Book Review - The Rending of Christendom Primary Document Catholic Study Course

In recent days, the study of history has become less a search for truth and almost exclusively about the creation of a narrative to further a political ideology. Some might argue that this has always been true. In my experience, however, such claims are most often put forward by the most egregious narrative-creators themselves when their lack of objectivity is called into question.

I first noticed this trend while in high school. As an avid student of World War II, it was perplexing to me that the entirety of the war was summed up in my so-called social studies courses in two events: the atom bomb and the Holocaust. Hardly anything else was deemed worthy of discussion. Church history suffered a similar fate in my ostensibly Catholic schooling. We were presented with a narrative that nothing particularly good happened in the Church until the 1960s. As a result, all the events, achievements, miracles, conflicts, saints, heroes, villains, doctrines and teachings up until that point were given very scant coverage indeed. When I later discovered on my own how fascinating, rich and beautiful Church history is, I was astonished and angry. To quote my parish priest, I felt like what I had been told was a diamond was actually a cubic zirconia--and that the real diamond had been purposely buried to keep anyone from finding it.

As a result of this experience, I have come to distrust most modern interpreters of history (particularly those who don't wear their subjectivity on their lapel) and greatly value the study of primary sources when learning or teaching history. And that's where Phillip Campbell's The Rending of Christendom comes in. In an accessible 100 pages, Campbell offers a gold mine of basic primary documents dealing with the root causes, major events and personalities of the Protestant Revolution. The objective is to give the student a sampling of important sources from that era and teach them how to draw inferences from them. The documents run the gamut of the conflict, from well known sources such as Luther's 95 Theses and the Edict of Nantes to less studied but equally fascinating documents such as Luther's "Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants" and the final letter of Mary Queen of Scots prior to her execution.

I feel quite confident that few if any high school and college students in Catholic institutions have ever seen these documents before. Unlike most traditional textbooks, these documents do the opposite of reducing history to a bland sequence of names, dates and capsule summaries. Rather, they add the excitement of the present to the events described and put intellectual faces to the key names: Martin Luther, Ignatius of Loyola, Thomas More, Richard Hooker, John Calvin, Francis de Sales, Elizabeth I, Charles Borromeo and many others. As such, the source documents here may be the beginning of innumerable conversations that have immediate relevance to the situation in our world today. Instead of creating their own narrative for credulous students to memorize and regurgitate, these documents allow students to contemplate the big issues of the time from the inside. They also provide fodder for students to draw their own conclusions, aided by Campbell's brief introductory statements and helpful study questions at the end of each document.

Of course, such a slim book as The Rending of Christendom can only provide an appetizer for the main course of historical research into the Protestant Revolt. My suspicion is that many more students will be tempted to dive into the ocean of such scholarship after using this introduction as compared to those using traditional textbooks. Because of this, I highly recommend The Rending of Christendom for use in both traditional Catholic educational settings and homeschooling. I look forward to seeing more such resources from Philip Campbell in this same vein--he is definitely on to something.

Really, resources like this should be a staple in Catholic schools that hope to do more than simply put a thin Catholic varnish on the secular American historical narrative. Other primary source compendia which fulfill much of the same function as The Rending of Christendom include The Christian Roman Empire series and Fontes Mediaevalium series, both by Evolution Publishing. Among these, I particularly recommend The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eye-Witnesses and Participants which chronicles the history of the much maligned and misunderstood First Crusade through the eyes of those who experienced it first-hand.

De-Certify Once-Catholic, Now-Dissident Universities

As disgusting and disgraceful as Father Jenkins and the board of Notre Dame have been over the whole Obama commencement speech fiasco, it now seems clear that this invitation is part of a larger trend among dissidents within Catholic academia in America.

Fordham University, a Jesuit institution in New York is hosting pro-abortion mayor Michael Bloomberg.

St. Joseph's University, another Jesuit university in Philadelphia, is hosting pro-abortion media talking-head Chris Matthews.

Yet another Jesuit institution, Georgetown Law School, is honoring pro-abortion vice-president Joe Biden.

