This blog site is devoted to the defence of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, by exposing the false and invalid Second Vatican Council as a non-Catholic heretical Council. We have zeroed in on the one piece of arsenal which most of us have overlooked and failed to employ over these past 40 years since the Vatican II sect was installed in Rome. The one weapon that strikes more terror into the enemies of the Church is the Bulla of Pope Pius II, Execrabilis, which he issued on February 15th, 1460.
Major Apocalyptic Sign Will Appear 23 September 2017
_____________________
A vision seen by St. John and described in Apocalypse or Revelation 12:1, will appear in the heavens in 2017. Speaking of His Second Coming at the end of the world, Jesus says in Luke 21:25 ... "And there shall be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars ..."
Jesus says that these signs will signal to mankind that we are very close to His Return at the end of the World.
In Genesis 1:14 it says: "And God said: Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day and the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years."
Here God says one of the purposes for the lights of heaven is that they are signs given to mankind. Planets can also be considered lights of heaven, because they reflect the light of the sun, and they look like stars when we look at the night sky, because planets reflect the light of the sun.
Some refer to planets as wandering stars.
In Matthew 24:3, the disciples asked Jesus, "Tell us when shall these things be, and what shall be the sign of your coming and the consummation of the world?"
And they asked him, saying" Master, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign when they shall begin to come to pass?" Luke 21:7
A few verses later Jesus says " ... there shall be great signs..."
In Apocalypse 12:1, it speaks of a great sign. "And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon at her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars: And being with child, she cried travailing in birth and was in pain to be delivered."
Now, take a look at how the different constellations and stars in the heavens will line up in the very near future on September 23, 2017.
We see the constellation Virgo, the virgin, which one could say is a representation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
On September 23, 2017 the virgin is clothed with the sun. You can also see that the moon is at her feet. Also notice the serpent below the virgin's foot. On September 23, 2017, above Virgo, the virgin's head we also see the constellation Leo, the lion, which contains 9 stars.
Near these 9 stars we see the planets Mercury, Mars and Venus. Since planets reflect the light of the sun, these planets also look like stars. Therefore this gives you what appears to be 12 stars near the head of Virgo the virgin.
So on September 23, 2017, we will have the woman, Virgo the virgin, clothed with the sun, the moon at her feet, and near her head 12 stars, as you can see, at the exact same time Jupiter, which is known as the King Planet in our solar system, will be right near the womb of Virgo the virgin precisely in the area where a child would be born. This is a symbolic representation of the Birth of Jesus Christ, the King from the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
This is how things will line up on September 23, 2017. It all lines up in the heavens exactly like the vision St. John describes in Apocalypse 12:1.
According to non-Catholic astronomers who have studied how these different constellations have moved and will move around in the future, this will be the only time in history that it will all line up like this.
On November 20, 2016, Jupiter went inside the constellation of Virgo the virgin, near the belly area. One could see this as a symbolic representation of Jesus Christ, the King represented by the King planet, Jupiter entering into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, represented by Virgo, the virgin.
Jupiter moves around inside of Virgo and finally comes completely out of Virgo 42 weeks later on September 9, 2017.
A normal human pregnancy is around 38-42 weeks.
Thus the time period of 42 weeks in which Jupiter will be inside Virgo is the same as a normal period of time for the pregnancy and birth of a human being.
About two weeks later on September 23, 2017 we have the moon at the virgins feet, with a crown of 12 stars, and Virgo is clothed with the sun exactly as St. John described in his vision in Apocalypse 12:1.
This is a clear sign given to us by God that we are very deep into the last days foretold in the Book of the Apocalypse
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
“Essential to the understanding of our chaotic times is the knowledge
that the Jewish race constitutes a united anti-Christian bloc within
Christian society, and is working for the overthrow of that society by
every means at its disposal.” — April 1958.
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
February, 1952
POINTERS
With this issue, The Catholic Observer changes name to The Point.
