ActonU – UPDATE – Friday

And so the final day of Acton University begins. We had Holy Mass in the Extraordinary Form and, to obtain the indulgence, had public recitation of the Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Breakfast (croisant and jam with coffee) brought a discussion of ad orientem worship after a young Evangelical fellow announced that he was interested in attending the “Tridentine Mass”.

Class now, on John A. Ryan and the New Deal.

UPDATE:

I was delighted to meet a representative of the Tea Party of ITALY! Yes, Tea Party Italia! Their lovely and charming rep gave me some of their spiffy swag.

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Class on the Politics and Economics of Edmund Burke is starting now.

UPDATE:

This is way too cool. One of the participants happened to know by heart part of a letter of Burke to the Sheriff of Bristol! She stood and recited it!

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UPDATE

Tonight we have a talk from Fr Sirico.

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As St Jerome once wrote that the world woke up and groaned to find itself Arian, so too today the world may wake up to find ourselves socialist.

and…

It was a mistake to take federal money in the first place.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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12 Comments

  1. APX says:

    Am I reading this correctly? Is today the day of a plenary indulgence? I was going to skip out on Mass tonight because I have a tonne of paperwork to catch up on, but if I can get a plenary indulgence tonight, I can skip out of paperwork for an hour or so.

  2. Supertradmum says:

    very cool

    I love the swag…do they have coffee mugs?

  3. Gus Barbarigo says:

    Coffee mugs? How ’bout a tea pot!

    Very cool, indeed! Maybe the Pope’s prayers for Europe are starting to bear fruit.

  4. Lina says:

    Hey – I know the girl reciting! Small world.

  5. I do believe that I also know the girl who is reciting the letter.

  6. Kathleen10 says:

    Well, at least you are at a conference that is pointed in the right direction. You’ve been in good company at this conference, and the topics sound great.
    Love the snake on the “don’t tread on me” stuff.

    We seem to be up to our elbows in Socialism, but hopefully it’s not too late. 143 or so days to Election Day!

  7. One of those TNCs says:

    Any chance we can get a transcript or recording of Fr. Sirico’s talk?

  8. catholicmidwest says:

    Of course it was a mistake to take federal money in the first place. It gave the government a handle on us. This is why we shouldn’t get into the school voucher mess either.

    The problem is that the Catholic church has been shrinking in size and influence in the US for years, and because of that, we can no longer staff our own services on our own steam the way we are. The perceived solution to the problem was to leverage grant money in order to: keep the “apostolates” open and even expand them, employ a lot of people, slap our name all over and gain power in the culture. The problem is that if people had thought about it for 10 minutes they would have realized the position it put us in. And they also would have noticed that we’ve committed ourselves to all kinds of things and ignored all kinds of other things in the pursuit of this grand desire. BUT……No one’s been in the mood to really think about these things realistically for a long time.

  9. filioque says:

    Love that Italian TEA Party! I recently met a couple of young conservatives from Costa Rica. They said they had a TEA Party there. I was surprised and asked whether they really called it that because it refers to an event in American history and also TEA stands for “taxed enough already.” How does that translate? They said everyone knew about the Boston Tea Party and what TEA means.

    Viva Libertad! Viva Liberta!

  10. shin says:

    ‘As regards this teaching and these theories, it is now generally known that the special goal of their proponents is to introduce to the people the pernicious fictions of Socialism and Communism by misapplying the terms “liberty” and “equality.” The final goal shared by these teachings, whether of Communism or Socialism, even if approached differently, is to excite by continuous disturbances workers and others, especially those of the lower class, whom they have deceived by their lies and deluded by the promise of a happier condition. They are preparing them for plundering, stealing, and usurping first the Church’s and then everyone’s property. After this they will profane all law, human and divine, to destroy divine worship and to subvert the entire ordering of civil societies. In this critical period for Italy, it is your duty, venerable brothers, to help the faithful realize that if they let themselves be deceived by such perverted doctrines and theories, these theories will cause their temporal and their eternal destruction. ‘

    […]

    ‘But if the faithful scorn both the fatherly warnings of their pastors and the commandments of the Christian Law recalled here, and if they let themselves be deceived by the present-day promoters of plots, deciding to work with them in their perverted theories of Socialism and Communism, let them know and earnestly consider what they are laying up for themselves. The Divine Judge will seek vengeance on the day of wrath. Until then no temporal benefit for the people will result from their conspiracy, but rather new increases of misery and disaster. For man is not empowered to establish new societies and unions which are opposed to the nature of mankind.’

    Pope Bl. Pius IX, “Nostis et Nobiscum”

  11. Raymond says:

    The Tea Party Italia memorabilia looks cute; although the organization will probably be nothing more than a minor, short-term wonder in that country.

    I’m sure that Fr. Z knows that European conservatism is different from American conservatism. And although I’m right-of-center myself and have lived in the USA for 19 years, I could never be a Republican Party member nor consider myself an American conservative. It is just too individualistic/libertarian for my taste.

    Now, taking a hint from the Italians, how about an American version of the German CDU/CSU? That might bring a smile to Frau Merkel’s face!

  12. filioque says:

    There has always been a strong streak of individualism in the American myth. Think of Daniel Boone, who is supposed to have said that he always moved farther west when he found he could see his neighbor’s chimney smoke. But the Founders who wrote the Federalist Papers and ratified the Constitution were working precisely for the proper balance of communal action (state power) and individual liberty that would protect God-given rights and provide for common necessities. We are very wide of the mark now, alas, largely through the steady perversion of Constitutional provisions. I am not very comfortable in the Republican Party, but not because it is too libertarian. It is only marginally less socialist than the Democrats; mostly it just slows down the process, rarely reversing it. At least it hasn’t expelled the pro-lifers, although we are mostly just exploited as people with no where else to go.

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