RIP Joe Sobran
1946-2010

Church, and blog house-cleaning

• Telling the truth about Anglo-Catholicism. After Anglicanorum Cœtibus, Anglo-Papalism makes no sense. A gem via Dr Tighe, or partly why, besides other RC news, Damian Thompson remains in my blogroll. He left out one thing: the sincere ones can become WRO too.
• A leaner, meaner fighting blog for peace. Blogrolling went down so I made a new, short blog list and cleaned up the rest of my sidebar. A sign Blogger seems to be going the way of MySpace (why would anybody choose prefab, garish pages when you can learn HTML and have your own clean, neat design? ... also the ability to custom-design pages is why I didn’t switch to WordPress as I don’t do my own hosting) in the onslaught of Facebook (I’m trying publishing to both but links get overlooked in the rush there) is there were many dead links and nobody told me. If you link to me and are no longer on the list, no knock on you. Chances are you no longer blog.
• The other Bishop Robinson and me on American Anglo-Catholicism.
• Conservative Anglicans in the local news for charitable work.
• Orthodoxy: St Sophia and her daughters, Faith, Hope and Charity (maybe her friends called her Amy), where the Russian names Vera (pronounced Vyera — I know someone who hates the way her name sounds in English), Nad(y)ezhda (Nadia) and Lubov (Luba) come from. Real or allegorical? What about the teaching authority of the church putting saints on the calendar? Does doubt about a saint make you a Modernist? I think it’s like Donald Attwater’s and others’ approach. You may admit the legend has no basis in fact (many don’t) but if you can’t prove a hoax, the church OKs public veneration. (Privately you may ask the prayers of anyone.) Regarding the invocation of saints, you don’t have to venerate anyone in particular, only approve the principle of venerating saints. (Lots of unpleasant people are elevated to our altars which gives you hope.)
• The services we love for the people we hate. Like Elena Maria Vidal’s observation on malicious people at Mass, a British priest vents about other trads.
• St Jerome.

Thanks for the memories



Jerry Lee Lewis is 75!



A 1960 gem from Neil Sedaka.


RIP Tony Curtis.

Now that’s an entertainer... here is the difference between Bieber and the legend Jerry Lee. Bieber makes teenagers scream whereas Jerry Lee made grown women scream like teenagers.

From Fr Todd Bragg.

Pimp out your lawnmower
From Cracked

Tutu on Israel’s bantustans: calling for a boycott of its universities
It probably wouldn’t work but the idea’s fine with me

Patrimony: hanging lamps in the sanctuary
Seven plus the Sacrament light. These happen to be at St Mark’s, Philadelphia.

Ordinariate news: Mount Calvary, Baltimore

The vestry of Mount Calvary Church, a small but historic Anglo-Catholic parish in Baltimore, has voted unanimously in favor of two resolutions: first, to leave the Episcopal Church and second, to become an Anglican Use parish in the Catholic Church under terms of Anglicanorum Cœtibus.

Fr. Catania writes: “The result of these developments is that the Archdiocese of Baltimore now stands ready to welcome Mount Calvary as a body into full communion with the successor of St. Peter, and the process of establishing ordinariates in various countries, including the United States, has begun.”

HOORAY!

What happened to ’50s Catholicism?
To this? The e-mail Dr Tighe forwarded to me says the writer is a Calvinist. Interesting point: somebody hijacking the central command, impossible in a locally based traditionalism, even one with Western practices (Johnstown, WRO), the way the Eastern churches are run. Rebuttal: Pius IX’s ‘I can’t. I’m only the Pope.’ You can’t blame the collapse on the magisterium which of course can’t teach heresy. Huge mistakes in prudential judgement? You bet. Vatican II was a marketing campaign like the fairly successful Counter-Reformation only it backfired like New Coke.

Dallas, January 1942
From AMM

Church

• Michaelmas. Deus, qui miro ordine angelorum ministeria hominumque dispensas: concede propitius, ut a quibus tibi ministrantibus in cœlo semper assistitur, ab his in terra vita nostra muniatur. Per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, Filium tuum: qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum. Amen. From the Lauds hymn: Angelus pacis, Michael in ædes, cœlitus nostras veniat serenæ, auctor ut pacis lacrimosa in orcum bella releget. From the offertorium at the requiem: sed signifer sanctus Michael repræsentet eas in lucum sanctam. From Newman. And a well-known devotional prayer.
• St Euphemia.
• Arturo defends religious ‘snobbery’. Not real snobbery (‘this is better and I know it so I’m better than you’) or hypocrisy of course but common sense that some things are better than others and not pretending otherwise.
• Whither goeth R²?
• More ordinariate and society stuff. Don’t miss Fr H.

Religious knowledge or lack thereof
From Daniel Larison

Equality or freedom?
Pat Buchanan’s latest at Taki on the myth of the glass ceiling (boss as woman-hating Snidely Whiplash) etc.

Pen and screen names
The stories behind a couple of mine

• Serge (1994-2004): when I first went online AOL suggested JBeeler435243 or something like that and I said ‘yuck’. So I thought for a moment and used the name of the Russian Orthodox saint whose feast-day (using the Gregorian date) is my birthday. These days I use it at restaurants when a clear, distinctive name comes in handy.
• The young fogey (2004-today): it fits. Old-fashioned but not establishment conservative; libertarian but not liberal.

From Elena Maria Vidal.

RC Bishop of Fort Worth is on Vatican panel for ordinariates
Predictably the ex-Episcopalian Bishop of Fort Worth says he’s not interested. Trivia: he was the Episcopal Church’s last Anglo-Catholic diocesan; he and his diocese left at the end of 2008.