It is a name we feel is wonderfully fitting. If there is any adjective
that describes American life today, it is “pointless.” What are we here
for? where are we going? what is the point of it all? are questions that
are left unanswered. Our particular concern, though, is that Catholics
are sharing in this general regime of pointlessness. And for them it is
especially tragic, for they have been entrusted with keeping the one
true Faith, and today they are losing sight of the point of that
Faith. They treat it as an efficient organization for the suppression of
Communism, as a fund-raising, enterprise — as almost everything, except
what it is, the Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ for our
salvation.
If you want to get The Point, send us your name and address, and
we will put you on our mailing list. We can promise you a monthly
[edition] of notes and comment in which all of the remarks will be
pointed, pointed in the direction of the Catholic Faith.
* * * * *
Christmas has passed for another year, and the Infant God and His Mother
were no more noticeable in this Christmas than in any of the past few.
It was once again a day of Seasons Greetings, Santa Claus, department
store gifts, and package-store spirits. Boston Catholics, however, were
given the privilege of observing Christmas in the traditional Catholic
manner. They were thoughtfully provided with Midnight Mass on
television, enabling them to witness the real absence of the Real
Presence in the comfort of their living rooms.
The boys and girls of Saint Benedict Center have in the past month been
going around Boston selling Catherine Goddard Clarke’s new book, Gate of Heaven.
In the course of doing this, they have spoken with some 70,000 Boston
Catholics. Needless to say, their experiences have been many and
diverse. Some of these experiences we will tell you of in future issues.
But, in general, they have this to report: While there remains a large
number of those unworthy Catholics who are ashamed of their faith or
indifferent to it, yet there is unmistakably a new vitality among Boston
Catholics — a kind of waking up — a growing concern for the state of
the Faith and determination that it be not lost. These are the people
who have been responsible for making Gate of Heaven the most widely read and discussed book in all of Boston.
Incidentally, Gate of Heaven will soon be available through bookstores, in a clothbound edition coming out March 3.
* * * * *
To say “regardless of race, color, or creed” is like saying “regardless
of butcher, baker, or murderer.” The people who want us to disregard our
creed are usually people who have no creed of their own worth
regarding.
* * * * *
The following question appeared, so help us, in a Harvard Philosophy
Exam: “7. Prove that when an irresistible force meets an immovable body,
Hell freezes over. (This can be done by pure logic.)”
Which shows what you can get away with when you have ivy on your walls.
* * * * *
Archbishop Cushing, in a recent address: “One-half of the world today is anti-God.”
Father Keller, of the Christophers, in a recent pamphlet: “Less than
one percent of the world is causing all the world’s troubles.”
Things seem to be a lot better in the New York diocese.
THE CENTER OF INTEREST IN CAMBRIDGE
Saint Benedict Center is the third point of a triangle whose other two
points are St. Paul’s Church, pastored by Msgr. Hickey, Vicar General of
the Archdiocese, and Adams House, one of the Harvard dormitories. The
arrangement is an extremely interesting one, as the occupants of each of
the three points can testify. It is also a much-visited one.
There are undoubtedly many places in greater Boston with more mossy
traditions than the Center, but there seems to be no place currently so
fascinating or notorious. For instance, there is a woman we know who was
visited recently by a friend from California. Since it was her first
trip to Boston, the woman asked her friend what she would like to see
first in the historic old city. “Take me to Cambridge,” the friend
replied. “I want to see Saint Benedict Center.”
The reason for all this interest and excitement is, of course, Father
Leonard Feeney, the Center’s spiritual director, the priest who dared to
decry the carefully-established methods of expediency and to proclaim
the Catholic Faith in its traditional purity. By doing this, Father has
disturbed the peace of mind of more people than any other man in the
United States. Many people are quite prepared to be charmed by Father,
who made his first reputation as a poet and lecturer, until they find he
is really saying what rumors have reported him as saying — that without
the Catholic Faith you cannot save your soul. People who never had any
interest in salvation, who laughed at Hell as a medieval superstition,
become suddenly alarmed when they find that this priest says that,
unless they change, they are going there. They gasp in horror, step
back, and cry that Father is “preaching hate.” In this land of religious
freedom, there seems to be only one thing that must not be said, and
that is that Jesus Christ is God and that He founded one Church for the
salvation of all men.
