+ AMDG

If you see papers actually written by Jesuit scholastics and priests and students, you'd most likely see the above 4 letters on the top of each page: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam - For The Greater Glory of God. His Holiness, JP2 used it routinely in his papers, so did Johann Sebastian Bach. Her Hotness, Delia Gallagher, must have, at some point, used the notation as well, since she too went to a Jesuit school, as did Her Hotness' colleague, John Mallon, and so did I.

They aren't just letters, that Ignatian axiom is one of the few things I still hold sacred in my life. So when Her Hotness' magazine published an article by John Mallon criticizing the criticisms that followed Fr. Thomas Reese's resignation, I was mortified and disillusioned. Whatever happened to that unspoken bond of fraternity somehow forged by writing the same 4 letters over and over on the top page of our exam papers? For 2,150 words (and I hope for his sake that he gets paid by the # of words per article), John Mallon sold out.

In his article, John Mallon used the words "liberal" and "left-wing" to describe Fr. Reese's defenders. So is that what is? You think about your faith and you question and you are a liberal, left-wing Catholic? Did Boston College not teach you anything, John? Remember those days at Gasson Hall discussing Rilke with your favorite Jesuit professor, or attending mass at St. Mary's with those old, retired priests who remained faithful to their sacramental duties even on early snowy mornings, or spending those quiet afternoons at Bapst? Did you think of yourself as an Orthodox Catholic then, or did your heart burn with the thirst for knowledge imbued on you by those liberal Jesuits?

Mallon's article was dismissive and eruditely mordant towards those who were alarmed by the whole Fr. Reese affair. "The Magisterium has definitively closed the book on the dissenters’ pet causes, but they simply won’t accept it. They mistakenly believe that truth is arrived at via dialogue instead of Revelation and Magisterial discernment. The dialogue was officially closed on contraception by Humanae Vitae, on women’s “ordination” by Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, and there never was nor should there have been a dialogue on abortion, which is covered by the Fifth Commandment." I'm glad John Mallon got that - because if I remember it right, the same Magisterium declared the earth flat and imprisoned the guy who - gasp! - dared to prove otherwise.

And I am disillusioned - maybe because I have put Her Hotness in the same category as some of the great doctors of the church... my bad, I know. But as a senior editor of The Magazine, she would have put her editorial stamp on Mallon's article and in doing so would have tacitly agreed (my speculation...) with the article's central discourse. And then it occurred to me that Her Hotness and I are most likely on the opposite end of the Catholic spectrum... and that made me real sad...

Ignatius, Robert Bellarmine, Stanislas Kostka, Oscar Romero, and his fellow martyrs... they all lived and died by the same cry: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam...