The CatholiCity Message

Volume XVI, Number 6 – July 13, 2012

Dear CatholiCity Citizen,

One item this month, about declining birthrates in the Muslim world, turned out to be longer than I expected, so we placed it at the end of this message. I think you'll like it. We'll have more quotes later, but let us begin with this bracing contemporary prophecy:

"I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square."
Francis Cardinal George

MACRO: THE NEW OLD MASS
I have noticed that most people have caught on to the new responses in the updated Mass after all these months. In a year or so, it will be difficult to remember the old responses. I take great consolation in the lack of protest or defiance in implementation among liberal elements of the Church regarding these welcome changes. Such docility from the left would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, and is a testament to the gradual transformation of the Catholic Church over the past few decades, the growing faithfulness of our bishops, the waning influence of modernists, and anecdotal evidence that the theme of my article "A Bright Future for the Catholic Church in America" is correct. If you haven't read my article, which makes the case for an explosion of faithful families and their impact during the coming generation, you can read it here:

http://www.catholicity.com/commentary/macfarlane/bright-future.html

MICRO: A LITTLE BOY'S FAITH
Many of you may recall that I grew up in a family comprised of nine girls and two boys (and thank goodness for my brother, or I may have turned out to be a choreographer and not a writer). We Macfarlanes are scattered all over the country now. While visiting my folks in New Jersey last week, I was able to spend some time with my amazing youngest sister, Cathy, who told me that she has a friend who transformed from being a completely fallen-away Catholic to a completely in-love-with-her-faith Catholic practically overnight after one of her sons, a little boy, told her friend's little boy about how much he loves praying, loves God, and how important going to Mass is. Evangelization can come in many forms. If you want some motivation for evangelization, here is a short essay I wrote a few years back during Lent, based on the Chestertonian principle that anything worth doing is worth doing badly:

http://www.catholicity.com/commentary/macfarlane/evangelizing.html

READING IS THE KITCHEN TABLE
I wolf down magazines and printed-out online articles like milkshakes. Here are a handful of my favorites: RealClearPolitics.com, Wired, Forbes, Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated, Human Life Review, National Review, Imprimus, First Things, Human Events, ESPN, The Weekly Standard, Inc., Popular Science, Crisis Magazine, and Dick Morris.com.

With four sons, ages 20 to 11, I keep all our magazines on the kitchen table for easy access, and you would be surprised how young kids will take a liking to heavier duty adult stuff like Forbes or Wired. Sparks a lot of great conversations. My oldest has been quite successful in building his own summertime business to help pay for college, raking in the dough compared to most of his peers. Could it have something to do with his reading Forbes for over a decade?

BELIEVING IN THE RESURRECTION OF THE BROKEN PELVIS
A year ago, my second-oldest son broke his pelvis playing rugby. He recovered completely (and started for his high school varsity team, St. Edwards of Lakewood, Ohio, which won the state championship this year). During the process, his doctor told us that every cell in the body is, in fact, replaced over a seven-year period, with bones generally taking the longest. He told us that in a few years, if healed properly, my son would have a completely new pelvis. Other cells are replaced daily, monthly, yearly. I confirmed the science of this elsewhere, and it got me to me thinking about the soul.

Every cell in your body that existed in 2005 no longer exists at all, including the ones that make up your permanent bodily scars, the cells that form your skull, the cells in your eyes and ocular nerves allowing you to read these words, and every cell in your brain, where your memory resides physically. This means memories of your childhood have migrated through brain cells that have been replaced many, many times over since the events you experienced. The "you" who conceived a child in 1995, or hit a home run in Little League in 1974, or typed a paper in college in 1993, has been replaced down to the smallest unit and physical particle. Our minds are more than our memories, of course. Our souls are the immortal, permanent principle of our self, as our faith informs us, and there is something profoundly beautiful, even musical, about the way nature (your body) and supernature (your soul) gently plays the endlessly mysterious melody of your existence in the recurring resurrection of your cells in your entire body, over time, and thus echoes the resurrection of Christ, and our eternal lives in heaven with Him who composed the song.

PARENTING ADVICE
Consider the following, if you have more than one child, or more than a few, even though I never read this advice anywhere, but have practiced it diligently. It takes a kind of dogged commitment, purposeful arrangement of schedule, plus an eye always open for accidental opportunity, as well as setting aside time and mental resources: try to spend time with each child alone, as often as possible, from birth, and until and beyond college, if possible.

SOME FEAST DAYS IN JULY
Saturday, July 14, Saint Kateri Tekawitha
Monday, July 16, Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Thursday, July 26, Saint Joachim and Anne, Parents of Mary
Tuesday, July 31, Saint Ignatius of Loyola

QUOTES

"If brevity is the soul of wit, then length is the soul of a home run."
G.K. MacBrien

"If I had a dollar for every time I prayed perfectly after receiving Communion, then I would be a penniless pauper short of remuneration for other activities. Fortunately, we cast our creed with the only religion brilliant enough and wise enough to elevate and extol poverty as a virtue."
Joseph Wood

"Grace is a certain beauty of the soul that wins divine love."
St. Thomas Aquinas

"He rides at ease who is carried by the grace of God."
Thomas a Kempis

"As a soul is the life of the body, God is the life of the soul by His gracious presence."
Walter Hilton

"Oh, take from me this body which weighs down the soul, and then I will praise the Lord. Take from me this earthly habitation which presses down the mind musing upon many things, and then I will gather myself together into one compact hole and praise the Lord."
Saint Augustine

"The eyes of the soul should not be hindered by the eyes of the body."
Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson

"The soul is the use, and the body is for use, hence the one is master, the other servant."
Saint Ambrose

TENS OF THOUSANDS IN PRAYER TOGETHER
We all know of souls in our circle who need medical miracles, or at least to overcome daunting medical, emotional, or social problems. Right now, among others intentions, I am praying foremost every day for the young daughter of friends who is suffering from a debilitating, as-yet not completely diagnosed neurological or spinal disorder that causes this brave little girl intense, agonizing, and constant pain. Her name is Pillar, named after a title of Our Lady from the Litany of Loretto: Mary, Pillar of Faith. Along with Pillar, please call to mind someone in your life (or even yourself) who needs a medical miracle, and with great baptismal faith, join me, my coworkers, and the tens of thousands of CatholiCity Citizens around the globe in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...

