.يا رب يسوع المسيح ابن اللّه الحيّ إرحمني أنا الخاطئ
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Asperger syndrome ‘The Infinite Mind’ radio show on AS (parts I and II) It’s annoying when an interviewee generalises and says people with AS can’t empathise. Somewhere else on the Web I read a good distinction between AS and high-functioning but full-blown autism: the person with AS does care how you feel and wants to be your friend; the autistic person probably doesn’t because he can’t.
I’m also not so sure there’s an AS ‘community’.
This looks like it might be really good. Apparently it was made a couple of years ago but I’m not sure if it’s been released (is it out on DVD?):
Mozart and the Whale A film with a semi-big-name actor (Josh Hartnett) and a beautiful female lead IIRC from the indie scene (Radha Mitchell) about a dating couple with AS. Wonderful!
This could go a long way towards undoing the damage the wrong kind of media attention has done (‘Law & Order’ depicting people with it as criminals and perverts).
We may consider someone insane for committing homicide in Radnor or West Chester. But what of the men in suits who condemned thousands of Iraqis to death, not to mention American soldiers, in a war based on false premises? Kill one person, and it’s murder. Slaughter thousands, and it’s national defense.
But why will they call me blessed? For my merits? No, but out of regard for God, because the Most High hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed, and rightly, justly so, for he that is mighty hath magnified me. I acknowledge the favour and claim no greatness of my own. I am indeed great, not of myself, however, but because he who is mighty has done great things for me.
Such is scaring their high-church minority well as the Roman Rite traditionalist refugees among them. I haven’t seen this rumoured ‘revised liturgy’ online so I don’t know if any of this is true.
Some claim that the latest self-revisions not only shorten/drop things but have ‘inclusive language’. I have some of their existing books for the office that have this problem. They don’t try to neuter or feminize God but it’s still annoying and a bad sign. To be fair, in the context of a rite that is obviously still full-strength and ‘unreformed’ it’s a relatively minor problem in itself.
In 1944 Rome issued a liturgical book for them that follows Orthodox usages (no filioque in the Creed for example* among many other things) but it has never been implemented. They didn’t want to be traditional and Eastern then or now.
A feminist article coming from them seems to suggest that regrettably much of what’s going on there is really just an ethnic version of the Novus Ordo.
And on the lighter side:
Would Prince Michael of Kent make a good tsar? He’d have to repudiate Freemasonry but he’s related to the Russian royals (and even looks like the last Tsar), likes the culture and speaks the language
*Which a lot of their churches now have done, possibly partly because it’s a gesture that’s hip in academic ecumenical circles.
Catholics who support Bush's wars for the sake of his feigned opposition to abortion are going against the express teaching of TWO popes. The message cannot be made any clearer.
From blog member John Boyden English RCs use beer-mat ads in pubs to try to recruit new priests They also say they’re going to have more lay-led services and even more parish churches that are lay-led, with the leaders living in the clergy house. The number of RC priests in the Archdiocese of Westminster (London) has dropped nearly by half since the 1970s. What I wonder is if this is mostly owing to the real vocations crisis, thanks to Vatican II and the larger culture in tandem, or the fake one on top of it manufactured by the liberals (as described by Michael Rose in Goodbye, Good Men: a selection process that deliberately weeds out orthodox and/or straight men) as an excuse to push for such services, which is both anti-sacerdotalist (anti-apostolic ministry and thus anti-Catholic) and ironically quite clericalist (not the authentic Catholic view) as this is used to sell the attempted ordination of women (such want power, not what the priesthood really means) to a badly catechized laity.
Join the campaign to contain and constrain the Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and its allies, including Christian Zionists.
As old friend Mark Bonocore told me, Catholic societies have extreme holiness and extreme evil side by side/in mortal combat; Protestant countries tend towards a kind of lukewarmness, a mediocrity. (The devil doesn’t bother with the lukewarm; Jesus said what he’d do to them.) But it seems that in the Russias decades of sovietization have given evil the upper hand for now.
Better to handle this in the time-honoured way: uphold the faith in principle and in practice but even those who don’t practise it at home at least have to continue to preach it. (So no naff ‘commitment ceremony’, certainly not in church!) A ‘tolerant conservatism’ as somebody online recently described it. Secular people may call it hypocritical but even hypocrisy is vice’s acknowledgement of virtue and in this case works for the common good. Better a millstone round one’s neck than to cause scandal or other sins.
The last thing any of the homosexuals I know and respect (even one or two who are wrong about these issues) want is rainbow flag-waving idiocy in church.
BTW, ‘celibate’ doesn’t mean ‘not having sex’; it means ‘not married’.
Historically when Catholics sin* they don’t try to bend the church to bless what they’re doing as good; they know better. Trying to do that is horribly Protestant.
*One of those paradoxes: sinless (infallible) church, sinful people in it.
Five from LRC Remembering another stupid war The Russo-Japanese one. The last Tsar was saintly but not a competent emperor. Philadelphia’s oldest Russian Orthodox church* was built as a chapel for his navy as he had two warships built in that city, one of which, the Variag (Viking), famously sank during one of the battles of that war.
Ships and the sea Largely forgotten but still important. I’ve only been deep-sea fishing twice but have some sense of what Charley Reese is talking about.
Most of us, I guess, have contact with the sea only at the beach and from novels. Nevertheless, the maritime industry and the world's navies are as important as they've ever been. They are beset by problems that require more visibility, at least as much as Tom Cruise's latest squeeze or the Michael Jackson freak show.
The reason many Americans don’t know about maritime issues and news is they’re not covered anymore, because:
A longtime problem is ship owners who register their ships under foreign flags to evade U.S. regulations and union crewmen, a practice that causes both pollution and safety problems, not to mention diminishes the ranks of our merchant seamen.
The use of foreign flags was probably the very first instance of outsourcing American jobs in order to operate cheaply and avoid safety and environmental regulations.
Also why a lot of cruise ships are dodgy health- and safetywise.
There's nothing like being at sea to put the human being in proper perspective. The immense oceans are hostile environments to us folks. Without the steel corks we float on, we could not survive. One feels properly small when at sea.
As the Psalmist wrote:
23. They that go down to the sea in ships : and occupy their business in great waters; 24. These men see the works of the Lord : and his wonders in the deep. 25. For at his word the stormy wind ariseth : which lifteth up the waves thereof. 26. They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep : their soul melteth away because of the trouble. 27. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man : and are at their wits' end. 28. So when they cry unto the Lord in their trouble : he delivereth them out of their distress. 29. For he maketh the storm to cease : so that the waves thereof are still. 30. Then are they glad, because they are at rest : and so he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be.
Here's one final tidbit of sea news. Daytona Beach, Fla., has the largest number of recorded shark attacks in the world (who knows what happens in places where they don't keep statistics). But don't worry. Florida sharks don't like the taste of tourists, so they take one nip and spit them out – most of the time.
Speaking of the deep, I saw Titanic (the 1997 one) on the box again last night and still like it. That reminds me: I’d like to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
I’ve met several older women from upper-class WASP backgrounds who were bohemian and cool like Rose ended up becoming. (Somebody rather like that in a few ways, who was a national news reporter back in the early 1960s when relatively few ladies did that, gave me my break in the newspaper business 10 years ago!) One, who died in the past year, was 180 me on a lot of issues (she was too liberal theologically even for the Unitarians whence she came) but we were friends. Back in the day even the liberals were nicer.
‘Cities with moral purpose’ reminds me that in England only places with cathedrals are technically cities; those without are simply towns no matter how big. An echo of the apostolic ministry.
Speaking of Philadelphia (this might be of interest, John), rumour has it that punk shop Zipperhead may close or at least move out of South Street. The street really is turning into the Cherry Hill Mall without a roof! At least it’s still got the antiques mall in the old synagogue just to the south in Sixth Street: a sort of mini-Portobello Road where you can rescue sacramentals and if you’ve got $150 get a nice samovar.
FromLauda Jerusalem Dominum The Roman Mass returns to Philadelphia’s RC cathedral after 35+ years’ absence And with style. The Fraternity of St Peter are hip to the legitimate liturgical movement and to good Anglican and Lutheran hymns. As Fr Magiera is a former professional classical singer (a tenor) and a former chorister at an Anglo-Catholic shrine church, and the organist and choir for this are from there, the resemblance to S. Clement’s (not an Irish-American re-enactment of the 1950s) was quite intentional! (Interestingly, John Notman designed both churches.)
1. You can't be anything you want to be. Not even if you work hard and put your mind to it. You can be what God made you to be.
2. Perception is not reality. Image is not reality. Reality is reality.
3. You do not deserve a break, a new car, a new house, a massage, a bubble bath, or a vacation. If you are humble, you might deserve the opportunity to do penance. Be thankful for what you have and don't expect more.
LRC pick What happened to the antiwar movement? By Joseph Sobran ‘The Movement’ (not just the antiwar part) of the 1960s was an instrument of great evil but thinking men as diverse as Mr Sobran and even the late obscure Fr Seraphim (Rose) see that in some ways it had a point: some changes are good.
(Admitting that apparently wasn’t good enough for the Movement itself, though, which in its spoiled baby-boomer arrogance thought it had the charism of infallibility, and a dumb blind faith in ‘change’ no different from the older generation’s mistakes.)
There was the understandable romantic reaction to the early 20th century’s cold, sterile secular faith in technology, etc. (hippies going to communes to bake bread and have babies as the funny, pithy Camille Paglia observed) and the antiwar movement, which unlike in the late 1960s is marginalized if seen or heard at all.
(I’ve been on about six antiwar marches and mostly what I see are ageing boomers representing history’s leftovers — such as silly Commie front groups — and the loud ‘Free Mumia’ idiots*.)
Based on what the common man thought he knew at the time Vietnam seemed to make sense, if you really thought there was a global Communist threat. Iraq doesn’t, unless you believe like the government really wants you to (despite PC pro forma remarks to the contrary) that all Arabs are alike.
Many people don’t remember that Vietnam was an example of liberal foreign policy given added selling power by the Cold War: nation-building, exporting democracy, blah blah. Liberal poster boy JFK upped US involvement there. (Read The Quiet American: after the French lost at Dien Bien Phu, the Europeans had it sussed before the Gulf of Tonkin battle was faked.)
And the authentic, peace-loving Right — on the way out since World War II and being given a death-blow in mainstream discourse by CIA employee Bill Buckley and his National Review — including strident anti-Communists, were divided about it.
Famous anti-Communist Arcbishop Fulton Sheen famously came to oppose the war.
Even the John Birch Society were split on the issue.
(The Communists won Vietnam’s civil war and Asia dominoed a little but the world didn’t after all. Communism collapsed from its own internal contradictions as wise men like Murray Rothbard thought it would.)
Today the liberals, both of the Democratic and the neocon varieties, are doing it again.
From blog member Lee Penn From antiwar.com The pipeline from hell Justin Raimondo on the increasing demonization of Russia, a country the neocons don’t like because it can fight back
Lee: Our rulers will propose; God will dispose ...
But for all the talk of war and remembrance, no time is more infused with insidious forgetting than the last days of May.
This is a holiday that features solemn evasion.
I saw insidious war/state propaganda again on the box recently in an otherwise good documentary about people who restore and fly B-17 bombers: there is a need for weapons and these planes show the beauty of the design (æsthetic) of their time and are marvellous machines representative of it, and yes, there’s the romance (nostalgia) of a more innocent, idealistic time. I’m all for these museum planes. But the way the soldiers were described (and I’m sure a lot of them were really decent fellows — some of them work on these museum projects) went beyond Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation stuff into religious allusion and metaphor (sacrifice, spilt blood, sacred values) more like the Byzantine Rite canons I read every morning than the ugly reality of World War II, which these boys were conscripted to fight. It approaches the real meaning of ‘taking God’s name in vain’, or worse a kind of idolatry of the state.
BTW, US Memorial Day began as the defeated and occcupied Confederacy’s way to honour their war dead.
But Bush gets this one right Embryonic stem cells. The New York Times and truthout get it wrong. That said the Republicans aren’t really pro-life, certainly not in the Catholic near-seamless garment sense of this blog. They simply know how to play pro-lifers better than the Democrats do.
