Posted on 02/13/2002 7:52:19 AM PST by Askel5
Traditional Catholic Action
Salon & Soiree
New Orleans, Louisiana
March 15th-17th (St. Patrick's Day Weekend)
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CATHOLIC ACTION Catholic Action is an apostolate. Its end is to win men to Christ as men were won to Christ by Peter and Paul. Is is a social apostolate. It seeks to restore right order in society, to re-create society. But its action is not political. The breaking societies of the West cannot be renewed by economic or political panaceas. Is is a moral sickness from which the body of society suffers, and it will not be cured by local plasters upon local symptoms. Politics, economics are phases of human behavior, but human behavior is inevitably determined by the right values which men hold, by their sense of right and wrong ... Catholic Action restores society by converting it to Christ. Restoring All Things: A Guide to Catholic Action, John Fitzsimons and Paul McGuire (Sheed & Ward, 1938) |
I see you got the obscure literary reference.
Well, Brideshead, Cordelia, Sebastian, and Mr. Samgrass were all asleep.
No doubt it was raining spiritually, only they were too sinful to see it.
Obscure literary references are no fair. They should be footnoted.
Seconded!
Your Simpleminded Friend.
I remember it from my first reading 22 years ago as a masterly exhibition of style, a memoir of the sensual pleasures absent from wartime England, and an affirmation that the Faith will survive even the destruction of civilization. Various mysteries about several of the principal characters remained unresolved, at least in my understanding, till quite recently. This past year I re-read the story of Sebastian Flyte, the narrator's lost and mourned best friend.
Sebastian is a beautiful eccentric, noticed and universally loved for his family's captivating charm, which in his case masks a deep but latent holiness. This holiness does not rest easily upon him. Instead, like his father before him, he resists it, fleeing (his family name is "Flyte") into moodiness, alcoholism, and ultimately physical alienation, taking up a demi-monde existence in the company of predators and pathetic hangers-on. His alienation gives him no comfort; indeed it's the cause of great suffering (his first name is "Sebastian", and pin-cushions are a recurring theme in the book). The book explores the various paths followed by Sebastian, his father, and his sister as they return to the Church. The narrator, a popular "society" artist, is an agnostic of lazy and indifferent protestant upbringing. His path to the Faith is through the discovery of genuine beauty, (acquired from his exposure to the Flyte family's extraordinary and intuitive charm), which he learns is far more subtle, complex, and vital than the facile and popular impostures through which his career has flourished.
It's Sebastian himself in whom I'm most interested. Charming, holy, secretive and self-alienating, living a disorderly but increasing Christ-centered life in an exotic city with dubious acquaintances, but suffering all the while.
The book touches on important mysteries. Do yourself a favor and get you a copy.
Thanks very much for posting that link.
Have you heard of the Franz Jaggerstatter episode? I came across a provoking commentary the other day:
Alan Donagan's critique of Hegel's conception of Sittlichkeit is instructive here. Donagan makes use of the case of Franz Jaggerstatter, noting that the just war doctrine of Catholic moral theology had degenerated in Germany during the Second World War. The terms of this doctrine were clear enough within the tradition of Catholic theology, but they had become a dead letter by the presumption of the community in favour of the claims of the government. Jaggerstatter saw the obvious and would not accept military service. He was hanged. But the local religious authorities assured him that he was wrong; that his duty was to accept military service. And they maintained this judgement even after the war.
Donogan observes:Is it possible to find in this anything but the depravation of the Sittlichkeit of an ethical community whose members had lost the habit of moral self-criticism?...Donogan is not denying that Jaggerstatter's advisers were part of an intellectual tradition which had the resources for correcting their mistake. His point is that this intellectual tradition had ceased to be a part of the lived mores of their community. Deprived of the judgements of the intellectual tradition, moral criticism became impossible.
Hegel disparaged the point of view of morality on the ground that being is abstractly rational; it could find content for its judgements only in the mores of some actual community. The case of Jaggerstatter reveals an opposite process. The moral theory of Catholic Christianity furnished specific precepts on the subject of legitimate war service, which applied to the case in question on the basis of stated facts which were not questioned. But, by recourse to the mores of their actual community, Jaggerstatter's spiritual advisers were able to evaporate the precepts whose applicability to his case they could not dispute. For, according to these mores, apart from such fanciful possibilities as a war with the declared intention of destroying the Church as an institution, no individual citizen was deemed capable of assuring himself that any war his country proposed to wage was unjust. Herre, what is exposed as empty, as lacking specific content, as allowing any filler5 whatsoever, is not Moralitat but Sittlichkeit.-Joseph Boyle, "Natural Law and the Ethics of Traditions" Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays ed. Robert P. George
We do have a copy. It's just been shelved indefinitely in favor of certain literary works by noted physician, Dr. Seuss. 3 out of our 5 family members recommend him! We do agree, however, that Brideshead Revisited is a classic.
God bless. And we hope you made it back to work on time on Monday!
Well...nobody complained. 8-)
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