The faith

• Anti-evolutionism isn’t a hill I'd die on. The church is against a random, chaotic, godless theory of evolution, but theistic evolution, in which God made man’s soul, like him and unique from other animals, and which fell through sin, is fine. You can believe in creationism, etc., but don’t have to.
• Modestinus hits one out of the park: For my part, my (meager?) defense of Catholicism over Orthodoxy, aside from my familial ties and history in Catholicism, is that there is nothing true in the Eastern tradition writ large which can’t be crammed into the Catholic tent, up to and including just about every single Saint — official and quasi-official — the Orthodox have ever venerated. But when I am Orthodox, I lost 1,000 plus years of Western Catholic spirituality, theology, and liturgy. That’s a bad bargain if you ask me. Moreover, there are certain tenets of Catholicism that I just find more plausible than the Orthodox explanation or, to put it another way, I don’t find the Orthodox polemic against them to be convincing (e.g., Purgatory).
• Yes, that polemic’s about a non-issue. Other than the scope of the Pope, none of their polemic holds up; either you accept the papacy or you don’t. Orthodox pray for the dead a lot; there’s a whole candle stand in church just for that. Prayer services for the dead after Sunday Liturgy are part of an Orthodox parish’s bread and butter. Prayer for the dead logically assumes an intermediate state on the way to heaven. The form of that state — mini-hell with fire, etc. — isn’t doctrine. Hell is possible and final because God gives us free will and is just. There may be no people there, but you can’t presume that. Kallistos (Ware) and some other hip Orthodox speculate about universalism in the form of apocatastasis, that you can pray someone out of hell and in the end all will be saved. (Based on one church father; the fathers’ opinions have to be vetted against doctrine.) Appealing. But wrong.
• The toll houses aren’t about purgatory but the particular judgement right after death; a Russian folkloric opinion on what that’s like.
• The official Orthodox Church is ethnic folk traditional Catholicism. Like Owen White, I like Rust Belt/Midwestern ethnic/immigrant Orthodoxy a lot because it’s so Catholic-like. Its right-wing splinter sects are like the church on crack.
• Bishop William Love of Albany: The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is and always has been central to the Christian faith. It is not a fable or some story made up by man to help us feel better about dying. It is the very heart of the Gospel - the Good News of Jesus Christ. Our Lord's death and resurrection is the perfect expression of God's total, unconditional, all sacrificial love for the world. Great. But his denomination can vote that teaching away. The Continuers don’t get that leaving the Episcopalians doesn’t solve the problem.

More Moore, OK tornado videos

Hear the sirens?

Those and basements or storm shelters are why relatively few get killed in the Midwest.

From The Chicago Tribune.

The tornado, the sexes and the decline of the West, and Catholicism and Orthodoxy

• From RR: scores killed when huge tornado levels Oklahoma City suburb. Catholic Charities USA.
• From Roissy: bearing witness to the self-destruction of the Western woman. But the Millennials I work with don’t seem much like this. Maybe God-given common sense is making a little comeback.
• LONG thread: me on Fr Robert Taft’s ecumenism, OicwRs, and Russia and the Ukraine. I start here. OicwRs: obnoxious Byzantine Rite branch-theorists who like the Tractarians happen to be conservative but on their terms, not the church’s. They’re pretty much limited to Stuart Koehl, an occasional Melkite, maybe Fr Robert Taft, and light, high-turnover traffic of converts who may start in Greek Catholicism as liturgically Orthodox and doctrinally Catholic (what Rome wants) but get fed up with the latinizations and second-class treatment, buy into Orthodoxy and convert. Thinking you’re smarter than both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Being Catholic doesn’t mean I can’t be pro-Russian or that I have to think the Greek Catholic churches are perfect.

The show

Drugs and psychologizing in the most recent episode. Flashback: why Don’s a sociopath. Don’s losing it and it almost hurt his kids.

It was fairly obvious from a few episodes back that Don’s first sex would be with Amée the prostitute.

The suspense with the burglar reminded me of ‘Crime Story’.

This is the worst I’ve seen Don; right after the divorce was second. I dig Sylvia too (yes, the affair is reprehensible, but sexual attraction is usually like that; nice guys like Arnie finish last) but hey, this is or was the Don. Guess he really fell for her. But hanging around outside her back door like a loser stalker? Come on! Not the Don I knew. The drugs worked for the story line, if it was a little pretentious in its effect. It exaggerated Don’s derailing. The dodgy doctor seems based on Dr Feelgood, I forget his real name, who served President Kennedy.

Bet that crazy stuff at the office really happened then. Madison Avenue was insane. Great soap-opera material.

Again, the control scene last week didn’t turn me on. What strikes me is it does turn on a lot of women, which is why they watch. There are lots of Sylvias. Beta affection, flowers and poetry, doesn’t work on them.

My guess is the show is ultimately about Don the anti-hero’s coming unglued (another casualty of the Sixties?), which explains the theme of the opening credits, and will wrap up next year (Matthew Weiner’s said next season will be the last and he’s written the ending) with him losing everything (Megan, kids, even the job he’s gifted at) but finding some kind of redemption so the audience isn’t completely let down.

Pentecost

• Mass: Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum, alleluia.
• Sequence: Veni, Sancte Spiritus.
• Good ecumenism: sermon by Fr Robert Hart.
• Trads have kids. My parish has so many boys it’s starting a Catholic version of a Boy Scout troop, not part of the BSA, for fear that the liberals will take the BSA over, as has happened to the Girl Scouts. Actually the BSA’s relatively conservative; its sister isn’t the Girl Scouts but the newer American Heritage Girls.
• Top Mormons know Mormonism isn’t true.

