This our sacrifice, and more

• From the Anglican History project: This Our Sacrifice. Classic Anglo-Catholicism, fitting the Book of Common Prayer into the traditional Mass, or how to do the Mass in English (It’s Not About Latin™) and what the ordinariates should be like (the British in that have been Novus Ordo for decades). It works even though Cranmer was a heretic (his consecration prayer isn’t allowed in the Catholic Church), because he was credally orthodox and a master of English prose. (Even though he edited and replaced collects because of his Protestantism, they’re not heretical and are gems to read and pray. My diurnal has them alongside the Roman Rite ones.) Benedict the Great’s reform of English Novus, his greatest accomplishment (at last, a church official acknowledged there was a problem with English Novus), is so close to it that the few times a year I’m at Novus I say the BCP things such as the creed from memory. My way of thanking A-Cism for giving me the pre-conciliar ethos. Other than that I don’t miss the Prayer Book because I know where it came from, so I’m not in the ordinariate. I still want to visit Mount Calvary, Baltimore, though. (The only English that Catholics are attached to is the English with a long Catholic tradition: the prayers of the Rosary, the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be.)
• This got Archbishop Robinson and me into a talk about Dom Gregory Dix. I admit I’ve not read The Shape of the Liturgy; he’s one of those people the liberals latched onto like John XXIII but maybe he doesn’t deserve that rap of derailing the liturgical movement and getting the church on the Novus track. He was never a reformer/wreckovator in practice: as an Anglo-Papalist monk of Nashdom he celebrated our Mass, in Latin. (Anglo-Papalists were would-be Catholics but they defended Anglican orders. Now they’re the British ordinariate.) Robinson explained that Dix’s motive was good: he was targeting Cranmer’s Communion service in order to defend our Mass. (Msgr. Barnes: The English experience of BCP could hardly be more different from that in North America. There, Anglo-Catholics would look to the Prayer Book to defend them against the liberal ascendancy. In England, Anglo-Catholics had the Prayer Book used AGAINST them. That’s why Novus was a badge of orthodoxy for British would-be Catholics.) The title comes from his idea that the liturgy’s shape matters even more than the words (one ancient liturgy still in use, the Nestorian, doesn’t have the words of institution, which is no problem), so Cranmer’s service was wrong (well, yes: writing a new liturgy from scratch is un-Catholic even if not heretical); not necessarily bad but of course you can see the problem right away of relativizing content. The liturgical revision in his name, after he died, was blowback.
• Fisher More College. In Fort Worth, Bishop Olson has suppressed our Mass at a traditionalist Catholic college in the official church. (By the way, almost all American Catholic colleges are private, not controlled by the diocese.) The story as I understand it: the bishop did it because the college had become “extremist,” whatever that means, and, says ex-FMC chancellor Taylor Marshall, financial mismanagement (president Michael King made a real-estate investment that didn’t work out, costing FMC a lot of money). The people defending the bishop say he can do this even under Summorum Pontificum because SP only frees up private Masses. I never heard of that. My first reaction was that SP frees up our Mass, period, so Olson has no right to do this. I don’t think King’s a crook; all investments are risky. He’s explained himself, answering Marshall, and anyway, why is that an excuse to suppress our Mass? The Fraternity of St. Peter were the school’s chaplains and allegedly withdrew due to the “extremism”; the FSSP deserves respect so that accusation, if it exists, has a lot of clout. (And FMC brought in Fr. Gruner* and John Vennari to speak.) So what is “extremism” that would justify a crackdown (again, he has no right to stop our Mass, thanks to the Pope)? I’d draw the line at sedevacantism right now or for the past 50 years or so, saying the council was heretical or not a valid council, and saying that the Novus Ordo is heretical (although the old English paraphrase comes close) or invalid. Saying the council and Novus were mistakes that harmed the church is allowable, and what I believe. Otherwise things like this from the Latin Mass Society (It’s Not About Latin™: allow our Mass in the vernacular and Catholics’ objection to it would fall like a house of cards) are triangulation or divide and conquer: beat the trads by splitting us up (“at least I’m not like those rad trads”). I still think this crackdown is foul. As Modestinus notes, mainstream American Catholic colleges have gotten away with dissent for 40 years. Is this crackdown part of the Francis effect? (He’ll end up like Paul VI and the mainline: the mainstream cheers for him but will push him aside; he’s a flash in the pan, the liberals’ last hurrah in the official church.) Hunker down. Without Benedict backing us, it will be a bumpy ride. (*He says things that need to be said and that official churchmen don’t, but Fátima isn’t strictly speaking part of the faith. I’m about doctrine, tradition-driven papal minimalism based on our doctrine, the Mass, and the office, not chasing even approved private revelations. I also don’t need sedevacantism, the Siri theory, the imposter Paul VI theory from Bayside, or the theory that Benedict is still the Pope to explain the mess in the church. We don’t worship the Pope. No matter who is in the See of Peter, the church is the church.)
• By the way, IF Pope Francis or someone else retracted Benedict’s Novus and SP, and there were no Eastern Catholic or ordinariate church to go to, I’d go to the SSPX. I’d miss the normality of parish life like 50 years ago but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. We have our Mass because of the SSPX. Fellay for cardinal; Lefebvre for saint.
• Low-church Francis opens his mouth again, about “civil unions,” a way the state now pretends the same sex can marry each other without calling it that. He admitted the possibility, which isn’t heretical. The Pope can’t change the teachings of the church; he wasn’t suggesting changing the matter of a sacrament to redefine marriage like the secular media wanted to hear. He’s appealing to civil liberties to leave homosexuals in peace, which is fine. That said, in the culture wars, saying what he did was bad judgement, a hallmark of this Pope.
• Why did the Sixties gut the church? Why did the council, the false “renewal,” happen? It wasn’t the hippies; they were a minority and too young, and not interested in the church. (They were mostly consumers of popular music. All the real work in the ’60s, good and bad, was done by people who looked like me.) It was the generation before them. The golden era’s blind faith in progress did it in: make the church all shiny, space-age new.
• This old lie from ecumenism grinds my gears. Recently Orthodox Archbishop Lazar (Puhalo) repeated it: “Actually, Vatican II in many way brought the Roman church closer to Orthodoxy.” Are you blind and deaf? Witness the Orthodox Liturgy: your Tridentine Mass, to your lasting credit. Witness the Novus Ordo. The reasons for that line about the council and Orthodoxy: collegiality, the vernacular in services, and the chalice for the laity. To which I say so what? The church can’t change teaching on the Pope or anything else; as Benedict the Great suggested before he was Pope, we can envision what I believe in: a loose communion run by tradition (Orthodoxy) but with the Pope’s share in the church’s charism of infallibility. (That part about the papacy is the only thing keeping the two sides apart.) The vernacular is fine (witness Anglo-Catholics’ translation of the Tridentine Mass) but Orthodox often don’t use the vernacular. Everybody develops a liturgical language (for American Protestants it's the King James Bible). Greeks use medieval Greek; Russians Slavonic. And the way the Orthodox (and Greek Catholics) and the Novus Ordo do the chalice for the laity are worlds apart. No sale. That line is left over from when ecumenism was fashionable. The world is less churchy now and everybody in the churches knows they won’t get back together. Still, you are an estranged part of us, not Protestants, so corporate reunion is our goal, with your rite intact (because of our true-church claim, we accept individual converts and unias, but they’re not our main goal). (The archbishop was a vagante whom the OCA graciously took in as a retired bishop, but they’ve made it clear his liberalism doesn’t speak for them.) Reminds me of this gem from Fr. Hunwicke (in which he also rubbishes the Celtic Christian myth in time for St. Patrick’s Day): Remember those happy heady days when “Orthodoxy” was the “sexy” version of Christianity? Eastern Christianity had more romance and less menace and “rigidity” than Rome ... because it came from further away. Sadly, when we got to know them better, we discovered that the Orthodox were, if anything, distinctly more “rigid” than Rome, particularly on questions like “Intercommunion.” As a friend once put it, if the liberals took Orthodoxy seriously it would be an embarrassment to them, because the liberals can’t blame the Pope for the Orthodox being Catholic.
• For the foreseeable future, the best we can expect with the Orthodox is common charitable work and witness against abortion and homosexualism. Like how I understand all the churches, official Orthodox, nationalist breakaway Orthodox, and Greek Catholic, have tried to keep the peace in the streets and minister to the wounded in the Ukraine.
• Jesus saves, Mary prays; save souls; happy Lent and feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Atlantic City Classic Car Show & Auction

At the Atlantic City Convention Center.

The Ukrainian revolution

So a mob has overthrown the elected government in the Ukraine, a move at least passively supported by the U.S., whose media talking heads are cheering for the rebels. The U.S. wants to weaken Russia by taking the Ukraine away from it and putting it in the EU. As LRC's Michael Rozeff says, neither Russia nor the Ukraine are threats to America; they're not Communist anymore, remember? Anyway, as happens with American-driven coups, the results might not be what the U.S. government wants. Good. It seems these are anti-Soviet right-wing nationalists, culturally conservative Slavs like the Russians.

American opinion from those who care seems to be that liberals, neocons, and well-meaning conservative Catholics support the rebels, remembering the Cold War and the heroic Ukrainian Catholic Church surviving underground for 40 years. Real conservatives like Putin's Russia, non-Communist and anti-liberal. I like Russia too for those reasons, but really this calls for common sense. The eastern and southern Ukraine are historic parts of the Russian heartland; let them go back. I would have counted Kiev as Russian too but apparently they want independence. That's their business. I fear for the Ukrainian Catholic Church, whose home is the far west that Stalin stole during World War II, as they're outnumbered in a secular country with a big Orthodox minority; not sure if they'd fare best in one independent Ukraine or in their own country with Lvov as the capital.

Also, there's the Catholic big picture of corporate reunion with Russian Orthodoxy, even though they want next to nothing to do with us for the foreseeable future. They are obviously an estranged part of us. Going after Russia to try to help the Ukrainian Catholics works against that.

I'm a legitimist — Putin and Yanukovych are the authorities — and born Orthodox get the benefit of the doubt, so for the Russian homeland, Orthodoxy.

The Kyiv Patriarchate schism from Orthodoxy is jockeying to be the state or at least the national church. They're friendly with the Ukrainian Catholic Church for their nationalism vs. Russia but I wonder if that would last if they got their way. They might not; most of the Ukraine, like Russia, is secular with a lot of very nominal Orthodox. The U.S.-backed former president Yushchenko belongs to the KP. The legitimate Orthodox church there is Russian.

And if a mob can take over the government in Kiev, reason the Russian majority in the Crimea who never wanted to be in the Ukraine, why can’t they in Simferopol? There's a patriotic song in Russia about the Black Sea fleet choosing to remain Russian after Ukrainian independence: that day the ships flew the Russian navy flag with St. Andrew's cross. Let them go back.

Dreher writes that, considering all the pipelines running through the Ukraine, Putin is a rational actor. (Right. He’s not stupid.)

Anyway, not our fight. Pat Buchanan, a historic American conservative for peace since the Cold War ended, is right: we should cut it out.

On making English the U.S.’s official language

Undecided. America at its best doesn't legislate those things, letting them take care of themselves, which is how we've used English for all of our history, but no problem if it is the official language. (I mean, nobody's surprised that the official language of France is French.) Relates to immigration: individual freedom to travel but a country has limited resources and an obligation to its citizens first. Why not tests to let in only the best and brightest? Also, no to social engineering: putting Islamists in the middle of Kentucky to defeat conservative whites. I love languages, knowing four of them (not fluent in the foreign ones), and an immigrant language can be a good hedge against the worst of American culture. Usually the language doesn't get passed down beyond the second generation. The second generation is perfectly bilingual, with the home language and then perfect American English learned in school (the schools did them a favor teaching them English) and from friends. Also, in Europe, multilingualism is normal. So have English at least quasi-official, teaching it in school, but leave other languages in peace.

The Novus Ordo doesn’t work

From an e-mail group:

The NLM article is very interesting, summing up very recent writings on the liturgy. I must say, I am surprised at all of this erupting just now. It's like watching a geyser insistently spouting; you've got to acknowledge the pressure that has been there all along.

I heartily agree, and have always agreed, that the Novus Ordo doesn't work. The whole premise -- that you can take a rite older than Gregory the Great, submit it to the tender mercies of an editorial board and publish the new product with great fanfare as Our Daily Bread from now on -- is dopey beyond belief.

What's truly revealing is the institutional psychosis. We enter the Conciliar period having been prepared by the Liturgical Movement of the 1940s-50s to expect that the Church will be renewed once we have, well renewed the Liturgy. We proceed to completely ignore the sonorous document produced by the Council Fathers on the subject (the stuff about tambourines and mood synthesizers was in a footnote). We lose sixty percent of our worshipping congregation over the next thirty years, all the while prattling on complacently about Renewal. It took FORTY YEARS before the liturgical establishment started to mumble, "Hmmm... didn't quite go as we had hoped..." And there are still people who insist that it was all to be expected, society went mad in the 1960s, you can't blame it all on liturgical reform.

Grrr. Ours is a sacramental faith. That means that signs and symbols affect us profoundly, more than we realize. Once there was a central symbol, one that affected virtually every Catholic -- the Sacred Liturgy. It was celebrated as something which we had received and should treasure. When violent hands were laid on that (the "winged monkey treatment" -- "Well, they took my stomach and threw it HERE, and my legs are over THERE..."), even that most sacred thing... everything was up for grabs. If you could do what you wished with the Liturgy, convert it into a vehicle for self-expression, then you could do what you wished with anything -- Religious Life, seminary formation, marriage, sexual morality, medical ethics, you name it.

It is all of a piece. And then we blame "The World." How could we expect that we wouldn't be affected by The World? Well, within living memory we took it for granted that the Church was supposed to be the salt of the earth, a leaven for the world, that the Church should affect the world. It's highly convenient as well as significant that we seem to have forgotten that.

Father Kocik and these other authors are attacking a forty-five-year-old logjam.

What I call the legitimate liturgical movement worked with the traditional Mass, teaching people about it, and wanted more of what is technically the norm in the rite, High Mass. Their ideal was a congregationally chanted High Mass, maybe with parts in the vernacular. You ended up getting the opposite. The low-church Irish-Americans described by Thomas Day were happy to have an even lower Low Mass and junked it up with a different kind of devotional hymns (pseudo-folk instead of 1890s pop), and the High Mass disappeared.

Without the council, the church still would have taken a hit from the Sixties but it would have been smaller. We had the clout to ride it out. My guess is eventually — in the ’70s? — we would have had a vernacular version of the traditional Mass, just like what the OCA, some other American Orthodox, and some American Eastern Catholics did. Pope Benedict the Great’s correction of English Novus was a big step in that direction.

Meanwhile, low-church Pope Francis gets on the cover of Rolling Stone and the UN tries to tell the church what to do. Let’s see; did he get that honor because of the teachings of the church and will it promote them? No?

The last of the original von Trapps

Maria von Trapp, who happened to have the same name as her stepmother on whose life The Sound of Music was based, has passed away at her home on Trapp Mountain in Vermont. She was 99.

Known as Mitzi, Maria was the youngest of the original seven von Trapp Family Singers, who emigrated with their parents to America.

Von Trapp was the last surviving member of the Austrian family of seven brothers and sisters and died in her sleep at her Vermont home. "It was a surprise that she was the one in the family to live the longest because ever since she was a child she suffered from a weak heart," family friend Marianne Dorfer told the Austrian Times.

"It was the fact that she suffered from this that her father decided to hire Maria von Trapp to teach her and her brothers and sisters," she continued. "That of course then led to one of the most remarkable musical partnerships of the last century." Von Trapp's first visit back to Austria after escaping was in 2008.

Much to say both about the history and the musical.

