Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education, by Stratford Caldecott

In this age of technological advance and overinformation, of the steady proliferation of college degrees (for the qualified and the unqualified alike), higher education has lost something, a certain quality difficult to pinpoint. Stratford Caldecott, in his book Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education, illuminates on this score:

[S]tudents come to a college education expecting nothing more than a set of paper qualifications that will enable them to earn a decent salary. The idea that they might be there to grow as human beings, to be inducted into an ancient culture, to become somehow more than they are already, is alien to them. They expect instant answers, but they have no deep questions. The great questions have not yet been woken in them. The process of education requires us to become open, receptive, curious, and humble in the face of what we do not know. The world is a fabric woven of mysteries, and a mystery is a provocation to our humanity that cannot be dissolved by googling a few more bits of information.

That is precisely the way the modern student approaches his college education—arriving to class, he expects to acquire “a few more bits of information” to add to the storehouse of data he has already gleaned along the way toward the coveted degree, the profession, the salary. And the modern professor obliges. Instead of teaching the arts and sciences as a meaningful whole, the modern mindset splinters them into separate categories made to appear in opposition to each other, so that the yearning for the divine awakened by study of the humanities—of music, philosophy, and the arts—is quashed under the thumb of the scientific hand. This is not as it should be.

Caldecott’s book is, as he confesses, a manifesto of sorts, a guide to rescuing the liberal arts from the deadening grip of postmodernism (essentially heir to the old nominalism of Roscelin and Ockham), which would rather fracture and divide than unify. Recalling the Trivium and Quadrivium of the ancients, he proposes these as inspiration. He also suggests awakening the poetic imagination with regard to science and mathematics, those two subjects of inquiry most often made (by modern man) the enemy of the divine.

But even more than this he offers a more certain way of taking back education from its postmodern captors: the liturgy.

The truly authentic man is the man united to God through prayer and worship. This union extends to his fellow man in one communion of prayer.

Catholic liturgy takes us even deeper than that. It takes us to the source of the cosmos itself, into the sacred precincts of the Holy Trinity where all things begin and end (whether they know it or not), and to the source of all artistic and scientific inspiration, of all culture…. [C]reation, through its very being, gives a kind of liturgical praise to God.

Encountering this one Source, then—and awakening the desire in students to do the same by reminding them of the divine source of all knowledge—is the key to taking back the liberal arts from their captors, and to the re-enchantment of education.

Caldecott’s book may be purchased here.

How the Rosary Stopped a Rampage

Domenico Bettinelli recounts his memories of the late Monsignor Kerr:

Kevin told us the story Msgr. Kerr told him about that awful night in Gainesville Tallahassee, Florida, in 1978. He said Kerr got the call from the police in the middle of the night to rush out to the sorority house. When he arrived he was told that all but one of the girls in the house were dead or near death, killed by a serial killer who was later to be known to the world as Ted Bundy. After giving those last rites to the dying college girl, then-Fr. Kerr was asked by the police on the scene to talk to the girl who survived unscathed. They wanted to know how she survived the brutal attacks, because Bundy had stopped right inside the door to her room, dropped his weapon, and left without touching her. But the girl would talk to no one but a priest.

When Fr. Kerr approached the near-catatonic girl, she told him that her mother had made her promise before going off to college for the first time that she would pray the Rosary every night before bed for protection; even if she fell asleep praying the Rosary, which she had that night so that when Bundy came into her room with murder on his mind, the beads were still clutched in her hands.

Later, Bundy would tell Monsignor that when he entered the girl’s room, he just couldn’t go on, he dropped his weapon, and he fled. Such is the power of our Mother’s protective mantle.

Vietnamese Catholics Heavily Fined under Revived Communist Two-Child Policy

LifeSiteNews.com reports:

The communist government of Viet Nam is punishing couples with more than two children, a local Catholic news agency reports. Catholic villagers in Thua Thien-Hue province told the Union of Catholic Asian News they are being fined for having more than two children under a revived government two-child policy.

