Pedes Christi
Hip, hip, hurrah! Not only has old (no, he’s not old) acquaintance Michael LaRue had a blog for some time but like another old but still young acquaintance, David Ermine, he’s now a Knight of Malta. Since I met him in 1993, when he was a good SSC priest, he’s had a long, wonderful journey.

Blog highlights:

• Dealing with anger in which he still sounds like a wise pastor.
• On Christian manliness. Basically by grace ennobling the crude alpha strengths Roissy preaches about.
• Including the most un-Roissyan chastity in one’s state of life. I remember a few years ago listening to an prominent and well-known Catholic layman extolling the virtues of self-mastery when it came to sexuality. The thought that came to mind as he spoke was, “He hasn’t mastered his sexuality, he has just repressed it!’ It’s worth remembering that virtue comes from vir, a clue that it means more than a quaint euphemism for a woman’s virginity.
• The danger of ritualism or why I’m not as avid a reader of NLM as you might think. He and I have probably been acquainted with enough spikey vicars of Bray (thanks for that phrase, Margaret) including gays who just like to dress up (like all stereotypes this has a lot of truth). Of course Catholicism and ritual go together and ritualism’s mirror fault, the Thomas Day factor of Irish-American hostility to ritual, is wrong too. Eastern Orthodoxy has its problems in practice too, such as xenophobic anti-Western Old Country folk (but not nearly as many ethnic born members are like that as you think) and fanatical, puritanical converts (Bob Jones goes high-church, goes online and becomes unholy terror Barsanuphius Jones; they also glom onto the obnoxious anti- stuff from the Old Country), but this doesn’t seem to be a big one there. More ritualistic than the Roman Rite (including the old version) most of the time but never for its own sake.

Labels: Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith