For the record: Bp. Schneider on Abp. Lefebvre

Some will find this offensive [Advisory: Rules 7-9]:

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, "Bp. Schneider of Kazakhstan on Archbp. Lefebvre of the SSPX" (Fr. Z's Blog, January 25, 2018):

The best English language vaticanista today is Edward Pentin. He has an interview with Bp. Athanasius Schneider today at the National Catholic Register (that’s the good one that begins with “National”). HERE

The whole thing is worth reading. However, I want to emphasize one part which caught my eye for two reasons.

First, it is Patristic. Bp. Schneider is a student of the Fathers of the Church, as am I. We need to return to the Fathers. It is amazing how many things they treated in their day which apply to our own.

Next, because it concerns a figure I’ve long been interested in, the late Archbp. Marcel Lefebvre. He was a great churchman and missionary in Africa who went on to found the SSPX. Since I once worked for the PCED I remain interested – and hopeful – for a wonderful result.

Here is Schneider on Lefebvre:

PENTIN:

What are your views on the Society of St. Pius X? Do you have sympathy for their position?

SCHNEIDER:

Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis on various occasions spoke with understanding towards the SSPX. It was particularly at his time, as Cardinal of Buenos Aires, that Pope Francis helped the SSPX in some administrative issues. Pope Benedict XVI once said about Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre: “He was a great bishop of the Catholic Church.” Pope Francis considers the SSPX as Catholic, and has expressed this publicly several times. Therefore, he seeks a pastoral solution, and he made the generous pastoral provisions of granting to the priests of the SSPX the ordinary faculty to hear confessions and conditional faculties to celebrate canonically marriage. The more the doctrinal, moral and liturgical confusion grows in the life of the Church, the more one will understand the prophetic mission of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in an extraordinary dark time of a generalized crisis of the Church.

Maybe one day History will apply the following words of Saint Augustine to him:

“Often, too, divine providence permits even good men to be driven from the congregation of Christ by the turbulent seditions of carnal men. When for the sake of the peace of the Church they patiently endure that insult or injury, and attempt no novelties in the way of heresy or schism, they will teach men how God is to be served with a true disposition and with great and sincere charity. The intention of such men is to return when the tumult has subsided. But if that is not permitted because the storm continues or because a fiercer one might be stirred up by their return, they hold fast to their purpose to look to the good even of those responsible for the tumults and commotions that drove them out. They form no separate conventicles of their own, but defend to the death and assist by their testimony the faith which they know is preached in the Catholic Church” (De vera religione 6, 11).

Thus, St. Augustine.

"Some of the culture vultures out there might want to read the Alypius incident"

A reader writes:

I have always had a thing for pop culture, but as I get older I am far more suspect of the merit of such an interest. A recent book out called Popolegtics (http://www.amazon.com/Popologetics-Popular-Culture-Christian-Perspective/dp/1596383895) received quite a lot of hype, and academics yearning to maintain connectedness and relevance with youth love such stuff. I know, I have too. The youth thing, though, is tenuous at best: one of the best parts of Amerio's Iota Unum dissects Paul VIs pandering to youth (harsh, but what else do you call this reaction to contemporary culture that remains a legacy within Catholicism from the Vatcian II era we are still stuck with?).

The impulse now seems more double-edged than ever, given the evolutionary arc of Youth Culture, as Carl Trueman here suggests. He continues to arrest me with his good insights, even if he does also recommend Diarmid MacCulloch (I posted a comment lamenting that over at IgnatiusScoop).

See this...

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2013/01/proust-paglia-and-exit-wounds.php

What we see has the power to shape our souls in powerful, unconscious ways; and when that sight is pornographic, whether of a sexual or violent kind, it shapes them for ill. Augustine realised this and exposed it brilliantly in his account of how his friend Alypius was taken unwillingly to see the gladiatorial games. Alypius kept his eyes closed until one of the combatants suffered a terrible blow. The crowd roared. Alypius opened his eyes. And from that moment on he was hooked on the games far more than the friends who had dragged him there in the first place. The pornographic sight of the violence had reshaped his soul.

As a postscript, it might be that some of the culture vultures out there might want to read the Alypius incident before they line up to see the latest Tarantino offering, with all of its no doubt beautifully choreographed blood and artistically presented gore. Is there a Christian perspective on such? Yes. It says that thirty years from now you may not remember the individual moments when you told your wife or your children or your parents that you love them, or any of those random acts of kindness of which you were the agent or the recipient. You certainly will not recall the sermon you heard last Sunday. But you will probably remember the exit wounds, every last splash of them.

[Hat tip to J.M.]

Six new sermons by St. Augustine discovered

The University of Erfurt has announced in a press release (March 26, 2008) that six previously unknown sermons of St. Augustine's have been discovered recently in a special collection of its university's research library (Bibliotheca Amploniana) by three researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The sermons reportedly appear in a handwritten manuscript dating back more than 800 years.

The researchers -- Isabella Schiller, Dorothea Weber and Clemens Weidman -- identified four completely new sermons of St. Augustine, and two that were previously only available in part, all written in medieval handwriting. The handwrittten parchment manuscript is identified as of a type originating in the second half of the 12th century, probably in England, and the work contains a total of more than 70 further sermons of different theologians of late antiquity and the middle ages.

The externally completely inconspicuous volume probably made its way by the 15th century into the collection of the bibliophile physician and theologian, Amplonius Rating of Rheinberg, who donated his extensive collection of over 600 handwritten volumes to the Collegium Amplonianum established by him in Erfurt in 1412. Read more here ...

[Excerpts from the press release are in my own translation.]