2
Dec
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This Thursday, at 6:00 PM, the Society of St Hugh of Cluny will be sponsoring a Solemn High Mass at the church of the Most Holy Redeemer on East 3rd Street in New York. A reception will follow. Music will include the St Nicholas Mass by Haydn. It will also be an opportunity for you to acquaint (or reacquaint) yourself with one of the grandest Catholic churches in Manhattan.
Most Holy Redeemer was the New York home of the Redemptorist order from the 1840’s to this year. The present church was built in the early 1850’s and its size aroused the wonder of contemporaries. It was one of the two churches that served the German population of the city, at that time centered in what later would be called called the East Village. The other church, the nearby archdiocesan parish of St. Nicholas – was razed in 1960 under Cardinal Spellman – only the rectory survives. The exterior and interior of the Most Holy Redeemer, however, obviously reflect extensive subsequent renovations.
Most Holy Redeemer enjoyed great prominence in the 19th century. But after 1900 the city’s German population started to migrate north, to Yorkville. By 1940 this parish was already experiencing challenges.
In this year the Redemptorists left. There was no publicity, no mention in Catholic New York, for the end of a 180-year apostolate. Of the former proprietors all that remains, presumably, are the many deceased Redemptorists buried in this church. The parish is now in Archdiocesan administration.
Most Holy Redeemer’s interior is a stark contrast to the (current) exterior. It is an incredible decorative display of marble, stained glass, paintings sculptures and mosaics. Despite some damage from the elements and ghastly renovations, much remains in relatively good condition.
(Above) Most Holy Redeemer also displays objects, decidedly less successful artistically than the rest of the decor of this church, inherited from the nearby shuttered parish of the Nativity. Most Holy Redeemer is also the successor to that ancient parish – housed after 1970 in perhaps the most undistinguished Catholic church building on the island of Manhattan. A dispute is continuing regarding the use of the Nativity parish site.
(Above and below) Special mention must be made of two of the chapels. Cardinal Spellman in 1966 designated Most Holy Redeemer church as the “pilgrimage shrine” of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. A magnificent chapel surrounds this miraculous image – a special devotion of the Redemptorist order. Regrettably, as readers of our series on New York churches will know, such devotions appear to attract little interest from the laity nowadays. – and don’t save their churches from closure.
(Above) The second spectacular chapel contains over 100 relics – including the entire body of the martyr St. Datian – brought to this church amid scenes of indescribable rejoicing in the 1892. HIs wax effigy lies beneath the altar.
After 1945, Most Holy Redeemer seems to have dropped out of the consciousness of most New York Catholics. Unlike the otherwise similar Jesuit parish of St Francis Xavier, it had no high school still capable of attracting interest beyond its immediate neighborhood. Its parochial school kept going, with diminishing numbers, until 1985. One well known New York priest can still remember nuns – still German! A graduate in 1972 was Ursula Burns, until recently CEO of Xerox. In more recent years the parish has served mainly a “Hispanic” congregation.
So a visit to Most Holy Redeemer is like a journey to the past of Catholic New York. I hope, though, that the Solemn Mass we are sponsoring this Thursday will be the start of a new beginning. There are only three or four other churches in Manhattan that can rival Most Holy Redeemer as a splendid setting for the Traditional Mass. We also hope that Catholics will become more aware of this downtown treasure and join in assisting the clergy and congregation in the recovery of this venerable parish We hope you can make ti!
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The Mass for this event is in the Extraordinary Form
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Please note that the Masses on this schedule are in the Ordinary Form.
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25
Nov
The Idol of our Age: How the Religion of Humanity subverts Christianity
by Daniel J. Mahoney
Encounter Books; New York and London 2018
The Antichrist! – how often his specter had haunted artists, philosophers and others “spiritually perceptive” since the consolidation of the modern world! It seems a widely shared perception that he cannot be far from an era of religious collapse and ideological fraud. In more recent years, the radical break with Christian morality of the Western establishment, coupled with the growing acquiescence of the Christian churches in their own liquidation, has made the issue more topical than ever. Chilton Williamson, reviewing the recent “religious” service in the Washington cathedral, commemorating John McCain and castigating President Trump, declared that the only god of the American establishment is themselves. Yet the self-understanding of said establishment is still that of a benevolent universal ruler, dispensing prosperity and liberation throughout the world.