What women want A subject that LRC has touched on: the real reasons for the so-called ‘glass ceiling’ may be to do with inherent differences between the sexes (not artificial ‘genders’) and not prejudice. Such discrimination by bosses may simply make good business sense but as the article points out, sometimes women, who tend to be collaborative and not competitive, have the better approach.
The Christian East in its several rites hasn’t got this feast (except the Ukrainian Catholics who, disobeying Rome, adopted it from the West) not because of any faith difference (as Bishop Kallistos (Ware) explains) but because of different historical circumstances. Practically speaking, nobody denied the Real Presence there*, so there are no elevations of, blessings with or processions with the Elements outside the Liturgy to answer that denial. Of course there are modes of presence — the early church, as the East does today, took God’s localized presence in the Sacrament as a given along with, in other ways, his presence in the assembly and in the celebration of the service itself, and starting in the early period, in icons. Western liberals misuse ‘modes’ to minimize ceremonial; Orthodox use it rightly to maximize it!
*A problem in the West since Berengarius in the Middle Ages, before the Protestants widely spread this error.
I choose to no longer take part in this heresy. I’m trading in my 11 General Orders for Seven Sacraments and my pocket Constitution for a Catechism. Semper Fidelis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
This reminded me of the goofy ‘charismatic’ covenant-community cult that was active where I was at university 20 years ago, recruiting a number of students: it dipped into both Evangelicalism and the social gospel of the heretical nominally RC chaplaincy (run by baby-boomers of course), all sharing a contempt for Catholicism as we know it.
Great site though it and I apparently disagree about Thomas Woods.
JO: I take no joy in the man’s misfortune, nor in the events leading to his downfall, but perhaps this outcome is a hopeful sign for Orthodox*-[Roman] Catholic fraternity in the region.
Father Dimitrios, secretary to the Jerusalem Synod, with enthusiasm tells AsiaNews what happened.
“Our community is full of joy. Yesterday, the Synod in Constantinople accepted the decision of the Synod of Jerusalem and no longer considers Cardinal [sic] Ireneos as patriarch. This amounts to excommunication since the Orthodox Church no longer accepts him as patriarch. Ireneos can no longer work with any Church in that capacity and we no longer have to mention his name during the liturgy,” he said.
Excommunication? I’m not sure about that. I think that all it means is that he can’t serve as a patriarch or as a bishop or priest unless another Local Orthodox Church takes him.
While I question deposing somebody for this kind of mistake, nothing to do with faith or morals and everything to do with the incendiary politics in that country, maybe it’s just as well that this fellow is gone for the reason Joe refers to:
Ireneos I (whose name means the peaceful one) had a reputation in Jerusalem for pushing his followers into clashes with the friars of the Holy Sepulchre and for creating troubles in the management of the Holy Sites owned jointly with Catholic Church.
According to Father Dimitrios, Ireneos I’s dismissal will improve relations with Catholics.
“Clashes between Orthodox and Catholics had become particularly heated under Ireneos. It is true that the rules under the current status quo are very restrictive and occasionally there are disagreements and frictions. But we shouldn’t get to the point of quarrelling and fighting each other,” he said.
That is, if Fr Dimitrios, clearly anti-Irineos personally, is telling the truth (that the former patriarch really was hateful) and not simply telling these RC journos what he thinks they want to hear.
*I’ve cleaned up this page’s layout a little bit for your viewing pleasure.
FromThe Onion Metalhead, goth find love Reminds me of Drake Adams’ knowledge of the ‘tribal youth culture’ scenes: he says that skinny and beautiful goths exist more in pornography and advertising (models playing goths) than in real life. The Simpsons’ Comic-Book Guy and his female version are commoner.
But as I like to say, if I were 15 and the only choices I knew were being a goth and modern liberal mainstream churches, I’d be a goth!
P.S. A friend who is a goth-scene veteran and who prefers to remain anonymous for this tip tells me that Drake is wrong: there are many hot goths.
Real Buddhism has ritual, iconography and, like, rules and stuff. (They resemble the Ten Commandments! Natural theology.)
Boomer (pseudo-)Buddhism wouldn’t have surprised George Santayana:
“American life is a powerful solvent,” he wrote. “It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native goodwill, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.”
This concern for authentic tradition combined with an awareness of this authenticity in other traditions (not the same as indifferentism/relativism), a little like René Guenon, was one of the late Fr Seraphim (Rose)’s good points — in Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future he praised Shasta Abbey in California for its authentic Buddhism, something as good as you can get without Christ, he wrote.
In the answers to Star Wars questions linked here yesterday it’s pointed that the religion in it is based largely on Buddhism.
First Things and I may disagree on political neoconnery, John Paul the Overrated and the Novus Ordo but it’s got a sober, intellectual tone brought over from Lutheranism (I like confessional Lutherans) and Anglicanism that often makes it amenable to Mass-and-office Catholicism.
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A number of students, faculty members and alumni objected so strongly to the president's visit that by last Friday nearly 800 of them had signed a letter of protest that appeared as a full-page advertisement in The Grand Rapids Press. The letter said, in part, "Your deeds, Mr. President - neglecting the needy to coddle the rich, desecrating the environment and misleading the country into war - do not exemplify the faith we live by."
The apostolic ministry in action: Patriarch Alexis II amidst his flock in the Cathedral of the Assumption, the Kremlin, Moscow
Eastern churches From Fr Michael (Wood) Church of Russia celebrates feast of SS. Cyril and Methodius today in Moscow Съ праздникомъ! Liturgical splendour from a marvellous site in Russian. The saints are famous for evangelizing what are now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, taking the common Slavonic language at the time* and giving it a grammar and the Glagolitic alphabet to make Bibles and liturgical books (approved by the Pope at the time). Glagolitic is what Russian looks like to people who don’t know Russian — the Greek-based Cyrillic letters (like Russian uses today) were invented later. Slavonic is still roughly intelligible with Russian, about like Chaucer is to this. The Latin of the Orthodox tradition for eastern Slavs.
*Which these Greeks knew because they were from Salonika, bordering what’s now Bulgaria.
Your Star Wars questions answered The experts say that my old college acquaintance now-Fr Luke Miller was wrong: George Lucas wasn’t re-staging the war for American independence by hiring British actors to play imperial officers. He simply was being practical as he was filming in England!
"Christians in Iraq paid twice after coalition forces entered," says Guryal, until recently an executive of the Middle East Council of Churches in the northern city of Mosul.
"From the time of independence in 1946, Syria has always opened its doors for every refugee who comes — Armenians, Palestinians, Sudanese and now Iraqis," says Archbishop Isidore Battikha, patriarch of the Greek Catholic Church in Damascus.
S al-B: Good statement, but another mistake by the press. Say’yidna Bat’teekha is patriarchal vicar to His Beatitude, Gregory III.
"They are all welcome in Syria, and the government asks us to help them — we open our churches, our meeting rooms, our schools, and help by money or finding money."
What I’m listening to (thanks to KaZaA) ‘Molly’s Chamber’ by Kings of Leon Ooh, I feel so hip! Of course I’m not but as a friend said, we know cool when we see it. The obvious signs here that I’m not are that this song is two years old and, like a lot of people my age whom I imagine are the real target market for this soft sell, I just heard it in that cute VW Jetta ad with the jumping, dancing couple.
It’s catchy with some guitar fireworks but like the Doors and Johnny Cash (both great) not a real melody and a mumbling, sullen lead vocal about a classic pop theme (read the lyrics here): a guy complaining about a girl, some evil woman who’s trapped him using the most effective means*, described with a metaphor anybody who’s heard the name Freud will get.
(Somehow I don’t think it’s about the hobby of gun-collecting.)
Maybe it’s because I’m unhip, not part of ‘tribal youth culture’ as Drake Adams has called it, that I care about what songs mean.
So I wondered what on earth an anti-woman grumble was doing in a cheery car commercial that in its way celebrates romance, a relationship.
There is the line ‘You want it’ implying the car is the ‘she’ who’s got what you want...
(So if you buy the car will you end up resenting VW as much as this guy hates Molly?)
Did the song choice have anything to do with the content or was it just because it’s got a great beat to stomp on the floor to?
Do the No. 1 ‘consumers’ of this music care what it says?
LRC picks Spyware/adware, begone! Slightly old news but still helpful. To find out more, search in this blog! In it (search using ‘kill2me’) you’ll find a link to freeware that kills the most persistent of these pests I’ve come across, look2me.
About the only time I’m bothered by pop-ups at home (I use Panicware Pop-Up Stopper, which works beautifully) is when I check page stats with Nedstat.
The only real problem I’ve come across lately has been with spam because I sent a few e-mails not through the Web (even using the ubiquitous and apparently less than secure Explorer this isn’t a problem) but through Outlook, also the favourite gateway of viruses. In the past couple of days my account, usually clean as Cliff Richard, has had a couple of unsavoury mass e-mails get through.
Yahoo’s free e-mail service, also Web-based and with a whole gigabyte of storage space, is also blessedly nearly spam-free.
More on the latest Star Wars (articles one and two)
Eloquent, wry, sober, deftly cutting, with undertones of anger, sadness, and hope, Bacevich writes like Paul Fussell with a political sensibility.
“Today as never before in their history,” the book relentlessly argues, “Americans are enthralled with military power.”
To a degree unprecedented but now taken for granted, the purpose of the armed forces has shifted from defending American territory to projecting power abroad.
"They appear to [sic] settling in a [sic] for the long run, and that will only give fuel for the terrorists," said a spokesman for the mainstream Sunni Iraqi Islamic party.
[An] audience member, who described herself as a Syrian lawyer, said Syria is a tolerant country with a large Christian population. The country has become a safe haven for Iraqi’s fleeing a grinding guerrilla war, especially Christians escaping anti-Christian violence that has wracked Iraq in the wake of the US-led invasion.
... “We are Israel’s strong ally,” Mr Shays said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It would be foolish for people to think that somehow we are neutral.”
S al-B: Israel’s ally, but sadly, not America’s.
A follow-up on the Dead Sea report:
Israel, Arabs agree to save Dead Sea S al-B: They plan a feasibility study of the proposition of transferring water to the Dead Sea from the Red Sea. But could this work? From the report linked to from a few blog entries back about a couple of days ago:
According to Amos Bein of the Geological Survey of Israel, chemical and biological reactions produced by mixing Dead Sea water with seawater could change the blue color of the Dead Sea to white or red or create deadly gases.
Was your meat smarter than your pet? Reminds me of some of the links that Joshua Snyder posted about the horrific practice of some Koreans (some Vietnamese and some Filipinos too): eating dogs. Specifically what’s cruel about the Korean practice is the traditional way they’re killed, by torturing/beating them to get their adrenaline up (they say it’s an aphrodisiac for men that way). Of course there’s no problem with killing an animal, whether by a butcher or by hunting, if necessary and efficiently using the carcass such as for food, so a hunter who’s a good shot has the right idea. Also the Korean way goes agaist halachah (Jewish law regarding things such as kosher dietary laws, also found IIRC in the Book of Leviticus): the kosher way, the animal is ‘gently’ (relatively humanely) killed, deliberately so the adrenaline rush doesn’t happen. That and the traditional practice AFAIK of some Native American tribes — acknowledging that this was a life (thanking and even asking the forgiveness of the animal in some of their religions), killing such only out of necessity and then efficiently using what they kill for food and clothing — sound good to me.
John Redmore, who runs an organic farm in England, disagrees (with giving up meat).
"We've been eating meat since we've managed to stand on hind legs," he said. "A natural part of being human is to eat meat."
It's natural to eat animals even if they're smart, he added.
"Yeah, they'd eat us," Redmore said.
But, he added, farm animals should be treated with compassion. After all, the research shows they may be able to recognize it.
A punto. Treating farm animals kindly is why keeping them is traditionally called animal husbandry: good stewardship of God’s creation.
Many monks traditionally never eat meat not because so doing is evil (the point St Paul made against the gnostic sects of his day) but because both physically and symbolically it helps and signifies mastery of the passions (in themselves not bad either but they need to know who’s in charge). Also, recalling how the meat sacrifices of Old Testament and pre-A.D. 70 Judaism are fulfilled/superseded by the Sacrifice of Christ, Catholics, East and West, famously don’t eat meat on Fridays* by immemorial custom (and in the Orthodox tradition Wednesdays as well, recalling the beginning of Christ’s Sacrifice with his betrayal and arrest).
