Christopher Hitchens, I wish I’d known you personally

A very public anti-God figure, journalist, author and cultural critic Christopher Hitchens, has a vicious form of cancer.  Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great gave an interview to Anderson Cooper that is worth viewing.

Hitchens notes that people are praying for him, and that some are praying he will “suffer and die.”

How ghastly.

Others, he admits, are praying in a more charitable manner, if–to his mind– without effect.

Oddly, the fellow enrages me or engages me–I enjoy Hitchens when I can mentally block the vulgarities he employs.  I cannot fathom how his famed intellect was seduced by Socialism, though it can indicate an idealistic hope for a better world. His attack against Mother Teresa is crude and unwarranted.  His excessive life style is one my Southern Propriety finds oppressive, even slavish. I cringe, yes, when he resorts to what many Christians think is blasphemy ( he cannot mean it if he does not in fact believe there is a God).

But on the whole I find him to be a St. Paul-like figure–an energetic  mind, a man very proud of his native talent, not shy about his certainties and possessed of a certain type of humor that amuses even when one disagrees with his premise.  I wish I had known him personally.

I’d like to know the off camera Hitchens. I imagine we could find areas of interest just shy of “religion” that would fill a couple of hours over a plate of risotto ai carciofi.  But I’d forfeit my dinner with Christopher Hitchens if I could offer my chair to Hillaire Belloc. Wouldn’t that be an intriguing conversation?

Perhaps, in view of Belloc’s  heavenly residence, I might arrange an evening for  Hitchens with that incredibly “lightsome” soul,  James V. Schall, S.J. of Georgetown University.    What Mr. Hitchens would enjoy is an erudite exchange with good minds melded to good souls. No “religious” topics, of course.  And none needed, because, after all, to Schall and Belloc, any and everything interesting is “of God.”

Somehow, despite my own adamant and nearly (?) smug orthodoxy, I’m not moved to pray for Mr. Hitchens’ conversion. I do not want to see him humbled or in any manner flattened into a desperate last minute- hedge-your-bets-Pascalian repentance.  I do not want the man’s chemo weakened, cancer ravaged “half demented” mind pushed to submit to an evangelist’s zealous belt notching.   It is not that I don’t wish his salvation. I do.

But a man who has spent decades as an “anti-theist” and who thinks that belief in God is the loss of individual freedom cannot be reached by a last minute assault on his freedom to reject God.  I believe God is a Lover.  I pray that  Hitchens can assent to his “aha!” moment, that he can see that ineffable beauty, the Love of God Himself,  that permits, for love’s sake,  Hitchens’ freedom  to rail against the very source of his freedom.  God never wanted a host of puppets; bobbing their mindless wooden noggins, they’d be utterly uninteresting. St. Paul was not uninteresting.  Perfect Love took the risk that man’s freedom entails–rejection.

I want for Mr. H  that recognition of a pattern that is of its own exquisite perfection after all, when seen from the distance.

And so… I pray that the most curmudgeonly saints in heaven–and there are quite a few!–come quickly to the side of  Mr. Hitchens, whose guardian angel will surely welcome their unique intercession for this most stubborn of charges.

Book of Hours

Few people keep Easter as the octave that it is.  Simply, we should celebrate for the full eight days, from Easter Sunday through the Sunday we now celebrate as Divine Mercy Sunday.

Some years ago one of my sisters sent me a lovely small book published by the British publisher, Phaidon Press Limited. Its title is Descent. It is described as “An intimate survey of images of the Descent from the Cross.”  The book is perhaps 5″ by 6″ and thus fits in one’s hands easily. There are two others in the series, Annunciation, and Crucifixion.

I mention this set of books because for me they offer a very personal means of meditation and –somehow–a sense of the whole Christian community that has “kept Easter” for 201o years.  These volumes are reminders of the imagery that our forebears in the faith found compelling.

All of this puts me in mind of the Book of Hours.  According to the Frick Fine Arts Library,

“From the large number still surviving, we know that the Book of Hours was the most popular book of the Middle Ages. Books of Hours were produced throughout Europe, but were especially popular in France and Flanders. These manuscripts were modelled on the Breviary used by the clergy, but in a shortened form and were used by the laity for their daily devotions. The core of the Book of Hours is the Hours of the Virgin divided into eight parts to be said at different times or hours of the day. The eight “hours” of prayer are matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, vespers and compline. Several other prayers and texts accompany the Hours of the Virgin.”

The illuminations from some of the more famous Book of Hours are breathtaking in their beauty, content and sense of Divine Order.  And the  colors! How exquisite– particularly the intense blue derived from ground lapis lazuli.

Of course, in a book of hours, the  illuminations are not limited to Easter themes, but depict the lives of the saints, the liturgical seasons, great feast days and even local life including the harvest or a wedding–again underscoring the Medieval worldview that all human endeavors can and should be sanctified.

Here is an endearing image of St. Francis and St. Clare preaching to creatures. Notice the stigmata on his foot.