The generations

Stuart Koehl writes:

Compared to the Baby Boomers, the Millennials are models of sobriety, industriousness and chastity. There's a tendency on the part of 20- and 30-somethings today to look on the Boomers as a bunch of old fuddles (and that's what we're becoming), but, when we were your age, we did everything that your generation is doing, raised to another order of magnitude. The only difference is the Boomers had the luxury of an expanding economy to soften the impact of their dysfunctional behavior. Today, Boomers still have no profound faith, still despise tradition ("Question authority!"--even after they BECAME authority), have a sense of entitlement that puts yours in the shade (just think about touching "their" Medicare or Social Security!), and they just about invented existential ennui. As for porn--the Boomers mainstreamed it, remember?

Right: the Boomers were partying on the golden era’s dime.

I work with Millennials who are very nice.

Reminds me: I think Sailer observed that SWPLs (rich liberals) preach libertinism and perversion but live more like ’50s normal, more likely to be married and faithful, with kids.

There’s the fallout from American values/the American worldview going to hell (after about 1968), which hurts the proles more than the rich, that getting married is rarer among the poor now; it’s becoming a status symbol for the rich. (Betas and herbs blowing beaucoup bucks in a sort of mating display; alphas don’t have to.)

Understanding Anglicanism

‘I thought I understood Anglicanism but now...’

The original post describes classical 'Reformation' Anglicanism on Holy Communion and Holy Orders as the Anglican Articles of Religion teach.

Basically now in Anglicanism you have three factions; used to be four...

Catholicism and Orthodoxy have slightly different approaches to the same one-true-church claim.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy: relativistic crap ecumenism

From a professor nominally in the church, via Daniel Nichols:

Most Catholics probably envision future unity between the Orthodox Churches and the Catholic Church as a re-installment of one world Church organization with the pope of Rome at the top of the governing pyramid. A look at history shows that such a model never existed, so what could Orthodox-Catholic communion actually look like if it were achieved?

What it would look like is not a “reunion” with them “returning to Rome,” to which they never belonged anyway; nor us being incorporated by them.

The new Catholic “Sister Churches” ecclesiology describes not only how the Catholic Church views the Orthodox Churches. It also represents a startling revolution in how the Catholic Church views itself: we are no longer the only kid on the block, the whole Church of Christ, but one Sister Church among others. Previously, the Catholic Church saw itself as the original one and only true Church of Christ from which all other Christians had separated for one reason or another in the course of history, and Catholics held, simplistically, that the solution to divided Christendom consisted in all other Christians returning to Rome’s maternal bosom.

Oh, sh*t. Branch-theory nonsense, or why ‘ecumenist’ is a fightin’ word among convert online Orthodox. The Zoghby Initiative. ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’, which means Greek Catholic converts who reject some defined doctrines, which makes them neither good Catholics nor good Orthodox, denying the true church. Bill Tighe puts paid to all that: while it’s true and helpful to remember that the pre-‘Reformation’ churches have lots in common, none believe the true church is juridically divided against itself. Newman explained the history: development of doctrine, which is not the same as mainliners voting to change doctrine. (The Tractarians may have feared that in 150 years, because of the papal claims, the Catholic Church would become what the Anglican Church really became. Vatican II came damn close, but because of the church’s nature, that’s impossible.)

But Fr Robert has a point:

We are all ancient apostolic “Sister Churches” with a valid episcopate and priesthood and the full panoply of sacraments needed to minister salvation to our respective faithful.

I think the change is that before, Orthodox bishops were seen as real bishops but lacking jurisdiction, because they seem outside the church, not under the Pope. (The same reason Bishop Williamson didn’t claim to be the Bishop of Winona; even in a state of emergency in the church, only the Pope can give jurisdiction; in disasters and cases of imminent death, the church supplies jurisdiction so a laicized priest can absolve, etc.) Today it’s clearer and fair that born Orthodox get the benefit of the doubt about schism, so Orthodox bishops are an estranged part of the church, having apostolic authority over their own people, other born Orthodox. (As my old buds in the Russian Catholic Church say, ‘We have bishops! They just happen not to be Catholic right now.’ There is no Russian Catholic bishop now either.) We believe the Orthodox are local churches (true defined doctrine, true bishops, true Mass); Protestants, even our high-church cousins, are not churches (‘ecclesial community’ is polite Vaticanese for ‘not a church’).

There is a hardline allowable Catholic opinion, made famous in the church years ago by Fr Leonard Feeney, that says all non-Catholics are going to hell. But I’m not saying that. That’s our equivalent to the hardline Orthodox one that says the church is a fraud.

So we just need to restore our broken communion and the rest of the problems you mention can be addressed one by one and resolved by common accord.

The only way that can happen according to Catholicism is if the Orthodox accept Catholic defined doctrine about the nature of the papacy. Not the same as ultramontanist opinion, unlike what many think. The Pope’s at the top of the chain of command but historically is laissez-faire; traditional Catholicism largely runs itself. (Vatican II was an aberration and bad mistake, of course nothing to do with doctrine.) He’s only used papal infallibility a few times the last couple of centuries to rubber-stamp what Catholics have long believed. Getting upset about the Pope is a red herring. Mostly a cover for Western liberals who really hate him for being Catholic; he can’t change the church to be what they want. (Right: they want more papal power, like what a mainline denomination claims for itself.)

The similar name to the man who should have been president in ’52 makes me wonder if it’s the same family.

Not news: mainline minister twists scripture

I don’t know why Chris Johnson dwells on the Episcopal Church. If you want to be Protestant, be happy with some nice conservatives such as our Missouri Synod Lutheran cousins, the PCA or the Southern Baptists.

Anyway, their presiding bishop praised the satanic.

Well, the ‘Reformation’ is about private judgement so there you go: the conservatives don’t have a leg to stand on in Protestantism; the liberals automatically win.

Like letting Episcopalians think that they can determine what God’s laws should be if He would just listen to the wise counsel of Episcopalians.

Yup, that’s the mainline.

