Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Straight talk to Anglo-Catholics about converting: the Orthodox option and other things. This blog is not a house organ; I don’t do pollyannish The Journey Home/Again glurge. In a lot of ways converting sucks even when you have to. I never want to do it again.
• The Roman option: My line, certainly true for Americans: everything Thomas Day’s written is true. In England ACs as RC national parishes (Andrew Burnham’s ‘bringing our folk with us’) along with the Polish immigration can make Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival of the Roman communion happen there. (But he’s got to clean house/go over the heads of the old liberals in his outfit to make it happen.) A long time ago there (no Poles yet — they were still behind an Iron Curtain) I often could find the Catholic religion because I was looking for it.
• ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’ An AC priest on temporarily staying behind: For those of us who are pastors, it’s not just about our own souls. It’s about the souls of our people too. As St. John Chrysostom said: “A priest though he may have ordered well his own life, yet, if he have not exercised proper vigilance over others, is sent to hell with the evildoers.” I don’t want to go to hell. Running headlong into “the fullness of truth” would seem to forsake our flocks whom, were we to delay a bit for the sake of catechesis and sensitive pastoral leadership, might come with us. Or at least some of them might. From Fr Jeffrey Steel.
• Why should we let the Enemy rob us of our heritage? The history of a mediæval parish and its place in ACism, from Fr John Hunwicke via William Tighe.
• On ‘services to relate to the kids’, or the old want unliturgical guitar junk. Speaking personally, I like guitars quite a lot whether it is in classic country or the virtuosity of Van Halen, Hendrix, Gibbons, Morelli or others. But that doesn’t mean I want to hear that style of music in church... We have a traditional liturgy apostolate that prays Vespers and Compline from the Monastic Diurnal [my breviary] on Monday nights by phone conference, and we facetiously refer to it as our “youth ministry” because the twenty-somethings came up with the idea and implemented it (and I’m grateful they did).
• Blogging ecumenism rocks: even though we don’t agree on particulars (because there’s a huge divide among us based on this issue; the ‘sexy’ stories grabbing some headlines are only symptoms of it) and probably in our lifetimes never will be in one church I dare say the Orthodox convert boomlet (though like Owen you can argue that bubble burst), Bishop Cravens, Derek and M, Brian M, Paul Goings, Pope Benedict’s revival and I are part of the same great movement (right, I’ll say it, of the Spirit) Catholicwards. Which is why we are at least talking to each other. The real ‘new Oxford Movement’ Cardinal Kasper is talking about?
• While in Derek’s com-box don’t miss the Revd Vicki McGrath on immanence and transcendence not only not being mutually exclusive but feeding off each other, something the legitimate RC liturgical movement of the early 20th century and the Orthodox agree with. High and deep. If you can’t pray up, you won’t be able to pray down.
• ‘I’ll take the high road and you’ll take the low road, and I’ll get to Istanbul before you’: I view the Ben Lomond situation as being a quintessentially Protestant fight. The essence of Protestantism (in so many words) is thinking that you have a right to defy Church authority as soon as you think a) you have a greater magisterium than the Church, or b) that those in authority have sinned one too many times for your liking. b) BTW is why the Charismatic Episcopal Church (never Episcopalians/Anglicans but Pentecostals who became do-it-yourself anglicans, for a long time a successful new denomination) broke up.

An idea about Sarah Palin from Tripp
Part of McCain’s intent is probably to muscle in on the silly PC identity-politics game. Ending it — making people think about real issues instead — would be a nice unintended result but probably won’t happen. Sorry but I can’t help remembering Jim Watt: ‘I’ve got a black, a woman’... and they cancel each other out!

So long and many thanks
LRC’s Charley Reese is retiring

On how my business has changed:

In 1955, when I started as a reporter, newspaper city rooms were full of tobacco smoke, alcoholics, gluepots, steel rulers, copy pencils and typewriters. There was a lot of profanity and an occasional fistfight. Editors excelled in sarcasm. But they taught me how to write clear sentences.

I never had to deal with typewriters at my job (Deo gratias), and people have always had to go outside to smoke, but am old enough that I learnt to touch-type on godawful manual ones right out of a 1950s office (they were so hard to use I nearly failed the course — now with computers, pure touch-typing with no clunky machine in the way, I’m fine of course) and, at the small-town paper I’ve been with for 11 years, still did literal paste-ups for the first couple of years. I used to know how to use a proportion wheel, which was sort of a slide rule of my trade. No fistfights but a few blessedly un-corporate characters, reporters and editors (some of whom drank) both charming and nasty and usually with something to teach me. The person who gave me my break in the business was a woman originally from Mississippi who’d been a national news reporter in the 1960s (she was acquainted with the astronauts), left for a while to raise her children, then ended up editing small-town weeklies.

Today

Computer keyboards don’t make much noise.

And thanks to the Internet no more constantly ringing telephones.

For all that’s wrong with a big reason for Obama’s SWPL support (not the colour-blindness MLK talked about 45 years ago but an affirmative-action candidacy: ‘we owe them this’... that and many of them are, consciously or not, statist interventionists like he is) of course I agree that it’s

a good sign that a black... can win the nomination of a major party.

I couldn’t care less what colour he is — somehow that makes me a bigot
From Taki

March for life not for Bush
A conservative RC agrees: don’t get played. From Vito of the Society of St John Chrysostom.

Have years of circulating photographs of aborted babies hardened us to the photographs of dead or hooded, naked, and leashed inmates in American military prisons? Has listening to the ugly shouts from the mobs of pro-aborts outside of clinics where pro-lifers protest or counsel deafened us to the screams of Arab boys being abused by American soldiers? Will the hungry, thirsty, and naked who are imprisoned in George Bush’s gulag, or the homeless, sick, and dead in American-occupied Iraq have no advocates at the Last Judgment? Is Arab life in no sense sacred? Are the born worthy of no pity all? Can the Administration and its propagandists who justify or downplay the gravity of our crimes honestly be counted upon to be “pro-life”? If injustices of any kind are dismissed by us as being inconsequential, it casts doubt on our real commitment to and understanding of the Christian message in general, and the cause of the unborn in particular. If our voices are not raised against the horrors of a fraudulent war, unjust imprisonment, and torture, do we have a right to, and can we practically expect to get any serious hearing in our fight for the unborn?

