Benedict and the Scandal Redux

In which I continue my argument with Rod Dreher.

Close

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Yale

I'm With Douthat on This

Whatever one thinks of how Obama's choice of pastor should bear on his qualifications for the Presidency, it's hard to feel anything but pity for the junior Senator from Illinois after watching Wright's disgustingly narcissistic display over the last few days.

I think Obama has been genuine in his attempts to transcend the BS that has characterized so much of the Professionally Aggrieved Grievance Professional shakedown industry as characterized by Sharpton, Jackson, and so forth. I think he's been sincere and effective in getting people to move past the old oppressor/victim paradigm that has poisoned so much conversation in this country. I think that, for all I disagree with him on, it's a tragedy that he should be betrayed by the sabotage efforts not of white racists, but of black ones. And I think the bitterest part of it is that its his own pastor--a father figure, no less--who appears to be working hardest to make sure that his job remains secure by perpetuating the old paradigm and destroying Obama's efforts to at long last move us past it. Fault the man for his tired Leftyism (and I do). But give him credit for being far more decent a man than the shakedown establishment or the sleazebucket that is the Clinton machine. I take my hat off to him and wish him well, though I will never vote for him, as I will never vote for any candidate who supports intrinsic moral evil.

Amy Welborn and Sherry Weddell

...are having an interesting conversation (or is it co-meditation) on the hard times cultural Catholicism is facing now.

The Worst Part Is, I Can't Blame Jan's DNA

My son Peter, a moment ago: What do you call something you put on your finger that controls all shopping areas?

Me, bracing for impact: I give up. What?

Peter, triumphantly: One Ring to Rule the Mall!

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Call an exorcist. This "ghost" is a demonic imposter!

I thought the bit about the Number Two Al-Quaida guy was funny too.

A friend of mine writes:

While searching for anthems as stirring as Jerusalem, I found this interesting article from five years ago about Britons' choice for their national anthem. I like how it's played at the start of English rugby games. In an odd sort of way, I can see how it might motivate certain rugby-type folk to go forth for bloody brawling upon the pitch. I don't know if Wembley Stadium has an organ, but that would be quite a scene to behold: Jerusalem blaring out of the organ pipes in a venue filled with 100,000 fans suitably libation-enabled and singing at the tops of their lungs.

As one who has on occasion been inclined to spontaneously belt out a Jerusalem verse or two, I figured you might enjoy this.

"Jerusalem" quite literally rocks:



It's a very strange hymn really. And it's enormous popularity is even stranger. It's a celebration of England as a Christian nation and a superpower by a man who disliked much that made England both Christian (in an orthodox sense) and a super power. Originally it was a poem by the exceedingly strange William Blake that combines equal parts legend (specifically the legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought Jesus to England), Tolkienesque hostility to the burgeoning industrial revolution and its "dark satanic mills" and the sort of pumped up "Light and Glory" patriotism that tends to afflict Christian countries when they feel their oats. France was, for a time "eldest daughter of the Church". Tsarist Russia saw itself as the "Christ of Nations". Britain had this spasm of gratifying mythology with Jesus roaming her hills and calling her to be the New Jerusalem, and even American gave birth to something similar in the Mormon myth that Jesus showed up on our soil because we are Oh So Special. Nationalism, in its Christian manifestation, has always tended to call on Jesus to bless and anoint national pride. It's partly harmless, partly helpful (because it really can call forth the best in a people (not for nothing did Eisenhower call his chronicle of the war against Hitler "Crusade in Europe") and partly sinister (because it can also call forth the worst in a people ("Gott mit uns!"))

The strange thing is that post-Christian Britain still loves the hymn. Emerson, Lake and Palmer's performance has not a trace of sarcasm to it, despite Greg Lake's various embittered atheist ravings and posturings in his other work. They just seemed to like the song. So do a lot of Brits. Music, like love, is funny stuff.

Catholic Bookseller Trade Show to Host Feast of Saint Narcissus

Gene Robinson will be at the Religious Booksellers Trade Exhibit (RBTE) in St. Charles, Illinois to hang with the peeps and talk about himself, his glory, his sorrow, himself, his sexuality, his greatness, himself, his life, himself, his views, himself, and himself.

Sedevacantism: An Especially Incoherent Form of Protestantism

So a while back, I get an email from somebody named "Paddy the Papist". He's a pugnacious Irishman with an All Explaining Theory of Everything about how Cardinal Siri was supposed to be the true Pope but nefarious forces put John XXIII on the chair of Peter and it's all been downhill ever since.

I have a hard time taking these conspiracy theories seriously and remarked as much to him, prompting a post to the effect that Paddy doesn't like the direction the Church has gone, so his theory explains why the Church has erred in not allowing the True Pope (Siri) to reign.

I asked why, if Siri was the True Pope, he denied it and remained in communion with the Church till he died.

With remarkably agile incoherence, Paddy responded that since white smoke was seen, that means Siri *was* elected and even he could not undo his election. Oh, and I'm a former Episcoplian and Freemason bent on corrupting the Church with the mortal sin of Joy.

Some readers may wonder why we should take Paddy's word for it that Siri was elected when Siri himself, who was there, denies it and remained in communion with the Church. But such considerations are only for people who do not have an all-Explaining Theory of Everything.

Basically, Paddy is asking me to believe he is more infallible than both Siri and the Church, even though he wasn't at the conclave and Siri was. That's Protestantism with a twist. At least, Protestants based their private judgement on a book that could argue back. Siri argued against guys like Paddy and rejected their claims that he was ever elected Pope. (And, of course, he's dead, which leaves us with no Pope. So much for the indefectibility of the Church.)

By the way, I was never an Episcopalian or a Freemason. I come from non-denomationalism. I do enjoy being Catholic. I am, in fact, commanded to do so: "Rejoice without ceasing. I say again: Rejoice" (St. Paul to the Phillippians). In addition to the crazy incoherence, the frequent sedevacantist hatred of joy is but one of the things that marks the sect out as despising the True Faith. My advice to sedevacantists: Repent and return to the True Church or you will go to Hell. You, of all people, know well that there is no salvation outside Her. Your responsibility and culpability for schism is far greater than the garden variety Know Nothing who splits with the Church out of sheer ignorance of who and what She is.

Feddie Over at Southern Appeal is Having an Interesting Discussion on Non-Denominationalism

Here and here.

Feddie's a former Babdist himself who is now Catholic. He and his readers have an interesting chat about some of the thinking that moves people out of mainline Protestantism and into various other places ranging from non-denoms to the Catholic communion. As a former non-denom, the note from his reader rings true at the experiential level. That is, a huge number of non-denoms and Emergents shop for a church with the paramount question: "Does this suit me best?"

Feddie's discomfort with this consumerist approach is deeply Catholic. He puts his finger on the nerve when he points out that worship predicated on "What's in it for me?" may well be worship (of the self) but it's not worship of God. That seems to me to be suicide compact that Seeker Sensitive Churches enter into. They draw huge crowds, but they very carefully instruct those crowd to remain entirely comfortable with the notion "It's all about You!"

Emergent Christianity offers both hope and peril here, I think. On the one hand, there is an awareness that All is Not Well. So Emergents are remarkably open to some aspects of Catholic life and tradition, for instance, because that pisses off and frighten mom and dad. Emergents will experiment with the Rosary. They want to learn about the Fathers. They are on good terms with figures like Pope Benedict.

But they also are often pro-abortion (cuz that pisses off mom and dad too). They are uncomfortable with all that theology stuff, because their hyper-rational Calvinistic parents were obsessed with diagramming everything. They often don't see what the big deal is with Christian sexual morality. Like all would be revolutionaries, they can see what's wrong, but they can't see what's right. Their approach is very often to say, "I don't see the point of *this*!" as the uproot some ancient truth of the faith, only to find out decades later that the thing they destroyed was rather important.

To all this chaos, the Church proposes, well, the Catholic faith, which is not composed of favorite bits and piece that suit somebody's lifestyle, nor of mere diagrams, nor of beloved practices and piece of old bric a brac, but is simply the gospel Christ proposes to us, in its entirety, offering the worship God commanded us to offer. The Mass, though it feed us, is blessedly not about us. It's about the worship given to God the Father by Jesus the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. We do not do it: Christ does it and we get to tag along and find both God and ourselves through it. In non-denomism, there is frequently a "worship leader" who leads people in the praise of God in song. In the Mass, the worship leader is neither the Choirmaster nor even the priest. It is Christ, offering himself to his Father, not merely through the praises of the people, but through the re-presentation of his sacrificial body and blood in the most Holy Eucharist. When we offer ourselves, we are given to God through him. When we receive the Eucharist, we receive Him--He Himself--in the sacrament so that we can offer ourselves to the world.

That suits nobodys lifestyle ultimately, because it a participation in crucifixion, death and resurrection that is highly inconvenient to consumer values. But it also happens to be our hope and our deepest desire if we can die to the consumerism and seek real life where it is found.

A reader writes:

I read the Tom Tomorrow cartoon you ran on April 14 at about the same time I got a phone call from someone I know who lost her home. The comic hit home. Hope-where does it come from, who will present it?

I offer a post of the bleak world of economic distress. For those of us toiling in the ghettos and with the poor, economic bad times are crashing hard, with families losing their homes. Workers and associates with talent and compassion are few and I am often lucky to work with dedicated professionals in many fields.

The secularist gets his or her fair share of grief for a limited world view. A lack of an eternal horizon. At the same time, so often my only co-workers in these ghettos are the secularists, oft-derided liberals, folks with little religion in their lives. I say this after watching underpaid gentle co-workers devote themselves to several individuals few would welcome to their dinner table. What to do with this? I offer respect to these co-workers, and note simultaneously that rarely have I ever met a conservative religious person in these wild lands. Rick Santorum did few book signings or politicking in these Badlands. Grover Norquist tutors few students in economics at inner city high schools.

The goats and the sheep story in Matt 25 is remarkable for a number of things, most prominently is the “surprise factor” for the judged. Who is surprised are those who seem shocked that they did right by Jesus. Could these individuals in this story have failed to recognize Him in their lives but have been charitable? Could these be the charitable atheists, and be held up as a model to uncompassionate, but prominently observant believers?

Alienation and abandonment dominate the horizon for the families in the inner city. Being with them is hard and I find little comfort in the possibilities for these folks in the short or medium term. And George Weigel, who gets such special access to the pope, wrote an article during Holy Week which seemed to indicate that everyone would do well with another helping of suffering.

Within this reflection encompassing recent disasters in my circle of acquaintances, is the sense of the alienation I feel from this Popamania in America for his visit. I have moderate criticism of this pope and his CDF. I have found his writings fantastic and profound, except the second part of Caritas es Deus. This was “very average.” His description of a praxis that could match his profound and near poetic dogma in the first part of this encyclical was disappointingly just “ok.”

Is it his lack of contact with the poor or folks who work with the poor? Folks who work with the poor have always been suspect of late in the Vatican (last 25 years or so). Romero’s cause has been held up in the CDF (since when did a cause for the sainthood go to the CDF?) while Benedict ran this congregation. This same congregation worked overtime to find words that displaced the work with the poor from the center of a Christology to a hobby and “pre-occupation,” as one would describe an interest in tennis.

Why is work with the poor so suspected among the leaders of our Church? Acknowledgement of the Christ in the poor is a centerpiece of our Christology since the Evangelists. And simultaneously, the main folks who serve Him as such seem to be individuals who are hardly religious. Just watch the parade of scarcely observant or overtly secularist liberals volunteering after college for the Peace Corps, Teach for America, or any of the religious volunteer opportunities like the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Just an observation.

Today the family is better housed for a short term. The family prompting this reflection does not have a home, and for the next year, at least, is unlikely to have one, just shelter. Despite Mr. Weigel’s suggestion, this family is one of many I know who could afford less suffering and more reward, more signs of the eternal Hope. Today. Just like the psalms cry to God about.

For many, the Resurrection is truly the only thing these individuals and families have to look forward to. And my job in the short term is to squeak a little less suffering into their lives (despite calls for “more suffering, please”).

So often my partners seem to have no conscious vision of the eternal Hope. Despite this, their actions clearly spread His Love and His Hope.

That His Hope could be spread by those who don’t see or believe is an act of Hope, and should be used as examples to those of us who hold claim to hold this Hope. May that I could be such an example.

I agree with you about the surprise factor in the Judgement. It was partly with that in view that I coined the notion of "eupocrisy" to try to describe the phenomenon of "good hypocrisy": people who are better than their own belief system or rhetoric can account for. Matthew 25 does not say that the Sheep will be saved because they understood transubstantiation or had the correct theory of justification. Still less does it confer salvation on those who wore flag lapel pins.

I'm not so persuaded that either of us have any real idea of the (theological) liberal/conservative demographics of those who serve the poor. However, it's not hard to figure out that sympathy for the poor is not a prime value for Limbaugh et al. Oh sure, there is the rhetoric about capitalism as the *real* engine of wealth creation (and it's partly true). And there is something in Limbaugh's loathing for liberal politicians who simple use the disadvantaged in order to maintain their own power. But there is also a note of mocking contempt for the homeless and the poor. "Compassion" is a word that Limbaugh finds extraordinarily difficult to say without a sneer in his voice. And he has taught the Right to say it in just that tone. Without a grounding in the Catholic tradition (and often even with one) I suspect it's difficult for many, if not most, conservatives to view almsgiving (a historic Christian duty--along with prayer and fasting--that is one of the three pillars of piety according to our Lord) as something other than a contemptible "welfare mentality".

RE: Romero and all that. I have blessedly no grasp of the intricacies of canonization and so have not the slightest notion what is happening in Rome. Romero was (horrors!) an Opus Dei guy (not the sort of thing you often hear) and, for all I know, that could be part of what is holding things up. Or, perhaps *nothing* is holding things up and this is just part of the normal Roman snail's pace. I'm not especially persuaded that either Benedict or the bishops are suspicious of working with the poor. Benedict, it is true, had and has real reservations about liberation theology, which was as misbegotten an attempt to graft Marx into the gospel as some of Michael Novak's misbegotten attempts to graft democratic capitalism into the gospel. But that's not the same thing as suspicious of care for the poor.

Indeed, as a convert, what has always struck me full in the face is how deep the Church's tradition (including it magisterial tradition) is allied with the poor. The notion "the law was made for man, not man for the law" is rarely more in evidence (to me) than in the Catholic Church's almost cavilier contempt for Protestant, Anglo-Saxon reverence for accumulated private property. The shocking teaching of the Fathers that the poor man who takes from a rich man to feed himself and his family has not committed theft but simply claimed what is rightfully his is the sort of thing that would give Rush Limbaugh and his acolytes the vapors. But there it is.

Communism, like capitalism, is a rebel child of its Mother, of course. But both ideologies are stealing from something in the Catholic tradition. Communism steals care for the poor from the tradition and alloys it with the sin of envy, justifying all manner of evil in pursuit of phantom happiness. Capitalism steals respect for private property from the tradition and alloys it with the sin of greed, justifying all manner of evil in pursuit of phantom happiness. What gives the sins their power is the virtues that animate them, cut off from the rest of the Christian tradition. I think that's what worries the Pope about liberation theology. I don't think he's worried about or suspicious of care for the poor. The Church, after all, remains the biggest charitable institution on the planet. This is but one of the reasons that the Left's general hostility to the Faith is, well, insane, just as the Right's growing hostility to the Faith is likewise insane. The fall poisons all hearts. It just does it in different ways.