As for that and claiming something satanic is good...

I hope mainliners aren’t really as arrogant as what I quoted, though in practice they are. To be fair to them, they do hold themselves accountable to something bigger than themselves, in principle. They hold political correctness’s (a Christian heresy) ‘truths’ about women’s and gay rights to be self-evident. They obviously don’t answer to the plain meaning of scripture (which they think is for idiots; higher criticism freed them from that, substituting a kind of nominalism or deconstructionism, and besides, most of the English lost their faith at the ‘Enlightenment’ so unbelieving Episcopalians aren’t news) or to church tradition (‘papist superstition’; as Bill Tighe says, I wonder what Henry VIII and Elizabeth I think of the result of what they did; Luther too).

Meanwhile Anglo-American culture jumps to political correctness’s conclusion, superseding churchy middlemen such as the Episcopalians and other mainliners. 86 the Jesus talk and stay home, play golf or go to brunch on Sunday mornings. Membership drops like a rock. Some denominations will go out of business; others will merge (as the Episcopalians have with ELCA, the Swedish version of themselves).

Other than loving and missing the pre-Sixties America our Protestant hosts created, a good home for Catholics, I don’t care.

The latest episode of the show

Last episode tears it: this show, namely Don, is porn for women.

Politics and the pulpit

Regarding politics, the place of pastors, including the Pope, is to preach on its goals, its ends: the golden rule (the libertarian non-aggression principle: no person or government may initiate force against another), don't be selfish (be just, share), etc. Any one political party or program, the means to those good ends, has no place in the pulpit. (A priest shouldn’t tell his parishioners which party or candidate to vote for.) Lots of well-meaning Christians’ economics (democratic socialism), Catholic and mainline alike, is naïve about how the market works, causing more problems. By the way, I have brother trads who think I’m as liberal as the mainline because I believe in religious freedom and the free market, instead of buying into Catholic churchmen’s monarchism (a trad thing), democratic socialism or distributism (third-wayism). The Catholic Church is apolitical: monarchy, dictatorship, republic, as long as Catholics are free, it’s all good.

Kermit Gosnell is mainstream

Of course I’m glad Kermit Gosnell’s going to jail (proud to say I once was in a pro-life demonstration in front of his place, with some saintly older Catholics, 15 years ago, long before his crimes were known). But predictably, the new establishment’s spin/damage control will work. The ‘pro-choice’ narrative is doctrine in American culture, promulgated by the elite. (Rather like how Communist symbols are considered cool or at least cute and quaint; they killed more people than the Nazis. So much for lefty peace and love.) Gosnell could have killed those babies in plain sight and gotten away with it, it’s so bad now. Because people are selfish; throw sex into that mix and you get these horrors. Middle America’s been cowed, from being at least passively pro-life to ‘I’m personally opposed, but’. (Also a generational changing of the guard: Middle America isn’t ’50s people anymore, Nixon’s silent majority, but children of the narcissistic Sixties — do your own thing = every man for himself, so you lose, babies — and their 2.4 children, in lefty lockstep. The new establishment. In the old America even Teddy Kennedy was nominally pro-life to please his Irish Catholic base, as Al Gore was to please Tennesseans.) Nothing will change. This sin will still cry out to heaven for justice. The only difference between Gosnell and your local abortion doctor is of degree, not kind. Gosnell is the Democratic Party in scrubs: the Evil Party. (The Republicans are the Stupid Party: last voted for them for president in 2000 and plan never to vote for their mainstream candidates again.)

The feminist utopia

Roissy writes here:

A feminist utopia is a million beta males under the heel of an alpha male state, toiling for the pleasure of fat women. Men paying through the nose for Obamacare, while women enjoy luxurious savings.

A simple resource theft and redistribution from men to women. A theft, because the women exchange no sex for the reward of the men’s resources, which is the natural system of male-female barter that feminist and equalists wish to subvert and reconstitute for the benefit of women alone.

Next Big Things that weren't and aren't

• Reggae dominating pop music.
• Hispanics in America as a political power and dominating the culture. Remember 25 years ago when Madonna sang lines in bad Spanish? Her market research was wrong. I don’t hate them like Sailer seems to (I’m one of them: a grandmother was a Spanish-speaking Catholic) but HBD’s true. The answer is neither shutting people out nor affirmative-action quotas but pure, individual meritocracy. Fair: immigration screening to let in only the smartest and hardest-working; we answer to our own citizens first. I don’t care what color you are; you’re welcome to move here, and to apply for jobs or take entrance tests. Disparate impact is not racist nor the government’s business. Egalitarianism is false and thus unfair. Sailer’s right that Republicans are wasting their time trying to court a Hispanic vote; Hispanics are largely apolitical anyway. The answer in our society is not white power or Hispanic power but individual rights (a northern European concept) so all our clans can get along.
• The charismatic movement. They’re still around. They and us trads are the only American Catholics who still go to Mass, a minority in the church. (They’re the ones who raise both hands at the Our Father.) But they’re not the force they were thought to be 30-40 years ago. After the council the liberals favored them because ecumenism was cool and charismatics don’t worship like trads. But because they’re an offshoot of conservative Protestantism (the Assemblies of God for example) the libs got tired of them.
• Ecumenism. Passé as society’s become less churchy. Plus it’s self-limiting. Charley Wingate rightly described it: unlike mainliners 40 years ago, we know union won’t happen; the churches understand what the others teach and aren’t trying to kill each other anymore. That’s as good as it gets.
• American Eastern Orthodox converts. Owen White called this. The boomlet’s over. In the end you’ll see a couple more Western whites there but mostly continued stolid decline (as Bill Tighe says of their cousins the little PNCC) with most of the few converts remaining people like Tom Hanks, basically nothingarians (ex-Catholics and ex-Protestants) who marry into it (yep, the plot of My Big Fat Greek Wedding), which is great for them. A folk Catholicism that should reteach the official church a few things; now that’s good ecumenism.
• Episcopalianism, the self-styled ‘cool Catholicism’ that does whatever secular culture wants (all of the pageantry, none of the guilt, har har). The whole mainline is passé. Ex-Protestant liberals have superseded it, and Catholics, including Bad Catholics who don’t practice and disagree with the church, don’t bother with an imitation even if it tells them what they want to hear; they know better.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy: the history of reunion attempts and conversion campaigns

Catholicism’s plan has always been to persuade all the Orthodox to come back, with accepting whole regional churches as a step in that direction. Born Orthodox get the benefit of the doubt.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy: 'this doctrine's for me but not for ye'? False.