The history I’ve learned over the years:

• The world would have been better off if the Central Powers had won World War I. Capt. Georg von Trapp was made a nobleman because of his wartime service to Catholic Austria-Hungary as a submarine captain.
• He wasn’t like the character in the show. Always was nice. He used a bosun’s whistle (smart!) to call the children when they were far away on the grounds.
• The elder Maria wasn’t sent out of the abbey for being a lovable troublemaker. She was sent to work at the von Trapps’ because of her health; she was sick from moving to a lower altitude from the mountains she was used to.
• She was hired at first just to be the younger Maria’s tutor, not the children’s governess.
• She wasn’t in love with Georg von Trapp but he apparently was with her so she married him for the children’s sake.
• They started singing because he lost his fortune in the Depression.
• The one who encouraged them to sing was actually the family’s priest. Max Detweiler the agent was fictitious.
• Maria wasn’t nice but she was sincere, very devout.
• The family was profoundly Catholic. Not only did they perform but up at their ski lodge in Vermont they had a liturgical life, being a schola cantorum.
• Because of that, it’s true than von Trapp was anti-Nazi. But because he needed the money, he considered the German government’s job offer to serve as a U-boat expert in their navy. The Germans were nice about it; they didn’t try to force him.
• Because von Trapp was born on part of the Adriatic coast then Austrian (why they used to have a navy!) but part of Italy after World War I, he was an Italian citizen.
• The show’s timeline is wrong. The von Trapps married in the 1920s.
• So is the geography. Salzburg isn’t on the border with Switzerland but with Germany.
• Anyway, that part of the show is made up. The von Trapps didn’t have to sneak out. They just moved, leaving Salzburg by train.
• Von Trapp died early on in Vermont, I think in the late ’40s.

The show and movie:

• Beautiful depiction of Catholic Europe, specifically real nuns, probably Benedictines. (Whose communities are “abbeys.”) The early scene of them chanting the office? Those are choir nuns, full-fledged women monks. Most nuns aren’t really nuns; they’re “sisters,” who were given the privilege of dressing like nuns.
• The names of the children are fictitious.
• Julie Andrews starred in a rival Broadway show, My Fair Lady (losing the movie role to the better-known Audrey Hepburn; no hard feelings, she says), and once was in a stage spoof of The Sound of Music before she landed the movie role. (Andrews didn’t appear in films until Mary Poppins in ’64.)
• Because of the heavy fictionalization, the movie’s not much known or liked in German-speaking countries. A more accurate movie in German is.
• The show has a couple of songs that were cut from the movie, with “An Ordinary Couple” replaced by the much better “Something Good.” I’ve seen a stage production.
• Christopher Plummer hated the movie, thinking it too sentimental. He called it The Sound of Mucus.
• The movie was the No. 1 box-office hit of 1965. What mainstream society liked, right before it went to hell.

Sexagesima: Common decency from Gene Simmons, let’s phase out the Novus Ordo, and more

• Common decency from Gene Simmons. On Tim Tebow and freedom of religion. Reminds me of what Steve Sailer calls diversity before “diversity,” 50 years ago. Before identity politics and the mainstream’s (new left’s) war on white Christian America, this is how Americans got along. Libertarianism at its best (when it’s not knee-jerk anti-authority and selfish: left-libertarianism is mental 12-year-olds who don’t like being told what to do) comes up with answers like his.
• Mass: Exsurge; quare obdormis, Domine?
• From NLM, which for all its good intentions I rarely read, probably because I can go to my Mass so I don’t have to read about it: The growing realization of the irreparable failure of the liturgical reform. Good; a somewhat mainstream conservative Catholic blog admitted it. Our holy mother, the church, is indefectible. (Also why low-church Pope Francis doesn’t scare me much; I don’t feel compelled to make excuses for him every time he says something the mainstream media want to hear.) The Novus Ordo was a mistake. Liturgies evolve. Writing new ones from scratch is un-Catholic. There is heretical intent behind the change. That said, because the church is the church, the Latin text isn’t heretical, and now, thanks to to now-Pope Emeritus Benedict the Great, clearly neither is the English. (His greatest accomplishment was ordering that change.) I have no conscience problem with the new Mass’s text. (Two years ago I got to put that to the test, visiting a liberal parish for a First Communion. Sure, I didn’t like the low-church ceremonial, the Eucharistic ministers, or the music, but thanks to Benedict it was Catholic in spite of themselves.) That said, Novus isn’t as good, it has harmed the church, and should be phased out. Modestinus is right of course: do that and issue a new edition of... the Tridentine Mass. I say most Catholics would go along with that, as long as it doesn’t have to be in Latin.
• Is the St. Benedict option some conservative Christians talk about even real? Some ghettoization is necessary for survival, but I like the idea better of starting over challenging the culture like immigrant Catholics in America 100 years ago did. Don’t like de facto Protestant government schools? (Political correctness/SWPL/the Cathedral, as it is a false religion/Common Core = decayed Yankee Protestantism.) Start our own schools! (Replacing the Catholic schools that the council ruined.) Etc.
• Christian theatrics.
• For yesterday’s traditional American former civil holiday, Washington’s Farewell Address. Stay out of it in the Ukraine. By the way, I don’t have many fears about a remaining independent Ukraine made up of what’s now the Greek Catholic far west. These are Eastern European conservative Catholics. As the Anti-Gnostic says, the revolution probably won’t turn out the way the mainstream West wants.

Saturday

• Pat Buchanan talks sense about the Ukraine. It shouldn’t be our war. It’s as if California seceded from the Union and Red China agitated it against the U.S. At least half of the Ukraine is really part of Russia. Over here, well-meaning Catholics, neocons, and liberals are cheering for the rebels; real conservatives including some Catholic trads now like Putin.
• From LRC: The economic lessons of blizzards.
• What went wrong. How and why the priestly underage gay sex scandal happened.
• Nobody said that then! I’ve never seen that show but good catches.
• From RR: Why Cupid seems to be missing more often. Assortative mating, part of rising social immobility/our Third Worldification?

The American Catholic showdown, and more

• The American Catholic showdown. Liberal Catholicism will die, and the indifferent masses will drift off to secular humanism. So this is a fight brewing among the Catholics who still go to Mass. American Catholicism won't disappear, because it used to be so big. But it will be a lot smaller, and sounder and higher-church along Pope Benedict's lines. (Francis is a flash in the pan for the libs.) It looks like the only choices American Catholic intellectuals are offering me are to be a neocon supporting the economic liberalism I believe in but reformed religion and the mainstream Republican Party, or to have my Tridentine religion along with fascism (just a description, not a dirty word) or monarchism, with well-meant leftism or third-wayism economically that just doesn't work. Zmirak really doesn't like trads. I have nothing against the man and agree with some of his points, as I am a well-meaning Catholic libertarian, but this line of writing reminds me of that tool who wrote how uncool and crazy Ron Paul supporters are so now he's on board with the people at Salon. Valid discussion point: was the golden era of American Catholicism around the '50s just a fluke - is America inherently anti-Catholic? I don't want to think so but it makes me think. Catholic Social Teaching seems to be a well-meant welfare state but anti-abortion and anti-unjust wars.
• From Theden: How we helped the USSR win WWII. By betraying our mother country: Protestant but still our people (why America defending Australia made sense).
• A reprint of William S. Lind’s 1995 article, “Militant Musings: From Nightmare 1995 to My Utopian 2050.”
• Culture-wars shows:
  • Sochi-bashing. Russia has lots of embarrassing problems but of course our mainstream media are going after them with a vengeance for thoughtcrime; Google’s in on the rainbow-flag waving. Reminds me of Henny Youngman inventing Polack jokes.
  • That mild multiculti Coke commercial. I don’t watch the Super Bowl but don't write about it because it seems to bring out the kind of lefties who were envious of the jocks and try to tear them down. (Like the Episcopalian crusade against alleged sex trafficking at it.) So I saw this after the fact. Perfect bait for the understandable nativist backlash, a set-up for the SWPLs to make fun of it (idiots can't even write English, don't know the song isn't our anthem, etc.). I love foreign languages but Roissy's right. This lefty business isn't about helping the poor but sticking it to their own white kin whom they hate. Importing Islamists and dropping them in Kentucky. Social engineering, or trying to replace the white proles.