Harvard College has been particularly upset by Father’s Christian
challenge. This stems not only from the proximity of the Center to
Harvard, but also from the fact that almost half of the Center boys are
ex-Harvard, most of whom resigned before receiving their diplomas,
giving as their reason that attendance at an anti-Christian institution
was incompatible with their Faith. This won for Father early recognition
among the Harvard deans as a man of dangerous ideas. Then, too, Father
has never pulled his punches when attacking Harvard’s teachings or its
teachers. He has openly and strongly denounced J. B. Conant, the
self-styled “skeptical chemist” who is Harvard’s president, for his
answer to someone who asked him if he thought we were right in dropping
the atomic bomb on Japan. Conant’s reply was, “I think we should have
dropped ten atomic bombs.” He has also attacked such professors as F. O.
Matthiessen, the Harvard English teacher who eventually jumped from a
hotel window and thereby won for himself the veneration of all loyal
Harvard men. (It is a Harvard custom always to refer to its own suicides
as “martyrs.”)
As far as the doctrine of “No salvation outside the Church” goes,
Harvard would be quite willing to admit as an academic point that this
is the traditional teaching of the Church. But Father’s insistence on
its application to every single individual, even those with a Harvard
degree, has made it a little too personal for Harvard’s comfort.
The latest evidence of Harvard’s hostility is an article in the Harvard Crimson,
a nervous, two-page diatribe against Father. Although the article is
somewhat in the nature of an “expose,” its exact purpose is a little
vague. The reporter seemed to be torn between trying to fit Father into
one of the categories he had learned about in sociology class and trying
to dramatize himself as a sort of counter-spy, like the ones he’d seen
in the movies. The article resulted in typical Crimson repercussions (someone broke the window of the St. Benedict Center).
Finally, and worthy of special mention, there are the Harvard
Catholics, that self-conscious, apologetic little group of misfits, who
are constantly trying to convince Catholics that a Harvard education
doesn’t hinder their Faith and to convince Harvard that their Faith
doesn’t hinder their being Harvard men. Among these Harvard Catholics
there has been each year a large number of priests, sent there to give
their education the finesse of the atheistic point of view. When Father
attacked Matthiessen, three Jesuits who were studying under him
retaliated by attacking Father. Matthiessen’s leap left these three
Jesuits sitting in his classroom. As evidence of their faithful
discipleship, they could offer, besides the prestige of a Harvard
degree, their notebooks, in which were carefully recorded all of the
suicide’s ideas.
BY FATHER FEENEY
The generic religion of the United States of America is meeting-house
Christianity. Its ritual requires three items: a pew, a pulpit, and a
preacher. Add to that a small organ, to assist in its single devotional
indulgence: a hymn.
The meeting-house itself is a sacred edifice which looks something like
a church, partly like a library, and a little like a bank. It is often
covered with ivy, and in more cultivated sections of our country, as in
New England, is usually rich in historical reminiscences.
Meeting-house Christianity discourages an intellectual outlook on the
subject of salvation, and thrives on sincerities rather than on
certitudes. Its theories in the field of Christian Doctrine are so
diverse that its disciples have fairly run out of hyphens trying to link
them all together. This program leaves it with a confused Christology,
and even with a theology which is sometimes a matter of conjecture. The
lifework of a devout meeting-house parishioner is to be a perpetual
seeker after truth, whose proper chastisement comes from never being
permitted to find it ...
Lacking system, even in its morals, meeting-house Christianity was
bound to have an explosion of pride somewhere in its ranks, and it had
one about a hundred years ago in the State of Massachusetts, by way of
an eccentric doctrine known as Unitarianism. The Unitarians, many of
whom were men of abstemious habits and great wealth, finding the
Christianity they were experiencing too complex to be a reflection of
God, delved into Deism and discovered a God too fastidious to become
man. As a result, the divinity of Christ went overboard in Boston as
lightly as tea had gone overboard in an earlier revolt. But the genius
of Christ, like the excellence of the flavor of tea, has never been
questioned there. In Boston, Christ continues to be quoted by
Unitarians, more at tea parties than in church, and not for what He
said, but for what He “put so well.”