And if I’m hypocritical for enjoying a few rashers of bacon (from something that might not have an immortal soul or at least not have a soul exactly like mine) how many militant vegetarians are pro-life?
*Nothing to do AFAIK with the silly story about the Pope ordering people to eat fish (never the rule) to help the Italian fishing industry.
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Some online have slagged me for making these parallels (it seems to have pissed off the RC neocons which isn’t necessarily bad) though I am far from the first or only one to make them. (The people at Cannes seem good company.) I answered one person thus:
As you are a writer and poet of course you know that 1) in fallen human nature there really is nothing new under the sun and 2) great literature ... deals with those timeless themes, which is why somebody in 2005 watching something written in 1970-something will see the present!
At her stop nearby at the Dome of the Rock, she faced heckling from angry Palestinians. One man yelled, "How dare you come in here! Why your husband kill Muslim?"
"We're reminded again of what we all want, what every one of us pray for," she said. "What we all want is peace."
Then tell your husband’s handlers to get the eff out of Iraq.
Some visitors that Mrs. Bush encountered near the Dome of the Rock, a mosque on a hilltop compound known to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif and to Jews as Temple Mount, shouted at her in Arabic. "None of you belong in here!" one man yelled as Mrs. Bush and her entourage arrived.
Who I’m listening to Dr Frank Senn: Back to the future with post-post-modern religion A rather high-church Lutheran pastor, liturgist, head of a Lutheran order of pastors (rather like the Anglo-Catholic Society of the Holy Cross) and a nice fellow (got to talk to him after his lecture), he describes the Catholic religion as we practise it liturgically as ‘pre-modern’, based on revelation and giving God the worship due him. Then there was the didacticism of the modern way of worship, shifting the purpose from worshipping God for his own sake to getting a message across to the congregation, the thinking behind both much of Protestantism and the wrongheaded liturgical revisionism of the last century. And he describes affective (thanks for that word, Paul Goings), emotion-fuelled religious revivals as reactions against that cold didacticism (and the obvious failures of modernity such as totalitarianism and modern war), from the Great Awakening to Pentecostalism and its newer variants today such as the ‘praise service’, and the ‘emergent church’ phenom. Modernity was about religion’s usefulness in building up society (which of course opens up a possible abuse of religion — propping up the state at the expense of truth, etc.) but in a way this is a return to the true, pre-modern approach. In their reaction against it and the subsequent seeking of the mystical, Dr Senn says, the Pentecostals and Catholics actually have something in common!
He says that the modern approach has a ‘meta-narrative’ — passing down the message of a shared culture is the point. (He doesn’t say it but in a sense of course that’s also true of our pre-modern religion even though it might be secondary.) Post-modernism, he says, hasn’t got that.
Anyway, this disillusionment with modernity may be what can draw post-modern people to the Catholic faith. (A sign that this might already be happening is the Anglo-American convert boomlet to Eastern Orthodoxy over the past 20 years.) One of the best comments comes from Paul: let’s promote the faith not as retrograde but as ‘post-post-modern’!
He also describes us as countercultural but I don’t entirely agree: that’s true only relative to the culture right now. Our culture and our meta-narrative are what I call the historicCatholic mainstream.
And he admits that ‘contemporary Christian music’ sucks (only he said it in a nicer, soft-spoken Midwestern way!) — inferior to secular rock music.
In his talk Dr Senn brought up some parallels I and some friends had thought of before. As friend of the blog Jennifer has observed, to change one’s religious affiliation is itself a modern or perhaps post-modern thing to do, even if it’s to a traditional religion.
Eastern churches Taissa of Byzantine Rite Church Supplies dies Went to Hanusey’s Ukrainian Shop today and had a lovely time talking to the venerable owner, Mary Hanusey, and getting a embroidered рушник (towel) and писанка (decorated Easter egg — either this is really wood or a heavily lacquered ‘fortified’ real eggshell, white with brilliant red, orange and black Greek-cross patterns.)
Anyway I mentioned one of the US Northeast’s spots to stock up on Byzantine Rite goodies, the Byzantine Rite Church Supplies shop across the street from Philadelphia’s Ukrainian Catholic cathedral (for the longest time this treasure was jammed into a narrow rowhouse), and Mrs H told me that the longtime owner, Taissa, died this week, only in her 50s, of ovarian cancer. What a vicious disease.
And interestingly this friendly, helpful woman (she found me the chain on which I’m wearing the crucifix I always have on me), whose business easily could be mistaken for part of the cathedral, was Eastern Orthodox. Reminds me of what a friend upstate in Pennsylvania told me recently about relations now between the two sides: friendly. (Happily quite different to all the rubbish on the Internet.) The old Orthodox priest’s wife taught at her RC primary school for example.
A lot of people miss you, Taissa.
Во блаженном успении вечный покой подаждь, Господи, рабе твоей Таиссы и сотвори ей вечную память (in her falling asleep, O Lord, grant unto Thy handmaiden Taissa rest eternal with the blessed and make her memory eternal).
Save the Filibuster The Democrats may have the wrong motive (opposing pro-life judge nominees for example) but they’re still right on principle on this one. Taking this away is one step closer to dictatorship (remember when conservatives scared people with this spectre whilst Mr Clinton was balancing the budget, etc.?).
John Bolton Mr Bush’s handlers’ plan to make him the US ambassador to the UN seems to me a now-classic modern example of conservatives being played. Ten years ago Mr Bolton would have seemed a hero to real conservatives (around the time Specialist Michael New was lauded for refusing to go under UN command) — because it was thought that to be anti-UN was to be for peace and against interventionist foreign policy. Now he’s being used by Mr Bush and company to give the finger to the UN for the latter’s opposing their interventionist, literally bloody fool’s errand.
Starring Johnny Depp looking androgynous in character. Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka was slightly mad and sadistic (reflecting the nastiness of Roald Dahl?) but not reminiscent of recent-vintage Michael Jackson!
Animals By Monk Damascene (Christensen) Another reason to love them:
'In our rustic atmosphere', Fr Herman observes, 'animals have a place. In the contemporary worldly atmosphere, on the other hand, they are as if robbed of their power, being at odds with the man-made world. When you look into the eyes of animals, you see that they are not just cute, furry playthings, but are an exceedingly serious phenomenon, creatures which take life in earnest. Animals bring in their own world, and they almost say to us: Enter into God's world. You belong to eternity.'
FromKatolik Shinja: A sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a former Reserve miltary-police sergeant, showing how Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell.
New blogs Philly Catholic From good friend of the blog Lauda Jerusalem Dominum, a smart Catholic fellow who’s unlike most ‘Fluffya Catlic’* RCs I’ve met.
ET go home On the science-fictiony beliefs of some atheists
Reversion to savagery How falling away from the faith caused the unique, magnified horror of modern war — the rebuttal to ‘Christianity caused most of the violence in Western history’. Quite the opposite.
*This culture is sometimes described as ‘conservative’ but it is definitely not traditionalist in religion or even its worldview really. Just complacent and parochial and shot through with a big dose of AmChurch-manship. (Or partly why, besides clannishness and other unfriendliness, ‘What parish are youse from?’ isn’t charming anymore.) Basically ageing liberal baby-boomers and older in charge telling the elderly working-class parishioners what to do, with a number of youngish (maybe not so anymore) folk who are EWTN-type neocons. None of whom would accept or even recognize Mass-and-office Catholicism if it jumped up and bit them. (And the part of that faith which is the Christian East simply ain’t on their radar as they might put it.) The parish church one block from home is like stepping back in time though — to the 1970s!
Two thumbs up I’ve only seen this, the first one (when it first came out!), a revival of The Empire Strikes Back and most of Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
Loved the first one (and it still holds up nearly 30 years on!) but didn’t understand what all the fuss was about with the others.
In fact going into this I wasn’t clear what a Sith was.
Now I understand.
It’s got the goods — strong characters to care about, a story with both epic/mythic and personal elements without getting preachy (but there are good moral lessons) or soppy and of course ace realistic computer-enhanced effects, so good that it was the only time besides watching IMAX that flying scenes made me dizzy and disoriented (in the film’s first few minutes!)
Obi-Wan Kenobi rules and Ewan McGregor does a spot-on Alec Guinness impression (he also looks and sounds, so I’ve read, like the last Tsar!). Next to nobody under 50 really talks like that anymore, which is too bad.
The soldier droids look somewhat like H.R. Giger’s aliens.
This is how liberty dies — with thunderous applause.
And yes, some of the major plot turns and scenes are sad — it is darker than the others.
*After all, making and releasing the movie now seems timely though as this review says (the link should work until the 25th May) Lucas wrote the story about 30 years ago and claims it’s partly about current events then — Darth Vader is Richard Nixon!
11:19 PM Permalink
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"Symbolism is everything," opined David Virtue, a conservative Anglican whose Internet reports circle the globe. "When the new pope met with the patriarchs from the Orthodox churches there were public embraces and kisses, but when Benedict XVI met Williams there was only a handshake. ... Williams edged forward perhaps hoping for a papal embrace but it was not forthcoming."
• They didn’t trash the Bible to deliberately spite the Orthodox priests: they probably simply needed toilet paper! Suppose you’re in the lav and haven’t got a roll and all you’ve got is a book that has no religious meaning to you, the equivalent (to you) of a Danielle Steel novel... (the Russians haven’t got Charmin — they often use newsprint!) • I’m not sure you can entirely blame Islam as after all Christians, though dhimmi (second-class) in the Muslims’ worldview, are also ‘People of the Book’ to them. • They weren’t torturing the priests. • The pro-Bush, Moonie-owned Washington Times might be less than objective.
P.S. Remember when the Americans bombed Monte Cassino?
*The Collegiate Church of St Peter, not a cathedral (it was once, briefly) but originally the church of St Peter’s Benedictine Abbey. It’s now what’s known as a Royal Peculiar (thanks for the link, John Treat) — the priests answer directly to the Sovereign, not to the Bishop of London (canonically, not sacramentally!). St George’s in Windsor Castle is the same way.
On the box ‘Dateline NBC’ NBC did its final news programme about miracles to lead into the last episode of ‘Revelations’ (fake excitement and anticlimactic really — you know who’s gonna win): a not unsympathetic look at Medjugorje (problematic as Mud Gorge is — I don’t think Stone Phillips mentioned that the local bishop, who calls the shots on such, didn’t approve it) and, more interesting, they showed Fr Emmanuel McCarthy* (whom they called ‘Charlie McCarthy’ — oops, that was Edgar Bergen’s dummy), a Melkite priest who faithfully follows the Orthodox tradition, is married and the father of 13, a peace activist (co-founder of Pax Christi USA) and was instrumental (through the saving of one of his children’s lives) in the beatification of St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (better known as Edith Stein). In many ways Fr Emmanuel seems a recruiting poster for this blog: traditional religion and the right kind of granola politics**, not mutually exclusive but with one logically coming from the other, part of the Catholic thing.
Then from the sublime to the ridiculous they showed a clip of John Spong, unwittingly capturing the modern Broad Church act perfectly: high trappings that don’t mean anything. In the background, as quondam +Newark was talking, was a big crucifix, while Spong was presenting his reheated 19th-century scepticism/functional atheism: he doesn’t believe in literal miracles as a modern man.
(If he had any honour he’d give up his pension but atheist cranks who aren’t nominal Christian clergymen don’t get as much attention and besides he’d have to rename his column or whatever something less dramatic than ‘A Bishop Speaks’.)
Spong, a Southerner, started out as a conservative Presbyterian. Looking at history, Robert Morse is proved right again: Calvinism shatters into Unitarianism.
At least with the sympathy towards Medjugorje NBC didn’t dismiss miracles or make fun of belief in them.
*Not our kind of nuns but a useful page to introduce you to Fr Emmanuel.
**Thanks, John Treat, for that summation of this blog.
LRC blog picks Forced sterilization The whole thing began not with the Nazis but with... New England Progressivism.
Rebranding If the neocons had done Waco it’d be called Operation Davidian Freedom, quips Anthony Gregory. (Remember when so-called conservatives used Waco as an example to fear the government?)