From RR

• Poll: schools not making the grade.
• Another poll: most Americans think they’d like having the Swedish system. Of course because many are ignorant. They think it’s the government giving them free stuff, as in nobody ultimately pays for it.
• Second Amendment headline: octogenarian 1, thief nil.
• Home is where the gun is. A small Smith & Wesson’s my style; of course you don’t lock your gun in a safe!
• Tea in a whole new bag: a proposed Taxpayers’ Equity Amendment. BTW I tune out anybody who says ‘Teabagger’. You can look up why.
• Do authoritarians understand libertarians?
• You don’t need tax hikes to balance the budget. Gridlocking the government like Clinton vs Gingrich helps (let the Commies and the Nazis destroy each other); of course better still, bring the soldiers home and cut the government down to constitutional size including stopping policing non-violent ‘crimes’ like using drugs or buying sex.

19 facts about the deindustrialization of America that will make you weep

From LRC

• A sign of Third Worldification but also entrepreneurial and resilient.
• A century of war.
• Depleted uranium. God have mercy on us.

From Steve Sailer

• As long as you don’t arrest someone etc. because of race etc. profiling doesn’t violate liberty but is simply good police work. To be fair to airport security et al., if the terrorists were smart they’d recruit more would-be hijackers/suicide bombers who look like and go by Daniel Patrick Boyd not Abdulhakim Muhammed.
• Is pretending otherwise really charitable and just? Modern thought = thoughtlessness. He reads Chesterton.

We bow to thy cross, O Lord, and we glorify thy holy resurrection
From here

Antiochian WRO photos: St Michael’s, Whittier
It looks English Missal (Tridentine in ‘thou’ English) like St Augustine’s, Denver. I think you can have WRO in Latin too (like Greeks and Russians worship in mediæval versions of their languages).

It’s inconceivable that Benedict XVI would produce the game-show reply ‘Pass’ to a question about sexual morality

What will it take, I wonder, for my liberal Catholic friends to recognise that – irrespective of your views on this matter – Rowan Williams emerges from this debate neither as a radical prophet nor a defender of biblical morality, but as a source of confusion and anxiety?

British Anglo-Catholic endgame
I don’t know much about non-papalist ACism there or how receptive the local Orthodox are to having WRO (British Orthodoxy is smaller and even more immigrant than American and the non-papalist ex-ACs like Fr Gregory Hallam seem to have settled into the normative majority Byzantine Rite) so the choice seems clear: Rome or liberal Protestantism. Congregationalism is not a Catholic option.

Preppy pitfall

“In a true democracy,” Lisa Birnbach wrote, “everyone can be upper-class and live in Connecticut.”

Of course good points about the upper-class attitude and style include a kind of modesty (not showing off, because you feel no need to and it wouldn’t be nice to the less fortunate — at least residual Christian charity, detachment and humility from socially responsible old WASPs) as well as quality and good taste. I’m happy for Martha Stewart: a discarded wife who rather than feel sorry for herself realised she’d spent 20 years learning how to be what many non-upper housewives wanted to be (a Connecticut society wife) and that she could handsomely and legitimately turn a profit by mass-producing and selling some of the trappings. (Birnbach and her friends were snarkier in their bestselling book: both selling the trappings and sending up their own class, telling the non-uppers it’s really better to talk, dress, act and think for yourself.) But here a WSJ article via Elena Maria Vidal suggests a down side of this early-’80s fad among non-uppers: egalitarianism really, the ‘self-esteem’ kick and entitlement for all, essentially being a spoiled brat: ‘I deserve to live like the Kennedys without doing the work to get there’ (part of their legend: the plucky immigrants who worked hard) — living on credit (buying a house you can’t really afford, sometimes egged on by race-based government policy) or the taxpayers, the world, are your trust fund.

Then of course it causes an equally unhealthy reaction: cutthroat competition, trying to set up a new class barrier.

No, while a true democracy is class-mobile it means all have the chance to be upper-class.

Rebooting old TV
From Cracked

From LRC

• The strategy to stifle dissent.
• Stock up to survive.

’60 World Series film found in Bing Crosby’s wine cellar

‘I will be totally honest: Catholicism is an institutional shell without any real actual mandatory content’
In a thread I linked to yesterday Arturo throws down another of his challenges. He’s not right all the time but at best he’s a rare realistic trad. The theology’s clear: objective validity etc. But in practice of course he’s right. As much a mess with lots of unbelief in a credally orthodox shell as Anglicanism. (And Anglicanism’s shell ultimately isn’t orthodoxy — that’s changeable by vote, unlike Rome — but institutionalism: being invited to Lambeth.) American RCism, unless Pope Benedict pulls off his revival, is well on its way to being the Anglicans’ deep freezer of latitudinarian moralism (moralistic therapeutic deism); witness the funerals that are de facto canonisations for example.

So you’ve got high, low, central and broad churchmanships there too (your self-selected clique). High: consciously Catholic in belief, authority and worship like the Pope; the similar but different trads and R². Low: Charismatics? Central: the muddled majority ranging from nice un-self-consciously pious trads to most who don’t want to be ‘too religious’; it’s always been so. Broad: the illiberal liberals, unlike Anglicans liturgically low too, who’ve been running most things locally for 40 years; AmChurch and the Magic Circle.