Catherine Pham Thi Thanh, 44, told the service that since 1996, she has been fined a total of 3,800 kilograms of rice for having six children. This represents a significant loss for the family which makes an annual profit of only 700 kilograms of rice from their 1,000 square-meter farm.

Despite the fact that Viet Nam now has a below-replacement rate of fertility - 1.83 children born per woman - the communist government in the early 1960s imposed a 2-child limit for couples. The UN's leading population control group, the UNFPA, has been active in contraception and abortion campaigns in the country since 1997.

In 2000, the BBC lauded the policy for having reduced the overall fertility rate from 3.8 children per woman to 2.3, but admitted that a "degree of coercion" was used to ensure compliance. This included fines, expulsion from the communist party and confiscation of land. The original policy was scrapped in 2003 but revived in 2008 after a 10 percent spike in the birth rate alarmed officials who never stopped "encouraging" couples to have only small families.

But even the UNFPA was reportedly "puzzled" by the revival. "In Vietnam now life expectancy is rising, the fertility rate is decreasing and in the next 20 years many people will be in the senior group," said Tran Thi Van, of UNFPA. "If there's not a sufficient labor force as the population is ageing, the country will face a lot of problems."

Viet Nam is following China and India on the path of demographic imbalance. The combination of ultrasound tests to determine the sex of the child plus abortion to favor boys, has forced the male to female ratio of the population to climb to 112-100 in 2007.

The Union of Catholic Asian News spoke to the local parish priest, Fr Joseph Nguyen Van Chanh, who confirmed that 90 percent of his 1,200 parishioners have agreed to pay fines as a way to be faithful to Church teaching and said that Catholics are taught natural family planning methods during marriage preparation courses.

Some local Catholics, said Father Chanh, are asking for donations from benefactors to support local people with large families.

The Throne of Glory by Way of the Guillotine

We know the story well. On the day following the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, 1794, sixteen Carmelites from Compiègne, singing the Veni Creator, mounted the scaffold one by one and were beheaded. To justify their condemnation, the tribunal had produced as proof of their treason a picture of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus along with one of the deposed king, taken from the convent wall.

Four years earlier, when the Assemblée Nationale had demanded the Carmelite Order to justify its existence, Mother Nathalie of Jesus came forward and on behalf of the entire Order in France addressed the company thus:

The most complete liberty governs our vows; the most perfect equality reigns in our houses; here we know neither the rich nor the noble and we depend only on the Law. In the world they like to broadcast that monasteries contain only victims slowly consumed by regrets; but we proclaim before God that if there is on earth a true happiness, we possess it in the dimness of the sanctuary and that, if we had to choose again between the world and the cloister, there is not one of us who would not ratify with greater joy her first decision. After having solemnly declared that man is free, would you oblige us to think that we no longer are?

The long penitential season for Carmelites begins on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, when Carmelites fast until Easter. It was on this day in 1792 that the nuns of Compiègne were forced from their beloved Carmel back into the world. Only a few months before, the nuns had together agreed to offer themselves as victims to divine justice to restore peace to France and to the Church. They renewed their offering daily, continuing to meet in secret for two years dressed as laywomen and convening for common prayer.


The Palais de Justice, the Conciergerie and the Tour de l'Horloge, Adrien Dauzats, 1858

The nuns were discovered in June of 1794, arrested, and imprisoned in the Conciergerie, where other priests and religious awaited their fate. (Ironically, the one Carmelite of royal blood escaped death because she happened to be away; she became the martyrs’ first historian). On July 17, they were called before the tribunal and, in the very city where St. Joan of Arc three centuries earlier had been abandoned and handed over to the enemy, they were condemned to die.

