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Showing posts with label Rao. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rao. Show all posts
Gardone 2020
Twenty-Eighth Annual Summer Symposium of the Roman Forum on Lake Garda
The annual Roman Forum on the shores of Lake Garda in Northern Italy is one of the most important institutions in Catholic traditionalism. The chairman, Dr. John Rao, has sent us the following information about this year's symposium. We urge our readers to consider attending the symposium and the lectures. We also urge our readers to consider giving a tax-deductible donation to support the attendance at the symposium of a speaker, a member of the clergy, a seminarian, or a student. Send all applications, deposit, payments, and donations for the Summer Symposium either through the PayPal link on the Roman Forum Website or directly to: Dr. John C. Rao, The Roman Forum, 11 Carmine Street, # 2C, New York, NY 10014.
Twenty-Eighth Annual Summer Symposium
Gardone Riviera, Italy (July 6th - July 17th, 2020; 11 nights)
The Traditionalist Movement: Its Origins, Ramifications, Divisions, & Enemies
Several generations emerging from traditionalist backgrounds have come to maturity since the end of the Council and the introduction of the Novus ordo missae. At the same time, a growing number of believers from the “mainstream” Catholic world have also rediscovered the importance of the traditional liturgy. But many of those from both groups are unaware of the roots of the Traditionalist Movement and the sacrifices of its original leaders and shock troops in their heroic struggles to defend the Faith. Even some of those who are active participants in the Movement often fail to perceive its immense ramifications in the realms of theology, philosophy, political, social, and cultural life, the nature of the debates that divide its component parts, and the character and extent of the opposition it faces: all of which hinders its efficacy in recapturing the full heritage of the Mystical Body of Christ. This year’s Summer Symposium will seek to fill that gap, examining the history and current state of the Traditionalist Movement globally.
Special Series: "1919—2019 A Centenary Meditation on the Church"
- Part IV: “Catholic” Purification and "Worker-Priests"
1919—2019
A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad
A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad
A Series by Professor John C. Rao, DPhil
| A "Worker Priest" celebrates Mass turned to the people in the 1940s |
IV. "Catholic" Purification and the "Worker-Priests"
Many personalists looked, greeted the early fascist
victories of the Second World War hopefully. A number of them, long convinced
of the innate weaknesses of the liberal bourgeois “established disorder,”
expressed little surprise over the conquests of Nazi Germany. What really
concerned them was whether Catholicism could find some way to turn a
potentially apocalyptic “purification” down the proper pathway. For fascism was
seen to be a “monstrous prefiguration” of the new personalist humanity waiting
to be born. It clearly revealed the presence of strong will, virile manliness,
self-sacrifice to the community, and even, in the context of the war effort, a
commitment to the construction of that European-wide super society which many
thought to be crucial to a better New World Order.
Pétain’s
so-called National Revolution was appreciated by French personalists both
because of its anti-liberal bourgeois character and its freedom from the more gross
“materialist” aspects of Nazism. They hoped to make Vichy France a wartime
laboratory for educational and evangelical schemes designed to reshape the
world in a spiritual way. One major example of educational experimentation
incorporating both contemporary Catholic ideas as well as features of the
fascist Ordensburgen—the castle
training centers for the new elite of German youth—was the École Nationale des Cadres at the Château Bayard above the village
of Uriage, near Grenôble. Founded in the waning months of 1940, this
institution became especially significant by June of 1941, when the Vichy
regime determined to require a session at the Ecole for all future high government functionaries.
Special Series: "1919—2019 A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for Purification Gone Mad"
- Part II: Dangers on the "Catholic Purification" Front
1919—2019
A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad
A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad
A Series by Professor John C. Rao, DPhil
Part II: Dangers on the "Catholic Purification" Front
Unfortunately for Catholics, the Church’s quest for purification of the spaces of public life in 1918 was a hotly contested one, with her Gnostic, Nominalist, Reformation, and Enlightenment shaped opponents either potentially or immediately wielding more power than she might ever hope to command on her own. Dangers on the purification front were international, national,and broadly cultural in character, with most of the threats in question ultimately perilous on all these levels.La Civiltà Cattolica continued to apply and develop the conclusions reached by the revival movement of the previous century to understand and parry them. Therefore, much of what I have to say below is fit into the broad framework that this journal’s interwar analysis provided.
