6 Dec – St Nicholas: SNOWFLAKE ALERT! NOT A “SAFE SPACE”!

soumela_nicaea_nicholas slaps ariusWARNING SNOWFLAKES!

This blog is NOT a Safe Space for you!  This post, especially, is NOT a Safe Space for you.

You know which sites you can go to to be affirmed and unchallenged by anything truly Catholic.  Please go to one of them NOW.

The Management

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There arrived in my email today an interesting study in contrasts, which I gave a bit more attention and detail.

Missale Romanum 1962:

Deus, qui beatum Nicolaum Pontificem innumeris decorasti miraculis: tribue, quaesumus; ut, eius meritis et precibus, a gehennae incendiis liberemur.

O God, Who didst adorn blessed Nicholas, the bishop, with miracles unnumbered, grant, we beseech Thee, that by his merits and prayer we may be delivered from the fire of hell.

What’s this prayers pedigree?

16_12_06_Nicholas

Meanwhile, the experts of the Consilium, dedicated to turning every Mass – sorry… “liturgy” – into a Safe Space to make Catholics into Tender Snowflakes…

Missale Romanum 2002 (new composition for the Novus Ordo):

Misericordiam tuam, Domine, supplices imploramus, et, beati Nicholai episcopi interveniente suffragio, nos in omnibus custodi periculis, ut via salutis nobis pateat expedita.

We humbly implore your mercy, Lord: protect us in all dangers through the prayers of the Bishop Saint Nicholas that the way of salvation may lie open before us.

Interesting choice, no?   Let’s water down the Four Last Things.

Our brothers in the Anglican Use surely took the following from the Book of Common Prayer, which in turn mined the Roman Missal

New “Anglican Use” Missal  

“O God, who didst adorn thy blessed Bishop Saint Nicholas with power to work many and great miracles: grant, we beseech thee; that by his prayers and merits, we may be delivered from the fires of everlasting torment.”

They got it right.

nicholas arius deck the hallsToday we are facing something rather like the Arian crisis in the 4th century.

Think about it this way.  There are a lot of people – more and more – going over to the position that Christ simply got it wrong about indissolubility of marriage (Kasperites).  That means that He wasn’t divine, right?  Moreover, these same people are reducing Holy Communion to a token of affirmation in the comfortable club we all more or less belong to.  What does that say for their belief in the divinity of the Lord?

The questions which are being hotly debated today go waaaaay beyond mere considerations of Communion for one group of sinners in hard cases (the divorced and civilly remarried).  The questions go ultimately to:  Who is Jesus Christ?

In the early centuries of the Church this question had to be settled by the Council of Nicea.  There were those who, following the heretical proposition of the priest Arius, believed that Christ was not divine as the Father is divine, that Christ was the greatest of creatures.

According to some accounts, during the heated debate of the Council the bishop of Myra, St. Nicholas, struck Arius across the face. Apocryphal or not, an exaggeration over time of a lesser micro-aggression or not, you have to admire the bishop’s zeal. After all, Arianism was not a small deal. They weren’t having a disagreement over the translation of a liturgical Collect. They were debating an issue which had torn apart the Church to the point the the Emperor Constantine had to intervene for the sake of civic unity.

The apocryphal story of Nicholas belting Arius in the chops continued. Nicholas, for his infraction, was taken to Constantine, divested of his episcopal garb and locked up. This is why Nicholas is sometimes in art not depicted with a miter, etc. During the night, the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and gave him an omophorion, the Eastern style of today’s pallium. When in the morning he was thus found clothed as a bishop, he was reinstated.

Nicholas-Icon-Meme-heretics

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19 Comments

  1. Dundonianski says:

    “Today we are facing something rather like the Arian crisis” I for one couldn’t agree more, indeed, day by day this crisis is being remorselessly driven forward.
    The emperor has many Kasperian et al helpers, even the mildest mannered of us who are faithful to Doctrine and consequential tradition of Christ’s Church must see that the emperor is truly naked.

  2. Geoffrey says:

    What book does the prayer’s pedigree come from?! I want to put it on my Christmas list!

  3. Pingback: 6 Dec – St Nicholas: SNOWFLAKE ALERT! NOT A “SAFE SPACE”! | Fr. Z’s Blog | Trump:The American Years

  4. Venerator Sti Lot says:

    Geoffrey,

    St. Nicholas is going to have to be feeling very generous, and you’re going to have to hang a lot of stockings… Looking at the Brepols online catalogue list of the CCL (Corpus Christianorum Latina) Series, there are (if I am understanding this) 14 volumes of the Corpus Orationum (160- 160M), and they’re between 105 and 180 euro each!

    Oh, for a handy, well-endowed library (which one were permitted to us)!

  5. Geoffrey says:

    I feared as much when I saw the CCL abbreviation!

  6. jaykay says:

    Oooooh, how much you HATE (the “Spirit” of) Vatican 2!!!

    In Austrian tradition they have the “Krampus” accompanying St. Nicholas, to snatch away naughty children. A devil-figure, apparently. Ooohhh, how triggering on sooo many levels! HATER.

    Of course, if dressed-up as a certain US political figure… no problem.

