July is the month of the Precious Blood. In the traditional rite, the first day of the month is the feast of that name. In the Roman Martyrology, July 1 also commemorates Aaron the High Priest, the brother of Moses. This liturgical concurrence is appropriate, since Aaron’s priesthood — part of the alliance mediated by Moses — was a priesthood that offered many sacrifices prefiguring Christ’s Precious Blood.
In his Making a Monkey Out of Darwin, the formidable Buchanan reviews a recent book by Eugene Windchy, The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold. You gotta give it to Pat; he’s not afraid to slaughter a sacred cow… or …
It would take too long to point out all that’s wrong with Laurie Goodstein’s New York Times piece, “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny,” so I’ll cut to the chase. The last sentence of the article reads:
But the investigation of American nuns surprised many because there was no obvious precipitating cause.
The same article reports that vocations in the group in question are down from 180,000 in 1965 to 60,000 today. It also mentions that
Brother Francis has taken a downturn. We received news last week that Brother has “a couple of months” to live, due to his worsening aortic valve stenosis. This prognosis is from his very competent cardiologist at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene, New Hampshire. As those who know Brother Francis can well imagine, he is taking the news very “philosophically.” Showing his resignation to the divine providence, he told one of the doctors, “I am in the Hands of God.”
Just after I posted an appreciation of the recent USCCB document clarifying the Church’s teaching on her mission and the Jewish People, I checked my familiar news sources to catch up on what’s going on.
Coincidentally, I discovered that “ADL president Abraham Foxman said that the bishops’ statement might be …
Our beloved Superior, Brother Francis, who will be 96 years old on July 19, is in need of prayers for his health. Brother was in the hospital last week with congestive heart failure, a condition he is prone to because he has long had aortic valve stenosis. He was discharged from Cheshire Medical Center last Friday, the Feast of the Sacred Heart. He is now at home, where the brothers and visiting health-care professionals are attending to him.
If you’ve not read Brian Kelly’s brief and delightful biography of Venerable Solanus Casey, please do yourself the favor. This Irish-American Padre Pio ought to be better known and loved across the nation.
Please Note: if any of our readers know some GM execs, could you please put a bug in their corporate ear? With all the trouble the auto-making giant is having these days, they should be reminded of Venerable Solanus’ past benevolence to Chevrolet, one of General Motors’ subsidiaries. As Brian writes:
Father Kenneth Baker, S. J., has written a short and delightful review of a recent book on Saint Francis of Assisi: “Preach Christ to the Muslims” The volume in review is St. Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims, by Frank M. Rega, S.F.O.
These two excerpts are worth savoring:
Trusting absolutely in God and willing to die for the faith, Francis was at first beaten by the guards but eventually taken to the sultan.
Over at Taki’s Magazine, Charles Coulombe playfully takes readers on a fast-paced romp through the unfamiliar (for most people) political spectrum of what is called “Paleoconservatism.” His article, The Old Paleos and the New, seeks to explain the contrasts and often bizarre alliances within this recently-coined label.
Kirkians, Burkeans, the descendants of the Old Right, Monarchists, Strict-Constructionists (like Birchers), devotees of Richard M. Weaver, and even certain Libertarians — all these find a home under the Paleo umbrella.
A magnificent writer, Elizabeth Thecla Mauro, has a passion for the sport, and boy is she good at her craft. Her team? The Yankees. Well, that’ll just have to be overlooked. She finds a nobility in the game and in the players, or in many of them that is, and …
The annual Pilgrimage for Restoration is a sixty-five mile walk from Lake George to the Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, NY. For four days, pilgrims attend Mass together, walk, camp, sing pray, and compare blisters! It’s an unforgettable experience. This year’s dates are Wednesday, September 23 to Saturday, September 26.
This event is not sponsored by Saint Benedict Center, but we participate in it every year, with great enthusiasm. The sponsors are the Company of St. René Goupil, with the…
"One of the most outstanding prophets of our time."
— Hamish Fraser
"The greatest theologian we have in the United States, by far."