One of the two newer, but historically rooted perils of the interwar period emerged from the United States. Due to her entry into the European conflict, and President Woodrow Wilson’s statement of allied goals in his Fourteen Points, his response to Pope Benedict XV’s peace proposals, and his popularization of the worldwide struggle as “the war to end all wars”, America loomed large as a potential purifying influence on November 11th, 1918 and in the months thereafter. Although the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles by the United States Senate and her consequent failure to participate in the League of Nations removed the imminent threat of New World competition for the political control of spaces in the Old, America’s “isolationism” in the interwar years was never truly complete. Latin America and East Asia remained public American concerns and fields of action, and New World cultural impact---the American way of life ---also continued to grow unabated in much of Europe as well. Cultural “Americanism” eased the way to American political domination of the European world in the wake of the second global conflagration. By 1945, mobilization of the American Way---what then came to be called pluralism---as a weapon for coaxing the reawakened Catholic Faith of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries back into its eighteenth century dogmatic slumber was complete.
A second new force competing with the Church for the occupation and purification of social spaces came out of Russia, which, although it played no role as a nation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, was nevertheless “present” in everyone’s mind at that gathering. For the seizure of power in Russia by Lenin’s Bolsheviks---formally known as the Communist Party from March, 1918 onwards---and the impact that Marxism-Leninism immediately exercised outside that troubled country’s fluctuating borders gave grave significance the world over to what was happening therein.This was certainly true in the defeated nations, Germany’s Communist movement sparking the Sparticist uprising of the weeks preceding the opening of the Peace Conference, and Hungary experiencing a Soviet style government briefly thereafter. But the spirit of the Revolution was not unknown to the victors either, with Red Guards seizing factories and agricultural estates and dreaming of an Italian imitation of the distant Russian model.
Special Series: "1919—2019 A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for Purification Gone Mad"
- Part I: The Peace, the War, and the Longing for Purification
1919—2019
A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad
A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad
A Series by Professor John C. Rao, DPhil
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Part I: The Peace, the War, and the Longing for Purification
Despite its claims of openness to everyone and anything, friendliness to time gone by is sorely lacking in our pluralist society, and this for very good reason indeed. Pluralism needs to destroy knowledge of the past in order to survive. Historical wisdom makes the depth and longevity of the intellectual, spiritual, and practical divisions in our daily life all too clear to those seeking to learn its lessons. Such wisdom diverts attention away from the only acceptable pluralist solution to human problems: the satisfaction of those material passions to whose endless permutations, monotonous as they ultimately really are, fallen man in his dullness seems ceaselessly attracted.
Unfortunately, we Catholics living in an all-encompassing pluralist society are ourselves subject to its soporific effects. We also have a tendency to don an historical blindfold, to focus on immediate material concerns and their time-bound explanations of current events, and, thus, to replace real intellectual judgments with shallow, pluralist-approved mantras. The result is that our own appreciation of the causes of our present ecclesiastical debacle is both too mundane as well as much too limited historically in its scope.And, sadly, this prevents us from dealing with its horrors effectively.
The Doctrine of Papal Infallibility
In the following lecture Prof. John Rao lectures on Vatican I, and gives a lucid explanation of the true meaning of papal infallibility.
Roman Forum 2019
The annual Roman Forum on the shores of Lake Garda in Northern Italy is one of the most important institutions in Catholic traditionalism, bringing together some of the best traditionalist minds to reflect on where we are, how we got here, and how to move forward. The chairman, Dr. John Rao, has sent us the following information about this year's symposium as well as the lectures on Church history that he will be giving in New York City. We urge our readers to consider attending the symposium and the lectures.
We also urge our readers to support the Gardone Summer Symposium through donations. The Roman Forum has now collected $25,000 of the $75,000 needed to provide for the attendance of the nineteen speakers and the musical director, as well as for the cost of the hall rental, a donation for the use of the parish church, and assistance for twenty scholarship candidates. $50,000 more is needed. Please do consider giving a tax-deductible donation to support the attendance at the symposium of a speaker, a member of the clergy, a seminarian, or a student. Send all applications, deposit, payments, and donations for the Summer Symposium either through the PayPal link on the Roman Forum Website or directly to: Dr. John C. Rao, The Roman Forum, 11 Carmine Street, # 2C, New York, NY 10014.
Op-Ed: "The City of Light under the Regime of Darkness: Historical Meditation on Current Events" (by John C. Rao)
The City of Light and the Regime of Darkness:
Historical Meditation on Current Events
by Dr. John C. Rao
Monday, August 28th, the Feast of St. Augustine, followed hard upon the Sunday statement of Archbishop Viganò regarding papal delinquency in the chastisement of episcopal evildoers. Mulling over the possibility of some providential connection of the annual commemoration of the Doctor of the Church and the ex-nuncio’s document brought to mind the Bishop of Hippo’s City of God. It did so because this work, published in the early fifth century, one of the many tragic eras in the history of Western Christendom, is of continuing significance to all of us living through what is without a doubt the worst of such periods of trial to date. Its significance comes both from the circumstances surrounding its publication as well as the substance of the arguments to be found therein.
Appeal: Help keep the Roman Forum going
Many of our readers are aware of the critical work our friend, Dr. John Rao, and The Roman Forum do every year on behalf of the Church and traditional Catholics everywhere. Their work is more important today than ever before, for obvious reasons.
The last time we implored you, our reader, to help, we helped raise over $10,000 to keep the Forum going. We are asking now once again. Please read below, and please click here to donate whatever you can.
The Roman Forum
11 Carmine St., Apt. 2C
New York, NY 10014
Dear Friends of the Roman Forum
Funds continue to be needed for Gardone because we have eleven scholarship candidates from among the eighty Summer Symposium participants--future seminarians, and students---none of whom has sufficient means for attending. Each of them needs $1,500 to be able to attend. Allow me to summarize why I think attendance is so important.
Proceedings of Dialogos Conference on Dignitatis Humanae published
In 2015 the Dialogos Institute held an important conference in Norcia, Italy on the interpretation of the controversial Declaration of the Second Vatican Council on Religious Liberty Dignitatis Humanae Rorate Caeli reported at the time (here and here). Now the Dialogos Institute has published a volume containing the interventions held at the conference.
Schedule for Roman Forum Summer Symposium 2018 released
We are happy to inform our readers of next year’s Summer Symposium of the Roman Forum in Gardone Riviera. We encourage our readers to attend this important gathering of Catholic thinkers. Or to support their important work through prayer and donations.
The Roman Forum
Twenty-Sixth Annual Summer Symposium
Gardone Riviera, Italy
(July 2nd - July 13th, 2018; 11 nights)
The Fittest and the Weakest: The Interwar Era, the Foundations of Late Modernity, and the Resilience of Catholic Christianity
The twenty-sixth annual Summer Symposium at Gardone Riviera derives its theme from the centennial concluding the “War to End All Wars”, fought “To Make the World Safe for Democracy” with the aid of a League of Nations that was to guarantee peace the globe over. Unfortunately, 1918 provided an entry into a twenty-one year period of disruptions rather than into an epoch where the lion would lie down with the lamb.
Church history and Catholic Social Doctrine on Soundcloud
| Dr. John Rao (Photo: The Remnant) |
There is a great deal of good Catholic audio to be found on the internet nowadays. We want to alert our readers to things in particular.
First, our friends at the Roman Forum have put a large number of lectures on Church History by John Rao up on Soundcloud. Included are the completed lectures of the current year (2016-2017), which is about the years 1794-1846, and all the lectures of last year (2015-2016), which was about the years 1748-1794. We encourage our readers to take a break from current events, and recall the Church’s struggles in previous centuries. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were periods in the Church’s life with many parallels to our own. The temptation to water down the faith, and try to make it palatable to modernity can be found then as now. And Rao masterfully shows how all attempts do so were counter-productive and disastrous, whereas attempts to recover the fullness of the Church's Tradition bore great fruit.
First, our friends at the Roman Forum have put a large number of lectures on Church History by John Rao up on Soundcloud. Included are the completed lectures of the current year (2016-2017), which is about the years 1794-1846, and all the lectures of last year (2015-2016), which was about the years 1748-1794. We encourage our readers to take a break from current events, and recall the Church’s struggles in previous centuries. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were periods in the Church’s life with many parallels to our own. The temptation to water down the faith, and try to make it palatable to modernity can be found then as now. And Rao masterfully shows how all attempts do so were counter-productive and disastrous, whereas attempts to recover the fullness of the Church's Tradition bore great fruit.
Roman Forum Church History Program 2017-2018
Dr. John Rao will be delivering the 26th annual Roman Forum Lecture Series in New York this year. Over the years this series has been an important study of the Church's struggle with the forces of this world, from which much can be learned in the present crisis. This time Dr. Rao will be covering the period from 1794-1846.
Roman Forum Publishes Collection of Essays on Luther and Prepares for 2017 Symposium
Angelico Press has published the proceedings of The Roman Forum's 2016 symposium in Gardone: Luther and His Progeny: 500 Years of Protestantism and Its Consequences for Church, State, and Society. The volume includes essays by John Rao, the Rev. John Hunwicke, and Christopher A. Ferrara, among others. The essays examine Luther's role in the dissolution of Christendom, and the effects of his teachings on later developments. The authors show how deeply the modern world has been marked by Luther's innovations. Traditionalists interested in a restoration of Christendom would do well to read Luther and His Progeny for insights on how Medieval Christendom declined and fell, since the success of a restoration will in part depend on understanding that fall.
Appeal: Help Keep the Roman Forum going
For most of our readers, you already know the critical work Dr. John Rao, and The Roman Forum, do every year on behalf of the Church and traditional Catholics everywhere. Last year, we helped raise over $10,000 to keep the Forum going. This year, for obvious reasons, it is more important than ever. Please read below, and please click here to donate whatever you can.