Snark, the sexes, and more

• From Steve Sailer:
  • Fisking an anti-HBD article.
  • The World War III that wasn’t. Not the “Reagan will blow up the world” lie from the left at the time (the now-forgotten nuclear-freeze movement), which come to think of it was a rehash of the liberals’ (Bill Moyers) slander in ’64 of the man who deserved to be president (one of whose campaign pins is in front of me as I write). But to give the freezeniks credit, they made me think: questioning the military-industrial complex like Eisenhower did, and warmongering in general (Gen. Smedley Butler: war is a racket). By the way, a Democrat with the best intentions (’60s liberals as in The Quiet American; good Cold Warriors) got us into Vietnam. A non-ideological Republican got us out (and then got busted essentially for not looking like President Kennedy). Peace through strength and the USSR’s internal contradictions (Marxism flouts economics) took it down as predicted by the smart.
• From Charles Coulombe: A paean to Anglo-Catholics. Their semi-congregationalism meant, after the council, they were able to teach this then-Episcopalian kid pre-conciliar Catholic practice when the American Catholic Church wanted nothing to do with it anymore, so thanks.
• From Sunshine Mary:
  • 10 changes to restore traditional sex roles.
  • Feminism and the Abilene paradox.
• From Roissy: Why women are more liberal. More because of self-interest (marry the state) than well-meant nurturing.
• From TAC: Corporatism loves gay marriage. Also, as Face to Face has noted, the anti-Establishment pose of the left has been gone for at least 20 years, so their merger with corporatism isn’t surprising.
• Also, as I understand it, fascism is corporatism plus statism, not belief in HBD as critics of the Dark Enlightenment claim. You can welcome a king or a Franco, or be laissez-faire, and believe in HBD.

A good word for the Dark Enlightenment, and more

• From Takimag:
  • Overreacting to neoreaction.
  • If I had a sickle. Kathy Shaidle on the dead Communist Pete Seeger. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is beautiful but they weren’t really for peace; they were cheering for the other side.
• New to me: Theden. Neoreaction.
• From LRC: Stuff like this convinces me the Beatles were an instrument of evil. “Imagine” is a beautiful song that sure is. (Here’s a good Lennon spoof.)
• From the Anti-Gnostic: bleak Christianity. Thing is, traditionalism isn’t quite the ghetto he makes it out to be. It’s a minority, but my parish is a magnet for young families with their four or more kids.
• While married priests wouldn’t solve the vocations shortage (all the churches are hurting as secular humanism, the son of Protestantism, replaces them), the ex-Anglican ordinariates and the Greek Catholics, if free to practice their traditions, would be a good witness, since nobody expects conservative Catholics to have them. Celibacy’s just a rule, and one I and other Catholics don’t think much about. Enforcing it caused two schisms in this country (Toth and Chornock) for no good reason. But the wrong people in the Roman Rite, old liberals, want to change, and they don’t care about the Orthodox/Greek Catholic custom. They just want to be like mainline Protestants.
• Another potential good from both: vernacular traditional liturgy. Most Catholics would be fine with my Mass as long as they don’t have to hear it in Latin. The English Missal is ready to be used!
• Forgotten history from Cracked (I hope it stops being PC preachy but it probably won’t): as a young Navy officer on a Pacific island during the war, Nixon was a fun guy. He ran a casino bar.

A rockabilly subculture, and more

• The rockabillies. At first it seems a rehash of the usual stuff (bikers, poodle skirts) by hipsters, only about style or being campy ironic, not a conservative cultural statement, but there may be more to it. What do you know? I'm sort of part of a subculture. The headline's wrong of course. '51 wasn't rockabilly; this thing's center of gravity seems more around '58.
• More common sense about the Ukraine. This much is clear: there are parts of Russia that don't belong in Russia (e.g. the Caucasus, Kaliningrad) and there are parts the rest of the world that do. Whatever the reason the east doesn't want to be in the EU (fear of being wiped out economically by better competition in the West?), been saying for years: make the west, which is Greek Catholic and wasn't part of Russia until the Soviets stole it in WWII, its own country with Lvov as the capital, and the east can go back to being an integral part of Russia.
• Thinking again about the lack of anti-Russianness in entertainment in the Cold War, at the time I thought it wasn't so much the Commies in the media as an understandable desire not to offend an enemy who has nukes aimed at you. So James Bond fought make-believe bad guys instead.
• The curious case of Dr. V and the wonder putter. Learned of this on Dreher's blog. Interesting possibility of a placebo effect in sports. The thoughtcrime: if somebody lies to you about which sex he is, can you trust him on anything? Reminds me of Bradley “Maybe a Hero, Maybe Not” Manning seeming to try to get out of jail by calling himself Chelsea. Sailer has an idea why some manly men have this problem: it's a fetish about a feminine version of themselves (autogynephilia).
• From Bishop Williamson: Pope Francis merely expresses more blatantly than his five predecessors the madness of Vatican II. The question remains whether any of the six Conciliar Popes ... can really have been Vicars of Christ. The question is not of prime importance. If they have not been Popes, still the Catholic Faith and morals by which I must “work out my salvation in fear and trembling” (Phil. II, 12) have not changed one iota. Keep calm and carry on as that memed British WWII sign says. Catholic liberals and non-Catholics don't understand that we don't worship the Pope, nor can he change essentials. Like Obama's not America's main problem, the issue isn't low-church Francis getting the libs' hopes up but that Catholicism is true. So I don't feel I have to spin everything he says, but those who do spin it point out he has defended essentials, that Benedict and others have, rightly or wrongly, criticized the market in the name of denouncing greed, etc., and that it's the secular media who are Johnny One-Notes about the church and sex; they ignore everything else the Popes say. This guy’s another Paul VI, nothing more.
• Ecumenism's just a reality check. This year's Chair of Unity Octave's over, and pretty much forgotten even by the churches, now that ecumenism's passé... obviously they aren't getting back together like the liberals and some Anglo-Catholics thought 50 years ago. All we can do is keep reminding non-Catholics what the church really teaches so we don't try to kill each other again, and let them know the door's always open. Catholic ecumenism is you-come-in-ism.
• Yeah, that's my parish. Went Novus yesterday in order to catch a vintage sale in New Jersey. Fr. David wore his biretta to preach, the white-gloved altar boy rang the sanctus bell, and Communion was at the rail, kneeling. All that's missing is eastward-facing. The charismatics raised their hands at the Our Father. Live and let live.
• From Bob Wallace: modern war as human sacrifice.
• From Face to Face (the renamed Dusk in Autumn): how elite are sports fans these days?
• From Ex-Army: Republicans are nothing but Democrats with a pseudo-conservative PR department.
• From the Anti-Gnostic:
  • The Dark Enlightenment is pissing off all the right sort of people. More.
  • There really is no American nation. Propositional states are not real nations. A nation can have a proposition, but the proposition is not the nation. The Church is simply not "built" for a world where the Empire disappeared ... and people can pick up and move someplace else when the fighting starts or the jobs disappear. At the same time, propositional states like the US are not "built" for the Church... just one of many odd little cults which the State may or may not choose to tolerate, similar to how the old Roman Imperium viewed Judaism and the early Christian Church. Better minds than me will have to figure out how to resolve this.

