Life, Liturgy, and the Pursuit of Happiness
By James De Piante
Alex is only seven years old. Nevertheless, Alex is a heretic. His heresy is as much a part of him as the Faith is a part of the children who live next door to him. This creates a problem for the parents of those children, who are concerned that Alex will jeopardize the faith of their children. So they work up the courage to talk to Alex's parents. They fear that Alex, steeped in the unbelief that characterizes his whole family, will menace the innocence of their children and they would like Alex's parents to counsel the boy so as to avoid the unthinkable. The parents are accountable for Alex's heresy. They have not merely failed to instruct their boy, they have positively inculcated in him utter disbelief in the providence, the omnipotence, the goodness, the very existence...of...Santa Claus. Alex must be instructed to keep his little secret to himself. Because the neighbors cannot abide his heresy.
Come now, you may be thinking. What harm is there in a cute story? Perhaps none at all, but then again, consider this: Our Lord tells us that we adults must have the faith of little children. The child believes what he is told because he is a child. If you tell him that reindeer fly or that a fat man living at the North Pole makes toys for all the children of the world and delivers them on Christmas Eve, he will believe you because he is a child. If you tell him that at midnight, in Bethlehem, in the piercing cold, God almighty, Creator, Lord and Master of the universe was born into this world as a tiny baby, he will believe you because he is a child.
God makes children innocent. He makes them guileless. He makes them believing—all the better so that they will believe what their parents tell them, especially when they tell them the mysteries and marvelous truths of the Catholic Faith. For some strange reason, when our children will most readily believe whatever we tell them, we tell them this silly story about Santa Claus. They accept the Santa Lie with as much simplicity and faith as they accept the truth of Christ's birth in a manger in Bethlehem. Side-by-side with the Great Truth of the Incarnation, they believe the Santa Lie.
Perhaps you may object to calling it the Santa Lie, but from the point of view of a child, what exactly is the difference between lying and pretending? We tell him that we pretended about Santa, but not about baby Jesus. Why should he believe you in either case? It might even be easier for him to believe that reindeer fly than that God Himself was born in a stable cave.
The child who trusts, who believes so readily, will not always be a child, and he will not always have childlike faith. Our children are growing up in a world filled with doubt. Doubt is fundamental to modernism. We all recognize Descartes's "I think, therefore I am," but we should also know that in Descartes's philosophy he might as well have said, "I doubt, therefore I think; I think, therefore I am." Doubt itself is given as the rational basis or one's existence. Our culture demands that we doubt, and that we doubt absolutely everything. In this climate, it is insane to give a child a reason to doubt, and to tell a child the story of the birth of our Lord side-by-side with the Santa Lie indeed gives s child a reason to doubt.
The problem isn't in pretending per se. It's in pretending in something that detracts from the truth. It's in the juxtaposition of the lie with the truth, thereby casting doubt on the truth. Christmas celebrates the fact that God has become a man. Isn't this marvel enough? Why do we have to invent this story about a man who has become a god? Santa is omniscient. "He sees you when you're sleeping; he knows when you're awake; he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake." Santa dispenses justice "You'd, better watch out, better not pout, better not cry. I'm telling you why..." And if he's not omnipresent, as is God, then he certainly has the agility of the angel: The problem is not that we pretend that there is a Santa. The problem is that we do so in opposition to the Incarnation.
The name of Santa Claus is a linguistic corruption of Sinter Klaas, itself a corruption of the name of St. Nicholas in the Dutch language. Yes, St. Nicholas was particularly generous to children. He was not fat, however; he was thin from fasting, which he did even from his infancy. He wasn't married to a Mrs. Claus; he was celibate. He wore red because he was a bishop, but he did not wear a red stocking cap. He did not live at or anywhere near the North Pole; on the contrary, he lived in Myra (a provincial capital in Asia Minor), and his feastday is nearly three weeks before Christmas. This fellow we call Santa Claus is not St. Nicholas, but rather is a perversion of St. Nicholas.
We all bemoan the commercialization of Christmas. But to say that Christmas is commercialized is to stop short of the bigger problem. We should not lament the commercialization of Christmas but rather its paganization. It is our duty to restore the truly Catholic observance of Christmas, to strip away all that is pagan in its celebration. That duty begins in our Catholic homes.
