In our obsession with worldly standards
of success, we forget
the message of the littleness of the Gospel. By Fr. Alvaro Delgado  We learn from the Church’s sacred Tradition and the Scriptures the sublime role the priest plays as a steward of God’s mysteries in the vineyard of the Lord, responsible for bringing the Good News of salvation to God’s holy people. Through the grace of his ordination, the priest partakes of the riches of Jesus Christ in immeasurable and unspeakable ways, and shares those riches freely with the flock entrusted to his care.
He earns none of these holy favors, he merits nothing of what he shares. His is a sublime and supernatural task that no priest is capable of carrying out without divine help and intervention at every step of this mysterious mission. It is God—in his Holy Spirit—working in and through the priest who brings this work to fruition. This supernatural mission is carried out not on the clouds of heaven but in the trenches of the world. So it is that the priest in the western world engages in a sort of spiritual tug-of-war, battling the temptation to measure his priestly calling by the standards of the world, not divine standards. He reels under the pressure to achieve something tangible on the world’s stage, something he can feel, see and touch. Something he can show the whole world, something the world will appreciate and applaud. It’s a concept of worth greatly influenced by the Protestant work ethic, which to great extent measures success by the external signs of wealth, achievement and production. Under this ethic, the external manifestations of success become signs of God’s favor bestowed on the believer. The modern priest—along with modern man—is beset with the ongoing temptation to justify himself before God and man. To justify his existence, so to speak, by what he does and what he accomplishes. To live out of fear that he is not meeting certain preconceived expectations of worldly success.
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The St. Noël Chabanel Responsorial Psalm Project exists
as a remedy for the problematic musical
settings that often destroy a prayerful mood at Mass.
By Jeff Ostrowski
 “The Chabanel Psalms are not only great music; they use a revolutionary form of distribution, both in terms of zero price and universal availability. In fact, the day the site went live, I knew I was looking at the future of sacred music.”
— Jeffrey Tucker, managing editor for Sacred Music
I have had priests come to me in the past and say, “This piece we sing at Mass feels wrong to me, but I can’t describe why.” This always calls to mind a statement by the great Franz Liszt, who said, “It is easy to have musical opinions, but difficult to find musical reasons for those opinions.” In any case, there are indeed musical reasons why certain styles of music are not appropriate at Mass, and these usually deal with rhythmic syncopation and tonality. The Church has been very clear in her legislation about the type of music appropriate for the Holy Mass. Unfortunately, many major publishers have chosen to promote liturgical music composed in a secular style forbidden by the Church.
Rather than “curse the darkness,” I would like to make HPR readers aware of a free resource that goes a long way towards helping in this area.
The St. Noël Chabanel Responsorial Psalm Project, found at www.chabanelpsalms.org, exists as a remedy for the problematic and sometimes malignant musical settings that so often destroy the prayerful atmosphere the Church requires for her public worship. It is part of the fruit of the non-profit organization Corpus Christi Watershed, an apostolate and institute dedicated to helping renew the arts and creative media in the Church. As creative director for liturgical initiatives at Watershed, I have had the joy and privilege of being able to compose works like the Chabanel Psalms as part of my calling as a musician, while directing the project itself and working with other Church musicians to further this creative endeavor.
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Both St. Thomas and Chesterton were aware that
human laws do not always
conform to the natural and eternal laws.
By Thomas Storck
 It was not Zeus who gave the order,
And Justice living with the dead below
Has never given men a law like this.
Nor did I think that your pronouncements were
So powerful that mere man could override
The unwritten and unfailing laws of heaven.
These live, not for today and yesterday
But for all time; they came, no man knows whence.
—Sophocles, Antigone
The quotation above, spoken by Antigone in response to an unjust enactment of the king, shows that even among pagans there was a realization that the divine law was above the laws made by man, and that at times human laws could contradict divine law. But unfortunately, man’s experience of law is too often of corrupt human laws, leading some to become cynics and proclaim, like Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, that law is nothing but “the advantage of the stronger,” just another racket by which we try to exploit one another.
