Masks of charity?

There is a common theme coming from the mask-fascists declaring that this is a matter of charity. A matter of love toward your neighbor. A matter of coming together and uniting. I am not persuaded by these arguments. I have studied socialist and revolutionary movements to know better. But more precisely, I have studied the teachings of the Church to know better. St. Gregory of Palamas talks about the pagans stating,

"[W]e know that if they [the Hellenic writings] have something beneficial, they have obtained it from us without fully understanding it. On examination, we also understand that they give it a different meaning. And if one of the fathers says the same thing as one of these worldly men [the Hellenists], the similarity is only in words. The meanings are quite different. In fact, according to Paul, the one has the nous of Christ, while at best, the others express human reasoning." (The Triads, Bk. 1, 1.11)

So it is unsurprising to hear so many people talk about love and charity and saving lives but is this really founded in the true charity of divine agape or is it founded in the deficient human reasoning of the gods of chaos? Every revolutionary movement starts off seeking something beneficial. Every revolutionary movement is about uniting people to a common good that is for the benefit of the nation. If I may here cite a reference to the heavy metal band Blind Guardian's album Beyond the Red Mirror. Regardless of whether you think the style of music is evil or not, the storyline shows a group called "The Nine" overthrowing the old order of "The One". Many aspects of the album can seem almost political at times as the first song on the album, "The Ninth Wave" almost appears to be about the rise of an earthly dictatorship. The opening lines of "The Ninth Wave" are as follows:

(We are a nation)

I will cleanse all your thoughts

(We will wipe them out)

Now my children

(For the sake of the nation)

Let us carry on in glory

(We are a nation)

Be my fellowman!

(We will wipe them out)

Let there be light!

(For the sake of the nation)

Precious and bright

(As dark night embraces)

As dark night embraces my mind!

"The Nine" intend to usher in an era of nihilism. They intend to completely destroy the old world. "The One" is a divine figure. "The Nine" boast about how there is no real salvation. There are no gods, no one can save you. But they also go beyond a state of nihilism. It is a state that seeks to make their act of the overthrow of "The One" seem worthy. "The Nihilist rebellion and antitheism responsible for the 'death of God' give rise to the idea of the 'new age': the transformation of man himself into a god." (Fr. Seraphim Rose, Nihilism, 92) And if indeed man is a god, then he must clearly make himself worshiped as a god, no?

And this is the root of the obsession with the pandemic by our media and our political ruling class. It has become blatantly more and more obvious to those in the Resistance that the social controls implemented by our political elites have minimal, if anything, to do with actual health policies. Most of the leaders involved in making these policies have no health experience, failed health experience, or haven't even interacted with the virus on a daily basis. The pandemic has become an obsession to embrace our inner fascists without us even thinking what we've become. We cannot think what we've become because our world has fallen into the abyss. So we repeat mantras that give us the confidence that we are working toward the benefit of the human race when we are actually nose-diving toward its own detriment. We cover up our faces to hide our beauty thinking that we actually hold a godlike power to stop and slow the spread of a virus that escaped from a level 4 lab in China and state this as our "act of love" toward our fellow man.

The modernist heresy is the spiritual error that you are in control of your world. That you can control things in life. That you can control your health. The Christian belief is that these are gifts from God. Every breath of life is a gift he has given to you. Every chance of suffering is for your perfection. But to think you can control a microscopic virus is disillusionment at best, and beyond nihilism at worst. It is the status that you yourself are god and capable of stopping the inevitable from happening upon you. Our political elites sure haven't stopped the spread of any viruses with their dictats, that's for certain. What they have stopped is our love for our fellowman. Our being there for each other. Our being side-by-side with each other. They insist that those who hold these views just want everyone to die from a disease. They are disillusioned by their own anger toward the God who has given them life.

The Christian mission seeks eternity. It is one thing for one to shelter in place voluntarily. That is a noble goal if they truly believe they are doing it to save someone. It is another thing to coerce the rest of society to follow suit. To mandate that society be distanced to such an extent that we now stand tethered by mere threads holding us together and to one-by-one clip them apart from each other separating us from each other. We are "united" under their whims to a common goal but only in a fictional sense. We are separated and broken off from each other. This is where they want us to be. They have not charity.

