Fact and rumour from Fort Worth

• Fact: a rector’s heartfelt apologia to his parish as he goes to Rome.
• Rumour: a meeting with Metropolitan Jonah and what it means.

Photo: High Mass at St Timothy’s in the diocese.

RIP Eric Kemp
One of the C of E’s last Anglo-Catholic diocesan bishops, retired for some time. Prayers ascending.

...died just before midnight, surrounded by his wife and family, fortified by the rites... Cuius animæ propitietur Deus.

More here and here.

From Fr Hunwicke.

Taking care of business
That is, taking out the (white) trash

Not only did work get in the way of libertarian anarcho-Catholic blogging today but I had something to settle.

Very recently as I was backing my modest car out of a space at work the bumper scraped somebody else’s as you can see here (the other car). Not a big deal. So I tried to do the right thing and left a note.

The other owner turned out to be an old blowhard I’ve worked with for 12 years; in the merger/downsizing he was demoted from one of the bosses to one of the staff. Ex-soldier who shouts four-letter words.

A lovely upper-class bohemian in our old office who was let go in the big change, a pretty good friend, thought he was one of the lowest class people she’d met and I always told her she was wrong, that that’s just his act and he was really nice, good at heart.

Class wins out. She’s right.

This creature (he’s not a man) socked me with a bill closer to four digits than three to replace the bumper.

Today he approached me in our office for the money and I told him to his face exactly what I think of him, very carefully: it sounded threatening but literally wasn’t. (It didn’t sound Christian but that doesn’t work on big bruisers from the veterans’-hall bar. As they say in cosa nostra it’s just business. E-mail me and I’ll tell you what I said.) Worked as if I’d directed it. He stomped out and yelled ‘You’re DEAD!’ An editor heard it.

TV cop heroes and martial-arts fighters know: use your enemy’s strength against him and play him.

Yes, I kept my money, now insurance is taking care of it and he’s not allowed near me on company property.

YF 1, bully nil.

I’ve picked up a few things hanging out with Italians, cumpare.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Exciting collects. Fr Hunwicke explains a way that Advent is different: it doesn’t use one of the standard scripts. Excita, quæsumus, Dómine, poténtiam tuam, et veni : ut ab imminéntibus peccatórum nostrórum perículis, te mereámur protegénte éripi, te liberánte salvári : Qui vivis et regnas in unitate Spiritu Sancti, Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum. Amen.
• The problem with mere Christianity.
• St Peter the Aleut beloved of convert propaganda. If he was real then according to Rome he was right and his murderers wrong (universal in Christendom: thou shalt do no murder).
• The Ratzinger proposal and the Zoghby initiative. In his outreach to other apostolic traditionalists the Holy Father is willing to listen and negotiate but of course defined doctrine is a non-negotiable. I wouldn’t say many Greek Catholics are OicwRs like thankfully few ethnic Orthodox are rabid anti-Westerners; both factions consist of converts online, cyber-churches. As much as I like the OicwRs versus the latter (like I prefer hanging out online with Anglicans to the convert blogs and boards of either) I’m sorry but Zoghby didn’t make sense; it was the branch theory minus the Anglicans. Tout somme schismatiques sounds charitable like the Anglicans but means no church. Un-Catholic.
• Brother Stephen on 450 years and nine or 10 schisms and conversions of the Treat family of which he is one, starting and ending with Catholicism, from Pitminster Church in the 1500s through Anglicanism, Congregationalism, ‘Churchachrist’ and Anglicanism again including Anglo-Catholicism to Our Lady of Lourdes, Overbrook and the Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank.
• Dublin sex abuse. Matthew 7:21. Throw the book at them.

WWII memorial in Virginia wants to honour... Stalin
Why that’s wrong (more). Sure, he killed more but, ‘like, Hitler was bad because he was, you know, intolerant; the Communists were idealists’.

It’s impossible to ‘win’ an occupation
This isn’t football

From RR

• Germany’s top soldier resigns over Afghanistan bombing.
• ‘Godfather of spam’ gets four years.

From Taki

• We find ourselves immersed in a culture that is paradoxically obsessed with sex but hostile to reproduction or ‘more of me, less of you’.
• The church militant. Good but I’m for legal ‘marriage equality’, only not the way the left want.

British police arrest more to get more DNA on file
John Boyden: because they care

The zoning of enterprise
Helen Rittelmeyer is back

I love Christmas. How uncool.
Now that Holiday (remotely related to and roughly contiguous with Advent) is upon us I’ll be looking for a Hallmark TV special, ‘The Armadillo That Saved Festivus’. No, seriously, I love Christmas including in its current form. (But I know that this, right now, isn’t Christmas.) So to those who grandstand about commercialism, neener. It’s when mainstream society forgets its anti-Catholicism for a while; even hard-shell Protestants put up statues of Jesus and Mary. The Incarnation wins out. God became man (actually at the Annunciation but anyway... we need a winter festival to cheer up), life’s long celebration’s here and you and I are in the way of eternal life. Deo gratias.

