Friday, September 27, 2013
A Special Note
The National Catholic Reporter for August 30 thru Sept. 12 of 2013, on page 23, continues an extensive report by Jamie Manson, of Pope Francis’ remarks on women. Reporter Jamie Manson says that the Pope’s words about women were “spirit-breaking”. And “the idea that we need a deeper theology of women is remarkable…” Manson claims that women theologians have been doing just that for the last two decades. However, I submit that there has been no return to the sources in Genesis during this post-Vatican II era. I offer the following meditations as an attempt, at least, to initiate such a return to the foundations. Everything presupposes Creation, especially the account of the Creation of Woman in Genesis 2:/8-25.
(Note: Paula’s next contribution to the blog, which she speaks of above, is very long and will be added in parts.) Thank You!
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
The Council in Question
THE COUNCIL IN QUESTION, by Moyra Doorly and Aidan Nichols, O.P., with foreword by Cardinal George Pell. Tan Books, Saint Benedict Press, 2011 in England, 2013 in America.
An analysis by Paula Haigh
The subtitle, a quote from Cardinal Pell, tells us that “None of us can take refuge in Fundamentalisms…”
Well, to put it all in the proverbial nutshell, it certainly is not easy to“dialogue” with Modernist rhetoric. And both Cardinal Pell and Dominican Father Nichols, are experts in that mode of discourse, as PASCENDI warned us. But perhaps it is worth an effort. One can at least attempt to expose the Truths of Reason and of Faith, especially in their unchanging and immutable principles and formulas – comparable to the biological DNA or genetic formula for the unchanging and unchangeable substantial form of each originally created kind as specified in Genesis One. To go immediately and directly to the main point at issue, I believe it is fair to say that every word of this exchange of letters between a lay woman and a Dominican (male) theologian is summed up in Father Nichols’ statement that “An Ecumenical Council will never formally commit the Church to doctrinal error.” (Page 101). The key word is formally.
Both sides of the debate seem to agree that the Second Vatican Council, unlike all previous councils, managed to evade this qualification. It made absolutely no condemnations, despite all expectations that it would and, indeed, should have. And it managed also, to evade the charge of any trace of doctrinal error by being very careful to reiterate the constant ordinary and extraordinary (i.e., de fide) teachings of the magisterium. Because of the undoubted and demonstrable presence of this kind of double-speak, so typical of the real – evolutionary – modernist as described and condemned by PASCENDI, in 1907, Father Nichols is able to say, and with some logical truth, that the price is too high to reject the Council, en bloc, as the position of Archbishop Lefebvre seems to require. Here are his..- Father Nichols words….”the primary consideration…is the proper description of the Church in her continuous, self-identical, believing and worshipping existence.” That is why I cannot, Moyra, say to traditionalists, come and join forces with us (orthodox official Catholics) at any price you may set. The price of rejecting the Council, en bloc, is too high for me to pay. And, indeed, we can hardly hope to persuade representatives of the civil order of the merits of Catholic truth, if at the same time, we call into question the coherence of that truth – the internal coherence of the pre-and post-Conciliar tradition considered as a unity.” (p.118)
There is only one way to answer this price and that is to show, most clearly, plainly and irrefutably, precisely how, when and where the coherence of the Truths of this unity of the Deposit of Faith that the Church is mandated to guard, teach and integrally, that is fully, to transmit. This coherence has been allowed to weaken and to be breached under the prestige of a false science so-called (Cf. 1 Tim.6:20 and 2Tim.3:7, 2Tim.4:3-4 with 2 Thess.2:10-11)
which began to rise in the late 16th century and continued. Until now it has effectively replaced the authority of the Church and the inerrant Word of God in Scripture. Vatican Council II must be not only questioned, but must, and undoubtedly will be, anathematized on the one irrefutable basis, that it is permeated, saturated and formally motivated by the Modernist “law” of evolution that a “being” must change, even substantially, or else go extinct.