"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends." (1 Cor. 13:4-8)

If it is a "public duty" to wear a mask in public such that you are threatened with jail time or must end up in court if you aren't wearing one, then your wearing one is not actually an act of charity. It is an act of suffering. Suffering can improve charity so it is put up with but it cannot ever become an act of charity. If love truly endures all things, then it must be able to endure a virus. We are living in a world where our leaders tell us to be charitable and yet their charity cannot endure a virus. Their charity cannot endure all things. Their charity is deficient. Their charity insists on its own way. It is irritable and resentful toward those who seek to challenge it. We must pray for them and know how much we have failed to be charitable in full. We must use the suffering to improve our own charity but it cannot be said that being blindly obedient is ever an act of charity.
 

In defense of Confederate statues

I'm actually talking about all monuments here. Statues, cemeteries, war memorials, etc. Confederate monuments need to be defended, not because of what they stand for people who are revulsed by them but because of what they stand for the people who put them up. As I have written before, a compelling case can be made in support of the Confederate secessionist movement from the Union. Before casting judgments, that article should be read in full because I provided a very well sustained argument for the Confederacy.

People these days talk of "charity" and "love for your neighbor" as if that is the equivalent of "do not offend your neighbor". It is nothing of the sort. It is to be understandable that things we come across will offend us and cause revulsion. Some things will cause revulsion to us throughout our lives. This is part of becoming an adult. It is how we respond. The problem with Confederate monuments is not their existence but the response to their existence.

In the history following the defeat of the Confederacy there was a long and bitter reunification process called "Reconstruction". Reconstruction is almost universally disparaged by American historians. Former Confederate states were held under what was essentially a military occupation which damaged their economic production and held them as essential slaves of the GOP. The period of Reconstruction ended with the heated and contested Presidential election of 1876 as Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden soared in nationwide popularity with nearly 51% of the majority voting for him. His Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, staggered with three points less in the nationwide vote. For a long time 20 electoral votes were contested as Tilden held a 184-165 lead. Back then, 185 was the deciding number. After long and bitter contentions, the electoral votes were given to Hayes with the concessions that Republicans would withdraw military troops.

The period of Reconstruction ended. Then came the Jim Crow laws and with them, the Confederate monuments. While it is easy to connect these statues to a "culture of racism", historians tend to know that people are more complex then what our modernist sensibilities seek to limit to them. For these Southerners, it wasn't simply about an animosity they held toward blacks, it was an animosity they had been fostering from the Reconstruction period toward the Union. The Union were centralizers and oppressors. These statues were put up in protest. But statues were put up, nonetheless.

This is the difference between Black Lives Matter, Anti-fa, and White Southerners. White Southerners have a culture. BLM and Anti-fa are about cultural destruction and annihilation. To White Southerners, these things have strong significant meaning and represents their history of oppression. BLM and Anti-fa have been able to scream that they have victimhood status but they use their victimhood to drag people down to their own inhuman level. They do not build culture or contribute to society. They denigrate and degrade society. The people who put up statues of Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, these are the people who build and contribute to culture. Confederate statues were placed in protest of the Union and they built up a culture and contributed to American culture. The solution to their existence is not to destroy or remove them but to leave them up and add more statues of honorable men.

St. Katherine of Alexandria

The Feast Day of St. Katherine of Alexandria falls on either the 24th or the 25th of November according to region. St. Katherine of Alexandria, with her wisdom surpassing the Emperor converted many to the Faith through her martyrdom. The Emperor grew jealous of her wisdom and ordered 50 of his wise men to put her to shame. Instead, her wisdom surpassed theirs. The Emperor ordered them put to death. Her prayers brought them to full conversion and repentance in their dying moments. In prison, she converted 200 others including the Empress. Her prayers caused the wheel she was being tortured on to break. Frustrated, the Emperor finally beheaded her. She is commonly depicted in iconography with the wheel upon which she was tortured.

The Age of Regress?