Secular Europe and more

• Steve Sailer on Russian bad guys in the movies. They're a stock villain now but weren't in the Cold War. Figures, since Hollywood was riddled with Communists. We helped the USSR win WWII.
• Somebody needs to publish a Pokemon-style table of Power Points for all combinations of various Victimist statuses so you can instantly calculate who gets over on whom. Oddly enough, there seems to be a pretty high correlation between how victimized your groups are perceived to be in the media and how powerful your groups are behind the scenes in the media.
• Today's intention in the Chair of Unity Octave is the conversion of European Protestants, which mostly means Lutheran Germany. Sounds like what it is: from 100 years ago. Hard to imagine a religious Protestant Europe now, when the Catholic countries like Italy, Spain, and Ireland are iffy. Are northern Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries the most secular places on the continent? (Most of the old Soviet empire in Eastern Europe is non-practicing Orthodox, different from secularists.) We're not talking about Lutherans and Dutch Reformed anymore but atheists. Yesterday was about the submission of Anglicans, imagining the conversion of the British Empire/Anglosphere: today, write off Britain and work on ecumenism with the Global South in Africa, so they remember what the church really teaches and know that the door is always open. (Ditto tomorrow's intention, American Christians: the evangelicals.) Anglicans' would-be Catholics, who taught me pre-conciliar Catholic practice when the American church wanted nothing to do with it, are now Catholic so we're done. By the way I like confessional Lutherans (the Missouri Synod), our semi-Catholic cousins.
• Our capital ought not be Tel Aviv. I don't like the Fed but still, a foreigner shouldn't be its vice chairman.
• From Roissy: With names like “Bullrun” and “Manassas” for these programs, NSA is now (inadvertently) telling us they consider themselves to be battling a civil war… with the citizens of the United States. Some would call this the result of mass scale managerialism run amok. I’d use a less innocuous-sounding term: Tyranny.
• The Henry Higgins of North American English. Many of the accents are subtle, not that different from newscaster American. Dick Clark from upstate New York for example. I knew about the difference between the old Southern accents that dropped post-vocalic r's, and the hard r's of Appalachia and Texas, the dominant Southern voice now. (England vs. Scotland?) This man calls that old sound Classic Southern, and distinguishes between Lowland and Inland Southern now, Inland apparently sounding more "country." This test, based mostly on word choice, is amazingly accurate. (My big marker, "hoagie," is something I don't eat.)

The Chair of Unity Octave, the Orthodox, and the ecumenical winter

A uniquely Anglo-Papalist devotion (Anglicans who weren't just high churchmen, but serious would-be Catholics) that some converts brought with them into the church in 1909, which became somewhat popular after Vatican II, and was renamed, when ecumenism was fashionable. Now we're in what Fr. Hunwicke and others call an ecumenical winter.

(Those few came into the church after the Episcopalians voted the year before to allow other Protestant ministers to preach in their churches. So they were the opposite of modern ecumenists; they wanted to bring people into the church.)

The octave started yesterday with what in the Roman Rite before '62 was the feast of the Chair of St. Peter in Rome. The point: papal authority is about the office, not the man holding it. His job ex cathedra, from the chair, is to defend the faith. He can't change it. He's only the Pope.

Today is dedicated to bringing the Orthodox and I guess the Lesser Eastern churches back into communion. Possible in a way not so with Protestants because sacramentally we're still the same church — bishops, Mass.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy are on parallel tracks. By that I don't mean two one true churches — there is only one of course — but the two, nearly the same church, an inch apart but that divide is infinitely deep. The difference is the scope of the Pope (the Chair of Unity): part of church infallibility or just another patriarch? I don't see the Orthodox coming under Rome but it doesn't hurt to pray for union.

Ecumenism is played out. All the sides know what the others teach and aren't trying to kill each other now. The fashionable ecumenism 40-50 years ago was indifferentism, an effect of Vatican II, when the liberal Protestants thought the church was joining them. (Liberal Catholics thought they were becoming Anglican, Anglo-Catholics thought they were becoming Catholic through the old dream of corporate union, then the Anglicans ordained women and it became clear again that none of that was going to happen.) Today, since the West isn't churchy anymore, nobody cares.

The best we can hope for from the Orthodox is practical culture-wars cooperation (anti-abortion) in Eastern Europe, and, on our side, the next Pope Benedict alluding to the intact Eastern rites in order to undo what the council did to the Roman Rite. (Something substantial, not the condescension about the pretty Eastern liturgies we've been hearing from churchmen for 50 years.) By the way, I have no problem with the church as a loose communion of ethnic and national churches very little to do with each other, the Orthodox way. In practice the Western Church operated that way for centuries, until the modern age. (As Arturo Vasquez alluded to when when he used to write about Mexican folk Catholicism.)

From Fr. H:

Ecumenism is in practice often more to do with changing the body one currently belongs to than (to dust down some of the old cliches) about Learning from Others, Sharing our Respective Insights.

In other words it's the liberals wanting to change the church, to become Protestant really.

The situation with the SSPX is church discipline, not ecumenism. Not and never was a separate church. Fellay for cardinal, Lefebvre for saint.

In other news, I understand the Ukrainian government is threatening the Ukrainian Catholic Church over supporting anti-government protesters. Understandably the UGCC is anti-Russian, given the decades of Soviet persecution, but as a Facebook commenter noted, supporting the EU instead is wrong. That and most of the Ukraine historically is an integral part of Russia.

By the way, wishing Putin's Russia and the Ukraine a happy Theophany. (The UGCC in its homeland is on the Julian calendar too.)

• The rumors of a new Oxford Movement are greatly exaggerated. From what I can tell from working with millennials, they don't long for liturgy or any religion. The American Northeast is turning into Europe that way. My semi-trad parish has 30-year-olds with their kids, but that just says the Catholic Church will hang on in America. It won't be big again like in the '50s. Liberal high church thinks it's up and coming but it's not (the mainstream's outgrown it) - just a older niche; high church among evangelicals will be a fad like converting to Orthodoxy used to be. Orthodoxy will remain a small ethnic club in America.
• American Orthodoxy. Apparently ROCOR said nyet to juridical union.

Establishment: The '60s vs. the Sixties

A mistake from a pretty good site. People in 1964 looked like me. This girl is modeling one kind of fashion from around 1970.

Actually in 1964 the liberals WERE saying "Obey the government without question, or you're a racist!" Liberals such as President Johnson. Then as now they were for government intervention to try to solve social problems, even if it went against the Constitution. The flip side of that was conservatives, who did care about the Constitution, not necessarily racist, opposed the feds' civil-rights actions. The radicals, such as SDS and, a few years later, the hippies, DID question the government, left or right. Sometimes they were right - accidental libertarians; I think mostly they were emotionally 12-year-olds who didn't like being told what to do (thanks, Anti-Gnostic). (It was also mostly a rich-kid thing.) That theme - of standing up for the little guy vs. Big Government - was around in the left as recently as the '80s, Dusk in Autumn explains. That "libertarianism" didn't seem last as the radicals essentially reached their goal of taking over the establishment. Liberals in the '50s-mid-'60s were committed anti-Communists; Cold Warriors: why they went to Vietnam and did the space race. The radicals didn't really want peace re: us in Vietnam for example; they were cheering for the other side. So Bill Ayers, who plotted to blow up our soldiers, is now a sort of respected elder statesman. '60s liberals still included socially conservative Catholics who wanted labor-union, New Deal socialism. Now the left, the establishment, wants to force the few remaining (yeah, thanks, Vatican II) such to pay for contraception and abortion and pretend two men can marry each other. Answers: no more social experiments but minimal government, MYOB foreign policy (non-aggression principle), free trade (sorry, Pope Francis; it works), tradition, and tribe, family writ large (why shouldn't the French like being French?).

• Three TV villains that the audience turned into heroes. I thought of Archie Bunker too when the "Duck Dynasty" fight happened, but I still think that was a publicity stunt. People loved Archie Bunker and hated Meathead because they knew boomer liberals were full of shit. Even Sammy Davis, Jr. was in the Bunker bunker. He recognized Archie’s vocabulary was that of a hard-working American who grew up in a rough neighborhood. "Family Ties" bugged me because conservative means culture wars, not playing the stock market or shopping at the mall.
• Boomer nostalgia. True except Dr. Spock gets a bad rap. I understand he was a common-sense godsend to young moms after the war, better than earlier experts' crackpot theories of child-rearing. Most of the major players and grassroots participants were Silents, and depending on the area of society, the later part of the Greatest Gen. Civil Rights, second wave feminism, electing Johnson -- all had nothing to do with Boomers. That's another way in which Boomer nostalgia is narcissistic -- it's self-aggrandizing, given how minimal their participation and influence was on Civil Rights, putting a man on the moon, and anything except for the consumer side of pop music (and related events like Woodstock). When the Boomers reminisce about the sound of 1967, are they including Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin, all of whom had #1 songs on Billboard's adult contemporary / easy listening chart? Almost none of which would show up on a Sixties compilation or playlist.
• Lefty nostalgia is weird too when it misses things like the draft (which the radicals opposed for their own bad reasons) - again, the liberals were all about the state. The draft that made us supporting players/saps getting killed to help the USSR win WWII. All of the “greatest generation” Americans who died in World War II died so that the Russian communist totalitarians, instead of the German Nazi totalitarians, could rule Eastern and Central Europe for the next 45 years. That is, so that that part of the world could be ruled by international socialists instead of self-described national socialists. All in the name of “freedom.” Joe McCarthy was right: FDR's government was riddled with Soviet agents and the Hollywood Ten were guilty as sin.