I agree with you that Catholics are ill-employed writing things like "If the poor be like to suffer they had better do it and learn thrift or perish!" Darwinian thinking is not Catholic, however it may be useful as a biological theorem, as morality it is wicked. In Weigel's defense, my guess (without reading his column) is that he's probably got in view the fat dumb and happy, not the desperate, when he offers his counsels of suffering. And there *is* a tradition among the prophets of saying "Woe to those who are at ease in Zion." It's hard *not* to look at a Paris Hilton culture--harder still not to look in the mirror some days--and not think, "What that guy needs is a good swift kick". But our Lord is in charge of such matters, not us. We are already inclined (especially in the US) to have too much faith in "percussive maintenance" and redemption via Jack Bauer. We don't need to be encouraged in that.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughtful note and God bless your work with God's most beloved poor. Pray for me that my own response to the poor will not suck as much as it does now.

A Tale of Two Covenants, Part Two

In which we continue the discussion of the relationship of the Old and New Covenants, Christians and Jews, and of the various alarums and discursions among Progressive and Reactionary Dissenters resulting from the misbegotten and abortive Reflections on Covenant and Mission document.

Christian Sanity

In which we talk about the fact that the chosen are chosen for the sake of the unchosen.

One Death is a Tragedy. A Million Deaths is a Statistic - Joseph Stalin

I think one reason our politics is reduced to this sort of trivia:



is summed up by T.S Eliot's observation that human being can't handle too much reality. When a culture become corrupt, it is faced more and more with its own capacity for evil. The reaction of most people to having to look at a sewer is to close ones eyes. And the more you close them, the harder it is to open them again. The conscience gets seared and you find yourself searching for ways to distract yourself from reality.

I think this spiritual posture is reflected in our politics. We live in dreadfully fearful times--so we focus on Britney Spears and lapel pins because it's just easier. We're like the guy who overeats because he's nervous about his obesity. Or Stalin continuing to murder until he could not longer feel what he was doing and had turned his mass graves into a statistic. Our is a culture of mass graves too, both of the body (though it be tiny) and the spirit.

God, of your mercy, help your wretched creature man. Without your grace we can never hope to get out of the holes we dig for ourselves.

Chaos!

So Obama, who really seems like a decent guy to me, despite his snobbishness and repellent political views, has to figure out what to do about his looney pastor and the fact that he has hung around his looney pastor for 20 years

He gives a good speech a few weeks ago that seems to diffuse the problem. No skin off my nose cuz I'm not gonna vote for him anyway, but he seems to have made clear that he's not Wright and Wright isn't him, all while maintaining that Wright is a sort of father for him that he respect. Fair enough. I've had father figures whom I respected who said demented things too. So I'm not much interested in the Freak Show's endless attempts to somehow say that Wright is practically Obama's running mate. More Rove sleaze, as far as I can see. Let's talk about something important, like Obama's deranged Lefty notions of governance.

But no, Wright has to go off and make a spectacle of himself in a way that even Andrew Sullivan can't ignore. He proceeds to be Wright even more forcefully, babbling about whitey and his AIDS conspiracies, lauding Farrakhan, and generally acting looney--all with the help of an apparent Hillary supporter (though the Press Club is now denying this).

So now Obama, who just a couple of weeks ago said there was no way he could disown the guy, is forced by this egomaniac into doing just that. Much like our current President's ability to gaze into Putin's eyes and see his soul, Obama's choice of pastor (and it was a choice) suggests something of the success he will have in picking reliable cabinet members.

Meanwhile, the Reptile is scheming with her new friends at FoxNews and will no doubt by shocked--SHOCKED!--at all this kerfuffle. And to top it off, that paragon of integrity and racial amity, Al Sharpton, is standing tall for Al Sharpton, the only cause he really believes in.

Oh, and Ron Paul people are creating a few headaches for the relatively smooth operations of the GOP machine as it processes conservative principles into a hash of hypocrisy and duplicity.

And presiding over it all: a President who now openly acknowledges torturing people, absenting the US from observing Geneva when he doesn't feel like it, and who lives secure in the knowledge that the press will not care as long as they have some juicy dish on some trivial ephemera to keep the airwaves humming with scandal and gossip.

We get the government we deserve in a democracy.

The Old Switcheroo

Islam, being a religion of oversimplification, oversimplifies the story of Jesus.

Problem: Jesus is a great prophet and God is good.

Solution: God snatches Jesus away and transforms Judas to look just like Jesus. Judas get crucified and that whole thing about the innocent sufferingg for the guilty is tidied up nicely.

Scientist Labors to Reinforce Perception of Scientists as Socially Inept Nerds

Only a true geek could speculate that sex might become unpopular.

Here's a documentary on this fascinating new theory:

We're Enrolling our Kids!

Francisco Ayala

The guy is some sort of theistic evolutionist. He thinks evolution helps to account for the problem of evil. I get the vague sense he's fudging somewhere, but that's just me. Some of his arguments seem to me to be very anthropomorphic. i know how *I* would feel if my wife chewed by head off after mating. But that's because I have an extremely sophisticated brain and a soul and the concept "me". Praying mantis' lack all that, so the attribution of "sadism" to God seems to me to be a purely emotional trick of speech or perception. The doings of insects are, on the whole, so utterly remote from human experience that the attempt to analogize from the horrors we see there to ourselves is, I think, one of the great blunders of a lot of this sort of discussion. We are horrified to see two insects eating each other. The insects themselves give the impression, not so much of contentment at a nice meal as of two machines automatically doing the subroutine they were built to perform in that particular circumstance.

And, of course, the question remains "built by whom". The line that irks me the most in the article is this:

But if God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, he said, “then he is a sadist, he certainly does odd things and he is a lousy engineer.”

Now the first part of the sentence is supplied by the report. But it calls into question whether Ayala, if he agrees with it, really believes that God is "creator of all that is seen and unseen". If we believe anything as Christians it is that that, in some sense, all that is exists "on purpose". God made it, holds it in being, and is its Creator. That includes midges, bloodflukes, child rapists, and Satan. It also include junk DNA (so-called), bad engineering and the mysteriously popular form of music called "rap". If God did not will that they be, they would not be. So I have to wonder what is meant by those words "on purpose".

Ayala *could* mean that God permits his creatures freedom to be whatever they are. Fair enough. But if he means "God permits them so much freedom that they are outisde his Providence and he has no control over them whatever" I think that's weasel talk. I'm perfectly prepared to believe that God writes straight with crooked lines. I'm even prepared to believe (as C.S. Lewis suggested in "The Problem of Pain") that demonic interference with and corruption of the natural order extends a lot further than merely the temptation of Man: that fallen angels have been harming creation since the Big Bang, if you will. I see no reason why this cannot be. But I'm dimly suspicious when theistic evolutionists say (or sound as if they are saying) that God is more or less out of touch with nature, just sitting around watching it grow and wondering what it might do next. This is, as Tom Kreitzberg puts it, "guff". It was the kind crap George Coyne used to spout to compartmentalize God from science. I hope it's not what Ayala is saying, but I can't tell from this one article.

By the way, my thanks to the Thomist for helping me get a little more traction on the whole thing about Paley. I was unaware that I'd offered a better version of Paley's argument than Paley. And, if Paley actually did use the specified complexity of living things to deny the design of the rest of the universe, then I agree that's a silly thing to do.

We seem to me to be entering waters well over my head here. My basic take is that, as I said, seeing the Mona Lisa in a workshop clutter with lot of (to me) unintelligble junk, I *connect* the junk with the painting rather than oppose them. I assume "Well, Leonardo made this, so I'm sure he knows what he's doing with this half-finished sketch over there and the dissected bats on this table. I infer Mind is behind it all, but that sometimes Mind is expressing itself in ways that are particularly transparent to me.

The curious thing about the atheist approach is the odd and almost prosecutorial impatience with what I would call "signs" (following St. John). Signs don't tell me everything. But they tell me enough to take a step, if I choose to.

The other day, I linked a piece about somebody who was miraculously healed after seeking Venerable John Henry Newman's intercession. It was really quite a remarkable healing: the guy was bent double with arthritis and now is just fine. In the comments on the news site, the Usual Suspects were heard from. They were utterly uninterested in this curious event. Instead of, "Why doesn't God give a clear sign that he exists" they switched to Phase 2 and 3 of the atheist play book and a) either denied altogether that the thing had happened or b) demanded to know why God hadn't likewise healed everybody in the world. There was simply no interest at all in the possibility that this healing was a *sign*: a thing meant to point to other things (especially to God himself and to the *real* healing of which this physical healing was simply an image). The problem, it seems to me, is in the will of such people. It's not that they can't see, it's that they won't. The will not take the elementary effort of soul to even consider the possibility that something supernatural occurred. They bat it away. It's a pre-rational response. They sense in their gut that such an event offers them a choice to take a step toward, at least, the possibility of the supernatural and they knock it away with a sort of animal fury that is about a million miles away from the "reason" they pride themselves on.

Of course, it can cut both ways. As Paley demonstrates, you can also do the Manichaean thing of driving a wedge between nature and Creator. I think the whole "uncommon descent" blunder of the ID guys is doing this when they posit that even theistic evolution is out of court. But I tend to think this is a case of over-compensating for the very strange insistence that evolution somehow disproves creation.

Reason #934857349583475734589735597 to Homeschool

If you leave your kids unsupervised for a few minutes they will not copulate with each other in a closet.

Children Lead People to Christ

Egan Chews Out Giuliani

Nice to see!

Ed Peters thinks so too!

Could Benedict have administered some Spine Growth Injections while he was here?

A reader writes:

The high school that I work at as the chair of the theology department is seeking a faithful and committed Catholic with at least a bachelor in theology (a Master's would be great) for our theology department. The school is making great progress and has wonderful potential to propose the Catholic faith to our community. The Pastors in our area are excellent and work very closely with our school and specifically with out department. If you could post the position I would greatly appreciate it. If not I understand.

The School's website is here.

A reader writes to ask for prayer for a younger family member (a minor) who is pregnant by a con artist she still trusts.

No more details than that. Please pray for the girl, that she would see through the guy and that he would face some justice and find God's mercy for his sins.

This is informative and interesting

So Amanda Marcotte, the embittered harridan (and former John Edwards flunky) whose mission in life is promotion of devotion to the Sacrament of Abortion writes about (wait for it) the Sacrament of Abortion in a new book called "It's a Jungle Out There" (because, you know, it's just so hard to win unswerving approval for the Sacrament of Abortion always and everywhere.

Now, with the narrative of the Revolutionary Vanguard of History types, you always have with it the narrative "We have climbed the ladder of history and are kicking it down behind us, leaving the primitives from which we arose to die in the dust!" This is standard issue Leftist thinking and this is exactly what "It's a Jungle Out There" naturally gravitates toward in its imagery. So much so, in fact, that it never even occurred to Marcotte to think about it. So for months, she labored over images like these and it never once occurred to her that there was a problem:







This was simply Choice Girl kicking those damn anti-choice primitives in the teeth. All good clean fun.

But then the book was published and the self-contradiction in Leftism came to light almost instantly. Where Marcotte saw the righteous triumph of the Power of Woman over the savage taboos of patriarchy, others saw grotesque racist stereotyping with white people beating up Ooga Booga "natives" from Central Casting. Much bustle etc. Attempts by blurb writers to excuse the racism are made (after all, it was for a Greater Good!)

But, finally, Marcotte herself apologizes with the telling remark that "I didn’t pick the offensive imagery in my book, but I should have caught it sooner than now. I didn’t and there’s no excuse. It was my first book, I was excited and happy, but I needed to have a more critical eye."

See, here's the thing. I believe her--and that's the entire trouble with her apology. I know something about what it takes to get a book in production and the pains an author has to take to make sure the book comes out they way he/she wants it. The fact is, Marcotte would have been looking at these images for weeks and months. And the fact that it never ever occurred to her that there was a problem with these images says something.

The thing is: it doesn't say "Marcotte is a racist" as her PC friends Pavlovianly respond (though Margaret Sanger (pictured below) *would* love the book just the way it is).



No. The problem is far deeper than a mere stupid prejudice about skin color. The problem is with the New Order's entire attitude to tradition, to the organic growth of the human family, to the very idea of family itself (and therefore to the cognate ideas of "tribe" and "nation"). She doesn't hate people because of the color of their skin. She hates people who love the ordinary human view of the family that has prevailed for a million years. Her loathing is not confined to this race or that race, but is for the human race. She wants to do away with what "human" has hitherto meant and replace it with the Imperial Autonomous Self, unfettered by "primitive" ties of tradition, love or (ooga booga!) religion.

A reader writes:

I just got a call from my mom, regarding her aunt Erin. Aunt Erin also happens to be my Confirmation Sponsor and the last remaining sibling of my deceased, maternal grandmother. Aunt Erin was at Harborview to have some kind of laser surgery (I don't know what the surgery was involving). Anyway, upon entering the hospital, she passed out, hit her head and subsequently, also broke her hip. She has some contusions on her head and is being checked for any blood on the brain, as well as trying to determine what caused her to pass out. Aunt Erin is 80 years old and an active member of St. Michael's in Olympia. Please keep her in prayer and pray for not only her healing, but also, pray that she also draws ever closer to the Lord, during this time. Pray also for her 5 children and grandchildren, (and other family and friends) that they, too, grow in their faith through this experience.

Thank you, so much!

Lord, hear our prayer!

Apologies to My Friend Diane

We disagree when it comes to "How to argue with Rod Dreher" and my disagreement was sharp enough that I lost my temper with her last week in comboxes below. I ought not to have done that. My apologies.

Folding@Home

Your chance to use your going-to-waste computing cycles for good. If you join St. Blog's Folding Group (#12489) you can help lead us on to Protein Victory and Protein Glory and well as make some scientific history!

Today's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment, Brought to You By the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

"...less than 0.4% of each day's heterosexual trysts result in the creation of new humans -- a statistically insignificant correlation for proving causation."

Biofuels are a Scam that Kills People

One tank of gas for an SUV = Food for one person for a year.

Obscene.

A reader writes:

We are all accustomed to seeing the Catholic faith misrepresented by our fundamentalist brethren. For the most part they are well-meaning and do no great harm. It is more serious when the largest non-Catholic Christian body in the U.S. spreads falsehoods.

Baptist Press, the media arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, published this story in anticipation of the Pope's visit to the U.S., plus this related article. As you will see they are less than fully accurate. Recently you linked to a column by Al Mohler, who at least seems to understand Catholic theology while disagreeing with it. It appears other Southern Baptist leaders are less enlightened.

Maybe you can link these articles and let your readers dissect them in the combox. It would help those of us who have Baptist friends and relatives. Thanks and have a great week.

Dissect away, me boyos!

Canadians Fight for Elementary Human Right of Free Speech

The Canadian Soviet Media Committee On Correct Thought has labeled such Undesirables "Freespeechers" and is working hard to sterilize Canadian society of these infectious bacillae.

For my part, click here to donate to the defense of free speech in Canada--while you still can.

If you want to know what's at stake and how it can and will happen in the US sooner or later, read this.

If you can't believe that Leftist PC tyrants are making common cause with Jihadist fanatics from the Dark Ages, this will explain something of the dynamic at work, IMO.

Palestinian Christians: Between the Hammer and Anvil

Fortunately, they're just Christians, so their suffering doesn't matter.

A reader writes:

I could use your advice.

I was following your story about Rod and read there about the allegations of wrongdoing by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. I was taken aback as I had not heard of this before.

I followed up by reading Ed Peters' blog. I respect Ed Peters alot. He doesn't impress me as someone who would engage in idle gossip or detraction unlike, say Matt Abbott. I also read the comments on Rod's blog and someone called JohnMcG pointed out that the allegations against McCarrick were detraction of the worst sort perpetrated by his enemies and without merit (the comment has since been deleted).