We have reached not the age of progress which the liberals once promised to us but the age of regress. I commented to a friend of mine recently that in order to have a liberal democracy dissent must be allowed and permitted. Otherwise, the democracy turns into a dictatorship. But let's clarify further that the term liberal in liberal democracy only qualifies the word democracy. It does not indicate that democracy is inherently a liberal idea. The idea of liberalism has been corrupted ever since the 19th century from the idea of freedom once perpetuated to the idea of democracy. A dictatorship can certainly be just as democratic, if not more. A dictatorship is simply just the logical consequence of collectivism as a result from democracy.

Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his article "Monarchy and War" in The Myth of National Defense places this accusation rather bluntly on democracy. Citing British Prime Minister Disraeli, "[t]he tendency of an advanced civilization is in truth Monarchy. Monarchy is indeed a government which requires a high degree of civilization for its full development. ... An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate of what is called a representative government." (84) Kuehnelt-Leddihn recalls the political nature of the prosecution of Socrates under the Democratic State of Athens. Socrates was placed to death for the corruption of youth. According to Kuehnelt-Leddihn, part of that corruption was the teaching of monarchy (84). But that is not the least part where we see the brutality of democracy unfolding.

It is at the height of the French Revolution, inspired by the American Revolution, to overthrow the monarchy and establish a democratic and equal form of government where we see the full extent of this brutality. Kuehnelt-Leddihn accurately describes the Revolution as "a sadistic sex orgy in which the 'Divine Marquis' played personally and intellectually a leading role." (86-87) We tend to think of the crimes and horrors of the Revolution being an attack on the aristocracy but even the most vicious "sadistic sex orgy, pregnant women...squeezed out in fruit- and winepresses, mothers and their children...slowly roasted to death in bakers' ovens, and women's genitals...filled with gun powder and brought to explosion." (90)

For Robespierre, the goal was not just simply equality, but sameness. Even Goethe considered those who promised both equality and liberty as charlatans  (87). Robespierre not only dreamed of placing the men of France in one uniform and the women of France in another uniform, he also considered church steeples "'undemocratic' since they were taller than other buildings" (87-88). This outright barbarism of the French Revolution led to such a majoritarian rule in that "truth" was relegated to the possession of the majority (88). It is fair to say that Tucker Carlson is a stand-alone journalist who only follows where truth leads him to these days. My own mother hates the idea that only one man could possibly be telling the truth. But truth does not belong to majorities and as more and more people give themselves to demons, the lies usually remain with the majority and the truth belongs to the minority. As Our Lord even states, "broad is the path that leads to destruction, but narrow is the path that leads to eternal life" (Matt. 7:13).

It is no surprise then that Karl Marx's own ideology was drafted from the French Revolution. "Men have often made man himself into the primitive material of money, in the shape of a slave, but they have never done this with land and soil. Such an idea could only arise in a bourgeois society, and one which was already well developed. It dates from the last third of the seventeenth century, and the first attempt to implement the idea on a national scale was made a century later, during the French bourgeois revolution." (Capital, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, Ch. 2) The theories emerging from this Revolution about absolute equality and sameness do seem rather ominous of a certain set of theories emerging today. These theories exist in the form of critical race theory. Class was the focus of the French Revolution. These were why the buildings were "undemocratic". For critical race theorists, democracy is breaking apart because of this absence of equality too. Indeed, critical race theory derives heavily from Marxist thought. Critical theory always attempts to tear down the old structures, according to Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx, 392). There is a never-ending search for a new victim. The working class no longer satisfies so Black Lives Matter finds this in perpetuating a myth about extant racism in cops and then other ideas follow suit whether it is in queer theory to attack sexual normativities or in the invented concepts of "white privilege". This is cultural Marxism.

As we move further and further away from hierarchical structures, we move further and further away from a monarchial view of the family in nature, and as such in governance. We move further and further away from nature as a result. We grow the power of the government as a consequence. We become blood-thirsty for power. As Søren Kierkegaard noted, "Is it tyranny when one wants to rule leaving the rest of us others out? No, but it is tyranny when all want to rule." (in Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, 487). The turning point for modern culture was indeed with World War I. It started as an old-fashioned territorial dispute which blossomed into a battle to defend democracy as the United States entered in 1917. "When in March 1917 the U.S.-allied Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and a new democratic-republican government was established in Russia under Kerensky, [Woodrow] Wilson was elated. With the Czar gone, the war had finally become a purely ideological conflict: of good against evil." (Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, x). Everything Austria represented was inherently wicked to the American Left according to Kuehnelt-Leddihn. It "inhereited many traditions of the Holy Roman Empire (double-headed eagle, black-gold colors, etc.); it had led the Counter-Reformation, headed by the Holy Alliance, fought against the Risorgimento, suppressed the Magyar rebellion under Kossuth..., and had morally supported the monarchial experiment in Mexico." (x)