On not voting:

Participation in community life is, indeed, a responsibility, but there are other ways of participating than by giving one’s assent to a fraud. Italian Catholics were directly ordered by the Papacy not to vote in national elections in Italy in the late nineteenth century because those elections, by their very nature, were designed always to hurt the cause of the Church. Italian Catholic participation took the form of an organized abstention from support for the existing system, and a dedication of energies to a militant education of the Catholic population for governing roles in a future, better nation.

The Dem convention: behind the glitz
From LutherPunk. Don’t miss David Bennett’s comment.

Beauty and the beast
This whole election is as meaningful as Mexican wrestling but it’s educational people-watching fun. Clever: pick a woman to look hip and appeal to some disgruntled Hillary Clinton fans but somebody who can keep working the Protestant right so you can play the moderate.

Kucinich sells out
A liberal I otherwise like. What the hell was he thinking? From LRC.

On ecumenical and interfaith doings

When it comes to faith, there is little room for messing around.

Being placed firmly in your beliefs to the point of intolerance is not some sort of license to impale your neighbor on your sword, but rather a foundation on which sincere charity (and not superficial “niceness”) is built.

Intransigence in the truth means humility before the truth. The good believer (not the fundamentalist) does not reply to invitations to compromise his beliefs with the sword, but rather says a staunch yet somewhat sorrowful “non possumus”: we simply can’t. We are servants of the truth, not its masters.

The ecumenical gestures of the world bother me because I simply don’t think they are very honest. I don’t think that Hindus become better people by being better Hindus, but I do think that Hindus will be better people if Catholics are better Catholics. The best way for Catholics to show “common ground” with other belief systems is to show that Catholicism is the way of life that can encompass all of them and bring them to perfection, and that means a pure, unadulterated, Eurocentric, logocentric, patriarchal, etc., etc., Catholicism as it has always been. Catholicism simply must “roll over” other belief systems, and in that process, the other belief systems will begin to meld, develop, and blossom new Catholic cultures, very much based on the original, but still very much as native as the pagan religions. All one must do is look to the Philippines and Latin America to see places that are thoroughly Catholic and thoroughly “other”. The traditions of the Word Incarnate invaded and stayed there, went native and colonized all in one fell swoop.

The kind of tolerance, not indifferentism or condescension, Arturo’s talking about is why I’m a libertarian.

Religion and libertarianism
Except for the pro-abortion bit Machan’s right. Again it’s good to remember that libertarianism doesn’t pretend to be a complete worldview like a religion; it’s only a tool, a way of doing things.

Leah’s right

As heated as discussions of ecumenicism and inter-faith dialogue are among Internet “Church nerds” of all types, how many regular pewsitters believe that their particular sect, denomination, or church is the “true Church”? How many actually know what theological position they claim to profess by virtue of attending a church of a particular denomination? Very few, I would think. Hence, I would think that most modern Americans by default are religiously indifferent, regardless of their supposed affiliations.

More Derb

I can’t say that I ever felt much warmth for either John McCain or Barack Obama. The first struck me as a burned-out Senate seat-warmer (term limits! oh please, term limits!) who had shown outstanding courage as a young warrior but considerable wrong-headedness as a politician — a category of persons with which history has, after all, been well supplied. Obama I have never seen as anything but a bag of wind, possessed of great political guile, but steeped in the faddy, solipsistic notions of post-1960s college leftism.

That these two men are much worse than I thought only became apparent to me at the Saddleback interviews conducted by Baptist minister Rick Warren in front of 5,000 of his parishioners.

Here the truth came out. These are not merely two different specimens of mediocrity, as is usual in presidential campaigns; they are two different specimens of love-the-world romantic fantasist.

In accordance with their youthful experiences, McCain sees the task in warlike terms: “evil must be defeated.” To Obama it’s more a matter of community organizing.

This is a Christian church? Hasn’t anybody present heard of original sin? The only way to eliminate evil is to eliminate the human race. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that McCain’s policies will have that result, but if it’s the result he intends, he ought to tell us.

Both men are determined to set this planet to rights, though, and hang the cost. Can we afford it? Yes, we can! (That faint sound you hear? That’s the clink-clink of devaluing dollars — just ignore it.)

From Taki.

A president not a saviour

In the original constitutional scheme, the president was neither Empath-in-Chief nor a national life coach. His role was to faithfully execute the laws, defend the country from attack, and check Congress with the veto power whenever it exceeded its constitutional bounds.

From RR.

Go, Derb!

Both parties’ choices of nominee are appalling to me. I contemplate the next four years with dread.

I don’t want either of these men in charge of the federal government, neither the crazy old fool nor the simpering sophomore. I don’t want either the moralistic imperialism of John McCain or the welfare-state-to-the world sentimentalism of Barack Obama.

American optimism has got completely out of hand. A corrective is needed. The corrective must come from conservatives, the people who understand that “human nature has no history.” We must revive the fine tradition of conservative pessimism. In this age, optimism is for children and fools. And liberals.

From Rod Dreher.

O tempora!

• The mess we’ve made of marriage. Charley may be right that the first writer linked here was being tongue-in-cheek but too much of this is literally true now.
• Nominally RC universities and ‘gender’ silliness. To announce that one’s gender can remain an open question — as an institution does by providing trans-friendly restrooms* — is an act of profound moral and intellectual defeatism. It amounts to saying that nothing important is knowable (whence nothing important is transmittable). Of course the people peddling that last bit don’t believe it themselves; they’re still living off Christianity’s capital regarding things like murder and ‘there are no absolutes’ they say absolutely.

*Lavatories.