Now here's my dilemna. I am involved with a Catholic spirituality called the Families of Nazareth. You may have heard of or read "The Gift of Faith" by Fr. Tadeusz Dajczer (It was featured on Amy W's blog and since her blogdesk sits right across from yours :). The Gift of Faith and other books of The Families of Nazareth are made available through the "In the Arms of Mary Foundation" . Most of these books have a forward written by none other than Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

In May, the Families of Nazareth/In the Arms of Mary are having a fundraiser dinner with Cardinal McCarrick as the keynote speaker/guest. I had planned on going with my sister who leads a FNM group at her parish. I already told her I was going as well as another friend who has offered to pay for my attendance. Yet now, after reading Ed Peters and then Richard Sipe's Statement For Pope Benedict XVI and specific allegations of sexual misconduct by Cardinal McCarrick I'm not really wanting to go and see him at the Fundraiser.

I wonder if I should tell my sister & friend my reasons for not wanting to attend the fundraiser, revealing McCarricks misconduct. I'm thinking I should warn my sister who could in turn warn some of those in charge in the movement. But wouldn't that be detraction? I don't want to be a 'cause for either my sister or my friend to be scandalized or have doubts about either the Church or the Movement because of this. What do you think? Is it detraction? Should I just keep my mouth shut and just tell them I have had a change of mind about going and leave it at that?

I can't see a reason in the world not to go. Even if McCarrick were guilty as sin, I don't see why the Families of Nazareth/In the Arms of Mary people should be punished for that.

As it is, all we are talking about so far is an accusation and some Internet Trial-by-Blogosphere scuttlebutt. That, and five bucks, will get you a cup of coffee. If Sipes has something, then he should do the canonical thing and establish guilt by canonical means. Until that has happened, I think it would wrong for anybody to treat McCarrick as guilty till proven innocent. And doubly wrong to punish the Families of Nazareth/In the Arms of Mary people for the presumption.

Show Me A Culture That Despises Virginity and I'll Show You a Culture That Despises Children

Decent Take on Benedict's Visit to the US, in the NY Times no less!

Religion a figment of human imagination, according to educated idiots

The first graf tells us:

Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.

Well, yes. We do have the capacity to reason, imagine and abstract. But then, those same powers are also what enable us to do, like, do science. But nobody writes headlines that say, "Science a figment of human imagination". Nobody writes opening grafs which read:

Humans alone practice science because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.

Even though that is absolutely true.

One thing practitioners of the Darwin Mythos are going to have to work out is the whole Peter Singer "Human beings are unusually clever piece of meat, different in degree, not kind, from the rest of the animal kingdom" vs. the "Religion is an epiphenomenon of the absolutely unique human capacity to invent meaningless crap" narrative of the "evolutionary explanation of religion" cottage industry.

Evolutionary attempts to explain religion are typically embarrassing. They suffer from the science nerd's tendency to stand outside the human experience looking in--like Christopher Lloyd in "Back to the Future" referring to a high school dance as some kind of rhythmic mating ritual, or Richard Leakey standing baffled before the gorgeous cave art in Lascaux. It murders to dissect and pretends that the corpse on the table is the living religios experience.

Gotta Love Jim Caviezel

He and his wife adopt a disabled Chinese child. Beautiful guy!

The other striking thing about the story is that he did it because some friend of his tried the lame argument "I won't be prolife till you adopt a disabled kid." When Caviezel took him up on it....

...the guy still refused to be prolife, demonstrating that that entire argument is simply a lame excuse.

Caviezel, for his part, has adopted another kid, also with a brain tumor. Magnificent!

I sometimes wonder what it will be like for actor who have played Jesus when they arrive at the Pearly Gates. I figure, you have to feel pretty sheepish and stupid when you look the real Jesus in the eye. But Caviezel is going a long way toward making it not be an act.

A reader writes:

Last night I learned one of my cousins has been diagnosed with leukemia. We are all a little shell-shocked. Those family members who are physically able are looking into being tested as possible marrow donors (myself included) and her prognosis is good contingent on finding a donor quickly. My aunt and uncle have health problems themselves and are very worried about my cousin, so prayers for their strength and emotional health would also be appreciated.

Also, and on a completely different track, St. Stephen's church here in Milwaukee was hit by lightning on Thursday during some nasty thunderstorms. The steeple is a total loss, and the church itself sustained water damage. Last night we had even nastier weather, so I don't know if the torrential rains did more damage or not. The church has some of the most beautiful woodwork I've seen in a church that small.

The parishioners do not yet know if they'll be able to use the building for Mass; they are in the process of building a new church but it won't be completed until sometime next year. So prayers for them (and all of us who've been hit by those storms) would be appreciated, too.

Lord, hear our prayer!

A reader writes:

Perhaps this type of information is what will make abortion as unpopular as smoking!
A real eye-opener, especially check out the Q&A.

Not if our chattering classes have anything to say about it. The powers and principalities of this world are not interesting teaching, but in fuddling us. Inconvenient information like this tends to get shunted to page 10.

The Anchoress is Spot On

Feminism that conceives of woman only as partners in a power dynamic, rather than as persons with dignity that comes from God--in a word, as human beings--is doomed to play the game of treating persons like things and things like persons. The answer to masculine exploitation of sex is not to exploit men back. It is love.

A mother I know used to tell her daughters, "You have something precious from God which belongs to you and no man has the right to take it from you without offering you himself completely in the sacrament of marriage." Very succinct and very true. Sex is the pledge of your whole self to your spouse. It acts, almost miraculously, to bind souls together when it is given in love and true commitment in the sacrament.

But it can be deeply destructive when given--and then taken away--in serial promiscuity. It's like adhesive tape. Rip it off too many times and pretty soon it doesn't stick at all. Relationship fall apart. People find it impossible to commit. The nerve of love goes numb.

Former Vatican Ambassador Backs Lady Macbeth

Machiavelli was Catholic, after all. So I can see why she might be attractive to some Catholics. Still, the attraction mystifies me. Indeed, the fact that these three people are the best we can do makes me wonder if (horrors!) that really true or if normal decent people are simply no longer capable of making through the filtration system for the office. Perhaps the strongest argument against Darwinism that I know is the American political system as it is currently constituted. It seems bent on selecting for the survival of people who, once in power, will be disasters for the nation.

Whoever wins, this election will be great news for our enemies and competitors abroad.

The Wisdom of the East

One nice thing about rejecting the dictatorship of relativism is that it allows you to name good--and evil, even in cultures that are not your own. You don't have to endlessly contextualize it when somebody is left to die because of their caste. You can go ahead and say, "This is evil." When an innocent victim has his heart cut out in order to maintain Aztec domination, you don't have to hem and haw forever about cultural diversity and the need to keep it in perspective. The God who judges the atrocities of European culture is the same one who judges the atrocities of men the world over and you aren't stuck in paralysis about whether such monstrosities are really, you know, evil. They are. You can say it.

Similarly, it gives you a footing for naming what is right and good in cultures that are in current disfavor among your own chattering classes. You don't have to schizophrenically praise fertility and almgiving in the West but condemn "Muslim breeders" for caring for their beggars. You can, like Benedict, see something really good in Islamic culture--a sense of familial interrelationship we have lost in the atomized West--that would have been second nature in the culture of Our Lord.

In short, cultivating a Catholic perspective makes it possible to be really catholic, trapped neither in a moral vacuum of PC relativism, nor in a jingo insistence on tribal triumphalism.

A reader writes:

Reading your posts on convertism vs. cradle catholica, I went on a bit of a trip down memory lane.

One morning after Matins at Holy Resurrection Monastery, where I was once a novice, one of the monks looked at me said "Dear Br. Spyridon (for that was my monastic name), the one thing you need but can never have is a Catholic childhood!"

He said this because he had seen in me (a very recent convert to the True Church (TM) ), from the moment I showed up, an awkwardness in my religion. Over the next two years he would do his best to give me the Catholic childhood I had missed. Using his unique spiritual gifts (discouragement and sarcasm), a vigorous reading program (The Sword of Honor trilogy, The Land of Spices, Speak Memory, to name but a few) and, well hidden beneath his crusty exterior, a generous amount of love and prayers, he attempted to transmute a convert still damp with the oil of chrism into a cradle Catholic.

Sadly, he was never entirely successful. I still feel self conscious when making the sign of the cross. I still don't know what to buy someone on the occasion of their first communion. Unlike the residents of Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, "... to whom the supernatural order in all its ramifications was ever present and ever more lively than the humdrum world about them...", for the me the supernatural order and clouds of witnesses are something I read about but rarely feel comfortable enough to treat as a reality.

My fervent prayer is that someday before I die I will be able to walk into a church and not wonder what the hell I am doing there.

I wonder if other converts ever feel that way?

I suppose we all do sometimes, though the sense "This is Home" is also mighty strong for me. I think the strangeness you feel may well be a gift. One of the most evocative description of the Church I have ever heard is that She is that "strange, divine sea." Chesterton loved to remark on the strangeness of the Church--and that no small part of her strangeness is precisely that she could feel like Home while being so manifestly strange. She is, not just a city but The City. That's St. John's description of her in Revelation: the New Jerusalem. When I think "city" I think cold anonymity, isolation, hard streets, steam from manholes, menace in the dark, empty footsteps at night on concrete. Things that are about a far from heaven as you can get. But John sees something entirely different: a bustling community of free souls living in joy and united in love of the Light: something more like Gondor or Florence at the height of her powers. To be a citizen of such a city was to be more than merely a taxpayer or cannon fodder for some noble. It was to know yourself part of something greater and to rejoice in it. Our experiences of "team spirit" touch on it a bit, but that is but a shadow. It is love of family, love of country, love of God and even love of enemy rolled up in one.

It *is* weird to be part of that. Sometimes I look around at my fellow parishioners and think "What am I doing here? I'm among my betters! Somebody should call the cops and have me thrown out as an interloper!" But the whole point of the penitential rite is that none of us belongs there. It's all grace.

So beautiful!

Prayers Answered

A reader writes:

Thought I'd give you an update on a prayer request you published on your blog for me back in July of 2006. My friends 18 month old daughter, (Montana) was diagnosed with stage 4 Hepatoblastoma (rare liver cancer). After many surgeries, lots of hard chemo, much prayer, and some close calls, she is in remission. The local paper (Kitsap Sun) ran a nice article two weeks ago chronicling their journey. The "slide show" with accompanying narrative is particularly touching, have tissue paper on hand if you watch it.

I remember many of your readers responding with prayers when you posted the original request in July of '06. I just wanted them to know the fruits of their prayers. Thanks for letting your blog be a conduit for God's healing grace.

Not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to thy Name give glory!

A reading from 2 Hallucinations 6:66

Jimmy Akin Replies to a False Charge from one of My Readers

My apologies to Jimmy for not being better versed in the controversy. I thought my reader was simply choosing to put the darkest possible construction on Jimmy's obedient change of mind. Turns out my reader was lying about Jimmy completely.

Another charming moment of Christian love and truth from the Makers and Manufacturers of Really Truly Pure Tradism.

A reader writes:

The funniest part is that those who fear theocracy are the same people who are bashing the Pope for not smacking down Bush. If the Pope gets involved in American politics, its theocracy. If he doesn't, he gets blasted for not condemning torture. B16 cannot win. Thankfully he does what he does regardless.

America: Where Anybody with Millions and Millions and Millions of Dollars Can Be President

Others need not apply.

I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. - William F. Buckley

I think much the same could be said for choosing somebody like Joe Whatshisface over the three millionaires currently vying to be our new Ruler.

John Farrell replies on the ID entry below and writes:

The main problem with the God of the Gaps thinking, is that it's inevitable once you buy into William Paley's natural theology (not a Catholic theology, btw). ID is trapped there. And will remain trapped there, which is why it's s frustrating.

Cardinal Schonborn hit this on the head in his book, when he reminds us that RCs don't believe in a cosmic tinkerer, we believe in the Creator. The ground of all being.

Okay, I get the bit about God being Creator and not tinkerer but (bear with me here) I've never understood the hostility to Paley. When I see a watch I *do* think "This was a product of Mind." Why is that bad? How is that different from Thomas' argument from Design? I don't think it follows that because I see Mind especially manifest in some work of nature that Mind is not manifest in the rest of Nature. If I go into Leonardo's workshop I will see, in addition to the Mona Lisa, a lot of junk laying around. I would not conclude that Leonardo had nothing to do with the rest of the workshop. I'd merely conclude that some of Leonardo's self-expression is particularly transparent to my perception that a Mind is at work in the workshop while other manifestation of the Mind at work may not be so obvious.

Living things seem to me to be especially transparent illustrations, not merely that Mind is at work in creating living thing, but that Mind lies behind everything. I don't see that Paley is saying much more than that, which is why I've never understood the hostility to him.

Jimmy Akin Thinks Newman Will be our Next Doctor of the Church

Sounds reasonable to me.

Also, he confirms something I've thought for a while: Origen is finally getting a little justice and undergoing something of a rehabilitation.

Both Newman and Origen will freak out Rad Trads, but there you are.

A Reader writes:

You have been so kind since last August when I first asked you to post numerous prayer requests for my aunt, who has brain cancer. Alas, I am writing again with yet another request. I recently received another update from my uncle in Texas about my aunt. (I blogged about it here.)

In short, things are not good. Though her tumor shrunk, she has developed clots, and it seems that there is no longer hope in medical intervention. She has gone home under Hospice Care. (And, by the way, God bless Hospice workers. This is the fourth family member of mine to be cared by such people.)

If you don't mind, please ask your readers to pray for her, her family (husband, four sons, one daughter-in-law, one new grandson), and especially for my grandmother. My father said that he knows she's been a good Catholic all her life, but he is very concerned about their mother, who, naturally, is taking the death of her only daughter very, very hard.

May God grant her the healing, whether on earth, or in the ultimate healing of Heaven. And may he grant strength, grace and comfort to your family and skill and compassion to her caregivers. We ask this through Christ our Lord, Amen!

Your Chance to Do a Good Thing

Dear NRCAT Supporters:

We now have strong evidence that, as many of us have suspected, the abuses perpetrated on detainees over the past 7 years were not simply the acts of "rogue" agents or low ranking soldiers, but were instead planned and approved of by top Administration officials ? including the President himself, as well as Vice-President Dick Cheney. ABC News and the Associated Press recently reported that the President's top national security advisors met in the White House, on numerous occasions and with the President's approval, to authorize interrogators to torture high-value detainees (by waterboarding them and subjecting them to sleep deprivation, among other abuses). Unfortunately, these dramatic revelations have been largely ignored by the media and the public.

Please help inform the public about the fact that top Administration officials were directly involved in planning the torture of high-value detainees by writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper expressing your deep concern about learning that your leaders participated in the torture planning meetings and your disappointment that the media and the public have not responded to the news about the meetings with the appropriate vigor and outrage.

Letters should be short and direct. If at all possible, they should refer to an article that was recently printed in your newspaper. You can check your newspaper's website or call or email the Editorial Department to find out the best way to submit your letter and any guidelines they might have for writing letters. Many newspapers may have word limits or deadlines for responding to articles. Don't submit your letter to more than one newspaper at a time.

A sample letter is provided below our names. Please re-write it in order to make it relevant to your newspaper and your community. If your letter is published in your local newspaper, please let us know and send us a copy of your letter.

Thank you for all you do to end U.S.-sponsored torture.

