any means. It has no mass, no energy, no wavelength, no temperature, no quantifiable existence of any sort.

In short, we can't scientifically prove reason exists any more than we can scientifically prove God or angels or heaven and hell exist: because it is outside the capacity of science to measure it.

And at any rate, there is absolutely nothing reasonable about naturalism. To say that existence is limited to what we piddling human beings can detect with our eyes, ears, and measuring instrumentation is to make natural world completely dependent on *our* powers of observation. It'd be like an angler fish confidently asserting there is no such thing as the sun or clouds because he has never seen them.

Reason can say "I don't know if there's a God." Fair enough. It can say "I don't know if there's angels or devils or heaven and hell." Fair enough. Reason can say "I see no evidence of these things". Fair enough.

But reason can never simply and categorically say "Those things do not exist", or "there IS NO evidence". That is where it gets itself into trouble, and that is where too many skeptics founder on the shoals of their own deification of it.

Second Sunday in Advent

The Christian origins of Christmas

What a fantastic blog.

http://chronicon.net/blog/

And positively devastating to the idea that the date of Christmas was chosen to supplant a pagan holiday.

The Corona of the Immaculate Conception

As we approach the patronal feast day of the United States, it's the perfect time to mention a beautiful devotion to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.

The Corona of the Immaculate Conception is a chaplet composed by a Jesuit priest who was one of North America's great explorers: Father Jacques Marquette.

Unfortunately, the Corona is not very well known. There's another, better known devotion called the "Chaplet of the Immaculate Conception" written by St. John Berchmanns. But in terms of authorship and historical context, Marquette's Corona has a special significance for Americans and Canadians.

Let's set the stage with an account of the Corona from Marquette's Jesuit superior Fr. Claude Dablon, writing from Montreal in 1677:

"Some months before his death, he said every day with his two men a little Corona of the Immaculate Conception which he had devised as follows: After the Credo, there is said once the Pater and Ave, and then 4 times these words: Ave filia Dei patris, ave mater filii Dei, ave sponsa Spiritus Sancti, ave templum totius Trinitatis: per sanctam virginitatem et immaculatam conceptionem tuam, purissima Virgo, emunda cor et carnem meam: in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, — concluding with the Gloria Patri, the whole repeated three times."

For a long time I never found an actual Corona of the Immaculate Conception for sale anywhere. So I went ahead and made my own with cord/twine, 15 blue oval beads, and a miraculous medal:

But you can also use St. John Berchman's Chaplet of the Immaculate Conception, which has the same arrangement of beads.

And now the Rosary Workshop actually makes a beautiful Chaplet of Fr. Jacques Marquette SJ with Russian trade beads and a sterling or solid bronze medal (image posted here with permission of the Rosary Workshop).

Their arrangement is slightly different than the one I made, but of course there is a good deal of room for individual preference on these devotions. Here's how I say it.

How to Say the Corona of the Immaculate Conception

1. On the medal, say the Apostles' Creed.
2. On the first bead, say 1 Our Father and 1 Hail Mary.
3. On each of the next 4 beads, say a Corona Prayer:

Hail Daughter of God the Father,
Hail Mother of God the Son
Hail Spouse of the Holy Spirit,
Hail Temple of the entire Trinity.
By thy holy virginity and Immaculate Conception,
O Virgin most pure,
cleanse my heart and my flesh.
In the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

4. End with 1 Glory Be.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 two times.

If you'd prefer to say the chaplet in Latin, the text of the Corona prayer can be found italicized in the passage from Fr. Dablon above.