It’s a crying shame
Goodbye, Transfiguration

From RR

• Who will protest Obama’s war? He sends tens of thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan but that’s OK because he looks black.
• On being libertarian and pro-life. Political compromises/exceptions (except medical necessity, legal in the good old days) amount to ‘I have the right to kill you because of what your father did’.
• The conservative as victim. Retreating into ignorant tribal identity politics or the reason besides sexual attraction people pay attention to Sarah Palin. I like her but she shouldn’t hold office.
• Stereotype fake-out: who is more conscientious about rule of law and secret torture prisons, Obama’s US or an Eastern European country? Like ‘which candidate would have legalised drugs and emptied prisons of non-violent convicts?’
• Canada’s Gitmo or it’s not evil when white hockey-playing socialists do it, eh? It seems the Tories are their GOP. Also: Colin Powell’s rise to the heights of US politics was due to his burying the initial reports of the My Lai massacre in 1968.
• College is a waste of money right now.
• Who will be the new founding fathers?

Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro. Dignum et justum est.
Nice to have a bank holiday on the important Russian feast of St John Chrysostom (Roman Rite: St Sylvester, abbot) this year.

Of course it’s not a church feast but the theme fits the faith of course (εὐχαριστία).

As many others have noted the first thanksgiving in America was 23 years earlier by the Spanish in Florida complete with Mass.

This arguably goes too far (atheism sliding into selfishness) but it’s nice to see a libertarian try to answer the Puritans’ killjoy descendants trying to guilt you today. From RR.

LRC and Mises have more on all that: the Puritans began to prosper when they abandoned the well-meant socialism their descendants want to impose on us.

Photo: A prince among men, Bob Sorrentino, cuts last year’s pie. Molte grazie per tutto.

From The Times

• Bliar: of course he knew there were no WMDs when he sent a token British force as part of the Coalition of the Bullied (by Real President Cheney, a Class A bully). Historical-irony note: the same pol who invented Iraq, by drawing lines on a map cutting up the Ottoman Empire, in his drive to wipe out a rival European power (yes, a nasty one but not the worst) ended up making Bliar’s poodleness possible by, in his lifetime, turning the country into a dependency of the US (and BTW handing half of Catholic Europe to the worse of the rival European powers at the time... and as the man had a way with words named the resulting empire). BTW more American forces are stationed abroad than British at the height of the old empire. Via RR.
• How much ought the Crown be involved with Parliament? The sort of constitutional crisis that almost turned Australia into a republic about 35 years ago.

The state of Christianity in Europe
From Taki

Girly men
Cracked answers Karen De Coster’s implied question

Historically women were attracted to strapping, virile men who would pass on their bulging, hairy-chested, muscular genes to their children. Obviously the point was to ensure that the resulting offspring would be strong enough to survive all the horrifying claptrap that goes on in the forest at night.

Thanks to some hormone magic, this tends to change after the woman is pregnant.

But when on the pill, a woman’s body thinks she is pregnant all the time.

Boomers and SWPLs say they love nature, yet...

And of course there’s the unnaturalness of this.

Feudalism would work better in Afghanistan than nation-building

Feudalism doesn’t work particularly well, but, for minimal security needs, it does work.

From Steve Sailer.

From LRC

• Ron Paul: the Fed will self-destruct when it destroys the dollar.
• WASPs and foreign policy. Among things that were better 70 years ago this wasn’t one of them.
• Why college might be a bad investment.
• The real Obama will send 34,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan and backs the Patriot Act. Is this what you thought you were voting for?
• As Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute has pointed out, the immigration “crisis” — a by-product of the Fed’s financial bubble — is subsiding. This doesn’t mean, however, that we’ll soon see an end to the police-state abuses supposedly intended to “secure our borders.” Those abuses have been tolerated and even applauded by conservatives whose idea of “freedom” is a police state within secure borders.
• Big Brother Facebook. As has been mentioned before: At 18 years of age you are responsible enough to handle a rifle in order to murder someone for the U.S. military, but at 19 years of age you are not responsible enough to handle your liquor in order to have a little fun.
• My industry is still in bad shape.

Protestant and Modernist Christianity is self-refuting
Fr Longenecker has 10 reasons why it eventually dies or turns non-Christian

Another part of Pope Benedict’s revival?
I understand there was no communicatio in sacris but the new rule allowing this always bothered me. I can’t imagine a Church Father lending his cathedral and altar to the local second-generation Montanists. The Orthodox would never do it (exception: the Antiochians have rented their Ligonier retreat centre to Greek Catholics).

Every time the mainliners whinge about these stories saying how mean-spirited the Pope is I see this (unmasked schism and heresy aren’t pretty).

Time to go, chaps
John Kensit lives. Behind all the granola mealiness of the liberals is this; at least this person’s honest.

Compare to yesterday’s image in this blog.

Hooray for Pope Benedict.

Getting ready.

Sanctus Clemens, papa et martyr
The office

Cum iter ad mare cepísset, * pópulus voce magna clamábat : Dómine Jesu Christe, salva illum ; et Clemens cum lácrimis dicébat : Súscipe, Pater, spíritum meum.

The feast of title of this place as well as this one.

Tomb.

Procession parts I and II.

Do we live in a police state?
Michael Lawrence discusses this

Local: Jim Schneller for US Congress
Not bad! More.

‘SNL’ on US debt to China
From LRC

From The Onion

• Nation’s music snobs protest predictable use of Metallica and Pantera to torture prisoners.
• Middle East small talks focus on getting Israel and Palestine to talk about the weather.
• American Muslims to Fort Hood shooter: ‘Thanks a lot, a**hole!’