Modern art and music
Very different to a YF æsthetic but they have their place

• Joshua: Guernica is a hideously ugly painting depicting a hideously ugly atrocity. I’ve never hated modern art because it is the only medium to express the ugliness of our times.
• Punk is reactionary. It was a reaction against bourgie conformity and commercialism. Authenticity and truth, even if presented in the most crass and shocking way possible, were to trump the delusion of all is OK. Read on.

Talking to Tripp and his friends about the US election

On growing up and the real world

The problem nowadays is that people conflate “X is immoral” with “the government should stop people from doing X”. America has a long history (up until around 1970) of giving citizens the freedom to do morally wrong things (be racist, be sexist, be lookist, etc.) as long as they were not explicitly injuring another person (classically theft, assault, fraud, slander) — and especially when it involved the disposition of a person’s private property. It relied on individual initiative to correct problems outside this sphere. Thus, if you are bothered by a business’s hiring and promotion practices (Abercrombie and Fitch, Hooters, whatever) then don’t shop there. Further, exercise your free-speech rights and encourage others not to shop there. Demonstrate in front of the store with picket signs. (Remember MLK’s fabulous bus boycott — black folks brought these immoral businesses to their knees... purely by using their First Amendment rights and their rights to shop where they chose.)

If you don’t like Delta’s hiring polices, go work for another airline. Or go back to school and learn another trade. But take responsibility for your own life rather than constantly running to Daddy (embodied in Big Government) to make the world treat you better.

— Jon at T 1:9

Mary
Marian devotion is really about Marian doctrine — about the Mother of God and thus God not one’s perfectly normal mother complex — but with Arturo I agree that this kind of piety is a good thing

• Another YF on the Assumption.
• The Assumption in the Orthodox tradition.
• More.

RR

• US Treasury, deadbeats?
• Economic myths.
• Canada deports US deserter. Appealing to UN authority over national is not the answer. (IOW I believed the furore over another soldier, Michael New, 10 years ago and back then the conservatives were right.) These men are heroes; part of their heroism is doing time and getting a bad discharge for their stand.
• Strangling Palestine.
• Pouring fuel on the Afghan fire.
• UK: Ingsoc and Big Brother.

This would have sunk a campaign 50 years ago
But not now. (Most of the swing vote identifies with Biden here.) It shouldn’t anyway with separation of church and state. But it’s like when a mainline Protestant minister tells the truth about Iraq or Palestine. Nobody outside his little circle is listening. It only makes the Sojourners feel good like this does the EWTNers (most of whom are in Mad Mac’s pocket anyway).

From the LRC blog

• The world would be better if more liberals were like Kucinich.
• Obama: cross me and you go to jail.
• The man’s master plan is ‘acquiescence to the status quo’. But who cares? He looks black and his family are the Noughties version of Camelot. I wouldn’t mind seeing him trounce Mad Mac but understand if the swing-voters aren’t swallowing this.

I made myself listen to Hillary Clinton’s feel-good rally speech last night, laughing every time she said how much she supports Obama. Anything worth reporting beyond that? Well, Chelsea’s grown up to be pretty.

Another YF on the Anglican row

Why should I be bothered about what a group of old frauds in frocks think about homosexuality? Well, I simply couldn’t resist blogging about what the chaplain at Porterhouse would call good, decent honest lust!

I despise the liberals for turning this into an issue of rights. That a woman has a right to be ordained or that a practicing homosexual has the right to be a bishop.

Were Gene Robinson a gay man trying to follow God’s path in life but occasionally falling into sin, then to me it would be a situation entirely different.

That reflects the Catholic position.

These issues are only symptoms of this great divide. The Protestants claim the power to bless gay sex; we don’t.

The fact he is a divorcé and is now living with his gay partner is what I object to.

The Church, to me, is about saving souls and not about throwing in its lot with modern society and modern values. What ever happened to going against the grain? What happened to Athanasius against the world?

Harry Tudor wanted an annulment the same time the Protestant heresies were metastasising in Europe. The rest as they say is history: accommodating the desires of the ruling class is simply what these people do as Theo Hobson approves of. He also notes that conscientious Christians in that church always felt bad about that — ‘half-hating’ this inherent liberalism. Evangelicalism, Methodism and Anglo-Catholicism were all trying to fix it.

The liberals need to lose their self-righteousness and the evangelicals their venom. And the church needs to rediscover a sense of tradition and continuity with which it can be restored to Holy Mother Rome.

Yes, the Evos would have to stop being Protestant (they could read some history as Newman suggests) which is about as likely in our lifetimes as the Episcopalians giving up liberalism.

From LRC

• Churchill knew the truth about the US and WWI: America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany.
• Does Bush want war with Russia? Russia’s war of retribution was far less violent or excessive than the U.S. bombing of Serbia for 78 days over Kosovo, or our unprovoked war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which has brought death to scores of thousands, or Israel’s 35 days of bombing of Lebanon for a border skirmish with Hezbollah. Yet, declared John McCain of Russia, “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” Even Dick Cheney must have guffawed. If we bring Ukraine into NATO, what do we do if Russified east Ukraine secedes and Russia sends troops to back the rebels? Here common knowledge is right: the eastern Ukraine is Russian.
• Neocons don’t get it. Democracy cannot be imposed on other people at the point of a gun.

Three from Michael Lawrence

• The scary a-word. Anarchy.
• Where do anarcho-Catholics find order?
• The hyper-democratic-socialist attitude in this country has pitted various sectors of society against each other to see who can more successfully loot the others. This applies to everyone. “Conservatives” like to pretend that they are not guilty of this sin, but truly they are just as bad as the Democrats: look, for instance, at how right-wing evangelicals have lined up behind Republican candidates who promise to make essentially theocratic principles the law of the land. The interesting thing is that the Republicans always manage not to self-destruct over it. LRC’s Butler Shaffer: Where would the Democratic Party be without its endless parade of victims and whiners who can be counted on to stagger and stumble into voting booths on behalf of party candidates?

