TWO BOOKS

 Professor Peter Kwasniewski has done it again!! However, whencever, does he get the time and the energy?? He has again edited, and himself made important contributions to, a valuable collection of papers.

From Benedict's PEACE to Francis's WAR, Angelico Press, hot from the presses ... is, of course, concerned with responses to PF's declaration of War on the Great and Holy Tradition. I suppose if I were a citizen of the U S of A, it might make me think of the attack upon Pearl Harbour; a violent and unprovoked attack on a peaceable people by thanatophile enthusiasts. I mean, of course, Traditionis custodes.

This crude assault on the authentic worship of the Latin Church is, perhaps, even more gross than the events of the late sixties and the seventies. Since then, reconstruction, painstaking and prayer-driven, had brought us laboriously back, step-by-step, ever closer, to a healthy Catholic culture. Beginning in 1971 with the highly restrictive Indult which Cardinal Heenan extracted from S Paul VI, we have moved, step by step, nearer to orthopraxy. Now a grim, rigid, merciless bigotry is attempting to steal the fruits of so much work ... and, indeed, of so much scholarship ... done over half a century. 

One of the good results of the Liturgical Revolution of circa 1970 is that, subsequently, immense amounts of research have revolutionised our understanding of the liturgical culture of the churches of the Roman Rite. There were some big names among those who laboured in the decades after the Council; but how much more we now know and understand than they did. 

And many of the pieces in this book are by some of those scholars.

In this volume, you will find the words of five cardinals ... two of them former prefects of Vatican dicasteries whose glory it is that PF found them insufficiently compliant, but could not silence them. And more than sixty other writers (the proprieties prescribe that I must confess: that they include myself).

 

Are Canonizations Infallible? is also a collection by Peter Kwasniewski; I have commended it to you before. An additional reason for everybody below the age of seventy to buy and read this book has just recently occurred to me. Videlicet:

Usually, empirical tests are hard to apply to discussions concerning theological topics. Freddie Ayer, the atheist Oxford philosopher whose lectures I rather enjoyed as an undergraduate, used to make this point rather powerfully ... until he had a ... well, shall we say an experience ... which very nearly ... um ...

In the question of Canonisations, we may have an exception to Ayer's non-falsifiability doctrine.

If, in the aftermath of this all-fun pontificate, PF is canonised, we shall know for a certainty ... do you agree? ... that canonisations can be as fallible as they can be, er, risible.

(Arouca Press.)

Read it!! 

 

FOOTNOTE: I have searched in vain among the footnotes for any evidence that whoever drafted TC had read the works of Christine Mohrman.