Music: ‘Walk Don’t Run’

10 reasons for Christians to be libertarians
From The Holy Cause

The RC Bishop of Providence does his duty
Patrick Kennedy is barred from Communion. Use bugmenot if you need to.

What’s new?
Asks Reverend Ref:

The [US 1979] BCP and ESPN both turned 30 this year. And yet, why is it that ESPN is no longer “that new sports network,” while some people continue to insist on referring to the BCP as “that new prayer book”?

If you like me were formed by, among other things, eastward-facing Communion and Cranmer’s sonorous prose (but not necessarily, one hopes, his Protestant theology) it’s a ‘new book’. US 1928’s far from adequate for Catholics (the theoretical ‘floor’ of my churchmanship using the high-low scale is the American Missal, jumped-up US 1928, the mode of the former biretta belt and now Antiochian WRO) but as Chesterton wrote, the beauty of the old Prayer Book is not the extent that it was the English Church’s first Protestant book but its last Catholic one. Cranmer went into schism and heresy but retained the 16th-century Godward worldview of our holy mother the church.

Good traditional Roman Riters will say the 1960 and 1962 (which I’m fine with) or maybe 1965 revisions are respectively the new breviary and missal and of course the Eastern Orthodox call the Gregorian calendar new.

I’d be saying the same thing then as now only I’d have been called a liberal: in the Roman Rite how about more well-done High Masses with chant, some nice Protestant hymns vetted for orthodoxy at Low Mass and sometimes having dialogue Masses (including congregationally sung High Masses) and doing at least some of it in the vernacular? (IOW Fr Hallahan could have looked over the fence at what Fr Smith probably was doing: now that’s my kind of ecumenism.)

I’m off to read Vespers from one of the old books.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• The plight of Egypt’s Copts. The ancient Egyptians, who became Christian very early on but were estranged from the larger church because of politics and what turned out to be semantic misunderstandings. They let the Muslim Arabs invade because they didn’t want to be under the Byzantine Greeks and have been a persecuted minority in their own country ever since. From Eponymous Flower.
• Iraq’s Christians seek return; sense extinction. Hussein’s (why were the media on a first-name basis with him?) rule, which was better for them than now, was none of our business. AFAIK Iraq’s apostolic Christians break down thus: the Eastern Catholic church, the Chaldæans, is bigger than its parent the Nestorian Church (properly called Assyrian; the full name is the Holy Catholic Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East... similar misunderstanding as with the Copts), which has two versions, the larger, somewhat liberalised (but not really by Western standards; relations with the Chaldæans are friendly, common among Middle Eastern apostolic Christians) one whose patriarch has lived in Illinois for some time (much of its diocese in California including the bishop converted to the Chaldæans about a year and a half ago, leaving the properties behind) and a small, Old Calendar, anti-ecumenical True Assyrian Church of the East started about 40 years ago. The Nestorians’ anaphora of SS. Addai and Mari is the oldest one still used (the Roman Canon comes close) and the only one in Christendom with no institution narrative. Website: Christians of Iraq.
• More on Eastern Christian soul and brotherhood. This week I got to know the friendly older chap, also baptised John, who works at the pizzeria near work. Assumed all these months he was Greek but he’s Armenian (is John Hovaness in Armenian?), and Armenian Apostolic (in communion with the Copts), originally from Jerusalem whence his family fled from Armenia (Hayastan, the world’s oldest Christian country) after the 1915 Turkish genocide. He’s been in the States since the fine year of 1960 and like me is a fan of flea markets.
• Did you know that Paul Anka and Jamie ‘Klinger’ Farr are Antiochian Orthodox?
• ‘Apocryphal’: the Pope on Anglican orders. Taking out later mediæval ceremonies with bad intent — officially no longer ‘thinking with the church’ — invalidated them. Reordination is the only way.
• Happy warrior Fr Longenecker’s sketch of the English ‘Reformation’ and him on the 20 minutes between the Pope and Dr Williams (short and funny): Don’t vorry. It von’t take me zat long to tell you vat I need to say.
• Reverend Ref: The [US 1979] BCP and ESPN both turned 30 this year. And yet, why is it that ESPN is no longer “that new sports network,” while some people continue to insist on referring to the BCP as “that new prayer book”?
• Gay trads. I’m all for being openly gay: honest with yourself and whoever else’s business it might be (your confessor for example). ‘Tolerant conservatism’ named for me by the other Bishop Robinson is a holy MYOB. Remember, you are a Catholic child of God first and foremost. Not a homosexual, a kleptomaniac, a glutton, a bigmouth, a lazy bones or anything else. We don’t define ourselves by our temptations or sins. We could all hang signs from our necks standing in the confessional line, but it’s the sign of the Cross that defines us and saves us.

A war on coca nobody believes in
From CounterPunch

Ron Paul wins big for the people
From Rod Dreher via Joshua

From Steve Sailer

• If IQ doesn’t matter then why are ambitious rich NYC parents having their 3-year-olds tested?
• Was Genghis Khan a dandelion or an orchid? The ongoing trend toward the future Stolen Generation of African-American children. Notice how there are two movies out this month, Precious and The Blind Side, both about how 350-pound impoverished black teenagers’ lives can be fixed up by caring social workers and/or white adoptive parents.