This ideology probably made its main break-through into Catholic theological thinking with the influence of John Henry Cardinal Newman – who thought of the Church, evolutionist that he was, as an organism – analogously with any other biological organism, subject even to substantial change, although he was careful to say that the Church’s dogmas – or the Church herself – could not change substantially. The distinction between substance and accidents here is super-crucial – but it is my experience that most Catholics – including Traditionalists, are quite ignorant of it. The point is that the Church is not properly even comparable to any biological organism. She is the Mystical Body of Christ. Her unity then, centers in the One Divine Person of the God-Man Jesus Christ, as does also her holiness center in His Heart, her Catholicity in her being the one means of salvation for all men; and her apostolicity in the historical perpetuation of His propitiatory Sacrifice of Holy Mass. It is the mind, the intellectual life of the Church, as well as the entire natural order, that has been, one must say, even substantially affected by the Church’s failure to fight and condemn the Modernist Heresy, that is evolutionary in its very nature. Although it is but an ideology, with no basis in reality, it has captured the minds of those who have not had a genuine love for the TRUTH, and so have been allowed by God, to embrace the “operation of error”, that is, in the End, the Great Apostasy of the Antichrist and his followers. (Cf 2 Thess.2.)
Both Moyra Doorly and Father Aidan Nichols, unfortunately do a “good” job of rather thoroughly muddying a very core concept of the Real World, and thus of the teachings of the Church, as they reflect this hierarchy of truths, (Cf pp.79,88,90,95.) The hierarchy of truths, I submit, refers not primarily to the truth value or degree of each truth, but rather to that truth’s accessibility to the normal human reason. But it is in the first sense of“ontological” or metaphysical, that is, the transcendental truth of all being, that the hierarchy of truths is most meaningful as describing the very structure of the real world. And it is in this primary sense that this hierarchy of truths forms the basis for the 4th way of proving God’s existence, (see Summa I, q.2, a3.) The real degrees of perfection are the only true and therefore – real answer to today’s oppressive egalitarianism. The extent to which this ideology of equality can be and is carried, is seen every day here where I am in a state-run nursing home. If a patient or “resident” – a victim of some severe psychic disorder and therefore heavily sedated – but still awake, has to all appearances unknown to his or her self, parked his wheelchair smack in the middle of a hallway that must be used by those pushing large carts at meal-time, - the “law” forbids any interference at all with the unspoken will of that patient to be where he or she is! Situations thereby arise which are sometimes so comical as to provide totally unintended entertainment for a still sane observer (dare I say?) such as myself. When no distinction is allowed to be made between the sane and the insane, what hope do we have except that of heaven?
In the hierarchy of the grades of perfection, each grade is perfect in itself. Can we imagine the daisy saying to the rose, “Oh, how I would love to be a rose!?” No. It is not possible. The daisy is perfectly happy in her daisy-ness because only in her daisy-ness does she find the perfect fulfillment of her daisy-nature. And so it is…on up the hierarchical ladder of being. When applied to the issues of ecumenism and religious liberty, both authors of the book seem unaware of a very important point and it concerns the notion of FORM in its co-existence with MATTER, in every composite, corporeal being. Two points are especially important.
Form, both physically and metaphysically and theologically, precedes and determines all processes of function. In the Order of Creation by God, in the first Six Days of the World, substantial forms were created ex nihilo and in toto, first. Processes followed.
In the Order of Generation, where the processes of development begin with the first reproductions in obedience to God’s command to increase and multiply, the substantial form of each created kind is transmitted physically by means of the genetic DNA, so far as present knowledge is aware. Only in the case of human beings is the rational soul immediately and directly created and infused as the one – substantial form with the body, of the human person, by God alone. God supplies the rational and immortal human soul, but the parents supply the physical body of each new human being. The great and all encompassing flaw of the Second Vatican Council was to place its main idea of "human dignity" in that human person created before the Fall. It is true that the form of each human being is made in God's image and likeness, (Gen.1:26-27) and this is not changed by the Fall insofar as this image and likeness affects the natural constitution of man. However, Adam and Eve's loss of sanctifying Grace did affect their natural lives - insofar as the Orders of Nature and of Grace seem to be as intimately united as matter and form, as potency and act, as essence and existence. Once in existence, essence is limited and affected by the actuality of the Form, which now, after the Fall, suffers - can one say radically or substantially - but is not altered specifically? And this seems to be the BIG question to be asked.
