Holy Saturday, April 3, 1926

Last edition:

Friday, April 2, 1926. "Fianna Fáil"

Labels: 1920s, 1926, California (Los Angeles), Calvin Coolidge, Eamon de Valera, Fianna Fáil, Ireland, Irish Free State, League of Nations

Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei?

A man who has conquered others, should conquer himself

Pope Leo the Great to Atilla the Hun.  He never did.  He died following drinking too much on his wedding night.

Some evangelical Christians excuse Trump's lack of Christian adherence by casting him as Cyrus the Vance, the Persian Emperor who was not Jewish, but who regarded himself as appointed by God and whom advanced the cause of the  the Jews.  In their minds, the non believer Trump is advancing the cause of (Protestant) Christianity.

More of his Christian loyalists, however, come from a certain Christian worldview that's very strong in the US, but only in the US, the comforting, but completely false, "once saved, always saved" view of Christianity.

It's expressed here in the misunderstood posting of one Franklin Graham.

Graham is the son of the late Billy Graham, the famous Evangelical pastor beloved by many American Protestants.  I never grasped his popularity, and perhaps things like this are why.  What Graham posts here, and what has been widely misunderstood by those shocked by the comments, is in fact absurd.  Graham espouses the minority Protestant view that you can never lose your salvation.  Believe in Christ as your savior once, and you are good to go thereafter no matter what.

This sort of view explains why so many people who attend mega churches live in such flagrant disregard for the basic tenants of Christianity, particularly the sexual tenants.  And the belief, taken from and misinterpreted from one single line in the New Testament, is completely condemned by the whole of the Gospel.  St. Paul, who specifically spoke of people losing their salvation after their conversions, would be appalled.

But for somebody as lazy intellectually as Trump, it's no doubt comforting, assuming he worried about the afterlife at all.  He's lived a life of moral dissipation but, hey, he's okay.

The belief on Trump's part is no doubt not only comforting to him, but it probably emboldens him as well.  Compared to Cyrus, backed up by the intellectually think "once saved" theology and pastors who repeatedly assure him he's on a Devine mission, and with people like Pete Hegseth in his cabinet, what could go wrong?

Well, everything, in fact.  And indeed, everything is going wrong.

And therefore, we might legitimately raise this question.  What if Trump's place in Salvation History is  not that of Cyrus the Great, but rather Atilla the Hun?

It sounds absurd, but frankly its not less absurd that he being a Cyrus the Great, and certainly no less absurd than the claims he's a "Godly man" that some of his supporters make. 

Attila the Hung, during his lifetime, was called the Flagellum Dei, the Scourge of God.  The thought was that Rome having became so sinful was being served by being whipped by Atilla by license of God.

The modern US is certainly no less sinful that Rome was from 434 to 453, the reign of Atilla.  The country still practices infanticide, something that only became legal anywhere in the US in 1970 (Hawaii).  The country has the reputation of being deeply religious but the Playboy Culture that came in starting in 1953 has lead to rampant sexual immorality and indeed sexual confusion.  The materialistic culture that started to come in during the 1950s has converted a class dominated culturally and economically by the middle class to one controlled by and for the extremely rich elite, the pinnacle of which was on display on Epstein Island.  Closeted homosexuals in office pretend they hold family virtues.  Office holders who maintain their deep love of family espouse divorce and contracept to avoid having one.  Money is everything.  We are willing to fight and die for oil rather than address the damage that it causes.  We go so far as to excuse our lifestyles and occupations, no matter what they are, surely endorsed by God, effectively mocking him.

All along, we pretend we are a devout people.

Vice President Vance, who is a National Conservative, lectures the Europeans about their losing their culture while the American Civil Religion is such a washed out version of Christianity that it must shock the listeners.  He has a point, to be sure, the West in general had engaged in massive moral decline with a life made easy after the recovery from World War Two.  But it's hard the case that the United States can look ti itself as a champion of Western values.

Which leads back to this.  