The Catholic Church isn’t trying to double-deal you with a claim that Greek Catholics don’t have to accept some Catholic defined doctrines. It doesn’t say that, because it can’t.

Living with the past: classic cars in space-age Wildwood

The Oceanic Motel right by the boardwalk, across from the Convention Center. A friendly, no-frills base for going back in time.






The spring boardwalk classic-car show was a bit of a bust partly due to the weather. Also, someone at the Oceanic explained, there was a split in the local car club so the hotel association took over the spring show at the last minute. And before Memorial Day, Wildwood is still pretty dead.

That said, it was about time Wildwood and I found each other. Because besides the beach and the kiddie arcades, the place lives on ’50s nostalgia. Not just fake diners but real places including space-age motels and neon signs. They call it doo-wop architecture here.




In fact near the Oceanic is the Doo-Wop Museum, more about signs and furniture than music, from art deco from the ’40s to the space age trying to be ultramodern but with the older culture’s sensibility. Society hadn’t gone to hell and people were happy and hopeful. Guess that’s the magic. A sexy time.

The ’60s weren’t the Sixties. A friend remembers the Atlantic City boardwalk in the summer of ’65 when all the ’50s stuff was still there.

Anyway, off-season Wildwood, full of real places from the golden era, on a car-show weekend with the old cars simply on the road and parked around town, is a way to go back 50 years if you’re looking for it.




’60 Impala. That’s what I’m talking about.







Of course the museum has a map of all the ’50s and ’60s motels in the Wildwoods so I was all over that. Walked about half of it.


The Mass barn: St Ann’s Church, part of a parish merger, Notre Dame de la Mer. Interesting architecture, not what I expected. It’s old but designed more like a town hall, basketball stadium or Protestant church than one of ours. Like I said, a barn built for big summer congregations. They took the basilica form and turned it sideways. Instead of a chancel and apse at one end, the sanctuary’s along one of the long walls with the entrance at the other long one. So the church’s wider than it is long, with the columns and basilica arches going along with that. Most of the space is filled with galleries of pews, again anticipating summer Sunday crowds.

Going there is like taking a health check of the Roman Rite outside my semi-trad parish. First sign: the merger; the institution’s shrinking in this country because of the council and assimilation into our post-Protestant host culture, even in Italian New Jersey. Second sign: the friendly priest is from Uganda; no American vocations anymore. Third sign: Pope Benedict’s reformed text so no conscience problem even though I don’t like the new Mass. Fourth sign: even in Novus Ordo New Jersey, signs of Benedict’s high churchmanship: tabernacle back in the center, and organ prelude and Anglican hymn at the end. But it’s still Novus NJ: bad hymns, altar girls (the libs have been flogging women’s ordination for 40 years; not going to happen) and worst, the squad of Eucharistic ministers, including older people who should know better. We need 20-30 years of a younger Benedict to clean this up. Fifth: at the Our Father, from all the outstretched hands you can see that besides us trads, most Catholics who go to Mass are charismatics, a movement once strong, in the ’70s and ’80s, often presented in the parishes as the only alternative to Modernism. I’ve known Korean War vets who ended up charismatic. Lots of charismatics in this non-trad place.

Breakfast on the boardwalk after Mass was at the Olympic Flame. Not retro; old. The fakers can keep the cutesies (Elvis, Marilyn and 45s all over the walls, etc.) and the overpriced modern food; I’ll take the real thing in a 50-year-old booth with bare white walls, good, unpretentious food, something more like 1963 prices, yes, the old music playing, and wishing the Greeks a happy Easter season: Χριστός Ανέστη. Christ is risen.

From the MCJ

• Benghazi disgrace. I haven’t voted for a mainstream Republican presidential candidate since 2000 and plan never to, but this gets me thinking partisan. Might this turn off Middle America enough to go GOP in ’16? The Stupid Party over the Evil Party. (Stupid: invade Iraq for no reason so now we pay twice as much for gas. Evil: Kermit Gosnell is the Dems in scrubs.) Regrettably Rand’s not his dad (he plays along with the mainstream party) but he’d be a good candidate. Ron Paul: no foreign meddling, no Benghazis. We have our civilization, they have their hellhole and all we do is trade goods for money.
• The futility of trying to debate someone who’s abandoned or never had rational thought. Pope Benedict at Regensburg vs. the blind faith of a devout Muslim, mainliner or peer-pressure secular humanist. One of the Catholic liberals after the council had been a Thomist before so she started off by admitting that according to Catholic theology her platform is nonsense; she stated her first task was to derail the discussion from the classical view of reason.
• I’ll say it again: let the Episcopalian dead bury their dead. If Catholicism doesn’t convince you, be Orthodox, Union of Scranton Catholic or in Chris Johnson’s Protestant case, LCMS, WELS or PCA. Another occasional point of mine: the conservative Presbyterians have their act together, forming the PCA. So do our cousins the conservative Lutherans. Anglo-Catholic Continuers, despite the Catholic order that should have given them an advantage over the Presbys, don’t. All those little denominations.