Is the Second Vatican Council a brand new kind of council from all previous ones? It would seem to be so. First of all, it seems fair to say that all - if not most - of the Fathers of that Council believed in at least some form of evolution. The principle here is the same, I believe, as that of human nature before and after the Fall. But given the fact that Vatican II was a human "thing" - analogous to a human construction such as a house or a poem, it could be formally flawed, just as a building constructed on a foundation of sand. Our Lord warns us of such false foundations in His parable (Matt. 7:24-27). But His Church is built upon the Rock that is Himself. It is truth as He said to Pilate, (John 18:37). Vatican II is a house built on sand and is dissolving into the New World Order, which is also built on sand, but must have its day in the false sunshine of Humanistic Evolution: the ever-shifting sands of the false science (2 Tim: 3:7) and its fables, (2 Tim.4:3-4).
But the Church is a Divine institution - not comparable even to a God-created substantial form, as those of the First Six Days, because these were all of the natural order - except for Adam and Eve, raised to the supernatural order of Divine Grace, so then creation. As the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church is complete in every way - except geographically, from the instant of Her Birth on the Cross and Her Confirmation at Pentecost. Her mandate at the Ascension was not given to infants nor to an "infant" Church - but to men fully equipped with "all truth", and prepared for martyrdom. The very unavoidable and irrefutable core and essence of the evil nature of the Second Vatican Council is to be found in the nature of its FORM. Its form is that formal principle which gives meaning to its every word - to every word of every document. This is the nature of a formal principle: it gives actual being to every syllable and word - that is the nature of a formal principle. And the formal principle of the Second Vatican Council is evolutionism -- an ideology false by its very nature. As such, it pollutes, contaminates, even those elements of truth it presents.
This is why there is no possibility of salvaging any part of this council. Recall Our Lord's brief words about trying to patch an old garment with a piece of new cloth, (Matt 9:16-17) or pouring new wine into old bottles. It may well be that in the great Plan of God, as seen in the Apocalypse, this Council is but a brief and rather superficial blemish on the Garment of the Church. For this visible Garment, after all, is but a passing reflection of Her real Nature, which is the Deposit of Faith: all Truth, the Holy Ghost Himself. And He cannot be defiled. But then, neither can His Word and the Father of the Word, for like the "all truth" - They are - and as One cannot be defiled. And so also, is the Immaculate Mother of God. She cannot be defiled, either, nor denied.
If there is any good in this book - it is in Moyra Doorly's defense of the propitiatory Sacrifice of the Mass. However, Moyra did not do well to follow the theory of a modern Architect, rather than the Sacramental Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas. On page 19, she writes: If "form follows function" - as the architect Mies Vander Rohe claimed, then....On page 22, Moyra says: Traditionalists and ourselves are surely in agreement that the forms of the Church's worship have developed over time....Rather than quote extensively, let me just say that there is throughout, no clear concept of FORM anywhere presented. And since this is a core concept in any serious, physical, metaphysical or theological discussion, a lack and loss - especially of its Aristotelian-Thomistic meaning - causes a lack of clarity and even of truth in the entire discourse. The FORM determines all. Such is pretty much the case when both sides in a dialogue-debate engage in sophistical-Modernist modes of discourse. Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., is a master at this Modernist discourse. Anyone defending the Second Vatican Council - would have to be so of necessity. And without a mastery of Thomistic Principles, there can be no coherent defense of Tradition, in the face of this evolutionary - deceptive Modernist attack on the Deposit of Faith Itself.
Thursday, September 5, 2013
St Therese of Lisieux
In August of 1897, just about six weeks before her death, St. Therese said: “It is only in Heaven that we will see the whole truth about everything. This is impossible on earth…” (Last Conversations, Page 132)
She went on to lament so many different translations of the Scriptures. She said had she been a priest, she would have learned Hebrew and Greek in order to know “the real text dictated by the Holy Spirit.” In this same book of her “Last Conversations”,on page 257, St. Therese confided to Mother Agnes of Jesus, (her sister Pauline), that “later, unceasingly making new advances, science will explain everything naturally: we shall have the absolute reason for everything that exists and that still remains a problem, because there remain very many things to be discovered, etc..etc..” Apparently, she said much more which Mother Agnes did not record. She saw such thoughts as temptations against the Faith. Mother Agnes said: She added that she never reasoned with these thoughts. “ I undergo them under diuress, but while undergoing them I never cease making acts of Faith.”