The Protestant  Reformation brought in the modern world.  It's dying before our eyes.  The United States is a Protestant country, and the United States as a great power is over.  It started to take blows when fallen away Methodist Hugh Hefner started to prostitute the image of  young women in a particularly harmful way.  As the culture became steeped in immorality, the mainline Protestant churches adopted it rather than offend.  And off in the corners some Evangelical Churches took a more radical view, with those views now expressed in the MAGA movement.

Closely related, although not appreciated to be, a culture that fell into lust naturally fell into greed.  No decent society, let alone a Christian one, would allow the wealthy the leeway they have in our society, nor would it seek to allow their unabated accumulation of wealth.  Greed and lust are, in fact, the two primary attributes of American culture.  The fact that we don't seem to realize that is because a third deadly sin has become manifestly American as well,. pride.  To state that Trump is a prideful man, and that MAGA is prideful movement, is to state the blatantly obvious.

And while we are at it, we might note that envy has now uniquely entered the picture  We evny what Denmark has in Greenland, and what Venezuela has it itself.

And look at Trump, and consider sloth. , , 

And finally, listen to Trump, on anything, and consider wrath.

These would be bad enough in one man, but when that man is elevated to the leader of a nation, that nation has endorsed it.  We, as a nation, have adopted all seven of the deadly sins as our primary national virtues.

So why wouldn't we invite a scourging, if only by our own conduct.

Nobody knows whether Donald Trump is going to Hell after his death.  That is not for us to know. Franklin Graham doesn't know. What we do know is that the Presbyterian raised Trump has lead a strongly immoral life in multiple ways even without examining the worst accusations against him, which in fact now deserve to be examined.  But the same is true of many supposedly "devout" Christians.  Indeed, the number of Christians attempting to be Christian, of all branches of the faith, is likely a tiny percentage of Christians in the U.S. overall.

What Trump is serving to do is to bring forward the hypocrisy of the American civil religion, the easy Christianity where the rules are made up and the points don't matter.

Sincere devout Protestant Christians have been deeply distressed by Trump.  They should be.  But there's another emotion in some quarters as well, a sort of principled schadenfreude.  I.e., knowing that everything is collapsing and taking a sort of delight in it.

That may sound deeply odd, but perhaps it isn't as much as it might seem.  The moral draft that's been going on has been going on for decades, and its been an obvious problem. The sort of worship of money that divests the middle class and which exalts economic activity above everything, including the happiness of average people and the environment, has been going on for decades as well.  The profligate use of American armed force is not new. The hypocrisy of our ruling class, now at an all time high, has been developing for quite some time.  Some times it takes a crisis for people to wake up. If they don't, they just perish and somebody less dense takes over.

Will Americans wake up?

I think they might, but when they wake up it's not going to be morning in America.  That country has died.  It was already ill, and had been very ill since the 2010s, but Trump came in like the batshit crazy anti vaxers that are part of his overall movement and administered a lethal does of ignorance and stupidity.  The country they wake up to may, in fact, be more like an old one, hopefully.  One less powerful on the international stage, and less willing to throw its weight around without the cooperation of others.

In other ways, it's going to be something entirely new.  Far right Evangelical Protestantism will not survive Donald Trump.  People like Franklin Graham and Paula White are going to be regarded as ignorant fools.  The big box mega churches will be exposed for what they are, worship service centers think on the hard lessons of Christianity.

Faith won't die, and it hasn't anywhere.  The Ancient Faith has started to revive in France, the Eldest Daughter of the Church.  The Apostolic Faiths in North America are growing as the young turn their back on the American Civil Religion and Americanism in general, seeking the real.  The Protestant Reformation was already dying, but now that death will accelerate, even if the Protestant faiths, particular those of the early Reformation, will live on, particularly in their most conservative, and frankly Catholic, forms.

Holy Week started yesterday.  We live in interesting times.

Happy Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, Mardi Gras, Carnival, Fastnachtsdienstag.