Health care

• From RR:
  • ‘The medicalization of misery.’ Political correctness, professional rivalries and payola: the making of the DSM, doctors’ mental-illness diagnostic bible. Worsening the unjust stigma of that kind of illness. I’ve known people clinically mentally ill. It’s not like TV and the movies. The opening story’s just sad; maybe the wife was shallow. Mania, depression and bipolar disorder (them both) are real illnesses, chemical imbalances in the brain, treatable with drugs. Interesting: psychiatrists are MDs so they have a profit motive to have as many diagnoses treatable with drugs as possible. The autism spectrum such as Asperger’s syndrome isn’t ‘medicalizable’ because it’s structural in the brain and genetic, not chemical, so there’s no incentive for these doctors to keep AS as a diagnosis. Also reminds me of Cracked teaching me that psychiatry isn’t like TV, etc., either. It’s not psychotherapy. You don’t lie down and tell somebody your sex dreams (Fulton Sheen: confession is psychoanalysis on its knees); your doctor monitors your meds, not good TV. There’s a kind of conservative who rails at pathologizing familiar feelings and behaviours, but goes too far, calling the really ill fakes. ‘All they need is some good old-fashioned discipline’ is only partly true. Science rightly understood is a tool, our friend.
  • By the way, persecuting homosexuals/trying to force them to change is wrong (it’s like torturing the blind; feeling that way is not a choice) but yes, homosexuality is really a disorder, exactly the word the church uses (‘intrinsically disordered’). Back in the golden era mid-last century, when liberals were still about individual rights and not collectivism/identity politics such as gay power, psychiatry was clear on that, not trying to reboot reality. (Protestant society still largely agreed with the church on sexual matters including abortion; they weren’t seen as ‘Catholic issues’.) Conservative Christians have taught me all my life (responding to ‘that’s so gay’ learned on the playground) not to pick on homosexuals; ‘they have a problem’. If both sides live the golden rule, the libertarian way (the non-aggression rule: no one may initiate force against another), instead of persecuting them or them trying to use the government to force us to change our beliefs, we can in theory get along. And by the way, as Steve Sailer has reminded me, the New Left threw out bourgeois morals for gays and the gays got AIDS in return. Nature’s payback’s a bitch.
  • What medical tourism tells us about our health-care system.
• Socialized medicine doesn’t make people healthier. From the Anti-Gnostic.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy again: Chris Jones again

On this link from Bill Tighe on an Anglo-Catholic’s long road into the church, the local libs turning him off at first.

For in the view over twenty centuries of Christian history, how could "Rome" not be Christ's Church? The question had only to be asked to see the answer.

I find it infuriating when someone says "to ask the question is to answer it" when it is obvious that the person has not actually examined the question in any depth at all. One may conclude that "twenty centuries of Christian history" are a slam-dunk for Rome only by passing very lightly indeed over the first ten of those centuries.

The author is yet another Protestant who converts to Catholicism without ever, apparently, giving any notice at all to Orthodoxy. I can understand how someone can examine the claims of Rome and Orthodoxy and honestly decide that Rome's are the stronger; I cannot understand how someone can give the verdict of history to Rome while ignoring Orthodoxy altogether.

This is a shallow article that does not even answer the question in its title. If the author were going to accept the claims of Rome on the basis of such a facile view of Church history, why indeed did he not do so decades ago? It would have saved a lot of trouble.

I respect the Roman Catholic Church and I have no quarrel with those who conclude in good conscience that her claims are true (emphatically including my Catholic friends on this list). But I do not believe that the specifically historical case in her favour is any more than generally plausible. That is why I am infuriated by shallow and facile appeals to history such as this article makes.

But on this scale of history, the agitprop of a Luther or a Calvin became a farce. These were obsessions from some narrow place and time.

... this time theologically rather than historically vapid.

Now I hate Calvin just as much as the next man, and even Luther I am not all that fond of, considering that I am a Lutheran. But it is hardly fair to reduce the theological thought of these men to "agitprop," and to intimate that their conclusions were only a reaction to the human flaws of the Church, rather than to serious theological issues. One may certainly conclude, at the end of the day, that they were wrong in their theological conclusions, but it is not necessary or accurate to say that they were not intellectually and theologically serious men who struggled honestly with the real theological issues that late mediaeval Catholicism presented.

And what the hell does "obsessions from some narrow place and time" mean? On what grounds does the author believe that early sixteenth-century Germany was a "narrow" place and time? This seems to me to be a cheap and insupportable psychological shot at Luther.

I could respect an article that says "I believe that Catholicism is right on the merits and Luther (or Calvin, or the Orthodox, or whoever) is wrong, and here is why." This is not that article. All that this article says is, it just feels right.

Sorry but although the Orthodox have much beautiful to reteach the West and they often do get shortchanged, fact is Westerners don’t need to know. Catholicism is not just the church. It’s Western civilization. Islam left Byzantium a backwater. Not feeling. Historical fact.

Open up something and find 1960 inside

From LRC: prepping in the ’50s. Fallout shelter as time capsule.

For more than a decade after they moved into their house in Neenah, Wisconsin, the Zwick family knew they had a Cold War bunker in their backyard.

It was not until 2010 that anyone thought to open the heavy steel hatch, climb down the ladder and explore the 8-foot-by-10-foot chamber that the home's previous owner had built to protect his family from a nuclear attack. Floating in five feet of water that had seemed into the bunker were sealed U.S. Army boxed packed with all of the supplies a family would need to survive two weeks underground.

The family donated all of the items to the Neenah Historical Society, which has curated an exhibit about the Cold War and the fear of the Soviets using 'the bomb.'

Similar thing happened with the Buried Car publicity stunt: a new ’57 Plymouth in a vault but the vault flooded; the car was ruined.

Reminds me: shows besides ‘Crime Story’ and ‘Mad Men’ set in the golden era, most of which I’ve watched regularly. Bit condescending in a boomer liberal way, and not as well made, but they were there.

