O tempora o mores

From: Catholic Church Music [7.6MB PDF] by Richard R. Terry, (page 40)

The spirit that is sorely needed these days

Hence, in order that no one for the future may be able to plead in excuse that he did not clearly understand his duty and that all vagueness may be eliminated from the interpretation of matters which have already been commanded,...

Tra Le Sollecitudini

Also, Pope Pius X seems to have had a subtle sense of humour. From the immediately preceding paragraph:

And it is vain to hope that the blessing of heaven will descend abundantly upon us, when our homage to the Most High, instead of ascending in the odor of sweetness, puts into the hand of the Lord the scourges wherewith of old the Divine Redeemer drove the unworthy profaners from the Temple.

Snippet: Humility and Manliness

Humility is a virtue. So is manliness or virility (c.f. St. Catherine of Siena). How does one progress in both equally without one of them swallowing up the other thus sliding over from the golden mean to the extreme of a vice?

For example, a colleague or superior treats you like dirt in public, simply because he is like that.  Do you swallow the insult and practice humility? Are you then enabling a bully? Or do you stand up for yourself and risk falling into the passion (here used in the sense that the Greek & Syriac Church Fathers and the Orthodox Christians use it; in the Latin Church and for us Roman Catholics, passion simply means emotion and is not in itself a sin) of Anger?

Christ expresses a mild protest when he is slapped in the presence of the High Priest, but thereafter meekly allows himself to be tortured and crucified. So what does this teach us?

Perhaps committing oneself to humility and clarity also takes care of virility?

Or perhaps, since humility is the wellspring of virtue (Dietrich von Hildebrand has a book by this title, which is actually a chapter from his longer book Transformation in Christ), those that focus on cultivating humility will receive virility added unto the grace of humility?

Perhaps Transformation in Christ has the answer. I've still not got this figured out.

Or perhaps the answer is something like the following? "Try to keep your prayer rule and do the good at hand. Allow Christ to war against the enemy with a hidden hand in your heart, and without you knowing it, your sanctification will have been accomplished."

Ideas for Future Development: Music and Abandonment to Divine Providence

Most Catholics have heard of J.P. de Caussade's famous book Abandoment to Divine Providence, a.k.a. The Sacrament of the Present Moment.

This book has been a lifesaver for me. But I have long thought that we are desperately in need of a practical means to teach people what exactly living the Sacrament of the Present Moment looks like in day to day life.

I have recently begun learning how to play the electronic keyboard from sheet music. This seems to me to be a very good arena to teach the practice of Abandonment.

An "arena" in the same sense, perhaps C.J.S. Hayward in his Technonomicon describes wine as a training area to cultivate the virtue of self-control:

One classic attitude to wine was not “We forbid drinking wine,” or even “It would be better not to drink wine at all, but a little bit does not do too much damage,” but goes beyond saying, “The pleasure of wine was given by God as good” to saying: “Wine is an important training ground to learn the Ascesis of moderation, and learn a lesson that cannot be escaped: we are not obligated to learn moderation in wine, but if we do not drink wine, we still need moderation in work, play, eating, and everything else, and many of us would do well to grow up in Ascesis in the training arena of enjoying wine and be better prepared for other areas of life where the need for the Ascesis of moderation, of saying ‘when’ and drawing limits, is not only something we should not dodge: it is something we can never escape.”

(C.J.S. Hayward, Technonomicon, #39)

Ideas for future development: Pious Hopes Regarding Divine Providence

One often hears statements like the following:

"If God means for you to marry a particular person / become a priest / enter the religious state, then He will make it happen no matter what obstacles lie in your way, or how much others oppose you!"

Such statements are often made by genuinely pious people who love God and their fellow-man.

But this seems be a sort of pious hope rather than a well thought out theological statement.

If this were true, why would St. Alphonsus Liguori rant about parents who smother the vocations of their children?

Why would the Permissive Will of God, which permits several injustices in this world, (and are we not told that God draws straight with crooked lines, and that many injustices will only be righted on the occasion of the final General Judgement?) reserve this one area as a special preserve where His will is never to be thwarted in this world?

In the Gospel, did not Christ explicitly give a vocation to the Young Ruler? And did he not decline it and walk away?

I remember reading that in the crisis in the Church in the decades following Vatican 2, around 300,000 projected vocations to the priesthood are missing. Did God wish to negate every one of these vocations?

Orthodox blogger Fr. Stephen Freeman (OCA) has written extensively on this topic. In one of his articles, he addresses this explicitly:

But should an individual expect to know the “will of God?” The answer is both yes and no. The Scripture actually tells us what the will of God is:

In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1Th 5:18)

Some will be disappointed by this revelation. Popular Christian culture has subscribed to many of the myths of our times. Those surrounding success and happiness are among the deepest. We are taught in various places that by choosing the right path (job, marriage, vocation) and pursuing it with commitment (education, patience) will be rewarded with success and good outcomes. We are told, “What could be better than making a living doing something you like?”

But this is tragically flawed.

Knowing God's Will by Fr. Stephen Freeman

For Reference: St. Thomas Aquinas on Effeminacy

From the RadTradThomist:

It is interesting that in our attempt to penetrate, through a historical analysis, the essence of the classical conception of the true gentleman, we should stumble upon article 1, question 138 of the Secunda Secundae of St. Thomas' Summa Theologica. Here St. Thomas treats the vice of "effeminacy" or "softness" (mollities), which is opposed to the perseverance necessary for all forms of fidelity. To be "effeminate" is to be willing to forsake a good, rather than endure difficulties and toils for the sake of the attainment of that good. The "difficulties" which St. Thomas refers to here, are not even the "heavy blows" of catastrophe or grave misfortune, it is, rather, the "soft blows" of the daily machinations of circumstance.

 The final part of the last sentence is a new angle that I had not pondered so far. Thus it should follow from this that unless we take continual ascetic effort to "swim against the current (of the world, the flesh and the devil)" in our daily lives, we inevitably acquire the vice of effeminacy.

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