Alternatives: non-obnoxious Orthodoxy (lay-level liturgical conservatism, preserved un-self-consciously... My favorite American Orthodox locale in America is the OCA midwest, in part because it feels so Catholic. Like AMM, rustbelt Orthodoxy is my favorite niche corner of our little religious boutique.) or Anglo-Catholic congregationalism, in part understandable but a playhouse in a liberal Protestant denomination as Damian Thompson says. Orthodoxy’s broad churchmen, like in ’50s RCism, are puny and powerless (and without a Vatican trying to keep everybody in line).

HBD and PUA
Roissy brings together arguably the two most controversial subjects I link to, Steve Sailer’s and his. Two related truths most people are too nice to say: because most of them are unteachable and women like men stronger than them no matter what they say. Me: the standard disclaimers, Christian morals etc. Here he gets it:

The web has released an unabashed HBD Kraken from its underwater lair, and this beast is not afraid to confront harsh realities without the whitewash of politesse and codewords. Unfortunately, in its zeal to smash pretty lies by the boatload, the movement tends to succumb to infatuation with its opposition theories. The faint whiff of immutable determinism swirls snugly like a straitjacket on the follower fringe. An impetus to categorize human interactions based on easily perceived objective traits hints at the nerd-like systematizing mind trying to grasp the significance of the new and dangerous knowledge.

No evolutionary scientist worth his salt would argue that genes are wholly deterministic.

Why it’s not necessarily racist (both simply describe reality including the bad; fallen human nature), nurture does help nature (Roissy’s point here and thanks, Joshua, for pointing out this man’s comment) and, part of not being racist, individual liberty trumps all.

The Anti-Gnostic again:

Beneath the bluster and decadence is a very substantive, traditionalist message. Conservative, monogamous 51-year-old Steve Sailer links him. Roissy is one of those people despised in turn by the Left for his reactionary opinions and by the Right for his (purportedly) dissolute lifestyle. Anybody demonized by all sides of the political spectrum is usually worth a listen in my experience.

Game is the equalizer for men seeking female sexual partners in feminist society, and it works whether a man seeks a one-night stand or his partner in the marriage sacrament. Game is a tremendous affront to the ruling cultural Marxists who insist, in the face of all scientific evidence to the contrary, that men and women are fundamentally the same and that human evolution has ceased.

On being in your 40s
Taki’s Gavin McInnes:

In my late 20s, I asked a cab driver what it was like to be 40 because that’s what he was. “It’s real mellow, buddy” he responded in his funny accent, “You don’t vorry so much.” As an angry young man, I had a lot of trouble understanding how you could not care what people think. “What if someone came up to your window right now and called you an ass?” I asked. “I vould say, ‘Oh my’” he said, “then vind up the vindow and drive off.” Before I could question his manhood, he added, “Now, if it vas ten or twenty years ago I vould get out of this cab and say, ‘vat did you say, moderfocker?’ and stuff like these — but now. Nothing. It’s not vorth it.” I finally get what he was talking about. Sticks and stones still break your bones when you’re 40 but unless it’s a peer giving constructive criticism, you honestly don’t give a tenth of a pube what people think.

Which brings me to another point. You become a lot less critical of other people’s work when you’ve actually done some of your own. Hey, “Friends” was on for 10 years. I never got a show on the air. Courteney Cox did all right. O.A.R. sound queer to me but they sell 80,000 tickets a night and I can’t even play the guitar. Good for them. Not to get all Baz Luhrman on you, but: The more you accomplish, the less you trivialize other’s accomplishments.

From Joshua

• Missionary to the multiculturalists. Newman was an Anglican priest who joined the Oxford movement in protest against the Wesleyan assault on ritual and mystery. I don’t think so. That started with the ‘Reformation’ not the well-meaning, admirable Wesley: Protestantism, its nasty subset Calvinism and the English Civil War it started, the ‘Enlightenment’ and the Industrial Revolution did that. Wesley was trying to bring the English back to believing in Christ.
• Totalitarian humanism.
• From England to America: Magna Carta and the supremacy of law.

British ordinariate

• Ready by the end of the year.
• Vs a cuckoo club.

Quotation

Our government, would be subject to every political pressure that desperate foreign statesmen can invent and their groups of nationals in our borders would clamor at the hill of Congress for special favors to their mother countries. Our experience in war shows that foreign governments which are borrowing our money on easy terms cannot expend it with the economy of private individuals and it results in vast waste... The collection of a debt to our Treasury from a foreign government sets afoot propaganda against our officials, against our government. There is no court to which government can appeal for collection of debt except a battleship. The whole process is involved in inflation, in waste, and in intrigue. The only direct loans of our government should be humane loans to prevent starvation. The world must stop this orgy of expenditure on armament. European governments must cease to balance their budgets by publishing paper money if exchange is ever to be righted. The world is not alone in need for credit machinery. It is in need of economic statesmanship.

— Herbert Hoover speaking against loans to foreign nations before the American Bankers Association in Chicago, December 1920

From here.

Church

• From Fr H: The temptation to make up tradition. Tradition is not something which we each confect day by day so as to have a stick with which to beat those of whom we disapprove.
• The epiclesis of the Roman Rite.
• Little-known English church history: who once made Oxford a diocese for real? The good guys (Cardinal Pole).
• Another Orthodox/RC debate over a clerical one-off that’s old news and a matter for their respective jurisdictions to handle. (Like the recent story of the Anglican priest in Canada communing a dog, nothing to do with her denomination’s teachings. The bishop: ‘Don’t do that again!’ Done.) The only issue that matters, dividing what’s otherwise the same church IMO. Flak means you’re over the target, onto the truth, so the ire of the Barsanuphius Joneses (legion online, rare among real-life Orthodox, most of whom aren’t ‘too religious’) is a good sign.
• It’s not often that the Episcopalian House of Bishops and I agree on something (the creeds, on paper for them; maybe the sacraments depending on which bishop you’re talking to; in most cases on capital punishment; and Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and immigration but for differing reasons on the last) so it’s worth noting: Bishop Bennison, retire, pretty please. There’s nothing more they can do.