Church steeples weren't just simply undemocratic to Robespierre, no. Church steeples were a sign of a monarchial culture. Thus, the age of regress naturally makes enemies with the Church and with Monarchisms throughout. For democracies, there is no greater enemy than the Church. The Church is the prize to corrupt. The Church is the prize to destroy. The Church has the greatest bounty on its head for all democracies. Is it any wonder that the Great War only became ideological upon the abdication of the Czar? Is it any wonder that Marx held religion as the opium of the masses and an obstacle to his Communist philosophy? Is it any wonder that Robespierre held the steeples as being built too high and as a subsequent obstacle to his regime of "equality"? We are in an era of regress. An era given over to a cult of demons. We should conclude here with the Bl. Alcuin, "Neither should we listen to those who say, 'The voice of the people is the voice of God,' for the tumultuousness of the masses is always closer to insanity!"

The Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple

Today, we celebrate and honor the Feast Day of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple. She is the Queen of all Heaven and the Bride of God. This feast day commemorates Sts. Joachim and Anna presenting her into the Temple of God as dedication much as St. Hannah presented the Prophet Samuel into the Temple. There is strong typology in the stories here. St. Hannah is a prefigurement of St. Anna. Both share the same name (Hannah in Greek is Anna), both women were barren, and both presented their children to God in the Temple from a young age.

The Irmos for the day reads:

"Seeing the entrance of the pure one, angels marvelled in wonder how the Virgin could enter the holy of holies. Let no hand of the profane touch God's living ark, but instead let the lips of those who are believers sing out ceaselessly in the words of the angel, crying out with great joy to the Mother of God: O pure Virgin, you are truly higher than all."

Knowing her future role as the one who would bear the Christ, the incarnate God, she ascended into the Holy of Holies, the place which in the Old Testament was reserved for only the priests and the Ark of the Covenant, and showed herself to be the Ark of the New Covenant. It is for this reason she is rightly given the title Ark of the Covenant for she has born God. The old Ark of the Covenant held God's presence in it but she has held God's flesh in her womb. What joy for us all to hold her as our Queen!

Because of the emphasis on the Ever-Virgin being the Ark of the Covenant, Easterners have also held the tradition that even after the birth of Christ St. Joseph felt himself unworthy to ever touch her and indeed did not out of the utmost fear and reverence for what had happened. This is why in our iconography we hold it inappropriate to depict the Holy Family together as Latins take liberty to do but only depicting the Christ-Child with his Mother in the image of the Directress.

God bless and happy feast day!

Joseph "Stalin" Robinette Abiden (Whose Name in Greek is Apollyon), Jr. is scoring more Mussolinis than Trump

During Trump's presidency, the Washington Post has basically kept a track list of times that Trump was allegedly "fascist". The man has personality deficiencies, this is obvious. But he's hardly a Mussolini. That said, let's examine that particular Washington Post article and compare it to the incoming Biden regime. It certainly may not seem like a lot but there is much in there to be horrified about coming into the year of 2021 and beyond. Those who opposed Trump because they thought they thought they were opposing a fascist are soon to realize that they elected a Communist.

Hyper-Nationalism

Nationalism can take on many different forms. It can be rooted in the ethnos or in the class or in the citizenship. "The methodical suppression of all dissent and criticism by modern dictators is the result of their nervousness towards public opinion" (von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality, 53). We can actually see a lot of this going on. Obviously, Biden's nationalism is more rooted in citizenship to the nation than Trump's nationalism, but it is still extant. Soon after "the Media" declared Biden the winner of the election, he actually created an "office of the 'President-elect'" taking full power, called for unity with his ideology, and demanded people accept him as 'President-elect' even in the midst of suspicious circumstances regarding how votes were being counted. For a dictatorship, you aren't allowed to ask relevant questions. This is an attack on "our sacred institutions". Notice how Biden even talks. There won't be room for dissenters in his regime. Alexandria Occasio-Cortez wants to keep lists of "Trump-enablers" and there are already "Trump Accountability" organizations emerging. This is a frightening system of collectivism Biden is bringing. This is to absorb people into one mind. "Obey!"