Genes matter. But don’t base the law on them. They’re only a factor. People are complicated and yes, deserve equal opportunity not equal outcomes. I’m neither a collectivist nor a determinist so no white-power politics or eugenics, thanks.

One of the amusing things about Palin supporters

... is that very few of them are prepared to accept that Palin and McCain represent the same part of the Republican Party.

From Daniel Larison.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Feast-day: O ye foremost of the heavenly host, we who are not worthy beseech you... Photo: an icon on my wall. (Explanation.)
• Fr Stephen Freeman: to believe in the truth.
• Saintly priest in Moscow gunned down. Fr Daniel Sisoev.
• The most mythological feast-day? I’m no Modernist: St Pius V thought so too. What matters is, like the legend of St Philomena, it’s not heretical and there’s no proof it’s not true. The Gospel tells us nothing of the childhood of Mary; her title Mother of God eclipses all the rest.
• Fr Hunwicke: Orate, fratres. It’s to the other ministers in the sanctuary; I knew that. The dialogue Mass gives the impression that it’s to the congregation, which is not theologically unsound but historically that’s not so.
• Naming the bishop in the Canon. St Cyprian: Whence you ought to know that the bishop is in the Church, and the Church in the bishop; and if any one be not with the bishop, that he is not in the Church.
• TNLM: Marketing Catholicism? As Arturo and Owen (criticising Ancient Faith Radio’s American evangelical makeover of Orthodoxy) might say, is the whole concept wrong? Of course so is the other extreme of not allowing converts (the Great Commission, the Book of Acts etc.). The other point is gimmicks from popular culture don’t have staying power bringing in the lapsed either (the parable of the seed not being able to grow roots).
• T1:9: Time’s Protestant-biased coverage of the Pope’s offer to the last Anglo-Catholics. Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism: friends or rivals? How about neither? The essential difference of infallibility (‘I can’t change that; I’m only the Pope’) vs fungibility (by the state, the dominant class’s mores, etc.: absolute power really) means corporate reunion’s impossible. Shut down ARCIC. This announcement from Rome is incredibly messy. No, it’s not. The two don’t compete; each takes in the few from the other side who ask to come in. They serve different markets as much to do with liking or hating Englishness and high culture in church as theology. Doctrinally rigid umbrella: biased much? Try solid or something like that instead. More democratic church governance: what? If that means trusteeism for parish ownership, forget it (although like clerical celibacy it’s not doctrine). Anyway the Anglican spokesmen seem awfully afraid of the Pope. Like they’re worried the Queen might hand back the keys to Canterbury Cathedral when he comes round next year.
• To quote the Bard (who pretty much kept his religious views to himself, sensible under Elizabeth I), sound and fury signifying nothing.
• Damian Thompson: 20 minutes. That’s all the time the Pope needed with Dr Williams. It looks as if they devoted much of it to ARCIC, the official dialogue between the Communions which I thought had been wound down years ago. There’s going to be a “third phase” of this waffle? To discuss what? Tips on where to buy the tastiest organic biscuits to serve after Sunday-morning services? Pope Benedict has given up on the Church of England, in the nicest possible way.
• A note from Dr Tighe: If the “original intent” of the framers of the 39 Articles in the context of the Elizabethan Church of England is normative, then the Evangelicals really do hold the “title deeds” of Anglicanism. But without church infallibility what’s to stop conservative Protestantism becoming liberal Protestantism as happened in 18th-century England?
• Here I stand revisited. Conservative ELCA people take a page from recent ex-Episcopalians and mull over a move from liberal Protestantism to... slightly less liberal Protestantism. More.
• Derek’s mini-Apologia. Moderate high-church Protestantism essentially. Comment.

Obama and the emperor
More here, here and here. And a note about monarchism:

... ignorantly believing the nonsense so many millions of American kids were taught at schools about how George III was like Hitler, only even worse?

Joseph Sobran, as you probably know, once wrote: “King George didn’t care a hoot whether you smoked or how much water your toilet tank held.”

Or the Queen and Prince Charles (almost met him once; if only he’d turned to his left not to his right) most likely don’t want to run your life; they only wish everybody would remain calm and do their duty. The kind of Canadian who wants a republic probably does want to.

P.S. Hooray for the Red Ensign. Dief the Chief was right.