• ‘Oliver Beene’: ‘The Wonder Years’ played for laughs in the era, starring Grant Shaud from ‘Murphy Brown’ and Wendy Makkena (the cutesy sidekick from Sister Act) adorable as a Laura Petrie type.
• ‘American Dreams’: mainstream lefty nostalgia (weird in itself, like they’re doing an end-zone dance over what they destroyed) with preposterous plots (son MIA in Nam escapes and comes home after a year; yeah, right) and a heroine with anachronistic hair. But you had ‘Bandstand’ (fudging the history: it left for LA in ’64) and other good stuff.
• Hiatus temporary replacement/copycat ‘Mad Men’ 1: ‘Pan Am.’ Not Emmy bait but an entertaining stand-in with pretty girls.
• Hiatus temporary replacement/copycat ‘Mad Men’ 2: ‘The Playboy Club.’ Canned after three episodes. Starring a Draper lookalike, of course some hot chicks, and PC plausible deniability in the plot (which makes weird sense considering how the left sometimes loves Hef for attacking bourgeois morals, then goes all puritanical when they get hurt by the new).
• Haven’t had a chance to watch it much but like it: ‘Vegas’.

Family or friends? Low-trust vs. high-trust cultures

• Damian Thompson: friends are no substitute. It’s primal.
• Muslims in Norway. The usual fear and envy (including mating competition as Roissy notes) from the white-power folks. Filtering the race-baiting, lots to think about. Both forms have good and bad. The two forms are at war. Sailer’s noted that the upper-class, high-trust northern Europeans (SWPLs) appeal to a kind of universalism (ripoff of Christianity), claiming to love humanity, fighting for the Other as an underdog (ditto ripoff), to wage war on underclass whites’ natural kinship and local community ties. (And, incidentally, on the Other’s natural ties, though the rich whites use the Other in a proxy war on their own prole kin; it gets interesting when the Other become too much for the SWPLs to handle. Then they wish conservatives would help them disarm them.) Is there a way to have the best of natural kinship and northern European high-trust societies? Not pure libertarianism’s every man for himself (‘question authority, man’; authority is part of God’s order, like it or not, so grow up), which leaves us all outnumbered Nordics, but halfway between it (hooray for individual rights and spreading family’s benefits as wide as possible) and Burkean ordered liberty, minarchism, recognizing families’ and ethnicities’ place in the social order; weak libertarianism. (Including freedom of association, balanced with the individual right not to have harm done to you.) In itself, libertarianism — strictly defined as living the golden rule; not starting fights but defending yourself — is not a problem; perfectly compatible with Christianity (and it can be said to come from Christian ethics). But the atomized individualism/anti-authority kick rings false and gets old. And if a guest abuses you, show some of your Viking ancestors’ strength and kick him out.
• By the way, remember, in the ’20s, for example, when the northern Europeans in America didn’t like Italian immigrants? For a few minutes in the Sixties, as part of the war on the old America, Catholic ethnics were cool like Jews (holy Otherness), then Roe v. Wade brought the hostility back, at least for the remaining unassimilated folks. Spiritual war on the church trumped that coolness. You still sort of see that political correctness about Hispanics (who are lumped together thus), but no va; they’re supposed to be America’s Next Big Thing but aren’t. (I’m one-fourth Hispanic.)

The sexes

• The show.
• Crying rape.

From Rational Review

From RR:

• Justin Raimondo: the Israeli-jihadist alliance.
• Electoral reform: downsize the liberals.
• The economics of SF fandom.
• Is college worth it?
• The case against student-loan forgiveness.

Monday

• From the Bovina Bloviator: why correct liturgy should come first. As we readers of the great Thomas Day know, exactly the opposite of the American Catholic way past and present, which the European liturgical movement was trying to fix but the council squashed it. (Instead of the congregational High Mass and Sunday Vespers it wanted, all junky Low Mass, all the time, the old American norm with a facelift.) From Low Mass’n’sappy hymns, comin’ up, to the libs 40 years ago with their guitars, to the JP2 conservatives telling us to get with the program: forget that artsy old-fashioned stuff and turn charismatic (forget your culture and worship like the libs). And then there was Benedict.
• Derek Olsen: behind liturgical spirituality.
• Fr C on not fitting into the churchmanships around you, even if they’re conservative. I was too Anglican to be a good Roman Catholic and too influenced by the Tridentine forms I sought out to be a good Anglican. I sought out a third way in the light of my experience in France in parishes like that of Fr Montgomery-Wright. Despite our doctrinal difference — finding a place in the Catholic Church vs. finding one in Continuing Anglicanism — we’ve always had a lot in common. His lasting point: the molds familiar to trads — Counter-Reformation religious order, militant laity — are neither the fullness of pre-conciliar Catholicism (the ’50s moderate/liberal French priests he knew, who didn’t go Novus but weren’t reactionary either: ‘they are not what we were’) nor for everyone; they’re not perfect. We’re both just old enough to have grown up naturally learning high-church forms, if not necessarily high-church theology, from the Anglicans before they became more obviously liberal, sort of parallelling Catholics who grew up right before the council. There are parallels and lessons for trads from the old Gallicanism, etc., a traditional church that largely runs itself and is locally based. But I’d say our religious culture isn’t necessarily Anglican. (Leaving the Pope on principle and accepting the English ‘Reformation’ even filtered through high churchmanship are not options.) But there’s a third way for me too. Peter Robinson, a Continuing cleric like Fr C, has described my answer when I couldn’t. Mass-and-office is pre-conciliar’s version of high-and-dry in a good way. Super-high and baroque liturgically like Gricigliano and Bourne Street, but Christ- and Eucharist-centered (why the Mass is so emphasized), very theological; devotionally moderate. The pre-/non-conciliar church is a big tent; different versions of the ‘mix’ I describe are of course welcome. (I don’t mind seeing the charismatics at the new Mass when I’m there on holy days or flea-market Sundays.)
• Justin Raimondo: liberty in the age of terrorism.
• Takimag: we’re idiots about the Middle East. Not only propping up Israel, needlessly angering the oil-producing Arab countries (we pay twice as much for gas because Bush invaded Iraq for no good reason), but, again, helping extreme Muslims (like the Saudi 9/11 hijackers were) overthrow one of the area’s last secular governments (Assad in Syria: they hate him because his religion isn’t really Islam, like Mormonism is to Christianity). That’s right: we’re helping the terrorists. Why I listen to truthers.