Militarism

There is a firm distinction between fighting a defensive war and fighting a war of expansion. Trump wanted to use the Department of Defense for exactly what it was meant. Defending. The past neo-conservative administrations, from Reagan-Obama, had used the Department of Defense for creating expansionist policies throughout Europe and the Middle East. Biden intends to bring a stronger militaristic style to the table. His foreign policy team will more than likely consist of Obama admin officials. Middle Easterners know they're screwed twice over with Biden. His intention is to establish "strength". Trump was "weak" is the typical neo-conservative anathema of a man who wants to end wars. Biden is "strong" because he'll assist the Kurds and continue the neo-conservative effort of building toward a forever global democracy.

Glorification of violence and readiness to use it in politics

While we haven't seen Biden using violence yet, you can bet there will be an "any means necessary" approach to establishing his will. If he people denounce his legitimacy, they will certainly be "re-educated". One wonders what that could mean. We already know his own attachment to neo-conservatism and his past history as Vice President serving under Obama while he contentedly allowed dropping bombs on weddings and the killings of innocent civilians. We also know his blood-lust to repeal the Hyde Amendment and work toward allowing late term abortion and cementing Roe v. Wade into law. If they can kill an infant, they can kill any one.

Fetishization of Youth

Biden's Vice President wants people as young as age 16 to be able to vote. What makes us think he'll disagree?

Leader cult

Immediately following the announcement of the media and even before the certification of any results, Biden established the "Office of the 'President-elect'". It's every bit as fictional as his election victory of course, but who's watching? He demands everyone submit to him, accept the results despite the legitimate questions concerning how ballots were counted and ignoring all of the voter fraud affidavits as the ballots are being counted. This kind of talk isn't allowed as it's the "attack on our sacred institutions". You'll notice how Biden-supporters are talking like this concerning politics. That to dissent from Biden, to criticize democracy, to throw skepticism at the way the process is being handled, it's either emanating from the "Narcissist in the White House" or it's a "direct attack on our sacred institutions". They have made these institutions "sacred" because that is their religion. Their god is the State. Their established cult is the State. Biden may not have the personality of Trump, but people love Biden. They adore his demeanor, they admire his triumphs, they adore the man he is. He is innocent and pure to them. But looks are deceiving.

Lost-golden-age-syndrome

For Trump it was the era of liberty. The era of freedom to dissent from the status quo. The freedom to question the things your government did. For Biden that era is the era of neo-conservativism. The era to form mass alliances and trade agreements on a global scale to usher in world-wide democracy. The era of bipartisanship in politics when Republicans and Democrats just went along with the plan.

Self-defined opposition

The Washington Post article looks at it from the racial perspective because fascism and nationalism to them are all about race. As addressed earlier, they can cover a wide variety of things. For Biden, the national ethos revolves around citizenship. His "self-defined opposition" are those who "attack our sacred institutions". Those "anti-democrats" who demand to know how the votes were counted. Those "racists" who voted for Trump. Those "dregs of society". "White supremacists" are what they are called sometimes. "Deplorables" is what Hillary Clinton called them. He defines his opposition as those who go against his vision of the State. Those who resist "Obama's legacy".

Mass mobilization and mass party

While Biden didn't form them, he has inherited a coalition of riotous freaks in the ranks of Black Lives Matter and Anti-fa who will do anything and will use force if necessary to silence opposition. Capitalists, "racists", "white supremacists", "offensive speech", etc. These groups endorse him. They go after Republicans and "enemies of the Democratic Party".

Hierarchical party structure and tendency to purge the disloyal

We'll have to ultimately see what Biden does to Black Lives Matter and Anti-fa. These will certainly be the ones that he purges first. Richard Spencer is actually onto something here though. We hear Biden even taking a different tone with the police. He knows it is the police he is going to command, not Black Lives Matter or Anti-fa.