On the lighter side, one of Stan Freberg's great Jeno's commercials.

Snow day

A rare treat, thanks to Winter Storm Hercules. It’s beautiful out now, sunny, and very cold (teens Fahrenheit), after a harrowing drive home from work last night, a normally half-hour trip taking two hours in a slip-sliding car, taking a long way in order to avoid hills.

• From Sunshine Mary: Common sense vs. political correctness. Most women don’t have the upper-body strength to be in combat in the military. Brian Mitchell taught me this in the late ’90s when I heard his lecture promoting his book Flirting with Disaster. He’s a West Pointer who quit the Army over this. More.
• From LRC: Block, the Austrians, and the Catholics.
• From Steve Sailer: Modest proposals. Old-fashioned ways to give up your freedom sound cool when you market them as high-tech.
• From RR: America, outsourcing a declaration of war? Our capital shouldn’t be Tel Aviv.
• From Dusk in Autumn: The class of ’63.

Happy new year

Not much going on here, which may be a good thing. Italian-American Christmas Eve featuring kids opening their gifts and la Festa dei Sette Pesci (which came pretty close to seven, minus eel; that’s just as well) based on the church’s vigil before the feast. On the day, the third, late Mass, Puer natus est, Sung, at Mater Ecclesiæ. Gifts? More panel/bowling/Charlie Sheen shirts for the summer. My job scrubbed New Year’s Eve; yesterday it was early Novus in town (at least it’s Pope Benedict’s corrected one; at it I say the Gloria and Creed from the old Book of Common Prayer by way of the old Anglican missals, from memory) and then shopping for vintage stuff in New Jersey.

The Prayer Book is great English but I don’t miss it as such because I know where it came from; those are Protestant services.

The church is much more than the Pope, who’s only a caretaker, but the world would be better if Benedict hadn’t quit.

All the wrong people like the new Pope for all the wrong reasons (Time’s Person of the Year). The limits of the papal office mean he can’t actually change the church but he could do a lot of damage like Vatican II did. That churchmen don’t get the market, and with the best intentions, isn’t new. It seems that among traditionalists, the learned are good third-wayers. I’m listening — I think I get it about greed and the Americanist heresy — but, despite crony capitalism which is not really capitalism, the market is still the best way. (Juan Perón meant well too but drove Argentina into the ground. Even a holy welfare state that was pro-life wouldn’t work.) My old line for third-wayers: make a great product that most people want to buy, and actually get it to the buyers, and we’ll talk.

Jim Coffey writes:

There is a difference between capitalism and oligarchy/monopoly. The big banking system in this country is anything but capitalistic. And the system of subsidies is not capitalistic but socialistic.

I think the man in the pew would be fine with our Mass, the old one, if it were in English. Fine with me.

Instead of the damage of Vatican II, John XXIII should have just issued two pronouncements allowing more of the vernacular and affirming that the church can live with American freedom of religion (then the church in America was doing so, successfully), then English-speaking Catholics should have just adopted the translations of Tridentine services that Anglo-Catholics had already done.

(The real John XXIII: teach Latin better and don’t ordain homosexuals.)

The “Duck Dynasty” fight was probably a publicity stunt.

• From the Anti-Gnostic: The Catholic Church seems most virile where she acts more like the Church Local: Hungary, France, Croatia, Poland. (France? I understand that except for the SSPX, the church in France is dead.) Rome seems unable to come to terms with a post-Imperial, multi-polar world, so they're jumping on the universal democracy bandwagon, anticipating a seat at the table of the global democratic empire. (Why American bishops don’t excommunicate pro-abortion Catholic politicians, people who actually do harm.) They'll get completely cozy with this about the time whole countries start rejecting democracy and the UN becomes an utterly irrelevant joke.
• Somebody in the Church of England has proposed making vestments optional. I think the Puritans wanted to ban them. The requirement long was, and the only vestments officially allowed were, cassock, surplice, and scarf (rochet and chimere for bishops), which are the Catholic choir habit, not really vestments. Anyway, just as well if they do. Chances are this is coming from their Evangelicals, their last conservatives, and as I mentioned it’s part of their heritage, plus now, influenced by American evangelicals, they don’t wear them anymore and the rule’s not enforced. Liberals used to be low-church too, thinking ritual was papist mumbo-jumbo, but have been high-church for a few decades, due in part to hippie shamanism and ecumenism, which was fashionable about 40 years ago. It was cool to look Catholic because they thought the church was liberalizing, becoming like them, so they thought union would happen. They'd keep wearing the vestments. Macht nichts. Most English people still wouldn’t go to church.
• Being Catholic there of course is different from here. Even with the many Irish coming over from next door, Catholics are far fewer in numbers and proportionally. You could find Catholic high church if you were looking for it (for example, the Brompton Oratory, doing Pope Benedict’s high church before he was Pope). I understand most practicing Catholics there now are Polish immigrants. Sort of like practicing American Catholics seem to be either brother trads or charismatics from the 1970s and ’80s.

Bullies, manosphere stuff, and the Pope

• From Sunshine Mary: The queer thing about bullies including in the culture war.
• From Return of Kings: The 15 magical years of womanhood.
• From Jeff Culbreath: Criticizing the Pope and the first and greatest commandment. As Hilary and I say, we don’t worship the Pope. It should be obvious that the Church is larger than the pope, and that Catholic dogma is larger than papal authority. If the Church could be reduced to papal authority, then popes would never bother to teach Catholic doctrine as objectively and universally true. And he and/or a general council would change doctrine like a mainline denomination. Interestingly, here the liberals think he has more power than he does, because they don’t believe in church infallibility. As Jeff said to me many years ago, we trads are actually papal minimalists.
• A gay man has kind things to say about his time at Liberty University. When I was a kid, secular culture was far meaner to homosexuals than conservative Christians were. Conservative Christians taught me that the putdowns I learned on the playground were wrong; homosexuals “have a problem.” Now of course we conservative Christians are pilloried for believing they have a problem. In the ’70s of course the homosexualist propaganda campaign had started, but it didn’t change the culture until the ’90s. The seculars 180ed from one sin to another, from the natural order without Christ to defying the natural order.

Autism, arete, and the ‘Duck Dynasty’ guy

• From Steve Sailer: Defining autism. Maybe it’s just an artificial catch-all so the high-functioning and full-blown kinds aren’t the same.
• Related as it’s where the normal and the autistic overlap: Cracked on what is and is not a nerd. I don’t find “The Big Bang Theory” all that funny; it’s too obvious like lots of sitcoms. (Studio and canned laughter: “closed captioning for the humor-impaired.”) I like Cracked’s earlier Photoplasty entry on it, retitling it “Your Dad’s Idea of Nerds” (True Nerds Are Watching “Community”!). Is that still on?
• From Bob Wallace: Eros, arete, and eudaimonia.
• Ex-Army on Phil Robertson. I’ve never seen “Duck Dynasty.” From what I gather, this is another skirmish in the culture war. A conservative Southern man believes homosexuality is a sin against God and nature, and says so; the elite has promulgated that Gay Is Good. Some libertarians are arguing that at-will employment is a fair, voluntary arrangement; A&E had the right to suspend him. Be that as it may, emotionally of course I say Phil’s right and A&E are jerks. Reminds me of Sailer’s post that a lot of the elite’s recent ridicule of the church is really just a cover for complaining about homos hitting on teenage boys (not children; it’s not “pedophilia”), which otherwise you can’t say anymore in polite society. By the way, here’s what Phil looked like before the West went to hell.

