Setting The Record Straight

Listen to Part 2 of the amazing and true life story of Father John Gerard. This is an except from “The Hunted Priest”, the autobiography of John Gerard, a Jesuit priest, who risked all in a savagely anti-Catholic England under Elizabeth I. He had been condemned to be tortured to death in the Tower of London yet managed to make a incredible escape. He survived to live a long life, multiplying generously his granted portion of God’s love.

Truth is more amazing than fiction. Especially when Jesuits write about what they will endure for the love of Christ. The Hunted Priest is an autobiography of John Gerard, a priest who dared and defied a savagely anti-Catholic England under Elizabeth I. At first he disguised himself as a country gentlemen and traveled about secretly administering the sacraments to underground Catholics. When he was found out, he hid in a series of the infamous “priest holes”, emerging once a day to say Mass and perform the sacraments. Captured, he was condemned to be tortured to death in the Tower of London. Listen to what happened next for that was only the beginning of his story.

Its Father’s Day ! We honor our Dads ! However in this “progressive” age many us have fathers that have disappeared from our lives. Some even have no idea who their father is. The one parent family is common now. Manhood is routinely condemned. Did this happen inevitably? Perhaps it could have been prevented if we knew its cause? It is curious that we do know its cause but most people refuse to believe it. It is a tragedy that the pathological effects of fatherlessness are not just emotional and social but include permanent neurological damage to the developing child.

How can today’s sensible secular intellectuals account for the unmatchable beauty, the order, and technical genius of the music of the Catholic “West”? “Parsifal” is Richard Wagner’s greatest opera. Unfortunately for some it is unashamedly Catholic and luminescent with sacred beauty. What had happened to the younger Wagner who, in Tristan and Isolde, had abandoned the order of logos and unleashed the relativistic chaos that eventually produced a school of modern classical music so ugly that no one now wants to hear it? Perhaps in “Parsifal” he had found the true sensuousness within the logos.