(from The Leonard Feeney Omnibus)
SAINT AGNES
Three hundred years after the first Christmas, there were still
numbers of people who believed in it with the freshness of Bethlehem’s
Shepherds. Many of them lived at Rome; and, of these, one was Agnes.
Agnes was a child and a Christian, and Rome was a bad place to be
either. Beyond being a child, Agnes was a girl, in a city where that was
discouraged. Beyond being a Christian, Agnes was a Catholic, in a time
before such a distinction was needed. For Agnes was born in the
catacombs, when the Rome overhead was still an Empire. And it was twelve
years before the Empire would be obliged, regretfully, to require
Agnes’ head.
In those twelve years, she learned, in its simplicity, the Catholic
Faith. That there was once a girl so loved of God that God’s delight was
to be born of her. That God as man had lived in our world and, before
He died for us, had devised a way in which man might become God. Indeed,
this Way was God — the Flesh and Blood of Jesus. Having received this
Divine Flesh and Blood into her body, Agnes vowed her virginity to the
Jesus with Whom she was so one. This vow, and the Faith that prompted
it, were Agnes’ transgressions against the Empire.
The removal of a head by a sword is a process that varies little with
individual performances. In this sense, Agnes’ martyrdom was, if not
routine, regular. But, as St. Ambrose says of the twelve-year-old Agnes,
“Behold! a strange martyr! She is not grown of stature to fight the
battle, but she is ripe for the triumph; too weak to run in the race,
she is still clearly entitled to the prize; unable from her age to be
other than a learner, she is found a teacher.”
For years after the death of Agnes in 304, Rome pretended to be still
an Empire, and perhaps this is why St. Agnes is seldom called “of Rome,”
lifting her city to her sanctity, in the way a Teresa would one day
elevate Avila. As if to compensate for this lack of length in her name,
Holy Mother the Church gives to St. Agnes the liturgical length of an
“octave-day.” On January 28th we have the “little feast” of St. Agnes,
exactly one week after her “great feast” of January 21st, giving us a
double dose of her annual love to warm our Januaries.
God’s saints are abundantly remembered. The truth of this is realized
in learning that St. Agnes has not only taken over two feast-day Masses,
but that she has established herself in the middle of each Mass of the
year. Secure in the Canon, between St. Lucy and St. Cecilia, St. Agnes
is every Mass’ reminder that an Empire is no match for a girl, when that
girl is out to win God’s heart.
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
July, 1952
POINTERS
The past few weeks were great ones for the Interfaithers. From
everywhere came reports of Catholic willingness to compromise the Faith
for the sake of some common interest with heretics and Jews.
In the mid-west, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference decided
that Interfaith was being neglected down on the farm. The decision
resulted in a union of the NCRLC with the non-Catholic Rural Life
Association. From now on, the two groups will have one name (The
National Committee on Religion and Rural Life) and one head — this year a
Protestant, next year a Catholic.
This inter-creedal agriculturalism should produce some interesting
religious hybrids. In such an arrangement, the opportunities for a new
Luther Burbank are exceeded only by those for a new Martin (Luther).
* * * * *
In The Catholic World last month the Paulists gave Interfaith a
boost by printing an article which described an unbaptized Jewish girl’s
“true mystic union with the God she so genuinely loved.” With all
sympathy and respect, The Catholic World explained how Simone
Weil, a Jewish mystic, could fulfill God’s Holy Will by spurning baptism
and stoutly refusing to join the Church. The article does not explain
just how Simone Weil got into Heaven without baptism, but the clear
impression is that she did.
When speaking infallibly, the Catholic Church tells Catholic mothers
that their children who die without baptism can never go to Heaven.
When speaking interfaithfully, The Catholic World tells Jewish mothers that their unbaptized children can.
* * * * *
In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Bishop Francis J. Haas was chosen to receive
the B’nai B’rith Interfaith award. While thanking the Jewish assembly
for liking him regardless of his creed, Bishop Haas got off some choice
Interfaithery.