Consider that we hesitate to say "Merry Christmas," in order not to offend. Rather, we say, "Happy Holidays," or "Season's Greetings." We would edify our neighbor if, instead, we were to emphasize the Catholic nature of the feast by wishing him "...a blessed and holy Christ-Mass." It is ironic that folks have lost the connection between holiday and holiness.
And so begins the holiday season: There's the office holiday party, the neighborhood holiday party, the church holiday party and the club holiday party. On it goes, from one holiday party to the next, all during what, in days of more restraint, was a penitential season. Then we go shopping. Out come the lists. Who did we buy what for last year and who bought what for us? How much did they spend, and how much did we spend? There's Mum and Dad, Gran and Grandpa, Dad's new wife, Aunt Marie, eight other aunts and uncles, and the cousins and the brothers and the sisters. We find ourselves with one last thing to buy along with all the other nuts 15 minutes before closing on Christmas Eve in the Wal-Mart in a blind stupor asking ourselves why we are buying this? Why? Because it's Christmas!
A lady at work told me that her Christmas gift budget for her three children was $1000 per child. Here's a lady, a secretary, who has to work a long, long time to scratch together $3000 after taxes, and I wondered why she just didn't quit work and give her kids some of her time as their Christmas present. I suppose we do as we must to assuage our guilt.
During the holiday season, the radio stations play this really silly, that is to say, secular, Christmas music. Think of it. Secular Christmas music; what a concept. The big day approaches. The advertising section in the paper grows bigger; the Wal-Mart becomes intolerably more crowded; the suicide rate climbs to its annual peak; holiday music saturates the airwaves. Mommy is hyper-baking and sending Christmas cards and wrapping presents. Garlands are strung out and so are Mom and Dad. Daddy's putting toys together and trimming the tree and hanging the lights and putting up decorations, and now its Christmas Eve. The tree is wired up with lights and the kiddies are wired up on sugar. The camcorder batteries are fully charged and so is the MasterCard. The camera is loaded with film and Daddy's a little loaded himself. We've been to all the parties, visited all the friends; the presents are under the tree; and now it's the dawn of Christmas Day. And after so many days of rabid expectation, it all ends in one anticlimactic and disappointing morning. How can Christmas ever live up to our expectations? As a metaphor of our disappointment, the exalted tree will be out on the curb tomorrow morning.
A Protestant work colleague of mine asked once, "What do you traditional Catholics do for holidays? Do you celebrate?" I took a moment to reflect on how our holy time, our ChristMass, fundamentally and quintessentially liturgical, has been appropriated, perverted, and bastardized by usurpers. I shook my head and said to him, "Ray, the problem with you Protestant folk is that you just don't know how to party." And I thought about how well-ordered and sensible the Catholic Liturgy is.
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We begin our Catholic observance of Christ's birth with the beginning of a new liturgical year. We commemorate 4,000 years of longing for the Messias with the four weeks of Advent, a time of penance and restraint. We fast on Christmas Eve. There are three separate Masses on Christmas Day; one at midnight, one at dawn, and one during the day. All that Christmas means could never be grasped and commemorated in a single day. That is why the Church gives us the Twelve Days of Christmas to celebrate. Beyond these, we have the entire Christmastide in which to rejoice. And when the 40 days of the Blessed Mother's purification have been completed, we conclude our Christmas season with the blessing and procession of Candlemas (February 2).
No matter what our ethnic background, we all have customs and traditions associated with Christmas that are uniquely and distinctively Catholic. What customs do you observe for Christmas in your homes? Are they distinctively and evidently Catholic? Do you have a nativity scene? It should be the outstanding feature of our Christmas decorating.
Yes, Christmas has been commercialized, secularized, and paganized, but that is not the whole of our problem; it is only one manifestation of our problem. Christmas, like the Mass itself, is part of a greater whole. It is only one aspect of the Liturgy. Our problem lies in the fact that we have ceased to live the liturgical lives of our ancestors. Their every day was quickened by the Liturgy, most of it committed to memory. Their thoughts flowed from the wellspring of the official prayer of the Church and from the psalms, which they chanted freely in the fields and at the hearth. The perennial Liturgy, however, has been snatched from us. We have been robbed. The first blow came with the Reformation, when monasteries and churches throughout Europe fell to the axe of the so-called reformers. Even in countries that remained Catholic, the Liturgy was weakened by the rationalism that emphasized action over prayer. The final blow came with the liturgical revolution wrought by the Novus Ordo Missae. Without the monasteries and convents, the Liturgy lost its substance and objectivity and no longer overflows to fill our hearts, our homes, and our entire lives.
If we are to understand the solution to restoring liturgical life and its holy days, we must first understand the problem. I believe there are five distinct aspects of the same problem.
The first aspect of the problem is that those holy days that have survived the onslaught are slowly but surely being secularized and perverted, most notable among these, I include Christmas, Easter, and Halloween.
The second aspect of the problem is that new, secular, quasi-religious feasts have been introduced, which serve as poor substitutes for genuine Catholic holy days. These include Mother's Day, Father's Day. Thanksgiving, and others.
The third aspect of the problem is that totally secular or even pagan feasts have been introduced that celebrate occasions that are not Catholic, or are even anti-Catholic, for example, Independence Day, President's Day, Martin Luther King Day, and Earth Day.
The fourth aspect of the problem is that countless saints' days, fasts, feasts, seasons, and traditions are completely forgotten or ignored. Examples of these include the Ember Days and the Rogation Days.
The fifth and certainly the most far-reaching aspect of the problem is that the most important and frequently recurring holy day, namely, Sunday, has lost its meaning in the modern world. It is routinely desecrated, and in practice has become indistinguishable from the other six days of the week. Likewise, the holy days of obligation are ignored and desecrated.
The restoration of Christendom will not happen apart from a restoration of the Liturgy. Don't hold your breath waiting for your local Ordinary to lead processions through the streets of your city for the Rogation Days or for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Monasteries and convents are not going to send us robust men and women to teach us Gregorian chant. It would be illegal for the civil authorities to declare that, as a nation, we will conform the patterns of our daily lives to the Liturgy of the Catholic Church. The solution will have to come from within the walls of our own Catholic homes, and we should begin by examining how we celebrate holy days and holidays. Consider a few cases in point.
What a surprise to find, when one looks at the liturgical calendar, that Valentine's Day is, well, the Feast of St. Valentine (February 14). A wonderful feast it is, and it has been totally trivialized and most likely made lustful. Catholics must not lose sight of the fact that Valentine is a great saint of God who gave his heart to the Sacred Heart. This is the feastday of a martyr who loved his Beloved enough to die for Him, the fact to remember in order to give the observance of St. Valentine's Day a more Catholic character.
But if St. Valentine's Day has been trivialized, pity poor St. Patrick. With the possible exception of St. Nicholas, no saint has suffered so much at the hands of the neo-pagans. In 1994, in Boston, the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade was canceled because a group of Irish-American sodomites won a State Supreme Court battle to be permitted to march in the St. Patrick's Day parade there. The US Supreme Court overturned the State Supreme Court ruling so the parade was held in 1995, without the sodomites, but not until May of that year. How it must pain St. Patrick and all good Irish Catholics to see the mockery that is made of his feastday as the tide of paganism once turned back by St. Patrick seems to have turned again in its favor. We are justly horrified at the desecration that takes place on his feastday, in parades in his honor, and in and about the cathedral that bears his name in New York City. There are a lot of fun things to do on St. Patrick's Day (March 17), but do not neglect to give proper attention to the heroism and sanctity of this truly great saint.
The Feast of St. Joseph is especially dear to Italians. His feastday (March 19) is the authentic Catholic Father's Day among Italians. The custom of the St. Joseph's Altar used to be maintained in their parishes and homes. The significance of decking out an altar with food and crafts in thanksgiving for St. Joseph's intercession in our temporal affairs is now all but gone.