The
Roman Forum
11
Carmine St., Apt. 2C
New
York, New York 10014
Dear Friends,
The
Roman Forum is still in need of at least $25,000 in tax-deductible donations in support of its Twenty-Fifth
Annual Summer Symposium. This program will be held from July 3rd
through July 14th, 2017 (11 nights) on the topic: Setting Right a
World Turned Upside Down---Transformation in Christ Versus a Sickness Unto
Death.
We
need this sum to provide travel, room, and board for our international faculty and
musical staff: fourteen participants at the moment, though still growing in
number and potentially to include some further and rather significant clerical
additions. No speaker receives remuneration for his participation. Funds are
also used to aid the many priests, seminarians, college students, and others
from across the globe---especially from
Africa---who would be unable to attend without some help. I cannot tell you
how significant this quarter of a century Symposium has become in creating a permanent,
worldwide, fraternal union of clergy and laity, as well as providing an annual academic
and activist strategy planning session on behalf of the Traditionalist Movement
across the globe. Those wishing to attend Gardone, 2017 can contact us through
the email address given above.
Roman Forum 2017: Setting Right a World Turned Upside Down
We are pleased to announce the program of the 2017 Roman Forum Summer Symposium. This annual symposium on the shores of Lake Garda is an important gathering of traditionalist intellectuals that has recently produced notable statements On the Ecclesial and Civilizational Crisis and Regarding the “Catholic” Apotheosis of Luther. We urge our readers to attend the symposium, or, if they are unable to attend, at least to support it through prayers and donations.
The Roman Forum
Twenty-Fifth Annual Summer Symposium
Gardone Riviera, Italy
(July 3rd-July 14th, 2017; 11 nights)
Setting Right a World Turned Upside Down:
Transformation in Christ Versus a Sickness Unto Death
Two commemorations will provide an extremely joyful framework for the Roman Forum’s next Summer Symposium in Gardone Riviera. 2017 will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of this annual spiritual, academic, fraternal, and strategy-planning program of indispensable importance to the traditionalist world internationally. It will also be the tenth anniversary of Summorum pontificum, with all that that motu proprio has contributed to the advance of the cause of the “Mass of the Ages”.
Dr. John Rao lecture: “Even Now the Devastation Is Begun"
Dr. John Rao (shown in the video above reading the Lake Garda Statement) will be delivering the customary Roman Forum Lecture Series in New York this year. The Program will be as follows:
ANOTHER UPDATE: Help keep The Roman Forum going
THURSDAY UPDATE: Rorate readers raised nearly $7,000! Dr. Rao still needs $3,000 to save the Forum. Please consider giving! This will be our last appeal. Please consider giving today.
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Please see an urgent message below from Dr. John Rao. If you can, please click here and donate now:
Dear Friends,
We have nearly fifty people registered for the 24th Annual Summer Symposium at Gardone, with application still open until March 31st. Unfortunately, we also have some very serious hurdles to overcome in order to offer our normal program, which is needed this year more than ever.
As you know, the Roman Forum no longer has any endowment whatsoever, and now relies solely on donations for all of its activities. We are still $10,000 short of the $30,000 required to run the Summer Symposium. The money is used to pay for our twelve speakers' participation (airfare, room and board), as well as scholarships for priests, seminarians, and students. We have nine more speakers to support, and a backlog of fifteen scholarship applicants. This year's Summer Symposium lectures on Half a Millennium of Total Depravity (1517-2017): A Critique of Luther’s Impact on the Eve of His 'Catholic' Apotheosis" will be going into a book to be published by Angelico Press. We very much intend it to serve as a means of fighting the campaign to glorify Luther which will indeed characterize 2017.
Fundraising is a very, very unpleasant work, and I promise that this, my second general request for help, will be my last appeal for help for this project. Quite frankly, I have a great fear that without your immediate assistance we may no longer be able to keep the Roman Forum going past this summer at all.
See our original post on this urgent matter below from December 29.
Guest Op-Ed: The Need to Close One’s Ears to the Rehashed Messages of the Pope
Last year, when we interviewed Raymond Cardinal Burke (see here) he confirmed Catholics can no longer look towards Rome -- towards Pope Francis -- for guidance on critical issues. The good Cardinal said, instead, to turn to the catechism and tradition.
With that sage advice in mind, we bring you this guest Op-Ed, written by the highly-esteemed John Rao who, among numerous other things, was Rorate Caeli's first-ever credentialed Conclave correspondent in 2013:
A Not So Surprising Surprise of the Holy Spirit:
The Need to Close One’s Ears to the Rehashed Messages
of the Pope
Register now for the Roman Forum Summer Symposium
Below, please see the information for this year's Summer Symposium in Gardone Riviera, Italy. Whether you attend or not, please consider helping the Roman Forum accomplish its critical work towards restoring the Church. Click here to find out how to help.
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