To neocons, is Darth Vader the real hero of Star Wars? After all, he offers the universe order! (Yes, I’m a geek and can quote character, chapter and verse from ‘Star Trek’ where I first heard a version of that line. Can you? Hint: Capt. Kirk famously shouts his name in one of the movies — search this blog and you’ll find a link to a funny animated bit of him so doing.)
At college, Luke Miller, now a sound Anglo-Catholic priest, argued that American science fiction is anti-empire as in anti-British and used Star Wars as a famous example. Maybe not.
I might see Revenge of the Sith; I understand it’s getting rave reviews.
Their love for the state, its wars, and its military is not only sickening--it is as far from the New Testament as is the Koran that they want to flush.
Even the most "liberal" jurisdictions in America - Antioch and OCA - are hard-line conservatives by comparison with the Continuing Anglicans - let alone ECUSA and AmChurch - and that is especially so concerning the Divine Liturgy.
From truthout The dark side of al-Islam ‘Honour killings’ of women. Should the Muslims follow the faith of Abraham to its true source, convert and be rid of such? Of course. Should the US government attack and invade Muslim countries (including those run by indifferent/bad Muslims where Christians were free, such as Baathist Iraq)? Absolutely not.
10,000 steps a day help keep middle-aged women healthy and looking good Sounds like a lot of bloody work! But one good thing about cultural changes and medical and technological advances in the past 40 years is that many people are fitter and better-looking longer than before: 50 for example isn’t really old anymore and that’s great.
Once saw an interview with an officer of Twinings or some other tea company in which he blamed television coming onto the scene in the 1950s for the decline of the art of the proper cup of tea. Hilary at Fiat Mihi, who is a master of the art (I don’t claim to be), has blogged about it — you can search here or there for the posting.
The Catholic faith FromParadosis viaStumble on Water Communion as inclusion and exclusion Quotations from Eastern Orthodox Metropolitan John (Zizioulas). The Blessed Sacramentis saving medicine but one of the things an Orthodox priest for example promises to do is ‘guard the chalice’. This is the Catholic answer to liberal Episcopalians for example whose answer to disputes over faith and morals besides ‘Never mind the teaching of the church Catholic and historic — obey me!’ (perversion of the apostolic ministry) is ‘Let’s show our love and unity (wallpaper over our real differences) by having Communion’.
To this I would simply add that sin is also an act of exclusion. When I sin, that sin is not the breaking of a law by which God and I must come to terms – rather it is also a breaking of community that includes my brothers and sisters in Christ (and really the whole of creation). Schism and heresy, by definition, are sins never repented of.
So keep the flame of grace lit in the lampada of your soul, keep on you the wedding-garment of sanctifying grace.
Recently had a conversation with an Eastern Orthodox priest in which he questioned whether the Western Catholic understanding of the state of grace was fair, meaning that objectively if one is in mortal sin one’s prayers and good works lack any grace or merit. I said that I think that’s a distortion of the Western position (rather like Calvin’s view of double predestination that if you’re damned you’re damned from the start and no prayer or good work will help you) because subjective guilt even from moment to moment is hard for us to judge, and afterwards I thought that this question reminded me of what a former friend called the great non-issue that started the Protestant heresies, faith vs works. The Catholic position as I understand it is that good works can be used by God to prepare you to be saved/have sanctifying (saving) grace restored to you*, which I think is the understanding that RC and Lutheran theologians recently came to. Again, it was a non-issue.
Believe that you are saved by faith; act as if you were saved by works.
- Reginald Cardinal Pole
Works prepare you for saving grace and heal psychic and spiritual damage to keep you in the state of grace** — not the Protestant accusation ‘You Catholics think you earn your way into heaven’ or ‘That’s works-righteousness!’.
Prevent*** us, O Lord, we beseech thee, in all our doings with thy most gracious favour and further us with thy continual help that all our prayer and work may be begun, continued and ended in thee.
*Once saved, always saved (OSAS) is bollocks. Contra Calvin we have free will.
**The Orthodox for example describe ascesis — fasting, etc. — as primarily therapeutic, not something that adds to Christ’s saving work, which of course is impossible. I think that the common Catholic position is that such opens you up to receive the benefit of that one saving work. The commonly known Western understanding that it satisfies divine justice/an angry God is valid but not the only explanation, and mistaught or misunderstood it can give the impression of just what the Protestants accuse us of. Another old friend, RC apologist Mark Bonocore, once described my explanation given here as translating teaching on temporal punishment and indulgences into Easternese.
Anglican-RC official dialogue agrees on Mary (more) The trouble with such statements is that many British, North American and Antipodean Anglicans aren’tAnglo-Catholics who positively believe in such — most, including the kind who usually are involved in these official ecumenical projects, are Broad Churchmen/liberal Protestants and so believe in nothing therefore everything. When the latter say ‘yes’ to these beliefs they probably really mean ‘yeah, man, whatever floats your boat’ (or however academics say it when they’re being condescending) not ‘we like you hold that these are true’.
There are also non-liberal sincere Christians among Anglicans who’d say something similar but not patronizing like ‘I can accept that as an opinion but not as required doctrine’ — like my Central Church friends who are high-church for Protestants but still Protestants.
Then in England and Australia there are the semi-Calvinist Evangelical Anglicans — Low Churchmen, thoroughgoing Protestants — who reject these outright as heretical because they’re not spelt out in scripture.
I’m actually moderate about the Marian cultus and those of the saints — a Catholic is required to believe certain things but not required to practise the devotions about them (but does have to accept them in principle). Everything about Our Lady ultimately comes down to one theological point as defined at the Council of Ephesus, that as Jesus is true God and true man and Mary gave birth to the whole Christ, not just ‘the human part’ (he is fully human, not just part), she is the Mother of God, a dramatic expression fun for scaring Protestants that happens to be logical and true.
That she is immaculate and was assumed into heaven are beliefs that are part of the common Catholic patrimony (as is the belief that she is ever-virgin, as alluded to in Ezekiel) and in fact the second belief first came from the Christian East!
Well, if as Griswold said in his congratulations to Pope Benedict XVI, "truth has many faces", then why not talk Immaculate Conception and Assumption to RCs, and talk about other stuff to Baptists, Unitarians and pagans? Fifty or sixty years ago this would have been ground-breaking. Now, it's just sort of sad.
A punto: 50 or 60 years ago such an agreement from churchmen, who mostly were gentlemen and thus honest, would have meant actual acceptance of the Catholic position. I’ve more respect for the Low Churchmen who are wrong about the doctrines but at least have principles. It seems that the Prots are wrong for the right reasons and the ARCIC types right for the wrong ones!
P.S. Not only were Fr North and I in college at the same time but we had a tutorial together on scripture in which he comported himself Catholicly. He’s moved on to better things, having the job that Fr Alfred Hope-Patten created.
12:41 PM Permalink
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Life issues abort73 Sharp new site! The number refers to the year in the US when the federal Supreme Court overthrew the felony laws of 49 states to legalize this form of murder.
I made my pro-life page, linked to the subject heading at the top of this entry, at the beginning of 2000 and I know it looks like it was made in 1995 because I’d just started teaching myself HTML. I still have a lot of catching up to do!
I’m glad there’s a better-made site to link to now.
This page from about.com also shows that contraception doesn’t prevent abortions — it probably causes some of them as using it encourages risky (as well as objectively wrong) behaviour.
To the tune of ‘My Bonnie’:
My father sells sailors the condoms My sister sticks them with a pin My mother, she does the abortions My God, how the money rolls in.
The furore over Newsweek and the Koran desecration at Gitmo Search in this blog under ‘Guantánamo’ and you’ll find links to stories that show that this allegation fits a pattern. Newsweek followed the modern trend (against classic journalism) and had somebody in the US government vet the story, and it ran for 11 days without comment from the latter. Now the magazine has retracted the story — because it, and the government, didn’t like the reaction. Please.
Sergeant Kevin Benderman cannot shake the images from his head. There are bombed villages and desperate people. There are dogs eating corpses thrown into a mass grave. And most unremitting of all, there is the image of a young Iraqi girl, no more than eight or nine, one arm severely burnt and blistered, and the sound of her screams.
"If I am sincere in what I say and there's consequences because of my actions, I am prepared to stand up and take it," Sgt Benderman said. "If I have to go to prison because I don't want to kill anybody, so be it."
Name: Kevin Benderman Occupation: Man
As I said, a hero.
We were told that we would be going to Iraq to jack up some terrorists. We were told it was a new kind of war, that these were evil people and they had to be dealt with ... We were told to consider all Arabs as potential terrorists ... to foster an attitude of hatred that gets your blood boiling.
- US Army veteran Jeremy Hinzman
Campaigners have also drawn attention to the often scurrilous tactics used by US military recruiters, who for three months have failed to meet their targets for recruits. After several cases where recruiters had illegally covered up recruits' criminal and medical records, threatened one prospect with jail for failing to meet an appointment and provided another with laxatives to help him lose weight and pass a physical, the Pentagon is halting all recruiting on 20 May for a day of retraining.
"I had an 18-year-old who was told he did not have to serve in Iraq. 'I was told I'd get a job where I would not be sent', he told me," said Ms McNeill, a lawyer. "He was recruited to be an military policeman. They are the people they are sending to Iraq. People all the time are told [by recruiters] 'I can get you a job where you will not have to go to war'."
Kevin Benderman is anything but a raw recruit. He joined the US Army in 1987, served in the Gulf War and received an honourable discharge in 1991. He rejoined in 2000 and served during the invasion of Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division.
...the punishment of two high-ranking officers does not erase concerns that the Army is seeking scapegoats among lower-ranking soldiers and sparing the brass.
Three from LRC Market multiculturalism Serving strong linguistic minorities (as Spanish always will be in the US) is good business sense. Très bien to know that French is alive and well in Louisiana (it’s Louisianan Fats Domino’s first language!).
Pagan conservatism Though the Crucifixion certainly was violent! And good somehow coming out of evil to win over it certainly is part of the Christian message.
Yesterday in the Byzantine Rite was the Feast of the Myrrh-Bearing Women (the women who visited Our Lord’s tomb and were the first to learn of His Resurrection), the same liturgical day when I went to a church and service in this rite for the first time 20 years ago! Съ праздникомъ.
9:31 AM Permalink
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On the box
God became man! Cooooool!
‘The Simpsons’ sends up the Catholic faith Or its version mangled for comedy’s sake including:
• Homer hashing the Hail Mary in praise of pancake suppers. • A bucket o’stereotypes including of course Irish brogues (featuring the voice of real Irishman Liam Neeson). • Bart, dude, that’s the wrong hand to cross yourself... but you’ve got the Latin down, lad! In nomine Patris... • Revd Lovejoy’s ridiculous claim of heaven separated by denomination with stereotype Anglicans playing croquet in Prot heaven and looking down on the immigrant stereotypes in RC heaven... hello, might the ethnic English instead be Anglo-Catholics? And haven’t you read Brideshead Revisited? OK, these are American stereotypes. • Our Lord chooses to party in RC heaven with fiesta-ing Mexicans, step-dancing Irish and amorous Italians. Echoes of Hilaire Belloc! Benedicamus Domino. • The part of Catholic heaven with dish-breaking dances, circle dances, ouzo, vodka and Cossack dances didn’t show up as it’s still not on most Americans’ cultural radar (the convert boomlet hasn’t changed that yet) but we know it’s there. (As is the English camp part.) • The usual regrettable slur that’s pro-contraception but that’s to be expected from these people. • No liturgical scenes, which is probably for the best, but we see Homer and Bart lighting votive candles to Our Lady (I want Christmas cards of that scene) and Bart with the Rosary! • Revisiting the point about the faith being childlike (not childish): vivid stories of saints (St Sebastian! Cooool!) are partly what win Bart. • Nobody romanticised or even bothered depicting the new-breed religion the church types bragged would be so successful. NOT! Actually ‘The Simpsons’ has been good about taking the piss out of it. There was the mock-Super Bowl commercial: ‘... we’ve made a few... changes!’ • Quotation:
...you’re going straight in the army, where you’ll be sent straight to America’s latest military quagmire. Where will it be? North Korea? Eye-ran? Anything’s possible with Commander Cuckoo Bananas in charge!
