Glory of Rome 2: Hymns Every Catholic Should Know

2. Tantum Ergo Sacramentum

Salus, honor, virtus quoque: sit et benedictio!

Really the last two verses of the larger hymn Pange Lingua Gloriosi, this sublime piece was written by the revered St. Thomas Aquinas, a talented hymnologist as well as theologian. Historically, the complete Pange Lingua hymn is associated most closely with the rites of Maundy Thursday and Corpus Christi. In more modern times, the Tantum Ergo has become a staple of the Roman rite of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Glory of Rome: 5 Latin Hymns Every Catholic Should Know; 1. O Sanctissima

1. O Sanctissima

Mater amata, intemerata: ora, ora pro nobis!

Believed to be a traditional Sicilian mariners folk song, O Sanctissima is most often heard today on Marian feasts. In Germany and Spain, this hymn has become closely associated with Christmastide.

Retrieved August 14, 2012 from http://www.stpeterslist.com/7497/glory-of-rome-5-latin-hymns-every-catholic-should-know/

Hawaii democratic vote on marriage upheld

Court upholds democratic vote on marriage definition

Carolyn Moynihan | 9 Aug 2012 | 

Press release from the Alliance Defending Freedom:
HONOLULU — A federal court Wednesday upheld Hawaii’s definition of marriage as one man and one woman. The court rejected a lawsuit that sought to tear down the state’s law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman and Hawaii’s constitutional amendment that gives the legislature the power to maintain the timeless definition.

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys defended the law and the amendment on behalf of Hawaii Family Forum, which the court allowed to intervene in the case in April.

“This ruling affirms that protecting and strengthening marriage as the union of one man and one woman is legitimate, reasonable, and good for society,” said Legal Counsel Dale Schowengerdt. “The people of Hawaii adopted a constitutional amendment to uphold marriage, and the court rightly concluded that the democratic process shouldn’t be short-circuited by judicial decree.”

The three individuals who filed the suit asked the court to declare the state’s constitutional amendment on marriage and the state’s law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman unconstitutional. The lawsuit also assailed Hawaii’s “civil unions” law, which became effective Jan. 1, arguing that nothing less than a complete redefinition of marriage would be satisfactory.

In its order in Jackson v. Abercrombie, the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii concluded, “Throughout history and societies, marriage has been connected with procreation and childrearing…. It follows that it is not beyond rational speculation to conclude that fundamentally altering the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions might result in undermining the societal understanding of the link between marriage, procreation, and family structure.”

“In this situation,” the court continued, “to suddenly constitutionalize the issue of same-sex marriage ‘would short-circuit’ the legislative actions that have been taking place in Hawaii…. Accordingly, because Hawaii’s marriage laws are rationally related to legitimate government interests, they do not violate the federal Constitution.”

Gov. Neil Abercrombie stated both publicly and in the lawsuit that he would not defend the state’s marriage law. His attacks on the law’s constitutionality prompted Hawaii Family Forum through its Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys and local counsel James Hochberg to ask the court to allow it to intervene in defense of marriage in the state. 

Ethics, Expertise, and the Virtues

A danger of Anthony Esolen's argument in the previous post is that it can be taken to warrant a kind of populist dismissal of authority and excellence.  This is not what Esolen argues, but it is a prevalent trend in modern conservatism, a response to the overwhelming dominance of liberalism in the academy and media.  Because our institutional elites have become so culturally and ethically corrupt and nihilistic, themselves trashing the very idea of standards of excellence, the "populist temptation" - that of throwing out the idea of elites altogether - is particularly strong.

In this post at the Public Discourse poet and essayist Mark Signorelli poses the question like this:

Surely, though, it ought not to take much reflection to recognize how far the rampant egalitarianism of our age is implicated in the corrosion of standards throughout our society—in learning and the arts, in manners and in civil discourse. The refusal to admit any criteria of excellence has simply become a basic fact of our profoundly nihilistic culture, and one of the most obvious causes of its unrivaled degradation. No longer are we willing to recognize, for instance, that Bach was a musician vastly superior to any rock star, or that an education rooted in the reading of Shakespeare and Plato can impart far greater wisdom to a young mind than one rooted in the reading of faddish bestsellers. If conservatism, as a body of thought, has no remedy for such a stark illness, it is hard to see how it can possibly claim our allegiance, or even our interest, any longer. 

How can we subject our present institutional leadership to the kind of harsh criticism it so richly deserves, while retaining our principled belief in the necessity of standards of precedence in our institutional life? 

To answer this question, Signorelli draws on Alasdair MacIntyre's work on the virtues and social practices.  (See especially MacIntyre's After Virtue and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.)

READ THE WHOLE OF SIGNORELLI'S ESSAY HERE.

Anthony Esolen on Expertise and Ethics

AUGUST 2, 2012

Expertise and Ethics

by Anthony Esolen

From Crisis Magazine

One of the more puzzling things about contemporary arguments regarding what things a good or free society ought to allow and what things it ought to forbid is our turn toward the “expert,” the ethicist, the person who has made a professional career of teasing out deductions from moral premises. But what really qualifies such a person to be regarded as a beacon of wisdom? Aristotle famously said that the best way to learn about justice would be to observe a just man. The dictum is not tautological. In the life of a Mother Teresa, for example, we may learn literally countless—that is, not reducible to numbers—lessons in love and magnanimity, whence we may confirm true principles already held, and reveal others whose existence we had not suspected. We would be confronting the just life not as an academic exercise, but as an intensely personal challenge.