The marriage gap rolls on
You can predict who will vote for whom. (Both sides are wrong.) From Steve Sailer.

Talking at MCJ

• Chris Johnson’s spiritual autobiography.
• Mine. Yawn. More.
• Talking to Dr Tighe and others about the conservative-Lutheran option for middle-stump ’Piskies. Why don’t they do it? More.
• Mark’s appreciation of MCJ:
  

  It is kind of funny that this blog has become such a haven for Anglo-Catholics and for ex-Anglicans who have gone to Rome or the East. It just happens that the other conservative Anglican blogs are evangelical in character and have gotten into heavy comment moderation and/or banning. For an Anglican or ex-Anglican of catholic sensibilities this just happens to be the last interesting blog left where we are welcome. Thank you, CJ, for running it and continuing to allow these voices to be heard. If it weren’t for you, where would I go to get my regular dose of Wm. Tighe?

Fr Hunwicke on WO: the larger church trumps everything

Unity with the ancient Churches of East and West which claim the allegiance of more than three quarters of the world’s Christians.

The unity of Christ’s Body the Church Universal is a Gospel imperative rooted in the nature of the Blessed Trinity itself (John 17; Ephesians) as well as in prudential considerations of witness and mission.

Amidst rubbish some good words from Jim Leach

Today’s Republican Party has broken with its conservative heritage.

The party that once emphasized individual rights has gravitated in recent years toward regulating values. The party of military responsibility has taken us to war with a country that did not attack us. The party that formerly led the world in arms control has moved to undercut treaties crucial to the defense of the earth. The party that prides itself on conservation has abdicated its responsibilities in the face of global warming. And the party historically anchored in fiscal restraint has nearly doubled the national debt, squandering our precious resources in an undisciplined and unprecedented effort to finance a war with tax cuts.

Biden’s lies
From Steve Sailer

Three from Benedict Seraphim

• On Joe Biden. It shows Obama’s fear and insecurity. But I don’t think it’s matter and anti-matter; Obama’s an interventionist (pro-war on Afghanistan to look tough for example) and more establishment than his fans like to think. He won’t lose those people so he can afford to reach out and choose someone calculated to appeal to a chunk of the swing vote, a muddled-middle white nominal RC like the kind of voter who doesn’t listen to Deal Hudson. Here’s the Times: No threat but no asset either. I’m not the only one who remembers Biden plagiarised Neil Kinnock.
• Forgiveness in a Communist prison.
• St Maximus the Confessor.

Great American inventions
From Chronicles’ curmudgeon Clyde Wilson: lists one, two and three

• Replacing the White Man’s Burden with the Multicultural Gender-Neutral Burden.
• Carnival-tent religion.
• A minority group endowed with large, unprecedented privileges by law, that continues to complain of oppression by the “privileged” majority.
• Christmas as a spending and consumption orgy.
• Atomic bombs and nuclear warheads (with a little foreign help).
• The cigarette, the most toxic form of tobacco use.
• Presidential “debates” that are not really debates.
• Libraries and bookstores filled with nonbooks.

On the Catholic thing

• ‘Just what are you?’ As usual Arturo understands a lot: Theology is something we should not take lightly. Again, the question: what flavor is this blog? The cop-out answer is, “I am Catholic, period, without labels or other allegiances”. Of course, there is the right-wing solution, one that is affectionately known by those who like it about as much as a toothache as “rad-tradism”. I guess in a lot of ways, I am more squarely in this category, if only by formation. [But] to go to my designated “liturgical watering hole” to get my liturgy of choice... I just feel it far from natural. And an answer, an opinion and school of spirituality not out of place in orthodoxy but possibly surprising to those who don’t really know orthodoxy: So in reflecting on this, I came to the conclusion that my Catholicism, indeed my entire system of seeing the divine, is viewed through the prism of the feminine... Marian. I think if there were more devotion to the Mother of God, everything else would fall into place. I don’t consider my Mass-and-office Catholicism particularly Marian but I agree. If that element’s not there something’s wrong because again the veneration of the Mother of God ‘is inherently about Jesus and that without paying proper attention to Mary, Christ is being short-changed and not fully understood’. Of course, that is the great thing about Byzantine worship: it is Marian par excellence. Of course! It’s o/Orthodox.
• From the same entry: To tell the truth, I am most proud of my non-Catholic readers, since that means I am writing something that transcends the party line.
• Arturo’s friend A. Guillory on the communion and cultus of the saints (not a cult in the modern sense of mind control and something that’s a false, rival god), which I think answers Derek: I think we Catholics salivate over those “say this prayer (this way) and (such-and-such) will happen” the way others must pick out their lottery numbers for the jackpot. But it’s not really that it’s works-based — it’s how we know that they are holding our hands. In the same way someone is just an acquaintance until they give you a true gift, a sincere gift from their heart. It’s how God and the saints become our intimates. We have saints that always knew they were going to be saints (St. Maria Goretti) and saints who got there initially kicking and screaming (St. Francis of Assisi). Saints who refused to fight (St. Martin of Tours) and ones who led armies (St. Joan of Arc). Saints that levitated during Mass (St. Joseph of Cupertino), and saints that fell asleep (St. Therese of Lisieux). Ones who were kings (St. Louis) and ones who did without great possessions (St. Anthony the Great). Ones who founded religious orders (St. Madeleine-Sophie Barat) and ones who did great things in existing ones (St. Bernard of Clairvaux). Ones whose lives are concealed behind myth and legend (St. Dymphna) and ones who kept diaries (St. Maria Faustina Kowalska). And on it goes.
• From the same entry: Maybe my children will finally figure out how Calvinists can believe in unconditional election and irresistible grace and yet care so much about what others do.