Prof. Daniel Mahoney summarizes the findings of thinkers who have confronted one aspect or other of this transition from Christianity to a humanistic cult or better stated, the merger of the two. Professor Mahoney is well acquainted with subject matter – he recently written an introduction for a new translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s diaries – written after he came to the West in the 1970’s. Prof. Mahoney has assembled a set of witnesses, some well-known, others less so, some stern prophets of disaster, others enthusiastic heralds of a coming transformation of the world. The common theme is the dawning of a new age and a new religion where man alone is god.
Prof. Mahoney draws on the insights of Aurel Kolnai to frame the discussion. Kolnai wrote of the negative nature of humanism and of its absolute incompatibility with Christianity, of the “primordial contrast” between humanitarian and Christian morality. And he wrote these thoughts in an essay published in 1944, when the new regime was, by its own estimation then and now, on the verge of celebrating its greatest triumph. Prof. Mahoney helpfully reprints that essay in this book.
Orestes Brownson is perhaps unfamiliar in this context, but he personally lived out an early version of the humanist ethics in an early predecessor of a “hippy” commune! August Comte, in the same era, also describes the possibility of creating a humanist society, but writes as an avid advocate of it. He is fascinating because his system explicitly acknowledges “humanism” as a substitute religion.
A high point of this book- or of any discussion of these matters – is Vladimir Soloviev’s incomparable A Short Tale of the Antichrist, an allegory of the advent of a humanitarian Antichrist. Soloviev, the “Russian Newman,” strove to overcome the division between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. His Antichrist is a mild bringer of terrestrial ease and happiness. He is able to seduce most of the Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic Christians by offering them, in exchange for submission to the world and to him, the secular goods they secretly desire. Soloviev’s tale builds toward a dramatic, appropriately apocalyptic climax. A Short Tale of the Antichrist is a part of Soloviev’s Three Conversations which is also remarkable for a parable justifying war (and, we might add, capital punishment) both of which remain anathema to the modern humanist ethos.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is cited mainly for his criticism of Tolstoy – in his day, at least in some respects, a humanist hero for his advocacy of nonviolence, the return to the land his disdain for traditional Christianity.
Prof. Mahoney now turns from the past to consideration of the present. For is not the regime of the American and Western European establishment the preeminent modern manifestation of modern humanism? And isn’t Pope Francis the exemplar of such humanism masquerading in pseudo- religious trappings?
“As we have noted, the present pontiff, no Antichrist to be sure, is half-humanitarian” Prof. Mahoney assures us. (surely a historic low point in papal apologetics!) But hasn’t our author squarely raised the issue himself by juxtaposing in this book Soloviev’s vision of an Antichrist of mercy with a discussion of Bergoglio, the “Pope of mercy?” And, in all honesty, isn’t what Mahoney says about this topic the real interest of this book?
Prof. Mahoney compiles a catalogue (or is it an indictment?) of Pope Francis’s “humanitarian ” statements and actions. The pope and his acolytes “sow confusion among the faithful and give into the pressures of the secular world.” Francis’s “discussion” of marriage is “marred” by a tendency to redefine Christian family life in terms of “values” that the Church presents to the world. The Church’s teaching is presented as an “ideal” as to which most people “will fall short.” The pope sometimes confuses Christian charity with “secular humanism.” Prof. Mahoney devotes more space, it must be admitted, to critiquing the pope’s attacks on capitalism, technology and America. He is disturbed by the pope’s affinity for socialist and despotic regimes. Here our author reveals his “neoconservative” roots.
Regrettably, in the case of Roman Catholics, academics and especially Roman Catholic academics, difficulties arise when dealing with those currently holding ecclesiastical, political, and economic power. The tone grows “nuanced,” the criticism is “balanced,” the prophetic voice is muted. Accordingly, Prof. Mahoney speaks of the “admirable Christian witness” of Bergoglio. One allegedly must be “moved by the poetic theologizing about the created order that informs the first parts of Laudato Si.” Francis is a “poet and theologian of charity.” Much of Amoris Laetitia is “beautiful,” “luminous,” “insightful and lyrical.”
Kolnai and Soloviev affirm that the humanitarian temptation is inherent in the modern world and, though perhaps adopting a Christian mask, remains essentially incompatible with Christianity. Yet in the case of the bishop of Rome, Prof Mahoney creates separate lists of “good” and “bad” statements and seeks to excuse the latter, suggesting Pope Francis is “confused”; that the remarkable resemblance of his thought to secular humanism is “unintentional.” Is this relatively inconclusive assessment of Pope Francis, in a sense, a test case of Prof. Mahoney’s critique of “the religion of humanity” as applied to actual recent developments? If so, one is tempted to ask, as in the case of so many other products of conservative thought: what was all the fuss about ?
We can say much the same of Mahoney’s remarkably mild conclusions regarding the thought of Jurgen Habermas. If Pope Francis is the chaplain of the Western humanistic establishment, Habermas is its court-philosopher. Prof. Mahoney critiques Habermas’s apolitical “emancipatory cosmopolitanism” – yet he alleges this to be counterbalanced by Habermas’s “fundamental decency,” lauds Habermas as a man “of peace and reason” and applauds his praise of Jewish thinkers.
I have reservations about Mahoney’s judgment in other respects as well. He speaks of the American “experiment” and its “proposition” that “all men are created equal.” He writes warmly of Churchill, Adenauer and especially Charles de Gaulle – yet wasn’t the current reign of modernity in Western Europe established under them? Pope Benedict is a special favorite of Prof. Mahoney; yet didn’t the “pope emeritus” in his address to the German Bundestag (much admired by Prof. Mahoney) studiously avoid any reference to Christ? And hasn’t Pope Benedict spoken of the beneficial effects of the Enlightenment on Western Christianity? Also muffling the impact of Prof. Mahoney’s book is his reliance on a repetitive, academic diction in which adjectives such as “rich,” “ample “and “capacious” constantly recur.
A year or more has passed since the publication of this book. In that time, Pope Francis has carried the fusion between Christianity and the contemporary “humanitarian” ethos to unheard-of lengths.
Starting in Abu Dhabi, Francis has launched an ideological and educational initiative couched in entirely humanistic and syncretistic terminology. In the “Amazonian” synod (and in additional interviews with his old dialogue partner Scalfari) the Pope has moved still further away from previous understandings of Christianity ( or at least those prevailing officially in the Roman Catholic Church). This new “Amazonian” faith seems to reduce Christianity to a mere restatement of the ideological norms of the Western European establishment – with Latin American liberation theology thrown in. The tension Prof. Mahoney discerns between Pope Francis’s “humanitarianism“ and his Christianity seems to have been resolved entirely in favor of the former.
Sandro Magister has analyzed recent papal initiatives, also turning to Soloviev’s parable of the Antichrist. 1) Anything but an extremist, Magister is nevertheless compelled to acknowledge traces of the Antichrist in Bergoglio’s papacy. “The novelty of the initiative of Francis consists precisely in the fact that it is the first time a pope has claimed on his own and put himself at the helm of such a radically secularized global educational pact. because in reality a ‘new humanism’ without Christ is not an original, but a constant in the thought of the West of the last two centuries.” And Magister cites extensive passages of a chapter of a book – also referenced by Prof. Mahoney – in which the late Cardinal Giacomo Biffi “took up the account of the Antichrist written in 1900 by the Russian theologian and philosopher (Soloviev) and applied it to the Church of today.” And in his wonderfully “brief and blunt” article “The Amazon Synod is a Sign of the Times” 2) Douglas Farrow, referring to the recent synod, states:
“The kairos, the culture of encounter, being lauded in the Pan-Amazon Synod is a Bergoglian kairos and culture. The church “called to be ever more synodal,” to be “made flesh” and “incarnated” in existing cultures, is a Bergoglian church. And this church, not to put too fine a point on it, is not the Catholic Church. It is a false church. It is a self-divinizing church. It is an antichristic church, a substitute for the Word-made-flesh to whom the Catholic Church actually belongs and to whom, as Cardinal Müller insists, it must always give witness if it means to be the Church.”
We can only emphatically agree that although we may not yet be at the point of encountering the personal Antichrist, today’s Church and society are most definitely “antichristic.” Although I do not agree with some of his conclusions, nevertheless Prof. Mahoney has done us a service by opening more people’s eyes to the gravity of this crisis.
- “Everyone to the School of the Antichrist: but One Cardinal Rebels”http://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2019/09/19/everyone-to-the-school-of-the-antichrist-but-one-cardinal-rebels/
- https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/10/the-amazon-synod-is-a-sign-of-the-times
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