- Homer
This was going to air last month but was pulled out of respect for Pope John Paul II who had just died.
The end of ‘Enterprise’ Nice to see Jonathan Frakes (whom I’d like to look like) and Marina Sirtis (you can hear a little more London in her voice now — she’s English) again... the reactionary Earth people who were the bad guys in the next to last one shown had a libertarian, small-government point. By-your-bootstraps miners who colonised the moon sound pretty cool to me, more so than the actually totalitarian ‘good guys’ of ‘the Federation’ (the US government) that Capt. Kirk and company (the US military) work for (preaching the late Gene Roddenberry’s godawful worldview, which was also intensely anti-religious). A likeable cast: Scott Bakula was cool. Jolene Blalock was OK but not as hot as everybody made her out to be. Didn’t follow it but liked the un-Trekkie theme song and it did outlast the old ‘Star Trek’ by one year, nothing to be ashamed of.
Hoshi’s job was a nice touch: for once the show didn’t assume that newly discovered aliens speak English or that some ‘universal translator’ gizmo is going to work with them.
I’m sure that by now Comic-Book Guy and thousands of other fans have written and posted their versions of Capt. Archer’s speech.
‘Family Guy’ is back And still great! Jingle, jingle, jingle, jinglejinglejinglejinglejingle... ‘Good night, honey’.
Life issues US state secret for decades: thousands secretly sterilized In line with Margaret Sanger’s eugenicist ideals. When liberals express alarm about population it’s often really about this: they don’t want certain kinds of people ‘breeding’. As P.J. O’Rourke accurately wrote, it’s an acceptable and even sanctimonious way to be racist. (In this city half of all black pregnancies are aborted. Sanger would smile.)
Speaking of life issues, on the TV last night ‘Saturday Night Live’ rose above its usual craptacularity with its mock-commercial starring Amy Poehler in a change of pace from her usual talent, accents and impressions. With no dialogue she and the writers beautifully sent up those annoying contraceptive ads with the girl singing the cover of ‘There she goes... there she goes again’ and go again and again and again our Amy does... with bar pick-ups, construction workers, a wheelchair-bound man, a 14-year-old boy, a busload of Asian tourists and finally the ageing doorman to her building. Brilliant. The logical conclusion of the great contraceptive swindle! (Using women, marketed as ‘empowering’ them.)
Pope Benedict XVI FromThe Perennial Rambler Santo subito? To be fair, starting the process now doesn’t mean he’ll be beatified or canonized (the BBC had a false start yesterday with a misleading headline that was quickly corrected, ‘John Paul to be beatified’) but I essentially agree that this seems a cheap publicity stunt, a media-fuelled* cultus too much like Princess Diana’s and something foreign to the caution and sobriety on such matters of authentic traditionalism, which even though it celebrates miracles is ever careful to reject hoaxes and spiritual delusion (enthusiasm in the Ronald Knox sense).
Much of this emotion seems to come from people for whom tradition began around 1970.
He may be a saint (deserving some credit for the fall of Communism) but all this seems hasty.
*Different from the local popular veneration and acclamation of holy and wonder-working saints in ancient times and known in the Orthodox tradition (for example, the Russian St Herman of Alaska, unknown to most for decades except the Aleuts).
What I’m listening to and where Catholic music by Hungarian composers Ferenc Farkas, Lajos Bárdos and Zoltan Kodaly (the names often don’t sound like they look). Modern music, some written as recently as 1994, with some cool dissonance but in Latin and part of the great tradition. To employ that overused word, awesome.
Sung by lovely people (met them), the Music Group of Philadelphia (as you can see they specialize in Eastern European music — they’ve done Russian Orthodox liturgical works)...
... at an ironic (but fitting the music like a glove) building demonstrating Catholic architecture (Victorian version of Gothic, the period’s version of a French cathedral):
First Presbyterian Church (Sorry there aren’t pictures of the interior.) Just west of Philadelphia’s posh Rittenhouse Square. It was controversial when it was built in the late 1800s as Presbys went in for early-1800s Greek Revival preachin’ barns, not this popish architecture.
These mainline ex-Calvinists haven’t got bishops and may be ‘diverse’, ‘inclusive’, yadda, yadda, but with First Presby’s Gothic chancel and stone altar front and centre (and in the right position for eastward celebration?) one could move in and have Mass (the organ console on a lift would have to stay around floor level though).
The unfriendly local RCs wouldn’t go near this culture in church with a barge-pole.
"When you get stopped going into a public place and you are told, 'You stand here and I'm searching your bag,' that's a search and seizure only the police department can do with probable cause," Mayor [John] Street told reporters yesterday.
"People in a free society going into a movie theater are entitled to more than that."
I think that the government has successfully proved that any service member has reasonable cause to believe that the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal.
As around the sun the earth knows she’s revolving And the rosebuds know to bloom in early May Just as hate knows love’s the cure You can rest your mind assured That I’ll be loving you always
As now can’t reveal the mystery of tomorrow But in passing will grow older every day Just as all is born is new Do you know what I say is true That I’ll be loving you always
We all know sometimes life’s hates and troubles Can make you wish you were born in another time and space But you can bet your life times that and twice its double That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed So make sure when you say you’re in it but not of it You’re not helping to make this earth a place sometimes called hell Change your words into truth and then change that truth into love And maybe our children’s grandchildren And their great-great grandchildren will tell
FromCælum et terra Catholic worship vs padded pews Daniel Nichols beautifully describes the Orthodox tradition in which he now worships and paints icons. What he contrasts it to sounds very like (Erastian and Protestant) Anglicanism in 18th-century England* before the Gothic Revival and Anglo-Catholicism changed things in the 19th. Also, I first read his observation about Protestant worship’s sterility vs Catholic worship’s childlikeness (not the same as childishness/patronization) in a book from the Episcopal Order of St Anne (nuns) written 80 years ago!
Having icons with a glowing red lamp and a smoking brass censer in front of them and bowing and crossing myself in front of them while reading St Basil and company’s profoundly theological yet poetic prayers seems like the most natural thing in the world.
*When pews weren’t only padded but boxed/walled off, with the upper classes having their own stoves for heat, etc., and you had to pay rent for them.
The Catholic faith From Fr Alvin Kimel Male priesthood and the grammar of faith The attempted ordination of women is something I’m not particularly interested in because it’s a non-starter but there are actually two Catholic positions on it: improbabilist and impossibilist. Given what the last Pope for example has written on the essential difference and complementarity but equality of the sexes (not ‘genders’, which are simply grammatical constructs, not essential) in my opinion the evidence favours the impossibilist position.
Pope Benedict XVI From Occidentalis The Pope’s proposal: More than one patriarchate in the West Besides the Pope as Patriarch of the West actually there are and have been for some time AFAIK three honorary patriarchates in the Western Church, those of Jerusalem, Venice and Lisbon (the last even has what looks like the papal tiara in his coat of arms).
Meet Bartholomew Gosnold The English vice-admiral who was the real founding father of what’s now the US: the first leader at Jamestown. A UK archæological dig may have found his bones there. If 37 is officially middle-aged then I’m a not-young-anymore fogey.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. My father [bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay] is Hungarian and my mother's [1950s bombshell Jayne Mansfield] grandparents were from England. And yes, I speak Hungarian. In fact, I can fake my way through several different languages. Suffice it to say, I'm good with an accent.
She deserved the Golden Globe: pretty and can act compassionate but believably strong enough to be a New York cop. As for her survey even though I’m all for romance I’m inclined to say that Benson and Stabler shouldn’t date and not just because Stabler is married (a big part of the show’s ongoing storyline). The ‘Law & Order’ shows are plot-driven, not character-driven (they’re not soap operas), and I fear it’d just be a big distraction like the otherwise wonderful-to-look-at Olivia D’Abo is when she pops into ‘L&O: Criminal Intent’ to be (the great) Bobby Goren’s nemesis.
11:02 PM Permalink
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In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse and offensive, but simply absurd.
Of course. My only contention is regarding who should have done the defeating: let the Nazis and the Communists destroy each other, killing two birds (the former evil and the latter really, really evil) with one stone.
For Americans, the first national legend concerns the very definition of World War II. In recent decades it has come more and more to mean the war against Hitler’s Germany. But for the American people at the time, ‘‘the war’’ meant the Pacific war.
For racist reasons conveniently used by FDR at the time (here’s also an accurate description of what the Pacific war was):
Apart from the way it was fought, that war was pretty much a traditional contest for imperial hegemony. The Philippines did not belong to Japan by right, nor to America. And while the Third Reich practiced a kind of evil different in kind even from Japanese atrocities, the Germans were never demonized and dehumanized in American propaganda and popular culture as the Japanese were a difference grimly reflected in the way Japanese-Americans were interned but German-Americans were not.
And:
For my own country the first nourishing myth is that ‘‘we won the war.’’ It’s true that only the British, along with their Commonwealth and Empire, took part in the war from its start in September 1939 to its end in August 1945; true too that British defiance of Hitler in the year from June 1940 to June 1941 was absolutely crucial. But the British, as they knew even at the time, could only play a negative part by not surrendering. They could not defeat Hitler on their own, but had to wait for him to bring about his own doom, by invading Russia in June 1941
Correct.
and declaring war on the United States (rather than the other way round, be it remembered) in December.
Behind this lies an awkward truth, one we didn’t learn in the cheerful war comics and books of my boyhood in the 1950s, but on which all serious military historians are now agreed. From the beginning to the end of that war, whenever the British Army met the Wehrmacht on anything like equal terms, the Germans always prevailed. And that pretty much goes for the US Army too, from their first disastrous encounter with the Germans, at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, in early 1943. American and British commanders always took good care thereafter that they had an overwhelming superiority in men and especially in weaponry before engaging the enemy.
So one can argue that American and British involvement on the Continent didn’t defeat the Nazis — Hitler’s own blunder of invading Russia did — and even argue that all it did was enable the USSR for its decades of empire afterwards.
In a war during which no British soldier, and only one GI, was shot for cowardice, at least 15,000 German servicemen were executed for dereliction of duty.
As for the lone American, search this blog for ‘Eddie Slovik’ to find out what a travesty this case was. And given how hard up the military now is for warm bodies and how military recruiters are cheating to get their numbers up, it’s only a matter of time before it happens again... and again.
A heroic Russian narrative of the war, and the memory of the tens of millions of Russian dead, is still potent and plays a part in the sinister nostalgia for Stalin resurfacing in Russia but Russian heroism also has to be qualified.
Yes, qualified by the fact that the Communists murdered far more of their own civilians than the Nazis did.
Saw that sinister nostalgia in the news recently:
‘Союз нерушимий...’: Russian pensioners enact a perfect travesty of an Orthodoxкрестный ход with icons (fromThe Moscow Times)
For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways, particularly by the bombing campaign that reduced the cities of Germany to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000 British servicemen killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were numbed — the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ — but it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.
Nor on the other moral compromises at the war’s end. Great Britain did not go to war to save the Jews from Hitler’s torment (and did not succeed) but to protect the freedom and integrity of Poland, an aim that Churchill, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, abandoned at Yalta. Worse still was the forcible repatriation of prisoners to torture and death in Russia and Yugoslavia. And yet all this was not simply conspiracy or betrayal: The Iron Curtain, with half of Europe under Soviet rule, was a painful but logical consequence of the way the West had let Russia do most of the fighting.
I’m reminded of the two Ukrainians I’ve met who wore German army grey (one served in Vlasov’s Russian army, nothing to do with western Ukrainian separatism from Russia, the other in the Wehrmacht) to drive the worse of two evils, the Soviets, out of their home.
The ramifications of this move are rather depressing. Time was the CDF at least functioned as a counter-balance to Cardinal Kasper's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. But no more. Now Kasper has an ideological friend and ally in the CDF.
His battalion chaplain, Captain Matt Temple, told him he was "ashamed of the way you have conducted yourself. I certainly am ashamed of you. I hope you will see your misconduct as an opportunity to upgrade your character and moral behavior for your own good and the good of your fellow man."
Apparently this minister of religion considers the following ‘moral behaviour’.