From RR

• Army to keep media from covering Palin at Fort Bragg. Why are Obama’s people so scared? Come to think of it, aren’t attractiveness and charisma all either has to offer really?
• On Sully’s Palin obsession.
• Not that her good intentions and sex appeal make her immune to criticism: Palin and the decline of conservatism. Goldwater should have been president.
• How high-profile CEOs could revive the Libertarian Party. Sarah Palin is rumored to be mulling the idea of starting a third party, pulling together social and fiscal conservatives alienated from the GOP. The Blue Dog Democrats, turned off by President Barack Obama’s spending, could reach across the aisle to moderate Republicans and try to attract independents. But the best third-party contender already exists. The Libertarians, like so many independents and disaffected Democrats and Republicans, are fiscal conservatives and social liberals — and no one has yet built a lasting coalition out of this growing force.
• Is libertarianism the way of the future?
• Choking the Blue Dogs.
• Government to give ‘gold star’ to companies that act as immigration police. I don’t like it but, when you filter out the racism and xenophobia, appreciate what part of my corner of the right is trying to say about charity at home and the wrongness of stealing from citizens. I’m still essentially an open-borders libertarian.
• Katrina blame case could bring billions in lawsuits.
• Justin Raimondo: Obama’s Wag the Dog: stage the Gitmo trial now to distract from possible attention to his war on Afghanistan not that we’re hearing any objections from the left.
• US war planners woo sceptical Pakistanis.
• Afghanistan is an unjust, unwinnable war.
• Welfare without the state. Mormons, Amish and old-school monks and proper nuns do it.
• The fall of Communism: another world was possible.
• Ganging up on Switzerland.
• PTSD: hell comes home.
• The welfare state actually violates individual rights, and hurts the very people it claims to help. Here’s a thought for mainliners in or following property fights: stealing is stealing.
• Stealing is wrong but so is selfishness. Such narcissism reminds me of a story about a selfish, no-good rich man who died and tried to get into heaven. But you can’t just walk through the Pearly Gates. An angel reviews your life, then St. Peter decides if you can enter. To counter the angel’s negative review, the rich man argued that he had a history of charitable giving. He’d once tossed a nickel into a beggar’s cup, he pointed out. Plus, some years later, he had aided a poor woman by giving her a nickel. Then there was the time he put a nickel into the Salvation Army kettle. Hearing all this, the angel turned to St. Peter and asked, “What in the world should we do with this man?” And St. Peter said, “Give him back his 15 cents, and tell him to go to hell!” Now that’s a story that these big banksters need to hear — and ponder.
• The best mistake ever. Getting the state out of the marriage business. Of course most of the human race throughout history including Catholics are not bigots. But minorities’ rights under the no-harm principle are our rights.
• Something for cat people: I’ve heard of moggies so tame they’re afraid of their natural prey (I think my hefty outdoor friend gets all the recreational bird-hunting he wants on top of handouts from people and a home where he can be fed if he needs it) but never captive big cats being like that. Call me sceptical but don’t forget the stories of rogue animals attacking keepers et al.

From Rod Dreher

• Defending conservative religious liberty while not threatening civil liberties. Just right. The trouble is that’s not good enough for the left. They want to own you.
• The prosperity gospel and the crash. The utter insanity — coupled with the flat-out greed of bankers willing to make loans to gullible and greedy Jesus followers — did harm.
• Facts, opinion and kids these days. “They can crack the alphabetic code,” he said. “But they can’t stay focused and comprehend what they’ve read.”
• Palin’s not the answer but Dreher and Glenn Beck seem wrong as to why (she’s a likeable, sexy, clueless red-state fascist). With the best intentions in the world Dreher and his crunchy good upper-middle-class taste seems (if I’m reading him right) a sort of orthodox mirror of the religious left: all the world needs is someone like him telling us what to do and spending our money to do it.
• Why’s Sully so scared of Palin he’s put his blog on hiatus?

‘Is our children learning?’
Apparently not in the twin capitals of liberalism, DC and New York, says Pat Buchanan at Taki

Adding to this blog’s recent ongoing theme, ‘It Really Was Better Then’:

Scholastic Aptitude Test scores peaked around 1964. Ever since, the national average has been in an almost unbroken descent.

Happy birthday, Archduke Otto
Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church in South Philly has a portrait of the Emperor Franz Josef in the basement hall. He was well liked by the Slavs in the empire.

John Boyden and the archduke.

More bibs and bobs

• Vocation. This problem’s a tough one. On one hand are the liberal RCs who accuse all orthodox young men of this (‘pious and overly devotional’) to screen them out of seminary and on the other are the young men who actually have this problem. I know about the holier-than-thou personality who wants power over others. Had a pain-in-the-arse housemate like that briefly, almost 20 years ago, who unsurprisingly tried out the seminary and last I heard is a therapist working under some quack (I know — I met him). Their schtick is ‘being orthodox RCs people can trust’; I see a huge malpractice case on the horizon. (If this is the therapy some dioceses offered, no wonder they went bankrupt over molestation scandals — some of them deserved it.) Matthew 7:21-23.
• Self-conscious converts or why I can’t stand online Orthodoxy (and like this instead) and stay away from converts in person.
• That ‘Mass’ video-game parody. Comment.
• Rowan, just shut up. Now. John of Ad Orientem: After I stopped laughing my first reaction was to wonder where Rowan is getting his drugs. But after a brief reflection I realized that this may be the first time Rowan has ever taken a firm stand on a controversial subject within his communion. Clarity is always a good thing. Either Bishop Farrell is being patronising, trying to be nice, or is a liberal too. Not to deny what Episcopalians like Derek and me have in common but official union talks are over. A dead end.

Two about TV

• ‘Mad Men’ fan blog.
• Good entry on ‘Crime Story’. Thanks, Rap Sheet, for linking to my page. That all-American show says something to men around the world. I get hits from the UK to Russia to Turkey to Chile.

It’s fun to compare the two: same country, same period but different cities and different jobs so different social classes. The upper-class or socially climbing young people in the first don’t listen to rock (at least so far in the episodes I’ve seen). People in both liked jazz. I wonder if Draper and Torello met in the Army in Korea.