Holy Ghost in Denver.  While you cannot see it in this photograph, opposite this wall is a row of confessionals.  Confessions are heard during Mass.

Shrove Tuesday.

Shrove derives from "shrive", which means to give absolution. So, while I don't know how many parishes offer confession the day prior to Ash Wednesday, that's what it refers to.

It's also called Shrovetide, the evening before the Shrove, which makes more sense, really, reflecting the penitential nature of Lent.

Pancake Day.

It's also Pancake Day in England and strongly English countries, for the custom of eating pancakes on this day.  Pancakes use a fair amount of fat in them and this was part of the Lenten practice of abstaining from fat during Lent.  It's also therefore one of the odd little ways where England's history as a once deeply Catholic nation is retained.

In Ireland the day is known as Máirt Inide, from the Latin initium (Jejūniī), "beginning of Lent".  It's still associated heavily with pancakes.  That's sort of indicative of Ireland's history of being heavily impacted by the English.

Of some interest here, potentially, the Anglican Church retains confession, but not the requirement that its members annual confess, like Catholics have.  Catholicism is now outstripping Anglicanism in actual practice in the UK.  It's often noted that Catholicism has declined in Ireland, a prediction that the Church made at the time of the Anglo Irish War when it did not want to become involved in the Irish government and was forced to against its will, but the Irish remain very heavily Catholic.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1937.

Mardi Gras.

Of course, it's also Mardi Gras, or "Fat Tuesday", from the custom at one time of trying to use up all the fats in the house on this day, in French speaking countries. Contrary to American belief, Mardi Gras is in fact not unique to New Orleans but occurs everywhere that French speaking people are located.

Knights of Revelry parade down Royal Street in Mobile during the 2010 Mardi Gras season, By Carol M. Highsmith - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID highsm.05396.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11990882

American Mardi Gras, or rather American New Orleans Mardi Gras, has become heavily Americanized which means, like all American holidays, it's associated with booze.  It is always a big party wherever it occurs, but the weird boozy topless event is an American thing, not a real French thing or culturally French.

Carnival in Rome, 1650.

Carnival and Fastnachtsdienstag

Carnival, from the Medieval Latin carne vale, "farewell meat",  is the same holiday in other Romance Language speaking countries.  The same sort of linguistic intent is found in the German name for the day, Fastnachtsdienstag.  The latter reflects the fact that European Lutherans observe Lent, but in the same fashion as the Anglicans.  It's not associated with the same Canon Law that it is with Catholics, but the observance remains.

We've actually touched on all of this, fwiw, before.

All of these days reflected a period when the Lenten fast was much more severe than it currently is.  People were using up fats as they wouldn't keep for the forty days of Lent.  Now, in the Latin Rite, there's no restriction on using fats at all, the obligation to fast is just on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, when the obligation to abstain from meat also exist, during Lent.  All the Friday's of Lent are meatless for Catholics.

In the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church the fasting rules are much more strict.  Starting on Pure Monday, yesterday,   As Catholic News Service explains it:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In the eyes of Latin-rite Catholics, the extent of Eastern Catholics’ Lenten fasting and abstinence is perceived as particularly strict.

The traditional Byzantine fast for Great Lent includes one meal a day from Monday to Friday, and abstinence from all animal products, including meat, fish with backbones, dairy products and eggs, as well as oil and wine for the entire period of Lent. Shellfish are permitted.

Fasting and abstinence are maintained on Saturdays, Sundays and on the eve of special feast days, although loosened to permit the use of oil and wine. On important feast days, such as the Annunciation and Palm Sunday, fish may be eaten.

“Oil and wine were restricted because, in the past, they were stored in animal skin,” explained Mother Theodora, the “hegumena” or abbess of the Byzantine Catholic Christ the Bridegroom Monastery in Burton, Ohio. “Though this is no longer the case, the tradition continues.”

There are varying degrees of fasting, from stricter to more lenient, depending on one’s work and state of health. Monks and nuns will often submit to the most strict fasting.

Holy Week is not considered part of Great Lent but “an additional, more intense time of fasting and prayer,” said Mother Theodora.

However, Eastern Catholics don’t plunge into fasting and abstinence cold turkey. “Meatfare” and “Cheesefare” weeks help them enter into the Great Fast gradually. By Meatfare Sunday, one week before the start of Lent, Eastern Catholics will have emptied their refrigerators and pantries of meat products. By Cheesefare Sunday, they will have cleared out all of their egg and dairy products, ready to enter into the Great Fast that evening, after Forgiveness Vespers.

In an effort to keep Eastern Christians faithful, yet creative, in the kitchen, cookbooks with fast-friendly recipes have been published.

By Laura Ieraci, Catholic News Service.  The rules for the Eastern Orthodox are similar, although I'm never certain of the degree to which the Orthodox are required to observe them.  Orthodox churches using the "Old Calendar" start Lent this year on February 23.

With all this, Catholics in the US enter Annual Question Time and the time of slightly difficult observances, the latter taking note of the fact that unlike some past times in the country, we're not likely to get killed or anything, so its nothing like it used to be.  Rather, as the US is not only heavily Protestant, but Puritan, Lenten practices baffle non Catholics.

Puritans disapproved of pretty much everything, including observing Christmas as a special day, so Lent was way beyond the Pale for them.  English culture, on the other hand, loved sports, so when the English dumped the Calvinist, which they did as soon as they could, their love of sports came roaring back. American culture has been impacted by English culture in every way, so Americans love sports but don't understand the Apostolic Faiths very well, in many instances, and in fact sometimes fail to realize that their own branches of Christianity are fairly recent innovations not reflecting the original Apostolic faith.

So for Lent, including its beginning, and its end in Holy Week, Americans just don't really have any observations, other than using Mardi Gras, like St. Patrick's Day, as an excuse to drink.  They way it shows up for Catholics, however, is that things that are fairly easy to observe in Catholic countries, like Holy Week or Ash Wednesday, are a lot tougher to do in the US, and of course, you'll be getting a lot of questions if you are Catholic about "why do you do that" and "why can't you . . .".

Holy Saturday, April 11, 1925. East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

The James Simpson-Roosevelt Asiatic Expedition, sponsored by the Field Museum of Natural History and organized by Kermit Roosevelt and his brother Theodore Roosevelt Jr., departed from New York City for Central Asia.  The expedition would return with over 2,000 specimens of small mammals, birds and reptiles, and 70 large mammals, including the Ovis Poli, the great wild sheep and result in the great book East of the Sun, West of the Moon by Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

Last edition:

Saturday, April 4, 1925. Recalling Lexington and Concord.

Labels: 1770s, 1775, 1920s, 1925, Adolf Hitler, American Revolution, Art, Easter, German SS, Mail, Post Office, The Battle of Lexington and Concord, Weimar Germany

Monday, March 26, 1725. Monday of Holy Week for 1725.

Last edition:

Tuesday, March 6, 1725. Henry Benedict Thomas Edward Maria Clement Francis Xavier Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York born.

Labels: 1720s, 1725, Catholic, Christianity, Jacobites, Monarchy, Papal States, religion, Rome

Good Friday, April 7, 1724. Bach's St. John's Passion played for the first time.

It was performed at St. Nikolai Church in Leipzig.

Last prior edition:

Saturday, March 25, 1724 Bach's newly written piece played in Leipzig.

1720s, 1724, Christianity, Classical Music, Germany, Martin Luther, Music, Protestant, Religious Music

Pope Francis on the Stations of the Cross.

In Catholic circles, you could almost hear the groan when it was announced prior to Easter that Pope Francis and Víctor Manuel Cardinal Fernández were issuing a new writing on something.

"Oh no" went up the collective mental though of millions of Catholics, and the written comment in social media by some.