As Easter draws to a close and we journey toward Pentecost, I put away the eggs and images of new life. But I leave out the small books of  illuminations that remind me that each hour of the day was once passed in “ordinary” work and life by the Blessed Virgin and her son, who is both Man and God. Because Christ did not shrink from “ordinary” human activities, He sanctified those same daily chores, those same family gatherings, the same passing of the seasons.  One might say that Jesus “saved”  us from ordinary work, renewing  human acts  as worthy of our time. As Easter people we too can sanctify our daily lives by offering every moment to Christ our Savior.

A blessed Easter Octave to all!

Population Bomb? It’s a Myth

The discussion of population / overpopulation comes in many guises other than simply claiming that the world has too many people: birth control, abortion, euthanasia, and now “health care”  that forces Americans to undergo “end of life”  counseling.

Many already know the history of Margaret Sanger, the woman behind the modern American eugenics movement–and with the advent of the Nazi eugenics program, eugenics  was suddenly such an ugly word.   Thus, Sanger was rehabilitated as  a great proponent of birth control because she feared the increase in the ” wrong” kind of populations. But her sentiment was polished up and dressed in fancy “freedom from fertility” language when the Rockefeller pharmaceutical interests pushed “the pill” on America.  It is important to note that  the Rockefeller interest in population control preceded the development of the pill–meaning that the pill was not developed to give women “control over their fertility” but to introduce the idea of the two child family as the morally responsible thing to do for the good of your fellow man.

The pill just made it so easy to do. Then  the next step was to program Americans to think and feel,”How dare you  consume more than your fair share of the earth’s resources?”  That is a breach of  decent civic behavior, you see?   Never mind that those who bear and educate  three, four or nine well adjusted and contributing new citizens, in fact ADD to the common good.

But the impression remains that the earth is groaning under the weight of six billion mouths to feed.

Is it so?

No.

We Americans can feed the entire world.  We have sufficient land under cultivation and the technology to harvest, store, preserve  and ship vast quantities of food.  I am not necessarily making the case that we should do so, but that we could do so–thus it is a myth to think the earth cannot feed the current population (and more!).

Why then are there people going hungry each night?  Why is there famine in some areas of the world? The answers are complicated, but reduced to a few words, the problem is not capability but political will. Food is used as a carrot and a stick by international cartels and by dictators and tyrants. How do you subdue a people? Starve them. Control their food and access to land and seeds.

I have written about how and why the United Nations pushes abortion as a “universal human right.” It is crucial to understand that the U.N. is not concerned about actual freedom or rights, but instead uses abortion as one of the main methods to control the world’s families.    The U.N. is itself controlled and funded by those who want to curb world population (Ted Turner donated one billion dollars to the United Nations Population Fund). Here is a good article by Bishop John Nienstedt on the “word games” played by the U.N. to tighten the noose over the world’s people.

Whenever you hear a talking head or a co-worker insist that the world is overpopulated, do you assume the comment is aimed at you because you are Catholic and / or a “life issues voter”?    Informed people must begin a cogent and persuasive campaign that smashes the myth of overpopulation.  Because behind every push for abortion and euthanasia there is more than the Madison Avenue promise of “freedom over your body.”  There is population control.

This video is from the Population Research Institute, but I grabbed it from the Inside Catholic site.  In a brief 90 seconds you’ll see that the truth is that population has increased in proportion to  man’s advancement in his ability to produce food.

None of the dire predictions of  the population scaremongers has ever come to pass.

Is the Pope right about AIDS in Africa?

At least one liberal Harvard professor thinks so:

According to Harvard professor Edward Green, Benedict XVI tells the truth about fighting the plague of the millennium in Africa: fidelity and abstinence promotion are better weapons than preservatives

http://www.tempi.it/007320-liberal-academic-edward-green-pope-right-about-aids-and-condom?page=0

United Nations Treaty Rears It’s Ugly Head –Again

The United Nations’  Convention on the Rights of the Child has been rejected by the US Congress for 20 years.  Now this pernicious treaty for “Rights of the Child” is  back. The Obama administration has promised to seek ratifcation of the treaty.

Susan Rice is the new US ambassador to the U.N. On  Monday,June 22, Ambassador Rice told students in a Harlem school that the Obama administration was actively working to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  Ambassador Rice,  however, admitted to Senator Barbara Boxer in February that she was concerned about ” the challenge of domestic implementation.”

The CRC is a direct threat to every American parent, as well as to national sovereignty.  It makes a global institution the daddy–parents could easily be overruled when a child exercises her new global rights to a “review” of parental decisions about his / her choices in friends, religion and–of course! –”health care,” which is U.N. code-speak for contraception and abortion.

For more information on this direct threat to your rights as a parent and the sovereignty of America, please see my article http://www.wf-f.org/0901MJA-UN.html

To protest contact:

White House comment line: 202-456-1111
www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/

(enter zip code for contact information for your senator and congressmen)