Death Sentence
Vigilante justice with Kevin Bacon from young Aussie director James Wan. Lots of good stuff here from the action thrills to blowback to John Goodman’s character to (not really developed but there) the younger brother’s conflicting feelings (the favourite son gets killed). Some critics rubbish Bacon for being wooden; I thought it was believable for his character, a corporate supremo who when pushed too far really is tough enough to pull this off. Did anybody before this think of using a rickshaw to film a chase scene?

Smithville, New Jersey
Not a bad place to spend a Saturday afternoon. I’ll remember the wild chickens randomly crowing.

Is man the creature God wants for its own sake?
Bishop Williamson explains

Amongst all the material creatures on this earth, man alone is rational, i.e. endowed with faculties capable of knowing and loving God. All the rest of material creation serves only as a trampoline for man to bounce his short life on, until either he jumps to Heaven or crashes into Hell.

But God cannot want any creature, even man, for anything other than for the sake of God Himself.

Frátres: Sóbrii estóte, et vigiláte

The devil is insanely jealous of us. He is jealous because God, bypassing the angelic spirits, chose to link His Divine nature with our human nature in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. The singular purpose of Satan then, with a fervor which is fed by jealousy, is to sabotage as many of the individual relationships with God as possible.

Sarum Rosary
As Taylor Marshall says there’s a lot of rot out there especially in Anglican circles that’s wrongly called Sarum, sort of their version of larger society’s fascination with fake Celtic stuff as an acceptable un-Roman alternative. This however is real. The mediæval version of the Ave ended with the Holy Name; St Pius V wrote the rest later.

Anglicanism: for Catholics, Articles XIX and XXI gave away the ending
Anonymously submitted by a learned online friend

Consider the penultimate paragraph of “The Revealing Church” by Dom Gregory Dix, in Laudate Vol. VIII, No. 29 (March 1930), pp. 24-46:

It is because it leaves no room for faith, but ultimately only for opinion, that we have presumed to call this theory of the authority of a fallible Church impossible; it is because it has already broken down under trial that we call it reactionary. Queen Elizabeth’s renunciation of the title “Supreme Head,” with all that it implied, in favour of that of “Supreme Governor” is its exact equivalent. what the Elizabethan church required, even under penalty of death, was obedience, not faith. Except for those doctrines upon which there was a general conventional orthodoxy at the moment quite apart from her dogmatic teaching, the English Church was to have no teaching and no revelation.

IOW when the surrounding society favoured orthodoxy, it looked orthodox. I agree.

Conformists might believe in their hearts what they willed of all the doctrines on which men differed, provided they conformed. It was the authority of a church by its own Twenty-first article admittedly fallible most thoroughly enforced. And it is because she has continued to send men elsewhere than to herself for faith, to the “Primitive Church” or the consensus, that the English Church for four centuries had been unable to assert her authority or to secure the obedience she has demanded. Because unless faith be the spring of obedience, in many things obedience is impossible. And now, after three hundred years of turmoil, we are presented with a resurrected Queen Elizabeth, busked in some scraps of Canon Streeter’s armour, and told that this is and was and ever shall be, not the Church of England only, but the whole Catholic Church of Christ. Non tali auxilio shall we end our troubles. It was she who first erected unreliability into a system and began them.

The article was a long review of One God and Father of All: A Reply to Father Vernon by E. Milner White and Wilfred Knox (1928) — a semi-modernist “liberal catholic” defense of the Church of England and against the papal claims.

Biden
The LRC blog so far:

• Part one.
• Two. RCs who vote this ticket don’t know about, don’t accept or set aside Catholic principles.
• Three.

Obama gets it. He’s got to persuade enough of the swing vote so he can win. So Biden means business as usual which people mistakenly think reassuring. The man has had some good ideas. Will it turn me into an Obamacon like Justin Raimondo earlier this year or the venerable Andrew Bacevich? I’m still staying home.

From LRC

• The demise of conscience, killed by the welfare (charity with other people’s money)/warfare (the Nuremberg defence works for Americans) state.
• Whither customer service? On the lost art of counting back change (which even I can do: can you count to ten?) and the problem of parrot English from call centres.
• No more Nato by Ron Paul. Its ‘expansion only benefits the US military industrial complex’.
• The real cost of a full Fannie/Freddie bailout. Try $2.5 trillion.

Quotation

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

— Noam Chomsky

As a comments thread at Taki once said, he and even Karl Marx often are right describing problems in society even though they’re wrong about the solutions.

From Michael Lawrence.

Another solution to end the great college swindle
From Rod Dreher

Upstate Pa. history in the news

These people came here and earned a nickel a day, and they still gave one or even two cents of that to the church. These glorious churches with the golden domes and beautiful three-barred crosses were built with the pennies of hundreds of thousands of these immigrants.

— Fr Glenn Davidowich

More.

‘Free the Beijing Six’
Translation: ‘Wow, cool! We got arrested in China! Buy our stuff to show off.’ Is anybody not surprised there’s a Facebook group?

More from RR

• Buffett: Game’s over for Fannie and Freddie.
• Religious left stumps for Obama. Including nouveau evangelicals. They have the best intentions in the world, you know, the kind that pave... They’re preaching to part of the SWPL choir, of course already in O’s pocket. The swing vote likely resents these types trying to tell them what to do. Anyway here’s Tom Woods on the compatibility of Catholicism and the market.
• His empire Christianity. Jesus and guns together is just fine with the religious left when they do it. Why should government be the way you fix “our” failings?
• How deeply stupid can progressives make themselves? Other than throwing the word genocide at Bush’s people I agree. The only difference between Bush’s and Obama’s version of the establishment is O would be better at it. ObamCo will bring you serious imperialism once they take power. If you think you’ve seen imperialism under Bush, you’re as stupid as Lindorff. Bush & Co. are vicious, murderous amateurs. The people who make up ObamCo — see here, for some examples — are vicious, murderous professionals. You haven’t even begun to see real trouble, to say nothing of real slaughter and real devastation.