Theatricality

We have seen the theatrics of his hiding in the basement and then going out and wearing a mask as he gathers people around the cause to fight the "pandemic of COVID-19". The theatrics are necessary to unite people to a cause. When people are united to a cause, they can be controlled much easier. We have seen it in small portions from Democratic governors. Lock yourself indoors, social distance, wear a mask, and if you don't, you're killing someone. Never mind the lack of evidence for it. This is so they can control you. It's all mere theatrics. "Look at how good I am! I wear a mask while riding a bicycle!"

Chaotic Administration

The Vice President he has declared him a rapist. He will have a man who shut down a large percentage of abortion clinics in Ohio in his administration, more than likely even as he wants to expand abortion rights. What more can be said?

Information and media policy

Biden decries information getting to the public. We saw it when the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop were released to the public. The media is far more supportive of Biden though than it is Trump. They agree with his policies so they go out of their way to protect him. The media is effectively a state media. When Obama was in the White House, Fox News was regularly disregarded from asking questions. Not the case with Trump who routinely fielded questions from all varieties of media sources. If Biden's cronies in the media shut down an article from The New York Post, what other sources will they shut down?

Consolidation of Power

One would have to see where this is going but we may never end up with resistance to the Neo-conservatism ever again. Not from the populist left or the populist right. Already, Biden supporters are calling for Trump accountability re-education camps and other means to re-educate former Trump supporters. That's third-world style garbage there. One wonders what Biden will do especially when he hasn't spoken against his supporters.

Pecuniary and institutional corruption

Well we know that Biden demanded the Ukrainian lawyer investigating his son get off the the case or he would revoke money from the Ukraine. We know that Biden does things he has investigated his political opponents for. We also know that he was deeply involved with the FBI investigation that explored "Russia collusion" and the false pretenses it was based on. He will use that power to go after his political opponents. That's why a former CIA official is calling on people questioning election results right now to be archived in a database.

Economic policy

While fascists are more belligerent, communists tend to institutionalize and take away private property. Biden will be on board with the globalist "Great Reset". "You will have no private property, and you will be happy." This is in direct contradiction to the Catholic social doctrine contained in Rerum Novarum. Private property is a fundamental right to happiness and the worker's earning. For Biden, all belongs to none. That is why he has never condemned his ally freaks in Black Lives Matter or Anti-fa.

Foreign policy

According to the Washington Post, fascists disdained alliances except with one another. That is the neo-conservative goal. Build democracies across the world. Form alliances with democracies. Promote democracies. Scorn all other forms of government as broken. If someone attacks democracy, they are attacking "our sacred institutions".

Cultural policy

Biden's cultural policy is antithetical to fascism but has similarities. I have heard it put recently, "the left wing and the right wing belong to the same bird". Biden's cultural policy is left-wing socialism. It is communism. It is the destruction of cultural monuments deemed "offensive". The erasure of history. He attempts to sway toward the Catholic Church as he professes to be one in spite of being an archheretick. He uses dupes in the Catholic Church to convince the religious-minded of the "good-nature" of his agenda. They've been erasing the liturgy so it seems fitting they'd coincide with his agenda.

Racial policy

The Washington Post looks at this because their understanding of communism and fascism are deficient. One can be a fascist and yet not a racist. One can be a communist and a racist. The goal is to move people toward a specific uniting front that makes them easier to control. Easier to herd together. Before you lock a fence around them and never let them escape. This is communism.

Biden and Camradala are already off to the most vicious start in terms of forming the most communist geo-political structure in world history. It might be even worse than Stalin. It might be worse than Stalin because Stalin had usurped power from the Tsar. This totalitarianism has been in the making from a "soft totalitarianism" for ages.

Catholic, orthodox, and the meaning of words

I was going to write a response to Mrs. Hoff's post about ecclesiology but instead, I think the better thing to do is write a response based on the meaning of words. It's rather confusing to understand her thought-process because for starters, so if I have misrepresented her at all, I would hope she would clarify. But what exactly does it mean to be Catholic and what exactly does it mean to be catholic? I certainly have no qualms about the ecclesiology laid out by Hooker. I mentioned in the comments how Hooker, had he been writing as a Catholic and making those statements about Anglicanism, would have actually been quite orthodox actually! To which, of course, it is protested by this Anglican blogger that she is Catholic.

"Hooker is writing as a Catholic because the Church of England is a Catholic Church. You are stuck in the narrow minded view that Rome alone has the power to do this. This is a view not accepted by anyone who is not a member of the Roman Church."

And herein comes to the question of definitions. I am not saying that Hooker is not a catholic or that the Church of England is not catholic. Indeed, as adherents to Nicaea, all Christians must affirm themselves as catholics or the creed makes no sense! What I am saying is that the Church of England is not Catholic. I touch on this as well in my post on the concept that comes up a lot in the East of being Orthodox in communion with Rome. The way that terms developed in the history of the Church, the Latins typically ended up using the term "Catholicos" to describe the Church and the Greeks used the term "Orthodox" to describe the Church. Until the schism, this implied no separation. Both referred to the same Church. When the schism occurred, so did confusion in terminology.

Even before the Great Schism of 1054 A.D., there was another schism between the monophysites and the Orthodox. Those Christians, ironically, also refer to themselves as Orthodox and are commonly known today as Oriental Orthodox. Of course both the Byzantine Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox have different conceptions of what Orthodoxy is and it is perhaps every bit as confusing and puzzling to them to see these terms used like this. I pointed out, when asked by two of the deacon's daughters as to whether I was "Orthodox Catholic or Roman Catholic", how meaningless the term "Orthodox Catholic" is. Because all Catholics are certainly orthodox! Or one would hope. A Roman Catholic is every much as "Orthodox in communion with Rome" as I am!

Another analogy I can draw is when my friend heard me refer to my godmother as the "Crazy Church Lady". He protested that there were quite a number of such crazy church ladies to which my godmother insisted, "I am THE Crazy Church Lady!" Certainly the presbytera is a crazy church lady, and so is my friend's wife, maybe one of our deaconesses, etc. But overall, THE Crazy Church Lady is only one person. She is The True Crazy Church Lady. Maybe there is an essence of craziness belonging in other crazy church ladies but there is only One Crazy Church Lady.

If we are asking precisely from an Anglican perspective of what catholicity implies, there does bear fundamental differences between itself and the Catholic Church. As a High Anglican, I never referred myself as a Protestant unless it was in the context of communicating with Catholics for the sake of clarity. Being that as the Anglican Church broke away from the Catholic Church in the protest movement against the Papacy, the term "Protestant" is definitionally sound and meaningful. But in the sense that a high view of the sacraments is held, that the Eucharist is central to the Church, sacrament over word, our conceptions of tradition and scripture, the Anglican Church is quite catholic. It is via media between Rome and Protestantism, in a sense. Another one I had heard as an Anglican was "Catholic but Reformed". In the same sense, Lutheranism is also quite catholic. But from a Catholic perspective, while these hold an essence of the Church in them by their baptism, they are not The Catholic Church.

So there we have the divergency of terminology. Of course the Church is "narrow-minded" on this issue. She has declared herself Holy Mother Church, the Church of all the Faithful. If she does not hold an exclusive view, then why bother with even claiming to be Holy Mother Church? But I wonder if Mrs. Hoff would hold herself to be Orthodox if she entered into conversation with an Orthodox Christian about this topic? Certainly, she is entitled to. But again, the terminology is what needs to be defined. An Anglican is not in communion with Constantinople, nor do they share unite with a monophysite church. Thus, it is understandable that an Orthodox Christian would also seek to clarify that what an Anglican is, is orthodox.

And in the sense in which Anglicanism deviates from Tradition, the Catholic and Orthodox alike would deem those deviations heresy and thus, both orthodox and catholic claims end up flattening. From a Protestant perspective, an Anglican is quite catholic, maybe even Catholic. But from the Catholic and Orthodox perspective, it depends on the sacraments, namely that of baptism. Anglican baptism is valid so Anglicans would be catholics by virtue of baptism but they are unconfirmed, so they cannot be Catholic. This is really just a semantic war that Mrs. Hoff is engaging in here.