✣ Highlights from the week online
Kicking the national addiction to rage In his column at CatholicPhilly.com, Archbishop Charles Chaput compared recent political debate in America to the film 28 Days Later, in which a “rage virus ... burns through the population like gasoline fire” and leads to social collapse. “We’re not yet tearing at each other with our teeth,” he said. “But the irrational fury on our campuses, in the streets, in our news media ... leads in that direction.” Donald Trump’s behaviour bears some blame, but not all, the archbishop said. Hate is found “not just among white nationalists, immigrant-haters and neo-Nazis, as loathsome as their ideas are, but also among the ‘progressive’ and educated elites”. Anger, he said, is “simultaneously so poisonous, so delicious and so addictive”. “People easily begin to like being angry,” he said. “Wrath feels good.” And America is now “addicted to anger”. Seneca pointed to a cure, the archbishop suggested, when he said that human life “rests upon kindness and concord”. That requires a “holy scepticism about the bad things we hear and see and assume about our perceived enemies”. We should love the Sunday Mass rule At aleteia.com, Katrina Fernandez said that every time she writes about missing Sunday Mass, some protest: “Missing Mass is not a mortal sin!” This is “heartbreaking” – as is the large number of Catholics who miss Sunday Mass – because, she said, it’s in the Ten Commandments: “Remember the Sabbath Day, and keep it holy.” There are circumstances which excuse one from the obligation, but they must be grave: illness or physical impossibility. But, “outstanding circumstances aside, let it be stated for all those with eyes to read: missing Mass actually is a mortal sin”. Those who make light of this truth – which is affirmed in the Catechism – should consider some real-life stories of Sunday observance: the “legless woman in Africa who crawls 2.5 miles to attend Mass”; the priest who “bikes for hours in stifling desert heat to bring the Eucharist to his patiently waiting flock”. These people love Jesus in the Eucharist. “We should be flinging ourselves against the doors of the church to get in, not making excuses for staying home.” Explaining the Faith in the modern world At firstthings.com, Fr Thomas Joseph White OP was interviewed about his new book, The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism. Fr White said that he was trying to address modernity in the way that Blessed John Henry Newman’s Apologia had addressed the questions of his own age. Newman’s book critiqued secular, agnostic liberalism, showing that it is “an implausible intellectual alternative to classical Catholic Christianity.” In so doing, Newman “shows how a tenacious search for the truth can emerge from within the sincerity of a modern individual seeker,” Fr White said.