What libertarianism is not
Today’s LRC pick

To die for Poland?
AmConMag on the US plan

Three from Joshua

• None dare call it treason. McCain’s main foreign-policy adviser: a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.
• Right now the Democrats have a better record on civil liberties. Don’t forget that qualifier.
• Chestertoons. ‘The apostle of common sense.’

From Taki’s Richard Spencer

The latest academic fad is to publish a 30-page white paper on what everyone already knows and has known for centuries — science that makes you go “duh!”

As John Zmirak remarked to me yesterday, “The Pill probably isn’t a sinister plot to destroy the peoples of America and Europe, but would it look any different if it were!?!”

The Obamanation of desolation

The appearance of John McCain and Barack Obama at Saddleback, California’s “purpose-driven” church marks the ultimate ascent of Rick Warren to the Gantry-in-Chief of the P.T. Barnum Church of America.

Obama needs to establish church-cred, if he is ever going to win the votes of the people he hates and fears.

His self-righteous public persona should grate on the sensibilities of normal people.

When the UCC says “God is still speaking,” they do not bother to explain why their “God” has been contradicting himself so much. I used to think black people had more sense than to put any stock in the post-Christian conventicles that joined together in the great anti-Church known as the United Church of Christ, but in joining the Middle Class upwardly mobile blacks have apparently become as gullible as their white counterparts.

A few months ago I had a white driver in Texas, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Obama. When I politely asked him why, he explained, anyone will be better than Bush. That is not an easy argument to refute — except in the case of Obama and McCain.

However you describe Affirmative Action and minority set-asides, they represent a deliberate and systematic policy of discrimination against people like me in favor of people not like me simply because they are not like me.

As I have said long ago and many times, we have only two choices in America: The first is a society that is legally color-blind, that is, a political and judicial system that does not discriminate on the basis of race though it cannot, on the other hand, prevent people from following their personal whims in private life. This is what I have always advocated, and it may be one of many possible dreams arising from the classical liberal fantasy that must be dear to the hearts of Americans. The other choice is a society that discriminates on the basis of race. If that is the choice — and it is in fact the choice Obama is forcing on us — we are in something of a bind.

From Chronicles.

My idea for a VW commercial was turned down

So, Max, what were you doing during the war?

I KNOW NUSSINGK! (Max goes into reverse and drives off.)

From RR

• Why the West can’t kick its Cold War habit.
• US missiles in Poland. Let’s see, this was bad when it happened in Cuba in 1962... Now why might Putin be angry?
• UK: Man nicked for photo of cop breaking law.
• ‘Assault weapons’ rhetoric is rubbish. An old friend who knows about guns made me hip to this years ago.
• The central fallacy of state schools.
• The herd mentality lives and destroys. By a left-libertarian. Taki’s Leon Hadar: Evolutionary psychology has become a faith dressed as a science for many secular conservatives, and in particular for libertarians, who despite their sense of determinism about the depressing future of the human condition, have embraced the notion that we are programmed by our genes to act in accordance with certain principles that we call “moral” but that actually help us to survive through our interaction with others. At the end of the day, the nice guy does come in first, if you will.
• War is the ultimate disorder.
• McCain’s foreign-policy judgement is crap. More. Not that the swing vote is paying attention; some, possibly just enough, might even like it.
• Health-care retail clinics.
• The truth about the 1956 Hungarian revolt. The freedom fighters were lied to by the US. Radio Free Europe, a puppet of the CIA, beamed broadcasts into Hungary which gave the revolutionaries reason to believe that they could expect aid from the United States.

Tiananmen Square
Today’s history lesson is from Justin Raimondo nine years ago via the LRC blog. Oh, goody, common-knowledge-busting:

The demonstrators were not freedom fighters but hardline Communists protesting Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist reforms.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• PC code words in liberal churches. Marginalising versus full inclusion: Christopher Johnson and I are not on the same page — he’s Protestant, pro-Israel and anti-Ron Paul, and why on earth does he complain so much about a church he says he’s left? — but his mama didn’t raise a fool. A handy little term, this [‘marginalise’]. If you point out that my consumption of three bottles of cheap vodka a day probably means that I have a serious drinking problem, I can condemn you for marginalizing me. And if you’re uncomfortable with the fact that I enjoy spanking your wife on a regular basis, I can rebuke you for marginalizing the Adulterous-American community. But you and I both know that “marginalize” refers to one sin. And only one.
• Rome on the local level isn’t perfect. Or: ‘Full inclusion! We didn’t mean you.’ The liberals in charge in England don’t like traditionalists but the latter are still small enough that one can get away with dissing them. But when they pick on the immigrant group that’s keeping their churches open... ?
• Neither are the Orthodox. Just rediscovered Fr Gregory Jensen’s blog through Christopher Orr and I like it. Not your ordinary online Orthodox. I think similar blogger Owen White also noted that the retention rate for their converts is less than 50 per cent. More.

Two from AmConMag

• Surging into Afghanistan. Barack Obama, in his effort yesterday to out-hawk John McCain in front of the Veterans of Foreign Wars... proposed to put two combat brigades in Afghanistan by early next year.
• Marching through Georgia. As Georgia started the war in the first place, even if Russia responded with a heavy hand, wouldn’t Washington be awarding the aggressor?

A real father of 20th-century technology
A history lesson from the very funny Cracked

Edison did not invent the light bulb. He was not the smartest scientist around — not by a long shot. He did, however, hire a brilliant man named Nikola Tesla, who luckily was.

Tesla is responsible for radio, microwaves, primitive radar systems and the electricity we use today, which Edison gets credit for.

Don’t forget to add Marconi to the list of assholes who stiffed Tesla. Marconi gets credit for the invention of the radio, yet it was Tesla’s creation.

The truth is that Edison hired Tesla to redesign his electrical generators. Tesla did, but when he asked for the $50,000 he was promised, Edison replied, and this is a direct quote, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor,” and paid him only in middle fingers.