Speaking on the great dangers facing our United States culture, the
Bishop, like a true orator, touched upon those concerns which were
nearest the Hebrew hearts of his listeners — “the high cost of living,
prices, wages, rents ... the entire economy.” Then, as any gentile must,
when addressing a Jewish audience, Bishop Haas launched into an attack
against “discrimination.”
His Excellency had the usual condemnations for those who “look down
upon others.” Notably missing from Bishop Haas’ talk was any reference
to the Divine Person Who, two thousand years ago, looked down upon B’nai
B’rith’s ancestors, a howling Jerusalem mob who accepted the
consequences of murdering God when they shouted, “His blood be upon us
and upon our children.”
* * * * *
In Boston, Interfaith went collegiate when the Jesuit priest who heads
Boston College paid a visit to Temple Israel Meeting House and stayed
long enough to give the baccalaureate address for a Protestant girls’
school.
* * * * *
In contrast, at the Eucharistic Congress in Barcelona, Generalissimo
Franco reaffirmed the policy that has made him an ogre to American
Protestants and an embarrassment to American Catholics: “We are not a
bellicose people, but if the hour of need should come, Spain, without
any doubt, would once again be in the vanguard of those in the service
of God. With the humility fitting in a good Christian, I proclaim the
Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Faith of the Spanish nation and its love
for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and for Pope Pius XII. By loving God,
Spaniards love peace, and they unite their prayers for peace to those
of the Holy Father and of Catholics everywhere at this time. The history
of our nation is inseparably linked with the history of the Catholic
Church. Its glories are our glories, its enemies are our enemies.”
THOUGHTS TO ADD TO A HARVARD COMMENCEMENT
On June 19, Harvard College held its annual commencement exercises. On
that day, the graduating class of 1952, having been presented with
diplomas in testimony of four years of faithful discipleship, was spewed
out into the world, to put into practice the lessons it had learned at
Harvard.
A large part of this class of ’52, like all Harvard classes, will end
up as alcoholics, drug-addicts, and suicides; but another large part, to
some extent overlapping the first, will end up in the most influential
positions in the country: as the officials and policy-makers in our
government, as the writers of our books, and the editors of our
newspapers, as the teachers of our children. All of these Harvard
graduates, whoever and wherever they may be, can be relied upon to have
this in common: they will all think, feel and act according to the
prescribed Harvard pattern, which they will attempt to impose upon the
rest of the world.
Harvard makes a great commotion about how it encourages freedom of
opinions; and while it is true that Harvard allows its students the kind
of freedom in choosing their intellectual diet that a farmer allows his
hogs, still, no matter what variety of swill a student may feed his
mind on during his four years, he comes out unmistakably branded with
the same mark as every other Harvard student.
The reason for this is that Harvard is fundamentally mediocre. The only
thing that distinguishes it from the rest of mediocrity is the
influence it commands by reason of its wealth, power, and prestige. It
is mediocrity organized and made effective. But it is mediocrity
nonetheless. That is Harvard’s milieu, its climate, and it cannot get
away from it. For the doctrines that Harvard has committed itself to
teach are the doctrines that mediocrity has made and that it thrives on.
Whatever might lift a man out of the class of the mediocre Harvard
teaches its students to avoid, by making it appear ridiculous or
unimportant. It teaches them to be suspicious of greatness, fearful of
courage, scornful of holiness. It teaches its students to revel in their
second-rateness; it teaches them to be smug, complacent, and
self-satisfied. It pretends to foster individuality, but the
individuality of Harvard is the same in every individual. If a boy were
ever to realize himself as a person, unique and to endure forever, he
might revolt against this mediocrity, and so Harvard teaches him his
insignificance. It tells him he is in existence by sheerest chance,
helplessly determined by his environment, a descendant of apes, one of
billions who have lived over billions of years on an unimportant planet
of an unimportant universe, a structure of atoms accidentally gotten
together, likely to be destroyed at any moment by the explosion of other
atoms, and then to be gone forever.
