How to Increase Priestly Vocations

I heard the other day driving along and listening to Catholic Radio that in some diocese or other, the Catholic Church had one priest for every 12,000 laymen.

The mind boggles, right?

I can’t cite to a source, because I can’t even remember what program I was listening to at the time.

Obviously, there are not enough priests. And this itself must be an important factor of the dearth of priestly vocations. Imagine you were thinking about taking a job serving 12,000 people regularly even as, say, a cashier. It’s a non-starter.

The Church needs more priests. Fortunately, the recipe is not hard to discern – although it is a fair bit of work to implement. But then, once the men of the parish were engaged in the overall project, it could get to be lots of fun for everyone.

On the Peculiar Difficulty of the Ascension

Herewith, a guest post from commenter PBW:

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I had a lot of trouble with the Ascension. Every time I recite the Rosary, to take the most frequent example, I start with a declaration of belief: The Apostles’ Creed.

In saying the Creed, I assert a series of beliefs that are jarring to modern sensibilities, but not, for the most part, to me. I believe in God, and in his only begotten Son. I believe in his conception, by divine intervention, in the womb of the Virgin. I believe that, his body in the tomb, Christ descended into Hell. There is much here to ponder, but it is all comfortably within the assent of faith.

“[T]he third day he rose again from the dead …” This is the fulcrum of the Faith. Whilst the work of our redemption was done in the Passion, the sign of our redemption is the Resurrection. It is the incontrovertible revelation of the nature of Jesus Christ. “My Lord and my God.” I believe, unreservedly.

What is it then, in the midst of all these wonders, that makes for awkwardness about the Ascension? For one thing, it is the staginess of it. It is the levitating Jesus, who “was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” (Acts 1:9.) It is the convenient cloud; it is the trapdoor into Heaven.

On Finding the True Way to Life

Over at his Notions, our friend Bruce Charlton has commented upon the discussion here about the question, raised by our friend Francis Berger, whether the throne and altar have been superseded.

He writes:

I think the ultimate question is something like this:

Is The Christian Church (in some sense of The Church) in-charge-of human salvation – or is salvation primarily a matter for each individual.

The answer is yes.

The Quintessence of the Reasoned Response of the Left to Dobbs

The egregor of the Left is in full control of this gal. I tell you, she’ll go down in history. This photo could be right up there with the shot of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi. Look at it closely, blow it up if you dare. You will never be able to unsee it; the quivering glossy ululating uvula of existential protest!

Man, I tell you, this is who we are, as Americans. It is the core of our democratic society.

Calling All Evangels: Battle Stations!

So here’s a question, quite serious: have you been feeling unusually depressed in 2020? Have you been feeling more and more depressed, over the course of the year? Have your feelings of depression been far more intense than any you have ever experienced?

The question arises from my recent correspondence with an orthospherean friend of many years – of many more years than there has been such a thing as The Orthosphere (most of you would recognize her name) – in which I learned that she, like me, has been thinking about death a lot over the last few months. I learned from her also of the recent suicide of a prominent pastor. That got me thinking.

The Concerted Salients of Our Demoralization

The morale of the West – and, thus, its capacity to morality under pressure, so then its economic vigor and geopolitical power – has throughout 2020 been assaulted on many fronts at once, more and more acutely. It is odd that things seem to have gone so badly in so many ways, all at the same time, and as it were in concert. The question naturally arises, whether that concert is orchestrated.

Monstrous Theologies: The Theme of Anti-Sacrifice in the Sci-Fi Pulps – Part II

Virgil Finlay (1914 – 1971): Illustrator of the Demonic Universe

[NOTE: This post is the continuation of the article — or sequence of linked essays — that begins in the post immediately preceding it. I published “Monstrous Theologies” in the mid-1990s in the journal Anthropoetics, but for this re-posting I have extensively edited and re-written it.]

III. Moore’s “Vintage Season” and Sacrificial Aesthetics. “Vintage Season” (1946) – attributed to Moore’s husband and collaborator Henry Kuttner but written in fact solely by Moore – deals with the creation of a work of art by an artist of the future who visits the earth in the immediate post-World War Two years, when the story was written.  But this act of creation is also an act of sacrifice, and the work of art that stems from the event has the character of an immolatory token. In fact, because “The Vintage Season” is a time-travel story involving the usual paradox, it resists any straightforward rehearsal. The basic elements of the narrative are, nevertheless, these: Oliver Wilson owns a house that three eccentric “vacationers” who call themselves the Sanciscos want to rent; to one of them, a woman named Kleph, Wilson feels considerable attraction, and he therefore lets the house despite the fact that he might garner a windfall from it if he sold it outright to a buyer. Wilson’s fiancée Sue pesters him to renege on the deal and to sell, but Oliver refuses.  The interest in this detail lies in Moore’s opposition of the market to the Bohemian group. The group represents culture and seems to promise something superior to the bourgeois world of exchange.  Moore’s Smith regrets leaving the comforts of marriage and participation in the nomos.  Moore’s Wilson, vulnerable to the temptations of art, cult, and difference, regrets his prior immersion in what strikes him now as the tediously normative.  He is an alienated bourgeois taking the usual route of opposition to the market for the mere sake of opposition.  If resentment is the sacred, as Girard so often intimates, then Wilson’s alienation renders him particularly vulnerable to the Bohemianism of the foreigners.

