Tuesday, August 15, 2017

He is mercy in your arms and our only hope

most older Catholics know this hymn, but the younger ones might remember it from "Sister Act"




ah, but do you know the backstory of the hymn, based on the Catholic prayer "Hail Holy Queen"


why "mother of Mercy"?  because she carries Mercy in her arms.

Professor Podles has an ongoing series of Anglo Catholic hymns, and their histories. This hymn was sung for the feast of the Assumption, which in the Orthodox tradition is called the Dormition of Mary. It's the ancient belief that Mary, like Enoch and Isaiah was taken to heaven.

So who wrote that prayer?

Hail Holy Queen enthroned above is an anonymous translation of Salve regina coelitum by Hermanus contractus (The Crippled or The Lame). Hermann was a son of the Count of Altshausen. He was crippled by a paralytic disease from early childhood. He was born in 1013, with a cleft palate, cerebral palsy and is said to have had spina bifida.,,, As a result, he had great difficulty moving and could hardly speak.

like many crippled children in those days, he was placed in a monastery by his parents while still a child, Caring for a crippled or handicapped child is not hard: but as the child grows, the physical strength needed is often beyond families. I suspect like adopted children, he didn't understand that this was to help him, not because his parents didn't love him...

So Mary became his spiritual mother and a source of hope, even when life (or God) put even harder burdens on him as he aged.
 When he went blind in later life, he began writing hymns, the best known of which is Salve Regina Coelitum.



Yes. Valley of tears. Modern life tends to insist we live in paradise and can do everything ourselves. Nonsense of course, but never mind.

The Disabilities act has mandated that society accept the handicapped and that is a good thing. But what about when even the electric wheelchairs and computers aren't enough? And what about the cost? Will the removal of Obamacare result in more handicapped being forced into the prisons of clean but dehumanizing nursing homes, or will it just offer them the "right" to kill themselves, as is being done in a couple of European countries, where the elderly are offing themselves when they feel their lives are useless?

As for the congenital anomalie of Spna Bifida: It can be treated, but it is expensive and need repeated surgeries. when I worked in Africa 35 years ago, we didn't do the complicated surgical repair it at birth, since the pulmonary and renal problems usually were fatal in childhood....

At that time, we were losing children from measles and kwashiorkor and diarrhea, which could be treated for a couple of dollars, so surgery that cost hundreds of dollars in a hospital 200 miles away was not an option...(things have improved since then, thankfully)...

yet those with  less severe problems, and those who had various other handicaps could be found in villages, and some of them we referred for surgery or job training, which was starting to become available.

Usually this handicap is treated in advanced countries... but in the shadows, there remains the debate if we can "afford" to treat them....

Past cases include Baby Jane Doe, where the pro death NYTimes cheered the parents on when they obeyed the doctors and decided not to let doctors operate on their child (ironically, the kid lived, and the parents changed their mind. She is still alive 25 years later)...

Another case was the notorious "treatment vs non treatment" study in Oklahoma  where a QALY criteria was used to decide if the kid deserved treatment..

.(a black doctor later reviewed the cases and found a racial bias in the selection, so most of the black kids were not treated. Well, duh. But of course, it wasn't "race" behind the doctors recommendations: most of the minority kids weren't treated because... being poor meant they'd have a negative Quality of Life years so they failed the criteria for treatment...)

complaints that doctors let those with poor quality of life live, so we need to be allowed to kill them is not a new idea: It goes back to the Republic and was resurrected by the Eugenicists long before the Nazis picked up the idea and ran with it.

So more recently, ethicists are again being praised for their "bold" assertion that infanticide is okay in some cases (while in the Netherlands they might just be killed outright).

Even the newfangled Vatican experts are getting into the mood: Luckily the Pope corrected them, and has called such killing false compassion,  (one does wish he would remove the barbarians from his minions instead of condemning the quiet Christians who are so rigid they insist on the reality of sin, but never mind).

So excuse me if I don't join the hyperventilation of the MSM about Nazis marching in the streets.

The real Nazis are not marching in the streets: They are the ethicists in academia who want the right to decide whether you should live or die.

Sigh.

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