Thanks to the true science, the real science-as-knowledge, widely published by the Protestant Creationists in defense of creation, especially in toto and in defense of the universality of the Noahian Deluge just some 4,000 years ago, our supernatural, divine Catholic Faith is still able to point to empirical, that is demonstrably physical evidences of the literal truth of Genesis One. I must hasten to add that only Catholic – Robert Sungenis has presented the irrefutable evidences for a geocentric cosmos – an important doctrine the Protestant Creationists still hesistate to affirm. I pray that the Sungenis-Bennett monumental study, GALILEO WAS WRONG, THE CHURCH WAS RIGHT, will convince them of the necessity for a geocentric cosmology in order to have a coherent creation science and theology.
What so many people fail to understand, is that divine Faith is rooted in nature; grace builds on nature; the supernatural order of Divine Grace requires the natural order, which is the formal object of the various natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry – all the life or biological sciences, and at the top, astronomy and cosmology. Mathematics, including geometry and logic, are but tools of all the sciences. Unfortunately, today’s mathematics is exalted as a science – whereas it is not. Its formal object is quantity, but separated from the substance in which quantity as an accidental category must inhere, mathematics is but an intellectual exercise, a game, as Lewis Carroll fully realized. (Lewis Carroll wrote ALICE IN WONDERLAND,and invented many games.) But the entire natural order has been captured and occupied by the false science of evolutionism – in all the branches of real science. This ideology pretends to tell us and to explain, as St. Therese predicted, all events and objects of the natural order, without any reference to God as Creator. The truths of Creation are truths accessible to human reason, but only by those intellectually gifted, even naturally, for the intellectual virtues of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding, are first of all, natural virtues, as are prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. (See Matthew Sheeben –THE MYSTERIES OF CHRISTIANITY and Garigou-Lagrange, - THE THREE AGES OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE, etc.
I recall a great apologist and defender of Carmelite Spirituality, Dr. Gore Morales, pointing out quite emphatically, “How can you hope to have the supernatural virtue of prudence, if you do not first have the natural virtue of prudence? The one is rooted in the other. It is fair to say that both the natural and the supernatural gifts are absolutely necessary for those theologians called to teach and to preach the truths of Faith and of Reason. One might look in vain for such teachers today. I strongly suspect the very young priest on EWTN, who presents “Dogmatic Theology”,by playing with his dog on the green grass of the lawn….This young man is not the kind of theologian St. Thomas insisted must always preserve the entire faith explicitly. The point to be emphasized here, is that divine Catholic faith cannot exist in a vacuum, that is, separated from the certain truths of the natural order such as:
Geocentricity – which means a cosmology with a fixed –immobile earth at its center.
An Order of Generation that preserves the Order of Creation, (the Six Days), by preserving the Substantial Forms of the Order of Creation, (the Six Days).
Included in a complete cosmology is the natural order, which includes the practical laws governing marriage and all forms of sexuality, i.e., morality.
How can there be, for example, a sound and/or orthodox practice of medicine without belief in the existence, immateriality or spirituality and immortality of the human soul present in its body from the moment of conception? How can there be any moral order, unless the institution of marriage is recognized as made by God in Genesis One and confirmed by Jesus Christ, and raised by Him to the Order of Sacramental Grace at Cana? How can there possibly be any question concerning the abominable practice of homosexuality, given the abundant scriptural examples and the Church’s constant teaching? To condone such perversion is the ultimate triumph of evil over good and the collapse of all civil order, temporarily.
Kyrie, eleison.
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Paula Responds to Comment by a Reader
That is very true what the reader says in his comment: “Evolution is not compatible with a fixed Natural Law.” She continues: “Evolution, in fact, along with Copernicism, destroys the entire Natural Order.
Dear Adrian Dulston: I use the Dominican English edition of the Summa in Three Volumes. I am not a Latinist either. The unity of the sciences will only come about when individual scientists realize the formal object of their science, and practice it in the right place in the hierarchy of reality. Everything presupposes Creation, as the ancient Greeks hung everything from the gods in the Great Chair of Being. (See my Study “FROM THE BEGINNING.)
The first principles of all knowledge are apparently lost to us today. And yet, the science of metaphysics provides all the necessary principles for the unity of all knowledge. Again, everything presupposes Creation. In my opinion, someday the Church will completely anathematize the Second Vatican Council on the grounds that it was entirely motivated and informed by the "law" of evolution, which was to change or die. See the encyclical "Pascendi" by Pope Saint Pius X - who said that the "law" of evolution was the principal doctrine of the Modernists. The Church was taken over by Modernists at Vatican II, with lots of help from the Masons and the Jews.
Thank you for your interest.