RIP Edward Woodward
Of The Wicker Man and ‘The Equalizer’

From RR

• Libertarian calendar girls launch fundraising effort.
• Afghan official said to take bribe for copper deal.
• Arabs, US and UK criticise Israel’s Jerusalem plan.
• Judge: Army Corps of Engineers responsible for Katrina flood.
• How to make sure your your child’s name won’t be an international embarrassment. Like how phonetically Diarrhœa is pretty to a non-English speaker.
• The lesson of the Maersk Alabama: fire back!
• Can government be limited? I may be a minarchist instead but give anarchism a hearing. ‘Minarcho-Catholicism’ just doesn’t sound as cool.
• The Obama most folks thought they voted for is clearly MIA. They just weren’t paying attention. All they saw was his colour and like a ‘magical’ movie character (as famously described by Spike Lee) they projected on him. Which is what he wanted. It got him elected.
• Fed foolishly weakening the dollar.
• The Palin experience. I like her (and don’t like the people who hate her), she’s attractive and she has no business holding office.
• Palin = Quayle.
• A decade of war coming home to roost.
• Promoting democracy by the sword. Nothing new for the left.
• Scoundrel-defenders, line up here. To whittle liberty down, the politicians must target some group that the majority of people are loath to defend. The perfect companion to the lovely Niemöller speech the left like so much. Cue the Ken Burns soundtrack violins: First they came for the pimps and drug-dealers...
• UK: common sense isn’t common any more.
• Would-be expat guide to South America.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Huw: practice, practice, practice. It is meet and right so to do (and here seems to agree with Arturo) but doctrine and a divinely instituted, infallible church backing it are still required as indeed Orthodoxy teaches. (So joining a faith where the content of the creeds is officially optional is not a valid choice. Sorry. I don’t make the rules.) The ad-hoc way of improvising, very slowly and case by case, is immemorial custom and far better than adopting wholesale change in principle (the ‘Reformation’ and the Epic Fail Council). Slavs in a parish in Pennsylvania not Cranmer’s or Bugnini’s approach nor the hyper convert stuff Huw mentions, thank you.
• A libertarian who happens to be Catholic looks at the Episcopal row. Defending the freedom of religion and property rights of people you don’t agree with. That and when it finally settles I hope people caught in the middle like Charley (defending his freedom of religion) still have a place to worship on Sunday.
• Fr Z on Cardinal Kasper and the Pope’s offer. 1) The invitation is mainly for English Anglo-Catholics (Americans aren’t interested) but that doesn’t mean TAC aren’t welcome. 2) Face it: union talks with the Anglican Communion are over. Drop them.

LRC on the university

• The open-source university.
• No government bailout, Schiffian logic goes, no inflated tuition.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• New blog: The Anglo-Catholic from a member (a cathedral senior warden and standing-committee member no less) of an ACA diocese (the biretta belt in miniature?), a rare example of an American Anglo-Papalist and another youngish man (a YF) who at least in style (not ironic hipster condescension) has more or less ‘gone home’ to around 1962 (with a waiver for the flavour-saver like my square goatee). Well done! (Tangent: a glimpse at what IT was like back then. It’s from Cracked. ’Nuff said.)
• Damian Thompson: the C of E washes its hands of Anglo-Catholics. The logic of the decision makes perfect sense to me... it governs itself according to Protestant principles of self-determination. Dr Williams just sounds pathetic.
• Speaking of which, from T1:9, more ‘many churchmen don’t understand economics’. The road to hell and all that.
• Fr Longenecker on Anglican snits: let our people go. Every time one of those people complains, the nuncio in Britain should ask for an old church back.
• Fr Hunwicke: Why can’t these people just robustly say “We decided to terminate the last phase of the Ecumenical Movement — the phase in which organic union was the aim — because there are very important questions on which we are right and Rome, quite simply, is wrong. This was an impasse round which there is no way until Rome changes her mind”.
• Joshua quotes St Edward the Confessor: The extreme corruption and wickedness of the English nation has provoked the just anger of God. When malice shall have reached the fullness of its measure, God will, in His wrath, send to the English people wicked spirits, who will punish and afflict them with great severity, by separating the green tree from its parent stem the length of three furlongs. But at last this same tree, through the compassionate mercy of God, and without any national (governmental) assistance, shall return to its original root, reflourish and bear abundant fruit.
• US RC bishops approve more accurate, more traditional missal translation no thanks to old liberals like Trautman.
• ROCOR blesses new edition of Coverdale psalter. From Mere Catholicism.
• Our deep need for the kind of liturgical worship most generations of Christians would have regarded as “mainstream”.
• Tripp asks: morality vs moralism: what’s the difference? Ties into discussions here about Bad Catholics. Our holy mother the church is often accused by outsiders of being moralistic (the pop-culture common knowledge that anybody who’s orthodox or just religiously conservative is self-righteous and/or probably secretly perverted) but it’s not. Example: Arturo’s world. (Not that the left are ever moralistic. Or class-conscious as well.)
• From Arturo: Slouching towards the American Jesus, parts I and II.
• The new, happy, wind-up Ochlophobist.
• Chris Johnson: forcing Catholic hospitals to perform procedures that the Roman Catholic Church finds morally abhorrent would be pretty much the stupidest move any American national or local government could possibly make.
• What all that lefty niceness really means: shut up. My comment: it doesn’t get much whiter.
• The World Council of Churches Nobody Goes To Anymore has come up with a unique way to raise awareness about climate change. Annoy the hell out of just about everybody.
• Motes, beams and stuff. Scratch a granola, find an old bigot/snob.

