A Sip of Calviccino

Your gentle commentator J. Grump had not darkened the doors of Café Preténse for many months. His free time had been occupied with familial concerns, which included the reading of Protestant dogmatics for proselytization purposes. This particular Saturday saw a lull in the glossing of Reformation ramblings, and he made his way to the old caffeinating hole for a bit of creative writing. The clientele was hipster and millennial as usual, and your pious provocateur noticed that the café’s prices had been hiked during his absence.

“The cost of being pretentious,” I mumbled to myself as I sipped an admittedly subtle cappuccino.

I had left my wife at home to spend the morning with friends, and she told me not to return until I had finished the first draft of a poem. My mind wandered from the rhyming dictionary and I began people-watching. I recognized a minor local Catholic celebrity a few tables down. He had gained a following with his polemic podcast and was talking to someone whose back was turned to me. I thought at first it must be a fan, but then I saw the familiar tail sprawling out behind the chair, and my back stiffened.

The composition of verse suddenly became very engaging, and I hoped to go unnoticed. I had scratched out three lines of doggerel before the horned devil stopped short on his way out the door.

“Why,” he said, “if it isn’t my old friend Mr. Grump!”

I looked up from my notebook with a weary look.

“Hello, Wormwood.”

“Mind if I sit for a moment?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.” He made himself comfortable. “So. What is new in the world of you? Which fresh annoyances are making your life difficult these days?”

“I’m sure you already know. What is new in the distillery?”

“Bother, that old thing. Never get into the family business, I always say. Nothing but complaints from the lowerdowns about the decrease in quality, but I have been able to successfully market Wormwood’s Abyss to the lesser devil-class. What we lack in prestige we make up for in volume, but the damned aristocrats are pushing for a more refined small batch. Recruiting great human souls for such a spirited end is extraordinarily difficult.”

“Is that why you were talking to Prof. Podcaster over there?”

“Indeed.” The devil removed his hat and scratched his horns in consternation. “Perhaps one day I’ll snag him, but he’s a crafty one. Your parish of Tradistanis has a few men and women of potential greatness, but I fear the quality of preaching has plateaued their development.”

“How so?”

He shrugged. “Those priests are trained to expound repetitively about the same spiritual habits. It’s more than the fluff that normal diocesan priests splutter out to their sleepy flocks, but not enough to raise up greatness. The virtues they promote require only a little thought, and souls with undeveloped minds and wills cannot commit great sins. I swear to Styx, I am so tired of tempting people to indulge in phantasmal luxuries.”

“Perhaps a simple and humble faith are what people need,” I said. “Who am I to despise anyone for their weird devotions and clinging to scapulars? I expect the Virgin Mary smiles more on them than on me, sometimes.”

The devil traced an inverted pentagram over his chest in a spasm of superstition at the mention of that name.

“Well, I had hoped for better from you.”

“Oh?”

“Vainglory is not the greatest of sins, but it is not a minor one. Encouraging people to look down on their fellow-man can be a stepping stone to bigger things.”

“Happy to disappoint you, I suppose. Don’t you worry that you’re telling me too much about your plans?”

“Oh. No, we’ll think of something else to do with you. Speaking of which, how’s the extracurricular reading coming along?”

“The Protestant theology of Dr. H? Slower than I had hoped. I would like to be done with it sooner rather than later. I don’t know what is more difficult, reading the blasted book or writing the commentary I promised my family. At least they’re engaging with me on something of substance. Family gatherings where everybody just ignores that I and my wife are the only Catholics in the room were getting so very old.”

“If you want my advice, be sure to respond in fine detail to all of that Calvinist’s arguments. That’s the only way to undo the wily wickedness of old Dr. H.”

“I cannot help but notice your twitching tail.”

“Don’t mind that. Have I ever told you of Dr. H’s arrival in the infernal realms? He lived to see the end of the Great War—one of the causes of the current dearth of greatness, by the way—and spent his last years in worry and doubt over the logic of the Modernists, not over the possibility of Papism. It was not hard to keep him distracted. You’ve seen clearly enough how he responded to those secular intellects with careful reason but to Rome with wrath, and then he added the usual Calvinist corruption of the divine character on top of that. Defamation of the Enemy and willful ignorance make for a fine vintage in the winepress of Dis. In fact, I believe there is a plan to open that particular bottle on the centennial of his death. The look on his face when he arrived…”

At that the wormy devil became lost in a reverie. I glanced down at my notebook and realized I could improve the rhythm of the second line. My scribblings interrupted the other’s thoughts and he packed himself up to go.

“See you on Sunday,” he said. “I need to see how our sermon plans are coming along.” I waved him out.

“Now,” I thought aloud, “what rhymes with ‘absinthe’?”

Sympathy for the Devil

“You drank the port?” His Traddiness’ eyes widened as the truth sank in. “All of it?”