In the end, it was just the Pope's meditations on the Stations of the Cross for this year, which didn't stop his most ardent critics from launching into them.  There's nothing inappropriate with a Pope doing this, however, and there's recent precedent for that matter.

Nonetheless, the groan beforehand shows the extent to which people are weary of hearing from Pope Francis, as so much of what he writes results in controversy.  And that ought to give him pause.  At some point, if people are reluctant to hear from you, and dread it, they aren't likely to take it to heart.

The Annual Protestant Meatless Friday Freak Out, Inconveniently Moving Easter for Convenience, and Oliver Cromwell, fun sucker.

I started this post right at the start of Lent, didn't finish it, and was going to trash it, but due to a late Lent event, I'm picking it back up.

The United States and Canada are Protestant nations. They don't really notice it as a rule, and quite a few cultural Protestants like to deny it, but if you are an adherent member of an Apostolic Christian religion, or for that matter probably if you are Jewish or Muslim, you'll definitely notice it.

One of the ways that it oddly comes up is the annual "it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that you can't eat meat on Fridays" discussion that Protestants in particular, and some very weakly evangelized lapsed Catholics, like to have.  It's ironic as some of the same people will insist that grape juice was served at The Last Supper (nope, definitely wine) or that the Bible says once you accept Jesus into your heart you can go back to sinning (nope, St. Paul in particular warns you can do that and still go to Hell).

Of course, it doesn't say that you must abstain from meat on Fridays.  It's a law of the Church, not biblically imposed. The Bible discusses fasting and gives lots of examples, and it left the office of Bishops to bind and loose.  This is a rule of the Church, which has been bound. 

It only applies to members of individual Churches.  I.e, Catholics are bound, not Lutherans, or members of make it up as you go Christian churches.  Moral laws bind everyone.  Church laws bind the members of the church.

Also, FWIW, fasting and abstention from meat go way back in Church history and used to be much stricter as a practice than it is now.  It's still much stricter in the Eastern churches.  In the East, fasting involves abstention from alcohol, eggs, dairy, fish, meat, and olive oil for the 40 days of Great Lent and Holy Week.  So the Orthodox, for example, are really down to a very bland menu at this point.

That group of people who like to claim that the Latin Rite practice was made up to support the fishing industry are really out to lunch on this one, particularly as the claim is based on a grossly misconstrued concept of what the food economy was like in the ancient world.  If you lived, for example, in a Sardinian fishing town in the Middle Ages, fish is what was for dinner every night.  The fishing industry didn't really need anyone's help to be economically viable.  And at one time the Latin Rite fast more closely resembled the Eastern one.  Claims like that are generally myths of the Reformation, created in jolly old England to justify carrying on with the Reformation when they couldn't come up with any actual good reasons to do so.

For most non-Catholics and non-Orthodox, however, this isn't in the forefront of people's minds.  Restaurants get it, as there are a lot of us, which is why fish based fare shows up this time of year darned near everywhere.  But rank and file Protestants, particularly of the Christmas/Easter variety, really don't ponder this much.  If you live in a state like Wyoming, that's really obvious, as we have very low religious observation here anyhow.  There are a lot of Catholics, but we're a minority.  Protestants who don't go to church often are no doubt the majority, followed by Protestants who go to the new "non-denominational" churches, which is to say the quasi Baptist, churches (there are no "non-denominational" churches).  They can't be expected to know Canon Law.

When you go to a function of any kind during Lent, this becomes pretty obvious.  "Here's your entrée". . will say the server, serving the beef sandwich between two slabs of beef served with beef fries. "Would you like gravy with that?"

Oh, well.

That you can't suspend this and just go to meatless on Saturday is something people don't grasp.  "You can skip it this time".  No, you can't.  Violation of the rule is a mortal sin.  That seems extreme to non-Catholics, and probably has for a long time, but by the same token we live in an era when a host of other mortal sins, the sexual and marital ones in particular, are ignored by even devout church going Protestants.  If you can convince yourself, getting married for the third or fourth time doesn't mean that you are an adulterer, you can pretty easily convince yourself that eating a hamburger on Fridays in Lent is okay this one time.  Indeed, in some odd ways, the logic isn't that much different.  They both involve appetites and excuses. 