Христосъ воскресе! Tribute to Russia

‘Christ is risen!’ Воистинну воскресе! ‘Indeed he is risen!’ This year today is Russian Easter. The world’s biggest Orthodox country celebrates. So here are some reasons why Catholics and other conservatives should like the Russians including Vladimir Putin.

• Good old-fashioned, traditionalist Christian nationalism standing athwart all of the following: political correctness, the European Union and both the American left’s and right’s expansion plans. A check and balance. Still a quasi-superpower thanks to nukes and its size; Europe’s big nyet. Putin’s ex-KGB but really just an old-school Russian patriot, not New World Order like Gorby. (Ditto Lukashenko in Byelorussia. Nobody would be surprised if Russia and Byelorussia get back together. Maybe the Ukraine too.)
• A quasi-state church with no ‘Reformation’ or Vatican II; trads’ natural compadres. The only error is the schism. The answer is NOT to latinize the proud Russians the way the Ukrainian Catholic Church ended up latinizing itself but to bend over backwards to persuade the Orthodox that, as the late, great Archimandrite Serge (Keleher), who spent time on each side (he was ordained an Orthodox priest*), put it, NOTHING really in their great tradition is incompatible with the Catholic Church. That you can come into the church and not lose your Russianness. It’s on us to make it and keep it so. They would help us a lot and, I dare say, we them.
• A Russian priest has a gay wedding; Russians tear down the parish church where it happened. Stupid girls do a political skit in church making fun of the religion, and go to jail for it. I don’t have a problem with those answers.
• Real men light candles to icons. Where it’s politically advantageous to have your picture taken at an Orthodox church.
• The Pope repeats that Catholicism claims it’s the true church. The secularists and mainline bitch. The Russian church respects it; they understand.
• Diversity, not ‘diversity’. Clannish, low-trust cultures, family writ large, such as the non-Christian Chechens, all in the empire.
• The Eurasian mix is part of Russia’s riddle. You have the Cossacks, basically Russians but with a difference, the Chechen strain. The traditional liturgy is basically High Mass, etc., in an archaic version of the language, with our baroque finery including the choral music but with that beautiful ‘sad’ Asian minor-key lilt. The people ‘don’t participate’! They are either silent or mill about doing their devotions, lighting candles to their lucky saint or at the table for the dead. A modern liturgist’s nightmare: wonderful!
• Like most Catholic countries, most people don’t go to church. When they do, they just let the singing and incense waft over them, hoping to get some grace. What much of the country was doing today.
• Among the world’s most beautiful, sexiest women. The men are more masculine; the women often more feminine (also true of Polish women, who have the same Slavic cheekbones and modelly way about them). Both sexes seem in top shape. A reason so many of them are Olympic medalists.
• They’re famous drinkers. I’m not, but from the empire you have the semi-sweet red wines of Georgia, among the best in the world.

*And as he said to me with a twinkle in his eye, his Russian bishop was nice by not deposing him when he came back to Catholicism so he remained an Orthodox priest in good standing. Born Catholic in New York; ’doxed in ’61; priested in ’67; returned in the early ’70s.

Sunday: the real and unreal

• From Hilary: the Real always wins. This little point is the essence, first, of the conflict between Islam and the West, and second of the kinship between Islam and what we call "liberalism," which, as it is playing out in western countries, is really just another term for creeping irrationalism. Both systems of thought look upon the restrictions of concrete reality as "irrelevant". Both are essentially nominalistic, saying reality is what I decide it is, that something that is true for me is not necessarily true for you, a rejection of the notion of objective reality, which results, as we have seen in a "dictatorship of relativism". This is what Benedict was getting at in Regensburg; that religion, whose purpose is to describe The Real, must first be rational. The ancient Greek philosophers, the church fathers and the Schoolmen including their dean, St Thomas Aquinas, define reason as discovering and conforming yourself to objective reality. That’s right: Catholicism, the butt of modernity’s jokes, has the b*lls to claim that cold, hard reason backs up its amazing religious claims. Old-school liberals from the ‘Enlightenment’ through the ’50s, such as America’s founding fathers, kept that definition of reason from us; the Sixties were a big rebellion, with exoticism and the seeming charity and humility of glorifying the Other (anything but old white Americans and anything but Rome) as the cover for this irrationalism.
• Unreality: ‘blessed’ bodily mutilation. Nobody’s surprised the mainline’s gone for this. The interesting part to me: In November last year, it was revealed that Britain’s youngest sex swap patient decided to reverse the procedure after living as a woman for less than a year. The 18-year-old, who was formerly known as Brad Cooper, has been having hormone injections to make him look like a woman but decided to revert back to living as a man. Reminds me of poor Mike Penner: the peril of glorifying someone’s mental illness. A middle-aged sportswriter for the LA Times, he had this problem and ‘came out’ in the paper, which hyped it. But it turned out he dearly missed his wife, who of course left him when he did all this. He went back to living as a man and tried to get her to come back, then killed himself. Lord, have mercy.
• More unreality: the Unclaimed Vietnam POW hoax. This story. Seems an artiste thought reopening vets’ and a family’s grief was worth it just to make a pseudo-documentary.
• From Takimag: the government that cried wolf. In the 1970s after the Watergate scandal, the president of the United States was forced to resign due to his operatives’ gross immorality and criminality which involved breaking and entering, theft, lying to Congress, and deceiving the public. Click ‘This story’ above for me on Nixon. No, the real lesson was if you’re unattractive and try to rise above your station by doing exactly what President Kennedy did, you’ll get smacked down. RIP.