Signs the economic collapse has begun
From LRC

Blockbuster files for bankruptcy
Another business made obsolete by the Internet

The CDF has appointed Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington as its delegate to oversee the initial work towards establishing the American Ordinariate

Those delegates of the CDF are not necessarily our future Ordinaries and probably won’t be.

Bono’s anti-poverty foundation ONE is under pressure to explain its finances after it was revealed that only a small percentage of money it raises reaches the needy

Hate to be the one to break this to you two brainiacs. But any idiot with Web access can “raise awareness” for free.

From the MCJ.

Liberty Central’s trick quiz

Designed to tell libertarian-leaning people that they’re “conservatives” and direct them back to the Republican camp where they supposedly belong. One thing you can do to come out “libertarian” (keeping all of my other views the same) is to agree that “moral standards should change with the times.” Of course libertarians don’t agree with that; we think it’s always wrong to murder, maim, plunder, etc. If they intended to design this quiz so that someone who answers its questions exactly as Ron Paul would will be told they’re a conservative, not a libertarian, they did well.

From LRC.

Chris Christie
From the MCJ and Roissy

Just how debased can the English language become and still be called English?
From Joshua

From RR

• The GOP: Trust me. Honey, I’m sorry; I’ll never do it again, I promise.
• How would libertarians help the homeless? Interesting but of course slumlords making excuses aren’t being Christian.
• Democracy’s overrated.

Double shot of history from LRC

• Titanic solved? The helmsman guessed wrong.
• John Wayne.

What’s to blame for liturgical wreckovation?
Writing about the upcoming ordinariates, Michael LaRue says:

My father was one who, for instance, was unable to forgive the Catholic Church or the Pope because he perceived that all the liturgical chaos in Roman Catholicism in the 1960s and later had invaded and destroyed his own beloved Episcopal Church.

Seen one way that was true. It was the proximate cause. 1979 copied the Novus Ordo. As Charley complains, the people who come back from Cursillo want to junk the hymnal and have guitars.

But if you study it even informally you see what really happened. The high-churchification Mr LaRue’s father remembered and assumed was normative only dated from about the late 1800s for Anglo-Catholics and from the 1930s to the 1960s for other Episcopalians. Fairly easily knocked down. And even so, its leavings are often more conservative than at St Novus but that’s slowly changing as the Episcopalians’ liturgy catches up with their changing doctrine and Pope Benedict very slowly makes RCs Catholic again.

Historically next to nobody, from Pius IX to the legitimate liturgical movement, thought the ordinary practice of Western Catholicism could just stop on command.

That said, there’s something to be said for Orthodoxy where no central high command (so no Bugnini can hijack it) and a natural grassroots traditionalism from the parish up mean a Vatican II will never happen. (Even New Skete looks liturgical-movement conservative compared to wreckovation, and it’s marginal in Orthodoxy.)

A house divided
Conservative a/Anglicans like the Revd Matt Kennedy vs those who believe the Catholic view of priests. (A high-ish view of apostolic succession — claiming to have bishops just like us even though they said we were wrong to believe in the Mass — is what historically distinguished Episcopalians from other Protestants.) I think English Evangelicals have long not believed thus, which explains the historic position and reason to exist of the Reformed Episcopal Church (now in ACNA?) and Sydney today. Dr Tighe writes: see comments 114-116. ISTM that rather that try to ‘fight for Anglicanism’ (for an invitation to Lambeth every decade), although Protestantism is a house of cards because of lack of authority it would make more sense for the Matt Kennedys and Chris Johnsons to just decamp and join the Missouri Synod Lutherans: conservative, liturgical and no claim of succession. Also why the ordinariates would make sense and ACNA doesn’t.

(BTW two LCMS pastors’ blogs I like: Father Hollywood and incarnatus est.)

I also like what the Revd Anne Kennedy once wrote: if you believe the Catholic view of priests, which she like her husband doesn’t, you have no business believing in WO.

Me on WWII
The original plans of the Japanese and Germans respectively were:

1. Get a ‘near-abroad’ empire much like the US had and still has in the Americas to compete with them and with the British and Dutch, who had Asian lands and were killing them economically. None of the ‘Hirohito in the White House’ nonsense the Americans were fed as other Americans were herded into concentration camps solely because of their ethnicity including a sickly, bedridden little boy called Noriyuki (later Pat) Morita and George ‘Sulu’ Takei and still others were shipped off to be slaughtered in places like Pelelieu for... what exactly? A trading relationship with the Japanese Empire would have been no more reprehensible than the one today with mainland China (Mao, the biggest mass murderer in human history?).

2. Rule Europe (the Russians would have destroyed them anyway) with Africa and Asia ruled by fellow northern Europeans the British and the Americas likewise controlled by fellow ethnic northern Europeans the Americans. (As both were more or less doing at the time and the Americans still do in the Western Hemisphere.) The Germans knew they had no big surface navy, marines, long-range planes or missiles to conquer the US and so made no plans to do so. IIRC the declaration of war was thanks to the Roosevelt-goaded Japanese attack on the military bases in Hawaii (FDR moved the Pacific Fleet headquarters from San Diego on purpose and sacked the admiral in charge who objected), specifically, like World War I, thanks to the alliance the Germans had with Japan. Italy was at war with the US as well but no threat.