It is hard to understand what the world has done to Easter. The Easter bunny is a bit too goofy even for modern man. (Little Alex has not gotten in trouble with the neighbors for divulging the facts about the Easter bunny, as he did for his heretical views on the Santa Lie.) I think the problem with Easter is not that it has been co-opted, because it hasn't really. Likewise, I don't think that the problem is that it has been commercialized or paganized, because it hasn't really, at least not to the extent that the other holy days have been. I think that the problem isn't with Easter at all; the problem is with Lent. That is to say, we just don't make serious Lents anymore. It's absolutely true that the satisfaction of our Easter is directly proportional to the austerity of our Lent. The postmodern Catholic Church gives up meat on Friday and fasts on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. That's all. And that's not very austere. The culmination of the Lenten Liturgy occurs during Holy Week and in particular during the Sacred Triduum. Now, the rites of Holy Week are opposed by the pagan rites of Spring Break. We Catholics used to impose upon ourselves the sweet burden of penance and reparation during Lent, sometimes heroically. This included abstaining from, among other things, eggs. Come Easter Sunday morning, what else would one do with all the hen-fruit but eat it, decorate it, and give it away. Easter eggs and the new life cracking its way out of the shell symbolize the resurrection and new life that Christ won for us on Easter. Do remember to explain that symbolism to your children. Don't have Easter without first having Lent and Holy Week. And don't have Lent without having Carnival. The Church says to fast well and to feast well, too.
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It's May, the month of our Blessed Mother, yet we Catholics are honoring earthly mothers. Is this wrong? Surely we traditional Catholics with our large families and our heroic mothers should celebrate Mother's Day. But there is something wrong with Mother's Day American-style. It is a purely secular feast. While it expresses a noble human sentiment, it does so on purely a natural level. It does so entirely apart from our Liturgy. Finding himself without the religious feasts of the Catholic liturgical year, the neo-pagan concocts new feastdays for himself and invests them with a non-Catholic, but still quasi-religious, character. When Mother's Day was introduced by an Act of Congress in 1913, the reaction of the Catholic Church in the United States was to question whether Catholics should celebrate the day alongside their Protestant countrymen, precisely for the reasons I have mentioned. Catholics better understood their Faith and had at least a marginally better sense of the Liturgy and the necessity to resist the secularization of culture. Immigrant American Catholics capitulated, however, presumably not wanting to appear un-American. In any case, that Americans honor mothers and celebrate motherhood one day a year is so hypocritical as to be ludicrous. For 364 days a year we denigrate motherhood, we despise motherhood and we despise mothers—unless of course they have 1.2 absolutely perfect children and full-time jobs. Oh, we like single moms, too. And we like the mother that has seven babies all at once. We buy her a house and put her on the news every night. But heaven help a woman who should have her seven children sequentially. She will certainly be subject to abuse, scorn, derision, and ridicule. It has become inconceivable that one could suggest that, for a woman to fully realize her womanhood, she should be a mother. Why celebrate Mother's Day with a nation that is eliminating mothers? What to do about Mother's Day? The answer might be to downplay secular Mother's Day. I wouldn't recommend that you stop sending flowers to your own mother on Mother's Day unless you have agreed beforehand that, in keeping with the Liturgy, there is a more Catholic way for Catholics to honor mothers. Two good alternatives come to mind. In many countries, even to this day, mothers are honored on December 8, Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In other Catholic countries in the past, mothers were honored on Laetare Sunday, a day that was known as "Mothering Sunday." In the Epistle for Laetare Sunday, St. Paul points out that the Catholic Church is a Mother leading us to eternal life. There are many delightful customs we must revive for this day, customs that honored our natural mothers; our heavenly mother, Mary; Holy Mother Church; and even the mother church of the diocese, the cathedral. This is a superior and Catholic alternative to a secular sham Mother's Day.
As springtime gives way to summer, we all look forward to fireworks. The Fourth of July is the High Holy Day of secularist America, especially so for devotees of the goddess Liberty. Let us be reminded that there is no such thing as secular. Things are either for God, or against Him, and this exalted feast of liberty is anything but for Him. Yet we Catholics eagerly celebrate an event (the signing of the Declaration of Independence) that is fundamentally anti-Christ, implicitly anti-God, and explicitly antiÂCatholic. If you are scandalized by my words, then consider these words, written in response to the English Parliament's having passed the Quebec Act:
The affair of Canada is still worse. The Romish Faith is made the established religion of the land... The free exercise of the Protestant faith depended upon the pleasure of the Governor and the Council... They may as well establish Popery in New York and the other colonies as they did in Canada. Your lives, your property, your religion, are at stake.