What does all this mean? According to the NCR article linked above, it means that American "Catholic" universities:

...have declared in the bluntest terms possible that they, and not the American bishops, are the arbiters of what is acceptable conduct for an institution that calls itself a Catholic university. And as a consequence, the administrations .... don’t appear amenable even to any self-examination of their actions, let alone to any correction undertaken by the Church hierarchy.

I have a one-word term for what these institutions are doing: schism.

There is no other word for it when Catholic institutions fail to obey the clear instructions of their bishops--and by extension, the Pope. The American Catholic bishops have been dancing around this issue for so long that the heads of these Catholic-in-name-only institutions now feel strong enough to come out and issue a challenge in the open. They have thrown down the gauntlet and spit in the faces of the bishops.

I urge the bishops to pick up the gauntlet.

Take up the challenge by immediately stripping the offending universities of their Catholic identities.

Now, more than ever, it is necessary that we have "truth in advertising." The souls of young Catholics are at stake here and we can no longer allow these charlatans to continue educating young Catholics in the materialist liberation theology/Culture of Death heresy in the guise of authentic Catholicism. If they want to continue to preach it--fine. But let them do so outside of the Church!

The dissident left in the Catholic Church knows that it has lost. Time is not on their side. They have no vocations. Indeed, who would give their lives for such a pathetic milquetoast philosophy that attempts to water down and obfuscate the authentic Truth? Practically all the vocations in recent years are of young, orthodox Catholics, inspired by the Pope, who will continue revitalize the Church into the future.

But the aging and discredited dissidents are still in power in many important spheres and in order to solidify their eroding support among believing Catholics, they are hitching themselves to popular political leaders and the 'cultural catholic' support that comes with them. But because politicians are such unreliable allies who are popular one day, despised the next, the bishops should move to accelerate this process by calling their bluff and de-certifying the offending institutions. They don't behave or believe as Catholics anymore so why should they be allowed to maintain their Catholic identity?

Also, in my opinion, the Jesuit order ought to be suppressed--again. This time, for the right reasons. They have become political slaves and partisans of the Culture of Death.

Your Eminence, pick up the gauntlet!

Boston College -- Where young Catholics go to lose their Faith (assuming they ever had it to begin with)

It's good to know that BC is doing such a bang-up job catechizing the students in its care in the basics of Catholic moral teaching. In a recent article in the BC student newspaper, The Heights, it was reported that 89% of the voters in the recent school-wide elections approved of a "sexual health" referendum. According to an article by Alexi Chi in The Heights, this ballot question was:

added to the ballot by a group called BC Students for Sexual Health and calls for support for affordable sexually transmitted infections testing, the availability of prescription birth control medication, and condoms on campus.

Don't you just love the terminology? "Birth control medication"?

Referenda like this are a clear indictment not only of the so called Catholic identity of Boston College, but also of the cultural Catholic parents of the students who voted. One must assume that if 89% of the student body at BC votes against basic Catholic moral teachings, then:

1.) nearly 9 out of 10 students at BC are no longer functionally Catholic, and
2.) that the university itself is doing an absolutely wretched job of catechizing young people and helping them understand that giddily following the pied piper of pop culture depravity is a sure path to both earthly and eternal misery.

I am an alumnus of Boston College. BC was a moral sewer when I attended over 15 years ago. It's sad to see that little has changed--indeed, it appears that things have gotten even worse.

In years past, few parents knew that "Catholic" schools like BC had rotted from the inside out. Today, it couldn't be more clear--as referenda like this one so stunningly demonstrate. For that reason, none of my children kids will even consider Boston College when the time comes.

If you are one of the 11% of actual Catholics left in the student body at BC, I implore you: get out now. There are several excellent, authentically Catholic universities across the country who'd be happy to have you--Christendom, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Thomas Aquinas, Ave Maria University, Magdalene, and the new John Paul the Great University in San Diego, CA.

Don't waste any more of your time and money at a university that people jokingly refer to as "Jesuit, but not Catholic."