  7. Unwilling says:

    Still, I can’t recommend they “go to one of them now” or ever. Let them stay and discover they won’t actually melt. Truth is liberty.

  8. gracie says:

    A few years ago a 4th grade CCD’r asked, “Who *is* Santa Claus”. The other kids echoed the question. They started giggling and commenting, “Yeah, everyone knows he doesn’t exist, but who is he? Where did he come from?” This was all said out loud among the 10 of them for several minutes. So I decided to scrap the next week’s lesson plan and do a whole thing on St. Nicholas.

    The kids really seemed to take to the lesson – hadn’t seen them this awake in weeks. After class in comes Maleficent aka Morgan’s mom (not his real name) screaming that M still believes in S.C. and I had ruined Christmas for all of them. It didn’t matter to her that all of his peers had loudly been proclaiming S.C. in class to be untrue and M had been laughing with them. She wanted Morgan to “believe in Santa Claus as long as he can”. I knew the boy didn’t anymore from just watching him but she couldn’t accept it. A few other parents got upset when a couple of fifth grade teachers talked about St. Nicholas. It was indeed fortunate for the integrity of the program that the Director supported the teachers and did not apologize – “regret” was the operational world – but it shows that the Snowflake mentality predates the millennials.

  9. aquinas138 says:

    Of course it should be mentioned that in the Byzantine tradition, St. Nicholas repented of losing his cool. It was against the canons for a clergyman to strike anyone, so St. Nicholas was stripped of his pontificals and placed in prison. Overnight, St. Nicholas repented of his intemperate action, though not of his opposition to Arius’ heresy. He was visited by Christ and the Mother of God; Christ placed a book of the Gospels in his hands and the Mother of God placed a new omophorion upon his shoulders. Our Lord and Lady also visited the other bishops and instructed them not to take action against St. Nicholas since he acted from zeal for the truth rather than malice toward Arius. The next morning, when the guards discovered St. Nicholas vested as a bishop in his cell, the Emperor Constantine had him released and restored to his dignity.

  10. Glennonite says:

    Ah St. Nick, I’ve loved this guy ever since I was a kid.

    “…deck the heretic.”—brilliant.

  11. JonPatrick says:

    I’m surprised we don’t have a “snowflake” version of the Fatima Prayer we use with the Rosary:

    O my Jesus,
    help us to be nice
    that the way of salvation be before us
    Lead all souls to heaven
    especially those in most need of thy mercy.

  12. Sonshine135 says:

    Sorry, but blame Pope Paul VI. Bugnini’s hands are all over these translations.

    If you have ever read the Apostolic Constitution Promulgation on the Divine Office, look at article 4.:

    “We have set up; a few of the psalms and the harsher verses of the psalms have been omitted because of difficulties which might arise in celebration of the Office in a vernacular translation”

    What? The only explanation that fits logically is the belief that watering down the teaching would make it more palatable to those who were already poorly catechized. It didn’t. Furthermore, the people who were interested left too, because if there is no hell to worry about, why bother?

    The language in the Divine Office is very snowflake as were the Mass readings prior to the NABRE. I even suggest that the new readings still omit some of the more powerful messages (i.e. the reading from Hebrews 12 that omits Heb. 12:8- “If you are without discipline, in which all have shared, you are not sons but bastards.”).

  13. Venerator Sti Lot says:

    For those, especially, whose German, Latin, and Greek are a lot better than mine, both volumes of one of the great ‘classic’ scholarly works on St. Nicholas is available online, Gustav Anrich, Hagios Nikolaos: Der heilige Nikolaos in der griechischen Kirche ; Texte und Untersuchungen:

    http://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/dms/load/toc/?PPN=PPN632244720

    and, Prolegomena, Untersuchungen, Indices:

    http://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/dms/load/toc/?PPN=PPN632245379

  14. Venerator Sti Lot says:

    Sunshine135,

    Whew – thank you for quoting this, and for your observations (“the belief that watering down the teaching would make it more palatable to those who were already poorly catechized”: lucid!). Interesting to contrast C.S. Lewis’s approach in Reflections on the Psalms (which may well be paralleled by Catholic contemporaries not as world-famous!).

  15. Venerator Sti Lot says:

    I’ve just noticed there’s all sorts of St. Nicholas service music – and medieval chanted plays – sung by Schola Hungarica and “Provided to YouTube by Hungaroton” since his 2015 Feast!

  16. Venerator Sti Lot says:

    Lots of other service music, come to that, at the YouTube channel entitled: Schola Hungarica – Topic

  17. Venerator Sti Lot says:

    I wonder if this has contributed to the traditional presentation of St. Nicholas as giver of both delightful things and corrective punishments (coal or salt – considered as disappointing rather than useful and delicious – and sterner stuff). I’ve seen European depictions which seem to work with the iconography of the Cleansing of the Money-changers from the Temple where it come to children who has tried to be good and the opposite!

  18. Venerator Sti Lot says:

    Ach: comes, have (!)

  19. Grant M says:

    I read in Jedin’s history how one bishop struck another at the council of Trent and was made to apologise, but then leave the Council. It seems that Holy Church does not encourage clerics to deck one another at Ecumenical Councils, no matter how great the provocation, and even if it might enliven somewhat dry discussions.

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