Tesla quit and tried to strengthen his electrical discoveries in an effort to provide free energy for the entire world, but Edison and his thugs at General Electric devoted time not spent on stealing patents to making sure that the rest of the scientific community thought Tesla was crazy and dangerous. Tesla died alone and in serious amounts of debt. Edison died on a pile of money in a “Suck it, Tesla” T-shirt that he did not design.

Speaking of light bulbs I’m not keen on the CFL craze.

Olbermann rightly rubbishes McCain
From the beautifully redesigned truthout

From RR

• The myth of green mass transit. Compare to SWPL (book): Public transport that’s not a bus.
• Fannie and Freddie fleece the taxpayers.
• Heads they win, tails you lose: the deal with the devil of taking state money. From LRC as is this: The evil of Cordell Hull.
• The cult of Obama is so obvious in all this, the Dems should just shrug and jump aboard ... at least for the one term he’ll be there. Don’t underestimate working-class white resentment. Mad Mac’s got a chance.
• The Obama-Clinton reconciliation act. It’s going to be hard to watch the political conventions after the Olympics. We’ll have to switch from events with real drama and results to pageantry with neither.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs
Or anti-Romanism then and now

• More on Moorestown: I didn’t get to take a picture inside Our Lady of Good Counsel Church (over 2,800 families) shown at right (maybe next time when I bring my own camera). The modernisation in this fine Victorian pile isn’t that offensive: a nice Laudian frontal, a hanging antique Sacrament light and the tabernacle front and centre in the wedding-cake reredos. Good taste reflecting this charming little upper-crust town dating from New Jersey’s colonial era (started by Quakers). Anyway this is from the church’s history: In 1866... the community acquired a parcel of land on the main street of Moorestown for their new church. Because of strong antipathy toward Catholics, a third party had to be engaged in the person of Peter Verga of Camden to negotiate the transaction. When asked what use he had for the land, Verga responded that he was acting as an agent for one who would open a business of repairing souls. Thinking only in terms of a shoe-repair shop, the seller readily signed over the deed. And so in the summer of 1867 a brick church was built in the heart of the village of Moorestown.
• Anglicanism and Rome: ain’t gonna happen. Corporate reunion that is: here the Revd George Clifford and I agree. Anglo-Catholicism’s only future is outside Anglicanism in the Catholic churches towards which it was always orientated. Most of his criticism is nothing to do with the origin and scope of the papacy and rejects the Eastern churches just as much and for the same reason. The real issue is ecclesiological: does one believe in an infallible church divinely instituted as Rome and the Eastern communions believe, and ACism’s godfathers the Tractarians believed, or in Protestant private judgement, not really a church but a collection of individuals, what Clifford describes as his freedom as an Episcopalian? (ACism was about doctrine first and not as opinions to be tolerated; dressing up in church came second.) All of the theological controversial issues from the modern ones on sex and the sexes to the classic ‘Reformation’ ones are only symptoms of this big divide. Much of Anglican culture — how to write English prose for services for example (more) — is worth saving in the Catholic world and Rome is not being hypocritical saying so. As for the Episcopal Church, Anglicanism, liberal Protestantism and Protestantism in general, as Clifford says to the Romeward, heartfelt best wishes. The door’s always open: officially Catholics are willing to talk to teach the truth about the faith including that God made man founded and still speaks through (our holy mother) the church.
• The Thames and the Tiber which covers among other things being fair to the Orthodox. From Fr Steel. Many thanks to Dr Tighe for a birthday gift a month early, a copy of Jalland’s The Church and the Papacy printed by the SPCK, and for bulletins from the Byzantine Catholic churches near him in upstate Pennsylvania including his own, St Josaphat’s Ukrainian.
• Преобразился еси на горе, Христе Боже...
• From the big blog of church porn ;) photojournal of Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival in the Roman communion, Godwardness (second photo).
• A Roman chasuble in Lyon cathedral from Treat.
• Benedict Seraphim on Rick Warren or liberals aren’t the only Protestants chasing trends: Sheesh, what is it with American Christians and “regaining credibility”?! Do we get to claim we’ve “regained credibility” when the media sez so? When we successfully pull of this mix of church-and-state activism thingy? When Rick Warren sells a bajillion more books? Come on. Also, Baptist Tripp’s home chapel has more images in it than mine. Believe it or not.

Moorestown, New Jersey
More

RR today

• Blowback from bear-baiting. Georgia started a war and oh, did Russia finish it. Pat Buchanan also talks about the West’s double standard as part of its anti-Russianism.
• Justin Raimondo on Russophobia.
• Ron Paul and the struggles of attrition.
• From the same writer: five kinds of libertarianism.
• Two paths for the Libertarian Party. This Libertarian is staying home.
• A group pointing out Obama’s record on abortion isn’t necessarily stealth support for McCain, no more than I am.

Good stuff



Click to buy.

More.

Believe it or not I’ve been on a modern gangster-film kick this summer, so far including of course the Godfather trilogy (a ‘soap opera for men’), GoodFellas and Casino.

Here’s mises.org’s Robert Murphy on the Mafia.

Two from Fr Stephen Freeman

• How to read the Bible properly: an Orthodox explains an infallible church vs Protestant private judgement. What is clear in Irenaeus’ teaching is that there was what he called the “Apostolic Hypothesis,” a framework of basic doctrine by which Scripture (first the Old Testament, later the New) should be interpreted. This consensus fidelium, or rule of faith, guided the Church century after century into its life, continually enlivened by the Holy Spirit. Though expressed in different ways at different times, the central goal was always the same: that the Church would teach the same Christ as it had received, and proclaim the same salvation it had always known.
• The veneration of the Mother of God is inherently about Jesus and that without paying proper attention to Mary, Christ is being short-changed and not fully understood. As she says, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord.’

A Protestant who likes Pope Benedict
LRC’s Charley Reese gets it and in that site’s fashion his criticism cuts across both the left and the right. (Whether it’s low-class, new-money flash or SWPL nice things, stuff is stuff as George Carlin understood.) But excommunication is not a ticket to hell; the church is not declaring the person hellbound. It’s meant for the person to repent and come back.