Reverend Mother Émilienne, Superior General of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, wrote in a letter:

I learned from a person who was a witness to their martyrdom that the youngest of these good Carmelites was called first and that she went to kneel before her venerable Superior, asked her blessing and permission to die. She then mounted the scaffold singing Laudate Dominum omnes gentes [the psalm sung by St. Teresa of Avila 190 years earlier on founding the new Carmel]. She then went to place herself beneath the blade allowing the executioner to touch her. All the others did the same. The Venerable Mother was the last sacrificed. During the whole time, there was not a single drum-roll; but there reigned a profound silence.

Another witness said the nuns looked as if they were going to their weddings.



Ten days later, Robespierre was executed on the same spot, and the provisional revolutionary government came to an end. The nuns were beatified by Pope St. Pius X in 1906 (the same year in which Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity died).

A community of English Benedictines, exiled in France, were imprisoned in October of 1793, where they met the nuns of Compiègne and learned of their sacrificial offering. After the death of the Carmelites, jailers forced the English nuns to don the secular clothes worn by the martyrs. They wore them still two years later when they were finally allowed to cross to their own shores, where they founded the community of Stanbrook Abbey. There they preserved the clothes as sacred relics.

One hundred years after the martyrdom of the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne, the Abbess of Stanbrook wrote to the Prioress of Compiègne:

We hold these things in high honor, as twofold relics; relics of the martyrs, and relics of our own Mothers, who were almost martyrs. How happy we are to have kept this sandal for so many years! It seems to invite us to follow in the footsteps of those who, in the person of our [Carmelite] Mothers, bade us farewell so tenderly, before getting into the cart to reach the throne of glory by way of Paris and the guillotine.

A lovely collection of black-and-white photographs of the present Carmelite community of Compiègne can be seen at this website.

(article originally posted at Patum Peperium)

What's a little eugenics between friends anyway?

Damian Thompson of the UK Telegraph loudly wonders why the American mainstream media have largely ignored Justice Ginsburg's seemingly pro-eugenics remarks in her recent NYtimes interview. In her words:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

Commentary from First Things defends Ginsburg against the charge, but the comments following the post make a good case that Ginsburg meant exactly what she said.

If you recall, Roe came on the heels of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, published in 1968, which terrified society with admonitions on its cover like WHILE YOU ARE READING THESE WORDS FOUR PEOPLE WILL HAVE DIED FROM STARVATION. MOST OF THEM CHILDREN, and prophecies within its pages that "[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over...the world will undergo famines...nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..." He also predicted, among other things, that world hunger would cause the pope to capitulate on the issues of birth control and abortion (Ehrlich's batting average is zero thus far). Far from these wild and inaccurate assertions discrediting him, Ehrlich is still reverenced among advocates of population control, whose motives are often less charitable than they like to portray. In P.J. O'Rourke's words, overpopulation is just another way of saying there's "just enough of me, way too much of you"--the "you" being poor, brown-skinned people who beget poor, brown-skinned children.

You doubt this? Ask one of these advocates if he thinks poor, dirty, crowded, leprous Bangladesh could benefit from a little population reduction. "Probably," would come the answer--yet ask the same about the wealthy, suntanned, bejeweled country of Monaco, whose population density is among the highest in the world at 44,000 heads per square mile (compared to Bangladesh's 2,200 people per square mile), and the answer would undoubtedly be no. If it's strictly overpopulation that's the worry, surely the latter qualifies more than any other place on earth. But who wants to rid the world of the bountiful and the beautiful? Or take booming, buzzing Hong Kong; no one thinks this center of commerce is a trouble spot for overpopulation--yet it has one of the highest population densities in the world at 16,000 heads per square mile, happily packed into those stacks of neon-bright skyscrapers.

And so the real motive behind population control becomes evident: it isn't reduction in general population; it is reduction, in the words of the august Supreme Court jurist, "in populations that we don’t want to have too many of." (To be fair, J. Ginsburg may not have meant what it sounds like she meant.) In short, eugenics--an ugly word for an ugly sentiment--but at least one high-profile feminist has finally come clean (or at least let slip) as to the ugly moorings of the abortion movement.

I Wear Black on Bastille Day

Vive le Roy!

Novena to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel

Begins today.