"Dear Immaculate Mary, along with our friends and miracle workers of heaven Saint Anthony, Saint Therese, Saint Jude, Saint Joseph, and Saint Escriva, we beg you to bring Pillar and all those in need of healing to your son, Jesus and His Father and His Spirit, and ask for your perfect, powerful, and persistent intercession, as soon as possible, in the smallest and greatest possible ways, beyond our imaginings and dreams, using whatever natural or supernatural means required. Souls open to grace, tears in our hearts, humbled by our selfishness and sinfulness, we beg you, we reach for your cloak. Fold them in the mantle of your arms, Oh Lady of Guadalupe, Immaculate Mother! With great love, we implore you. With sublime hope, we thank you. Amen. And thank you, again."

Below you'll find my longer observations about declining Muslim birthrates. Please, take a moment to visit our website and "reload" on our CDs, my novels, and pamphlets if you are running low or have fallen out of the habit:

https://secure.catholicity.com/

I remain yours, as always,

With Immaculate Mary,

Bud Macfarlane

DECLINING WORLDWIDE MUSLIM BIRTHRATES
Leaders and academics in the Muslim world are apparently ignoring the astonishing fact that birthrates in every Muslim-majority country and Muslim populations elsewhere (including in Europe) have declined rapidly and dramatically in recent decades to non-replacement levels. One review I read of a book on the subject that predicted this decline will lead to even more political instability in the Muslim world. Here are two links:

http://www.lifenews.com/2012/07/05/underpopulation-muslim-world-faces-devastating-fertility-decline/

http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=891

I am reminded of a course I took at Notre Dame almost thirty years ago, The Catholic Vision, which became the basis for a book by the same name by the professor, Fr. Edward O'Connor, CSC, a wise Thomist who also happened to be my confessor. One of the few faithful Catholic theologians there at the time, the course was daring, modern, completely orthodox (and packed with students), consisting of an ambitious multi-disciplined survey of how the Catholic Church influenced and "sees" the world, including through history, science, sociology, philosophy, and culture.

While taking the course, I was taken aback by population figures showing that out of the (then) five billion souls on earth, over two billion were Christians, with roughly 1.1 billion of them being Catholics. Muslims were next at around 900 million, though the professor's main thrust was to point out the inexorable growth of Catholicism (in terms of world population) since the time of Christ. Today, there are roughly 7 billions souls on our planet (more than lived on earth in all of human history before 1960), and Christians still outnumber Muslims by roughly 2.3 billion to 1.6 billion, but Catholics have only increased to 1.2 billion since the 1980s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations

For the first time in a long time, Catholicism is not the world's leading religion in terms of population, although one could say that all Christians are Catholics in the sense that they are our separated brothers and sisters in Christ. And Islam is by no means monolithic, consisting of numerous, often bitterly antagonistic and/or nationalistic sects. As I like to say, if any person, regardless of religious affiliation, merits heaven after their death, he will be pleasantly shocked to discover that heaven is Catholic, along with everyone there. Neither Mohammed, Buddha, nor a garden variety demonic pagan serpent-god will preside over any of our final judgments.

My view is that if there are seven billion souls on earth, we should strive to help all of them become Catholic to the greatest degree that God calls us. Through her prayers and sacrifices for the conversion of souls, my patron saint, Therese of Lisieux, after all, became the co-patron of Missionaries without ever leaving the convent. Most CatholiCity Citizens live in mission territory already; the souls we can influence live within ten square miles of our (mostly suburban) homes right here in the western world.

As for the population "contest" between religions, the brief Muslim surge since my ND days is now dramatically reversed. Their decline is as much about Muslims aping the selfish and modern aversion to the responsibility, sacrifices (and love and joys!) of raising children already embraced by mainstream non-Catholic denominations and sadly, the vast majority of nominal Catholics, a generation or two earlier.

I suspect Catholic populations will catch up eventually, because we always do over the long haul, and that happens because Catholicism is the only one, true faith. Those of us who have been given the gift of believing the whole of the Catholic vision will always want kids because we love kids. All good Catholics, in the deepest level, embrace the profound mystery of co-creating immortal souls as a sublime gift from God.

"To see oneself as a Catholic is to see oneself as a parent."
Joseph Wood

Islam is a false religion, and what little spiritual truth it espouses is often distorted. As a political movement over history, it is a tragic, endless story of oppression, expansion by war, utterly contemptible misogyny, bloodshed, as well as the antithesis of civil and religious liberty and equality. One of its few redeeming qualities was its welcoming of children. Now a lethal cancer, the Culture of Death, has spread throughout its body.

In recent decades, the Catholic Church has allied with Muslim countries to fight abortion, particularly against various United Nations initiatives. Pondering declining Muslim birthrates, I fear that even this tenuous bridge will inevitably collapse. A part of me is deeply saddened that all over the world, Muslims no longer want to have kids around.