Friday, August 9, 2013

And then the UNTHINKABLE happens...

The Episcopal "Church" USA is (once again) "enriching" its liturgical books by adding all sorts of people to its liturgical calendar, including Frederick Douglas, Cardinal Newman, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Teilhard de Chardin, Thurgood Marshall, Nicholas Copernicus, John Calvin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, J.S. Bach, Charles de Foucauld, and Pope John XXIII. You can read all about it here:

http://www.diobeth.org/Customer-Content/WWW/CMS/files/How_We_Serve/Worship/HolyWomenHolyMen-1.pdf

But the strangest addition is by far G.K. Chesterton, to be commemorated June 13th. I think we can safely assume that if Gilbert were alive today, he would have satirized the malfeasance of many Episcopal clergy, including "Bishop" Schori, and exposed them to public ridicule; nevertheless, in the Augustinian spirit of "gold out of Egypt," let us consider the collect proposed for our dear Gilbert:
O God of earth and altar, who didst give G. K. Chesterton a ready tongue and pen, and inspired him to use them in thy service: Mercifully grant that we may be inspired to witness cheerfully to the hope that is in us; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (p. 425 of the pdf)

Yours Truly proposes that we turn such liturgical revisionism to an happy issue thus:

O God of earth and altar, who didst give thy servant Gilbert Keith Chesterton a ready wit, a caustic tongue, and a nimble pen, to the extirpation of error and the infatuation of the vain: Mercifully grant that by his prayers and merits we may be inspired to witness cheerfully to the hope that is in us and hear thy laughter in the congregation of the righteous; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, ora pro nobis (and pray for us too)!

1 comment:

Geremia said...

De Chardin? His evolutionism denies original sin!

From a footnote of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange's Essenza e attualità di Tomismo:

"Some teach more or less explicitly that the material world would naturally evolve toward the spiritual, or that likewise the spiritual world would evolve naturally or quasi-naturally toward the supernatural order, as if Baius had been right. The world would be thereby in natural evolution toward the fullness of Christ; it would be in continual progress and hence would not have been able to be in the beginning in the perfect state of original justice followed by a fall, namely, original sin; such evolutionism, which recalls that of Hegel, mutates the substance of dogma itself."