Paula Haigh
Monday, September 2, 2013
Dr. David Hart Again
There is no possible way of avoiding the issue - not just of sin in general - but of an Original Sin. Even the ancient Greeks in their very humanistic myths, retained vestiges of the Primordial Revelation. The most telling of those myths is that of Pandora's Box. Look it up! And all of the Greek Drama's "celebrate" the hero's flaw, from Achilles' heel on through the Great Tragedies. And so, Dr. Hart's insistence that there is some kind of justification for "modernity's" rejection of the traditional natural law doctrine - which touches that human nature - which is basically good - is nevertheless wounded and weakened - so that it is not as it was originally created. The Traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church is beautifully precise. It tells us what we experience every day: our intellect is darkened - our will is weakened and we are strongly prone to do evil, that is, to commit sin, especially when under the influence of the passions. There is no better systematic explanation of the natural law in its moral degradation, due to the Original Sin, than that of Homer and the Greek Dramatists in pre-Christian times, and that of St. Thomas - making use of Aristotle's Ethics and ordinary experience, in his Summa. Especially helpful for today - is his examination of the human act - in all of its circumstantial and contingent detail.
No, there is simply no excuse for Moralists or Ethicists today to dismiss the Medieval contribution to the intellectual life of today. Nor can I find any excuse or any reasonable explanation for the substitution of the term modernity, for Modernism. It is but a skillful evasion - typical of the reforming modernist's on-going - ever-changing - devolution of all things, - even the very words we use - just as Pope Saint Pius X explained in the encyclical PASCENDI and the syllabus LAMENTABILI in 1907. Due to World War I, (1914) and the efforts of Pope Benedict XV - to extinguish what he called the fires of witch-hunting, the entire legacy of Pope Saint Pius X to stamp out the destructive efforts of the Modernists, KEY FIGURES, in a movement with roots going back to the Galileo case and before that to Copernicus himself, not the least of which was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (d.1955), survived to blossom in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Teilhard's influence on all of the Council Fathers has never been acknowledged. However, it has been my contention, for some years now, that the Second Vatican Council was totally informed, in every word of every document, by what PASCENDI points out as the principal doctrine of the Modernists, - the so-called "law" of evolution by which all things must either change or die by extinction. (See #26). This is why it is futile to pick out two or three deviant chapters or documents - such as the one on Religious Liberty or on Ecumenism - or on collegiality - as departing from tradition - while allowing the Council as a whole to be acceptable. This is what Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers try to do. But it will never work. Vatican II is evolutionary - both in its letter and in its spirit. Until this fact is recognized and the Council is anathemetized, i.e., condemned in toto - its evil fruits - in the guise of the ever new thing - now it is "evangelization" - will continue to stifle and extinguish the divine Catholic Faith of untold numbers of souls.
It seems impossible for those committed to "modernity" - to speak directly. Here is a statement of Dr. Hart's with which I take issue:
One: The late modern picture of reality is, culturally speaking, something altogether unprecedented.
Two: In the days of, say, Thomas Aquinas, there was no particularly cogent alternative to seeing nature as a rationally ordered continuum in which all things witnessed to a final good, at once cosmic and moral.
Three: Even if one did not concur with Thomas' (often very questionable) moral judgments, one could scarcely reject many of his metaphysical presuppositions - and so one might not notice the covertly theological nature of those judgments. Not so now.
Four: The modern person's failure to find a moral meaning in nature's forms is not simply attributable to a perverse refusal to recognize objective truth.
Five: There is now a story that makes nihilism - in the technical sense of disbelief in any ultimate meaning or purpose beyond the physical - plausible and powerful.
This is all one paragraph - but contains at least 4 or 5 very distinct issues. And Dr. Hart does elaborate more in the remainder of the article upon the "story" that makes nihilism ...plausible and powerful.
First, I reproach Dr. Hart for masking or attempting to cover the irrational, evolutionary worldview with his very sophisticated and sophistical reasonings about the plausibility and power of this worldview - fictional story. Dr. Hart continues to explain that "with the rise of the mechanical philosophy, modern persons began to conceive of natural ends, not as inherent purposes, but merely as useful functions.." Here he puts his finger, however gingerly, that is, briefly, upon the rise of empirical science - with its emphasis, upon experiment and Sir Frances Bacon's insistence upon usefulness, that is, the beginning of the technological revolution breaking off from the Copernican revolution, but following it.