15 hours on the job
Normal blogging will resume later today

A close encounter
With my neighbours’ deck umbrella one night

The church and people on the autistic spectrum
Sounds like a chapter in a book I’d like to edit or contribute to some day. From Jeff Culbreath.

China says Fed policy threatens global recovery
From T1:9

Today’s LRC entry on libertarianism

Simultaneously one of history’s greatest and most overrated bands
In the tradition of the Rutles and in John Lennon’s writing style, a Wikipedia parody

21 accents
Actress Amy Walker has a Meryl Streep-like talent for them. I had to look up where she’s from!

Yearly festival at St Nicholas, Philadelphia
This year I saw Brother Steven Haws and Michael Neuschl from Clem’s; Brother Steven has long lived in Mirfield and Michael is now a parishioner at St Nick’s. Caught up with several local people and of course had my Slav soul food of stuffed cabbage in red sauce and pierogi. The bearded figure is of Grandfather Frost, not exactly Santa but a whimsical personification of winter. This year in the church they played recorded Russian liturgical music showing off the building’s acoustics. It’s said that Stokowski used to pop in and listen to the choir; I have a 1950s recording of them and know many of the people on it.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Beautiful instructional videos on the Tridentine Mass. Low Mass. The rest are now here (scroll down). The consecration is done this way in Latin at Clem’s. Commentary at Fr Hunwicke’s. Of course it’s a hotchpotch; that was standard thanks to longtime priestly habits, parishes having only an older copy of the Missal and immemorial custom. There’s a story of John XXIII doing things like that, the older forms of ceremonies that he was used to despite their recently being modified or stopped officially. Or as one man suggests, this simply could be a snapshot of official practice in much of 1962. Elsewhere somebody quoted Gamber that the second Confiteor was made optional not banned.
• Fr Z fisks RU-486. Lefty RCs don’t like the Pope’s offer to the last Anglo-Catholics. Surprise, surprise.
• An FSSP priest talks on EWTN about chant (plays on Windows Media Player). Another non-surprise: compare the age of the audience of this to that of the average readership of The Tablet.
• Margi on Rome and the Pope’s offer.
• Jeffrey Steel: it is totally unacceptable in Catholic theology to have structures set up that would allow for bishops to not be in communion with one another. Or we and the liberals actually agree: flying bishops, codes of practice etc. will not do. As Damian Thompson says, they’re a Wendy house in a liberal Protestant denomination.
• The besetting failure of Orthodoxy in America is our almost global unwillingness to lay aside knee jerk anti-Western polemics. Also a criticism of identifying with either of the two big political parties. From Mere Catholicism.
• One for the religious blogosphere.
• Вечная память (eternal memory, RIP): Patriarch Paul III of the Serbian Orthodox Church, aged 95 (pictured at right). Biography. Acclaimed by all that knew him as “the walking saint”, he will be sorely missed by all apostolic Christians as a true example of Christ-like humility and piety, and a light in an increasingly dark, Godless world.
• The Patriarch of Moscow’s hobby: flying planes.
• The Russian Orthodox Church ends ecumenical relations with the German Evangelical Church, the old state merger of Lutheran and Reformed that’s the country’s Protestant church. Talking to each other is fine but of course official talks on union make no sense because of the very different Catholic vs Protestant beliefs on the church (infallible vs fallible and fungible). That became clear talking to the professors from Tübingen in the late 1500s (just like Protestants today they wanted both an Eastern church legitimising what they did and to start a ‘Reformation’ in the East). As with the conservative Anglicans over the gay bishop and gay weddings, why now? Coverage of this makes it sound like John Stott’s compromise of limited women’s ordination (in which the woman minister is always supervised by a man and there are no women bishops), an untenable position that understandably seems more offensive to liberal Protestants than the Catholic one. Official Orthodox talks with ACNA make sense because there’s still a remote chance of ACNA’s three AC dioceses converting.
• Report from Moscow and on Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk meeting the Pope.
• Ex-Planned Parenthood director cold-shouldered by her old pro-abortion church. More. Somehow I don’t think St Francis would like that place very much. (He was devoted to the Pope and wanted to go convert the Muslims... I think these people might have hired him as their gardener on their grounds.) Time to convert.
• Those churches that live by the surrounding culture, die by the surrounding culture. 1955 was better of course but it had its problems: since the ‘Enlightenment’ mainstream Western churches, including, in practice, RC, too often became mere vehicles of civic religion useful for making more productive or more obedient citizens (at least in ’55 they were more likely to give lip service to orthodoxy). As Dr Tighe recently wrote of the quintessential Anglicanism of the period, a deep freezer of latitudinarian moralism, the dutiful religion of the Queen and George H.W. Bush. To be fair, isn’t the modern mainline more about SWPL decorum than living faith or coherent doctrine? (Or it’s just as homogeneous and conformist as the ’50s but I like the ’50s better.) From Tripp.
• Li Madou: Fr Matteo Ricci.
• Patrick Kennedy. A commentator: What he doesn’t get is that he doesn’t disagree with the hierarchy of the Church, he disagrees with the teaching of the Church. And ...yes, that makes him less of a Catholic. A lot of Catholic politicians (and Orthodox politicians for that matter) think they can be Protestant individualist pick ’n’ mix theologians Monday to Saturday and good Catholics or Orthodox on Sunday. The Kennedys seem to straddle the line between Bad Catholics and Modernists. They’ve always traded on the ‘Catholic = my grandmother was Irish’ identity not the ‘Catholic = I believe in all that stuff (even if I don’t live up to it)’ one. Patrick Kennedy’s guilt depends on whether he’s ignorant or malicious. There are lots more Bad Catholics than Modernists. Bad Catholics don’t agree with the church but don't think they can bend tihe church to their will; Modernists like Protestants think they can. Joe Biden is a Bad Catholic. The church doesn’t micro-manage, and there’s some truth to ‘Catholic’s not just what you believe; it’s what you are’ (so Bad Catholics arguably are still in the fold), but if you cause public scandal it’s time to excommunicate (part of Pope Benedict’s mop-up after the Epic Fail Council?).
• The greatest scandal in American Orthodoxy. Selling out on contraception and presenting that as church teaching is second.
• Some buckshot at the Protestants from a friend of the blog: Reading “magisterial” Protestants discuss history is a lot like hearing whores talk about love. You know that they really don’t take it seriously, but only use historical data to justify their own pet theories. Never once does it occur to them to step into the actual world that the authors of the thirteenth century or the Patristic era actually lived in, oozing with scapulars, rosaries, saints’ bones, and other “superstitions” that don’t jive with their pet interpretation of the Gospel. Never will such a person admit that, “hey, maybe the way people did things a thousand years ago really is better than what we do today”. Instead, it will just be another toy in their bag of seductive tricks to defend their whitewashed churches, minimalist doctrine, and the fact that, compared to any church prior to 1500, their assemblies are barely shadows or ghosts of what a Church should look like.
  