Sincerely,

Linda Gustitus, NRCAT Board President
Rich Killmer, NRCAT Executive Director

Dear Editor:

As a resident of _(town name)_, a member of _(name of a congregation or other faith community)_ and a long-time reader of the _(paper name)_, I am writing to express my outrage regarding the recent ABC News reports that President Bush's top national security advisors (including Vice President Dick Cheney and now Secretary of State Condolezeea Rice) held numerous meetings in the White House to approve the use of abusive interrogation techniques (including waterboarding and sleep deprivation) on high-value detainees. Not only do these meetings implicate top Administration officials in condoning illegal acts that constitute torture, but, as ABC News reported, the President himself admitted that he was aware of these meetings and approved of them.

I am indescribably saddened by this compelling evidence of the fact that our highest leaders condoned and participated in acts of torture. Furthermore, I am also disappointed by the relatively mild response from the media and from the public to these revelations. I would have expected that news of the President's top advisors meeting, with his knowledge and permission, to authorize interrogators to illegally torture detainees would have been met with a widespread public outcry, and with a deluge of press interest in the issue. Unfortunately both the public and the press seemed to have responded with a collective yawn. I hope that this newspaper will take the opportunity to editorialize against the use of torture.

According to ABC News, after one of the meetings, the then-current Attorney General John Ashcroft asked "Why are we discussing this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly." John Ashcroft was right; history will not be kind to the top Administration officials who allowed detainees to be tortured. If the American media and the American public do not respond to these revelations with the outcry they deserve, then history may judge us unkindly as well.

Sincerely,

(Name)
(Address)
(City, State, Zip Code)
(Daytime Phone Number)

By the way, in addition to failing to single-handedly bring to justice every bishop whose name has been rumored to be linked with scandal by Matt Abbott, Benedict also betrayed Andrew Sullivan by failing to chastize Bush about torture. What else could his visit have been for if not to involve himself in the intricacies American politics?

For my part, I think the notion that Benedict's job was to slap Bush down is silly. I think it not merely silly, but malicious in the extreme for Sullivan to suggest that there was some sort of impromptu concordat between Benedict and Bush to the effect, "I won't talk about torture if you will overlook my guilt for priestly abuse." What a sleazy low blow.

Benedict did not come here to fix the United States. His purpose was no more to interfere politically with Bush than it was to interfere politically with his communicants Kerry and Pelosi. He had other fish to fry.

Fixing American is our job. We're actually Americans.

Tyrannosaurus Tasted Like Chicken

Personally, I think the obvious resemblance between dinosaurs and birds is an awfully strong pointer to evolution somehow relating the two. I am, however, a little puzzled about how T Rex can be the ancestor of the chicken. I'm even more puzzled since Archaeopteryx predates T Rex by millions of years. And I'm even more puzzled since we know of several other species of dinosaur that also had feathers.

The whole T Rex was Chicken Little grandfather narrative *could* be some sort of illiterate reporters garbling of the story. If it isn't, I will remain puzzled.

By the way, speaking of the Darwin Mythos, I *think* I'm finally starting to get what may be the conflict between ID and Catholic critics of it (at least in my comboxes). It appears that the argument is not really between *intelligent* design and a Catholic view of creation, but between *interventionist* design. That is, ID advocates tend to speak as though the development of species occurs through "then a miracle occurs" tweak in processes which would otherwise be merely natural. So nature is, on this thesis, riddled with little pockmarks where God pokes his finger in and miraculous fiddles with the DNA, and then the ball is rolling for a new species to emerge.

The difficulty with this view is that it makes God (mostly) absent from the governance of the world. He swoops in now and then, for his own inscrutable purposes, and fiddles with the physics, but then leaves thing going "on their own". A more Catholic view (as I understand it) is that The Whole Show is under his governance--that it is the rules, not merely the miraculous exceptions to the rules, that point to him. And, of course, the danger of such "God of the gaps" thinking is that what yesterday was inexplicable and regarded as miraculous is tomorrow explained as electromagnetism or whatever.

I can grant the merits of that quarrel. I do think it is sounder to argue for the existence of God from the intelligibility of the world than from the gaps in our knowledge. What I don't think this points to, however, is the absurdity of the phrase "intelligent design". Admittedly the phrase is not perfect. It can communicate an over anthropomorphic view of God as an human engineer who is perpetually tweaking and patching up the system, rather than the view of creation as one Grand Act taking place throughout all time and space. It can encourage the notion of God as one more cause in the universe, rather than as the source of being who is transcendant to all created things.

But hey! Talking about the eye or arm of God can confuse extremely simple people. On the other hand, what generally confuses me is the insistence that there is something so radically wrong about saying "God made the universe and it displays his glory." That's what's baffled me about the hostility to ID, and I'm beginning to think I see why. For me, looking at the universe, I think "The heaven declare the glory of God!" Observing living things, I think, "O Lord, how many are thy works. In wisdom thou hast made them all." When the ID guys show me a picture of a paramecium flaggelant, I think "How wonderful are you works, O Lord." That's about where it stops for me. I have no theory that "this could not have come about by natural means". I think "If this came about by natural means, then God's creation of nature is even more astounding than I thought!" In short, I don't need *intervention* to explain it. But I feel violence is being done to reality every time it is demanded that I don't need Mind to explain it.

The universe seems to me to be chock full of the fingerprints of some ordering Mind (I speak, of course, in a Romans 1:20 way and prescind from further discussions of what else that mind may have to say to us in Christ). What puzzles me about those *hostile* to ID is that they often seem to be quarrelling, not merely with the notion of God of the Gaps interventionism, but with the notion that nature has a Mind behind it.

I would particularly ask readers like John Farrell, "Am I getting closer to grasping the quarrel?"

Today Seems to be Music Day

First I get this email from Jeffrey Mark Ostrowski, a Liturgical Composer in Corpus Christi, TX:

What if I told you that clicking a button would show you a Catholic website that contains (among other things) newly composed Catholic Responsorial Psalm scores based on Gregorian chant with Organ/Vocalist scores for the entire Catholic Liturgical year ??

And what if I further told you that these are offered ** COMPLETELY * FREE * OF * CHARGE ** to anyone who wants them, and the PDF scores can be downloaded *instantly *without even a login ??

* If I told you this, would you take five seconds to go check out the website, download PDF scores, and listen to the mp3 samples??*

* Guess what? It is true!!! No joke, and * absolutely * no strings attached.*

Here is the site

. . . and here are free Mass Parts for organ and voice:

*Who in the world would provide such a thing for absolutely no cost?*

Corpus Christi Watershed would !!! We are a 501(c)3 non-profit Catholic Institute dedicated to promoting the Catholic arts. Watershed Liturgical composer Jeff Ostrowski has composed more than 850 scores since August of 2007, and all offered online completely free of charge.

The project has been praised and recommended by several famous clerics, including two Bishops and Fr. George Rutler.

Here are two articles which explain the project in greater detail:

Finally, to show the compositional techniques employed to create this truly Sacred Music (which Pope Benedict wrote about when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger), please see this article:

If you want to learn more about me, please view this.

May Christ bless you 100,000 times for your kindness.

Meanwhile, somebody else sends me links recommending these:





Now you know!

Excellent! Makes Me Proud of My Home Town!

Sherry Weddell writes:

Frank Sheed faciliated a debate back in the 30's about who had given more to the Church: cradle Catholics or converts.

For the purposes of charity, it was convert who made the case for cradle Catholics and a cradle Catholic who argued for converts.

If only a bit of that same spirit broke out around St. Blog's.

Works for me. Lemme tell ya some of what I appreciate about cradle Catholics.

First and foremost, a wellf-formed cradle Catholic knows in his bones certain basic truths about the universe so deeply that it known in their bones, not just in their brains. That's as it should be, because the faith is incarnational. My wife (a cradle Catholic) is, 'ow you say?, at home in her skin and before her Father in heaven in ways that I still labor to live. I will always speak Catholic with an accent, so to speak. She is a native. She has always lived in a Catholic universe and she is, consequently at home with the knowledge that she is part of a big family--the family of God. More than that, she is full of the charity that comes from being righty at ease in her own skin. She has nothing to prove. She is not obsessed with the notion that, if you can't articulate it in words, then there's some doubt about whether your faith is true or real or what have you. We converts are intensely logocentric--especially Protestant converts. Our background is all about the Word. A cradle Catholic *can* be very verbal (see Buckley, William F) but he doesn't *have* to be. Of course, many converts are also quiet people. But there's a contentment with silence in a well-formed cradle Catholic that seems more natural to them. Often the convert who seeks silence in the Catholic communion is trying to get away from noise, not get to God.

I'm also grateful to cradles for a simple but huge fact: they are the ones who preserved the Faith so that a dolt like me could finally find it. I owe cradle Catholics a debt I can never repay. Thank you!

I could go on, but you get the idea. The parts of the Body depend on each other. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you." Twas ever thus and it applies to converts and cradles.

Indiana Republican Tony Zirkle Addresses Hitler Birthday Banquet

Best quote:

When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn't know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it.

Given my sick fascination with the bizarre, I went and found this guy's website. The crazy part is that he really *doesn't* seem to know all that much about Nazis. Judging from the strange meandering screed there, it appears he is a very earnest, very clueless, Seventh Day Adventist with a thing abou p*rn, and a lot of "sources" which string together a sort of religio-apocalyptic reading of history that aims to prop up those twin pillars of his world: SDAism and hatred of P*rn.

He appears to actually oppose anti-semitism (sort of) and he criticizes the Nazi (because they could lead to p*rn). He calls "The Eternal Jew" a slanderous book, but also quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion without any awareness that it's about Jews. Also, he picked up the term "Jewish Zionist", which suggests he's hanging with fellow kooks more often than just at Hitler birthday fetes. But, still, he seems to animated primarily by fear of the vast P*rn Conspiracy, which Jews happen to be a part of, rather than by the Vast Jewish Conspiracy. (We must parse our Vast Conspiracy factions with fine distinctions lest we assume all kooks are the same.)

You run into kooky people like this on the Internet: auto-didacts with a particular obsession who can be stunningly clueless about the rest of reality. It's just that they don't wind up running for office usually. I doubt he means much harm at the end of the day. But I also rejoice that his chances of election stand at 0.

Chris Johnson has, well, a bit of fun at this odd duck's expense. I bet the Indiana GOP is hold their breath and just hoping this guy gets thrashed and goes away. There's "event horizon" before which you don't denounce nuts in your party lest people notice them when they might not have otherwise. David Duke and Sister Souljah, you denounce, because they are prominent enought to attract attention without your help. People like Zirkle, you pray will just implode on their own. However, now that his cluelessness has made national headlines, I'm guessing the Indiana GOP will issue s statement to the effect of "Don't stand so, don't stand so, don't stand so close to me."

Hillary's PA Win Explained!

Gott mit uns!

"My aim is to reinvent the sacred. I present a new view of a fully natural God and of the sacred, based on a new, emerging scientific worldview."

A "fully natural God" is another way of saying "Nature". In short, he is proposing paganism: the worship of the creature instead of the Creator. That's a lot of things, but it ain't "new".

Sinister Protestant Converts!

One odd phenomenon I'm running into with a bit more frequency than in the past is the strange vision of the Evil Protestant Convert to the Catholic Faith who haunts the fever dreams of some Cradle Trads. Like the guy from North Carolina who moved to the New England village, lived there for 50 years, raised his children there, served on the city council, worhsiped at the local Church, died, and was buried with the epitaph, "It's as if he was almost one of us", cradle Trads seem to find it very difficult to believe that Catholic converts are Catholic. We are something Other. Something sinister.

One reader, for instance, prophesies (on the basis of nothing whatsoever) Jimmy Akin's looming apostasy. Why? Because Gerry Matatics has apostatized into nutty sedevacantism and, if you've seen one convert, you've seen 'em all:

I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that if Benedict lasts another decade or is succeeded by a like minded pope, some of the lay apologists that are trashing Gerry now will be jumping ship themselves.

There's NO WAY the Jimmy Aikens are going to sit by while Rome says things like: "pro multis means for the many", "the Mass of Pius V was never abrogated", "Protestant Churches are not true Churches."

Jimmy's accuser has a far higher regard for his own mind reading powers than the actual record warrants. But when you are engaged against an enemy of the faith as slippery as a convert, accuracy is of secondary importance. So you can just sling such prophesies, even when they are contradicted by known facts and ignore requests to document, for instance, a single place where Jimmy has ever dissented from the Church's teaching on our relationship with Protestant ecclesial bodies. The main thing to remember is that converts aren't *really* Catholic.

Another reader follows this up with the popular Cradle Trad theory that the *real* reason Evangelical converts are so active in apologetics and evangelization is their itch to run the Church, transform it into the image and likeness of their native (and apparently ineradicable) Protestant belief, and (natch) make all the vast money that is to be made in the fantastically lucrative world of discussing the Trinity, arguing with obscure fundamentalist ministers about fine points of Marian doctrine, and preaching chastity to a sexually deranged culture. What faster way could there be to limitless wealth and power? She writes, with a straight face:

Aiken had a long track record of talking down to people who held a position on pro-multis different than his own. When Arinze clarified this, he jumped on board. But, a lawyer like Ferarra could point to all of the instances when he sung a different tune. How many times will he stand for being corrected before he too declares himself pope?

Nevertheless, the lay convert apologist phenomenon is disturbing. First is our reliance on it. Where are the priests and where are the cradle catholics? Depending on a steady infusion of former protestant ministers doesn't point to a healthy situation in the Church.

And I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the sede issue. You'll fnd a lot more former prots in your local sede chapel than you will in a typical novus ordo parish. And the sedes are motivated by the dollar as much (MORE!)as any layman trying to feed a family. Ever see a poor sede chapel?? Those people have bucks and at times, they sound like Americanists of the Novak-Weigel-Absp.Ireland persuasion.

Why are these former protestant ministers so gung-ho to jump head first into apologetics when they should be on their knees in thanks for the God who could forgive them for years of trying to pry Catholics away from the True Church? Can't they give up the pulpit? They might not be ready to lecture us.

And since when is being a convert automatically a job qualification? Our own Sgt. Joyce Kilmer continued to write poetry after his conversion; and while people were quick to compare him with Chesterbelloc, he was known to say, "I have nothing to teach cradle Catholics..." Hyberbolic for sure, but where is the modesty in the hearts (or at least words) of Staples, Aikens, Hahn, etc?

Years ago, people would quip that converts were "more Catholic than the pope." But that was a reference to their apparent piety as contrasted with an Italian bishop
they never saw.
My husband would never get to be a guest on Journey Home. Any one who tries to ask him what he converted from gets the answer "horse-pucky."

It's a little off putting at first. But how refreshing to hear someone who doesn't want to recast the Church in the image of his "conversion experience" but rather allow the Faith he has embraced continue to mold HIM. He doesn't look back at the foolish things he once believed.

So: according to my reader, Jimmy Akin held a private opinion but altered it when it seemed to him that the Magisterium was against him. Wow! That *is* evil! See how converts just blend in with Real Catholics[TM] by submitting their judgment to the teachers of the Church? They're like chameleons!

And it's "disturbing" that converts are trying to be obedient to the command to teach all the nations the gospel. What are they *really* up to? Modesty means "keeping your mouth shut" and "having nothing but contempt for the religious tradition from which you came". I could say more, but Nick Milne captured perfectly the silliness of this peculiar provincialism:

What petulant dross.

Protestantism has more apologists to begin with, I would say exponentially, than Catholicism does, and these apologists are the ones doing the reading, studying the history, and having the debates. Why on earth would it shock us that people who have made it their job (not even just a vocation, but a literal job) to research and weigh the truth claims of the Christian churches might be more liable to conversion than those who take no interest in such matters?