These are the words of none other that Alexander Hamilton. He, and the other Founding Fathers, used such hyperbole to stir up widespread anti-Catholic hatred and bigotry so as to incite the people to break ties with England. Much is made of the other four so-called Intolerable Acts, but it was this fifth intolerable act that was so offensive to the Founding Fathers. It did little more than allow a Catholic in a Catholic land to hold public office without having first to renounce his Catholic Faith, which renunciation was absolutely required of him in the other colonies and in England in compliance with the so-called Test Act.
Perhaps it is unfair to characterize Independence Day with the words of Alexander Hamilton, so consider also these words, penned by the author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson himself, on the 50th anniversary of its signing (July 4, 1826):
May it be to the world what I think it will be, the arousing of men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition have persuaded them to bind themselves, when the human mind was held in vassalage by kings, by priests, and by nobles.
Jefferson understood that the Declaration of Independence was not so much a declaration of independence from England but rather a declaration of independence from Christendom. We would do well to understand it likewise. A cursory reading of nearly all the Founding Fathers will reveal a similar hatred for the Catholic Church. I will leave off the Founding Fathers with these words of Benjamin Franklin which are particularly appropriate:
I wish Christianity were more productive of good works and not holy day keeping, and long prayers that area despised by wise men.
Roast your weenies, light your fireworks, and go to the parades if you must, but when you talk to your Catholic children about July Fourth, stop short of canonizing the anti-Catholic Founding Fathers, and do what you can to diminish the pseudo-sacred character the day has been given by our national mythology. Yes, it is a Catholic's duty in religion to love his country, and there is much to love. Look first to honor those who sought to make this country truly Catholic: Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortez, Frances Cabrini, Mother Elizabeth Seton, the North American Martyrs, Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe, Juan de Padilla, Junipero Serra, and others. Where was the first permanent settlement in the New World? Jamestown, you say, in 1607? Fifty-six years earlier (1551), Lima, Peru, was already becoming a thriving Spanish Catholic cultural capital. As the Jamestown Pilgrims were barely surviving their first winter, Spanish Catholics were celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine, Florida.
Catholics don't have to pass mid-summer without serious merrymaking. According to our Lord, it is St. John the Baptist (not Thomas Jefferson) who is the greatest man ever born of woman. St. John the Baptist was a martyr, and typically it is the day of the martyr's death, and hence his birth into eternal life, that we celebrate. But St. John was born without original sin, sanctified in the womb by the presence of our Lord. So we celebrate his nativity (June 24) with a Liturgy that bears a striking resemblance to that of our Lord's Nativity six months earlier. As St. John the Baptist's feastday comes at mid-summer, St. John begins to decrease so that our Lord, the Light of whom he gives witness, can increase. Thus, the custom in Christendom was to celebrate the feast of the Baptist with bonfires. So go ahead, roast your weenies, but roast them on the Baptist's fire. Shoot off your fireworks, not to announce the coming of the British, but rather the coming of the one who would announce the coming of the Messias.
Christopher Columbus brought Christ and the Catholic Church to a land that practiced human sacrifice, yet he is despised by the world as the quintessentially evil, white, European, Catholic male. Though their motives need purifying, many Catholics, particularly those of Italian descent, celebrate the voyages and discoveries of Columbus with great merrymaking. Catholics must rejoice that he discovered our land, not because it gave rise to the political entity that is the United States of America, but precisely because he brought the Catholic Church to our shores.
Soon after Columbus Day, it's time for what used to be All Saints' Day, preceded by All Hallows' Eve. Now called Halloween, it is an absolute inversion of its original intent. Instead of praying for souls and fearing damnation, Halloween is celebrated as though we wish to become among the damned. Witches, devils, ghosts, ugliness—these things are satanic and are often made to appear cute and benign. But to make evil things cute in no way mitigates their evil. On the contrary, it makes all the more insidious.
We must reclaim Halloween. One of the most delightful alternatives is the All Saints' Party. Rather than dressing up like Power Rangers, Pocahontas, Godzilla, anti-heroes, children and their parents dress like saints. The secular world will never have as much material to choose from as what the panoply of Catholic saints provides.