The two white Americas and more

• From Roissy: Obama’s America, land of the twee, home of the fey. Familiar truths to many readers: elite vs. non, left vs. right, North vs. South, round two of England vs. Scotland. The Anti-Gnostic has wondered if the military will get fed up. Then again you can argue that as a creature of the government, the military isn’t really conservative (gay weddings at West Point, and before that, the left like Ken Burns getting nostalgic about the draft and World War II, which they helped the USSR win). But I can believe soldiers vs. SWPLs.
• From Takimag: A safe Christmas for Christians in the Holy Land.
• From Alternative Right: The Obamas, Camerons, and Mandelas of this world act out their roles as distinct leaders of distinct countries, parties, and interests, but the reality is they are all members of one big international club, with collective interests, united against the various tribes of “shitmunchers” (Brits, Yanks, Tories, Democrats, blacks, etc.), whom they trick into voting for them.
• From MCJ: Rich lawyer screwed over by Obamacare. But Romney came up with his own version, remember? He’s from a liberal Republican family. (And the Mormons aren’t really conservative; they just did that in the good old days to blend in.) See above about it all being the same.
• From John Boyden: The motels and neon signs of Mesa. Wonder how the Lollipop showed up; it’s in Wildwood.

Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown

A First Things article on the first "Peanuts" TV special. A Christmas gem from towards the end of the golden era. Interestingly, as the writer notes, much public life then, including TV, was secular, but not secularist. Christmas carols that aren't hymns, "Season's Greetings," etc., were all there. It has its place. Vince Guaraldi got the job because Lee Mendelson liked his '63 hit "Cast Your Fate to the Wind"; "Linus and Lucy" (the "Peanuts" theme) is almost a speeded-up version of it. Also the last years of "Peanuts" being a comic strip for grownups; it became one for children because, the writer says, Charles Schulz needed the money. I knew he lost his faith, like much of Middle America, but yikes:

In 1968, fearful of the potential damage to his reputation and lucrative cartoon empire, Schulz shuttled his oldest daughter—then eighteen, troubled, single, and over three months pregnant—off to an abortion mill in Japan.

God have mercy on him. Still, great Christmas show.

The Ukraine for dummies, and more

• From Takimag: The Ukraine for dummies. Common knowledge is right about the eastern half of the country; it’s Russian. The trouble is it’s Sovietized. (But since the Evil Empire is gone, what’s that to us?) The first Eastern Christians I knew were Greek Catholics from the west, WWII refugees and their children. Understandably they liked to give the impression that the country was like them. The trouble now: imagine if California seceded from the Union and Russia were stirring it up against the US. That’s sort of what it’s like.
• From Steve Sailer: The hidden divide in American institutions. In America, our current ideology is focused on promoting churn. Lots of individual profit from this, but is it good for Americans as a whole?
• From Bob Wallace:
  • The madonna and the whore. The manosphere is a useful map, but still.
  • Witches.
  • Fetal programming.
• From RR: Doctors disappear. Predictably, a government program will do the opposite of its stated goal. Real health care, with real doctors, will become a luxury for the rich. Lots of this is being farmed out to non-doctors expanding their scope of practice. The rest of us will be lucky to get a nurse at the Minute Clinic.
• From Ex-Army: Quisling revisited. Wronged? He wasn’t a Nazi, more like a Nordic Franco; Norway just happened to be in everybody’s way so the Germans grabbed it first.
• From the Anti-Gnostic: the real dystopian future?
  • Our actual future.
  • Apocalypse chips.
  • Markets! Pepsi, Inc.! K-selected taxes --> r-selected consumption of high-pro Pepsi-paste.
  • Mandela funeral follies. I’m not outraged by the selfie. Then there’s Michelle Obama’s envious snit. Jackie Kennedy she’s not.
• From Bill Tighe via the Rev. Larry Peters, one of our “cousins” in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod: Msgr. Charles Pope on the purpose of a funeral. Not mainly to make the mourners feel better or a tribute to the person. A few years ago I went to the one for one of the holiest people I knew, and it was simply a Requiem with a sermon, partly an appropriate tribute.
• From Hilary: The battle between the Faith and Novusordoism is often small to the point of invisibility. But there are places and situations in the Church where it is being made nearly inescapable, and the religious orders are one of those places. It is impossible to revive the religious life in the Church in its current condition. The Church as a whole had to choose between the World and the Faith. "Conservatism" is not a position in the Church. It is only a waiting room (in the same way Newman called Anglicanism a way-station on the path to atheism*), a place that until recently had been kitted out by the popes as a kind of Catholic VIP lounge where you could have a few drinks with your well-heeled Beltway friends while making up your mind about which side you might choose in the unlikely event that you had to. True but I’m probably a smidge more moderate than this sounds, more like the orthodox Bad Catholics described here (most pre-conciliar Catholics — we’re not and never were a cult) and the moderate trads Modestinus has met. *At least since the “Enlightenment,” pretty much (all of English Calvinism basically lost it); the mask of credal orthodoxy isn’t officially off but started to come off in the Sixties.
• Golden-era music by Noël Coward: “Mad About the Boy.” Two recordings.

Mandela, Pope Francis, the Progressive Principle, and more

• The truth about Mandela. In the midst of the secular world’s worship, some rebuttals well known to conservatives. He was put away for violence, for terrorism; he was a Communist and lied about it; South Africa is worse off. And he was virulently pro-abortion (which of course raises his appeal to secularists). Necessary disclaimer: opposing him doesn’t necessarily mean supporting what he was fighting against. Steve Sailer’s non-platitudinous take.
• Darn that Pope! Most churchmen don’t understand the market. And he doesn’t like trads. Hunker down.
  • Takimag’s Kathy Shaidle.
  • Another Paul VI. He can’t actually change the church but he can do a lot of damage to its standing by taking it out of the culture war.
  • The wrong people like him. It all really means he’s their hope for neutralizing the church in the world, unlike that alleged confrontational meanie with delusions of grandeur, Benedict the Great. A friend recently told me the head of NARAL praised Francis.
• From Rod Dreher: Kids in the collapse of Catholic culture. Again, the American church shot itself in the foot with the council.
• From Sunshine Mary: The Progressive Principle is a means by which a small group of elites team up with the loser dregs of society to exploit the traditional middle class for personal gain. The elites win, the loser dregs win a pyrrhic victory and are made worse off, the traditional middle class gets robbed of culture, values, money and happiness... Margaret Thatcher said the problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people’s money. I’ll go a few steps further, Mrs. Prime Minister: The trouble with progressivism is eventually you run out of other people’s civilization to plunder. More.
• From Roissy: Getting to the id of it. Compare and contrast: Women, would you rather date Paul Walker (pre-dead, of course) or a waiter that looked exactly like Paul Walker? Men, would you rather date Scarlett Johansson, or a waitress that looked exactly like Scarlett Johansson? Also, a helpful taxonomy of equalists, and a word of warning about Chinese society.
• From Bob Wallace: Legalize hemp!
• Christmas in Centralia, Pa. The few residents still decorate the town including with a Nativity scene.

Pennsylvania

• Harrisburg gives in and will let Centralia fade away, leaving the last residents in peace. Too late for John Lokitis, whom the movie The Town That Was was about. He and another relatively younger man were forced to move. Good for the few remaining people. I went there in 2004 and it was safe. The fire is under the southern hill next to the Catholic and Orthodox cemeteries; Lokitis lived next to that. Stay off the hill and you’re fine. As one former resident has explained, Centralia was never a cute picture-postcard village but a tight-knit, kind of rough mining town that’s their much-missed home. The Ukrainian Catholic church, St. Mary’s, is still on the northern hill. St. Clair to the south has some kind of Catholic or Orthodox church every few blocks.
• Trouble With Angels building no longer Catholic and to be sold to developers. The Lindenwold Castle, a century-old mansion that’s a replica of Windsor Castle, where the golden-era movie was filmed. I didn’t know until now that it’s close by, in Ambler. Another epitaph for the American church shooting itself in the foot with the council. As of last spring the institution was no longer Catholic, having been sold to a secular company; the order still owned the property. How’s that “renewal” working out? The movie was typical for the time, a sign in America that Catholics had arrived and almost had their moment. A PR gift to the church (imagine having that now) that actually says very little about the faith (sometimes that’s fine), just like Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s. Filmmaker Ida Lupino was fascinated by the all-female community. The sequel, which I’ve never seen all the way through, was a predictable, disappointing celebration of the Sixties, exactly what undid such communities.