Dr. David B. Hart - Part Two
Until this huge problem of the
metaphysical identity of the atom, and its
ever-growing families of particles is solved, cosmology will continue to spin
its many wheels, allowing an increasingly ominous technology, and an even worse
enslavement to it, which resonates most stinkingly throughout the moral
dis-order. The title of Dr. Hart’s “Back Page” column, in this issue of
FIRST THINGS, also drew me to the lack of clarity in his thinking. And reading
on, I find it becomes even more unclear. To deny the obvious “intellectual
hegemony of theology” – even in the discourse of a natural theology, such as
that of William Paley, is to deny the hierarchical unity of the sciences - a
fact that even modern cosmologists and physicists keep discovering, in spite of their
overt or covert atheism. For they cannot help classifying the sub-atomic
particles in terms of their increasing mass. (See Scientific American, Extreme
Physics.)
Even the science of mathematics
is hierarchical, from + to – plus to minus and 1 to infinity. It is impossible
to escape the 4th Way of St. Thomas’s Proofs for God’s Existence,
which is based on the “grades of perfection” found in the real world. The title
of Dr. Hart’s column is “Purpose and Function”. I expected at least some
reference to Form. In the moral sphere, this would require, I believe, some
reference to the formal aspects of the human ACT, - a subject about which St.
Thomas has great detail, and which involves both intellectual knowledge and
willful consent. But, I think I grasp Dr. Hart’s main point. He seems to be
saying that there is no purely – natural argument for a moral conclusion
anywhere. I maintain that there is. And one must recognize that the inference,
the affirmative judgment of the human mind, or the intuition, as Bernard
Lonergan would call it, of God’s existence and His main attributes, while not
self-evident, as St. Bonaventure believed, are, nevertheless,
accessible to the natural reason without the aid of Divine Revelation, or Faith,
but by the very natural created structure of the human mind, (reason plus will)
and its co-naturality with the structure of the created world. (The science of
Epistemology has also been lost.)
It is a real perversion of the
wholly natural activity of the human mind to hold, as the modernist scientific
method insists, that nothing be admitted to “science” that cannot be verified by
measurement or some other appeal to the sensory apparatus. If electricity could
not be measured, it too, would be denied existence – despite the evidence of its
most marvelous effects. And so, it is most regrettably a fact that modern
science (falsely so-called a knowledge by St. Paul to Timothy 6:20), denies the
existence of God – despite the abundant evidences of His effects in creation (Cf
Romans 1:20). St. Paul speaks of the purely natural knowledge of God as the
Efficient Cause and End of all things. Why, then, does modern science exclude
His causality – which is known by natural reason alone, without reference to
Divine Revelation? I challenge Dr. David Hart to answer this question.
Furthermore, is it not incumbent
upon the Catholic scientist to defend this very natural recognition of God’s
existence, not only on the basis of traditional Church doctrine (e.g.
very prominent in St. Thomas and in the OATH AGAINST MODERNISM, required of all
Catholic teachers under Pope St. Pius X, and not abrogated
until Pope Paul VI, who abolished it), but on the basis of scientific truth?
I speak from experience. I was
born into a family of atheists on my father’s side and of lapsed Baptists on my
mother’s. My parents separated when I was 5 and divorced when I was 7. My
father worked hard to dissuade me from even considering any “organized
religion.” He worshipped “nature” and was really quite a good writer of
sonnets. My mother was quite adamant that I would join “no religion”, until I
was 16. My mother had custody, but my father was very strong about his “visitation
rights”. My mother and I lived in Washington DC, (where I was born), but my
father lived in Takoma Park with his brother and his wife – a suburb of D.C. It
seems they had all lived together until my father and his brother left for
Europe without telling their wives. This, I gathered, was the main cause for my
mother to divorce my father. I had to travel by street car, and later by
bus, to
visit my father whenever he requested, which was usually weekly. But the point
is that all this time I was wanting to join the Church. It may have been the
influence of my cousin with whom I spent some summers in Martinsville, Virginia,
but I distinctly remember knowing with total certitude – that I was supposed to
worship this God that I instinctively knew. I never remember anyone telling me
that. In fact, my mother, whom I adored, and my father, whom I greatly feared,
both were always telling me quite the opposite.
I could multiply anecdotes, as I
am sure everyone else could also. What kind of perversion is it that denies
this natural knowledge of the human soul?
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