This does make Catholics stick out, and the Orthodox even more, maybe.  In some ways, as the Catholic Church has suspended so many of these rules, the fact that there are some remaining makes Catholics stick out all the more and, in turn, the few remaining rules offend people all the more.  And that is in a way part of the point in the modern world.  It sets us apart, and it should.  Like those who appear with ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday, it's going to mark you.

This came to mind as when I got home last night, Long Suffering Spouse announced, "my mother proposed to have Easter Dinner this Friday. . ."

Eh?

Now, by way of an obvious point, we're clearly a "mixed" family.  My side of the family is all Catholic.  LSS's is all non-Catholic.

I don't know where the dinner suggestion stands right now, as LSS isn't saying, which means it must be in the air. She protested this as we have "town jobs" which means that a Friday gathering really isn't a viable option anyhow.  And one of the things about being married to a Catholic means is that the Catholicism will start to be picked up by the non-Catholic party, no matter what.

Beyond that, however, under the current rules for Latin Rite Catholics, (and I'm sure for Eastern Rite Christians as well) on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the fasting rules allow Catholics to eat only one full meal and two smaller meals which, combined, would not equal a single normal meal.  We've already seen that the Eastern Rite is fasting by this point every day. Catholics may not eat meat on these two days, or on any Friday during Lent.

Now, I'm over 60 years old, which means the fasting rules no longer apply to me.  As it is, however, that's my normal daily routine anyhow.  I never eat big breakfasts or lunch.  I used to often skip both, but thanks to my thyroid medication, I'm hungrier than I used to be.  Be that as it may, I'm not comfortable with a feast on Good Friday. That's weird, from an Apostolic Christian prospective.  "This is the day our savior was murdered. . . let's just skip ahead to the day he was raised".  

You can't really do that.

Of course, in Cromwellian influenced Protestant America, you probably can.  He wouldn't, as he didn't approve of observing things anyhow, but he so messed stuff up it's never recovered in the English speaking, non-Catholic, world.  Another reason that they've had to hide his head.

Anyhow, I love my in-laws, who are great, but this is pretty much something I'm not going to be able to do.  I can't go to a big Easter dinner on Good Friday and do something like, "wow, that ham looks great. . . I'll just have the mashed potatoes. . . thanks".  The meatless rule still applies to me, and there's probably not going to be a giant cod for an "early" Easter dinner.

That would be weird.

Also weird is that on Good Friday, I have people trying to make appointments.  Most law offices are closed on Good Friday.  I guess there were enough old Irish and German Catholic lawyers, even here, to make that impact.  But most Americans work as Oliver Cromwell was a theologically deficient fun sucker and our Puritan heritage is ruining everything. Working to the grave is one thing that our Protestant founders in this country really gave to us, and it's one of the things that's really wrong with the culture.  Now, I usually do work, but I've long looked forward to most of the office being out, and only working a partial day.  And it gives me a chance to take Holy Saturday off.

I'm going to have to handle this today.  In prior years I think I would have just said yes, to somebody wanting in, or "the office is closed".  But instead I'm going to just say, the "office is closed for Good Friday".

I'll let the Puritans ponder it.

Holy Week.

 This is Holy Week.  It commenced yesterday with Palm Sunday, which we noted  yesterday:

Palm Sunday

 

Zdzisław Jasiński Palm Sunday 1891.

From City Father:

Palm Sunday

In those countries which were spared the cultural impact of the Reformation, at least directly, at the entire week is one of celebration and observance.  In a lot of those places, people have the whole week off.  Some of Spanish and Central American friends, for example do.

Well, in the English-speaking world we've had to continue to endure the impact of Cromwell and all his fun sucking, so we'll be headed to work instead.