Conceived immaculate

• Mass: Gaudens gaudebo in Domino. Non-Catholics often think we’re talking about the virgin birth (Christmas!), which of course we believe in, and which this is connected to, but most of you (the Protestants who read this blog know more or less what the church teaches) know it’s about Christ’s redemption not being limited by time, as he is God and man, so Mary is the Mother of God, that wonderfully shocking term (because it sounds as though Mary existed before God, which of course isn’t what it means). When it comes to Mary, “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” et Verbum caro factum est (“be it unto me according to thy word” and the Word was made flesh); the rest is commentary. Mary was saved just like us only at a different point, as the dignum filio suo habitaculum, the dwelling place fit for her son. Which is really why the Orthodox call her all-holy (Greek παναγία and Russian пресвятая) and sinless (пренепорочная). Jesus saves; Mary prays. (It’s Not About Latin™ but I like it very much.)
• As I like to say, the flashpoint of all rebellion against God has to do with him and the flesh he created coming together: who Jesus is, the Eucharist, and sex. (Some of the angels rebelled because they wouldn’t serve man, right?) About which ancient heretics, Renaissance-era heretics, and moderns respectively say non serviam. “Show me a society that hates virginity and I will show you a society that hates children.”
• Sidebar: Christmas shopping yesterday, I noticed that a department store’s toy section was rather pathetic, barely taking up a corner of floor space. The mall’s toy store was only about half full, of junk from Red China. I’ve been told that about 50 years ago, John Wanamaker’s, a local big downtown store (12 floors!) had a wonderful toy department with a monorail for the kids that went around the whole department. The rich have their boutique shops and of course now there’s online shopping (hooray for the market), but still.
• From Rod Dreher: Dana Gioia on Catholic art; here, Catholic writing. It’s probably not what you think; it’s “rarely pious”: Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent. “Welcome Sinners.” “Here comes everybody.” Which is what the traditional church always has been; cf. Modestinus. (Arturo Vasquez back when he wrote online about Mexican folk Catholicism: Catholic cultures are scary because people are.) John Boyden and I talked about this about 10 years ago when I mentioned that I think the relatively recent Christmas movie The Family Man is a Catholic story even though it’s not really religious (like It’s a Wonderful Life, which it mirrors; made by a believing Catholic). He agreed that the trappings of the church don’t make a story Catholic. Anyway, the traditional church produced Flannery O’Connor; the council, feh. Again, how’s that “renewal” working out? Also, you’d think I’d be into Lord of the Rings but never have been for some reason. I understand Tolkien, a believing traditional Catholic, never set out to write something pious; this fantasy world was just playtime for a very smart man, so well done that people lose themselves in it. I like C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters are good reads) but Tolkien thought Narnia (read it when I was 10) was a dumb, preachy ripoff of his work.
• Yeah, that’s Sung Mass at my parish: the Sixties never happened.

The truth about a famous photo, Catholicism and Orthodoxy again, and more

• From Cracked:
  • Five ways modern espionage has left James Bond behind. In short, the Web, using disposable local frontmen rather than expensively trained agents in the field, and privatization/outsourcing.
  • Six classics despised by the people who created them. The true story behind the Vietnam War photo above: At the time the picture was taken, South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the man doing the shooting, was Chief of Police and the guy getting shot was the leader of a Viet Cong assassination squad tasked with murdering South Vietnamese police officers, and if those officers couldn't be found, their families would be killed instead. The man Loan shot had been caught near a ditch containing 34 murdered men, women and children, among them were the wife and six children of one of Loan's closest friends (the six murdered kids were also Loan's godchildren). As for Loan himself, when he wasn't gunning down bad guys, he was into building hospitals and giving presents to orphans. After he immigrated to America, he spent several decades running a remarkably non-murderous pizza parlor until his identity was leaked and death threats forced him to close his business. According to 1969 Pulitzer winner Eddie Adams, two people died the moment he took the photo: "The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera." RIP General Loan. Like Ian Smith, one of the 20th century’s most wronged men.
• From Roissy:
  • Alpha f*x, betas chucked. Executive summary: women screw around with charming cads and ignore beta providers when their financial needs are met by the state or by a rich daddy, and their emotional needs are met by a supportive culture that condones the removal of all restrictions on female sexuality.
  • The problem with diversity. It weaponizes intrawhite status whoring. Open borders isn’t really about rescuing the world’s poor; it’s about sticking the shiv in the flanks of non-elite white people by dumping, say, Iraqi Islamists in the middle of Kentucky.
• From Modestinus:
  • This seems to be the extent of the Catholic Church’s interest in the East: They want Orthodoxy’s often romanticized account of collegiality and synodality, but none of its theology, spirituality, or liturgy. When I mentioned this observation to my Orthodox brother, he exclaimed, “Our governance is the last thing they should want. It’s the worst part!” Indeed. I wouldn’t say it’s the church’s only interest in Orthodoxy, and admittedly, churchmen aren’t very interested in it, but this rings true in that many or most of the few Westerners who mention it (outside those churches themselves) seem to be liberals trying to undermine the Pope because the nature of his office (part of church infallibility) stands in the way of what they think is progress. Which is why older libcaths (young libcaths are about as rare as young fogeys) try to be ecumenical (which used to be cool when the West was churchier) by blathering about collegiality this way (meaning they want the church to change doctrine by vote like the mainline), ignoring (because they don’t take Orthodoxy seriously, because they know it has no clout or traction in the West?) that at heart Orthodoxy’s a kind of traditional Catholicism (I call it a kind of folk Catholicism).
  • Same goes for priestly celibacy, only a rule, not doctrine (not a hill I’d die on). There are great conservative examples of married priests if you know where to look (the Orthodox, their Eastern Catholic counterparts in their ethnic homelands such as the western Ukraine, and Anglo-Catholic turned Catholic priests). The wrong people want to change it and it wouldn’t bring in vocations. I don’t think about it and living in the church it seems not to come up. It seems to me the Western Church’s more mainstream experiment with married clergy, permanent deacons, is small (see above about not boosting vocations) and lost in Catholic culture; both priests and laity aren’t quite sure whether to treat them like clergy or laymen.
  • Pope Francis and CST. Regular readers know my opinions on these matters. That said, Pope Francis’ message here is benevolent (even if he doesn’t understand economics and even though he doesn’t like trads) and Modestinus is a gentleman acknowledging that Catholics drawn to libertarianism mean well too, so maybe a weak libertarianism (minarchism?) is a Catholic option.
• From the Anti-Gnostic:
  • The hierarchs can preach all the social democracy they want. They still can’t re-write economic law.
  • Mass immigration might be bad for libertarians.
  • One thing can be predicted with certainty, and that is democracy will end. Future trends are all pointing toward authoritarian, mercantilist rule, as in places like Dubai and Singapore. How does this fit with your view that the church will turn its back on the Anglo West and cozy up to this new state to have some power?
• From Dusk in Autumn: Mid-century Christmas songs are almost all secular. Some blame Jews for this dilution of a Christian holiday. For now I’ll just file the fact he mentions with what Steve Sailer calls “diversity before ‘diversity,’” golden-era Americans just being decent to each other without the modern left’s self-righteousness (it was also America’s lost Catholic moment). (“Season’s Greetings,” a favorite from then, is worse than “Happy Holidays,” which has its place in public life.)
• Sailer: PISA’s global results are largely the American bell curve writ large. The Finns do well not because they’re permissive but because they’re Finnish.
• Justin Raimondo: Long live “isolationism.”