Harvard is just as cheap and vulgar as any daily tabloid. It has a more
refined vocabulary, but its interests are exactly the same. What the
newspaper presents as a sensational bit of scandal, Harvard presents as a
case history in psychology. As for Harvard’s pretenses to culture, they
are as fraudulent as Hollywood’s. Harvard will teach its students to
laugh at American millionaires who import castles from Italy in which to
have their cocktail parties, or who hang Renaissance paintings on their
walls to give their homes an air of refinement. But Harvard itself will
import anything it has read about in history, in an effort to give the
place a tone, and is blissfully unaware, as only an American bourgeois
can be, of the grotesque contrasts that result. For instance, Soldier’s
Field, where the Harvard band forms itself into big H’s while blaring
“Wintergreen for President” and where the Harvard football team gets
trounced by Yale, is modeled on the Roman Colosseum, where Christians
once were martyred for their Faith.
The courses at Harvard, which the students refer to familiarly as ec,
gov, phil, lit, etc., present either a hopelessly superficial survey of
some subject, or else encourage the student to blind, intense
specialization. “Sorry, that’s not my field,” is a frequently heard
Harvard expression, offered as excuse for anything from not knowing the
chemical structure of coal to not knowing that God has become man. The
Harvard faculty includes such men as Pitirim Sorokin, a mad Russian who
periodically, and in scarcely understandable English, assails the rest
of the faculty and the world in general for their failure to adopt his
sociological theories. Ernest Hooton is another Harvard teacher who
receives great kudos. He is a somewhat simian anthropologist who, to
amuse his friends, named his son Newton. Hooton’s task is to convince
his students that all men originally descended from creatures like
himself.
Probably the most representative of all Harvard teachers is the late
F. O. Matthiessen, who was professor of History and Literature. He
exemplified perfectly the kind of man Harvard likes to boast of and to
hold up to its students for their admiration and imitation: he was
literate, liberal, agnostic, and successful. But one night he took a
room in a Boston hotel, wrote a note telling of his pique at the state
of the world, and then stepped from his twelfth floor window.
Harvard had considered Matthiessen’s brains one of its most valuable
assets, and it was upset to find them splashed vulgarly across a Boston
pavement. To cover up for this disgrace, Harvard organized an
association that would give perpetual honor to Matthiessen’s name and
his ideas. The ultimate comment, however, the summing-up of both
Matthiessen and Harvard, was provided by John Ciardi, an Italian
apostate in the Harvard English department. Asked for a statement by the
Boston newspapers the morning after Matthiessen’s suicide leap, Ciardi,
striking a literary pose, remarked, “At times like these, one finds
oneself on the edge of things.”
BY FATHER FEENEY
There is a Holy House of Bread
Where friends may feast and foes are fed,
And none is starved, none surfeited;
Where souls can relish the ideal
And bodies revel in the real
Where mind and mouth can make a meal;
Where simpletons who suck their thumbs
Can share the carvings and the crumbs
With Constantines and Chrysostoms.
Within this Fortress I was brought,
A little thing without a thought,
And given all for giving nought.
I was anointed with a Sign,
And someone’s promise, made for mine,
Attached my branch unto a Vine
Of Immortality and Love,
With Intimations from above
That Wordsworth was not thinking of.
Arriving at the age of two,
I found the faith I held as true
Enhanced my infant point of view.
I could believe a rubber ball,
Although somewhat phenomenal,
Would really bounce against a wall;
A jumping-jack when squeezed would squeak,
As though unwilling, so to speak,
To wait for reason’s pure critique.
When toys were trunked and school begun,
I was, among a many, one
Entrusted to a wimpled nun:
A virgin vestaled with three vows
Who had the Holy Ghost for spouse,
And tried devoutly to arouse
An aptitude for long divisions
Involving cerebral collisions
With theological precisions.
This gentle girl in cape and coif
With softest silver in her laugh,
Prepared me for my epitaph:
“Here lies a Lad whose sins were sins,
Not streptococcic orange skins;
Nor were his virtues vitamins.
He learned the rules and knew the game;
If Hell or Heaven hold the same —
Himself, not spinach, was to blame.”