The gospel according to George’s minders:
Sgt. Benderman's opposition is not the theoretical if sincere opposition of a student peace activist. Kevin Benderman has seen things that none of God's children should have to endure. He was present when his superior ordered his unit to open fire on small children who were throwing rocks at the soldiers of his unit. He chased the hungry dogs from an open mass grave filled with the bodies of young children, old men, and women. Kevin saw the burned child, crying in pain, while all around her ignored her injuries.
Lord, in Thy mercy: hear our prayer.
Like another hero, Camilo Mejia, he knows what he’s doing and is taking the consequences like a man.
The turning of Middle America The red-staters are starting to ‘get it’ about Bush and Iraq just as top Democrats are selling out:
While Republican Joe from Indiana has gone from supporting to opposing the war in Iraq, along with millions of other Americans, Howard Dean, the former antiwar Democratic presidential contender and now Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has changed from opposing the war to supporting the occupation of Iraq.
Opposition to the Iraq War is crossing the ideological divide. In the bars of America (which I know something about), non-liberals are getting fed up with this war. Although seldom stated explicitly, there is a growing feeling that Iraq is becoming another winless, bloody Vietnam, a disaster and humiliation in the slow making. In Republican strongholds in the Midwest, conservatives are reluctantly turning against not only the war but also the man who gave us this war, George Bush. Unfortunately, mainstream Democrats appear to be on the wrong side of this change.
Although Howard Dean (along with Dennis Kucinich) carried the antiwar flag during the Democratic presidential primaries, possibly costing Dean the nomination, he has now abandoned that position at the exact time Americans appear to be catching up to his antiwar stand.
Possible stopped clock Tom Hayden tells the truth:
I do not believe the Iraq War is worth another drop of blood, another dollar of taxpayer subsidy, another stain on our honor. Our occupation is the chief cause of the nationalist resistance in that country. We should end the war and foreign economic occupation. Period.
To those Democrats in search of a muscular, manly foreign policy, let me say that real men (and real patriots) do not sacrifice young lives for their own mistakes, throw good money after bad, or protect the political reputations of high officials at the expense of their nation's moral reputation.
No, mobilizing 500,000 troops wouldn't have prevented airplanes from crashing into buildings, but that is putting the cart before the horse. The Swiss wouldn't have invited an attack like that. My ideas of a citizen army and a non-belligerent foreign policy is not an either/or proposition. They are to work in tandem.
My contact with their stuff is in my job at a small-town newspaper. The local RCs send me their bulletin every week which sometimes has inserts like ‘Catholic (sic) Update’ printed by the St Anthony Messenger — stuff obviously from people who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s and sounding like the starkers emperor’s courtiers (hollow praise echoing through empty rectories, seminaries and convents no doubt) except that they actually believe their own bullshit. An example: to keep an imprimatur they can’t come out and say that they’re indifferentists but they obviously want to soooooo bad!
... [Friedrich von] Hayek--with the perspective of a foreigner who had adopted England as his home--could perceive a further tendency that has become much more pronounced since then: "There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by the British people in a higher degree than most other people . . . were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility . . . non-interference with one's neighbour and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority."
He might have added the sense of irony, and therefore of the inherent limitations of human existence, that was once so prevalent, and that once protected the British population from infatuation with utopian dreams and unrealistic expectations. ...
From Andrew Cusack The ex-Catholic Apostolic Church, Edinburgh A beautiful church perfect for our kind of worship but actually the product of some 19th-century Scottish do-it-yourselfers, Presbyterians to begin with who claimed to have new revelations (a little like the early Mormons), whose sect has since died out. Part of the same social-cultural currents of the time that created the Gothic Revival and Anglo-Catholicism.
What I’ve ordered from Amazon Holy Bible, King James (Authorized) Version, 1611 Finally! The standard of the English language in the rare originalAnglican version, a great Catholic Bible as it’s got all of the deuterocanonical (‘second canon’) Old Testament books (known to Protestants as parts of the Apocrypha) that originally were in Greek (why the Jews later and after them the Protestants dropped them). Most King James Bibles are printed by Protestants, who have omitted those books from their printings since the 1800s.
I think I’ll be about set when I get it: I’ve also got a Greek/Latin parallel New Testament, a Protestant Bible in Russian (good translation approved by the Russian Orthodox but the deuteros are missing), an Апостолъ in Slavonic with the NT except the Gospels and the Apocalypse (the last is not read liturgically by the Eastern Orthodox), a good old RC Douay/Confraternity Bible from the 1930s for some good commentary to answer Protestant arguments, an RC Revised Standard Version, again with some helpful commentary, and the New RSV Study Bible, which has got even more OT material, such as the extra stuff found in Eastern Orthodox Bibles such as Slavonic ones, but the English is soooo PC (the OT is ‘The Hebrew Scriptures’ and there’s, gack, ‘inclusive language’). The extra texts and the commentary might be helpful (checked against trustworthy Catholic commentary of course) but I’ll be sticking to the King James for my reading (and Coverdale’s psalms, which I’ve had for a long time).
Incidentally this version has long been the favourite English Bible of Eastern Orthodox, perhaps dating back to a time when more Anglicans could be trusted and they were keen on real dialogue. Some of the former say that this is actually the most authentic English version.
Anyway I’m happy that this book is on its way (and for less than the local Protestant shop wanted to charge!).
LRC picks Awkward truths about World War II My belief: the Nazis and the Communists would have destroyed each other without American intervention, with the result of no Iron Curtain. Much like Napoleon, Hitler lost when he decided to go after Russia.
Two years out Charley Reese on that ‘mission accomplished’ rubbish
Each weekend hundreds of loyal Roman Catholics travel miles and miles to attend the unchanged traditional Latin Roman Catholic Mass, offered each Sunday at 9, 10 and 11 o'clock at the Ave Maria Chapel in Westbury, Long Island...
- Intro to the Radio Mass
Samer has told me that Fr De Pauw, the Belgian-born former canon-law professor who started one of America’s first traditionalist chapels (in a New York hotel hall — it’s been in Westbury since 1968), died the 6th May, aged 86.
22 years ago he was a small part of my formation — through his taped votive Low Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary broadcast every Sunday night on the radio in New York he introduced me to the sound, the prayers and the language of the Roman Mass! (I knew what it was thanks to my old-school Episcopal liturgical formation and understood it as by then I knew Spanish.) Essentially he got me started learning Latin! His bass voice with a thick Dutch (Flemish) accent was unforgettable: ‘Hail, Holy Kveen’.
(Here is a quickly downloadable .ram video of the Fr De Pauw experience: A look round the Ave Maria Chapel, his position in his own words and then a complete video of his votive Low Mass of the BVM.)
Interesting fellow — he served with the Belgians and then in the Polish Army as a chaplain during World War II, having been priested in 1942.
Then he was a respected canonist teaching at Mount St Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md. in the 1950s and 1960s.
That’s what he was really — an academic and a lawyer, not a pastor or a liturgist.
When the end of the world happened in the 1960s he tried to do what Fr Nicholas Gruner tried and succeeded at 10 years later (and got away with for 20 years): Lawrence Cardinal Shehan in Baltimore went after him and he tried to get himself incardinated in Italy, in the Diocese of Tivoli, but Shehan wouldn’t excardinate him. So for decades afterwards Fr De Pauw either had two bishops or none depending on your POV... he was listed in the Catholic Directory, I think under priests of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, until the 1980s.
He wasn’t without his faults. There are many excellent ways to defend the Roman Mass but his niggling, eccentric reading of canon law (‘Quo Primum is irrevocable’, etc.) isn’t one of them. (QP, with which St Pius V issued the Tridentine Mass, is written in standard Roman legalese as Father well knew and in fact the Roman Mass was fine-tuned several times after the Pian missal was issued.) As he was functionally a vagus (he refused to affiliate to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s group) he was a bit of an ego trip, a legend in his own mind. There is a strong whiff of ‘worship of the 1950s’ in his brand of traditionalism, and part of that was his toadying to the US government and its civil religion, the Establishment... the immigrant as super-patriot. Unlike SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson, Fr De Pauw wrongly was in favour of the war in Iraq. (The cult of the US military was big in Fr De Pauw’s 1950s-worship.) Like a mouse standing on top of a Republican elephant, vicariously being a big shot!
So what you ended up with was a kind of caricature of 1950s suburban ethnic-Irish RC practice, big on devotions but weak on ecclesiology (‘Which bishop are you under?’ is as basic and traditional as it gets) and the essentials of ‘Mass-and-office’ Catholicism as emphasized by the legitimate liturgical movement that Vatican II killed. And of course the social-justice and peace aspect of the faith is too important to be abandoned, left to liberals!
In a sense he was ahead of his time — he tried to save the Roman Mass a few years before others tried — and while his refusal to cooperate with other traditionalists isn’t exactly excusable it’s partly understandable — maybe he deserved credit he didn’t get.
As for which bishop he was under, canonist that he was, he tried to solve this by the book — as a travelling priest of a foreign diocese, just like Fr Gruner was for 20 years — instead of going under a retired bishop without ordinary jurisdiction (what Abp Lefebvre was) so he gets some credit for that. He couldn’t find a way to make it work though so functionally he was ‘his own Pope’ with all the possible cult-of-personality dangers of that.
But Fr De Pauw deserves a grateful tip of the biretta and of course our prayers as he kept the Roman Mass going in his part of the world when nearly no-one else was.
O GOD who didst cause thy servant Gommar to enjoy the dignity of a Priest in the apostolic Priesthood, grant, we beseech thee, that he may evermore be joined unto the fellowship of the same. Through Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
Where I’ve been Eastern State Penitentiary revisited Spent most of Saturday at the marvellous yearly jumble sale* in the streets all around this old prison and finally walked around inside most of the prison itself with an audio tour I flipped on occasionally.
There are several art exhibits going on at once. One uses sound — taps and booms — to give the impression of being haunted. When I first saw another — white statues of cats on the roof and pavements — I thought they were supposed to scare away birds and rodents! No, they’re sculpture, ‘Ghost Cats’, a tribute to the colony of semi-wild cats who lived at Eastern from its closing until only a few years ago, and the man who fed them for 20 years. (The cats were caught by the museum staff about 10 years ago and neutered as a humane act; the colony then slowly disappeared.)
Whoah-ho-ho-ho! Look at all those toilets!
- Bart Simpson
The oldest cell-blocks like the façade are towering and oddly beautiful like a cathedral; the one place where I felt the presence of evil was the most modern block, No. 14, dark and dripping with condensation and icicle-like stalactites. Death row oddly enough didn’t scare me.
But the scariest story comes from one of the old blocks I walked through:
But of the many graphic reports of ghostly activity at E.S.P., the story of a middle-age locksmith is perhaps the most powerful and most frightening.
Not long ago, the man was alone there, at dusk, in “four block” (Cell Block #4), performing routine restoration work.
At one particular moment, he was removing a 140-year old lock from the door of an abandoned cell when he encountered an energy so incredible and so powerful that to this day, he shudders when he recalls his introduction to the ghosts of Eastern State Penitentiary.
It was as if that locksmith somehow possessed the key which opened the portal to Eastern State’s tortured past – and was ushered through that ghastly getaway by the phantoms who dwell in those cells.
Faces in the walls … a glowing, floating rock … a foggy, steamy, form which seemed to beckon…
These images were only part of the man’s encounter with the unknown in Cell Block 4 that night.
He was physically transported into a nether world by a tidal wave of energy upon which as many as 100 ghosts spiraled.
In what might be described as an “out of body” experience, the locksmith felt drawn not only to, but into, the horrible supernatural stew.
One spirit seemed to dominate and rise above the others. It rose as the form of a man, with three rings of steam, or mist swirling around it. But within a short time, others … hundreds … of bizarre forms materialized.
He describes his emotions at the time in weird and confounding terms – “It was as if I was inside a microwave oven,” he says. But then, there when he recalls, it was as if he was “standing buck naked in a sandstorm at the North Pole!”
So confounding and confusing was the episode that the locksmith was riveted in place, unable to move, as spirits cried from every chamber and wall of “four block.”
He could do nothing but stand petrified amid the ghosts – or at least some of the ghosts – which haunt that very special … and very haunted place.
Sometimes, as in some southern and eastern European countries, holiness and extreme evil can be in the same place. The RC chaplain’s office has murals of biblical and church scenes painted by an inmate who was baptized while in prison and after his release never committed a crime again.
*At which I rescued some sacramentals including Seven Dolour beads, a third-class relic of St Frances Cabrini and a Mexican folk-art glass-doored little box with a holy-card portrait of... the Maronite monk St Sharbel from the Lebanon!
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From blog member Samer al-Batal The latest from the Holy See on nuclear disarmament Even as a semi-catechized Cold Warrior kid the nuclear option gave me conscience problems: ‘Sir, turn your key!’ (If you are my age or older you’ll recognize that reference.) That’s reinforced now by knowing the Catholic faith, which transcends and makes irrelevant the shifting popular notions of political left and right (I am a classical liberal), and by knowing some of the people, specifically Russians, who would have been incinerated.
Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, defender of the Roman Mass, wanted Vatican II to condemn the use of nuclear weapons.
What I believe revisited: Why? An answer from a non-credentialled person written in literally 30 45 minutes:
Non-Catholics and non-believers may be puzzled by this blog’s frequent entries about or alluding to a certain kind of churchmanship. Puzzling to those who wrongly think ‘Christian’ means ‘evangelical Protestant’ or ‘Christian conservative’ means ‘Protestant religious right’. Or the non-believing visitor might think, ‘How quaint’ or (patronising) ‘That works for you’ or simply ‘Why does any of this matter?’
The last is a powerful question and one that I can’t answer as thoroughly as I’d like but it’s only fair to try.
‘So you believe in this stuff. Why?’
I didn’t systematically go through all the books I could find comparing religions though unconsciously I did do some studying.
Like some said of Elvis ‘I was born believing in God’ but I largely got my cues from the clues all around me all my life in Western culture, all of which point to the faith, to the church, which ultimately points to God. Even secular things and natural phenomena point to a prime mover.
That and traditional moral theology — learnt (largely from a saintly priest taught by the old school with the Roman manuals) after I started doing things in church — I’ve personally found to be true.
And as you’ve probably noticed if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, the traditional rites and ceremonies evolved over centuries (not corrupt modern knock-offs reminiscent of Protestantism) best teach and express this Godwardness.
So it gives me a foundation, a worldview, a compass, a road-map and any better metaphor you can think of.
Fine, you might say. So do lots of other religions!
Protestantism is obviously man-made, an altered knock-off of the real thing. A quick read of history with an open mind demolishes it (in its ‘pluriform’ manifestations as Frank Griswold might say) easily. The trump-card for arguing with Protestants is ‘Where did your Bible come from?’ The Bible isn’t self-interpreting (thus thousands of squabbling sects) and it didn’t fall out of the sky; it’s the church’s book.
Back to the ‘squabbling sects’: the Protestant principle of private judgement is self-refuting. It breaks the law of non-contradiction.
As for non-Christian religions, the faith’s explanation of them as ‘good dreams’ from pre-Christian times (as C.S. Lewis put it) and containing parts of the truth is sufficient. They didn’t form my culture (except that Judaism, the mother of Christianity, partly did) and the faith makes room for everything that is good and true in other cultures. Wonderful.
Then there’s the personal matter of faith, your devotional feelings or your ‘personal relationship with God’. Just like the disciples’ account of their seeing Christ risen, which no-one else did, such can’t be proved but as with all of this (including Aristotle’s prime-mover idea) the Schoolmen for example did prove that it’s not unreasonable to believe. (It takes blind faith to be an atheist, not a Christian!)
Two or three people may try to write off my own faith and advocacy of it here as symptoms of Asperger syndrome. ‘There he goes again’, obsessing and perseverating. Of course God can use anything to speak to you, and if you are born into this fallen world with a disability (evil doesn’t come from him) he can use that. Yes, of course the rules and rituals can particularly appeal to somebody with AS in a way they might not to someone else. AS is a part of me, whether I like it or (often) not, but all that bringing it up does is show that (no surprise) I’m a less than perfect spokesman! The faith stands on its own.
It’s fashionable now among writers about autistic-spectrum disorders to speculate that famous people in history, from Newton to Einstein, had them but if you want to throw my faith in my face you have to prove that millions of people over millennia (what a cloud of witnesses!) had them, which I’m sure one can’t do.
(BTW, Dan Aykroyd and Steven Spielberg really do have AS.)
Since I’ve known about AS for five years and so can consciously compensate for/work with or around it, I dare say that, except for finding unusual ways to get my brain to work (to think and do things you might take for granted), it’s irrelevant, about as pertinent as whether or not a spokeman wears glasses! (I do.)
Incidentally this is how I think the Rosary works for somebody on the spectrum: it takes ‘stimming’ behaviour and applies it to prayer like putting a waterwheel in a river.
I know that there are ‘thinker’ blogs by people who’ve done their homework and can write that could put all this much better but I think that about covers it for now.
For the most part people can solve their problems on their own without having to get authorities involved. At least in smaller communities it seems to be that way. If parents can reprimand their children by teaching them what is right and wrong, it is only common sense that adults should be able to settle their matters in their small communities on their own. Today’s small communities only need Opas [grandfathers] again, the elders, to oversee the process, because they used to carry the most respect when it came to the facts of life; they have lived it the longest.
If the Union were still voluntary, the Supreme Court wouldn’t dare, for example, to strike down the abortion laws of all 50 states, because many of those states would have seceded immediately after such an outrageous usurpation of their power.
Mr Blair, this defeat is for Iraq and the other defeats that New Labour has received this evening are for Iraq. All the people you have killed and all the loss of life have come back to haunt you and the best thing that the Labour Party can do is sack you.
The cause of death was a form of cancer now appearing with increasing frequency among Vietnam veterans exposed to the defoliants called Agents Orange and Blue.
A reputation won on the battlefield made it impossible to dismiss him when he went on the attack later as a critic of careerism and incompetence in the military high command. In 1971, he appeared in the field on ABC's "Issue and Answers" to say Vietnam "is a bad war...it can't be won. We need to get out." He also predicted that Saigon would fall to the North Vietnamese within four years, a prediction that turned out to be far more accurate than anything the Joint Chiefs of Staff were telling President Nixon or that the President was telling the American people.
On leaving the Army, Col. Hackworth retired to a farm on the Australian Gold Coast near Brisbane. He became a business entrepreneur, making a small fortune in real estate, then expanding a highly popular restaurant called Scaramouche. As a leading spokesman for Australia's anti-nuclear movement he was presented the United Nations Medal for Peace.
...Hack's conviction that "nuke-the-pukes" solutions no longer work in an age of terror that demands "a streamlined, hard-hitting force for the twenty-first century."
With a majority of 161 seats in Parliament until Thursday, the Labour leader - George W. Bush's closest international ally in Iraq - now faces four years of running Britain with only 66 seats more than his opponents. It is a safe majority, as long as Labour MPs are happy to toe the line. In recent months, about 50 rebel Labour MPs have repeatedly voted against their own party's line.
"From now on, he (Blair) is on a leash," said Patrick Dunleavy, professor of political science and public policy at the London School of Economics."He will be constrained in anything he says, internationally and domestically."
"His authority is much reduced," said John Curtis, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde.
That’s not a bad thing — witness second-term Clinton, conservative president, boxed in by a Republican Congress.
Mr. Blair appears to have lost much of the public's trust, many of whom believe he led them into war in Iraq on the basis of a lie –that Saddam Hussein wielded weapons of mass destruction.
Clueless liberal from the World War II or boomer generations 20 years ago:
The church must change and be more liberal to relate to young people.
LOL.
Nearly every church type complaining about the new Pope is old. The same people who bragged to me 20 years ago that the coming generations won’t know let alone want the old religion.
A new word from an anonymous priest via Hilary at Fiat Mihi:
Ratzenfreude: The expression of joy about others’ dismay about the election of Pope Benedict XVI.
In defence of Laura Bush, stand-up comic • She’s smart. • She’s funny. • She’s an attractive lady of her age. • There is a place for bawdy humour. • She has the same freedom of expression defended by this blog as anybody, even if you don’t like her act. • Anything that pisses off a fascist like Michelle Malkin has got something going for it.
From Whitehall Fr Alvin Kimel vs Bishop Charles Bennison on Catholicity Fr K gets it; +Pennsylvania doesn’t. The latter is infamous for the half-truth perverting the Catholic position on scripture: (quoting from memory, paraphrasing a little) ‘the church wrote it (in a sense true) and can change it and has many times (false)’.
FromKatolik Shinja On the track record of Catholic vs Protestant colonies A topic, including the Calvinist connexion to the worst abuses, I’ve blogged about before. Other examples include Russian intermarriage with the Aleuts in Alaska (who are still Russian Orthodox) and the Anglicans vs the Dutch Calvinists who invented apartheid in South Africa.
We understand that the listing of the Eucharist was highly upsetting to Catholic members of the eBay community and Catholics globally. ...we have concluded that sales of the Eucharist, and similar highly sacred items, are not appropriate on eBay. We have, therefore, broadened our policies and will remove those types of listings should they appear on the site in the future.
On behalf of Bill Cobb, President of eBay, Inc., North America
Suza Capps eBay, Inc. Office of the President Support Team
A prayer:
O Lord, my God and Saviour, Who, as Thou didst endure for our salvation the outrages of those who crucified Thee, so now endurest the irreverences of those who “discern Thee not” rather than withhold Thy Sacred Presence from our Altars; grant us Thy grace to bewail, with true sorrow of heart, the indignities committed against Thee; and with devout love to repair, as far as lies in our power, the many dishonours Thou still continuest to receive in this Adorable Mystery; Who livest and reignest, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, God, throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.
The dry and barren waste must burst forth into springs of living water. This change must take place in our hearts if we would be saved; in a word, we must have what we have not by nature, faith, and love; and how is this to be effected, under God's grace, but by godly and practical meditation through the day?
Saint Peter describes what I mean, when he says, speaking of Christ, "Whom having not seen ye love: in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."
Christ is gone away; he is not seen; we never saw him, we only read and hear of him. It is an old saying, "Out of sight, out of mind." Be sure, so it will be, so it must be with us, as regards our blessed Saviour, unless we make continual efforts all through the day to think of him, his love, his precepts, his gifts, and his promises. We must recall to mind what we read in the gospels and in holy books about him; we must bring before us what we have heard in church; we must pray God to enable us to do so, to bless the doing so, and to make us do so in a simple-minded, sincere, and reverential spirit. In a word, we must meditate, for all this is meditation; and this even the most unlearned person can do, and will do, if he has a will to do it.
Of course, as a priest at the unquestionably sound Brompton Oratory once preached on the feast-day, Christ appearing to go ‘up’ was a visual symbol he chose as something his audience would understand; he was really entering another dimension*, not risking being burnt up in the outer atmosphere as John Spong fatuously argued.
The 5th May is also the feast-day of Pope St Pius V, codifier of the Roman Mass.
On the box Asperger syndrome on ‘Law & Order’ again Saw it the other night in a special two-hour one. Knew within the first hour that the suspect had it. Missed most of the other one with Mark Linn-Baker but thought that Vincent D’Onofrio as Bobby Goren was much more sympathetic than anybody in the recent one. (Goren might have it!)
The depiction of AS was pretty accurate right down to the bad treatment the sufferer got from his mother, a cop (Stabler deserved to have his job threatened for harassing the suspect) and a prosecutor (I can’t stand Bebe Neuwirth’s character, full stop). But I’ve met one person diagnosed with it and she didn’t act like that — you wouldn’t have known unless she told you.
Just what we need — the public thinking that we’re perverts and criminals using a disease-of-the-week excuse. Despite the psychologist’s explanation I’m afraid that’s the message people get.
One of the best scenes: when the defence lawyer, the mother and the man with AS are in a room and the first two are talking/arguing about the case. The man suddenly throws a teacup onto the floor, stands up and says angrily, ‘He’s still in the room. Stop talking around me!’
Does New York have the ‘guilty but mentally ill’ plea? I think that’s the plea and verdict that should have been used — it’s fair to both the defendant (he does time and gets help) and the victims (it doesn’t excuse what was done to them). He was mentally ill because the AS was badly handled but people with AS know right from wrong (whether the person is aware is a distinction both the law and moral theology rightly make).