“I didn’t think you’d miss it,” was my reply. “You entirely forgot about the bottle of F—.”

“You drank that? I’m never leaving a bottle at your house again!”

“Fine, I’ll buy the next bottle of Chartreuse.”

“Darn straight you will!”

“It will be the yellow one, though.”

"What?" His Traddiness snapped.

The little lady sniffed at us and rolled her eyes. The three of us were sitting on the outside patio of Café Preténse, enjoying the last warm spurts of autumn before Texas decided to welcome Old Man Winter.

“You know, Rad,” she said, “you could just buy cheaper wine.”

We both watched as His Traddiness’ face turned a few shades of wine-dark, and laughed through a brief chill wind. I turned towards her and admired the frothy latte that sat so smugly superior to the tea on the other side of the table. I decided to defuse the situation with another bomb.

“Did you hear the most recent about Fr. Facile?”

“No, what did that little pipsqueak do now?”

“Apparently he’s been doubling down on his pseudo-mercy talk. He’s gone almost Full Kasper in his Sunday sermons. The Church is changing, didn’t you know? We are now welcoming the perverts and the homewreckers without exception. Anyone who’s not on board is going to fall behind the March of History.”

“Oh, joy.”

“I wonder how soon before he comes out?”

“Of which closet?”

“Hard to say. Heaven save us from the wicked clerics. You know, I was accosted by a fellow parishioner at Tradistan the other day about needing to pray for our wicked leaders.”

“Not a bad idea,” chimed in the little lady.

“Sure. But mostly I pray for their destruction. That seems like a worthy cause.”

“Not their conversion?” she asked sweetly.

“I suppose I must,” I admitted. “But I draw the line at praying for the repose of the souls of those who died as public enemies of all that is good and holy. This is November, the month we’re supposed to pray for the faithful departed. I don’t feel the need to pray for the faithless.”

“What’s got that bugaboo up your posterior?” asked His Traddiness.

“The lady and I knew a fellow who went to a local Catholic university. By all accounts he was quite the academic and literary modernist, although I know nothing in particular about his spiritual life. He had a young wife, a very young daughter, and another child on the way. He murdered himself in the middle of the night about a year ago.”

“Wow.”

“The worst of it, though, is the sympathy and nostalgia surrounding the whole ordeal. All of his close friends are heartbroken, of course, but they insist on not thinking badly of him. It took me weeks of sorting through Facebook comments to even get a hint that he had taken his own life.”

“To do that to a wife and child!”

“Exactly the point. I don’t deny that he may have had some psychological problems, but surely they cannot have rendered him invincible to the demands of familial justice, nor to the tugging on the heart by the ladies in his life. All his friends say that he doted on his daughter, but I suppose not enough.”

“Remember what Pius the Third said in response to a request that a Requiem Mass be said for the repose of his predecessor, Alexander the Sixth?”

“What’s that?”

“‘It is blasphemous to pray for the damned.’”

Just then a familiar vintner of damned souls walked out of the front door, saw us, and waved.

“How goes the quest to eliminate lukewarmness?” the devil asked, with a tip of his hat to the lady. His horns showed for a moment.

“Making progress one good drink at a time.” I raised mine. “To your utter failure.”

He smiled toothily and walked to his car. I was disappointed to see that it did not sport a darkly humorous customized license plate.

“That wormy bastard wouldn’t know good taste if it hit him in the face,” mused His Traddiness. “Based on the financials going back and forth in his emails, he could easily afford a Rolls but, like most evil men, prefers a Mercedes.” The devil put-putted away in a cloud of noxious green exhaust.

“I wonder sometimes if I should pray for all my ancestors who died outside of the Church,” I said once the fumes had cleared. “A lot of them were Protestants who hated Catholicism. Quite a few others were staunchly non-religious their whole lives. The New-Springtimers say that charity demands prayers for all the dead, except at their funeral Masses, but I have to wonder. Isn’t it reasonable just to assume that those who die in manifest sin are damned, and to cover your bases by praying regularly for all the poor souls? At least that way everyone who can be covered is covered.”

“Wouldn’t you want someone to pray for your soul in particular,” asked the lady, “even if you seemed to die in evil circumstances?”

“It would be nice, but at the expense of public scandal? Perhaps not! In that case I might have to satisfy myself with the scraps that are tossed out commonly to all the purging souls. Better to be in Purgatory and buried in unconsecrated ground than in Hell and buried behind the rectory. In any case, I’ll be planning in my will for private Masses to be said for my soul by some helpful religious orders.”

“You’d better hope those orders hold up their end of the bargain,” she said. “Lots of them are simply dropping all the old charges they held for praying for the dead.”

“That’s a sobering thought. I’d better die in some saintly way! Perhaps the martyrdoms will begin soon, and I can get that done and over with.” She sniffed again at that.