The answer: let the Nazis and Communists destroy each other.

[Germany’s treaty with Japan did not require the declaration of war on the US; it was simply another case of Hitler being irrational, going against the original plan I’ve just described.]

BTW the wise America Firsters (including former liberal John Flynn), like me, were not pacifists and supported a strong military for its true mission, defence of the homeland in case the worst happened.

Sending Americans to die for any other reason, to serve any foreign government, even the British, was unconscionable. (Those who volunteered to fight for the British — the RAF’s Eagle Squadron and the American RCAF pilots — are another matter. Their choice, their honour.) As was siding with Stalin — he and Lenin killed far more people than Hitler. Orthodox Christians BTW — catholics — for being Orthodox. FDR and Churchill handed over half of Catholic Europe to that butcher. As you know WWII was not fought to help the Jews but only to help Churchill and Stalin wipe out Germany as a competitor. The British turned down giving help to the German resistance (including career soldiers like Canaris and Rommel and old German nobles, including Bavarian Catholics, nothing to do with Nazism) which wanted a conditional surrender.

The Thomas Day factor, or why the RC liberals don’t just trade places with ordinariate-bound Anglicans
Saved from the comboxes

Because 1) the persecuted Irish couldn’t do high churchmanship (big services with lots of ceremonial and music in nice buildings — the Anglicans stole their buildings and they were hiding out having Mass in houses and on rocks in the countryside, and school in the hedges and barns) and brought that minimalist, unliturgical, devotional (rosary, novenas, and hymns not chant) approach to church to America and Britain, 2) Jansenism, a heresy that saw beautiful things like art and music (and incidentally sex, hence all the bad jokes about Irish Catholic guilt) as suspect, 3) Irish hatred of things they saw as English (when in Ireland they saw a Gothic church and heard an organ playing and a choir singing it was a church of the hated English or at least a state-favoured Protestant church), which means high churchmanship and the kind of English in the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (so they went reverse-snobbish in the 1960s and chose ICEL ugly, inaccurate English instead), 4) Modernism, or being heretical, anti-Catholic RCs, and 5) the cinema, radio and television killed off Sunday-night religion (public recitation of the office in church) just about everywhere — 75 years ago Sunday Vespers was not only the norm in RC parishes but required (as indeed on the books it still was in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia until only a few years ago).

It is only with the advent of secularism that the church had to create a moral panic in order to internalize assent
I don’t necessarily agree with it all but again Arturo makes you think: why low-church RC neocons have long rallied round these issues grasping at an identity and trads don’t

Nice pro-RC testimony
From here

Good answer on homosexuality

To my mind, if you’re going to raise up sodomy from its traditional place in moral theology, and still condemn certain other positions, you have to do some theological heavy lifting. The Roman position, although demanding and counter-cultural, is at least consistent. The “reappraiser” position, which allows same-sex gratification, but still wants to take a stand against polyamory, prostitution, consensual incest, etc., etc., is a theological house of cards.

— Paul Goings, 2006

Please pray for Joe Sobran, very ill

From LRC

• Lew Rockwell: the Tea Party will betray liberty.
• Shoplifters’ picks. Catholic theology says it’s not stealing when you’re really, truly in need, for survival. Of course that’s for food etc. not makeup. Other than that of course petty theft is wrong because, naturally, somebody has to pay for the stuff, and we do through higher prices. Just like when the government makes it costlier to make and sell things.
• Sympathy for the school-bus dad. On one hand bullying’s been around since the fall of man; on the other, tell off the state schools and, if you can, don’t send your kids to them.

From Eunomia

• Bad political commercial. It doesn’t actually make sense to argue for a government that is both smaller and more “caring.” For the thousandth time, Obama doesn’t reject American exceptionalism explicitly or implicitly.
• The Obama administration has hardly emphasized human rights in its conduct of foreign policy.
• Bad articles on the Tea Party and foreign policy. From what I’ve seen of its foreign-policy ideas I don’t like them. It is the British who have very sensibly recognized that the special relationship, especially during the Bush-Blair years, was tremendously harmful to British interests and the reputation of Britain in the world, and it is their leaders, not ours, who have made a point of calling for a serious reappraisal of the relationship. Gotta love the irony of Britain possibly having a revolution for independence from America!

Still working
I’ll be back in a few

Some music and slides for your enjoyment while I work

From Joshua

• Americans turning against empire.
• Organising against it: where left and right meet amicably.
• Orwell and Waugh.
• Self-esteem vs standards.
• Giving Pax Christi their due as I’ve always done here: bishop says quit Afghanistan.

An Australian watches ‘Mad Men’

Spy technologies you can’t hide from
From Cracked

From FB: ‘At one point in history the church had deaconesses, but this ministry has appeared to fall by the wayside’
There’s some wiggle room for opinion in Catholicism (east and west: the commenter is Orthodox) on that, which is why some Anglo-Catholics (the late Mgr Graham Leonard when he was Anglican Bishop of London) conceded on it and ordained women deacons.

Lutherans and Anglicans since the 1800s have had deaconesses who essentially were nuns, habits, ‘Sister Name’ and all, minus Anglo-Catholicism’s fine Roman Catholic trappings.

