October 08, 2026 – Pastor’s Note

Listen to this note instead: https://morefrmoore.podbean.com/e/october-08-2026-pastors-note/

Reminder – Listening Sessions

Introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wao1xBYeiQM

Calendar and Registration Link: https://www.whatcomcatholic.org/sessions

This weekend:

  • St. Peter, Sunday, 10:00 am
  • St. Joseph [Ferndale], Sunday, 12:00 pm

Assumption Website Down & Bellingham Bulletin

Over the last few months, different pages on the Assumption website have redirected to a strange Thai gambling website. We have no idea how this has been happening and we have been wack-a-mole-ing the problems as they manifest. Now the website has given up entirely.

The Assumption website is ancient in technological terms – my guess is that we are still using architecture from the mid-2000s. We are not going to attempt to revive it. Instead, this will just force us to build out the Whatcom Catholic website faster than anticipated, since that is where we are all headed eventually anyway.

This has also forced us to combine the bulletins between Sacred Heart and Assumption going forward. Ultimately, the county is headed towards one, unified bulletin, so this was going to happen anyway. The website failing just forced the change a little sooner than expected.

Democracy of the Dead

“Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.” -G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I think about this concept a lot, especially when I am working with our elementary school and our future high school. A lot of the Classical Education movement is based in this idea – that both the writings and the pedagogy of our ancestors are profoundly important and ought not to be abandoned easily. I am deeply thankful that my own high school education included Latin, ancient and classical literature, and a basic review of western philosophy. I want that for more of our society and especially our Catholic children.

Seminary, of course, gave me an additional six years of reading ancient, Medieval, modern, and contemporary perspectives, which is another thing for which I was and am deeply grateful. When we talk about priestly vocations, I wonder if we do not speak enough about what a blessing it is to receive a priestly education, even before the blessing of living a priestly life.

Due to all of this education, I am exceedingly miffed when I hear the implication that previous generations were stupid, ignorant, racist, bigoted, superstitious, or otherwise not worthy of listening to. Part of this terrible belief comes from the simplistic and increasingly identitarian way in which American history is taught today – i.e. everyone before the Civil War was a slaveholding oppressor and everyone before the Civil Rights Act was racist, so of course we should not care about any idea published before the 1970s. But the idea goes much further back than this. How many children come out of elementary school believing that humanity thought the world was flat before Columbus? And how many youth leave high school believing that nothing good happened in Europe from the Fall of Rome (AD 476) until the invention of the printing press (AD 1440)? This tendency to teach that “everyone before me was wrong” very much emerges out of the Protestant Reformation, the core argument of which was that everyone between Augustine and Martin Luther corrupted true Christianity. The only thing that has changed since AD 1517 is what we say that previous generations were wrong about.

Chesterton actually writes an entire book called “The Everlasting Man” against this way of thinking, and this book was paradigm changing for me. His core argument can be summarized in one argument he makes: Why, he asks, do we picture cave men carrying clubs and dragging their women around by the hair? What proof do we have of these social dynamics? The primary evidence we have that humanity lived in caves is cave art. Why, then, should we see prehistoric humanity as savage rather than artistic? It is from our hubris about our own superiority, not anything based in reality.

Instead, anyone who has sat down to read the literary, philosophical, and theological works of previous eras is usually surprised by how much we still have in common with the writers of previous millennia. They may not reference cars and computers, but the social, religious, and political problems they are dealing with are very similar to our problems today.

As one example, I am currently reading through Against Heresies by St. Irenaeus, a work from 180 A.D. that I had never before made time to read. I am only about 25% through it, but I am surprised how well it holds up [you’d think I’d learn!]. His philosophical arguments for monotheism predate Aquinas by a full millennium, but they are structurally exactly the same even if somewhat less rigorous. And the heresies he is writing against, well, they are extremely similar to Mormonism, Scientology, and even Q-Anon in how they were developed and propogated.

If you want to start engaging in the Democracy of the Dead, especially with early Christian writings, I might recommend the following, which are accessible enough:

Published by Fr. Moore

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