And each ruling group sets down laws for its own advantage; a democracy sets down democratic laws; a tyranny, tyrannic laws; and the others do the same. And they declare that what they have set down—their own advantage—is just for the ruled, and the man who departs from it they punish as a breaker of the law and a doer of unjust deeds. This, best of men, is what I mean: in every city the same thing is just, the advantage of the established ruling body. (338e-339a)
But the Catholic tradition, while aware of the propensity of men to pervert the law, is likewise aware of the glorious vocation of law, both human and divine, provided that human law reflects and follows divine law. The classic presentation of the Catholic view is that of St. Thomas Aquinas in the treatise on laws in the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae. But a more contemporary presentation of the same doctrine can be found in G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. As a novel about a group of police detectives, we might expect the book to deal extensively with law, especially with human law. And so it does. But Chesterton’s work of fiction is in fact a portrayal in dramatic form of the doctrine of law, both divine and human, set forth so brilliantly by St. Thomas. Just as Aquinas holds human law to the high standard of reflecting the divine law, so Chesterton deals in different ways with human laws that have been twisted so as no longer to be in harmony with the “unwritten and unfailing laws of heaven.” I shall first expound the doctrine of St. Thomas on the relationship between human and divine law and then show how Chesterton’s novel is an illustration of Thomas’ key teaching on the necessary harmony of human and divine law and the role of reason in law. Lastly I will add a few reflections on the usefulness of this Thomistic teaching for us today.
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By Mark J. Clark
 During the debates of the Second Vatican Council one prelate after another addressed the Fathers of the Council in fluent Latin. That they did so is hardly surprising, for Latin remained the living language of the Roman Catholic Church. What may be surprising, however, is their collective level of fluency. The European prelates in particular displayed in their speeches and lively discussions a near-native mastery of Latin that would have been the envy of Renaissance humanists living five hundred years previously. Among the issues the Council Fathers debated in Latin was the introduction of vernacular languages into the Mass. When they ultimately decided to endorse the use of the vernacular in the Mass it doubtless never occurred to them that the facility in Latin that they took for granted—Latin, after all, was an integral part of their own intellectual patrimony and would remain the official language of the Church—would largely disappear within half a century.
Yet disappear it did, and quickly. How and why merits our attention, as does the question of what can be done to revivify the tradition of living Latin within the Church. For if living Latin dies, the consequences for the Church are grave. What is significant about the fact that the Fathers of the Council spoke readily in Latin is that they thought in Latin, which gave them easy access to the length and breadth of the Catholic tradition. The Church’s treasury of writings spanning the centuries is like a large chest in the attic, to which Latin is the key. Unfortunately, we stand in danger of losing the key, for few now live who can actually think in Latin. This is especially true within the Church herself. A sign of this is that even at the Vatican documents are no longer composed in Latin and then translated into vernacular languages but are first thought in the vernacular and then translated into Latin. We are in fact in danger of becoming strangers to our own tradition, for few can read the thoughts of our Catholic tradition in the language in which they were thought.
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The daunting specter of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) continues to loom in our country and throughout the world.1 At times it appears as though the culture of death will prevail in the minds of our people and in our laws. In November of 2008, Washington state joined Oregon as one of the two states that has legalized PAS by ballot initiatives, protecting physicians who prescribe a lethal dose of drugs to a patient seeking to kill himself. With the backing of millions of dollars, the initiative was passed with nearly a 6:4 margin. Since 1991, there have been six ballot initiatives seeking to legalize PAS in five states. (Washington voters had initially voted against PAS in 1999 at a 4:6 margin.) From January 1994 through June 2009 there have been 113 legislative proposals in twenty-four states. Thankfully, for various reasons, none have passed. However, in Montana (Baxter v. Montana), a district court legislated from the bench and determined that doctors may assist in suicides and be protected from liability. In December 2009, the Montana state supreme court upheld the ruling.