P.S. Northern Ireland has a strong accent — think Gerry Adams. If you’re going to have a character from there who emigrated in her 20s, she’ll still have it, though probably modified, 30 years on. Couldn’t they have hired somebody who has or can do the accent? Sometimes adults’ accents completely change but more often not. Once you hit puberty, if you move you may pick up some local colour but won’t sound like a native the way kids can change their speech. It’s the same window involving brain structure and chemistry that makes it easy for kids to be fluent in more than one language but hard for adults.
List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can't really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), 'Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.'
Sport. Some sports are fast and fun to watch (I can go to a game and enjoy myself) but I don’t and never will understand why most people are obsessed with them. So you waste lots of money on overpriced game tickets and products for teams that are only businesses nothing to do with you personally or your cities (didn’t you learn anything from the Dodgers abandoning Brooklyn, the Colts Baltimore or the Browns Cleveland?) but I’m weird for not buying into it?
Las Vegas. And its East Coast opposite number, the new Atlantic City, which unlike Vegas I have seen. Trashy. Psst... it’s all rigged so you’ll lose.
‘Survivor.’ I watch some reality TV, admitting to being fascinated by the eating stunts in ‘Fear Factor’ and the educational value of ‘The Apprentice’ (how business and businesspeople act, in game-show form) but I’ve never seen this.
Fashionable secularism/agnosticism/atheism. How on earth can people live without being conscious of a Higher Power or without a road-map? Looking at the state of things, in a lot of cases not very well indeed.
Jennifer Lopez. I think the reason she wore that infamous deep-cut dress to the awards ceremony was to blind you with her breasts to the fact (IMO) that she’s really rather ordinary.
Britney Spears. (Actually her target market is a bit younger than I am.) It seems like she’s hiding under layers of computer-enhanced sound the fact that she can’t actually sing. As for the rest of her act, I’m supposed to be turned on but any number of stars are sexier without even trying. As a British critic wrote of Kylie Minogue about 15 years ago this girl is about as arousing as a dancing, prancing antiseptic swab.
‘Desperate Housewives.’ Teri Hatcher’s hot but ABC simply isn’t a part of my world.
Roller coasters. Forget it. I freak out on kiddie carnival rides.
Runners-up, in the category ‘They’re orright I s’pose but I never got round to reading/seein’ ’em’:
Also, the analogy of the painter and his work for religion and the dismissal of it doesn’t work as it obviously leaves so much unanswered (the painter may have come up with a pretty picture of God that’s not entirely true but who made the painter?).
Charlotte Wyatt A pro-life case in the UK. One cannot withhold food and water as in the Schiavo case but there are times when one can refuse extraordinary means to prolong the life of someone who’s dying... when does that cross the line into Peter Singerian infanticide/euthanasia?
More on abortion as eugenics ‘It fights crime retroactively’ is really a way for liberals to say ‘I can’t stand the thought of those people... breeding!’ There’s something funnily ironic about such hateful people unwittingly applying their own logic to themselves as they’re contracepting and aborting themselves into extinction.
One of the joys of going to school at San Francisco State University in the late 1980s was seeing and meeting many of the different flavors and denomination of communists, socialists, and other various leftists.
My experience at the six or so antiwar marches I’ve been on in the past few years, from cute college girls and cool Palestinian activists to splintered Commie front groups, the ‘Free Mumia’ fools (quoth a friend: yes, retry him so he can spend the rest of his life in prison because he’s a guilty f*cker) and the loudmouths from ANSWER.
...why I'm far more critical of them than I am of Democrats right now. Because they pretend to be the friends of liberty when they are not, never have been and never will be. Some of you may have fond memories of a GOP that at one time was indeed vocal and honest in supporting liberty. I do not. I came of age in the 1980s, in Ronald Reagan's America, when the "liberty" of the Reagan-Thatcher Axis of Evil gave us a hectoring, moralistic school-marm state, more law enforcement, more government contracts for corporations to build things – armaments, mostly – no one wanted to or could ever afford to buy, and more lobbying for more appropriations as those corporations milked the state for all it was worth. It meant more, not less, government regulation, more intrusiveness, more centralization and more war.
Democrats? Liberals? Leftists? Incompetent, incapable, irrelevant, impotent. Even during the Clinton regime. They proved their pointlessness in generous portions during the last election, and will prove it again in the next election.
Which is why, in 20/20 hindsight, I miss second-term Bill. Boxed in by a Republican Congress in practice he ended up being a fairly good conservative, even balancing the budget and creating a surplus which Reagan (whom I voted for once) didn’t.
Regarding the morals, culture-wars stuff, I won’t be fooled (played) again, even though Mr Bush’s handlers tricked votes from people like me in 2000 by making classic-conservative noises about non-intervention and against ‘nation-building’ (unlike, booooo, Clinton in ex-Yugoslavia). Remember when conservatives were afraid of the government because of things like Waco, and Specialist Michael New refusing to go to foreign wars under UN command? (They’ve got no problem with burning people to death and with needless wars as long as they’re in charge.)
It doesn't matter right now that liberals and Leftists aren't real friends of liberty. They have no power and will likely not have any for some time to come.
To pinch a slogan from sometime pop star and nutter Sinéad O’Connor, fight the real enemy.
What about 9/11?
What indeed. If the classic-conservative talk were more than talk Mr B’s handlers would have pulled troops out of Arabia (fixing what proximately pissed off bin Laden) and stopped propping up the Zionist police state (we know the protty religious right will never do that, for their own barking dispensationalist reasons) and 9/11 never would have happened.
Christianity provided the first, and most effective, challenge to the state's unrestrained war-making power. In the twentieth century, states became quite skilled at, to paraphrase Ryan [McMaken], "slipping free of the yoke of Christian morality."
Today, with the assent to political and cultural power of the "end times" Christians and neoconned Catholics, we are witnessing a new, and dangerous, phenomenon: a Christianity which actively celebrates war and labels those who oppose war " bad Christians." Opposing those who think Christians must study war forever more should be our first priority, even if it means an otherwise unacceptable alliance with the religious left.
BTW-- Look for the Catholic neocons and religious right to take pot shots at the new pope as soon as it becomes clear he will continue his predecessors' heroic opposition to the war party....
If I remember correctly, Woodrow Wilson pretty much told Pope Benedict XV to shove it when the Pope tried to stop WWI.
Teachers are being told not to mention that Communion bread and wine represent the body and blood of Christ in case children get it in their heads that Christians are cannibals.
Think the system might be a bit biased against the Catholic faith?
It’s the same thing the pagan Romans accused the Christians of.
One can also get into what ‘represent’ means — if by it you literally mean ‘make present’ then no problem.
New guidelines for religious education teachers also want them to refer to the Holy Spirit rather than the Holy Ghost because the latter implies "a trivial and spooky concept of the third person in the Trinity".
“And with thy ghost” would only be after the rector was dead; and that would be inappropriate because the ghosts of good people (I am assuming that your rector comes in this category) were not supposed to appear to people, as in the forbidden raising of the ghost of Samuel by the Witch of Endor.
Confusing sorcery with apparitions of saints and, by extension, with asking for their prayers (the stricture against speaking to or praying for the dead) sounds Protestant of the original writer.
To be honest when I was a kid and first heard ‘Holy Ghost’ I thought of Casper but in spite of that am for ever grateful for having experienced the tail end of the old Episcopalianism — by introducing me to the basic forms and substance of the Catholic faith it immunized me for life against...
The world has gone barking mad. This is just pandering to — and actually increasing — children’s ignorance of religion, rather than teaching them facts and truth.
Why go to church on Sunday morning to listen to what can be heard at home on NPR?
For people not Stateside, NPR is National Public Radio, a respected news service but one that’s considered somewhat secular- and liberal-biased.
8:27 AM Permalink
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On religious liberty By Pope Benedict XVI It’s yesterday’s liberalism but (contra the good folks of the SSPX) the good kind of liberalism: the classical kind, not the modern or liturgical ones
Often not lived up to (witness the failed invasion of Canada, the treatment of the Cherokees and later other tribes, the Mexican War, the War of the Northern Aggression, the Spanish-American War and the theft of Hawaii from the Hawaiians) but closer to the true and good heritage of America, not what’s being fobbed off as patriotism now.
Drawing on lessons learned from the extraordinary triumph of war propaganda, along with the early accomplishments of the advertising industry, social scientists embarked on the comprehensive application of these social psychology techniques to politics. They've never stopped since.
This in turn caused a split to resurface among liberal thinkers of the day. One side held that the public could and should participate in democracy. The other scoffed, maintaining that the public was too ignorant to do any more than cast ballots once in a while. Needless to say, corporatist-conservatives didn't then and don't today even bother dithering with such sophistry.
Priests often make the mistake of assuming that the touchy-feely stuff will attract the young, but there is no evidence of this. When I was at college we got a new chaplain who thought we would like to do a folk Mass and all this bogus ‘meaningful’ stuff. Well, we did it once just to humour him, and then got on with rehearsing the Byrd four-part Mass for Sung Mass on St. Margaret's Day.
More recently he has taken, when in Rome on a Sunday, to attending mass in the eastern rite at the church attached to the Russicum, the Russian College.
Some might think me a staunch conservative because I still believe in Almighty God. Yet, by today’s standards, I’m a flaming “librul” because I don’t believe that His Name is “George Bush”.
From truthout CIA takes prisoners to country condemned for torture Two things are upsetting about this story: that this is happening and that there are now so many of these stories. As the government flunky in the trashy movie Broken Arrow said, one doesn’t know whether to be more upset that such things happen or that they’re so common that the government has got a code name for them.
The corporal works of mercy Nun fights for families and justice (register to read — sorry, all three of these are from The Philadelphia Inquirer) In the photos she looks very secular and liberal but of course one can’t argue with her charitable work and advocacy for the poor: something entirely Catholic that the secular world has pinched!
False dichotomy:
... the [police] officer who once turned in frustration to the fierce, slender woman during a protest she was leading.
‘Sister Helen’, he said, ‘nuns are supposed to be home praying! What are you doing here?’
True perhaps of actual nuns (most RC orders of women weren’t and aren’t), who are female monks whose main ‘job’ in the church is to keep the opus Dei (liturgical prayer in the form of the daily office) going, but not of traditional religion in general as falsely accused by the secular media.
Scene from bad 1960s movie or movie about the period:
Sister Liberal: As John and Paul (and George and Ringo) have just taught us for the first time in human history since Jesus, all you need is love and so we must help the poor — what a radical concept! (And long live Che Guevara and Eldridge Cleaver!) Father Villain: Sister, you will be silent! Shut up and meditate on Our Lady! (Booooooo.)*
Getting back to reality, the people Thomas Woods writes about in The Church Confronts Modernity, people like Dorothy Day, Catherine de Hueck and the JOC (Young Catholic Workers) movement, and the Anglo-Catholics in Victorian London and 1940s South Africa (they started the anti-apartheid movement) ‘got it’. The secular world and its ageing imitators among church types either lost it or never understood it in the first place.
A helping hand, a helping of grace (register to read) A heroic Baptist minister went to Indonesia to help after the Boxing Day tsunami. The kind of religious practice that the secular world likes, big on charity, silent on matters of faith. True as far as it goes but not the ideal of course.
*Last night some friends and I saw parts of the movie version of The Shoes of the Fisherman, based on Morris West’s embarrassing then-trendy 1960s novel on those themes in which a Teilhard de Chardin clone, one of the story’s heroes, preaches such crap, improbably winning over Anthony Quinn as West’s bad ripoff of the real, heroic and un-liberal (he learnt good scholastic theology as a seminarian in Innsbruck circa 1912 and later adopted his saintly predecessor’s (Metropolitan Andrew (Sheptytsky)) use of authentic Orthodox externals) Metropolitan Josyf (Slipyj). The movie is worth a look mostly to see the papal tat before it got trashed in that period and also as an odd time capsule of the rubbish that earnest then-young church types bought into. Looking at the number of vocations since then, including of women serving the poor (thanks, Treat), you can draw the conclusion on it. Am still looking for the answer to balancing papal primacy with fairness to non-Roman rites: the actual history of the Eastern Catholics and West’s book and movie are no help!
Some jottings about the news
blog info
a not unsympathetic look at Medjugorje (