(from Songs for Listeners, Macmillan)
Good Night, Sweet Princeton!
Maritainism is a system of thought which allows Catholics to be both
Catholic and acceptable in the drawing rooms of Protestant and Jewish
philosophers. Maritainism is not a seeking and a finding of the Word
made flesh. It is a perpetual seeking for un-fleshed truth in an
abstract scheme called Christianity. Maritainism is the scrapping of the
Incarnation in favor of a God Whose overtures to us never get more
personal or loving than the five rational proofs for His existence. This
plot to encourage only pre-Bethlehem interest in God takes its name
from its perpetrator, that highly respected religious opportunist,
Jacques Maritain.
The slightest acquaintance with Maritain’s history is sufficient to
indicate how awry he must be in his Catholicism. He is a former Huguenot
who married a Jewish girl named Raïssa. During their student days in
Paris, both Jacques and Raïssa felt a double pull in the general
direction of belief. Intellectually they were attracted to the religious
self-sufficiency of a Jewish intuitionist named Henri Bergson.
Sociologically they were attracted to the spurious Catholicism of Leon
Bloy, a French exhibitionist who made a liturgy of his own crudeness and
uncleaness and tried to attach it to the liturgy of the Church. At some
point in their association with an unbaptized Bergson and an unwashed
Bloy, the Maritains figured out that there was a promising future ahead
of them in Catholicism.
Jacques Maritain is noted for his solemn-high, holier-than-thou
appearance. For this reason, more than one priest reports that by the
time a Maintain lecture is over, any priest who is present has been made
to feel that the Roman collar is around the wrong neck and that perhaps
he, the priest, ought to put on a necktie and kneel for Maritain’s
blessing.
One explanation of Maritain’s distant expression is that he fancies
himself to be the Drew Pearson of the Christian social order. Judging by
Maritain’s passion for the abstract, the fulfillment of all his
prophecies will come in an era when mothers can sing such songs as
“Rock-a-bye Baby, on the Dendrological Zenith,” and children recite such
bedtime prayers as “The Hail Mariology.”
Jacques Maritain prefers Thomism to Saint Thomas Aquinas and,
similarly, he much prefers the notion of the papacy to the person of the
Pope. He could not, however, turn down the prestige of an appointment
as French ambassador to the Vatican. Maritain went to Rome, but he
protected himself against over exposure to Italian faith by visits to
Dr. George Santayana. In Maritain, Santayana recognized a brother, the
kind of European intellectual cast-off that is annually being grabbed-up
by American Universities.
That Jacques Maritain should now be found preaching at Princeton
University is not so strange. It did not require too much insight on
Princeton’s part to see that a Catholic who hates Franco, speaks at
Jewish seminaries, and favors “theocentricity” in place of Jesus, would
be a bizarre, but harmless, addition to anybody’s faculty club.
Perhaps Princeton realized also that a Catholic’s admirers are a good
measure of his militancy. Among Maritain’s more prominent sympathizers
are John Wild, Charles Malik and Mortimer Adler, who are, respectively,
an Anglican, a Greek schismatic, and a Jew. Naturally Maritain could not
insult intellectuals like these by telling them that although they are
outside the Church they can get into Heaven because of their “invincible
ignorance.” It was necessary that Maritain concoct a new way of getting
around the dogma, “No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church.”
After a lot of abstract deliberation, Maritain decided that a man could
be “invisibly, and by a motion of his heart, a member of the Church,
and partake of her life, which is eternal life.” According to Maritain’s
new covenant, the important salvation-actions in our world are no
longer a head bowed to the waters of Baptism, a hand raised in
Absolution, a tongue outstretched to receive Jesus in the Blessed
Sacrament. “A motion of his heart,” says Maritain, is all that is
required before a man may partake of eternal life.
The Sacred Heart might have saved Himself a lot of inconvenience had He only known this, one Friday afternoon on Calvary.
“Essential to the understanding of our chaotic times is the knowledge that the Jewish race constitutes a united anti-Christian bloc within Christian society, and is working for the overthrow of that society by every means at its disposal.” — April 1958.