(I used to know a former Lutheran one; they founded and used to run Lankenau Hospital, originally the German Hospital, and their motherhouse is still in Gladwyne. They don’t wear habits any more. I think the Blue Nun wine label is actually of a German Lutheran deaconess. The little APA denomination has them too, as well as a small order of nuns: basically 1950s Episcopal style. I don’t think the Episcopalians still have the deaconesses now that women can be Episcopal priests. [Clarified after Fr Wells’ comment.]

BTW she was assigned to one of Philly’s Lutheran churches, conservative — they had a service in German — and high-church — they called it Mass. The former pastor has long been an Orthodox priest, originally an English Missal WRO but he switched when immigration changed the parish.)

The argument is whether that’s what deaconesses were or if they were women deacons in holy orders. Some say that Greece now has women deacons but only in convents.

BTW there’s a traditional order of cloistered, eremitic RC nuns (like Carthusian monks) who when they’re professed wear the deacon’s stole and chant the gospel (the idea being that the nun alone in her cell reads the prayers of the Mass — the ‘dry Mass’ like male hermit monks — but of course doesn’t celebrate Mass?).

Fr L and the Telegraph on the Pope’s UK tour

• Damian Thompson: Pope 1, secularist fanatics nil.
• Dawkins = Paisley. Of course! The Anglosphere’s secularists are curdled Calvinists.
• The protester personality. Of course I’m chary of cyber-diagnosis (often just the ‘s/he needs help’ line as an insult) but this is pretty good.

From RR

• British police chief: decriminalise cannabis. I thought in the UK now small amounts are legal.
• The Constitution Party ‘useless’. Like the Tea Party now, I hold them at arm’s length for similar reasons (I’m not getting into the Protestant right’s crusade) but they’re less objectionable than the Tea Party.
• Can you steer the Tea Party to libertarianism?
• Right, we’re selling $60 billion worth of advanced weapons to the country most of the 9/11 hijackers came from because our régime (Israel really) now hates Iran. (I guess that ‘Ayatollah A**ahola’ T-shirt’s back in style.) Game plan: keep yammering about the Ground Zero mosque and maybe the proles won’t notice.
• LRC pick: ‘I work for the government. What depression? Things have never been better for me.’
• The GOP’s trying to impress you by boasting it outliberals the Dems. Whatever. As Arturo says, as with some other things (Anglicanism for example) I’ve arrived and settled into the ‘f*ck it’ stage regarding party politics.
• How inequality shapes our lives.
• The real lesson of state schools. ‘We’re all in boot camp’ essentially. Control and conform. Or uncoincidentally schools and prisons look a lot alike. Arguably they’re not really set up to help disabled kids actually learn or enable the smart kids not interested in their agenda.
• Third parties.

Learning to hate our two-party democracy
From Taki

Protester the Pope probably didn’t mind

Two Sunday ones from Derek

• From Paul Goings whom I’ll always associate with St Alphonsus and public recitation of the office: on ‘museum religion’.
• More on Sarum and Anglican liturgical history. Me on that history.

Me on ecumenism

Hee hee
Maybe the anti-Pope squads cancel each other out

I gather that at Twickenham on Friday there were two groups of protesters; the ultra-gay lobby and the ultra-Protestants. The police were out in force to keep them from really spoiling the occasion and managed to herd them together into one corner where they could keep an eye on them.

What they didn’t reckon on was that the two groups spied each other and realized that here was an enemy even more hateful than the Pope; so they then set about having a regular ding-dong at each other and quite missed what they had come to spoil.

From David.

At least Herod and Pilate became friends in their opposition to Jesus...

I just got the news: Ford’s discontinuing the Crown Vic in 2011
Which partly explains why American police are switching to cool Dodge Chargers.

In a few years it’ll be the end of an era for drivers. No more white-taxicab panics/fake-outs when speeders et al. see that awful, familiar silhouette at a distance, more so recently after the cops wised up and put in low-profile light bars on the roof.

Psych!
I wonder what taxi companies will switch to.


Old-school.

Slogans’ heroes
Bill Kauffman collects campaign buttons from candidates who deserved to win. I’ve got a ’60s Goldwater one on my bulletin board above the desk. From @TAC.

Sunday

• Lead, kindly light. Feast day: Oct. 9.
• Deborah Gyapong writes here: Bishop Robert Mercer, the retired bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, and Bishop David Moyer of the Anglican Church in America are present as guests of the Holy See in Birmingham, a sign of the unity to come. These are not Anglican bishops but in TAC, a denomination interested in the ordinariates. (Make the rounds confirming all and vetting, training when needed and ordaining clergy, and maybe even keep existing congregations together with their priests: National Parishes With Clout™, Pope Benedict’s new battalion on the R² front.)
• Fulton Sheen: Keep your eyes on the crucifix; for Jesus Christ without the cross is a man without a mission, and the cross without Jesus is a burden without a reliever. From here.
• Hell and God’s love according to St Isaac the Syrian.
• Intercommunion or no, another RC/Orthodox bunfight. Sacramentally they’re the same but the similarity of a one-true-church claim means no at least on paper. (Among the Syrian laity, you bet.) Like Archimandrite Anastassy I obey the rule.
• On that note, well-meaning ACNA/Reformed Episcopal Bishop Sutton doesn’t get it: If we were attempting to merge our jurisdictions it might be a different matter, but this is not the goal of our ecumenical conversations. We are seeking Eucharistic inter-communion. Newman got it. You don’t enter altar and pulpit fellowship with a Catholic church like with a denomination; you join it. But of course the REC was founded to protest such thinking.
• Some of what Newman left behind. I don’t agree with Fr Bob Hart but I don’t hate him. I respect him: a principled theology that’s not Roman Catholic, old high-church. (I see something clever but man-made, which is how he sees Rome; fair enough.) And he has no time for convertodox.
• In Greek Catholic churches the problem of imitating the Novus Ordo goes on. An example from Romania.
• A reminder: much of the RCC in Britain and Ireland is now immigrant Polish. An Irish reader once commented that they eventually go home.
• Benediction at Hyde Park: Hilary’s play-by-play.
• Fr L’s self-righteousness test: if you think someone is self-righteous, accuse him of it. If he says he is, he’s not. If he says he’s not, he is.