Three or four weeks later and it's Thanksgiving. Just what can possibly be wrong with a day given thanking God for his bounty? Consider that Thanksgiving was instituted by anti-Catholic Pilgrims as a reaction to and a substitute for the "Christmas of the Papists." The celebration of Christmas was made illegal and remained so in many states well into the 1800s. Disregarding its anti-Catholic origins, we should also consider that Thanksgiving is a favorite event of the ecumaniacs. This is the day when we are to put side all religious differences in order to give thanks together. This is a secular, quasi-religious feast that I think ought to be downplayed if not ignored in the Catholic home. For Catholics, every holy Mass is a thanksgiving. Holy Mother Church gives us the Ember Days as our days of thanksgiving. The four Ember Weeks coincide with the changing of the seasons. We thank God for the gifts of nature and seek to use them in moderation. And how does the Church require us to give thanks for the earth's bounty? By fasting. Catholics show their appreciation not by indulgence, but rather by sacrifice.
If, after the 12 Ember Days, you are still not satisfied that you have adequately discharged your debt of gratitude, then consider also observing the long-standing and Catholic tradition of giving special thanks for harvest bounty at Michaelmas, the Feast of the Dedication of St. Michael (September 29). If you insist on observing Puritan Thanksgiving, then at least baptize it and make it a Catholic day. Sing the Te Deum, go to Mass, teach your children about God's providence. Don't fall for the myth about the fun-loving bunch of pilgrims who wanted nothing more than religious liberty for all. Every last one of them would have despised you and your "Popery." Avoid the sin of gluttony. But better still, give thanks with the Church on the Ember Days and on Michaelmas.
The most frequently occurring holy day in the Liturgy is Sunday. We should pause perhaps and reflect on how we spent last Sunday. Maybe the Sunday before that. Then we should consider this from Exodus:
Remember to keep holy the Sabbath Day, six days you may labor and do your work, but the seventh is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. Take care to keep my Sabbath, for that is to be a token between you and me, whoever desecrates the Sabbath shall be put to death. Six days there are for doing work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of complete rest, sacred to the Lord.
But sometimes it happens that our ox ends up in the ditch on the Sabbath Day, and we're faced with the necessity of pulling it out. I suppose that if this happens every Sunday, we should evaluate where and how we are driving our ox.
Have a look at the Wal-Mart parking lot on a Sunday afternoon. It looks exactly like the Wal-Mart parking lot on a Saturday afternoon. Can we distinguish ourselves from our pagan neighbors in how we observe the Lord's Day? Do we find our ox in the Wal-Mart parking lot on Sunday? Apart from assisting at Mass and refraining from prohibited activities, what else might we do? Prepare for this holy day on Saturday evening, spending half an hour as a family reading and discussing the Epistle and Gospel of the coming Sunday Mass. If possible, eliminate certain daily chores for the children on Sunday. Listen to some liturgical music in the car on the way to Mass. Put on your Sunday best as a tangible way of fostering the proper interior dispositions. The idea is to set the day apart by sanctifying it with such special gestures.
My wife was talking to a Novus Ordo friend recently, someone with whom she likes to get in some friendly taunting about the Faith when they talk. Their conversation went something like this:
"So, Peggy, what are you all doing for the Rogation Days?"
"The what kind of days?"
"The Rogation Days. Three days of prayer, fasting and petition. You know, the procession Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension Thursday. By the way, your kids are in Catholic schools so they'll be out of school for the Ascension, right?"
"Well, actually, no."
"You're kidding; why not?"
"Well, see, there's the problem of child care. A lot of moms have jobs, and if the kids are off and both parents have to work, what are they going to do with the kids? They try to keep in sync with the public schools so the parents can be off when the kids are off. As a result they've used up all the holidays."
"What do you mean, 'they've used up all the holidays?' You mean they don't get off for Ascension Thursday but they get off for other holidays? Were they off for Martin Luther King Day?"
"Well, yes."
A Catholic must question all the underlying assumptions here.
First point: What is the father doing working on a holy day of obligation? Of course, if there's a buck to be made, his employer won't be closed to commemorate the event. But, the father knows that the Ascension is a holy day of obligation. Assuming he gets a few days vacation, shouldn't he have planned for the occasion?
Second point: What is the mother doing working on a holy day of obligation? Same argument. Couldn't she have arranged to have the day off?