Which is to say: the preponderence of Catholic apologists who are former Protestants has little to do with some reluctance to leave the pulpit, but rather with the fact that their whole way of life has been informed by a sort of intellectual missionary zeal to begin with.

Where are all the cradle-Catholic apologists, you ask? They barely register. For one thing, "talking people into it" isn't how Catholicism defines its missionary efforts, and the mandate for such talk is simply not the focus of the Church's sacramental and intellectual life. The focus of the Mass is the Eucharist, not the homily. The object of Catholic study is to better understand God, and prayer, and charity--not the historical-critical method. Tradition, not rhetoric, has pride of place. Anne asks why priests aren't doing the brunt of our apologetical work. What priest would have the time? What priest, being a priest, would think that was even his job? He has more important things to do. Being a shepherd. Administering the sacraments.

But though such things as I noted above are not the focus, there is most certainly a need for them on the periphery, and we are fortunate indeed that so many Christians have been trained in these pursuits, however wrong their starting positions might have been. It comes down to a question of just how we should treat Protestant converts. Should they, as Anne has suggested, be kneeling in gratitude and humility? Certainly. But to say that this is all they should do--to say that the Protestant convert has nothing to teach the cradle Catholic--is not only misguided but also insultingly wrong.

If you want to see scandal and wretchedness and apathy and the soft tyranny of the lukewarm in the Catholic Church, why, look to your cradle Catholics. Look to that broad and greasy middle for whom Catholicism is an inherited chore rather than a marvelous gift. Look to that swath for whom it is more of a "cultural marker" than a relationship with Christ. Look to those who preface statements of rank, idiotic heresy with the magic words "I was raised Catholic..."

Protestant converts - all converts! - are uniquely able to teach the cradle Catholic what it means to see the Church as a prize and a glory to be cherished--and that might never have been gained. They demonstrate with their very deeds what it means to approach the Church, and to approach God, with the love, and yearning, and conviction that One who is wiser than any of us once said would demand hatred even of one's own family rather than an acquiesence to what is easy and cheap.

It is certainly easy to see why one would feel less than well-disposed towards learning about one's own faith from someone who had previously made a career of preaching error, but if one allows one's self to wallow in such disdain for long, the limits of this thinking begin to recede. After all, in that case, what could Newman teach a cradle Catholic? What could Augustine? What could Paul?

So, in summary, the chief virtues of former Protestants practicing Catholic apologetics are:

1. Apologetical work actually gets carried out, rather than being done poorly or neglected altogether. This is also one of the merits of letting former Protestants sing in Catholic choirs, produce Catholic art, contribute to Catholic charities, and so on.

2. Their particular potency in evangelizing other Protestants.

3. The manner in which they remind (and simply teach, in some cases) cradle Catholics what it means to see the Church as a Lady on a distant hill, a lamp in one hand and a sword in the other, rather than as a sort of comfortable jacket.

I'm somewhat skeptical of #3, at least without balancing it substantially with the enormous gifts we converts *receive* from well-formed cradle Catholics. But more than this, I think the danger of all "I am of Peter! I am of Paul!" temptations is that it is nonsense for any baptized Catholic to be talking as though "converts" or "cradles" are "better" or "real" Catholics. In Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, convert or cradle. People raised in the faith have their own particular gifts and genius to give the Body. Converts, likewise, have unique things to bring to the Table. They are neither better--nor worse--then any other baptized and practicing Catholic. I with Cradle Trads would drop this festering bit of provincialism. It ill becomes them.

On second thought....

I think I was wrong about McCain's pension, though not about paying our rich ruling class off the public tit.

Unapologetic Catholic writes (persuasively):

Ther is no chance I will vote for McCain.

But he is a retired military officer. Retired officers who have honorably served their country are *without exception* entitled to a retirement. They earned it by delivering a "blank check" payable to the American People. The check can be cashed for any amount up to "my life" payable on demand.

McCain delivered that balnk check and earned his retirement check.

McCain's "blank check" was cashed by long term physical torture and hardship.

Now, there's another rule relating to military retirements. Military retirement income is taxable. Disbaility income is not taxable.

Upon retirement, all military personnel are administered a physical exam. If you are not physically fit to retire, you may be rated as wholely or partially disabled. The percentage of disability can be very low or range to 100%.

If, for example, you are rated at 30% disabled and otherwise entitled to a retirement check, then 30% of your check is non taxable....credited to disability.

McCain was rated at 100% retired. Therefor his entire military retirement check is tax free. I think the article was critical of not disclosing the disability pay. He didn't have to--it's not taxable income.

Now, its true that some military members approaching retirement suddenly discover an old war wound and attempt to get a disability retirement for the tax benefit.

McCain is not one of those and has earned his military retirement and also earned his 100% disability rating.

Under no circumstances should McCain decline the the retirement/disability benefits. It is a point of honor. We Americans are deeply in his debt.

If he chooses to donate money to charities in a greater or lesser sum, great, but how much relatively weathy peopel should contribute to charity is an intersting question of solidarity--and not related to McCain's entitlement to his military disability and retirement pensions.

He has compled with the spirit and the letter of all military regulations.

As I said, I will not vote for him--for president. He is unquestionably an American hero who deserves every bit of his military disability retirement accompanied by a grateful nation's thanks.

I think this is a fair and persuasive argument. So I retract my remarks about McCain. My tendency is to think of our ruling class first as members of our ruling class and not in terms of their other roles (in McCain's case, as a disabled ex-POW). And my skepticism about our ruling classes need to be suckled off public monies is very very high. So my more or less automatic response is to think it's probably unnecessary.

However, upon reflection, I think the mischief that would be done if we started telling vets who gave their all that the terms of the agreement they made are now changed (and, oh, by the way, you are screwed) would be unjust. So, in the case of somebody like McCain, I think it is best to honor the sacrifice.

On the other hand, I'm still highly skeptical that our fabulously rich ruling class as a whole needs to be paid public monies while they also earn millions elsewhere. I suggested cutting off that pay for people above a certain income level. People were (mysteriously) opposed to this. Gosh! What if that leads to graft.

Now I realize the grave danger that politicians might, just might, think to use their political connections to make money elsewhere if we didn't pay them. Why, some would say they even do it now, while we *are* paying them. So I think the best thing would be to forbid them to make any money from any source other than, you know, the job they are actually supposed to be doing during their tenure in office.

Once they leave office, they can return to their lucrative six and seven figure careers and forgo the retirement we pay for. I, for one, would rest easier knowing that it isn't being taken out of my kid's hide to pay for Bill Clinton's and Jimmy Carter's retirement.

Rod Replies

And I argue a little in the his comboxes. Patrick Rothwell also has pertinent things to say here. At the end of the day, "Matt Abbott hears through the grapevine..." is not going to be sufficient grounds for Stroke of a Pen governance of the Church.

Tales of the Explained

What always amazes me is when people go on insisting it was paranormal when we know how it was done and the guy's neighbor says "Yeah, I stood here and watched him launch the balloons."

The other amazing thing to me is the people who say, "This paranormal story was bogus, therefore all stories of the supernatural are bogus."

I think the smart approach is to take each story as it comes and see where the evidence actually leads. Yes, chances are high that when somebody sees a waterstain on a freeway underpass, it's not an apparition of the Blessed Virgin, just as the odds of a single hailstone landing in my hand are low.

But in a universe governed by a supernatural God, it's not at all odd to suppose that, now and then and for his own purposes, God may choose to fulfill the Harvard law of animal behavior and, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, do whatever the heck he wants.

The main thing that irks materialists is that God appears to have no reverence at all for carefully controlled laboratory conditions. He eats with tax collectors and sinners, not to mention granting miracles to unkempt shepherd kids and French peasants with no standing in the community of those determined not to believe. He has the gall to miraculously heal people at Lourdes and cause the sun to dance before countless thousands and Fatima, but since these documented events are not sufficiently reverential of the rules of the scientific game, they are tossed out by the high priesthood of materialsts.

All this merely means that lot of reality is not subject to scientific examination. Science can (and does) take a look at miraculous claims. But even in the fact of something spectacular (like Peter Smith's regrown eyes after they were destroyed by silver nitrate solution) all it can do is say, "Yep. The eyes sure are healthy. Don't know why." For the "why", you need to apply to the nuns who asked for Mother Cabrini's intercession. (By the way, I have a friend who actually had lunch with Fr. Smith.)

Some people, who mysteriously pride themselves for being "rational" reject supernatural explanations out of court, no matter how bleedin' obvious the miracle is. That's because they confuse "reason" with pig-headed committment to shallow materialism no matter what. I prefer to actually use my reason for thinking. So when a paranormal claim is shown to be bunk, I have no driving need to believe otherwise. But similarly, when a supernatural claim gives ever indication of being supernatural, I have no driving need to reject it.

Not all claims of the supernatural are claims of the divine. Some of them bear strong earmarks of the demonic. Unlike many moderns, I find nothing a priori ridiculous about that either. The Church's ancient claim that there are non-corporeal intelligence (angels) and that the some of them have chosen to rebel against God has much to recommend it in both scripture and in human experience. So I see no particular reason to doubt it (beyond the knee-jerk materialism of the present age). I think such agents can have effect in our world and I think the wisest thing to do when you encounter a person of intelligence and good will who claims an encounter with such a being is to take them seriously, just as you would such a person if they claimed to see a plane crash.

The skeptical answer to all such claims is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." That slogan is, to put it kindly, rubbish. Extraordinary claims require evidence. Period. It is extraordinary to claim that light is both a wave and a particle. But the evidence point to the fact that it behaves that way anyway. Physicists did not have to perform seven Herculean feats to show this. They simply had to show that light behaved like a wave and a particle. In the same way, the evidence for the Marian apparitions at Lourdes don't have to consist of proofs so incontrovertible that every last person on earth is compelled to accept it. It simply has to be sound enough that it's bloody hard to explain it any other way.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is simply a psychological justification for saying, "I will refuse to accept anything that challenges my comfortable materialist worldview." You can do that. But don't insult my intelligence by calling it "rational". Rational people follow the evidence where it leads. Pig-headed ideologues ignore inconvenient evidence by shouting things like:

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

The Internet: Our Best Argument for the Electoral College

The reason the Founder instituted the electoral college was because they had a Augustinian distrust in the wisdom and goodness of anybody, including Jefferson's Common Man. Thanks be to God and Madison, they were democrats, not because they had faith in the greatness of man's glorious goodness, but because they had faith in his fallenness and believed that the best way to keep fallen man from acquiring too much power was to set every element of the government (including voters) at cross purposes with every other element so that it would be possible to get things done when you really needed to, but not so easy to get things done that you couldn't enact some stupid tyrannical act on a whim.

The main check on the voter (aside from the fact that we have representative government instead of direct mob rule) is the electoral college, which demagogues like H. Ross Perot wanted to replace with mob rule via a "one man, one vote" internet voting system.

Happily, the Internet itself gives us ample demonstration of the extreme folly of allowing direct mob rule based on "the wisdom of the voters". Here, for instance, is the "wisdom of the voters" resolving the question, "Why do we gals have painful cramps when we get our period?" This is, mind you, the "answer" you will get if you turn to Yahoo for "knowledge" on this subject:

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters
Good question. I actually never have painful cramps during my periods. Even though a lot of women seem to experience these side-effects (painful cramps and mood swings) during their menses, I don't believe it is natural or normal. If it would be, then Nature or God/dess would be pretty sexist to put women in such misery, just because they are women; but I don't believe that is the case.

I strongly believe that these symptoms have psychological causes that apply to women worldwide because of living in a patriarchal society. Eckhart Tolle, the author of 'the power of now' explains it well in his book why women experience these things just before or during their periods and I believe he's right.

Before I quote this interesting passage about the collective female pain body out of his book, let me explain in short what a "pain body" is: it is a negative energy field, almost like an entity, that has become lodged in people's inner space. It is life energy that has become trapped, energy that is no longer flowing. Of course, the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living part of you, and you identify with the past. The pain-body is a very low vibratory frequency that feeds on pain, misery, drama, etc. It is unconsciousness and it feeds on unconsciousness. The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the natural process of mind identification. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pattern from your past.

Everybody has an individual pain body, based on your own traumatic experiences from your past, but there are also collective pain bodies that a certain race has his share in for instance. Most women also have their share in the collective female pain body, since women have experienced a lot of misery due to living in a patriarchal world.

Quote from the book('The power of Now'):

THE COLLECTIVE FEMALE PAIN-BODY

The collective dimension of the pain-body has different strands in it. Tribes, nations, races, all have their own collective pain-body, some heavier than others, and most members of that tribe, nation, or race have a share in it to a greater or lesser degree.

Almost every woman has her share in the collective female pain-body, which tends to become activated particularly just prior to the time of menstruation. At that time many women become overwhelmed by intense negative emotion.

The suppression of the feminine principle especially over the past two thousand years has enabled the ego to gain absolute supremacy in the collective human psyche. Although women have egos, of course, the ego can take root and grow more easily in the male form than in the female. This is because women are less mind-identified than men. They are more in touch with the inner body and the intelligence of the organism where the intuitive faculties originate. The female form is less rigidly encapsulated than the male, has greater openness and sensitivity toward other life-forms, and is more attuned to the natural world..

If the balance between male and female energies had not been destroyed on our planet, the ego's growth would have been greatly curtailed. We would not have declared war on nature, and we would not be so completely alienated from our Being.

Nobody knows the exact figure because records were not kept, but it seems certain that during a three-hundred year period between three and five million women were tortured and killed by the "Holy Inquisition," an institution founded by the Roman Catholic Church to suppress heresy. This surely ranks together with the Holocaust as one of the darkest chapters in human history. It was enough for a woman to show a love for animals, walk alone in the fields or woods, or gather medicinal plants to be branded a witch, then tortured and burned at the stake. The sacred feminine was declared demonic, and an entire dimension largely disappeared from human experience. Other cultures and religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism, also suppressed the female dimension, although in a less violent way. Women's status was reduced to being child bearers and men's property. Males who denied the feminine even within themselves were now running the world, a world that was totally out of balance. The rest is history or rather a case history of insanity.

Who was responsible for this fear of the feminine that could only be described as acute collective paranoia? We could say: Of course, men were responsible. But then why in many ancient pre-Christian civilizations such as the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Celtic were women respected and the feminine principle not feared but revered? What is it that suddenly made men feel threatened by the female? The evolving ego in them. It knew it could gain full control of our planet only through the male form, and to do so, it had to render the female powerless.

In time, the ego also took over most women, although it could never become as deeply entrenched in them as in men.

We now have a situation in which the suppression of the feminine has become internalized, even in most women. The sacred feminine, because it is suppressed, is felt by many women as emotional pain. In fact, it has become part of their pain-body, together with the accumulated pain suffered by women over millennia through childbirth, rape, slavery, torture, and violent death.

But things are changing rapidly now. With many people becoming more conscious, the ego is losing its hold on the human mind. Because the ego was never as deeply rooted in woman, it is losing its hold on women more quickly than on men.

So there you have it. According to the Wisdom of the Voters in this 2000 Years Smarter New Age, cramps are caused by the Inquisition and the Catholic Church. Other religions pitched in. The way out of this impasse is to buy whatever New Age book Oprah is pushing this month.

Best part, down below is the answer that got shunted to the side by the "Give us Barabbas" crowd:

Whe you get your period, your uterus is contracting to expel the endometrial lining. This is what gives you cramps. Think about how much your hand would hurt if you were constantly making fists all day.