From Joshua

• History: the orthodox are not pro-war. Sheen assailed A-bomb use.
• More on ‘most of them are unteachable’: More children need to be left behind! Those Mr. Jackson describes as having “little conception of ordinary decorum” and “no interest in academic subjects” do not belong in the classroom. Another part of the problem as other LRC readers know is the state schools are less about real learning than indoctrination/social engineering.
• I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.
• Anti-Catholic prejudice is one of the main themes of today’s increasingly conformist imagination. An old friend and I came to the conclusion that the country’s élite are creepily, consciously evil because you had a Catholic country turned Protestant by force (it took most of the 1500s) with lots of reminders of that (names of churches, schools, towns etc., echoes in the classical music, even the crosses in the flag); this élite know jolly well what it all means (even with today’s secularised, dumbed-down schooling?) and say ‘I will not serve’. Calvinism eventually turned into granola but it’s all the same really. Counterpoint: don’t forget the WASP virtues of manners and duty. Civilised and tough people (armed with, along with guns, a classical education; P.J. O’Rourke: ‘People here acting as though they were in the Iliad; have figured out all the angles; send pecunia’) who created an empire (right or wrong, nothing to sneeze at — BTW the Irish enthusiastically took part) that not incidentally included inventing America.
• On that note, not from Joshua but Dr Tighe, crumbling empire and moral absolutes. Or if you sit through enough of the pleasantries you can hear a few words from the Pope hit their targets. Dr T, who like me lived there, has nailed its established Protestantism with the phrase deep freezer of latitudinarian moralism to which I add in a shell of credal orthodoxy like the walls of the old Gothic church that still has a mediæval saint’s name.

Boston Globe tailors print edition for three remaining subscribers
My changing biz sent up by The Onion

A party not ready to rule: the war on Christine O’Donnell
From @TAC

From LRC

• Depression II: 15 shocking poverty statistics.
• What’s with wearing camo uniforms everywhere? I wondered about that too. That reminds me. I may not be a pure libertarian but that’s OK. I’m all for a crack defensive military with spiffy WWII-style uniforms like the US Navy has brought back for its officers and the Air Force is considering (keeping Air Force blue of course but going back to the cut of the Army Air Forces officer’s coat — looking like a soldier again and not an airline pilot or bus driver). But DoD seems not to have learnt from the Canadians’ mistake of not leaving unification at command level and merging the services (they’re slowly bringing back the traditional British uniforms); now they want to dress sailors in either camo or, dressier, just like fake Marines instead of the traditional sailor suits. (While we’re at it the Coast Guard should go back to the cool old-school Navy uniforms too.) And I like having the traditional men’s uniforms for the women but agree with Brian Mitchell on women in combat being a bad idea.

That’s better.

From Mark Shea

• I know little about Christine O’Donnell except these few facts. First, she sends both Andrew Sullivan and Karl Rove into spittle-flecked paroxysms of fury. So she’s got that in her favor. She appears to be another bellicose War Party candidate like Palin. So she’s got that against her. I have zero interest in Delaware politics, but I am grateful that the Tea Party movement is doing its part to surface people who send establishment drones into frenzies and who would probably look pretty good in armor.
• Archbishop Burke, who literally wrote the book on Canon 915, has been elevated to the No. 5 guy in the Church. Expect some changes on the whole Episcopal Spine Alert front. I’d love to see the day when Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi sashay up to the front of the line with that smug look on their faces and are given a polite blessing and asked to return to their seats.

Some 20-something with a camcorder has dwarfed the queen of the media
From LRC

Can the Tea Party reach out to social libertarians?

If they’re serious about building a real alternative to the Bush/Obama megastate, as opposed to merely being used by the Republicans and discarded as soon as the GOP is in a position to relaunch the K Street Project, the activists need to build countervailing power of their own, rooted not merely in talk radio and the Internet but in the indigenous institutions that shape people’s everyday lives. In some areas — bank bailouts, eminent domain, the crackdown on civil liberties, America’s imperial foreign policy — they might even reach across the invisible lines that separate their favorite segments of civil society from the churches and councils that mobilize people on the grassroots left, to work together on issues of shared concern even when they aren’t about to back the same candidates. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to cross a boundary, even if there’s a risk that a stranger might hit you in the head with a rock.

From @TAC via Andrew Sullivan. On this I’m with him except on abortion and a different view of ‘marriage equality’ (kick it all down to boring old contract law; no culture-wars fireworks for something none of the state’s business).

Damian Thompson on the Pope and the Queen
I didn’t see the point of blogging a picture: it’s only a state visit. But here are some choice quotations.

Pope meets the Queen – who, unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury, is a real Protestant.

Dr Williams may really think he’s close to us because of his views on the sacraments or on the prayers of the saints, and/or the liturgical practice he does or at least accepts. Well and good, and true as far as it goes. But because he believes in a fallible church changeable by vote, he’s not one of us.

The Queen’s honest about not being Catholic.