Christianity may well wither and die in this current flood of secularism. If so, it should die true to its roots. Trying to pander to people who hate it won’t save it.

‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world’ means somewhere on earth not necessarily Antioch, Carthage, Paris or Hull.

Sweden
Per Bylund at mises.org on his country. Good points (individual responsibility is reality) but I think Christians and others can see the same problem of pride in the bad sense in both the old and new cultures he describes. Fallen human nature, you know. Made worse by good old Protestant private judgement. ‘I answer to no-one’ and ‘I know what’s best for you’ are a dangerous mix.

Getting back to his point the reason the country was successful at first wasn’t that Swedes were socialists but in spite of it; it was because, still living off the capital of the old values of responsibility, culturally they were northern Europeans! (The British brought the same virtues to America.)

Scandinavian economist: In Scandinavia we have no poverty.

Milton Friedman: That’s interesting because in America among Scandinavian-Americans we have no poverty either.

His site:

anarchism.net

From his blog:

‘They hate us because we are free’?

Two from Mark Shea

• The 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Bad Fiction Contest. Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”
• Rome and C.S. Lewis on life on other planets.

From RR

• ‘Cultural competence’, political correctness’s latest DBA described by Wendy McElroy.
• Cannons to the left of me, cannons to the right. Both mainstream US presidential candidates want to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Not marque and reprisal to get the 9/11 culprits but a conquest of the country, something the British and the Russians couldn’t do. More. The Taliban government did not attack the United States, our old ally, Osama bin Ladin, did. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not at all the same organization (if one can really call Al Qaeda an “organization”), and no one seems to be listening to what the Afghans themselves are saying. We should be.
• Getting messy with Jesse helps Barack. Both men’s black cred is unshakeable and Jackson’s ‘badmouthing’ gives Obama a boost with the white swing vote.
• The irony is that George Bush, in his zeal to extend the US imperial reach, has actually crippled it for the foreseeable future.
• The origin of US state schools. To make Protestants who were good tools of the state.
• Bad laws breed civil-liberties violations.
• Another prediction of the end of cheap air travel and a long but interesting recent-history lesson.

Today’s LRC picks

• The downturn is good news. People are wising up and saving instead of listening to the Keynesians.
• The music industry’s suicide note and what it should have done about file-sharing.
• Believing what Obama has said all along unlike many of his erstwhile fans. The man is not a peace candidate.

Good political cartoons



From Padre Mickey.

Cricket Avenue

The Worrall House



From 1991 to 2000 the top floor was home.

That was close!

  

I almost moved into the top floor of this place. More.

Demons can’t curse Mary
From Taylor Marshall

Revelation 12:1. Signum magnum apparuit in cælo: mulier amicta sole, et luna sub pedibus ejus, et in capite ejus corona stellarum duodecim. Ps. 98:1. Cantate Domino canticum novum, quia mirabilia fecit.

Shadow army, shadow war
Using tax money to hire mercenaries

The Bush Administration hasn’t waged this war on the cheap, but certainly it has on the sly.

The administration has been able to wage this war without a military draft only by enlisting a Shadow Army, which according to the CBO, will have cost the American taxpayer an estimated $100 billion by the end of fiscal year 2008.

From AmConMag.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Answering neo-RCs who hate traditionalists. Again Arturo is spot-on.
• The only future(s) for Anglo-Catholicism. In England as RC national parishes (‘ways that allow us to bring our folk with us’ as Andrew Burnham says); in America the same (which is what Anglican Use parishes are) and/or as Western Rite Orthodox parishes. RCs might laugh at the notion of ‘Western Catholicism reconciled with the Orthodox’ as a tail wagging a dog, and Orthodox anti-Westernism is a problem, but it would be a lot of St Augustine’s, Denvers under Mgr Mangels and of course would be a good thing. Note that it looks a lot like Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival. The Continuing Churches? They do good but the world doesn’t need more denominations as Jeffrey Steenson has said.
• To answer LutherPunk’s question (more), locally, no, they don’t, which is why there are about four times as many WRO parishes (not a lot but still) as AU RC ones; the Antiochians train new priests to do it as needed and the local Romans don’t.
• Anyway what if the Anglican liberals are right? The Spectator’s Theo Hobson thinks so approvingly. Like RC converts he sees a Protestant and Erastian institution put in its place by the state (Harry and Liz Tudor and Joe Stalin shared the latter notion), sort of a spiritual concierge to the ruling class. He notes that conscientious Christians in it have always felt guilty about that — Anglicanism ‘half-hating’ its inherent liberalism — and so Evangelicalism, Methodism and Anglo-Catholicism were attempts to correct it. In the despised Third World, now free of the Erastianism (no more ‘empah’), the Evos may have won. But it’s still not Catholic.
• Somebody who denies an infallible church (agrees with Articles XIX and XXI) but accepts everything else in the faith is not a Catholic; likewise a Catholic who reads Coverdale is not an Anglican. That said this ethos, ‘a culture that began in England but isn’t limited to the English today, of a Benedictine-based emphasis on the divine office in daily prayer and a love of moderation and fair play, not necessarily tolerant of heresy but of people’s failings’, is something everybody from Ref to Dan to Charley to Derek to this Coverdale-reading Catholic come from and take part in even though it’s not enough to have a communion (‘I thought we were Church of England’ said the old parishioner in Hobson’s story). But it’s still not a bad thing to share.
• BTW, what do you say, Jorge? Is denying gay marriage a heresy according to Affirming Catholicism?
• Damian Thompson in the Sunday Times, found here: A priest who looks barely out of his teens explains what he does when unsolicited copies of The Tablet — a liberal [Roman] Catholic magazine that opposes the Latin revival — arrive at his church: “I painstakingly remove the staples and feed it into the shredder. It’s time-consuming, but God’s work.”
• This blog is not a denominational cheering squad. Rod Dreher: the priestly underage sex scandal in the US RC Church is not over.