His Traddiness sipped the rest of his tea and began to recite from memory, “In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.”

“And may the devil get his due,” I added.

“Amen.”

Great and Holy Thursday: Usque ad Mortem Obediens Factum

Usque ad mortem obediens factum—"obedient unto death," words constantly repeated in the Divine Office today and tomorrow.

There are two ideas that catch our attention today: (1) a sadness over the impending loss of a loved one, the One and (2) the choice of accepting what Christ offers us.

First, the sense of loss is one made in the Roman rite through subtlety, something not well known in the Eastern rites, where dramatic and symbolic gestures dominate the liturgy. At Tenebrae, Mattins and Lauds sung in a progressively darker setting the night before the particular day, we sang the ferial psalms with three sets of lessons. The first set of lessons, taken from the Lamentation of the Prophet Jeremias, begins with the words Quomodo sedet sola civitas, "How sits the lonely city." The Lamentation is full of morose imagery: widows, weeping, tears, gates broken, and "remembering the days of her affliction" (lesson 2). The Prophet is staring at the great city of Jerusalem, where God's chosen people lived, in utter desolation some time after being sacked in the sixth century before Christ, a tragedy which saw the Temple of Solomon destroyed.

At the time of the Last Supper the Crucifixion had not yet taken taken place, but two millennia later It has, and we can look back to it it with the same same fascinated macabre through which Jeremias looked at the "lonely city." More importantly, Jerusalem was not a city with a temple. It was a temple with a city attached to it. Everything about Jerusalem revolved around the temple and the promises God made to the Jews through it. Similarly, Christ likens Himself to a temple, which he challenges the Jewish priests to destroy and which He will rebuild within three days (John ch. 2).

At Mass the finest vestments are worn and the altar is prepared as it would be for the greatest of feasts. The Gloria is sung de tempore for the first time since in two months, with organ and bells blaring. It is  a time for celebration and for joy. Yet, the organ stops and is not heard again. The word "alleluia" is still absent and the Gloria Patri.... ("Glory be to the Father....") prayer is missing from the Mass. What a quiet contrast. If I may be crude, I think of the initial joy followed by liturgical starkness as representative a great party for a friend who you love, but may never see again. You want to sing, dance, eat, and cry with this person, yet your heart and mind still cannot be satisfied because you know your friend will be gone in a few hours and you have no control over his fate. That friend is our Lord today.

The second theme of the day is accepting what Christ gave us. Many in our Roman tradition emphasize the ordination of the Apostles, though the "form" throws the Thomists a real curve, or the institution of the Eucharist. Yet, reading St. John's Gospel from chapter 12 until the Passion begins, one cannot help but notice everything is one continuous discourse. After washing the feet of the Apostles Christ tells them that His commission and His commandment for them is love of one another. He continues to clarify that He is of His Father, and that only through Him and His love will anyone see His Father. The Apostles are humanly confused at the moment, but our Lord promises them the "Paraclete," the Comforter, who will illuminate them and preserve them in Truth at the appropriate time. Yet by the time Jesus says these things Judas has gone, being told "What you must do, do quickly." The Apostles cannot fully understand what is transpiring before them. My own poorly-formed opinion is that their sins and lack of grace impedes them from seeing Christ as He truly is. Yet, Jesus allows them to hear His entire message that night and prays to His Father in heaven for unity among them.

Judas does not hear the message. Is he included in our Lord's prayer? It is unclear.

Caravaggio's Betrayal of Christ

Judas is a case study is turning away from God and losing one's soul to the abyss. We find intimations in the Gospel that Judas had an eye for money, accosting the sinful woman for pouring valuable perfume on Christ's feet (John ch. 12). Perhaps he thought he could start a revolution. Perhaps he was disappointed in the sort of Messiah Jesus was. Perhaps he was simply greedy. Either way, Judas did not lose his soul in any one instant. It was a gradual decay of his faith in Christ. Yet our Lord allows this betrayer to eat at His table and partake in Holy Communion. How welcome are we to approach then! How kind God is! Yet, we must be careful with this kindness and approach it worthily, as Judas also illustrates the compounding effect of sin wrought by an unworthy communion.

For his sins, although He knew Christ in a more human way than anyone who has lived since 33 AD, Judas was excluded from Christ's discourse on union with His Father, on love, and on the comfort God grants. Judas removed himself from all these things.

We cannot gerrymander with God. We must accept what Christ offers us, everything, even if His message, His commands, His actions, and His precepts for living discomfort us, as they should. Judas tried to pick and chose what of Christ he wanted, mainly a miracle-worker who would eventuate some desired effect. But this is wrong, both for Judas and for us.

Christ's love is so complete and so perfect that we lose our souls by not embracing it when it is offered to us. Take it, all of it. Much like the Eucharist....