Paradoxically, however, the Queen may share as much ground with the Pope as with her own Archbishop. The supreme governor of the Church of England and the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church are both octogenarians dismayed by modern immorality. Neither of them thinks that gay unions are compatible with Biblical teaching, as Dr Williams appears to. (You never know quite where you are with +Rowan.) And, although the Queen has never expressed a view on the subject, she is not thought to be a great champion of women priests.

Today’s meeting undoubtedly reflects a clash of historical traditions and formal theology. But it is also an encounter between two devout, old-fashioned, conservative Christians – and, in that respect, a meeting of minds.

Benedict shows the utmost courtesy but never, ever attempts to obscure reality with platitudes.

An old friend once told me that’s a mark of real class vs affected class. They don’t really bullsh*t you because they have nothing to fear — losing a job for example — by speaking that way. So no euphemisms, no cornball-elegant PC big words from corporatespeak (‘thinking an extra syllable makes you sound like Jeeves’ as David Mitchell says, or as Matt Groening’s writers put it, no ‘buzzwords dumb people use to sound important’, the stuff I love to rip out of news copy before it sees the light of day).

As much as I joke like a Jacobite about Betty Hanover and Phil the Non-Greek, I don’t dislike the woman: she’s all about trying to live up to her obligations.

David Mitchell is always hilarious
From Samer

Two Don Draper ones

• Draper Daniels vs Don Draper. The real one didn’t cheat on his wife and had nothing to hide.
• The inanity of modern college orientation vs Draper cool. Actually university freshman rules (wearing beanies for example) and hazing in the golden age were just as inane in a different way, maybe more honest (control and conformity just like boot camp or plebe summer) and not as patronising. The only ice he breaks is the ice he puts in his scotch.

Pope Benedict: It isn’t the Church’s job to make herself ‘attractive’

The Pope in Britain: live

Bishop Fellay: if St Boniface had followed the Spirit of Vatican II there’d be no Catholics in Germany
You’d still have the Norse religion like in Wagner which the Nazis ultimately wanted to bring back. I believe in religious liberty but the SSPX rightly oppose indifferentism (catechismspeak for no one true church) and he makes the point that the bishop of Tarves and Lourdes lets (liberal) Protestants use a church but not, well, Catholics; in many cases the old liberals really are liberal Protestants.

(The Orthodox rightly don’t lend churches to non-Orthodox. I can’t see a Church Father being ‘ecumenical’ giving the local Arians et al., even second-generation ones, a turn at his altar. But I respect freedom of conscience and can see helping Protestants secure their own places of worship, as Catholic bishops in Italy have done for Anglicans.)

Counterpoint: born Anglicans are under no censure; they’re acting ‘in good faith’. Bishop Fellay is not excommunicated but has no faculties — yet? — to serve in his orders as a bishop; technically the SSPX are still not in good standing.

A conservative Protestant who’s not a Muslim-baiter
Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali and Pope Benedict, salt and pepper

A reflection on anti-Catholic sectarianism in Australia
Scroll down. I know self-pity including from conservative Christians is uncool but good point. I understand Gerald Henderson is essentially an Aussie Tea Partier and Australia another brand of Anglo ex-Protestant secularist country: California’s climate and surfers, Texas’s man-sized frontier attitude (the national myth tributed/sent up by Crocodile Dundee and Outback, itself based on the movie and not Australia itself, its founders say) and Britain’s socialism and secularism and hatred of Catholicism and a related accent (Anthony LaPaglia was made fun of for being Italian, a reason he actually changed his accent to his hybrid half-New York one).

The motu three years on
High Mass for Holy Cross Day with procession and veneration of a relic at St Paul’s in the Italian Market. I was at work so Michael Ernst has posted pictures (more).

Revolutionary times
From LRC

Ancient and liturgical-movement cool
The sanctuary of the cathedral in Torcello, Italy. From NLM.

From Ad Orientem

• Hooray for Calvin Coolidge.
• Gold hits record high.
• Ought the Russians end official dialogue with all Anglicans as they did in the US in 2003? Absolutely. (Like Fr Siarhei, Met. Hilarion didn’t get the memo: the Orthodox at those confabs are supposed to be cute props saying sweet spiritual nothings.) Infallible church vs subject to change by vote are irreconcilable, never mind the headlines about sex. As Patriarch Jeremias wrote to the Lutherans, let all future talks be only for friendship’s sake. Some history.
• Met. Hilarion again: mandatory celibacy for deacons and priests wrong. A valid opinion. But this doesn’t sound right. Celibacy is discipline not morals and sacramentally they’re the same church (RC doctrine; allowable Orthodox opinion); not so the Anglicans (except, as with other Protestants, baptism and marriage).
• Bulgaria: religious liberty means schismatics have rights.
• Wrongly deported. Individual liberty matters.

Iraqi exiles in Philadelphia

La Banque Mondiale propose le retour du temps de comptoirs
A reader writes:

Friends, take five minutes, put this in Google translate and read carefully. This is why there are shantytowns outside every Third World city. Small tenant farmers are run off their land so large government-supported multinationals can grow soy and corn for confined animal feeding operations in Europe. We did the same thing dumping US government-subsidized corn on Mexico. Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe some of the illegal aliens we worry so much about are Mexican small farmers that we ruined by our farm policies? [My emphasis.]

How not to report the Pope’s visit
The mainstream-media playbook

At this point, the Tea Party looks more like a Republican Party civil war

... between the existing establishment and a would-be replacement establishment than like a genuine anti-establishment uprising, internal or general. And I can’t say I’d want either of those establishments running my life or yours.

From RR.