The Sanciscos behave like Wildean aesthetes: “There was an elegance about the way [their] garments fitted them which even to Oliver looked strikingly unusual”; and “the feeling of luxury which his first glance at them has evoked was confirmed by the richness of the hangings they had apparently brought with them”; Kleph’s coiffure strikes Wilson as perfectly sculpted, “as if it had been painted on, though the breeze from the window stirred now and then among the softly shining strands.”  From such behavior, Wilson infers that their depth of culture radically exceeds his own, an inference sustainable, as it turns out, in aesthetic terms only and not in any ethical sense. As in the case of the magic shawl in the Northwest Smith story, phenomenal beauty guarantees nothing about ethical acceptability. A certain type of intense beauty indeed radiates from a certain type of archaic violence, which the beauty tactically conceals. Kleph shows some reciprocal although, ultimately, only a condescending interest in Wilson, who visits her in her room one afternoon while the others are away. The foreign accouterments of Kleph’s room include a peculiar “picture of blue water” hung above her bed the marvels of which entrance Wilson. Describing Wilson’s response to this, Moore employs the language of of fascination: “The waves there were moving. More than that, the point of vision moved. Slowly the seascape drifted past, moving with the waves, following them toward the shore.”  The images compel Wilson’s attention; he cannot peel his eyes from them, and they in their turn temporarily absorb and obliterate his sense of self. Smith has the same problem when he gazes too intently at the weird shawl.

The Sigil of the Orthosphere

Thanks to InfoGalactic, I learned the other day a bit about Chaos Magic. I had searched on “egregor” – the Greek for “watcher,” a topic of some interest to me – and found out that it is a term of art in that discussion. In Chaos Magic, an egregor is an artificial spirit, created by a magician as at first a heuristic hypostatization, a “thought form,” devised for his own convenient internal usages, of some nexus of impulses within himself – sometimes nice, sometimes not so nice (as, say, a besetting temptation) – so as to identify and, above all, simply *notice it,* and thus address it more aptly; and then at some point publicly promulgated, so that it then engages the interest and attention of other practitioners, who find it useful and adopt it for their own internal operations, so that it then informs their activities. A meme, in other words, but a meme that has some intrinsic characteristics that lend it suasive and informative powers, so that it can seem to take on a life of its own, and become the apparent animating spirit of a whole group of people. Widely disparate people, not communicating with each other at all (so far as we can know), can evoke the response to current events of an egregor that has possessed them without any outward coordination, and in a unison of spirit and even of diction that is truly wonderful, even spooky.

There is much truth in this notion. Consider, e.g., anthropogenic global warming. Or transsexuality. Or Trump Derangement Syndrome. Or Communism. Or for that matter any fad or trend or notion, any ideology, that has little objective correlate or reason outside the merely social world.

The Argument From the Enmity of Our Enemies

My heart is of course broken at the disaster inflicted yesterday upon Notre Dame de Paris. All that must be said about the cultural and religious meaning of this catastrophe has already been well said by many commentators of the Right, so I shall not here repeat them. Everyone knows that this was an attack of the Enemy upon the Body of Christ, and upon Christendom, such as she still is. The chorus of the Right has now, rightly, begun to ask why this obvious fact may not be mentioned. And everyone knows the answer to that question, too: Islam, modernism and Liberalism are all bound and determined to destroy Christianity, and Christendom.

One thing only, of the obvious, necessary things that must be said, have I not yet seen anywhere said: Saint Denis, Our Lady, and all the saints, pray for France, for the West, and for her Church.

There is a yet deeper question: why is it, exactly, that Liberalism, modernism, Islam, et alia, are so determined to destroy Christianity?

Freedoms of Speech & of Religion Open & Allow the Race to the Bottom

The basic problem with freedom of speech and of religion is that in principle, and then inevitably in practice, it opens the agora to the discussion of the pros and cons of every alternative cult. No topic is prohibited. So, no sort of doctrine or rite is forbidden within the pale. There ensues a proliferation and interpenetration and confusion of heresies and petty foreign cults. The cult of Moloch is then sooner or later bound to enter the lists. Where there is freedom of speech and of religion, no one will be able to prevent that entry legally.

Where it is legal to advocate and to practice Molochism, it will sooner or later be advocated and practiced, by at least some few.