What a maroon! Do people still *believe* that superstitious rubbish about physiology?

Somebody asks:

So I must have missed the posts where you called for George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton to stop accepting their government salaries. Could you post some links to those?

I'd be *delighted* if they stopped accepting those completely unnecessary salaries. However, nobody sent me an email about that and I didn't think to mention it.

Anatole France once remarked that "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." I have this notion that it isn't just those storied Welfare Queens and all those dreaded illegal aliens who should not be sucking off the public tit if they don't need to. I think we would be well served if most of the executive and legislative branches went without public funding, for the very simple reason that the vast majority of our ruling class are millionaires who don't need my money, but confiscate it from me anyway when I could really use it myself. I'd also love to know that I am not paying for keeping Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter wealthier than they need to be.

Do *you* think we should be paying for Bill Clinton's retirement? Does this seem like a sound use of your confiscated money?

So yeah, I'm inclined to think that paying gov't benefits to vastly wealthy people is just as dumb an idea as paying gov't benefits to people with home theater systems and a Cadillac.

A Tale of Two Covenants, Part One

In which we begin taking an in-depth look at the relationship between the New Covenant and the Old.

If I can lead just *one* innocent unsuspecting child into the sulfurous depths of (gasp!) respect for Judaism and away from Truly True Catholicism of the Jew-Baiters, I'll be content.

Benedict and the Scandal

In which we ponder, yet again, Benedict's failure to live up to the demands of the American blogosphere.

Cool Benedict Video

All Religions Are Basically the Same

No! Really! Oh, and the conflict between Aztecs and Conquistadors was entirely one-sided. Mean white male Abrahamic monsters bent on conquest vs. a pastoral earth-affirming people whose close ties with with blood and soil were undergirded by a different moral and spiritual perception of the relationship of the beautiful rhythms of nature to so-called "victims of human sacrifice" (a Eurocentric frame of reference that prejudices the argument).

Churchill Famously Said that Democracy is the Worst Form of Government Except for All the Others

Well, NO MORE!



Here's a system that's even worse *and* more entertaining! And the beauty of it is: if we apply it to this election the results will be *identical* to what we'd obtain by going to all the fuss and bother of voting: a disastrous candidate will be President on January 20, 2009.

Just a humble public servant

A reader in the military writes:

John McCain gets tax-free disability pension - Los Angeles Times

This is despicable. Total distortion of the medical disability benefit
system for vets.

I don't know what the regs are. As far as I know, he was wounded, so I can see why they'd give him the $$$ and I'm not sure what my reader means.

On the other hand, it's not like McCain really needs it, so it's very, well, Republican of him to accept this wonderful government handout to augment his millons.

Don't forget: this election is largely about which fabulously rich Inside-the-Beltway operator we want to be out of touch with us for the next four years.

Update: I think I misread my correspondent. It appears that he thought the *article* was despicable, not McCain's pension. That explains a lot, cuz I couldn't see how McCain was distorting anything.

A reader writes:

My sister is reading A New Earth by Tolle. She must have time to watch Oprah. (makes me sick) Have you done or read anything on this? Is there an analysis from our Catholic perspective? The other was A Course in Miracles.(That my laundry gets done with 10 kids in my house should be one of those miracles, don't you think?) I heard that Fr. Groeschel was with this author before her death and she deeply regretted the book. I don't know if that's true or not. Was hoping you knew something.

If you could help me with this I would really appreciate it. I have to teach my daughter how to tell time today so I don't have any.

Thanks for your help.

I haven't read A New Earth, but I've heard reports that it's the Usual New Age Crap. That's about all I know. "A Course in Miracles" is pure poison and, yes, Fr. Groeschel knew the author, who died in one of the blackest psychotic depressions he ever saw. (You can read about it in A Still Small Voice, a book I found very useful when I was writing about private revelation for Volume 3 of my Mary trilogy).

Sorry I'm not more help. Maybe a reader knows more.

National Catholic Singles Conference

Join hundreds of men and women for the 5th National Catholic Singles Conference (NCSC) next weekend in Chicago! NCSC was created to give single Catholics the opportunity to meet other like-minded singles and learn more about and share their Faith, including John Paul II's life-changing message of the theology of the body! Come and hear nationally-recognized top Catholic speakers discuss the real issues of living as a single person in today's culture. Enjoy praise and worship, workshops, socials, mixers and make friends for a life time!

Speakers Include:

Fr.Thomas Loya (national speaker on the theology of the body - TOB): Living a Spousal Single Life

Dr. Philip Mango (gives a humorous presentation of the differences between men and women, which deeply enriches one's understanding of TOB) : The Real Deal About Men and Am I the One With the Problems or is it My Date?

Fr. Richard Simon: Lord Give Us a Clue: How Do I Know What To Do With My Life?

Anastasia Northrop (applying TOB to singles): Why Are We Still Single or Single Again?

Vicki Thorn (gives a fascinating talk on hormones and TOB): The Biology of the Theology of the Body

Greg and Julie Alexander (their marriage was transformed through TOB): Beyond the Aisle: the Redemption of Real Love

Sr. Raffaella Cavallin: Conquering Discouragement and Attaining Peace: A Woman's Interior Journey

Healing Mass, Praise and Worship with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in private adoration chapel, Confessions and Prayer teams will be available throughout the weekend. Chaplet of Divine Mercy, Morning Rosary Walk with Dave Sloan, Midnight Prayer, Catholic exhibits from around the country.

Enjoy Friday Hors d'oeuvres Reception with music by Tone 9 Jazz Quartet & Saturday night Dance with Grand Avenue Big Band.

When and Where:
Friday, April 25 - Sunday, April 27, 2008

Lincolnshire Marriott Resort
Ten Marriott Drive
Lincolnshire, IL 60069 USA
815-828-5094

Space is Limited Register Today.

Guy Who Committed Starship Troopers and Showgirls Discovers the Ancient Slur of Yeshua ben-Pantera

In his upcoming biography of Jesus, "Basic Instinct" director Paul Verhoeven will make the shocking claim that Christ probably was the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during the Jewish uprising in Galilee, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Verhoeven also writes that Christ was not betrayed by Judas Iscariot, one of the 12 original apostles of Jesus, as the New Testament states.

The 69-year-old Dutch-born director, best known for directing the famous Sharon Stone crotch scene in "Basic Instinct" and who also directed "Showgirls," starring Elizabeth Berkley in one of the most panned films of the '90s, claims he and co-biographer Rob van Scheers have written the most realistic portrayal of Jesus ever published.

Remember: One good rule of thumb whenever one encounters a "real Jesus" who is radically at odds with the picture offered by the ordinary Tradition, Scripture and magisterial teaching of the Church is to examine the dominant fixations of one's own age and see how much of a Rorschach ink blot test that new "real Jesus" is. This "real Jesus" is, like all the others, a reflection of our Paris Hiltonized culture.

The difference between Verhoeven and the ancient Jews who first concocted the slur is that the ancient Jews were of sound enough mind to know that the slur, if true, destroyed Jesus' messianic claims, while Verhoeven is so debased that he has no interest in whether Jesus was Messiah, because he just wants to associate him and the Blessed Virgin with a little sexy scandal so he can make money off the titillation. The ancient Jews who invented the slur were higher and nobler men--and therefore capable of graver sin when they lied about Christ. Verhoeven is, by comparison, a critter barely able to think above the gutter and his sin is the intellectual equivalent of spray painting "SEX RULZ!" on an icon.

I am reminded of Jesus' remarks to Pilate:

"Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?"

and a little later:

"You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore he who delivered me to you has the greater sin."

Both the ancient Jew who concocted the lie of Yeshu ben-Pantera and the modern imbecile film director who accepts the lie are guilty of sin. But the sin of the one who invented the lie is greater, because he is a greater man.

That is *not* to say that all Jews are guilty of that lie:

595 Among the religious authorities of Jerusalem, not only were the Pharisee Nicodemus and the prominent Joseph of Arimathea both secret disciples of Jesus, but there was also long-standing dissension about him, so much so that St. John says of these authorities on the very eve of Christ's Passion, "many.. . believed in him", though very imperfectly. This is not surprising, if one recalls that on the day after Pentecost "a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith" and "some believers. . . belonged to the party of the Pharisees", to the point that St. James could tell St. Paul, "How many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed; and they are all zealous for the Law."

596 The religious authorities in Jerusalem were not unanimous about what stance to take towards Jesus. The Pharisees threatened to excommunicate his followers. To those who feared that "everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation", the high priest Caiaphas replied by prophesying: "It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish." The Sanhedrin, having declared Jesus deserving of death as a blasphemer but having lost the right to put anyone to death, hands him over to the Romans, accusing him of political revolt, a charge that puts him in the same category as Barabbas who had been accused of sedition. The chief priests also threatened Pilate politically so that he would condemn Jesus to death.

Jews are not collectively responsible for Jesus' death

597 The historical complexity of Jesus' trial is apparent in the Gospel accounts. The personal sin of the participants (Judas, the Sanhedrin, Pilate) is known to God alone. Hence we cannot lay responsibility for the trial on the Jews in Jerusalem as a whole, despite the outcry of a manipulated crowd and the global reproaches contained in the apostles' calls to conversion after Pentecost. Jesus himself, in forgiving them on the cross, and Peter in following suit, both accept "the ignorance" of the Jews of Jerusalem and even of their leaders. Still less can we extend responsibility to other Jews of different times and places, based merely on the crowd's cry: "His blood be on us and on our children!", a formula for ratifying a judicial sentence. As the Church declared at the Second Vatican Council:

. . . [N]either all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his Passion. . . [T]he Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy Scripture.

This is just the right balance. The medieval Christian tendency to blame all Jews for the choice made by some to lie about Jesus is wrong. Similarly, the attempt by some moderns to claim that the only Jew involved in the Crucifixion was the one being crucified is likewise wrong-headed. Jewish response to Jesus was and is enormously diverse.

In the time of Jesus and the centuries following, some of it involved a powerful Temple elite's wilful concoction of lies ranging from paying off the guards at the tomb and calling Jesus a bastard. Phariseeism continued this tradition of hostility after the destruction of the Temple. Not for nothing does the New Testament assign real blame to the Jewish enemies of Jesus and the apostles and Christians cannot just explain all that away as incipient anti-semitism, particularly since the New Testament is written almost entirely by Jews.

But outside Pharisaic Judaism, a lot of the response involved something besides merely irrational malice toward Jesus. There is, for instance, simple incredulity at the enormity of the apostolic claim. We are, after all, talking about man coming back from the dead.

Some of the Jewish response involved the perception the apostles were bent on undermining the Law and the Prophets. That's no small part of what Paul seemed to be saying (and, ironically, of what Stephen seemed to Paul to be saying).

Some of it involved the inability to grasp the paradigm shift between popular Jewish conceptions of the Messiah and Jesus' actual fulfillmnent of prophecy. So, for example, if you think the Messiah is going to "set the world right" and nothing happens that you can see, you will find believable the old rabbinic story about the man who rushed into the rabbi's house shouting "Rebbe Levi! The Messiah is here!" Rebbe Levi put his head out the window and looked up and down the street. "I see no change", he said, and went back to his work. Ordinary Judaism never accepted Jesus' revelation that the Kingdom of Heaven does not come visibly and that you should, in fact, beware of anybody who purports to bring it about by visible, political means.

But (let it not be forgotten) a lot of the ancient Jewish response to Jesus also included faith in Christ. As has been noted by some historians, by the fifth century, a huge number of Diaspora Jews were, in fact, Christian.

It is one of the tragedies of the Church's history that Catholics were so often unable to treat unbelieving Jews with respect. It is one of the tragedies of Jewish history that ugly lies promulgated by some early Jewish polemicists (like the Yeshu ben-Pantera slur) gave later Christians the ammunition they needed to act in a manner so untrue to the Lord they professed. And it is a our tragedy today that guttersnipes like Verhoeven now stand for a debased paganizing culture of death, sex and Mammon that holds both Christianity and Judaism in contempt.

Tancredo's Malkinized Bigotry

The whole notion that the Pope repeats the biblical command to welcome the alien, the orphan and the widow because he's trying to "fill the pews" is so numbingly stupid that only a Movement Conservative on a blog or Talk Radio could credit it. Yeah! What better way to stuff Rome's coffers with treasure than to throw the doors open to desperately poor people, give them services without charge, and (very often) never see them again.

Especially because, as we all know, Catholics are notoriously generous tithers. Those pennies and nickels really add up. And that's what it's all about!

It's weird to me that in a nation that worships wealth at so many levels (just look at our great cathedrals of Mammon known as "office buildings") there is so much energy spent on the suspicion that some kindness shown to immigrants is really Rome's way of trying to Get Rich Quick. Especially since, at the end of the day, so much of the American economy is inextricably bound up with exploiting illegal aliens for labor.

I think the term is "projection".

Another Reader is Very Very Upset that I Said Bush was Lawless



Cue the normal round of excuses and tergiversation. However, at the end of the day, our President is a War Criminal. And, what is more, he is a war criminal who (as war criminals do) made sure that it was the people following the orders who took the fall. That's but one of the reasons I find the Administration's policies on torture so disgusting. They claim to be "supporting the troops" but in reality they sell the troops down the river both by forcing them to do evil and by hanging them out to dry when they do (if they get caught). The military, to its credit, revolted against these despicable policies. The Administration, in response, simply made sure that they could continue to do this stuff via the CIA.

And Catholics cheer for it in greater percentages than the general population. Shameful and despicable.

Does This Seem Surreal to Anybody Else?

You Learn Something Every Day!

Turns out I "expect Bush to act like an orthodox Catholic."

I am at a loss to see how the bare minimum expectation "Don't commit war crimes" is tantamount to expecting Bush to "act like an orthodox Catholic".

My criticism of Bush has centered almost entirely on that issue. I have also criticized his tyrannical and lawless approach to his office (what with authorizing the use of torture and holdin himself exempt from obeying the law if he doesn't feel like it), but that also has nothing to do with "acting like an orthodox Catholic". Nor has his mismanagement of the war and the economy much to do with professing the Catholic faith. It's the bare minimum job requirement of his office. Indeed, I can't think of anytime where I've demanded he, say, confess the seven sacraments, honor Mary, submit to his bishop or do anything else specifically Catholic. But, as I've learned long ago, criticism of the President for incompetence and war crimes is BDS and can be shouted down as such in many places in the blogosphere.

Lady Macbeth Survives

Asked for a statement on her destruction of her party in the naked pursuit of power at any cost, Mrs. Clinton replied, "From hell's heart, I stab at thee. For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."

A McCain spokesman thanks Mrs. Clinton for her efforts on his behalf.

The man doesn't even have to campaign.

Of course, the downside is that the Freak Show tends to make people forget there *is* a GOP candidate since Hillary does such a good imitation of Karl Rove that the NY Times is having trouble telling the two apart.

Remember When Screaming "Bush Derangement Syndrome" was the Righty Blogosphere's Favorite Method for Shutting Down Any and All Discussion of Every Stupid or Evil Thing This Administration Did?

Turns out that people went on noticing the lousy job the Administration was doing anyway.

This Plays Hell with Foreign Policy Here in the Land Where There Are Only Two Sides to Every Question, Where Iran is Simply Evil and Israel is Always Our Friend:

Bin Laden's deputy says Iran trying to undermine al-Qaida...

Army veteran charged with passing secrets to Israel in '80s...

We don't do complexity here in the US. Too tiring. Give us a different set of headlines.

Beyond Hope

In which we discuss Benedict's message of Hope to a Millennial America that is marinating in worldly despair.

Scott Richert answers the Musical Question "What Did Pope Benedict Hope to Accomplish?"

He also has a very nice photo gallery of the Holy Father's visit, for those who would like to relive the past week.

I've added Scott to my blogroll.

Fr. Augustine Thompson, OP, writes:

I am an occasional reader of "Catholic and Enjoying It!" and one of the "authors" of "The New Liturgical Movement." Fr. Philip Neri Powell, O.P. ("Da Mihi Hanc Aquam") has suggested that I write to you.

I have recently started a "mirror" blog for the materials on New Liturgical Movement that relate to the Dominican liturgy (my area of contribution), because friars and others have been asking me if it could be consolidated in one place.

Here is a link to the new site.

I am trying to get the word out to Dominicans (and others interested) about the site's existence and its resources, especially the downloadable books of Dominican Gregorian Chant in pdf format.

Your site has enormous readership, including many Dominicans. A mention by
you would do wonders. If you think it not the kind of thing your readers are
interested in, that's fine too.

I don't think my readership is enormous, Father. But I think they'll be interested! Thanks for sending along the link!

A reader writes:

I've just been going through a few other blogs pointing out the bright side of the Pope's visit.

"It was beautiful. If you didn't get choked up, you weren't alive."

"There's a humility about this man [...] that is quite something."

We have been blessed to have two pontiffs, Pope John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict XVI, who truly reflect the radiance of Christ. Two celibate men, who gave themselves up to follow Christ, and who have such different personalities. It is a witness to the fact that once we give ourselves to God, it is then that we become fully human. The bright side is not something generated by our selves, but a reflection of the radiance of Christ.

Amen!

Barb Nicolosi Enjoyed "Expelled"

Gives it straight A's in fact.

I know this will create a lot of screaming from certain of my readers. Here's the thing: it gets hard to buy the whole "Unless you are a scientist you have absolutely no voice in this argument" thang. The quarrel here is between people who use science as a cover for atheist materialist agitprop and (quite often) those who find the agitprop unconvincing. Stein's no scientist. But he is a theist who can tell when theism is being shouted down in an unconvincing manner and skewer such tactics with aplomb. People can complain all they like about problems with ID. Knock yerself out. But Barb's reaction is the reaction of a lot of normal healthy theists to the arrogance of the atheist naturalist crowd: "I remember encountering some of this when I was in a Catholic high school, and having witnessed the entrenched Marxism (ie. social Darwinism) jerking everybody around at Northwestern University where I went to grad school, I found Expelled painfully true, and actually understated."

Until the defenders of atheistic naturalism can find some way to move past "Shut up, he explained" tactics they will continue to be sitting ducks for people like Ben Stein. As long as people like Richard Dawkins continue be not only self-appointed, but also *enormously popular* Popes of the Church of Darwin, the claim that this is a simple quarrel between unjustly aggressive religionists bent on Lies and dispassionate scientists who just care about Truth will ring hollow. The reality is that there is a huge and aggressively anti-God agenda at work for a large number of Darwin Mythos devotees.

The Great Thing about Being an English Scientist is That American Media Automatically Confer Oracular Authority on Almost Anything You Say

Scientists are High Priestly Mediators of Ultimate Truth in our Culture and Americans are particularly inclined to believe that a British accent automatically confers higher intelligence. So when Richard Dawkins says something people take it seriously, no matter how ignorant it is.

Likewise, when Stephen Hawking, whose field is astrophysics, not biology, pronounces on something he knows little about, people treat as the voice of God on Sinai.

In fact, we can't say how common life is in the universe because we still haven't the foggiest idea at to how it arose. Hawking's argument is pure aesthetics of the "It stands to reason" and "How arrogant for us to suppose" variety. It's an aesthetic I sympathize with, but it's not science because we only know of one planet where life exists and have zero evidence for others. More mischievous, though, is his panicky urging that we have get off this planet and go somewhere else to live.

We ain't going anywhere. It would be cheaper and easier to colonize Antarctica than the moon or Mars. (And those are our sole planetary choices in this solar system). Getting to another star and creating a colony there is even more dubious. But when Hawking says we have to leave the earth and that we are doomed if we don't, people tame him seriously because he's a scientist and a Brit. A fundamentalist sect like the Heaven's Gate people say the same thing without a British accent and a Ph.D. and people laugh.

Rad Trads Protest Benedict Eating with Tax Collectors and Sinners

They are thankful they are not like other men. They fast twice a week and tithe mint, dill, and cummin. They are pure and separated from the Unclean. Compare and contrast their virtuous gloom and malice with the completely unseemly joy of people like David Hartline, who commits the unpardonable sins of faith, hope and love here.

The whole thing reminds me of Screwtape's lament about the young:

The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth. While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent. Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry—the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon—are always blowing our whole structure away. They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first. So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or "science" or psychology, or what not. Real worldliness is a work of time—assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience.

Rad Trad cynical bitterness is every bit as worldly as Madonna. I'll take all those joyful kids cheering for Jesus and their heroic self-forgetfulness any day over the cranky complaints of the Tradition Inaction crowd.

Spirituality a Seattleite Can Appreciate

The Experts Speak!

Remember this stuff the next time somebody prophesies doom for Earth Day:

• “...civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.

• By 1995, “...somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Look magazine, April 1970.

• Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor “...the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born,” Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.

• The world will be “...eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age,” Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.

• “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” biologist Barry Commoner, University of Washington, writing in the journal Environment, April 1970.

• “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from the intolerable deteriorations and possible extinction,” The New York Times editorial, April 20, 1970.

• “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half...” Life magazine, January 1970.

• “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

• “...air pollution...is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

• Ehrlich also predicted that in 1973, 200,000 Americans would die from air pollution, and that by 1980 the life expectancy of Americans would be 42 years.

• “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.

• “By the year 2000...the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine,” Peter Gunter, North Texas State University, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.

General rule of Thumb: Righties use militarist apocalyptic catastrophe scenarios to manipulate people with fear. Lefties use environmentalist apocalyptic catastrophe scenarios to manipulate people with fear.

The key word to remember here is neither "militarist" nor "environmentalist". It is "manipulate".

A reader writes:

I saw this article in the Corner and read something that I thought would be interesting in light of the "we need torture to get vital information" argument.

John McCain, quoted toward the bottom of the story about giving up information when he was a prisoner in North Vietnam:

Recalling how he gave up military information to his interrogators, McCain said: "I regret very much having done so. The information was of no real use to the Vietnamese, but the Code of Conduct for American Prisoners of War orders us to refrain from providing any information beyond our names, rank and serial number." ...

Eventually, I gave them my ship's name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed. [Page 194*]

But remember, if you oppose torture, you are merely a bedwetter opposing a Randian anticoncept that expresses nothing but the disapproval of the critic. You are not a Real Practical Warrior who Knows What It Takes to Win a War.

The Siena Institute on Blessed John Henry Newman and his Theology of the Laity

Sherry Weddell is always interesting.

Belloc Foresaw a Lot of the Modern Predicament

We continue using and using up Catholic capital. It's rather like oil. The great civilizations of pagan and Jewish antiquity found a creative synthesis in the Catholic Christendom, which bequeathed to us little things like science, the university, the hospital, the rule of law and various other little hobbies of those ignorant medievals. Then we smashed the whole thing, took credit for them ourselves, kept using them (and so preserving what sanity we have) but have also been in the long slow process of deconstructing them ever since.

The warning of Scripture is that sooner or later, we will achieve what we have been laboring to achieve: the man of sin who claims to be God.

I'm skeptical he will arise in Islam. For all its many evils, that does not seem to be one of them. I think something worse than Islam will ultimately defeat Islam. I'm inclined to suspect it will promise "peace and safety". At any rate, I think this:

675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.

...is *far* more likely to arise in the post-Christian West than in the Islamic world. Doesn't mean Islamic aggression doesn't need to be defeated. It merely means that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" is a safer position for Western Christians to hold than "Woo hoo! We're NUMBER ONE!"

Postmodern Britain

Where religion (no qualifiers) is "evil" but padded bras for seven year olds are just part of the Glorious Capitalist Way.

Most amazing quote:

[A spokesman for TESCO, the manufacturer of the padded bra for seven year olds, said:] "Far from enhancing breasts or sexualising young girls, this product is designed to protect and cover girls' modesty at the sensitive time when they are developing. Any woman who remembers that period will understand."

In 2006 Tesco agreed to remove a home pole-dancing set, that included an extendable pole and frilly garter, from the Toys and Games section of its website.

This is the Absolute Truth



The Curt Jester desk is right next to mine. Amy Welborn sits across from me. Some of you write me from time to time to ask where she is and I always have to say "I don't know. She lives in Indiana." But the truth is, she has been uppity to the Masters and they beat her so bad she can't type for days at a time, so I try to cover for her.

Please! One of you needs to get an intervention team here! In addition to myself, mot of the other St. Bloggers are being held in a deserted warehouse on the edge of St. Louis! The address is...

Wait! They're coming!

Gotta go!

The story is odd but my favorite part is the reader comments

"that is way cool.... not the anal probes but the lights."

Bill Clinton: Simmering Cauldron of Narcissism

He's a victim!

Tweedledum and Tweedledummer tear at each others hair and clothes in the naked pursuit of power--um, because, er, they just want to be humble public servants and are regular joes just like us constituents.

Because, after all, who among us *doesn't* have millions upon millions of dollars pouring into our banks accounts from special interests, giant corporations, fabulously monied connections, and large sophisticated politico-industrial complexes solely focused on acquiring near-limitless earthly power? Which of us ordinary voters has not felt what it's like to be locked in a life and death struggle to strangle or be strangled by warring political factions who threaten our dream of being the most powerful person on earth? These people are just Ordinary Folk! They drink beer and go bowling!

Henry VIII at the Corner

When an Anglican becomes an atheist, he remains an Anglican. Derbyshire proves this with his theologically illiterate scientism over at the Corner, a screed he should have just title "No Popery!". He begins by confusion relativity with relativism, blaming the Pope for doing the same, and then builds on his confusion from there as though Newman had never existed and as though the Church was oblivous to the development of doctrine. Jim Manzi shares his confusion but has enough humility to recognize that the Pope does not. Jack Fowler attempts to engage him and K Lo tries to keep the peace.

Derbyshire responds by shouting "SCIENCE!" Ramesh Ponnuru rolls his eyes and tells Fowler not to cast pearls. Derbyshire double dog dares Ponnuru to, in effect, instantly cure him of his massive ignorance right this minute via Corner jottings or admit that only science is true, all religion is relativistic subjective delusion and there is no God, especially that Romish one.

It's all so wearying. I applaud Fowler, K Lo and Ponnuru for each, in their own way, trying to get Derb to think about this stuff instead of just reflexively spew Anglican atheist No Popery. But my weariness overcomes much hope that he will do so. Like so many of his kind, he is tired of hearing what he has never yet heard.

Questions like "Which came first: Morality or Law?...

Always strike me the same as "Which came first, walking with the right leg or walking with the left leg?"

The answer to Rod's question is "Man in the image and likeness of God came first". As Chesterton says, there is no trace of people saying "I wont hit you if you don't hit me" in antiquity. There's lots of evidence that they said, "We must not hit each other in the Holy Place."

StrongBad Digests the Problem of Breakfast Cereals

Note the headline

For the rest of the world he was a cardinal. For al-Reutera, where there is absolutely no bias or anything, not so much.

The Christ our Hope blog is on the Air!

The author sends along this Buh-zarre story on the EU's powerlessness in the face of wide-spread dog spinning, a truly weird (and cruel) practice of divination among Bulgarians.

If you oppose abortion and artificial birth control, you are like Aztecs who practiced human sacrifice.

And if that logic appeals to you, you also think opposition to abortion and birth control is like support for slavery and hatred of civil rights.

The usual blah from the Usual Suspects. And, of course, the principal focus is the Catholic Church.

Sometimes you get the sense that these articles of just phoned in or generated via a sort of macro in a word processor, just to keep up the anti-Catholic word count quote in the MSM. So long as there is "yah yah Catholic Church yah yah birth control yah yah womens' ordination yah yah gay marriage" it hardly seems to matter what the intervening text is nor how the concepts are related to one another.

Another Catholic Realizes that Movement Conservatism is, just like Leftism, a Jealous god who Will Have no God (including the real One) before it

What strikes you about the goons at the Malkin blog is the sheer blast of instantaneous contempt the moment the Pope makes a remark out of keeping with Movement dogma. Catholics are fine while they can be made us of. When they can't, they are trampled under foot with the same alacrity as a prolifer who gets uppity about the unborn at liberal anti-death penalty rally. Catholics are permitted to speak about things the party elders find useful. Otherwise they are to shut up and have their mouths shut for them. If you think your party care about your faith beyond its utility to the party, you have a sharp learning curve ahead.

Stephanopolous and Gibson Moderate the Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Oh, how very far American political discourse has declined.

Final Wrap Up on the Liturgy Wars

Oodles of replies to my comments last week on liturgical nastiness. I don't have much to add but I wanted to make a few final comments because I was struck by a couple of things.

The first thing I note is the great pain expressed by a number of commenters on the thread. Repeatedly, people wrote about the great pain they felt because the music at the DC Mass was, in their view, bad. Fair enough. There are hymns I find repellent ("Anthem" heads the list but there are others). I've been to any number of liturgies that were severely lacking for one reason or another.

Secondly, I note again, that some of the critics of the Mass have really constructive things to say in a charitable way. Many of them are, in fact, liturgists (I single out Jeffrey Tucker in this regard and thank him for trying to begin the conversation constructively). My reference to "hysteria" on the NLM blog was meant to refer to the combox conversation that followed Jeffrey's remarks. And some of the people who were having hysterics over there moved their hysterics over here. One person memorably spoke of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as "sh*t" here in my comboxes and swore never to read my blog again because of my grave sin of gratitude for the Eucharist. Don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out, pal. Others used slightly less Anglo-Saxon terms to call the sincere act of worship offered by brother and sister Catholics "appalling" and "obscene".

And multiple times, while all this naked judgment of the worship of others was being noised about, the theme of "persecution" reared its head: as though by defending the writer who felt wounded when his act of worship was slapped down as appalling and obscene shit by fellow Catholics, I was issuing a blanket declaration that "Those Catholics who take seriously the Church's teaching on the liturgy and sacred music are Pharisees".

To clarify: No. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that those Catholics who take the Church's teaching on liturgy more seriously than they take the Church's teaching on charity often behave like Pharisees (and self-pitying ones at that), not unlike those in the apologetics subculture who "defend the faith" ostensibly out of love for truth but really because they just enjoy beating people up in an argument.

The curious thing about this phenomenon is, as I noted last week, the tendency bitterness has to turn us into people who regard virtue as a sin. One of the theological virtues, for instance, is Hope. One person unburdened himself on three separate occasions to say, with a peculiar sort of relish, that he could read the souls of all worship leaders, that the Church is doomed, and that his pain should trump everything:

Catholic music uniformly stinks. I think they should do away with everything except service music and that should be put into a chant form so that we can do it without the piano player and the showoff *leader* lady with her hands in the air and her ENORMOUS EGO.

It's just one more face of the corruption we have to wade through every single sunday.

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We're about ready to witness a collapse in American catholicism akin to the collapse that has occurred in Europe. Watch.

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At this point, Mark, they're not "ugly arguments for beauty." They're accounts of the pain and damage the ugliness we have to wade through does to us.

I'd settle for silence. We're not even talking about substituting something decent here. The liturgy wannabees need to shut the hell up and let us worship. Period. I"ve had enough.