  So I offer you all my advice: ditch the history crap and jump on the Rick Warren bandwagon that is actually the future of your church anyway. Twelve-step is where it’s at, without all the pretensions of being linked to the past in any viable way, or the long venerable tradition of Western humanism. Who cares anyway? All that stuff isn’t going to get ya saved! Besides, instead of being a starving grad student mulling over Latin texts that you could give a rat’s ass about when the rubber hits the road, you could be making hella bank from megachurch SUV drivers with lots of disposable income. It’s not like you don’t have families and stuff. Anyway, cut all the pretensions of actually caring about history. Just be Protestants already and be done with it.

Obama pledge parody
Old now but still good

From Joshua

• Edmund Burke, a man straddling the two conservatisms, the ancien régime and classical liberalism, neither a drawbridge fantasist nor a neocon. Not perfect but of interest and worth to Catholics: high-church conservatism.
• American empire vs American people. Now that the people who sort of stood with us the past eight years protesting the war and the loss of civil liberties are making creepy personal plegdes to the O man the empire carries on.
• The culture of pretend: how psychotherapy keeps our communities sick. Our way of life “peaked” many decades ago. As Dreher has written, people were happier then even though the experts say they had no right to be. Empire has been about the task of destroying family and village systems, breaking down our sense of belonging and relatedness, removing opportunities for meaningful work and deep connection to a close-knit community or tribe for centuries, perhaps millennia.

Rabbit hole
From LRC

From RR

• Fair enough: Hasan charged with 13 counts of murder.
• TSA changes procedure after blowback for thuggery. I’ve never been abused by the TSA but yes, in the past 10 years the country has become a police state.
• Facebook proves boy innocent.
• Advanced Japanese WWII subs.
• Real power goes to those who pick producers’ pockets.
• The winds of change die down or new boss same as the old.
• The 50-year war.
• The Vietnam analogy breaks down.
• NYT to Obama: it’s unwinnable.
• A dangerous dream.
• Overseas insanity.
• Why most counterinsurgency wars fail.
• ‘Money’ requires no government.
• Obamacare is a devastating tax on the working class.
• Arms in defence of liberty.
• Killing individualism and individuals.
• The sleazy advocacy of a leading liberal hawk. And that’s not the real problem but rather that the left believe in starting wars for our own good on principle.
• Regardless of going about it all the wrong way because everything they were doing was based on what today can be regarded as outmoded crackpot science, Marxism has its heart in the right place: justice for the productive class. When Marxism identifies freeloaders on the backs of the productive worker, it sees it as its job to free the worker from the freeloader ... not burden the worker with more freeloaders. That is the exact opposite of what’s going on in what is seen as left-wing politics today, which claims to be the workers’ friend but burdens their productivity with taxes, regulations, and setting up workers to go to war against each other by dividing them into ‘unionized’ workers and ‘scab workers’.
• Snubbing Eastern European victims or the common-knowledge strip-cartoon version of history: like, Hitler was bad because he was, you know, intolerant but the Communists were idealists. The collapse of the Soviet Union apparently has not been all that welcome by Mr. Obama’s political base, the extreme Left Wing of American liberals. These folks have always had a soft spot in their hearts and minds for experiments in collectivism. Any anti-individualist polity is for these folks a progressive undertaking since by their lights humanity makes progress when it moves toward lumping all of us into a huge mass to be guided by the likes of Stalin, Hugo Chavez, or Fidel Castro, all of whom want to impose on it a one-size-fits-all way of life. So it is very likely that skipping the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall was a calculated decision.