Third point: What is the mother doing working when she has school-aged children? Perhaps she means to earn a few extra bucks so the family can send the children to a "Catholic" school. But there's something wrong when that school doesn't have off on Ascension Thursday.
Fourth point: what is the school doing working on a holy day of obligation?
The children, along with their parents and the school, are celebrating secular feasts and desecrating genuine Catholic holy days, all with the approbation of the Chancery Office. Do you think it is even remotely possible, when these kids leave that school and then their homes, that they will have any sense of the liturgical year, any notion of what it means to be Catholic?
What is true of Sundays is true of the holy days of obligation. The distinction is that most of us do not have to work on Sundays. The fact is that we probably don't have to work on the holy days either. We can go through our calendars at the beginning of the year and mark the holy days (those of obligation and otherwise). We can make our plans to take vacation for the holy days. What a message this will send to our co-workers, to our bosses, and to our children. And, we might even keep our ox out of the Wal-Mart parking lot on holy days, too.
As so-called traditional Catholics, we know the way we pray reflects what we believe—Lex orandi, lex credendi. Similarly, the way we celebrate reflects what we believe, too—Lex convivendi, lex credendi.
The secular, pagan, anti-Catholic world will have its celebrations, its feasts, its own diabolical anti-liturgy And what will we do? Will we renounce it in favor of the celebrations, the feasts, the commemorations, the prayers of the Catholic Church? As it is natural to man to celebrate, likewise it is natural to man to use his celebrations to teach. The holy days instruct. They teach us and our children. We must decide which lesson plan we will use, which curriculum will form the basis of our instruction.
Holy Mother the Church, guided by the Holy Ghost, has sanctioned the pious customs of her people. She has integrated them into her Liturgy, and made of her Liturgy a whole that speaks to man as God wants us to hear Him—simply, as children, united with Christ, in sorrow and in joy, in prayer and in song, in fasts and in feasts. Our genuine Catholic holy days must be restored. Our genuine Catholic holy days have been replaced by secular, and therefore necessarily anti-Catholic festivals. If our Lord Himself tells us we are either for Him or against Him, then there is no middle ground. Nothing is neutral. Nothing is truly secular. Secular is a myth. Secular is a lie. Secular is not for Christ, therefore, secular is against Christ. These so-called secular feasts must either be baptized and made Catholic, or they must be eliminated from our homes and our lives.
To make our homes truly Catholic we will have to make radical changes. We will have to make concerted efforts to rethink and redirect the focus of our holiday celebrations. Change is the mantra of the modern world. We're constantly reminded that everything must change, that change is the only thing that is constant. The destruction of the Catholic Liturgy took change. The destruction of Christendom took change. And, the restoration of it all will take change, too. A change back. That will take courage, and it must begin with the resolution to change, with the resolution to restore Christ first to His rightful place in our hearts and then in our homes.
No one can described our current situation better than did the incomparable and prophetic Dom Gueranger:
But now for many ages past, Christians have grown too solicitous about earthly things to frequent the holy vigils, and the mystical hours of the day. Each new generation increased in indifference for that which their forefathers in the Faith had loved as their best and strongest food. Chanting, which is the natural expression of the prayers and even the sorrows of the Church, became limited to the solemn Feasts; that was the first sad revolution in the Christian world.
But even then Christendom was still rich in churches and monasteries; and there, day and night, was still heard the sound of the same venerable prayers which the Church had used through all the past ages. So many hands lifted up to God drew down upon the earth the dew of heaven, averted storms and won victory for those who were in battle. These servants of God, who thus kept up an untiring choir that sung the divine praises, were considered as solemnly deputed by the people, which was still Catholic, to pay full tribute of homage and thanksgiving due to God, His Blessed Mother and the saints.
Then came the Reformation, and at the outset, it attacked the very life of Christianity. It would put an end to man's sacrifice of praise to God. It strewed many countries with the ruins of churches. The clergy, the monks, the virgins consecrated to God, were banished or put to death, and in the churches which were spared, the Divine Offices were not permitted. In other countries, where the persecutions were not so violent, many sanctuaries were devastated and irremediably ruined, so that the life and voice of prayer grew faint. Faith, too, was weakened. Rationalism became fearfully developed. And now our own age seems threatened by what is the result of these evils, the subversion of all social order. (Dom Gueranger, The Liturgical Year, Vol. 1, "Advent," General Preface)
And thus it has come to pass.