— Rev. John J. McEleny, S.J., (Father's Jesuit Provincial)
"The greatest theologian in the Catholic Church today."
Leonard Feeney was born in Lynn, Massachusetts on February 15, 1897. On the eve of Our Lady's Nativity, September 7, 1914, he entered the Jesuit Novitiate of Saint Andrew in upstate New York. During his 14 year formation as a Jesuit, he studied in England, Wales, Belgium, France, and the U.S.A. At the end of a brilliant scholasticate and theologate, he took religious vows as a son of Saint Ignatius, and was ordained a priest on June 20, 1928.
Father Feeney then embarked on what would become one of the most celebrated careers any priest could enjoy as a writer, lecturer and editor. During the 1930's he was literary editor of America, the Jesuit-run Catholic monthly. At the same time, his books, published by some of the major publishers of that time, were becoming standards in Catholic schools and homes all across the country. They include Riddle and Reverie (MacMillan, 1936), Song for a Listener (MacMillan, 1936), You'd Better Come Quietly (Sheed and Ward, 1939), The Leonard Feeney Omnibus (Sheed and Ward, 1943), Your Second Childhood (Bruce Publishing Company, 1945) Mother Seton, an American Woman (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1948), Survival Till Seventeen (Sheed and Ward, 1948).
Father's genius as a writer, speaker and theologian, was attested to by some of the most prominent Catholic figures of his day. Bishop Fulton Sheen once said that the only substitute he would allow on his radio show was Father Feeney. Frank Sheed, of Sheed and Ward said, "For Father Feeney, dogma is not only true; it is breathlessly exciting. That is his special vocation. . . to make his readers feel the thrill." During Father's days at Oxford, Lord Cecil, the famous Oxford don admitted, "I am getting more out of my association with Leonard Feeney than he could possibly get from me." Of the Jesuit's writing, Cecil said, "it shines with a pure, clear light."
In 1942, during the height of his literary fame, Father Feeney was transferred by his Jesuit superiors to Saint Benedict Center, a Catholic student center which had been founded two years earlier by Catherine Goddard Clarke. Mrs. Clarke had sought the permission of the then-Archbishop of Boston, William Cardinal O'Connell, to establish an educational oasis of Catholic truth close to the renowned secular universities in that area. The Cardinal readily agreed to the project, admonishing Mrs. Clarke to "teach the Faith without compromise." So it was that Saint Benedict Center quietly came into existence that year at the intersection of Bow and Arrow Streets in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Center's initial purpose was to provide religious instruction for the Catholic students of the universities and, in keeping with the instructions of Cardinal O'Connell, its policy was to teach the authentic doctrines of the Church through the study of Holy Scripture, and the writings of the Fathers, Doctors, and Saints of the Church. This program of studies achieved immediate success, filling the spiritual vacuum created by an obvious deficiency in the neighboring academic institutions. The Center was attended in large and growing numbers.
With Father Feeney's transfer to Saint Benedict Center, a whole new era in his life — and in the lives of countless others — was to commence. Within three years, he came to see clearly that the Church was headed down a dangerous path of compromise and accommodation, leading to what is now universally recognized as a "crisis in the Church." Not only did Father see the problem before anybody else, he also saw the primary cause: the obscuring of the Catholic Church's teaching "outside the Church, there is no salvation" (extra ecclesiam nulla salus).
In 1949, with the loyal support of those who had become his spiritual children, Father Feeney founded the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. From the foundation of the Congregation until his death in 1978, Father Feeney continued to teach his disciples and form them into a community of apostles dedicated, not only to the restoration of the Dogma of Faith, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, but also to the conversion of the United States of America to the One, True Faith, outside of which no one at all is saved.
After Father Feeney’s death in 1978, the great Scottish apostle of Christ the King, Hamish Fraser, eulogized him as "one of the most outstanding prophets of our time. For not only did he most accurately diagnose the contemporary malaise, long before others became aware of it; he also put his finger on the very omission which was both symptom and cause of the plague of liberal indifferentism which eventually surfaced as post-Conciliar Neomodernism and oecumania."