South Jersey: cars and a little drive-in burger stand

At the Grand Marketplace, Willingboro, NJ.




Stewart’s Root Beer drive-in burger stand on Route 130.

There’s another one on Route 38, Weber’s, but this still has its satellite roof ornament that lights up.
Meanwhile, close to home, it looks like Walt’s has been enclosed in cement, like a tomb for the real Walt’s. Either a bit of fake Fifties or something modern replacing something real.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy again: Chris Jones writes

On this. My first answer is in my life, it really is more traditional, more conciliar in the old sense of tradition governing itself, not the Vatican II sense, and less Pope-centered than many think Catholicism is. I have my Mass and parish; the Pope and my archbishop are distant, little to do with me really. Again, the use of papal infallibility in the past 200 years has been extremely cautious and conservative, essentially rubber-stamping what Catholics already believed about Mary. So getting upset about the Pope doesn’t make sense to me.

I too allow myself to prod you, John. Principally because I really do disagree with you, and firmly so, on the issues we argue about. But also because I see a chink in your intellectual armor that is really needless, one that you could and should address if you want to continue to speak in favor of Catholicism on a public forum.

The chink in the armor, as I see it, is this. Out of a laudably irenic spirit, you wish to portray Catholicism as more traditional, more conciliar, and frankly less Papal, than it actually is. You have always had a generous and positive attitude towards the various expressions of traditional, liturgical Christianity, and you still have. But this leads you to portray Catholicism as little more than the "best of breed" among the various traditional Christianities; the "market leader" as it were, in the smells-and-bells market. But that is too thin a reed on which to place a robust defense of Catholicism, because Catholicism is more than that. The Papacy makes Catholicism qualitatively different from the other traditional Christianities. It's not simply the "scope" of the Pope, as you so love to say; it's the centrality of the Pope in Catholicism. The Papacy is the linchpin of the whole Roman Catholic system. The Papal claims, if true, make all other traditional Christianities incomplete and inauthentic; but if false they make Catholicism disloyal to the Apostolic Tradition and therefore inauthentic.

I don't want to make you into an ultramontanist, but it seems to me that you need to be a little more "montane" than you are if you are going to be a more intellectually consistent -- and therefore effective -- defender of Catholicism. Another of your favored catchphrases is "he can't do that, he's only the Pope"; and of course I like the idea that the Pope, too, is subject to the Tradition. It's almost enough to make me a Catholic. But if you're going to take that line, it's not going to stand up based on the arguments you have made for it so far. You have to show how, concretely, the limits that Tradition places on the "scope of the Pope" work, in the real world. Without that, the picture of Catholicism that you have painted is merely one of "the best" among a variety of serviceable versions of Christianity, rather than one of a faith that is qualitatively different and uniquely genuine. And even if the notion of "the best available version" were true, it would run the risk of being merely subjective: not "the best" in any objective sense but merely John's preference.

All of this is why I keep needling you every time you claim that the Orthodox are somehow really Catholic. It is not only a mis-characterization of Orthodoxy, it's a mis-characterization of Catholicism. If your picture of a Catholicism in which the scope of the Pope is clearly and effectively limited by Tradition were accurate, your claim that Orthodoxy and Catholicism are pretty much the same would be a good deal closer to being true. Your depiction of the Papacy effectively limited by Tradition is, after all, exactly what the Orthodox have been saying they wanted for a thousand years. There may be case to be made for your "scope-limited" Papacy, but so far you haven't made that case. You need either to make that case, or get busy defending the sort of Pope that the rest of us seem to think exists.

Friday

• Daniel Nichols on goofing off online at work: the class divide. By the way I don’t. Because my job is about productivity online, and part of my conservatism is these fine folks get the benefit of my ’50s work ethic.
• Takimag article: where the men are. Derb reads the news and Roissy. Alphas in prison: one reason putting women guards in men’s prisons is crazy.
• Steve Sailer on libs and gun control, and Derb on anti-racism. Both phenomena are part of the Christian heresy of political correctness. The Boston Marathon bombing suspects have caused more Sailerian and Takimag race-baiting, a mix of fear and envy of clannish, low-trust ethnic cultures (which have their good and bad points). Anyway, trying to filter that, the points. I’m a believer in individual rights, not group rights (white power, black power, etc.). That said, groups exist because on average they have characteristics. (And again, clans have their good points, the family is nature’s unit, and libs fight nature by claiming to love the Other and humanity as a whole — another ripoff of the Christian message — while trying to cut down natural family and ethnic, or family writ large, ties, which are seen as bigoted and low-class.) On average some minorities are more dangerous. Not an excuse to violate anybody’s freedom but just a heads-up. Sailer has made the point that underneath the liberal love of gun control (superficially based on the Christian ethic of not doing harm: thou shalt not kill) is something they’ll never admit (like SWPL chicks don’t admit they dig jerks, men who will dominate them): they wish conservatives would help them ‘disarm dangerous minorities’ so downtown becomes a white playground for them. Another example how libs don’t really care about blacks. Or individual rights. They get mad because conservatives defend the Second Amendment instead (which of course is race-blind, good for all races), and so the proxy war against prole whites escalates. Derb’s made a Roissyan observation that anti-racist moralizing is a SWPL version of game, a mating display: ‘I’m so rich I don’t have to worry about dangerous neighborhoods.’ Interesting.
• From LRC: Peter Schiff says the whole bubble economy will implode when the Fed is forced to turn off the printing press.