The world is again as universally evil as it was in the time of Noe. The Sacrifice of the Mass is disappearing and the "abomination of desolation" is at hand. Once again let us listen to Dom Gueranger: "The Liturgy is essentially and intimately connected with the Eucharist. Where the dogma of the Real Presence has ceased to be believed, there also have the canonical hours ceased and could not but cease" [emphasis added] (ibid). We should not be surprised. The majority of Catholics today no longer believe in the Real Presence. And "...there also have the canonical hours ceased and could not but cease."
Our world is once again pagan. Our world is once again barbarian. It was the Liturgy in the monasteries that rescued the world from barbarism into the light of the Middle Ages. It will be the Liturgy that rescues us from the barbarism of the postmodern age.
The Reformation began with physical violence and attacks on the Liturgy. The violence eventually subsided, but the attacks on the Liturgy continued. Again, hear Dom Gueranger:
For when the Reformation had abated the violence of its persecution, it had other weapons wherewith to attack the Church. By these several countries that had continued to be Catholic were infected with the spirit of pride, which is the enemy of prayer. The modern spirit would have it that prayer is not action.
There were found men who said "Let us abolish all the festival days of God from the earth"; and then came upon us that calamity which brings all others with it, and which the good Mardochai besought God to avert from his nation, when he said: "Shut not, O Lord, the mouths of them that sing to Thee!" (Ibid.)
The monasteries are silent; the convents are silent; the seminaries are silent; and in our churches we are dumb to singing the chant of St. Gregory. The festival days of God have been abolished from the earth, and the mouths of them that sing to the Lord God of Hosts have been decisively shut.
Imagine that in the time of David, 4,000 men—Levites—daily chanted the Liturgy in the Temple, the type for our holy Mass. Imagine that in the time of our Lord, four times a day, 500 priests and 500 Levites, forming two mighty and magnificent choirs, chanted David's Psalms together. Their entire existence was given over to perfecting the singing of the praises of Almighty God. In the ages of faith, hundreds of thousands of men and women who had consecrated themselves, who had given their very lives to God, paid homage at all hours of the day and night to Him, His Mother, and His saints, by chanting the Divine Office. This is how the mighty and good God should be glorified.
And today? Today, the monasteries, the convents, the seminaries are silent-because they are empty. And they will stay silent and they will stay empty until we fill them with our sons and our daughters. But our sons and our daughters will not go there if they do not understand what it means to be Catholic. And they will not understand what it means to be Catholic if they do not understand the Liturgy. And they will certainly not understand the Liturgy if they have not lived the Liturgy. And they will never have lived the Liturgy if they have not lived it in their own homes—in our homes.
This is not about vacuous customs and quaint ways to pass the time during the year. This is about war. And not war against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. We are in the army, and the City of God is under siege. This is about restoring the edifice of Christendom, one small liturgical stone upon the other. This is about having the courage to change our lives to make that happen. The restoration must come, by the grace of God, beginning in us and in our homes. Christ must reign. Our homes must become the monasteries and convents of our age.
With the help of God we must live fully and entirely Catholic lives, not secular lives with a few Catholic adornments. We must live the Liturgy. We must make of our homes schools wherein the Liturgy teaches us our Faith. Our Catholic homes must be islands of liturgical beauty in a sea of secular ugliness. Our homes must be havens of godly sanity in a world gone mad. Our homes must be bulwarks against barbarism, founded solidly on the Liturgy.
God, give us strength. God, give us the courage to restore Thy festival days upon earth, to once again open our mouths and sing to Thee. By Thy good grace we will fast, we will pray, and we will sing with the Church, sorrowfully, and joyfully, and we will feast; we will feast heartily, like good Catholics, in anticipation of the heavenly banquet of eternity.
James De Piante is a father of four and assists at the Latin Mass at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, Charlotte, NC. There he is a member of the League of the Kingship of Christ and director of its Archconfraternity of St. Stephen chapter. He lives in the countryside outside of Charlotte where he and his family keep bees, grow vegetables, and raise chickens for food and profit.
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