....
Who are these medical ethicists who recently have concluded, with wonderful logic, that parents have a right to murder their infant children—and who call it, with telling duplicity, “after-birth abortion?”  We would not turn to Larry Flynt or Hugh Hefner for a definition of decency; why should we turn to these people to advise us on which children we may kill and when? Are they crooked? Why should we follow the crooked, when we want to walk straight? 


READ THE WHOLE ESSAY HERE

Patriotism and Democracy: Why no one would be cheering for Team Europe

Is patriotism a virtue, asks Alasdair MacIntyre, and he argues that, rightly understood, it is.  Roger Scruton argues that the national idea, again rightly understood and distinguished from Enlightenment and 19th century nationalism, is inseparable from and necessary to the liberal democratic state.  Here the English MEP Daniel Hannan takes up the discussion in relation to the Olympics

No one would be cheering for Team Europe

The patriotic emotions stirred up by the Olympics are the basis of real democracy

Patriotism turns out to be a rather underrated quality. In Euro-correct circles, it is sneered at or feared as a prelude to ethnic hatred.  Photo: Paul Grover

By Daniel Hannan

7:41PM BST 01 Aug 2012

It is by the merest chance that we are cheering Team GB this week rather than Team EU. At the 1992 Barcelona Games, the European Commission demanded the creation of a united team that would compete in a blue-and-gold strip, mount the podium to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth and tot up a European tally on the medals table. Fortunately, the scheme broke down in arguments between the EU and the IOC over money, though that didn’t stop the French President, François Hollande, from insisting this week that “it’s the European medals total that counts”.

Only a politician or a Eurocrat could say such a thing. Sporting events are a reminder of the many and complex elements that define nationhood. Listen to the way people employ the pronoun “we”: “We’ve got a decent chance in the sailing”, “How many medals are we on now?” With what significance we freight those two letters. Our emotions are bound up, not only with the performance of our athletes, but also with the mood of our fellow countrymen. We form a nexus of identity – the identity that makes us call ourselves British or Portuguese or Swedish, but not European.  READ MORE

Cardinal George on "Chicago Values"

Recent comments by those who administer our city seem to assume that the city government can decide for everyone what are the “values” that must be held by citizens of Chicago. I was born and raised here, and my understanding of being a Chicagoan never included submitting my value system to the government for approval. Must those whose personal values do not conform to those of the government of the day move from the city? Is the City Council going to set up a “Council Committee on Un-Chicagoan Activities” and call those of us who are suspect to appear before it? I would have argued a few days ago that I believe such a move is, if I can borrow a phrase, “un-Chicagoan.”

The value in question is espousal of “gender-free marriage.” Approval of state-sponsored homosexual unions has very quickly become a litmus test for bigotry; and espousing the understanding of marriage that has prevailed among all peoples throughout human history is now, supposedly, outside the American consensus. Are Americans so exceptional that we are free to define “marriage” (or other institutions we did not invent) at will? What are we re-defining?

 It might be good to put aside any religious teaching and any state laws and start from scratch, from nature itself, when talking about marriage. Marriage existed before Christ called together his first disciples two thousand years ago and well before the United States of America was formed two hundred and thirty six years ago. Neither Church nor state invented marriage, and neither can change its nature.

Marriage exists because human nature comes in two complementary sexes: male and female. The sexual union of a man and woman is called the marital act because the two become physically one in a way that is impossible between two men or two women. Whatever a homosexual union might be or represent, it is not physically marital. Gender is inextricably bound up with physical sexual identity; and “gender-free marriage” is a contradiction in terms, like a square circle.

Both Church and state do, however, have an interest in regulating marriage. It is not that religious marriage is private and civil marriage public; rather, marriage is a public institution in both Church and state. The state regulates marriage to assure stability in society and for the proper protection and raising of the next generation of citizens. The state has a vested interest in knowing who is married and who is not and in fostering good marriages and strong families for the sake of society.

The Church, because Jesus raised the marital union to the level of symbolizing his own union with his Body the Church, has an interest in determining which marital unions are sacramental and which are not. The Church sees married life as a path to sanctity and as the means for raising children in the faith, as citizens of the universal kingdom of God. These are all legitimate interests of both Church and state, but they assume and do not create the nature of marriage.

People who are not Christian or religious at all take for granted that marriage is the union of a man and a woman for the sake of family and, of its nature, for life. The laws of civilizations much older than ours assume this understanding of marriage. This is also what religious leaders of almost all faiths have taught throughout the ages. Jesus affirmed this understanding of marriage when he spoke of “two becoming one flesh” (Mt. 19: 4-6). Was Jesus a bigot? Could Jesus be accepted as a Chicagoan? Would Jesus be more “enlightened” if he had the privilege of living in our society? One is welcome to believe that, of course; but it should not become the official state religion, at least not in a land that still fancies itself free. Surely there must be a way to properly respect people who are gay or lesbian without using civil law to undermine the nature of marriage.

Surely we can find a way not to play off newly invented individual rights to “marriage” against constitutionally protected freedom of religious belief and religious practice. The State’s attempting to redefine marriage has become a defining moment not for marriage, which is what it is, but for our increasingly fragile “civil union” as citizens.

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

Retrieved August 1, 2012 from Catholic Chicago Blog, hosted by the Archdiocese of Chicago