This summarizes almost everything that's wrong with the attempt at "Reform through Rage". And it's what I run into again and again and again among those who fantasize that they are "helping the Church" when they are, in fact, saying "It's all about ME" just as much as the most egomaniacal liturgist.

Do I deny that there is tremendous pain in those words I just quoted? No! But (and this is key) many so-called reformers do! They pretend that they are simply and solely motivated by a cool dispassionate interest in the teaching of the Church and that it is only the Enemy (meaning, often, people like my reader below, who are motivated by their own emotions/self-interest/needs/wants etc. And so, "it's not about YOU! You are selfish!" gets brandished by the Raging Reformers against people who are doing their best to make a self-offering to God. That's bad enough, since it means that lots of sincere and innocent worships have their worship denigrated as mere narcissism. But coupled with the fiction that the Reformers rage is "holy zeal" and not simply vengeful catharsis enacted against innocent people, it's a lot to swallow. Because the reality is that for many so-called Liturgical Reformers the motivation for "reform" is every bit as self-centered (on their pain/anger/disgust etc.) as the narcissistic NewChurch liturgist.

That's why I spoke last week of the "crossfire" in which so many ordinary people find themselves. What those interested in liturgical reform are going to have to ask themselves sooner or later, is whether they want reform or catharsis more? If they merely want to indulge their anger, then they can certainly do that. But they will never achieve anything by it, just as a parent who beats his child will simulate "discipline" but only wind up losing the child forever when he gets old enough to walk out. Treating people like my reader below as The Enemy will simply insure that he and the other 46,000 people who had a delightful time of worship in DC will shrug and walk off.

That would be a pity, because the Church (and Benedict) really do have invaluable things to teach us about how to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass more fittingly and with all the beauty it deserves. But ugly (and disingenous) arguments for beauty (which purport to be rooted in truth but are actually rooted in rage) will not achieve the end desired.

Here, by the way, is what the Pope had to say to us:

I ask you, in the Lord Jesus, to set aside all division and to work with joy to prepare a way for him, in fidelity to his word and in constant conversion to his will. Above all, I urge you to continue to be a leaven of evangelical hope in American society, striving to bring the light and truth of the Gospel to the task of building an ever more just and free world for generations yet to come.

That does not mean "Shut up and stop seeking better liturgy". It means "Make beautiful arguments for beauty, not arguments that kick good men and women in the teeth for offering sincere worship and not arguments that treat despair as a virtue and hope and joy as sins."

A reader writes:

I don't know why it always happens to me but I am in an argument with a couple of atheists about Mother Theresa. I never knew much about her but hearing all sorts of charges based on Hitchens' book automatically makes me assume that it is a hatchet job. But, when I google, all I come up with are umpteen million blogs criticising her.

Can you or a reader point me to a reliable evaluation of her life and work?

I'm not much of a Mother Teresa scholar. I suppose a place to start would be Malcolm Muggeridge's "Something Beautiful for God". Beyond that, maybe readers know more.

Cow was right near home plate for the Papal Mass at Yankee Stadium

Jan just talked to him. He thought both Masses were glorious and is delighted to have had a chance to hear and see Benedict again. What a wonderful time to be 19 years old!

A reader sends along the following

Mark, here's an interesting passage:

When we use the expression 'the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath;, or when we say "the Constitution is not a death pact" it is convey the idea that laws and customs are meant for substantive ends, not merely procedural ones. Cures which kill the patient and laws which empower criminals are alike in that sight of the ultimate object of the exercise has been lost.*

The urge to stand above the grime and gunpowder sometimes obscures the historical fact that police forces must sometimes become a little like their enemies in order to effectively fight them. The Duke of Wellington when asked about his troops understood they were the scum of the earth and once said, "I don't know if they scare the enemy, but by God, they scare me." And when we think of Johnny Depp swashbuckling through the Carribbean, it's good to remember that the British Tars who pursued them were no shrinking violets themselves. The men themselves were cut from the same cloth, even if the actual clothes they wore were different.* [...]

(Wonder what Mr. Commerford would think of this ...)

I have no idea what Mr. Comerford would make of it, but I have a rough idea of what Pope Benedict would say, not about the action of French, but about this latest attempt by a blogger to justify consequentialism (summed up in the phrase "we must become a little like our enemies in order to fight them"). In short, this incident is being used by the blogger (and my correspondent) as a metaphor for American use of torture (as evidenced by the reference to Comerford, whose principle beef in my comboxes has to do with torture, not with French responses to piracy.

Against counsel to do evil that good make come of it, and against the bare-faced lie that respect for elementary human rights is merely "procedural", the Pope "has been critical of harsh interrogation methods, telling a meeting of the Vatican's office for social justice last September that, while a country has an obligation to keep its citizens safe, prisoners must never be demeaned or tortured."

That why "In a private meeting with President Bush, the two leaders “touched on the need to confront terrorism with appropriate means that respect the human person and his or her rights,” according to a joint U.S.-Holy See statement.

Meanwhile bloggers like the guys at the link and, most especially, readers like the guy who sent me this go on making excuses for consequentialism, imitating Caiaphas, and trying to figure out a way to ignore the ordinary teaching of the Church which says that human rights are for human beings, that you do not do evil that good may come of it, and that it is a false choice to say "either we abuse prisoners or we admit defeat."

Murder, Inc. is Excited!



Margaret Sanger's KKK Values in action!

Check out Pavel Chichikov's Latest Work!

Mark your Calendars!

April 27 is National Hairball Awareness Day and who among us is immune from the excitement!

I just wish I could be there to handle some of these beauties! Boy, you east coast people have all the best stuff!

A reader writes:

I have been some what miffed about your characterization of Republicans recently. After my experience at Michelle Malkin's blog and the response to Catholics in the comments section, I am much closer to being on your side. You were mentioned by another poster in the comments and I am Mendol in the comments.

Yep. I note that reader Amy P. had a similarly enlightening experience among the flesh-eating "conservatives" on that thread.

Put not your trust in princes, as the man said.

Sorry you got burned! The Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head. Twas ever thus in this world and the servant is not greater than the Master. You can do a lot of things with the rich and powerful. But you can never ever trust them. The notion that the GOP is somehow run by people who *care* about the Church (as distinct from finding aspects of its teaching and portions of its membership useful) is painfully contradicted now and then by the sheer brutality of the contempt you meet whenever some prominent Catholic (including the "revered" Pope touches on some sacred conservative cow). Then the knives come out just as quickly and as ruthlessly as if Catholics for a Free Choice were brandishing them.

Matatics Completes His Transition Back to Protestantism

So I open my email this morning and get this ad from somebody who is apparently part of the James White Axis of Realio-Trulio Reformed Anti-Catholics. The guy's got a radio show and his special guest is none other than Gerry Matatics, shilling his latest assault on Holy Church with the musical question "GERRY MATATICS: Is John Ratzinger a True Pope?"

I can confidently answer that question with a solid negative: John Ratzinger is not a True Pope.

The ad informs us that Matatics only "grudgingly" uses the term "sedevacantist" to describe himself. Is that because he doesn't deny that the Pope is the Pope. No. He denies it alright. The name for people who deny that the Pope is the Pope is "sedevacantist". So why deny what he in fact professes? I suspect it could have something to do with the fact that, as the ad says, "Prior to Gerry's adoption of sedevacantism ... he was one of the most highly sought after Catholic apologists in America, and was one of the most highly praised contemporary defenders of the Catholic Faith." Now that he has chosen to regard himself as smarter than Holy Mother Church and to do radio shows aiding and abetting professional anti-Catholics, it's hard to persuade Catholics that he isn't the best person to turn to for information on the Church. "Sedevacantist" doesn't help enhance that reputation. So while advocating a sedevacantist position, Matatics prefers not to *name* that position too loudly.

The refusal to give things their proper name is always one of the marks of hell at work.

PS: a new ad showed up just now, with Matatics denying that Joseph Ratzinger is the Pope. Matatic's not a sedevacantist or anything though.

I'm Dreaming of a White Pentecost

We have had three days of snow and hail here in Seattle, which constitutes a record, I believe, for the latest snowfall in the area. Last week it hit about 80 degrees.

We're planning to do an intervention on the weather man.

Friday was fun. Last week, Peter and I went for a bike ride in the balmy weather. This past Friday, we called it a snow day and let the kids stay up watching a Star Trek double feature. We all agreed we were living on the Genesis planet as we watched it snow three inches. Utterly bizarre for Seattle this time of year.

A Note from a Faithful Catholic on the Receiving End of New Liturgical Fussbudget Hysteria

A reader writes:

My daughter and I sang as part of the Papal Mass Choir in the Washington Nationals stadium. I would like respond to a few points made by your readers in the comboxes and some of the articles to which you have linked.

Obedience. A big deal to conservative traditionalists, of whom I generally consider myself one. The general plans for the Mass, including the music, were to the best of my knowledge cleared with the Pope’s representative some time ago. Had we been asked to delete one piece or add another, I am sure it would have been done. Some things were done specifically because we thought they would please the Pope. He likes Mozart, so we sang the Ave Verum Corpus. He’s German, so we made sure to sing the third verse of “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name” in German.

Aesthetic Unity. The Mass music admittedly did not have that. Rev. Neuhaus disapprovingly called it a stew. The metaphor is apt, but I question the disapproval. This was to be one of only two Masses in this country, a country which is truly culturally diverse. Each group wishes to present something of its own to the Lord. Fr. Johansen understands this, but says the following:

Archbishop Wuerl, in his greeting of the Holy Father at the beginning of the Mass, stressed the different cultures and ethnicities represented at the Mass. Fr. Neuhaus observed that the spirit of "multiculturalism" pervaded the Mass. A different EWTN commentator, after the Mass, gushed about how the Mass represented the "diversity" of the Church in America. Others waxed about how the Mass was an opportunity for the Church in America to show the Holy Father who we are. The problem: That's. Not. What. Mass. Is. About…The Mass is about re-presenting the eternal Sacrifice of Christ at the Last Supper and Calvary. It's about Him, not me, and not even about we.

How can I possibly disagree with something so obviously true? Well, because as far as music is concerned, it is simply wrong. Unlike Apollo, God did not set forth a given musical style. Each culture brings its own to the Mass. I think Archbishop Wuerl thought this important. Furthermore, seeing how his presentation comments dovetailed with the Pope’s remarks in the homily, it certainly seemed like this had been worked out and approved in advance. I cannot make people like music they simply don’t like, any more than anyone can convince me that Telemann is anything but boring. But if the music is performed professionally and reverently, it should not be a cause for scandal and dismay.

Reverence. This was certainly a concern for our director, Tom Stehle. During our rehearsals, he repeatedly reminded us that this was prayer, not a performance for ourselves. At the Mass, when not singing, we were to focus our attention on the Pope.

I think one of your commenters complained that too much of the music was loud and up-tempo. This may be just a preference for Mystical Contemplation as opposed to Joyful Exuberance. If you’re talking about Offertory and Communion, I tend to agree. But remember, this Mass was being held in a baseball stadium where every note and word had to fight traffic noise and the clatter of overhead helicopters. This is not conducive to Mystical Contemplation. If you say this is a good reason to have Mass in a real church, you have a point. But once you accept the fact that it will be outdoors in a city, you have to deal with that fact.

We rehearsed for two months, three hours at a time, no bathroom breaks (really!) We did it to present something beautiful to God and the Pope. Those who attended the Mass, and at least some of the local reporters, seemed to understand and be touched by this. Sorry some of you weren’t.

The notion that this Mass was just thrown together, or a surprise to Benedict, or the work of Benedict's evil grand viziers who betrayed him or of wicked narcissists who just wanted to do their American Idol thang for the cameras or all the other hysteria that I've been encountering around St. Blog's... well, it's not just out of touch with reality, but as my correspondent demonstrates, it hurts and insults the very real people who labored to offer this liturgy to the glory of God. If it was good enough for the Pope, who in blazes are we to sit in judgment of them?

Some people who are particularly exercised about the music have been gnashing their teeth because (in a baseball stadium filled with 46,000 people) there was applause for Placido Domingo. The Puritan hackles go up! This is NOT ABOUT YOU! they scream into their comboxes. They've read Benedict on the liturgy! They know what is and is not permitted to happen in a Real Pure Mass[TM]!

Yes. Except, well, there's Benedict pausing in the liturgy to thank and bless Placido:



Has he forgotten that the liturgy is NOT ABOUT PLACIDO? Or is he simply doing a human thing and praising beauty while thanking somebody for a good job? I kinda think that's not a big problem.

One of my readers (who was at the liturgy) sums up the disconnect between those who received it with gratitude and those who seem only interested in using it as a club to beat the people who offered it:

If knowing the difference between good liturgy and bad liturgy means turning into people like this then God save American Catholics from knowing the difference between good liturgy and bad liturgy.

I was quite put out by the anti-Catholic nuts with bullhorns who spoiled the half-block walk from Nationals Stadium to the Metro. But at least what they believe really *is* that small and crabbed. Why are so many Catholics so eager to demonstrate their love for the Faith by making it look as small and crabbed as Rev. Frank's Bible Church of Christ the Judge? What's the point of ugly arguments for beauty? But what do I know? I was assisting at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, not watching television.

What's the point of ugly arguments for beauty? That's my point in a nutshell. My reader above gave his all to worship the Lord in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. For his troubles, he and a lot of other brothers and sisters in our Lord Jesus Christ got kicked in the teeth by people claiming to be the Real Pure representatives of Real Pure Catholic Faith. Is it any wonder Real Pure Catholic faith has such a bad name?

The Best Part of Election Years: Political Humor!

They're not trying to shock anybody. They're just trying to provoke a conversation about our patriarchal heteronormative culture.

No. Really!

Is there something in the water at Yale?

This guy was also a huge enthusiast for the courageous transgressiveness of Little Miss Ilse.

John C. Wright on those Stupid Midichlorians

The Force should have just been left in the mist of Lucas' half-baked spiritual realm. The moment you link it to some physiological basis, you raise all these dumb questions that get in the way of the story. Worst plot turn in the whole series.

John also has fun with moral relativists who are perpetually trying to have their cake and eat it. In the comments, a few vague souls try to hold up their end against John and Mike Flynn and wind up getting fragged by common sense. What fun!

The Scandal of the Gospel on Full Display

For me, the single most arresting display of Christ-like humility in the meeting of the Pope and the sex abuse victims was this: after the Pope apologized to them and asked forgiveness for the sins committed against them there was this amazing exchange:

"I asked him to forgive me for hating his church and hating him," said Olan Horne, 48, of Lowell, who gave the pope a picture of himself as a 9-year-old boy, just before the Rev. Joseph E. Birmingham started molesting him. "He said, 'My English isn't good, but I want you to know that I can understand you, and I think I can understand your sorrow.'"

Horne's act is, quite simply, a miracle only possible by the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. It will, I guarantee you, be seen by no small number of people as revolting and scandalous (like the cross itself). The notion that a *victim* should be apologizing will (according to the "It's all About Power" interpretive grid of the world) be taken as an act of self-hatred, of the hideous Mind Control of the Church, etc.

In fact, what Horne did was liberate himself from the last and most insidious shackle of the sin committed against him: the temptation to think that bitterness is healing. More than that, by his unfathomably noble act, Horne made it possible for many many others to likewise forgive and let go of the imprisoning rage that always tempts us to remain in the power of those who have harmed us. This act of forgiveness and humility is the power and the scandal of the gospel on display in full strength. I am humbled and shamed by it as I look at my own slowness to relinquish anger and bitterness when I am hurt. God bless this man forever!